Oh, it started at six as well. Alright. The time is 06:17PM in this December 11, the twenty twenty five conference of planning development committee meeting, Fairfax County School Board will now come to order. Apologies for the late start, traffic and and IT. So we have a couple of items to go through. First is administrative, which is the minutes of the 10/30/2025 CPDC meeting or before the committee for approval. Those are posted online and I'll open the floor floor for a motion, and then we'll have a discussion on that.
Is there a motion for the minutes? Yeah. The minutes are posted online. Yeah. That's fine. We can we'll put a pin in the minutes. Why don't we take five minutes to go through the minutes? Does that work for you? Do you have Internet access? I do. Okay. I don't think so. It's on board docs. I think they're online. Yeah. My I don't know. My board docs and nothing is working on my end, so we can put those up. The work session or the meeting? So we're doing in part of the CIP work session, we're gonna fold in a conversation of ed specs. I think you brought that up at the dais. So we're so basically, we teed it up with the CPDC meeting, and then at
the work session coming up with CIP, there's gonna be a bit on on ed specs in there as well. Well. Instead of a community advisory committee, you want to say a school board advisory committee. That's fine. There there no objection. That's fine. It's working for me now. I don't know. So, miss Marin, the background section is what's taken directly from the BoardDocs cover sheet. So this is just laying out the history of the joint facility review committee update, and that was taken directly from BoardDocs. Yes. Yes. So the board direction to the clerks on minutes was, at least for this interim
period while we're working on the backlog to provide the summary of the meeting so that the brief summary. And so that's why these minutes are a lot more condensed than they had been in the past. Okay. So the minutes above this very clearly state the tenor and the overview of what was discussed. The minutes for this facilities committee do not. The minutes for this facilities for the update that I gave on the joint committee's meeting just says that I gave a report. So that's not very helpful when we're looking to understand what was said in the
future. So Two reasons for that. And we can edit these and come back to them at the next meeting. But the joint facility, facility committee has their own minutes, and so, that's that's one reason. And in board meeting minutes, when board members are giving reports, we don't actually go into the detail on the reports. So for example, on the regular meeting minutes, for committee reports or liaison reports, it just says that that committee chair gave a report on the committee, it's recent, activities
and work. It doesn't go into the Thank you, mister Jackson. But isn't that because then the committee minutes show what was discussed? I mean, there's nowhere now that's discussing what I have brought to the board as a joint committee. It's not here, and it's not anyway, I I I don't really I'm So do we my day at that meeting this morning, so I'm a little tired. But, like, this just is not very helpful to say that I spoke about it. So do we have the link to the minutes for the full joint facility committee? Well, I I don't need to see it, but my guess my question is could we put in there the link to the minutes for the joint facility committee?
Why don't we do that? That would be great. Yeah. Just so that's captured in there. So at least there's a link over to the full discussion that took place. Yeah. And I know, mister Jackson, you were telling me this morning about whether they were available or not. So if they are, then I'm cool to approve this tonight. But if not, I'd like to wait. So are you okay to approve it if we stick that link in there? I am. Okay. Alright. That's fine. Thank you. And then that technical adjustment, I appreciate it. So okay. So we'll make those two adjustments and then we can come back at the end. Not a big deal. Okay. So we'll defer the vote on that until the technical adjustments are made. Going back here.
On so the next order of business is agenda item three, logistics integration of community members of the Facility Planning Advisory Council's work into the Comprehensive Planning and Development Committee. So to set this up, there's a document, on board docs. There's basically two key decisions that I I would prefer to have a decision point on tonight. If not, we'll have another meeting, I think, in February where we could finalize it. So the because of the changes that the board approved for FPAC and CPDC structure at the meeting last week, mister Dunn brought an amendment that the board approved where
we went from, two key amendments. Number one, we went from we added the or related to the criteria section of community members. The second amendment was going from three community members to five community members. So because we've increased it from three to five community members, miss Sizemore Heizer brought an amendment to an amendment, that requires us to come up with a way to weight the votes so that the community member votes do not outweigh board member votes. So the first discussion point is is, the weighting of those votes. Now I did talk to the clerk, and, Kevin, you know how board docs works
much better than I do, but in talking with the clerks, the recommendation was instead of, like, a point five vote or a point two five vote or a fraction of a vote, everybody on the CPDC, to include the community members, the board members, and the city representative, get one vote with board members getting an additional one vote apiece. And the recommendation my understanding is that that recommendation was because of how board docs is set up in the counting of votes in board docs. Kevin, do you have anything you wanna add to that? No. That's correct. And so, with board docs, we cannot really wait votes.
And so, this is our way of basically addressing that and we would basically create an additional, school board member CPDC vote and then that way, when I load the votes, in for each motion then they would actually show, reflecting that weighting and everything would work seamlessly without us building some to, calculate the votes. Okay. Mister Dunn. Thank you. One of my motions at the, dais on Thursday was to obtain a, legal opinion
on the roles, responsibilities, and restrictions on community members serving as a member of CBDC. I would like to request that next time we have a CBDC meeting that we have a closed session to be able to discuss that opinion as a committee. Secondly, I'd like to suggest that we and I'm happy to make a motion in this regard. Given the novelty of, waiting of votes, yeah, I would like to suggest that, we obtain a legal opinion or perhaps parliamentary guidance from our parliamentarian, Jason Morgan, on on
precedent for for waiting of votes. Not saying I oppose it. I just, what I don't wanna have happen is we do take some action now or ten years in the future. And, and it could be about, you know, the renovation queue or whatever the subject matter is. And then there's a lawsuit, and they find that we have broken some law, broken some parliamentary procedure. We've seen this in Loudoun County. We've seen it, with, you know, various, you know, the missing middle in Arlington County.
We've seen it with data center proceedings with the, and just lot lots of stuff that you're probably familiar with, mister McDaniel, from your work on the county. And, and I just don't wanna have the, FCPS be vulnerable to a legal challenge. So getting authoritative, definitive legal guidance, in advance of making any decisions as a committee on how we should wait, how we should do it for the convenience of board docs, I think would be, be prudent. Yes, ma'am. I appreciate the innovative approach to trying to make this work, but I do not
support creating a new mode of voting. I agree with my colleague, that we really need to be cautious, and I think it could be really just a time consuming thing to ask legal to go and do this. I I think we need a little more time. I'm aware there were some people who couldn't make it tonight even though this was a scheduled meeting. Just given the discussion at last Thursday's regular session, I think there are some more people who'd like to be here. I've been out of town. I'd like to digest this a bit more, so I would like to just wait. I don't yet want to ask counsel to proceed with this.
I'd like to have a bigger discussion. But, on the face of it, I am not interested in creating a new creating a precedent for a new way of doing business just on the fly because of this. Mister Donner? Sorry. Just while I can say something, I I was there not a joint facilities meeting today? So I I just didn't see on the agenda that there was going to be a briefing on that. So I just wanted to see if it might be possible for, one of the attendees. Yeah. There was, and we we can have that conversation. That's not a big deal. So legal did send a memo around, and I'll be careful what I say.
But that was addressed in the memo, the questions that you're raising. So, there's no particular as I said in my opening comments, there's no particular pressing need to make a decision tonight. We just need to figure out either a path forward or a decision. So there's no problem on my end of scheduling a closed session to make sure that we're good with that. The board did bind the structure for the the requirement to have community members not be outweighed by or excuse me, community member votes to be outweighed by board member votes. So with that as kind of the baseline for the discussion, we can certainly have a conversation for closed session.
I think we have a February meeting. I can't remember if it's January or February, maybe both, but we can certainly have a closed session to talk about that. We have a meeting in both January and February. There you go. January. So after the first of the year, we can have counsel come and cover that memo. But that memo was sent around. I don't know if you guys saw it or not. I think that was just today. It was either yesterday or this morning. Yeah. What what are the dates in January and February, Kevin? The January meeting is January 15, and the February meeting is February 19, but that's gonna be right before the PM work session on the budget.
Okay. That's right. Yeah. We scheduled an earlier meeting on that day because of the budget work session. Miss Mearin. Well, granted, I was not here at the Thursday regular meeting. I don't think that I I think the information that whatever is in this legal memo that was just sent would have been good for the board to have for that decision. So I just feel like there's a lot of carp before the horse here, and, I definitely need more than a few hours to know that something's in my inbox. So I would just like to table it completely. We can talk about it next time, but I I don't wanna put any action
forward. We have a lot of priorities, including the CIP, before we meet again. So, I really would like the staff to focus on that and not this particular thing. That's my feeling. We can do the closed session conversation to go over the memo in January. And I guess I obviously, there's a memo from legal, there's something that's closed, but I don't know why it needs to be a closed conversation to talk about the makeup of a committee that was already talked about in public. So Well, there was the I mean, there's legal I'll work with counsel and I'll work with, the clerks to make sure what we can be very clear, what we can and can't can't discuss, and open versus closed.
That'd be great. So I I'm not making any I don't know. So I don't wanna I don't wanna say one thing and it turns out to be something else, mister Dunn. Okay. Can can you please make sure that, Mark, can you please invite John Foster and or I don't know if Sona Rewari participate in the memo at all, but whoever are the authors of the memo are there and prepared to speak, to it. I just wanna make sure we're not talking just amongst us since legal is not a regular attendee at CBDC meetings. That's fine. Yeah. So the next discussion point, which similar logistical issue, when we went from three to
five members, the original document had a phase in schedule of the three members, and that was based on the audit committee original phase in schedule of two members. So the original document phased in one member on a one year term, the second member on a two year term, the third member on a three year term, but now they're going to three to five members, we need to figure out a way to phase in those additional two members. You know, the recommendation here is just something that I can help with with the clerks. I have no pride of authorship. If the committee wants to do something different, it's really immaterial in my mind, but we do need to figure out and perhaps it could be a part of the
conversation. Yeah. That draft that document that I sent you earlier, Kevin. It's right it's right there under under that second discussion point where it says two one two two one three. So effectively, we would take the additional two members, and one would get a one year term. The second would get a two year term, and then the that fifth person would get the three year term. And then at the end of each of those respective terms, it would start the three year cycle. And the point of that was to try to not have everybody rolling off at the same time as well. So if does that make let me ask. Does that make sense from the timing perspective?
Not saying that's what we have to go with, but just Might be recognized. No. No. Go ahead, please. Can you, clarify the second bullet under changes approved where it says changing criteria dash or related? I don't know what that means. Yeah. So your amendment, it took the original criteria and added the comma or related to it. I think it had more than that. It had Oh, wasn't more than okay. It wasn't Whatever what okay. Whatever your your approved criteria is, I thought it was just the or related. But whatever that is, that's gonna be the change so we can update the document to reflect that.
Yeah. There were more subject matters that were explicitly called out. Right. Can I ask, is it necessary? Is is, is the audit committee I never served on the audit committee, so I don't know. Are are the two people who serve on the audit committee, are they staggered? They were staggered. Yeah. Originally, they were originally, they were staggered. And then they started the they started the rolling end of the cycle. And, again, that language came right from the governance manual appendix I wanna say appendix l, which was the audit committee original application process. Is it not just possible to do one year terms that are renewable?
I mean, we can just keep renewing at least an item. Under the approved changes, it's a three year term instead of one year term. But in terms of the actual roll in of those members, we can do you know, we can figure out how we wanna do that because we did approve technical adjustments. We gave the clerks the latitude to make technical adjustments, and I would I mean, I would consider this technical adjustment to comply with the addition of two extra members. So however we wanna phase people in, whatever works best, I mean, whatever the committee wants to do, I'm I'm totally fine with.
Understanding that, we approved, three year terms, but we could, is there is there a benefit? That wasn't that's something that was discussed at the dais. So do you feel strongly about that three year term versus renewable one year terms? Just to match, you know, what other people do. Although, how how was the term of service of the citizen members on the audit committee? Is that I believe they're three years. There's three years. Three years as well. Yeah. Okay. Yes, Merrill. So I'm realizing that when we thoughtfully updated the advisory committee, you know, guidebook and
advisory committee protocols, that was the function of the public engagement committee of the board and they have not been part of this and, you know, I do think it's unfortunate that this all went through on Thursday without key information like the number of committee members and how they're gonna vote, but it's the public engagement committee that's really supposed to be talking about terms. And, again, I just think this needs a bit more work, to be, consistent with how we've approached other committees. So I I don't know why we would wanna have this one be different for
any other reason. I think it needs to be something that gets worked on with public engagement. That's what we do with the rest of the committees. Gotcha. Well, so the board's proved the structure with the two changes. So we have a charge from the board as well to come back with a way to integrate the two changes that the ask someone from PEC to have a hand in that, I suppose we could, although PEC isn't necessarily the keeper of the advisory committees. But, you know, again, if we're gonna have a conversation in closed session about item number one, the discussion point of waiting of the community member votes, we can chew
on this for a few weeks and come back with a way to figure out how to roll in these additional two members. Because it doesn't have a effective start date until 04/01/2026, so we do have some time on that. And and I guess And there's Go ahead. There there is another suggestion that's coming to me as I'm sitting here. You could also do adjust this slightly to do, three people on a one year term and then two people on the the two year term. And then that way, it allows the board to appoint two sets per term. And because right now, if you do the three year cycle, then you would only
appoint one full set every term. That gives you more flexibility for your consideration. That makes sense. Okay. So what I the name plaques are still up. Do we know what more turns? Okay. So what I'm hearing is now we've had this conversation, we will have another agenda item for the January meeting where we can flush this out a little bit more and we can think about it for the next few weeks. And we'll be able to do the closed session in January? Well, yeah. If if we need it to be closed session. If we don't need it to be closed session, then there's there would be no point. But I I would suspect it probably will be a closed session.
You think it also depends sorry. No. That's fine. I'll follow-up with staff to see if if it's closed versus open. I think it also depends on what else the chair and vice chair already have on the docket for closed meetings. You know, there's a method to scheduling closed meetings. So To to be clear, I was referring to just a closed meeting of this committee, not the full board. That was your was that mister Dunn, was that your suggestion? To to have the closed session in January? Well, a closed session of the committee. Yes. That's correct. Full board. Okay. I wanna make sure I understood that.
Just like audit sometimes have closed sessions in there. Okay. Yeah. I think it has to be really clear, like, mister Jackson just made a recommendation. Like, can those be fleshed out? I I still don't understand why we can't just start everyone at the same time in April. Why why are we dovetailing them in or scaffolding them in? It was to have staggered terms. That was the point of the staggered terms. Audit doesn't do that? The audit member, community members are still staggered. And then so the April 1 cut ending date, so whoever is currently on Oh, it's no one because it's us. So okay.
Thanks. Okay. Alright. And then the next item on this list is discussion of FPAC work and CPDC work for the year. So at the board meeting last week, I did, make comments that we would bring in anybody from FPAC that that chose to attend to talk about the items that they're working. I know we have staff here as well. Talk about the items that they're working on and how do we integrate that into, the work schedule for CPDC, and ideas to tackle some of that work starting 04/01/2026 as the committee structure changes over. So we have who do we have from FPAP?
Priya Swamy. Priya and I see Brian up there as well. And can I ask, the hard copy agendas that we received are different from the agenda that's on the screen? It technically isn't that's supposed to be called an agenda. That was just details on the discussion points that we were going to have but I point taken. Just for the consistency of No. I got you. Board docs. Yeah. So the board doc, this document is the basically the background document for item 1.03. It should not have been called an agenda, but I I got you there. So discussion of FPAC work and CBDC for the year.
I will open the floor to have a conversation. I know Priya and Brian, you guys are on Zoom. Feel free to jump in here, raise your hand, and Kevin will, make sure that you guys can can speak. We'll do a quick mic check. And then I maybe I'll turn things over to I know, Brian, you're you're kind of new ish here. So any input that you wanna have on the work that FPAC has been doing and how can best integrate that, you're certainly welcome to jump in here. But Priya or Brian, do you guys have any input on what items that you're working on that you would like to see CPDC take up?
Brian? Yeah. Sorry. Can you hear me alright? Yes. We can. Sorry. I I just I'm I'm more listening today just because I with the short notice of the meeting, I I couldn't find the childcare, so I'm I'm watching two of the ones at the same time. So, I'm I'm more just kinda more more listening than that participating tonight. No worries. Thank you. Yeah. And hi, everyone. This is Carla. I'm here today. I'm not representing you. You know, this is a a fox. So, I'm here to listen and I'm trying to understand how, how, these changes will
be affecting some of the, the work that AfPak has done. Okay. Thank you. Mister Don. If if I may suggest based on work done by FPAC over the past two years and discussions, held this year, one topic that I think it would be worth discussing, is energy management and, in particular, virtual power plants, which I believe is a topic miss Swami brought to FPAC. A similar and related topic is the use of ESCOs and, similar, arrangements to, maximize
energy savings, and perhaps getting some kind of report, from facilities on are we currently using ESCOs and similar arrangements, and are we headed in a direction to use them more, especially to, upgrade some of our HVAC systems or other other, energy intensive systems in our building. I think what we saw at Hayfield Secondary School is a dire need to upgrade
our HVAC generally. And I was surprised coming out of the pandemic with all the pandemic dollars that we didn't come out with brand new spank and HVAC everywhere, but, maybe those dollars went other other places. But I think, I know we will get data through the facility's condition assessment, but, having some understanding of how we can use third parties, and their financing without spending additional dollars on our part to actually get better HVAC systems or similar energy intent systems and still perhaps saving money, I think, would be useful to know, especially at
a time if anyone's tracking, the Virginia Corporation Commission just authorized virtual power plants to be established in Virginia. So I think it's a very opportune time. In addition to that, there was a lot of work that FPAC did on, private public partnerships, bringing in, Gilbane and other people to do presentations, within the last two
years, writing a couple memos, doing, reactions to the p three report we received last year. And I think, there's there's more work that could be done to lay the foundation, perhaps for exploring that, down the road, by FCPS. Thank you. And for staff, could we get actually get a copy of all the memos that FPAC has sent directly to you? Because some board members have not seen them. Can we get a copy of those memos? We can find those for you. Okay. So let's recirculate that, to make sure that we're not missing anything that, you know,
we don't need to be missing. Sure. Shouldn't be a problem. Okay. I can also communicate to Katie Herman. She has all those memos. Whoever has the memos, let's just get a copy of all those memos that have been sent around. I don't wanna miss any of the work that's been done or have any balls be dropped. For for what period of time? I two years. Last year? Yeah. Yeah. Two years. I mean, since the term started, I think that's probably reasonable. K. Do you want those directed to this committee? Yeah. Just send it to the whole committee. That's fine. Yeah. That works. Yeah. And then I think, you know, I had an I did have an idea, and I kind of you know, I think we should kinda chew on this of how
best for CBDC to tackle some of this work that's been done because we do not meet as regularly as FPAC meeting as FPAC met. There's some interesting language in the governance manual about the ability for, committees to set up working groups. So one of the thoughts that I was having and kind of chewing over in my mind is the ability to set up working groups that have specifically worked on some of these topics that we're discussing here. I think the memos that have been generated could inform the topics that we would then decide to pick up and potentially small working groups can be kinda tasked out with doing some of that work without requiring full committee meetings.
But, you know, that's we can flesh that a little bit more in January if we need to. Oh, you're fine. Did you hear did you hear that? I thought oh, sorry. I thought I thought you might be interested. And what I was saying is, the governance manual does allow for committees to set up, working groups or yes. Working groups, so small subgroups of the full committee. So since we're expanding the committee from five members to 10 members, I think that will be a good opportunity to set up working groups with some of the topics that we identify that the FPAC has been working on. That way we don't get bogged down and having to have the work directed through
full meetings of CPDC. So one idea that I did have is if there's a member of CPDC that has a particular interest in a topic area, you know, that like virtual power plants, for example, you could be able to work as a subgroup, a working group directly with some of the community members to flesh that out more, because we do meet less than FPACnet. And we only have, like, work session time, so to speak, to do some of that heavy lifting they've been doing. But that was an idea that that that came to mind. Miss, go ahead. That's great. Thank you. I I I wasn't aware of that, so that would that that would be very
helpful and useful to be able to report back to CBDC. Miss Mira. Yeah. Just thinking about the meeting we had this morning, myself and mister McDaniel for the joint facility committee with the board of supervisors, and I'm happy to go into a summary of that. But, you know, it's become clear to me as just one board member that there's a lot that we could learn about facilities. Today, it was about the 2232 process. And even though we have had conversations about it, there's a lot more to it. I think the same could be said of what was in the last which the
first joint committee meeting. There's a lot of background about how, the funds what funds fund facilities. So I don't I I think we should deliberate about what kind of work topics we wanna work on because there's things that are really, you know, connected to us and things that are more, you know, I don't know about the data centers and, you know, that did that come up today? No. That was a different meeting. But there are things that we really need to dig deeper on. And, like, how do we transfer that knowledge to the other decision makers that were
on the boards with? You know, even ed specs, like, that could be, I think, something that is more pertinent than talking about, you know, data centers that we have zero control over. So I I think I'd like to establish some parameters on what we work on as being things that we can actually influence and maybe, like, legislative advocacy or somewhere else, you know, let's weave that in. So, yeah, when we do discuss that, I I would like to keep that in mind. Thanks. Mister Dunn? I I fully agree. I just wanted to mention since, and and I didn't mean data centers. I'm sorry if I misspoke at all.
I was talking about virtual power plants, which is just using, like, batteries and such for, you know, energy storage and distributed, energy management. I did wanna mention about the 2232 process since you touched on that that, miss Sizemore Heizer and I, attended a meeting last year with the planning commission, which was focused on the 2232 process. And I know the staff for facilities and the staff for the planning commission are continuing to have some dialogue about, creating different buckets.
One bucket for major renovations and then a separate bucket for maybe lighter touch projects so that you have different levels of community engagement depending on the scope of the project. That was kind of the rough informal agreement we reached, although, obviously, consultation with the board. But it might be beneficial for, my colleagues, miss Marron, miss McDaniel, to also be designated by the chair of the school board to be the people who also engage in those discussions with the planning commission.
So then you maintain unity of conversations, rather than having different parts of the board having separate dialogues about basically the same or related subject matter. That is an excellent dovetail into what I was just gonna ask miss Merritt to do. Would you like to give an update from this morning's joint facility? I would. I would. But I really appreciate that, that, idea, mister Dunn, because also I believe miss Sizemore Heizer is the planning commission contact. And as we know, she won her election. So after Tuesday, that will be vacant.
So, that that's a great idea. Yeah. So 2232. So, absolutely, mister Dunn, you mentioned so it was, like, February. And, really, what we did at the meeting today was hear from the county about what the 2232 process is. And just kind of all get a level setting. And the link is posted on their committee website, and I am getting the, you know, the links altogether and more happy to share. But, you know, the the history seems to be that, like, in 2014, the county really looked at the the code 2232, and there were three, actually, I just saved
it to my desktop, if I could just pull it up right here because it was interesting. So the twenty two thirty two by state code has requirements that a public engagement process be had when it's, referring to location, the extent, and the character. So in 2012, it was kind of, agreed upon that the bond process did due diligence about location. Right? Because people are voting on the bond. There's clearly engagement. But in 2022, the planning commission expressed interest understanding, but I believe it's generally right,
so not verbatim. But in 2022, the planning commission, wanted to have a more formal process because there seemed to be times when the school's projects were coming to the planning commission and the project information might have been incomplete or changed, and they just wanna really be sure that the community engagement piece was happening. So that's what changed in 2022. And then earlier this year or was it even last year? It might have been '24 that, the schools and the planning commission part of the education part of the planning commission went over that the way that it's being implemented
now with 2232 is taking a really long time. And so that brought us to the topic being on this joint committee today, which is what's going on? What has happened? How can we make things better? And as part of the presentation and I I'll I'll pull it up to share just among us. They did outline four projects that the schools had gone through the 2232 and showed that it was above sixty days, which is the minimum that is required for public engagement, before it goes forward, but the the body can ask for more.
And so, indeed, it was more than sixty, and, it showed it was under one year. So so we the next step is to the staff are gonna work more on it and really see if we could get to clarity on how to bring things to, the planning commission that satisfy the twenty two thirty two that are more complete, so there's not as much back and forth and using of time. So that is the next step. We don't expect that it will be updated by the January committee meeting, the first one or the second, but that is what came out of that.
And then I'll pause there because the next, subject was about MOU. So but I'll pause there. Thank you. Mister Dunn. I just wanted to highlight I I believe, that narrative is missing a very important chunk of information. And this is not from my personal involvement, but I can just tell you I've had dozens of hours of conversation about this and read a lot of stuff. So this committee, CBDC, I believe under the leadership of former school board member Karen
Kees Gamara, when she was chair of CBDC, devoted, a year or two years of work, and I don't know if miss miss Pitches was on at that time, to developing an entirely new approach to community engagement, basically, and solely intended or primarily intended to address the planning commission's concerns about 2232. Now even though that was done at very laborious time intensive work and it was successfully implemented, I believe it's at least partially reflected on the, facility's website.
In the conversation that miss Sizemore Heizer and I had with the planning commission last year, there was concerns expressed that it did not meet the planning commission's expectations, and former planning commission member, miss Strandley, had extensive thoughts on that and shared at that time different documents by email and otherwise. So just be aware that there is that piece out there that you might need to consider and and wade through, all of the documents. Yes. Thank you.
And I did wanna say that I did request that our staff send to the county a link to the communications process that we have. And I did I will resend it around. My email is super slow. But, I'm not sure if the county received that. So but you're right. So there's some disconnects here. It seems like ensuring that whatever we put forward is as complete as possible is really the linchpin, that that seemed to rise to the top of the conversation. There was also some concern about the fact that there was perceived to be, and
and and maybe mister Davis knows this, an MOU that was, not entirely lawful. And FCPS was using that, and the planning commission disagreed, and when they discovered that. So that that's a whole thing as well. And, again, I'm referring to things that preceded my time, and, I'm sure there are people who can discuss this at greater length. But just these are things that need to be resolved within 2232. It's definitely not a neat little package. It's got a lot of, hot messes in there.
Yeah. I agree. And I think the key takeaway from the 2232 conversation, at least in my mind this morning, was discretion. There is the state code is very broad in terms of what it allows localities to do when they interpret and implement the twenty two thirty two process. So we just have to have a conversation with with the county side and the planning commission to make sure that we're getting back to, something that everybody can be on the same page with. And that's a good segue to the MOU, but before I talk about that, I wanted to share that I had asked and and hearing that the, mister I'm happy
to wait. I don't want you to are you okay? Okay. In an effort to be more clear about the expectations and not rely on, you know, agreements or assumptions, you know, I said, does the board of supervisors in the county have policy or regulation or something that we could really, you know, code in so that we all know. And the response was, well, we wanna keep our flexibility, which is fine, but not to the point where it creates a lack of things being done on time and and included. So there was this kind of conversation about, let's be flexible, but we also need
to know what we're doing. So, so going into the MOU, we I know our staff has started compiling MOUs for all sorts of different facilities and, really, they're the ones I've seen have pretty much all been out of date. And I shared an example of four different high schools, around my district that all had different MOUs ranging from 2003 or seven to 2014. And so the commitment there from the county was and the and our staff was to gather existing MOUs to see what was out there.
Although I said, well, if they're all expired, I'm not sure, you know, we could just start new with a new template. But, really, the point that I made is that our community use policy needs to be updated with what we needed to have. And I know it was updated maybe two years ago, but there's stuff in it that needs it needs more clarity based on what I am thinking from this joint committee meeting as well as, my participation as our liaison to the Fairfax County, athletic council, FCAC, Fairfax County Athletic Council, because there is a lot of wasted time and
money and a lot of frustration at the joint facility use, I I think, because these MOUs are out of date and there aren't not agreements written down that are updated. So I do see it as part of the joint committee plan because we're trying to save resources. And until we get our policy with what we need to deliver our mission and what the community needs ironed out, then the MOU comes from there. So I agree. Yeah. It's a big pool of yarn and Yeah. And and there are things on the table like the turf allocation.
And I said, well, allocation and use and maintenance are all tied together. And if we just have a turf allocation policy, which is, I think, what exists from twenty o eleven, and then we have a maintenance, like, it's gotta all come together because otherwise, we remain in this position of maintaining, facilities for the entire community, and then we're using our instructional dollars now more and more to do that. And that is lessening our ability to meet our mission. So that's that's my lens, is I wanna get us out of the business of
maintaining facilities for the entire community's use. I want it to be a fair share. So I'm sorry. Can you clarify these MOUs? Are these MOUs with third party organizations like soccer clubs and other organizations? Some are. It varies. There is no template. So it could be a high school, the school board, and the board of supervisors. It could be a boosters club, a high school, private or nonprofit soccer, you know, for sports league, and the Park Authority. There's many iterations and not a format.
And so And they're and they're not limited to just athletic. I mean, athletic that was one example. So, like, for example, our SAC MOU for the SAC classroom spaces, that's a big one. You could even go into 1988. Correct. You could even go into, you know, shared parking lots, things like that. So it's I mean, dozens of MOUs across a whole bunch of different topics. Well, and even the MOUs with the parking lots has a good point, miss Britannia, because facilities like, we recently, our board signed a lease for tens of thousands of dollars to lease space for our school buses to park.
Now what if there's a library parking lot or, you know, something that's undeveloped, we could park it there seemingly for free or at least for cost to the county rather than paying a private provider to lease that space. So that's part of the shared or joint use or co location that's gonna come up on the agenda, I believe, at the second January meeting. But there's no MOU for that kind of thing, you see, or no standard way to even approach it. And, at at a minimum, we should know what our legal obligations are if they are legal because MOUs generally are not legally binding.
But we should know what our promises are, informal or or otherwise, and be able to categorize those and have those in a spreadsheet, a database, or something else. And update them and but I'd also say sunset them because there might be some organizations that have gone out of business or, you know, some sports that are no longer being practiced. And, you know, I I do know that, you know, the use of our fields are increasingly encumbered by outside organizations. I have a middle school where, recently put in a cricket field.
Right? Well, there's not a cricket team at the middle school, and so that is an investment. I believe a $100,000 are in that neighborhood of of dollars. Now if the middle school decides it wants to use that field for something else, then we might be creating a legal liability. So there might be not just legal agreements, but legal risks associated with this. But there's also a question, that I think from a strategic level, if you take a step back, does FCPS want to own athletic fields? Right?
Like, if they're being used by, you know, outside organizations, perhaps FCPS could make a decision at some point. Well, we just wanna hand over those to the park authority to manage or the county to manage as a common resource. We'll use them sometimes. We'll use them sometimes, and then they're off our books. We don't have to pay for them anymore. Just kinda like outsourcing responsibility. Not advocating for that, but we do need to be thinking broader because I do appreciate miss Baron's point. If we're spending budget dollars that are for the public, that's not our mission. Our mission is the students.
Right? Yeah. Exactly. And this is why I I asked at the outset that the Park Authority be at the table because when all three of us are at the table, that's when we start to see these things. And, exactly I mean, I'd asked today too, are MAUs legally binding? Do we want a contract? Like, that's we need to figure that stuff out and write it down, because, you know, the example I gave was my doc my daughter's in South Lakes varsity soccer, and the last time the turf allocation policy was reviewed was when she was one year old. And we're having all these problems, and I don't wanna leave these problems for the
next future boards. Our you know, we try to do our policies every five years. Maybe that's the thing. And I do I do hear from the county athletic council, mister Dunn, that, indeed, there are more private, recreational groups coming in. And, again, what is our mission? It's to educate kids. It's to provide our residents' use. And then so that's why that community's policy update is so important because we can articulate that that as a school board, that's the hierarchy. And when we run out of space and money, well, that's just it. I've also learned that no other county around us has any kind of community use
like we do. Loudoun, Prince William, whether it's because they have parks and rec space or what, but nobody does what we do. And I think that what I'm seeing is there's a lot of miscommunication and dispersed work, and I really think we gotta figure out how to get out of the business of managing the community's use of our schools because that's not our job. So And do we even get those community use dollars? Do those come back to us? I don't think so. And that's something that could also be stipulated or we recognize, like, what's in kind.
Right? If we if we park school buses at a library, well, that could be in kind and it needs something more sophisticated and succinct than what we're doing now. That's a great question. It depends on who you ask. We we get a portion of community use dollars. I think we and there's a budget question out there. There's a response from the budget department. I'll have to go back and dig up, but it's a very small portion of the community use dollars that's collected. Like, I think it's a few $100,000. It's not it's not all that that much. Do you know what the total revenue for the community use is?
I do not off the top of my head. I mean I I don't wanna say one way or the other. It's the the split of the community use fee is kind of a, it's a little convoluted. So basically, the county collects the fees and then gives us our share of the fees. And, you know yeah. I mean, I I guess I've always struggled with communities. I've never dived into it. But why if it's our buildings, right, it's clearly our buildings, and we're letting them be used, I mean, if if there's a third party who uses the Fairfax County
Government Center, do we we don't get a cut of that, and we're not the reservation agent for that. So why would the county be the reservation agent for for community use? If it's our building our land and and they are budget constrained, this seems like the opportunity to I mean, we could just contract out to a third party, not the county, to manage this on behalf and make it more profit centric. Right? I don't disagree with you. So it's it's and I I know, Mellie, you've been really on top of the community use side of the house because you've done a lot of research. Yeah. I I think And if I'm saying anything that's not accurate, correct me, please.
No. I agree with you. I mean, I think that's the question. Like, that would could be something the CBDC works on. You know, something that I've been trying to do through this work and with, the athletic council is find that kind of information to understand and to, in some ways, to lessen, like, well, this is the school's property and the county's property and the park's property in some ways. But then when it comes to, well, we're paying the bill like, a great example is the stadium bathrooms. Right? So the stadium bathrooms so 15 high schools did not have bathrooms, including South Lakes porta potties.
So we the previous board authorized having them installed. Took three years. I don't know if it's 2232. Took a lot of permitting, and they got installed prior to this school year. So then community use is, like, great. So how do we get the keys? But the thing is we staff them. We clean them. We secure them. We light them. We pay for the water. And so I brought this to the athletic council, earlier this year, and I explained that. And other sports, some teams were like, well, yeah. When we have, like, a tournament, we do pay a thousand dollars for the weekend
to have FCPS provide that service. And so all these years, right, we're we're not being paid for that, and that's why we're dipping into instructional dollars. So I've been really pleased with NCS, has seen that and been like, okay. Yeah. We do need to have, like, a legal liability raver and a plan for security, and are we gonna need cameras? And, like, that's just standard stuff that we don't have. So I think that's a really good case study and we can use that to say, okay, now how do we expand that to all these other things that we've been footing the bill for and we just can't do anymore?
Maybe we could have done it, but we can't because we need that for instruction. I just if we're looking at naming rights or we've had discussions of naming rights, other source of revenue, and we're limited by law in generating fees, so I'm not quite sure if there's a legal reason. Maybe we need a legal opinion on this. If that's some something that would prevent us from managing our own facilities. I don't think we would be precluded from that, though. But that just seems like something that we could do to generate money, especially if if we dedicate a 100% of community use fees to maintaining our infrastructure because looking
at the CIP, and press miss Davis has a comment, our deferred maintenance backlog is we're spending a fraction of what we're supposed to be spending. I mean, our our deferred maintenance backlog is, was it, 300 and some million dollars right now, so it's incredible. And to your point, not only that to maintain them, but there's damage involved that we have to come through and take care of the damaged sink, door, whatever it is. So there's a lot of fees involved in in just that one MOU. Well, thank you. And I know mister Muick and mister Gordon, their offices have been pulling stuff together.
Like, we had that call with the cancellations, and, really, the cancellations are a symptom of the problem. Right? So the county is concerned, and we've reduced it way low. When we went over those numbers, most of the can the highest number amount of cancellations were because of maintenance issues. And so if we're looking at this problem of cancellations, well, they're getting canceled because things are broken and not able to be used. And so I think that idea is getting elevated, but it's not really coming forward as the thing that we really need. And maybe yeah. Naming rights for more money, but this structure is I think has worn its use
out. And we need to I'm trying to show data to, support that finding to help it help us move forward. That that's my goal with this. But the policy is what is driving this setup. Can I also ask, is is your joint facilities board intending to discuss with the county? The they've talked about doing a special bond issuance, and please correct me if I'm using the wrong terminology, to do, like, early childcare, like expanding SAC or do you
know what I'm talking about? And and my concern is they're doing this it's you know, I've talked to the superintendent before, and she said the county has not approached her to have a conversation. And it seems our schools are the ideal location if you wanna have more day care. Right? And, or expand SAC, transform into something else. Why aren't we involved in that conversation? Because instead of going out and building new buildings, which is costly, it's very expensive to build now, use some of our underutilized, school space across the county. Right?
I haven't, maybe I I haven't I I've been I've I've heard nebulous kind of discussions about bonding, for that, but I do know that when we started with the joint facilities task force, SAC specifically came up, but the we love our acronyms. SAC is being discussed by SCIPPED. So the SCIPPED committee, which I think miss Saint John Cunning and I can't remember who else is on that from our side, but they're kind of taking a focus on the SAC structure, which is part of that early child education.
But, no. I I haven't, really seen any forward progress to your point. And and this committee's charge, as per the board matter that the supervisors put in place early this year, is to not introduce any new ideas for funding. It's to reduce. It's to find reductions. Now, however, our staff has said, well, we can talk about the split of the bond because we have double the amount at least double the amount of square feet, and half the bond comes to us and half the bond goes to the county, but our buildings are used more. And so that's why that occupancy, use there's, like, a number of the occupancy rate,
like, how many hours a day our buildings are used. And it's way up there, and it's used by a lot of people that sometimes make a mess. Right? So, and damage things. So I also want to elevate that, but it's not on the agenda yet. So I think before we talk about new money, which I don't see an appetite for, we could at least talk about the distribution of the bond. And I have all sorts of question about the bond program, how it's done and how it's prioritized. I don't I can't really find the foundational documents of that. So I agree. If if they have the opportunity to do a special bond for childcare, then that
raises questions of why don't we have the opportunity to do a special bond like a green bond, right, or a special bond focused on facilities to kind of do a onetime, you know, upgrade of our facilities for maintenance, the infrastructure backlog, or to simply cover some of our dire needs. Right? Forty one year renovation backlog is not to anyone's benefit, especially given the ramping community use. We are often the only game in town for most of the facilities across the county. We just don't have, you know, a wide number of community centers geographically dispersed.
We have onesies, twosies here and there. And, and and so we need to take advantage of that and press the county to help us, if there is flexibility in that bond authority and we're often told there's not until they decide they do have flexibility. We need to find out what that is. And I don't know if that means hiring our own independent, financial advisory firm that is expert on bonds and such, but we do need to get independent advice and not just rely rely on the information there that we're told, which I feel is perhaps not not fulsome. I mean, I think there's so much work that can be done here.
This is why, you know, I continue to say we could spend more time on this. So today, we hosted, chairman Jeff McKay at Western High School for a tour, so myself. So I scheduled the tour and, Sandy Anderson, Riccardi Anderson, and Robin Lady joined. And so that was after the joint committee meeting this morning, so a lot of the stuff was fresh in my mind. And we were, you know, talking about some of these things in the 2232. And, you know, I suggested I think we really should be talking about this more often and together. And I don't know that there was much interest in that, but that's why I
think the data the more we can share the data, it will be compelling to to do it. I'm also wondering, miss Pitches, do you have a different approach in any of this? Do you guys do community use? I'd love to know can you share with us? Yeah. Thank you. Miss Pitches. Chair Pitches. Sorry. We have a community use person that we employ. Giselle Gray. She's housed at Fairfax High School. And the way we do it so when youth clubs use our fields, they are charged a fee. It's usually per athlete.
I don't know if that that charge is different all the time. And the way and we have churches that use Fairfax High School or some of the other buildings. Everything gets scheduled through FCPS or and Giselle. Yeah. And I believe 15% of the revenue goes to you guys. I don't know who in the county receives it, and then 85% remains with, this the city school board and Fairfax High School. That's how I mean, it's a lot easier when you obviously, we have four schools.
But we just having that one person sort of take care of it all. And we have a there is a method to the madness. Like, we know that we have to pay Fairfax County 15%, and that is to cover electricity, custodial staff, to clean up anything, just all the things, all the utilities. And we do have a mix. Okay. And we do FCPS does have a community use office. And they park We use that as well.
Right. What I'm noticing though is that it's a lot of work. And again, nobody else in the area does this. And I also know that there or I've heard that there are sometimes when school staff will schedule something where they need to rearrange an orchestra concert or a back to school night, and, like, they need to have the priority. And if our policy doesn't say that and if there's an expectation that we're gonna there's an expectation now that principals are gonna do this stuff and, like, we just have to remove that because they are focused on instruction.
And even though they're not, like, directly in the system, they're coordinating with NCS and it's it's just created this untenable situation in all all sorts of ways. In the school services agreement, it says that all school in our agreement with you guys, all school events come first. So if something gets scheduled through community use and then let's say they decide to have a band concert, that person gets bumped. That's true. So that is I think that's interesting to know and I wonder if that's gonna be part of the MOU pull that, you know, that agreement pull. And that is true, but there's instances where maybe something is canceled last minute and
it, like, cancels a whole tournament, which we don't want either. We don't want people to, you know Right. Or there's an expect like, so why did you have to change it so much or do you need this block? There's just a lot to it that is not codified that, again, creates frustration and waste of time and money. So that's really where I'm trying to get everything, like and whatever we come to might not please everyone because we have limited space and limited dollars. But that's the reality. Yeah. So, in the city, the stadium turf and, Draper Park and Stafford, which are the
two athletics fields, they're across, Fairfax Boulevard from the high school, are all maintained by Parks and Rec. Parks and Rec. The school board maintains the other fields that we just turfed, like the baseball field and the softball field. We maintain, those fields. But, like I said, we do contribute a certain, amount of money, every year to parks and rec for the high school turf to help them with the upkeep. There's something about the practice fields.
Mhmm. That the parks manage that. But then now there's this thing with the green days where teams are practicing out of season. Right? So then that's now creating an issue because the community leagues like, again, because it's not clear Right. Who gets what and how things are prioritized. So this is the culmination of probably, like, three or four months or so. No. I Everything's listening and creating. It's I I love the conversation. I do I know we started late, but I do wanna end on time. Right. We've got eight we do need one quick housekeeping item on approving the minutes but,
I do like to free flow conversation and one idea that I just came up with, and I'm gonna add this to the so we talked about virtual power plants, ESCOs, triple Ps. I I do think once we get our community members on board and we're starting to create these kind of working groups, naming rights needs to be something that we we look at. I know I've brought that up to the I brought that to superintendent a couple of times. I think there's some appetite, to look into that but we probably need to do some homework around that. Can I go back to an earlier agenda item, which is you had asked for input on the staggering of members, and there's a, recent example of which I'm aware
in New Mexico where they shifted from a elected public utility commission to a appointed public utility commission? And, they did wanna have staggering it was three members. And they started all three members at the same time, but they had one member appointed for one year, second member appointed for two years, third member appointed for three years. And so everyone started the same time, but, different durations. And so when people were interviewing, they understood I'm interviewing for a one year position
or I'm interviewing for two year position. Right? And, so you could start all five members at the same time and just have, you know, two for one year, two for two years, and one for three years, and then it'll naturally rotate. It will be a little uneven since there's an odd number, but that's one solution, to address your earlier question. No. I agree. I think that's so that that was the intention of I think that we're on the same page. It may not maybe wasn't outlined clearly with that. So they would all start 04/01/2026 and then one year, two year, three year, two
members, two members, one member. So I think that and and yes, whether we, you know maybe it's one of those things where it's like, well, maybe I don't wanna do this. I'll sign up for one year and see how it goes, that type of conversation. But no, I I completely agree with that. So, alright. Let's get these minutes approved. So we're gonna go back to item one point o two, approval of the minutes. And, Kevin, I know you're gonna make those two technical adjustments, inserting the link and, committee community from from community to school board. Yes. Is that done? Or you just you're going to do it? Yeah. I'm going to do it. So the Alright.
Yep. So that will be done. Is there a motion to approve the minutes as discussed with those two technical edits, miss Myers, or a second? Mister Dunn, all any discussion? No. All in favor? That's unanimous. Thank you. With that, our next CPDC meeting is 01/15/2025 at fourth we might adjust the time. I just I know that 04:30 may be may be tough for folks, especially bringing community members on board. But it's here 04:30, Gatehouse sixteen hundred. The Fairfax County School Board Conference and Planning and Development Committee meeting is adjourned as of 07:25PM. Thank you.