 Solar, solar. Is that something that affordable housing units have been able to get a way to incorporate it into? Yeah. So, her has, what do you call it, an actual kind of deal, you know, the meaning of the deal. So, it's quite an aggressive challenge for you. The one and two is still the meaning of the deal. I don't know what I'm saying. That's when I realized it. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. The media started running all the time. Hey, hi. Hi, how are you? The media started running all of these stories when the media was coming in. You know, it was interesting to see that our energy is quite so high. What's your career about? Just kind of like this. You know, thousands of people are fighting about their housing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That's a new power up in the books. Yeah. That's what I mean. Oh, wow. Every year. Yeah. Every year. Every year. Every year. Every year. Okay. You mentioned disaster. Which one? Seven years ago. Oh, yeah. Uh-uh. She invited Sango Jackson. Was that what you do? I don't know. Okay. Thanks. I think it's David's. Yeah, I know. Which one of you is supposed to be here now? right now. And hello. How are you? Good, how are you? Good, how are you? Just saying. Young lady. I have to take all of that. John Greer. Oh, I don't want to sit down. I'm just going to sit down. Oh, good. Let's have a seat. I'm so sorry. I got to sit in the middle. Yes. I'm going to go sit in the middle. I'm going to go sit in the middle. It was all mine. She called me in. I'm going to go sit in the middle. It was Randall. Who is she? I said, I'm going to sit in the middle. I said, that wasn't me. I said, that wasn't me. So they were going to sit in the middle. So that's what she was asking me about. But then we had two members on the whole town. I'm going to go sit in the middle. I said, why don't you get three? I'm going to leave you. Could you tour around? And see if we can find it. I don't think so. I don't think so. I'm going to go sit in the middle. I'm going to go sit in the middle. Okay. Are you? What else have you learned? Yes, he still has his dinner on Tuesday night. Okay, okay. Yeah. When we get these things at the council meeting, we don't have time for them to do this. I start wondering if it's by design. I really do. Thanks a lot. You're welcome. Oh, Sam. It doesn't count. Mr. Moe, don't worry. I want to warm my purple time. You don't have to. I just wanted to look good for you, Howard. Is this my co-founder? Probably, yeah. What does he have? He didn't answer. But he was nervous. He was nervous. He was nervous, really nervous. I thought you might want to know that. He was on the spot. The first question. The first question this guy comes up, his name is John Graham. He goes, I got a question from Casa Labrador. I live in mainstream. He never read my blog. And he never return my emails. And you told me when I had a problem, you told me to go take care of him. Is that a question? It's a second one. It's a second one. It's a second one. It's a second one. It's a second one. It's a second one. How do you find the truth? I don't know. It's a little bit warmer. I'm not very good. We got a little reason. He's like 5-5. That's right. He was in high school. He was earthy. He was in district 2. I need to tell that. The control has crashed. The control has crashed. Yeah, that's him. We saw that. I saw it. He was ported on the agenda. Yeah. I get that. Okay. Thank you. Thanks. Hello. Hi, guys. Hey. How have you been up since? I'm fine. This is where they were runned. I just can't believe how this is going to be. So thank you. We wish I could give you a minute or two minutes. I'm going to lie to you when I say that. I'm not going to lie to you. That's what we're saying. If you don't know us right now, you'll end up in your home. I mean, I just can't believe we're doing all this. I'm going to lie to you. Do you think we can talk about this? Yeah, I just can't believe we're doing all this. I'm just going to lie to you. I'm going to lie to you. I can't believe my words. I can't believe my words. I can't believe how long it is. I can't believe how long it is. I don't know what to say. I need you to answer me. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Is my brain... What did you hear today? You know what I'm saying? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. How are you? What do you say? How are you? Yes. What are you doing? What are you reading? Sc nieu. What are you reading? What are you reading? You can't do. I'm sorry. I guess I gave the wrong time. Excuse me. I know what I said. Good. Really? No, I told them that I was going to be out. Hi. Thank you. Well, I think... I would say... I like it. I like it. I like it. I like it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. He's here. Good morning. Good afternoon, Miss Wilson. Here. Yes. Here. I need to get used to the new name. Thank you. Count, if you would please open us up with a word of prayer. Let us pray. We pray for our lives, but in the city of ours, we simply ask that as we gather around this table and of course in this room, we pray for your continued blessings, not upon each individual, but also upon this city of ours as it continues to expand and grow. Bloom and blossom. Touch us all. Sensitize us all. Amen. Welcome everyone to the hall. So he will join us as soon as he finishes that. So we're going to go ahead with the agenda. I believe, Miss Wilson, we need a motion to amend the agenda. Yes, ma'am. Just to add a few items. Mr. DeVall. May I pretend I'd like to make a motion to that the matter is recovered by attorney client privilege pursuant to 30-4-78-2 municipal complex convention center discussion negotiations instance proposed purchase of property pursuant to 30-4-78-2 fire station two and seco discussion of negotiations instance proposed sale of property pursuant to 30-4-78-2 GenStar water tank site and to add the following to the meeting agenda under other matters item 68 commercial corridor development plan Mrs. Wilson city manager. Thank you. Is there a second? Second. Madam. Yes, sir. Is there a discussion? Let me just ask a question just for clarity's sake. The items that were amended of course is a continuation of our discussion. Some of those items anyway. Okay. Just wanted to make sure. Yes, sir. I was going to ask you all finished your motion. I was going to make the point that about the majority of those additions that y'all had such a full and productive day yesterday at Busbee street. We didn't get to several items. Okay, good. So we're going to pick those up today. Thank you. I was willing to stay later. I know. I like this story. In hindsight, I wouldn't agree with it. All right. It's been moved and seconded to amend the agenda. All right. Yes. Aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. We will begin our city council discussion items. Council Mayor Pro Tem and Council but going a little bit out of order to allow Mayor Benjamin to finish his call and so he is fine with us getting started and I did not tell David I did tell Ms. Matthews that she was not up first. I should have told the person who is up first now to be ready. Okay. He's always ready. So I wasn't worried about that. But our Housing Official for the Code Enforcement Division with the Columbia Police Department Mr. David Hatcher. Thank you, David. Thank you, Ms. Wilson. Eric. Brief on the vacant building registration ordinance briefing and we'll, I'll just kind of monitor where we are and which item we take up next. Thank you, Ms. Wilson. Eric, it was kind of to give me a heads up. Okay. I did know. Well, good afternoon members of council. Ms. Wilson, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the proposed vacant building ordinance with you today. Since our last meeting in June I've had the opportunity to meet with several stakeholders to discuss your ordinance in more details. Specifically, I met with the Building Industry Association, several of the major commercial real estate companies and several neighborhood leaders and citizens. The document I have passed out to all of you outlines the major concerns that were brought to my attention during these meetings and little notes about how I've addressed those issues in this revised version of the ordinance. Which I'll go into more detail here in a second. But first I just wanted to restate the objectives of this ordinance from the Code Enforcement Point of View. First objective is we want to identify all the vacant buildings in the city of Columbia. We want to establish a local point of contact to address issues with vacant properties. We want to create a mechanism for determining property owners accountable. And we want to discourage long-term vacancies. And overall we want to reduce blight and crime in the city. You'll see I've listed several of the stakeholder concerns that have come to my attention since June. I'll highlight a few of the major ones. First there was some concern about the amount of time it takes an owner to decide what they want to do with their property. So once it becomes vacant and they don't know exactly how they're going to reuse it, that takes time. So the request was to have more time before we required it to be registered. So I changed the time from 60 days. So I gave a grace period from 60 days to 120 days. Once it becomes vacant you have 120 days to register with the city of the vacant building ordinance. We had a lot of concerns with the vacant building plan. Some people thought it was going to be mostly just geared towards commercial buildings. Some thought it could be more cumbersome and require a lot of resources to put together. And it wasn't very business friendly. So my proposal was, and I mentioned in the ordinance, what we'll do is create a single one page form to keep it simple. It'll just be a simple questionnaire. It'll be part of the application process so it won't be anything trying to make it as less cumbersome as possible. But it's an important document I think so that we can know what's going to happen to the building. So our goal is to make that as minimal of an inconvenience as possible. Another thing is obviously people don't like the fees so there's a lot of drawback on the fees. The complaint is it's a double tax. Also that the fees should be different between commercial and residential. They shouldn't have the same fee across the board. So I haven't really changed the fees much but I did break it up between residential and commercial so there's different fee structures for each. And I've added several exemptions through all these meetings in certain circumstances that I didn't think of before that we may encounter going forward. So the ordinance includes the exemptions and I didn't take away the fees because I feel the fees are important as an important way to kind of discourage the long term vacancies so I left the fees in there. That's obviously up to council to decide on that. There were some concerns about financial hardships so we do provide an exemption in there for consideration. Also the subject came up that if a person owns a vacant building and they don't really want to do anything with it they just want to be vacant and it doesn't have any code violations and they don't want to rent it out or don't want to occupy it they don't feel they should have to be burdened by the ordinance so I did make an exemption for the fees as far as so if the building is being maintained in good condition and it's in category one by definition in the ordinance the fees but we still want them to register. That's both residential and commercial. Where is that David? I see the exemption for the states. Where's the? For the fees? It's on the exemption of the fees. It's the exemption of the fees. It's on the second section of the exemptions. I'm sorry I don't want to. So it doesn't I see on here you talk about the states and properties and probates but if I own a property it's in my name but I don't want to bother with that and it's vacant but I'm keeping up the code that's listed in here that it says. It is and that's another exemption as the state if it's a state or a probate as long as you as long as it's being maintained to minimal code. We still want you to register it but you're not you'll be exempt from the fees. What is the purpose of you registering that? So we know it's vacant. Probated you can happen any minute right? Again there is I mean the state is settled. It can happen any minute and what you have to notify them that it's no longer vacant. It can remain vacant. Yeah well if it I think Mr. Padura is asking if it after maybe for a while and then it's no longer vacant then we notify you if it doesn't in no longer has you registered. Yeah we would just take it off our list. It's similar to the rental ordinance. I mean if you have a rental property and you're renting a property out and you decide you no longer want to rent it and you sell it to somebody and something moves into it they notify us and we essentially close the case or close the permit. I'm only concerned because it's not really a permit. They don't have to pay a fee that they feel like that's what I'm wondering about. But it's almost like two categories in it. The first category of course is the house is perhaps demolished. The person's dead won't the property. Look at that scenario in addition to coupled with the fact of what you're saying move. Whether or not it enters probate what happens to it. So it's almost two different kinds of scenario with the same results. If it was demolished you wouldn't have to register for that. That's right. It's just vacant land. Yeah I mean it's just to help us know where these properties are. Again if it's being maintained it really is not a big issue from the code enforcement perspective but we'd like to know where they're at. Mostly because if we have this ordinance in place and we realize the house is vacant it would be nice to know and have it part of our database so that we don't continuously send them letters saying hey you need to register for the ordinance. We'll know what the situation is already. We'll have it documented. We don't have to go through all that. So it'd be better for the code enforcement. David can you register online? My long term goal would be to register online. I think we're kind of the software that we use to do code enforcement is intergov and I think there's some push to get that online. So once that goes online we should be able to have something I think with that as well. That's Mr. Bredor's point. Yes they still have to register but they've simplified the form and then if we're able to do it online it really shouldn't. It's kind of the process of doing business. It shouldn't be a lot. And our goal is not to make it, we're trying to make it as easy as possible. I wonder if you can tie it to the closing attorney just because. Why are you just charging other people? It doesn't necessarily know if it's going to be vacant. But if you close a probate or you settle the case notify them. Like somebody has to, I got you. We'll see. It's up to the owner whether or not to keep it vacant or not. That's not really... No. Also office industry on general commercial structures that are listed and managed, listed or managed by a commercial real estate company are generally maintained and have a known point of contact. There's also a database that we can have access to that we can actually pull all that information. With that we've exempted them from the registration. There's also probably one of the bigger concerns is there's fear that the city's trying to take away people's properties. That is not the intent. And there were some references to eminent domain in the ordinance. I removed all those references so that doesn't say that because that is not our intent. And there's concerns about the annual inspection. A lot of people don't want us to do the inspection. My theory is because they don't want us to see what violations are there. But I think that's an important aspect for us to be able to know what we're dealing with and know what conditions or properties are. Probably also good to share with the fire department so that they know if there's any unsafe situations they need to know about it if they have to respond to it. You would do that with residential and commercial? The inspection? Yes, sir. That's the proposal. We have the ability to do that. We're talking, I mean that could be a significant amount of properties. Yeah, I mean it could be a couple thousand. I hope it's not because I rather see them filled. But something we need to think about how you would achieve that based on what you already have on your agenda and how we would keep up with that. I think it's going to be important because the one thing you don't want to do is get into a situation where some people feel like well I'm getting inspected. They're not getting inspected. Because you know most of those after they've been closed for any period of time have to come up to code the current code and that can get quite expensive for a lot of folks. So I mean there'll be a challenge there if they're not already struggling on vacancies. So I think we need to think about how we're going to attack that. I had the same thought in terms of education and the general public. If there is a building that's vacant for a period of time and it meets the initial smell test so there's no violations, no fees either. You indicated that you would, there's a classification or there's a determination you make about that building, right? Yes sir. The question is how do we need to educate the public in the immediate area that the building is vacant but it's okay. It's vacant but it's in compliance with the order. So we intend to do anything different or special on that? That way it again alleviates I think some challenges we have would probably reduce the number of calls we get. Yes sir. And I think my, the way I interpret it, the way I think it's going to work out is when the person registers or fills the application out to get the register of the building, we'll do the inspection, we'll make the determination of what category and then we'll issue them the registration, whatever that, some form of piece of paper I would imagine it says, hey you're registered and maybe we'll go ahead and identify the category on that registration just so they know and we can provide the definitions with that too I think just to kind of document. So if anybody have a question they can, you know, they'll have papers. Here's my registration of the city. The owner. Yes sir. So with all that in mind I'll just go quickly over the revised ordinance that's in front of you. It's also included in the packet. So with the ordinance we're proposing that all vacant buildings be registered annually. It assigns a category, as I just mentioned a second ago, to each of the buildings based on the overall condition, category one, two or three, category one being the ones that are no violations, no issues. Provides for exemptions, multiple exemptions. It requires a local agent within 45 miles of the vacant building. That's similar, we took that right from the rental ordinance that we passed a couple years ago. It requires a vacant building plan. I've made that a little more simplified than the original version so hopefully it'll be less unburdersome for people. It requires annual inspections, establishes security measures and establishes fees for registration. It also establishes fines and civil penalties for non-compliance and we plan to handle the registration directly within the code enforcement division and keep track of the registration. Similar to how we do the rental permits, the same person will handle the registrations as well for the vacant buildings. I'll go over some of the exemptions for the registration. These are exemptions from the registration altogether. Residential structures that are already registered as rental units. We know that sometimes when they're in between tenants that may sit vacant for a while so if they're already registered with us through that, they're exempt from this ordinance. Structures that have multiple units where at least one of them is occupied is not defined as a vacant building so it would be exempt. Office industrial or general commercial use buildings that are actively for sale or at least with a licensed real estate company are managed by a licensed property management company. Accessory structures that are not designed for occupancy, so like garages and sheds and et cetera. Buildings owned by the government or success or an interest to the government. And then buildings that serve as a primary residence of which the owner is away for an extended period of time for work, vacation, military or medical reason. We want the building to be maintained to minimum code. Do you know that buildings are exempt? Yes, sir. Why is that? Well, I guess for a lot of things like any state owned buildings or not, we can't really regulate those anyways. We don't have the ability to make them keep up the code that we require our citizens to do. We have a lot of limitations with state and federal buildings. So what about the university? Are they considered a state agency? I believe so, yes sir. I guess another way of putting it. Do we have the authority to bring to their attention the condition of a building? We do and we often do. I guess when it, and a lot of times we get compliance, but when it comes down to it at the end of the day, we can't take it any further than that. An example would be the work. Do you have SOD, SCDOT too? I don't say DOT and the railroad company is one of the big ones we deal with like overgrown ride aways and stuff. We could tell them all day long and sometimes we make the, we build the relationships with DOT and the railroad companies so that we know who to contact and generally we can get something done, but at the end of the day if they say they don't want to do it, there's really nothing we can do. We need to pay to buy all these government agencies at the tune of $3.8 billion worth of property. I think they should have to require to keep up to the standards of what a home are. We're putting this on residents and businesses and all of the standards, they ought to have to follow the exact same standards. That's just, I mean... It would be helpful to be passed by them. Well, I mean, but I bet, well some of the legislators, I mean, they may not know it, but you know, we had the issue on Leesburg Road where we had three properties bought by DOT and they never got, nothing got done forever and ever because they weren't in a hurry to do that project, but they bought and condemned property and then left them their vacant and it became, you know, a homeless and drug haven. And there was nothing we could do about it, you know, at the point I think, and that's, this is where this comes into play, is if they're exempt, if all these entities are exempt and they're that big of a landholder in our community, there has to be something that we can do. I mean, they can't be allowed to be different than the residents. Yeah. The bottom line on all of that is that the folks in the immediate area pay intact. Well, we're feigning. That's what a big sign in front of the properties that call you a congressman, so and so. We couldn't do that. David, could, what would be the problem with including that category in section five versus section four so that at least you're sort of putting them on notice obviously we can't charge fees, but to, I guess, continue that conversation that you have with the relationship buildings that we have with some of our state agencies, kids and or other government officials, at least make it be required to register, but not the fees. I'm not opposed to that, but I guess what it just goes back to the once they decide not to, we really can't do anything at that point. We gotta get legislation. We can put it in there. If enforcement becomes an issue, then we'll deal with it, but maybe just put it in there. Put them on notice. Well, we could, you know, somebody suggested we do this with speeders and it makes sense to me and maybe we do it with other government properties. We take pictures and we run ads in the Columbia Star in the state paper and say, have you seen what your state government is not maintaining? Give them the old purple. That's the other way. It would certainly help us from code enforcement if they were universal. I agree. Four bill building. That's true. Sometimes I'm surprised. Yes, ma'am. So buildings that are exempt from the fees only, not the registration. Buildings that are actively being marketed for sale or rent up to one year longer by appeal. Still, we would like it to be maintained to minimum code for the duration on the market. Buildings are actively being renovated. Repairs we would like to see progression, obviously. Properties that are in probate are actively being transferred. Structures with a DP zoning classification. Structures listed on the national historic. Places and structures listed eligible for the national register of historic places. Structures damaged by fire or weather event. The financial hardship I mentioned earlier. Category one structures that have not had any citations within the last 12 months. Buildings that are structurally deficient that have been ordered by the city to be demolished and the owner has essentially signed an agreement with the city to do a consent demolition. So that's it on the exemptions. I'll just go back to the vacant building plan. Again, I've tried to make it as simple as possible since the last version. I anticipate just being a one-pager that goes with the application. There'll just be a series of questions that they can check off and answer. Maybe a place where they can put a description and sign off on it. That's what we're trying to keep that as simple as possible. And then the last section is just the, on the last page is the establishment of the fees. I did break it down by two different categories. Fees for non-residential structures and fees for residential structures. The non-residential, I'm sorry, the residential structures are considered are classified or defined as one and two family residences. So anything with a three family or more or commercial buildings are considered non-residential. So the initial registration for both is no charge. And then it's the first annual renewal is when we start charging the fee for the registration. And you can see the breakdown if you want me to go over all that. But it gradually increases over time. At each year you renew it to the third year where it's just for non-residential to be a thousand or proposing a thousand a year. Per year you have to renew it after it's been vacant for three years. And then on residential it's $500. We do have an inspection fee. And then we have enforcement penalties for failure to register and failure to maintain the vacant building plan. That's kind of it. Any questions? Yes, sir. Mine is financial a little bit. Number one, how many properties do you think they're going to be a registrar or going to fall into this ordinance between residential and commercial? My initial research, I think it was about 3,000 properties that are considered vacant. And the way I came about that, it wasn't a definitive way. I just, we were able to take the active water meters or the inactive water meters I should say. And we kind of put those out and we're assuming those are vacant. Number two, is there any way or have you thought about maybe assigning all the fees that you're collecting for that in an escrow account to help with the facade problem or anything else to generate the economic or economic development in some areas? That would be all your call. As far as I know the money, we just go into the general fund and however you all determined to distribute that. That's what it is with this program. This program, for the inspectors? If it's going to be a cost, does that mean we're looking at an increase in the budget on your side? Is that what you're saying then? It's going to have to for them to be able to do it. Already, right. And when we've got properties that are banned into vacant and we get complaints, we board, but what are David going to do? I'm assuming that all the money collected is going to go into their budget to help them cover all these costs, not only from this, but from the enforcement of it. But it's not a bad idea though because some folks may be, there may be a way to do something to put something away if there is access for people who need financial assistance. That's something we could consider. There are no charges if they have financial hardship. Well, that's what my question was. It says for the registration, but it doesn't talk about the inspection compliance. This is going to be costly. David, let me just say this before we go any further. I want to thank you. You taking your time in tweaking this document. We've had an opportunity to meet with you and several community groups have met with you. You took your time, and I'm appreciative of that. There were some areas we had, there were some pushback areas, of course. One particular other was the fee issue. And I think that's some conversation we need to have because one of the things that similarly to what Moe just suggested was having instead of placing that into the general fund making that a separate item so that houses that are that can be perhaps rehab using some of those funds for that. We understand that there are going to be some administrative costs, but some of that costs could very well be associated with houses that could very well be restored. Not restored completely, but at least having some income to assist in the program. The other piece of that is we threw with budgeting, but of course you are doing a lot of what, boarding up and demolishing houses and that sort of thing in a budget. Some of those money could very well be placed into administrative side with some latitude to place those other money into places that are rehabbing that we could rehab. So I think we're on the right track. I think we're on the right track. But again, there are a number of houses that we do need just for the appearance of this city needs to be going down. And of course that's another issue in itself and demolition costs money. This means that when we review next year's budget there may be some issues where we need to expand some of those funds for demolition. I know one house that we demolished in my district, I mean the cost was six to five hundred dollars. And of course that in itself hits that demolition piece pretty hard. So if we could very well look at some of that and further tweak that, it would certainly help. That definitely would. I agree. Under the exemptions, the one clarification I want to understand a little bit was the structures with DP zoning classification on the National Historic Registry. Why are those exempted? There was some discussion I met with the planning department and we talked about that. There's already a financial burden with historic buildings as it is because they're there's also lots of tax incentives and stuff that they get that none of these other property owners get including the Bailey bill and everything else. And so I mean I think we need because the DP zoning classification is a very large area in our community. So I think we need to look at that before we commit to that. That's a pretty big exemption. And I'm not opposed. I think it's like 265 properties just in this zone downtown one. So I do think that we ought to take a look at that before we finalize it just to understand that. Because I do think that there's some issues there that you would find that we're allowing one group of people to have who have opportunities to collect several other financial opportunities to help them get the building that the other property owners wouldn't have. Yes sir. Just going back to the concerns about property owners who may have a financial challenge. I'm hoping that maybe after six months or so, maybe seven months we could kind of take a quick look at where we stand, what are some of the issues with certain cases and see if it's financial and I'm assuming y'all might have a little bit if not a whole lot of information on the property owner. Age, when I get calls sometimes if I got one today, folks tend to volunteer that in terms of their capacity to participate financially. I'm hoping we can at some point pick a look at that and see what the information tells us, number one. And number two going back to I think we touched on this yesterday again depending on what's divided between demolition costs boarding, up a building and that sort of thing if there's some way we could maybe contribute a little to a pot that might be that some folks may be able to help if there's a challenge with some of the costs of compliance and that sort of thing. Something I think we all might want to think about. David, you've met with a lot of these groups. Do we need to circulate this or have a public hearing or anything? Are the groups pretty well satisfied that it's been aired? I mean I've tried to address all the concerns as best I could. I think there might still be some opposition to it but without just not doing the ordinance at all, I don't know how we could go forward without some opposition. I do want to congratulate David for his efforts. We got a lot of positive feedback from the business community and others who said that he really came with the right spirit for the conversation he didn't just give to everything that everyone was saying but he came solutions oriented and tried to find that common ground so that's the best we can ever ask for. We always know that people will not totally agree with everything that we need to try to get to the middle as best we can and I feel like we I don't know that we should We had one because that's where we got some of these. We did have an initial public hearing. I mean legally I don't know that we have to have another one but it could be up to the council. One thing I would just suggest and I know certainly we'll need some time to just be implemented under our belt to see how it's working but David and I were at a community meeting last night and vacant buildings came up and particularly most of the buildings that were raised as a concern for us are buildings that are in donut holes and so I did share with the neighborhood that we were passing well it was possible that this would be passed and that we would certainly share it with the county because we've done the homework and due diligence on something and that it would be up to them to adopt something similar but maybe once we pass it we could just send it over there as a courtesy and just say it's come up a couple times and this is what we were enacting and that they may want to look at doing something similar. And we did get when we did the the county actually didn't reach out to us and we gave them a copy of what we did as well so I don't think they ever took any action on it but they did get a copy of it. That is a problem for us at donut holes so it would be our benefit to try to get them on board with it. Thank you. Agenda in October. Thank you so much. We will now have our update from the Columbia Housing Authority. Ms. Higary Matthews our interim executive director. Welcome and I know Ms. Matthews has with her several board members and staff. Thank y'all for joining us and I guess I'll leave it to my high school class mate Mr. Primardi to make the introductions. Mayor Benjamin, members of City Council, good afternoon. We are pleased to have with us our new interim executive director, Ms. Higary Matthews. She's going to tell you about some of the exciting things happening at Columbia Housing Authority and some exciting things to come. We are very excited and lucky to have her here from Greenville. I would like to introduce fellow commissioner, Ms. Cara Simmons who's also present and had to leave our vice chair, Ms. Anne Sinclair. Ms. Matthews I will let you take over and answer any questions and give a presentation and introduce staff. Thank you. On behalf of the Columbia Housing Board of Commissioners we'd like to thank you again Mayor Benjamin and members of the Columbia City Council for inviting us here today to the work session to provide an update on Columbia Housing before I begin I would like to introduce two of my team members and that's Ms. Yvonda Bean who is our chief operating officer. Ms. Bean has been with the agency for probably a little less than eight days and I'd also come from Lafayette, Louisiana and I'd also like to introduce Cynthia Hardy who most of you know need no introduction but Cynthia Hardy is our director of communications and public relations. As you all know I joined the agency on July 1st, 2019 as interim executive director. Shortly thereafter on July 5th, 2019 Columbia Housing Board held a meeting for the sole purpose of introducing a 12 month action plan. The major themes throughout the plan included improving service delivery to residents creating a climate of transparency and accountability maximizing operational efficiencies and creating community confidence and increasing community confidence. Prior to joining the Columbia Housing I was able to gain some insight on agency operations through the review of several internal documents and reviewing those documents I thought it would be best to incorporate a comprehensive assessment of all departments using industry experts and third party firms to take an impartial look at operations within the first 120 days. Some of those assessments have been completed while other departments are still being assessed. What I thought I would do for today's work session is talk to you a little bit about Columbia Housing's progress. I'll start first with the Housing Choice Voucher Program. Most of you know it as Section 8. We have the opportunity right now to house an additional 400 families through the Housing Choice Voucher Program. This program allows families to rent on the open market to private landlords. We will be opening our waiting list in a few weeks to take the information. That information will be shared on our website and also marketed throughout the community with our community partners. Next I'll move to a brief update as it relates to our housing developments. I'll start first with Lord Place and just give a tiny bit of history and then kind of an update in terms of where we are today. Lord Place is the redevelopment of the former farms and West Avenue apartments. It's located at 3800 West Avenue. The property was condemned as you all know by the city in 2013. In May of 2014 the Housing Authority entered into a master development agreement with Liberty Solutions, a general contractor from Charlotte, North Carolina to redevelop the West Avenue site. The Housing Authority subsequently acquired the site from Allegro Properties in December 2015 and completed the demolition on the existing improvements in 2016. A partnership was formed by Liberty Solutions and a development plan was initiated. Financing was secured for this property in 2018 and construction commenced in January of 2019. The project consists of 87 total units, 48 two bedroom units, and 39 three bedroom units. It's built on 5.8 acres of land and there's a total of 8 buildings, 7 residential buildings and a small community building which includes a management office. This is 87 units, 87. The project was financed with tax-exempt bonds and 4% low-income housing tax credits. The bonds are short time and will be replaced with an FHA 221D4 mortgage for permanent financing. In addition, as you all are aware, the City of Columbia also contributed $1.3 million of disaster relief funds towards this project which we're very excited about and please know this will not be our last ask. The plan is currently 47% complete and is scheduled to be finalized in March of 2020. Property management will manage Superior. Property management company will manage the property until the Housing Authority has developed the capacity to manage low-income housing tax credit properties. Gonzalez Gardens in June of 2014, the authority entered into a master development agreement with Mungo Homes, a general contractor based here, as you know out of Columbia, and NYX Development, a Maryland-based development company. These two firms subsequently formed Urban Renaissance LLC and a development agreement was transferred to that new entity. The development agreement included the development of Gonzalez Gardens and Allen Benedict Court, former public housing communities. A demolition and acquisition approval was received by HUD in 2015. The approval transitioned the land over to our non-profit organization called Community Housing Authority Development Inc. and required replacement of 128 units below 80% of the area median income and 131 units between 80 and 120% of the area median income. These units have a 20-year restriction on those units of affordability. Since then, amendments to the development agreement called for the construction of 12 off-site single-family homes and in the surrounding neighborhood and eight single-family homes on the Gonzalez Garden site. The 12 off-site homes were completed with GAP Financing, again from the city of Columbia, which we're excited about that. We are also excited to note that the eight on-site homes were completed as of date and all have been sold. A development plan was completed for Gonzalez Garden site, but the analysis of the plan and this is kind of something I talked about when I first joined the agency and reviewing the current development plan. We did place a pause on the current development plan to make sure that we had all of our financial sources were viable. We have subsequently developed some alternative financial scenarios that reduce the financing gap. We initially had a $6 million gap to complete the construction on this project and we've narrowed it down to a million. We have a million-dollar gap right now. We're still working on to close that deal. We're also internally analyzing that as well and also we're analyzing the buildings as well. The initial plan had three-story walk-ups and three-story walk-ups in this community. I don't know if that would be feasible. Especially with families who are aging in place and things like that to have to walk-up three-stories. So we're working internally just to create a different design concept and then have further discussions with our board and the community to gather feedback through charrettes on what that will eventually look like. The excitement at Gonzalez of course emanates with those eight houses before they were even occupied. Of course there has been some pushback in terms of can we do more of them. And of course just based on what I know and what I've read the numbers have been crunched. It's a good start for something that's going to be very, very good side. That residents are already there. Already cooking grass, already maintaining property and from all appearances it looks good. So with those with you tweaking the design and that sort of thing instead of the walk-up stairs that helps you. Thank you. I think I also had a question about being home. Did I understand you correctly that there were originally 12 homes built and occupied and then you added eight more. So we've got 20 single family homes. Yes. The eight were the most recent ones. We actually had the eight were closed on in between the last of June early part of July. Really nice looking house. Yes, thank you. Yes, it's one million right now. And the reason I'm asking is we've had some discussions with that thing from later. Yeah, that number was certainly different than the conversation that you had and that conversation was had with the developers prematurely and it did not involve the housing authority which was sort of kind of inappropriate to have that conversation without the housing authority as we are a strong partner in the deal. And so we kind of went back to the table and just analyzed where we currently were and we also are able to maximize some of the instruments that we have access to to close that gap. Like we have access to new HUD programs called Rental Assistance Demonstration Program and we have access to increase the revenue through our project based voucher assistance. And so those are just some of the things that we did to close the gap. Yeah, but we're certainly back on a million is the number right now and we're certainly back on track with those discussions. Is there the ability not to go into traditional finance to fix that gap based on the size of the project and all the program income that's coming in? We have so traditional financing. What we try to do is look at some of the non-traditional financing because when we create these programs there is a they don't produce a lot of cash because the units are, you know, the rents are affordable and so working with those non-traditional financing options helps sometimes to make sure we aren't working so close against the margin and some of the traditional mortgage financing programs require a quicker payback than some of the non-traditional. So traditional sources typically we can get mortgages at about 20 years or you know but some of the non-traditional sources we can get mortgages at 40 years and sometimes longer than that. But really in the reason I'm saying that just seems to me is that this is a short term gap and if you could use that then once you've got the project out of the ground you've got the program in you could refinance it. It seems to me that this project seems to have had this gap discussion for a long time now and it just seems like we've got to figure out a way to close it. It's narrowed significantly though. What the gap pay for? The gap is what we're looking for, the pay for hard cost just hard cost yes. I would think if you did a more traditional financing on a short term the cost of that money is going to be a lot more than what she could get with non-traditional. Yeah but if you turn around and you're balancing it over the 20 year period the problem is is the project stays stalled on a gap it's costing you more money anyway. So I don't know if I I'm just trying to think outside the box here because it just seems to me and it's got so much potential to affect the surrounding area and with a positive effect it just seems to me. Because of your work we're a lot closer than we have been. Yeah absolutely. Can we update sources and uses and kind of see how it all fits in and as soon as we can get that we can make some moves. Absolutely because our development team internally were really working to get an updated sources and uses to have a better meeting with you guys to talk about where we really are. It's exciting. Is the infrastructure already in the ground? Water, sewer, cable, utilities, that kind of thing? It's probably to the site. Yeah probably to the site but not on the site. That's what we can help in. I think we already have that. That's what we can help in. Yeah okay sure thing. We'll work towards it. I'll put on my Wonder Woman cape and we'll work towards it. Actually we've already had a groundbreaking. You up for reelection this year? I think it's important to note that we here at Gonzales Fighting is at Stanstel and nothing has been going on so we were trying to encourage you and support you anything we can so we can get this project back on the ground again because everybody is asking us what's going on with Gonzales. We actually placed it on pause with me joining the organization just in July. We placed it on pause for about two weeks so that we could take a look again at the performer and the sources and we knew that there are some things that we could do to close the gap and so that's where we are. But we're on track now so we will certainly be meeting with City Manager and her team to move this project along. We would love to see some frames going up before November 5th. Absolutely. Alright team y'all. No pressure. That's called pandering. Yes. What would be really helpful just for uptake reasons for the bulldozers? Just to say that we are in the process. I'll go on. Okay. Thank you Mayor. So moving along the Allen Benedict Court property we anticipate that all units will be released as of August, excuse me, October 15th. In anticipation of the release we have issued a solicitation for environmental consultants that will enable us to commence all environmental testing including lead and asbestos. This testing results will be included in the development of a remediation plan which will be included in the specifications for demolition. So in short we needed to do these steps so that we can put together the solicitation to procure a demolishing contractor. The redevelopment of the ABC site was included in a development agreement with Urban Renaissance the same group, yeah, Mungo and Nick's development. That's news to me. Okay. So it was included in the solicitation that was done by the Housing Authority back in 2013. However much has changed since 2013 so in regards to the redevelopment of that site in the surrounding area therefore we intend to solicit a new master development partner with more extensive mixed income development experience and we anticipate to also release that solicitation to by the end of the year. So you know, obviously that's a very it had a lot of problems for everybody and the things that happened there. But one of the things that came out of that is walking around and I'm excited that you're doing a solicitation. I would encourage y'all to make that solicitation with the option for somebody to rehab that. We had an opportunity to take some folks over there who specialize in housing credits and stuff and their initial kind of plan and take of what they thought could happen over there was pretty amazing and you know, sometimes it's great to take something that has left a bad taste in people's and really turn it into something that everybody can grab ahold of and be really proud. And I would encourage y'all because there's an opportunity to make that historic, which that means there could be some credits in there so you could really do something unique that would really have significant meaning to people. There's a lot of history in there obviously but the opportunity to modernize that property with everything from courtyards to solar to really capturing the heart of it and turning it into something that everybody would be really proud of is worth looking at. And so I would hope that y'all would look at. I think going ahead and doing your understanding of the testing, we know there's probably some asbestos that needs to be done lead mitigation but their concrete, the concrete buildings themselves have such good bones because you can, the crawl spaces underneath them, the ability to bring in gas appliances or electric appliances, solar, thermal heating water, courtyards, some of the reiterations of the people that have gone to take a look at it is pretty amazing and these are private developers who see the value in the heart and the bones of that and that would be really see the kind of the phoenix come out of the ashes there. So I hope y'all will at least take a look at that. I think what councilman recommends is think outside the box. Sometimes it's not necessarily to follow the script on doing some stuff like that. I mean I'm all for renovating or rehabbing the whole complex. I think there's a lot of history but there's a lot of new things nowadays in technology and everything else that you can probably think outside the box and re renovate that and re bring it back to life sooner or faster than you would in traditional Some of the people who've looked at it who are interested have taken buildings that nobody else could do that to and created incredible living spaces and preserved them and so I think it's worth taking a look at. I appreciate you already thinking outside the box and reissuing an RFP on the side already and also closing the gap on Vidal's gardens. I've heard some of the same feedback that Mr. Rickman mentioned. I'm not sure if I'm as in love with the rehab of the existing. I've not been up under the buildings like some of the folks may have been. I'm just not as in love with the concept. Y'all do diligence. I'd encourage if you see something there you've been a lot of different places and seen some creative deployments and if there's some around adaptive reuse that might help you get quality development with a little price tag and leverage and credits and everything else. I think it's worth a look but I've always had a view of something different on the site but You need to see the picture. You see the preliminary drawing you'll step back and catch your breath. Stumble over I was told not to do anything until she had the ability to get settled and get things going. She seems pretty dark on settled to me right now. Let's make sure we facilitate that conversation. I would like to say this too. That property was under restrictive covenants with the federal government and so we'd received approval from HUD for the demolition of that property so to revert that back to something different than demolition I think will be like an act of Congress to get that scenario passed but I do think we could certainly look at some ways where we can still capture the history and I've done this a number of times in different places and we always make sure that there are design surets with the community, the surrounding community and gathering feedback from the public on what that design will look like when it's all said and done so the housing authority won't be designing this in behind closed doors but certainly out in the public to get the public's feedback particularly the community, the surrounding neighbors in that community. I just want to agree there are developers coming out of the street work to do something created where there's the encapsulation of taking what you got I just think it gives us another opportunity to articulate and sort of dream beyond the box I hear what HUD is saying but if there is something plausible though, something that we are able to at least look at and talk about it does give us an opportunity to do it but I appreciate what you brought to the table today and I hear what HUD is saying HUD is saying demolish demolition. What we are saying I think collaboratively is that is there a creative hold or a creative possibility that something that could be historically used for history purposes and that sort of thing. It opens up a window of that. Just an opportunity to talk. First of all how are you enjoying your first council meeting? I am enjoying it thank you. Ms. Matthews has given us a lot of information and I think she is thinking out of the box certainly what I hear her saying is there will be a request for proposals and someone has a great idea that is looking at deeper and she can sell it to HUD and she's willing to do that but right now all she is saying is she's moving forward. Let's let her move forward and give her that leeway and I appreciate that but just make me understand the demolition permit that you got from HUD if you want to change your mind why is that a problem with HUD? I will help her out. That is no exaggeration what you are saying. It literally takes an act of Congress to get approval to do the demolition so HUD is certainly full of regulatory requirements. You are responsible for the HUD regulatory requirements so just make sure whatever procurement guidelines we are not running to follow them and Daniel and whoever you guys have who wants to share some information with the housing authority and their board for consideration. Let's do it post haste. Both feel the ground. Well I am at the end of my presentation so in closing City Council again for allowing me to present during your work session. The city support is immensely invaluable to Columbia Housing's ability to continue to preserve and create more affordable housing for all of the citizens of our community and we look forward to our continued partnership with the city of Columbia. So thank you guys. Back to the first point of the vouchers. So the 400 vouchers that will be released. I know we certainly all saw it with vouchers once the residents from Alameda had to be relocated but I think traditionally it's great to hear those vouchers because that waiting list is crazy but I think there also has been a challenge at finding home landlords that will accept vouchers. So can you guys talk about have you all thought through that and is there a plan to make sure that everybody wants to partner with the housing authority to provide quality affordable housing in this community that we have landlords who are willing to step up and partner with you guys as well and provide the units. Absolutely so we're going to be really beefing up our communications with our landlords and also the relationship with our landlords. Our landlords are so important to the success of this program and so we're looking at landlords that we have not done business within a while to see if they're interested in reconsidering doing business with us in the future and then there are some additional incentives that we can do internally to do a better job at being a partner with our landlords that we're going to implement as well. So this landlord workshops are going to continue just from here on out so it's not going to be a one time ordeal continuation of meeting with landlords and these landlords could be Mama Pop so if y'all know of any please let me know Mama Pop landlords they can be landlords that own just a few duplexes multifamily units also if you know of any commercial realtors or property management firms that have units available please have them contact us as well. We should have right now we've got our website is under construction we have a dash page up right now and we should have that website up within about two to three weeks so that will be a gateway to so our landlords can register on there to get involved in our workshops to continue to redevelop that relationship. So just to carry on a lot of the people I don't say my friend but landlords you would ask I guess HUD requirement for voucher housing might have a different requirements than regular landlord or is it the same do they I mean is there a different specifications or something that a landlord has to meet for him to be on the voucher program? Yeah so the basic criteria for the landlord to participate on the voucher program is that they can't be delinquent with paying taxes to the local municipalities and they also must meet housing quality standards inspections and so it's not like code inspections but it's a housing quality standard inspection that governs safe and sanitary kind of codes and so we go through we have an inspector that will go out and inspect the unit before we enter into a contract with the landlord but those are the two biggest So that's the set I guess or the list that I'm looking for or maybe you can either put on your website or email it to us that we can share to people because the method that is oh they have different specifications or requirement than anything else and we don't want to go through all the hassle headache of qualifying and all so if you would send that list to us or me personally I can share it with the people I know. Okay we sure will we'll get that to you. The problem sometimes is Mo is that because of the inspections the housing authority will require that houses are up to a certain standard there are some landlords who do not want to repeat the process and so they choose not to participate in the program but I guess to that point is making sure that the partnership you're working with landlords because I know I've heard some concerns before is that some of the standards are more than even housing authority own properties and I know that that's certainly something that you're concerned about and we'll make sure that's addressed but I think that's been a concern in the past so I think that redeveloping that relationship with landlords and understanding that the standards are the standards based on safe and security of the residents it's not meant to be punitive and we hear it a lot sometimes with the landlord registration of others people feel like well I'm not making a whole lot of money and I've got to reinvest in the property why do I have to have these other things just that communication and that would be my concern is 400 units is great and we've done that in the marketplace but to get those 400 units so that people get a voucher and they're able to actually use the voucher is going to be the thing that we would like to see. Okay. Two, do you have something? No, I'm okay. Two thoughts that that's okay. We can wrap up this Matthews presentation. One, obviously whatever you're doing on Alameda court let's keep it moving fast. People need housing and we want to make sure whatever we go if it's adaptive for you it's a new development. We want to see a quality product on the ground sooner rather than later. Secondly, I know that Mr. McDowell has been spending a lot of time with both Ms. Matthews and Chairman of the Board just talking about food security in and around the former Save a Lot location. They're incredibly helpful and supportive as we look at creative ideas to try and address that need while of course recognizing the housing 30 central focus of providing housing to folks and making sure that they can casually meet their primary operations. They've been very helpful as we look at creative solutions to it. So I just wanted to say thank you for that. We want to continue to facilitate a productive dialogue in that space. Thank you. I hope this is the start of a new creative. We know what our role is. You all know what your role is. But somewhere in the middle there needs to be Ernest and I have done some talking about hardware and I think you may have shared it. There needs to be a positive hardware and aspect as it relates to both city and CHF. Not only for the financial infrastructure needs but there needs to be a progress but we can part that. Believe it or not, my emphasis of course is on those persons, those residents those clients, those brothers and sisters who are impacted by not having any way to deal with it. Having some way to deal with it not having any way to deal with it. The thing that probably drives me more is Mr. Roper, they are constant reminders. I appreciate you coming. I know you didn't have to do it but you did. We are glad that you had to be here. Oh I know that. We are glad you came. Mr. Davis. Let me say this I'm listening to you. You obviously do have the background track record and expertise. What I'm liking about this, we've all had a pleasant role to play up to this point in our own way and that sort of thing but I think what we've sort of laid out today and this is public that this neighborhood, this location is moving forward and anybody who is familiar with it, I could remember when I first came here some of my best friends academically and socially lived there and people who have come from that area have made their own mark in the city statewide and nationally. The good thing is that everybody is on the same page and the need is there. That's undeniable and there's a commitment to get it done. Thank you. Better leave while you can. Thank you again. Thank you. Thank you. Mr. Mayor, I'm going to take a moment of personal privilege if you don't mind. We do have, we're holding item two due to Mr. Blackstone's under the weather. We will reschedule the update from the Columbia Chamber. But I wanted to introduce some of you. I hope that maybe better in passing our new HR director, Ms. Denise Javis. Denise has been with us. Is it two weeks yet, Denise? Officially, but she came in the midst of the move so she was working with the team as they relocated to Main Street and we're excited to have her. Denise brings a wealth of HR experience with also education background, 28 year education professional in 10 of those years specific to human resources. She's a native of Orangeburg, South Carolina, graduate of South Carolina State and University of South Carolina for her master's. That's right. And another terminal degree from Nova Southeastern University but Denise has just fit right in and we're so excited to have her. She and Pam are quite the team. I'm glad you said not me. I appreciate being welcome here today. You mentioned my experience in education. I'm very goal driven and we love to have data to drive that. I had my first athlete a couple of days ago and we talked about a customer service satisfaction survey and how that might point to specific areas of responsibility but whatever it is we're going to tackle it together and we're going to do it together so everybody's on board and we're excited. Thanks Denise. This is next open enrollment. I'm just kidding. It's coming up. If y'all have any questions they have certain things they need from HR quite often so I'm good to know Denise. Good to see you Denise. Welcome. Alright so we are tracking pretty well today. We have two quick items and then some more lengthy items in executive session from yesterday that carried over to today and I'll meet y'all to stay put down here for the first part of executive session just so we can utilize the screen and then we'll move upstairs. The next item is the AMI water billing. Is this the City Manager for Columbia Water? Is this the direct response to the questions received last time? No sir, I think Mr. Badura specifically had some questions from some of his constituents and we just thought we would address them with all of you. But some of it is legit and he'll go over it with y'all. It's kind of important. We do have an issue that some of your constituents have brought to our attention and we just wanted to make you aware of that and talk about water billing and this is something that comes up on social media quite often and we generate about 145,000 water bills every month and you can imagine that not every one of those 145,000 recipients is happy to receive that bill. So things do happen, leaks and what not. So we wanted to address some of those concerns. I do want to let you know that we have reviewed our data over the previous years versus this most recent period. We have not seen any sort of a surge in complaints or concerns about water bills. This is kind of natural run of business volume that we're seeing. I think maybe they're a little more prevalent on social media and the next door app that you're seeing were, but we did identify one particular issue that we definitely wanted to make you aware of that. Before we touch on that I wanted to talk about a few of the efforts that we have made over the last two, two and a half years to make sure our water bills that we're sending out even in advance of the AMI investment that we're making are accurate and so just wanted to refresh our memory about that. You remember something that Joey had started implementing was changing up our meter reading routes because we've got folks, staff going out and physically reading 145,000 meters. It's about 142,000 right now because we've put in a few AMI meters. So instead of the same person reading the same route every month, month after month, month after month, six months to a year, every two to three months we swap routes. So there's a little bit of accountability there. We also audit, routinely audit if there are any issues. We would go back and pay somebody to go back and reread the route to make sure that we've gotten the numbers right. So we're doing that. We've got a consolidated skip report that we implemented about two years ago. We've seen our number of estimated and skipped a meter readings steadily decline. So we're up toward best practice, best in class with about 1% estimated readings. That's still quite a few estimates out of 145,000 readings every month. But we're doing what we consider best in class for folks that read meters manually. And again, we want to improve on that and AMI will help us. But that has given us increased accountability. If you remember, you allowed us to invest in vehicles for our meter readers. I received a call from one of you about a vehicle that was parked at the Best Buy at Harbison, a meter reading vehicle, and inquired about that. It was a really good inquiry. We were able to see exactly when that vehicle was parked there, exactly where it was parked, when it was moved to the next spot. And we could go back and see every meter that was read in that Walmart and Best Buy. So that meter reader, we caught him doing exactly what he was supposed to be doing. He parked his vehicle and was walking to the meters and reading those meters. But there's that accountability there, which is a nice tool to be able to check behind employees when you do have those types of concerns. We've implemented the customer advocate team. That has been effective in terms of these very problematic high bills trying to help the customers diagnose what's happening there. Might there be a leak that's hard to identify. So those things are being effective. Do you have any stats on the customer advocate team? Like how many concerns are they getting and then the time it takes to resolve it? Could you get that? I can get that. Yes ma'am, we will get that. We track those. I'm sorry, I don't have those with me today. We've got an escalated complaint review process. So that if you get a complaint, if I get one of Ms. Wilson gets one, we take that directly to staff. A lot of times those are phoned through Shanique as well and we try to coordinate a response on that. We have a high billing, a high bill screening process so that if we do have an error in meter reading, we're catching that bill before it goes out. Now that is a very manual process. So that is a difficult process and it really it's impacted by how quickly we get the meter reading data loaded so we don't catch every one but we're catching more than we used to. But Clint isn't, I mean when you're doing the bills and it shows your volume usage or whatever, can't we set the software up to that it automatically connects when somebody's got an above average bill or whatever? Or we can, where we set that threshold and how many rereads that means because the average above average it's hard to define average. What is average in the summer? What is average in the wintertime with irrigation? Sometimes folks they may use twice as much water in one month as they did the next. What is that trigger? Then how many screenings does that generate? And right now since it's a very manual process that threshold too low is simply too much of a volume and we can't get to them all. So we've got that trigger set fairly high right now and again we don't catch every one but we're catching more than we used to and with the AMI implementation that's really going to take care of a lot of those. That's why you need that app that I was telling you about because you can connect that threshold high level that if somebody wins over his average or whatever threshold that you're doing because you can text them right away and connect with them right away. The software will if even if it's a pattern not only total usage over the month a pattern that is indicative of a leak say that they use water every hour for a 24 hour period most residential customers don't use water in that pattern. They can get a text alert and notify them hey you may have a leak. I'm saying you do but you may have that information is available will be available to our AMI customers when we launch the application which is coming very soon. So just wanted to bring you up to speed on a few of those things and let's talk about the bills that we're sending for those three to four thousand customers that and we're replacing meters today that are receiving AMI meters so our existing analog water meters measure water I know you said it's like folks who are effective will get something but can we get kind of a list of the rollout like what people are starting to ask me and I don't know. Yes ma'am it was in the book. It's in the last meeting briefing packet but I have the book of my car so if it's in the book I'll get it on break. I want to make sure we know specifically what you're asking for the actual neighborhoods as that was in schedule. Yes ma'am it was and we also update that each month and we send out that monthly council updates in the back of that or detail maps where they'll be and week by week breakdown of where our staff plans to be. The maps are probably not the best for me and I just get like a list of the neighborhoods. Yes ma'am we'll absolutely do that. Let's make a note of that. Okay so we're reading our analog meters and traditionally have read them in cubic feet and we billed them in hundreds of cubic feet so CCF and that's how we've generated our bills that's how our rate schedule is set up. You've heard folks mention we give the first 300 CCF with the base charge there. Our new AMI meters we make the decision in order to try to be more transparent. We're going to bill instead of these mystical units of 100 cubic feet we're going to bill in gal or rate read meters in gallons and bill based on ultimately based on thousand gallon units. So that's a little easier for folks to understand. This transition from the old technology to the new we've got a few thousand receiving and a bill that was generated from a new style meter, a rest generated from an old style meter. So there's a little bit of a crossover there and that's the position that we're in right now. You'd be billed for two. Yes sir. But it catches up the next time. Yes sir. I'm going to show you. Yes sir. We're going to show you exactly what the bills are right now and what we're looking to go to to try to be transparent. So this is an example of a current bill that is going out right now. We sent about two cycles of these bills out. It can't be mine. That's too cheap. So you can see them. It's not all about you Daniel. One issue though that was pointed out to us and you will notice the readings of four and eleven. Those are the actual meter readings that came off of the AMI meter. So that's indicative of four thousand gallons of usage as we as the period started. Eleven thousand gallons of usage as the period ended. The final reading that's a unit of seven. It's designed to confuse you so you don't know what you're paying for. I mean that's all behind this thing. You're right. I understand that. That is seven thousand gallons of usage. That is a residential bill. Seven thousand gallons. Our typical customer uses six thousand, eight thousand in that range. Six units. What you'll see down here though is a decimal and the formatting for the printing is not correct. But this appears that they used more sewer than they did water. We don't meter the sewer we meter the water. Unless they drank a whole lot of bottle of water they didn't produce more sewer than they did water. What's happening is we are printing what's entered in as the reading from AMI in thousand gallons and for sewer it's converted to units of 100 cubic feet. That is confusing for the customer. So we've got to address that and we recognize that. Very important point. The bill is accurate. So we haven't overcharged anybody but it is confusing if they see that. Due to some customer feedback we've recognized we've got a problem here. So we've got a couple of potential solutions to that and a phased in approach that we wanted to share with you. We just wanted you to be aware we're going to put information on our website explaining this but also share with you what we're going to be doing here. But again the bills are accurate. That is what's most important. You need to do the infomercial. And we can do that. So this is what we're looking at. We're calling it option A but this is really phase one of what we want to do for those AMI customers. So we want to report the reading. We want the customer to be able to go out and look in their meter box and see a number that is reflective of what they're reading on the meter. So it's not confusing for them. Or once we launch the app be able to see on the app what their meter is reading and that be reflective of what's on the bill. Completely transparent, accurate, and understandable for the customer. I thought we was talking about bill. Y'all didn't pay the power bill. So these readings will continue to be for AMI customers. They'll be in those same units. Now the reading unit we're then going to show in thousands of gallons and then we'll convert that to a billed unit. So it's just a mathematical conversion to CCF at that point. And we've got the conversion factor down here. They'll also see their previous year's usage in CCF. So your charges are accurate. So you're converting everything to CCF? Why didn't you just convert it back the other way where people are used to reading it that way? So we're going to get there for phase two. That's what phase two is going to look like. We hope to implement this change which would be no cost to us. It's just a printing. The information's there within the next two weeks. That's what we want to do. Have the explanation on our website this week. Implement this printing change within the next two weeks as soon as we possibly can. But that's not the long-term solution because we want to have a bill this design to look like they're going to look for the next 20 years because ultimately everybody is going to have an AMI meter and they're going to be billed in thousands of gallon units. So one question before you go on. So are we changing this bill look to all the bills whether you've got an old meter or a new meter? Even though the old meter is not going to say thousands of gallons. You're not going to read it in gallons, right? This will be AMI. We can reflect this bill on every customer. It can look this way because this is their previous reading. If it's an AMI meter it'll be in thousands of gallons. It'll be CCF. It's what shows up on the meter. And then this unit of reading for AMI customers it'll print KGAL. For analog meter it'll print CCF. That's what I was saying. The bill will look the same. The units will change based on the type of meter they have. And the system will pick that up and recognize that automatically so it's not a manual adjustment. Until you've got AMI actually Councilman great question until then but we want to implement the new style bill sooner and I'm going to show you what that looks like as well. This is just an interim solution because we've recognized there is some confusion and we want to minimize that. It's a pretty easy change. The more involved change is going to bill customers that have AMI meters in units of thousand gallons. Our ordinance is set up where we bill based on units of CCF. And we've already asked our legal team for advice if we had one little change one little sentence to the ordinance can we bill analog customers as CCF and bill AMI customers in KGAL. The rate table really a drop of water cost it doesn't matter whether you measured in KGAL or CCF it's just math conversion at that point so we want the flexibility to be able to bill either in thousand gallons or CCF depending upon the type of meter that you have. At our last Councilman Yes sir. Now will that give them that opportunity to opt out of that and stay with the council? So what we have done Councilman DeVall yes they had some concerns about the technology and we have continued to be in dialogue with them we have shared a legal opinion about we are not going on their property to replace a meter so there's some of that going back and forth what we have done is place those on a deferred list so we have not changed out their meter while we continue to try to answer their questions and educate them about the benefits of AMI. As we continue the evolution and the installations if we see we are getting more and more of those we are going to generate a cost of service basis to say it's a possibility I mean we may just move forward and we will talk about all these options with you but one option is to generate a cost of service and say look if you want to leave that old meter there we will come read that old meter it's going to cost you X dollars extra per month for us to have that staff person reading driving a vehicle out there and reading that if we allowed many many people to opt out and didn't pay they didn't have to pay that extra charge we would never get the rate of return on this major investment that we are making so yes ma'am. Alright it's a little bit of an aggression but not really we are getting I'm getting not as many on the meters but I'm getting some of those on the meters they were all getting a lot on the 5G as well I know it's Risa Kay and I have been talking but is it possible to maybe have at a work session and that's fine we can refer to environment infrastructure but maybe some kind of briefing on the newer technologies and the research and kind of where we are because I think that especially the ones we are getting on 5G that's a form letter that form email is being generated but it's starting to generate well no I'm getting some from people in Columbia but they're probably a part of this but I'm just saying before it gets too big if we can head off that people understand that we're hearing it we've got you know we're hearing some we've looked at the research we've looked at the technologies with Teresa's giving me a good briefing on where we are as far as legally with the 5G but I just think that we're starting to get more and more and as people start hearing other people's complaints this is going to generate more and maybe to get ahead of it maybe we can have some kind of work session briefing on just what cities are doing what these technologies are and how we've done our due diligence as best we can to make sure there are no health concerns that we're aware of. You have a concern? You know I think that was we yes we can do that I think I guess I'm thinking through who would present on the science of it ultimately and you know a lot you know school districts are dealing with those complaints because they're willing to put up the towers as they're getting I think we do too I don't know that we get the return that maybe the school districts are some of it is just is and sometimes I think when we feed into the discussion you're going to also create that environment for more if y'all want us to do we absolutely can do it I guess we'd have to think through who would which areas of service in a city are being impacted by it right now simultaneously you know we're trying to move towards a more smart city type and I guess that was my point is that there are things that we have to move towards I think we've clearly chosen a path and we need to execute that path and if there's some folks small groups or maybe not so small groups that have some type of conscientious objection and we want to find some way to allow them to go their own path if there's a cost of fee for service associated with that then we can work within our full deployment to meet those needs and it seems like that's the reasonable way to do it but I don't want us to spin our wheels particularly I mean we've really chosen a path we've really chosen a path and invested some significant repair funds in doing so and it's the right thing to do it's the right way to go but I understand the concerns of some of the families and I mean I've gotten the emails as well the computer generated ones but none the less legitimate concerns if we're going to give staff some direction let's give staff direction to come up with a construct that allows them to deal with the concerns of those folks in a way that falls within our system. Y'all found that? I use the school example is because those are everybody's babies okay and so when families have questioned it there the approach that I've seen consistently is they address it yes we're doing that there's no science that says we shouldn't be doing it we've looked at it I think we've said those things I mean sort of saying that in a public forum again but and we can continue to do that and maybe have a pat statement that we continue to push and utilize I would I guess I hesitate about like a workshop work session discussion because I just don't you know there's always going to be two sides of the issue and you can look for the research and who would you know who's to say that we on staff have someone get up and speak and maybe it's that state why don't you just put it to the floor right in the water we went through all that and it's like this is what we do so I think maybe I don't know if I feel like we've done that basically the statement we don't have any research that tells us differently we've done we've done our due diligence and this is the path we're taking maybe that and I think the municipal association or was it municipal association treats them and sent the pat they've done it some of it too because the 5G stuff y'all are looking at everybody every municipality's getting it to the point they put something out I don't know if we've shared that or not but we will do that yeah but Dr. Oz did a special on that there wasn't any evidence either way and I think this is a much different example but the algae moves right now Clinton those are doing a phenomenal job of addressing it and people seem to get it and because fear see you know hopefully we just we just keep saying what it is and what the bats are and we're addressing it the algae and the water that's causing the taste issues in the lake Marisa which are much much better by the way the measures that we've taken have been effective so far so I haven't heard much of that a lot of the water bills this deal though and that's more on the northwest side and that's not where you live I think bottom line our bills are accurate we do have a plan that our AMI customers hopefully about the beginning of next year we're going to have to potentially change the ordinance so you'll see that moving forward but AMI customer would get a bill based on thousand gallons and a lot of customers still get a bill based on CCF until their meter is changed out so that's the long term solution ultimately everybody gets that thank you for clearing it sir I appreciate the questions because I thought that was a pretty interesting discovery that we discovered and I'm glad we cleared the air and everybody's happy we want every customer to be able to quickly and easily have confidence in that bill and understand everything that's on that bill it's really important so we're going to do everything we can to make sure that happens I did have one other mention about Google reviews and an unhappy customer that had been on our drawing our attention to a website I spent better part of an evening reading 153 reviews that we have on Google and many were not good our star rating is not great I queried several other leading utilities in our region misery loves company I'll just say that we're right in line with those there were a few positive comments the majority of comments that I read the common issues were call hold time which we're working very hard to address the payment system the missing digit issue let's make it easy for people to give us money where that has been addressed the folks some folks are unhappy with the bill there's out of city incident a lot of those and some just said we're plain old crooks so that you know that not happy with the leak adjustment so many of the things though that we saw are issues that we're already trying to address so I know we're not ignoring that as well any questions speaking of customer service and people call in the numbers and all that I get a lot of nobody answers nobody cares nobody where are we are we collecting that data are we working on it what's so we are collecting that data we reviewed that data this morning in our staff meeting what we saw was not good we had a little bit of a round table discussion at the staff meeting about what are we going to do about this we took some actions to reduce that whole time today but it's still not good we are going to be applying a lot of resources and mental energy and trying to reduce that we're also bringing in a new customer care administrator as well that I think will help bring some new ideas to the table but Miss Wilson is invested in us as managers going to training up in Virginia about and most of us have been through that and how to become a high performance organization we're going to apply that methodology to call whole times in particular I think the problem with most of the conversations I get from the call whole time is the fact that nobody can help them they can't give them direction they can't tell them anything they can't make a decision they can't do this and let alone the people who go downtown and it's constant you know I mean it's just these people are calling three or four times trying to get to the right person so I think it just goes back to what we've talked about before is somehow we got to give people autonomy to be able to answer and make a decision and that's what the customer wants they don't want to talk to five people to get that decision empowering the folks and that front second line of response is what this high performance organization methodology is all about and so we're going to allow them to help us improve the process they need to be participating in improving the process but that's our next approach. But it's cultural unfortunately it's cultural that we have here and somehow we got to change that it's like once we do a repair work some people's repair gets done right away and other people months and months they're out there their yards disturbed the roads you know this and that and it's communication and it's how we you know it's easier for people to kind of like you go to a restaurant if somebody to come see you right away you've been there for an hour you really hadn't but you have in your mind but if somebody came and I'll be right with you they bring you a glass of water I'll be right back you're calm you're relaxed same thing with the customers it's that touch it they kind of know and somehow we got to let people be ownership of their projects doesn't matter if it's somebody in public works or if it's somebody behind a desk or on the phone we got to give them the autonomy to take ownership. Exactly it's been a process they've all been through it and they had to but now it's that mid-level manager that cultural change and doesn't happen overnight but it's really I teased them because I went through it first and I came back on you know I was excited about it several years ago now and every single time any of our folks have gone to this they drink the Kool-Aid because at first they go like what is she sending in here but they've met lots of friends and governance across the country. Tyler St. Clair he's a sales retreat facilitator and that's where I met her and we believe it makes for a more engaged employee as well a more satisfied employee too. Thank y'all. Thank you. There's gotta be something done it's all the way up here. So Mr. Badura brought up another issue I think this will be quick too just for some discussion on the Board of Zoning Appeals meeting schedule. So the discussion came from last week's BOSA meeting and then the planning commission the week before that so the planning commission takes cell tower discussions on their 10 o'clock and then the Board of BOSA it's 10 o'clock. Some of the residents came up or the community contacted me as why are the meetings at 10 o'clock instead in the afternoon and that's what my only question is is there we set on 10 o'clock and I mean we've had the same discussion with council meetings that we had you know they used to be at noon o'clock and now we've moved them to 6 o'clock where people can attend is that something that's set in stone or can we change it can we adjust the time and I appreciate the committee members who volunteered their time to do that so I'm not really I'm not going like I'm not saying anything about the committee I'm just like questioning is there any way we can play around and move the time where more residents can attend those meetings if they need to. Anybody's thoughts? Are there any decisions or traditionally has that been now and Chris is here so she may want to chime in I think the Board themselves create their the Board members created their schedule and I think they've weighed in or they liked it for schedule but anyway Chris you could maybe help us out with how that historically has worked. The 10 o'clock goes way back beyond any of our 10 years here so Board of Zoning Appeals is 10 o'clock, DDRC is 4 o'clock, Planning Commission is 5.15 p.m. so Planning Commission is actually after hours and there was an effort by one of the Board of Zoning Appeals members to have the rest of the Board change that date and that was not successful with the Board members. That said you appoint the Board so I believe in some way you could influence their decision thinking on that, not on any other decisions they make but on that particular item I think you could have a discussion with the chairs. They're at 4 p.m. 5.15 p.m. Bozo is the only 10 o'clock and I understand Bozo followed state registration of state law on a lot of decisions they make and I'm just curious does that mean the 10 o'clock version from the Board members there certainly are and I think some of the discussion from them was well you also have business people who are doing business before the Board and so I think that was some of their argument at the time was that it still doesn't make sense because business people you're still taking them away from their business to come at 4 o'clock in the morning yeah they do Additionally Board of Zoning Appeals meetings used to be like council meetings in last 6-7 hours so if they no longer last time So that could have been a rationale Ask them then to consider I mean just so it kind of I said I put in Chris It is official it's public hearing work session we're talking about in public so But yeah maybe a request from us just to consider it I just think it's beneficial for the residents for us I mean you know sometimes we I mean I know we can attend or we can as a public but nothing more than that I mean on making a habit of attending but I think there's a lot of residents who wish to be there especially on the boats They go here and pass it, they've waited on this floor they're not considered and the Board meet the Board they need to go out and see what the zoning people have on the agenda because they just try to pass they went for the business in our neighborhood stop putting business Okay okay The time needs to be changed because people got to go to work I go to all of them mostly and they just work people they're real nasty They got two new people on there too We will send the message I heard you say do we want to send a message She will deliver the message Is it an easy message or a hard message Well given that it was recently rejected by the Board it's easy for me to tell absolutely I mean people have real lives and real jobs and schedules are adjusted to through our jobs certainly and if I may ask around the five o'clock hour I think people can take an hour from work easier than taking a whole day off Sometimes meetings can get long We start fading that certain hours They're human beings too We'll do that Thank you Krista We'll be in the executive session I'll make a motion to go into the executive session and ask the board to repeat the additions that we had at the start and I will add to the executive session receive the legal advice relating to pending treatment of potential claims Today, Jackie Morris vs. COC Jeffrey Rich vs. COC Shane O'Griffin vs. SCDOT COC and Richard McKenna received legal advice relating to matters covered by a 29th president pursuant to 30-4078-2 Organs of 2019-07-04 Columbia Urban League and AMI discussion of the A-1 Municipal Court All for number 8, could you also add administrative addition I need to add on an administrative matter discussion of a formal person to a public body pursuant to 70A-1 Parks and Recreation Foundation or grant pursuant to 70A-2 affordable housing one grant opportunity We're going to finish, we are, but you're going to finish No, it's a lot