 this is their last council meeting. Yes, thank you all. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Jessica Mcagrin. It is unfortunate that I get to stand up here today though and let you know that Mania Shore, our Director of Library Services is leaving us. Her last day will be the first week of May and so this is really her last council meeting here with us today. So I wanted to invite you to join in me in thanking Mania for all of the work that she's done in her almost six years here with the City of Fort Worth and also wish her well. She is embarking on a very large adventure that I'm quite envious of, to be honest. Really neat, she is moving over to Japan and we'll get to just experience a whole new culture and world, so we're pretty excited. But with that, I wanted to invite Mania up. I think she wants to say a few words as well and thank you. Thank you, Jess, for the last time I'll say Mania Shore, Library Director. You know, this year the Fort Worth Public Library will welcome over one million visitors. Check out almost four million items, offer almost 7,000 programs and make this community a better place to live, work, and play. I am proud of the work that we have done and continue to do. Thank you so much to David, the CMO team, this Mayor and Council and the previous Mayor and Council for taking a chance on me, a first-time Library Director and a Yankee to boot. What I didn't know back in 2017 when I accepted this position was how much I would end up loving this city and how much it would change me for the better. Shoot, this is why I wrote something instead of winging it like I normally do. I hope this is not a goodbye but a see you later. Please continue to watch your public library because the incredible work and staff will continue long after I am gone. I'm gonna make you cry, Mayor. That's not hard. You are in capable hands with Marilyn Marvin and Michelle Gorman and trust me when I tell you that this library system has become a leader, not just in Texas but in the nation. Keep it up, Fort Worth. This truly is one of the best cities in the country and I've lived in a lot of them. It has been an honor. Thank you so much. Mania, we love you. I'm so excited for you. That's why I'm trying not to be sad because I think your next adventure may be your greatest yet and you have left this place better than you found it. Your team is amazing. Every single one of us are on this table could say something great. And most of all, you're just a good human. People want to be around you. You're infectious for all the right reasons and Fort Worth is so fortunate that we took a chance on you and that you took a chance on us moving forward. So thank you for the blessing of all the time you spent in our city among our kids and our oldest adults. One million visitors is something absolutely to celebrate. God bless you and your next journey and we love you very much. Thank you so much. Hey, Mania. No, I'll cry like no tomorrow. We kind of started this government journey together at the same time in 2017. I'm really thankful you, as a mayor said and you said took a chance on Fort Worth. Time and time again, I asked you to get creative and you did. And so we've got the library in Las Vegas Trail because of you. We got another library possibly coming because of you and just getting creative you and your staff across the board of understanding. We lived through COVID and you made sure that you got that library open. At least through people could still check out books. I have a love affair with Libby still because of you and getting things digitally. But I just say thank you again for ensuring that we keep the library a great asset for our citizens and ensuring that you're running it. It was run in a really well manner and I'm gonna miss you a lot. Thank you. Thank you. Joe Gina. Oh yeah. Mania, I just want to acknowledge your service and let you know that you really turned the city upside down with your creativity. When you delivered that children's library, people all around this nation were talking about how unique, how appropriate. And I can tell you, we coined the phrase only children can go there. And if you don't have one, you could rent a kid because Mania sure doesn't mind you renting children to get to the library. You also turned neighborhood leaders into advocates. You know, people on the east side of Fort Worth advocate for you all the time in terms of what you're doing begging for more promotion from the city for your efforts. And so even though we're approaching your last day, you also had your last name changed and it was fun meeting your hubby over the weekend. We will miss you and hope to see you later. Great job. Thank you, Mania. All right, next up we have informal reports. The first one is architectural design selection process and Steve Cook and Brian Glass are available if there are any questions. All right, the next informal report is on economic development program agreement with Sinclair Digital and Robert Stearns is available if there are any questions. All right. I don't have a question, I just wanna say. In support of this, I've seen what FRUCC has done with this technology and I think it's a great thing that we can support in a lot of different ways. So thanks. Very good. The third informal report is on extending community center hours. Dave Lewis from Parks and Recreation and Victor Turner from Neighborhood Services are available if there are any questions. I think Jared has a question. Yes. I just wanna overview a bit. Dave, Victor? Oh, it's neither. Here comes Victor, but that's not Dave. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council, Kelly Picard, Assistant Director of Parks and Recreation. And in summary, this report, what it provides is a listing of facilities, their current operating hours and any associated late night programs that are offered at those sites. It also discusses this in regards to the one-second collaborative. These are in priority zip codes that have been established as priority because of the amount of youth gun violence in these areas. And so what this list out is where we have existing facilities in the city of Fort Worth, if there's zip codes that are in other areas like the city of Arlington, what those areas are. But it also talks about how we actually decide what the operating hours are for our community. What are the demographics? Is this a high senior population? Are there a lot of young families? So we're focusing on a lot of after-school programming, youth opportunities. And so we can be flexible in that in our current operating hour structure, but we have to give a little bit. So to truly expand our hours will involve more resources for staffing and operating supplies. Thank you for that. I think first of all, I'm particularly interested in please that you all connected with the one-second collaborative knowing that they're prioritizing zip codes and they see you all collaborating and coordinate about possible facilities and spaces where some of that programming can be facilitated is a huge opportunity for partnership. I'm also particularly interested. I know Councilwoman Beck might be as well about the opportunities for Southwest Community Center specifically for late night hours, specifically for teens to give the teens an ultimate summer car area, a space where they can go and possibly partner in whatever ways we can with programming. So I look forward to continuing to work with you all on that as we move forward. Absolutely. Elizabeth. Hey, so there was something in here that was a little alarming to me. I should say concerning, not alarming, but it was about recruitment of staff for those programs. And I remember what we went through last year with the lifeguards. And so it might not be appropriate in the context of this IR, but if we know that staffing is potentially an issue, I'd like to see what we're doing. If you can't speak to today, maybe a future IR and what we're doing to get out ahead of that so we don't find ourselves in the 2022 lifeguard situation again. And I know you all worked really hard on that one too, but I think it was a big PR campaign that helped us push past that. And so if we can be helpful in that now, preparing for the summer, that would be really helpful. And I do have some hopeful news on that front. The hiring fair that was held this last Saturday was extremely successful in bringing out, especially our seasonal positions to get helpful, get those filled. But we were, after the sixth recruitment at Chisholm Trail for the late night rec programmer, we have a candidate who's ready to start. So hopefully those late night hours will be starting in the next month or so as soon as they're onboarded successfully. But it is, it's an ongoing issue that we try to market to the community through every avenue we can look at. And it goes through cycles. Sometimes it's some positions and not others. Sometimes it's just seasonal. We went through a period of full-time positions being difficult to fill. But we do wanna work with our partners in HR to look at these more difficult to fill positions in the late night hours and to see how we can improve that recruitment because this last go round at Chisholm Trail was difficult to find someone to fill that spot. And I wanted to address too, we did have a great initial meeting with one second collaborative. And what that looks like right now, we don't know yet because they haven't brought in their proposals for who their program providers will be. But that can take a variety of forms. It could be we use their curriculum with our own staff. It could be they send out program providers to help supplement that. Or it could be a situation similar to the coming up program where they truly just come in. We're the host site and they come in and use our space to provide their programs. So we look forward to seeing that develop as well. Thanks. Well, thank you for bringing up the staffing. I know Clara at Como Community Center has brought up several times their staffing needs. So I'm happy you're getting out ahead of that. One thing I'd like to look at this is I don't see this FW at six program, especially it's gang related. And from a meeting I had last week with the police department of the gang activities, increased gang activities in Las Vegas Trail area. I'd like to explore getting this program there and some other programming that's late night program, which we do not have at this point. But, and so that might be off this offline advising us how to do that and getting on, it looks like CCBD funding and other things. So I'll be advocating for that. Thanks. Yes. Good afternoon. I'm Monique Hill with Neighborhood Services Department. And just to address that council member crane, we can look at talking with LBT because we partner with them obviously right now about what their needs are. We have asked for stats. We typically will ask about gang stats and looking at the trends so that we can try to come up with programming, but we can involve Paige and see what their needs are and see how we can get some services there. And then the other thing I might just add is that you'll probably already do this or if you don't, because we're having trouble extending hours and staffing, do we do a call to nonprofits in the area that do programming, especially for youth where they just need a space? Maybe or we can ask them for help, especially as we head into the summer and we can take that offline. We don't have to derail the conversation today, but I've had a few conversations with nonprofits that I'm interested in that partnership with the city of Fort Worth, utilizing their staff and volunteers. So maybe we talk about that together and see if we can create a better situation here. Yes. Thank you. We're always willing to do that. I was just going to respond quickly to that. We do have a different program provider agreements, supplemental that we do not have to pay for. We also have program provider agreements where we pay for services to come in and do programming for youth. And then we also have staff led and then contract instructors as well. Okay, great. So we're willing to look at any opportunity. Thank you, Kelly. Chris. No, Mayor, I believe that's a brilliant idea. I work with a lot of nonprofits and feeding opportunities where they're just looking for space and they have people that are ready to work. So I would love for us to see that make that happen. I had a question here. And I don't know if, on I think the third page of your IR, it lists the extended community centers hours operation. Are these the only centers that's going to be extended at the time? That it would be yes and no. Okay. It depends on the direction we go and what the focus might be. If it truly is looking at extending and where we need extended hours, that early morning hours to serve more senior populations is that those later night hours for teens and older youth. And so this is just specifically focused on the priority zip codes with the potential collaboration with the one second collaborative. So no, no, they're not the only ones we're looking at extending, but for the purposes of this IR, they're the only ones listed. Okay. And is it kind of highlighting, I guess a center location within the zip codes? This is a zip code. All right. Thank you. Thank you. All right. Our next informal report is on the Fort Worth central city stone water and water projects. And I'm going to first call on Dana Bergdorf to provide a little clarity on that informal report. Dana. Thank you, David. I appreciate the opportunity. I get to work with the central city project with the Territory Regional Water District and the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And so we've been working with them for at least 10 years, but really 20 years on that Panther Island and Trinity revision project. But what we wanted to bring before you today is I think some really good puzzle solving and problem solving work by TPW and stormwater as well as the water department to deal with a challenge that's affecting all of our projects where we're receiving bids that are higher than our cost estimates. One of the things that we wanted to assure everyone and we're making sure that hopefully you've received, I think we can get this up on the screen, the this chart that shows the projects that we've mentioned in the informal report as well as getting the word out to residents and the media and others that we have no intent of delaying any of our city stormwater projects. What we're doing is addressing a cash flow management issue to make sure that we've got the dollars available to meet the critical path schedule for the Army Corps, but also not jeopardize our stormwater projects that our residents have been counting on. We've heard for years the concerns that you all have in all of your districts with stormwater and flood management, you've been gracious in the past to increase the stormwater utility rate so that we could begin to issue revenue bonds so that we could get more done than just using our pay as you go capital. And in fact, there's discussions going on now about whether it would be appropriate to consider a future rate increase to continue our capacity. So what you'll see in the chart before you is the listing of the projects that our stormwater team has identified where they're able to shift the funds. It's basically a temporary shift so that we can authorize the contract work for Grand Avenue, which is one of the major projects that's a stormwater relocation project in the way of the bypass channel. But they've done a great job of selecting projects where we won't be delaying their schedules. So in some cases, these are residual dollars coming from projects that are completed. In some cases, these are projects where they're under construction and they've got contingency and other dollars available. So it's a safe bet to just transition these dollars for a few months. In other cases, these are projects that haven't begun design yet. But in terms of the dollars that those projects will need, there are four of them out of the 11 that would need some dollars coming up this fall or in early 2024. And so David and the city management team, William Johnson, Regi Zeno is our finance director, have identified the short-term, whether it's a commercial paper program or other financing option that will enable us to keep all of the projects on track, including those four. So we wanted to make that clear to everybody that we understand how important our stormwater program is and appreciate Mayor Pro Tem Biven's leadership on this in the past. Certainly appreciate Councilor Beck and the work you've been doing to support Linwood and others. And so partly wanted to put that message out there that we are not going to be delaying these projects. We can't afford to delay them. They're life safety projects and they need to be completed. And so, but I do want to acknowledge that across the board, we're all going to be running into cost overruns. We've been seeing that for a couple of years now. And so doing this cash flow management will be part of our challenge through a number of different projects, not just related to central city, but because of the high-profile nature of that project, we wanted everyone to be aware of what we're doing, be transparent about it and get that information out to you. So let me stop there and see, David, if you had anything else to add. I know Gina has a question and Leonard. Yeah, go ahead, Gina. I just wanted to, for the sake of the inquiring minds, I did get a call from media and I explained that we've done this type of transfer before, but not on such a big scale, but it's all about managing the dollars, making sure that what's shovel-ready gets addressed while we maintain the schedule that we're going to be adhering to. And so I think it's important that the public know there's no funny business about this money. It's just like managing pots of money and making sure what is ready when the project is ready is the best way I could explain it. I just think the public needs to be competent that we do have a great staff. We know what's top, who's on first, who's on second, and the idea of money being used is not money being stashed away in some slush fund. Thank you, Gina. Leonard and then to Carlos. Yeah, thank you, Dana. I guess in a similar vein to Gina's comments there. So our phone and email certainly lit up when the Fort Worth Report article came out, which was a bit of a surprise. Where did they get that information? And can you address the information that was in there, whether it was off base or the genesis of it? Yeah, my takeaway was that there was wording in the article that implied that by moving the dollars from the projects that we were automatically delaying those projects or perhaps giving folks the fear that some of the projects might not get completed at all. And so that was unfortunate because that was not what was conveyed. And so our communications folks were following up with the Fort Worth Report to make sure that they also have this very data that we prepared for you all to make that clear. Unfortunately, folks picked up on that and ran with it. So yeah. Thank you. Thank you, Dana. Carlos. Thank you, Dana, for that report. And also thank you, Jennifer Dyke and the stormwater folks, for putting out some further information to clarify the projects. And again, to your point, this is a reprioritization of these projects because it frequently gets, I think, conflated when you talk about Panther Island, but what we're talking about here is a central city flood control project. Correct. That is what's driving this. Yes. The Corps of Engineers have their timetable. We have our own. We have to make sure that we meet theirs so that we can get these critical plan projects in place. And one thing that I will counter is it's not a taking from Peter to pay Paul. It's not that. There is a reimbursement plan already that is part of our staff report that's in place. The dollars are traceable. We have to meet our needs. These are part of our total needs and they will be addressed. And I want you to clarify something else that in District Two came up as well that I want the viewing audience to hear. And this deals with the 28th Street and Lebo Channel Hazardous Road overtopping mitigation project because that was mentioned there in the Fort Worth Report news story as well. It was not called out in the IR or mentioned in the table per se, but are you prepared to give a little clarification to that project and how that project is not impacted? Correct, that project is not impacted. And I'll ask Jennifer or Lauren or whoever'd like to come up and speak more specifically to that project. But that's another one of the pieces that was to be corrected. Correct. Right, definitely. That's an active construction project. So we would never just stop an active construction project. So definitely it's moving forward. So what we think happened is that in the informal report there is a bullet point that specifically says stormwater hazardous road overtopping project. So we were moving 4.6 million from this project. And so we think that maybe there was some confusion that they thought that that was the 28th indicator project off Lebo because later on it says something about this amount of money in the Diamond Hill area. Agreed. So that's where we think the confusion came in. Yeah, and I spoke to many of the stakeholders of Diamond Hill afterward and clarified for them to make sure that they understand that the Lebo channel work which is a multi-phase project continues it is not impacted, correct? Correct. And we're actually about to move forward with awarding a contract in May to start up the next phase of project development and design on upper Lebo. So. Terrific. Thank you Jennifer. Thank you Dana. Councilor Rebecca. So I was trying to follow the money here in this IR and it was a little hard for me to put it all together. So the original budget was $10 million for this project. For Grand Avenue specifically. For Grand Avenue. Okay. And so that's doubled, more than doubled now. Correct. Correct. And so when did we initially develop that $10 million estimate? The cost estimate I think was from last May. Mm-hmm. May 2022. And then we went to bid in December and I think bids first came in in January and they were actually about triple. So then we went back out, we changed the scope, tried to break it out to, because we only had one bidder that was part of the challenge as well. So we had council rejected the bids, we went back out with a re-scoped project, also put in an alternative construction methodology because these are large pipes going through the levy and worked with the Army Corps on that piece as well to get that approved. So I know when the transportation and mobility subcommittee meeting, I guess, last week, we talked about how price overruns are impacting our bond allocation dollars. And the number I believe that I wrote down from that meeting was about 30% is what we're seeing. The increase, is that correct? Is that the number y'all gave us? So 30% seems to be on par with what we've seen in other construction projects. This is double, more than doubles. And so what, how did we miss the mark or what happened there? So we really think it's the complexity of the project because it's going into the federal project footprint, the Corps' property, and we typically don't do projects in Corps' property. And so looking at the bid amounts, the highest prices of that bid were for the cofferdam. So where they're outfalling the storm drain system into the bypass channel, you've got to hold back that water to be able to construct the outfall and the sluicy gates that open and close to protect the water from going up the system. So those were the most expensive parts of the project. And so we just don't have experience. I think we don't have like historical bids on doing anything like that because that's a typical Corps of engineer project, not a city project. Sure. Okay. But yeah, we'll follow up with the team, the consultant team that worked with us. I'd appreciate that. And then so what is, I see later that it gives us a total dollar amount for the central city project and that's between 53.8 and 60.5. Is that correct or that's not? So where did we start for total project costs on this? About 23 million. Yeah, the 22.9. So we've doubled. Yeah. So what we did is when the Grand Avenue bid came in and it was so high, we knew that that was going to, obviously the future drainage projects bids, we're going to have similar high prices. So at that point in time, we use the Grand Avenue bid to update all of the other projects very similar. And then, sorry, I have a lot of questions about this because this is a hefty increase. Is all of that reimbursable by Terrain Regional Water District? So even though we've had the price increase, we're still going to get dollar for dollar back from TRWD. Correct, 100%. So we're not going to have to, in the future find additional dollars anywhere. So we're not going to, my concern is we've got some big projects either here or in the future that we know need to get done. And I don't want to, I need us to be a little more careful when we're bidding those because that seems to be kind of an issue that we're having in the city. David is when we're bidding, we're low balling what we're telling our residents and what we're factoring. And then it's coming back in at significantly higher amounts. And that's not good for y'all, it's not good for the city. It's not good for any kind of planning, yeah. Okay, thank you. And the one thing I do want to point out is we've done some other small projects for the central city work in terms of relocating utilities. And the water district per our agreement has reimbursed us when those projects are completed. We call it a green sheet here locally in terms of the city having the as built drawings and those projects being completed. The water district to help us out on the cash flow side are going to reimburse us annually even for multi-year projects. And so, but despite that, we do need to have this interim financing effort so that we can have, within two or three months have that cash on hand. So we're not having to wait for the annual reimbursement and to keep all these projects moving forward. Any other questions from council? No, I'll just repeat what I told David Cook yesterday. I think maybe our greatest mistake here is not actually the information within it. It's how we present it. And you both did a beautiful job today trying to explain a very complicated topic that has an immense amount of understandable sensitivity around it and the community because of our flood control needs. So maybe just moving forward, we always do a presentation. This turned into one anyway out of an IR to make sure that the public really understands what we're moving here. And thank you both for providing additional context today. Appreciate it. Thank you. Next Informal Report is the monthly Development Activity Report and DJ Harrell is available if there are any questions. All right. Next Informal Report is an overview of leave benefits for parental needs and Deanna Giordano is available if there are any questions. Yes, I do. Deanna. Deanna. Maybe more of a statement of thanks to Deanna and her team and to city attorney's office for working on this so diligently, both with me personally and my staff. It's no secret that I feel very strongly that the city of Fort Worth should embrace a 12-week policy for the women having babies in the city of Fort Worth. And if you look at the closely counsel at the summary recommendation at the end of this IR, I think this is the right approach. No abrupt moves will be made on city policy. This would be a part of a consideration in our budget process for the next fiscal year, a consideration from each of you and feedback to Deanna would be very helpful as she leads into the buzz at just into a package process. But importantly, we think a hard dollar amount of $600,000 per year to offer that additional six weeks of paid leave to our females that are having babies in the city of Fort Worth. I think for me personally, knowing what it's like to deliver a child and try to come back to work is an incredible importantly benefit, but I think there's still some things to work out. I just wanted to thank you, Deanna, for all that you've done to this point. And we'll keep going and can't wait for the next fiscal year moves we make. Elizabeth. Yeah, I'm with you. I think six weeks. I know, Deanna, sorry, I can't see you. I appreciate that you did the survey to kind of see where we were and other municipalities. And when we compare to the corporate world, I think that as one of the largest employers in Tarrant County, it's really incumbent on us to set the standard and make everybody else reach it with us. So I think that in that vein, the 12 week policy is us leading the charge on that and setting the standard. Two questions I noticed in here that when you did the comparison of some of the different cities, civil service was treated differently than general employees. That's correct. And I wanted to know what that mechanism was, is it because the civil service employees negotiated that in their contract? And so is that the case? That's our understanding is that it was applied to their general employees only and that the civil service units would have to bargain or meet and confer. So with that being said, what would that budgetary look like if we only extended that to our general employees and left it up to those civil service organizations to advocate on behalf of their membership for that? So the cost that we have in there, the 600,000 with the additional of the new maternity leave benefit, that 600,000 is what we have costed to be the cost for the city. That would include both fire and police. Fire is probably the one department that gets a little trickier because they have backfill requirements where police does not in general employees also do not. So we'd have to get into understanding their makeup. They have a very small population of females so it wouldn't be as impactful. Okay. And then if that were the case, I know we just renegotiated fires contract. And according to the next IR meet and confer, the police contract is coming up in about a year. So if we were to institute that policy in the upcoming budget cycle for general employees and then leave it up to the labor unions to do their thing, how does that impact the change to fire given the fact that they've just signed their contract? Yeah, so let me, we would have to have an MOU or some memorandum of understanding to get that into their collective bargaining agreement. And we're advocating that this be applied for all employees. And that's kind of our position and that's what we would submit forward in a decision package. And that's the $4 million? That's 600,000 is what we're costing back up. It would only apply, you're thinking before when we were gonna apply this additional 12 weeks to all employees, we found additional benefit that's available just to those that are having the baby themselves, the women that are available. So that's the $600,000. Okay, I see what you're saying. Yeah. Okay, all right, so thanks. So more to come. Thank you, Deanna, very much for all your hard work. All right, our next informer report is on police pay and turnover and Harold Cates is available for any questions. All right, that takes us to the last informer report. Regulating sale of alcohol near childcare facilities. Daniel Leal. I don't have to hear about that. Daniel and Melinda, who's got, there we go. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. I think Gina would just like you to describe the IR. Yes. You don't mind, thank you. So this IR report response to Council member Florez requests to review the city regulation of alcohol sales and to consider whether to require 300 foot distance between restaurants that sell alcohol and childcare facilities. In 1984, City Council enacted chapter four of our city code alcoholic beverages, section 44, sales near churches, schools and hospitals in accordance with section 10933 of the Texas alcoholic beverage code. Make it unlawful for any person who is engaged in the business of selling alcoholic beverage to sell alcohol within 300 feet of churches, public or private schools and public hospitals. The TABC section mentioned above provides that a municipality may adopt an ordinance to apply the 300 foot distance separation to childcare facilities that are licensed by the Texas Department of Facility and Protective Services. Per TABC, the 300 foot distance must apply to all business selling alcohol, not limited to restaurants. The 300 foot distance may not apply to businesses that where the childcare facility is located on a different story of the same multi-story building, or if they're in different buildings, they are at different levels as well. If the City Council wishes to amend the city code to require the 300 foot distance between childcare facilities and businesses that sell alcohol, staff will need to determine if the affected childcare facility is indeed licensed by the Texas Department of Facility, Family and Protective Services. And it is suspected that the number of variances to be heard by council would increase by doing so. Staff would recommend the current alcohol distance exception anyways to the Central Business District, downtown near Southside, West 7 Urban Village and Panther Island continue to apply. That's the AR, if you have any question. Any questions, Councilor Carlos, go ahead. Not a question per se, but again, the purpose of me asking for this was per the last experience that I had with such a variance, right? And in doing my research, I came to find out that there was a licensed childcare facility in the vicinity, right? And you and I had talked about it again and caused me to start to wonder, well, is it something that council could consider? So it's exploratory in nature. I do totally understand how in certain districts there would be in areas, there would be an increase in those applications for variations. So again, exploratory in nature, I wanna get informed as to what is out there, what can be done. So what you just said was TABC does allow for municipalities to make those decisions on their own, correct? Yes, it does allow for city to enact such an ordinance. And the variances will be applied only to new businesses, not to existing potential conflicts. Understood. So what is staff's recommendation right now again? I think I heard you say it, but would it offer an undue burden and too much of an increase in these applications for staff to handle and you're, I guess, comfortable with leaving it as it is? I think we could assume that workload. Okay, well, see, I don't wanna assume. I wanna hear what staff's position is. I don't think we have a strong position. It was more of an explanation of the situation, but the Texas Code allows for cities to adopt that. So it sounds prudent to adopt that. So I would be in favor of that. So it's something we could explore a little later on, say perhaps when council grows by two. Yes. Okay, thank you. Okay, I do have a question because I'm just a little bit confused. Maybe it's to Carlos. Are you proposing that we decrease the foot distance? No, I'm not proposing anything, Chris. What I'm saying is that in addition to when we consider, say schools, churches, being a vicinity of a place that sells alcohol, maybe childcare facilities could be on that list too when considering the distance, that's all. Yeah, and again, it was exploratory nature just to see if that's something that, first know about it and then something that council can consider at a later date. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Mayor, that concludes my report. Okay, we'll keep moving. Any questions regarding the city council M&C log that you've gotten in your emails for next week? No, let's move on to update on Tarrant County College. Dr. Elva LeBlanc is here with us from TCC. Thank you for joining us, Dr. LeBlanc. The floor is yours. Get to say congratulations in person to Dr. LeBlanc. Good afternoon, thank you so much. Mayor Parker, city council members, thank you for inviting me, as you know. I am honored to help lead an institution that has meant so much to me personally. I have seen firsthand how Tarrant County College changes personal lives, families, and communities for the better. So this is very much appreciated. I would like to begin my brief presentation by sharing a little bit about community colleges in general. So community colleges are truly an American concept based on the belief that for a democracy to exist for people to make wise decisions in their representation, that education is extremely important. And so nowhere else in the world do you see community colleges like you do in the United States. They have the entrepreneurial spirit, they stand ready to pivot quickly, and they are connected to the community, hence we call ourselves community colleges. So it also speaks to the issue of giving people bootstraps. So we are in Texas, we're always wanting people to pull themselves up by their bootstraps, and community colleges do just that, and which is important to point out. So in the state of Texas, you will note that 43% of all Texas post-secondary institutions, excuse me, post-secondary students are enrolled in community colleges. 70% of all minority freshmen and sophomore students are in community colleges. Now community colleges do serve students of all ages. In addition to the young students that we have in dual credit early college high schools, we have workers that we call mid-career adults. Workers now change careers more frequently than in the past, and this is particularly true since the pandemic. So they're always, we are increasing the number of adults that are wanting to upscale and reskill. And that's an important comment to make. And you'll also note in the presentation that 94% of the dual enrollment and 93% of the career and technical education degrees are coming from the community colleges. There are three important documents that can help educate people more on the community colleges. These are all online and free to anyone that's interested in learning more. There's the Building Talent Strong Texas, which is the strategic, the state's strategic plan for community colleges, the Texas Commission on Community College Finance, and a report by the Dallas Federal Reserve Bank. Community colleges are requesting different formula funding starting after the legislative session. Currently we are funded by headcount and contact hours, and we are moving more towards student outcomes. So we are wanting to be funded for the number of students we graduate, the number of students that actually move on to a university or that go straight to the workforce. And by making it focused on student outcomes, we believe we will gain additional support from the state. The Federal Reserve Bank in their study will also talk about how the community colleges in Texas move more quickly and are able to serve the community better than other models in other parts of the country. Part of it has to do with the governing model that we have. The trustees are elected officials. They are elected to represent the community. Many of them actually are connected to the business community, which allows us to have influencers on our boards that help connect business community with the college, and that is certainly true of Tarrant County College. We have a very strong Board of Trustees, and they work tirelessly, for no pay, by the way, in support of our students, which we very much appreciate. So now let's move toward the discussion about Tarrant County College. So Tarrant County College is the fifth largest college in Texas, and the 20th largest higher education institution in the United States. It has a huge footprint throughout Tarrant County. We offer courses year round. So yes, we have the traditional semesters, but we also have semesters in between semesters, and individuals can earn their degrees quickly if they so choose. We have associate degrees, credentials, workforce, and economic development programs, weekend college, and customized training programs for area businesses and corporations. Tarrant County College has quite an impact on Tarrant on the county. We have over 8,000 students that graduate every year. Of those 8,000 students, 55% come from economically disadvantaged families. So you can see that the community college is a real game changer, and if you want to move people from poverty to middle class, they can certainly start at a community college like Tarrant County College. Now one in 10 Tarrant County College students take dual enrollment in early college, high school. Very large number of our population have taken courses at Tarrant County College. I'm just curious of the city council members, how many of you have taken courses at Tarrant County College? Okay, it's a nice number, and I know there's at least one that has, I'm still recruiting to teach for us, but we'll discuss that at a later time, right? So we- My mother did take classes there just so you know. Okay, so we're always recruiting good people, you know. So in terms of our workforce pathways, we respond to our business partners by continuously adapting and implementing pathways and programs that keep students progressing efficiently towards completion and align with career opportunities. The five education and career pathways that we've identified are aligned with the public school pathways. So we start conversations with students long before they joined Tarrant County College. We often comment on the fact that we are, we are advocates for our students before they come to us, and we continue being advocates for them after they leave. So we have strong technical programs linked to workforce development. We have over 70 specialized workforce programs because they're very expensive to fund. We don't duplicate them on every campus. So every campus has specific technical programs. Most of the time they are aligned with the area that they serve. So for example, Trinity River campus being downtown and close to the hospital district has the nursing, allied health programs, radiology, nuclear medicine, et cetera. The Northwest campus has aviation, transportation, logistics, entrepreneurship, police academy, fire academy, et cetera. Again, the location plays an important role. And the other campuses have equally strong technical programs. The South has manufacturing, automotive, robotics, construction, welding. Northeast has Cisco training. They have very strong computer science programs and education. And Southeast being in Arlington has the culinary arts, hospitality, management, and engineering. So when we look at all of the different groups that we partner with, you will note that we also have a small business development center, not far from here. We work with the workforce solutions for Tarrant County and the Fort Worth Chamber. And our workforce services learning center is connected to workforce solutions. I did notice in preparation for my presentation today, I reviewed your impressive strategic plan. And I noticed that on page 24 of your strategic plan, you talk about the importance of workforce solutions for Tarrant County and the Fort Worth Chamber. And we're certainly part of that partnership. Additionally, on page 25, you mentioned Tarrant County College, our partnerships with K through 12, as well as our expansion with online offerings. Our online program has really grown significantly since the pandemic. During the pandemic, we transitioned thousands of students and thousands of employees from face to face to online. And people learned really fast how to take courses online. And so as a result of that, people feel more comfortable with it and are more inclined to be interested in the online courses. 77% of our students work. And so the online becomes an excellent option because they can work any time and take the online courses. We partner with everyone. I'm often mentioned that we are nonpartisan. We work with our community partners, universities, business and industry, our public schools, government, and of course, TCC Foundation. Oops. Yes, that's correct, okay. So in terms of our K through 12 partners, we have dual credit, early college high school, and pathways in technology. We work with 18 independent school districts, 69 dual credit high schools, 21 early college high schools, and seven PTEX. That's a huge growth in a very short period of time. So examples of business and industry partners are on this particular slide. We do partner with 1,200 businesses in the Metroplex. They serve on our advisory committees. They partner with us on multiple fronts, and they are critical to our success. Community organizations, we partner with Catholic Charities and other groups of greatest importance as the Tarrant to and through. That's been a huge success in a very short period of time. It includes the public schools, Tarrant County College, and the universities. So it's been quite impressive. Tarrant County College was considered as a partner toward the end of the conversation. It started out with universities, and as a result of us being included, we've discovered that about 50% of the students are starting at Tarrant County College, and they're doing extremely well. Their persistence rate from one semester to the next is over 83%, which is impressive. I'm so sorry to interrupt you. We actually can't have questions from the audience. That's okay. I can answer your question after. We'd be happy to answer questions afterwards. That sound okay to you? Are you sure? Okay, well, we're happy to visit with you. Yes, ma'am. Okay, thank you so much. Dr. LeBlanc. That's fine. I appreciate the participation, actually. In terms of our university partners, you will note that we partner with many, many universities not only throughout the state of Texas, but outside of Texas as well. We have articulation agreements, again, in an effort to be advocates for our students. So when they move on to universities, all their courses should count. And you will note that UTA, UNT, and Texas A&M are among the top universities that the students will transfer to. We also have government partners. We talked about the Small Business Development Center, and we do garner federal grants, such as Title V and TRIO programs, all of which are there to support our students. And then this community has been extremely generous in multiple ways. But one way in which I can demonstrate is the participation in our foundation. We have people from this community that serve on the foundation, raise money for scholarships, and make it possible for even more of our students to get through and finish quickly. So in my presentation, I want to, again, thank you for your time. And I want to say that Tarrant County College is all about solutions, partnerships, and we are working harder than ever in order to serve this community and make it possible for more of our students to finish with a certificate or an associate degree and either transfer to a university or move straight into the workforce. And I thank you for your time, and I'm available for any questions you may have. Thank you, Dr. LeBlanc. And we're excited. On Thursday, we'll have our second annual where achievement begins celebration. We were celebrating your Tarrant County College students that are currently high school students. We are all underachievers. They graduate with their associate's degree from Tarrant County College or college degree at the same time they graduate high school. And that's just another reflective partnership that you have with our area schools. Thanks for all of your work and for giving us an update this afternoon. Any questions for Dr. LeBlanc? Oh, Gina does have a question. Go ahead, Gina. Just a tidbit of information for the audience there. Dr. LeBlanc spoke with such enthusiasm and excitement about Tarrant II and through. I think it's important that people know the founder of Tarrant II and through is leading the city right now. Thank you, Maddie, for that inspiration. Thank you, Gina. I appreciate that. Thank you, Ellen, for being here. We appreciate you. Thank you, Mara. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, moving right along, our next presentation is a briefing about the gun violence unit. Deputy Chief Mark Barthin is here. And Mayor and Council, thank you for the opportunity for me to present to you all the gun violence unit and really highlight some of the significant good work that they're doing to combat gun violence in City of Fort Worth. Gun violence unit is part of the support bureau, investigative support command, and part of our violent personal crime section. It was created in 2021 as a pilot project. We took six detectives and a supervisor on loan. And the goal was to investigate non-fatal shootings in the same way that we would investigate a homicide. Since then, the unit has become a full-time unit of 10 detectives and a supervisor. And as you can see in 2022, they answered 345 calls of non-fatal shootings across the city. So again, investigate non-fatal shootings in the same manner as a homicide, take weapons used in criminal offenses off the streets and arrest the violent offenders that are responsible for these offenses. So one thing that separates them from normal divisional detectives is like we said, we wanna approach this the same way we would a homicide. The investigators are gonna make the scene of every shooting regardless of how severe it is. This allows us to preserve evidence, lock in witnesses. And really it, I guess it excels the speed of an investigation and leads to more successful outcomes. So previously non-fatal shootings were investigated by our divisions. Typically those divisions are overworked. They've got caseloads that are, they're working everything property crimes and then all your non-fatal shootings and non-major offenses is what we would call it. When they were worked by the divisions, the clearance rates were about 16%. They just didn't have the resources to work these cases the way that they need to be worked. So the gun violence unit since their inception in 2021 that clearance rate has jumped to as of February of this year it's actually about 70%. So clearly they're much more successful with getting these cases and bringing them to a successful outcome. So this is the map for the last three years of all the offenses that these guys responded to. And 2021, 2022, and then so far in 2023. So basically what the map show us is it coincides with our PRAs which are our police identified hotspots across the city. And it kind of matches our historical crime trends as well. They correlate with our socioeconomically challenged areas. Some of these areas have more narcotics issues more gang issues. And it really just kind of ties into information that we've already known it just puts the data to it. This is a breakdown of victims and suspects that are known. And then one of the things that we've seen in Fort Worth and really kind of everywhere is road rage shootings are increasing. In 2022, we responded to 16 of them. So far in 2023, we've responded to six. The bottom numbers are better. As far as the gun violence unit is concerned we've only responded to one known shooting that occurred on a high school campus. And so far in 2023, we have not had any. So one of the benefits of the gun violence unit is a lot of times we would get gun victims that would claim that these were accidental shootings. They still investigate these cases just as if it's not an accident. And a lot of times what this turns up is these were family violence offenses or they were engaged in other criminal activity and they were claiming that the shooting was accidental to try and cover up the offense. The gun violence detectives do an excellent job of interviewing witnesses and suspects and victims and are usually able to get to the bottom of the truth on what those calls involved. So the goal is, let's rethink how we investigate these cases. We wanna identify and apprehend the offenders but we also wanna understand how and why these shootings are occurring. We're gonna investigate the cases thoroughly regardless of if we're getting cooperation from the victims. And the goal is to take this information that we learned from these shootings, share it with other units across the city and try to identify our known actors and get them off the streets as quickly as possible to prevent any future gun violence. Moving forward, there's opportunities for this unit to tie into the one second collaborative. If we can identify young adults that are associated with gun violence but aren't necessarily involved with it, we can possibly kinda send them to those deterrence programs and maybe in some of the systemic violence that's happened in our community. We work with our real-time crime center. We are able, with the centralized unit, we're more able to share this information across city departments and across different units within our own department. And that leads to just successfully identifying who these offenders are and it allows us to go into those neighborhoods where we're having those significant issues and target the offenders with as little disruption to the neighborhood as possible. Ties into the chief's vision of the violent crime initiative in Fort Worth Safe where we wanna take that surgical approach and remove the bad actors without disrupting the community. Any questions? Thank you, Chief Carlos and then Elizabeth. No questions, but I wanna take this opportunity to acknowledge the gun violence unit's efficacy. You know, I got to see that, unfortunately firsthand when my mother was shot recently, bringing all those forces in subject matter experts to bear, to expedite an investigation was very illuminating, you know, for me, even among that chaos of that night. Certainly the improvements that you've made in clearance of cases, I mean, nearly 70% from 16% it was, it's very impressive. And I just wanna reiterate, gun violence can touch anyone at any time. Do not consider yourself immune. So my thanks to everyone involved. You know, I can list the names, but you know who you are, you know, supported us that night. And I think this is a great resource to have, if needed, you know, for the residents of Fort Worth. Thank you, Carlos. Elizabeth? Yeah, so when it talks about all leads are followed up on all witnesses are spoken to the day of the shooting. Do we treat juvenile witnesses and I would, any difference in how do you classify them as a witness versus a victim? I'm gonna refer to Sergeant Green. Yes, yeah, I'm Sergeant Green with, I run the unit. Juvenile witnesses, we speak to, we have, we utilize KACU, which is our Crimes Against Children's Unit. They utilize the, I guess the interviewers from there for their criminal activities that will utilize their interviewers for any juveniles of a certain age. And is that witnesses, if there are witness to it as well or- Correct. And that's all within the same day, correct? Yes. Do you happen to know at the top of your head when a police officer is involved in a shooting, how long we have before we interview them? When a police officer is involved in a shooting. CPI? Yep. That would be related to the Major Case Unit. Okay, can you answer that question, Chief? Thank you. So you guys get to see me no matter what. So usually the Major Case Unit, they try and at least interview most of the witnesses within the first two weeks of an offense. I'm talking about a police officer, when a forward police officer- So whenever a forward police officer, of course they have, there are four to the rights of legal representation and usually we get the interview done within three days, 72 hours. Okay. Sometimes it's sooner, sometimes it might be a little bit later, but it's done very quickly. Okay. I just wanna make sure that we're providing our juveniles with the same level of care that we're giving everyone in our community. And so to the extent that we're interviewing a day of an event, I understand operationally, right? We get it and we're able to process these cases faster. But what is the balance that we have with making sure particularly our juveniles, adult is a different standard for me, but particularly our juveniles that we know are most often a witness and a victim or it's a very thin line. So I'm just interested in how that interplays and making sure that we're being careful of that. And so I heard you say, Kaku, are they there for all of them? No, we utilize their interviewers. They have specialty forensic interviewers and they'll come in and actually interview the children for us. We do not approach them, like I said, there's due diligence and care for children and juveniles in these particular incidences. And we definitely take that and consider it. And that's for all of them, right? For all of them. Okay, perfect, thank you, I appreciate that. And then my next question is, we talked about some reductions. Let me get there, sorry, I made a note. I'm moving forward when we talked about some reduction strategies. And specifically, one of the bullet points that interested me was to work with other departments where non-police crime prevention approach is needed. Can you give us some examples of maybe what you're thinking about and what we're already doing? Well, one thing that came up earlier was the presentation with Parks and Recreation and the one-second collaborative and how they're trying to extend hours for certain Rec centers and things like that. Those are the kind of other departments within the city that we would want to partner with. And then there's other programs through the city that are already in place that we can explore how to better utilize them like Hope Farms or even Operation Progress or LVT Rise. Just utilize what we already have to try and maximize and combine our efforts. Cool, are there any projects or programs that we're not doing right now that y'all are looking at or would be helpful? Not, I mean, not that I'm aware of. I mean, I don't know what I don't know. So I'm not sure what's out there. Sure, okay, that's fair, thank you. Questions, Chris? I had a couple of questions. I think the first question I had, this gun unit is investigating non-fatal cases. Who, do they participate in fatal cases or? Absolutely, in some cases, their cases do turn into homicides and when that happens, these guys are trained and operate just like our homicide detectives and they often will keep that case and work it to conclusion. But I guess to answer, you wanna? Yeah, absolutely. If we're two or three days into a case and we've identified witnesses, crime scenes, we've collected evidence, we'll continue with the case. We work directly with homicide in our robbery units very well and we stand in contact with them quite a bit. We will meet with the homicide detectives to ensure that the case is moving properly and smoothly. But again, my background comes from homicide. I teach these guys how to work these cases, so they're pretty much on spot. I review all those cases in clear detail. So to answer your question, if we're well into the case, we'll continue to work the case. Okay, but homicide, I mean, if they're murdered right on the scene, you guys don't have no affiliation with them. Homicide will respond to those particular cases. Okay, and just a question. This is an open-ended question in your investigation process of gun violence. Where are they getting these guns from? It's difficult to say. These, we're seeing a lot of guns that are being recovered from theft issues. We're not seeing the original owners utilizing these weapons. So through theft, through trading off weapons, and that's why we respond so quickly as to we wanted to obtain these firearms as quickly as possible so they don't commit the offense and then go sell or trade this weapon for another firearm. So we almost doubled the number of guns in the city you recovered last year, just our unit alone. But getting out there and getting those guns off the street as quickly as possible is part of it, but before they are traded off. But again, finding out where these guns are coming from, we do work directly with the ATF. They are stationed out of our unit, and we do specific backgrounds on these weapons. And again, we're finding they're either stolen and car burglaries are not reported stolen, but we're not finding a lot of original owners committing these offenses. Does that make sense? Fair. And the original owners, you might not have this, maybe it's the future gender item. How many of those original owners have had multiple guns stolen? I wouldn't have those particular numbers. Yeah, I think- We're finding a lot of people who have a car burglary or some, they may not have their weapon information, they may not report it stolen. You know, it's very difficult to make that determination, especially if people don't take the time to report those thefts, or they just may not realize it is stolen at that particular time. And are we investigating weapons being sold on the street? I mean, I think that's a part of- Well, absolutely. Like I said, we work directly with the ATF. Okay. We communicate with them directly with all our suspects and victims and whatnot. They use our information, correlate with their information and they actually put together operations in conjunction with our unit and they move forward to get these guns off the street. They just actually did a very large sting operation which is very successful. Thank you for those questions, those answers. I just, when I look at the areas of the crimes and the victims and those who have been committing these crimes and look at the age, we look at criminal history. We look at background. A lot of these individuals should not have been able to purchase a legal gun. And so, when you have hundreds of them happening, that has to be something that's happening within our communities, on our streets, in our neighborhoods or at shows or whatever it may be. And so, I think it's very important that we continue to work with what you guys are doing in the process that you're working with gun violence. But I think there's another piece that we're missing that we need to focus on where these guns are coming from. And if we can stop that corporate, then we maybe can save some lives. Absolutely. Thank you. Elizabeth. And this is just my ignorance. Is there a requirement if you have a gun stolen that you have to report that then there's no legal requirement for that, correct? I don't think there's necessarily a legal requirement. There's definitely a logins. Stealing. Possessing or stealing a gun. I just didn't know like if someone had their car broken too and they didn't report. A lot of people don't even have their gun information, serial numbers, things that sort on hand. So. Okay. Would it be helpful? Is that information that would help you further if you knew that it had been connected to a robbery or I guess, is it pertinent to know where it was stolen from or who owned it before in your investigation for future crime prevention? Oh, absolutely. We actually work with the ATF at an I've been program where we identify guns that were used during specific offenses, multiple offenses by collecting specific, well, let's just say, we can identify multiple shooting incidences and how they're related. We find that a lot of our shootings may be related to homicides, robberies. And that way we actually meet with those units. We bring that information together. And we've actually, I think solved a couple of homicides because of that information sharing and developing that. So then would it be useful to bring back something to us plan or whether that's a PR campaign or some sort of concrete program that helps encourage people to report those stolen? I know registration is, can't say that word without people getting wild, but to encourage them to report it as a crime prevention mechanism. Oh, absolutely. That identifies where the thefts are being twofold. Who's taking the guns, of course, where they're coming from and are the people using those stolen weapons the same one who stole the guns. So it would be extremely helpful. So then that would be my charge to y'all is to in the future bring back something to us that we can work amongst here and with Renee to help y'all help us. Thank you. Any other questions from council? No. Thank you both for this update. We appreciate it. Keep doing the good work. Thank you. Next update is a community engagement office update. Renee Tellus and Michelle Goot are going to dazzle us with their presentation. Good afternoon, Renee Tellus, Chief Communications Officer. The communications and engagement team, the small but mighty team members within our team that focus on engagement and not to be confused sometimes with our pal and partner, Victor Turner leading the neighborhood services department. The CPE engagement team is dedicated to building trust, support and open dialogue with community members. Our neighborhood associations are one way in which we could and should do that and they're central to this mission. We are at an important time in the decision making process for the division, including an assessment of what software should house our neighborhood registry and yet still speak to the other programs in the city that it needs to as well as any upcoming budget requests associated with that determination. So kind of as things have developed after about a one year tenure from the previous manager, I assessed I needed someone who could quickly kind of get under the hood, make some fast operational and hiring decisions and I'm thankful to our director of communications and public engagement, Michelle, for taking on this role in a temporary capacity for the weeks ahead during this critical time. To hear that I was under the hood to handle this, so. Thank you and just as a reminder, as Renee said, the community engagement office is part of the communications and public engagement department and this department handles internal and external communications, Fort Worth TV, the website, call center and media relations. So today I'd like to give you all a history, my screen disappeared, that I hit. Okay. Today we'll be covering a brief history of the office and a detailed description of some of the major areas that we focus on. While most of this presentation is about the current and future goals of the community engagement office, I thought it was important to provide a brief history. Thank you for allowing me to share a quick refresher. The Fort Worth League of Neighborhoods was an organization founded in 1985 with 17 charter members. Over the years, the level of involvement and activity of the organization has decreased. During COVID, they did not hold meetings and their website has not been updated since that time. The city has not interacted with them in several years. At one time we had a very close partnership with them, but over the years that diminished as they became less active in the neighborhoods. At one time, the league also refused to share their list of participating organizations with the city, and so currently they are not considered registered with the city. In the 2000s, some of the league duties transferred to what became the city's neighborhood education division, which took on the responsibilities such as maintaining the neighborhood database, providing community organization training and mediation. The initial city team that was formed in the neighborhood education division was staffed by at least one member who previously worked and volunteered with the league of neighborhoods, which led to the division's continued focus on what had previously been the responsibility of the league. In addition to neighborhood organization support, the neighborhood education division also began to deliver educational curriculum and programs for four departments who funded the division. This was stormwater, water, environmental, and code. In 2016, the neighborhood education office was moved to communications and public engagement department. In order to avoid confusion with the new neighborhood services department, the division's name was also changed. On occasion, there is still some confusion between the office and the department. The office also expanded the partnership beyond the four initial departments to include all city departments and programs and also began supporting all city-wide meetings. The office changed to a general fund model in 2020 to better reflect the expansion of outreach and operations for multiple departments. I don't know what I'm doing. Can I get the keyboard down? No, it's actually here. You touched on the monitor. Oh, okay. It's a bit sensitive. Okay, technology. Okay, staffing. The office has nine full-time employees assigned to the community engagement office. One manager, which became, the manager position became vacant as of 27 March. Our volunteer services coordinator has been hired and will begin April 24th. And we have seven community engagement liaisons. Three of those are currently filled. Unfortunately, I don't think any of them could make it today because they're actually out doing presentations at schools. We are in the process of interviewing for the four open liaison positions and hope to have those filled by mid-May. This chart really just shows a timeline of the staffing. And I'm sure you all are very familiar with the fact that we've had kind of an ongoing challenge with keeping positions filled and rotating. Traditionally, the community engagement liaison position experiences turnover. The role requires significant evening and weekend work. We require them to do school presentations during the work week and then go to community meetings at night and then frequently do events on Saturdays. So it's a very time-intensive work and it's not for everybody. The job is also fairly entry-level, particularly in terms of compensation. More importantly, a liaison's work exposes them to the entire city, including job opportunities. Many liaisons have left the office for internal promotions that provide them with increased responsibility and pay. For example, there's a former liaison who is now a police officer and the previous manager is now an assistant director in another department. We are pleased that many of our previous employees are choosing to stay with the city but we wish they would stay with community engagement maybe a little bit longer. We are excited for Amethyst to take on this new job in her former department. And as Renee mentioned, for the next several weeks, I will be heading up the office temporarily to focus on bringing the team together, getting new staff members selected, trained and onboarded. Two of our three members that we have as liaisons have been with the city less than a year. So we have a very young and inexperienced team but I believe the vacancies over the last year and the new staff members are an opportunity to build and expand upon the office's work. So for the focus areas that we have within the office, it has always focused on four general areas. There's been a heavy focus on neighborhoods which includes work with associations and HOAs and the neighborhood registry and database. There has also been a focus on outreach and education material, including presentations and courses delivered to schools and community groups as well as outreach on timely topics. We added volunteer services to the department or to the office in 2018 and that includes one full-time employee. And we also provide meeting support and engagement for special initiatives that have traditionally been led by the communication staff with support from engagement. Moving forward, the goal is to have the community engagement team more involved in this. For the remainder of the presentation, I will cover each of these areas individually. So our focus area neighborhoods, some of the things we do with neighborhoods includes the registration policy and database. We attend meetings. We provide operational support and training. We administer the street topper program and we put on the annual neighborhood award ceremony. I'm gonna go into these in more detail. The office is currently working on transitioning the 20-year-old neighborhood database to more user-friendly format that will include streamlined processes, enhanced visualization of the information and a better user experience for staff and the public. The current system is as much a frustration for us as it is for you. As you know, accuracy of the database is really important and it fell during the pandemic. Staff recently made a targeted effort to connect with all registered organizations. We received over 250 updates and recently provided a list to each district office with organizations that we were unable to contact. I recently reached out to district directors to set up meetings and we will be going over these lists during those meetings to provide updates and get any addition. We have also set up a reminder system within the database so that we can proactively work to get the updates done as quickly as possible. I know you're probably thinking, why can't they keep a database up to date? And why do we have this clunky system that we haven't replaced? Well, our database is more than a list of contacts. It interacts and is directly connected to many internal systems and it combines and displays information from many different departments. It also includes a GIS system which is used by multiple departments and processes to identify organizations that need to be contacted. The primary purpose of the registry is to ensure that we have contacts when the city needs to reach a neighborhood organization and relate information to them about the area, specifically development and zoning information. The annual update process is also being adjusted so that in the past, we've only had one registered contact that we listed. If that person happened to leave the neighborhood or just get a different email address, we would end up with the information going to a black hole. So now when we have the registration process in place, we're asking for multiple contacts so that we have backups if we need it in the system. While neighborhoods and HOAs have been the focus of the registry system, we are also updating the information we have for other organization types, including alliances, redevelopment organizations, and faith-based registries. We appreciate your assistance in encouraging people to complete their registration each year. We are also coming forward with recommended updates to the registration policy with the intent to make it easier for organizations to understand and comply with. Attend meetings with nearly 300 neighborhood organizations. Our department is going to make sure and actively track that the city is making regular touchpoints across the board, particularly when there is timely information. Staff from many departments, not just engagement, isn't are in frequent contact with neighborhoods. This includes NPO's, water, TPW and park and recreation capital projects representatives, library presentations, and outreach by code and other departments, including neighborhood services. We are actively looking at ways to enhance our ability to capture and report all of these touchpoints. We are currently sharing the meeting reports once again that we do whenever the community engagement staff attends a neighborhood meeting, but we only have those reports when we are attending a meeting and completing the report. We wanna find a way to make those more comprehensive and inclusive of all the departments so that you know who is being contacted in the community. And we also have one place where we can go to see everyone who's been involved with a certain organization. Operational support and training. We provide training presentations to community organizations, including how to build trust, officer roles and responsibilities, how to create agendas and have great meetings and how to recruit volunteers. Moving forward, we have plans to make much of this information available in a self-serve format in the form of an online toolkit. We will continue to offer all of the training in person, but would also like to have an online version for those who prefer that as a way to get their information. Sometimes the staff receives pressure to mediate situations and take sides on operational and interpersonal conflicts within neighborhoods. I'm sure you all are familiar with this. Very politically correct, Michelle. I worked a long time on that one. On that one, okay. In order to support organizations during these times, we're working on establishing a network of mentor organizations and leaders that will allow us to match organizations with needs of their peer organizations. For other types of disputes, we are going to work on referrals to the Tarrant County Dispute Resolution Center. When we are asked to, this person doesn't get along with this person, you need to come and fix it. It's really, it's a no-win situation. I don't know if you all are Star Trek fans, but it's a Kobayashi Maru. There is, it's a no-win scenario for us when we go into that. So we also assist organizations with just starting or reorganizing, and we are currently working with seven associations who are in that category. And last, we administer the Street Topper Program in cooperation with TPW. The Street Toppers are paid for by the neighborhoods with signage design approval and installation. And we also host the Mayor's Annual Neighborhood Awards, the last one which was held in February. Thank you to Council Member Flores for serving as our emcee that day. And congratulations to the neighborhood of the year, Oakhurst. And I had nothing to do with the judging. I just need to say that because I live in Oakhurst, so I, so our next focus area is outreach and education. The office provides outreach and education to residents on behalf of a wide variety of departments. This includes both recurring and standard topics and information on special initiatives. Whenever the city has information to deliver to the public, the engagement office connects with neighborhoods and community organizations through the contacts in the database. The election is a perfect example. In the past month and a half, we have attended 40 different neighborhood association meetings and HOA meetings to provide election information. We also use next tour to distribute information on both city-wide and targeted neighborhood areas. We post information for the city-wide and geographic specific programs. Recurring key messages that we post and provide information on include recycling, winter weather, heat advisories, holiday bulk trash pickup, water conservation, election and other topics. We also distribute neighborhood information and outreach on capital projects, the Wi-Fi construction and public meetings. One of our future goals is to look at call center data to determine what messages are needed in different parts of the city. For example, if one part of the city is having a lot of phone calls come in about streetlight reporting, we will increase our communications and targeted messaging to that neighborhood to make sure they know how to report the issues. Deploying education curricula for children and adults. We have a great relationship with our schools and we have a variety of TEKS-correlated courses and lesson plans that both staff and teachers can deploy. Staff delivers these courses also at city libraries and community centers, particularly during the summer. Courses cover many key city messages and these include air and water quality, storm water and other topics. If you've ever heard a child mention Freddie the fish, they learned about him from the city community engagement liaison. We also actively participate in the Fort Worth ISD VitalLink career awareness education program, which brings in rising sixth and seventh graders for career exploration with the city. During COVID, our ability to deploy school programs stopped almost entirely. However, staff was resourceful, they packaged course material, including full lesson plans and made them available to teachers. This was very successful and as a model that we would like to make continuously available, moving towards more tailored presentations for the schools. We aim to create an educator resource page online, which can be used not only by our RSDs, but anyone who happens to homeschool, community groups and others. We are also going to continue our workshop series and we are looking at offering it regionally throughout the year. We will once again survey neighborhood leaders to see what are the topics that they are most interested in when we're designing the workshops. This is just a list of some of the topics that we have and we have the list available online. The adult workshops we primarily do at neighborhood association meetings, HOAs, we're actually coming out and doing them to senior groups at the community centers as well. And then the topics for the children are the ones we do at the schools and summer camp. On our final part of the outreach and education, staff also interacts with residents and distributes city messages by attending community events. The events greatly slowed down during the pandemic as we all know, but the levels are now rising and we're coming together with a comprehensive calendar that lists these events so we can be sure and attend as many as possible. These include community center events and larger events like Earth Day. We also hope to work with our new volunteer coordinator to perhaps develop a group of city staff who can volunteer and help at these types of events. Some other things that the community engagement office, the team is responsible for. In 2018, we added a full-time employee who is our volunteer services coordinator. We have over 25 volunteer programs in the city that attracts around 10,000 volunteers every year. This coordinator is responsible for maintaining the volunteer database, working regularly with all of the department volunteer coordinators, working with a third party background screening vendor and then coordinating all of the different programs within the city. And then finally, meeting support and engagement. While the city engages with the public in multiple ways, it has traditionally been handled ad hoc by departments or by the communication staff. Redistricting, bond election and the race and cultural task force meetings are all engagements that were handled primarily by communications. The goal is for our community engagement team to be more involved in this process, which is a better fit. We will also look at a variety of tools to use for engagement, both in-person and digital. These will include tools like the thought exchange, which was used during the last budget outreach. In closing, I'm excited about this opportunity to continue the work we currently do with our neighborhoods and to look for new ways to engage all the residents in Fort Worth. As we, when we looked at the statistics, we found that 44% of the residents do not live in an area that is covered by a neighborhood association or an HOA. So we wanna, while we continue our support and our strong support for the neighborhood associations, the HOAs and the alliances, we wanna be sure that we don't leave out those other people who might not have an organization that they can go to for information and find ways to engage and educate them. We welcome your input and ideas and I look forward to giving you a future presentation once we have all these new things in place. As I said before, we recognize that neighborhoods are a strong foundation in our community and we continue to support and engage them, but we also want to be sure we provide opportunities for all the residents to provide input to the city. Thank you, Michelle. Any questions from Council? Chris? Just a last comment you just said, the ones that are not associated with the neighborhoods and HOAs, how do we engage them? Do they need to sign up for city news, city engagement? What's the process? The neighborhoods and HOAs? The ones that are not in neighborhoods or HOAs. When we have our community meetings, hopefully we bring in other people. Whenever we have sign-in sheets at events, we always ask people, do you wanna sign up for city news? And so city news is one way that we continue to provide information. We've done a big push recently to get more people subscribing to city news, but we're still at less than 40,000 and for a city our size, we should have more people. In our whole database, I'm getting off to have a big bit, we have Gov delivery and within Gov delivery, when you go in to sign up for Gov delivery, you can sign up for specific topics that you wanna get information on. We have 170 topics and total we have over 900,000 people subscribed to get updates. City news is still a much smaller number than we would like and so we have those other subscribers that we can share information with when we need to, encourage them to sign up for other tools where they can get information. Social media is another way we share information. We're on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram. Next door, I would say when we're dealing with getting information directly to residents in a geographic area, next door with all the stuff that goes on our next door. I think a lot of our council members know a little bit about next door. But, so for the best way is city news to go online and sign up for city news. Is that the best way? Because I do newsletters and I try to encourage people to get involved in the process. So the best way for neighborhoods that are not on HOAs are neighborhood associations to sign up just for the city news online. Yes, and then it goes directly to them. Correct. There's no, and that's the other challenge with neighborhoods in HOAs. Some are really good with sharing the information. Like we send it to the person and it immediately goes to their members and some we realize don't share it and so there's that gatekeeper. And I think the other comments you made that you guys always reach out to neighborhood association and those are neighborhood associations who are registered with the city. And I think that's a key point to put to let people know because there is associations and neighborhoods that's out there that's not registered and they're not getting information. Yes. So I think, and I'm sure you guys are already doing that but making sure they know you get the information if you're registered with the city. If you're not, you're not gonna get the information. And I was just talking with someone earlier that HOAs is we're having a challenge with getting HOAs to register. And so we're doing a big push for ones that we know are out there and organized to tell them to register. I think sometimes they think that the registration is somehow like gonna come in and try and control there and that's the last thing we're gonna do is we don't wanna come in and control it. The city forward doesn't wanna control the neighborhoods. But so I think it's educating them on what it means to be registered. Thank you. Carlos, Gina, you had a question, go ahead. Yes. Carlos or me. Go ahead, Gina. Okay. I wanna thank Michelle for the recent work they gave my office in reactivating a neighborhood association that had been deactivated back in 2019. And so since 2019, people living in the Carver Heights East neighborhood area were missing that connectivity that community engagement provides. And so we now have a group of offices there. And I'm on a mission here after Chris and Elizabeth and the new people came up with the idea of hiring new people, I hired someone to just work on community re-engagement. So that's important to me. One thing that I think we still lack is that traditional public information function. And there's a stark difference between community engagement and public information. And I think we're still missing that. We haven't had that role functioning as it should since Pat Swachino left. And I don't know if we ever hope to get to that area because the larger we grow, the more difficult it's gonna be to train the public to look for some point of communication from a person or an office. I do think on the other hand, the way community engagement is rebuilding, rebranding itself will be an indirect way of getting information to people. But I still think we need the typical PIO and that's a topic that I think we have to discuss with David. On the other hand, I will tell you that I have a few neighborhood associations and a real good mentors to new ones. You all hear me often talk about the John T. White Neighborhood Association. The reason why the people in East Fort Worth are real, real aware of zoning changes is because James Hooks will call development services every Monday to ask what's coming at us. And so they'll put out these red alerts on their Facebook page. And that has helped a lot of neighborhood associations nearby. But we hope to continue reactivating those who have been deactivated. But when boundaries are territorial and cause a problem, we'll be trying to start crime watch operations that way. For example, there's a Gene Capers edition that right now is part of Rosedale Park Edition in my district, but those two neighborhoods don't really connect. And so to keep the peace, we may just try to do a crime watch organization for Gene Capers, but thanks so much, Michelle and your team Terrence Howard was awesome. Terrence Hamilton was awesome. But if you think about it for since 2019, no activity because paperwork, you just didn't make it to city hall. When we find neighborhoods that don't have those associations, that's the best way to recruit them to start one because usually they're mad about information they didn't get, but they would have gotten if there had been an association. So thank you for your work. Thank you, Carlos. Thanks, Mayor. Michelle and Renee, I don't need to tell you that as of recently, that department has experienced a lot of turnover and thusly some turbulence there. From where I sit in my council office, I saw some noticeable disconnects in the input that I would get from some neighborhood orgs that would tell us, well, where are they? Why aren't they coming to our meetings anymore? So I can't overemphasize enough how important it is to have a presence there. As a council member, I try to make my meetings as much as possible. I still haven't mastered the art of being in two places at once, but it's helpful to have someone else when your district director can't go in there as well. To help you out and to cover that base. Now, one specific thing, and Renee, we've talked about this, I think, I know with amethyst I had, but bylaws, that request comes up every now and then, especially when you have a lot of turnover in a given neighborhood organization, a new one's coming on, or they come to the point where we need to revise our bylaws and they need some expert advice, right? Just to put a bug in your ear, if you can have someone that can be ready beyond just whatever post-it training we have, come time that they can rely on a subject matter expert to help them out with that regard. I've gone through it myself, I've given them pointers. It can get a little intensive as far as the labor. Now, dispute resolution, all I'm gonna say about that is, please keep our council offices in the loop on that, because oftentimes, like it or not, we're very well aware of those dynamics that go on there and that can be helpful instead of you walking in to something you may not find too pleasant. All right, the street topper program. Yes. Right now, TPW administers this. So when you say you're gonna administer it, what does that mean? I mean, does it still stay under the wheelhouse of TPW? I mean, they control the funding and all, or you're just strictly administrative. The, we work with the neighborhoods. When a neighborhood is interested in getting street toppers, we'll work with them on the design, the colors, getting all of that ready. And then we work with TPW to do the install and the neighborhoods cover the cost of that. Okay, so it stays there? Yes. You're still putting those signs. We're not gonna be. Okay. Climb in it, Bladders. Okay, perfect. Thank you, that's all I have. You have questions from council? Okay, thank you very much, Michelle. We appreciate it. Thank you. Council, we'll move to our last presentation, the briefing on solid waste technology with Brandon Bennett and Steve Keller with Waste Management. Brandon, I'll turn it over to you. Yay. Okay, so we've got some really good and exciting news for you, but before we get to it, we have to go through a little boring stuff and talk about where we've been and how we got to this excitement for you this afternoon. We wanna cover again the contract overview, customer service, education efforts, and how all of these things have resulted in the implementation of a smart truck technology. We currently, we have for a number of years now since 2003, had a contract with Waste Management of Texas to collect our residential garbage. Our commercial garbage is free market. We have a grant of privilege system where the free market commercial haulers pay us a percentage of gross receipts in order to drive on our roads. But on the residential side, our customers only have one option and that option is Waste Management of Texas. And in that contract, they are required to have an MWBE subcontractor and that contracts for 25% and it's always at 25% or sometimes a little bit more and that's with night waste services and they've been a great partner for the city. Both of them have been a great partner. So we have a large number of contractors that work for us in solid waste. And today is our day to brag a little bit about solid waste and night waste services. Historically, we haven't always had this contract prior to 2003, actually go back into the 90s. We were like most major cities in Texas. We collected our own garbage. We had our own trucks, our own staff. In fact, the MLK property where Waste Management operates its trucks out of today, that used to be a city facility with city garbage trucks and city staff. And we did the right thing. We moved from it being a city garbage service to a private garbage service. We are in the business of public safety and repairing roads and all the other things that are unique to government and solid waste is a private sector option that we have available to us. It saves us money and increases our service level and our options. In the contract, there was an initial 10 years and every 10 years or so, we can, or a little bit before 10 years, we can extend it another 10 years. We could do that four times. We can go all the way to 20, see this one is up in 2033. We can go another 10 years. No, yeah, we can go another 10 years from there if we wish or we can go out and we can place it on the open market and go out for competitive bid. That's not unusual in solid waste. When you look at the number of trucks that are required and how much each one of those trucks costs and you look at the level of knowledge that entails to pick up garbage every day and to do it correctly without any gaps, all of that is important to have long-term contracts so that the company can invest in its vehicles and we can invest in that knowledge so that it's seamless to the public that if there are garbage routes on Tuesday, it gets picked up on Tuesday and they're not any of the better. When you start switching contractors every 10 years or so, you start getting these big gaps in service, you start having problems with service and that's something that we want to avoid. Our last contract negotiation was wrapped up around December of 2021 and in that process, we asked waste management for a number of new things and one of those was some smarter and innovative technology that we could employ in the day-to-day garbage collection process. In doing that, again, we always look at our goals and guiding principles. We always want the best service. We want to be neat and clean and safe as a city. We want to decrease our costs wherever possible, preserve the landfill that's critical and then of course maximize our contracting opportunities to meet business equity goals and so in extending that contract, we were able to meet all of those things and some of the highlights from that is and I know Carlos and Ms. Bivens has been around for a while that we had this antiquated system where people could not put extra bags out. They had to go to the grocery store and buy a pay bag and then they had to know to do that and then they had to know to have a supply of them on hand and then sometimes people would have a couple extra garbage bags and the lid on the garbage container would be up and waste management under the old contract didn't have to pick up a black plastic bag outside of cart and didn't have to pick it up when the lid was standing open and that resulted in a lot of customer service impacts and it also resulted in a messier city that when you don't pick up people's garbage and it's overflowing, it'll continue to overflow until they get home and then they have another week's worth of garbage they gotta figure out what to do with that under the new contract, right? If it's a garbage bag that's sitting out if the garbage cart, if the lid is sitting open they're gonna pick it up and they're gonna empty it. Now they charge us for that extra service and as we develop this technology we'll be coming back to all of you with some budget recommendations, budget decisions on how we would assess that feedback to the property owner for putting the extra bags out or having the overfilled cart. We are a pay as you throw city that people pay by the amount of garbage that they put out there and we don't wanna be a city where we just say you can pile up 10 garbage bags outside of cart or something along those lines because that results in additional litter before the truck comes around as animals get into it and tear it up. So we were able to do that in a very large degree because of the smart truck technology that we'll go over in more detail and it essentially is there's computers on the trucks there's cameras on the trucks and then they use artificial intelligence and that intelligence gets smarter every day and we'll be able to talk about that and show you some pictures later on. And then we also established some performance metrics to drive down miscollections by 20%. We were just into that measuring period right now as you all know that in today's economy finding staff, retaining staff, finding parts for your trucks, replacing trucks that all of these have had an impact on the solid waste industry as a whole not just on our local solid waste collection folks. And then created incentives for waste management. Historically, it's been a penalty if you don't pick up a cart and you don't then go back and get it within 24 hours there's a liquidated damage that we hit you up and it's all penalized, penalized, penalized. So we also built into this contract some performance incentives and that is if you reduce the number of miscollections by 20% over this quarter then we will reward you by not charging you the liquidated damages. So the better you do at avoiding the frustration in the first place then the better it's gonna work for you financially. So our customers win and the contractor wins. Also on the new contract again focusing on landfill diversion based system we wanna increase recycling. We'll go over that a little bit more. And then there was always a concern whenever we don't go out and competitively bid these contracts did we get the best deal? And I'll tell you we hired a consultant. This is a consultant that works with cities all over the state. He'll tell you that as he did when we came to you and said we'd like to move forward with it we got a good financial deal with waste management and we also got one of the leading contractors for waste collection in the nation. And part of that is particularly for our smart truck technology is that innovation and creativity that we probably would not have gotten if we had gone simply out and done a low bid type document. So when you look at this there's an example there when you have cameras on a truck it records as it's going down the road we can now say such things as was somebody's cart out or not out was there a couch that was sitting out that we collected or didn't collect that that's the benefit of it. It also and I'll give us a little bit more but it also helps aside from solid waste I will tell you that in this last week I can't talk about it or actually is today I can't talk about it in great detail but we have a society where everybody has a video ability on their phone and with waste management having these smart cameras on their trucks it's not just about collecting garbage but it's also about public safety and they're the only great partner to code compliance but very much into public safety and working with the police department so as an example there's a camera on the side of the truck maybe there was a burglary at a house and that camera picked up the suspect data picked up the license plate of the car that was there doing the burglary things like that that will help our police department reduce crime. On the residential collection service details we always feel like we need to remind y'all because we don't talk about solid waste as much as we used to. Garbage recycling yard waste that's once a week and then bulk collection is once a month. So if you look at this and you kind of average it out that's about 13 service attempts per household per month. The number of collection customers we have is a little over 250,000 you do the math and that's approximately 3.3 million service attempts every month. It's a lot. And so when we get the calls where we perhaps missed somebody's cart that day when you look at those numbers they're relatively low in fact they're less than a half a percent. So getting into that half a percent if you look at this to date we've been doing really well. So when you look at our service success rate almost at 100% for garbage and recycling and yard bulk is down a little bit. Some of this has to do sometimes with the amount of bulk or the damage. So sometimes what happens is when there's storms and there's wind damage people drag the bulk after the truck goes by and then they report it to us that it was out when it should have been when it wasn't but it's still reported as a service miss. So we expect the bulk in this time of year when you look at March, April, sometimes into May those numbers tend to be a little bit lower because of the storms. Overall when you add all those things together there at the right side you can see that over time we've been up there pretty close to 100% and that's awesome. Reroute we just it's been a few months since we did the reroute then we know that there were some concerns. We wanted to just give you a quick update about a third of our households were rerouted back in November. The benefits were we knew we would have fewer missed collections and assurance that more routes would be completed on time. We wanted that predictability and since the route change garbage and recycled misses versus last year have decreased 8.8% and garbage and recycled routes not completed are down 36% and that's huge because some of our routes were so big and so far away from the landfill that they weren't able to pick up the Wednesday on Wednesday or the Tuesday on Tuesday. Now we're seeing a much higher completion rate of that. And again there were lessons learned on the timing of communications. I can just say overall that on the private sector that the waste haulers deal with reroutes all the time they don't necessarily work with councils and others and how they communicate but they've got a dead set on how they communicate with the customer. That seemed to work pretty good. We had several hundred customers over about a two to three week period that had repeat problems. A lot of those were tied to a new driver and a new area and things like cul-de-sacs and software glitches. So overall it was pretty painless, much different than a city to the east that went weeks and months and even a council member up there had to pay for garbage service for some of their constituents. So it was pretty much I feel comfortable saying for the customer it was seamless, it's never perfect. There are always people that will not get the mailer or get the thing at the door or get the additional information and sometimes it takes a couple of weeks to get it. I will say we always picked up people's garbage, right? We didn't charge anybody extra and we went the extra mile to make sure their garbage got picked up. QR codes again, you know, this falls on the heel of Michelle's presentation. We continue to push our apps for people to use them but it's user friendly for both a clean and safe city to report litter and illegal dumping and things like that but it's also for recollect a great way for people to get reminders on when their garbage day is and when their bulk month or bulk week is for the month so they don't miss that. Waste management evolved in technology and with that I'm going to ask Steve Keller from Waste Management to come up and talk about some of the new technology. Well, you're on the wrong slide. I think we're starting on clean slate. Okay. All right. Hey council, good to have you here today. I can see the excitement on your faces that we're talking about the exciting world of garbage. There's nothing more exciting than garbage, correct? Yeah, go ahead and say that. My name is Steve Keller. I've been working with the city of Fort Worth. You may find this crazy but starting in May, it'll be my 24th year as the representative of Waste Management to the city of Fort Worth. I look around this table and I see so many different people over that 24 years that have had great impact on what the future of Fort Worth is. You know, you all may not believe this. You know this to be true. There's a few things that are more personal than garbage to a resident out there. They want their garbage picked up. They want it done in a timely manner. When it doesn't happen, they're gonna call y'all and they're gonna call somebody and be upset about it. But Waste Management has partnered with the city of Fort Worth to bring into effect a program, the regular collection program that we're doing right now. And I just want to mention this, 23 years ago, 22 years ago, when they started talking about converting Brandon talked about the collection system is right here. You don't realize what impact that has 20 years later. But during the COVID pandemic, the mere fact that Fort Worth had changed their collection system from citizen containers, you know those galvanized cans that you used to see out there to an automated system, you had very few glitches in your garbage collection system during that COVID time. During that COVID period, there was about a 35% increase of volume that was at the curb. And the reason is everybody was at home and they were looking for things to do and they were cleaning out their closets and their garages and all that kind of stuff. And the amount of volume that came to the curb was incredible, but we were able to keep up with that because of decisions like folks like y'all right here made during that time period. And I think that's interesting. Brandon said we've been a good partner. This is just some of the examples of what we do. The Clean Slate Program in particular has been a really exciting thing. We partnered with the Presbyterian Night Shelter to identify people that were needing jobs out there. Have worked in this program. We've had several employees, several folks that became full-time employees at Waste Management through this program. It's very, very cool. The heroes on the water, we've been doing this out at our Wildlife Habitat Sanctuary, which is just west of downtown Fort Worth at our closed landfill. Councilman Beck, we've had a lot of the veterans out there and we continue to do this several times a year. It's a real cool program. Next slide, Brandon. This is just some of the examples of the things that we've been involved with from the Trinity Trash Bat to the Habitat for Humanity and those kind of things. Okay, Brandon. I'm going to talk about Smart Truck just real briefly here and tell you some of the things that have happened. Waste Management is the leader in innovation in this industry. There's no question about it. We do things, seven, 10 years later, our competitors start following up with this. And this Smart Truck technology in particular is very cool. There's been cameras on trucks forever out there. We could, you can take all the pictures that you want, but what do you do with the data? How do you, as Brandon mentioned, 3.3 million service opportunities a month? How do you disseminate what needs to be seen? What is personal? What happened on that residence collection day? And Waste Management pioneered our own technology as proprietary, we call it Smart Truck, and it's an artificial intelligence-based technology like what Brandon was saying right there that scrubs the data down to where circumstances that have taken place can be disseminated and be looked at and be seen and be told to the resident that may be complaining or needs educating on what is out there. Go ahead, Brandon. This is just a little bit about the Smart Truck technology itself. What it does, it validates service in real time. So right now, while we're sitting around this table and our trucks are out there on the streets performing services, it is validating every individual service on the garbage and the recycling side that's taking place. There's what it does, the platform collects video footage. It pinpoints the location of the truck, and then it has this telematic data. I had to ask exactly how to describe that. That is, the circumstance has taken place. It goes from the truck to the cloud, and then to customer service where it can be used for verification circumstances in there. That is one of the real innovative things that we've come up with. It does have service verification. It has the ability to share pictures and images with the residents that might be calling in. It's that I have a problem and you miss me or whatever it is, and we can pinpoint and show exactly what took place at that resident in real time. It's also accessible by the call center and the solid waste staff, and it increases program efficiency and effectiveness. Okay, Brandon. Now, this is just kind of a schematic of showing what the truck looks like in the camera positions and what it does. One thing in particular, you see the red button up here. What that is, we, you know, not everybody puts their card out every day or puts their card out on time. Sometimes they might be in the kitchen fixing breakfast for their kids and hear the truck coming down the street, like this happened recently to one of our members here. I think it was, was it you? I thought it was the mayor that just said. Yeah, yeah. I wasn't trying to pick on you, Mayor, but. So, and now I'm concerned that there are pictures of me in my pajamas in the middle of my street waving down the truck. Well, I will tell you that we do not share that information with anybody, so. Excellent. Can we get in on a freedom of information? Elizabeth would like it, I can tell. Right, right. And your sweet driver, I think I told you this, got out of the truck, noticed, because I took two cans across the street because I had to cheat, because I was late that morning at 7.05. And he got out and he brought my cans back up and then proceeded to tell me, and I quote, I've been doing this for a long time and I've noticed the women are the one doing the work that they don't do anything. I thought it was really, really funny. Well, Mayor Parker, what happened that day when he drove by your house is that he hit that red button and it said nothing out. And it's because that does happen. And you'll be surprised how many people are called and say, they missed me today. Well, you were in there fixing breakfast for the kids and forgot to put your card out and now you're calling back in, but it does do that. It also has these two other cameras over here and we're going to show you what these cameras do. You know, this is just all of the technology type things, but the real interesting part is that it records a video of the Ben's contents when it is being dumped. It actually records every service that takes place out there. Okay, go ahead, Brenna. The smart truck technology means a cleaner, greener, safer, Fort Worth. The camera, Brenna mentioned the bags. One of the things that the staff insisted to us is because in the old system, and this was debated around this table ad nauseam for a long time, we only picked up carts that were filled correctly. And that means they weren't snow-conked. So if you had four or five extra bags and you raised your lid up and you put those up on top and they were sticking this far up above what the cart is, you didn't get collected in the past. If there were bags sitting outside on the ground, those things did not get collected. So Brandon made it clear and his staff made it clear what we want is, if it's out, let's get it picked up. And so that's what we can do with this technology. And as he mentioned, we do get a fee for doing that. It's not huge. But how do you verify that? Well, these cameras take these pictures and show exactly what is out there on the ground. It also helps with the litter. And I know litter is a big focus of this council and this staff. And I think Brandon will say it's had a tremendous impact on litter in the neighborhoods by the fact that we're getting all these extra bags. Can I ask you a quick question about that process? Because I know I've had it happen to me with my recycle bin. Sometimes you get odd-shaped boxes that you can't break down completely. But my recycle bin isn't full, but it might be open. So do we get charged for that as well? Is there a mechanism that you can tell? Like this was just a... I'll come ahead. We have a video to show you. And I think we can cover it. That'd be a good time to cover that. Yeah, you want to go to the videos? No, I think... You want to go and keep going? Okay, let's do that smart truck in action. Okay, here's what it does. It takes two pictures that are captured at each one of the services. It takes a picture prior. And then it takes a picture. This thing's called the inclementor. That's the arm on these trucks. Once that arm is engaged and starts moving out, a video starts. And it shows the actual action of that service taking place right there. It captures an eight-second video. It shows the lifting of the container, five seconds after it's triggered, and it shows the refuse being dumped into the hopper itself. Now, the mayor, I said this, I hope you weren't putting this out there, you know, what happened to her. We are guaranteeing to you guys we will not share the images or the customer information with any third parties for marketing or data mining. This is proprietary. This is city of Fort Worth. It is not going to be shared out there, okay? That also means with my colleagues, correct? That's right. Well, I don't know if they've noticed, but there's kind of a red dot in front of all of their homes to identify where it is. Oh, they didn't know that. We really don't know that, but... I don't really want it because I don't want you to have mine. You also didn't say harassment. You thought it was going to be used for harassment. Right. The purpose of the photograph for videos is to educate and inform the city and WM about what's going on at the customer level so we can improve collection services, diversion, and recycling. Our images are shared with the service address customer on record, and they can be shared with the city communications team to illustrate service issues or successes for the community there. Okay, Bryn. Okay, how is it used? Well, no, I just did that one, Bryn. Yeah, you got it. Okay. All right, in the future, and we're working with the staff right now, by the way, I want to say this, I've worked with several solid waste staffs in all of these years that I've been working with city of Fort Worth. You have the best, the finest solid waste staff that I've worked with. Jim Kiesel and his team, Christian Harper, Sharon Gamble, they are tremendous. They are on top of what they do, and it is a pleasure to work with them. They're tough when they need to be, but they're fair, and I think that needs to be said to you guys, and you're very fortunate to have the far-looking folks that you have on that staff right now. The future uses, and this has been talked to us, Jim, and has brought it up to us, recycling. Recycling contamination is one of the biggest problems in our industry, and it's not just Fort Worth. It is everywhere. People do not realize what they can and cannot put in there. Now, y'all've done a tremendous amount of education, and still, their people don't get it. Well, we're working in the future, as this technology keeps being developed, to be able to help identify contaminated recycling, and to help, you can use that education, that information to educate your residents out there about this is what you did wrong in there. Does that make sense? Okay. The current state, I will say this right now, every stop linked to WM, excuse me, customer database, every cart lift and its contents is captured on the camera. The averages are reviewed for overage contamination, and that's part of this AI technology that we provide. We do all of that work and then send it to the city to be verified, whether it's a real case or not. And in the future, notification and education sent to the customer to drive the right behavior out there, okay? And then we do have a couple of videos, I believe we're next, just to show you a little bit. This is just real short. I'm sorry, it's a little bit blurry, but we'll wanna show you what takes place as the cart is being picked up. And let me just set the stage a little bit on this video. So this is a camera inside the hopper, and you'll see the cart come up and empty. Where artificial intelligence is gonna be key to us is let's pretend in this case, it's a recycle cart. It's garbage cart, but let's pretend it's a recycle cart. The way we do recycle cart checking now is we have to send staff, they drive out to the neighborhoods, they have to pick up the recycle carts and see what's in there. And then determine whether it's garbage or not garbage. With artificial intelligence, it does it all without staff intervention. But it takes some time, it takes months and months of emptying garbage for the artificial intelligence to recognize, number one, it's a recycle cart. And then number two, there's a black plastic bag. When this gets, over the next few months, as this gets better, we'll be able to send notices to residents saying there was a garbage bag in your recycle cart without any staff intervention to speak of. So let's, this is really kind of cool to watch it, pick up the cart and empty it. And there's the black plastic bag, right? So artificial intelligence will be able to identify that. It will create an exception. And then that will then go into a file which we can send the letter off to the customer. And Brandon, it will know that address. Now it's not gonna know the human being or anything. We use parcel data and all that kind of stuff. But it's, so you'll have the ability to send information to that particular address to say, this is what you did wrong or here's how to do it right. So we have one more video to show you, at least one more here. And so what Steve was saying, what's other thing that's cool about artificial intelligence is it will start predicting where your carts are. So we're creatures of habit. So people at a certain address, people that live at a certain address, they'll put their carts on the left side of the driveway or the right side of the driveway. And when those carts aren't where the computer system is anticipating that they're going to be, it starts thinking to itself, did they not put their carts out, is something different. It also, because it knows where people will typically put their carts, when there is a violation or an exception, it will be smart enough to know whether it's your cart or your neighbor's cart. And then staff will be able to verify by watching the video, the same thing. In this case, I want to kind of set the stage that let's pretend that you're a customer and you get home from work and your recycle cart is not empty. Still got all the recycled material in it. So you call the call center. Yeah, it never happens. That never happened. You call the call center and you say they missed my recycle cart. The call taker can then look up your address and watch the video that I'm about to show you and to see, number one, was your recycle cart out when the truck went by? And then number two, did they empty your recycle cart, right? And so let's play the video as if you're the customer on the line and let's see what the driver saw. You can see that house didn't have anything out. Yeah, get out and out. So, and then... Yeah. Oh, and there's a recycle cart, right? And as you can see in the video, it stops at the recycle cart. It picks up the recycle cart and it attempts to empty the recycle cart. In this particular case, they had stuffed full boxes, they hadn't broke them down and the boxes were in there so tight that the boxes didn't come out. So it wasn't a failure on the part of the contractor, right? It was an opportunity for the call taker to help educate the citizen that you have to break the boxes down because sometimes they won't come out of the cart. But to speak to that also, if the cart lids are open just a little bit, right? The AI is not gonna flag that as a violation or to charge you, right? I want everybody to know that. If it did, there's still human intervention on this where we look at the videos and say, it's kind of like when you slow down for a stop sign and you almost stop and there's no other traffic around, right? A police officer's probably not gonna write you a ticket for that, that you were close enough, kind of with the recycling with this also. If you're close enough, you're good to go. And one of the things about that also, most of these overage bags that we're talking about are the ones that people are leaving on the ground outside of their cart. Did that require the driver to get out, reload the cart back up and dump them back? That's where most of these instances are taking place. And by the way, if you'll notice, he showed you the video, the other camera angle is showing the location and it's pinpointing the GPS of what that house is right there. This video that we just saw, if you were the customer calling in, the call taker can ask you for your email address and actually email this video to you at home so that you can watch the video for yourself. I hate to mention red light cameras, but it's almost like the red light cameras. I don't know how many times I thought I didn't run a red light only to look at the video and say, yeah, I guess I did, right? It's kind of the same thing with the car. That way people can see, yes, my cart wasn't out when the truck came by or my cart was. And that's really a feel good story because I think when you work in solid waste for a number of years, you start feeling like people put their carts out late, the truck really didn't miss it, but they're trying to say the truck missed it. I will tell you the vast majority, the super majority of the time, the contractors are not, or the contractors are missing the cart and our citizens are honest when they say they missed the cart, right? And you say, well, that's a good thing. Well, of course it's a good thing. It shows that our residents when they call and they report this thing as they're being honest and they're being reasonable and then we work to make it right for them. And again, a lot of the missed cart collections are simply just having a right number of drivers and the right number of trucks and having routes that we can get to in a single day. The call center is an integral part to this and Sharon Gamble and her staff do wonderful, you know, they're unsung heroes sometimes that you think of all the calls that come in for all the various things in the city and how well that Sharon and her staff do. In this particular case, we've pretty much talked about the highlights that when somebody calls about a missed cart, they can look at it online. They can see where the truck is, right? They can see as that person's area been serviced yet. There's all of this data that we will continue to make better use of. And then just kind of a geeky nerdy slide here, but when you think of artificial intelligence, it gets better over time. If you look at over the past 10 months between staff getting used to the system, the drivers getting used to the system and the artificial intelligence generating better data for us, we've been able to drop the data errors in the system by over a third and that'll continue to climb. That's what the graph shows. It shows we are all getting smarter and more customer friendly as we move forward on this and that's exactly how it's supposed to happen. With that, any questions? Any questions from council? No. I don't have any questions. I'll say thank you when we had the switch and change. I'm still getting some complaints from neighborhoods that things are missed, but I appreciate staff, Christian Harper. We've been blowing him up, so appreciate that and all this technology is great. Because I know sometimes it is people haven't put their trash out and now that we have the video. Well, I'd say that now y'all are all official trash rats for the rest of the day. Welcome to the club. Thank you. Anybody else? Thank y'all very much. Appreciate you. Council, that's less of our presentations. Any future agenda items for Mr. Cook? Go ahead, Allen and Michael. And Gina. Thank you. Thank you, mayor. Thank you, Chris. So I have two IR that I'd like to request today. Both are related to police. The first one is, I would like an IR related to police response times. Specifically, I would like a breakdown of calls requesting police response, the average response time by priority. And I would like it by patrol division and council district if possible with reflection of the new council districts based on when it will probably get to us. The second one I would like an IR related to preventative patrol time. And I would like to understand its impact on crime statistics overall, how much we're doing currently and what other safe cities or cities that are widely regarded as safe are doing in that area. Michael, Gina, go ahead. I'd like to talk about how we can get food to school kids when school is out. You know, we learned during COVID that there were people who had severe food challenges. Right now I've got a food truck that's in my district that's feeding people but it's not in the right zone for it to be taking place in. And so I think we could work with neighborhood services and zoning to see what can we do to help get food to the school kids when school is out because mobility is gonna be a problem. And if we can just work together with the school district, neighborhood services and other agencies, we need to address this food insecurity during summer again. Michael? Yeah, I'd like to request an IR on, we have a neighborhood that is close to the TCU that's been in the overlay but looking at all the development that's happening around it. So an IR about from zoning probably preservation staff on what zoning changes might be necessary in that area to preserve that neighborhood and also what, talk a little bit about conservation districts, historic preservation districts and the TCU overlay and what those implications might be if we open that up again and what that would look like and what that process would look like and what voices might need to be around the table, et cetera, a full comprehensive look at that. Do you mind if I go ahead with the tag team on that? So that's actually coming on the east side of the university as well. And so also with that, what we can do with our building standards because a lot of these homes look like single family on the surface but when you start examining plans they're very clearly stealth dorms and so to what extent we might be able to tighten up our building codes to prevent some of that as well. Thank you. Any other future general items council? I have one quick one and it may be in the normal cadence of updates on non-1 communications, specifically could be an IR presentation how we're handling when you get a text from 911 once you've called in or you text 911 how they're handling that. I personally had a little mix up and so I'm just kind of curious what the procedure is and y'all can handle it however you think is best. Thank you. Let that meeting adjourned.