Parking, that's St.

Patrick's doing.

You'll stiff fine to strict enforcement on parking.

That's what we got in the backflip.

Happy St.

Patrick's Day.

And we are definitely a lively clutch today.

Everybody's so round up and ready to go.

Um, obviously, I'm not Bobby Dyer.

But uh the mayor is on some very uh important business for the city uh out of the country on economic development.

So we wish him well and that he brings on lots of good stuff for us.

Um I think everybody else is here.

So, Mr.

Manager, I'm gonna turn the meeting over to you.

Vice Mayor, thank you.

Appreciate the opportunity to be here today.

And the first presentation will be from Brent McKenzie, who is here in action in Virginia Beach.

And he'll give City Council a General Assembly overview in terms of where we are as we wrap up the General Assembly session.

So go ahead.

Brent, the floor is yours.

Thank you, Mr.

Manager, and good afternoon, Madam Vice Mayor and members of council.

It's a pleasure to be here with you this afternoon.

Uh today we are going to provide our uh last in-person briefing on the General Assembly session.

Uh, we'll talk a little bit about the post-session schedule, status of our legislative agenda items, which uh there's nothing has changed since the last time, and then we're gonna roll through some of the legislation of interest that we've been following throughout the legislative session.

So um the General Assembly session concluded this past Saturday, late in the evening, about 7 30 or 8 o'clock.

It was a really long day.

Um they will come back into session on April 22nd for what we call the reconvene session.

And just as a reminder, basically what happens is all the legislation that passed in the um last week of the General Assembly session, all that legislation gets uh wrapped up and sent to the governor.

The governor has 30 days uh to either uh sign the legislation, she can amend the legislation, or she can veto the legislation.

So on April 22nd, the General Assembly comes back to deal with all of the amendments and vetoes.

Uh following the reconvened session on April 22nd, they have scheduled a special session to begin on April 23rd to deal with the budget.

As hopefully you saw in my emails and probably through the news, saw that they did not come to a budget agreement uh on time and said they're gonna come back on April 23rd to deal with that.

Uh the major sticking point uh as the General Assembly session was concluding, revolved around the uh debate over the data center exemption uh tax exemption, and that provided a little over a billion dollars in additional funds to uh spend that was included in the Senate budget.

Uh House conferees did not want to include that.

They were looking at some other ways of dealing with data centers, and so um they were unable to come to uh an agreement there at the end.

But sounds like things are moving in the right direction, and they're pretty confident that they will uh have this wrapped up by April 23rd.

Uh our legislative agenda items, uh nothing really changed here.

All three of these items went uh were sent to the governor.

Um our election system items are in effect, and um the uh legislation carried by delegate ask you that in its original form was uh trying to deal with some of the SAV issues, and it's um it's version that passed, creates a kind of like an oversight committee for some of these hard to uh permit projects, and um will hopefully help uh lead us to a solution, but it does not provide a direct solution.

Uh, we can provide some more information on that moving forward as that legislation gets enrolled.

Uh so the next few slides just kind of uh provide a quick overview of some of the items that we had included in the policy section of our legislative agenda.

A few things we wanted to highlight for you.

So the first one is then on affordable housing, and I'm not gonna go through all of these, there's too much to go through, but um, we wanted to highlight these for you.

And if you have questions, please let me know.

Or if you want more information, please let me know.

So, a couple things off of this list.

Uh the first one, HB4.

Um, creates a framework for localities to preserve affordable housing.

Basically, this legislation would allow if there's an affordable housing to uh development in the city, uh, and that developer was going to sell um said development, that locality would get first right of refusal to be able to help maintain um its affordability.

So that was an interesting piece of legislation.

SB 74 authorizes any locality in the Commonwealth to provide for an affordable dwelling unit program.

And then I'll highlight one other one here on this list for you SB90 from Senator Aired.

This legislation provides some new authority to local governments, and it would basically allow that if a condition exists in a dwelling unit, like in an apartment complex that is a material non-compliance by the landlord with a rental agreement.

Uh that it would allow the local government to basically institute an action in court to try and get the landlord to fix the problem.

So that's some new authority that is headed towards local governments, assuming that the governor signs that legislation.

On the economic development front, a couple of things that we've been talking about this year.

HB18 establishes an employee child care assistance pilot program.

This would be a program where the state provides some funding and the employer provides some matching funds and we're provide some child care for their employees.

This has been an issue that the mayor's brought up multiple times.