City Council to review the way Charlottesville funds nonprofits

Charlottesville City Council will meet at 4 p.m. for two work session discussions followed by a regular meeting at 6:30 p.m. Is this the week that they find two people willing to be on the Charlottesville Redevelopment and Housing Authority? That’s the topic of a closed session. Councilors did not appoint either of the two vacant positions on May 18. (meeting overview)

Both work sessions have to do with budgeting. The first is about how groups can ask the city for money. A staff member will go over the grant possibilities including those for affordable housing. Another will specifically go over the Vibrant Community Fund. That’s the process for nonprofits to submit ideas for funding. For many years, Albemarle and Charlottesville conducted this process jointly but parted ways six or seven years ago.

There are no materials available in advance. If you want a preview, you can take a look at the most recent Vibrant Community Fund report which explains why projects were funded.

The second work session is about a concept called “participatory budgeting” which takes away power from elected officials over a portion of the budget. There have been previous efforts and at least one Councilor wants to try again.

“The goal in 2019 was to pilot new ways of engaging community residents and build public trust by empowering citizens to determine where and how public dollars will be spent in the community,” reads the staff report.

There’s no advanced material for this either. My observation is that the general public already does not understand the budget process and there’s so little sustained coverage of it by other information outlets.

The Vibrant Community Fund itself is a form of participatory budget with each application scored by members of a review team. Council does not appoint this review team but they do appoint the members of the Charlottesville Affordable Housing Fund (CAHF) Committee and the Community Development Block Grant (CDBG) & HOME Task Force. Both make recommendations on how to spend money.

Ultimately voters elect the City Councilors to make decisions. However, general elections for City Council elections have trended toward becoming uncompetitive at the same time the city had brought in more revenue from rising real property taxes.

Since 2016, the city’s total taxable value has increased over 104 percent from $5.945 billion to over $12.16 billion. During that period, land values increased 121.58 percent and improvement values jumped 97.91 percent.

The city’s general fund budget has also increased during that time but at a smaller percentage of 69.61 percent. The FY2016 budget was nearly $156.4 million compared to nearly $265.25 in the current fiscal year.

Both the 2023 and 2025 general elections were uncontested.

Before you move on: Thank you for reading this story about an upcoming meeting in local government. This is the sort of article that fits the mission of Town Crier Productions, a mission to increase awareness about how government works by looking up close at what happens at meetings. This story comes from a Week Ahead edition of Charlottesville Community Engagement published on May 31, 2026.