 of the City Council of Fort Worth, Texas with the invocation by Pastor Marcus Brecken of Gateway Church. Welcome, Pastor, and thank you for being with us this evening. And please remain standing for the Pledge of Allegiance to the United States and State of Texas. Let's pray. Our dear Heavenly Father, we thank you for this great city, one of the greatest cities in the world. We as citizens love living here and so we pray for Mayor Parker and those who govern us. We pray for all those who serve and we pray that you'll give them the grace to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly before you with integrity. We pray that they defend the oppressed, protect those who live upright, and discipline those who do wrong. May God give them emotional stability and mental clarity and physical endurance. We pray for law enforcement and first responders that you'll give them protection, discernment, strength, and safety. And God the wisdom to handle difficult circumstances with compassion toward those who suffer. We pray especially in these days for our schools, those who teach, the administration, that they do their jobs thoroughly so that those who learn can do so in safety and in healthy environments. We pray that you would protect our schools and make them safe places to grow up with knowledge, friendship, and wisdom. God we pray also that you'll bless those who are less fortunate than we are and bless in a special way those who are homeless. We pray that you will give those in this chamber wisdom to act on their behalf. We pray that everything discussed and decided upon denial will be pleasing to you in Jesus' name. Amen. To the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, for nomination. All right we have consideration of the minutes of the May 17th and May 24th council meetings and we need a motion please. Moved and seconded by council members Crane and Beck respectively. All in favor cast your votes. I can't vote so okay got it thank you. And with that motion is approved. Okay the first speaker is going to be Bob Willoughby. Hi my name is Bob Willoughby. We've got to talk about a two-page letter that my council gave me we're going to do it over the next couple of weeks here. They're threatening to ban me for harassment and they call what I'm doing right now harassment. That's what they're calling harassment. So what I'm doing right now this letter which I just sent a report back to the city attorney asking for immediately a letter of withdrawal and I should get one for apology because the stuff on here is just totally totally false unless now the council members seem to have been threatened. Which council member? Beck are you threatened? You want to come down afterwards and talk to me? I'll be down here afterwards to talk to any one of these council members that feel threatened. Which one? Any of them? Let's get one down here. Okay I bet we won't have none. Another thing they went after me was calling out my website fwdistrict5.com. That's an address. That's all it is. When can you come to council and not say the words fwdistrict5.com? It's the same thing as if I put a sign up in front of my house saying we'll be forgiven. You're off topic. You're off topic. It's not off topic. It is and we're going to shut your mic down. Stay on topic. Am I still on? Stay on topic. Mike's gone. Mike's gone. Your mic is gone. You don't have to jump up. Yes, he will. If they just tell me to sit down, I'll sit down. Sit down. Okay. I just didn't understand them. Thank you, Bob. Next speaker. Thomas Trollen-Cosse. Council members, fellow citizens, taxpayers, public servants, and those of you on an authoritarian power trip, I don't know how we can be off subject when it is general public comment. The First Amendment is one of those things that the council still has not even begun to embrace or recognize. You violate our First Amendment, our Fourth Amendment, our Fifth Amendment, and often our Fourteenth Amendment. But I'm going to get to the particulars of what the Fort Worth Police did and what its role was in Mr. Flores' district a couple weeks ago. You see, I could have told you sooner, but over the last 11 months, you've had a total of 19 general comment sessions in nearly a year. This is a large, diverse city with lots of issues that are hot button issues that need to be addressed a lot more often than every 21 days. You see, as five of you know, I was at a press conference. I was a legitimate press because the First Amendment guarantees the freedom of the press to all 330 million of us. And you witness TRWD detain me and not allow me into a press conference. Well, 10 days ago, TRWD's subset group, TRVA, held a meeting publicly announced it appropriately, and two of the people sitting in front of me were supposed to attend that meeting. At the last minute, after five o'clock, they canceled the meeting without proper notice to the public. The media knew, the board members knew. As also a member of the media and free press, I asked some questions about the meeting and why was it canceled and why wasn't there a proper notice, et cetera, et cetera. When we wouldn't leave the publicly accessible area, the Fort Worth police was called. Nearly 12 officers, I think, may know showed up for two men with cameras. The Internal Affairs Division now and the Office of Public Police Oversight are both investigating the series of things that happen. At least two of those officers, of course, are on this list, Officer Gilbert and, I think, Officer De La Santos. What's weird about De La Santos is, Rick Ricardo De La Santos is not only does he know me, but have been to his place to bid on a pawn. He pretended not to know me and looked like he was more loyal to the TRWD police chief, David Geary, than to his superior officers on the incident. Making it a little bit more complicated, when there was a press conference in December 14th, the mayor herself texted me and said the city of Fort Worth does not have jurisdiction on that property. So while they were about to arrest me for not failure to identify, which under state statute 3802 were not required to, it turned into a fiasco. And a number of officers were insubordinate to their own, to their own superiors, and a number of things took place. You got a long way to go to improve things in Fort Worth. Next speaker. Okay, we're going to try now to go to our caller. Her name is Carrie Hines. Recently brought to my attention. Yes. You have three minutes. Go ahead, please. My name is Carrie Hines and I live in Fort Worth. It has been brought to my attention that in 2016, 13,000 Fort Worth residents and 400 different lawsuits sued Chesapeake for unpaid royalties and received 52.5 million dollars. I repeat, 13,000 Fort Worth residents and 400 different lawsuits sued Chesapeake for unpaid royalties and received 52.5 million dollars. I also understand the city of Fort Worth and Fort Worth ISD also sued Chesapeake and settled in 2016. However, no one in the city, as far as the city manager, the city council, or the mayor notified any of the other residents of Fort Worth that they needed to sue as well. We know sign on bonuses were unfairly given out. Those who lived in areas like Stop Six received $300 sign on bonuses while others in the more affluent areas would later receive much larger sign on bonuses. To add insult to injury, some Fort Worth residents have not received one dime in royalties. Is it fair to tie the residents of Fort Worth to leases with companies that do not honor the contract and clearly have not done right by the citizens of Fort Worth? This was proven in court over and over. Yet not all residents have been fairly compensated. That said, we are tied to these leases as long as we have 667 active whales in the city. The city owes the residents to either renegotiate these leases or shut down these whales. But the damages the drilling has done to the environment has not and will not be cost effective under the current leases. We understand the city renegotiated their lease and so should every citizen of Fort Worth. Lastly, what has been done to the residents of Fort Worth is why call it theft, fraud, and breach of contract. Thank you. Thank you. We're two other callers, LaSandra Huggins. We could not reach her and neither could we reach Tuwan Fan. Okay, so all right sir, you're up for speaking. You have got three minutes. Good evening, Mayor Pro Temp and council members. My name is Tuwan Fan. I'm a director of the Fan Foundation. We are a 501c3 non-profit based here in Fort Worth dedicated to providing low income housing and jobs training. I come before you today to speak on the development of permanent supportive housing through the home ARP NOFA for which the Fan Foundation has applied, that which Tara Perez spoke on this afternoon, and for which you are to vote on next Tuesday. In speaking with neighborhood services, we were not selected due to HUD regulations that we were not that were not clear to us. I have scheduled meetings with some of you and I hope to meet the rest of you if you have the time. We have great respect and have enjoyed working with neighborhood services and look forward to continuing to work with them. However, I want to bring to your attention a different way of addressing chronic homelessness than the single site new construction projects being recommended. While these developments have their uses, they have the significant downsides of taking a very long time having high costs and inadvertently segregating citizens and concentrating poverty. We do not advocate abolishing this method. Instead, we believe that it should be supplemented by scattered site housing developments that consist of the acquisition of ready to move in turnkey properties and the renovation of existing Class C properties. New construction is considerably more expensive. Turnkey one bedroom condos have been listed for as low as $85,000 and rehabilitation can be done for less than $120,000 per unit, much less than anything recommended. New construction takes on average two years in a regular market, but in this hypercharged market two years is optimistic. The chronically homeless have been unhoused for at least a year and are we to ask them to wait for two more years. Acquisition of turnkey properties can provide housing in a matter of months. The last point is one that we believe is most vital to the long-term success of this program and that is the segregation of our most impoverished citizens and the over-concentration of poverty. We heard just this morning that even the venerated Casa de Esperanza has been getting citizen emails complaining about panhandling, unsheltered homeless, and people screaming out for drugs and alcohol. While we heard Lieutenant Gorey disabuse us of the notion that the residents are responsible for these complaints, the stigma of single site housing remains. By segregating these citizens, we cut them off from the society at large. How can we expect these citizens to reintegrate to society if we separate them away? What kind of role models would they have around them? What kind of job opportunities are available where they are? If instead, we weave them the most vulnerable citizens into the existing fabric of a neighborhood, they have a much better chance of becoming productive members of society. For these reasons, we in others, we ask the city council to give greater consideration to the acquisition of turnkey properties and rehabilitation. Fort Worth is a leader in solving homelessness with Casa de Esperanza, and we believe that it should maintain that lead and prove to the rest of the nation that we are a dynamic city that cares about its citizens. Thank you. Our next speaker is Daniel Hayes. Good evening, Mayor Pro Tem and council. I'm sure all of you are familiar with the classic television show, The Twilight Zone. I'm sorry, Mr. Hayes, could you please state your residence, please? My name is Dan Hayes and I live in Fort Worth. Thank you. The Twilight Zone remains one of my favorite old school shows. Unquestionably, I find the scariest episode to be number 22 from the first season. Originally airing in 1960 in March, the monsters are due on Maple Street shows what can happen in a suburban neighborhood when unusual happenings start to take place, where there is the power of suggestion and when neighbors become suspicious of each other. But where are the monsters? The episode aired during the last year of the Eisenhower presidency. It was designed as an allegory of the political situation for a nation which, among other things, had only recently emerged from the Joseph McCarthy Communist witch hunts, was increasingly dealing with demands for racial equality, and in which there was a very real threat of nuclear annihilation from the Soviet Union. The episode illustrates the tendency towards seeing those not like us as the others. The neighbors on Maple Street find there are very real consequences to their suspicions, their words, and their mistrust of each other. By the end of the episode, the fabric of this quiet neighborhood has been completely ripped apart. They are the monsters on Maple Street. This episode serves as a cautionary tale for all of us. Over the last 60 years, its concept is still as relevant as ever, playing out in the hateful acts of violence and death, committed with increasing frequency in our nation. If we fail to recognize that words matter, that what we are doing to ourselves is providing platforms that motivate some to violence, others to mistrust of people and governments, and which make us all a little more cynical. I don't know what we can do about it, but the first step towards solving any problem is recognizing that something must change. At the moment, we can't seem to agree as a nation on even that basic point. Rod Serling wrote the script for this episode, and his closing narration is worth repeating. It goes like this. The tools of conquest do not necessarily come with bombs, explosion, and fallout. There are weapons that are simply thoughts, attitudes, prejudices, to be found only in the minds of men. For the record, prejudices can kill, and suspicion can destroy. And a thoughtless frightened search for a scapegoat has a fallout all its own for the children and the children yet unborn. And the pity of it is these things cannot be confined to the Twilight Zone. Thank you. Next speaker is David Mendez, followed by James Smith. Mayor Pro Tem, Council. David Mendez speaking on behalf of Northwest Neighborhood Alliance, 180,000 residents strong in that alliance. Important to note for you. Excuse me, Mr. Mendez, could you state your city of residence, please? Fort Worth, Texas. Unlike the president of the short-term rental alliance for Tarrant County, who actually lives in Aisle, and the vice president who lives in Arlington, who spoke last time at this council, we are all residents of here at Fort Worth. Short-term rentals, I had a really good speech planned. I did. However, I learned kind of a puzzling, troubling statistic that last year, one-third of all houses were bought by corporations in Fort Worth. Those are corporations, not families. Those are people who don't live here. They don't live in the state. They're out as state investors, California, Nevada, New York, Florida. Those homes have forever been taken off the market for families in Fort Worth. Sure, they may be long-term rentals, but on the topic of short-term rentals, imagine taking out a chunk of houses that will no longer be available to families. Those will be short-term rentals for tourism. Tourism is important. I'm not going to argue that. Tourism is actually very important to any city. However, when you talk about removing an inventory that is already, that this council has many times said an inventory that is already short to where those homes will never be available again to single families, to families that want to stay here and put down roots is short-sighted and ignorant of the problem that you have proposed that Fort Worth has. I ask that you think carefully about short-term rentals within neighborhoods. Think carefully about what that's being done to the city right now. Another thing to consider is that short-term rentals, you have no idea how many are out there. You were just briefed on this a little while ago. Code compliance does not have the capacity to do what you want it to do, to monitor and enforce short-term rentals. You're asking them to do a job that they can't even do in the course of their normal duties because they are so short-staffed. Think about this very carefully when you start putting short-term rentals in neighborhoods. They belong in the places you already have them. The ordinance already says seven street area. The places where there's tourism, those were short-term rentals belong. Neighborhoods are for families. Thank you. Next speaker is Mr. James Smith, followed by Manuel Matta. Good afternoon, council. My name is James Smith. I live in District 8. Two weeks ago, I stood before you guys and I was elated that there would be a trial June 23, 2022. Only to find out that there may not be a trial June 23, 2022. There's a 50-50 chance that this trial again would be delayed. That's problematic for me and problematic for the family. I don't know. I don't know what I mean. I'm disconvigated about this whole situation, but like I've told you before, there's nothing being appropriate from October 12, 2019. Moving on. I went to church last Sunday, Sunday before last. First time in two and a half years because that's how I've been feeling. My church is a block from my house, but the Lord sent me a mile from my house to go to church. I'm like, why am I walking a mile when I can just walk a block? I walked that mile and noticed that every alley from my home to Morningside is three feet tall or more. I spoke with my councilman last month about my alley, not knowing that every alley on the south side is beyond cold. If I get a ticket or I get threatened to get my yard cut for $300 because it's 12 inches tall, why are the alleys allowed to get three feet tall? That's unacceptable. And this has been every year since there have been alleys. It's nothing new, but nobody's come to talk about it, so I'm talking about it. I suggest you turn the alleys over to the Park and Recreation Department. They have the twos. The alley shouldn't be cut once a year. I cut my yard once a week. So why should the alley be cut once a year? Last time I was here, I talked about building trust with the police department and the citizens. I mentioned taking the logo where the west begins to where trust begins on the side of the car. I don't know whether y'all took that as a joke, but I'm serious. If you want to build trust between the citizens and the police department, you're going to have to start somewhere and that's the first place to start. Every day that officer walks to his car, he's going to read where trust begins, reminding him that that's where trust begins. I mean, I don't know the process. I've asked about the process. I haven't heard the process, which brings me to think, why do we come down here to speak to you guys if what we ask you or suggest to you doesn't get a proper acknowledgement? 25 seconds, 24 seconds. Two years and eight months. I'm broken. I've been told that by a good friend and I trust his judgment because the things he uncovers in the city of Fort Worth are astounding to me because nobody seems to care what he finds. Justice for Tatiana, thank you for your time. Our last speaker for this evening is Manuel Mata. My name is Manuel Mata. I live in Fort Worth, Texas District 9 and in 2021, $856,876 were obtained primarily by county and city investigations, primarily to low income individuals who had no chance of getting their property back. So instead of giving it into the community, they seized it from more after school programs that aim towards single parent homes or areas that are affected by gun violence. So having a free pass to continue to do this isn't enough. I come from a low income area, have most of my life. Majority of these programs don't have enough money or support to reach more kids because I can tell you what gun violence does. First hand, my little sister was shot and killed in a senseless drive by. I talked to as many kids in my neighborhood about the truth of committing these crimes and the consequences of them. $74 million to increase transparency. So I'm asking everyone in here to cover these two things and to give the residents that don't have a voice either because of fear or feeling small and overlooked. The human race matters to me. I hope I can convince others to see it the same way. I'm proof no matter what life does to any of us, if you believe in your heart, you are doing anything for the right reason. Walls and barriers are going to outnumber us all the time. My village overcomes odds and struggles daily. Asking any single mother or single father in my neighborhood. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem, that completes our speakers for the evening. Thank you Ron and tonight we close the city council meeting in honor of the Uvalde community, especially the friends, family, and loved ones of the 19 children and two teachers killed on May 24th. Our hearts cannot fathom the pain of a community grieving such tremendous loss. Fort Worth will continue to pray that families affected by this tragedy will be surrounded with love and support during these incredibly difficult days. Good evening.