Charlottesville City Council to receive Office of Human Rights report, review transit strategic plan

For the past few years, Charlottesville City Council has been holding a work session at 4 p.m. of each regular meeting in order to get a deep dive into particular issues. I’ve only been able to capture a few of them this year, and was glad to have written up the one in February on alternative fuel sources for Charlottesville Area Transit.

I’m also glad I was able to write up the work session in early May on the city’s efforts to get better at delivering transportation projects. 

• Charlottesville transportation planners seeking to rebuild public trust, May 16, 2024
• Transportation planning manager updates Charlottesville City Council on existing projects, May 17, 2024

Council’s June 3, 2024 begins at 4 p.m. work session and has two items. (meeting info)

The first is on the Human Rights Commission and the Office of Human Rights and their annual report. In recent years, the office has grown to four full-time employees.

“The resulting organizational structure now mirrors that of other municipal offices in Virginia with similar human and civil rights enforcement authority, marking the first time since the creation of the OHR in 2013 that the office has full staff capacity,” reads the annual report.

During 2023, the office served 288 individual people who made up 2,060 contacts. Seven ended up being complaints and 214 were inquiries. The number of contacts was down because the office made a decision halfway through the year to “prioritize processing jurisdictional complaints of unlawful discrimination and minimize work related to navigation and advocacy.” 

Two of the inquiries came from North Carolina. 

Of those seven complaints, four were for housing, two were for employment, and one was for public accommodation. There were no complaints for credit or private education, two of the other areas where the Office of Human Rights has jurisdiction. 

Some other information from the report: 

• One of the positions is an investigator in training. 
• One of the powers that the Human Rights Commission has is to hold public hearings, but only one has been held since 2013. 
• There were 16 open complaint cases at the end of 2023. The Office of Human Rights contracts with a firm to provide mediation services. The status of these cases can be seen on page 21 of the report. 
• For those the Office of Human Rights can’t help, referrals are given to the Office of Civil Rights in the Attorney General’s Office, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, the Virginia Department of Professional and Occupational Regulation, the Central Virginia Legal Aid Society, the Legal Aid Justice Center, and other agencies. 

The second work session is on the transit strategic plan for Charlottesville Area Transit that tells the Virginia Department of Transportation what the agency is planning to do for the next ten years. This document has been produced by the firm Kimley Horn and synthesizes several other plans including the 2021 CAT System Optimization Plan and the 2022 Regional Transit Vision Plan. 

“There are over 40 service improvements from these plans that were included in the CAT TSP,” reads the staff memo. “This set of improvements is fiscally constrained by projected revenues and expenditures and phased in over the short-, medium-, and long-term.”

You can take a look at the plan itself on the city’s website. 

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 is from the June 3, 2024 Week Ahead edition of the newsletter.