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Good afternoon happy Thursday everybody happy beautiful Thursday this March the 24th 2022 here in the Bull City Durham County North Carolina I'd like to call this city council work session to order at 1 p.m. on this great day we certainly want to welcome all of you here in attendance in person again hi everybody it's so good to see people in the audience hey everybody yes and and those joining us remotely as well madam clerk would you please call our roll mayor O'Neill I am here mayor pro tem Middleton I'm here council member Caballero here councilmember Freeman present councilmember Johnson here councilmember Williams here thank you thank you so much I will now recognize and in my colleagues were any announcement so comments all right Councilman happy ever thank you good afternoon everyone good thank you just real quick under the other matters at the end of the agenda I wanted to quickly talk about some ARPA conversations it'll take maybe one or two minutes thank you so much thank you anyone else councilmember Freeman just acknowledging I noticed there were some first responder activity on Main Street I just want to hope that folks are safe under the fire engines and EMS were out there along with our police so just sending a good cheer or a good well wish to those folks who are involved and then just a note that the youth works application is out and I want to make sure that folks are aware that we do need corporate sponsors and so if you have a company and you are willing to bring on a youth for the summer please do reach out to our workforce and economic development department thank you thank you so much mayor pro tem I think I saw your hand raised thank you madam mayor good afternoon good afternoon honorable colleagues and to everyone watching whether you're in the chamber in the chamber nice to say or remotely hope you're all having a good day first off madam mayor just by way of a bit of celebration this week I had the opportunity on your behalf in the city's behalf to welcome of the council general of Israel to the southeastern United States are not sauteed on and a delegation from a non-governmental organization called shuraka that works to promote peace in the Middle East cross Arab lines of Arab Israeli lines of religious lines of denominational lines and planted a tree got to plant a tree in East Durham Park it's called Tree of Peace which is marked out there hope residents and citizens will get an opportunity to go by I was very pleased to be doing that in Durham and they recognize Durham is a place where we work really hard to make everyone feel welcome and to make everyone feel valued and to honor each of our existence and whatever iteration it comes in so I was very pleased to welcome the council general and to give her a city of Durham pen to wear along with her friendship pen of the United States flag in the Israeli flag so I just wanted to thank our friends also I keep Durham beautiful who provided the tree for us to plant I didn't know you just don't stick them in the ground and pat them and walk away there's who knew there's a science to it so I want to thank our friends to keep Durham beautiful and thank the council general as well for her visit to Durham and the opportunity to welcome her on our behalf secondly and finally we are within the waning hours of our open application period for those that are interested in filling the vacant seat on this council of these seats that do not belong to us that belong to the people of the city and we take this this sacred obligation very seriously and approaching it with great sobriety and filling this seat this seat that belongs to you so if you are still finishing up your application just know that tomorrow is the deadline if you are interested in serving on the Durham City Council to fill out the rest of the at-large term per the vacancy per the resignation of our friend and colleague councilmember Charlie Reese that's it Madam Mayor thank you so much it's good to see all of you thank you looking on councilman Williams thank you mayor colleagues I had the opportunity to spend some time with the folks over at Bridges Point Incorporated the sickle cell agency that provides support and resources for sickle cell carriers and I I'm embarrassed to say I did not know that there were so many folks that carry the sickle cell treat who suffers from the disease and are so limited in the support and resources medical resources that are available to them so I am starting today to name that I hear you and I am committed to finding support for you to the hundreds of residents across Durham and I'll reach out to my council my commissioner colleagues to see if there is any type of Department of Public Health support for them as well but we have a we have a contingency of people in Durham with sickle cell that if you know what they actually go through on a daily basis it we shouldn't lot of happening Durham so I hope that we can find some support for them but just wanted to name it and I'll start that advocacy today thank you thank you any further announcements well I've had I've had the opportunity to meet some more of our city workers over the last couple of weeks as you know as things warm up and as we get back to whatever normal is going to look like I've been blessed to be able to interact with some of our city workers I met with some of our union members on yesterday had a really good conversation with them and on this morning I did a PSA with the water Department of Water Management and let me just tell you we have some very smart people in the that run the city and I'm just so happy and pleased to be a part of it they are very dedicated and I just wanted to give a shout out to all our city workers again today always gonna try to keep them in the forefront of my mind without these able folk we wouldn't be able to do what we do and I'm just always so pleased to meet with them you'll see a public service announcement will be coming up they told me on spectrum that I did this morning for the Ms. Water Challenge beginning in April so we'll see how that goes but they're very professional make me feel very comfortable we only did about 500 takes for about three sentences but you know we get it done and they were so patient so just a shout out to all those that I've met and all those I've yet to meet thank you all for all the work that you do so we will move now to our priority items and I'll turn to our city manager to see if she has any today good afternoon madam mayor mr. mayor pro tem and members of the Durham City Council I do have one priority item for you this afternoon agenda item number 20 which is shared economic prosperity the Durham small business work plan built to last and youth works program update that is a supplemental item that has been added to today's work session and we expect the presentation to last about 20 minutes that is all I have this afternoon you are now here the managers prior to items may I have a motion for their approval move second the move by councilwoman Freeman seconded by councilman Williams that we approve the managers prior to items all in favor say aye aye any opposed the eyes have it and the motion passes unanimously and now we'll recognize our able city attorney's office for any priority items good afternoon mayor mayor pro tem and council members donno tools sitting in for city attorney Kim Rayburg and the city attorney's office has no priority items thank you so much attorney or two you now turn to our city clerk for them recognize her for any priority items good afternoon madam mayor madam mr. mayor approved him and council members I do have a couple items I wanted to update you on the out large vacancy applications and then discuss how to process the agenda item for the April 7th work session thank you so much now entertain a motion to accept city clerk's priority items move second right it's been moved by councilwoman Freeman and seconded by councilwoman Johnson for approval of the clerk's priority items let us have a vote at this particular time all those in favor say aye any opposed hearing none eyes have it and the motion passes unanimously we now move to our second order of business and I will read to you the entire agenda starting first with the administrative consent items the departmental items presentations and public hearings okay and we do have one matter that the citizens that a citizen has pool right okay all right so we have our first item will be the approval of the city council minutes item number two is the participatory budgeting steering committee appointments the department of items beginning with item 3 is a virtual private network VPN access and digital technology performance audit February 20th 22 item 4 which is amending the FY 2021 2022 budget and other grant project ordinances and it will be pulled by Miss Stella Adams item 5 which is FY 2022-23 budget development guidelines will also be pulled by Miss Stella Adams item number 6 the amendment of operating agreement with volunteers of America of the Carolinas Inc. VOAC to provide services for homelessness coordinated entry with diversion number 7 the annual report for the community safety and wellness task force number 8 master service agreements for the 2022-2025 City of Durham Durham Chapel Hill Caldwell Metropolitan Planning Organization DC HC MPO on-call professional services engineering services data collection and community engagement item 9 purchase contract repower of gold Durham buses I don't matter would you pull that please item 10 the award of construction contract for the Eno River force main relocation project to J. F. Wilkerson contracting company incorporated I'd like that pulled as well please sir item 11 award of a professional engineering services contract determines group Inc. for the improvements for access to utility easements and facilities project item 12 February 2022 bid report number 13 amend the FY 2021-22 capital improvement program and amend the design bill services contract with Skanska USA building incorporated from major league baseball facility standards upgrades at the Durham Bulls Athletic Park Madam Mayor would you pull that please yes number 14 lease agreement with Durham County at 2725 Holloway Street for the continued operation of Durham County Amalat substation and emergency medical service training item 15 revised cultural and public art resolution to incorporate membership changes item 16 contract with s and m e incorporated for traffic study at the waste disposal and recycling center madam if you could pull that item yes ma'am presentations item 17 is an update on the Durham safe routes to school program item 18 the 2019 trail implementation program under public hearings number 19 item 19 zoning map change bull city townhomes number 20 just a supplemental item is the presentation shared economic prosperity Durham small business work plan built to last and you works program update all right madam manager here's what I have for the food items and presentations we have put item number 4 by miss Adams number 5 by miss Adams 9 10 and 13 by mayor pro tem Middleton and item 16 by councilwoman Freeman we also have its presentations 17 update on the Durham safe routes to school program 18 2019 trail implementation program and also item number 20 shared economic prosperity Durham small business work plan built to last and you works program is that what you have as well madam manager yes all right thank you so much we will now return to our and review our pulled items beginning with item number 4 which has been pulled by miss Stella Adams and that item is the men the men the FY 2021 2022 budget and other grant project ordinances and we have our staff person here who is miss Christina Reardon did I did I murder your did I kill you got it got very close Christina Reardon yes with budget and management services thank you and it's written is here to ask any questions miss Adams miss Adams is there I believe right miss Adams you have the floor now you have three minutes I believe miss Adams can you hear us ma'am miss Adams she's been unmuted on our side okay miss Adams can you hear us I believe your mic is on on this end if you can hear us if you can raise your virtual hand and you can make sure that our internet is working properly can you say something miss Adams all right miss Adams what I'm gonna do I'm gonna ask me a pro Tim to start with item 9 and then we'll return to you as I see if we can get a technology folk to take a look and make sure that everything's working okay so may a pro Tim if you allow me to pull to look at one of your pulled items which will be number nine absolutely as you direct ma'am absolutely and which is the purchase contract repower of go-derm buses and then we'll return back to miss Adams and we have miss a Tom Devlin here for to answer any questions all right sir you have four thank you so much I'm good to see you good afternoon real quick all my pull items are real real quick questions so it's a good thing to read because when I first saw a repower like what does it repower me and I read to the memo it's exactly replacing stuff so go Durham we strive to get 15 years out of our buses I read that 12 about 12 years is when we need to repower things I know there's some some type of math behind repowering as opposed to repurchasing but it's I just wanted that is that an industry best practice to repower as opposed to just make them go to 15 as a so good afternoon madam mayor mayor pro tem and members of council Sean Egan director of transportation for the city hope everyone can hear so 15 year planned useful life the federal transit administration requires buses purchased with federal funds to be used for a minimum of 12 years what we find is that over the we're trying to maximize the life cycle benefit and minimize the life cycle cost so what we do is a series of three five year life cycles so at the five year we adding up to 15 years total so at the five year point we replace the engine and transmission we have a very demanding duty cycle for our equipment so at about five years we start to see reliability fall off significantly and we don't want to be in a position where a bus breaks down and strands our riders by the side of the road we want safe and reliable equipment so we do that at the five year mark at the seven and a half year mark we do interior and exterior rehabilitation so we repaint we replace any seating that needs to be replaced or carpeting that needs to be replaced internally so that's at the midlife seven and a half years then we come back at 10 years and do the drivetrain again the engine and transmission and at the 15 year point that's when we're supposed to be retiring our equipment we haven't always kept up with this cycle so we had for example last year some buses that have been serviced for over 18 years in our fleet but we've now retired all of our 2003 and 2005 equipment so we're back within our planned 15 year useful life but we need to move forward with this contract so that we maintain that five-year cycle for five and ten engine and transmission replacements best primer ever thanks and for demystifying some of that you know we did we just kind of jump on them and ride them and it's I think it's good every once in a while to hear that's what goes into maintaining our fleet so I appreciate that yeah I didn't I'm sorry I didn't recognize you without the without the headset my bad man and your filter game is strong as well because you look you look different in person it's my first time ever speaking in this chamber so wow that's right well nice to be here I didn't recognize you in the chamber thanks so much man I appreciate you that's it Madam Mayor on that item thank you Councilwoman Johnson and also thank you Madam Mayor I'm sorry Sean I need you to come back hey so I just had a question and you know we're trying to convert a good chunk of our fleet to electric buses and those are a lot more expensive up front but are there the same kind of ongoing maintenance costs that we see with the diesel buses like do they start to look better when you factor in all of the upgrades and stuff that we have to do with the diesel ones over time so what we expect with the lifecycle cost of the electric vehicles is that we won't have at these large outlays at the five seven and a half and ten year cycles there will be costs associated with battery pack replacement the industry is still working its way through this the technology is still new so it's not entirely clear a what the right timing is for those battery pack replacements and then what the cost associated with those would be but the ongoing maintenance cost and fuel cost is much much lower for the electric equipment it doesn't have all of the moving parts that require maintenance the way that a diesel bus does so our hope is that over a 15 year lifecycle the savings in maintenance repower rehabilitation and in particularly fuel these days with gas and diesel prices where they are moving to electric should yield significant benefits for us and provide a comparable overall 15 year lifecycle cost with significant air quality emissions and noise pollution benefits that all sounds really great thank you Debra Duregan this is in a complicated way I just had to take a moment of personal privilege while you're here when I came back from DC last week I wrote the bus to my house and I wrote an electric bus and there was a rider who verbally assaulted one of the drivers while I was on the bus and I was tired I had a hoodie on I had shades on I had my mask on and I just looked like a regular person just sitting there quiet and the the person you know started just cursing out the driver I want to say that the driver was so professional he handled it extremely professional and when I got off the bus I gave him my card and I thanked him for a service so I wanted to highlight that customer service experience and I also want to highlight that our drivers go through a lot folks in Durham please be respectful and the bus was really really cool and I think he used the last amount of the battery to get me home so I shout out the transportation thank you guys thank you anyone else okay we're going to return back thank you mr. Egan I didn't recognize you with your eyeglasses we're gonna return back to pulled items number four and see if we can get miss Adams on the line which is the amend the FY 2021-22 budget and other grant project ordinances miss Adams are you available we'll see if you will okay here we are if you can unmute I think you may be able to speak at this point I've asked her to unmute madam mayor but she hasn't I think you're ready to proceed miss Adams miss Adams can you hear me she says you you may be unmuted now madam mayor she is unmuted all right miss Adams she's speaking but we can't hear she's speaking try to speak now well all right we can hear you we're gonna have yes we're gonna have you on council when William speaker phone he actually has his phone up to the mic going on school so if you could just speak we should be able to hear you miss Adams that's one second and to my colleagues I'm the newbie so pardon this informality yes ma'am Egan is here to address some comments as to item four so if you would allow him to do so and thank you for your comments on that items miss Adams and we'll come back right we'll come back to you good afternoon again Shawnee again director of transportation what you have before you in the grant project ordinance is funding for the safety and state of good repair of our system so for example the repower item the replacement of engine and transmissions that work has to take place across our fleet to ensure the safety and reliability of our equipment the federal funds are matched with city tax funds that are raised through the city's 3.75 cent property tax rate this does not include funding from the county half-cent sales tax that is a separate source of funding this is part of our ongoing safety and state of good repair program at the same time we have most certainly heard strong community support for improvements on the route nine we have requested in the FY 23 county transit work plan additional services and additional funding to improve service on the route nine and we're working closely with that team to add future funding more hours better frequency in the coming years for route nine so we want to make sure that this can move forward so that we ensure the safety and state of good repair of our fleet but we're very aware and we've heard loud and clear the the interest from our community in more and better service on route nine and we'll be working to advance that through the adoption of the county transit plan hopefully later this year if any further comments from council all right we will move now move to item five FY 2022-23 budget development guidelines and Ms. Adams you may speak to that agenda item at this time I know John allure is also on the line if there's any questions as well but I'm happy to answer anything Mr. Allure if you if you have any comments we are ready to hear those sir I think that you also we can see you but we can hear you but you can hear us obviously okay let's see Mr. Logan you try and say something again I saw the mute button did come off still having technical difficulties yeah he's just texted that he's passing it'll have passing the baton so thank you I will say that yeah I'm sure that what he I imagine what he would say is that we could we would be happy to add kind of those that language to the guidelines and make that revision before the council meeting on Monday thank you so much we'll look forward to the other decision I don't matter if I might I firstly I do want to say in defense of the staff in the city the the language of equity is ubiquitous in our in our strategic plan and the way we score things for the budget as well so this this this particular document instrument you know is in no way it's a pretty kind of set piece that we get each year but this is no way is reflective of the absence of equity or the you know the the presence of an equity lens we talk about all the time and it informs all of our work so there there are a number of other places to look to be assured by that I don't know that this necessarily constitutes a directive to the staff to change the budget guidelines you know we can certainly talk about that as a council but but I would say I agree with Ms. Adams of as always with she's a gadfly for us and making sure that we remain focused on equity but it's in there it's in the scoring it's all through this process I this is you know I I was going to pull this one anyway because I think this this item warrants I think at least some kind of highlights or or a primer before we just pass it on consent you know we usually used to kind of massaging this a little bit and I noticed that there there may be a tweaking at least room to tweak the tax rate and I think that certainly warrants kind of the the thinking or the the tick-tock behind it rather than just passing it by consent particularly for for residents who may be watching and wondering what their taxes are going to look like and how we're going to proceed so I was just wondering if staff wanted to give us a kind of a tick-tock as to how we got to this particularly iteration of it of the guidelines sure yes and we I do want to say that the text I just got from director or was that he wanted to say exactly what you said so which is that we do have some equity tools that we're using in the budget this year and both in our CIP scoring and also in our budget requests but as far as this document this was created after your you remember your budget retreats that council held over four days and so it's kind of a direction to staff for the manager's proposed budget on what should be kind of included in that budget and so as far as the tax rate goes the the the one change that council is considering is the in the general fund there is language in here that says the general fund which is currently at 30.95 cents may be considered to fund additional structure and salary adjustments and those would be for staff got you okay thank you for that I I just know that this this is a I mean we in the scrutiny that miss Adams put on it is is only you know indicative of how the rest of the people when they see these guidelines that this is kind of one of those threshold kind of moments when it comes to although we haven't ultimately passed a budget yet but one of those kind of aha moments this is what's kind of frame so I just wanted to give staff an opportunity to bring any any potential highlights get manager please think yeah thank thank you madam mayor I would not add a lot of comments but what I would bring to the attention of the mayor and council is that we did have a couple of years when we were very flat with our compensation for our employees because for good reason that good reason being we were in COVID we wanted to ensure that we could vary that we were fiscally responsible with the resources that we do have while we value our employees we know that sometimes that value is in the form of compensation and we want to make sure our employees are very well compensated what you have in your budget guidelines is a may because we are still developing the budget and we would not propose an increase in any amount if it is not required or needed in order to balance the budget but you you you will recall we made a significant investment very well deserved in our public safety public safety departments that is going to require us to bring an additional item in the tune to the tune of nine million dollars into our base budget just to cover those market adjustments and as we look at some of the other frontline workers as well as others who provide service in this community because they also have not had a significant any significant increases to the base salary over the past couple of years we are working very diligently to manage our budget within the tax rate that has have already been that that is the 30.95 cents you see there but we did want to have some flexibility to move that slightly if we need to and obviously if we did make a recommendation for that it would be just that it would be a recommendation for your consideration and your approval which is why we did not have an amount in there because we're still hopeful that we'll be able to incorporate all of our priorities and not have to have that adjustment. Thank you so much for that madam manager and and let me be clear this this this you know my my invitation to kind of make these statements on record is more about transparency and understanding for the for the public's sake not that you know we're not going to dot our eyes across our T's and that we understand you know in city halls speak that it's recommendations and the parameters but I but I know you know when folk who aren't plugged into this stuff don't do it every day when they hear stuff like oh they're going to vote for the guidelines they're set already I just wanted to be you know as we go through each step give an opportunity for the very excellent meticulous work that the staff is doing to be highlighted and showcased as much as possible so thank you so much for that on the great guidelines thank you thank you madam mayor thank you madam manager all right we will next to turn to item number 10 which is the award of construction contract for the eno river force main relocation project to jf which was in contracting company that has been pulled by mayor pro tem middle yeah the floor sir thank you madam mayor who who uh chair munrone mr c resource person he's aren't virtual so that may be don't can you hear us can we look like he can't hear you all right but we can't hear you hear you are you not muted are you yeah it's clearly the russians I um well if he can't um and there's no one in chamber I'll I'll until we get the technology worked out I'll I guess I can just suspend or all right would you like to move to the next item which is item 13 which is amend the FY 2021 22 capital improvement program amend the design bill services contract with skanska right USA building ink for major league ball baseball facility standards upgrades at the D Durham Bulls athletic park also pulled by your mayor pro tem you have a floor sir thank you madam good afternoon sir good to see you you you can probably anticipate what my question is going to be but I'll I'll put it on record anyway so the original project budget was five million 220 thousand and now it's it's it's being estimated that's going to be more than 100 percent more than that um I know there's math and science and good reason behind it but I you know I just so for our residents and constituents that might be watching this meeting and looking at this agenda explain to us why there's so much more money needed than what was originally projected good afternoon uh john pot just wiles with general services department yeah um it's a it's a good question it's a big increase the the big reason is and we're you know we're seeing this in a lot of our construction projects that go to bid this past year or so is just a very volatile construction market so things are a lot more expensive than they were um that's that's one reason another reason is that the design has just evolved over the past year we're working within a existing ballpark existing building and we're um we're sort of uncovering unknowns that we didn't know about before so like we need additional shoring to you know avoid utilities throughout the sidewalk um there's we're not able to use existing ductwork that we were kind of counting on using or counting on using some of the existing lockers that we're no able no longer able to use so things like that um but the big i think the big reason is the uh just the construction market in general so i mean you mentioned ductwork and stuff this and is this a fair characterization this is this isn't like primarily being driven by like osha concerned i mean this is major league baseball that's right the standard is correct so that's right so the um it's part of a restructuring of the relationship between minor and major league baseball clubs and so there's new requirements that must be met um at the Durham Bulls athletic park and this is happening all over the country as well so we're not we're not alone in this um they are not it's not optional it's a requirement if we want to keep our franchise with the with the Durham Bulls then we have to do it so um you know since the facility was originally designed for single-a minor league baseball and now it's a triple-a um you know where bulls currently play at um there's extensive upgrades that must be performed these include addition of a new batting tunnel um also you know renovations to the office and the player locker rooms uh upgrades to the um reconfigurations of all these spaces basically we're you know we're we're completely gutting the underneath of the Durham Bulls stadium all the all the back of the house area that you don't really see um except for a couple of spaces we're we're pretty much gutting the whole thing and having to redo it to make these allowances these requirements for these upgrades um let's see also includes training room upgrades and all the associated HVAC the plumbing electrical uh and just the architectural finishes uh there's also uh women locker rooms that's added for female umpires trainers and coaches and there's been some other projects at the Durham Bulls athletic park to improve sort of the fan experience over the years but this is really the first project that's come around um to address some these back of house issues and we do have someone here from from Skanska um to if you want further information on sort of the the general price increase in the construction market he might be able to give more information on that sure if you'd like to share I'd be more than happy to okay hey how are you welcome thank you for having me um I didn't have anything specific prepared but as as John mentioned um and as you see every day in the purchases you're making at home um material and cost escalation has been a significant concern since the start of the pandemic we saw throughout 2021 a period of hyperinflation that we'd only seen four times previously in in the 19 since the 1900s and those periods usually lasted four to six months but this one has lasted 18 months and then we started to see a taper off at the end of last year when things were starting to get under control with the uh pandemic uh the the escalation rate was decreasing and we were anticipating that this year we would have uh on the neighborhood of hood of four to eight percent escalation where a typical year three to five unfortunately Omakron hit and that has started spiking pricing again along with the um and now conflict in Ukraine adding more instability there's just a lot of uncertainty in the material market and availability driving pricing up um we're now seeing uh escalation of 25 percent over the past uh year or so just and that's as John said driving a lot of the pricing thank you so much for that and and you know to be clear I I I understand the the dynamics of the market and construction cause going up but I I guess what I I think is important to delineate for our constituents and folks watching is that yeah construction costs more but this is also being it's not like the ballpark's about to fall apart it or I don't think uh you don't want to go over say that but but that delineate for our our constituents and residents that this is it's not only construction cause this is also being driven by standards that major league baseball has uh prescribed in order for us to keep our franchise which is one of the jewels in our crown absolutely uh as as John said you know we have a locker room currently but major league standards say the locker room now has to be bigger so you can't just go into that ballpark and make one prute room bigger without making another room smaller that major league baseball also says has to be bigger right so uh working within that existing facility as John mentioned and trying to fit all those pieces is also why we're forced to add an addition on to the for the bed batting tunnels to provide that requirement as well all right well thank you I appreciate the uh the information and I I I'll yield there thank you madam mayor thank you thank you councilwoman johnson thank you madam mayor um so I had a long conversation with Wanda about this item um and was able to get some a little bit more details in terms of the amount of money that we're spending that we're already spending before this 10 million dollars um comes into the equation on the ballpark um I right now do not feel like I could make a convincing argument to this community that that spending another 10 million dollars on these renovations in order to continue to spend significant amounts of money every year to maintain the ballpark to pay for the debt and the operations um that that's a good use of public money and I'm wondering if someone I really need someone to help me understand like how what what is the case for this and and what are the consequences if we don't do this so we lose the franchise then what are there are are there alternatives to us taking on um this this responsibility the the bulls have an owner for example major league baseball is requiring this are they are they providing any funds to teams or you know to make this happen I would really like to figure out a way that we don't have to spend 10 million dollars in public money to continue spending millions of dollars in public money to to maintain this operation and maybe there isn't a way but I want to plumb the depths of our options a little bit so there aren't a lot of options that I'm aware of I mean these are these are requirements that we have to do if we want to keep the bulls franchise it's my understanding um the the Durham bulls are chipping in uh toward the project um but since it's a city facility um the the majority of the burden falls on the city for for this um so as part of the um the original item that came before council earlier in the spring um for the design the pre-construction contract with scansco um there's also a cost share agreement with the bulls so I didn't go into detail in the agenda memo but um it's one of the attachments it the cost estimate shows the portion that we're paying of the cost estimate and again this is just an estimation estimation of the cost so we won't know the true cost until it's bid but this is our hours scansco's best guess what it's going to cost um so the bulls are contributing about one million of the total two point ten point two million of the projected construction cost where the city would be paying nine point one and so these typically these are four um things that are above and beyond what are required by the MLB uh through this this agreement so it's things like you know if they want additional lockers or they want a little bit better lockers than what we would typically have and they're paying for those upgrades um if they want you know nicer ceilings or light fixtures something that's just nicer than what might typically be provided they're chipping in for that um if they want um let's see sorry I have to look at my notes there's a few other areas there's like a bat swing area and the video coaching area so there's certain things that they are paying for that's above and beyond what's required um and are they they're there there's no funding I'm assuming since you didn't mention it from major league baseball to help people meet their requirements it's just here's a mandate and you need to retake your team away that's my understanding okay um and do you have a sense of I mean this this may be beyond kind of y'all scope but what is the financial benefit to the city of Durham of having the bulls in the bull stadium in actual like dollars like of economic activity what do we get from it I could not answer that um perhaps someone else in the administration could but I don't have that information okay and if we were to not provide the required updates and major league baseball says okay you can't have a franchise then what we just don't have it I don't know that either okay anybody know good afternoon jean approach general services department uh if we do not complete the the requirements of major league baseball that flows through minor league baseball then we would not be able to continue to host games at the Durham Bulls athletic park we would not be in compliance with the franchise agreement and we would not have a franchise agreement in order to um enjoy baseball um I would I would like to know how much that would cost us in in dollars I know that there's sort of a larger civic um goal of you know having the Durham Bulls and that that's a it's a point of pride for the city and and and that is worth something but I I would like to put some numbers on what we lose if we lose the franchise if that's possible we can work with our partners at the bulls as well as others to pull whatever economic impact information we can in order to have that to have a full complement of the impact okay that'd be great thank you and then in my conversation with the with the manager there was also some discussion about our lease with the bulls and the requirements of that lease this may be a city attorney's office question what what kind of um what kind of requirements do we have as a result of that lease and what would be the consequences of of breaking that by not doing these upgrades and Don O'Toole city attorney's office I don't have that information Fred Lamar probably is the one in our office most familiar with that I'm sure that we can work with general services and have that information for you as well thank you thank you um yeah I would just I'd like to know all the options before we move forward with putting a whole lot more money into what is already kind of a money suck a beautiful money suck thanks y'all yeah what's the timeline that we're dealing with here so if we don't move forward today then what are what are we up against the timeline for fulfilling the standards the requirements so it's a it's a stepped sort of requirement the absolute deadline I guess is opening day for 2025 so there's there's no compliance thresholds for 2021-22 but then beginning on the opening day of 2023 the threshold must be within 30 points so it's a it's a penalty point sort of system so we have to be within 30 points by the opening day of 23 season and then the compliance thresholds declined to 20 points the opening day of 24 2024 and then down to 10 points on the opening day of 2025 so what we have now is a is a is a project that gets us with you know within those 10 points of compliance by next year so we have time for you to get the information that council member councilwoman jonesa requested without getting to a point where we're losing the franchise well we need the funding for the project now because it fulfills all this one project is designed to fulfill all the requirements we need so it's not a it's not a stepped project over the over the course of the next few years it makes sense to go ahead and do it all at once to to get it done if that makes sense note it it'll it'll cost more to divide it up among different projects over the next few years thank you councilwoman freeman thank you madam mayor i just wanted to offer to staff um a comparative and just acknowledging that richmond didn't do the upgrades and they lost the braves their downtown suffered a huge loss and so i think that that could give you some numbers to look at councilman may approach him middleton thank you madam mayor um and i i appreciate the um um council member johnson's uh important questions about revenues and economic impact but i i just want to be clear the bulls ain't going nowhere um and uh it is it is a huge uh jewel uh in our crown i know for a fact of speaking to uh business owners in the downtown area i mean when people come to those bulls games it drives so much other economic activity from restaurateurs to our parking um and whatever and and it's a money it's a revenue generating uh operation and i think long term globally whatever we spend uh to do the upgrades and i think it's important that we have an explanation of what these upgrades are and why we're spending the money but i i am in i don't even want to send the message that we're even considering um letting the franchise go at all i don't want to telegraph that in any way um i do want accountability and explanation for the money that we're spending but i i just want to make it clear that i don't this you know this that's the non-starter for me at the even consideration of of losing the Durham bulls um here in Durham for all types of reasons economic and otherwise so thank you madam mayor councilman cover your thank you i appreciate all my council colleagues comments on this um i also appreciate the um i think it would be important regardless of the economic generation that is brought by the Durham bulls at the end of the day it is a private franchise and it is public property and uh the the city the taxpayers own that and so i think it is an important um there's been plenty of cities who have decided not to do publicly funded um athletic venues exactly for these types of reasons so i think it's important for our public to know it is an economic generator but there is a cost for that economic generation and folks deserve to at least have an accounting of it thank you council council just uh just to add to it uh probably i believe there's a billion dollars of development that's coming in that area and i'd like for the city to be a partner in that so um as your i think what councilwoman johnson is asking for i think it's really good to um to know you know what parts of the city or what assets in the city you know are doing for us economically that's definitely my lane of interest um but i'm looking at it on the positive side i'd love to know in addition how that could actually supplement what's happening over the next five to ten years so but i'm i'm with you mayor pro 10 any further discussion so one of the things um that the staff did not speak about um is the bidding timeline and as the council has discussed um some some members have discussed this particular item it is actually on this cycle uh it is you know the options that we have at the end of the meeting is to leave it on consent or place it on um you know gba for further discussion but also as the as the city attorney and the general services department director talked about providing additional information um i would like that to be in the context of how quickly that additional information could just could be provided compared to um the schedule that is proposed in this particular item for the bidding so if you want to go first department and and i don't know about the city attorney's ad thank you i am not quite sure how long it will take to assemble that information i can we can work really hard to pull something together in timeline for um a monday night discussion or to keep this on the schedule if that is the preference um we are constrained and concerned about the ability to get to market to get bids in order to be prepared to start this project at the close of the season so that is another thing that's driving our our timeline for the construction donald tool city attorney's office i'm emailing with mr lamar and he's actually looking at that right now and so i'm sure he can work on the same time frame as general services madam mayor i for me it would be just good to know i don't want this to be a constraint ultimately i'm going to support keeping the bulls so keep that in mind madam it's just point of clarification so we're taking this off of consent just pending what on on our next meeting what is it that we want to know how much money we make from them or i just want to be clear that what we are what we're asking the staff to bring us what i understood is that we would pull together information about the economic impact that the bulls have in our community and you think you will be able to have that available by monday hopefully by the monday council meeting 11 the monday of our next city council meeting i think i can try really hard in the next couple days to see if we can meet that um information supplement by working with some other partners i don't have that information myself i will have to rely on others to help with that you said sign this factory now that's again don't let me hold you up i rather ultimately i'm supportive so please don't you know later you can say hey councilman williams this is what we found out but that just focus on councilmember johnson's request i think that was the same request yeah the overall economic impact and i would also i mean like to see and um the information about what we're spending that what the city is spending on debt service maintenance and what we're getting in i know there's a there's some cost sharing and there's some um something else i forget but yeah what what is coming in what's going out and what's the economic impact so that we can say this is why we think this is so that we can say to the community this is why we think it's worth it it's not just so that we can say during bulls it's because there's an actual benefit that's occurring to our community and i don't feel like i can make that argument right now thank you councilwoman freeman thank you madame i just want to make it very clear that regardless of the impact analysis that i think this should move forward and so i would be fine if it was on gb on the consent agenda or gba either way i think we need to make sure that we're taking care of our facilities that's a given as the d-pack and we're looking to bring on the wheels um skating rink so we just need to make sure that that's covered the contracts that we have in place allow us to to receive the revenues that we're getting and so i don't want to make that an issue where we have where it might fall in jeopardy and so i do i do want to make sure we uphold our contracts um even though i know we're asking our attorneys to look at them but it's important to know it should move forward thank you and i'll just add by saying that i do understand um the need for accountability and that things have really uh increased as we all know from the price of gas to food under construction overall it's a very difficult financial season um for us as a city and for people in their individual lives however as i was sitting here thinking about the Durham Bulls i cannot remember time as that that has not been a part of Durham you know there was a movie made about the Durham Bulls Kevin Costner i mean Durham Durham gets his reputation a lot of it is derived from his relationship with the Durham Bulls i cannot imagine a time so that that that heartfelt tie for a lot of Durhamites including myself um you can't monetize that that's a part of who we are it's part of what makes Durham great so there are sometimes um where the the reputation and the tone of a city to me that sounds like no no Durham without um Duke University or no Durham without North Carolina Central University you just can't imagine that so um i am sure that there are lots of Durhamites who who who have that similar state of mind however i do recognize that there is a need for accountability when we talk about these types of things but um the Durham Bulls here to stay i i would agree unless something really drastic happens i can't see that happen let us now move to uh number 16 i just wanted to say one last follow-up thing if possible i'm sorry on the agenda item we were just discussing oh yes i just wanted to add one thing i just want to be clear from my perspective i just want a general accounting i think this is i think folks and i and i get why folks are feeling this way there's clearly a lot of emotional attachment to this issue but people need to understand what that emotional cost is and i think that that's a fair thing to bring up and i think it's a fair thing to understand as someone who has to help pass a budget uh and what is i think it's it's personally helpful to understand the narrative around it our public our residents should have an understanding yeah if my assumption is going to be it's probably a very great positive economic benefit that story should also be told at this point what i'm hearing from staff that is unclear on our ledger what it costs to have it versus not and i think that that's an important thing to share regardless and i i enjoyed the room you know everybody understands the emotional realm we're dealing with but it's still important to understand the money attached to it thank you Madam Mayor if i might um if i might i pulled the item i was the one who pulled the item so i i am well aware of the the need to be transparent and need to give a financial account that's why the item was pulled we're all fiduciaries um but i i would venture to say that understanding the nature of the brand of a city is not a motion that that it transcends emotionalism understanding what something means to generations of folk um that's not emotion we're all you know intelligent conscientious fiduciaries of the city and all of us understand our need to give nobody's saying spend money no matter what you know what it costs just throw money at it um and i'm listen before those numbers come back we've heard projections and we've heard reports before about the impact of the Durham Bulls uh on our city and and both you know empirically and anecdotally from merchants that work in that area and business owners that that operate downtown so there's no doubt in my mind that a case is going to be made for the economic economic vitality of this but i i do want to you know just just you know this isn't about emotion nobody's just ranting or throwing emotions around this is about the brand of our city we're not only fiduciary fiduciaries were brand ambassadors as well and i just want to i want to let everyone know that when i engage in discussion and debate with this council my operating assumption is that each of us are concerned about transparency each of us are concerned about the cause and that each of us have an eye on that that's a given for i don't even have to deal with that that's my assumption uh when we engage in these debates uh in discussions which is why i pulled it thank you madam mayor councilwoman prudence thank you madam mayor and i just wanted to just delve a little deeper appreciate council member i mean mayor pro tem um middleton clarifying that the emotion is not just the part of this conversation i think it's also important to acknowledge how many jobs are tied to that and how many people actually work there and so i wouldn't i think it's going to be difficult for the staff is to actually assimilate the actual number um beyond just you know the the facility itself of of the worth and value of the organization that's been here for what almost a hundred years so i i push back on it because i know that folks look at the dollars and cents as if that's the end all and be all but it's not and we know that that there's a lot of layers to the conversations and it's really disheartening to hear it's kind of flatten that way that's all thank you thank you all we knew move now to item 16 which was pulled by the councilwoman freeman contract with s and s m e s and m e ink for traffic study at the waste disposal and recycling center councilwoman freeman you have the floor thank you i just had a quick question in regards to actually requesting an air quality baseline study as well and i'm not sure if s and m e can do that or not but i do want to make sure that i ask the question while you're moving forward with this study okay uh good afternoon wane fenton assistant director of solid waste uh that is not a part of this but we can certainly make inquiries and see what could possibly be done to include that that's all thank you thank you all right we're now at the time where we're going to take about a five minute break so that our our technology persons can check on our own features and then we will move into our presentations uh following that right so we'll come back it is 2 13 let's come back at 2 20 let's come back at 2 20 everybody somewhere in there testing testing testing testing so i know one of the division's most important projects over the past few years has been the development and implementation of the equitable community engagement blueprint what is the blueprint and why was it needed the blueprint is a document that we created about four almost four years ago three and a half years ago in response to a few residents coming to a city council meeting and um asking and really i mean really demanding city council to do a better job of engagement specifically around the the belt line project whenever the city makes decisions in those projects it can have really positive impacts but sometimes if we're not careful it can have negative impacts and that's where engagement comes in it's really important to make sure that we're you know engaging residents to make sure that we see all sides of what's happening and can do our best to mitigate any harm i was looking for an opportunity and an old friend of mine suggested that i apply at go Durham the community really relies on us on go Durham public transportation well i like driving a bus because of the friendly culture i love it in the morning when people greet me good morning they give me a free me wave they appreciate you and that goes a long way being a bus driver and go down anything can be achieved here um you can come in at the bottom and you will be able to excel in a fairly short amount of time here i started as an operator and i'm here now as a operator training specialist so long as you stick to it you can't excel the perfect candidate that would excel at go Durham is someone with tenacity someone with drive someone who wants to make a difference for their community you have to be people-oriented you have to be experienced and you have to be on hands ready to go but with the proper training it's just like driving a car so as a new driver with road training come in and you see me and i'm going to make sure you have all the tools to succeed they give you a lot of input and they work with you step by step so you won't be alone in this do anyone considering working for go Durham you won't regret it please come please apply we would love to have you join the go Durham team North Carolina Constitution requires that the courts be always open we had to figure out how to protect people's constitutional rights i ultimately decided to get vaccinated one i felt it was safe two i have a public facing job it was quick it was easy i had limited to no side effects and to me that's a fair trade-off for staying healthy stay up to date on your COVID-19 vaccine find out when you're due for your booster visit myspot.nc.gov testing and testing recording in progress okay we're back all right we're gonna briefly return to item 10 the award of the construction contract for the eno river fourth main relocation project to jay of wilkerson contracting company enkham mr grielly has joined us thank you so much i think this item was pulled by my mayor pro tem middleton and i'll turn it over to him to mr grielly good afternoon mayor mayor pro tem members of council i apologize for the technology challenges that we were having today here to answer your questions thank you so much uh don i appreciate your uh leaning in and actually coming to the chamber from where you are that's commitment thank you um very quickly the um yeah item 10 okay i have to get my uh bearings so i am i am jf wilkerson contracting enkham very very pleased that they're using a certified firms for ub their ube goals but i and this question actually might be better for some of our for some of our equity folk um again our equity our equity goals again in previous conversations not in this conversation our equity goals are about um minority and and women owned businesses but it's also about derm as well you know we we want to empower some of these type of businesses in derm and and i noticed that the companies are zebulon and young zilla they're from the certified list that's not a bad thing and i i'm sure there are trucking companies in derm but i guess my question is about the list for our certified firms on the ube list when um we award contracts can the company just look at that list and i'm looking at you but i know some other folk may jump in on this yes on this answer can you just pick anybody from that list as long as they're on a certified list or or do we encourage folk to to lean towards derm companies if they're on uh the list matter manager thank you for that question i knew we might tag team a little bit here so the hub um database is a list of qualified firms and in order for a majority firm uh to meet the goals as long as there is a qualified firm um certified firm used then the goals can be met with that certified firm we do provide a sub list to two majority firms so that they may try to reach out to the to individuals that can do the scope of work to bid on the project as you will note these are construction projects so regardless of who the who the subcontractor is it still has they still receive bids from them so the answer is they can select and come to you know come to the table with um someone that has been selected that is certified and if it happens to be someone from our local community then you get to you know two for one but they're not required to pick someone from the local community and they also are looking at the bids that they receive for that scope of work absolutely thank you madam manager do we do we know what and if we don't know this this is something we can we can you know research what percentage of of um interest or companies on the certified list are in fact Durham companies are local do we do we know that we we certainly do know where their headquarters is located because it you know it's probably about 4 000 certified firms on the hub list and and they're you know their name of the company their address their contact information email addresses it's it's all there so the answer is yes we do know where they're from where they where they list their headquarters to be okay and is is how well represented is Durham on that list that's generally speaking um do we know I think the representation um is dependent upon the scope of work so in some scopes of work we may be represented well and in others there may not be anyone in Durham that can provide the scope of work you know certainly want to be very clear that the staff members that work in the space you know they are trying to assist firms um and sometimes these the bidding phase it has has a certain limitation in time and they want to make sure that they are providing firms that actually do the scope of work that the prime contractor is looking for because as I mentioned the list is pretty long it's like three you know 4 000 businesses so they go into those business into that list and they look for a subset of firms who may may be helpful and this is presented to the to the firms during their pre-bid conferences and in the packages so that it kind of you know is all up front absolutely well thank you for that amount of managers absolutely no shade towards aughtry instruction company or covenant trucking company whatsoever and I'm glad that we have as part of our internal architecture at the city folk who are looking to make sure that these companies are representative and you know we've got more work to do to build capacity amongst our own local interests and companies or what but we're on the we're certainly on the right road now I just want to acknowledge that work um on behalf of our people thank you so much now for coming and good to see you in person thank you guys take care thank you madam mayor thank you sir we will now turn to our presentations we have three this afternoon and we will take them in the order that they are appear on our agenda uh the first one item number 17 is an update on the Durham safe routes to school program the second will be item number 18 the 2019 trail implementation program and then item 20 to share economic prosperity Durham small business work plan built to last in youth works program and we'll start with item 17 the update on Durham safe routes to school program Mr. Dale McKeil yes good afternoon I'm Dale McKeil I work in the transportation department and it's great to be with you in person today um mayor uh mayor pro tem and members of council um Durham has has been doing work in the safe routes to school area uh providing bicycle education um teaching children how to walk and bike safely and promoting a walking and biking to school or at school for a number of years um the partnership for a healthy Durham led a lot of these efforts but a few years ago the northbound department of transportation put together a grant program that provided us an opportunity to expand our program to give it a little bit more stability and the city um put out a request for proposals and reviewed some applications that were received and ultimately awarded a contract to bike Durham to provide these services and John Tomage the executive director of bike Durham is here today to talk about the work that we've been doing in this area good afternoon uh madam mayor members of council madam manager thank you for this opportunity to present to you the work we've been doing with Dale uh and Sean and the transportation department uh over the past year with the safe routes to school program and thank you for this opportunity to hopefully bring you a bit of joy today because of all the benefits that a safe routes to school program offers uh joy for the elementary school students is one of the the most rewarding for those of us uh working on this program the only thing I'll point out here because Dale covered uh this is that we have an oversight relationship the city of Durham and Durham public schools through uh Dale and then on the school side Matthew Palmer and their new transportation planner Kristen Brookshire we meet with them biweekly to review the direction and the implementation of this this program through this grant there are really two complementary components uh the walk bike and roll to school events and the bike safety classes and I'll I'll share our experience with those with you but it's also evident to everyone involved in this that the third leg of the stool are the infrastructure improvements that need to occur to make sure that there is safe walking and biking infrastructure for for the students and and the families to feel comfortable for their their kids to come to school bike Durham is a local uh Durham non-profit organization that works on sustainable transportation you can see our vision and mission here today in the chamber is our board member Carmen Kwan who is the chair of our education committee that uh we house this in uh we do the work with uh an employee part-time employee Jacopo Montobio and some contractors including Stephen Mulaney who also works uh in the schools and has been an outdoor educator for for many years uh and uh educator is best Baldwin and and Ruth Brown and we're currently recruiting for additional paid and volunteer safety educators to be able to expand the offerings in the schools walk bike and roll to school events are one of the key uh elements that we're able to offer and it's related directly to the key objective which is to see more students walking biking and rolling to school that requires the safe routes that there are sidewalks and places where kids can walk and bike and cross streets safely it requires a culture of walking and biking to school and it requires the skills on behave on behalf of the students and so we're working on building that culture through these events and the skills for for the biking the let me point out in October the first time we did this uh on a large scale and we had good participation from 13 elementary schools over 5000 students these were both walk to school events and walk at school events there are some schools where uh it's not really still safe to get from off of campus on to campus because there aren't sidewalks connecting to the the school and in those cases there were often walk events that were organized on the campus of the schools this year may 4th is national bike to school day throughout the month of may and on that date we'll be working with elementary schools our target is to engage 20 schools in the the activities and more than 7500 students eastway elementary likes to do it big they did it just before Halloween this past fall and so kids were in costumes there was music they started at the save a lot across the street and went around the block a big parade with with the teachers the administrators principal brooks parents it was a great great morning we're also working this for this spring with cc spalding uh we've made a connection with the recreation department at North Carolina Central University so students will go off campus to walk around north a section of North Carolina Central and back to campus and Merrick Moore we're working with fire and police to be able to close a section of cheek road for that morning so that the students can walk through the neighborhood off of campus and and back to the school and again we hope to have 20 schools involved with that this this may the bicycle safety skills course is the other key activity that we offer we've been at Merrick Moore spring valley and eastway in the fall we're just finishing up at creek side elementary this this week and then we'll be at glenn and and you know valley and we may be able to be at a fourth school this spring if we bring on those educators and work out the schedule one thing to point out is we're prioritizing the schools that have high proportions of youth that are families that are eligible for the free and reduced lunch in this first year there have been we also need a willing partner on the part of the school and a PE teacher or PE coach who is enthusiastic about bringing it in so we've we're prioritizing those schools if you're familiar with Durham schools you'll notice that a couple of those don't fall into that category and but we're still working to to go to those schools first the bicycle safety course is we see students four different times whether that's four days out of the week or once a week out of for four weeks depending upon how school structures their PE class there's in-class elements there's on bike elements and they walk away from the end of the time with some some skills that they're bringing back home this is the testimonial from one of the students at Merrick Moore and one of the things we love about this is he talks about bringing this back home to his family and his cousins and encouraging them to get on their bikes at home so even though he's at Merrick Moore Elementary where there is not safe infrastructure to get to that school he is still being able to use these skills at home we also we know that some of the students don't have access to bicycles and we've started a program in cooperation with the bicycle co-op where we're able to through the school either the PE coach or a counselor identify students that need bicycles and are able to match many of them up with with bicycles at the end of the program just a couple more shots of kids on bike and doing the course getting instruction getting the helmets learning how to pump up a tire learning how to put on their helmet and put on a safety vest the learning that the importance of being visible and making sure that your bike's in good condition before you get out on the road we're also getting great feedback from the the PE coaches that we're working with this one in particular one of takeaways here is her last statement about looking forward to having this program back next year that's what we love to hear but we also don't want this to be just a one time a year that we're able to interact with students these are skills that require practice to stay good at and to refine so we're hoping to work through deeper relationships with some of these schools so that the kids have more touch points throughout the year and also exploring ways to do activities outside of the school so at Eastway Elementary at the end at the conclusion of the in-school program coach Watson suggested that we do an event on a Saturday at the school we invited the neighbors at Franklin Village and we had about 40 different families show up that that's Saturday and go through the skills course there as well some of the more students that had been in the school but then there were other students that were either other ages or there were siblings of those kids who were in the school or they were from the community some of the the activities coming up next I've mentioned both this May is the walk bike and roll the school and we hope to have 20 schools and maybe up to 14,000 students involved we are identifying some Spanish-speaking educators bilingual educators because so many of the DPS students come from Spanish speaking families and so we hope to add that very soon um we will be doing summer programming so many of the DPS students are going are able to go to their school throughout the summer for extra enrichment activities or because they had that year of zoom there's still a lot of ketchup um and so the bringing PE and bringing the bicycle safety education into the summer schools um and then finally uh deepening the relationships with schools raising the awareness so that more schools are looking to be engaged with us uh and and leveraging the interest that we're seeing from the administration the educators the families uh to be able to get some of those physical improvements so that more families can actually feel safe having their kids walk and bike to school thank you very much there's different ways that you can follow the work of bike Durham and this program and we're happy to answer any questions councilwoman Freeman that was absolutely great thank you thank you thank you uh and I have to say that I have to appreciate Jim McDuffie for introducing me to the bike walk day over 10 years ago and my only one request over the years has always been do we have to do it all on one day because I've only been able to get to y smith and eastway on that day um I really um appreciate this project coming forward and I'm glad that there is funding and I just want to make sure that it's clear that when you're talking about infrastructure specifically it's not limited to just sidewalks and um bike lanes that it also includes bike station repairs and so the one that I know that is available in eastern is at shepherd's house church because a well a private citizen installed it there and so I don't know if there's a map that shares the bike stations that are also available publicly but I know that those private ones have been the only ones I've seen in eastern so if you do know of some if you could share that that would be great um and that was my main question also just to keep on the praise and saying thank you for doing what you're doing I know that it's not just bikes it's pedestrian safety but the bike piece is helpful for the kids thank you thank you just a quick question um good to see you in person beyond zoom um do we have do we have kids that you know of that are in need of bikes that um or do we have a pipeline of donation opportunities just to get more kids involved uh yes so what through the schools we are working with as we are partnering with the school offering the the training um using either counselors or their their p.e. coach to identify students that who might need those and we've been working with the bicycle co-op there are other organizations in the triangle that including our own police department at the christmas time that work to um either purchase bicycles or have donated bicycles outfit for for distribution to kids um but we're specifically trying to uh do that in conjunction with this um the program and the kids that we're interacting with and make sure that they get a bicycle as well as lights and a helmet um so that they have all the safety equipment thank you so much and uh I we were sharing uh a few zooms together and I reached out and asked you to call me but I realized that I'd logged in mistakenly under my restaurant name so um that wasn't a restaurant asking you to call it was me so I'll reach out to you that was my mistake and I now I know why you never called all right but thank you sir I think we had someone that was going to say something if you wanted to come back to the mic sir you may I was going to share with um council member uh freeman that there was a repair station installed at uh holton uh resource center that's been probably nine nine months ago or so and so there are now two in in uh east arm but it is a good suggestion to better publicize those locations councilwoman coverer thank you uh good to see you um and I hope you invite us I like to do the the bike walk things at the schools it's fun um club boulevard has it's been many years since I've been at that school but it was always a very fun uh thing to do and I it is um I think I went out to merrick more this past fall and it is a good you know reminder that are a lot of our schools are not safe to get to and they do not have the infrastructure um and we need to do a better job about that so I I appreciate the program I look forward to joining you all in May and uh we need to do a better job making sure our kids can access uh our schools so that they can bike and walk and we will as we get the dates and times for the different schools we will certainly extend invitations to you all to join those as you can anyone else councilwoman johnson thank you madam mayor um thank you for the presentation I was also able to go out to merrick more um for the for their day last last fall and it was it was a great activity to have happening during the pandemic too for kids to be able to be outside and have fun and and hang out together um in a in a situation where school has become um a lot more controlled like they have to you know be social distancing and um so I think they really enjoyed it like it was a lot of fun um for me as well and for for the teachers and they can be able to go outside and just enjoy you know being together outside they were super excited about you know being able to run around and they're always really excited about free helmets and getting to check out bikes and yeah so this is just a really good program I'm glad that we're supporting it and y'all seem like a perfect organization to take this on for us um to thank you for your work and look forward to um being able to attend these events again thank you it's been a good partnership thank you so much that was a great presentation and thank you for all your hard work it's this is a feel good one so thank you thank you so much we'll now turn to our next presentation just item 18 and 2019 trail implementation program this Lindsay smart good afternoon I'm Lindsay smart with the city's parks and recreation department thank you for having me here this afternoon to review the 2019 trail implementation program for the next 15 minutes I'm going to go through a little bit of Durham's trail history um and bring into focus some efforts that are um more current and going on now and then we're going to look to the future for what's next with our trail program our first trail opened in 1985 and it was the lrb creek trail phase one and since that trail opened we have built just over 31 miles of trail when we when we think about mileage of um of trails in Durham we do it we also do a comparison based on population and so when we look at the um 31 miles of trail and our 2019 uh excuse me 2020 population estimate was 283,000 we also look around the triangle to see what our peer communities our neighbors here are doing and in the triangle there's almost 245 miles of trail collectively between these four different municipalities and towns so that's pretty interesting we did notice that we are starting to fall a little bit behind though some of our neighbors here in the triangle so that initiated us to look at the progress that we've made since 2011 when the 2011 trails and greenways master plan was adopted and so since the adoption of that plan we have made great progress we have built um about six miles of trail listed here we also have received federal funding for three trail projects that are currently underway the downtown rail trail the extension of the third fort creek trail and the r kelly Bryant bridge trail and in 2017 deputy city manager Ferguson created the trail action group which is an inner departmental group of um technical staff that are all that all overlap um construction and delivery of trails in Durham so we've made great we have made great progress since 2011 on advancing the Durham trail program we when the tag group the trail action group was initiated we pulled together all of those technical experts to discuss barriers to construction why are we doing such a great job yet falling behind some of our neighbors here in the triangle so the tag group got together for a series of meetings to identify those barriers and really focus on implementation what's what is the future hold for us how do we overcome those barriers so we had participation from 10 different departments most nine different departments as well as the Durham Chapel Hill Carboro metropolitan planning organization so thank you to the city manager and all of the deputy city managers for loaning us your staff this was a very um comprehensive and time-consuming process we met over six months to identify barriers and talk to everybody who is somehow related to any project delivery here in Durham to come up with a short list of those barriers those challenges that we need to focus on overcoming to be able to advance the trail system here and we came up with this list of five lessons learned um right-of-way acquisition design constraints cost project cost estimating compared to bids that we get back when we advertise the project funding strategy um you know diversifying funding strategy and permitting challenges all of that information went into the development of a scope of work for this 2019 trail implementation program i am the Durham Parks and Recreation staff liaison to the trails committee of the Durham open space and trails commission so as that in that role as liaison to the DOS trail committee i met with DOS to also get their input on this scope of work so while the technical team that you saw the photos of before while they were working on drafting scope of work the trails committee also participated in that and i brought all of that information to the technical team and we developed the scope of work to them beaker services for an engineering and planning team to help us deliver the scope of work so the three large elements of the scope of work that are that make up the trail implementation program are an overall trail network review and the strategic corridor feasibility and implementation program document the first element of the scope of work is the overall trail network review and so this is the overall trail network from the adopted 2011 master plan there's 96 miles of trail recommended in the city that we are still working towards and most of the trail trail recommendations are along bodies of water which create a lovely user experience for the trail users but we start to get into some design constraints because Durham is in the Falls Lake watershed and the Jordan Lake watershed which are both to impaired watersheds so one of those lessons learned from the earlier slide was some design constraints well here's some reflection on that being having such a great trail user experience by being along these bodies of water in nature a little bit more less urban stimulation more recreational feel we then have more design constraints because we are in those watershed those constrained watersheds the overall trail network was also evaluated for opportunities and constraints and redundancies since 2011 the transportation department and other partners have made great strides in building sidewalks and develop and put installing bike lanes and shared lane markings and different bicycle facilities so we so there was a comparison for where we have recommendations for shared use trails and on roadways that have recently received sidewalks and bike lanes because it wouldn't be a good use of of city funds to take out what we just built in the take out sidewalks and bike lanes that we just built and put a trail there so looking at that redundancy and where have safer bicycle and pedestrian corridors already been created and so where should we then focus dollars out so we should then focus tax dollars elsewhere while all of that was going on the overall trail network was being reviewed and evaluated by the consultant team i met had a series of meetings with the DOS trail committee and they selected the nine priority trails that would be studied as part of this program and we these are the nine trails excuse me the downtown rail trail connector to the r kelly brine trail the piercantown trail extension the lion park american tobacco trail forest hills park connector trail we need to have a naming meeting to shorten some of these names this slide in itself could probably take about five minutes the rockwood trail the north prong creek trail campus hill connector trail third fort creek tributary trail the warren creek trail extension the sandy creek trail extension and the panther creek rail trail so those were the nine priority trails that dos identified and put forth for the scope here for this implementation program and these nine trails were studied in in great detail for again those lessons learned those barriers to trail delivery there's a pretty good geographic distribution around around durham um those nine trails were in addition to geographic distribution those nine trails were evaluated for constructability and community context factors because geographic distribution is not the only important criteria to consider for building out durham's trails so there are um so the trail constructability factors that were looked at is hydrology wetlands stream crossing structures along the trail topography and land ownership some of those are those kind of repeating themes here of those five lessons learned or those barriers to construction um so we're looking so those nine priority trails were evaluated for constructability to overcome those challenges community context factors were also a big part of this feasibility um and evaluation of these trails key destinations trip generators network connectivity multimodal hub safety and equity the consultant team performed site analysis for those nine trails they walked as many of the corridors as they were able to access um without trespassing on private property we told them that they should avoid doing that so they walked as many of the um corridors as they could and they also performed desk review of all available data for um environmental constraints and connectivity and all of those um factors that we just saw on the previous slide they delivered a very technical document to us that we needed the whole technical team to get back together to review and the the alignment evaluations that were delivered in that document one example is shown here this is a section of the extension of the sandy creek trail opportunities and constraints and um other alignment information was all detailed throughout a map with several pages of of information that that went with a whole bunch of these maps so i'm going to walk through the nine priority trails to give some context and background to each of them and um and then we'll talk about the entire document so the downtown rail trail to the r kelly bryant trail connector is approximately point six miles as the crow flies to connect the eastern termini of the downtown rail trail that that termini is currently at avondale drive and we are this trail connector would connect that trail to the northern termini of the r kelly bryant bridge trail that is currently in design and that northern termini is at drew grand b park so this priority trail project would connect those two um trails that are um in design the piercent trout piercent town trail extension is approximately 1.5 miles and the it extends from the current termini of the current piercent town trail it extends north um through nc central university continues north to make a connection to the haytie heritage center the american tobacco trail forest hills park lion park connector that trail connects the tuska luca lakewood neighborhood through west end neighborhood to lion park through forest hills neighborhood through forest hills park and connects to the american tobacco trail and that's a pretty key connection as we have some park projects going on right now that we are making sure we accommodate this future trail alignment in as part of those projects the rockwood trail this project connects um beyond the intersection of 15501 business the Durham Chapel Hill boulevard and university drive and then travels southeast through rockwood park and to connect to the third fort creek trail that is currently in design right around the weaver street recreation center and weaver street park north prong creek trail the campus hills connector is approximately four and a half miles and it begins down at meridian parkway and travels north to campus hills recreation center and then continues um up to dakota street the intersection of dakota street and austin avenue and that intersects with the southern end of the current or the r kelly bryan bridge trail that's currently in design the third fort creek tributary trail is our only true east west um alignment that we have um for a trail corridor in um in these nine priority trails most of the other trails follow bodies of water and therefore um primarily run north south or northeast northwest to southeast this trail will connect to the existing third fort creek trail to the american tobacco trail near Fayetteville street and the warren creek trail is is our northernest most trail um in this group of nine priority trails it will connect the southern side of west point on the eno park down to horton road and make the connection to the existing warren creek trail the sandy creek trail extension is approximately two miles and there's the existing sandy creek park and sandy creek trail is in the middle and we asked for the consulting team to evaluate a northern extension up to the albular trail near cornwallis road and there's potential to run it further north up to carman boulevard and also evaluate opportunity to run that trail southward across 15501 which is one of the reasons that we have a very high cost estimate here and to connect to the existing new hope creek trail and we at first we were met with some exasperation from the consultant team asked trying to figure out how to get across 15501 in there and we said yes that is a big priority is to figure out how to cross that that um that roadway and connect to these trails down here so they they looked into it and they figured out a way and the final trail of the nine priority trails is the panther creek trail it's about six to seven miles as the crow flies from eastern durham near junction road and travels um east northeast out to falls lake kind of near cardinal point and that is along the former panther creek rail line i think that was the name of the rail line it's um along a former rail line through there so all of the evaluation of the overall network as well as the close um evaluation or a more detailed look at the nine priority trails all went together into um the implementation program document and while the technical committee and dost and the specifically the trails committee of dost reviewed all of that analysis and all the recommendations the consultant team started to begin um started to develop the funding strategy and implementation strategy for all of those nine priority trails so the implementation and funding strategy for the nine priority trails includes alignment options they were tasked with figuring out at least two alternate alignments for every trail every one of the nine trails um opinions of probable costs i will note that those are twenty nineteen dollars um so those because those estimates were put together um in 2019 for us so all of the cost estimates on each of those slides will have you know have to have a year of expenditure inflation added to them the permitting need permitting needs for every um each of those projects as well as a funding strategy historically the city has funded a lot of our city trails with federal funds us department of transportation federal funds that are available through the ncdot prioritization process it's a competitive scoring process and we've been very lucky to um receive a lot of that grant funding but we have to diversify our funding strategy because not all of our trails not all 96 miles of trail would be competitive for that process so how else so the consultant team was tasked with how else we could look at delivering our trail projects here this is a lot of text on it this is a high level summary of those nine priority trails and the funding strategy so the consultant team looked at each of those trails and compared those the alignments and all of the constructability factors and community context factors and compared it to the way ncdot um spot the strategic prioritization office this is a office of transportation how they score projects so where the project appeared where a certain project appeared to be competitive for that scoring it's put in this category you know the strategy is to pursue the federal transportation funding we have a high likelihood of having receiving those funds receiving federal funds for these three trail projects the rockwood trail and the north prong creek campus hill connector trail um did likely would not score well through that competitive grant process so the consultant team is recommending that the city consider funding those two projects with cip dollars um and not pursue ncdot funding for that and then the last four projects down here the third fort creek trail warren creek trail the sandy creek trail and the panther creek trail those all are recommended to be developed with city cip dollars as well as private partnerships and through development agreements with developers who develop land in the along those corridors the next steps in this process is to um develop a public engagement strategy um and figure out how how best to engage the Durham community on nine trail corridors and um so develop an appropriate strategy and plan and then start to conduct that equitable public engagement with a focus on those nine corridors and continue those conversations in those neighborhoods while us different funding cycles start to come up so that we can have that public input and priorities from the neighborhoods so that we can meet those funding cycles and then begin to incorporate public comment um and influence influences into the decision making for priority trails and exact alignments trail amenities and different um elements of the trail that the public can comment on and give us direction on and continue to prioritize projects and those design elements as we continue to have those public conversations so with that thank you so much for listening to this Durham trail program story and i'll take any questions thank you councilwoman freeman thank you miss smart that's a great presentation i really appreciate the overview and the work of dust and so many folks in the community to pull that recommendation for the nine trails as a priority i do want to just um ask a couple questions um and i'm i'm just just thinking about it uh off the top of my head just listening and thinking about some of the things that have been going on the 31 miles that we were talking about does that include all of our i guess is it including roadways that would be safe for dirt bikes or four wheelers no the 31 miles are just the shared use trails like the tobacco trail like an eight or a 10 foot wide trail that's available for all non motorized users okay and um just noting the i know there's a area by east end park there's two there's two specific areas the first is the area where the bridge is broken and i think it's kind of like just marked as not like as a don't use but people are still using and um i'm just wondering if that is included in the north throng or north throng trail as a as a repair at all it is not that bridge is actually not along any of our trail corridors it's in east that bridge is in east end park and it's important it's an important project for us to replace that bridge so it would just be a replacement not a part of any of the trails correct okay and then um just acknowledging that there's a huge swath of land um back there behind the east end across the way off of austin avenue are there any plans to address that at all i'd have to look more specifically at some of those parcels i don't remember the different alignment all of the different alignment alternatives for the i think it's called the downtown rail trail r kelly brine bridge trail connection which would come through there um so i'd have to go back and look at that but i'm i will say that that would actually bring you through so you could come from east way into east east east end park and then go straight into the tail end of the beltway or the green beltway that would have you and so it would be great to have that included in some way shape or form an update so thank you i think that was all i had i would also i think that's all i have thank you just understanding the cost breakdown the consultants generated this as a um uh what it may cost to do this is that correct correct each trail each trail okay all right yeah thank you madam mayor and good afternoon lindsay a great presentation uh good to see firstly i want to say um we we didn't it wasn't lost on me the uh nod to parks and rec uh the show in your presentation i saw my man ron swanson in the in the uh slide uh saying as a permit by the way parks and rec is probably the truest depiction of what it's like to work in local government that we've ever seen on television so i would commend it to everyone um i wanted to ask the um the first off there's no better position i think into the entity than dost to kind of quarterback this for us and kind of direct this but i am curious as to with the identification of the priority trails did we just totally outsource that to them and they just came back with the list or how much engagement was there with them on their methodology in terms of identifying these trails the nine priority trails are included in the 2011 master plan so they were selected through the public the broad public engagement process that was conducted in 2009 and 10 for the development because that plan was adopted in 2011 so through those years when that public involvement was conducted the all of those trails are in the master plan they're part of the 96 miles of trail in that so they weren't new trails that were identified and drawn and selected by dost we looked at the uh the five priority trail brochure from 2014 dost reviewed that that was endorsed by council um as the next five priority trails back then so dost reviewed that as well as the 2011 master plan and suggested those nine priorities got you and and and i'm glad you said it because that gave uh you've given voice to the larger um engagement process because it just reads like dost chose these so it's important i think that that um you know it couldn't be a better folk to run point for us but i'm glad you spoke to the larger uh engagement uh that went into identifying um the list the um the numbers that are attached to each trail the the um i guess it's speculative at this point what it might cost each trail extension are those numbers those are just construction numbers are those numbers taking to account the possibility of having to pay off you know a choir land or eminent domain or paying for is that just construction numbers those numbers are all in for design acquisition and construction got you i think that's it for me great presentation i i will say that um you know it's nice it's important i think when you live in urban environments to have areas that are oasis and respite and in green and open for folk for our health and for our sanity as a city so this is incredibly important uh and crucial work to maintaining that important balance as a great american city we know but we don't want it to be all concrete and skyscrapers so thank you for this incredibly important work that's really for us that's a woman jocelyn thank you madam mayor um and thank you lindsay could you tell us a little bit more about the ncdot spot process and what we would have to do to get that grant funding and any limitations on it like could we get funding for all three of these projects we have to pick it's been a couple years since i worked in the transportation department so i may not be the best staff to answer that question um every 18 months to two years ncdot does a prioritization process and it's a scoring process and municipalities all submit their priority projects to the durham chapel hill carboro metropolitan organization and then the mpo as a whole takes all of those projects and prioritizes them for submittal to spot so it's sort of two that first round is prioritization i don't i don't know if there's a that's not true excuse me a few years ago when i worked for the mpo in the transportation department their uh mpo's were limited to i think 24 projects that they could submit and that could be outdated information at this point but there was a there was a cutoff for how many projects could be submitted to ncdot for each round of the prioritization and so that's 24 projects um for all of the communities in the mpo and i'm sure you're aware of all of those so the mpo does a prioritization process with within itself to identify the most competitive projects to put forward if you put forward projects that aren't very competitive you're you're sort of losing that slot and the consultant team for this implementation program was tasked with looking at each of those nine projects and developing alternate alignments and some of the alternate alignment options could be an opportunity to be more competitive if we move to trail a different direction or we kind of change the trail corridor a little bit we might pick up points from that from that competitive process that was the goal um we the those alignment alternatives focused on a funding strategy not necessarily community context factors because that's something that the city has learned the way that ncdot prioritizes projects through that scoring process doesn't always align very closely with the values of of durham and so we wanted to maintain the integrity of the trail corridor that was identified through that public engagement process for the 2011 master plan but also say okay if we if we deviated from those values and we went to just focus on getting more points for the grant process to get a project funded what would that look like so that's included in the document thank you that's really helpful um do you know and like a ballpark number is fine how much funding there is available for like in an 18 month cycle i don't know okay one of our recent calls that we had related to the downtown rail trail um members of the transportation department were on that call and they said that spot six they're actually not taking any new projects they're trying to fund more fully fund existing projects because a lot of bids are coming back higher and so ncdot is working with all the municipalities to more fully fund that the existing process okay thank you yeah i just i know ncdot is having a lot of their own budget issues lately and so um and you know these are real big numbers it'd be really great if we could get some um some state support and yeah figuring out how we can be our best chance to get that seems like yeah the right absolutely the right strategy um and i'll try not to be too skeptical we should definitely try um to get to get this funding and yeah just trying to get a sense of like how likely it is thanks councilwoman come by here thank you um good to see you lindsay thanks for presenting here um i just wanted to thank you and dost i know you all do a lot of work around this and i'm excited i will say as an npo member i i know what's happening with ncdot so i i do have some concerns around the funding for those specific trails i'm glad that we are diversifying um our funding sources so some things can move forward even if other things can't and again just thank you for the excellent presentation and all the work anyone else i didn't say thank you and i apologize thank you for this thank you for your time i'm drinking coffee and it's not working so councilwoman freeman thank you madam mayor i just a couple more questions and just just um i don't know if there is already an existing map that shows alleyways but if you could direct me to that that would be helpful i'm sorry i couldn't hear your question i'm sorry alleyways so i'm talking into this mic instead of this one the if there's an existing if there's an existing map that shows the different alleys across the city i'm just trying to get a feel for how much of the urban side of this open space conversation we're still missing it's acknowledging that in i think 2019 we added scooters to the mix and so in addition to bike and walk we've got scooters four-wheelers and dirt bikes and they all need some place to ride so i just want to make sure that the network is really robust and there's a real opportunity on the east side of derm where i'm talking about where the east the east end park is and the connection coming from the r kelly bridge straight into the the belt line so i just want to make sure we maximize our opportunities to councilmember johnson's point i think we can we can gain quite a bit of points when we start to add in the environmental aspects of how we can mitigate a couple of things so i look forward to those conversations thank you well i learned a lot today from you miss martt i appreciate the lesson and all of the information about the trails today i do share some concerns about where we're going to allow our atv riders our four-wheel riders every summer uh as it gets warmer we see more and more of them on on our streets and it would be really nice for them to have a safe place to ride but hopefully i'll be meeting with the Durham parks and recs they have a couple of other things i'd like to talk about so i can at least get up to speed um i was always a worker with Durham parks and record recreation department as a child i was a tennis court attendant and uh swimming i'm allowed in a lot of a pool so Durham parks and recreation says i've always been near and dear in my life so i look forward to talking with you and learning more and thank you so much for your time today thank you and your presentation thank you for everyone's time all right we'll now move to item 20 our presentation on shared economic prosperity Durham small business work plan built to last and u works program update i'm miss andrew pettigrew good afternoon andre pettigrew director of the office of economic and workforce development um madam mayor mayor pro tem and members of city council and city manager i'm here to provide an update on the status of the oed small business work plan uh in addition to that uh we are providing an update on our summer youth works program which uh applications are out now uh adria graham scott will start our presentation and provide that update i'll follow up with the update on the work plan as well as an update on uh the built the last innovation lab and i believe that stella adams may also be available as the board chair to provide some comments good afternoon madam mayor mr mayor pro tem members of council um my name is adria graham scott i'm with the office of economic workforce and development and make sure i can move these slides this should take me okay okay i want to move it all right um as you know i provided an update for you um that was essentially in a synopsis of an assessment that was provided to us by rti as a third party evaluation organization that came in to look at our youth works program and determine the efficacy of the program and um i provided that information to you when we last met about a month ago today i'm giving you a brief update on that but just as a summary to look back on what we covered then to just set the stage for what we're doing going forward i just wanted to recap some of the things that went well with our program we served over 375 participants we had a number of workforce and and professionals engaged almost 400 395 and overall i think we received really high marks on our program structure and the content where we had some real challenges were with our organizational platforms and so i call those the pain points and that's the areas that we've been trying to focus on in our our launch for this year um looking at some of the process issues and to resolve them so that our participants will have less complication in terms of being a part of the program engaging in it and moving forward with it so part of the problems that were identified some of the process issues that were identified was the fact that the enrollment process the onboarding process was pretty complex requiring up to six different applications and so which we're trying to streamline that we've already opened our interest form and at about 11 o'clock this morning i took a look at our our enrollment and we were about at seven a little over 750 about 760 applicants thus far and so our goal is to reduce the number of those applications that our young people will have to apply as they move into the program the second real area of concern was around the stipend payment process and that of course occurs at the back end and so we are in conversations with a couple of our program partners in an effort to try to reduce the complexity of that and hopefully with the reduction of the complexity we also will reduce the timeline and be able to get stipends to our young people in a much more efficient way our program is still going to be hybrid this year with all of the uncertainty around our health landscape we are still looking to try to ensure that we are maximizing the benefit of providing as many options as possible to our young people so we will offer them a hybrid program this year and last year's program if you recall was primarily virtual and one of the challenges we had then in launching something new and trying to make it work was the number of platforms that we had to integrate in order to make the platform the program virtual 100% virtual so there were several different platforms that had to be integrated together caused a lot of confusion ultimately they were overcome but in this iteration we are working to reduce that so that we only have one platform to work with other things that were identified were the fact that we have a limited program dedicated staff our staff is all has to deal not only with the youth works program but also with other program challenges and so we are not we don't have dedicated staff to this program and one of the things that was pointed out by RTI was the fact that if we can get this program up and running on a 365 day cycle that it would be a much more efficient program and I agree unfortunately because our time has to be split between other commitments we're not able to do that with our current staff levels so it'd be great to have a person or two that would be dedicated specifically to running youth works we did a brief review of various programs throughout the country and identified Detroit as one of our areas that were similar in terms of the goals that we were trying to achieve and the way that the program was run this was pre-covid we took a visit to Detroit and we met with them and went through their process and we learned there that they had at least two and a half dedicated staff all year around and then when the program would ramp up just as they were about to start the summer they bought on a cadre of individuals which we also will be doing this year as well. Last year of course again in in deference to the public health situation we had limited in-person options so this year again we're hoping to increase that option and some of our employers felt like it would be a benefit to have even more engagement with our young people and so again we're hoping to to change that dynamic this year we're introducing the option of having a job fair and that would be an in-person and a virtual we'll do both but that will give employers an opportunity to engage with our young people in a more engaged and deeper way and the last thing is around the staffing and recruitment this is of the volunteers so the employer volunteers were you know they were very committed to being a part of the process it was just a very difficult dynamic had nothing to do with the employers more so with just trying to work out the logistics of putting everybody where they had to go so this year we're using a different platform for that purpose and I hope that that will help to alleviate some of the difficulties that were experienced at that point. Some of our providers from last year include the ones that you see on on the screen now today I'm happy to say we just released our RFP for our program providers so that there may be some repeats that you see there or some new new people that will be participating I've been getting calls from lots of program providers and so the RFP lays out what the structure of the program is and what our expectations are and so we're really excited about the opportunity to to review what our community partners can bring to the table and bring to our young people it's okay I get it yeah okay I'm sorry I got all right this is the structure that we've set up for this year's program last year we had several sessions and those sessions were divided just using time and so some of the feedback was that there was an overlap of some existing programs and so some of the young people were not able to participate when they wanted to or some of them started and had to to leave so what we did we were very intentional about trying to take split split off the older group from our youth so from 18 to 24 we're going to start them in late May and again that's intentional because if they're in college they're probably out by late May and those who are not in school you know this gives them an opportunity to engage with employers earlier and so hopefully they'll have a chance to work all summer long so you'll see that that program session has started earlier thus far we had about 160 18 to 24 year olds who've applied so I think that's right about where we were sort of in our sweet spot where we were thinking we would have about 150 in that cohort session two and session three are both running concurrently and again that was intentional we worked with DPS they're running their remediation program for the month of June and so we weren't able to we didn't want to start in June and cause the same type of conflicts that we had last year so we felt comfortable that if we began in July that we'd be able to navigate in between sort of all of the other programming that's occurring this summer a benefit of the youth works program is that once again this year we're doing 20 hours per week I'm hopeful that you know as we move the program forward that will change but the benefit of it is is that there are several different programs that are being launched one especially with DPS they receive funding to do specific programming this summer and so this will hopefully keep us from conflicting with one another and enable some of our young people to take advantage of both programs this is just an example of some of the different ways that employers can participate with our program very similar to last year you know there's an opportunity for them to come and talk about their careers through career panels we have we want to make sure that we're tying training and education to everything that our young people are hearing about not just that they're hearing about these various career opportunities but what it takes to get them there and we're hopeful this year to have some work site tours we're in discussion with a couple of our our partners down in RTP and so we're hopeful to be able to schedule some on-site tours more to come on that mentoring of course is always an option and we welcome that from any of our employers who are willing to work with our young people on a more in-depth basis and something that we're carrying over from last year was the pitch challenge something that the young people seem to really enjoy I know in one case they actually played the little shark tank music and so we're really we're going to bring that back because it seemed to be very popular and a great way to help to enforce partnership teamwork creative thought and problem solving and so any support that our industry leaders would like to lend to us in this in this space we certainly welcome it and that concludes my portion of the report if there are any questions thank you very much enjoy your presentation we do have a question councilwoman Freeman thank you I appreciate the presentation and I just wanted to say as I said this morning in our workforce development meeting I want to thank all of our staff and our partners for getting it right and acknowledging I just left the rural summit for North Carolina and there's a lot of folks across the state who are experiencing shrinkage and decreasing populations and it's due to the fact that I I assess that it's due to the fact that they haven't engaged their use and they're not trying to find ways to read read and or to make sure that there are folks who are formerly just as involved can re-enter society with a job and so I really wanted to just take a moment and say thank you and thank you for the work I do have a couple of questions you mentioned you you mentioned Detroit and two and a half staff members would be the difference between doing year-round support could you I didn't hear a cost with that and I didn't know if that was something you were planning to bring forward or not but it would be great to have year-round support acknowledging that as you're building this pipeline these students are going to need support throughout the year to acknowledge if they're going towards actual careers or towards college how we can support them and then make the connections with our corporate partners thank you councilwoman Freeman for those comments and that question I don't have an exact number for you we did put forward a budget request but it did not include an FTE and so this is something that we have been debating and discussing internally for a while because a number of our programs have a nice dovetail with what we're trying to do with our youth works program and I think that the previous mindset was that we could leverage off of our existing programs and to help make this run but to your point about really focusing and our resources in a laser-like fashion that makes it the most efficient program possible that's where that FTE makes a difference and we are trying to make it work with what we have but certainly those additional resources make all the change in the world because the types of things that we're doing we're trying to address some of the issues you're talking about recognizing from our other areas of programming we're dealing with individuals that are facing barriers to employment we're taking the knowledge from that and we're kind of using the youth works platform as a way to help address some of those things and start catching some of those issues at the root cause and so it's a great platform for that they can't do this type of thing with DPS because of other restrictions but we can do it so if we're really wanting to do this to its maximum benefit those FTEs make a difference thank you and I would say that I think it's important to acknowledge that DPS is 321 program is going to really sharply depend on how we get this up and running if we want to be a really good partner to our DPS school board who implemented this then we need to really figure out how to make sure we can address I know I said in the previous conversation a thousand students but there are way more than a thousand students that need to be served and I thank you for that thank you I'm just going to reintroduce myself to the audience Andre Pettigrew Executive Director of the Office of Economic and Workforce Development and I'm going to provide an overview of our small business work plan the work plan has these five priorities and I'll go through each of them and give you an update in terms of what we're doing to implement this in support of our small business community again this slide is just to represent the context of our work the work plan was developed before there was COVID-19 however COVID-19 actually really put a focus in on the need to support small business but in particular black and brown small businesses who were disproportionately affected by COVID it also talks about the fact that we realize that there is a role for the city but we have a number of partners both public and private that are doing this work and the ability for us to share information leverage our resources and coordinate the effort is something that again is a positive byproduct coming out of COVID the third point here is again the integration of new resources the federal government through a number of dollars at COVID again CARES funds ARP funds around lending but there's also been dollars directed at supporting technical assistance and again being able to again share leverage and again define the ecosystem the entrepreneurial ecosystem which is a set of resources and partners who support our private businesses is a part of the effort again this is a five-year effort in my mind I think the investments that we as a city and we as a community make to sort of rebuild the ecosystem to do the outreach and provide the resources to support small business it will take that and again I think we're in the second year of that in terms of this work plan again when you think about the impact of COVID 41% drop in business activity for African-American businesses 800,000 women have left the workforce as a part of the effort again a lot of our work is towards women entrepreneurs as well as entrepreneurs of color again there's a major restructuring in terms of supporting small business so priority number one is around technical assistance some of you may know we have had the Durham Small Business Advisory Council as a part of my office they tell me for almost 15 years we continue to manage that but because of COVID we developed something that's called the Durham Collaboration the Durham Collaboration in addition to the traditional small business development centers some of the CDFIs a number of banks joined us in other organizations like the chamber the black chamber we are on a call during COVID at the height of COVID we're on a call twice a week again comparing notes sharing resources and figuring out what we need to do as a community currently we meet weekly doing very much of the same thing in fact this sort of collaboration which I'm going to say was informal was also one of the sources for how we were able to get this community navigator program I wanted to spend a little time talking about the SBA community navigator program E3 equity for every entrepreneur Ford Cities is a successful contractor Ford Cities is a technical assistance company that works nationally with cities and building small business equal systems they're headquartered here they've been doing this work since 2014 and again the city and the county met with Ford Cities in developing a strategy around this grant this grant is is really all about coming up with processes to formalize the set of resources and essentially tracking what small businesses are receiving in the community as well as tracking the outcomes outcomes include the technical assistance but one of the most important one is the amount of capital they receive how many business startup how many how much resources equity as well as debt they receive because we were able to take the work that we were doing informally included in the proposal Ford Cities has won this one million dollar grant over a two year period they will serve as the hub the hub essentially is the center they are responsible for doing the training within the spokes as a hub and spoke system and I'll talk a little bit about the spokes but they will serve as the hub doing the training the coordinating as well as the performance metrics required as a part of this grant the Biden administration set aside a hundred million dollars to try to address the negative impacts of the ppp program payroll protection program and the emergency disaster economic program the idle program again the report came out very early that black and brown companies small businesses did not receive the dollars that were targeted in this program the Biden administration's responsiveness as part of the art program was provide a hundred million dollars to in fact strengthen ecosystems in communities we are one of 50 organizations in the country that got this grant there were over 700 applicants for this grant and so again the city and the county are strategic partners we are not receiving any of the dollars but we're strategic partners because again the work that the hub Ford Cities and the spokes will do is important the partners there are listed in the diagram North Carolina Central's business school as well as Durham Tech Small Business Development Center and there are four new technical assistance providers who have joined this program and they're not new in that they've been operating in our community they're new in joining this program because of the emphasis on equity Provident 1898 Knox Street Studios Helios Foundation and Infinity Bridges are the spokes that are defining the core of this ecosystem we know that the ecosystem is much broader and much bigger than this but each of these groups are going to be working again in a much more formal fashion each business that is looking to get support services will be assigned a navigator that provides an assessment of what they need and will literally escort them through the process and not lose them one of the difficulties in supporting small businesses is that there is a lot of stuff there and quite frankly you got to do it efficiently because their business is the thing that really matters and so the ability to again assign an individual within these organizations to follow them through the maze of TA you know financing seminars and what have you is important on the back end of this forward cities will begin to provide a report in terms of again the number of people the type of support they receive and the outcome again I'm very optimistic about the ability to do this it's a pilot program the issue of sustainability and who will run this after two years is something that is a part of the evaluation there'll be a recommendation that comes out of this report in terms of how this should be funded who should be the principal you know hub and spoke of this and and so again I'm very optimistic about this approach and again happy to know that Durham is one of 50 organizations or communities to receive this I made the same mistake I'm going to get out of this so the second slide is really around our our our seeds legacy program again as I listened to the budget retreat a number of you had raised some questions about the seed legacy program and again this is a program shared equity and economic development that we are doing in partnership with the national league of cities and the democracy at work institute this program has been going on for two years again we were interrupted by COVID but we did not stop our work again we have worked with a focus group of 24 businesses in our community that have been in business for more than 20 years in that during that period we actually provided some one-on-one counseling as well as continuing to sort of work with them because again at the height of COVID every community was concerned about losing businesses that had been around a long time the legacy pilot program we're launching next month the legacy pilot program is a business retention expansion and succession planning program we will identify 15 to 20 of these firms in our community to provide them with a curriculum that is a master as masterclass educational program so it won't really be about startup one the area of crisis management and how to modify your business strategy another area is in the area of real estate again many of our business businesses who are have been around a long time they actually own their property and so are looking to figure out how to leverage it and for those who do not own property one of the big issues is how to again afford the rent when again the market is changing this is the issue of gentrification how do you prevent it and again within this program there are some assets that other communities have used that we seek to use as a part of it the the legacy business registry is about how we formally identify legacy companies in our community and and again the criteria is posted there 20 years of continuous operations independently and locally owned and a part of the community fabric so it's just not any business but a business that has contributed uh in addition to the economic contribution but contributed in a cultural way again this program is being managed by a contractor Latasha Gatti is the owner of infinity bridges they won this contract competitively and so they've been a part of the design of this program so I actually included just some background in this around legacy programs the american planning association actually put out a memo to their members throughout the country uh this memo was really about the importance and a growing trend around legacy companies uh again we are just starting our program but there are other communities have had it for a while uh within our national league of cities cohort uh san francisco washington dc and miami florida are part of the program that we've been working in uh and again we've been able to learn from them uh and share our information san francisco has had the longest program they've had a program since 2016 uh again uh they have a designated staff um they have been able to find out how to raise the money and again through a legislative process uh they have created a budget uh funding stream that's a million dollars as a part of the grant program that they have and that money is used again to provide business assistance so businesses who are a part of their program are eligible for specific technical assistance not general technical assistance this is the things that they need individually within their organization um again it's based on the number of employees you have uh and there's an allocation made the rent stabilization grant is one of interest uh this is funding uh that san francisco makes available uh for businesses who leases art whose lease is up and changing the city actually works with the property owner uh and will provide a subsidy to support the business in order to maintain the rent from going up too high so there are two things about that one trying to negotiate a an increase that's not as high but also a longer term lease and the the city has been very successful in supporting a number of these businesses as you can see there are 275 companies that have been identified and selected as a part of this program and again uh that's the logo uh that pretty much is prominently displayed in many of these businesses going forward priority two is really around uh the communications and outreach um again the comment that i want to make in this regard uh is really around the work that we have been doing on our our website so Durham business 360 dot com uh was developed by oe wd as a small business portal uh it is a website in which our businesses can actually do business on again there's business information that will help people in terms of developing the physical feasibility study uh we actually have a number of um startup um you know how to start a business we have nine of them on our website uh that people have used it takes them all the way from doing their business plan to engaging the planning department and getting licensure and all that sort of stuff it's been very popular uh one of the things that i wanted to to note about our outreach and our website uh is how we've improved uh the spanish translation uh there's a tab on our website for our spanish speaking entrepreneurs that at least introduce what the resources are finance technical assistance in the in the spanish language the next thing and again we're working with the language access program here we will be translating all of the how to do business startup programs into spanish and making it available to our spanish community again there's a lot of information this is a result of uh of our small business surveys we continue the survey and that information is ported on our website uh again the website has been up for three years you can see the growth from last year the uh already just for february two months uh we've had 10 000 hits uh i expect that uh we'll go beyond the 48 000 that we had last year it's a calendar year the Durham small business recovery fund uh again we will be uh before you um to discuss this more specifically but just to give you an update uh all the grant money has been gone for over a year the city and the county had 1.8 million dollars in it for uh loans uh currently we have 39 approved loans uh 860 000 dollars uh have been uh distributed to the borrowers again the average company is 10 years it's been in business and the average loan is 27 000 so again these are mature businesses who uh again are taking on debt to grow their business again i know that uh you know grants are preferred we don't have grant funding uh but uh again 129 business have applied for the grants for the loans uh and again i think one of the important goals for us was to make sure that women and minority businesses were receiving the dollars and as you can see we've been able to keep that efficacy up uh this is pretty similar to what we were able to do in the grant program and a lot of that really has to do with the outreach and efforts that's there there's technical assistance available to each borrower uh carolina small business development fund uh is the administrator of this program uh again they are working both collectively and individually with these uh companies uh as as as borrowers i think the other thing that carolina small business fund has been able to do is provide additional resources uh they actually are a lender themselves uh they have received monies from banks to help do the outreach and continue to support their digital library they have a digital library that's available to small business in addition to the 101 uh counseling that they do again as i said we'll be back with you to make some modifications to this program again i think the biggest takeaway for us is with the remaining money what we've learned is that many black and brown businesses have taken on uh some of the fintech financial technology loans uh where their higher interests and their adjustable uh rates and again with interest rates going up uh we are just concerned that if we can help these businesses take down some of this high interest debt to our program again our program is is a term loan 10 years at 3 percent uh we think that that will help get the money out and actually provide a service to businesses that are there in the area of equity through procurement uh we need to do more work there again uh we are working with equity and inclusion uh Sharon Williams and part of our goal is to do two things increase the outreach to promote the opportunities that are available uh through the city's office of procurement and working with E&I but also build the capacity to really understand how to become certified and why that is valuable in terms of new market opportunities related with that and again i as a part of the discussion with the the water department bidding is really important uh in understanding how to bid and how to do it competitively is something that we think is an important part of the training that we want to do as a part of OEWD just an example momentum 360 uh is a training program that that we do in in OEWD we've done three courses uh this period since July uh one of them is in the area of public arts so we had 26 artists who participated in this program and the program was really about how they can be more competitive in competing for public art calls that the city or even private sector organizations what we're talking about is sculptures paintings interior design murals and in this program which was great i you know went to the graduation we partnered with triangle artworks and it wasn't a theoretical thing each each participant joined the team and they actually responded to RFPs that were actually national and many of them chose to submit their proposals around the country for these things again it wasn't academic it was real for many of them but part of the program was really helping them to sort of assess the opportunity and to competitively bid and again i'm emphasizing that because again in the construction area it is hard bid and in order to really fashion a good bid you got to have a strong financial background you have to be able to track your costs and have the financial record keeping that's required as a part of this and within our momentum 360 program we have the financial academy that we did that was our first series this this summer and it's all about that back in helping entrepreneurs understand you know quite frankly how to get out of your shoe box out of your wallet and into a financial system that you can manage but additionally it really is about getting them to be much more comfortable about understanding the difference between their profit and loss statements and balance sheet and not automatically deferring the discussion about their financial records to their accountant again this is a series that i want to expand next year and to do it on a more frequent and regular basis yes it's basic finance 101 but many of our companies are at that level and again i think it helps them in the long term in terms of business operations again the final priority is really in the area of place-based work in the neighborhoods as you know we have a neighborhood stabilization program we continue to make investments in north-east central Durham and the Fayetteville quarter our brownfield environmental assessment program is a unique program it is one that the city has had for almost six years and again i was told that it's quite it's not often that you're able to get to reprieve this contract from EPA but we've been able to do it actually the program has just ended in september and we do have some general fund money that we applied to it but again it's a simple problem property owners who own property and are using it in order to do any development improvement they have to be able to determine whether or not there are any environmental hazards there this program provides that assessment provides that technical assistance that helps them figure out exactly what they need to do there is some federal monies that are part of the remediation that's not a part of our program but we've been able to successfully get some remediation grants for for some of the property owners in Durham bottom line it actually improves their opportunity to be able to um develop their property you know as a part of the effort and actually be a part of the economic growth that's happening in their community again this is a timeline of activity uh i again just reference that there are some things that are ongoing new things that are coming up again we will be implementing this national league of cities hispanic outreach program where again we are working to develop a program specific to the Latinx community not just a translation but one that is culturally sensitive and delivered by a trusted partner in that community Prospera USA is a company that is working with us through the national league of cities to be a part of that again i'm looking to do a evaluation of the economic the small business recovery fund independently as a part of the work that we're doing going forward so again that's the small business one and i'll be very brief uh in providing an update on the work that the city the office of economic workforce development is done as a part of the built to last and it's my expectation that stella adams will be available to provide some additional detail we included in your packet a report that the the built to last innovation uh a board had submitted providing an update so again built the last was commissioned to develop the roadmap which was a part of my office in the office of economic workforce development there were two important components to that that was the creation of a separate non-profit to run both an equitable development fund as well as a training training center uh it was the fund the equitable development fund that was again again the big differentiator as a part of the work that the lab was going to be able to do again we put together uh working with their board a startup memorandum of understanding that included the scope of work that was came to city council and was approved we hired the forest law firm that developed reviewed and filed the organizational documents in partnership with the built to last board so the articles and corporation have been filed by the secretary to the secretary of state a 501 c3 application was submitted to the rrs again all the organizing documentation is in place the mo u milestones this is a a a contract that is $416,000 the initial payment of $180,000 was paid at the execution of the contract the next deliverable is in fact the strategic business plan that provides the fundraising strategy the operating costs as as well as you know staffing as a part of the program after that the third payment has to do with the feasibility of the equitable development fund again part of that is the fundraising strategy the management and the design of the program and again assuming the the positive feasibility study the remaining dollars will be distributed and paid over the the final six months as a part of the program so again that is where we are now and again expecting to get the strategic plan as part of the next deliverable and again if Stella Adams is available or are still on the line I I think this is where we were looking to have them provide some additional feedback on the program it's miss Adams she's she's not well again I I know that she was on earlier and the original plan was that she would be available for some comment so she is on the she is on the on the call but again we cannot hear her well again I will take questions in regards to small business work plan or any questions that I might answer in terms of bill to last any questions thank you madam mayor and I thank you andre for sharing this update I know that there's always so much going on in the office of workforce and economic development and before I begin I just had a couple questions from earlier I know we were trying to assess an economic impact of the ballpark I just wanted to know if you want to weigh in on any numbers you wanted to add to that conversation I don't have any numbers but I did refer the economic assessments that is actually done by the sports commission they do a report every year around economic impact and I actually refer that to Gina as a starting point so again those reports are going to speak for themselves and I would hope that you would join her in figuring out that report that report to us because I want to make sure that the jobs aspect is not lost and there was also a previous question by one of my colleagues around the firms that are here in Durham for MUBE and MWBE and I didn't know if you had specific numbers around that I don't have specific numbers but I do know that the hub lists can be disaggregated as a part of geographically I think the other thing I would say in regards to that is that in addition to be hub certified there are a number of SBA certifications DBE veterans again you know it would be what I intend to do is for us to actually get the list of Durham businesses who are certified in each of those programs and use that as sort of the outreach and database that is available for the companies as well as available to us to use to track how well we're doing thank you forwarded to an automated night when you finish recording you may hang up or press one for more options and want to leave a message but I guess we can this is the Durham City Council saying hello hey um Leonardo yes we are here all of us good afternoon miss Adams you have a floor if you want to make any comments I did and and I apologize I don't know why none of my devices are working where I can talk to you all um I do want to just say to you that as the chair of the built to last board I'm really excited about hope that you've gotten an opportunity to see the update that we have um we have um held we held our first board meeting on January the 11th where we um um elected a number of folks um I was elected chair of the built to last lab Derek Rhodes was elected as treasurer and he is the founder of Durham success summit Pilar Rochelle Goldberg was elected secretary and she is the president of El Centro Hispano Anita Daniels is a member of our board she is president of actualities limited um Kurt Maryweather um is um co-founder of diversity Inc. Doug Spate is um a 5 s um startup with um with um triad growth Dr. Stefan Wilson and um we just um recently hired Dr. Joyce Blackwell as our um as our um yes ma'am we can okay um and we just hired Dr. Joyce Blackwell as our executive director she is um and we're very excited to have her with us we have been and our next meeting is set for um April the 12th and we're just so looking forward to um working with the city but working with the community in the development of um an equity fund one of the things that um is critical I think is looking at the feasibility of establishing an equity fund so it's not just um debt but also equity available particularly to our um um minority and women owned businesses located here in Durham um and we have hired Cedar Grove um and they are in the process of they will be conducting a feasibility study to look about how to do that um we have taken on not just the equitable um development of the equity fund but we're also looking at doing trainings um through the program to again we're not going to duplicate but we're going to try to collaborate with other organizations throughout the city to strengthen um minority and women owned businesses in our community um and we have um and we're also committed to working with the city um to increase opportunities um for our um our minority businesses um to compete and to win um contracts and um to access the capital and credit that they need to expand and be sustainable the purpose of built to last is to do just that help our communities um help our businesses um through succession planning and help them to sustain themselves through good times and bad um Andre gave you the statistics I won't repeat them but when you lose 41 percent of black owned businesses nest um and that's the intergenerational impact that can't be um brought back um and we're we're going to try to um help the city build by making sure that we have this equitable development fund we have Dr James Jim Johnson and Jeannie milk and bonds working with us in the development of this um study and we hope to bring it to you soon um I'm not sure if any of our board members are still on the line and still available and maybe you can hear them better than you've been able to hear me but I want to thank the city for all that you have done again um there are a couple of slots I probably will talk to Andre and um and and the city manager about that we would love for you to um recommend folks to us who can help us bridge um um some of the programming that we're doing and um again I look forward to your questions but we're excited and looking forward to um delivering product to you um untimely basis is there any board members present um maybe they could be allowed to say a word if they like thank you so much for your comments this afternoon miss Adams um we're looking now I don't see any board members looking at I'll see the manager's list are there any further questions for Mr. Medivh? May I approach him? Thank you Madam Mayor good afternoon Andre good to see you sir Adrian the whole crew thank you so much for being here I was greatly looking forward to this presentation I want to thank the staff um I actually asked for this update to be brought to us as a council to help us kind of inform our decisions and give us a broader view of the lay of the land as we as we go into our budget process this is something that has been um uh very important to us as a city certainly as a council uh under the the overall rubric of our shared economic economic prosperity plan so I want to thank all of you for being here um one of the reasons why I had asked for the the presentation or update was to try and make an assessment of capacity and bandwidth moving forward to to add more things or to the department to your portfolio um and Miss Scott you actually you set something interesting with respect to our youth works that the staffing issue we don't have dedicated staff to that um and I know under the small small business work plan talking about the uh the seeds program which I think is incredibly important and you alluded to uh San Francisco uh who has a dedicated staff and Mayor London breeze doing great great work uh San Francisco is kind of the bellwether for a number of initiatives uh going on around the country but they do have dedicated staff to do the kind of legacy work so I guess my first question is do we we're going to do it via grant via contract now do we anticipate needing to staff up in that area and to to deal with legacy type initiatives moving forward you're going to make an ask at some point in the future so again we're piloting the program and and designing as a part of it uh based on the pilot we'll get a better sense again and we're looking to contract this next fiscal year I have a budget request in uh for operating that um and then we'll go from there I think one of the things that that has made San Francisco different is that they created the dedicated funding source again over time it didn't start that way um and you know and I don't have that ask in this proposal because we're really trying to figure out what is going to work here in Durham uh as a part of it so uh next year under contract and then from there uh we'll see yeah no I I appreciate I'm listen I'm a huge fan of Durham specific data I say it all the time uh to see what works in Durham and how it works for Durham um the with respect and and Miss Adams if you're still on thank you so much for joining us I heard that the the it said that the first board meeting was on January 11th the next one's going to be April 12th is the board have they have they been meeting monthly is it once a month uh did the board meet in February and March no miss Adams if you can hear me we meet quarterly quarterly okay and are there and I think I heard you refer to the executive committee meets weekly but the board meets quarterly okay and miss Adams how many how many slots still need to be filled on the board before it's at optimal um not to imply that it's not working by optimal I mean before it's at full capacity I don't remember how many slots were designated for a full board but how many slots are still empty currently so when our when our board met on um January 11th our bylaws allowed for seven members and we had seven members present that board then voted to expand our um board to 11 members so we currently have seven members we would like um we have put in our um plan that we get some recommendations from the city to spots from the city and then we have two spots that we are um keeping available perhaps to um assist with getting other funders thank you thank you for that so um seven currently and we can go up to 11 um that's correct got you um just kind of looking forward and uh not asking for any firm you know commitments anything today that's that has the force of law behind it but best guess um as the folk who are kind of running point for us and are closest to this when do you think ballpark we may see the the not only the establishment of the equity fund but actual money going out to businesses um in our community uh to build capacity to help them you know compete to you know broaden the supply chain as well but this kind of when when do you see that happen generally speaking from my perspective we we will have you know we'll have the feasibility study within um within six months we'll start looking at and then now tell us what we need to do and how we need to go but you know an equity fund that is going to be meaningful and long term um is something that you're going to have to you know it's going to have to have um significant investments we're not talking about um in my mind we're not talking about like a little a million or two million we're talking significant funding so but I think that we can start helping people within um 24 months is when you'll see it on the ground and and and but in the interim we'll certainly be doing partnering leveraging um participating in um community investment activities trying to get um trying to get equity investments into the fund as quickly as possible there's opportunities open right now for that we're you know that um you have to take advantage of when they happen but we'll be talking to um but again I don't want to get ahead of the study and and and that's the first phase all right well thank thank you all so much for this really important um I I think potentially transformative work um for our city um you're it's on record that there are some more um board members that need to be filled in the ask of the council to kind of think about folk and and to help an identifying folk who would add value to the board as duly noted and I know my colleagues and I will will take that to heart and begin thinking about uh those type of things um but thanks again uh to the staff for for making this happen uh today and for the ongoing important um sometimes unheralded sometimes uncelebrated but absolutely critical work uh for our city thank you so much good to see you all as well thank you madam mayor thank you madam mayor any other questions I'm sorry I just wanted to make one comment to uh to the mayor pro tem uh about the continuing work um again oe wd is one player we're not the the major uh technical assistance provider or trainer in the system um I had mentioned that additional resources have come our way again you guys are evaluating uh some of the the ARP funding uh in in those proposals there are a number of proposals directed at supporting small women minority business but additionally um our partners have augmented their activities North Carolina Central University has received at least two prominent grants focused on supporting small women minority business as a part of their small business technology development center uh so there are more hours and more resources available there uh JB buxon has increased the capabilities of the small business development center again both of those organizations are sort of anchors to this SBA community navigator program uh the four partners that they are now funding uh have been doing this work but have never been funded to do this work in the way that this program has done um again my point here is is that no one is waiting uh we are all again trying to sort of partner and leverage to continue this intense work um the rebuilding uh the availability of the resources uh again in the area of access to capital if you as you know we feel the whole we we we feel the whole uh in terms of the Durham small business recovery fund uh again in the long term we aren't going to be a lender uh our success will be dependent on our abilities to continue to get the banks to be responsive to the needs of our work and again uh what's going on out there is the big banks who aren't very present here i'm talking about chase the wells and what have you uh they are investing in local cdfi certified development financial institutions in and in the case of mechanics and farmers uh again uh one of our local banks uh the five largest banks invested i think about 73 million dollars in that organization and to me that's great news because jim sills and mechanics and farmers now have added capacity to provide lending credit facilities in our community and so those are big things that have to be integrated into the program and again these announcements are fairly new people are trying to figure out how to do it but again uh you know no one's waiting i want anyone in the community to think we're waiting and again we're all sort of figuring out where we can deliver the best support working together collectively absolutely your point is well made and well taken and i don't think i used the word waited but if i did i certainly wouldn't create the impression uh that that anybody's uh twiddling their thumbs there are a lot of pieces i will say however that a lot of those players predate the urgency of this matter that they were always free to do those things but i think now the the entree of the city's voice and folk like you providing leadership and communicating urgency for those folk to coalesce and do what they were always free to do we always knew we needed capital we always knew we needed more support for black and brown businesses but i think the the state of urgency around it now is is directly related to focused attention um by the least of elected folk but folk like you have been running point for us so we know y'all doing the work that's why i said unheralded and uncelebrated i want folk to know that it's it's moving forward thank you so much thank you Madam Mayor Councilwoman Converter thank you good to see you all good afternoon um i have a few questions first of all thank you for the very in-depth proposal around several different components of y'all's work is it's super helpful and i appreciate it um sorry that's my microphone um i just had a couple of questions so i appreciate you uh naming um with the Durham business data portal what's going to be happening there and i saw that some of it's already getting translated i know that that's something that's going to take some time i just wanted to appreciate you all and then i know that our our latino community does need a lot of support i think you all are entering into that work i think you realize how critically important it is and i was just curious what are some of the who are some of the partners you all are working with thank you for that question again we are in a cohort group sponsored by the national legal cities uh getting technical assistance from from Prospera USA which is hispanic-owned consulting company have been around for 20 plus years doing this work nationally and they're advising Durham and eight other cities in terms of what we're doing uh in this program we are looking to identify barriers that are limiting the success of the hispanic community uh in our work and there are two focus areas obviously the translation and putting together culturally competent programs uh are important uh the other thing that was identified uh was being able to help the the hispanic entrepreneurs formalize their business uh again to the force um you know i i said get out of your wallet and and and get into a financial system uh really what that means is a lot of people work as self-employed the family money the business money is all tied together um as a part of that uh our community partners include uh vicki garcia uh of the uh you know the latin credit union community credit union um uh maricio solano who is head of economic development for uh el centro uh and uh angie saccar who uh is uh hispanic and she runs panam construction you know they are a fairly successful uh construction company uh here in terms of size i again uh they uh somewhere between four and five million annual revenue uh so they're fairly successful they have been providing the guidance into the work that we're doing uh we are putting together a pilot program uh targeting at bringing um 15 latinx construction companies who've been in business from two to three years uh to do the financial management that we've done in the financial academy to also provide some support in terms of bidding and how to bid uh in each one of those companies uh as a byproduct of this uh we will get them hub certified uh as well as uh exposed to them other uh certifications at sba and others uh again working as a cohort but also one-on-one counseling uh that program uh is slated to launch uh we've already designed it we have a small grant from the national league of cities to implement this so again we're looking to have that launch in may i'm very optimistic about it uh again it will be in spanish um you know the language appropriate uh going through it so and we think that uh that's going to give us a lot of insights in terms of how we scale future programs and outreach to the hispanic community thank you so much i appreciate all of that information i just actually want to thank uh the folks that are community partners um some of those folks reached out in the fall uh to me actually and and we're curious because they were hearing especially angie at pinum you know the folks that she works with were wondering well how do we get these contracts how do we get into this ecosystem how do we level up our small family businesses that might be now second generation right and so it it was on immigrant hustle and and they want to continue uh all of that um that work and and build it out and so i just really appreciate that the city is is entering into this space uh it's very much needed and uh i know that uh it will bear a lot of fruit in the future councilwoman johnson thank you madam mayor and thank you uh for this presentation it's really great to get all these updates um i'm wondering if you can speak a little bit more about the employee ownership aspect of the seeds fellowship and also um the opportunity to expand our employee ownership work through the budget request that i submitted earlier um and with in partnership with with y'all and yeah just how you how you feel about how you think it might work how it is part of how it could build on the work that we've already done in that area thanks so um again uh the silver somami with people retiring business owners uh at a rapid rate all the research shows uh that very few businesses small businesses have succession plans we identified that as a part of the research we did with the national league of cities here in our community um we actually uh partnered with the north carolina employee ownership center it's headquartered here in durham serving the the greater state but they have been an excellent partner for us to talk about succession planning when we started working with the legacy companies we were really very much focused in on retention and expansion but as we talked to some of the owners about whether or not they had a plan many of them did not uh and we also learned about uh employee ownership as a as a possibility i can tell you at the start of this i had no idea uh about employee ownership and it was not a priority as we went into the seeds program but over time uh in learning how uh once many owners are deciding to leave uh they're either skilled technicians or professionals uh and maybe don't have a a a kid or someone in their family to transfer it many of them are finding that they they can sell the business to their employees. In that process, what we've learned is, one, it's a good option. It's not for everybody. In the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center has actually done a number of outreach events talking about succession planning, but also talking about employee ownership over the last 18 months. And again, that's been helpful. The other thing that we have learned is that those businesses that do that transfer to employee ownership solve a number of issues. So first of all, employees is hard for them to assemble and start a business by themselves. So the whole cooperative approach to be able to essentially be in a position to buy a business that you've been working and contributing is, mitigates a lot of the risks. You know what you're buying. The second thing is, so that there is a wealth creation opportunity. The other thing is, is that for businesses who have spent 20 plus years, they've got to find a way to monetize the value of their business. And that is through a sale. And oftentimes people just, hey, I just give up and close the doors. So now we have an option for those business owners to essentially sell back to their employees. They may hold some of the paper, in other words, get an annuity as a part of their retirement. And the SBA has put in dollars specific for this purpose. So there is funding available to support employee ownership conversions. And don't get me wrong. What I have learned about the employee ownership thing, again, is that it's not for everybody. This is not going to overwhelm the conversion thing. But it is a really effective option. There are some very successful employee ownership configurations that have been successful all over the country. They, again, continue to be successful. Generally they pay better than other companies with benefits. And I just think any wealth creation option that we can support is a good idea. Again, too, it helps sort of monetize the sweat equity of many of the owners. But it also provides an opportunity for the employees to come together, share the risks, and to continue the business. Thank you. And so the proposal to contract with the North Carolina Employment Ownership Center to expand that model to help people to provide technical support for potential startup employee-owned businesses and to help existing employee-owned businesses. Do you feel like you have the capacity in your department to manage that contract? So again, let me just differentiate your proposal with what we're doing. Right. So within the SEATS program, the legacy program, we have actually had the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center provide some hands-on consulting. So there's some legal financial aspects of that work. So they've been supporting us specific to those individual companies. Your proposal is really, from my standpoint, a much more macro approach to essentially educating our community about employee ownership and this as an option. As I read your proposal, it included outreach, not only to the business community as an option, but also to the financial community. So there are groups of banks, lawyers, and accountants who also aren't aware of this option. And again, this model, the ability to propagate this model and get people to better understand it, I think will help more people consider it as an option. And again, it's case by case. It's not gonna be a massive movement in terms of that. The third thing I'd say about this is now that there is, in fact, dollars set aside, specifically targeted for this. Again, even I don't know all the bells and whistles around it, the ability to have someone who is knowledgeable, who works in this area, and as a resource is something that I took as your proposal. Again, in our office, we're managing contracts. We're not delivering the service. Again, I have a program staff and a fiscal staff that is essentially working with all of these contractors in order to do the work. And so to me, the ability to take on this additional contractor with a contractor we're familiar with, I think we can absorb that. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to make sure because we had some, when we'd had the conversation about budget requests, there'd been some concerns from council members about not wanting to give staff more work than y'all can handle, which is of course a very important concern, and we need to always be thinking about that. Thank you, appreciate all your work and these updates, and look forward to hearing more, especially about the new built to last folks. It seems like really exciting. Projects got a lot of community involvement, so I feel really good about where that's going. Thank you. Councilwoman Freeman. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I just wanted to circle back around and know before we got to Ms. Adams, I still had a few questions, and so I appreciate the chance to hear from my colleagues a really good conversation. And I really want to touch on exactly how many staff members are in the office. Right now we have 14 FTE. And in the conversation, we were talking about the YouthWorks program again, just noting if you were to add two and a half more staff members, how would that help? Well, again, we do our budget proposed presentation on April 5th to the city manager, and in that we'll, again, make a proposal in terms of staffing. Part of the challenges that, again, we do have some vacant positions in our department. And again, what I'd like to take a look at is how we might repurpose some of that staff in order to do some of the work. You know, I have essentially taken a model where my staff is not the technical assistance trainers, not the loan packages, not the providers of the service. We are in essence managing relationships and contracts as a part of it. We know the work, we can deliver the work, but I have tried to contract more of these activities out to local organizations as a part of the work. Again, the example that Adria talked about in terms of even our summer program, the RFP on the street is to pay providers to deliver some of the training that maybe in the past staff delivered. Again, it is very difficult to be the experts in so much that's going on right now. I also know that we have some very capable community-based organizations who are eager to participate in this program. And that's why I'm excited about the community navigator program. Because again, there is an investment being made to build their capacity because quite frankly, those organizations in the neighborhoods on the street will always be more effective than we will. And again, it's important for us to sort of develop the partnerships and strategic relationships to help provide the guidance and actually to respond to what the needs are. And just taking from that, your priority five is kind of my priority one. And just acknowledging that the revitalization programs for Northeast Central Durham and Federal Street corridor have been kind of stagnated. I noticed the sign grants have gone away. Are you planning to bring funds back for that? Which signs went away? Business signage grants. Yeah, we're discussing that. Chris Dickey who has managed this program for the city for 15 years, we've been really talking about how we can modify the program. Again, we haven't been doing facade grants and signage improvement grants for a while. Part of that is the combination of quite frankly, having a landlord property owner who is gonna be a partner with us. Again, this hasn't happened, but in some places, we make these leasehold improvements. And if the landlord is not cooperative with us and considers raising the rent as a result of those leasehold improvements, we aren't gonna remove them, but the tenant has to pay those increases. So again, we're trying to figure out the balance around being able to do that. I appreciate that explanation. And just acknowledging that in COVID, I think we had the COVID grants available. And I'm just like just noting that there are ways in which our dollars could be used to actually get out today, acknowledging that that bill to last is, you talked about 24 months before equity fund comes online, what can we do today? That is supportive of the businesses that are existing or starting up right now. And so if you have thoughts around that, I would love to hear what that looks like and what the plan is, acknowledging that there are brown fields and that like the dollars are not there. And I'm just trying to make sure that the businesses don't stop coming online. Sure, again, we'll put some thoughts together as a part of our budget presentation as we move forward. And I would also love to hear more about how you plan to partner around housing, acknowledging that many of our mixed use projects coming online are including both commercial and housing. And the way we were just talking about our trails, there are areas in which businesses are in the area. And if there's ways to partner on funding, acknowledging that there's about $2.9 billion that was announced for transportation and infrastructure. All of those are things that staff could be focused on if they weren't just doing pilots. And so I just wanna make sure that that's clear as a priority as well. Thank you. Any other questions of council? Yes, thank you, mayor. And I direct the pedigree, please don't take my face as frustration. I am for some reason tired today. So I think I wanna understand better and I won't be before you long. This may be a question for the manager. Which, do we have a department of not this one or if this one where we focus on matters that are, I guess, more high level such as economic initiatives that would overall expand the tax base in the city or focus areas that would take advantage of what's happening now in regards to responding from COVID. We had a lot of federal funds come through and we're gonna have more. Spread in the courts across transportation and whatever infrastructure. But what I see here today is what we needed for a long time. And that was a lot of support for the ground level. A small, mom and pop shops. And I'm glad that we finally have that in place. So now I'm gonna move to looking to see, okay, so what's the, putting our big board pants on. The big economic initiatives to say, Raleigh right now, their tax base is three to one, two hours. We're about to catch up and be, you know, they get maybe two to three or whatever. So I noticed a loaded question, but if it's not this department, then where do we do that type of work from the city perspective or facilitate those relationships? And if it is this department, then back to Director Pettigrew. So if you're the main, you know, one of your question is, you know, more macro economic development, Andre can certainly respond to that because there is sort of a delineation of who focuses on building the economy in different spaces. And I think you couldn't speak to that. And if that is not the response, then I'll come back in. Thank you, Williams. Appreciate your question. So we are the organization that works in partnership with the county and the Greater Durham Chamber around the macro economic aspects of the work. We partner with them on a number of the business attraction activities, some of the major development that has come into our community. And again, we essentially do that following the lead of the chamber and the county. So part of that is because we have decided particularly over the last three years and based on our small business survey that in Durham, and again in that small business survey of which over 750 firms responded, most of our businesses are less than 50 and our minority and women owned businesses have less than 10 employees. We have a lot of sole proprietors, independent contractors as a part of this work. And again, you're correct. They did not get a lot of support and COVID actually made us focus more on that group. PPP was really about that sort of emerging business, that middle market business that you're asking for. That is the business that actually has an accountant, has a lawyer and a financial planner and a bank relationship that allowed them to secure the funding. Many of our businesses, not just in Durham, but around the country of color and women owned did not have that capacity. So we've been focused in building that infrastructure and that support. And so there's a middleware there. There's the bigger companies like Clorox, Carzon, the companies that we help play a role in bringing here. But there is a middle ground here and that is that entrepreneurial set of companies that quite frankly the American underground Adam Klein and the work that he has done has provided that infrastructure, that middleware. These are companies to be available for equity, you've got, and you know this, you're a business person, you actually have to be able to have a rapid growth and an exit plan that allows you to either IPO or be acquired by a major player. And again, we're not working in that space. But a lot of that work is going on. Private equity is making significant investments in our community. In fact, I was looking at the Triangle Business Journal's report in terms of the largest equity investments of companies, again these are privately held companies and are publicly held. And I think five of the top 15 were Durham based companies. So again, they're not small, there may not even be minority of women owned, but there is a vibrant private equity world going on in the Triangle and some Durham companies are participating and you're correct, OEWD is not working in that space. Okay, and that's what I was sort of getting to, I appreciate it. And I think the how robust we've taken on the micro approach to small business sustainability. I do think the direction has to come from somewhere and I think it should be the city. Because if we are responsive to economic development, growth and development in our city, then therefore we don't drive that direction. And we have a convention center smaller by, like Cabarras County's convention center is twice the size of ours. So we don't have a real convention center. And we don't talk about those things. And we don't have enough hotels downtown and we have all of this growth that's coming. We talk about affordable housing a lot. So are we gonna have a lot of affordable housing buildings everywhere? Or are we gonna have a lot of luxury apartment buildings everywhere? At what point do we insert the economic, like Durham is open for business. Durham has convention centers, event space, amphitheaters, concert halls, the things that are economic drivers to the point where we're generating enough revenue to actually handle the social issues and the problems that we have in our city. Because we'll never build our way into it. We're never gonna be able to pay for, we're never gonna in a solo fashion pay for all of the problems we have. So I would like to see us start talking more in the macro area as well, at least setting the direction. I don't think the city can afford to do it alone. And it doesn't make logical sense to do so. But we have a lot of folks in the private sector where we could actually build better corporate partnerships, build better public private partnerships to do this. And I think once we start setting that direction, we have an audience or contingency of people and folks in the private market that are ready to jump on board. But I think that that direction has to come from us. I would personally volunteer to get involved in that conversation. There are folks that are waiting. Sure. And again, my only comment, and again, your comment is fair. Again, the economic development professionals in Durham, we do work together and we regularly meet together. So in addition to the city, the county, the chamber, Discover Durham, RTP, we actually have a regular forum to talk about these things. Again, we have not formalized that strategic plan and maybe that's what you're asking for. What is the formal documentation? The master plan. Yes. Master plan. We don't have that right now, but we do have a solid working relationship again where we're sharing information and leveraging and talking about the macro growth that you're talking about. Again, I'm confident that these discussions will lead to more formal things as a part of the work. This is something that we began, again, out of COVID, trying to make sure that we better understood how we were all working together and trying to anticipate not just the urgent needs, but the important needs going forward. So again, I will take your comments back because I'm sure they're all listening right now and to see how we might further actualize them. Thank you so much. I've also spoken to each of them and they're ready. So let's get to it. Thank you. Thank you, Councilman Williams. Are there any further comments? Mayor Pro Tem and then followed by Councilwoman Freedman. Thank you, Madam Mayor. So back to just a kind of specific budgetary concern. I'm gonna thank Councilmember Johnson because I think she actually put her finger on one of the, what was one of the animating propositions for this presentation today. That's kind of a consideration of bandwidth. And I wanna say philosophically, Councilmember Johnson and I are shoulder to shoulder in terms of the importance of the potential impact of corporate ownership and the model that I very much like. But you said something about ability to handle the work. So I guess my specific question is, it seems that Councilmember Johnson's presentation and SEED, they're similar, but they're not fully conflatable. So I guess if the 75 grand, based on what I'm hearing today on the Councilmember Johnson's proposal comes to you, you're gonna take that money and find somebody to do what it's designed to do. You're gonna contract that out or do RFPs. Would you? Again, if the area of interest is around employee ownership and again, I think that that was her area of interest, I interjected the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center because that is a group that has been working in that space. That is a group that is actually working throughout the state there. Again, I don't know what we would do, but I could imagine an RFP that goes out to solicit someone to provide a scope of work again to be determined. And based on that, the winner would secure a contract from us and we would manage that contract and that relationship according to the terms of the scope of work. Right, and that's the end, so that's what we do. But it's not like we can take this money and just kinda add it to what's going on with SEED. No, no, actually, I think they're different. My point was that, again, the Legacy Program is really about the legacy companies who are gonna be certified as such. Absolutely. We're gonna support them of which this is a part. I think the approach that, my understanding of it, is a much more macro approach where we're actually laying a foundation, an educational foundation within the financial, within the professional community around what this option is as well as with our business owners. And again, my office is not doing that. We're doing that for the businesses who are in the Legacy Program. Right, which would be an expansion of your, is my point. All right, well, thank you, that's the answer, I think. Thank you, Madam Mayor, that's all I have. Council Member Freeman. Thank you. That question just got me thinking about a couple of other things, but I just wanted to just second Council Member Williams' point and just acknowledging that the lack of this strategic plan is actually causing harm to the economics of our city today. And so just acknowledge the way we come out of COVID is with steps. We have an opportunity here with all the ARPA dollars that are coming online to push in on a number of areas that will have impact. So whether it's in women and minority owned businesses or just local grown businesses or what have you, we don't have an on ramp in the same way we have a DOS plan with nine trails and it's frustrating because I've had an accident for that for like at least five years. And so I know from the work that we've done with Andrew Driver corridor, it's taken 10 years to get to where we are and we're not there yet. And I mean, I can't wait 10 more years. So I really have angst about starting something different that doesn't quite cover a large plan that will get us to the next step. And so I'm not concerned about moving forward with the budgeted requests from Council Member Johnson. I'm concerned that we missed the opportunity to actually do what we need to do to cover our businesses here in the city. So that's what I will say. Thank you. Any further comments? Thank you all. Thank you Madam Mayor. Thank you City Council. Thank you so much. Just one additional thing Madam Mayor, if I might. I just want to be really clear that Hispanic is not limited to Spanish. And that is an oversight that folks will make or over compensation that folks will make. And it's really offensive. Thank you. I now turn to Madam Clerk for our Board and Commissions and Task Force nominations. Good evening, everyone. It's after five. I wanted to give the Board, Committee, Commission and Task Force report. The Council's nomination to the Participatory Budgeting Steering Committee at large members are Paulette Jackson, Tanula Starks and Monte Watson. And that's the end of that report. I did have some questions about the at large vacancy process. First off, I wanted to let you know we have received five applications and the names of the individuals are Brenda Hill Pollard, Marky Brown, Shalia Ann Huggins, Dr. Monique Holsey and Tim Alran. In addition, there were a couple questions about processing and I had sent everyone an email about it. And to meet the stated date of March 28th of Council receiving the packet of applications, we do have to go through a vetting process for the election registrations, city residency and tax delinquency checks. And I did wanna check with you, did you want me to send out the applications with that information or just provide it to you as we receive that? Because if we wait to process those items, it may take a few days after the March 28th request date. So I wanted to ask what you would like to do. I'm gonna turn to Mayor Proctham. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Madam Clerk, are we not doing that as we get the applications, just checking there like in real time? Isn't that what we did before in the last processes? Right, we're doing that as quickly as possible, but as we get closer to the deadline, we're getting more applications. The first two applications are done. Now we've got three to do and it just takes some time to turn around because these are outside agencies that provide this information for us. We can impress upon them the urgency, but I did wanna let you know there may be a delay in some of that information that we receive back. Okay, by outside agency, are you referring to the county in terms of their? There's the Board of Elections, there's the tax department, and then we can do the city residency ourselves with GPS. But it's really those two items, the Board of Elections and the tax checks. So we have five now, the process closes tomorrow. Are you saying you need more time to get the? I'm saying I may need more time. I don't know if we just have the five applicants that we have today, I think we'll be fine. But if we get, let's say, five more tomorrow at 4.30 in the afternoon, then that is going to complicate things. Obviously I can't speak for the whole guy. I think we'll be comfortable with giving you a little more time beyond 20th if you need a day or two more to vet. But as far as getting the information, I think in the past we have considered receipt of the application that the vetting is assumed that once it gets to us, we're assuming we're getting that packet because tax status was verified because, so I don't think we need to see that connected to the actual packet. We'll just assume that if it passes you, that those odds were doubted and teased or crossed. I think that's how we've conducted ourselves before if I recall correctly. That sounds good. If I need more time, is it okay if I request more time? Sure. Okay. I think colleagues, we, okay. Yes ma'am. Thank you for letting us know, absolutely. And are you supportive of the applications going into the April 7th agenda packet as a supplemental item? Is everyone good with that? Yeah, I think that's what, yeah, absolutely. Okay. Thanks for the thumbs and that's all I have. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Thank you for your work. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. At this time, I think that we are ready to settle our agenda and I'll turn to our city manager. Well, I think you ever had a supplement. Oh, that's right. You also had. Yeah, I just wanted to bring up an item. Arpa, again, I know we're having a conversation on April 6th, I think at 6 p.m. And so I just had a couple of follow-up questions. One, I've been asked by folks who submitted proposals if we are going to allow public comment that evening. And I didn't know. So I wanted to bring that to you all and see where folks are. So that was question number one and then question number two and really it's kind of more a, well, yeah, I guess it's a question. My understanding is that we would be discussing, regardless of the outcome, we would be taking up the staff process that was introduced to us in December and having a continued conversation from there. The reason I'm asking is again, there's some conversation from folks in the community that they should be resubmitting proposals or doing proposals differently. And there's been some confusion and I want to know that folks, our community partners who've submitted proposals that they do not need to do anything if they've already submitted a proposal, but I also wanted to get clarification from folks. I think there's a lot of some rumors and some concerns and I wanted to allay those rumors and concerns that my understanding is that we were continuing the conversation we began in December. Even if the outcome is, we decide to do something different, we're at least starting there. That would be my assumption. Is there anybody that thinks in a differently or has a different idea that we would pick that conversation up? I would just ask, I thought we were going to be having some evaluation from staff around some of the projects that were duplicate or where partners or folks were engaged and submitting multiple, one separate and one together. No, that was not part of what we were going to be doing at this, we asked for requests for proposals and that's what we received. And that is where we are with that. We had not started working with any of those proposals because we don't know what next steps would be, but we are poised to begin working as soon as you all provide us the additional direction. My proposal, unless anyone has differently, is simply this, I would ask Councilman Mojavejaro along with Councilman Williams, if you all could give us a short process for what that conversation would look like and also a recommendation as to how we will go about having comment, public comment. I think we have, we had like 71 proposals out there so I don't know that that is viable for us to have 71 proposals, persons from each of those proposals speaking to us. I think that Councilwoman Cabrera had already sort of grouped them into different sections of housing. I remember there were some in housing and some in different areas. So if you all could provide us with sort of a short process on how we take those groupings and figure out who we want to talk with and how we best do that. So I'm gonna give you all that mandate to sort of come up with one, what that conversation will look like. Where are we picking, where are we gonna start and how we're gonna direct that conversation? And then the second part of that is the allowance of public comment and how that process should go. The set might take us a little while to kind of figure that out and I'd rather kind of put it in a smaller subset and then you all give us, think about it and give us some ideas since these two folk on the other side of you all have already, you're already tied up with the legislative process so I won't put that on you all but I do think that there needs to be a conversation between at least two of us. Are we comfortable saying, and this can be conversations that we have individually with each of you, but that can we come into that room with having some determinations that some proposals will not be moving forward just to curtail the possibility around, there's 77 proposals but there's agreement on, we're not gonna move this chunk forward then we know we can remove those folks and we can at least let staff let them know or folks at least comfortable with that decision. Councilor Lung Johnson. Thank you. I think, I mean this is just my feeling but I think what would be the best thing to do is if y'all come with a proposal and then we discuss and change it from there, not so that the process is a little bit more structured and not as open-ended as we're gonna just have a big conversation because I don't think that'll, I think that'll be much harder to land on a decision and I think we should make a decision. So if y'all come with like, here's what we think we should do and then we discuss from there, I think we'll actually get to a conclusion in that meeting. I think we have, I would agree that we need to kind of narrow it down. I think most of us have kind of looked at most of the proposals. I've begun to look at them and I have some ideas of where my priorities are. I think all of us do. So it's a matter of kind of narrowing that focus down. In those individual boxes that we have. Yeah, just to be clear, so we're gonna get together and come up with the process of identifying, not determining. Right, just identifying. Okay. So that we can kind of know. Madam Mayor, if folks are comfortable, I mean, each of you received a spreadsheet kind of narrowing that conversation down. If folks are comfortable with those decisions in that spreadsheet, which I think we should add as a supplemental item to the, you know, ahead of time so that the public can see it. That will narrow it down quite a bit because we're then just choosing around some options. But I wasn't clear when I had conversations where I left it with individuals was here's a spreadsheet. How do you feel? And folks were gonna kind of mull it over. And where I was unclear is are we showing up with, are we all showing up with an assumed point at a conversation or are folks like, no, I don't wanna, the spreadsheet doesn't work at all and I'm not interested in having that conversation. Does that make sense? Y'all see, weigh in, weigh in, weigh in. Because there were some assumptions made, you know, they're structured in a way where some things were, we would only potentially use up to half of the money but there wasn't necessarily consensus among the seven of us around that decision. There was, there were some other kind of decision points that we would have to make to arrive around the conversation. I'm hearing both you and council member Johnson want to have, which I think is the efficient way to do it. I just wanna make sure that we're making the decisions now to have that efficient conversation. Councilwoman Freeman, I wanna ask you to weigh in a little bit. I'm not, I'm not sure I'm following completely because I know that this spreadsheet that council member Johnson put together lists, I don't know if it was all 71, all 71 of the projects. But the, I guess the criteria or the grouping, I haven't seen that spreadsheet and I haven't seen, there was something else you mentioned. There was another document, well, whatever. But I'm missing something, that's what I feel like. Council member Freeman, if it's okay council, I mean, Mayor O'Neill, I'll just respond if that's okay. That's the only spreadsheet and that's all 77 projects and it's an assumption of, based on the December conversation that there was not consensus on council around spending all of our ARPA funding on the staff design process, the staff and community design process, but it seemed that there was consensus on spending up to 50% of it. And so we would enter the conversation on the sixth, with that number one assumption made, we are only talking about 50% of the ARPA funding. But when I had individual conversations, I think with you council member Freeman, you were not necessarily on board with spending up to 50% of the money. And that was 50% of the dollars we currently have. We've received all of our ARPA funding, it's around $44 million if I'm not mistaken. Okay. The best process that we're discussing would follow the staff process that we have already had conversations with, we've already received 77 proposals around and we'd basically be saying we're gonna allocate 22 million or thereabouts of our ARPA funding to that process. If we can start there, if we at least can agree to that one, then we can create a better and efficient process for April 6th. I do not feel comfortable coming up with a process if we can't even start with that one kind of consensus. And I'm probably the only one that doesn't want to do the 22. So I'm fine if consensus is around 22, but I think we should be looking at a much bigger plan, so. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Firstly, I thought it was important that the mayor and council member Williams had opportunity to averse themselves and come up to speed and that was built in another part of the decision of waiting April 6th and I think that was the right decision. But the beginning, there were two currents that I think fed our current position, two currents that fed into where we are now. One was there are people hurting in our city that needed the money immediately. And two was that there was enough money where we could do something kind of blitzkrieg at the beginning quickly and still have a significant amount of money left to think about whatever you want to call it, a Marshall plan, investment in legacy neighborhoods, something big and transformative. And I think that the spreadsheet that council member Johnson produced was actually informed by the staff's work. It was more, it was just a graphic depiction of work that the staff did that we asked them to do. The scoring work. And when I first saw the staff's work, I was comfortable at that point with at least, as I eyeball some of the list of those proposals, I recognize a number of those groups doing important work, whether it's maternity issues, housing, eviction, diversion, a number of those initiatives are things that we've already funded in the past that we're already familiar with. I think back to when our small business owners were kind of on us about dragging our feet about getting money out the door in the aid plan to our business owners. And some of them, as we now have another pile of money that we need to get out the door that's available to us. And I don't wanna become subject to those type of critiques again from folk in our community. So I think that for me, the ones I've looked at on this spreadsheet, I think there were a number of cutoff points that we can take action on as a council to get some of those checks out the door for people who need it right now, and still have a significant amount of money. We can accomplish both things and allow for council member Williams and the mayor to have opportunity to look at it. Me myself personally, I have no intentions of reading 77 RFPs in their entirety. That's what the staff is for. I mean, when we're in work session, how many contracts come before the council at any given period? And other than perhaps Steve Shull and maybe Charlie, who reads every page and every jotting tittle of those contracts. So some of those proposals, I know that I'm not gonna read all of them, but I know that the staff is and the staff is vetting. And I think that the work that the staff has done thus far was what we asked them to do. I think it's actionable. I think it was on point. And I think that that has to be, that's a good starting point for us to either we affirm what the staff has done or we ourselves are gonna have to come up with a whole new rubric to judge these RFPs. And I'm not gonna read all 77 of them. I know that, but I'm great for the staff that has. So I think on April 6th, bringing the spreadsheet and kind of going, if each individual council member wants to go, if there are particular proposals that we have issues with or we have questions about, if we wanna bring those folk in, we can certainly do that. But I think we're at a point where we can accomplish holding back a significant amount of money to do some of the big equity, transform the pieces we wanna do, and we can get some help out the door that is desperately needed right now in our city. That's where I am. Just for clarity, you've asked council member Caballero and I to come up with a process for April 6th, correct? Because a lot of the work seems to have already been done. So, yeah, I just wanted to see clarity on it. I don't think we have to recreate the will as deputy manager Bertha Johnson and her staff have already done a great deal of the work. And council member Johnson has organized it with their magical spreadsheet powers. So, council member Caballero and I will come up with a process on how we'll deliberate and facilitate that evening. That's my understanding of your request. Is that right? Yes sir. Thank you. So there are a couple of other assumptions that are in play in that spreadsheet that are not quite in line with what council member, Mayor Pregent Middleton was saying. Primarily that it defers all of the proposals that are focused on more county related functions like health and safety to a future process with the county which was something that we'd also talked about in December. So, if we spend half the money on the proposals that are still in that spreadsheet that doesn't actually leave us a whole bunch of money to do a big thing, it puts us into a situation where the rest of that money is gonna go to a combination of funding those proposals in cooperation with the county or maybe the county just decides to fund them all but I'm not gonna count on it. So, we may, there are proposals under that health and wellness category that I think are really good that I wanna be funded and I think in an ideal world we would enter into some sort of partnership with the county to fund some of those. It also eliminates any proposal that the staff had recommended that we not fund so anything that was below 20 is cut. And that's the way it got to being able to give, that was kind of where I started with just that list to get to giving away that 22-ish million. I think most of them are in the 20 to 21 range most of the scenarios. So, I don't think we have quite as much flexibility. If we go with, if we went with that framework, I don't think we have quite as much flexibility to do a big equity initiative because we haven't considered all those other health and wellness proposals, which I think we should consider or, but we do have the potential partnership with the county and they also have a ton of ARPA money and hopefully they would be willing to be more like the primary funder on those proposals because they are much more of like a county function. If we could make that partnership happen, then I think we're in good shape but because we haven't had those conversations yet, it still feels sort of up in the air. Council Member Johnson, thank you. And I think it's a really, really important clarification. Let me say some of those health and wellness initiatives that would not be funded, I see that as part of that equity kind of piece. Some of those who didn't make the cut are some of those type of initiatives that I think we may want to add into that moving forward. And the math, I guess what I was thinking, when I looked at the 22 million, whatever we don't spend after, if we fund what crossed the scoring threshold, my point was is that what is left over, we're not obligated to take that money and to fund the ones that didn't get funded on that list, that that gives us the bandwidth to do what we want to do. That's purely mathematical, that 22 spent, 22 left, without any strings attached to it or any kind of predetermined obligations for that is where I was getting that. But I think you make an excellent point mathematically and structurally from the spreadsheet. Thank you. Madam Senate Manager, thank you Madam Mayor. What I did want to say, and we've been having conversations internally with staff about when we do receive the direction to move, we're going to be ready to move very quickly. But one of the things that we would do under any kind of process is as soon as a proposal is a proposal and once we have that proposal in our hands, you all are looking at what the person asked for or what the organization asked for, but there has to be a vetting of that between us and that organization in terms of the scope that is in the best interest of the community. So in some ways, the amount is a, up to a amount or a potentially an amount, but the actual contract amount and it would be transparent, you would know what that is. But if someone asked for a million and a half dollars, I'll just use that as an example, and then we go negotiate with that nonprofit and determine that what they're trying to do and we go back and forth with it, that ends up being 500,000, then the number goes up and down based upon those negotiations. So we always knew that at the time that the nonprofit is selected and the amount that they asked for, there would have to be additional vetting around the scope of the service and the amount of dollars that would be applied to that. And we will be coming back to you. Certainly we would never go above an amount that you all had given us authority to negotiate with. Thank you, and I appreciate that explanation. I just wanted to clarify for the folks who have submitted proposals, no, you do not need to do anything extra. I just want to ensure that because I'm hearing some angst out there and you do not need to do anything extra. Your proposal has been submitted. We have it. And additionally, Council Member Williams and I will be figuring out how we could potentially take public comment because that was the second part of things that folks have asked me and I wanted to make sure I address it. I appreciate all of my Council colleagues' comments and I know we will have a very robust conversation and I look forward to working with Council Member Williams although I do leave the country tomorrow. So. And we'll leave next week, so. But we'll get there. I think we've heard a couple of things that we can agree on to kind of give you all a kind of a box. And one is that we want to make sure that we address some of those organizations who can provide urgent help. We also want to make sure that we are following what our staff has already ably done and how they've categorized those at the cutoff point, right? So we're gonna stay above that line. I think we also have agreed that we are going to try to hand out half of the money, reserve the other half with no promises on the other half and how that will be delivered. We're also going to make sure that we're trying to be deliberate about making sure that those that we fund are ones that the city normally funds and not reach across into the county arena. So are those all kinds of things that we can kind of agree on as to a broad box? I want to make sure that we do identify the black lead or black focus organizations as a part of that equity conversation. Anybody have any issue with that? I think by definition, the equity will lead us to talking about the black lead in brown organizations. And some of them are already on that list, some of them are on that list already of the folks that have been vetted. So thank you. That kind of gives you all a broad box to kind of frame us, to frame us. Yep, I'm gonna go back and watch this on YouTube so I can get the instructions. It will be good to go. Emergent, try to stay within the city mandate. We're not gonna go below what the city has already determined. Our staff has already determined. So it's pretty, and it's all laid out on us. I think on the spreadsheet when I looked out, it's pretty much that that's pretty much how that spreadsheet flows. You'll be able to pick it up from there. Okay, makes sense. Thank you all. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks everybody. Madam Mayor, just real quick. I know this time is coming up, our legislative committee work. Just wanna put it on everybody's radar. I'm on that committee and I think, Mayor, you're on that as well? I believe so. And Julie, okay. So I know that our delegation has been asking for us to get it together. So we will probably be meeting sooner than later. And we wanna think about those legislative ideas that we have that we wanna collaborate with and meet with Madam Chief of Staff, coming to Wallace and get to work on that. So let me put it out. Bless you. Don't remember as I chair the legislative committee, we will be meeting soon to talk about our legislative agenda. Tell the delegation they need to get themselves together. Note it. I'm gonna ask our city manager there to go ahead and sell our agenda. We're not gonna go there in that one. Again, good afternoon. Madam Mayor, Mr. Mayor, pro 10 members of Durham City Council, before I ask that the agenda be settled, I did wanna have a few more comments around item number 13. I would want to emphasize that the reason that this item is being presented by General Services onto your agenda today is due to the time-bound nature of the project. And there was discussion here about getting additional information that, certainly I have had text conversations as well as some conversations during the break with the staff that would be able to put that information in certain types of memos or format and add it to the agenda item as it moves through the cycle. Before I started to call it out, I wanted to find out from you all's direction whether that item will be on the consent agenda or on the GBA general business agenda. I'm fine with it being on consent, but it only takes one person to put it on GBA. Yeah, I mean, if it's on consent, I'm gonna pull it. So I prefer it to be on GBA so that it doesn't go to the end. So for your agenda, I have items one through 12 and items 14 through 16. For the general business agenda, I have item number 13 and for GBA public hearings, item number 19. And that is what I have for your agenda. Second. Second. Oh, my mic is not on, I'm sorry. It's been moved by Councilwoman Johnson and seconded by Councilman Williams. We are now ready to let us conduct a verbal vote. All those in conformance with settling the agenda, if you would let us know by verbally saying A. Aye. Aye. Aye. I don't know why I would say that. Are there any nays? Hearing none. That agenda is settled and that motion has passed unanimously. Now, are there any other items to come before this city council on this day? If not, this meeting is adjourned. At what time is that? 5.30. 5.30, 7 p.m., but let's say the strong. Warns up. I was about.