A summary of four Charlottesville City Council budget work sessions for FY2026

One issue with being a one-person information operation is that some stories that go out in the Charlottesville Community Engagement newsletter don’t appear on this website until some time later.

That’s the case with this edition from April 10, 2025 that I wanted to get out just to have some sense of what had happened at four budget work sessions for the City of Charlottesville. I had not been able to review the events but felt I needed to do before proceeding to writing about the next steps.

Sam Sanders has been city manager since August 1, 2023 having been hired as a deputy city manager by the interim manager provided by the Robert Bobb Group. Sanders has attempted to manage in a transparent manner. That has included efforts to engage with his City Council as often as possible.

The development of the budget that will begin on July 1, 2025 officially kicked off at a work session on September 16, 2024.

“The FY26 budget will build off a FY25 total budget of $251,948,630 that is a 10.29 percent increase over the FY24 budget,” I wrote in my story from the work session.

That amount is more than double what the budget was back in 2008. The cost to buy housing continues to go up and that’s reflected in higher assessments. The published land book for 2024 shows that the city would collect $104,649,939.84 in total taxes based on a real property rate of $0.96 per $100.

However, Sanders proposed a two cent increase and Council agreed, so the actual collectable amount would increase to $106,830,146.92. The land book for 2025 has not been posted but assessments are up an average of 7.74 percent.

Sanders held several work sessions with Council between September and early March when he released a budget for FY2026 that is not based on a tax increase.

The recommended budget as introduced totals $264,474,183 and is a 4.97 percent increase over the current year.

“That’s $12.5 million in additional money,” Sanders said.

So far I have made an editorial choice to focus on Albemarle County. You can read those stories here. For the rest of this newsletter, resources to get me and you up to speed on tonight’s wrap-up work session.

Council has held budget work sessions on March 6, March 13, March 20, and March 27. I won’t be able to fully summarize them all here, but we’ll go one by one.

March 6, 2025: Work Session #1

• The March 6, 2025 work session lasted an hour and a half.
• The minutes capture this in 150 words or so.
• You can watch the video here.
• This is the link to the presentation.

Some other things that jump out at me that aren’t in the minutes:

• Charlottesville Area Transit is adding eight drivers and a mechanic.
• The city is using $900,000 in general fund revenue to pay the Charlottesville Parking Center for the lease for the Water Street Parking Garage. Learn more about that here.
• City Councilor Michael Payne said a top priority for him is building a permanent homeless shelter

March 13, 2025: Work Session #2

• The March 13, 2025 work session lasted just over two hours.
• The minutes capture this in two pages.
• You can watch the video here:
• This is the link to the presentation.

Some things that jumped out at me:

• Several items that had been funded out of the Vibrant Community Fund have been changed to be funded through the City Manager’s Discretionary Fund. These include $5,000 for the “WTJU Radio – Black Business Expo”, $5,000 for the UVA Film Festival, $5,000 for the Virginia Festival of the Book, and $2,500 for the Charlottesville Opera.
• Several organizations funded in the past through the competitive Housing Operation and Programs Support were lower than in previous years and at lower amounts than requested.
• Sanders explained that a $298,000 request from the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority for Community Development Block Grant funds to replace roofs at the Dogwood portfolio was ineligible. He said the city co-owns those houses and that request should have been made through a different channel and made as part of a report to Council. Council agreed to pay for half of the $10 million purchase price in the spring of 2023.
• Through March 13, the city had disbursed $501,977 through the emergency Pathways Fund to 692 individuals. The average disbursement is $725.40 and 70 percent of requests are housing related.
• Sanders took some time to describe the $967,000 in requests that have come from non-profits outside of the budget cycle. These range from $175,000 from the Uhuru Foundation to expand their re-entry services to a request for funds $500,000 from the Dogwood Veterans Memorial for a pedestrian bridge. Sanders said he is hoping to have final decisions at today’s budget wrap-up session.
• Technical errors led the Blue Ridge Coalition for the Homeless to lose a $250,000 federal grant. Executive Director Shayla Washington explained this was due to accounts not being transferred to her account with the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development.
• Various other groups appealed for additional funding from Council.

March 20, 2025: Community Budget Work Session

• This event lasted just over two hours.
• The minutes are not yet posted here but they are posted here.
• You can watch the video here.
• This is the link to the presentation.

After a series of speakers, Sanders queued up a discussion of discretionary spending opportunities for Council.

“We are managing competitive processes, using community based review teams and committees to make recommendations to you,” Sanders said. “But we also recognize that you would like to participate in that.”

Some highlights:

• Deputy City Manager Ashley Marshall explained more about the $250,000 to replace lost funding from HUD for the Blue Ridge Coalition for the Homeless would ensure continuity of service for a six month period.
• There was discussion about the Dogwood Memorial Vietnam Memorial and their request for $1 million to pay for the pedestrian bridge. Council supported allocating City Councilor Brian Pinkston’s idea to put $100,000 toward the project.
• There was much discussion about funding for individual groups and Council agreed to not fund a $4,200 request for Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia. City Councilor Michael Payne said it was inappropriate for UVA to submit such requests for funding. City Councilor Brian Pinkston said removing the request was petty, but there were three votes to proceed just like last year.
• Even though this was not the capital improvement work session, there was a discussion about debt service. The city will have $191,243,827 in outstanding debt as of June 30, 2025. The debt service payment for the current fiscal year is $17.9 million. That’s 7.1 percent of the total budget. The city plans on issuing $138 million in debt over the next five years.
• Sanders warned that federal funds to support Charlottesville Area Transit are dwindling and it may time to consider adding fares back to the equation to recover some costs.

March 27, 2025: Work session on the Capital Improvement Program

• This session lasted about two and a half hours
• Watch the video
• There is a page and a half of minutes.
• This is a link to the presentation.

Some highlights:

• The recommended budget anticipated a capital budget for FY2026 of $31,987,686. That comes from a transfer of $8.3 million from the general fund transfer, the issuance of $23.46 million in bonds, $200,000 from the schools, and $40,000 in miscellaneous revenue.
• One project discussed at this meeting is $250,000 for access management for Riverview Park. There was $250,000 set aside in the FY26 budget for this purpose. Parks Director Riaan Anthony said the funding would be used for a study for ways to improve access to the park. For instance, some vehicles may be coming into the park with kayaks and other portable boats and one improvement might be to add space for this. He said the idea is not to increase parking spots. City Councilor Natalie Oschrin argued against any expansion of asphalt and she suggested people could park on neighborhood streets rather than the park. Anthony said the scope would likely cover the city’s new parkland to the northwest at 0 East High Street. City Councilor Michael Payne was also skeptical of this expenditure. There were three votes to proceed.
• City Councilor Brian Pinkston continued to make a plea for funding for the Dogwood Vietnam Memorial. Councilor Natalie Oschrin expressed her concern about the project and said access might be improved without spending millions. Councilor Lloyd Snook said he could support $100,000 to help support a public-private partnership to build the infrastructure. Oschrin said there are other priorities that are more important to bring sidewalks compliant with the Americans with Disability Act.
• Charlottesville City Schools requested moving up the design and construction of an early childhood education center at the Walker School by one year. Council agreed. This will mean selling bonds a year in advance.
• Council moved off of the capital budget and into operations by moving into a discussion of increased funding for Charlottesville Area Transit. Deputy City Manager James Freas said the city will continue to offer service fare free, and the costs have increased as part of the collective bargaining agreement now in place. This is a robust conversation that deserves its own post, but I have to move on.

This is only a partial account intended to document a little of what happened at the time it happened.

Before you go: This story originally went out in the April 10, 2025 edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement. Why did it take eight days to post here? Good question. Right now stories can be produced either here first or in the Substack newsletter first. Mostly this is the newsletter. Some weeks are more intense than others, and a decision was made to focus on Substack first. One consideration for the future is to have one content management system for both. This is currently in the imaginary phase, but Town Crier Productions eventually graduated to whatever you say here.