 We're gonna go ahead and get started. I'm just gonna do a few like an overview and some housekeeping stuff and then we'll get the council member to come up here and get us started. So we're gonna have four presentations tonight. We're gonna be covering the budget, the proposed bond election projects, redistricting, and then the My Fort Worth app that the city has. We're taping tonight's meeting so that if somebody isn't able to attend or if you just wanna go back and watch it to get, you know, to see it again, we'll have that taped and we'll have all of the PowerPoint presentations in the video. If you provide your email out front, I will also email you all of the presentations from tonight, so anything that you see on the screen don't feel like you have to write it down really quick. I'll send you a copy that you can have. Afterwards, we'll have staff available if you wanna come up and ask about any of the bond projects. We have staff from multiple departments here that can answer your questions. So feel free to ask questions during the presentation but we'll also have staff here afterwards if you have individual projects that you would like to find out more information about. We have a list of all the projects also outside. And we will have, after each presentation, there'll be an opportunity to ask questions but staff will also stay afterwards for additional questions. So now, Councilor Williams, if you wanna come up and welcome everybody. Hi, good evening, everybody. So my dad is a Baptist preacher, so I'm used to like, amen. But let's try that again. Good evening, everybody. It's so great to see all of you here. You know, this is what community is about, right? About folks coming together around important issues and important decisions and really making decisions that work for all of our city and continue to ensure that we have a prosperous city. So I'm so glad to see all of y'all here for the sound hall, for our folks that are gonna be tuning in virtually. Thank y'all also for watching this video as well. Today we have a number of things to talk about. We'll be talking about redistricting, the bond, and we'll also be talking about the Mindful Worth project or the app and also the budget. And so I won't belabor the point because we have a lot of great information for you. If there are any questions that you have, please feel free to ask those during the Q&A segment. And if we can't get to your question, Mr. Kendall Locke, who's our district director, he's passing out his cards and they're available on the table. Please feel free to reach out to our office with any issues about the topics today. If you have issues about other topics that are beyond what we're talking about today, please feel free to connect with us after the event and we'll make sure to have that conversation with you and connect you to the proper staff. So without any further ado, I'd like to introduce Mr. Mark McAvoy. He'll be my first presenter and then he'll introduce next presenter and I'll come back and say the final words and then tonight. So thank y'all again for being here, even my little ones who came right out of school. I'm glad y'all are here as well. I think we may have some future council members here one day, so I'm glad y'all are here. Thank y'all again and look forward to connecting with y'all after the event. Take care. All right, good evening. How are y'all? Great. Good. Well, first of all, I wanna thank council member Williams and Kendall for putting this together and extending the invitation for us to come out and share some information about the city's budget with you all this evening. My name is Mark McAvoy. I'm the director of planning and data analytics and that is the department that has the group in it that oversees the development and management of the city's budget. And so I'm gonna spend a few minutes this evening talking with you about the fiscal 2022 budget and that is the budget that we are currently in the process of moving through council, getting ready for public hearings that are coming up on September 14th and then we have a scheduled council consideration on September 21st to adopt the budget for the fiscal year that begins on October 1st. And so what I will do is just walk you through some very high level information about the budget. If at any time you have questions about any of the information, feel free to interject. I'll be happy to answer questions. Also reserve some time at the end for that as well. And then like Michelle said at the outset, if we wanna stick around later and field some of those, feel free to do that as well. So we will go ahead and get started. Mentioned that we are talking about the fiscal 2022 budget. And so what I'll say before I get into the actual presentation is that the city is a corporation. It's a legally created corporation by the state of Texas that operates as a corporate entity. And like most corporate entities, it has a financial plan, a spending plan, an allocation plan, and that's what the budget is. It kind of lays out the plan for funding all of the city's services and functions and responsibilities and all of the things that it does throughout the coming fiscal year. And so everything that you see tonight presented is the plan, the funding plan for the year that begins October 1st, 2021, and ends September 30th, 2022. And so we're gonna start talking about kind of the foundation of the beginning of the budget, which is talking about assessed property value and how that assessed value influences the recommended tax rate and ultimately the revenue that the city derives from property taxes. And so as you can see here, over the last several years, going back to fiscal year 2014, you can see a steady increase in both the appraised value of all property in the city of Fort Worth and then that property, which is ultimately taxable property, which turns into the levy that we use to create the revenues, or not create the revenues, but to set the recommended budget with revenues that we expect to collect. And so as you see there, just in the change from fiscal 21 to 22, we added close to $8 billion in taxable property value in the city of Fort Worth. That's just in one year. And I'm gonna show you here with this information how that breaks out between new construction and the appreciation, essentially, of existing property. And so as you can see here, the change over year over year, fiscal 21 to 22, is approximately $7.5 billion. $4.2 billion of that is in the change in taxable value, essentially appreciation of existing property, 5.3%. The other 3.2 billion is new construction value that did not exist in the previous tax year. So this is essentially new homes, new office buildings, new hotels, all of that kind of stuff. And that constitutes 4.1% of that increase in taxable value between 21 and 22. So all of that taxable value then is used to create the plan that turns into the recommended budget with the revenue. How do we set and derive that number? Well, the city has to recommend a tax rate to apply against that taxable value to bring in the revenue to fund those operations that we talked about. And so for the fiscal 2022 budget, the recommended tax rate is 73.25 cents, or 0.7325 of every $100 of assessed value or taxable value. And that constitutes a one and a half cent decrease over the current year's property tax rate. So the tax rate is coming down one and a half cents this year, year over year. Yes, ma'am. So I have some information later in the presentation that kind of talks about that on average. That is true on an individual property basis. It really depends on whether your values are stagnant or going up. I'm sorry to say again. We tend to survey the entire city to see where trends are happening. I can't say that we looked at a specific subdivision over another, but yes, generally we look at where the hotspots are, where the highest value increases take place just to get a sense of where that's happening. Absolutely. So when you look at the rate, we talked about the 0.7325. How is that rate allocated? What does it go to fund? Well, you can see here in this flow chart breakout, we have that allocated in several different ways. The first split is between operations and maintenance, which is exactly what it says. We're operating facilities. We're maintaining streets. We're maintaining parks. We're doing all of the operations and maintenance that you have come to expect as a resident of the city of Fort Worth. And then the other part of that first breakout is to fund debt service. So the debt service goes to pay the long-term debt that goes to invest in new capital infrastructure, essentially. And so then you see a second split there coming out of the operations and maintenance allocation, which 52 cents of that is pure operations. And then we reserve six and a half cents for essentially cash-funded maintenance of capital infrastructure. So all of the roads, the parks, the traffic signal systems, the bridges, all of those capital assets that you see as you travel around the city on a day-to-day basis, that six and a half cents goes to fund the maintenance and upkeep of those capital assets on an annual basis. Yes, sir? That is correct. It's maintenance and upkeep. Say again? Yes. Yeah, it would fund salaries of the employees doing the street maintenance, salaries of the park maintenance workers, the librarians, the traffic signal technicians, all of those folks. And you're absolutely right. The capital portion of that is going into the actual upkeep and maintenance of those capital assets. Yes, ma'am? Partly. Most of the police budget is funded through the general fund, which is in this budget that we're talking about. And we'll get into a more line-item representation a little bit deeper that shows you the breakout of the police budget and the general fund. But part of the police budget is also funded through the CCPD, which we'll also talk about in a slide further in the presentation. You're welcome. Staying on tax rates and looking at a more historical perspective, going back to 2013, you can see how the same allocation that we just talked about from 2013 to 2022 recommended tax rate has gone from 85.5 per $100 of assessed value or taxable value to 73.25. So a dramatic reduction over those nine years. And as you can see, even though the tax rate is reducing, there are in combination of 2014 and 2018 almost $700 million of debt added with bond elections that occurred in those two years that are the capital assets that are added that going back to your question, sir, that six and a half cents goes to maintain year over year. So how do the values, the rate and the revenue work together? Well, essentially we take the taxable value, we apply the tax rate to it, and we come up with an estimated property tax revenue. And as you can see with this slide, the taxable value is going up by that 9.4%, which we talked about 4.1% of that is new construction, 5.3 is appreciation, the reduction of one and a half cents and the tax rate, which leads to a total property tax revenue estimate for fiscal year 2022 of $596 million, which is an increase of 7% over the previous year. And this is just kind of giving you a picture of the comparison between 21 and 22 and in each of those allocations of how the tax revenue breaks out. And you'll notice on the fiscal 22 side of the ledger, there is a new item in there, an economic development set aside of $2 million to seed some incentive programs with essentially a quarter cent of the property tax rate. But you can see the bottom line there again is 596 million, which is an increase over last year of approximately $39 million. So to go back to a question that was asked previously about what does that look like to our homes, right? On average, we're taking an average here. This is gonna fluctuate depending on the value of your property and how much it has appreciated year over year. But if we're looking at a $200,000 home, taxable value of $200,000 in fiscal 2021 with the current tax rate applied, the tax rate or the, I'm sorry, the tax revenue that would come to the city of Fort Worth is essentially $1495. And if you put that on a day-to-day basis, it's about $4.10 a day. That's the city's portion of your property tax bill, okay? If you assume that that 5.3% appreciation applies on average to this home in this year, fiscal 22, that taxable value goes up to 210,600, apply the new tax rate, which again is one and a half cent lower, and you get a tax bill essentially of $1543 or $4.23 a day. So if you break it down to a daily conversation, the increase for the average home is approximately 13 cents a day in property tax paid year over year. Yes, sir. True, you could break it down to whatever time increment you wanted to break down, right? So this is just an easy way to look at it to help bring some additional context to it. But the bottom line is like you asked earlier, on average, starting with a $200,000 home, you're paying essentially $48 more this year than you did last year on the city's portion of the property tax bill. Keep in mind there are other portions. There's a school district portion, a county portion and some others. There's a lot of contributing factors to a number like that, and I've not read that article, so I'm not sure exactly what it's focusing on, but there's no question. As we saw in the first slide, the taxable value is going up. We saw that graph with the line going like this, right? So it's increasing, there's no question about that. So we saw this chart before, but this is just to kind of put it in the context of the actual tax bill, the city's portion of the tax bill. Same breakout, this time using dollars on the average house. 1543 overall, the operations and maintenance portion of that 1232, the debt portion 311, and then you break it down farther between that operations and cash capital piece and you see the numbers there. So now all of that goes into the budget making process. We say we've got this revenue number from property taxes we're gonna plug in and now we're gonna do budget making and we're gonna recommend a budget to cover the operations of the city for the next fiscal year. What does that look like? Again, this is going to be at an extremely high level, right? But it constitutes a macro picture of what the city's operating budget looks like. We'll also present some information about the capital budget when we get deeper into the presentation. But from an operations perspective, total operating budget for fiscal 22s, 1.861 billion. You see the breakdown there between the general fund going back to the earlier question, that includes all of your general governmental services, police, fire, parks, libraries, neighborhood services, transportation and public works, all of those things. You have your enterprise funds, 631 million and then you just see how it cascades down from there for a total of 1.861 billion. And ma'am, to answer your earlier question, the CCPD portion of the police budget is in that special revenue, that third bar on this chart, which is in total 171 million. Now at fund, there are more things in the special revenue category than just CCPD, but CCPD is a special revenue fund. Yes, sir? Where does the sales tax come in the way? So in the general fund, in that total revenue there, that 761 million that constitutes and we'll see it in the next slide. So why don't we go to the next slide and I'll show you exactly where it's represented. So here we're just looking at the general fund revenues and you can see the top bar, the biggest percentage of those revenues, which in total is 760, almost $2 million. Property tax is the largest. Sir, to answer your question in the general fund, sales tax is the second largest at $182 million. Now there's another sales tax component that goes into CCPD, which we'll see in just a minute, but as you go down from sales tax, you see the remaining general fund revenues that make up the total. So you have a variety of other things. Charges for services, if you go and you rent space at a park or a room at a library or any other charge for services, you get a plan reviewed downtown or something like that. That's what that revenue consists of. Licenses and permits, if you build an addition onto your home and you get a building permit, those kinds of things. Everybody knows what a fine in forfeiture is, I unfortunately do. So I'm a little confused. What's the general fund revenue in relationship to the prior slide? So the general fund is one of the pieces of the total operating budget. So an enterprise fund is essentially a fund that contains a business unit that operates, takes revenue in, has expenditures, but it funds itself. So think of the water utility as an enterprise fund. And here I'll show you the, well, we'll get to that in three slides. If you look at this and compare it to last year, fiscal 21, again, you see that growth in terms of general fund revenues which is increasing by approximately $43 million year over year, which is a 6% increase from fiscal 21. If you look at the expenditure side, and I realize this is a little hard to read because there's a lot of information on it and it's small print, but these will be available for you. You can see from the highest budget amount to the lowest, the expenditure side of the general fund, which is also 600 and I'm sorry, 761 million, also an increase of 6.4%, 04%. And ma'am, you can see here at the top of that list is the police department. So the general fund portion of the police department's budget in fiscal 22 is 282.3 million. And you can see fire part transportation on down. And so you saw that that difference year over year was approximately $44 million. Well, 40 million of that increase is made up of essentially six things that you see here. There is an increase in pension contribution that is part of that 43 million. There is a collective bargaining agreement with the firefighters. You see a portion of that in contract wage and benefit increases. We're opening new city facilities, we're always doing that. Five or so million of that is associated with those new city facilities. Police wage and benefit increases associated with the meet and confer agreement is there and then pay for performance and economic development incentives round out that list. And so 40 million of that 44 million increase is accounted for in these six items. So sir, yes sir, pay for performance is basically a program for all of the city's 7,000 employees. It's an incentive-based pay increase program so that you're taking your workforce and you're allowing it to grow. You're allowing salaries to grow not only to remain competitive but also to reward performance of people who are on staff and have performed above and beyond for the year period that you're considering. Every employee I know in the city on any city is, in my experience, working with them and being one of them for years, always works about the take right and goes beyond for the type that they get. I don't understand how you can reward something they already are doing. So this is, whether that's true or not, this is a program that is designed to allow individual supervisors of individual employees to say, through a performance evaluation, you're doing great work, you qualify for a pay for performance increase. And so not every 7,000 employees will necessarily qualify for that but it's available as a program funded with the notice here. Is that like a bonus or an increase in this salary now? This program is an increase in salary based upon an evaluation. So it's a merit-based program but it is an increase to the base salary. So it becomes an ongoing expense. Yes, sir. Okay, let's say a general increase to the stationary increase due to all employees. So occasionally there are both occasionally there's one or the other, occasionally there are none of those. And so in this particular year, fiscal 22, there is not an across-the-board increase programmed. There is not. Now, having said that, if you look at two of these line items, we have some contractual increases that I just mentioned with the fire collective bargaining agreement and the police meet and confer agreement. So those are contractual obligations that must be met but an across-the-board increase this year is not programmed. However, we do have, as we've been talking about this, pay-for-performance program, program for fiscal 22. Yes? So what happens if the employee disagrees with the supervisors that's thinking about their performance? So like in most employment settings, there are a variety of ways to dispute that, I have a conversation about that. In some cases have formal grievance processes to go through and get that mediated and resolved at a higher level. And that happens regardless of whether we have a pay for performance program or not, those kinds of conversations. But those things do exist. Yes ma'am? Is the merit based on a subjective or are there objectives that the employee needs? And is that kind of public or is it just for buddies, you know, if you like real well or, you know, you both find it, you know, working in the department? How is this merit assessed by the supervisor who accounts for that? Sure, so when any employee starts work, they get a performance plan that is agreed to with that employee and the supervisor, and that's what they're evaluated on. And so there are objective criteria and those objective criteria, like in any other system, are subjectively applied, meaning I may have a different viewpoint of a performance criteria than you have or than she has or that he has, but to the extent that it is able to measure in general performance, it does a very capable job of doing that. And ultimately it comes down to that relationship between the supervisor and his or her employee and that conversation that happens if there's some kind of disagreement. But generally, one of the other aspects of this is that it's, we try to encourage at the city that you don't just have the conversation about performance at the end of the year when you get your evaluation. This is an ongoing dialogue, so there should be no surprises, there should be no issues when you get to the performance evaluation. Is it a training program existing previously? I believe so. I would have to get you some information on history and how many years it has, but I believe so. Yes, sir. Just to be very, very clear and make sure everybody who attended tonight understands there is no collective bargaining available to employees under this performance pay plan at all, correct? For general employees, that's correct. All right, any other questions before I move on? All right, enterprise funds. Sir, you asked about this earlier. So here are the enterprise funds, and you can see by far and away the Water and Sewer Enterprise Fund is the largest, constitutes almost 78% of the enterprise fund total of 631 million. We also have the Solid Waste Enterprise, Stormwater Enterprise, our municipal airports, which Mr. Venables, who you will hear from later on the bond program, manages as an enterprise, and then we have a municipal parking enterprise fund. That's the collection of enterprises that operate essentially as a business line that are completely managed and operated with the incoming revenues to cover the expenses associated with operating each of those businesses. Yes, sir. Does the city make money on those services that it provides? Or does it break the law? So are you asking in general or in these? By water and the sewer. Well, in each of these enterprise funds, one of the characteristics of an enterprise fund is that you are able to carry a fund balance so that you can fund operations if you run into a situation where your revenue start declining. And so that's one of the unique aspects of an enterprise fund versus, say, the general fund. And so in general, managers are submitting budgets and running operations in order to cover their expenses with planned revenues. But think back to February when we had the winter storm that was a 100-year storm, events like that, especially if you have more than one of them and they start stacking up, your expenditures go up and your revenue pretty much stays the same. There may be a gradual increase, but an enterprise allows for the business manager to make those decisions. And generally, if expenses are going up for some unplanned thing, you can cover those with balance. Let me go here first and then here. Can we have any control at all over how much we have to pay the water districts for the money they pump up the hill from Lake Livingston? Well, I think it would be different. The territory for water districts, as I understand it, is our water supplier. We buy all our water from them. Raw water? Raw water, yes. So they just tell us what the price is and we pay it, right? We don't have any control over that. I am not an expert on that. I can get you some information and answer that question, but the water department is the subject matter expert on those rates, but going back to your question, that's an expense that we budget annually. And we know that cost annually. There are very few in-year dramatic increases. That's a known cost. I think you had a question, sir. An enterprise funded from like a business and let's say for some year ago, if you want to get a water sewer made a $100 million profit by the end of the year, they have that much more revenue than the investments. Do they file that into the back of the general fund in any way or is it kept in their own books until such time as you see it, so what's the, how does that work? Right, one of the other characteristics of an enterprise fund is that money stays in the fund. But in order to achieve a, in this example, $100 million profit, there would have to be an extraordinary circumstance and in the budget making process, if it started to look like that was setting up to happen, there would be other things that some other changes that would occur to prevent that from happening. So generally speaking, you want to be able to cover your expenses and then put away for capital improvements over time, right? That's what each of these is set up to do. Yes ma'am. Capital improvements includes the developments that are on the plans for the various parts of Fort Worth and County and that was before the developers pay into this enterprise fund and definitely that there are problems built and the demand on water for the stock of these new developers. Sure, that's a complex question, but generally speaking, the capital improvement of each of these enterprises is funded within the enterprise. So for example, the Water and Sewer Fund funds its capital program through the enterprise fund. With respect to development, yes, absolutely. They are looking out and assessing growth predictions and looking at trends and seeing where hot spots of growth are happening and communicating with our development department to understand who's coming in to ask about what open territory, those kinds of things so that they know generally how to plan for the future. So those conversations are happening daily, right? And then there are other mechanisms set up for development to help fund some of that infrastructure, but that very quickly gets to be a complex answer. Love to spend some time talking about it, but I'm gonna move on here so that we can respect the time of the other presenters. So another important aspect here, enterprise typically are fee-based. You're paying a fee to get something. You have a water bill, solid waste bill, storm water bill, et cetera. And you can see here that there are no, essentially no rate increases for those enterprises that we just talked about and programmed in fiscal 22. Special revenue funds. This is another collection of funds that has purposes that you can see there. We've got CCPD as our largest collection of culture and tourism related funds that we've grouped together here. Municipal golf on down. The one part of your question, ma'am, that you're asking CCPD, you can see there that most of that is in the police department. So that's another chunk of funding that goes to fund programs that the police department manages. So now capital. We've talked about operating. Here's what the capital budget looks like. What you're looking at here is a, the recommended capital improvement program from fiscal 22 to fiscal 26. The red boxed area is the fiscal 2022 capital budget. So you can see the programs listed there on the left, aviation, public events, general solid waste, storm water, water, and their respective amounts. So the capital budget for fiscal 2022 is $442 million. And then you can see as you go over the out years, 23 through 26 are plans. And not to have a heart attack. Is my water bill going to go up by five pounds for 242? In other words, that's a huge increase in water for the new year. So in fiscal 2022, the top line here reads no retail water or sewer rate increases. So your rates. It was running out over five years. It went from something like 242,000 to a billion, something like that. Well, and so all of the enterprises that we talked about, and water and sewer, if you remember, is the largest at 491 million, right? So they are paying a portion of that 491 million to cover investment in capital infrastructure, whether it's new infrastructure to serve, new growth, whether it's repair and replacement of infrastructure. So that's happening every year. They're making capital improvements every year. And part of what you're seeing here is that investment in new infrastructure. So 442, 246.7 more or less to a billion, 134,000. That's the top for five years. Yes. All right. What is the significant deviation? What is the significant deviation between 2022 and 24? I'm gonna ask Roger to address that since he's sitting right here in the front row. Okay, what those really represent is this market's describing where an enterprise is formed. So we're setting aside a revenue for users every year. Dollar allocations to cover capital investments. A lot of the capital investments that you see it in airfield are the runways themselves, the shoulders, the ramps, the aprons, anything that's common to the aviation community or users of the airport. So we have to allocate a certain amount of dollars to cover match obligations and capital investments that need to be made over the next five years. Actually, we have a 20-year plan out there. We fortunately receive some dollars from TextDOT Aviation on an annual basis. So they help, through their funding mechanism, contribute dollars to the airfield. We are able to match some of that. Some of those larger increases that you see right there are ones that are gonna be paid for 100% from the aviation department because they may not be specific to the runway or to the shoulders, but we have capital investments outside of just the main runways themselves. I hope that answers your question. Oh, correct. Yes, sir. Just very quickly. With the installation of the new water meters, I don't know about anybody else's water bill, but it's already been up. Are those increased revenues somehow accounted for? Can we see how much the revenue increase for the water department has gone up? How much of that is attributable to the new water meters? Those sorts of things are very interesting. I would suggest with the new water meters that we can work with Council Member Williams and Kendall to set up a meeting with the water department so that they can come out and address that because we don't have people from the water department here tonight. And I think it's something that they would really be best to address. So I'm gonna ask if we could hold budget questions till afterwards and Mark could be available to answer them, but I wanna be sure we're able to get to the other topics that we had for tonight. So I don't wanna cut off conversation, but I wanna try and keep this moving so that we can at least cover the other three topics. So thank you. All right, thanks, Michelle. So second part of the capital conversation that we talked about, remember back to that six and a half cent allocation on the tax rate and we talked about it being the cash capital portion of the budget. Here are some things that are funded by that cash capital. So as you can see in 22, there's a $4.4 million increase and these are some of the programs that you find in the PAYGO budget, essentially. Street maintenance, traffic system maintenance and you can see how they're funded going into fiscal 22. So these are some of the things that when we talked about it earlier, these are the maintained assets that this fund is designed or this allocation is designed to fund. So what does all this mean? We talked about what does it mean for the average house earlier? What does it mean for the average person? Fiscal 22 had 870 million and we're talking specifically about tax revenue here. 870 million in tax revenue using the 2020 census count. It's about $946 a year. Look at that average increase or the increase of the budget for the average person. Tax revenue goes up to 928 million. Same census count, it's about 1,010 a year. So what are the next steps? Got upcoming budget meetings. I mentioned earlier some of the work sessions. I'm sorry, the public hearings. We have a work session on September the 10th and then you see the two public hearings on the 14th all leading toward that scheduled consideration that council is going to do to adopt the budget on September 21st. You've also got some additional town hall meetings that are scheduled and I believe these are also posted on the website. All of the recommended budgets are posted on the website as well. So if you wanna get in and take a deep dive into all of the stuff that you've seen a very high level representation of here this evening, you can do that anytime they're available at the city's website on the budget page. I'm going to, who's next? Is it the bond program? So I'm gonna call up Roger and ask him to start his bond program presentation and I'm going to leaf through these to get there. Thanks Mark, thanks Michelle. She's helping me out because she knows I'm technology challenged. I probably couldn't get it to this point without her assistance. So anyway, my name is Roger Venables. I'm with the aviation department and formally for being appointed as aviation director I was with the property management department. Hold it up, got it? Formally I was with the property management department where we handled the facilities really from construction till they were decommissioned. We also handled the real property, transactions, leasing, acquisition, et cetera. But when moving over to aviation I'd already been involved in the bond program and I enjoy being part of the bond program because I think they're important to a community so I wanted to stay on board with it and they allowed me to do that, so thank you. So when talking in terms of bonds, first we have to start with some overarching goals. We have to test what we end up with at the end of day against these goals. So for us it's maintain and improve existing infrastructure and address equity, provide mobility and city services in those growth areas, enhance active transportation and recreational corridors, allow for flexibility and partnership opportunities, and then achieve balance and fiscal stewardship. And I think what Mark was alluding to is if we're gonna build it, we're gonna maintain it. So there has to be a healthy balance there. So as we're considering new projects for the bond program we're also looking at the operating and maintenance costs that would be attached to those new facilities. So look at an overall strategy for the program. Now we wanna try to accelerate delivery of these projects. We've had some challenges, obviously we're in a high growth period over the last 10 years, keeping up with those needed capital investments. So we've set aside $29 million to help fund early design of these projects, in particular arterial projects or transportation projects, to get them to a 60% design phase. This would help us identify the right of way and in some instances be able to secure a right of way in advance of the bond program. We know we've got a ride in the road. We know there's a period of time there for us to acquire a right of way, franchise utilities to get out of the way, relocate even before we get started on our road project. And then of course reserve debt capacity. We're not suggesting with the $500 million program that that's all the city can afford in terms of debt capacity. But you need to reserve some debt capacity for those things that come along that are unanticipated or emergencies or grant match opportunities that fall outside the bond cycle that are unanticipated at this point in time. So a little bit about the program highlights. So I'll explain to you a little bit about the process to get to where we are today. But when we step back and look at the program as a whole, what we're looking at is about $213 and a half million dollars worth of partnership opportunities, leverage opportunities with Tarrant County and outside partners to assist us with our bond program, but we both mutually benefit from each one of these projects. 200 and almost $230 million in transportation, infrastructure, community center facilities and park improvements that are located in MMAs. That acronym is majority minority areas. And I'll talk a little bit about that in just a moment. And then a little bit about over $100 million in park improvements and open space conservation, open space conservation is a new category for the 2022 bond program. And I'll provide a little bit more detail behind that. So I think Mark's adequately covered this piece of it, how we distribute the envelope tax that we collect. A little bit about project development. You know, when we start bond program, we're asking departments to submit their projects for consideration as part of the bond program. So how do they get to those projects? How are they developed over time? They are conceived from master plans and strategic goals. Those are our guidance documents, if you will, for capital investment over periods of time based on development activity, what's needed. City council may have projects, waitlisted projects from previous bonds. We've got one in particular, the 2018 bond that was carrying over to 2022. Service demands, public meetings, boards and commissions, neighborhood meetings. You can see there's a lot that feeds into it. Combining with data collection and analysis is done by every one of the departments. So if you look at property management, its facilities, we know what the condition of those facilities are. We're looking 20 years in advance at what needs to be replaced. Those capital maintenance items that we're talking about, roof replacements, HVAC. We have a life expectancy on those assets and it's being able to manage it through that life cycle. So what does the process look like? Here's it is in general. The department submit those projects to a prioritization committee. That prioritization committee is really represented by individuals from various departments around the city that act as a filtering process for each one of those projects that are submitted by the departments. The departments are asked to rank and prioritize their projects. They know best what the needs are. Committee goes through that process, comes up with some recommendations of its own ranking and prioritization based on general criteria and I'll show you those in just a moment. Management, we'll take a review of it, we'll send it to the CMO, we'll have those discussions. That's the second layer of filtering, if you will. Then it goes to city council. City council will provide some input on these proposed projects and then here we are today is coming out and getting your feedback and input on the proposed projects for the 2022 bond program. Citywide prioritization criteria. While departments will have some unique criteria that may germane to their operation, to their mission if you think about TPW and roads, they'll know what the pavement condition index is. That's not represented necessarily in these criteria. These are looked to all the projects across the spectrum, whether it's park, streets, facilities. A new criteria for the 2022 bond program is equity. And I'll talk about that in a moment. Service deficiencies, we're looking at where are we deficient in services around the city? Where are those leverage opportunities? There are significant leverage opportunities in this bond program with Tarrant County. Approved master plans and strategic goals. Does the department have an approved master plan that calls for that capital investment? Could it be a capital replacement of an aged facility? Is it collaborating with another department? Does it improve existing infrastructure? Or do we have federal, state or legal mandates that we can't cover anywhere else but through a bond program to fund? Public health and safety, does it address any existing health concerns? Could it be environmental or public safety? Economic development, does the project strategically, those dollars put in place, would help stimulate economic development? So equity as I mentioned is a new criteria. We took this right from the task force of race and culture and their recommendation. Does the project address and help to reduce and eliminate racial and cultural disparities consistent with their recommendations out of the task force? So we asked the question in this criteria, project is located within or JSON2 and serve a super majority minority area or a majority minority area. Difference between the SMA and the MMA is, the SMA is 75% minority population within that geographic area. As you can see on the map here, those are represented. So what did we start with? There were almost $1.3 billion worth of projects that were submitted by the departments in the aggregate. And remember the role of the prioritization committee is we've got a target of about $500 million. So we've got to be able to pair that down and prioritize those projects and set them forward for recommendation. So here's where it kind of broke out and this is very typical. Streets and mobility generally represent the lion's share. About 53% of those projects that were submitted, 28% on facilities, parks at about 17% and of course open space conservation at around 2%. So where did we end up? So we went through this prioritization process. We've got about 64% that's being allocated to streets and mobility again, not atypical. Park and recreation about 17% got a plan, new public library in a high growth area of the city. Two fire station replacements, a police facility, a new police facility, a couple of community centers and an open space conservation program. So this is giving the map and this map's got a little bit more detail but if anything it just shows you the distribution of projects around the city whether it's intersections, arterials, or established corridors. This shows you where they lie within those majority minority and super majority minority areas. The streets and mobility, this is just breaking it down by project type. So what you see in red font as arterials, intersections, traffic signals and grade separated railroad crossing, these are project types that we've applied or made application to Tarrant County to participate in in a 50-50. Yes ma'am. Well I'll go through it a little bit on that in just a moment in terms of transit. Yes. The majority minority area and the super majority minority area, the difference on the map, yeah. 75 per super majority minority area is a geographic area with 75% minority representation. That's a super majority minority area. A majority minority area is 50%. So we can get you a little bit more detail on how it breaks down by district. I don't have that information so, am I? Presentation available on the website Yes ma'am. It will be. So I can get you more detail on what is in council district six in terms of SMMA and MMA. You know, overall it represents about 47% geographically of the city, okay? If you think about it in terms of that. There you go. In aggregate between the two. Yes sir. So here's where we left off talking about these particular project types. On the arterials, we got 11 arterials planned and I'll just point a couple of things out and $110 million worth of Arbonne funds. Tarrant County and Green, we're asking for $149 million and then we're through some impact fees that we've collected in future improvement agreements. We're at about $308 million worth of improvement. So the takeaway, if you look down at the bottom, under total project cost of $570 million dollars, look at our bond fund request at $317 million dollars. We're leveraging that to get $570 million dollars worth of improvements on the ground. Some of this may change depending on which projects Tarrant County selects to move forward with in their November bond program, okay? So here are the 11 arterials broken down by district on the left project in the middle and providing those limits. And again, all this will be online. We'll also have an online feature where you can go in and hover over a particular project, get some detail on that project and provide some comments and feedback on those projects. This is a proposed established corridor supporting transit. So $10 million, we're setting aside for the East Lancaster Avenue that we can use towards match opportunities. Same with Eastbury and McCart. Those are specifically for design. If we have opportunities to go out and secure right-of-way using some of those design dollars, that's a good thing. So if we can get the right-of-way done early in the process, that's always helpful. Proposed intersections. So I think we've got about four in Council District Six. You share one with actually three, but anyway, I'll let your eyes rest on those. And again, we have a summary list that lists all these particular projects for you to take a look at and we'll be here later in the day to answer any questions about it. Our vision zero, high injury network. So we have identified about 10 locations or corridors, if you will, throughout the city. They represent those where we see the most related fatalities and severe injuries. A vision zero initiative is to get to zero on those. So with the aid of a consultant in TPW, they'll identify particular improvements that can be made in those corridors to help eliminate those severe injuries and reduce it to zero or even fatalities. Here's a list of those top 10. I think you'll see a couple. So I'm gonna move on to Park and Recreation as another category. This just gives you the distribution, if you will, around the city of where these particular projects are gonna be located. And I'll go into a little detail about each one of them, but here's the Supermajority Minority Areas and where they are located. So Park and Recreation by Project Tite, Gateway Park Development, eight million enhanced neighborhood family aquatics facility at seven Fort Worth Botanic Gardens, contribution towards capital investment there at 4.6, Sycamore Park Development at five million. And as you can see, we're going down the list to represent about $85 million worth of request. Partnership funds and other funds combined, we get to about $100 million. So again, we're trying to leverage dollars with partners when we can. To the right, you can see the first year O&M that we've been talking about is we build something newer or expand it. We're gonna have additional operating and maintenance costs. This is our estimate of what those first year O&M would be based on when we think we'll deliver the project, okay? So bomb program occurs in 2022. Obviously we're not gonna have it built in that same year. It will probably take, it could take three years to get it on the ground. And when it does, we know we're gonna have some additional operating and maintenance expense. Some of these parks, projects are probably right now, aren't they, like, we do and Botanic Gardens? Yes, sir, they are. And I'm gonna speak a little detail on each one of those two in particular in just a moment. That goes back to some of those contractual obligations that we mentioned. Here's the first one, Botanic Gardens. We turn that over to the management of the BRIT, Botanic Research Institute of Texas. They are now responsible for that capital maintenance, improvements to the Botanic Gardens. However, when we turned it over to them, we turned it over to them with a lot of deferred maintenance on those existing facilities. And we committed under that contract to bring forward in bond elections funding to help support the rebuild or rehabilitation of those facilities. This is $4.6 million, as are, again. Well, the Botanic Gardens offer free hours to the public at any time it's going forward. Well, I don't know if I can answer that one. I have someone from the Parks Department, I think Parks Department, there's a lot of finger pointing, no, I think it's Parks, but we can get you some more, we can get you answers to that question. I'm not prepared to answer that one. Ha, ha, ha, ha. Yeah. Okay, so that thing keeps falling down. Yeah, that's good. See if that works. Okay, great. So the next project is Heritage and Paddock Parks renovation. This is on the north end of the downtown, kind of where the convergence is there at Main Street, right before the bridge. Again, those improvements are in bad shape, particularly Heritage Park. But we also have an opportunity is to improve pedestrian mobility in that area as well. So we've got some outside funding sources, I think it's about $8.3 million that's being contributed to the parks themselves. We've got another million and a half that's a carryover from the 2014 bond that's gonna be combined with this project, with this $13.5 million. So overall, it's probably about a $22 million project. Fort Worth Water Gardens. We've done some maintenance over the years, but it was constructed in 1971. It's been there a long time. It's starting to show its age, particularly in the infrastructure that you don't necessarily see all the time and that's the piping, et cetera, and the utilities. A lot of those bald cypress that are out there today, those roots have done a pretty good job of taking care of that utility infrastructure. So we need to come back in and rehabilitate that. And so that's what this $6.5 million would do. Drainage and erosion control, a lot of times we do try to extend the life of those assets through that paygoat funding where we maintain those improvements. But again, these are big ticket items to come back in and replace dams. We're gonna have to come in and do significant pond dredging to increase stormwater capacity. So that's about $7.1 million to do that at a few parks and you can see where those are located out in the city. There's a couple down here in council district six. Meadowbrook golf course renovation. We did this to Rockwood. So we're gonna do something very similar with Meadowbrook. Come back in, do some rehabilitation to the fairways and teas and cart paths. And again, increased playability of the golf course. That's $7 million. And then Sycamore park improvements. Sycamore park improvements. Sycamore was formerly a golf course, was decommissioned by the city. This is taking that 66 acres and converting it into a community park. So it would be masterplanned and developed as a community park. Stop six enhanced neighborhood family aquatics facility. I'll talk a little bit about the stop six hub in just a moment, but this is an aquatics facility but it's located essentially adjacent to a plan. Stop six community hub, right across from Rosedale park in the stop six area. Forest Park pool replacement. It's gotten shut down on and off over the years. It's undergone some renovation. This is going to be a complete rebuild and replacement of a replacement of the existing forest park pool with an enhanced neighborhood family aquatics facility at seven and a half million dollars. Echo Lake park improvements. This is a park that we received from the county in 2017. It sits just north of Worth Heights community center. Much like what we left the Brit with, the county left us with in terms of a facilities. It could be ball field improvement. I think there's a playground out there. None of it's compliant. It's not ADA compliant. It's deteriorated condition. This is coming back in and masterplanned and really redeveloping and replacing those facilities at a five million dollars. Gateway park development. This is continued design and construction of park improvements and athletic fields and skate park and a lot of security lighting. Neighborhood park improvements. These are parks that over time we've collected this land and now it's time to consider Park Reserve. It's come back in and developing this neighborhood parks. We've got one at West Haven Park. Now West Haven Park was an interesting one because it was formerly the Vanzant YMCA. So to purchase that property has removed that infrastructure. Now coming back in and we're going to redevelop it as a neighborhood park. Fort Worth Zoo. Yes ma'am. I had friends with Sierra Club who did a cleanup at the county park and it was horrible. And so the question is maybe this is to detail but does the city provide trash pickup at its parks? Yes, we do have litter pickup at our parks. Yes. Yeah, and I tell you what, we can visit with Joel in parks at the end and if you've got specific concerns. I'll say Joel again and here. Ha ha ha ha ha. So Fort Worth Zoo. This is another one of those contractual obligations, right? The zoo is managed by others. However, we are an obligation to provide some of the utility infrastructures to support new exhibits at the zoo. So you think about the three and a half million dollar investment that's made by the city but you look at the return that the zoo puts in place in terms of its investment in there. It's a small piece. Trail gap connections. This is the handle. Yes. I can't remember the, is it the? Yes, yes. Fort Worth Zoological Association. Yeah, they manage it. Those people. Trail gap connections. So this is looking at those gaps in trails around the city. There are three in particular, we're particularly interested in and that's Bomberspur, Mistletoe Bridge to Forest Park and in Sycamore Creek Trail at five and a half million dollars. And we'll take that funding and we'll go to get as much we can and grant match opportunities and leverage those funds with other entities to build out those sections. Open space conservation. As again, as I mentioned, it's really a new category for us but it's acquisition improvement of land citywide. So we know we have environmentally sensitive areas around the city. A lot of these areas open space are going to evaporate if we don't go preserve them. And so that's what these dollars are designed for. They go through a process in selecting those particular properties will go through a selection process themselves. Okay. Which one provides the highest quality, if you will, of environmental conservation, et cetera. But anyway, Jennifer Dyke and Stormwater Management Group has a lot of information about that. I would encourage you to reach out to Stormwater to talk about the project in detail. Facility improvements. As I mentioned, these are where the facilities are planned. New police station, couple of community centers, fire station replacement and of course the new public library. This is where they lie in relationship to the SMMA. So the two that we're planning on is fire station 16 and fire station 37. I'm going to go into a little detail with them in just a moment, but this is just to show that $76 million worth of bond funded requests, if you will, for these facility projects. And on the right, this is what we anticipate those O&M expenses to be once those projects are delivered. So library system improvements. So we're showing you on the map where the existing libraries are as well as that new one that's planned in far Northwest section of town. This would be up near Sundara Ranch and Avondale-Hasslet. This is an area of town that experienced the highest rate of growth. Well, in fact, we almost got 3,200 new people during a year of a pandemic within the three mile radius where this planned library is going to be located. It's darn close. It's still Fort Worth. It's still Tarrant. Fire station 37 replacement. So 37 sits up north side of town. It's on Ray White Road, 4721 Ray White Road. It's a fire station that was to serve as a temporary fire station. It was moved on site in 1998. And it's been there ever since. It needs to be relocated off its current facility and we need to find the fire department of permanent home for fire station 37. It sits on a blind clover of Ray White Road. So it's difficult for our fireman to deploy out of the site and come back into the site. And it's temporary in nature. It wasn't intended to be a permanent facility. Fire station 16 replacement. This is about half the size of our current three bay double company fire station. It's a little over 5,000 square feet. It was built in the 60s. There's so much wrong with this particular fire station. You don't even know where to start. We can't accommodate female firefighters. Like I said, it's half the size of what we normally have. The bay doors are too small for modern fire apparatus. We actually have to lower the suspension of the fire apparatus to get it into the bays. So I think it's definitely a need and a need of replacement. A stop six community center hub. This is to replace the existing MLK community center. So what we're gonna do is set this proposing to do is put it on about five or six acres that's currently owned by Fort Worth Housing Solutions who removed Cavill Place that was out there. It's now cleaned up and we were suggesting coming in and replacing with a new community center about 28,000 square feet. It would not only contain what you generally see in a community center with the recreation component and meeting spaces, but it also have a public library about 3,500 square foot public library attached to it or included in the facility. Be able to have social services programs run out of that as well. And as I mentioned earlier, an aquatics facility adjacent to the plant community center. And then fire station community center is one that's a carryover from 2018. It was between it and Diamond Hill. Diamond Hill ended up, we moved forward with it as part of the 2018 program. Nothing's changed in terms of the condition of this facility and its need for its replacement. We were recommending putting on the 2022 bond program. Yes, ma'am. So what we're planning on doing is it will stay in place until we construct the new community center. And then we'd be decommissioned that center and tear it down, the existing one, and then redevelop that area into parkland. The new hub is gonna be across from Rosedale Park. So Northwest Patrol, we actually own the land for this property at 60 acres, about 3,900 block Angle Avenue, 18.6 million dollar project for about a 32,000 square foot facility for the Northwest Patrol. Right now, they're housed in different locations, one of which they pay about $151,000 a year in rent. This will liberate them from having to pay that rent out of their operating budget once we build them a new facility. Well, this is actually located just west of Meacham Airport. There's a Northwest Patrol that they already have up there. There's a Northwest Patrol. This will be the Northwest Patrol. It's more Northwest Central, if you will. Yes, still part of the city. Yes, ma'am. Yes, public meetings. That's what we're doing right now. We'll have these and be conducting them through October. We're gonna be at this point from here out is validating, adjusting some of the pricing that we already have for these projects. We've seen some increases in material labor costs. We wanna make sure that those assumptions that we have made when we put these pricing together still hold true. So we'll spend some time taking a hard look at those at our pricing structure. And then we'll finalize a project list, hopefully by the end of the year sometime, and then city council will set a bond referendum sometime in January, February. This is the proposed schedule. Yes, ma'am. Okay, so this election May 7th, this is a special election, right? It's not during the election year. I'll also be during the election year. This is, I think it's twice a year, right? May, November. So there will be another election during the time that we'll be voting on the bond election? What I'm trying to say is, are you, cause it looks to me like you're gonna have a special price that we're paying to hold this bond election whether it passes or not. And then you're still gonna be looking at another election that you were paying for as well. No, there is a separate election in November for Tarrant County for part of their bond program. This is the city's bond program. Only cities would be in May of next year, May of 2022. So the only thing in the main election is having the bond election. From the city, from the city side? Yes. Yes. And then of course we'll have some public education meetings too once this is set, once the propositions are set, we'll come back out again and discuss what you'll be asked to vote on in May. I'm sorry, ma'am. So who is the one that's the last to introduce the projects are gonna be, if we move them to the bottom? So city council will make that determination as to which projects they want to move forward with for the election in May. Yes. I have a very little apron here. I have no idea what the stop six is that you were talking about. So stop six is just an area of town. Let's have a name designation. It's in council district five. We're calling it the stop six hub because it's gonna be multi-purpose in nature. It's a little bit different than a normal community center in terms of the program to be offered out of the community center, as well as the public library. You know, part of the, one of the criteria that I think I mentioned earlier was project collaboration. This is one of those projects that collaborates with other departments to gain some synergy. And so we've got parks in terms of the aquatics facility. You got the library services and then you've got the recreation component and neighborhood services. All will be combined in that. Sorry to be able to give input to your city council members but they want that stuff to happen in their neighborhood. Yes. I mean, that's part of what these meetings are about is to, again, to seek your input again. Yeah. So we got a lot to cover. Thank you. Yes, yes, ma'am. There was a new 2018 bond election in which there were surface things like a new police officer right here by us. Yes, ma'am. That was to be built during that time. Is this going to be carried over and be allocated continued allocation into the 2022 because now I hear they're not even on a break ground until February of 2022. Yeah. So it is still part of the 2018 bond program. Okay. It's just going beyond about a four year period. It's not going to be included in the 2022. It's still paid for out of 2022 authorized project. Yes, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. And then the new libraries also in the 2020. And the new libraries. And it's coming to ground breaking next year. Yes, yes. Well, good evening, folks. I'm from the Indochast Assistance City Manager. Michelle tells me I have 10 minutes. So I will rush through information about city council redistricting. Three weeks ago, the US Census Bureau released the long awaited results of the April 2020 census of population. I expect everybody in this room completed a census form probably online. And we finally received the block level population data that will serve as the basis upon which the city council will be redrawing council district boundaries to ensure that each council district contains roughly equal population. And a special challenge that we'll be facing in the next round of redistricting is the creation of two new council districts. Because as many of you will recall, five years ago, the voters of Fort Worth approved an amendment to the city charter, increasing the number of city council districts from eight to 10 plus the mayor. And so we're gonna be adding two new council districts as well as redrawing the boundaries of the existing districts. That's a big challenge. And the main themes, the main points I want to convey to you, aside from the slides, is that the process will be highly participatory and it will be more transparent than it's ever been before. Participatory in the sense that everybody who is interested will have the opportunity to prepare council district maps for consideration by the council. We have redistricting software that is now available for use. We've been training interested citizens for the past several weeks and we'll have additional training sessions if you're interested and we can give you more information about it. You can either work directly on your own computer if you wish, or if you're not comfortable working on a computer, you can work in a group with others and we'll ensure that your ideas are reflected in the maps that are presented to the city council. So it's a highly participatory process and it will be transparent. You'll be able to draw maps this fall, starting on September 20th, we'll have the software fully loaded with all the pertinent data and then we'll have public hearings starting in January, whereby the city council will be able to consider your comments. They'll select an initial map based on what they receive from the public and then you'll be able to comment on the initial map and eventually after the city council prepares a proposed map you'll be able to comment on the proposed map. So there will be many opportunities for citizens to participate in that process. Let me see if I can run through these slides almost as fast as Mr. Venables did when he was trying to find the lost slide. And, yes. All right. Okay, we started the process by appointing a task force to recommend the criteria and procedures by which the city council should redraw the district boundaries. And it was done by means of a resolution adopted in August of last year. And here's a list of the task force members, chaired by Lorraine Miller, a former clerk of the US House of Representatives from Fort Worth. And we had folks appointed by all the council members, former council member, Jungus Jordan appointed Ms. Linda Kennedy to represent the council district six, but you may recognize other names on that list. And we were just saying, as I mentioned, because we wanna be sure that each council district has roughly the same population and we wanna create those two new council districts that the voters authorized in 2016. The official population count for the city of Fort Worth, according to the Census Bureau, is 918,915. Now, we expect that today, the population of Fort Worth is probably in the ballpark of 940,000. But for the purposes of redistricting, we're using that official count of 918,915, or roughly 115,000 for each of the eight districts that exist today. And you can see it in council district six, the population increased over the past 10 years by 17%. So rapid growth in council district six and every one of the council districts increase in size. The fastest growing of all the council districts was council district seven, increasing by 76%. Council district seven is far north Fort Worth as well as the west side of Fort Worth. It wraps all the way around from the museum district across Lake Worth all the way up to Alliance and Texas Motor Speedway. So it's a very large district geographically and it's the fastest growing part of Fort Worth. So because district seven and other districts have grown so fast, the numbers are lopsided now and we need to make a lot of geographic changes to bring these council districts into balance. Here's a snapshot of the demographic characteristics of the city of Fort Worth and not to take much time reviewing, I'd be happy to discuss it with you afterwards. But you can see our total population for the city of Fort Worth increased by 24% and the fastest growing segments of the population included the African American or black population which increased by 29%, Hispanic by 27%, the Asian population increased by 73% and other population multiracial groups increased by over 150%. So we have a much more diverse population in Fort Worth today than we've ever had in our history. Overall, the white population in Fort Worth is now 37%, Hispanic 35%, African American 19%, Asians are now 5% of Fort Worth population and other groups represent 4%. If we want to zoom in on council district six, you can see that we've had some of the same patterns. The white population in council district six actually declined by 10%, the black population increased by 30%, Hispanic by 43%, Asian by 26%. And so you can see that council district six today is about 34% white, about 29% African American and 27% Hispanic. Council district six is the most diverse of all the council districts in Fort Worth in respect to all the different demographic groups. So we had three broad goals in redistricting, preventing gerrymandering, providing the best opportunities to elect council members who reflect our diverse population in promoting education and public participation. This is the schedule that the task force followed. We don't have time to discuss it in any detail but I wanted to emphasize that they spent a lot of time conducting research, a lot of time listening to the public before they made recommendations. They delivered their final report to the city council in March of last year and the council adopted a resolution in April, I should say earlier this year, March of this year and in April, the council adopted a resolution establishing the criteria and procedures for redistricting. Many folks participate in the process. Here's some of the data on the number of folks who took part viewing the meetings, speaking at the meetings and submitting written statements. There are three themes that were most prevalent in the public comments. First, a lot of folks who did speak express interest in creating an independent redistricting commission comprised of citizens who are not appointed by the city council. We also heard the pleas for greater public participation and greater transparency in the process. Council adopted the resolution with the criteria and procedures in April of this year. Here's a list of the criteria. Again, we don't have time to discuss them in any depth but equal size, respecting voting rights according to various laws, creating minority opportunity districts containing what are called communities of interest in single council districts. If you represent a neighborhood or a group of neighborhoods that wants to stay intact within a single council district and not be split, then you have an opportunity through September 15th, another two weeks to register as a community of interest with the city. You can do that online. You can check the city's redistricting website for that information. And finally, we wanna ensure that each council district represents contiguous territory that we don't fragment the districts geographically. Those are the high priority criteria. There are five other criteria. Compact districts identify with geographic boundaries when containing whole voting precincts, whole census blocks and block groups and not considering the place of residency of incumbents or potential candidates when drawing the district boundaries. We also set some redistricting procedures. You can take a look on the screen. Again, we don't have time to discuss them in depth, but again, they reflect those principles of participation and transparency throughout the process. Here's the process that we've been following in advance of redistricting, training on redistricting software, registering communities of interest. August 12th, when we received the block level population data. And on October 5th, we'll have a joint work session of the city council and the redistricting task force. So the task force can explain to the council why they're recommending those procedures and criteria. Going forward, the months of October, November will be devoted to helping citizens to produce their own proposed redistricting plans. A lot of time is gonna be devoted to citizen participation. In December, we'll brief the council on the redistricting maps that have been produced by citizens as well as a recommended map from city staff. The council will hold one public hearing so that they'll hear from citizens about why their proposed maps should be considered. They'll then select an initial map as a starting point for drawing the lines. And they'll have a hearing on that map. Then they'll go into their work sessions. But any decisions by the council must be made in public meetings that are advertised solely for the purpose of discussing redistricting. The redistricting will not be discussed in any other meetings than those special meetings that are devoted specifically to the discussion of council district boundaries. We anticipate that they'll have additional public hearings on a proposed map and they'll be able to adopt the map as early as April. They need to do it by July because that's when folks, potential candidates have to establish residency in the districts that they wish to represent. When they file for a seat, a place on the ballot, they have to file in January and February for the May 2023 election. So that's a process for redrawing council district boundaries. If you have any questions, I'll be happy to take a couple of questions now. And if there are additional questions, we'll hang around afterwards to hear them. Yes, Dr. Miller. I'm Bruce Miller, I'm not an empty doctor and I'm a retired physics professor from DCP. We pointed out that the public hearings, the public hearings overwhelmingly, the public asked for an independent redistricting submission. The Racing Culture Task Force recommended that the city establish a race and culture of independent permission to do the redistricting that goes from 8 to 10 districts in 2023 that we're going to have. So I'd like to know if you could explain what would have to happen for the city, the covered council to switch to an independent commission to actually get an independent commission to draw the maps instead of the city council. Good question. Thank you, Dr. Miller. One minor point of clarification, the Task Force on Racing Culture actually recommended that a group study the desirability of creating an independent redistricting commission rather than actually saying that they should. So just a point of clarification. It was their intent that we give it a serious consideration, yes. But to answer your question, if the city council, and it's entirely up to the council, if the city council wanted to establish a process of independent redistricting subject to the city council's ultimate approval of the map because the city charter currently requires the council to approve the map. But if they wanted to rely upon an advisory group to conduct all of these public hearings and hear from the public and deliver a proposed map to the council at the end of the process for their consideration, if they wanted to do that, then we have time to do it. We need to get some direction from the council in the next few weeks in order to start that process. But it is feasible to do. They would appoint an impartial group, perhaps comprised of the chief judge of municipal court, the city secretary and the city auditor, to review applications from interested citizens who wish to serve on the independent redistricting commission. They would select the core, probably five members of that commission and those five would select another six or so to comprise an 11-member independent redistricting commission that would do everything that we explained the city council would otherwise do. But this would be a group of impartial, well-qualified citizens who don't have any vested interest in the outcome of the redistricting process. There are arguments on both sides, whether they had the council do it exclusively or rely on an independent group, we could stay here all night arguing the pros and cons. Nevertheless, it is possible to do it if the council wants to do it. Thank you. I'm from citizens who are independent. I'm not sure if that's what the board does. I don't think it's anything like that. I'm not sure where it's at. Thank you, Dr. Miller. Any other questions before I sit down? Thank you all very much. I think we're gonna hear from Sharon Gamble about the My Fort Worth website app by which you can request service in the city of Fort Worth. Sharon. Just a reminder, we have handouts about redistricting on the table out front and we also have a list of all the bond projects. So don't forget to pick those up and be sure you leave your email so we can send you all the presentations. Hi, my name's Sharon Gamble. I'm with communication and public engagement and I manage the customer care division. I have with me James West who works for the My Fort Worth team and he also does our IT support, but don't tell IT. And then I have, that's right, that's right. Markel Augustus, she is a supervisor in our city call center and any time that you use app other, this is our manual process. So be kind and select the right one. So we just wanna show you a couple of new things that we've done in the app and we just updated for the third quarter so we're kind of excited for who's on the app now. First thing, when we implement departments, we're always, always learning. And one of the things that we learned was when fire came on board, they said, Sharon, what can you do on the app? And I don't know, let's go find out. So we actually advertised a message about how to report fireworks. That was our first time to use the message system. So it will always show up here when you first open the app. My first question to everybody here is who has the app on their phone? I am so proud of district six. Thank you, thank you. And I want you to know that some of the requests are on the app because of you guys. I've presented before and I put on wildlife. They asked if I could put wildlife on the animal pickup. I said, hmm, I don't know. Yes, I can. So I figured it out. But I have this wonderful team that helps figure. But anyway, on this app, it has the new request. It has your reporter. Everybody wants to remain anonymous. I want you to know that your information is never, ever, ever shared. So just want to keep that in mind. But I'm going to go over the request because that's what we update our top five every quarter. And we have a new one that was vehicle violation. That came up top. So we had to retire one. And then we have our animal. And you can see egrets. Animal control asked, can we put egrets on the app? Well, absolutely. We know how because district six, so does how to do wildlife. And then we have aviation. They are new to the app. If you live by alliance or by any of the airplanes, you can report noise complaints. We just added the city vehicle recognition to say that we only gave you a right to complain about city vehicles. Well, now we've given you the right to compliment city vehicles. And then code enforcement was our first install. They have always been on the app. And then we have development services. They're one of our new customers. And we have all their links to their website, which we learned through library when we put them on the app. But they have a permit complaint that they have replaced their email system with a work order system. So it's making them more efficient. Environmental's always been, fire code is always, it's a new one, it was first quarter. Graffiti's been there, high grass for private property and public property. If you don't know, just put it on one and we'll figure it out. Library requests is the same way. It takes you to their system. So it's neat. Illegal dump's been there. The mayor's office, this is new. We actually, the call center, city call center, takes the, one, two, three, four, takes the mayor's calls. And we have put them in a work order system. So we're making them efficient. And, but your requests that you can use on the app are all there. Right here, you want a meeting request for the mayor? What would you like? I mean, and you just answer the questions. Your description of your organization, date meeting, day before any specific date, the reason why, and number of attendees and other attendees, other attending the meeting. So it's just a simple fill in the blank, as always. Municipal courts, they are new this quarter. These are all their topics on their system, which is kind of nice. They want to advertise the virtual court. I thought that was neat. I didn't know, because I don't go to court. But it takes you right to the information that's on the website. And then you stay in the app. So then you can, if you press this back here, you can go back to the app and then go back. And what we learned from the municipal courts is, hmm, we could actually ask people, what did they think? Well, what a brilliant idea. So let's ask them on the app and then you fill it out and then they'll get a report of how you, what you thought. And I tell you, that's the most of our calls for the mayor's office is share your opinion. Makes sense. Neighborhood service has been on there. There is an alleyway. We handle about 1200 alleys in the city of Fort Worth. And it's unpaved alleys, grass. And the city actually maintains them. And you can put in a complaint there. And they'll let you know if it's in that program or not. And then what does it take to get it in that program if we need to? In an alley. Please, this is my big bra-raw. Because we actually, the neat thing about using the app is it goes right into the work order system. We actually interface with their system. You're welcome. But the abandoned vehicle, that is a large complaint. If you wanna follow a, well, let me show you the abandoned vehicle. It just answer the questions as the vehicles appear drivable, make and model. I would never know. It's a red car. But, and you don't have to know. It's a character field. So you can just put in red car. But, Collar, I love some of our requests. They ask you the direction you're traveling. And always I have put in there. Don't know. I was going there. But, vehicle location, it determines how fast we can generate it. So, if it's on the side of the street, please put that. If it's on the highway, let us know. And then, call 911 if it's on the highway. Don't be on the app looking. Seriously. But anyway, and then we have noise complaints and parking. The convention center is new. It will tell you public events in those venues. And that's convention center and Will Rogers. But also, we have Visit Fort Worth. If you've never been to the Fort Worth site, it's kind of amazing. You go into it and it's a Visit Fort Worth and it tells you anything you ever wanted to know about Fort Worth. Oh, I'm so sorry. I hit something wrong. Good question. I know it. Absolutely. Did you all publish a directory of phone numbers? I'm not asking for individual phone numbers. It's the Western Water Department phone number. What's the, you know, it's really hard to figure out how to reach the city of Fort Worth. I don't want to answer that. Let's take a break. Oh. You want the blue pages on the residential? Y'all remember the... Yeah, that's what I thought of when you said it. I worked for Code Compliance. The first thing I did was put a directory together so I would know where to call. But what the neat thing about the website is, is every department has their phone number on it. So you, if you know what department, yes. And it says Contact and then it has their phone number. If it's a call center, it has their hours of service and their email address. Yes, when you go, now this is Michelle's territory so I'm making it up as I go. But no, there's a dropdown. If you say government, no. Yeah, there's a tab across the department that says across the top of the website and one of the categories is departments. And if you click that, it will give you a list of every department. When you go to their homepage, it will give you their contact information, their email and then, like she said, if there are hours, like if they have a walk-in. Very much. Yes. I will also, when we send you the presentations, I will send you links to, we have a very robust redistricting page on the website that has a lot of resources. We also have a budget page and we have a page for the bond election, which includes an interactive map where you can go and find projects. A window will pop up to tell you about the project and then you can comment on it. And that's something that we just got loaded, like within the last two days. So please go and take a look at that and give us your feedback. So, we could be putting maps on there. Well, as we get the maps submitted by residents, we'll be putting maps on there. Some software that you can go in and... Yes. Okay, they're on the redistricting page of the website. There is a link that will take you to the software, which is run by a company called Esri. And we have a video of the first training session that we did that's on that page. So you can watch that. We have the PowerPoint presentation that was used for the training. And then we also have extra videos that the vendor provides. We'll also be posting the next round of training, which will be starting the last week of September. So be sure and watch. We'll be sending out city news next door through all of our channels. We also have a special newsletter just for redistricting that you can subscribe to. And there's a link to that on the page as well. So, yes. There are sometimes some of the areas in which there are dead trees and it is city's responsibility. There is not any place in here that I can find under dead trees. I'll let Sharon handle that. I have it and it is a part of the app. I have not gotten approval to put it officially on the app. But I will be going back and saying, a citizen has requested. Those are my favorite words. Power lines are on core. On core. Yes. Yes. So under the park department, it does talk about park maintenance and you are able to put in forestry issues. And so if you put something in for on core power lines, even though we may not do it, we have a wonderful work relationship with all of the utility companies so that you don't have to chase down who to work with. So under park department, if Sharon goes. I will just say. I do have neighborhood, but see park doesn't, they don't go there. But park, okay. So what we did in the second quarter is we added park maintenance and we added the equipment and that's all. But I have behind the scenes three requests for forestry and guess what? One of them is traffic hazards. Huh. But let me just go into the website. The hard way. Mm-hmm. To prove, I'm gonna prove out, I can't go that way. I didn't know that. Yeah, I'm here at McPherson. I don't have a link and I can't manipulate the library card. It just takes me to the organization that's on the system. Sharon, I just want to tell you, I love the app. Thank you so very, very much. It has been tremendous, it's put in street lights out, high grass, watering room, things like this. It's tremendous. If you haven't used it folks, get used to using it. You can really, really help the city by identifying areas that they need and come out and take care of. Thank you. Thank you very much for the kind words. We really appreciate it. We've worked really hard and it shows. So I appreciate you seeing it. And I cannot find this lovely thing that says departments in the system. Oh, departments, it says departments. Y'all, it's really hidden, it says departments. Okay, she's gonna take me away. I'm gonna give Sharon a little mini hook. So we have some time. If there are questions you have about the budget, Mark is still here. We have representatives from several departments that can answer questions about any of the bond projects that you wanted to talk about. Fernando is here for redistricting. And if anybody wants to ask more questions about the app, Sharon and her team will be up here in the front. So Council Member Williams, do you wanna close this out? We needed more time, or fewer presentations. Oh man, well, thanks again for attending tonight. I wanna give a special thanks to the staff. I know that it was two more hours, probably on an eight hour work day. So thank y'all for coming and joining us for this town hall and sharing all of the wealth of information that you had to our District 6 residents. I'd also like to thank our neighborhood police officers for being here, Officer Hayes and Officer Nash. Thank y'all so much for always being here on call whenever we need y'all. So we really appreciate y'all tonight. I also wanna thank the Chisholm Trail Community Center for hosting us tonight. We had just enough space. We were hoping to move it to the gym if we needed to, but we didn't have to. But they really worked hard to set up this event and to make sure that the community center looked just as good as when we cut the ribbon. So I wanna give those special thanks. I also wanna remind y'all that this town hall is something that we regularly do with our office. We heard y'all loud and clear. So next town hall next month in October, we'll do two since we won't probably do one in November because of the holiday season. We'll cover, Kendall, help me out here. We're gonna cover water. Oh yeah, we're gonna cover water. And then we'll also cover TPW. Especially, I think it's important because there's some issues that we've all ran into around Reisinger, down McCart. I mean, we wanna be able to share with y'all what we've been working on, on those two corridors in particular. So bring your water questions and your road infrastructure questions next month. And we'll be sure to communicate out the location for that. The last thing I'll just say is, clearly there's a lot of major decisions that we as a council have on our plate in front of us. And your input, your questions are absolutely critical to me being able to represent our district excellently. And so please continue to engage our office. If you have questions, if you have thoughts, ideas, please do not hesitate to call us, email us because that helps us govern better when we're governing together. So this is all of our seat. And so please, let's help make these big decisions together. Kendall, my district director, he has his cards on this table right outside. Please email him. We love to hear from our neighbors. And if you'd like to set up something with me as well, Kendall can do that. And I'd be happy to connect with you all and he'll share all of my information with y'all as well. And so again, this was such a treat. Thank y'all for hanging in there two hours, a two hour marathon. I'm actually training for a marathon. It's not going so well, but it didn't make. So don't worry about that. But again, thank y'all. Y'all have a blessed night and look forward to seeing y'all soon. Take care.