City Council Work Session

good evening i would like to call the work session of march 4th 2025 to order we have three items on the agenda very meaty meaty items and we are glad to see our school board members here to discuss with us how we move forward together so uh miss clark would you get us started yes the first work session item is a joint discussion with the school board on the proposed fy26 budget with a presentation by schools carolyn pitches school board chair and jeffrey plattenberg city school superintendent will provide the presentation good evening council and mayor and staff um i'm carolyn pitches i'm the chair of the city school board and um why don't we all introduce ourselves christina cesary lauren bertelmay

sarah kelsey okay um we're um pleased to be here we're grateful for the opportunity to discuss our uh fy26 budget with all of you we know there are some challenges um and hopefully we can um work together to address some of those and i'll turn it over to the superintendent thank you very much madam chair and um good evening and thank you for allowing us to present the fy2026 school board approved budget this evening um tonight in our presentation i'd like to also acknowledge mr dan phillips the assistant superintendent for the school system as well um tonight our presentation is going to include five different components that we're going to be speaking about the first component is the actual budget components of the approved budget the second one is the school services

agreement or what we refer to as the ssa the third element is the history and trend data of the fcps operating budget and the fourth item is the history and trend data of the tuition bill and the cost per pupil and then the final and fifth one is the city membership enrollment and not only the september 30th but also what's called the average daily membership or adm which is march 31st and that's what's used for state reporting and funding as i said um this slide depicts the components that we're going to be speaking of that make up the fairfax county fairfax city schools budget they include the operational costs the tuition expenses the debt service of outstanding school bond obligations um also some capital lease expenses and also expenses still for uh katherine johnson and fairfax high

school um improvement of the annual contribution for turf replacement and the capital improvement program for our four buildings we're going to be spending the majority of tonight's conversation on the discussion of the ssa which is the tuition expenses as it makes up over 90 percent of our budget and the with the existing debt comprising five percent the cip just over two percent and the admin fee 1.5 percent the other capital turf less than two tenths of a percent a little background on the school services agreement it was originally executed in the early 60s in 1962 and ratified in 1978 it's the driver it's a four-way agreement between fairfax county um the city fairfax council the fairfax county

school board and the city fairfax uh school board and we're going to go ahead and discuss in detail the tuition um really agreement and also the ssa but i'd be remiss without talking about the school services agreement and the incredible value that it provides for the city of fairfax students if you take a look at what's presented here it represents just a smattering of a lot of the extensive programs and supports the social emotional the language opportunities our students have here in the city the avid program special programs that provide closing of opportunity gaps and preparing all students for college and career readiness and successes the athletics the arts and things that would be challenging at best for us to provide had we not had the ssa in in place these are the current

uh county operating costs rather over time that are included in their annual state report and they're a driver um for our tuition bill historically you can see thank you i didn't know how to get that red dot open it's always good to have support um anyway historically you can you can see the increases of 31 million 50 million and then you'll see 80 million to 100 million and then it jumps up to around 200 million and now 300 million increase for the budget in fy25 that's not shown on here the current fiscal year that we're in um and we review constantly all of these operating costs but we also look at their approved budget their year-end budget and uh respectively any of the quarterly improvements

during the school year their current and their carryover from prior year um which really had kicked off the acceleration that i hadn't anticipated certainly in 2024 but it was something that really generated a whole big jump that we'll get to in just a minute but you can see the significant increases over time this chart reflects the cost per pupil for the city over time and our tuition history which reflects the correlation to the fcps operating budget that i showed on the previous slide from approximately fy 2011 to fy 2023 or the 10-year average was 3.81 percent increase in fy 24 it went from the prior year 4.7 increase to a historic 13.71 when i say i talk about the year end that we didn't account for in fy 24 that type of increase of 13.71 i know a few of you are

familiar with that because we had deep conversations about it um was really was really eye-opening and quite a shock because as i said it was historical and now we're expecting an 8.25 percent increase so you can see the increasing trend which correlates the increasing trend from the operating expenditures that i had shown previously this slide reflects the cost per pupil which reflects where we've been over time and shows the city currently is the fifth lowest cost per pupil and significant less than the city of false church which is one of our good comparators that we do a lot of people ask why do we use false church well they have actually less student enrollment than the city does but they're

a self-supporting or self-operating instructional program that they provide for their students and as you can see it's over three thousand dollars per student per year that's currently now that will change because of what we said about the incredible increases that we're seeing um in not only our operating costs but also our enrollment and speaking of enrollment membership plays an important role in both the primary and secondary factors which we'll show in a minute we'll show the city enrollment trends as well so if you look at this now this is the september 30th 2024 data that we show our city enrollment totaled 2,992 city of fairfax students that are enrolled in our schools that is up from last year at this time of 2,922 it's kind of an odd looking difference the 2922

to 2,992 but that's the difference in the increase that we have from the prior year each year we take a look at our opening school enrollment data on september 30th again which is different than the average daily membership or adm that i mentioned that's pulled march 31st with adjustments and that's what's used for the state calculation for funding for all localities across the commonwealth of virginia as i stated earlier we've seen an increase in membership and this this slide depicts the adm or average daily membership as of march each year over trend of years there are a number of reasons for this growth and you all are familiar very well with them they include growth from new development we also have transfers in and transfers out during the school year that affect this and

additional special education reported data of student needs and growth and services provided in our schools the dates for student membership projections and official budget counts as i said are march 31st and the reason why they are past september 30th as i mentioned there are a number of different reasons but preschool data isn't added to it until december 1st and the fcps pre-k is done in in march as well um but again the adm is just one component of the formula for our tuition bill this slide shows the difference between the september 30th and the adm so you get kind of a balancing out of seeing well where are we in comparison um when you take a look at the cemetery enrollment those adjustments that occur

the calculations and the formula that the commonwealth requires us to account for and then what the resultant adm reflect you can see it's getting closer and closer to our september 30th enrollment and our september 30th enrollment we think is trending up and growing and in comparison to fairfax county public schools their growth has been relatively flat where ours has not ours has been considerable the now we're going to go ahead and discuss the 2026 school board budget and the detail of these uh budget forecasts include two primary factors and secondary factors two factors that impact the tuition bill the detail are shown here which articulate the complexities associated with forecasting really a budget that we prepare in december here we are speaking to you on the 4th of march

but we actually prepare our budget and start amassing the information as i mentioned throughout the year prior year fiscal year year end data what fcps may be indicating because we put our preview budget together before they've even presented their proposed budget um and so forth and the timeline associated with that which is which is pretty challenging um at best so when you take a look at some of these different factors they're they're pretty self-articulate i mentioned the 300 million per year one of the things that impacts us and impacts their operating budget greatly is when they took a take a look at the salary increases with collective bargaining it's added a an additional challenge for not only their salaries

but also their health care uh provides us the adm is another component the historical trends and fluctuations are things that we look at as well and the secondary factors the adm as a percent of the total school enrollment for fairfax county and then taking a look at something we get that's called classroom rental which is the number of county students that are attending our schools as well um it's important to note that each student level is calculated separately the elementary middle and high or the elementary and secondary and the reason being is the higher cost of the elementary education is primarily driven by ratio based staffing formulas that require a greater number of teachers per student and also a

higher allocation of specialized support staff to address the unique needs of younger students the lower cost of middle high school education is driven by a combination of factors most notably the teacher load-based staffing formulas and the lower ratios of specialized support staff relative the elementary schools so really the bottom line or in short the fcps spends more per pupil on pre-k education than on grades 7 through 12 and that's reflected in our tuition bill so how we get here well when we take a look at this there are multiple factors that go into the tuition number and really on average we've been and this is really i think a pretty good graphical representation of that that statement approximately

1.7 percent of fcps's operating budget is what our tuition bill usually is historically it had been approximately 1.6 percent but it's up significantly there are a number of different things the multi-year investments that are mentioned here such as pre-k expansion and so on the salary increases that fcps does ongoing needs such as rising health care costs that i alluded to in student services and required adjustments such as either state mandates and one example one that mr martinez and i have been watching closely is the forecast of a one percent bonus that the state usually provides absolutely okay so just so everybody understands what the 1.7 percent is that's the percentage of the overall fcps population that we

represent so that is why we are responsible for 1.7 percent of their operating budget because that is what our student population represents does so just to make that connection thank you for that clarification and and and comment and in taking a look at that it's one thing that we look at over time we look at historically what percent of enrollment what percent of adm what percent all this data is audited each year by the city of fairfax finance staff we also this year performed an enrollment audit to make sure that they weren't charging us for county students in in the that represent city students so we were constantly looking at an auditing and prior to that we had an outside group helping us and assisting us in our forecast and

projections but because of all these increases because of the significant impact because of the fy 24 impact we've pretty much mandated and new financial measures that have been put in place by the finance team of preparing a budget collaboratively we've been analyzing and taking a look at this collectively together in preparation of our budgets so anyway great great point thank you so much chairman pitches so by the numbers another graphical representation of the numbers i mentioned being impacted by the collective bargaining and seven percent salary increase and there are other expenditure categories that i mentioned um the food service enhancements in the health care transportation and also that seven percent increase

are considered their collective bargaining salaries and benefits if you will and that is fcps's increased projection of 240 million dollars the required adjustments that they state the student needs enrollment changes primarily special education increases retirement rate changes and contractual rate changes and insurances ones that they consider required adjustments on that prior chart that was part of that graphic represent 46.2 million of their increase and then ongoing needs their substitute incentive test fees online campus cyber security and the like and multilingual instructional services are about 48 million and then what they call fcps calls multi-year investments which are hr infrastructure technology certified athletic training expansion of the fire

fine arts and what they term inclusives preschool which is the expansion of pre-k for an additional 4 million so as mentioned previously the tuition amount has increased considerably in fact it's been historical increases from the fy 2024 that i mentioned upon the increase of the city of fairfax enrollment as well significant increases predominantly in the fcps operating budget our tuition bill before classroom rental was in fy 24 60 million 955 thousand 83 dollars 61 million basically well over what was budgeted due to these rather significant and unplanned increases as i mentioned again our partnership we implemented a process of working collaboratively and closely with the city of fairfax chief financial officer and budget director

in doing so we were able to find the significant and fund the significant difference for what was that historical 13.71 increase in 24 and thanks to the council's support for that additionally the fy 26 proposed is over 12 million from the fy 25 adopted keep in mind what i mentioned about the budget that's prepared in december a year prior and it's a direct result of budgeting way in advance for the prior year actuals which come in august of the following year that's why we've been monitoring closer than ever before and working more collaboratively than ever had been done in the past i can't stress enough about the development and the budget working close partnership uh... miss riddle and mr martinez and their staff um it it really has been um it's been challenging but it's been really a very transparent and open process

uh we continue to monitor the fcps budget and review their expenditures as well um and so for an fy 26 we've collectively agreed that an increase of 8.25 percent on the current forecasted amount which is a revision from the fy um 25 budgeted amount um especially with those the seven percent all of the different components that i meant mentioned that fcps has in their budget um is why we've come together with our proposed budget amount and again this doesn't account for the classroom rental which is accounted for in revenue but not in expense um prior to the actual tuition bill coming here classroom revenues however um are growing much smaller than the tuition bill um in in relation to it so a local funding effort what does this mean to

the city of fairfax historically in fy 24 uh it was approximately 35 percent of the um general fund that was dispersed to schools based upon what you've heard this evening um and what we are anticipating i do believe that it is going to continue to um that actual amount of contribution is going to increase considerably and in fact the 26 does reflect that the fy 26 budget for schools so here we have our timeline that reflects our being very early as i mentioned in the terms of the budget season especially when the state budget is usually wrapped up around march at the end of march and fcps presents their budget um as i said the beginning of january they're they will be wrapping theirs up there and

um kind of in the shock and awe right now with working with their counterparts in the county on their funding they've proposed a lot of cuts that we are very concerned about the school board has asked us to investigate much further in fact to ask the finance staff to come and present to us from fcps they've committed that they will be doing so but they said right now it's premature because they don't know what the actual um ultimate impact will be on the surface the impacts are rather draconian when you look at fairfax county proposing a cut of the after school programs for example we have an incredible after school program our students need our community is expected it's a very very solid robust

program that's just one of many one of the other recommendations and that would be a huge loss in revenue uh considerable loss in revenue would be if there were to be a change in uh qualifying for freedom to reduce lunch from 40 to 60 percent and so on that's just some of the cuts but they will be keeping us informed because our board has uh demanded that we be kept informed of these incredible and challenging times um so madam mayor members of city council this concludes my presentation and madam chair if you have any concluding remarks um i just think it's important for everybody to know um that we are work trying to work with fairfax county catherine and i i originally i had met with carl sort of casually to

talk about these challenges and then catherine and i met with him formally um requesting that we we kind of put our heads together and we really figure out what what we can do to um um to attack this issue because this is not we cannot as we told fcps we cannot um this is not tenable we can cannot year over year um take on an eight percent plus increase in our tuition costs um so um we've been sort of trying to work with with them and we have a meeting scheduled for the 28th of this month uh both superintendents catherine and i their school board chair carl frisch um mr martinez is going to come i think gwynne's going to come and um lee burden from fcps so we're hoping to um present some options

um i have a few i have a list of um four that i think would uh that i feel are fair we'll see what you know what the conversation is um but we'll keep you all sort of updated on on that conversation catherine will be there so i'm sure you you have a conversation with council but we want you all to know that we understand that this is difficult on our taxpayers this is difficult on all of us as elected officials and that we're you know we're really working hard to see if we can come up with some sort of compromise with the county well let me just iterate the point you made earlier we're 1.7 percent of their budget because our enrollment is 1.7 percent of the counties they are huge compared to us and yet our fates are tied

together and our fates have been tied together for decades and so the fact that they're willing to meet with us is an important indicator that they want this to continue to work for the city of fairfax and they want to support us and we want a partnership that works for us they are staggering obviously under the burden of these school increases as well so i don't know what that will bring but they are willing to sit down and at least explore and talk with us about what might be possible moving forward and so i'm you know i'm very hopeful it all starts with a conversation at this point i will open it up and ask if we've got questions from the dais uh for the school board uh council member hardy chandler

thank you for that presentation and um i it might be premature but i'm just wondering if you're willing to provide a general overview of your four ideas because um certainly we would want to um start to think about how we can support or explore or if there is something that you feel comfortable previewing if it's not too premature no i'm happy to so typically um we uh there's a three to five percent somewhere in that range increase um i think the average is 3.77 percent um we one option the best option i think for the city is to ask them to cap an increase say five to five and a half percent uh that anything beyond that we would not be responsible for um considering the size of our jurisdiction and our tax base we don't

have what they have um a second option would to ask them to cap it for the duration of the renovations um that actually would buy us time because we would they would end up with it by the time we finish there'll be a new school board as well um then another option is to there is his uh precedent for a superintendent to superintendent um addendum to the contract without opening the full contract originally uh we originally when the contract was um first put into place there we did not receive classroom rental that only came about um between superintendent mr george step and um daniel dominich uh after the renovations the first round so there is the option possibly to do something similar where

we ask for an increase in the classroom rental because they have more students now in our schools we're going to go through yet another renovation the academy is almost 600 people i think larger than it when it when it when it was um first opened so that's a possibility and of course the the least or the option that doesn't really bring us much yield is to ask to pay the exact same tuition as they do but that's that's not going to get us to where we need to be so um that's sort of like a top down just some ideas uh council member amos i just want to say thank you and definitely echo your sentiments about this being unsustainable and i've talked about it before so i'm not going to go all into it i sent my budget questions early so we can get out of here early but anyway um so if my

understanding is correct fy 27 is also expected to be roughly eight percent if that's right so let's assume the worst case scenario and we don't get to a solution this time around is there any forecasting that this will slow down at all or or stabilize no council member i want to thank you for that question but um the current trending when you see the graphs that um spike and then expand and contract you can see that the trend is going upward and and as i caution with the collective bargaining and the broader impacts with that it really has created a more challenging environment where normally i would say you were going to have your ebb and your flow you're going to have ebb and tide and you could see it by the graphs of the

charts because of that nuance i i think that it's going to be a continuous upward trend um but i think everybody is looking at how can we sustain these challenging requirements um if we're truly going to have a partnership together so um the long answer is i don't see it as going away anytime soon no i i appreciate your candor on that and it's just i i don't like operating from a position of limited limited negotiating power and you know unfortunately that's where we find ourselves so i just want to acknowledge that unpredictability has a cost too and i think we saw that more recently between the projected and the adopted budget for fy25 so we need to get something done and i appreciate the options you set forth i think setting a cap makes sense uh to not exceed but we need some kind of

backup plan council member hall thank you for the presentation uh a couple questions i think more just maybe clarification for those that are listening at home um can you explain the classroom rental a little bit more as far as how that number comes around is it per pupil is it per seat without getting too far into the contract um and then when it comes to infrastructure replacement and upgrades do our taxpayers pay for things that are done at their buildings when they build new schools those kinds of things and finally sorry i'll just get them all out there um as a global statement and i don't look at you specifically mr martinez i know it's not your decision but um i think this is yet another

example of why our budget cycle our our timeline is really at a disadvantage when it comes to our schools which is such a huge portion of our budget i think we're working on estimates on estimates i know i've said this before but this is just another example of now our um corrected estimate is much higher than what it was and we don't have all the information it's very very hard to make decisions with estimates of this enormity so i'll let you talk um thank you council member hall yeah the um and i know your your accounting background you're going to want to know the details so i'm going to have to follow up with the exact formula it's a formulaic approach about the percent of county students versus city students

and that ratio difference of the number of county students is what derives that actual amount that's why the statement about it being not a comparator and not really covering the the the full load if you will of the impact for example there are 1400 students that attend the academy that are bused in each and every day um to fairfax high school that's a good situation because it allows for a lot of programming and a lot of teachers and so forth but it also is wear and tear on our buildings um and then the second question was about whether or not the well we have to pay any of the freight for any of the renovations and the answer is no um city of fairfax does not pay for fairfax county public schools renovations and

in their buildings thank you i just want to make sure everyone everyone listening is able to understand that so thank you council member hardy chandler so is the 8.25 percent that's forecasted is that conservative or could there possibly be an expansion from there since since it is a forecast i keep looking over mr martinez for that one because it is a joint forecast that we believe is uh conservative but i'll let him speak to that he is more qualified than i sure thank you so the eight and a quarter percent is a conservative forecast i think in discussions that we've had with fcps the superintendent myself previously they were looking at about on potentially anywhere a range between seven to about nine percent

so we sort of cut it in the middle just slightly more above that at eight and a quarter with more time passing as fy 26 starts developing we actually get our true up bill at the end of august of october time frame of this current calendar year then we can revise that estimate if need be either up or down hopefully down and then come back to council with updated projections and collaboration with the superintendent and the school board as well council member peterson thank you uh two questions one if you could just again restate what is driving at least primarily these increases in tuition cost and second how does that compare how does that benchmark not just in this region but statewide against changes in tuition cost

elsewhere well that's the second question is an excellent question because i i don't have the data to reflect what that impact is i do know from my superintendent colleagues that collective bargaining has really had a huge impact across the commonwealth not only in this region but in southwest virginia as well um in regards to and the other question was what are the actual components that are included in it as i mentioned the terms that are used were that there were stabilization components that were a part of their uh fairfax county public schools budget that specifically impacted um and some of which that they referred to were the required adjustments the technical terms that they used were multi-year investments required adjustments ongoing needs

right and then salary increases so if you take a look at the um um the 240 million thank you um madam chair the 240 million of that impact right i was talking about 300 million a year is what they're now proposing each year but 240 million of that impact was seven percent compensation increases transportation and food service enhancements those are salary enhancements because each of those collective bargaining components groups are considered the individual elements um and then health care increases of over 10 percent um comprise that 240 million the term required adjustments are student needs and enrollment enrollment changes and the the statement is primarily special education service increases

retirement rate changes and contractual rate increases like insurance premiums and the like and for service providers that provide service um to the students of fairfax county where services can't be provided those increases as well they consider those required adjustments that are non-negotiable um ongoing needs is a term that i'm i'm trying to understand myself because an ongoing need when somebody says no new initiatives it's the continuation of the substitute incentive the test fees the online campus cyber security the middle school late buses the safety and security major maintenance planning time legal fees summer school inclusive practices and the multi-lingual instructional initiatives those ongoing needs are

programs that had already started so it it's not um and i don't mean to to diminish it anyway but it's not to say we're going to stop or when legal fees i don't know that they can put a control on that to be honest with you um we're going to go ahead and stop these initiatives that the board has already approved whether it's summer school or safety enhancements and so on and then the last one was the multi-year investments now multi-year investment when i talk about pre-k expansion scps has been in the process of expanding early childhood and pre-k uh offerings um that they refer to as inclusive preschool beyond those that were for qualified uh families so it's to provide it to the community as a whole much like full day kindergarten was when it came out so the

expansion of that program is not saying well we're going to stop for now and then we'll implement it it's really a multi-year investment that they're going to continue investing in if they get the funding now this is what was included in the budget um as i said it's early on we don't know where um not only the state is going to be but where fairfax county is going to be because uh fairfax county gave fairfax county public schools a pretty good indicator when they underfunded them by 128 million dollars something of that magnitude so it it really says you know you're going to have to sharpen your pencil folks and and go ahead and see if there are any other additional savings that you can have but i will tell you that

these programs are community commitments and it'll be an interesting uh budgetary process much like they all are thank you uh really helpful when you look at the entire bucket of drivers uh increased costs there's a set that are permanent structural changes it sounds like in a set that are either one time or some time adjustment kind of a catch-up or a reset or something what's your feel for how much of this and this goes to the growth rate issue and what's driving how much of this is something that's a permanent built-in rate of increase and how much of it is just a periodic thing that's going to be over well that's that's an excellent question um when i look at that um councilmember peterson it is

predominantly an ongoing when you talk about salary increases which was the 240 million um and benefits basically when you talk about that increase that becomes a new plateau a new level that's built upon so to me they all become systemic and part of the overall operation and it continues to grow um the the biggest thing and when i talk to the cfo for february senate public schools and i say uh to miss burden how are you going to be able to address a recession these difficult times um the challenges people face and and and she quite frankly has stated to me the only way we can do it is when you look at staffing because the human resource component is the largest portion of our budget whether that's pupil teacher ratio whether it's programs she goes i don't know but when people ask me

you can work around the margins and we've done that the majority of any significant impact would have to come by way of people well and and maybe just to ask it does not sound like the salary increases are indexed to economy no it does not and it sounds like if i heard it right that the annual rate of increase has hyped up and that will continue at some higher level as opposed to we made an adjust adjustment to bump it up but from there forward the annual rate of increase will not be quite so high did i read that right i i don't i can't speculate on what i think those increases are going to be i just don't believe it's tenable i think this is what you're saying as well i'm sorry i agree with you i don't know what

to say about that the problem is that the county is having a very difficult time keeping teachers because uh the surrounding counties are out paying the salaries are much larger much uh bigger if you go teach in arlington even loud now prince william has come up pretty close on fairfax county um so that's i mean that's just the way things are the the they have a huge amount of teaching staff that they have to that they have to pay and if the if they the collective bargaining if they get the seven percent that's not going anywhere they're not going to end up with a decrease in pay and typically teachers i would say what three percent is is the typical um raise but that's why we 240 million dollars that's more than the operating costs have gone up

yeah very long time so i don't suspect that it's going to you know that we're there's going to be a downturn well i'm sorry to ask so many questions this will be my last for the moment but back to the earlier point about benchmarking uh with other jurisdictions those who are competing and i gather successfully by paying more are they not experiencing a similar escalation and similar challenges and would that not cap that competition um your your first point is absolutely spot on and that's what i mentioned the region superintendents we meet and discuss this um we are all struggling with how to address the increase in health care costs and also the salary the competition as chairman pitches mentioned

has become something that our region has been extremely challenging and we one of the things we talk about each uh year prior to the budget is what percent are you looking at what is your salary increase and we don't just talk about salary increase in terms of market scale or cost of living adjustment we also talk in terms of step and then we locked um also go into a lot more detail about what kind of health impact on the health care costs because those those two are two big elements that impact all of us as superintendents and that's in terms of benchmarking when we're talking about that that leveling and competition it's one of those things that um i don't really i see it as a huge challenge i don't really

see a way uh forward yet but i again these are proposed budgets um that that that we'll have to continue to monitor um to see exactly how this plays out because i know there's concern by all the financial members that are reeling and dealing with this as well as the superintendents as to um how can we address these needs that are competing with each other uh while still providing the services our community expects other questions from the dais anything anything so i have a couple questions um can i ask about school lunches do we do our schools have school lunch debt that we carry yes we do all the schools i don't know what the mountain is yeah they do so let's and what's not the city that carries it the county does carry

because actually a local business asked me about school lunch debt sure and so what happens is um it varies between school to school and i know um when i used to work at fcps um there were some schools that had a larger debt that they were carrying than others um the practices had changed over time on how to deal with that debt um no longer can't graduate and things of that nature um that were kind of draconian back in their day but um and that's handled through food service which is also um it's it looked at as a total component at year end to see the pluses and the minuses and see where they are and to work with the schools and to try and collect that that throughout the school year in a very soft approach well like i said a local business spoke to me just yesterday about the fact that

they were interested in figuring out how to help retire school lunch debt in the city schools and i don't even know that that is something we can do where there's an avenue to even do that we could yeah please let me know that individual's name i can talk to them and work with them i'll make that connection and you know i know that delicate delegate danica rome has done a lot on school lunches she's the one i think we had to pass legislation to keep stickers from being put on kids about their lunch debt which was kind of crazy um but you know progress progress um but the but aren't some of the funds and this is why we have to look at state funds and federal funds too because you know the state stopped funding a lot

of our education programs back during the recession of 2008 like lots of cutbacks were made in richmond and everybody adapted and then the economy changed but the money didn't come back right so for a very long time for a very long time we have been underfunded by the state right yes right so that's part of it that we need to keep in mind is that we're trying to figure out how to do something with our budget to pay for our school bill but the but the county's also struggling and all of this is a it's a much bigger conversation you know we have a billion dollar surplus you know we have to figure out what to do with our surplus and yet you know we've got localities that can't pay their their tuition bills or fund their

schools so that's that's one thing is looking at the fact that i understand we have the administration that we have but you know that lasts for four years and then we have something else and so that's coming up and that impacts the one percent too because it looks like we will not get the option for one percent sales tax under this administration but things change so that's hanging out there as a solution talking about state funding getting state investment in our public k-12 education needs to change hopefully that will also change with a different administration but what about funding for free and reduced lunch is that a usda program is it does do usda programs fund free and reduced lunch where does

that money come from yeah they're they're um usd programs fund some of the commodities that come with it but one thing you mentioned the the the jlark study identified that school districts across the commonwealth were way underfunded and that burden was placed on the locality yes it did and then nothing happened i'm you know so people need to keep in mind that that's in a representative form of government you have to hold your representatives kind of accountable for things like having a study that tells you something and then your representatives don't do it um but i'm just looking at anything federal because i don't think we get a lot of federal money that i'm aware of except maybe some special education programs but i but i do wonder about any kind of federal money

that could disappear i guess my question is we're in kind of a bad situation could that bad situation get worse if federal funds are simply removed out of what we are allocating as part of our budget simply put yes and it's significant and uh lee and i the cfo for fcps and i have talked about that it would be significant if not only federal funds but also grants that are federally funded because there are not only positions but programs that are are very important for students that would impact all of us yes and see that's something so we're struggling to pay what we think we know it's going to be moving forward we're forecasting what we think the expenses are going to be and there's no way really

until it happens to understand what cuts in federal funding could mean for us struggling to pay a forecasted budget so i just everybody needs to be aware we can do it we can do our best and we can work with the county but all of us are in the same boat all across the commonwealth of virginia in trying to figure out what monies we have what monies we're going to have and what things could end up source resources drying up and then we have to decide what we're going to do about some of these things whether we just cut the program which i can't imagine that we're going to be able to do or where else we look to keep programs going when they're just our funds for them you know it's just this is real and i don't think it's necessarily feeling very real for people right this minute

starting the third month of a new way of looking at education federally um but i think we all have to be realistic that this budget that's been presented to us has been been very thoughtful i know that mr martinez everyone everyone's done their best to try to figure it out but i think we have to be realistic about the fact that it could be far worse as far as cuts and resources to these programs so if if no one else has any questions i i yes council member mcquillen um what neighboring municipalities have a similar school services agreement as ours no none in the commonwealth and what um previously when we were forecasting um and doing your budget what safeguards or what can contingencies were in place in the event that there was an economic downturn that might be a question for

for mr martinez i don't know so so council member about six years ago um that council at that time actually put into place uh via financial policy something called a budget stabilization fund also known as the bsf um we actually funded that for the first time at the end of fiscal year 2024 there are four or five items or ways to utilize the budget stabilization fund one is actually for a increase in the tuition contract the school's tuition contract that would be allowed to tap into that we are projecting uh potentially for fy25 to utilize the budget stabilization fund to offset some of these projected increases in the tuition contract so that is something that the city in collaboration with the school

board along with the council as well who created this policy and has now been funded to utilize in a way to offset those expense expenditures sure and what currently is the balance of our budget stabilization fund going into fy26 i'm going to go off of memory here but i want to say it is 4.3 million dollars or so which sounds significant but but once you use it it's gone correct and then there ain't no more until fy27 okay actually right so um potentially i mean a lot of things can happen but it just makes it very difficult to try to get something together and you plan and you and you're calculating with what you think you have but we don't really know i think every effort from what i'm hearing has been made to come up with a good realistic

budget for the schools and um and to absorb that into the budget discussions we're having for the city uh any other comments that we have before we thank the school board for coming and talking with us this evening um council member hall just quickly for those that are watching at home please come check out your school board meetings uh council i encourage you to go check out your school board meetings not just the meetings but the work sessions valuable things are discussed um i know i've been getting a lot of questions from residents in the community about the budget about the school budget about the budget in general i'm happy to answer any questions on the school budget but i would strongly recommend that you reach

out to your school board members that's what they're here for i am definitely not an expert on it the past three months i probably wasn't an expert on it for the two years before that but we have experts just for that so please reach out to them see their meetings email them contact them do all the things that will you know help you sleep at night and help you make good choices when it comes to the future and we're going to recognize that we're all doing the best we can here especially given what we're going on in the current environment so thank you thank you very much i echo the fact that we're very transparent here in the city and so if you want to know what's going on there's many opportunities so thank you very much ms casey our next item is the discussion on the q transit

development plan wendy sanford transportation director will provide the staff presentation you good evening mayor members of the city council tonight we are here to discuss q we are here to give an overview of the q transit system in as an introduction really to our transit development plan which is a long-range planning tool for the bus system before we get started let me introduce the team first on our city staff we have chloe ridder multi-motor planner we have charles kudz jr who's the general manager of our q system david summer's our public works director and last but not least we have lucas muller with kim lee horn who is our consultant who is the lead on our our tdp so first in terms of our objectives for tonight it is to provide background about the q bus system

discuss the purpose of a tdp a transit development plan present our draft goals and discuss just some initial analysis really we have just kicked off this project we've done some public engagement and we're going to have some some preliminary recommendations in a few months but we didn't want to come to you at that point without first introducing the project so tonight really is an introduction of the project an opportunity for some preliminary input an opportunity for us to share with you what we're doing and some of the input we've received thus far and we have some questions for you at the end and we'll discuss the schedule and next steps first by way i'm going to do a few slides just about some brief background about q first a little quiz does anyone know what q used to stand for

city university exchange energy saver energy saver okay it's somewhat of a moot point because we have now done a rebranding and we are now q city period university period everyone right everyone but until just about a couple of years ago it was that was what q stood for we there are four routes to gold routes to green routes and a map of our system is up on the screen we operate seven days a week during weekdays we have 30 minute headways and on the weekends we operate every hour we have a fleet of 12 buses we require eight of them to operate our peak service and in terms of our staff we have about 35 staff we have 22 full-time bus operators 15 part-time operators two supervisors and one general manager

mr kunst and our queue office and our bus storage area is down at the property yard just to give a little context about q we are one of many transit providers in northern virginia this map shows the city of fairfax it shows the queue routes it also shows the metro bus routes that serve the area as well as the fairfax connector bus routes just in general in northern virginia it's somewhat unique there are a number of transit providers there's art in arlington there's dash in the city of alexandria there's us there's prtc there's loudon county transit there's a lot of transit in northern virginia but the idea is for us to be seamless to the user and it's something that is a challenge and it's something that we all work on together in terms of ridership what the chart shows

here is 2019 through 2023 but the the data on the side goes back all the way to fy13 but what i'm trying to show you is that we had high ridership it really went down and now we're we're back up a lot of every all the bus providers were seeing very low ridership during covid and what we're seeing is that not only have we recovered to the point where we were before covid we have exceeded that we're up we're up to about a million rides a year in terms of ridership hot spots what you see on the map is a heat map and so what it shows where you see red is where we have higher more higher boarding activity um and so clearly you can see the two highest spots of boardings are at george mason university and at

the vienna metro rail station and then other areas of high boardings are near our activity centers as expected in terms of our budget what is q cost and where does our money come from we have an approximate 5.8 million dollar cost to run the bus system about half of that is salaries and fringe um another 2 million is internal services and what internal services are are really our fleet maintenance costs and then a management fee that q pays to the city for other services like hr information technology and so on the remainder is training uniforms insurance and other fees that we pay and then how do we pay for that and that's what's shown on the right side of the screen um about 920 exactly 927

000 comes from mason that was in fy25 in 26 that is going to be increasing to 950 000 a portion comes from state funding i'll come back to that in a minute the majority comes from 30 percent transportation revenues that's that nvta money that we've talked about that comes back to us from the nvta we utilize that funding to pay for q operating in terms of state funding the city receives assistance from the department of rail and public transportation which is the the sister agency to vdot in the commonwealth of virginia so in virginia you have vdot which is roads and then you have drpt which is transit they're both state agencies we receive funding from drpt to help offset our bills to for both metro we we support

metro for both operating and capital and they also provide assistance to us for our local operating and capital needs all of that money that we receive is held in trust at the northern virginia transportation commission the nvtc and we use that money primarily to pay our metro bills we choose to transfer some of that to assist us with q so that 728 that you see in state funding here that is money that we transfer from our nvtc trust fund to offset our q costs that is not the total of what we receive in state assistance i just want to be clear about that that is what we choose to transfer to ourselves to pay for q operating constrained resources what we're showing here is this blue line and what that shows is our revenue

hours and what that means is those are the hours that we operate the bus system and we could go back even before 2019 that line would still be flat going all the way back we have maintained the same service levels really since this bus system started in 1980 minor fluctuations but what we do see is that even with that same constant level of service that our costs go up and that's the same that we're seeing really everywhere we just had a conversation about schools it's primarily due to our salary costs and just fuel costs all of those costs going up to operate the same bus system so we recognize that we have constrained resources in terms of recent improvements again even though our services primarily stayed the

same we've made some really nice upgrades to the system over the past few years as i mentioned a few minutes ago we updated our logo and our branding you might have seen our new wrapped buses traveling around the city we also have some improved bus stop amenities we've added these little blue seats that you see in the bottom right hand corner they're called semi seats they take up a much smaller footprint than a regular bench they can also fit around a bus stop pole so they're they're a way to provide seating when we don't have as much space we've we have done those at 17 stops at 23 stops we've added some solar powered lights and you can see the photos they're very small lights and the idea is if you're standing at the pole it

helps illuminate the passenger so that for safety reasons and also it helps them to be seen by the bus driver we've also installed some solar powered real-time signs some new bus shelters we have a new real-time data provider so that's if you have your phone you can pull up it's gps based it can tell you when the next bus is coming and we've also taken a bigger effort to expand our marketing and communications for the bus system so that's just some very very brief background about our bus system and now we're going to transition to mr. Muller who's going to talk to us about what a tdp is why it's useful and what we're doing here to plan for q's future all right thank you and good evening as miss sanford mentioned my name is lucas

muller with kimley horn i'm the consultant team project manager for this effort and i've been working with trends agencies around virginia around northern virginia for the past 14 years or so and excited to tackle this with you all and it's really a great time to to jump into this really an opportunity to define what q's purpose is and create a plan for that system and help meet the needs of the city through that effort this is a process that involves a lot of technical analysis as well as really important conversations with stakeholders with members of the public with bus operators all those people that help really develop this blueprint for the next 10 years so a little bit just more on the technical side

of the background so ultimately this is a state requirement we heard about the virginia drpt this is a stipulation to complete this plan in order to receive future state that the funding that helps support those operations and with that there is a set of guidelines that kind of outline the specific chapters which we'll get into in a minute here q did complete a tdp previously that was in 2017 i think we all know a lot has changed since 2017 both in the city in the broader realm of transit and just how people get around in general and so this will look at starting in fyi 26 looking at 10 years in a 10-year planning horizon for what the potential recommendations can be the plans require those to be cost constrained recommendations that

doesn't mean necessarily cost neutral but in order to allow to be able to show that you can provide that funding for those recommendations the plan must be ultimately adopted by the governing body for the system that's that's you all so we certainly want to hear from you all as we go through this process and make sure that we can help you understand and provide feedback into the recommendations that are developed 10 years is a long time to plan transit for uh drpt understands that so you know we want to set that 10-year time frame but there are opportunities to update that on a on an annual basis and flexibility knowing that things change so in terms of those guidelines that i mentioned there's five chapters that are specified in the transit

development plan really kind of walking through a logical process chapter one really where does the organization want to go what is the purpose how do we measure success uh if you ask different people it might be very different to them what a successful transit system looks like and so kind of identifying some of those performance measures uh system evaluation chapter two it's really we dive into the data we look at where people are going where people are traveling how that's changed pre and post covid and then we look at also the performance of the individual routes uh and the system itself chapter three looks at recommendations so that can be anything from a service recommendation you know the bus should turn here instead of there

uh it could be when the buses operate um and it could also be uh more uh planning pot you know a policy or a study to do at some point in the future uh as well and then chapters four and five really about how you implement those recommendations so chapter four takes the capital side so what what are the vehicles what's the technology what are the bus stop amenities things like that that need to build on what your cart what you currently have planned and then also to integrate those proposed recommendations and then chapter five is the more of the operational uh side of where of those uh where those ongoing revenues come from and one of the first steps of that process in that chapter one is to develop the goals and objectives uh for the system

and you know with something like that we certainly we don't want to start from scratch um we recognize there's been a lot of uh planning that has been done in the city um and so we want to build on that we use the uh the existing um the goals and objectives that were developed back in 2017 for the tdp as a starting point but really looked at these all these kind of plans that the city has done as well as looked at kind of some of the trends that we're seeing in other similar agencies and really looked at ways to kind of modernize those goals and objectives for our system um so with that based on that policy review as well as a discussion with some city staff members we've developed these proposed draft goals these are still in draft form but we

do feel these are represent a a strong summary of of the priorities that all have been identified in the city and how the queue system can help us get there so one of the things we'll be asking when we get through is is to hear some of your any feedback or questions you may have about these these goals in particular um as we move on to uh developing those recommendations uh there's a there's a bunch of different inputs to those um as i mentioned those recommendations can be more service changes or they can be policies or studies that may need to be done but really looking at a combination of those technical components market demand uh service service assessment looking at how the routes are performing according to various metrics

and then that market really how where are people traveling when are people traveling that's something that's really critical that we get into and how does the bus service that's being provided align or maybe not align with those current trends and finally one of the most important pieces that feedback that we get from uh you all from members of the public from the people that use this system every day that's the most critical feedback that we can get because they know it best and so we're ensuring that we integrate that into the process and speaking of that engagement we just wrapped up the first phase of public engagement on this effort um we held um we we created a a public survey that was available both online as well as in person uh we conducted some in-person engagement events really went to where the people are

um we conducted bus stop chats uh so had members of our team uh our bilingual street team out talking to members of the community uh we also took a couple opportunities to ride on the buses and talk to people it was a little cold out so we got on the bus with them and talked with them about what we were hearing uh and really promoted that survey um and got uh over 500 responses um which we were very pleased about uh representing a wide cross section um and also you might have seen the bus at the uh chocolate lovers festival if you stopped by that that was a big that was a big hit uh to be able to go on the bus um so briefly so what you'll see here is uh as a preliminary um summary um i mentioned over 500 responses when we took these that was just a couple less than two weeks ago february 18th we got about 150 responses just since then um so what you see here is kind of a an analysis of that preliminary data uh we're working on digesting and and summarizing the full survey that just closed uh last week um but generally as i mentioned uh we did we did get a strong uh cross section of

uh of uh of input um generally the respondents were more racially diverse and lower income uh than the city of fairfax respondents overall um we had about 48 percent of riders say that they ride q uh over uh four or more days a week um so frequent uh frequent use um a lot of use to of q to transfer to other services uh q is pretty unique in the sense of northern uh in the north virginia given its connection you know to the metro rail to fairfax connector uh and serving that relatively small geography you know in the full context of northern virginia um a lot of people were satisfied i mean that's great news i think something uh mr and his team everyone should be proud of over 90 percent of people said that they were satisfied uh with the system um so that's great um great to hear um and certainly want to build on build on that um there was also a um support for the fair free service uh that has been uh that has begun

uh uh so we asked a bunch of questions on the survey and again there will be a uh a full summary of that but a few we want to hit on a few of those uh the critical questions that we thought might be interesting uh to this group uh so first we we asked this is the asking riders uh why why do you ride q uh and those teal bars that you see are all of the uh respondents and then we also broke out uh students given uh how much of a uh uh how much of a uh percentage that mason uh students provide uh to the system so largely those two the two top reasons really to save money or that people don't have a car um we did hear we did see generally trends from from students here uh mirror that um but there was a stronger kind of stronger percentage of students that did not uh own the car um i should say these percentages here just to clarify these are

uh the percentage of the percentage of overall respondents so that's why you'll see the percents not or add to more than 100 so people could select multiple uh multiple options here um we also asked uh people who were non-riders um why they did not ride uh and really the ones that rose to the top here although it was a pretty even you know relatively widespread reasons here but generally about coverage and frequency and that is not surprising we hear that a lot uh throughout virginia uh you know making sure that the the routes go where they need to go and they operate frequent enough um so um and then finally and this is probably the most critical piece to developing our recommendations is you know based on these priorities and needs what do you think you should focus on

uh and again really the the converse of that right people are saying we should focus on uh frequency and providing uh routes to uh areas not served um and and also we heard a lot especially from students about those the the the call them the shoulder time period sometimes you know later in the evening uh earlier in the day uh where service may get less frequent but there there's still uh there's still a need for that so we would love to do all of these but you know certainly important to consider as we go forward you know the constrained resources and how do we how do we deal with trade-offs and prioritize these different elements um so as we mentioned we're just getting started with our analysis here but did want to just share a

couple a couple tidbits uh of what we're seeing so far um and first especially since covid uh travel patterns certainly have changed we're seeing more people travel uh at not just those really concentrated peak periods but throughout the day um and looking at ways that the service can uh potentially align with that um so again most of the weekday frequencies is roughly 30 minute headways means the bus comes every 30 minutes uh and then kind of later in the evening it goes to 60 as well as weekend on on the on the um on the 60 minutes um so while it is great to have coverage you know if you can think about being out there yourself you miss that bus it's really tough to wait another 58 minutes uh to have to to have to do that um so you know that's something that we we want to look at

uh and really trying to identify what are those time periods that really could support additional ridership and seeing how that can potentially scale up another way that q is fairly unique is the route design currently um so q has these two routes that operate in loops so they both run uh clockwise and counterclockwise i every time i say counterclockwise i remind i had a college there was a college presentation one time where someone said anti-counterclockwise and i was like oh that's just clockwise anyway um so there there are there can be um benefits and drawbacks of the of this route design uh it does provide coverage and one seat ride for most riders uh but at the same time that can mean

that they are sitting on the bus for a long time um especially um you know if you if you're trying to go to the to the opposite direction uh what we've heard is you know some people will even get up to to avoid being outside they'll get on the bus that's going in the opposite direction even if it's longer just so that you know they're not they're not outside uh but it's taking a longer uh route around the loop um so those are the types of things that we'll be looking at as we look to develop recommendations one of the things we've heard so far is just you know an interest in some more direct um direct connections potentially to some of the major the major spots um so this is roughly about a year-long process um we as i mentioned we just finished up our first

round of engagement um and are here with you all for this first work session uh we're going to be working the next few months on the technical side developing those recommendations uh sharing those with staff and and and vetting those and then taking them out to the public in that round too uh and then anticipate coming back to you all to brief you on those recommendations get your feedback uh and ultimately look forward to documenting those and seeking adoption uh in the fall um so um with that um appreciate the the time tonight we had a few um discussion questions here that we had identified um so we'd love to get your feedback and thoughts on these as well as you know certainly if there are other questions that you all have uh we can uh touch on those as well thank you all right

thank you for the presentation council member amos i'm just going to preface to say that i love the q bus so uh it saved my butt many times especially when i was going to george mason and i was on crutches and it was a bus i could actually get on with crutches uh that's a complaint to george mason by the way um filled out the survey thanks to wendy so appreciate that too i would agree with frequency being a big part of that i do recall that there were some nights where i wouldn't get home i would arrive at mason at nine o'clock and not be able to get home until probably closer to 10 o'clock so uh that would be a portion of that but it also tapers off at night because usually i was one of two

people at that bus stop so i get that as well um before i ask i had a three or four questions before i ask that the first question i want to ask actually came from a constituent who may have emailed all of us i just don't know the answer uh they were asking specifically about uh lanes specifically for q buses and dedicated yes dedicated bus lanes do you have a general response for that it's difficult to do when you have a constrained environment um it's it's brt bus rapid transit and it can happen actually in a shared lane or in a dedicated lane we do not have plans right now for any dedicated lanes in the city of fairfax it would mean taking away a travel lane for general purpose there are other technologies that are used um signal technologies to allow like a green uh if

the bus is approaching a green light and we have the technology similar to what an ambulance has um it can keep the green longer to allow q so it's called transit priority um there are things that you can do to give transit priority other than just having a dedicated lane but we do not have any plans for dedicated lanes at this time and i'll say this if i'm answering the team feel free to jump in i am not a transit expert by any means so i'm doing the best well you kind of answered two questions in one because one of my questions was going to be about what about an express q bus system which i'm i'm sure you've heard many times when you say express meaning fewer stops uh yeah and like for example vienna metro direct

bus access rather than having to make stops along the way that is definitely something that we've heard just even early on in this process uh a desire to look at that more uh more direct more direct service uh so that's definitely one of the concepts we'll be exploring okay uh in addition to that what are our communications like with our neighboring jurisdictions like vienna arlington places that people would frequent a lot in terms of outreach outreach outreach partnership opportunities in terms of the outreach for the survey um i don't know if if what the where the geography is in terms of in terms of where people responded from um it was mostly mostly focused within the within the city uh looking at riders and non-riders um but certainly throughout this process

you know we we would be working with the staff both you know fairfax connector wamata um and other surf and other surrounding agencies to to look at where those connection points are um there's also regular um miss ritter and uh miss sanford can probably speak to their regular coordination meetings through mvtc through nvta uh where those that where that coordination happens and one other thing is that metro has just finished up something called the better bus network project um and actually lucas and his team were the consultants on that and so they were looking at um improvements to the metro bus routes they also did look at queue as part of that and so um we are taking a regional approach that's one of

the reasons why it's important to look at those routings that are there's actually new um routing taking place in june taking effect in june from that better bus network and so we're looking at where those new routes are going to be coming into the city so that we can coordinate any recommendations with that so that maybe answers your question yes excellent and last question in terms of stakeholder engagement uh old town fairfax business association central fairfax chamber have we also done outreach with them as well we did i mean we used we used uh with the help of our communications director we got the word out about the survey well one other thing that's come up mr amos is um the bump outs some people say hey

i don't like when the bus stops and traffic has to stop can we create bump outs well that creates problems i don't know if you want to talk about the issues we've had wendy with buses that have pulled off of the travel lane trying to get back onto the street best practices are for the bus to stay in the travel lane when passengers are getting on and off of the bus questions comments council member hardy chandler thanks for answering that because i've heard that question as well mine is another family that is positive and positively impacted by q so thank you very much they're very much a part of our uh weekday um i think 10 years is actually a short amount of time in the grand scheme of things will the q

system always exclusively include buses uh i think that's a very difficult question to answer uh for for now the answer is yes um um you know about this like as far as uh paratrans or um absolutely like some other yeah other other considerations i i'm just putting that out there we talked we talked about it um briefly because i know most other transit agencies have trolleys and they've taken on paratransit and things like that it's something we could look into when i think about the changes from 2017 to now i just cannot imagine you know what's going to be happening in the upcoming years and what might be possible particularly in terms of direct routes um clearly the hottest spot is george mason and the second hottest spot is metro right so what are some variations

and that's not a question necessarily to answer now i'm just curious about that being uh thought about and maybe part of future surveys even well some of some of the things that i've talked to wendy about and we're looking into it um if you look at our routes we go in what they call a circular circular motion it may be better to go uh what we call inbound outbound where you go from point a to point b and also um looking at the peak times we talked about probably doing a tripper we put another bus on that particular route and that way instead of waiting 45 minutes an hour maybe be every 30 minutes every 15 minutes doing peak hours um trolleys are good they look good and they're good for like entertainment um small projects but not running regularly on a regular route because they don't

hold up that well um paratransit i was surprised that city of fairfax didn't have paratransit but i think there's another company is metro that provides the paratransit piece but that is something we could look at because we do have a senior community that may want to utilize that service right if i could jump in real quick i'll just say it really comes down to how much we're willing to spend um right now we use the same buses for all of our service and we run all day um when you start getting into different types of buses different types of services express services it just it adds different types of buses you might use a smaller bus you might and you have different numbers of drivers so it really comes down to how

much the city is willing to pay for our transit service and so when we're the direction that i have given to our consultant team is let's really try to see if we can reallocate the existing resources in a different way um rather than looking at huge cost increases but i really think ultimately the answer to your question is how much are we willing to pay and how much are we willing to put forward to support transit so speaking of pay my second question has to do with what is the formula for the george mason component of it since they're such heavy users and there seem to be you know really a strong connection even to the point of the students being pulled out of the survey the student population is clearly a significant one as part of these these discussions and these plans so

i guess the first thing is what is the formula for their contribution and are there ways to expand that so this is a this is an interesting topic of discussion it's there isn't really a formula it's more of a discussion there are many with mason that we have there are many ways to calculate what a subsidy could be you could look at how many students do we have riding the bus i'll say let me just pause there for a second it's difficult for us to know right now how many students are riding the bus because we don't have fare boxes when you have a fare box when somebody's getting onto the bus and paying and and students were free when there was a fare the bus driver would push a button to count for a

student when they would show their id right now because we don't have fare boxes we don't actually have an exact number unless we do a survey of everybody riding the bus so we have an approximation we look at where people are getting on and off to do a best guess again when we have students when we could count it was about 36 percent or students i believe that number is probably higher but again difficult to know so it's not a formula it's a negotiated amount um and it's a partnership with mason so some ways that you when you calculate the formula it comes out that they should be they they could be paying more other ways than the 927 other ways you could look at it they could be paying less so right now we have a negotiated amount that is set

for three years and next year is the four is the it'll reset to another period of three years which is why it's increasing by three percent from 927 to 950. um so that's a short answer i don't know if mr martinez has anything to add so basically everything that wendy just said um i think previously the contribution amount was 750 000 uh so starting in fy 24 was the first year that we renegotiated that contract in the partnership with george mason university as wendy stated fy 26 will be the last year of that initial contract uh that amount is about nine hundred fifty thousand dollars after that there's option two options either one we continue uh automatically based off of the consumer price index which is about three percent and or we renegotiate

after that three-year window at the end of fy 26. but there's other things to keep in mind is that yes we are getting getting students to campus but now so many more students are living in the city and are also residents of the city and so mason does operate some of some shuttles and they run their shuttles through rest and limousine it's a private um transportation service and their shuttles run um to mason and their students um take our buses they take their shuttles but what we're finding is that the students are living all over the city they're also shopping all over the city and so there the shuttles are useful but our bus service is probably more useful in many ways because it's taking the places that the shuttles don't take them so um it's it's

not a direct answer um we would be running the bus with or without them um and the way we look at public transportation is that where it's fewer cars on the road and so regardless of if it's students or or non-students it's still trips that are not taken in a private auto in a single occupancy vehicle council member peterson uh 10-year planning horizon do you have a projection for how much you expect and let me just call it business as usual uh for ridership to increase in the next decade that is something that we will be working through as part of the as part of the analysis uh certainly there are all projections and forecasts uh you might be familiar so the the region the the metropolitan washington region does um region-wide population and employment forecasts

uh for each jurisdiction and then creates kind of a region-wide travel demand model that looks at the potential growth um in you know throughout the region both in population and employment so certainly we will be looking at those areas that are projected to grow both from a population and employment perspective you know in and around the city as we consider that's definitely a one of those inputs into um you know developing developing recommendations will we be setting a 10-year goal for ridership as a part of this so one of the one of the pieces in that beginning chapter is performance metrics um so look and one of the things that queue and all of the systems in virginia is required to report to um the department of rail and public transportation is the general

um are the costs and then the ridership and cost per rider things like that um so that certainly will be yeah that will be a um a measure of performance measure that will be looked at i think whether it gets adopted as an official goal or if that's a set performance measure that will have something we'll have to determine that as we develop the plan if that is a goal how specific are we able to be in terms of the different types of users the market segments and the potential to help them ride more to grow within that do we have a feel for that is that a part of this i mean i'll be honest certainly ridership forecasting especially 10 years into the future is a very challenging and there's a lot of

there's a lot of factors that are outside of our control a lot of times when we look at this we look at we look at access to service as as a proxy or a a a way to look at potential ridership so right now if you were to find if you were to look at a specific point how many people are within you know within a certain distance of that service and how much of people are within a certain distance of high frequency service and how how far can people get with that service um so looking at how we can expand the service to reach those reach the people reach where there are areas of density and people that have propensity to use transit general that are in the same way to build on that um so what you're doing will include um

basically identifying potential barriers to access and figuring out how you can help address them because this is access driven in terms of the amount of ridership that you get i'm sort of understanding this correctly and let me give you an example of i think where this is going perhaps is how taylor made what our long-range plan can be um it would appear you know you've got one segment which is students or younger people who are dashing back and forth you also have commuters and there's a side note here we've got back to office going etc so interesting issues here in terms of what that's looking like but if i understand it correctly from the survey your survey wasn't broken down by different market

segments but if i read the tea leaves it sounds like you've got a commuter segment that's probably neighborhood based that is saying one of the reasons i don't ride is it's kind of hard for me to get to the bus stop and that's a barrier to access and it would be an example of if you want to increase your ridership for people who aren't riding now but could if we reduce that barrier you might come up with a way of doing that i don't know whether it's feasible it may be that structurally there's nothing you can do about it but i'm just wondering how much you would sort of map those kinds of things so we would be doing as well as we possibly could to serve as many as possible yeah it's a great question

certainly the walk a walkable street grid is a key driver to access to transit uh in terms of developing like specific street segment or specific barriers that would come in a more generalized transportation plan effort in terms of you know these are the specific sidewalk segments that need to get upgraded that that would be outside the scope of this project but you know certainly when we're looking you know we have data on each bus stop and what the ridership is there you know and if we see that a bus stop is having low ridership but we're seeing you know that's in a an area that might have you know really high density of population or jobs that might raise a question mark of hey let's let's zoom in there

let's see what might be happening here is it that people can't get to the bus stop is it that the bus there doesn't go to where they need to go so that kind of helps us hone in on those locations but we wouldn't yet be getting to you know specific infrastructure projects as part of this and just my last question building on this do we have good data to indicate generally speaking how far people are willing to walk from their home to a bus stop generally yeah generally um talking about a quarter mile to a half mile um that people depending on um you know again the pedestrian connectivity the comfort of the street it's a lot lower if you're going along a highway where you're getting sped past so you haven't sat in months and months of transportation meetings yet but no no no i'm

talking about like with the transportation planning board so between nvta and nvtc i know a lot about bus rapid transit and the last quarter mile and something called trail to transit and this is how people get to the to the train station or to the bus stop generally it is about a quarter mile but when they talk about trail to transit they're talking about things for instance pedestrian paths so if we don't have buses that go to every neighborhood but a neighborhood has a pedestrian path that goes to where the bus stop is on a major road that cuts the amount of distance on foot to get from their homes to the bus stop so trail transit is a thing and and also the last quarter mile so come on chloe talk about it

talk about it she's really the expert i just sit in the meetings and try to like keep up well so you did mention um there's different connections to it scooters bike share um and then pedestrian paths but one thing i did want to mention is we're looking at the small area plans where we're looking at higher density and as we look at any development project that comes through we also are trying to look at where we can put bus stops really close to those higher density areas because that is one of the access questions is if the bus stop is right there and then if we look at express service as one of the options um that'll give you an overall shorter trip um versus having to like lucas mentioned right all the

way around before you even get to metro and then you're still in metro for another half an hour so having a really long trip is also a barrier so we want to be thinking about the overall trip time um and how people are getting to the bus stop from not just to the bus stop but from their home to their destination in the most efficient way possible well and so it sounds like what you're trying to do is have a plan if you will or an approach that enables access for high density areas but also for low density areas and it's a different set of options you mentioned scooters et cetera et cetera so we have these different situations or segments and you're trying to sort of cover all of them if i'm hearing this

correctly when you talk about bike share or scooters those are actually also considered transit and so you have the scooters which are not docked you have your bike share which are docked and sometimes there can be bike share we don't but have undocked bike share but you consider that all part of your transit system because they address that they call that the last mile so council member hall so i have a number of questions some are specifically related to the summer just in general just to answer or to address one thing that you said though mr lucas um was that um am i on yeah i am yeah okay uh you mentioned that we needed to think about where we have sidewalks or opportunities for people to stand and wait for a bus correct okay i do just want to point out that i don't think that

that should be a barrier to putting a bus route through a place because we put kids on school buses every day where there are no sidewalks so to me that's not the it is a priority sidewalks are absolutely priority but putting a bus somewhere because there's not a sidewalk is still a priority to me um so if you could pull up um slide three for me just we can look at the map together a little bit um so i think some of the barriers of the system in general for looking at what we could improve is really hitting some of those neighborhoods so for example i'm going to pull out cobdale because that's where i live in order to get to the bus from my house we would have to walk about a mile in order to get to katherine johnson middle school where we would then pick it up um it seems to me that

some of these other neighborhoods even if we could just for example put a bus that went down norman avenue or put a bus that went through um sorry i can't really see some of the other roads here but some of the other neighborhoods just kind of a primary road that goes through them right to me that people are willing to walk that quarter mile that half mile to potentially pick up transit whereas i'm probably not going to walk a mile if then i only have to go to the grocery store right like that's not it's not super convenient for me to think about doing that um and i do agree that there could be some additional thoughts given to the frequency of how things run because again you miss that bus you're not going

to stand around for an hour right i mean you probably won't maybe you will or maybe you've lost your job now because you're not there anymore um so back to the overall ridership though so we've talked about kind of who rides um and i recognize this is not an easy answer but do we have any idea what percentage of the ridership is actual city residents i know we did this the student population but do we have any way of knowing who else is riding besides that so um can look at the specific question i believe we did ask something in the in the realm of that um and we can see what those final numbers are i do want to make sure it's clear though that this was not intended to be a statistically significant survey in terms of a

representative sample um so there are ways to do more detailed rider surveys where you can really get those definitive numbers it's a very difficult question to answer um you know the students are a little bit easier but also still difficult because even though we see people getting on and off at mason people might be they might live somewhere work somewhere else and still might be students um with the non-city residents also difficult to know you can look at who's getting on in the morning at metro that potentially might be people who are non-city residents utilizing q because they're taking the metro and then getting on there it's difficult there's other transfer plate locations outside of the city it's a difficult question to answer yeah i i understand and and i'm not really

sure how to make it better but just trying to think through some of the things um for those watching at home what is the minimum age to ride the q bus technically is there a minimum age by yourself well yeah i mean like we see middle school students on it is there a specific age that is supposed to be riding or not so the rule of thumb would probably be somewhere around 12 13 without with a without adult somewhere around 12 13. that's okay that's great because that that's our middle school population and i know that they use it a lot to get around including my kids yes um off topic sort of but when were the buses wrapped with the new logo um they were just completed about six months ago and they

were started about a year and a half ago it took a little while because a bus took about a week each bus took about a week to be wrapped um but about six months ago they were completed okay um and so i understand we get the portion of funds from george mason yes and i understand that we use the nbt trust fund that we choose for that 728 the arpa funding of 400 000 those funds are going to be that's extinguished at the end of this year right this is the last year of the arpa funding so next year if we were looking at revenues the lines would be mason subsidy state funding 30 the arpa would go away okay and then the 30 percent i'll ask for myself but for those that are watching at home too but the 30 funding that's

the money that we put in and then kind of multiplies and then we bring that back or this is we're just coming up with 3.5 million out of our city budget no so this is the funding that was generated from the new taxes and fees that were put into place back in 2014 um 30 those taxes and fees all go to the nvta the northern virginia transportation authority nvta different than nvtc 30 of them 30 of the taxes and fees come back to the jurisdiction and where they were where they were raised and they were raised 70 percent stays with nvta for regional projects so that 30 percent money comes back to us it is held in the um transportation tax fund so if you were to open up your budget to the transportation tax fund in there you're going to see two sources of money the 30 funding and the cni

the commercial and industrial tax there are different there are different requirements for how those funds can be spent 30 funding um can be spent on projects that increase capacity and also projects uh public transportation purposes and so we are allowed to use our 30 percent money for uh the operating expenses of our transit system the c and i money the commercial and industrial tax at 12 and a half cents on property zoned commercial or industrial that can only be used for projects that um increase capacity so that c and i money cannot be used on transit operations that's why we use the 30 percent money but it is not general fund money that we are using to pay for q okay so is it safe to say

then that the average resident is not directly paying for the bus service they're paying through the increase the taxes and fees that they pay that would be that that go to nvta okay and that's generated through all the other sources that you just said before right so those are the transit occupancy tax the additional sales tax uh the grantor's tax those are the taxes and fees that everyone in northern virginia not just city of fairfax is paying because all of the locale so that all and all of those taxes and fees the money from that goes to the nvta jurisdictions can choose how they spend that 30 percent money our jurisdiction is choosing to spend that 30 percent money to pay for the q system okay so

we didn't use it to pay for the q system there would be an opportunity to use it to pay for something else correct but we're still paying in that as a resident on a daily basis correct okay thank you yeah i was asking about the students in the george mason but we can't really answer that um did in this survey result or survey that they took did we ask them where they want to go for example you said that there were places that there wasn't a bus stop where they wanted to go where they needed to go or where they were trying to start from did we ask them kind of an open-ended of where would they like to see a stop there there were some open-ended uh there were some options to provide open-ended

commentary um we're still working through what those are but we did ask that okay uh and then final i guess almost finally uh do we ever do kind of counts at each stop i know you said that there's hot spots and that like do we go to mason and click click click click seven people got on here and then they got off at this stop i know that's a lot of record keeping one day but could we do counts over the course of you know one week or one month or something to generate that information to find out what specifically to find out exactly how many people are getting on at mason and of those people you know roughly where did they get off did they take it all the way to the metro or did they pick it up in the neighborhood and then they went to mason or was it a person who got on in the morning and

pretty much wrote it all day long for something to do and then didn't get off until you know six hours later so one thing is that on our buses we have something called automatic passenger counters so they sense who is getting on the bus and getting off the bus at every stop so we do have counts at every single bus stop for how many people are getting on and how many people are getting off we're actually right now in the process of validating our apc data we have people on the buses counting how many people are getting and getting off to make sure our apcs are working correctly so we're in the middle of doing that we don't know though that if you get on at a certain stop we don't know then what stop you're

getting off at all we have are numbers we don't know how long you're riding where you're getting off we don't have that origin destination however you do have some of that didn't weren't we talking about that yesterday with james uh yes yes so there's a yes there's a a tool called replica data which is a data source that comes from anonymized aggregated cell phone location based service data that can show general travel patterns of where people are going uh and that's something that's that's very can be very helpful and a relatively new uh exciting data source in the in the realm of of planning okay um i also want to mention you know if the i mentioned when we get to recommendations there's most of our

energy and time will be focused on those service recommendations but it also op says an opportunity hey if we if we think it's a crit if you all collectively think it's really critical that there is that more detailed origin destination and or rider detailed survey that can be something that can be programmed into a future year to say let's make sure we try to allocate funding in the future and see what other grant funding sources there might be to fund a more in-depth survey like that okay uh yeah i'm not trying to spend future money at this point i'm just trying i'm just trying to understand what we have already asked people that we could then be able to try to figure out what we can do with the data and understand

it better um there are limited resources we want to make it you know great for all i think personally i think trying to hit some of those other areas maybe that are not being accessed might be better um and you know maybe there are certain times where there is a bus maybe that kind of speeds to a destination rather than picking up a couple other spots but i don't really know how feasible that is with 6.2 miles of what we have and what we have to work with so thank you for the presentation and for all you've done i know it's not an easy task when you don't always know what you're trying to get out of it so thank you appreciate it council member hardy chandler okay very very quickly i'm just curious how you got the people who didn't ride the bus

uh that's a great question so we the in person so the feet the survey was promoted in a variety of different ways so it was promoted online um and that email you know there were emails sent to various community members um so i would imagine that some some of the responses came from there i also mentioned we're at the chocolate lovers festival so i would imagine there might be some visitors there or people that might not necessarily use the bus but um we we did get predominantly rider feedback i think it was about three quarters riders to uh one quarter non-riders which i think is a relatively good split for this um and so both both of those both of the inputs it's helpful there because ultimately you know i think we would all want to see if we can

capture more of those riders those non-riders in the future and to follow up on that i'm very interested and intrigued a little bit about the unique queue experience as a draft goal can you kind of touch on some of the factors that contributed to that making it to the draft and is there some visioning around what that might look like yeah it's a great question um and you know it kind of came up in our discussions really you know a lot of these a lot of these goals besides that one maybe that you look are would be fairly common among other transit systems in northern virginia and there was really a desire to you know okay we are a relatively small city within within the context of northern virginia we take really strong passion and interest in making sure that we're serving the customers

serving the riders and making that an enjoyable experience and seeing how we can kind of make that um make the experience unique to what uh what q is i think this may have originated from uh something uh when you had said i feel like if you talk to people who ride q people who ride q love q um it's something unique i think um i don't know if you talk to people who ride connect or feel the same way and it's not it's just it's it's we're a small system we know all our drivers if you take the same route every day you're going to know who your bus driver is it's that's it's i think a gem in the city of fairfax this bus system and i think it's different than some of the larger providers because we can be more um

familial i guess i don't know if that's the right word and so i don't know if charles you want to speak to it but you know we have great customer service we have great drivers and so i do think that having a unique experience is something that is particular to q that is not particular to maybe some of the other systems yeah i would just like to add that it's a lot of work i mean just the fleet guys who keep the buses running i mean we're running all these buses constantly keeping the buses clean picking up the trash at the bus stop making sure all the signage is there charles making sure all the drivers show up and ride their routes and bint the routes being on time it's an enormous effort to run this bus system

and the fact that we get such good feedback from the residents is a real credit to how hard those folks work so council member mcquillen thank you for the presentation um i really love the solar lights and signs i appreciate them i've noticed them everywhere um were any of the students that were surveyed were they high school students by chance or do you know of any of the students happen to be the question the question that we asked i believe it was just um like how how do you would you describe yourself so i think it was just a student it was just a student in general um i think i would say most most of them were probably gme students but i don't think we have a split okay i echo council member hall's comment

on the route i also live in the left if you're looking at the map i'm on the yellow route in the left portion and my son did ride the queue for quite a while after high school following you know right out of high school um at the end of the day and it would take a long time for him to come home so that was one of the biggest drivers for him not to ride the queue was just the long ride because of the route so having something where you can kind of see where they're coming from and where they're going more direct routes might be helpful um i also wanted to ask do we take into consideration like school dismissal times or big activity times in the city when the queue bus is on their routes so that's that's

one of the things that we're looking at um they consider like uh peak times like you know when the most folks are riding the bus so that's something that we we're looking at currently and like i was telling you about the tripper sometimes you may have to put an extra bus on there or you may have to maybe split the route i think the circular motion this is just me based on all the years experience i have i think the circular route makes it seem longer as opposed to inborn inbound outbound yeah because as you if you see a bus going inbound you also see a bus going outbound so it shortens the time so you go from a to b and then express service we talked about that because based on my experience

um they love the walmart george mason and in vienna metro so if you could combine those three into an express route i think it would change a few things excellent thank you um i have a question on one of the slides why is the service time 60 minutes on the weekend is it just because it's more busy is it so on the weekends we run four buses at a time um i would say the weekend is probably a little bit slower than the weekday so that might have something to do with it four buses okay and then um you noted sorry were you finished i didn't mean to and then you noted that the revenues are flat operating costs are increasing uh will this plan the feedback from that the recommendation will you provide recommendations that will offset the expenses

that you're seeing the increase in expenses will that be included in the plan recommendations um we'll certainly have to look at you know what the what the potential forecast increase over those 10 years could be um similar to a lot of the conversations tonight you know there will be a certain level of inflation that is assumed um the plan does require you to outline um the fund like kind of the funding splits and the um you know the the sources of funding that could meet those those increases okay so but no um like creative recommendations of public partnerships or anything like so i think well part of part of those funding sources could be you know additional new you know additional funding sources

um or changes to existing agreements you know we it's not we're not doing an in-depth you know revenue study per se but certainly be able to look at you know what other funding sources might be out there okay um and then when we were charging riders how much did we charge i believe when we stopped was it two two dollars or i'm forgetting i believe the last the last fair we charged was a dollar 85 for okay for adults um and it was lower for seniors and high school students i know it's been a while sorry i don't remember i feel like it was it was somewhere around there yeah yeah thank you thank you councilmember hall thank you um so if a person is on the bus sees something says something has a problem either be it with the driver

with another person on the bus this is a resident question um who do they contact who should they reach out to to kind of bring that to staff's attention so so you're referring to one of the riders so basically when a rider sees something they normally uh contact the driver indiscreetly okay or or they may call us on the telephone i received a lot of calls and then we based on the information or what's needed we we take care of either we forward it to the local law enforcement or i may ride up there to see what's going on or we may make some suggestions okay and if they have other suggestions just in general though are who was the best contact point for that would be me or yeah they call one of us believe me they when

something's not going right they call okay so they know the number they know yeah i mean i know some of the people you know about first name basis i mean because we talk a lot about different things okay um and just a council member mccullin's point um if i did the math right it looks like at a cost of 5.8 million for the bus per year with 984 000 riders it's about 5.89 per rider that is correct regardless of where they're going just kind of as a ballpark number that's okay thank you anyone else council member bates thank you so um personally i would uh more likely um want to see more frequent service on the q bus and i think that the majority of us on the council want to see um you know at least explore more frequent service or uh you know expanding the routes um i think that

those of us who live closer to existing routes want to see more frequent service than those who live further from existing routes want to see the routes expanded so um and if you look at the uh the survey data it looks like it's kind of an even split those top two spots as far as we want to see between more frequent service and then expanded routes and with maybe a slight lean toward frequent service and so certainly uh things that i think are worthwhile to look into and we'd also i think mainly want to look at which um you know the different options and what's you know more cost effective to expand service and what would yield the greatest um increase in uh you know in service um and uh potential riders

served i guess um and then also uh traffic signal prioritization of q buses was something else that i think um that individual who emailed us had raised as council member amos mentioned um and i think that it sounds like that would be a lot more feasible than a dedicated lane especially chainbridge road can't really do that you know unless you take several front yards pretty much from what i can tell so um definitely something else to look into very valuable feedback from from the resident who emailed us um yeah so that uh that's all i have for now thanks thanks and yeah i think you know you all and the the people so far in the survey really you know capture that this is the classic trade-off of transit planning

right frequency versus coverage um and it's often not a blanket solution right you can't just pick one or the other you have to understand you know where where and what qualities of of streets of neighborhoods you know can can support that frequency versus you know maybe there's some lesser coverage um so you know that's the dealing with the constrained resources where can you really get the the best you know the best investment uh and it's it's challenging uh and it's it but that's you know where what we're going to look at um and come up with the come up with the best options possible okay a couple other things back in the olden days back in the olden days um so the first campus at the first dormitory at mason opened in october of 1981 it was supposed to open in august of 1981 so when i

came here there was no campus to move on to so i lived with my cousin jim graham in falls church in the sleepy hollow neighborhood the only way to get to class every day was to get on a metro bus get off in fairfax city get on the q bus and get to the campus in 1981 so for people who didn't have a car it was a lifesaver i think people are still using it that way so when i looked at the survey results people are not necessarily riding around within fairfax city some people are coming in either on a connector bus or a metro bus getting on the q bus to get someplace they want to go that the q that the connector or the metro bus doesn't go unless we put ankle bracelets on people and track them in a very weird surveillance way we are not going to necessarily know how many or how many

people riding the q bus literally came into the system or they're riding the q bus to connect and there are some bus stops in the city where obviously they can do that they can get off the q bus at a bus stop and pick up the metro or pick up the fairfax connector so that makes it a very important key piece to regional transportation as far as where it doesn't go it doesn't go to fair oaks mall which is one of the reasons i think mason put in the mason shuttles is because our q bus never went to fair oaks mall so when my daughter who worked for lord and taylor i don't know maybe three years we we lived over in camp washington she took a metro bus she took a metro bus from our neighborhood such a

short such a short distance from fair oaks but you couldn't safely walk it and the q bus didn't go there so she took a metro bus back and forth to work every day so these are the some of the ways that when we think about how people inside the city and outside the city are using the q bus there's a lot of variety there and we don't necessarily have our arms wrapped around it i think the survey is great and we're getting great survey results but we really still don't know but i can tell you going all the way back to 1981 there's a lot of people getting on the bus in the city who came here on another bus um the other thing is the transportation plaza at fairfax corner that they recently opened and there's

a lot of buses because they're kind of shaping that to be a major transportation hub in the county which is right on the edge of the city so our q bus does not go to that transportation plaza is that a potential in the future i don't know i don't know it's a question of how much we are willing to pay for it so for a bus to go out there 15 minutes and come back another 15 minutes that's another 30 minutes and and we'll lose riders who don't want to sit on the bus for it to go out there so it's really another route the same question came up a few years ago about going to vre um we were asked can this go to vre well it can but what's the trade-off right you're gonna if you're extending and that's another

15 minutes that way and back and so people don't want to sit on the bus for that long and at there's a certain point where they say this is just too this is this bus ride is too long and so it becomes a new route which is more money so ultimately all of these questions about frequency coverage where we go outside of the city i mean i get calls i there was a unit there's another university down 29 like inner something international unit what was it called yeah yeah international university it's on 29 yeah because something they called me and they said can you extend your service and come down there because our students come from other countries and don't and they come without cars um and you're

just far enough out the city outside the city they can't get there how about northern virginia community college these are the questions that we get asked all of these destinations are worthy destinations and so it's a question of how much do we want to expand our service area how many more routes do we want how much do we want to spend i don't know that we need to expand everything but what would be better is if we had technology or an app that made it easier i know there transit out apps out there because i use them but if people are trying to get from international university someplace for them to understand you get on the connector bus and you get off here and then you get on another but that's what i think is missing is that we don't have a very

integrated transportation system where it comes to buses we there are transit apps sorry i didn't mean to interrupt you but there are transit apps where you can put in your start and destination and we have now we have one on it's a service planner and we use the one from metro and you can and it will tell you to switch buses it's people don't like to once you get past a one seat ride two seat rides are less popular well i think but i do think education is really a key piece of this the other thing even within the city like when i first got in the mayor's seat and there was i think it was spotlight on the arts and they had a map of where all the things were taking place in the downtown and it showed all the parking garages and none of the bus stops you know

this is a mindset too it's kind of like we should be showing people where the free bus stops or you know but but we don't necessarily we have not as the city embraced this asset we've had for 40 years into something where we are helping people understand how to use the asset so i was reading to kids yesterday at providence elementary school i'll tell you what the book was it was sofia valdez future prez okay and she oh god isn't that great and she like she creates a park out of a trash heap and um she goes to city hall and talks to the mayor and the clerk and she has petitions signed and she she does all these things anyway had a very robust conversation with this fourth grade classroom and i don't know how

we got on the q bus i kind of get on the q bus we talked about invasives too but anyway i asked if people if these students knew what the q bus was and like maybe a quarter of the students raised their hands that they knew what the q bus was and the rest were like what is the q bus so i explained what the q bus was and then this one student says well i rode the q bus with my mom when we didn't have a car and i said well that's wonderful and then the student next year goes well i would like to ride the bus but i don't think my mom would let me i'm like well maybe the idea is that you and your mom could ride the bus together to see how the bus works so lots of conversation about the q bus in fourth grade

but this to me is where it starts i mean if the kids don't know i had to describe what the q bus looked like and the fact that it went to the public library and the middle school and it had to stop at the high school you know things like that i just think we have this asset i'm not sure that we have to change things or invest in things to simply think differently about how we leverage the asset how we make sure residents understand how to use it how people understand how transit apps work so that there is a smoother way of getting around without us creating more routes getting more buses or expanding it it's just been a like i said it's an asset the city's had such a long time that i just think there

are things we could do to make it more valuable and for more people to use it the other survey result i noticed is that people who said they took it because they couldn't physically drive and i know that we've got nb rides we've got you know metro access for people with disabilities but i don't know if we're really reaching communities like for instance older residents or people who could drive but maybe would be actually safer not driving if they knew they could get around on the bus so is that is that just a segment of the population where we're just not doing a good job saying it's clean it's safe the bus drivers know who you are you can get around you know without being in your car and i just think

more effort on that front with information and helping users understand whether they're young kids or whether they're older residents or whether they're students from other countries who are used to a different kind of transit system that may find our transit system fragmented and have difficulty embracing it i would just like to see us figure out how to do more with what we already have too i mean i think that's just a reasonable expectation yes council member hall one more thing i know wendy you and i emailed about this before but i think putting out some more promos on facebook on our website if we could try to just do a couple of different ads here and there maybe in different languages i know we're not completely there

yet with all of our communication by any means which is a hope goal but i think if we're trying to hit other targets of audiences that we know we're riding the bus it would be great to put it out in their language thank you all right are we good oh council member peterson do we know what the price sensitivity is for charging to ride in other words how many how much drop off would there be if we charged x cents dollars whatever so to get a specific answer would we would have to do you know a more more detailed fare free study um i mean generally i would point back to the that the ridership graph that was showing that even before um you know at before the ridership levels now have exceeded what they were

pre-covid you know when there was when there was a charge um so you know there there has not been a detailed study of what is the exact number i will say the only the the only the only transit service that i know of especially in northern virginia that is actually making money is the loud and the loud and commuter buses all the way from loud and into dc those were the only ones it is a inherent component of transit that it is that it is part of this you know a service that's that's provided um to to the general public and you know it not as a you know the percentage of revenue that comes from transit is on bus side tends to be between five and ten percent of the overall revenues i think the word is infrastructure

because we are thinking of this as something that makes money or it should make money or it should offset the cost of operating it but it's like charging for a sidewalk or charging for the roads we think of transit somehow differently than basic infrastructure but dash removed their their fare boxes because it costs them more to collect fares cost them more to collect fares than the fares they were collecting and that's why we we do need to think when you're thinking about how many dollars or cents but but is the effort of collecting that money even collecting the coins and counting it and depositing in the bank and the staff time for managing the boxes cost more than they were collecting so there is kind of

this idea that a certain amount of transit or transportation is infrastructure it's how you move people around an area uh fair fair enough although we're deriving zero revenue as i understand it from riders right now that is correct we have a four-year zero fare program and we're in we'll be entering the fourth year in fy26 and knocking the door at a million rides a year knocking the door at six bucks a ride in terms of cost 5.8 million divided by 985 000 right if i got my math right billy you'll have to check me here uh and i think that all practical considerations uh considered if it's feasible is it possible and how much of an effect does it have on ridership to have some partial participation in this 50 cents a dollar whatever i mean we have a tight budget right so so we will be

doing next year um an evaluation of our zero fare program so um we will be looking at these questions as to our ridership how much would we potentially lose it'll be looking at that as part of that evaluation so we'll be doing that in preparation for the decision that this council will have to make before fy27 so we're obligated for during fy26 to remain zero fare um as the mayor has already stated bus systems do not do not pay for themselves no bus system does a good bus system is getting 10 percent back when we were collecting fares the only people who were paying fares were um well so let's say who was free all mason students staff faculty um and high school and middle school students we had an

agreement with the with fcps for that so who were paying were um either commuters or other adults um transit dependent people um and a lot of the commuters were getting federal benefits don't know about the status of that but we were charging fares potentially to people who least could afford to pay the fares and so there is a question of how much do you bring in is it worth it um and how much ridership will you lose so i don't know the answers to your questions but um we will be looking at that next year i could add a few things too also so initially when the the free fare program came out a lot of that money came from the state and as time went on it became lower and lower and lower so you could make a decision whether

or not you could make it without the fare what i do know for a fact because i came from some of the larger transit companies one fare box now will run you anywhere from 50 to 90 thousand dollars so you have to buy a fare box then you have to find somebody that can work on it which is slim to none then you have to worry about maintaining it then you have to worry about people counting the money it you might spend over a hundred thousand dollars a year just on one bus in a fare box so i mean i i go all the way back back in the day where you just drop the money and they flip the lid and it drops down in there them days are gone so you have to look at the you know you know both sides to see if it's even feasible to do

so and no transit agencies have ever been in made that much money in uh revenue they came up with different ways i i talked to wendy about this but when is the boss you can make a little bit of money in advertising to make up yeah yeah that was a conversation that was had with previous council many years ago about advertising on the buses not that we couldn't have it again because we could um no i i do think too that when you say the like again the fares the cost of collecting the fares that if you're looking at data and and evidence based it's just not there that costs more to collect it than you're collecting but the other thing is encouraging people to ride the bus of all ages what is the what is the flip

side of not offering that we're trying to reduce cars and parking and traffic and we want to be more pedestrian friendly we want a city that's walkable and safe and to me getting more people on the bus and less people in cars and offering multimodal which is the bikes and the scooters overall benefits the quality of life inside the city i'm just a very big proponent of buses generally and at some point we'll probably go electric i mean all electric i mean that's coming down the road there's by the way vml is hosting something on march 14th in mclean about autonomous vehicles i mean there are all kind of things coming when you talk about how far how long ago 2017 well you know what was life before ride sharing

and scooters and even having bike share in the city i mean things change so quickly things that you didn't dream of are suddenly what you use all the time and so even though we we're doing our best to kind of forecast and figure this out we have no idea what the technologies are that are coming that could just upend a lot of what we think we know about what's going to happen i know you don't like ambiguity but like i live in that space i mean i just live in that space tom i'm like just things happen and you there you just can't always just put a box around it because you can't predict the things that are going to happen you don't anticipate like scooters ride sharing what did we do before ride sharing we

did something but now we just call a lift we call an uber any any other final thoughts this has been fun though i really enjoyed every minute of this yeah thank you thank you very much thank you very much all right miss miss clark who do we have up next the last work session item is a discussion on the proposed fy26 budget i'll recognize brian foster city manager for the discussion thank you mayor members of council um i will kick this off because i have of course we have um gwen and jc from the finance department here as well melanie's here brooke is here david is here as well if there are things that may be come up in their area i presented the budget last week um and you of course had these lovely um thick books to take home and and and peruse um with lots of the

um information um so we sent out um just a suggestion of how we might want to structure the discussions certainly not set in stone and you're welcome to change the if you know the direction but uh we wanted to sort of help you focus on you know manageable chunks um as far as the discussion goes um so we were so for tonight we were just basically um focusing on the general fund which of course is our largest fund um and we don't necessarily have a specific presentation i've given you a presentation um we can review some of that if you'd like um but where we need to be on the schedule um is next week um you will be asked to set uh an advertised tax and i said since i said excuse me you to decide a tax

rate on which to advertise it's not the rate you're going to set you're not voting on the actual adopted rate um so what's been proposed um is for real estate and that's what we're focusing on when i say that we have the deadlines it's the statutory um advertising requirements that we have before we have the public hearing um and so to keep us on our schedule um that the the what's recommended with the budget that was presented was 9.5 cent increase which would take the rate to a dollar 12.5 or a dollar 12 and a half um as a reminder um and this might and for the folks the council members that that are new to the dice and this is your first budget um i typically recommend to council um to actually advertise a rate

that is higher than the one that's recommended and the reason is because um you're still going to be having discussions and what you want to do and if you want to include other things or make modifications that would require additional revenue that gives you the option to have that as a possibility because by law whatever rate you advertise when it comes time to adopt you can always adopt a lower rate but you cannot adopt a rate that's higher than that without starting the whole public hearing process again which takes time and you have to go through the same advertising requirements so it certainly does not obligate you to have a higher rate than what's been recommended but it's just really more for your

flexibility however you you ultimately choose the rate you want to advertise whether it's the recommended rate that's in the the budget that i presented last week or it's some other rate but the key point that you need to understand is that you can only go lower than the rate that you advertise you cannot go above it without starting the process over so again typically that's what i would i recommend have recommended in the past to governing bodies just to give them that flexibility that's ultimately where we need to be next week and so we're going to have another work session next week you do not have to decide that tonight by any stretch but that's ultimately that's your first decision point that you'll need to make

what did they do last year do you know so last year and then more recently they've council has advertised the manager's proposed rate and the main reason for that is because there has been very little fluctuation in the sense of either a three cent or one and a half cent increase so nothing as the current budget is being proposed at nine and a half cents okay council member amos uh just to chime in so i'm not exactly sure how the structure is supposed to work for tonight so i'm just gonna i guess jump to the tax track i support uh proposing the manager's recommended recommended tax rate not the tax rate we're going to adopt we don't know i would prefer not nine and a half but i think additional research is required i mentioned in my budget questions i sent

earlier i am concerned about the tariff war about to get into and how that's going to affect cost and materials moving forward at least for the next few years so we need to afford ourselves flexibility again we can go lower but i think you know cutting off our own foot here is not necessary uh since we have a couple more months of discussion upcoming and i have like two other comments but i don't know if i should do that now or just wait till we so we can we it's it's your meeting we can we're flexible um to you know some of you said we're able to submit some questions ahead of time um and so we've started the answer we don't have answers for everything but we can go through some of those if you'd like

um or um however however you'd like to proceed no i think i mean if you've got questions ask your questions i sent my questions in early but just to kind of clarify two things one additional question and then i think education is really going to be key in this and so i know i briefly mentioned it before including in my questions i would like to see a more interactive format than public hearings because personally i'm not a fan of the public hearing process as it is nationally um so i'd like to see some type of interactive format like a budget town hall like the uh like the county does now granted they do it by district but they still do that for jurisdictions of a hundred thousand people 150 000

people so i think we could do that as well um and this is actually an email that i got from a constituent and i just wanted to get your thoughts on it can we get a chart that shows the city's tax rate compared to the rate of inflation so so the the so we can but i want to caution you and and we've and i'll start and i'll let jc and gwen chime in because we talked about this earlier because one of you sent that question to us we can show you the rate of inflation that's easy we can also show you the rate the tax rate so the percentage change over time but if you're asking us to correlate the two there are way too many variables to have a direct correlation because of there's a variety of factors of what you

choose to put in the budget what you don't put in the budget arpa funding is a great example we got a bunch of arpa funding which was put in the budget so yes we can show you the the inflation trend we can show you the assessment trend we can show you the rate trend but if you're asking for a direct correlation we are not able to do that so just to clarify um if you're if you're looking for cause and effect we can't not going to be able to tell you because there's there's just way too many variables in that but we can show you individually and you can and can draw your own conclusions then go ahead and so i've actually thought about that previously before and i think the manager is absolutely right trying my fear was if i presented something like that to council it may be viewed as

disingenuous because there is no way to fully correlate that i'll give you a very quick example so uh loudon county in the last four years their tax rate has actually gone down by about 12 and a half to 13 cents mostly related to data centers inflation during the same four-year time frame has gone up about 20 cents no correlation between the tax rate and inflation there you would think that they would both be going up that is not the case they have a different revenue source than we do or other localities they're taking advantage of that they're able to lower the tax rate from that side so like the manager said a multitude number of variables that it would be very hard to draw a very sound correlation

additionally one of the things that we do here in the city is we assess every single year in my mind inflation is kind of baked in with those assessments that get recessed every year usually those assessments appreciate every single year so inflation is kind of baked in how do i back that out how do i back out meals tax how do i back out arpa to try to really give you and the public the most accurate information where i wouldn't be challenged or say that i'm presenting something again not as genuous as i potentially could council member peterson well just to follow up on that i have certainly received a lot of uh feedback from people who are interested in cause and effect understanding the causal factors behind

a growth and a budget the comparison with inflation is a helpful starting place for them because i think the first causal factor that they go to is whether we just have a general cost of living increase the cost of doing business increase and that's what's going on here if there's variance from that there's more going on than that and that gets to the next stage of question which is well what else is going on here and why and that i think is a very helpful conversation because the drivers of this increase are specific and that helps people evaluate you know whether they are in favor of or not in favor of of certain things that are involved in that but it sort of places this in context for them and gives them a starting place

for understanding the cause and effect relationships and a budget and i would say in a case like we have this year where the jump is so significant people are very sensitive to what is going on here and understanding that story so i would be supportive of um providing the information again i don't think there's an attempt to quote unquote correlate i think causal relationships are the bigger issue here i think people want to get started on understanding this situation a little bit more clearly so i would be in favor of it i mean to to just quickly on that i mean it again it goes back to my point on education uh it's more so i mean if you look at the main causes it's essentially schools and cip but having that con contextual factor

people can understand that narrative a lot more clearly i mean i was explaining the budget process to my partner and she was like nine and a half cents oh my goodness then i went through the cip projects van dyke park went through the school contract and how we're in my opinion on the on the wrong end of that deal uh and when i broke that down for her she's like well you know when you put it like that so having all everything on the table completely transparent i think that's extremely beneficial especially for us as well council member hall i agree i think the town hall concept something where we address all of these concerns from the residents in person being able to speak to them is key council member hall i think with the town hall format i fully support it i actually would like to see a

budget committee made up of residents for the next time we do this budget so that there's a group of core residents that have you know expressed interest in being involved um i think they can help communicate they can help make decisions they can you know help help feedback rather than just the six of a seven of us sitting up here um but i think the key for the town hall for me is that it's not so much us talking it's us listening it's them being able to provide their feedback their thoughts their comments ask their questions and not in the public hearing opportunity when they can speak for three minutes and then there's no response that's honestly my biggest problem with this entire governmental system the way it's set up

is that i don't think it lends itself to conversations very often and so i would love to see a town town hall where it's more resident driven than it is council or staff driven council member stacy hardy chandler i agree with that and so what we're having to deal with are both the current budget and what needs to happen in this timeline while simultaneously building a more inclusive i know that's a bad word but it's going to be a good word for us a more inclusive process along the way so i think one of the things we have to keep in mind is that while we want to engage the public more there's we we have to be very thoughtful about how we get there from here because this is our starting point um and to the point of you

i i do think we have to be uh careful because um it is tempting to want simple answers and i'm hearing you when you're saying that there's more complexity to this and i believe that if we provide the venues for for providing all of that and not just you know isolated pieces of information not only um do we get more input we get more understanding um about the budget process and it carries more credibility to your little sample group of one to be able to um really draw the lines between the dots so i'm in favor of that while recognizing that we're not there yet and how we get there collectively while meeting the the requirements of the decisions that we have to make now is something that we have to

all agree and work together on so we can certainly put together um a meeting of what you're describing and and where it's more interactive um that's not a problem we can we can put that together it'll take us a minute to to do that you'll have to make a couple of decisions like the advertised tax rate before we're able to pull that off but we can we can certainly do that um we we have time to do that um i would just say um that i think you you you have gotten a lot of citizen feedback by all of the thing projects plans all the things that you've done granted you're getting little snippets but just like you got feedback on the queue just this you know in that survey and then i've heard a lot of you say more frequent service would

be great increasing the routes would be great okay well there's a cost involved in that i'm not saying we shouldn't do it it's cost involved in that and oh by the way we don't charge a fee we don't charge a fare and the funding the the part of the funding that we have for that goes away the arpa it's going to disappear the grant for the zero fare going to disappear uh there i don't think in the conversation brief conversation that i've had with wendy the 30 funding um there's a max i mean there's just what that generates is a max and so without any change there's a likelihood of general fund money having to go into queue potentially depending on again depending on other decisions that are made so all

of these things um are certainly interconnected um the schools is another i mean that's this by far the biggest driver um in in in how our budget ends up working um that can we can have that discussion later i mean i know there's some things to that they're working on but the the the root of that is the contract that we have um and if you don't change the contract um then then the way it's that's going to continue to be you know that those because you don't control how the county spends its money for the school system you're just on the hook for a percentage of how they spend their money um and so um that's that's the long and short of it um so there's other things so lots of these things um come about so we when we talk when you know we talk about uh the when and i did my presentation i

mean is the budget is as much a reflection of what you value as it is dollars and cents and and revenues and expenditures it's where you know so if you value transit and the q bus then that's where you'll put your you know then that's where you want to put your funding and i and i would say we we absolutely can do a town hall and i hope we can get some very good attendance um and people come out and participate but i would be remiss if saying if you that you are getting citizen feedback and you have been getting citizen feedback whether it's in the comp plan um all these other plans as far as what they want the community to be like what the things the projects they want you to invest in those kinds of things so

um just just be mindful of that that that you you have been and will continue to get feedback that has budget impact even though it may not be a direct comment on the budget that's been proposed so we've got to assimilate all of that and what we're putting together so i will call on my colleagues here a cautionary thing here is that when people come to a town hall they are not necessarily representative of the entire community so q bus riders may not be in the room to advocate for keeping the q bus fare free i mean they went and they rode the buses they were at the bus stops they talked to the people who are actually using that service when we ask people to come and talk to us about the budget and i want to

hear from them too but are they representative and if they're not representative then they're representing the things that impact them and that and we as an elected body we need to hear from the community but we also need to understand that there are sections of the community we aren't hearing from and those people are the people who need services to be funded and and we're hearing from voices of people who are advocating for maybe something else or different priorities so i do think it's always important to hear from people but i think we also be need to be aware that we are not necessarily hearing from everyone about programs they use that that they care about so we have to keep things in perspective

i'm going to call on council member amos then council member hardy chandler then council member mccullough no i i completely agree with the mayor on that point and that's part of my personal frustration with the public hearing process when they did a national study a few years ago they looked at public hearings across the country and found that it was usually the same group of people who showed up to every public hearing with similar complaints and even with the budget process i saw with the county it's either a group that's advocating for a particular thing usually on behalf of like for example like parks or libraries or people who want the tax rate reduced it is generally older white retired people who don't use public transit it's all those factors so it doesn't have to be a budget

town hall but i do want some kind of venue where it's interactive where people can engage where even if and i know there's costs associated with it but even if we provided daycare for people for example multilingual services if we can expand that to get more people there i want diversity in these meetings and be it a budget town hall or something else i just don't think public hearings will adequately do that oh yes girl i did not know that girl scouts shout out to you all thank you so i want to echo those sentiments it would not be putting a meeting together because i think it would look like a public hearing right i'm talking about building a community engagement system that's why i don't think it's going to be a short-term one-time kind of thing i think we have to build a process that really

draws in diverse voices or else we're just doing the same thing calling it something different to your point about uh sectors of the the um city that aren't being heard so i think there's some value and investment in that and i guess what i'm saying and i think people are on board having the patience to actually build it because it isn't just a meeting right another meeting coming up um second to that i do think that um as i mentioned when i sent out a communication that we should be talking about our strategic priorities our decisions should align with what it is that we value and i think that we can have some more conversations about where this body has common ground in those priorities because

what we decide on uh for the budget will tell our story about what we value um for me it is very clearly a future beyond this council um i'm going to be looking to decisions that we're making now that have long-term impact and that's why i think you know when we're talking about the q bus in a 10-year horizon that's very short in terms of my thinking and what and the um future residents of the city that i'm here to serve too that are not here are not necessarily impacted this year the third thing is um you said that your recommendation is to build in a little cushion and i think that's responsible and what are you um estimating that cushion to be if we were to take that recommendation of of building that cushion into the advertised tax rate we discussed that internally and you know we think

you know one a dollar 15 was two and a half cents higher than recommended and that's about the difference in uh the meals tax that's being proposed because we haven't talked about that you know because i've heard some comments about did not liking on the meals tax um there are other options for you um we we all know you know realist no one likes to be on the you know put it on the real estate and and but the reality is that's your largest that's the biggest bang for the buck in terms of you know the smallest increase gets you the biggest return um and so um there's a combination of things that we we can do um and again i'm we've given you a recommended budget uh nine and a half or or one twelve and a half is the

new rate all all we're suggesting is if you again to your point of the budget town hall and hearing what the citizens have to say if you were here if if if you are then hearing a large um response about specific things that then require additional resources and you wish to do that if you don't advertise a sufficient tax rate then then you don't have that option because you can only go lower i'm certainly not advocating a a rate higher than what was been recommended but into but again it's all i to to council member hardy chandler's point you know as far as the values and stuff and we would quite we welcome that and that's goes back to my first meeting when i asked those questions to try to get to help with the formulation of the budget um you are going to have that discussion that is a retreat

topic at your next retreat again it's a timing issue that's not until the first saturday in april so it is before you have to adopt the budget but it's not while we're having all these discussions tonight and next week and the week after that um but it is important discussion to have so we worked with what we had which was the what was adopted and so um that the that is what we're what we currently work from and again if if there if there's a desire to change what the some of those values are tweak them or move in a slightly different direction perfectly okay we just need to know that and that's and that's a very important discussion for this body to have with each other so we can be aligned with um what you're

wanting and so we can make sure we're putting forth the right suggestions and recommendations in order to fulfill whatever vision uh and desires that you have council member mcquillen um so we went through a similar situation with um the school board as you guys know with the bond referendum and one of the first things we did was we did town halls and wanted to get out into the community to educate the public and i believe that that was a huge part of why it passed with such a large um amount of voters or votes um so i would like to see a similar um outreach with this situation with the budget i think in doing so we get to educate listen collaborate um it provides the environment for ideas and thoughts to come forward this is how we come up with creative solutions to

difficult situations um so that's my thought process just on the town hall situation so i do agree we get a lot of feedback but this is a chance for us to build um a relationship and to build trust with our community um i too would welcome further discussing um the goals and priorities of this council i love that um and do we have the ability to introduce or pass certain fees like an entertainment fee the short answer is it depends so we're so again virginia's dylan rule state so it's what the state allows us so certain fees we would have i mean and so we just need to check in terms of um so i think what you're talking about is like an admissions tax i think perhaps you're saying entertainment fee like

admissions on tickets to events yes we learn that at a different right so that that we would need to double check and an admissions tax is for at least for some folks it's a level it's different than a tax well so it would go on the it goes on the ticket yeah yeah yeah so i'm just i'm thinking outside the box i'm trying to think of these creative you know different things that maybe right now it won't bring a lot of money but potentially could if we have a large venue coming in so so i think there are potential um options that we can look at absolutely but again did not want to presuppose any of those things in terms of trying to balance the budget that was a that's a action outside of the budget process that there's no guarantee for us and making a recommendation that

council might take council member peterson just to clarify april 5 retreat is that going to be covering budget issues because my agenda that i received from melissa shenaberry says no no not the budget specifically what i was speaking to was the visioning and the goal set the the values and so forth that council wants to have that's that discussion is scheduled to take place then well i so i wonder whether we should be thinking about allocating time and possibly a significant amount to a budget retreat and whether april 5 might be the time to do that and here's why this big increase we're proposing and in those cases it's pretty common uh for there to be an expectation on the part of constituents that we are going to be going through every brick of a budget

with a fine-tooth comb to be sure we have done everything we could to avoid to identify opportunities for savings to justify things that are uh staying and are going to result in a high increase uh and that's going to take time going to take time from all of us to go through this in a fair amount of detail again i think it's an expectation people have and i think it's a standard practice but it is time consuming and we don't have a budget retreat set aside to help us together go through that and i'm just wondering whether we ought to consider that well we do have work sessions set up pretty much every single meeting and and while i do think that this is important and it requires a lot of focus there are

also other things that we still have to continue doing beyond the budget too and some of them are kind of larger issues which is why we were going to use the retreat for something that's not budget focused because we've got so much time allocated to budget discussions in work sessions so i mean i just i don't know i don't know what the saturation level is for talking about the budget probably varies by person um but i mean i'm happy to entertain that council member hall may i ask that maybe we see if there's another saturday that could work as a secondary option of this is the budget conversation if we can't get everything that we need to in these work sessions um we're all new right most of us are new my apologies this is huge this is an unprecedented suggested tax increase this yellow

piece of paper that i brought with me is a ginormous increase um we have way more taxpayers now than we did previously based upon the total number you know the total amount of real estate that we have here there's more condos there's more townhouses there's more single family homes than we've ever had and yet we're asking people for more money and i recognize that it's a necessary evil i've gone through pretty much every single page of this i have a ton of questions um and so i want to do as many as i can in a work session because people are watching and because i think it's important but i also and i i'm happy to send questions by email but i i don't want them answered by email because i want our residents to

be able to hear every question that was asked and every answer that's been given um but so i think maybe just a second i hate to take up more time people's lives are valuable i get that but in case we don't have it i'd still like to have the april thing but i think we need another opportunity set up just as a catch-all yes and to your point about the um town hall and about the future conversations i love the idea of getting a committee set up and having conversations for the next time this goes around but i don't want it to negate us doing something for this budget and this time and just one final thing on this is that people when they get a yellow piece paper like this they kind of wake up a little bit right so we may not i i heard from residents friends that i've not talked to any while

because they got this and so yes they might not care about the q bus they might love the bike lanes they don't always come out and talk about those things so this is an opportunity to have a larger conversation that's not just tax bill focus but it's what are we doing with our money how why where all the things council member amos uh while i agree i i also wonder it is our first work session on the budget and i don't want to get too ahead of ourselves either i mean i would like to see how feedback goes with advertising the rate next week because that is a public hearing if i'm correct yes yeah there's a public hearing on the budget next week so i i would like to see you have you four you have four of those

scheduled yeah so i i do want to see if it's an adequate amount of time already because i mean i mean let's be real it's about to be 10 o'clock we could we could set that up but it could be a redundant conversation and it and even if we find another saturday in april it might be a week before we're supposed to pass the budget i don't know if that's productive so i would like to see how feedback goes next week from the community but also our initial responses coming back to us first i think we should send the questions first get that back and see how that process goes i as far as this saturday thing i kind of meant for us if there's still a bazillion questions that we haven't answered internally

not community focus that's a separate thing as far as i'm concerned sorry thank you as far as the questions go as far as asking to email them that's just so we can get a head start on them absolutely uh we we're prepared to go through at least the ones we can give you answers to that you've already sent in this evening if you'd like that's part i mean so i mean and and we can continue to you know and then of course if you just in general conversation is you can if you have questions if we can answer the question we will if it requires us to do some research or verify answers we will do that and then and provide that to you at the next meeting other thoughts yes councilmember bates thank you um i just first off um i am definitely supportive of the

uh town hall idea um i do uh echo um councilmember amy's council member or mayor reeds um comments before that you know we do need to consider um that uh you know whoever comes out might not be representative of you know the entire city but it certainly is i think a very important part of this process having community engagement um and it certainly is also very helpful uh in terms of you know there have been several cases when uh the feedback that i received um has contributed to the conversations that we have up here um and uh as far as uh putting in a bit of a cushion in the um advertised rate um i really have mixed feelings about that um because you know on the one hand um as you know we've discussed before

public safety was a big priority of ours and uh right now um as i understand it the staff positions citywide are just you know flat we're not you know adding anything else um is that right yeah and uh on the other hand um we just had a presentation last year from uh on the results of an independent consultant review of our police department saying that um you know we we need additional uh sworn in civilian positions to um increase the amount of proactive enforcement time that um proportionately that our officers have um and that even you know we're we are short staffed in that space and uh even if you look at separately the icma staffing guidelines you know we're we're falling short of that in the police department um and you know i singled that out because we did have the

independent consultant come in um now i um i'm hoping that you know maybe in future years we won't um see this much of an unprecedented increase in the recommended rate and hopefully we will be able to take another look at that i was really hoping we'd get started on that this time around um but you know we might just as an example might want to have a bit of a cushion for that reason you know as you know in addition to whatever else you might want to think about doing this time around um on the other hand again it is really an unprecedented increase that's suggested and uh you know i i'm hesitant to say that i want to advertise a rate that is higher than the recommended rate um but you know if we do i think

that we need to do so with the understanding that that is an absolute last resort um you know as far as going above the recommended rate and uh i'm hoping that we might even be able to uh you know maybe uh scale that back a bit you know um short of the recommended increase and maybe even find room for um you know there's always a chance we might be able to find some room for some additional priorities in there as a result of um you know moving some things around so i don't know i mean i as far as uh the uh advertised rate um yeah i think that we'll need to maybe think about that a bit um and i guess uh next week we can maybe have some you know some different options um and then maybe discuss further and decide

which we want to introduce at that time yeah yeah we're certainly not asking to decide that tonight i mean next week is when the decision needs to be made and again that's just to what you want to advertise um so and and i just threw that out so you'd be start so you could start mauling that over um at the end of the day you know if you don't care to do that that's fine but it just at least from the real estate perspective then that's that limits you to at the that rate or lower um again that's where you get the the biggest that's just the reality i mean that's what the state gives us to or allows us to do and that's where you're going to get your biggest um return with the smallest smallest increase

i mean you know this once an increase in real estate generates way more than in personal property or other other other rates and that that's just that's just our our reality and that's true in every jurisdiction we're not the only ones struggling i mean that's just real estate property taxes what funds localities but the other kind of elephant in the room that we are not talking about because it's impossible to really discuss it is what is happening with federal cuts you know we know that thousands of people in our city work for the federal government we know that that there are likely thousands more who work for federal contractors and if people start to lose their job there's every you know people lost their homes back in 2008 with the mortgage crisis they simply walked away from

homes that they couldn't pay the mortgages on that sounds apocalyptic and yet we've already lived through at once and so the idea that if people lost their jobs they could lose their homes and those homes could be in a situation where they're taken into receivership it at the minimum we could see a decline in our meals tax for the same reason you know it's not just the tariffs making everything more expensive i mean people are already paying whatever for a dozen eggs but the fact of the matter is people are going to start cutting back on things that generate revenue for us like the meals tax and i don't think we can predict that i mean we are here we are it's it's march 4th we are so this administration haven't hasn't even started doing what they're going to do and we're trying

to do a budget as is every other locale every location northern virginia trying to figure out what kind of economic hit our communities are going to take and what does that mean for the bottom line where we are generating the dollars whatever the tax rate is to pay our bills and i don't know that i don't know that there's any discussion in the world that resolves that there just isn't we don't know what's going to happen but i think the advertised rate going slightly higher between now and the end of april that's like 60 days we might have a better idea i don't know that we will but having a higher advertised rate again doesn't mean anything we're going to adopt what we're going to adopt but if

something happens and we start to see evidence that it is a major economic disaster we we need to think about that that is the responsible thing to do because we don't know what's going to happen i mean that's just my thought on this council member amos uh and this is more so a question what is the likelihood that we would also see another jump in the fcps budget like we did before like we did fy 2025 so currently we're projecting about eight and a quarter for 26 and potentially 27 beyond 27 we have not estimated or projected where we would be coming in i think as the superintendent and chair pictures mentioned trying to have those discussions with scps potentially doing a cap would be very beneficial for the city if we can negotiate a percentage of that whether that's

three percent four percent five percent hopefully not 13 or 14 percent but uh that's the best estimate right now sir okay i mean that's just something to have in the back of our minds too and this is goes to council member hall's point about maybe we need to fix up the schedule uh just because we have that unpredictability we have cps and then we get a seven million dollar gap out of nowhere and we have to figure out how to pay for it so i think we should think about that and if you wanted to talk more on it but the other thing i was going to say thank you is that you're asking that question but we also there's going to be additional townhouses condos apartments where people are moving in right things that are

now ready in a neighborhood where they were built that they weren't ready six months ago so that average daily membership that tuition bill is going to go up incrementally just because we have people that are now suddenly in their homes that they weren't before so even no other changes that's more students in our building and that's something that we try to predict that's something that i know mr foreman does a very nice job of looking at what's being built and where and all of those numbers but people are living in different places than they ever were before right you before you wouldn't expect a townhouse to draw that many or whatever else but those ratios are changing and so we might have

20 more students that enroll in between now and the end of the school year that we weren't even expecting and we can't we don't know how to work those um separately i i do think we should jump into the questions and responses the budget if i can just make one blanket question comment and this is directed at no one it's just me trying to understand but using the words miscellaneous and um other when it refers to income and expenses it kills me like i need to know what's behind that and i recognize that you have um some notes on things but when i see like anything over even two hundred thousand dollars a hundred thousand dollars it just makes me wonder like what is what is made up in that number and i think that

that's something that needs to be detailed out for everyone i know i see your face and i hate that i'm sorry i know but i know it's more work and it but i know you have the information so i i know it adds probably a hundred pages to our budget books but i just think it's really key thank you so i was gonna just very quickly so we roll up which is a very common practice in localities or actually any budget so we have roll-up codes uh if we were to provide the detail it would probably be about a 1800 to 2000 page document we have a very extensive exhaustive excel model macros crashes every once in a while that has thousands tens of thousands of lines that roll up and we're trying to provide a high level

detail even though it's not that high level we are trying to give you some information uh we are more than happy if council so chooses to give you all the detail the 2000 pages or so of information is there a way to make it like a read-only access so we can look at it if we want or would you prefer that i see okay this is in this department this line item this is what i want to see and then you provide that detail i don't want to put more work into it but if it's available and we can browse then that works for me if it works for you i could create you know high level pdfs of all the excel spreadsheets would probably be the easiest way um like i said it's a huge macro workbook that is very detailed and

to give you that would i wouldn't put that on my worst enemy um i i don't even manage it because it's beyond me um but you know pulling out the information in a usable you know a pdf of those pages it would be separate between revenue and expenses by department is is the way it's built short of doing that maybe i'll when i take my next dive in maybe i'll pull up a couple things that i'd like to see and then maybe we can go from there because i don't want to create more of a burden i really don't okay thank you mayor also i think i think all of you have availed yourself in the over the next week you all have individual meetings um with the staff where we can if we want to get into some of those really nitty-gritty things that we can um to make sure you just give you a better

comfort level um of you know what's in the budget um i mean just to be you know really blunt about it the the the the magnitude of what you're trying to deal with you're not going to solve in looking at all the line items and trying to find a little bit here a little bit there a little bit here we can certainly go through that exercise you're really what you're talking about now is you're talking about service levels staffing levels that's what that's what you're talking about if you're wanting to make a significant impact and as far as the amount of the rate that you want to that you're wanting if you're wanting to reduce the the potential rate and also keep in mind that um the way we've structured

it and we and we were very intentional in structuring this way yes it's a big jump but you we're also thinking about the future and we're not just thinking about this this one year you've got a tremendous forget about cip you could get rid if you want to get rid of all the cip projects fine but you still have 250 or 220 million of approved school bond projects that's going to have uh that if you remember from the davenport study they said if nothing else happened 20 cents on the real estate tax rate ultimately to fund that debt service now lots of things could change between now and then but we've given you debt capacity a revenue stream that's going to get you started um to to do that so the more you

want to to reduce is fine but you're also potentially impacting what we've set you up for and you're just going to have to do this all over again next year um potentially and potentially depending on where you end up potentially more next year than this year so i i don't i'm just i'm just saying we're and we we can walk you through all of that um but that's the other piece um that and i recognize you all have a very difficult decision in how you have to vote for this um i certainly don't envy that just like it was difficult for us to craft something and put it together to where it wasn't you know if you remember just the school piece we were starting at 13 and a half um without anything else um and so it's

it's down to nine and a half but also but obviously there's other we we moved some of that in other ways to to help generate that revenue yeah i just i think i'm going to put right out there the number that i asked for specifically which was the thrown toilets not saying i support them or i don't but that was a huge number a couple years ago and i'd like to know what that costs now and what that costs moving forward that's one specific thing so there's going to be things like that in other areas of the budget that i think we all kind of have our own questions about and again absolutely so we have that number we can talk about that tonight we we pulled that because you send it to us ahead of time um but remember that's also a level of service i mean you might not think

it's a level of service but part of that is it's providing um portable restrooms uh and maybe it's maybe it's at a level uh that you don't want we can have a lower level of portable restrooms and that's fine but it still gets back to that underlying question which is what's the level of service and so forth um that you want that citizens expect that you're wanting to provide for the citizens so it's it's all interrelated but we we but we any and that's why i'm saying any question you want to ask we can we can pull that information for you and i have i need to pull it up but i have that information well i appreciate that but i also think there's probably services that we don't even know we're

offering that as a brand new council for the majority of us we want to try to understand that so that when our residents ask us questions we can say yep we provide that service like when people move to the city i had no idea there was a flyer that went to them no idea right we were trying to recreate we're trying to create one on our first day and there's already one so it's things like that that we don't know what we don't know and we're trying to know those things council member peterson where did we land on carving out an extra saturday just for budget so an extra saturday or as opposed to basically using the fifth just for budget are we looking council member hardy channel sorry i think the suggestion was to go

with the work sessions and if we didn't get through everything to have the extra saturday as a cushion as a plan b if we needed more time because we are new and may have questions but to stick with the work session i will say personally my preference is this schedule because i need it chunked i i need it uh in the budget section um to make it digestible for me so i feel like this is helpful but i do understand and i um uh feel like it could be possible to carve out some additional time if we need it just in case not instead of okay so so the question still is do we want to keep the agenda for april 5th or make the agenda for april 5th budget keep april 5th as is because my understanding is we're also setting up

a bus tour to tour the cip projects that's a different day now oh good lord all right i trust y'all we've we've broken that up to make it easier let's keep not every meeting needs to be about budget because not everything is about budget it is the thing that's going to consume our lives for a bit but let's build in the cushion see what's working and if things aren't working we have questions left over then we can use that cushion i don't think we need to pull the trigger tonight no okay okay is that a fair consensus to be clear so we would it's a contingent option okay yes we can make it a contingent option great okay that's good okay uh yes um would you like me to go through the answers that we have sure okay um

so i think council member bates sent an email i think he was first so we'll go through his first um and then he said uh first uh about the uh the increase in education that we mentioned the kinds of increase in education cost is not sustainable are there any suggestions to address that well i think with the school board you heard some of the suggestions um that they're working on um the uh that is the that is the you know the elephant in the room um just uh council member quillen asked a question about what how everybody else is doing so just very briefly the city of fairfax i think is unique in how it does the schools and the fact that you contract with uh another entity to operate your school so you're operating by a contract everybody else what i would call the traditional

method you know is um they they formulate the budget they ask you know they approach their governing body for for funding and then there's this this back and forth um there are williamsburg james city operates a joint system and i think greensville county and emporia operate but i don't but i don't think it's a tuition contract and even if it were it's not the same because they're much smaller and it wouldn't be set up set up quite the same way um so um changing the contract if if there are ways to amend it if you can do a cap quite honestly i don't you know i think a cap would be a great start but i i think in essence you're amending the contract if you put in a cap um and so um there's different

you know um there you know the the the comment that was in there about um you know it's more cost effective to do it this way than operate your own school system um that well may that may be although i would say at some point the lines are crossing uh and to where you that may be a consideration um the continent the comparison with fair uh was the false church city um they operate their their fiscal 25 budget total budget for their school system is right at 65 million and of that 65 million 52 and a half is city funding and they have an adm of 2634. so there may be 300 students less but they're operating there right now i'm just giving you the numbers you you can argue whether their system is as high a quality or not as high quality or offers more things doesn't

offer more things but in terms of operating and just from a pure number standpoint that's that's probably your best comparison um i just i just leave it out there but but anyways so things are so the only way i think you're going to address that is how how that just how that contract and that and that funding gets structured because you're not controlling how the county school system spends its money and our school sport is not controlling that you're just get you're just left with a formula and paying the bill um currently any unfilled positions uh that in your opinion could be frozen without significantly affecting city services um right now uh the short answer is we we that would take a little more analysis to make sure we we always

can um to look at that um most of the positions uh the our large number are in public safety so i'm assuming you want to we would want to continue the public safety there's a building inspector position we're required to provide that service and again with all the development we're having i don't think that's a position you would want to freeze there's some in sanitation um etc one in animal control so um yes there's a vacancy we can certainly continue to look at that but again that starts to impact service levels so i'm not at this point i don't know that there is something for us to continue to look at same on the same line um currently any field position so that in your opinion uh could be frozen or consolidated upon

turnover without termination without significantly affecting city services sort of the same i'll probably give you the same answer um off the top of my head um i'm not sure that there there are but as we have turnover that's one of the things that we look at um in terms of before we just run out and fill the position and i would just again mention and i mentioned in my budget presentation that we do manage vacancy savings as part of the budget so when we have vacancies we account for that which in essence lowers your funding requirement because we're not in essence budgeting a hundred percent of every position full cost of benefits because we know there's going to be turnover um naturally occurring

turnover throughout the year so that is one of the tools um that we use um i think probably jc can you pull up the couple couple of slides um um and then because last thing is any potential opportunities for cost savings minimal impact to city services so i remember if you remember i told you we would give you options and so here are some alternative options um which we did not talk about one is the personal property tax um uh that's the one uh for for for most residents that's the vehicle that's the tax on their personal vehicles um that's also one that's also loathed by most people um one penny of personal property tax generates 40 000 in revenue roughly current currently 10 cents would be 400 000 which is ruffle which is a rough equivalent to a half cent on the real estate tax rate

so again if you're looking to switch things out that's an option for you the average uh ppt rate in northern virginia is four dollars and thirty cents so at 404 13 we're slightly less um and then of course there's some that are significantly less you know in the 350 range and then there's some who are in like the six dollar range so i mean again the average 4 30. um the next slide is also related to personal property tax this is something that could be done uh that can give us a one-time benefit but it and i caution you it's a one-time benefit so not using it to fund operations but we could switch to twice a year collection for personal property tax just like you have real estate you pay half june half in december right now you pay

personal property tax the whole year in october and it is as of january 1st so you're paying in arrears you could change that to where you have half due in april half due in october then the year that you made that switch the city would realize a one-time revenue increase of six and a half million dollars that is an accounting issue because we do a fiscal year july to june and residents pay the tax on a calendar year january to july i want to stress that that would not be a tax increase that would pay the same just in two separate payments the next slide will show you how that works so this year october 2025 calendar year 25 100 of the tax is paid that is our fiscal 2026. if you made the change to be effective for the next fiscal year which is the next calendar year they would then pay

their first half of calendar 26 in april that is still fiscal 2026 that is where you get the one-time gain in essence you're going to get 150 of revenue in 2026 however residents pay 100 in 2025 they pay 100 in 2026 april october they pay 100 in 2027 april october that's a one-time gain what do we use one-time revenues for we use it for one-time expenses so we have recurring revenue to pay the one-time debt the nine if you remember from the presentation 9.8 million dollars it's the three million for schools to start their projects six and a half or 6.8 for the one-time debt that we have you could put that six and a half towards that you would not need recurring revenue which means you could lower the tax rate

but that then decret then to what i just said earlier you're then cutting the future capacity that we've built in which means you're just going to have to turn around and raise in in the for next year in the future all or or you can or you could have it slightly less but still dedicate all of that for um for debt service so there's some ways to work on there's some ways to work on that the reason this was not in the budget is because this is a whole different thing that you would have to agree to vote on and we weren't going to account on this as a budget balancing tool as far as what we propose to you but it is an option and that would give you some uh flexibility in how we're funding and and doing

things and i think mayor council member hall has a question yes council member hall so as far as i'm concerned this is the most hated tax but i don't hate this option and i say that because i i think it's expensive for many residents and i think it's something that you kind of forget about so i i i'm not opposed to paying it twice a year what i am curious about though is what is the additional staff and internal costs time wise postage wise all of those things that would go into this so we would we haven't as we we would need to calculate that i believe that the the additional cost is mainly going to be in the postage and the mailing the that piece from a staff perspective again all the work is

done to for the bit you know for um because it's as of january 1st so it would front load some of the work in the beginning of the year because it's they have less time to get it ready because instead you know because they've been working towards an october on time frame um but i'm not going to say there's not some additional work on staff because we would need to ascertain that for certain but it's still a making this change to your point um is a way to for the taxpayer to spread that payment out so it's less than they have to pay all at one time um but it's all but it's an it's a one-time revenue opportunity that is neutral neutral to the taxpayer other than they will complain that they just paid you in

october and they got to turn around and pay you apart again in april but that's that's a one-time problem and then and then it takes care of itself council member amos i mean uh in terms of the personal property tax while i agree it is the most hated tax because i hate it too um i would argue that it is the tax i would actually probably get to people who rent in the city as well more so than the real estate tax rate would which includes myself in this situation so i do want to throw myself under the bus in terms of that conversation uh i like the two payment option just because i would rather pay in two payments than than one um but my biggest concern with this budget is that deferring is something that we've had an issue with prior councils doing and i don't

want to replicate that and one of the questions i asked was specifically about what the tax rate would look like next year if we had to move forward with this nine and a half cent proposal because i imagine each reduction we go for i mean debt debt is debt we owe it we're obligated to it so what exactly are we looking at because i see this as much as a fy 27 issue as a fy 26 issue let me just say i'm not i'm not looking at it from a let's raise the tax and i'm not looking at it from a let's look at it as a one-time windfall i'm looking at as a i really like this idea in general that's all no i uh we appreciate that i mean it we that's one of the things we talked about is that it can be it people will look at it different ways but certainly can be um helpful for them um to to spread it out

it's went for peterson well i we should i think be sure to get some public feedback on this because people don't like going through the drill of paying taxes and more than one politician has lost re-election because they altered the method by which that happens and so uh check it out i mean some rather famous people have lost their jobs because they changed the way folks paid their annual taxes and so there's a there's an issue i think we need to be sensitive to uh just real quick to build on that because i forgot to ask my question is how would tax relief work specifically for personal property tax it's there's no impact the way the personal property well i say there's no impact the way personal property tax works now just quick history lesson when this was done jim jim gilmore was

governor and he campaigned on no car tax the idea was it was going to phase out to where the state was going to reimburse for ultimately a hundred percent so so localities would be revenue would be held neutral but then the tax would go away the problem is it was extremely expensive and they couldn't afford it so what the state has done is they've capped we get a fixed payment every year for for and and that payment is then distributed uh to um the taxes there's a calculation that's done each year um on how much real quote unquote relief that you're getting um and that quite honestly as p as the population grows uh and there are more cars in the city that that relief is going down anyway but from a but from a

from a city perspective um it's a flat amount that comes in and it doesn't it doesn't change yeah and less so about the allocation of funding i mean more so the schedule because for example i think the application is usually due in may time frame and i remember because when i first moved to the city i didn't know that because the county you can do it whenever you want but we had it for may and so when i moved here i didn't realize that tried to apply for it in like september because i'm a procrastinator sometimes and uh couldn't qualify for it so wanted to know how that would work with two separate payments i can speak we don't i believe only disabled vets get tax relief for personal property right are um

i meant damage and high mileage you would it's this we we can confirm with the commissioner it's the same process again you would do it you would i guess have to do it earlier in the year because one because if you divide it into two payments you would want the effect of that in the first payment obviously but again just as a reminder that the the the liability for the tax is january 1 and so whatever happens after that i don't want to say it's irrelevant but it's just it doesn't it's it's whatever so like if you sold that car once we get this a lot i sold my car on on january 30th well that's great except you owned it on the first of january you're still liable for the tax we don't prorate so you're liable for the

whole year so that's part you know so one of the things is by paying in april and then again in october you would catch you would less likely to hear some of that because the the the pay due date versus when the liability incurred this much closer together so again it's just you you you asked about options and this goes to council member bates question of you know what other creative things or whatever so these are some of the things that um that are possibilities again things to consider um if if you desire i'm sorry just to comment if you only own your car for six months out of the year you only pay the tax for the six months you don't pay for the whole 12 months yes you do you're liable for the whole year i don't unless this well let me let's say that i don't think we

prorate do we yes yeah we've received i mean we've sold a car in a partial year and halfway through the year and we only get a bill for three months okay just want to make sure that's really clear to our residents i think it would be the same as for real estate if you sold or had an improvement or if you received tax relief for elderly we can make adjustments throughout the year and there will be refunds or whatever that would account for that piece but i don't think the dollar amount as the city manager said the dollar amounts wouldn't be significant yeah yes mr martinez so just to go back because i don't think uh council member amos question was fully answered and i think you're alluding to

what would the potential rate be for fy 27 utilizing this method with the crystal ball being very cloudy um but utilizing the 6.5 million dollar as a base that's equivalent right now to about seven cents so and as the manager stated this is a one-time revenue source so there would potentially be the need in fy 27 to increase by seven cents potentially now that being said just really quick back in 2007 the real estate tax rate for the city was 72 cents between 2007 2010 it increased 24 and a half cents or almost 33 percent nine cents alone in 2009 between 2007 and 2013 it was a total increase of 35 cents or about 47 percent increase that was also right after the last bond referendum other than what just passed in november for the high school and the middle school if i'm not

mistaken in 2004 additionally there was significant investment within the city infrastructure specifically where we're we're sitting right now the city hall annex was built during that time frame the new police headquarters was also built uh historic blenheim site was also done and then there was some really good undergrounding utilities in old town as well so a lot of investment infrastructure that was done during that time frame between um in the city and again about a 35 cent increase 2007 it was a one cent increase 2008 it was a seven cent increase 2009 again was a nine cent increase and then 2010 was a seven and a half cent increase oh are we good are we ready to okay move on to the next thing okay so those were mr bates's questions

that he asked um uh mr amos asked several questions um which i think all of you were copied on i'm only going to answer the ones that we can answer this evening i'm not going to try to answer all of them the uh so he he asked about estimating the impact of the looming tariff war and cost of materials is there a way to assess this ahead of budget adoption to have the most up-to-date information um i'm not sure how we were just that's more of a wait and see but where that's where that will more likely impact the more practical practices on capital projects and and those of course are bid out um and experience tells me that the contractors are going to cover themselves over the potential uh spikes and if it costs for tariffs which will basically lead to higher bids that's that's where

i think that's that's probably the most likely outcome of that his next question is can the meals tax be raised above the six percent level the answer is yes it can be if you would like and can we add a sunset provision like the town of Vienna did and the answer is so what I understand is you they increased it and but they put a sunset on the increase for a certain period of time so so if council desires that that is certainly something that could be done if you wish to put a some type of limitate sunset limitation on the increase that could be done as well how can quickly can we update the charter to increase the transit occupying tax you can do that the next time you have to bend the charter for anything besides that would be

next january or a year basically a year from now january of 2026 and if that were to pass it would be effective july 1 of 2026 which is the start of the fiscal 27 the start of the fiscal 27 year so if it was and we would know if the uh we would know by the by budget adoption or that you need to know whether the charter if we were to pursue that if a charter change was done and to where you could have that um i would also so certainly a good revenue source but it's not going to um raise but so much because we have a limited number of hotels in the city um uh i think you asked the what if if we approve the nine and a half what would potentially be the tax for recreation for 27 we obviously don't

have crystal ball what i did tell you was that we are very confident that from a debt perspective if you adopt how we've proposed with the um revenue stream that we're saying you can dedicate towards debt you won't have to do anything for debt you may have to do something for operating but you wouldn't have to do anything for debt we're fairly confident on that um so just to make make that distinction um you asked about could we have deferred tax payments for furloughed or fired federal workers is that possible i'm sorry the answer is no that goes back to the dylan rule we can only do what the state allows us so there are prescribed programs for such as elderly disabled veterans but just but any

other programs the state would have to authorize that and so that unfortunately is not an option for us you asked about unassigned fund balance and again you wanted to could we use some maybe that for a tax relief program again the answer to that is no i'm sorry because again goes back to the state does not give us permission to do that uh uh let's see uh can we separate the rates on the senior centers to process the county separately at a different rate the answer is yes but i believe we do reciprocity um so um that has been the long-standing arrangement so if you so the if we did that then i think the issue is that they do the same for our residents um uh the you asked for updates to a ppe for fire

station number three so we do have some information out uh requesting information about potential opportunities those are due later this month um we'll be coming back to council it's for the pot it's not for specific proposals but basically are there options we're we're finding out for the market you know are there options potential that we could then pursue um um um and then you asked about a budget town hall which we've discussed um this evening and we will work to get that done he had other questions which we will work on but this was the bulk of his questions i do i appreciate you answering that many questions anyway so thanks there you're very well quickly um um excuse me let me pull this up um council member council member hall let me pull up her message to me

excuse me just one second um you have a question about the um you had the question about um the comparison for inflation and which we talked about earlier so we will work on on that and and get that out um to you um um and then specifically she asked a question about the throne restrooms um um so in fiscal the fiscal year just ended uh uh through 20 24 um the the entire year um was 164 000 for uh and that had uh what i would say um um uh permanent if you will or every month um um at uh ots van dyke and uh the vice park um and then part of the year in providence and ratcliffe and um the the the the but a portion of those um the the two seasonal ones um they are able to take from the the summer camp expenses

um which adds which allows them to add additional weeks of contracted camps and so um about 45 000 of that that was that's how that was covered um so that was the so that was the actual cost for so for the last fiscal year the last complete fiscal year and the only comment i would make about that going back to who shows up at town halls to advocate for things is that you don't necessarily get the people whose kids went to the rec pack programs who had a place to wash their hands before they ate lunch and an all outdoor program uh showing up to say how much that expense meant to their kids having a good summer outdoor rec program so i again we have to look at when we put these things out there and they are important and we want

to hear from people we're not necessarily going to hear from people who are the people using these services or who benefit the most from these services i totally agree um and my son almost went to the ratcliffe park and toilet was not the reason why he was going to go but it was a huge part of it i mean it's very nice to have but i'm thinking from a how are they working out where are they working where are they getting used used so just trying to understand as much as we can about each of the toilets where they are right so that's where they are and that was the the cost for the year um and then the one that was 164 for the year and my understanding is that um with the renovations to old town hall i

think the expectation is the ots one will go away because there'll be um facilities access from the outside as part of the old town hall renovation so that's one that would be removed and there was one that had been at theis park next to the trail which will be removed because we're going to build bathrooms at theis park and then removed being removed or is removed being moved somewhere else and still have the cost not not necessarily i mean i think the one at theis i don't know that they've moved the one at theis park i think they've taken it out for maintenance i think the only two we have right now are van dyke park and old town hall theis park will have permanent bathrooms old town hall will

build permanent bathrooms for old town square so that leaves the one at van dyke park and at such time as we do van dyke park as part of the cip bathrooms are in that plan just like there are bathrooms for the katherine johnson middle school fields because building bathrooms in my opinion is a must-have not a nice to have but the throne bathrooms were a nice bridge while we figure out how we're going to fund bathrooms that really should have been built you know decades ago but we're doing it now and so you're going to see the throne bathrooms disappear i mean as we get permanent bathrooms i think you'll probably see them back for the rec pack programs again this summer because it makes providence park and ratcliffe more usable for all-day programs so i mean i i agree people need to

understand why these things matter it's a it's a quality of life level of service decision i mean we've had porta potties out there for a long time but that's not everybody's idea of a pleasant way to spend time in our city and as far as children go i just think hand washing is a really important thing i totally agree and i will say that the soccer tournament that we ran at draper drive park immediately after those bathrooms were installed was absolutely amazing i mean i was literally emailing with i believe it's kathy salgado then saying is it going to be ready and she was like we have another inspection on thursday i'm like great because it's on saturday and sunday so it was fantastic again just want to understand because i'm sure it's buried in other somewhere so um do you

know what the cost is for 2025 and projected for 2026 right now by chance we can get that for you i don't i listen i don't this was not provided when i asked the question for the expense so we can get that for you and then um council member hardy chandler didn't ask a specific question as far as numbers but she mentioned about the values and as we were going through i have an opportunity to discuss those which so as we have these conversations we can certainly do that again just to reiterate we're having that discussion at the april 5th work session i believe that is all the questions that and i'm looking at the rest if if somebody said you just remind me i'll pull them up believe that's all i've got we've

gotten so far and um again um i think all of you have signed up for one-on-one um conversations so we can actually bring your book we can go through it in in as much detail um as possible um and answer some of your specific questions like you where we can pull it up on the screen and show you like some of the maybe finer details that's not in your book to sort of give you an idea and would encourage you to as you continue to go through or if you hear from constituents um you know with questions if you'll just send them to us and again just like we did this evening we will answer them in the public setting so everybody can hear what they are just getting them in advance it's just helpful for us to try and

get you the answers um as timely as possible so we're not you ask us in one meeting and then we have to wait a whole meeting to to to get you an answer so um i don't know if gwen or jc i think we've covered everything is there anything we you all wanted to cover we haven't covered or did we miss anything no sir okay so um that is so are there other questions or things even if we can't answer it this right at this moment that you will want to put out for us to be working on council member peterson not for tonight but um back to an observation uh council member bates made earlier uh with regards to police and public safety there was a fairly extensive uh management consulting report uh delivered last fall number of recommendations

uh would be helpful to know to what extent they are reflected in the budget if not where not and why not and i think more generally um from the perspective of the chief how well does the budget reflect the necessary priorities of that department okay we'll get that for you um as much if i root i have had a i've reviewed a little bit of this certainly the executive summary of the study and so my recollection is is that um it is not actually adding positions it's reallocating and restructuring the head count that we already have that doesn't mean there's not a fiscal impact but i don't believe that that study actually required additional positions it was reallocating the same head count in different in a different

fashion but i will confirm that yeah i think the overriding issue is whether that the budget places that department at full capacity in terms of the city's needs council member bates um my understanding was that there were different components to um to and i thought it was the same consult might have been different consultants i don't know but i my understanding was that uh one sort of component of it was making recommendations on um the organizational structure and all that is yeah you know the restructuring of existing um positions but then there was also recommendation on increased staffing levels yeah that's my recommend that's my recollection too but it was several years out it was like what year one year two year three so we'll get you in

and let's we will i don't want to talk out of school so we'll we'll review it and get your answers but i do think the system is good is we have questions and emailing it so it makes our time very productive when we get in the room and have a discussion that you've had plenty of time to look at it get the details so we make our in-person time really productive i i think that would suit all of us so as you have these thoughts just send them and they'll be added to the list so that when we get together for the work sessions we can we can run through them sure just a general question obviously there's been a lot of arpa funds that are applied in many years and they're all going to terminate the cip the other things that are beyond that and and any budget conversations in general those have

assumed that those funds are no longer there and we need to replace them with operating funds or some sort of other capital management sure so arpa funds were one-time use funds the majority of that went to um cip projects specifically in stormwater also parks and recreation there was revenue replacement that was utilized once as you saw tonight some of those funds went to transit which was allowed uh but beyond that there are no ftes there are no ongoing operating costs associated with arpa they've all been obligated they're all projected to be spent before uh the deadline which i want to say is december 30 in december of 2026. okay sorry i think so specifically for stormwater there was 1.5 for

2025 there was 1.4 for 2026 the tax rate that has been suggested for stormwater is expecting that we don't have any more influxes and now we need to start to carry that on our own entirely right correct correct okay just want to make sure thank you and just since you mentioned the cip and that's one of the things we have suggested as a topic for the next work session um just just as a general comment um we can review projects and and answer questions so that are project specific would do the best that we can if we need to bring in staff to for for more detailed follow-up we can certainly do that what i want to make sure that that council understands is that simply canceling a project moving a project to another year does not impact the budget proposal for this year the only way you're

going to impact that is to reduce the cash contribution that is made to the cip so we make a cash contribution every year of 11 plus million dollars the rest is debt funded that is part of our plan of finance if you recall from when davenport was here and if you go look at their presentation and we can we can provide that slide to you again one of the point one is one of the assumptions is that there's a minimum of 11 million dollars transferred in cash every year to fund the cip the cip is obviously much more expensive than that and that's where the debt piece comes in you also have a um a financial policy that says that you will contribute at least five percent of general fund expenditures the equivalent to it to the cip

and that's all part of of why we have a triple a bond rating all of those things are interplay so if you're wanting to um change the cip and your goal is to reduce what the tax rate is for the budget simply changing projects is not going to do that you have to you what we will have to reduce the cash contribution to the cip so i just want to put that out there as you're thinking that oh maybe we can move this project or do something different if you want to do that that's still fine um you know those that will ultimately impact how much how much we may spend over time uh on specific things but in terms of impacting this budget that's that's in front of you you're going to have to reduce the cash contribution

i just want to make sure that that that everybody understood that so understanding that i would like to task you if everyone else is in agreement of maybe coming up with three or five ideas that could be trimmed in our operating expenses that could potentially help us lower the tax rate for this year we can certainly do that we can again we can we can give you a list of things sure i mean i can pull them out myself but i don't i don't know the impact that they'll have so if some educated conversation could occur about a few key things that would be really great thank you excuse me just for clarification you are i'm assuming you're referring to things in the operating budget yes recognizing that capital improvements will change things over time but not for an immediate tax

okay let's just for clarification thank you council member hardy chandler while adding i think the triple bond rating the double triple bond rating that we have we want to maintain so that there are far-reaching consequences just articulating those along the way okay that's what we've certainly tried and and how we structure again how we structured fits into all of that so the creation of debt capacity and and all of those things fit right in with that and i think davenport is planning on just sending their just so you know that basically their confirmation that yes what's being proposed and how it's structured fits in with the plan of finance and they would certainly recommend that purely from that financial perspective

and they're not making a value judgment on programs just purely from how things are funded and i think that's is that not forthcoming jc it is all right anything else for the good of the body budget just in general anything else you'd like to to add add or offer when will we uh see an agenda for our next work session when will that be posted miss clark potentially tomorrow okay so uh one of the issues in our session as i understand it and this is a discussion about the george snyder trail and trails in general and i sent an email around earlier suggesting um a thought process and some key uh questions to get answered and um i guess the question is how best to go about doing that because i think it would be helpful um to identify uh those important questions

in advance and have the staff be in a position to respond to them so that we can have that information uh available during the meeting itself so um that could happen perhaps by us submitting uh those questions under that kind of format but i just thought i'd check because i think that there will be potentially a number of questions and it will be very important for us to get fairly clear uh staff responses on them sure i mean it's on the work session to discuss the george snyder's net trail so there a presentation we may by staff just as an overview but it's a discussion so if there's specific things anybody on this dais wants answered it is to everyone's benefit to email staff to ask them that like if

you want something specific they can be they can show up prepared to speak to exactly what this dais wants to understand about the george snyder trail but they're just going to lead off by just doing sort of a an abbreviated overview of where we started what has happened and where we are but i definitely think if you've got something you absolutely have to know tell them in advance how far in advance i think is you know because they they generally try to to post the presentations within a week but if there's something that they need to amend they can amend their presentation they will send it out to us i mean that's i'm looking at you that's generally how it's happened previously right yes we try to always post on wednesday afternoon sometimes it's thursday and we typically

post the presentations um with that however we do as when we've gotten amended presentations we send that to you when we receive them and we post it on your own i guess yeah so you've got time to submit your questions but if they need to up send do an updated presentation they'll do it as far in advance as they can so you're not looking at it the day of the meeting if that's your question i want to give i want to give them time but i also need some additional time to process some of the right stuff from friday right i think i think in that regard we try to be as flexible and responsive as possible both the staff and right and answering things and just understanding they want to get it out ahead of time so you have time to look at the presentation and the staff report but if things change

they will update it and give you a more updated presentation with if there's additional slides or there's additional anything you'll get a newer version of the presentation and can they do that uh if we have if we submit questions even over the weekend yeah i think so i'm going to speak for staff i think so they're going to do their best but even if it's not in an amended presentation with a slide they'll come prepared to answer the question absolutely they'll come prepared to answer the question so if you have thoughts over the weekend just email them to staff yeah certainly we may not you likely won't get a response over the weekend but certainly send it to us and we will we'll be ready to work on that and

have it ready for you for tuesday for tuesday yeah yeah one i will say too the future list we keep that updated consistently throughout the day so looking forward for the next several couple of months out you can see sort of what's coming ahead and you can let staff know well in advance what you may be interested in so it's not like such a where where can they find the future list does everybody know where the future i will send the email um later my computer just died but i will send it to later sorry there is there there is a there is a future list and so that would be a good thing for her to send the link because when we put things in we decide that we'll do it in april or we'll do it in may or we'll do it in

june that's all out there and so you do get an idea of sort of what's in the pipeline and that gives yeah it gives everybody a chance to say okay this is in the pipeline and this is what i'd like to specifically know about the thing we're talking about in two months right right yes council member amos has absolutely nothing to do with this i just wanted to thank facets and all the religious partners for hosting hypothermia prevention week which is wrapping up i think either this week or next week so it's wrapping up soon um so yeah just wanted to say thanks for that and uh hope to see y'all at the mosby woods luncheon on saturday if y'all can make it yeah yeah yeah it's on my calendar all right is there anything else for the good of the body before we call this party to a close

oh okay i'm looking around okay i'm adjourning this meeting at 10 59 p.m