City Council Work Session

Catherine Readgood 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 Ms. Clark would you get us started?

Ms. ClarkclerkYes 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.

Carolyn PitchesGood evening, Council and Mayor and staff. I'm Carolyn Pitches. I'm the chair of the city school board, and why don't we all introduce ourselves? Christina Sesari.

Wendy SanfordstaffLauren Bertelmay.

Ms. ClarkclerkSarah Kelsey.

Carolyn PitchesOkay. We're pleased to be here. We're grateful for the opportunity to discuss our FY26 budget with all of you. We know there are some challenges, and hopefully we can work together to address some of those. And I'll turn it over to the superintendent.

Jeffrey PlattenbergThank you very much, Madam Chair, and good evening, and thank you for allowing us to present the FY2026 school board approved budget this evening. tonight in our presentation i'd like to also acknowledge mr dan phillips the assistant superintendent for the school system as well 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 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 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 expenses, the debt service of outstanding school bond obligations, also some capital lease expenses and also expenses still for Katherine Johnson and Fairfax High School, 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% of our budget, and with

the existing debt comprising 5%, the CIP just over 2%, and the admin fee 1.5%, 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, the City of Fairfax Fairfax County School Board and the City of Fairfax School Board. And we're going to go ahead and discuss in detail the tuition 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 programs, 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 place. These are the current county operating costs, rather, over time that are included in their annual state report. And they're a driver for our tuition bill. Historically, you can see, thank you, I didn't know how to get that red dot. It's always good to have support. Anyway, historically, 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. and we review constantly all of these operating costs but we also look at their approved budget their year-end budget and respectively any of the quarterly improvements during the school year their current and their carryover from prior year 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%. In FY24, 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 FY24, that type of increase of 13.71%, I know a few of you are familiar with that because we had deep conversations about it, was really eye-opening and quite a shock because, as I said, 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 Falls Church which is one of our good comparators that we do a lot of people ask why do we use Falls 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 $3,000 per student per year. That's currently. Now, that will change because of what we said about the incredible increases that we're seeing 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, 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 total 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 until 2992, 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 polled 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 data membership as a 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, 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 March as well.

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. kind of a balancing act of seeing well where are we in comparison when you take a look at the 70 30th enrollment those adjustments that occur in the calculations and the formula that the Commonwealth requires us to account for and then what the result in 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.

Now we're going to go ahead and discuss the 2026 school board budget. And the detail of these 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, and so forth, and the timeline associated with that, which is pretty challenging at best.

so when you take a look at some of these different factors 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 salary increases with collective bargaining it's added 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 The 80% 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.

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 number 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 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 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 1% bonus that the state usually provides. Absolutely.

Carolyn PitchesOkay. So just so everybody understands what the 1.7% is, that's the percentage of the overall FCPS population that we represent. So that is why we are responsible for 1.7% of their operating budget, because that is what our student population represents. So just to make that connection. Thank you for that

Jeffrey Plattenbergclarification and comment. And in taking a look at that, it's one thing that we look at over time. 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 that represent city students. So we were constantly looking at and 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, 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 7% salary expenditure categories that I mentioned. The food service enhancements in the health care, transportation, and also that 7% increase are considered their collective bargaining salaries and benefits, if you will. And that is FCPS's increased projection of $240 million. 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 are 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, cybersecurity, 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 or fine arts and what they term inclusive 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 $60,955,083, $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 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 with Ms. Riddle and Mr. Martinez and their staff. it really has been it's been challenging but it's been really a very transparent and open process. We continue to monitor the FCPS budget and review their expenditures as well and so for an FY26 we've collectively agreed that an increase of 8.25% on the

current forecasted amount which is a revision from the FY25 budgeted amount especially with those the 7% all of the different components that I mentioned that FCPS has in their budget 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 prior to the actual tuition bill coming here classroom revenues however are growing much smaller than the tuition bill in relation to it so a local funding effort what does this mean to the city of Historically, in FY24, it was approximately 35% of the general fund that was dispersed to schools. Based upon what you've heard this evening and what we are anticipating,

I do believe that it is going to continue to, that actual amount of contribution is going to increase considerably. And in fact, the 26 does reflect that, the FY26 budget for schools. So here we have our timeline. It 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, as I said, at the beginning of January. They will be wrapping theirs up there and 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 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 it. Our community is expected. It's a very, very solid, robust program. That's just one of many. One of the other recommendations would be a huge loss in revenue, considerable loss in revenue would be if there were to be a change in qualifying for freedom to reduce lunch from 40% to 60% and so on.

That's just some of the cuts, but they will be keeping us informed because our board has demanded that we be kept informed of these incredible and challenging times. Madam Mayor, members of the City Council, this concludes my presentation. Madam Chair, if you have any concluding remarks.

Carolyn PitchesI just think it's important for everybody to know that we are trying to work with Fairfax County. Catherine and I, originally I had met with Carl sort of casually to talk about these challenges, and then Catherine and I met with him formally, requesting that we kind of put our heads together and we really figure out what we can do to attack this issue. Because this is not, we cannot, as we told FCPS, we cannot, this is not tenable. We cannot year over year take on an 8% plus increase in our tuition costs. WE HAVE BEEN SORT OF TRYING TO WORK WITH THEM. WE HAVE A MEETING SCHEDULED FOR THE 28TH OF THIS MONTH. BOTH SUPERINTENDENTS, CATHERINE AND I, THEIR SCHOOL BOARD CHAIR, CARL FRISH, MR. MARTINEZ IS GOING TO COME.

I THINK GWEN IS GOING TO COME. AND LEE BURTON FROM FCPS. WE ARE HOPING TO PRESENT SOME OPTIONS. I HAVE A LIST OF FOUR THAT I THINK WOULD that I feel are fair. We'll see what, you know, what the conversation is. But we'll keep you all sort of updated on that conversation. Catherine will be there, so I'm sure you will have a conversation with counsel. 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

Catherine Readwell let me just to 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 for the school board councilmember Hardy Chandler

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerthank you for that presentation and I it might be premature but I'm just wondering if you're willing to provide a general overview of your four ideas because certainly we would want to 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

Carolyn PitchesI'm happy to so typically we there's a three to five percent somewhere in that range increase. I think the average is 3.77%. We, one option, the best option I think for the city is to ask them to cap an increase, say 5 to 5.5%, that anything beyond that we would not be responsible for, considering the size of our jurisdiction and our tax base. We don't have A SECOND OPTION WOULD ASK THEM TO CAP IT FOR THE DURATION OF THE RENOVATIONS. THAT ACTUALLY WOULD BUY US TIME BECAUSE THEY WOULD END UP WITH IT. BY THE TIME WE FINISH, THERE WILL BE A NEW SCHOOL BOARD AS WELL. THEN ANOTHER OPTION IS TO THERE IS PRECEDENT FOR SUPERINTENDENT TO SUPERINTENDENT ADDENDUM TO THE CONTRACT without opening the full contract.

Originally, when the contract was first put into place, we did not receive classroom rental. That only came about between Superintendent Mr. George Stepp and Daniel Dominic 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 was 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 that's sort of like a top-down just some ideas

Catherine Readcouncilmember Amos

Anthony AmosI 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 gonna go all into it I sent my budget questions early so we can get out of here early but anyway so if my understanding is correct FY 27 is also expected to be roughly 8% 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

Jeffrey Plattenbergcouncil member I was thank Thank you for that question, but the current trending, when you see the graphs that spike and then expand and contract, you can see that the trend is going upward. 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 but I think everybody is looking at how can we sustain these challenging requirements if we're truly going to have a partnership together so

the long answer is I don't see it as going away anytime soon

Anthony Amosno I appreciate And it's just I don't like operating from a position of 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 to not exceed. But we need some kind of backup plan.

Stacy HallCouncilmember Hall Thank you for the presentation A couple questions I think more just maybe clarification for those that are listening at home 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 and then when it comes to infrastructure replacement and upgrades do our taxpayers pay for things that are done buildings, when they build new schools, those kinds of things. And finally, sorry, I'll just get them all out there. As a global statement, and I don't look at you specifically, Mr. Martinez, I know it's not your decision, but I think this is yet another example of why our budget cycle,

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 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

Jeffrey Plattenbergthank you councilmember Hall yeah the and I know your your accounting background you're gonna want to know the details so I'm gonna have to follow up with the exact formula it's a formulaic approach about the percent of county 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 comparator and not really covering the the full load if you will of the impact for example there are 1,400 students that attend the Academy that are bused in each and every day to Fairfax High School that's a good situation because it allows for a lot of programming a lot of teachers and so forth but it also is wear and tear on our buildings

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 city of fairfax does not pay for fairfax county public schools renovations and their buildings

Stacy Hallthank you i just want to make sure everyone everyone listening is able to understand that so thank you council member

Catherine Readhardy chandler

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerSo is the 8.25% that's forecasted, is that conservative? Or could there possibly be an expansion from there since it is a forecast?

Jeffrey PlattenbergI keep looking over at Mr. Martinez for that one because it is a joint forecast that we believe is conservative. But I'll let him speak to that. He is more qualified than I.

Mr. MartinezstaffSure. Thank you. The 8.25% is a conservative forecast. I think in discussions that we've had with FCPS, the superintendent and myself previously, they were looking at about potentially anywhere in a range between 7% to about 9%. So we sort of cut it in the middle, just slightly more above that at 8.25%. With more time passing as FY26 starts developing, WE ACTUALLY GET OUR TRUE UP BILL AT THE END OF AUGUST OF OCTOBER TIMEFRAME 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 IN COLLABORATION WITH THE SUPERINTENDENT AND THE SCHOOL BOARD AS WELL.

Thomas PetersonCOUNCILMEMBER PETERSON. THANK YOU. TWO QUESTIONS. One, if you could just again restate what is driving, at least primarily, these increases in tuition costs. And second, how does that compare? How does that benchmark, not just in this region but statewide, against changes in tuition costs elsewhere?

Jeffrey PlattenbergWell, that's the second question is an excellent question because 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. In regards to, and the other question was, what are the actual components that are included in it? And the terms that are used were that there were stabilization components that were a part of their Fairfax County Public Schools budget that specifically impacted, 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.

If you take a look at the 240 million, thank you, 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 7% compensation increases, transportation and food service enhancements. Those are salary enhancements because each of those collective bargaining components groups are considered the individual elements. And then health care increases of over 10% comprise that $240 million. The term required adjustments are student needs and enrollment changes, and 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 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. Ongoing needs is a term that 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, cybersecurity, the middle school late buses, the safety and security, major maintenance, planning time, legal fees, summer school, inclusive practices, and the multilingual instructional initiatives. Those ongoing needs are programs that are already started. so it's not and I don't mean to diminish it anyway but it's not to say we're

gonna stop or when legal fees I don't know that they can put a control on that to be honest with you we're gonna 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 a multi-year investment when I talk about pre-k expansion. SCPS has been in the process of expanding early childhood and pre-k offerings that they refer to as inclusive preschool beyond those that were for qualified 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. As I said, it's early on. We don't know where not only the state is going to be, but where Fairfax County is going to be because Fairfax County gave Fairfax County Public Schools a pretty good indicator when they underfunded them by $128 million, something of that magnitude. so it really says you're going to have to sharpen your pencil folks 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 will be an interesting budgetary process much like they all are

Thomas PetersonThank you really helpful when you look at the entire bucket of drivers increased costs, there's a set that are permanent structural changes, it sounds like, and a set that are either one-time or sometime 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 it, 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 with time

Jeffrey Plattenbergbeing? Well, that's an excellent question. When I look at that, Council Member Peterson, it is predominantly an ongoing, when you talk about salary increases, which was the $240 million, 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. the the biggest thing and when I talked to the CFO for February Senate Public Schools and I say to Miss Burden how are you going to be able to address a recession these difficult times 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

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.

Thomas PetersonWell, and maybe just to ask, it does not sound like the salary increases are indexed to economy. No.

Jeffrey PlattenbergIt does not necessarily.

Thomas PetersonAnd 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 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?

Jeffrey PlattenbergI 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.

Carolyn PitchesThe problem is that the county is having a very difficult time keeping teachers because the surrounding counties are outpaying. The salaries are much bigger if you go teach in Arlington, even Loudon now. Prince William has come up pretty close on Fairfax County. so that's I mean that's just the way things are they have a huge amount of teaching staff that they have to pay and if the collective bargaining if they get the 7% that's not going anywhere they're not going to end up with a decrease in pay and typically teachers I would say what 3% is the typical raise, but that's why we, $240 million, 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 there's going to be a downturn.

Thomas PetersonWell, I'm sorry to ask so many questions. This will be my last for the moment, But back to the earlier point about benchmarking 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?

Jeffrey PlattenbergYour first point is absolutely spot on, and that's what I mentioned. The region superintendents, we meet and discuss this. We are all struggling with how to address the increase in health care costs and also the salary. The competition, as Chairman Pitch has mentioned, has become something that in our region has been extremely challenging. And one of the things we talk about each 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. step and then we'd like to also go into a lot more detail about what kind of health impact on the health care costs because those those two or two big

elements that impact all of us as superintendents and that's in terms of benchmarking when we were talking about that that leveling and competition it's one of those things that I don't really I see it as a huge challenge I don't really see a way forward yet but again these are proposed budgets that that we'll have to continue to monitor 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 superintendent says to how can we address these needs that are competing with each other while still providing the services our community expects.

Catherine ReadOther questions from

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerthe dais? Anything?

Catherine ReadI have a couple questions. Can I ask about school lunches? Do our schools have school lunch debt that we carry?

Carolyn PitchesYes, we do. All the schools. I don't know what the amount of those. Yeah, they do. So it's

Jeffrey Plattenbergnot

Carolyn Pitchesthe city that

Catherine Readcarries it, the county does carry. Because

Jeffrey Plattenbergactually a

Catherine Readlocal business asked me about school lunch debt.

Jeffrey PlattenbergSure. And so what happens is it varies between school to school. And I know when I used to work at FCPS, there were some schools that had a larger debt that they were carrying than others. The practices had changed over time on how to deal with that debt. graduate and things of that nature that were kind of draconian back in their day. But, and that's handled through food service, which is also, it's 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 throughout the school year in a very soft approach.

Catherine ReadWell, like I said, a local business spoke to me just yesterday about the fact that 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, or there's an avenue to even do that.

Jeffrey PlattenbergWe could, yeah, please let me know that individual's name

Catherine Readand I can talk to them and work with them. I'll make that connection. And, you know, I know that 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. But, you know, progress. Progress. 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, 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 county is also struggling, and all of this is 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 1% too Because it looks like we will not get the option for 1% 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? Do USDA programs fund free and reduced lunch? Where does that money come from?

Jeffrey PlattenbergYeah, USDA programs fund some of the commodities that come with it. But one thing you mentioned, the JLARC study identified that school districts across the Commonwealth were way underfunded and that burden was placed on the locality.

Catherine ReadYes, it did. And then nothing happened. 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. 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 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?

Jeffrey PlattenbergSimply put, yes. And it's significant. And 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 very important for students that would impact all of us, yes.

Catherine ReadAnd 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, 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 there just aren't 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. But I think we all have to be realistic that this budget that's been presented to us has been very thoughtful. I know that Mr. Martinez, 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 in resources to these programs. So if no one

Rachel McQuillenelse has any questions, yes,

Catherine ReadCouncil Member McQuillan.

Rachel McQuillenWhat neighboring municipalities have a similar school services agreement as ours?

Carolyn PitchesNone

Rachel McQuillenin the

Carolyn PitchesCommonwealth.

Rachel McQuillenAnd what previously when we were forecasting and doing your budget, what safeguards or what contingencies were in place in the event that there was an economic downturn? That might be a question for Mr. Martinez. I

Mr. Martinezstaffdon't

Rachel McQuillenknow.

Mr. MartinezstaffSo, Councilmember, about six years ago, that council at that time actually put into place via financial policy something called a budget stabilization fund, also known as the BSF. 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 AN INCREASE IN THE TUITION CONTRACT, THE SCHOOL'S TUITION CONTRACT. THAT WOULD BE ALLOWED TO TAP INTO THAT. WE ARE PROJECTING POTENTIALLY FOR FY25 TO UTILIZE THE BUDGET STABILIZATION FUND TO OFFSET SOME OF THESE PROJECTED INCREASES IN THE TUITION CONTRACT. 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

Thomas Petersonand

Catherine Readwhat currently is the balance of our budget stabilization fund going into FY 26 I'm

Mr. Martinezstaffgonna go off a memory here but I want to say it is 4.3 million dollars or so

Catherine Readwhich sounds significant but but once you use it it's gone correct and then there ain't no more until fyi 27 okay 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 no I think every effort from what I'm hearing has been made to come up with a good realistic budget for the schools and and to absorb that into the budget discussions we're having for the city any other comments that we have before we thank the school board for coming and talking with us this evening councilmember Hall

Stacy Halljust quickly for those that are watching at home please check out your school board meetings. Council, I encourage you to go check out your school board meetings. Not just the meetings, but the work sessions. Valuable things are discussed. 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.

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 recognizing that we're all doing the best we can here especially given what we're going on in the current environment so thank you

Catherine Readthank 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 miss Casey our

Ms. Clarkclerknext item is the discussion on the Q transit development plan Wendy Sanford transportation director will provide the staff presentation

Wendy SanfordstaffGood 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 introduction 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 Ritter, our multi-motor planner. We have Charles Coutts, Jr. who is the general manager of our Q system. David Summers, 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 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 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?

Catherine ReadCity University Exchange?

Wendy SanfordstaffEnergy Saver.

Catherine ReadEnergy Saver. Okay.

Wendy SanfordstaffIt's somewhat of a moot point because we have now done a rebranding, and we are now city, period, university, period, everyone.

Catherine ReadEveryone.

Wendy SanfordstaffRight. Everyone. But until just about a couple of years ago, that was what Q stood for. There are four routes, two gold routes, two 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. 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. Koontz. office and our bus storage areas down at the property yard. Just to give a little context about Kew, we are one of many transit providers in Northern Virginia. This map shows the city

of Fairfax, it shows the Kew 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 Loudoun 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 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 back up. 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 to about a million rides a year. In terms of ridership hotspots, 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 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

About half of that is salaries and fringe. Another $2 million is internal services. And what internal services 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. about 920 exactly 927 thousand dollars comes from mason that was in fy25 in 26 that is going to be increasing to 950 thousand 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 queue operating In terms of state funding, the city receives assistance from the Department of Rail and Public Transportation, which is 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 for both Metro. 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 NBTC TRUST FUND TO OFFSET OUR CUE 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 CUE OPERATING. CONSTRAINED RESOURCES. WHAT WE'RE SHOWING HERE IS THIS BLUE LINE AND WHAT THAT SHOWS IS OUR REVENUE HOURS. 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. 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 a way to provide seating when we don't have as much space we've heard 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. Mueller 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.

Lucas MuellerstaffAll right. Thank you and good evening. As Ms. Sanford mentioned, my name is Lucas Mueller with Kim Lee Horn. I'm the consultant team project manager for this effort. And I've been working with trans 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 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 and the broader realm of transit and just how people get around in And so this will look at starting in FY26, looking at 10 years, 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 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. Ten years is a long time to plan transit for. DRPT understands that. So we want to set that ten-year time frame, but there are opportunities to update that 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? 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. 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 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. buses operate. And it could also be more planning, you know, a policy or a study to do at some point in the future as well. And then chapters four and five, really about how you implement those recommendations. So chapter four takes the capital side. So what are the vehicles? What's the technology? What are the bus stop amenities? Things like that that need to build on what you what you currently have planned and then also to integrate those proposed recommendations. And then Chapter 5 is more of the operational side of where those ongoing revenues come from. And one of the first steps of that process in that Chapter 1 is to develop the goals and objectives for the system.

And, you know, with something like that, we certainly don't want to start from scratch. We recognize there's been a lot of planning that has been done in the city. And so we want to build on that. We used the existing goals and objectives that were developed back in 2017 for the TDP as a starting point, but really looked at 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 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 represent a strong summary of the priorities

that 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 to hear some of your any feedback or questions you may have about these goals in particular. As we move on to developing those recommendations, there's a bunch of different inputs to those. 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, 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 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. we held we created a public survey that was available both online as well as in person we conducted some in person engagement events really went

to where the people are we conducted bus stop chats so had members of our team our bilingual street team out talking to members of the community we also took a couple opportunities to ride on the buses and talk to people with them and talked with them about what we were hearing and really promoted that survey and got over 500 responses which we were very pleased about representing a wide cross-section and you also you might have seen the bus at the chocolate lovers festival if you stopped by that that was a big that was a big hit to be able to go on the bus so briefly so what you'll see here is a Summary, I mentioned over 500 responses. When we took these, that was just a couple, less than two weeks ago, February 18th.

Brian FosterstaffWe

Lucas Muellerstaffgot about 150 responses just since then. So what you see here is kind of an analysis of that preliminary data. We're working on digesting and summarizing the full survey that just closed last week. But generally, as I mentioned, we did get a strong cross-section of input. Generally, the respondents were more racially diverse and lower income than the city of Fairfax respondents overall. We had about 48% of riders say that they ride Q four or more days a week, so frequent use. A lot of use of Q to transfer to other services. Q is pretty unique in the sense of Northern Virginia given its connection to the Metro Rail, to Fairfax connector, and serving that relatively small geography in the full context

of Northern Virginia. A lot of people were satisfied. That's great news. I think something Mr. Kuntz and his team, everyone should be proud of. Over 90% of people said that they were satisfied with the system. So that's great to hear and certainly want to build on that. There was also support for the fair free service that has begun. So we asked a bunch of questions on the survey, and again, there will be a full summary of that. But we want to hit on a few of the critical questions that we thought might be interesting to this group. So first we asked, this is asking riders, why do you ride Q? And those teal bars that you see are all of the respondents. And then we also broke out students, given how much of a percentage that Mason students provide to the system.

So largely those two, the two top reasons, really, to save money or that people don't have a car. We did hear, we did see generally trends from students here mirror that, but there was a stronger kind of, stronger percentage of students that did not own the car. I should say these percentages here, just to clarify, these are a 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, multiple options here. We also asked people who were non riders why they did not ride and really the ones that wrote 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 throughout Virginia you know making sure that the the routes go where they need to go and they operate frequent enough. And then finally, and this is probably the most critical piece to developing our recommendations, is based on these priorities and needs, what do you think you should focus on? And again, really the converse of that, right? People are saying we should focus on frequency and providing routes to areas not served. And Also, we heard a lot, especially from students, about those, call them the shoulder time period sometimes, later in the evening, earlier in the day, where service may get less frequent, but there's still a need for that. So we would love to do all of these, but certainly important to consider as we go forward the

constrained resources and how do we deal with trade-offs and prioritize these different elements. so as we mentioned we're just getting started with our analysis here but did want to just share a couple a couple tidbits of what we're seeing so far and first especially since covid travel patterns certainly have changed we're seeing more people travel at not just those really concentrated peak periods but throughout the day and looking at ways that the service can potentially align with that so again most of the weekday frequencies is roughly 30 minute headways means the bus comes every 30 minutes and then kind of later in the evening it goes to 60 as well as weekend on on the on the on the 60 minutes 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 to have to do that. So that's something that we want to look at 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. So Q has these two routes that operate in loops. so they both run clockwise and counterclockwise. 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, so there can be benefits and drawbacks

of this route design. It does provide coverage and one-seat ride for most riders, but at the same time, that can mean that they are sitting on the bus for a long time especially you know if you're trying to go to the to the opposite direction what we've heard is you know some people will even get up 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 but it's taking a longer route around the loop 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 connections potentially to some of the major spots.

So this is roughly about a year-long process. We, as I mentioned, we just finished up our first round of engagement and are here with you all for this first work session. We're going to be working the next few months on the technical side developing those recommendations sharing those with staff and and embedding those and then taking them out to the public in that round two and then I just be coming back to you all to brief you on those recommendations get your feedback and ultimately look forward to documenting those and seeking adoption in the fall so with that appreciate the time tonight we had a few discussion questions here that we had identified so we'd love to get your feedback and thoughts on these as well as

certainly if there are other questions that you all have we can touch on those as well thank you

Catherine Readalright thank you for the presentation council member Amos

Anthony AmosI'm just going to preface to say that I love the Q bus So 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 That's a complaint to George Mason by the way 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 9 o'clock and not be able to get home until probably closer to 10 o'clock so So 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. Before I ask, I had 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. They were asking specifically about lanes specifically for Q buses. Dedicated, yes, dedicated bus lanes. Do you have a general response for that?

Wendy SanfordstaffIt's difficult to do when you have a constrained environment. 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, signal technologies to allow like a green, if the bus is approaching a green light and we have the technology similar to what an ambulance has it can keep the green longer to allow queue so it's called transit priority 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 doing the best

Anthony Amostwo questions in one because one of my questions was going to be about what about an express Q bus system, which I'm sure you've heard many times.

Wendy SanfordstaffWhen you say express, meaning fewer stops?

Anthony AmosYeah. And like, for example, Vienna Metro direct bus access rather than having to make stops along the way.

Lucas MuellerstaffThat is definitely something that we've heard just even early on in this process, a desire to look at that more direct service. So that's definitely one of the concepts we'll be exploring.

Anthony AmosOkay. In addition to that, what are our communications like with our neighboring jurisdictions like Vienna, Arlington, places that people would frequent a lot?

Wendy SanfordstaffIn terms of

Anthony Amosoutreach? Outreach, partnership, opportunities.

Wendy SanfordstaffIn terms of the outreach for the survey, I don't know where the geography is in terms of where people responded from. MR. It was mostly

Lucas Muellerstafffocused within the city, looking at riders and non-riders. But certainly throughout this process, we would be working with the staff, both Fairfax Connector, WMATA, and other surrounding agencies to look at where those connection points are. There's also regular, Ms. Ritter and Ms. Sanford can probably speak to, there's regular through NVTA where that coordination happens.

Wendy SanfordstaffAnd one other thing is that Metro has just finished up something called the Better Bus Network Project. And actually Lucas and his team were the consultants on that. And so they were looking at improvements to the Metro bus routes. They also did look at Q as part of that. And so 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 routing taking place in June, 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

Anthony Amosyes excellent and last question in terms of stakeholder engagement Old Town Fairfax Business Association Central Fairfax Chamber have we also done outreach with them as well

Wendy Sanfordstaffwe did I mean we used we used with the help of our communications Director, we got the word out about the survey.

Speaker 17One other thing that's come up, Mr. Amos, is 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.

Wendy SanfordstaffBest practices are for the bus to stay in the travel lane when passengers are getting on and off the bus.

Catherine ReadQuestions, comments? Councilmember Hardy Chandler.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerThanks 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 weekday. I think 10 years is actually a short amount of time in the grand scheme of things. Will the Q exclusively include buses?

Wendy SanfordstaffThat's a very difficult question to answer. For now, the answer is yes.

Speaker 1You can talk about this as far as paratransit.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerAbsolutely. Like some other considerations. I'm just putting that out there.

Speaker 1We talked about it briefly because I know most other transit agencies have THEY'VE TAKEN ON PARATRANSIT AND THINGS LIKE THAT. IT'S SOMETHING WE COULD LOOK INTO.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerWHEN 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 ROUTE. 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. thought about and maybe part of future surveys even

Speaker 1well some of some of the things that i've talked to wendy about and we're looking into it if you look at our routes we go in what they call a circular circular motion it may be better to go what we call inbound outbound where you go from point A to point B. And also 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. Trollies 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 may want to utilize that service

Wendy Sanfordstaffright if I could jump in real quick I'll just say it really comes down to how much we're willing to spend right now we use the same buses for all of our service and we run all day 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 the consultant team is let's really try to see if we can reallocate the existing resources in a different way 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?

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerSo speaking of pay, my second question has to do with what is the formula for the George Mason component of it since there's 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 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?

Wendy SanfordstaffSo this is an interesting topic of discussion. There isn't really a formula. It's more of a discussion. 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 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 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 had students, when we could count, it was about 36% were students. I believe that number is probably higher. But again, difficult to know. So it's not a formula. It's a negotiated amount. 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 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, it'll reset to another period of three years, which is why it's increasing by 3% from 927 to 950. So that's a short answer.

I don't know if Mr. Martinez has anything to add.

Mr. MartinezstaffSo basically everything that Wendy just said, I think previously the contribution amount was $750,000. So starting in FY24 was the first year that we renegotiated that contract in the partnership with George Mason University. As Wendy stated, FY26 will be the last year of that initial contract. That amount is about $950,000. After that, there's two options. either one we continue 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.

Wendy SanfordstaffBut there's other things to keep in mind is that yes we are 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 Reston Limousine as a private and their shuttles run to Mason, and their students 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 the shuttles are useful, but our bus service is probably more useful in many ways because it's taking them places that the shuttles don't take them. So it's not a direct answer we would be running the bus with or without them 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

Catherine Readcouncilman Peterson

Thomas Peterson10-year planning horizon do you have a projection for how you expect, and let me just call it business as usual, for ridership to increase in the next decade?

Lucas MuellerstaffThat is something that we will be working through as part of the analysis. Certainly, they are all projections and forecasts. You might be familiar. So the region, the metropolitan Washington region, does region-wide population and employment forecasts. for each jurisdiction and then creates kind of a region-wide travel demand model that looks at the potential growth 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 developing recommendations.

Thomas PetersonWill we be setting a 10-year goal for ridership as a part of this?

Lucas MuellerstaffSo one of the pieces in that beginning chapter is performance metrics. And one of the things that Q and all of the systems in Virginia is required to report to the Department of Rail and Public Transportation is the general are the costs and then the ridership and cost per rider things like that so that certainly will be yeah that will be 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.

Thomas PetersonIf 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

Lucas Muellerstaffthis? I mean, I'll be honest. Certainly ridership forecasting, especially 10 years into the future, is a very challenging, factors that are outside of our control. A lot of times when we look at this, we look at access to service as a proxy or 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 a certain distance of that service and how much of people are within a certain distance of high frequency service and how far can people get with that service. So looking at how we can expand the service to reach the people, reach where there are areas of density and people that have propensity to use transit in general.

Thomas Petersonto build on that. So what you're doing will include 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, this is going perhaps is how tailor-made what our long-range plan can be. 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, et cetera. So there will be 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 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.

Lucas MuellerstaffYeah, that's a great question. Certainly, a walkable street grid is a key driver to access to transit. 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 would be outside of 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 an area that might have, you know, really high density of population or jobs, that might raise a question mark

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

Thomas Petersonjust 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?

Lucas MuellerstaffYeah, generally talking about a quarter mile to a half mile depending on 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.

Catherine ReadSo you haven't sat in months and months of transportation meetings yet. But... 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 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 of transit is a thing, 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,

Chloe Ritterstaffso you did mention there's different connections to it, scooters, bike share, and then pedestrian paths. looking at the small area plans where we are looking at higher density and as we look at any development project that comes through we are trying to look at where we can put bus stops close to those higher density areas because that is one of the access questions. If the bus stop is right there and if we look at express service as one of the options that will give you an overall shorter trip versus having to like Lucas mentioned ride all the way around before you get to metro and you are 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 and how people are getting to the bus stop,

not just to the bus stop, but from their home to their destination in the most efficient way possible.

Thomas PetersonWell, 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.

Wendy SanfordstaffWhen 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 at the last mile.

Catherine ReadCouncilmember Hall.

Stacy HallSo I have a number of questions. Some are specifically related to the summer just in general. Just to address one thing that you said, though, Mr. Lucas, was that, am I on? Yeah, I am. Yeah, okay. 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. 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 a priority, but putting a bus somewhere because there's not a sidewalk is still a priority to me. So if you could pull up slide three for me, just so we can look at the map together a

little bit. 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 Cobbdale 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 Catherine Johnson middle school where we would then pick it up 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, 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, 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 super convenient for me to think about doing that. 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. So back to the overall ridership, though. So we've talked about kind of who rides, 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 the student population, but do we have any way of knowing who else is riding besides that?

Lucas MuellerstaffSo look at the specific question. I believe we did ask something in the realm of that, 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 So there are ways to do more detailed rider surveys where you can really get those definitive numbers.

Wendy SanfordstaffIt's a very difficult question to answer. 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. 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

Stacy Hallyeah I understand and I'm not really sure how to make it better but just trying to think through some of the things for those watching at home what is the minimum age to ride the Q bus technically is there a minimum age

Wendy Sanfordstaffby yourself?

Stacy HallWell, 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

Speaker 17rule

Speaker 1of thumb would probably be somewhere around 12, 13, without, with a, without an adult, somewhere around 12, 13.

Stacy HallThat's great, because that's our middle school population, and I know that they use it a lot to get around, including my kids. Yes. Off topic, sort of, but when were the buses wrapped with the new logo?

Wendy SanfordstaffThey 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 But about six months ago. They were completed.

Stacy HallOkay and So I understand we get the portion of funds from George Mason.

Wendy SanfordstaffYes,

Stacy Halland I understand that we Use the NVT trust fund that we choose for that 728 the ARPA funding of 400,000 This is

Wendy Sanfordstaffthe 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.

Stacy HallOkay. And then the 30% – 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?

Wendy SanfordstaffNo. So this is the funding that was generated from the new taxes and fees that were put into place back in 2014. 13, 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 where they were raised. 70% stays with NVTA for regional projects. So that 30% money comes back to us. It is held in the 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 C&I, the commercial and industrial tax. There are different requirements for how those funds can be spent.

30% funding can be spent on projects at increased capacity and also projects public transportation purposes. And so we are allowed to use our 30% money for the operating expenses of our transit system. The C&I money, the commercial and industrial tax at 12.5 cents on property zoned, commercial or industrial, that can only be used for projects that increase capacity. So that C&I money cannot be used on transit operations. That's why we use the 30% money. But it is not general fund money that we are using to pay for Q.

Stacy HallOkay. So is it safe to say then that the average resident is not directly paying for the bus service? they're

Wendy Sanfordstaffpaying through the increase the taxes and fees that they pay that would be that that go to NVTA okay

Stacy Halland that's generated through all the other sources that you just said before

Wendy Sanfordstaffright 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 choose how they spend that 30% money. Our jurisdiction is choosing to spend that 30% money to pay for the Q system.

Stacy HallOkay, 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. But in the 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?

Lucas MuellerstaffThere were some options to provide open-ended commentary.

Mr. MartinezstaffWe're still working through what those are, but we did ask that.

Stacy HallOkay. And then, well, I guess almost finally, do we ever do kind of counts at each stop? that there's hot spots and that like do we go to mason and 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

Wendy Sanfordstaffto find out what specifically to

Stacy Hallfind 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 for something to do and then didn't get off until six hours later?

Wendy SanfordstaffSo 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 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. Weren't we talking about that yesterday with James?

Lucas MuellerstaffYes, yes. So there's 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. And that's something that can be very helpful and a relatively new, exciting data source in the realm of planning.

Stacy HallOkay.

Lucas MuellerstaffI 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 says an opportunity, hey, if we think it's a, 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.

Stacy HallOkay. Yeah, I'm not trying to spend future money at this point. 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. 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 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

Catherine ReadCouncil Member Hardy-Chandler. Council Member Hardy-

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerOkay. Very, very quickly. I'm just curious how you got the people who didn't ride the bus.

Lucas MuellerstaffCouncil Member Hardy- That's a great question. Council Member Hardy- So the survey was promoted in a variety of different ways. So it was promoted online and that email, you know, there were emails sent to various community members. So I would imagine that some of the responses came from there. I also imagine 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. We did get predominantly rider feedback. I think it was about three-quarters riders to one-quarter non-riders, which I think is a relatively good split for this. So both of those, both of the inputs, it's helpful there because ultimately, I think

more of those riders, those non-riders in the future.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerAnd to follow up on that, I'm very interested and intrigued a little bit about the unique Q 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?

Lucas MuellerstaffYeah, it's a great question. 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, 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 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, make the experience unique to what Q is. I think this

Brian Fosterstaffmay

Lucas Muellerstaffhave originated from something when you had said.

Wendy SanfordstaffI feel like if you talk to people who ride Q, people who ride Q love Q. It's something unique, I think. I don't know if you talk to people who ride Connect or feel the same way. And it's just 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, 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 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.

Speaker 17Yeah, 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 bitten 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

Catherine Readcouncilmember McQuillan

Rachel McQuillenthank you for the presentation I really love the solar I appreciate them. I've noticed them everywhere. Were any of the students that were surveyed, were they high school students by chance? Or do you know if any of the students happened

Lucas Muellerstaffto be? The question that we asked, I believe it was just like how would you describe yourself? So I think it was just a student in general. I think I would say most of them were probably GMU students, but I don't think we have a split.

Rachel McQuillenI 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 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. It 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. I also wanted to ask, do we take into consideration school dismissal times or big activity times in the city when the queue bus is on their routes?

Speaker 1So that's one of the things that we're looking at.

Speaker 17They consider it like peak

Speaker 1times. Like, you know, when the most folks are riding the bus. So that's something that 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 of experience I have. I think the circular route makes it seem longer as opposed to inbound, outbound. because 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 the express service, we talked about that because, based on my experience, they love the Walmart, George Mason, and the Vienna Metro. So if you could combine those three into an express route, I think it would change a few things.

Rachel McQuillenExcellent. Thank you. 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?

Speaker 1So on the weekends, we run four buses at a time. 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. Okay.

Rachel McQuillenAnd then you noted, sorry, were you finished? I didn't mean to interrupt you. And then you noted that the revenues are flat, operating costs are increasing. 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?

Lucas MuellerstaffWe'll certainly have to look at, you know, what the potential forecast increase over those ten years could be similar to a lot of the conversations tonight. There will be a certain level of inflation that is assumed. The plan does require you to outline the funding splits and the sources of funding that could meet those increases.

Rachel McQuillenOkay. But no creative recommendations of public partnerships or anything like that?

Lucas MuellerstaffSo part of those funding sources could be additional funding sources or changes to existing agreements. We are not doing an in-depth revenue study per se but certainly be able to look at what other funding sources might be out there.

Rachel McQuillenOkay. And then when we were charging riders how much did we charge?

Wendy SanfordstaffI believe when we stopped was it $2? I believe the

Chloe Ritterstafflast fair we charged was $1.85 for adults and it was lower for seniors and high school students. I know it's been a while.

Wendy SanfordstaffSorry. I feel like it was somewhere around there. Thank

Catherine Readyou. Thank you. Councilmember Hall.

Stacy HallSo if a person is on the bus, sees something, says something, has a problem, either be it with the driver or with another person on the bus, this is a resident question, who do they contact? Who should they reach out to to kind of bring that to staff's attention?

Speaker 1So you're referring to one of the riders? So basically when a rider sees something, they normally contact the driver indiscreetly.

Stacy HallOkay.

Speaker 1Or they may call us on the telephone. 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

Stacy Halland if they have other suggestions just in general though are who was the best contact point for that would be me or

Speaker 1just call one of us believe me when something's not going right they call

Stacy Hallokay

Speaker 1so they know the number they know I mean I know know by our first name basis i mean because we talk a lot about different things

Stacy Hallokay 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 five dollars and 89 cents per rider that is correct regardless of where they're going just kind of as a ballpark number okay thank you

Catherine ReadAnyone else? Councilmember Bates

Billy BatesThank you So personally I would more likely want to see more frequent service on the QBus and I think that a majority of us on the council want to see you know at least explore more frequent service or you know expanding the routes I think that those closer to existing routes want to see more frequent service and those who live further from existing routes want to see the routes expanded. So if you look at the survey data, it looks like it's kind of an even split those top two spots as far as what people want to see between more frequent service and then expanded routes and with maybe a slight lean toward frequent service. And so certainly things that I think are worthwhile to look into, and we'd also I think mainly want to look at which, you know, the different options and what's, you know, more cost effective to expand service and what would yield the greatest increase in, you know, in service and potential riders served, I guess.

and then also traffic signal prioritization of Q buses was something else that I think that individual who emailed us had raised as councilmember Amos mentioned and I think that it sounds like that would be a lot more feasible than a dedicated lane especially Chambridge Road can't really do that you know unless you take several front yards pretty much from what I can Definitely something else to look into. Very valuable feedback from the resident who emailed us. Yeah. So that's all I have for now. Thanks.

Lucas MuellerstaffThanks. And, yeah, I think, you know, you all and the people so far in the survey really, you know, capture that. This is the classic tradeoff of transit planning, right? Frequency versus coverage. And it's often not a blanket solution, right? You can't just pick one or the other. You have to understand where and what qualities of streets, of neighborhoods can support that frequency versus maybe there's some lesser coverage. So that's the dealing with the constrained resources. Where can you really get the best investment? And it's but that's what we're going to look at and come up with the best options possible.

Catherine ReadOkay, a couple other things. Back in the olden days. Back in the olden days. So the first campus, 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 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. 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 lived over in Camp Washington, she took a metro bus. She took a metro bus from our neighborhood, 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 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. 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.

Wendy Sanfordstaffit'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

Catherine Readand

Wendy Sanfordstaffso 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

Catherine Readyeah international University. It's on 29.

Wendy SanfordstaffYeah. They

Catherine Readcalled

Wendy Sanfordstaffme 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. And you're just far enough out the city outside the city and 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?

Catherine ReadI 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

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerbut

Catherine Readif 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

Wendy Sanfordstaffthrough our transit app sorry to interrupt you but there are transit after you can put in 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. People don't like to, once you get past a one-seat ride, two-seat rides are less popular.

Catherine ReadWell, 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. garages and none of the bus stops. This is a mindset too. It's kind of like we should be showing people where the free bus stops, 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 Perez, okay?

Speaker 18isn't that great?

Catherine ReadAnd she like, she creates a park out of a trash heap and she goes to City Hall and talks to the mayor and the clerk and she has petitions signed and she does all these things. Anyway, I 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. library and the middle school and

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerit had a stop at the high school you

Catherine Readknow 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, 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 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 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.

Stacy HallOne 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, a goal, but I think if we're trying to hit other targets of audiences that we know are riding the bus, it would be great to put it out in their language. Thank you.

Catherine ReadAll right. Are we good? Oh, Council Member Peterson. Do

Thomas Petersonwe know what the price sensitivity is for charging to ride? In other words, how much drop-off would there be if we charged X cents, dollars, whatever?

Lucas MuellerstaffSo to get a specific answer, we

Thomas Petersonwould have to do a more

Lucas Muellerstaffdetailed fare-free study. I mean, generally, I would point back to the ridership graph that was showing that even before, you know, before the ridership levels now have exceeded what they were pre-COVID, you know, when there was a charge. So, you know, there has not been a detailed study of what is the exact number. I will say the only transit service that I know of, especially in Northern Virginia, that is actually making money is the Loudoun commuter buses all the way from Loudoun into D.C. Those were the only ones. It is an inherent component of transit that it is part of a service that's provided to the general public. The percentage of revenue that comes from transit on the bus side tends to be between 5% and 10% of the overall revenues.

revenues.

Catherine ReadI 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 fare boxes because it cost them more to collect fares than the fares they were collecting. and that's why we do need to think when you're thinking about how many dollars or cents but is the effort of collecting that money even collecting the coins and counting it and depositing it 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

Thomas Petersonuh fair enough although we're deriving zero revenue as i understand it from riders right now

Wendy Sanfordstaffthat is correct we have a four-year zero fare program and we're in we'll be entering the fourth year in fy26

Thomas Petersonand knocking the door at a million rides a year knocking the door at six bucks a ride 5.8 million divided by 985,000, right? If I got my math right, Billy, you'll have to check me here. Correct. And I think that all practical considerations 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

Wendy Sanfordstaffwe will be doing next year an evaluation of our zero fare program. So we will be looking at these questions as to our ridership, how much would we potentially lose? It will 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. As the mayor has already stated, bus systems do not pay for themselves. No bus system does. A good bus system is getting 10% back. When we were collecting fares, the only people who were paying fares were, well, so let's say who was free. All Mason students, staff, faculty, and high school and middle school students. We had an agreement with FCPS for that.

So who were paying were either commuters or other adults, transit dependent people. 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, and how much ridership will you lose. So I don't know the answers to your questions, but we will be looking at that next year.

Speaker 17I'll add a few things too. Initially, when the free fare

Speaker 1program came out, a lot of that money came from the state. 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 $50,000 to $90,000. 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. You might spend over $100,000 a year just on one bus in a fare box. So, I mean, I go all the way 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 both sides to see if it's even feasible to do so. And no transatlanticians have ever made that much money in revenue. They came up with different ways. I talked to Wendy about this, but Wendy's the boss. You can make a little bit of money in advertising to make up.

Catherine ReadYeah, 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. No, I do think, too, that when you say, like, again, the fares, the cost of collecting the fares, if you're looking at data and evidence-based, it's just not there. It costs more to collect it than you're collecting. to ride the bus of all ages. 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. At some point, we'll probably go electric. I mean, all electric. I mean, that's coming down the road. 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 long ago, 2017, 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'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 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've really enjoyed every minute of this

Stacey Hardy-Chandleryeah

Wendy Sanfordstaffthank

Stacey Hardy-Chandleryou thank

Catherine Readyou very much thank you very much

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerall right miss

Catherine Readmiss clark who do we have up next

Ms. Clarkclerkthe last work session item is a discussion on the proposed fy26 budget i'll recognize brian foster city manager for the discussion

Brian Fosterstaffthank you mayor members of council um i will kick this off 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. And you, of course, had these lovely thick books to take home and peruse with lots of the information. So we sent out just a suggestion of how we might want to structure the discussions. It's certainly not set in stone, and you're welcome to change the direction, but we wanted to sort of help you focus on manageable chunks as far as the discussion goes. So for tonight, we were just basically focusing on the general fund, which of course is our

largest fund. And we don't necessarily have a specific presentation. I've given you a presentation. We can review some of that if you'd like. But where we need to be on the schedule is next week you will be asked to set an advertised and I say since they set, excuse me, 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. So what's been proposed is for real estate, and that's what we're focusing on when I say that we have the deadlines, is the statutory advertising requirements that we have before we have the public hearing, and so to keep us on our schedule. that 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 as a reminder and this might and for the folks the council members that are new to the dice and this is your first budget I typically recommend to counsel to actually advertise a rate that is higher than the one that's recommended and the reason is because 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 ultimately choose the rate you recommended rate that's in 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

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.

Stacy HallWhat did they do last year? Do you know?

Mr. MartinezstaffSo 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.

Catherine ReadOkay. Councilmember Amos.

Anthony AmosJust 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 right I support 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 you know cutting off our own foot here is not necessary 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

Brian Fosterstaffwe can we it's your meeting we can we're flexible to you know some of you said we're able to submit some questions ahead of time 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 or however like to proceed?

Catherine ReadNo, I think, I mean, if you've got questions, ask your questions.

Anthony AmosI 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. So I'd like to see some type of interactive format like a budget town hall like the, like the county does. Now granted, they do it by district, but they still do that for jurisdictions of 100,000 people, 150,000 people. So I think we could do that as well. 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?

Brian FosterstaffSo we can, but I want to caution you, and I'll start and I'll let JC and Gwen chime in 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 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, if you're looking for cause and effect, we're not going to be able to tell you because there's just way too many variables. in that. But we can show you individually and you can draw your own conclusions. Go ahead.

Mr. MartinezstaffI've actually thought about that previously before and I think the manager is absolutely right. 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 So Loudoun County, in the last four years, their tax rate has actually gone down by about 12.5 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.

ABLE TO LOWER THE TAX RATE FROM THAT SIDE. 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 REASSESSED EVERY YEAR. USUALLY THOSE ASSESSMENTS APPRECIATE EVERY SINGLE YEAR. SO INFLATION IS KIND OF BAKED IN. 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.

Catherine ReadCouncilmember Peterson.

Lucas MuellerstaffJust to follow up

Thomas Petersonon that, I have certainly received a lot of 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, 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 whether they are in favor

of or not in favor 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 in 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 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,

Anthony Amosjust quickly on that. I mean, again, it goes back to my point on education. It's more so, I mean, if you look at the main causes, it's essentially schools and CIP. But having that 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 wrong end of that deal. 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

Rachel McQuillencouncilmember

Catherine ReadHall

Rachel McQuillenI 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.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member Hall.

Stacy HallI 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. I think they can help communicate. They can help make decisions. They can, you know, help feedback rather than just the six of a seven of us sitting up here. But I think the key for 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 hall where it's more resident driven than it is council or staff driven.

Catherine ReadCouncil member Stacey Hardy Chandler.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerI 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, we have to be very thoughtful about how we get there from here because this is our starting point. And to the point of I do think we have to be careful because 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 providing all of that

and not just isolated pieces of information, not only do we get more input, we get more understanding about the budget process, and it carries more credibility to your little sample group of one to be able to 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 requirements of the decisions that we have to make now is something that we have to all agree and work together on.

Brian FosterstaffSo we can certainly put together a meeting of what you're describing and where it's more interactive. That's not a problem. We can put that together. It'll take us a minute to do that. You'll have to make a couple of decisions, like the advertised tax rate, before pull that off but we could 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 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 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 there I don't think in the conversation brief conversation that I've had with Wendy the 30% funding 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 are certainly interconnected the schools is another I mean that's this by far the biggest driver in in in

how our budget ends up working 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 root of that is the contract that we have and if you don't change the contract then the 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 and so that's that's the long and short of it so there's other things so lots of these things come about so we when we talk when you know we talk about the when I did my presentation I mean is the budget is as much a reflection of what you value 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 All these other play 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 Just just be mindful of 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

Catherine ReadSo I will call on my colleagues here a 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? representative, then they're representing the things that impact them. 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 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 to be aware that we are not necessarily hearing from everyone about programs they use that they care about. So we have to keep things in perspective. I'm going to call on Councilmember Amos, then Councilmember Hardy Chandler, then Councilmember McClellan.

Anthony AmosNo, 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 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 day care 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. I did not know that. Girl Scouts. Shout out to you all. Thank you.

Stacy HallBoy Scouts, too. Some Scouts.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerSo 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. PROCESS THAT REALLY DRAWS IN DIVERSE VOICES OR ELSE WE'RE JUST DOING THE SAME THING, CALLING IT SOMETHING DIFFERENT. TO YOUR POINT ABOUT SECTORS OF THE CITY THAT AREN'T BEING HEARD. SO I THINK THERE'S SOME VALUE IN 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. So second to that, I do think that 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 FOR THE BUDGET WILL TELL OUR STORY ABOUT WHAT WE VALUE. FOR ME, IT IS VERY CLEARLY A FUTURE BEYOND THIS COUNCIL. 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 WERE TALKING ABOUT THE Q-BUS AND THE TEN-YEAR HORIZON, THAT'S very short in terms of my thinking and what and the future residents of the city that I'm here to serve to that are not here are not necessarily impacted this year the third thing is you said

that your recommendation is to build in a little cushion and I think that's responsible and what are you estimating that cushion to be if we were to take that recommendation of of building that to the advertised tax rate?

Brian FosterstaffWe discussed that internally, and, you know, we think, you know, $1.15 was 2.5 cents higher than recommended, and that's about the difference in the meals tax that's being proposed because we haven't talked about that, you know, because I've heard some comments about not liking on the meals tax. There are other options for you. we all know no one likes to be on put it on the real estate but the reality is that's your largest that's the biggest bang for the buck in terms of the smallest increase gets you the biggest return and so there's a combination of things that we can do and again we've given you a recommended budget 9.5 or 1.12.5 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 response about specific things that would 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 rate higher than what has been recommended. But, again, it's all, to Council Member Hardy Chandler's point, as far as the values and stuff, and we welcome that, and that goes back to my first meeting when I asked those questions to try to get to help with the formulation of the budget. You are going to have that discussion. That is a retreat topic at your next retreat.

Again, it's a timing issue. Saturday and 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 but is important discussion to have so we worked with what we had which was the what was adopted and so that the that is what we're what we currently work from and again 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 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 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 and desires that you have

Catherine Readcouncilmember Maquillen.

Rachel McQuillenSo we went through a similar situation with 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 amount of voters or votes. so I would like to see a similar outreach with this situation with the budget I think in doing so we get to educate listen collaborate it provides the environment for ideas and thoughts to come forward this is how we come up with creative solutions to difficult situations 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

a relationship and to build trust with our community. I too would welcome further discussing the goals and priorities of this council. I love that. And do we have the ability to introduce or pass certain fees like an entertainment fee?

Brian FosterstaffThe short answer is it depends. So we're so again Virginia's Dillon 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 so I think what you're talking is like an admissions tax I think perhaps you say entertainment fee like admissions on tickets to events yes we learn

Rachel McQuillenthat at a different

Brian Fosterstaffright so that that we would need to double check and an admissions tax is for at least for some folks it's different than attack well

Rachel McQuillenso it would go on it

Brian Fosterstaffgoes on the ticket yeah yeah yeah

Rachel McQuillenso 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

Brian Fosterstaffso so i think there are potential 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's an action outside of the budget process that there's no guarantee for us in making a recommendation that council might take. Understood. Thank you.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member Peterson.

Thomas PetersonJust to clarify, April 5 retreat, is that going to be covering budget issues? Because my agenda that I received from Melissa Shinneberry says no.

Brian FosterstaffNot the budget specifically. was the visioning and the goals, the values and so forth that council wants to have. That discussion is scheduled to take place then.

Thomas PetersonWell, 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 is a big increase we're proposing. And in those cases, it's pretty common 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 identify opportunities for savings, to justify things that are staying and are going to result in a high increase. and that's going to take time. It's 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.

Catherine ReadWell, we do have work sessions set up 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 were 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

Stacy Hallmay 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 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 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. 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 am happy to send questions by email, but 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. 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 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 newspaper like this they kind of wake up a little bit right so we may not 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 all the things

Catherine Readcouncilmember Amos

Anthony Amoswhile I agree 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

Brian Fosterstaffthere's a public hearing on the budget next week so

Anthony AmosI would like

Brian Fosterstaffto see you have four of four of those scheduled.

Anthony AmosYeah, so I do want to see if it's an adequate amount of time already because, I mean, let's be real, it's about to be 10 o'clock. We could set that up, but it could be a redundant conversation. 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 I think we should send the questions first, get that back, and see how that process goes.

Stacy HallAs far as the Saturday thing, I kind of meant for us, if there's still a bazillion questions that we haven't answered internally, not community-focused. That's a separate thing as far as I'm concerned.

Brian FosterstaffAs 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. 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. So, I mean, and we can continue to, you know, and then, of course, if you just in general conversation, 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 provide that to you at the next meeting.

Catherine ReadOther thoughts? Yes, Council Member Bates.

Billy BatesThank you. I just, first off, I am definitely supportive of the town hall idea. I do echo Councilmember Ames, Councilmember Mayor Reed's comments before that, you know, we do need to consider that, 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. And it certainly is also very helpful in terms of, you know, there have been several cases when the feedback that I received has contributed to the conversations that we have up here. And as far as putting in a bit of a cushion in the advertised rate, I really have mixed feelings about that. because on the one hand, as we've discussed before,

public safety was a big priority of ours. And right now, as I understand it, the staff positions citywide are just flat. We're not adding anything else. Is that right? Yeah. And on the other hand, we just had a presentation last year on the results of an independent consultant review police department saying that we need additional sworn and civilian positions to increase the amount of proactive enforcement time that proportionally that our officers have. And that even, you know, we are short staffed in that space. And even if you look at separately the ICMA staffing guidelines. You know, we're falling short of that in the police department. And, you know, I singled that out because we did have the independent consultant come in.

Now, I'm hoping that, you know, maybe in future years we won't see this much of an unprecedented increase in the recommended rate, and hopefully we will be able to take another look at that. this time around 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 on the other hand again it is really an unprecedented increase that's suggested and you know I'm hesitant to say that I want to advertise a rate that is higher than the recommended rate but you know if we do I think that we need to do so with the understanding that that is an absolute last resort you know as far as going

above the recommended rate and I'm hoping that we might even be able to you know maybe scale that back a bit you know sort of the recommended increase and maybe even find room for you know there's always a chance we might be able some room for some additional priorities in there as a result of you know moving some things around so I don't know I mean I as far as the advertised rate yeah I think that we'll need to maybe think about that a bit and I guess next week we can maybe have some you know some different options and then maybe discuss further and decide which we want to introduce at that time. Yeah.

Brian FosterstaffYeah, 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. So, and I just threw that out so you could start mauling that over. 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

rates. That's just our reality.

Catherine ReadThat's true in every jurisdiction. We're not the only ones struggling. That's just real estate property taxes are what funds localities. The other 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. We know that thousands of people in our city work for the federal government. We know 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 it 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. at the minimum, we could see a decline in our meals tax for the same reason. It's not just the tariffs making everything more expensive. I mean, people are already paying whatever for a dozen

Stacey Hardy-Chandlereggs.

Catherine ReadBut 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, here we are. It's March 4th. We are so, this administration 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 in 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 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

Anthony Amoscouncilmember Amos 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?

Mr. MartinezstaffSO 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 3% 4% 5% hopefully not 13 or 14% but uh that's the best estimate right now sir

Anthony Amosokay I mean that's just something to have in the back of our minds too and this is goes to councilmember Hall's point about maybe we need to fix up the schedule just because we have that unpredictability of CPS and then we get a $7 million 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,

Stacy Hallbut 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? 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 separately 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 using the words miscellaneous and 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 some notes on things,

but when I see, like, anything over even $200,000, $100,000, it just makes me wonder, like, what is made up in that number? And I think that that's something that needs to be detailed out for everyone. I

Rachel McQuillenknow I see your face and I hate that. I'm sorry.

Stacy HallI know, but I know it's more work and it, but I know you have the information. So I know it adds probably a hundred pages to our budget books, but I just think it's really key. Thank you.

Mr. MartinezstaffSo I was going to 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 if we were to provide the detail it would probably be about a 1800 to a 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. WE ARE MORE THAN HAPPY IF COUNCIL SO CHOOSES TO GIVE YOU ALL THE DETAIL, THE 2,000 PAGES OR SO OF INFORMATION.

Stacy HallIS 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.

Speaker 18I could create, you know, high-level PDFs of all the Excel spreadsheets. It would probably be the easiest way. Like I said, it's a huge macro workbook that is very detailed. And to give you that, I wouldn't put that on my worst enemy. I don't even manage it because it's beyond me. 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 the way it's built.

Stacy HallShort 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. Thank you.

Brian FosterstaffMayor. Also, I think all of you have availed yourself over the next week. You all have individual meetings with the staff where we can, if we want to get into some of those really nitty-gritty things that we can to make sure, give you a better comfort level of what's in the budget. Just to be really blunt about it, 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. What you're talking about now is you're talking about service levels, staffing levels. That's what you're talking about. If you're wanting to make a significant impact

as far as the amount of the rate that you're wanting. If you're wanting to reduce the potential rate, also keep in mind that the way we've structured it, and we were very intentional in structuring it this way, yes, it's a big jump, but we're also thinking about the future. We're not just thinking about this one year. You've got a tremendous, forget about CIP. 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, if you remember from the Davenport study, they said if nothing else happened, it's 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 to get you started to do that. So the more you want 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, potentially, and depending on where you end up, potentially more next year than this year. So I'm just saying we can walk you through all of that, but that's the other piece. And I recognize you all have a very difficult decision in how you have to vote for this. 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. So if you remember just the school piece, we were starting at 13 1⁄2 without anything else.

And so it's down to 9 1⁄2, but obviously we moved some of that in other ways to help generate that revenue.

Stacy HallYeah, 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.

Brian FosterstaffAnd again, absolutely. So we have that number. We can talk about that tonight. We pulled that because you sent it to us ahead of time. 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 portable restrooms, and maybe it's at a level 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 that you want, that citizens expect, that you're wanting to provide for the citizens. So it's all interrelated. But we, and that's why I'm saying any question you want to ask, we can pull that information for you.

And I have, I need to pull it up, but I have that information.

Stacy HallWell, I appreciate that. 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 MOVED TO THE CITY, I HAD NO IDEA THERE WAS A FLYER THAT WENT TO THEM.

Ms. ClarkclerkNO IDEA, RIGHT? WE WERE TRYING TO CREATE

Stacy HallONE 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.

Thomas PetersonCOUNCIL MEMBER PETERSEN. where did we land on carving out an extra Saturday

Catherine Readjust

Thomas Petersonfor

Catherine Readbudget so an extra Saturday or as opposed to basically using the fifth just for budget are we looking council member I

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerthink the suggestion was to go with the work sessions and if we didn't get through everything to have the extra Saturday day 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 need it in sections to make it digestible for me. So I feel like this is helpful, but I do understand and I feel like it could be possible to carve out some additional time if we need it just in case not instead of okay

Catherine Readso so the question still is do we want to keep the agenda for April 5th or make the agenda for April 5th

Anthony Amosbudget 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

Catherine Readtrust y'all we've broken that up to make it but

Anthony AmosLet'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 or we have questions left over, then we can use that cushion. I don't think we need to pull the trigger tonight.

Thomas PetersonOkay, is that a fair consensus? To be clear, so we would, it's a contingent option.

Catherine ReadOkay, yes. We can make it a contingent option. Great. Okay. That's good. Okay. Yes.

Brian FosterstaffWould you like me to go through the answers that we have? Sure. Okay. So I think Council Member Bates sent an email. I think he was first, so we'll go through his first. And then he said first that the increase in education, that we mentioned the kinds of increase in education costs is not sustainable. Are there any suggestions to address that? Well, I think with the school board, you heard some of the suggestions that they're working on. That is the elephant in the room. Council Member McQuillan asked a question about how everybody else is doing. So just very briefly, the city of Fairfax, I think, is unique in how it does the schools contract with 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 they formulate the budget, they ask, you know, they approach their governing body for funding and then there's this back and forth. 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 and set up quite the same way so changing the contract if there are ways to amend it if you can do a cap quite honestly 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 the 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 with 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 26 34. so they're maybe 300 students less but they're operating there now i'm just giving you the numbers you can argue whether their system is as high a quality or not or offers more things, doesn't offer more things.

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

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 etc. One in animal control. So 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 for us to continue to look at um same on the same line um currently any field positions that in your opinion uh could be frozen or consolidated upon turnover without termination without it 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 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 turnover throughout the year so that is one of the tools that we use I think probably JC can you pull up the couple couple of slides and then because last

thing is any potential opportunities for cost savings minimal impact to city services so I remember remember I told you we would give you options and so here are some alternative options which we did not talk about one is the personal that's the one for most residents that's the vehicle that's the tax on their personal vehicles that's also one that's also loathed by most people one penny of personal property tax generates 40,000 in revenue roughly currently 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 PPT rate in northern Virginia is four dollars and thirty cents so at four oh four thirteen

we're slightly less and then of course there's some that are significantly less you know in the 350 range and then there's some are in like the six dollar range. So I mean, again, the average 430. The next slide is also related to personal property tax. This is something that could be done 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 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. They 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. 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 percent of revenue

in 2026. however residents pay 100 percent in 2025 they pay 100 percent in 2026 april october 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 for next year in the future. Or you could have it slightly less but still dedicate all of that for debt service. So 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 proposed to you but it is an option and that would give you some flexibility in how we're funding and and doing things and I think mayor council member Hall has a question

Catherine Readyes council member Hall

Stacy Hallso 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'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

Brian Fosterstaffgo so we would we haven't as we would need to calculate that I believe that the additional cost is mainly going to be in the postage and the mailing that piece from a staff perspective again all the work is done to for the bit you know for 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 timeframe 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 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 it and then it takes care of itself

Catherine Readlet's remember Amos

Anthony AmosI mean in terms of the personal property tax while I agreed is the most hated tax because I hate it too 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 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 FY27 issue as a FY26 issue.

Stacy HallLet me just say, 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.

Brian FosterstaffNo, we appreciate that. I mean, that's one of the things we talked about is that it can be, people will look at it different ways, but certainly can be helpful for them to spread it out.

Thomas PetersonPrincipal Peterson. Well, we should, I think, be sure to get some public feedback on this because people going through the drill of paying taxes and more than one politician has lost reelection because they altered the method by which that happens and so 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

Anthony Amosjust real quick to build on that because I forgot to ask my question is how would tax relief work specifically for

Brian FosterstaffThere's no impact. The way the personal property, well, I say there's no impact. The way personal property tax works now. Just a quick history lesson when this was done. 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 100%. So localities 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, and that payment is then distributed to the tax. There's a calculation that's done each year on how much quote-unquote relief that you're getting. as the population grows

and there are more cars in the city that relief is going down anyway. But from a city perspective it's a flat amount that comes in and it doesn't change.

Anthony AmosLess so about the allocation of funding I mean more so the schedule. For example, I think the application is usually due in May time frame. I remember because when I first moved to the city I didn't know that because the county but we had it for May and so when I moved here I didn't realize that tried to apply for it like September because I'm a procrastinator sometimes and couldn't qualify for it so wanted to know how that would work with two separate payments I

Speaker 18can speak we don't I believe only disabled vets get tax relief for personal property

Anthony Amosright

Speaker 18are I

Anthony Amosmeant damage and high mileage

Brian Fosterstaffyou would it's this we can 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 liability for the tax is January 1 and so whatever happens after that I don't say is irrelevant but it's just it doesn't it's it's whatever so like if you sold that car when 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 So, again, it's just 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 are possibilities. Again, things to consider if you desire.

Stacy HallI'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.

Brian FosterstaffYes, you do. You're liable for the whole year. Well, let me say that. I don't think we prorate. Do we

Stacy Hallprorate? 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.

Speaker 18I think it would be the same as for real estate. If you sold or had an improvement or if you received tax relief, probably we can make adjustments throughout the year. and there will be refunds or whatever

Stacey Hardy-Chandlerthat would account for

Speaker 18that piece. But I don't think the dollar amount, as the city manager said, the dollar amounts wouldn't be significant.

Mr. MartinezstaffYes, Mr. Martinez. Just to go back, because I don't think Council Member Amos' question was fully answered, and I think you're alluding to what would the potential rate be for FY27 IT WITH THE CRYSTAL BALL BEING VERY CLOUDY BUT UTILIZING THE $6.5 MILLION AS A BASE, THAT'S EQUIVALENT RIGHT NOW TO ABOUT 7 CENTS. SO, AND AS THE MANAGER STATED, THIS IS A ONE-TIME REVENUE SOURCE. SO THERE WOULD POTENTIALLY BE THE NEED IN FY27 TO INCREASE BY 7 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 24.5 CENTS, OR ALMOST 33%, 9 CENTS ALONE IN 2009. BETWEEN 2007-2013, IT WAS A TOTAL INCREASE OF 35 CENTS,

or about 47% 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 sitting right now. The city hall annex was built during that time frame. The new police headquarters was also built. SITE WAS ALSO DONE AND 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 IN THE CITY AND AGAIN ABOUT A 35 CENT INCREASE. 2007 IT WAS A 1 CENT INCREASE. 2008 IT WAS A 7 CENT INCREASE. 2009 AGAIN WAS A 9 CENT INCREASE. AND THEN 2010 WAS A 7.5 CENT INCREASE.

Catherine ReadAre we good? Are we ready to move on to the next thing?

Brian FosterstaffSo those were Mr. Bates' questions that he asked. Mr. Amos asked several questions 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. So he asked about estimating the impact of the looming tariff war on cost of materials. Is there a way to assess this ahead of budget adoption to have the most up-to-date information? I'm not sure how. We're just, that's more of a wait and see. But where that will more likely impact this is on capital projects. And those, of course, are bid out. and experience tells me that contractors are going to cover themselves over the potential spikes and cost for tariffs,

which will basically lead to higher bids. That's where I think that's probably the most likely outcome of that. His next question is, can the meals tax be raised above the 6% 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 some type of limitate sunset limitation on the increase that could be done as well how can it increase the transit occupying tax. You can do that the next time you have to amend the charter for anything besides that would be

next January, 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 we would know by budget adoption or that you need whether the charter if we were on to pursue that if a charter change was done and to where you could have that. I would also so certainly a good revenue source but it's not going to raise but so much because we have a limited number of hotels in the city. I think you asked if we approve the 9.5 what would to be the tax reaffirmation 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 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 so just to make make that distinction 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 Dillon rule. We can only do what the state allows us. So there are prescribed programs for such as elderly, disabled veterans, 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 maybe that

for a tax relief program? Again, the answer to that is no, I'm sorry. Again goes back to the state does not give us permission to do that. 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. So that has been the longstanding arrangement. So if we did that, then I think the issue is that they do the same for our residents the you asked for updates to a PPE for fire station number three so we do have some information out requesting information about potential opportunities those are due later this month we'll be coming back to council it's for the pop it's not for specific proposals but basically are there options where we're

finding out for the market you know are there options since that we could then and then you asked about a budget town hall which we've discussed this evening and we will

Speaker 17work to get that done

Brian Fosterstaffhe had other questions which we will work on but this was the bulk of his questions I did

Anthony AmosI appreciate you answering that many questions anyway so thanks

Brian Fosterstaffthere you're very well quickly excuse me let me pull this up um council member hall let me pull up her message to me excuse me just one second You had a question about the comparison for inflation, which we talked about earlier. So we will work on that and get that out to you. And then specifically, she asked a question about the throne restrooms. so in fiscal the fiscal year just ended uh through 2024 um the the entire year um was 164 000 and that had what I would say permanent, if you will, or every month at OTS, Van Dyke, and Theis Park, and then part of the year in Providence and Ratcliffe. and um 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 about 45,000 of that was that's how that was covered so that was the so that was the actual cost for so for the last fiscal year the last complete fiscal year

Catherine Readand 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 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.

Stacy HallI totally agree. My son almost went to the Radcliffe Park, and the toilet was not the reason why he was going to go, but it was a huge part of it. 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, so just trying to understand as much as we can about each of the toilets where they are.

Brian FosterstaffThat's where they are, and that was the cost for the year. and then the one that was 164 for the year and my understanding is that with the renovations to Old Town Hall I think the expectation is the OTS one will go away because they'll be facilities access from the outside as part of the Old Town Hall renovation so that's one that would be removed and

Catherine Readthere 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. Does

Stacy Hallremoved mean removed or does removed mean moved somewhere else and still have the cost?

Catherine ReadNot 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 at Van Dyke Park and Old Town Hall. Theis Park will have permanent bathrooms. Old Town Hall will build permanent bathrooms for Old Town Square. 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 Catherine 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

decades ago. But we're doing it now. and so you're going to see the thrown 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 Radcliffe more usable for all day programs I mean I agree people need to understand why these things matter 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.

Stacy HallI 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 was Kathy Salgado then, saying, is it going to be ready? 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 do you know what the cost is for 2025 and projected for 2026 right now? By chance?

Lucas MuellerstaffWe

Brian Fosterstaffcan get that for you. I don't, that's not, I don't, that 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 I believe that's all that we've gotten so far. And again, I think all of you have signed up for one-on-one conversations.

So we can actually bring your book. We can go through it in as much detail as possible and answer some of your specific questions. We can pull it up on the screen and show you 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 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 is just helpful for us to try and get you the answers as timely as possible so 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 y'all wanted to cover we haven't covered or did we miss anything no

Mr. Martinezstaffsir

Brian Fosterstaffokay 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 want to put out for us to be working on

Catherine Readcouncil member Peterson not

Thomas Petersonfor tonight but back to an observation councilmember Bates made earlier with regards to police and public safety there was a fairly extensive management consulting report delivered last fall number of recommendations would be helpful to know to what extent they are reflected in the if not where not and why not and I think more generally from the perspective of the chief how well does the budget reflect the necessary priorities of that department okay

Brian Fosterstaffwe'll get that for you as much if I were I have had reviewed a little bit of this certainly the executive summary of the study and so my recollection is is that 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

Thomas Petersonyeah i think the overriding issue is whether that places that department at full capacity in terms of the city's needs council member bates

Billy Batesum my understanding was that there were different components to um 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 the organizational structure and all that is, yeah, you know, the restructuring of existing positions, but then there was also recommendation on increased staffing levels.

Catherine ReadYeah, that's my recollection, too, but it was several years out. It was like year one, year

Brian Fosterstafftwo, year three. So we'll get you in. I don't want to talk out of school, so we'll review it and get your answers.

Catherine Readbut 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 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

Stacy Halljust 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 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?

Mr. MartinezstaffSure. So ARPA funds were one-time use THE MAJORITY OF THAT WENT TO CIP PROJECTS SPECIFICALLY IN STORM WATER, ALSO PARKS AND RECREATION, REVENUE REPLACEMENT THAT WAS UTILIZED ONCE. AS YOU SAW TONIGHT, SOME OF THOSE FUNDS WENT TO TRANSIT WHICH WAS ALLOWED. BEYOND THAT, THERE ARE NO FTEs, THERE ARE NO ONGOING OPERATING COSTS ASSOCIATED WITH ARPA. THEY HAVE ALL BEEN OBLIGATED. they're all projected to be spent before the deadline which I'm going to say is December 30 in December of 2026 okay

Stacy Hallsorry 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 and

Brian Fosterstaffjust since you mentioned the CIP and that's one of the things we have suggested as a topic for the next work session just just as a general comment we can review projects and and answer questions so that are project specific to 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 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. 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 provide that slide to you again, one of the assumptions is that there's a minimum of $11 million transferred in cash every year to fund the CIP. The CIP is obviously much more expensive than that, comes in you also have a financial policy that says that you will contribute at least five percent of general fund expenditures the equivalent to it to the CIP that's all part of of why we have a triple-a bond rating that all of those things are interplay so if you're wanting to 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 view 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 you know those that will ultimately impact how much my how much we may spend over time on specific things. But in terms of impacting this budget that's in front of you, you're going to have to reduce the cash contribution. I just want to make sure that everybody understood that.

Stacy HallSo 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.

Lucas MuellerstaffWe

Brian Fosterstaffcan certainly do that. Again, we can give you a list of things. Sure.

Stacy HallI mean, I can pull them out myself, but 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.

Brian FosterstaffExcuse me, just for clarification, I'm assuming you're referring to things in the operating budget.

Stacy HallYes, recognizing that capital improvements will change things over time, but not for an immediate tax.

Brian FosterstaffOkay, that's just for clarification. Thank you.

Catherine ReadCouncil Member Hardy-Chandler.

Stacey Hardy-ChandlerWhile 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.

Brian FosterstaffThat's what we've certainly tried. And how we structure, again, how we structure fits into all of that. So the creation of debt capacity 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 that 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

Mr. Martinezstaffis

Catherine Readall right anything else for the good of the body

Thomas Petersonbudget

Catherine Readjust in general anything else you'd like to to add add or offer when

Thomas Petersonwill we see an agenda for our next work session

Catherine Readwhen will that be posted miss clark

Ms. Clarkclerkpotentially tomorrow.

Thomas PetersonOkay, so 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

Brian FosterstaffI sent an email around earlier

Thomas Petersonsuggesting a thought process and some key questions to get answered, and I guess the question is how best to go about doing that because I think it would be helpful to identify those important questions in advance and have the staff be in a position to respond to them so that we can have that information available during the meeting itself. So that could happen perhaps by us submitting 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 staff responses on them. Sure.

Catherine ReadI mean, it's on the work session to discuss the George Schneider trail. So a presentation we made 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 speak to exactly what this dais wants to understand about the George Schneider Trail. But they're just going to lead off by just doing sort of 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 generally try to post the presentations within a week. But if there's something 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?

Ms. ClarkclerkYes, we try to always post on Wednesday afternoon, sometimes it's Thursday, and we typically post the presentations with that. However, we do, 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,

Catherine Readso you've got time to submit your questions, but if they need to 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

Stacy HallI want to give them time But I also need some additional time to process some of the right stuff from Friday So right

Catherine ReadI 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. If there's additional slides or there's additional anything, you'll get a newer version of the presentation.

Thomas PetersonAnd can they do that if we submit questions even over the weekend?

Catherine ReadYeah, I think so. I'm going to speak for staff. I think so. They're going to do their best. But

Stacey Hardy-Chandlereven if it's not in an amended presentation with a slide, they'll

Catherine Readcome prepared to answer the question. Absolutely. Come prepared to answer the question. So if you have thoughts over the weekend, just email them to staff.

Brian FosterstaffYeah, certainly we may not, you likely won't get a response over the weekend, but certainly send it to us and we will be ready to work on that and have it ready for you for Tuesday. For Tuesday,

Catherine Readyeah.

Ms. ClarkclerkYeah. 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, 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

Catherine Readwhere can they find the future list does everybody know where the

Ms. Clarkclerki will send the email um later my computer just died but i will send it to later

Catherine Readsorry 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 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.

Anthony AmosCouncil Member Amos. It 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. so yeah just wanted to say thanks for that and hope to see y'all at the Mosby Woods luncheon on Saturday if y'all

Catherine Readcan make it it's on my calendar alright is there anything else for the good of the body before we call this party to a close ok I'm looking around ok I'm adjourning this meeting at 10.59pm