Okay, we'll call the budget work. And the first up is marketing. Right, good evening everybody. First of all, I'd like to introduce Betsy Rutowski from destination Fairfax. Eric Snyder from Downtown Fairfax Coalition and Carol Scanlan from destination Fairfax Coalition and Carol Scanlan from Destination Fairfax. They're here to support. And also Chris Martin, who I work very closely with at the moment. Just to show the organisation chart, everyone else does it with all their employees. And I do it by way of all the different outside agencies that I work with. One notable addition this year is Old Town Village. They've just come on, they're coming online with their opening, and I just like to add them in there. The core responsibilities are in no particular priority order. In marketing, there's no such thing as this is the top, this is the top. Everyone works together. They're all interrelated, and it's sort of probably, whichever one comes to the top of the pile. My budget breakout is fairly simple. In that you see advertising, it takes 49% of my budget. Print is 11%. Contract services and website are vitally important and I'll explain why later on. And so it's a simpler break out the most of accomplishments and this is where we get to the interesting bits. Last year we did a couple of interesting things. One was the addition of FYI to our sort of base. For those of you who haven't seen FYI, now I have sent it to you all, so, but I know you have a lot of paperwork to read. Basically, what it is, it promotes city businesses to hotels, to people within the city. It has a concise, all the restaurants and the businesses that put events on, we promote them, so that when a visitor comes to stay at any of our hotels or comes to a business, they can pick up a copy or find it online and see what's going on. So if they want to get out and go to PJ Skadoos, they go one particular night, there's a lady's night with competitions and prizes. So that would be great. That was on a Tuesday night. Should have gone last night. But it gives a nice, it's been very well accepted, the Homeowners Association's like it as well, because it gives events. It's been very well accepted, the Homeowners Association's like it as well, because it gives events, it's not just the calendar, it's the event, but it supports our businesses. So we've been very pleased with that. What we have done in the past, we've been printing off 500 copies and mailing every two weeks. We've actually taken it down to once a month now. It's much more manageable. And the sort of the response is the same. A lot of it is going to go out online. I'm building up a database of email addresses as well. And when I have a sort of an optimum number, then we'll start going live and sending that out on a system called Constant Contact. The other thing that happened in 2007 was the walking tours. And the walking tours through the museum, through downtown and coming online later this spring is a really really exciting thing and it's a five mile walk around the city. So that's just to let you know about that. It's very important. We've been having on average 30 plus people coming to the walks. So that's 30 people who are coming down on a regular basis, walking around visitors, and then they'll stop by, see the shops, etc. Go for a meal, which is very important. And then the other thing you can read the rest, the other thing I really want to highlight here is visitfarefacts. The visitfarefacts.com website. It's very, very exciting. And in fact, I had figures through this morning because we're constantly looking at it, we're updating it. And I think Melanie, you get there to be a copy yet. Sorry. Anyway, briefly then, I'll just brief you because it's all colourful, all colour lines. We just redesigned it recently because as I say, it's living, it's breathing. People go to it once they come back to it and see the same old pictures, the same old information. They don't go to it again. It's not there. Then they don't feel they're getting anything new out of it. There's been a 70% increase in traffic through our website. The original website, in the worst month was just getting 19,000. Now, this month it was getting 49,000. Now, I'm not very good on maths, but a 70% increase is pretty significant. And when you Google Fairfax City VA, it comes up fifth on the Google list. But when you type in City of Fairfax, it comes up second on the Google list. So I think that's pretty significant. We're really pleased with that. This year, the Watchword this year's partnerships, we started off on a great footing with the opening of Fairfax County Public Library, or City of Fairfax Regional Library. And that was a great start to the year, I felt. What I mean by partnerships, and you can see the names that are there, is actually matching our money with other people's money, so that we're able to do a better deal for the city, for some of the events that we're putting on, for some of the openings, and we've got a lot of openings at the moment, which is quite good, but making sure that the city name is prominent, you know. So, and then we need to build on our website success, make it more livid, YouTube, podcasts, and working with people like one of our podcastes with Fairfax Symphony. City Band are going to be doing a podcast shortly, so we'll have that. And the other one of my, I think, they only came in literally 10 minutes ago, the new banner stands. They should be for, but then when anybody's going out, I think they really do epitomise the arts history, business, and we'll be having recreation as well, that one haven't come in yet. And I'd just like to thank Mr Snyder for taking the top photo of the auto-embellage. Thank you. So, then next year, 2009, what's our biggest challenge actually is probably the economy. I think we'll be foolish not to notice it's economy and confidence. Confidence is a big thing because if we don't show ourselves in the marketing terms as a confident face of the city, then the city loses confidence in us. And I do believe that we have to carry on and be very out there, as people would say. The other thing that's going to be happening as most of the tourism pundits will tell us is petrol is going to reach or gas is going to reach $3.50 a gallon. We know when that happens, people start looking where they're going to go. If they're not going to drive too far away, then we need to take advantage of that. We are in the greater metropolitan area. In the 2004 census, there are 5.9 million people in that area and another million in Fairfax County. We need to make sure that we can look after them and invite them into the city to eat and visit with our historic areas and our shops. The other thing is we need to support Lenham. There's things in place already and Mr Martin will be talking more about that, but we need to make sure that people know about Lenham that it is top the history side. People want to come and visit history. We are a beautiful town and that's what people want to see and And I think that it must be a major part of next year, already I'm buying advertising for next year. And this is a big part, redesigning, refocusing. We also need to focus on some of our events that we do in the city. And things like fall festival, our parts and recreation events. So we know this year we have an increase in fall festival so we need to build on that as well. We need to carry on talking with developers, property managers to explore the opportunity, naming opportunities, sponsorship opportunities, anything that we can do there. Where the dollars go, oh dear, where the dollars go, it's always an issue. The 2009 figure isn't necessarily my salary, but it's I am split between two departments, my assistant and I are split between two departments. So that's where this half of the split. Contract services, part of that is where we took away from the county, but obviously we do still have contracts that we have to work with, still have contracts that we have to work with, but we'll work on a slightly more cautious measure. Likewise with our operating costs, as you can see, my overall decrease next year is going to be 22%. So the watchword of the marketing department next year is leaner and leaner, so hold on to your purses. Monitoring, last year we did in September through the summer, sorry, we did a, this is a way of giving us performance measures. We did a survey, visited information programme survey in conjunction with George Mason. It gave us some really interesting figures and stats so that we can spend better, be more careful where we put our money. What do they do when they come to the city? Well, you can see what they do when they come to the city, dining sort of really supersedes everything. But they come for our festivals, they come to the museums, and they come to shop. So we need to be aware of those things. And how do they find out through friends and family? So perhaps we need to revisit our own people and do some more advertising within ourselves. Tell our friends about it and do that. Also the website, 17% on the website and that I think is worth noting. A lot more people are going on to the website, a lot more people are going and doing, you know, going that far. Was Fairfax the main destination? Yes, but those 22% came to DC and were visiting Fairfax, so we need to make sure that when they come to Fairfax, again, we feed them, we give them a good experience when they get here. The examples of things like what we did during the year to help out our finances is we started doing corporate advertising. It gives the city a great way of spending money. It's good for the businesses in the city and I think it shows that there is more of a partnership. We're looking at things like building on our successful events. More people are going green. We have two farmers markets in the city. Urban green events, in fact I was told earlier on that the farmers market, the downtown farmers market, the Saturday market, are tracks between 1500 and 2000 people on a Saturday, only given Saturday. You know, we need to make sure we know about this. This is the Washington Post. I did a lot about online work last year with the Washington Post. We know readership in the newspapers falling. This way people can go online and find us. This year, however, we're going to be a little bit more focused and we're doing the greater metropolitan area. We can actually focus that carefully. This is some of the advertising we did with the downtown people. We also did it with the Fairfax Boulevard, so we're actually now starting to go out and about and look at our advertising elsewhere. And then some of the partnerships that we created last year, some of the internal partnerships and some of the other partnerships. Actually, events that we can put on or be part of that actually are low or nil cost to us. And I think that's important, that has to be looked at. Things like one of the things that we were looking at, and this came out of a conversation, was if dining and visits to historic properties are both high on people's lists of to-do things, then why not join them together? This is actually the mock-up of a place-smart that we're doing right now, and that will be ready in time for the opening of a promotion that I'm going to talk about afterwards. And this is, everyone here has been to have a bite. They have paper placements. Well, guess what? They're going to be having a city of Fairfights at a place. So they'll have something to eat, look at it, and go for a walk around downtown, around our historic properties. The other thing that we did earlier this year is our ground opening of the library. We also have started taking, piggybacking on other people's events. This is the chocolate lovers because it's a great event. We all like chocolate. It gets the city message out on flyers out on and they've got a very good PR machine, I have to say. So, we've also promoted on the Fourth of July flyers and the walking tour flyers so that people always see the event and see the message City of Fairfax. And then obviously the one is a very high profile event. We partner with Cox Communications and also in overfare for children's hospital. This year they made the most we made between us all, made the most amount of money, 14,000 and that's for the children's hospital. That is a tremendous thing. Lastly, and I think Winston Churchill was thinking of every marketer, and he said this, never, never, never give up. And I think we've got to say, times are hard, but we should never give up on marketing. It's the one thing that gets our public face out there. It keeps people coming in to the city to partake of our businesses, to shop, to eat, to go about their business, to pay taxes if they're coming to eat, if they're coming to shop. And I think that's really important. The brand is excellent, it's the City of Fairfax. The tagline, the sense of place, we know where we are, we're in the heart of it all. Families are moving into the city, they like what we've got. They want to be a part of what we've got. In fact, for me, enough, we have a little button on the website, and I had a note from a family in Alberta. They are moving to the city because they went onto the website. They like what they saw. They then went to the city because we linked. They liked even more what they saw. They're moving here and settling, family and three children. You know, I think that, to me that says it all. They like what we've got and they come in here to be part of it. Thank you very much. Thank you. Open it up for questions, comments, thoughts. Ms. Cross? Very nice. Thank you. First of all, I just want to say great job with the many, many balls that you cup and keep in the air all the time. You're just an amazing talent in that regard. I want to examine a little more closely the budget that you've been assigned for this year. And obviously there have been some pullbacks on that. And in that regard, when we first went into the marketing and obviously there have been some pullbacks on that. And in that regard, when we first went into the marketing and began to really focus on the value of having a serious and dedicated marketer for the city, we envisioned or I envisioned, I shouldn't speak for anyone but myself. An individual who would serve the entire city. Not only parks and recreation, not only the arts, not only the historic resources, all of those elements of the city that we, as a whole, make this such a special place. And so my question is, how closely are you working with other departments utilizing there? When someone comes to you from another department to say, for instance, we're opening a new service on the QBAS, or we're going to, we're due to open plenum, and we need to coordinate with you. We're opening a new shopping area. How closely are you working with those people and how much is the partnership monies involved? Are you taking from other departments budgets in order to do the marketing for them or is it all on your out of your budget? That's a lot of questions, I'm sorry. Right, I think marketing with other departments and yes, I understand what you're saying. And I think that's been one of the things that Mr Hodgkin and I have talked about is that marketing department actually is a service department and looks after or should look after other departments and as such we've got a lot of departments in the city. There are some departments I work with, yes, I mean parts and recreations when I work very, very closely with. Historic resources, I've also been working closely with because we're looking at Blenham, because you have to have something to market as well and to bring attract visitors into the city. I mean, that's one of the historic resources. I think is probably somebody that epitomises what has happened and that it's a partnership that Mr Martin has come to me. we've talked about things, we've planned and we've moved forward. So a lot of advertising has been done that way. And I think I'll answer that simply. I've done things with the City Manager's office. The City Manager will ask me to I do a few things that are, you know, market deem does marketing. In fact, I suppose I allow to do this. That's marketing. And I was asked, would I help out? And so that's what I came up with there. Economic development as well. Jeff Duff- and I have a very close working relationship. We sit on some boards together and that's been terrific. Transportation, division of public works. We've already worked on a shopping and dining guide in conjunction with George Mason University and redone portions of that. We're working on a project promoting the use of the Q bus and advertising with the Q bus because we have facts the bus, we have insights of the bus, and it breaks my heart every time I don't see anything on them. So, you know, Alex, the social and I are working on that and also proposed business directory. So, yes, I am, but not as much as I would probably like. And I'm sure other departments would like to come and get some marketing stuff. I heard marketing used quite a lot last night in the various budget hearings. And I think we can do a lot. So does that answer some of you? Yeah, it does and it brings to me a question of how many hours are in the day and how at the present time you're divided between cultural arts and marketing. Yes. And what's the ratio of 50, 50, 50, 50? And you have an aid that is 50, 50, 50, 50, between cultural arts and marketing, cultural arts and marketing, or cultural arts and parks and recreation. No, cultural arts and marketing or cultural arts and parks and recreation. No, cultural arts and marketing. Okay. It just, and I'll just stop here, but I just want to say that I don't think marketing is a good place in economic times such as these to, to cut back. It's one of the few proactive things we can do to enhance our economic performance. And I would hope that we look take a look at the amount of time we're allocating of the summer shirt to marketing activities, as well as the amount of that we've reduced her dollars in terms of marketing, marketing budget for the next year. Thank you. Thank you. Other comments, questions? As long as I- Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good to see you this evening. And I have a question about the Q bus. When you do do advertising, is there some kind of schedule that you have that you know folks are going to be advertising so you won't be able to use that space? But there is no sale of advertising on the bus inside and out. Can you use those spaces and how do you choose to use them? I mean, I hope that they're never blank. They always need to have something about the city of Fairfax on them, since that would be a free marketing tool for us. And to add to that, is there any way that we help the businesses in that way? That since if they're, you know, how do we do that? How do we thank you? Yeah, I think you're right. We have to have a schedule and that's one of the things that Mr. Pososa and I have been looking at. We've got to have a schedule. We have to know. And, but he's obviously, we are looking to promote the sale of the marketing of the advertising space, because that's enormously useful to the ongoing sort of things that we need in the city. But when they are vacant, yes, we use them for promoting the city events. They had the opening of the library on the back of them. They'll be having the opening of the old town village on there. But they'll also have our events as well, like for festival, like chocolate lovers festival, or for July. They have all about our in-house events, if you will. But then comes the next year, which is selling the space, or working with our partners. And yes, I think it's too early for me to give you a definitive answer, but I'll make sure once we've got the whole programme together, you see a copy of it because it needs to be inside and out because you people go by and there is a way of saying how many times the bus is seen and how many times the back of the bus is seen. There is a rubric for that that I don't have at my finger at the moment. But yes, there is, but we also have a lot of ridership as well. People get on that bus. I mean, one of the other things I had, and I'll just share this because it was really funny. A young lady emailed me through visit Fairfax and wanted to get from Philadelphia to the city of Fairfax. She was coming to visit with a friend and said, can it be done? I said, actually yes, it can be done. You can do it quite easily because you can catch the train from Philadelphia to Union Station. You can catch the Metro to Metro Central and then onto the yellow orange line into Vienna and then the cube us and it was I thought you know people ride the cube us a lot and we need to make sure we're inside as well as out okay thank you and another question I have is about your marketing I you skipped over to kind of went over to a little bit yes you do you do help other departments in marketing. And I guess I, how is that paid for? I see your marketing. You have a budget here for your in-house marketing. I guess I need to understand. So the $114,000 in the budget for purchase services. Is that, what is that? Before I, I don't want to put words in your mouth, what is that? 114,000. That's the advertising we do. When you go back, when you saw the advertising say, the advertising that we put on the website, the website development, things like, gosh, golly, gosh, any advertising that we do for the city. That comes out of all of that. I mean, advertising is hugely expensive. So then we need to do something under the, let's say, fourth of July or, I mean, for festival, those, does that marketing, you might have any come out of Park and Rex? Yeah. So, yeah, comes out of Park. That comes out of Parks and Recreation. I place the advertising, oftentimes I might get it designed as well, but I will place the advertising because the advertising, when you buy media, you buy discounts, and the discount, the more you buy, the more discount you get obviously and so right now the the discounts that I'm getting from various people like Clear Channel for our radio like Washington Post like any of the newspapers it's quite significant it's quite significant in fact we advertise with one magazine, a niche called Preservation, Preservation Magazine, and it's by subscription. It's a very, very close to nation. It's very, very good place to be. We started off, I believe, two years ago, at $6,700 per advert. And that's a four-color advert. We've now got it at $4,000. Because I am a regular customer, because I go with, I advertise with them four times a year. But I don't necessarily pay for all of those. You have, they get paid for, resources will be buying one this year. So let me ask this question. Do you have a handle on how much money in each of the different departments that you consume and advertising? I mean, I feel that, I call this a new, you know, a new little category for us as a citizen, which is great. But now I need to understand where we're pulling. Now all of a sudden your budget is pretty much spread out. Yes, well, it's actually because it's their advertising, not Marta, it comes out of their ad, but each department has an advertising budget. So what I do is I they come to say, well Joe, let's do some advertising. Let me talk about parts of recreation because I did I've done a lot for them. I did bride and advertisement from my toll town hall. They will come to me and say we need to do this. So I'll say, okay, we'll put it together, boom. And then I'll pass on the bill. Now I can pull those figures together and get them to you. But I will... It's curious about what a yearly amount there is. As a rule of... I do actually sort of get some ideas. I reckon with parts and recreation I've probably placed about $8,000 worth of advertiser. And that's with it doing... actually it's not quite a breakout because I'm actually doing two brochures for them as well at the moment. With historical resources it's probably more like 15,000 because of the size of the advertising and because, and again that includes the courting history brochure that we re-rejigged and redesigned and printed. So that gives you an idea. Yeah, that just gives me an idea. I just need you to understand how it worked. Thank you so much. Nice presentation. Mr. Mayor, thank you. I appreciate the presentation. And I think the only thing I really want to focus on is the marketing piece of your job, although they're all intertwined and I realize that. I think that since this is relatively new in both cases, both responsibilities to the city. And last year I supported Mrs. Cross's efforts, so that's why I feel like I need to speak to this this year to gin this up a bit. I think that it's also the right time to reflect on what's working and what's not. And frankly, with all due respect, and I know I'm going to upset some people in the community when I say this, if marketing is more of the priority than as I talked about last night, maybe it's important for all of us on the City Council to reshift our priorities and put more of your efforts behind that. I know that that will upset the other half of your job and the people involved there. But that's the point I'm getting at. If that's where volunteers can make up more on the other side, because we've been at that now for what, two years, three years in terms of the art. What's that? Great, I'll be saying. No, the arts. Oh, the arts. I've been with you two for years. Yes, right. So all I'm getting at here is that this is really the right time to reflect. And if marketing is indeed the council's priorities moving forward, and I don't know if that's the case or not, but that's certainly what Mrs. Cross is articulating. And I think there's some merit in what she's saying. And maybe it shouldn't be housed in Parks and Rec. Maybe it should be housed in economic development. But again, this is something that Mrs. Cross I would only ask that you get with the city manager and come back to the council for the markup so we can talk about this. Because I'd be willing to consider that. I know that some of our friends that were here last night might be watching and saying, oh, no, this is the wrong approach, but in tight times you have to make choices. And this may be the area in which we have to make some tough choices. Thank you. And if I could add the, and I think that makes so much sense to, to combine marketing and economic development, just they go hand in hand. The halftime position that works with Ms. Armature is pretty much devoted to cultural arts. So it wouldn't be as if we were totally turning our back on them with support from the city. And under her direction, I think that person could be very effective on a part-time basis. So as you say, I'll bring more of those thoughts and facts and figures when we deliberate at a later date. Thank you. Any other questions or comments? If not, thank you very much. And I'm going to move on to historic resources. Good evening Mr. Mayor, members of Council on Chris Martin, Historic Resources Director. It's a pleasure to address you again at this time of year. As has been alluded in several other presentations, our core responsibilities and activities are indeed expanding with the opening of the Blenem Museum and Interpretive Center on October 25th scheduled for later this year in 2008 and that will be open six days a week greatly expanding our activities and also Civil War Weekend will return in the spring of 2009 annually. It has been every two years swapping with the home store, but we are going to have that event every year to bolster Blenheim. One of our responsibilities also is to work very closely with historic Fairfax City Inc. And we are the staff liaison to that very active advisory board. I'd like to recognize Betsy Rukowski is one of the board members here in the audience with us. And also some of the past presidents and current president David Pumphrey and the most recent past president Karen Stevenson for the last two or three years, Hildi Carney, and several are in this photo of the 15th anniversary of the cake cutting here in our org chart. So we really don't just recognize paid staff, but always have and grew out of a volunteer effort dating back to 1992 when the museum was founded solely by the city council on a volunteer effort. And so we value volunteers will actually be recruiting and needing another 20 or so core volunteers to help staff blend them. We have about 37 volunteers at the museum currently, but we'll be recruiting for Blenem. As the director of the Office of Historic Resources, I sometimes feel like the General Manager and all-star team with the paid staff that we have that many of you are familiar with listed in the orchard here, the only other full-time staff person in addition to myself, Susan Gray, our curator and visitor services manager. We also have three part-time Andrea Lohan-Water, Nate Rasmussen, and Cammy St. Germain. And the results of their excellent work will be featured throughout this presentation in the successes that we're going to show you. Our goals have remained the same, and we will be updating these goals actually with the comp plan update as one of our initiatives later this year. And also the stabilization of Blenem has been completed and really we have quite a few accomplishments related to these goals. Increases in our visitation for a couple of new programs, relatively near our second Sunday lecture series, really in its second year. And Susan Gray has done a great job increasing the attendance there. Actually with the help of council last year, if you recall, you increased the programming. It was a very minor fee for speakers fees, and we were able to get better known speakers and attendance for that program while still small at about 300 a year is done at very little cost. Also the walking tour spearheaded by HFCI also at the leadership of the mayor is a new program but also another additional 300 visitors to the R.A. House for example which had a large increase in visitation despite not having the benefit of being open on the first night. First night in 2006 and the year before we actually had over 500 people on that one night alone and that was actually our Largest attendance for that downtown property, but the the downtown walking tours have been a major head and and provided About $700 of income to historic Fairfax City also and also on the slide for those at home that's Randy Litton portraying Henry Logan in the Ratcliffe House on July 4th and we've expanded hours there and will be open on Saturdays April through October, Friday's and Saturdays and a lot of nice days we will hang the flag out even during the week. Other accomplishments also credit historic Fairfax and the chairman of their Jamestown Committee, Ed Trexler, has spearheaded and organized and coordinated a series of about six different events with our participation in the Jamestown anniversary celebrations. And he just came back from Jamestown within the last month and reported that in their national summary they featured our historic African American marker. Dedications, we did two of those out of four markers within the last year as a great example of historical diversity. And we also, through our curator, were fortunate to be able to borrow a very rare document, the original George Mason's manuscript resolves from the Library of Virginia. We're able to do that since we renovated the Upper Floor of the Museum in 2005 with the proper climate controls. So we really have expanded our facilities and now we've got the objects even if they're on loan. Blenem was also listed as a Jamestown project and even though we didn't begin construction in 2007, we did do the groundbreaking as you remember last year. And what you see is the new interpretive center as of last Thursday. And it is about to get its new standing seam metal roof. And again, it has really three components, a multi-purpose room, a center auditory reception and gift shop area, which we'll be talking about later related to the revenue that it'll produce. And the front part is an exhibit area, and it's intended and actually placed in the former location of the original barn at Blen get to both internal and external partnerships. Joe, I'm sure alluded to this briefly, but our office gets a lot more out of its dollar through partnering and especially through the publicity, much greater publicity. This is the fourth year that we have hosted the Women's History Day in conjunction with the Commission for Women. And you see Dodio Rorke portraying a 1920 suffragette on the slide on the left. And that's been a very popular program. Also internally with Parks and Rec, we did an oral history program with World War II veterans in conjunction with the senior center in Karen Bixler, very popular program. Again we've expanded internally and also of course as you heard in the last presentation Joe Ormyshire's marketing. That's one of those nice ads in historic preservation magazine in the center with our competition neighboring around and also we've coordinated with the county and even their visitation efforts in FX their FX DMO and the City of Fairfax actually featured prominently in their brochure not not only the city, but its historic buildings, its courthouse, its hotels. And so we are coordinating whether or not we give them money or not, but we are definitely coordinating we send cross training to their ambassador training from the Museum and Visitor Center. center and that has proven very effective and we'll be going actually to the Virginia tourism conference next week and Fredericksburg will be sending staff to that. And we share objects with the county as well and have been recognized by the county for our exhibits and they actually sought our expertise for their exhibits and are now hiring our exhibit designer from the museum to modify Fry and Pam Park. And I forgot to mention this last year, but the Virginia Tourism, State Tourism Organization also recognized the museum last year unsolicited as a model visitor center site, especially doing a lot with a little. And they featured at their annual seminar. So we're very proud of what we've done there over the last two renovations. This time of year is a perfect timing to gather the tourism statistics over 2007. Not all of them are in depending on what jurisdiction we're looking at, but enough of them are in to track trends and explain why we are where we are. Basically nationally tourism has been flat and is projected to decline over the next couple of years because of the high price of travel, travel inflation and personal income. Those two things directly influence national travel. Locally, it's a little bit mixed, but generally flat. The visitation from the Museum and Visitor Center has been stable over the last three years despite other similar facilities actually showing fairly significant declines. We talked about that last year and wanting to track that more and understand where we were and why we are where we are. And the reason is that we actually increased programming with some of the ones that we talked about before and compared to another visitor center say on Lorton on I-95, their visitation dependent highly on automobile travel was down significantly where ours is fairly stable. And that is because of the increased programming that we have done. And that's the advantage of being a multi-function building, a museum and a visitor center. The Virginia Tourism Committee measures tourism a little bit more broadly and it's northern Virginia measurement, including parks and other leisure activities. And generally it's somewhat flat or a little bit increasing. And of course, website visitation in all our areas continues to increase. Couple of the initiatives we've already talked about, but one key one is going to be improving highway signage. The last two times we improved highway signage were in 1998 with the Interstate Highway Signs on the Beltway in 66 and our attendance increased dramatically the next year by almost 2000. And in 2002 with our Civil War trails, trailblazer signs, again we saw a significant increase right away that was directly connected to those highway signs. And with Blanem being opened six days a week, it falls into that category of being open at least five days a week where you can get advertising on those interstate signs that you have to be open a certain amount of time typically to warrant V.consideration for that. So what we want to do is add Bluntum to a revised Herfax Museum and Visitor Center sign, advertise them both, get the signs updated. Civil War will be a major, a major increase for us with the 150th anniversary of the start of the Civil War in 2011. And again, HFCI is assisting in coordinating a local committee to celebrate that. With Blenum, we will be doing quite a bit and also Outside of Blenheim our downtown and really is a historic district of civil war activity in a way and when we Give those walking tours we talk about that quite a bit whether it's Antony afford or or most be raider or whatever it is Let's look at the budget for a couple of minutes. These, this is the personnel as typical of other city departments makes up the majority of it. But when we really get down to breaking out where they, the increases and decreases are, we are asking for one new staff person to help get Blenem open and we looked at other operating costs and actually cut $17,000 in seven other accounts. We trimmed actually seven other accounts, but we actually increased, we didn't just cut. We increased advertising $5,000 and office supplies for Blenheim startup at the Interpretive Center. So we worked within what we had and adjusted to where we are. But we cut some minor programming and we think that we might be able to ask historic fair facts and they have been very generous any time we've done a major exhibit or programming or conservation and have liked to support that. So we feel that we can work together continually without a problem there. And in fact, as we'll talk about in a second, several of the revenue categories that don't show up in the city go to historic Fairfax like walk-in donations, Civil War Weekend Gate receipts, things like that and that adds up, you know, significantly. So we are all working together and we did not have any new CIP requests we could have for Blenum to finish off Blenum but we did not. Instead, we chose to come back with a more exact figure when the bids come in for the House and Cottage Interior Restoration. And the current employees were as described in the org chart, and with one full-time new employee, which we're going to discuss here. And there are really three reasons that summarize why we need the new employee. The site is different than our other sites. It's a multi-building site. It has not only the visitor center, but the Guendam House, Grandmas Cottage. How do you manage that? If it's open six days a week, it's very difficult to get consistent volunteer hours on weekends. We find that at the museum and we have a lot of backup data to show that. We not only just keep the doors open on weekends, we've started to do a lot more programming on weekends with our second Sunday series, for example, and other events. And that is when our visitation increases. So we would like to have a staff person that can not only be there, but also do civil war related programming, not only at that site, but perhaps at other sites and add, for example, a civil war component to our downtown walking tours, which I think would be in high demand, could be as often as we wanted to do them, but I think could be at least worked into the rotation every four to six weeks. This is the last slide, and it talks about a trend that we've started to pay a lot more attention to because it has grown despite our flat visitation. The revenue at the museum gift shop grew 17% two years ago and 10% this year and the total gross receipts at the museum with its 25 square feet and three shelves essentially was about $36,000. That has to have an asterisk because about half of that was the White House ornament. A very popular, very profitable item that the profits go directly to historic Fairfax. So the city sees about half of that $36,000. A Blenem interpretive center was designed with 187 square feet of museum gift shop space. And with projected greater visitation in the museum for several reasons, because Civil War always attracts, generally attracts more visitors, compared to other types of programs, and historic sites, according to the Virginia Association of Museums and other stats, attract usually 50% more than just standard museums. Historic sites are more attractive, historic house museums are a more attractive type of site. So in that way, our projection of 14,000 on page C157 may end up being conservative on an annual basis, but we can project just by comparing to what we already know and selling less of the White House ornament on an annual basis $20,000 of revenue on the gift shop end. And a lot of other historic sites use this, Manassas funds, most of Manassas revenue is from the gift shop, I don't Manassas. And that's a typical justification for adding new staff. And we feel that's appropriate too to just recognize. We actually think the projection in the current budget, talking with the finance department, is actually a little bit low, could be raised somewhat. We also are asking new fees for the first time for some of our school programs. Almost all the other facilities do and this is right in line with what they're doing. It also validates a little bit what we're doing. We've been doing it long enough to do that. And we will increase the city walking tours to be in line with the HFCI walking tours price wise so there's no confusion there. It's not a lot of revenue. We don't think it will hinder the the amount of school tours we get because everyone else charges it and we think the demand is still strong and especially at Guendam with the fourth grade SOLs being related to the Civil War, we expect very steady visitation there. So with that, that's the last slide. I'll be happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Could you talk a little bit? I know you've talked quite a bit about adding this new staff person, but yes, I'm a little concerned that we're right away moving in the direction of bringing somebody on full time when we have no idea how many people are going to show up at the Blondam Interpretive Center. And it seems like more prudent thing to do would be to start slow. And then it is the numbers support it and the programming is there that you would come back to us next year for a full-time position. Also, it sounds like you're planning on doing the Civil War weekend again this year. What are the revenues versus the expenses of that program? You've typically shown that in the past, but this year you've left that out of your budget presentation. To answer your first question, I think the trade-off would be by necessity having the site open less fewer days a week. So that would have to be considered. Part-time staff is also harder generally speaking. In our office we have great retention. Generally speaking it's harder to keep for a long time. You know, several years. We like to hire and keep people and we have a great record in doing that. They're also other, we have part-time staff now, so we're actually very familiar with how that works and usually they have other jobs or other school. Again, weekends are very difficult and we needed the consistency. We thought we needed the insurance even though we would like to have volunteers, even at the museum we can't guarantee volunteers and if we're going to have any sort of standard hours and and guarantee those we need staff to cover it on the second question was related to Civil War we could so where we can it isn't in The expenses are in this year's budget the revenue the gate receipts are about $6,000 typically. If the attendance is about 2000 attendees. As you recognized and mentioned and more broadly related to the cost of these other special events when you actually add in the cost of all these other departments, it is fairly expensive, but actually the direct costs in our department are only $12,000, not including staff. So it's not really expensive from a purchase services point of view. We just work one long weekend and do it. We think it's really important for the Blenheim site to get that back on an annual event. And several of the attendees in living history participants have recommended that as well. Mr. Assistant, maybe we can get a, I could have sworn that this has become a six-figure event. Maybe I'm wrong, but I thought this was somewhere around $100,000 when he factored in police and everybody else that's needed to support this event. I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but again, it comes down looking at priorities and figuring out what is giving us the best bang for the buck. Talked about the struggle with Civil War Weekend in particular with the numbers going down on a fairly frequent basis when you've done it because you've also done it in conjunction when there's been either Apple Blossom Festival or there's been some Civil War event out in Winchester or some other part of Virginia and quite frankly that's the bigger draw on. I know we've talked about this that's been a struggle. I don't know that you've resolved that or not in terms of the weekend that you're selecting that we're not competing with other civil war events throughout the Commonwealth. So I would just hope that we can, and we don't have to blabber tonight, but that we can get back to looking at this and really getting the full picture of what this cost of the city and conjunction with everything else that we're looking at. I mean, operating costs for a blend of them are $100,000 that we're going to see this year that we haven't seen before. And that doesn't include the salary numbers if I remember from previous correspondence for Mr. Assistant. So just something to think about it. It's a great opportunity, but there's also some real risks here. Point's well taken. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Just an overall question. How much of you worked with the county parks and rec? I mean, of looking at or historic, I'm sorry, historic, at the Colvin Mill and the other historic properties that they have of marketing and staffing. And can we partnership with them in bringing this online to make it a faster hit, more available, you know, getting it out there because they've already they've invented that wheel. They have success at several historic properties and how can we work with them? That's true and we actually are very close touch with them. Planning and cross sharing as I mentioned, they with us on some of the planning that we've done, it's interesting you brought that up. There's a definite difference between us and the county, whereas they typically are very heavily and well-staffed having several museum educators per site and not and pennies for programming We are the reverse Where we can we're we're a problem staffing the buildings But have more programming money than they do and so we can we share for our We can miserableate on that quite a bit and compare notes. How can we work maybe a little bit more efficiently towards an end of- to the end of- that it's not- that, costing us as much, I.E. a new staff person, that we can maybe use some of their skills to make us a little bit more efficient and successful. I would invite you to maybe look into that a little bit more. Thank you. Mr. Mayor. One quick question. The meeting room within the new interpretive center, is that a room that will be open for rental by the community or community use? It will definitely be available for city and city sponsored functions. We currently have an interim use policy dating back to when we had a couple weddings, it blew on them four years ago, five years ago. And we had said we would revisit that after the new facility opened. But it's, and that involves zoning issues. Every time we did it it even with that policy. We had special exception permits and had to, had to outline parking and noise and all that kind of thing. And Mr. Sissin and I talked about that and from a staff perspective we thought we would get the site open and, and then revisit the revision to that policy after we kind of saw what we got and how close it was to the neighbors and things like that. But we definitely expect and can have city sponsored functions there and but it's not going to be available to be rented by for private meetings or? It could be, but we would have to change either the historic district guidelines or the zoning classification. It's in an R2 district. Okay. Good. It would be another source of revenue that I think would be fairly simple to administer? I would just caution, as was mentioned last night in parks and rec, their maintenance costs, staffing costs, fix up costs associated with that when you rent out. And for example, the county doesn't rent out, Colvin Run mail and site, the visit it on a daily basis, because then what do you do to your visitors who are driving from New York, or Pennsylvania to see civil war signatures of their ancestors? It's typically the smaller sites like Drain'sville Tavern, Chape Wakefield Chapel, that are rented for functions like that. All right, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm going to ask, I don't see it on here and I think I heard you say it. I just want clarification. There was a $500,000 amount of money that needed to be for grandma's cottage and some other improvements that I don't see on here but there was also some money I think earmarked out of that $500,000 for some kind of overrun or cost over cost on the Blenem interpretive center. Can I get some clarification on that and find out where that money is and how we're working with that. If the $500,000 is an in this budget, where is the amount that was the overrun on the Blenheim Interpretive Center? Sure. That was mentioned in Mr. Assistance opening night presentation. And I have a little breakdown of those funds, actually of the 500,100 was the Crasnell barn funds which were agreed upon but actually never formally transferred that the evening that the Interpretive Center was downsized. And so that's 100,000 out of the 500,000, whether we the other interior of the house in cottage about 350 exhibit case work for the house in interpreter that was estimated at 75. Crasnall Barnard 100 and that totaled about 500. So can I I would love to have a list of that if I could. Is it in the is it in here that list? Okay. I wonder if I can get a list that. Um, and the reason I asked it so we're not spending any of that $500,000 that you talked about at your opening night. Is that or that's something we're going to be discussing later. I guess I need a memo in that of that amount of money. So I understand it for this budget process when we go to you know roll up our sleeves. Yeah, I'm concerned about that. The 500,000 is not in the budget. Okay. And it's really a task with the council probably need to grapple with in the context that next two to three weeks has to whether or not we're going to go forward with that expenditure. Mr. Martin and consultants are wrapping up the bed documents as we speak to bed that project next month. Well, then I need, I need, you went through those numbers pretty quickly for me. So I guess I need you to go back through for me exactly the amount of monies that we need for the Blenheim that was the overrun that we did not, the overcost on those. I need to see that. So that list that you have would be great if we can get a copy of that. And then I do want to go back to something that Mrs. Cross was discussing. And that is when you rent out space, you know, we don't have really an issue now with the parking. I mean, I think there's going to be parking for buses. So I think we need to go full steam ahead and figure out a way we can rent some of the space out for weddings because it takes two or three years. I mean, people plan these weddings now for two or three years at a time before they can get on the books. And I think we need to be full-stim ahead way before this opening in October. So that is one of my priority. And the other thing I'd like to talk to is Mr. Greenfield's point on the Civil War weekend or whatever that is. I did enjoy it when I went. There were not very many people there when we went, but I think it's important maybe the first time we find out what the cost is. And when we're doing some kind of opening, we make that a big splash. And then I do think we need to take a very good look at how much that costs and back to how the council feels that we need to make sure that we're spending money in the appropriate places for get the biggest bang for the buck. So those are my comments. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. Sorry, any more, Dr. Martin? Just a couple of quick questions. And I should know this, and I just don't off top of my head. But currently, is your office, we may have consolidated everything here, and I don't know, but is currently your office still in the Rackle'm not going to be in the room. I'm not going to be in the room. I'm not going to be in the room. I'm not going to be in the room. I'm not going to be in the room. I'm not going to be in the room. I'm not going to be in the room. I'm not going to be in the room. I'm not going to be in the room. I'm not going to Blenum Restoration and the Blenum Visitor Center and Turperative Center and all those sort of things. I never quite bought into even back when we were talking about spending the money to build the building that we somehow were going to have this two or three hundred thousand dollar overhead in terms of staffing and overhead and keeping the doors open. And I very distinctly remember during those discussions and talking with representatives of HFCI that they stepped up to the plate and said, look to get this thing off the ground. We're going to supplement it with volunteer help and keeping the doors open and doing some of the things that need to be done. I personally think what needs to be done to get this open is you need to take one year staff that's now over the museum and relocate them over at the Blenheim, I said that at the time. I do not support, maybe the only exception, I do not support adding. It's not just this full time staff person. Last night we heard we were going to have to add a 50% custodian in addition to that. And so I would just challenge HFCI to kind of renew its vow that we had when we really struggled with the expenses of this to step up to the plate to help get this facility open to get it off the ground. But I for one, don't even support a part-time person, at least initially, until we prove its success and we get it off the ground and it's going to be a slow ramp up. I think I just heard if I'm not mistaken, it's probably not going to be open until the fall is that what you said. So we're going to be already four months into the fiscal year and I would feel much more comfortable and you all being creative and redoing some of your resources, moving some of the priorities. I do agree that I think quite frankly the Blendham Interpretive Center may be more popular than the museum. And I think we need to try to move our resources around as we try to bring this new interpreter to center on ground. I'm very excited about it. And I think it's going to get a great addition to our historic resources. But I'm not excited about in this year with this challenge and bringing on one and a half full time staff just to get the doors open. So I assume we'll be talking about that later on in the budgets, but just so I get that out in front and on the records. There aren't any surprises. I do not support the full time staffing that's been recommended. I don't disagree one day we may need it, and I hope we do need it. And when we do need it, I'll be the first to step up to the plate and suggest that, but I don't think that is April 2008 as we sit here today. So with Mr. Sisson. Thank you. I think I have some good news in that regard. The total costs are not as high as what I feared they would be last year. And I think our estimate is about 150,000 to operate Blenem, the interpretive center. And y'all correct me if I'm far off based on that. And then if we do not hire that full-time staff person, that comes down dramatically. So. And that's what I'm advocating, Ms. Winner. Thank you, Ms. Winner. Last night when the voter, the registrar came before us, he talked about how they get people from the county to work the polls. So what you had just said about the historic loop in the county having a plethora of volunteers, you might, because I do agree with the mayor on that one position, disagree with it that you could maybe go to the county and say, well, share. And maybe they could supplement some volunteers for us. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, if there are any more questions, thank you for your time. We're now going to move down to utilities. Peace. Good evening, Mr. Mayor. Members of Council, it's good to be here on an evening when we've seen a little more rain again today. We're doing reasonably well in that regard and maybe after the budget presentation if there's a few questions I'm prepared to go into some issues on that. Okay. Okay. You guys in there? Absolutely. Okay. I'm not going to get to you. Okay. Okay. Okay. We're good. Um. Basically, as we get into the organization, um, we have four separate, uh, functionalities in the department, uh, staffwise, we do have some overlap, but as far as financially, the way the cost centers are broken down, we do have these four. Of the four, the impamant treatment is simply water only. Obviously, and the other three, combined water and wastewater. Our responsibility is essentially have not changed over the years. But the first one that we have there is the uninterrupted operation of the treatment plant. As I said, I do have a few slides prepared for after the budget presentation is completed to update on some of the production and supply issues if we care to get into that. So if there are any questions when we're done, we can look at that to address our number one core responsibility. And as we address these responsibilities and we've already looked at the fact that we'll be looking at a rate increase and in fact Mr. Silverthorne and I think mentioned about the ups and downs that we've had over the recent years which kind of peak my curiosity too. So I went back and looked since 1993 which is how far back the chart goes, the typical you see in the agenda items for the increases. Actually, the average water rate increase since 1993 has been 6.81%. So, and we're talking about seven this year. So, I was surprised to see that myself. Meaning the group is pretty high. That's a system. Sorry I'm just right. I mean that's a pretty steep run. I think. 6.8% annually. Annualized? Annualized, right. That's a large thing. But it's still pretty much. As we as we start looking at some of the things we've been getting into, we've been able to implement some changes at the treatment plant. Most of these have been addressing some of our regulatory issues. Mostly what we call disinfection byproducts, which are two of the major items that we test for, just to keep you up to date on that, the limitations that we have on the two, which are referred to as trial and methane and hallowed acidic acids. We test for those in parts per million. We're limited to respectively 80 and 60 parts per million. Our running averages, which is what we report to the Virginia Department of Health, have been running less than 40 and less than 30. So we're below half of what the limitation is and the whole purpose of implementing and carrying on with some of these treatment projects in particular, I've been to make sure we're up to date on those. As we look at the bath method survey, we have finished that, and this will enable us to look at coming up with a realistic time table as far as when we need to address dredging the city's reservoirs again, which has not been trying to do over the years and solicit here is the last one on this list is the introduction of new technology for field personnel with the scanning of all of our drawings into the laser fish server and provision of laptop computers in the vehicles for our crew personnel. When they're out in the field, they have the ability, not simply to look at the role of system maps that they normally carry with them, but if the question comes up and they need a little more detailed information, they actually have access to all of the drawings that we have in the Department of Utilities, which includes many, many file cabinets full, which have been scanned in. So using their laptops, they can go wirelessly online, get on the laser fish server, and call up any of the maps that they need without having to worry back, coming back to the property yard to research them. In the this await fiscal year, we've been continuing with some of the projects, particularly at the treatment plant, getting them to a point where we can move ahead with them as we move into new financing, getting them ready. We've also been looking at continuing to see where we are with our 24-inch water main, which of course is our lifeline coming down from the plant and all the studies that we've been having on that have been very good and we're looking into what technology is available to make sure that as we carry on that we can pinpoint any areas that may be a problem and address those. As you can imagine with 26 miles of pipeline we're not likely to just go out and replace the whole 26 miles on any given day. So we're looking into technology that will enable us to really pinpoint any areas that are problem areas and address them individually. On the sewer end, and you'll notice probably as you look at some of the capital improvement numbers, in this year we are finishing up work on our last two wastewater pumping stations. So that by the end of this fiscal year when these are done, all of our sanitary facilities will have been completely renovated within the past seven years. So there will be in good shape with all of those. So as we move forward from a capital improvements up on you in the sewer fund, there will really be very few projects that will be ongoing, except for our normal pipeline rehabilitation and man-owned rehabilitation, which we do on a yearly basis. So we're glad to see that we're getting to the, really to the end of some of these major things on the sanitary end. The last, what you would consider, major issue is the, the picket road metering station, which has been designed. We've been at once. We brought it back in. We're looking at what we can do to pair off a little bit of the cost, and that'll be a, that'll be rebid. And that will be the last major capital issue. I'm going to turn it in. As we go forward in the year, we'll be looking at some actual new feed and storage facilities at the plant that we've been discussing over the last several years. They have been designed, they have been permitted, and we're simply waiting to address scoped wise exactly how big they need to be before we put them on the street. Same thing is true of the raw water station. This will likely be the raw water station, it will likely be the largest single capital issue going on in the next probably 15 to 20 years as we look out that far. And so we have the authorization to go ahead with the design. We again are we scoping that to make sure that capacity wise we're looking at the right size at this point time. And then that'll be moving along. Another thing that I wanted to mention actually if we back to the next slide. The some of the new technology we've added last year and are moving forward and continuing. This year we've gotten some new software to go along with the line locators position where he deals mostly with, I'm sure you've heard, of mis-utility, you know, call us before you dig and all that stuff. We do our own locations, and so the new software that we've gotten for the line locator enables him to be able to get all of his tickets in his truck so that he doesn't have to worry about picking up tickets in the morning, going out, doing them, finding out he's maybe out on the trail eight, nine miles away. His last ticket is done. He has to drive back into the city hall to get new tickets. He can get them all right in his truck. Also if a, what they call an emergency ticket comes up where there's been some sort of one of the utilities has an emergency that they're working on. There's been a failure of some sort. Those he also gets on his cell phone immediately so that besides coming in on the computer he gets an immediate notification that that's the next thing he needs to go to. So we found that that has cut down on a number of trips back into town, a little more efficient. We're continuing with our radio read meter issues And that's something that this year, as we've gone through the issue of the bacterial logical notifications we had, we've been working on, how can we get more tests done, get them done quicker, sooner in the month. So with the additional time that our meter readers have since we've got some of the meters installed where they don't actually have to go and read them. They can do them via radio. The additional time that they have, we have transferred some of the additional sampling tasks to them. They've been trained at the laboratories and how to collect samples, what to do with them. So we're able to utilize their time a little more efficiently based on some of this radio-re metering. As we look at the breakdown, I've got two slides, one for the sewer fund and one for the water fund. I guess a little confusing if you try and put them all in one. But one thing I wanted to point out in this slide is that the small slice in there for debt service, this budget is the final year for debt service in the sewer fund. So that amount actually will not be carried forward except with new financing. But as far as the financing that's in place now on this slide. And also this next one on the water fund, that debt service number in both of those slides. This is the last year for our current debt service and they both are ended and go away this year. As we look at the overall budget for next year, this is the total for water and sewer funds. We see that the biggest issue that we will have is the fact that we are looking at one additional person out request. But as you see, even with incorporating that into the overall budget, the overall budget is just about 8.5 percent lower this year than it was last year, even with the new position that we are requesting. And with regard to the new position, the biggest driver on the new position is some common wealth of Virginia staffing requirements that changed actually last June and we've been kind of fighting to be able to manage those things since then and it's just getting to the point where there's so much over time that we're asking the operators to work. It's becoming really quite a burden on them as well as we are upping the e-over-time budget. So we're looking at that one staffing person. Basically what it boils down to is a requirements to have, the commonwealth has three different classes of operators that we have at the plant, class three, class two, and class one. And what they've done is changed the requirements they have as far as having class one operators, which is their highest class available on site and also by phone. We used to have the option to have more people simply available by phone so that the operator on site could call a class one and we are now faced with actually having to have one site. So that is the major issue. We've looked also at kind of where we fit in the overall scheme size of plants. We believe it or not, we're considered a large plant. We're a large plant. Fairfax County is a large plant. Fairfax County is a huge plant. Fairfax County is a huge plant. We still fit into the large category. Large category has two breakdowns. The break point for the even more stringent regulations that Fairfax County has comes at the 15 million gallon a day mark. Our plant is a 12 million gallon a day plant. The break point on the other side in order to get down to the medium size plant is at 5 million gallons a day. And even just looking at the demand that the city has here itself, we typically are just about at 6. so we don't go under that either. So we're firmly entrenched in the lower ash allon of a large plant. As we look at the breakdown of the sewer fund, the largest single driver in the sewer budget is contract services. This is what we pay the county for for their treatment of wastewater And it's it's pretty much the fixed per gallon rate We have anticipated a little bit of reduction in that for two major reasons one is there there has, and we're anticipating there probably will be a little bit of kind of hanging on conservation from some of the restrictions, even though they've been voluntary, we actually have seen some reduced demands. And also in some of the work we're doing particularly with the meter station that we'll be fixing. We see that the actual flow to the county is likely to be lowered because they're not going to be as many opportunities for what we call inflow and infiltration, which essentially is rainwater. And as that gets into the system and continues to the county, of course, it's part of what we send them. So as we get rid of more and more of that, we'll be dropping that item. On the on the water side, again, you can see the breakdown in the various areas of the budget. And as you can see also, there is about a 10% reduction this year, as opposed to last, in what our proposed budget is on the water end. That actually concludes the budget portion. Now I've got four slides left. Two of them deal with the production, demand, available flow in the stream, things of that nature, and the other two refer to the projected expenses, revenues, and things of that nature as we kind of move out into the next 15 to 20 years. And there is a separate presentation that will be scheduled as far as the financing of the water and sewer funds that will be covered in considerable detail when we get into those. So if there's any desire to go into those four slides, that's fine. Other words? That's all for a second. Let me see if there's any questions on the subject. Yes, sir. So far. Thank you. I guess, first of all, I'm sorry to, you know, the mayor didn't want to labor it when you started out and I apologize. So let me go back to it. You mentioned on average almost a 7% increase since 1993. That's annualized. Am I correct in this name? Right. And are you saying that you were surprised because you also thought that might be steep or were you surprised as you think as the manager does, which I'm stunned by, that that's not a big increase on an annual basis. Well, I guess I was surprised because our more recent ones haven't been that big. Now, it's not a big increase. I mean, if you look industry wide at what's been happening and what is projected to be happening throughout the country, we're going to be seeing many, many double digit increases in ways where it's worth it. Well, I just have to tell you, I'm completely flabbergasted by that answer and by the City of Managers' answers as well. I mean, it must be nice that people think that 7% increases in water rates aren't substantial. Maybe it's all relative because other jurisdictions, as you're saying, may be seeing the same thing or they may be higher in the future. But I'm just, I think that to the average person paying their bills, especially in Thai economic times, I'm wondering what planet you guys are living on, I'm just going to be very candid about that. Well, to just to comment on that, you know, we look at, sorry, Bob, I just, I disagree that that is a reasonable rate increase. I'm sorry, but go ahead. We look at inflation rates, and of course they are less than that. However, it's substantially less. When we look at what drives wastewater costs, much of it is everything we have to do now that we didn't have to do five or ten or fifteen years ago. Every time we find something else that maybe needs to be addressed in the water, it's something that we need to possibly address in our treatment stream. And of course we all, I guess, saw the news with pharmaceuticals. That will, of course, lead to some additional things, probably on the wastewater and more so. Another issue we've had really since Hurricane Katrina wiped out several of the chemical facilities that water. And so right now we are stuck with a single supplier for one of the chemicals that we use in the biggest bulk and really can't shop the market because there's only one supplier on the entire East Coast. Okay, but having said that and maybe this is where let's see some further educating here. Your budget is down eight and a half percent yet we're raising rates so I'm trying to understand and maybe I need help from from one of our two finance experts as to how that meshes because normally when you cut expenses you don't need as much money coming in to take care of that. So what am I missing? Okay, well again this isn't here in this. Something, this is something that will be addressed in a lot of detail when we look at the ongoing financial issues for financing the capital projects. So it's capital driven. But your capital costs are down substantially too. So this year they are because we have removed several of the projects until we see what the financial package moving forward is. So we've moved the rate increase to a year later? In other words, if you're not going to be spending the money. Well, we're looking at continuing these rate increases. I understand. Yeah, to believe me, I made that clear. But I'm trying to understand if we're not going to be spending the money because your budget here calls for reductions, at least in the short term. And I realize we're going to be playing catch up then. You're saying that you need to build that up. Am I understanding that? I see the manager nodding. Finally we're in agreement. Then in terms of you want to build that up to help alleviate that burden in terms of a bigger shock a year or two later. Is that what you're saying. Oh, and also if we keep it down as far as cash on hand, and it gets to a certain level, and when we do go out and look for financing, it's kind of like when I go to get a mortgage, if I have no money in the bank and no job, nobody's gonna give me a mortgage and it's kind of the longest same lines we need. That makes sense. That was what was a little bit unclear, and I apologize for misunderstanding. Are we not fully understanding that? Are we charging the same race because we were having a sidebar repair? We're charging these increases to both city and our wholesale water customers both. Am I correct? Is that even, I recall that there may be some small discrepancy, but generally speaking, this one, we're talking 7%, you're talking about what we've increased to city residents paying their water bills on an annualized. We charge the same rate to city residents and also county residents and other. That are part of any year, we lump in what our actual operating costs and maintenance costs are. It all goes into a big formula to make sure that whoever is the wholesale customer is getting charged for what their portions of the various operating and maintenance issues are so Okay, it isn't it isn't simply the rate there are other issues involved Fair enough so it is but it is seven Residents in the city on an ongoing basis. That's the number that I was focusing on. Let me ask you another question on technology. I raised this. You addressed, you sort of danced around a little bit. One of my former colleagues on the City Council, Mr. Coglin. I used to talk a lot about basically during times when the water system was under stress that we would charge more because, you know, basic economics, he would argue that people would cut back if we were charging more during those times. And I understood that, but I also understand that when times aren't flushed, and I was saying to him, well, does that mean we're going to give them a discount? And he never quite bought into that side of it. But I guess that taking that to the next logical level, what about the issue of some sort of technological advance with metering that during summer months or during times when we actually have more stress on our system that we could, we could technologically, you know, without necessarily going through kind of the rigmarole of council action and rates, but we basically build a rate schedule for water use that would be commiserate, let's say, with some electric companies do, for instance, especially in California now, where you during peak demand during the summer months, for instance, you get charged higher rates. And lower rates during winter sessions. So can we do that? And if so, is that technology, is that something you guys have aggressive we've been exploring? And if you said that, I apologize because I was too focused on the rate increase. So I apologize. No, we, in fact, many of the jurisdictions surrounding us do have seasonal rates. Right. I remember this last year. Okay, thank you. Right. We certainly can address the issue of seasonal rates. The problem it'll be on our system is some of the others. Most of the other systems bill every one monthly. OK, so when you're talking seasonal rates They'll basically say okay from this month through this month. That's your winter period. That's your Now when you get into summer that's based on you know from Whatever maybe maybe April or May through say October And everyone is kind of on the same playing field because they're all billed monthly. We bill our residential customers quarterly so then we start getting into what really is any particular season season for any. I would already get around it is to bill monthly. And if we bill monthly, we have about, round numbers here, about 2,000 commercial customers that we do bill monthly. And about 11,000 residential customers that we bill quarterly. Okay, so the 11,000 we are reading four times a year 44,000 reads the 2000 we're reading 12 times a year Okay, add those to get now take the 11,000 and say we're gonna have to read them 12 times a year That's 130,000 reads and we've got two meter read Well, there's an easier way to do this than which is again, the technological aspect. I mean, a lot of things now are being done electronically with electric meter reading for electricity, for example. Right. Why can't we go to a system? And I realize that's an investment and it would take some time and it wouldn't happen overnight. But why couldn't we build a plan that looks out, you know, three to five years that would allow us to do that. Also, it may be other ships. It also would save on the meter reading position because maybe you could shift one of those positions back to a different role and save some money. We actually are into a program to do that. We've been doing it as part of our, it's like an accelerated normal replacement program. We currently have gotten a pretty good number of the commercial, the larger meters, replaced on the radio read. And we focus on those for two reasons, basically, you know, it's the largest source of revenues is the large of commercial meters. And also many of them are in places where honestly it's quite difficult to read them particularly in the winter months so we found that that has been a real boom to us and freed up a fair amount of time on the meter readers which as I said we've been able to kind of transfer that time into some of our sampling issues. As we're getting more done that's our ultimate goal is to have the entire system on the radio reads. Okay, that's very helpful. Two just general comments, closing comments. One, I just want to thank you for what I think has been, you know, a much more rigorous management, even if we disagree on the size of the rate increases, which I think we may end up disagreeing on. The more rigorous management of the system, you mentioned in particular the dredging, which was something that I've been through with at least one of my colleagues originally that was still on the counts that the two of us serving back in the 1993 timeframe, and we put that on the ballot. That was a real fault of leadership in my opinion. I'm sorry I'm being really blunt on this fact. And I think that your leadership has shown that you're looking at these things proactively. And I commend you for that and thank you for that because otherwise you end up playing again the catch up issue. And then finally on the rate increase, I want to make sure that my comment is understood that I am not overly enjoyed by the proposal, and I apologize, Mr. Assistant, if anybody took offense by saying that others who may disagree with that and think that's a reasonable rate increase may not be from this world. But I will just tell you that that is just my own opinion and certainly no disrespect was managed, except for the fact that I just, you know, disagree with the size and being something that would be expected, I think, in terms of, you know, where water rates should be going in the future. That's unfortunate, and I realize all utility costs are escalating in this country overall, water being one of them. But I just hope that we can continue to be creative and find solutions to curtail water usage during times through creative pricing, through technology and the like, and just hope that future counsels will continue to explore that. Thank you. Well, and if I could, just, you know, I don't think it's quite as simple as we're making it out to be, and I would suggest that maybe we're going to have to schedule just a discussion on this alone. It's not just as simple. And I've spent a lot of time on this topic and I've had the opportunity along with Mr. System to spend some time in dialogue and discussion over the last several months with our compadries, our wholesale, water authority folks. And there's a lot that's all coming together. We have a lot of debt coming off, but we realize we have a very aging water system that is going to take a tremendous amount of reinvestment in to do exactly what you're suggesting, Mr. Soberthorne, which is to reinvest in our water system to make sure that it's the top technology and it's updated in a way it can. We have, I don't remember what it is, 25 miles of pipes to shift the water from where it is to where we are that's all aging. And at the same time, and our wholesale customers about to disappear, I mean, they've already put us on notice that as they grow, they don't want to be dependent on a water source that they don't have total control over, and I don't disagree with that approach. But I think, and the reason I'm saying that's a little bit more complicated than I think just increased costs, part if I understood it right, this increase is sort of to stabilize that system over a long period of time and understanding that our wholesale customer may be gone. And it may be sooner rather than later, it could be phased out over four or five years if I heard it right or it could be phased out next month. And that's probably not accurate, but quicker. Over two, it could be realistic. And so if I understood, at least in the dialogues that I've had, part of this rate increase, Mr. Sisson, is to stabilize that investment that's going to be required over a period of time, to stabilize our water rates so that if we wake up one day and Loudoun County is gone, that we suddenly aren't in a different world if I could. So- That different planet. Different planet. Right. Different planet. Well said. Are you? So that's why I'm saying it's not that simple. And I would urge Mr. Sovereign and probably others because I can tell you I'm not totally wrapped around it. And I've spent a lot of time in effort over the last couple of months trying to understand those challenges, especially on the wholesale side. And I also think, and this is where we're not talking about either, is as we've kept those water rates low in the last several years, it's been 3% if I remember right. If I follow this, we've reinvested in it we've gotten the fund balance and the water system down low and this is different topic for a different area and part of this is to stabilize that as well so that as we have to go out and borrow more money to modernize it we have a little bit more stable now that that debt's coming off. So I agree with everything you just said and I fully now understand the issue of the building up the fund in that respect. So we have that that that I guess flexibility or whatever the right terminology is. And I will tell you that what threw me was what two things for me. One was that we were reducing our expenses this year while the same time raising. And it wasn't clear from the presentation until I asked the question as to why. And I think that's helpful. It was helpful to me. It was probably helpful to some of my colleagues, probably helpful to the public who may be listening. That wasn't clear at the outset. And then secondly, not disagreeing with that approach at all. I think that the thing I was disagreeing with was whether or not there was a comment made, sorry to say this, that 7% is a reasonable rate increase. And the context of everything else that we learned in the subsequent questioning, yes, I agree with that, but I'm only saying that it seems like most people who are paying bills would not agree that 7% is a reasonable increase in any bill when they're getting raises in some cases no raises at all but raises of less than inflation or the rate of inflation. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Okay, I think Mr. Assistant wanted to jump in as well. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Mr. Silver, though, and new I would rat rise to take the bait. No, I agree with your wrap-up comment that 7% is way more than we would like to see. There is no way that that's a reasonable increase for anything in today's world. But in the context of every other water purveyor in Northern Virginia, it's exactly what everybody else is seeing. And you don't need to turn to it. But on page A55 in your budget book is a list of nine different jurisdictions. And we are the next to the lowest jurisdiction. Even with the 7% increase. I'm sorry, even with the 7% increase. Right, well some of the rest of them have their increases projected as well in there. But that is a position that in the lowest, by the way, is Perfax County, that produces hundreds of millions of gallons of water a day, and we produce 10 or 12. And so there the only reason why we're not lowers because it's simply a matter of scale, but we have maintained that second lowest in Northern Virginia for at least 16 years. And the highest one on that rate is 50% higher than what city residents pay. I think Mr. Borishok and his crew have done an outstanding job. We work very hard every year to scrub those expenses. We have done too good of a job, frankly, because our fund balances are not where they need to be. And the mayor said very well that this is an effort to stabilize this system a little bit more. So I want the citizens of the city to be assured that they have good value in their water system and will for quite some time. Mr. Rasmussen. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I have a number of questions that are all on the CIP issues. Are we going to be addressing that anytime soon? The whole issue of where the water and sewer system is going in terms of needing to upgrade the improvements to the water main, the new water treatment, the new raw water treatment plant, all that kind of stuff, are we? Well, and if I could, I know that our bond council and staff is working feverishly on that now, and I think the discussion was, let's get through the budget process and then we will have a, and I think there was even a date, Mr. Sissin, it's within the next month or so. If I remember two months, I don't remember the exact date, but. And that will be a very detailed presentation and discussion carrying the CIP really out, you know, 20 years kind of into projections. So yes. Thank you. Okay. Any other questions? If not, thank you very much. Appreciate your time. And I will just say, I've said this before privately to the staff and I know we've talked about eclectively. You know, when you look back at all the wonderful things our city forefathers did for us, going out and having the initiative and the foresight to purchase our own independent water system was something that should be commended and it really truly is one of the great resources of an independent city like the city of Fairfax and to all the folks that are involved in it. It's something that I know we're all proud of but it's something that I think we can all be proud of even in the future and thank you for that effort. Thank you. We do have a great plant out there. You've all been out there, I guess. And as I've told Bob on more than one occasion, it's probably one of the major things that actually drew me here to work for the city. That particular plant. Thank you very much. We're now moving forward to information technology. Okay, good evening. It's nice to be here to present our IT budget for the next year. These are our IT responsibilities. They are the typical responsibilities of all production, IT departments. Our staff is divided into two teams. Application development headed by the IT Assistant Director and the Enterprise Support Team, which is headed by our telecommunications manager. I want to go back a little bit to 2007 accomplishments only because they kind of come forward through this year and we had the big construction effort as you remember with City Hall and the police building and our staff prepared that helped quite a bit with that. We had to redesign all the telecommunications to take into consideration all those new buildings. And we moved the data center a little over a year ago into the middle of the construction zone. If you can picture all the data racks and servers surrounded by plastic hanging from the ceiling, which kept out some of the dust, but it didn't help keep the dust out when this hole in the ceiling was drilled by the construction crews. We had pointed and retaining here getting all of that done and we moved all the staff, hitherto and yon several times to finish that up. And I might add because of our staff, and I want to say to them in public that they have done an outstanding job, we did not miss a day of work. And when they turned off their computers on Friday, they turned them back on on Monday, and everybody was back in business. So they deserved many kudos for that. And we went on and did our regular work of upgrading software. This next fiscal year, this the one that we're in, we finished those moves. And we started a couple of other projects. We have available in this building now, wireless for public use, and it's inside the building. Although it was used as Mr. McCarty mentioned last night during the fall festival and this summer to enroll folks into their parks and rec classes. They set up outside. They use the wireless network that we have at the Elbow and this building and it's here. We have a separate one for the private network for our internal staff to use in a separate with public. We are moving into a phase where we are increasing our use of mobile technology for the staff, as Mr. Borscheck just mentioned, with the utilities department. And so in order to assist with that, we have implemented a new Outlook Web Access for Remote Users of the internet. We've increased our security access to internal networks with it through a VPN tunnel. That's a very secure method of getting into our city's applications. And we require encryption software on all of our laptops so that city data is protected at all times when they are outside of the building here. The last one on this list right here, the virtual server system is a new technology being investigated by departments across the country. And it is the ability to use a piece of hardware for multiple uses and to set up virtual environments if you will. And we're using it here as a test for disaster recovery so that if a server crashes or is an operable, we can set up very quickly those applications on a separate computer and have those up and running in a very short amount of time to recover those. And we don't have to have dedicated servers or a similar exact device ready and available for them. And we will be continuing with that effort. We are continuing also with our Panamation upgrade, the billing, and central receipts. We have done a number of new web pages I want to mention. We have 870 web pages in the city. And they are all filled with great load of useful information for citizens of businesses. And I would just say this publicly for the folks watching that they should look at the emergency management website, for example, where they have many opportunities to get information on protecting their families and their businesses during an emergency in the city or elsewhere. We also implemented some applications they can now sign on for inspection requests on the internet and all phases the building, mechanical, electrical, and plumbing, and get those scheduled through the internet. That's a much great time saver for them. We implement a granticus, which is a live video casting on the internet so that people at home, not in this area, can watch the council meetings from their laptops or wherever. And I want to mention that we keep some reports of those meetings and the most requested meeting so far has been the council session of February 12th. And we've had 1664 requests for that particular meeting, just an outstanding number. Now that doesn't mean they watch the whole meeting. I might point out that to you. They might have clicked on it and said, what is this? I don't want that. But. Can you remind us what was on the agenda that night? I have no idea. Anybody here remember? Good consent agenda. Let's talk. February 12th. I don't know. Okay. But the useful thing about it is that the agenda is side by side with the picture so that they can go later on that evening and click on the agenda item and only view that portion of the meeting that they want to see. So I think from that standpoint it's very helpful. We are planning to add podcasting to that later on in a few weeks, and so that they can download it and watch those five hours of meetings at their leisure. It can also be used for other purposes. I might add, for example, if the historic resources wanted to do a podcast of a virtual walking tour of the they could do that on a podcast and it would be available. So. Next year we are working on a couple of things. Real Estate Assessment. That product will be up and running probably by the fall. We've already started that project and our emphasis is on mobile computing. The real estate department will receive tablets as part of this application. They will be able to go out into the field with their tablets, do sketches of the homes, take digital pictures and download that live to the database here at City Hall. And they'll be able to gather much more accurate information much more quickly by doing that. Also, the public works will be getting laptops for them. They do a number of inspections and the supervisors work in the field as well. They'll be able to keep track of those efforts online live and print out inspection reports, print out requests for anything and leave that with a homeowner without coming back to City Hall. As you know, the price of gas, anything we can say by keeping people off the streets is a bonus. We actually started that program this year with the zoning and technician and doing zoning inspections. And we have a single zoning inspector. And we didn't have her with that equipment. I don't think she would get anywhere near as much work done as she has been able to do with that. We have some money in the budget for Blenem technology. These are the phones, a couple of computers to go into that building. And we are planning to upgrade the city's network. That is the hub of our telecommunications network. With the in conjunction with the Homeland Security, as well as the wide area network that we have here, the switches that are there are simply not the right capacity to service all of our needs. So we're going to replace those with bigger switches and then move those existing ones, which are still fully functional out to other areas where they can be reused to more appropriate. We have two cost centers. One is just the telephone system. And that is primarily the lines out to Verizon, et cetera, for long distance and our PRIs that go out outside the city. Okay. I have a feeling we may be down on television. Nope. Shall we? Is the back screen got online? It's showing the chart that I have. We'll check it. Go ahead, why don't we just keep pulling it up? Yeah, it's up now. Okay. The budget has gone up. Overall, it's not 9%. And just to remind you, the budget from 2007 to 2008 was actually down 15% so this is not, yes it's an increase over the current year but it's taken in context. I'm really, the thing to say is that it's difficult to maintain a steady budget in IT simply because there are projects that come and go and so it fluctuates a little bit more than some of the other departments do. We've added some additional lines here. We've done do more long-distance calls and so the telephone costs for those outside contractors have gone up a bit. contractors have gone up a bit. We have some additional projects. We had a consultant to a workflow analysis of three areas of the city land management public safety and financial management. We had a number of recommendations of ways that we could improve our internal operations and we are going to be putting some of those into effect and restarting that project this year and some of those costs for software adjustments, etc. are reflected here. We're going to be doing some software upgrades and equipment maintenance has gone up a bit. In terms of capital costs, we have three placements servers to do and those network course switches are in that fund as well. And then the mobile equipment is in the capital costs or the other operating costs along with equipment rental. We are planning to put in a failover internet line so that if the internet connection here goes down, which we use obviously every day for a business, that we will have a recovery internet connection. It will be located at the police department, so that it's at a separate facility outside of City Hall. And it's a different provider, a different network so that more than likely it will be available. It's not something that is terminated locally here. So that is a disaster recovery measure. The only budget adjustment that I want to mention this evening is the one that for the Fire Screen Center, which was due to postpone from last year to this year, and now it's being postponed once again. And that is for the the Fiber, the computers, phones, et cetera, for the inside of the building. The only thing I want to mention is that the cost of the Fiber to get to the building, if we can possibly, we're going to look this year in our own budget and perhaps I'll talk to fire about it. See, what they might have available, to at least bring the fiber down to the building, even if we don't purchase any of the equipment or anything else. So I just wanted to alert you to that. That is our mission statement, which you can read, but I will be happy to answer any questions. Thank you. I'm sorry. Are you ready for just general comments? I just want to, a couple of things. I mentioned, first of all, that on the issue of an electronic community, I think they pointed about websites and so forth that you've mentioned with the city staff. I appreciate that very much. I think you guys have done a terrific job and the website does look great. And I think it's come a long way actually just in the last couple of years. So my compliments to you and your staff for that. The other thing is, I'd like to see more, I mean, it's always more, but in terms of trying to get more of our business community engaged and links and so forth, I know you've been moving in some of that direction already, but the more we can do to make this, you know, an all-inclusive kind of little village, I think that makes electronic village, I think makes great sense. So if you can continue on that track, that would be great. Curious about the council meetings, and I'm still waiting, I think Rachel, I don't know if Rachel's here this evening, but she's not. She had talked about coming back with additional statistics. The statistics you share with the council on that one meeting is fascinating, but I think that the council's going to be even more amazed at some of the other statistics in terms that I've already, I've asked some of these questions. So I've gotten some answers and asked that the whole council be briefed on and hopefully I think she's putting together a memo on this and I think Melanie's not in yes to she's helping. And the point is is that the numbers are terrific. I mean people are actually, I think even our city manager was skeptical, is this really right that these numbers and the number of hits that we're getting and I think there's even a way to track where they're coming from in terms of servers from around the country and we're getting people that are watching our meetings not only here locally but also elsewhere I think I had heard that from somebody you're not sure okay but the more the more data points we can get on that, I think the better. The other thing I want to talk about is the wireless networks. We had talked about this and I think we all had concluded that it made sense to postpone this because of changing technology and some of the vendor problems and jurisdictions having trouble elsewhere about this. Certainly agree with that and I apologize if you mentioned it but did you talk about where we are. I know you said about this building. I didn't hear what you said about Van Dyke Park. We had sort of left it that we would think about our public parks, our schools, our public facilities. And you mentioned public facilities. Did you talk about parks? If you did, I didn't hear it. No, I apologize. I did not mention that. That actually did get cut from this budget to meet the guy. How much money are we talking? That was 13,000. Okay. Okay. Thank you. I yield for Mr. Murr. Miss Cross. Just to follow up on one of the last things you talked about, bringing the fiber to the fire training facility. Is that $134,000 just to bring the fiber to the building? That's 20,000. That's 20,000. 20,000, okay. The rest of that is for the equipment that would go inside the building. Which we're going to close the pump. OK. BELL RINGS Find a... Sound effects here. How is it looking? I'll let you see. I'm going to plant it. Yeah. Well, that's going to be a... That's going to stick around for a while. Right. You started selling. Well, strangely enough, I want to talk about software that's available to define the address as to whether it's in the city or not. We heard from the Commissioner of Revenue and Treasurer last night that this software does not exist and yet the police department has available in their cars immediate access to whether an address is city property or not. The reason I keep harping on this and it's been, I've been at this for a couple of years because it just staggers my mind that we don't have that ability. But it becomes such a confusion when we're looking for revenues that are to come to us, but oh no, they go to the county because there's uncertainty about the address and where it, whether it's city or county. And it seems to me that it would be such an easy thing for people in those two, the Treasurer's Office and the revenue office to be able to serve a customer and key in their address and be able to immediately tell them yes you're in the right place or know your properties in the county and you're going to have to go across the street. So is that available or not? Well I think most folks use the electoral boards address from the state but we are also building our own central address database here in the city of all the city's addresses. So we would be at once that is completed. We will be able to check that. I'm sorry. Sorry if I could just add to that a lot of the revenues I think you're referring to miss cross the revenues that are collected by the Treasury Department. Much of that comes through the state. So it really does not have anything to do with our systems internally. There will be, for example, sales tax is something that is collected by the state and then it's actually dispersed to us in Fairfax County and any other jurisdiction in the state. In our software or programs would not have anything to do with determining what money comes to us and what money does not. So those are not actually, we don't have our technology and our staff does not actually have control over. Those type of disbursement of that type of revenue. I understand that, but I think it would be enormously valuable to the gentleman in the Treasurer's Office, the tickets, cars that don't have appropriate stickers. When those stickers are purchased, they're either purchased for the city, or they're not purchased, they're just, the tax is paid in the county, but there isn't a sticker involved. But it seems to me that there is so many applications for that use in the marketing department, in the revenue offices, in the city manager's office. I would hope that this database will, how soon would you think that that might be available? We're doing that. We have been doing that, but it will be up when the came off product is because it's needed for that product to operate. That's what it's based on location finder. So all the addresses will be in by the time that application is ready, which will probably be this fall. And how will that work? You'll just type in an address. And then the system will say, will confirm that this is a valid city address or it is not. Yeah. It can be used for multiple purposes. Okay. Yeah. And just another application is the fire department in their EMT services, the ambulance services that we're now that there is now a fee for. I mean they answer calls both in the city and in the county and I'm sure at some locations it's difficult to know whether it's a city address or a county address. So I'm reassured that we're working on it and it is going to happen because I think it's really going to be an important tool. Thank you. Other questions or comments? If not, thank you very much. We're now moving on to fire and rescue. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of Council good evening That with me assistant chief Andrew Wilson for those that may not know Chief Wilson that's viewing. My name is Tom Owen. I'm the City Fire Chief and it's a pleasure to be able to cover with you our FY0809 budget request. The purposes to briefly highlight the department's activity and accomplishments during calendar year 2007 review our proposed fiscal plan and present information relative to the major program area of the department. In your budget book, the Fire Department budget can be found on pages C85 through C96. Our organizational structure has remained fairly consistent for the last several years. We have two major divisions within the Fire Department, Our organizational structure has remained fairly consistent for the last several years. We have two major divisions within the Fire Department, emergency operations and code administration. And our chart also depicts the integrated chain of command that we have with our rank officers in the Fairfax Volunteer Fire Department. As you know, normally Chief Bome joins me for the budget presentation. Unfortunately, at a prior commitment and is not able to be here this evening. Our core responsibilities continue to be to promote fire prevention and life safety, provide effective firefighting and emergency medical response services, provide all hazard emergency response planning to the community to ensure continuity of government, ensure building code compliance through effective plans review and inspection services and promote livability through the administration of our property maintenance code. We have a number of notable accomplishments. I'll highlight just a few. First is that the completion of phase two of our Public Safety Training Center, and the initiation of phase three construction at this point is underway. During the last year, we've hired a total of nine firefighters and six fire medics to fill existing vacancies, and I know the council is aware that maintaining full staffing in the fire department has been a continuing challenge for us. It is something that we've continued to work on and at this point we are very close. We have two vacancies remaining and Chief butters has been working hard. We actually have employment offers out for those last two positions and I am hoping that within the next 30 days I can proudly say that we are once again at our full staffing level. that we are once again at our full staffing level. As you know, we plan to develop and implement it in the past calendar year, a program for cost recovery for ambulance transport by the billing of insurance companies. This has been a major body of work to put this program together and get the appropriate approvals, initiate a contract with a billing organization and begin the process and billing did get underway the end of January of this year. In conjunction with the Fairfax Volunteer Fire Department, maintaining a very modern state of the art fleet, we took the livery and placed in service a new foam bumper for the city. And we also working with our volunteer leadership developed and implemented a new volunteer recruitment campaign. And as you'll see in later slides, our volunteer participation continues to be another area that we are challenged and we continue to work on. And I'll certainly highlight that more in the future. Training certification of seven new operational volunteers, five of which have recently been qualified for minimum staffing services also and notable accomplishment for the fire service last 12 months. The breakout of the fire department's budget by cost center. Administrative division represents 9% of our total expenditures. It incorporates four uniformed and one civilian full-time equivalent position. The operations, which is our largest division, represents 70% percent of the Fire Department budget, was 60 uniformed full-time positions. And code administration is 15% of our budget, with five uniformed and nine civilian positions, our total authorized strength being 69 uniform and 10 civilian positions. Looking at where the money goes overall our requests for this year actually decreases by 3%. The primary reason for the decrease relates to a correction in salary and benefit costs over 2008. Increases in contract services relate to projected increase in city county contract costs for our dispatch and communication services. Increase in internal services due to utility and motor pull charges increasing. Our capital cost increase relates to the additional funding provided to the Fairfax volunteer fire department under the MS Billing Revenue Sharing Agreement and these monies are all set by revenue to be collected. The operating cost increase is simply an inflationary adjustment over prior year. We do have a personnel request that the city manager has recommended in his budget includes the addition of a part-time position to serve as the EMS insurance billing manager. It certainly is a necessary position to provide the quality control that we need on the front end of the billing process when it comes to the audits of our EMS patient care and transport reports to ensure that they are complete, accurate, properly coded, and in forward to our billing company for processing. The figures here represent the initial request however I've been working with the personnel director as well as assistant city manager on a less costly alternative to meet this need. I was actually certainly hoping to be able to announce that tonight but unfortunately this occurs. Injury has delayed our completion of the project but I do anticipate there may be as much as a ten thousand dollars savings that we can yield through this shift that we are working toward to meet this need. Looking at our department budget by cost center administration 54% of our expenditure increase in capital cost reflects an increase in revenue from state fire programs fund. So again, these monies being reflected in our budget as an increase are actually offset by the matching increase in state revenue. The increase in operating costs is primarily because of upgrades in our tele-staff and electronic EMS reporting system. These are software upgrades that are necessary, and so those costs are built in for the next budget cycle. The Operations Cost Center, as I noted, the decrease in personnel services relates to the correction and salary and benefits that I mentioned. Increasing contract services is due to increased city county contract cost, as mentioned. Internal services is due to motor pool charges, and as mentioned. Internal services do the motor pool charges. Capital cost increase relates to revenue sharing, being reflected in the budget with the appropriate revenue offset. Code administration, decrease in internal services due to adjustment in water and sewer allocation, and the operating cost increases due to an increase in maintenance code violation contingency account. This account has been adjusted up and downed over the years. This actually reflects every story to what has been its original full funding level on an annual basis. Our CIP contracts, projects that were submitted include the initiation of a repair and maintenance program for Fire Station 3. Fire Station 3 owned by the Fairfax Volunteer Fire Department. But as I know, Mary Councilor aware the city did invest about $1.8 million a number of years ago during the expansion and renovation of that station. We are now looking at that aging of that facility and some of the major repair issues that are facing the volunteer department. And I felt it was appropriate to submit for the first time including that facility under the city's repair and maintenance program for public works. The initial project request for the first year of $40,000 is to deal with the apparatus Bayflore which has a crack and is partially sinking on one side of the station. Traffic signal preemption was also submitted. This was to do another 10 intersections in that program that we've had underway for a number of years. The IT infrastructure for the Public Safety Training Center has mentioned by Ms. Bohan. All of these CIP projects that I have mentioned have currently been deferred and the manager's recommended budget. And in going back to that, I feel the most pressing need is again the introduction of Fire Station 3 into the Repair and Maintenance Program. We understand what we're up against from a physical standpoint. I think the Fire Department is very willing to hunker down and bear through these deferrals if need be But I think the station repair and maintenance is really part of that is helping to protect the investment that the city made a number of years ago in that facility There is also a CIP request related to the fire department that is in the public works budget and that is the ongoing repair and maintenance line item for station 33 and certainly the fire department supports that request. That's a $12,000 item. Our emergency response activity for the past year continues to show a department with a very high operational tempo 10,727 total emergency response reflect to 30 emergency vehicle responses per day or one and a quarter each hour of the day We have a vehicle in the city that is responding to an emergency incident. I Know always of interest to the council is how that breaks down between city and county response activity and then past year responses, 54.3% of all of our responses were into Fairfax County and that's actually down from the previous year, which was 55.7%, 58.5% of our EMS responses are into the county and that is also down from 60.7% from the previous year. I think the good news is that moving to transport insurance recovery for EMS responses, we will at least now be better positioned to recover revenue for those calls for those county calls that we answer outside the city. As I mentioned, we continue to be challenged with our volunteer participation, our minimum staffing by volunteers to climb 51% over the past year, and supplemental staffing declined by 9%. A lot of this is due to the simple turnover in our operational volunteers and a decline in availability of volunteer certification training. We have always been fortunate with our partners in Fairfax County to have our volunteers attend certification training through the County Fire and Rescue Academy. There has been a pretty significant curtailing of those course offerings because of decline in operational volunteer participation in the county stations. There was a time that they would offer a volunteer certification course at least twice a year. They are now fortunate if after a period of 18 to 24 months they are able to muster enough volunteers to actually have one class. It's meant that we've done a number of training classes for our volunteers in-house. The volunteer certification that I mentioned in our accomplishments was an in-house program where we fully trained and qualified seven volunteer members on our own. Once again, there's a cost benefit relative to the number of students you have to have before you invest the kind of resources it takes to run those schools. And so we look to have 10 or 12 members before we initiate our own program. So between what we can offer ourselves and the reduced availability in courses through the county academy, training opportunities for our volunteers have also been a challenge. And so it's not a matter of body count. Our volunteer membership continues to rise. It's the fact that we can't get volunteers into the training classes because of the reduced number of offerings. So something we are continuing to work on. Hopefully our volunteer recruitment program is going to reap some benefit. And I know that the manager forwarded the new television commercials that we are now airing. And we're hopefully going to reap some additional applications from folks within the demographic that we are trying to target. We've also done some realignment from a management standpoint with our volunteers. We've now actually assigned a squad of volunteers to each of our career shifts. What this is going to do, we think, is more closely aligned, a core group of volunteer members to each of the work groups, and hopefully allow our career staff officers to help engage in coordinating training for those volunteers on shift, and building more of an intimate working relationship day to day that will hopefully encourage them to participate more on an operational basis. Certainly, Chief Bowman, our volunteer leadership have been very engaged in this dialogue and these proposals to go forward. And so we're very encouraged with some of the changes that we see coming down the line. The good news is on the training side in-house, we can point to a 276% increase in the number of hours volunteers have spent training with our continuing education programs, the monthly drills that our volunteers attend, and that increase also affects the number of hours participated by the seven volunteers that qualified through our in-house program, as well as the names training that's been required of all emergency responders nationwide. Career and volunteer have had to complete that process. On the code administration side, the number of construction permits issued in inspections perform has remained fairly steady, while the number of permits permits issued in inspections performed has remained fairly steady. While the number of permits issued in total inspections are down slightly over 2006, we see a fairly consistent amount of work out of code administration relative to new construction as well as reinspection. Our city fire marshals also remain active in a wide variety of activities that includes not only the routine fire prevention, but the Tank Farm Oversight Program, non-residential use permits conducting all of our fire investigations of fires within the city, and a wide variety of specialized inspection services. That will conclude our presentation this year. I'll be glad to answer any questions. Questions, comments? Thank you. And again, if you've mentioned this, I will take it offline later just a quick question in terms of the facilities use in station three in particular. One of the things that I, you know, I guess it's been, how many years now, 11 since we had that on the ballot for renovation, I'm trying to remember. I believe that was 92 when it was on the ballot. Oh, so it's even longer. It's been 15 years. Construction started, do I believe, in 94? Okay. Did you mention any of the challenges there that are ongoing now with just in terms of more female firefighters and the like that it would that that In many ways that facility is You know it's been a long time we may need to relook at some of the challenges there in terms of some of the the facility requirements actually in that regard We're in very good shape both fire station Station 3 and 33 Windows remodels were done. There was a great deal of foresight in projecting growth in the future. And so we actually have adequate room. The bigger issue really has to more with some of the wear and tear issues. We have windows that the casements are leaking. So there's some window replacement kinds of issues going forward. The roof on the fourth floor continues to be a challenge as the roofer chase leak to leak. The HVAC system is another area that we're starting to see some wear issues. The volunteer department actually already replaced one air handler on the roof and it's about a six zone system in that building. So it's very likely that going forward over the next several years, we're going to see additional HVAC. One of the things in the CIP and it's a five-year proposal is to actually do a study of the HVAC system to see what the issues are. And certainly with technology changing over that period of time, going forward to repair a replace will certainly break much more efficient facilities in there from an HVAC standpoint than we have. Okay, I appreciate that. So what you're saying is that basically the facility aside from CIP related items, so you think it's going to withstand the next five years at least. Absolutely. Great. Thank you. Other questions? If this cross? We heard from the police last night, and I'm looking here. I think it's, it had to do with their need for a communication system that would enable them to communicate with you the county. It was P-25. P-25, radio. Do you already have that equipment? We do. Again, our communication services are through Fairfax County. And so under our agreement, the city county contract, there are provisions for us to be included on the fire department side as the county makes those changes in technology. The only thing that was not included was our portable radios and we actually started making the conversion through the city budget about five years ago. Doing it in small lots but we have now converted all the portable radios over so that they meet the new P25 standard. So we're actually better positioned because of our communications relationship with the county than I think the police department or but I know I did watch chief rap report presentation last night and what he has shared with you is a very accurate reflection is that is what is happening within the communication field as you move into the digital wave is that these bandwidths are becoming much more narrow. And so it is these upgrades to the new standards that are being set by an organization called APCO. The APCO P25 standard is what this actually is. And the unfortunate reality is people who recently bought the older technology radios are now having to go through and completely replace those systems. So it's a catch 22 and if you operate on a regional basis as we do here in Northern Virginia, you really can't be out there on an island by yourself without the ability to communicate directly with your neighbor or in our case, crawl services between the fire department and the police department. Thank you. Is that a process? That's a thank you. I just have two quick things and the first is, and we may have, when we made the decision to go to the ambulance transport billing system. Did we talk about that it was going to require a part time or billing manager when we made that decision? Was that part of the conversation? Yes. At the time we made the presentation that in fact was included. The City Manager indicated in our discussions prior to coming to council that it was important to make council aware that yet we were going to try to deal with it in this budget process. My original request that went forward in the budget process was a full time position and again understanding the fiscal reality of what we're facing and the manager is recommended that as a half time position and something will certainly work hard to make work. The under the CIP, you had talked about the importance of Fire Station III repair and maintenance program of $40,000. And you said this was the first year you've ever included that in the General Fund. Is that traditionally a responsibility of the volunteer? Yes. Funding? Yes. They have pretty much managed the entire facility issue relative to repair maintenance, operating costs associated with that. But once again, very much like the discussion we've had Mayor with the revenue sharing, it's not very difficult to look at the revenues that the volunteer department has from its traditional sources and see how flat they have become. So I engage the Board of Directors in looking at opportunities at the city maybe able to help provide some relief to the Volunteer Department. This was one of those areas to look at what we might be able to do on the facility side to help lift some of that burden from their finances. And I understand that I guess the only question I have is when we went through with the ambulance fees, I thought part of that was a stabilization of a revenue source and quite frankly even a little bit more revenue if I remember it right through that process. Did I catch that right and I guess the sequence that is if that's the case, then what else is happening that's causing their revenues to drop to the point where we also in addition to doing that have to step in and pay for some of the CIP things. Sure. Your recollection is absolutely correct. In fact, let me take you back to the ordinance that was passed by this body. It actually says that the revenue sharing relationship with the devolunteer department, that they can only use the revenues received through this program for apparatus equipment and facility. So certainly the use of the revenue sharing money towards support for the facility is an eligible expenditure for these monies through the plan. The reality is, as we've gone forward in looking at the amount of money, it has been driven by the level of apparatus replacement. And particularly with the debt that the Volunteer Department continues to carry, their focus as these monies begin, and again, it's not a lump sum. It sort of comes in a little bit of a time, was to begin to deal with their apparatus replacement issues and the debt that they continue to carry associated with that. But it's gonna come down to being a matter of priorities. My concern was not wanting to wait relative to the facility because what's important to me is you need to know my view of that it's a work location. I have a number of city employees over there that we are directly responsible for health safety and welfare and things like leaking roofs and HVAC systems that are becoming questionable in terms of their efficiency are question in my mind. Therefore, I move forward approaching the board included in the budget. But it is clearly an issue of priority in one where the revenues that can be gained through the insurance billing can be used by the volunteer department for these needs as well. OK. All right. Thank you for your time. Appreciate it. We're now moving on to community development and planning economic development. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Members of the council. I have with me this evening Mr. John De Poletano, chairman of the business improvement district, which is received funds from the city as a pass-through through our department. As a result of the 600 tax levied on the business improvement district, likewise I have with me Mr. Daryl Estino is the chairman of the Fairfax Renaissance Housing Corporation who also receives funds that's passed through the department for operating the Renaissance Housing Corporation. And these two gentlemen will be speaking when we get to those sections. Community development planning, basically we're organized in the four divisions. We do community development, we do economic development, we do city planning, comprehensive planning, and we do zoning administration and enforcement. You'll notice on the chart that we've got a new addition there, it's special projects engineered, it's part time person. This is a position that deals fundamentally with water quality and stream issues and other special projects that was previously in the Public Works Department and has emigrated to our department will maintain me the same responsibility. The salary for that position will show up in our budget numbers and I assume that the public works budget was reflects that as well. In terms of core responsibilities, I won't go through this in great detail, but just to say you're welcome. The planning division obviously does land use planning and implementation and architectural review and are responsible for three boards and commissions, planning commission, Renaissance Housing Corporation and the Board of Architectural Review. There are three people in that division. The community development division is responsible for development plans essentially for land use applications and development plans. So anything having to do with development, rezoning, special use permits, variances, etc., all the way down to site planning and subdivision is done by these folks. Zoning is responsible obviously for zoning administration and enforcement of the city zoning regulations. It's also responsible for an awful lot of permitting. They permit a variety of things, signs, any land use, non-residential use permits, flood plain, tree management, things of that nature. They also staff the border zoning appeals. Final core responsibility then is an economic development, which is responsible for all of our economic development related matters here in the city. The economic development division, which is, consists of one person, not really a division, but in any event is responsible to work with the economic development authority as well as the business improvement district and serves as an officer on the business improvement district board. The recent activity that seems to have picked up here lately is that the economic development has also sort of taken the lead on the administrative work associated with property disposition, so the properties that the city owns and is trying to dispose of or release. The majority of that work of the administrative work associated with that is done by the economic development manager. A year in review. I think I'll again won't go through all of this but this illustrates the development activities that we've dealt with and any increases in development activity that we've faced. I think notably land use applications are up about 8% architecture reviews, 6% site plan subdivisions under reviewer It's up 3836 percent. And finally, and I think notably, we have 142 active zoning enforcement cases. We don't have historic data on zoning enforcement cases. We have in cap records in this manner as it relates to zoning enforcement. We were beginning now with this past year, and so we'll be able to track not only the number of cases but the nature of those cases because I assume a lot of them are now overcrowding cases which are obviously a lot more complex and difficult to resolve. Continuing 2008 in review, the emphasis of the department really has fundamentally shifted over the past year. From one of a review of development, organization to one that not only reviews, but also tries to facilitate development and redevelopment in certain specified areas and by that I mean just there's a lot more interaction with property owners in advance and potential developers in advance of any construction applications being submitted. And some of that's due to the master planning effort that we've initiated over the past year and it worked through over the past year and it worked through over the past year. Fairfax Boulevard Master Plan, obviously, we had an extensive process and we're about to wrap that up. Just for your information, as soon as we've wrapped up this budget process, we intend to try to get that on the front burner with the Council and the Steering Committee. Fairfax pull of our partnership. We continue to provide services for the partnership and support in any way that we can. Old Town Village, you can go out there and see it. Obviously every day it's coming along. Businesses are starting to open more and more. We'll open. We'll get a few minor issues dealt with like signage and outdoor seating and things like that and it's going to be a very lively place here in a couple of months. Again, property acquisition, disposition and property management are things that we're doing a lot more of than we ever have. We've worked a lot in Old Town Parking. We've done an Old Town Parking data collection. We've worked with a consultant on their analysis. And we are now in the process of developing a way finding system to help people find the parking and understand the location and availability of the parking. This slide, initiatives and challenges I actually had a lot of things I wanted to go over here. I'll try to go over them in summary. I apologize for the small font. This slide is all about the land use challenges associated with a mature city essentially. And how we deal with both residential and commercial redevelopment. This issue number one and these aren't in priority orders but obviously this issue of Mcmatchins or residential and infill development is still on our plate. We still continue to get a lot of conversation and inquiries and complaints about it and they may have hailed off a little bit due to the nature of the economy right now or the condition of the economy but nonetheless that will change and this will soon become an issue that's a hot issue again and we're going to have to deal with it. The second bullet extremely important, complete the master planning process. By the process, I mean we will again next month present you in the steering committee with our recommendations from that master plan as to what we believe should be taken from that master plan and incorporated into city policy. And then whatever is incorporated into city policy and then whatever is incorporated into city policy is what we implement. So that's a major step for Fairfax Boulevard. And obviously a part of that is going to be a foreign base code that there's been some discussion about and again next month you will have an opportunity to provide you with a foreign base code, a draft for, and we'll begin working that through. We still have on our plate the rewrite of the zoning ordinance in a comprehensive fashion. We've got the comprehensive plan review, which is due, and then we've got major redevelopment issues, particularly along the centers that are identified in the draft master plan. Continuing, this is the work remaining in old town draft master plan. Continuing, this is the work remaining in old town Fairfax along with some miscellaneous zoning tech amendments. But we do have some wrap up going on in old town Fairfax and old town Fairfax redevelopment, the library, the web lot have actually spurred a lot of interest in conversation about redevelopment of some of the areas around those. And those are things we'll deal with next year as well. These deal with our efforts to facilitate and address redevelopment activity, basically. And then the bottom deal with more within side baseball stuff. These are administrative issues and management issues associated with an uptick and a level of development. And us trying to deal with the logistics of the things that we have that are ordinary parts of our job, plus what has come down the pike over the past three years. Proposed budget by and here's the budget breakout by cost center. This is essentially the budget that was approved last year. That was approved last year. There is one exception and I'll get to that in a second. But you can see it's fairly evenly broken out into the various functional areas. One point I'll note that the Renaissance House incorporation contribution or grant from the city is proposed to be zeroed out for next year not make the cut for the budget. So that need will be deferred. Under expenditures, again, this is more broken out rather than by functional areas by type of expense. You know, the most notable change in this is the top line, its personnel, and the personnel reflects two things. It reflects, first of all, the transfer of a part-time position in front public works into the planning shop. And the second thing that it does is it reflects an additional position, a new position, and I'll get into that. Again, basically, factoring those items out, we're not looking at a 12% what we'd be looking at a 5.4% increase. The position in the spin request is fundamentally somebody to work with Fairfax Boulevard redevelopment coordination. The gist of this request is that it would be a position that would be split from the city's general fund and that there would be some participation for the expense of this position on the part of the business improvement district with their funds. What I've done here is prepare the list or transcribe the list from the proposed master plan. That are the main implementation steps, obviously underneath this, there are underneath each of these bullets, there are probably, you know, five, ten sub-bullets for each one. And they range from developing and helping develop policies to form base code to managing the contracts for street designs to establishing parking strategies, things of that nature, as well as development review, design and development review for those in particular the center areas. The master plan actually specifically recommended two positions to get it started. I appreciate fully that the master plan has not been adopted. I also appreciate fully that the recommendations contained in the master plan are not embraced uniformly by members of the council. I have the strong feeling however that there is much in the master plan a substantial amount that will be adopted and to the extent that a lot of it is adopted we need to pay some attention to it from a staffing perspective Again a little bit more about that in a minute The to move on to talk a little bit a little bit about the Renaissance housing corporation I'll turn it over to mr. Lestina move on from there. Thank you mr. Hudson I call your kitchen to the next slide. I would just like to highlight three numbers on this slide, the bottom, the last three. But 154 loans that we've been completed and closed of that 144 are now finished with the attendant upgrades that we funded and there are 10 under construction at the present time. In the next slide, just call your attention to the bottom numbers that are smaller. Roughly our average loan now for fiscal years 07 and 08 are $146,000 and our interest then for two years that we set aside an escrow is roughly 23,000. Now I would point out that the housing corporation has not lost or written off one penny. It's pretty difficult to find a lending institute that can make that most. I don't know if you can find any. In the past, the FRHC has recaptured money from interest escrow accounts due to some early payoffs. And in this economic climate, those of all but vanished. And so under next year's fiscal budget, the housing corporation as Mr. Hudson pointed out, has been zeroed out. Now we estimate that we have enough money to get through to somewhere around February, March or April of next year. But we can't commit all of our money for loans because we need to retain some for administrative purposes due to the two-year length of the loan, and which requires quarterly progress reports. And so when we close loans in February of 2009, it'll take us to February of 11, February 2011. And so when one looks at zeroing this thing out, it's kind of like a downward slide and that we need to think ahead because of the commitments that are involved here with these loans. I respectfully request and the housing corporation members the same that it are grant not be zeroed out. The FRHC is very willing to commit its fair share to the city shortfall but we request that it not be zeroed out before it could force an additional hurdle before refunding in the old 910 budget year. We request that it provide a little money enough for two in the old 910 budget year. We request that it provide a little money enough for two loans would be 46,000. Our last grant was 420,000. So the simple deduction, 46 from 120 leaves, 74, contributed toward a shortfall needs. And then we would request a general agreement that in the coming year after this budget term that we're looking at now, we look at a grant that would fully fund it for the coming year. That concludes my remarks. Moving on to the Fairfax Boulevard Partnership, which is our business improvement district. As I said, our economic development manager serves as a board officer. Bid programs were over the past year, a marketing public relations, master plan development, business development in a street scape program. A strategic business plan adopted entry signs for service organizations were put up and they looked great by the way. They really do. And the bid was funded with a 6-cent per 100 surcharge for those businesses located within the business improvement district, geographical area. There was considerable, and I'll administer in the polatown I speak to this or supplement it, but if I can just summarize, I think the discussion went kind of like this. Sixth and a hundred was really too much, more money than was necessary to perpetuate the function of an organization, but not enough to do substantial capital improvements and physical improvements along the corridor. And so a survey was sent out among the membership or at least the membership of the board. And basically the results came back that they would like to continue to be in existence. and I think the consensus was, but at a reduced surcharge of instead of six and one cent per hundred on their real estate tax rate. And one cent per hundred translates into a little under a hundred thousand dollars annually and that is according to the bid board sufficient amount of money to keep the organization up and running. John, would you like to elaborate or? I'm going to speak as little as much as we'd like February meet as a board to re-stratagize the future of the group. The group will be three years old in June. And after two and a half years of meetings, monthly meetings, and being involved in various activities, we've got a pretty good gauge of what levels of interest we have in certain areas and what interest doesn't really, it doesn't, has never materialized in other areas. And it also came to light as Dave was saying is about the dollars is there's no need to continue to collect this amount of money in that the major expenses have already been accounted for. The master plan and the, and in the first two years, the signage and also the administrative costs and the startup cost, you might say. So the questionnaire, six part questionnaire was given to every board member, and pretty much unanimously the board thought it would be. It was worthwhile to continue the organization, but it should be rethought out as far as the strategic plans were abbreviated. And we were almost pretty much 50-50 on whether we used, continue to use our existing funds and then come forward with request of new funds if needed or to reduce to a 1% or to run administratively and the dollars that we have already collected and will be collecting used in court in conjunction with the planning department to implement Some of the phases of this master plan and transportation components Okay, let's You're done with a formal presentation. I have three more slides. Okay and you're done with a formal presentation. I have three more slides. Okay. I'll see everybody's hands. Thanks. Go ahead. You should have a handout. These were after the fact I apologize. I've been a little crushed here and wasn't able to get these in. I want to show you the slides of the Active Proposals map. This is a map showing all of the development applications and development projects that we have going right now. There's a lot of it. It's fun. It's basically concentrated in Fairfax Boulevard. Some of them are big, some of them are small, but they're not big wins to make our lives interesting. Projects under discussion. Again, some big, some small, some very big, but there's a lot of development activity and a lot of development discussion that's coming down the pike right now, and I wanted to call your attention to them. I've again provided you with a supplemental handout and it has a listing of these so that you don't have to squint to see them. Conclusion. We continue to have challenges making redevelopment work while respecting adjacent residential neighborhoods. That's going to be the real push pull of what's going on in the corridor. We're making good progress, but we still have a lot to overcome. And what I call structural obstacles, the structural obstacles I'm referring to or two things. One, is there are portions of Fairfax Boulevard in particular that I would say have a bit of an image problem and that's something that really has to be overcome and it has to be overcome with a home run kind of development. We have to take some of the worst of what we have and see if we can turn it into something a lot more impressive or some of the best of what we have. Also the other structural issue that we have is the issue of the small parcels and the ownership of small parcels and the propensity of these businesses or undercapitalized third-tier types of uses to come in and want to reuse these things. It contributes these existing sites. It's a real struggle and it's something we're going to have to take some proactive measures to try to get consolidation in more substantial development. I would increase in redevelopment numbers, increase in the complexity of development means an increase in the time and effort on our part to try to resolve these problems. I think two things I want to leave you with. One is just an observation or a statement about the work that we do as an apartment. I think we struggle to maintain the quality of what we do, given the resources. We take pride in adding value to the development process. There are things that we do, things that occur all around you. By the way, I didn't have enough time to put some nice photos in, but I'm glad somebody did it for me. It's right here. We actually as a city, six square miles, we've got two examples of development in the urban land institutes residential development handbook. It's a handbook that can draw internationally on different types of development. The show is example in the little six square mile city of Fairfax has two examples that they're holding up as to developments that match specific or address specific needs, issues in a creative and positive way. Which two of those just that are curiosity? Farcraft is one. The other is maple trays. For different reasons. We have an award winning old town village. It was honored by NIOP recently, and it's being used as I understand it by other localities as a model for some of their center redevelopment. The library will certainly win an award for something. We have an award-winning comprehensive plan. It was honored by the state, the Commonwealth of Virginia, and it was honored regionally. We have an award-winning capital improvements program. We have a Renaissance housing program that's being emulated by others in the region. We are downtown development is being modeled by other jurisdictions. As I said, streetscape and bus shelters have been emulated by others as excellent examples of relatively low cost but high value improvements. And you see similar bus shelters all over in the city. Well, you know, this is a little thing, but it's something that, you know, I'm surprised to see these bus shelters that we all designed here Pop up all over the place are non-standard Finally, I want to say that we have a business improvement district that is viewed within the region as a very Impressive accomplishment to have a business improvement district that extends over three miles And it was created in a very short period of time We don't get a chance to blow our own horn very much. We're actually far too busy to apply for awards, but I can tell you that it is reflected and I wanted to point it out to you and I wanted to let you know that our people are very proud of what we do as well. Leave you on a positive note in looking at all this redevelopment. We did the back of an envelope bus analysis as it were. We looked at five projects that three have been approved, two of them will have a very good chance of being approved. Just to say, you know, what kind of revenue are we talking about with redevelopment? It's not a real discussion that we've ever had, and it's not a real comprehensive analysis we've ever had. I think we had told you just swapping out for Best Buy was over 200,000 annually, just from, you know, retail sales tax essentially. There's five projects on the table. Some approved already, a million bucks. We've got another, by a million bucks. Let me say a million dollars in net revenue, plus revenue coming to the city. We've got another five projects coming right behind that. That's another million dollars. These are things, these aren't pipe dream kinds of developments. These are things that are likely to occur. Looking at redevelopment of the city's centers in a conservative way under modest floor area ratios and I'm not talking about kicking up the densities I'm talking about having them redeveloped under. We are talking over the court or between $8 and $11 million in annual recurring net revenue. That's the picture, that's the landscape that we've got to look forward to. We've got a couple of years before some of this stuff starts getting online. We'll stay on top of it. Some of it will, I mean, that's not to mention old town village, which will, by the way, exceed the revenues that were projected for it. So I want to leave you with a positive Mr. Mayor and members of council and be glad to field any questions. Thank you Mr. Hatson. Mrs. Wendell. Thank you Mr. Mayor. I have a little bit for each one of you please. Looking at the Renaissance. It is extremely unique. It's been extremely successful. And I guess I'm talking more to my colleagues than to you, Mr. Lestina. And thank you to you and York, the people that work with you on your success. We get a lot with the McMansions. And I think if we could look at in our mature city as Mr. Hudson had described the city, we will continue to need that the redo of these homes and the updates of the homes. And the idea of zeroing out this service actually, this program, I think would be folly looking at the long term, at a long term. Yes, we are, we are in difficult times now this year, but I think even if we were to do two projects to keep it on the books and not let it falter, not let it lose a little momentum is the right thing to do. Especially, you know, the idea of retaining some money for a two-year lag that you described. If we were at least able to keep two projects going, by the time we get all this redevelopment and all of these new businesses online to bring in that eight to 11 million net revenue, we would still have all of the working pieces in order that we will have more development of those homes. It's just kind of okay. So not a question, mainly to my colleagues. The second would be the Fairfax partnership. The one scent would give you enough to keep Everything in order and keep things working is what you said Turn half your experience and look at the administrative column to keep Less every year because we're not going to master plan a lot of other things at this juncture But it appears that it would be somewhere between 80 to 100 a year. Okay. To, um, So again, to my colleagues, the idea of keeping this partnership going that businesses don't have a vote They are and they have been working with the neighbors It is a partnership with the neighbors. It is a partnership between the neighbors, the businesses, and the city. And again, I think with the increase that we will be having to give the revenues to keep our services high and our taxes low by using the businesses of the city to do that. I think we need to keep this project viable. Just a little bit for the short term so that it is and can be very useful and productive in the long run. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. David, thank you Mr. Hudson. Thank you very much for the presentation. I'd like to talk to you about the conference of plan though. I thought when I was first elected, I guess, six years ago almost, we had to redo the conference of plan. I understand it was every five years that we redo that. Is that in your proposed next year's plan? Yes, it is. Our requirement is for the planning commission to review the plan every five years to determine whether or not it's advisable to amend it. So there's a formal review process. And then from that you kick off the plan amendments. And that is something you're going to be planning to do in FY09. Yes. Okay, I just didn't see it here on your chart. Next thing is, I do want to talk a little bit about the Renaissance program. I want to ask a couple of questions and maybe I didn't see it in here or have enough time to read it all. But how much money did I understand that it has right now that you're going to be forwarding to this next year? How much is that? I would estimate that if we do two loans a month, we'll have roughly back out our other fees, 366,000. We divide that by 23,000, which is what it costs us to commit, you know, to MS Goldblee, each of the loans on average. That gives us 15 loans. If you take 15, and you can work it through the next year, and even if we did just two a month, we would run out somewhere in the neighborhood of February, March, April. With the requested money for two more loans, we'd still run out, but we'd run out a little bit later and we'd be able to get ourselves by. I do have a question though about that and maybe I'm trying to understand the economics because there's so many changes going on here now in our economic viability and cross the nation when it comes to housing. And of course, more folks are having more difficult time selling their homes and also getting mortgages. So, is with thinking that you would have two loans a month, are we sure that the banks would be doing that? I guess, is that still going to be viable? Yes, it's very vital. Okay. I think the banks kind of like it because we're on the hook for the interest for those two years. And then when the individuals want to at the end of those two years, then refinance with that bank or with the financial institution of their choice for pay-off. I see. So right now in the fun, the fun that you have right now, your the total amount right now, not backing anything out is 366,000 or so. No, it would be if we assume that there would be the, I don't know what's happening here. That would be assuming that we're going to be doing six more loans and the money that we'd have to set aside for our auditor and for our attorney fees. Okay. So how many right now, I guess I'm not hearing it or taking what? How many loans or how many applications do you have on file right now that you want to put through in the let's say the next not assuming but just what is actual? Yeah, we do that each month and we've been running as many as eight a month and as many as and as few as two a month. Okay, so what I'm doing is lowballing this trying to help out. I hear that. Okay, I just wondered how many we, the actuals we have. All right. OK. OK, thank you for that. You're welcome. OK. That's all my questions I have there. Then I'd like to move on to the bid. And I think it's going to involve both of Mr. Hudson and Mr. Politanio with, in relation to the person that we want to hire to manage or I don't know what that person is really going to do for the bid, but I guess the coordinators, what you called it. When we started the bid or added the six cents two years ago, three years ago, that my understanding was some of those funds were going to be for personnel exactly for that to coordinate with City Hall on the development of the bid. So I guess I don't understand why we're the city will be picking up half that cost or through quarters of the cost When I thought that was going to be coming out of the bid cost I don't know which one wants to answer but I'm I really don't recall that as being a part of it that was going to be coming out of the bid cost. I don't know which one wants to answer, but I'm... I really don't recall that as being a part of it, and I'll go back and double check. I knew that fundamentally they were charged with developing a master plan and getting that off the ground. Okay. I may have misunderstood it. I just thought that we would be doing that for some years to come and that that would be something that we could be doing that for some years to come and that that would be something that we could be including in that I guess that's six cents for with the mass plan. So I guess I'd like to look into that a little bit. So and then so my question then is if that wasn't something we were going to do how is it that the bid then can come through and do half and the city do the other half I guess I need to have clarification on that. I think, first of all, it's not polietanol. Okay, sorry. I knew I was going to mess it up and thank you for forgiving me. It advanced. There was nothing was ever laid out at the beginning saying this is how you're going to spend your funds quite candidly. The only thing was the fact that there would be a master plan done and that cost of that would come out of these funds. I think we're coming now is, it's not so much, it's almost like where are we now, if you will. And with, you will. And with when we receive the last payment of the third year, there are, we'll be about $500,000 that we don't want to just spend for the sake of spending, if you will. So the thought was, since it was unanimous, if I pronounced that to the best I can, that we do continue, the thought was, let's just have attacks enough to continue as administratively. But let's spend that 500 where the board, the board of the bid, best thought it should go. And of all the different areas that we've spoken, met and talked and have been about, it has boiled down to basically development of the corridor. It's not so much buying average or putting up banners or anything. It's boiled down to, let's accomplish something that was started with the master plan. And then best way to accomplish that was a partnership with the planning department and to, and that these funds would go the furthest if it was half funded by us and half funded in the department. I understand that a little, but my question then would be since we, I am a little concerned that we, we approved the full amount of the 6% or 6% three years ago and now we reduce it to one and is there an opportunity, my concern is we'd have to come back and increase it again later. And I don't want that to be going on. So I do have some reservations of moving it back down to one sense. And I'm hoping that maybe we could look at a way to maybe work this employee into with the bid money if we're having some issues with our finances this year. Next year, I mean, it seems like that would be a thing we could consider. Okay. Let's. Okay. Not's not statement. A clarification. Possibly mislines thinking about Jamie's position because the admin isn't no. No. Okay. Any other comments the red suns housing corporation. Is there, given that things have slowed down a little bit, they may remain that way over the next year, could we not explore reducing the full-time staff person that's dedicated toward the housing corporation to a half-time person taking that savings and maybe putting it back in if you had to absolutely have to put it back in toward going toward your additional loan. Mr. Hudson has been exploring that fourth rightly. and I've been exploring that forth rightly. So it is on the in the mix of trying to be able to do that and I would let him speak to it because it's a kind of an administrative thing that is under his purview. Thank you. And I will speak to that if I can. The, and I will speak to that if I could. The, the Rinsons housing corporation position that we have is a position that was authorized by the City Council for approximately 15 hours a week as part of the home pride program way back when it's now 40 hour a week position. I mean, we basically, we had a 25 hour a week planner and this was an extra test that was put onto this position. As the Renaissance housing corporation then became a vehicle for fundamentally guaranteeing loans and working with applicants and working with banks and inspecting properties and making sure that the improvements that were that were that the individual said they were going to make were actually made and they were made appropriately and in a manner consistent with what was approved, that 15 hours became 40 hours. At the time, basically what I'm getting at is it has become a full time job. It's become a full time job because the nature of the position is changed. The nature of the work of the Renaissance housing corporation has substantially changed. So it was initially started. If there's, you know, I've got basically, I am low in this environment right now that I'm having to deal with to think about trying to give up even the 25-hour a week position. I actually am hoping it's going in the other direction to take the truth. if we can save some time or gain some efficiency through this, then we've got plenty of work to be done outside of that. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Two things. With regard to the bid and the reduction from six cents to one cent, that in addition to the NVTA funds that were to be assessed on the commercial side. This is really, it seems to me, going to be kind of a boost to these commercial businesses. Do you see it that way? And do you see that relief, so to speak, being reinvested in their businesses and being sort of an impetus to improve the corridor? I think that operating as a board and representing these landowners and business owners, you know, oftentimes, canally, it would come up, you know, what are we getting for our .06? And for some larger properties, it's quite a large amount of money was taxed, and the thought is that we would rather see that money with improved transportation. We would rather see those dollars go towards funding of transportation and studies. And we would like to augment that with our own studies, our own dollars, or part of what we have. So I don't know if I'm answering the question. I think the vast majority, the majority no longer feels it's the best service to the community and to themselves to be charging or collecting this .06 because it's not enough dollars to do anything substantial and it's way too many dollars just to continue to get them in. Sure, no, I agree. But would one sent be enough to pay half of the salary of the plan coordinator and do a traffic study? No, no, no. 1% is enough to for us. That's about covers our administrative costs. We have under contract this group that we're using. And to cover that cost and just to have the phone numbers, the websites, and everything it takes, that's what the 1% is for. The remaining dollars in our offer would be spent to do these studies between the planning department and ourselves. How much remains? Of course, $500,000. Thank you. Mr. Hudson, your department is the only department that does not have performance standards It's part of your presentation here. Everybody's busy and I know your department is usually busy. But I think those are important things to track. And I would hope that you would undertake the necessary, make the necessary efforts to include that in your presentation for next year. Your department works so very closely with our business community. And I think we have to be very vigilant in monitoring our interaction with those folks and how we're processing applications and what just how efficient the operation is. So I would just ask that that would be one of your priorities for next year. For next week I'll have some for this year, you know, for the upcoming year that I will get out to you under separate cover and then hopefully we'll be able to spend a little time on them after that and make sure that they're meaningful. Part of the issue I have with these is that some of the work we do doesn't lend itself to quantitative performance measures. It's more qualitative and any event. I guess a lot of departments can say that it's on any event. I will have them for you next week. Just two quick things that I'm going to try to ask for stuff as opposed to try to make too many statements tonight on some of the things that we've talked about. But I have to admit, I got a little bit lost in the numbers with the Housing Renaissance Corporation. And I've tried to follow it fairly closely. And it's not something to correct tonight, but Mr. Assistant, what I'd like to see is sort of a summary of the Housing Renaissance Corporation. I know it probably already exists in some form or another, but how many individual loans given this year? What's the interest amount? I know it's in bits and pieces, but I sort of lost track of it. How much is in the money that would be retained over? How much is the shortfall in already committed funds? And if we could get that, I would appreciate it and help me a lot. I guess the only other, more of a comment, but I want to frame the issues because I think it's going to be important as we go forward. To continue to get dialogue from the bed and the business owners and certainly we're going to be talking about it here. You know, when I look back at the creation of the bid originally, it was quite a debate, as you all recall. It was quite a discussion and quite frankly, it started well before the actual formation of the bid. It started through a whole series of outreach meanings, the business owners and landowners. I can remember we held them all over the city of Fairfax when there was nothing more than a power point that was put together that eventually evolved into the creation of bid and then a very, very healthy dialogue and discussion certainly appear that that wasn't unanimous as we all know. And I bought into the concept of the bid because of the discussion of we need to do some really spectacular things on the bed. We need to do the master plan, which I think was a great success on the funding. We need to have enough money that we can do substantial things that business owners can buy into and are willing to pay extra for. When I look at this budget and I realize that our commercial businesses got a 14% increase in their assessments and we talk about looking at the solutions that the state may have on the transportation funding and they're talking about sales tax and we look at the increase of personal property tax and we look at the increase of the meals tax. We are talking about a commercial surcharge, which we'll be talking about soon. Somewhere between zero and 25 cents, the number that I've heard is, that most jurisdictions are talking about is in the 10 to 12 percent range. When you add all that up, it is a substantial new responsibility and hit to our commercial businesses, which quite frankly, as I go around the city, in many cases, need some help. And they're not all doing great right now, and that's probably not unique to the city of Fairfax. I'm sure it's north of Virginia wide. And I have to be very honest with you, as a huge supporter of the bid from day one. I don't think, and I wrote down the phrase, and Mr. Hudson said, you know, we need the 1% to keep the organization up and running. That was never the intent, at least from my perspective of what we were doing by charging a surcharge. If we were going to do that, we could have funded the Chamber of Commerce, we could have funded the Downtown Merchants Association. We could have funded a whole variety of organizations. And I understand the shift and I understand where we are, but I'll just speak for myself individually and in talking to many land owners and business owners on the FIFIX Boulevard. I would have a very, very hard time charging a 1% surcharge to support the operation and the organization to keep it running. We talked very, very long and hard if you remember right when we set that original rate. Was it 1%, 3%, 5%, 6%, 10% and I think we all agreed at the time that it had to be large enough to make a major impact. And if it was going to be too small and I remember this dialogue very distinctly, then we shouldn't do it in the first place. And I would just suggest, as we default to the too small, on my viewpoint, I'm going to have a real hard time doing that on top of the 14 percent increase in assessments and on top of a commercial surcharge that I do believe there will be support in the business community. So I just want to frame that so it's out there and we'll certainly have some interesting dialogues and some of the things that are going to unfold as it takes. The only other thing, Mr. Hudson, and again, just to frame the issue, you can bet I'll be calling you first thing in the morning, maybe others will as well. You passed out this sheet of active proposals and there's a number of them that are active and in the development stage, quite frankly, that I've never heard of before, and that's not bad. I know there's just a lot going on, but the one that strikes me the most is one that's called Walgreens, Redevelopment of La Mena Site. Is that the site that we used to host the master plan? And the only reason I bring that up is, you know, we talk about this great master plan and consolidation of property. It wasn't that long ago we approved the redevelopment of the Franks nursery site. And during those very discussions, we talked about, well, we can't we get this particular site involved in it and how important it was going to be if we couldn't, which we were told we couldn't, that it just wasn't available in the foreseeable future, that we designed the one project so that it could be expanded down there. Is this project on Walgreens, is that owned or under contract by the same developers the Frank Nurs nursery site? No, it's not and it's um and it's uh the ownership will be retained by the current owner So the probably it's not going to be sold. It's just it's going to be upgraded improved I only frame that because we're going to have a lot of interesting dialogues in the future on the master plan and the validity of the master plan And how to pull the master plan off and investing in full-time staff to implement the master plan and rewriting zoning ordinances to implement it. And it really all boils down to the end of the day is that the rights in the interest of the individual landowners. And I just framed that so as we go forward, we don't get so hooked into this concept and this thing that we bought into called quote the master plan that we don't get so hooked into this concept and this thing that we bought into called quote the master plan that we don't lose sight of reality. And that's the only point that I want to make there. I think I'll stop there and hopefully that will generate some dialogue and discussion as we move forward. If there aren't any other questions, thank you all very much for your time and coming out and sharing it with us. We're now moving on to the finance department. Excuse me, Mr. Mayor. We're actually going to switch. We're going to have finance go last. We're going to have human resources. Meeting the finance, we'll get us back on schedule. I'm assuming. Is that right? Absolutely. I was going to say, Miss Armate, you look terrific. Terrific. Thank you, Mr. Assistant. Please. Good evening. Excuse me. I'm Louise Armate, Human Services Coordinator, and I've run through as quickly as I can. I'm sorry. It's not a viral black. What I'll share with you in the Human Services area is that the state funded a 2-1-1 program this year and the 2-1-1 program is very similar to 4-1- it's human services information. Crisis link is on Northern Virginia, bitter at one, the RFP. And this could have some impact on the human services area because this is a 24 hour information process and callers are then directed for follow up to whatever jurisdiction in which they live. So that is an initiative that hopefully is not going to require any local funding in the future. It is fully state funded at the present. One of the other things I'll just share with you is that a new initiative this year in the Human Services area is to try to pull together the compliance with Title VI civil rights act, limited English, proficient speakers access to full services. And so we will be working with different departments to try to facilitate that and to do that as well as we can. In general, the Social Services Budget Area appears to be up 15%, in fact, that does not include the revenue that the school-age child care program brings in. So it's considerably less than that. In the Department of Family Services, which is a Fairfax County agency with which the city contracts to provide public welfare and other child protective and aging services. There's been a considerable amount of movement, especially with the decline of federal and pass-through funds for subsidized child care, which has been a significant decrease. And there has been some local funding to increase that, but overall I'd say about 20% fewer families are being served now. And with the higher unemployment rates and the higher cost of living in this area, that's a real concern to us in terms of the goal to keep working and keep people independent. In terms of the, just in general, I can tell you that the county's caseload exceed the standards in public assistance and some of these areas. And I think that in general we are getting a very good benefit. The costs would probably be at least 40% higher should we try to provide these services directly and I don't think we'd have the same breadth of services that we do with our current contract. One of the only major initiatives that is happening in the Department of Family Services is funding of the housing first project and this was similar to the presentation that Dorothy Srell gave to you at the work session. The Kate Handley family shelter opened this year and the county's pledge that that will be the last shelter that they open with hopes that funding will not go towards shelters but more towards providing housing and the supportive services for housing. Another major shift is the domestic violence and sexual assault service programs which have been funded historically through the Fairfax Falls Church Community Services Board are now being shifted to the Department of Family Services. This will not be an increased cost to us or costs for the community services board of declined. And I think that this is a much better fit domestic violence is a significant issue with child abuse, with aged abuse. And so it's very much better meshed, I think, with the Department of Family Services, which is charged for investigating those areas. The Comprehensive Services Act is the notoriously volatile area in which the city has just been very, very fortunate. There is significant change on the horizon with the state changing its mandate so that children who are in foster care prevention services are now required to be provided with a local match of 46%. This is because there was a real concern that families were having difficulty accessing mental health services for their children. And so I don't know that this was the best resolution, but it is the resolution that our general assembly gave us. And so one of the risks, and I just went upstairs to review the emails, we still don't have a decision yet about how this formula may change. It is so before the general assembly and the risk is that residential treatment programs for at-risk youth may be completely funded by localities. And as I said, we've been very fortunate that we've not had city residents that required this kind of care because our residential facility can cost as much as $200,000 a year for locality as small as ours. That's just nearly impossible to try to fund. But these are mandated programs. So we're hoping that the state will continue to fund at least half of their services. The school H child care program is one which you've discussed for the past several years the SAC program at Daniels Run has about a year and a half waiting list and it providence it has more than a two year waiting list. And so they are limited as close to the size and it is a concern that we have families that are waiting for care for so long. The parental fee revenues are such that the net cost of this is actually less than $100,000. We kind of lo-balled the community health care network last year and utilization did go up. And so the fees that you see are more in line with what you had seen in previous years. Dental clinic hasn't changed. Main Street Child Development Center did at our request begin to provide before and after school care to their graduates. So the state license will only allow them to care for children up to the age of eight. They are now caring for about 12 children. And that has increased significantly our subsidy rates for those children who cannot because of long waiting lists get into the SAC programs. But the Main Street continues to provide excellent services with head start, wrap around, and other programs that mesh very, very well with the entire school readiness initiative that the school board is particularly interested in. Transportation funding is static. We haven't seen much utilization of the seniors plus program that would provide additional transportation services. So that cost hasn't been significant. The community services board, as I mentioned to you, our $30,000 funding has shifted from the CSB to the Department of Family Services for the Domestic Violence Initiatives. I think two things that are important in the CSB area. One is that there has been some proposed increase in county funding and we would then pay a commensurate percentage of that to try to reduce the length of time to access services. This is one of the initial concerns from the Beeman Commission. The Beeman Commission was formed to try to determine what went wrong when people cannot get mental health services as soon as they need them and it was formed after the death of the, the deaths of the graphics county police officers. That report and recommendations have not been issued but we know that there had been a significant delay in receiving services or at least the initial assessment and so the increased funding will hopefully and has reduced that. But I can tell you that caseloads for mental health practitioners have been reduced from about 50 to 40, but the maximum benefit is if they are more in the line of 35. The community services board, though, of course, is a predominantly Fairfax County funded agency, and so they are not looking to have any increase in their budget is at all. One of the other things I wanted to mention to you is that we do not know what kinds of new mandates will be required as you saw the General Assembly did provide funding for increased mental health services in the aftermath of the Virginia Tech slings. And this could have a local match, but we have not been apprised of what that will be. It would not affect us in this current budget year are offending with the Community Services Board is that we provide that funding and determine that and then we do not pay actual. One of the other things I do want to mention to you is a federal grant called Money Follows the Person. It's a federal demonstration grant that has been given to the State of Virginia to provide community support services to elderly and disabled persons who are transitioning from institutions. And this is in keeping with the Olmsted decision, a 1999 Supreme Court decision, which was part of the American's Fidiciability Act consideration, which says that services must be provided in the least restrictive and most integrated community service basis. And so this money follows the person protocol is hopefully going to really provide excellent services and open new doors. In fact, you'll begin to hear the phrase no wrong door so that if an individual with need contacts of a particular agency they hopefully will be directed without concern. Commission for Women is flat. The county funding, as you know, has been held fast this year. Most agencies were asked to reduce their budgets by about 4%, but fixed personnel costs and contract costs have weighed in to be about a 2% overall increase to us. to pay actual costs. We can only anticipate, estimate what the costs will be. And so, you know, that's what I can provide to you. There are a few things that we know may have some influence. The County Executive is recommended delaying the opening of the Birk library so there will be some significant savings there. We do know that with the housing market there will be a decline in revenues from recreation taxes which has significantly offset our joint court services. We also know that there's been a little bit of increased funding for the Commonwealth's attorney. Again, the Commonwealth's attorney has some of the highest case loads in terms of prosecution in Virginia. So, the county has provided a half million dollars and again we would pay a population based percentage of that. The health department is flat this year. I failed to include the primary function in the health department which is certainly the prevention of communicable disease. And especially have some new initiatives in tuberculosis. There was a large norovirus outbreak last year, and so we do know as well that the health department will be opening a new lab at the Old Bell Willard site in the city, and that's projected to open in May of 2009. We know that we've had an additional adult day health center and we've already got a city resident there. This is what we used to call geriatric day care. It's a medical model for providing services to individuals who've had strokes or potentially have Alzheimer's that are debilitated and cannot be alone. The family is then able to have this daycare program for them. And the fast-trans, busses provide transportation. One of the other things that is an initiative that's been expanded is the PACE program, which is an all-inclusive program of care for elderly. It's almost a nursing home without walls, if you will, so that using some of the funding that is through that demonstration grant that I mentioned, we hope that we can provide these very intensive services to residents in the city so that we can avoid nursing home or other institutional placement. The other program that really expanded this year was the Homeless Medical Intervention Project for people who are both sheltered and unsheltered so that there are four vans in the different regions of the county and covers the city as well that provide medical services at the shelters and provide transport to medical services in the other quadrants. That's all I have. Does anybody have any questions? There were some years back in the late 90s or early 2000s where the CSB budget was going up in 2015, 20, 20, 20% a year. And now it's far. What's the reason for that? Well, I think that better fiscal management on their part and a more equitable system of how the city pays for those services. Part of the reason that we were paying those exponential increases is because the county has an addendum funding process that the city does not have. And so I'll give you a category that always was funded through the addendum process in June. And that is the special education graduates, persons who were mentally retarded who age out of the public school system in age 22. And then would be without any services. These were locally funded special programs. They're very costly. The city never paid for that service at the time and we were always providing sort of catch-up funding and so that's the reason for some of those increases. But we do not pay a strict population-based share. If you look at a chart of the county funding and then each of the cities, we are several percentage points behind the county, but it was considered to be equitable because of some of the county projects that are specifically for county agencies. Thank you. The question is comments. If not, thank you very much. We're now going to move on to finance. You've delayed it as long as you can, Mr. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of council. As usual, we will make an effort to get us back on schedule. We're that's going to be hard at this since we're already 30, 45 minutes. It's that fancy accounting we've been talking about. I got it. What's the math? Technically. Again, we will make this brief. There aren't many changes as there usually aren't in our budget. We're covering the finance department, which includes our accounting finance department also the real estate assessment department and our organizational chart, which has not changed in the last couple years, includes the real estate department and finance department again and a total is about 12 and a half employees in total. The core responsibilities of the finance department have not changed that includes your typical budgeting, accounting, auditing, finance, retirement committee, tax relief, payroll, and accounts payable and all those sort of things. The core responsibilities for the real estate department include various items that really make up the work that they do in appraising almost at 8800 properties each year. We don't do it every other year or every few years. We appraise each property each and every year. Major accomplishments for the Finance and Accounting Department. Again, very similar to what we've done in the past. The GFOA awards were budgeting and accounting. We have done several debt financing, and we did convert to a new payroll software program in the current year. Major accomplishments for the real estate department. Most notably is, again, a slightly nearly 8800 properties, which includes over $94 million in new construction in the past year, which obviously continues to add to the workload. They also continue to assess these properties that are relatively or very low cost to the citizen of about 1% of the assessed value or of the revenue generated by the assessments in that department. of the revenue generated by the assessments in that department. The budget breakout cost center includes the real estate finance and we also break out the audit, the cost of the audit, which is over $100,000 that's been an expense that has been growing because of increased regulations in the auditing industry. And also our Senior Tax Relief Program has been growing each year. And of course that grows as assessment grows, but it also grows as our tax rates. And so the million dollars that you see includes the proposed increase in the tax rate of 11.5 cents for real estate tax. the tax rate of 11.5 cents for real estate tax. Where the money goes, not again, not many changes, but most notably our contract services are going up from the previous year and that mostly due to the cost of the increased cost in our auditing, which is driven by additional standards that create additional procedures and more time for the auditor and staff. Also under other operating costs, there's over a 16% increase and that is actually expense due to our tax relief program. For the finance department, breaking this down a little bit further, you have your typical your program personnel cost increase and also under other operating cost. We have a slight increase, though, that it's a 7 percent increase. It's just over a thousand dollars or fifteen hundred dollars, which includes advertisement for a buyer. Our buyer will be retiring. And our buyer, I think, has been in our department for about 18 or 19 years. And this is a position that is critical to our department and to the city. And so we are planning ahead for her retirement and do plan to bring someone in. So there will be a slight overlap. So there can be, because this is a position that requires training. For the real state department we actually have a decrease or a slight increase in the personnel cost and a decrease in other operating costs. The operating costs reduction is part of our cuts in which we want to eliminate as much travel and training as possible, actually affecting certifications or absolutely necessary training. We have been looking in both the finance and real estate department to decrease our costs in training by looking at programs offered online or locally to keep those costs down. Actually reduce the cost from where they had been in the past. Some statistics, which are typically of interest, are 2008 assessments statistics, which gives you a breakdown of the residential commercial apartments and gives you a total of what our tax base is and gives you a breakdown of what our new construction costs or increases to our new construction for the year. The next slide shows overall assessment changes by property type and you'll notice that the residential on the average is down by over 6.5% up by 14.4% apartments by 11% in our total tax base is virtually flat, which without our new construction we would be, we would experience actually a negative or a reduction in our assessment days. Further breakdown of our residential properties are shown on the screen, what makes up our 6.5 percent decrease. The next slide is our residential sales information showing a trend from 2005 to 2007, the number of actual sales, and you can see how that decreases. And also gives you an idea of what the average sales price is for the various types of resident. Still not cheap to buy a single family house in the city of Fairfax, a new one. Mine might not be so, maybe cheap, but our next slide is actually, we'd like to leave it up for a little bit. It's available information and how folks can get a hold of our real state, our real state assessment department with questions and to receive information. We have a couple web addresses that you can go to and also phone numbers and, uh, versus city hall address. And finally, our last slide. What everyone's been waiting for all night. And if you look close, you can find something of real interest on that collage. Questions, comments? Mr. Greenfield. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. It's probably best directed toward Mr. Bennett. Would you be able to talk a little bit about foreclosures in the city, in particular where they're concentrated? If you're keeping track of that, I seem to remember at some point a list of foreclosures. Maybe it was a list of sales data that you had provided several in Little River Hills. If you're tracking that information, if so, are you considering those anomalies or are you considering when those sell? Are you considering those as part of your sales data that determines the assessed value for that neighborhood? Well, we obviously track what's going on with the foreclosures when we can find out about them. They don't always come through in the transactions in an obvious enough way. They're all over the place. We've had actually one and a couple in our most expensive neighborhoods, Farcroft and Pickett's Reserve. Really? Yes, and we've had some and our less expensive neighborhoods like Foxcroft, Colony Condos and Ardmore. I I mean it's pretty much across the board. We saw a lot right at the end of the year. I mean an increase. We probably picked up five or six in December. Seems to be an increasing trend. What we're seeing a lot of also are what's known as short sales. And those are actually where the lender has agreed to take a reduced, you know, a price that's less than what's actually owed on the property. It's in lieu of foreclosure, basically. We've seen a lot of those and those are a little scary because when those properties are out there on the markets are not technically a foreclosure but other properties in the neighborhood have to compete with those prices. So it tends to affect, you to affect everyone in a negative way. We're seeing quite a lot of those. We currently don't have a method of tracking those in our system, but we're working on, we have them on a neighborhood by neighborhood basis. So we're working on getting them in a format where we can report those out if we need to, but we're seeing quite a few of those. We do not base the assessments on foreclosure sales and at this point we're not basing anything on the short sales though we are keeping an eye on those. foreclosures are not considered to be an arm's length transaction. So shouldn't really be used to estimate the value of you know fair market value of property. Out of the 380 sales that occurred in the value of fair market value of property. Out of the 380 sales that occurred in the city last year, how many of those were either the short sale or foreclosures? Do you have an idea? I'm not positive about the short sale for closures. I think we had about 26 that were short of, which doesn't sound like a lot, but when you consider that we had to the prior year, it's quite an increase. The short sales I'm not positive of, we started to see those quite a bit in the last couple of months of the year. We could probably put together some figures on the light. That'd be great. Thank you. Thank you. This is winner. Thank you. Of the 8800 properties that are assessed how many are businesses and how much are our private residents? I believe we have about 7400 somewhere in that range residential Thank you Any other questions or comments? If not, thank you very much. Mr. Sissin just a couple of house points before. I assume you all are taking notes of requested budget memorandum to the one that I had asked for tonight on the Housing Renaissance Corporation and we're probably others that I need to start keeping track and del deal about halfway through. The other one I want to make sure, I know you sent out an email this morning and it came up again this evening as well. I still want to make sure we're getting the quest that I asked from Park and Recreation in terms of the breakout and the events we do, the number of people who attend the events, the cost related to those events so we can truly for the first time have a... Okay, great, thanks. The last thing, and this is a point of discussion that came up tonight as well, and I talked to Mr. Hutchkin's just beforehand, let us not forget that we do have to have a discussion on the commercial tax rate that we've all been talking about and talking around. I understand. I just got an email from MBTA this evening that I guess the legislation made another change in terms of some of the restrictions they're putting on the commercial tax rate portion of it and I forwarded it to you so you'll probably get it when you get back upstairs that we need to look at. But it's my understanding we have to treat that just like we're going to treat the advertised tax rate and the advertised water rate that we'll have to have a introduction. I believe it's on the 25th of March and then we'll have to have a public hearing on it at the next meeting. So that's still yet to be talked about. We haven't talked about that at all. So I just want to point out to my colleagues. It's still a very important discussion we have to have in front of us. So with that, if there are any other comments or questions, we'll stand adjourned. Thank you.