Council to hold work session on decarbonization study on March 26

One way to find out what’s happening with municipal government in Charlottesville is to review periodic reports from City Manager Sam Sanders. He also provides some comments at each meeting such as an update last night on a meeting for the study of planning for alternatives to the city’s natural gas distribution network. (read the written report)

“The decarbonization study work session is scheduled for [March] 26,” Sanders said. “It’s a special work session that’s been added. The Office of Sustainability, the utilities department, and the consultant Black & Veatch will all be present to walk Council through an update as to where we are.”

The study got underway last year and Council had a briefing last March. Sanders put the work on hold in January.

“Part of what you’ll hear in the March session will be an update to some public outreach events that we plan to have so that we can get more feedback and hopefully we can bring something forward in the way of recommendations by the late summer,” Sanders said.  

In April, the city will begin implementing a system similar to Albemarle County’s Human Services Alternative Response Team, or HART. 

“We’ll be rolling out a co-responder model where Human Services, the Police Department, and the Fire Department will be coming together and working on better strategies for how we respond,” Sanders said. 

In the written report, relatively new Deputy City Manager Eden Ratliff introduced himself and pointed to his experience in local government in Pennsylvania where unions for public workers are more common than in Virginia where they were only authorized by the General Assembly in 2020.

“Collective bargaining is a new concept to the city and has many implications for both cost of the work force as well as management of the work force,” Ratliff wrote. “I helped conduct a brief collective bargaining training for City Council as the City prepares to move to a unionized workforce in FY25 with fire, police, and transit unionizing.” 

According to city communications director Afton Schneider, the collective bargaining ordinance approved by Council recognizes up to six bargaining units with three currently recognized. The remaining slots are for the categories of labor and trades, administrative and technical, and professional workers.

“Currently the Teamsters have filed a petition to have the labor and trades bargaining unit recognized,” Schneider wrote. 

Other items from the written report:

• On March 18, Charlottesville will consider funding requests for affordable housing projects. There were 17 applications through the Housing Operations Programs Support (HOPS)  and six received from the Charlottesville Affordable Housing Fund. 
• Also on March 18, Council will consider a resolution to govern the financing of the second phase of the Piedmont Housing Alliance’s redevelopment of Friendship Court into Kindlewood. People have begun to move into the 62 units in phase one and there are to be 104 units in phase 2. 
• The Housing Advisory Committee is working on recommendations for a land bank ordinance, but in the meantime, the city is working on developing procedures to govern land purchases. In the past year, Council has spent $5.9 million to acquire property along the Rivanna River to prevent a development and another $4 million to purchase property from the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority. 
• Appeals of property assessments are down sharply over last year according to the assessor’s office. The deadline passed on February 29 and as of a week before, there were only 40 applications. That’s compared to 345 in 2023. 

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