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So thank you all for joining us. Let's start with roll call and then we'll jump right in. Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Connelly here. Miss Downs. It's running late, you'll be here shortly. Ms. Flynn. Here. Ms. Hussot. Here. Mr. Schneider. Here. Ms. Underhill. Here. Mayor Hardy. Here. Thank you. So today's April 21st that we were missing a milestone. April 20th was Mr. Shields birthday. In addition to many other things that people celebrate on April 20th. What was the stop the meeting? Let's have cake. Where's the cake? One. I have to bring the cake. I'll bring cake to go up on Wednesday. No, please don't. Thank you, though. Very nice of you, though. Okay, we'll just have cake on Wednesday. Thank you for all that you do for the organization for the city. Thank you. You had a great one. I did. Although I was dreading this meeting. But other than that, it was a great birthday. We have a good work session scheduled for tonight. We're going to kick things off with a discussion on public safety. Followed that by a focus on transportation, also transportation safety, but everything we do in transportation. Then we'll have a brief update on solid waste services and then finish things up with sort of a conceptual framework for the budget reduction options that we've discussed through Gubbops Committee and briefly at the last council meeting. So with the public safety budget, we do have a guest from Arlington County and we'll let chief of police who's also our director of public safety, Shuron Ford, make introductions to our Arlington County guests. But we do have the Arlington County fire contract and one of the requests of council is to get a briefing on that contract and our relationship with Arlington County for fire and EMS services. We are on the process of working through some changes to that agreement and we're asking the Council schedule consideration of authorization to execute those changes at your meeting on May 14th. May 12th. Thank you. And so I wanted to provide just a brief introduction of our relationship with Arlington County for fire and EMS. It is a relationship that goes back many years. We currently are operating under an agreement that was executed in 2014, but their president's far back into our history before that. And the agreement basically stands for a couple of principles in terms of how the costs for Fire and EMS services are provided in the city. For the staffing at station six, the principal for a very long period of time has been at the city and the county share 50-50 the cost of the salary and benefits of the personnel at station six. With respect to the station itself, the general division is at the city paid for the construction of the station and handles capital expenditures associated with the station. And this county provides all the equipment for the firefighters and EMS staff and all the operational expenses for the station. Similarly, for the apparatus, the city pays for the apparatus and the county maintains the apparatus by as the fuel changes the oil, et cetera. And so that's the basic division in terms of costs and its work. apparatus and the county maintains the apparatus by as the fuel changes the oil etc. And so that's the basic division in terms of costs and its work for generations. The changes that are before the city and the county right now is one to reflect the actual staffing that is at station six right now so the agreement says 33 and There are actually 39 staff members at the station so the agreement would make that change and we would split the full cost of the 39 staff 50 50. In addition, we are a growing city and so there's been some discussion about how to cover some increased costs that are coming from calls for service in the city. And so what we are working through the details on but conceptually have agreed to at the staff level is with respect to ambulance fees. So currently we're projecting $295,000 of revenues from ambulance fees for transports that originate within the city limits. And we would cap that at that $295,000 level and in the future revenues in excess of $295,000 would be retained by Arlington County. And that's a way that they would be compensated for some of the growth and some of the new facilities that are happening in the city So those are the kind of the two big changes. There are other details that we're working through But one is certainly to first just get grounded on some of the larger sort of structural issues with the relationship So with that chief far if I could turn it over to you for introductions, and then we'll hear from chief public Thank you, miss. Good evening Mayor Hardy, Vice Mayor Hiscott and members of council. Thanks for the opportunity to present the public safety components of the fiscal year 26 proposed budget. Our department's mission is simple but critical. We protect lives uphold constitutional values in the police department and maintain the trust of our community. Tonight we're going to provide you an overview with the investments we propose to sustain, enhance and protect public safety in the city of Falls Church. We'll start with the fire services contract and then proceed over to the police department services. As a quick overview of the proposed public safety budget for rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of the tax rate of FY25. These increases are driven in investments in personnel, technology, public safety programs, and inter-gear-stictional contracts, which you're about to hear, one of those. Before I do get into the police department portion of the budget, as Mr. Shields said, I wanna pause and turn over the presentation to Arlington County Fire Department Chief David Pobletz. First, a brief introduction, if I may, Chief Pobletz and I were in City of Alexandria and I have a lot of respect for his professionalism for being an exceptional leader. And he has more than 25 years of experience and fire service, both serving in departments in Maryland and in Virginia. He took over the Arlington County Fire Department in 2018. They operate nine fire stations and have about 375 employees. Chief Favillis has been a trusted partner in keeping our CED safe and I'm on our road to turn on the mic over to him so you can give him an overview of the fire contract. Thank you. It's good to work together again and Mayor Hardy, members of the Council and also Mr. Shields. We really looking back on this agreement and how we've operated together as public safety departments. We really enjoy a good working relationship between public safety, fire, police and EMS between the city and the county. So we would like to answer any questions you have, but trying to profile some of the emergency services between Arlington County and also the city of Falls Church. The approximately a thousand calls for service are handled by the Falls Church Fire Department, Station 6, also Falls Church volunteer fire department. That's the station runs about 2,000 calls, approximately 50% of the emergency calls year after year are in the city and that's been increasing since the pandemic took a little bit of dip in the pandemic times. All of our emergency service calls were depressed, but since 2022, 2324 and looks like it's trending this way in 2025, there's just been more calls for emergency services. The majority of those are EMS calls, it's about 70 percent, about 25 percent or fire and about 5 percent or rescue or hazardous materials type incidents. For the workforce at station six, there's currently 39 firefighters, medics and also officers assigned. In 2022, those initiatives to reduce the work week for fire first responders. The trying to attain a better work life balance, reduce some of the traumatic exposure stresses and also try to get people home to rest more. The traditional three platoons that we work in coming in the North Virginia region works 56 hours a week. So we try to reduce that to 50 hours a week by using a Cali day. That's basically a 24-hour shift off every eight or nine shifts. About it's once a month. We do work, we're under 65 days a week, 365 days a year, 24 hours a day. So that initials started in about 20-22s. That brought up the number from the previous agreement of 33 to 39. The station responds with a paramedic ALS equipped engine, a medic unit, volunteer ambulance, and also a ladder truck, which provides a really good coverage for the city and also good response for the county and also Fairfax County. We dispatch all in the entire Northern Virginia region dispatches the closest unit regardless of jurisdiction. So it's quite possible a Fairfax County unit can respond into the City of Falls Church if it's the closest unit and we operate seamlessly we have interoperable communications. So it's a pretty elegant system. We just wanted to see if we can and that's probably the biggest change for the agreement in terms of cost was a personnel cost. Now the capital costs for fleet, they are just getting more expensive and also longer to build every year. We've seen, we think we broke the barrier, we have a million dollar fire engines now. That was unthinkable five or ten years ago. They also take 36 to 48 months to build. It's just supply chain and manufacturing. So everyone, all emergency services, equipments, medical supplies, everything is just inflated. That's the times we're in and we times we expect that are gonna continue. So glad to answer any questions if you have. That was just a real quick profile, but. Thank you. Welcome, Chief. Questions for Chief Fard or Chief Hallwoods? Mr. Snyder? Thank you very much, Chief Chiefs. So a couple questions to the Arlington County Fire Chief. First of all, I note that the city has grown significantly in population over the last 20 years. Yet we have one station and basically the same apparatus and service. Can you give us some commentary about that? Do we have an adequate fire protection establishment here to cover the increased population and if there are any questions How can we best answer those questions? Very timely we are in the midpoint of an accreditation process using a national model So the first phase was a strategic plan the second phase was a community risk analysis and also a standard of cover to make sure we provide the best emergency resource deployment and the City of Fallschurch was included in that. So the analysis over the three years of data, 21 through 23, showed that the City of Fallschurch, while its growing, has adequate coverage in terms of fire and rescue and EMS service, each one of the units were under what we would call or what it's categorized as stress criteria which would be a utilization over 25, approximately 25% of the time. So while I'm going to say everything running out of station 106, the Fallsturch Fire Department is in the middle or moderate zone. So there's It can accommodate, the station can accommodate more incidents, can respond to more incidents, but also the station was well designed and constructed. It's possible if there's additional growth or need for additional units, the station can house that. So I think the physical plant, the physical facility, would it have enough space to cover any emergency services for decades to come? We will share that report also. It just went live last week, I believe. We'll share that link and it could be posted. It's a public document. Great. Thanks. That's the most fundamental question I could ask. Similar question to the chief of police at this point based upon the needs in the community. Are we providing for adequate police protection? If it's okay, can I come back to that question? As soon as I have to achieve, fire chief is done. I'm going to do a quick five minute overview of budget. And if it's okay, take that question off there. Because some of it, some of the questions will be addressed in the mirror. Okay. Good. Back to the fire chief. So I want to make sure I heard it right. What what what percentage of calls from station six are in the city versus the county? Approximately 50% with annual on average annual responses in false church or about 1,100 incidents a year, 1,150. Okay. And how many calls are being responded to by Fairfax County units, do you know? We can pull that information. I don't have that at hand. My. We can I'll get the data to you. Okay. There are two stations relatively close that do provide additional coverage from Fairfriars County for 20 to 40. Okay. Those are questions I have. Thank you. Laura? Thank you so much, Chief, for being here this evening. Just to so that answered my question, so the reason that we went from 33 to 39 was to achieve greater work-life balance and so that we weren't overworking the staff. So I did have a question, that's great. I just had a question about the overtime. I noticed that currently it's capped at 7%, that we won't be building more than 7% of overtime costs and then the new agreement would say would bump that up to 10 percent. So just a question over time, why do we might be short, you all might be short staffs if someone might have to pick up extra hours. I was just curious when overtime comes into play. I'd like to introduce Megan Carnie, she's our fiscal officer. I won't talk about the whole overtime situation. So the seven% is 7% of the salaries. It's not tied to Arlington County Fire Department's actual overtime costs. Our overtime costs actually run about a million dollars a month. We cost overtime for, if we have a staffing shortage, for training, for deployments, for special events, we're running overtime costs. So the percent was some way to get at overtime without doing a difficult math calculation based on the actual overtime for the department. For FY 26, we will keep it at the 7% to make the proposal in the contract a little bit more digestible for this upcoming fiscal year and then move it to the 10% and that's 10% of the salary costs. So it won't actually hit that overtime number but it's to help us achieve some of the overtime expense for the station. Thank you. You're about. Mr. Shields, you were mentioning $295,000 in ambulance fee revenues. I never thought about revenues and the fire department altogether. So can you just explain that a little further? Sure. So it's very standard and done across all the Northern Virginia and most jurisdictions for the fire department to charge fees for transports is the most standard fee your being charged for an ALS transport or BLS transport. You get charged to set fee. Most of these fees will go directly to your insurance, your primary provider, your secondary provider, and then sum to yourself. We do have a fee waiver process for those that meet certain income limits that can't afford to pay the fees. We also have implemented fees. We call them treat no transfer or qualified health professional fees, where we are providing care but we're not transporting you. And our medical director would say that someone needs just diabetes medicine, I think, as something he explains to us, where we can provide the care, but we're not forcing you to go to the hospital. We're not taking you to the hospital. And we never force people to go to the hospital. But so we do charge those fees. They often go to the insurance company. We are raising those fees this year to help cover some of our increasing pharmaceutical costs and our transfer and training costs as well. So it's very standard done. Fairfax does it. Alexandria does it. They all do it. So we bring it about $195,000 in fees per year from all users. The city of false church does. City of false church. So the volunteers are paid 100% of the fees that they are charged. The city of false church is also reimbursed for the fees that are charged to the city of false church residentsurch residents. Can you talk a little bit about that cap the budget projections 2.95 and so it's capped for at that level for how long? I guess we're increasing ambulance trips, but we're capped at 2.95. Can you just talk to that please? Yes. So one of our proposals to our the Arlington County was to increase those fees. So the Virginia Board of Pharmacy has required our fire departments in the state to produce their own EMS and our own pharmacies, which has increased the cost of our service. So one of our attempts to gain back, to cover the cost of that additional expense was to increase our ambulance fees. So that is why we're increasing our fees and capping where you are so that the additional revenue could be spent to our increasing costs. And do you have a projection for, you know, based upon all the information you've gathered so far on your increasing cost, you know, we get projections for our health care fees and costs for the city. So just so we know in future years what we should be planning on additional costs in addition to staffing will need to cover those or we can anticipate that will be reimbursed for those ambulance fees beyond 295,000. Yeah, so this year you're still hitting about that 295,000. Right, so I'm thinking about the out years to cover, you know, I have to cover those expenses and out years. So we cover those expenses. Do you have the question? Do you think that $95 revenue does? I guess you flip it. It's revenue not received. It's not expenses. That's what you're saying. Correct. Okay. So if the city would be revenue foregone. Right. I'm trying to get out, not I guess it's not expense, but a revenue for gone. Follow on question while we're on the ambience fees, would it make... So the revenue foregone? Right, I'm trying to get at, not at expense, but revenue foregone. Just a follow on question. While we're on the ambulance fees, would it make sense to have some sort of CPI escalator in 10 years, 295 is not going to be worth very much at the current rate of inflation? That's kind of what I'm trying to get at. So thank you for articulating it better than I did. Yeah, we can look into that and kind of build into the contracts and review periods where we would kind of look into the contracts and like review periods where we would kind of look at the agreement so that it's not just 10 years and then we look at it completely again. So maybe every every two years we kind of come back to the table. Yeah, I think that would be a good practice but we will follow up on having a CPI escalator for that $2.95. I think that would be a hopeful discussion for us to have, just so that that concept sort of stays, you know, that value will erode over time. Other questions? Yeah, I just wanted to confirm that this agreement would be in place for 10 years? Well, we typically do have terms for our agreement. So five is what the chief is saying. I think the last one was a five-year term with an automatic renewal. Yes. And we found it was working well. So we exercised the automatic renewal. Now there are structural changes, and that's why we're working through those right now. Thanks. Other questions? Okay. I had two more. So I know many jurisdictions are now subject to collective bargaining agreements. Is the fire department under one as well and how far are you in that cycle? We are getting ready to sit back at the table for the second contract we've are we're in the third year of contract, we are going to be renegotiating a contract, could be two, three, four years to be determined, but we will be probably for FY27, have probably a new labor agreement and probably fiscal picture. And those costs are just assumed to be ones that we'll to, I guess, assume as part of the fire contract. So whatever the new compensation percentages are that you negotiate will then be baked into this agreement. Correct. Roughly, like, what's your anticipation, I guess, of how much that budget will grow? Hard to say we're getting FY27 butch guidance that doesn't look so good. I know. So we're probably in the same way we don't know but we're I'm gonna say the county manager has told us or set the expectation for a lot of uncertainty for this FY26 and also FY27 so we don't know. Okay and then more of a question for why it so with both the revenue and extra expenses, I guess, when we update our next run of the fiscal model, we should probably bake these new numbers into our assumptions for new development because we bake in operating costs of public safety and teachers and everything else it comes with growth. And so the new costs associated with fire which is baked into the fiscal model. We update that every five years. I would just say, you know, the agreement doesn't have a growth trigger like that. And so it really is just driven by the county's cost in terms of what salary is. The Kelly Day change was not driven by necessarily by an increase in call volume. it was driven by a negotiated new staffing model. And so that's kind of as a feature of this agreement, the way that it's structured, it doesn't really have those growth triggers in it. Now, if we kind of became completely out of whack in terms of how station six was operating because we grew at such a faster clip than the service territory of the county part of station six, that might be something the county and future we want to discuss with us, but that's not currently the case. Okay. Other final questions or that? Okay. Chief, you have a floor again. We excuse our guests. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your service to our community. Thank you. Thanks against Chief Foblet. I want to now jump into our police department's portion as a presentation. I'll start with our administrative programs. We continue to focus those programs on transparency, accountability, and professional standards. And in FY26, we're permanently funding the professional standards manager position that we talked about last almost before your year ago. Of course, this is integral to our national accreditation efforts through the commission of accreditation law enforcement agency, commonly referred to as Kleea, a key priority for the council, the community and as well for our department. Since my last budget report to you, we've begun the three year accreditation assessment process, which will culminate with an independent review in about two and a half years from now, resulting in a what I'm confident and as a accreditation award. So transitioning from that to our traffic safety programs, which I know folks wanna hear about about. I just want to share that the city's automated enforcement remains a strong tool for school zone and traffic safety in 2024 to the new speed cameras, the red light cameras and the stop arm cameras on our school bus has nearly issued nearly 7,500 citations. This program is helping us reduce dangerous driving behaviors and protect vulnerable pedestrians, particularly around our schools. With respect to the city's photo red light enforcement program, last year council requested that we evaluate the program at the two locations. Those are broad cherry and broad and hand-dale. The goal of this program was to improve traffic safety by reducing red light violations and preventing crashes while freeing up law enforcement resources. The police department has completed its evaluation and believes the program has met its intended goals of reducing crashes at those two locations. However, since our contract with the eventers about to expire next month, there's an opportunity to examine the future of this program and given our anticipated budget shortfalls, I've recommended to the City Manager that we end the Photo Red Light Enforcement Program. In FY26, we will continue to focus our photo enforcement efforts with the speed camera and the school bus arm programs. In addition to using technology to supplement our traffic safety efforts, I can report that in calendar year 2024 we issue 3,331 traffic citations, which reflects an 18% increase over the previous year and it's near their pre-pandemic numbers. Aside from enforcement efforts, we review and analyze traffic crash data on a weekly basis and share the data with traffic engineers and the public. Our public education efforts around traffic safety has included implementing a child safety the seed inspection program, digital and social media campaigns, and bicycle safety education engagement with various groups of the city. Finally, the police department's speech trailer should be ready for deployment next month. While traffic safety is an important priority for our community, the uniformed officers of our patrol section remain as the backbone of our daily operations, which along with our dispatcher stand ready to respond to our community's public safety needs at a moment's notice 24-7 365 days a year. In calendar year 2024, we dedicated, our dedicated patrol officers responded to nearly 31,000 calls for service with about a third of those calls originating from the community members while the other two third or officer initiated activities. While the patrol budget remains steady, we are investing in making sure these frontline uniform personnel have the necessary resources. Those resources include upgrading and replacing the body-worn cameras and their in-car camera video systems, which aligns with the use of force review committee recommendations for the long term. As a background, the current equipment was purchased using a federal green and fiscal year 21 and its sole source of funding since has been use of CES assets. This program is here to stay and it requires dedicated funding in a budget to ensure sustainability and built-in technology upgrades. Thanks to also to your support, we're also upgrading the officer's mobile computer terminals and mounts in their vehicles so they can communicate effectively before their operations. We have a lot of information that we have to monitor and monitor the operations. We have a lot of information that we have to Watch Night Falls Trust Festival many more. We need to make sure we have public safety coverage. Of course the work of our patrol officers will not be possible without the backing of our support services, team members which includes investigations, professional development, emergency and dedicated community engagement programs, which we've implemented new programs on bringing on new programs I'll talk about. In the coming fiscal year, we are focusing on delivering another session of the hugely successful community policing academy that I had introduced last year to you. We recently graduated 15 community members who spent seven weeks learning about their police department. I believe this program is immensely important to our trust building campaign and engagement with our community. This year on August 5th, we'll be hosting another national night out event in Cherry Hill Park. And yes, Madam Mayor, we're looking for more volunteers for the dunk tank, but all are invited. And yes, I want, don't know if my son is coming back this year, so we need volunteers. Excited to announce that for this coming fiscal year, we'll be relaunching our rape aggression defense program, commonly known as RAD rad that's so important to empowering women by preparing them for potentially dangerous situations. Investments and staff development is a party and we're enhancing the education and training of our staff and leaders. This has been a cornerstone of our professional development office since being implemented during this current fiscal year so So we can meet those new standards within the accreditation process that I spoke about and maintaining officer certifications and ensuring succession planning within the police department. Pivoting to the discussion we had for the FY25 budget around staffing in our emergency communication center with your support to dispatch your positions were added to help manage workload during peak hours and reduced burnout. I'm happy to report that all positions in our communication center have been filled. And this year's budget continues to support these positions. So in closing out my presentation, I want to highlight our future priorities to ensure our public safety personnel are prepared and ready to address current and future challenges. I spoke to Council last year about our patrol staffing and identified a need for four additional police officers to address shift relief factors in our current staffing models. In fiscal year 25, Council approved two of those four positions, and a third position was approved for our school resource officer program. In future fiscal years, a need for these two additional police officers remain still, so we can ensure adequate staffing relief is place in place for our police department's patrol operations. To get to Councilman Snyder's question, beyond the shift relief factors, further staffing challenges exist related to growing workload demands on police services. I believe using a workload-based staffing model is the appropriate method in equating the workload resulting in a community's expectation for police services with the staffing levels required to complete their work. The first step in ensuring the staffing is aligned with workload is an independent and transparent data-driven study. My type of priority for work load-based staffing model study is ensuring peak workload periods do not exceed minimum staffing levels and at the same time addressing officer safety and wellness issues that exist relating to working the current 12 and a half hour shifts. As mentioned the staffing study will be an open process with opportunity for engagement from our community and in addition to our sworn-staffing parties, the study will be an open process with opportunity for engagement from our community. And in addition to our sworn staffing parties, the study will evaluate our support staffing parties related to investigations, public information, state-am mandated reporting and ever growing FOIA demands which already require additional investments. So in closing, the FY26 budget for public safety reflects a balance between sustaining our current strong performance and investing smartly for our future challenges. We're committed to maintaining a city that's safe, welcoming and resilient for everyone who lives, works and visits, false church. I want to give you my sincere thanks to you council and city manager for your partnership and ongoing support for our public safety personnel. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you, Chief. I'll start over here, Justine. First of all, thank you so much. You mentioned all the programs that you do to build trust in the community. And I think that's really been showing whether it was the night out that you mentioned or officers on bike, which I've been seeing around the community a lot more, or the community programs, which people were raving about. And I saw the photos of the graduation. I wanted to bring up a few stats that you mentioned, one of which was an 18% increase in citations, I believe I'm saying that correctly. Is that simply because we have more, we've been dedicating more officers to patrolling? Or is that simply because you think driver behaviors changed now that people are getting back on the road after COVID? I think it's many things, including those things outlined. Also coming out of the pandemic nationwide, we saw a pullback on enforcement by police officers. A lot of it shaped by changes in legislation. For a long time, when the police reform movements were happening in 2020 and 2021, A lot of officers felt guarded about putting themselves out there. So we're starting to come out of that. Also, I've made traffic safety the importance of it very well known to our officers. I'm a support of them to not be fearful to get out there and be visible. We don't talk about citations with officers. We tell them be visible. Look for unsafe behaviors and make sure you stop those, you know, behaviors and have those opportunities to interact with folks. Those are great opportunities for building trust and engaging with the community. Some hoping those conversations are part of the reason for the increases. You mentioned that our contract with the vendors coming up. I didn't quite catch what you said. This was for the photo red light. You were saying that we should extend it or end it. End it. End it. Okay. So the photo red light at the two locations have been there since 2011. Last year when I came before you, the spotty asked me to review it and potentially if it needs to be moved. We analyzed it based on the current locations and we don't really feel like it still needs to be there. It met its intended goals of reducing crashes. If you look at the citation numbers over the last couple of years in the budget work work, it shows it's kind of stabilized to some levels. But the contract does expire next month. It's an opportunity to evaluate that and talking with city manager and staff and looking at some of the fiscal challenges we have as a city coming. This is one of those things that we can cut while in focusing on our other risk behaviors. A lot of the crashes in the city are driven by speed, distracted driving, and we'll focus on some of those risks as opposed to our rely violations. So right now the contract with vendors costing us more money than we're taking in from the low violations. That's correct. Let me see what else. In terms of future funding priorities, you mentioned public information and FOIA coordinator for expanding hiring and recruitment program. Could you talk a little bit about what that is? So we have program funding related to our background investigation, our psychological examinations. When I took over, I decided to digitize our background investigation process so that it's in line with whether jurisdictions are doing. So prior to using the system we would give an applicant a 40 page PDF document and ask them to fill it out and send it in. Most 22 year olds and 25 year olds are interested in doing that. Most systems use an online system where you can enter your system. Your information is an applicant. So that system itself, and of course just getting out there and doing recruitment. A lot of our neighboring jurisdictions spend a lot of trips to college campuses and job fairs and all of those things require funding. Gotcha. Is there, or officers time involved in dealing with the PDF documents or that's just the time spent is on the applicant side? Yeah, the challenge and advantage with a small agency is you wear many hats. And that's true in every jurisdiction, but our background investigators are trained officers throughout the agency. So they could be patrol officers, they could be detectives, they could be other folks, that double duty as background investigators. So they get those cases assigned to them and they do them as time allows or for over time. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. Okay. Thank you, Chief Fard. Something that you said and something that the fire chief said were similar and I just want to make sure I'm thinking about it in the right way. You mentioned a workload-based staffing model and he also seemed to say the same thing that he's not saying. You're not staffing based upon this is our population. This is the hours we need we're covering up but you're actually looking at the calls for service and determining it based upon the workload. Yeah, and that's a really good way because it allows a conversation between us, you and the community about what service requests are, right? And we get to adjust those things. So if we want to go to every single call that we're called to, then we need to figure out what that is and figure out what the staffing requirements are for those. Certainly if we don't have the ability to allocate the staffing requirements, then we can look at the police services and cut those back. So right now the staffing model that's used in the Falls George Police Department is referred to as a minimum man manning model. Minimum. Say it again. Minimum. Manning. Nope. No, no disrespect to the ladies in the room. It's just what it's called. And it's been that way for decades. And basically it says you have an ex amount of officers assigned to every hour of the day. Of course, as you see the problem with that is the moment your workload peaks above what is required, if that requirement is below that staffing needs, then you have a deficit. So I think it's a good model, it's transparent, and everybody can kind of see what we're doing. And then on the photo red light, I was thinking, and then I was rethinking in my own head, having a conversation with myself, wouldn't it be nice to be able to say this program was successful when we needed it anymore? But I suppose as soon as you say that, then people will start running red lights again. So you can't do that. But that is one of those where we put in the new speeding program on Broad Street there. And some people are upset because they're getting tickets and you get that accusation of, well, that you're just making money off of tickets. And it'd be nice to be able to say, that's not what, here's an example of that's not why that program is. I don't know how you say that without giving people free range of my red lips. Well, my last question of the accreditation. I'm last year when we did not fund that in the budget. You found some excess funds to be able to fund it. So this year you're asking for a full time position in the budget for that. Yes. So we have a temporary policy analyst that's helping us with that process in fiscal year 25. It's a temporary position and that position's really been helping us getting our general orders up to shape. We've put out 30 new general orders already just since November I believe, or Highly Ability Wands, some of our administrative ones, but he is not really engaged with our accreditation process. So the policies, part of the accreditation process, we really need that staffing level to get that work done and be successful. And how long will it take to do that accreditation process? Some will two years. Yeah, it's three years. We've already started so we kicked it off in November. Okay. And as about two and a half years or so from now, we'll have our final test, if you will. It's constant continuing process, but in two and a half years to three years is one we will be accredited. And then how long is that accreditation good for and when do you start the next process? Three years. Well the process starts immediately. Immediately. So it's an ongoing. It's not like you need somebody for three years and then you don't need them for ten more years. It's a good thing. That's the paradigm I'm trying to change with staff view on it. It's not a once every three years. It's a process that makes us better on a daily basis. It's just we get tested every three years. Okay, thank you. Yes. Sure, thank you, Chief. Couple of questions. How many citations were issued in the intersections with the red light running cameras? I don't have that information. I can get it for you. It would be helpful to know that. Sure. The second issue. Well, can I just add, it's very difficult to tell with our RMS CAD data because where an office or a Mark as you're probably aware, if they don't use in the actual intersection as the address and use a block number, trying to go back and research that and, you know, weed through it, maybe some what difficult, but I'll do my best and see what I can pull out. Yeah, in order to weigh and balance whether taking those out would have a significant safety impact, we need to know what's the, what are the violations that are being captured at those intersections. Second point I'd make is well, you're focused on speeding and distracted driving is right on point The fact of the matter is anybody who drives or walks around here knows that red light running is Absolutely endemic as it stops on running so And I will say that all efforts to increase electronic enforcement for speed have ended up in a Running literally into a stone wall enrichment. So there continues to be a lot of interest in that. But I really want to know what the potential safety impacts are because I don't want to be penniwise and pound foolish. I don't want to increase, I don't want to decrease the safety of our citizens because we save a little bit in in vendor fees for red light running camera. So in order to make that, to make a rational decision, we need a lot more data. It seems to me that I've seen so far. So I'll be very interested in what you can provide, trends as well. And are there other intersections where we might have a greater impact and we should in essence continue the program but move them to other intersections. So I'd be interested in sort of a top to bottom review of the safety consequences of your recommendation. I'll leave it there for right now, thanks. I will just add we based on the analysis we did of the two current locations one thing that I found was in the history of those two intersections at some point no turn on red signs or added to those intersections and the citations number dropped dramatically. So a lot of times at an intersection in terms of red signals, red light, you know, enforcement, sometimes other measures such as that. So even we have done some studies of other intersections and I'll certainly get to cancel that information. But what may be a first step as opposed to the photo enforcement, maybe looking at other options just like some simple,, I was just putting up an alternative on RedSign and see how that goes. But I will provide that data. Sure, certainly support that, but I am interested not only at those intersections, but other intersections where photo red might have even a greater impact. Thank you. Yes, sir. And just to add on to that, I guess before we make that call, because I have the same concerns is what costs may outweigh the violations is we should look at whether reading go shading with other vendors that might be more cost competitive. I think there's more than one vendor out there that does us these days whether that's an option as well as looking at other intersections that may be more risky now and I guess my third question is is using crash data the only indicator that we have of risky behavior? I hate to get to a point where people are injured or get crashes, but obviously we're trying to prevent getting to that point. So I guess I'd look to our public safety professionals to figure out, can we use data before we get to the point of actually seeing crashes and injuries and prioritize those intersections that we see risky behavior? There's requirements within the law that we have to look at in terms of determining eligibility for new intersections. So I'll consider those and get back to you guys. I have some broader questions and then some specific questions. But first of all, thanks again to you for this report into all of your staff and so many improvements that have been made It's good to hear about Where we have come with the staffing on that accreditation and why we need this additional support But on staffing levels could you talk about what where we are? I know participating in the regional Organization that we do we with their other local jurisdictions that have significant problems in staffing their police departments. And I know we've done better, but where are we today? What percent staffing level are we roughly? So our staffing numbers in the book right now for our proposed for FY 26, like safety in the police department is 59.35. That mean but what are filled like how many are open? Oh, that's an I can look at the numbers here, but it doesn't reflect. Sure. Like I heard that public safety officers we currently have one and that might have impacts on how we're doing parking enforcement or how we're addressing some of the other issues? Sure. So I mentioned our emergency communications service fully staff are public safety. So we have three authorized public safety positions. Two of them are vacant because one of them decided he wanted to become a police officer. So he's at the academies we speak. So we have two vacancies there. We're actively doing interviews with that some today. And what's going on with the federal government? It's resulting a lot more applicants. We have three officer position openings. And those were primarily due to a recent resignation of someone going to another federal law enforcement agency and to retirements. So you know, typically takes about six to nine months to fill a police officer position with the background and hiring and there's only two Academy dates. So we have three sworn position openings and two the PSA, so altogether Five out of 59 roughly. Yeah, and the rate the rate compare. I think you mentioned other agencies I've talked to my peers and other police departments We're doing better than most most agencies National eye to running 10% or higher vacancy rate and our tuition rate is not bad either. So, and we're also looking at some lateral hires so that we can get them on board quicker. Great. I loved that you mentioned or you talked about the use of force recommendations. Where are we on implementing, if you were to say roughly, if they're 100 recommendations or they're 50 recommendations, we've implemented half of them. Or is that something you could talk to tonight or come out and give us an idea of where we're going? Not in great detail, but I can tell you, most of them we have implemented. We recently updated our internal affairs policy, our use of force policy. We implemented a new disciplinary actions and appeals policy, an employee intervention program policy. And these are all, by the way, on our website, open to the public. Our policy analysts experienced long-forced man professional who is helping us with those policies injecting those use force review policies. And when I first got here, I met with the vice chair of the use of force review committee. And I feel like we've implemented most big picture stuff was use of force investigation, administrative investigations, our professional development and staffing, the four overarching things. And pretty confident we've implemented most, some of them we're still working on. Great. I think that's just an excellent example of where the community and staff have worked really well together and such an important thing and it was particularly tough time. The MCT deployment, I feel like we had some delivery bumps or delays or something, where are we, like how many from the product not arriving or something like that, there some delay in getting those into the officers. We've received those. Are we on implementation? Yeah, so there soon to be deployed. We had to update a lot of the mounts and the cars because we had various models, there was various mounts. So most of all the vehicles have received the updated mounts. We're working with IT to update programming of each of the laptops before they get issued. So I think within the next 30 days they should all be kind of out there and assigned. That's fantastic. Just looking at my notes here. On the budget we have two grants. We have federal grants and state grants. One's like $50,000. One was a couple hundred thousand dollars. And as we've been discussing through the budget process for all federal and state grants, is there any concern that with those grants not being there for fiscal year 20th. None, that I'm aware of. OK. The fees on the revenues, this is under total department budget, down 25. I guess it's not a huge number dollar wise. But why, what is that reflecting versus fines and forfeitures, which is a much larger, like what's separated out in fees under the revenues versus that where? Are you on page 65? I'm on page, yes. GF65, the first line licenses fees and permits. I just look at the percent change and I'm looking at a 25 percent decrease in revenues there, but it looks like it's offset by fines and forfeitures, which is 38% increase. Just curious, like what are the differences between fines fees? Yeah, the fines are probably I'm assuming it's running out of the photo-inforced program. We recently implemented, but I'll have to get back to you. I don't have the exact answer. It's not top priority by any means I just want to understand it. I also wanted to mention thanks for including the crash reports and now this is the police department working with our communications we just have crime reports and now we have crash reports and that has been helpful me. I am surprised that most of them are during the day. Like I thought a lot of them would be late nights or Friday nights or Saturday nights when they were occurring, because you see driving well impaired, and I thought those would be paired together, but there really aren't. The majority of them are on some intersection of broad, and they're the bulk of them seem to be during the day. So thank you for making that public. I think that's data that's going to be helpful to continue helping us make better and better decisions on crash data. And we did also publish our in our last annual report our office of professional responsibility data, both of our use of force data and internal and external complaints. Our 2024 annual report will be coming out soon. And if you'll have me, I'll come back like it did last year and do a presentation for you on it. Great. The significant change on overtime funds, there's an overtime just incorporated into salaries and wages. So where we see just 9.22 percent, that includes an increased staff member and over time and projected you know CPI cost something that's all incorporated in that salaries and wages. I thought it would actually be higher. Yeah so the over time is $42,000 for FLSA practices for petrol schedule and then $36,000 for the special events. Okay, so less of a percentage of the salaries than like the fire would be. No, we don't do it like they do or the $42,000 is strictly based on F LSA practices and our work schedule. There is a comment on trends and issues about complete streets that kind of, just caught my attention because I said there's a potential for an increase in pedestrian and bicyclist injury crashes with complete streets. And I feel like the goal of complete streets, which is tied into vision zero, the whole purpose of it is to have decreased pedestrian and cyclist activity. So I was just wondering what your perspective was on. What page are you on? I wonder if it's type of. Page 71. The second goal point on trends and issues. The city's goal of shared mobility and complete streets. There's potential for an increase in pedestrian and bicyclists, injury crashes. I know we'd have more out there, but the intention of the complete streets and the vision zero is to be engineering and creating it with all the folks that are sitting behind you to make it even safer to walk and bike. And I was wondering why you thought is it just a numbers game of more people will be out there and therefore there's an increase? I'll ask you back to you on that. And the last question for now and thank you for your patience with me as I look across off the ones that people already asked. I'm on page 72, looking at the supplies and others. Again, I just was twice as much as FY24 actual versus adopted. And I just couldn't remember why we, what is covered under material supplies and others is a couple hundred dollars. Speed cameras. Speed cameras. Speed cameras. Okay. Thank you. And this may. I think that's it. Let me just move on and I can always come back. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you again for your leadership and service. I have I guess one remark observation comment and then three staffing related questions. So just to pick up where Miss Hiscott left off on the body worn cameras and car cameras. I just wanted to commend you and the city manager for you know making the local investment in funding. I think that you know national sort of discourse and budget implications and sort of our strong showing in terms of constitutional policing and when you did the annual report on sort of what excessive force looked like or lack of excessive force incidents in the city would have made it an easy time to sort of say we don't need that investment. And so thank you for your continued commitment to kind of transparency and officer accountability to themselves and to their colleagues and to the community more generally. So just wanted to comment on that one. And then on this staffing related questions, I remember last year we had the conversation about the four full-time officers and you wanted all four of them and sort of said you'd take two on because it would be easier to onboard given the significant investment and sort of bringing on four officers at one time and so I'm a little bit disappointed to see the lack of those officers. In this year's budget, given that we have sort of put them over into fiscal year 26 as far as I remembered, thinking that the commitment was there to actually staff those positions. So given what you just said about sort of being down three sworn officers in your mind, Is that mean that like the police department is down five sworn officers from where you wanna be staffing wise or where to kind of those, the three vacancies plus the two patrol spots, you would ideally want sort of fit in terms of overall kind of operations with those five sworn positions if you take them together. So the four total officers was four different shifts to put one additional officer on each shift to address the shift relief factor. So the two that were authorized, we allotted those for the midnight shift since unlike day shift, there's no other resources available if they run into trouble with a lot of calls for service volumes. So those two additional positions that we're still asking for, those are a lot of day shifts and we still want to add those. They're three positions. I mean, I would say like end of the calendar year towards the calendar year, we were in a different place than today, right? Because we had someone retire beginning of January, we had someone leave about three weeks ago, four weeks ago. So had those two things not happen, I would be before you in telling you to have one vacancy. And before that, we were near fully staffed. So it's a constant effort. Oh, we tried to forecast our attribution, looking ahead.. So with the coming up Academy class, we're running several applicants through, and I'm hoping to get those two or three positions filled. So then our focus would be to onboard the additional position, as that you mentioned. And the two full-time officers that are going on funded again, in terms of the concrete effect on sort of attrition or retention, staffing, can you just speak to that a little bit more? So that just want to, maybe I'm just picking hairs, but the two positions that we got approved in FY25, in my mind, by end of the year, we were at or near filling those. What changed was the retirement and the departure of the one recent employee? What was the second part? Oh, no, so I'm talking about so you're talking about the two from fiscal year 25 But then weren't there two more? Yes, you still Right, so the two that you still don't have yes, what is the effect on the department or the other officers of not having those two? I see. I see. Well, the effects is on our overtime budget. That's a negative effect. We will be overspending our overtime budget fiscal year 25. We're using some salary savings to make up for that. Leave, the availability of leave, the availability of training. And frankly, some commanders having to go on run calls. Sometimes that's what it takes in a small department. So those are the effects. It's not helpful. One of the most recent, a person I love was a supervisor on day shift. So trying to backfill all of those is a challenge. So I think that's the effect. And then two other staffing related questions. I know you were here earlier at one of our BDGs talking about the behavioral health specialist and it was at that time somewhat of a preview for budget season and it was something that hasn't been recommended in the budget and so in your view kind of with the continued what is it the CIT training or credentialing? Do you feel as though, you know, you're sufficiently staffed and trained to meet that need, even without the behavioral health specialists that might have aided considerably in efforts with at least some interactions? Yeah, and it's not, I do, and I don't think it's just my opinion. We had a study done, as you know, over a one or half fiscal year. And that was the recommendation from the study that the call volumes that they were saying just didn't justify a course under officer to be dedicated. We do have CIT, as you mentioned. we just had two other officers go through and get certified. We have our CSB contract, we have our mental health professional that works in the city. So we have a lot of resources to access if they are needed, and just the evaluation that was done didn't justify the position at this time. It might change in the future. We'll certainly come back to you. And then last question. When you were talking about growing workload demands and sort of needing to do a data-driven study for a workload staffing model, what kind of is involved in that study in terms of of what are you envision? Like is that an in-house study? Is that someone who you bring in? Is that accounted for in terms of the budget of any outside sort of consultant that you would need to even determine what a workload staffing model recommendation is for how the department needs to be staffed going forward? Yeah, it's definitely a work that we don't have the expertise to do internally. So we do need to bring a consultant group to do that for us. It will look at all of our workload data. It will look at our staffing, our time and attendance data, our training data, looking at the positions, looking at the organization structure, and based on our workload, determining what is the level of staffing that that equates. It's a very interactive process, engaged, and much like Device Mayor mentioned, with the Use of Force Review Committee. It puts it all out there for the community to talk about what level of police services, law enforcement services they want, and then we can equate that into the staffing level that's needed to address that and it's scalable. So it's, yeah, it's outside consultant and it'll be a public facing event. And so then so in terms of financing at then are you looking at like it doesn't seem like fiscal year 26 necessarily has funds unless it does have fun somewhere for this. Yeah. Like a fiscal year 26 unfunded as of now or something that you're looking at for fiscal year 27? It is not funded because I don't know how much it's going to cost. So we'll be here to add. I'll work with city management and then I'll forget how it is made for. If we don't have the means to make for our budget, I'll speak to the city manager and he'll go with you guys. Yeah, I just wanted to have a sense of like what the need might be because it seemed unfilled as of now, but important in terms of properly appropriately planning for the department and the city's needs. No, I appreciate that. Thank you. I just wanted to jump jump in on Aaron's comment. When you're talking about public transparency, there was a chart that you gave us last year about types of calls of service. And there's a mention also in the fire and rescue services about types of that they were enumerated below and I didn't see them. But that would be helpful I think in that sharing with the public. Here's the types of services that we're getting. And here's why we'd staff at the level we staff, and then here's why we would talk to a contractor or a potential potential consultant about. So that was in our annual report. Yeah. There was based on the UCR crime reporting structure. So that'll that'll also be in our 2024 annual report once again. But there's a lot of work activity that's not necessarily UCR or crime related. So that work, the staffing study would encompass everything. Yeah, actually that's a great tie-in. It's not in the budget book and doesn't necessarily need to be like a reference in here too, that annual report so that the people can find, why are we staffed at the level we're staffed? I'll hear the number of calls of services we have and here's why. That's all I just want to add. Thanks. Thank you so much. So to be clear, I just wanted to make sure I'm understanding your priority in terms of new position staff. It would be the one, the staff person that would help with the accreditation. Is that really okay? And I know that you came to speak to the human services advisory council a little while ago and talked about, you know, that you had wanted it that I guess the year before and it wasn't funded and that just for everyone know, I know that the human services advisory council is very supportive of you, you know, receiving this position. So just wanted to make sure that was clear that that was really that's really your number one focus in terms of newly funded positions. And what you know I do agree with Mr. Snyder in terms of it is a little counterintuitive. You know I just ran for election in the fall and then one of the number one things I heard was about people talking about complaining about traffic and speeding and all this sort of an, aggressive driving. So I think for all of us to sort of wrap our heads around, you know, we, personally, I, wouldn't mind seeing more speed cameras at home as kindly on the school side, they did see a drop in people running past the school buses, you know, even though the schools did receive fees, they also saw a drop and people didn't repeat it once, they were rebuilt, they didn't usually do it again. And that's what I'm hoping to with the speed camera that we have on broad, that hopefully we'll see that will decrease. But I think it is, we've actually heard people asking, could we have a camera at the stop sign on Anandale, kind of behind the Harris-Teter, because that's a bus stop there. and there's cars that blow through that stop sign on Anandale kind of behind this Harris-Teter because that's a bus stop there and there's cars that blow through that stop sign all the time and there's lots of kids. So I think it's for us to sort of wrap our heads around getting rid of something that, you know, when we would, some of us would like to see more technology employed. Do we have any, do you have off the top of your head and what that contract, the dollar amount of that is for that? Sure. So it's in the book for FY 24 before we bought the speed cameras, which is $175,000. Okay. That's just our fee to the vendor running those two intersections. Okay. We have about $183,000 in personnel costs related to our time positions. Those are 0.75 positions. But those positions are responsible for all of our photo-informed programs. They're the ones who validate all of the violations out of the school bus farm program, the SPI camera program, and also the red light camera program. So the 170, 475,000 is what is the cost of those two intersections for the red light cameras. Okay, thank you. And then just a comment, I just wanted to thank you for the police academy, I thought was terrific. You know, so much, I wasn't here for the conversation about use of force, but I think the more that we can reach out to the community with the police academy, I can't tell you how loved the resource officers are in the schools. I mean, I just see them as such a great way for our students to be exposed to police officers as members of the community and work. It's just, it's from NAML. I know that we've gone years where we haven't had it for budget reasons. I want to thank the city council for funding those positions because I know that's really, really valuable in the schools. And so again, just thank you for all that outreach. I think it really makes a difference. Thank you. So at the Budget and Finance Committee, we were just talking about positions that could be added in the city that would bring in revenues. Some of the ones that the Treasurer's Office was talking about was parking enforcement. They used to have someone who was doing collections. so they weren't a police officer, but they were doing collections on treasury desks that hadn't been paid. But then one of the things that came up was parking officers that would be giving parking tickets. And I know that's a public safety aid operation, something that you've been struggling to fill as well. But is that something that if we were able to hire someone to do that, it would be a revenue generating position that would be revenue neutral? I rather than I get into the revenues as the least chief, but the, yeah, I think obviously if you have more people at the right and tickets, that's going to produce more revenue. Right. And I know we don't write tickets to produce revenue. But I guess it was more in the sense of the treasure. But those public safety aids, so circle back to the public safety aids. You're low on them as well, right? So yeah, we have three positions allocated. We had three filled. The last time I talked to you. One of them had to leave for medical reasons. The other one became a police officer. So the other two were actively in the process of filling. We had some interviews today. We're going to push some of those folks into background. It was kind of interesting seeing some of the applications that have come through. It's kind of sad also seeing some federal employee layoffs. So they gave us some more energy to move quicker on those so that we can give some people some opportunity at the income that they've lost. Okay, any final questions? The benefit going last, actually, my questions or answered, I had a bunch of staffing ones and everyone brought those up. So overall, Chief, I guess I certainly appreciate how much you've taken to heart when you talked about community policing and building trust and being responsive to the community. So thank you for serving us so well on that. On the crash data, I think we talked about how it was great that you've made it more transparent in democratizing the data. I think what I'm most interested in, especially since we have public works in the audience, is the cross-functional team that looks at the data and then does something about it. So it's not just, hey, we're putting the data out there, but hey, based on where the data says we're having crashes and injuries, how are we going to fix the street so that doesn't happen again? I think that's a core tenant of Vision Zero, whether we've implemented, adopted or not. And that behavior is really important, so I appreciate you. Leading the way on that, even if we haven't happen again. I think that's a core tenant of Vision Zero, whether we've implemented, adopted, or not. And that behavior is really important, so I appreciate you leading the way on that, even if we haven't formally adopted that as a city. My second question kind of has to do with what Laura says. I think all seven of us up here here, that the number one kind of community request is around enforcing bad driving behavior, whether it's speeding, red light running, stop sign running just you know it's just gotten worse and partly I think it's because as we become a more walkable city, we have more people on the streets observing that behavior. And so by nature, you're just going to have more demands for walkability and safer streets. That said, beyond kind of the headcount request, which I know as your unfunded needs, what else would you need to kind to be more responsive to those. Knowing that enforcement is obviously only one tool in the toolbox. Yeah, now I appreciate the question. You know, if I looked at our staffing and our program goals and the tiered level, that first tiered at a bottom level, that foundation is our patrol officers. It has to be, right? They're 24-7 along with our dispatchers. If someone calls, they have to have people to go. So to me, that's not negotiable. Everything above that, every tier above that is, I want to say optional, but it's second to patrol. So we've had some conversations about patrol staffing, the shift relief factor, to workload. So assuming those things are addressed and that foundation is solid, then I would love to have traffic safety officers out there who they're dedicated or committed goal is to make sure the roads are safe. And that's not just going out there and doing traffic stops and giving, you know, citations. It's doing day now, says it's doing the public education, it's doing the outreach over the past year, done a lot of outreach with our youth around bicycle safety. And I've done that on my own time coming in on a weekend to do that. And I love it. I enjoy it. It's not, if I didn't enjoy, I wouldn't do it. But those are the things that we can expand on and do more of, which we're a little bit limited with. So, yeah, I think we, I definitely am focused on patrol and then beyond that is these other layers of opportunities which also speak to the other questions about attrition. Just like anybody else, police officers would like different opportunities in their career and that I want to spend 25 years working patrol. They may want to become a detective, and might want to become canine. So if I have to focus, there are a lot of staffing on patrol, then those things are absent. So in a perfect world, that's what I would want, is to take care of patrol first, and then do those other programs. Okay. Any final thoughts or comments, questions with chief? Okay. Thank you for being out there Friday night doing street closures yourself. That was fun too. Okay. Why it's back to the agenda on, we ready to move to transportation? We're going to move to transportation and so Andy's going to come forward and other members of the team to come join the table as well. We do have a couple of slides that we want to go through but before we get into those, we'd like to introduce our new director of Public Works Amanda Stout Brain is joined the city last Monday and I know that the whole team is excited to have her on board working very closely with Tara and with her, working very closely with her CPED staff, with her police and Amanda brings a great experience. I think to many of the things the council has already been talking about for years, I'm in a great perspective on how to make change happen here in the City of False Church in very positive ways to improve safety, to help our business community with respect to how transportation impacts our business community, and of course all of our community members. So Amanda, welcome. It's great to have you here. Yes. Welcome, Amanda. And also, thank you to Herb and Tara for stepping in, so, Abley and the Interim as well. We appreciate that. On top of your other responsibilities. I say thank you. I have had a warm welcome last week, and I'm really happy to join the team in the Agon. Thank you to Herb and Tara for all their good work for stepping up. Yeah, looking forward to working with you all. Thanks. So Andy's gonna take us through a presentation and then we'll look forward to engaging with the council and discussion from there. Okay good evening mayor members council it's good to see you all this evening I think we've got the introductions covered except we also, you know, from our planning department here from a transportation planning perspective. So hopefully we've got all the people that can answer any of the questions you all have, but we'll try and cover some of the basics here through the presentation. So if it's okay, we'll go to slide three Cindy so we'll pick up where we were with you all a couple weeks ago with the CIP so when we talk about the evolution of the city's transportation infrastructure in the city the games in the CIP right so this year CIP has 59 million dollars over the six years for transportation, which is 40% of our overall CIP budget. Go ahead in the next one. And so when you look across the city, kind of where all of these projects are and what they're delivering, this is where kind of the transformational change in the city from a transportation infrastructure standpoint is happening. So some of the projects on the list here are things that are finishing up right now like the WNOD trail crossings, the Broad Street Hawk signals. Some are about to start construction like the Maple and Anondale roundabout. Some of the future projects are transportation focused like you know the South bus stop improvements. And then some of them are projects that weren't initially focused on transportation, but we tried to build in some transportation improvements. One of those maybe we haven't talked a ton about, but is the Fellows Park. Big part of that project is putting in a sidewalk, right? And so I think this is where the actions that this is a culmination of a lot of staff work and community input and engagement to get us this vision of where we're trying to go. Okay, next slide. So how do we, so even beyond the CIP from a transportation standpoint, how do we get all this stuff done, right? You know, you all got to hear from the police chief earlier. you know, there's, there's more, you know, other departments and things involved, but when we talk about kind of the nuts and bolts of a lot of this work, it's involves the folks here, you know, both from our planning and our public works departments. So kind of the resource constellation that we've got here from a planning standpoint, we have three folks in our planning department. One of those is an over hire, but we have two essentially two permanent transportation planners. We have two engineering positions for transportation engineers. The senior transportation engineer left in October, so we've been kind of without that position for the last eight months. We've got our fingers crossed on a candidate negotiation happening now, but that's been a challenge. From an operations standpoint, we have six kind of positions that do a wide range of work, but kind of core to this group is traffic controls, striping, and signage activities. And then contracts, right? There are over 30 contracts that our team manages and support a transportation work across the city. So, as we talk about the different programs and activities tonight, like there's rarely anything that can be done by any one of these individual teams. It usually takes a couple, if not three, or all four of them. Next slide. So it takes a lot to keep a city running from a transportation infrastructure standpoint. The resources that talked about on the previous slide need to juggle all of these programs and responsibilities and we talked about different ways to kind of represent this and thought, like a word cloud would be good. Some of these have a lot of community visibility, you know, and we'll talk about a number of those tonight, you know, things like paving, NTC, missing links, also just responding to resident inquiries. And then others aren't as visible but are critically important. Things like development, plan reviews, grant applications, bridge mass-starm inspections, so we know when to make replacements and repairs. All that stuff's gotta be managed by the folks that we were talking about on the previous slide. And as we've kinda thought about kind of where some of our limitations have been, the transportation engineering piece is kind of where we started this conversation internally about like how do we juggle doing all of these different things. So I just wanted to walk through that initially so to give everyone some context as we're talking about all these things that we want to do kind of how we get them done. Next slide. So the largest component of the public works budgets are infrastructure funding account. This year we're managing a $1.5 million budget for that program and proposing to increase it to $2.2 million and FY26. The biggest changes with pay-ding and we'll talk a little bit about more about that in a minute. But the other notable changes we're planning to reduce, you know, the money spent on brick maintenance. So we'll be bringing a proposed change to streetscapes, standards to city council on May 19th. So that's been an ongoing conversation. We're proposing an increase in the signal and street light maintenance. This includes the traffic signals, but also the decorative street lights on commercial corridors that I think we've talked a little bit about. Pavement markings, it supplies and resources to do more of this kind of not so much new installations, but kind of redoing kind of refreshing the pavement markings around the city. And then finally, project management and support to setting aside some resources to help get this work done, so particularly with the engineering limitations that I was talking about earlier. So it's important to note that the FY26 budget uses $800,000 in capital reserves to fund this work. So it's not covered in kind of our base tax collections. It is however kind of in the CIP before you kind of laid out to provide that funding overall six years. Andy, can I stop you here briefly? For the 1.5 in this year's budget, how much of that was operating, how much was capital reserve? Because I think we also use the combination of the two. So I think it was 800,000 this year as well. So the FY25 breakdown is 700 general fund 800,000 capital reserves. The doubling operating then. Going 700,000 to 1.4. Like that's the bigger headline. Because we're trying to sustain more of this in operating. That's what we've been told over time. That we need to build more of this in operating. The fact that we had 700,000 FY25, and we're bringing all the way up to 1.4 million, that's a big deal to be able to build that into operating. Clearly, that's not the full amount that we need, but that's really building that capacity. But it's based on investment revenue, so that's not necessarily sustainable money. 800,000 is, or is that it enough? Yeah, in my PowerPoint, I made that differentiation because as we were going through a budget work out, that's where we found the money. In truth, it is general fund money. So it is part of the general fund. And while we as we were building the budget viewed it as yeah we're fine we're paying this through investment returns but we could view it as this is being paid for the tax dollars and something else is being paid for with investment money. So it's in some respects the color of money is judgment is applaud. Okay, sorry. Thank you for the energy. Oh, good. Okay. Next slide, city. So, uh, so paving. So, you know, we use a data-driven planning approach here in the city that's based off of pavement-conditioned index study, which we do every three years. Um, the next PCI work is about to get started. It'll be finished in early summer 2025. The typical scope of work we're doing around the city is resurfing selected roadway sections with a two-inch mill and then a two-inch overlay of new pavement. We also update curved ramps to meet ADA regulations and address pedestrian and bike facilities where possible and in line with our plants. So the goal is to extend the pavement life and minimize long-term cost to the city. Next slide. So what are we going to do with this additional $500,000 in funding for paving? So the punchline is we're going to pay more streets. So, another team estimates another 1.25 lane miles of streets in the city, which is an increase of over 50% from what we're planning to do this year. Additionally, you know, we're looking for improved execution. So, dedicating some project management resources to be able to execute all of this work and looking for opportunities to incorporate what they call pavement management system approaches. So doing some additional kind of studies to better plan out and prioritize our investments. I think in the budget book, we talked about a $1.1 million unfunded need for additional paving work. So what would that get us? It's additional resurfacing and the ability to add to address more structural deficiencies as we identify them in the city. And so, longer term solutions, you know, the FY26 funding levels in capital reserves that is sustained through the six-year CIP. And so, yeah, so that's where we've got with that. Yeah, ask you just a quick one. On that 1.1 million unfunded priority, that's just materials that doesn't include the labor or contractors or whomever would execute on that or does it. That would be all contract costs, right? Okay, so that would be the people that ask for everything. Okay, thank you. Okay, good. Alright, so next I want to take a couple minutes to talk about some of the capabilities and the work that the teams doing here around the city and some of the things they've been doing to help us become more efficient and responsive to transportation infrastructure needs in the city. So road markings are a critical component of road safety, both installing new ones and refreshing the existing ones, which gets back to the kind of the budget requests. So our team completed 15 different projects throughout the city last year related to road markings. The ones in the photo here, so the stop bar on the left is on Birch Street up by Birch and Broad. The middle is our recently purchased road marking equipment, which, you know, herg can tell you, but it will make our team more efficient and effective at getting some of this work done. That equipment just got here last week, so I don't even, this picture we added into the slide deck today. And then the, it's kind of exciting. And then the picture on the right is a site distance improvement for an intersection that we implemented at Yucatan and Lincoln. So the rapid flashing beacons on North Oak Street, we've excited to have finally gotten those completed and installed. And I think as we've talked with you all before, you know, had some significant lead times from the manufacturer. Part of the trick with this for our team is we had to buy both two a pair of them instead of just one. We had one that had failed, but we had to buy both of them because new ones don't talk to the old ones. You have to buy them so they work together. The cost of the components for this installation was $87,000. And then as you can see, you know, with Devon, Denillo, and Jeff here in the photos, we had to do all the assembly work here in the city. So those poles are 12 feet high. So they built kind of a place in the warehouse to be able to assemble those. Do all the assembling and testing in the warehouse and then it makes the installation out on the street a lot easier. Okay, next, pick, sign, slide. So it's a road sign production. So we've got some in-house sign making capability. The team's built out, you know, one of the advantages of taking back the Fairfax water building is we've been able to kind of repurpose some of the space. So we've got kind of a cleaned up new sign shop in the building. And this reduces our costs and turn around time for making and installing signs in the city. So the team estimates we did roughly 100 signs in the last year. We We have 25 pending project requests and that's a project request not assigned. So like quite a few of those requests involved multiple signs. And so we have a lot of work kind of ahead of us in this department. So you know, where does the work come from? We've got to replace aging signage around the city. Community requests from the NTC program, parking, and then special projects, this team and this equipment helped us with the Saigon Boulevard sign. Next slide. In addition to new capabilities being brought on by the Smart Cities program, which we'll talk a little bit more in a minute, we've got to take care of what we have through annual maintenance and repair activities. So the team out here in the one picture is doing a signal light repair at Broad and Maple. Some of the things that Herb shared with me that the team kind of runs across Sir Bird Nests, you know in the traffic lights,, faulty wiring, and then timing coordination with changes and things going on in the city. So on the right, we have a test cabinet. The team is set up in our workspace out of the property yard. This allows us to conduct diagnostics in a safe environment, and then test changes before you implement them in the field. As we've talked about it, this is a growing body of work for us here in the city, and we look for it to be consuming more and more of our team capacity going forward. Next slide. So streetscape work, we replaced 15 decorative light poles along Broad and Washington in 2024. This one on Broad Street is crossed from West End Park. The plans to replace additional poles in 2025. More importantly, we need to address some wiring issues that we've got with the street lights on Broad Street. And we're discussing options with the contractors this spring. If you all remember going down the street during the winter with the holiday lights and you drive by a couple poles and there weren't any holiday lights on, this is why. And so I know the mayor's asked about kind of painting some of the light poles that's something we need to address. There's also some structural kind of performance things that we need to address as well. Is it big enough that it's a CIP project? Because we had some that I think had fallen. And there's some on Park Avenue that they've gotten hit. There's like four of them that are down just permanently. And so we just capped them with little cones, or really big cones. I guess, are we at a point where I guess all these poles just need to be replaced? because they've gotten rusty and unsafe, or do we think painting and just changing them one at a time is sufficient? So I think we're, I don't know, have heard you want to jump in. I think we have the team looking at it now as far as what are some kind of options in the middle of maybe kind of how you've kind of laid it out there. Sure we could make it a capital project that's another capital project for us to kind of find and fund. But, herb, do you have some thoughts? Yes, I think one of the challenges we have, especially the ones on Park Avenue, are where they're placed at and cars that keep hitting them. So, because they're in the front of the sidewalk, we had actually looked at moving them to the back of the sidewalk so we wouldn't have the accidents that we've been having. So we've sort of held off on those just to see what our best course of action would be for putting them back up. Some of the wiring in the ones on Broad Street and Washington Street, there's literally what we call conduit. There's no conduit. So some of these wires are just buried in dirt or buried in concrete from years ago. So now what we're facing is a lot of the wiring is just old. So we have to go in with it to pull it out or it's abandoned. And so that's some of the issues that we face with these. So it could potentially be a CIPE project. However, I think one of the challenges we have is this is a starting point. Because you don't want to necessarily just pick a block and say we want to start at Broad and Washington and go to Virginia. Because we don't know which ways the wires run. So that's one of the things that we're looking at now to see how big this actually is. And then we'll have a better sense. Thank you. So neighborhood traffic calming program. So we completed two projects in 2024 on East Columbia Street and East Jefferson Street. Both the petitions for these projects were submitted in 2022. So the turnaround time was a little less than around two years for each. Notably, this did include a period of time where we froze work on NTC projects in support of the Greenway down. To allow us to focus on the Greenway down's project. Case times on these projects can vary significantly based on consensus in the neighborhood or lack thereof. Complexity, the problem and requested solutions. We talk about light versus heavy solutions, engineering limitations, those kinds of things, and then staff workload. I don't know if we need to go back to it, but I'll just reference my green chart on slide five, like trying to kind of balance where this work fits in with all the other things we have going on. Next slide. So currently we have seven active cases in the NTC program, and each of these are given a rating of high, medium, and low based on traffic speed and volume data. Beyond that, we have seven additional potential cases in the petition data collection phase, and we expect a couple of those to shift to the active list soon. Some of the ones on those lists have been there for a long time and probably, you know, may drop off. While some of these were paused previously due to competing priorities, nothing is frozen at this point on the list, and we're looking to complete four to six of these projects in the next six months. Some of the work on the ones at the top of the list is actively being planned and contracted for now. To help with throughput, we'll look to leverage a portion of the proposed CIP funds for additional engineering support in FY26. And then, you know, each of these creates new long-term maintenance requirements for the city that we have to balance. Next slide. So, from the missing links standpoint, we had recently completed a sidewalk on Walla Street. Hopefully everybody's had a chance to check that out. One of the challenges on Walla Street was the right away that the city had and the cooperation of the property owners. So to be able to build a sidewalk, we ended up having to build the sidewalk in the street, which shifted us kind of made the street to narrow to keep parking in both travel lanes. So we elected to change it to a one-way street and at a bike lane. So that's kind of what we ended up for the final product there. It's been a change, and so it's kind of working through that with the community But I think this is you know provides a great pedestrian linkage in a key commercial area of the city On Hillwood Avenue we have four separate segments of sidewalk to be installed in 2025 The scale of this effort requires engineering plans and some additional kind of erosion and sediment control and other work that we needed to do ahead of time, outreach and coordination with a lot of residents and there's some topography geometric constraints that the team had to work through. And in addition, we're doing stormwater projects on Hillwood Avenue. So we've a couple of those segments have to be timed with the stormwater project so we don't put a sidewalk in and then tear it back up. We are proposing to increase the CIP funding for missing lakes 50% in FY26 to $250,000. Next slide. So we're making great progress with our Smart Cities partnership with Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. Next slide. So we're making great progress with our Smart Cities partnership with Virginia Tech Transportation Institute. VTTIs a lot easier to say. Specific to traffic control, which is the part we're talking about tonight. There are several other components of smart cities. Our teams deployed seven new traffic control cabinets. We have 14 others that have been delivered in our pending installation. The kids advance traffic management system dashboard is in the graphic on your right. I think you can see the seven dots of the cabinets that we've got in place there now. This new centralized management system will help with remote monitoring, configuration, and analysis of kinda how things are performing here in the city. Hopefully make things a little bit easier for us. The system also includes new capabilities from myoVision and a capability called Dirk that provides smart intersection equipment that does provide some know, provide some good interesting data on vehicle detection and close call, near misses, I guess, safety event detection. So we will continue to evolve and grow and how these tools and capabilities are integrated into the city's operations. This ties back to the conversation with the police chief earlier. All of this is more work for us, right? And so from a smart city standpoint, we're on the, for a work session with you all in June 2nd. So we'll be coming to that work session to share with additional information on this and the other components of the smart city's program. From a budgeting standpoint,'s important to note that the grant set up to kind of provides VTTI support to the city, which has been immensely helpful from an engineering and kind of set up standpoint for the city through FY28 via the grant. And then to maintain things kind of after that is something that we need to continue to work on a solution for Next slide So just kind of the takeaways so the CIP project portfolios But we're going to see some noticeable impacts and walkability in the city We've got additional resources proposed to maintain existing assets so $700,000000 increase in the general fund for paving and contract engineering support, long-term solution for the capital reserves portion of the program. Our incremental improvement programs will sustain or grow and I made a correction on this slide from what you all got like last week. Neighborhood traffic calming is staying at 200 not 250. That was my error. But the missing link sidewalks is, you know, we're intending to grow 50%. These programs were challenged by staff capacity constraints. And to solve that, we're going to look to leverage the CIP funds for consultant help when we need it. And then both additional, both efforts create additional infrastructure in the city to take care of and will, you know, increase the demands kind of on the team long term. And then finally, smart cities prevent some opportunities and challenges, you know, will be looking, you know, be working through a long term kind of way to sustain those capabilities as the grant support concludes in FY28. So So FY26 will present some challenges for us, but I think the team's also all positioned to deliver some notable progress. So with that, happy to take any questions and turn them over to the esteemed team here to answer for you this evening. Thank you. Great. Thank you. I'm sure we all have questions. I'll just start over here and we'll go around again. Thank you so much for that presentation. Thank you to Irwin and all the work that you guys have been doing. Public Works has some of the most visible projects in the city and I've been told multiple times from people who have lived here but went away for a little bit and then came back to visit over spring break or whatever else. They said, wow, there's so much that's changed in the city, there's so much that's gotten done. It looks really beautiful. People were really impressed with the WNOD crossings, although I know that there's been some minor issues there. But all the rapid response teamwork, all the paving work, it's really phenomenal what you guys have been able to do. So with that, my first question is about the paving. So last year we needed $1.8 million additional investment per year to get our paving on track. Now we need $1.1 million. But if we go back to the slide on page 8, it shows that rapid drop-off in terms of if if you don't do paving, this is how much more costs. And it's a lot, it goes from five million to, I think it was like 15 or 20 million or something astronomical. Given that we're not investing the full amount, so we're not, we still have 1.1 million that we need to invest every year Is that number that we need to invest going to grow? exponentially if If we don't put that money in soon I don't know who can answer that So I think that that's a question that we'll be able to answer next year once we start to engage with the consultants. And that's really why we carved out some money this year to get the experts on board to take a look at our whole network holistically and start to give us some recommendations in terms of what the next five years, 10 years would need to look like and how that will kind of play out. I think Andy mentioned it earlier that we're collecting new PCI. It's actually gonna start in May. So we're gonna have a brand new data set and now is really the time to get the pavement management experts on board and look at everything with that new data set. I'm gonna have some more information. Okay, so hopefully soon we'll have a better perspective as to whether or not 1.1 million as additional would be enough or maybe we need to do even more or maybe not as much. Okay. And then in terms of, I saw in the GF92 it mentions cost overruns, funding has increased in the cost center by $200,000 to allow the city to outsource project management and other transportation services. Is that something we're seeing these sort of cost over runs across the board right now in terms of our projects going through DPW? So So on GF92 the 200,000 that is called out there is the same 200,000 up there for project management and support. So it's intended to be, I think we've historically struggled with, we feel like we've got a limited amount of money. We want to spend that money on doing stuff. We want to pave. We want to put in sidewalks. And I think think what you know, Tara and Herb and I have kind of talked a bunch about over the last six months is it's money doesn't do you any good if you don't have the people to actually help you get it done and so so we've deliberately tried to say hey we need to set aside some resources to be able to help make sure you know overseeing all this payment work in the city is a bunch of work. So we need to make sure we've got the capacity to do that for NTC project for all of those things, right? And so that's what that money's for. Does that make sense? That's not an overrun or anything like that. That's just simply hiring more project managers to take on some of the work. using consultant. consultant more clicks. Yes. Okay. That makes sense. And then I'm curious about vacancies right now. So we had the question to the police chief about how many people were on staff versus how many vacancies could you run through that for DPW? So I think as of today, we have, think we have 10 vacancies in public works. And that includes some positions that we've identified some folks to hire. I think we're down from 16 or something maybe before the end of the calendar year. So with Amanda starting last week we've had two new public works folks start today. So we're chipping away at it. I think Taren Herb have done a great job, trying to focus on carving out the time to be able to kind of interview and bring folks in. So we're by no means there, but I think we're trying to do in a good direction. Are we seeing more applicants now? Like I guess the police chief mentioned in this department? Yeah. On the engineering side yes. So we are applicant pools have grown kind of similar to chief farts comics and we have more qualified people coming in. Wonderful. Okay. It's great to hear. I am curious about the Rapid Response team. Is that fully staffed and are they fully, do they have a full slate of projects that they're working on? So we're down one maintenance worker in Rapid Response. They have a full slate. What's sort of happening with rapid responses is it's taken on a sort of a bringing of its own. It started out as just three people and we've now moved it to six people and so we have traffic, we have signs and we have pavement markings and so now you basically have three different sections right now because everything is growing exponentially in the city. So I expect the traffic department to need to grow more in the future and break these things out even more because we have one person doing signs and markings and really that should be two separate type of jobs and we have one person doing traffic in our street lights and all of these things should be broken out separately so the same person that's fixing your lights of the same person that's putting up street poles the same person that's doing your delineators in your stop bars of the same part is the same team that is making your stop signs or signs for chief or any of those things. And so it's sort of the picking the priorities. And so they have a full sleep to answer your question. That's that's good to hear. Yeah, I was wondering what well. When we look at the community survey, the number one thing on that list was walkability and bikeability. And so the rapid response team is one of the visible ways that we get to Towards that goal, but something else that there's thinking about from a council perspective is You know if we're interested in doing things and not having to wait Five years to get a bike lane or you know several years to go through a traffic. Are there opportunities where we could have some sort of temporary investment where it's maybe a temporary speed bump to see if that works in that location or maybe it's terrible or maybe a temporary bike lane or trying things out. And so the rapid response would be a great way to do that. But I guess we would need to have the staffing beyond what we already have. It sounds like they already have a full slate. Correct. And some of those things are, some of those things that you have mentioned we have talked about. And it's their opportunities because we deal with so many from internal to external stakeholders. So I think there's an excellent time and an excellent opportunity to do that. just the resources. Right. We don't necessarily want to say no, but there's only so many hours in a day. There's so many days in a week. Yeah. I totally understand. Let's see what else. Something that was in this document last year was an ask for a communications person for DPW. I don't know if you remember that, but I did not notice that in here this year. Is there no longer a need for a communications person? Because I remember that being something that Zach had talked about, not being able to have the time to do all the explanation to the public or post on the website, all the updates or have a clear picture of like what was going on in DPW especially when the public was constantly asking what's happening with this NTC program or what's happening with whatever else is going on. So I'll jump in just to note that in the communications budget last year the council sort of halfway funded position for website upgrades and we've transitioned that into a website manager that will help I think the entire city organization keep our website up-to-date, keep it crisp, concise, informative and so that is one additional resource that will be helpful to all of our city departments So it doesn't probably get us all all the way I think what was probably what Zack's vision was and Tara's probably not in her head In terms of what's needed, but it's a step forward. Okay. Yeah, I think something that As somebody that's interfacing with the public a lot is is being able to have some sort of clear communication. And so that's especially in terms of what projects are going on or what projects are coming up or how much longer they have to wait for their NTC project to come forward. Or just even getting perspective. I think actually that list of the NTC projects of low and high priority ones because a lot of people people said, well, I submitted this project a year ago, why haven't we seen anything? It often takes a long time for these projects to go through the process. And your street is not the only street that maybe needs it. The other, my final point, oh, one more thing, actually two more things. The public facilities manual, what would that get us? Or what's the importance of that? So the public facilities manual is really important for the city. And we're all of the local jurisdictions that surround us have one. It would give us something that would standardize what we do and why we do it. So when you look at streetlights, there'd be a specific way with a standard that calls out exactly what it is, how it's installed. It's something that you can hand over to the contractor and ensure consistency for all of your infrastructure that's built. Right now, we lean heavily on Arlington County and Fairfax County for their standards. And so we borrow bits and pieces from their public facilities manual and then as a backup we utilize V. But having our own would give us that city brand and exactly what it is that we want our city to look like. It's a step above and beyond the streetscape standards which do that but they don't do it on a level that a contractor would need to actually implement the infrastructure. If that makes sense. That does make sense. And then my final just note is I appreciate, as we're going through NTC projects or other things like that, getting the most bang for our buck, so making sure that we're putting our money where it's most important. So working with the police department, looking at where there's incidents, but maybe not even incidents, but near misses or other things like that to actually use our dollars in those places rather than maybe you have some people who are very upset about one area, but we're seeing a lot more near misses in another area. That's where I'd like to see a lot more of the rapid response and other quick turn around moves so that we can actually hopefully start to see a difference a little sooner than several years out. Anyway, thank you guys for the work that you're doing. I really appreciate it. That's all. Thank you for all those questions. I just have one question and it relates to sidewalks. One of the things that is on the board plan is to look at our streets, gave standards and hopefully, in my mind, hopefully, other mind possibly, move away from brick sidewalks to concrete sidewalks. Is that reflected in your budget or is that something that may or may not happen? So it's not actually in the budget yet. So what we've proposed in, so this is kind of like a spend plan, right? So this is what I would call it. So we've got a bucket of money and kind of across all of our different programs. This is how we would, you know, look into next year how we would propose to spend it. So we're proposing to not spend as much as we have historically on brick sidewalk and crosswalk maintenance because I think for future installations, we're gonna shift to something else. That's what we're gonna come talk to you all about in May and get your feedback on. So that's how it will show up in this budget. I think the other pieces, the project costs for our CIP projects will be reduced, right? And so it isn't mind-blowingly less expensive from an analysis. I think the team did last week, but it is less expensive. It should save us money and make some of our projects more affordable. Thank you. One follow up to my own question, which is, as we contemplate that, and again, we'll talk about it more in May, the maintenance is still the maintenance of the existing sidewalks. So, existing brick sidewalks. Last year we did several crosswalks, we did them, and then we put in the WNOD crosswalks as well. So those are still going to have to be maintained as brick. We're not contemplating, referring back to concrete, right? Maybe this is from the May conversation. So I'm just the maintenance, one of the reasons we want to change is because brick side wastes cost that much more money to maintain, but the existing ones are still going to have to be maintained. Correct. OK. Yeah. And we haven't talked through, I think. And so I'm kind of just speaking off the cuff here, right? Thank you. But I think it'll be situationally dependent. We might want to think about if we need to completely overhaul a brick crosswalk. We might want to think about trading that out right versus making repairs to a sidewalk. I'm one of our commercial corridors that it probably make more sense to repair it. But you know, I think it would be situationally dependent. Okay, great. Thank you. It seems to me the bottom line with the transportation areas we need to find a way to get more money into it, not less. So whether it's paving or it's sidewalks or it's lighting or signals, we're just not funding this little a level that it has to be funded at that our citizens want. So I think our collective challenge is both short-term and long-term how we can invest more into this area. I think one area of efficiency would be to take a serious look at that. The neighborhood traffic calming effort, it takes a lot of staff time and can that be streamlined? Can we do more projects without going through that process? So that would be one area of efficiency. But I think the issue here is simply that we're not meeting our citizens expectations in this area despite good efforts on a part of staff, which I fully respect and appreciate. The other frustrating thing is that a lot of the state programs are geared toward capital. They're not geared toward small projects of the kind that we do. It's an issue that I have raised and I'll keep raising. But it's maybe an area for legislative work to make it easier to get the kind of money that we need and that that, frankly, many municipalities are size need. You can build a mammoth highway project and it seems easier to get that than it is to do a few sidewalks. So, again, it's an issue I raised and I'm gonna keep raising it. But within our immediate control, this is an area where, as we look at, where're going to end up with a budget, this is not an area where we can provide less than we're doing and seems to be an area where we're going to need to do more that it really serves all of our citizens regardless of your income level and and supports our commercial activities here. So that's my comment looking forward to final decisions on the budget. We need more money and paving, we need more money and sidewalks, and we need to make sure that we're staffed up so that we can actually use the money that were allocated as quickly as we can do responsibly. Thanks. Most of my questions have been answered or asked and answered already, but I did want to point out in the police report, there's also discussion about the quality of the road beds and its implications for safety as well, not just intersections and lighting and timing, but the actual quality of the roads. And so I think we need to, to your point, Dave, consider that as a part of a totality. I like that slide that's showing how all of these departments are interoperable and overlap with intent and purpose. And I think that we need to continue to focus on not not only is it just for pet and bike safety, but it's for a car safety and the data that's gonna be provided on the broad street court through that VTTI, I think should hopefully be providing additional insight and information as to where those problems occur. So I'm really excited to see how you all work together. And again, thanks to Herb and Tara and to the police department for doing a lot of the work and to you for all the engineering that's happening as well. On the VTTI, I know that has been a huge grant and you all have all worked on that. And Cindy's spearheaded a lot of this discussion. I do think in terms of where funding could be hopefully continuing in the grant cycle is on a project that's been and invested in so heavily by the state that there could be some grant money to ensure it's continuation and it's success and that we're implementing it whether that's training dollars or to make sure that our staff knows how to use everything to its best effect or how to analyze the data as they suggest and so my only comment is that I'm sure you're already thinking of it and that that might be where we can actually have some dollars that aren't necessarily just assigned to the asphalt on the street but the technology that will help move those things forward because the state as an over you know or we're arching state through VTTI is investing heavily in us and wants it to succeed as well so that's my only overarching comment and then a very specific comment that came from my ESC crew last week on missing link sidewalk was regarding the Roberts Park sidewalk. And there's that one link that's on our list in terms of priorities. And there's been discussion like, oh, that's a dead end. It doesn't go to anywhere. That's not a priority. Well, it actually has a really big priority to that neighbor, who could as the only entrance to Roberts Park. It's the only park that you can even have to go. Even if you live on the backside of Roberts Park, you have to go all the way around me, all the way around the block to come to that one entrance. So just ensuring the last quarter, It's almost like a half a block of sidewalk that may seem not impactful because it's a dead end, but it really is impactful because it's dead ending into a park. And those folks feel like, know that's their only their entrance pardon? I was just thinking there's not actually any sidewalk on Randolph at all on either side so it's that one little thing but then the big street all the way through the entire street has no sidewalk. sidewalk. Right. Yeah. So I know that's very specific, but I wanted to communicate that from the USC crew. Thank you very much. I'll just, I'll echo the comments on appreciation for staff, recognizing sort of all the changes and the different vacancies and just sort of moving pieces all the time for this department in particular people having to step into different roles and sort of not only be in different roles but just have like two hats and do all functions or triple functions and so thank you all for that work. I will say that there's I think you know when we look at like the community survey and sort of see, you know, the comments about street conditions or transportation infrastructure, resident safety, like it feels sometimes like these conversations, like that this was the conversation we were having last year about right sizing, DPW in terms of engineering versus planning, versus implementation, like staff, the people who are there on the ground and the rapid response team and actually seeing the visible change in the street, whether it's with the, you know, flexi posts or with the pavement marking. And so I guess I'm still like hoping that we can try to like find that in the right way because I feel like I was hoping last year that the you know the throughput would feel different this year and even though there are like very big things we've seen changes in it's sort of like are we still getting this or organized in the right the right way so that we're like successful next year? And so I guess I was wondering a little bit about like the $200,000 project management support. Like do you feel like that support? Well, I guess A, I have a question. Like on one of the slides, it sort of said to help address staffing capacity through CIP funds. Is that different than this 200,000 or that's this 200,000? It's different. Okay. And so, can you talk about kind of those two pieces? So, just kind of... Sure. So we have a set of resources that are helping with CIP projects. We talked with you all a bunch last year about adding some project managers. We've had some challenges with hiring. We have an additional transportation PM on board that's helping kind of with the transportation, all the transportation CIP projects we have. So we've had some success there. I mean, we're really close on the sanitary sewer, engineer, PM, and then the third one is the facilities PM that we just went through a round of interviews and didn't find the right candidates or having to kind of start that again. So that was kind of the focus last year. I think, and that helps for CIP projects and kind of that workload. I think the things we're talking about here tonight are, so this $200,000 is really intended to help this body of work, the $2.2 million managing all this pavement work as a project. And historically we've wanted our transportation engineer who's the same person doing NTC meetings and you know the whole constellation that we had on the earlier slide and so this is intended to help with some of those things. I think the other thing I was referring to is so in the CIP we have $200,000 annually for NTC and we're proposing $250,000 for missing links sidewalks So rather than you know to help kind of grease the skids with that work is to take a portion of that amount of money If you know kind of we need it to help with some project management support to move some of that work forward. And so, okay, so that helps me understand a little bit more. In terms of the, if you feel as though you have the project man, so, so there's always kind of like the question in my mind, because sometimes you say, don't give us more money because we don't have the capacity to take on more projects because we have so many things that we're doing, right? And then there's the, the project managers can only do so much if we don't have the staff to actually, right? Not have the same person doing the putting up the post and dealing with the signal repair or making the stop sign and doing the pavement marking, right? So I guess when I'm looking at this 200,000, I'm trying to figure out if you have this person, do you feel like the through-put for rapid response team or for missing links or for neighborhood traffic calming that is helped or is there still the issue in terms of not having staff capacity to be able to get this done, even if you have someone who can better direct traffic on the like we need people here to do these things. So I'm still looking, I'm like trying to figure out both the $200,000 help with the community like perception of is this actually improving, is this getting better? And I have like a longer term concern about, you know, the $30 million that we're gonna have to put out for like referendum for the property yard, right? And wanting to make sure that DPW is well positioned in these like years leading up to that, where the community is like, oh great, I've been seeing all these improvements. Yes, I want to get behind the $30 million investment in this team rather than a frustration that's growing on. I'm not seeing this happen, so why are we investing $30 million more in something? So I think strategically, I'm just trying to figure out where some of this is helping you both with the community perception of is enough happening on street conditions and traffic infrastructure and safety, and then the like, are we actually staffed in a way with even this additional person to get these projects done? So I think it's step in the right direction. Will I sit here and say everything that the community wants and is expecting we're gonna be able to deliver with this? I think it's, I mean, you know, Councilmember Underhill had several ideas on her questions, right? Like, that's been the challenge with some of this program is, you know, when we've got a couple residents that email somebody on the staff every week with something that requires a bunch of time to engage with and we want to do that. But, you know, I think, So I think we're going to make more progress with what we've talked about. I wouldn't even think about it so much as this is a person. It's more, we're trying to tap into companies that have a suite of people that can help us with some of these things. And so, um, so kind of shifting away from I need, I need a person kind of here five days a week in the office that person might be good at one thing and not other things and having some of this financial resources and consultant contracts can help us with some of that. And I guess that, you know, like I trust that you've thought through all of these things. It's just in this, in like it sort of feels like we have to ask the questions. And I look at like $200,000 in project management support. And I have the same questions on like, well, the rapid response team seems to be really successful. And people go, wow, like that's great. Like those are great projects that we get tangible results from. And we feel safer because of. And so, so like does it make sense to have the $200,000 going into project management for like NTC and missing links where you might not see as much because they have taken longer the missing links are sort of disjointed right like because they are such small segments versus like could could do more with $200,000 in the rapid response team. You want to take that one? Yes. So part of the $200,000 would be helping the rapid response team. So whenever we have something that we need to do from pavement marking perspective or FlexiPoster or whatever, we're going to have to lay that out from an engineering perspective. And so sometimes that's hiring the engineer to help us lay that out if we're at capacity within DC, annual paving, missing links, whatever other programs that we're running. It's hiring that additional help to take on that task so that we can keep moving forward. So it's also annual paving and rapid response. Pretty much any program that falls under the infrastructure being able to tap into a consultant resource when we don't have the capacity so that things don't fall significantly behind. Oftentimes it isn't that we don't have somebody on Herb's team to go out and put the striping on the street, the other piece is in the constellation having had the capacity to do the up front work that's needed for them to be able to go out and do that work. And so talk about it being project management, it could be engineering support, but it's trying to balance all of that out so things do get through the system better. And I think what we proposing is this Well, it's not and anything and everything everybody whatever want it is some additional capacity that should help Help help you know get more things done kind of across the board It's some of the reasons NTC and missing links take a while if we haven't had enough capacity to work on it It's definitely the case on the missing link side of things, right? And so we're trying to position ourselves by focusing on vacancies and getting those positions filled and then trying to leverage some additional being more open about the money we've allocated for some of these programs to be able to use it for some staff support to be able to help actually get it done. And then I guess my last question, maybe it's also echoing Dave's comment on NTC. You know, I do have some concern, right, for how resource intensive it is, and also how it sort of does sort of invite like the serial emailers, right, to constantly engage with staff in a way that might not always be like the most efficient use of your time. And looking at sort of the duration of these projects, I know that you reviewed sort of the NTC process. I don't remember within the last year or two. I don't think I was part of it yet. No, I think it was when that the last couple of years, you looked at, yeah. I think it was 2023 because I was probably paying attention, but not yet part of the conversation. But I do have this concern that it feels like at least with some of this that maybe that ground up process isn't working as well as it like we need to do just to top down like these are places that need help, need you know better safety considerations or based better quicker safety improvements. And so I would almost like to see like rapid response team and neighborhood traffic calming, melding in a way that's less like actually neighborhood process driven and petition driven and survey like, you know, who wants what where and we can't do anything because someone's like the holdout to actually saying, where do we need these improvements based on the data that we're seeing and can we, you know, please go do this and if it's in the right of way, like we're just going to do it. It's like a parallel like vision zero team, right? You have your data that's where you have crashes and injuries and then that drives the work. Same sort of resources that goes in does NTC but, you know, maybe don't invest as much in NTC if it just gets bogged up in the neighborhoods. Right. All right. No, thanks. I'll actually, and thank you all for being here. And Amanda, welcome. I'm sure you will have been in a whole week and you're already here in front of the City Council. But sort of piggybacking on Ms. Flynn's comments. So one thing that I wanted to know, when we look at the neighborhood traffic in Calming, to me there's also a connection with the missing link. So I'll give you an example. I live on Midvale, which is a block from Newland. So Newland is a missing link street, and there also in the traffic calming process is up here. So do we ever look at the fact that, you know, and here it's like a medium priority. But to me, there's a bus stop on that street, and there's also no sidewalk. And so the fact that some of these areas may not have sidewalks, I know the mayor and I have been recently hearing from some great falls residents too. And so does that ever bump up the priority if some of these don't have sidewalks? Do we ever look at those to like connect those to? As an evaluation criteria for the neighborhood traffic calming request. Yes. I mean in track I guess in terms of the priority, you know, so like I guess my point is that if it's Mrs. Kakow is talking about the one. You know if it's something that's maybe not, you know, not as, again, some of these have sidewalks using the Nolan example. There's a bus stop, there's no sidewalk, and it's a huge cut through to get to, people used to get to broad. So that's all I was wondering is if, if some of these don't have sidewalks, is that bumping up in terms of priority? And it's so wide that it actually could be in the street probably and still have, I mean, you're the engineer, but as opposed to Wallace Street where we actually want Nolen narrowed, I think that's the point of then T.C. requests and speed bumps and narrowing of it because it's a cut through just to augment your point. Yeah, I mean the CACT does look at other factors like pedestrian generators and you know other safety factors you know nearby when it prioritizes cases. Okay. Okay, great. And then I did have a question about the smart city. So that you had said there's still 14 cabinets that need to be pending installation, is that right? It's correct. And what would the timeframe is that like years out then? Or... Cindy, is that what we're tearing. We'll have a full briefing in June for you, but by the end of summer, early fall, all the signals will be in. Oh, yeah. So great. Then it's the training, the maintenance, the data, street lights, and parking the other components. Oh, great. 14 sounded alike a lot. So I didn't mean to sound pessimistic, but. I think a lot of it is just getting the equipment lead time and then some of the programming and testing. And then MOT when we have to do an intersection work. OK, great. Thank you. I guess that's it for me. Thanks. OK, so I guess I get to wrap up. So obviously this is an area that council cares a lot about because it is kind of the number one community priority and I think this is also a community that has high expectations of what their public works infrastructure looks like. So thank you for kind of meeting that challenge head on. I have a couple like observations, a specific, a few specific comments and then some broad kind of like themes that we've talked about several times and I think other council members have touched on so one Can you go back to the slide that showed the CIP projects that we've got? I think it was one of your early sides Andy When I stared at that and I tried to add up the money involved It's a lot of money like it takes a lot of time and money to evolve what we are Which is the 1940s car oriented city into this multimodal city? And I think we need to have the appreciation of how difficult that is to evolve a city. We've got going for us, we're compact and so we are already naturally more wa- into this multi-modal city. And I think we need to have the appreciation of how difficult that is to evolve a city. We have a lot going for us. We're compact. And so we're already naturally more walkable. We've added a lot of economic development where you have destinations to walk to. But it really takes time to make it easier and safer to walk. Like we just have streets that don't have sidewalks. And when you leave fall church and actually compare and contrast what the rest of northern Virginia is like, in order to make sure that you're not doing that enough. And yes, you're not doing that enough. And yes, you're not doing that enough. And yes, you're not doing that enough. And yes, you're not doing that enough. And yes, you're not doing that enough. And yes, you're not doing that us. And so I want to start with that because oftentimes when you're in the middle of it and you hear from all the community requests, we're not doing this enough, we're not doing that enough. And you actually compare and contrast what the rest of the region looks like. That is again, in the 1940s, Caryd or Suburb, it takes time to get there. So why don't I wanted to share that observation. It was mostly because Fairfax City City Council came and walked with us two or three weeks ago. They walked most of the city with me on the WND and on Broad Street. And they are pretty small city, they're about twice the size we are, but their main observation was like, wow, you guys have done a lot. And so I thought that was a nice accolade coming from a pure locality that the investments we have made in the past, you know, five, ten years and then coming up in the next few years are a big deal. They don't feel like enough when you're living in the moment. You still want more done. But I want to share my appreciation that when you take the big picture perspective, it does take time to get there. coming up in the next few years are a big deal. They don't feel like enough when you're living in the moment. You still want more done, but I want to share my appreciation that when you take the big picture perspective, it does take time to get there. Second, which is something I mentioned when the chief was here already. As we get that mode shift, you have more people on the streets. Naturally, we're going to get more demands for walking infrastructure. So the feeling that we hear from our residents and our constituents that we need to do more is only going to increase. It doesn't mean that we're not doing a good job. Clearly, there's still high expectations. But now... So the feeling that we hear from our residents and our constituents that we need to do more is only gonna increase. It doesn't mean that we're not doing a good job. Clearly, there's still high expectations, but naturally, as you get more people on the streets, they're gonna demand better infrastructure. That's just naturally how it's gonna go. So that's kind of the second observation. In terms of specifics, I think Laura asked about this. So when we get to early fall of smart cities, Does that me we can start using the data for those 14 intersections, or do we still need to do other things? You wanna speak to any of the technical piece? And I know we have training in a lot more details. I think we're still working through data protocols and what that will look like. So it's something that's in progress that we're working on with VTTI. But we can have more information in the near future. So what that would look like. I'm going to be able to talk. Five thing I hear is about signal timing. Like people get caught in between like a red light, and then they'll get green and they get red again. And that causes frustration when people aren't broad street. And I think just getting traffic to flow better could actually go along the ways and actually making it safer for pedestrians to not dealing with upset drivers to Yes, and once all of the cabinets are installed on the central system is live One of the first things that they're gonna do with the grant is do signal optimization So they're gonna be taking a look at the timing and making adjustments to make everything run more smoothly through the city and we we think, in the year 2026, like when do we actually get to timing our signals on broad street? Fall on the wall. Okay, so people feel differently, hopefully by the fall, or at least see the signals synced up better. Yeah, as of right now we think that it'll happen by the fall, and we have tasked them with putting on that pedestrian hat. So as they're looking at traffic signal optimization, they are also going to be looking at it from a walkability perspective. And what can we do on these corridors to keep things moving smoothly, but also increase the safety from a walkability perspective from a pedestrian perspective? I know one of the cool features, like if you can detect a pedestrian, like not having someone actually push the beg button, like we've all been fans of actually just having automatic walk signals That would be a nice improvement, especially our you know busier quarters like broad and Washington be one where be nice if you don't push the button And the first phase needs to make sure that it gets synchronized and that timing is optimized and then we have the ability to collect the data and Actually see near misses and traffic flow and high peak and then you can do that second and it can get back to what DPW has been saying, I heard why is say in the chief make data driven decisions. So maybe the 2B because it's probably on somebody's bingo card. LPI is part of that for me. I've asked about it for probably 10 years now. I think we have nine intersections with LPI's. That's another great, kind of low cost pedestrian friendly way to let pedestrians have a head start. I think we have nine intersections with LPI's. I think I was told that we need more of our intersections upgraded before we could add more LPI's. But that would be another good low-cost thing that we can do. Moving on to complete streets. So we haven't adopted it yet, but I guess with all the new paving money we're going to have, are we going to kind of re-examine the streets before we repave to look at whether we should do additional markings, whether we could put in bike facilities, whether we could note parking or narrow things with striping. So at the beginning of each year, as we start to create our annual paving plan we do have a joint meeting with DPW engineering operations and planning and we run through each of the streets together and see if there are any infrastructure upgrades that we can accomplish with the budget that we have from a bike perspective planning perspective, walkability perspective, changing like the crosswalks if there's some sort of a need for that that's been identified over the past years. So we do look at it through that once as we update the plan. Are we too late to kind of catch the next wave of paving projects? Is it going to start? Are we going to make any changes to the street that are planned to be paved in the coming year? So we have an outlook that goes... We're working on a-year plan, but right now we have the next two fiscal years, but we don't actually do the drive-through with planning and operations until the year prior. So we haven't done any drive-throughs recently, and as soon as we get to the new fiscal year, we'll be looking at doing that drive-through. So there's definitely time for us to take a look at anything that hasn't been paved. Yeah, it's part of this fiscal year. Well, I know it's been on our work plan to kind of adopt Vision Zero and complete streets. And now that we have a man on board, hopefully we can get to that. But I would love to be able to catch things in flight or before they're in flight so that we're not too late and have repaved and restriped the de facto when we probably could have done something different or might have been desired to do something different on that street. So paving seems like a really good time to catch it and get to a complete street. So on paving, was it the great recession why it where we really took money away from the paving budget? Yes. That was like, oh, eight, so like 17 years ago? So obviously it took, you know, it's been many years since we may rebuild that back up. But I guess one of my questions, and I think Tara, you might have answered it. My question was like, what is the catch up plan? It took us 17 years to get to this point. Like how do we get back up? But I guess we're waiting for the new PCI data to figure out how we're going to, yeah. So we're collecting the data in May. I think we should have it by the end of June in terms of a data set that we can work with. And then part of why we wanted to carve out additional money this time specifically for pavement management is so that we can utilize the same consultant who's collecting our PCI data to also take a look at our whole entire pavement management system. They did build our PCI system for us. So one of the things that is kind of unique to the city, I suppose, is we wanted to look at practical paving limits because being small and having limited budget, we want to make sure each time that we're going out there, that we're covering as much as we can and having very logical cut-offs, which is very different than how the data is normally collected when you're looking at a huge network that encompasses like 50 square mile area or something, right? So we've done that to make sure that we're paving roads in a logical sense. And then what the pavement management software will do as we start to look into what that that'll look like an employee that, is it doesn't, it'll, it has a whole series of algorithms that it runs and ultimately it shows you how you're going to get the best bang for your buck. So what roads do you need to capture right now in order to extend their life for the longest amount possible and do that for your entire network before it drops off on that front. Before it drops off and you're in a position where you have to reconstruct, or you're gonna repave, and it's just gonna drop off again relatively quickly. So the software will help us make those types of decisions, and so that's what we're looking to look into and implement this next fiscal year. Okay. Sidewalks and moving to missing links. I think we talked about this tarot when you presented us kind of the recommendation of where to use the missing links money for the coming the ending fiscal year. And I think one of the priorities was obviously getting to ADA. There were some concerns about whether we should really just prioritize those dead and streets. Roberts Park I think being one that's important where there those public facility, but I would encourage us to look at probably higher usage streets where there might also still be ADA issues. So that's a comment there. So then some kind of closing observations. So I'm glad that you're showing us some throughput date on NTC, because I think I had asked for what average wait times and throughput. And I think generally the expectation from the communities that it should not take two years and that we probably want to get more than two projects done per year because then we got two done in 2024. And so I'm hearted to hear that there's other support on council to look at a different way of tackling this, whether it's an NTC 3.0 maybe you know where some of it's you retain a bottoms up element but I think some of it does need to be more tops down and ideally driven through the data that we collect based on crashes and injuries and just saying no we're just going to make these changes and use some of the same resources to get to those projects faster. I think our role is to kind of defend that with the community and manage it with the community but I think given that what we're seeing now and what the community's expectations are in terms of actually changing the roads, the meet people's expectations of what safe roads are, I think we need to look at doing it pretty differently. And so I would encourage Steve B.W. to think about revamping and potentially the CACT since the chairs here as well to collaborate with us on what a 3.0 version of that might look like so that we can actually deliver faster projects. I know that NTC is a very popular thing and bottoms up is important, but I think to get the results and outcomes we want, we do need to do it differently. Second general observation I have, we have a structural issue with money. As I think about past kind of five years, we've had a whole slew of just one time money in the city, whether it's opera money, grant money. We've been very successful in getting, you know, NBTA money. like lots of great transportation money. And the result is we've built a whole bunch of stuff in the city past five years. Now we need to maintain it. And so I'm pretty concerned whether it's public works. Nyee. a lot of great transportation money. And the result is we build a whole bunch of stuff in the city past five years. Now we need to maintain it. And so I'm pretty concerned whether it's public works, new buildings that we built, new parklets, new parks. Just this morning I was walking through the Burman crossings which have these beautiful plantings. I'm like, well, who's going to go weed all these gardens? So I'm pretty worried about that. And so not transportation related, but I would encourage public works to give thought into like all the new stuff we've built as a city over the past five years with all this one-time money. So I'm pretty worried about that and so not transportation related, but I would encourage public works to give thought into like all the new stuff We've built as a city over the past five years with all this one time money Which again we're very grateful for because when you're a little city you do need to rely on that grant money What it means to maintain it going forward? I do not want to be in a position or leave a council in a position where 10 years from now we are dealing with street poles that are falling over because we didn't do a good job maintaining new ones we put in. And so I'd encourage us for all the new stuff. Maybe go back in inventory, all the new stuff we built across the entire city's kind of infrastructure and figure out what realistic cost is to maintain it going forward so that future councils are not inheriting a giant bill or issues that require much more money to take care of down the road. So I think at the time we were very grateful all this one time money, but I think it does cause a structural issue for future council's budget. So I think now is a good time to at least stare at those numbers and think about what that might mean. So with that, any other thoughts, public works related or transportation related? I just plus one on the top bottom approach. I know I already said this before, but I would say to me with traffic calming, I do feel like those streets that have bus stops should be one that we really, you know, because those are tough ones and those little kids are not always looking both ways across in those streets. So I would just say if we wanted to explore maybe a different approach to me, those are ones that float to the top for me, ones with bus stops. Thanks. In general, like high pedestrian like vulnerable populations, bus stops being a big part of it, like we should concentrate on where we have lots of people using streets and might be getting hurt. That's what I was gonna say. The volume is not just cars, but also people and the ages of the volumes of people. My guard, part of the data that's collected that inform the safety engineering. And I want you to hold this accountable to that because I know that it's often, we will get neighborhood tool be upset with, you know, parking, getting taken away, or changes to their front of your art you know depending on what the issue is but I think you're hearing from us that you know in order to see things differently we're willing to feel some of that heat and so challenge us on that. Okay well thank you very much. Thank you good discussion we appreciate that in depth discussion. We are at past 10 o'clock. Do we want to take a break before we get to trash? Or keep going? People are okay. I will be taking a break. Okay. Sounds like we need a bathroom break. It's 1006. So can we go come back at 1015? Okay. Thank you all. So can we go back at 1015? Okay, thank you all. you you you you you you you you you you you I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. you you you you you you I'm going to do it. you you you you you you you I'm going to start with the first one. there just let you know FCCTV is ready and I've turned the mic back on in the room. So, ready when you are. All right. So for solid waste, we don't have a kind of an update to the presentation. We do have some additional information from the council's questions. And from the last time that this was discussed, we do have the treasure who is I think virtually. And so two questions that the council had were just about the feasibility of if the council were to proceed with wanting to implement a fee that would be associated with a reduction in the tax rate. Is that feasible to do? is a technical matter between now and the mailing out of the bill in November. And the Treasury can speak to that. I know that the Treasury has met with Tyler technology and discussed kind of what that would look like through going through our vendor. And they can provide some information on that. I think the bottom line is, we believe it is feasible to do it. And we can provide some more information on that. The probably with some caveats. There was a question about the revenue sharing agreement with the schools. I do think it's feasible to have a carve out, sort of a hold harmless provision that would be written into the revenue sharing approach that is a written document. And I've provided a draft of what that could look like and it just provides a pretty simple methodology by which the intent, which is both the general government and the schools would be held harmless in terms of the revenue sharing agreement with any change to a fee structure for solid-way services. And we would, this is before the Council really just to let you know words have been put on paper that we think are feasible. This has not yet been reviewed by the schools and we'll have some back and forth as we always do on these. But the basic idea is if it's worth 1.5 cents, we would do the 50-50 split and then after that is arrived at, we then deduct 0.75 cents on the tax rate out of the general government budget and Increase the school transfer amount by the same amount that would have that effect And if it were translated into pennies on the tax rate that would just grow naturally over time So that's Just some information on that and we'll think that through a little bit more, but that's not too complicated. One other thing that's been passed out to the council, this is in response to questions about kind of what the impact of a reduction of the tax rate would be for condo owners, townhouse owners, and single family home owners. And so in that chart, which I, if Cindy, I'm allowed to share my screen, I could just put it up real quick. It shows several bell curves of kind of what those look like. And so the blue Belkurve, and it has been smoothed out, it looked like a Belkurve, but the median condo value is assessed at between $400 and $600,000. That's sort of the peak of the Belkurve there. With townhouses you have a cluster, that out townhouses that are in the 600 to 800,000 range, and then you jump over to another cluster that are very similar in value to single-family homes and that 1 million to 1.2 million. And then single-family homes, their median is typically at that 1 million to 1.2 million as well. This was requested just to have some sense, and you can then do the math in terms of what we've tried to do in the earlier presentation in terms of what the impacts are for folks who sort of fall on this chart in different levels. The why access the number of properties? Yes, so that's right. And so for the condos for instance, there are just over about 550 that are in that $400 to $600,000 range. The single-family home, which there are more of those and condos instead of the bell curve is a little flattened out, but its peak is about 700 homes are in that 1 million to 1.2 million. And confirm my math on this, but I think it was 3,000 single family homes plus town homes. So the sum of the red line and green line is around 3,000. 3,000, 6,000. Right. Yeah, that's right. Just over 3,000. Some of the red line and the green line is 3,000 and then, you know, roughly the condos. Yeah, there are about 1,000 condos. There are eight condo buildings comprised of 958 units. What about us? And what's not on here is any apartments or commercial buildings. So multi-family, there are 15 multi-fif-fif-fif-fif-fif-fif- buildings. Because we are 50, 50 in terms of housing stock. Yeah, over 50, 50, so I'm talking in kind of round number. So that gives sort of just a high-level picture of it. When you talk about multi-family, those include like not just the buildings but the developments like Falls Green or the ones off the Broad Street, do they count as apartment buildings, even though it's a whole development? Yes. Yeah, okay. So in terms of where I think kind of, what we want to get out of tonight of tonight's discussion, I think there's probably two options at this point. One option would be for the council to proceed with a tax rate reduction and to set a fee and to do that at your and in conjunction with the budget this year. If the council were to do that, well, we would recommend just going with the flat fee, not the variable fee. We would further recommend that composting be something we implement over a longer period of time. So what this really would be is a transition to a fee structure where solid waste would be effectively an enterprise fund. And then from there, we would work with community on kind of all the things that that could mean. That can open up new opportunities for composting, for different ways that we treat other services that we have because it would be out of the tax rate and service own self-supported fund So that is one option The other option is to is to take some additional time to study this in a more holistic way So we have a lot of policy behind this. The City Council just in 2024 adopted the Solid Waste Management Plan. It is a really rich document with lots of data and with lots of policy recommendations. The fee fairness question was one of many dozens of recommendations. And the real heart of that solid waste management plan is geared towards encouraging our greater reduction of waste flows, reuse of materials, recycling, reducing the amount of flows to the waste energy plant. For the environmental benefits, the basic efficiency of it, as well as the cost benefits of that. And so one of the very powerful ways that we can do that is having an FE structure that provides one structural support for making that transition. We as was noted in the last discussion staff have not done a deep study of providing, of instead of moving to a fee, instead of providing service to the condor buildings or to the multifamily buildings. I do submit to you that's a complex undertaking. It's one that is not called for really in our solid waste management plan. It's not envisioned there as a recommendation. And we don't have precedence for that in the region. And so I do have some misgivings that thinking that that's going to be a very likely direction that after evaluating it in more depth that we would want to go in. What we can anticipate is that it would be a higher cost of service. And so there would be an increase, if that's the direction we went, there would be an increase in the tax rate and it stayed within the tax structure, there would be an increase in the tax rate to provide that high level of service. But that would be the other way to address the equity issue. Again, it has not been studied in depth, even studying it is a pretty significant undertaking. But we would have time to do that. And more importantly, I think study the ways that we can make sure that we align our how we pay for the service with our policy goals. And that would be the objective of taking an additional time to study it. The composting piece could fit either an option one or an option two, but I think composting, if we went with option, you know, with sort of the more accelerated path of doing it with this budget, I think that that would be a big lift for staff to work with community in terms of who's going to subscribe to that composting service, how we're going to roll it out, and we also would need $155,000 in the budget to buy the bins, which we don't have at the current time. We have Mr. Holmes, we have Mr. Young here, do you have anything you would add to that summation? And then look forward to engaging with the council and getting council's thoughts on this. I think the other concern that we have is staff itself, we currently have one staff of one and so to allocate more resources probably from rapper response or some other DVW it would be very taxing on us. And maybe before we open it up for discussion we do have the treasure on the phone and so Jody did you have anything you wanted to add in terms of what I stated at the outset with respect to feasibility? No, just I would echo her but it would be a heavy lift for us too. But I've got a couple of work around I've talked to finance and they said they would lend us a person, J. Vias, for the duration, if that's what we end up doing, but then that will also impact finance. So how would all work out? But, and we've talked with Tyler, Munis, and they are confident they can get it done by the middle of October, as long as they say there's no delayed responses from our staff, as we go back and forth working through all this. So that's one reason why we would need extra help from Jay. So that's where we're at. It is feasible, but it will be a very heavy lift. And then one last thought on that topic, just thinking about sanitary sewer as a utility fund and solid waste moving, possibly becoming a utility fund or an enterprise fund in of itself, I think it's worth thinking through whether we'd want to maybe combine them into one utility fund and conceivably in discussion with Fairfax Water could the service Water, could the service be billed through the water bill? You know, that it's something that has not been vetted or fleshed out in any way. That is kind of more the Arlington County model of how those things are grouped together. But that would be if we had some additional time we could consider those options as well. Jody to confirm the resources that you need every year to add a flat fee or just this first time. No, just this year. Just until we get it worked out with MUNIS. Thank you. And it's only the flat fee one is what you're entertaining. Yes, that's what we yes, that's what we talked with them about Okay questions your comments from council Thank you for joining us. Jody Sure, thanks Aaron I just I had a couple of questions that I had sent earlier and thank you for sort of the bell curve of sorts depiction of households and tax kind of assessed value. I don't know if the treasurer, the city manager has an answer. I was interested in whether they're income based or other exemptions from the storm water fee for example So like state code I think would allow us to have exemptions or income based exemptions from a solid waste fee and so I just didn't know is that something that exists under the, for the storm water fee, and then separately, is there any difference in terms of collection of fees versus collection of taxes? So do you run into people, for example, who pay their taxes, but don't pay fees, or do they generally like rise and fall together in terms of just enforcement? I was interested in those. So I know Jody has some insight in terms of the collection of the stormwater fee, and then I saw Sally was getting close to the mic as well. But Jody, you had done some work on that question. Yes. Yes. And we looked at exemptions for stormwater fees back when we were reviewing the senior tax relief. And there's no, Sally, correct me if I'm wrong in this, but I believe there's no, there's nothing in the state code that would allow us to exempt stormwater fees impact. In fact, exempt properties such as churches have to pay storm water fees. So we couldn't find anything that would allow us to exempt storm water fees. And I don't know if the solid waste fee. Oh, and I guess in terms of collection too. Since the storm water fee is on the real estate bill. It's it's in the ordinance that we passed that we collected the same way as real estate taxes and that's why we put it on the real estate tax bill because we you know unpaid taxes on a real estate parcel constituted a de facto lien on the property and we can always collect on that, either when the property sold or if we have to sell it for delinquent taxes or something, but that's why they did it that way. Does that make sense? Yeah, yep, that answers the question. I think I had sent the city attorney the code provision on exemptions for solid waste fees. And so I just didn't know our experience in terms of the storm water fee, but it sounds as though you're saying we don't have exemptions for storm water fees because we don't have state authority to provide them and that you haven't had issues in terms of people not paying fees where they pay their taxes. Like where they kind of make the decision they're doing one and not the other because you placed it on the tax bill. Right, right, exactly. And I don't trust Jody's answer on this stormwater fee. That was my inclination, but I have not looked into it. And I can also look at what you've sent about the trash fee relief for income-based fee relief. And I guess, I mean, where I'm going with these questions is that I support trying to do something to address the payment of the condo owners into the general, that we're training curbside that we're dealing with cat curbside trash collection through the general fund in the taxes when they're also paying for that service and multifamily and commercial properties. I'm a little bit surprised that like we're in this position because like I went to the city code and the city code seems to contemplate that there actually is a disposal charge and that there is a fee for service model. And so, you know, it does lay out that residents receiving city solid waste service shall pay a solid waste disposal charge to be set by resolution of the city council with the billing schedule due date for payment and method for payment determined by the city manager, city managers does and then it has its own enforcement scheme for failure to pay the charge that will be enforced through any civil remedy available as described in the charge. It will be enforced through any civil remedy available as described in a separate section of this code. And so it's all in the solid waste portion of the code. And so to me, like we have city code that's governing what it is that we're supposed to be doing. it looks as though, you know, it has separate provisions for multifamily solid waste collection and commercial solid waste collection. So then in my mind, it's kind of like, well, what then does a fee structure look like and how do we do this in a way that like, it's not a train wreck of trying to implement a fee structure or that it doesn't create its own inequities because we haven't done the work that we're supposed to do and that we're able to do under state code or have authority to do under state code to actually have exemptions for you know those households with incomes that would warrant getting relief and not having a $310, $350 fee imposed upon them. And so then that raises in my mind, you know, we're just kind of throwing out one and a half cents in terms of a number and saying, you know, $950,000, but if you need to plan this in a way that has relief, right? That normally tax relief or fee relief is cost-shared across a community and isn't just in the pool of like the people paying the fee. And so is it really a 1.5 cent reduction or is it a 1.25 cent reduction if you need to leave buffer space for like tax relief for example. And so I have, so I want to do something on this and I think the code actually mandates to do this a certain way in a way that we're not doing it right now. But I also don't want this to be kind of done haphazardly, but we're not kind of doing the fee structure in a way with the depth of analysis that I think it might need to do this properly. And like to answer what I think might be legitimate questions about like, you know, even if collection fees are the same, if you have tipping fees, doesn't 800 square foot, or 1000 square foot, townhouse, should the fee be the same as 4,500 square foot home with an accessory dwelling at at this point, right? Like, and so I think there are some questions about fee structure that makes me uncomfortable with just saying it's one and a half cents, take it out of the tax rate and just impose a $310 fee across the board on everyone in the city without without doing a little bit further thought on that. So that's kind of where I am and I don't know what further thought, like how much of that we can flesh out in X number of months. The things to give some additional thought to is a variable fee to encourage less usage of the service. The composting piece I think also deserves some additional thought in terms of its roll out. There's the main things. And this gets back to why certain asked about payment and lieu of service because I think that we could potentially do more thought on this in what the fee structure looks like, even if there's an interim solution of what does it look like? I don't know, you said eight condo buildings with 958 units. Like what would a payment and lieu of service as an interim measure mean in terms of like a payout if we're even possible to those eight buildings for fiscal year 26 and then properly implement this in fiscal year 27 for example. And so on that one, we've not done an exhaustive study on that. We don't know of any precedence in Virginia of people doing that type of thing. We do have the district of Columbia. The district just across the river does do that. But we don't think we have the authority here in Virginia to do it. And that's why I mean like it would be if we don't have the ability and it doesn't look like right we have the ability to do a tax credit on an individual tax bill. and you at least do like a payment and lieu of service to an HOA since you're not actually providing the service, but you're building the building. Okay, and then my third question, I may have just lost, but it will come back to me. So in Aaron's questions, which I don't think we talked about publicly, but we probably should since it was in Aaron's questions, is about how we actually have authority to do it as fee and we should be doing it as a fee. So Sally, could you speak to that's all council has that same information? Yes, the city code that Aaron reference does explain that the and I can pull it up quickly here. Does explain that the charges for solid waste collection are is supposed to be by charged by fee, not tax, and it's a fee that's supposed to be set by resolution of the City Council. And the section that everyone can find it is... Here, and do you have that handy? That's a 3-4-3 subsection B. That is the old days, 1948, or how long have you been? Yes, I went back. I went back to every code that was referenced in our city code back to 1991, and that provision has been there the entire time. Because I think one of the questions is, do we have authority to move to fee? And I guess the answer is yes very much so, because we should be doing it as a fee. Okay. Oh, my third question came back to me, which was just, can you explain the rationale of the revenue share? So I guess I anticipated that on the revenue share, it would be like a whole harmless for this year, where we changed what was a part of the tax rate, but I didn't anticipate that like going forward, it would necessarily be the revenue share, it would just sort of be like this is, this is what we need to tax in order to get this level of service or reach these demands of these things we're paying through the taxes. So I wasn't really sure why it's a recurring piece of the revenue share as opposed to a hold harmless fur, whatever the implementation year now that we've changed like what's in the tax rate mid-street. So it would need to be kind of a perpetual thing or whenever you ended it there'd be a $500,000 discrepancy. Now we'll say that things evolve over time and the reason that this has never been sort of, this is more like English common law as opposed to the Constitution of the United States, it can evolve over time with three consensus. And so, you know, one way it could evolve is that if over time for various reasons, 50-50 doesn't work for or the other then you make some adjustments to that and you go forward that way. And so that would be the other way to handle it is you just change the ratio and maybe over time that would be a preferred way of doing it. But right now it would be be, you know, this math would be the correct math. But I guess it's only one and a half cents. It's one and a half cents based on whatever the cost of the services. So that's like not a constant. So I just don't understand like some of the, some of the, some of the way that the one, I don't understand why it's perpetual and maybe it's just I just having a hard time grasping or something that isn't part of the tax rate is then part of the revenue share. When we're not putting other things into the revenue share that are like fees or charges and counting it is like in terms of why it's even, why it would be part of the 50-50 split. Like I would understand needing to do a correction for the year in which it's off from where we started, but I don't understand why it would be in necessarily going forward, and I don't understand why it would be held at 1.5 when like that cost could go up or down, depending on what like recycling and trash rates and tipping fees and all of that is, like it seems. I'd definitely see your math because if the fee is to be, is covering a cost, we're not making a profit. You're not using any other, you're not getting any other revenue from that to then fund things from the general government. I think rather than revenue share would be through the tax rate, so that the tax rate is supporting supporting what the schools need It's not saying To not support the schools needs, but maybe there you split the fees out for that and then you still have five hundred thousand dollars That you have been providing the schools and you have to figure out what that where that is in the tax rate I lost now Following what you am I you following what I'm saying maybe we're just following each other's saying, schools needs are independent of the cost of the trash services. So we need to be funding the schools needs through our tax rate and if we separate out the fee for solid waste, we need to be funding the solid waste through the fees. Rather than parsing a revenue share that may or may not get to what the school's actual needs are depending on the fluctuations of the cost of the solid waste and how many people participate and all of that like the way to fund the schools is through the tax rate. And that's why yeah I sort of view it as like a whole harmless this year because it's like the budget estimates came in based on a budget that was X amount that was divided Like with 50 50 revenue sharing, but I'm having trouble like understanding if it's not supposed to be part of the tax rate And it's not a revenue. It's just a fee for service. Why it's not treated like other fees and the revenue sharing Just not part of the cost split. This would be doing that. But yes, yes, so we would be reducing the base to be shared. To be shared next year in 27 and that reduction would remain forever. Any growth on top would be on a reduced base. So in order not to create that imbalance and carry on with the current transfer amounts that we have and then build a growth. I think this is the best way of holding a penny and a half in the revenue share. Not attach it to the waste fees by any means. The waste fees can, you can add a third bin later, they can just go their own route, but this one and a half cent would just grow with the rest of the tax revenue. Yeah, I guess I'm just understanding. I don't understand if we are talking about it and akin to an enterprise fund, like the enterprise funds aren't at all part of the revenue share, right? So like, that's what this does. Yeah, but you don't, then you don't reduce your tax rate. Yeah. Why reduce the tax rate and then put it in the fee structure? Like if you're saying, you take your solid waste fees out, and that's $900,000, and that reduces the revenue share because we're dropping the tax rate. Don't drop the tax rate, and it stays in the tax rate to fund the schools not in the fee for services provided. Maybe it's a good offline conversation. We can just walk people through that. I mean the intent is to provide the intent is to hold everybody harmless. Right. And we think this does it but there'll be some more iterations. I'm there'll be more discussion about it. Okay. Okay. Mary Beth. I sent in a question I don't see an answer to it and that is if we know how many HOEs are providing trash service to their residents, can we refund them that amount? Where's that backwards? What does she ask? Okay. Just in different words. Same, same, we would probably have to standardize it, but that concept does not appear to be allowed in Virginia law. Okay, sorry I was listening to that one. I was just writing it down. And because you mentioned the Solid Waste Management program, I googled it, And it's really interesting how this group of people that met for over a year looked at this without taking any of this into consideration but on page eight they're talking about the fact that we have more homes and multifamily buildings and but in their minds they were looking at it from the prospect of getting to zero waste. That was the main goal. So they're saying as the city moves towards sustainable and waste reduction goals, it will be critical to consider providing supporting services and or programs from multi-family dwellings to be able to participate in zero waste. So that's the other side of that is that there may be additional costs to get people to participate in zero waste, which seems to be like two sides of the same coin. In Fairfax County and their zero waste goals is trying to engage with the multi-family community too, but they have that like at a year, eight and year 12 in terms of their management plan. I think Arlington is the one who's had all those compost bins in their commercial corridors and encourage people in multifamily to use it. Right. We're small enough that when I visit multifamily buildings, a lot of people say, oh, I just go to the community center and take my compost. They do it there, right? Love to have compost in their buildings, but practically people can get to the community center. Right, right. But I, and I sent those to the thing from Laura Myerland and the slideshow from Arlington that were at the Cog Farm Committee, which also kind of lay out a rationale for composting or organic recycling as they're calling it and how to do that in different ways. Which is an interesting data point as we look to the future. Mary Beth, do you want to read your disclosure statement while you have the mic? I don't know. I'll just hold it for next day. Okay. Other thoughts? Laura? Laura? Yeah, I just wanted to know and I appreciate miss a costa saying that you know you all you think you could Get this done maybe with some help. I did what you know I did note that there were two staff members from the Trojars office who who wrote in this. So I'll be clear, I support this. I, you know, for equity reasons and I totally get it. But, you know, it's a lot, you know, on our staff. And so it's sort of, as I said, the devil's in the detail. So, you know, overall I do support it, but I did note that two staff members in the Treasurer's office wrote in with different reasons. One was just that it's a heavy lift for their office, and the other was worrying about, you know, does it then create burdens on other, and what we talked about, especially with the, you know, with that chart, which I do not like, with the property values, you know, the lower property values have the greater net impact. And so just throwing that out there. And so just to be clear, we could not, if I'm understanding what we were talking about. So if there were seniors who were receiving tax relief, they could not receive relief from this, right? Because it's a fee, is that right? The stormwater fee is what is, you cannot have an exemption for under state code. I'm not sure about the solid waste fee. And the state code does provide express authority to provide relief to income eligible people for solid waste collection. Oh, okay. It does allow you to. Okay. We'd have to actually do an ordinance. Okay. So that's the thing as part of it is just making sure like we're equipped to do that. And then you have to figure out how many corresponding homes you might have who seek it, right? Because you'd then need to be a increase. Right, and I have no idea what those numbers are. I have no idea. I'm just throwing that out there. I have no idea what those numbers would be. But that just sort of came to my mind. Again, looking at this chart and the net impact on those lower property values is higher than the higher property values. So I was just thinking about seniors who do receive tax relief from us. And then the only thing I wanted to throw out, I know Mary Hardy, you had championed the organic band. But I also, I get $175,000 is not a small amount of money. So I didn't know if there was a way that if we went forward, if there was a way we could, I would hate for us to put out that kind of money and not have so many takers on it. So I don't know if that's something that we could survey people, find out how many people would really be interested in that before we put out that much cash, I don't know. But again, I definitely get it and I support it. I'm just, you know, there's a lot of details that we still need to figure out. And I know it's a heavy lift, why it for you and your staff. So that does burden me a little bit to think about the staff having to do this. So thanks. So I think on the one-time cost of the bins, I think Lonnie, the staffs talked about having an incremental rollout of that. So we don't buy a whole property art full of bins that nobody's using. Like, I mean, I think we can be intentional and come up with a smart way to do that. So we don't spend money unnecessarily. Maybe you can have it. It's still a cost we have to cover. Right. But maybe you could do a small and have like a wait list or something. You know, like it started, you know, and then it's just sort of like, We're going to have another 50 next year, whatever, put your name on the wait list, or whatever. What, like 500 300 people? Use 238 people. That use composting right now that we're heavily subsidizing. So. 50 next year, whatever, put your name on the wait list or whatever. What, like 500 300 people use? 2, 13, 38 people. That use composting right now that we're heavily subsidizing. So ideally more than that. Wait, that's, we'll often have 500 some. I think I have it backwards. That was opting in. So I think, I mean, I liken this to kind of, in the 70s, when we rolled out recycling people said I don't want to recycle but we said nope we're gonna actually make it citywide we're all gonna get recycling but we're not gonna compel you to recycle but now that you We're gonna actually make it citywide. We're all gonna get recycling but we're not gonna compel you to recycle But now that you have it as it been next to you people started recycling and now we have one of the highest recycling weights in the Commonwealth And so I'm hoping that 30 years from now when we've moved to composting people say I'm glad that we moved to composting one point because it made it more accessible. Right now I think we've seen our composting uptake rate flattened out over time even with this heavy subsidization. So if we actually want to get to those zero-way schools at least because it made it more accessible. Right now, I think we've seen our composting uptake rate flattened out over time, even with this heavy subsidization. So if we actually wanna get to those zero waste goals that we all signed off on, and our solid waste plan, we do need to do something pretty bold to actually just make it available to everybody. And again, our next door in Aburn, our own city, when they implemented this, said that it was very popular in their single family townhomes. People kind of grumbled about it first, but they actually realized that it did divert a bunch of trash. So I think the hope is also that you reduce your tipping fees. So at the end of the day, you also reduce some costs too. And that's what I was going to say in favor of both the equity on the solid waste, but a rollout across the whole community that we're no longer subsidizing a small number of users of composting, but we are providing it for everybody. And you can still have a rolled out uptake because not everybody's going to do it on day one in terms of staffing, number of pickups, et cetera. But we discussed that at ESC last week as well and certainly ties into carbon reduction and a lot of our energy goals for the overall community and the government. So I'm in favor of supporting a rollout of composting to all single family homes in town, everybody who receives waste services. There was discussion on the type of bin and we can go in these details later, but the smaller type bins that we use right now for composting is that perhaps an option and not the three giant bins. I know it includes waste and we can discuss this further, but that is an option as well. I think that would actually be important to talk about now as we... I mean, simply because if it's a small bin, I'm just thinking about Winter Hill, if you drive by there on Trash Day. I don't know if they have space for a whole third set of bins. Maybe they do. If it's a small bin, that's different. The little carry one or the little, the little rolling one that fits a little bit of compost. If it's yard waste and kitchen waste, that's a different thing altogether. Could be good, not necessarily good or bad either way. We just need to kind of understand what we're doing. If we have a contract from waste management, or whoever is taking the rest of our trash, then it would make sense to roll it out all at once because it's all part of this contract to serve the whole city. So those are the details I'm worried about that we may miss along the way in our enthusiasm to do something. So the financial model that we've put together assumes that it's a combination of yard waste and kitchen waste. So we could, you know, in theory, offer some options on different sizes to fit your home, but what we've modeled out right now is like, well, you know, some of the costs offset. And so it's a relatively small increase in cost because of that. We're going to continue to handle yard waste separate and just do a kitchen waste compost thing that's not an option we've looked at yet. So we can get some of those crude costs, I imagine. So will we get rid of bags and stickers? Correct. Everyone will have their own bin as it won one bin. Okay. Can I jump back in there? I don't wanna go in depth about the revenue share, but I just wanna put this out there. I know that the school board contacted me and they said they felt like it wasn't fair because we're calling it a fee. They feel like it's sort of, by calling it a fee now that they're not gonna have access to that as revenue. And I will say it's former school board chair. I will say that the school system, 86% their budget is for staff. And so the school system really relies on that one time funding to buy electric buses to build a new baseball field. So I can see why they are very concerned about losing some of that one-time revenue because that's what they really count on for facilities. So I'll just throw that out there. I know we'll discuss that more at another point. But I do why thank you for putting this out there as a draft for us to discuss. Appreciate it. I just want to be clear, also also am not suggesting taking any revenue away. It's just where the revenue is accounted for, whether it's in tax rate or fee rate. And it seems to me longer term would be beneficial to the schools to have it in the tax rate. And to the cities and to everybody paying for ways to separate that out.. So to be very clear, it's not taking the intent, it's not to take anything away. Yeah, keep funding this, not that you remove solid waste as a fee for the services you're providing and you leave in your tax rate what it costs to support our schools. That's where it should be supported in the general government tax rate. So that is across all everybody who can access that. That's everybody who lives in multi-family buildings. It's everybody who lives, you know, so you are keeping that in the tax rate. So that's what this is? Which is what general, which is what revenue shares? The revenue share is, the revenue tax rate. You're saying remove it. We can talk about later. I hear exactly what you're saying. Yes, that's what this does. Exactly what you're saying. But we can talk about how that is happening. OK, well, the semantics matter in that the intent is to the school retains that. And it is, if you're keeping it in the tax rate versus trying to cover it with the fee. Christine? it is if you're keeping it in the tax rate versus trying to cover it with the fee. Christine. So just to be super quick and give my two cents, I would like to talk about the fee or how we're doing with the schools offline a little bit more just so that I can get a better understanding. But in terms of moving forward with this, as Herb mentioned, I think it would be best to look into composting over the next few months, not necessarily try to rush that and implement it now and add more burden to staff. But I do think it would be worthwhile to implement the split out the trash from the general government fund or excuse me from the tax rate. What I would like to do though to Aaron's point is if there can be relief services for people, if they do struggle to cover the change payment, that is something that I would like to see if we're allowed to do that. And I think that would address a lot of the issues that do come up, that's all. Okay, to be brief, plus one that, and I guess my fourth point, so find a spare way to solve solid waste, be greener, divert food trash, but also solve this sooner. I think I've talked about why then the timing feels really important, because this fairness issue grows bigger. As you add more mulsier family, you're getting more people who are paying into this and don't get service. And I think it's easier to do it. The budget's only gonna get harder. And so I think if we kick this a year out, we're gonna be facing with the same challenge with much tougher budgets. And the thought of then implementing a $300 fee or $350 fee is just me that much less appetizing for a future council. So I'd encourage us to think about addressing the sooner than later. And then glad to have the opinion from the city attorney that we can address low-income seniors, potentially with some relief options. So if we could Google quickly, you know, what how other jurisdictions handle it? Is that something that, you know, we should look into how we could implement something, how we'd account for how much relief people have given in the past, whether it's full relief or some of it, I'm sure other people have addressed this too. Dave. Thanks. My experience with moving essential services into enterprise funds has always come after a full community discussion. And that has not occurred on this topic. We had a great discussion tonight, very convincing arguments for composting, convincing arguments for various sorts of reductions of whatever the fee would be for whatever purposes. What we do know is that if we move on this now without consulting the broader community, about 3,000 people are going to pay more than they will get in terms of any tax reduction. I think it's important we hear from them and it's important we hear from the entire community. So I would favor that we go out to the community, we engage full-scale discussion with this. People understand that you're still paying it, whether it's a tax or a fee, and people understand that a significant percentage of the community, and they may go along with this. They may think it's a great idea. They may not. I think it's fundamental that we get a full community discussion of this before we go ahead and enact it because we're smarter than our community. Well, we're not. That's my experience and we'll end up with a good result. I think if we do that, if not, we could end up with a split community in a lot of anger about why wasn't I consulted about the fact that something that I have considered a basic city service is now a fee and I will actually pay more than the alleged tax reduction that I may or may not get depending on where I fit into the yet unknown scale. With regard to the equity issues, the clearest and the correct way to deal with the equity issue, which the city manager, it's not that tough to get the numbers that you would simply include that in the tax rate for the condominium buildings that have raised the equity issue. That's the most direct way to deal with it. The complication comes when we're making major changes in the structure of a basic service with unknown components to it. A lot of discussion about how the numbers would be and whatever. And I think that's what we need a full and fair community discussion about. And if we move now, it's not a full and fair community discussion. So I think that these are great ideas that have been propounded to and I think they deserve a full discussion in the community before we have the hubris to impose this on our community. We've never done it before. We've always ended up with a consensus. And I think we should follow that approach here. So my basic view is let's have the discussion with the entire community understanding the financial as well as the environment and other impacts that it will have on them. And I see that a significant number of people will end up paying more as a result of this. So I think they have the right to have their voices heard as well before we make a decision. Thank you. Any final, Laura? I believe Ms. Kylie, you had floated the idea of doing some sort of working group. You had mentioned that you thought we could at a later date if we went ahead, we could approve the budget and then come back and amend it, is that right or not? I don't think we can do that. That was like a pondering perhaps, but I just out loud, okay. Yeah, okay. Could that happen, but we have to set the tax rate, right? On the white to tell us last week that we could actually change the tax rate mid cycle, which has haven't done it before. Do you want to speak to that? Oh, right. Hapitito. I was going to spend doing some research. Yes. I think that is possible to change the tax rate. We have authority to do that in the middle of the cycle. What happens? I mean, so there are two issues, right? So there's what's the tax rate, but then what does the fee structure look like? And so, we're thinking about the fee structure in the context of the tax bill so that we get better compliance. But I guess I'm just wondering, you know, how can the conversations about the fee structure take place or, you know, can't they take place separate apart from any decision about about whether this is in or out of the budget for purposes of the tax rate. So it's a conversation about this 9,000, there's 3,000 households that are affected by this decision of where this $950,000 is either in the tax rate or in the fee structure. And so you could conceivably make a decision that's like, well, actually per the city code, this should be a charge and not part of the taxes. And so if you make a decision about, it's one and a half cents lower because it so happens that it's the $950,000 and so that's the correlation to the one and a half cents. Then it's a conversation with the people who are affected by the fee that they should be having about do they want a third bin? What size should the third bin be? Like all of those questions that don't feel like are questions we should answer without community input, but it doesn't mean that like that conversation has to happen and all those answers have to be made by May 12th because you're talking about just like a pool of people with whom you now need to have that conversation. You can have that conversation up until October, right? Until we finalize the tax bill. I think that's just it. It's a conversation that has to happen with those 3000 people that shows them why we're discussing what we're discussing versus. You know, if somebody asks you if you want to pay a higher fee, the answer's presumably almost always going to be no. So the discussion needs to be why the change in fee structure versus what you're doing. Yeah, and do you want a third bin? Or do you want to, like, all just compost at the community center? Like, everyone else is going to be composting, right? Like, I mean, it's, that's what I mean. Like, once you make a decision, you should be able to disentangle these things and then have the conversation with the people to the extent that we are mandated one way or the other to do this. Well, I mean, I would submit what should drive the whole discussion is your policy. And your policy is to reduce waste. And the pricing structure can be one tool to help you do that. That's what should drive it. Composing is another tool. And that's what would take, that's really kind of what the fault process would be about as designing a fee structure so that it does that. And I think by extension, that also would probably address the senior tax release issue. And so we would need to have a complicated tax relief program for this. The senior relief program, it would be based on your volume of waste. And that would be alignment. We haven't designed that system yet. So there's, you know, the policy basis behind this does speak to the equity issue, but that's kind of the secondary issue, the primary issue is about solid waste policy. And so that's what's kind of, to me, is a little bit what we're a difficulty with trying to do this just from a fee perspective about taking just one dimension of the problem. Now, we could take additional time after the decision has been made to move to fee, we could do this down the road. That mean, so it just means it'll be probably a little clunkier in the rollout. There'll be lots of questions for which we're not ready for the answers, because we haven't done the work yet. If our primary goal is to divert less waste into trash, like composting is one way also. A pay as you throw model is another way. I guess data point of one, my household, because we back like we produce half as much trash. Like we only drag our bins to the curb every other week or so. And so other people who compost may have similar experience. So if that reduces my trash by 50%, that's pretty significant. Way more, as significant as a big bin versus a little bin. So other people who compost, I'm kind of curious, using additional data points, like what is this pack full? If our primary goal is to divert less food and less waste to trash, like composting is as impactful as a pay-as-you-throw model, because now you're providing another way of giving less things go less in the landfill. So you may not have to do it all at once. You could do a flat fee with compost, and then you could move to the pay-as-you-through in future years. Madam Mayor, I would just submit that you make very convincing arguments. Let's take to the public. Let's see whether the public accepts your arguments, rather than sort of saying, we're going to do this and simply communicate to the the public about well we're going to do it and you can do this under this or that. It seems to me it's a fundamental change and what we're doing there are costs that will be imposed that will create more lack of equities we've already seen and my own view is I want to know what the community thinks about this before I'm going to make a change like this. Now, others may disagree with that, but that's, I think, the better, longer term course is to get community buy-in from the very beginning with respect to the policy and the other elements of this program. In fact, that's the way that we would like the community to begin to discuss this issue. But this issue has not been widely discussed in the community. It's not been widely covered. And I think we'll make a serious mistake to impose a major change like this with economic consequences. I think nobody disagrees, I think, with to communicate. Obviously I've had people talk about it my office hours, I've had people respond to me based on my blog post and so there has been discussion about it. Now that said, we've also had lots of input on our solid waste plan, our government energy plan, our climate plan. So those are policy documents that we have adopted with community input. And so we are truing back to those policy goals. And clearly we can keep doing more communication. Like if whatever we decide May 12, doesn't get implemented until the tax bill at the end of the year. And so I think there is still room for ample discussion on how exactly the mechanics of this go. The composting thing is actually, I think it's a $20 impact to the overall fee, 22 sorry the biggest change is the fact that we've had more than half the city subsidized a cost of solid waste forcing a family in town homes. That's just a reality. We're not adding a bunch of new costs other than the composting of $22, which we're posing as a way to divert trash from the landfill. Actually, you are. Look at the chart. The chart says vast numbers of people are going to pay more. They pay more because. And in your fee or whoever the fee is, versus the alleged tax reduction that they would get. I mean, just have the discussion with the community. What are we afraid of? I mean, just personally, I feel comfortable moving forward with this specifically because it's part of the budget discussion. And so anyone that's interested in the tax rate and economic impact to their bill should be paying attention to this discussion that we're having now and should be reading the news press or would be engaged in sending us letters or contacting city council members regarding their economic impact. And I've heard from people from who have discussed things in both both directions understanding that you know whether or not this is a fair system that that's in existence right now. And then also people saying that they understand if their bill goes up, but you know their assessment didn't go up as much. So at least from the people that I've been communicating with that does seem like people are paying attention and especially those that would face an impact. So anyway from my perspective I do feel comfortable moving forward because this is part of the budget discussion. I'm not sure. I don't maybe share your optimism. I think we don't have the news press delivered anymore to the homes. One thought would be maybe we could send out, I don't know if it's focus or if it's a quick news release or something, but we have the budget town hall coming up on Thursday. So maybe that's a way to do it is to send out, you know, not to get no offense to America through a buried in a focus. Maybe it's a quick, a quick press release that says the city's thinking about how maybe changing the way that we charge for tech services and adding some more composting options and all that. If you want to hear more, come to the Budget Town Hall on Thursday. That might be one way to do it. But I just don't know. I don't know one in my neighborhood knows anything that we're talking about with us. Because I've talked talked to them and they don't have any clues. So I just, I think the people that are well informed, that follow-a-things are, but I think the general, public probably may not be as informed as we hope. So that's just a thought. So I'm still in the fence. I hear both sides of this and I can just continue to worry that we will go fast and break things. And I don't, we don't do that. We, it's like we're riding the bicycle and trying to build the bicycle at the same time. And I know we have those policy documents, nice bike path that we're on, but it seems like there's a lot of moving parts to be four weeks before the budget adoption and still just not quite sure. That being said, I could be convinced because I feel like it makes sense. But it's taken me a bunch of weeks to talk about it and think it through. And you know, when I pay my federal taxes, you know, who knows what the fees are. I get a bill and I pay the federal taxes, who knows what the fees are? I get a bill and I pay the bill. And I'm not looking at whether it's $300. So that's the last year. Whatever, I'm just paying it. And I think for a lot of people, that's exactly what it would be. They're just going to pay it. And they're not going to get all stressed out about it. So I see the pluses and myses. But I'm worried that we're going quickly without really thinking about all the ins and outs. Although we have talked about it a lot, so I don't know if there could be any other ins and outs that we have in me at considered. One take away to follow up on revenue share to understand the mechanics of what that means. Are there other takeaways on this one or next steps? Communication idea like how can we use the Thursday town hall at 7pm to spend a fair amount of time on this topic as well as the next topic on this work session agenda which is budget reductions. Let's move on to the two hoax for the town hall meeting. Can I make one and I know I kind of mentioned this in passing at other points in time but given both our transportation related discussion and now this discussion about tax rates, it's not advertised for fiscal year 26. I'm not asking for anything for fiscal year 26, but when we turn to fiscal year 27, can we start looking at the C&I tax as a place, to potentially increase transportation related revenues also to the extent that like purely commercial properties are getting the benefit of any reduction that's based on the fee for the trash fee moving to a purely fee model. You know, there's certain ways to recalibrate that in terms of, you know, what could be a windfall, so to speak, of purely commercial properties. You can make back some of that, because when you look at other tax rates, like, Fairfax, it's like 104 on a residential property plus the $100 trash fee bill. But then they're like charging 1, 16, 5 to commercial properties, because it's 104 plus the and a half cent C and I tax. So I think we need to also just think more about what we're currently putting into our budgets and cost spreading across everyone for transportation related local costs. And then maybe look at how you reduce the tax rate further, but maybe get it back and see an eye tax in order to help with those different like residential cost burdens that people are just continuing to bear otherwise. I think CNI for me at least is on the list of levers not necessarily for this year but if the budget is going to go the way it's going to go probably for the next three years, probably need to be on the list. I agree. So. Okay. The City Council is going to be discussing the FY26 budget for the City of False Church. I am an employee of the False Church of the City of School Board which may be affected by the proposed fiscal policies. As a result, I am in a group of three more people who may realize a reasonably foreseeable director and director of benefit from the proposed ordinance after consideration. I am electing to participate in this transaction because I'm confident my ability to participate fairly objectively and in the public interest. Okay, budget options, why? We're in, but we have to say about budget reductions. Okay, one minute ago. Okay, so two ways of doing it. Looking at our revenues and our expenditures. On the revenues, I will give out a couple of things. Your staff is still, I want to just preface this by saying that staff is still in the review process. Some of the things are going to take some more analysis and due to some staff out on spring break, we plan to bring a lot more details next Monday. So on the revenue side, a couple of things First note is one penny on the tax, real estate tax rate is 630,000. The budget also includes a contingency of 500,000, although I believe we should keep it intact, not knowing the full impact that's going to roll out during the fiscal year of the federal budget impact. And then 20 cents increase on the vehicle tax amounts to 280,000. So that's as far as we've gone on the revenues. On the expenditures, we're looking at various categories and whatever we bring to you will have along with it impact to some or the other operations service products that we're doing. And we're looking at personnel, which includes vacancies, compensation, and other, either whether it's full time or temp or looking at vacancy factors and things like that. Non-personnel could be a review and is going to include a review of our contracts that we have some major ones are in DPW some of the ones that we are that are inter-geuristicional we can't touch those however We're going to have to make Some hard decisions if that's the way we want to go. There are contracts for infrastructure maintenance, planned view, security in the building, and those kind of things maybe not necessarily mandated, but staff and council together has planned in the prior years and even this year to increase the funding there. But, and then the other thing that we would look at are other miscellaneous places where there could be some possible internal policy for the city management on travel conferences. What do we do? Do we put a halt on travel outside of Virginia? And we're looking at each departmental budgets and where we would land if we were to go that way. Some of the training, there are options for virtual, but not all. So it's going to be a case-by-case analysis. It's going to need a little bit more time. So we plan to bring you more details at our next meeting on April 28th, Monday. But I'm happy to address any questions we're all here or take any direction that you may provide. And you know, I think we are trying to start with a service impact approach. So if the council does have thoughts on service reductions, you know, areas where you'd say, you know, this would be a lower priority. So consider reductions for these services here, higher priority services that we don't want to cut at all. And so if the council does have any initial thoughts on that, as we're doing our work, that would be welcome. I guess knowing order of magnitude would help to base on the expenditures that you talked about, like personnel compensation vacancies, like with some combination of that being enough to get us there where we don't then have to talk about reduction in services to know like how big are those levers, right? Even making impact in vacancies is going to affect our service levels. Because there's a reason those positions were to be either they're new and they're being recruited or there are vacancies people at the left. So we are actually scrutinizing every single vacancy where it's at in the process of the recruitment. Can we put a stop at this time or not? And if we did, what impact it would have? And it's highly unlikely we could come up with even two vacancies that would not have any impact on the service level. Okay thoughts. I have a couple questions. Just he mentioned I think at the budget and finance committee meeting we're talking about taking more out of the retirement savings the extra interest. I know that would be a one-time but that was about $140,000. We're really we're going to recommend strongly against one-time things. It's going to next year's budget is going to be worse than this one. So we would encourage not to do one-ton tax. So not to use that money at all? Or maybe take out that much every year? Well, yeah, I mean, if we go that direction, we are most likely going to experience big market losses in the pension fund. So we're going to be drawing down on those reserves to sustain the 640 that we already are benefiting from. So this is, to me, the time you take that money out and maybe increase it is after when you feel like you have some pretty rosy days ahead and there would be a safe thing to do. That's just, that would be our recommendation. That's totally fine. I just wanted to make sure that, yep, what your thinking was on that, I think as we've talked about only taking out the 640, it's for smoothing times, and this is definitely a time that needs that smoothing. So that one would be off the table as a, that lever is locked. I'm not able to move. I think so. I think that's a tough one to feel comfortable or something that's gonna put us in a better position for next year's tough budget. Okay. Can you talk about one time? We had talked about, you know, Crossman Park, not being the top priority for expenditures because Erlington is built that huge park across the street from it. And, but you didn't mention that, is that because that's also one time? Yeah, that's being paid for out of capital reserves. So if we reduce that, it could be good to save that money. And that's not a bad thing to do, but it won't help close the $600,000 gap. 1.2 million total for general government schools. Have we heard from the schools? We have not. I think key staff were out last week. They're back and we'll have conversations this week. I think the other thing I was just writing down thinks that we heard tonight about we need more paving we need more sidewalks I just wonder. We get to decide basically how much revenue we have to work with. Like when I first got on council and I was refinancing my house, I was talking to the person on the phone and she said, well, we're gonna, this is what your rate's gonna be. Now you really don't have a control over what the taxes are. And I was like, well, actually, I do have a little bit. And she didn't understand at all what I was talking about. But if we look at it, what was presented to us was 5.9% growth, which would be a 2.5 cent tax cut based upon the original plan. Do we have to have a two and a half cent tax cut? Is that, where is that on the priority list? Is that number one on the priority list that we want to keep it at two and a half cents? If we look at, like you haven't heard from the schools yet, but if you look at the school's budget, they built that on that 5.9%. So who knows where their levers are? Or if they had originally asked for 7 or 8% and got it down to 5.9%. We still don't know what the governor's money is. So I guess in the priority of things is being able to say, well, we're going to not increase the text rate to in a half sense or decrease the tax rate. You don't have to decrease it a different amount, not decrease it at all. Is that one of the levers? Does that make sense based upon what Kieran's saying about the needs that we have, what we just heard from transportation about the needs that we have? Does it make sense to not reduce that tax rate? So I'm just putting that out there for discussion. But I do think that's important to talk about as we go for it. I just wanted to make a few comments. Yeah, I hear you on not reducing the tax rate, like two and a half cents. I would have a hard time still supporting just a flat rate understanding. I think that our equalization rate was like 114 something, right, and we're talking about a tax rate that's 121 at a time when people are heavily cost burdened as they are. And so to me, like I don't know, just coming in on a flat rate as opposed to some reduction, I think everyone sort of has to bear the cost. But you can't just say to the community, you know, you and because real estate values are going to get us out of this hole, we're going to come to you and have you absorb kind of the 1.2 million that doesn't seem like we're getting out of the 25% sort of like meals, sales tax bucket that we thought we could get. And so my view of it is like everyone's gonna have to bear some piece of it, whether it's you know the city finding some places and expenditures and maybe not doing the full 2.5 cents, but something short of that and still getting some reduction. I also don't support rating the pension fund and wouldn't support rating the pension fund. I mean, at that, I'll say it in a way that sounds harsh, because I think people who rely on it will be like, wait, what, what are you doing to the pension fund? And then on personal property tax, I still have a hard time thinking of going to five unless we actually go find those cars in the city that should be paying personal property tax that aren't. And so for me, in the budget book, it says something like a $20,000 part time position would expect to bring in several hundred thousand dollars of car taxes that aren't personal property taxes that aren't being paid. And so I don't kind of understand, unless that's just very rosy thinking that that $20,000 position is gonna bring in that much revenue. But I do think it's important to not just like, go after all the places we know money exists so that we can squeeze extra money out of, but thinking about where those places that we're not actually getting taxes, that we should be getting taxes, and how do we find them instead of just raising the rate on the people who are already paying the personal property tax? So I don't know if you have a reaction on that $20,000 expenditure that's in there for a part-time comm rev position given that it seemingly was related to several hundred thousand dollars that we're not collecting right now. I was say it's kind of a flippant response, but when you're in accounts receivable, every position, you know, the Treasury's office has five people and they raise a hundred million dollars. So, you know, every position is, brings in a lot of money because that's the job. But I mean, this says it's a 20, it would be $20,000 and this person would bring in several hundred thousand dollars. So how is the position not paying for itself and more? Well, yeah, I guess the question is that position needs to be bringing in 20 million dollars if it's going to be comparable to the other positions in the office. The thing I would offer, you know, we've had some really good discussions with our constitutional partners here over the last couple of months on on how to get it. Some of I think that the areas that you're talking about with the team we have, right? And so what some of it becomes more of a process question and a communication question, then a staffing question might remind, right? It doesn't mean we won't come back to that as a potential need to fill a gap in the process, but I think kind of working with the Commissioner Revenue and the Treasures Office, we've got some things in the works. They've got some things in the works that we're supporting that I think are going to help close the gap. I feel like you're going to be able to find the cars, so to speak, that we currently are at accounting for anywhere. Because I do. I mean, that's its own equity issue, right? It's like we're going to raise it to five on the cars we know about, and we're going to continue to ignore the cars that aren't paying the personal property tax. It's a mandate pure and simple. I need to do it. It needs to be done. 100% agree. Other thoughts on the options or levers that Karen and Mike talked about? We're doing work now. We'll provide a bit more structure for this conversation at your next meeting. But if you know council does have any other sort of thoughts in terms of kind of lines of service that you think we should be looking at that would be helpful for us to see. I guess I have two thoughts. One is building off what Aaron said about CNI. For me, it's definitely below the line for this year, but I'd like to see it on the list of consideration of revenue options along with meals tax. Below the line for me this year again, but we should know how much does 1% bring us? Should we need that option next year or the next year on the list of considerations? And then going back to Q&A number three, so in terms of the question of like, should we decrease the tax rate to enough sense as proposed? I had asked for comparison, I'm not just tax rates, but what the tax impact is, like people's bottom line and benchmarking that across the region. So I just want us to be really cognizant that even with a two and a half cent, decrease it's still like a three or four percent impact on their tax bill. And so when people are cost burdens, like trying to minimize actually the total tax bills, important to me. the two and a half cent decrease, it's still like a three or four percent impact on their tax bill. And so when people are cost burdens, like trying to minimize actually the total tax bill is important to me. And so being able to give them some relief, some kind is important. And then my third point, actually I have three points, which I say every budget cycle, but we just can't get used to 6% revenue growth. If this is the beginning of the bad years, like we should exercise discipline now on what that looks like so that next year is not gonna be that much harder. Because if we only have two% or 3% revenue growth going from a 6% budget to a 2% budget, it's going to be really hard next year. So we might as well start thinking about what those expense levers are now. I know I've said it every year, it clearly hasn't mattered, but maybe this is the year. Can I say no? No, it has mattered, and I think it's really important to think that way that like what is gonna happen next year? And we just, we don't know, but the trend doesn't look great. But the other piece is, is we're talking about people who are cost burdened and we all know what's going on in the region and we're all really concerned for our neighbors and we've all heard stories of a family with two state department parents and they both have lost their jobs. Or... all know what's going on in the region and we're all really concerned for our neighbors and we've all heard stories of a family with two state department parents and they both have lost their jobs or things like that, right? I mean all of us have neighbors and friends who this has happened to. But there's also considerable number of people in the falls church that are not cost burdened by what's going on. So the percent, so we're not all, it's not that we're all cost burdened. There's a percentage of people and fulsures that really are right now, but there's another percentage that are not at all. So I, so while I feel great compassion for people who are and want to make sure we're looking after them, I don't want to build our whole plan on the people who are burdened versus the people who are not, if that makes sense. And it sounds way less compassionate than I am, but. Okay. Other thoughts? Okay. Sounds like we're going to talk more next week, so. I think that's it for official items. Do you want us to talk about consent? We already talked about fire services. Why? We don't need to talk about fire services again on the agenda, because that's listed as consent. Do we? I'm asking you. Okay. It's 11.45. I'm guessing people don't want to go through schedule. I have a whole other category I'd like to talk about on budget because we received a letter from FC Cannes. Let's see April 9th and we discussed it also with the ESC last week extensively. You all have a copy of it. There are approximately 12 requests. And I would like them to be part of the official part of the Q&A for the budget. I don't know if you've seen it here in, but I can certainly make sure that you have a copy of it. Because we've spent a tremendous amount of time on our energy action plan, community and government energy action plans. And if we talk about where we fund our priorities, we have not funded much in the way of our priorities, at least what we've said in terms of our action items there. And there are a lot of questions specific to things we can do that don't cost a lot of money and some things that do require money. And so there are several things that I want to, I would like all of them answered in the Q&A, but a couple of things I just want to bring up specifically are talking about the Aurora House solar project again because it is one of those that you spend money on. There's a return on investment that pays for itself over time, but it is tied to tax credits for solar, which we know will likely be going by the wayside. There's also discussion. I would like to discuss if we do change something to CAR tax, we've talked about having some kind of incentive for electric vehicles, for people who purchase new electric vehicles moving forward. And one way to do that is through an increase in personal property, you know, in the CAR tax that would fund some type of incentive moving forward. And that's the number 238. That was, we have like 238 registered EVs currently. So even if you doubled it, that's a nominal dollar amount. There's a request about the neighborhood tree program. I don't remember what we spent on that before, but that also ties into our conversations of tree canopy percentage, if we can, if we look at spending money on that. And then there are other questions about our plans, specific questions about the energy audit programs and the shifting of dollars. And then just personnel who is going to be responsible for ensuring that we are keeping on track of our GOEAP, their stats on what we have, GOEAP and C plans, because they're stats and we're not doing so hot to start off with. I talked with the school board chair today, there are questions about how we coordinate with the FCCPS on their capital purchases and through lens of sustainability. So we've talked about how to add to that. I won't go through all of them, but there are, I would like to have them all addressed as budget questions, because they come from a large group of sustainability-focused community members. So I can follow up on that next Monday and make sure that you have these here and to the extent we can answer some of them. I'm sure Kurt can help answer some of them as well. We talked about some last week at the ESC. And I'm sure everybody's really tired and doesn't want to hear that this but we have had a couple of big meetings this week. Last ESC and CDA both met in the past week. One takeaway from the ESC is that there's a new change in lead programming. There's the next update is going to be released in April which we should be incorporating into any special exception requests that come through. And I know we have one we're discussing, it was calendared. So I want to make sure that hits that discussion as well. And then just a quick update on the CDA. There's a pro, Hoffman did a whole update on everything. It's happening at West Falls. We can share with everybody you guys can look at it sometime It's not midnight on a Monday night But suffices to say we approve the role Assessments the 120 926 condos that are coming online should start closing in June those will all hit the tax assessment Rolls for this years billing cycle and mr. Schneider confirmed and we or, or we all confirmed with our Munich app, whose our municipal bond advisor and our attorneys on the CDA, just that we're in full compliance. And despite everything that's happening in the economy, there's no additional legal or financial liability to the city based upon the CDA agreement. So just wanted to confirm that for everybody. In case that's what you're laying away worrying about at night, you can take that off your worry list. And then the rest of these things I can bring up on Wednesday or next Monday. Can I say a question about the condos that are coming online? Are they included in the budget planning for this next year? And there's also budget question 17 about collective bargaining agreements That said it would be we'd get a presentation at the April 21st for accession. Yeah well that's happening next. That's put off. Okay. Great. I think we're adjourned. All right. Yeah. Cindy and Sally. Can I just patch you briefly about the whole planning commission and site plan thing because I raised it actually with a few other electives. So the good news, everyone's crying. I'm sorry. I did welcome back to the VNL materials and I saw it in the out here. I'm going to get some good news out. We didn't discuss it at all.