City Council Special Formal Meeting, 6/9/2026

everybody to our afternoon session.

Honorable members of city council, in accordance with Virginia Beach City Code 221, and by authority vested in me the mayor of the city of Virginia Beach, I call for a special formal session of the Virginia Beach City Council on Tuesday, June 9th, 2026 at City Council conference room 2034, building 1, 2, 2401 courthouse.

The purpose of the formal session will be allow council following its regularly scheduled formal session as listed in the attached agenda to convene into a close session to consider the following matters. Publicly held property district 6 public contract BB golf course RFP personnel matters appointees council appointments council boards commissions committees authorities agencies task

force committee at the conclusion of the um close session the city will convene into an open city for purposes certified in the close session the formal session will be broadcast live on TV and vbcloud.com dog face with life and also uh Mark was it that there was a change?

Yeah, the original the original version sir um erroneously said district two but we changed it and got it out today to say district 6.

Okay. Now that's not record. Thank you.

Okay, at this point can I have a motion?

Oh, no. We're good.

Let's get ready to go. And my silences are loud today. What can I tell you?

Here we go. So, Mr. Mayor, members of council, the first briefing will be a briefing on the upcoming um hurricane season. So, as you know, typically around this time of the year, we give city council a synopsis on what we've been doing to prepare and also a general sense of what we are seeing from the experts as it relates to what to expect for this season. Next voice you'll hear David Topsinski, our emergency

management director. So go ahead.

Yep. Good afternoon, Mayor. Uh council members. Thanks for having me as we kick off hurricane season. Just going to give you a update on the outlook prediction from the National Hurricane Center for this season along with what we've been doing year round to prepare for not only hurricanes but any type of severe weather or large emergencies.

I'm pressing the button.

All right. I jinx. I don't know.

Probably not. I told you I was going to mess it up. Bam. It's I got it now.

You're right. On. Helps.

Thank god I'm not the only one disconnected here.

Let me take some of you.

I jinxed it.

I hope your predictions are better than this.

It's a forecast. They don't have to be accurate.

I have every year. Every year, once a year and I mess it up every year. All right. Uh so yeah, back to the presentation. Uh so the outlook for this year, the hurricane center has a 70% uh confidence in their forecast that we will see below normal uh hurricane season. They're forecasting we could experience somewhere between eight and 14 name storms. Three to six of those would become hurricanes and

then one to three of those could grow to become a major hurricane which is a category three or higher. And really that's because El Nino conditions uh are already starting to develop and they're going to continue develop throughout the the summer and into the fall months. In short, what that means is that it's going to be harder for hurricanes to develop in the Atlantic uh ocean this

summer, but not this summer, but not impossible. uh and there's still a really uh strong risk of storms forming.

The weather service has described in their forecast uh like a sports metaphor of essentially the outlook is like shots on goal or goal attempts. And just like in sports, it only takes one goal to go in to win in overtime. And that's what we're worried about is it's the one storm that causes impacts here. Uh keeping in mind we don't have to have a direct strike. We know that the remnants

of tropical storms, nor eers, uh, and many other severe weather patterns can cause issues with flooding, power outages, damaging homes, uh, and roadways. And that's what we work year round to prepare for.

All right. Uh so the first though as we start hurricane season uh which started June 1st and runs through November 30th, we do like to take this time of year to remind uh our residents, businesses, and even our employees and workforce uh that now is the time to kind of take a moment and prepare and think about how severe weather uh and tropical storms could impact them uh and disrupt their daily

lives. So we take a moment to think about things like insurance. Do they have the right policy? Is it up to date?

What's covered? Do they need separate flood insurance? Um moment to think about like evacuations. If they had to leave their home, where could they go?

Who could they stay with? What supplies would they need? Their medications, pets, food, etc. How long could they stay with family, friends, uh co-workers? And then likewise, if they were to stay put in their residence and then have to stay there for a few days, what supplies would they need ahead of the severe weather so they could stay in their home like a camping trip without power until it's restored? power is

restored.

A big topic that we like to remind everybody of is where do they get their information from uh and notifications.

Make sure they're signed up for BB Alert and how other ways that they can receive official information and alerts from us um so they know have actual information to make decisions on. And we remind everybody to help us spread the word.

Check in with family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, anybody else that might need help preparing um or and help us share that message across the community. We have a ton of resources online uh on our emergency preparedness web page. The website's up on the board or a simple Google search of Virginia Beach emergency preparedness from our storm guides to emergency checklist. All Virginia Beach specific uh geared

towards our communities and their needs.

So, going to how the city prepares uh preparing for large scale emergencies and severe weather. It's really a year- round effort uh by everybody. Uh for instance, this past year, our emergency management division conducted or participated in over 300 hours of training and exercises uh with many different departments and agencies across the region, state and federal government. Uh in addition to our normal

preparedness activities, uh we did go through a uh reertification uh audit by the National Weather Service and we're reertified as a storm ready community where they looked at our policies, procedures, past responses um and our protocols uh to redesate us as a storm ready community. FEMA reviewed us and our capability to issue emergency alerts and send alerts and warnings to the public uh which we far exceeded the

expectations on. Uh with your help, we were able to adopt the city's first dedicated disaster recovery plan uh which pulls that out from underneath the emergency operations plan. It gave us a dedicated framework for how we'd recover from a large-scale disaster in the days, weeks, months, and years uh after something significant impacts us.

We continually uh review and revise the emergency shelter plan for the city. We want to make sure that's able to meet uh the community changes uh and meet the needs of our citizens across the city as our landscape changes. And then we did conduct a regional evacuation work group with the southside partners uh of Hampton Roads. And we really just walked through what would a large evacuation

look like? how could we share resources and information and begin to coordinate that if we had to evacuate multiple jurisdictions at once and all these really uh on top of preparing our community, it also helps align us with the recommendations that came up from the FEMA review council uh recently. We know that those recommendations um are to be implemented over the next two to three years, but

they're essentially just going back to letter of the federal law of disasters and emergencies are the responsibility of the local government and if we're overwhelmed in the state and then the federal government will support as needed. Uh and they're putting the emphasis back on preparedness and response capabilities uh and maintaining uh an investment from the local and state level in disaster preparedness.

So, we're moving towards making sure we we meet those definitions, which we are pretty well prepared for. We're still waiting for funding sources to be released and what that could look like in the future. Most of our grants are still in limbo.

Uh, as part of our preparedness efforts, we've also completed a complete full upgrade of the emergency operations center. uh that helped us modernize our infrastructure there, expand our footprint a little bit by reorganizing it, but allows us to continue to operate the city in any type of adverse con uh condition. We've built in a lot of redundancies uh so we can continue to provide those essential services and

functions that the residents rely on.

Part of that was uh integrating a field EOCC into our equipment cache. So we can now not only operate out of our main emergency operation center, but we could set up like in the tent photo uh anywhere, any field, any parking lot, be fully online with systems uh and services to continue that government continuity and we could actually plug and play that field EOC into any city facility that has power or data. Um and

we've built in those redundancies there.

Uh we've completed and implemented a switch to a new disaster management application uh through EZRI and RGIS.

We're now able to monitor the city resources in real time uh and situations across the city uh rapidly share information and send alerts to the public. Uh and as part of that in partnership with ECCS uh we were able to expand the watch desk capabilities which means we can maintain situational awareness and then watch for incidents that are growing, intervene earlier and then prevent those from

escalating into a major incident um before it gets too far out of hand.

Upcoming we have an exercise with the Virginia Task Force 2 urban search and rescue team that will be in July.

They're going to do their full-scale exercise like a hurricane response doing search and rescue um and handling that component and then we'll be parallel to them in the emergency operations center working hand inand on how we would manage a large-scale disaster like that uh in real time making sure we build that kind of redundancy and muscle memory in our staff across the city. And

additionally, multiple departments uh also train year round in things like damage assessment, debris management, public alert and warning, search and rescue, etc. Just to make sure they're prepared for any type of emergency that can arise.

Key here is I just want to share our kind of procedure for what happens when there's a storm approaching.

Our goal is to provide you with that accurate critical information uh upfront, early on, and regularly so you can keep your constituents and the residents advised with good information.

We monitor year round for anything that could impact the city or disrupt our operations during hurricane season. Our emergency management division staff do watch the National Hurricane Center reports daily. When we have a storm foreman uh that looks like it could be heading our way, we will assign a dedicated staff member to just report on that storm. As we see developing, we might start issuing specific Virginia

Beach weather briefings along with providing leadership uh briefings and intel reports up to you through Patrick.

As that confidence increases, that forecast gets to a little bit over 50% confidence that we could see some sort of impacts. We'll start uh expanding our modeling, look at what those impacts could be on our own. We start looking at the excessive rainfall outlook. Um we'll conduct conduct initial planning briefings. We'll start public messaging heavy on how to prepare for what we

expect to to see from the storm. Um and then our individual departments will start their storm preparations. And then pre-arrival, there's not a set timeline.

We know how the forecast changes. It can change very rapidly, but generally somewhere around 24 to 72 hours, 48 hours ideally, we'll start making those critical decisions. Again, always feeding that information up to you consistently and regularly so you have that accurate uh information, know what what we're planning for, but that's when we'll start issuing evacuation orders, declarations of emergency. Uh we might

consider opening evacuation centers, um requesting outside resources, and activating those disaster contracts. And then immediately after the storm passes, we go into that recovery mode, determining the impacts to life safety, providing that search and rescue life safety, clearing roadways, checking critical infrastructure, and we start restoring those critical services uh as we get into rebuilding. So, our goal

again is to always give you accurate, reliable information. We're going to keep you updated regularly with what we have. There's a lot of always conflicting reports. We want you to have good information to share with the residents uh at your disposal.

And then lastly, a big component of what we do year round is community outreach.

Um we do conduct community outreach year round across the entire city. Uh most recently, we've attended the public safety homeschool day. Uh we've delivered emergency preparedness STEM program uh to fourth and fifth grade students across all city of Virginia Beach schools in partnership with the fire department's fire and life safety unit. not only given hands-on uh emergency preparedness uh instructions

to students but also sending them home with critical information for their families. We've presented at the first precinct citizen advisory committee. Um we visited with many different civic leagues and other community groups and upcoming the near future uh we'll be presenting to residents through different library programs. Uh we have scheduling to meet with our senior resource center partners like every year

we do make sure they have the most up-to-date information and we're engaged with them so we know their concerns and can help them after uh after a disaster and uh we have presentations and outreach coming up to the Sandberg Civic League to discuss emergency preparedness specifically down in Sandbridge and and their unique hazards down there among many others uh events coming up.

That's what I have for my briefing.

There's any questions?

Yeah. Uh, let me start it off by saying what a tremendous job you and your folks do. I think the only thing predictable about hurricanes and tornadoes are their unpredictability.

But I think where you and Virginia Beach, your entire Virginia Beach with fire and just everybody, you know, when we had the tornado uh a couple years ago, the response was phenomenal. The results were outstanding. We were un blessed. Nobody got hurt. Nobody got killed. But but when I saw the coordination and interaction of all the services coming together in that neighborhood, I'll tell

you what, kudos on you. Hutch.

Yeah, I just wanted to hit on a couple things. Um TPS, you did a great job, buddy. And the team is fantastic over here. We appreciate it. you know, we're pulling from other agencies, the Coast Guard and others there that help us out and have a lot of knowledge on what we uh what we do. I would just like to say to y'all that um you know, we're a metro

city with with police and the fire and our EMS. We have our assistant up there, assistant DCM sitting up there, I believe. So, uh we have a we bring a lot of irons to the fire and uh emergency management is is not second to no one.

Um they really we don't realize what they're doing but like he said if you heard him 300 hours of you know of training this year that's a lot of training. Uh storm ready getting this getting the storm ready uh quotes behind your name. That's there's nothing wrong with that. Exceeded FEMA you know that's that's no small task to be able to do that. I know we hammer FEMA a lot, but

um but having their alerts, being on the notification saying that we're getting that right to a million people roughly because other people are listening to what we're saying. Um not and NOFK does a great job, too. Don't take anything away from Jim. Um but the disaster recovery plan, getting that done, um you know, we we do these plans and a lot of them do get put on a shelf and then

never looked at, but that's that's not the case for these folks. They have to.

we follow them. But, uh, all of that put together and then especially I wanted to bring up is sort of what you hit on, mayor, is with the EOC, um, having that field EOC like when we had the jet crash, you know, um, but and then you said right behind it, which I thought was so uh, interesting is USAR and that we're going to train together and bringing those two groups together

with the EOC and the USAR experience. it it was with the the the tornado, the the fire, the jet crash, and the shooting, you know, that's just a few. Not to mention the long ones where we get the hurricanes and we have to sit in there for days waiting to see what it's going to be. But it just really it is a testament to y'all. And then to wrap it

all up, just the stem with the kids, you know, to be able to take them and get them interested. And then hopefully one day as they grow up, they'll they'll be better informed and react better, you know, and stay on top of things. The one thing I did want to joke with you a little bit about, but how'd that evacuation plan go? Did you figure out how you're gonna get us all out of here?

I got a special plan for you. Don't worry.

Yeah. Yeah. It's called evacuation in place y'all.

So, anyway, thank you, sir. Appreciate it.

Okay. Anybody else at this time? Amelia.

Thank you so much for the presentation and talk about the certification that you received.

Can you explain a little further?

Yeah. So, every five years the weather service um nationally they do storm ready comm uh storm ready communities and what that is is they want to promote local governments to take actions to protect their residents and their businesses um from any type of severe weather. So, they have a matrix of checklist. They come in, we meet with them, they come to our facilities. We have a great working relationship with

the National Weather Service already. Um but they come in and sit down and review our afteraction reports, our plans, uh our future plans, our technology, our capabilities for alert and warning, how we plan with them for events. Um and along with past responses, and then they issue a write up and a report on that.

And if you meet their criteria, you can be awarded the certification, which just shows you meet these minimum qualifications. And then as you exceed that, you get those exceeds or far exceeds which we've received for our abilities and what we've accomplished.

Thank you. Congratulations.

Thank you.

Anybody else? You know, once again, uh, you know, when a storm is imminent, you know, you have to make decisions and there's a decision loop. And I told this story a couple times recently. When I first became mayor, uh, we were told we were going to get hit with a category.

Okay, it's gone.

We evacuated Sber. Bottom line is it missed us and took out the Jersey Shore.

But you always got to be ready, you know, for that situation. And if I could use this to underscore, you know, our last meeting when we were with our lobbyists from Washington and emphasize the need to get Nimmo Parkway done. Uh you I'm sure that there would be concurrence in this room that that has to be a high priority going forward because once again these things are so unpredictable. Part of our preparedness

is making sure our folks can get out efficiently.

Yes, sir.

Okay. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Okay.

So, Mr. the mayor, members of council.

At this time, we'll be joined by our department of housing and neighborhood um neighborhood preservation.

Preservation. Yep. Housing and neighborhood preservation director, Ruthie Hill. She's going to come and brief city council about some recent changes to the attainable housing workforce performance grant program that were passed by the state as well as an update that we want to do to the city of Virginia Beach program as it relates to capping some of the exposure regarding the finances of that program. So Ruthie

will kick off the presentation, then we'll be joined by Sharon Shaw. We'll go into further details. Go ahead, Ruthie.

Good afternoon, mayor, vice mayor, members of city council, um city manager Dhaney, and um city attorney Mark Styles. Um today, as uh he just told you, we're going to talk about some updates on the attainable for workforce housing performance grant program.

So, we're proposing changes uh to this current program policy to conform with requirements of new state legislation.

Um we want to align the application document to those changes and then we're looking for a set to set a not to exceed performance grant award amount for the grant period. And we're looking for your um guidance on the not to exceed uh discussion.

So, I'm going to give you a little bit of background just to recap. Um, in May of last year, 2025, there was an ordinance approved to establish this Virginia Beach Attainable Workforce Housing Performance Grant Program. It is a partnership between the city of Virginia Beach and the V uh VBDA, Virginia Beach Development Authority.

And then in September of 2025, we actually launched the program and began accepting applications.

Um this program actually provides an incentive for private development of safe affordable housing that is desperately needed in our city. They are all multif family rental housing and the developments must be new construction and must be fully um affordable. They can be mixed use and mixed income u projects. Um secondly, there is an incentive to the private developer to create this housing and it's based on an

incremental tax real estate which is actually means that the grant funds are created by the real estate taxes that are gen generated by that development itself. Um, finally, it's self- sustaining and it's performance-based. And what that means is that the grants then that that bring in the development income are then allowed to get the the um real estate generated from it. The grants can be

awarded for an initially a 15-year period, but they can actually ask for an additional 15 years of benefit if they have met the criteria.

So the purpose is to provide um housing, affordable housing and to further economic development. We do this by incentivizing the construction of new affordable rental units in Virginia Beach. These units must be rented and affordable to households that are at or below 80% of the area median income. The program also incentivizes further those um programs that are rented and affordable

to households with incomes at or below 50%. There's an additional incentive.

What this does is it makes development affordable to our city and more feasible to fill the gaps that the developments the funding gaps that the developments um are having in order to do this funding.

So there was some recent legislation, House Bill 352 was enacted this year and it will allows localities to meet the requirements of this act. We have already taken advantage of this. But what we need to do is we need to use um the changes that came with this legislation and update our policy and our our grant policy for this. Today, however, we're looking for uh proposing these changes to you, but also to

conform with this legislation. Um but we're also looking for guidance from you about capping the um the tax. I'd like to introduce Sharon Schae. She is our housing development manager. She's going to walk you through the examples and the changes proposed uh for me. She is actually our subject matter expert and has been attending all of these meetings. Um and so I'm bringing her up.

Thanks Sharon.

I'll be back when she's finished.

Thank you.

So um just to start with some of the examples of the required changes that we have to make to align with the legislation.

The the most important one is um the legislation requires us to record a restrictive covenant against the property to um requiring that property to be used as affordable housing for up to 30 years. So that was the biggest thing that we did not have in our policy that needs to get added. Um, and then there were some other small non-substantive changes. For example, we have to add a definition. We had a

definition in there, but there's a specific definition that they wanted us to put in um that was actually in legislation. Um, we have to designate a local officer who's going to accept applications. And we have a timeline in ours, but we had to change the date because the state legislation had a different date than we did. So, we're changing that as well.

So those were um like Ruthie said, those are the required changes to conform to the legislation. Um but in addition to those there while we're while we're going through this process of changing the policy, um we decided it would be good to align our program application, put some information that we have in the application into the policy. Um, so this doesn't really change how we're

operating it, but we had information to talk about the requirements for the developer to have their land use approvals before um, bringing forth a grant application. Um, we have a definition of multifamily rental housing. We have a description of the occupancy, rent, and utility allowance standards that the developers have to conform to once they get their grant. Um and we also describe how the compliance

monitoring will be carried out. So we wanted to align those two um th those two documents.

And then the biggest change that staff is proposing is um a a not to exceed amount. So this will impact the grant award.

So the current policy, our performance grant is capped at 100% of the incremental new real estate taxes levied and collected for the um improvements on the site. And we adjust it based on whether or not the the property is fully residential or if it's mixed use and if it's fully affordable or if it's mixed income. So a 100% affordable residential property would have no adjustment. They can go up to the 100%.

Incremental um value.

So the the other incentive that um Ruth had mentioned too that we provide a grant we increase the grant amount if if a developer is targeting units in a mixed income development at 50% of the median or lower we'll double the grant um for that type of project. So that's our current policy.

So what we're proposing is to add to our policy and not to exceed amount for the grant period which is again up to 30 years.

So the way we would determine this is we would look at when the developer gives us their application, we would look at the comparable value of um or the comparable assessed values of other similar projects. So we we would look at the the value per unit of another affordable housing development that's similar.

Um, we would look at the current real estate tax rate that is set by city council and we would apply an annual increase in assessed value of 3% a year over the term of the grant.

And the reason we picked 3% um is that usually in affordable housing the underwriters the the people who are providing low-income housing tax credits or tax exempt bonds they usually required showed they asked developers to project in the future what their um income and expenses are and they have them trend income at 2% % and expenses at 3% and one of the expenses is real estate taxes.

So that's why we chose 3%.

And of course once we figure all that out all those annual tax amounts would get reduced by the base amount to get the actual grant amount each year.

So this this not to exceed performance amount grant amount would be documented in the grant agreement that the developer would sign after the city council approves it. Um but the annual grant that they would actually get is really determined by the actual assessment growth and the tax rate each year. Um so I'll go into an example to show you how this would work.

So if you had a for example 175 unit development that was all 100% affordable and residential um we would look at currently the estimated assessed value we're looking at for similar projects at 124,000 a unit. So for this type of project that would be 21.7 million.

Um we would apply the current tax rate of 97 cents per 100 of assessed value.

So their taxes would come out to 210,490 for the first year and then we would escalate that again 3% every year and then every year deduct the base amount. And when you do that you get a not to exceed amount of 9.4 million over 30 years. And this comes out to about $1,800 per unit per year over those 30 years.

And then again, taking that same example, if you apply this not to exceed amount, um, and this this slide kind of shows you what would happen in in reality if that developer's project actually increased in value 5% a year.

Um over the 30 years under the current policy we would over those 30 years be play paying out 13 roughly 13.5 million which is exceeds the not to exceed amount.

So what would happen is the city would keep paying that grant each year. But in this scenario when you do the calculations um this developer would hit that max at year 25 even if though their grant term is 30. So that we would not be paying a grant award for those last five years.

And then on the flip side, if the actual assessed value only increased 2% a year, they would just get 8 million, which what is what the calculation would come to. So there would be no impact before an before under the old policy and the new.

So before we go into questions, just to recap. So, what we're looking to do is conform with the requirements of the state legislation with these changes, align our application to those changes, and then ask you um if you would like us to move forward with with the not to exceed award amount changes.

So, questions for for Sharon or I Rosemary and Stacy.

So, this doesn't affect the ones we've already approved?

No, ma'am, it does not.

Ones moving forward?

Yes, ma'am.

Okay, Stacy. Thank you. I just I think there's a lot of misconception about uh this program amongst the public and um I would just like ask you with the in your opinion on a scale of 1 to 10, how effective has this program been at meeting the goals of the city over the last six months that we've had it?

Uh 10 plus.

10 plus. I I I would concur. I think what people need to realize is that one, there's no upfront outlay by the city.

Correct.

So there's no call for cash. If somebody wants to come in and build a $21 million project, it cost the city nothing upfront.

Um if the property ceases to ever be workforce housing, the grant stops automatically.

Yes, sir. so that we're not stuck with a property paying a grant on property that's no longer meeting our goals. Um, it also gives incentive to the developer, the owner, to keep this property in good condition because the grant is initially a 15-year grant.

And the only way they can qualify for the second for an extension of 15 years is by making additional investments to maintain the property.

That is correct.

So, at the end of the day, the city's getting workforce housing that they don't have to they don't have to pay for up front. There's no maintenance, no insurance, no uh burden on the city to uh keep that property going. We don't have to worry about it falling into no repair.

And for each unit, because you said it costing about 18 $1,800 a year for each unit, that's $150 a month. And but for taxes, the city's uh going. So, it's just inc to me, it's just an incredible deal.

That is an amazing thing. And it's been very effective. We've had uh a few people have already applied. We've got more people in the pipeline. Uh developers seem to be really excited about the program. So, and I think those are the things that uh people really need to understand to understand how effective this program is. And at the end of the day, you know, people might say, well, you're paying for a developer

to build a building. We're really not cuz under this program it's fleet for revenue and at the 97 cent u tax rate that we have it would take well over a hundred years for a developer to re recoup their investment. And this is only a 30-year program. So it's not even close to paying for the cost of the project. And so, um, you know, the changes that we're proposing here, uh, you know, given

that, uh, even at a a five-year annual increase, I mean, I I know the last several years have been there maybe little in excess, but I don't think I don't think it's going to hurt the program. I don't think people are not going to take advantage of it because of of that cap and, you know, getting back to that 2% or even a little bit more. uh it would have no change whatsoever on on

the outlay or the the re the ability for a developer to recoup their investment uh a portion of their investment. So, you know, my recommendation would be this is um this doesn't hurt anything.

It doesn't really change the program. Um you know, so I re I would recommend that we move forward with the proposal.

Anybody else? and we recommend it too.

When it first came out, number excited about it. We'll put many more of these units in district 4 where there's some land. But the main thing is that each of the developers who have come up are people that are well known for the quality of what they're presenting. My question is it mentions about having a governor uh somebody that would be like an officer that you mentioned look in there.

Uh we would just have to uh designate a person in the grant document of who the person the contact is is what that means.

I was wondering do we have to now hire second you know another person? No ma'am, we just have to put the name of the person who they contact in the grant document.

One part I really like that um Councilman Cummings mentioned is that 15-year where they come back and double check. Are you keeping this up just like we have on the Baker Road when we have those done by Lawson?

They're very well kept. So applying to this would be great. So, I'm for recommending us moving forward with the new changes.

Thank you.

Anybody else?

Just like to say real quick, just say anything we can do to help with workforce housing is is a 10 plus for me as well. If the more we need it, so it would be very helpful and if that's working the way it looks like it's working for us, that's a that's a great uh great thing. Thank you. You know, let me say again, bring our motto when confronted with uh problems improvise,

adapt, and overcome. The fact is we have a housing crisis in Virginia Beach, but it is not unique to Virginia Beach. It's everywhere.

And over the last uh couple months uh you know two things come to really mind that is a wakeup call for me. I've been working with a very nice group of folks from the NAACP who are working on the housing uh thing and if possible the next time we get together if the manager doesn't mind if you can maybe attend because they're really trying to come up with some innovative stuff you know to help you

know people in the community that really need some help. Uh recently I had a couple of constituents uh call the mayor's office saying they're having trouble paying rent and uh you know and then we find out that and you know so I reached out to a couple realer friends and I'll tell you what trying to find an apartment less than 2,000 a month is difficult and uh you know I was at a banquet the

other day with the special ops folks and I was sitt was next to a Navy diver and uh he had trouble finding housing you know in Hampton Roads he's living on Moya and you know Hutch I think a bunch of our fire folks from what I understand live oh a lot more than I like no so once again let's just say what it is it's a crisis but I think you know

based on what Stacy said I think when we present this to the public okay the naysayers are going to be out there okay we know that but we are confronting a crisis and I think if we articulate it uh the way that you know Stacy Ruth you you said it you know I think it's got to be a good public relations effort that we are engaging this proactively and you know once again it really comes

down to a lot of the yeah and let's realize that a couple years ago at a retreat we determined that housing attainable housing was our fourth highest priority after storm water public safety in schools and once again uh you know you know working with Harumpa you know milit military advocacy group you know the the you know the department of defense one of their highest priorities are housing

daycare quality of life issues for folks so once again I think uh does anybody object let's move forward and aggressively and even come up with more innovative ideas to confront.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, thank you.

Okay, two good presentations.

Okay, council discussions and initiatives.

Anybody? Josh Rosemary.

Thank you, Mayor. Um, I wanted to say thank you to uh the folks who came out last night to Williams Farm Center. um to learn about the uh Pleasure House Point wetlands restoration project. Uh we gave a project update. Uh a public works director did a fantastic job. Um and uh we learned yesterday that the project to date has come in u a little over $3 million under budget.

Um which is which is fantastic. Um, we also learned yesterday that um, had we waited it out and maybe gotten the credits from um, one of the other banks that we may or may not have probably could not have gotten those credits from. um it would have been more expensive um more uncertain and um as a result of this project we have credits left over uh to go ahead and execute on future flood protection program

projects. So um I want to I want to thank the staff who came out. I would like to thank the residents who came out. We had a really neat um kind of surprise treat from a local uh drone photographer who many of you may already follow. His name is Hutton Strader. Um he's uh done drone photography work at the resort. Um and uh he's worked with the environmental studies program and

students. Um so he actually got out there on June 5th uh just last Friday and took some amazing footage of the of the project area. Um so we were able to show real time of what it looks like currently. Um and um and speaking of graduates, I just want to throw out a congratulations. I know all of us do. Uh to all of our graduates um who are um closing out school this week. And um I

just a bittersweet one to my twins who are graduating fifth grade at Thorood Elementary School. Um and um and I'm going to give a little shout out to my daughter, one of my twins, Alana, who um was blindly selected for poet laurate um at her graduation ceremony. So um so pretty awesome.

Yeah, I graduated fifth grade in 1955.

Oh, Lord. Rosemary. Back to the future.

I just wanted to bring up something and and maybe some of you have had some interactions on this or not. And and just maybe if we could look into this a little further. Um, but our buses when they stop their little arm swings out and everybody's supposed to stop and they now have cameras on them. And I've been and this was state legislation.

This was not our legislation, but uh we are all we want our kids to be safe.

Absolutely. Absolutely. But I've heard from at least four different people that when the arm was comes out, they were progressing right past the bus and they couldn't stop, but yet they got hit with a a ticket. And I heard from um one lady who was she left Florida and went to New England. She stayed Virginia Beach one night. She was a visitor and when she got home she had one of these summon

citations in her in her mail in her mail and she was really upset. She says because she wasn't able to stop because it came out so quickly and she was right next to the bus and so she wanted to fight it but she's a kind of hard to come and fight it and it's a $250 fine.

You think about our other fines for uh cameras. The red light running is $50. The school zones is hundred. $250 is I mean I heard from somebody's very senior since a very fixed income. And I mean she it's unfort that could be somebody's groceries for a week or two. Um, and I talked to the school board chair about it and she said that their attorney is having to spend a

lot of time in court having to go to this, which is not the best time for our attorneys to be spending and they're throwing them out left and right. So, I don't know if it's the lag time like when it comes out if they need a couple of seconds. So, if you're traveling, you get past it because what happens the bus stops, the arm goes out like immediately. the doors open and once the

doors open the students are allowed to stand up and get out. So, there's plenty of time, not plenty of time, but at least a few seconds. So, I was just wondering if anybody else had any concerns about this. Um, you can just kind of look into it. Uh, maybe the lag time might need to be adjusted or I mean, $250 seems a whole lot, especially for a lot of people. Yeah, I think that might be

worth looking into if we could if we could look into this.

And like I say, the school board chair says our our attorneys haven't spent all this time in court over these tickets. So, has anybody else had had heard anything about this?

Heard about it about the 250 trolls. The state said it.

H Yeah, this was a state state legislation.

I'll mention something about that in my upl.

Yes. Well, I'm really excited. I'm sure you know about Black Street, famous group. And what's even more exciting, they're homegrown and they are from district 4 and they're about to have a global pass event from all their multi- um Grammy awardwinning platinum and they're headed for three days this upcoming Junth to Africa, uh Morocco, to Europe to North America and of course everyone's waiting for them to play the

famous Hot Diggity.

They won a Grammy for it.

They won a Grammy for it. So, we're we're really excited because they were they were on the Hot 100 for four weeks with that and they've sold over 7 million albums. So, I was thinking before they go for the Hollywood star that maybe somewhere in July, I was talking with the mayor about this that we could maybe prepare a resolution for them because I mean this is very special from Virginia.

And then hopefully we would also consider the street naming.

uh you know once again the ceremonial one not an official one you know and you know Ameilia thank you but once again you know one of the reasons you know I spoke to you I mean the genesis of this group and a lot of other groups you know started in that section uh you know many things and u and once again I think when we honor you know folks like this you know we do have a

creative community that live in Virginia beach that some way has been left out a little bit. And um I was able to uh work a couple of years ago with a guy named Gabe Niles and uh we did a podcast and uh you know he asked me to do that because you know he wanted to let you know people know the mayor cared about youth you know minority youth in the

area and as a matter of fact he had he's been appointed to our task force and u you know and channel 13 did a profile on him that I thought was very very you know positive in a way that we are being inclusive. So if it's okay, I would like to uh with with you know help Amelia and you know go forward with these initiatives but I think it was also to

re realize that it's it's amazing how many artists that we have not only in Hampton Roads but we have right here in Virginia Beach. And I think this might be a lovely way and maybe even within the resolution to acknowledge some of the other names, you know, you know, you know, some of the other uh incidences that that you know that they really started a wave of positivity.

So does anybody object with us going forward with this?

So Mr. Mayor, just to clarify, there's a council resolution recognition rec resolution. Yeah. Yeah.

And also uh resolution for street.

Yeah. He's going to be back in town after the trips of first week in July if possible if that's not Russian.

What was his name?

Chy Chanty Black. And if you recall two uh state of the cities ago, they did the national anthem. And I'll tell you what, it rocked it. You know, maybe we can get a clip of that and send it out to council members. Uh we've been told that it's one of the best renditions of the national anthem that a lot of people ever heard. They sang it ac cappella and uh you know, they are very very talented

group of musicians that originated right here.

and uh you know that's just you know what we do but but once again I think you know acknowledging the creative culture and uh and uh you know Michael you know you've been at the forefront of making sure that folks had the opportunity I was at an event where number of creative culture artists were there they had headphones and they were custom painting them and selling them for charity you know they're involved in

so many uh you activities with the arts and uh there's another uh group that we go to I think Ameilia you've been to a number of them with the the poet laurates yes you know the you know they they run at Renaissance Academy there's a lot of stuff going on that people could really take advantage of so that's okay if we can move forward um you know speaking along the line we

always said we got the task force uh you know for safer Virginia is going to be up and running and we always who said we're going to be 100% transparent about that. Then on Thursday, we're going to be meeting with our chairs who are Delegate Higgins and Senator uh New Craig, you know, just to go over the ground rules and get it going. And you know, one of the things this is an

opportunity for us to build a bridge with our general assembly in terms of not only this, but other things going forward that are germanine to what we're trying to do. And uh you know I think you know it's it's going to be a good positive step and then once it's open you know these meetings are going to be open forums to everybody and they're also going to be I believe four um

outreach and Delina Miles of every uh first citizen of Virginia Beach who is very proactive in organizing uh she's going to be the moderator at these things. So, and we're hopefully going to have everything wrapped wrapped up by I guess hopefully uh October time so we can get whatever thing because we're going to need enabling legislative from the general assembly and um and I can tell you that all of

the other mayors in the 757 are committed to what we're doing. As a matter of fact, we just found out another 757 mayor, you know, put in a you know, youth u you know, Patrick about curfew. It sounds like um it's legislation that the city of Newport News is considering after several pop-up teen takeover events in that city.

They're um looking at looking into the idea of declaring a curfew to address the issues.

So, what's happening here is happening everywhere.

Yeah, we don't.

No, but I tell you what, you know, we got some work to do, but at least we're we're showing the public that we're confronting it. And yes, you know, we as a council, you know, took some heat from the curfew, but can I say that since we had the curfew, we really haven't had any problems. And I'll tell you what, if you go to Jackaloupe and if you go to uh you know,

the uh the other things, it's not going to say that. And you know, this is always going to be that way. But I think if we set the tone and show that we're serious, come to Virginia Beach, have fun. But if you come to raise havoc, you know, you're going to be dealt with and that's all we want. But once again, you know, I just want to thank uh, you know, council for courage and conviction.

We're all going to be mo moving forward and I invite you as we go forward with the task force over the next months. I invite each of you to be proactive and help out. Okay. And that's all I got.

Anybody else?

Okay. We're getting into close. Okay. Uh the chair will entertain a motion to recess into a closed session pursuant to the exemptions from open meetings allowed by section 2.2 code of Virginia as amended for the following purposes.

Discussions or considerations of acquisition of real property or public purpose or the disposition of publicly held property with the discussion in an open session would adversely affect um the bargaining position or a negotiating strategy of the public body pursuant to section 2.2371183 2 3711A3 in district 6 and that is corrected from a previous thing of district 2 but it is district six public contract discussions

to award of the public contract involving the expenditure of public funds and discussions and terms or scoop scope of such contract discussions in an open session would adversely affect bargaining position for a negotiating uh strategy of the public body pursuant to section 2.2 to 3711829 that's BB national personnel matters discussions considerations or interviews of prospective uh candidates for employment

assignment appointment promotion performance the motion uh salaries disciplining or resignation of specific public officers appointees or employees from any public body pursuant to section 2.2 2 371181 and that's appointments, boards, commissions committees authorities agencies, and appointees. Now I'm asking for a motion.

So move second.

I

Okay, we are in recess.

Close session.

Second council council.

Hi.

Hi.

Council council.

Hi counc.

Hi.

Council has left.

Hi council.

Hi.

Mayor D.

Hi.

I vote the session. All right.

Thank you all. We are we are done. Thank you.