 Good morning, morning, morning. Okay. And we are live. Good morning, everyone. I'd like to call this meeting of the Durham City Council to order. We are here today to continue the budget retreat work that we have been doing. And I'll first ask Madam Clark to call the roll. Mayor Schuyl. Here. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Here. Council Member Caballero. Here. Council Member Freelon. Here. Council Member Freeman. Present. Council Member Middleton. Here. Council Member Ease. Here. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Colleagues, before I turn the meeting over to Bertha Johnson, I do want to let you know and let our staff know that we've had a loss for the city of Durham. Our former transportation director and a good friend and many of us, Mark Aronson, passed away a couple of nights ago. Mark was a wonderful transportation director for many years at the city of Durham. And I know that most of my colleagues were not on the council when Mark was still transportation director. But many of our staff and work with him for quite a long time. And so I'd like to ask to please can we now remember Mark with a moment of silence. Thank you. All right, colleagues. I'm now going to we're going to begin the agenda and I'm going to turn the floor over to Bertha Johnson. Thank you, Mayor. Good morning, everyone. Again, welcome to our third budget retreat of this fiscal year. We will have our last retreat tomorrow. So John is going to pull up the agenda. And I just want to just go over the agenda and also share with you or remind you of what we have coming up tomorrow. So today, of course, we have our opening remarks by our interim city manager Wanda Page. We'll have employee compensation discussion. Hopefully we will have an hour will be sufficient for that discussion. We have our green and equitable infrastructure discussion at 1030. We changed this item. And so when I sent you out the presentation yesterday, I added an updated agenda, which is the agenda you see before you today. We will have a break, hopefully, unless we over time and we need to press through if folks need to leave. And I guess, Mayor, if we are running over time, I guess that would be a good time to ask the question if people want to stay longer to get through all the presentations. Then we'll have a discussion on the city council budget request. We have a few slides, just reminding everyone the process and then the scores from individual city council members with totals, as well as the staff scores from the equity team. And we will have closing remarks. Tomorrow, we will have our 911 calls for service project presentation. We have about two hours scheduled for that presentation. It is a long presentation with lots of documents, which you receive with your with your package. And in the afternoon, we'll talk about the budget guidelines. I asked that you think about the previous presentations from the last two days, as well as what you hear today. And then what you're going to hear tomorrow morning before we make final decisions on the budget guidelines. As you may recall, the budget guidelines are specific in terms of what we do with pay and benefits, what we do with the tax rate, any other revenue adjustments on the expenditure side, any set of sides, any allocations from unbalance, the tax rate number, as well as any other adjustments that we need to make or we need to have guidance around before we develop those guidelines. And so I will bring those guidelines back. That will be the last item on the agenda for tomorrow. So as you think through what you've heard, you know, the last two retreats as well as what you hear today. You know, you can jot down notes and I'm happy to send out last year's guidelines and we think that would be helpful so you can see all the categories we need to finalize, or at least come to some agreement about a draft guidelines that we'll bring forward at a later date. So if you don't have any other questions, any questions, I will turn it over to Wanda Page for opening remarks. Thank you Bertha. So good morning Mayor, Mayor Shull, Madam Mayor Pro Tem Johnson, City Council members, city staff and residents who may be tuned in today. Bertha has just mentioned budget retreat session number three has arrived, and it is a continuation of the previous two sessions. So it's just, it's just a bridge we've just had a little break but we're back for session number three. And it is once again, the staff the administration's privilege to be able to spend the next four hours with you presenting information reports. And it goes in behind the scenes getting these reports prepared. We try to be ready to respond to all your questions on the spot but if we don't know the answer, we will certainly come back with with it for you at a later time. And we really want to help facilitate your conversations when needed, because all of this conversation that will happen over the next four hours as well as tomorrow. It really provide us the budget development guidance that we need when we come back in May with with the recommendation to you for approval for 2021 2022 fiscal year. So once again, thank you Bertha and John, the budget department staff, the deputy city managers and department directors for really being the team that's always ready. Always willing and always able to bring new ideas to new situations, new ideas to old situations and sometimes very quickly in on the spur of the moment. But it's always with renewed focus on really our purpose and our purpose is to develop a book a budget document that really brings the policy of the council and the organization alive and it truly is designed to reflect the values of this great organization, as well as the community that we live in and we all love. Bertha has mentioned that today's agenda only has three topics will three main topics. And, but just to reinforce we do anticipate, you know quite a bit of discussion on all three, and we will ready for that discussion. I'll start, you know, just briefly speaking on item one, and as often as I can, I shout out the dedicated service of the city employees. It is certain this is certainly not a secret that one of my highest priorities for the final version of this year's budget recommendation is the inclusion of employee pay adjustments that that really are reflective of the market conditions that we find ourselves in. I really want to make sure that we're able to retain benefits that support our employees physical mental health for both themselves and their families that they go home to every day, as well as, you know, fully funding and analyzing and making sure that we fully fund our safety needs personal protective equipment any modifications that we need to make due to covert 19 and present, and in the days to come, because our employees that deliver this service to our community. They are absolutely essential to quality of life so regardless of where they fall in in in the vaccine scheme scheme, they are absolutely essential to the quality of life in this community. Over the last few weeks, human resources, along with others have actually been working to analyze employee pay and market structures, and they have prepared some pay adjustment scenarios that will be presented for discussion today. As Bertha said, you know, certainly our final decisions will not be made today, because we want, you know, everything that we have to present to you to be considered, along with, you know, other things that we may bring back to you before the final decisions are made. And certainly every successful organization must regularly evaluate its long term growth strategy. So I'm moving to topic to now. And today is just one of those days. And we certainly are prepared to begin a discussion on how and when we might increase our capacity for new capital investment. And in this particular space, it is with the focus on what would be more our strategic plan goal of a sustainable and natural built environment sometimes will focus in other areas but that is where we will be focused today. For that presentation that Deputy Manager Ferguson will make. And then we will conclude the day discussing the city council budget priorities and will be poised for that discussion as well. We all have four hours ahead of us. And I don't want to take up too much at that time because I certainly want us to be able to have a break during that time. But at this moment, if Regina is ready, I will turn the meeting over to her to get us started with our pay and benefits presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Manager. Mr. Mayor, Mayor pro tem council members. I am Regina young blood interim deputy city manager for administrative and support services. Together with JJ Scott, the interim director of human resources we will be discussing the employee compensation plan. Next slide please. So first I want to talk about why we adjust compensation we do that for many different reasons. We do it to reward employee performance. We do it to retain valued employees. We do it to attract new employees to the organization. And sometimes we adjust compensation because we want to correct for inequities and following a plan helps to ensure consistency. So before we get into the scenarios next slide, I'd like to talk briefly about the history of employee compensation within the city of Durham for context. So in 2008, the city embarked upon an ambitious compensation and classification study for its general employees, meaning those that are not in the public safety realm of police and fire. That compensation plan was developed, and it was never fully implemented. So what do I mean we were at that time in the city embarking on the great recession at the time. And so finances were uncertain just as finances are uncertain at this time. And so a decision was made to fund half of the pay plan and to give employees half of the raise that they were expecting. And then they were going to fund the city was going to fund the next half in the next fiscal year but unfortunately the recession deepened, and the city was never able to fund the second half of that pay plan. So that caused some angst and consternation for our employees and over the years because revenues were still down for some time, the pay plan that was put in place in 2008 was never adequately maintained. Moving forward to 2017, the city conducted a police and fire pay plan study, and structures were put in place that helped us to get more competitive with the market for police and fire pay. We embarked on a step plan for both police and fire, and those structures were going to be adjusted the plan was to adjust those structures every other year. Unfortunately, the, the 2019 pay plan for general employees took a little bit longer than we expected so the police and fire pay plans were scheduled to be maintained in 2019, but that did not happen. The city hired a consultant to complete a general employee pay plan study in 2019 that was implemented with two structures for general employees, an open range structure that was meant to be adjusted every year and a step plan structure that was meant to be adjusted every other year. Next slide. So that left us previous slide please I think we went too far. So what we have in place today are different structures for different types of jobs. The police have a step plan for sworn police employees. The fire has a step plan for sworn fire employees and general employees have to pay plans, a step plan that is supposed to be adjusted annually. Excuse me every other year, excuse me. And an open range plan that is supposed to be adjusted annually. And we adjust these structures to maintain market competitiveness. Now let me say a little bit about structures I've said that were quite a bit. What does that mean. A structure represents the minimum, the market, and the maximum of pay for different types of work. Jobs are assigned to different paid grades through a citywide classification process and jobs and positions can be reclassified if their work changes. Next slide. So pre COVID, what we were proposing to get ourselves back on track with the maintenance of our pay plans and structures was the police and fire had another study done so that we could maintain their structures. We looked at competitive markets of our peers to determine how we might adjust those structures. And we found that we were at least 9% behind the market for police and 8% behind the market for fire. We were just at the beginning of trying to discuss, you know, as as a leadership team, what adjustments we would make we were considering potentially an 8% 8.5% or 9% adjustment to the structures for police. We were considering possibly anywhere from a 7% to an 8% structure adjustment for fire. We were planning on doing a 3% structure adjustment for our general employees in the open ranges. And we were going to put in the budget 5%, as you know, 5% for step moves for police and fire employees for their merit movements. And we had budgeted in that, at that time, for an average of 4.9, excuse me 4.8% performance increase for general employees. And we were also planning to maintain our new part time pay plan. But then COVID hit. And there was uncertainty about revenues. And so what we actually put in the budget for pay for employees and maintenance of the structures was nothing. Next slide. So where are we now. All of our pay structures are due for adjustment. Police lags behind the market at least 9% fire lags behind the market at least 8% open range structures, estimated to lag behind the market between three and 5% and fire recruits require an adjustment to their starting pay so that it keeps in in compliance with the Durham minimum livable wage ordinance. So now I'd like to turn it over to JJ Scott so he can talk a little bit about the demographics of the people that are pay plan impacts. Good morning all. So I will continue where Regina left off so she got us up to speed to where we are now. So moving forward looking forward. What can we expect first as wanted to share with you all. Some summaries of our current employees so every snapshot of employees is a point in time. And so what we see here was as of January, what our employees structure look like so up to the left, we can see the broad racial groupings of our employees and the groups in each of those groups, and those colors actually serve as the key also for the larger graph on the right. So orange represents white employees in the large graph on the right as well. If you go down to the green graph, you can see the different pay structures so Regina just ran us through all the different pay structures that we have. We have a number of employees in each of those structures. We added the part time structure, which is highly variable the number of employees that are in that but again, when we pulled the data, this was the number of employees in the part time structure so you can see, we have about three times as many general employees as police but police and fire together are about the same as our general employees overall. So moving to the larger graph that I alluded to. There are three or four, I'm sorry, major groupings so it's by pay plan at the bottom, and there's kind of a, a thin bar in between the pay plan so we've got the general police fire and part time pay plans, and then it goes in order, the percent of each racial grouping that falls within to these various salary structures and so you can see some patterns that are apparent in our current employee makeup. So, again, looking at the general from making less than 50,000 on the left, going all the way to greater than 90,000 on the right, and then the same with police, fire, and part time. There's a lot of data on this slide I'll pause if there are any immediate questions on this. I have one immediate question. The 90 is the top range I guess for general employees, like 50,000 more than the 90,000. So is the top range for for the general or I think for each of them is 90 and above. Can you break that up a little bit more to say what what it looks like for 140 and above. We can. Yes, I don't have that immediately available but we can get that back to you. Yes, we can do that. Any other questions. All right, next slide please. All right, so when we were putting together various scenarios to present here and to discuss with interim city manager page and the administration. We have a lot of moving pieces that we can move around so we know that we are in a constrained environment with funding as Regina ran through. We have a lot of things that we're also trying to accomplish. So, here are a couple of the things that we were considering as we put these together. We wanted to align with the compensation plan that we put together a lot of time and effort went into putting that together. So we have a lot of expertise in that. And so we want to, as much as we can make sure that what we're doing aligns with the principles laid out in in those plans, we're of course, very connected to the market. We have for better or for worse a very competitive market we compete not only with other growing municipalities, but we also have the private sector here. We are competing with all of them for employees and that market moves rapidly as you saw percentage points a year. And we do the math on bonuses versus raises and I have another slide on this so we'll get into the details here in just a second. But these have different strengths and weaknesses. And we're talking about using those for compensation. Of course, there's the amount so how big is the bonus or how big is the raise that will obviously affect the total amount of compensation. So we can get down into selective application of whatever dollar amount we we decide on. And so, how would you select merit is the way that we have traditionally done this through our pay for performance plan. And so, you know, higher performers we get a higher reward. We can do it by salary. So, as you noticed on the previous slide we've broken down employee groups by salary. And so we can choose to apply compensation to only those making under over between certain amounts. We can look at different pay plans. And so police fire general employees are all they all have different pay plans and we do treat those pay plans differently. And so there are differences now between how far behind the market they are the types of work that are done in those pay plans is different. And so we can be responsive to those different pay plans. And then we can get specific as job type. We can also be sensitive to equity. And so we have an eye on that. And just an example of compensation and equity a few years ago we we went up to $15 minimum wage and back and back then that was not a market driven. And so that was something that the city decided needed to happen and then we went so far as to apply that minimum to part time employees as well. And then of course, as I mentioned at the top available funding that kind of is the overall constraint for all this. So the scenarios that we're going to look at in just a second here. Representative no, it's unlikely that any of the ones that we look at will actually be the ones approved but we wanted to give you a representative sample of how we can move these different levers around. Next slide please. So a quick detail on the bonuses versus base salary. So traditionally we are very much a raises organization, but bonuses can have a some real advantages and so one, it's a it's a chunk of money, the way that we would usually do that and so employees notice that they get what can be a substantial amount of money all at once as opposed to running it out over the year. And so that can be really rewarding and motivating to an employee to see that and recognize the organization. Handing that to them in recognition of their work, and it allows us to maintain flexibility so bonuses a one time thing. Once we pay it. It's, it's done it does not have any future year implications. And so with raises, so a raise, it can be a smaller amount per paycheck, but it really shows that the organization is investing in employees and that can lead to greater retention we do tend to be a higher 10 year organization so once employees make it a year or two. They tend to stay a while. I think right now are average 10 years up around 10 years, which is pretty high and it's grown through cove it is it is our turnover dropped raises can help us maintain market position position, because one of the things that we look at is the average salaries that people are actually making there's the structures, but there's also the salaries that people are actually making. And we really want that to be close to the market rate. One of the benefits for employees but possible downsides for the organization is it raises will compound over time so if you add three, five, whatever percent a year, that number is growing and again that can be a huge amount of employees definitely recognize that. But for the organization, it also compounds. Next slide please. And we'll take a look at one of the at the first scenario. So these scenarios are in no particular order, again, but we just wanted to give you a glimpse into some of the things that we're talking about and how much they could cost and I should say these costs are estimates, and we would, we will be working with budget to refine these look at the out year impacts but just a ballpark here. The first line on this, and I'm going to go through this first one on more detail I won't do this for for all of these. The first ones, we want to move the general employees pay structures up 2% or up several percent, it could be slightly more than that but we want to give employees a 2% add to their base salary. So every employee's salary within this within the general structure would get a 2% raise. So again, spread out over a year it's not much, maybe, but it's $2 million overall to do that if we looked at police and moved their structure and base salaries up 4%. That's 1.4 million and for fire to go three and a half 800 million. And so what are those numbers so those numbers represent about half of where we think we are relative to the market. And I want to point out that this is represents some creative thinking on behalf of staff to come up with this model of both moving the structures and adding to base at the same time so we can kind of knock out a couple of things at once. Then we have bonuses, so $1,000 bonuses across the board. So in this scenario, we're treating all employees equally, and we can see the cost, just, you know, multiplying the number of employees by that $1,000. And I'll just point out that in future scenarios, you'll note that this bonus part can change. We add in a pretty rough estimate for part time employees. So if a part time employee in a scenario worked 17 hours a week, they would get around $500 and that would we would vary that based on the actual number of hours worked. So to accomplish this, and just to put that in perspective, this is, this is, you know, a fraction of what Regina presented earlier, of where we really hope to be, but giving the constraints. We thought this was a reasonable scenario. So that gets us to $6.7 million. And I'll add that this does not include benefits estimates. And so you could add somewhere between 25 and 30% to that. But again, we would work with our partners in budget to refine that number. So I'll stop on this first scenario. And again, this, this is not first for any reason other than it includes a lot of pieces. But are there any questions on any of those things that I went over? Yeah. Hey, this Council Member Freelon, I had a question about the metrics for merit based raises for police, but I don't know if it would be appropriate to ask you that question or if we should wait until, you know, we have someone from the police department around to discuss that. I think we can broadly say that all employees are evaluated using what we call our EPEP system, the employee performance evaluation program. And goals are set for each employee. There are three core values that each employee has as a part of their performance evaluation, then there's anywhere from one to three departments selected competencies that employees are evaluated on. And so based on the goals that are set between the employee and their supervisor and how the employee is rated on those goals, the core competencies and the department specific competencies, an employee can be rated anywhere from effective is hopefully what we want people to be highly effective or exemplary. There is provision for individuals who are not meeting expectations to be rated minimally effective or highly effective. And so individuals that are ineffective and minimally effective do not get merit increases, they get put on a corrective action plan, and then those merit increases are for individuals who make effective, highly effective, or better, and merit pay is differentiated between those levels. Effective is 4%, highly effective is 5%, and exemplary is 6%. The way that it works for police though, because they're on a step plan, they move one step. And what they get is the value of the difference in percentage if they were highly effective or above as a lump sum, excuse me, as a lump sum. Okay, thank you for that breakdown. I guess I was hoping to get into the weeds a little bit, but again, I know we have a long meeting ahead of us and I'm happy to have that conversation offline, but kind of more specifically is what is seen as highly effective. Is it tied to things like how many arrests you make, or did this many traffic stops? And I guess the idea or the question is about the extent to which performance and excellence is based on, like what matrix are those based on, very specifically, what behaviors are we incentivizing systematically in police, especially seeing that's where most of these dollars are going towards. So happy to, you know, to put a pin in that for later. If that's appropriate. Great question. We'll get that information and we'll talk with you about that offline. Thank you. All right, next slide, please, John. Just noting, this is Councilmember Freeman. I would also like the follow up on that question. Thank you. So in this scenario, top two items are the same top three items are the same, I believe so the main thing that we changed here is the bonus structure. So what we're looking at here is giving more money so $1,000 to employees making less than $50,000 $750 for those making between 50 and $90,000 and then $500 for employees making greater than 90,000. And so what this allows us to do is perhaps introduce some equity to it. So, you know, percentages would give larger amounts of money to employees at the top of the pay scale. Some can the equivalent would be a higher percentage at lower ends of the pay scale. And so this can allow us to differentiate those bonus amounts. And so you can see the difference in how much that would cost the city. And again, the amounts, the pay cutoffs, all of that, all of those are variables that can be adjusted. So if we did, if we made that change, we can see the total comes out to 6.3 million on this one. All right, and we'll just bring up the last slide then John. So this would be a another scenario that we could do. And so in this one, what we did we maintained all the structure adjustments and the ads to base that we talked about up top. But here we eliminated bonuses for public safety. And so the thought here being that because we're moving the structures so much. We go with providing bonuses to those general employees who would not be seen as much of a raise. And so we can see that that also knocks down the cost a little bit. And I believe that is the last scenario. Yeah, so we will take any additional questions. Hey, this is council member Colorado. When can you put up one of the three scenarios slide so I just have my base thank you so based on the earlier slide where it was like, you know, fires up to 8% lower than the market rate for that job. This is essentially is the goal then if we're 8% I mean we can't stop here we'd have to add another base next year. Right. And so I'm curious what that does. What's the, what's the longer term impact of that because we know that that's such a big jump and this isn't we can't stop at three and a half percent and 4%. So, and it doesn't have, I don't think you all you would have provided that information if you had it, but I would like to see that kind of you know ripple effect or domino effect. This year and then what does that do next year. And just so I understand council member cover your. Are we talking about the compounding effect over like five years. Yes, because we're not hitting. Obviously we can't afford to give the full whatever 7% to police in one year, the full percent. So I'm looking at the space and saying okay well you're basically cutting it in half I mean a little bit less so then where's the other half and what does that do to our finances. Yeah, our hope would be to continue to chip away at it in future years. You know again we're always looking at the financial situation. We are still uncertain and so this was an amount that we felt, you know, might be possible. Yeah, this year, but as more information comes in, we will certainly be looking at it but yes you're right this, none of the scenarios that we have presented are everything that we would wish to do in a perfect year to get aligned with the market. And I appreciate that you all are thinking about how do we raise that base pay and stay competitive and fitting it within our fiscal constraints for this year. And it depends to me why you approach the problem that way. So I appreciate all the information today. I will just add and I think I see the mayor, I mean he's the manager jumping in she's probably going to say the same thing that with the police and fire structures as well as the step plan that we have for general employees, just keeping in mind that when we adjust those structures, every single employee in that structure gets a raise the size of the structure adjustment. And also giving the merit increases in that same year. You know a person could get anywhere from 8% increase in that year depending on how far we adjust those structures so that is something that we always have to consider and consider very closely with our available funding for the organization. Thank you Regina, I was also going to add just for a little get a little more background I guess also market studies are have to be fairly current. So when we do a market study. It is only, you know, it's only current for a couple of years because the market is constantly changing. So while we may have done a market study a couple of years ago. It indicated this is what we need to do. Before, you know, we would really rely on that being the current market, a year or two down the road, we would certainly refresh those numbers. So so we don't stick with a market is a point in time, but it gives us something to work for. Typically, we know that the market is generally increasing but sometimes it's not increasing as much. Maybe at some periods of time it might be standing still, but it over time it is going to increase, and we want to make sure that we're moving our, our pay plans, you know, toward toward market, just because we need to do that in triangle. And if I might jump in, thank you. First of all, good morning, everyone. Good to see all of you. Thanks so much for the presentation. I have a quick question about the bonuses. And I didn't want to say however and I appreciate my colleagues comments and observations about what this will look like and how this will impact us in the future. As I approached this as a policy policymaker I know that the presumption is that our capacity to deal with these increases will grow as well. I mean, we're not going to stop raising taxes. And the presumption is that our economy will continue to expand as well. I think was it last year the year before where we had an increase in our budget. Our revenues, but it was based upon our tax based growing new folk moving here, more folk paying taxes. So, of course, the hope is that our capacity to meet these increases will grow as well. And of course we can adjust near the years as policymakers if need be like we did with coven. So my question about the the bonuses just to be clear. In scenario one, the, the $1,000 bonus that you had for police and fire as well. As I read this, that is just a straight bonus not tied to anything, you know, meritorious or your, it's just, here's the grand. This is your bonus period. Am I reading that correctly this particular bonus is presented in this graphic is not based upon how many contracts you close how whatever you did whatever you're doing your department. Here's your amount and there's variants and it based upon that this is just a straight $1,000 is that correct. That's right. Well, I was going to say, essentially, yes, but we would suggest that only individuals who are at least meeting expectations right in the effective or better range would get sure. Got you got you. And there would be. And if you meet that metric there'd be no variance in the amount, it would just be that $1,000. And okay, that's helpful. All right, thank you. That's all I have right now. I have a couple of questions. Thank you all so much for the presentation and for these the, the creativity with which you've approached this. So, one of the advantages that wasn't listed for bonuses. But I believe is an advantage especially this year is that we can take it out of one time funding. And I know that's one of the reasons that that was included as part of this plan so I just wanted to mention that. I think we are better off right now and in terms of what we have, what we expect to have in terms of our one time funding we're this year in the current fiscal year and as we heard in the recent report we're adding to our, our undesignated fund balance general fund balance and so I think that that's a good aspect of this plan, an important aspect of the plan. So, this is just a, we talked a little bit about this last time but I just wanted to be refreshed on this. The multi year that we saw last week, last budget retreat. Can I be refreshed and this may be rather than Regina JJ this might be somebody from budget on what is built in in terms of pay, starting in FY 23, and how this these plans would comport with that. Johnson director budget management services again, john can jump in as well. What we planned for 2023 is to restore all of our pay plans. Typically as we bring the multi year to each year we only make changes until the for the upcoming fiscal year. And so everything is restored in 2023. We do not have any pay increases built in the multi year as of yet for 22. Okay, but just to make sure I'm to what I thought I remembered, but 2023 then does fully restore the pay plans in the existing multi year. That is correct. Okay, thank you that's important and I'm really glad to hear that. So, if the minimum. Minimum bonus. If we had. So you've got three, three structures, but in two of the structures. Let me just pull mine up on my iPad real quick here. The in two of the structures the bonuses you've got the, the, the equity bonuses in the second and third plan basically you've got it. You've got an equitable plan, but the total for both of those plans actually less than the plan where everybody gets $1000. And I'm wondering if what the cost would be if the lowest bonus was 1000, but we ran, but we created an equity bonus system. So, you know, what would the what would the additional cost for us be I don't know that we know that you know might take somebody with calculator to do and let us know but I would be interested in that potential scenario. And then I guess my. But I want to, I want to endorse the equity scenarios. And I would like to share that very much, but I would like to make it so that, you know, each of our employees at a minimum would get $1000 bonus, and I would like to see what that would cost us. You know, with an equity, you know, so that would mean that the lower paid employees might get, I don't know, you know $1500 bonus you all would have to help us. Just to, I've had this discussion a little bit with a manager, but and I expect a lot of my colleagues have as well. And this can be, you know, I don't know if she wants to step in and answer this question at this time or we'll discuss this later when we get, you know, tomorrow to the to the budget guidelines. But what would the, you know, what is the assumption of the administration about the, what the implications of this would be for our tax rate. So, so we have not made any assumptions about our tax, you know, about our tax general tax rate, the increasing beyond what the council has already decided. Well, you know what we can look at is we know what a, you know, what a penny on the tax rate brings. We already talked about that's three point, you know, 3.4 4 million dollars but, you know, that would be a permanent increased, you know, to our taxes we're talking about, you know, a sort of a hybrid raise situation here. But we have not spoken about raising taxes for a, you know, we're not that far into our budget development that we have, you know, spoken about raising taxes for salary increases. Are you, are you working on the idea that or let me say this way. We are not assuming. So, so the, the bonus money would be coming out of general fund or other one time. One time money. Is that correct. That is correct, sir. And then the, and then you're not making the assumption that that the increase that the increase in base would necessarily be that we would necessarily need a tax increase for that or you're still working on the assumption that we hopefully will not and you're going to let us know that but this is not a that there's still flexibility here that I would I would stress the point that there's still flexibility. All, you know, all of our employees don't work in a general fund that's covered by, you know, a general tax increase, you know employees work across, you know, our enterprise funds as well. And we, we, you know, we, we are just, we're just showing you all today, the kind of increases that we could potentially make that would help, you know, help us with our structures. Put, you know, put raises and money in the pockets of our employees, and, you know, also, you know, help us not, you know, have to, you know, find as many as many dollars within the budget that we currently have existing. So you will all recall that our budget presentations from our departments were due on the 22nd. That has just been a few days and that is where we really start to really, really get into the details of, you know, what next year's actual needs are going to be. You will also recall that we, we asked our departments this year to really, really look at, at potential offsets or things that we can, we can cut costs and maybe replace them with higher priorities or cut them all together. So those are some things that are new in this budget season that we haven't had to do in the past. So we don't want to talk today about, you know, what we would need to raise a tax for, but we do, you know, we, we're not saying we would never come back with that. But today we just want to get your thoughts on what you see here as we try to develop a package to increase the salaries of our employees. Thank you. Just, you know, I know you're looking for feedback and my feedback is that I think that I really appreciate the approach to this I think that the I would, I would like to see as I said before an additional plan which has an equity plan with a minimum $1,000 bonus so that we could get more bonus money into the pockets of our employees using our one time money, which, you know, at least it seems to me from what we heard from the financial report that we could probably probably do and probably do with without much strain, but looking forward to see the numbers on that and appreciate the manager's comments about the the potential for doing this without a tax increase but we will we will learn more about that. So those are my comments but I think it's really really moving in the right direction so thank you. Thank you and I definitely definitely I know I appreciate your line of questioning and I just to further underscore and clarify a manager page so is, is that characterization correct that that when you, because I know you guys weren't at ball and there's some there's some science and message behind presentation brought us today. Is that an accurate characterization that we can achieve this without a tax increase or was that just bracketed out of the conversation totally and this was just kind of that makes sense with I will, I will, I will go out front and I'll have the budget budget team that stands behind me come as well. We can accomplish an increased package without a tax increase. We have a very large budget in the city we can accomplish it. However, we are refining numbers and we're talking, you know, 3 million 4 million 5 million, you know that it sounds like a really big number. But I don't want us to really focus on any particular one thing that we need to do, needing a property tax increase for it before we have better numbers for you about the trade offs. You can always add a property tax increase to something and make money. But at this point, that that would not be a recommendation that I would make it to increase taxes for to increase salaries, I would not make that recommendation today. And this, and this this this is a segment in conversation with with respect to salaries but in the expanded universe of the entire budget including our request and stuff that that does not extend to the rest of the just want to be clear about. We're just talking about the salary part for our employees we're not talking about everything. Yeah, I don't want to create. Okay, you know any. All right, thanks. That's great. All right, I just want to telegraph that. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you council member other questions and comments. Any other anyone else want to, I think that our staff is looking for some feedback here on the general direction in which they're moving and wondered if anyone else would like to offer that, or have any questions. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, I also really appreciate this approach. I think that the bonuses coming out of one time money is a fabulous idea. And I like the equity scale in terms of bonuses giving, giving the larger bonuses to the folks closer to the bottom of the pay scale. Yeah, I'd be great if we could do it all without a tax increase because we're already going to do the increase for the bond and we have a lot of departmental requests and council requests to consider. But this is of course I think after, you know, not having not being able to do this last year this is definitely a priority for me and I think a priority for the city to make sure that we can put a little something in into the plan for for raises. So, yeah, I like where we're going with this. Thank you. Council memories. What she said. Okay. Any, any others, any other comments. Just to note, I think that scenario two is probably more in line with that conversation with the, I agree with what Mayor Schultz said with making the thousand minimum, and then working from there. All right. So, Regina, do you feel like you all have your guidance and that you have the, it seems like you have the affirmation that we're moving in a direction that council can support and we're looking forward to what's next do you feel like you have what you need. Yes. Yes, I do. Great. Thank you. Any further comments on the colleagues or questions. Okay. Super. Thank you so much. Great presentation. Thank you. So, if there are no other questions on the employee compensation, we'll move to DCM Ferguson's presentation. Good morning. Good morning, mayor. Good morning, mayor pro 10 members of council on both Ferguson deputy city manager for operations. I am tag teaming this presentation this morning with finance director David Boyd, and we'll be talking to you this morning about what we have titled and certainly can be retitled to fit your interest but what we have tentatively titled green and equitable infrastructure and we'll be talking about potential projects that fit under this category, as well as funding considerations ways that can be considered if you choose to move forward and paying for some of these things. So, to get us started, let me just say that, you know, we obviously have a CIP that you see every year a 10 year plan. And that is always a very competitive funding process that CIP does not approach never has really approached full funding of all the capital projects that have either been identified by the council as having an interest brought forward by the staff or advocated for by residents. And, you know, while we have a number of adopted plans and policy documents that are out there that call for certain projects the CIP has always only been able to deliver a subset of those. The last few budget conversations and in private conversations you've had with the city manager. There's been an interest in talking about ways to fund or consideration of ways to fund an additional tranche of projects that meet certain criteria and those criteria generally have been conveyed to us to be things that that meet a green or sustainability agenda as well as having an equity focus. So, we took that direction in an effort to paint a broad brush picture for you today of projects that might fall into that category, and those projects that we intend to show you today are either projects that come out of those adopted plans that we've talked about before policy documents that you've seen and given a blessing to, or projects that you haven't necessarily seen or talked about but that staff have identified as a way to advance certain council priorities and in particular I think I'm thinking about the sustainability roadmap and some of the carbon neutrality goals that council has set. Next slide please John. So, as so as is absolutely necessary for this conversation I'm going to start us off with some some caveats and some considerations. The first is that this is exercise has taken place over the course of about a week and is dealing with some really broad and futuristic thinking. The cost estimates that you will see today are extremely preliminary they are our best bet best effort to paint with a very broad brush and just give you an order of magnitude for for different categories of projects. Please understand that these would need to be heavily revised and vetted. If anything were to move forward, and that they could change drastically from what you see today. Secondly, as is noted in the very title of this presentation I think council has intended an equity focus with this and as is consistent with our organization's values or racial equity analysis would be a critical step in determining which projects should be included and which projects should be prioritized. I want to make it clear that what you see today has not had the benefit of that analysis. And so this really is just sort of a universe of projects that would certainly be vetted and and analyzed through a number of different processes but in particular racial equity analysis. Similarly, these projects have not for the most part been introduced to the community and it certainly councils expectation in our internal expectation that equitable engagement strategies around important projects, really in terms of all the work that we do is a significant part of developing and delivering projects for the city and that that those processes can change what we do they can change these projects. They have the potential to convince us that these projects shouldn't be pursued or certain projects shouldn't be pursued so I want to be clear again that for the most part the projects we're talking about today have not had the benefit of any community engagement and that that would be a time consuming, but also a very informative process that would impact the projects that we're talking about. Next projects are not shovel ready and for those of you who've been on council a few years understand it can be frustrating at times but a necessity that projects take some time to begin to design to have conversations with our residents and our partners, and ultimately to deliver those projects so when you are talking at this stage in the process, it's important to understand it could be years and in some cases many years before we were in a position to deliver any projects that are being talked about today. And finally, delivery of a significant tranche of new capital projects requires a great deal of infrastructure in the in the staff and the organization and that is infrastructure that we're not scaled for right now. We don't necessarily have enough staff or staff resources available right now to deliver millions and millions of dollars of new capital projects. So if we were to move forward in this effort, we'd want to make council aware from the get go that additional and significant general fund resources would need to be made available to deliver anything along this lines. So now that I've brought a little sobering dose of reality, I'd like to move forward and start talking about some of the categories of projects that that council could consider that fall into these areas. John, if you could advance the slide. So let me just go over the categories briefly and then I'll spend a little bit of time on each category going forward. The categories include new sidewalks, sidewalk gaps, sidewalk repairs, pedestrian safety and accessibility intersection improvements, bicycle facilities, pedestrian access to transit, trail construction and repairs, dirt street paving. Next slide please John. Renewable energy, energy resilience, electrification of transportation infrastructure, energy efficiency, greening of community spaces, and circular economy. Next slide please. I feel a little bit like the late great Alex Trebek reading off categories. So I guess in keeping with that vein, we'll start talking about each category and the dollars associated. This first category is new sidewalks. Total potential cost to deliver funds identified in this category is $58.3 million. As most council members know we have an adopted bike walk master plan that was adopted in 2017 and we do fund a number of these projects in the CIP this category consists of those projects not currently funded in the CIP and these include some major quarter projects such as Miami Boulevard, North Carolina 54, Pettigrew and Hardy streets. I'll pause here and say that I'm going to move through these categories fairly quickly I know you may have questions about individual categories and we have staff available on the call I'm going to let most of those detailed questions fall to those staff. But if you have questions you feel free to stop me now but I will make sure that we have time to get into that as we move forward. Next slide John. Let's go back one to sidewalk gaps if we can thank you. So this next category of sidewalk gaps. The next category to fund to fund this is 4.1 million, much like the last group you saw this is also a group of projects from the bike walk master plan sidewalk gaps are very similar to new sidewalks and they are new sidewalks but these specifically are a category of sidewalks that connect existing sections of sidewalks frequently they'll connect new developments to to nearby sidewalk infrastructure and 4.1 million dollars would deliver the projects that that fit this category from the 2017 plan. Next slide sidewalk repairs. So this group of projects comes from out of analysis from our public works department total cost of projects in this category is 16 million. These are again, there are existing funds in our CIP for a subset of sidewalk repairs this is from current analysis but as we continue to update the analysis and and inspection of our infrastructure public works anticipates a growing amount of funds needed to complete all the sidewalks in the network of sidewalks throughout Durham and $16 million is a funding level they identified to complete necessary repairs to the complete network at least as we know the need to be right now. The next category is pedestrian safety and accessibility intersection improvements at a total cost of 2.6 million. So this goes back to the 2017 bike walk plan, which identified a number of pedestrian safety and accessibility improvements around intersections so these could be crosswalks, ADA ramps pedestrian signals flashing beacons and similar types of improvements. Next slide. So the next category is bicycle facilities total potential cost for these projects comes in at around 7.7 million. This is again called for in the 2017 bike walk master plan. The next category is bicycle lanes on busy, busy roads, it would add neighborhood bike routes in low volume areas and add protected bike lanes. When we go through and resurface streets were able to add those after the resurfacing takes place. And the next area is $10 million group of projects for pedestrian access to transit so as councils aware, the Durham County transit plan has a high level of community engagement going on right now and one of the areas that's been in this effort has been a need and the desire for improvements at and around bus stops to really improve the accessibility to pedestrians of that transit infrastructure so while we anticipate the Durham County transit plan being able to fund some of those needs. An additional contribution in capital funds would augment that funding level and help deliver projects more quickly and a and also deliver a higher number of projects. So I'll just let the sticker shock of this one set in our next category is trail construction and repair so we haven't adopted master plan for trails and those council knows from the number of projects that have moved through various stages of design and approval recently. These projects come with a very tall price tag. $61.1 million is an omnibus number for the entire known infrastructure need around trails so this would deliver construction of all the trails in the trail master plan. It would conduct a number of repairs to existing trail infrastructure it would help with some costs increases that we're seeing with certain trails that are under design now. I would state for this category and it really applies to all categories obviously this can be broken down to its component parts and sub components so again we are we are showing you the broad universe of projects that we know about. Not implying certainly that that any of these numbers would be practical or achievable but this being one of the largest tranches in there I just wanted to remind council that that this is the whole universe of what we know. So the next is as council is aware we have a dirt street paving program and we have funds identified in the CIP to conduct ribbon paving basically a basic level of paving on existing dirt streets with throughout the city. An additional level of funding would accelerate the completion of this paving throughout the city and that that level is funded at at 5.6 million. Just a little bit of the thinking on the inclusion of this you know we talk about we talk about green infrastructure but but the broader category in the terminology we use a lot of sustainability and one of the key concepts of sustainability is is building for the long term and building for the future and I really think that's how dirt street paving at least gets into this conversation. It is both clearly a part of the equity conversation when we compare that infrastructure to what other what other residents enjoy those who have dirt streets are obviously a lower level of infrastructure but it's also a key sustainability piece when you think about the fact that dirt streets take a lot higher level of maintenance so we're putting a lot more repetitive money into dirt streets so this ribbon paving program does satisfy I think some of the core criteria we heard going into this presentation. So we're going to transition now to a second group of projects I think a lot of what you heard up until now has been pedestrian related bike and pedestrian alternative modes of transit other than single single occupancy vehicles and maintenance of our core infrastructure I think now we're transitioning into green green technologies and more sustainability. I say that because at this point, we're moving to an area of projects that that we've done less work on that that are a little bit more aspirational in nature. And so I would say there's a higher level of variability on the cost you're about to see we are we do have staff available to talk about these types of projects but I wanted to note that transition that there's a little bit more certainty and specificity on the projects that we were just talking about compared to most of the areas going forward so this first category is renewable energy generation and the total potential costs again very much a broad number here is 13.5 million. This category would specifically be about generating carbon neutral energy collected from renewable sources. Presumably this would take place at city facilities you know there's concepts about putting solar generation at the landfill or on top of city buildings, potentially in partnerships with other agencies that we work with like DHA. So this this category could fund that generation certainly would help meet the city's carbon neutral energy goals that we've set forward. The next category is energy resilience, and this is estimated at 5 million certainly the last couple of weeks of news coming out of Texas really underscores the importance of investments in energy resilience I think this is a value that we've had in the city for some time but but clearly with new technology and new investment, there's opportunities to make great strides. It would fund the category of projects designed to enhance the reliability and resiliency of key city infrastructures using micro grids, energy storage and battery technology and solar capacity. These could be used for key city facilities that could also be used a community facing facilities facilities that might be used for sheltering in an event of a weather event like what what Texas has has seen in the deep south has seen over the last couple of weeks. So, this is an area I think that broadly fits the goals we heard from council. Also, these this is a key component of the sustainability roadmap that council has adopted. This area is electrification of transportation and the total potential costs that we've identified at this point is 7.2 million. Obviously, as you've heard, we have an effort to to bring electrification to the city's fleet. As as technology allows and as good options present themselves within the universe of vehicles being offered a key infrastructure piece of that transition is getting the charging infrastructure in place for those vehicles, not just at the fleet facility where we maintain those vehicles but throughout the city where those vehicles are operated. This would fund that charging infrastructure this also would includes some funding for public facing infrastructure at key areas around the city so again this is an important sub component of of that transition to an electric fleet. This area is energy efficiency, and this the sum for these projects right now is 18.5 million. As as I said, a government we have a massive inventory of facilities that that we own and maintain over 2.4 million square feet of real estate. These buildings were built over, you know, a span of many many years, obviously our newer buildings built to a high level of energy efficiency but our older buildings were built with the technology of the age and so this category of projects would fund weatherization retro commissioning and retrofits to those facilities to bring them up to modern standards of energy efficiency and certainly build in long term energy savings for the city. The waste reduction in the circular economy and this proposed amount of projects is about 13.8 million. There are really two key projects that that we envision in this portfolio and those are both at the transfer station. There is a a proposed thought that council has heard some some development around regarding a materials recycling facility or a mirf, allowing us to control our own destiny with a with a private sector partner. In terms of being able to continue to receive sort and recycle materials from the Durham public. And so that project is envisioned here. A second project that's envisioned is a large scale composting facility council knows we have an exciting and very successful small scale composting effort underway with a future pilot program we anticipate, but enable to scale that for the opportunity to compost for the entire city in terms of yard waste and potential green waste. An additional investment would need to be made at that facility and that's envisioned here. And I believe our last category is enhanced inequitable green green spaces and we've thrown a figure of about 2.8 million on this. Another category of projects would serve communities by continuing to grow the tree canopy build demonstration projects and public spaces and ensure those spaces include sustainable infrastructure like green roofs and solar gardens. There are concepts about you know providing Wi Fi and solar generated recharging for personal electronic devices and community parks. Those are some ideas we've seen around the country that potentially could be considered and developed further for Durham. So, there's, I know there's been some recent discussion in the community about concerns about about elements of the south LRB stormwater facility that's being developed now and under construction about certain amenities that were not able to be paid out of stormwater fund, if council were interested in seeing those amenities added back to the project. Another category under which I think that could be provided. So there were a few things we considered up front that ultimately I think we we feel fell a little bit short of the criteria but I just wanted you to know they were out there if some of these felt like a better fit to you obviously we could come back and present more information. Those categories included park renovations or new amenities at parks obviously we have a long list of park improvements that we don't have funded in addition to many that we do. New recreation centers have been talked about from time to time throughout Durham they come with a really huge price tag and right now we didn't feel like they necessarily fit the criteria for this presentation today. We're obviously aware of our ongoing effort to to meet the needs for street repaving ultimately didn't feel like that was a good fit for this. And then, in addition to that, potentially, an equity angle for street reconstruction but, but we want you to know as we've talked in certain CIP conversations there are some streets in Durham where repaving is simply inadequate that there really is a degradation of those facilities and we will need to find capital funding from some source at some point for some significant street reconstruction projects. So, with all of that said this is the, this is the whopping summary 224.4 million dollars of identified projects, very broad brush again very, very much a menu that could be chosen from and I think just I'll hit the note again that that many of these projects or just ideas at this point and certainly would need a lot more direction from council a lot more work from staff to get them to a point where we felt comfortable giving you a sense of competence about about what what the details look like and what what the costs look like but hopefully this presents to you an idea of the types of projects you are interested in. So with that, I'm going to hand the virtual microphone over to finance director David Boyd for discussion of how these projects might be funded or delivered and then when he's done, I think all of us including a number of staff on the call are available to answer any sort of detail questions you have from there. So David, I'll let you take it from here. Thank you Bo. Good morning, David Boyd finance director. So, as Bo mentioned, our current CIP capacity is essentially maxed out with the current 11 cent tax rate allocation that we use for that purpose so we really need more revenue in order to increase our capacity but the question is what do we do with that revenue and one way to do that is to issue a bond for one time influx of capital dollars and then use the tax to pay the debt service. The other alternative is to just allocate more tax revenue to our existing CIP funding model. Next slide. So we'll talk about the bond issuance considerations first and then we'll move to the second approach. So, very roughly, and based on what I think are reasonably conservative interest rate assumptions, one cent on the tax rate would get us about $50 million in project proceeds from a bond. And obviously requires a referendum for this purpose. And it would, you know, give us an increase all at one time or over a couple of years in our total outstanding debt over and above what we had intended the issue through our plan through our CIP plan which I'm not saying it's prohibited but but is another thing that that rating agencies take into consideration how much debt do you have outstanding at any given point. That would just provide us immediate access to those capital funds and would enable us to proceed with with projects as soon as we're ready to. Next slide. The debt must be issued within seven years of the referendum. And the other thing that that Bo mentioned was, you know, the influx of capital dollars at one time, you know, does require some some staffing for us to be able to manage that increased project load because here before we had not staffed for an influx of capital dollars but instead to fund the 10 year plan. And again, you know, once, once we issue that debt and use that tax to pay the debt service, our capacity goes back to what it was before. Next slide. So here's the more detailed schedule of what this would look like to get on the November ballot council would need to take three actions. The, and this is assuming that that we have the July holiday for for council. The first action would need to take place at the first council meeting in May, we could possibly slide this one cycle. That would mean we would be coming to you in an April work session, you know, with the first item for council to take action on. There's a section action required the second meeting and then a public hearing in June. And some public notice requirements prior to the election, which is currently scheduled for November but as we all know, could potentially get pushed out. And similar to the conversation that we that we've had about the affordable housing bonds which we have not yet issued that were approved in a referendum. November ago, we wouldn't issue these these bonds immediately after their approval. As, as Bo mentioned, there's going to be some time required before we're ready to build anything or spend any money so it would be unlikely that we would actually issue any of this debt until you know fiscal 23. I think there was another question that at our last retreat about, can you know, can you if we don't do it this year, can we do it next year, and the answer is we can do it in any November election. In terms of having a referendum. Next slide. So the other approach is to push more tax revenue into the 10 year CIP so right now there's 11 cents, you know, we could increase that, and then we would work from that constraint in terms of what we could fund this year. So, so if we assume that that we continue with the current funding model wherein we're, we're using the interest only line of credit option with the future fixed rate take out and assuming that that we only use cash to fund 10% of our capital. We do get some capacity over time but it's not at once as it would be with the bond issuance. And then this approach, the capacity that we would get would be more sensitive to the future interest rate environment. You know, overall market forces, you know, if projects get more expensive than we have less ability to deliver over time as opposed to doing a one time bond issuance where you get your money now you know what you're paying for it and you can proceed with projects. Now, next slide. But in the long term, you do end up with more capacity. Overall, I will heavily as Bo did at the beginning of his, his comments I will heavily caveat caveat this projection, because it's based on the way we fund the CIP and based on the fact that that projects don't really conform to spending a fixed amount every year. It's a little challenging to come up with annual capacity calculations, but very roughly and assuming that economic conditions do not change drastically. I would expect that that over a 10 year horizon, we would have, you know, twice as much capital capacity as if we did, compared to doing a one time bond issuance now so whereas one cent on the tax rate we get you a $50 million bond one cent on the tax rate. Use this way would, would potentially get you $100 million over the 10 year CIP planning horizon. And I think another potential benefit is that it allows us to kind of ramp up our, our internal resources to deliver capital. That will be a challenge, you know, to deliver a large slug of capital projects at one time. This would, would allow that to be spread out over time but then obviously you have to wait for that project to be delivered. It does also result in a permanent capacity increase assuming that you don't reduce that tax allocation in the future. You don't have this the seven year borrowing limitation. And based on the type of debt we're issuing in our current funding model there there's no vote required to borrow money in this regard. And that's kind of the two issues I think both covered, you know, the types of things that that we heard you talk about that that need funding, and then some options on how you might approach paying, paying for. So I'll turn it back to Bo. David and so at this point we're at the end of the presentation, just real quickly I want to offer extreme thanks and appreciation to a number of staff, Gene approves Marvin Williams, Wade Walcott, Sean Egan, and I'm sure I'm leaving somebody out and certainly their staff have very hard over the last four or five days to help create some of these categories and ideas and obviously David's put a lot of work so I want to want to thank all of them for bringing this forward and at this point we're ready for questions or discussion. Thank you so much. Oh and David, but do you want to take down the slides or whoever's running the slides. John could do that for us if you thank you john thank you. It's a fabulous presentation. And just want to say bow you do such a great job of providing context and appreciate that and David, thank you so much for presenting us with those two options and really again giving us great context on on that. All right colleagues, questions and comments. At this point. I can start I, I also want to thank bow for pulling us together so quickly, and acknowledging that having a number of 224 million helps the conversation just acknowledging that 11 cents on a dollar is not going to work for the type of infrastructure work we need to do, going forward, and it gives me a whole lot more confidence in the conversation around initiating a bond, acknowledging that this. I mean, these are the things we know we need nationally and like a green new deal. And if we could set that up here locally that would be phenomenal. And I know, I know specifically like around the trails I just had the specific question if that would also include, I guess, infrastructure or not infrastructure but the actual like alignment of sewer lines and that might come across some of those trail areas. I just really wanted to know, like, if you could set 61 million and to place, would any of that be able to be used to kind of do some of that resiliency work that we've been talking about, or that I've been talking about with the cog. So I probably want some more information council member about about the nature of that work you're talking about obviously as we build trails. I think I detect from your question you're you're thinking about areas where it interacts with other infrastructure like storm grain infrastructure storm water infrastructure and our trails do frequently follows similar alignments because they're in stream areas. Obviously the third fort creek trail is is a project that was has had a lot of sort of interaction and interplay with good storm water practice. But I'm reluctant to say that that these are stormwater projects they are at their core these are ideas generated around, you know, around the transportation and recreation benefits of trails, but certainly where we come across situations where streams need to be restored or where stormwater or drainage or flooding issues can be addressed. We try and be as collaborative as possible in those efforts. Thank you. I think, and along those lines additionally I think a scenario might be like a Duke Dern or Duke fitness was a Duke diet fitness center with that fit into something like this. So there is, there are trail like amenities around the South Elroy wetland which is the project you're referring to. And, you know, again, I think that's a good example of where I think our departments try and work really closely to treat our environmental work also as an educational opportunity and where appropriate a recreational community so I would say those concepts and values are very consistent with how we deliver projects I just would want to hold off on being more specific or giving a higher level of commitment until we were looking sort of project by project. Yeah, I get it. I hear you. I, and I just one additional question with the, with the availability of these fund dollars help or hurt, I guess, efforts to go after kind of workforce development dollars to support, I guess bringing online programs that would support these types of jobs that to come out of this workforce developments a little bit outside of my area of specialty so that would be a question I would probably want to talk to Mr. Pettigrew about or Mr. Chadwell and we can, I can check in with them on their thoughts on that and we can share that back with you. Okay, thank you. Thank you. Colleagues, questions, comments, Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. I just want to say that was awesome and gave me a really, really good idea of what is needed and what the costs are going to be and I want all of it so now we have to figure out how much we can actually afford to do but my initial thought was oh my god can we have all of it. We can find us like a local patron billionaire and ask them for, you know, quarter billion no big deal. So couple of questions I know we're likely to get some additional money federal money for transit or maybe we already have is that can that money be used for some of the pedestrian improvements related to transit that y'all mentioned, or other kinds of improvements that might in relate to transit use. For a great question I'll ask Sean agon if he's on the call if he could potentially comment on that. Certainly, so we have already received the first $12 million from the cares act, and we are in line to receive an additional $11 million from the most recent Chris. What we've been focused on is evaluating our capital replacement needs and deferred maintenance, as well as the impacts of cuts in state funding, lost fair revenue and other increased costs that we're seeing. So, while those these types of expenses, bus stop improvements sidewalks, crosswalks around bus stops would be eligible, there is the funding at this point is generally fully subscribed from those four programs. So we'd be looking to this and other opportunities like the Durham County Transit plan to fund new initiatives. We're at so we're we're focused right now on catching up on deferred maintenance and fleet replacement needs. Got it. Thank you. A little bit of wishful thinking on my part, I guess. So, in terms of the election in November in the like uncertainty around the election. What does that do to our schedule if we were going to consider a bond like would we just move ahead assuming that there would be an election and if not the referendum would just move forward to whatever. If the election happened I just I feel a little unclear on like the legal implications of, of not having it when we think we're going to have it. Well, my sense is Mayor Pro Tem that, you know, absent, knowing that it would be moving we would have to proceed with this timeline and then, if and when we know about a different date, then we could, you know defer any actions that hadn't been taken until, until we know that, you know, based on where we are now to hit the November dates we would have to we'd have to subscribe to this particular schedule. Thank you and I believe you said we could, we could put a referendum on any bow like on any election so we could do it when there's not a municipal election like for the 2022 state and federal election. November election is what bound Council tells me when, when, when there's, if there were to be any elections and anything other than November then it then there becomes more restrictions. Okay, but not including a delayed election that goes from November to something else. Okay. Great. Thanks y'all. I'm really looking forward to digging into this more. Other questions. Charlie. Thank you. Thank you, Steve. I want to, before I get into the specifics, I just want to bring the conversation into a slightly different place, which is all of these options, whether we choose to go forward with a green and equitable infrastructure bond, whether we choose to fund additional debt capacity out of the out of the regular property tax rate going forward, some combination of those two, which I think is probably the better strategy but whatever we choose to do. If we don't figure out with the county, some way to alleviate the property tax burden on our low income, long time homeowners. This doing these things will help our infrastructure, but hurt some of our most at risk neighborhoods. And so I just want to make sure that we're all aware that we've got to keep having that conversation with the county, with our attorney, with our community development department, because as we talked about raising tax revenue to meet the obvious clear and in some cases dangerous infrastructure needs that our community has, we have to be honest with ourselves and with our with our residents about how we're going to pay for it. And all this of course flows back to the fact that the state of North Carolina refuses to allow local governments to tailor our property tax system to meet the specific needs of our community. You know the seven of us sitting around the table could could figure out a property tax system that alleviated the burden on low income homeowners that made high income, high value property owners pay their fair share and support the needs we have in the community in a way that did not increase this place in the gentrification. But that's not the world we live in. So, so I just wanted to make sure we're all that this that's what this conversation makes me think about is how unfair this is that much of the burden for making these critical changes is going to fall on folks who can least afford it. Coming to the to the issue at hand, but I just want to make it clear that this kind of presentation really plays to your strengths. And you did a fantastic job most are really jealous of the great out background there at the blur I got to figure out how to make that work, because that's unfair that's really cool. The one the one cautionary note I want to I want to make sure we all understand is that the presentation, the outstanding presentation that by made is based on existing plans. In many cases, especially around the bicycle industry and infrastructure area, specifically the 2017 bike walk plan is the kind of the wellspring of much of that part of the of these projects. I just want to remind all of us that that many of the infrastructure needs in our community be desperately needed infrastructure is not included in those plans. You will look you will search those plans in vain for a plan to add sidewalks and bike lanes to cheap growth. You will search in vain to find a plan to improve pedestrian infrastructure on junction road. And those are just two examples within the last several months that we've heard over and over from Durham residents where that we desperately need infrastructure there. I don't know how to square that circle. I understand the need to move forward with what we have on the shelf. I totally get that but I also recognize that as both said at the very beginning these are not shovel ready projects. These are projects that that were created and prioritized on on some very good metrics but at least with respect to the 2017 bike walk plan was explicitly not included. One thing that was not included was racial equity. There isn't an equity analysis but it had to do with the, the, the proximity of the project to low wealth neighborhoods. And in many ways as we know there are correlations there with our low wealth neighborhoods of color but that is a level of analysis we're going to have to add in right quick if we expect to go to the voters with this in November, or later. And so I just want to make sure that as we have these conversations, we remember that not every critical need in the community is included in the plans we've already made, especially with respect to cheek road and junction road. I feel like we need to have some allowance to do that. The final thing I want to say is that as eager as I am to do this in the next election and I hope we can. I want to call back to something that Council Member Middleton reminded us of two weeks ago, which is that in order to make the case to our community about a bond like this, we've got to do a ton of work around engagement and public education. And he's going to be a heavy lift in my view to get there from here. That's not to say we can't do it. That's not to say it's not important do it. It's not to say that that we're, we are unwilling to do that work we are, I know we are. But it's, I just want to make sure that that that we all remember that we've that we can't just call this play and assume that everybody in Durham is going to want to run it with us. We've got to make the case. And, and the fact that there are critical needs that aren't in the current adopted plans. Like cheek road and junction road that makes it harder. But the fact that they're not in the plans is simply a legacy of the, of the of some of the, the inequities that we are trying to address with this bond and so I think that's, we've got to make sure that we try to keep all that in front of us as we move forward. But again, as I said at the beginning both this was a fantastic presentation. Thanks to all the department heads, especially you David for helping us think about this. It's good to have a number. But let's remember that that's not the whole universe of what we need in the community. That's all I had see. Thank you. Thank you. Other comments. I think Javier had her hand up. Good morning. Thank you. So I think, obviously this is the need whether we do a mixture of a bond or increase the, the, the tax allocated to CIP. What is very evident to me is this is, we are woefully behind on offering something like this. So I think we need to think about, especially the trails component, you know that plan was developed in 2011 it's been a decade. It certainly doesn't have a racial equity component. And I know that folks on DOS have discussed that recently, realizing that the priorities there may have may change. So, I know we need to do this, however it needs to be done. You know, I'm curious. I think the county does or is the intent was to do a series of bonds for school improvement infrastructure projects because there is such a deficit. You can't necessarily do it in one run because it's already behind. So I want to understand a little bit more about that. I'm anxious around the timeline if we wanted to put it on the ballot for this November, November, whether the election is delayed or not. There was a lot of community engagement around the affordable housing bond that was very successful. It passed with a large percentage of approval. I worry about will we be able to accomplish that between now and November with everything else we have going on with COVID. I think that's one of my concerns in general. Thank you to all the staff who pulled this together. It's a huge number, but it also at least makes me painfully aware of, you know, that this is absolutely a need. We hear this consistently from residents. I do think that at least a portion of this should be put before residents because there has to be I think a recognition. The things that folks want, you know, have to be paid somehow. And the way we are the only way to do it, or at least the majority of the way to do it is through your property taxes. I understand that the fairness around that as to who carries that burden is not something we can control because of the limitations at the state level, but that is how we fund projects at the end of the day infrastructure at the end of the day and so when residents ask for these things, and I think we should have them, there also has to be a recognition of well, when you ask for things. Who's going to pay for it, and a bond lets people decide, you know, yes I'm willing to pay for it or no I'm not. And so that's why I think at least a portion of this should be put before the voters. Again, I appreciate staff, I look forward to more information. I don't know about the timeline, as far as this November or not that I'm very concerned about that. Thank you. Mark Anthony. Thanks Steve. Thanks colleagues first of all, thank you so much. And David for what I think is a wonderful primer and necessary primer and on ramp for this conversation, it's exhilarating and sobering. It's exhilarating because I think it captures how serious we are as a city about what we need to do in these areas but it's sobering as well. Because of the lifts that are before us I want to I want to thank Council copy error and I want to particularly thank Charlie for I think capturing the concerns and additional caveats that need to govern this conversation and I want to associate myself with the spirit of his comments. A few things I want to say about this I am, I, I think this is something we should do. But I don't, I'm not confident that we're ready to do it this year. And partly, I feel vindicated that feeling by your own caveats that you included. I think that's what you're doing in your report and I just want to highlight. Of course you say that the cost are preliminary but second thing the second bullet is a racial equity analysis would be a critical step in vetting which projects should be prioritized. I would even go further and say a racial equity analysis will be critical and betting which product should even be included period in his bond, before we even get to prioritization. In mixing green considerations and equitable considerations, and you can actually play with it should we put equity before green or green before equity, because it's possible to to put on steroids, some green products in our city that aren't really equitable by virtue of what neighborhood they're in, because an equitable lens is going to require us to look at historically, what communities in this city have been disinvested, abused or even targeted. For example, from a purely equitable lens I think about what happened in hay talk, or or that that corridor which is you know one of the gateways to downtown that Fayetteville street for corridor, the gateway to downtown. I mean we from an equitable equity point of view we can do a bond just for that area. We can make the projects green, but equity I think would demand that we take a look at some areas that we know, whether it's it's Braggtown, Charlie mentioned cheek road and junction road, some areas because of redlining. We know that there are areas that are depressing the city because of historical redlining we can point to history. So from an equitable point of view. There, there are some areas that should immediately be looked at, and we can, we can do green projects and equitable projects whereas there are some areas in the city where yeah we can do some green projects but are those really the areas from an equity point of view that we need to focus on. And it seems to me we can, we're committed as a city to being green we've made commitments to lowering our carbon footprint and doing things doing sustainable progress. We can do that within our existing CIP. We can focus our our efforts and our concerns and our initiatives to be green and sustainable within the existing rubric of our CIP the question is for me. Do we want to take a quarter of a billion dollars and put those projects on steroids right now because we got to get them right now. They're urgent. Do we need to make them super urgent. Or can those things be obtained and can we meet those goals within our existing rubric because what I don't want to happen is we sell this as an equity initiative. We're going to take a quarter of a billion dollar infusion and then default back to business as usual, where we're basically, we basically just supercharged our existing CIP rubric. If we're going to do, are we going to have two lanes one this projects that are funded by this new money, working alongside our CIP, are we going to radically realter or alter our existing CIP. To me with would not be what we're trying to do here if we're going to go hard on the equity piece. Then I think that that we've got to we've got to we need to take some time to identify what is truly meeting our equitable needs. And if we're going to if we're going to try and do a hybrid of green and equity, because for me when I hear equity, you know, and all of us I think on here sat the racial equity training, I immediately default to thinking about what are those areas that have been systemically targeted systemically and institutionally targeted by governments in the past, and we can rattle off those areas in the city. And if we take that approach, radically, that may leave some of these other projects where they are in the existing CIP model in the existing kind of rubric we have for our CIP. I'm not interested really in super charging or putting on steroids stuff that we're already doing or is already on the radar. Unless we determine, you know, we do we really need to do that, if we're already targeting them focused on them. Your other bullet says most projects have not been introduced to the community. I mean, one could assume that if it's in the bike walk plan that that's public record that it's kind of been introduced because people can read it. Are we saying that people haven't even read what we already have introduced and those plans are already on the shelf and consumable. So, so if projects have not been introduced to the community, it's February now it's practically March now. We're talking about our first action in May. We is that given and mayor pro tem I think raise an important point. That's if the schedule doesn't change with elections. Is it really realistic that between now the end of February beginning of March, with our first action pending in May, that that gives us the time to really do the work we need to do to educate to inform to get the buy in. Javier spoke about getting community buy in, I think which is critically important. Because, listen, we did a lot of work on the affordable housing bond but I sat in a bunch of meetings where folk in the community did not feel fully informed about it. We had to work really hard to get buy in, particularly from some some some marginalized communities in the city when you afforded by housing bond, and this is a shorter window between now and our first action to do the education and to do the selling if you will, but I think we need to do on this particular bond so so what I would say is is in, you know, wrapping up that in spirit and principle, I think this is a great idea. But, but I don't want, I don't want to vote to commit the city to a quarter of a billion dollars of debt to default to business as usual. If we're really going to do equity, then this could very well be a revolutionary transformative action we take with this bond to address the injustices of 147, going through hey tie to and you know to address the injustices of redlining in our city. With green and when we do it make sure that those those addressing what we do to address it is green has a green capacity, but I am not interested in in super charging our commitment to green infrastructure that we already have made, particularly if it's going to be in super charging infrastructure in neighborhoods that historically have not dealt with equity, and who are already on the radar to be serviced anyway, if that makes any sense. So, I think this is something we should pursue. I take your caveats very seriously I think we need to lean into them. I don't think we're ready to do it this year. Based upon where I sit right now. Thanks, Mayor. Thank you. Other colleagues, other comments colleagues or questions. Did you just to just a clarifying question. I put it in a chat I was hoping someone just answered the, are we talking about 50 million that David mentioned or different number because I was thinking this is just a $50 million conversation. I think that and say I think that's up to us. Okay, and then I just, I just want to make sure that we're, I appreciate the equity consternation in this conversation but I just want to make sure we know that when we're talking about green, greening our community or reducing our carbon footprint this year feels inequitable in it in and of itself just acknowledging that we've been waiting. The 11 years for a lot more green infrastructure and a few other things. This is not it's I mean, it's not the same thing as the neighborhood by neighborhood plan I get that that makes sense. I don't want to play, but the waiting aspect does cause cause me this. I mean it makes my heart pop a tape just acknowledging that I mean the air we breathe, and the trees we don't have. Those things are not things we can just wait on. And so I just want to make sure that I keep that in the conversation, noting that I'm confident that this council will ensure that the projects are equitable. That this council will work its best to engage the community, wherever I mean with. I'm not I'm not as concerned about the disillusion that you know that this would help everyone, like this is this is not a this is not a bond that would be in place to help just one subsection of the community. I just want to help the entire world for us to spend a little bit right now on this. And then I just want to note also to the point someone made I think it was council member Reese around encouraging the county to support. You know, some structure or putting in place some structure to make sure that we have resources available for for homeowners or property owners who who might, who might be, I know, would be harmed by a tax increase and I think that that fixed income approach. I'm already doing that work and I feel like the county's on board and if I'm missing something please let me know. I do think that there is there's got to be a better education but I don't think it's in Durham, honestly I think it's beyond and making sure that folks understand what is that risk. So I'm just had a lot of thoughts, and I'll continue to have those conversations with you all but I appreciate the conversation as always. Thank you. Pierce. I just had a thanks, Mr Mayor. I just had a really quick question for Bo. Wonderful presentation. Um, after hearing from Charlie and Mark Anthony about, you know, I saw you kind of shaking your head in affirmation of some of the critiques about the race equity lens and, you know, the calls from community which are really calling for some issues around cheek, junction, hay tie. You mentioned that our previous plan or someone did had a socio economic lens and that there's kind of overlap with the race equity piece. But I'm curious from your perspective. I wanted to go back to the drawing board a bit and and really dig deep and say, maybe our last plan didn't include all the metrics we wanted. Let's do a new one. How much would that cost and how soon could you provide that. Thank you, Council Member. So, you know, I probably want to bring Sean Egan into that conversation. I think, you know, there is probably an opportunity to work with the tools and analysis that took place within those, within those plans and to augment that with, you know, with kind of current thinking and updated thinking so not necessarily, you know, redoing the whole plan. I think there was a great deal of good thought that went into the development of the bike walk plan in 2017. I'm sure the department with assistance from, you know, from other departments in the city could apply a filter or a lens to the projects or their prioritization within that to try and reflect I think some of our more current thinking on equity and how we deliver projects and Sean, if you want to add to that or if I've over committed you, let me know your thoughts on that. I think it's a great concept. We had a very good meeting earlier this week with Mayor Schuyl and Bloomberg Philanthropies and Genetside.com, the former transportation commissioner for New York City. And we talked about the success that we've had with shared streets and working with neighborhood communities and our approach to equitable community engagement and working through and applying a different filter. I think could be a really promising project for us to collaborate with Bloomberg as part of the mayor's challenge to help us and use the resources like having Genetside.com and the expertise that Bloomberg has partnering with them and our partners at the Duke Center for Advanced Hindsight and really thinking and taking a look at how we can apply that type of equity filter to these projects. I expect that there's going to be considerable overlap, but I think it could be really valuable for our community to validate that with some research and analysis and applying that filter. Yeah, thank you, Sean. I really like that idea. I imagine there will be overlap too, but it would certainly strengthen our capacity to go out into the community and make the requisite arguments that will be important to get folks on board. I love that Center for Advanced Hindsight. I wrote that down. That seems like a really dope concept. Would this new lens include bringing projects on that aren't currently in the plan or would that just be kind of reorganizing what's already in there? I think we'd want to apply it first to the priorities that were identified in the 2017 plan and then look at what perhaps might fall out and then what was next up on the list that just missed the cut in the 2017 plan and maybe some of those projects could be accelerated as part of the review and reprioritization. There's no shortage of meat. Yeah, I guess that's a really important piece that I think both what I took from Charlie and Mark Anthony's comments was that perhaps our previous plan, especially with the business as usual piece, was missing some critical elements to reevaluate. So when I hear business as usual, you know, shuffling and remixing what's already in a plan that was inequitable perhaps to begin with because of some blind spots that went into it would be a really, really important rather than just yeah, kind of moving around the pieces that are already in there. And I mean, I'm CC'd on the emails you get about Junction Road every two weeks. I know you know, you know, community members have been making calls for these. And these are going to be the same community members we have to go back to and ask for, you know, for a quarter billion. So I think I would encourage as you do that reanalysis and place that lens for it to really be a back to the drawing board and not not a, you know, remix effort of what of what's currently in there just because we've already made that investment. That's why I was asking how much money it will cost and how long it would take because I know that that that might be a heavier lift. And I know, you know, anyway, those are my comments. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for the comments questions at this point. Mark Anthony. Thank you, Steve. And I want to thank Assistant DeGiorna for her comments and I want to I want to associate myself with her comments I believe this council as well. It's committed to equity. I, you know, my work on a council now is, is, I think more about my life as a private citizen than being a person in power. And I'm trying to craft do my best to craft the city now that I want to live in. More so because I'll be a private citizen far longer than I'll be on council. And if I weren't the individuals on this council. I am confident. I'd sleep well with having this city run and equity being championed by folk on this council so so I want to lean into that and associate myself with that. But the issue is those that we have a record that there's there's a clear record in our city. And I again want to just underscore something, you know, Charlie said about there are some things that aren't even on this list. Right now we're talking about a quarter of a billion dollars. And I think if we use the word equitable in the title, then we are inviting a certain level of scrutiny. If we're going to, if we're going to use equity, then we should be prepared for some hard questions and hard conversations. You know, as I move about the city and you probably share the same experience colleagues. You know, green isn't really controversial when I when I have conversations with folk. I haven't heard anybody said that they don't want, you know, to try solar and reduce our carbon footprint. No one pushes back on that. How did we get the equitable has been the challenge when we've had that conversation. For example, we, you know, we light rail was supposed to connect a tie physically back to the the ancestors and descendants of of of hay tie back to economic opportunity. We didn't get light rail. We did however past tree protection and expansion. So, so we got that. You know, we didn't have a problem, you know, buying electric buses and things of that nature, but we still have neighborhoods in our city that are in disrepair we still have seniors that have to run an obstacle course to stand at bus stops in our city. And so, so, you know, we, we committed ourselves to reducing our carbon footprint, but our shared economic prosperity plan is still kind of in its burgeoning stages. So, so we've scored and done great work on the green space. It's been the equitable space that we've had a problem seeing some some some real numbers and let me be clear. Before the city in the country I'd rather be doing it and we're living in the terms of our strides but when we get granular. And then when we add a quarter of a billion dollars to the conversation and start looking at actual, you know, scoring. We're doing better in our green space than we are in our equity space, and we're doing good in our equity space our racial equity, you know, task was put together a great report. And I'm not I don't want to any ways just we're not doing the but relatively speaking, you know, we're making strides our tree canopies being restored we're going to make sure we do that we're going to have trees. We're going to have electric buses and Durham, but but the the corridor Fable Street corridor, cheek road junction road of all these other areas that that we've been talking about for decades in our city are still wanting. We're going to raise a quarter of a billion dollars and stick equity on the title, then that's going to require us to lean in and have some hard conversations and set some hard standards. I just don't know if between February and May is enough time to do it, particularly thinking about the list we had to go through with the affordable housing bomb, all the work we did with light rail. Didn't it didn't happen. I believe in this council I just believe that the clock for doing the work that is necessary to requisite work and positioning this in a way that our citizens our residents will embrace it and can fully embrace it and not with knowledge and comfort. So I just think that's a short runway between now in May, but I have full confidence in this council that they will look out for for equity. Moving forward, so I just I just wanted to add that conversation thanks to you. Thank you very much. Other comments colleagues, Adriana. Thank you. I really I just wanted to know I appreciate that Councilman Middleton. And I think that this is, this is why it's, it's the conversation we're having right now. And I think we'll continue to have it because at every stage of our, or every meeting that we have where in the planning case, these are the things that are going to continue to come up. And so I'm mindful of that at all times, and I think that the, the, the speed is definitely always a, you know, point of contention and acknowledging that who gets left out of the conversation is often people who are not directly involved or in an often mostly impacted. And I do hold that tension, but I do think that that the work that's been happening around equitable engagement has been fast and furious and hasn't stopped since last year. And with the, you know, the transit work that's still happening. There are a lot more people engaged and even more prepared to respond than they were two years ago. I'm very grateful to our community engagement team with Linda with the neighborhood improvement services for the work that they've done over the last few years to get that up and running and engaging folks consistently ongoing and so when, when our department, I'm sorry, the director of the Department of Transportation, each son, Sean Egan says, you know, that the slow streets program is working and they're actually being nationally recognized. I think that that's the reason why and so I just wanted to amend my confidence in the and the council to also just confidence in how the staff has also been moving and just acknowledging that a lot has a lot of transformation is happening. And I wholeheartedly support, creating a very transformative, equitable green bond in any way shape or form, whether it's this year or next year, but I do know that it has to happen. And I think Council Member Caballero mentioned in tandem I think Council Member Reese mentioned in tandem. I do know that this year, considering the projects that we do have in the pipeline, either we're going to we're going to end up increasing that you know that 11% to 11 cents to something else this year, or we're going to do a bond this year because the projects are just going to continue to back up. There's not enough money in that there's not enough money there for the projects that need to happen. And that's not to say the, the, I mean the plan projects, that's just on staff, you know, we know we have to do maintenance and repairs we know why we're doing maintenance and repairs that we could actually be putting in, in place the green infrastructure, which might be solar, or would have you and so I just want to make sure that we don't, we don't try to push it all to next year. So some one way or the other we've got to do something this year that actually will help alleviate this pressure because we just keep pushing it back. I'm not for certain but I'm going to assume that not a lot of projects got done. Thank you very much. Any other comments colleagues. I just want to know what staff needs to hear from us. Because we've all said a lot and I want to make sure that we're giving them what they need to move forward. Staff wanted to have this discussion with city council. We will be looking at for at some point for you mayor and council to give us, you know, the direction to proceed or not proceed with additional work toward toward a bond. You know, if we're talking about adding money to the CIP and what kinds of, you know, projects that we may be able to change the order of or even change the priority of, you know that that discussion is more ongoing that we can complete as we talked about in the first, you know, the first presentation, you know, we that that that's more tax increase discussions that we can make more holistically when we've looked at everything that we want to bring into focus for this for this year. But if we're going to, if this council is serious about doing a bond in November or whenever the election happens, then there are some refinements of the projects, you know, getting getting those things in place in order to do that. So that is the direction that we need. We don't need it today, we'll need right this moment, but we need it. And you need it soon. So let me just make some comments. Thank you very much, Madam manager. The one one question that I think would be important to know. I think if the election date is pushed back that statewide a lot of people who have already been looking towards what they consider necessary bond referendum in November are going to want to have them. And the election, the municipal election that might replace the November election. So I think that there will be and I've already heard a little bit about this from a couple of other mayors through the Metro mayors that there may be considerable interest in having the possibility of bond referendum in. For example, we don't know this but if the municipal election was pushed back until May and July say that there would be a lot of interest in the possibility of having municipal referendum then so I think that's one thing I'm interested in and I wonder if our city attorney or bond counsel or whoever is appropriate. I kind of do a little work on that. Yeah, Charlie put the question in the in the chat that I don't know the answer to that question but that would be something I was curious about an interested in. I think everybody's raised some really important questions and I am, I'm contemplating the timing and very appreciative of everything that everyone has said I think it's some some hard questions. The, if we are able to do this next year and you know mid year or something to me that changes the timing question a lot I think it gives us more it does give us more of a runway. And I think that more of a runway is really going to be helpful. I will also say that we going into the housing bond. We are much better prepared at this point no question. We had a lot more. You know, the projects had been so much, you know, so much. There was just so much community preparation. By the time we really started revving up for the housing and the projects were very well defined. And so I do agree that it will be challenging to see what would happen if we're going to do that this November. I also hear the urgency and feel the urgency around the climate. And around our quality of life. And around the equity that we can create through this bond. And so I'm very, I'm just saying to you all that I'm thinking about it as I know you all are. On the, you know, one of the one potential way to go you know so one of the things before we had the housing bond we had the penny for housing. Then we had the two pennies for housing. And then we felt when we, we were ready for the bond when we had big projects. When when the housing authority was ready with big projects and we had other big projects that wanted to do. We put the bond on top of that. And so I think that's something we can also be thoughtful about now and I thought I thought what David presented us with was really interesting about an important about the, you know that a petty for the bond will give you $50 million over over the life of the bond. It'll give you 100 million dollars over 10 years. And so I think that, you know, and when I look at these projects. The other thing about them that is striking to me and I'm, you know, I'm, I'm reflecting here on, you can tell, I don't know. But one of the things about them is that they're not a lot of them that are really huge so that they do seem like things that are fundable through, you know, a penny, you know, adding penny to the, to the debt, you know, or some amount to the debt. Without a bond, because you're, you don't get it as fast, but you get more money over time, and you get it at a rate, and you get it for projects that aren't real big. But then there are some that are potentially there's the potential Murph there's the potential organics recycling facility that do seem more susceptible to the need for bond funding. And so, it seems like, you know, thinking ahead and Javier and, and Deidre Anna both mentioned this I think others as well maybe some combination of these things seems important. I'm not really sure about the timing, and I'm not really sure about how to get more guidance about the timing I think that that would be the issue for me is. I'll throw this to you. Is there anything that you think that you all could add to our thinking in the near future that would help us with the timing. If we were to go the bond route. Again, I'm thinking off the cuff here, you know, I think, certainly, we could take a look at the universal projects that we discussed this morning. And, and do a sifting based on which ones are a little bit more shovel ready or a little bit farther along in their development. And that that could inform a discussion of timing I think the city attorney mentioned in the chat that that she'll be coming back with some guidance on the shifting of the referendum to date and whether or not that has an impact so I think that feedback might be useful as And then, you know, I think beyond that I think as the city manager and tones I think hearing a little bit more from the city council about your priorities and you know which amongst this very large universe of projects really I think those three things would would help us inform a discussion of timing. Obviously, as you indicated, and some of your colleagues, a decision to put more resources or a tax increase to the CIP is a less less fraught conversation, I think that would put the onus on us to determine if the projects would would be able to kind of be accelerated and move to the front because that that funding would would certainly come the soonest if that were a decision that the council were to make, you know that that that funding and therefore the project funded by those by that funding, you would need to be accelerated so again I'm rambling a little bit mayor but I think those are my thoughts to your question. Yeah, well that's helpful. I think one more comment that I'll get to you. Just one other thing I wanted to say which is, I worry a lot. When we talk about the most recent controversy that's come to us from a loud voice. You know, one of the real vert, you know, like cheek rotor. Those are important, for sure. But the, I think the point of having the equity analysis is that you're not just hearing the loud voices. And you know that the really great thing about that I love about our, you know, our government here in Durham is that our staff really doesn't let the politics that we hear leak over into the analysis that they do so for I know that, you know, on the on the on the bike pad plan I know there are lots of other neighborhoods that would love to be on that bike pad plan, and you know, would love to lobby for that. And I think that, you know, the beauty of, of what are, you know, that we that we empower our staff to do their work, kind of free of those politics, not free of our policies, in the sense that we need a race equity analysis, but free of the politics of the loud voices that come to us is just something I hope will will really keep in mind. So, Charlie, I just wanted to drop a quick note of caution about the possibility that our municipal election will move to next year. Just so folks are aware this is a proposal was made by the director of the state board of elections. In the last several days, there was a house committee on elections had a had a hearing yesterday. I don't know if you call it a hearing anyway she the director made a presentation at the, at the House elections committee. And much to my dismay I sat in and listened to it. Unfortunately, it wasn't until 45 minutes into the presentation that she even started talking about the local elections issue. And the questions after her presentation had to do with the 2020 elections, not the 2021 elections, which I understand that was controversial and people need to make their political points they want to make about it and that's fine but the caution I'd want to want to leave you with is that only one Republican House member addressed the issue of the 2021 municipal election directly. I don't know what county was from but his, his perspective, Brunswick Brunswick, thank you Brunswick County that's right. And, and his perspective seem to suggest that there might be support to move local elections where they have to move them, because obviously they have to for those for those elections that are run with in limited words or districts that are elected solely from those districts, but that for other other types of elections there may not be as much support for that. And I think, unfortunately, Republican displeasure at the State Board of Elections about stuff that happened last year may carry over into their decision about how they weigh the arguments that she's making, the other issue are our issue. And so I don't have any real forecast on that except to say that the one person who spoke seemed to be skeptical of moving elections like Durham's. So that's something I don't I don't want us all to assume that because this was in the press this week that that it was going to move. So, that's all I wanted to add. I agree wholeheartedly with that. I think we we don't know yet for sure and it's a lot to very uncertain at this point. Mark Anthony. Thank you, Steve I appreciate it and this has been a great conversation I really I feel in a better position to to engage this in green and green and equitable infrastructure bond, a little more, a little more steady after this conversation, I do. And I appreciate your points do I appreciate your point about the staff not, you know, insulating themselves in politics, I do. Some people are loud because they haven't been hurt for for a long time, and oftentimes, you know, oppressed people have had to raise their voices, sometimes and, you know, speaking softly sometimes as a luxury of having, you know, you get what you want all the time so you don't have to yell. And I know that the staff is in tune with equity. And oftentimes, and you know this every year you're you're you're you're one of our chief champions of this but the reason why we have to bring a racial equity lens to the stuff we've done is because some of the stuff has been baked into the discussion, historically. So I certainly agree that you know we the finger in the wind technique should not be practiced by our staff and our staff brings, you know, the utmost professionalism to their work. But, you know, for, for a lot of folks that we're kind of by inertia the system has already been cooked in a way where you don't have to push some buttons or raise some voices because it's already going to work that way. So to, you know, some of us get loud sometimes. But, but it's because, you know, when you haven't been heard for so long sometimes you raise your voice, but but I do want to affirm the importance of our staff working environment that's free from, you know, political considerations or finger in the wind but I do also want to acknowledge the folks who might be watching and listening, we understand why you get loud sometime, and while we've had to lift every voice sometimes and make some noise from time to time but I do appreciate the admonition. Thank you, Steve. Thank you point taken colleagues, do we think we have done it for now not that we know exactly what we've done. Sometimes we do better and offering solid direction. Bo, let me try this and then I'll see if my colleagues think that this is a reasonable way to move. We now we are in February the 25th and the date that David told told us we would need to be there. Begin action would be May the third. But let's let me let me just offer this colleagues and, and as a tentative way to proceed this is not something that I have strong advocacy for but I want to try to help us shape something for the staff. How about we ask the administration to formulate a 50 50 million dollar potential bond that we asked them to bring back to us in a month. The shape of this bond this potential bond, and what would be necessary from a race equity standpoint for us to be able to successfully, you know, that the projects or to let us know that they feel like they are already previously successfully embedded in that way. And that, you know, I say a month wouldn't have to be a month could be a little longer could be six weeks I guess but something in that time period, and that we have a little bit more to look at that has more of a shape. And what we what we have now is the catalog of the, the, you know, we have it we have a giant, a giant menu, but it isn't we it hasn't really been shaped. And just to think about that a little bit more I just did some quick additional the current CIP and I added something like my math just was rough maybe $270 million in the current CIP for the next 10 years not not all that's general fund spending of course but I would just offer that as a way to potential way to proceed and see the manager is here and either from Wanda or bow anyone that would like to comment. So, and you're probably going to have some more discussion and both please jump in as well. Putting a number is one thing, you know, $50 million in a bucket. You know, we've had a lot of discussion here about, you know, different opinions about, you know, priorities and topics and whether it is, you know, things that are already in our plans or things that have never been conceived of. So we can take the 50. We can take the 50 million but we would need a little more guidance on where you want us to focus that 50 million from from just what I just said. So here's my thought on that. And I think you mean I think you let me let me ask, you mean categories. Yes. Okay, so my thought on that is that this might be an opportunity for the council to employ the head waiting that I advocated last time which all my other colleagues rejected. But I am thinking that in this case, it might be more. Maybe it would gain more acceptance because we're not talking about doing individual analysis of individual of individual proposals but we'll be, but what but we would be prioritizing categories of the future. So that's one thought I have as a way to proceed but I'm open to others and would love any suggestion that you staff have for anything from the council. But do you have anything you have any thoughts on that. Mayor your comments echoed sort of thoughts I was having that you know the working with BMS staff budget staff who I know have been very thoughtful in the past about working with council on prioritization tools. I would propose a quick exercise that if if your colleagues on the council are amenable to could at least give us a very rough cut thought on some of what we presented that you know I think I might suggest at least my early thinking would be to keep those categories at a very level to get some high level feedback between the more infrastructure oriented side of this kind of that first half the presentation the sidewalks the trails, the access pedestrian access, being one large category with a few maybe larger subcategories and then the focus on sustainability and some of those projects being a second category with some subcategories. If council were willing to participate in an exercise like that I'd be happy to work with the manager and the budget staff as well as the team who helped develop these projects and try and think through what an exercise might look like. I think that would be great colleagues, can I see some thumbs do you like that idea. Okay, I think we got thumbs. Okay, would I think that would that would help Charlie. I'm glad that that exercise will be useful, whether we decide to go forward with a bond this year, whether we decide to create a longer community engagement process that puts a bond on the ballot in 2022. Our time boost our borrowing capacity using the tax rate this year to help fund selection of projects from the from the buckets that ranked highest in this exercise or I think it's useful, no matter which way we go and I appreciate the staff being ready to do that workforce. Thank you. Agreed. All right. Have you all got what you need. We have a start. We appreciate you. Sometimes, this is the way big things start. It's not always neat. It's often a lot of ideas on the table and that's what we've got. And that's really what these retreats are for I think, where we can have these kinds of free ranging discussions that are outside of our normal council meetings where we're, you know, going through one contract after the next. So I appreciate my colleagues and all they brought to it. And I will just say that we've got a lot of more thinking to do. So thank you. Thank you, Bo. Thank you, David. Much appreciated great presentation. Thank you, Bertha. Yes. So we were scheduled for a break until 1145 so I need to know if you all need an additional five minutes to get the full break. What time would you like to come back. Okay, with us taking a break. Do you think we're on schedule so are you good with that. I am. I am. All right. How about we come back in 10 minutes at 1145. Great. Thank you. Thank you. Colleagues 1145. We'll see you 10 minutes. Just a reminder to staff that if you stay in the zoom room. We are still on a live feed to you too. So please, please be cognizant of that and you yourselves. Thank you. All right friends we're at 1145. And I think we're ready for our. Our next part of the agenda before we do that though the clerk has asked me and I agree with her. Colleagues at the end of this agenda if we could stay for five minutes to try to set the close session time that we have upcoming I would I would appreciate that. Okay, Bertha. It's all yours. Good afternoon again Bertha Johnson director of budget management services. I want to also add my thanks to Bo and David and john and the departments for the presentation that you just had before the break. We just started having those discussions really on Friday and they were able to pull together an awesome presentation so I want to thank them for their hard work and Bo's leadership with the presentation with his department directors. So the next item on our agenda is city council request. And this is an opportunity for us to we have a presentation. And we also want to get any additional feedback from you all today and any follow up that needs to happen before we discuss the request again on March 1 and again as we finalize the budget development guidelines. On the background we started this process. Last year for obvious reasons we weren't able to fully implement. In November we asked city council members to submit their budget request to us by December 31. We received 11 budget requests totaling over $2 million from city council members at our last discussion on February 4 city council selected the school court rank ranking methodology to use for vetting projects. We also agreed in addition to the staff, developing a team to vet the project using the scorecard ranking that city council members would also score the projects individually and share those scores with us and you'll see those later in the presentation. So just a reminder of the scorecard ranking. So what I want to point out here is the criteria and we use to score the projects, but also keeping in mind that the, the projects that would score the highest or rank the highest would be transformative would serve the entire population will be available, and the administrative impact would be minimal and those would be the parties that would score the highest in this process. So here is a look at the staff scorecard rating. So just to be transparent about the team. I would like to thank you all that we would be appointing an internal team to work together to, to score the projects. We had the budget analyst from the budget team, as well as Robin Baker from our PB staff. And from OPI we had Aaron Parrish who serves on the citywide race equity team, as well as Shannon Delaney from the OPI team. There was a cross section of folks working on it from different perspectives in terms of looking at the dollars but also really focusing on, on equity. So here is how the projects were scored just to share with you how each project was scored. So, just for example if you look at the basketball saves lives you can see it was selected by the staff to be transformative, served a subset of the population, it did advance equity, it aligned with the strategic plan objective, it required recurring funding I believe over two years, and that it would be a new process would have to be implemented to implement the program at the city. So that's an example. So here's the overall ranking, according to the staff ranking. You can see the deer program was number one immigrant legal defense fund number two, so on and so on and you see the dollar amounts associated with those. Again, a higher score would go to a project that had was one time funding versus recurring and several of these required recurring funding, not necessarily long time, long term but at least two years. So here are the positions, obviously, that would be the even longer term funding. So here is the overall ranking council scoring. This is my first time seeing the scoring, this was just finished this morning. So you can look at this as it compares to and john you can flip back and you can see deer was number one, for example, according to the council scores and also number one on the staff scoring. Obviously, you did not have this presentation before today, because we just finalized it this morning. But because there are only 10 projects on the list. It's pretty easy to see how they align with the internal scoring as well as the council scoring. And just as a reminder at the February 4 agenda item included a summary of all the projects as well as staff analysis with additional information that you could use as many you probably did to make your scoring decisions. So any questions before I move on a question on the on the staff ranking for city council salary equity. What new process would be required. That's a very good question begin we struggled with that. John Laura assistant budget director, because on the one hand you say well you're just you're just an employee you're just going from from part time to full time. On the other hand, what we struggled with was finding comparative analysis about what other councils are are giving full time staff who are in a counselor or a administrative position such as a as a council. And that was the new process was that it would need to be some sort of evaluation of what would be how you benchmark it with how other people pay full time councils. Okay, thank you. And I think the other part of that was how do you move forward with that would you continue to do increases each year what would you tie that increase to the salary. Would it be performance would it be merit based would it be population would it be growth would it be. So what process was being placed to keep those pay increases moving forward. I had so I'm just going to share that on some of these. And I'll say this was around the language access coordinator specifically. So in some of these cases what I did not see in the formula which I'm just curious about is. So in some cases I think there's duplication. Right, so some of the components that is not a question that's asked is this duplicative of other work the other departments are doing. I think that we have identified another question I had, you know, if you're asking for what the language access coordinator it was a new process and a new staff, I think on the, on the staff scoring and my scoring it was just new staff, because we're supposed to have a language access plan that the person wouldn't in theory be implementing so I didn't understand how that was a new process on the staff side, and then further there's no place to say, what is this a need in the long term that hasn't been met. When I think about a language access coordinator the city of Greensboro has had one for 10 years. And that could be applied for other places I'm just using this one. So there's not anywhere in the in the formula itself to think about that to think about the the need in the organization as a whole because there's that is not there, even though it should be. I remember this just I'm just naming some of the places that I struggled with. I incorrectly did a couple of, because I thought the deer funding may end up being recurring, like even if the amount is lessened. So I did not do that one as in one time and same with El Centro I thought that was recurring and that was my miss so I think those would have ended up higher although both of them, I think dear ended up my number one anyway. But I just wanted to say that to my to my colleagues that in some of those I ended up doing them reoccurring when they actually aren't at least based on what's being shared today. And so they would have moved up or down based on that. So I want to point out a few respond to a few of your your questions and comments. So the analysis that we share with you as part of the agenda item had all of that information in it. It had whether it's recurring or not. It also answered asked answered questions around. For example the basketball saves lives, it went out to parks and recreation they were provided information back in terms of what you know how they would move forward with that if they were given additional funding. So that was part of the analysis. And then so it's not part of the ranking but it was part of the analysis and then I would also say that when we talked about the scorecard we went through it and we asked, you know, if there were other things that you all wanted to add in terms of the story and obviously we can't add everything so you have to keep it to a manageable number of criterion, but that information was part of the analysis and I'm happy to reshare that Lindsay can send that out as a matter of fact she sent it to me this morning. She can go ahead and send out to you all that has that analysis that you saw it was back and back on February 4, but it did have a lot of that information. I appreciate that I use that analysis and part of my ranking specifically around where else does this live and so is there are there other departments even though it wasn't directly asked, you know, are there other departments who do this work who could expand their work and so does it need to be dedicated funding in this way. Yes, I had a couple of. So, could I ask you all to go ahead and email this to us now. Yes, absolutely. So we can look at our, we can look at all the slides, you know, and then the just a couple of considerations that were in my mind. I did not write rate the stipends for the boards and committees or the grant funding for the boards and committees high, although I support them. But I didn't write them have, but they're also inexpensive. And I think that's another thing that's that's is a consideration for me is what are things that we want to do that we can fit into our budget that will move us along. So, and then there are certain things, for example, in the, we are the ones that you know the staff had indicated that, you know, and wreck previously. And I can't remember. I maybe was in this, you know that there are certain parts of this that they would be supportive of funding, and you know that's that seemed like good guidance to me. So, all of this is just to say, you know, I don't think the impact of having grants for boards and commissions is very high. I don't think I'm going to comment on these other things, but I also think that the cost is very low, or relatively. So I just wanted to put that out there as well. I would just in budget. That's something we struggle with all the time. Sometimes aspirational things cost a lot of money and sometimes things that are not really big priorities. I think a heavy lift and just remind everybody it was a council member who said this a number of years ago I forget who that these kind of tools are, are just that they're tools to help make decisions but they're not the decision making itself. Yeah. Thank you john. All right, colleagues. Other questions and comments I can't see all of you all, but I'm happy to just, you know, pitch in here. Now I can see. Jump in. Sure. Thank you. Sorry I was hiding because I'm eating a snack. So just in terms, I mean in terms of the making of the decisions, what process are we using at this point, like I think it would be helpful to get a sense of which proposals that a majority of the board wants to move forward. Those can be included with the big package of all of the administrative ask that the staff wants to move forward when we come back and look at all of the proposals together. But I so I'm just wondering what like what is the what is the thing that we have to do now so that the next thing can happen. So to john's point, you all agreed that you wanted this to be information to use in decision making. We talked about, and I think we had it. Maybe we skipped it in presentation we talked about, you know this very thing whether you all wanted to say, we want to choose, you know the items the top five ranked items. We want to set aside a dollar amount for council budget request. That is what you all need to decide. Once you make that decision, we will finalize that list and share it back out with you all. And then that that is what we will include in the budget development guidelines that projects ranked one through five will be included in the budget, or a second item will be included in the budget to, to support city council request, which means you also don't have to necessarily use those dollars the way they're ranked in this presentation you could set aside a dollar amount and say item to, you know, it right. But we really think this other item is an item we we rather move forward at this time so it's up to you all to make that decision we just need to know how you want us to move forward. Okay, so we should do that now. Yes, yes. Okay. So, Steve, I don't know how you want us to do that. I'll give you some thoughts. Did you all send us the email yet Bertha with the with someone let us know if they sit out the, the presentation. I haven't received it yet. The reason I'm asking is I think that way we could look at be sent to you but now I'm not. That's way. Okay, thank you john. Yeah, I'm just thinking that that way we'll have it up, we can put it up on our iPads and, you know, our on our computers and be able to look at those things and have a discussion at the same time. So, I would offer one other suggestion. Since you're waiting for that presentation was scheduled to go the one o'clock if you all want to take a few minutes and look at that. So that you're not trying to do it, you know, in real time if you want to take a few minutes and look at the presentation. That's a great suggestion. While we're waiting for that email to arrive. It hasn't hit my box yet but I am going to take this opportunity then to have another quick discussion with council. We had, we're trying to schedule a closed session on a personnel matter. As you all know, we were, we're hoping to have it on March the fourth, and everyone could do it 11 o'clock but several people could not stay until can only have to leave it 1145. So I wonder if I can ask you all now to check your calendars and see if possibly that you could begin the meeting at either 10 or 1030 on March the fourth. Could you all just do that right now and let me. Mr. Mayor, I have a meeting at 10am but I can move it if it works for everyone else. Okay, thank you. Other colleagues. Mr. Mayor, I'm trying to make it so that we at least get an hour together. Mayor, I can't believe we will need longer than 45 minutes on that topic. I just, I don't, I don't see it. Okay. But if you want to meet at 1030 that works for me. Okay, 1030 as well. Let's see if Deidreana can and Pierce pierces a thumbs up. Deidreana, I know you have tight schedule are you could you meet it. You got a thumbs up. Okay. We'll, how about this. We'll, we'll meet at 10. Yeah, so we'll meet at 1030 Mark Anthony. I guess you're the big question mark. Do you think that would work for you. I make 1030 work. I may be shuffling about and won't be on camera, but I'll make it work. You might need to do that. Great. Colleagues, thank you. Madam clerk. Can you advertise that meeting for 1030 on March the fourth. Yes, Mr. Mayor. I'd be happy to. Thank you. Thank you so much. All right. Thanks. Thank you. Colleagues, thank you. Madam clerk. Can you advertise that meeting for 1030 on March the fourth. Yes, Mr. Mayor. I'd be happy to thank you. Thank you so much. All right. Thanks colleagues. I thought the birth I had a great suggestion. We've now received the email from Lindsey. Would you like to take a 10 minute break to look at these and give it some. Thoughtful consideration. And we could come back at 1215. And discuss it. How does that sound? Everybody good with it? Okay. We're going to take birth as thoughts. We're going to, we're going to give this some consideration. You have a. An email from, from Lindsey Beno in your, in your inbox now. See you all in 10 minutes at 1215. All right. Thank you, everyone. Bertha, thank you for that suggestion. I think that was really helpful. Lisa was to me. I'm going to make a suggestion and answer to Jillian's question about how to proceed and see if you all like the suggestion. We have. We have a number of proposals that we had. And I'm going to suggest that we had four. Of the proposals that ranked. Highest amongst both groups. There was. The deer program ranked first. Amongst both groups. The staff rated the legal defense fund and we are the ones funds. We are the ones and legal defense funds, second and third. And the El Centro funding was, was ranked fourth by each. I would say that those four proposals where staff and. Council were in. The. Total agreement. One thought I have is that we could advance those four. And the other one is that we support. They are the council's first, second, third and fourth choices. The second and the total cost of those just to. I would be a 462,000 plus whatever portion of the, we are the ones fund that we wanted to fund and staff had some recommendations on that. That's my first recommendation would be to advance those four proposals. This, this, the groups that the ones that had the second highest average between staff and council. Where the community resiliency fund and the stipends for the boards and commissions. We could discuss those. Of course, as well. So, and we can discuss any of them. But let me just start with those first four. And. See if there is. If we can come to agreement on that, if anyone has any thoughts on, on how to proceed other than what I'm suggesting. Vietta. Thank you. I would just like to have some clarification from staff because in the council's part is 250,000. But within the staff analysis, it was less for the, it was less for the staff. I think it was less for the ones fund. And I know that they have also applied to PV. So just want to have. Some conversation on the amount. I think that that's right. As far as the top four, I just want to understand the money. So I will ask. I believe Lindsay and Robin are both on questions about the dollars. It was also, I think they broke it out in the attachment we sent today. I'm sure you didn't have, you know, but I'm not sure if that's right. I'm not sure that. So I asked Lindsay to come on and, and respond to that question. Everyone. I'm Lindsay peanut budget analyst. The amount that's in the analysis. And that's on this table is that 250,000. And that was the total amount requested by where the ones. For the city. And so we did, we. Included that total amount. Obviously with the understanding that council could choose to fund different components. Depending on what year of thoughts on, we're on doing so. And so that's the analysis dives deeper into what those different components are and sort of creates like a. Laundry list of possibilities. Lindsay, you recommended funding certain aspect of that. Can you speak to that? Yes. So we recommended funding the. We're the ones ambassadors. We're the ones ambassadors. We're the ones ambassadors. We're the ones ambassadors. We're the ones ambassadors. Primarily because it seemed like those were the first, that was one of the primary steps in the. Process for. Information gathering for future projects. It also appeared that some of the other components were a little bit less developed in terms of how much funding would actually be needed. For example, the. The mutual aid centers. It was unclear whether or not. We were the ones ambassadors. We were the ones ambassadors. We were the ones ambassadors. We were the ones ambassadors. We were the ones ambassadors. And so we wanted to be determined. I believe in Q3. And so it seemed like the timing worked best. To begin funding. We are the ones ambassadors. Do the information gathering and see what sort of projects would come from that. And then potentially if council wanted to fund those projects in the future have. We are the ones. Come, come back and. Give more detail around those projects. Okay. And I think that's a good point. I think that's a good point. But the. I think that's a good point. The data of the aid centers. And Lindsey confirmed that Durham County has not committed funding to this. Is that correct? That's. As far as I know, that's correct. Yes. I wonder if we know. I wonder if Pierce knows any more about Durham County's interest at this point. Do you know? No, I'm not sure. Okay. The. three here 24 page numbers are a little funky we're the ones fellows ambassadors total request 187 our third of that would be $62,400 is that what you all are recommending as the first step Lindsay yes that is okay um okay and then there was a comment or question about the PB and I think bertha you said that robin was here and maybe could answer some questions about that about the are they applying to PB is that is that the question for the micro grants yes i'm here Andrew Holland budge an engagement manager we actually had two interest meetings for nonprofits over the past couple of weeks and the grant application actually opened about a week and a half ago so there's still time for nonprofits to apply they have a month so the deadline is march 17th to apply but we will be sure to follow up with the nonprofit and just to see if there's some interest for them to apply and i also believe robin has been communicating with them about their interests or their communication with Durham County yes sorry robin baker with participatory budgeting and the budget and management services department and so based upon the last correspondence that we had with that we are the ones um representatives they were in the process of working with county staff to get on the commissioners agendas they were waiting on the December appointment of the new commissioners and that is the latest information that we have two weeks ago thank you robin and Andrew okay um colleagues i guess then i will modify my proposal a little bit to say that we support the uh the the 62 000 is an initial investment in the we are the ones for the ambassadors that we and we support that and the other top three uh that we begin this way beginning with deer the legal defense fund and um and the alcentra funding as the top four items and very happy to entertain any discussion that you have i'm sorry how veer did you i was just letting you know that charlie's had his hand up for a little bit charlie sorry it's okay thanks steve um so with respect to the um ambass the we are the ones ambassadors um it looks like the the in the presentation which by the way lindsay you did a fantastic job on this analysis and the um and the uh scorecard uh ranking so thank you for putting all that together that did not look easy um and i know on the on the the budget request analysis i can't imagine what it's like for a staff person to go through and vet requests from the elected officials um who ultimately you work for um and uh that is uh that was awesome so thank you for that guidance and help um we appreciate that and you forgot to add that we're super mean yeah we're we're horrible we're horrible people so um uh the i guess my confusion about that if we is that we don't without a commitment from the county on their portion first of all it's difficult to understand it's difficult to see how we can commit to our third of that number one but number two was my understanding the staff recommendation was actually to to ask um the we the cypress fund slash spirit house to use the philanthropic funds they've already raised for the um for the administrator and programming costs for the for the centers um for the mutual aid centers and for us to then pay for the fund the ambassadors so i guess i'm i'm a little bit confused about what what that recommendation means i heard uh i heard staff say in response to your question steve that the staff recommendation was 62 7 uh for the ambassadors but it's 62 4 but it seems like if i read that recommendation correctly it isn't the staff request actually for 187 200 for up for the city to pay for the ambassadors and for the for the non-profit to pay for the uh mutual aid work um and administration that's not the way i read it but let's hear from uh maybe we can hear where's the whole thing contingent the county doing their part that's the sort of what i was i was thinking that i mean we'll hear from staff the way i read this um request city 62 400 for the WAT we are the one fellows ambassadors but i'm i may be wrong as i often am so we'll hear from hear from staff mr mayor if i may uh one of the things that that we you know we typically do when we receive a proposal and it includes multiple funding sources you know our analysis up to a point that we we know for certain that the other funding sources are not going to be received we would you know we would look at our part being if it's a three part we would look at our part being one third of the total total dollars and so this analysis our staff did a did a wonderful job under those assumptions over the weeks um you know not having as much information about the other funding sources you know we can certainly you know reshuffle the the support or investment based on dollar figures and based on um you know other more finality around the total uh initiative but that is the reason you see the one third there because we our anticipation is that the other funding sources would be also supporting um those um those fellows so that hopefully that that that is helpful that's that's that's i appreciate that clarification that's right so if the initiative i guess the i guess what i'd like to add uh our ask is um it seemed are we recommending then or are you all recommending that we um that we is this something we could do even if they didn't come in with this i mean it seems like with the ambassadors the ambassadors really is about the number of ambassadors that you have and so we could fund a number of ambassadors i think it's the total cost is for in nine and so we would be funding essentially three of them even if the county and the other partners didn't come in and so i guess we could make an evaluation about that once we knew their plans and i think an important point about this particular recommendation is that we you know we do we do support that component because we feel like it it is a direct benefit to the community but certainly the other administrative um infrastructure that would you know would have to you know be part of that that structure would also have to be in place and we you know we anticipate that with the private support uh you know and not knowing exactly what the county is going to be going to be doing there there would certainly be you know other funding other than the city funding and we will be we will be anticipating that so i think one one thing and i want to just notice that uh the the staff righteously put in the last slide in our presentation that we would make these choices at the march first meeting and then the manager would decide whether or not she wanted to put them in her budget presentation on the final date so let's just be real real clear about that uh this decision does rest with us but we're going to be under the continual care and guidance of our city manager and our budget director um yeah charlie thanks steve um the one of the other things i wanted to ask about was the language access coordinator and want to can you give us a preview about whether or not that um has been i believe that's been a departmental request um can you give us a preview about how favorably you intend to view that request because it might help us scratch that off our list so so we we actually don't have a whole lot of requests that cross you know cross cross lines if you will but this is one of the requests that's coming you know came from the administration as well as as as a council we have reviewed our requests we have not prioritized them and put them in the in the totality of the um you know of the overall budget budget asks but this is a very high priority for for the administration to provide resources to our language access plan so i can say that you know in in this meeting as well that's great thank you for that update the last thing i wanted to talk about is the council salary proposal first of all i just want to thank pierce for bringing this forward it's not a subject that that it's easy to talk about as elected officials um politically it can be very toxic um to say to to say that we need to vote ourselves a raise especially during a time when state when city employees didn't get a raise last year we're looking at some modest raises this year but certainly not anything close to what the adjustments we were considering pre-covid and i think there's just an an an inherent discomfort with um with folks talking about raising their own pay uh that's just the way it is the flip side of that is uh as as pierce rightly uh says this is a significant equity concern the circle of people in the city of Durham who can afford to take on this responsibility like financially afford to take on this responsibility is small and is necessarily circumscribed by by incredible layers of privilege and wealth and so the the idea that we should pay city council members a living wage for the work we do is a great idea in a number of different respects um but there's always the problem for me that if it cost you know 80 thousand dollars this year to do that that is not the first second or third place i would choose to spend an extra 80 thousand dollars in our budget but that's just inherent in the budget process um i think we ought to consider um trying to leapfrog some of those concerns by taking a look at when the latest term of any current sitting member expires which is i believe december of 2023 at this point changes to the elections notwithstanding i think that's right um and uh and consider codifying an increase in the pay of city council members that is pegged to the living wage Durham living wage at 40 at 2080 hours a year basically um to increase every year as the living wage increases not linked to the kind of the performance measurement process in any way because i don't know how you do that um and to have that be effective um in january 1st 2024 that way none of us is actually voting ourselves a pay increase because there's absolutely no guarantee that any of us will be in office then and the voters will be able to have their say in between a decision to do that and the effective date but it we will have made a commitment that going forward we are going to do our level best to make sure that everyone can afford to do this job without regard to their financial circumstance that has nothing to do with running for office which is his own kettle of fish and incredibly hard and expensive in itself time consuming but to my mind that seems to be a way to try to square the circle that we find ourselves in on that issue um and for that reason i won't support putting in the budget this year but i do think it's a conversation we need to have and i think making it effective uh after all of us have faced the voters one more time if we do um makes a lot of sense uh that's um i think those are the things i wanted to oh oh one other thing um i think we should consider adding the stipends for boards committees and commissions um as mr steve as you said it's a very low dollar uh addition to the request pool it uh it it it has a lot of the same benefits that increasing council salaries do um and i think the burden on resident participation in our volunteer boards committees and commissions has been somewhat less in some ways during covid but in in some ways it's been higher in terms of the need to have technology you can't just get in your car hop on the bus and come downtown for a meeting and so um i think but under unprecedented times when we're not under covid i think um we had a really good conversation about the barriers to entry the barriers to coming to meetings we talked through some of the ways that might be administrated um in ways that are that are as low impact as possible about encouraging um board members who don't need the stipend to defer taking it um but i think as between the the um the stipend and the grants for the boards committees commissions which i both think are important and good ideas i think the stipends makes a lot of sense um to go ahead and move forward this year for those reasons so that's what i wanted to say thank you steve thank you very much let me um i want to try to pare this down a little bit uh so we can focus on we i'm not trying to i know everybody's got some comments but let me go to the first first well let me let me just start with the first four items and see how people feel about these and then we'll we'll open up discussion to more of the items um do we want to recommend that the funding of the deer program the legal defense immigrant legal defense program a portion of we are the ones and we'll work our staff will help us give us some guidance and the alcentro funding those are our top four and i just want to see if there's consensus on that okay i see some thumbs uh marquette they'll let you comment okay yeah sure you wanted to comment on those i did i was giving my thumbs up now but i did want to comment but i'll reserve until you're ready to entertain okay great um so i know that um yeah so uh jillian are you good with those okay great so uh i think that we have a consensus i don't i think didriana may have had to she'd said that she'd had to leave briefly and be be back oh no but here she is okay here she is with her thumb great thank you very much okay super um so the those four then we will recommend and then uh i'll now just ask we've had some comment on some of the others but looking forward to other comment uh and i'll start with marquette thanks steve and and thanks colleagues so i think it was a really really productive conversation i'm totally in agreement with those four moving forward with the four um one question i did want to ask i i was part of a conversation not too long ago about phasing out the um crime cabinet and one of the points that was made was that uh uh we were cautioned against or we were advised to look for a duplicative effort in the area maybe there are some other things that do some other initiatives that do what the crime cabinet does i'm wondering um and i can't get a sense of it from the reading from the staff reports if the el central funding and immigrant defense fund funding are they in any way overlapping in their mission and if not fine but but i i'm just wondering if they are um but i support moving forward with the uh the four um i was gonna raise i wrote a note to myself to raise the issue about council pay increase and councilor charlie said that you know we can have a discussion about it i disagree i don't think we need to have any more discussion i think he nailed it i think that was a classic mike drop mike drop moment what i wrote to myself far less eloquently than he was that i think we should pass it but give voters a chance to fire each and every one of us for doing it before it goes into effect so i want to totally associate myself um with his comments i'm totally for increasing it but tethering it to the next election for the last one of us don't want to whenever all of us have had a chance to be fired for it then it goes into effect so i don't think any more discussion is necessary i think he nailed that um i support also the uh the uh moving forward with the stipends i do remember our conversation uh when we discussed this prior that at least a soft commitment to somehow identifying folk who who are needful of the stipend um or or or not giving it to folk who get needed because the concern was the folk who who participate in our boards and commissions now don't need it um and that's the problem that we want to get more folk to participate in our boards and commissions and one of the ways to do that was to to you know incentivize that through the stipend it wasn't to address you know lack or an equity issue with the folk who are already participating it was a purpose for it so i just want to revisit that that animating proposition about the board and commission cut because i remember us talking about that and and ask if that's still going to be built into um our boards and commissions stipend structure or are we looking at it the same way mr. mayor uh steve when you spoke about kind of the across the board tiered uh bonus conversation with our with our employees i mean if we're going to give everybody the same stipend on the boards and commissions is that really equitable or is that just equal um so i just want to ask that javier yeah does the last i agree with um the first four i think that those are all i think there's consensus there um the the stipends piece at least what i remember was we were going to model it i thought off the pb stipend which is that everyone's asked um everyone's offered the form so it was and and you just did it anonymously and it was it was presented as the needs-based right so we're encouraging folks who really need the stipend to apply for it we didn't want to put a lot of burden on folks with like paperwork um so it was just and we didn't want folks to feel like they had to you know share that they needed it publicly so it was kind of like here's a form we're asking folks who who need this to apply for it if folks don't need it don't apply for it and i thought that that's how we did it with pb and it kind of worked well the folks who had and i know it was i think bus passes and things like that but the folks who did need that support of their ones who who ended up getting it and i might be wrong but that's what i remember from the conversation last year julian do you want to comment on this one since you put that forward sure yeah the conversation we had last year it was going to be opt-in so exactly what javier said folk if they if they need the stipend they fill out a form and everyone will have to fill out a tax form for the city um as well because it'll be reportable um on a w nine so the anyone who wants it can can ask for it and we the budget only includes it the budget um anticipates that about 50 of people on our current boards and commissions will ask for it i think that's a really conservative estimate i think it'll be less but the hope is that more people who for whom a stipend is um is helpful will then apply for boards and commissions and so utilization would go up over time that's helpful thank you very much thank you and i think um your first question mark anthony was about potential are are the um the immigrant defense fund and the el centro funding um do they overlap i would just say that i don't believe that they do um the el centro funding is really for supporting their infrastructure um they are you know a key institution they get supports from all the other area localities we have sporadically given them support in the past but this would institutionalize that um and then the yeah so that's uh i would say that i wouldn't say there's overlap and i would ask javier if she agrees yeah as far as i know there's no overlap well and let me say mr. mayor i you know i'm familiar with the work of el centro over the years and they're they're an uh you know indispensable partner here in the city and i'm excited to support um the immigrant defense fund as well i think it it moves us closer to who we say we are as a city i'm excited to support in large part to you know to the gravitas and leadership that javier has brought to it but on the merits of it as well i think it goes directly to who we are as a city so i appreciate the answering the question and i'm looking forward to supporting them both enthusiastically thank you pierce thanks steve um appreciate everyone's comments i just had a quick question about um with we are the ones uh and and kind of re-evaluating so how would that work in a typical budget process um you know we need to make our decisions and we vote on it in june what if we find out about the county chipping in and you know may how does that impact our ability to reevaluate if we're making a decision today only about 66 000 that's my question well i'll i'll give an answer and then our staff can pitch in uh i would say that if it's may that's really late uh but i wouldn't anticipate we won't hear from the county we'll hear from the county earlier than that um and then we could reevaluate but let me i see i see the managers here and let me uh defer to her yes so i was about to say um that very same thing and you know when we're talking about this level of support in dollars what we're talking about today you know may not be the exact penny that we we are we're looking at you know before we would enter into an actual agreement it would be an agreement that you know had a full scope of services and everyone would understand you know the the you know the investment and the return on it so i would just say that as we we have a protocol we're checking in with the group every couple of weeks just to get an update because there is uh the county um support but it's also the support of the private foundation and where that fundraising is so in the end there's going to be commitments for a pool of money and then we want to make sure that the city's you know contribution to that uh is one that uh that permits the initiative to be successful based upon the total the total sources of funds okay thank you for that um Wanda and i i would i guess i would just say next time y'all are talking with them i know you check in every couple every two weeks or so um if there are any deadlines around you know when you would need to find out about x before we can make a decision about why i would just want to make sure that we communicated that to the we are the ones folks um because it sounds to me like if we don't if we don't figure this out within a particular timeline then it might be put off until the next fiscal year or i don't know if there are other places where we could pull from budget to fill in the gaps so anyway i'm just kind of wheels are turning around really just deadlines uh how soon do we need to hear back from the county from philanthropy before the city is ready to step in for the full 250 which it seems like we're willing to do but today we're only committing to 66 7 because you know that's the portion of the program that we want to support now but even that's contingent upon uh the infrastructure from uh other partner that other partners will be able to provide uh support for so anyway i'm just kind of thinking through that here's i think also what would be useful and i'm happy to do this along with you is to have some discussion with our county commissioners and see where they are and see if they can you know do what you've done which is advance the ball you know uh and so uh your colleagues are supportive and so if you wanted me to join you with some discussions with uh you know a couple of county commissioners i'd be happy to do that and maybe we could uh you know talk next week and schedule a time maybe early next week you and i can talk and schedule a time to try to talk to them i'm happy to help with that but i think that you know you're it's going to take your leadership as well okay thank you yeah thanks for that context yeah but i'm happy to be you know in the meetings and join you as an advocate i appreciate that i know i know your colleagues on the council are as well um okay i'm i'm looking at the list now and let me tell you what i think we've done so far and i'll ask bertha if she's heard the same thing we have agreed to support the funding for deer the immigrant legal defense funds a portion of we are the ones with the discussions we're having the alcentro funding um and we are also uh i'm hearing general support for the salary increase for council at a future date after after the after 2020 after the 2023 election but that we i think we need some more council discussion of that to sort of formalize that and uh we'll look to the staff to bring that to us at a time you know sometime soon so that we can formalize that decision so i think that's what we've decided i've heard also substantial support for the stipends for the boards and commissions from at least three colleagues maybe four um so maybe i'll try to focus discussion there for just a minute since we have heard several people speak for that uh and i see javier is also adding her support to that so uh colleagues this is an expenditure of of at the max $50,000 do you want to add this to i've already heard mark anthony charlie javier and i see pierce uh and jillian and and digerona okay good so i think we have unanimity there the ones that we have not uh decided upon and can certainly discuss at this point are the basketball the community resiliency fund the language access the refugee and immigrant coordinator and grants funding for the boards and commissions does anyone want to speak at this point on any of them okay jillian thank you um yeah i wanted to advocate a little bit for the grant funding for boards committees and commissions um even in a smaller amount if folks were um not comfortable with committing $50,000 um but would be willing to commit a smaller amount i think would be really helpful for our boards to um to do their work particularly the boards that we have created that haven't that don't have an existing departmental relationship um because boards that do have that are able to get resources and support um through the departments that they are connected to but boards that we have created like the race equity task force the workers rights commission the women's council um that i've served on have had a really hard time um with getting access to resources to do to you know just to do small things so the race equity task force wanted to have a facilitator come in and facilitate a couple of workshops for them they needed money to pay them and it was this um you know we weren't able to like it was this process to figure out how to make that happen you know talking to tom figuring out like where there might be sources of funding um recently the women's council wanted a small amount of money to join um north carolina coalition against domestic violence and get access to those resources and so i worked that out through the clerk's office but had initially offered like to pay for it out of my expense funds obviously travel isn't happening so like there there's ways for resources to be allocated but i think it would be really beneficial to have some kind of central pot of funding where boards and committees and commissions could access resources for um for those pieces of work and we've heard particularly from the folks on the racial equity task force that this lack of resources was a barrier to them um and that they want some kind of resourcing for the commission moving forward um which i think is reasonable but i think it's reasonable to do it for all the boards so that they all have access to um to you know provide food at a meeting or hire a facilitator for for an event um and i'm you know i think the amount could be tweaked to fit you know whatever we think is reasonable i don't i doubt that that all of the funding that i proposed would be used in in the first year i kind of just wanted to make sure there would be enough and there are a lot of boards and commissions um but yeah some of them have access to resources that others don't and i think it is um a fairness issue right now thank you other comments on that i know i'll um i would say that uh that i mean i'm certainly open to that and uh you know i mean it could be a different number it could be 25 000 and see how that goes but i'm interested in other comments mr mayor are you interested in just the specific grant piece or on all of it the ones that we're still trying to work through i'm just going to stick with the grant one now i think if there are other ones we want to talk about yeah i think that will help i think it'll be better if we can focus um i'm open to depending on where we are i think we could lower the amount and then like many other things it's it's just not that much money and it could really help our boards and commissions out um so definitely open to having that conversation and uh would like to hear from my colleagues but if there's agreement on on a lower amount i you know it is in a lot of money i could be there too mr mayor if i might sure yeah i guess i um coming in i was kind of agnostic about this and uh i uh i was holding it in tension with the stipend piece and and when i say in tension with the stipend piece i i guess i was just wondering what the scope of work was for the boards and that it is our intent or how we envision these boards doing their work is it is it is it leaving the realm of kind of voluntary boards and commissions uh you know where they get into a realm where they would need grant funding to do stuff um but listening to the mayor pro tem i you know i i find her compelling and i think that uh you know the things she's outlined uh makes sense i was certainly you know supported um 50 grand or or lower at the $25,000 mark but but in listening to the mayor pro tem and thinking back kind of to my own work and and and the community and stuff it would be nice to give them the flexibility to to do uh some things again i was just thinking that were we looking at an expansion of their uh responsibilities that you know to more work than than we actually advertise but listening to the mayor pro tem uh kind of delineate kind of things they'd be doing with it um i think it's a good thing so i would support it even at the lower amount or at the state and amount thank you yeah absolutely so um i've heard four voices of support um i'm going to uh ask uh that we consider it at the $25,000 level and then we can see how that goes um i see a thumb from jillian i see a thumb from pierce i see i see a bunch of thumbs okay i'm going to add that to this then um we are now uh let's see i'm just working through my little chart here um by my calculation um i think if we did these just the things we've said uh we would and if there was a tax increase needed for them which we don't know yet but certainly quite possible it looks like uh about $603,000 depending a little bit also though on the expenditures they rise for we are the ones uh and so that's more than uh it's it's somewhat more than a sixth of a penny on the tax rate got got that about right i have that about right bertha um i'm not adding it but i'm sure some of the folks on my team are so they can drop it in the chat okay all right um other other uh and so javier you're next yeah so i'm the one who put in the language access coordinator and listening and the immigrant and refugee affairs coordinator knowing that public affairs has also put it in and and um city manager wanted pages already stated that it is a priority for staff i'm fine with removing it out of our column um because i know that there's alignment and i know that um staff has has seen the need for one um so that's where i'm at on that one on the immigrant and refugee affairs coordinator role that was put forward partly as both a city and county um position so if i think about you know and all i know is that i sent the budget analysis to commissioner alum who's leading it on the county side i'm willing to um say you know is there interest in moving it forward if the county agrees because then our commitment is basically half um which is at you know the highest pay range was 84 000 so uh we can have that number and if there isn't a commitment from the county to to do a joint funded position i'm comfortable with um not moving it forward um but just wanted to hear what my colleagues had to say about that um additionally and this is something that i've learned a lot about this past year um leading the immigrant and refugee round table i've done a lot of that work uh not necessarily what i would think you know um i i see the need for it in staff uh based on what the conversations i've had with our refugee resettlement organizations based on the fact that we will be getting you know we've had four years of not as much migration into Durham that we're going to be seeing in the next few years and the folks who are going to be showing up in our communities uh from the border um who are predominantly central american and then the folks that we will be getting through the kind of traditional refugee process expecting a lot of syrians and i guess for higgins is maybe the other population these are folks who've been sitting in camps for several years they're showing up in Durham highly traumatized and i think we need to be proactive in in really having the infrastructure to support these residents uh which is one of the reasons that i put the position forward thank you other discussion of that item mark anthony thanks uh steve and i did have i'm intrigued by the uh the proposition of having an actual um work of city municipal worker to deal with those kind of issues i guess i'm at my question is um and i defer to to javier is uh you know enormous amount of work in this area i guess what would the person actually do uh like what would their week to week activity look like and part let me be honest about part of what informs the question is i we've been so conditioned um oftentimes to think about these issues from a federal lens and and kind of federal restrictions and federal prohibition prohibition of what we can do at the state level let's forget about at the municipal level so i i guess from a municipal level what would having an fte dedicated to these issues that are so entwined with federal policy what would their work they look like or what what what would their job on the description look like i mean i can tell you what i've been doing which is a lot of who just hire you coordination between uh during public schools uh our county folks our refugee resettlement organizations el centro hispano our community engagement folks in nis um and and what we're hearing is how little interaction these folks have with local government um there is a huge gap on what they can access or or if they even know how to access it and while they have paid staff in these organizations they also have capacity issues so this is essentially a kind of bridge bridge building role and a coordinating role uh because there are so many moving pieces and i would not have um been this last year has been really illuminating for me um about you know because we were in a covid crisis it kind of brought it to the forefront but the need has been there for a while um and i am concerned about what's coming i will i will name that um i think our resettlement organizations are going to have a really hard job because the federal administration as you said mark anthony um really kind of limited the work that they were able to do in the last four years and so now the numbers are going to be increasing um and um while that's really great it also you know will very much shine a light on what the last four years at the federal level has done um and the kind of impacts of those decisions and how they ripple out locally even if it is a federal issue well i'm going to be totally transferred i'm deferring greatly to your leadership and and insights on this i know what would be helpful to me would be to see uh perhaps some an actual job description of what of what uh it would look like but but again i'm deferring to your i agree that this is a this is a storm we know is coming um and the situation that we know is only going to uh thicken as we move forward and i i can't imagine the city other than Durham um you know doing something like this and being in position and actually codifying it within our org chart but it would be helpful to me uh to see what this job would actually entail daily and weekly basis but i'm i'm certainly deferring to your leadership um in this area so thank you happy to happy to send that larger cities have entire departments they have immigrant affairs departments we are not new york city we do not have that level of immigration so that that is um wide as a position and not a full department ask got you thank you other comments on this so um i think that i had i had a comment okay sorry charlie thanks deep um i i've i've shared these thoughts with Javier this is not the first time she's hearing this but let me just share with the rest of my colleagues that um i i absolutely agree that we need more local government resources in this area and Javier is 100 correct that as refugee caps have been raised by the new president and rightly so Durham will get the lion's share of those resettlements here in north carolina um we're already a leader in the state in that area my kids have gone to school we live and we we went to hope alia we go to hope alia elementary just where a ton of resettled refugees end up um steve and i went with the unhigh commissioner refugees to some programming at our school that's geared towards the refugee community and the kids they're part of that community in our school it's amazing work i guess my hesitation with this is not the need it's not the month the price tag it's that when when javier describes what the what the position does it sounds an awful lot like what dss does connecting people with resources making sure that they are um connected with the things that they're entitled to support encouragement this this is the position that seems to me to veer deeply into the county's lane um and and although i but although i have hesitation about that and and the position and the proposal is defined um would have a split the cost which i think is fair and good um i think what we've seen over the last year is a little bit of the blurring of the lines between the city and the county in terms of what we choose to fund and what we choose to do um a lot of the back in the bull campaign is really a public health okay most of the back of the public health issue that we have spearheaded and funded and and because that work needs to get done i totally understand that um and um a little bit with the with the learning centers as well um and so that's that's where i am with it i have this inner discomfort um with uh with with doing it because it just seems so far out of our role i think larger cities that have these these positions of these departments don't have the city county dichotomy that we do um and you know they have city departments that deal with this stuff as well all that is to say i don't know how i feel about it and that's um that's and the other thing i'll say is that it's as as the as the size of these requests go it's pretty low on the cost side um in fact i think it may be the lowest dollar item on here because we're splitting the what is it 84 that we're splitting that with the county um and i know it's contingent on them on them doing it and if they so anyway that's all that's all i want to say about it so i'm undecided thank you thank you jillian thank you um yeah i i think it would make sense to continue having the conversation with the county about the split position and come back to the refugee and immigrant affairs coordinator position if we are able to get the county engaged i think it would make a lot of sense for it to be a joint um city county position and i just don't know what the county is thinking right now but if the county were to be excited about splitting the position i would be i would be supportive of of the city putting in half um and also just want to express support for the request from public affairs for the language access coordinator that's something that we've been talking about through a number of budget cycles um and it's good to see that that's moving forward and um would definitely be a departmental request that i would be excited about um about supporting as well thanks oh and so can i go back real quick to salary equity i just wanted to say i think it's an awesome idea to do it in january 2024 i think there should be some sort of formal commitment to it so that whoever's in office in january 2024 has already has the template and it's and it's not on them so i don't know if that's a resolution or like programming into the budget in advance or something but that we do something to ensure that those folks have a free pass to raise the salary because we already decided look y'all you're getting more money um and that it's committed so that anyone who's going to run for office in you know in 2023 knows that when they come in they're going to be getting a living wage for a full-time job i would agree and so when when the staff brings that back to us with that's that's a great point we need to figure out some way to formalize that colleagues it's 10 after one our stop time was one um and just want to see if there are any of these other items that we want to discuss at this point i don't want to shut anybody off but i'm not seeing any um so you saw from christina in the chat that if all of this took a tax increase that what we've said we are supportive of so far that would be a 0.16 of the penny the housing bond is 1.38 roughly so 1.54 would it about a penny and a half now if if this was all to be funded with tax increase we don't know that we'll all be funded with tax increase but um and uh but i just wanted to give that perspective uh colleagues i'm going to now turn to bertha and and ask her to wrap us up or the or the manager i will turn it over to the manager for closing comments as well as any council members um comments after the manager thank you bertha so um mr mayor madame pro tem and members of the council uh today has been a good day we have discussed some very very important topics not just topics that are going to affect this one year's budget but really the future of our city as we continue to center racial equity in our organization and our community and consider the systemic racism we live with today it brings in to focus how intentional we must all be in our deliberations and our decisions if we find ourselves defaulted to something old out of expediency maybe a master plan that may be a bit dated or needs a new and a different look the kind of discussion that we've had today it really gives us the freedom to do so even if it takes a little more time or costs a little more money to just get it right you can count on us to do that though uh in my opening remarks you heard me say our team is always ready willing and able to bring new ideas to new situations sometimes very quickly with a renewed focus i will also add a new lens we use this lens as we continue our work and we have heard you today we'll be back tomorrow with more reports and more discussion culminating with the budget guideline discussion and document and then our difficult work will begin again i would like to thank staff here today who do this work every day and never give out of ideas and energy because we love this community and public service is in our dna so we will see you here tomorrow beautiful words thank you madam manager all right colleagues i will entertain any very brief remarks that you might want to make and then we will call it an afternoon javier i just very briefly want to thank staff for today and i'm looking forward to tomorrow also to my colleagues for all of their really helpful insights and and guidance today and looking forward to next number four thank you so much mark anthony i want to thank the staff as well and to say i'm i'm proud to be a part of this council on this day in particular jillian thank you um to echo my colleagues appreciations for all the work that staff did to um get this get us through this meeting and i feel really good about the choices that we made today in the conversations that we had and looking forward to some more exciting discussions tomorrow thank you charlie i just want to say how grateful i am that we decided to break these up because these days are much much better than than eight and nine hour days i can't it's just been so much better so thanks um uh i know we all rushed that recommendation straight to the head of the line when we started this i think javier may have been the one who was loudest about it for some logistical reasons in her house but i just want to say thanks to the staff it's made a huge difference for me in staying focused and energized and making sure that i can actually get up and walk around a little bit during the day so thanks everybody i see pierce's comment this has been a wonderful first budget retreat experience i agree it's just all right any other comments okay i'll i'll just say uh did you want to go ahead thank you i i um i appreciate i also appreciate my colleagues and their comments it helps to kind of color in all of the work that the staff has been doing and i will say that i have to apologize for the last part section i was a little distracted with another meeting but i do think that we're headed in the right direction and uh you know a penny and a half doesn't feel as hard and i'm i'm still nervous i'm still nervous so we still gotta get the rest of the season but i look forward to to having the conversations thank you thank you yeah i'll just add great work by the staff as always i don't always feel that we do as great work but i thought today we were good i really did i thought yeah we're we're thinking we're discussing we're you know um yeah we brought a lot of good thought to it today and i i think we served our staff well and i'm i'm proud of us if i don't know if mark anthony and i agree on the same idea right out of the bat that we had before the meeting and to tell each other about that's scared i don't i just gotta tell you i don't know that that gives me some pause but let's let's keep let's keep pushing forward i wasn't gonna mention that i'm gonna keep that off the agenda it's a good day yeah other than that we were good thank you colleagues a great day and so grateful for our staff just an amazing staff thank you budget staff finance staff public our our hr staff bo david uh jj regina everybody who presented today was awesome shawn got getting the mix so everybody so grateful we'll see you tomorrow at nine is that our is that our time tomorrow bertha that is correct nine o'clock and we're gonna dig deep into the 911 calls which is super exciting thank you so much this meeting is adjourned