Coraggio Consulting
Prince William Board of County Supervisors Meeting — Organizational Meeting, Tuesday, January 10, 2023

Date: Tuesday, January 10, 2023
Place: Prince William County Board of County Supervisors, Virginia
Length: 2h 39m (video)
Official meeting video (Prince William County, Granicus): https://pwcgov.granicus.com/player/clip/3218
Official Board of County Supervisors page (Prince William County): https://www.pwcva.gov/department/board-county-supervisors

Machine transcript (speech-to-text) produced by Coraggio Consulting. Not an official county record. Names and numbers may be misspelled; check the video at the timestamp before quoting.
Speech-to-text: whisper.cpp, model large-v3-turbo. Produced 2026-11-04. Timestamps are [HH:MM:SS] into the meeting video.

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[00:09:01] Good afternoon. It is 2 p.m. on Tuesday, January 2023. Please join me if you want to bow your heads for a moment of silence. Thank you.

[00:09:24] If we could all rise for the reciting of the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, to the republic for which it stands, one nation, God, with liberty and justice for all.

[00:09:42] Thank you. Welcome to our first meeting of 2023. We are going to go through the agenda. And we have people visiting us, giving us presentations. We have new people to introduce. We have public comment time. And we will just start off with item number 3A, a resolution to approve the minutes of December 6, 2022.

[00:10:03] So move, Madam Chair. Second. Motion made by Supervisor Bailey, seconded by Supervisor Bodie. Are we using our motion buttons? Oh, they did that. Wow. Okay. We're still getting used to our new system. For those who don't know, this is all. It's still relatively new.

[00:10:19] Okay. Seeing no further discussion, please vote. Vote unanimous. Okay. We are now on to organizational manners, which, as noted on the agenda, I'm going to begin with my annual remarks, and then we will complete the annual election of Vice Chair Pro Tem and then talk about the 2023 calendar.

[00:10:41] So just give me a moment to go down there.

[00:10:59] Welcome. Good afternoon. My name is Ann Wheeler, and I'm Chair at Large of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors. I am excited and honored to embark on my fourth year as the board chair and have the opportunity to speak today on our county's amazing progress and potential as part of the annual State of the County Address. This is a tradition that allows us to reflect on our recent successes and to look ahead with hope and determination to the opportunities and challenges that lie ahead.

[00:11:27] Together with our adopted strategic plan as our guide, we will continue to build a brighter future for all of us. I'd like to start by expressing my deep gratitude and admiration for my colleagues on the Board of County Supervisors. Their tireless commitment and dedication to our community has been a constant source of inspiration to me, and I am grateful to each of them for their tremendous service to their constituents. As a board together, we have been able to make so many positive changes to bring us to where we are today. I especially want to recognize and thank Pete Canlon for his many years of service as the Gainesville District Supervisor and I think I can speak for all members

[00:12:04] of this board when I say that we wish him great success in all his future endeavors. I look forward to working with the incoming Gainesville District Supervisor after next month's special election. I'm also thrilled to welcome Christopher Shorter as our new county executive whose wealth of experience in local government operations, strategic planning, and financial management will be an asset in leading the organization and advancing the county to a successful and exciting future. I do want to take a moment to thank Elijah Johnson for his invaluable contributions as acting county executive over the past year. His commitment and dedication to the organization

[00:12:42] and the community is commendable, and we are so very grateful for his leadership and guidance over the past year. And while there are many to thank for the success of the county, I want to expressed my heartfelt appreciation to the nearly 6,000 county staff members who work tirelessly every day to make Prince William County a strong, prosperous, and vital community. Your dedication and commitment are truly inspiring, and we are deeply grateful for your service. Prince William County is at a forefront of progress in many areas. Our growing community is a shining example

[00:13:21] of diversity and inclusivity, with Prince William County being the most diverse county in Virginia and the 10th most diverse county in the nation. It is through the collective vision and hard work of the Board of County Supervisors, county leadership and staff, stakeholders, local business owners, and members of the community that we stand at a true turning point as we enter the new year.

[00:13:44] Together, we can achieve anything. So let's embrace this moment and work toward building an even brighter future for all of us. Despite the continued challenges posed by COVID-19 pandemic and an uncertain financial climate, Prince William County has made remarkable progress this past year.

[00:14:01] Thanks to the resilience and determination of our community, we have not only weathered the storm, but have emerged stronger than ever before. Our county has become a place where people can live, work, and play with confidence and optimism for the future. One of the most important actions we can take to strengthen our community, in addition to investing in our local economy, is investing in the education of the next generation of leaders in Prince William County, our school system.

[00:14:29] this has been one of the highest priorities for this board and last year's budget offered a hundred million dollars more annually in school funding directly from the county than we had given before this board was ever installed communally over the last three years we have given over 250 million more to support our school system this funding ensures continuing success in our schools and helps provide our students with the resources they need to succeed we are raising the bar on raising the next generation, and our entire local community will benefit.

[00:15:04] Along those lines, I'm thrilled to announce that our local economy is thriving. Our internal economic development initiatives alone have resulted in $1.3 billion in capital investment just in 2022. That represented the creation and retention of over 1,700 jobs. Our coordinated efforts to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic with the ARPA funds helped our storefronts, hotels and small businesses rebound and reimagine their future in 2022. Last year we awarded more than $9 million to approximately 350 small businesses in Prince William County with our

[00:15:41] Restore Retail Grant and Lift Up Lodging program. Looking forward to 2023, our Economic Development Department will move forward with plans to implement an SBA microloan program, giving more options to our community businesses to stay, grow, and expand right here. We will also release the comprehensive barriers to success study, which will dive into how our business resources and systems can be improved for small business owners. Finally, we are doubling down on the value of our entrepreneurial ecosystem. High growth companies can drive innovation and, moreover, increase new

[00:16:18] jobs and employment. That's why the board supported an expansion of the Ignite program, which will now offer high growth companies cash grants of up to $100,000 to help them achieve their goals and Prince William County. The IGNITE program is expanding to support ongoing education, community building, and student-built business development initiatives. Overall, it's a very exciting time to start, grow, and expand your business in Prince William County. Financially, Prince William County continues to thrive as the board remains committed to its principles of sound financial management and further diversifies its tax base to maintain a stable revenue system.

[00:16:56] I'm pleased to report that our financial efforts have been recognized once again by all three bond credit rating agencies, which have affirmed Prince William County's AAA bond rating. This is the highest rating available and a testament to the Board of County Supervisors' focus on making smart investments in our county while providing the necessary services to support our residents.

[00:17:18] The rating analysts have recognized our important progress in attracting new businesses, diversifying our tax base, and strengthening our financial condition. Out of more than 3,100 counties in the nation, Prince William County is one of only 49 to receive a AAA rating from all three agencies, affirming our status as a fiscally responsible and sound local government.

[00:17:41] Last year, I spoke about the board's priority of addressing the recruitment and retention of a skilled workforce. In November 2022, we reaffirmed our commitment to our current and future staff by adopting a collective bargaining ordinance. For the first time in the county's history, employees have the right to bargain collectively over terms and conditions of employment. In addition, in December 2022, the board approved an increase to the police pay scales, as well as hiring incentives for all hard-to-fill vacancies throughout the county organization, making Prince William County government a more competitive and

[00:18:15] desirable place to work. As a board, we are dedicated to supporting our county staff and will continue to work hard to create a supportive and fulfilling work environment. We value the contributions of our dedicated employees and are committed to helping them succeed. In addition to supporting our first responders to create a safer community, we understand the importance of investing in our community to help achieve that same end.

[00:18:39] That is why the Board of County Supervisors recently approved the creation of a new Community Safety Initiative. This broad initiative aligns directly with our strategic plan goal of being a safe and secure community and brings together county agencies, community groups, and trusted voices from across our county to address the various concerns related to safety.

[00:19:01] By leveraging and coordinating the efforts of all those committed to keeping Prince William County safe, this initiative allows all voices to be heard and identifies protective steps forward. We are excited about this positive impact that it will have on our community and the chance to work together to build a brighter future for all of us.

[00:19:18] Prince William County continues to make important strives in achieving our health, well-being, and human services strategic goal including securing funding for the crisis receiving center this cutting-edge project will help some of the most vulnerable members of our community by providing timely access to services for those experiencing acute mental health care needs the initial 11.9 million dollars needed to open the crisis receiving center which will be located in the old gander mountain building in woodbridge was secured from a combination of federal state and local sources we are hoping to see it open early next year and it will be of immense benefit

[00:19:55] to our community we also have secured federal funding to assist in the building of the county's homeless navigation center on the eastern end we look forward as this project progresses another priority for the board of supervisors of our strategic goal of environmental conservation and sustainability in the first year the office sustainability was allocated a million dollars to advance sustainability in our county the sustainability commission was formally created consisting of eight appointed residents by the board of county supervisors in addition to this we continued our with our stream water restoration projects throughout the county

[00:20:29] and our reforestation initiative to plant native trees in resource protection areas transportation and safety mobility remain top priorities for the board of county supervisors that's why we work closely with our regional partners and state and federal agencies to enhance transportation options for all our residents in 2022 as pedestrian crashes continue to increase nationwide, we completed critical pedestrian projects on Old Bridge Road, Gemini Way, and Mill Street to provide safe, ADA-accessible facilities for our residents. We celebrated key milestones on major transportation improvement projects, including breaking ground on the

[00:21:08] Brentsville Interchange. We also broke ground on the Prince William Parkway-University Boulevard Intersection Improvement Program, an innovative quadrant intersection funded by the Northern Virginia Transportation Authority that will create a new connection to the Innovation Park area and significantly improve mobility and support economic development. The county was recognized with an achievement award from the National Association of Counties for our successful efforts in enhancing transparency and public participation in our transportation program to improve our service to the community. In 2022, the county also secured more than $100 million

[00:21:46] dollars in external funding to implement the capital improvement program for transportation projects that were adopted by the board. The majority of the funding for active transportation projects, more than 80 percent, are from sources outside of the county revenues. Finally, we adopted a new mobility chapter of the comprehensive plan that, for the first time in county history, incorporates recreational trails as part of the transportation network and actually reduces roadway lane miles from the previous plan. 2023 will continue to be an exciting year for transportation. We are entering this new year with many active mobility projects in the county,

[00:22:23] such as the Balls Ford Road Interchange scheduled completion this year. These active projects around the county total more than $1.2 billion. Many of these projects include pedestrian access and safety aspects, including sidewalks, shared use paths, and traffic calming measures. This reflects this board's commitment to reducing transportation fatalities and injuries as one of the priorities in the coming year. We are excited about these projects, which exemplify how Prince William County is leveraging collaboration, innovation, and strategic investment to meet

[00:22:57] the current needs and set up our county up for long-term success. One of the most impressive achievements last year is the completion and adoption of the Comprehensive Plan, a turning point for prince william county this extensive plan is a result of six years of hard work planning and research and it outlines the county's plan for growth for the next 20 years it represents our commitment to investing in and guiding our community from roads and parks to libraries and land use and it shows that prince william county is a growing thriving place i believe that we can

[00:23:34] make positive progress if we all work together with a shared goal of making our county a stronger and better place for all county residents as we look forward to 2023 we have so much to be excited about i truly believe that prince william county is a great place to live and do business we've accomplished a lot over the past three years and there's more work to be done but it is an exciting time for prince william county as a region as our region continues to grow and offer new benefits and opportunities prince william county is committed to being part of that success and

[00:24:09] welcoming and embracing the diverse perspectives cultures and backgrounds of all those who call our community home it's an honor to serve you and we look forward to the many accomplishments we will achieve throughout our collaboration in 2023 let's get to work thank you thank you and that brings us

[00:24:43] on to some of our other organizational manners item 4b to elect a 2023 vice chair board of county supervisors for the board of county supervisors do i hear a motion for 4b so move madam chair second i moved that uh right well hello everyone no uh i move that kenny bow to become the vice chair for our season for 2023 thank you and did i hear a second already a motion seconded by vice current vice chair franklin very good is there any further discussion madam chair uh supervisor

[00:25:21] Sure. I just want to thank my colleagues for the opportunity over the past year, and I am honored to pass this on to Supervisor Bodie. He knows that he cares deeply about the policy portion of the work that we do, and I'm looking forward to having him serve as Vice Chair.

[00:25:39] Thank you. Okay. Seeing no other further discussion, please vote. Vote unanimous. Thank you. That brings us on to Item 4C, the election of 2023.

[00:25:57] Chair Pro Tem. I'd like to nominate Supervisor Bailey as the Chair of Pro Tem. Second. Motion made by Supervisor Angri. I meant to second it.

[00:26:21] Is there any further discussion? Madam Chair. Supervisor Bodie. Thank you, Madam Chair. Likewise, I would like to thank the board for their confidence in the very illustrious elevated position that is Pro Temp over the past year.

[00:26:43] I'm looking forward to working with Supervisor Bailey in that role in the coming year. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Bodie. Anything else? Okay. Seeing none, please vote. Vote unanimous.

[00:27:00] Wonderful. We're moving right along. That brings us to 4D, the adoption of the Prince William Board of County Supervisors 2023 meeting schedule. I know everyone has the one in front of them, which is the addition with the addition of the January 25th, which is the joint school board meeting at the school board.

[00:27:19] They're hosting us this year, so I'd entertain a motion for 4D with that correction. So moved, Madam Chair. Second. Okay. Speakers. Supervisor Lawson. Thank you, Madam Chair.

[00:27:35] First of all, I'm going to assume that is on a Wednesday night, right? Correct. Okay. That's right, because now I see the 24th right before it. I would like to amend the schedule. Right now you have the budget presentation on Tuesday night, the 21st, which is customary that we hear the budget around mid-February.

[00:28:01] However, given the special election is that day, I realize the polls close at 7, but I think that it would be proper for our board to amend the schedule and either have the budget presentation on the 28th or include it on the 14th with the CIP or maybe even suggest that we have it on the 23rd.

[00:28:25] I just think that for the sake of whoever our next colleague will be and for the public's sake we shouldn't be meeting on an election night is that you making a like amended motion yeah i'm just suggesting that we amend the calendar we can discuss you know a date that we think um we we could move it to like i suggested the 20 february 23rd yeah i don't think we should be meeting that night i mean there's a special election in the county originally we had

[00:28:59] an afternoon meeting and we got rid of that um so i understand i and i i didn't i didn't even realize that you had scheduled an afternoon meeting and i appreciate that you got rid of that but uh i just think it not to mention whoever this our next colleague will be the budget is a very important piece of what our work is annually and i think out of deference to our next colleague we we can delay it two days or a week whatever you know the the board i'm open to

[00:29:33] discussions i think we should okay so we've got a amended technically that's okay supervisor angry and i'll just say as a as as one who came into the same situation uh during my special election right into the budget season it was uh very overwhelming um i'm just looking as you say So you would think you're saying that the person coming in should come in to the budget and not do it before they get in the seat?

[00:30:02] So the 14th wouldn't necessarily. You know what, Supervisor Angry, thank you for pointing that out. You're absolutely right. So we shouldn't look at the 14th. We should do it post the 21st. And then I'm just, because then March is already here. So then you're really talking about adding a day, like the 23rd or the 22nd.

[00:30:22] Yeah, or the 28th, like the following Tuesday. So, one sec. Ms. Madden, can we talk about the availability of the 28th for your staff as well as other people and whether other people are using the chambers? I can look into that. I think the board trumps anybody else using the chambers, quite honestly.

[00:30:40] I do think we can make it happen. And if we're not having a meeting on the 21st, that will eliminate some of the staff pressure to have 21 and 28. So, we can certainly set that as just an evening session. Well, no, I would actually then go back to we were supposed to have an afternoon and an evening session, and we got rid of an afternoon session when we could have been doing some work and consent agenda items.

[00:31:01] I would like to add that back in then. So then do you need a motion to go both afternoon and evening session? Would that be? I guess I would. If Supervisor Bailey would amend your motion. If you want to restate your motion, how about that? And then we'll just go from there.

[00:31:17] Well, so I guess it's a friendly amendment. I accept the amendment. Thank you. okay great and to be clear um it sounds like the chair had an afternoon uh so we'll do afternoon and evening on the 28th we can make that change and it gives our new county executive another week well i guess is there anything with regards to the budget presentation that we don't like we don't have anything legally that we bump up against or anything like that i don't think the presentation there's any issue we obviously have the public hearing in april um so it won't be out there quite as long for everybody to look at and for you all to

[00:31:54] dive into but it's a week and and honestly I don't think it'll maybe I don't know if Elijah or Dave Sinclair is in the room and wants to I guess I probably like another week anyway so we'll just assume that that's good yeah okay and madam chair supervisor Lawson I'd also like to say whoever's responsible for giving us all of August off thank you we went back to yeah we kept missing national night out and having a meeting on the second and it just wasn't working because we never got to national night out so we just went back to how it used to be so i'm sure

[00:32:28] supervisor bailey yeah i have my line yeah no i get the thing no very good yep uh just for just for clarity um so i'm understanding and accepting your your amendment that we're going to have a meeting on the 28th both at 2 and 7 30 for the for the clarity for the community thank you and And no meeting on February 21st.

[00:32:49] And no meeting on February 21st. Very good. Okay. Any, Supervisor Franklin? No, I'll just second what Jennings says. Okay. Okay. Any further, seeing no further discussion, please vote. Oh. Okay. Supervisor Bega.

[00:33:07] Thank you, Madam Chair. I know that Supervisor Lawson just acknowledged that we're off for the entire month of August. However, in trying to be mindful of county staff, would it be possible for us to reconsider the meeting that we have right after Labor Day? That is a weekend which most families go out, try to enjoy that last summer with their families.

[00:33:27] And I know that it means that county staff can't really leave because we have a meeting right after. So would it be possible that we perhaps consider having it on September 26th? So there are reasons because of numbers of meetings in a row and things like that.

[00:33:47] And we've always had one right after Labor Day. I will defer to Ms. Madden. so thank you supervisor vega we appreciate that i would only suggest if we're going to do that that we shift the 12th to be a regular meeting the 19th to be a work session and the 26th to be a regular meeting um that just allows us to have a break sort of in between those regular meetings um so if you all are agreeable to that i don't i don't if it i can't see if anybody on staff is behind me shaking their head or not but um i'll speak for the organization and say we do

[00:34:23] You do have all the month of, has there always been a meeting after the weekend of Labor Day usually? I think we have, and then there have been years where we've also moved it, so it's up to the board. And I was asked, Madam Chair, that's the reason why I bring it up, and so I think it's fair for us to consider it at least.

[00:34:41] This is your schedule and your calendar, so whatever you want. Any further thoughts? I mean, you know, a lot of work builds up over the month of August with consent agenda items and things that have to be approved and budget appropriations and things like that.

[00:34:56] I worry about pushing it off another week, but I'm just one person, so I'll entertain other thoughts. Madam Chair. Supervisor Bodie. Did you have your? I think Supervisor Lawson. Okay, yeah, I didn't. Okay, I've lost the vote.

[00:35:12] Yeah, Supervisor Lawson. Thanks. So, actually, I like the idea because if we're going to have all of August off, that also gives staff the time to enjoy the end of August, like Supervisor Vegas said, the Labor Day weekend. I know the clerk's office in particular is scrambling, which means staff has to get their reports in, you know, mid-August.

[00:35:36] I like the idea and take the advice of the clerk that we can just shift accordingly to what she suggested. So I believe we'll be adding another meeting at the end of September, September 26th. Yes, Madam Chair. We would move the meetings in September from 5, 12, and 19 to 12, 19, and 26.

[00:35:57] And just make them regular work session and regular meetings. And to your point, I mean, this is January, so we're giving everybody, including the school division, notice that if they have appropriations, they need to get it done in July. I think they take off. They take off.

[00:36:13] Yeah, they have a little different schedule, but we certainly can make it work. Supervisor Bode. Yeah, just so to be clear, we'd be striking the September 5th meeting in whole. We'd be adding a night meeting to the 12th. We'd be removing the night meeting from the 19th, and we would add a 26th meeting.

[00:36:31] That would be an afternoon and night meeting. Yes, that is correct. We just shove it all down a week. Okay. Several of you have already voted. If you would like to change your vote, let me know. I can clear it, but if we need to. I just, I can't vote because it didn't pop back up.

[00:36:48] Really, I've got you recorded as yeses in my system. Okay. That's good. Yeah. Okay. Okay. It may have kicked you out, so. Okay, do you want to vote? If anybody wants to change, let me know.

[00:37:04] I don't think it sees you voted. Did she vote? Okay. So has everybody voted? Andrea, I voted. Did you see my vote? I did see it. If you'd like, I can try to reset it, and you can all do it again. You want to try it? Thank you. Hey, it's a day of first. Let's give it a go. Okay. So vote. Anybody?

[00:37:21] Okay. They're popping back up. Do you see yours? I see mine. No, mine's not there. Okay. But just mark me as a yes. You're a yes. All right. Supervisor Bodie, thank you. Supervisor Lawson, we'll get it worked out and record. Vote unanimous.

[00:37:36] Okay. Awesome. Actually, thank you, Supervisor Vega, because I'm off and away Labor Day weekend and have to rush back, and my family's like, ah, why are you going away Labor Day weekend? So, that brings us to item five, a community presentation.

[00:37:53] We are honored today to have the president of Northern Virginia Community College here with us today, Dr. Anne Kress, as well as Dana Kaufman, who is the director of the College of Government Affairs and Community Relations. Yes, Susanna Stein, yes.

[00:38:12] Hi, welcome. Okay, I got it. All right, well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you. So good afternoon, Chair Wheeler, fellow county board members, and county executive Shorter.

[00:38:27] Welcome to the team. So I'm Susanna Steen, and I'm honored to be the chair of the North Virginia Community College Board. This is my final year on the board. I'm actually an appointee of the city of Manassas, even though I live in the Prince William County, but I work and volunteer in the city as well.

[00:38:46] And unfortunately, my colleague and your appointee, Mr. Sadiq Sheikh, He cannot be here with us today, and he said it's regrets, so you have to put up with me here. So thank you for the opportunity for us, for our NOVA team to update the county on all the good that NOVA has been doing, and wanted to thank you for the constant support of the community college.

[00:39:09] So I trust you already know that NOVA is an essential and strategic asset to this region. So in order of appearance, the following members of the NOVAS administration team will be joining in this presentation. And it will be Dr. Molly Lynch, who is the provost of the Manassas campus.

[00:39:27] Then we will have Dr. Richmond Hill, who is the provost of the Woodbridge campus. He'll be here any minute. Then also we have Mr. Steve Partridge, who is the vice president of strategy, research, and workforce innovation.

[00:39:42] And then, last but not least, we will have Dr. Enkress, who is the president of NOVA. All right, so as you can see from the slides, NOVA is indeed quite large. And because of the size, we can offer many different programs.

[00:40:01] So we are offering 63 associate degree programs that lead to either direct employment or transfer to four-year institutions. And 164 workforce programs and courses. that meet specific skills of area employers.

[00:40:24] And actually, the company that I work for, Micron, is one of them, and we certainly recognize the importance of these different educational programs. So while NOVA's large size is known, it may not be so well known that we have small class sizes.

[00:40:40] The average is 24, and they are all taught by professors, not by teaching assistants. So with this slide, what I want you to keep in mind is that NOVA has proven itself again as the top supplier of educated or trained talent in this region.

[00:41:03] So you can see there the combined Manassas and Waterbridge campuses that add up really pretty much to more than 20,000 students. And now finally, in cooperation with the Prince William County School System, we provided college credit instruction to 2,328 high school students, and that was this past fall.

[00:41:30] So this represents more than 12% increase over last fall. This also equates to effective scholarship of Prince William families of $3 million. Region-wide, these free dual enrollment courses are effectively a college scholarship that totals more than $12 million.

[00:41:51] And accordingly, the investments that you have and continue to make in our community college are being returned manifold. So now I will turn it over to our next speaker, who is Dr. Mala Lynch and Dr. Richmond Hill.

[00:42:08] So Provost Lynch is going to share with you a more detailed look at the Manassas campus, and Dr. Hill will do the same for the Woodbridge campus. Thank you. Actually, I may punt. I might be Dr. Hill and Dr. Lynch today if he doesn't make it.

[00:42:24] So there he is. So I'll cover this slide, and then I'll hand it over to him. So what you see up on the screen is the demograph of the two campuses combined. Dr. Hill and I work very closely together because we are the only county that has two Nova campuses so he and I are partners in crime as you see we have about 20,000 students between the two of us we go back and forth who has more it's a little friendly competition but the demographics as you'll see of of our campuses match the demographics of the community and that's something we're very proud of another thing I'd like to point out is our students are a little older that's not surprising we get a wide range of students the average age

[00:43:03] is 24 and then you'll also see that we have a lot of part-time students and And that's one of the things we have to be very cognizant about in making our schedules. We have night classes, we have weekend classes, we have online classes, trying to get some of those students who are non-traditional students who are working, who are parents, and who really want to continue their education.

[00:43:23] And so I am going to hand it over one more thing. You'll see also that 22.6% of your graduates are coming to NOVA. That varies greatly by high school. So some of our high schools that number is much higher and some it's a little lower. that's the average for all of them and we have been working with the schools about which schools are feeding students to NOVA. Dr. Hill you made it just in time to talk about your campus. All right good afternoon and thank you for this opportunity. So at the Woodbridge campus we do have some unique programs and I want to highlight just a few of them this afternoon that we're very proud of

[00:44:02] and they are producing folks that are able to come right out and go into the workforce and do some good work right here in Prince William County and so the first one I'd like to highlight is our heating and air conditioning program. And we've been able to maintain HVAC excellence accreditation for quite some time now. I'm very proud of that. And also dual enrollment with Prince William County Schools and the CTE program. We also have IT and cyber security at the Woodbridge campus. Very proud of our cyber lab and our cyber team. As the host campus, they work very hard to make sure that they're able to be competitive in competitions

[00:44:39] and also to attract students to that major into that area of the workforce. And then our cinema and our film and photography program. Very proud of that program, the study abroad with the Czech Republic, the FAMO Institute. We actually just had them visit from the Czech Republic in November.

[00:44:59] And to just further develop our communication and our partnership with them, We have students that actually go and spend some time over there developing their portfolio. We've actually had some students that have actually stayed and completed their bachelor's program over at FAMO as a result of that partnership.

[00:45:19] And also coming would be our data center operations training, which would be on the campus. And I'm sure Dr. Knights will talk a little bit more about that as that's under his area. But that program is going to provide some highly skilled technicians in our area to go right into our data center operations right here in Prince William County.

[00:45:39] And we have a renovation project going on. So most of you are aware of the Woodbridge Seafelt Building, which is our oldest building on campus. And it's 144,000 square foot building, and it is being renovated. The construction on our swing space has already started.

[00:45:56] It's an 18 to 24 month renovation, and a lot of exciting things are happening inside of that building once the renovation starts. We'll be looking at having a one-stop approach for our student services. So right now, there's a number of different student services functions located on several floors in that building, and it'll bring it all into one area, counseling, advising, financial aid, parking services, veterans affairs, right in one location.

[00:46:21] in renovating our Lakeside Theater, as I'm sure many of you have been in our Lakeside Theater, state-of-the-art biology labs and academic learning resource center, and also kind of swinging that building around a little bit so that it faces College Drive, the entrance just like our Arts and Sciences building does.

[00:46:40] And so we're excited about that and hope that once we get that building up and running, I'm sure you all will be a part of that process of welcoming that building to, renovated building to Prince William County. Thank you. I'm back up. When you're the preface of a campus you're kind of like a proud parent so I'm gonna have to control myself about not talking for too long. So at Manassas we have a couple unique programs. We have the engineering tech program. A lot of you have been in our fab lab and if you've ever want to come back out again you're more than welcome to take a tour and we'll give you a hands-on project to play with. And part of that is also our

[00:47:19] classes but we also do a lot of professional development for teachers and also a lot of field trips with the K through 12 trying to build a stem pipeline with interest in that fab lab I have the biotechnology program it's an AAS degree the students do complete an internship to make them ready to go out into the workforce for that we have automotive diesel and welding I'm very excited that we have six hundred eighty five thousand dollars in federally directed funding to expand our diesel program so we're gonna be able to get some big fun trucks for our students to work on in the next in the in the coming year as that program is really growing the need for diesel mechanics and then

[00:47:59] we also have early childhood education which is accredited by the National Association for the education of young children just like Woodbridge we have some renovations coming my two main classroom buildings the original ones on the campus are going to be renovated 120,000 square feet we're doing one building at a time we kind of got delayed with COVID and then things got more expensive so we're working through that but hope to have that running soon it'll be a real change for our campus one-stop shop for student services we're doubling our chem lab space kind of reimagining the way libraries are libraries are different than they used to be when many of us were in school

[00:48:38] where it was all about books and cubicles study carols and then we also have gotten funding from the state to build a trade center so we will be building a $15 million trade center 24,000 square feet we have a firm pick that's working with us and Steve's going to talk about labor market data we've been doing a lot of that figuring out what should go in this building what are the jobs that this region needs to go in this trade center so just to give you a highlight we're gonna be looking at electric and hybrid vehicles there's a big push towards electric not only cars but buses and who's going to fix those things

[00:49:16] also diesel generation diesel and backup generations for your data centers and your hospitals those diesel engines that run the the backup generators industrial maintenance is another program we're looking putting in and also some fiber optic cabling so that building is going to be very flexible designed to change based on the needs of the region in terms of trade so as i said I'm like a proud parent. I'll be really excited to have you come out and see our renovation, the new Trade Center, and also if you ever want to come to the Fab Lab and, you know, 3D something, 3D print something, we will be there for you. And now I'll pass it on to you.

[00:49:54] Thank you, Dr. Lynch. Good afternoon, everyone. I have the part of the college that is the external facing. So all the employers that call and say they can't find talent end up on my desk, and we get a lot of those calls. Even as the economy's slowing, we still have a lot of pain points locally. One thing we're doing over the last year to really fix that is create a front door for the college. A lot of times businesses would reach out to the college, they would go to faculty, they would go to different staff, they would just randomly call numbers or emails.

[00:50:23] We wanted to create a front door so they could really see the breadth of what NOVA offered to the business community. And one thing we're really proud of is the Guaranteed Interview Program. It's a new program. We were the first college in the country to launch it. UVA, I think, just copied us recently, which is a very flattering statement for UVA to do.

[00:50:40] Basically, for all our non-credit programs, you go into the program and you know there are employers at the end of it waiting to interview if you successfully complete. It's been so successful that we're going to be launching it over the next few years to all our credit applied programs, meaning if you go to NOVA and then we're redoing our website, you'll be able to actually look at employer logos and say, "I want to work for Amazon Web Services.

[00:51:00] I want to work for Micron." Click on their logo and you will find out which program leads to jobs at these employers. really sort of shifting the way students look at higher education because for a long time it was about the piece of paper and the goal i have three boys you hope they get a job but you really need them to get a job and you want them out of the house at some point so this really makes it easier for parents for working adults to invest their time invest their money and know there's opportunity waiting for you one way we really focus our efforts is we have an entire labor market team they look at nothing but federal state local data they also look at job posting data they're really

[00:51:39] mining that data to say which of our programs lead to really good outcomes where are we missing programs we should be launching and which programs have sort of jumped the shark and say these job opportunities aren't what they once used to be and we need to start to phase them out so we look at this data monthly quarterly as the data comes out and we also publish that data to share with our students to share with our faculty to share with our k-12 partners because often what we hear from parents we hear from students is they don't know what they want to do when they grow up a lot of us probably still don't know what we're going to do when they grow up we're really trying to share the information to give them better information to make better decisions because it used to be

[00:52:13] college was a little cheaper you could go and explore and take classes and figure out i don't like this or i do like this you really can't anymore more and more students are borrowing and they can't borrow and borrow and borrow to take classes to explore they really need to get So, we put out, with our K-12 partners and our workforce boards, information about different career options.

[00:52:34] This one is an example of IT. It shows you at different levels of education what you can make, the job openings, and the type of employers that are hiring in our job market. And we update this information constantly. So, you've seen the wages on some of these go up dramatically recently. You'll also see the type of job postings and who the biggest employers are.

[00:52:51] It's all on our website. We do hard copies for the K-12 partners. We really want to do a better job at career exploration. Because often students that show up at NOVA have never worked, and they're being asked to pick a career pathway, not even know what work is like.

[00:53:07] So we're really also trying to work with the K-12 partners to get more internships, career exploration earlier, so students can make better decisions when they get to NOVA. We also test this data. We do a survey every year. About two weeks from today, we're going to be launching our 2022 Workforce Index, where we interviewed over 250 businesses, asking about what the upcoming year looks like, how the past year went, and look at some of that data and how we can better prepare our students for the workforce.

[00:53:35] And finally, you can see some of the partners I mentioned, AWS, Micron, some other companies we work with, and some average wages of our graduates a few years after graduation. So we're real proud of the work of being workforce-focused as an institution. And now I will turn it over to Dr. Chris.

[00:53:51] Oh, yes. You should have a handy-dandy handout in front of you that gives a little overview of the type of jobs, the graduates who are in your county that are going through the NOVA programs and NOVA campuses. I think it was with your packet. It was sent out with a packet, I think.

[00:54:08] oh I didn't it's not in front of you I think it was sent out it is in your packet but we will give you copies and send you afterward but it gives you a little overview of your county profile and the type of students we're serving and the type of job that they have access to when they graduate so once again thank you so much for this incredible opportunity I'm Ann Kress I'm the president of Nova and I have to just note that I'm starting my fourth year as the president I started right before the pandemic I know the chair mentioned the pandemic I'm going to talk a little bit about nova post pandemic but i just really want to thank prince william county for your

[00:54:46] incredible support of nova and our two amazing campuses as you can see our amazing provost right here and some of you knew the other dr hill dr sam hill who retired as the provost of the woodbridge campus just last year so we it's hard for us to balance a lot of information so we just went in in search of someone else with the same name.

[00:55:09] And luckily we found them. One thing before I leave this slide, I know there's a lot of discussion about college affordability, especially in the context of debt forgiveness and debt suspension. And I really wanna call your attention to the fact that 60% of the students who attended NOVA's Career Pathway programs graduate with no student debt whatsoever.

[00:55:31] The average student who graduates with debt from NOVA graduates with less than ten thousand dollars in debt so you know it's an incredibly affordable alternative we keep trying to help folks understand that especially for low and middle income individuals they might come to NOVA at no cost whatsoever for tuition know that a full-time student for a full year will attend NOVA for about fifty five hundred dollars I want to say that again for the entire year a full-time student will attend NOVA for fifty five hundred dollars tuition and fees included so nova in context post-pandemic nova's

[00:56:09] in a really good place especially when you look across the country one of the things that you'll see is that there's a lot of talk about the declining enrollment in community colleges and higher education is college worth it we're not really seeing that at nova we're seeing a slight full-time equivalent enrollment decline of about four and a half to five percent but in terms of the headcount students we're actually seeing an increase as of last fall part of this is honestly the economy our students more than 70 percent of them are part-time students and so if they can work they will work right so they'll take fewer classes and take on an extra part-time job and then when

[00:56:48] the economy shifts a little bit they'll come back to nova and take more courses so we're looking good with that we're outpacing all of the colleges in the region in terms of enrollment when you look at our highest growth by percentage it is in those non-credit programs that vice president partridge was talking about right those fast forward credentials four months or less we're really seeing especially post pandemic the time is the new pressure for individuals they really want to get retrained and trained and skilled and upskilled as quickly as possible but we also see real strong enrollment in terms of our transfer programs that affordability option again and i'll I'll talk about that in a moment.

[00:57:26] I also just want to highlight those two components of NOVA, the workforce side and the transfer side. So NOVA was one of just five community colleges across the country recognized by the Harvard Project on Workforce as community colleges that are doing it right when it comes to workforce development.

[00:57:43] In fact, they described NOVA as the workforce hub for Northern Virginia. And then we were also recognized for our incredible partnership with our friends at George Mason University. The advanced partnership where students will transfer from Nova to Mason and lose zero credits, right?

[00:58:00] They have shared coaches between the two institutions. They're co-enrolled from their beginning admission into advance. That program has been highlighted nationally as a best practice. And in fact, in fall, we were featured along with our friends at Mason on the PBS NewsHour as what needs to happen to support students in college.

[00:58:21] Thank you. think it's great our students think it's great it's amazing our students as you've heard before do represent the diversity of our community that's incredibly important to us that they find that welcoming and inclusive environment at nova what we also don't see at nova though that you're hearing a lot about across the country is missing males when you look at nova we're really enrolling male and female students at about the same percentage females are just slightly above But there are a lot of stories in higher education that males are sort of abandoning.

[00:58:54] You're seeing the difference between those two percentages at some institutions being two-thirds to one-third. We're not seeing that. We think in part that's because of our program mix as well. We're able to offer every student that on-ramp that might lead to hands-on education, that might lead to CTE, that might lead to transfer.

[00:59:14] We're really conscious of the different students that we serve. this is a little harder to see but the important story that this table tells you is that we don't just enroll students in representation to the representation in our community we graduate those students we don't see those equity gaps in graduation that many institutions see as well we're very proud of that we want all students to know that when they start at nova they have that chance to succeed and we're there with them in fact one of the things we've been telling them since the start of the pandemic is you matter to nova right you matter to nova and how we spent our

[00:59:54] higher education emergency relief funds we dedicated more than 80 percent of those dollars directly to students even though the federal government told us we only needed to dedicate 50 we dedicated staff we rearranged how we offer things we trained our folks to deal with remote situations we think all of that is key to nova's success and then i just want to highlight two different programs one around IT which obviously is very important in Prince William County we have about as you can see 4600 students in our IT programs everything from short-term certificates to transfer degrees 4600 is larger than

[01:00:34] pretty much any universities College of Computer Science right this is a huge component of what we do at Nova it is especially a huge component of what we do at the two campuses in prince william county and one of the things we're also doing as you heard vice president partridge mentioned is always working with business and industry to understand what's on the horizon what's next so you're looking at some of the programs we'll be rolling out but we're also looking at data analytics we're looking at the rise of bioinformatics that alignment between health science and i.t so we keep looking out on the horizon in fact i've got

[01:01:11] a committee that works with me of business leaders on the future of work so that we know that we're preparing our students for the future and then there are some of the programs that are in development also just want to highlight a couple things we've got partnerships obviously with Mason but we also have opportunities for our students to transfer to public universities into private universities across the Commonwealth and beyond so we're really excited about that especially in IT and then in terms of our medical education campus which is in Springfield we have about 2,100 students there that is the only standalone

[01:01:48] medical education campus across all 23 community colleges in the Commonwealth we're proud of that it has nursing plus 10 other health care programs and a growing number of programs as well we're looking at adding surgical technology and other programs we did receive some significant investment in our MEC as we call it as well we received a significant private donation to create the Arlene Evans and Barry Dewberry Center for Nursing Excellence which will build out an entire sort of virtual nursing laboratory for our students we also received 25 million dollars through the general assembly assembly to

[01:02:28] expand the MEC to add even more nursing students and then most recently we received 2.2 million dollars through congressionally directed spending that will bridge our soon to be LPN program through non-credit workforce into the RN program to create even more on-ramps for individuals into nursing. So I also mentioned transfer. Obviously Mason and our advanced program is our gold standard, but we have transfer agreements with every single public university across the Commonwealth. When you go beyond Mason, what you'll see is that we transfer more than a thousand students every year to Virginia Commonwealth

[01:03:06] university we transfer about 500 every year to uva we transfer more than a thousand to virginia tech so students really can start at nova and go anywhere so with that i will pause and just end with the thought that there are 23 community colleges in the commonwealth of virginia but one out of every three students who is in a community college in virginia attends nova nova accounts for a third of all system enrollment, but we couldn't do what we do to help our students succeed if it weren't for the support that we receive from you. So I want to thank you for all

[01:03:45] of that, and I'm happy to take any questions, as are my colleagues. So thank you, Dr. Kress. Thank you so much. I mean, thank you for bringing your team and giving this presentation. I'll just go on the record to say, you know, I came when I got this position, I quickly understood that we had one of the best community colleges, not in the state, in the entire nation, right? And that we are really, in Prince William County, we've got two campuses, right? And you look at that, I mean, if you add them up, we have more students than any other county, right? And so this has really been such a benefit to us. And I know that you work with the high schools and things like that.

[01:04:20] I just want to touch on the fact that I talked to someone recently about the number, about workforce development, and the number of job openings that are in the DMV area is enormous, 100,000. And one could say, oh, our economy is booming. But no, it is not good to have 100,000 open jobs. You know, you might see it because it represents the fact that businesses want to be able to get workers and we need to be able to provide them. And you know, what I saw here is that you're actually providing the jobs that the businesses need. And so that is so critical to success, not only of Prince William County, but of our region. So I just want to, I just want to highlight that um you know very grateful for i you know i loved going to the fab lab when i was

[01:04:59] first elected that was great right and then going down and seeing the uh the fiber when you worked on the um the fiber yeah fusion fusion spicing for the fiber um and then building that facility that fits in so well with our community just we are really grateful that you're here and you are not even a hidden jewel you are a jewel of prince william county so thank you to all your team that you brought here. I'm sure my colleagues have some comments and questions. Supervisor Franklin.

[01:05:27] Sure. I just want to echo the chair's comments. So thank you all for what you've done in our community, particularly Woodbridge and Neabsco area. I do want to ask about, because I've always thought that, and this may be happening to a degree, about some type of small business incubator that NOVA could house. Can you talk about if that's something that you all are doing or have thought about or any work with the SBA? Just kind of curious as to how you help in the small business space. We have had conversations, and I hope, you know, I would encourage you to come if you haven't already visited either one of our campuses, but certainly the Workforce Center on our Woodbridge

[01:06:06] campus has some space that could be an opportunity for that, and I know Steve's had some of those conversations. Yeah, you bring up a great point. I mean, most businesses, if you look at where the jobs are, it's in small business. So we definitely encourage it. The SBDCs or SBCs are part of the higher ed programs like Mason. So we don't want to compete with what they're offering, but we do partner with them. We also have an entrepreneurship program at Nova. What we see is a lot of our trades programs and our applied programs take classes as part of their electives because they eventually want to open their own business, but they don't necessarily get a degree in entrepreneurship. But we have had conversations with your development folks and GMU how we can

[01:06:45] partner to make sure that students that are interested in that have a pathway forward. Supervisor Angry. It's odd when you press that button, then you forget you press that button. Dr. Chris, it's great to see you. I can't believe it's four years, but I guess that goes in with this turn, because I remember in 2019 when you came on board, which is pretty incredible.

[01:07:12] Everything they said, outstanding. And I'm just realizing that, you know, as your neighbor, literally next door. I got to get over to spend more time with you. So I'll be doing that, Dr. Hill. I'll be getting back to see you. I want to really congratulate and talk about the veterans services that you all have provided. And I can only speak from personal experience as my daughter really made me the proud dad when she decided she wanted to go to NOVA. Great, great university, and she's still there, and I know that Virginia, with their Veterans Services offer, that I'm going to get the term wrong.

[01:07:51] Predates to careers. Yes, and so I was able to very easily get this paperwork together. I say that as a hands-on person that did it for folks who need to know about that connection of that program, being a dependent or being a survivor or just being a veteran.

[01:08:10] The program you have with that is incredible, and you're right. She'll come out of there debt-free without paying a bill with the degrees that she needs to be successful. I wanted to kind of highlight that. I don't know if you want to speak to that a little more, but I'm very impressed with that.

[01:08:28] Sure, absolutely. Thank you so much for that, and I'll turn it over to Dr. Hill in just a second. I also want to thank Supervisor Bailey, who has been wonderful in bringing us together with the folks from Quantico, and Dr. Hill will talk about that program. just so everyone knows the entire virginia community college system has a program called credits to careers where effectively all of the military occupational specialties the mos's that individuals come out with are equated to certain levels of college credit so that they're starting sort of in front of the start line when they come back nova serves an outsized population

[01:09:05] of veterans compared to other community colleges about 11 percent of all of our students are veterans or active duty personnel so we're very conscious of the services that they need holistically as well and we have a veterans center for excellence we were happy enough to receive a federal grant to help support our students in everything from providing loaner laptops to veteran students to connecting them to other social services to providing them with special career counseling because many of them are first generation college students but i'll let dr hill

[01:09:40] talk about our special arrangement right now with quantico yeah thank you yeah another way in which we're partnering um with quantico is through our basic skills pilot that we just did this semester and we had our workforce development basic skills program work with a small group of marines and the whole goal behind this pilot is to work with them in basic skills through an eight-week program so then at the end when they retest that then they are able to use their educational benefits tuition assistance and also are eligible for promotions and so we're running the data right

[01:10:15] now to look at the success of that program and how we can grow it but very successful uh in in in just another opportunity you know to partner with uh marines and their families to make sure that they have a pipeline to promotion and success and also to join us at nova so some of them will actually be joining us in actual degree programs and certificate programs.

[01:10:37] Outstanding. Thanks. Thank you. Supervisor Brody. Thank you, Madam Chair. Dr. Kress, the whole team, thank you so much for coming out. Echo a lot of what my colleagues said. We have a treasure in Nova Community College in Prince William County. We're blessed to have such a robust, advanced community college in our community that, again, reflects the diversity of our community, which is frankly in and of itself an accomplishment so it's a a testament to you all and your hard work to make sure that you are doing that and I assume that part of that is also going in the fact that

[01:11:12] you're recruiting and hiring faculty that represent the the community as well so one of you could talk about that a little bit I would appreciate it absolutely we know that representation matters right so um just on a couple fronts one is that um we have a chief diversity equity and inclusion officer who works with faculty staff and students in terms of programming we also have a search advocate program with every search that we do so it's somebody who reminds people to keep looking at the actual qualifications on the job itself you know no one goes into these with any

[01:11:50] sort of set agenda I don't think but what happens is we tend to look for people who are just like us who are not necessarily going to be just like our students and that's in every aspect of diversity diversity of thought diversity of experience diversity of academic background as well as you know demographics so we're very conscious about that and we continue to make strides we're we're happy to say that especially when you look at our administrative tier our students our faculty or staff can also look at that tier and see that that they can advance at NOVA, that we're inclusive in that way as well.

[01:12:28] Appreciate it. And my last question is in regards, I think it was mentioned earlier that you are looking at a trade program that you're sort of unveiling. And it sounds like you hired a firm that sort of helped with what that looks like and what it's going to eventually become. How much interactivity have you had with the local unions in the area and how that might shape out a collaboration there?

[01:12:50] Sure. I don't know if you want to talk at all about the discussions we had prior. But one thing, I've mentioned the system before. So just so everyone's aware, those sorts of projects are really managed at the system level. So we obviously contribute to the discussion and to the needs.

[01:13:07] But all of the contracts, all of that arrangement, we're effectively part of a larger system. So that goes there. We had discussions with the unions even leading up into the advocacy of the program. And I know Dr. Lynch has worked really closely as well.

[01:13:25] Yes, before, as the ask was being put forward, we were working with unions. The electrical union is literally right across the street from my campus. So we were very cognizant of not competing for the same students and trying to work collaboratively with them in making that ask.

[01:13:42] And so we are not trying to offer an electrical program because it's right across the street. But we were also, we had some conversations with them about doing some of their pre-trades. Like they have some pre-work that they do before they put people in an apprenticeship program and looking how we could partner with them with that.

[01:13:59] So we did talk to them about that and tried to make sure that we weren't cannibalizing each other, but also complementing and finding ways to expand the trades in the whole region. Appreciate that. And just a comment for all of you. I appreciate your attention to recovery and resiliency from COVID.

[01:14:18] We know that we had a lot of graduates over the last couple of years coming into NOVA. Part of that was because, frankly, their entire life got upended with the pandemic. And a lot of their academic achievement maybe wasn't exactly where it would have been had it not been for COVID.

[01:14:35] Some students thrived under COVID. Other ones had some challenges. As a father of six going on seven, I had kids that were all across the spectrum. in terms of that of a 17 year old that went off to college earlier this year. But that being said, the nimbleness of your organizations and how your campus were able to sort of respond to that is also a testament to your achievement.

[01:14:56] And I hope that as we continue to see what that profile of graduate looks like, who regardless of where they were in their K to 12 career, experienced COVID, you all continue to be nimble in that regard, so I appreciate that. Thank you, Madam Chair. - Thank you.

[01:15:11] - Thank you, Supervisor Bodie. Supervisor Bailey. - Thank you, Madam Chair. Dr. Kress, I'm like my colleague over here, four years already, that's awesome. - I'm going into my, so I've had three years. - Oh, we're gonna count it. - Starting my fourth year. - We're gonna count it in. Thank you so much for, first of all, just coming.

[01:15:30] We've talked about that. I know you came from an area called Forest Park Community College, which is near and dear to my heart as well. And I appreciate just your understanding our diverse community. And so that's so important. I want to thank you also for acknowledging that the military spouses and active duty individuals need the attention.

[01:15:56] Our meeting that we had initially with the commander back when has really grown. And I would please encourage you to continue that because it is a new way of the military person to live and to thrive active duty and or retired, however that looks.

[01:16:17] And so please keep that on your radar. I would really appreciate that. I wanted to ask also, I'm very intrigued by the Guaranteed Interview Program. I think that's excellent. I remember meeting you last year, and you've got great things to tell.

[01:16:32] So if I may, please, I wanted to ask you, how do you recruit the businesses that you partner with, And what does that look in the future in terms of growth? Is that a fair question? Oh, absolutely.

[01:16:48] But before I turn it over to Steve, I also want to note that one of the participants in the Guaranteed Interview Program is actually the Prince William County Schools. So you're one of our best customers. All right. Partnership. Yeah, I mean, long term, we want to grow it so all our applied programs have a dozen or more employers.

[01:17:08] Because I think it's really a litmus test. If we can't find employers that will offer guaranteed interviews for our students, we probably shouldn't be offering that program. But right now, it's really, we have no shortage of people interested in the program. It really goes, most people want to hire our students. That's really why they show up. And we've got almost 5,000 employers that hire and post jobs on a regular basis.

[01:17:28] So it's a large number that not all of them rise to guaranteed interview because we do an MOU with the employer. We get to use their logo. We put it on our website. So we're a little over 20 employers have signed up for the Guaranteed Interview Program, but there's thousands more that are posting jobs all the time. It really comes down to businesses that have enough of a demand that they want to create that long-term pipeline with us.

[01:17:47] And you do see it with the larger employers. We work with dozens of small businesses every month, but they're hiring kind of like one or two throughout the year where maybe the Microns and others might be hiring on a steady basis that they need that guaranteed pipeline of students coming through on a regular basis. So we don't see any problem growing up long-term, Even with the slowdown anticipated, we see a lot of demand in this area really pent up because of the number of job postings that have gone unfilled.

[01:18:12] Okay, that's excellent to hear. And I just had one, Dr. Kress. Dr. Kress, I just wanted to also advocate for the military spouses. Yes. And that was something that you and I had talked about previously also.

[01:18:28] And the boards that we sit in, particularly the NVRC board, we talk about that a lot. when the spouses transfer to different spaces and they either are degreed or not degreed, but they need the opportunity to get the credentials to become employees in the workforce.

[01:18:46] Is there an opportunity with the programs in the military or is that something you're looking at? Yep, absolutely. And one of the things we're actually doing with Quantico is they've invited us to go to their town hall meetings, which include dependents, to talk about NOVA and the opportunities.

[01:19:01] So we want to make sure that we keep that out there. The other benefit NOVA offers is that we have on-campus classes, we have remote synchronous Zoom, and we have NOVA online. And so a military spouse who might start with NOVA can continue with NOVA, even if they're moved around the country.

[01:19:18] And then we're able to also then take those credits that they might have accumulated and turn them into a credential. And I think that's really critical. One of the things we see is that many folks have some college but no degree. So some of the industry recognized credentials and the other sub-credentials that we can award then would give somebody actually a tangible document to provide to a potential employer.

[01:19:42] So we work with military spouses, also dependents and beyond. Just two things I wanted to sort of buckle on to what Steve was talking about though. One is that we recognize that many first generation college students, and this could include military spouses and dependents, they are not necessarily aware of what I would call the rules of the road when it comes to not just getting a job but building a career and so we have received a grant from strata foundation to actually work with individuals who are first generation college to help them understand how

[01:20:16] to build a network how to build a career plan how to help see themselves not just in tomorrow's job but in the future and then we also during the pandemic started a career leadership readiness institute helping folks to understand how to optimize a linkedin profile so that using the right keywords so someone finds you how do you network how do you interview especially when things were remote how do you look somebody in the eye we've also partnered with an organization women giving back in one clothing pantry and we look to expand it so that folks know how to dress

[01:20:51] and have access to the clothing that they might need for an interview so we're really thinking again holistically about how to connect people to real meaningful and lasting economic opportunity thank you so much welcome and stay thank you supervisor lawson thank you women giving back that's great i believe that's in loudon county right yeah yeah and fairfax and so yeah okay i didn't know they've uh expanded their borders that's great um first of all nice to see everybody Thank you for your work. Frankly, I think you gave us more credit than we deserve.

[01:21:29] You know, we like to support you, but honestly, I don't know what we can do to support you anymore, but you're easy to support, to be clear. I'm a product of a community college.

[01:21:45] I grew up in a small town in northwest Iowa where we had a community college, and I went there for a couple semesters before I went on to the University of Northern Iowa. And I'm also a first-generation college kid, and I literally never thought of that until somebody mentioned it at the podium.

[01:22:04] I'm like, oh, yeah, that would be me. Anyway, I have a question for Dr. Crest. If you don't know it, you'll quarterback it. That's right. I've had a couple times in this labor shortage that we're experiencing, folks that own businesses, and honestly, they're people that I just personally know that are reaching out to me because they're having a hard time hiring.

[01:22:32] In one case, more recently, it was somebody that has leasing and selling copy machines and equipment such as that, and he's just having a hard time hiring people.

[01:22:47] and so i ended up referring him to our economic development department but honestly i should have thought to maybe call have him call you or i call you what what do you advise in a in a service call like that sure absolutely that's exactly why we built the business engagement center so it's a one-stop shop you can post a job you can connect with our career coaches you can look to serve on an advisory board there's also the contact information for the folks the right folks at Nova so if you will make sure that everyone gets the actual web address but it's okay the business engagement center okay the thing I would

[01:23:27] mention is that Steve's area also can do customized training so you know sometimes people have a need that isn't necessarily even a non-credit certificate but they have a professional development need for a team or in onboarding employees and we can aggregate that and then create courses that we deliver potentially even on site or remotely or we can connect to a third-party provider so you know there's lots of different ways to get to that opportunity to find the right workforce to upskill your workforce so we want to be that hub for all of workforce development in northern virginia so just reach

[01:24:04] out through the business engagement center okay i will uh probably send them a text tonight and say I'm hoping that my economic development department knew to, you know, send them there as well. But they do? Okay, good. Good.

[01:24:20] So maybe he's already received that kind of help. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. Well, I don't see any further questions, but this has been valuable, great information, and also people who stream and watch the meetings, you know, we get your word out there. We are really lucky to have you here in Prince William County.

[01:24:38] I mean, I'm a little biased because we have the best county in the Commonwealth, But you guys certainly help with that. So thank you for coming out today. And if you ever need anything, please contact any of us. Thank you. And I also want to, once again, thank Susanna Steen and Sadiq Sheik in their absence for being such incredible representatives of Prince William County on our board.

[01:24:57] So thank you. Thank you. With that, we are on to item number six, public comment time. The board will hear in-person and remote public comments.

[01:25:12] We're going to begin with in-person public comment. Today we have five people signed up to speak. We ask that all speakers state their name and magisterial district at the beginning of your remarks. Everyone will get three minutes, and you will see that on the board.

[01:25:30] After the first 15 minutes of in-person public comments, we will close the in-person sign-up. And with that, I will call all five speakers, and we are doing residents first. We have Patty Koontz, Russell Bryant, Patrice Summers, Mitch Nason, and Carol Tindall.

[01:25:54] Yeah, welcome. Hi. It doesn't sound like it's on. Hi. My name is Patty Koontz, and I'm from the Gainesville District. Little shout out.

[01:26:09] I'm a Novin mom. My older son graduated from there and is now graduating from VCU, and my younger son will be going there this coming fall. But once again, my name is Patty Koontz. I'm from the Gainesville District, and I believe in the power of a thank you. A simple thank you can mean so much to a person receiving it and it lets that person know that their actions and words were truly helpful. Today I'd like to make a public thank you to Supervisor Franklin. I happen to be friends with the uncle of the missing young man, Jose Guerrero, who's been gone since September 21st. I shared the post of his disappearance at my friend's

[01:26:45] request and texted him daily, but nothing has helped. He told me on December 27th that his family is broken. As I hung up the phone, it just entered my head to contact Supervisor Franklin. I didn't know what else I could do. It did kind of slip my mind that it was just two days after Christmas and she might be out of town. I texted her and asked her to call me, and within five or ten minutes, she did call, and yes, she was out of town celebrating the holiday. She told me not to worry about it after I apologized for disturbing her visit. When I spoke to her about my friend and

[01:27:21] her family's and their family's anguish and their belief that the police weren't doing enough. She asked if I could find out what the police officer was investigating and if she could talk to my friend. I gave her my friend's phone number and she called him while she was on vacation. He gave her the police officer's phone number. She called him and reported back to my friend and then they agreed to keep an open line of communication with each other which she has been doing since that day. Though Jose has yet to be found, been found, and the embers of hope that he will return safely

[01:27:57] are fading, the family does take comfort in knowing that someone is in their corner, making sure he's not forgotten. When I told Supervisor Franklin how much her calls meant to my friend, she simply said that that was her job, and 90% of being a supervisor is helping her constituents. She's not making political hay out of her community outreach. She's just doing what is right. And for one, I am truly appreciative of her and firmly believe that Woodbridge is very lucky to have her as a

[01:28:30] supervisor. Thank you again, Supervisor Franklin, for your compassionate action. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon, Chair, Supervisors, new County Executive Shorter, and County Attorney.

[01:28:50] My name is Russell Bryant, and I still reside in the Woodbridge Magisterial District. Our county cost of government has part of its basis in the metrics which are measured and monitored related to the county population, such as calls for police assistance and response, calls for EMS and fire services, libraries, etc.

[01:29:11] All those services are related to the current root causes for requests for county-provided services. As county budgets, in part, are generated by the detailed granular metrics of our growing county population, I recommend that the future county budget negotiations add efforts and tasks to analyze and develop courses of actions to reduce the incidence of current root causes of government service load, and possibly make county funding allocation a bit less onerous

[01:29:50] and shift the discussion and negotiation of county taxes and rates via reduced calls for county services. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next speaker, please. I'm Patrice Summers.

[01:30:09] I work for the county, and my magisterial district is Montclair. I'm speaking or representing one of my coworkers. This is why I feel we need a union to represent employees.

[01:30:26] I work in the finance department. our department has many issues, which we have tried to resolve with our supervisors as well as with department heads and upper management, which never gets resolved and seems to get swept under the carpet. I have even gone as far as to file a grievance and that ended up being denied. I was told it was filed wrong and certain procedures weren't followed when filing it. I asked questions and went over the procedures with them on the filing, in which it was still denied.

[01:30:59] And so they gave up. These are some of the issues I have concerns about our department. I do not have enough time to list them all, but one, it is a toxic and hostile and dysfunctional work environment due to supervisors who play the teams against each other and also do not know how to handle employees the same and or fair.

[01:31:26] There are clearly favorites who do not have to be held to the same standard as everyone else and given special treatment. There is a lack of growth and or opportunity and advancement. There is also no fair evaluation goals.

[01:31:45] They're not realistic. There's a lack of knowledge that goes on, especially when someone is knowledgeable about something and they have good accomplishments. Those are never pointed out, only the negative.

[01:32:02] I believe each employee really does enjoy and love to actually come to work and have goals that they want to reach. But without the union coming in to help, our concerns wouldn't get resolved.

[01:32:21] We have the right to bargain over paying benefits, but also we need the right to bargain over working conditions. Conditions. If we can't talk about working conditions with the county, are you going to help us resolve these issues? We will have to bring health and safety issues, staff issues, and others to the board to keep meeting like this because of the current ordinance doesn't allow it.

[01:32:48] Unfair labor practices need to be clearly included in accountability so all rights as workers and union members are protected. Otherwise, the ordinance is nothing but a fancy sheet of paper with no real accountability.

[01:33:05] We need accountability. Staff leadership needs accountability. Thank you. Thank you. Next speaker, please. Good afternoon, Madam Chair, distinguished members of the board. I'm going to ask to use the projector as well, but before I do that, Mitch Nason, my address is on file, 17 and a half year employee of the county and president of the French Wing Professional Firefighters.

[01:33:28] Before I start the year doing what I did ending the year, and that's advocate for the hundreds of men and women that that serve our communities, firefighters, paramedics, support staff and dispatchers. I'd first like to, on behalf of that same group, turn my attention to our acting county executive, and thank you so much, Mr. Johnson, for the year that you gave us as the county executive.

[01:33:53] You started off the year with a bang and a snowstorm, and you led us through a difficult time coming after the pandemic, and you did so amazingly. And we look forward to continue working with you, but thank you for your service in that, sir.

[01:34:10] Secondly, Mr. Shorter, on behalf of the hundreds of men and women in the fire department, I'd like to say welcome. We look forward to working for you. You have awfully big shoes to fill, but we look forward to seeing you do so. Now, I'll turn my attention briefly, and this is really starting where I left off, and that's to highlight the staffing shortages that are going on currently in the fire department.

[01:34:34] I mentioned this several times over the course of the fall, and we'll continue to do so, quite frankly, until we get the staffing where it needs to be so the community can be as safe as they deserve to be. The attrition levels in the fire department are at a 90% increase over the five-year trend.

[01:34:50] That was in FY22. The first two quarters of FY23, we lost 30 individuals. We've lost six individuals since the 1st of January. That includes one resignation that I saw come through this morning, and I know of at least two or three more that are pending. I highlight all of this to say that we need to do something.

[01:35:07] Every single one of those individuals that left, whether they were retired, they left to another agency, or they left the service completely, has left a vacancy. That vacancy has led to both voluntary and mandatory holdover, forced overtime. My fellow employees have been, let's just use the example of Christmas, three people didn't go home after finishing their 24-hour shift on Christmas Eve and instead stayed for another 12 hours.

[01:35:32] And this is despite a robust accommodation system that utilizes volunteers that do a tremendous job to help bolster the emergency services that are offered to Prince William County. There's still significant holes. I would suggest the most obvious way to start trying to handle that is address the issue that's highlighted on this page, and that's the fact that we're the lowest paid fire department in NOLA, Virginia.

[01:35:54] In December, you all took a much-needed step to fix a compensation issue that was facing our police department. a well-deserved raise that it was a long time coming your fire department is facing the exact same problem we haven't we are 18 percent behind the hourly average in northern virginia and without the hard work of this board to address that the attrition numbers that were on the last slide are just going to get worse i'll be back next month um happy new year i look forward to

[01:36:25] working with you all thank you very much next speaker please good afternoon chair uh madam willer uh madam chair i'm sorry board and um new county supervisor welcome uh i have a anonymous um testimony if you could give us your name oh thank you my name is carol tyndall i'm a resident of stafford county but a county employee so i have an anonymous uh testimony from a colleague

[01:37:03] and it reads i welcome the union for a few reasons i believe they are they are a group that will fight for the employees for fair and equal rights. The union would be a safety net for us all.

[01:37:20] The union will make sure that our jobs are protected and that we have fair and equitable pay. I've been here for some time now, and I believe that Prince William County can do better with the pay scale for individuals that have the qualifications and knowledge and the experience.

[01:37:40] I have witnessed so much unfairness in the workplace, which causes division also in the workplace. It clearly shows that it's not what you know, it's who you know to get a seat at the table. I am 100% for the union because I know it will do better than the current situation that's currently in place for the employees of Prince William County. I also hope that they will be able to review our benefits because the health insurance that we pay is extremely high for

[01:38:19] county employees. I'm just asking that the county board hear our cry for better working conditions and fairness. Thank you for your attention to this matter. First, I want to acknowledge the work that has been done, but we have more work to do. We must address the language in regards to the unfair labor practices as we employees need management to be held accountable. We need part-time and full-time employees who work over 120 days per year to be included regardless of benefit status.

[01:38:58] We also need the ability to simply bargain over workplace conditions. If we indeed are your most valuable resources please demonstrate it in the ordinance by making the ordinance clear and transparent to protect your most valuable resources thank you thank you very much this will conclude in person public comment time and i will turn it over to vice chair bode for remote public comment time thank you madam chair uh miss van or whoever's starting to man it uh this year

[01:39:35] do we have any folks online well thank you so much for the very eventful first remote public comment time everyone that's good good job good job okay uh that brings us to item number seven public hearing 7a the to budget and appropriate 374 million 601 810 for the carrier over the school board fiscal year 2022 encumbrance and unencumbered balances to the fiscal year 2023

[01:40:10] i will now officially open the public hearing for item 7a ms madden do we have anyone signed up for 7a okay is there anyone in chambers or in the atrium who would like to speak on item 7a please go to the microphone in the back of the room seeing no one approach the microphone in the back of the room this will officially close the public hearing on item 7a uh could i get a motion made by supervisor angry seconded by supervisor okay okay supervisor bailey okay

[01:40:50] is there any further discussion any discussion i don't see any my little speakers thing isn't lit up so i'll assume there's no discussion seeing no further discussion please vote vote unanimous okay thank you our first public hearing down that's good uh brings us on to item eight

[01:41:22] county executive time welcome mr shorter so glad to have you here very glad to be here i just want to really start by thanking you, Madam Chair, and the entire board for the time and guidance over this last few weeks. Certainly looking forward to the next few weeks and months spending time with each individual time with each of you. Looking forward to our work together.

[01:41:51] I did want to start, if I could, with a call for and encourage residents to volunteer for our annual point-in-time count. As many of you know, the point-in-time count is a literal count of persons experiencing homelessness in our community that occurs each January. It is a requirement for agencies receiving federal funding for programs serving residents experiencing homelessness. The data from the count is used to inform funding decisions and resource planning and identify gaps in raise public awareness.

[01:42:29] This year's count will begin on January 25th and end on January 26th, conducted in multiple shifts throughout the 24-hour period. Right now, we have volunteer opportunities for the morning shift of January 26th.

[01:42:45] So it would be great if we could get people to sign up for that time frame. Volunteers will need to participate in training prior to the event. To register for the account or to find additional information about the Homeless Services Program in Prince William County, our residents should visit the county's social services website at pwcva.gov backslash dss and look under the PwC Continuum of Care section.

[01:43:18] I am also excited about the newest members of our public safety community. I had the great pleasure of meeting 18 new police recruits last week. They just kicked off their law enforcement career as they started the academy yesterday.

[01:43:36] They are a very diverse group, and I am certainly excited to see them serve our community. Tomorrow, we will celebrate the volunteer recruitment graduation of 13 fire and rescue volunteers.

[01:43:53] They will be joining the Dale City, Dumfries, Lake Jackson, Stonehouse, and Yorkshire departments. I am grateful for their willingness to volunteer, their time, and to serve our community in such a meaningful way. I am also excited to share that the Department of Social Services SNAP ET program was recently audited and had no findings and no recommendations.

[01:44:20] That's good. Yes, a very big deal. SNAP is an important program to those individuals and families in our community who are eligible for monthly benefits through the Supplemental and Purchase Program for Nutritious Foods. It is one of the many public assistance programs the county has to assist residents as they transition from dependency to self-sufficiency.

[01:44:45] This is a huge accomplishment, especially considering the complexities associated with federal and state reporting requirements. I'm very proud of the tremendous work and efforts of our social services staff. County employees continue to live the county's vision for doing the right thing every time.

[01:45:07] We saw this recently with our development services employees. They went above and beyond by working with Cirque Italia on a temporary activity permit involving the installation of a very large circus tent which requires a number of permits due to the size of the tent and the electrical connections. There were some challenges due to the fact that the tent is manufactured in Europe and staff had difficulty matching up the specs with the Virginia statewide building code as well as the desire for the company to move as quickly as

[01:45:42] possible. Staff worked nights, weekends, coordinated with the company to ensure that Cirque Battaglia opened a safe venue for the public to enjoy. For their efforts, 19 development services employees recently received a Leadership at All Levels award from the county. I would also like to briefly recognize the team who worked so hard on our new enterprise human resource system

[01:46:16] that went live last week, Tuesday, January 3rd. Mobius Workforce replaced the county's legacy human resource system. This new self-service application allows employees to manage their benefits, time, and leave in one system at any time of the day on any device.

[01:46:38] It took many, many, many months of planning and steadfast commitment by several employees across the organization to put this system in place. The project team, which consisted of employees from HR, finance, IT, development services, social services, management and budget, and our Office of Executive Management, who worked diligently on this, including nights, weekends, over the holiday, to ensure a successful go-live and a modernized payroll and HR system.

[01:47:14] With the implementation of Mobius Workforce, the county now uses a single system for primary transactions for finance, procurement, budget, and human resources. This is a huge accomplishment. I'm very grateful for the team's work, for their dedication, and for their effort on this significant project.

[01:47:36] It will absolutely impact every single employee and leave a legacy of how the county operates in terms of our human capital management system. And it is also important to note that due to the hard work and commitment by the project team, the new police pay plan, which has been fully implemented in Mobius, meaning that this week's pay will include the changes that went into effect last week, January 1st.

[01:48:11] Yes, so our police will be paid according to your leadership and great efforts in December based on that plan. And finally, Madam Chair, if I may go to the podium, I'd like to provide for one additional recognition.

[01:48:33] Well, we've had an opportunity to say it a few times today, and I am humbled with the opportunity to say it as well.

[01:48:55] Elijah, if you would come down. We were able to keep it a secret, so I'm thankful. I will read the plaque as he comes down to Elijah T. Johnson in a heartfelt appreciation for your commitment, your dedication, and exceptional leadership in serving Prince William County as acting county executive January 1st through December 31st, 2022.

[01:49:27] I'll say and I hope that you all will join me in a standing ovation. Elijah, thank you. Thank you. Madam Chair, Madam Chair, Madam Chair, can we take a photo right in the front?

[01:49:50] Yeah. Can we all come down? Yeah, we'll come down. Can we get down? We can get down here. Well, if they can stand and we can stand from here. If they can stand right here, they can stand from here. Maybe they stand in front of us, we all stand here.

[01:50:07] Can we do that? We can close it. Close it in. Oh, okay. Are you taking the plastic off? Thank you. So, while you all are surprised, this is truly a surprise.

[01:50:23] I told Chris he owes me for this one because they usually don't get things past me, but this one got past me. I was not expecting this, and it is much appreciated. When you do this job, you never know what's going to happen and wasn't sure what was going to happen.

[01:50:43] But I got to tell you, the response from you all, from the entire organization over this past year, has been overwhelming. I can't tell you the countless e-mails I received throughout the year from staff even last last night i'm in i'm in shop i'm in sam's club walking and doing some shopping and a staff person from from juvenile services stops me you don't remember me but thank you for the six percent i said i said thank the board for the six percent but um but it's that type of reception that i've received from you all and from the entire organization from the community

[01:51:21] it's just been overwhelming and much appreciated. So thank you, thank you, thank you for that opportunity.

[01:52:16] Anything else, Mr. Shorter?

[01:53:06] That is all. Thank you. Okay, well, thank you and welcome, welcome. That brings us to county attorney time. Ms. Robel, the floor is yours. Thank you, Madam Chair, members of the board. We have several items for discussion in closed session this afternoon. We will have consultation and discussion with legal counsel and briefings by staff members pertaining to the acquisition of real property for a public purpose, with the accompanying legal advice from counsel and briefings by staff members pertaining to actual litigation, and regarding specific legal matters requiring the provision of legal advice by such counsel regarding land use acquisition for right-of-way on property located at 12017 Balls Ford Road in Manassas,

[01:53:44] owned by Industrial Concept Group et al., circuit court case number CL21-5503, where such consultation or briefing in an open meeting would adversely affect the bargaining position, negotiating strategy, or litigating posture of the public body. We will have personnel discussions relating to the following.

[01:54:02] The county attorney, the members of the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, COG, the Potomac and Rappahannock Transportation Commission, PRTC, Board of Commissioners, and the Virginia Railway Express, VRE Operations Board. We will have discussions of reports or plans related to the security of the McCourt governmental building complex and the safety of persons using such building complexes, including briefings by staff members, legal counsel, and law enforcement or emergency service officials concerning actions taken to respond to related threats to public safety.

[01:54:35] In consultation with legal counsel and briefings by staff members pertaining to the discussion or consideration of the acquisitions of real properties for public purposes, to include public parks and other public uses, where discussion in an open meeting would adversely affect the bargaining position or negotiating strategy of the public body, along with the accompanying consultation with legal counsel and briefings by staff members regarding specific legal matters requiring the provision of legal service by such counsel pertaining to legal advice regarding land use law, proffer law, sale agreement, and covenants law, where such consultation, discussion, or briefing in an open meeting would adversely affect the

[01:55:13] bargaining position negotiating strategy or litigating posture of the public body these items are appropriate for closed session pursuant to 2.2-3711a1378 and 19 of the virginia code so second motion made by supervisor bailey seconded by supervisor vice chair bodie it's a whole new thing i gotta use any discussion seeing none please vote vote unanimous okay great Well, that moves us on to Supervisor's Time, Item 10.

[01:55:49] I'm going to try to change it up every week. So today I'm going to start to my left with Supervisor Bailey. Thank you very much, Madam Chair. Good afternoon and Happy New Year to everyone. I just want to go through a few things. Over the holidays, I was able to attend a wonderful ribbon-cutting with American Legion Post 28, Paving of Liming Way.

[01:56:10] This is a project that has been in the hopper for about 15 years, and we finally got it done. So thank you so much to Transportation for getting it done, and thanks to Ms. Tiffany Williams and county staff for your support. I started a new podcast entitled Potomac District Talk for my first segment.

[01:56:30] I was very honored in that the CXO, Christopher Shorter, participated. We got a lot of, what do you call it, likes. We've got a lot of likes, so thank you. You are welcome in this community, and we enjoy the conversations, and we look forward to an amazing 2023 with you.

[01:56:48] On January the 2nd, we had a wonderful time joining Mayor Bowser in her inaugural ceremony, and it was really wonderful. On the fifth, thanks to our own Secretary of Health and Human Services, Mr. John Littell, and his staff for coming to Prince William County and thanking him for his support and focus on our CRC.

[01:57:14] He wants to make it the premier CRC in the state of Virginia, and so we are so grateful that he joined Chair Wheeler and I and Debbie Exec, or Acting Council, it's all. Elijah Johnson we we love you so much and Lisa Madron and staff who came and just explained to uh secretary about our vision to heal minds and so we're grateful that he came to visit us on the seventh we had the pleasure of attending the swearing in ceremony for the Dumfries Town Council and congratulations to Mayor Wood uh Councilwoman and Vice Chair um Monet Nickerson and Councilwoman

[01:57:54] Salonia Miles for your accomplishment. We're looking forward to January 19th for VACO. It's coming up and as my colleagues say it's coming up really soon but we're looking forward to that and also I just want to let the community know that we will be putting together a mental health task force and a public safety task force in the Potomac District to serve the community. As you know we've had in our county um in our in our district some unfortunate happenings with uh gun violence and so we we find it very important that we focus on that so with the mental health piece

[01:58:30] and the public safety piece we thank uh dan alexander for uh helping us and putting that together as we go forth with our new initiative with the community public safety initiative um um and just our prayers go out to those families that have lost loved ones to gun violence in the past two months it's been um it has broken hearts and broken families and so our prayers go out to you and with all that said and done madam chair thank you for an opportunity to speak thank you supervisor bailey vice chair bode thank you madam chair um first wanted to wish everyone

[01:59:05] happy holidays happy new year welcome back i hope everyone had a restful peaceful holiday season a couple of things from me first i would like to give in my notice of intent to appoint Natalie Shorter to the library board no relation to our new county executive as far as I know earlier this week I had a great preparation meeting for the joint environmental task force which we have with the school division with Julia Mano who is our chief sustainability officer and school board member at Jill Jackson our first meeting for the jet will be on February 9th looking forward to the collaboration we will have for our school division to promote and achieve our

[01:59:43] environmental goals. Later on, probably this month, I will be bringing back some initiatives that I brought forth near the end of last year, fast track initiatives and other things that our sustainability commission has been working on that I think that the board needs to dig into here in the first quarter of this year. Finally, I want to acknowledge and give my heartfelt condolences to some of the folks that have been claimed by traffic safety incidents that we've had over the past couple of weeks and some of the property damage that's occurred as well. We've had a lot of of traffic related uh tragedies recently um we had a very bad accident on on

[02:00:20] minnieville road and uh and katon hill a couple weeks ago which resulted in uh power outage for quite a few hours folks and given the cold um there were some challenges there we also had some really uh unfortunate accidents happen on old bridge road even recently as today um so i just wanted to make sure that as we continue in this new year i know many of us start to sound like broken records up here but we have a large amount of issues and challenges in the county when it comes to traffic uh related incidents and accidents and what have you um so we really need to continue to focus in on that and continue in the new year because frankly you know some of these issues are

[02:00:59] things where we try to engineer our way out of out of incidents but frankly some of it comes down to culture and how people are trying to rush to wherever they're trying to get to appointments work school whatever it is and we have to really tackle that as a community so i hope that between our transportation department our law enforcement departments and also with the folks that are working on the new community safety initiative we can get a holistic handle on our traffic safety challenges with that i turn back thank you so much madam chair thank you vice chair

[02:01:29] bodie supervisor lawson thank you madam chair uh so um a few things that i want to um chat about First of all, Mr. Chris Shorter, welcome to Prince William County. I look forward to working with you, and thank you for honoring Elijah Johnson.

[02:01:50] He certainly is leaving big shoes to fill, and I'm confident you will. I left a message for Tom Smith, who is in charge of our public works department and the litter crew, on the way down here.

[02:02:09] And, Tom, if you've heard my message, I know you'll follow up with me. And I've brought this up before, and I know the board colleagues are going to agree with me and join in, but the litter in our county is unacceptable.

[02:02:25] And it's not because of the county's fault, but Mr. Smith does have a litter crew, and I was leaving him a message to say, you know, I don't know if there's probably a labor shortage in the litter crew as well, like the landfill but i'm sure you all are noticing it as as i am i mean 234 right now is it's embarrassing and i guess what i'm i'm asking and i i know i've brought up um and given directives last year related to litter in the commercial shopping centers i noticed that also

[02:02:56] um it's frustrating it is it is not the look of prince william county that any of us um want and Mr. Shorter if you could talk to your staff related to how we can be more proactive to address the litter I'm frustrated I don't know what else to do other than are we finding the police department stretch then and I realize that but like do we do we have litter ordinances that we can do a better job of becoming more proactive and send a strong message to the community that you

[02:03:35] know we're not going to tolerate it um am i does anybody else agreeing with me on this no and i think it's um it's probably due to a labor shortage if we can't get people to if we can't we're closing the landfill because we can't get people to to work i think that's but uh i'm sure mr shorter can get back to us next meeting with that that yeah thank you so much and again mr smith if you're listening i know that you're stretched thin too but uh i do know that he has a litter crew i just don't know how often they're able to get out there um you did you want to chime in if you don't mind for 30 seconds I was literally going to bring that up but with regards to my

[02:04:10] district it's totally an issue I've received several phone calls driving up and down route one and and the challenge is even when our guys uh clean up you know a couple of days later back to the same thing I got a phone call from someone uh they went out of town for uh the holidays came back they said I've never seen so much litter I know ever in Prince William County and and it's definitely not our guys. They get right on it as soon as we call them. I think we need to have some type of education campaign. You know, they did it with the seatbelts. They did it with

[02:04:44] cigarettes back in the day. Speeding. I mean, we got to get people to understand that we live in a beautiful county. We want to keep it that way. And it takes all of us to really handle this issue. So spot on. Thank you very much. So maybe even the communications department can help too with, Because a couple years ago, you know, we asked them to put together something regarding speeding.

[02:05:05] So I'm confident you'll take care of it. And then I really want to thank, and he's unfortunately already gone from Prince William County and moved to Arizona. But Captain Garrity, Captain G, you were fantastic. I really enjoyed working with you while you were the Western District Commander.

[02:05:24] Captain G is now the Chief of Police in Yuma, Arizona. Yep. And man, he was such a great guy to work with when he was in charge of Western District. And I really enjoyed our working relationship.

[02:05:40] And then he went on to Criminal Investigations Division, and now he's a chief in Arizona. He had 32 years of serving at Prince William County. And another really important thing about Captain G that he's really humble about, but I'm going to brag on him. He was the lead detective for Prince William County during the sniper case.

[02:05:57] So he's got some stories of his own to share. Anyway, Captain G, I know you're not listening, but I know your colleagues are, hopefully, and I just want you to know I really appreciate your service to our community, and I wish you God's blessings in Arizona.

[02:06:13] And then the last thing, Mr. Shorter, I want to brag on is people in the development services division, Wade Hughes shop. Farm Brew Live is out in the Brentsville District, and they have now this massive igloo.

[02:06:31] And it's my understanding it was a special construction project that required lots of work and a lot of, I guess, specialties. I don't know much about it. But I do know that Wade's people, Chad Roop in particular, is the project manager, and it was a rush to get it permitted for their New Year's Eve celebration.

[02:06:54] And the owner called me on Friday afternoon, December 30th, to praise this county and the workers that he had worked with in this very arduous project. And I think they worked together closely for like three or four weeks.

[02:07:10] And he said it was, I think he referred to it, if I remember, as a beautiful experience. He thought in the beginning it was something insurmountable, but everybody rolled their sleeves up and dug in. And he said it was really enjoyable to work with everybody. So Chad Roop in particular, and then my own chief of staff, Michelle Trenum, was constantly making sure that everything was on target.

[02:07:33] So I just wanted to let you know that I'm very grateful for Wade Hugh, Chad Roop, and everyone that was helping get that project approved for New Year's Eve. Thank you so much. Thank you. Supervisor Angry. Thank you, Madam Chair. Happy New Year, everyone.

[02:07:49] Welcome, Mr. Shorter. I'd like to give my notice of intent to reappoint Kelly Easley as a Neapstco District appointee to the Animal Advisory Committee, Laura Heffler as the at-large pet retail grooming position to the Animal Advisory Committee, and Ron Yeo as a Neapstco District appointee to the Board of Equalization.

[02:08:09] And all of their resumes are on file with the clerk. I just want to talk about one initiative and the highest target goal that I want to achieve in the next, hopefully, 30 to 45 days, and that is the red light camera, speed cameras in the school zone.

[02:08:27] I know we did a study. I'll be working with the chair and you, Mr. Shorter, and I know the board is on board with this to find out the status and how quickly can we start seeing some of these cameras and speed cameras in our county to actually combat much of what we heard.

[02:08:44] Thank you, Supervisor Bode, for unfortunately talking about the recent series of accidents and death that we had in the county. So we have to do something and not continue talking in circles. So I'd like to get an update, and hopefully we can get those implemented soon. Thank you, Madam Chair. Very good. Thank you, Supervisor Angry.

[02:09:00] Supervisor Vega. Thank you, Madam Chair. I don't have much. Just want to wish everyone again a happy new year. We're really excited to see what this new year will bring. I also want to congratulate the 13 most recent graduates of the Prince William Volunteer Fire Recruit Class.

[02:09:16] I want to thank you so much for being willing to not just risk your life, but doing it so in a volunteer manner. It really shows your love and dedication to our community. Also, I just want to remind folks in the Coles District, and I know it's not just a Coles District issue, but countywide, just because of the number of emails that we've received, the client hearing is set to come before us this coming Tuesday.

[02:09:38] So I just want to remind folks, it's coming up. You can continue to send your emails and call my office. And I'm going to do my very best to answer questions as I'm allowed to do so. And that's all I have, Madam Chair. Thank you. Thank you, Supervisor Vegas. Supervisor Franklin. Sure. Just very quickly, on December 16th, I presided over VRE's operations board meeting, concluding my term as chair.

[02:10:00] So for those of you on VRE, thank you for the opportunity to serve. As mentioned, I also attended the Dumfries Town Council swearing in, and just want to say congratulations for all of the members of the Dumfries Town Council who was sworn in, and thank you for those who serve.

[02:10:18] A few upcoming events, January 18th from 7 to 9 p.m., I will be hosting a virtual community safety initiative town hall in partnership with Daniel Alexander from the county exec's office. And I believe either Chief Newsham or Jarrett Phelps will be joining us from the police department.

[02:10:36] We'll be discussing the recently approved community safety initiative and answering any questions that residents may have. So please go to our website or sign up for our listserv to receive more information about that, including the link. Also, just very quickly, we talked a little bit about the Route 1 beautification.

[02:10:54] That is a plan that I'm working on specifically for the Northwood Bridge portion, which after the widening was done, we've had some challenges keeping some of those plantings in top shape. We've also seen a lot of litter, as was mentioned. So working with both VDOT and the Prince William County Department of Transportation along with Neighborhood Services to come up with a plan to figure out how we can get some maintenance on that portion of Route 1.

[02:11:20] Just so that residents know, that portion is actually maintained by VDOT. The portion on the southern end of Route 1 past OPITS is maintained by Prince William County. That's why you sometimes see differences in how it's being maintained, but we have raised those concerns to VDOT, and we're going to all sit down and come up with a plan, including a potential budget for what maintenance could look like.

[02:11:46] Just very quickly, some people have asked about the Affordable Housing Ordinance that we've been talking about over the past couple of years. I was able to talk to staff and have a quick update there. The zoning text amendment has been initiated, and as part of the initiation, the planning department has begun research and stakeholder engagement.

[02:12:06] They have put together a stakeholder group based on board feedback, and they've been working throughout the process. And so I'll continue to follow up on where that ordinance is and when it will come to the board. But I just encourage everyone to continue to have those discussions.

[02:12:24] And then very quickly, I met with some marina owners last week to talk about dredging. There is a coming issue with dredging in the Neabsco Creek. We do need to figure out where to dump the dirt. We do not have a lot of space in the landfill, as many of you know.

[02:12:41] But we had a very good meeting. We had a couple of different suggestions with the help of Tom Smith, and it was actually a productive meeting, and we should have some answers soon for those marina owners. So thank you to those that came out to that. And then there were some concerns that I raised about the gym floor at Veterans Park.

[02:13:00] I actually went to an event there for an organization that I'm part of, and I was horrified by what I saw. And I reached out to Seth, who's over Parks and Recs, and he did tell me that the floors are relatively new, but that because of some change in staff and things of that nature administratively, they were not able to repair, but they are in the process of repairing the gym floors at Veterans Park, and so we do want to let our residents know, please continue to use the gymnasium. Please don't stop using it. We're going to repair the floors and make it something

[02:13:37] that's prideful for the district and then lastly it was mentioned early about the gentleman jose guerrera who's been missing from the woodbridge district it is something that discussion i've been having with his family since the christmas holidays very unfortunate issue obviously so just want to highlight that there will be a vigil tomorrow at 7 p.m in the shopping center where americana is located and just to let people know i have not posted about this um but i have been talking to the family i met with them over the weekend in my office and we are going to meet with chief newsham uh jointly um this upcoming friday to talk about

[02:14:15] where the case is what can the community do to help um and just to provide whatever type of relief may exist so just please keep that family and other families um that are impacted by um any level of um of despair here in prince william county and your prayers and with that i yield Thank you, Supervisor Franklin.

[02:14:39] Our last meeting was, I guess, December 15th, and I'm just, some of the things, I was able to attend the Washington Airport's Task Force Holiday Open House with Supervisor Angry back in December. That same Friday, I was privileged to speak at the law enforcement graduation for our 51st session of cadets.

[02:14:55] It looks like a great class. I kept 2022 with the sign unveiling for UVA Health Systems at the Haymarket Medical Center on Tuesday the 20th. In the new year, I spent time at the Rosie's Gaming Topping Off Ceremony with Supervisor Bailey was there, which was held this Thursday, January 5th.

[02:15:14] They're moving along with their $400 million investment of a facility. It looks like it's going to be great. It should be finished in about a year. Later that day, I took a tour with Supervisor Bailey, was invited to tour the Gander Mountain CSU facility with the Virginia Secretary of Health and Human Services, John Lytle.

[02:15:33] And this past Saturday, I was also lucky to attend the swearing of the Dumfries Town Council, which was just a great, great event. They hosted us there. With that, I want to provide my notice of intent to appoint Diane Paguaga to the Board of Equalization.

[02:15:50] Those are annual appointments that everybody has to reappoint, just as a reminder. And to appoint Mike Beattie to the Animal Advisory Committee. I think those might be annual appointments also. You know, they tend to just go along, but we are supposed to do that annually, and we can have those out next week.

[02:16:08] Two things before I finish up. I'm going to pass out. This is a draft resolution. As everybody knows, Debbie Jones retired from the Prince William Chamber of Commerce on December 31st, and she's with the chamber for more than 32 years. You know, she served as the president and CEO of the chamber and led the business member organization through, you know, a lot of transition and change.

[02:16:30] At this time, I want to just take a point of privilege. I want us to waive the rules of procedure and vote on a motion to commend her for her service to the chamber and the county. I provided a draft copy, and I want to give it to her on Thursday, which is why I'm doing this tonight, if anybody objects. This is not the final copy, but I'm just hoping if we can give that to her on Thursday at her retirement party.

[02:16:51] Madam Chair, do you need a motion for that? I think I do. I mean, you want to second it? I'll second it if you met. Okay. I support this. Okay. If anybody doesn't mind waiving the rules, I don't like to do that normally, but I think everybody knows.

[02:17:10] Debbie? Okay. Is there any further discussion? Please vote. Thank you. That way I can come from the whole board. The other is a -- I'm going to pass out something on a discussion.

[02:17:26] I had talked about that I would bring forward a change and -- or propose changes in public comment time, and, you know, with Mr. Shorter coming on and being new, I didn't want to make any drastic changes our first meeting or give anything out. And so what I'm handing out is a really, you know, realize that it's a rough analysis.

[02:17:45] It wasn't done by county staff. It was done by my office. But it had to do with looking at how many times we had public comment time last year, how many hours it was, and how many speakers from stuff that our office pulled together as well as stuff that information that county staff had provided in the past.

[02:18:04] We went through what some of the other jurisdictions we're doing in terms of best practices. And you can read this, and you can, you know, technically, by law, we only have to have public comment time once a quarter. And I'm certainly not suggesting that we ever go to once a quarter for public comment time.

[02:18:25] Though, on the other hand, last year, we had 38 rounds of public comment time lasting over 51 hours. And I know that everybody understands. I mean, one of the questions I get when I'm out in the community is, hey, you know, why can't you run the meetings better? You know, why can't you get control of the meetings?

[02:18:41] I mean, you know, and a lot of that has to do with lengthy public comment time. And so the first sheet is a discussion. And moving forward are the three things that I was going to actually the A and B are what I was going to propose and write a resolution on for next week.

[02:18:58] But, you know, I'm certainly open to having conversations during the week if anybody has any better suggestions. One is keeping public comment time in the afternoon limited to an hour. You can see, and the list in the back talks about what some of the other jurisdictions do.

[02:19:16] You know, Arlington, you know, one speaker per topic, for and against. I can't imagine that would go okay over in Prince William County. We don't necessarily want to do that. Public comment time, 10 people per day at the end of every other meeting, which is Fairfax. Public comment time in Falkier, 20 minutes.

[02:19:33] Alexandria, 30. So in the highlighted yellow area on the second page, I'm suggesting that we try out, and we can always change this, and this will be in our rules of procedure, public comment time limited to one hour in the afternoon for both in-person and remote, and we'll have to figure out how that's going to work.

[02:19:55] also one hour at the end of every evening meeting after we do land use cases, because hopefully those will move along quick and have that. So still sort of have it twice in our rules of procedure. And then, you know, one of the analysis, and I think I talked about a while ago, is that a vast number of our speakers are repeat speakers, sometimes twice in a day.

[02:20:21] And so I'm proposing that public common time speakers are limited to speaking once every month. You know, I got that idea from Fairfax, which is once every six months, which doesn't seem to be – it seems somewhat restrictive because people want to come and talk to us about things.

[02:20:40] And so I'm just throwing that out as speaking once every month so we make sure that we hear from all the voices. If we're going to limit public comment time, we have to make sure that it's fair and equitable then at that point so we can hear from everybody and the same people don't speak, you know, week after week on the same topic.

[02:20:59] You know, last but not least, and I know I'm going to run out of time, but thank you. The highlighted note at the bottom, it talks about how this is a discussion of public comment time. Another issue is public hearings. And I got this idea from Arlington, yeah, on page one at the bottom, highlighted.

[02:21:22] Arlington, I was reading the newspaper article, recently did this. If they have over 60 speakers lined up, I said 45, I forget what number there was. If they have a certain number of speakers lined up where they know people are going to show up, they automatically trigger a two-minute and three-minute as opposed to three and five.

[02:21:44] Right now in our rules of procedure, I'm allowed to have discretion and change that at any time. I've never done it, partially because it feels like I would just, you know, depending on what the hearing is, I don't. So I would like to have it codified where if we have over 45 speakers signed up, including remote, you know, if we get, you know, however many people sign up, you know, with Ms. Madden and Ms. Passos at the beginning, if we get over a certain amount, it will trigger the speaking time being reduced to two minutes per person, but those people who are speaking representing groups will get three minutes.

[02:22:20] And I'd like to make it a standing rule in our rules of procedure. So this is really food for thought. We don't even have to do anything about it next week, but I wanted to just sort of get the conversation going. We can't have this discussion in closed session. We have to have it at the dais. And so I would appreciate any input that anyone wants to give me over the week.

[02:22:40] I will put together the resolutions. If anybody has problems with those and wants to suggest others, I'll be open to that. And I will be bringing that forward next week. I'm thinking we're dispatching the agenda tomorrow. Yes.

[02:22:59] Okay. Yeah, I know you've already done one to moving it in the rules of procedure at the end of the evening meetings. So that's already been written. Yeah, so I probably can't. So maybe next week I hand out the resolutions and we have a conversation. Anyway, so just want to get us moving.

[02:23:18] I mean, that's part of my responsibility is to keep the meetings moving and making sure that we hear from all the people of Prince William County. Supervisor Angry, your light is lit, though you didn't speak. That's right. Okay. And, Madam Chair, I know this is your supervisor time.

[02:23:34] No, I've run over, but we need to have this conversation. Okay, thank you, because I don't want to put you out there by yourself because I've said to this entire board that public comment time has been weaponized, and I don't like it. And by all means, to the public, I want to hear the public's comments.

[02:23:51] But what we experienced last year with the process is extremely too much. We should never have a 10 a.m. board meeting. We should never be 12 hours into this. And so I agree with that we need to look at this. I actually agree with everything on here, and we should roll this all up into one.

[02:24:06] I've got to listen to what we want to do, but whatever we do, we've got to do something. So I'm supporting you on doing something, because I was going to make this a very big point of mine when we start discussing what the next process will look like for this board in this last year. Thank you.

[02:24:22] I know we can do this better. I appreciate that support. Thank you. Supervisor Bailey. Thank you, Madam Chair. I concur with my colleague. I think we can work together to make this process seamless so that we can be about the county's work, even in a more robust way.

[02:24:39] We have to respect our citizens, and of course we do, But our quality of life in doing so is very important as we go about doing the county's business. And so I appreciate you bringing this forth for discussion because I think this is something that we can take care of in a quick way.

[02:24:58] But I appreciate you wanting to hear what our desires are as well. But for me, in just supporting this, I believe that this will bring about even better quality of life for everybody concerned, including the citizens that are coming forth during public comment time.

[02:25:15] So thank you. Thank you. And I will add this is also, you know, other jurisdictions did this also because of staff. You know, we have lost a staff member who, you know, in our realm here of doing a public comment time. You know, and having Christian left?

[02:25:33] Oh, you mean Christian? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, not, yeah, lost it. And so, you know, one of the reasons they talked about it in Arlington and other places was because of the onus on staff. You know, there's an onus on the public who wants to be able to comment or see the county business, and there's an onus on staff, and there's an onus on the board.

[02:25:52] No one, you know, no one is doing their best at midnight, so, yeah, or two in the morning. So, you know, in other places, they're experimenting with different things, and, you know, I'm open to that, too. I just know that we need to start having the conversation, so.

[02:26:09] Well, good. No other further comments? Okay. Yes, Supervisor Lawson. Yeah, I'll just say this. A lot of it's a reaction to what this board is doing. Whether you support it or not, the public is reacting to measures that the board, you know, is taking up.

[02:26:32] So there are a lot of contentious cases that draw the public out. So we, you know, we have fingerprints on this too. So I just don't, I don't want the public to think that, that it's, it's all their fault that we've had, you know, early, early morning board meetings.

[02:26:54] It's not, it's a collective ownership. And frankly, this is America. They have a right. It's a first amendment right to, to address their elected officials. So I'm going to be very protective of the public's interest as we look to, I'm not saying that I'm going to close door on this.

[02:27:18] I'm going to read it. You gave me two pages worth of your notes, but I want everybody to know that I will be very cautious of what we are doing to affect the public's right to address us.

[02:27:34] Well, and I will say those late nights that we have, those were public hearings. And that's why I wanted to do the distinction between public hearings when we are hearing from the public versus public common time. I know. I understand that. But to your point, the public hearings, you're suggesting that you have the authority, which you already do, to waive, you know, the three-minute rule and go to two minutes.

[02:28:01] And that's a rule that you, that's a right that you already have. But the public, you know, I'm protective of the public because of standing practices. And if they are used to three minutes, then we need to make sure that if we're going to change it, that we consider advertising that change.

[02:28:21] Like, if there's more than 45 people that sign up, you know, several days in advance, we need to be proactive about managing what the public is expecting. Of course. Things like that. So I just want to make sure, as we have conversations, that we have it, lay everything out on the table and make sure that it doesn't look like we are trying to skirt any of it.

[02:28:48] Can I, I just got a comment. Supervisor Angry. Can I comment? I just got a comment. And I said this on day one for this board, that this dais represents all of Prince William County. We're seven district supervisors representing the district, but our real true representation is on this board.

[02:29:06] And on this board, we function with the public watching us. We're just like a fishbowl, with the public watching us what we do. Our interaction really isn't with the public. They just get to make sure the business that we're taking care of, which is their business, is being conducted and done in a manner professionally to the needs of the people.

[02:29:25] But I say to your comment of the public has a right to voice their concerns because they do First Amendment right. That's where my office comes into play. That's where your office and everybody's office comes into play that these folks can come through these offices and tell us the stuff. Because when I was mentioning weaponizing these public commentaries, we have weaponized this public commentaries.

[02:29:44] because we have geared up the public to come in on issues that draw in things. And I think to that point is where we can do better. You know, we can listen to the concerns and we can be the voice of what they're saying. And they have all of our email addresses because I know when there's something contentious because I get 300 emails one day and I know there's something on the agenda that I need to pay attention to, which is great.

[02:30:09] And that's when they call my office and we go through things, but then I got to come in here and kind of do it all over again. I don't mean just about I, I just mean this board. When we come in here, it's us as a united board having a discussion with the public watching us, which is why I think this dais is actually set the wrong way.

[02:30:24] It should be in a horse so we can talk to each other and not really spend all of our time engaging as if the public has a say in the conversation because they truly don't. And I don't mean that in any disrespect. It's just that if that was the case, we would really be here extremely long.

[02:30:39] But I think that's the point of our offices, is that we take the brunt of our districts, of our conversations, and we chat with the people, and we come here, and we get the work done. I'm going to stop there because I just, you know, I feel like we do a lot here that keeps it going because we engage more than I believe we should.

[02:30:56] Madam Chair. Thank you, Supervisor Angry. Supervisor Lawson and then Bailey. Thanks. Thank you, Supervisor Angry. But the First Amendment specifically says it protects freedom of speech, the press, assembly, and the right to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

[02:31:15] So they do have a right. It's a First Amendment right. You fought for those rights. So I would caution you not to dismiss those. We are required at least once a quarter to hear from the public.

[02:31:30] true um and we're obviously we're obviously exceeding that i'm just trying to suggest that maybe it's because of i've i've been on the board the longest now um we didn't have this problem for my first five years on this board where we had we had of course we had certain things that would require the you know or that would um the public would react we'd have longer public comment time than others but this is a pattern because of the board it's not because you know it's it's it's not

[02:32:04] because of the public is just suddenly wanting to come down and and consume a lot of their personal time addressing us i'm saying there's a chain reaction and it started with us as a board and that's what we have to be mindful of and i i will be very diligent and careful about what we are doing to upset a long-standing apple cart. So that's my point, but I know that you'd be sensitive to the First Amendment. Supervisor Bailey. Thank you. I just want, just for point of clarity for me,

[02:32:42] Madam Chair, you're offering this opportunity for us to look at this and come back and talk together so that we can respect our community's First Amendment rights. Am I clear on that? Yeah, I'm trying to get some conversation in other people.

[02:32:58] Okay, so I don't want us to put anything out there that's not really happening right now. I think we as intelligent leaders can do that. And I certainly don't want the community or anybody in this audience to think that we are not respecting First Amendment rights.

[02:33:19] And so that's certainly not where I'm coming from, or I think my colleagues are coming from at all, because we certainly respect the First Amendment right of people to voice their opinion. We're just trying to do it in a more organized and collective way.

[02:33:36] Am I misunderstanding that? Not at all. You know, I'll close with, you know, this is about getting the business of the people done, doing it fairly, hearing from a broad swath of the community, and that's really what leadership is about. So that's why I'm offering this change.

[02:33:53] With that, I will suggest that we go into closed session, and after that, we'll come back and report out. Thank you.

[02:34:10] So, we are back from closed session.

[02:34:28] Can I get a motion to certify, please? So moved, Madam Chair. Second. Motion made by Supervisor Bailey, seconded by Vice Chair Bodie. Any further discussion?

[02:34:48] Seeing none, please vote. Okay, we have some items to report out. Supervisor Bailey. Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I move the authorization of a settlement and acquisition of property interest on and across an acquisition of an additional 1.5839 acres of approximately portion of 1.2017 Balls Fords Road, owned by Industrial Development Group, as to be undivided one-half interest, Douglas E. Lane, trustee of the Douglas E. Lane Living Trust, dated September 15, 2011,

[02:35:28] as to an undivided one-fourth interest, and Harry Fulweiler III, trustee of the Harry Fulweiler III, revocable living trust, dated August 16, 1993, as to an undivided one-fourth interest in the Gainesville Magisterial District.

[02:35:44] Second. Motion made by Supervisor Bailey, seconded by Supervisor Brody. Vice Chair Brody, is there any further discussion? Seeing none, please vote. Okay, who's next? Supervisor Angry.

[02:36:00] Thank you, Madam Chair. Madam Chair, I move that we remove the following from the alternate position to the Potomac and Rappahannock Transportation Commission. Pete Canlin, Kalai Kandasami, hope I got that, and Maggie Hansford. And I want to thank each of them for their service to the PRTC Commission.

[02:36:19] Thank you, Madam Chair. Second. Motion made by Supervisor Angri, seconded by Vice Chair Bodie. Any further discussion? Seeing none, please vote. Okay, next, I believe, is it the COG appointments?

[02:36:35] Madam Chair, members of the board, and I'll provide this to the clerk for the resolution, but your Metropolitan Washington Council of Government appointments for the Board of Directors, it will remain the same with Chair Ann Wheeler and Supervisor Andrea Bailey. For the Transportation Planning Board, it will remain the same with Chair Ann Wheeler with an alternate of Rick Canizales, the member will be Supervisor Angry with the alternate of Paulo Bolita. For the Air Quality Committee, it will remain with Supervisor Bode as a member and Robert Burkhart as an alternate. Supervisor Angry will take the vacant position as a member and

[02:37:11] Paulo Bolita will remain as an alternate. For the Region Forward Coalition, Supervisor Franklin will remain as the member and the alternate will be vacant. For the Human Services Policy Committee, The member will be Supervisor Bailey with an alternate of Courtney Tierney, and the member will be Supervisor Bode with an alternate being vacant.

[02:37:30] For the Climate, Energy, and Environment Policy Committee, the member will be Ann Wheeler with the alternate of Julia Mano. With the Chesapeake Bay Water Resources Policy, the member will be Supervisor Bode with the alternate of Supervisor Bailey. And the Food and Agriculture Regional Member Policy will remain the same with Mr. Bode as the member and Chair Ann Wheeler as the alternate.

[02:37:52] Second. Oh, so moved. I'm sorry. Motion made by Supervisor Bailey, seconded by Vice Chair Bode. Any further discussion? Seeing none, please vote. And I believe our last is Supervisor Lawson.

[02:38:10] Thank you, Madam Chair. My motion is related to the county attorney's compensation, whereas the Office of HR implements the county's decision ban methodology for classification and compensation purposes, which was adopted by this board. after the classification and compensation study included in this implementation is a review of internal equity comparisons based on the county's adoption classification and comp plan. I move the board adjust Ms. Robles' compensation as discussed in closed session. Second. Motion made by Supervisor

[02:38:42] Lawson, seconded by Vice Chair Bodie. Any further discussion? Seeing none, please vote. Okay. We are at the final agenda item. I will entertain a motion to adjourn. So moved, Madam Chair. Second. Thank you. Any further discussion? Seeing none, please vote. We are adjourned of our first meeting in the day.

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