 budget retreat on the FY23 budget process. I'm John Allure. I'm the Director of Budget and Management Services. And if Mayor O'Neill is ready, I will turn it over to the Mayor to call the roll. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday on this beautiful Thursday. Madam Clerk, we are ready to call this meeting to order and call the roll. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Mayor O'Neill. Here. Mayor Pro Tem Middleton. I'm here. Council Member Caballero has an excused absence. Council Member Freeman. Council Member Johnson. Council Member Reese. Right here. Council Member Williams. I'm here. Thank you. I believe we have a quorum. Very good. So again, welcome everyone. In a moment, we'll pull up the agenda for today and I'll briefly go over that for everyone. Just a couple of reminders that we are streaming live on YouTube and I just chatted that out to everyone if they want to share it with people. And as well, our entire process for all four retreats is available online at City of Durham's budget development process page. And if you go to the city's web page and search on the budget department, you will find that in the materials for all of the retreats so far, day one and two. And now day three are up on the site. So residents can follow along at home at their leisure and they will stay up for the entirety of the budget process. Just a brief overview of what we have in store for today. I'll quickly turn things over to opening remarks from the City Manager, Wanda Page. We'll have a presentation from Interim Director of Human Resources, JJ Scott on a pay discussion. We'll turn things over to a language access update. Then we'll have a presentation on council budget requests followed by a parking fund overview and discussion. And there's a break as you can see put in there, but we can put that break wherever we decide is appropriate if we're running a little behind or head on anything we can break as you feel is necessary. And those are the end of my comments. If anybody has any questions, very good. I'm going to turn it over to Wanda Page. Good morning, Madam Mayor, Elaine O'Neill, Mr. Mayor Pro Tem, Mark Anthony Middleton, council members, city staff, and our wonderful residents in the Bull City. We have joined together for budget session number three, a continuation of last month's sessions, and we hope to spend the next four hours today with you presenting information, reports, responding to your questions, and even facilitating conversations that will continue to provide us the budget development guidance that we need in order to propose a budget for fiscal year 2023. I'd like to thank you, John, Laura, and Christina Reardon, the budget department staff that have been working hard in the background on coordinating what you will see today. The deputy city managers who are always present working with department directors and leaders and contributors all throughout the organization for just being a team. We could not do this work if we were not a team. I could certainly not lead this organization without a team, and we are a team in everything that we do and we try to accomplish. But today, during this budget session, we will be, again, listening. That's where we get our guidance. We will be listening. We will be reviewing with you material that we have put together, that we've analyzed, and bringing our best material to you to help you be able to make decisions and give us guidance. And we also never forget that it is our responsibility to continue to innovate and bring new ideas to the table as we put together these budgets in very difficult times. As I was introducing myself to new council members, one of the things that I always do is I bring out the budget document because sometimes the conversations that we have don't always do justice to the document that has to be coordinated and put together in order to make this presentation to the community, which will happen in May. But it is a document. It has more than 400 pages in it. It reflects the values of our organization and our community. And it reflects, it is really our roadmap for a year, for the most part, that holds us accountable for using the resources that have been provided to us for the purposes that they have been provided, which is really to serve the residents of this community. So we do anticipate discussion. This morning, John has referenced four topics that we have prepared just for you today. And as we finally begin to put the pandemic behind us with so many of its economic uncertainties, central to this year's budget proposal, and we talked about it last year, we talked about it mid-year this year, is the statement that does define one of our core values. And that is our employees. The budget proposal that you have before you today or will have as we continue to continue to develop it, it reflects changing market conditions for market conditions for salaries. And it reflects our need to be changing with those conditions in order to attract and retain city employees all across the organization. We focus sometimes on certain sectors of our organization, but we all know that their employees all over this organization that serve every single day, as the mayor often says, when we're sleeping 24, somebody's working 24, 7, 365 days a year. And as the city manager, I thank them. I thank them when I see them. I thank them in settings like this. And I thank them whether they hear my voice or not. Today, the human resources staff have worked to analyze employee pay and some of those market structures. And they really have prepared a detailed presentation on the paying benefits that are included in the current budget draft. So last month, you received the sort of a big picture view of the current budget draft. And we talked about that budget draft, including some things already. We talked about it, including annualizing the market increases that we made for our public safety, our police and fire department employees. What you will hear about today are some additional market pay adjustment scenarios that will be presented for discussion. Because before we leave at the end tomorrow, you all will be giving us guidance on sort of narrowing down the guard rails that we need to work within as we prepare the final budget proposal. So to continue to serve our growing and diverse community, we have made some key investments with your guidance and direction to enhance our language access capacity. We are excited today to bring you an update on our progress in that area. So that will be one of the things on the agenda today as John has referenced. Discussing and prioritizing your city council new budget requests, it will be a continuation of the decision making and prioritization that we have incorporated recently in our budget preparation guidelines. This will be the third consecutive year that we've done that. And it has worked well for us as we receive new budget requests from our departments. We receive them from you. We receive them and when we receive them from you, we always know that they are reflecting the residents that you are in constant contact with and that you engage and communicate with on a day to day basis as we do. Every successful organization must seek out and implement strategies to solve its most challenging problems also. So we are often talking about things that we dwell and things that work out well for us. But we will conclude our session today discussing one of our bigger challenges that we have before us. Our parking enterprise, and I call it an enterprise because it is one of our business type activities, has been one of the activities that has been hardest hit during the pandemic over the past two years. There are some things that we will probably get into as we have that discussion about potential ways to resolve some of those issues. But it is an issue that we will face this budget season along with future budget preparation years into the near future. We are prepared today to begin to meet some of the challenges that we have, discuss how we will balance the needs of all of our residents, our stakeholders, our customers, and just get it done. So I am pleased to have this team with me today. There are about 34 of us, I see, on the call. And before I turn the mic over to Interim HR Director John Scott, J.J. Scott, to get us started with the first presentation, you have said goodbye to some very great leaders and employees over the last year or so, or two years. And we've also welcomed some new leaders into the organization. And we have recently welcomed a new finance director to our team, Tim Flora. I would like for Tim to click his camera on. I'm told he's here and introduce himself to this group. And then the next voice you will hear will be John Scott. Thank you, County Manager Page. Hello, everyone. I'm Tim Flora. I'm excited to be here. He's nervous. He meant city. That tells about my past. So I am very thrilled to be with you today and thrilled to be a part of this organization. I have over the years heard so much about it and was just so grateful to be accepted as part of this organization. I've got several years of local government experience in county and municipal, even have a few years of federal government experience thrown into to boot. So I look forward to getting to know you more as we move forward and and excited to be again a part of this organization. I guess that's my cue. Good morning. Welcome aboard, Tim. Good morning, Mayor O'Neill, Mr. Mayor Pro Tem. Members of the Council, my name is JJ Scott and I'm currently serving as the interim director for Human Resources as Wanda mentioned, I'll be speaking with you this morning on some of the compensation issues that we'll be considering through the FY23 budget process. Before we dig in, I want to thank the HR staff, particularly Joyce Baker, Alithia Hardy and Veronica Jackson. They've done a ton of work on this presentation and also wanted to shout out the collaboration that we've had with the budget team and all of the guidance that we've received from our leader, City Manager Paige. This has really been a team effort. And with that, I will see if I believe budget is running the presentation. There we go. Excellent. Thank you. And you can go to the next slide please, Christina. All right. So here are the main topics that we want to hit this morning. Compensation can get complicated quick. So I'm going to try and hit the high points of each item. But of course, please stop me if you have any questions at any time. Wanda alluded to this earlier, but one caveat before we really get going. I got to acknowledge that we are early in the process here and there are a lot of moving parts. So this is going to be an overview of some of the options that we have. And I'm going to provide you numbers but they're ballpark estimates of the cost. We'll also be taking a look at some of the data that we'll be considering throughout this process. But again, the data is changing as well. So as decisions get made, the numbers that you see will be refined. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. Next slide, please. All right. So first, this is just a review of the numbers that you have already seen. So this is what is included in the multiyear projection, which was shared by budget. So everything that you see here was included in the gap that you saw. So we've got the full year costs, the structure adjustments for our sworn employees. You see those up top. We budgeted for increases for pay for performance, that pay for performance program for each pay plan. You see those in the second group of bullets after that. And we're going to talk more about what exactly pay for performance is in a little bit, but just wanted to reconcile these numbers since you've seen them already. The multiyear estimate also does include some round numbers about possible benefit cost increases and the amount might change for what the city pays into the state retirement system. But I didn't want to get too specific there. Let's go back one more slide just for a second. So I wanted to make an important note. This is the general fund. A lot of the numbers that you have seen are the general fund only, but we have 30% of our employees are not in the general fund. So when we're looking at the pay for performance amounts, for example, so we have employees in the open range and the step range who are in, for example, the water and sewer fund, stormwater funds, and some of these various other funds. And again, I'm going to show you that detail later, but just something to keep in mind that a lot of these numbers, and I'll try and be specific when it's the general fund only, but they are actually larger when we're talking about the entire employee population. All right, Christina, we can go to the next slide. Great. Okay. So at this point, I wanted to just take a step back and acknowledge that, although paying benefits are extremely important to the employee experience of the city, they're not everything. And we really can't neglect these other factors. So EngageU is the name of the umbrella program, and that houses all of our engagement and development programs here at the city that come through HR, I should say. So these programs have changed substantially over the last couple of years, and we're going to need to continue to invest more time and energy in them to make sure that they're relevant and effective in doing what we need for our employees. From the beginning of the pandemic through, at least through this year, a fiscal year 23 that we're talking about now, we can see more change in the workplace, and we've seen in decades for at least portions of our workplace. How these types of programs are delivered is going to need to change to reflect that. But I do want to highlight real quick just two ways that we are adapting. Midday Moments, probably familiar with, so that is our weekly live program hosted through Zoom. And that lets employees connect directly with important issues from around the city. We appreciate Mayor Neal was just on. And I wanted to shout out our host, our current host, HR employee, Andrew Woods. He and his team have done a really good job of keeping this program going and just offering this outlet for our employees and for important news. And then I wanted to jump to the bottom bullet on here, flexible work policy. We've been pretty aggressive in developing and implementing a flexible work policy. As you know, many types of jobs can now be done partially remote. And something that we included is that jobs can also be done partially, possibly outside of standard working hours. We already have 350 flexible work agreements that we've received. And we're going to continue to try and develop this policy and refine this so that work can be done when and where it's most beneficial for the city and for employees. Because we see this as an important way that we can help improve employee well-being, as well as our competitiveness in the market. All right, next slide. So I wanted to take just a second to talk about benefits. I'm not going to talk about our benefits a whole lot. In this meeting, we're going to come back and cover this later in the process. But I wanted to put up this extremely busy slide to make a point. And that is that we have really generous benefits. They're great, and they're very affordable. As I mentioned before, we don't have the rates set for the upcoming year. But I am pretty confident that we'll still be able to say that we provide exceptional benefits and our rates are better than most other organizations of any kind, really. And so we will be back later in the process once we get some of those numbers ironed out. So let's jump to the next slide, please. And for the rest of the presentation, we're going to focus on pay. We have a lot of options when we're talking about employee compensation. These are kind of the big picture items. So pay for performance is actually what most employees think about first when they're thinking about their pay and raises. These are permanent increases to salary. Usually it's a percentage and it's applied annually based on employee evaluations. But there are other things too. So we can do structure adjustments. And we talked a lot about that during the police and fire process that we just finished up. And that's when we move the minimum and the maximum amount that we will pay for a certain type of work. Usually that's in response to market pressures. Those are permanent changes generally. Well, pretty permanent. But then we can also do more short term or more targeted items. So incentives and incentive is when we want to either reward an employee for getting specific certification, education or some other qualification. And then we can do things like bonuses. One time bonuses, we can do them around hiring or retention or sometimes just as part of the general compensation plan. So again, these bottom two are options that are temporary and won't permanently add to our long-term costs. All right. Next slide, please. So we're going to be referring to four pay plans and I've made some reference to them already. And these are the four pay plans for full-time employees. We do have a part-time plan, but work on that is still going on. So we'll have to come back later with some more info on that. So here you see some just basic statistics on the four plans. And it's important to note that these plans are set up like they're different because they represent different types of work. And so our set plan, that's mostly that's general employees. So these employees are primarily in operations, administrative support, some trades positions and ends are generally not exempt employees. The open range then is mostly exempt employees and they're doing work that's been defined as professional management or executive positions. And there's some highly skilled technical work that falls into the open range as well. And then we've talked about the sworn police and fire a lot. So again, you can see the relative size, salary tenure and age. And again, of course, this is for current employees only. So on the next slide, we'll get into a little bit more detail. I just wanted you to be able to see, this is again a pretty busy slide, but I just wanted you to see some of the job titles that are within each pay plan. And top jobs is really, that's just referring to the number of current FTEs that we have for each job. So fire and police, pretty self-explanatory off to the left. And then that open range you can see. So we've got those jobs like engineers, a lot of analysts, some of the AD positions show up their AD classifications, I should say, show up there. And then over in the step plan, that's where you can see a lot of the biggest jobs are maintenance type jobs, admin support, and then some more technical roles like inspectors or mechanics. So they all fall in that step plan as well. So let's jump to the next slide. And I apologize, this slide is actually out of order, but we're going to cover it right now. Anyways, this is the fund slide that I had referred to earlier. And so what you can see is that definitely the majority of our employees are in the general fund. Over 70% are in the general fund, but we do have a good number over in that water and sewer fund, the solid waste fund, disposal services, and the stormwater fund. And then a couple of others spread throughout some of the other funds at the city. And the reason I mentioned this, so again, the general fund gets a lot of attention, rightfully so. And when we're talking about property taxes, sales taxes, that's what funds any changes to employee salaries that we might discuss or might implement. For these other funds, they have independent rate models that determine what they're going to need. And so those rate models would have to be adjusted if we do make changes. I can't say, I certainly can't say if any rates would go up or down based on this, but it's just something to be aware of as we consider changes to employee pay. Next slide please. And so we are back to looking at the demographics of the pay plans. And so what we've got here is it's the same data two different ways. So on the left is just the raw numbers. And these are broad categories of both race and gender, trying to simplify it so we could get it on one slide here. But you can see the relative size and the relative makeup, the numbers on the left, and then the percentages on the right. All right, we can jump to the next slide please. And here we'll start getting into a little bit more detail on the options, the compensation options that we have. So the first is pay for performance. And this goes by a couple different names. Some groups refer to it as merit pay, or you'll hear this P4P or see that. But what we're talking about here is a percentage increase that's applied to an employee salary. So a lot of our employees that manifest as step movement. And so for all the public safety, sworn public safety employees, and then for the employees in our general step plan, they're going to go up a step within their pay grade. For public safety, that's 5%. For general employees, that's 4%. The open range is different in that there are no steps. It's just it's wide open. And so the amount that an employee in the open range can go up through pay for performance can vary. And that's going to vary based on their evaluation. So in typical matrices that we've used the past couple of years, 4% to 6% has been the amount we usually budget 4.8% as the average. So you see some cost estimates at the bottom. And again, these are big round numbers. But the amount that has been included in the general fund, the multi-year general fund plan that you've already seen, and then an estimate for what it might cost overall if we include the other funds. All right, we'll jump to the next slide. And this is just a quick history because the last couple of years have not been normal for pay for performance. But as recently as FY20, we had full implementation of our pay for performance plan. So everything that I showed you on the previous slide, that happened for employees at that time. That was, of course, also the beginning of the pandemic. And so we did our first round of premium pay, which I want to emphasize is not part of pay for performance. But I wanted to acknowledge it because it was a substantial amount of money for our frontline employees. And those were, that was not permanent ads, of course, I should add. In FY21, we did not do any pay for performance. But we did do, again, premium pay. And we did both percentages and bonuses for FY21. And then for this current year, we did not do our regular pay for performance. But we did provide bonuses to all employees who are rated effective or better. So let's jump over. So this is pay for performance. And then next slide, we're talking about structures. So I'd reference the structure movement. And again, this is what we did for police and fire. So you're familiar with this. And so I just wanted to give some history of when these different plans were introduced and what their movement has looked like over time. Now, we had had some rough timing and that we had the pandemic come up when some movement would have happened. And so we saw that with police and fire, where we did a little movement at the beginning of the year, did the study and then did some substantially larger movement. But we did also move the step plan by 2%. And so those employees saw a direct 2% salary increase. And then we moved the open range by 7%. But again, those employees don't move with the range. So we instead applied a direct 2% adjustment to their salaries. So now let's get on to some approximate costs for some other things that we could do. What we've looked at previously is included in the multi-year. Nothing here is included. So this would be an add. So this would require additional funding or decrease another cost to make any of this happen. So something that we could do is do some additional movement to the structure. So you see the step plan and the open range plan on here with some sample costs for what it would take if we moved those ranges one, two, or 3%. Again, this is general fund only. So you can add a little, an extra 30% on there for some of the other funds, just as an estimate. As I noted before, the step plan, you can see the cost is considerably higher for a structure adjustment because that's going to directly increase their salaries. Whereas with the open range, it's only anyone who would fall under the new minimum, they'll be brought up to that minimum. And so that's the estimated cost that you see there. The bottom set of bullets is to do that direct salary adjustment to the open range. This can be combined in any way, but again, this just gives you some sample costs, some ideas. If we did want to move the employees in the open range salary directly, that is an estimate of how much it would cost. All right. And then we had mentioned incentives of bonuses. This is something that we currently use. And these are just some examples of places where they are used across the city. One of the advantages of incentives and bonuses is that they can be more targeted. So a structure adjustment and even pay for performance, those are big kind of blunt force movement of salaries across an entire pay plan at a minimum. These give us opportunities to identify and try and address specific issues. And so you can see some of the places where we've used this so far across the city. And we will be discussing additional possibilities throughout the budget process. Next slide, please. I wanted to quickly bring up the Durham minimum livable wage. So this wage will be going up. It's going to jump to $17.60 as of July of 2022. And you can see the annual rate equivalent there as well, just above $36,000. And just an example of how we adjust for that. So we know that in the general step plan, one of those steps, one of those grades is going to be below this minimum livable wage. And so we, at a minimum, will be bringing that step up to meet the new amount. Next slide, please. All right. So as we've been saying a lot in HR and in the city in general, there's a lot going on. So these are some of the other things that we have talked about and that we'll be discussing with the city manager. We've got some reclassification studies going on. So this is when the work that an employee is doing changes. And so we can actually go in and study that and see if they actually belong in a different job. And so we can just change them in place, change the title and the classification and the salary for that employee. We've also identified some hard to fill classifications. Some of these have been going for a while. Some are new. And so we will be looking at some possible solutions. And these are just examples. It goes across the organization. And so we are trying to be creative. Compensation isn't the only solution for all of these. So we're trying to be creative with our solutions, but it will be part of the conversation for sure. Compression and bypassing. So we know that this can occur when there's not movement in a structure or of a structure. And so again, we're going to be looking across the organization, looking at our data, looking at the issues that are arising and seeing if there are ways that we want to try to address any of that. And then I mentioned the part-time structure. This is a big thing. Our friends in Parks and Rec do a lot of work on that. And so somebody, either we or they will be up to discuss this at some point in the future and just let you know what's going on with the part-time structure. All right. Moving on. And to wrap up, I just wanted to give you a little bit of insight into the numbers that we are looking at when we look out across the organization. We're paying attention to a lot. This is just a small bit, but wanted to show you because it is important. And it does get a lot of press. And so we wanted to get some of these numbers out to you directly. So let's start with turnover. And as noted, this is full-time turnover only. The bar chart on the left is our annual turnover, FY22. It's just a year-to-date number. Note that this is without recruits. So you could see a different number, depending on if recruits are included. This is without recruits, just because that tends to be highly volatile. And we do, but we do look at that. It's just not included in these numbers. So that's overall on the left. And then on the right, we've broken it out by the three major types of turnover that we see. And so the light blue line is resignations. The dark blue line in the middle is retirements. And then the bottom line are disciplinary terminations. And so you can see, I mean, this is being driven by resignations. A lot more people are resigning now than had been in previous years. Retirements are also up. We saw a real jump. The most retirements we've ever had on record in one month was in January. And some of that was just people shifting from maybe doing it earlier or maybe doing it later in FY22, and instead just doing it in January. But regardless, it's going to be an elevated number for us. So let's jump to the next slide. And we can look at turnover in a slightly different way. So now we're looking at it by pay plan. And so what we're looking for here is our different things happening in the different pay plans. And when I look at this, the first thing I was actually struck by was how similar they are. I didn't really expect to see it quite so similar. But on the left, that's that overall turnover number again. And you can see it, it's not the same, but definitely very similar patterns across our four pay plans. The middle set is resignations only. And so you can see a little bit of the variation there. But again, it's a pretty, pretty consistent pattern that we're seeing there. And now in the final slide over there, we see that retirements have really jumped up in fire and police. And that jump that we saw there in January that I had mentioned, that is where a lot of those retirements were. So we would expect to see a little bit of reversion to the mean, as they say, like that'll probably smooth out a little bit just because people did kind of clump around that January date. But it's absolutely something that we are keeping an eye on. And the reason I bring this up is because you would do different things if your turnover is due to resignations versus retirement or if it's happening in different locations. So let's jump to the next slide. And this is just a broad look at hiring. And again, we're looking at buy pay plans. This is just a number of new employees that we are bringing in by pay plan, especially in the sworn pay plans. We actually see a lot of promotion. So it's really just the recruits that are coming up and then they're promoted up through the ranks. So this is only considering new employees coming into the organization. And what we see is a pretty, pretty strong downward trend through FY21. And then it looks like a leveling for FY22. But the important thing to note is that, you know, this is a this is an actual number and it's only partway through the year. So we are actually seeing hiring pick up a little bit more, which is great. So we are very excited to see that happen. Next slide. We've heard a lot about vacancies and we definitely do have a lot of vacancies. This is probably a slice that we don't look at too much just by pay plan. And so you can see we do have a lot of vacancies in that step plan. And then sworn police is next open and fire. What's important during the budget process is the duration. So this is one of the things that we we really look at. And if a position is vacant for a really long time, you know, we take a good hard look at it, we do budget does city manager does and see if that is a position that could possibly be repurposed in a different way so that we're not adding positions to the budget, but we're more adapting to the types of work that need to be done. So yeah, so that's that's vacancies. Again, very high level look at it. Let's jump to the next slide. And just wanted to share, you know, that's a little tiny bit of data, but there's a lot more stuff that we're going to be looking at. Again, it's it's pretty early in this process. Normally, we wouldn't be speaking with council about compensation until much much later in the process, but we wanted to get ahead of it and get a little bit of guidance. But these are some of the other things that we are going to be considering. There was just a discussion earlier this week among some of the HR professionals in our region. So we're going to be putting together a survey so that we can all see what each other are thinking of doing. And then of course, we're all keenly aware of the more regional and national numbers around inflation and the consumer price index and all that. So of course, we want to be responsive as the situation changes. So I will wrap it up there and open it up to any questions that you may have any additional detail that I can provide. Good morning, Scott. I do have just a general question in terms of the vacancies that you're seeing in the step arena. Are there jobs? Are they in clusters or just across the board? Are there specific positions that we're having trouble filling? Yeah, it's a combination there. For the most part, well, this is changing a little bit. But for the most part, the positions that have been harder to fill are more technical positions. But we are seeing, I made mention of a CDL issue that we're attempting to do. This is a new thing. There's some new requirements around that. And so we're anticipating that there's going to be some challenges in that arena. I'm pulling up my vacancy report right now so I can tell you what some of the bigger vacancies are. We love our data in HR. I want to try and get you the most accurate data. So it's the positions that we actually have the most of. So the top six are all maintenance positions that are vacant. So what we're seeing there is probably competition with construction. And so they can be much more dynamic with their salaries. And as we know, when you walk around, there's a lot of construction going on right now. And so that is probably driving at least some of those issues there. JJ, you probably didn't see it in the chat, but Council Member Reese requested vacancies by departments. And I know we can do that. Yes. Hey, I just had a quick question that you made out of the answer to this, but I'm wondering if that leveling out and potentially increase in hiring in 2022, is that happening broadly in the labor market? Is that something we're seeing? Because obviously our trends are mirroring the national trends. And I'm wondering if this is an improvement that we're seeing across the board or if we're just getting lucky. Yeah, I think generally, and so it's very variable for different organizations, different industries. But the churn, so that turnover, so every turnover that can involve, that's a new vacancy that we then hire to fill. But if that person leaves, the vacancy, the hiring, the vacancy rate and turnover are all intertwined. And so what we're seeing is really that churn. So yes, a decent amount of hiring, but in some cases, people not sticking around as long. And we have seen some of that as well, just lower 10-year, less connection to the organization. I mean, the last two years have been rough for everybody, but if most of your work has been over Zoom, for example, there's just not as strong a connection to the organization. That's not everything, but that's part of it. Thank you. Madam Mayor, if I might. Good morning. Thank you. Good morning, colleagues, friends, everybody watching. JJ, good to see you, man. I don't know if I've done it publicly on record. Let me just congratulate you on your assumption of leadership. You're in the department and congratulating a great job you've been doing. Really hit the ground running. I want to also personally thank you for the assistance you've given me. I've had a couple of inquiries to HR and preparation for this budget process. You and your entire team just do really bang up work down there. So thank you for the work your shop is producing. So a couple of things. Firstly, I'm curious as to how much, I'm sure we've always been invested in flexible work policies, but I'm wondering pre-COVID, post-COVID, how much more of our workforce is being recontorted or impacted by flexible work policy? Is it much more now than pre-COVID? I'm sure it was a value of ours, but talk a little bit about that if you would. It is much, much more, much more now. We had some flexible work in the organization, but it was nothing like this. It was in the tens of people maybe who would take advantage of it. It just wasn't something that we did generally. We have made a point, and I think the city manager and deputy city manager have been very clear that when we were even developing the flexible work policy that it was meant to be a beyond COVID thing. This was not purely around keeping people out of the office to keep them safe. This policy was designed really to optimize work. I think we have really, especially among cities, been pretty aggressive in this front and can really be leaders on understanding how we can get the work done and serve our residents, but also it can be really beneficial for the employee experience, employee well-being. Well-being is a big concern right now, and so flexible work can move us in that direction if it's done correctly. Like I said, we have 350 agreements that we've gotten in, and so agreements are kind of the process where we make an employee define what they're going to do. They have to work it through with their supervisor, get it approved by a department director. There's definite structure to this. We would expect another 100 or so in this initial batch, and then we're going to monitor. We're going to see over time how this works. If we need to, if we can expand it, if we need to pull it back a little bit, what kinds of... Am I frozen or is JJ... What are the issues? Oh, did I? He froze just for a minute, but you're back. Okay, sorry. I try to come to City Hall and hope it's better, but sometimes you get caught. But yeah, so we'll be evaluating the program over time to see how we can do it better. Thanks for that. When I've spoken to business owners throughout the city, and one of the things that we're discovering is they want customers in traffic back, but because folk are kind of re-contouring and reconfiguring their work life, not coming into the office more, there are ripples everywhere. Speaking of ripples, I was also wondering as we make decisions about compensation and budget, are there economies that we're realizing in other areas? If we've got more people working at home, how does that impact in terms... I know we've got to still pay benefits and salary, but the less light's on. How does that impact equipment costs and things of that nature? Are we realizing economies, maybe not of scale, but economies and other areas' impacts because of that? I see the manager's pops on. Yes. It's hard for me to stay in the background when we start talking about some of these things that I wanted to pop in to say, when we talk about what JJ has mentioned, we got 2,600 employees and we have about 350 that have these flexible work plans. So when we talk about, are there efficiencies or are we saving? It's not really that measurable because regardless of where someone has to work from, they still got to have equipment. We're not really saving power or those kinds of things. Potentially, if there's no lights on in one office for a day or so, we may be saving it, but I don't know that it is really measurable. It will be a very, very minimal amount, if any. If I could just touch on your earlier question when you asked a little bit about people coming in, the public coming in, it has been made very clear to us and to staff that customer service levels can't be impacted. We saw that a little bit through the resident survey a couple of weeks ago. Our customer service, our employees are doing just a fantastic job. We want to do this and we want to do it right and the customer experience is absolutely a part of that. Let me try, I'll find a question about actual the step in the structure plan, kind of, I guess, mediate or be a whisper for some of the questions I'm even getting now from members of the public watching. As things, our status quo was 5% for step for public safety and 4% for general. I'm looking at the potential numbers of a 1% increase, 2% increase, 3% on the step plan, open range, open range market. Is the looming decision before us going back to status quo that 5%, 4% and what it would look like plus that 1% or 2% on the structure? So, in other words, 5% be 6%, 4% would be 5% and the cost. Is that ultimately the decision we need to make as a council? Yeah, that's absolutely part of it. So, everything that's on that initial slide is baked into the gap that you have seen. Anything that's on the later slide, so those options, those would be ads, yes. So, if we already said we're going to do the pay for performance, the step movement, but additionally, we wanted to move the entire step structure that for general employees, yes, then those numbers that you see on that slide would come into effect. And is it the staff's intention, and I saw the caveat that it's still early in the process and there's things that need to be done, is it the staff's intention ultimately to bring us a recommendation or is this purely resting with the council to prescribe what that increase or non-increase should look like? It's in about a I'm sorry, go ahead, Linda. I wanted to say tomorrow we will have budget guidelines and what has happened in the past is there the range of increase because we have a lot of work to do to balance the budget. And what you would typically see is an increase or a market adjustment not to exceed a certain percentage and then the recommendation coming forward will be within that range. And that would be a discussion that we would actually have tomorrow with you because it does have such an impactful, you know, it's so impactful on the on the budget. Right. And I appreciate that. And let me tell you what animates my question. I knew that, but when I saw that there's still some eyes that need to be dotted and teaser need to be crossing variables that need to be substituted. I didn't know how that was going to impact tomorrow's discussion if we were still waiting on market studies or regional studies or if it was early in the process, how early in the process actually are we because I was anticipating that discussion tomorrow. So that's the only reason. Yes. So one of the reasons that we, you know, we have not actually done market studies for those pay plans that are not police and fire. So you will recall, we did specific market studies for the police and fire positions. We have not done that for the other positions that we have, but we know that because, you know, we only increased the structures to 2% last year. And, you know, we all realize what's happening around us that there's got to be some need for to increase some of those positions, even without a study being put in place. You know, we can't we is particularly in our regular pay plans. We have over 200 different job types that we have very many more job types than we have when we talk about our police and fire personnel. We have, you know, less than 20 job types in those, you know, in those pay plans. But in our general and our open pay ranges, we have over 200 of them. So, you know, we don't always do a full pledge market study on them, you know, every year. We did last do it in 2019, which was part of JJ's presentation here this morning. So the reason we have the range there, there will be some of our other cities and counties that are making decisions about market adjustments. And those are some of the competitors that we have for employees. And we just kind of want to stay in, you know, in balance with with, you know, with Raleigh and others. And some of those decisions have not been made about their pay increases at this point. So I think that is the, you know, specific answer to why we say we're not, you know, we're not quite there. We, you know, we'll never be there today when we're actually putting the budget together. But we do want guidelines, you know, regarding the things that you have not, we have not already told you that is in what you've seen in the current gap that we presented. And so that's what is meant by that. Well, thank you so much, Madam Manager and JJ. I'm going to yield now, but I do want to say that, you know, this, what we see here today really does not do justice to the incredible amount of work and how nuanced these considerations are and how fraught really this is, because, you know, you think you just throw more money at it, but then you've got compression issues and bypassing issues. You guys just deal with so much stuff down there. So we're really grateful for what you do for us and for helping us get through this, perhaps the most important part of our budgetary consideration. So thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'll yield back. Well, all right. If there are no other questions, we can proceed. Well, JJ is on the screen. I'll just say the only reason I didn't pop in in this discussion and you should, I think you are already aware of this is our staff and JJ staff have been meeting weekly since the fall on not only this issue, an entire variety of issues where budget and human resources intersect every week we met yesterday. And so everything that was expressed by JJ and by the city manager is aligned with budget thinking. There's no need for us to provide additional comment. And with that, thank you, JJ. And we're all right to move forward. It's 10 o'clock. I think I'd like to turn things over to Director of Communications, Beverly Thompson, and she's going to do an introduction for us on the Language Access update. Thank you, John. I really appreciate it. The morning Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, City Council members and City Manager Page and Stout. John, thank you so much for allowing me the pleasure of introducing the city's first ever Language Access Coordinator, Michelle Gomez-Sespadez. Michelle joined the Communications Department in September and has done an absolutely amazing job. I believe she and the work she does fit perfectly in the communications department. You know, at the heart of communications is being able to share information in a meaningful way, so that the person on the receiving end can be informed enough to engage in some way. That is also the goal of Language Access, providing information and the right language, the correct language, to enable a person to understand and be informed enough to engage with the city. I'm so excited for you to meet Michelle and hear about her accomplishments and her future plans for ensuring that providing Language Access in Durham is just how we do business. Thank you. Thank you so much, Beverly, for that introduction and thank you all for allowing me the opportunity to be here this morning. I'm really excited to share with you all the work that's been done so far regarding Language Access. But first, I would also like to thank Beverly for her incredible leadership of the Communications Department and for the work that she's done so far with Language Access and leading us up to this point, as well as thanking my team and the Communications Department as a whole for the incredible efforts that they've done as well and also welcoming me as part of their team. So thank you all. It looks like the budget team is also going to be presenting the presentations. I'll wait for that to show up on screen and then we can get started once that's online. All right. Thank you. Alrighty. So thank you again for this opportunity and again, it's an honor to be present here and to present to you all the city council members. And so let's go ahead and move forward. Please go to the next slide. Thank you. So I would like to take an opportunity to share a little bit about myself and my role. As Beverly mentioned, I started with the city of Durham back in early September and I'm housed in the Communications Department. I began my role head on and taking a look at the LAP and analyzing what that work looks like. And so as I move forward with my role as LAP coordinator, my role is to direct and guide the language access plan implementation, as well as offer strategic guidance, training, and departmental support on language access efforts across our city. And I assist in identifying bilingual staff, language service vendors, and other resources for our city department. Next slide, please. And so before I share about the city's language access plan and what we've done so far, I want to share with you some of the things that I've been sharing with our city staff to inform us and get us all on the same page and get familiarized with the concept of language access to help us understand why we're pushing forth this effort here in our organization. And so taking a look back at what language access means, when we talk about it, we mean providing individuals who are limited English proficient, reasonable and equitable access to our services and resources. Similarly, as we do with our English-speaking individuals. Next slide, please. And the term limited English proficient, or LEP, as I'll be using from here now, is one that is used and heard a lot throughout when we discuss language access. So I've taken the time to, I've also taken the time to share what this term means with our city staff so that we can all understand what we are referring to when we say someone is limited English proficient. And so as defined by the US Census and the American Community Survey, LEP speakers are individuals who speak English less than very well or in much simpler terms have the limited ability to read, write, understand or speak English. Next slide, please. And so one of the things I like to say is that our goal for language access is to provide language services to all who need them when they're interacting with our agency. But one of the common questions that we do get asked is how do we determine the LEP population group in which we are to provide language services to. And so our language access plan points us to the Safe Harbor Guidelines by the Department of Justice that state by offering language services to at least five percent of the city's population or a thousand people, whichever is smaller, and who speak a primary language other than English and have limited English proficiency is strong evidence of compliance with Title VI, which is something I will discuss further in the next slide. And so taking these guidance from the DOJ helps us identify the language group for our language services and who we are to provide language services to. And currently, according to our policy, Spanish is the only language group to meet this criteria. When we take a look at Durham's demographics, we see that we have a Hispanic population of 14.4 percent according to city data from 2019. And when we take a look at the American Community Survey from 2019, 5.3 percent of that population that speaks Spanish at home is limited English proficient. Next slide, please. And so there are two legal bases that support providing language services to LEP speakers. And the first one is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This prohibits agencies that receive federal financial assistance, like us here at the City of Durham, from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin in the provision of any program or activity. And so when we take a look at how the federal government interprets discrimination based upon national origin, it defines it as the failure to define or, excuse me, the failure to ensure LEP individuals can effectively participate in or benefit from our federally assisted programs. And then when we take a look at the second legal basis, the second legal basis is the 2000 Executive Order 13166, which affirms Title VI language access requirement and provides additional guidance for how agencies can fulfill those requirements. And so as I mentioned, the Department of Justice is the agency that oversees compliance of Title VI. And while these two legal bases do exist, most of the time states and individuals, governmental agencies enact their own language access plans and policies to best support the populations that live in their communities as well as basing them off their available resources and efforts. Next slide, please. Thank you. And so bringing it back to Durham and what this means to us. So we know that here at the City of Durham, we have residents that come from all over and that speak a variety of languages. And so as part of our commitment to effectively communicate with members of our community, we're working to reduce this communication gap with our LEP residents and the city through our language access plan. And so next slide. And so a little bit of background on the LEP, as we all know, the City adopted this plan back in 2019 to better serve the community and advance a language access effort that helped make our city be a more welcoming and inclusive place for us to live and for our immigrant and refugee communities and those that are non-English speakers. And so when we take a look at the LEP, we see that it serves as a tool to ensure compliance with Title VI, as well as helps us meet the City Strategic Plan Goal 3, which is creating connected, engaged, and diverse communities. However, the main purpose of the LEP is to ensure that we are providing limited English proficient individuals meaningful access to our services and our resources. And so I'd like to point out the term meaningful access because it is another term that is used a lot when we talk about language access and it's what drives us in terms of what and the efforts that we're pushing forward. And so similarly to that of the language access definition, meaningful access as defined in our LEP policy means providing LEP individuals the same ability to use and enjoy the services that our English-speaking individuals do. And so and the way of course that is achieved is by eliminating communication barriers that ensure our residents can communicate with us and that we can communicate with them effectively. Next slide please. And so now I want to take a closer look at some of the key parts of the LEP that guide our organization in bridging this communication gap and helping us push forward towards meaningful access. And so for starters, the language access plan outlines that we provide interpreting services to non-English speakers either through a language service or the assistance of a bilingual employee. It also sets forth in interpretation standards where interpreters must meet both linguistic and culturally competency standards, where they should also be able to accurately and impartially interpret to him from both languages, as well as test bilingual employees for language competency to receive a language incentive pay. And then another way that we are to provide meaningful access to our services is by also providing written translation of vital documents, which are documents deemed necessary for an individual to be informed, to be able to access a service or a resource from our city. And so examples of vital documents can include information such as city policies, brochures about city services or emergency preparedness information and more. And so it's really up to departments to identify what their vital documents are and ensure that they're translated into the language that meets the substantial number of the LEP population group, which in our case is Spanish. And the plan also outlines that we place signage and notices that inform and invite our residents to request interpretation and translation services as they were to need them. And of course, the only way that the LEP can truly be effective and help us move towards meaningful access is to have staff informed on policies and procedures. So it outlines that we provide opportunity for staff to be trained on the LEP to ensure knowledge and compliance and provision of language services. And we are to also track and collect data from the monitoring and updating of our language access efforts. This is so we can measure how we're doing as an organization and bridging that communication gap and identifying any areas and for improvement and for us to work on. And then lastly, the LEP also notes having a complaint and investigation process in place for residents that may not have been adequately been provided language services according to the city's LEP policy or FACE discrimination based on their LEP status. Next slide, please. And so since the adoption of the LEP, I do want to highlight some of the work that has been done up to this point to move us forward with our language access efforts. Next slide, please. The city established a language access plan steering committee to provide inside on language access efforts that were taking place in that were taking place across the organization, as well as help push out the implementation throughout their departments. And so our committee has grown up to 30 members that represent 20 of our public facing departments. And we meet monthly to discuss matters of language access, how to support departments with language access efforts as well as get them informed about new resources or progress on where we're at with the implementation of the LEP. Next slide, please. And the city also has contracted with language services for departments to use for interpretation translations needs. And so these services are contracted through the communications department. And the first one is one that most departments have already worked very closely with and that is language service solutions. This service provider provides interpretation and translation services in Spanish. And then the second provider known as language line solutions got established as a second service just a few weeks ago, probably early February, to be exact. And so they provide telephonic and video interpretation services for instantaneous access to an interpreter, as well as interpretation and translation services. And so they also provide language assistance or interpretation and translation for languages outside of Spanish, if we were to need them, including ASL. And so that's one of the key benefits of being with this language service providers that we have access to other languages if departments were to ever engage with other communities that may need language assistance and other languages outside of Spanish. And so for departments to be able to use this service, though, they have to set up an account and then they'll be able to gain access to all the services, including a toll free number where they can access an interpreter over the phone. And then as we know, bilingual employees often get asked to help with interpreting and translating. And so we do have a language incentive pay in place for bilingual employees to get tested for language proficiency and receive an incentive for providing language support in our department. And so we do have a page on our city's internet site where city staff can locate qualified employees that provide bilingual services, as well as find information about our other language services, such as the rate sheets, or even guides on how to get started or use the language services. And that's available to all city staff and departments for access. Next slide, please. And I also want to highlight some of the work that has been done in the past few months to increase awareness and understanding about the LEP both externally and internally. And so as part of a communications plan, we developed and launched a language access webpage, well, two of them actually, one in English and one in Spanish. And this was done to inform the public about the city's language access plan and our efforts to make our programs and services accessible to non-English speakers. Next slide, please. Our department also produced three videos. The first one was part of a communications of our department's news program, Bull City Today, to inform the public about our new language access webpage. And the other two videos were where one was in English and one was in Spanish. Those were used to inform viewers about the available language services and our language access plan. And so all of these videos combined received a total of over 3,000 views. And the English language access plan video was even picked up by WRAL and shown during the evening news. So that was really exciting to see that the video was picked up and helped amplify our message about language services being available here at the city. Next slide, please. And so we also published these videos all across the city's main social media channels, including YouTube and the Roku app. And along with general information about cities, our city's efforts on language access. And so all of these posts linked back to the language access web pages. And we also even developed a communications, well, the communications plan also included a partner package that we shared with local organizations so that they could help us spread the word and among our Spanish-speaking community so that they could also be informed about language services here at the city. Next slide, please. And so when we take a look internally, an effort that recently just finished up this week were city-wide webinars on language access. And so there were four opportunities for city staff to join in and learn about key parts of the LAP as well as receive tips and best practices for providing language assistance to non-English speakers. And after each webinar, there was a survey for attendees to provide feedback and we received about 50% of responses. But from those responses, 92% of survey respondents noted that their knowledge and understanding of the LAP increased as well as 90% of respondents said their knowledge and understanding of language services and resources also increased. So that was really, really exciting to see the impact there as well. Next slide, please. And so part of what I showed up to this point has been a small portion of multi-phase action plan that I put together to help us move forward with the LAP. And so I'd like to share with you all what's coming up and what's for us to look forward to as we move forward with the LAP and the implementation. So next slide, please. And so when I began back in early September, I had an opportunity to speak with departments and review a report on where we stood as a city since the adoption of the LAP. And that helped me identify an action plan that to determine our next steps in moving forward. And because this is a large scope of work, I broke it down to three phases where phase one has focused more on targeting, more so on targeting the immediate intangible needs of the city's language access efforts. This has included updating the LAP policy and identifying any emerging language groups that may fall into our substantial number for the provision of language services as well as looking to increase awareness and understanding of the LAP. Because as we all know, COVID put everything on the standstill for many programs, including the language access plan, which was created and stopped it back before the start of the pandemic. And so we've been working to bring this back to the forefront of everyone's minds through the language access web pages, the videos, the social media push, as well as the language access webinars to inform staff on the LAP and our language resources. And another tangible need part of phase one have also looked at establishing the tactics outlined on the plan, outlined in the plan. And this includes creating taglines that go out and important information, as well as increasing signage and notices about available language assistance and much more. And also taking a look at improving the provision of translation and interpretation services. And so we've been collaborating with HR to support the revisions of the language incentive policy and program as well as recently contracting with a second language service provider so that we have more opportunities and more resources available for departments to meet, to help them meet their interpretation and translation needs. And so taking a look at phase two, when we take phase two centers on the long-term efforts of the organization. And so this is much more taking a look more in developing in-depth staff training, a training plan, as well as assessment, looking at data, data collection and reporting, and then also working more closely with departments to be able to tackle their unique language access needs. And then lastly, phase three is looking at overseeing the maintenance and assessment of the language access plan and continuing to support departments with their needs. And so with all of that said, this work is large and it's going to take time for us to reach a place where this work becomes more so the second hand nature for a lot of us. And so as we move forward, it's going to take all of our organization to be committed to language access and increasing meaningful access so that we can continue making our city a more welcoming and inclusive place for all of our community members. And so now I finish off with sharing my contact on the next slide and I'll open it up to any questions. Very good. That's a lot of work. That's a lot. It is, yes. Very good. That was excellent. Excellent. Thank you. Yes, I see a question from Council Member Johnson. Oh, hi. Thank you. I don't have a question. I just wanted to thank you for your work. I'm really excited to have you in this position. This is something that we've wanted to move and the city for a long time is to have a staffer who can dedicate themselves completely to this effort. So super excited to have you. And thank you. We're really making progress. And I'm sorry that Council Member Cabello isn't here to see the presentation because this has really been like her baby since she got elected that she's been trying to push us to do more in this language access piece. And so it's great to see how much work has been done. And we still of course always have a lot more to do. But I'm really excited about where we are and I'm really glad to have you here to keep moving us forward. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I see a question. Handray from Council Member Freeman. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I also want to echo Council Member Johnson's comments and saying this is phenomenal. I think it's great. I know that this conversation has been going for a long while and this issue does not limit itself to just Spanish. And so I do want to ask how exactly are you identifying non-white or black language speakers in the population? Because it seems like a little bit difficult. Yes. And so the language or the limited English, the Department of Justice has a webpage called LEP.gov where they provide resources and information on how organizations can identify populations. And so really it depends because of the guidance they have, the guidance that they provided, which is a 5 percent or a thousand people of a city's population. That's what we're referring to to help us identify. But we do utilize the tools from the American Community Survey, taking a look at our city demographics internally, taking a look at schools, school data in their populations, and specifically taking a look at the languages that are spoken at home. I know for other cities and municipalities, it really varies. And so sometimes that information is not provided by the US Census. And so they refer to their county health departments, school data, as I mentioned previously, and an overall of what are some of the common languages that they interact with in terms of their agency. But since we do have some data from the US Census, that's what we've been looking to to identify the population groups. But we have noted that there has been an increase in Arabic speakers and Korean speakers and most recent data. And so that's why we push book to have a service provider that could provide interpretation and translation services in other languages if we were to engage with with other communities that would need language assistance. Yes. And thank you. I really want to highlight that. I think it's important to acknowledge that most Hispanic, most of the Hispanic community may speak Spanish, but they do also speak Portuguese, French, and other languages. And I don't think that just translating everything to Spanish is the solution. There are many villages in the Mexican community that don't speak Spanish at all. And so I want to make sure that we're not kind of glazing it over. And I know that the work that I've done in Eastern highlighted it for me in a ways that which I wouldn't have thought we would be so deficit on in the city. But I know that we continue to be deficit. And I'm going to be hopeful that we'll continue to move this ball along and the work that you're doing is phenomenal to include Portuguese, French, and Arabic at the very least. So thank you. Absolutely. Thank you. I see a question, a hand raised from Council Member Minnan, please. Thank you so much and good to see you. Congratulations. Thank you. A really great presentation. It's so great to be here. And my colleagues have captured a sentiment I think I definitely need to be echoed. I want to on the record just thank in her absence, Council Member Caballero for her for her shepherding and stewardship of this something that really, you know, goes to the heart of who we are, not just as a city, but as a country. If there's anything unique about the, at least the American or North American iteration of the Democratic experiment is that the proposition that a whole bunch of people that are disparate, not connected by a single bloodline or dynastic land grabs at least not now can come together and govern ourselves and live together. And the ability of folk to be heard and to participate in interface for their government is absolutely critical. So this work is really it's beyond government is sacred work. It goes right to the heart of who we are. I don't also want to miss the opportunity to comment that title six emanates from the 1964 civil rights bill with that flow directly from the work of the civil rights movement and Dr. King at the Testament to the need and the importance of black brown unity and coalition building and cooperation. Of course, after President Kennedy was killed, a lot of gas was given to passing the civil rights bill is 64 and then 65 public common voting rights and 65 public accommodations is 64. This is really, really important work. It's proud to be part of the council that that adopted our language access plan. And and you're right, this should be second nature. This should be part of our DNA as a city. I want to also say that I hope that one of the things that will come out of our budget considerations is an increase in the language incentive bonus from $1,000 to $1,500. Something that I've asked for, I think it pairs nicely with what we've done in terms of increasing our pay for our first responders and what I anticipate we may do in terms of our overall pay plan for the city. I think it makes us a much more competitive employer and it demonstrates how serious we are about accessing our democracy. With that said question, I and you touched on it in the presentation about us us kind of monitoring doing reports and catching stats to make sure that we're in compliance with the language access plan. But how many avenues or portals will members of the public have to grade us on how we're doing? I remember a couple of times hearing from residents and constituents that we didn't have interpretation here or you didn't have the document in Spanish. I know we're still ramping up. But in addition to us kind of policing ourselves, will we be issuing surveys to the public as well? Or would you be looking for on-ramps for folks who are outside of City Hall to score us as well? Great question. I do think that is definitely in the plan and conversations that we've had with our team here. Part of the work plan includes developing a system for us to collect that type of data. And so part of it too includes taking a look at what other agencies are doing so that we can learn from them and be able to identify how to capture that. I know from taking a look at compliance reports from other agencies, they typically only from what I've seen so far that they report on the instances when interpretation and translation was provided and having complaint forms where people can submit their information and be able to share when language services weren't provided. And so that's certainly part of the plan and figuring out a system and a way for us to capture that information. My hope too is that when we take a look at the immigrant refugee communities, which tend to be the large LEP populations, we also have to be cognizant that they can be a little bit hesitant when it comes to sharing personal information. So also taking a look at other avenues where we can probably have small group meetings or conversations in the community where we can engage that information and have opportunities for them to provide input and share their thoughts in terms of where we're at and how accessible we are as an organization. Thanks for that. That's good to hear. And that's all I have. This is such critical work and we're so happy that you're leading this for us and if this council could be of assistance in any way. I know I speak with the entire council. Do not hesitate to ask. This is so vital to our mission as a city and indeed as a democracy. Thank you so much. Madam Mayor, I'll yield back. Thank you. Thank you. Madam Mayor, I just also wanted to chime in. Pretty much my colleagues have said everything that I was going to say. As many of you know, my wife is a former immigrant herself and she speaks multiple languages, fortunately, but she got here. English was a bit tough for her. So I think council member Freeman sort of touched on what I was going to say, ensuring that we have some option of accessibility for other languages. Being said, I think that the work that has been put forth here is nothing short of amazing. And I'm just learning every day how to keep it magical. You make it look so easy. The magical ability that you just have the ability to do it here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to go on record and show my appreciation. Thank you. Thank you. When I see your hand raised again, did you have a comment? I did. I was just trying to leave space for others who hadn't spoken yet, but I just wanted to also follow up. I realized when council member Meadowton mentioned the compliance, just acknowledging that the ADA compliance probably is a good compliance model to follow. I don't know if you're partnering with the conversations that are occurring in the city around ADA, but it would probably be good. I don't know what the work plan looks like, but yeah. Some of the staff around that. Absolutely. Thank you for that. I'll make sure to reach out and start conversations around that so we can take a look and see how we can combine it. I know recently I'm part of a language access network with language access coordinators from other agencies, and I know this was recently a conversation that came up too in terms of how to combine language access with ADA work. I want to say that we have an underutilized office in the building. It might be. Yeah, I would just like to have some more conversations about this. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions for Michelle? Well, thank you so much. Michelle, I appreciate you coming here today and giving us that overview. I don't think this body needs reminding, but perhaps some others aren't aware that this is specifically addressed in our strategic plan as an initiative to expand the outreach and engagement to non-English speakers in our communities. So it's very, very important. We're happy to have you here. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you and thank you all again for the opportunity. Thank you. So before moving forward, I just wanted to check the temperature of the mayor, mayor pro tem council members. Do you want to press on or would you like to take a break now? I'm good. That's up to you all. Let's continue. Very good. So moving on, we're going to give an update for you all on the council budget requests. And I will be providing that for you with the assistance of assistant director of budget management services, Christine Reardon. Christine Reardon. So just as an overview with this, as you know, you've were provided the presentation in advance and also a packet of we were able to use a tight turnaround, but we were provided to do some analysis within budget of the items that were submitted. And I hope that is helpful to provide sort of some some ideas around it's not a full analysis. We didn't have the time to do that, but certainly we were able to take some time to kind of flesh some things out and give give some of these things, some context, some of our ideas around what some of the challenges would be. And we did some scoring. We'll get to that. Take the scoring with, you know, with a dash of salt. It's scoring is not the be all and end all. But again, we tried to provide you with some basis to make a decision. So the city manager alluded to this, but some background on the history of council budget requests. We began this process three years ago in the budget process for FY 21, which began to almost precisely two years ago in calendar year 20 council members wanted to be more transparent with the types of requests that they had submitted in each budget cycle. On March 5 council, there was a work session where they discussed individual budget requests and came up with a prioritization methodology at a city council work session. And then the coronavirus pandemic hit and that process was suspended that year. So moving on to last year in FY 22, we initiated the process again beginning in December 2020 and council submitted 11 requests last year, totaling $2 million. On February 4, a methodology for making decision was selected using a scorecard ranking. On the 25th, BMS staff vetted the requests through this ranking and shared it one of the budget retreats. And there was a discussion at that retreat with city council on the requests to provide guidance to staff and just if that's a tip to say that's the direction we want to head in with today's discussion. And then on May 2021, that was, I'm sorry, Christina, I forgot the last item there. I think city manager used the guidance in developing the proposed budget. So this year, substantially fewer requests, you see, I believe, seven there that one of them has been broken out. There are actually six items that were brought in. So I'll briefly go over them. One has been referenced already, city language incentive pay increase, advanced by Mayor Pro Tem Middleton, a reoccurring amount of $40,000. An item, the Durham open space and trails land acquisition, which was advanced by council member Caballero. And I've split this because a part of the request was $1.5 million for land acquisition. But in addition to that was a request for an FTE for a full time employee. Where that would be housed, there's some discussion about is where that would be best served. But with benefits that position would be approximately $108,000. That would be a reoccurring thing. The question mark next to the land banking is, DOSC submitted this item and they said, well, for now, that's all we would need. But there is some question about future land acquisition. So that's why there's a question mark there. Continuing increased funding for boards and commissions, that was advanced by council member Johnson. Just in addition to an amount that already exists of $4,000. Increased funding for council interns, again, advanced by council member Johnson, the increase would be about $26.5,000. And that is to provide an intern for all council members. An employee ownership technical support pilot program, that would be a two-year pilot housed in the Department of Office of Employment and Workforce Development. For, there's a one-time amount that, well, it's $75,000 over two years, I believe. And then finally, shot spotter technology, partially subsidized a pilot, so a one-year pilot advanced by Mayor Pro Tem Middleton. The one-time expense for the pilot would be $197,000. But there is an option that you see fleshed out in the materials of possibly extending that to a four-year contract. And that's why you see, I think, the high on that is about $700,000. So the current process, BMS staff reviewed the requests provided by council with an analysis for each of the requests. And we scored submissions for council using the scorecard methodology developed. I know in past years, we asked council to do some scoring. We simply didn't have time for that this year. Also, we didn't know that there was as much value. Scoring is more useful when you have 11 items. I don't know how useful it is with five or six items. That's why I said I would not pay too much importance to the scoring. It was just something to help you. So the scorecard rating, this is the same system that you had used in past years, scored on impact, population served, advances in equity, strategic plan alignment, funding frequency and administrative impact. And these are how it kind of parses out, whether an item is transformative, the population served, to what degree advances in equity as a yes or no question, strategic plan alignment, whether it's at the level of a goal or an objective or an initiative. The frequency is a big thing. One time funding is easier than reoccurring. And administrative impact is a very big consideration, I would say. Allowing departments, and I think that would probably take up the most consideration in further evaluating these processes. We would probably want to do a much deeper analysis of how departments, our department's structured to take on some of these things. Some of them are easy, $4,000 for language incentive, I don't think is a big consideration. Whereas taking on a program, a pilot program and OEWD, that's something we really want to engage the department on more on to see if they have the capacity. So this is how the staff scored these things. One would be ranked the highest, five would be the lowest. Again, I will stress to you, when we score things, you kind of take a lot in consideration. Scoring is helping you to prioritize, but it doesn't give you the context. You need discussion over these things. The flip side of that would be that sometimes simply discussion can lead to anecdotal information, that's why you want a scoring. And we could certainly over many of these have differences of opinion about whether something is transformative. I think in some of these cases that you could make the argument that that remains to be seen, whether it serves a full population or not. Those are typically in CIP discussions where we have a lot of history of scoring methodology usage. That is a lot of the struggle that we go through. But this is just internally what we came up with. And just the next slide kind of gives you a different look at that. So the OEWD program ranked highest. The internal funding for the intern funding came lower. And then just some of these I've alluded to, but some discussion points, some things to consider as you're going through these, the language incentive pay. I think there's kind of two trains running here. It was already something submitted by the communications department concerning this. So we certainly want to consider Council or Mayor Pro Tem's item in consideration with that. They will probably inform each other. The open space and trails land acquisition. There's a lot of consideration that needs to be done with that about it's a DOST initiative, but exactly where that should is the proper place for that program to be housed. There would be county involvement in that. So I think a lot of discussion we would need to initiate with the county to see whether they want to come in on this. The funding of boards and commissions, the funding for interns, somewhat simpler. It's just an increase to something we're currently doing. OEWDs, the employee ownership, it's a two year pilot. So and I've already alluded to this, we want to engage the department on that shot spotter. There's a host of considerations here. It's something we've considered before. Police Chief Andrews is available on the meeting. Should you want more information on that? I know Mayor Pro Tem Middleton in his submission suggested some community engagement around this initiative. Certainly I don't think it's ready out of the box, but we certainly want some community discussion around shot spotter. Our next steps would be to get some guidance from you, some agreement on these requests, which ones you'd like to continue moving forward if there's any you feel are not, there's not a consensus around moving forward. We've also alluded to this. We can include the recommendations in the budget development guidelines document that we will visit tomorrow. Last year, I believe the language was City Manager will consider approved or those items that were deemed to move forward. I think we're recommending similar language. And then the approved requests can be considered a possible discussion in the proposed budget, which will be presented on May 16th at the City Council evening meeting that evening. So with that, I believe that gives you a framework, a structure for discussions and we are happy staff is available. As I say, the Police Chief budget staff to answer any further questions on these items. Thank you so much. I'll open up the floor for colleagues, comments, concerns. And I'll kick off. That's all right. Just real quick. John, thank you so much for this really important work and for the work the staff has done. I did just want to clarify something with respect to the initial shape of my initial request relative to ShotSpotter. It was a million-dollar placeholder. I appreciate the due diligence that the staff did. And I think the four years, you said possible four years, whatever, it's still south of a million dollars over four years. But I did just want to clarify for the record that my appreciation for the specific cost for this fiscal year would be if we did it, but that it was a million-dollar placeholder. Not knowing how things would parse out ultimately, but I just did want to clarify. That is correct. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'll have more to say later. And I see Council Member Johnson has her hand up. Hey, thank you. Thanks for doing this work. Appreciate the analysis. Just wanted to give a little bit more context to the OEWD proposal. I have had some conversations with Andre about it already, and it would be a contract with an outside provider to provide the services. So OEWD would just manage the contract, and they indicated to me that they have the capacity to do that. But absolutely should continue to engage them in the process, which I just wanted to like, John, you know, and other budget staff know that I had already talked to him before submitting the request. And then the thing about interns, so I had a brief conversation with Diana about interns, and we realized that it was difficult to, the amount of funding we had, it would be difficult to hire somebody who could be there for the entire semester, just because we didn't have sufficient resources. I don't know what folks' plans are for hiring interns. This is kind of like, if everyone wanted an intern and everyone wanted them for the entire semester, this is the amount of money we need. But if people don't plan to hire interns, for example, I have no plan to hire an intern, then we don't really need to move it forward. So I feel like we should just have more conversation about what people's actual plans are for interns over the next year. We might not, I mean, it's a small amount of money relative to lots of things, but we might not need it in the budget. And given that the analysis was pretty, like that it was kind of a low score, I wouldn't want to prioritize it over other items if we're, and it's a small amount, so maybe it doesn't matter. But we should have more conversation about whether or not people want interns. Thank you. Yes. Should I go or should? Yeah, sure. And then, and then Council Member Williams, sorry. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Good to see you all. Apologies for being late. I appreciate the patience. I just wanted to share that the items that I brought forward are actually asks from, you know, Durham open spaces and trails with the supportive environmental affairs board and I think some other commissions. And those are longstanding requests. I think this is now, it's the fourth year that those requests have been made. So I do feel like that is a priority. So I just wanted to add that kind of clarification that I am acting. And so as Council Member Freeman, as our liaisons to those boards and just helping them route those items versus, you know, I want to acknowledge the work that those people have done because they've been very diligent advocating for that. I also want to share that I know with like the fund, you know, there's the, there's the position and then there's the fund. And I think that honestly any amount we can dedicate would be a win, quite frankly. So I want to just share that so that people aren't like, oh, that's a lot of money up front. I think the idea is that we just make a commitment that we could build upon. I think that the position is something that folks have been very eager to have because even if we dedicated some funding to an actual, more funding to a fund for open space, if we didn't have a person who was really dedicated in doing that work, we're not really going to hit the targets that I know that the folks were advocating that we do more, that we won't want to accomplish that. So I just wanted to provide that extra context. I do think it should be a priority because it's been something that's been advocated for for several years now. It scores very high on equity. I think because we've been doing so much work around our CIP and other things like that, we're well positioned to do that work extremely well. So I hope that we can get some agreement on that on council. However, we wherever we land on funding that we do at least make a commitment to start to apply a little bit more to the actual fund and then to create the open space and implement her position. And I expect that we will see some some advocacy and some emails and some public comment on those issues because those folks are are are some pretty hardcore commissioners for our city. And I do want to acknowledge that council member Freeman has also been in many of those conversations. Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Questions. Have we I guess, and I didn't submit any budget requests this year because I'm still learning the process and I want to fully appreciate it. But are we submit the budget request? It's this a matter of us initiating something or or have we assessed if there are any external partners that are willing to take the initiative to maybe at least some of these initiatives for us. So by by making a decision today to move forward with these, what you're deciding on is is that the that the process will continue to analyze and consider those in the preliminary proposed budget by by saying by saying no to any of them, the process would stop right here right now. We would do no further analysis or no further consideration. Okay, that's good. I think that answers my concern. I just I again, I I'm more so physically physically logical in a sense. So always try to make it make sense for me. And I know that we've done some pretty cool things in the past, you know. And I know that we have some community partners knocking our doors down. And I'm seeing some of the things they're offering, you know, to work with the city on. So that's why I asked the question whether we need to initiate these things or do we invite partnerships. And as I'm personally focusing on building more corporate better corporate partnerships. The fact that this is considering whether we consider it moving forward is what I wanted to hear. I appreciate that. So thanks, John. I have to like Councilman Williams did not sit any, send any budget requests. And basically, because I felt like I was just too new to this process to begin trying to spend money or ask folks to spend money. So kind of wanted to go through this process and kind of learn before doing that. So today, you're saying that we need to make a decision on the budget requests that have been submitted to move forward or not. Will you guide us through that process? And we take them one at a time. I think what is what do you all normally do? How does that process work? I'm happy to facilitate that in the past. Council is somewhat self facilitated. I think what would be helpful would be to put the items perhaps on the screen. Yes. And another thing I would suggest is to see if there's any consensus around. Well, we just know we want that to move forward or we just know we don't want that to move forward. And then to knock those off. And then there may be some, you know, spend the majority of your time on the gray areas where you need discussion. That would be my suggestion. Okay, let's take them one at a time, man. So if Christina can pull up. Yeah, we have someone putting them back on the screen right now. Thank you. And just a reminder that the DOST one is combined and as Council Member Caviero said, the 1.5 could be any amount. Okay, I guess the first question I will ask is if anyone in my colleagues have any questions regarding the budget request that have been submitted, any particular ones? For me, I definitely like the Durham Open Space programs. Those are kind of non controversial in terms of moving forward for me. Also, I think most of them are as a matter of fact. Okay. But are there any specific questions about ones? We may not have any questions. And I think the open space one since that's the longest standing one that you all have been talking about. Maybe that's the place to start. That one's been before us before well before you before folk before. Is there any any questions about that? Adam, are there a hands raised? Did you want to acknowledge in order or just let's jump in? Let's jump in. Let's just have a discussion. Let's round round Robin. Let's go. And I'll have to pull you all back up. Let's see. I had a quick question about the city language incentive pay. That's like a clarifying question, because it might be able to pull it off our queue. If I'm not mistaken, last year when we when we did the language access coordinator because it was getting routed through the department just says it's stating here. All right. And I do want to acknowledge Mayor Pro Tem Middleton because I very much believe we need to fund this. So this is not a I'm pretty sure you're the one who who prioritizes I want to thank you. And so it's not a question about whether we fund it or not. I just know last year we did it through Beverly. And so it was we were basically able to take our language access coordinator ask off our deck for lack of better terminology because it was going to get routed through the department. So I want to hear from staff if that's an option for us. Since it's going to get routed through a department anyway potentially if that's if we're in the same position. Thank you. You are in exactly the same position. So in the matter of the language access at one, even if you said no today, it's there's it's still going to be considered as a submission from the communications department. That clarifies the one that submitted it. John, so are you saying that because I was unaware that the department was going to ask for for $1,000 to $1,500 specific precisely that's what they were going to ask for. And I just got lucky. And I can speak to that, John, if you would like. We did have our communications and our HR department has submitted a request. It's not exactly the same as your request Councilman Middleton. It's kind of more of a tiered approach and there's kind of a it's it's a little bit more complicated than just adding another $500 to the incident. So but it is something that would be considered as part of their their request that they have submitted to the City Manager. Thank you for that. John, I'll lead you to kind of direct if you want to. Certainly. So perhaps that's the easiest. And do you want it to you could say, well, since it's it's already coming forward, we'll leave that one off. I don't want to be presumptuous. Well, yeah, I as the one who kind of initiating it, I, you know, I, I trust that the department whatever the department brings force is going to be generous and on point. But I'd like to see the specifics of the ask relative to, you know, before just kind of taking it off. And that that's not an indication of no trust of the department, but I just I just wouldn't know, you know, what what it looks like relative to my ass. So. So so, Mr. Mayor Pro Tem, I think the discussion around that has to do with if I am correct, then staff can correct me. If I'm not, your specific ask is, you know, we have a certain number of employees, we always have a certain number of employees who have qualified based upon testing that they can speak a second language, and they receive a language incentive because of that. That is right now $1,000 in the assumption here is that your request is to basically change that base number from 1000 to 1500. I believe that the department of communication and Beverly is here as well was working to refine a proposal that as as Christina has mentioned, that was a tiered proposal based upon how employees actually use the language, the second language or the multiple languages in their job. And that was work that the steering committee had been working on, you know, during the time that they have been in existence. So I do not think that it is the identical proposal, but it is, you know, it crosses over and you all will have to decide, you know, if you want, you know, this particular item to advance to simply bring that incentive that we currently have from 1000 to 1500, or you want us to continue to evaluate the tiered program that the department is advancing. Right. I guess my point is I would like to juxtapose it too. I mean, I have no idea that the tiered program that the department is going to advance that the 1500 would be the floor, like the lowest floor of the tier. I do not know what the, you know, the floor would be or the ceiling would be. So just for, you know, decision making purposes, I'd like to just see the two juxtaposed. I'm city manager, if I might add on to what you said, we did do a survey among the the people who have qualified to provide language information or to translate or interpret on behalf of the city. And they did tell us that they preferred a tiered approach because some of them actually work a little bit more than others and they were still getting the same amount. And in addition to that, they are either better in translation or interpretation or they can do both. And they wanted to see them. We wanted to see them compensated for the ability to do more. For example, if they can provide both interpretation and translation, they would get paid more. However, if they could do one or the other, for example, translation or interpretation, they would get paid a little bit less. Let me ask my question this way. And do you know, can you forecast today in the department, whatever the department's going to propose, that the lowest amount you can get is $1,500? Whatever the tiering is, what do you know today that within your proposal $1,500 will be at least the minimum? We are still working on that with budget. And I would have to defer to them to determine what amount in total would be appropriate. And that's my point. Absent that number today, I would need to see the plan juxtaposed with, I mean, if we could say today, it's going to be no less than $1,500. And if you go, you can go up from there. But if the floor is $1,500, then we're good. But if we don't know that today, then I would need to see the plan juxtaposed with my ass until we substitute those variables. If I could interject, I would just like to say that I think this would probably be a good one to hold off on and to just allow the staff to finish their process, because it feels like it's a large undertaking with a whole team of folks, as Councilmember Cavillero explained, and I'm here in Beverly explain as well. And I think that it's probably better to go through their process and figure it out internally to their language access plan, rather than us as a Council kind of over or kind of top down pushing that it should be a minimum of $1,500. So I would just let them go through their process. I think it's already been, you've raised the issue. The request has been heard. I don't think it'll be any lower than $1,500. But that's just my thoughts. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. I appreciate the assistance. But that's what I was getting at in addressing the staff. And I'll put a fine point there. Beverly, did you want to respond to that? I agree. We definitely will do more analysis and work with budget and the city manager to determine how we can proceed with implementing the tiered report. Cool. And then we'll juxtapose it to at that point. Thank you. Thank you. A couple of hands raised. I don't want to certainly acknowledge them. Councilmember in no order, Freeman and Councilmember Reese. Councilmember Freeman, will you let me just talk about the pay increase real quick and then I'll step aside for the other things you want to talk about. I just wanted to say first about how grateful I am to the Mayor pro-temper initially raising this issue. It's important that we incentivize these kinds of skills. And so I'm grateful for that. But it's even better that our staff is already working on this. As is often the case, we identify problems and propose solutions that our staff is already hard to work on. My assumption is that after hearing the conversation today and hearing unanimous enthusiasm for additional incentives for our employees to acquire these important skills that the city manager in proposing embedding the budget proposals that come before her will prioritize that in an appropriate way. And of course, once the city manager's budget proposal is released to the public and to the council, the council will have every opportunity to kick the tires to vet that proposal as it relates to language incentive pay. And if the council believes that the amounts proposed in the city manager's proposed budget are insufficient, the council of course has ample opportunity at that time to increase the floor at whatever level and whatever time they see fit. That's why I think it's probably a better idea. And again, with gratitude to the Mayor pro-temper moving this forward and for prioritizing this and for putting this on our agenda today is something to talk about and to reinforce with the city manager and our budget staff how important it is to us. I think it's probably best that this particular council budget request fall by the wayside today so that staff can continue to do their work, put forward the best proposal as they see to encourage the acquisition of these skills on the part of employees who need them. And then for the council, I say the council because it won't include me, for the council to review the budget, the proposed budget from the city manager determined at that time, does this meet the needs that we see in the administration for encouraging and incentivizing the acquisition of these skills? That's just my take on it. It just cleans out this particular process. It simplifies it for us going forward and obviously all of our staff that are involved in preparing the budget process are on notice about how important this particular item is. Just my suggestion. Thank you. Appreciate it. So there are a couple of other items here that are fairly low dollar amounts. And oh, I'm sorry, council member Freeman, you out of it, please go ahead. I was just for the next item, I was just going to ask a couple of questions. Very briefly, so there's a couple of items that are very low dollar amounts, the boards and commissions grants and the interns and would not require a lot of work around the analysis. Meaning, I don't, if it's your pleasure to move them forward, I think you should possibly try to get some consensus now on those. It will be my pleasure to move those forward. Does anybody else want to comment or not? I do. And I think I took to heart council member Johnson's comments about kind of gauging what our desires are with respect to interns. I plan on hiring an intern next year. And I think the threshold that these amounts are under, I don't have a problem moving it forward and just having the bandwidth and the bandwidth to do it if we decide. If we don't, it's not like it's a gazillion dollars sitting there or so. I think these amounts are ones that I can live with being in a budget, whether council chooses to avail themselves of an intern or not. We don't have to spend the money, but I don't have a problem with it being there. I was just going to agree with Madam Mayor and just agree to move them forward. Charlie, that's a yes. Leonardo, Jillian and Javier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've already, I've already, you know, just started seeking folks that would be interested. I think it's a great way to engage, engage folks that, you know, younger folks that would be interested in the political process. I think this is important. Okay, that's I think three decisions. I see some hands up and I don't know who went up first. So council member Reese. Sure, I wanted to talk briefly about the open space and trails items because it feels like that's next. The I am full support of the new FTE as that's been advocated from our friends at open space and trails for a number of years. I think it's important, but I think it's also important that the administration determine the very best home for that position. I think one thing we have to understand is that we here on the council, I left the door open, we're on the council have all kinds of great ideas about what could happen and what what what priorities might work. But this is the kind of decision that really needs to happen at the administrative level. We need really need to let our staff guide us on that. But I think the position is great. I think the case that DOS has made over the years about how having the position in and of itself generates activity and focus and makes it possible for us to do this kind of work. That's those are also arguments that our colleagues, council members, Calvier and Freeman have made over the years. I think that's really important. So I'm in full support of that with respect to the acquisition amount. I really appreciate council member Calvier's clarification that that's not intended as necessarily a recurring amount. But I do think it's important to put something in the pot to start with, because we don't know how active will this position be in acquiring this? What are the opportunities? What are the costs? How often can we expect to see an amount get used up, get spent through and need to be replenished? I think I can foresee a time when it would become a recurring item. But right now, I just don't think we know enough and I appreciate council member Calvier has been clear about that. I think whatever amount the council decides to put in, I do believe that given that we don't know that this is that we don't believe this is a recurring amount and that we're not sure the best way to fund this going forward. I think the best source of funds for that, I don't think it's beyond our brief to talk about that. Now, I think the best source of funds for that is probably fund balance, because it is the kind of one time cost that we're using to get a program up and running, see what opportunities the position itself can generate through activity and community engagement and looking at that parcels that are on the market or might be might be able to be on the market. This is the reason why you have a position like this. The county's been done a great job with their work. And I think we should we should get into this game as well. So those are my thoughts on those two. Thank you. So with with that, I think I heard four votes now for the DOS item. And again, all that means is and I'm sorry, I heard the mayor, I heard council member caviar. I heard council member Freeman now council member Reese. I just want to be I just want to be clear that the item, the item I support is the open space and trails FTE. I do have concerns about the land acquisition just acknowledging that three pieces of property could be that that 1.5 million. And I would really rather have a process in place through our real estate division that highlights those items. Because I noted there was 44 parcels mentioned in the write up. I know when I submitted this a couple years ago, the land acquisition piece was not with it. And so I would love to have more feedback on that from our real estate division from general services essentially, around where those pieces of parcels are and all of that before we move forward with an amount. Just acknowledging that I don't know that the 1.5 million is necessary today. I agree with Charlie that council member Reese that it would be a better use of fund balance to use those dollars that way, rather than in our budget, well, in our regular budget. And so I just want to look at the process and probably go about this a different way. And so I would vote for the open space and a different process for the land acquisition. So I believe it's so we again, we would just consider this consider both pieces. And I think we've we've heard the sensitivity around the land council member Middleton and then council member. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm going to also add my thanks to council member Caballero and Councilman Freeman for for parroting and carrying a DOS very important ask. And this this is a huge issue for us as a city in terms of equity in terms of our health and well being as a city, I do I'm in full support of the FTE as well. I do have some questions about the acquisition fund. We do we we've taxed ourselves to do affordable housing initiatives. We have a penny for housing. We have a half penny for trails and parts. I'm just wondering. I don't want lazy money just sitting around in anticipation of something that we do all the time as a city where we're poised as a city through other channels to acquire real estate and acquire things when we need. I'm wondering if us as a council may be making it one of our city's goals and values to be vigilant for opportunities to acquire land for open space use would be a better way forward rather than kind of determining some amount, some predetermined amount that sitting at non-interest bearing, I assume, or just sitting somewhere. We don't know what the real estate market is going to look like with it might need more than 1.5. And if we're not going to if this is going to be a fund that's something we're going to look to that's dedicated, it might be better to look at what we do for affordable housing or our trails more so than kind of have, you know, just just fill in the blank amount to sitting somewhere being lazy. And I don't remember that not bearing interest. So I definitely support the FTE, but I think we do need to consider what is our goal. And if it's I mean, as a city, we acquire real estate and things all the time. Is it possible to just use the mechanisms and apparatus we already have in place to acquire real estate with an understanding that this is now one of our priorities and values as a city that as we see these opportunities arise? Because you're going to have to come back before towards anyway, even if it's 1.5 million, you have to come back towards anyway to for any purchase agreement. So we already have a significant war chest as a city. I'm just wondering, do we need to say 1.5 million for this or do we need to say the city significant resources will now be used as you know, in pursuit of this is one of our values. That's where I am on the 1.5 million, but I definitely support the FTE. Thanks. Thank you. I'm glad to hear that folks are in support of the FTE. My understanding and this is a conversation that's happened at the DOS level quite a bit is that we're trying to mirror, I think, in a way what Raleigh is already doing. Raleigh ends up having a fair amount of dedicated land at Durham because Falls Lake is their water. And so they are very interested in purchasing stuff around there. And so it was a if I'm not mistaken, an idea or concept that was mirroring what's already being done by another municipality. But my guess is staff would be able to provide more context for colleagues or even DOS commissioners. I think the FTE position was definitely a priority for those folks just because there's not, you know, there's not anyone identified to do it currently. And we're missing opportunities because of that. But open to whatever, you know, I think that having staff come back or thinking about other ways to do it, I think folks would be happy. I just think they just want a commitment that there's a city commitment that we're going to look aggressively at land that can be purchased and preserved for open space within the urban core, especially because money of the things that we have preserved are out in the county. And so folks who have who lack transit or access to those aren't able to really use the open space that other folks with a car can. I did also want to thank city staff for helping with these items. I did a lot of work and I didn't want to not acknowledge that. So thank you so much. I just wanted to thank the mayor pro tem for putting some thought into what it looks like to try to fund the acquisition portion of this FTE over the long term, because I think he's 100% correct. It makes no sense to be doing this arbitrarily on a periodic basis. And I don't think it makes sense to do it periodically as an ongoing basis from fund about. He's absolutely right. And I think once the position is created, which sounds like it not will be, which is fantastic. And once the position itself, I think the rationale for it is that it generates opportunities to acquire open space. That's why the position exists to do the engagement in areas that need additional open space opportunities to work with city staff to identify opportunities for acquisition and then to engage with staff in the acquisition process. And as the mayor for Tim said, it's something we do a ton of already. I think the justification for putting some money in at the beginning, some again, as rightly pointed out, an arbitrary amount at the beginning is that we don't really know how many opportunities are going to be generated, what the speed to market is going to be in terms of acquisition, what the costs are going to be out there. And I think that's why Councilmember Caviera said from the very beginning, the $1.5 million is a number that they picked seems pretty good to me given what we know about kind of the real estate market right now. And I suspect it won't cover a ton of opportunities. But I think it gives us at least a start. And I think the other benefit we have in setting some money aside at the outset is that otherwise, the mayor for Tim is absolutely right, we've got a ton, we put a ton of resources into real estate and acquiring land across the city as an organization. But I think one of the great things about setting aside a particular pot of money for this work is that then those acquisition opportunities don't have to compete with the other important acquisition real estate acquisition work that the city's already doing. This creates a whole separate channel for the work that the city is not doing right now in an intentional and directed way. That's why the position would be created and that's why the money is important. But I do agree, I absolutely agree that once we seed this work with an additional, and whatever the amount is, $1.5 million is what's in the request that seems fine to me. But once we do seed the request, we've got to start making some really intentional planning efforts about what happens next. And I would anticipate that that work would go, would continue throughout the next fiscal year as we plan for the next next budget. Not this, the one we're working on with the next one. By we, I mean the city as a whole and y'all specifically. Because I do think it makes sense for us to consider some regular funding mechanism exactly like we do it on our affordable housing programming. Obviously, we probably wouldn't need a penny every year, although I'm sure Dost would be psyched about that, but some increment on our tax rate also has the benefit of allowing that, those resources to grow as the underlying tax base grows. So anyway, those are my thoughts about that. It can be done a bunch of different ways, but I think that's the path that makes the most sense right now. Thank you. Council Member Middleton and then Council Member Freeman. Thank you. I want to thank Council Member Riesfer, as usual, is on point, incisive comments. I guess for me, I'm wondering if once we onboard the FTE that the conversation about initial amounts might be better had with that person. And the reason why I say this is because I think at this point, I mean as the council we can determine what our values are and what the priorities are in terms of acquisition. I mean, if we tell staff that we really want to focus on acquisitions that are in support of, you know, protecting our watershed or expanding our holdings in terms of for open space, I mean, we can do that. And I'm confident that the staff will govern themselves accordingly. My concern is that, you know, 1.5 million is 1.5 million that if it's spoken for in the budget, that may or may not get spent, or it's an amount that we can actually, the purpose of the amount is a purpose that we can achieve in other ways through mechanisms already established. Then that's 1.5 million we can't put in a budget somewhere else. And it's taking up space symbolically, if that makes sense. We don't know what, you know, what the acquisition is going to be. We haven't onboarded the FTE yet. And 1.5 million, that's going to go toward our half billion dollar budget. And when we look at other things we need to fund, I just think that giving ourselves that 1.5 million space somewhere else, while still in a position to accomplish what that 1.5 million is aimed at, would just, you know, from a, from a, from an agility point of view, a mobility point of view as an organization, but just put us in better shape. For me, at this point, 1.5 million would be a symbolic nod to the work. And if we don't put it in, I don't think in any way we do violence to still meeting the very noble and necessary goals of what DOS is asking for. We still have the financial wherewithal. We have the agility as an organization. We have a council that can tell this staff, we want you to be vigilant, particularly for acquisitions that serve this purpose. And now we've got 1.5 million of bandwidth that we can use somewhere else in the budget without doing any violence to the noble goals of DOS and the intended result of this ask. That's my position. Thank you. But Council Member Freeman, just before you speak, I just, we, I think we've certainly heard you that that we will pay particular attention around the process for that land acquisition. All of that would be questions that we would ask. And just a reminder on the time, I want to be sensitive to the fact that there's still, I believe, two, two remaining items, the last two items on that list that we need to discuss. Council Member Freeman. Yes. Thank you, John. I just wanted to circle back to Council Member Cavallero's point and just acknowledging the FTE role and the kind of wherewithal of all of this. I do want to make a pinpoint that I do feel like if we don't make it for, I guess, a clarifying point around where this seat, like this seat, like this position should sit. I do want to say that I know that this FTE, and the reason I've been so adamant about it, it has to be someone, someone in planning. It has to be someone engaged in our zoning and development in our city. As Council Member Cavallero mentioned, our urban area is depleting. And without a plan in place for this open space, the dollars won't matter. We won't be able to afford the areas that we're trying to keep available for folks in the urban core. And so that's just one point. And then around the 1.5 million, I do want to be clear, like my main area of concern is that each and every year, if we add $2 million to our budget, where are we going to stop it? I mean, how is this going to trickle out into our community as tax increases? And so I do want to be mindful that if we're going to add that 1.5 million dollar fund, there needs to be a fund that depletes a little bit at the very least. And so just putting that out there. Thank you. So there are two items, the OEWD Employment Ownership Technic Support Pilot Program and ShotSpotter that remain. John, I had a question. And I was having a little dialogue with Councilman Wood Johnson and Mr. Pettigrew in the background. So I'm asking this question because I'm still learning the process. So when it comes to, I guess I sort of alluded to this earlier too, when it comes to initiating programs, if you were to identify an external partner that is doing some of these programs in the community, and this is not just specifically to this one, but just in general, do we have to continue or is it a way that we can identify some of these efforts that are already happening basically? And I'm asking that question because it may be an opportunity for us to get more, to do more, to reach more people or to do less. I'm just trying to get an idea around how this works. And I'm also asking because I may when I do submit a request in the future, I'm trying to learn the process of how I can best expand it and maximize it. I mean, I certainly at this point, I mean, I don't know because I haven't looked in depth, but certainly I think that would be a component of the analysis. Always a consideration in any of these things is there somebody in the is there an external entity that can do the job better? That's part of, but you know, rather than taking on a program ourselves, that's kind of a core component of analysis and a question that we typically ask. Okay, thank you. I love this idea, this concept. I want to make sure that we could get the most out of it. So as we're moving with it, I hope that we could potentially do more, maybe not necessarily in our budgets, but with a corporate part there or so. Mayor Pro Tem, I appreciate, you know, from the floor. Oh, no, John, John, I am a council member, I'm a proud council member that the mayor pretends a new thing. So council members and what a stick. So I appreciate you. No, no worries, buddy. So I did have a question of the technical support pilot program. I did have a question about bandwidth within that department because I know we've got shared prosperity on the menu. We've got built to last on the menu. There's some deliverables we're still waiting for on some pretty big initiatives from that department already. So I did, and I was glad to hear council member Williams and you talk about the possibility of shopping this out. But I guess my question is, is the goal of this pilot to to to prescribe proactively prescribe this model of business to business owners or to help those who ask us for help in it. In other words, are we advocating this as a city, or are we providing support? And what's the market? Have we been getting a lot of ask regarding help in this area? Because I know we get asked all the time about startup capital and capacity, you know, building capacity to, you know, compete for RFPs and things of that nature. But is this something that we're getting a lot of asked for? And is the goal to prescribe it, advocate this, or just be there to help people who proactively come and ask for help? If that makes sense. I can try to respond to some of those questions. No problem. And Andre is not on the call. He is watching, but I told him I would try to answer the questions and then refer anything that I can't answer over to him. So the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center, which is the proposed contractor to develop this program, is a group that supports people who want to start cooperatives and advocates for cooperatives as a business model. I don't think it would be appropriate to say that they prescribe the model to businesses. They are advocates for the model and will help people who want to start cooperatives and other kinds of employee-owned companies start them. I mean, it is a particular focus of theirs. They want to create, to help people create cooperative businesses. It is not an organization that does small business development of all sorts. They particularly focus on employee ownership. They're already part of some work that the department is doing regarding the legacy program, which was to help legacy businesses, particularly focusing on Black-owned businesses transition to employee ownership as a succession strategy. So that's what OEWD has been doing so far and has participated in a fellowship with the National League of Cities and Democracy at Work Institute called SEADS, which trained a number of people and they've been a part of that fellowship program for a couple of years. This would expand the effort beyond just helping legacy businesses transition to also advocate for employee ownership as a model for new businesses and for existing businesses to convert, not just as a legacy strategy. It would be shopped out. It would be a contract with the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center in the city of Durham. And they're currently, Andre clarified for me that we don't have a contract directly with them. We have a contract with another provider that subcontracts with them as part of the legacy program. So I'm not sure exactly how OEWD would want to structure it, but this would allow that partnership to expand to reaching out to additional businesses that might want to start up as cooperatives or convert to cooperatives outside of just that existing legacy framework, which is also an ongoing project that OEWD is doing. They're still building out the legacy work as well. Councilmember, thank you for that excellent primers. So is it your sense that we get into this contract with NC Works or whoever you said that we stroke them and check for $75,000 is part of their job? Do we have an existing caseload or queue of folk that are approaching our planning department or OEWD asking for this assistance? Or will part of the contract be to canvas Durham and find potential users of this service? Yeah, not to my knowledge, Andre could answer that question. But I would be surprised if people wanting to start cooperatives were coming to the city of Durham because we don't have a program. And it's a particular set of technical skills and technical assistance that employees need. And it's different from other small businesses. So I would be surprised if anyone's coming to us about trying to do this. I don't think they would be necessarily canvassing to find people who are interested. They have existing relationships with cooperatives and co-op development organizations. And people come to them. I'm sure there would be some advertising, like advertising the program's existence the same way we do for other programs so that people know it exists. I'm not sure how much outreach would really be needed. I think once the program was advertised, I'm sure that people would come and take advantage of it. If they were finding they weren't getting as many people as they wanted, then maybe they could use the networks that they have through other in our small business community and with other cooperative businesses in Durham to try to find people who could benefit from the services. Okay. Thank you for that. I mean, I'm a big fan of co-ops and the business model, definitely. And I just wondering what the particular iteration from Durham would be for us spending the money. But I definitely in principle, you know, support it and just wondering what it would look like. What do we get in for that 75 grand based upon the need for our particular populace here in Durham. But I thank you for the work and thank you for advancing it. Sure. Thank you. Yeah. And it might make sense to have, I mean, we could put this on a work session agenda maybe and have Andre come talk about what they've already done and kind of what he, yeah, what he sees as potential for the future. We've had a couple of short conversations about it and I've had a convo with the folks at NCEOC and have refreshed myself on what's up with the legacy program. But yeah, it might be helpful to have a deeper conversation about what we're doing in this area. And this is an initial request. I would love to see us do more around employee ownership as overall part of our strategy around inclusive economic development. And there are lots of really great studies and organizations out there talking about how employee ownership contributes to shared prosperity, to wealth building, to the ability of workers and particularly of people of color to build wealth and equity in businesses. So I think it's a really, I think it's a really strong model and meets a lot of our goals as a city and a lot of our goals as a council, but it is relatively uncommon. But there are some existing programs in other cities that do similar work for similar reasons with similar goals. And so I would like to, I'd like to push this forward as a as a more, as a more key part of what we're doing around, around shared prosperity and around economic development. Thank you. Thanks. And I like the idea about the work session, by the way. Thank you. Council Member Freeman and then Council Member Kevillero. Thank you. I was just going to ask a couple of questions, but I think the work session idea might be better. I will say that it's off-putting to kind of come into it with a organization or a plan to put together and to just set it up as a council request coming to a department. I would really like to see this more like an RFP. I don't know the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center and would definitely like to know more about it. I completely support having cooperatives and being supportive with technical support, but I do know that the department or OEWD has been stretched and I'm more focused on the use works aspect of how we haven't gotten to the 2000 goal that we set a number of years ago and also on the Build Back Better, I'm not Build Back Better, but the essentially the organization, the nonprofit that was set up and should be stood up. And there's a number of items in this department that I just had a lot of questions about and I'm just concerned about adding something else. And so that's mainly my issue. I would like to hold off on this item. Thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to share that I am in support of this. I like the idea of hearing more at a work session. I know that we have discussed expanding the types of technical services and things that we do in OEWD, specifically around cooperative business models. So I do appreciate the item. I appreciate Council Member Johnson for bringing it forward. I like the idea of hearing more at a work session. I think that we're going to have to be aggressive in this area. Cooperatives in general are a good business model. It democratizes ownership. It helps folks who are often left out. I think all of us know that. I think most of us are in agreement around the business model and I think that the city has an important role to play in this work. So I look forward to further conversation and I am in support of the item. City Manager has her hand up. Yes. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak. I am speaking specifically to the presentation item and I wanted to link the OEWD request to have an update back to our previous budget work session. The Mayor Pro Tem at the time wanted to hear during this budget season an update on built to last and we have been working in the background to make sure that the presentation that we bring forward from OEWD includes all of the topics that are relevant to our budget preparation for this year coming up. And so this discussion today has been very, very helpful for us. We do intend and we have been working with the department director to bring that presentation forward. So we will make certain that the items that have been mentioned here are part of that work session and it will occur. I am looking at the, I believe the work session that we have it scheduled for. I'm waiting for a text to come in, but we already have it calendared out and it will be before you all make your final vote on the budget guidelines as it relates to the OEWD initiatives. Right now we have it scheduled for March 24th. So the SEEDS program which is really similar to what has been talked about here with employee ownership or co-ops is a program that that department does have as part of its portfolio and we can certainly include the SEEDS update in that presentation from OEWD as well as the YouthWorks initiative. Council member Williams and then council member Reese. Yeah, I think it's already been touched on. I whenever it comes to any type of opportunity for economic development, I want to make sure we can maximize that. I think this is a matter we need to have a little more discussion about which has already been said. There may be more opportunity here. I also want to be really cautious about we as a city trying to do it all when we have some corporate partners begging to, you know, get engaged. There are some initiatives the city has launched in the past as well as even up to a meeting I had yesterday that was offering to do some of the same type of work. So as we're moving forward, I just love for us to assess the need first if it's coming from the city and really look at the community partners that are willing to, you know, explore and facilitate some of these initiatives. So I look forward to talking about this more at a work session at a later time and, you know, supporting it based on the need then as well as some other initiatives. But I just don't want to overwhelm when we have a tough budget year right now with some of these matters. So appreciate it. Hi. Probably my last opportunity to wait in on the this technical support pilot program for employee ownership. Excuse me. Let me just start by saying that this is one of the very first things that Councilmember Johnson and I started working on together when we joined the council back in late 2015, early 2016. So my interest in this is longstanding I think for a lot of reasons but mostly because Durham is, has been and will continue to experience dramatic economic growth and expansion and without programs that make it easy for businesses to transition to an employee ownership model and without a city government's voice and saying, hey, this exists because most business owners don't even know it exists. This exists and solves a bunch of problems that businesses typically have in an expanding market while also empowering workers to build equity in the actual sweat of their brow. If we don't, if we don't do things like this at a cost of $75,000 in a way that was scored very high on staff rubric methodology. If we don't do things like this, the rapid growth and economic expansion we're going to see in Durham is going to continue but it will continue to be a tale of two economies. One for owners and the wealthy and one for workers in the poor. And I don't think any of us wants that. I understand there are questions. I think we should welcome those. But given that the proposal scored well in the metric, given that it's a modest amount of money and given that Jillian, I'm sorry, excuse me, I can't remember. Johnson has worked with the department to make sure that they have the capacity and the interest to do this. I don't really see any reason not to go forward with it so I approve them. I approve going forward with it. Thank you. And finally, John, I'll move it to a work session for further discussion. So I think what I'm hearing on that item is that it's going to move forward to a work session which will be prior to the budget guidelines. So there is still time to hear. We're going to have more discussion on that and it can still be included. And then finally, there's just one item left, the shot spotter item. John, I'll go first. I brought it forth. Of course, this is not a new item for us. You know, I listened to the discussion and kind of the flow discussion and it struck me that some things have finally come of age for constituencies that have been asking for things for years, be it DOS or bike lanes, any area of our city's activities you can look in. And there have been concrete policy outcomes from particular groups that have asked. And one of the things about, you know, governments when you pass a policy, it's not all, it's rare that one policy will speak to every single constituent group in the city. But I think that, you know, at best we do multiple things. We, you know, we walk and shoot them at the same time and try to do as much good for as many people as you can as a government. Gun violence continues to be an issue in our city. Children, as I've said time and time again, continue to jump in bathtubs at night. We have communities in Durham that have become desensitized to the point. I speak to them every day, literally, who don't even call the police anymore because they just think they don't care or they're not coming and have incorporated the reality of gunfire into just the way things are in our neighborhood. I think that's immoral and I think that's unacceptable. I don't live in a neighborhood where I hear gunfire every night. I go to sleep peacefully. So this isn't really about me. This is about like those folk that have advocated for trees and bike lanes and for open space FTEs. This is about a group of people in our city, a diverse group of people in the city, mainly poor, mainly people of color, people that have had bad relations historically with police, but also up to institutional partners like North Carolina Central University. This is something that they've asked us to look at. I've proposed this pilot and let me be clear. I really mean a pilot. My pilot proposal is actually a pilot because we've attached a word pilot to some things that we have no intention of ever getting rid of, no matter what the data says. We've already codified them. We've created whole departments on pilots, but a pilot by definition, you try it, you get the data and if the data doesn't support you, you undo it. But we've attached a word pilot knowing darn well it's not a pilot. It's going to be policy. It doesn't matter if mental health responders get hurt or God forbid killed. Those data points won't matter because we think it's for the good of the city and we've made the determination that no matter what, we're going to do that even if we've attached a word pilot. So let me be clear. I really mean a pilot. I really mean getting the data. I really mean for the cost of less than what we pay our city's top executive to see if we can help some folk who have been crying out for help for years. This is the city of science. I believe in science. I believe in getting the data. Let me be very clear because I've got some, this is not a politically expedient issue. Many, many, many folk who are part of my base and supporters, you know, we've had very spirited conversations and debates about, but I want to be very clear to the city. When I first talked about ShotSpot, I wasn't even in office. I went on behalf of the city to Boston as part of a delegation to find out how Boston had improved community police relations and dealt with crime. And by the way, a lot of our conversation partners, other cities, cities that we've looked at either for guidance or on participatory budgeting, guidance on mental health responders, they have ShotSpotter too as part of their overall comprehensive mix of approaches. When I first talked about this, it had nothing to do with violent crime. It had nothing to do with catching bad guys or taking perpetrators off the street. Let me tell you what it did have to do with. I grew up in a crime-bridged area, and as a young man, I became sensitized to hearing gunfire every night. Oozies. Now, we're not talking about semi-automatic pistols. We'd actually hear oozies, but we didn't call the police because that's just the way it was in Red Hook at those times during the crack epidemic. But I remembered distinctly one morning getting up and walking through Coffee Park, and there was a body in the park, and they were out there, and there was tape around it, and all the police were out there and everything. What happened was we heard the gunfire. We didn't call the police, but somebody actually died. Somebody actually got shot, and they bled out in the night because no one came for them. This isn't about violent crime. This is about catching the bad guy like a roadkill, like an animal. This young man laid there and bled out in the night because no one came because we were so used to hearing gunfire. This, for me, is primarily about the belief that in Durham, if you're hurt or in trouble, someone should come to see about you, whether anyone calls 911 or not. If in the process, we find shell casings. If in the process, there are perpetrators in the area. If in the process, we can connect some investigatory dots and take repeat shooters off the street, bonus. But first and foremost, when gunfire goes off in our city, God forbid someone should be hit, and they're lying in the street bleeding out because no one called in Durham, someone should come for you. And I'm saying on behalf of those folks who have watched other groups have policy impacts year after year after year. On behalf of those mothers and fathers, on behalf of NCCU and other institutions in the city, I'm proposing alas that for less than what we pay in salary to our top executives, we engage in an earnest pilot to collect data to see if this is a tool that could help us. If it doesn't help us or if it does harm, which I don't see how it would, but if it does harm, I'll be the first person to advocate for it to be dismantled while all of the other pilots that we have named will continue to go forward, no matter whether or not a mental health responder gets hurt or killed. We won't use that as a justification to back away from the program. So I don't think we should use cherry-picked anecdotes for this one as well. It's time to throw everything we have that aligns with our values as a city that does no offense to who we are as a city at this issue of gun violence, once and for all, the children who are jumping in bathtubs are worth it. I propose that we move it forward. I'm just going to echo that sentiment, Mayor Pro Tem, I did have an opportunity when I was in Washington, D.C., to have a presentation with I think it was the president and some other members of that company, and so I'm comfortable with moving forward with the pilot for one year. Yeah, let me just share my thoughts about this. I want to first of all say that the Mayor Pro Tem is absolutely right that there are lots of opinions about this in Durham. The Mayor Pro Tem and I have heard most of them over the last three or four years. I also want to thank him in the proposal that he sent and the funding request that he sent. He identified the need for some real deep engagement with our neighbors about whether or not this is a good idea. The last time this issue was squarely before the council was, I think in 2019 or thereabouts, and I think we need to, excuse me, I think the council really ought to hear from folks in the community before we decide to put money into this technology. I truly believe that. And for me, the right model is one that the city used when we moved forward with police-worn body cameras. During that time, the administration took a really positive community engagement approach and had a Captain Marsh from the from the Durham Police Department all throughout the community doing events large and small to talk to folks to answer questions about what was at that time a new technology for Durham and in some ways an invasive surveillance technology that can be used for good purposes. And I think the record will reflect that police-worn body cameras have been a net positive in the city. But I do think that that process was super important. And I watched that process from before I was a candidate during my time as a candidate and then as a newly elected council member. I think that's the right approach. I think we need to bring our community together and not just in a one-time, one-shot thing, but I think what was great about Captain Marsh is that he did this over a period of months, went to every part of our city. I think he does it at every pack and a number of other types of community organization meetings, took, stayed as long as people wanted to ask questions. It was truly remarkable. I think that's the kind of effort that's deserved here because I think there are some very diverging opinions about whether or not this technology makes sense for Durham, whether or not the technology works for the purpose intended. And even if it does work for the purpose intended, what would that mean for police response times? And so there's just a ton of questions. I think cherry picking data is awful whether that comes from folks who are deeply concerned about this technology or from the corporate interests that want to sell it to Durham. So I think both cherry picking both cherry pickings are bad, but I think there's been a ton of press coverage in the last year or so about about shot spotter and I encourage all of my colleagues to avail yourself of that so that we can understand what this technology does, how it can be used, and how it can be misused. But I do think fundamentally that the mayor pro tem was absolutely right in this funding request. We need a deep level engagement with our community about this issue publicly on the record to answer all of our community's questions about it before we decide to move forward and spending somewhere upwards of $800,000 over the year over a four year time. I just I really believe that. And that's what I wanted to say about that. Thank you. I'm not sure who was next, but I'm going to jump in and just say that I really appreciate my council colleague, Charlie Reese's comments and I would agree. We've had some pretty in depth conversations and on this council pre mayor O'Neill and council member Williams terms. I will say that I've always been reluctant. I know the mayor pro tem knows that very well. But I also know that we should have robust engage community conversations. And so I agree that I'm open to that part of it. But just to say the flat out, we should fund this. I've been a no. Obviously, I think it's important to hear from from community and have conversations and I appreciate him sharing some of that history and how that was done with other technology. Thank you. Thanks, y'all. I also wanted to say again, I've you know, have been very clear that I have deep concerns about the use of this technology in Durham. There are some new there's some new research from Chicago that came out late last year. Chicago has been evaluating their use of use of shot spotter. They are one of the cities that has been that has deployed the technology in the most expensive way and they over the last year. So after a shot spotter alert led to police arriving on on a scene and finding a child and shooting the child and the child died, they've been evaluating the use of that technology more, more significantly and put out a report late last year that I think is that I've read recently and I think is really helpful for our conversation with about this technology given the given the amount of shot spotter sensors in neighborhoods that Chicago has used over a number of years, they've kind of they've been one of the flagship cities for the shot spotter corporation and the fact that they're now reconsidering their deployment, I think should give should give folks pause. I feel very clear that the issues with this technology are very significant and I think yeah and I do not want to move this item forward I do not want shot spotter in Durham. I would be interested in having some more conversations and looking at research and data comprehensively to give us more of a sense of what this technology might look like. I'm happy to read things that I haven't read and look at data that I haven't seen but I have done extensive research on this technology over the last four years that we've been discussing it and I think that the negatives and the risks the negatives and the risks are a deeply concerning and mitigating issue to any benefit that might be obtained through shot spotter deployment and I would encourage people to read the most recent research again out of Chicago because it is it's very comprehensive and it does not make this technology look like and a good tool for the for the work that we're trying to do but yeah I'm sure that there will you know now that we're having this conversation in this meeting I'm sure that there will all there probably is already people in the community who will be who will be reaching out to us and talking about this and I'm looking forward to hearing folks opinions and getting getting a sense from people in in neighborhoods in Durham that are that are dealing with crime and with gun violence what they how they feel about how this how this technology might impact their communities thanks. Councilmember Williams go ahead I'll yield to you. Yeah thank you for the time I so I feel really strongly about this as well and I too have done a great deal of research on it and I I think I'm most concerned with not getting the same type of energy that we get in other asks as we do when it comes to public safety from this perspective I don't think we have much more time to do any more listening and we've listened a lot we've done research we've done surveys the survey that we recently just went over came back and sorry about the noise in my background there's survey that we just got back this is one of the top issues you know public safety and I for us to have the luxury to sit and not offer anything but hope some prayers that's just not what the community want to hear at least the community that I'm talking to you know and and some of us have a luxury of not having to worry about you know what's happening when it comes to gunfire and and violence you know and I and I speak to that it's not a black or white thing for me I live in a neighborhood where it's not shooting up every night you know but I do listen to the folks who are experiencing that and what they're asking for is something something you know and and I was elected to you know listen to the community so mostly what I do every day is a listening tour and government is a representative body and I'm representing the constituents not only in Ward 3 but throughout the whole city just like all of us are you know but I do I do and I think colleagues this is where we're going to strongly disagree you know we don't have time to wait any longer we just don't have that luxury you know and we can have our positions on it that is perfectly fine I don't expect us to all agree on everything but this is one thing that we got to offer up something and to suggest that we push it out a little longer with folks getting shot killed on a weekly basis and you know I know we have is for this year believe whatever you for the palette you know 197,000 whatever whatever it is the mere fact that it only cost a little over or under $2,000 to get an associate's degree from Durham Tech but yet it costs $30,000 to incarcerate someone in the state like where are our priorities we can't even give this a shot and that that that is my biggest concern you know and and you know I don't need to go on and on about it I just think that our for I think that beyond us I think the priorities have been set and if we're really listening to the folks that are infected that are affected the most I think the listening has already been done and now it's time for us to act on it so I do hope that we can actually be reflective of what the folks that are impacted the most are actually saying and I want to hear the same energy and putting forward some solution and right now this is one that we have before us as we do any other ask that we ask for thank you mayor councilmember freeman were you gonna thank you yes thank you can you hear me sorry I was just gonna say that I appreciate the conversation and the chance to hear the conversation again I know we've visited this conversation a number of times and I've said like I've said before I do live in a neighborhood that has gone fire almost every night and I do hear the concerns that folks have raised around gun violence I am I just as I've said in the past I fully support a pilot I think that it's it's worth having the conversations in the community while the pilot is going it is also important that we also we acknowledge that this is a technology that our police department would have to use and so just acknowledging that the cost I think seems a little bit shy on on how that technology would be used just acknowledging that there's probably going to need to be new resources put in place to make sure that we're analyzing those bullets and that there's actually someone on the other side of this conducting the investigation around where these guns are coming from or what what types of guns are being used it's not just limited to the technology itself and so I'm I'm in full support of moving forward I'm in full support of having the conversations with our community as we do move forward I think we had a very huge missed opportunity when our chancellor from North Carolina Central came forward and asked for us to partner with him in it and I appreciate the opportunity to to do this now and hope that you know some of those folks who were interested in partnering with us will come forward again thank you. Mayor if I could jump in I think my hand was up again I I appreciate all of the excellent points my colleagues have raised Councilmember Johnson, Councilmember Caballera and Councilmember Reese who I have deep deep respect for and I take very seriously everything you said I take it so seriously that I actually want this to be a pilot a real pilot that's subject to review I think the the real test would be as to how sensitive we are to to data and and data points is is there anyone in this to do that really thinks that if one of our mental health responders is hurt or killed that those that support the program are going to call for dismantling does anyone really believe that all we need to do is cross the threshold of one bad thing happening and that will justify not trying it we've already built a whole department around these these pilots and we don't have one piece of data yet and and with you know due respect I think facts matter Councilmember Johnson alluded to the the Chicago incident the Chicago Police Department responded to a shot call a shot spotter call because gunfire actually did go off there were shots fired at a passing vehicle I know the issue you're talking about well and it resulted in a tragedy but the technology worked they were there because gunfire went off and they were responding to actual gunfire in that incident and I've read all the stories just about all the stories that that you've alluded to they're not considering undeploying shots but they're reviewing the technology and there's there's a big difference there are over 100 American cities in which is deployed I'm simply saying in Durham let's see if it'll work for Durham and if it doesn't work then then you know I'll be the first person to say okay well that didn't work and we even have to decide what what what work looks like one of the calls we talked about our our sending responders to one of our responders to our domestic incidents down the road a few weeks ago two New York City police officers were killed responding to a domestic incident these are people with guns who were trained to respond to violent situations who were killed are we has that dissuaded us from looking at fielding on our mental health responders or an armed responders no because when the issue is something we agree with we double down on let me let me assure the people of the city with respect to shot spotter there's gonna there has been and there will be a whole lot more community engagement than there was when we voted not to hire 18 more officers there will be it has been a whole lot more community engagement than when we announced even before the manager announced that we were going to start a whole new department of community safety so I'm glad to see now that we're concerned about robust community engagement and hearing community engagement I'm going to tell you what's going to happen in the community engagement there are going to be some people who are going to be for it and there are going to be some people who who who will repeat the same points we've heard here today and that's where leadership comes in from where I sit I have watched constituencies in this city time and time again get what they want because you know that they have folk that resonate with their particular policy positions on this council I've seen us pass initiatives you know with very little community engagement we did it because we thought it was a good idea and because we got elected and because we had the votes and we're elected to lead we thought it was a good idea for the city at the time I will suggest that we had one huge piece of community engagement recently that was an election it was an election where visions for this city were put out and I believe and and people can argue with me but I believe the people of this city rejected zero some game politics I believe they rejected the notion that one group can prescribe what's good for the city I think they said that they they want everything on the table they want us to try a creative approach to approaching gun violence affordable housing issues and all other issues and again I hope that this concern about hearing from the community will persist and be sustained the next time one of us has an idea that we think is a really good idea and we're committed to doing it no matter what people say I hope we will keep that spirit as we move forward I think we've crossed the threshold of four but let me reiterate that that I uh intend uh for this to move forward thank you madam mayor councilwoman macabre errand and I kind of kind of try to finish this one but I think we are I appreciate uh so uh mayor pro tem I was suggesting we do community engagement because I was something you suggested you wanted to do uh you clearly have your four votes I have said for years you won your election great now that you're you're correct uh elections have consequences uh the voters and taxpayers are Durham are going to be paying for a type of technology I don't support there's a lot of evidence out there that it's not good technology it's a private company that makes money and pays off fear and that is what you are doing too and doesn't tell anyone in the city that this this council hasn't done anything about gun violence it's untrue it is an untruth we have we just gave our police department a massive raise that they deserve why because we have vacancies and we're trying to incentivize it we've put in a violence interruption program we are mounting a community safety department exactly to to provide a menu of options so I I'm fine with those things I haven't voted for increased police officers for a better gang response but I will draw a line on technology like this and you can have your four votes and that's fine and I'm going to hold you to it when something bad happens it is not good technology I lived in Chicago they spent an inordinate amount on policing and strategies like this and their gun violence has not decreased period it's been years and they spent millions and millions of dollars on public money on failed policies and I'm not going to support it so yes you are correct you have your four votes you can move it forward and I will not support it and I will continue not to support it there are other ways to help us have real community safety they're hard and we all know that until we actually do something about regulating guns in this country we will fail over and over and over again. Dr. McCarrill you're not going to attack me personally. Wait wait wait wait may I approach him? She attacked me personally. Okay but that's okay let's let's let's let's let's try to wrap it up and then I may respond to the personal attack Madam Mayor I'll only take a few seconds to say that I trade in fear is is is just does no justice to the intellectual level of this of this conversation it's it's a visceral kind of lazy mentally lazy attack that I'm not trading in fear I'm trading in what people in Oxford manner have told me what people in McGoogle Terrace have told me what people in Cornwallis have told me what people in the halls of North Carolina Central have told me so I don't trade in fear I trade in what constituents tell me and it's not my four votes the people of Durham have spoken it's their four votes thank you Madam Mayor. All right just to kind of put this in the context from where I sit as a judge kind of dealing with technology first of all we all know that technology is only as good as the people who operate it I don't care what it is from your telephone to which is which we have watched evolve we've all watched technology evolve and it continues to evolve and it continues to be a good part of how we analyze and view our relationships with each other on a personal level in business setting you know we you think about it the evolution of a computer all of these things are evolving technology and as human intelligence gains more we we get better at it but I just want to kind of tell you where I am on how I got here having served on the bench for 24 years at 17 at the district court level there was a there's a machine that we use in terms of DWI to to check for the breathalyze everybody knows that well in those 17 years and even at superior court when we're doing appeals level there have been various iterations of the intoxicants and I think when I left there was an intoxicants of 5000 that we were relying upon for use in in the system to gauge breath analysis so there's always going to be some tug especially you know most people know that you can get convicted of a DWI at a point zero nine I believe is the standard and so if somebody failed to a point zero eight or they got to a point zero ten you kind of write at that strip their stress and it always became a contentious moment in terms of how you you view the machine and its operator you know because you're so close to that threshold so in that vein though you have to kind of be reliant on the workings and the mechanism of that machine one will it will itself calibrate did the operator restart it so that it could check itself doesn't have the capacity to check itself and so in watching that technology develop you know it became standardized you use that and we all use it and we all as a community rely on that for police officers and state troopers and everybody else to keep your community in check on whether somebody's drunk driving and we really don't question it but it is always a question in the courtroom so I think there's a difference in when you and how you use technology whether it's going to be used in a court setting or whether you're using it as a community gauge to kind of get what's going on so the other thing that comes to my mind when I kind of look at this piece of technology knowing that background is that you're always going to have bad stories because technology is only as good as the people who operate it and how well it works so there's always going to be this discrepancy and what happened in Chicago what happened in Wilmington what happened here but the things when I met with these owners of this corporation and I understand that there was at one point there was an offer of six months free and there's a now there's an offer of three months free I don't know how you argue with free I just don't because that gives us the opportunity to have our own data set and not rely on the papers that we read or the people who or the officers that we've talked to other different communities we get a trial we get a trial based on Durham and what Durham needs and that's the dividing line for me and so when I talk to them they did indicate that we were having an opportunity to kind of pick the area they will work closely with our police officers to make sure that you know they know how to operate the technology and of course the company's already there but when you have such a clamor of differing opinions why wouldn't you accept free let's see and then we have the opportunity to come back so that's how I came to my decision as to as to the use of this technology and it is still evolving like all we don't have perfect cell phones we watch them people freeze up on the computer right now but we're not going to say oh don't use computers because they're freezing you know this is a this is an ever changing area and I do think that we are as a community and as people we rely more and more on technology and we understand that that it is evolving and I do think that we have a unique opportunity with this particular in light of all the people that are dying on our streets this is one too in the toolbox that we get an opportunity to try for free I want to thank you madam mayor for removing a lot of the righteous indignation that was coming across and just acknowledging that these tools are tools for our city and if we I think I fully agree free is a really good reason to move forward I also want to say that I want to make sure that our arrogance is checked in that we want to do is best for the residents of this community because it's not about me it's not about votes it's not about all the things that we're really just off putting in this conversation I really want you to think about how you're coming across and these conversations to people who deal with this on a daily basis because trying something that you don't feel like fits for you it's it's just it's just off putting I just want to thank you for recentering this conversation and making sure that we do acknowledge that if we do move forward with this technology that the tools are put in place and the people the resources are put in place to make sure that it's monitored and it's actually working in a way that's beneficial to our city it does not mean that it's permanent it is pilot and I would just leave it at that thank you if I might add thank you councilmember Freeman and for reiterating that yeah when I use the word pilot I really mean pilot I also want to speak to this notion of corporate interest this this term that's been thrown around I want the people of the city to know that every piece of equipment the city owns every contract that we approve has a corporate interest interest tied to it every paper clip we purchase every stapler so this notion that all of nothing's given to our city for free all those police cars you see and trucks you see fire trucks and and and Durham city vehicles we brought those from someone there are corporate interests approaching us all the time every time we we vote on a contract there's a company that's going to get a check so it's a bit curious this notion that we're somehow uh cow-towing uh we lack the acumen or intelligence to distinguish between getting rolled by a corporation that's trying to make money and us acting in the best interests of the people that elected us I also want to want to speak to this notion of being held personally responsible for something which I think is a new low in the deliberations of this council this is a policy decision for a city imagine me saying that I would hold one of my colleagues responsible if one of our mental health responders are hurt or god forbid killed should I hold the folk who support mental health responders by the way I was the first person in the city to call for them a first elected official in the city to call for them so should I hold uh those responsible should I hold people responsible who didn't vote to increase police if something happens in the neighborhood because we had a lack of of patrol people to respond to 911 calls should I hold my colleagues responsible who didn't vote for uh for an increase in police staffing or who vote to take positions away if something happens to ridiculous proposition and it's beneath the it's beneath the level of deliberation of this council I will not hold individual council members responsible for policy decisions my assumption is that we all love this city we bring our best to this job every day and we act in the best interest of our constituents and what we think is the best interest for the city I will never deny any one of my colleagues that thank you madam mayor well I think we might need to somewhat take a break after we finished this um John but I'll put it back in your hands madam mayor if I could have one last thing to say um so for folks who um you know I so we all value the personal experience of residents we all talk to residents all the time we all listen to what residents have to say I do live in a neighborhood that experiences um high levels of gun violence um I hear shots regularly I heard shots last night um I'm raising my kids in that community I know that council member Freeman as well lives in a community where there are um where there are high levels of gun violence and we disagree um about whether or not this technology is appropriate we do not actually have um a survey of residents that says whether or not they want shot spotter um we have a survey of residents that says that they want um that they want an increase in the safety of their communities and we all want that everyone wants their communities to be more safe um I do not think that there is a value in getting something for free if that thing does not work or if that thing causes harm um and I do think that the shot spotter corporation is very different from a lot of the corporations that uh that we deal with in the city on a regular basis for other kinds of procurement um they actively market shot spotter to cities all over the country to cities like Durham um in particular that have issues um with higher rates of gun violence and they refuse to allow their technology to be independently evaluated their prototype their proprietary algorithm their um their their corporate intellectual property is not able to be evaluated by um by external sources by outside by outside um companies and so or outside individuals so I don't think that shot spotter trying to sell us this technology is analogous to you know somebody trying to sell us a stapler they have their their business model is dependent on the kind of outreach that they do to cities um to try to try to sell this technology around the country and they and and they won't allow independent evaluation of the technology which I find um which I find pretty concerning that is of course they're right as a company they can do what they want to with their intellectual property um but it worries me that we can't get an independent evaluation of their algorithm um I don't think it's disingenuous to talk about um the you know the the votes we have for the last you know four years not had shot spotter in this community because there were a majority of council members who were opposed to it with the most recent election that changed and elections have consequences um our community is likely going to get this technology because there are now a majority of council members who support it um and I think that it's fine to be transparent and open about that with people they're people voted they're going to get what they voted for um I'm hopeful that as we continue to move forward with this process that we can have in addition in addition to I think I think it's important that we both listen to what people in communities are saying recognize that there are a variety of opinions in those communities no single voice or group of people have um have the monopoly on what the community wants or thinks um and I think it's important to listen to those people and get that qualitative data I also think it's very important that we that we actually consider the experiences of other cities and the quantitative data that's going to come out of um of this pilot if we do it and likely we will um and not just respond and not respond to people need something people are worried with something that doesn't work we need to do things to improve the safety of our communities and we're doing a lot of those things with our violence interrupter program with our community safety program with targeted policing in the areas where we think it's most appropriate giving people something if that something is not effective while that might be um a politically expedient thing to do I don't think it's a good use of funds and I won't get a good thing for us to be to be doing in general I want to give people the correct the correct um solution to their problem not just something because they want something and because it's free um if this works if this reduces gun violence in the city of Durham then I think that's a reason to consider continuing it in um while also considering all the potential negative collateral consequences that come along with it um um but I don't think that because it makes people feel better that we should be deploying it or because it makes people feel like we've done something we need to do something we are doing things and we need to do effective productive things um so I I hope that as we move through this process we'll we'll look at whether or not this is working in addition to um how people feel about it the perception of safety and the reality of safety can be very different things um and we want our people to feel safe we want them to feel like we care but we also want to do things that are going to work um and I do not think that there is good data out there from anybody but ShotSpotter itself about the effectiveness of this technology and actually reducing gun violence in making people safe um so again my vote is no I understand that um this will likely move forward in spite of that and I look forward to working with my colleagues and the community to um to make our city safer and um yeah hope that we can that we can do that for our folks thanks matter of fact my I always appreciate council member johnson's comments and again I I don't know how you determine efficacy without trying something first I think clearly we have some entrenched views about this technology that will not be dispelled no matter what um yeah and also I I do want to also say that you know Apple doesn't allow people to see how their internal technology works either so this company is not uh exotic uh or or or so much different there is indeed proprietary information and proprietary technology but that goes for Apple and Samsung as well and how many of us are watching this meeting on those uh devices as well so the notion again of this this corporate specter we deal with corporations all the time we have given contracts to companies uh engineering companies who had neary enigra working for them but because they they occupied this niche or this specialized field that they couldn't find anybody else any people of color to do it we had to go ahead and go with them uh and we do it all the time so I just think that that that argument is is specious but to council member johnson's main point about community engagement there will be more community engagement around this particular pilot than anything else this council has done uh I mean this council has acted time and time again where certain parts of the community uh have spoken and have gotten uh a vote the other thing is you know this kind of circumscribing what success will look like before we actually deploy it I want to be very very careful about pointing this out um shot spotter is not just about reducing gun violence it's about increasing response time it's about potentially saving someone's life who is bleeding out because you have whole neighborhoods that are desensitized and calling police what is success for our mental health uh responders look like if if if if one person's life is saved in a city I mean how many people did the during police department murder last year that were in mental distress I mean what what number what baseline number are we comparing success for we're doing that because we it's a good idea and it's its own justification if one person's life is preserved because we have mental health responders guess what the program is a success if one person doesn't bleed out in Durham because help was sent notwithstanding or whether or not anybody called the police or not then that's a success here's how if the if the technology works if gunfire goes off you call the police what does a human being do you call 911 that's what shot spotter does it does the same thing a sentient human being would do if they hear gunfire the only thing it does is it cuts out having to go by your house first to determine where it was if gunfire goes off and our police respond the technology worked beyond that if our mental health uh responders save one life no matter out of 300,000 if one life is saved then every penny we put in that department as far as I'm concerned is justified I will not allow this particular issue to be made exotic I will not allow this particular issue to be somehow packaged as different from all of the other neat ideas this council has had over the years that we've implemented and we can go down the list I don't need to go down to here so so we're not going to act like somehow this is so different and this is exotic from all of the other neat ideas we've had as a council and we're certainly not going to let it devolve where we're attacking each other personally because the vote didn't go our way thank you Madam Mayor I'm going to ask um councilwoman Freeman and councilman Williams to please keep her remarks brief so we can go to break people are needed to take a break councilwoman Freeman you first and we'll end it up with councilman Williams include this part thank you Madam Mayor and thank you um Mayor pro tem Middleton and colleagues I I mean it's it's always heavy um in these discussions but I do appreciate the points of views that always come across I don't appreciate the some of the statements but I I can hear um councilmember Johnson I do want to respond and say I hear you and I think it's important that we do continue to support our community and that we do continue to do the work that we know that we've been um elected to these office to the office um for this council to to serve and so I heard what you said and I I hold you at bat and I think that um as we move forward it'll be important to make sure that we do um focus on the data and it will be nice to have the data for Durham thank you Madam Mayor I actually councilmember Freeman just stated what I was going to respond to councilmember Johnson about I'm agreed to disagree or agree and disagree I look forward to working with all of my colleagues um and I was going to also name companies that do not give access to their uh their data but I may approach them sort of went down the laundry list about that as well that we use so constantly every day uh Mayor you actually address the evolution of technology I was going to say that but you stated that so what I'll end with is you know I was elected to make tough calls I was elected to be held responsible or accountable so uh in response to uh councilmember Caballero and anyone else who may have this I uh I accept uh you can hold me accountable for the decisions I make and I think that um you know I'm not going to be held like kind of I won't hold you accountable for the outcome of a company that we're trying but I do hold all of us accountable for tough decisions that's what we're here to do and I don't think that that should be a problem and and we shouldn't be afraid of leadership that's what we're elected to do so uh I'll just end with that uh let's let's work let's let's let's work to make the decisions necessary that need to be made um and let's go to break appreciate it Mayor what a spirited discussion I think now I'll turn it back over to John to lead and direct this thanks John I uh certainly um appreciate that um before we go to break two matters first if we could have the slide back on the screen I think it would help I'd like to summarize what I believe budget has heard with these um and just for some language here when I say move forward what I'm talking about is we will continue to analyze and it may become part of the recommended budget so that's what I mean by move forward so with the first item city language incentive pay increase um what we heard around that is it's going to move in forward in conjunction with an item that has already been been uh submitted by the communications department Durham open space the two items you see move forward with with the FTE move forward with a consideration although certainly you you want more analysis around a process for land acquisition with that item and you want to see more fleshing out of that move forward with the funding of commissions and grants move forward with the funding of the council interns on the OEDW item the um employee ownership there's a there's a an inserted step what's going to happen is we're going to have some conversation around that when the Andre Pettigrew comes forward to you at a work session and that will happen before we adopt the council budget guidelines so just inserting a step within that and then finally move forward with ShotSpotter if that's what we heard the second thing I would like to propose to you yes a break but we only have you until one o'clock so I would ask we're in an intersection here Sean Egan is coming back tomorrow anyway we can defer his parking presentation until tomorrow if others have commitments at one o'clock however if it's your pleasure to continue we can certainly try to continue after a break I'm fine with continuing after a break um and I'm actually I'm fine with either either one I'll I'll go with whatever the majority wants to do I'm fine with anyone John is that a few minutes break just for the restroom or fuel excuse me sorry y'all um John is that presentation the last thing on the agenda it is okay and do you know how long it's gonna be or have a sense I think Sean can do it in a I think he has he had 45 minutes I think he can do it in a half hour okay I have a commitment at two but I'm I'm able to stay until then so let's take at least five ten friends you're gonna lose me at one o'clock and that is absolutely fine so I'll see you back for the break okay we'll take a break and we'll see you shortly how long uh 10 minutes okay thanks afternoon Sean good afternoon right is we pull this up if we are ready Sean Egan is here to give us um from the Department of Transportation to give us a update on the parking fund thank you John uh good afternoon Mayor O'Neill and Mayor Pro Tem Middleton and members of council as John said I'm Sean Egan the Director of Transportation presenting today on the parking fund slide the key revenue sources in the parking fund are monthly permit revenues and hourly parking both on-street parking and off-street in our garages the FY 20 monthly parking revenues included a rate increase that remains in effect our revenue losses really began in March of 2020 at the onset of the pandemic as offices closed and office workers who parked in our facilities ceased doing so so that what you're seeing here is a reduction from the 20 where we had three quarters of strong demand in one quarter of a weak demand to a large reduction in monthlies that has been basically flat from 21 into 22 and then we're expecting recovery in 23 we've seen some progress on hourly from 21 to 22 and we expect that trend to increase into 23 slide please so monthly parking is the primary revenue source in the parking fund sales of our monthly parking permits are down across the board through all of our facilities our forecast based on input from stakeholders shows recovery and parking utilization in our facilities in the coming years slide so these are some of the steps that we took to contain costs we furloughed 11 part-time employees some of those have come back in part-time special event rolls for us we've frozen a full-time position we refinanced our debt to take advantage of both low interest rates and lower payments in FY 22 and 23 and then we've changed how we provide security services to reduce our alliance on contracted security but we continue to use contract security overnight and on weekends and we've made some other adjustments to reduce expenses pressure washing allows us to maintain the cleanliness and attractive appearance of our parking facilities however given our current finances this is a necessary cost containment measure to cancel that contract slide now we see here is a look at the peer outreach that we did last year we collected information from cities across North Carolina as well as some of our neighbors in South Carolina and Virginia and what we found was that our monthly rate of $100 that's currently in place is right in the middle we're behind Raleigh and Chapel Hill that have already moved to 125 our hourly rate is also in line with peers but some of our peer cities like Chapel Hill, Greenville and Virginia Beach have already moved beyond that 150 rate and in terms of rate changes what we've heard from our peers is that they've held their rates constant during the pandemic there has not been a significant increase in parking rates from our peer cities but that several of them are looking to make parking rate increases in fiscal 23 slide so many of the cuts that we talked that we put into place in FY 21 remain in place and so we're continuing to hold those our customer demand is down so our customer service needs are less we'll be continuing to monitor that and then we've also experienced an increase in indirect cost for the support services that we receive from budget finance city attorney's office etc and so that's impacting our cost profile slide we've also have significant capital needs we've recently conducted a capital needs assessment looking at major rehabilitation and repair of our facilities also we have expenses for tenant upfit for some of the the the tenants coming in to our morgan rigsby deck we have two tenants currently we have monsoon indian and suites by shader and the outfit work is underway right now for salon lofts which will be the third tenant but there are additional tenants that we would like to line up and the expenses for those tenant outfits would proceed as a general services cip request we've suspended some of our projects and we've submitted our major capital improvement needs informed by the facility condition assessment for general cip funding rather than utilizing the parking fund slide so here you see our recent history of rate increases we went from 80 to 100 dollars on monthly in f y 20 this was part of a plan to have monthly parking increases in even fiscal years and then hourly parking increases in odd fiscal years we did get council approval in f y 21 to increase the hourly rates from 150 to 175 on street 125 to 150 off street however due to the pandemic those increases were not implemented and so that puts us in a position of having to look at increases to both monthly and hourly rates as we move forward as well as special events slide so what you see here just a note at the bottom that our off street rates are 25 less than our on street we see our two different scenarios scenario a is in line with what we're seeing from our peers it would keep us kind of within the bounds of what our peer cities across north carolina and our neighboring states are doing on both the monthly and the hourly scenario b is a more aggressive scenario that looks at what rate structure would enable the recovery of some of the revenues that were lost during the pandemic and provide a path forward to making the parking fund financially self-sustaining over the next five years slide so there are significant impacts on the parking cash flow model from the two scenarios what you see with scenario a which is a rate structure that's generally in line with our peer cities we continue to have a negative fund balance over the next five years there is some recovery in revenues but the combination of demand utilization and revenues is not sufficient to fully address that negative fund balance over that period but we do get to a positive favorable net operating position in years 26 and 27 but we're still carrying the impacts of the revenue losses in earlier years scenario b in the next slide has the higher rates and this does get us more revenue more quickly it puts us in a position where we're bringing in revenue in 26 25 6 and 7 we have net positive operating income and there we're able to reduce that negative fund balance that you see on the bottom line there so that in the following year that that fund balance would return to positive and then the next slide we did conduct a series of stakeholder engagement sessions we had 13 of these sessions with our downtown parking stakeholders and have shared these scenarios with them both the scenario a that's in line with our peers and scenario b that's a more aggressive approach not surprisingly what we heard from our stakeholders was a preference for scenario a but they also expressed significant concerns because we did not implement the 150 to 175 increase due to pandemic conditions to get back on schedule we'd be looking at even with scenario a a 50 percent increase from a dollar 50 per hour to 225 per hour in the on street and that would go from 125 as the current rate to two dollars per hour and off street and so we did hear significant concerns from our stakeholders about that large of an increase when the next rate interval that many of our downtown stakeholders were expecting was that 25 cent increase from 150 to 175 for on street so these are the scenarios that we've developed and we're interested in feedback and input from the council I'm happy to take any questions open the floor for discussion thanks I have a question and Sean thank you for the presentation are all of the spaces in our parking garages being utilized they are not so I think it was one of the early slides shows the utilization rates by deck so we're seeing some of our decks are performing better so Corcoran and church tend to be high performers whereas our Morgan rigsby and Durham center decks tend to see lower utilization so what we do expect to see recovery across the board but our more popular more utilized decks we expect to recover more quickly I can't remember what year it is Charlie definitely knows that we decided to build that new parking garage and at the time there was this intense sense on behalf of the downtown community that parking was a crisis and that if we didn't build a deck that it was going to hobble our economic growth and there was this huge rush to build this deck and Charlie was I think the only person who was like we shouldn't do that and I just want to say I think he was right I don't know that we needed another parking deck downtown I wonder if there are opportunities for us to reduce costs by reducing the amount of parking we're trying to manage like do you think we need to keep all of these decks can should we try to sell one so one of the discussions that we've had on going with general services is looking at our whole inventory and particularly looking at the surface slots that we have that our prime candidates for development development activity in downtown is strong we have received expressions of interest from developers in the past for some of the parcels and so we are working with our colleagues in general services to develop an assessment to see which parcels in our inventory may have a higher and better use than with a with an emphasis on those surface facilities okay thanks that yeah that makes a lot of sense that I I mean I feel like most of the maintenance though is on the like most of our costs are from the decks not from the surface parking right but if we sold the surface parking then that would give us some revenue to deal with the the issues in the deck so maybe it even so thank you hi Sean thanks for being with us today I'm sorry I have to leave I'm five minutes late for another thing but this is really important appreciate the presentation and all the work that you and your staff do on a whole host of issues but today especially relevant the parking fund I think in fairness I don't believe that any of us could have predicted what actually happened to the market to the parking market downtown which is that we saw a really interesting and unexpected increase in supply around the downtown core which allowed those providers to undercut deck pricing to a certain extent at least and and and and also just makes it really hard to make money when there's too much of a thing in a place where people want something but not all the thing that you're trying to sell them that sounded really stupid but I think you get what I'm saying anyway um the I would be very interested in looking at opportunities to get rid of surface parking in downtown Durham and if the city owns surface parking lots that can be repurposed we should look into that but I think more broadly and I know there's going to be a range of opinions on this and I don't want um my colleagues to accuse me after I'm gone if not caring about uh folks who need to be downtown and can't afford it but the choices are these people who use parking can pay what it costs or the rest of us can pay it for them and the people who aren't parking uh downtown are typically our poorest neighbors who don't have cars who rely on bus service to get around if they work downtown so these are our choices they're not great choices I totally get that but I support as aggressive a policy of forcing people who drive downtown to park let's be as aggressive as possible in asking them to pay for it because if they don't the rest of us will in higher property taxes that's how the math works and I want us to get real creative around um doing this in an equitable manner I know that we have talked and worked for a while on equitable uh ways to soften the impact on low income workers who are forced to park downtown because sadly uh our system of public transportation is not where it needs to be yet but the simple math the dilemma that we face as policymakers is that either that right because right now we're not the people who park downtown are not paying enough for it that's why we have a deficit there's lots of reasons for that folks aren't parking downtown as much um you know there's lots of things are happening and I know that there've been a lot of a lot of my colleagues have expressed the view that it's really important that we get more people downtown to support local businesses I definitely want to support local businesses but the fact is if the parkers don't pay for the cost of their parking everyone else will and our poor neighbors who don't have cars for the most part will be the ones that pay and and that doesn't seem fair to me it doesn't we're going to hear lots of stories about people who don't want to pay more to park downtown totally get that as I said if there are ways to soften the blow for folks who are in difficult situations and must park downtown we should explore that but for the most part my belief is this the people who use parking downtown should be the ones who pay for it it shouldn't be the rest of us and that's all I had to say about that colleagues I know you'll make great decisions love you all and we'll talk to you soon take care well I want to thank council member Reese for his spirited comments but I just wanted to touch back and say thank you I think the appreciate the presentation and I appreciate the engagement the stakeholder engagement I wanted to hear more about the breakout of the stakeholders that you're engaging and specifically how many hourly employees are involved in this conversation so we worked with downtown Durham Inc as our primary conduit to our downtown stakeholders so we've during those sessions we talked to business owners and property managers represented through and assembled through DDI to get a sense of their their expectations for how many of their staff would be coming back whether they're using monthly or hourly I think many of the the views represented there do represent the hourly employees many of whom for example can't use our transit system because their shift starts too early in the morning before the buses are running or too late in the evening after you know our transit system has stopped running for the day so there certainly is that input was was part of this we have developed a discounted product for parking for hourly workers in the downtown area we haven't seen much uptake in that offering just yet but that is something that I think as more more people are coming downtown and using it that is an option that we've made as a discounted product that's available to lower wage workers thank you and then I would just also just like to offer that I'm hopeful that you're not considering selling off the parking decks or any surface parking acknowledging that we're trying to figure out an open space implementer that could be a part of this conversation and then also considering affordable housing conversation and the wrap that the county's doing if we were doing something similar it might be a little bit better but that's just my opinion and I'm not in there thank you thank you madam mayor Sean good to see you man thank you so much for this and we know that you know managing that whole downtown corridor is is tricky and there are a lot there are a lot of factors that that come into play you know not only with parking but you know there's always that tension between class A office space and residential towers you know what's the right balance in that mix parks you know versus space for retail all of these things in parking first of all I don't I don't know that it's necessarily the best deal to look at occupancy rates right now and kind of make any determinations you know particularly coming out of COVID and I think we're projecting more it'll be a much more realistic picture of what the need is after COVID I think is has fully subsided and people come down you know counter memories make some interesting points to folk you know they're folk who drive downtown because they can't use the transportation system who are low you know low wage workers who have to drive but the people who are driving downtown who are high wage workers are driving for the same reason the same transportation system that's not robust enough for the low wage is the same transportation system we would hope that folk would use if it were more robust who are in the higher end as well I know from business owners downtown that the folk who park downtown may should pay but they also tend to be higher spenders as well to stimulate you know the economy and businesses that are going on down there so I say all this to say it's not real easy we got to find the right mixer no real easy kind of cookie cutter responses I am concerned about an equity issue I do I do appreciate the the aggressive approach because I do think that you know driving folk we wear car-centric culture and those of us that drive downtown and park and spend money should you know bear some of the cost more so than folk who aren't using them but we also know there's some economic stimulus that those folk bring as well when they park and spend money downtown I'm also concerned about maintaining bringing some equity to this because I've gotten emails from folk who work not only downtown proper but the the compact district of 9th street quarter compact district folk workers who work in many of those shops who are working and need to park but who have their checks being eaten up by you know parking costs so so I don't know if a real estate dump right now is I kind of agree with council member Freeman I'd like to kind of hold on to the dirt right now and see if there are ways we can you know post pandemic you know maximize revenue from this enterprise but also if we can maybe do something for folk who are workers down there as well and I don't know what that'll look like but a real estate dump right now I don't you know I'm not inclined to to go that way right now but you know who knows what the future holds but I would think that if I had to choose today and thank goodness I don't the more aggressive approach is certainly resonating with me I guess that was option B but that's that's you know it's not my final answer but but if I had to choose today that resonates more with me for for any number of reasons but I appreciate the work I know we're going to have to make some decisions and I'm hoping that we'll have a clearer picture of what supply and demand will look like as we come more out of the pandemic thanks Sean good to see you thank you madam mayor thanks Sean and thank you all for a robust conversation I tend to think that what we're now hopefully we're coming to the pandemic endemic stage of the pandemic not quite there yet but I do think we're going to see a difference over the coming months and this is going to require looking at this more intensely I think madam manager popcorn thank you I did want to interject as this is a retreat and we're talking about ways that we might solve some of our problems I wanted to bring the council's attention back to last year when when we were in this space and we talked about the possibility of utilizing some of our ARPA funding for revenue replacement in some of our some of our operations that we know were definitely impacted by COVID um before the final regulations final rules came out um we we kind of dropped that idea because there was a there was a concept that you had to look across your whole enterprise before you could you know assess uh access uh that funding for for losses in specific places well when the final rules came out um we we we did not have that restriction on us so you know as you you know Sean went kind of quickly but in either one of those option a or option b there's a significant negative fund balance or negative equity position in our parking fund that it is not advisable to leave five six seven years for the fund to fix itself um because it's just this is not a this is not a good place for us to be so I bring that to you because you know we're looking at two options here but neither one of them actually get us get us out of our hole and I do not want us to leave today and not have you all you know give some impressions about you know interest in some portion of ARPA funding to help with this situation yes or no or have us continue to look you know look at other other ways but you know it is it is a pretty big hole either way I don't matter if I might matter manager if you would stand I think you raised some some excellent points I so you know I'm I'm a layman as I look at these I see these deficits riding out over several years on paper and they will eventually correct themselves what is the what's the practical impact on our operation does it affect our our rating as a city what what's the practical impact in terms of day-to-day operations having these you know these deficits on paper until it corrects itself if we just choose a or b what's the what's what bad is going to happen if we just ride it out just let it correct itself well I understand the question that that enterprise you know basically has bills to pay when you look at the financial statement you see the revenue coming in you see the expenses going out so that fund has actually borrowed funds from a another fund that actually has money in order to cover the expenditures or the expenses in the fund so it's no it's no such thing as riding it out when you see those negatives and you see it compared to the revenue that is coming in it still has to you know those things the debt has to be paid you know all of the expenditures have to be paid the ones that can't be reduced and if it's not covered by the revenue that's coming in if there's no money in the bank to pay for it then it has to be borrowed or it has to come from another fund or has to be borrowed from another fund in order to cover it cover the cost so that's just that's the truth and that's the answer that yeah that's what I wanted to hear on record we we got to get it from from somewhere are you are you uh are you making are you considering any recommendation I mean we've heard real estate sales we've heard you mentioned ARPA we've heard uh you know fund balance is do you have any recommendations today are you still living with this we're still living with it and and the reason we brought it here is because we wanted to hear you all you know sort of ideas about the fee you know the fee structure because that's you know that's that's really it's an enterprise it's a business enterprise so you know once we have a good idea of you know what the fees are going to bring in the parking fees are going to bring in and you know go back and sort of retool and and and look at you know the operations with with that in mind we still you know will be probably needing to do something because this condition because that fund had some cash reserves in it and now those reserves have been drawn down you know this condition of you know extend an extended period of time of you know negative you know a negative balance there is a new thing so so it is something for us to look into and resolve now and going forward or having a plan to resolve and so hearing from you helps us with those recommendations that's very helpful what I what I've already said my affinity for plan two but if we need to have some kind of mixed bag reaction maybe adopting option two with a one-time infusion from fund balance of whatever amount the staff determines or some other type of creative kind of in ARPA I mentioned ARPA I guess ARPA can be on the table as well but if we could combine a an option with a with a one-time perhaps like knock on wood one-time cash infusion to kind of stabilize the fund until it gets to a point where it's self-sufficient I mean that that's something I'd be willing to look at or that's worth saying I'll yield at this time thank you madam thank you madam manager very helpful now so I'm a freeman I think yes her hand raised thank you madam mayor I was just going to respond to the manager page and just say that I think it would be important to make our fund whole and if ARPA dollars are available that's what we should use I think it's just a matter of knowing what that number looks like so that we understand going forward with the conversation around ARPA but the ARPA dollars were made available for situations as such and so I do think that's important to note like I think ARPA is the best way to move forward councilwoman Johnson thank you madam mayor I would be very sad if we had to use ARPA funding for this I might just have to be sad and that's okay but I would love to figure out another option just because I feel like the ARPA money has been we haven't made any commitments about it but we have represented to the community that the money is going to go to proposals that community members have submitted to us and I feel I feel good about that process and I would I would like to keep that as intact as possible I know we haven't made a formal commitment but I feel like we've like I feel committed to the ARPA money going out into the community and doing work in the community I think the question about what to do with surface lots is really interesting we the county using their surface parking lots for affordable housing is really great that of course I mean I think that would be awesome for us to do too obviously that doesn't get us any money and doesn't solve our parking problem but maybe there's an opportunity for some kind of partnership like with the old police station for example where we partner with a developer who would provide some affordable housing in exchange for in exchange for a land deal yeah and I I also would be in support of the higher rates I completely understand why downtown stakeholders want to pay less I when I park downtown I mean yeah I would like to pay less too but I do think the principle of of the users paying for the service in this case when the service is not something that is it's not something that's like crucial you know it's not like I very much support for example as having non-fee based trash service because that's something that that everybody needs but for driving and parking downtown feels a little bit less like something the city should be subsidizing at the rate that we're currently subsidizing it and I know we'll be subsidizing it some no matter what rate we choose but we subsidizing it a lot no matter which plan that we choose and so having a little bit less of a subsidy feels more appropriate given the finances the financial state of the fund thank you yeah I I agree with um councilwoman johnson I would be really sad if we have to use our fund that would probably be like the last thing that I the the last resort um that's going to be one time funding um and hopefully we can move forward with the plans to try to make sure that that goes out into out into the community um I would be in favor of the higher rate um and but I am in favor of of a mixed bag as well so we if we have to use our uh I would kind of be doing that but not so good a taste in my mouth but I do understand the need manager for us to make sure that we cover and not have that big of a deficit involved madam mayor if I might I I'm sorry madam manager I was just about to interject and say you know often when we hear you know different different views it gives us you know it gives us an opportunity to look at you know maybe not one thing but multiple things you know including uh all of the sources which you know potentially could involve the the parking fund you know actually having a loan from another fund as well as a mix of some of the other choices that we've talked about here but giving us you know that that freedom um for a while to come up with some things to be helpful um but I did you know want to point out that we we we had suggested that last year we do still have you know 40 you know 43 million dollars of ARPA funding that was not committed we only used the seven um little over seven million for uh pay for um for um the hazard pay in from our original allocation and the the deficit during the time frame when um COVID had its most impact was you know nowhere near you know nowhere near the amount of money that is left um and you saw that when Sean put that up but you know it would be it would not be a significant amount but could help in the mix of things that would get us to a better place for the park and enterprise um you know that that we are running thank you madam manager madam mayor I was going to say I first of all want to fully associate myself with what you and councilmember johnson have said when I when I mentioned the mix I definitely put uh uh fund balance above ARPA I think I think councilmember johnson is is is 100 correct of what we've represented to the community and the expectations we created around ARPA funding um so I I would I would prioritize fund balance and I like the idea of a loan from fund balance that when when that you know uh fund becomes solvent that enterprise becomes solvent starting to replenish what you got uh from fund balance uh up front I also want to say that um with respect to the county councilmember johnson mentioned the county doing affordable housing I remember we were organizing and advocating for the county to use some of their land for affordable housing I think the plan is councilmember johnson to actually still have parking there in the deck but wrap the affordable housing around it externally so it'll it'll be an incorporation of both parking and affordable housing uh generating funds and also meeting our affordable housing goals so that that might be something you know sir down the road surface lots we might want to consider if we want to still retain parking revenue but also incorporate you know architecturally they have all these ways of wrapping it around the parking which I believe is what the county is going to be doing um mentioned that but yes that's exactly what I was talking about there are other questions for Sean when are we going to need to pull a trigger on this is this uh so uh certainly we will you know we will be asking uh well a different item has to come back for a fee you know a fee item we we can't we don't change or we can't change the fees without you know bringing bringing that forward to council uh it can be in conjunction with the budget process so it can you know it can be at another time our projections are you know based upon the budget year that we're preparing now so we we we haven't proposed to make any real changes to what we're currently doing but those changes will be effective like in July so for you know that is why we're getting the guidance here you know so we know what direction to to take as we prepare this this overall budget and financial plans for our funds can I ask if there will be a plan specific to how you do outreach so the folks understand that there is an option for folks who have lower means because I mean if you're talking about July you probably need to have that conversation by like April so I'm going to let Sean talk more about the engagement components of a new new rate we're listening at the preference that the council has and sometimes that's what we have that's all we have to go on when we go out to engage but Sean you go right ahead so I think we would be interested in conducting additional engagement and we can report back on that when we do come back with the fee change proposals but I think what we've also heard today is that there's particular interest in us working on our discounted product for lower wage workers in downtown Durham and so and what steps that we can take to grow the utilization of that grow awareness of that in our community so that those folks know that this product is available to them so that that'll be another significant part of our outreach and we can report on that when we come back with the fee change proposal. Councilman Williams. Yeah I was going to ask have we seen any impact on the some of the programs that we've been doing downtown in regards to park your participation around like the streetery or the or the on Saturdays with the farmers market. So you know the streetery is an evening and weekend event the farmers market is a Saturday we see much lower utilization of our decks and off-street spaces evenings and weekends so we have substantial capacity available for off-street parking so when on-street spaces are removed on an evening or weekend for a special event we have capacity where we see the greatest demand on our off-street decks is a weekday daytime during business hours and that's pre-covid or post-covid I mean pre-covid or apparent as well. The trend is the same but the levels are much lower during COVID. Gotcha, gotcha okay so we should see some improvements once and if people come back into the office as we migrate into hopefully an endemic phase of COVID. That's right and the model assumes recovery in utilization across all of our facilities. All right and just help me with my memory here parking is free after what time? Seven? So we did bring a proposal to have parking continue hourly after seven or to have a one-time flat rate so the I think you see it it's $7 would be the flat rate for that so that's what you see is the the special event parking it's on slide eight and the presentation is seven after seven. Okay I like the sound of that so and I don't have the presentation in front of me right now what was uh was that an option A or B I can't remember? It was the same in both $7. Oh it's the same in both okay all right and do we have any based on the activity down in town do we have any projection around what that seven after seven could could bring? I'd have to go back and look at the specific revenue forecast for the special event I don't I don't have that in front of me at this moment but we can certainly follow up with that. Okay got you and last question would it I guess it would help if we were to have that to have more events going on downtown for example Louisville Kentucky has 4th Street live on Tuesday nights and it literally takes up their entire downtown and they they were doing this because it was a driver for parking and it really helped out so that's my line of questioning here that's why I'm asking if it makes sense for us to also while we're looking at balancing this fund out maybe having some some ideas around active more activity or programming downtown to help with you know uh restoring or you know proffering up our parking parking fund so appreciate it. It's certainly a vibrant downtown with many events celebrating our arts and culture and communities would be a driver of demand for our facilities. Thanks Shawn always good to see you and that's exactly where I'll take it but appreciate it. Thanks colleagues, thanks Mayor. Thanks Shawn great presentation. Thanks everybody. Back in your hands John. Thank you so much Mayor O'Neill. With that that ends our program and I'm going to turn things over to City Manager Page for closing remarks. Thank you. Thank you John. Thank you Mayor and members of council. First I will say we have heard you while there was not consensus on every item that we talked about today for us your administration today still has been a good day because we have received the policy guidance from you that we need as we proceed in this budget process. We have discussed some very important topics important to all of us and it's not just topics that affect just this one year but the future of our city in general. We will be back tomorrow. We always do. We always come back with more reports, more discussion and we are hoping that it will culminate with a budget guideline document and then our difficult work will really begin once we have that in hand. Again I would like thank the staff here today who do this work every day. The staff who once this meeting is adjourned will return to their offices. They will incorporate what we have heard here today and continue to refine this budget proposal for you and for our community and we will see you here tomorrow. Thanks everybody. Great job. Pelosi to Strong. Bye. Thanks Bill. All right. Thank you all.