 We need to zoom in, we need to zoom in. That's me, Patrick, and WB. I'm the city attorney. That's me, Patrick, and WB. I'm the city attorney. That's me, Patrick, and WB. I'm the city attorney. That's me, Patrick, and WB. That's me, Patrick, and WB. That's me, Patrick, and WB. That's me, Patrick, and WB. county attorney. That's me, Patrick, and WB. I'm the city attorney. That's me, Patrick, and WB. That's me, Patrick, and WB. Again, extend my appreciation to Carrington Middle School, Rodgerson. I had an opportunity to visit Carrington several months ago, and as I came into the school and the entrance, this lovely group of young people were playing. They weren't playing for me, they were just playing for people that came in. But as I said, Mr. Rodgerson, it would really be nice if you had an opportunity to visit us at City Hall and extend your music here, and she was gracious enough to do that. And again, we want to say thank you. It's a prime example of good things that have happened in our community, particularly with our young people. So, we are very appreciative and I know it's close to the end of the school year, but we appreciate the fact that you took the time to be here, and hopefully you can find time to come back again. So, thank you. We'd like to call the Durham City Council meeting to order on Monday, June the 1st at 7.02 p.m., and certainly want to welcome all of you here this evening. Thank you for being here. If we could just take a moment of silent meditation, please. Thank you. I'll ask Councilman Brown if he would lead us in the pledge. One nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice. Madam Clerk, could you call the roll, please? Mayor Bell. Mayor Pro Tem Cole McFadden. Present. Councilmember Brown. Here. Councilmember Cattati. Here. Councilmember Davis. Here. Councilmember Moffitt. Here. And Councilmember Shul. Here. Let me ask whether there are any announcements by members of the council. Here and now, I would ask for prior items by the first by the city manager. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good evening, everyone. No priority items this evening. Likewise, City Attorney. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. No priority items. And likewise, City Clerk. Yes, Mr. Mayor, members of the City Council. Item number 30 on your agenda, zoning map change, North Mangum residential. A protest petition has been filed and it has been ruled insufficient. Thank you. Enterting the motion for acceptance of City Clerk's prior items. Second. It's been properly moved. Second, Madam Clerk. We open the vote. Close the vote. It passes seven to zero. Among other things that we will have on tonight's agenda is the opening of the public hearing for the budget. The City Manager presented his budget a few meetings ago. The City Council has had an opportunity to begin looking at some detail with the City Manager's recommendations. And tonight is an opportunity for the public to weigh in on the proposed budget. And likewise, this is marks the third time that the City Council is holding an E-Town Hall meeting. And as you may know by now, it's designed to provide an opportunity for everyone to participate in their local government. But it's especially important for those who don't normally attend City Council meetings to have a chance to win on budget decisions and to interact with City Council members. These are very important decisions that determine how your tax dollars and how tax dollars are spent on City services and programs. Some of our viewers may have already submitted their questions via email, YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. And we certainly want to thank you for that. For those of you here present in the audience, you may submit your questions on the blue card on the table near the Clerk's office. That's over to my left. Those fair staff will collect the cards with your questions and give them to tonight's moderator. Since this is a public hearing, for those of you who don't have a question but have a comment about the budget, you still have an opportunity to comment following the E-Town Hall at about 8.30. We're expecting this to conclude about 8.30. So simply complete the yellow card. And as usual, if you have a comment for public hearings, you have an opportunity to be heard. Again at the end of the Town Hall, I will continue the public hearing which will be conducted as we normally do. Now I'd like to introduce a person that's no stranger to many of us and certainly has been gracious enough to appear at all of the E-Town Hall meetings. We have tonight Ken Smith, the anchor and reporter for WRAL-TV and he will explain more about tonight's E-Town Hall meeting. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. Appreciate that very much. I'm Ken Smith with WRAL and Fox 50. I'm joined tonight by the Honorable Mayor Bell, Mayor Pro Tem Korokomik Fadden, Council Members Eugene Brown, Don Moffitt, Eddie Davis, Dan Cattade and Steve Shul. Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. City Manager Tom Bonfield presented the proposed 2015 budget to the City Council and the public at the May 18 City Council meeting. After that, the City opened the cyber doors via email, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube to begin taking your questions about what you'd like to see included in next year's budget. This E-Town meeting will last about 45 minutes. We've called some questions from the Facebook and Twitter and Facebook and email accounts that we will be giving to our honorable lawmakers tonight. Tonight's E-Town Hall is part of the public hearing process to give you at home as well as those of us in the audience a chance to get your questions answered. Now over the past few weeks, the City Council has heard from several residents about what's proposed in this year's budget, from repaving the streets to making repairs of parks and the fees that are charged in those areas. Tonight we'll hear from City Council members as they provide answers to your questions and hear your concerns before adopting the final budget at the June 15 Town Council meeting. We'd want to make a note of that date as well. Durham continues to be on an upward trajectory all around us. We're seeing changes as apartment complexes and hotels and businesses open throughout the City. I mean, look around when you came in here tonight, you saw the construction and the repairs and the improvements being made to this building. With growth comes more needs. Some are seen as the needs for sidewalks and others are unseen such as water and sewer pipelines. Durham like many other cities still face challenges in making sure that there are enough revenues to cover all the expenses. In other words, making sure that there's enough money to pay for everything the City needs to pay for everything that you need as consumers. That's where you, City Council and the City Administration come in to work together to make those tough decisions. Clearly the resources continue to be limited. So let's get right to some of the questions, again that we've pulled from Facebook, Twitter and email. Mayor Bell, this first question is for you. In the past years, the tax rate kept getting raised for specific things like housing and parks. When the Southside project is finished, will that part of the tax get lowered again? Thank you, Ken, and thank you for the person that asked that question. As probably most of you know, the City has spent a great deal of effort in the revitalization of our downtown area. You can see all that around us. We've been equally important in trying to continue to revitalize some of our inner-city neighborhoods, particularly those neighborhoods that have been depressed for a long period of time. The area that the person is speaking about is Southside, which was formerly Rowland Hills, Southside Community, where we have 140 plus mixed income, truly mixed income apartment development that has already began to be occupied. Part of the funds that we use to develop that development has been from community development block grant funds, which are federal dollars, tax credits, and also from the half-cent sales tax that the council has since property tax that the council voted on specifically for affordable housing. So I would hope that this council and future councils will continue to support that effort, and it doesn't necessarily mean that we would raise taxes, but certainly I don't see us lowering taxes if we're going to continue to work with developing affordable housing in this community, which is vitally needed. Anyone else? Excellent. All right, Mayor Bell, thanks. Next question, how has the General Assembly's decision to eliminate privileged taxes or business license fees impacted the budget, and how will the revenue loss be made up? Councilman Brown, I think you have some thoughts on this. I have several thoughts, not the least of which. This General Assembly is not one of my favorites. Over the years that I have been following state legislatures. And by the way, I worked for the National Conference of State Legislatures in the executive position many years ago. So I know a little bit about how state legislatures should work and how they should. This city actually lost close to $3 million when we were forced by those in Raleigh to eliminate what was called the privileged tax. And indeed, I heard one reason that this was supported is that the legislators in Raleigh didn't like that name, they didn't like privilege. And really quickly, tell folks what the privileged tax is, if you don't mind. Well, it was a tax imposed upon businesses. First of all, fairly, for the most part, small tax that every city had. And every city relied on. And it was installed in order to get revenues from all the businesses, big and small. And it was something that we had counted on in the past for many, many years. So how do we make up for it? And that's a challenge, folks. Close to $3 million, $2.9 to be more specific. So we took, we made up for it by taking one penny, which had been used in the past for debt service on capital, which was about 2.5. And then we took 400,000 from the growth, fortunately, that we had in our sales tax. The negative impact of all of this is that we can now do about 11 to 12 million dollars less per year in capital improvements and projects. And do not ask me because I cannot answer. And the hell the General Assembly did with this money that they got from all of the municipalities, because their record is one of not increasing funding or even maintaining funding for almost anything within state government, including, unfortunately, education. And I think this next question from a resident shares your frustration, and this specifically deals with roadways. This resident said, our streets are abysmal. I'm frequently paying for new tires and getting real alignments monthly. I don't think it's fair that we have to pay so much in taxes when I already pay a higher tax living in Durham due to frequent vehicle repairs. Will the city council reimburse me, or the city rather, reimburse me for all the repairs I have to do because of living in Durham? Or will they start directing more of my tax dollars to street repairs? Let me respond to that. Let's see, what else? Oh, Diane, go ahead. That's your favorite. Good, Diane. I'm sorry. Mr. Mayor, I'd be more than happy to let you respond. Oh, ladies first. Go ahead. Okay. So on the issue of roadways, I think it's important to make sure that the roadways are open to the public. I think it's important to make sure that the roadways are open to the public. I think it's important to make sure that the roadways are open to the public. So on the issue of reimbursing for repairs, that's really a question for the city manager so we can defer that there. But regarding, it is, regarding directing tax dollars to street repair, I will say that this council has focused on street repair. This coming year, we do have $2 million dedicated. This past year that will end at the end of this month, we provided $750,000 for street repair. If you will recall the 2010 bond for street repair, which was $20 million, those funds were expended over 2011 and 2012. And we have been able to repair all neighborhood streets that were rated poor and very poor at the time. We, of course, will be reevaluating and reassessing priority streets and then we'll continue to allocate funding for repaving or resurfacing. This will be on the public works webpage later this fall. Excellent. I appreciate that. I share the concerns for this next resident since many of us at WRI will do a lot of volunteer work with youth, children. This concerned resident says our children are our future and it's imperative that we have programs in place to support them and keep them off the streets. What programs are in place in Durham to offer our youth something they can look forward to, whether it's after school or whatever the case may be. And Mr. McFadden, the school of McFadden, you, I know, have thoughts on this. Thank you. Thank you. Providing year-round positive activities for youth is a high priority for the city council. Our goal is to engage youth through our city departments and support of local non-profits. The Parks and Recreation Department will continue youth care programs offered throughout eight city recreation centers. They include Irwin Holmes, Edison Johnson, Weaver Street, Waltown Park, W.D. Hill, T.A. Grady, East Durham, W.I. Patterson, and their two shared youth sites at Holton Career and Resource Center and the Community Life and Recreation Center at Lyon Park. In addition, the city manager will continue, the city manager's office will continue its partnership with Durham County and Durham Public Schools to fund two positions for the Durham system of care at a cost of $70,000 to us. Also, there is an interlocal agreement with the Durham Public Schools to provide $75,000 to place up to 50 students in summer work opportunities. In addition, we ask that our community mentor our students and also call on those persons who you do business with to provide monies for our summer youth program. Many of them don't know about it, and so I would advise you when you go grocery shopping to ask them or buy clothing or whatever, ask them if they are familiar with the summer youth program. If they aren't, then share that information with them and let them know you will continue to do business with them when they support our youth. That's very important. Because they are doing business in those communities. And it's important that businesses support these causes for our youth. Sure. And the city and county governments cannot afford to employ all of the youth. And so we depend on the public sector, the private sector, I mean, to help with that. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. This next resident writes, the police department has had various listening sessions regarding body cameras. Does this budget include any funding for police body cameras? Councilman Davis, you have thoughts. Yes. Thank you so much, Ken. This has been an issue that has captured national attention, the whole idea of police officers wearing cameras so that there can be a recording of interactions. And we certainly want to make sure that we have that same advantage here in Durham. There have been listening sessions that have been put forth by the police department. And they've been outstanding. The police officers who have been doing the research on this have gone out of their way to share that interaction with citizens who have had questions about the use of the body cameras and those things. So the question really is, as you asked, will the budget that we have now cover the use of the body cameras so that all of the officers will have them? And the answer is yes. But there's a civil lighting to that. In addition to our budget being able to cover those body cameras, we're hoping that we might also be able to capture some of the grants that are being proposed by the Obama administration so that we can indeed enhance our budget with the grants that might come from the federal level. Whatever the funding source is, we want to make sure that that is an issue that is covered here in Durham so that there won't be any issues like what we've seen in other places around. We will have a way to document the interactions that our police officers have with the public. Councilman Davis, thank you. This next question from a resident is about the arts. Why does the city of Durham put $2.1 million toward arts and cultural programs like the Carolina Theatre, the Durham Arts Council, the full-frame documentary festival? Why is that? Councilman Moffett. Thank you very much. I'll let everybody know that I got these questions a little bit earlier this afternoon so I was able to do a little bit of writing and it helps me just to like look at the word so please bear with me. We finance hard services like solid waste collection, police, fire protection that everyone uses or may need to use. We also finance soft services that contribute to the overall quality of life in the city. There are parks and arts and cultural programs that not everyone uses necessarily but which touch our lives in extended ways. The arts stretches mentally. They push us to think and to feel. In the downtown area alone, there's the Durham Central Park, the Farmers Market, the Performing Arts Center, the Durham Bulls, Carolina Theatre and much more. All of them at one time or another have gotten some help from the city. Downtown is now a thriving neighborhood of offices, retail stores, hotels, residences. People want to live here and employers are moving here because of it. Property values are up. There are many jobs we're not so long ago. People didn't even want to walk. Some of those jobs are service related and many of them are professional. Cultural activities like those I've named and the Arts Council, the Full Frame Documentary Festival and others contribute a vital part to the whole community. We'll wait for the siren to go about it. Currently you believe that the arts are important. I will say that's part of the hard planning that we do right there. And clearly the arts are important in your opinion, yes? I think that they are. They're essential to the whole community. So we may not, like for example for myself, I only may go to the D-PAC on occasion or I might go to the Carolina Theatre on occasion, but even when I'm not there, they're still touching my life and everyone else's life in extended ways. They're essential. Thank you. There have been several cyclist deaths this year, this resident writes, what is Durham doing to make sure the streets are safer for cyclists? Constable Shul, you have some thoughts on this. Thank you, Ken. It is true that in the last year we've had four people from Durham die and who are cycling. Three of them in Durham, one of them in Chapel Hill. One of those deaths was about a week ago. And so clearly we have a need for better bicycle infrastructure, safer roads for people who are riding bicycles. And we're doing some things about it in the city and I'll mention a couple of them. One of them is we're spending $120,000 this year, mostly most of it federal money, and we're matching with local money to take both our pedestrian plan, our Durham walks plan and our bicycle plan that we've done a few years ago, update them and combine them into something called a complete streets plan. And that complete streets plan, what that does is it makes complete streets of streets that serve pedestrians, cyclists and cars, all of them, and figures out a really good way and so that study will be coming out in the next year. We're also I think another really important thing is people need safe places to cycle off street. They need trails. And we have 30 miles of wonderful trails in Durham if you've been on the American, raise your hand if you've been on the American tobacco trail. Yeah, almost everybody in the audience, that's fabulous. It is, someone told me recently it was Durham's River, and I think it is. But we need more like that. But just to look at some of the things we're doing for Bicycle Infrastructure, Kim, we're doing about $20 million in projects, mostly federally funded, but about several million dollars in local funds as well. Five large projects in the next couple of years. Old Durham, Chapel Hill Road, excuse me, Hillondale Road from N147 to I-85, Maureen Road, Cornwallis Road from Chapel Hill Road to Roxborough, Fletcher Road, a long portion of that. Fayetteville Road widening from Riddle Road to Barbie, Carver Street Extension our additional projects. Austin Avenue from 147 to Holloway Streets, a state project that will have Bicycle Lanes. And then some, not just building Bicycle Lanes or taking roads that we're expanding the pavement on and building lanes, but also restriping where we can make complete streets, Bicycle Lanes where we don't have to do anything but restripe. And we'll be talking about one of those tonight. If you stay around, you'll really enjoy it. On US-15501 Business, and I think we'll have an interesting discussion of that. But also, Guest Road, Hillsborough Road from Nonstreet to the Bridge over Hillondale, 15th Street from Main to Hillsborough, Chapel Hill Road from Lakewood and Moorhead, Moorhead, North Point Road from Broad to Guest, all these are streets which we'll be restriping to create complete streets and better and safer conditions for cyclists. The last thing I want to say about those this, it really is really, it's really whatever we do with the striping and whatever we do with widening the roads really depends a lot on us. But those of you all who raised your hands, you all like me, most of you cycle, we have to be safe ourselves. Wear helmets and be safe and look, and then cars need to be cognizant of cyclists as well. We need to share the road. Very good advice. And it really speaks to every signature of many people living in the triangle, living healthier lifestyles, walking and cycling and not forgetting motorcyclists as well. Thank you. Some good advice. Mayor, we'll come back to you. This resident said we started going to the full stream motor cogear street garden pit area about once a week. No matter what night we go, there are always cars parked all over the place. Parking probably will only get worse. I would love to see more parking in this area. How does this budget address the need for more parking in places like garden pit area, gear street and the like? Thanks. And I think the question has been raised pretty much reflects what we said earlier about how downtown's Renaissance is really coming alive. Councilman Moff had just talked about the things that are happening there. It's really becoming a place that people want to be. And certainly with the challenges we had in revitalization come more challenges and parking is one of them. This budget specifically doesn't speak to parking directly. There's one little minor thing that the council will be doing shortly and that's raising the on-street parking fees. I was telling the council and city manager, I got a $10 parking ticket down in that area. I paid it. What? Yep, I paid it. But if it goes to $20 like it's being proposed, you won't have bother about me getting another parking ticket. Hopefully that's what will happen to some other people. But we realize that parking is a challenge and certainly the way we've been able to move in the direction we'll have is because there's been public-private parking garages have been put together. That area that you're speaking about is another segment that's going to have a lot of growth and certainly parking is going to be one of the challenges that we're going to have to deal with. We have a parking study. When is it? About this fall? Well, the parking study was already completed but the next phase of implementation will be coming back to the council this fall. So we have an opportunity, that particular time to begin to look more seriously in terms of what's needed for parking. Not just in that area, but in the whole downtown area. Let me make one correction. When I spoke earlier about the affordable housing, I mentioned the fact that the property tax was 1.5 cents. It's really 1 cents. I'm on the chair of the Chancellor's Authority, a Go-Triangle board, and a light rail has been on my mind quite a bit. We have a half-cent sales tax. That's the one-cent property tax that we've devoted dedicated to affordable housing, which brings in about $2.5 million a year. Thanks, Mayor, for that correction. Let's get back to the very candid Councilman Brown. This one is for you. We see brand new hybrid buses on the roads yet many routes are fair free, meaning taxpayer funded and not sufficiently utilized. What are we wasting money to improve, or why are we wasting money to improve an infrastructure that is oversized for the ridership that we have? That may correct the erroneous part of that question. And that is we have no in quote, fair free buses except full city connector. And that was started about five years ago with help from the federal government and from my local congressman at the time David Price. And we're going to try to continue that because that goes into East Durham, which is an area we want to help try to revitalize. We also are getting help from Duke University for that route. But otherwise, unless you are a senior citizen like Choose your words wisely. One or two of us here belong in that category. That's the only fair free bus system that we have. Hybrid buses, is it oversized? Do you have enough ridership? Well, first of all, they're not oversized. They're about 40 feet long, which is the typical bus size. And we purchased several of those about five years ago but I say when we, they were 80% subsidized by the federal government. That just doesn't mean they were free. But only 20% came from the local taxpayers. And I must confess once again in all candor that some experiments work better than others. And the hybrid bus system has really not worked that well. That is to say in terms of efficiency and savings. So we will not be getting anymore. We switched over to what is called clean diesel which I don't think is an oxymoron. Some people may think it is. And that's the route that we're going to continue. Now in terms of overall service believe it or not folks the general bus system carries a little over 20,000 riders a day. 20,000. And yes, the city subsidizes that just like all major cities in this state and throughout the nation. And one reason we do that is to help those who cannot either afford a car or do not want a car but have needs personal and business wise. So we still have one the lowest rates in the state. You can ride the bus for a dollar. Such a deal. So damn good deal. So I think it's important that when any taxpayer asks about a certain service they try to also have empathy with those who cannot afford perhaps what they have to appreciate the fact that as a city we're doing what we can to help all of those who need to get a ride to work first and foremost or to go visit a family or whatever the list can be expanded. So that's where we stand 20,000 passengers a day. Councilman Brown, thanks. This resident writes I'm curious if there's anything for new sidewalks. I live in the 500 block of East Trinity Avenue that cars whizzing by in a fair amount of foot traffic there's nowhere safe to walk. If cars are parked on the street it's even more dangerous because pedestrians have to walk around maybe walking the street. This is all near the semi busy intersection of Trinity and Avondale. Councilmember Khatadi any thoughts on how the budget addresses the sidewalk issues in many of our neighborhoods? Yes, I have a lot of thoughts on sidewalks. It has been a priority for me and it is a high priority for my colleagues in fact for the CIP ranking that we did this year sidewalks were our number one priority. So this coming year we have $350,000 budgeted for petition sidewalk construction which will be used to address the current list of petition sidewalks that are awaiting funding and those are mostly on neighborhood streets. We have $500,000 to be used for construction of new sidewalks that have been prioritized in the Durham Walks plan. There's also another $100,000 for sidewalk repairs throughout the city and as my colleague Councilman Shul already mentioned we're updating the Durham Walks and the bike plan together this coming year and that's fully budgeted through the MPO and as I mentioned with the CIP with sidewalks being our highest priority in the general fund capital funding plan that will be moving forward there's almost $17 million in new sidewalk construction there's just under a million this year because we had a wonderful presentation by staff last week from both transportation and public works and it's really, I'll say mind boggling on how long it takes and how complex sidewalk projects can be they really tend to be street projects so they need a lot of design and permitting so it takes a while but we'll be doing our best to get to them. Thanks. Councilman Katadi thank you. This resident writes I've been reading the preliminary budget and I am shocked that so much of our taxpayer money is devoted to employees why isn't more of this money directed toward alleviating poverty or improving our schools Mayor Pro Tem Cole McFadden most of us, well we don't do schools but if you look at it most of our services are employee driven public works, solid ways, police, fire parks and rec, housing code enforcement all of them have to have people doing that work. However we do have a very capable department of office of economic and workforce development which is responsible for job preparation and placement programs and they do an awesome job doing that. What I would like to offer is that citizens go online and google the workforce development office. It's amazing all the work they do and the programs that they have. We work through the North Carolina Works Career Center system which focuses on preparation training placement and retention of Durham residents and career opportunities especially those in high growth industries and we've earmarked $100,000 for the made in Durham task force so we are making I think good strides in addressing job opportunities and that kind of thing in Durham. But we don't have jurisdiction over the public schools even though we do partner with them around employment opportunities. Understandable. This one comes from a high school student it's good to see our high school students engaged in the process and this really has to do with busing. I'm a student at Northern High School in the culinary program I want to be able to ride the bus in Durham but it takes forever to get home. If I caught it right after school at 2.30 I wouldn't get home until after 4 o'clock, 2.30 to 4 o'clock it takes almost an hour to get to the Durham station because there are over 50 stops on the way. Could you look at doing express routes like Go Triangle does. Councilman Davis you have thoughts on this. I do and thank you so much for the young people in our community who have issues that they want to bring to the City Council. It's delightful to know that we have future leaders operating in our schools right now. I think that we might be able to do some things along the way although we need to distinguish between the Go Durham and the Go Triangle the roles that they play the Go Triangle obviously is designed to get people from one portion of the triangle to another whereas Go Durham the local bus system is designed to get people and to pick them up along the way so I can see the frustration that a person might have with the number of stops that they might have. What I would suggest that the person might want to do is to do some organizing to force their concerns at the City Hall and at the Durham Station to share the concerns that they have so that we might be able to assess and to look at the routes to see if there might be some way that we might be able to adjust the schedule, the bus routes so that people might be able to get from one point to another in a more expedited fashion. But the main thing I think is making sure that we are able to listen and to make the adjustment I think our transportation department works real hard to try to make sure we listen and update the schedule along the way so that we might be able to make improvements that will benefit all of the people including the student who is going from northern all the way to the inner city. Yeah power in numbers, the more people who are concerned about the more people have an issue with it the more things can possibly change on their behalf Councilman Moff, this one is for you Durham seems to have a lot of parks many do not seem to be used very much in other places of lived that have been larger more regional parks that were destinations for people, i.e. New York Central Park and the like. Do we have so many small less useful parks that still require lots of maintenance when resources could be more focused and be more effectively used to improve our parks? Ken thank you again my council member Shul is our liaison to the recreation advisory committee and knows a lot more about parks than I do but I can take a swing at this one. Back in the early days when Durham first began focusing on parks the trend was towards smaller pocket parks to which people can walk. Over time cars have become more prevalent and larger team sports have gained popularity but some of our smaller parks are still heavily used. The first five parks for example is often filled with families and having parks for families can walk is still really important. That said there are other of those small parks that aren't used as much many of that or of those parks were purchased using state and federal funds that required us to agree that the land would be a park forever. Those deals can be unwound but it's very difficult so we tend to continue to maintain them but at the same time it's a little bit easier than trying to unwind those deals. At the same time we do see the need for larger regional parks. We do have two that are mostly wilderness at West Point on the Eno and Leaf Farm and we have other larger parks at Valley Springs where there's two soccer fields and three baseball fields and at Twin Lakes we have one soccer field and where we're planning and working on having more. We see the need for more playing fields in the space for it. So I want to thank the person who sent the question in and parks is just one of the many things that the city does the city funds and one of the things we think is really important. Appreciate that. We just have a few more questions. I know many of you are here for the Blue Cross Blue Shield issue of the budget so we're going to try to keep it moving. One resident writes about the city's legislation efforts over the past few years what is the city doing to encourage continued economic development? Councilman Schuhl. Thank you very much. Excuse me. I think that the questioner is right that we need to be trying to extend the prosperity that we see downtown outside and to the neighborhoods adjoining downtown where we don't have nearly that much prosperity and I think the best way that we as a city can support the prosperity of our businesses is to do the things that our most basic things extremely well. Provide excellent police protection. Provide excellent fire service. Pick up the garbage on time every time. Provide you all with plentiful clean water that comes out of your tap every time you turn it on. Provide the bus service that Councilmember Brown talked about to 20-some thousand riders every day and do it extremely well. All these things, all these basic services done really well, support economic prosperity and I think that's our most basic task. But there are other things we can do too. The mayor has spearheaded the poverty reduction initiative in census tract 10.01 and this initiative focuses resources in education and finance and jobs and housing and crime and health all on this one census tract that is one of our most challenged in terms of poverty. And that's a really important way that sort of focused effort to fight poverty. And then there's some specific things that we do. For example, if you've been to Andrew and Driver Street lately, that corner there, there's a city spent about four million dollars to improve the streetscape and infrastructure to help bring that area back. And then there's neighborhood revitalization and other kinds of neighborhood revitalization like the mayor mentioned about the south side community where housing is the main way in which we're trying to do that. And then there's the most direct ways of always the Office of Economic and Workforce Development takes on. And where there's two million dollars in this budget for employed training, a lot of this federal dollars. Last year we trained about 400 unemployed workers through our City of Durham programs. About 70% of them were placed in jobs. We have a $200,000 grant for training people in ameliorating brown fields and to give them that training. We have 485 young people in our summer youth program. All of these are ways that we can improve the prosperity of our residents. And I could go on, but what I will say is this, that just barely touches on the length and the breadth of our economic development work. There's a lot of it and I think our city employees do a great job of it. Thanks. And this last question from a resident. I purchased my yard waste cart back in 2001 for $90. I got a letter in the mail saying that my fees were going up $1.50 per month, which is the cart rental fee that some people are already paying because they did not buy their carts. Why am I now going to be charged the same as someone who did not buy their cart? Councilman Moffat. Why is that? It's a question of the moment. So very recently for those of you who don't subscribe to the city's yard waste program, very recently the solid waste department sent out a letter and said we're changing the way that we do this system. And when we first started the program a number of years ago, the language that was used was purchasing your cart and people feel ownership over that. But they continue to need repair and replacement and when those carts break people expect the city to step up and replace the cart even though they feel like it's their cart. And starting in 2008 we switched to what was called a rental. I see those as a one-time fee and a monthly fee. And for that fee we've been able to repair and replace the carts. We actually have two different problems that the solid waste department is trying to untangle. The first is we have some people paying one amount and some people paying a different amount. The second problem is that we started out it's an annual program and so it started out saying you make an annual payment but there were people who said that is a hardship and so we also allow people to make monthly payments. But those are actually two different accounting systems that we reconciled. So now I don't know if I should wait for the Actually we can hear you. Yeah we can hear you. In any case now they're trying to untangle all of that. So the cost to the city of handling the yard waste program is not currently covered it's almost covered but in order to untangle all of these it's a single monthly fee for the pickup and the repair and replacement for a single cart and an additional fee for additional carts. And some people use a professional yard service to rake and haul their leaves in the fall to do their pruning and mowing. Some haul their yard waste to the transfer station themselves or hire someone else to do it. Some people live in apartments where the management takes care of it but there are 18,000 households in Durham that buy once a week and haul away any yard waste that's on the curb. We've also made changes that have benefited the subscribers of the service. For example now if you do a major pruning instead of having to bundle it or put it in bags or get in a cart you can move big piles to the curb twice a year call the city and the city will come pick it up and take it away whereas previously not very long ago you would have to pay for that service. So when the dust settles the cost of the service will be just covered by the fees. It's for the carts, the gas in a truck the trucks themselves, the labor the grinding of the yard waste and the hauling of it to a final user. So we're going to by making these changes it places the entire cost on the subscribers who use the service and relieves the taxpayers of that extra burden. So thank you for asking the question. Thank your residents they've been very engaged in the process and that ends the the Q&A session really quickly. I've got a couple of minutes I'd like to give some if not all of you an opportunity for some closing remarks very brief please. Very brief. The candid and very direct. My colleague did a very fine job explaining this yard waste fee and thank you for that explanation. On the other hand I still believe that mistakes are made by government at the local state of federal level and here at the local level frankly I think that's very rare. But we need to admit it. That was a lousy letter that went out it was very confusing it was unclear and I don't know who edited it but I don't think anyone did and it just that letter itself left more questions than answers and so I think we need to belly up and admit that we made a mistake with the content of that letter and we should have had more of what my colleague just said in the copy. So I apologize to you as taxpayers and those of you who receive the yard waste. Councilman Brown thank you. Anyone else closing remarks? Mayor Portem. First of all I'd like to thank our staff for the time they put into making this production possible. So let's give them a round of applause all of them and we'd like to invite our audience to dialogue with our office on youth which has been in place for many many years. We also have a youth commission that has been put in place to advise on matters pertaining to youth in this community and I failed to mention that we have a junior fire marshal program that program is actually recruiting tool for us and when the students reach age 18 they can become firefighters if they pass the other requirements. So please contact our office on youth and thank you again. Thank you all. Thank you mayor. Thank you council members and thank you everybody for being here. One more one more closing remark. I do want to just take a moment. I also want to thank some staff because they labor in the back and that's our whole budget department. So Bertha Johnson is the department director and deserves acknowledgement along with her whole team and I want to thank them for that. I want to tell you that actually there are a couple of people I think you have a notebook if you just hold it up for a moment. This is what the budget looks like right now. It started last fall and went through two days of meetings with council two solid days we were meeting on this then there were coffees with council all over town where people could come and give us their feedback there was budget development public hearing two more days with council where all the department directors came in and talked to us and tonight another public hearing before it's over. So it's a complex process I'm delighted that the manager has come out with a budget that does not require a tax increase. Thank you. The mayor has to say something. The mayor has to have it last night. I think what you witnessed this evening is you know council in action we have a very good council very knowledgeable they do the homework and it's not necessary for me to add anything to it I agree 100% what's been said this evening what's important is that we try to use transparency in what we do we make a great effort to do that we value the comments we hear doing the public hearings we value the comments that we get in the emails we don't necessarily always agree but the fact is we hear them and then ultimately we have to make the final decision but this is a process that we look forward to to a certain extent because it represents pretty much the culmination of the year we take a vacation after this is done and we start back again in July but again we appreciate all the comments that have been made we're still going to continue this Ken we appreciate certainly your participation in this thank you I want to say how grateful I am to see so many people involved in the process thank you for indulging us for this e-town hall meeting you can stay in touch with your city on the website DurhamNC.gov DurhamNC.gov the council will be reviewing the questions that were posted remember the city's portals are always open Facebook, Twitter page the website all the resources and documents referenced tonight will be on the city's website again thank you for coming may I turn the meeting back over to you as we indicated this is a night for the public hearing really we've sort of jumped the gender down to item 25 that sort of public hearing is we're going to continue that to allow for comments from persons in the audience as I indicated earlier if you have comments then assume you've signed up at the clerk's desk do you have comments okay let me ask is it anyone else that wants to speak on this public hearing that has not had an opportunity to do so I need to know the numbers so I can judge the amount of time we're going to allocate to each speaker okay we have one two three five six persons that have signed up to speak as anyone else who wants to speak on this item if not then as I call your name if you would go to the podium to the right we're going to allocate three minutes for each speaker there's a timer right in front of you in case those of you have not spoken and the first person is David Fellereth followed by John Goble followed by Lawrence Brookman followed by Sandy Swinter Center I can't pronounce read the name followed by Juan Castro and Pete Sedan and Gwen Silver as anyone else that wants to speak has not signed up if not then the first speaker will be David Fellereth if you come to the podium to the right and the last speaker will be Gwen Silver again if you just state your name and address for the record my name is David Fellereth and I live at 817 Nancy Street in Durham I am the president of Durham Soccer Council which is a civic group that I helped found earlier this year and I'm also co-founder of Durham Atlético which is the company that operates adult foot saw a league for adult foot saw and very soon in conjunction with Durham Parks and Rec we'll be offering clinics for children we are delighted that the city council is committed to making improvements to our public soccer fields the need for this is well documented just to stay on a par with neighboring North Carolina cities we need approximately a dozen more fields and we're looking forward to working with city council to achieve these goals we urge you to consider expediting the creation of a multi-field complex whether it's at Twin Lakes or somewhere else so that it might be built by 2019 or sooner we know this require raising additional revenue but we think this is vitally important for our community particularly lower income members of our community who have difficulty finding places to play we have a couple of other members of the council who will talk a little bit more about why this facility is important but I would like to make it a slightly different point about budgeting while public funds are scarce and the community needs are many it's important for the council to know that there are private funding sources that can be leveraged to achieve smaller but equally crucial improvements on a faster timeline and this speaks to a little bit to what councilman Moffat was talking about with smaller parks we have been in telephone and email communication with the US soccer foundation which has recognized that one of the challenges in growing the sport around the country is making it possible for lower income communities to participate to that end the US soccer foundation has set up several grant programs to help cities provide better soccer opportunities in urban areas and in lower income communities I want to briefly describe three of them safe places to play kaboom and soccer for success safe places to play is a program to assist in the conversion of existing public spaces into a safe well-lit place to play soccer the support includes the inflation of turf, irrigation lights and artificial surfaces suitable for the 5-a-side variation of soccer called foot salt there are secondly the US soccer foundation has entered into a partnership with kaboom to expand the construction of many pitches in underserved communities in the United States as you know parks and rec already has a relationship with kaboom and this would be a natural way to expand it finally there is soccer for success this program recognizes that having adequate facilities in lower income neighborhoods is only half the battle the other half is having structured funded programs for children and this program supports that thank you and I fell to if you have written remarks if you could leave them with the clerks so it would be also part of the public record and we have an opportunity to look at what's been said next is John Goble good evening my name is John Goble and I live at Two Creek View Lane in Durham I'm the current president of vice president of the new Durham Parks Foundation and I'm the chairman of the open space and trails commission and I'm here tonight to talk to you about trails first I want to thank you for taking the advice of the open space and trails commission on the west elderly creek I understand that we have have some resolution on that issue and we actually have saved some money that we could probably use and that track that project is back on track so thank you for that I also want to thank you for considering the Burton Park Rocky Creek trails from the Kelly Bryant bridge that goes to nowhere that just sits across the highway there we need trails to connect to both end of that and that Bryant bridge structure I'm also pleased that you haven't cut off thinking about the Durham-Duke Beltline I know we have a tiger planning grant that is running a little bit behind schedule I hope that will move forward quickly and get us in the direction of the Duke Beltline I understand that even though trails were the highest priority in the recent trails parks and recreation master plan I understand that not everyone on the city council thinks of trails as a really high priority they are economically and environmentally sound we need to do this for our community and for the health of our students I'm a teacher the health of our citizens will improve greatly if we add more trails and make them accessible for people to use I understand that part of the reluctance is that we perhaps in Dost haven't given you a detailed enough plan for our trails so by the next budget cycle we're going to give you a very bold plan for years for trails in Durham and we will help you in any way we can to raise money to make the public aware and to get these trails built thank you welcome next is Lawrence Brockman yeah, Larry Brockman I live on 1407 Pennsylvania Avenue here in Durham and many of you the city mayor and city council have seen me in the past city manager advocating and talking about greenways and particularly the West Ellaby Creek Trail I've been laboring working with different folks in the community for 10 years along with the city of Durham and so I just wanted to say thank you for the effort and addressing a very difficult land acquisition and easement issue so thank you for providing the backing to the real estate staff to make that happen is that probably in next year we'll start construction of the West Ellaby Creek extension and then hopefully have a final by the 2017 so that's great news and thank you for that support I want to continue to I guess just advocate and ask that you seriously look at and support and we're going to work with different folks we'll be working with John and the Durham open space trails and other neighbors to try to bring more I guess planning and then suggestions for funding over the next year to the city council next year at this time there is one project I want to quickly see I got a minute and 49 seconds there's the North Ellaby Creek Trail this is unlike many other trails in that this would be an unpaved trail now visualize East Club Boulevard in Rocksboro right behind compare foods and big lots and Harbor Frates essentially from that point all the way to the mountains of sea trail you could without a lot of trouble we've got and have a an unpaved trail from that point all the way to the mountains of sea trail and Falls Lake land is almost always owned by public lands either DOT, City of Durham Corps of Engineers and Ellaby Creek Waters Association a person could walk, bike, hike literally from that point all the way down the watershed mostly along the creek on an unpaved trail and the beauty of it is that probably 70% of that land is already or the trail is kind of exist from the City of Durham's surface trails unpaved service roads along the creek where the sewer right away accesses are essentially a trail ready to be walked it needs some planning it needs the City of Durham to staff perhaps look at options and put down on paper we're starting to engage with some of the city planners on it but just wanted to bring this to your attention because there's really an asset very low hanging fruit a fraction of the cost of what it would cost to put an unpaved trail in most anyplace else but it would potentially provide a lot of miles for people to hike, walk, bike and connect the mountains of sea trail so it's something that just wanted to raise awareness of and let you know that that's there without probably a lot of time and money thank you welcome Sandy Swarinton you're going to have to pronounce your last name because both the city attorney and I watched it I watched it publicly he watched it silent Sandy Switzer, I have really bad handwriting I'm the new executive director of the Triangle Land Conservancy I want to speak on behalf of the greenways in the City of Durham on behalf of our partners and really want to reiterate things that Steve and Don and others have said about the importance of trails and open space in the region the Triangle Land Conservancy has protected about 17,000 acres of land in the region and other people I think are going to talk about the economic benefits of trails I will just say that it is obvious that having access to open space is increasingly important as more people move downtown particularly young people who want to also get out and there are a lot of connector trails that could happen in Durham that would lead to larger trails as the previous speaker said I want to reiterate that as well so the Triangle Land Conservancy does land protection not just because we like to look at pretty open space but because the trees on that land and on greenways help keep our air clean the land that is protected along watersheds helps keep our water clean and certainly the health benefits of getting people outside particularly kids but other people exploring the wildlife and nature around us is so important for our sanity I think not to mention our health and with all the Blue Cross Blue Shield people here it's hard not to be thinking about the health benefits of that and they are in fact one of our partners so thank you all and I also want to just talk briefly about the leverage really often if the city can put money towards any of these projects I think you all know that very well it leverages in our case private funds often federal funds so I do hope that you'll continue to protect land for trails for greenways and for hiking and biking so thank you next is Juan Castro my name is Juan Castro and I'm just here to advocate for soccer it's been a situation that we've been through for at least that I know the last 10 years and we as a community it's something that we always love to do and we live with it and in Duran we've been having a difficult time in order to be able to play soccer I play in a group that we support ourselves we've been playing about 8 to 10 years we've been trying to get a feel from Duran which is in lakes and we have paid the city of Duran at least a quarter of a million dollars to play during this time it's been really hard for us you know since we don't have nobody to support us sometimes it's really difficult to go out there get somebody to borrow some money to go to the city and reserve the feel for us and that won't be the biggest concern from my community the biggest concern is that we don't have a place to rent you know we actually just have one feel at this moment in Duran you know and maybe you guys have noticed people play soccer all over that city and another thing that show up lately is that cities close in the soccer fields at 9 p.m and most of the people that plays this sport at least on my community we start working at 7 at night we have no time to play we have one feel and we have no time to play so in another words you know we are playing on every corner that we can find empty space to play so and that's why I decided to come here and see if you guys can really support us on that matter and I know you guys are the ones that can help us to maybe not solve that but give us a hand to the community how to work that out and again I'm not used to do this it's the first time I believe I do it and I decided to do it in the name of all the community that I know is a lot and you know and anybody is invited to go to Twin Lakes on weekends we have at least 500 people there in that field you know I went to the steering committee meetings that you know that they believe or they want the city to have parts full of people go Fridays or Saturdays to Twin Lakes and it will be full of people and again thank you for listening and I hope you guys are going to help us to solve it thank you our next is Pete Sadan good evening my name is Pete Sadan I'm the director of operations as well as one of the directors of coaching for the Triangle Football Club Alliance which is a non-for-profit youth soccer organization that basically caters to 2500 families which close to about 300 are Durham residents and obviously as Juan is addressed and David included I appreciate the councilman's talking about the need for soccer fields as well as athletic facilities as a youth club for us we don't own any of our own fields and we are solely reliant on the municipalities specifically the city of Durham for facilities we've been unable to actually get access to many of the fields therefore we've done more private partnerships with the public's private schools which ultimately is causing us and our kids more money to rent those fields the angle that I really would like to take more about is what an athletic facility can bring to the city as a youth club we host three tournaments during the calendar year one of which brings about 250 teams to the area and by the area I mean Kerry, Holly Springs Fiqua Verena and Raleigh we cannot use any of the fields in Durham at that time that's an October weekend so all the benefit is being put into Wake County the bigger event that we host actually is in the January timeframe over 400 teams 13 different states represented heads and beds there's three nights of the event bring all these people in that event is actually hosted in Fayetteville of all places due to facilities we can't get the fields in this area $1.9 million of economic impact over those two weekends are brought to the Cumberland County area for our members and we're not supporting the hotels here especially in the city of Durham as well as the restaurants and the gas stations so again obviously for us we want the county to look at athletic facilities obviously we want soccer specifically okay but if you guys can look at what an athletic facility can do that's multiple fields in multiple venues we'll bring more people to the area thank you the last speaker is Gwen Silverner is there anyone else that wants to speak that has not spoken if not then Gwen you're the last good evening Mayor Beall, Mayor Pro Tem members of the city council and everyone here this evening I'm Gwen Silver and I'm speaking as a concerned citizen I recently looked at the budgets for the previous year and noticed that they're the budget appropriation for Northeast Central Durham for police protection was removed about 2012 2013 budget cycle and it seems like this budget started about 2004 $50,000 a year appropriation just for Northeast Central Durham that line item and I do have the budgets for 2009 10 1012 1011 and 1112 and it seems that it was discontinued about the year that we had the drive-by shooting where a two-year-old was shot on Driver Street and I'm speaking as a citizen that that line item be reinstated in the police budget for $50,000 moving forward and $50,000 each year until that time I also speak as a person who's worked in Northeast Central Durham last year I clocked close to a 1,000 volunteer miles and I would very closely estimate that about 75% of those miles was worked done in Northeast Central Durham and I think that you would very consider this as a very sincere request and one that's definitely needed it does cover the census area track for your poverty initiative Mayor Bell and I think it will prove to the people in this community that you're very serious about crime thank you so very much and thank you for your consideration you're welcome that concludes the comments on the public hearing on the proposed budget and capital improvement plan and let me ask one last time is there anyone else that wants to speak on this particular item if not let the record reflect no one else asked to speak I'll close the public hearing matters back before the council for any comments or considerations if not, if there are no comments then I would entertain a motion to receive the comments that have been made as a part of the public record so moved second it's been properly moved and second Madam Clerk will you open the vote close the vote it passes 70 this concludes the public comment this council will be still meeting with the administration to develop a final budget I think the plan now is to adopt a budget our second meeting in June two weeks from now in June so again even if you haven't had a chance to speak if there's some thoughts that you have in your mind that you'd like to relate to us certainly feel free to email mail, call on the telephone or what have you as we continue to develop this budget I haven't said that we're now going to move to the regular agenda and the first item on the agenda are the consent agenda items consent agenda items can be approved with a single vote unless a council person or I remember from the public asked for an item to be removed and we'll discuss that later I'll just read the heading of each one of the consent agenda items that would be working okay the first item on the consent agenda is approval of city council minutes two is the recreation advisory commission appointment item three is the Durham Board of Adjustment appointment item four is the Durham Bicycle and pedestrian advisory commission appointment item five is the health benefits performance audit item six is the audit basic financial statements of the city item seven is setting following fees for candidates to municipal office item eight is 2014 annual reports of bicycle and pedestrian advisory commission item nine is the Durham Chapel Hill Boulevard business 15 X 501 road reconfiguration project and I will call that item item 10 is the speed hump policy revisions item 11 is the bid report for April 2015 item 12 is the proposed sale of 2300 Nevada Avenue by upset bid item 10 4496 city track 810 item 13 is the proposed acquisition for the west LB creek trail phase two project acquisition of approximately 0.88 acres and grant of additional greenway use of 0.04 acres of existing utility easement across a portion of 1510 north point drive partial ID 126269 item 16 is the general business agenda item 17 is in a local agreement between the city of Durham and public schools to fund the Durham youth work internship program item 18 is management agreement for a public art project item 19 is resolution to support the upper noose river basin association monitoring for the reexamination of falls lake stage two goals at the proposed funding level item 21 is the telecommunication license agreement with frontier communications of the Carolinas LLC items 25 to 23 items that can be found on the general business agenda for public hearings entertain a motion for the approval consent agenda with the exception of item 9 it's been properly moved and second madam clerk will you open the vote close the vote it passes 7 is 0 we'll move to the general business agenda item 16 is 2015 2016 employee benefits recommendations let me say obviously this is an item there's been a considerable amount of discussion what I'm going to suggest is Mr. Manager unless you have the staff to do otherwise if we could deal with all the items with the exception of the health turn we have 16 people who sound to speak of that so do you want the staff to go through each one of those questions? Sure excuse me Regina could just introduce those topics just briefly I don't think there's too many questions from council members on the various other benefits we'll just rely on council members to ask any questions you might have once you give us a quick overview and leave the health insurance we'll come back to that we'll come back to the health insurance I'm just a Regina Youngblood HR would be the recommendations for all of the benefits as I understand it we're going to talk briefly about all of the benefits that are recommended except for health insurance and then we'll come back to that amount I don't think we need to go through each one of them just give a quick overview and then if council members have a question about anyone in particular we'll come back to more specifics well we did an RFP we received bids from various vendors and all of the selected vendors are recommended in the item that you have before you are there any questions about the benefits? I think this was presented to health insurance subcommittee and there was no questions as I recall on the on those items unless you have any questions I did have a I did have a question on the delta for dental insurance yes what is the question? why did we choose them rather than Blue Cross Blue Shield well we have received hundreds of complaints about the Blue Cross Blue Shield dental benefit over the last year delta dental provided a proposal that we thought was sound the size of their network far exceeds the size of the Blue Cross Blue Shield network and so although the administrative fees may be more expensive for delta dental we believe that through claims being lower because more of the claims will be handled in network we'd make up the difference my understanding was that there was primarily one complaint one of the major complaints had to do with the out of network yes there was a change in Blue Cross Blue Shield policy last year where they no longer provided advance payment or direct payment to out of network providers and so that one particular issue generated hundreds of complaints so my understanding is that they are willing to change that they have made that but they did provide that as a proposal after the RFP process it was not a part of their original proposal I understand that that's my only question my only reservation about this so I just want to make clear that in addition to the particular item that was of concern we also made the recommendation for delta dental because of the size of their network let me are there other questions on those items we do have one again let me for those of you who may not attend our meetings this is not a public hearing item public hearing items are where you just saw us go through the budget process where persons who sign up to speak allow it to speak but given the importance of this being a general business agenda it's a particular item if you sign up for this item and I have one person that had signed up Kurt Latia CEO and those on the dental delta dental of North Carolina if that person is available you have three minutes to make comments respond to any questions that the council may have thank you Mr. Mayor Madam Mayor Pro Tem honorable members of the city council and citizens of Durham my name is Kurt Latig I'm president and CEO of North Carolina we are based in Rawling and I've been there for four years now we have been in business since 1970 and as Miss Youngblood has mentioned we do have the largest network of dentist in North Carolina as well as throughout the United States that bring the broadest access to affordable care as a matter of fact right here in Durham we have the largest network exceeding 34 by 34 percent more dentist in our network than your current carrier if you want to boil that down to tell me in dollars that would generate an additional $160,000 in savings per data that was provided to us through the open bid process in the RFP over what your current carrier is providing just because of that larger network I'd also like to draw the council's attention to the fact that in 2011 Durham County had commissioned a health assessment a listening session in 10 community centers across this county including Little River Community Center Emily Kay Community Center and out of that listening to the citizens they were asked what health issues impact you and your family and your neighbors the most in Durham County the third highest ranked item by these citizens was access to medical and dental care so again with the largest network we're taking care of that issue by providing broader access to dental care for your employees at more affordable rates unless there are questions but recognize Mayor Pro Tem good evening sir how are you I'm well thank you what is your company's commitment to assuring a diverse workforce we are very committed to a diverse workforce Madam Mayor Pro Tem what does that mean that means that we have diversity amongst female and male as well as different races into our workforce as a matter of fact looking at the selected vendors I know per the data that we had to provide we were on par with female diversity as well as African American diversity specifically I recall amongst females in our company how else do you contribute to Durham besides providing affordable dental care to employer groups and citizens in this city and in this state we also began and very proud of the fact that three years ago our mission is to improve the oral health of the communities that we serve we started three years ago a program called Smiles for Kids and through that program we issue a call for grants for organizations throughout the state that provide either oral health education or oral health services to underserved children in our communities I'm very pleased to say that two years ago there was a clinic actually here in Durham that we gave $5,000 to that's provided oral care to underserved children children who do not have access to oral care and we know that 51 million hours are lost every year in the country by children who have oral health issues because they miss school for that pain or that care so we're very proud of our Smiles for Kids program and growing it into the future thank you sir thank you madam are there other questions? thank you thank you Mr. Mayor sure what I'm going to do is to as probably some of you may know this item was bought to the City Council at the last work session I guess normally the process is that these items go through a committee the committee being the insurance committee the insurance committee had heard the presentations from the staff however the insurance committee had not made a recommendation to the full body I asked that it go back to the insurance committee for further discussion and then to come back and report to the City Council its recommendation what I'd like to do is to hear from whoever is the chair of the insurance committee to make their report and then we will continue with discussion and again I have persons up to speak on the health issue primarily with the health insurance part so at the appropriate time what I recognize those but I'd like to get the report back from the insurance committee at this time thank you Mr. Mayor I am the chair of that committee Mr. Davis and Mr. Shul are also members at our meeting last Thursday the majority of us which are the two Mr. Davis and I voted to go with Blue Cross Blue Shield of North Carolina there were some questions that Mr. Davis had and I think they must have been answered and we stick with that recommendation and I'd like to move that we go with Blue Cross Blue Shield there's been property moving second and now the question is open and I would recognize questions from council persons if there are questions I think it's been property moving second and now I'm entertaining questions on the motion we're going to have an opportunity to hear the people I don't want to hear what the council has to say first before I call the question is there a minority report from this committee I don't know if you call it a minority report but I did vote for the staff recommendation for the and be happy to discuss that whenever the mayor feels like it's appropriate appropriate now I want to get to the conversation with the council and then we have an opportunity to hear from persons that signed up to speak and then hopefully come back and take action on item so I recognize council first I guess I'm just a little bit confused originally I thought you were asking about all of the recommendations except for health then we got to talking about dental and I'm not sure if the motion was for dental or for health let me say what I asked for I asked the manager to have the staff person to present all the items that have been proposed and ask are there any questions on any of the items the only question out here was on the dental insurance and she responded to that and you've heard the CEO speak to that no one else responded to any of the items in her portfolio the health insurance was the one that I was holding out for a specific discussion based on first the recommendation from the insurance committee now discussion by the council and to hear from the public and then back to the council to make a decision so if you want to discuss the health insurance it's appropriate now it's another item you want to speak to Mr. Mayor would it be appropriate for me to ask a question or to make a quick comment about the health insurance it would but I want to make sure the council will mark it since he's raised the question Ken I just wanted to ask the mayor for Tim if you were the motion you made was to go with Blue Cross was that for the dental well for that too well I think we need to be specific it's the motion the motion for the health insurance or dental insurance well I reported that the report that I made dealt primarily with the health piece because that was a controversial piece excuse me the health the health discussion to help part of the portfolio of items that the administration has unless you have another item that you want to speak to that has been spoken to I'm a little uncertain of the process because normally the motions come at the end of the discussion is what I've seen so I'm just not sure where we are right now but as long as we have discussion a motion was made in a second and I entertained that so we had a motion in a second it's on the table for discussion so that's where we are now and I think Councilman Brown wanted to know if there was a minority report Councilman Sewell said he didn't know if that's what it was but he was in the minority so he was ready to make his comments so that's where we are Mayor yeah I'll there's a lot of detail here and it's complicated but and I'm appreciative of all the people that are here today from Blue Cross Blue Shield and we had a group also at our insurance committee and we've gotten a lot of emails from Blue Cross Blue Shield folks which I'm very appreciative of and many of them describe in a lot of detail your commitment to your company and your commitment to your city and I appreciate that very much and I want to say that for the last three years we've since in this recent contract with Blue Cross we've had I think very good service and I think our administration agrees with us with that and their report to us on the insurance committee that we've had a really good service in Blue Cross and I certainly have felt that way myself those of us on the council are also on that plan and it's been a very I think it's been really good I think the our staff did put out a request for proposal as we do on many many things in the city constantly to try to get the best deals that we can for our tax payer and in this case also for our employers and two significant bids one from Etna and Duke and a kind of combination ACO plan and the other from Blue Cross and both of them are substantially better than the plans we have now in terms of cost and quite comparable in terms of benefits if not better this I think first of all I want to say speaks very highly of our staff under the current kind of configuration of these plans it looks like whichever one we take we'd be saving in the somewhere in the area of 7 to 10 million dollars over three years from the current Blue Cross Blue Shield rates that we have the last figure I heard was about 8.9 million but again this is a kind of moving target and but I commend our staff Miss Youngblood for taking the initiative to issue the RFP and getting the competitive bids Mr. Mayor my support of the my support of the Etna and Duke ACO plan is pretty simple I can talk in more detail when we get into that kind of discussion if necessary but it has to do with what were the benefits to our taxpayers and to our employees it's a very good plan not only is it a very good plan but it is a plan that according to our staff's estimates and they've been asked to do lots of different estimates over the last week will save us under according to the numbers that we have the most recent numbers depending upon what happens somewhere between 2.7 to 4.7 million dollars in the next three years some of these figures are under debate I would say and I have spent some time today again talking to our staff as a member of the insurance committee trying to really understand this talking to Miss Youngblood and I think I understand it pretty well now but I think for that's a lot of money and even though Blue Cross Blue Shield truly is the hometown company in this situation I know that I feel that my first obligation is to our taxpayers and to our employees our employees under this plan would be getting a 15 percent premium reduction in the first year very substantial reduction and the savings to our employees and taxpayers is very very significant the other thing I want to say is our staff has no incentive to do anything actually in terms of their own work except for pick Blue Cross because if Blue Cross is not picked a tremendous amount of work has to be done to re-sign up people for the new plan so our staff even with this incentive all the extra work that our staff is going to have to do was able to objectively look at this and say you know here's the best plan for our city for our taxpayers and for our and for our employees and I admire that I admire that the fact that they did take that independent stance even though I think for them and for all of us there's no incentive for anybody up here certainly not for me to pick anything but Blue Cross because Blue Cross is the hometown company and a tremendous corporate citizen here but I have to balance that against the savings that our taxpayers and our employees would realize and they're very very substantial and I think that's my responsibility and so if we get into the details Mr. Mayor I'm ready to say more that's the basic case that I have for the supporting the staff recommendation Any other comments? Thank you Mr. Mayor I would like to start the general discussion by your commission asking the two CEOs of these two fund companies if they are here and I'd like to start I have one question for each company a different question but I'd like to start with Blue Cross either Steve Chris or Brad Wilson Great As Blue Cross comes forward let me just share with the council we have two persons that have signed up to speak that are head of the well represented organization Mr. Mayor Mr. Tracy Baker and obviously Brad Wilson so I just want to make the staff where it's there in the audience Mr. Wilson thank you for coming this evening and bringing a few reinforcements but and thank you for submitting a proposal but that goes to the heart of my question and I've heard this from all the colleagues as well because I think it was correctly if I'm wrong but three years ago four years ago when we went through this exercise and at that time Mr. Wilson Blue Cross was in a competitive bid with another company and you kept coming back with different proposals and that has happened once again and I don't you know with all due respect I'm reading a message here email from Steve, Chris this morning I guess the latest document that you sent our staff was let's see now what's today Monday I think they got it last night and it just raises a question about the overall professionalism of your company and why don't you give us your best shot first the activity that yielded the email of I guess last evening to the staff and then subsequently to the council arose out of the insurance committee meeting of the other day that after a robust it was about two hour conversation as the committee wrapped up and I'll ask any one of the members of the committee or the staff to correct me if my recollection is incorrect that two members of the committee said to the staff we want you to validate and verify what at that time was around a $2.4 million number that actually was favorable to Blue Cross Blue Shield that was the end that was right at the end of the meeting and please go forward and verify that number at least from my observation that was obviously undertaken pursuant to the council's directive or the committee's directive and I'm assuming that the staff's recommendation or the analysis of the numbers were sent to both parties both Aetna and us and that came in somewhere around 5 o'clock on Friday so work was undertaken over the weekend to take a look at that analysis and because we believe the numbers had shifted from that which was presented to the committee on Thursday we went to work to figure that out did so and at the earliest opportunity when those numbers had been calculated got them back to the staff and back to the council now part of our energy here is around the fact that we share your common goal and that is to bring the highest quality lowest cost quality service to the city employees there are lots of numbers here and we can certainly and happy to go into them but as I stand here tonight that information that was submitted back to you and back to staff from our perspective played off of the same set of numbers that yielded the conversation at the insurance committee on Thursday some corrections were in fact made an adjustment was made in a key term that produced what in our view is a result that we needed to respond to so as we stand here tonight we believe the documentation supports and the analysis supports apples to apples as best you can bring apples and apples together in this very complex circumstance that on a good day the blue cross blue shield proposition is I'm going to round it up so I don't have to filter through my papers right now a million dollars better and on a bad day somewhere around 100,000 so that would be why you saw this last flurry of activity all stimulated by the question the appropriate question very good question that was asked by the members of the insurance committee as they concluded their work on Thursday thank you so much for that answer but I think you will have to admit too that you made an additional change major change once the debate the discussion the dialogue on this issue started we have revised our proposal throughout the process we are unaware of any rule that says that that is appropriate or illegal or can't be done and in fact after the first meeting of the insurance committee I'm sorry committee I made inquiry about whether or not if additional information was forthcoming from us would it be appropriate and would it be considered and I was assured that it was appropriate and it would be considered and we said about that course one reason for that is again let me remind you this is our hometown we have a lot of emotion around this and a lot of commitment around it and we want to do everything we can to bring you the highest quality and the lowest cost product and we believe that's exactly what we've done and we believe that the weekend analysis yields that result I would further more argue to you at least the modest difference if you want to take the weekend's work is essentially immaterial as the council looks at the totality of the circumstances and all of the change including but not limited to all of the change that is going to be brought to the city employees as these changes are made not just in the health piece but in many many of the other changes that are on the table for council approval tonight so I'm happy to continue my advocacy but let me just stop I think I've over answered your second question and I'll hush thank you so much and again for your proposals and then I'd like to have the Aetna representative here please yes and my name is Tracy Baker and I'm the president for Aetna for four states one of which is North Carolina and I reside in Cary, North Carolina great thank you and also thanks for your proposal thank you for your willingness to want to do work with the city of Durham we're glad you're here I guess Tracy the question I have in some ways does not directly affect you but can anyone you included is your CEO still Mark Bertolini I'm just looking at this holistically in terms of how corporations work and where their profits go and so on is there any reason that you could tell us why he received compensation in 2013 in the amount of 30.73 million dollars which is the figure that I received from Morningstar I am not personally familiar with his compensation I apologize for not being able to answer that the same year Mr. Wilson who just spoke to us received compensation of 2.9 million not familiar with his compensation either me too well believe me no one is crying in their beer about any of these salaries but I just wonder what that tells us about your company now in 2013 you should have known because it did drop to be fair which I always try to be it did drop to round numbers 15 million compensation and probably I would suggest that part of that was due to the ACA the Affordable Care Act but I would think that any good Board of Trustees would recognize this was coming down the pike indeed it was submitted in 2010 got off to a very rocky start we all agree with that and frankly none of the insurance companies were very excited about it but so it dropped from 30 to 15 but that tells me that you know something's amiss with your Board of Trustees that they would go ahead and compensate him compensate him as the CEO to that relatively high level knowing that probably the next year wasn't going to be a good one and again to be fair Blue Cross lost money too with the ACA but I hope you understand the nature of my question too I'm just not in a position to answer I apologize for that Thanks I have questions but I want to make sure my colleagues have an opportunity well let me say I did not participate in the insurance committee in fact I was out of town I didn't get back in town until late Saturday and I spoke to one of the staff first on Sunday and I asked they would send me the information that they had and I told them I didn't know if I would be able to look at it but to send it the fact is I just scanned it but today I had a little bit more time to really look at it and asked them to send me the spreadsheet because they sent me a PDF and I couldn't do very much with a PDF but I wanted to understand the numbers a little bit closer in terms of what was being done and I would say first of all those are based on assumptions a lot of assumptions and I need to understand assumptions a lot clearer so I guess my question is for the staff when I look at the three-year projection and I guess I can do it by line items the first one speaks to the fact that you have an expected billing charges and I guess to be apples to apples you assume that the billings were going to be saying this is going to be understanding the fact in the 5% that's correct each company what I didn't quite understand was the item which speaks to enrollment percentage in ACL whereas you allocated 70% for Etner and 60% for Blue Cross Blue Shield could somebody explain to me sure, both of those numbers in the best case scenario that you're referring to I'm looking at the best case right now right and so the 70% participation rate in the ACL for Blue Cross Blue Shield excuse me for Etner is tied directly to the fact that we know that we already have 70% of our claims running through their Duke ACL network and we don't know all of the entities that are a part of the Blue Local Network because they're still under a non-disclosure agreement but what we do know is that Blue Cross Blue Shield disclose to us that roughly 60 to 61% actually of our claims are running through their Blue Local Network as proposed and so the best case scenario assumes that we're going to have all of the people that are currently using Duke facilities sign up for the ACL network good so the number of those 70 and 60 numbers came from the providers correct so we're going to take a little bit more part just to make sure that I'm clear about it and we also made it a valid assumption that we would have less enrollment in the Blue Local product because it's a bit more restrictive they offer a two tier model either you're in the Blue Local Network or you're out of network with the Etner proposal you have three tiers of coverage within the Duke ACL you can go to a Duke ACL provider both of those can be accessed before you hit out of network well that was the next question I was going to ask need to understand a little bit more about the tiers and why you would expect that because one company has three tiers that weren't defined here but you just told that automatically people would sign up for that tell me how many employees or city employees are eligible for health insurance how many city employees all full-time employees are eligible for health coverage as well as part-time employees that work at least a thousand hours can you tell me how many actually taking part in the health insurance program a total number that are taking part in the health insurance I don't have that number in my head but I can pull that up for you in one of my let me tell you why I'm asking that question if we know that people are where they are today about 2,200 so we've got about 2,200 and what would you expect the number to be if we change to the number in our proposals we're assuming the same number so we've got 2,200 people in both plans right but we're just assuming a different percentage of them are going to choose the new ACO product and come out of the core of the basic products that are also going to be off and that's what I'm trying to understand why the 60% come from Blue Cross and 70% came from Etna that's correct that's important because it's part of it's in the documentation that they provided in a response so to about 22 questions that we'd previously asked them so Blue Cross is saying that 60% of 2,200 would go to them and you're projecting based on what Etna said that 7% it's based on the claims that are currently so what both providers did was they looked at the claims that we had over a 12 month period Etna ran them through their established Duke ACO network and they were able to show us that 70% of the claims that we experienced over that 12 month period were already going through Duke ACO network providers and some information was provided later by Blue Cross Blue Shield when they proposed their Blue Local Model and they said that they had 61% of the claims going through that Blue Local Model well I'm going to pencil that because that's obviously one contention here can you explain to me the discount level the discount what is that you have 56% for Etna and 53% and so what we were attempting to do here is take an objective evaluation of both of the proposals that were submitted to us and we reduced both of the discount percentages that the providers had given to us based on our estimate of what was likely to occur so at 70% participation you would guarantee a 56.10% discount rate for Etna and at 60% participation what we were assuming and this is well let's start with year one in year one for Blue Cross Blue Shield there would be no ACO product available so we would basically be operating our standard core and basic benefit but what they have guaranteed us in year one is a 53.89% discount rate guarantee in the best case scenario we're assuming that they're going to be able to deliver that their actual discount rate for us it's been 50% so in the best case scenario we're giving them credit for being able to achieve the target that they said they would achieve in year one in year two with 60% participation we've increased the discount rate slightly but not to a level that Blue Cross Blue Shield reported to us because again their current discount for us is 50% 56% would be excessive so we ratcheted that back to 54.8% in the best case scenario because again there were assumptions that they're making about what they're going to be able to deliver for us and we had to objectively conservatively roll that back and we did the same with the Etna numbers I don't have to tell you but the reason that's important is because we're getting down to what is really allowed insurance coverings and so if you have it higher than that it's going to mean that your allow number is going to be a lot smaller which is what we're dealing with so I guess again a question for me and should need to be confirmed by Blue Cross as to whether or not the 53.89% is a valid percentage I mean I've heard what you said but they're making a proposal and they need to understand that these are the numbers we're basing our assumptions on so does someone prepare to speak to that sure Good evening Mr. Mayor Madam Mayor Pro Tem members of council to your question sir the number first off I'd like to make a correction the 2014 data which is what this entire RFP was based on has an effective discount for the city of Durham 2014 at 51.1% so the data that we've been working on is 51.1 with respect to the discount for 2000 the first year if you will the first 10 months that number of 53.89 in addition to the number of 56.9 which is the assumed 60% enrollment has been actually attested by Ryan Link one of our staff actuaries so this is not sales folks making up these numbers these are actually attested numbers to the existence of the blue local product would be my second point well let me understand so you're confirming that 53.89 is correct is actually attested to you in addition to the blue local subsequent year 2 and year 3 third comment would be I think this is a very important point of clarification the percent of claims that run through either the Aetna ACO or the Blue Cross Blue Local ACO product the percent of claims is 70% per Aetna 61% per our analysis that is very different than what the assumption is of the enrollment by staff throughout this process staff has assumed the enrollment to be 60% now there's a myriad of ways you can get to a 60% enrollment you can make the benefit design richer which is inherent let me cut you off what are you saying the enrollment is as a staff has protected is it higher or lower for Blue Cross Blue Shield we for the purposes of apples to apples in a level playing field we would assume that the enrollment would be 60% and here's why you can drive enrollment with a $0 contribution for instance if you walked into an employee and said here before your coverage was going to cost $15 per paycheck and now Blue Local the cost of the insurance is $0 you might see 80% enrollment just for the attractiveness of the paycheck deduction so who better to make that assumption than staff let me ask again the staff has said for 2015-2016 it's 10 months because we talked about June to July so they're saying you got 3 months in this year and 7 months in 2015 when they say you don't have the ACL they've indicated that their enrollment would be 0% and you're saying it's not 0% no no I agree with that that's correct because we wouldn't have the product but what we are contending and to Mr. Brown's challenge we received the spreadsheet Friday evening we noticed two key inputs that had changed one was the ADNA enrollment assumption went to 70% and therefore the discount for ADNA jumped increased and for Blue Cross if you look at our proposed discount guarantee at a 60% enrollment it has always been 56.9 I asked the question of why was it changed to 54.8 I'm talking about the year 2 yes sir year 2 and year 3 year 1 it's a given that the product won't be available to city employees so year 2 and year 3 that is our contention which is hey all along since May 22nd following the city council work session where we were asked to provide greater detail to the accountable care organization that number has been 56.9 at the 60% enrollment rate and so when you plug those values in to Mr. Boyd's spreadsheet to Mr. Brad Wilson's comment earlier the financials of this offer actually swing in our favor to the tune of 940 some odd thousand dollars which was the spreadsheet that we're happy to hand to the clerk a hard copy to distribute to staff okay let's continue so 54.8 should be 56.9 and where that number is and therefore you're saying that you have a larger allowed amount than what's being proposed with Epner now the staff also showed that tell me what is the run out administration what is that if we were to switch from Blue Cross Blue Shield to Etna there's some claims that are currently in process that Blue Cross Blue Shield would need to carry through to their to handle the administration of those run out claims okay and again that's for this year only one year and you've made it the same zero for each one okay explain to me this core coordination fee $4 per person $4 PM PM how do you get to that so through the Etna proposal they would charge us for the administrative fee of coordinating care through their Duke Well program and that's $4 per employee per month the Blue Cross Blue Shield proposal waived that care coordination fee so that's why you don't see an amount for Blue Cross Blue Shield so this is what it would cost us in care coordination fees $168,000 with the Etna plan okay the next item was the total ASO fee net of allowance so that's the administrative fee since we're self funded the only thing is the cost for the Etna proposal is approximately $27.50 per employee per month the cost of the administrative program excuse me administrative fee for Blue Cross Blue Shield is $31 and one cent per employee per month the note that it's net of allowance is an additional cost is in the Etna proposal they're giving us credits to our administrative fees in all three years $82,500 in the first year and credits of $75,000 in year two and three in the Blue Cross Blue Shield number we've added $50,000 to the cost because in year one they would not have an ACO but they would want us to participate and fund an incentive program and the cost of those incentives would be $50,000 so the net of it is Blue Cross Blue Shield is $976,000 versus Etna being $790,000 that's right can I have a comment from Blue Cross Blue Shield on that cost because that's a pretty big number yes sir so in the scheme of things if you will the administrative fee as a percentage of the entire city spend on this item is about .4% so I would never tell you the $200,000 or how much that is is not a lot of money but the real savings for the city is a lot of savings and not in what it costs to administer the program okay that still is a large number that we're having to deal with can you explain item I the expected ACO savings as percent of allow yes so because of the care coordination we would expect through the ACO we would expect some additional savings above what's proposed in the discount guarantee and so the number that we've assumed here is 2% savings for the Etna ACO in year 1 3% for Etna in year 2 and year 3 1% for Blue Cross Blue Shield in year 2 there's nothing in year 1 because again there would be no ACO available and then rising to 2% in year 3 and the assumption of a lower percentage is one we've got lower participation assumed for Blue Cross Blue Shield ACO product and we wanted to recognize that Etna's ACO will have three, four years by the time Blue Cross Blue Shield is able to launch their ACO in the market Etna's program will be functioning for four years and there will be additional providers and additional ability to coordinate care across a larger number of providers so that's what that percentage is meant to reflect. Mr. Mayor could I get a comment on that please I would welcome the chance to respond to that so what these ACO savings represent are incremental improvements in care coordination frankly if you look at $700,000 roughly divided by the number of members that the city represents which is close to 5,000 divided by 12 you come up to about a $17 per member per month additional value assuming Blue Cross does nothing well that is a huge assumption because in our latest report to city staff we had a $22 per member per month savings as a result of care coordination with the pharmacy disease management case management Mayor Pro Tem Cole McFadden had given the example of a nurse reaching out to her following a potential surgery situation that is an example of the outreach that the city currently enjoys today and for the reason and for that reason we are unsure why there is additional value for trade for Etna moving forward I gave the example of a subcommittee meeting that that savings number would presume that a doctor at Duke would treat an Etna patient who is a city employee differently than someone who is carrying a Blue Cross and Blue Shield ID card I am not convinced that a doctor at Duke knows which insurance you have I do need to clarify one statement just to make sure that we are clear on this latest analysis it is meant to only address savings that we currently enjoy so it would not reflect any savings that we currently enjoy through Blue Cross Blue Shield care management program those are already figured into the claims cost that is being proposed at the top next question you probably answered that but just tell them again item L benefit improvements as a percentage of allow and the question was 23% right so with the Etna model one of the things that Etna put in their initial proposal was a suggested way to make the value of the benefits richer for employees so that they would not only enjoy lower payroll deductions but they would also enjoy lower out of pocket benefits and so the cost of making those benefits richer to entice individuals into signing up for the Duke ACO would be approximately 3% of the allowed cost the Blue Cross Blue Shield plan did not include a proposal or recommendation actually that we make the benefits any richer the Blue Cross Blue Shield proposal in fact suggested that we make the steerage into the Blue Local program exclusively based on premium differences but we wanted to make sure that we weren't just making a benefit to the bottom line of the city we wanted to make sure that our employees were being taken care of and not just getting a quality benefit but also one at a most affordable price and so we proposed to steal to enrich the benefits on the Blue Cross Blue Shield plan which does cut into some of the savings that they've proposed that we would make and so because there's lower participation assumed in the Blue Local product that's why the benefits enrichment costs for the Blue Local product is less Now I'm going to ask Blue Cross Blue Shield because Brad you made a statement I think that what you guys had done showed that there was a positive savings to the city above the Etna savings and none of these numbers reflect that I have here so do you have something you can share with the council in terms of what your spreadsheet looks like yes so if we may submit this to the city clerk well at the same time I want all the council people to see it so can you hand that out I've gone through the spreadsheet that the staff provided me and the remarks that Brad made he alluded to the fact that they had gone through the spreadsheet also and the net of it is their numbers showed a positive that Etna was proposing and I'm asking the spreadsheet so I could go through the spreadsheet and understand what assumptions they made to come up with that so is this the spreadsheet yes sir it's on the back so if I may Mr. Mayor on the back of this document the first is just the description of the document on the back at the top level is the finance spreadsheet we need Friday evening around 5.30 for Mr. Boyd and you'll notice the lines B which is enrollment percentage in the ACO and then in the blue line which is the discount level those are the input values that had been changed this is a pretty elaborate spreadsheet so kudos to staff for its creation so as you change those inputs the bottom blue box number which shows the 2.6 million dollar advantage is the best case scenario presented by staff on the lower half of this page is simply the following restoration of our assumptions all along which is the enrollment in the ACO product for both Blue Cross and Etna would be 60% and at that enrollment rate the discount for Etna and Blue Cross would be what it's been up through May 28 when did we have the insurance subcommittee so what we were saying is we were surprised that the enrollment percentage changed and that our discount was adjusted downward those are significant assumptions to be made in this document and Mr. Brown I understand sort of the last minute presentment of this document but we felt like that this was very material to our case because if you simply restore those two values as the bottom blue box indicates the advantage to Blue Cross is actually 946,000 so if the enrollment percentage stays 60% and both Etna is awarded its discount assumption at 60% and Blue Cross is awarded its discount assumption at 60% the net result is a 946,000 advantage to Blue Cross those were the that was the point of Brad Wilson if I could just supplement I'm sorry Brad excuse me I just like to get clarity from staff my understanding was that the 70% in the first column for 2015-2016 came from running our actual claims so that 70% really isn't up for negotiation that's the number that you got that is correct and I do want to be fair Mr. Christ is aware of our previous analysis where we were assuming a 60% enrollment rate but as tasked by the insurance subcommittee on last week we were asked to speak specifically to the latest set of numbers that we received from Blue Cross Blue Shield that showed a $2.8 million savings over the Etna proposal and so in trying to do that we thought the best way to represent the information was in a best case versus worst case scenario the 60% participation had been a middle of the road we were attempting to make a conservative estimate at that particular time but we know that 70% of our claims are going through the Duke ACO network and so a best case scenario would be 70% enrollment I do also want to point out on Mr. Christ analysis all of the values what was not restored was the actual discount rate that would be associated with the 60% for Etna it should be a higher number I don't know what it is right off the top of my head I don't know if Etna can speak to it with all due respect throughout every document it has read 55.3 so I was just simply referencing that these might seem to be nuances but they're making a difference in this line that we're getting down to which is what's the loud amount in terms of the insurance because everything else builds off of that so I'd like some clarification as to what number is the one that's acceptable and what not Mr. Mayor if I could just supplement Steve and the great work that staff has done if you focus and thank you for all your very insightful questions I would urge you to think about it this way line up an assumption is exactly what the word means and it's an educated assumption and I get the science behind all the assumptions that have been made but at the end of the day it just appears to me if you want to do an apples to apples comparison the assumptions have to be the same otherwise by definition you're going to get a different result because the assumption is different therefore the reason that we did the work over the weekend to realign the assumptions and it comes out with the result that Steve has just spoken to what I'd like to say that I didn't say a minute ago is what I discussed or we discussed with the insurance committee if the council is nervous about the assumption being equal and you're wondering whether or not we can get to 70 versus 61 accept our number believe it we believe it put it in the contract and if we fail to get there we're accountable for it I call that the risk mitigation what does that mean you're accountable for it what it means is if you hold us to the number we're submitting to the council again 940 some thousand if you use that set of assumptions and run it out five years that that will be the difference in the contract if it goes I think it's three years three years it's a hundred and change pick your term say that blue cross blue shield that's what we're gonna make we want you to deliver that you said that you're 940 some thousand dollars better then we're gonna put it in the contract and if you're not you're gonna have to come up with the difference we believe our numbers I don't know any other way to address the variation and assumptions because we can pick whatever assumptions that we want and put them on whatever line we want this is three years not five years three years I don't have anything in front of me I just wanted to say the same thing to the council that I said to the insurance committee about the conviction of belief that we have behind the numbers that we have run as Steve have said we have actuarial attestation that was requested and we're happy to have provided that this is not a sales pitch it's been validated hence the reason we believe it hence the reason we're ready to stand behind it in a contract and move beyond a debate about what's the right assumption on what line it's the bottom line that counts the quality of the service and I would argue to you the lack of disruption to the city employees I'd have to turn to our attorney to question how you write that into a contract and what validity it has I'd have to wait until all the terms are settled but I think what I heard was fairly clear and unequivocal and we could certainly work with the staff to dot all the i's and cross all the t's on that particular issue but I'd again have to hear more about what the actual terms are going to be I can ask councilman Davis thank you and as a member of the insurance committee that was what swayed me that comment that was made by Mr. Wilson at the committee that they would guarantee that the city would not lose any money and that they would guarantee through a contract that the Blue Cross and Blue Shield would end up being better for Durham or they would pay through this contract they would make and for me if that can be guaranteed legally it solves a lot of the problems for me it would take away the whole issue of risk for the city it would allow us to make the best decision for our employees and for the citizens of Durham and it would allow us to continue to work with a firm that is located here in Durham, North Carolina so that was what swayed me to ask them to put together this plan to make sure that they could present it to our staff and to us and for me that is the real crux of the matter Well look, have you finished Eddie? Yes Have you finished? That sounds appealing I guess the question that I have for the staff is the bottom line in terms of what we're expecting the total plan to cost us that's what we got to pay that's what you're basing the fact that employees are going to have you say 13% less or something like that? 13% less so we're looking at the bottom line for Etna by year versus Blue Cross Blue Shield and what they're proposing is that the bottom line for Blue Cross Blue Shield is just a little bit higher than Etna when I say a little bit it's a lot of money to me it's 244.453 versus 24772 so that's about a little bit over $300,000 in the first year that's going to cost the city but when you get into year 16 and 17 when I assume the ACO kicks in also then it appears that we are appreciably lower than what would be projected for Etna I mean that's the way I read this so how can you get Blue Cross Blue Shield to guarantee the bottom line that's really what if it doesn't exceed that then how do we get you to guarantee that? that's the important question because if we don't agree on the assumptions the amount that they want to guarantee is a lesser amount than we believe we would be losing if we went with the Blue Cross Blue Shield plan so can somebody speak to that? Mr. Mayor? this is the problem I have with that there's a lot I can tell you all you folks in the Blue Shield you guys are great you all do a great job this is not about the service you provide and Blue Cross is a great community member you know the staff went out with a request for a proposal and got proposals back and based on the response that the management team has done proposal after proposal after proposal it's pretty clear that in that first round I have a proposal I have a problem here in that they're trying to guarantee something against their own assumptions which lowered the assumptions that we have for Aetna Aetna runs has 70% of our claims today go through the Aetna's ACO Blue Cross says well no let's lower that to 60% and now we'll guarantee against a 60% number so the problem is Aetna has a dog in the fight the question is does our staff have a dog in the fight when we start talking about do we want to take Blue Cross's assumptions for Aetna or themselves or do we want to take our staff's assumptions for Aetna and Blue Cross for me I look at these numbers they are complex I believe that our staff is fairly and thoroughly and until somebody can tell me why and I'm not asking you why the 70% which is currently going through Aetna's system should be reduced to 60% as just one example then I'm really stumped on why we should think that a guarantee against reduced assumptions for Aetna would be in our best interest I don't disagree and that's why I'm asking the question they came back and again we've had a lot of these proposals but the bottom line is we asked the insurance commission committee to go back and re-look at it and that's what they've done and as a result of their re-look and questions they raised we've gotten a spreadsheet so as a result of the insurance committee listening to Aetna, listening to Blue Cross listening to the staff raising questions of your own we asked them to come back with their proposal we realized we started months ago but we have to start where we reset we reset it at the insurance committee when they met last Thursday okay well that's what I want to understand and now they've come back with their proposal and Don raises a valid question why accept 70% why accept 60% for that when the staff says 70% is the number that's about it thank you Mr. Mayor just a couple things believe it or not we've had council meetings I've never heard this many sirens I was just glad it was on my time this time instead of Don Moffitt's time at that siren Mr. Mayor a couple different things I just think it's important to realize that to me I understand that both Aetna and Blue Cross are trying to sell us something I've been in business for 30 years and I was in sales and I know what sales are and I respect sales I made my living through it but that's why we have our staff to make some sort of objective decisions between the various proposals that we have and I do want to go back to Gene's original point it is true for sure that we at the insurance subcommittee when Mr. Wilson offered a guarantee we asked our staff to say what would that look like what does that mean exactly how would you analyze that and so they got some new figures that's true and but I do think it's important to think about the process as a whole here we had an RFP proposal the RFPs came in just like all the other RFPs we always get and our staff made a decision to recommend to us before it ever got to us it was subject to new proposals coming in from Blue Cross and I think that what Eugene said the same thing happened three years ago or a version of it and I do think that there's a danger in that and I think the danger is if we were to undercut again our staff for the second time and award it to Blue Cross based on uncertain assumptions that are offered late and often sometimes so late that it's hard for our staff to analyze them fairly who's going to want to come in and compete next time for our business I think that I do think that that kind of subversion of the process is really important it's not what I want to ultimately make my decision on but I don't think it's true that sort of what happened in the process doesn't matter I think it does matter we have a process we follow it all the time and I think that this has been a very unusual and problematic situation and it's politicized something that you know we're we hold elected office we're used to politics but this politicizes contracts and that's not usually the way it goes and I don't think it's the way it should go but that gets down here then to okay to two organizations with their various assumptions and our neutral staff having trying to make a decision between these assumptions I can appreciate Mr. Chris saying that it is true that the enrollment number in a document we had previously was 60% for for at none is now at 70 and that's because as Regina explained and I think well that this is a best case scenario previously we hadn't gotten that we had a sort of middle of the road scenario for both companies so there are several things on this sheet that have changed I also have to say that again you know I think that for me who we have to trust here is our staff everybody's selling and again that's good but that's why we have the neutral arbiters and I think our staff has done a really good job of trying to present this to us with a whole lot of detail and we certainly study a lot of detail in the insurance committee and the same kind of questions Mr. Mayor that you were asking so I think that the two key numbers are the discount level and the enrollment percentage I think Mr. Chris was right when he said that the ACO fee while there is a substantial difference that's not the real driver the real driver is the enrollment percentage in the ACO and the discount level and there are always going to be assumptions built into that and I think our staff has done a good job of analyzing what those assumptions are. I hear that Blue Cross doesn't like the discount level that's assigned to them in this case but whether or not their discount level is 50% as our staff says are 51.1 that's still quite a bit lower than the 53.89 that the staff assigned and so even after hearing this I have one other thing to say about the benefit of Richmond the well maybe I'll just make a question for you Regina which is how does the how does the benefit in Richmond figure into driving people into the ACO because I think Blue Cross Blue Shield doesn't have an ACO relationship in the first year and you know hopefully would in the second year we don't know the size of that network and so forth but in the first year we'll be trying to drive people into the ACO which is where our savings will really come from the higher number we can drive in there right correct and so how does the benefit there are two ways to do that as I understand it one is and maybe you could speak to both of them how do we because I think the big question for Aetna for me is how do you actually get people even if they're already in that network to sign up for that network again essentially I think that if I'm right there are a couple of ways but I think this to me is where Aetna's assumptions or the work they would have to do would be really important work and you all have built in some things that would help us drive people into that network and I think those two things one is a premium discount and the second is the enrichment of the benefits and so could you talk about what those are a little bit in some specificity in the first year but I think the council will be interested yes I can I don't know if council still has access to the May 14th insurance subcommittee presentation that we provided and if you were to take a look at slide number 13 excuse me 12 actually you'll see the premium portion that we're referring to and so I think just one example is looking at the premium which would be the payroll deduction premium that employees pay let's just say for family coverage on the core plan now because the benefits that we would be offering on the ACO plan would be comparable to the core plan and so right now an employee pays $21 per month for that family coverage under the Duke ACO they pay $222.95 so almost half the cost for a comparable benefit that would be savings loss to employees in the first year if we were not able to offer this Duke ACO then if you go to page 14 of that same presentation it provides you with an example of how the enriched benefit works to employees in terms of out of pocket benefits so in this particular example we've got allowable costs for a particular procedure of $20,000 on the basic plan sure if you don't mind could you go back to slide 13 and just again just like looking at the family plan as an example so could you compare are we looking at monthly numbers those are monthly numbers could you describe what you I didn't quite get what the savings would be I can read it and do the math but maybe you can help me what would the savings be from the Duke ACO versus the core plan it looks about $260 a month about the difference between $481 $285 so that's $260 per month for each family that signed up for the ACO versus the core that's correct I didn't see I don't have it before me the family please how much $440 $481 that's the core plan under the basic plan of family coverage is $249.25 and the reason why I was giving you an example of the core plan compared to the ACO is because there are similar out of pockets but the ACO is in fact even richer in the example that I'm going to show you on page 14 okay go ahead so if we would take a look at page 14 of that same presentation again this is an allowable procedure that costs approximately $20,000 under the basic plan I'm not going to go through every element of it but the total out of pocket for employees is $24,500 on the core plan the total out of pocket would be $2,750 and under the Duke ACO plan the total out of pocket for that would be $2,500 so the Duke is cheaper than the core plan that's correct and the ACO and the Duke ACO is cheaper than the core plan that's correct so the benefit richness is greater for the Duke ACO plan the total out of pocket allowable maximums so Aetna it would be the benefits administrator if you selected the Duke ACO product you would go to the Duke ACO providers but you'd also have access to Aetna's larger network so you could make a choice based on each procedure on a case by case basis where you are going to get the best care and you could also go out of network if you chose to one of the issues is so Blue Cross Blue Shield is working on a relationship to have the same kind of ACO relationship with Duke and I'm assuming that that will happen next year roughly 10 months from now or something and I think should that happen then Blue Cross Blue Shield soon would be able to offer similar benefits but at this point the benefits to our employers our employees are far more beneficial for people through the Duke ACO and we already know that about 70% of our employees on the Blue Cross plan currently are already enrolled with providers if that's the proper term who are in the Duke ACO network so that's not a so and then I say but I do say the challenge for the end of the plan would be can we get those people to convert from the you know into the Duke ACO they're already enrolled with those providers you would think so yes but then I think that the other thing which you didn't really refer to and I think it would be important to talk about is the premium incentive to get people into the Duke ACO in the first year so can you talk about that so the city is making a larger contribution to offset the cost of premiums for individuals who select the Duke ACO plan and so again back on page 12 you can see all the differences in premiums so we would also be making the Duke ACO for employee only the free option so right now we provide our core excuse me we provide our basic employee only as the free option we'd be charging a nominal $10 a month option to steer more individuals out of the basic employee only into the Duke ACO employee only which would be the free option and the premiums for all of the plans are lower than both basic and core so we would be giving our employees a richer benefit for the lowest cost of all of our plans I was trying to I'm yelling to Steve thank you so the first year premium for the Duke ACO would be about I don't actually have it in front of me Regina but as I remember about a 14.5% reduction from employees current premium rate is that right that's correct so that would be something that would be of course very attractive to people to drive them into the ACO we already know that they're enrolled with those ACO providers and the benefits that they would get would be significantly richer or at least significantly less expensive the out of pocket would be significantly less that's correct is that right and so I think that there are several things to think about here one is the benefit to the taxpayer and I think that that is certainly more subject to argument I think the benefit to our employees I think is at least as I read this is more certain if etna can indeed drive people into the into the ACO and I think from what from the reduced premium the enriched benefits and the fact that 70% of the etna employee of the city employees are already inside the Duke ACO I think that that's highly probable when you speak about the reduced premium for the employees we projected in the budget an increase in health premiums did we do it based on the assumption they won with etna or what? No so that was just based on actual experience of cost trends and so we were going to increase the plans even if we stayed with blue cross blue shield if the recommendation was blue cross blue shield we were going to increase core and basic benefits by 3% just to cover the cost of increasing claims and that's still significantly less than what you're seeing in the market most employers are increasing benefits cost by about 8 to 10% well in terms of the and I think T C's point is a point to be considered the question is whether we're going to be able to drive people into the plan that's a lot of that isn't that correct all right so you could make a comment I said the basis of what you're proposing is that because of the enrichment of the etna plan we're going to be able to drive more employees to accept that plan that are presently in the Duke plan and that's what's going to get the numbers up I would say there are three things one is there already the number we're trying to hit is 70% I mean it means yes so 70% but currently already 70% of our employees are with these same Duke ACO providers and the claim 70% of the claims I'm sorry thank you are with the Duke ACO providers that's the first thing so you just got to hit the same number we're at so how do you do that and I think what our staff has done is they've done two ways of trying to incentivize that one is to offer the lower premium in the first year so if you look at the way in which the staff has organized this the staff our employees would receive a larger share of the savings through premium discounts early in the first year and then the city would receive in the later years it would receive a higher share and so that's a choice that our staff has made in order to incentivize people to stay in the ACO essentially and then but in addition to which there's another even more I think that people the premium will be something that will get our employees attention because it's a significant cut but I think the real benefit the larger benefit and I would bow again to Regina on this but to me it seems that the larger benefit reading those charts is what your out of pocket will be because your out of pocket will be significantly less in the Duke ACO plan and so employees would have to be educated to that as well but to me it's not a science and I'm you know I certainly am not an expert but I do think that those things and I believe that our staff has studied this a lot and of course our insurance broker who is an expert has also studied a lot and is our neutral representative as well and I think that is I think that those numbers seem reasonable given those things. Okay I'm back to the proposal that's been presented to us and I guess my bottom line is are we going to be able to make the total plan cost which we pay for and employees pay for cheaper under the proposal that Blue Cross Blue Shield is presenting versus what Etna is presenting and it hinges on this 60% really that's the biggest difference in what's being proposed here so I'm going to ask the Blue Cross Blue Shield comment speak to that. Mr. Mayor thank you for your question I would contend let's let's leave it 70% for Etna 60% for Blue Cross so if the assumption was tied to how many claims were in network versus the original enrollment assumptions which the enrollment number by the way has been consistently 60% but let's assume that it's 60-70 our question is why did the discount assumption go from 56.9 to 54.8 that is a huge impact to the allowed amount so it's one thing to say staff has line of sight into the percent of claims that will be in network with Etna ACO may not argue that but it's another thing to say that staff has line of sight into the discount that we will achieve at the 60% enrollment rate which has been attested to by our actuaries at 56.9 so we would argue that 54.8 and Mr. Boyd said was an intentional number is erroneous that alone can have a material impact to the overall financials you're prepared to guarantee our guarantees have been centered on that number yes sir I'm asking what are you prepared to guarantee in terms of the bottom line cost excuse me you're originally when we were at the subcommittee I'm talking about now where you know well an overall discount for a five year program I didn't do it for the three year but it was 13 roughly 13 million dollars off of the current run rate with current Blue Cross assumptions so I would have to factor that into a three year number is this going to be for three years or five years I know you asked for five years but it was three years we went back and said with the hope of getting some more locked in savings that we would entertain a five year commitment it's my understanding that that five year commitment is on the part of the insurer and that we have the ability to go back out to the market whenever we'd like is that correct that's correct so independent of whether it's five years or three years you're saying we can still go by count okay recognize comes from the market Mr. Young Boyd on the spreadsheet that we have in front of us one of the key shifts between your spreadsheet and the one that Blue Cross Blue Shield brought was in the discount level and they're making a case that their number has been changed I have two questions for you one in the assumptions that you all made was Aetna's discount level also modified yes okay so the was that the number you said was bigger but you're not sure what it was right I don't have that with me but we modified both of them because we were attempting to give both of the percentages a haircut as David would call it just to be more conservative with the discounts that we would likely receive okay so your understanding then is that the level of percentage of 55% would mean that our actual cost would be 55% of billing is that correct and then and I think that what Blue Cross Blue Shield is saying is that this line C is a key number in these assumptions would you agree with that let me ask then somebody from Blue Cross Blue Shield your guarantee is that you will achieve a 56.9% discount level over three or five years so you would have that's just a simple yes or no would you guarantee you said that 56.9 has been actually attested and that is the number that you stand by so I'm asking in your guarantee because I look at this I think how do you guarantee these various assumptions if this is a key assumption you can guarantee it 56.9% now when you visited me last week I believe you told me you were ready to put a half million dollars down on a guarantee that's right so let me ask you are you willing to guarantee 56.9 year by year $500,000 with the exception of the first year of course because you don't have an ACO that's why I was going to qualify that so thank you 56.9 we have $250,000 at risk per year so it would be a half a million dollars for two years would be the guarantee yes sir then I have a question sooner or later I'm going to ask the gentleman from Aetna to give us his thank you we'll get there because I do want to hear from you I have a question which is if I understand this right the history of all of this is that Aetna wound up making we have two of our largest employers in town is Duke and Blue Cross Blue Shield if I understand correctly Aetna came to town and wound up ensuring Duke's employees with an ACO and I know that Blue Cross Blue Shield is the first class insurance company I've used you all for years and you don't have an ACO why are they ahead of you why are you not even today if they came to town with an ACO with Duke I would think you guys would be scrambling then so why today are you unable to offer an ACO to our employees for the next year thank you Mr. Moffitt for that question so with respect short answer is the timing wasn't right the costs are very complicated and there's give and take predominantly around financials of course and so the timing is now right we are set to make a press release that this product will be in the market affected 1116 for our ACA individual members and then for you as a group employer account 7116 I would point out excuse me I would point out that this product exists available in the triangle market with different providers so in Charlotte it's Carolina's healthcare system and this market will be predominantly Duke and others they're just ahead of you I mean you said timing wasn't right but they had it figured out I would submit that the product that is being proposed to the city that is also in place now Mr. Baker would have to answer this this is conjecture on my part fairly admit the product that is being proposed to the city which the Duke University health system employees already have today is not the same commercial product that exists in the market today and it's available openly to other employers so Aetna Coventry is ahead on those two specific accounts you and one other okay so then didn't I just want to ask the gentleman from Aetna um Blue Cross Blue Shield has quite a lot of time at the podium and I wanted to invite you to I'm exhausted oh well let me make a couple of comments I think we're all making this harder than it potentially is so yes you have two different evaluations you have one that Blue Cross has done you have one that your own administration has done and they're different the one thing I will tell you though is the Aetna proposal hasn't changed since the original RFP the discount guarantees we gave you are the same we and the reason we gave you a number it is what we're actually running today we are running and I won't even use the 70% but I will comment on that if you use the 66% or the 60% I think it had a discount value and there are 55.3% that's what we're running today now that is versus 51.4% that I believe Mr. Christ mentioned earlier your risk is the difference between those two the difference between those two is over four million dollars a year if you want a real guarantee and I'm going to punt this over because I'm handing the keys to my competitor and they can drive away with the car but the risk to you is the four million 500,000 guarantee versus four million is not a real guarantee that's your risk and so if you want a real guarantee you'll get a dollar for dollar they will achieve 55.3% just like I'm achieving today and then you have a real guarantee that would be my comment comment on the 70% Duke is already running over 80% local enrollment into the ACO can I tell you that your population will do the same no I can't 60% reasonable probably 70% I don't know to 70% happen you're one I can't tell you that either but what I can tell you is they have a population that is in similar areas to you what I can tell you is they have multiple plans that they offer and the same things that your administration is advising today and that is they provide a lower cost out of their pocket out of their paycheck and they provide better benefit and that's what drove the 80% plus into the ACO so those are the comments that I would make but realistically if you're looking for a real guarantee you're going to have to have Blue Cross give you something that gets to our discount level that we're achieving today if they do that there is no reason for you to purchase that no reason because they will effectively guarantee what we are already achieving but that's a $4 million guarantee not a $500,000 guarantee okay Don I think you've gotten what you were looking for okay let me tell you where I want to go with this and for all the faithful Blue Cross employees that have been sitting there I'm not going to call on you because what we're concerned about are the numbers and I don't think that's what you're going to provide us I'm sure you're going to tell us why we should choose Blue Cross and I've heard the letter so that's and I'm not discounting what you're saying it's not important but we've gotten that what I'm concerned trying to understand is what are the numbers that we can make a decision on and we have a proposal here from Blue Cross Blue Shield from Etna we've got the latest proposals we've heard what the key differences are we've heard about guarantees what I'm going to suggest is taken into the insurance commission's committee's recommendation that we let the administration relook at these numbers and come back with us a recommendation it's not undercutting the staff by no means and I hope that doesn't come across that way you've been working on this for months I'm seeing it for the first time and I'm the one that's got to make a decision along with my other colleagues so I've got an input I need I think the administration has input that they need I like them to go back and sit down and get the various latest and come back with the recommendation and I don't know how soon you can do that Mr. Manager try to do it third by third you've got to I'm going to try to get back here by Thursday I'm out of town I'm going to try to get back here by Thursday to be a part of this so if the make of the motion the second of the motion will remove the motion so we can allow the administration to look at the very latest proposal and come back with their recommendation to the council Thursday at our work session so no comments for a minute back again you've all been faithful you understand how the process works believe me I understand what you're going to say I've gotten those letters so you don't have to convince me that you you blue-clothed all of me to take the plan you don't have to convince me that that's what you feel but again we've got to look at what the numbers are and that's what we're attempting to do here alright recognize this comes from Katani Mr. Mayor I appreciate the additional chance for staff to review this yet again I do appreciate that my question is whether we should sever this and go ahead and vote on the rest of the package so staff can move along that's a good recommendation that would be my motion to move the staff recommendation with the exception of the health benefit it's been properly moved the second any discussion hearing and un-called question Madam Clerk will you open the vote it passes 7-0 thank you Mr. Mayor I appreciate the staff's opportunity just a moment ago that our risk is $4 million in that instead of guaranteeing a 56.9% discount rate that the suggestion was they only guarantee a 55.3% dollar for dollar and I'd like to ask the staff to explore that with them so that when we have this discussion again you can give us Blue Cross Blue Shield's response to that guaranteeing that exposure we'll do thank you we've seen democracy in action so far in Durham Durham City Council perhaps in action Mr. Mayor we've got action on this because we've got a lot of clarification as to questions that were raised and we've got everything answered with the self-insurance piece I'm pretty sure we'll get that answered Thursday for you guys the good news we're not done yet but you guys can leave I want to say Thursday that's a work session that we have at 1 o'clock Thursday we'll be back in the council chambers but on the second floor if you choose to come back if you can come back let's move to the next item okay we've moved to item 26 good evening Mr. Mayor members of council Pat Young with Planning Department item 26 is case A14 quadruple 03 Briar Creek Assemblance plan amendment we have been advertised in accordance with the provisions of law and our affidavits to that effect on file with the Planning Department the case is a request by in my homes to change the future land use map designation of 23.24 acres of property in the south side of Andrews Chapel Road near its intersection with Delweb Arbor's Drive and immediately adjacent to the Wake County line this is within the suburban development tier and the current designation of the future land use map is commercial the request is to change that designation to low density low medium density residential which allows for 4 to 8 units per acre staff recommends approval of this item based on compliance with the four criteria for comprehensive plan amendments bound in the Durham Unified Development Ordinance Planning Commission reviewed this item at its April 14th meeting of this year and a recommended approval by a vote of 10 to 0 I'll be happy to take any questions this is a public hearing the public hearing is open we have one person that has signed up to speak on this item Jared Eaton is he present we have three minutes good evening Jared Eaton is with Eaton's Land Corp and I'll speak to both the plan amendment and the zoning briefly I know you've had a long meeting tonight I'm here representing my client in my homes I appreciate Pat and staff summary of our request I'm just going to highlight a few points we are requesting a density of about 4.8 units an acre this is a property right adjacent to Briar Creek on the very eastern edge of Durham south of our parcel and Raleigh is a mixture of commercial and apartments west of our parcel is a townhomes community at about 8 units an acre we think that this 4.8 unit per acre number that we're requesting is a good transition to lower densities north and east of our property as Pat mentioned we did get unanimous approval at planning commission we got a good suggestion from Tom Miller at the commission to ensure a good mix of housing because we're proposing single family and townhomes so per Tom's request we put a range of units number of units of townhomes and single family that would be constructed to ensure that we had a product mix on the property we did have a neighborhood meeting last year we have no opposition that I'm aware of also and I don't know if Pat wants to address in the staff report I think there's an increase in a number of students at Durham County Schools I believe it's 121 is the actual number my client is proffering to write a check to the Durham County Schools in the amount of $60,500 that's $500 per student and that check would be given to the school system for the final plat for the project and that's all I have I'd be glad to take any questions you have thank you Questions by members of the staff council does anyone in the public want to speak on this item either for or against let's recollect no one else has to speak out of clerk public and be closed matter of fact court counsel it's been property and moved to second Madam clerk will you open the vote closed vote will you move to item 27 zoning map change thank you again Mr. Mayor and members of council Pat Young again with the planning department the case C14 quadruple 06 is the companion zoning case to the future land use amendment case you just heard but includes a larger piece of property 114.17 acres located south side of Andrews Chapel Road near the Wake County line the property from its current zoning map designation of rural residential to planned development residential or PDR 4.793 and this would allow for a maximum 500 residential units which is as Mr. Edens just told you a mix of town home and single family units the development plan associated with this request includes a number of commitments that exceed the unified development ordinance standards and these are detailed in your staff report for the item these include a number of improvements such as the installation of four-foot bicycle asphalt bicycle lane along Andrews Chapel Road and improvements associated with relignment of Andrews Chapel Road and extension of Briar Creek Parkway to the north as Mr. Edens alluded to there is an error in the staff report section G entitled infrastructure the staff report says that there would be an increase in 168 students which is incorrect the number of 121 students and Mr. Edens said the staff determines this plan is consistent with the comprehensive plan and other adopted policies and ordinances and planning commission recommended this approval of this item at its April 14th meeting by a vote of 10 to 0 I'll be happy to take any questions this is a public hearing the public hearing is open questions by the council if not we have two persons that have signed up to speak well no one signed up to speak on this item and Jared you've already spoken I just want to speak on this item let's record that no one else has to speak on the declared program meeting is closed matters back to the council property movement second Mr. Mayor I'm sorry to interrupt may I suggest that the additional proffer that Mr. Edens may be incorporated in the motion all right that's a part of the motion recognize councilman Schuel I was just going to thank Mr. Edens for the developer for the proffer we'll note it closed vote it passes 7 to 0 the manager reminded me about our consistency statement somebody make them it's been a proper movement second Madam Clerk we open the vote close the vote it passes 7 to 0 all right okay the next item is item 28 zoning map change 108 Celeste parking lot 0-0-0-0-0-32 thank you Mr. Mayor members of council Pat Young again with the planning department the case before you Celeste parking lot Z-14-0-0-0-3-2 was a request to change the zoning map designation of 0.46 acres of land located at 108 Celeste circle near its intersection with NC Highway 54 from its current zoning map designation of RS-20 residential suburban 20 to office institutional with a development plan which would allow for the development of a parking lot and that use is committed the development plan associated with this request includes commitments greater than the ordinance standards which includes as I just mentioned the development of a commercial parking lot five foot of additional right of way dedication an offsite sidewalk connection and stormwater management in excess of ordinance requirements staff determines that this request is consistent with the comprehensive plan and adopted policies and ordinances and by a vote of 9-2 the planning commission recommended the approval of this item and its April 14th 2015 meeting I'll be happy to take any questions again this is a public hearing the public hearing is open I ask for the questions by members of the council we have two persons that want to speak on this item no questions by the council I'm going to recognize Brian Steins and Ramada Bonta Chris Selby speaking in support of the project first and let's allow five minutes on that speaking for the project all right if you could again just identify your name I'm Chris Selby I live at 138 Celeste Circle this proposed parking lot is at the upstream end of our neighborhood which experiences periodic flooding there are two main channels for stormwater to go in our neighborhood one is immediately downstream from this lot and it's on private property and therefore by ordinance it cannot be maintained or serviced by the city it's our job the other route for stormwater to go is in the right-of-way and recently the city has been making plans to stream that upgrade this particular stormwater system in our neighborhood and I'd like to thank the council for their guidance and assistance in enabling these upgrades to be made with regard to the lot it's supposedly needed for the UNC employees at the Carolina crossing building this building was approved in 2010 and 2011 and it was obvious to me at the time that there would be attendant parking and traffic problems and I brought these issues directly to planning and also to the meetings but to no avail it seems that when I hit middle age I acquired this occasional invisibility but so you can imagine how happy I was to hear that the applicant decided that they would be good citizens and include in their project the maximum possible stormwater detention facilities in this parking lot consequently if this lot is constructed it should not exacerbate stormwater problems in our neighborhood thank you Mr. Mayer my name is Brian Steins thank you all for your hard work and painstaking commitment to this community we get to see firsthand what you guys go through I certainly appreciate that many residents I obviously didn't make myself very clear I was trying to get persons that were speaking as proponents of the project and you are against it yes good evening council members appreciate your time tonight I'll try to be brief my name is Chad Abbott I'm with Summit Design Engineering 504 Meadowland Drive Hillsborough North Carolina I represent Ray LaFernay and UNC Hospitals he is here tonight as well as David Cates of Summit Design obviously you've been presented with staff reports and we've answered questions from some of the council members we've tried to address all requests for as Mr. Selby stated to help the neighborhood with flooding problems so that we did not add to those problems we've held non-required neighborhood meetings and we've met staff recommendations we're consistent with all adopted plans for this area and we greatly appreciate your vote tonight for the rezoning I'd be happy to answer any questions moving forward thank you I have Rolanda Thornton is that correct Ronaldo is that it you left okay well he didn't sign up as to what he was for against Mr. Stimes now thank you and it's against as well as a lot of the residents in the neighborhood many of which could not be here tonight but thanks for letting us speak it's kind of scary to imagine an established residential neighborhood in which someone can come in and erect a parking lot it's my understanding the reason the house was originally sold is because of crime they had seven or eight break-ins because of the believed to be because of the commercial location of commercial property near their house so I think further residents fear more potential crime or at least potential negative downstream effects another reason that they were against this proposal it doesn't follow the future land use map proposed changes we've been working to get those changed to a residential designation and that's been proposed and looks like it's coming to fruition there's also seems to be other other options for parking as opposed to building a parking lot in a residential neighborhood so there's various other options that could be explored and utilized but I think just from the basic functional level could you imagine if your neighbor was suddenly the house was demolished and a parking lot was put up right next to your own house how you would feel about that so I respectfully request that you deny the rezoning proposal and look at other options or have the owner look at other options for their parking needs thank you are the questions of the proponents of this project by council I very much appreciate the residents concerns I do have some questions but really for staff Mr. Young in the future if anyone wanted to convert the parking lot to a parking deck is that precluded by language noting no building on the site it would be precluded because the commitment that's included as part of this plan prohibits all structures including structural parking and then I believe in the planning commission comments there was a prior developer developer proffer regarding lighting on timers but I did not see that and committed elements did that disappear that's not included on the final plan the applicant asked that he be recognized to make an additional proffer I believe during your last commentary so that may be forthcoming but it's not included in what's before you there were also comments that the lot is not tied to the building as the building is leased can you comment on that it's my understanding that the ownership is an affiliate of UNC hospitals but that the UNC is the office building adjacent so there's not common ownership but the UNC's made a decision to go ahead and purchase this lot and they are the owner through the corporation that you see on the application and the committed sidewalks that you mentioned to those meet the intent of the BPAC request sorry bike pad advisory commission to the best of our understanding they do committed proffer that creates the connection to the on the east side of Celeste is the only adjacent pedestrian network okay thanks those were my questions yeah so are there other councilmembers of questions I can ask councilman Moffitt Mr. Young the Mr. Stein right so I have the name right Mr. Stein you don't have to get up Mr. Stein mentioned the parking lot next to your house and I wanted to ask about that I've been out to the neighborhood it's a nice small neighborhood and I've enjoyed meeting the folks out there but I want to know are there driveways like will people using this parking lot be using Celeste circle to get to it there is an access proposed office less circles of gas okay buffers can you describe any buffers that might between parking lot and residential what would that look like so the property immediately to the north of the proposed parking lot there would be a required 30 foot buffer and that is depicted on the development plan to the south and to the east are office properties including the parcel that would be the primary generator of the pedestrian traffic for parking and there would not be a required buffer because of the width of the Celeste circle right away at this location other than street trees and vehicular use area landscaping okay thank you the impact of lighting and I heard it was an additional proffer in the wings so let's go ahead and get that additional proffer on the record just in case chat happen again with summit design I apologize I didn't offer the first time I was going to wait to see if we needed to amend so I proffer based on the comments received from the people in opposition we would like to proffer the developer commits to providing lighting on timers for the parking lot it is an employee parking lot intended for employees at the facility so there's no need for people to be parking after business hours there will be a gate on the parking lot as well such that it would keep others from parking there Mr. Mayor we there had been some previous potential proppers as the first time we're hearing this precise language could you provide a little additional detail chat on terms of the hours that would be utilized we just want to make sure that it's enforceable and clear I mean the hours of normal business hours so normal business hours of the clinic would be open six I'd say six o'clock seven six or seven whichever department I don't know six is six appears to be fine so no operation of lighting between six p.m. and six a.m. is that what I heard seems appropriate yes oh and the other question is just at what point all the proppers didn't have a trigger point right so Steve Medlin with the Durham City Planning Department obviously a proffer of this nature typically it would be required that timers be installed prior to issuance of a C.O. on the property in this case the property in question would be the parking lot so they couldn't utilize the parking lot until it had been filled verified that the timers were in place I would simply ask the applicant to be very clear as to what their expectation in terms of time is obviously I understand the hours of the clinic may only be from nine to six or whatever but typically I would assume that there are folks that are in that facility more than that and so I would probably urge you to probably be a little more conservative in terms of what you really are willing to commit to I can share with you that on prior instances most people have put like nine p.m. versus six p.m. obviously because that's more reasonable to allow for some after normal business hour operations to occur just anyone overstep the bounds acceptable to the council we would definitely appreciate nine p.m. so do I need to re-proper? Councilor Moffett are you still okay any other questions coming recognize Councilor Schruel thank you Mr. Mayor so when I looked at the Mr. Cates was kind enough to send me a document today or a photo of the buffers it looks to me like there's about a 30 foot buffer on the between the parking lot and the residents and no significant no buffer other than a few street trees between the lot and the street itself and so less so I'm interested sir if you could all have you considered a proffer in that regard that is to say I know you want to maximize the number of spaces in your lot but would you have you considered proffering related to a buffer on Celeste itself we had discussed that with the prior meetings had been brought up but not requested when asked the security issues safety issues of not wanting to completely shield it from the right way as people are passing by to make sure they could have some eyes on the property since it would not be used at night time and additionally the homeowners adjacent to the property have not issued any request or desires to additionally buffer the front or decide whether or not residents have not been at any of the public meetings the city has held we did hold a neighborhood meeting and it wasn't that big of an issue there either seeing the problem an issue with stormwater okay thanks and then yeah so I'm interested in what my colleagues say I will tell you that right now I'm sitting here torn on this and so I'll be interested in any insights my colleagues have and I was able to talk to a couple of neighbors and I can see arguments on both side of this so I'll be interested in any wisdom that my colleagues might have to offer yes what was the vote again I'm sorry 9 to 2 I'm sorry the planning commission vote was 9 to 2 at the April 14th meeting yes sir recognize council member a couple questions real quick first of all I parking the slot I want to go this is really for the adjacent two-story brick commercial building right correct so I parking the slot how do I get there right now that's why we are proposing the sidewalk connection that we can get up to select up selects drive into the service road but there is discussions between the hospital which is leasing the building and does not own the adjacent property to provide steps that would allow people in the parking lot to have direct access up to slope at the rear of the property there is a substantial change of about maybe 7, 8, 9 feet that we need to put steps on and so it's all of our property and we have been in discussions obviously it helps the employees get back into back in from the parking lot into their vehicles in a more timely manner so how many steps excuse me how many spaces it's about 11 feet so that would mean 14 you know 14 steps and how many parking spaces the current is 40 plus 41 parking spaces we've changed it several times throughout this I have two buffers is there any screening required so there is going to be screening required on the east and south side because I'm not immediately on the south circle side only the street trees because of the way they've oriented their parking is oriented kind of north and south and the vehicular use area landscaping is adjacent to where the parking stalls are so there would not be any required the current design of the side plan there's about a 10 foot open area that would I assume be grass or thanks recognize council shul thank you mr. mayor there are there and maybe this would be a question for one of the neighbors and that is are there currently employees of who are working at that building who are parking on celeste now that has been an issue in the past right now there are currently no parking signs along the street and that's working for the for the most part it is thank you okay do we have other questions comments if not the public hearing is closed matter of fact for the council and I'm going to ask for motion on this item you have a comment I'm looking for a motion if not I'm going to make a motion so I'll normally make motions but I want to move this item it's been probably moved in a second any further discussions questions hear none madam clerk will you open the vote close the vote it fails for lack of seven with council member mayor bell voting no council member Davis voting no council member moffitt voting no and council member shul voting no alright that's the item let's move to the next item thank you mr. mayor members of council pat young again with the planning department item 29 is parkway plaza 2 z 14 0 0 0 2 9 this case is a request to change the zoning designation of 14.74 acres located at 4215 university drive from its current designation of commercial center or cc with the development plan to a modified development plan so it would remain ccd but with different development plan conditions which would allow for the development of a retail out parcel at this site the development plan associated with this request does include a number of commitments greater than unified development ordinance standards including limitations on peak hour trips location of buildings designation of park and ride spaces and various pedestrian improvements at the intersection of west gate and university drive staff determines this request is consistent with the comprehensive plan and other adoptive policies and ordinances and planning commission recommended approval at its April 14th meeting by a vote of 11 to 0 I'll be happy to take any questions so public hearing is open questions by the council on the staff report if not we have two persons that are signed up to speak Jeffrey Ruselli and Blake Hall those persons present let's see if you can do this two minutes each thank you my name is Jeff Ruselli I'm an architect with new city design group 1304 Hillsborough street Raleigh North Carolina we've been working with the owner of this property for some time including recently completed improvements fresh market grocery store and other facade renovations to Parkway Plaza we've recently been working with staff on the proposed zoning map change that's in front of you now that will allow for continued improvements on this parcel we're here to answer any questions thank you for the developer let's see Blake Hall my name is Blake Hall at 209 Roebling Lane carry North Carolina I'm with Timmins group civil engineer for this project and I'm working with Jeff Ruselli here and I'm just here to answer any questions the questions of the developer hearing none is anyone else who wants to speak on this item let the record reflect and no one else has to speak the public hearing is closed as a matter of fact before the council the property movement second Madam Clerk will you open the vote it passes 7 to 0 thank you let's move item 30 oh the consistency please the property movement second Madam Clerk will you open the vote close the vote it passes 7 to 0 thank you move item 30 zoning map change Northmangam residential Z1400042 thank you Mr. Mayor members of council the case Z1400042 Northmangam residential is requested to change the zoning map designation of .86 acres of land located at 809 and 811 Northmangam street in 804 Glendale Avenue from its current zoning map designation of commercial general or CG residential urban 5 or RU 5 and residential urban multifamily to commercial neighborhood CN and residential urban multifamily if approved as requested this action would allow for the development of a single family residential property fronning on Mangum Street and up to all the zoning units on Glendale Avenue there's no development plan associated with this request staff determines this request is consistent with the comprehensive plan and other adopted policies and ordinances and planning commission recommended approval at its April 14th meeting by a vote of 10 to 1 I'll be happy to take any questions questions of the staff from the council thank you Mr. Mayor there's a I read this a few days ago I'm working on my question here okay there's mention about an area south of development where a greenway is in one of our plans Pat and I'm sorry that I can't tell you which where I found that exactly in our the staff report but I was a little bit unclear to me whether or not that was on the to the south of this property or on the south end of this property I'm quite confident and I'll confirm while we're speaking here councilman sure that the proposed greenway location doesn't go on to the subject property but it's located immediately to the south and I will confirm that okay thank you very much okay we have Dan jewel and Tom Tucker to speak on this I'll be quick good evening Mr. Mayor members of the council my name is Dan jewel culture jewel Tim's 111 West Main Street resided 1025 Gloria Avenue this is a this is a project which is down zoning a piece of general commercial along Mangum Street to see and which is a much less intrusive type zoning to allow for single family residential that's the difference and it is cleaning up a messy zoning along the western side of the property the net result of which it will allow one more residential unit to be built that could be built today my client Stuart Cullinan would very much like a pocket neighborhood of eight or nine lots facing on Mangum Street in Glendale we had good support from the planning commission other than one stray no vote that we couldn't understand why we got that but at any rate we want to bring back the character of this neighborhood as we think it existed 50 years ago believe we have a neighbor here in support I also have a letter from a Mr. Tim Warrell who owns the property across the street that I will give to the city clerk we respectfully ask you consider a recommendation for approval for this project I'm happy to answer any questions that you might have other questions of the developer recognize Councilman Contatti and then Councilman Schuhl sorry we're all tired here so can you tell me why you chose to not do a development plan and then I have some specific questions I can we actually originally chose to do a development plan and we actually submitted a development plan with our original plan back last fall what we ran into though was this on our first review the development plan NCDOT was going to restrict us to one or two driveways off of Mangum Street even though four driveway cuts exist today you go out there and you can see probably what it looked like 50 years ago when they're single family houses when I mentioned to NCDOT that they did not actually regulate residential driveway permits they said yes but you if you have a rezoning application in with the development plan we have the right to be able to restrict that that is the only reason regretfully that we resubmitted without the development plan not a single family character to have a single driveway in that on Mangum Street and were they basing that on safety concerns they were basing that on their concern of the traffic on Mangum Street and folks backing in and out of the driveways even though we showed a scenario where we could allow folks to turn their car around in front of the units and go back out again they still wouldn't back off well so while I know you have not submitted a development plan and so anything we discuss is not binding I wanted to get a better understanding of how you propose to address the concerns expressed by the bike ped commission specifically repairing Mangum sidewalks bike ped parking and again the bike ped connection from Glendale. Right. So yes there if there are damaged sidewalks out on Mangum some of them they're not in the best shape we will repair those as part of this project there's we're not sure why Glendale was ever cul-de-sac it was originally a through street connected to corporation totally the antithesis of you know current urban design grid streets that sort of thing but at any rate they put a cul-de-sac in there there's a nice wide drainage flume that I ride my bike across all the time to get from Glendale down into corporation street so that accommodation is already there there was a requested planning commission whether we could remove the cul-de-sac and restore it and we said where we'd be supportive of the city's efforts to do that the oh bike parking bike parking I'm sure my my client will provide bike parking at each of the houses that he builds so be privately owned councilman should you have your hand up I actually was going to ask about the BPAC recognition but I did have one just one comment which is the way I read the dissenting vote at the planning commission and also the same person D. Gerona Freeman dissented on one or two other related things I think Dan was kind of a generalized concern or objection to the fact that we don't yet have our affordable housing plan or toolbox you know and you and our planning staff did such a great job recently at that forum where I think you all laid out what a lot of the realities are at least that's the way I read that and so I wonder while I do want to endorse her general concern although I certainly plan to support this thank you any other questions not anyone else want to speak on this item are you coming to speak or you're signed up that's why I was asking were you planning on speaking hello my name is Tommy Tucker I live at 817 North Mangum Street and it's the property of immediately adjacent to the project to a lot that's currently proposed being developed and the main plan I spoke at the planning board meeting on favor of the project and I'm speaking now in favor of the project for a number of reasons number one in the seven years I've lived there the lot has been pretty much vacant nothing's going on a lot and most of the traffic that at least pedestrian traffic is going to the convenience store that's on the corner of corporation and Mangum and in addition to that there's been quite a bit of activity across the street and one of the houses that was recently sold police raids and drugs and things of that nature since 2012 or 11 there's been quite a bit of change in the neighborhood particularly due to the little five point streetscape proposals that the city put forth as well as some of the other developments in the area house across the street has been sold recently and that's helped the area there was a vacant commercial building across the street that's also been sold so this proposal is furthering the development of the area and it's definitely helping I wouldn't say the gentrification of the area but it's helping the neighborhood in terms of the crime and the activity both the pedestrian activity and the vehicular activity in the area so basically I support the project and I hope that you vote for it thank you thank you there are other persons that want to speak on the side of him let the director reflect and no one else has to speak I'll try to put the hand to be closed now it's back before the council move the item we open the vote close the vote it passes seven to zero we've got the consistency statement it's been probably moved in second Madam Clerk we open the vote close the vote it passes seven to zero okay we moved item 31 zoning map change circle K at Duke Street Z1400035 thank you again Mr. Mayor members of council thank you for being with the planning department this request is a request to change the zoning map designation of 3.82 acre parcel of land at the intersection of Duke and Fraser streets the northeast quadrant from its current zoning map designation of office institutional or OI and OID to mixed use with the development plan to allow for between 9 and 29 residential units in between 22,400 and 25,000 square feet of commercial development the development plan includes commitments in excess of UDO standards which are detailed in the staff report with this item including installation of a bus shelter and deployment of pedestrian improvements at Duke and Fraser streets staff determines that this request is consistent with the comprehensive plan and other adopted policies and ordinances and at its April 14, 2015 meeting the planning commission recommended approval by a vote of nine to two public hearing the public hearing is open recognize persons that want to speak let me ask first are the questions or members of the council here and then I've got four people that signed up to speak for this item Alice Stevens Patrick Biker John Retman and Ronald Harvard are you going to speak first sir good evening I'm sorry let's take five minutes on this good evening yes sir good evening Mayor Bell Mayor Pro Tem Colm McFadden members of the city council my name is Patrick Biker I live at 2614 Stuart Drive I'm attorney with Morningstar law group in Durham I'm here tonight representing Circle K and traditional neighborhood development partners for this mixed use development at the corner of North Duke Street and Fraser Street our team that is here tonight includes Taylor Sealoff with Circle K Bob Chapman with traditional neighborhood traffic engineer VHB and Dan Jewel our landscape architect with Coulter Jewel Thames we are very enthusiastic about creating a first class mixed use project at this location this site has essentially been a vacant lot for around 50 years and during all that time a wide range of development has taken place to the north south east and west in short this zoning map change represents a fine example of infill development since all necessary infrastructure is already in place for the project we anticipate that this mixed use development will have a top quality convenience store with fresh food and excellent coffee for the healthcare providers at Duke regional and other workers nearby we also expect to have an outstanding Durham based sit down restaurant as well as 9 to 29 residential units to inject new life into what has become a depressed corner of Durham back in the 1990s as I think you all know I worked for the Durham Chamber of Commerce working on economic development for Durham County at that time this area was a hot corner of Durham with good employers like Qualex and several physician groups now about 15 years later this small triangle between North Roxborough and North Duke street has 175,000 square feet of vacant office space personally during the last 10 years I cannot recall working on any zoning map changes north of I-D-5 with the exception of Lucas Middle School and so while downtown Durham the area around Duke University and South Durham have all seen strong investment over the past 10 to 20 years this part of Durham has seen disinvestment our project aims to turn that around in closing over the past seven months our team has worked hard to be a good neighbor to our residents on the west side of Duke street we held two neighborhood meetings we have a committed element to upgrade all the corners of Duke and Frazier with pedestrian signalization to improve connectivity with our neighbors based on all this information. Thank you for your approval. I want to thank two of our neighbors for staying with us this evening to speak in support of this project and now I'll turn the podium over to them and then answer any questions you may have. Thank you. John Rettman, Alice Stevens and Ron Harbeth. Thanks for letting me speak I'm John Rettman I live in the 3300 block of north Winston road which is just a couple blocks over from this area. We moved here from the Charlotte area and it's been very obvious to us since we've moved here all the development that's taken place downtown main street over by Duke over in the Central Park area the gear street area and as the council talked about earlier and as Patrick had mentioned there's been very little going on in north Duke area out there there are several older residents that have lived out there and the houses are empty because the air is on them and I think by having a restaurant over there from what our realtor told us when we moved here the number one thing most young people are looking for these days is be able to walk to restaurants or bars and I think by having a restaurant over across the street you could probably encourage maybe some younger couples to move up into that area and take over some of those houses right now that are empty. I've seen the plans for the circle it's very very nice and I can speak for some of my neighbors too that couldn't make it here that they're also in favor of the project and I think it'd be a great thing. They've just torn down the old barbecue restaurant that's been an eyesore sitting on that corner up there and they're building a new Starbucks there so maybe this is just the start of some development up there that we can turn that area around so hopefully you guys will vote for it. My name is Alice Stevens I live at 407 Newsome Street which is just a block south of the proposed development. One of the council members when we were at the planning commission his issue with it one of the gentlemen who voted against it was he was concerned that Duke Street would turn into Roxborough Road with sort of this sprawling retail that's sort of taking over residential areas and I think the development proposed here is actually does quite the opposite by incorporating residential areas into a comprehensive plan with retail and actually kind of softens the transition from the retail north to the neighborhoods more south so I think it's actually a really a nice addition to the neighborhood in that regard. Additionally I'm one of these young people that he was referring to and I would love to have a restaurant nearby I think increases the walkability of the neighborhood and I think the spot everyone likes to ignore on this is the whole gas station but gas stations can be done nicely there's the new sheets going up on Hillsborough Road it's all brick and it's beautiful and I think it could look nice so I'm not concerned with that so thank you. You're welcome. Thank you. Do you have anything to add to this run? No? Oh, that's even better. Anyone else to want to speak on this item? If not I'll declare the public hearing to be closed as a matter of fact before the council. Second. Madam Clerk, I'm sorry I recognize Councilwoman Marford and Councilwoman Cattati. No, I actually have some questions here. I want to start with staff please. So understand that the site has been cut in half basically there's a residential component and a restaurant and gas station convenience store I assume being a Circle K. If we were dealing with each of those separately now they're put together into a mixed use project here if we were dealing with each of them separately what would the staff recommendations be? I know that this is a complex process so I'm asking on the fly. Well, the site is designated as office on the future land use map and I think we haven't independently analyzed the sub market as I think Mr. Biker may have done but there certainly is a large amount of vacant office up there and not any obvious significant demand at least certainly in the near term. So we would have to evaluate and see if there's any significant demand for the sub market that didn't have to occur because of mixed use. So I'm not trying to duck the question but it's difficult to say without seeing what their justification would be but we can certainly verify that there is an abundance of vacant office in this part of the community. Okay, good. Ms. Wenders and her comments said she didn't get to ask about the site access to Frasier Street in the NCDOT letter. Do you know what she's referring to? I'm afraid I don't off the top of my head. I might defer to Mr. Judge and my colleague with transportation department to address that. I'm going to let you guys look at that for a minute. I'm going to ask the applicant that you would be fine. One of the people who testified on the facade, is there a commitment to building materials? In front of me but we do have the design guidelines, correct Pat? There are design commitments but the what it currently reads is that it will be masonry metal, panel, glass and or stucco. Our project architect I'm sorry he couldn't be here tonight is John Felton with Klein Design but we're committed to doing a first work with Klein Design to design it. Obviously we haven't gotten to that point yet. So I asked the question of staff, if they were separate projects what would that be like? If these were separate how is the Circle K and related restaurant, how is that different? Because it's a mixed use project then it would be if it was a stand alone project. Well we have to design everything for the organic development over the 3.82 acres. So we will have to show how it's convenient for people to walk from the townhouses to the convenience store and the restaurant and also you have to have if they were separate projects you wouldn't have the bus shelter for example which is a requirement. The mixed use district but is not I believe a requirement in either commercial or residential. And so it's going to have that transit amenity. It's going to have that organic feel to it and it will have a common design elements as we referred to just a few minutes ago. Okay. Okay thank you. Do you have an answer about Ms. Bender's comments? Sure so I consulted with Mr. Judge and the DOT letter just refers to vehicular access to Frasier so that there's an alternative to access only on Duke and that's been provided by the applicant. Okay. We're confident it's been addressed. Great thank you. Thank you Mr. Mayor. I would just say that we've been wanting to update the mixed use ordinance for a very long time and this really does just meet the bare minimum. You have two uses side by side. I don't really see a lot of integration and I appreciate the comment about having a nice gas station but there aren't commitments to make it a beautiful gas station so I'll thank you. Thank you. Any other comments? I recognize Councilwoman. The people in Northern Durham actually want development in that area so thank you very much especially for a restaurant. As long as it's not what kind of restaurant do you think this is going to be? I'm glad you asked that Mayor we've worked with the owner and chef of Gear Street Garden in the boot and he's provided us a letter of intent for providing another Durham based local restaurant in North Durham. I have a copy of that letter if you'd like to see it but that's who we're working with. I can't promise that it might not work out but that's the letter of intent that we have in our files. Thank you. Any further questions? Entertain a motion on item. Move the item. Second. Move the second Madam Clerk will you open the vote? Close the vote. It passes. Four to three with Councilman Katati voting no. Councilmember Davis voting no. Are you voting no Mr. Davis? I'm sorry. Councilmember Moffitt voting no and Councilmember Shure voting no. Okay. Let's move item 32 consolidated annexation hops and road self storage center. Mr. Mayor we need the consistency statement for the previous item. Second. Move the second Madam Clerk will you open the vote please. Passes seven to zero. Item 32 is consolidated annexation hops and road self storage center. Thank you again Mr. Mayor members of council Pat Young of planning department. This is the consolidated annexation initial application. This is a zoning and utility extension agreement item for 14.8 acres of property located a 48 12 hops and road and adjacent right of way which have approved would allow for the development of up to 400,000 square feet of non residential development and this request also includes a comprehensive plan amendment. The utility extension agreement would allow the applicant to serve the development with city water and sewer services. The public works department has determined that the utility extension would allow the applicant to serve the development. Second a voluntary petition for annexation has been reviewed through the budget management services department as part of the fiscal impact analysis associated with this request and the analysis projects that estimated revenues from the project will exceed estimated expenditures following annexation. Third as I mentioned a plan amendment is required with this action to amend the budget to be approved by the commission. This is a request to the office to commercial and staff supports this request and the planning commission recommended approval by a vote of 10 to 0 at their April 14th meeting. And finally the proposed initial zoning for the site would apply the requested commercial general or CGD to the subject property as I mentioned allowing up to 400,000 square feet of non commercial UDO standards which are detailed in the staff report for this item including right of way dedication along Hobson Road and a limitation on the number of peak hour vehicular trips generated by uses on this property. I would also note that there is a request to allow exceedance of the UDO standard for fence height in the street yard from the standard in the UDO is 4 feet. This would allow if approved as suggested to 8 feet. The staff recommends approval of the zoning map and the planning commission recommended approval of the zoning map case at its April 14th meeting by a vote of 10 to 0. I'll be happy to take any questions. Thanks again. This is a public hearing. Public hearing is open. We'd ask questions by members of the council. Recognize council. Yes, Mr. Young real quick. The fence that they're asking for the variance, I guess it's a variance but 8 foot. If I recall right, wrought iron. It is. There's a detail provided in the staff report. Yes, it is. I don't know if it's iron but it has that appearance. The applicant may want to elaborate on the material. Any other questions by members of the council? Anybody else who wants to speak other than Ron Harvard that wants to speak on this item? If not, can you take three minutes? Thank you mayor. I'll hopefully do that and a lot less. Members of council, Ron Horvath 16 consultant place. Okay, long night. Thank you for hearing us tonight. Mr. Moffat to answer your question. It is a wrought iron looking but more than likely will be aluminum or some other material like that so it'll be a similar. Will not be chain link. The request before you tonight is under general commercial or commercial general. We know the tier change in the compact neighborhood will be coming down the road in the not too distant future and this is a good transition into that in which general commercial does allow residential office as well as commercial. We have limited to 150 peak hour trips until such time as the compact neighborhood comes in and other plans are developed. I ask for your support tonight and available for any questions. Thank you. Recognize councilwoman Katani. I have a question for Mr. Horvath. I appreciate the security concerns but could you get by with a six foot fence instead of an eight foot fence? It's still you know eight foot is one of the reasons we made a decorative was because of the eight foot I wouldn't like an eight foot chain link but it is a security concern. The initial buildings are a climate control multi-story some of them some single and we think it will add to the look and we do need the security for the facility. Appreciate other questions comments anyone else who wants to speak on this item if not let the director reflect no one else has to speak public hearings closed. It's been proper move second recognize council. Yes, I wanted to ask about the right away that the BPAC requested sufficient right away for a bike lane if I understood it right. And then it was very hard for me to follow in the documents exactly what was being proffered and it looked like it was just a section one section of the frontage but not the entire frontage can you help me out with that? The entire frontage is not needed for the right away dedication closer to NC54 there's sufficient right away there. Bike pad asked for some additional road improvements that we construct the bike lanes in the road. There are no road improvements but we are dedicating the additional right away along that section of Hobson. So I'm just going to look back to staff and see heads nod yes it's taken care of. Mr. Horvath characterization is accurate there are no roadway improvements so we don't normally request the bike lane bike pad did. Thank you. Further questions? If not the public hearing is closed I've done that entertain a motion on item. It's been a property movement second Madam Clerk will you open the vote? Close the vote. It passes 7-0. All right thank you let's move it's been a property movement second Madam Clerk will you open the vote? Close the vote. It passes 7-0. Thank you. Street closing. Street closing 15-0-0-0-1-2. Thank you Mr. Mayor and members of council. Final planning item before you tonight Eden's land corporation proposes to close 87,012 square feet of existing public right of way which includes a portion of Ridgeway Road and all of Ridgeway Court. The right of way is currently open and it's bordered by property owned entirely by SLVNC2 LLC which is the applicant for a recently improved zoning case called Carolina Crossings. It's my understanding of the applicant's intent to redesign the roads to accommodate the recently improved zoning case. This request was reviewed by emergency service providers utility service providers and city departments and no negative impacts were identified and as such staff recommends approval I'll be happy to answer any questions. Questions by council. We have one person that has signed up to speak, Jarrett. I could even, Jarrett Eden's Eden's Land Corp. As Pat said this is just to close streets so that we can implement a development plan that council approved last year by rearranging the street network so if you've got any questions I'd be glad to answer them. Thank you. Questions of the developer. Hearing none, anyone in the public want to speak? Yes sir. I know you've been up here before but Chris Selby, 138 Celeste Circle I spoke in favor of this before the two commission meetings in this body in favor and I'm still in favor of seeing this project go forward. I do have a concern about the roadway aspect. There are two connections of this development with our neighborhood. One is where a road comes into Celeste Circle and forms a T-intersection and that's required by the UDO. Then there's another connection with Crossland Drive which continues on into that neighborhood. That is supposed to be a collector street based on the collector street plan map and that's a major road. It will eventually be Southwest Durham Drive. Unfortunately there seems to be a problem since it goes just after it exits our neighborhood and before it gets to their neighborhood it goes through a small section of Corps of Engineer Land and as I mentioned at the council meeting last that connection really needs to be made and it appears they're having some problem with it and we receive some assurance at the council meeting that it would be made but it seems like they're still having problems and if that connection is not made Southwest Durham Drive will come from 15501 and then form a T-intersection with our local street, Celeste Circle and I don't think the neighbors want that and I don't think the city wants that either and so I think for this project to go on so far assurance has been given and it's not been done. Essentially at this rate the project could be finished and then we'll have Southwest Durham Drive at some point we need to see this connection made I believe. Staff if you can comment to that question. Thank you Mr. Mayor I'll let Bill Judge elaborate but to Mr. Selby's point as part of the reference development plan for the Carolina Crossings subdivision the Crossland Drive connection will have to be made all the way through the project from its existing terminus to the northern end of the Carolina Crossings project. I'll let Mr. Judge speak about the Southwest Durham Drive right away. Yeah. Bill Judge Transportation that's correct as part of the other the approved development plan that will be required to reestablish that connection Crossland Drive and construct it applicant may be able to speak as to any negotiations that they're having with the Corps of Engineers on getting permission to build that right away but there is an existing 60 foot right away there is my recognize councilman Mark Mr. Judge Mr. Judge if they're unable to come to an agreement with the Corps of Engineers what's the results? Probably after the fur to the planning department but I believe they have to probably come back and amend the development plan. Steve Madeline with the Durham Planning Department I'll just confirm what Mr. Judge just indicated to the council. Would it be and then it would have to come back to for re-approval. Any deviation from the development plan would require a new rezoning of the property which would mean ultimately the council would have to sorry reconsider the item. Does the applicant have any comments on this? I mean as applicant and engineer for the project in question I'm not aware of any issues we're having with getting right away that existed before the Corps property even existed so we have our own attorneys who have done their title work that's why the land was bought to begin with we have surveyors who have done their research we have no issues and again if we do have an issue we've got to come back later but I have to close these streets to implement what you guys approved last year. Thank you. You have a comment. I do. I do. Brian signs 204 Celeste Circle. It's a question. You can get in front of the microphone. The question I heard that I'm just a little confused. I heard some of the streets are going to be removed but maybe some will still remain. Is there a map or could I just get clarification on that. Reason I ask. Oh perfect. So would so this will be removed. All of those. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Okay. Anyone else want to speak on this item. No one else has to speak. It's closed. It's been properly moved in second madam clerk. We open about. It passes 70. Okay. Let's let's move to item nine. Item that was pulled and if the staff can come up again and just make whatever comment you feel appropriate is the Durham Chapel Boulevard business 15501 road reconfiguration project. Good evening Mark and transportation department. We went over this item I think in detail at the work session. The reason we're doing before you is as part of our routine review of annual resurfacing projects we review those for opportunities for restriping to address safety issues any capacity issues or accommodations the bicycle bicycle plan and in this case after looking at the opportunities for the resurfacing of us 15501 business from university to the Chapel Hill road we noted that there were accident problems on this facility speeding problems and it was also part of the Durham bike plan so we determined there was an opportunity to restripe the project to provide three travel lanes instead of the five existing travel lanes with bike lanes on both sides and up to 21 parking spaces on one side of the street and so that's the recommendation before you. Thank you let me ask the comments by the council we have persons that have signed up to pull this item in the comments by the council members. Okay Susan Sewell David Stevenson Sarah Foster Patrick Edwards Laura Hall Blake Addison and Wayne Lee in that order. Let's take two minutes each on this initially if we can come back if necessary. My name is Susan Sewell I live at 2904 Legion Avenue that's a half block from Chapel Hill Boulevard I've lived there for 14 years and in the neighborhood surrounding for another seven so I've got a good experience with this bullet boulevard and I'm a big fan of the way I want to walk there without being concerned about the traffic and I hope we get that eventually. I attended the meeting at Rogers Hurd at the traffic department or transportation department did and I also discussed with neighbors and we've discussed this on our listserv. I support this redesign of this road I think it will make it safer. We are now in the urban tier we have a nice commercial little hub with lots of residential areas around and we're ripe for being a great walking and walkable and bikeable area and this will be a good step in that direction. We are no longer a country road we are in the city in the urban tier. The restriping has been successful in other areas the staff tells us that it reduces the speed and that's our number one concern for safety. Long term we are still hoping for sidewalks and parking and crosswalks but that's not within the scope of this. We think this will be easier. The slower speeds will make it easier for people to see the businesses in our area that are so great and to be able to turn into them safely. Thank you. You're welcome. David Stevenson. My name is David Stevenson. I live at 28 or 9 Legion Avenue and I am president of Tuscaloosa Lakewood Neighborhood Association and the CLA board has endorsed this proposal but I am here tonight speaking as a resident who has lived just off the boulevard for 23 years. Living so close to this vibrant commercial strip has been mostly a blessing by virtue of having such quick access to many of Durham's finest restaurants and businesses. Quick access not necessarily easy access but in most cases if I'm frequenting any of the businesses along the boulevard, I take my car even if it's a 5-10 minute walk from my doorstep. It's simply unsafe to walk along any strip of any part of that road. Much less try to cross it, you really need a death wish to try to cross the boulevard in any circumstances. It doesn't have to be this way. This thriving commercial district is still walkable and bikeable and this proposal, this change is an important first step. If I felt that this would harm the businesses along the boulevard, I wouldn't support it. They're very important to us. It's very important part of our neighborhood having these wonderful businesses nearby. If I thought it was going to create additional traffic, cut-throughs through the neighborhood, I wouldn't support it either. I do support it. As I said, it's a first step of the only part that's on the agenda tonight, but I'd really like to encourage the council and city planners to prioritize installing sidewalks, at least one traffic signal and crosswalks to complete the picture. Thank you. Welcome. Sarah Foster. Sarah had to go home. Unfortunately, the rest of the restaurant owners also left. April and May is the hardest time of the year for us, but I'm Laura Hall. I'm the owner of the Refactory Cafe. I'm at 2726 Durham Chapel Hill Boulevard. Basically, I am here to oppose the proposed road diet. I'm also here on behalf of at least 15 other businesses that are right there and I have a petition signed by them. I also have a petition signed by homeowners that the first responses are they nuts that you're going to take this boulevard that right now our businesses are growing, they're thriving. It's a foodie destination. I'm proud to be part of it. The really great thing about it is when people come down to that area, if one of our places is busy, they've got another one to go to. It starts from Biscuitville, which by the way has great biscuits. It's me, Sarah Foster, Claudia with Google right down to Nanna's and the Thai Cafe, so it is a thriving area. Our concern is if you now throttle that back and slow down that traffic and slow it down, but decrease the amount of traffic, you will negatively impact our businesses. At the end of the day, yes, it's a boulevard. Is there a lot of traffic? Do people speed? Is there a light at Hope Valley Road and Chapel Hill Boulevard? That's the most dangerous part because people are trying to get across there and we've got four restaurants in a row. At the end of the day, as you have, as soon as you come underneath that bridge the speed changes. If you had a light there, the light down by Nanna's absolutely slows down the traffic as well. So if you shrink the road, you will diminish the traffic. You'll negatively impact our businesses and the jobs and the tax dollars that we're now generating. Our businesses are attracting people not just from Durham, but from all over. Anyway, I'd like to know what it would take if I need to get more petitions. I will. If we need to, how we get you to consider not going forward with this proposal respectfully requested. Thank you. I'm sorry it's so late. No problem. Thank you. Blake Addison. Thank you for hearing me and hearing us. I am against the road diet. My name is Blake Addison. I'm the owner of Classic Treasures on the Durham 1501 Boulevard. My first chance at looking at the proposals at Rogers Her with a DOT representative there and I was somewhat shocked that they were going to take a lane off of each side and shrink it down to two lanes and I quickly shot my arm up and said my suggestion stopped right there at the intersection of Hope Valley Road and 1501 would at least break the traffic the speed because there are cars that do come by my store that are running in excess of probably 75 miles an hour and that's a 35-mile-hour zone so I do, I would like to see something done that would slow that down but the to me is just something that that would take away from our businesses and would also be dangerous with the parallel parking proposed coming out of restaurants such as fosters having to pull out a little bit farther across the bike lane and the parallel cars that are parked there to look to see with the traffic oncoming with one lane per direction so I wanted to come down tonight and just voice my opinion against the proposed shrinking of the boulevard thank you you're welcome Patrick Edwards Sarah Foster gone right whose name did I call the head and sign up what is your name okay I'm sorry my name is Wayne Lee I live at 5120 Inverness Drive for the last 21 and a half years I've owned here by design which has been located right there near the boulevard for the last 13 years I bought the building that I'm located in now in 2617 when I bought this building all the windows and doors had bars in the windows the building had been vacant for over a year after remodeling the building and building this business numerous neighbors came by and thanked me for what we did to help on the boulevard and I'm not the only one all these other businesses had moved in and improved that stress I'm here to oppose the change because I feel like it's really going to hurt our businesses if you read the articles in the paper it would seem that this proposal has already been passed but I feel like that you haven't taken the time to really listen to the businesses I'm not here to fight you because I agree that the speeding problem on the boulevard is terrible I agree that it needs to be slowed down I think that can be done with police monitoring the situation and adding a traffic signal at Hope Valley Road intersection there I think that would really slow down the traffic and I think that by adding the I don't have anything against having the extra bike trails or bike paths I like to ride bikes myself but I think on the boulevard from the bike is that the cyclist that I have talked to they said that would be a death wish you know with all of our businesses and all the entries entries and exits from the businesses I'm afraid one of my clients will run over a biker or a walker and anyway I just wanted to thank you for your time tonight I want to take the advice of a 90 year old that told me today he said all you got to do is say that I support the cyclist but not on Durham to have a boulevard thank you there are all that have signed up to speak to miss anyone I think I hit all the cards okay can you state your name please hi my name is Kristen Lampkowski I am I live at 605 Yancy street I am the current chair of bike Durham I'm here tonight on behalf of bike Durham to support this redesign but I'd also like to speak from a personal perspective to someone who goes to the businesses on those roads and who also drives on that road on an almost daily basis I would like on the weekends when I'm not commuting to Chapel Hill via vehicle I'd like to be able to bike to those businesses I don't go to them as often as I would like because I do find driving difficult on that or parking difficult on that road and getting in and out of those businesses difficult I would prefer to bike there I also think that I would be more likely to drive there to some of the stores that might sell larger items like furniture to make purchases if I knew that I could easily get in and out of those businesses I do not like having to drive a car out of most of those parking facilities that are on that road and personally I feel that the concerns about sight lines that I've been brought up about the parking that would be on the road that personally would not be a concern for me so I would personally like to encourage you all to go forward with this redesign and as part of as a chair bike Durham I would like to encourage you to go forward with this project because right now this would be the best way to reduce speeds and increase safety on those roads cyclists don't want to bike on that road in its current condition but more people would be willing to bike if traffic was slowed down with lane reductions and the stop lights would be wonderful but it's not a part of a scope within the scope of this project the scope of this project is about repaving and the potential to reline the pavement that will be put down and so we would like you to to use the current design that has been put forward by the city when you are voting tonight I encourage you to vote for this redesign thank you welcome okay let's move this back to the council and I want to hear comments about councilwoman Tade councilwoman Shul and councilwoman Mark thank you Mr. Mayor I just want to say that I appreciate everybody coming out and staying here so late to keep us company I do very much appreciate the concerns and fears of the business owners I actually disagree I frequent many in fact most of the restaurants and the shops at least weekly and I think this will only enhance customers backing out of pennies for change or classic treasures it's very scary and pulling out of Google Hoff regulator I didn't mean to say regulator excuse me but any of the restaurants it's just really really challenging so I actually think more people will come and so I want to thank the staff for their creativity and NCDOT for their willingness we have fought tooth and nail to get this kind of work done elsewhere in the city and I'm just delighted that this is moving forward I think this is a great project I did want to ask staff if you thought that in the future we could do traffic counts or an assessment for a light something that would give folks some sense that we can reevaluate Mark here in some transportation department again we've done previous traffic works signal studies there and it has met some of the volume thresholds not their accident thresholds but we'll continue to work with DOT to see if that might be a possibility including the crosswalk exactly crosswalks would just be tremendous I also think the parallel parking spaces will be an asset and regarding no one here express these concerns but we've certainly gotten lots of emails about folks concerned about loading and unloading trucks and I assume that we could do loading areas which certainly exist elsewhere in the city we can look at that possibility as well and I completely support the recommendation for sidewalks in the future it's out of the scope of this project thank you you're welcome to recognize Councilman Moffitt and then Councilman Schuhl well one of the things that Diane said that I was going to say was thanks you guys have stuck here it's important to both sides and I know that I've been in retail a long time I know the importance of access and parking also like everybody else here frequent the businesses along that stretch of road and experience with ends announced there I look at the at the staff report and I look at the crash rates I mean it's clear I mean even the business owners who oppose this project are very clear that they're speeding and there's a lot of speeding and there's high speed speeding I will say the suggestion about having the police monitor it more the police studies show that people travel the speed that the road apparently allows doesn't really matter what you post on a speed limit in having the police there works when they're not it's not at least that's my understanding I'm getting a nod it's not a solution to the problem so we do need to do something one of the benefits of this is that it's very inexpensive that's my understanding my question is so the business owners are concerned that this is going to have very serious negative impacts on their business we get to a point where we think oh this has been a mistake how hard will it be to change it well it's really not a construction project we're just talking about restriping I wouldn't say we could just go out with a little paintbrush and paint over the striping we'd have to remove that and restripe that but it would be nothing like a reconstruction of the streets so if we wanted to like the other day we were finding out that sidewalks take five years what kind of time we said you know what we think is a mistake we want to move forward how long would it do you estimate it would take to make a change we'd want to work with DOT on this and get their approval to go back to something different than what we're proposing and if we use our pavement marking materials that we use now are thermoplastic so that has to be done in warmer weather so it could be a matter of months but not years okay thank you the other thing is one of the things that concerned me was over at Foster's today and talking with them and one of the things that concerned me was the idea of prelo parking along the street with no sidewalk I thought that was a very legitimate perspective but then I recall that the staff report shows or talks about the fact that it's mitigating the illegal parking that's going on even today that happens I know Sundays I see cars parked all along the shoulder I don't know about other times exactly how busy it is so that helped with my concerns about that and the fact that those spaces are only going to be used when the parking lots for the adjacent businesses are full so at this time it's a difficult decision but I do support the project moving forward I understand the concerns of the business owners and I do please I encourage you to stay in touch and stay in touch with us and let us know how things are going so that we can respond if we approve it and if I'm wrong All right, recognize Councilman Schuyl. Thank you Mr. Mayor I do think it's important just to note the crash rates on the boulevard are the total crash rate is about two and a half times roughly the North Carolina urban U.S. routes the night crash rates are two and a half times the wet crash rate and wet crash rate is about five times the North Carolina urban U.S. routes average so this is a dangerous road as you all know and I think that this is a good solution the main reason I'm for it I do I am pleased that it will provide bike lanes but the main reason I'm for it is car safety I have 54 injuries in the last five years on this on this on this trip and so although I do also appreciate your concerns I do want to say one other thing which is I also go there a lot and when I'm trying to turn left out of the refectory or fosters or google hoop I do feel like I'm taking my life in my hands and I think that and I have become an influence my desire to actually come to the street and so I am hopeful that this will actually increase business we'll find out but I do think this is a really good thing to do and appreciate our staff and the NCDOT being able to work together to do it thank you Mr. Mayor welcome other comments recognize Councilman Brown but the agreement here concerning the boulevard is that the status quo is not working it is not working particularly in terms of safety and also the parking issues what is the I think one of you mentioned that you have a petition signed by the business people along the boulevard and that's signed by what 15 and that's 15 out of how many could you come to the microphone please unfortunately the timing of this has not we have not had the ability to get to the rest of the business owners but if we had two weeks we could get to the rest of the business owners and then you would have an assessment of how everybody on the boulevard that would be affected feels about the change well it appears Mr. Mayor there's somehow a breakdown in communication here if you have such a large percentage of those who make their living on this relatively short stretch of the boulevard who are or may be opposed to this something's wrong here and I'm just a little concerned that maybe we're using an axe here when we should really use a scalpel my colleague Diane Cattati brought up the issue she was quoted in the Herald Sun about how yes we need more parking but this entire plan only adds 21 spaces was that the yeah it is 21 spaces I'm glad the state is paying for this believe me we need to get as much out of the state as we can after what they've done to us I'm just a little dubious about this and I'd like one final quick question I'll promise Mayor for Mark can you tell us the process that was used to contact owners and I'll ask Pete Nicholas of our staff to correct me if I'm wrong but we actually expected that we wanted to solicit input from both the neighborhoods and bicycle community and the property owners along the boulevard and actually held a public meeting on April 7th which I'm sure some of these property owners went to and expressed them position I think we've attached to your agenda item for three weeks after that meeting and encouraged people to share those comments and the summary of those comments were included with the attachment and it was clear that there was a difference of opinion from members who both attended the meeting and some of the property owners and we wanted to make sure that was shared as part of the agenda item I will just conclude by saying I was at pennies for change today that's a horrible place to access my wife says I go too often to classic treasures and that's a little less difficult but it's still I guess I'm not quite yet convinced thank you Mr. Mayor. Actually I think what your wife was saying was that you are a classic treasure. I want to do everything that I can to support increased safety on all streets and roads and that is not what my issue is here my concern is that you've got businesses that have made an investment along this corridor to live it sleep it every day I'm on the corridor I visit maybe one or two of the places there I know the traffic is there but I'm concerned that you've got people that made an investment that are telling us that it's going to hurt their business I mean I have one person come up and say that it's going to improve my business it's going to help our business and I know it's easier said than done to say well if it doesn't work we just go back and restripe it I mean we're probably restriping it at our own expense and I know NCDOT will come back and give us any more money I I think it's an idea whose time may not have come at this particular time you know to say that if it doesn't work we go back and restripe it meanwhile the business is someone might have gone out of business because it didn't work I just I can't support it the way it is and either we're going to call for a vote or we're going to allow time for other persons to come in and express their concerns but you got businesses that have invested along this corridor that have invested along this corridor and if this was a protest petition and you had this many people coming up protesting I know where we'd be you listen to them but all my bicyclist friends my complete street friends which I've signed up for I just think this is the wrong wrong tactic to take on this particular corridor to me if you're trying to slow it down I think street lights, stop lights would make a big difference in those corridors I mean I have a hell of a time coming out of Mechanics and Farmers Bank getting on that corridor a stop light they would make a difference and I think a stop light would make a difference elsewhere I don't have a problem with sidewalks if we're doing sidewalks when I talk about doing sidewalks we're talking about narrowing an area that people are saying it's going to hurt them if you do it anyway, I recognize Councilor Davis Mr. Mayor, following up on what you just said is it possible to delay this for another cycle to allow for more businesses to have an input? It's fine with me, I mean you've heard someone say that they could have more business I know the timing and all this stuff and somebody is always not going to be able to come but that's like we need more input than I don't think we're going to get a different tone based on what I've heard again, you're talking about people who made their life investment along this corridor and now we're talking about possibly cycling and if it doesn't work, we'll go back and redo it meanwhile, you know, what's happened to the business so yes, you could do it I mean that's I'd like to, if I'm in order to move that we delay this for one cycle it's been proper to move the second discussion on the question you recognize Councilman Moffitt and Councilman Cotate so if I understand what you're suggesting is we're talking about two weeks we have 62 items on that 63 because we moved Blue Cross Blue Shield to it so I'm a little concerned about wow so and then I would like to turn to staff before we vote on the motion if we continue it beyond two weeks can you talk about the impact on that if we haven't made a decision within two weeks we'd lose the opportunity because they've awarded the contract and it will be due in the resurfacing this summer they've indicated that they wanted a decision by the end of May but that we had to get the final plans to them by no later than July 1st so that would be the end date recognize Councilman Cotate Mr. Mayor, I don't see it in the attachments but I wonder I think I have seen it elsewhere so I'm wondering if staff could share a little more information about the volume the vehicle volume on the corridor I'm wondering if some of the fears that you think that it's going to slow down not speed wise but that it will reduce the number of vehicles that that road is designed with the two one lane in each direction with the turn lane to let staff speak but to carry this an adequate load and we have examples of this elsewhere in the city and I wonder if you could share a similar road volume but I mean okay I'll stop this section of the boulevard carries approximately 14,000 cars a day and it's been relatively flat at that for the last 15 years within 1,000 vehicles a day of that number for the last 15 years and we've done other road reconfigurations on University Drive that carries between 13,000 to 17,000 cars a day on Main Street along front of Duke East Campus that carries approximately 12,000 cars a day and 16,000 cars a day between 9th and Broad Street on Main that was reduced to three lanes and we're looking at also on Chapel Hill Street that carries it's turned it to three lanes that carries 12,000 and we're looking at one other proposal that will be considered in the future is on Fayetteville Street that carries between 15,000 around 15,000 and that would be recommending that that go to three lanes as well. So the traffic analysis determined that this would operate an acceptable level of traffic with the three lanes in the existing volumes. All I'll say is that I had considered those numbers because I had heard that information previously and perhaps that should be shared with all the business owners but in my mind I've never been in traffic on that road and again there's the safety the speed etc. I really do think that it will be much more attractive to people and people will come to all these businesses so Mr. Mayor I don't go into this thinking that we're going to restrike but I think it's going to be a tremendous success story. I remember 10 years ago I'll venture somewhere in the last 12 years talking about this being an attractive area and it's only gotten more and more and more attractive and I just think that this is a win-win for all of us and I appreciate the concerns but I we know that it can bear that level of vehicle traffic you are not going to lose volume I think you are not going to gain people that have been afraid to come or do not like it so I just I would like to propose a substitute motion moving this item. Second. Second substitute motion comes first any further questions on it? I have an item I'm going to ask the clerk to open the vote please. I'm close to one question. I'm sorry. Can you read this? 5 to 2? May or bail voting no and council member I'm close. Can you re-open it please? Yeah I will. Can you speak of the Mike please stand. Sorry my motion was to approve the item as submitted by staff to restripe the road in the configuration as proposed. I'll second. So we've got the motion. Brown substitute to the substitute. I would move that we move forward with ncdot in terms of the reset resurfacing and then come back and talk about the lines later because I've you know it's hard folks for us to turn down this money from ncdot and the road needs because the road is going it's not going to be repaved okay tell us the road is being resurfaced correct rose going to be resurfaced regardless of your decision by ncdot they've awarded the contract for the resurfacing the only decision is on what kind of pavement markings to provide and we need to render that decision so that's get the resurfacing time it'll be done under either option it'll be it's scheduled to be it's scheduled to be resurfaced it the contract has been awarded for the resurfacing we've taken this opportunity to consider restriping it as part of the resurfacing project and dot will do that they'll do the research they'll do the strike well they can go ahead and start the resurfacing and they can pay for it and then we can let them know how the stripe should be aligned that's my motion that works I don't have a problem that all right so this is a substitute for a substitute the motion this is what it is I mean the original motion was to go and then we had a substitute and I was Diane's basic sense except the staff report and gene substitute is except the staff report to have the ncdot resurfaces and we'll come back later and decide how we wanted to strike I think that's what you're motion absolutely okay so that's what we're going to have a question on it Mr. Ironson if we wait six weeks to decide what we want with the striping can you tell us what the impact of that will be our expectations will be it'll be striped as it is today so so the motion effectively is simply the reverse of the motion that that's councilwoman Katadi made which is either we strike it with the reconfiguration or without and just to be clear perhaps another way to put it would be do you want five lanes or do you want three and so let's be clear which one we're voting on so you're now voting for five as a reason what gene was saying that and now that the staff I know it's getting late 10 minutes 12 I thought what gene was saying is go ahead and have ncdot resurface and then we come back later inside how we want to strike what I heard Mark say is that if it gets resurfaced they're going to do the striping I guess my question is if we came back two weeks later and said here's how we want to strike is that too late what I've said is they've told us that they we have to submit to them a final pavement marking plan by July 1st so information July 1st right the 1st of July we have to submit a final pavement marking plan to them that they can use then if it's to be anything different than what it is today fine yes absolutely we have a July we know what the motion is okay Mr. Mayor okay I'm just going to say Mr. Brown it would be a lot easier to vote on exactly what it is as opposed to a what if I just I find that really problematic I mean those of us that have worked with DOT you can't just go in and say oh well we'll tell you later it just doesn't work so if you want to vote for the five lanes why don't we vote on three and if that doesn't pass then we'll go back to the original motion as opposed to this convoluted one sorry I'm sorry my friend I don't think is that convoluted what Mark just told us is a NCDOT will resurface the street at state expense and then we will have until the end of June to come back to them and recommend how we want the striping to occur councilmember Brown I'm sorry let me ask since we only have one more meeting and it has 62 items on it what you are suggest we have only one more meeting before the end of June so you are suggesting that we simply postpone this decision two weeks yeah or as long as we have in terms of NCDOT I'm not going to vote to turn the resurfacing down I vote to resurface the road we can vote on the motion that's on the table and the motion is on the table is to I'm whether you like it or not the motion on the table is to vote to resurface it and come back later to make a restricting decision we can vote on that and you vote in the way you want and then if passes we know where we are if it doesn't pass we go to the next substitute motion so I'm going to call the question and Madam clerk can you open the vote this is for the substitute to the substance substitute to some motion your motion okay can you close it it passes four to three with councilmember Cotati voting no councilmember Moffitt voting no and councilmember Shul voting no yeah so that's that's the motion so the staff has it we got it and if we've got a long meeting we just have a long meeting all right anything else come before the council all right we're adjourned at level 53 p.m.