CHARLOTTESVILLE, VA (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) – Charlottesville City Council and the School Board will meet jointly Wednesday at City Space and will discuss plans for how funds from a 1% sales tax for school capital projects could be spent if voters approve the raise in November.
Before the joint session, the Council is expected to appropriate $234,000 to the City Reserve, then apportion more than $206,000 to the Charlottesville/Albemarle Family Drug Court, then – in the joint session – release $1,840,576 from the School Operations Contingency Funds to the school division to support the new Collective Bargaining Agreement for Licensed and Support Professionals.
Council will also decide on releasing $159,424 to support conversion of six part-time bus driver positions to full-time.
The Board and Council have met before to discuss possibilities of where sales tax money could go before Council gave the referendum go-ahead, but that meeting – unlike Wednesday’s session – did not include the opportunity for public comment.
After that, the two panels will then discuss the potential 1% sales tax revenue produced, if voters approve, to help accomplish two targets in one of the four priorities in the schools’ 2023-2028 strategic plan.
The targets are accomplishing “100% completion of annually designated modernization projects on school campuses”.
Many of those were discussed at the July 8 joint meeting that included eight potential capital improvement projects that included a renovation and addition to Charlottesville High School, the construction of a new school at Jackson-Via Elementary and a number of other renovations upgrades across five other elementary schools — Greenbrier, Summit, Trailblazer, Sunrise and Tall Oaks — as well as CATEC.
“I think you could take care of somewhere on the order of half of what I presented as sort of the ideal … renovation project timeline,” said Michael Goddard, Deputy Director of Public Works to Cville Right Now at that time.
The eight presented projects would be in addition to the recently completed Charlottesville Middle School project and the Charlottesville Early Learning Center, which is currently in the design process.
Goddard, who has been with the city for 10 years, said many of these projects have been discussed for the majority of his time with the city, even before it began putting more funding into major school projects like CMS and the CELC.
“We’ve started to spend a lot more money on those kind of bigger capital projects for the schools,” he said. “But we’ve been kind of building the program, at least on the conceptual level, for all the time I’ve been here.”
The second target they’ll discuss is “annual progress improving air quality in division and school buildings”.
Toward that goal during the summer was a Summit Elementary window replacement, Sunrise Elementary roof replacement, and Greenbrier Elementary bathroom renovation, according to CCPS Supervisor of Communications Amanda Korman Simalchik.
The public will be able to speak after each of those discussions.
