 There are some time restraints that I think is necessary. I think our clerk has to, he has to leave. Yeah, I was going to say that. And of course, we want to be true to form and true to our time. So let's go ahead and get started. City Clerk, Madam Clerk, would you call the roll please? Present. Present. That's about for just, Lord, in the midst of all that we do as a part of our responsibility for the city, as we continue to expand and grow it in meaningful and positive ways, we would ask that as we talk today, as we strategize today, we ask that your spirit might give us the sort of grace to get things done. We ask that we claim it in your name. You have your agenda attached, and of course, four specific items we'd like to discuss here today as they were referred to us by our council. And of course, I want to jump right into the conversation if you all would allow me to do that. There are four concerns, of course, that was brought to us. Of course, the first, of course, was the Columbia Health Initiatives, Columbia Clean Initiative. And I think that's why Sarah is here with Robert today. Is that right? You all going to do a presentation for us? All right, I just want to. I just want to make sure that meant yes. We want to talk a little bit about the development of boards and commissions and the structure. And of course, we want to say a word about the development of policies, procedure, and structures for advisory committees on the equity index. And I think all of our members have a copy of that index profile. Is that right? Is that right? OK, let's start off with our health initiative. Pam? Yes, sir. Reverend McDowell has certainly been an advocate for us having some emphasis on our community health here at the city of Columbia. So we have had a lot of discussions about creating a Columbia Health Initiative in the terms of maybe doing it as a board or a committee. So our suggestion as staff is that we maybe take a step back and put some emphasis on the four major health issues that seem to be the biggest issues for our communities. Those would be diabetes, amputations, heart disease, and hypertension. And the thought is that we would start by focusing on one of those health issues at a time and do things collaboratively with our partners out there in the community that are working with these health issues. So the first health disparity we wanted to talk about was diabetes and have some diabetes awareness in conjunction with council and make sure that we are working with those entities, again, out there in the community that work on these types of issues. Diabetes November is Diabetes Prevention Month. So the concept is that we will focus on that particular health issue and do some activities around that promotion of awareness and prevention and have a real clear council dedicated focus again on that. So the concept was maybe to have a walk for life. And again, we were doing this with Reverend McNowell's input, having a walk for life partner with South Carolina DHEC and the South Carolina Diabetes Action Council to promote their In It Together initiative and do a lot of PR, press conference, a whole campaign around diabetes prevention in the month of November. So that was the initial thought is to start there and then subsequently add those other three health concerns to the calendar. We know heart health is in February. And so we can add events as the years progress. But we like to start with a kickoff of diabetes prevention in November. Did I sum it up, Reverend McNowell? One of the things that we initially talked about the genesis of this conversation started almost a year ago when we looked at the possibility of perhaps adopting a plan that was similar to a plan that originated out of New Orleans. But it gave a larger approach to that plan and involved more folk in terms of a board of directors and that sort of thing. One of the things that I thought was very interesting is that there are some real critical areas. We've talked about it. Joe and I have talked about it. There are some real critical areas in 29203 that's related to diabetes, amputation, hypertension issues, and of course, heart disease. And one of the things that I wanted to do, you took something from me. OK, good. All right. One of the things that I think is interesting for us, instead of starting with a larger committee in some shape, form, or fashion, but to do it in terms of the issue that is resonated within our city. And of course, want to start small. But we also want to make this emphasis because we want to declare November as National Diabetes Month with a walk for life, one and a half, maybe a mile walk, inviting persons to come in and be of support of that. So we want to start small and perhaps further down the road, initiating something much larger. What do you all think, Dr. Russell? That was easy, wasn't it? I'm going to get through before 4 o'clock. Need a motion or anything? No. I think we're OK. We will bring this to council, isn't that right, TK? We will bring it to council as a report from our committee. Is that OK? Pam, thank you very much. Absolutely. Please know that publicity, that we do plan to promote this in such a way, and we'll invite persons to walk with us, whether it's a mile or a half a mile, or whether it's three blocks, we want to invite folk to come and be a part of this emphasis. And I think the larger concept, we don't throw it totally out of the window, but at least we got a starting, we got a good starting for it. Absolutely, yes, sir. We'll work with our public relations department on helping us with press releases, press conference, making sure we advertise. The hope is that we partner with those individuals at DHAC and those other entities, South Carolina Diabetes Action Council, to coordinate with them. I have been in contact, of course, with DHAC and with a person there at DHAC under that in-it-together emphasis, and they are very, very interested in partnering with us. Yes, so we'll reach out with them and we'll put together a plan of action to make that happen for us in November. Sounds good. Yes, sir. Sounds good. Thank you all so much. OK, Robert, Sarah, and anyway. Robert, come on in. That's good. I'll plug this up. All right, Robert, Ms. Sealy. Good afternoon. Sarah and Sarah. Counselors. They are with us. I got some trees that I need to come down, Sarah. I'm just kidding. I'm just kidding. They came down last week. They came down last week. Thank you so much. Everybody knows Robert. Anderson, our Public Works Director, and Sarah Holler, who was formerly the Superintendent of Forestry and Beautification, is our Deputy Director for Public Works and has been for several years. So Sarah, thank you for being with us today as well. So we want to talk a little bit about the Columbia Clean Initiative, which I think came to overall counsel and referred to the committee through a motion of Councilman Brennan. And it was a concept of potentially under the Columbia Water Umbrella, looking at utilizing staff and resources for beautification of our entire service area. And as we drill down and talk some more with the legal team and others, and you folks, I think we had discussions about appropriate use of funds and areas of focus. And so we've kind of honed in on the city limits and utilizing public work staff to forward this initiative. So what we've got for you today is some slides. And we're going to start off, Robert and Sarah, we're going to start off with a little overview of the services that we already provide. I think it might provide good background and context from Forestry and Beautification standpoint. Talk a little bit about some of the special projects that we've got that are moving forward. Some of the existing partnerships that we have with others in the community and some potential partnerships. And then move to the initiatives and ideas and hope that we'll have more of an open discussion about how we might formulate this program and move forward with funding and focus areas. So I'm going to turn it over to Robert and or Sarah. And we're happy to answer any questions throughout as we move forward. Thank you, Clint. Yes, sir. Well, one of the things I do want to mention, of course, Councilman Brennan has had some conversation, either with you, Clint, and with me, of course. This, of course, sort of gives us a great idea of what possibly could happen. And he's in support of it. I'm sorry, Robert. Go right ahead. Thank you. Yes, sir. Thanks for some time this afternoon. That's a presentation we developed probably several weeks ago, and we kind of got bumped around. So we've updated it a little bit. And some of the early slides we're going to run through the divisional overview. The budget was passed. Forestry runs on about $2.7 million. The forestry side's got about $982,000. They removed stumps, grinding of approximately 4,400 trees a year. They plant around 500 trees a year. They do all the pruning. And as of anybody who was out last weekend, we do a lot of storm response, I believe, last Thursday night. We had 66 calls, I believe, somewhere around there. And then Friday, we had only two or three until we found out the next day that it looked like World War III over on Shady Lane. And if nobody's been on Shady Lane, it was right interesting when I got over there on Monday, I believe. So the right-of-way sections got about 963 trees. Of course, we mow. They help us plant in the fall when they're not mowing. They help us plant 500 trees. We have a sidewalk edging crew. This crew here was put in by the city manager several years ago. And the idea is for the gateways that are coming into town, these crews rotate through the main thoroughfares. And if we have time, when we had the personnel, we rotate through the secondary thoroughfares. And what we try to do is mow them, edge them, and make sure the sidewalks are passable, and make sure it does look like a presentable city when we're coming in. Right now, just like everybody, we're still shorter crews. We are starting to get applications. We're starting to hire crews quickly and starting to still run them through Express. So some of these projects will be coming back online. And in horticultures, 834,000, that's the landscape plannings and the landscape maintenance. We'll talk a little bit more about that. The next slide is somewhat several overview. Question for you before we move on. How many people are we short in the sidewalk edging crew? Because I don't think the gateways are where they should be in terms of upkeep. Don't disagree with you. And I think we lost our crew leader for our mowing. I believe we pulled the whole crew about a month and a half ago. So I don't know that. I know we approved a requisition to hire the crew leader back today, so that should put our edging crew back in the street about July 11th, is what I'm bringing in here. And he is a former employee that's experienced, so he'll have no training coming up on our crew leaders and running our mowers. So we'll move those crews back to edging and mowing sidewalks. Good. Robert, we understand the dilemma, of course, of our being short persons. How's that recruiting going? The recruiting is going real great. The express recruiting is very good. Forestry's filling their place up solid waste. When I talked to Samantha yesterday, only had seven vacancies, which means we have almost a full complement of people. We're always going to lose some, win some. But we're starting to get applications again. And I think that's encouraging. And we're still finding applicants don't show up for interviews. That's just the new norm. So we try to capture them when they walk in the door. If they walk in the door for an interview, they get an interview on the spot. And I would say nine times out of 10, they get a job offer on the spot. So the next is just a quick overview of forestry. I think we really want to get into what we do in our current practices. So our mowing crews aim for a 14 day mowing cycle. We aim for 14 day bed maintenance. That includes the bed mulching throughout the year. We try to do that once or twice a year. We plant yearly annuals, but we are slowly under Caleb's leadership. He had started and we will continue to convert our annuals to perennials. You can see a lot of that on Assembly Street. I think you'll see some on Bull Street. I believe you'll see some on Rosewood as we can continue to convert them. So we're trying to cut back on our annual flowers, but we will continue to plant some. And we have some successes and we have some failures on our plant selections. But I believe Sarah would tell you that the only way to go would be Vincas, am I correct? Okay, so that they are very hardy and they fill up a great area. We currently had our edging crew, but currently we have one. We will be putting them back on the street in a couple of weeks. Remember, they only focus on main thoroughfares. So if you take a little bit of the edging crew and think of Farrah Road. So Farrah Road is where we start. I think it's about two miles to the end of Farrah Road. So one crew has to work one side three times to edge the road. So they had one side of the sidewalk. They got to edge the other side of the sidewalk and they edge the curb side. So when they get through, they've edged actually six sides of the road and blue and mowed that. So it does take quite some time to do it. We've looked into some mechanized equipment. Haven't found anything that we really are satisfied with. There is a new hydraulic disc blade that you can put on a gravely lawnmower that we were looking at and it was not patented yet. But when it becomes patented, we will probably try to put one on our gravely. It's hydraulically driven to see if we can't edge roads a little bit or edge sidewalks a little bit faster. For Robin, logistically, when you say six cuts, is that the sidewalk side and the street side? So we have one side of the sidewalk. Then we do the other side of the sidewalk. So we edge it to make sure it's got a good crisp line. So we do it this side, sidewalk, and then the curb. And then we turn around and do it on the other side. So we're making several passes when we go through. So you say that you guys aim for a 14-day mowing cycle and bed cycle. What is the reality? 20? Sarah? Probably. I mean, I think we got a little bit better because of the drought. Rain's gonna affect our growing cycle. You know, when it was, when it was a drought, we could actually mow a little bit quicker and it didn't grow back a little bit quicker. Sarah and I actually had a conversation yesterday. 126 actually looks great, except for if you look at the dandelions that are out there, but if the dandelions weren't there, the mowing wouldn't look so bad. So would it be in our best interest to spray a herbicide out on 126 for the dandelions? Keep the dandelions down. So therefore, if we're not back as soon, the mowing would be a little bit more crisp. So we have several, several ideas and we keep rolling ideas around through the department as we can to figure that out. So currently, and I have that a little, a little bit later in the presentation, I got meetings, but, and I will address that, okay? Of where we're working right now. So we have tree removals that we do during the year. Right now, of course, after a storm, we're inspecting a lot of trees that had limbs fall out of them and the tree removals will go up and down on the health assessments. I believe Councilman DeVall sent one to us today and one developed into two. So we do use contractors, go. So if there's a tree in, like in a meeting in some way, a neighborhood wants to take it, wants to take it out. Can we do something like that? As long as it meets our guideline for removals, we will take it out. It's a healthy tree, generally not. Get a trivia here. In Hellerwood in Tamaka, there's an island that's got a redwood tree planted. It was planted 100 years ago and it's surrounded by a wrought iron fence. I never knew this story until. I was through there the other day cause the tree fell down. You know where you looked at the road? Where the road's coming out? That island right there. And there's two big pine trees going. It is a redwood tree. And the neighborhood has been chasing me to take those two pine trees out. I believe, and I'll defer to Sarah, pine trees are not as important as some of the other trees. If I'm not correct, we will take some pines out. They won't take it out, so the redwood tree will grow more. The redwood tree's probably about 70 feet tall. I think it's the only one growing in Columbia. There he is, exactly. So would we go take those two trees out? Would you do that for me? Thank you. There, interesting human interest there. I'm sorry, Joe, we're ready. Let me ask this question. Sir, let me ask you, how does in one of my areas, particularly in the Bonneville Road area, we understand the camouflage policy or let's, we never let those adapt to it. There are some huge oak trees on the, and I think one or two of those places, of course, we've been in touch with you. I think Robert may have visited a place with me there where the trees are, I mean, beautiful oak trees, but they're in the right away. And of course, the root systems are of such, and folk are constantly asking me about free removal. Of course, if it's a dead tree, I understand, we're gonna take it down. Or if it's a part of a tree that they generally try to manage through that tree. You think there needs to be a revisiting of that old camouflage? Yeah, you can't, yeah. I figured I'd get that answer. I think overall, or just... All right, well, I'm sorry, Robert. And Councilman, I also want to point out we're actually doing a study right now with the University through a grant that we're actually heat mapping the city of Columbia that will show you the benefits of the canopy through our CPAC organization and show you the benefits of what shade really does versus where shade is not. We're gonna actually use the heat map to develop, hopefully, a better plan to plant some of our canopy trees. So there's good sides and bad sides. I do think we need to look at these trees again. If there's some concerns, I'll make sure they're healthy. I called it camouflage, into some smiles, thank you. I think it's very important that we look at that, Robert, and if we're doing that, if USC gives us that kind of data and we're able to see where there are some real trouble spot, make sure. I think like the place you're talking about over there, Joe, and I think there are several, and I think we may have visited a place there off of Bonneville Road. It was a church. You remember? You remember? And of course, we offered to them a covering of those stumps, not stumps, but roots that had grown from the right-of-way into this person's yard and found it pretty hazardous for her to walk. So getting that kind of information would certainly be very important, I think. Thank you, sir. You're welcome. We will definitely look at those trees in that area. So we cross over a lot of lines in public works and we're gonna talk quite a bit about that, but we also have a curb painting crew that works out of our traffic engineering division. So they paint a lot of the yellow curves. They paint all the parking places around town, spaces. So they're on a basis of wherever, whenever we need them right now, they're currently painting five points, but they also do the sign replacements around the city. So if there's any signs missing, any signs stolen or anything like stolen, they actually replace them. And the notifications of right-of-way maintenance is something that Sarah and I discussed a couple of weeks ago. We just instituted this week. We, our Trinum Road was where we've got some complaints recently about the sidewalk being mowed and trimmed. So what we did is we went ahead through our ordinances and actually sent them our ordinances that is up on the screen right now that requires the duty of the owner and the occupant to keep the premises clean and the sidewalks clean out to the curb. So we sent a mass mailing to the area on Trinum Road to make sure that was done. We sent one to a couple of other addresses. That's gonna be a new practice that we do and at least make the owners aware. Councilman, I think that goes a little bit about where you were talking somewhat about that, but we were gonna start sending notifications to people that they need to take care of their area to the curb. We used to hang a flyer. We're gonna send mailings from that one. We have some records of where we've done. There weren't red. There were just an eight and a half by 11 piece of paper. My point is definitely make it seem. Make them red. There's no silver. Again, I think this is really good stuff. I just thought I needed more fence. Change it from, you know, appearance to appearance and free. Because, you know, and put this, get this committee working on more and more things we could do to improve, to improve the look around. Because again, the sidewalks and stuff, I mean, we can edge all those sidewalks. We ought to have contests or something where we, you know, we ought to do it neighborhood by neighborhood, you know, feature of your sidewalk of the neighborhood and the worst sidewalk in the neighborhood. Something to add to that. So, and I believe coming up is that Leisha in public information is setting up a meeting for us all to start the discussion of how to do that. So she's, yeah. So we're waiting on that meeting to be scheduled and we, you know, we'll have some internalized. I'll tell you something, Robert. I just don't think anybody knows. We've built these wood fences right up next to the sidewalk. It's so bad. I bet you those folks never look at that side of the road. Understood. So, additional workloads. The, so since we've added or not added any, we haven't added any personnel in quite some time. We've actually added Lady Street to our workload, Assembly to Huger. The Greystone interchange. I know a lot of council members weren't here. We actually got a $25,000 grant to, from Scott's Miracle Grow to plant the area there, I guess across, it would be on the west side of, what is that, Greystone to actually make it look a little jungly, kind of matching what you get going into the zoo. So we tried to match theirs back then. Danielle Riffenberg did a great job designing that. Hardin, Calhoun and Reed Street intersection. The North Main intersection, phase one and phase two. We now have a North Main intersection, or North Main coming in. Oh, I guess we'll consider it phase three, which is kind of the middle of that. Pulaski from Devine to College is part of our additional workloads. And then we have Future Projects, I already mentioned North Main. We have Elmwood from Gadsden to Sumter. It's a replanting. We have Green Street and the Green Street Bridge. We anticipate we'll open sometime later this summer, is what we're hearing. We have South Main that's coming along in the future sometimes. We have five points and that's gonna be coming along hopefully in the next year or so is what we're hearing. And then of course we're gonna have some more additional streetscaping on Assembly Street. The other Future Project that I've wrote down today is, we've heard this several times, but it is the welcome signage to Columbia. That is a passion of a few people here. I know that there's a July discussion happening about that. We've kind of talked about it with Clint and internally a little bit. We know we need to look at the larger picture of this. And my analogies sometimes are not that great, but I guess I can foresee that we're gonna have a big welcome to Columbia sign somewhere and we'll probably have a lot of baby signs that look like that and maybe some of the lesser entrances or wherever and it's gonna be hard for staff to do that. We do think that maybe it ought to be turned over to a E&I's committee, the Environmental Infrastructure Committee to make that selection, to make the idea selections before they present to council, I'm sorry if that's a bad idea, but I would not pick the committee, some of that. That's probably a better statement. I mean, there's a lot of ways that we can garner input and feedback about the different designs that we already have. And I'd like to get all of the council members involved in that if possible since I've been kind of leading up some of those designs. But you could also use avenues such as COLA today and have people vote the same way they did for the flag. So I'm open, but I agree with you that we should certainly have one large sign and something to emulate that. And I did have a conversation with folks at the Midlands Business Leadership Group and they're very interested in potentially helping out with some of the maintenance costs of these. The other thing we would like, the consideration when we do that and you look at others and as I went to Greenville the other day for a conference and looked at the Clinton sign is we wanna make sure that we're designing the beautification in with the design of the sign that'll be accommodating for quite some time. Hopefully, of course, perennials and not annuals but that's definitely things to think about. We have already believed signed the maintenance agreement probably two or three years ago out of Columbia so they did not. They have picked up the assembly street maintenance from Huger Street to Pendleton, Pendleton to Blossom. So they did pick up that. We are still under negotiation for South Maine and what we need to do. And we will definitely look at that. I do not believe we've signed the agreement on South Maine yet. We've seen it and actually responded back to DOT with some of the things that we like sidewalks that we don't wanna maintain the sidewalk on South Maine. When you signed that maintenance agreement is there obviously the DOT share revenue or how does that offset the cost of us taking on that burden? Doesn't offset the cost at all. We actually. But then why do we sign? We would actually take care of it. We would use USC to set South Maine and then South Tampa to do it. Yeah, yeah. And we're already narrowing those lanes, aren't we? We voted to narrow some of those lanes a while back. Yeah. I just want to say on that, like I said, that's a USC-driven project. It'll all be a USC-driven landscape project. We'll definitely have those discussions again with USC. The way it sounds, absolutely. I think we have a lot of garden clubs. They're all over the place. They're all interested all of a sudden. Now they do the street program, we adopt a highway, and we adopt a gateway. These garden clubs compete in them. We do some of the community promotions grant as a prize to sustain their club. Now, let me ask this. When we look at next year's budget, since we're through the issues budget, we've got my future projects here and other things like that. I mean, if the economy continues to grow, we have additional funds in the way of an event, one day it's one of our top priorities. I mean, Wilson coming for her budget priorities in December, perhaps we can maybe add some more. Oh, I mean, especially if we're not in a, we're in a hiring situation. That's the great unanswered question about that. Councilor Ramo, I'll skip ahead two slides to go back one slide in a minute. So the one thing we did is we looked at the comparisons per capita of other cities around here. And what we did is just took, tried to do the best we could with beautification budgets that people actually invest in and took the per capita of the citizens. Columbia invests about $20.87 per capita. Aiken invests $64. Greenville invests $36, a little over $36. Savannah, Georgia invested $50. So I think that's kind of right along with what you just said, is that, you know, we're maintaining at that level. So our, maybe so, but I will tell you, our management and our forestry beautification division is very slim, okay? So I'll go back one slide to our partners. Our partners have been for years has been keep them endless beautiful. We put $20,000 towards that every year. They run several items for us, but Adopt-A-Street is one of them. The River Cleanup is one of them. They run spot litter checks. They get with Samantha every month or I think once a month and she tells them where she wants to litter picked up and how, and they get volunteers to do that. So the River Cleanup is one of the big ones that they do is keep the River Clean. Columbia Green, Columbia Tree and Appearance Commission, as you mentioned, the garden clubs, we do partner with a lot of them. A lot of them come with a few dollars and say they would like to do something. What do we got to do? All of them want the main focal point, as you can imagine. So a gateway may be a great idea for that. The Midlands Business Leadership Government, I think that's what that stands for, been going to it for several years. They're currently working on the beautification projects of the Midlands Gateways, the first two is Highway 302 and Forest Drive. They did recently switch people running that again. So we're waiting on a contract from them and the contract will have to go through eight or nine entities, and we're wanting a couple changes to that. So I believe that contract would probably come before City Council, so you'll get to see that before it goes anywhere else. Our partners are always gonna be our hospitality districts. And the town of Irmo, we actually once a year, and I can't tell you how many years we've been doing this, ever since Sarah's been here, I know at least that we fund $10,000 for the maintenance of the, and the beautification of the intersection out at Lake Murray Boulevard. Questions on that? Uh-huh. I apologize. Your thoughts, sir? Hospitality, theoretical question. When we deal with H taxes and the A tax, beautification of these districts, at some point in time, should we ever begin to look at, maybe I'm getting myself murdered by everybody's professor about it just a bit, is do we look at more beautification with those H tech dollars than maybe some of the things we've spent in the past on these things? I mean, when I look at Five Points, we rode around down there. There's lots of things that we could do in Five Points that would make the area more blighter and more attractive. And H tax allocation that's going down, taking part of that and doing that stuff in Five Points, is that something you think we ought to be taking a look at as we go forward? Same thing in the district? So, Clint and I had a little bit of this conversation the other day. I think currently the, and I'm not great at H tax, by the way, I do the public works things down here on, but I understand that H tax, what they do is they enhance the services we currently provide. So, we sweep, blow, do tree maintenance on Main Street, Five Points in the Vista every night. Seven days or six days a week. Or five days a week and then one morning before church. So, that's something we do. If you look at the different levels of services, Main Street's elected to go behind us first thing in the morning and run a handmade street sweeper up and down the sidewalk, even though we've already blown that off. Five Points runs a guy with a five gallon bucket, I believe, and a picker, I think I've seen that. And then, of course, Bobby's in the Vista doing his thing and calling in trip hazards and anything that he sees. Hanging baskets off light poles and watering programs and centers and meetings and things like that. So, all of the hanging baskets on Main Street are actually funded through city center partnership. We do not do that. I believe they have Hey Hill do them every year. Yeah, we actually fund them in the city center partnership. That's correct, right. The Five Points that work like that and the Vista doesn't work like that. That's correct. It's just something that I would just... We can definitely look at how their H-tax money is funded. I mean, it would certainly be to our advantage to at least have a clear clarifying statement relative to H-tax and, of course, what we do in the Vista, Five Points and other areas. It would certainly help each of us to understand that there's a clarifying and a defining characteristic of what H-tax does and how that's done because here, before, we haven't done that in the past. And if this is a new paradigm, and I think you said that you and Clint have had some conversation, I would hope that that conversation continues. And if there are recommendations, we need to hear from you guys. And I think this is what we were looking for a little bit today was a little bit of give and take between the two of us to figure out where we think we needed to go. We have some ideas, but where we think we need to move things around. And I understand that sometimes contracts can be better. We're gonna talk about that. I'm not a contract guy, as you can imagine, but I think that we can do just as good as job as a contractor and I think we can do it just as cheap. And I know Councilman Taylor may argue with that. I believe, but I would make my argument and I think until proven differently, but I know years ago when we had a contractor doing some work in the vistas and everything, we got to arguing about that weed was there and know that weed wasn't there with the contractor. So maybe contractors are better off mowing instead of pulling weeds or differently or we gotta have a better check system. And I'm not saying either or, we just need to look at things differently. Correct, we do not. And that's not for what we're expected. Perhaps you could say the city center partnership is doing the part of their allocate. Correct. So the question then is, if you were to get age tax, and you don't have to answer this today, if you were to get age tax or age tax allocation, what would you add into what we're doing to make our gateways and hospitality districts look even better? You don't have to answer that today if you don't want to. I'll answer it through maybe opportunities. So opportunities, I'm gonna run through several opportunities that we've had. Some of these just happened before pre COVID and could have happened a little bit differently if COVID wouldn't have happened. Little Rock, Arkansas was one of the best, or not the best one we've seen, but was one that was interesting. And it was called a bridge to work. So the bridge to work program, the estimated cost was about $175,000. And it was a program to work with the homeless. So our thought was to work with one of the, one of the providers around Columbia, maybe several providers to beautify the city. And what the program did in Little Rock was it was a goal to beautify the city and working through the next steps. And it was to create community support. And what they did is they took a group of people and they hired them. And I believe back then it was for $9 an hour. They had a supervisor for $12 an hour at the city's interest where they thought they needed to be that day. Or that week they would send them to that location and pay them. There was a part of inspection that came after that so they were supervised. But the second part of the program that Little Rock did is they required lunch for the individuals that went out every day. And during that lunchtime, they actually had some kind of counseling. I'm wrong, but they had some kind of counseling every day during the lunchtime that went out and talked about this, whether it was how to save money or whether it was how to seek housing or how to find a better job. Or so they always required part of that. So we almost got into Little Rock, the Little Rock model with a company here with one of the providers here in town. But of course COVID hit and that very quickly went south. There was an additional request this year from Keep the Midlands, beautiful. $42,000 to run a little bit different model of litter collection. I don't know that they have the volunteer groups, but they may. Of course we've got a lot of nonprofit groups that could tie into some kind of a Little Rock model. They're all looking for some kind of funding. Grants, we're always looking for grants of anything we can do. I know there's quite a bit of money out there right now. Councilman, you mentioned that we put it in here, the business and corridor challenges. We could definitely challenge the corridors to do a better job and maybe get out of the commercial corridors and get into some residential corridors because those corridors are potentially bringing business to their location. So people do drive by, so it doesn't have to be just in front of my store, but it could be several blocks or many blocks. Of course, everybody talks about youth. A lot of people you talk to talk about youth is easy to get during the school year. They're a little harder to get after the school year. Unfortunately, I don't have any kids, so I can't answer that question. Contracts, so we talked about contracts. We talked about, you kind of got my opinion of the beautification side, but maybe we can get contracts to mow some of our larger areas, such as maybe a 126. And it's easy to make sure the contractor mows 126 every 10 days, but what that does is that brings a better staff in that we don't have a mower on the street to actually do some better beautification through the city, make sure we're focusing on the weeds, make sure we're focusing on the plant material a little bit more. Painting curving, I know that's one of the suggestions that came out early from Councilman Taylor. I will say that we did this at Public Works just right outside of our gate, go by and look at it. We did it within probably a week after we talked about it. I looked at it this morning. We haven't touched it since. So we took the dirt off the curbs. We took all the grass around it. We swept it, we painted it. The curbs are already marked up. There's grass already growing and stuff back on the medians. So that's been a couple months maybe. So that gives us an idea of how often, not that we'd have to go repaint the curbs, but how often we may have to look at some of the grass and stuff around the curbs. There are some models for a street sweeper that has a electric eye on it that will spray herbicide. When you go by, it'll actually read an electronic eye and actually spray herbicide. So when we're sweeping curbs, we can kill some of that. The one, and that's been out for quite some time. We had some concerns about wind blowing. The other one was the sign removals and the sign litter is what DOT calls it. As we see those, we're turning them into DOT. They're not, years ago, apparently, according to everybody. There wasn't Google, so you had to have a sign to get somewhere, but Google will get you anywhere you wanna go, one way or the other. So they have taken the policies that they don't mind to remove some of the directional signage. So we are looking at the directional signage. So that's some of the opportunities that we came up with. You go ahead, sir. How many streets were there? We have seven, I believe, but we run five every day. We run two during the daytime through at night. So the nighttime streets. Yeah. They're on a staggered basis. They're right. We have two that run residential. So they run Monday through Friday, eight to 4.30. And they are vacuum street sweepers. So they sweep up finer material. They sweep up sand and small debris off the road. At night, we run a three-wheeled mechanical street sweeper, especially in the downtown districts. And the reason is it has greater turning movements than a four-wheel model. So, but yes, we do have them. So. Good night. Robert, good. I'm sure. They go a lot at night. They go a lot at night. At night. Let me ask you this. And I know this is not a hypothetical question, but at least during the winter, when it's falling everywhere. And of course, it poses some, some, I don't want to say danger, but it does. These, when they pick up those leaves, of course, they run across that drainage system. That has a propensity sometimes to pose an additional flooding possibility because of stopping up. Is there anything that we could do with those street sweepers as it relates to, I know that's a tenuous task. I know it is. It is. And I've got to answer it in a bigger answer. So I want to start by saying in my 34-year career, and most of it with solid waste under my belt. So it's 20-some years. We never had what we had last year ever that I remember. The most we've ever been behind is about a week and a half. We've never been three weeks behind. So the, but once we get behind, it's all somewhat weather driven for us. I, you know, we don't know when the first frost is going to happen. We don't know when the first heavy rain event, once the leaves start dying off, because they're told to, according to Sarah, somehow they're told to die off. We don't know how cold it's going to get. So we don't know what weather we're going to have and how many people are going to rake in their yards. So last year, if you remember, we had a beautiful November, beautiful December. People raked in the yards. We didn't have the personnel. We got behind and we couldn't catch up. So with that said, the one thing we do is we do have leaf vacuums that we do for our current trucks. What we do is it's kind of odd. We turn the body upside down on the body. We hook a vacuum machine to it. We bring temps in and we rake leaves into these trucks. And what happens is it goes to their impeller, it breaks down the leaves. We're getting probably three times as much on the truck as we can get with a regular truck loading with our claws. So it complements us. So we were really building up. This year we will have our roll-off truck, which has already become a lifesaver to forestry already. They actually said that it worked real well last week during the storm. It's nice to be able to drop a container on the street and say, hey, there's gonna be a container set in here for the next five days. If you wanna rake your leaves and bag them, we'll just be more than happy for you to do that and put them in the truck. But the street sweepers come behind and they actually clean the gutter line after. They can't sweep as much during the winter as they can in the summer because of the heavy curb line. But that's what they're doing is actually sweeping leaves up. And it's done by a vacuum method. So that's how we compliment our leaf collection. So I'm not saying we'll never get that far behind again, but it was ironic that that was the worst year I've ever seen was last year. Well, what happened last year? Of course, some residents decided that, I mean, gee whiz, if you take a pile of leaves and put them to the curb, you run the risk of wind blowing them somewhere else. So of course, the thing that sort of helped most was that folk raked leaves up, put them in a bag. When the clamps came, when the truck came in with the clamps, they picked them up, which was easier. So I think that helped tremendously last year because that leaf population was certainly volumous, like I don't know where. Well, our current personnel level was completely down. It is completely different than it was last year. Last year during leaf season, we were as many as 35 personnel down. I think right now, I think she told me five or seven. I can't remember four, you said between four and six. So we're right in that area, which is just general, but we can bring 10 or 12 10% to run behind a leaf loader and run rakes all the, we can pick up quite a bit of material. So we are a little bit better prepared this year. We are prepared as every year. The division works, all the waste division works for 10 hour days. We always prepare to work Wednesdays and Saturdays during the month of November, December, sometime in early January to get the city cleaned up. We were doing that last year, a long time before leaf season and that's where we got behind. So, and when you pile one week on top of two, you can only imagine the tonnage that's out there. Put it hard or something like that. That's the one area I haven't heard mentioned. It's coming, it's getting ready to come out. We get age, landscaping. So we've, over the years, we've done several mock-ups of beautification out there. There's some water challenges, I believe, of getting water to the medians. Then the group came forward and wanted to put a welcome to Columbia sign. So we were going down that road and then the funding fell on that. I had nothing to do with that. You had nothing to do with that. I don't know why he's funny. I did, I just said, I think I showed you the picture is what. So the welcome to Columbia sign, it came through, keep them in this beautiful, and she's currently resigned, but that private deal was $1.2 million, I believe. So that fell through and then Harbison continues. The only thing we do is mow the areas, all we do. Just sweep the main thoroughfares, bridge, park bridge. So what's in the city, yes. For years, Councilman, we've talked about putting holiday decorations out there. We don't have the electricity and the way the mast arms are not built out there, but the way the intersections are, we have no place to hang anything. So we've talked about putting grand decorations. But they also do a great job at Bauer and Harbison, and it's probably one of the most beautiful intersections in the city, they do a good job planting it every year. And that's done through the Harbison group. Good question. So the signage and kind of auditing the signage that's out there already, are you all actively then pulling signs with the blessing of SDOT? So we won't pull them. They didn't want us to pull them. So what they did is ask us to send them the signs. And what they do is they have everyone of them. If you look at the back of an SDOT sign, they got an inventory on them. Tony was very clear that he wanted to make sure they got them out of his system so that it exists. So they're scanning them. So if you see a sign you want removed, just text me, email me, and we will get it to them to get it done. We can't see them all, but with all of this, we can see a lot of them. Speaking of sign, we recognize a lot of wonderful and the most attractive signs in the world. If there was an entity that wanted them, is there another, does DOT require that, or can we go to a bronze plaque that mounts in the sidewalk, or something that's more permanent? I think it's a little bit of both, is I can't remember really Columbia doing an honorary sign, but I know DOT does a lot of signs. There's two that we will put up on Jovay's residential transition. They're kind of an odd to have a highway sign. Again, I'm sure the individuals need to be recognized. The question I'm just asking is, you look and see if maybe there's a nonprofit or somebody that would pay for some type of, like I say, some other type of signs that melded permanently in the concrete or something like that. So what we'll do is, we have a collaboration meeting with DOT every month. I will put that on for our next meeting and I'll try to figure out how they do their signage. I know they just put, I think I've seen the news, they put 15 up in the state for the women's basketball team the other day. And they said their locations, which is all over the state. Green with the right around them. Agree. So our challenges is always gonna be road ownership. 70% of the roads are owned and maintained by DOT, 30% by the city. Stormgrain ownership, we've got that as we go through. Vacancies, hiring, turnover, we're always gonna have that. As we found out last Thursday and Friday or Thursday and Friday and Saturday, the weather conditions are always gonna pay havoc on what our crews do. Unfortunately or fortunately, we have cross-trained enough that when we had a weather storm as we did last, I keep saying Thursday, but I can't, was it Thursday? Okay, two weeks ago, that's great. I missed that. But two weeks ago, that we can pull our forestry crews off of mowing and they can start cutting trees out of right-of-ways. So we have cross-trained enough to put multiple crews on the street that we don't have. The transitional... Henry's not here to protect himself, but any collaboration with the parks, maintenance guys on situations like that and stuff? We do, if we get far enough behind and the easiest one for me to go back would be the flood of 2015. We not only pulled parks and rec employees, we pulled water, we pulled wastewater, we take tailgates off trucks. We put a fairly good, I'll call it, fleet out to pick up some streets in some areas real quick. So we do have the ability to pull them all in as the year goes on and the bigger the deals. I think the snowstorm of 2004, we did the exact same thing. So it's kind of like all hands on deck and all the departments are ready for that. Transitional growing periods, special projects that we do throughout the year. So with that, I think we've discussed a lot, but we'll take any questions, comments. What do you mean by transitional growing periods? Transitional growing periods is just different times when things mature. So we've got to cut back things in the fall. We don't cut back things as quick as other people would like us to do. So when we have spring to fall, we're gonna order our annuals and it's gonna take us a few weeks to go through that transitional growing period when we're gonna take our old stuff out, tell what we've got, put our new stuff in and let it grow back. So that transitional growing period doesn't look as good. It's kind of planting a, my wife and I differ on something, but it's kind of planting that pot at your house where I think you ought to put one flower in it and Shelley thinks you ought to put three flowers in it. The one flower will go to three flowers if you'll just give it a little bit of time. That's what I think we've been meaning by transitional growing period. It's gone. It's gone and the contractor should have already started planting this week. Thank you. Are you going to start off talking about this? Yes, it's all low growing. The reporter in the room, if they're missing all the shrubbery out there, it's to address a homelessness issue. That's correct. And the shrubbery has been gone for probably six or eight weeks. So. Let me ask you this question. Can you say low growing? Are we talking about in terms of height? It was designed to be able to be seen through. You'll be able to see through as you go down the road. It hasn't happened. That's right. I have to read that. The new stuff won't come through the other? It's not like they're going to connect them to each of the other stuff. They won't, if it connects, it's going to be more of a facing issue. What's happening with that field right behind that area? I know we've planned the same thing in the past but when it's not blooming, it's kind of an eyesore. So the flowers are growing. That's our land. Yeah, no, it's not. Okay. Yeah, Pastor Jones. So he called me last week. We talked about it a little bit. So what we've done usually is we spray an inhibitor for grass in there. So I told Pastor Jones what we would do is pull a soil sample on it this year. We need to figure out what's lacking. There's no reason that the first year it was one of the draws of Columbia because of the sunflowers. We haven't had a sunfire bloom since the first year. We don't know why but it can't be anything but the soil. So we're going to pull a soil sample. We'll probably go ahead and mow that real soon and he will continue to maintain it until next year and hopefully we can find the additives we need to put in it to make that gateway where people came from all over to take pictures of that field the first year. I ran into many people and professional photographers taking pictures out there. So that's our goal every year. We've got to figure out why it won't grow. So I'm an old farm boy. So the first thing you gotta do is get a soil sample and figure out what's going on. Initially we will take care of the first initial cut. Yeah, we'll cut it quick after that. He'll maintain the rest of the year. So there is some reference in ATACs and H-TACs about highways, roads, and streets. So we'll follow up to see whether or not there's some opportunities to use some of that funding. For some of these projects, we'll just have to look. There is some reference to highways, roads, streets, and bridges, but we'll have to look and see if the interpretation leads itself to being able to use that funding for these kind of projects. Ms. Benjamin, how specific are those? That's all it says, Reverend McDowell. It just says highways, roads, streets, and bridges providing access to tourist destinations. So I don't know whether that means you have to clear the path. I don't know whether it means you have to make sure the streets accessible if it's that limited, or is there an opportunity to expand that. But we'll look and we'll get more information. It may be limited, but we'll check. Other questions? Remind me, again, so I'm assuming that we have like a counterpart at Richland County that does some of this stuff too, for the ones that are unincorporated. Is there any overlap ever that we work with them on? So I don't know that Richland County has a true beautification division, and I don't believe they have any street sweepers, so you should notice very obvious when you run out of the city into the county, you'll see some debris buildup in the curb line, you'll see cigarette butts. It's very clear generally to me that transformation, but I don't believe, I know they have a forestry beautification side, but I do not believe they have a wide-awaited beautification. Correct, and then they have a special services division that will work on illegal dumping and stuff like that. Any other questions? So more strategically, essentially this would then, you would say current kind of priorities and opportunities is what makes up the Columbia Clean Initiative. What is the initiative? There's a lot of things we talked about, and I want to be clear about what our call to action is. So the initiative would be is take a wider look at this and see which, if any, we want to do a buffet style. Do we want to add contractors to compliment our personnel? Do we want to reach out to a little Rock, Arkansas style to see if we want to do something similar to that, or do we want to pick two or three of them and do kind of a hybrid model of what would make Columbia look good? Bustles, any other questions? Stella? I think I'm just, I think we've consistently talked about beautification and appearance at our retreat, at, during the budget, during our meetings. And so I'm supportive of whatever we can do to get some of these things moving along where we start to see an actual difference, because it sounds like we have the structure, we've had some challenges, many of which are out of our control, but I'm just not seeing where we can be. So I would recommend to the larger council that we move forward with identifying opportunities that show immediate progress in our beautification and appearance. This is the first step to getting that done. And much appreciated, Robert. Okay, thank you. Ms. Sarah, thank you so much, Clint. Thank you all so much. Just a question off to Kuff. All water leaks stopped? I'm just playing, I'm just kidding, I'm just kidding. Thank you, thank you. Thank you, Clint. So, Robert, make down the essence of time, because I know you all wanted to end. I was hoping we could maybe lip three and four. Can we do that pretty quickly? Yes, sir. I want to talk a little bit about the equity index and what we might, what I want to suggest something with that. If you could say a word about just boards and commissions. I think you just, I think that there is some work, there's still some work we need to do with our boards and commissions in terms of a real clarifying of what their particular functions are. One of the things that I found in that large notebook was this document, was this document. And of course, six committees, of course related to council or the committees that we have listed. We do need to do some work with the other boards and commissions. I don't think today is today, nor the time, but we do need a clarifying statement. And if you would help us get to that point. Absolutely, yes, sir. So you all have seen this before. I just want to kind of refresh your memory. This was an overview that we gave you all when we did the, when we gave you your notebooks. And so what we wanted to do is just kind of make sure you refresh your memory on this document, talk about the listing of the boards, the committees, the task force, the boards and commissions and then have a plan of action where you all can address some specific concerns and issues you have about each one of them. My suggestion would be that we take it because this is, it's a lot. And if you see in the handout I've given you, and like Mr, like Reverend McDowell said, you do have the six council committees. Then you have your special committees, task force and commissions and how you do your appointments. You've got your land use boards and then you have your 31 lists of external boards and commissions. And so, you know, I know there's some thought about changing some things about the boards and commissions, doing some streamlining, maybe eliminating some things, making some term limits, those types of things. Probably some of the notes that Councilman Taylor has provided us with the stickies. So we had a suggestion that maybe we could devote some of your future administrative policy committee meetings to addressing the specific categories. You could take a meeting to talk about the land use boards, take a meeting to talk about the external committees and then you all can make some suggestions about how you'd like to see some things change. We'll definitely review what you've sent Councilman Taylor but is that kind of what you had in mind with some of the stickies? Let me just say, I haven't gone through all those and made the notes on them. It's not quite as discompobulated as it might have seemed at some point in time. So I don't think there's, you're gonna find there's that many changes that need to be made. I mean, I really don't think, I don't think it's gonna be that difficult. I think that what we've gotta do is, I went through and I made notes on each one. We've got some situations where Council appoints this many, but it can have up to this many. We probably should define those things. We've got some appeals that don't meet, but once every two or three or four years, that if we can figure out a way, if TK can figure out a way that we can, if you're appointed to one of those appeal committees, you're appointed to all four. So we don't have four separate committees for it. I think that would be an easier thing. And then the last thing is really more than anything else is I think, and if we had some great interns this summer, if you got one hidden somewhere you could use to take those terms and put them in an Excel spreadsheet that's got the dates that people's term expires. So we're always able to look, and you're, in other words, keep making a perpetual deal so when we appoint people to get added to it, so you always have, I'd say, a 120 day look or even maybe a six month look ahead where you could advertise for 90 days and you got 90 days to look at it and do it. But it's not as much overlap as I thought there would be. Okay, great. And there's a couple in there that I think we might wanna broaden the Tree and Appearance Commission. I think that's, I think we're here and all throughout town that's a really important, important thing in the city that we might wanna make, put us a little bit more teeth into that one or something. I don't wanna tell you, Pam, I think it's, I think if you've got an intern and you guys can take a look at that in an afternoon, I think we can do everything that needs to be done on that in an hour. Okay, great. That's great news, because that's what we really wanted. If you wanted to dedicate some time that we could dig into it a little bit more. But what we can do is work on the suggestions that you've made for us. Like you said, get an intern, get someone to help us. We also may have some capacity, capabilities with match board to do some projections on term endings. And so we'll get you a spreadsheet. And I was just saying on that, that way you just, that way you know, you know what's coming up. There's some issues where every council member appoints somebody, but it doesn't say who appointed who and the terms are up. I mean, it's just this little bookkeeping. And then the cool thing, if we could do it, it would make things a lot easier would be if we could have a standard set of operating guidelines on these that every committee was subject to, whether it was a pit tenants and participation, because they're all individually on there. And I just, just a standard set of guidelines that we could do in one vote. This is, this applies to the 30 appointment committees, whatever we have. Sure. And we could possibly look at that. Our city code, section two dash five nine and maybe add some of those standards. That's what I was saying. A standard language to that. About attendance, about participation, different things that you guys felt were important. Yeah, a couple of them like, for example, if somebody doesn't come to the meetings, the committee has the right to put them off. The city manager or council ought to have the right to put them off. You know, and like I said, just standardize that. But I don't think it's, I don't think it's the full deal that we thought was good. I think you'll chuckle when you go through it. Well, we can certainly give you some proposals to add some of that language, to standardize some of you all. But all of us can chuckle at one time. Yes, sir. The only thing I wanted to add to that was also just taking a look at allowing new people to step up and serve in leadership positions within the committees. I'm really interested in also tracking how long someone's been the chair. So, you know, with kind of new folks coming on and some of these committees being re-energized, I think it's time to maybe, you know, say thank you to folks that have been there a long time, use them for their institutional knowledge, but allow somebody else to step up and lead the group. And that's what we did. If we did a broad guidelines that applied to everything, we would probably want to put term limits as the chairman and maybe even term limits. Yeah, yeah. And I think, Ashley, I think some of that information is available, didn't it, to show that, okay, good. Well, the intent of this conversation today, particularly with boards and commissions, is to start that conversation. And starting that conversation, of course, simply means we gotta dig a little deeper into the weeds of boards and commissions to see with clarifying statements how they look and how they function. So, of course, one of the things that I would possibly suggest as we get to that point with council is that that's an ongoing conversation right now. Is that fair? Yes, sir. We've got our asses. And I say an ongoing conversation, putting some meat to the bone. Absolutely. Well, the only thing I would add to that is we did pull some committee reappointments because we were looking at this. And I promise you, I really don't think there's gonna be that difficult a thing to do. And I would hate for us to stop appointing these commissions for indefinite period of time. So, like I said, I went through every single one of them. It's just, like I say, it's not that bad. So is your recommendation as a committee that we continue to do the appointments that we have that come up as we're going along with this process? I think we just need to have some notice. I'm not so sure if we've gotten, if we've been alerted to what's coming up in the next 60 days, or in other words... We should be able to track whose terms are about to expire so that we can start recruiting or getting the word out. This is, maybe one of the things we could do is we could have, we could only appoint people quarterly if we wanted to. You know, one meeting and so you're just looking at, right now, okay, what's expiring, say for example, in the third quarter, in the fourth quarter, and you put those out, you know. I think that's the conversation we want to have. No question about it. And of course, that's the conversation. And of course, Ashley, some of that conversation you have with some updated materials and data being placed into that folder or file or whatever you want to call it. Yeah, we provided a vacancy list when we gave out these lovely binders so we can update that vacancy list and provide that as well or put it in a different format. Yes, if we could do like Excel and electronic, that'd be awesome. There were a little bit of issues on the vacancy list and on how the vacancies that are there get appointed. You know, it's kind of just an odd deal. Like I said, some of them, some of them that we've actually even discussed on this quote, but I think like the Bicycle Committee, which was up for the last time. Each, the bylaws say each council member appoints a person. Then you can have up to X number. We ought to just decide what the X number is and just be done it. But the people who are expiring, it might have been Dr. Bussell's district that she appoints and it's not important about that. That's where it gets a little bit interesting. And then I think we have to look at some residency and occupational thing. We've got people that don't live or work in the city serving on some of these things. People that have moved away to New York that are still listed on some of these things. Well, they work in 29203 or four and live in 29209. Good day. I mean, that's, I'm sorry. My point is, it sounds like lots of things, but when you add them up, it's not that many things. And then the last piece that TK's probably got to take a look at, is probably the biggest thing that we need to adjust is on several committees. Some are city committees, some are committees that are created to handle state statutes that have specific requirements for certain appointments. We have to, can we broaden that? Or do we have to go by those lines? Some of them are by state statute. They have some requirements. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. So is there any means to change it? Like I said, I really don't think it's that... Well, it's a two-pronged conversation. It's a conversation we can, this is what we want to do today, is just to raise the issue with some specificity to them in terms of how we might get some of that work done. As it relates to our boards and commissions, integrating that into a document. And I think Mr. Taylor alluded to the fact that it's not gonna take long, but we need to have that conversation. Hey, what I did for you, I think, is that actually I circled all the expiring positions on all of them, so we can do that. It might be the easiest thing just to look at what's coming up. I hadn't seen the documents. We may just go ahead and do those and work on them. I don't look in that big. You can do that. Please. Come on. If you would, I'd go back and look in the big binder, but just run me off a copy of that so I won't have to look in the big binder. That's all of that. He went through every single thing in that big binder. I don't think that... We can certainly talk about things to add to the code. We can certainly review things that maybe have some statutory implications. That means I gotta look through the big binder then. And we can look at giving you all a more accessible vacancy. I guess what I'm asking for, Ms. Benjamin, is the smaller version of what's in the big binder. And if we could do that, Mr. Taylor is very studious. And if he's going through that big binder. Hand clap. Thank you very much. But I think the easiest thing for right now is just look at what's expired on Matone now and December 1st. December 1st. Unless addressed, let's just deal with that. Let's exhale it out. I don't know how we're dealing with that. We can fix anything else. Let's exhale it out. I think it's a big plan and I think that should be a reduction. Okay. So if you really get to get that, if you want to send it to our committee first and then we'll send it to the crowd. Yeah, let's do that first. I think that's the approachable thing. Let's do it. And I would say for Ashley, I think it was probably, I think it's July 1st. I think we probably should look at it. We could do them all at one time. Advertising everything and do the appointments in September. And I like the idea of potentially having like two times a year that we update these so that all terms either start January to January or June to June so that it makes it easy. You don't have these random one-offs coming off, you know? Yeah. The only problem with that is some of those, some of the Boers that are statutorily required, they start, they have their own process. And some of the other external ones. We can always delay it and just do it all together, okay? Just like you do it. All right. So you have what you, you've got what you need. That way you're only advertising once a quarter. Cool. Maybe you got that. Okay. We are on to the equity studies. Yes. Let me make sure all minds are clear. We okay? Yep. Mr. Taylor? Dr. Brussels? Mm-hmm. All right. As you know, one or two, several years, I shouldn't say several years ago, but years ago, that was probably back in 2000s. It was in 20s, 19. We're 19. And I think you were a part of that. I was. I helped design that study. I recommend. All right. Let me get through. We did this in 2019. And of course, when we did this committee, it was, for lack of a better word, like a blue ribbon committee. We came up with this equity index study. And of course, as I said, as you sort of indicated, Dr. Bussell, you were a part of this. Very interesting study. We didn't get it physically in our hands until 2021. Was it 2021? We got this. We got the equity study. Yes, sir. The thing with the equity study that it did not give any recommendations nor did it give any suggestions in terms of how it might function, what implications, there were no implications there. One of the things that I would possibly, one of the things that I really want to suggest is that I've had a conversation with Mayor Rickerman about this document and about how we might move forward with this document. One of the things that he sort of indicated and sort of he and I had this conversation and that was allowing the community relations council to sort of take the lead on this in terms of allowing them to look at this document, perhaps after looking at this document, bringing necessary recommendations back to us for implementation. So one of the things that I would like to suggest is that we take this document and we forward it to CRC. With, and we would ask, the ask would be that now we're developing some kind of strategic plan or priorities of what we can do based on this data. Absolutely, yes, ma'am. So what do you think, what was your suggestion be then for, I know originally this conversation stemmed out of the advisory committee for equality. And one of the things we talked about last time was we'd like for that committee to encompass all types of equity and diversity. Would you recommend we keep that committee? Well, if CRC is gonna take the lead, thank you being a part of this at the very inception, the genesis of this committee's data, of course, came out of this committee. And I would think that after submitting the data that that committee ceased to be, it would certainly be a suggestion that because you worked on that committee that you'd be a part of CDC, CRC, because you had some expertise in putting this thing together. So I would think that an advisory committee on equity would cease to be in that CRC. I think some of that responsibility. I think that's fine. Yeah. So that's gonna be your recommendation, Reverend McDowell to the council. This to go do away with the ACE committee. Yeah. We could do that. I think it, because CRC is so engendered with social justice issues, inclusion, equity, that whole frame of things, it certainly lends itself to a real document that they could perhaps bring back to us. And I don't wanna give you too much work, but to bring back to us some real height recommendations how we might implement this thing, you okay? Sure. No calls? I didn't even think about a cause. No, ma'am, no calls. I'm sure there will probably be some language to say that it's gonna cause. They've already committed to it. I didn't attach a dollar figure, nor did I have a dollar figure to attach. They want to take the lead on this. Is that all right? Sit a minute. Thank you, ma'am. Glad you better too. All right. No, that's not a H-text. No, no, no, no, we're talking about the name. Okay. Based on some of the other. I just heard H-text in CRC. Are y'all talking about the name? No, no. CRC, Community Relations Council. I just like to confirm that. Every now and then, you have to say. The alphabet soup of government, that's right. So are we in consensus with that? Yes, sir. Thank you, sir. Thank you, ma'am. Happy to support that. All right. That concludes our agenda for today. I am very appreciative for committee's participation. Robert, Sarah, thank you so much for that. Thank you so much, Ms. City Manager, for being with us today and glad you're better. Thank you. Thank you, Post and Courier. Thank you. Don't take down, don't spill the beans on us now, okay? Thank you very much. You all have a good day. Joe, thank you too, sir.