 to chair some. Okay, no problem. I'll give you the brutal hard difficult parts. Thanks, Steve. That's how you show your love, right? You're just preparing me. That's right. We are at one minute now. Thank you very much. And I want to welcome everyone to today's meeting of the Durham City Council. This is a work session. It's at one o'clock on June 4th, 2020. Another extraordinary work session of the Durham City Council. They're not as extraordinary as they used to be. Maybe I should stop saying that. They've become routine. But I'm still very grateful to the staff, our tech staff, our clerk's office, our public affairs office for all the work they do to make this possible. So thank you all so very much. And we're really grateful. I know my colleagues are as well. I'm now going to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Mayor Schultz here. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Councilmember Caballero. Here. Councilmember Freeman. Councilmember Middleton. Here. Councilmember East. Here. Thank you. Thank you very much, Madam Clerk. I'm now going to ask if there are any announcements by members of the council. And I'm going to begin by calling on Councilmember Caballero. Thank you, Mayor. I was wondering if we could hold a moment of silence for Aurea Soto Morales. And before we do that, I would like to say a few words. Of course. Thank you. So I'm going to say it in Spanish first and then in English. We're going to do a moment of silence for Aurea Soto Morales, a eight-year-old girl who was part of our community here in Durham, attended the Creekside School and died due to complications from the COVID-19 virus. Yesterday I had the opportunity to talk to the father of Aurea, Mr. Salvador Morales, and Mr. Salvador Soto. And I wanted to thank him for taking the time to talk to me. I told him that we were going to do this moment of silence. And I also asked him if he wanted to share something with the Durham community, with the Durham community of his daughter. And he told me that he wanted to share this, that she always told him, Papi, please carry me, I want to fly. And he also told me that she always wanted to be a mariposa. And at this moment I am thinking that Aurea is now being like a mariposa. We are thinking of the family of Soto Morales. We are praying for you. And thank you very much. Yesterday, excuse me, on June 1st, Aurea Soto Morales, a eight-year-old Durham resident, died from complications of COVID-19. She was a Creekside elementary school student. I know that the community at Creekside is also very, is mourning her loss and grief and grieving. I had the opportunity of speaking with Aurea's father yesterday. And I just wanted to say thank you to him for taking the time to speak with me and shared with him that the city of Durham would be holding a moment of silence in honor of his daughter. I asked him if there was something he would like to share, a story or something about his daughter. And he said that she always told him to throw up in the air because she wanted to fly, that she always wanted to be a butterfly. And so today I'm thinking about how I'm hoping and praying that she is now a butterfly and is observing all of us. To the Soto Morales family, we are thinking of you. We are praying for you. May God bless you. Thank you. Council Member Cabillero, thank you so much for that. Thank you for being in touch with the family. And thank you for bringing us this. And now I will ask for all of us to join together in a moment of silence in memory of Aura Durham's butterfly. Thank you. These are hard times in our city in many ways. And I don't know that there's a harder time than losing a child. So thank you for that. All right. We'll now move on to other announcements by members of the council. Mr. Mayor, can you hear me? Yes, we can, Council Member. Welcome. I apologize. I was wrapping up a call. No worries. We're glad to have you. And I truly appreciate Council Member Cabilleros bringing the Soto Morales family into this space to make sure that we're not missing how much grief our families are experiencing in their community. I'm hard-pressed based on an interaction I had yesterday to not give some more depth to the conversations that I keep hearing around the current unrest beyond the COVID-19 context. And I just want to make sure that I take a couple of minutes and just say that there is a disconnect for folks who are just waking up and just realizing what's been happening and what the impact has been for Black and Brown folks in this community for a long time. I woke up this morning reminded of a trip I took last summer because I was involved with the National Black Caucus of the local elected officials where I had the opportunity to visit the National Civil Rights Museum, I'm sorry, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. And I just want to express just how far this goes. When I say to people that I feel it in my soul and I feel it in my DNA, there's a sense in this country that because of the loss in the videos that we're seeing that that's where this is stemming from. And I want to stress to people that they understand that this is coming from as far back as a mega-evers and as far back as that Mississippi Civil Rights Museum was able to list all of the people who were lynched back in front of a panel filling a room of names and people that have been lost in our community across the country and as much as I want to be okay in this, I'm not. And as much as the grief of losing a child, whether the COVID or to gunfire or to anything, doesn't sit well with me, it doesn't sit well with me to see white adjacent people or white people try to act as allies and not acknowledge the full human existence of black people in this country. And it's really starting to eat at my soul. I want to be clear that white violence is the violence that people are responding to. And it's not limited to police. It is not limited to these incidents. It is the experience that folks in this country have had for over 400 years. And I just couldn't not say that this afternoon. Thank you. Councilmember, are there any other announcements by members of the council? Mayor Pro Tem, do you want to talk now about the racial equity commission? Yes, I'm sorry, totally forgot about that. So thank you for reminding me. So the mayor and I had a brief meeting with the co-chairs of our race equity task force in order to discuss the work that they've been doing and the recommendations and the form for the presentation of those recommendations to council and to the community. They're going to be ready to report back to us in early July. And after some conversations with staff, we think that it would be best for us to hold an additional special meeting in early July for them to present their recommendations to us. The meetings that we have scheduled already have pretty full agendas and being that we're on Zoom, we don't want to overload folks. So I'd like to propose that we schedule a special meeting on the first Monday in July, which is July 6th in the evening at our normal meeting time, 7 p.m., if folks are available then, to hear from the race equity task force and discuss their recommendations. Thank you very much, Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. I really appreciated in having heard their, having talked to our co-chairs, Judge O'Neill and Karen Haldeman about their plans, I'm excited to hear their report. And I think what we should probably do now, rather than everybody check calendars, is ask our administration if they could see if that July 5th date works for folks. And that meeting we would have the, Charlie's holding up July 6th, is it? That's what you meant? That's a Monday? Monday, Monday, July 6th at 7 p.m. I'm sorry, I said July 5th, I apologize. No worries. Monday, July 6th. And so I'll ask our staff, Madam Clerk, if you could perhaps check with the members of the council and the administration to make sure that that meeting is one that is a date that works for folks. And if not, we can figure out another one soon thereafter. Okay, we'll do, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Thank you, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. Any more announcements by members of the council? All right, thank you. Then I'll move to priority items by the city manager. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of city council. It's good to see you this afternoon. There are a number of priority items listed in my priority memo that are really just pertain to additional information that is being provided as a result of some follow-up questions from council members. So on the interest of time, I'm not going to go through and read all those. I do want to point out that there are two additional agenda items that have been added. Agenda item number 48 is the city council budget work session reconciliation discussion. And then agenda item number 49 is the Durham Small Business Recovery Fund. Those can be handled at the end of the meeting or whenever you determine appropriate. Those are my priority items. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Manager. Can I have a motion to accept the manager's priority items? I'll move. Moved by Council Member Middleton, seconded by Mayor Pro Tem. Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll? Mayor Schull. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Aye. Council Member Caballero. Aye. Council Member Freeman. Council Member Middleton. I vote aye. Council Member Reese. Aye. Thank you. Thank you. I have gotten instructions before I get to the city attorney from Beverly that my volume is too loud. Usually my volume is not loud enough. So I'm pleased to hear this. And I'm not exactly sure how to deal with that. So maybe Viv or somebody can tell me some quick instructions and I will try to get quieter. You can send me a text. Madam Attorney, any priority items? Good afternoon, Chair, members of City Council. It's good to see you all. The city attorney's office has no priority items today. Thank you, Madam Attorney. Madam Clerk. Good afternoon, everyone. The city clerk's office has no priority items today. Thank you, Madam Clerk. All right. I'm going to move through the administrative consent items and after I do that, what I would like is if the manager would recommend to us the order in which he would like the various presentations, unless you would prefer to do that now, Mr. Manager. Mr. Mayor, why don't you start reading and I'll go ahead and glance through those while you're doing that. Okay. That's okay. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks. Under City Clerk's Office Item 1, approval of City Council minutes. And I sent a correction to the clerk. I believe I copied it to Council members quite a while back. At one point it says on page 4 of the April 23rd minutes, it said, City was paying to recycle at approximately twice as much per ton to recycle and to ship waste to the landfill. Should say City was paying to recycle at approximately twice as much per ton to recycle than to ship waste to the landfill. So I will offer that correction. Item 2, Carolina Theater of Durham Board of Trustees appointment. And I said to the clerk before we go through these that we would have a discussion of the balloting process because I think we've got a little bit of confusion. And so before I do that, I see Council Member Caballero. Did you want to comment? I'm going to talk about it in a minute. So it's my question. Okay. Wait until then. Thank you. All right. So for this, Madam Clerk, why don't you describe the process? We've got a tricky, you guys. I mean, it was easy when we all showed up and wrote down who we wanted. Now we're in a situation where it's distant and we've got to fill out ballots and send them in and so forth. So Madam Clerk, why don't you talk about what the process ideal process is from your standpoint and then we can and then we can comment and figure it out. Good afternoon, Council. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. This process has been revised because of the virtual meetings. We were passing out ballots at the beginning of the work sessions and those ballots were completed by each Council Member. What's happened is that we don't have the luxury of being together and to pass out those individual ballots. So what has happened on the actual agenda items, you will see that there is a ballot included in the item number. For example, number two, it was to fill a vacancy to the Carolina Theater Board of Trustees. You will see in your Granicus or the iLegislate app that the ballot is included. What I did last evening was send you an email so that you could summarize all of your selections in one email. The first time we had multiple ballots in conjunction with a virtual meeting, we had a lot of emails going back and forth for each board and it just was very voluminous. So in an effort to streamline, I sent an email with all of the agenda item numbers that dealt with boards and committees as well as the categories that were being requested. So the Council, instead of having to scan your ballots and resend those to me, all you do is submit your selection or your nomination on that email for all of the different boards and committees and then send that single email back to the clerk and copy LeBron Brooks on the email. It seems to cut down a lot of administrative, a lot of background work like the scanning and then the printing and that sort of thing. So if anyone has a better idea of how to process the names, I'd be happy to take that into consideration. But to do the email seems to be the most efficient way for the clerk's office to summarize all of the nominations. Thank you, Madam Clerk. I think that works well. I think what we should talk about a little bit, Madam Clerk, is the timing. And so we all get the work session agenda several days before. Maybe what would be a good day for you to send out that reminder email, Madam Clerk? It's really up to Council. Could you send it out, say the Monday before the work session? We could do that if that's what you would prefer. You might even remember that we are kind of forgetful people. And you might even do it twice, maybe the Monday before and the Wednesday before or the Monday before and the Tuesday before or something like that. Okay. I know that's kind of a pain, but maybe I bet Laverne would would rather have us do it well and write and might be worth for her sending out a couple of emails to us. Okay. All right. Council Member Freeman. Is there a way to do it so that it's actually online and just a click? Like how you would do a poll? Like a Google portal? That could be simple enough. Yeah. I'll ask the clerk to look into that and see if they think that that would be the easiest way to go. And they can let us know which of those two options is best. Because the person out in the signing and scanning with 12 different ones, I know I was definitely not like up for it. Yeah. So just to be clear, the clerk is not asking us to print, scan or do anything like that. All the clerk is asking us to do is send her back an email with our choices. So if you're like for one, there's a few of these that I wanted to be, that I wanted to request to be re-advertised. How are we making that clear? Because if we're just voting, then I mean the person likely gets four votes and then that's it. Yeah. I had the same concern and I'm going to raise that, but I don't want to talk about that now. What I did was I simply put on there, I'd like to re-advertise. And so what I thought is we could, as a group, discuss that as we usually do. So if you get to one, as we go down here, that you think we ought to re-advertise, as we usually do, let's talk those through. I agree with you, that's a concern. Council Member Cavillero. Yeah, Mr. Mayor, I sent my full ballot with all my choices last night and I included City Council only for that reason so that folks could see as they were making their choices. You know, usually we don't, we turn them in and the ballot's the ballot, but just so folks could see where I wanted to re-advertise for that very reason. And I just used the City Clerk's format and just put, I want to re-advertise this position in that stated slot. So, and then I saw your email for a few that you wanted to re-advertise as well. Yes, thank you. Okay. So thank you. I appreciate that discussion. I'm going to go through these now and if there's any that you want to re-advertise, that would be great. We can discuss those. Item two, Carolina Theatre and Dura Board of Trustees appointment. Item two, let's see. I thought this was a very well qualified applicant and I felt that the balance of the Carolina Theatre Board was pretty good. Are there reasons that you're concerned? I just noted that there was just one white woman and there's probably three or four already. There aren't any black males. There aren't like, I mean, well, there's one black male, I'm sorry, but I actually serve on that board and I would like to have it re-advertised. Okay. We'll re-advertise that then. Item three, citizen advisory committee appointments. Item four, Durham City County Environmental Affairs Board appointment. Item five, Durham Homeless Services Advisory Committee appointment. I'd like to re-appoint the person who's applied but then re-advertise the second appointment. Anyone have any thoughts on that? Mayor, I also think re-advertising the second position is a good idea. Agreed. All right, thank you. So, Madam Clark for number five, we're going to re-advertise the second appointment. Really noted, thank you. Item six, Durham Open Space and Trails Commission appointments. Again, I would like to re-advertise for the third seat. How do people feel about that? Yeah, there were two that were reapplying that word. Yeah, I think that makes sense. All right, others. I heard from Councilmember Freeman. Okay, it sounds like we are good. Madam Clerk, I'm sorry to make this hard for you. We have a lot of seats today. Item six, we're going to advertise for the third, re-advertise for the third seat. Okay, thank you. Item seven, Durham Planning Commission appointment. Item eight, Durham Sports Commission reappointment. Item nine, Housing Appeals Board appointments. Yes. I'd like to re-advertise for the tenant position for the Housing Appeals Board. Okay, I thought we had some very well qualified candidates, but there's only one candidate who applied for the tenant position and she also applied for another board, which I thought she would be better on the other one. I see. Okay, why don't we see what the vote is on the other one and then we can decide what happens with this one. Sounds good. So, Madam Clerk, let's see. Cassandra Stokes applied for two boards and depending upon what happened on the other board, we may have to come back and re-advertise on item nine. Okay, Mr. Chairman. Item 10, Human Relations Commission appointments. Item 11, Mayor's Council for Women appointments. So, Madam Clerk, I think just to review, we're going to re-advertise item two. We're going to re-advertise the second appointment on item five. We're going to re-advertise the third appointment and item six. And we may re-advertise for one of the appointments on item nine. Yes, Mr. Mayor. That's what I have. Thank you. Thank you. Under Budget Management Service Department, item 12, Fiscal Year 2020 Budget and FY21-26 Capital Improvement Plan. Mr. Mayor, I assume that would be on GBA? Yes. Thank you. But we're going to be discussing, Mr. Manager, we'll be discussing as an item today, the loose ends that we call them on the budget. Right. There is a discussion item in the later in the session, correct? Yeah. Item 23, FFY 2019 and FFY 2020, FTA section. I'm sorry. I jumped ahead of myself. No, I know. I'm sorry. I'm still reading budget items there. Okay. City Council's office, item 13, Resolution Honoring Andrea Harris. And I want to ask Councilman Freeman to thank her for submitting this. Councilmember, would you like to read this on the following Monday night? Yes. I didn't want to pull it. I just wanted to note, if anyone had any additions, they can share those with me. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Item 14, Department of Community Development Rules and Procedures for the Affordable Housing Bonus. I have submitted a couple of questions about this and about student certification and the level of and the regulation requirements and so forth. Did I receive the, Mr. Johnson, did you email me those and I missed them? We were going to do it on follow-up, Mayor. Okay. That's fine. But I'll provide it to you on follow-up. No problem. Are you pulling that item? You can. Okay. Okay. Item 14. Item 15, First Amendment to the North Carolina Coalition and Homelessness NCEH contract to provide services for homelessness coordinated entry and homeless management information system, planning and administration. Item 16, Operational Assistance Contract with a Housing Authority of the City of Durham DHA for the DHA Downtown and Neighborhood Plan. Mr. Mayor. Mr. Mayor. There are a number of housing authority items that are in the agenda. I would suggest we go ahead and pull those. We do have a presentation coming from Mr. Anthony Scott, but I think it may be helpful to go ahead and just set those aside to be sure in case you have any follow-up questions after that presentation. Agreed, Mr. Manager. Thank you. So we'll pull item 16. Item 17, Relocation Assistance Contract with a Housing Authority of the City of Durham. And we'll pull that in the same category. Department of Transportation. Item 18, Transfer of Ownership of 2017 Light Transit Vehicles from the City of Durham to the Town of Chapel Hill. Item 19 under Department of Water Management, Brown Water Treatment Plant, Electric Service Agreement between Duke Energy Carolina's LLC and the City of Durham. I had to ask Mr. Greeley for some comments on some energy efficiencies and so forth, which he provided as an attachment. I much appreciated those. Item 20, Western Union Payment Services Agreement. I don't want to pull it, but I do want to say what a fantastic service change. This is a great step forward for our cash paying customers who tend to be our unbanked customers. So bravo to the Water Department and the Finance Department. Finance Department, 21, Interlochen Cooperation Agreement for the Collection of Taxes between County of Wake and City of Durham. Item General Services, Item 22, City of Durham and Southeast Sustainable Communities Program Grant, Commended Grant Budget Ordinance. Item 23, Contract with GDS Associates for the Development of Carbon Neutrality and Renewable Energy Action Plan. And let me say this is also very exciting and congratulations to the staff for moving this forward and it looks really good. Item 24, Contract with Rebuilding Together, the Triangle Ink for the Southeast Sustainable Communities Fund Grant Project. And I had submitted a question about that regarding working with the students at Southern and got an excellent response from that. Thank you to Gina. Item 25, Design and Build Services Contract with Environmental Hair Systems LLC for the Durham Performing Arts Center. Item 26, Restrictive Covenants for 505 West Chapel Hill Street. Very exciting to see this progress. Item 27, Broker for Benefits. I had pulled this item and so we'll come back to that. Item 28, Fiscal Year 2021, Contract to Fund Economic Development Program to Services Operated by Downtown Durham Ink Using City of Durham Grant Funds. Mr. Mayor, excuse me, these two items also I think should be pulled. We do have a presentation while not directly related to the items there and somewhat related. So I think I would suggest pull those after the presentation as well. Great. So we'll hold that still after the DDI presentation. Item 28 and 29, which is Fiscal Year 2021 Amendment to Contract with City Services and Programs for the Downtown Durham Municipal Service District. Public Works Department, Item 30, Contract to Amendment Number 1 for ST-288A Bridge Engineering Services for City Maintained Structures. Item 31, Resolution to Support the Upper News River Basin Association UNRBA FY 2021 Budget. Under Solid Waste Management Department, Item 32, Contract with Atlas Organics LLC for the Management of the City on Composting Facilities. Another fabulous step forward. Item 33, Contract with Echo Flow for the Operation the Household Hazardous Waste Facility. Under Presentations, Department of Community Development Item 34, Housing Authority in the City of Durham. A Police Department 35, 2020 First Quarter Crime Report. Yes, presentation today. These are all presentations. Item 36, FY19 and 20, Downtown Durham Municipal Service District Presentation Annual Report. Under Public Hearing City County Planning Department, Item 37, Consolidated Land Use Item NCC, Student Center Building. And colleagues, please note that these all have various different dates that we'll be hearing them. They're not all usually, you know, it's the following Monday, but if you check out each item, you'll see when they're scheduled for. Item 38, 505 West Chapel Hill Street. Item 39, Unified Development Ordnance Text Amendments. On the list changes 14, TC 1900006. Item 40, Historic Properties, Local Review Criteria Update. Item 41, Goodwin Crossing. Item 42, Hebron Village. Item 43, Unified Development Ordnance Text Amendment, Affordable Housing Dwelling Unit Definition, TC 19005. Item 44, Consolidated Annexation, South Mineral Springs and Pleasant. Item 45, Consolidated Annexation, 1432 Ellis Road. Item 46, Committed Element Modification, 1900 Hillendale. Under the Community Development Department, Item 47, Approval of the Draft 2025 Consolidated Plan, 2021 Annual Action Plan. Supplemental Items, Budget and Management Service Department. Item 48, FY 2021 City Council Budget Work Session Follow-up, and that's a discussion. Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Item 49, The Durham Small Business Recovery Fund, and this is also a discussion. Mr. Manager, the items that I have pulled are items 14, item 27, and then after the DHA discussion, items 16 and 17, and after the DDA discussion, items 28 and 29. That's correct, Mr. Mayor. Mr. Manager, how would you like to proceed? Well, I would suggest we first deal with the two pulled items that aren't associated with other presentations, and then as you've requested, that we do have kind of five discussions slash presentations related to the Housing Authority, the Quarterly Crime Report, Downtown Durham, Inc., the Small Business Fund, and then the Budget Issues. My suggestion would be that in large part because we are expecting another large gathering downtown this afternoon, or later this evening, that we let Chief Davis presentation go first in the event that she has additional planning necessities, and then move to Nicole Thompson and the DDI. Similarly, if there's coordinating functions they have for that event this evening, I think it'd be good to move those along, and then the other three probably I would suggest going then next with the Housing Authority, and then the other two would be your preference, either budget or the Small Business Loan Fund, whichever. All right, thank you, Mr. Manager. We'll do the items 14 and 27 followed by Chief Davis, then DDI, then DHA, Small Business Fund, and then budget. Thereby good? Thank you. Mayor, just real quick. Sure. One of the items in the budget and the work session follow-up memo to staff does relate to the Police Department's budget. Mr. Manager, are you going to be prepared to work with us in that conversation if I have additional questions at that time? Yes, I think the budget staff will be able to answer any questions you have in that regard. Fantastic. Thank you. Then I'm good with what you put forward, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Council Member, for that. All right, folks, we're going to move along then in that order, and first up will be item 14. Council Member Freeman, this is roles and procedures for their affordable housing bonus. Thank you. I just really wanted to touch on, I appreciate the bonus set in fourth language. I just wanted to find out really if there was going to be any income or any money that would be attached to this bonus in regards to how we do. I know right now that planners or developers will submit, in lieu of doing the bonus, they'd rather do a payment. I mean, is there any calculations that are included in this, because I didn't see it if there are, but I was kind of hoping to get a handle on. Council Member Reginald Johnson, Director of the Department of Community Development, Assistant Director Carol Otto, will be able to respond to your question. Good afternoon, Council Member. There is no payment in lieu option associated with the density bonus. That is not something that is statutory. We are exercising a provision in the charter that allows us to do the density bonus, but it does not allow us to do a payment in lieu. Do you have any calculations that identify just how much it costs to actually create a unit? We have done that in the past. It all depends on who you're trying to target with the unit and what assumptions you make about how the overall project is being financed. Is there a particular question that we could try to answer for you? We can certainly follow up in writing. I'm just trying to try to make sure that it, I mean as you're setting up, as we're setting up the criteria, the criteria you're setting up is based on some numbers. And whatever those numbers are, whether they're an affordable housing rate based on income versus the cost of a unit, I was just hoping that there would be some cost conversation on this as well. Well, the actual density affordable housing bonus is based on the charter provision, which allows us to do to provide a increase in density to developers that agreed to provide 15% of their units as affordable. So actually the analysis really came from the charter authority that we are working with. There was some discussion back when the bonus was being initially discussed around what is the appropriate level of affordability, but we're really having to sort of hang our hat from an authority perspective on what the charter allows us to do. I'm not talking about what the developers would be allowed. I'm just talking about just the basic numbers. An actual formula that is used. You're saying there isn't one. No, it's 15% of the units affordable at 60% of area median income for rental units and 80% of area median income for sale units. Okay. And that doesn't shift based on cost at all? No. So if it's a million dollars to develop this site and you're doing 15% of those units, it's the same as if you're doing a $6 million project and it's 15%. This is a voluntary program. So it is the developer's discretion and decision whether to utilize the bonus and they will do that based upon their analysis of whether the density that they are receiving offsets the cost of providing the affordable units. And what I'm asking is this community development even looking at how to help offset any of that cost? The cost, the density bonus is based on the concept. It is a very substantial density bonus. It is based on the concept that the bonus itself, the increased density, is sufficient to offset the cost of units. And if it isn't, then the developer would choose not to build the units. And more often than not, in the past, that's what's happened is they've chosen not to use. And you're trying to be more appealing. And what I'm saying is if it's even more appealing would be to figure out how to associate the resources around the cost as well as the density. And that is something we could look at. But again, the question becomes, do we want to put, and this is the policy question the council can consider, do we want to put limited financial dollars towards creating 60% or 80% AMI units for a period of time in a market rate building? Or do we want to try to pursue affordable units that may be either more affordable or lower income? It is a challenge for us to understand what the appropriate subsidy level would be because every market rate building is different. And that is not our wheelhouse in terms of kind of financial modeling. We don't really have a deep understanding of market rate projects. So it would be complex, but certainly something we could explore if council wanted us to do that. I just wanted to, I appreciate that. That's kind of where I guess I need to kind of do some more research. And recognizing that I'm trying to, in a, on the fly, I'm trying to figure out if this is actually going to be beneficial post COVID. Recognizing that so many folks have lost their job. The folks who are going to be, like there's dynamics in this that are not what we were thinking about when we initially started talking about these affordable housing density policies. And so noting that there are, it's much easier to set up the market rate units or what have you from a planning perspective. The cases that I saw on the planning commission is much easier to just do without it. And if we're not attaching some level of finance to this, I don't see how it becomes appealing to a market rate developer. And that's what I'm concerned about because it's getting much harder. It's not as hard. It's not like prior to where we were in, in full straddle of building, it's kind of like you'll see very few, like very few new developments built. And then if they have a choice, they're going to choose not to do the affordable housing. That's what I'm getting. So I appreciate, I appreciate the work on it. I just want to make sure that we're keeping in mind that things have shifted and things have changed. And we may need to really revisit exactly how, how this package comes together before all of the land is developed, especially in our downtown core and surroundings of urban areas. Thank you, councilmember. Ms. Lado, I have a couple of questions I sent to Reginald and maybe it'll save you all some time to ask them now. The student certification, can you explain that certifying that the tenant is not a student? Is that what that is or what is the student certification? It is intended to distinguish between students who are dependents on other household incomes. So essentially college students who may still be dependent on their parents incomes from students who may be, for example, older adults who are working, who are also students, to allow the latter group to be affordable housing tenants, but not the former group. So that's, that's the intention of that. And it's a fairly common practice in a, in fact it's very, it's usually a mandatory practice in affordable housing developments and it's something that given the population of Durham we felt was important to carry over to the density bonus. Thank you. Can I ask everybody who's not speaking to please mute? Thank you. My second question is about the level of regulation. It seems like a big requirement. I think this level of regulation is necessary. It also seems like a big requirement for the landlord to meet and is, and there are issues about enforcement and so forth. Is this model on a system that's working elsewhere? So I would say pieces of it are modeled on different systems. So we looked at, for example, inclusionary zoning ordinances to try to figure out what definitions people were using for income, what definitions people were using in terms of how you set rent, for example. And what we realized was that a lot of communities were essentially defaulting to either HUD or long-income housing tax credit standards. So what we have tried to do is go through and take those standards and then really strip out the parts that seemed unnecessarily complicated. Like for example, we are not requiring a utility allowance. You would normally require that as part of a, you would set a rent, but then you would lower the amount of rent you could charge based on the assumption around what tenants are going to have to pay for utilities. That can get complicated. So we chose not to require that for the density bonus. The principal thing that will be required is upfront really the agreement around what are the units that must be provided and both in terms of their size and their affordability level and kind of executing that contract. And then from then on out, it really is income certifying the tenants. That is the primary requirement that the landlords will have on an ongoing basis. They need to be open to monitoring, but we will only monitor the affordable units and we will essentially be coming in to ensure that they are appropriately income certifying the tenants and that the rents being charged are appropriate for the unit type. I'm sorry, what is our stick? The, because this is done as a under the UDO, it is the stick that we have for enforcement of any kind of zoning related issues. And I would need to defer to the city attorneys for the specific on that. Mr. Mayor, your honor, your honor, I'm sorry, I apologize. Mr. Young, thank you. Yeah, just very quick. Could we have staff, could we have staff kind of look at all the participants and go ahead and mute whichever microphone they see coming activity from the policy because it's getting really a little distracting trying to pay attention to that background. Sorry, sir. No, I appreciate that. Please, if you're not speaking, please mute. Thank you very much, Council Member. Mr. Young. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Members of Council, Pat Young of the Planning Department just to emphasize what Ms. Lotto just said. We in the UDO, we have the ability to send notices of violation and issue civil citations in the amount of up to $500 per day if there's on compliance. So that's that's the enforcement mechanism. Thank you very much. That's what I needed to hear. Thank you. Mr. Johnson, no reason to send me an email about those. They were answered. Thank you. Any more questions? Madam Myprotem, did you also have a question? I thought I saw your hand earlier. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Mayor. My question was also about enforcement. It just seems difficult once we've allowed people to build additional units. Like we can't really take them back. So, yeah, that I'm just wondering how we, you know, how we manage that. Yeah. Ms. Lotto? Yes, sir. I will note that we are requiring two things. As part of this one is the recording of a restrictive covenant on the property that requires the units to be provided as affordable. The second is a contract between the developer and the city that lays out the developer's commitment. But again, as you have indicated, the sort of if we wind up with a non-compliant party, then we have the enforcement mechanisms that Mr. Young has outlined. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Myprotem. Thank you, Ms. Lotto. We appreciate you all. Thank you, Mr. Johnson. We're now going to move to our presentations and we're going to begin with Chief Davis. Chief, welcome. We're glad to have you. And looking forward to your report before you start. Mr. Mayor. Yes, sir. Mr. Mayor. I thought item 27 was pulled. It was. I'm sorry. Do you still want that pulled or? I do. Okay. Could we handle that one? That's I think we just had those two items that weren't related. Yes, my fault. My fault. Thank you. Chief, I'll be with you in just a second. Apologies. Item 27 was an item that I pulled. This is broker for benefits. My question very simply is that the vendor has 11 employees, no minority employees that I see. And I wanted to discuss with the vendor their hiring practices or hear from the staff about their hiring practices and their outreach to minority applicants and so forth. So good afternoon, Mayor and Council. My name is Veronica Jackson. I am the benefits manager for the city of Durham. We have with us today John Gazarowski of IVA, who is our current broker and is also who we are recommending for our incumbent broker as well. Thank you, Ms. Jackson. Welcome, Mr. Mr. Gazarowski. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of City Council. The question is that we do have 11 employees and none being minorities. And is it okay to respond right now? Absolutely. Please do. Yes, sir. Okay. Thank you. Often we actually, if we do have an opening, well, first of all, I want to let you know that when we first started Independent Benefit Advocates in 2005, we initially set up what we call equality and diversity policy, as well as an equal opportunity statement. And I think you should have a copy of that. We follow that precisely. When we do go out and try to find an employee to fill a staff member, we normally use a service. And the service that we've mostly used was ZIP recruiters or MD. And we haven't had a need for firing a person in over five years. But in the past, I think it's just timing right now, but in the past, we've had minority folks that were part of our staff, but eventually left for other reasons. And we also had an intern that emailed us that wanted to spend their summer trying to understand the insurance industry. We reached out to that particular person, but apparently they were in Durham, but apparently they never gave it another opportunity for them to come over to us. I think it might have been because of the distance from Durham to Apex. And again, going back, one of the things that we're proud of is the minority and women-owned businesses that we actually are able to contract with. And all three of those businesses do offer services to the city of Durham. And those are the benefits enrollment technology that we have, the broker-builder solution. We also use a women and minority group that does all of our graphic design to publish the benefit booklets that we actually produce for the city of Durham. And all of the printing that goes with those booklets, we also use a company called Zebra out of Durham. And all three of them are the minority in women-owned businesses. I can assure you that if an opening does come up, and we've actually offered, most of the time when we actually look at a position, it's positions that require a little bit of experience, some education, but not, I mean, we don't base it on education, we base it on experience. And we've actually reached out to women, minority women, to different health carriers. And often we get situations where we can't meet their monetary requirements and or they select another brokerage for them to go with or a health insurance company. But I can assure you we're always looking at folks to come into our organization to assist us going forward. Mr. Gazarowski, thank you. And thank you for explaining about the minority women contractors that you use. I appreciate hearing that. Did you say, when did you say you, you say you haven't hired anybody in five years? Did I hear that correctly? Yes, I think it's been longer than five years. Okay. Well, first of all, congratulations. That speaks well of you. It's very important to this council that our vendors are employing a diverse employment group and that they're reaching out when they are hiring beyond the normal kinds of general hiring organizations, the websites and so forth. Because we know that that kind of special outreach is often necessary to get good minority candidates that I know you all work in your company. So what are the professions that are that are important for your company? What are the what are the skills and the professions? Great question. We start with the receptionist and then we go into account management and account executives. Account management are folks that actually help manage and team up with the HR people at the city of Durham. And they're the ones that actually put together all of the proposals when we sent out a request for proposals. They have to actually look at the proposals. They have to evaluate the proposals, make the necessary comparisons and evaluate the benefit plan designs, the actual costs, making certain that the contracts stipulate the exact amount of detail that the city of Durham or other accounts have purchased. So the account manager is a very comprehensive position. And in addition to myself, we have two other account managers that work a significant amount of time with the city of Durham, because you're one of our largest case that we have. And it takes a lot more maintenance and management to make sure that you know all of our responsibilities. Mr. Gazarowski, you don't have scientists. You have people who are in business, people who have business skills, correct? That's correct. So right here in Durham, we have North Carolina Central University, historically Black University. And there are many people there who have those business skills that you want. So I'm going to ask that the next time that you hire, that you make a special effort to reach out to North Carolina Central University for your candidates. And to other minority colleges and universities in your area, as you know, we have Shaw, we have St. Aug, you know these institutions. But since you're working here in Durham, especially North Carolina Central University, I want to ask you that the next time you recruit someone or have a position open that you make that outreach. Yes, sir. We actually did that one time. I knew a graduate in the law school over there. And this was about nine years ago, asking her to help me try to recruit some business people there. Mr. Gazarowski, I want you to do it more systematically than that. There's a placement office at North Carolina Central. It shouldn't rely on somebody that you know. It should rely on you going to that placement office and finding the candidates you need. Are the council members? Mr. Mayor, I want to thank you for your question. That's usually the line of questions I ask. I try not to ask them when it's 50 employees or below, but I do appreciate the mayor making sure that it's clear for all of our staff. As you bring forward these contractors, this is important to most of us on this council. And it should be a part of your question or line of question as you're talking to vendors and contractors, because it's definitely going to be something that comes up for us at the council level if money is going towards these organizations or businesses. So thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? All right. Thank you, Mr. Gazarowski. Thank you, and I'm very sensitive to this. And the promise I'll make to you is I will reach out to the North Carolina Central. Actually, we'll call them after this conversation and identify our potential needs going forward. That'd be great. Thank you. We'll count on that. Thank you, Ms. Jackson. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Mr. Manager, thank you for reminding me we'd missed that item. And we'll now go to Chief Davis. And Chief, welcome. Glad to see you. And before you get started with your report, I just want to thank you for your leadership of the department over these past very, very difficult days. And for your strong statements, deploying the racist murder of an innocent man by a police officer. I thought what you, the statement you issued from Noble and your appearance on national television, you did a great job representing our city, representing your profession. And but also here at home, we know we're not out of the woods in terms of the demonstrations. And we are so lucky that we have powerful voices for change that are speaking up right now for the kind of change that we need in our society. And at the same time, those voices are peaceful voices. But we also know that without the right kind of police department and the right kind of police department leadership, that we would not be where we are in Durham. And we have been both fortunate but also extremely well led of our demonstrators and our police department. So Chief, I want to thank you, express my gratitude and also express my appreciation of all the hard work and incredible dedication this is taking on the part of our police department. I mean, to be in the crucible as they are and to remain calm and patient and to manage the situation as they have is, I know how difficult it is. And yet they've done it. And I hope you will pass on to every one of them. My appreciation and appreciation of the entire Council. So good to see you Chief and welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. This has been a very, very trying and emotionally charged week I think for everybody. Anybody that's a human being would be impacted and affected in a most profound way as it relates to this incident. So not just this incident, this incident and others. So thank you for those remarks. We will continue to be committed to what image that I think we all want for Durham is that this is a safe place to live. This is a place where there is obviously just a lot of pride. And I think every last one of you who have contributed in some way to help us facilitate peaceful protests here in Durham. It's not just the Durham Police Department. It's been a myriad of individuals who have been involved in that communication and that boots on the ground communication as well. And a lot of credit goes to some of our organizers who insisted on providing space and leading in a way that didn't create further harm to individuals that turned out and didn't rise to a level that the Police Department had to intervene. And we don't want to have to intervene. We've had these internal conversations and I just thought this would be a good time for me to preface that to this group as well. Thank you all so much. So the first quarter report, our quarter covers the department's five performance measures, part one violent crime, part one property crime, clearance rates, response times to priority one calls, and staffing levels also discuss a little bit about the 2020 first quarter highlights. And as my operators getting set up, wait for the next slide please. Am I able to pass it on to go to the next slide? I think that can happen, Chief. Let's see if I'm not sure who's operating the slides right now. Oh, there we go. Great. Thank you. Okay, there we go. I wanted to take just a minute just to let you know about a few of the personnel changes in the Durham Police Department. We had two vacancies for Deputy Chief, as you know, Chief Assembly and Chief Marsh retired earlier this year. And at this time, I want to announce that Deputy Chief Gregory Pickerel was promoted and is over investigative services and Deputy Chief Sherry Montgomery was promoted and is over administrative services. Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome Amanda Fitzpatrick, who is our new Public Affairs and Communications Manager. So I just wanted to give you an update on those personnel changes. Next slide please. Are we getting the next slide up? Looks like maybe we've lost our screen, Chief. Let's give our tech folks a second to get it back. Okay. Looks like the clerk is donning that. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Great. Thank you. So beginning with reported part one, violent crime, homicides, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault increased by 24% in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. It's the first 90 days of the year. There were seven homicides in the first quarter of 2020 compared to 12 in the first quarter of 2019. Investigators have cleared five of these cases plus one homicide from 2019. The number of reported sexual assaults decreased by 15% during the first quarter. Approximately one quarter of the rape cases reported during the first quarter happened in prior years. Robberies increased by 9% during the first quarter of 2020 compared to 2019. 75% of robberies were from persons. We experienced a trend of robberies from Hispanic victims, particularly in apartment complexes during these first 90 days. 36% of robberies from persons involved, one or more Hispanic victims. So at that time, we increased our patrols in the areas that these incidents were occurring. We also communicated to the public in several complexes and health forums so that we could try to provide information for those residents to try to help prevent some of these incidents. Officers passed out crime prevention flyers in English and in Spanish. And information was provided to Spanish-speaking media. These incidents have decreased significantly. We were able to identify individuals that were responsible for several of these particular incidents and made arrests in that regard. 60% of the robberies in the first quarter involved a firearm. Approximately one, third, 31% of aggravated assault incidents were domestic in nature. Can you hang on one second? Can we have the property crime slide up? Can we also have the is there a slide right before that? It should be. There we go. I'm sorry. No worries. There we go. I just wanted to make sure we got to see that one too. Thank you. Go ahead, Chief. My fault. That's all right. That's what we should be. Okay. The percentage of multi-victim firearm incidents increased during the first quarter this year. 39% of all aggravated assaults during the first quarter were from multi-victim firearms. This was 31% during the first quarter of 2000. That was a comparison to the 31% during the first quarter of 2019. Our target is 30%. The last time our percentage was 30% or below was in the third quarter of 2014. So at least we got really close this time. Next slide, please. Part one, property crime, which includes reported burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts increased by 24% during the first quarter of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. There was a significant increase in the number of commercial burglaries, primarily to convenience stores, specialty stores, and restaurants. The reported residential burglaries were down by 14%. We do believe that the pandemic had something to do with some of the shift in some of our crime during this period. Less burglaries, individuals being at home as opposed to being in retail stores and businesses. The reported residential burglaries were down at 14%. We continued to have an increase in burglaries to sheds and at construction sites. Most of the time in these incidents, it was tools that were mostly stolen. We've seen a decline in burglaries in April and May. Larcenies made up 63% of our part one crimes compared to 61% in 2019. 40% of our larcenies were from vehicles and were thefts of motor vehicle parts. One third of the larcenies were from shoplifting incidents. At least 44% of stolen vehicles were either left running or had keys in the vehicle. Approximately three quarters of the reported stolen vehicles have been recovered. And that's indicative especially during the first couple of months of the year when people are running cars and it's cold outside. We typically have upticks in that regard. Next slide please. Our clearance rates, we compare departments clearance rates to those of departments our size. As you can see, our clearance rates were better than the average for cities, our size, for homicides, robberies, burglaries, larcenies and overall part one property crime during the first quarter of 2020. We expect the clearance rates to improve as the year goes on as well. Just those 90 days doesn't really give us a good indication of what type of investigative process we progress will have during the course of the year. Next slide please. So priority one calls. There were 2,158 priority one calls for service in the first quarter of 2020, which was a 19% increase from the 1,813 priority one calls during the same period in 2019. Our average response time was 5.93 minutes, which was slightly over our target response time of 5.8 but rather close. We answered 56.49% of the property one calls in less than five minutes in the first quarter of 2020. This came very close to meeting our 57% target. In March, our average response time, and I think this had a lot to do with COVID-19, is 5.45 minutes. We had 535 priority one calls in March. Our average response time of priority one calls in April was even less 4.48 minutes, which was a time that we have not seen, I don't think, in my time here or maybe ever. We had more priority one calls in April than March, but less traffic on the roads in April, of course. Next slide please. Our sworn staffing was at 94% at the end of March 2020. Our non-sworn staffing was at 90% at the end of March 2020. 11 recruits graduated from our BLET 50 class during the first quarter of this year. We currently have 21 recruits in our basic law enforcement training academy, number 51. This academy is scheduled to graduate this summer. We've hired two lateral recruits. These are individuals with prior experience from other agencies. Next slide. This is our U visa report. For the quarter, it's not very much to report on, with the exception of the fact that we had, we processed 48 U visa requests during the first quarter of 2020. 67% were approved. Next slide. Two major issues impacted the first quarter, a massive malware attack on city computers in the COVID-19 pandemic. Through all of this, the Durham Police Department continued to respond to calls and provide service to our community. We found innovative ways to serve the community while keeping our employees safe as well. We continue to recruit new officers but have found ways to do much of the process virtually. We conduct temperature checks when employees come to work and we provide masks that are needed, personal protective equipment, and hand sanitizer at all entrances in it throughout the work space. We also changed our 911 call response protocol to make it safer for employees and our residents. We provided information to the public, communicating in English and Spanish regarding our response to COVID-19, the orders that had been distributed to the public, the changes in the orders as well. Unfortunately, COVID-19 forced us to cancel several events in March, including national honor guard training. We planned to host here in the city of Durham and a women in law enforcement open house, which was a recruiting initiative and our women's history month luncheon for our employees. There were other highlights and various activities that are in the accompanying report that all of you have received, but that ends my report and I am open to any questions that you may have. Thank you very much for that report. I'll first ask if there are questions or comments by council members and Madam Clerk, maybe you could take down the slides so we could all be on the thank you very much. There we go. Before we do that, I'm going to again ask our tech staff, Vivian, maybe you can help. Am I still too loud? Is my audio okay now? Apparently it must not be too loud because Vivian maybe can't hear me. Well, this is Beverly. She did inform me that it was fine. Thanks a lot, Beverly. Thank you, Beverly. Thank you. Okay, you're welcome. I'm sorry. My tech savvy is not very savvy. I'm going to now ask for any questions or comments for the chief council members. Councilmember Middleton. Mr. Mayor, thank you so much and thank you so much for capturing, I think, the sentiment and spirit of this city in terms of how we feel about Chief Davis' job and the remarkable job that protest leaders in our city have done, so I will not try and go in again. I've already expressed my appreciation to the chief and thank you, Mayor, and I want to associate myself with your comments to her. Chief, I want to ask, we know we've been talking a lot about use of force in the country and rightly so in the wake of the George Floyd lynching, which we all witnessed in slow motion. Again, it has been in tone about one of my colleagues that our department does not use best practices when it comes to use of force, and I do not want my silence about it to in any way signal to the people of this city that I'm not interested in making sure that we are using best practices. One I want you to tell me just very directly, is the Durham Police Department using currently best practices when it comes to use of force and if not, why and what can we do to get there? Well, I think that the Durham Police Department absolutely is using best practices as it relates to use of force. I think there are different ways of articulating what those standards are and I think this is a great time for us to even take a more surgical look at our policies and really just find out where the discrepancies or the contradictions are so that we can all establish some clarity as it relates to these different standards that we think are best practices in the department. So I'm open to that conversation, but I've looked at our policies and procedures and there have been, you know, several lists and I believe some of the issue is that while we have standards in place, when a person looks for a particular policy, if they're looking for a particular issue that's covered in our policy and it's not in an index form, it doesn't mean that it's not there, it just lies in some policy that's titled something that that person is not referencing, if that makes sense. It does and I thank you for that and I think it's important to be very clear to the people of this city who have put us here to make sure that those type of things are in place and I want to just go on record that I spent a lot of time in my adult life working under the leadership of some amazing people in this city to reform this police department and we know we've got more work to do and you'd be the first to admit that chief, but I think it's important that the statement that we are not practicing best policies when it comes to the use of force needs to be challenged and if it turns out to be true then we need to get to work on making sure we are doing that and I don't think there's a person on this council who would not be for making sure that's in place, but if that's not the case then I think we need to stop saying it or we need to clarify exactly what we mean when we say that. I think we owe that to the people of the city, I think we owe that to our employees who work in the police department, I think we owe it to all of us who work so hard to make this city all that it can be. So thank you for that and I know you'll keep us posted if there's work we need to do, we'll do it. So thank you Chief, thank you Mr. Mayor. Thank you and if I may elaborate just a little bit further too, in no way are we so caught up about what our policies say that we aren't open to clarifying and even tweaking where we all might think that they need to be tweaked so that they can be clearer and what I've done is I've basically provided sort of a cheat sheet for a lot of the issues that have been raised so that we could reference where that policy clearly deals with that particular issue. So I've worked with our police attorney on this as well and we felt like we have captured some very critical issues even issues right now that are before us to make sure that our policies are best practices. I personally advocate for best practices because I know our policies in the Durham Police Department far exceed policies around the country and that was part of my appeal to the nation that we have best practices national best practices so that these issues can be covered not just in our department here what I'm doing here in Durham but all across the country as well as opposed to policies being treated like a smorgasbord and agencies are able to pick and choose. So I am so certainly open to more conversation and dialogue and sharing the department's policies and open to modifying or better clarifying for the public how they can find these policies that currently exist. That's good to hear. Thank you Chief. Mr. Mayor that's all I have right now. Thank you Councilmember. Councilmember Reese. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Chief Davis it's great to see you today. Thanks. I managed to catch your spot in Good Morning America always doing Durham proud. Appreciate all the work that you've done. I was I think three of us were at the first of the Durham protests over the weekend Saturday maybe different times but and I can just tell you that from my perspective kind of in amongst the protesters that the conduct of your officers the strategy that you have put into effect for protecting the the right of the people of this city to protest was exactly what I would want it to be and so I just wanted to say thank you for that. I certainly felt protected and I know the other protesters often remarked on it during the protest itself and I think that's something we can be proud of. I want to ask about some of the specific numbers in the in the in your presentation but I do want to follow up and Councilmember Middleton's excellent question about use of force policies. I know that earlier I guess it was late at some point over the weekend we received an email from a community member who had gone to a website I think it's eight can't wait dot org where they allow you to pull up from a menu the name of a city and then it is doing some kind of an has already done some kind of analysis in the background to match up a set of use of force practices with what is available what the city has on record and I forwarded that to you and I think Charlie's thinking right now and what you wanted to say next but while he's thinking I would add that I also appreciate the work of the officers and I just want to make sure that we're keeping in context and frame of mind how some of the folks in the community who are protesters and maybe rioters and looters just making sure we're not alienating any one of those in our conversations in general and just making sure that we know that people respond differently to grief and whether it's violent or not I think it's hard to cast judgment I try my best not to but I really do want to make sure we're not trying to pit people to like and say how they should protest I really want to steer away from that that conversation and beyond that I I don't have too many questions right now thank you councilmember is councilmember Reese back with us we lost him for a minute there I think he may be calling back in before we before he comes back I'll ask other other council members who have comments or questions mayor protan thank you mr mayor thank you chief for being here just want to appreciate again your work and the work of your officers over the last few days of protests we've seen in a lot of other cities how quickly things can escalate and I'm glad we've been able to avoid those escalations here in Durham I so the policies use of force policies that councilmember Reese was referring to the eight can't wait policies that have been circulating throughout the country which are based on some of the research that's been happening from police reform organizations around the country about best practices and use of force policies the email that we received and the list of policies I had a chance to review it and they have right Durham is having two of the eight policies that they that they deem best practices for use of force have you had a chance to review those policies and do you have any thoughts on implementing those here in Durham those changes I guess it I guess it depends on which two it is or the ones that they say we don't have and I think yeah there's six that they say we don't have now that now that Charlie's back he can maybe give you a little bit more details I don't have them in front of me Charlie do you want to take over yeah I am I'm really sorry about that one of the one of the problems with the world we're living in now is that we're all trying to be online at the same time yeah I think probably for the purposes of this conversation it might be better for rather than ask you specifically about the different standards is just ask you to commit to getting more information to us about that particular set of standards as I said I sent it over the weekend I'm happy to send it again it's just that it's something that a lot of folks are asking us about specifically and and I want to make sure that we are responsive to that desire just to learn more about what our use of force practices actually are versus what a website I never heard about until five days ago says they are and if there are areas where we can improve I know that you and I share the same commitment to making sure that Durham remains as a place where our practices are best practices and so that's I guess I didn't I didn't want to ask you to go through the list with us over this meeting today and figure out like where we were what I all I wanted to do was say this is out there we're hearing about it if you could help us understand where we actually are with respect to those standards that would be great absolutely and I have that and I will provide that for you thank you fantastic and I apologize for for dropping off if I can I can I keep going Mr. Mayor is that okay absolutely councilmember thank you I appreciate it it's um okay um I want to talk a little bit about calls for service and response time over and with the caveat and all this data is that it's one quarter of day and as we you and I have discussed many times this first 90 day report is the least informative in many ways because it is susceptible to the law of small numbers really a 12 month look back is a much more valuable tool to use but that's not where we are today we're at the 90 day point and traditionally we have compared these quarters to each other and I think when we get to what I've seen so far the first five months looks a lot better than the first three months in terms of where we are in crime in our community but let's talk about the 90 day report specifically I want to talk about domestic violence you know we've read a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic about how the the virus and the and the physical distancing required during this time to combat the novel coronavirus means that folks are trapped at home together and I'm sure we're all experiencing that at some level or another and that in abusive situations that can be very very dangerous for folks who are in those types of situations and I just wanted to point to the data in your underlying report that suggests as best I can tell that violent crime related to domestic violence is up about 25 percent over the first quarter of last year I wanted to ask you to comment on that I know last year we instituted the lethality assessment program which made I thought a huge difference in terms of the level of support that a first responder could provide to the alleged victim of domestic violence on scene to help create a safety plan for them and I just wondered what how the COVID-19 pandemic and the specific and this very kind of peculiar and unprecedented limitations that puts on folks how that impacted the progress we were making last year I think it absolutely did impact it because just by nature of officers not having as much close contact with individuals even though our response has been responding to the call after the incident has occurred we haven't been able to do as much of that in your face sort of proactive training we were even developing a Hispanic version of the lethality assessment brochures as well so that our Hispanic community could be made aware of these various indicators as it relates to domestic violence and also the help services that are available to everyone that might feel that they are trapped in a situation so this has been a concern of ours because we did see a bit of an uptick people were at home people were not at work more domestic violence in the daytime hours than in the evening time hours and we just don't really know how much longer and of course we've seen a little bit of a decline in it but we don't know how much longer this situation is going to go on of course but the second phase of you know the stay at home orders being released it might give people an opportunity to just have that that air time that get out of the house time even some of our domestic violence situations have not been between domestic partners they have been between a son and a father or a domestic partner and a child that was not a biological child so we have seen those upticks and it has been concerning but we are trying to make sure that we use our lethality assessment protocols that is very awkward when you're standing at a distance you're trying to get through the call as quickly as you can and provide that person a safe space and then move on. No I appreciate that and I know that the folks that work at the crisis center are hard at work trying to figure out the best way to bridge that physical gap and just wanted to raise that issue with you because it's obviously something that's important to all of us and hopefully the next set of data will help us kind of understand where we are. The next thing I wanted to talk about is response time I think it's remarkable that in the first quarter of this year calls for service are up almost 20 percent that's that's a wow number to be honest and certainly reflected in the underlying crime statistics but what's even more astonishing is that your average response time only went up about 3 percent can you help me understand how that's possible like what is happening there my mind is blown what's up with that we're a little bit at a loss about it too um you know we we saw where where we were hit with the pandemic we had you know supplemental officers were available to work supplemental we had better response times we did respond more to just COVID related calls initially there were several COVID related calls where people were just calling about individuals that were violating the the stay at home orders and even though those calls didn't require a lot of time and it freed up officers to go from call to call they still were you know part of this total aggregate number of responses that that we made for that period we didn't see a significant decrease in activity as far as calls for service during that period which was surprising but with the additional type of calls that we received it sort of balanced things out um but it is uh something that has been sort of kind of a phenomenon for us we just didn't really put our finger on it but your observation it was ours as well well good to know i'm in good company um i have i have one theory about it this could be totally off base but might be interesting to look at is that even though we didn't have the stay at home order till the end of the month the fact that we had the state emergency declaration and local emergency declarations um early in march i wonder if the reduction in travel you know had already general travel chief had already made a study at that point i mean i don't know if you i don't know if it had by the end of march of course travel was down um uh something like 40 percent in Durham um just a theory that if you know maybe if you disaggregated about that that month you might see uh it down more in march but as i say that's a that's just a theory yeah the council ever reads i'm sorry please go ahead no that's okay i appreciate any any thoughts or welcome i just it was such a such a strange outcome i suspect you're right mr. mayor there's something to do with the changing nature of our community's activity during the COVID-19 pandemic even in the absence of Durham state home order um i certainly know our family's behavior changed right in the middle of that second week of march and i know a lot of folks did as well next i want to turn to um the homicide rate during the first three months of the year you know we um the i think comparing the increase in aggravated assault to the decrease in homicide is another real head scratcher um and i don't i i wonder if you have any thoughts about it i just i i mean is it is it just that the number of homicides is always so low compared to you know the aggregate number of crimes that occurred any period of time that it's really hard to look at trends in that number or what do you think is happening there well you know we did see an uptake a serious uptake and just aggravated assaults aggravated assaults that involved multiple individuals and we believe and this is just a theory that during a particular window during this this virus i think people felt that the police department was sort of at bay we've had several conversations because quite frankly our officers were at bay to some degree we had talked about you know making sure that we maintained visibility but we didn't have that same level of community engagement boots on the ground talking to people the kind of canvassing that we've had in the past where we spent a lot of time in the community because of the fear not just that precautions from the police department but also from our community members as well as it relates to exposure so there was a lot of caution however we had individuals that felt like it was open season to just do some arbitrary kind of drive-bys and some of it didn't have any particular pattern to it it was a very different period during a few of those weeks at the beginning of the year of aggravated assaults i've said before that aggravated assault sometimes contribute to our homicide rate in a in a sense that people have gotten lucky because they have definitely been the target of an aggravated assault and you know we've been blessed that that individual didn't expire as a result of it yeah um yeah i don't i don't really yeah it's hard to hard to draw some again it's the 90-day report it's hard to draw a ton of trends here let's um and the 90 days to your point is really hard to draw trends and i'm not saying that this isn't an important report because it does provide information about those 90 days but it's the six months that really help us to get a picture as it relates to trends and and what we're working with as opposed to the the various variables that come into play during a pandemic during a snapshot where a lot of really weird things were going on as it relates to movement and environment in the city no and i i absolutely we're we're just gonna have to to take a look and see where we are in another month or so and um but i appreciate your thoughts on that i wanted to call out one item from your larger report and then ask you to respond to a more general question i just wanted to say that i i always read the above and beyond section of your report that's um often one of the first things i go to because i think during a time when a lot of news is bad the above and beyond section of your quarterly report is always really inspiring and i have talked about this officer before but i will talk about him again because he was one of the officers of the month in the first quarter officer wag staff in squad 2d i just encourage people if you want to pull that report it's on pages seven and eight of the detailed report that the chief provides to us in our materials it seems like every time you come to talk to us officer wag staff has found yet another way to excel in the service chart community so if you just pass along my my thanks to him so the other the last question i wanted to ask and it's pretty open-ended but i think you deserve the opportunity to have an open-ended response to it as you are well aware many of the protests that have happened here in Durham and north carolina around the country have um called on elected officials like the six of us to reallocate a government funding away from local police departments and to other types of government spending that can make community safer in a way parallel to our law enforcement function i know that it's likely that you have a strong thoughts about that and we're going to talk about your budget after you leave which is awkward so i wanted to give you an opportunity to spend just a minute or two to talk about your perspective on that question my my perspective is that it is always my priority and my concern to ensure that the work that has been entrusted to me um is played out in a way that the city of Durham can have victories whatever that looks like as it relates to everybody that's involved the monies that are allocated for me it's about how do we achieve a victory and you know fighting the various elements in our community and trying to suppress crime we can only do it from one angle and we do hope at some point that some of the other fields in our community the social types of issues are addressed and i said it over and over again you know it's it's hard to put police departments out of business because nobody's paying attention to the other things that can help stop crime and and that's not indictment on this council because this council has always been supportive of community and grassroots types of programs but i would not ask for people if i didn't need people to respond to the 47 percent increase of aggravated assaults if there were other types of interventions in place that could help us curtail some of the crime that we see then the police department wouldn't have near as much uh response to certain communities that cry out for somebody to help intercept the bullets to help intercept the drug dealing and those emails come to me on a day-to-day basis so i know our work is important in the community and i know there's balance that that needs to be there i would love to be able to work closer with with any other entities that could help us from a holistic standpoint make our community a better place to live work and play quality of life issues joblessness education you know all of those things come into play when we're talking about crime as well so you know that's my best answer council memories i don't i personally believe that our work is valuable if i turn the lights out at police headquarters for 24 hours we would have some problems in this city so i know that our work is important but i would love to see us reduce that 47 percent and i not have to come and ask for gang officers my requests are only based on the empirical data that's in front of me that this is happening and everybody is screaming at the police department to make it stop and if there were other effective ways to make it stop i am certainly open to that thank you chief natas for that i think that's um obviously a critically important perspective as we talk about these issues um and we are you know bottom line we get those emails too um often right by the ones that say um you know the that they're outraged at the level of the budget of the police department and we have to it's our job to figure out what to do with that and so i appreciate you sharing your perspective with us and mr mayor i'll i'll yield for thank you thank you councilmember councilman middleton thank you mr. mayor thank you council race for your line of inquiry um chief i have a question a couple of members of them well one member of the media contacted me this morning about an incident last night in front of the police headquarters um your officers had established a perimeter and at some point a a a civilian car personal vehicle uh somehow was inside the perimeter and and scared some folk pretty bad there's some stuff floating around that the car was deliberately allowed in the perimeter to do harm to protesters i know that there are people that plan on being in our streets tonight do you have any um info on what exactly happened last night and can you assure our public that that it will continue to be protected as they exercise their constitutional rights this evening in our streets yeah absolutely and you know i think i can speak for all of the um the officers that have been out and working for the last five days about how appalled that we were that we got blamed for what happened last night when our efforts in our strategic efforts over the last five days has been all about trying to keep our community safe and make sure that they had that open safe space to be able to peacefully protest last night was the first night that we had a group of protesters that splintered off into three different locations and what it required us to do even though we followed and and paid very close attention to the path of the group to ensure that the streets were open and blocked off for them to get to and from we ended up having to take other vehicles and go out to the freeway and to some other locations in the city so that we could provide those other groups with that same level of safety somehow we were still looking at footage because when it happened i was sitting in the command center and i just want to want to let you know everybody in the command center was screaming because we're trying to figure out where the car came from and what happened is we believed that the car came from one of the arterial streets hood street we think and they're looking at footage to try to determine where it came from so that we can make sure that if our protesters decide to lay down in the street or whatever we have all of the streets in the area surrounded we basically had to move some resources around and had no idea that somebody would sneak around to hood street and get on the roadway and when they realized that people were laying in the roadway of course they turned around but it scared everybody the police department would never intentionally allow people to be hurt or harmed in the middle of a protest i think we've been able to prove that that i mean a lot of things happened that we didn't intervene in and i think it was a little bit it was kind of disappointing that people thought that it was that that something like that would intentionally happen that would have been grave circumstances there so you know we're still looking at it and and of course the police precinct has five different areas that you can kind of get in and out of towards the main part of the front building so we're we're basically going to be trying to shore up and even ask our organizers who some have communicated with us if this is where you plan if you if you're going to do a maneuver on this particular street or you want to lay in the street let us know because if if something happens that we haven't been able to anticipate we're not going to be able to protect you as much as as we would like to so i think some of the communication also would be helpful but you know we're expecting protesters tonight too and it is our intent to allow people to peacefully protest without those types of incidents from happening and we are looking into it to try to see who this individual was that infiltrated the area well thank you so much for that chief i can't tell you how much self-restraint i have to practice sometimes as i scroll through social media and want to insert myself into some of the conversations i see but of course if i do it'll become a whole different conversation um but to see folk basically blatantly accusing our police department of trying to murder some people even when as far as sorry they're trying to murder protesters and kill protesters i i just want this public to know to a person on this council i think i'm not out of bounds by saying this to a person on this council if we had when that there were any officers that were deliberately trying to hurt protesters we would insist that those badges be made to a mural uh somewhere so so i just want to assure folk that um we'll be taken to the streets tonight uh that i think our record has been established um we welcome this is Durham we welcome free speech and protest in Durham and i i just wanted to give you an opportunity to address what happened and to give folk assurances that we do everything we can in our power to look after them tonight thank you thank you your honor thank you thank you council member other other colleagues questions or comments for the chief anyone all right chief i do have one uh i have a couple things uh first of all um you all proved to everyone that you're doing everything you can to protect our protesters and their right to protest and i don't think there's any question about that and i'm grateful for it um and you've really gone above and beyond and i know it's put a lot of pressure on our police officers and i know the hours the long days the trying to move around the city and able to in order to be able to uh protect the protesters dealing with very difficult confrontations with both sometimes with people who aren't protesting and also sometimes people who are mad that the protesters are out there uh you know blocking off a freeway uh is really hard and please express our gratitude to the whole force for that i just am so grateful i know we all are thank you and our city and our city is chief i don't know how much you this you get but i get so many emails and communication from people saying how proud they are in our force and uh it's just it's over very you have overwhelming support for that and i'm grateful thank you thank you um i do think that the you know the the uh the aggravated assault number is is very uh concerning it's a big worry and uh i'm looking forward to the uh the longer term i agree that you know one quarter is just a quarter uh as council member race was saying he's absolutely right as you were saying chief uh but i am concerned and i will be looking and hoping for better um i want to just tell you in the council that president obama sent a communication to mayors uh yesterday asking mayors to take a pledge that over the next 90 days we would work with our excuse me police departments and communities to look at our use of force policies similar to what we were talking about earlier chief yes and to see what changes need to be made um he has uh recommended a four part process that includes review of the policies engaging the community reporting the findings back and then reform and ask that that be done in 90 days and i'd sign that pledge uh and um i was really i would just tell you that it was so uh it was such a if you haven't seen that any of the president obama's messages for anyone here over the last week uh i urge everyone to do so and it it'll show you what a president ought to be doing uh but one of the things is that uh he did reach out to mayors and ask us to take this pledge which i have done and so um i'll look forward chief to thinking with you about our our use of force policies and reviewing them and uh as you say uh sometimes it's a matter of just clarifying for people letting people know that that uh i think i think what uh calcino re said earlier you know there's a website they don't really know much about durham they look at some words and they pick that out on the other hand we do need to really think about are we doing what is really the best thing because um we know we have the best chief um and we know that you are representing us in amazing ways not only here in durham but nationally and we want our use of force policies to be the absolute best model for the nation and i think part of that isn't just in what the policies are but the way in which they're expressed uh are they clear to people can we make a very clear statement to people about what those policies are so that everybody knows this everybody in the community not just on the forest knows and understands them so i did want to tell you that chief and i know we're all looking forward to thinking together about our use of force policies over the next uh over the next period of time thank you so much mayor thank you council thank you chief we really appreciate you we appreciate everything you do uh you're a great leader we're so lucky to have you and we'll we'll be talking again soon thank you thank you mr mayor i want to thank you for sharing that you did uh sign that pledge thank you councilmember all right i want to thank chief davis again and now we're going to move on to the report from downtown durham ink uh and uh i hope that michael tomson is with us and i'm not sure which staff member is going to help us introduce good afternoon mr mayor and council summer allston office of economic and workforce development yes you're correct uh president and ceo downtown durham incorporated nicole tomson is with us today we are before you as it relates specifically to um an annual report for the downtown durham business improvement district that is required uh by north carolina statue and um we understand that you all have already had a chance to review the presentation and the report and so i believe the expectation based on time is that nicole tomson will um introduce the item herself make a few very brief remarks and of course entertain any questions you may have um before i turn it over to nicole i just want to clarify if there are any questions for staff thank you miss allston it's good to see you thank you sir um is are there questions for staff before we hear from uh nicole tomson i don't think so summer thank you so we'll we're here from nicole okay thank you nicole hi everybody a good evening afternoon i guess good afternoon um afternoon nicole we're glad to see you thank you i can't start my video so thankfully there's a picture there so imagine imagine that talking to you um i am not going to spend a lot of time because i only have a very short amount of time i'm at the request of of staff so i don't i don't want to spend time going through the presentation or the report you all receive that in your packet and i'm more than happy to answer any questions that you might have um but i did want to do a couple of highlights first and foremost i do want to take the time to say just a few words not only from myself personally um from the ddi staff the ddi board um but also the downtown residents and businesses who have been extremely proud of the community of durham and the love that we have all shown durham during these very difficult times and i include covid and its difficulty but certainly the the terrible images that we have all witnessed and how that has again brought to the forefront an issue that really needs to be discussed uh and in saying that our true appreciation for the great work of police chief davis and her team um i have been to and and been um downtown through all but one of the present a protest and to witness her team and how they are working with the community to give them the space to mourn and to remember and to express that pain has been truly uplifting um and then a great shout out to the community uh that that recognizes that in durham we do things differently and we say that quite a bit but we truly do things differently and i'm i'm just proud that that i'm a part and that i need an organization uh that that believes very strongly in that but i did want to take the time to thank our community activists our community leaders our community and our police chief and her team um for how that how we have represented and how we show our sorrow for what has happened and how we are trying to rebuild with that um just a couple of things because i think i now only have like two minutes but a couple of things that i did want to kind of highlight uh and that's pretty much focusing on where we are today i certainly could spend lots of time talking about the great things we've done in the past and what we've got planned for the future and we'd be happy to answer any of those questions but today in light of where we are in downtown um restaurants closed small businesses closed struggling to get back on their feet because of covid um a community that is hurting uh there are things that that i do want to bring to your attention that we are trying to address in downtown uh first and foremost i want to acknowledge the great work that our ambassadors have been doing they remained essential employees um so as the city shut down our 11 ambassadors remained on the street uh doing the work excuse me during the work that they are they were hired to do i'm happy to do that we were able to offer them hazard pay so that they could continue to work um and they were the eyes and ears in downtown when other people were not downtown as everyone was hunkering in place they practiced and still practice social distancing wearing masks and gloves but they kept downtown beautiful and ready for when we started to come back they interacted with the businesses that were open during curbside delivery they reported the gathering of individuals over the limits that the city had put in place um so a constant communication with the police force on on those issues but always foremost that we were keeping the downtown area clean safe and welcoming when people were ready to come back downtown so i do want to take a moment to to recognize that they stepped in and helped the city when the city had its employees unable to come downtown we stepped in and we took over all of the city doing maintenance of common areas so again highlighting that great relationship that we continue to have with the city and with the different departments i want to move on to we have taken it upon ourselves to try to get relevant and accurate information into the hands of the public um since this pandemic started march 13th we have sent out 74 emails that list has grown from our my email list has grown from about 200 to over 500 we're currently sitting at about 550 right now and that email gets spread throughout the the city and parts further i've had people call me from willmington and other parts of the city um but our stance was in order to work together we needed to have the same information and i appreciate all the resources that have been been providing us information that we could then send out to the community that information also highlighted the small businesses that were struggling with pp p applications idle applications unemployment questions all of those kinds of issues that we were able to address and find them resources so that they could find the funding they needed the questions that they needed that was quite a big thing when we first started to deal with the unemployment issue getting them finding them an email that they could use in order to address very specific questions about how do i get paid how do i get through the system what do i do um so we became a resource for those businesses and their employees um we have tried to continue to show that that durham has still got things happening through our virtual performances we do a thing called from the heart where we continue to work with our local artists and on one day a week we have an hour long performance by local artists music performance to remind people that there are still artists and there are still musicians that are doing things in downtown and we ask people to just turn tune that on turn that on and listen to it in the background but it is a way to stay connected to our artist community our buskers who we would have on the street on a third friday but because we're not doing third fridays they continue to need funding and employment we also just to to kind of wrap up very quickly we are doing work around our small businesses so early on we did a little bit of seed money we put some seed money about ten thousand dollars to seed the feed durham initiative which is an initiative to get downtown restaurants to provide food for our health health providers as a way to offset or to have an additional way of having income coming in by offering a large amount of food meals to to our health care workers and we also did a small seed amount of money about six thousand dollars to provide funding or meals to the EOC emergency operations center and the the point behind that was we were noticing that a lot of institutions are using our well-known businesses and not our smaller businesses so that allowed us to allow businesses like spanglish uh dames and of a req assault to participate and offer meals to EOC the long-term hope of that is that when the city or people in that that space need to do a catering event or a large event they will reach back out to these downtown restaurants and have them do those events when we are no longer practicing social distancing and when people come back downtown they'll know that there are other restaurants in downtown um so all of these are looking for ways to one provide income additional income into the the restaurant but also to start making some and creating some uh connection between our downtown restaurants and and employees that are working in and around the downtown finally i will end with the work that we've been doing around the outdoor dining we continue to work very closely with city staff the attorney's office the planning department the department of transportation they have been great to work with in working on how we make outdoor dining work recognizing that this will be all over the city but there are some challenges giving our small streets serve us street infrastructure the small workspaces that we have for a lot of our restaurants how that will work so that we can allow open dining outdoor dining for those uh those institutions so that they can start getting open and start making money and that we protect them and get them um hopefully as close to whole as possible over the next few months um and the final thing that i will mention is that we continue to work and we are very interested in hearing what will happen with the small business assistance fund we have had numerous conversations with a number of different entities and individuals and have provided our input and our guidance and our advice on ways that we think would be very beneficial and we strongly recommend that any program be open to all throughout the city and the county and that the criteria be as specific and clear and easy to follow as possible um that's all i think i have time to share i probably went over there is hours upon hours more than i could share um but i do appreciate the time and i'm ready to answer any questions thank you very much nicol we appreciate it thank you for that excellent report i'll now ask if there are any questions or comments by members of the council um questions or comments by members of the council all right nicol thank you you got off easy today we're glad to have you here we appreciate you very much appreciate your work thank you and thank you to the council uh thank you to um city manager um we look forward to continuing to work with you uh in the in the next year thank you thanks again for the time thank you so much and uh we we we also look forward to it and especially appreciate the work recently uh with our trying to figure out how to help our downtown businesses in this difficult time mr manager uh yes mr there were two agenda items associated with the ddi if there's any questions about those we can answer them now otherwise we'll just move those to the consent agenda that's what i was anticipating mr manager um unless there's objection we'll move them to consent thank you thank you very much our next uh item colleagues uh before we go to our next item our next item is to hear from mr scott uh from the derm housing authority but i realized that there were i there were two things i meant to say during announcements which i didn't um and and so let me just let you know what they are uh because they relate to future work of the council uh one of them is i sent you all an email today as well as to staff around the that had promised you all about the housing implementation affordable housing implementation committee the group that will advise and help oversee and provide transparency for and accountability for the money that we're spending mostly affordable housing bond the dedicated funding source and all of our housing funds i've made a specific proposal to you all it will not be um it will not come as a surprise to any of you all this is the proposal that we had talked about uh uh you know several months ago um and prior to covid uh but i had held up on that after the various events that we've all been experiencing i've now sent you the email and i'll i'm looking forward to talking about this and getting this uh getting your approval of this plan so that we can move forward with bylaws and so forth uh and and um i'm i'm i'm going to ask that it be scheduled uh at one of our upcoming meetings soon so i want to let you know that the other thing i want to let you know is that another item that uh i previously brought to the council uh and a couple of you all have also been involved in uh i want to bring back and get us moving on is the uh the resolution that we've discussed about reparations uh and the uh the work on getting our uh other communities involved with us in that work the uh around trying to make some change in in in federal reparations policy so i want to let you know both of those are coming soon um as as our policy requires that you hear about that now so that it'll come to us uh at a at an upcoming uh meeting in the near future all right i wanted to say those two things and now i'm going to ask uh for the report from the Durham Housing Authority to see Mr. Johnson Mr. Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, members of council, uh Reginald Johnson, Director of Department of Community Development, the presentation that you will hear is from Ms. Anthony Scott at the Durham Housing Authority. A lot has gone on since the passing of the bond referendum last fall of course you have seen him several times as we have discussed with McDougal Terrence. The part about this purpose of this presentation is to give a more comprehensive overview of the work that is going to be doing that the Housing Authority will be doing as part of the bond referendum as well as provide an update on McDougal Terrence and so without any further ado i turn it over to Anthony Scott the president and CEO of Durham Housing Authority. Mr. Scott. Mr. Johnson, Mr. Mayor, Madam Pro Tem, thank you for this opportunity to come before you someone going to bring up my presentation please. All of these have all these things happen on a schedule we're not always sure exactly what the schedule is so let's hang on one second for our clerk to. No problem. Yeah. What I'll cover is as Mr. Johnson mentioned providing a overview starting with McDougal Terrence and talk about the uh the strategies we have around the preservation expansion of affordable housing. So next uh two slides please. Madam Clerk one more slide please. Great. There we go. Thank you. So McDougal Terrence um the emergency evacuation regarding the carbon monoxide concerns began on January 3rd and we're happy to say that the last family member finally went back to McDougal on May 1st. The work that was completed included new heating systems, new venting, replacing gas cells with electric cells, electric upgrades, and environmental remediation. The total cost to date is $10.1 billion so far with that. Uh next slide please. And that cost breakdown is as follows for relocation costs $5.3 million repairs $4.8 million and to date the sources of funding for that we of course received a $1.4 million grant from the city which will be focused on our electrical work and a um $3.2 million grant we've requested now we haven't received this but requested this from HUD this emergency capital fund grant that we are hoping that we will get. We do have a call tomorrow with the local HUD field office as well as the offices in Washington DC to hopefully move this this request forward. We uh that leaves us with a balance of five and a half million dollars and the remaining funds will have to come from the DHA capital funds. The impact of COVID-19 which you know began in March we still had families up until May. The one major impact with COVID-19 is that the electrical conversion work that we were doing which will allow us to switch from gas stoves to electric stoves. We decided to halt that work because it would require families to move out of their homes back into hotels for three to five days but we decided given the COVID-19 concerns that it was wide for us to halt that and so we put that on hold. We still have about 129 more units to go to convert from gas stoves to electric stoves. All of those 129 units I should mention though are new stoves or stoves that have not had any reported issues for carbon monoxide. Next slide please. I'd like to talk about RAD as a preservation of affordable housing strategy. RAD as I've talked about over the years allows us to convert our public housing funding which as you all are aware is very unpredictable. It's up and down. You never know what you're going to get from one year to the next and certainly that changes from one administration to the next to a more stable platform which would be to the housing choice voucher funding. Those two programs are funded separately. The voucher program our belief as housing authorities our belief is because that is a private sector oriented program it is it is typically funded at or near its full funding request so housing authorities came together and said we think it's important that we look at a new way to approach our public housing renovation and development and that is to utilize the housing towards voucher funding program. There's essentially a revenue currently getting for public housing under that program as we convert units to the housing choice voucher funding program those funds would just switch from one program to the next so essentially as a revenue mutual program why then do you ask aside from the ability to have more stable funding when we look to that it also allows us to be much more flexible and go after various sources of financing that housing authorities currently can't use under the public housing program. Some of the things that were built into the law to do the rad law were built to be protections for residents they're based on the history of some of the other programs that housing authorities have been made available such as hope six built into the law rad number one is that you have a one-for-one replacement of any housing in other words if you go down a unit you have to replace that unit going forward you can't go down the unit and decide not to replace it not only is it a replacement of a unit one-to-one basis but you have to replace the same bedroom sizes so if I tear down a two bedroom unit after replaced with another two bedroom unit I can't replace it with a studio apartment for example you also have a first right of return any existing public housing resident who's in a unit at the time that we convert to rad will be allowed as a first right of return to come back to any units that are built on that existing site there is no re-screening meaning that if you're a public housing resident today and we're converting to rad we do not re-screen you if you're eligible to be under their program it is automatic that you are not screened coming back to or being part of the rad program and lastly one of the key things is that the rents for those that are getting a a income-based rent your income-based rent will still be at 30 percent as it is now it also allows a unique feature called a transfer of assistance that means that we can transfer a subsidy from a unit on property a and convert that to a unit and property b and I'll talk a little bit more about that as we talk about some of the other developments that are going on next slide please so we have definitely gone all in and utilizing the rad program so over the course of the years we're going to do a portfolio wide rad conversion that is all of our public housing communities will convert to the rad program again it allows that stability and funding and it allows us to make sure that our rad program that our public housing will be more stably funded over the course of time so one of the things that we're doing is that we are we have actually already converted shoulder-wide units of public housing the former hopes that well the current hope six bills the main street town houses and Franklin Village those sites that those properties that have public housing in them have already been converted under the rad program which means no no real change for the residents there it means that we simply get the public uh excuse me we get the housing towards voucher funding instead of funding under the old public housing program edumon alms is another site that has been converted under that and also warring and damar court warring road and damar court have also been converted and these were the first sites that we actually did renovation work under we started damar court in january warring road in february of 2018 both of those sites have now completed their construction there are 102 units at damar court 224 units of warring road and those have now been completed their construction under the rad program next slide please the broader strategy that we're pursuing however is the redevelopment of our public housing communities we started in the downtown area those properties with the highest value at the moment and as you know as supporters of this uh that involved five sites that are owned by dha or our um nonprofit affiliate development ventures each and two sites that are owned by the city of Durham that dotted area that you see is our commitment that any housing that we're going to build i talked about our transfer of assistance a little earlier any housing that we're going to transfer any units i should say that we're transferring to another site will remain in downtown we're not going to move them further out than the downtown outline that you see here this allows them to make sure that we're keeping affordable units in the downtown area and they don't have the opportunity to outside of the downtown areas and life that they're used to in being in downtown Durham next slide please the overall downtown development plan um calls for seven different sites five of those that are directly owned by dha two of those owned by the city and one site is actually owned by the county this is the schedule that we produced well over a year ago currently we are on track with this schedule and the one thing i would like to point out though is that this is a 10-year plan and the primary reason that this is a 10-year plan is because that column there that says nine percent that represents a nine percent tax credit uh projects that we intend to go after because Durham is only allowed one in a given year it means that 10 different nine percent tax credit deals means that there's at least 10 years in which we're going to be looking to build those those particular phases out if that changes which we hope that it does and we're continue to push the state to make a change we could see that timeline timeline change to be less than 10 years what you see outlined in red are the sites that are are being utilized under that was passed in november um next slide please this is uh the renderings that we have for all the sites at minimum and they're built out this is what those would look like we fully expect however those those designs to change for the better that is maybe more units or more amenities or more more uh commercial retail would have you what we have in our our ddmp is what we determine to be the minimum that we expect any of the work that we do and any developers that we bring in we expect them to meet at least the minimum of what we have in the ddmp plan but our hope is to see more next slide please the first uh of our ddmp plan is the jj henderson towers that building is currently 178 units it is um occupied by primarily seniors we are going to do a top the bottom renovation of that site it is expected to close by the end of 2020 and um the other site where you see jj henderson new construction is a new construction building that will be put on that same physical site next slide please this is an early rendering of what that property would look like that's 80 additional units that will be added to that site as you can see 71 bedrooms 10 to better units we have already applied for tax credits on that we did not receive the nine percent tax credits on this site but with additional support from the city we converted that from a nine percent tax credit development to now a four percent tax credit development and we are still on schedule to begin construction on that on that particular development by the end of 2020 next slide please next on our plans are the oldham and liberty site total of 14 acres it has at least three phases probably four we've applied to two nine percent tax credit deals on that on that development we as i mentioned earlier only only going to get one of those what we don't know if it's going to be the senior site or the family site either one will be happy with and we'll keep this on track with our schedule if all goes well with that application process we should be able to start construction on that in july of 2021 completing that by december of 2022 next slide please the two two applications that we put in is for 172 unit building at a cost of about 16 million dollars and two an 80 unit building to cost about 17 million dollars next slide this is a site plan of the oldham and liberty development the phase one in two that you see highlighted on on the left of your screen is representing um elizabeth's commerce street being the first one currently listed as building d and then elizabeth's street is building actually d and c so hopefully we'll get one or the two of those will get funded this year it will be able to stay on track with our development goals this is indeed a preliminary site plan so what you see today is going to change very likely but this is the early planning for that and over time as we begin to take on phases you'll see the site plan in the ultimately to plan itself for those different phases to change and take shape next slide one other development that we have is doing a renovation is laurel oaks that is a 30 unit building that is being renovated as we speak that work started last month the renovation cost is 1.6 million dollars that includes funding from the city of about 800 000 in dha is contributing as well as funds for about 800 000 this work we expect to be completed by september or this year next please i also want wanted to talk a little bit about roll up relocation because with all of this work that we're talking about with the exception of jj hinderson which we're going to renovate with residents in place similar to what we did with more in damar with more we wrote in damar court we essentially allow those units to become half full through attrition and we had to relocate a few families but we were able to do the renovation of both of those sites with residents in place essentially we did half the work completed it then we moved people into those completed units and we completed the other half of the work the jj hinderson towers will take a similar approach so they'll probably do one or two floors at a time and once those units are completely renovated residents will then move into the newly renovated units and they move to the next series of floors with our other sites with odum towers with four-fill heights those sites will see us having to go through an extensive relocation effort because we're going to be tearing down those buildings and building new developments there we will engage a consultant to work with us to help place residents in other dha properties and in some instances if necessary we can offer them vouchers or temporary relocation once the work is complete those residents will have an opportunity to move to any completed units that we have or if they choose they can stay in units that are currently in or will be in so with that i believe that's my last slide and i will open it up for questions oh got a couple of things just talking about going forward um poober road and corn wallets are already we are also going to engage in a portfolio wide-run plan we want to make sure that we are getting all right units up to speed where they should be many of you may know that in december i hired a new director of housing operations uh mr manuel foster out of out of your house and he had a trial by fire just on being able to do a a plan for going through each of our properties basically unit by unit coming up with a repair plan and making sure that we can get those properties in as best of shape as possible similarly with me do with harris although we talked about everyone is back at home and with the exception of the electrical work what we're going to be focused on is taking care of the other repairs that were needed in the door to health and safety issues and now we are to develop a plan we originally planned on doing that within 90 days of people moving back COVID-19 has put a severe hamper for us on doing that because we are only doing emergency or urgent repairs currently we're not doing more routine repairs that's going to change as we continue to develop our PPE guidelines for how we can do ongoing repairs so that's the work that we're dealing with right now once that's complete we get those protocol work on the dual as well as the rest of our portfolio to get our units into top shape and that includes as you see here this portfolio wide effort Oxford Manor Cornwallets got inside the club boulevard and I should mention it's not just about repairs that we're talking about we're looking at a long-range planning in terms of how do we begin to do the redevelopment efforts for those of you so I believe that is in fact my last slide so I'll open up the questions thank you very much mr scott we appreciate a very comprehensive report and grateful to you for all that you're doing let me first ask if my colleagues have questions or comments for mr scott you want to start mayor pro tem thank you mr mayor and thank you mr scott for being here this report is really helpful and it's been good in the dha meetings also to see all the progress says progress that's been happening on doing the rad conversions um I just had a couple questions or thoughts on the Oldham Liberty preliminary site plan I noticed that y'all and I know this is early in the process but that y'all had planned on separating the market rate units from the affordable units and the senior units in different buildings can you talk a little bit about that choice well actually we are at the wide range of incomes in both sides so they go from 30 percent below all the way up to 80 percent so it's 30 percent cohort there's a up to 60 percent cohort and up to 80 percent cohort so that's what will be in both the the Elizabeth street site as well as the commerce street site and then the market rate but the market rate buildings are all market rate no we that was the initial plan that came from our development but we sat down with them and said that going forward we want to see the market rate mixed in all of our developments going forward that was the original plan that we had going forward we're going to continue to carry that through but these first two phases are 80 mixed and below but the remaining when we talk about market rate will be market rate as well as others great thank you yeah i think that that's um that's the way i would want to go so i appreciate that chain could you talk a little bit about where y'all are at with handling your eviction rate and what your plans are for when you're allowed to resume evictions when that moratorium expires the moratorium that was issued by hud expires in july i believe it's July 24th and what that moratorium does is it doesn't allow housing as well i should be more specific it talks about that housing authorities are expected to collect rent even though there's been this moratorium on evictions and this goes back to the policy that we had going back last summer or something before last what we said that we are working with all of our residents if you are having problems paying your rent then we will work on rent do rent agreement with you so we make sure we do not have to file we have continued to encourage our residents to set up those agreements with the housing authority so that we don't need to go through the process of filing for eviction if you're unable to pay if the resident has refused to engage with us and you know we have to go forward and do the eviction process what we've seen and i did not get the latest statistics i i meant to do that and forgot but i know that um around january or december i think we had about 120 or so families that had gone into a payment agreements with us not one of them had um gone back on that payment agreement and all of them stayed within good standing as a result of that so we think that that that policy change that we made a couple summers ago is the right way to go it provides the housing authority the means it needs to make sure that these families can stay in their housing as well as the means for the families themselves that comes to us let us know they have any problems paying rent if you are dealing with the issue of criminal intent we will evict you and the moratorium that hud issues excludes any resident that is having criminal issues in which we have the ability to evict obviously that is subject to whatever courts are doing but in terms of the authorization that housing authorities have if there is a criminal intent going on we will still move forward with eviction but for lack of payment we simply will work out something with that resident who is having problems paying their rent that includes relationships with the department social services and we're working on something with alliance as well um and we think that that's the right way to go great thank you so much um so you're not anticipate i mean one of the things i'm worried about in the private market is that when this eviction moratorium is over a lot of people who haven't been able to afford to pay their rent who are still not able to afford to pay their rent are going to be evicted um you're not anticipating having that issue come up in your properties well what we'll do is for any who have not and we're we're reaching out constantly to families to see if you're having problems paying your rent particularly because of covid related issues then we want to do an agreement with you even when the moratorium ends we're not changing our policy on coming before us and i'm working out an agreement with us so that we can avoid going through with an eviction process great thank you um i've this is what we want so i'm glad that you're doing it um well you know i think that all of the policy changes that went into effect as as a result of the pandemic um are going to expire before the economic impact of the pandemic is it's you know it's far from over i think we've even felt um the majority of it so um it's yeah i'm glad that folks that live in dhc properties are going to continue to have that a variety of options and um yeah we're we're going to just have to work through it as as it comes but um thank you for being proactive and for your presentation thank you thank you madam mayor pro-chan um uh council member caballero thank you uh hi anthony's good to see you thanks for joining us today uh it was a great presentation provided a lot of really great information um just to i had a follow-up question um so july the moratorium ends by HUD policy but do you as an individual um housing authority could you extend that on your own that moratorium or is that um something that you're barred from doing it is it is well that's a good question i'm not sure if we're barred from doing it but again the policy we feel that the policy we have in place does not make a moratorium necessary because effectively what we're saying is if you're having problems paying your rent we'll work out and something with you so that you can in fact avoid eviction proceedings altogether which is really the goal um we do have an obligation to collect rent that is something that we're monitored on by HUD on a monthly basis and so part of the the thing that we need people to understand is that we have separate reporting that goes on with uh they look at evictions they look at vacancies they look at work orders they look at all those things and they are already asking us about what's happening with your rental collection and so we explained to them what we're doing how we're handling this process um and so that's what we think is a better policy than a moratorium because the point that um mayor pro tem johnson just mentioned is that what you don't want to have is you do a moratorium folks don't pay rent when the moratorium ends then what happens you still have uh you still have this uh build up of rent that's owed and then how do you then solve for that problem the process that we have in place avoids you ever getting to that point to begin with thank you for that i have a couple just to continue on that i guess what my concern is if we have had folks who have been unemployed for several months uh even if they got a stimulus check which we know some folks did not get uh it was not a lot uh so my quit you know at a certain point the amount of income coming in may not be enough to cover and and like what are the policies for how how much time do people have to pay back rent uh is it actually something that's manageable for folks um so and and happy to we don't have to happy to get an email about that but i just want to know more because i my concern and i'm hearing this from a lot of people is if you've got three and four months backed up rent and you still don't have a lot enough income coming in and we're not really going to work with people in a very detailed way uh there's not enough there's not enough coming in to help it anyway if that if i'm making myself uh clear if you are there are two things i'll make it we can avoid the email one is that uh remember that doro public housing is income-based rent so if your rent goes down your rent okay thank you the other thing is that we absolutely work out payment agreements that are reasonable based on i appreciate this clarification you're welcome thank you very much council member uh council member reese thank council member freer thank you mr mayor good afternoon anthony how are you today oh well sir thank you great to see you it's a good presentation it's good to get an update on where we are um you know the people of this city made a pretty strong uh commitment to the dorm housing authority um this last fall um and uh i want to say that uh i am glad to see the work of the housing authority it's a little up to their end of that commitment uh continue even in these really difficult times of our global pandemic so thank you for the presentation had two um i have a question and more of a comment my question is about the relocation program um in your presentation you indicated that residents will be relocated to other dha properties or potentially receive vouchers for temporary uh relocation can you talk a little bit about what that voucher looks like and please reassure me that it's not the same kind of voucher that uh current voucher holders are finding impossible to spend in dorm right unfortunately it is that same voucher this is the housing charge voucher the only vouchers that we have um and so uh and that's that's one of those things where a person would have to want to use a voucher you know obviously they have to find housing with that voucher they wouldn't have to move it um but it is the same housing choice voucher that that they would be able to use um i'm sorry the first part of your question no no um i just want to be clear then is it is it possible that residents who are being relocated might not have another dha property they can go to as a result of a capacity problem and will be forced to leave holding one of those vouchers no they won't be forced to leave holding a voucher um and yes it's always possible i can't sit here and say it's not possible but one of the things that we do is we start to do um a holding of some of our units that to have them make it so that there will be places for people to move to um so we we uh for for the different sites that we have we hold vacancies so we can make sure residents will have units to move to under this process um you you have to do a special process you go through for it but basically you're allowed to do that and those vacancies don't count against you uh when i first came here the housing authority had some sort of freeze because they were looking to do renovation and they were looking to do some of that we we now that we've changed our program a bit uh we're still going to use the same strategy but the option of a voucher is something that's there it's not something that people are going to be forced to take okay great i appreciate that if um if there are capacity constraints and and anyway i know you're going to keep in touch with us as that goes forward and if you run into problems like that i hope you'll let us know well in advance so that we can help craft a solution um because that's the piece of this that i heard believe it or not a ton of concern about last fall when people were talking about the bond was where are people going to live while they're rebuilding these communities and um the first part of that answer is in many places that we're going to build in place uh so people won't have to leave until their new home is ready but in other situations they will have to relocate and the commitment that i think the city has made is that those folks will have a place to live and giving them a voucher and sending into the private market doesn't live up to that commitment i'm glad to hear you telling me that that's not going to happen but if but let's keep in touch because absolutely the city needs to be ready to stand in the breach uh and support those folks if it does in that if it doesn't become a necessity right and i just want to add one more piece to that is when i talked about the transfer it gives us the ability to have quote unquote so instinct we're transferring 21 units from the modem and liberty site 21 units available in that development is being built by someone else and it gives us the ability to kind of lessen that burden around where do we create these replacement units so it's not necessarily one hundred percent needing to be us but as we find interested partners they can assist in that relocation effort as well that's great um the last thing i wanted to say is more of a comment and you may want to respond to it or not it's up to you um i appreciate the questions that my two colleagues say this is i appreciate your service but if we come out of this pandemic and we see the same levels of dha eviction filings that we have seen in years past i will tell you that the commitment that my personal commitment to making sure that the rad conversion process that the bond supports goes forward will be tested each of those projects come before us individually for bond funding um and that's going to be a factor for me it's there's a tension there though because as frustrated as i might be with the number of eviction filings that you have the housing still needs to get built i don't know how to resolve that tension but i'm just telling you this is something that i want to make sure has your personal attention once it becomes possible to have eviction filings i know you and your staff are understand that this is a priority for us but i'm just telling you personally as a member of this council that that's going to be a huge deal for me so i hope you'll keep that in mind thank you and that's all i have mr. mayor thanks anything thank you and if i could just make one comment regarding that and i would just ask that all members of council all the advocates for our residents in terms of the eviction filings and this is something that i asked the group that was that was calling for a moratorium you know back at the beginning of the year and i asked a question i said will you commit to helping spread the word that we need you to come to the housing authority to work out agreement it allows us from the standpoint of reporting to HUD to show that we have an agreement to have that rent paid so the advocacy around the moratorium is just as critical to provide it for the residents to let them know that come to the housing authority if you're having problems they rent and we can avoid the eviction filing process all together but if people are not responsive to the housing authority then we need to take the appropriate action um or else we end up having problems on the back end dealing with HUD so that that's my response my commitment is never to evict someone because they have an inability to pay right thank you council member and thank you mr. scott uh council member freeman thank you i appreciate uh the questions of my council colleagues um prior and i appreciate the the responses that um nothing scott has given i just wanted to touch in and say that i'm really looking forward to our joint city dha housing meeting and i'm hoping that i'll at least be on an annual basis so that we can actually touch base because i'm i'm concerned about waiting for projects to come forward but um i i just wanted to touch on there were two things the on the soft side of this transfer you're putting out a contract for for partners is that process already laid out or is this something that you're just kind of getting together like where are you in that we uh we're hoping to be a little further long in that but given the COVID-19 concerns we decided to pause and just kind of take a look at what's happening in the market um we and that is let me just clarify you're talking about the request for um proposals for development partners for the rest of our portfolio yes yes so the intent was that we were looking to do that by no later than march of this year but when COVID-19 hit we were very concerned about where things were and how people would look at this so we have paused for now we're now taking a look at that trying to take a test to the market to see where things are but we will probably be looking to put out that RFP for the end of summer and i just want to make sure that i'm that i'm noting that i i have my own feelings about the moratorium conversation but um i really want to make sure that we're we're keyed into the fact that the people that live in this housing are people that we uh you know they're our neighbors and how we engage and make sure that their needs are met uh is important but it's also important to make sure that the opportunities are available because it's you know dha housing forever is just not uh really i don't think that's what they want and so just noting that that's exactly why i think it's important to make sure that there's resources available i'm hoping that you're partnering with the office of economic and workforce development on being facetious but um around making sure that those opportunities are clearly aligned and spelled out for your residents and i'll continue to keep watching there right and i i didn't talk about this in this presentation i just kind of referenced it in the first or second slide that as you know we have a whole um prosperity plan built into this overall with us a 30 percent um goal for both contracting and hiring and the current developers that we have on board have already signed on to that um as a part of what they do moving forward thank you thank you council member uh council member middleton thank you mr mayor and i want to thank each and every one of my colleagues who's insightful line of inquiry basically eviscerated most of my questions so i have uh that's a good thing uh so just a comment and just a quick question um but anthony good to see you man always good to see you um thank you as well i want to i um the the great black bard biggie smalls has a line in one of his songs that says my whole crew is lounging celebrate every day no more public housing and it it's it's a funny line but it's peaceful because the line indicates how resolved we are that public housing can't be a place of decency where folk can't build a life it's someplace to escape from rather than make a home or create memories and and as a product of public housing i wish that um i had had leadership and and focus conscientious as you uh during those times when i was growing up in public housing when during that time i can appreciate biggie smalls i was talking about so i know it's been a tough ride um i think the ironic thing is you're you're the leader that actually took these matters as serious as they needed to be taken and some folk have said well you know we need to get rid of the leader who's finally uh treated these issues uh with the attention that they deserve to be treated in that predate you about 50 60 70 years so i want to um thank you um for the heart for the spirit uh that you brought to this work the technical competency of course is there but i think you brought a spirit of heart and a genuine um perp a genuine purpose uh to this work so i'm gonna thank you uh for that as a as a as a as an alum of public housing um you can create memories there and they should be places of decency and respect and home uh where you can call home i also just want to remind folk that are engaged in this debate that focusing on housing decent housing and even evictions eviction is tied directly to income so we can't just talk about housing without talking about things like jobs as well or universal basic income or reparations and and we can't just get caught up and make sure the places look nice and there's fresh paint and good appliances and we want to stop evictions the best way to stop evictions is to make sure we do what we need to do with intentionality to raise income and to make sure incomes are steady which means that we might have to make some uh raise our flag and plant our flag and draw some lines as to what we will and won't accept in terms of job creation in our city uh and insisting like made our Jackson in Atlanta i know there's a different kind of legal situation here but be as bold as made our Jackson wasn't in Atlanta in insisting that our people are unable to participate uh so they won't need to work out of eviction diversion programs they'll have the money uh Chupak said i love paying rent when the rents do everybody talks about that does mentality but even he wants to pay bills on time wants to have the ability to pay bills so so while we talk about housing let us remember that that paychecks and income are important as well not just a nice place a place that's aesthetically pleasing that goes for public housing as well um my question is is about the relocate the uh right at first return and i'm glad you mentioned it that rat dictates it but let's let's be honest many of us have been hurt before uh and there are folk in the city who just don't trust us that we're not going to displace folk um and no matter how much we talk about the right at first return and you're guaranteed to return um there's some things that can happen in the interim when folk are are temporarily displaced so i want to ask about our tracking how robust our tracking systems are for folk that may move while their unit is being rebuilt there are not there are things that occurred natural attrition folk die folk move folk decide that um they don't want to return i like it where i am now but i've spoken to folk uh over the years in different cities and public houses that when their new unit was ready nobody told them they just kind of got they fell through the cracks and got lost in the system uh they they moved them somewhere else they built a shiny new uh uh complex and they started the process of bringing people in the screening people for that complex and and folk just fell through the cracks so i i want to ask you how robust our tracking and information sharing how well will we be keeping in touch with folk who may be displaced to let them know when the project is finished that if they haven't moved out of town if they haven't passed away if they haven't you know just decided i want to stay here that your unit is ready and and and we will get you back there if you want rather than let folk fall through the cracks that makes sense it does and i think a lot of what you're referring to is a big issue under the whole six program um those things that i talked about with rad where i said it requires this requires that it's actually built into the law and it wasn't part of the law it wasn't part of the whole six program essentially we're rad and a lot of people don't know that rad is actually a program that was created and championed by housing authorities and they they lobby for years to try to get something that made sense for how we can improve our public housing communities learning those lessons from the past with hope six and so that's built into the law we're required to track those families and have them come back they can't be out for more than 24 months and we have to and we require to track them if we are not hud does not allow us to move forward so you don't get to open that nice shiny new building unless you are accounting for those residents that were a part of that building from the beginning so it's a lot of things that are built into the law of the program it didn't exist before based on some of those really really harsh lessons learned going back to 1996 when Atlanta housing authority started what became the hope six program all the way up into choice neighborhoods into what we have now as rad so we'll be definitely tracking those and you think about you know we've gone through rad already with marina de mar so we had to move i think about 10 people 10 families i should say between those two sites and move to other places now they're they're they're moving back to the completed units and we definitely have to track those folks as long as they're dha resident it's easy to track them because they're either going to be you know in another public housing unit or in rare cases they might select the voucher but they're going to be a in a dha program where we can track them now if they choose to move out of public housing entirely that is a day or no longer in public housing or no longer part of the voucher program that's different but then they're not part of the dha family to begin with well thank you so much for that i wanted to give you the opportunity to say that over here i think it's important because i want the folks that are watching that have concerns about displacement that they're not hallucinating and that their fears are not unfounded and that there's a real historical precedent with it not being you know a paranoid there's real factual historical reason for us to be cautious in the term we've been we've been hurt before but i wanted to give you an opportunity to to state that um without ambiguity on record that that we will we will not allow that not on this watch to to happen uh to folk so um that's all i have thank you so much um miss scott keep up the great work thank you mr mayor thank you council member mr scott um the uh for damar court and maureen road have you all realize developer fees we have not even though the construction is finished we haven't technically completed all the steps that will allow us to close out the project if you will what will the can you give me an estimate of what those developer fees will be um i believe those developer fees in total would be at or around a million dollars but that is still very preliminary because we've had construction delays as those delays occur we as a developer are responsible for those overruns and costs and so i developer fee will be going towards those overruns and costs well i am looking forward to you all receiving those developer fees i know you are too and not as much as we are i know that but that's great i mean i think this is the this is the future of dha uh developers realizing developer fees plowing them back into the ability to redevelop and so i'm really glad to hear this um the um one of the things that you didn't mention uh property that is in the hands of the housing authority is Fayette Place and you and i have had discussions last week about Fayette Place and can you talk a little bit about your thinking there it's not in the first phase of the bond we have heard from our friends at Durham can about a planning process and that you and i both said that we would participate in can you just speak some about Fayette Place and your thoughts about it going forward well as we both have committed we expected to have a planning process begun within the first six months of the year obviously we had to do a terrace to deal with and then uh overlaying that we had the COVID-19 situation that pushed a lot of things back um you know when you look at what we have in the DDMP plan we have what i like to say is the floor and that's true with all of those plans right so it calls for over 500 years of housing 20 000 or so square foot for a grocery store but i think that we can certainly do more and something that's uh more exciting for that community than just housing in a small grocery store that's my goal but ultimately it's going to be determined by the interests of developers who can bring in um the necessary vendors um and and and uh people who are going to leave that space we're going to make that happen i think that there has to be a comprehensive effort would say a place that includes that downhill street corridor going all the way down to nccu at minimum and that that becomes a larger part of this is part of what we've said from the beginning would say a place one of the reasons why that ended up moving further down in our priority list is because as a part of the DDMP we did a full-fledged market study and the market study indicated that they have a place because look think about it wouldn't it be great if we could have started at a place build housing but there's none now and then as we talk about tearing down other units and people have a place to go that was the initial thought i had from the beginning when we started this but we have to let some of the facts and independent information help guide us so that we won't be uh taking on developments that just don't make sense or can't truly realize their true value to the community so now's the time to begin to look at say a place again to see how we might be able to expedite that timing that we have the one thing we've always said is because of the nine percent we've created a kind of a linear program but it does not mean that we have to go about it in a linear way the nine percent tax credit component of whatever those sites are we'll have to be linear but we can still do other things on any of those other sites that's why the RFP that was referenced by council member Freeman is going to be an important um indicator for how uh people see the opportunity to develop say a place side or the four-seal side or any of the other sites that we have and that's because it's all going to be market-driven so i think with the planning work we do with some understanding of how other things could be done in that ati community will all go towards the appeal of developers for what can happen on the fair play site it has to be something that is adding value to the ati community and not just um sort of a a kind of one of the meal housing development only thank you i have one more question uh and this relates to one of the two items that we have for dha funding today uh which i'm very supportive of the item 16 is operational assistance contract with the housing authority uh for the ddnp and am i correct to say that a lot of these funds are going to hire development staff at the housing authority yeah development all along it's been excellent at guiding us through this process thank you all right council members any more questions we've been at this meeting for more than three hours already and we've got two big agenda items but i think this was a super important discussion all right mr scott thank you so much we really appreciate you you're you're a great leader we're so lucky to have you and uh we appreciate you being with us today thank you thank you um mr manager i'm without objection we're going to put the housing authority items on consent as well thank you mr mayor all right uh we have two more items and um the first item is the small business plan and i see mr pedigree welcome we're glad to see you okay afternoon mr mayor mayor pro tem and members of city council happy to be here to follow up on our conversation about the the Durham small business recovery fund based on our last meeting at work session uh we took your input uh we did some additional research as well as talk to our potential partners to come before you with a new proposal today i'm going to cover uh the background of that proposal provide a timeline as well as eligibility and funding terms for this program um i'm waiting for them to put my slides up we'll be patient as we always are there we go okay and we can go right to the next slide we can go to the next slide that's possible so and i'll just begin talking uh as a part of the program overview again there's clearly a lot of interest around this project but more importantly there's a lot of need for our small businesses and again we're coming before you to propose that the city council authorizes the city manager to establish the Durham small business recovery fund it's a financing program that is going to help eligible small business in our community who've been negatively impacted by COVID again we have put together a single program that the city is developing but there are two component parts you heard last time about the loan aspect of our program uh but we have since been able to find a way to provide a grant portion so it's a single program with a grant option as well as a a loan option uh we have selected the carolina small business uh development fund uh as the administrator of this program again just to remind we can go back to the next slide having a little problem with our slides but colleagues also this is in our in on our agenda if you look at the very last agenda item the slides are also present there while the clerk is trying to get them together so go ahead and i'll continue in our last conversation we talked about the fact that the city did not have a infrastructure to administer and manage a program like this and thus we needed a third party we're happy to have the carolina small business development fund be a part of this program uh kevin dick who is the president and ceo of carolina small business development fund uh is joining us on the line uh he's available again if there are any specific questions as we get through the presentation again we selected them uh because of their experience uh there are 30 have 30 years of experience of doing small business lending uh in north carolina uh they have a track record with us here in durham they serve as a member of the oewd small business advisory committee and maybe more importantly because of the speed that we needed to get this program up carolina small business fund is one servicing the statewide rapid recovery home program but it also has stood up in his managing the mecklenburg county emergency recovery program and thirdly uh when we decided that we could find a way to do a grant program uh they are the only organization that's managing a grant program uh they developed and are implementing the raleigh grant program and so we thought that combined expertise and background was really critical to the work that we're doing so the fund is set up uh with two parts as i mentioned uh it's set up to receive funds from the public sector as well as the private sector again the public sector funding will be directed towards the lending part of the program where private sector funds can be set up uh and to be used for grants currently the city has committed a million dollars for the loan program uh and duke uh has committed a million dollars uh for the private side and again we intend to uh continue to fill that uh to go out and get additional funding uh next slide the carolina small business fund give me one second um mr pedigree the the clerk and i have been in communication uh behind the scenes she's having trouble um this getting the slides to move so we'll just move them as quickly as we can uh but colleagues again i do want to remind you that if you want to follow along on the slides they are in um on the last item of the agenda you'll see the presentation there and that has the slides i'm sorry go ahead okay uh the carolina small business development fund will manage both programs um they'll administer the loan program by essentially providing all of the the loan uh origination underwriting and servicing that's required as a part of that program uh they will essentially provide the technical assistance that supports the the borrowers in that program uh they will also manage the grant program and again i'll talk about the terms later this is a unified program where we will essentially work with them to provide the outreach and marketing to promote the program um i think we know from experience so far uh in regards to these local recovery programs that the funds will be exhausted fairly quickly and uh again having uh an experienced administrator with systems programs and forms already up uh that's going to accelerate our work one of the primary interests uh in this program is how we connect these opportunities these financing opportunities uh to our communities of color uh to our disadvantaged businesses in our community um again in managing the programs that the carolina small business fund has done uh and i had an opportunity to talk with my colleagues in raleigh as well as mecklenburg county about their work uh they've been able to really achieve uh a a very effective level of diversity in terms of participation of these programs uh in raleigh they actually provided an intervention that i think has helped uh the abilities for uh our smallest businesses or disadvantaged businesses to participate uh that intervention uh and this is something that we'll do as part of this program uh is to essentially open a time period for applications to come in so there's not a rush to be in the system on the first come first serve basis that actually also enables uh us carolina small business fund to provide some advanced technical assistance uh one of the things that we have found with all of the programs both at federal and state level uh the level of preparation in terms of making sure that the proper forms and documentation are available and by having that sort of runway uh it has enabled more of this targeted community to successfully apply uh the third part of their approach that i think is innovative in that uh once all the applications are in i think they had over six hundred uh in the rally program uh they randomly select all the qualified applications uh in a hundred units so the first hundred are applied against the amount of dollars that are available um again if that hundred exhausted uh the fund uh then it would be done uh if it only exhausted half of the fund uh a next round of a hundred firms would be selected um again this actually this process has actually generated a 59 percent uh participation rate in terms of businesses of color receiving the grants uh they did not utilize uh this approach uh in mecklenburg but again the success of the loan program in mecklenburg uh is at 52 percent uh businesses of of color uh i asked both of my colleagues what they thought the key elements were to their success above and beyond the interventions that i talked about the carolina small business fund actually has a documented track record of working with disadvantaged and low income businesses uh it is core to their business it's a part of their core mission they have the credibility they have the connections and the systems that enable us to sort of make that happen and that it works so again we're happy to have them as a part of the program uh again the urgency of getting work out uh again uh if we can go back to the slide okay the timeline for disbursements if we can get back to that slide because there are a number of points i wanted to make there well maybe not so we've set up a timeline uh that essentially assuming that we get council's approval and can most negotiate a contract by june 8th we can get the application process launched available for our our businesses to apply by june 18th and again i'm looking at the grant portion of this by june 18th keep that window open for the 10 days that i described earlier again going through the review and selection process the grants can be received by july 10th so this is effectively around six weeks i know that again this is about the same timeline a little faster than what they were able to get their program up with rally is again they have the infrastructure and the services to be able to do it a similar timeline for the loan program the difference about the loan program is once it's open we will evaluate loans and make you know loan determinations and fund those on an ongoing basis again there's no need to sort of keep that window open it's it is a first come first serve but we will apply the marketing outreach and technical assistance approach and again it's generated good success in mecklenburg next slide so eligibility um just kind of want to work through that and i'm i'm mindful of the importance of people understanding uh what who and what this fund is for so independently owned and physically you're located in durham uh these are locally owned and based businesses in durham the size standard uh the size standard is 25 employees at less than two million dollars in total revenue i want to pause to talk about that size standard and and why and how we've come up with that uh there've been a number of surveys out in terms of measuring the impact of covet on different businesses first of all every business large and small has been impacted by covet i reference a study that was done around north carolina over 468 businesses done by the institute the minority institute here in durham where it talked about some of the challenges that these firms have had most of the respondents were businesses of color um the vast majority of the 468 firms uh had employees less than 25 over 80 of those businesses were less than 25 um the state did a hub survey taking a look at hub firms this survey was about 300 and again the impact on these businesses in terms of doing state work uh the survey showed of those businesses uh that here again the vast majority over 80 had employees less than 25 um again the point here is that the very small businesses um you know are the ones who have been impacted every business has been impacted but again the smallest of the businesses and many of them uh most of them being small disadvantaged businesses are the ones who were not successful uh with the PPP program they have struggled in terms of getting involved with some of the state programs and so we have chosen this demarcation and every business any business in durham that meets the size standard uh are eligible now inside of the program uh you know businesses that have revenue under a half a million dollars will be eligible for the grant program again this is an effort to provide funding for those very smallest of our businesses however businesses with revenue over a half million and up to two million dollars are eligible for the loan program and i'll talk about the terms of the loan program as we go forward uh all businesses must be able to determine uh or demonstrate that there's a at least a 25 percent decline uh in their revenue uh due to covid uh we expect them to show a minimum of two years of profitable operation and a growth trajectory again this intervention is to mitigate the impact of covid uh next slide the loan amounts uh and again the loan amount range is from five thousand to thirty five thousand dollars uh this amount uh is consistent uh with the loan amount that meckenberg county has done i think their average loan is somewhere between 25 and 27 thousand um the maximum grant amount uh is 10 thousand dollars this too is similar to the grant amount maximum grant amount within the rally program in fact the grant amount is up to 10 thousand dollars or two times the business rent or big business mortgage uh for the business so again uh these are for storefronts uh businesses that are actually paying a commercial rent or are owning a property going forward uh the loan is a term loan up to 10 years the interest rate is three percent uh which effectively is just below prime um again this is favorable terms um the deferred principal payments are up to 12 months so uh for the first 12 months uh first year the businesses will be asked to pay interest only uh on their loans um again personal guarantee for all business owners uh 20 percent or more ownership uh we are not taking any ucc one filing so effectively uh we are an unsecured creditor uh in this in this model uh next slide so the cost of of administering the program again we still have to negotiate these but this model is consistent with the model uh that is being done uh in meckenberg uh as well as raleigh and in some of the other statewide program uh so effectively the loan administration fee is 10 percent of the loan fund plus 10 percent that's set aside for technical assistance uh the technical assistance is the sort of accounting marketing the support that's tailored to the needs of the individual businesses uh and again that is paid over the term uh of the contract uh there is interest the three percent interest is split the city will get two and a half percent of that interest repayment back into our program along with the principal and the point five percent uh is uh provided to the carol lion small business fund to essentially handle the performing and in essentially managing the the the fund dollars uh in the loan fund uh the administration of the grant because the grant program is a simpler program uh there is not a long term technical assistance component however there is technical assistance that's available in the small business network ecosystem uh there's a 10 percent grant fee uh for the administration of the fund so uh with that i'll stop and again be prepared to answer questions and uh if there's an opportunity we'll have kevin dick weigh in in terms of clarifying some of the points thank you very much andre um let's see um if the clerk can take the slides down now so we can see everybody uh and let me just say uh we're glad to have kevin with us kevin are you uh with a hearing distance i hope you can hear me great yes we can great to see you um and as well as the rest of the council members um and please have this opportunity to um potentially address you or support andre however i can't it's great to have you back in Durham virtually kevin thank you hopefully we can make it in person soon one of these days right um all right mr manager did you have a comment thank you mr mayor i was just wanted to andre to kind of follow up on that last slide and clarify the cost of the program costs and are those 10 costs and fees something that we'll be looking at covering on behalf of the program or are those fees that will be taken out of the individual business loans could you just clarify that a little bit more please thank you the management fee the administrative fee uh is uh an additional cost our goal is to put the two million dollars on the street and again we'll need to cover the administrative costs uh from uh our budget from our our our sources right just wanted to be sure everybody knew that's what the intention was thank you really appreciate that clarification thank you colleagues uh you have heard mr pedigree's presentation and now i'll ask if there are questions or comments or members of the council council member reese yeah i'm gonna have to switch off the video hold on i was not looking good can anybody hear me okay yes yes we can andre good to see you thank you for this presentation um rather than he prays on you for doing great work in a short amount of time i want to get right to it because um we've been here for a while and we're going to be here a while longer i want to turn straight to the grant and loan terms a portion of the of the presentation um there are a couple of things here i want to ask you to consider first of all the second item the maximum grant amount of ten thousand dollars or two times the business's rent or mortgage whichever is lower i think this provision especially the second part of it excludes a number of our businesses that don't pay rent or have a mortgage uh food trucks folks who own a business that runs out of their own home for example um and i had a friend uh actually just text me uh constituent just text me during your presentation uh to talk about um the the fact that that would exclude him from the program um i think it i don't know what we gain well i don't know how much we gain by including the portion of that second bullet after ten thousand dollars uh so that's one thing i would ask us to consider today as we um think about how to roll this out uh second of all um i want to hear more about the implication of a personal guarantee and what that means you talked a little bit about it but i'd like to hear that one more time with a little bit more detail um i as i as you heard uh in our last time together um i want to resist um collateral to the extent i can it seems like this might accomplish that but i want to hear more about it um and uh third of all i want to talk about the timeline for getting from where we are today uh approval uh to the disbursement of grants and loans um and maybe that is a question for kevin in terms of what can be facilitated if uh if if there's if there's anything the city can do financially to make that move quick more quickly i'm interested in hearing about that so those are the three things i have for you um thanks sure um on your first point um you know in the discussion there there has been uh emphasis around uh businesses uh that were either storefront or paying commercial rent as opposed to home-based businesses and again we can talk about that in fact i'll ask kevin to maybe also talk about that uh the the trucks um they're uh included in the rally program so uh vendors uh like the uh the trucks restaurant trucks um would be included in in the activity um you know again we can talk about that again we're trying to service the pleasure of the of the council here um and kevin can talk a little bit more about how rally has implemented the program i wanted to maybe also now talk a little bit about the the unsecured credit position that we have so a personal guarantee means that the individuals uh who sign on uh are are are liable uh again if if there was some form of liquidation uh we would have to stand in line uh with other other creditors uh we need to hide any secured creditors uh that the borrow might have uh and so uh again uh you know how where we are in the line uh i don't know i i just know that essentially as an unsecured creditor uh it's not the uh it's not a secure position so i hope that it put some light on it um i did have a hold on having a technology problem here i did have a question about what about what other jurisdictions um that are doing these kind of loan programs is there a consensus about whether or not collateral or personal guarantees being required to some of them do neither what's what does the landscape look like out there well do you mind that kevin maybe jump in since he's participating uh in uh both statewide as well as local programs uh to kind of talk about the island for you i know there's a range great thank you kevin will you uh will you um comment on that yes happy to mr mayor and and uh council member reese great to see you appreciate the question um it really uh varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction um we generally uh we've seen in mecklenburg for example where we are um collecting uh ucc filing but that it doesn't necessarily have to be a deal breaker um we're with the um statewide program um that that collateral uh expectation is there the 20 percent um the the guaranty the personal guarantee for anyone that owns 20 percent of the more or more of the business is there as well um and i believe that's also the case in mecklenburg uh in the city of riley because it's a grant program none of those provisions would apply um thank you that's that's good to hear um and um kevin will you also talk about the storefront requirement which i think uh which i think is really um uh what that second provision does it really requires you to have a physical location whether it's a storefront or an office or something can you talk about how that has worked in other jurisdictions as well sure and and really um what that counts comes down to councilmember reese is really a policy decision relative to what you want this program to do in riley the storefront provision was there because the grant fund was seen as a mechanism to also drive place making and and really drive um you know helping businesses that help contribute to sort of the vibrancy and the character of the city visually and create places for gathering um obviously at this current time um you know there's a there's a certainly a restriction with gathering but they wanted to really um drive place making and and and drive the ability to um help help strengthen the character of the city so the storefront provision as well as the food truck uh provision was placed into the grant program but um and it's it's been effective in terms of the the fact that we had 615 applications this morning we actually wrote letters to 116 successful grant applicants um and as andre alluded to we we launched this the program may 11th and we um are deploying capital on june 4th so three and a half weeks um from the time that the program was launched to the to the time that folks uh will start to get folks should start to get a um aca transactions as early as tomorrow and into early next week so in terms of the effectiveness of the program it has not hindered the effectiveness of the program um from that standpoint all of that said it that is also um you know that's a policy question the program does not have to be um run that way i think that uh in in talking with andre and in talking with the folks in raleigh we want the the program to meet economic development uh outcomes and and objectives that are very holistic and so you know from an economic development standpoint it's about getting capital into the hands of businesses but it's also about trying to sustain the community vibrancy um in the best way possible but it's really you know it will really be up to the discretion of counsel thank you kevin i appreciate that that's that's helpful um i guess just to close um i i know i guess the council's gonna have to have a conversation about that i don't know if the folks are going to have questions so when that happens we'll we'll we'll we'll have a conversation about the issues around thank you about um the mortgage rent requirement um the um uh so that that'll be good i guess the other the last thing i wanted to say is not really a question just uh when we get to that point where we're talking about how uh when we come to decide about how we feel about the requirements i've had good conversations with many of you and with staff about the one million dollar commitment that the city of durham has already made to this fund i think that's a good place to start but i was having conversations with some of you immediately after the last work session telling you i thought we were going to need another two million another million dollars in it um i don't know how to handle that um in this context but i think we should signal to our community that we're willing to put in another million dollars when it's necessary and i know there's a difference of opinion about that in the council and hope we can have that conversation with the time comes i'll stop talking now for a bit thank you sir you're welcome thank you council member um okay other questions and comments for mr pedigree or mr dick yes mark uh councilmember mills thank you mr mayor and uh thank you councilor reese i don't think i was one of the people you spoke to after the meeting about another million but i certainly am on record thinking that the first million is a great start and certainly i'm willing to do more as the program rolls out so no difference of opinion from me um andre and kevin good to see you both always good to see you thank you for the work uh you've done and you're doing on this um a couple of questions i um first on on the program eligibility i um i'm not even close to being a restaurateur restaurateur uh but but from my work on the board of the ddi i know for a fact that there are our restaurants downtown that have more than 25 employees um so i i'm wondering how are they just out or or can we tweak uh somehow um the uh you know the the eligibility requirements are i know we don't want to inadvertently send a signal that we're not really interested in restaurants but i know that for a fact some of them i frequent have more than 25 uh employees so so and i'll just do these in shotgun and you can respond uh after i'm done i also want to i want to uh ask a question about the the the language and if it's fair to interpret when i read businesses with revenue under 500,000 are eligible for grants does that mean they are exclusively eligible for grants that businesses under 500,000 are not eligible for grants and loans and businesses with revenues over 500,000 are eligible for loans that loans exclusively um just go ahead if you want to yeah no that's that's correct we we've chosen to essentially bifurcate the program for the smaller firms to be able to be eligible for the the grants okay under half million and again you're you're not required you're not eligible for the loans and those with uh over a half million are eligible for the loans only uh and again yeah and and again you know this is a very flexible uh loan term uh you know 10 years and and what have you it it's it's not a grant but uh you know we you know uh we think there's a market for folks who can take on loans everybody can't take on loans that's as measured by uh the fact that the both the rapid recovery loan fund program which is about 125 million dollars uh has a very good set of firms who are applying uh for that as well as again some of the experience and some of the other local loan programs got it so and what are we going to say to restaurants or places that have more than 25 employees so um again we did not make an industry determination right so we know that uh there are businesses that have more than 25 employees um uh the data that I showed was really one how to essentially reach the businesses that the research has shown it has had the greatest difficulty accessing resources again this is a policy question uh again we serve it the pleasure uh of of council here uh but the research has shown that disadvantaged businesses businesses of color uh are mostly businesses that have 25 or less uh the surveys uh both here in north carolina as well as national has talked about those firms failing to be able to access these resources uh ppp you know other state and in federal programs and even grant programs on a first come first serve basis and so based on that data we chose to pick something that covered actually 80 of the businesses in our community there are absolutely businesses that have more uh than 25 there are businesses that have more than 2 million in sales uh again that's a decision that was made is there a cutoff data as to when you had those 25 employees because I imagine this might incentivize some folks to cut their employees until they get under 25 or if you had 25 while you were in business and you're not in business anymore you may very well not have 25 anymore so is there a date certain that you have to stipulate at this date I had such and such employees or is it when you fill out the application well it's part of when you fill out the application Kevin help me in terms of uh there's a time range where we're looking at uh when businesses are are are sort of operating uh until we are going back in time not just what the current figure is before Kevin answers I think one of the important things around this program uh is that it is not the end all uh you know we are going to support uh grantees as well as borrowers to access other funds for example uh there still is 160 billion dollars out there for PPP and again many of these firms were not able to access PPP partly because they didn't have a bank relationship and partly because they didn't get the format so again you can access our program as well as that uh everyone that's applying for our program should be also applying for the golden leaf rapid recovery program again these are just ranges of capital and for a lot of our smaller independent businesses for the first time freelancers sole proprietors and self-employed people can access the federal and state unemployment insurance again that doesn't replace your revenue but if you don't have overhead like rent and some of the other things that's been a viable source we've been able to connect entrepreneurs sole proprietorships and self-employed people to access that resource and again uh accessing that resource or any other resource doesn't disqualify you from participating in our program got you um I appreciate that turning the grants the grant and loan terms is is it possible to get something less I mean that's not tethered to rent I mean uh I see the rent or mortgage and I appreciate uh council recess and about this I see the rental mortgage um um stipulation but is it possible are we losing some type of metric to determine another could you get a grant less than 10 grand for whatever reason are you are we looking at income statements or or I just said we're giving you six or four or and what are we basing it on so I'm not going to try to guess one of the things that I said to you we're going to we're relying on the Caroline Small Business Fund because they've actually processed over a thousand applications between grants and loans and so this is an opportunity Kevin maybe to share what you've learned from that experience because again that's informing our view we don't have a loan program again I want to say that again the city of Durham has not processed an application or review the grant through the office of economic workforce development and so we have to rely on partners with the experience and that's in part uh you know why we have Kevin here today to kind of help give us some additional insights uh based on that experience so okay thank thank you Andre yes council member Middleton um hey man I'm sorry no I said hey man how you doing I'm doing well how are you you're well I asked for the video to come up so you all could see me but I'm not sure what's going on but um what we found in Raleigh is that the average grant size has been about $7400 to $7500 um and I did want to just again offer this perspective about the two times rent or mortgage again this is not necessarily um this it's ultimately is a policy decision and we follow what the client wants but the basis behind the two months rent or mortgage was that um we wanted to to have sort of a baseline uh that we could really um we could use a baseline to come up with a solid amount and um what we were trying to achieve really was first of all to stretch the grant dollars as much as we could so in other words instead of everyone getting $10,000 per say if you if you had um something that said all right well we'll make a max of $10,000 um but have some baseline that really uh is related to actual expenses that a business owner might have um and we we figured that doing it based upon rent or mortgage was more universal than doing it based upon payroll because that you know micro entrepreneurs or sole proprietors wouldn't necessarily have payroll but most people would probably rent a space so you know and obviously that's not an absolute but it we thought it to be more general um so that's but I hopefully that answered your question uh about the average grant size as well and I also wanted to provide some perspective about the choice of rental mortgage finally I will say I did get a note from staff that even with say food trucks as long as you are connected to some sort of commercial lease so in a food truck uh in the case of a food truck it will be a commissary where they have to pay rent or things like that um that would also be considered as well now that that's extremely helpful and demystifying some of the methodology behind uh this stuff uh finally uh the the three percent interest rate is that is that the best we can do and I don't mean from our perspective I mean from the perspective of the uh of the lindy's how did we come up with three percent as opposed to one percent uh sorry go ahead Hunter well I was going to say part of the the premise is that uh we have to uh for the public money charge a competitive interest rate a market rate uh we're choosing to use prime which is the the best rate available to any borrower large or small and reduce that by a quarter of percent uh and again part of the legal construct is that we can't put together a program that competes with other lenders or borrowers and so um again I I think you know just to cut to the chase uh while we're putting this together uh we'll make sure that we are able to do the very best in terms of the the loans by the way some of the other programs are at five point five percent Kevin you have a better sense of the of the competitive rate uh ours is one of the lowest of the rate that are out in terms of the loan programs Kevin do you want to comment on that uh the relative loan the relative interest rates of what you're seeing in some of these other programs sure thank you mayor shul um the only interest rate that I've seen lower than that was sba idle um on a 30-year term that's 2.75 percent I haven't seen anything lower as andre said we wanted to um you know really look at prime as a baseline and then discount it lower than that but I would also say that with a 10-year repayment term um that's still a pretty favorable um monthly repayment for most business owners okay um and now I appreciate that and I guess my question is and I understand the the uh the competition argument are are we legally uh constrained to comport ourselves to not undercutting other lenders or or is it a choice on our part I mean I know we want to recoup some money as a government but we're a government operating under emergency circumstances this isn't really a for-profit venture for us as a government we're trying to stabilize our economy and help our residents and therefore operating under that motivation and in that spirit do we have to set it at three percent I guess is my question I mean if we wanted to do one percent could we legally council member uh I'm going to refer any legal question to the city attorney all right madam attorney good afternoon um I also have on this call assistant city attorney Krista Kukaro who has been working closely with oewd on this project so I'm actually going to let her address that question council member Middleton if you don't mind thank you councillor yep she says her audio cut out she can send you notes and you can cheat off as best I understand it um the city cannot just set a one percent interest rate I'm hoping she's going to text me she's back let's jump in um we can't undercut the natural market for one um and Krista can you hear me yeah I can hear you can you hear me okay yes okay um yeah you good afternoon council um and thanks for for the opportunity to answer this question Andre um and can you are on the the right direction I do believe that we are somewhat limited um in in what we're able to do as far as interest rate um do you think we have to remain competitive um however I do think you know one of the questions I think we can talk with Carolina small business development borrowers who may be this is meaning that they may not be access traditional financing whether there may be the availability of lower interest rates for those borrowers and I think that that's something that we can talk with Kevin about and I think legally that would be justifiable absolutely I'd be curious in knowing the absolute lowest we can go and not run afoul of the law and that's a question you know just put it straightforward like that understood um thank you gentlemen mr. mayor I think I've taken up some time I think that's all I have on this thank you sir thank you colleagues thank you Kevin and Andre thank you council member thank you council member who who else would like to ask questions at this point or have comments council member freeman thank you mr. mayor I just wanted to uh to make sure I weighed in and share uh first I'd like to welcome um Kevin back to the bull city as a fellow mountie uh I um I just wanted to make sure that I noted um council member Reese mentioned uh if there were costs associated with moving any faster I would definitely like to hear if there is any way to to shift the move up the timeline as as much as possible and then also uh around a lot the conversation around the additional funding I too had not had conversations with Reese council member Reese but um I would be interested in figuring out how to make sure we do make sure that the that if it funds ran through in a week that there were there was a way for us to continue to um provide funding in this case so uh council member freeman um I'll take the first question I think the the second one obviously is um not more council related and I'll take the second one in terms of the first question um I believe that we could move faster um and I don't we don't necessarily need to make a cost be associated with that um for example we used a review period in Raleigh that was 10 days we may be able to have some flexibility on that um it wouldn't necessitate really strong technical assistance between contract execution and the launch period so that we could really make sure that people had their paperwork in order so that they could definitely meet that five-day window um but I I do think that that is an example of how the whole process would move faster and each subsequent step would be moved up um five days okay thank you sure so I want to uh stick with that topic a minute because one of the concerns I have about moving faster or too fast uh is that it is it potentially will be at the exclusion of many businesses that need is additional technical assistance and we you know we have we'll have a you know somewhat of a challenge and communicating to a lot of businesses we know that that the businesses that are in the know are going to be quick to quick to uh to get their applications in but I think I'd like to hear staff you know think about or at least talk about you know what are the expectations for getting the word out how we recruit potential candidates and in particular what technical assistance uh they might need to be able to be you know submitting uh applications and eligibility applications so I mean that that's one reservation I have I know I understand the urgency of get it out get it out but I also think you have to think about uh is there a an unintended consequence of moving too fast if it if it sets up for the potential for uh you know limiting uh many of the businesses that we're interested in in recruiting so if you could talk about that a minute and I'll come back to the funding question after that so um again there's been a lot of learning over the last uh month uh in terms of these various financing programs and again it's documented evidence uh that minority small businesses did not do as well and again the bank relationship was one of the biggest stumbling blocks because in the ppp program the sba program uh it was first of those who had the relationship and most of our businesses start their businesses with their own capital and did not have the bank relationship but second was the number of folks who got knocked off the site because they did not have all of the forms uh available in order to process the the the information again we have worked very hard again we are co-hosting a number of seminars webinars uh in literally in terms of how to uh and what forms you need uh if you have not processed as example uh your your schedule c for your tax return for 2019 uh that is a very important form to be able to do uh again that sort of is the technical assistance of getting that level of documentation uh in other things that are related to your payroll a whole host of things that are important in terms of the loan underwriting um you know same thing for the grants it's it's not simply there's a criteria for for getting grants and the kevin can speak to uh those who uh aren't successful in getting grants and what some of the problems were uh around that so i i don't want to downplay that again i'd like to make sure that we use the have a runway to provide the technical assistance we know that people need the money and they're ready to jump but if we're really looking at what some of the challenges were for the firms who weren't fully prepared uh we want to use this time to market it and provide the direct technical assistance going forward so kevin maybe you can talk a little bit about how you have used the runway sure um we extended the runway on the front end by making sure that we had technical assistance sessions both in english and spanish in rally and we found that to be very effective we did that through webinars um they were well advertised we we actually um in that case partnered with the city of rally's economic development staff we made sure that we had buy-in from groups like the rally chamber way county economic development and so forth um and we also used um you know the opportunity to appear on television with mayor baltwin and rally with when a vision television so that we could also um and and i did that with our latino programs director um so we have by the way three bilingual staff who are all conversant on the loans and grants um we also uh partnered with shaw university and use social media platforms to make sure that um knowledge about the grants went out um to the right channels and mecklenburg we just partnered with their their pio office and economic development department uh in in order to make sure that um the word got out that way obviously social media um was a very important component as well um and so we used uh we did intensive technical assistance for a few days right before the launch period um and i would say the first day of the launch period in rally we had 615 applications in total over the 10 days we had over 150 that first day so um to manage your bond fields point um there could be an unintended con consequence of keeping the review period too short it may have lessened the number of applications we would have gotten at rally for example um but again that's a that's a policy call and i think you know my point was that our infrastructure can accommodate whatever time period you want that thank you i just want to note that i i hear with um with uh our city manager saying and i think in this case that folks are upside down in this and that the folks who are most impacted in this have been waiting a long time and they've been looking for something and so the word getting out is is very important and i appreciate him acknowledging that you know we don't want to miss anyone um that should be at the forefront of this and uh i i mean i'm i'm i'm open i hear i hear that that conversation so i'll let uh andre decide whether it's a quicker turnaround or not but any other thoughts on council members i'm sorry council member freeman just on that second point around making sure that that folks understood that funds were available you want to make a comment oh well i'll come back to that if we could just get any other feedback from council on the timing issue i think that's a pretty critical piece to uh to give the caroline small business fund you know the the heads up as to what the expectations are uh obviously we're going to do everything we can to to market the program um but um we know the challenges when we're in many of the communities that are uh that are that are typically negatively impacted by a lot of things we market it they don't have the same access to information that that uh individuals and businesses that are kind of you know at the at the access points typically do any other comments on that council members well i'll just say that i i'm comfortable you know i'm comfortable with the um schedule as proposed i agree that in this case speed is the enemy of access uh and uh i think that being able to give the technical assistance being able to reach the disadvantaged communities that's going to be important i mean it's all we all wish it was out now it's not out now um but i think that let's don't hurry it uh in order to you know and then miss out on a lot of the businesses that we really want to be able to serve any other comments on that all right other questions and comments on the council members so may i want to follow up on the money question yeah go ahead calcium average thank you could i could we um that seems to be an important question and apparently it's being framed as either we're inclusive with the money or we move quickly and so if that's the choice i wonder if we could just get a sense of the council about where the council's priorities are that would be great okay i'm i'm happy to hear that uh you heard where mine are you heard where councilman frayman's are others mayor pro tem and council member caballero sure thank you mr mayor and i think it's really important for the funding to go to the businesses that we're targeting we want to make sure that people who really need this money can access it and especially you know along with our um with our you know strategic plan guidelines and our values around supporting disadvantaged businesses so i think that that would be um like that that's my primary concern um it's making sure that the money gets to who really needs it thank you council member caballero name if the if the will the council was to speed it up i would go that way as well but i think that i guess my biggest concern is within the latino community we are there's always a communication lag i don't know how well uh translation interpretation is how quickly you can get done and so just knowing that and and that's just in spanish i don't even know how we do it with other languages um i'm i'm hesitant because i think there will be a large percentage of the community who will literally hear about it much later unless we have that real tight yeah i mean i think that this timeline um you know it would we always that we were doing this center we're not but now that we're doing it when we are what's the timeline that's going to get us the businesses that we want okay i think we have some consensus councilmember reese do you want to join that consensus or do you want to uh or councilmember millton yeah i i want to join that consensus i i think uh what the mayor pretends that makes a lot of sense i also find council copy arrows concerns about uh access compelling as well my assumption is that i don't think anybody it's a secret how quickly we wanted this thing turned around as possible how um um important this was to us my assumption is that this timetable that's been brought to us took that into a counter i don't think we does any more we can do to make folk know how much we want this to go out as quickly as possible so my assumption is that that timetable is predicated upon knowledge of that and i think it also allows uh for us to get the right people as the mayor pretend said in council copy arrow as well so i'm cool with this timetable based upon that all right thank you councilmember let's hear from the manager on the um issue of the funds and then what i'm going to try to do is i'm going to try to distill what i've heard as the questions and get some consensus around that or uh decision around those uh it is now five it's now 10 minutes after five and we've got a bunch of budget work to do so i'm going to try to help us focus this discussion and um we'll start with the manager so thank you mr mayor uh so what i wanted to say about the the money side you know we we have the million dollar commitment for the loan fund from the city and the million dollar commitment from duke for the grant um i i think we we acknowledge or we need to recognize that there will likely be a need for more funds and i think we have the potential for you know for doing that uh in the the money that we're setting aside in in covet but i have a couple thoughts about that one this this is for us for Durham uh new territory uh i think it would be more prudent to to let this first pass happen at the million and million and then doing a you know a quick evaluation of how successful we were meeting the the objectives that and the values that we've laid out uh for example if in fact uh the the random draw system doesn't attract the uh the the disadvantage minority of businesses that we'd hoped we may need to go back and pivot how we think about that uh if in fact it's uh um you know successful uh you know we can we can react that way but rather than commit you know at the extra million dollars right now to this program i believe that there's an opportunity to come back for a second round if this is successful or maybe come back with a a modified program if there's things that we needed to learn from that i also think that um at some point you know we're going to probably have a more uh full and deeper conversation about other community needs uh and how the requirements and the expectations for the the the monies that we've put aside for covet response are going to be deployed and right now we're you know obviously laser focused on the the small business fund we really have not talked about many other community needs and i suspect we will in the next uh you know coming days so whether it's next week or the next month but just a little hesitant to commit too much to one program both in terms of structure and in terms of just the the segment of of of that resource so uh i acknowledge you know that that maybe we say if it works there's more money to come but i just would be hesitant to to put that in there right from from the get go that those are that's just some of my thoughts thank you mr manager let's go ahead and take up that question is there anybody that thinks that we ought to allocate any more money right now let me also add by the way that the county is putting in a million dollars so um we'll be starting uh there they apparently are going to be voting on that uh at their budget meeting uh but that's my understanding from uh commissioner Jacobs that there was support for that last night or two nights ago uh so i'll i'll ask now are there people that think we ought to be allocating more money now uh or do people think that we ought to wait see how this goes and then allocate more money if necessary i'll focus the question this first question mr mayor councilmember freeman i just wanted to to just um clear this clear the um the conversation and making it making it more pertinent to what we're talking to what i'm talking about and that i acknowledge that we're trying to be intentional about reaching small businesses but i want to be real specific in saying that i would like this money to reach small black and brown businesses who are at their end and i have been trying to be very patient in this process as as a councilmember i feel like it's incumbent upon me to make sure that i am pressing as hard as possible to make sure that we're doing what we can now because this is our future tax base and so the small businesses that are on main street are a small subsection of what we're seeing and how hard um businesses are being hit and so i don't know that that conversation and context is included in this but this is this ties back to the initial conversation around uh what white violence looks like and so acknowledging that reparations have never been paid there are small businesses in this community that are just barely skipping by and so the additional time and then the lack of whether or not they'll be able to get through on the first um in the first process of the second it's a it's just it's just a lot right now and i just want to make sure that i that i clearly state that that's where i'm coming from in this and so i i really appreciate what andre has pulled together and his staff um with mr kevin dick and i'm grateful that we're at this point but it's not it's not so much that that i don't think that we'll we'll get this wrong or we'll miss these folks it's really just that we're so far behind and this is pre-covid behind we haven't touched we haven't been able to reach those those businesses in a way that was impactful in this entire fiscal year and i want us to be as intentional about this now while we can and so that's exactly why i'm just like i mean the time and the money is the time is just now and i just want to be clear and saying that thank you i'll go back to the question i was asking which is is there anyone uh or i'll put it this way um the manager has recommended that we um spend this money that we do a quick evaluation on how it goes see what we need to tweak and then if we would like to put more money in that we can is there anyone that wants to offer a different position i'm mr mayor hi it's me charlie i'm on audio again because no problem things stink um yeah i do want to offer a contrary position um and that is that um that i think everyone on this call knows that a million dollars isn't going to be enough we should we should model our public policy around what we know um and we should if we don't allocate the two million dollars today we should say we know we've allocated a million dollars and we were prepared to allocate another million dollars um when this uh when this particular fund is exhausted that's what i think we should say okay other thoughts councilmember middleton thank you sir and then council and then mayor pro tem i i i think the manager's um recommendation is sensible i'm already on record saying that i support more money and i think we're going to have to get more money but i also realize you know our count there are other counties that got a zillion dollars in cares funding uh and we did not and and there's a lot of counties that are getting credit for doing stuff and they're not they're spending federal money not their money it's a million from us it's a million from the county it's a million from duty it's three million uh that's a start i but i'm also mindful that there's some other things that we're gonna have to address i am deeply concerned deeply concerned about the rising infection rates among our the latin eds community uh with kofi we may need to spend some money on ppe and and and stuff in that community coming up uh we still don't know what the price has had on the google terraces we still don't know what eviction rates are gonna look like uh and if we're gonna need to do more on eviction diversion relative to this uh pandemic so i want to give 10 million dollars to everything to everybody but i realized that we did not get the same federal help as other counties did um and as a as a policymaker i'm constrained by that and compelled that by that as a bleeding heart liberal i want to write a billion dollar check to everybody i'm for every cause um and i wear that print and i say that proudly um so i i think the manager's recommendation with the and i'm glad to hear that the county's come up with a million uh with three million going into this uh with this time until that's presented to us i'm comfortable with that and i will i will make a declaration right now publicly uh that i'm more than willing to revisit this and add another million uh at least um after uh we get this money out the door so i'm i'm going to uh affirm the the manager's recommendation at this point thank you councilmember councilmember caballero um i am comfortable with saying we're willing to dedicate another million i think that basically it'll be two million because hopefully the county's money will be ready at that point and so it's two million now and two million whenever whenever we just say we allocate it we're going to allocate it i should say and i we only have five million dollars we know we need so many more million dollars to do the relief that durham needs uh and there are going to be the list of needs as long and we just need to be um very careful right now mayor pro tem thank you mr mayor um i'm not comfortable with the um with adding another million to the pot at this time i think that we've spent a lot of time talking about small business relief and haven't spent as much time evaluating all the other needs that might exist in the community for this five million dollars so i'm reluctant to commit 40 of our total covid really fund to small business without having evaluated any other potential um needs that exist in the community i feel good about a million and the county and do coming in with a million and we may find that you know we think an additional million dollars for this is where this money can best be spent but i feel like we haven't really evaluated our options fully and i don't want to commit to something before i feel like i know what all of the um potential needs are that are on the table thank you madam mayor pro tem um i am hearing uh three people at least who are not ready to add another million and so i'm going to say that uh we're we're um since there are only six of us uh that that's where we're heading uh we're we'll we'll go with the manager's recommendation um i believe is what i'm hearing um i think we're all very clear that we're interested uh quite interested uh in the evaluation of the program a quick evaluation uh and to then see if we want to tweak it what we want to add to it but i think that that's uh the high i'll just consider that question uh settle are you comfortable with that councilmember race i will concur with you that it takes four votes to change the uh proposal and those don't exist to change the proposal thank you mr man thank you and mr man if i might say what gives me what gives me some some confidence and comfort the apparatus and and machinery for dispersing it will already be in place the relationship is already existed will be existing with the loan manager so it's not like we're gonna if we put that other money in it it'll be almost instantaneous the ability to get it out because we're doing the work of putting the machinery in place now so i do take some comfort in that that's not going to be months before if we add another million is going to get out the door the machinery is already in place so it will be in place thank you mr mayor thank you all right i see i see a couple of other issues that i want to define and um move towards some closure and decision making on one of them is the issue of the personal guarantee another is clarity around i just want to make sure that that i understand about the the uh business needing uh the food truck issue i'll call it and then the uh the idea of the lower interest rate for businesses who are not able to access capital on the uh on the private market uh so i'll start with the what i think what i think i understand about the about the uh the the businesses who are able to access this am i is it are we are we uh can can food trucks access this can businesses that have home offices access this am i to understand that that's right food trucks can but i believe that that uh home-based businesses would not okay and kevin just validate how it's being applied yeah kevin did you comment on that sure um the way andre just described it is how it's been administered thus far okay so colleagues are we comfortable with that that do we want food trucks to make sure that food trucks are included yeah okay thank you mr mayor mr mayor councilmember reek sure i uh it appears to be that kind of day for me um just will say that i don't i understand that there's going to be a lot of need that we have to be selective but i don't think it makes sense to exclude uh businesses that operate out of their own homes many larger businesses started that way uh and i don't think uh it's fair to exclude them but since everybody else raised their hands i'll stop talking now thank you i don't know that we've had a full discussion of that i'm happy to hear more um kevin do you would you all first of all councilmember cabillero and then we'll ask you kevin i thought we were taking it one by one so talking food trucks and then moving to home-based businesses uh okay i'm not comfortable um home-based businesses i'm sorry i mean say that again i am not comfortable excluding home-based businesses because i know that a lot of those businesses are sole proprietors and they are not getting and and they are um folks who who are having a hard time qualifying for unemployment and have a lot of barriers right now okay um kevin you want to talk to us about home-based businesses any reason that we should not include them uh again mr mayor and council i believe that that is a policy call um if you are interested in in sort of the place making aspects of business growth and business sustainability then you exclude home-based businesses but if that's not a priority you don't have to and we i think we'll just figure out a way to um to to verify all of the documentation um based on this this new element all right thank you kevin so i've heard two people voice their support for home-based businesses is uh mayor pro tem thank you i don't um i feel fine with including home-based businesses but i'm wondering about the grant maximum being related to the rent payment as an issue potentially if we're going to include home-based businesses yet it that's if i could just that's why i wanted to remove everything after ten thousand dollars in that bullet do you want to comment on that either kevin or andre the what what i would say is the mayor pro tem is correct i mean we we would have to find some of either find some other alternative threshold to a ten thousand dollar max or um go with what council member risa said and just make the max ten thousand dollars um you know that's that's a policy call i will say i will say this in raleigh the grant fund was eight hundred and fifty five thousand dollars um at a max of ten thousand dollars just flat you know everyone can receive basically ten thousand dollars and no real thresholds or or um documentation requirements that would evaluate an amount up to ten thousand dollars but everyone just getting ten thousand that would have meant that 85 businesses would have been funded uh and the program thus far 116 have been funded with that eight hundred and fifty five thousand dollars i just i'll offer that for perspective and nothing else the grant funds were stretched further by having a parameter somewhere between zero and ten thousand dollars but again that's a policy decision and we leave to you the um creation of the parameter that would apply to a home base business we'll figure something out sure we we can we didn't consider that we we would just take a look at it but again having a qualifier again is something that we would work on to try to solve all right okay colleagues and i'll uh i'll ask uh for a thumbs up if everybody could uh show me your thumbs if you're in favor of keeping into home base businesses i'm trying to get my thumb up okay i'm seeing a solid majority of thumbs i'll now move to the question of um lower interest rate for businesses who can't access capital in the private market what i heard um christus say was that uh there there is a potential exception for those businesses in terms of the interest rate they were able to offer i think we're all interested in offering his lower rate as we can um and so um how would that it could that be something that you all could operationalize kevin and andre either you all have any comments on that i will be so i'll be frank i i definitely would need to check back with my credit department and see what sort of administrative um concerns if any we would have there um it it i i can tell you it's probably more expedient to have the same interest rate for all of the businesses that qualify rather than having parallel underwriting guidelines that just it slows the process down but um you know it's something that we could look at i would say based upon the um the the request for and desires for urgency and a real you know somewhat finite time frame um relative to how to how soon businesses get funded i would recommend keeping a standard interest rate um again it's it's pretty competitive but um you know uh that we can we can i will at least commit to checking back with staff to see if it creates any constraints and mr. mayor if i can be clear i and i agree in terms of expediency not having two separate rates my um request was or my my inquiry was what is the absolute lowest rate we can have for everybody that does not run afoul of the law and as i've heard that from our our attorneys my understanding is that um that the what is here is at least very much in that ballpark it's prom just slightly below prom and attorneys feel that that that would that would meet the criteria and as i hear them that's because we can't be you know less than a market rate uh that that would be the reason that for that for that interest rate is that am i getting that right andra yes and uh that mr. mayor and council um you know we have to sort of put together negotiate this deal and a lot of these terms and conditions and so i think the the spirit of uh councilman councilmember millington is to make sure that we have got as close to the the right line as possible and again let us go back and and and see that and if if if in fact we can go lower our goal is to go as low as we can without you know causing any other thing so let us take another look at what was proposed and and come back as a part of it again we need to talk to underwriters and the market here we don't get to set the interest rate you know willy nilly so again we understand what the intent is give us the opportunity to go back quickly and find out what the limit is okay and that's all i want to know it's it's not only a spiritual question it's a math question what is the lowest we go without getting in trouble is it if it's if it's 2.75 or 2.5 or two i just like to know that number what that number is so thanks um other comments on the interest rate question are we all in agreement with the position put forth by councilmember millington i see some thumbs great okay i just want to say um about that you mentioned coming back i would just say uh let us know what it is yes yeah okay uh the last question that i have on my list uh is around the issue of a personal guarantee um i am very troubled by the idea of a personal guarantee and uh wondering what we need to require that uh mr mayor i don't know if you want to go ahead kevin i'll weigh in so mr mayor you know i think we're just we're cognizant that we are managing public funds and so the personal guarantee is the somewhat standard provision with many of the loan programs you see being administered around the state um i i'm not certain that there is an absolute requirement um i would want to confer with our credit department just to make sure and we can do that very quickly um but you know it's it's really a matter of um trying to you know we realize we have fiduciary responsibility with city funds and we we do want to make sure that um yes it's a fairly uh liberal loan package but we do want to make sure that funds get lent um responsibly and appropriately um other than that you know again absent any specific apprehension of our credit department um is certainly something we can consider if that's what you want us to do okay go ahead america i just add this i yeah you know many of the businesses that we are targeting um don't have strong credit facilities in some ways this loan is a credit facility that will enable those who are able to continue and be successful to get the next loan uh you're not going to be able to finance your business if you're successful on grants alone at some point you're going to need some form of financing and for many of the businesses that will be participating in our program uh this will be a term loan favorable that demonstrate their ability to pay and all that sort of stuff to connect them to the capital markets and again i think we should be mindful of that uh this is a a bridge loan or a facility uh that is getting them to the next level understood um i i'll just say i understand uh about our fiduciary responsibility um i'm also i i'm i don't like to predict this ahead of time but i am that we're going to have a high default rate if we're reaching the businesses that we really need to reach that we're going to have a very high default rate and a high default rate amongst businesses that are owned by people again if we reach the people that we want to reach are people without much resources um do we want to be taking a personal guarantee from them um that is my concern any other comments well why don't you check on that kevin let us know uh we'll do yeah all right um i think that that is all the questions that we had raised i think there are a couple of them that need um some more clarity uh but i think our direction for you needs to be go ahead do these things you know bring us the clarity uh but i see the manager and i bet you he has some advice well i don't miss samir but i want the clarity part was what i was going to ask you because uh i want to know you know from the direction uh that you know we would recommend give us the authority to move forward yeah and we meet again next wednesday and then we meet again on the 15th and i want to be sure i know you know in terms of moving this along what the expectations are if if you know there's there's still you feel like there's still another level of of council review that we need to come back to we can certainly do that but i also want to be sure everybody knows to what extent that may impact the schedule or not and i i don't know that answer i defer to andrew and kevin about the schedule you put up is conditioned on a go forward when well i i think we were considering a go forward today from council and then uh you know resolving some of the things that you talked about uh to me i understand the intent to try to come up with the most favorable terms interest rate credit requirements uh and if we have uh the authority to move forward and resolve those those issues um to the best of our ability and within the legal constraints uh i would hope we wouldn't have to come back to you guys if you essentially allow us to take your intent and you know push it to the limit uh that will allow us to keep moving and again we obviously will inform the city manager and council in terms of what the results are but we clearly understand the intent and you know i don't want to come back and have to say well we can only move it a quarter of a percent i'd rather move it to what that limit is and get the program going agreed um uh kevin i do have an answer for you um i've just heard we don't necessarily have any specific issue there is a path forward i would say to waving the personal guarantee if that's what you want to do that's my personal preference um i i guess i'll ask for thumbs i see a majority of thumbs can i ask a clarifying question about the program before we go much further the slide about eligibility says that businesses with revenue over 500 000 are eligible for grants businesses with revenue you know under 500 000 are eligible for grants over 500 000 are eligible for loans is the opposite also true that a business with under 500 000 is not eligible for a loan and a business over 500 000 is not eligible for a grant that's correct okay so they're meant to be exclusive categories that's correct okay great thank you all right i'm really working hard to draw this to a close here you guys and i want you to help me okay um if you don't have a super important question please don't ask it i am uh what i hear from uh uh from andre and from the manager is that they would like us to give approval to move ahead uh with a couple of unsettled questions and and and you heard that andre described to us that he the way in which he has heard our concerns on a couple of really not many one or two unsettled things uh so i'm going to ask the council uh i think we'll vote on this um i'll accept a motion that we move ahead that we authorize the administration to move ahead with this program uh on the time scheduled that they have that they have outlawed uh and and with the uh to contract uh with carolina small business fund to do this uh and that they using the million dollars that we put forward um the city to provide the administrative funding outside of that to support this work uh and that we hear back from the administration uh what they have decided on the couple of unsettled questions so move let's think we need to suspend the rules mr mayor thank you we do uh and i'll move to spend the rules on that purpose all right thank you to move to second that we suspend the rules and vote madame clerk will you please call the roll mere shul hi mere pro tem johnson hi councilmember caballero hi councilmember freeman hi councilmember middleton i vote yay councilmember riz hi thank you uh i put forward a motion councilmember freeman would you like to uh make that motion so moved second thank you was there a second second councilmember caballero thank you madam clerk will you please call the roll mere shul hi mere pro tem johnson hi councilmember caballero hi councilmember freeman hi councilmember middleton i vote yay councilmember riz hi thank you thank you thank you andre thank you kevin uh we appreciate you and hope you have the direction you need and we're looking forward to getting the money out the door uh i wish it was june but it's going to be in july and uh i think we'll be able to help a lot of businesses so thank you thank you for the support thank you now we'll move to uh our budget discussion colleagues i know everybody's been sitting here a long time uh we're going to go ahead and persist we're going to push through this uh if you need to turn your camera off and run to your refrigerator or stretch your legs please feel free no one will uh no one will question your dedication okay um i see uh our uh manager of a budget uh director bertha johnson here miss johnson welcome good afternoon mayor i'm barely coherent at this point i understand um bertha johnson director of budget and management services um this agenda item was created to provide answers to questions raised by city council during the budget work sessions on may 27th and 28th as well as questions we received subsequent to those meetings some of the responses we deem as information and some required decisions to finalize the budget i'm happy to go through the document or proceed as council wishes thank you very much um i apologize i just want to share that my my uh ipad is died so i can't see if there's the attached documents i just have the budget sheet so i'm just going to ask that you bear with me on this yeah no problem council member freeman do you want me to email you that document please we'll do right now um so uh we have in front of us the document this is item 49 that was provided item 49 i just want everybody to wrap their mind around that for a second um the presentation there which um no i'm sorry for item 48 apologize we have the document there the budget follow-up exhibit and then there's a separate one for the water management positions and so our objective here today uh we've got a budget to pass in a couple of weeks uh is to give the administration a little less than a couple of weeks uh is to give the administration very clear direction this is our time where there's something we want in or out of the budget uh this is our time to make that decision to have those discussions um and so uh i will so so there's a in the uh the memo that we received i guess i would not favor going through all of them because some of them are simply for example the police headquarters sale is simply an accounting of how much we're receiving for the sale of the police headquarters it's not really a budgetary item for budgetary consideration it's informational uh so um maybe what i will do and i'll ask my colleagues to help me i will go through this memo and pull out the items for discussion that i think uh are ones that we actually want to discuss if you all have another one that you want to discuss that you think i've missed let me know and then we'll go after we've done that we'll go to the water management question and then after that we'll take up any other budget issues that anyone else has and we go with that okay right javier is good with it and i'm good with it and so we're good with it okay everybody that's good too thank you uh the the first is the transportation position uh this is the this is on page one of 14 this is the business services manager uh and the transportation department described the reasons that they need that position so i think i'll ask now uh is there discussion of that position are there questions about that position um or any any concerns that anyone wants to raise at this point mayor pro temp thank you mr mayor um it looks like from this memo that the staff is now recommending to move all of the funding for that position into the parking and transit funds and out of the general fund um which would be a hundred and eleven thousand two hundred and sixty five dollars from the general fund that would be saved and that sounds good to me that's the way i read that too is that correct uh that is correct that is correct does that mean that that hundred and eleven thousand dollars could we could put it towards something else yes you could we would reduce the uh contribution in some of the area we would reduce the fund balance contribution to the general fund if we didn't put it to something else that is correct right thank you um the i'm going to say that the police headquarters sale is not an item that we need to consider uh the public works positions is the next item on the list mr mayor can we just on the police headquarters sale i just want to make clear again to the public that this money is not programmed into this year's budget thank you that's right it's it's in the general fund it's not oh did we moved to the affordable housing no it's just it's not anywhere because we are it's not on any budget at this point until the sale goes through but eventually the money will flow into the general fund and then the council can determine what to do with it at that point yeah right okay thank you there's nothing actually budgeted for it that's right i remember now thank you for that clarification by the mayor pro tem can i ask you would be helpful to direct it to the affordable housing fund now rather than wait if that's because i know that's been the issue around in the public it just really isn't the way the accounting rules would have the revenues flow since that's a sale of a city asset it needs to first flow through the general fund and then be reappropriated i just want to make sure that says thank you i but uh our understanding is it won't be allocated without coming back to the council we've been assured that by the administration that's right yeah thank you the public works positions uh but thank you madam mayor pro tem for remembering that the public works positions um is the next item uh there is a description of the public works positions and how they're going to be covered some from fee recovery and so forth um i'll just ask if there are people that want to discuss this one now i mean is there are there are councilmember cabrera and then mayor pro tem i just wanted to say thank you for doing the prioritization that i asked it's very helpful all right thank you so much mayor pro tem thank you mr mayor i was just i wasn't clear from this prioritization like of these positions of these top three are these general fund funded or are they cost recovery or are they um stormwater fund one one of the positions and one of the vehicles will be funded by the stormwater fund one of the positions by development fees and one of the positions and a vehicle in the general fund okay so that that's the that's the current proposal yes that is okay move from the six positions to the three positions okay thank you and what how much does that save us in the general fund it's about five hundred and four hundred and seventy five thousand okay thank you i'm sorry mr manager go ahead now we'll get councilmember i apologize i just wanted to clarify were was there revenues associated with the positions that were those other three positions that weren't uh recommended there were revenues associated with one of those positions i believe that amount was a hundred and thirty five thousand so the net of that would be because those revenues are programmed and the net of that compared to the four hundred and seventy five thousand would be so the number you you gave was was a net number not the it it took into account the revenues that we wouldn't receive or whatever well not necessarily but that is the amount they associated with with that okay all right thank you it all depends on of course the development fees that come in right thank you thank you councilor milton thank you mr mayor i just wanted to confirm these three positions listed are directly linked to us um being regulatory compliant is that correct those those those were not those three positions the question was um if they if they would get three positions versus six which positions three positions what they prioritize i'm looking i gotta get this coffee me quicker i'm looking at the wrong i got you yeah i got you thank you i'm sorry thank you mr mayor no worries it's late um any more questions or comments on the public works positions uh furlough part-time employees any comments on the or questions on the furlough part-time employees uh item i just want to thank the staff for this i had to ask for this detail breakdown my thanks to the staff for just very helpful thank you uh the next item is not really a budget item so much it's uh it's the it's a re um an imaging of the engagement matrix that was asked for um this i know that's not a budget it it isn't it isn't a budget item but it's something that i do think whether the council provides that feedback as a part of adopting the budget or at some point we do need to have clarity around uh uh expectations around the engagement of those programs whether they should continue virtually or um in some cases be you know be suspended whatever until we can get back physically so mr manager um i don't think we're gonna do that tonight i understand are you good with that yes i just want to remind you that you know it is something that we need to have some determination from the council acknowledging it's not necessarily a budget adoption uh limitation so um can i ask that you i mean perhaps we could put this on one of the upcoming special meetings we could or we could wait till august if you'd prefer but um you know can i ask there is it i'm recognizing that there's budgetary programming plan around some of these areas the ones that are in the non non urgent non non mandatory section is it possible that we we set um some like parameter around i guess where the budget is so that it's tied and it kind of puts it on a hold so to speak so recognizing that we know we might not know right now that we're going to have a budget shortfall based on the sales sales tax or whatever tax that's coming in is there is it possible to set like some parameter that says that the non urgent like as a council as a non urgent non non mandatory items could be held um until we you know we've established where we are kind of financially that would be your decision so i think what we'll do is we'll wait till this comes back to us and we could we could figure out how to handle that then okay and we'll take it up on your timeline mr manager thank you uh the next item is engagement public art this is also not really a budgetary item so much uh as it is a question of how people are being engaged around this um any questions or comments on that if not we'll move to community development and this is information on the long-time homeowner grant program we have approved the uh at our last meeting we voted to continue the current program and this is information about that we're going to we're going to look at the water management separately in a moment because there's a separate memo on that uh then there's the city of Durham fte's and uh this was a question about the um the fte's positions added uh in the budget uh and there's a listing of the of the positions and how they're being paid for so questions about that comments anybody okay um then there's the police department reconciliation um this is uh it's a it's a uh comparison of actual adopted estimated and proposed budgets uh as you can see there uh i'll any any questions or comments about that at this point mayor pro tem thank you mr mayor i think we just i think we need to just be clear about what's in the police department budget and what's changed from last year because there are a lot of ideas flying around about how we're increasing the budget what the money is going for i've heard a wide variety of of wrong information about what's going in the budget so i just want to take a minute and clarify for the public why the budget's going up what's in it this year that's not in it last year i agree i agree that's important thank you thanks i'm happy to walk through the the large pieces of the the dollars that change from year to year um the biggest component of that is nine hundred and forty six thousand dollars for the community or an policing grant um in december 2016 uh city council adopted the grant project ordinance for this grant which required um a six hundred thousand dollars match and it funded 15 positions those positions have been uh will be absorbed into the general fund and that again that amount is nine hundred and forty six thousand uh three hundred and thirty one thousand is the additional amount needed to fund the six positions that the council adopted to add to the gain unit not eight hundred and twenty nine thousand of that amount is for the state retirement which is required which we have no control over that number um an additional six hundred and sixty seven thousand is included in grants and you can see the grant amount changing and that is for the CARES grant that the police department received for PPE so the other is a net of reductions and and benefits as reduction in the cost of benefits based on individual employees choices and the additional cost needed to annualize the pay increases in the current fiscal year police officers receive their pay increases on their anniversary date of hire and so in that particular year they may only receive you know um they will receive typically less than 12 months of that increase but the next year you have to full you have to fund a hundred percent of that increase and so those are the major components of of the three million dollars thank you thank you i want to thank uh mayor pro tem for asking the question i also have been hearing completely wild ideas around what the increases were around thank you i would like to point out that those numbers are on the previous page on page um on the subsequent page page 10 those numbers also there as well the only other thing i wanted to add mr. mayor real quick is we had someone at our budget hearing money and i suggest that this budget included um funding for seven new fte's in the police department budget that's why i asked for the specifically for the head count reconciliation that's the bottom of page 10 as you can see that's not accurate um the two from from last year's budget to the current budget um the the head count um increases two because of the what we approved last year but didn't get hired until this year um and the two grant positions and then the six positions that we approved mid-year and so that's how we get up to 681 just wanted to clarify that with everybody thank you council member thanks everybody for your attention to that any other are there any other questions or comments about this item okay thank you well now i'll move to um the next uh there's an attachment on page 11 comparing the the uh race of a department and a staff with the race of uh the people who were furloughed by department any comments or questions on that i just want to say thank you to staff for for making that available thank you council member and then also um there is a breakout uh on page 12 and 13 of the um these are the furloughed employees and their average hours worked kind of by position is that a fair description bertha that's correct any questions or comments about that thank you for that information i have two questions sure just regarding the bus drivers and the facility um i think it's facility attendants all right is anyone like keeping an eye on these facilities now like is there is there no way to bring some of those hours back online just as a matter of like i'm i'm just looking at it like there's there could be something i think i think some of them actually have already been brought online i don't know bow can answer that or anybody else from dpr that may be on the call uh i am i'll need to check with dpr to get an answer on that i believe the facility attendants are only for rental facilities those are really uh positions and i'll correct this if i get this wrong but that are just on site when a rental is taking place they're not necessarily people who tend to the facilities like maintenance technicians or custodial uh so they really are but where we where we have facilities that have open gates locked and unlock those kinds of things those attendants those are those folks are back working like the lakes and some places like that i'm thinking specifically lines part where there's an attendant that has folks sign in and sign out that is a uh not a city employee okay that's a uh um but those types of attendance would be like all the attendance that we have are you're saying are back to work well no we're i'm just saying we're in some cases they are where we have facilities that have opened that have attendance that need to lock and unlock gates and those kinds of things but as as mr. ferks indicated there may be rental facilities that are currently not available for rent so if there is an attendant associated with that facility they would not be back to work yet but once those facilities are available they will be right bo yes and i'll get some clarity from joy and provide that uh after the fact you know my read of this list is it's like first pine lodge and the armory facilities where we only provide staff during the road but i'll clarify it and people peed on Beverly i'll clarify and get an answer back and i just just another just quick question uh i'm a i'm assuming that this is this is including that there's no programming until the july time frame for any of our rental facilities uh that you know unless they are able to operate under the mass gathering restrictions we have right now and that that really rules out all of our facilities so at this time until the mass gathering limits go up we're not anticipating restoring any of our facility rentals thank you bo any more questions or comments on that okay now we'll move to the water management memo which is a separate memo and it's a description of the positions uh the positions related to customer service uh the um positions related to regulatory compliance and then financial information about those positions and also about the rate uh the rate uh the effect on the rate for each of the tiers um and so i'll ask are the questions or comments by members of the council on this um on this item i see mr grily good afternoon your mayor pro 10 members of council don grily water management good afternoon don um council members questions or comments for don at this point council member middleton yeah mr mayor actually i hi don how you doing man good good evening um we um the last the very last phase 14 department of water management vacancies i had asked for that information and it kind of informs my next question what is what is the possibility uh bertha of uh using some of these lines uh for the positions that the water uh management folk want now and then back filling them at some later date is that a possibility um um probably for not all 11 a lot of them are technical in nature and you know certainly as an example we have two engineering positions that have been vacant for an extended period of time and as soon as we got a candidate we would like to to bring those on because those certainly help with our projects and also help with development review um a number of these positions are very technical in nature or fill out crews that we've been trying to shortfall so it would they would affect operations i'm just talking about the money i'm i'm talking about just taking the money from those lines not the not swapping out the actual job descriptions i know that mr mayor when we when we uh uh brought on your assistant amber i believe we used a position from another place in the or chart and then backfilled it uh or will backfill it at some point it may have already been backfilled is that not an option for us um with respect to the positions that water management's asking for now money wise i'm not talking about the job description i'll defer to bertha but overall the when they um budgeting this year they they do budget a certain percentage of vacancy um so our budget is reduced on the personnel side based on the the um vacancy rates that we've participated in but i'll defer to bertha and how we how that's done so we have um unfunded positions but leave the positions authorized and then ask the department we've done that in police and other departments where we asked the departments to come back to us to request those positions to backfill those positions if needed and so that is a possibility we we've done it and we and we can do it where we unfund positions we've done it in planning and inspections and other departments and departments come back to us and make the request and we have them fill the positions based on their prioritization based on the money that's left so if the 11 positions um if they wanted to fill those positions or these positions but we can unfund um or take a sum of money out of the budget so don here's where i am i'm i'm compelled on the three positions that will keep us regular uh in regulatory compliance and i think you made a case for them being mission critical um beyond those three i would be i'd be open uh to considering them using the uh the mechanisms that bertha just described uh perhaps and i you know i'm certainly open to hearing what my colleagues say but that that's where i am on that right now thank you councilmember camayano yeah i was just curious i'm i thought i had sent an email asking prait for prioritization how solid works had provided that and i sent that email on monday night uh just it helps me you know understand out of the 11 i know three are regulatory i understand that there may be need for more out of the 11 uh and so i was just curious if if and maybe i'm just missing it okay in the table on page four yeah um those are in priority order thank you i appreciate that yeah because the top three are regulatory related so they're their first three and just a question i'm sorry is it common practice that when you bring on the staff member they get a new truck um for these those four positions are all field positions related to meter reading and they operate as by themselves so they drive a truck councilmember capi ghetto um and i would so well just to follow up councilmember freeman's question part partly i would think that with covet having folks in their own vehicles is also a priority that um i can imagine right now is is is large and then just out of curiosity the offline research and resolution team there's four uh can you do that with half of those positions instead of four two or is it one of those things where if you're not going to have all four it's just not uh effective um it becomes less effective you know originally the request was for a much larger team that we reduced the four okay so any reductions the team just becomes less effective right so then why spend that money yeah and i'd like to comment on that that's one area that i do have pretty significant concern as we know uh we have been under um no utility turnoff since i think march is that correct don yes and uh that order from the governor has been extended all the way to the end of july now so we will end up with about maybe five months worth of uh um payments that have not been made in many cases the i think we were up to two or three thousand customers uh that are in that in that world 3300 what is it 3300 over 3300 and so and it's growing and when when that changes uh there is going to need to be considerable staff capacity to engage those customers in workout plans we you know we obviously there there are a lot of touches are required to work through payment plans with customers unlike just a typical water turnoff or turn on or some bill dispute that these these individuals might be working with on a routine basis we know that there is going to be a considerable workload that is going to have to be required at some point when the you know that that directive is discontinued and i am concerned that if we just rely on temporary employees to to do that or don't have any employees to do that there's there's going to be a significant increase in hold time wait time backlog and in essence you know we don't want to be just discontinuing service for non-payment if we haven't had the time to to work through payment plans with customers and i don't know if you want to have any more comment about that or comment about how that that number appears to be growing and and what that revenue side looks like but it isn't something that we can just write that revenue off no i think uh your comments were we're right on the mark i mean currently out of the uh we're out 973 thousand dollars right now in revenue um 35 percent of that is uh non-residential um so out of the uh 3300 accounts uh 2,900 over 2,900 a residential account so they account for almost 89 of the customers that will have to deal with our residential customers thank you i appreciate you all clarifying that for me uh and then i have one last question when i'm looking at that same table what is the it's the AMR collection staff and includes is that is those are those the meter positions you were discussing earlier with the trucks is that the same uh well there's two positions that actually do the turn on the turn offs the meter data collection that's the billing field staff um and then the the AMR collection staff is related more to the back billing issues to make sure that we collect um all of our meter readings so we don't do any bill estimation thank you thanks thank you for your good questions mayor pro tem thank you mr mayor um i feel comfortable with adding these 11 positions the increase you know the difference in the increase in the rate is pretty small in terms of what people actually have to pay um but i am concerned about the the issues that we're going to face when the disconnection moratorium is um is suspended and wanted to um get some legal advice from our city attorney about what our options are um with regard to like payment plans and the length of time we can give people to pay and how long we can you know can we not disconnect water indefinitely even if people don't pay um kim can you give us some general guidelines my goal is everyone gets water so like how can we what what are what are ways we can act within our legal constraints to get to that place right so this kind of goes back to a conversation we had about a year ago um so you know we can't just wave all of the back charges um we can implement payment plans for folks um historically we have um but in terms of this special circumstance of coming out of the moratorium this is new territory for us and so i would mayor pro tem like to do some research on that specifically i don't believe that the various orders and in any you know directives that have been passed recently address exactly how cities can get kind of back on um solid footing and keep utilities on for folks and not ever burden the system but i'd like to have some time to research that issue specifically and perhaps get back to you all with some more specific um thoughts on that that would be great thank you i will do that i would like to add you know we do have the hardship fund that will assist with customers in the past when we've had um on very unusual situations we've been very lenient with our payment plans um you know typically we try to very short you know anywhere from two to four months at most but considering the circumstances and we're going to work with our customers to um you know keep them in water extend it out um as long as we can come to a reasonable um uh decision or agreement that we can move forward is as uh mr scott mentioned earlier with the um history marks during that housing authority discussions um you know we want to work with our customers and we want to make sure that we can keep them in water and have terms that work well for them and work for us as well thank you um yeah that's a priority for me i think it's a priority for all of us especially given that the pandemic is still ongoing and the you know it's unlikely that the shutoff moratoriums are going to last until the end of the pandemic but it's still really important that people be able to access water you know it's important all the time but it's especially important now um so i appreciate y'all prioritizing um keeping folks water on thank you thank you councilmember freeman and then councilmember race thank you i was having fun with my hand disappearing i'm sorry i got you i see the pencil you're good i i i appreciate um mayor pro tem's question and i long those lines i was going to ask about i know we talked to him talked about not looking at other areas that we could have impact with the covid funding that we put aside and if you it would be nice to know if there was a number around those 3300 customers um that currently for residential um it's six hundred residential it's six hundred and twenty eight thousand dollars a little over that and for non-residential it's uh three hundred and forty five thousand dollars rounding off three hundred and forty three hundred and forty five thousand so about nine sixty eight about a million dollars is what you're saying yeah it says short of a million dollars and just just acknowledging that if it were if it were something that we could look at as we have future conversations around uh what other assistance we're willing to offer i would be willing to have the conversation about putting a million dollars towards making sure that folks have water thank you councilmember and councilmember race hi it's me again um i think so let me start by saying that after the most recent conversation we had about the water and sewer rate the fact that the proposed increase went from 2.9 to 2.1 percent i didn't bother to go back and check but i can almost guarantee you that's the lowest increase i have seen since my time in the council don you want to just off the cuff confirm that's true i believe so yeah um and uh so i appreciate you sharpening your pencil on that um after the conversation about um merit pay and i think at 2.1 percent there it's a it's a very modest increase given the the important work um that these positions do i share the city manager's concern about the customer service positions the building utility technicians i know a lot of us heard from a ton of residents uh during the last fiscal year about the troubles that they had the same this my same concern applies to the um amr collection staff which is the is the as the staffing we need to prevent that back billing issue from coming back again which is a huge priority for me the two if if there was a consensus on the council to try to shave anything off the 11 positions at at the 2.1 percent increase it would be the two billing field staff and those two vehicles um but i think on balance and though i don't necessarily like it i'm probably mostly where the mayor pro 10 is is that in that i can live with all of this but we really have to develop a solid plan to deal with uh what's going to happen um when we start being able when we start collecting again and when uh folks start running up against um the their their bills and i think one thing we what we do we should think about is setting up a pot getting a policy in place for specifically related to the to the to the balances that are accruing during the COVID-19 pandemic and coming up with a policy that is exclusive to those amounts um and i think that may give us some flexibility to talk about a longer payment term if we did that um so that's kind of all i'm thinking about thank you mr mayor thank you council member i believe everyone has had a chance to comment um and so what i think i'll try to do is i hear um i'll just add my voice to um i favor funding all the 11 positions i think the customer service positions are super important i think we've finally gotten a lot of where we want to be in terms of answering phone calls i agree with charlie that we were not where we wanted to be for quite a while um and i think that replacing the part-time people full-time people and you know really doing this service well over the long term is really going to serve us well during the service well is going to serve us well um the um so i'm i'll i'll add my voice to that and just add so maybe we could hear uh from other and i think and that's where also uh charlie i believe that's where you also came down if i heard you correctly correct yeah uh councilmember cabrera councilmember millton councilmember freeman so either any of you all want to um pitch in on where you are at this point mr mayor i'll just say that the mayor pro tem's uh comfort council reese's comfort with 11 positions that made me comfortable with it i find their arguments compelling so i'm going to thank you thank you councilmember cabrera and councilmember freeman as am i hi okay okay uh thank you uh don thank you we appreciate you and um i think we're we're finished with that item on great job by the way you did what you had to do good job thank you best head on to everybody um colleagues uh so let me see if i can summarize where we are and then we'll uh open it up for other items that everyone wants to discuss i think where we are is that we have gone through the items that the administration has presented to us uh and uh i i i'm not sure i have the sense that there may be some of those positions that people still want to talk about let me ask that first are there positions uh the public works positions and so forth uh we i think we've we've dealt with the water management positions but with the transportation and the public works positions i think those were the other two departments are there other items at any but i think the transportation position we also settled people were happy because it was not no longer in the general fund um so i think that leaves the public works position am i correct on that bertha that those are the only other positions that are in that memo that's correct so um our water people's comfort levels there um i i didn't hear anyone uh at this point saying that they wanted to take those positions out but i just want to double check before we move on from that everybody good okay may ask ask a clarifying question yeah of course those positions out are you referring to the three yeah that's right the three of this i guess i was talking about the six is that what you mean the three or the six bertha yeah i was talking about the six there so let's let's refresh there's six positions recommended by public works there are three positions that were prioritized is that what you mean bertha that's correct yeah so i'll ask that question uh in a in a clearer way uh where are we on these three and six positions not can i ask a clarifying question because the way that it was explained when bertha explained that there could be three and then three added as necessary or as filled and the backfilling conversation that's where i thought we landed but i'm assuming that's the difference so uh we'll ask um consistent as it can be you know so somebody's mic is on somebody's mic's on yeah it's don don meet your mic um so bertha um let's talk about let me go back in the let's everybody that uh if you want to go back to the public works positions to talk about this thank you page two and three um and so uh council member freeman had a question bertha did you get that i did not come here councilmember freeman why don't you ask your question again uh i almost forgot uh yes the i know councilmember middleton uh had asked about the backfilling and how that works is that possible in this case with the with the three additional positions that is and just leaving it at zero now and then at zero or three or six at three yes and then bringing in the other three as as they are as they were identified i guess however you were however you needed as you explained it bertha so well i cannot do that at six thirty i get that yeah got mayor pro jam i feel good with the three positions that would be my preference um and with the if we were to do those three positions and the um with the savings from the transportation position we'd have almost six hundred thousand dollars unallocated in the general fund given current budget parameters that we could talk about what to do with um okay uh let's hear some more about uh the public works positions uh that chart that we have on page three uh we have the three positions at the top of the priority positions and how are they oh i see this the the first is paid for out of the cip is that correct out of the storm water fund yes out of storm water funds cip the second is paid is paid for out of fees without my review yes the third um is as a general fund but not paid for by fees already is paid for by fees it is general fund is the third one yeah it's general fund and that one is not covered by fees okay so and that's the utility inspection position right away engineer yes right away engineer that does the you know the the fiber in the utility construction inspection that we can't get reimbursed for okay so and i would say to marvin williams is here if you have any other specific position questions that would be great thank you so as i understand it the two of the first three positions are not general fund well one i'm general fund but it's paid paid for by fees no the third position is general fund and marvin's on the phone if you want to clarify that is general fund not paid by fees yeah and the one above that the one above that is paid by fees yeah so the they of the other three positions how are they paid for but they all pay for out of general fund hey marvin mayor members of council marvin williams public works so the other three positions one would be paid for by development fees also the second right of way position would be paid for by the general fund and the survey position is paid for by the general fund as well all right so um there are three of the six positions that are not paid for out of the general fund is that correct three of the six right all right well let me let me then just ask colleagues of these ones that are not paid for out of the general fund oh well i'll let me be more clear they are paid for from the general fund one of them is paid for by stormwater cip one of them is paid for by uh the general fund and then two of them paid for the from the general fund but they're paid for by fees is everybody okay with supporting those three which are not paid for out of the general fund unless they're fees associated with them councilmember millton and then mayor pro tem and then councilmember caballero in light of the conversation we have we just have with don i mean i'd be curious to hear marvin make the case yeah for those three i'm gonna say yeah i'm yeah i was first i was i was i agree i was trying to make it a little easier by first taking on the three that are not uh funded out of just general fund revenue other than fees but maybe i can't do that so let me see let me see if i'm trying to i'm trying to narrow it down but i'm sorry no no worse i'll say mayor pro tem and then councilmember caballero and then we'll uh go here for marvin thank you um i just wasn't sure so there are of the three priority positions two of them are funded by fees correct correct one that is stormwater fund one is out of development fees and then there's a third position mr mayor that you are asking if we're there's a third fee funded position that's not in the top three priority positions and so you're asking us about those three got it that's what i was trying to do but you did it better than i did just not a councilmember caballero and then we'll we'll then we'll try to we'll see what we can do after that yeah i just wanted to say for me i wanted to see prioritization from both departments so we had a place to go to if the will of the whole council was to cut i wanted to know when we came to that decision what what departments really needed um if folks are willing and wanting and and marvin wants to make the case for this full six i am i'm willing especially in light of the conversation we just had with dawn um and but i i wanted to have something to fall back on if we said you know this is too much money understood i think that's good okay marvin we're throwing it to you um and um i will just say for myself that it's easier for me to decide on the fee supported positions three of the six than it is the others uh so maybe you could concentrate on making the case for the others uh and then we'll we'll have councilmember questions and comments so all six of the positions are actually mission critical for us i believe the data that i provided in the prior presentation shows that our workload is at the point that we don't have the ability to add any more efficiencies in our operations in engineering whether it's in the right away management group development review group or in our survey group so even if we don't get these positions now we're going to have to make the request again next year and it may be more positions than what we're currently asking for because the work continues to come in for us especially in the development and the project side right of way the permitting has continuously increased month over month and that trend isn't going away with development we just met with the hba this morning through our development services center group and in talking to them the expectation is that the trend for development is going to continue to be on the uptick through next year at least so there's not going to be a drop-off at any point with the projects that we have in our queue and as well with survey we already have a backlog of projects and those requests are going to continue to come into us from our own engineering and storm water groups but also the other city departments that rely on survey duties from public works so all six i believe are justified it's just a question of if the council is willing to support them and allow us to have those at fiscal year 21 thank you very much marvin questions comments colleagues uh council member milton yeah um i marvin used the uh the phrase for me that the threshold phrase for me is mission critical i don't think he would use it lightly um or just uh you know for whatever so i'm inclined to support to six right i am as well but i am as well council member freeman is as well council member caviato is as well so mayor pro tem and council member rice where are you all i am i i can count to four mr mayor the rumor has it you can count even higher than that i'm skeptical at this point but i will just since i've got the floor let me just say that um the two right of way i think they're two right of way positions is that right um yes that's correct yeah those they are general fund based and in this environment kind of the hardest to accept but i think what you told us at the budget work session last week about how dangerous it is have our utilities in the right of way without the staff necessary to go out and make sure it's okay that sold me on it um and i just appreciate so much the work that you're doing and i'm on board sounds good thank you any comments from mayor pro tem sorry i had to i had to get a snack but no worries i i i'm happy with the majority opinion all right thank you did you bring enough old class yeah right make another comment please yes you may just want to point out that these positions are budgeted in appropriations not authorized meaning that if the fees do not come into support of positions we wouldn't activate the positions thank you all right colleagues um i think we've dealt with all the positions now uh and i think we're now down to other let me ask the manager first mr manager do you feel like we've dealt with all the you know what you and i have been calling the loose ends uh that you need to hear about we i need to hear we need to hear from council members if there are other budgetary items that are on their mind things they want to consider but in terms of all the things that you all flagged are we okay i believe so are the correct yes that was list yes so thank you that thank you well appreciate everybody sticking with it all right colleagues uh now uh general budget comments anything that you uh want to add subtract or talk about in terms of our budget we're getting down to the bitter end here and then our next uh our next opportunity is when we're going to have this budget from the tip to be voting on uh which will be on june the what day will that be the 15th on june the 15th we'll be voting on our budget and we're this is our last shot essentially so time and just thank the staff for uh getting us through this budget cycle i know it's been difficult and uh very taxing we're at five hours and 43 minutes at this point in this meeting and i'm sure that there's been a lot of work behind the scenes to get us through this virtually and i'm just i'm just grateful that we managed to do it so i just want to thank you i feel good about where we are and um i'm good thank you thank you thank you by the comments of the comments at this point last shot at the budget mayor pro tem um i hate to extend our lives in this way but can we talk for a minute about the fund balance i know that in our initial um discussion we had said that we would um suspend our 16.7 fund balance policy and allow the balance to go down to 12 percent i know that the current budget does not do that um what are what's the what's the thinking behind keeping the fund balance at 16.7 and not taking some of that money out of the out of the rainy day fund for the for the rain we are currently experiencing i think it really depends on for what purpose i think we're at what 17 percent birth 17.2 16.3 16.3 okay um as you recall we had to remove the oh that's five million for the gas tax power we got that so we're at 16.3 so i guess is your question mad member tim can we go lower than that if we want to spend money on something else so i'm getting questions from people that's like you know why aren't you giving our staff raises if you still have these millions of dollars in reserve and we could go lower and it not affect our bond rating like what's the what is y'all's reason for not wanting to take the fund balance lower right now well uh in my mind two full one you know the the amount of money that we are taking the fund balance down for recurring expenses is is substantially larger than we have ever done and those expenses are going to be with us next year as well um and so i you know that that's one piece and then just just again if we if we did direct pay raises uh those expenses are also going to be with us uh next year and so to the extent that we're using all of those one-time revenues which i think at that case would be more than the revenue reduction projections um it's going to really put a strain on on next year's budget uh if the council wanted to you know do some some one-time thing uh one-time you know uh adjustment for employees that was a bonus that still is going to impact the the amount of fund balance that we're taking down but not necessarily become a recurring expense so i mean i i i just can't see how we could get to an additional seven million of fund balance to pay for raises birth is that correct that's correct um it would be seven million to pay for the raises and the number between 12 and 16 is about nine million and then those raises we would have to pay for those raises in future years with the escalator on top of those thank you yeah i'm very very challenged yeah i i feel um i feel comfortable with that decision i just um need to be able to explain it to folks and explain y'all's reasoning right and i think you know the other piece uh uh mary pro tem is just the uncertainty of how long and what you know do we do we have the revenue impacts correct you know i i think that we we are making the best judgment we can right now but as i've said you know quite a number of times this is fluid and um i i'm not a hundred percent sure that that we aren't going to need more of that just to just keep from keep from having to cutting services if if any of the uh the the revenue drops are way more significant than we thought or prolonged longer than we thought thank you other comments councillor caballero yeah i just wanted to say and i know that folks are seeing and we've said this a number of times it's just we're in a very difficult situation and at this point there is no lifeboat for us as a city of Durham we have very few funds coming from the state or the federal government the only place we can go is to raise taxes and i think every single every single council member has committed to not doing that we know that everyone is in uh hard economic times and we are doing uh and again thank you to the staff because we were pretty far along our budget process and we had a lot of pretty incredible new initiatives that are not getting funded which are a huge you know i'm still mourning the fact that we're not doing some of the work we were planning on doing uh so i hear our residents i know everyone is is anxious um but even even just next door in wake county in raleigh they are getting a significant lifeboat that we just did not get and i think that our residents need to see the reality of the situation that we are facing here thank you council member the comments colleagues all right um i really thank you everything that everybody's done on the staff i want to thank my council colleagues and i thought everybody did a great job today hanging in there and making the comments and thinking this through um and it's top budget no doubt it's not the one we wanted and it is i there is a lot of heartache in it uh it's really tough for our employees and all the new things that we were excited about doing that we can't do it's just the reality we're in i'm i am concerned about the revenue projections uh that i know you all work so hard with the state and others to figure out being overly optimistic and so that gives me uh makes me very supportive of keeping a decent fund balance because i'm worried about it um and you know we've we've we're gonna we've got a lot of things we've already laid out as potential needs uh you know water cutoff related small business related are there going to be other things related to you know eviction diversion and all these kinds of things that we all care so much about we've already said that we would be willing to fund mid-year some property tax relief so all these things are on our list and i think that we're you know we're a very well managed city and i think that this is another example of that as much as it's hard i think you meant to say first go ahead i think you meant to first class well managed city i agree you know we are we are way down the line of no support and i really appreciate council member cabillera pointing that out with no support it's it's definitely been hard to watch the struggle that folks are experiencing and knowing that we we just i can't i can't see raising taxes at this time and yeah thank you thank you thank you everybody i'm gonna we have one more piece of business i'm sorry to say which is we need to hear from the clerk uh about the the positions that we um voted on sorry everybody um and uh madame clerk good evening everyone i'm kind of sorry too but work is work right i guess so okay the first one you've um decided to re-advertise the carolina theater board of trustees you've nominated rachel everhard and carl newman to fill the vacancies on citizen advisory you've nominated julie julie malavade to fill the vacancy on the city county environmental affairs board representing biological science uh you've nominated christopher tones to the homeless services advisory commission and you've decided to re-advertise for the corporate private sector position there were three applicants for the open space and trails but you decided to re-advertise one so you've reappointed derrick beasley and camilla hayward rotini you've nominated carmen williams to the planning commission and you've reappointed susan scott to the Durham sports commission you nominated three applicants to the human relations commission you've reappointed john rooks appointed erik chicone and reappointed nathan plumber and then for the final two there there was um some discrepancy the housing appeals board everyone agreed to reappoint kevin davis and casandra stokes received three votes by um mayor schull councilmember middleton and councilmember freeman and then there were three councilmember um votes to re-advertise the position for the tenant and was that decided to re-advertise no we haven't decided that yet let's hear the women's uh the it's also related to the next one right and then the final one the mayor's council for women uh you voted or you've nominated gloria de los santos to be reappointed for ward three and then there was also a discrepancy here margaret brunson received two votes from councilmember middleton and freeman kermisha ramirez received one vote from mayor schull casandra stokes received three votes from councilmember reese um councilmember caballero and mayor pro tem okay well we've got a conundrum but we're so good at solving those um so casandra stokes has three votes for housing appeals and does she have two or three votes for women's commission it's also three votes for women's commission she was extremely popular she was just popular from different people for different it was unanimous we all voted for okay um so uh how do you would you all like to proceed here um i was going to make a yeah mayor pro tem um i just wanted to say i've been the liaison to and the current liason to the women's commission and then the have been the liason to housing appeals board and i felt that miss stokes skills and interests and background were more um were more fitted for the women's commission um they also have had um they're still kind of trying to figure out like what their place is in the city and what work they want to do um and i felt that she would be a really strong contributor to um to their mission so i just wanted to put it on on women's council okay i'll i'll change my vote to casandra stokes for the women's commission which would give her four um it then though therefore means that she's not she can't be on the housing appeals board so um before we go back to the housing appeals board though let me just say that um i hope colleagues uh i hope uh shea ramirez has been uh applying for things and i think she's great and i hope we'll find a good spot for her in the near future she goes under the name kershimia that's a real name so i just wanted to keep that in mind for the future but now let's go back to the housing appeals board um and tell us again without miss stokes who has votes but also like to say the same thing for miss margaret brunson agreed she has a great application we had good good she was a good candidate mr mayor the housing appeals board um casandra stokes received three votes from yourself and councilmember middleton and freeman and then who else got votes and then there were three votes by council to re-advertise the time because she was the only candidate okay so we'll re-advertise the housing appeals board okay how do we do madam clerk did we finish that we were finished all done you did great mr manager um are we prepared to settle the agenda i think so mr mayor uh what i have is items for consent one three through eleven thirteen through thirty three uh general business gba item twelve gba public hearing for june the 15th items 37 through 40 and item 47 gba public hearing for june the 24th items 41 through 43 and gba public hearings for july the first items 44 through 46 mr manager item 12 is the budget correct colleagues can we put the budget on consent i'm happy to put the budget on consent i feel like we've beaten it today i would just offer that with the way that public comment has worked it might be better to just have some run through or on it just a short version but that's okay maybe we'll we'll put it on gba maybe we won't need a presentation but we can ask if anyone makes wants to make comments good people will make comments mr mayor okay well then it's not a public hearing so we won't uh we won't allow oh yeah you know live comments anyway oh okay got it understood yeah so that we'll hear from people we'll hear from people uh by mail by email and that kind of thing and then we can respond as council members to correct sure by some of the things that get mixed up in the correct yeah so we'll keep that on gba then is there any um that's the only gba item like separate public hearing items correct you all have heard the manager's recommendation to settle the agenda i'll accept the motion second uh motion by council member caballero seconded by council member freeman that was settled the agenda per the manager's recommendation madam clerk will you please call the roll mayor shul uh mayor pro tem johnson hi council member caballero hi council member freeman yet oh god i i i vote yay yay yay thank you the longest work session of my tenure this is it good job everybody thank you everyone the motion carries unanimously the agenda is settled um i believe that there is no more business to come before this council and i'm going to declare this meeting adjourned at six fifty six thank you all night everybody bye see 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