 I think we have a quorum enough to get us started. No, don't worry, you're okay, come back, you're good. I'll call our work session to order. Today is December 5th. Welcome everyone and turn it over to David Cook. Thank you, good afternoon everybody. Let's see, we have a couple of organizational updates and recognitions. First, I'm gonna call on Judge Rogers to tell us about what his next plans are. Good afternoon, Danny Rogers, Chief Judge. I'm here today on behalf of myself and my family to thank you for the opportunity to serve as a municipal court judge for the city of Fort Worth for 27 and a half years. First time I walked into this room, it was for an interview with the then municipal court ad hoc committee. Jim Lane was the chair and after the interview was over, I walked out and went back to my office and called my wife and I said, well, that ain't gonna happen. And she's like, what happened? I said, I could not get Jim Lane to look at me. I said, it's just not gonna happen. An hour later, the phone rings and the lovely lady on the other end of the phone said, Mr. Lane in the committee would like to recommend you to the full council to be appointed as a municipal court judge. And just like that, my life changed. For 16 years, I served as the jail judge and it was the best. It was awesome. You never knew who you were gonna see, what you were gonna see, or what you were gonna smell. But I loved it. I loved every minute of it. In 2012, Chief Judge Morris asked me to come by her office and she told me that she wanted to recommend me to the committee to serve as deputy chief judge. But the downside of that was I had to give up the jail. But it was a great opportunity to work side by side with her, who I called boss, and learn so many things from her. In 2016, she retired and I felt I applied for the job. 2017, your predecessors appointed me as the chief judge of the Fort Worth municipal court. You and your predecessors gave me so much more than a job for the last 27 and a half years. You gave me and my wife an opportunity to put our two children through Baylor University where they got educated and grew up into adults. My son also met the love of his life, married her and together they produced four little people who adore us, we adore them, and they call me Papa and they call her grandma. You gave me the opportunity to work with a whole host of amazing people to help make our court into what it is today, a court that seeks to do justice on a case by case basis. And it regularly goes out into the community to meet with folks and to hopefully give them the opportunity to forgive some warrants and make their lives a little bit easier. Finally, you gave me an opportunity to serve my hometown in a meaningful and positive ways. I'm very proud to have received all of these opportunities and my words today I fear will not fall short, but please know that I have done the best I could do to live up to the trust that you and your predecessors put in me. All of the former mayors and councils, I have tried to be fair, fair, fair, as I learned at the very first judge school that I went to so many years ago. I will miss you and I will always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers. Thank you again for all the opportunities and thank you for leading Fort Worth, the city that we all love. Thank you very much. Judge Rogers, congratulations on your retirement. I know we will be seeing you often around Fort Worth because public service is in your family's blood, so it's just onto the next phase of service, but as your friend and colleague over the last 10 years, I love you and I'm so proud for you and we cannot thank you enough for the amazing impact you've had on the city and as a reminder what public service really is all about. You really do embody that every single day, so thank you for all these years and thank you for the cookie, although I think we probably should be the one thanking you, but we do appreciate you. Council, if you wanna say anything, go ahead. Thank you, Judge. I'll miss the bow tie too. I can teach you. Oh, yeah. All right, next I'm gonna call on Dana Bergdorf to recognize some folks here. Thank you, David. Mayor and members of the city council, I'm hesitant to follow the wonderful Judge Rogers, but thank you for that. I'm excited to be talking with you today about two awards that have been granted to our historic stockyards. It's appropriate that we actually have representatives here from the Economic Development Partnership and Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce to listen in because we certainly think of the stockyards as a tremendous asset to Fort Worth and Economic Development Initiative, but what's really important about the stockyards is that it's authentic and that there's a huge amount of history associated with our historic stockyards and is an important part of Northside Fort Worth. So we're excited to report these awards to you and I'd like to bring up DJ Harrell, our Development Services Director to tell you more about them. DJ. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council, City Manager Cook. The Texas Chapter of American Planning Association recognizes exceptional planning efforts among many nominations across the state. This year we met in Corpus Christi and this year the stockyards won two awards. The first award was Great Places in Texas in the public space category for Mewlale. Great public spaces promote social interaction and a sense of community. The second was a public-private partnership with Bennett Partners and Majestic Realty. This award, the Planning Landmarks Award for the Stockyards Horton Mewlborn Restoration. This restoration work included the repair of significant structural damage, including foundations, walls, columns and roofs from years of neglect, weather and fire. The removal of all non-original elements, structures, openings and equipment also was a priority to return the bonds to the historic state. This year we have, today we have Justin Newhart, the Manager of Preservation and Design for Development Services Department, Ethan Cartwright, Vice President of Marketing with the Stockyards Heritage Development Company and Samantha Garber-Narrio from Bennett Partners to receive the award today. One of y'all has to talk, right? Somebody tell me about it. Well, I would like to say it was really easy to do what we've done over the last few years, but thank you for all the support the city has shown. Bennett, our great partners to work with. You know, the cool thing about all of this is when we first started, we had about three million visitors. I believe by the end of December, we will have nine million visitors. So thank you all and let's continue to do good work and preserve history. Thank you. I'd just like to also thank the city for putting this together. We are very invested as a company in Fort Worth and mean presently in the Stockyards and hope that we can continue to restore a lot of the historic buildings down there and give them new life and new opportunity. Sam, how many times did you redesign the mule barns, do you think? I can't tell you how many times we designed those openings on exchange. They changed dimensions many times and we've done many iterations. I won't go into exactly all of them, but so glad that everybody has found and loved them the same as we do. And we're down to, I think, we have one last lease space left out of 180,000 square foot. That's awesome. And to Justin and your team, thank you so much for your diligence. It took a lot of partnership with the city to get it right and I think it's paying off. So congratulations on this award for everybody involved. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you. Justin, thank you. I don't recognize Justin without a cowboy hat on. Let's see, now we'll call on Jessica McCackern to announce an award. We always get very excited anytime we get to get up here and recognize our employees, like Dana said. And today is no exception for me. I get to recognize a great group of individuals for a partnership that they've developed years ago. So it is with great pleasure that I share with you that the Texas chapter of the Public Risk Management Association, also called TEX Prima, selected the City of Fort Worth Athletic Trainers Program to receive the 2023 Risk Management Achievement Award. This is an award that recognizes programs that contribute to successful risk management efforts. The Athletic Trainer Program was established in 2016 as a partnership with Baylor-Scotten-White Institute of Rehabilitation and embeds athletic trainers within high-risk departments of the city. Today, we have three athletic trainers that are onsite full-time within the police department, the fire department, and the water department. You know that athletic trainers are most commonly employed in the education space and with professional athletic teams, but over the recent years, there's more and more corporations that are recognizing the importance of having athletic trainers within their companies to work on risk mitigation efforts as well. The athletic trainers in the City of Fort Worth work closely with the risk management and safety teams to provide individual and population-wide risk reduction interventions. Some of the programs that they've established here in Fort Worth include driver ergonomic evaluations for police officers, cardiovascular fitness programming for firefighters, biomechanics training for utility employees, and individualized stretch and strengthening programs for crews across the city. Athletic trainers place an emphasis on risk reduction by identifying high-risk populations and activities and then creating dedicated individualized programs that mitigate the risks of those positions and activities. They also provide first aid services, including cryotherapy, taping and wrapping, and massage techniques to address discomfort early on. When an employee is injured and needs medical attention, the athletic trainer stays with that employee and works with their physicians to keep track on the treatment program. The athletic trainers here in the City of Fort Worth assist on average 175 different employees each month, and they've treated over 2,000 employees annually. This program has proven to be highly successful with a rate of return of over 500%, and an estimated savings of $1.5 million annually in reduced claims costs. I'm gonna show it just a very short snippet of a video of one example of this program, and while I do, I'm gonna have some individuals join me and then I'll recognize them after the video. They will blow off some of those minor injuries in order to stay on that fire truck every day, and we recognize that we needed to, first of all, help our people. We knew that there are injuries that are not being reported or continue to affect them day to day. We knew that we could help them. P.F.T. results, so every four times... Baylor has been very forthcoming in helping us develop this new program for us. I mean, we're started from nothing. We were able to bring things in, and we immediately started seeing people. I've gone into and watched the different drills and put on the equipment and learned how heavy it is and how physically demanding it is. Unlike a regular athlete, their season never stops. Their entire career, they're on season, and they have to be performing at 100% all the time for their safety and for the public's safety. So it's really important that you take care of your machine and your machine as a firefighter is your body, so taking care of that is so important for not only your health and safety, but the health and safety of fellow firefighters. So the Athletic Trainer Program within the city of Fort Worth is unique because there are not many cities across the nation that use this program. However, we've proven it is highly successful and can easily be duplicated for other municipalities that are interested, and we see more and more that are starting to catch on. I'd like for you to join me in recognizing the employees that brought this program to fruition as well as the athletic trainers that are currently working with us. So to join me, and they're gonna come a little closer, not be shy. We've got Mark Barda, our Risk Manager. We have Chris Lam, our Risk Supervisor. Danielle Castor, our Senior Risk Analyst, is not able to be here with us today. For our athletic trainers, we have Sarah Nectarline who works with the Water Department. Brian Newman works with the Fire Department. And Christina Ferguson works with our Police Department. And I'm told that we also have joining us today the retired Assistant Fire Chief Homer Robertson who starred in this video who is also instrumental in bringing this program to Fort Worth. Please join me in thanking these individuals and recognizing the receipt of this award. Congratulations, thank you. Homer, I think Elizabeth has a bone to pick. Just a second. You're gonna walk into this building and not bring banana pudding. That is a shame. It's good seeing you. Thank you. All right, next up are informal reports. We have a number of them today. The first informal report is on the September 2023 sales tax revenue and Clay Pearson is available. If there are any questions. That's all. I'm gonna keep going. Keep rolling. Here we go. Next informal report is on the adoption of the City of Fort Worth's 2024 Federal Legislative and Administrative Agenda. TJ Patterson is available if there are any questions. No questions. Thank you to TJ and the Corley Pipes. All right, the next two informal reports are on the recruitment for directors. The first one is on code compliance. The second is on environmental services and Holly Moyer is available if there are any questions. Any questions, Council? Nope. Rolling. Next, informal report is on customer care, team updates and statistics and Sharon Gamble is available if there are any questions. I'm gonna keep going. Next, informal report is on home buyer assistance program, policy change and Victor Turner is available if there are any questions. Nope. All right. Next, informal report is on the inventory of Fort Worth Housing Finance Corporation, lots and surplus property available for sale. Again, Victor Turner is available if there are any questions. Elizabeth. Victor and Ricky. Well, and Ricky's house are with property management. Thanks, Victor. One question that I have as we move through these lots, has there been any discussion as we develop the community land trust in that model of including properties like this into that land trust as well? Yeah, we had some conversations with Rainwater about lots that we have and the possibility of those being included in the community land trust. Also, we have some other properties that will be up for where we can sell them in about another two, three years, about 64 properties that those would be a possibility as well. So we've had some discussions. So is it not possible for the city to just elect to include those in since we own them or is that? Well, we sell those properties. So yeah, they could make an offer on them and follow the same process we would with any developer. Right, but we cannot do that. What I'm asking is as the city, right, we own these lots and we know we're developing this land trust. So can we elect to, as opposed to selling them to someone, can we elect to put those into the land trust? Yeah, I would suppose the HFC could do that. Okay, thank you. Any other questions for Victor? Thank you. Don't go far, Victor. We'll do these next to the next two informal reports. The first one is on veterans assistance programs and Victor's the guy. And the next one is on small business program for veterans and service disabled veterans. And Christina Brooks is available if there are any questions. Council Member Lara-Storff. I don't have any questions, but I do have a couple of comments. And that's one is thank you to everyone involved for putting these together. To also urge my colleagues here as well on the veterans assistance programs, especially this time of year, where it gets really tough for veterans and their families. Make sure you send these out, especially the Ford Home Veteran Assistance Grant. One of the, I guess, unknown secrets of it, that one is the dependence of veterans 25, veterans 25 years or age of younger can benefit from that too. So getting that out is really gonna be huge, especially the Healthy Homes for Heroes grants. Getting that out this time of year, you're gonna hear about a lot of folks who are without a heater, et cetera. And then come find out that is a World War II veteran who just no one in their family knows about any of these benefits that's available. And this is one that is available to them. And if they try to go online, though, to fill out the application, it'll, and correct me if I'm wrong, right now they won't be able to, because the city funds are not there. However, the funds through these grants are there, but because the application process is essentially one of the same, they won't see it. So they actually have to fill out a hand application. And I believe take to the community action partners in Arlington, and please correct me if I'm wrong on this, but I think that was the case. And so I just asked that as a city, if we can do better on the process, because trying to navigate that, I'm trying to help a veteran get down to Arlington to try to go through this process. If we could just improve that or find a way and let me know what I can do at all. I'd love to be a part of that. Yeah, to respond to that, we're in the middle of changing some software. So once we get that implemented in a simplified process form, they won't have to be doing paper and applications like that. So that should streamline it. Awesome. And I don't know if it's possible, but even seeing how many, because one of the things I run into with veteran organizations all the time is they wanna help, but the funds aren't there and they're waiting till the next grant comes in. So a lot of folks will lose hope in the process because is this a one month wait? Is it a two month wait? Is that a six month? If there's a way to even have like, how much is still left in that pool at all? That way they know if there's even a chance, they should just go start barking up a different tree. It'd be great. And then I'm gonna go move on to the next one, which is the Veterans Programs for Small Business. Big thanks to Ms. Brooks for the work you put on that one. I think you really understood the intent there with what we were trying to do and that's assist these veteran owned small businesses in services-abled veteran owned small businesses. We're trying to find ways to work with the city in some of these contra-acts, et cetera. And so you understand the intent there and I know it's always difficult when you have the good idea of fairies sprinkling these things out there, but I appreciate all the work that you put in that and making this what I feel is gonna be an amazing program for the city of Fort Worth. And then of course, the veteran owned small businesses that are here and then the things that we have, what I really want you to know is what the action that we're gonna have behind this, not just, oh, thanks for this information, but it's now it's going forward and working with the Fort Worth Chamber and with some other initiatives. And I think we've got some really big things on our rise and all that coupled with Council Member Beck's initiative to get that veterans position, which is now live, which is huge. I think all these things are coming together now. So just thank you to you and your team for putting all this together. Thank you. All right, if you have anything. I'm just gonna remind everybody that that position is live. So for those of all you watching, not here in the room with us, if you know a veteran that works in the veteran service space and would be a good fit for this particular position, please go to our city website and encourage them to apply because we'd like to get them in as soon as possible. Cause as you can see, we've got a lot going on. Thank you both, appreciate that. Jeanette, go ahead. Victor, I did have a question for you. Sorry. I know that there are certain programs with the city of Fort Worth that assist not just veterans, but their family members. Which ones are those specifically? Victor, sorry. Did you say programs specifically city of Fort Worth? Well, yes, that will assist not just veterans, but also their family members like surviving spouses and children. I wanna ask you to speak to that. I know as Councilman mentioned, the forward home and healthy heroes are the two that we get from Texas Veterans Commission. But then all of our other programs are eligible for, not only just veterans, but citizens across the city. So currently, Mr. Turner is correct. The only grant that we currently have that assist surviving spouses and dependents of veterans is the Forward Home Veteran Assistance Program. Thank you. The next informer report is on judicial pay recommendations for fiscal year 24. And this will be your last time to give Judge Danny Rogers a hard time. Any questions for Judge Rogers? I think you're all free, Judge, thank you. Thank you. Next informer report is on lease amendments with the Southwestern Exposition and Livestock Show on the sheep and swine bar renovation. And Michael Crum is available for any questions. I have one question. Thank you, Michael. Just to clarify the proposed amendment, does it change the ability for the Fortress Stock Show and Rodeo to host private events or does it change the terms of their previous kind of? Yes, ma'am. Well, first of all, we need to welcome Brad Barnes and Matt Carter to the meeting today as all of you can appreciate Stock Show. They've been in Stock Show season now for several weeks. They didn't want to be at the bottom of the agenda is what I'm hearing you say. Well, and to yank them out of Stock Show prep and to get them down here, you know it's important. None of us want to make them mad because if you ride green entry, you wanted to put you on a good horse, not a mean horse. Words to live by. So Council Member Hill, no, it does not. So what we're doing in the agreement is we're codifying what has been an informal understanding between the city and the Stock Show about events that the Stock Show holds at the Will Rogers Complex that take place outside of the licensed period. Yes, ma'am. So stay right there because the next informal report is on the Will Rogers Memorial Center Master Services Agreement. And Mike, I don't have a question. If you'll just summarize this for anybody that's listening or for council members that haven't been following this as closely. Yeah, so this is a conversation with the city and event facilities for Worth which is a supporting organization of the Will Rogers Complex and the Stock Show have been in for several months about how to increase the efficiency of the delivery of capital projects at the Will Rogers Memorial Center. And so this agreement. Any other questions? Michael, what's the timeline to get the agreement in place? So we're ready with the document. So we're briefing you all today. We're going to ask for your consent to enter into the agreement a week from today. We'll sign the document and be off and running. Thank you, Mike. Thank you. All right, the next informal report is a litter control update both fiscal year 23 year end and a fiscal 24 outlook and Cody Wittenberg, Lauren Priyer and Richard Zavala are all available if there are any questions. That's perfect. I have a question from Cody specifically. Cody. Come on down, Cody. Hello. Hello. First I want to say thank you to your staff because we prioritized litter abatement this year and the year before and we certainly see you moving around the city. And I know I always get really excited when I see a street sweeper like I might cheer and honk and wave at it. But despite all of that work and we can see by the numbers, right that we are absolutely doing more to pick up litter. It still seems like it's, it almost feels like we put the money in it and our residents are, I'm going to say it's people from the East driving through Fort Worth have just ramped up the litter. And I know I feel it as I drive through my district. And so are you noticing an increase in litter as well is my first question. And then my second question is what can we do to better engage tech stock because so much of the litter that I see is along our interstate freeways. And so perfect segue into how hard Dr. Wittenberg has worked. Yeah, absolutely. So for the first question we absolutely saw a lot of litter this summer. There were some changes in contracts and some changes with tech stock specifically and their contractors had some changes and some delays. And we absolutely saw our highways getting more and more litter and debris along them. And even throughout the city, we certainly have seen that. But as the temperatures have cooled off and some of our contracts and some of tech stocks contracts have stabilized we're hoping to get ahead of much of that moving into the fall and spring and moving on into the next year. Speaking specifically to tech stock, we sort of asked the question of what can we do working better together and how can we work to really advance highway maintenance and to really improve our highways. And I'm very, very thankful to the Fort Worth Tech Stock District. They've been very receptive. We started monthly meetings about three months ago. We've worked to change our municipal maintenance agreement with them to allow the city and us with tech stock to work more cohesively together. And I think we're really excited for the prospects of what's to come. And I'll add that I know Renee's team is working on a city news story that I know I'm gonna personally turn into a social media post. Each of you are welcome to do the same thing because I know everybody gets this question about highway litter abatement. So just wanted to say thank you, Cody. He's making it sound easy. It has not been and they've worked very diligently and tech stocks still talking to us. So that says a lot because I think they recognize their opportunity for a partnership here. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. The next info report is on managing the feral cat population. And Chris McAllister is available. I will stop. Is that on the council rules of procedures? Yeah. Okay, we'll go to the next one. I'd like to hear a report on that and just our partnership with operation kindness will help what all will entail and the increased number of spay and neuter that we'll be able to achieve. Hello, Chris McAllister, assistant director for animal control. Can you repeat the questions? Which are, I was walking, sorry. Just a quick report on this IR and just I saw, I read, you know, that our partnership with operation kindness is that like a continued partnership? And so it is. So currently operation kindness through facilities agreement works within our shelters and they're just helping us keep on top of the space and neuters of the shelter pets, the ones that are going out for adoptions, adoption events, pets marks, things like that. What we've done is we just started talks with them about coming, being in the shelter and maybe doing some feral cats, maybe doing some pop-up in the neighborhoods. We think there's a big need in some specific neighborhoods to low cost vaccinations, spays and neuters, feral cats is there's needed some community cats. So we have just begun those conversations and we're going to report back to you in mid January, kind of what the plan was. And so just grants out there that are they may be available for this? So we have secured a grant three months ago, give or take two, three months ago from Petco Love, a big donor for us. And my plan is to use part of that to support these programs with OPK. Okay, thank you. Thank you, Chris. Thank you. Next informal report is the process for reconsideration of council actions and Lee and Guzman is available if there are any questions. Carl, let's go ahead. Lee, I just have one question. I don't know if it's already articulated in our rules and procedures, but when the council member submits requests for reconsideration, I've read the IR, understand how that works. Do we have to provide a reason, articulate a reason for that at that time? Or how does that work? Could you speak to that? No, you don't have to provide any sort of an explanation. It's just the request to do the reconsideration itself. And remember, that's a two step process. So of course the reconsideration is its own vote and then the actual action item would be reconsidered at the second vote. Okay, so at the time that we do reconsider for, can you speak to that? Reconsideration requests has been made at the dais weekend, whoever it is may not say what that is to the rest of the council understands. Okay, all right. Thank you, that's all my question. Councilor Nettles. Yes, I had a question that I thought of after you had spoke earlier. It said reconsideration for council proposal. Is this only reconsideration for council proposal or is it any action item, such as MNC's zoning? It's for any action item. So the council proposal is a mechanism that's used to get the reconsideration to happen. So it's for any kind of an action, a contract, any kind of a, any approval at the council's done. Okay, and I think it would be, Dr. Williams mentioned it earlier, if we could look into other practices versus unanimous vote versus majority vote, because I wonder how it will even work. Okay, yeah, we'll look into that and I'll definitely get that information back to you. Okay. Any other questions for Leanne, council? Jared? Oh, I'm sorry. And then Carlson. Go ahead, Jared. No, please, go ahead, you. Please, too. No, we thought before you. So Leanne, as far as reconsideration is concerned, if a proposal is materially different than the previous proposal considered, has it still applauded this rule? No, this would just be for the actual action. So if it's materially different, it would be a new item. Great. Okay, and something that Chris said triggered a question for me. When it comes to voting with majority and all that, and again, I'm relying on you to tell us what our rules procedure says. So how are they articulated so that we can use the correct terminology when you're thinking of this, especially when it comes to, say, two-third vote type of situations? So what does our rules or procedures say that? Because it's not always a clear majority, right? Sometimes the prevailing side is two-thirds. That's right. So if the original item required a two-thirds vote when you go back and you do that actual reconsideration of the item, let's say you've gotten past the first threshold of whether you're gonna reconsider, let's say that's passed, and you're at that action item, you would still, those same underlying rules are still gonna apply, so you would still need a two-thirds majority or a super majority or whatever the rules were. The first time it passed would still apply the second time as well. So do we need any kind of change to that terminology? No, I think it's clear as it's right now. Thanks, that's it. And lastly, I was asking about the unanimous vote in order for us to even vote on the reconsideration. Understood, yes, and we're gonna take a look and see what other cities are doing about that, and I'll get that back to you guys. All right, thank you. Any other questions, council? Jared, you're good. Just a comment, when you're looking at it, it would seem that reconsideration would require a super majority at the most and maybe a simple majority at the least, and so unanimous is a bit unique to me, so I look forward to reviewing that. All right, next in formal report is on the results for incentive agreements reviewed during fiscal year 2023 and Robert Stearns is available. If there are any questions, Robert? Any questions, council? Yeah, sorry, I have another three. Sorry. Mayor, can we ask him? Well, sorry, I was just asking to do an overview. Yeah, sure. Is that fine? Sure, okay. Okay, thank you. Mayor, members of council, Robert Stearns, economic development. So again, the informal report that you have in your packs today is really something that we present to you on an annual basis. So as part of any of our economic development agreements, as you know, when we bring those to you, they're kind of broken down their specific commitments that they have to meet on investment, on job creation, on spending with business equity firms down to current policy and on salary, which is a newer requirement in the policy. So those agreements are reviewed on an annual basis throughout department and then that information is compiled into the report that you see in front of you today. So for FY23, we're looking at actually agreements, we call it tax year 22. So we're always kind of following a lag year behind. So this is tax year 22 agreements and compliance that we're looking at. For tax year 22, there were a total of 35 chapter 380 agreements and eight tax abatement agreements that were reviewed. Those projects that were finalized represented about $61 million in taxes that are being generated towards the city. And as you can see in some of the charts and graphs that we included in the informal report, those dollars continue to grow overall the overall cumulative investment over time has grown from about 3.56 million from these agreements to about 5.78 million in 2022. As for the overall results on the projects and the compliance in general, I would say that they perform fairly well. The construction participation with court work businesses exceeded the requirements job commitments or where they need to be the salary requirement which is a new thing that we put in place in the last policy. The two companies that have commitments on salary requirements easily exceeded those. The challenge that we are continuing to see and this is not new, we brought this up last year is on our MWB participation. And there's some challenges with that in general but just tracking that over time, right? So many of these agreements are 10, 15, 20 years in length and the MBE requirement is on the construction component. So when you look at it, we look at that year one, year one when we do the first year of compliance on the construction, if they hit it, great. They get the full benefit of that percentage of the abatement or tax or the agreement. If they don't, there's a reduction and that reduction carries forward for the life of that agreement. So there's not an opportunity for them to spend more on additional construction at a later date to get that number out. That is an ongoing drop. And so when you're looking at just from the numbers, if you got some long-term agreements in there, it's hard to change that percentage because you're still carrying agreements that are now, again, 10, 15 years old that never hit the requirements. What I would say is that we had one agreement that was completed this year under our new policy. So we went through a significant revision of our policy to align the MWB requirement with the business equity ordinance. And so that business equity ordinance and the company that is under those requirements actually far exceeded what their commitment was going to be on the project. And so I think as we continue to see some of these newer projects that are completed under the revised policy, I think you'll see those numbers really start to look a lot better. But again, we're still continuing to carry some older agreements that probably were not as better aligned when it comes to the MWB requirement. And then along with that, we continue to talk with the Christians Department of Diversity and Equity on how we can better align our processes. So again, how we can get them engaged earlier on in the processes, talking with the general contractors, how we can utilize their B2G Now system to help us in the ongoing tracking. And so again, I think some of these ongoing improvements will kind of help us get that number a little bit tighter than what you see it today. So my question was actually related to the MBE. So thank you for addressing that. First, I wanna say great job because as we look at what was committed and then what was verified as I went through this IR over and over again, I saw that it was actually what was verified was greater than what was initially committed. And I know when it comes to economic development deals, I get it and I'm sure my colleagues get it. People, they question, is it really the best use of our tax dollars? Why are you giving our money away? And I think what this IR shows is that we're doing a pretty good job of selecting who we choose to give those to in the return that we're getting to our community. So hands off to you and your staff for navigating that for us. In light of what you explained with the MBE, is it possible, because we looked like we were doing stellar until we got to that, right? And knowing that the majority of that is done in the first couple of years, but then we're still reporting years out to the extent that that skews what this data looks like, is there a way that we can capture that in construction stage and display it and report it that way so that we get a better idea because it might actually be better than what we think it is if we've just got these long-term agreements that are kind of skewing it. Yeah, definitely. We can take a look at that. We can coordinate with the lab and Christine and his department and see if there's a better way that we can present that information that gives you more of a real-time look at what's going on as opposed to against some of these older agreements. Thank you. Thanks, Robert. Oh, sorry, Chris. I apologize. I just wanna piggyback on that. I asked this all the time. What is the actual goal for the MBE goal? What depends on which policy the agreement was approved under? So the policies have, two years, the tax abatement policy has to be updated every two years. So the city has to elect to participate in tax abatement. We historically have tended to make updates to the Chapter 380 policy at the same time to ensure that those two policies are in alignment. So the MBE commitment has varied all over the place. So at one point it was 25% was the goal that was kind of across the board when you had some ability to go back and negotiate that. There was not a hard reduction tied to that 25%. There was a good faith effort at one time under the agreement. So you may have had a 25% commitment, but if you made a good faith effort you would get credit for that. So it was not until I think four or five years ago that we really tied down the MBE component and we said it's a 15% goal and that number was really established by historically we went back and looked at some of how the companies have been performing under some of the previous deals and we were looking at some of the projects that were currently in the mix, some city procurement projects and what the MBE participation was on those. And so we kind of set it at 15%. We removed the good faith equity, good faith effort portion of it and made it a hard commitment. So right now under today's policy and the policy that was approved two years ago is a 15% hard commitment to business equity firms. And if you hit that, you get 10% added to your agreement, your incentive agreement. If you don't, that entire 10% goes away for the life of the deal. It's a very strict, you either hit it or you don't pass, go either way. Do we know when we measure other cities with our goal? We did. So when we made the revision to set it at 15%, we did a look at how a number of cities were doing it. Our policy as assisted day is fairly stringent. Most cities still have some level of good faith effort in their requirements. So even if they have a higher percentage, they still allow this kind of vague good faith effort that if you have, you can show them that you've reached out to contractors or you had some event that brought contractors in, that would satisfy your commitment on the project. And in our case, we do not have a good faith effort commitment. So it's either you spend the money or you don't. Thank you, Robert. Appreciate you and Christina are working on this. And so I think it's very good if I like the 15%, but if we can continue to increase that along the way, as we increase those projects, they'll be grateful also. Yeah, and I think that says we, as I said, we usually update these every two years. And so I think that's part of the discussion we have with Christina and what she's seeing from the standpoint of overall capacity within our business equity areas, our six county region. And so that will allow us to adjust that number to be, again, exactly in alignment with the ordinance. Robert, I'll add something that Carlos will remember. We had a number of eight AM meetings, often on a Wednesday after a council night, getting to the point where we got to the 15%, but what could not be ignored is the impact the Beck School had on helping deliver these numbers. And so that's very important. We didn't do it on its own and it wasn't done by staff. This was council involved. We had contractors, even Bishop Hornsby from Mosier Valley would come to these meetings. And so it's quite a bit of work. And to get to the hard number of 15% was a struggle that some people really didn't think would happen. So I just can't sit here and not weigh in on that. Thank you. And the final, wait, wait, wait, one more. Oh, sorry, I almost got there, no problem. Thank you. Robert echoed all the sentiments in saying, really good job, I'm always inspired by the work that your team delivers in the form of incentives, just to kind of reiterate some of my colleagues' comments. I think the MWBE in general as a city is a huge opportunity for us, especially on the side of thinking about ways that we can continue to enhance availability of MWBE contractors here in the city. And I would love to continue to explore that with you and Christina and my colleagues about ways that we can help bolster capacity, especially through our black chamber and our Hispanic chamber. I know we currently do provide some support for that availability work, and maybe there's some more we could do there to help knowing that this is a constant conversation across all of our contracts. If I may add, Mr. Council Member, and also in reference to the question from Council Member Bivens, your January 9th work session agenda includes a briefing on minority business enterprises with remarks by representatives from the black chamber, the Hispanic chamber and the Beck School of Construction. So we'll be addressing all of your concerns and everything the city is doing with economic development and diversity inclusion to expand the capacity of minority owned businesses. So thank you very much. Thank you for that clarification. I look forward to that. And also I don't want to be, I would be remiss if I didn't say this, the work that we're doing, especially with regards to MWB is really important and we're doing a great job. This is about how do we continue to provide more opportunity in our city. Thanks, Rob. All right, now the final Informer Report is an update on the Texas broadband equity, access and deployment. Kevin Gunn is available, if there are any questions. Gina, no, no one. You're good. Mayor, that concludes my report. Okay, council. First item, any questions on membership boards or commissions coming up on December 12th? If not, any questions on zoning cases or MNC log for December 12th? Nope. Okay, our first presentation is with Steve Montgomery and Robert Allen to talk about Fourth Economic Development Partnership and the fourth chamber of commerce. And Robert Stearns is gonna kick us off. Yes, thank you, Mayor. So again, I appreciate the opportunity for three of us to get up here and talk about economic development in Fort Worth. Robert and I got to touch on this a little bit at the mayor's state of the city. Steve, unfortunately, could not be there for that event and so it's great to have Steve here with us. I was at, I think, some of the genesis around this conversation today was making sure that we're not duplicating efforts and make sure everyone's kind of aware of what it is that we're doing. And I would say, I guess for me, I can't speak for Robert or Steve, but we talk so much that it's really less of a thought that we are duplicating efforts. It's much more in my mind of, how are we supporting each other through the partnership? We all have specific things that we're trying to get done, but in many cases, economic development's a team sport and so it's not just the city, it's not just the EDP, it's not just the chambers. We are continually working together to enhance and make sure that Fort Worth is as competitive as it can be when it comes to recruitment, retention, and business development. So I'm gonna just walk very quickly through my piece of this because you all have seen, you've seen this multiple times. So you know exactly where the city stands from an economic development standpoint. Obviously we are focused on competitive business attraction and again, we do that in support with the Fort Worth EDP. We do some site assessment. We do special district development again. So TIFFs and PIDs, that's our realm exclusively, the Chamber and EDP are not involved in that. And then we do some support on promotion, target sector marketing, and outbound marketing. Entrepreneurship, we're really focused on the small business development and that's been through a number of initiatives that we've done really through the James E. Glenn entrepreneurial campus to the Entrepreneurship and Innovation Committee. We've done a number of activities related to how do we build up our entrepreneurial legal system. And along with that, it really involves how do we provide additional access to capital. So programs like CDFI or Fort Worth that provides dollars to some of our small businesses. Innovation districts, that's really our space, particularly with some of the development happening around the Texas A&M hub and the activity going on in their south side in the Medical Innovation District. And then councils where, of all of our efforts as it relates to the smart cities heading out to the conference and utilizing that as a real touchstone to be able to really market Fort Worth as the city of the future and a city that is really bringing these technologies of the future forward. And then our final piece is really community vitality. Again, we are heavily invested in neighborhood reinvestment. Retail recruitment, not as heavily, but I didn't note that because obviously we are aware that there are food deserts in several parts of the city. And so we wanna try to come up with a strategy to try to continue to focus on attracting grocery stores in those identified areas. And then catalytic development, those types of developments in underserved areas that can promote larger, broader scale redevelopment activities. And so this is kind of the wheelhouse that we spend the majority of our time with. But as you'll see through the presentations from both Robert and Steve, you'll see at the end how all this really kind of intertwines to support economic development as a whole. And so with that, I will turn it over to Mr. Montgomery to talk about what's going on at the Fort Worth Chamber. You hear that, Mr. Montgomery, you like that. So Mayor Parker, Council, City Manager Cook, thank you very much for the opportunity to be here today. I am Steve Montgomery, President and CEO of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce. While I am new to this role, most of you know I'm not new to Fort Worth. Grew up here, spent most of my professional and personal life here. Earlier this year, the Executive Board of the Fort Worth Chamber made a very important decision to redefine our approach to achieving our foundational elements of our mission. Business attraction, retention, and expansion. They established a renewed focus on business attraction and stood up a new entity called the Fort Worth Economic Development Partnership to focus solely to concentrate on business attraction, set up a new entity, brought in the best and the brightest, Robert Allen. I think that was the right decision on both accounts. The Fort Worth Chamber's mission was redefine the focus on the other elements of the fundamentals of business retention and expansion in addition to member services and member programming. And that is my charge. We are fulfilling that charge by reorienting the organization around these core principles, leadership, engagement, and advocacy. Leadership, ensuring that the voice of my members and as the voice of the business community that we are leading, that we are at the table, that we're doing the work and that we're engaged in the right conversations, that we're engaging our members, that we're providing forms by which our members can engage with one another and that we're engaging our strategic partners, the Fort Worth Hispanic Chamber, the Fort Worth Metropolitan Black Chamber, the city of Fort Worth, near Southside, Camp Bowie District, downtown Fort Worth Inc. Just to name a few of our strategic allies. And finally to be the fierce advocate for business members to help solve their problems, help deal with and work with policymakers to articulate a business climate whereby prosperity is shared across the community. These activities are fundamental, basic blocking and tackling of what a chamber should be doing. If we're not achieving these, frankly, little else matters. But beyond these fundamentals, we're also innovating around business intelligence. And that is using data stacks and analytic tools to help our members and our community stakeholders make more informed, better decisions. We're also activating our members on issues like that have direct nexus to economic development, workforce and talent, mobility and infrastructure, veterans and military affairs, small business and homelessness. And we want to engage in these matters in a constructive and productive manner. To date, my strategic vision has been to bring stability and a renewed strategic vision to the organization. We've done some internal reorganizations, restructurings and we're meeting with our members and we're sharing our vision and we're gathering feedback. In 2024, we begin delivery of these initiatives, standing up the business intelligence unit, which we can dive into more if you'd like. And in 25, we don't just deliver, but we excel. And finally, I just want to add one thing. One of the reasons that, one of the things that attracted me to this role was my belief that a high-performing, well-functioning chamber has true civic value. And I'm passionate about the success of my community. And I feel like this is a way that I can contribute to that success. I know that everyone around this table shares that passion and I look forward to being your partner in this important work. Now I'm gonna turn it over to my partner, Robert Allen. Steve, thank you. Mayor, council, city manager Cook, great to see all of you. Robert Allen, CEO of the Fourth Economic Development Partnership, new organization. So for some of you, this is probably gonna be new. So I'm gonna walk through it briefly and then at the end, I'm gonna show you a slide that hopefully brings it all together for you to understand who's on first, what play we're calling and why we're calling it. So first of all, again, new organization. So our work and effort have been here nine months. Our work and effort has been focused on building our organization. What does that mean? It means identifying necessary resources to compete better and also finding top talent. So my executive vice president, I was able to steal from our partners to the East after an 18-plus year stellar career there, Jessica Hare. And I inherited Sarah Thurber on my team as well, who's a second rock star that we get to add to our team as well. A couple of questions I've gotten is how big of a team are you building, Robert? Our answer is very small. So best case scenario, I had two more members of our team and then we stopped there because of all the support and counsel I need from these two gentlemen that just went before you. So again, foundational elements of the past eight to nine months, identifying the resources, building the team, putting together the review and the refinement on our target industries. And what do I mean by refinement? Are we targeting the industries we need to? You and your predecessors have spent a lot of time targeting certain industries for incentive purposes. I think you're on the right track, but I think we need to constantly ask ourselves, could we adjust that moving forward? For example, could we highlight financial services more than it's being called out today? Does something not warrant an incentive discussion in a target industry? Robert and I have this conversation. It feels like weekly as it should be because we need to be constantly asking ourselves that question. Additionally, we need to be targeting subsectors underneath each of those target industries that guides our work moving forward. As you move into 24 and beyond, you start building an actual target list. What do I mean by that? Exactly what I meant. We are gonna look at businesses that we think fit within the fabric of Fort Worth, Tarrant County and our surrounding communities and then use that list as our jumping off point to go on offense. There are versions of lists that I have uncovered and found in the files, if you will, of previous iterations of organizations. We're gonna use all of that to guide us as we move forward, but we have to be thoughtful about the businesses that we wanna go after when we go on offense. Homegrown growth is really important and I wanna point this out because a lot of people have asked me, how quickly are you gonna be able to go on offense in a bigger way? And I have said both publicly and privately, I wanna reiterate this now. I am going to start in Fort Worth as I already have in very close coordination with Steve and his team at the Forward Chamber. If a business in Fort Worth wants to grow and expand, we need to make sure they have all the tools and resources to do that first. Then and only then will I go look to the state of Texas, an area where I spent 20 plus years of my career, so I know it pretty well. Then and only then are we gonna go coast to coast in this country and then and only then are we gonna go international. I wanna correct the record about what was said about a conversation that invoked me in a previous presentation to you, was said that we don't have the bandwidth to do international. That is not true. What I said is we will get to that after and only after we take care of Fort Worth, Texas, the country. Best case scenario were international offense when it comes to business attraction and recruitment in 2025, but only when we feel confident and comfortable that we've taken care of those other boxes. Finally, moving forward 24 and 25, full blown offensive maneuvers, outbound communications and marketing. And again, all of this is done in extremely close coordination with Robert Stearns and with Steve Montgomery. We all need to be playing our role as champions of Fort Worth. We recognize that. We understand that. We agree with that. And we need to do it in very close coordination. We need to use the opportunity. We talked about the rodeo previously. Use that as a marquee event to host folks who are looking at Fort Worth. We absolutely intend to do that. Moving forward, again, full blown offensive tactics. And then finally, we need to make sure that we're on offense in cities, in states, and then again, ultimately countries that make sense. You can spend all of your time targeting certain areas for economic development and it will absolutely drown you. If you are not specific and strategic about what we need to do and the methodology to get to that, we will be spending our wheels over and over and over and I won't be here very long, to be honest with you. So let me try to bring all this together and then we're happy to take questions. This is what the three of us put together to hopefully help explain roles and responsibilities, but also very clearly overlaps because we want to be very clear. There are overlaps as long as we're closely coordinated in those overlaps, then we are all good to continue our coordinated missions moving forward, everybody driving towards the goal of a thriving community. As you all know, we are the fastest growing city in the state of Texas and that is an honor, but that also comes with tremendous challenges. So if we fall short of communicating through this matrix, if you will, it's gonna cause problems for us in the international and then the domestic and then the local economic development space. And so as Robert said, we wear each other out. It feels like daily, certainly weekly. We have a standing weekly meeting with him and his team and my team. I office down the hall from Steve. We are in very, very close communications. We're gonna go through this process. So I hope this lays out. I won't bore you with going through it because I know it's in your packets, but we will answer questions in a minute. But I hope this lays out for you a very clear picture and understanding of who's taking lead and what areas, where our overlaps are, why those overlaps exist and then what our ultimate goal is in the middle, which is obviously to contribute to a thriving foreworth and region around us. With that, we're more than happy to take any questions you might have. Thank you, Robert. Questions from council? I know Mayor Burton-Bivens had a question. Yes, I do. And I can only tell you that this question is not for Robert. So I don't know who's gonna respond. But a few years ago, I've tried to fold it, Chris, I'm sorry. Before Steve was hired, the chamber had taken a different approach and that was going to find them not focusing exclusively on the member-based concern. And they were going broader into the city. And so for so many years, there has been the absence of grocery stores, not just in inner city communities. We have grocery store deserts all over the city. And so this is a practical example that I hope to get from you and our Steve. So Steve, get up there too and tell Becky I said hi. How does this new makeup, this new focus that has me very excited, how does this partner with the city of Fort Worth Roberts team to get a grocery store in any community where it's missing? I'm trying to see how this chemistry is gonna work. Absolutely, it's a great question. So you're exactly right that the prior configuration of the four chamber was focusing on our major employers which are super critical, right? We need to give them support and we benefit so hugely from them. What we got away from and what I'm getting back to is a focus on small business, right? That's the essential economy in any community is small business. So it's a combination of that focusing back on the small business but also on the advocacy side, helping on the public policy side, working with Robert, working with this body on what kind of public policies can we advocate, can we pass to help support, closing the gap on the food deserts and encouraging maybe a national retailer to put an establishment in some of these areas. What kind of incentives can we offer that? So again, it's twofold. One, focusing on small businesses and also focusing on advocacy and public policy. I think it's two part. Let me tell you this, Steve. I've gone to the, what did I join? Robert, the ICSC, whatever that was. Yeah, I've been to those conferences. It didn't pay off anything. That was just too big for my world but I want you to know, I live in Southeast Fort Worth. I know I'm gonna have a grocery store at Trinity and 820. The development is gonna demand that but right now I have to drive, I have to drive to Arlington or come all the way out on 7th Street to get the needs of my new dietary requirements which are very different for me. And so I want you, because you're my friend for so many years, I need you to get me a grocery store. Yes ma'am. In Southeast Fort Worth. I'm on it. Thank you. Thank you. Any other, quite amazing. Thank you. I have a couple of questions and really just to play off Gina's comment. I mean, high level, how do you assess, and this may be a question for you Robert Allen, how do you assess companies are a good fit? So do you look at the landscape? Literally, we have a food desert. We're trying to attract companies that mimic our morals and values in Fort Worth. Can you just kind of give me? Happy to, yes. And Councilwoman, let me add to that too. If you don't know my background, I'm a fifth generation Texan. So all I know is Texas, that's all I know. I spent 20 plus years in Austin working for the governor's office in various capacities. And then at the attorney general's office, I've had the honor and privilege to have a very, very, very small impact on the state that I love dearly. I never felt like I had an impact on my community in which I lived in. Part of the reason I took this, and several of you around the table that I've talked to about why I did this, know that this is part of the reason why I said yes to this opportunity is because I feel like I can have a very small role in impacting a community that I think is special. Part of what we're do there, and I talked to Robert about this actually just the other day, I said, part of what I really need to do is I get my feet down and we move forward through this endeavor is to understand how we bring monumental change that doesn't show up, pardon my language, I'm a sports guy, in the box score. A grocery store in your food desert is something that doesn't show up in the box score, unfortunately, but it's monumentally game changing in your neighborhood. When I get my feet down next year, hopefully soon, addressing some of those monumental issues is certainly on my personal to-do list and also my professional to-do list, bridge to your question, Council Member Hill. You have to start with the understanding and it was said earlier with the Stockyard Awards commentary, Fort Worth is unique, it's authentic and it's special. I didn't take this job or move to Fort Worth to change any of that. So I want that to be the baseline of everybody's understanding of what I'm trying to achieve. I saw Austin grow, I saw the pain, I saw the traffic, I understand that personally, I'm not trying to change any of that. I think it starts with trying to, and it's very difficult out of the gate sometimes with the limited information we get, to assess not only the jobs, just the sheer numbers, but also the wages. This is very important. We know this is important. We have to make sure that they are long-term, high-paying, sustainable jobs. I think it starts there for me, point one. Point two, we had a company in our office today that just, DrinkPack, thank you all very much for what you did on DrinkPack. And Holly from DrinkPack today told us in our office, it was the right fit, it felt right. It's a gut thing. It's hard to put an answer to it specifically, but oftentimes as we get the honor and privilege to host these individuals as we move forward, you get to know them. You understand what they're looking for. Do they want to be good community partners? Do they want to engage in the community? Are they looking for more than just an incentive? Those are the types of things you look for in companies. And then that's point two, and then point three. At the end of the day, we need to diversify the economy to survive challenging times. If they are to come in, they will because economies are cyclical. And so we look at gaps of where we think we can better perform, and we certainly go to work on trying to target those gaps from a business perspective so that we can diversify the economy so as we move forward and become part of the largest Metroplex in the United States of America in 76 years, they tell us, that we can be prepared for that growth because that growth can be scary to a lot of people who don't understand what that really means. Does that answer your question? Yes, ma'am. One more follow-up question. When you talked about strategy, let's go to 2025. We're talking about going statewide, nationally, globally. Can you, again, high level, I know you don't have those plans in place yet. Can you talk to us about national and global initiatives and what you see in the future for the city of Fort Worth? I will. Did you want to clarify something on that previous question, Robert? I was just gonna provide a little bit of follow-up but a little more detail. So, and I think I said this at the mayor's day, the city, one of the first conversations that Robert and I had was around the types of companies that we were responding to, right? And I think there was a previous desire to respond to pretty much everything that came through the door. And Robert and I both decided very early on, that's really not what we should be doing. Fort Worth is a special city. We are not reaching and grasping for every company that comes through the door. So there are several, there are several industries, there are several companies that are not paying the wages that we want to see. There are companies that are not the right fit that we automatically say, hey, that's not the space that we're gonna play in. You keep more than welcome to come to Fort Worth if you'd like, but that's not something we're gonna incentivize. And I think that has been very helpful when it comes to being able to be very strategic and focused about what we do want because we're not spending a lot of time dealing with the ton of companies that we really don't have any interest in trying to bring here. Let me address your last question. And I think it starts with, again, I talked about at home homegrown growth, 40 to 50 some odd meetings since both Steve and I have been in these new roles with existing companies saying thank you first of all for what you've already done for Fort Worth. If you have growth plans moving forward, we wanna be the first ones to hear about it. We wanna make sure you grow at home. I do not wanna wake up nor do any of you and read a headline in a paper that suggests a local Fort Worth company is gonna go expand somewhere else where we hopefully had the opportunity to keep them at home. So the local homegrown growth plans are just good old fashioned knocking on doors, showing up at people's offices, letting them know that we're here to support and asking them that question directly. Are you planning on growing? If so, when, how and how can we bring the cavalry to support you? When you talk statewide, it's about, again, identifying companies or target industries that we want to have a conversation with. It might be CEO change. That's a perfect opportunity to go have a conversation with somebody who may not be in your backyard. Domestically, it's a little bit more targeted and nuanced. There are certain states that provide good opportunities for us to have introductory conversations. High personal income tax states are a great place to start. The gifts that keep on giving, Illinois, California, increasingly the Carolinas, Georgia, Florida, those are becoming competitive states. Those are opportunities for us. We need to be mobilized and ready to go have conversations and just introduce Fort Worth into that conversation and then take that internationally and be thoughtful as you are looking at the countries in that case that you wanna go target. Again, we could spend every day of our jobs going to states and countries around the world selling Fort Worth. That would be a wonderful job, but I would submit to you that the ROI on that effort would be very low. It needs to be very thoughtful, very targeted, especially when you get to international work, by the way, you have translation issues, you have cultural issues, and oftentimes you have deal flow issues. Certain countries do deals very differently than other countries and very differently than the United States. And so you've gotta be wary of all of those conversations as you're going in so you don't just assume that it's a partnership and a traditional sense of doing business in the state of Texas or in the United States, does that make sense? Thank you, and thank you for the presentation. This was helpful for me and I really appreciate it. Anyone else? Yeah, I will tell, we lost D.R. Horton to Arlington. I'm not saying I want him back because I cut down a lot of trees. But we have had some losses that have been rather stinging. So I wish you all well. Thank you. Gee, that's funny. Any other questions or comments, counsel? Go ahead, Michael, please. Thanks again for this guys, really appreciate it. If you had to summarize when you're talking to companies, why they're even talking to Fort Worth in first place, what would you tell us as a counsel? Unique, genuine, authentic, and we care about our community. And so if we're going to have a conversation with you about Fort Worth and what it means to be in Fort Worth and contributing to the Fort Worth community and economy, we care deeply about that. And I would argue, I get asked about incentives a lot and I wish nobody had incentives, but unfortunately, incentives exist. And so I really give credit to Robert and his team for the presentation earlier. There should be pretty strong teeth in those incentives. They're taxpayer dollars at the end of the day. They need to be used wisely. But again, authentic, genuine, and we care about our community. And we expect those that look at our community to understand what it is to be Fort Worth and to contribute to moving forward. That's a long answer, but that's what I would suggest to you. Thank y'all very much. Great job today. We appreciate you. Okay, counsel. Next presentation is, wait for it. I proposed 2024 Neighborhood Improvement, Victor Turner. I heard there's a Santa Claus hat to go along with this presentation. There's a hat. But it's not on. It's not on. You notice you wore a red sweater? Yeah, yeah. So David asked me to wear a Santa suit. Santa wears red, black, and white. Well done. And a hat. The hat. It's a little warm in here, so that's why I didn't wear the hat. Good afternoon, Mayor Counsel. It is again time for us to talk a little bit about our Neighborhood Improvement Program and neighborhoods that staff is recommending this year. As you know, we've been doing this for quite some time now. The graphic on the screen shows all the different neighborhoods that have been selected, starting with stop six in 2017. So you can see a little bit about each one of those areas and the boundaries and the square miles in each of the areas. Last year, we solicited a consultant to take a look at the program after we've been doing it for a few years. Just take a look and see if there are any tweaks, any changes we need to make. One of the things that was developed was a scorecard. So we can see how those areas have done once we've invested some dollars in them. So this is the overall scorecard showing each of the neighborhoods that we've selected over the past few years. And you can see for the most part, there's been very positive change in all those neighborhoods. There are a couple of exceptions in some categories, but I think that will change in those kind of outliers. Citywide, so crime against property, crime against persons, you can see the trends there from 2015 through 2023. And then in some of the upcoming slides, you'll see some of these same statistics for that particular neighborhood. Stop six report card. You can see some of the improvements that have been made in stop six and there continues to be improvements there. As we all know with the choice neighborhood initiative, that $35 million grant from HUD kind of piggybacked on what city had already gotten started with the NIP program. Just some more information about stop six and each neighborhood to have the same report card talks about property values, building permits, issues and crime. Ash Crescent, this neighborhood is pretty much done with the exception of one park, Smiley Park that property management and our parking and recreation department are working on to finalize that acquisition and get that project completed. And you can see some stats here about the Ash Crescent neighborhood as well. North side, there are no remaining dollars there and you can see improvements that we've made in North side, more there. I know we're gonna run through these so we can get to the neighborhoods for this year. Rose Mine is another area. We do have a little bit of money left there that we're working with the neighborhood on getting that spent. Como and we had this picture down here. That was something that was added later to help with the trash in the lake and I think that's worked pretty well. And you can see in Como, crimes against person, how that's gone down. And this is unique with Como because that was one of those neighborhoods that we had a little bit of discussion about cameras and all and they did relinquish and have some cameras, but you can see there's been a reduction in crime in Como. Las Vegas Trail community, one or more recent one. So there's still some dollars left there but we're making changes, improvements there as well. And the most recent historic Marine, too recent to have much data to report. So since 2017, you can see the amount that have been invested in each and other neighborhoods, how much is remaining. So we're doing pretty well as far as expenditures in each of those neighborhoods. Now, while I got my Santa suit on. The whole process, when we made the tweaks last year with the consultant making some recommendations. And one of it was kind of to get them kick started, an intense code enforcement effort, try to clean up that neighborhood. And you can see year one, where it says clean up trash, dumping, overgrown foliage, those type of things. So that's kind of the approach we're taking going in cleaning up the neighborhood, getting it ready for kind of the level two where we start doing some capital investments in the neighborhood. And then setting the stage for more large scale projects. And so that's kind of the phase. And then as part of our neighborhood quality and revitalization committee, it came up that instead of one neighborhood, we should do two. And so thankfully we have budget for that. And I think with this phase approach that goes really well with having more than one neighborhood. And so previously we had probably, I don't know, 27 different metrics that we were measuring and try to select neighborhoods. So part of that consultant's review and recommendation was to consolidate that. And so you can see we have three large buckets here. Financial hardship, opportunity and neighborhood condition. And you can see what makes up each one of those categories. And we score those across the city by census tract. This is another graph showing those areas and the color codes there to show how they score in each one of those areas. Financial hardship. And you can see the sections of the city that are most hit by financial hardship. And you saw the definitions of that earlier on the earlier slide. Opportunity, which basically is about education and then the neighborhood condition, infrastructure related things and sidewalks. So final selection. No drum roll. Okay, we'll keep going. All right. All right. So after going through all that scoring, the top two neighborhoods that came out are a seminary from Council District 9 and Worth Heights from District 11. This is a more close boundary of seminary. And that's based on that census tract. You can see some of the assets in the area at Greenbar Community Center and Park. Worth Heights, see that boundary there. And this map shows some recent things. You can see the Community Land Trust over to the left of the screen where it says Carol Park, CLT. And then most recently when we invested in Tobias Plate overlay how those neighborhoods are categorized based on that neighborhood conservation strategy plan we did. And you can see Worth Heights is in that color of I guess that's fuchsia or pink or something. That's distressed and also the other neighborhood that's kind of a lighter pink seminary. So the two neighborhoods we're recommending are seminary and Worth Heights for this coming year. And take any questions. I think that's a great idea, Elizabeth. Thank you so much. That is such a great gift to not just District 9 but the city. What I really want to applaud in this new methodology is that if you look at the map and you see that we could kind of go all over the city but we're really making sure that we're capitalizing on any investment that is going or recently has gone in that neighborhood. And I think that's just a really good use of these funds because it really can stop the bleed in some areas and it really helps us hyper focus. So thank you for doing that and thank you to staff for really sitting down and working with the neighborhood quality and revitalization committee to kind of develop that and move forward. So thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you. Jeanette. Just thank you so much. I'm very excited for District 11, City of Fort Worth. I'm really happy that you focus on the neighborhoods that really need these type of improvements. Worth Heights has a lot of issues and I'm hoping that it's just surrounding that Rosemont neighborhood and just like Elizabeth says, capitalize on improvements that were made in the area. But thank you again. Carlos and then Jared. Victor, I think we mentioned it to you before. North-Northside, that might get confusing. You know, terminology, but that's the far greater North-side historical area. So, thanks. Jared. Thanks, Victor, for the presentation and also thanks to NCRC and this council for approving the neighborhood conservation strategy. This is fruits of your team's labor and all of our labor and it's really neat to be able to see the three year phase approach on top of two more neighborhoods, on top of the scorecards to show proof of concept and impact. I mean, so all in all, this is really, really cool to see the work in action. I wasn't sure what the scorecards will look like when we were discussing it as a committee, but I'm really excited to see the results for our previous neighborhoods who have been selected and have worked through these levels of investment. So, all in all, really cool. I'm awesome job and I'm so proud of this moment. Thank you. Chris. Victor, if you can go back to the slide of the selections for me, please. Yes, right. So, I'm looking at the one through five and I'm glad that you did this as well. We'll look at that number as of today. What's the likelihood that those can actually change when you go back and do the study for the next year for two? Yeah, the crime statistics could definitely cause that to shift a little bit. Those that are three through five, so the other things are based on census data, so they're not gonna change much, but crime could definitely cause a change in the scoring. Thank you. Great job, Victor and team. Thank you very much. Yeah, we have a whole group of them back here that have been. Stand up and grab, y'all. I see you back here, hiding out. So I brought my own A-man corner, just in case you didn't like it, you have a chorus back there, that's good. Thank you, Victor, appreciate you. Okay, council. Next presentation is update on take-home vehicle policy and use, Bridehunter Property Management and Christian Simmons. I think we're gonna do this one. I feel like I'm gonna stand to the side so you can actually see me. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Christian Simmons from the Fort Worth Lab and I am here solo today to talk about take-home city vehicles. I do want to say thank you publicly because I think he's watching the live stream to Bridehunter who is the AD Overfleet in Property Management. He wanted to be here today and couldn't, but he's been a huge collaborator on this project. And thank you to the other folks in Property Management and the lab who helped. It's never a solo effort, as you all know. So here today to talk about take-home city vehicles, as most of you know, the city allows take-home vehicles for certain employees in certain positions, largely with the purpose of being able to respond in an emergency in a timely manner. And so today we'll talk about how those policies look across the organization. We'll show you some maps as far as the current practice with take-home vehicles. The lab did a compliance review. So we'll talk about the results of that and then progress and recommendations and a path forward. The reason that I should explain this early on, the reason I'm standing here from the Fort Worth Lab is because as the lab builds out its data arm for data analytics across the organization, we're looking to be a collaborative thought partner on projects like this where there's a big element of data collection analysis and in this case even visualization through mapping. And so that's why you're hearing from the lab on this process. So we'll start with current policy overview. The first one I will mention, the middle there, there's an overarching policy in the city's code of ordinances. And in this part of the city code, it's section 2189C. And that code says that if you live outside the city limits and you're a person who is going to be called upon to respond in a civil emergency, that you should be able to respond to that emergency within 30 minutes. So you should reside in a place where you can get the call, get in your car, respond in 30 minutes wherever that emergency is occurring. And that's in normal daytime traffic going the speed limit. So that's what the code says. That's still definitely an active and relevant part of the city code. And so it's important to mention that as the foundation against which these other policies should be built or at least balanced. The second policy we'll talk about is the administrative regulation or AR E6. It's the use of city vehicles. It was last revised I think in October of 2018. The scope of this policy is all city departments except police and fire. I'll mention at this stage that today we're only talking about one department that takes home vehicles regularly outside of police and fire. That's the property management department. So you'll see on a later slide that there have been departments who opt in and out of this program over time. So we'll talk a little bit about that. But for today, this AR is primarily focusing on property management's use. But any department who opt in would be subject to the regulations in this AR. So you'll see the criteria there and this is all in your packet. So you don't have to read each piece. But you'll see the criteria, number one, necessary to respond to emergencies. And then there's a couple of or statements about clean air objectives or other factors that contribute to efficiency. So if you're a person who falls under the take-home vehicle, that's a privilege that you can have based on your position and your role with the city. There's a few things that you have to do and those are outlined in the policy. You have to annually submit this form to vehicle use agreement form. The director of your department is supposed to approve that. You're supposed to have defensive driving every three years. Your vehicle should be outfitted with an AVL or an automatic vehicle locator. That's a program through property management's fleet department. And then your department should be verifying your home address. I'm taking a minute to go through these now because when we populate the rest of the table, there's lots of similarities. Once you have a take-home vehicle, the department is supposed to be doing quarterly internal reporting on vehicles, where they are and how much on-call is happening. That justifies the program. And then for every policy you'll see, there is supposed to be an annual reporting process through budget development. So that would now go through the fourth lab. The authority to amend the policy, the ARs, is with the city manager. So I'm gonna skip and show you the next two just for method of comparing across the table and because they're very similar. So fire and police both have their own SOP or GEO for the take-home vehicles. And I wanna say that these policies can be more restrictive but are not less restrictive than the city's policy. And that's how they should read. And so fire's practice is, again, necessary to respond to emergency or a high frequency of after hours use. They are also supposed to be submitting a form approved by the fire chief or a designee and then they too suggest quarterly internal reporting in their policy if requested by the fire chief and they have an annual reporting requirement as well. The difference going to the police general order is really the only differences I'll highlight are that they have an extra criteria that allows them to take home a vehicle. That is that it advances the goal of police visibility in the city. So that's one thing that's unique to them. Their requirements are mostly the same and then reporting the GEO is actually more restrictive than the other policies we've seen because they are requiring employee monthly reporting on their after hours usage. So that's current overview of where the policies sit as we stand today. You saw in each that there's a vehicle use agreement or a tool at least to sort of tell us where our vehicles are and who's driving them. Everyone right now, this is a good news thing. All those departments are using this same form and I know it's like a little dry to talk about a form but the form's important because it helps us with compliance to this policy. So I wanna tell you what it is. It's an electronic form and when employees sign it they are agreeing to a number of rules and regulations. Most of them are what you think they'd be. It's like I'm not using my vehicle for personal things. I'm not traveling outside my authorized range without permission. I'm adhering to all the rules and then I'll highlight that fifth bullet. They're acknowledging that they understand that the vehicle benefit, like the privilege of taking home a vehicle is subject to federal taxable imputed income. So they see that on their pay stubs. There are some positions that are exempt from that. It's really not the position it's the vehicle. So for relevancy today, that's marked police and fire vehicles. If you're a person who drives those you are exempt from the federal taxable imputed income. Unmarked to vehicles that have a law enforcement officer driving them are also exempt. So I mentioned at the outset, the reason I'm up here, happily up here with you is that the lab did this data collection. And so we provided, we queried all the data sources and provided the departments with inventory lists and said, here's what we think you have. Is that right? What do you have? And answer these questions. So these questions were designed to measure the compliance with those policies that we've gone over. So we'll get into the data. It's an interesting part. Now that you have the right context. Here's who's currently taking home vehicles on a regular basis. So you'll see the police is 95% of the total. And then we have property management and fire, as I mentioned, making up the other 5%. At the bottom there, you'll see aviation code, parks, CPW water, all advised. And we've, you know, tested this that they're not currently allowing take home city vehicles on a daily basis. So all of these departments at one point or another have had part in the take home vehicle program. And they're not doing it anymore for various reasons. CPW has vehicles assigned to people to take home when they're on call, which might happen like four to six times a year. Or sometimes in the case of like a winter storm, they'll take home a vehicle and then water pulled back their take home vehicle program earlier this year. And they're developing a supplemental policy, which will be as or more restrictive than the city's policy. But you should also remember that water has 24 seven crews as well. So that, you know, that sort of changes what callback needs. This is a map. I'll orient you to the map. So if you can see, if you can see the color, that external purple line, the outmost line, that's a 10 mile buffer from the edges of the city limits. So that gets us almost a didn't in the North, almost like Dallas, we're pushing Dallas in the East, not quite to Cleveland in the South. I think it actually goes through like Alvarado on 35 and then to the West Wutherford. So it's a 10 mile around the city limits or from the city limits. Then the green, you can see the green is a five mile buffer. The departments and their vehicles are noted by color. You can see the legend there. So red's fire, blues police, CLS property management. If you prefer the data in a table, it's there. But some of the interesting statistics are off to the left. So across all departments, the three we're talking about, 58% of those vehicles are going outside the city limits on a regular basis, mostly daily. Police again makes up the majority of the total, almost 60% of theirs go outside the limits. And then the other two have about half going outside the limits as well. So we have maps by department, just so you can see. Oh, I should mention the city limits, if helpful or shaded a little darker, like within, you'll be able to see that on subsequent maps a little bit better. So here's police's vehicles. We started, we did the five and 10 mile buffers because the code says 30 minutes and we're trying to put some framework around, like what does that look like in an objective way? And so this is how we decided to take a stab at it for this first conversation. The five miles, if we were to make a policy change, not saying we are, if we were to make a policy change that we were gonna do a five mile buffer then 25% of police's vehicles are still outside that line. And then if you increase it to 10, then 12% of their vehicles are still outside that line. Just kind of shows you where we are. Here's fire, they have 11 vehicles, they're about half and half. And then here's property management. Okay, so that's maps, compliance, findings. The maps obviously tell the story of where people are but they don't really tell the whole story on how are we doing with all those policy and the announcements that we saw. It's safe to say that no one's perfectly compliant with the policies as they sit. Definitely some reporting gaps to close. So I wanted to highlight some of the things we are doing well. I mentioned the form that it's available electronically. Everyone's using that form. They're not doing it as regularly as they should. We have the ability to pull reports on submitted vehicle use forms. That's a helpful tool for departments that they probably really don't even know. And so we're planning to communicate with departments about that. And then we just lack processes for things that are outlined in the policy, like driver's records checks, driver's license checks, have you taken defensive driving? Like some of those questions we're supposed to be answering. It's just not a great process for those right now. I'll mention on the left-hand side there AVLs. I mentioned the automatic vehicle locator program through fleet. It's a great program. I think the latest iteration was like 2021 or something. So through that program, we can do location monitoring because it's important to know where assets are, obviously, and track compliance with the program. You can also draw a geo fence with AVL and say like, here's where I think the car should be and I want to get a ping if it's not there. So there's some tools that we could use in a more robust fashion through the AVL program. I will say that police and fire don't have the AVL program. They have something different that happens through their mobile data computers, but similar tools. Quarterly internal departmental reporting is not happening on a regular basis and the fourth lab has not been through the budget office in whatever previous iteration it was, have not been collecting that annual data. And part of that annual data collection is supposed to include justification. So that's an important piece of it. So it's not just like where are the cars? It's why are you taking it home and is this still relevant based on your own records? So here are a couple of recommendations. We'd like to first improve weaknesses in that vehicle use agreement form. And like I said, it's not the most exciting of topics, but it is, I feel confident that it'll improve like a large chunk, like 90% of the compliance and reporting issues because we'll have accurate data at any given time. We'd like to make that an automated push. So like, if you're on the city network, you might get an auto push every year for like security training or some other like expired thing. We'd like to do that with the vehicle form. So we'll be doing that. Vardy convened the committee for a lot of these recommendations. We'll be providing departments with a standardized format for internal tracking and reporting. I think we'll revise the reporting requirement from quarterly to by annual twice a year for our purposes. Knowing that the departments can still choose to take a more restrictive cadence with their reporting. And then the Fort Worth lab is going to conduct regular audits on compliance of departments. I do think that will fall to us. And we commit to implementing that required annual justification process through the budget development stuff. So it'll happen starting an FY25 budget development, which is like coming so soon, just already. Outside of just reporting the bigger question of like policy amendments, we're gonna do some cleanup update language across like PRRs and administrative regulations and GOs and SOPs, because there are some inconsistencies. So that's an easy like matching definitions and requirements cleanup. There's also some vague language that I think we want to revisit like special circumstances. That's something that's allowed. You can say a director can approve in special circumstances. And I think, you know, based on what we're seeing, I want to put some more framework around what that means. We'll clarify some more reporting requirements for what the department should be collecting as far as not where the vehicle is, but how it's being used and how often. And then that last bullet, I think is a key going back to how I began, which is we need to determine how to best comply with that response time requirement that's in the city code and set a timeline for what implementation that might look like if changes arise from those discussions. So that's the story. That's where we are right now. These are sort of a stab at next steps. So this includes some of the form revisions. We've already convened like a cross departmental committee to fix at least the reporting side so that we're compliant with the policies. And then we'll complete policy updates to hopefully in the first quarter. And we'd like to commit to coming back in, you know, five or six months and updating you on the status of all of this. So with that, I will help facilitate discussion or take questions. Thank you. Thank you for putting this together. I know that it was a tremendous amount of work. The first thing that I wanna talk about is the length of time that it took us to get this report to council. I asked for this IR back in June. So it's taken us close to six months to get this done. And it's worrisome that it took that long but it took that long because we did not have this data because we were not following the policy. And so I'm glad that we have at least righted that ship. So thank you to the Fort Worth Lab and to David Cook and to all the departments that put in this effort to make sure that we were doing what we said we were going to do back in 2018 when that policy was enacted. I asked for this IR because I got a sense something was awry. And that sense turned out to be correct. We weren't following policy. But more importantly, we did not have an eye on our assets. It is our job as a council to be good stewards of the tax dollars that are given to us by our residents. It's a job I take seriously. I know it's a job that we all take seriously here on this council. To do that, we have to protect the assets that we have whether they be buildings or vehicles. And I don't know under this current standard even now that we're in reporting policy, right? So let's be clear, we're now within policy with the exception of the 30 minute which it sounds like staff is grappling with but that policy was based solely on how we report, right? And so now we have a forum that everybody fills out. Now we know how many cars we have and we know where they're going because previous to this we did not know where they were going. And so thank you for that. But I think it's time to really have a discussion about a reasonable policy. If you could go back to the map that shows all of the vehicles that are leaving the city, thank you. That is obscene to me when I look at that map to think that that many vehicles aren't just traveling outside of the city limits outside of our ETJ, outside of a 10 mile buffer we've got folks traveling hours away in city vehicles. And so David, who pays for the gas on those? Do the city employees put their own gas in those vehicles or is that on ours, our dollar? Hello, I'm David. Hi David. I'd like to answer this question. Yeah, so I think what property management has advised is that typically these are paid for by like fleet fuel cards. So our tax dollars, our residents are paying for these hour long or two hour long commutes both ways every day, correct? Okay, great. Who pays for the maintenance of these vehicles when they need their regularly scheduled oil changes? Yeah, that's the city as well. Okay, and that goes mostly through the James Avenue service center, correct? So we have put that asset in place to protect those assets. And now, I mean, we're keeping them in good use because we're traveling, you know, what is that far up way, those two dots way up top? Do you happen to know what city that is? I don't even know where that is. That I mean, it's north of Jacksboro. It is north, yeah. I don't remember. I know the one here, that's like Ray Hubbard or whatever like up there. Like Ray Hubbard, yeah, so. So we've got folks going out to Bridgeport and Lake Ray Hubbard. It looks like not quite to Graham but almost to Possum Kingdom. Yeah, okay. Great, that's great. So my question is, what is the reasonable policy going to look like? Because I am not comfortable with our taxpayers footing this bill. And so I'd like a follow up to know, I'd like a dollar amount place to this. I think that's really important because I know last year we had to adjust PD's budget by $2 million specific to their fuel because they had gone $2 million over their fuel budget. And when you look at this map and you see just in addition to the work that they do keeping our residents safe, they're driving hours at a time. I'm sure that adds up quite quickly when gas is $3 or $4 a gallon. I'm sure our residents would love to have their gas bill, their gas paid for by a fleet as well but we're not able to do that. And so I think we owe it to our residents to make sure that we are tightening that circle and that we are not subsidizing commutes for any of our employees. It's a gift of public funds. I'm not done. So I have some questions of PD specific if they'd like to have someone come up here with Christiane or maybe you can answer them. Chief Nox is coming up. Thanks Chief, appreciate it. Mayor and council. Thank you. So you're on the hot seat cause y'all have the most vehicles. So my first question is, what is your process in selecting who does and doesn't get a take home vehicle? The policy is set up. So we have some positions that are pre-approved for different tiers of either take home or off-site parking. There is a form a take home vehicle request form that's available online on our portal that would be filled out by an officer making the request. And this request goes up to the chain of command digitally through the system. The deputy chief over each officer is responsible for approval. But then they can go all the way up through assistant chief and chief as well. Okay. Can you give me some examples of the types you mentioned tiers? So could you step that back and explain to me what those tiers mean? Yes, so there's basically four tiers. First tier is full privileges inside the city or outside the city limits. That's reserved for units such as SWAT, hostage negotiations, teams where life is potentially on the line and their response is obviously very important. Next we have the second tier which is in city limits or within five miles of the city limits. Tier three would be vehicles. Sorry, can you give me an example of what maybe tier two might look like? Yeah, actually I have a list here. If you'll give me a moment. Awesome. I can give you some specific examples. If you want to go, whatever's easiest, if you want to go through the tiers and then give me the examples or do it as you go. Let's take in a moment to pull up. I'll go ahead and go through the rest of the tiers. That third tier is for vehicles that are not allowed to be taken home but they can be parked at an approved off-site location. Maybe another city facility. There's also an option for neighboring cities. Maybe at a police department and a city that joins the borders, city of Fort Worth. And the last tier doesn't have to do with taking vehicles home. It's not one we make use of very often but if parking is a problem at a specific home assignment for an officer so much so that they don't have room to park their vehicle at that location, they're allowed to park it at a secondary location with approval through that system. Okay. So the main ones as far as what we're talking about today which would be officers who are taking their vehicles either home or parking off-site on the way home would be one of those first three tiers. Okay, great. Has your list pulled up yet? Let me see. While you're waiting are there any as you're promoted through Fort Worth PD, is there any point in which you're automatically assigned to take home vehicle? Normally that's gonna happen and if you look at the tiers, the tier one is usually allowed for captains and above. Now there are some positions say for some sergeants or lieutenants in investigative units who have heavy after hours usage of vehicles because of callback in traffic, maybe for fatality accidents, maybe a detective in a homicide unit responding to a homicide scene, things like that. Okay. Generally speaking, so over half of the vehicles are leaving Fort Worth city limits. Yes ma'am. And the majority of those are unmarked and so can you tell me specifically what types of vehicles are these unmarked vehicles? Could be Tahos, could be Chevy Impala's, maybe Ford Explorer's, there's various types of vehicles. And how do you determine who gets what? The vehicles are usually assigned based on the assignment and the need. For instance, a detective probably would not need an SUV responding to the scenes that they do and they don't have a lot of equipment they have to carry. If it's a SWAT unit, their vehicle has to be something that can not only store the equipment they have but secure it as well. So it'll depend on the needs of that officer based on their assignment. Okay, gotcha, because these are vehicles that they are taken straight to a call. They're not coming in any place else. And that is the point. We don't want them to have to stop and go somewhere, transfer equipment, we want them to be able to go straight to the location where they've been called. Okay. Do you know how often we replace PD vehicles? I don't know the schedule. We can get you that information usually based on mileage but I don't know the exact schedule of the hand. The exact mileage. Yes ma'am. Okay. Is there ever any, I guess one concern I have is, or let me ask, do you ever audit once someone is given a vehicle that they were actually called in or after hours work? It's supposed to happen is there's an after hours usage form and officers are supposed to fill out whenever they use the vehicle after hours. It's justification for taking the vehicle in the first place. And that is to be audited periodically. So is that form being utilized? Not the way it should be. Once this came up, we started looking into it. And listen, any blame or any fingers pointed that all goes right here. I was not doing what I needed to do to make sure that everyone was following the policy as they should to make sure that these after hours usage forms were being done as they should. That's something we're in the process of correcting right now and working with Fernando Costa, working with the lab. We're working on ways to make sure there's more levels of accountability to make sure what needs to be done is going to be done. Because up to this point it hasn't been done the way it should have been. Right. It was you and everybody else to be clear. So. What's that? I said it was you and everybody else. Oh, it's my responsibility. The whole city was not following rules. And so as we start doing these after hour usage reporting because it sounds like we're going to start making sure that that's occurring as it should. What are your plans to audit these particular positions to ensure that they in fact need a take home vehicle? Well, one of the things we're going to be looking at obviously is our policy. Sure. And if the policy aligns with the vision of the city when it comes to take home vehicles, our policy does require monthly reports to evaluate the indicated usage of department vehicles and the appropriateness of continuation of take home or offset parking privileges. The policy is there. We just need to make sure we're following it. Sure. And then my last, I think my last question is what is that threshold? Is it, I got called in once this month or this quarter or I got, you know, I'm being called in once a week, you know, once every two weeks. What's that justification look like for y'all? That's what we're trying to determine. I don't want to have a knee-jerk reaction and just pull a number out of thin air. We've been talking with Assistant City Manager Costa about that we've actually reached out to multiple apartments in the area to see if we can determine the best standard on how that's tracked and what the proper justification is. So we'll definitely be providing that number. But at this point, I feel to be premature for me to give a number when, before we look at the data. That's fair. I think that's all I have right now. Thank you. Thank you. Questions? Councilor Williams? Thank you, Mayor. This might be for the lab, but am I understanding correctly that there is no method of track or we're not currently tracking whether vehicles are being used at any of these places outside of the city for non-city uses? I don't think we're currently tracking it based on the data here. I think the way we would do that is via vehicle location. Employees are certainly signing that they're not doing that, but I don't think that's being actively verified now. Okay, thank you. And then one legal question for vehicles, whether they're being used for city use, but especially not city use, what is the risk if they're in an accident that's their fault to the city? Can I add? If I could add to that. And what does that risk look like if there's a non-city employee traveling in that vehicle? Per our city policy, if an employee is not acting in the course and scope of their employment, we're not legally obligated to provide them a defense like we normally would for an employee or to pay damages separate and apart from the fact that as a city who has vehicles just like you, if you're allowing someone to drive your vehicles, you're obligated, your insurance would pick up. So one of the requirements that we have for the city is that employees have to have insurance. And if you are involved in an accident, then we would pay just like a city, your insurance policy 30,000 limit and anything other above that could come from the city, from the employee. Also, because we have rules in place about driving vehicles, not in the course and scope, if you are violating policy, you could be disciplined and you could lose your privilege for driving a vehicle. And then just to follow up for the portions of the policy that we're not currently following, does that add additional risk to the same question? So the risk is always, and I'm saying this in public, but the risk is always the same whether or not you're, if you're driving a vehicle and you're not looking where you're going and you hit somebody, that happens every day with anybody driving a vehicle. You get claims for, notices of claims at all of every other council meeting. If you look at them, you'll notice most of them are accidents. So accidents happen when you have this many vehicles on the street, that's gonna happen. We don't see a whole lot of them happening outside of the city limits or a lot after hours. There have been occasions when we have said we are, we don't think you're in the course and scope of your employment and so we're gonna deny coverage, but that doesn't happen very often. The vast majority of our accidents occur on duty and be it from whatever department and inside the city limits. Thank you. And just to kind of wrap up, that's all the questions I have, but just as a comment, I'm a bit concerned with, although I understand the timeline, the six months to try to become in compliance, I'm concerned of risk management issues if in the event of us trying to correct this issue that in that timeline, something really unfortunate happens in our vehicles, especially as far as they're going. And so I am not sure if that's, the six month timeline doesn't really sit well without corrective actions more immediate to reduce some of that risk. Council Member Crane. Yeah, thanks. Thank you again for this. Thanks, Elizabeth, for bringing this up to one question I do, I think we have to parse and make sure as we move forward, I know that there are police officers that are hired, our churches, our synagogues, our schools, off-duty special events. So that isn't really considered city business per se, though sometimes I think we require it, depending on how large the event is. So some of these vehicles I know travel and go to those, what I would say, not city business, but are a public safety concern. So I don't know if you have a comment on that, Chief, of why I think, I mean, what you think about that, but at least looking forward what that looks like and just parsing that. I'm not sure I understand the question, Council Member. In other words, if someone's driving their vehicle to an off-duty assignment, how does that, how does that lace into this policy? There is an approval process for that as well. There are many part-time jobs where there is absolutely no benefit to having a marked patrol unit there on scene with the officer, but there are somes. And as you mentioned, maybe at our houses of worship within the city, or the deterrent of a marked patrol unit out front is absolutely beneficial to everyone involved. So there was a process for that approval. And in situations like that, we do approve them to use those in an off-duty capacity. Chief, wouldn't that, thank you for bringing that up, Michael, because I think that's fair. My opinion would be that falls under the advances police visibility in the city. And so, as long as it's within the city limits and in PD, as y'all, because don't you, correct me if I'm wrong, but every off-duty position like that, y'all approve, correct? Yes, that's correct. And so as long as it's within the city limits and it is to that end of advances police visibility in the city, I think that's a really good use of that. I would be interested to know a follow-up, the marked versus unmarked. I know for operational reasons, some vehicles need to be unmarked, right? We don't want undercover vehicles marked. But when we talk about police visibility, we do that because we want people to feel safe. And I know a lot of us get comments, I never see a police officer driving around. Well, they could, right? We know that about half of our vehicles are unmarked vehicles. And so when we're giving those Tahos, those Impala, you know, Impala's, whatever it is, can more of them be marked? I know that there's a cost associated with that because you've got to go to the paint shop, but I think that goes a long way to increasing visibility of our police officers throughout the city. So as you go through this process, I would ask you to look at what, when you decide if it's marked or unmarked and what we can do to expand the number of marked vehicles to align with that particular part of the policy. Okay. I just got a comment. Thank you, Mayor. My biggest takeaway from this, thank you, Chief. And thank you, Councilman Beck, for bringing this up. My biggest takeaway from this is the budget, how it affects our budgeting process and the fuel that is used traveling so far outside of the scope of the city of Fort Worth. Although I know it's important that they can go straight from where they live to an incident or accident. I don't know if I want someone traveling from Minnwells having a way to come because that's still gonna take 30, 45 minutes and sometimes even without traffic going down 35. So as we go through this process of re-looking at our policy, I think it's important that we consider how far we want to allow certain vehicles to go and how much we're gonna be, if we're gonna be 100% responsible for it, I think that there needs to be a community weigh-in on how many vehicles we're gonna allow to travel miles and miles outside of the 10 mile radius. So that's what I want to look into the policy. And if we wanna put a budget cap on fuel, and so I think it's gonna determine between PD, fire and other departments to determine within their own departments how much they're gonna use or how many vehicles they're gonna allow to go outside that radius. And I think that would be fair to our community and our residents. Those are my comments. Council Member Rivens. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you to Council Member Beck for uncovering this or bringing this up. Chief, my concern is number one, had software being stand up, taking the questions. I think all the questions that I even thought of were already prosecuted by Council Member Beck. And I appreciate your candidness here. My concern is how this is going to impact morale because when you take a look at employees who are able to take vehicles home, there's obviously some type of benefit there. And so I hope as you're looking for the answers to bring things right, make sure you get the input from your police officers because there will be some who can weigh in with some positive input. And I think that's gonna be helpful with morale because you would expect a dip. I think if you make sure you include them all with suggestions, it may end up working for the better. Thank you very much for recognizing that. Mayor Pro Tem, I appreciate that because that is a concern. There will be a hit to morale. There's no question about it because the discussions we're having, there's a possibility some people lose their take-home privileges. Not something anyone wants to hear and at a time where we're struggling to hire and retain who we can. I hate to have any other reason for someone to be disgruntled but definitely will be something we need to have officers involved in as much as possible but there will be an impact to morale for at least some. Best of luck. Thank you. Any other questions or comments from Council? Council Member Larsdorf. Just a question about the map. I love maps, so thank you for the map. Is this taken, was this like one snapshot in time or was this, I guess the final place for the vehicles every night or I guess what was the data used for this particular? So this map represents the addresses where the vehicles are going and residing for the night and it's a snapshot of current data that we worked back and forth with the departments to validate. Okay, got you, thanks. Any other questions from Council? Jeanette. So this may be too much in the weeds but let's say there is a police officer in South Division so will the radius start from their work area if they only stay in that division for their job? If I may, Christiane, that's something we're looking at. With the policies that we have looked at from other departments and looking at our policy we've been trying to compare the way distances are measured. Some measure from the city limits. Some measure from the place of assignment. Some may measure from city hall or criminal justice center. Very preliminary, I don't know what the best is going to be but if you look at a map of the city of Worth it's hard to find a center where everything is even on all sides of town. It's possible that doing it with something similar to this, the buffer inside or outside of the city limits may be the best way to go but we're looking to try to determine the best way to do that that's gonna be fair to all in all assignments and also recognize the fact that with some units again we'll go back to SWAT. They're not responding to their regular business location. They could be responding to anywhere in the city and even if they live in the city of Fort Worth say in Forest South Division depending on time of day they can't get to the other side of the city in 30 minutes themselves. So we're trying to determine the best way to measure it that's fair for all and being respectful of the resources that we have. That's my back and Jared's. I think that begs an operational question for me. If we've got these folks that we need and we need quickly, right? It's the nature of their job. Are there any, the city policy of 30 minutes but is there a restriction, does the Fort Worth PD have a restriction on that distance to that recall time based on as part of the application process for some of these specialized units? I'd have to go back and look at this application process for those units. We can definitely find that information out for you. Because when you, I want them there as quickly and as safely as possible whenever there's a crisis I think that goes without saying. But if we've got folks that are in those, I mean it looks like we've got a couple down in your Hillsboro, right? It doesn't matter who's car you're in or how fast you're going, it's gonna take a tremendous amount of time for you to get even to the most southern border of our city. And so that's also something that I think should probably be taken into consideration is practically speaking, can they respond in a reasonable amount of time to keep our residents safe regardless of if it's a take home vehicle or not. I'm not telling you to tell people where to live, but I mean from an operational standpoint that does seem like it could cause some issues for you. Councillor Williams. Thank you, Mayor. Dovetailing off of that, it would make sense maybe as a way of incentivizing officers living closer to these buffers if maybe we provided a housing allowance and that's something that maybe we could discuss in the next budget cycle. But some of these take homes are really far the second thing I was curious of after Council Member Martinez's question is operationally speaking, does the clock in terms of hourly wages start from the moment they get in the cars for somebody's take home vehicles that are further out? Like how does the hourly rate start or their on duty start when they're so far away? Normally when they're already off duty, they're already at home, when they get the call to respond, that's when you start the clock. Because we've interrupted what they would have been doing in their own personal lives at that point, so as soon as they get the call, that's when we start. And then if they're not called in and it's just like a regular shift, do they, does the clock start from the time they get in the car or when they get to there? It starts whatever the normal shift time is. So regardless of how long it takes them to get there or how early they may get there, the pay doesn't start until that shift starts. I see. So if they're on a morning shift as it starts at 6 a.m., doesn't matter what time they leave the house, doesn't matter if they get there at 5 a.m. to work out first, at 6 a.m. when roll call starts, that's when the pay starts. Got it, thank you. Yes, sir. Michael. One last thing. Did you hear anybody? I just wanted to say thank you to you and your team and everybody for the bank of apprehending that and what y'all do for us every day. So I do appreciate and we'll muscle through this, but appreciate what y'all do for us. Thank you. Only one closing comment. I'm less concerned about the distance for some of these if the job justifies it. So I think that's where the detail is gonna be needed for the committee that you've convened to really understand where these tiers are, who is receiving the vehicle. And importantly, it's a protection for your officers too or any other city employee that's taking home vehicles to make sure the policy's being adhered to in all departments. And if that's not the case, it really comes down on them individually and no one wants that at the end of the day. And then second piece, it was brought up earlier about morale from Mayor Tim Bivens. I couldn't agree more. And so just being cognizant of that, and I don't know who's on the committee, but making sure some of your officers that have had a take home vehicle and some of these specialized units and giving you feedback on how important that has been or in units that you maybe could rethink that policy, they don't need a take home vehicle and they could use a leather parking location moving forward. But I think we all can agree that budgets get squeezed and this is one area we could probably look to be better stewards of taxpayer dollars if at all possible. So thank you for your hard work and we'll wait to come back when you're ready for additional policy changes. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Thank you. Conclusion of our presentations, do we have any future agenda items we wanna discuss with CMO? Anyone else? Yes, Council Member Crane. I have a few here. One I know back in October 17th this has to deal with homelessness. A coalition sent a letter and just put in terms high priority, median priority, longer priority. I'd like us to actually an hour on that to explore what is possible in the short term, midterm. And I know we're doing a bigger study, but I think that's at least to have us to have an answer of how we're going to address that. The second thing, and it can go together, I don't know, I feel sometimes, I'm using the word feel, maybe we're not addressing the homeless population as best we can in a strategy. And I think our team does a great job, I'm not saying that, I think as we're all dealing with the subject. Austin has a homeless strategy office. You've got a volunteer corps in Dallas now with homeless initiatives and Lidaflora Brewer and all the great work she did. Maybe we can look at a more comprehensive plan of what we're doing there and we can talk through what that looks like. And then the third thing is, I deals with valet parking. I'd just like to know, and I've read through the ordinance, do we ever, will you issue them licenses? But I don't know, do we ever go back and look, are they being utilized and used? And what does that look like? And so in light of driving around, you'll see lots of can't park your valet, but we don't see any valets out in front of it. So I'd like to look at that. Council Member Vivins. I'm gonna segue from Council Member Crane, the National League of Cities is taking on homelessness in a real aggressive way now. And what I wanted to see, Michael, I know staff listens to us and sometimes they give us suggestions based on what they think we can accept. And in the past I've told them, don't ever bring little bitty houses to me and don't bring trendy things to me, but now I'm really trying to figure out some things we can do. And so I would like for Victor's staff and DJ's staff to get together and see what type of housing can be brought to help homelessness. I looked at them as little villages for a while. Surely there must be some land in town that can be donated, where we could accommodate a community that has housing that I disliked terribly in the past, but I give. And so I need some creative suggestions to address homelessness. And I'm really thinking about not just homeless people, but veterans as well. And we need some help. So staff, if you've heard me tell you, don't bring that to me, forget that. We have a real problem that needs to be taken more seriously than what we're doing now. And little bitty houses can be a part of that for me. I don't know what else is out there. I want to say something to that point, Gina, because I remember this, I know you remember this, when Johnson Murphy was here, heading the zoning section, she was working on that until we lost her to the city of Irving. So I think we lost continuity there. We were talking about this years ago. Yeah, yeah. I'm serious. I'm desperate now. Councilor Lara-Straff, I need to take Chris. So I guess to add on to Councilman Crane's thing, I met with a homeless veteran just last week. Actually, he's living in his truck and he's trying to get off his feet. And he was driven away. He was underneath some bridge with another community of folks living in their vehicles. And they were driven away like, well, where do we go now? So they're looking for a place. And so we were talking about parking lots. There's other cities who are implementing safe places for these vehicles to park, as they're in transition is what they're saying. So they just want a safe place. And so there's a few places in North Fort Worth where they're parking in the business parking lots and the businesses are letting them because their businesses are actually giving them jobs too. And so the citizens, they're coming to me like, hey, I got a real big problem with this. Can we get them tickets for the registration? What can we do to drive them off? I said, well, that's not gonna make it any better for them. So why are we gonna make the issue worse? I think their situation worse. And so one of the things I'd like to look at, and I was excited about that, the lots that were for sale, but unfortunately I went through all of them that wouldn't help. But I'd like to know if there's any public property that we own, any large parking lots that we may be able to utilize in a, I guess, more efficient manner for a safe place for folks to park for the homeless living in their vehicle who are just one more issue away from actually being in a tent outside of the Taco Bell and going forward. So I'd like to know if we, if the city owns any assets that we could utilize for that. Chris? Yeah, and I just wanna add to, I think that's what Michael was saying, but if not, I wanna add to it. Looking at that position, being a more high level position, not getting rid of what we have as it relates to homeless, but adding to we have Chief Office of Communication, we have the lab, which makes it a more brighter. So I think adding to what we have in a more comprehensive chief level position to handle this innovation as it relates to homelessness. And also I've been talking with Leanne about council compensation. And I know that some laws state that it can be within two years. And I said, we don't meet that for this May. I know Jared had brought up an election in November. And so I want this council to consider or something brought back to us because it doesn't make sense to happen in election cycle, which will be next May. So if it's not this May, which we don't make it legally, if it's not November, then we're talking about two or three years from now, reconsidering council compensation. They're my charter election. Sure, yep. Okay. Y'all can pay for my house like Jared said. Anybody else? Council? Yes, Carlos and then to Macy. I'd like an update from TPW on the Vision Zero program. Haven't heard anything about it. When an NLC, I stopped and talked to a couple of GM engineers, they're doing their own Vision Zero thing. So I'm curious to see if any details, are we collaborating with them? And you know, we're not. What are we doing? You know, just a status report. Council Member Hill. I think just to tag on, I think we're all concerned about homelessness. It might be helpful if we had someone from the mental health area as well, because let's get down to the root of it. Yes, we can try to house them, but I think mental illness and addiction and some other things are causing the homelessness problem we're in. So I don't know if that's a helpful thing for y'all to have JPS or Healing Shepherd Clinic or people that are on the ground on East Lancaster that work with these people every day, come and present to us and have a better understanding of a holistic approach to it. Anyone else, Council? I might offer, I just attended the COC meeting for Tarrant County. And I would venture to tell you that from a community standpoint and for a resource standpoint, we are doing everything right. I think connecting the dots, sometimes our most biggest obstacle, you have a lot of other municipalities interfacing with Tarrant County and Parker County, which is included in our COC. Maybe the better prudent use of our time may be in the late winter, trying to convene a real workshop on this issue, so that we're all at the table, you're bringing in all of our different partners and we can identify at the end of that workshop, where are the policies we feel like we're falling short, we need more resources in, is it money, is it housing affordability? Mental health is a piece of that. You're gonna see a huge uptick in point-in-time count for family homelessness because they may use McKinney-Vento to really count those families, which will drive those numbers up considerably. So I think if y'all are open to that, rather than just do one-off IRs, let's convene a full session on it and we can decide on the format as a body. So I'll have my staff kind of work around through Tarrant's office as well. The Tarrant County Homeless Coalition is just coming to give us an update. I don't know that they're on the calendar. No, it'll just be a general overview. It might be helpful. I'm really glad you brought up the mental health thing because in my conversation with Tarrant County Homeless Coalition yesterday, that was exactly what we talked about, is that at the end of their presentation, part of it is we could do all of this money for homelessness, but the truth is, is that a lot of these people aren't homeless, they just have severe mental health issues and so presentation, let's just make it even bigger or part of that round table would be helpful. So thank you for bringing that up. Let's incorporate our Hope Team tooth because they'll have information. We'll work on a format and then get circulated so y'all make sure it encompasses everything you want. Yes, Gina. I have one more future agenda item. It involves the children and this is a project for communications. I'd like to see community engagement, communications, whatever, whoever's gonna do it because I can't do everybody's work, but we need to communicate to the schools about our one daytime meeting and I'd like to see a coordinated effort of invitations to schools yet to get here and see how government really works and that's what happens, you all. We couldn't do it at nighttime because that would be overtime for school staff but if you can bring them in for daytime, that's a daytime meeting, that's a field trip and so we need help from communications to get that word out to the districts that touch us and Mayor, thank you for the daytime meeting. Good question. Councilor Martinez. Actually just came to mind but I'd really like to hear from PD on how bad the fentanyl crisis is here in Fort Worth and where are the hotspots in the city. Anyone else? Okay, meeting adjourned. Thank you all.