Help Us Balance the Budget

It’s not fun being on the City Council these days. You all know we getting hammered for charging new fees – the 911 fee, the weed abatement inspection fee. But we’re also in the middle of making very tough decisions about how to cut our spending as well. Nobody’s hammered us about cutting their services yet – but I’m sure that will come soon enough.

I want to emphasize, however, that we’re still in the process of figuring out what programs and services to cut in order to balance the budget. We haven’t really made any decisions yet, though the staff has made some recommendations. So I’d like to ask for your help. I’d like you to let me know where you think we can cut.

In order to do so, I’d like you to take a look at the same information we’re working off of.

A few weeks ago, we on the City Council adopted four principles to guide us through these

Principle 1: In spite of adverse economic conditions, the Council remains focused and committed to the achievement of the long-term General Plan Strategic Visions embodied in the 2005 General Plan and will continue its commitment to the community to become a national model.

Principle 2: To ensure increasingly limited resources are allocated to what matters most in achieving the General Plan Strategic Visions, the Council recognizes that tough choices will need to be made and that its emphasis will be placed on eliminating, reducing, or restructuring lower-priority programs and expenses rather than compromising the success of high-priority efforts by inadequate funding.

Principle 3: Buildinq on the first two principles, programs and initiatives that produce income or save future expenses should generally be given higher priority than those that simply consume revenue.

Principle 4: Because we will be asking more in these difficult times from workforce, the Council remains committed to the goal of competitive compensation to continue to retain and attract able and loyal staff.

To gather information about how we spend our money, go to the agenda for the April 7th meeting and pull down the staff report for Agenda items #6 (“Budgeting For Outcomes Process”).

Warning: This is a really long staff report – close to 200 pages. There’s a lot of detail from the internal City Hall process of trying to prioritize what the city spends money on – a process that was known as “Budgeting For Outcomes,” and included not only city staff members but also representatives from the Chamber of Commerce. There’s mind-numbing detail here, but it contains three really important things.

First, it contains a breakdown of how we spend all of our General Fund money and, second, a first cut at what might be reduced or eliminated. This is broken down by what we call our “strategic goals” -- the goals contained in the Seize The Future vision and the General Plan. The sheets called “Citywide Outcome Rating Work Sheets” show how much money the City spends on different city activities. For every strategic goal, there’s another worksheet behind the “Outcome Rating Work Sheet” called the “Citywide Reduction-Restructure-Elimination Work sheet”. This was a theoretical exercise by the staff – if we stopped doing the 20% of the things that were least important, what would those be?

Third, beyond these worksheets are a set of recommendations – one for each strategic goal – from the Budgeting For Outcomes committee for each of those goals. This was the final set of recommendations made to the City Manager and the staff leadership team by these committees.

Take a look at all of these. It’ll help you understand what we spend money on, and I hope it’ll help you focus on what we should and should not be spending money on.

Once you’re doing doing that, go to the agenda for the April 1st meeting and pull down the staff report for Agenda item #1 -- Actions to Maintain Fiscal Sustainability”. This is a much shorter report – only 18 pages. And the really important part is the last 9 pages – the list labeled “Attachment A”.

Attachment A is the City Manager’s final recommendation of what to cut. Some of these things can be cut immediately; others can be cut in the next fiscal year starting July 1.

Please look this over and tell me what you think. What should we spend money on? What should we cut? Just email me at fulton4ventura@gmail.com.

And what do you have questions about? I’m compiling a list of questions and concerns I’m going to pass on to the City Manager. Give me a question and I’ll pass it on, and then I’ll print the answers.

Thanks for paying attention.

Starting Sooner … and Ending Sooner?

It’s pretty exhausting to be on the City Council. Most Monday’s we have a closed session to discuss litigation and other such matters beginning at 6 p.m. and then we have a regular meeting starting at 7 p.m. We usually go until between 10:30 and 11:30 p.m. – and, more often than we’d like, we wind up going to 12:30 or 1 a.m. We can’t make good decisions at that hour – and it doesn’t do the public any good to take up important items at midnight.

So we’re going to start our public meetings at 6 p.m. instead of 7 p.m. We’ll see whether it allows us to get to important items at a decent hour and get home a little earlier.

The first meeting starting at 6 will be May 5th. We won’t be meeting next Monday, April 28th.

Earth Day 2008

Tomorrow is the 38th Earth Day. That's one day a year set aside to think about how what we do affects the planet that we live on.

I'll commemorate Earth Day by not using my car at all. This is a mostly symbolic gesture for me. I travel so much for my day job that I spend a lot of time driving back and forth to the airport and flying around, so I have a bigger carbon footprint than most people. But I do try to have at least one car-free day a week. I'm lucky to be able to have the option because I can walk or bike or conveniently take the bus to practically everything I need, including my job, the supermarket, and City Hall.

Earth Day has had meaning for me since it began back in 1970. I was a ninth-grader in a small city in Upstate New York, and I was part of a group called "Growing Americans Stopping Pollution" (GASP). We spent earth day cleaning litter out of our local riverbed. Almost 40 years later, and we are still trying to figure out how to keep our riverbeds -- and our planet -- clean enough for us to survive. (Though on Saturday morning, 450 people turned out for Earth Day beach cleanup and picked up an enormous amount of trash!) It does seem to me that the issue of climate change has created a "special moment" in our environmental awareness similar to the one that gave birth to the original Earthy Day.

I won't go on at great length about what we at the City are doing or what we as a community are doing on the environment. Suffice it to say that every day should be Earth Day; every technology should be a green technology; and every job should be a green job. But the job of protecting the environment -- on top of everything else we have to do at City Hall -- is sometimes really overwhelming. For example, climate change is sure to be on of our biggest issues here in Ventura in the years ahead. We are a beach town in between two rivers, and a rising sea level will have enormous consequences. But in the rush of daily business, neither I nor anyone else has had the time or energy (to say nothing of the money!) to begin dealing with the question. All I can promise to you is that I'll work harder on that one in the months and years ahead.

What's a tax and what's a fee?

We've been getting some flak for the new fire inspection fee for high fire hazard areas, and I think the topic warrants some discussion. The fee charges high-fire-hazard homeowners $99 each for the City's annual inspection of their property.

Last week we on the City Council got this email from a constituent:

Was this $99.00 fee for weed abatement dreamed up at the same time as the 911 fee? Fire and police protection clearly fall into the 'General Fund' category. Therefore I'm not sure what I'm paying for; but I am VERY sure I'm not getting my money's worth from this City Government . . . !!

Here's the response I wrote:

Thanks for writing. I wish we never had to charge anybody any fees for anything. Unfortunately, sometimes we do.

As I'm sure you know, the state laws governing property tax (principally Proposition 13) keep those property taxes fairly low compared to other states and also gives us only a small share of the property tax -- only about $1 out of every $6 in property taxes you pay come to the city. I wish we could change that, but we really can't. It's all either set in the state constitution or determined by the Legislature.

Therefore, sometimes we have to charge fees for specific things. In this case, the City is obligated to enforce the State Fire Code as it pertains to 1,200 property owners who live in high fire hazard areas. (This is about 3% of all the properties in the city -- there are about 40,000 properties altogether.) As I am sure you know, it is the property owner's responsibility to abate the weeds and grass in the fire hazard areas, and if this is not done by the time fire season starts the fire department will go on to your property and do it for you and you still have to reimburse the city. (I know this because I used to live in one of these areas.)

But even if you cut down the weeds yourself, there's still a cost to the city for coming out and inspecting each of the 1,200 properties and determining whether the property owner is complying. The $99 fee is designed to cover most of the city's cost of "monitoring compliance" in this way. And you're right, this fee is new. For the City, it's a question of who bears the cost of monitoring compliance of these 1,200 properties with the mandatory State Fire Code. Should that cost be borne by the 1,200 property owners in the fire hazard areas, who must comply with the law? Or should the cost be borne by the other 39,000 property owners whose properties are not in fire hazard areas? Our conclusion was that, since it is the responsibility of the 1,200 property owners to comply with the law, it is only fair that it should be their responsibility to pay for compliance monitoring too. I wish we could pay for everything out of general tax money, but we can't.

I'm sorry you don't feel like you're getting your money's worth. As I said before, unfortunately under state law the City only receives $1 out of every $6 in property taxes you pay. I don't know how much your property tax bill is, so let me use an example. Let's say the property tax bill that you just paid (due April 10th) was $1,500. (This would be about right for a house that was purchased for $300,000.) Well, about $750 of that bill goes to the school district. About $500 goes to the county. And about $250 of it goes to the City. I'm sorry if you don't feel like you're getting $250 worth of service (or whatever the amount is for you) in a six-month period from everything the City does.

This is why Cities have to charge fees when we often wish we didn't have to -- because we don't get as much property tax as people think we do. I know this is hard to believe, but generally speaking Ventura charges fees on fewer things, and charges lower fees, than most other cities in this area.

Bill Fulton
Deputy Mayor

The constituent and I emailed back and forth a couple of times more, and it was a pretty cordial exchange. In the end he still believed it was a tax, rather than a fee, and joked that politically this was okay for us because it was a tax on only 3% of the voters.

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that the flak on both this and the 911 fee comes from the perception that the constituents who pay the fee don't see what they're getting for it. We already have access to the 911 system, so why do have to all of a sudden start paying for that access? The city already inspects our properties, so why do we have to all of a sudden start paying for that? And it's not like we're getting anything new or anything we want. We're just paying fees for things that should be general government expenses.

These are all fair points and I can understand why people have this reaction. But my response is this: For better or worse, over the past 30 years -- since the passage of Proposition 13 -- cities have been charging more and more, and higher and higher, fees for a variety of specialized services because we can no longer afford to pay for them out of general tax revenue. The goal in charging these fees is recover costs from individual constituents who benefit from individual services; so that the general tax money can be used for things that benefit our community as a whole. We in Ventura have been behind the curve on this for many years -- there's been a culture in City Hall that we just can't bear to charge our constituents for anything. As a result, we have high expectations and not enough money to meet those expectations. We have to begin reconciling the two.

How Do We Avoid Becoming a Commuter town?

Last week my friend Camille Harris delivered another negative broadside in the Star, attacking the City on a wide range of issues. I thought the article was both inaccurate and unfair, and so I have submitted this letter to the editor to the Star.


To the Editor,

Once again, Camille Harris has written an op/ed piece that relies mostly on hyperbole -- and, in some cases, erroneous information -- to make a case against the City of Ventura's economic development and planning policies. ("New urbanists trying to wall city in gray," April 18).

That's too bad, because the goals Camille seeks to promote in her article -- especially her goal of a town with fewer commuters -- are goals shared by the City Council. And the very policies she harshly criticizes are, in fact, designed to promote the goal she professes to support. I hope that Camille and everyone else in Ventura can unite around these common goals and work together to achieve them, rather than focusing on negative rhetoric.

First, a little fact-checking is in order.

Camille claims that Ventura is mostly a commuter town and the end result of our planning efforts will be to build more housing for commuters. These statements are not true.

By any standard, Ventura is job rich, with more than 50,000 jobs -- including many good-paying jobs at the County Government center and elsewhere.

Also, about 50% of the people who work in Ventura also live in Ventura. This is a far better situation than in any other city in Ventura County. In most of the other cities, only about 25% of workers live in town and 75% commute. So we are far more in balance -- and have fewer commuters relative to the size of our city -- than Oxnard, Thousand Oaks, Santa Paula, or any other city nearby.

To me, this is the single most wonderful and precious aspect of living in Ventura. Because so many people who live in town don't have to commute somewhere else, they have more time, energy, and money to devote to life in our community -- as neighborhood activists, soccer coaches, PTO presidents, and so forth.

But this wonderful balance of living and working in Ventura is also fragile. The percentage of people who both live here and work here is going down. This is especially true in the western part of our city, such as the Midtown neighborhood where Camille lives, because Santa Barbara folks can afford to outbid local residents for beautiful old houses. That is why I believe that all of us in Ventura -- the city government, businesess, environmentalists, and neighborhood activists -- must work together to ensure that our beautiful city remains a city where people can both live and work.

In fact, both of the city policies that Camille criticized so harshly in her op/ed piece -- our infill development policy and our economic development policy -- have been put in place for the purpose of maintaining the fragile jobs-housing balance that all of us, including both Camille and myself, value so highly.

If we had continued our housing sprawl policy of past years, the result would be the construction of many more large single-family homes on large lots, which would be affordable only to Santa Barbara commuters and L.A. refugees with lots of home equity. In addition to discouraging that type of development, the City Council has also strongly resisted attempts by developers to take land reserved for jobs and convert it to housing. We've been heavily criticized by the business community for being anti-business in these situations -- especially when we refused to allow this switcheroo to happen with the Star's former headquarters on Ralston. But for most of us on the council, it wasn't clear to us why being "pro-business" required us to create more housing for commuters -- and take needed land away from office and industrial developments to do it.

By contrast, our infill development policy instead encourages developers to build a greater variety of housing -- including two- and three-bedroom townhomes and condominiums -- that will be less attractive to commuters and more affordable to the hard-working people who already live and work here in town. These folks will then have the time and energy to serve as soccer coaches and PTO presidents.

On economic development, Camille is quite right that we have not done a very good job over the last decade of fostering positive economic growth -- and especially bringing good jobs to town. That is why we partnered with a venture capital firm to encourage the creation and expansion of high-tech and biotech companies here in Ventura. These companies are well established in both Santa Barbara and the Camarillo-Thousand Oaks area -- but many of the people who work at those companies commute out to those locations. With the help of our venture capital partners, we will be able to nurture companies here in town where these folks will be able to work. This will allow them to stop commuting, work in town, and -- again -- allow them to conserve their time and energy to benefit our community.

It is always tempting to believe, as Camille often suggests, that we on the City Council have the power to stop the world from changing or to protect our beautiful town from anything bad that might happen. I wish we had this power, but of course we don't. The world -- and our community -- will change whether we like it or not. I believe our job on the City Council is to work hard to make sure that we can manage the change so that it makes our community better rather than worse.

I agree with Camille that our goal should be a community where as many people as possible can both live and work in town. But this won't happen if all we do is pine for bygone days. To succeed, we all have to work together to recognize what is going on in the world around us and find ways to work aggressively to achieve the goals we all share.

Why We Adopted the 911 Fee

As everybody in the world knows by now, last night Ventura became the first city in Southern California to adopt an access fee on telephones to help pay for our 911 call center.

It’s been splashed all over the newspapers and featured on the 11 o’clock news. Driving through Midtown on my way home from last night’s City Council meeting, I saw Patrick Healy of Channel 4 setting up his “live shot” in front of Pizza Chief on Main Street. Why there? He needed a pay phone as a prop – and how many pay phones are there anymore?

The 911 access fee would place a charge of $1.49 per month -- $17.88 per year – on every telephone line in Ventura, including landlines and cell phones. Individual telephone users will have the option to instead pay a fee of $50 every time they call 911. This, of course, is the controversial part – but it’s important to note that no telephone user will be charged $50 for a call unless they have selected that option in writing in advance.

I voted in favor of the 911 access fee because I think it will help us accomplish two goals.

First, it will help the City pay for a very important but expensive operation, the 911 call center. The 911 service is required by state law. Many years ago the state promised to help local governments find a way to pay for this service, but this has not happened. One of the reasons we did not add police officers or firefighters between 1990 and 2006 was because of the added cost of the 911 center. In fact, it has taken cops off the street to supervise the call center.

And second, it will – with other steps we are taking – free up money to hire more police officers and firefighters. In 2006, we asked the voters to approve Measure P6, a one-quarter-percent increase in local sales tax to add 14 police officers and 11 firefighters. The measure got 62% -- but it required two-thirds. What we kept hearing was, find another way to do this without raising our taxes. Thanks to the 911 fee and other steps, we should be able to hire 12 new police officers and 6 new firefighters within a year or two – about two-thirds of the way toward the goal we set in 2006.


Expanding Public Safety Staff

It’s quite true that discussion of the 911 fee emerged after P6 was defeated.

We spend about half of our general fund budget for police and fire. (Most of the rest goes to public works.) As I said above, the message we got from P6 was, increasing police and fire staff was really important – but find another way to do it. We knew we had to do something. Our public safety force is stretched so thin we are not making our goal of 5-minute response times. It doesn’t do much good to have a great 911 call center if we don’t have enough people to actually go out and respond to the calls.

So the first thing we did, in the 2007-08 budget, was earmark all the additional money we had available for more police officers and firefighters – six officers and three firefighters, to be exact. To do this, we squeezed all the other departments and told them to hold the line. For the first time since 1990, we are going to have a bigger police department and a bigger fire department. We now spend 54% of our General Fund on police and fire, rather than 50%, as we used to.

I was hoping we could do this again for one more year, but our revenues are lagging behind projections. The real estate boom is over, and increases in property tax revenue have been cut in half, to about 5% per year. Within a year or two they’ll be at zero until the real estate bust is over. Meanwhile, sales tax revenue is flat. This situation is not unique to Ventura. Every city in the county – indeed, in the state – is facing almost exactly the same trend on both property tax and sales tax.

But we also knew that, in the long run, we would probably need more revenue to bring police and fire staffing up to the levels where we needed them. So last year, we on the City Council asked the staff to come up with some alternatives. Back in December, we looked at a variety of choices, including another run at the sales tax, imposing additional taxes on new development, and other things. We decided that a 911 fee would be the fairest way to increase revenue.


Paying for the 911 Call Center

We get over 50,000 911 calls per year. That’s an increase of more than 250% since 1990.

The 911 system is very expensive. It involves a lot of capital cost, because you have to have really great, reliable equipment, and it involves a lot of labor cost, because you have to have lots of dispatchers and supervisors on hand all the time. Our call center currently costs a little more than $3 million a year to run. That’s not including the capital cost. Most of the money goes to the salaries of the 12 dispatchers, 4 police corporals, and 1 police sergant who work there full-time. Two to four dispatchers are on duty at all times, and one corporal is one duty from 6 a.m. to 2 a.m., seven days a week.

It’s important to have our own dispatchers because it’s really, really important for them to know our local geography intimately. (And, of course, you have to have a surprlus on hand so you don't get a busy signal.) You can’t do this remotely; it slows things down, and even a few seconds is vital on a 911 call. It’s also important to have the police corporal on duty because that you have to have somebody capable of making decisions instantaneously about how to respond to the call. Responding with too few people can put a police officer at risk; responding with too many can mean there aren’t enough people left for the next call

As I said above, the 911 system was mandated by the state under a state law passed in 1986. At that time, the state promised to work with the local governments to come up with a funding source to help pay for a system that everybody knew would be very, very expensive to operate.

And, in fact, the state does levy a 911 fee on each phone line – as a number of our constituents have pointed out. This fee is tiny – only a few cents a month – and it is devoted to the capital cost of the telecommunications equipment, not operations.

But the state never followed through in its promise to work with the local governments in finding a way to pay for the 911 system. (In fact, not long after the 911 law was passed, the state shifted the allocation property tax in a way that is unfavorable to the city – we get several million dollars a year less than we otherwise would.)

I’m pretty confident that if the state had followed through on its promise to work with the local governments to create a funding source, it would have looked a lot like the 911 access fee we passed last night. But since the state never did anything, we had to do something.


$1.49 per month and $50 per call

The fee will work like this:

* It’ll be $1.49 per month for every phone line billed to a Ventura address, cell phone or land line.
* Low-income lifeline customers will be exempt.
* Businesses with “trunk lines” (one phone line that leads to a switching system) will be charged for three phone lines.

This is designed to generate about $2 million to $2.5 million per year – or, in any event, no more than 85% of the cost of the 911 call center. The money will not be in the General Fund. Because it’s a fee, it will be in a separate fund that can only be used to pay for the 911 call center.

There’s a provision that says that that the city must continue to spend the same amount of General Fund money on public safety. In other words, we can’t reduce public safety spending because we’re now getting money from the 911 fee.

The controversial part was the option of paying $50 per call. Here’s how that works:

* If you don’t want to pay $1.49 per month, you don’t have to. You can fill out a form instead informing the city that you want to pay $50 per call instead. Nobody will be charged $50 unless they have notified the city in advance that they have chosen this option.

* There’s a “Good Samaritan” clause that gives the Police Department discretion to waive the fee if you’re helping out a neighbor or calling in a very serious crime.

* People can switch back to the $1.49 per month fee at any time.

Why $50? It’s 85% of the cost of processing each 911 call.

The fee-per-call idea emerged for two reasons.

The first was to help strengthen the legality of the fee. These fees have been challenged in court by telephone companies in Northern California. Most of the time they are winning. Our City Attorney, Ariel Calonne, believes that by giving telephone customers two options, the fee is less vulnerable in court.

But there’s another, very practical reason: Not everybody uses all their telephone lines for voice communication. Many uses their lines for faxes, computers, and other things like that. By choosing the fee-per-call, you can ensure that you won’t be whacked for access to a service you’re not going to use.

We could simply exempt fax or phone lines, but that would require a cumbersome administrative procedure. People would have to declare that they don’t use their phone line for voice communications; and then we’d have to check and enforce that. This would cost a lot of time and money. By charging a per-call fee, we can ensure that people don’t “game the system” by claiming that their phones are used for fax service. Everybody pays their fair share.


Conclusion

There you go – my rationale for voting in favor of the fee, even the per-call option. Given all the considerations, I think it’s the best option on the table right now. Many people have, as usual, asked why we can’t simply generate more tax revenue by allowing more big retail stores in town. (We heard the same argument on P6.) The answer is: We must do both. We have a number of important locations where we must make sure that there is good, high-quality retail that serves our community and also generates tax revenue – downtown, the north end of the mall site, the Kmart site, the auto center. Each of these locations has potential. But it takes a long time to attract good retailers and put them in place.

We waited 16 years to hire additional police officers and firefighters. I don’t want to wait any longer.

At Last, A New Midtown Corridors Code

I’m sorry for the delay on this, but I fell ill after Monday’s meeting and am only now recovering.

Last Monday (11-26), the Council approved the Midtown Corridors code, including a large number of changes from the draft that was prepared by the staff. This action took place at the end of our second very long joint meeting with the Planning Commission.

Technically, both bodies discussed the code; then the Planning Commission made recommendations, then we approved the code with changes. Thanks to the Planning Commission for their hard work. The code will return to us for a second reading, probably on the consent calendar, in a couple of weeks – on December 17th, I think.

Overall, as I’ve said before, I think the Midtown Corridors code is a great improvement over the current code, and it’s an important step forward in implementing the General Plan. Gradually, we are knocking off these codes and plans called for in the General Plan. The Downtown Specific Plan is approved; now the Midtown code. In January we will hopefully knock off the Victoria Corridor plan and then wrap up the Saticoy & Wells Community Plan. Then we can move on to the North Avenue, Westside, and Midtown community plans. You can read more detail about this in the article I wrote in the Star on Sunday 12/2.

The big issue, of course, was views. I’m proud to say that we took what I think is the first action ever in a city code to protect views.. Here’s what we did:

-- We retained the suggested five-foot side-yard setback for corridor properties that are located at intersections with north-south streets.

-- We decided to require a 10-foot-wide sidewalk on the side-yard portion of all the corridor properties – that is, a 10-foot sidewalk will wrap around to the side street.

-- In order to maintain viewsheds along the hillside-to-ocean corridors (through streets), we will now require the upper floors of buildings on the through streets to be set back even further. That is, a building at Main and Seaward would be required to have a 10-foot sidewalk, a five-foot setback, and a further setback on the second and third stories.

-- To protect the terminating vistas looking northward, we required that the third stories of three-story buildings at a terminating vista be set back such that the ridgeline is visible from 200 feet to the south at a height of five feet.

Here’s a rundown of the other changes we made:

-- We clarified that all building heights must be expressed in the code in terms of both stories and feet.

-- We knocked down the height limits for buildings south of Thompson on either side of Borchard (the Vons and Big Lots shopping centers). Height limit will now be 45 feet (three stories) except on the areas immediately adjacent to residential areas, where height limit will now be 35 feet (two stories).

-- While retaining the “arcade” and “gallery” building types, we clarified that the arcades and galleries could not encroach on the public right-of-way (i.e., can’t be built over the public sidewalk).

== In deference to Community Memorial Hospital, which is required by state law to under a major renovation, we clarified that CMH’s future plans are probably best addressed by a specific plan rather than simply following the terms of the new code.

-- We decided to permit four-story buildings on the south side of Thompson at Seaward.

-- We allowed a few more uses in the main zone along Main and Thompson to permit business support services, as well as art studios and bars and taverns with a use permit.

-- We required landscape screening in the rear of the corridor properties where they abut residential properties.

-- We specified that the code should come back to us in a year for review.

Several other ideas didn’t fly. They included the following:

-- Picking up on an idea from Planning Commissioner Scott Boydstun, I suggested that we require all third stories be set back 10 feet from the street, to maintain the two-story feel of Main and Thompson. This didn't pass.

-- Councilmember Jim Monahan moved that we cut the parking requirements to match those downtown – essentially, from 2 spaces per unit to 1-1.5, Nobody seconded the motion.

-- Mr. Monahan also moved to limit heights to 26 feet to match the VCORD initiative. No one seconded this motion either.