The Hampton City Council convened for a work session to review the upcoming General Assembly legislative priorities, receive a strategic shift presentation from the Community Development Department (CDD) detailing operational improvements, and hold an in-briefing on proposed Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) amendments. Council members engaged in discussions regarding collective bargaining mandates, zoning code modernization, and customer service enhancements, while setting the stage for evening voting on these items and a motion to proceed to closed session.
Good afternoon and welcome to Hampton City Council work session. I want to ask the clerk to call the role, please. Councilman Bowman. Present. Vice Mayor Brown. Here. Councilwoman Campbell. Present. Councilwoman Bay RB. Present. Councilwoman Harper. Present. Councilwoman Muggler. President Mayor Gray. Present. And we have several presentations this afternoon. So I'm going to get started. Ask the city manager to uh introduce the first one. Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. We have with us this afternoon to give an update on the proposed uh General Assembly legislative priority document that's on your agenda for adoption this evening. Mr. Ed Reed, Vice President of Two Capital Consulting. You all received a report last month. There were some changes recommended at the time to delete one item, and since that time, based upon the VML meeting and other uh legislative conversations at the regional level, there have been a few items that we have also added by you know checking in with each of you. But we wanted the public to see the changes and to know the changes that have been made. So Mr. Reid is just going to go briefly over both the deletion as well as the additions that are uh showing up in your final package for adoption this evening. All right, good afternoon. Good afternoon, Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of council, uh city manager, city attorney, and city clerk. I appreciate the opportunity to uh brief you today on uh those additions and deletions to the uh the presentation that I gave on back in October. And so I'll try to be pretty brief today and not to bore you with some of the information that you've you've already heard uh last month. And so we'll jump right in. The first thing that I wanted to tackle is um we've had some changes uh since the last time I've uh presented to you all, and so I wanted to give you a bit of a election recap and talk about the implications for that for the upcoming uh general assembly session. So the the Democrats swept all three uh statewide offices that you'll see there in the presentation. So we'll have a new uh new governor, Lieutenant Governor, and attorney general coming in in those offices. Those transitions are underway. Um our team's been uh communicating with the respective uh transition teams to to find out how we can be be helpful as that transition takes place. Uh we have um in House District 87, delegate Jawan Ward was re-elected and and she'll be serving in in that capacity, and then in House District 86, uh delegate elect Virgil Thornton will be representing uh the district there. And so uh likewise we've been in communication with the members of the delegation as well to give them a little bit of a heads up on what's in the legislative package before uh council formally adopts that um this afternoon. Um to the right there you'll see just some of the implications with the pickup of of 13 additional seats on the Democratic side and the House of Delegates, um, it will create um a ripple effect in terms of the way the committees are made up. And so um that is something we we likely won't know the extent of until the beginning of session in January, but we'll keep a close eye on how that impacts the work that we're doing here on behalf of the city. Um but we do expect some of the the makeups um in terms of committees to change. Um we also have a special election that will take place as a result of uh Lieutenant Governor elect Hashmi being elected, and now her um Senate seat will need to be filled in there at this point. There are two House members that have announced that they're running for that seat in the central uh Richmond area. And so if one of them is victorious, we'll have another special election for that house seat as well. So again, some ripple effects in terms of that, um, but work is well on the way to to ensure that we're off to a great session. Some important dates here to keep in mind, and there's one slight correction here on November the November 17th date is actually the beginning of the pre-filing uh period. Uh the uh it ends on December 1st, and so um usually a little bit later in the process with the beginning of that deadline um after the election in the House, and so we we saw the election uh last week, and so we have a little bit more time in terms of the pre-filing uh deadline there. Two important dates are coming up next week, and that's the 18th and the 20th through the 21st.