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290 actually use alternate modes, City Hall has developed an incentive plan to encourage our employees to do so, resulting in 470 trips a month. 2. City-County-UniVersity Cooperation The litigation over reversion has made close relations with the County difficult, yet over the last year our firefighters and their firefighters have hammered out an agreement on our fire services and our Police Department has set up a regional computer network with the County and University Police Departments to fight crime. In addition, we set up the Juvenile Detention AuthoriO/ for the construction and management o fa local Detention Center so our youth will not be carted away to Staunton. Current city-county ventures include a Committee on Planning which will study increasing cooperative planning, which is at a peak of interest now. For our youth, the City and the County are also jointly renovating the skateboard park on Mctntire Road. I am optimistic that the City and County will sign thefire services agreement in March, which I see as a new era in City-County relations and creates a momentum to work together in the future, Thanks to community leaders like the League of Women Voters and the SC's for encouraging cooperation. The challenge here is clear: can we and the County talk and work together in order to save money, plan for smarter growth, and plan for our children's needs? We must continue to press for more involvement by the City in the University's long term planning and for U. Va to actively work to preserve nearby neighborhoods. 3. Equal opportunity This Council is proud of its commitment to bringing about a greater diversity within City government. This past year has seen more qualified minorities move into senior management positions than ever before due to the emphasis on equal opportunity in the recruitment process by the City Manager. Council supported the University's admissions policies, and strengthened the minority presence on the School Board. But challenges remain: one of the major ones in equal opportUnity for the City government is to diversify the middle management leadership of the city, a long term commitment this Council has and will continue to be committed to achieving Two proposals on the table are appropriately discussed here; one is a proposal for Jefferson School, an important landmark in the African-American community. If it is not appropriate for the current use, one idea is to create a Multi-Cultural Center there, a place where citizens couM support and celebrate the arts in creative ways; I am highly supportive of this idea; we need such a place to bring us together. Another Equal Opportunity proposal I support is a budget proposal for a Charlottesville Public Schools Scholarship, to guarantee our children the resources to enter and succeed in two or four year college or technical training school, to give them the dream of getting a higher education. How did we achieve our successes and become one of the Best Places to Live in America? We did it because this is a city of doers. As Igor to know Charlottesville many years ago, I began to see that Charlottesville was a city of activists. We like to sit in Higher Grounds or Chap's or Mudhouse and talk, but we also like to get out there and do it, and that includes citizens, city staff businesspeople, organizations from Rotary to Rivanna Trails, City Councilors, members of our boards and commissions, our young people too, who give volunteer service in the thousands. How will we meet our challenges? The same way. Through daily talk and work. In Will and Ariel Durant's famous classic, The Story of Civilization., they say "Civilization is a stream with banks. The stream is sometimes filled with blood from people killing, stealing, shouting, and doing things historians [and the press] usually