 introduce the new Trendy Metro president and CEO. Thanks, David. Rich, are you here? Well, maybe we're not introduced. Maybe we're not today doing that. Just kidding. OK. If he comes in later, maybe he was over. I know Steve Montgomery was going to be your part, but they were just at that other presentation. All right, we'll wait. Somebody be on the lookout. OK, then I'm going to announce that Deanna Giordano. And she's going to talk about Job Fair this Saturday. Deanna. All right, I wanted to take a brief moment to announce the city's annual It's Well Worth It job fair. We're hosting that this Saturday at the Como Community Center. It'll be from 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. And the Como Community Center is located at 4660 Horn Street. We have some information that's advertised on the city job site or the city internet sites. If you go to FortwortTexas.gov, there's additional information. You can pre-register to attend the job fair. We have over 600 participants that will be actively involved pursuing careers with the city. In addition to that, if they don't pre-register, walk-ins are perfectly welcome. But we want individuals in the community to learn about employment opportunities with the city of Fort Worth. We also want them to pursue careers with the city. We know that public service is one of the most rewarding jobs. We have a number of departments that are participating, aviation, human resources, code compliance, development services, police, fire, water, library, IT solutions. Many of our city departments will be advertising job postings that are available. And some on-site interviews will also occur. So those residents that are interested in pursuing their career or networking with our city departments, we encourage you to attend. Once again, Saturday, 9 a.m. to 2 p.m. Como Community Center. Thank you. Thank you, Diana. Next, I'm going to call on Chief Davis. He's going to recognize a soon-to-be retiree. He's learning. I'm still learning. I have a list of plenty of people. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of Council, Mr. Cook. After 37 years of service to the city of Fort Worth, Chief Robertson has announced his intention to retire the first part of July. Chief Robertson was one of the first people that was a friend, a colleague, and a historian to the history of the Fire Department Fort Worth when I arrived back in 2018. I'll be forever grateful for his help and his wisdom and pushing me in the right directions to know the lay of the land and the people in this town that have been so gracious to me. And if it wasn't for him, I'm pretty confident that I would have struggled a little more so. He and his wife, Kathy, have been married for about four years now, three years. And we wished him and Kathy the best of health and happiness in his retirement. And I wanted to have an opportunity for him to see you today, so I appreciate it. Homer? Thank you. You know, about 37 years ago, freaking crying, 37 years ago, there were people in the city that said I wouldn't make it six months. I don't see any of them here. Yeah. Right? So it has been an honor to work here. Not because I had to, because I wanted to, right? You just mentioned public service. Man, I've seen so many changes in the city, incredible fire department, city, and most of them have been good. Most of them have been really good. Positive, moving us forward. And we couldn't do it without members of council to do that. And great employees. All the city departments do an awesome job. They're all working in their models, delivering their models. I am most proud of the fire department model because it's very simplistic. You pick the phone up, no matter. You tell us what's your problem, and you don't even tell us what your address is anymore. And in a few minutes, based on what you tell us, four people or 100 people are going to show up to solve your problem. Nobody else can do that. Nobody. Well-trained, millions of dollars of equipment and solve. We're problem solvers. So new members of council, don't forget that. The old members know that. Don't forget that, OK? My son couldn't make it. Kathy came today. They both of them sacrificed a lot for me to help here. I just want to say, Chief, thank you for your service. Thank you for your friendship over the years. What I hope this means is you'll have more time to cook that dang good barbecue that you may, and have me over. So I appreciate you. Thank you. Yeah, go ahead, Gina. I don't know if any other members on this council have had the need to call 9-1-1, but I have. And when I called 9-1-1 on my birthday, October 16, 2018, I was experiencing a stroke. Fire department on the spot, no problems. The call was so boring, MedStar played it. Carlos will remember since we're the old ones now. They played that call in this work session. I will never forget the date, but what I will tell you is when you call 9-1-1, everybody's going to show up. Sometimes in a real rush, sometimes depending on what you communicate to them, not so fast, but they got to me just in time. And very few people know that I experienced a stroke. And it's because of the urgency that they got to me. And so they are always special to me. And of course, the MedStar team too. Absolutely. Thank you, Chief. Carlos. I'd like to say something to echo the comments of my council colleagues, Homer, I appreciate you. There's no way to encapsulate. In brief comments, all that you meant for your service to the fire department in the city and to this council member. I do have a question though. You're retiring, what, July 1st. Is that anything to do with you skipping out on all the work that's waiting for us on July 4th? I don't know, Chief. You may want to look into that. But anyway, that's a lot of work. That is a lot of work. And hey, I look forward to seeing you at the Red Steel Gathering. All right, you're going to cook up some good stuff, right? All right, thank you. Homer, I love you. We really do. And you represent all that's good, not just in the city of Fort Worth, but in people in general. All of us have called on you numerous times. I'm included in that. I will miss you. Thank you, everybody. Let's see, I need to correct something I previously said. The special called council meeting for the city uttered interviews start at 1 tomorrow, not 11, 1 o'clock. All right? Now I'm going to call on police chief Neil Noakes. He's going to recognize several folks from the police department. Chief. Mayor and council, if I may, before I start, I would like to thank Homer for all of his work, his years of dedication. I've enjoyed working with him personally. And the city is better off having had his service for 37 years, no question. Speaking of service, and one thing that Homer said earlier, at Fort Worth PD, we're not really looking to hire law enforcers. We can teach you to enforce the law. We're looking for problem solvers. We're looking for compassionate, professional, empathetic problem solvers who can come in and take care of whatever issue someone may have. You see four of them right here. One of the things we're investing in heavily at Fort Worth PD is leadership, development, and training for all of our officers. And specifically, we've got some examples of the leaders in our department who are also in leadership roles. And I wanted to recognize them for some programs they completed recently that shows their commitment to being leaders in this city. First of all, I want to recognize Lieutenant Mike Williams. Raise your hands, everybody sees you, sir. Lieutenant Mike Williams recently completed the FBI National Academy, which is a 10-week program in Quantico, Virginia at the FBI National Training Center. It is no joke. The training is rather extensive about best practices in law enforcement, mental health and wellness, all the things that leaders in law enforcement need to know to lead an agency. It's hard to be gone from your family for 10 weeks as he was, but his dedication to this sitting in the department has led him to put in to be accepted for and be successful in that program. And I want to applaud Mike Williams for what he did there at the FBI National Academy. Second, we have three members of the most recent graduating cohort of TCU's LEAD program. And LEAD stands for Leadership, Executive, and Administrative Development. It's a program that's similar in nature to the FBI National Academy, but it's done locally at TCU over two full semesters. The graduates receive 12 graduate hours from TCU, and again, they learn about best practices in policing, health and wellness, all the things that leaders need to know to do well in an agency. Having gone through that program myself, I know that that one is very difficult. It's demanding about two hours and 40 minutes, two nights a week, again for two full semesters there on campus at TCU. I want to applaud, first of all, Paula Fembers, Deputy Chief Paula Fembers on the end. Lieutenant Chris Gorey and Sergeant Dana Stevenson. I applaud them because not only are they leaders of tomorrow, they're leaders today, and we appreciate all of their efforts. Thank you for allowing us to recognize them. Thanks, Chief, and thank you, everybody. Oh, photo. And now I'll call on Brandon Bennett to introduce a new code compliance assistant director. I, real quickly, get you back on track here. I'd like to introduce Jim Kiesel. He is our new assistant director, code compliance for solid waste services. He's filling the vacancy that Robert Smouse created when he moved on to the private sector. Jim has 20 years of solid waste experience, both in the public sector and the private sector. He did a stint at waste management for a while. He has an MBA and he has landed here in Fort Worth with both feet running. Probably the one biggest piece for you all, since we kind of have a public safety theme going on this afternoon, is Jim has inserted himself into the crime prevention through environmental design and the city's crime prevention task force looking at violent crime. And he's already finding creative ways to use drop-off stations to help with cleaning up communities, because we know there's a correlation between crime and crime. And he has lots of other wonderful ideas. We look forward to him working with all of you and I'm sure all of you working with him. So Jim, thank you and council, if you'll welcome him award. Thank you, it's an honor to be here. All right, now turning to informal reports. There are a few. The first informal report is on the July 4th fireworks complaints and Chief Davis and Chief Nokes are available if there are any questions. All right, I'll take that as we're moving on. David. I'll take that as we're not moving on. No, no, we are, but the CEO just walked in. So do you want to? Oh, thank you for that. You're welcome. Thank you. All right, but just remember we got past the first informal report. Okay, so now I'll call on council member Michael Crane. Council member Michael Crane. Thanks, David, and I want to take this opportunity. We have a new Trini Metro CEO, Rich Andresky, and wait, come on up. Okay, come on up. You go up here. You're, Gene, I want you to go to that one over there. That podium over there, so you can, yeah, thank you. He started yesterday, so he's fresh on the job but has years of experience in the public transportation sector. I'm not gonna read your bio, I'm gonna let you talk about yourself, but welcome to Fort Worth and we're looking forward to your leadership. Michael, yeah, thanks for inviting me. You and Chris, I really appreciated the time you spent with me to get me acclimated and acquainted to Fort Worth. Really, it's a joy to be here with all of you. Again, my name's Rich Andresky. I come to you from Connecticut where I've spent the last seven years as the chief of public transportation for the state of Connecticut. I've dedicated my working professional career to public transportation. And I gotta tell you, I wasn't looking for this opportunity but when it became available, the reputation of Fort Worth, the city of Fort Worth, really preceded itself. I sort of talked to insiders in the industry, people that know public transportation around the country. Heard two things about Fort Worth. One is the warm heart of people and the vision that all of you have for the future of the city. Also heard a lot of good things about Trinity Metro and the team over there and the great projects that they're delivering. So, you know, Text Rail obviously came on line recently. That's been a huge success. I know that there's an appetite for more investment. We've heard about, I've heard about the extension of Text Rail to the near South side. We've heard about the East Lancaster Avenue, Bus Rapid Transit improvements. But really, my hope is not to do too much talking but to do a lot of listening in the first month, two, three months on the job. So that's what I'm really hoping that to really meet and hear from you about what you really see the future for this city. And Trinity Metro is one piece of a healthy, vibrant city and we wanna play a role and support you in that vision. So again, it's my second day on the job. I don't have a lot to tell you about my role except to say I wanna meet myself available and be there for you and to listen to you. And if you all have any questions, I'd be happy to take any questions. Elizabeth, go ahead. I would just like to welcome you to Fort Worth. We're really excited to have you. They are a public transportation system, could use a lot of TLC. And so I'm really excited to see what you do there. And I'm really grateful for my colleagues, Michael Crane and Chris Nettles who serve on the Trinity Metro Board and act as really our liaisons to make sure that we're fostering better communication and better coordination between Trinity Metro and the city. So thank you and I look forward to working with you. Thank you. Welcome, Roche. You've made it a whole week in Texas weather. I'm sure I wish you and Rebecca and Connecticut a few of these days, but we're happy to have you here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. It is a bit warm, but we're looking forward to it. My family will be joining me in about a month. We're moving on down, so. Give them two months. Give them two months. Wait till September. Thank you. Thank you, thank you so much. Rich, I'd give the family a little longer. When I moved here, they told me there were two seasons, summer and August. So something to think about. Alrighty, next up, second informal report, which is an update on the city's COVID-19 response, Brandon Bennett is available if there are any questions. All right, next up, informal report, residential solid waste rate and revenue history, and Brandon Bennett is available if there are any questions. Yes, we really almost made it. Brandon. Brandon, there was something in the last paragraph, which I'm excited to hear about. I know we'll talk about offline. I know you probably can't give a bunch of details on it, but can you just talk just really quickly about the opportunity that that is mining gas and then generating electricity off of it? Absolutely, so we've been working with our landfill operator, Republic Services. Our landfill has been in existence long enough, and the amount of gas that's being produced underground is a sufficient quality and quantity that we are gonna move forward with mining that gas and selling it on the open market. We anticipate that sometime late summer we'll be coming back to you with another informal report that talks about the agreement that we have solidified with them and then actually start moving forward to development. So we're really excited about this. Right now, we're just flaring the gas off, we're gonna collect it and we're gonna sell it and we're gonna make some money at it. You read my mind, I was gonna ask what are we currently doing with the gas? We're burning money right now. We're burning money in there. Yeah, we're gonna change that. I think I have to prompt Jared to ask it for me, but is there any point in the stage of this operation where council members can direct the spending or does it go directly to the general fund? In other words, can I get some of that money for district five? Yeah, so the way it is set up, the Solid Waste Fund is an enterprise fund, so revenues that are generated within that fund stay within that fund, it doesn't go to the Solid Waste Fund, but most certainly, I'm sure that the city manager or others could look at this from an enterprise level and decide if there's a different policy. And for that, we need five votes. Yeah. Oh yeah. So as you remember, part of the Solid Waste Fund currently isn't sustainable, right? So this is one of the strategies to help make sure that it is on a long-term sustainability path. You're a joy killer. Yeah, we'll have to think of something else. Okay. That's all I think we're gonna do. Thank you. Thanks, Brandon. Next is the application process for crime control and prevention district funding and Keith Morris is available if there are any questions. Next is the Fort Worth Police Department policy for runaway children and assistant police chief, Sparrow is available if there are any questions. All right, mayor council, city manager. Good afternoon, chief. I appreciate you putting this IR together and I also appreciate the additional information you sent via email this morning. I do have some very concerning questions though about this particular policy and how we're looking for our children. First, I wanna say I understand that we don't have unlimited resources and it's your job to prioritize the safety of all of our residents. I think we're missing the mark here because we're not prioritizing the safety of our children. And I wanna share a bit of a personal story on this one because I think it shed some light to why I'm so concerned about this. I certainly hope that you have never experienced in your family had the occasion to experience a child with mental health issues but my family has not been so fortunate in that. And as part of that, in my home, I saw a child run more than once when they were having a pretty severe mental health crisis. And I understand that there are provisions in this policy that talk about children with medication or children with mental impairment but I can tell you those aren't the questions that are asked when the police officers show up. The first question they ask is well have they done this before? And then the response becomes do I lie or do I tell the truth? Because I don't know how they're gonna respond to that. And my 10 year old baby has run or my 11 year old baby or my 12 year old baby and I just need help finding them so that they can get the help they need. We're not doing right by our children when we don't exhaust our resources. And if they've run away twice does that make them any less vulnerable than the child that's run away once? And I wanna share some information that I gathered as part of reviewing this IR. Runaway children are the most vulnerable to be trafficked. And when a child runs, a child runs because something is wrong whether it's at home or a mental illness. And so I really urge you to review this policy on what that looks like for our children that are particularly the child that sparked this was 10. And I'm glad that they were found but 10 is young. 10 is not an age, they can't be criminally tried. There's no culpability at 10. And so I think the same would go for a child choosing to run. There seems to be some ambiguity in this particular policy as to what the difference or what the child in immediate danger or the mental health requirement is. And so I'd really appreciate y'all going and taking a look at that because I think oftentimes, even if it is a mental health issue or even if it's not, if they're 10, if they're 11, if they're 12 and they're out on our streets, they're vulnerable. And we should be looking for them regardless of how many times they run away. Thank you. I totally agree with that, Councilwoman. The whole point is if any child, obviously any child is precious. And we tried to exhaust all our resources to find that child. But if any child is a danger to himself, herself or somebody else, we will search until we can't search anymore. And when people are under that type of stress or obviously that child is a danger to him or herself or somebody else, so we will. And I apologize that that was your experience and that is not our policy. But it is, if your policy is what I'm looking at here, it's that you won't search for them if they're a habitual runaway. Well, that's something that's taken in the totality of the circumstances. It doesn't mean that we won't search for them if they're habitual runaway. When I worked sex crimes, we had prostitutes who were raped and it was proven that they're raped and they were victims. And in that case, they're treated like a victim. So if somebody is actually going through, like I said, stress like that to where they're a danger to themselves or somebody else, that would put that person in that category to where we continue to look. Whether or not they ran away one time or 10 times. So I would, I... Anybody can be a victim. It doesn't matter what happened in your past. Doesn't matter as far as what you've done. Anybody can be a victim. Right, but the email that sparked this was a 10-year-old child that ran away and I know that they were found safe and sound and I appreciate that. And I appreciate everyone that did that hard work but they were 10 and we stopped looking for them. And so that, because they were habitual runaway because they've done this before. And I understand that if I've run away to my best friend's house five times now, go look at my best friend's house, right? Find me. Don't just say, well, she runs away to her best friend's house and leave it at that. I don't think that we should ever receive another email here on council when we get that heads up and not because I want you to stop sending them but I don't ever wanna see another email that says that they've stopped looking for a child. I wanna know what the update is, where they found that child. And it does not matter how many times they have run. We're looking to that. Thank you. I just have a kind of a follow-up to that a little bit. When we talk about trafficking, et cetera, there was gotten onto a lot of media attention recently about a child abducted at the American Airlines Center. 15-year-old girl went to the bathroom. By all accounts, it's very normal. No abnormal home life, but we know these predators are out there and they're looking for any opportunity and that's what they found with this girl. And from all accounts, you might have willingly left, et cetera, those parents were told to go home and file the complaint there. So they had to drive 30 minutes without their child in the car. I just wanna know how we would handle that situation if something like that arose. Maybe at Dickie's, a girl was abducted. Either way, even if she left her on her own accord or not, we should be looking for her. So how would that have been handled here? Would we have told people to go home and file that because she might have left willingly? If so, we may need to. But what's- No, we'll never tell anybody to go home. I mean, there's no waiting period as far as when you can file a missing person report, but we will take all of the totality of the circumstances involved and make a decision on that. I can't tell you exactly what was told to those officers or I don't know any of the details about that, so I can't tell you. But anytime that there's any type of possibility, if somebody's been abducted or something has happened where a person's been a victim of a criminal activity and criminal episode or anything like that, we're gonna take action. Okay, I just wanna make sure that if something like that happens here, we don't do what Dallas did and leave those parents in a lurch. And then it was 10 days. They found the girl. She'd been trafficked in Oklahoma. And so I just wanna make sure that we're working as we can right then and they're trying to find that child. Well, that's huge. That's a terrible thing, so. I wanna piggyback on that too. I think that reporting piece is important. Forward resident constituent of District 7 is still, two of her sons are missing. It's reported that their father took them against court order out of state in Florida. And she was told to go home to make the report. It may not have been a policy, right? But it may be that there's misinformation about how to do the reporting. So I think that's something that we should look into and see if there's a better way to communicate that out to schools and to parents and also throughout the PD just to make sure we're all on the same page about how to report that. All right, once again, that's not our policy. Thank you, Chief. Next up is overview and roles of the Fort Worth Police Department School Resource Officers and Assistant Chief Sparrow is available for questions. I like that you didn't move there. All right, next informal report is notification of emergency events in council districts and Fire Chief Jim Davis is available if there are any questions. All right, next up is female fire recruitment, fitness requirements and hiring data and Chief Davis is available if there are any questions on that informal report. I've got a couple. Okay, Chief. Yes, ma'am. Thank you for putting this together. When was the last time we did the camp heat? I believe it was just before COVID. COVID. It was right in that we have not done ones during the whole COVID pandemic. Do we have any plans on putting another one together? Yes, ma'am. I also sent a couple of females from our fire department have gone to other cities that have got similar programs to observe their processes to try to bring back some different ideas and best practice. Okay, awesome. Let me know when that happens. I'd be happy to help recruit in that particular effort. And then just on a positive note, I know we've got a class of recruits right now that's a little unique. So if you could just tell everyone in this room and everyone listening about that upcoming graduating class and why they're special. Well, I think with the support of the city manager's office and council, we hired 29 and for the first time in the history of the fire department, we have a minority majority class. So we're pretty proud of that. Thank you, ma'am. Next in for more reporters on washout rates of male recruits and the ability to have non-firefighters assist with recruiting Chief Davis and Deanna Giordano are available if there are any questions. Thanks, Chief. Next is the monthly development activity report and DJ Harrell is available if there are any questions. DJ is getting off easy today. Well, maybe not. Next in formal report is the 2022 transportation impact fee study update. Once again, DJ Harrell is available if there are any questions. I have a couple. There, I knew we wouldn't let them out easy. DJ. Well, DJ is coming up here, David. I think this, I think some of this goes back to conversations that we've had about our impact fees and how they operate. And so really DJ, it's not so much a question, but I just want to make sure we're having a conversation about, you know, I think these do a good job of addressing growth where we haven't seen growth before, but how do these fees help mitigate some of our past sins? And so what really brought this to light wasn't necessarily our transportation impact, but some other impact fees we have in the city and in what that does to development. So in this case, what that does to transportation and how we're investing those dollars into the central city where most of the development was done prior to these fees ever being instituted. And so can you touch on how we're dispersing those or does it stay, does it stay relative to where the fee was collected? So basically the transportation impact fee program works in conjunction with the efforts by our transportation public works, to look at the roadways in a holistic manner. For instance, the impact fees are only related to new growth, right? And new capacity related to that growth. So you can't be used to repair existing roadways or to overlay existing roadways or anything that doesn't add capacity to our arterial network. It's based on our master's thoroughfare plan and where we project the growth to go in the future. But concurrently, transportation public works, they're working on programs, they're looking at things like user fees. I'm a multi-family developer in the near south side and I wanna put in 400 units. So I have a transportation impact fee as, no. So we're not charging anyone in the central city for the impacts that they cause to our transportation system. Right, so in the central city, I think there's also a map in the IR, right? And there's some grayed out areas and all those grayed out areas are no fee service area. So those are the areas that the study shows that all of our roadways are fully built out for future capacity sake, right? So all we'll ever need as far as lane miles and width and capacity for movement in those areas has already been constructed. Well, I'm gonna stop you right there and I'm gonna ask that staff go back and look at these transportation impact fees because what I hear you talking about is a lot of roadway construction and that's not the only form of transportation that we need in the city. And we just saw the new Trinity Metro CEO here and in the central city, we're really focusing on density and for that we need transit to move people around. We're never gonna build our way out of congestion not in the south and the north and the east or the west. So what can we do to help alleviate traffic? And so to gray out an area and say that we're not, we're not going to account for the development that's happened there and how that impacts my residents who get stuck in traffic because we are built out. We can't build a new arterial. We're doing a disservice to all of our residents and it's not, it's something I think we need a remedy. Okay, we can definitely look at that. Hi there. Just a quick question that's come up on or during several town halls. Could you explain, if you would, the timing of the impact fees and when they are applied and how the developer might manage the timing of those fees or not? As they come along the development or are you speaking about the study? As they come along. Okay, so when they get a project approved? Yes, as projects come to the city of Fort Worth, what the city staff does is review their plat for the type of land use number one and also number two, what study it would fall under. So depending on if it was platted in 2012, it may be under a different rate than it is under 2022, right? So we look at that and assess the plat at that time. So council in the past has adopted a schedule one and a schedule two. So the schedule one at the time of plat is set in stone. So say a single family residence has a cost of $16,000 for that development per unit. Well, council has chosen to adopt a lesser amount, which is the schedule two. So the amount may be $3,500 for that unit, but that's not assessed or collected until the building permit actually comes in. So when the building permit comes in, they get a bill for that $3,500 at that time. Now also one other caveat is certain developers elect to build roadways or we have to require them to build roadways that they come in to the city forward. And then what we do at that time at the time of the building permit is give them the credit for what they've already contributed to the roadway network financially. And again, thank you. This has come up. So you mentioned in there say just as an example, the $16,000 and then the $3,500 of actual payment. That's a city policy in terms of what the discount is. And if I recall, and you might remind folks, we talked about this maybe about this time last year, I can't remember. But that discount is something that we review every five years, is it? Yes, sir. Okay. So we typically have reviewed it every five years, but any given Tuesday, the council couldn't decide that you would like to change the collection rate. Okay. And so again, just to reiterate or repeat maybe for people, we discounted it five years ago and then the five years prior to that to incentivize building, right? And just to effectively make it easier, less expensive for developers to build their products. Is that fair? Well, I think where it started is in 2008, at the inception of the program, we decided on the collection rate, but we were also going through some turbulent times in the economy. So I think the council made the decision to try to continue to contribute to the current growth and then we could eventually get there and catch up. They were doing a lot of studying the needs and the pace that we were growing. And so then when the study was uploaded in 2013, we actually went down because the council had that same vision. We really wanna spur development. We don't want to deter folks from building here in the city of Fort Worth. And so it wasn't until 2017 that we actually started creeping back up, right? So we crept up just a bit, not to where we were recommended to go back in 2012, but we crept up a bit. And so that's where we kind of been a bit up and down with the collection based on the feedback that we get from our partners in the development community. As part of this study, what we do is we also go and meet with the real estate council, the builders, the realtors, and get a feel for what they wanna recommend. So when we do bring something to the council, we'll bring a holistic view of what staff recommends and what all of our development partners also recommend going forward. And then you guys can make an informed decision based on feedback from the community as well. Okay, thank you. I have a question for DJ. And I know the state of the department that you inherited, but can you describe the diversity of these resources you check with, the councils? And when I say diversity, I'm talking about size of company, age, who are we talking to? Are we talking to the big money in Fort Worth exclusively, or does the small stakeholder have a seat at the table? What we try to do is be as inclusive as possible. I mean, we don't really have, track it by demographic, but we do go not just to the development advisory committee, the real estate council and folks like that, but we also take the tour going to neighborhood associations in order to get in front of them. Because what we wanna do is have the full report back to you guys, like here's what the builders are saying, but here's what the residents are saying, because these are the folks that have to get to work in the morning and these are the folks that you also need to hear from. So what we try to do is diversify it in that way by not just the builder, not just the folks that are developing these things, but also the folks that are gonna be the end user and in charge of where we go as a city. Well, I've never liked the makeup just because of the absence of the small business person that I think needs to have a seat at that table. I don't know how you correct that, amend that, approve that, but we have to get beyond the perception that it's the big wheels making these decisions and it's hard for the small businessmen, the small builder to keep up. And so I'd like to follow up on this conversation to see just who are we talking to to bring everybody to the table. And for the new council, I'm not talking ethnicity, I'm talking about size, because depending on the size of your company, your choke point may be a little bit higher than a smaller business owner. And so that's important that we have that type of diversity. And if we can talk some more about it in the future, maybe 60, 90 days, that'll let us see who's there and this council can help you identify likely new partners. Thank you. Thank you, DJ. Thank you. Next in formal report is on the city facility naming policy and processes and Dana Bergdorf is available for any questions. All right, next in formal report is the feasibility of increasing the number of day city pools are open. Kelly Picard is available for any questions. I have any questions? I just want to thank Parks. I know many of you have probably read some of the articles about how we weren't able to operate our pools full time. Having talked with staff about that, they have done a tremendous job of trying to combat the lifeguard shortage that is happening nationally. So really just thank you to Parks and Rec for doing that. And Kelly, I don't see her, but there she is. She's hiding. Kelly, thank you. Thank you all for everything that y'all have done to kind of write that ship. All right, the next in formal report is on Fort Worth's international profile and evaluating the need for a global foreword. And Robert Stearns is available if there are any questions. All right, next in formal report is the Lancet. Dave, I'm sorry. Could we just kind of get an overview there? Yeah, Robert. Mayor, Mr. Council, Robert Stearns, Economic Development. The MNC, I mean, not the MNC, the informal report, sorry, MNC jumped the gun a little bit. But this IR is really on the status of evaluating the need for a global hub. So Fort Worth has not had a really, what I would call an incoming point for global development, business development for some time. We used to have an international center several years ago and Sister Cities in some ways, it has tried to kind of step into that role a little bit to help us develop some of these relationships through the Sister Cities partners. But when we have companies that are operating overseas, they really don't have an access point when they're looking at Fort Worth. Likewise, we really don't have a way to explore those opportunities. And so what we are proposing is really hiring a consultant to help us look at the feasibility of developing an access point here in Fort Worth, which will allow us to explore those opportunities as they come forward and also help us kind of build out an international development plan as well. Thank you, Robert. I think it's super and can't wait to take the next step. Thank you. Thank you, Robert. Next is the Lancaster Lamar Mixed Use Development Update. And Robert Stearns is available if there are any questions on that. All right. Next in formal report is on the Office of Police Oversight, the 2020-2021 inaugural biennial report and Kim Neal is available if there are any questions. Question? Kim. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Kim. Thank you for the report. It's very thorough. Congratulations on the work you've done so far. I have only two questions for you and I'm sure others around the table may have more. But if you could, please elaborate on your most proud moment in this role and the most challenging. What have you done that makes you proud to be here that moves Fort Worth forward and what's holding you back? I think my most proud moment is despite the, if you will, liabilities we had with COVID, the pandemic and the fact that our office opened up right at that time period, the number of people that reached out to our office and were willing to engage with us both from the city, from the community, the number of stakeholders that really took interest in our office and participated in a lot of those virtual sessions. So I was able to get to know a lot of people in a lot of groups very early on. And so I'm very thankful for those communications and I'm also thankful for finally getting to meet a lot of those folks face to face and actually seeing if they're short or tall or they can see that I'm tall but and actually really networking with those folks this year. So that's probably my most proud accomplishment, the number of people we were able to reach despite the issues with COVID. I think from that same standpoint, I wish we could have reached more. You know, we continued to for the first two years to be challenged with the pandemic. So we weren't able to get out in the community as we wanted to. And so we're trying to take that on this year and we've had face to face engagements and we plan to continue to have those as much as we can. And so that's probably the thing that I'm faced with the most. I'm often concerned when folks tell me that they still aren't aware of our office. And so that bothers me. And so I try my best to continue to reach out to the various communities that we have to ensure that they know that we are here to service their voice. And I'm gonna cheat and add one more question to that. When it comes to your request, suggestions, directives, however you couch these involving what you need from the police department, can you categorize what it is that you need most? And I know you've reviewed a lot of tapes that the public probably doesn't know about, but how is that working relationship? We have a good working relationship under the former chief crowds and under current chief Neil Nokes. We was about to say Neil, because my last name is Neil, but anyway, under Nokes. And so we have continued to have a very collaborative relationship. The police department has continued to open up their doors to our office and be willing to collaborate with us and talk with us. I'm not gonna say we always agree. The majority of the times we do agree, but when we do disagree, we disagree respectfully. And I think we work together collaboratively to understand that we're all trying to get to the same common purpose, which is those enhanced communion police relationships. So as long as we continue to lead that as our guide, I think we can always continue to have a great relationship. I have a couple questions. I'm looking at the, I guess the reports on 17, 18, and it talks about, I guess your recommendations to the department that says PD concur slash in progress and some slash complete. The ones that are in progress, do we know a time, did you give them a timeframe since they agree with implementation? I did not. Many of these recommendations, some of these recommendations were under the previous chief. And so of course now we have a new chief. And so one of the things that no chief Nokes and are committed to do is to create a more formal process for receiving these recommendations and then in turn following up with those recommendations. We've talked about it and we're gonna put it to paper and talk about it a little bit more. So that's what we're gonna be doing in the next, probably the next month or so, less than the month or so, we're gonna be formalizing that process. Okay, and I know you might not can answer this, but chief is here. And since you said that some of these were under the formal chief, does our current chief still agree with a lot of these recommendations moving forward? I'll have to let him answer that. Mayor and council, I cannot think off the top of my head of any recommendation that have been agreed upon by chief Cross that I did not agree with myself. All right, thank you, chief. Yes, sir. I don't think that's not a question I have. Thank you, Kim. Thank you. All right, this is the final informal report. It's the proposal to combine the commercial and residential zoning boards of adjustment and Daniel L. is available if there are any questions. Hey, Daniel, how are you? Good afternoon, mayor and councilor. Hey, reading through this, I did have actually my person that serves on this raised a few questions with me looking at this. And it looks like we split it because of caseload back in 2006, or previous councils did, and caseload has been going out. And that's attributed to a decrease in cases for applicant education, but it says an increase in denials made by the Board of Adjustment. I'm just, I'm trying to clarify what that means if they have to come to the Board of Adjustment to get to denial, how is that? No, what has, I mean, I mean, the Board of Adjustment proposes to A, grant variances, things that do not match with the zoning standard. Sure, I know what the board does, yeah. Okay, so what has decreased significantly is the number of cases on both the residential and the commercial boards to a third of what it was in 2015. Sure, I understand that. You said the decree, but I'm reading this last, I'm just trying to get clarification. Staff attributes the decrease in cases to applicant education, applicant education, that totally makes sense that we're edging, but an increase in denials made by the Board of Adjustment, they have to quickly come before the Board of Adjustment with the case to be denied. So I'm not sure how that increase in denials has lowered the number of cases coming to the Board of Adjustments. Yeah, so I'm afraid my version doesn't have contained that sentence by Cedan, Steiner, the manager, any manager. Yes, thanks. Sure, so I think what's happening is you're seeing that our staff is doing a great job of educating our applicants. So when they come forward and they say, I have an application to receive a waiver, our staff is advising them and saying, traditionally our board. One for sure, just for the record, this never comes to us. This is the final adjudication. Zoning we get, we may have a chance to make some zoning cases right that the zoning commission got wrong, but this we never have a chance to that chance. So anyway, I just wanna point that out too. Thanks for the explanation. I think Michael brings up some good points that we've talked about. I know I've had this conversation with staff. This is gonna be something we need to handle prior to the addition of two new members on council because theoretically you'd end up with 11 and not nine. Is that the best decision we wanna make as a body? Are we gonna change the makeup of each board and commission? Those who attend attendance is an issue on certain boards and commission. The way we report that to each of you on a daily, on a monthly basis is probably important. If we need a better appointments process, we've needed it for years in cooperation with city secretary's office. So I think this is probably a bigger question for us. The other issue I just raised is the length of the meetings. I know that some of our commission members do so and they have full-time jobs. And so I fully support combining them. I think it's a good move. I just want us to be cognizant of how long those meetings would be. You know, a full day. I don't know what we do about that, but just letting y'all know it's a concern. So I'll start answering that question. We, for example, notice a big haptic on the zoning commission in which we were not able to address all the cases by 5 p.m. We meet one to five with a previous work session at 12. But by, you know, working with the chair, we were able to get a more streamlined process on timing everybody. So I'm pretty confident that we can do something similar in this combined board. I've got a comment to share. Having served on board of adjustment, you know, it is important that people understand that that's the end of the line at City Hall. You got to go to district court, which means you got to pay money. I am concerned that the way the alternates are named without love, admiration, respect for you, David, I want to choose my own alternates. And so I think that's a discussion that we need to have because we're the ones who know who our constituents are. On one occasion, I appointed someone very, very new. My first year in the council, that person had been accused of voter fraud. I had no clue. And so when it comes to, you know what I'm talking about. And so when it comes to our alternates, the council needs to own every bit of that appointment process. So that's my two cents. I would like to add something. I have a question. Who's bringing this proposal to council as a staff? Yes, this is a staff initiated proposal. Okay. And so if we're having problems with attendance, I don't think no one's been notified of that issue. Okay, I haven't seen it. But so I have a concern with combining them. For one, a lot of our residents in district eight has to go before this board. And when you talk about commercial and residential, you're talking about two different policies, issues, situations. And so you put that focus, to focus is in one person or in one board. And I think that can potentially hurt my residents down the road. I don't know if there is a better way to, I think staff has to do a better job of setting up and putting us on the agenda. And where those meetings are not all day in three and four hours. And so I think there are some things that I would challenge staff before we move forward with this proposal because I don't agree with it now, how we can make it better. And I think that's a staff issue that you guys need to look into. So based on timeline, we've got some time, Chris, for you to talk with Daniel directly and play Dana and legal on the reasons why forward. We can bring up some of these other issues and maybe a full presentation in August, how we're gonna deal with appointments, the absences, so each of you are informed. Then it sounds like the appointment of alternates is also an issue we need to cover. Mayor, I was in the queue to say something about the staff and this is nothing new, Jeanette. You and I talked about it when you joined the city and I talked about it before to staff and I know we had some changes there in the city secretary's office. Our appointees can miss and I don't know if this is a rule that applies across the board, 25% of the meetings. And that's one of the metrics that I use when I appoint people. If they can't meet that, if they're having trouble meeting that, I expect honest answers for them to inform me, for staff to tell me, but that information has not flowed easily to council. I have to often seek it out. So it's good to know that if we can facilitate that better to council members and know if we do have an emerging problem or an existing problem. As far as board of adjustment is concerned, my appointee has before in the past done double duty. He has spoken to me about it and with his concerns. I'm not taking a position one way or the other. I'd like to know a little more about functionally how that's gonna work. It's hard to find people to serve in these positions. First and foremost, I get that. And sometimes, you know, they have jobs. You know, some are retirees and offer some flexibility, not always the case. So again, what I'd like to see to make my job a little better so I can get good, you know, available appointees is more of that information transfer from the city secretary's office, wherever that is. Whoever, you know, gets delegated that task. And zoning people are a different breed. When you get good zoning people, you wanna keep them. So I just wanna make one quick comment. I may have the enviable position of being the only one at the table that's actually participated in a lawsuit against the city because of a board of adjustment commercial case that was wrong. And it's a brutal process. And we need to make sure it's better. You sue the city. Thank you both. He's Allen. Thank you. Mayor, that concludes my report. Okay, we made it through IRs. Any upcoming zoning cases we wanna talk about council, that'll be for your next meeting on the 28th or action items for the 28th upcoming. Then we're not, we're gonna move to Christina Brooks on to give us an update on CDFI friendly America. Good afternoon, Mayor, Council, City Manager Cook. Community. In quarter four of 2021, the city council approved $3 million of ARPA funds to address access to capital issues for small businesses in the Fort Worth marketplace. Working collaboratively, the diversity and inclusion department joined forces with the economic development department and neighborhood services department to identify a solution. Not only to the access to capital issues for small businesses as outlined by the city's 2020 disparity study, but also to address other unmet capital needs in the community, like for affordable housing, permanent supportive housing, economic development and target revitalization areas, major public private partnerships, early childhood facility upgrades and other nonprofit needs, as well as mortgage loans and alternatives to predatory payday loans. We identified CDFI friendly model as a viable solution. Founding partner for CDFI friendly America, Mark Penske is here this afternoon to give account of where we are, what we've accomplished to date and what's next. Join me in welcoming Mark Penske. Thank you, Christina. Mayor, council, good afternoon. I'm glad to be here with you. I also wanna addition and thanking Christina for her guidance and support in this. I wanna thank Robert Stearns from Economic Development who's been a great partner as we've gone through this. My purpose today is to report eight months into the work that we're doing out of 18 months, where we are and how we expect to get to where we're gonna go to. I have almost entirely good news to share with you and I'm gonna focus around the goals that we announced when we first rolled this out back in January as a way of organizing this. And I'm gonna give you a sort of a top line results. I'm gonna give you a little reminder, a little background into what we're doing. Christina did a nice job of sort of setting the stage for that. And I look forward to your questions in the process. I'm gonna give you a couple of data updates. Top line headlines, we're on schedule. Things are going as we expected. We've had no major surprises. We've been successful in the outreach which we've done in the community. We have a phase of our work we call Educate and Organize which is really bringing people together. We've been really happy with the way that's gone and bringing sources of financing together with folks who are looking for financing. We are on target to start business planning in July and financing which as you'll see in our report started as soon as we got going and it started with a flurry is on schedule and accelerating and I think we're in good shape for what we're trying to do this year. Just really briefly, we go through a four step process outreach which is really getting to know the community a little bit and it's been wonderful to get to know this community. It's a wonderful place with people who are really dedicated to each other and to the community and to the city. We do what I call the Educate and Organizing work which I just mentioned, we do the business planning and for us business planning is not only going through the process of putting everything into numbers it's a process of further organizing because we go out, we'll take that plan out at various stages to all of the folks who are gonna be affected by this and involved in this and make sure they understand it, make sure they're comfortable with it, make sure they understand what's expected of them and what they can expect from it. So that's a really important phase of our work that we'll start over the summer. And then implementation which as I said with financing we've already started but just to note upfront, CDFI Friendly Fort Worth will be an independent nonprofit organization. It'll have a staff of perhaps two or three folks. That does not exist yet. At this point CDFI Friendly Fort Worth is a brand if you will that CDFI Friendly America, my organization is sort of managing. We hope to make that transition over the summer and I'll talk a little bit about that. Here's the timeline for what we're doing as I suggested earlier. As I said, we're on schedule. The bottom line, the green line suggested that we're not trying to plan something so that we can later do financing. We're trying to do financing whenever we see the opportunity because that's the goal that we're after. So let me take us back just a little bit to where we started. This is an analysis. If you look at the blue line in the middle it tells you what the lending per capita, CDFI financing per capita is in each of these jurisdictions. And you can see circled red that Fort Worth was lagging with some comparatives. And what I wanna do first of all is update that and I wanna update that with a little bit of good news and then a little bit of bad news. The good news is that we actually have, I just got this this morning, there's now data through this day, these data are through fiscal year 19. We now have data through fiscal year 20. The good news is that Fort Worth's number went up from $39 per person to $46 per person and 18% increase. So this is through fiscal year 20. The bad news is that, and it doesn't quite match up here, Tarrant County went up 43%. Dallas, Fort Worth, the region went up 32%. Texas went up 30% and the United States went up 38%. So we've lost ground prior to starting this work. So it becomes all the more urgent and all the more important that we succeed at what we're trying to do. Just this is where we started that, with some things that we laid out when we first met with council and in our January event that first the people of communities, people in communities of color and Fort Worth are under capitalized. That's our driving organizing principle. That's where we're centered. That from our experience that a community centered and community controlled CDFI friendly strategy, the one that we're building here, will in fact attract CDFIs that will increase financing and it will create opportunities. Some of which we can anticipate, some of which frankly we can anticipate because there are a lot of people out there with a lot of good ideas that we don't know about yet. And that we think that there's significant untapped demand for CDFI financing in the city and that's a combination if I can. Going back to if you look at the financing per person and you look at above it and see that 61% of Fort Worth's census tracts are eligible for CDFI financing or qualified as eligible for CDFI financing. It tells you that there's some demand that's not being met. So I said I wanted to talk to goals. I'm gonna talk to these goals. We wanted to engage and educate and organize Fort Worth as a CDFI friendly marketplace. We wanna attract CDFIs if we're not successful in making CDFIs understand what the opportunity is hard to do financing. They are not gonna come and we're sort of dead on arrival, but fortunately not. We wanna arrange and identify technical assistance providers. I'll talk a little bit more about this perhaps as we get into questions but one of the things we've learned in Fort Worth which didn't surprise us is there are a lot of people who have good ideas or a lot of people wanna do financing whether it's small business owners, new small business owners, new developers. We've met a whole bunch of new developers with great ideas. They're new to this. They don't yet know how to do it. They need technical assistance. So I will tell you that within the week prior to a public event that we're doing on the 29th here in Fort Worth, we will be releasing on our website a whole set of new technical assistance resources for the community to draw on to sort of build their capacity. We will stand up an independent nonprofit and we will facilitate. This is what we said officially. I promise council, I'll say it here, $250 million or more over five years. I stand by that. I think that looks incredibly reachable and I expect that that's gonna happen. Again, as you know, the city of Fort Worth put $3 million in using ARPA funds into this. A million of it will capitalize an enhancement fund that will be part of the new entity. A million of it goes to cover the work that we're doing and there's some money in there for expense reimbursement. Really quickly, CDFIs are just to remind you are private sector financial intermediaries. They come in different forms. They come in different sizes. They have different focuses but they are all private sector financial institutions that are working with under-resourced, under-capitalized, underserved people and communities. Almost all of them provide finance. They all provide financing and technical assistance. They provide the technical assistance in different ways. Their business model is to be profitable but not profit maximizing. That allows them to ensure that they're sustainable but it allows them also to use some of the revenue that they bring in to support their customers since their, they rise or fall based on the performance of the loans that they make. And last and this is a critical point, there are more than 1,400 CDFIs working in all 50 states right now and including a fair number in Texas. What's not happening is they're not working in Fort Worth so we just need to, we just need to get them here. I'm gonna skip this slide. You have it in your, it just shows that CDFIs are an intermediary. I wanna report on the goals. So our first goal was to engage, educate and organize. We've done outreach, which means meetings with more than 400 folks in this community from all areas, everybody we were referred to, we wanted to talk to and we did talk to. We've done a whole series of targeted information and education sessions for potential borrowers and we'll continue to do them and do more of them. We received inquiries from more than 200 about 230 prospective borrowers. We reached out to every one of them. Every one of them got a call or an email or a call in an email or multiple calls or multiple emails to see whether they were interested in borrowing and in fact, whether they could borrow now. One of the CDFI mottos is we don't say no, we say not yet. And so our goal is to work with these folks who were interested in borrowing. In fact, what we found was that there were a fair number of those folks who were not yet ready, who are interested. There's a fair number of folks who didn't respond for whatever reason, but we think that it's an indication of the level of interest in what we're doing. The website we put up has actually had a very remarkable traffic and social media has been successful as well. This big what if is what if we can't attract CDFI? So when we started work here in January, if you go back to sort of January 1st, there were three CDFIs working here. One of them with an office here, William Mann Jr. CDC was an office here with different levels of commitment, different levels of capacity, different levels of activity and different reputations in the community. Now there are about 21 CDFIs working, trying to serve Fort Worth and still feeling out, some are still feeling out the market, some have jumped right in and they bring the capacity to do the full range of financing needs that we've identified in this community. I will say that until about three weeks ago, we didn't have anyone doing consumer lending, just small, what we would call small dollar consumer lending, we now do. So we've plugged that gap and in fact they've done, I think about 13 or 15 loans just since they've been here. So we're very happy about that. Not all of them will stay, not all of them will find that this is a market that they want to be in. I'm confident that at least 10, probably 12 to 15 will stay for the duration and that's part of our goal here is to make sure that this happens in a way that they understand the market, they understand and they do better than most people do. They understand it takes a while to develop these markets when they come in but they understand also that they need to make a commitment that they can't just show up occasionally for a deal and so we're confident that this is gonna be a productive. To give you an idea of that, there's about $2 billion overall, a little more than $2 billion and overall CDFI balance sheet capacity. It means there's $2 billion potentially to be loaned here from these CDFIs and it's not all gonna come here so we're not trying to suggest that it will but there's plenty of lending capacity and as I said, and sufficient liquidity which means they can lend when they need to lend and that we're covering all these sectors as Christina mentioned. Small business is where we started but consumer lending, non-profit lending, home ownership and mortgages and real estate of all types. Now one of the things I wanna mention in this cause I'm gonna come to some numbers in a minute is that the smaller or simpler deals are the ones that get done first. And so when you hear about the data that we're talking about, a lot of it was consumer lending and small, small business loans. We're starting to see mortgage lending pick up, we're thrilled about that. We'll see what happens with the changing economy but we think that that's gonna continue and we're working now with a whole bunch of folks doing various types of real estate developments and larger businesses, businesses seeking over half a million dollars in financing. They take longer but they're coming. As I said, we know that technical assistance is core to what we need to do. We've identified primary areas, we've identified local, regional and national providers of technical assistance all of whom are eager and willing to help as we go forward and as I said, we're going to release a bunch of documents soon. We have to create an independent nonprofit. Sorry, I'm talking so fast but hopefully I'm covering everything you need to know. We need to stand up CDFI-friendly Fort Worth. That work will start in July. Over the summer and particularly into the fall, Texas A&M Legal Clinic has agreed to do the legal work to charter the organization and to do the nonprofit filings. We've done this a lot but we wanna have local buy-in. We wanna make sure, you know, we could just produce the documents. We want the local folks to be part of this and to understand this. United Way has agreed to be our fiscal sponsor while we're waiting on our 501C3 determination. We've been really grateful for their support. And I don't think I'm talking out of school when I say we've gotten into a conversation with them about making their first alternative investment out of their endowment into the CDFI-friendly Fort Worth enhancement fund which would be a new thing. We'd be thrilled to work with them on that. Don't know that they're gonna do it but we're excited that they're talking about it. We've had a steering committee in place since March. It will phase itself out in the next month or so as we begin to form a founding board of directors. A couple of things are really critical for us in terms of making this work, making CDFIs from other places. Look at this and say that's a place I wanna go or that's a place I wanna stay. It needs to be community-centered. It needs to be represent the voice and the interests and the desires and the needs of the communities that we're trying to serve. Without that, CDFIs don't stay around. That's a critical thing no matter where they're practicing. It needs obviously have the core skills that you need. This is a new thing for a lot of folks but there's plenty of talent and expertise in Fort Worth to fill the staff. And it needs to be non-governmental. It needs to be sort of an arm's length from the government. I think the council understood that when you were going forward with this and so that's where we'll start. Over time, the board will change. And I will say to you again, I can't talk in specifics here. Part of my job is to go out and talk to banks and foundations and others who are in united ways. Anybody who's interested in investing in this strategy and there are a number of ways they can invest. One is they can do lending directly. We love that. We'd like to encourage them if it's a place they haven't done it before. Second is they can partner with any of those 21 CDFIs when they come in. Often the CDFIs come in and they're looking for, it's a really big deal and they can do the riskier part of it but they wanna bank for example to come in. We'll try and pair them with one of the banks that we're talking to who has never done this kind of stuff before and that's pretty true in most of these cases except for the really big banks. And so that they can do it. Or they can support CDFI-friendly Fort Worth in either of two ways. CDFI-friendly Fort Worth as a non-profit is going to have some operating costs, costs something so they can make grants. And I will tell you though I can't name names that I got my first commitment, voluntary commitment to operating support for CDFI-friendly Fort Worth this week. Yeah, and so we're excited about that. And the other is to be part of this enhancement fund which the notion of the enhancement fund is that if you're a CDFI lending in Fort Worth and you're in Boston or you're in New York or you're in Dubuque, you may not be on the ground here much, if at all. And you wanna know that there's somebody on the ground who has the same risk profile that you do in the deal. So you're watching. So if the entrepreneur gets sick or the developer has a life event, it's better to know if a deal's going sideways on day one or day two than it is on day 31 or day 32 when your chances of actually recovering the loan become much less. So happy to talk about the enhancement fund if people are interested. Financing, the interest, as I said, from the bars have been really strong. Now here I have some updates for you, again just from this morning. We now have 60 loans, 40 loans closed to date in small business and consumer. And now, as I said, we're starting to see mortgage loans for a total of about $6.1 million. So 10 times what you're seeing up there as the first numbers rolled in. We have a significant pipeline of potential deals. Not all of them will come to bear, but we have five real estate projects with about $81 million in potential activity. There are 14 million in small business loans over 500,000. And not only are we hearing about more deals, more deals coming to us every day, the best thing is, the CDFIs are telling us they found a new deal, which is the goal of this whole thing. We want them to be here and to find those opportunities and to mix it up and figure out how to do the financing. So what's next? We expect to see the financing activity increase at a rapid rate. We can't promise it'll increase 10 times by year end. But as I've said before, I'll be surprised if we don't at least hit $20 million by year end, which is again, half again as much financing has been done here over the last 15 years. So we're encouraged by that. The CDFI friendly Fort Worth, our goal is to have it set up and operational by September 30th. Sometime between August and the end of the year, we'll hire an executive director. That will change the dynamic significantly because me coming to town, and my team coming to have a team of eight people coming to town isn't the same as having someone whose year every day wakes up every day, knows everybody talks to people, deals come better and more gets done and CDFIs will like that better. So we'll do the business planning we talked about and by May 30th, May 20th, May 2023, we will officially be done with our contract. One of the commitments we make with every place we work is that we're here whenever we're needed, and we will stay involved at no cost. We will stay involved to provide whatever support is necessary, but we're confident that this is gonna be able to run autonomously and independently on its own. So hopefully I covered the things you wanted to hear about, but I'd love to answer any questions you might have. Questions, council? Go ahead, Leonard. One quick question. How have you marketed it locally today? Most of the marketing has been through that outreach, going out and talking with folks and inviting, every meeting involves, are you looking for financing? Do you know anybody who's looking for financing? Is there a part of the city we should be looking at? Is there a sector we should be looking at? So that's the way we like to find it best right now or to start. We've also used social media and that's generated some activity. And around the January 26th kickoff meeting, we got a fair amount of activity and have posted a page on our web, which invited people to tell us if they were looking for financing. It created just a surge of folks who are interested. Not all of them are real yet. We hope many of them are real over time. So that's been a big part of it. On the other side, the CDFI marketing, right? We've gotta reach out and convince those folks that wanna be here. I have about 35 years in the CDFI industry. My partner has even more and there aren't many people we don't know. So part of that is just getting a word out. People look for what we're doing now. We've done this in a number of places. People wanna know where we're going next. So there's part of that. And the other part of it is that when we need someone like a small dollar consumer lender, we ask, there are only a few of them. We ask around and we call them up until we find someone who wants to come here. Twist their arms gently if we need to. Have you worked with or interfaced with the chambers at all? We have, yes, absolutely. Thank you. Yeah, we are working through the chambers. Thank you for that. Yeah, we've worked with the chambers and have had the chambers on the steering committee. And so that's been an active outreach. We've gone out, we've done presentations both in person and via Zoom with groups that the chambers are pulled together and that other groups are pulled together. So we're open to every and all suggestion. If you have somebody we should talk to, please let us know. Great, thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions, council? Thanks, Mark. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thanks so far. Our next presentation is an ARF update with Reggie. And then, Mayor, I have a recusal statement on this one. So I'll go ahead and read it. I'm recusing myself from this item due to a conflict venture. So, ladies and gentlemen, I'm the employer of the Terran Area Food Bank. Thank you, Jared. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. I'm here today to provide an update on the ARPA allocations. As you know, the city received approximately 173.7 million through the federal ARPA allocation. The city received the first half of the allocation in May of last year and the second tranche was received on June 6th. All projects to date have been approved by council and all ARPA information available to the public is available to the public on the city's main webpage. Today, council has approved 120.4 million for various programs as listed for the ARPA program. There are several planned uses. These documents have yet to come to council for final approval, but as listed, majority minority infrastructure projects within the parks, majority minority area infrastructure projects within TPW for various improvements such as street lighting and traffic signal upgrades. There's a third outstanding M&C related to the Texas Wesleyan public utility relocation and the last one, Texas A&M University and the specific program use hasn't been identified at this point. When you consider all two categories, we've identified programs up to approximately 145.6 million which leaves now a balance of approximately 28 that's available for subsequent appropriation. The finance department issued a request for project proposals on April 14th with a timeline established in the receipt of those proposals by May 13th. All projects were initially reviewed by the finance department for eligibility and the listing of projects were then referred to the CMO team for prioritization. Within the revenue category, the city received several project requests that totaled 32.6 million. Within the non-revenue category, as illustrated, we received several proposals within that non-revenue category totaling approximately a 100.4 million all within to be funded within that 28 million. If I can go back, the revenue category, actually there's only 8 million available within that category. And then of course within the non-revenue, only 20.1 million available obviously to fund the, obviously we couldn't fund all of the 100.4 million of requests received. The city manager team is now in a position to recommend projects within the revenue recovery provision. There are two projects both within public events category and these are for two particular capital projects related to air handlers at Will Rogers and some other various renovations at Will Rogers and these two capital projects will exhaust the revenue category availability. Within the non-revenue category, there are several projects that are being recommended. The first is the visit for work, an allocation of 750,000. This is in conjunction with a previous ARPA allocation in the amount of six million that occurred a few months ago. Public events unemployment count for approximately 127,000. This is related to some unemployment claims that were actually intended to be funded with CARES dollars, but those claims had not been processed by the ending date of CARES. Within the public safety group, there are two recommendations. One to fund public safety workers' comp claims expenses, two million and the second one would be the police healthcare expenses that have been incurred at approximately 1.5 million. The third category, the deeply affordable housing at the Tobias Place, there's a recommendation to fund eight million for this program and this program would help to create 288 new affordable units. This final approval would be contingent upon Tarrant County's approval of two million, which is expected in September of the current year. The fourth proposal is for the United Way Gun Violence Prevention Program. This program is in collaboration between Tarrant County United Way Forward Police and eight other organizations and the focus around this program is to address youth gun violence. And again, this allocation is contingent upon Tarrant County's approval of approximately 1.9 million expected actually next month. And the last recommendation is for the Tarrant County Area Food Bank. This is for a capital acquisition project and the food bank is expecting to purchase 80,000 square feet, purchase an 80,000 square foot facility to provide double capacity for the food bank. And again, this approval is contingent upon Tarrant County's authorization of 4.8 million also expected in July. Reggie, I think Gina wanted to jump in with the question. Go ahead, Gina. Yes. Reggie, thank you for this report. I have some, quite a few questions. First, I saw where you've got some infrastructure projects in there, majority minority, but I'm real concerned about funding entities that already have enough money. And what I'm looking at is, you know, back in 2018, I had four lives lost because of flooding. This recent heavy rain, one life lost. And it concerns me right now because I have people whose homes are falling apart, mainly because of the way this city authorizes construction. And these are very, very nice neighborhoods. So the idea that I don't see funding going toward infrastructure is one problem. Another, I saw where we are taking a look at housing, but again, giving money to folk groups, entities who already have it, where we need affordable housing. I just wrote down some notes. I'd rather see money go toward workforce, the workforce preparedness, workforce training, gun violence. Okay, you know, let's give a Walmart gift card to have a gun turned in, but is that really getting to the problem? And I'll even throw in mental health, since that's what some folk want to blame it on. But I'm concerned about how this becomes the plan and at what point does council weigh in on this plan? And I'm not blaming you, you're just the guy up there who knows how to count the money. But you know, how do we weigh in? I'm just, I really like the way cities nationwide have used ARPA funding. They've been very, very smart, very wise. But to me, this just looks like it's too easy and we're not really thinking about need where we can. And so I'm just gonna use the categories that you put up there, infrastructure. I have a whole bunch of need there. I have street lights that stay out all the time. Now I'm told it's because people still copper. Well, I don't believe they still copper all the time. I just think we're not fixing street lights. When it comes to the roads, if you, I can show you video from the John T. White area where it looks like a raging river. And so what are we doing here? How does council weigh in? I'm real concerned about this. So let me jump in right here. So every one of these items comes to council for approval. One of the reasons we bring an informal report ahead of time is so that we can have that discussion debate. So I don't have to be this mad right now? Yeah, it's not yet, but. And that's okay. Grand heads mad would be too. We got to do better than this. And part of this is, and this is good feedback. Let me go. So there's a revenue category and a non-revenue. The way we've approached the revenue category is the places that lost revenue, particularly when you think about hotel revenue and things that actually went backwards. So we're looking at those things to fund. That's why you see the Will Rogers, because Will Rogers had to put capital projects on hold because they didn't have the money. I appreciate that, David, but I'm thinking about people. Why not? Now I'm going to the non-revenue category. And we had carved out, I think there's money in TPW, right? And money in parks and recreation. We could decide that there are a higher priority infrastructure needs. And we targeted majority minority areas for both the spending. TPW put the emphasis on streetlights, right? We could decide that the money should go to stormwater. I mean, that is up to us to decide, up to you to decide where that money gets allocated. So one of the reasons of bringing this is really to get that feedback. When you look at the way we wanted to approach a lot of this money was, since it's one-time money, is to look at one-time expenditures. So capital and infrastructure should be placed at the top because we don't necessarily want to fund programs that require ongoing commitments of other revenue sources, since this is a one-time revenue source from the federal government. So that's why you have the food bank. That's why you have a focus more on infrastructure than creating ongoing programs. Well, this wealth gap continues to broaden and my priority will always be focusing on people. And when you take a look at people, people need to have decent infrastructure. People need to be able to ride down 820 and not throw out an axle or park a car somewhere because they've been disabled and not worry about, do I have enough support? This, we need to do better. And I think we have the chance and the reason why I'm so upset is because I know how ARPA funding works. I know it's a one-time deal. We owe it to these taxpayers, the dollars to do the best we can. And right now infrastructure in, even Trump talked about infrastructure week. Everybody knows we have infrastructure needs and I really got them bad in my district. So that's my input. And I will just add to what Mayor Pro Tem is saying about what do we do? I think we have this conversation. Instead of putting up MNCs and voting them up and down, I mean, we already have some strong concerns about some of those MNCs we don't agree with. Let's take them off and replace them with ones that we really need. That's my suggestion. I got some more questions once he finishes his report. The next slide is just a summary of the recommendations that are just articulated. And ultimately it remains approximately 330,000 left after we've considered those projects. And next steps. On the 28th, we'll have an MNC which appropriates the second tranche, the 86.9 million, which was received in June. We will, as a second MNC, planning to allocate the four million to the Park and Recreation Department for the recommended park improvement projects. There's a third MNC which allocates approximately 127,000 for the public events and unemployment expenses I referenced earlier. The fourth and fifth items are actually not related to this presentation, but are ARPA related MNCs, one to execute an interlocal agreement with Tarrant County for the radio transmitter site. And the last item is execution of a forgivable subordinate loan. And this is related to a previously approved city ARPA allocation. And as has been mentioned, additional IRs and MNCs would be processed for all of the projects that are listed previously. And those would occur over the next several months. So to pick up on the theme, if Reggie, you go back. No, no, no, to that last slide on the MNCs. All right there. The two that relate to go forward commitments are the second and the third bullet, right? So we could decide to pull those off the agenda on the 28th and have a conversation about how that then gets allocated. Those I think are both in the non-revenue categories. Is that right? Correct, Reggie. Or so, right? Yes, that's, yeah, two and three. Those are currently on the 28th, but we can pull those off for that broader conversation how we should use that money if it's a desire by the council. David, everybody, and I'll stress this to new council people, ARPA money is like a Christmas list. Oh, it is. And you get a chance to spend money that you wouldn't have anywhere else any other time because it's a one-shot deal. Yes. We have to be good stewards of this one-shot deal. And I'll just reflect on something that you said, Mayor Purgem, these are taxpayer dollars. No matter if it came from the federal government or not, taxpayers paid for this. We've had a general sense, and this is not a hit on any nonprofit that was listed there, but we've had a general policy, David, over the last number of years of getting out of funding or subsidizing nonprofits. So I'm surprised to see some of this on here. And it's not to say that their needs are what they are, are not good, but I agree with Mayor Purgem. We've got bigger problems, all the stuff that Leonard's trying to do in the north part of Fort Worth and catching up on infrastructure, all the infrastructure that hasn't been done on the east side of Fort Worth. I've got my own infrastructure, and so I just want to say, we probably need to step back a second. Now, for one, and I was giving a clue here, there are rules in how the money can get spent, so it's not open-ended, right? So there are gonna be some limitations in how we spend it, but we need to come back and we can share both the limitations and then the categories of what also came in, right? Because you've got departments that have identified needs on the infrastructure side in majority-minority areas, right? And we could decide what's the most important infrastructure if we wanna go down that because it's one-time infrastructure spending, which is fair game. We have provided funding for some nonprofits if it's presented a couple different ways. One, that it'll meet the criteria of ARPA. Two, that it is contemplated as a one-time expenditure to expand capacity for broader public community benefit, right? That might be the food bank purchase of a larger building. And the third was to try to leverage other people's money, right? That's why you see some of those conditioned on county approval of the same project because we were trying to leverage money, meet a one-time obligation and the requirements of ARPA. But we can bring that back for a broader conversation. Does some of this information already exist in terms of when we went through the bond package, right? And I remember with Lauren as an example of TVW, creating a list and how we rank things from an infrastructure standpoint. Can we look back at that list both, or I should say look at the list by district and what would be most important since the bond passed? We could look at that and just, and also with the test of eligible to ARPA. Yeah, of course, apply that as well. But that would take a lot of the mystery out of it if we've done all the work. And counsel, you might look at the, there are two projects submitted. There's two slides in this presentation. One is revenue recovery category and one is non-revenue recovery category. There may be items on those lists that you feel like should take precedent over the ones that have been selected for approval that are going on the MNC on the 28th. That seems like the first list you should look at prior to going back to departments because theoretically your department has looked at some of those infrastructure needs and submitted them accordingly in the each category, right? And we're not talking about a lot of money. You're talking about 20 million in non-revenue and 8 million in revenue. So a lot of this money has already been allocated. So maybe we take this presentation in this list and quickly get with David and city management team on anything you'd like to take precedent over those. And importantly, if we're gonna decide as a group to not fund things such as Tobias Place or United Way or Tarrant Area Food Bank, we need to give that information very quickly not just to nonprofit partner, but to Tarrant County as well because it's gonna change a lot of other decisions. Not to say they can't get those projects funded, it just would change their equation quite a bit. Go ahead, Elizabeth. Mayor Projim, I truly appreciate you setting the tone of this conversation because as I sat here and looked at what was being recommended to us, I too had some pretty big concerns about how we were using these dollars. I've sat at this table and as my colleague once had pitched a fit about how we were spending those dollars because I truly do believe that they are mana from heaven and they should be treated as such. They are a gift, one that we can use to make generational change in our community. We can right the wrongs of our past. And so earlier I talked about transportation impact fees that really comes from stormwater issues within my district where we have lots of wrongs to write. I'll just put them out here on the table so that when we're having these conversations, there's no ambiguity about where I am on these. For our public safety workers' comp claims and police health expenditures, my question would be before we could vote on this, did any other departments experience increased health expenditures and workers' comp claims? And if so, one, I think this is a city budget issue, not an ARPA issue, but I'd be interested to know if that's something that was across the board for all departments and if we're doing something as a city to help mitigate the cost of COVID. The United Way Gun Violence Prevention Program, I think we need a lot of work when it comes to gun violence and prevention. My concern with this is I don't think it meets the one-time expenditure qualification that we have played out and I haven't been able to receive an answer as to why it didn't go through the CCPD funding process that was laid out to us in an IR for how these projects are selected and it could be it didn't meet the timeline or whatever, but I would like to know about that specifically and I agree with Eugena that this should be about infrastructure, one-time investments and I think we should really take this last 28 million and try to right our wrongs because this is a perfect opportunity to do so. On that topic, I wanna say something here. Infrastructure is a big problem, not just in District 7. Leonard and I both know that very well. District 2 has territory that equally has big needs and we hear about it all the time when we go to our combined meetings. So again, I hear it not mentioned but I'm gonna keep mentioning that so it doesn't get lost in the collective mindset here. That's inclusive too in District 4 for Allen. Now with that said, we don't have enough money to go around to take care of all our needs. Infrastructure is a big one, couldn't agree more but I'm gonna reserve judgment because there are other things in there if you read carefully and there that we, best be careful, all right? That are also important to many of us here in this council, so let's review it carefully. I'm more concerned right now, David, with the process because when Jay was here and we had this ARPA discussion, we were told, well, hey, go mention it to Jay, talk to Jay, he can get that dispersed that information to the departments. From time to time, I have my discussions with whatever relevant department there is but there's never been really a very structured process other than that. So I'd be curious to see how we can and maybe you could advise us, how we could best float our needs that we're aware of to you so that we can have a very orderly discussion about those needs. I just have a question because when I was looking at the allocations, each request is recommended to receive the amount that they requested. And so I almost like a math game. My question is, some of these other projects, be it whatever it is, and their dollars, are we able to, if we're not able to do a whole three million, would it work if we did 1.5? I don't know, that may be a question for each of the different departments or whatever it is. I was trying to figure out, were we only able to fund these because it kind of made up the eight million and the 20 million? No, we can give you more information. Some of them won't qualify. So it was just, it didn't qualify for the money. And so whether it was one dollar or one million dollars. So there's also maybe a way we can say that some of these wouldn't have qualified for ARPA at all, even though we got the request, right? And then others, it could be that area of, there was a range that it could have been funded at. So can we get a list of the decisions? I keep getting them on like newbie issues. Can we get a list of the reasons why, if they qualify or not? And the ones that qualified, just the overall recommendation on why they aren't funded or moving forward in relation to the others. Good, thank you, Reggie. Sure. Next up is our friends with Dr. Barnett. Thank you for coming and Andy Taft are gonna present on the proposed African-American Museum and Cultural Center. Thank you for your patience, gentlemen. Should have put you first. All right, leg is asleep. Okay. Mayor and city council, thanks so much. I'm proud to be here to brief you alongside Dr. John Barnett on a project that's been years and years in the making here in Fort Worth. My job today is to bring you up to speed on the African-American Museum and Cultural Center work that leads us to today's briefing. And Dr. Barnett will brief you on the most recent efforts and where we go from here. The idea gained traction in the summer of 2019, about 17, about seven months before COVID. And you might recall that a broad group was brought together by Fort Worth Housing Solutions to discuss what was gonna happen in Butler Place, the relocation of the Butler Place residents, the infrastructure associated with that land, aspirations for how the land might be reused to the betterment of Fort Worth, the utility challenges, and historic preservation. And that last point is particularly important because about a third of Butler Place, I'm supposed to be moving this, yeah. So this is the committee. And about a third of Butler Place, which is in the lower right-hand corner of this slide, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. It's about 17 acres. And Butler Place is rich in Fort Worth history. Originally, that area was known as Chambers Hill. And you have to imagine Butler Place before the interstates were built, right? It was across the railroad tracks from downtown, but it was attached to downtown. It was an African-American community. And it is where I Am Terrell was built. It's the first school for African-Americans in Fort Worth. I Am Terrell was built in 1882. And let's give that a little bit of perspective. That's 33 years after the founding of Fort Worth. And it was just 17 years after the first Juneteenth. So it gives you a sense of timing. About 57 years after that school was built, and as part of the New Deal, the very poor living conditions in Chambers Hill were improved by the construction of Butler Place. And the Butler Advisory Committee discussed the likely loss of some of the historic assets there and agreed that among the various mitigation steps that would be taken would be that Fort Worth Housing Solutions would consider ensuring the preservation of Carver Hamilton Elementary School and support of an African-American museum in Fort Worth. Now, Fort Worth Housing Solutions is working through the required mitigation processes now with the historic preservation authorities. And as you can see, the mitigation efforts, yeah, here we go, the mitigation efforts being discussed include support for an African-American museum, retention of two Butler Place apartment buildings, saving the bricks, preserving the Carver Hamilton building, which is located at the top of this image in red, and saving the bricks and a number of other improvements. During the Butler Advisory Committee meetings, and you can see here who is on the committee, a lot of time was spent discussing the African-American museum. And that conversation was so animated and so passionate that the museum conversation started to dominate the Butler conversation. And so a special committee was spun off to talk just about the museum. And D. Jennings and I were appointed to be co-chairs of that effort. And we accepted, as long as Fernando Costa was agreed to help us staff that effort. And we've been extraordinarily thankful and fortunate to have Fernando and Victor Turner and their staffs helping us every step of the way. The steering committee quickly grew to include community members, museum officials, real estate professionals, and attraction representatives. And after our friend D. Jennings passed away, Dr. Burnett agreed to coach here. So early in the effort, UTA Center of African-American Studies conducted a survey of stakeholders to assess the appropriateness of a museum and a cultural center as a way to preserve African-American history in Fort Worth. And as you can see on the charts up here, 94% of the people interviewed thought that that was an appropriate way to preserve African-American heritage in Fort Worth. But there was also a question about whether or not you would want a museum or a cultural center or both. And as you can see, about 75% of the people said both. And that comports with a number of conversations that we've had with museum officials. The combination of those two is especially strategic. There were also questions about museum membership and community support contributions, those sorts of things. And as you can see, the red here is favorable. The responses to the survey were favorable both in the African-American and the white community. So during COVID, we raised funds to conduct a professional museum workshop. And we made the decision at that time to wait to hold the workshop until people could get together, until community members could sit in a room together and look at each other in the eye, have shared experiences and build relationships. And so we did that. And we did that in November of last year. And we had quite a few city staff involved. And this very productive workshop included leading museum experts from around the country and scores of interested Fort Worth citizens. And you probably saw the newspaper articles about that in the Star Telegram. The workshop panel findings concluded that there's a strong community interest in the creation of an African-American museum and cultural center. The museum should be non-profit and should have autonomy, which is to say that it shouldn't be the wing of an existing museum, for instance. The museum should be a minimum 24,000 square feet and the quality should be in keeping with the other leading institutions in Fort Worth. The steering committee should articulate the museum's mission, vision, and goals before we move forward. And the steering committee should also commission a full study to assess and detail the museum's sustainability and economic feasibility. So that brings us up to today. And now Dr. John Barnett will share with you the steps that we've taken since the panel gave us those recommendations and where we go from here. Dr. Barnett. Thank you very much, Andy. First, let me acknowledge the mayor and the council and say what a privilege it is for me to serve in this capacity. D. Jennings and I finished high school the same year and I've known him for quite a while. He finished I.M. Turrell and I finished, well, Mighty Mighty Dunbar. I think I can say that. And so I, whereas I regretted his death, I'm honored that I was chosen to take his place, if you will. First, let me introduce myself by profession. I'm a pediatric dentist. By passion, I'm an art collector. By blessedness, I'm a native of Fort Worth, Texas. I was born in St. Joseph Hospital and grew up on the north side about three blocks from what is now Billy Bob's and Cattleman's Steakhouse. As a matter of fact, I still have the stench of the stockyards in my nostrils in that when I grew up, armor and swift were working packing houses. And now that area is one of our main tourist attractions. And so I'm not a stranger to Fort Worth and honored to be in this position to contribute to the progress, the progress of our great city. As Andy was referencing, we were charged by the panel of museum experts to come up with a mission statement, vision and goals. And we tasked our committee to do that. And this is what we came up with. The mission is to rigorously explore and proudly express African-American history and culture to enlighten, inspire, engage and challenge everyone toward a better understanding and a more just society. Very briefly, our vision is to bring people together by telling our stories. To that end, on April 22nd, April 2022, a panel of real estate experts from the Urban Land Institute in Dallas, Fort Worth District, presented the results of a site selection study. I need to say that site selection is a misnomer because at this point, this museum does not have a selected site. We took input from the workshop. We took input from stakeholder interviews. We took input from meetings of our committee and we identified with the help of the Urban Land Institute five sites that should be vetted for possible location of this museum. These five sites were the James E. Gwynn site. There is a plot of land behind James E. Gwynn that was identified as a potential site. The corner of Evans and Rosedale where the Juneteenth Museum is going to presently be located. And then the Hope Global Project, which is on the south side, was also identified as a potential site. So there were three sites on the historic south side, which were identified as well as two sites in the cultural district. Those sites were the plot of land site four. And I could hear which is the plot of land in front of the Heritage Parking Garage and then 1300 Gindi, which is on the corner and is now occupied by kids who care as well as Art Fort Worth. The five sites then were evaluated based on criteria established by the Urban Land Institute and their recommendations were, number one, the cultural district adaptive reuse of the 1300 Gindi. Their second choice was the cultural district new construction, which is the plot of land next to 1300 Gindi. They also added a sixth site, which we did not authorize, but they looked at the Southside Community Center, which was located on Rosedale. And they selected that as a potential third site. But of the three, we concentrated our attention on their number one recommendation. They provided pros and cons for all three locations. And we out of a necessity decided that we would select the number one preferred site, not our selected site, but for the case of moving this project forward, we had to have a site to concentrate on. And so we use the 1300 Gindi site as our preferred site. Having chosen that site as our preferred site, we then vetted or exposed this location to groups of concerned neighborhood stakeholders. On May 4th, we had a focus group with museum representatives and other cultural leaders at the Hazel Harvey Peace Neighborhood Center. And there were 15 in attendance. On May 9th, we had a focus group with business and civic leaders, 11 in attendance at the Hazel Harvey Peace Center for Neighborhoods. And then on May 12th, we had a public forum at the Como Community Center, which had approximately 50 people to get input on the selection of the ULI of the 1300 Gindi location. In addition to that, on June 22nd, I mean June 2022, Rainwater Charitable Foundation and United Way sponsored a learning tour for some 12 of us that allowed us to visit three outstanding museums of African American history and culture in the United States. We went to Montgomery, Alabama and we saw the Legacy Museum. We went to Washington, D.C., where we spent three days. We spent two days in the National Museum of African American History and Culture. And on the third day in Washington, D.C., we visited the Anacostia Museum. That is pictures of us in front of the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. This is a picture of our group in front of the National Museum of African American History in Washington, D.C. And then on the third day in Washington, D.C., we visited the Anacostia Community Museum, which was on the southeast section of Washington just to see what a smaller footprint would be like in a museum. As Andy mentioned earlier, the recommendation of our workshop was that we have a minimum of 25,000 square feet, yet all of the comparable museums that the ULI presented to us had an average of 40,000 square feet. And so our last stop was Detroit, where we visited the Charles Wright Museum of African American History. Prior to the building of the African American Museum in Washington, D.C., the Charles Wright Museum was the largest African American museum in the country. It is composed of 125,000 square feet. And we spent a day there with their staff and their executive director, and we were engaged by what they shared with us as we looked at continuing our journey towards an African American museum here in Fort Worth. I'm happy to announce that our steering committee created a 501C3 non-profit organization, as was recommended by the workshop. And it just so happens that on June 3rd, we got our certificate of filing back, which made official our steering committee now having a non-profit. The steering committee selected officers, in which I would serve as the chair, and Andy Taff would serve as the vice chair. Dr. Jennifer Brooks would serve as our secretary, and Scott Wilcox, who is the chief operating officer and chief financial officer for the Amon Carter Museum, would serve as our treasurer. We have not named directors at this point, apart from our officers, but our attorney of record is representative, Nicole Coyle, who is a partner in West and Associates, law firm, and our accountant is Juliet Williams, who is a CPA and president of JJ Williams PC. We determined that we would need in our next step to raise funds for a feasibility study. It was determined that the cost of this feasibility study would be approximately $230,000. At this point, we have raised $40,000, which has been approved by Fort Worth Housing Solutions. We have been awarded $30,000 from the North Texas Community Foundation. We have pending and prayerfully favorable outcome, $40,000, which will be discussed and voted on on the June 28th meeting from the city of Fort Worth, which leaves us a balance of $120,000 that we anticipate coming from individuals and foundations. To that end, we have appointed and selected Attorney Glenn Lewis as the chair of our fundraising committee, and we have tasked him with the goals of raising the $120,000 to complete our feasibility study, as well as raising an additional $50,000 that we will need for first year operations. Because at this point, all of our experts, all of our legal firm, our attorneys, and our accounting firms have been pro bono. And it has just been by the grace of God that we have found people who have seen the vision and embraced our project to provide those services for us, but we're running into situations now where out-of-pocket money is not going to meet the needs that we have. And so Attorney Lewis has accepted the challenge and he now represents the chair of our fundraising committee. There has been some question about this $230,000 feasibility study. What would be the scope of it? We will put out bids to national firms who've had experience in African-American museum construction, but the scope that we would ask them to consider would be an orientation meeting, which would be a meeting with our board to give some insight into what we would like to see done and have a site and area evaluation of concept description and industry trends, market analysis, evaluation of comparable facilities, annual usage of physical planning and concept development, financial analysis, and warranted and typical development costs. Let me say that every step of this process, we have tried to be as transparent and have tried to communicate with the public as much as we have. We have determined that we're going to trust the process. We're process locked and we're not putting the cart before the horse, but we are methodically taking our time to do this right because this museum is not for our 501C3. It is for the citizens of Fort Worth and they deserve to know what we are anticipating doing and how we're doing it and that they are a part of it. This is a museum for the people, by the people and of the people. And so our goal is to lay this step by step process out before the public so that they can be aware of what we're doing. As you know, there are three cultural institutions in the works right now. The African American Museum, a Fort Worth African American Museum and Cultural Center and the Juneteenth Museum and then the Transform 1012 North Main which is also referred to as the Freight Ralph Center for Arts and Community Healing. Let me say that we are not a conglomerate of museums but we are pledged to be mutually supportive of each other and so there will be some overlapping constituencies but our themes and our coverage are independent of each other and it is our feeling that Fort Worth is ready for these institutions. And so there is a brief overlap of the three but they each have their own character and their own personality. And so then what might we say are the keys to success for the museum and cultural center? One, community support is important. Two, leadership of the non-profit organization. Three, economic and financial feasibility which we will determine by the feasibility study once it's generated. Four, cooperation among cultural institutions. There are five major institutions at this point in the cultural district and I think a cooperation among those institutions to highlight or to enhance what already exists will contribute to the success of all of the institutions located there. And finally, fundraising or funding partnerships are important. What then might we say is are the next steps to move this project forward? One on June 28th, the city council will consider MNC allocating $40,000 toward the completion of our feasibility study. On July 27th, the stereo committee reviews a report on the city's building condition assessment of 1,300 GNDE, not our selected site but our preferred site for the sake of moving this project forward. On August 9th, the city council considers resolution authorizing the city manager or his designate as a consulting partner to execute the Butler Place memorandum of agreement which contemplates a study on the feasibility of a museum and cultural center. Andy covered that in his part of this presentation and that should be considered on August 9th. Between September and December of 2022, we plan on completing our fundraising for the feasibility study and starting to issue a request for proposals and select a qualified consultant to perform this work. Then between January and June of 2023, we plan to complete the feasibility study. We are moving along at a pace that is quite honestly, it's exhilarating. We're not moving too fast. We get questions all the time about when is this gonna be done? When are you gonna open? And I'd say when the time is ready, the doors are open but we're more concerned with being thorough, being transparent, trusting the process, answering what we know when we know it. I've been asked so many times about things that I just can't tell you. It's like you ask the football teams, are you gonna go to the Super Bowl? They say we're concentrated on winning the next game. The Super Bowl will come and we keep winning the next game. And so we think this museum will manifest as we take the next step. And so as we have taken these steps, we have summarized them in our reports and we're hoping that we can keep moving this forward. Let me then open the floor for, if you will, for questions if there be any. Any questions for Dr. Burnett? Anybody? Chris, go ahead. Yeah, I just have a couple of comments. First, thank you Dr. Burnett and Anytae for working diligently on this. And not only do I believe Ford is ready but we need, this needs to be part of Ford. And so I talked about that in our Juneteenth parade march about how we have to move a path forward. So I'm really excited about what you guys are doing. I look forward to voting on the MNC that's coming up. I do have, I guess a question because I wanna make sure that we as people or we as the black culture don't just get leftovers or hand me downs when we deserve the very best as any other museum that's out there. And so I am greatly excited about the gritty street of whatever it is, but I want us to make sure that we get the very best. And so I wanna make sure we look at the condition. I see that coming up July the 27th. I do have a question because I think Anya mentioned it and it's in your next steps as well. What is the relations for the African Museum and Butler? When this was first for placing the African Museum Butler or let me clarify your question. What's the relation, you talked about there. Well, the committee came out of a subcommittee for the Butler Housing Project. And so we have kind of evolved from a subcommittee to study we did not want to lose or the committee did not want to lose the historical significance of the Butler Housing Complex. And so to mitigate that loss, the thought of a museum if that property was no longer gonna be occupied by its original residents, how do we mitigate or preserve the historical perspective that is contained within the Butler Housing Project. So from that, this 21 member subcommittee was formed of the Butler Advisory Committee, of which now has evolved into the Fort Worth African American Museum Steering Committee, which as of June the 3rd has evolved into 501C3 non-profits for the Fort Worth African American Museum and Cultural Center. So the etiology or the beginning of it was the Butler Advisory Committee and we have evolved to our present state, yes. I don't know if that answers your question. No, it certainly did. And you have a site committee as well. A site committee? Well, we use the urban land, well, we use the workshop of museum experts to canvas the city. They listened to the input of some 100 stakeholder interviews. And they chose or recommended those five sites that we then vetted. So we started out with no idea and we brought in expert panels to say in our city and they took bus rides around the city, but they heard from the input from the 100 stakeholder interviews what would be areas that they think would be suitable and came to a consensus of the three areas in Historic South Fort Worth and the two areas in the cultural district. So all of this organically evolved from interviews conducted by national panelists to bring us to where we are today. So our site committee, which would be contained is really a culmination or a consensus of all of these groups coming, making recommendations and we have taken their recommendation and moved it to the next step to kind of vet and get insight into what is most appropriate for this institution. Gina. Thank you. Thank you for the presentation, Dr. Barnett. Andy, you may not remember, but I was at that first meeting with you at Butler and all the black folk were wondering what's downtown Fort Worth ain't doing here? What are they up to? And it was very interesting watching the dynamic in that room that evening as time moved on, Councilwoman Kelly Allen Gray took an active leadership role because that's her district. And this is my question to you. The current site and the preferred site involves two council districts. And I'm just wondering, are you going to involve the council member or in this case members as Councilwoman Gray was involved? Because if you come to City Hall, that means you probably want something. And what better way to make sure the council is fully engaged? And I think that's you too. And so I'm not asking for them to have presence, but I'm just curious, are you all going to do this with us at that table? Definitely. Congress, I mean, Councilman Firestone, the Gindi preferred first location is in his district. And so my plan, and I guess this is my reach out to you, Councilman, that I'd like to talk and sit down and give input. We are only coming, I think we came off of the trip last week. So we're just at the point where we are now ready to go to the next step with the feasibility study and we are centering around our preferred site. So definitely and definitely and definitely we will include Councilman Firestone. Well, I didn't mean to drag people into more jobs, but I noticed the former council person and I didn't see us having presence there. So that satisfies my question. I do think there's a need for continuity because I know that there are still people who think that it should be at Butler. And so that's in district eight. And so I just think it's, I think it helps your cause if you're a lot step with council folks, no matter how controversial they make me end up being, I can see Leonard just turning up everything. Well, no, appreciate that, Gina. You know, you're right. I mean, this is the first that I've seen this information and kind of seen the bigger story, which is fine. I do think it's important I was gonna bring this up for this reason that for those that are watching like myself that are seeing this, hearing it for the first time, have you engaged or has anyone from the city engaged kids who care for the Arts Council? Yes. As a matter of fact, this week, we have a meeting with both of those entities. Tomorrow, I think we're meeting with Arts Council and I think it's Thursday, we're meeting with kids who care. We have previously met with kids who care. So we've been in there, we're touring the building with tours being led by both of those entities. And so no, we are actively engaged and they are a part of, and they attended the focus groups that we gave when we got our results from the Urban Land Institute, both representatives from kids who care. I think it was Deborah Jong was there and Jared Sloan was at that meeting as well. And they were, is that right? Okay, yes, was at that meeting. And so yes, we try to keep them as informed of the steps of where we are saying that this is a preferred site and we have not selected a site. We think that if we do the correct vetting and if we follow the process and trust the process that the site will become evident to us. And so sometimes I guess if you feel the motion or the momentum going in one direction, you can say that's where you're going to put it. But it's hard to say we have to concentrate on something. So we've taken the consensus of all of these panels and focus groups and experts to look at this. And this is where we are. I am sure that there is not a site that we're gonna get 100% consensus on. And so we're doing our best to take with input the best that we can humanly do because I think perfection is out of our reach at this point. So yes, so preferred site but not selected site until we get back the feasibility study which will even give us a deeper dive into some of the questions that may need to be addressed where we can get to the point of presenting to this council and to our mayor, this is where it points and can you support that conclusion? But we have given you everything that we have done and none of it has been in the back room. None of it has been in my living room. It has been through expert input, showing that to the public, getting their feedback, wrestling with that, going and getting another panel, traveling to see other museums. It is more important that this be done right in the eyes of the public because building it might be the easiest part. Buying is getting forward to know that this is their museum. You know, this museum is not an African American museum. It's a museum of American history representing the perspective of the African American. But this is American history. It's just from the perspective of the African American and it will focus on the impact of African American history as it related or manifested in Fort Worth. And so we're bringing this from American history, from an African American perspective to a focus of how that perspective manifested itself. You know, our society is changing. Sometimes you can't see change when you're in the middle of change. You have to see change in the rear view mirror. But our society is changing but we have to do things that contribute to the change of our society. Even if we don't live to see it, we have to start bending that moral arc. Oh, I'm sorry. I've been told that and without passing the plate, it might be time for me to sit down. Are there other questions? Yeah, I did have one other question. And I was just thinking the same thing. And I was like, we had an organ here. I'm enjoying you speaking. Cause we had an organ and I was right on set. I was just trying to wake people up in the back. But the other question and the final question is how you set the sites. And I saw the Southside Center on there, which is fine in the feasibility. They will also be looking at Butler as well, all the sites. No, no, no. So no. The feasibility study will concentrate on our preferred site. We would almost have to run a separate feasibility study for each of the sites to give us all the parameters. So the firm will take our preferred site. That's why we had to get to a place of greatest consensus, greatest agreement because we're looking at $230,000 to give us all of the metrics and the parameters for our preferred site. We may not have to duplicate that for each site, but it would surely be some percentage of that, which could easily double the cost if we ran that site, if we ran that kind of analysis on all. So the Butler was not on our five sites. It was the three Hope Global, Evans and Rosedale, and the Plot of Land Behind Wind School. Those were our three that came to us from our museum experts that toured the city and evaluated based on input from the stakeholder interviews as to where this should happen. So we went from a large, we went from Fort Worth in general down to five sites based on the recommendation of this panel of museum experts. Yes. So I have a question about the site selection because I'm a little confused. Was it the museum experts that chose that selection or chose the Gindi site or was it ULI's recommendation that ultimately put the Gindi site up at the top? The museum, the museum, the panel of museums recommended those five sites. And then ULI went... And then ULI came and did the deep dive on those five sites and they categorized these sites. ULI is a great organization, one that I've worked with in my previous professional life and I know they do a lot of great work around the city. I'd be interested to know the makeup of that particular site selection committee that did the analysis. We have it. Oh, I can give it to you. ULI, I'm sorry, the ULI makeup. Yes, I thought we... Let me go, that's the ULI makeup. If one, I can make a copy for you, but that... I can see it. Oh yeah, that's the makeup of the ULI. And that was really my concern with putting so much weight behind ULI is that I think there's maybe some richness to the different locations that could have potentially been missed with that particular setup. And I just wanna say as a note of architecture when you showed, I wanna make sure we get this right. I think it's a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. Architecture matters and those other museums that you saw that you showed us were designed to be museums of African-American history and or black culture and they were designed to reflect that. And I would hate to see a shoehorn, such an important project into a building that wasn't designed with that thought, that very intentional thought around it. And so that's just, for whatever it's worth, those are my two cents on that particular. Thank you. Yes. I think additionally, the next time we reconvene, it would be beneficial to be, as you said, very transparent and again, just getting the information for the first time and again, for those listening. One takeaway is, well, why was our site targeted for this? Why, just because we're there and this group happens to like us, why are they disrupting where we are, potentially disrupting where we are? And I think just that conversation has to occur. Yes. Kids who care, the Art Council, they've been there a very long time and impacted thousands of lives that have great respect for what they learned there, for the facility, for the kids that have grown up there, all kinds of things. And so I would just say, this could be really alarming again to people and I just feel like that is honestly just totally dismissed. Could I say that we have talked to kids who care and they are not moving, they are incorporated, that building on 1300 Gindi is 96,000 square feet. We have met with kids who care and they want to stay and if that becomes our selected site, our plans are for them to stay. We have also had conversations with Arts Fort Worth. We have not asked anyone to leave. We are open to their being there or accommodating or making whatever choices they have, but we have not asked or eliminated anybody from that building of a 96,000 square foot building. 24,000 square foot was the minimum. The average was 40,000. I think it would be more than enough space but we have met with both of those groups and we have not asked anybody to move out. Dr. Burnett, I think you see why engagement with this body is important. Because there are some conversations that should take place before we get here and that's not your fault, but that's the reason why engagement is important. And it also helps our viewing audience know that we are probably on the same page. Yes. Any other questions for Dr. Burnett? No, I'd just like to add one more thing. And I think some of, and I have heard this in the community and by other leaders, I think some of the canuity is of why the culture district was selected is to support the museum, to make sure it's supported and held up. So I don't want that to be lost on ears. I don't, it's not the museum proceeding on other museums, but it's to make sure that it survives its tenure. That's just, I didn't put words in your mouth but there's some of the things I heard throughout the community is that black folks want it in black communities, but will it survive in the black community? I said what I said. Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Any other questions? Dr. Burnett, thank you very much and Andy for your time today. Thank you very much. We appreciate you. Councilor, our last presentation is actually, segues perfectly, public art program. I don't think Mark's here today. Is that right? So Fernando's going to lead us and Martha Peters will also be joining us in a moment from Arts Fort Worth. Thank you, Mayor and Council Members. For 20 years now, the city of Fort Worth has been contracting with the Arts Council of Fort Worth and Tarran County, also known as Arts Fort Worth, to manage our public art program. And the Fort Worth City Council plays a big role in the public art program. Among other things, the city council allocates subject to voter approval, 1% of the amount associated with every transportation bond proposition, and we just had a bond election passing last month, and 2% of every bond proposition associated with parks and various kinds of public facilities. The council also approves a long range master plan for public art, and an annual work plan for public art, and individual contracts for the design and fabrication of artworks. And finally, the council approves the appointment of Fort Worth residents to serve on the Fort Worth Art Commission, which works directly with the public art staff and selected artists on the design of that artwork. And those relationships are depicted in the organization chart that you see on the screen. You see that we have a professional services agreement between the city and Arts Fort Worth, and the heart of the work occurs in the Fort Worth Art Commission, which is currently chaired by Mr. Estrus Tucker, and includes various public art experts as well as community leaders who can contribute a valuable grassroots perspective to decisions that are made by the Art Commission. The public art program has enjoyed many successes over the past 20 years, but the council and others have pointed out, and I think it's a valid concern, that we need to do a better job of delivering our public art projects in a timely way. And I think you can see evidence that that need in this table that shows you the status of what we're calling legacy funded projects, projects that were funded with the 2014 bond program and even further back, as far back as the bond program of 2004. We have completed within those four debt programs a total of 60 projects, but there are 27 additional projects that are not yet complete. They're still in progress. You can see the different stages of progress all the way from planning to fabrication installation. There are actually four projects on hold. Three of those projects we'd like to take and reallocate or reprogram their funds for underfunded projects in the same council districts. And so Martha Peters from Arts for Worth will be seeking meetings with the affected district council members to discuss opportunities to reprogram those funds. The fourth project, which we're not recommending to have funds reprogrammed is associated with the convention center expansion. And that public art project will be ready to go as soon as we're ready to proceed with the convention center project. We were delayed as you know, by COVID and are getting ready to resume that work in the months ahead. And so I'd like to introduce or reintroduce to you the director of public art for Arts for Worth, Martha Peters, who has worked with us since the very inception of this program. I think most of you know Martha well. And she's prepared to outline for us a strategy to accelerate the delivery of public art projects in Fort Worth. Martha. Good afternoon, mayor and council. Before I begin, I'd like to introduce Karen Wiley, president, CEO of Arts for Worth, our incoming managing director and president of Wesley Gentle and our board chair, Jared Sloan. I believe Estrus Tucker was planning to join us. He may not yet be here, but anyway, I wanted to acknowledge them. So on November 30th of 2001, Mayor Parker presented a proclamation celebrating the 20th anniversary of the public art program. Currently the Fort Worth Public Art Commission collection includes 93 artworks throughout the city that celebrate our diversity, our history, honors our connection with nature and reflects who we aspire to be in the 21st century. These images are representing all the 10 projects that were completed this last fiscal year. While the public art program has enjoyed much success and some national recognition, we know that we have fallen short in timeliness on some of our projects and certainly on several of these legacy funded projects. We value being entrusted with the management of this program and we appreciate the opportunity to have reviewed our processes, look for ways we can be more efficient and get our projects moving more quickly. So we're gonna share some of the challenges we faced, but also the ways we've identified where our process can be improved. So Arts Fort Worth, and we are legally still the Arts Council of Fort Worth and Tarran County Inc, but this is our new name. We offer professional management services to the city and really the public art program is a multifaceted program. It includes program planning, including big picture planning and bond, a package planning, project management and our staff each is managing probably between 12 or more projects at any given time. We also do a lot of planning with the community and of course our artist selection panels. Project management really is like being a ring leader in the three ring circus because you're working with artists, the community, the city, project architects and engineers and of course the art commission. And I want you to know that I meet weekly as with very few exceptions with each of the project managers to see how we're doing on each of their projects and help them with any issues they're dealing with. We also work through city processes, the funding for public art stays in the bank of the city and those projects, the funding is only released through contracts with the artists. So we do work through the city's budgeting system and of course the law department. We also handle collection management of 151 artworks that includes our legacy collection, which are pieces that were previously owned by the city before this program began as well as donations of artwork since then. Community engagement, artist engagement is a huge part of what we do. It's what really makes the artworks connect and then we also serve as liaison to the Fort Worth Art Commission that you appoint. So just as in a nutshell, our organization began in 1963. We did work with, our predecessors worked with the city to help establish the public art program and our current staff has, believe this or not, 70 plus years in this very specialized field. Public art project management has been something we've done for the city under contracts since 2002. This fiscal year we're managing 43 projects in all council districts. And I kind of mentioned some of these items but I would also mention that we do report to Mark McAvoy under planning and data analytics of course is under Fernando Costa. So I was asked to look at other nonprofit organizations that manage public art programs that are city or county in the country. There are only a few. Most cities have their own staff with this arts expertise to manage their public art programs. But it was very interesting to touch base with these organizations. The first being the Arts and Science Council that manages the city of Charlotte's public art program for culture, which is in King County, Washington in the Seattle area, they manage a county program. And then the Regional Arts and Culture Council of Portland, Oregon, also managing a city program. And you can see their structure is a little different. They're under contract with the government entity but the public art funds go to them. They actually enter into the contracts with the artists and then once the artwork is completed they convey the artwork back to the governmental entity. So very different model than we use here. Closer to home, the Houston Arts Alliance is a little more like us. They also are like the others where they do have some independence. However, their funding is only sort of moved over to their accounts as needed to pay artist contracts. City staff reviews and approves project plans. They don't involve their city council, which I think is really interesting. But they also contact directly with artists and then they convey art to the city of Houston when they're finished. But they recently went through a process review program looking at how they could improve performance. And I thought it was interesting some of the ideas that they came up with. One is they do, although Houston Arts Alliance has the public art team, the city actually has a mayor's office of cultural affairs and it's just a one or two person office. And their director is now having weekly meetings with the public art manager. And this is really important and helpful because there are a lot of issues that need that high level attention. And then also they decided to hire two temporary project managers to address their project backlog. And then they developed some general project timelines for commissions, acquisitions and conservations with a caveat that sometimes those standard timelines may need to be adjusted under certain circumstances. So here in Fort Worth, the public art program managing it is really a collaborative partnership between the city of Fort Worth and Arts Fort Worth. To my page here. And while public art itself is a very highly collaborative effort and so is our management. Both entities have certain tasks that they're responsible for in order to move a project forward. So my staff and I have to give a shout out to Ann Allen, Alida Lobby, Jenny Kahn, Michelle Richardson who all helped really analyze each step of our project to understand where are there places we could be more efficient. So on this particular slide, you can see this column is showing the phases of a project and the tasks underneath. And then up above you're seeing all the folks who play a part. Of course our staff, city staff, the city's project consultant meaning the architect or engineer for the project, the council member and whose district the project is located. Their appointed project core team which is a group of stakeholders that helps us vision the project and follows it through from beginning to end. The artist selection panel which includes some project core team members and art expertise from the area. The artist that's selected of course in the art commission and then I added Fernando the ACM. So you can see as an example if you look under project core team formation we are staff, city staff especially the community engagement office and the council member all have a role in identifying potential people to serve on that core team. If you look under artist selection an artist selection involves just about everybody so you can see how that works. On the next slide is the continuation of the process. So here we have the final design phase and the commission phase which is when the artwork is actually built and installed and so forth. And here we also see for instance a contract review needed by the law department, purchase orders and payment requests so all those kinds of things are handled by city staff. So we of course work closely with project managers in the city departments but I did reach out to each of them to ask them well what is your standard timeframe for your projects? So we could really think about doing the same for public art. And for facilities basically architectural projects 36 months for park improvement projects 36 months arterial streets 48 to 60 months after a right away acquisition. So ideally a public art project runs concurrently with the larger capital project of which it's associated and that's our goal and that's the ideal. So we are adopting these as our standard guidelines going forward for our capital projects so that the artwork is finished concurrently with the project wherever possible. I will say that sometimes we're not really they're not ready for us till they have to get done before we get done particularly street for instance but in most cases we should be able to adopt this timeline. So looking at some of the challenges and solutions to timely project delivery we first have to look at some unique aspects of public art. One is that we have you involved which is wonderful and it's great but it's unlike any other capital project and we really find that it's very much a benefit to our projects. We also have robust community engagement the advent of project core teams with the master plan update of 2017 really amp that up and it's been very helpful but as you can imagine we have lots of people to convene sometimes scheduling can be difficult but it's well worth it and Zoom is helping a lot these days we're kind of continuing on that way. We also have the unique aspect is that artists are commissioned to create one of a kind original works of art. So we have artists who they're very qualified they're very knowledgeable but they may be doing a project that's unlike any other project they've ever done but it's worth it because then the city has an asset like nobody else's so that's a unique aspect. Also artists are responsible for everything design, fabrication and installation even if in many cases they subcontract out some of that work or much of it the fabrication and installation. So they are dealing with subcontractors and we have seen sometimes that can be challenging and then of course finally that our artists works are copyrighted. So if we have an issue with an artist and we have to let them go that usually means we gotta start over with a new artist. So there's some examples of delays that are beyond our control the city's control and that might be an artist who has an injury or a serious illness fabricator backs out they have to find another one. Of course the recent cost spikes and supply chain issues everyone's facing we're seeing. And other issues that have come up including unknown site conditions even aspects of a site that the city wasn't aware of and then also review time frames for instance if we have a project associated with Text. Some examples of things that we may be able to control better are things such as contract negotiations. Artists not maybe making the public art project their priority. Staff turn around times for their tasks and of course there's sometimes capital projects that need to be delayed to find a new site. And sometimes council members might have a request that impacts the schedule. So here are the solutions we come up with or at least some things we think will help with general project delivery and we're excited we're already starting to implement some of them. And we've been talking with course Fernando and Mark McAvoy about some of these ideas and I believe we have their concurrence. But one is if we run into a project with a delay or any kind of budget change that we would request the assistant city manager to sign off on that. So it's crystal clear what's going on and then of course communicate those issues with the council members. And we do try to keep our council members involved but I think this will add another layer of information and transparency. Also if we have an artist who's just been a little slow or just not making the project a priority to have the city attorney send out a letter of non-compliance if they're missing a deadline. Because there is a termination for cause clause in their contracts and that might wake them up if our staff isn't able to get them to move forward. And then we're also working on a new kind of public art contract that's basically a base contract for preliminary design with a denda for final design and commission so that we don't go through a contract negotiation three times. We have a one kind of a three in one contract which we think will help expedite negotiations. Re-establish weekly meetings with the assistant city manager or department director to prove our communications. And then ask that our city try to our city staff partners try to turn things around within five business days if possible. One issue that we and the arts Fort Worth have experienced in the last couple of years is a reduction in our staff capacity. One reason is that one of our most experienced project managers started getting involved with helping clean up some ERP and capital budget matters during that switch over to that new system. And she's found herself doing more and more sort of internal capital budget work that's taken her away from project management. And then also in 2021 we took a budget hit or a decrease during COVID-19 and that decreased the state level now for two years and that has had an impact on our staffing. So to show good faith and our firm desire of doing a better job, getting those older projects out the door and meeting the kind of expectations we know you have. Arts Fort Worth, the board and the president authorized hiring a part-time project manager at arts Fort Worth's expense. So that's what we have done and we were able to hire a former employee who used to be a project manager for us and so we're hopeful that will make a difference. I know you saw a chart at the beginning with the status of old projects and I wanted to show you this as the 16 or 14 or so projects that we believe will be complete by the end of this calendar year and into next calendar year. As you can see, these are all pieces in fabrication or final design. So these are a priority for us and we'll look forward to having them all installed. So just to wrap up, I just wanna share with you as Arts Fort Worth representing our management of your public art program that our commitment is to prioritize the completion of legacy funded projects, work with city staff to implement some of these new process improvements, really all of them if we can, commit to a standard timeframe for public art projects moving forward and to report back to you on our progress in September when we share with you an annual work plan for 2023 as well as the art commission's public art plan for the 2022 bond program. And that's all I have. Thank you, Martha. Any questions, council? No? Okay. All right. Thank you very much. I appreciate you. Council, I think that's the last of our presentations. We're not doing budget today. Any future agenda items or reports, requests for city management? Go ahead, Michael. Jeanette, most of us got an email today from Jeanette about a liquor licenses process. Jeanette, I thank you for sending that out, but the real issue is that we have an ability at some points under certain licenses to protest those licenses. So getting it after it's already been signed and approved by us doesn't really help us. So I'm not sure if this is an IR, but we need to put a process in place where we're notified so we at least might, and this stems from liquor license that was issued in Como. I don't know that in that particular instance, I do know that we couldn't have protested it, but it would have been nice to know about it in process because there probably could have been some other things that we've done. There's some, I've met with state rep Charlie Garan, state rep Ramiro, they were part of this conversation. There are some things that need to be done on the state level, but where we can control on the city level, I'd like to try and do that if it's going in the neighborhoods where it shouldn't. Any other items, council? Yeah, I have one. I don't really know if this is a future agenda item, but I want to put it on the hearts of us. Mentioning to David, also to Christina Brooks about us partnering with the Juneteenth and doing a debriefing of all the excitement that happened over the weekend. I think that's important. So visit forward Christina Brooks office, city staff, so that we can be prepared for next year or whatever. Whatever we need to do to bring a more partnership together. So that's that. So I don't know who can put that together, but I think that's very important. The other thing is I just got a text message about people complaining about being have access to watching us Facebook, but they talked about, I guess, the way it's done now, it's not available until a day after on the city website. I don't know, yeah, live stream, but they missed half of the meeting. When can they go back and watch it? So it's kind of getting a little bit. Yeah, and Renee, I know is looking at this immediately. So then we talked about with him last week. Because I did ask him about the Facebook when you weren't here. Okay, so that's my two future agenda items. And I have one for Deanna probably, and we can just can wait until August, but I know we have a six week family leave policy. I want us to kind of get an update on how that's worked so far for city employees and do a little exploration and probably deep dive with best place for working parents on the push to maybe go to 12 weeks and think about that as a future agenda item. There's no rush on that. Go ahead, Elizabeth, you had something. Yeah, so we have several small historic cemeteries within the city. And so I'd like to get an IR on where those are, what involvement the city has in maintaining those and what our historical preservation staff can do, and we can do as a community to make sure that we're preserving those. And that really comes from a conversation from a potential encroachment to Pioneer's Rest Cemetery. And that has some of our founding leaders in the city. So it's important that we're making sure we take care of those. Anybody else? Go ahead, Jared. I'll do one. We met with the parks department, which I'm really grateful for at Crow Spake Park. And I know that parks does everything they can in terms of dredging ponds. I know that there may be a need in this upcoming budget cycle to look at, is that budget sufficient? So I'd love to maybe get informed and report on the need for dredging in district six, but I'm sure that applies to other districts too. Anybody else? Going once, going twice. That's it. We're adjourned and we're gonna go into executive session. The city council will now convene into executive session on the following matters. The city council will conduct a closed meeting or to discuss.