Once every three months, leaders of neighborhood associations in Charlottesville have an audience with the City Manager. The latest meeting was on June 15 though outgoing interim City Manager Michael C. Rogers was not on the Zoom call.
Instead the meeting was facilitated by Alex Ikefuna, the director of the Office of Community Solutions. He has some updates.
“We’ve hired a new housing program manager, Antoine Williams,” Ikefuna said.
Williams fills a position that has been vacant for nearly three years.
“He’s going to be responsible for overseeing our housing program, federal housing funds, implementation of the Affordable Housing Plan along with related activities,” Ikefuna said.
Several community members have approached the city with requests to have their particular community added, such as the Little High Neighborhood Association. Ikefuna had an update.
“This map when it was created, it was for planning purposes only and there is no plan to change the map,” Ikefuna said. “However, we are proposing to create another map and may perhaps modify this map for neighborhood leaders.”
Ikefuna said any association that wanted to form would have to have a resolution approving new boundaries, and that would have to be approved by the association they would be leaving.
“It’s going to be a complex process,” Ikefuna said. “I think it’s going to be protracted as well and that was the original reason why we didn’t to change the boundaries of the planning map.”
To make things even more confusing, there are also neighborhood assessment maps as well. But for the purposes of the neighborhood map, Ikefuna requested official requests from leaders.
The president of the Fifeville Neighborhood Association had one question about transit.
“I was just wondering if there was going to be any route changes in Fifeville coming anytime soon?” asked Carmelita Wood.
Her question was fielded by Stacey Smalls, the public works director. But he didn’t have an answer.
“All changes to the transit system is transit, so we can take your question and then get that to the transit department,” Smalls said.
“Ms. Wood, let me ask you,” Ikefuna chimed in. “Have you guys, your neighborhood association, have you made a formal request in the past?”
“We’ve talked maybe a few years ago about maybe going back to every half hour,” Woods said.
Fifeville is currently served by Route 4 and Route 6. On January 3 of this year, Council appropriated $1 million in surplus funds from FY22 to purchase two additional buses specifically for Charlottesville Area Transit Route 6.
I have a question in to the city about the status of this initiative. CAT is currently taking public input on a transit strategic plan, two years after rolling out route changes that were never implemented with the official answer being a lack of drivers.
Read my latest story for more on that plan.
Next was a question about the status of improving Stribling Avenue with a sidewalk and appropriate drainage to prepare it for additional pedestrian, bike, and vehicular traffic expected to come with the development of 169 apartment units approved by Council last April. The upgraded road was a condition of the rezoning and the budget has increased to $5.4 million.
City engineer Jack Dawson had an update. Here’s a reminder that the city is still trying to add capacity to deal with transportation projects.
“We are working right now with our limited project management staff to try and possibly submit that for a grant,” Dawson said. “I don’t know if we’re going to be able to do that for revenue-sharing. That process closes soon. But after that we are trying to on-board some project managers and that is the first one in the queue.”
Smalls said he just approved the budget for two new project managers for transportation.
The next meeting of this group will be on September 21.
Take a look at the whole video on YouTube.
Before you go: The time to write and research of this article is covered by paid subscribers to Charlottesville Community Engagement. In fact, this particular installment comes from the July 12, 2023 edition of the program. You can also listen to the audio version there in the podcast. One day I’ll have all of that audio cross-posted here, too!
But to ensure this research can be sustained, please consider becoming a paid subscriber or contributing monthly through Patreon.
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