 Thank y'all all for being here today for our first Task Force meeting in the new year. And I want to go and ask my co-chairmen if they have anything that they would like to say. Yeah, first of all, good evening and welcome. We're reading in my tradition in Judaism now the story of the splitting of the red scene how the Israelites went through. And it's interesting because there is a story in Idrash that relates to all of us. When the Israelites were standing at the edge of the red sea and it wasn't opening, a man named Naqshom started to walk into the water and the water did not part. He walked up to his hip and it did not part. He walked up to his chest and it did not part. But he kept going with belief and faith and when it ended up right under his nose, when he thought he would drown, the sea parted and the Israelites were able to go through. I say this because at times it would seem that we too as a society are looking in front of us and not seeing a clear path of how to get through. We're looking at us and we're facing a huge task here. And some people are saying, oh, you won't be able to do it how you can be able to help solve this problem. But I look back towards my faith tradition. I look back towards a story that's saying if we keep believing not only in our mission and in our task, but in each and every one of us together as individuals, as a community, as friends and as a task force, I believe that together we will be able to make the sea of inequity split. So all of us, both in Fort Worth and around, will be able to walk through as equal partners. So I thank you for being part. I can't follow that. I'm just going to follow it. Did I okay that? Thank you all for being here. You know, right now we've had a lot of community conversations over the last quarter of last year, but we still have some more to do. But our committee work is getting ready to get started. And some communities have already met and some will be meeting shortly. So, you know, we're listening and learning and now we're going to do our due diligence and start looking at what we need to do to make our recommendations. So at this time I want to go to line three for approval of minutes. Because everyone had a chance to read the minutes. Got a motion? Second. All in favor? Aye. Now, the next thing is discussion about the redistricting process. As you all know, we talked a little bit about this at our last meeting. And we have had some other conversations, the co-chairs. We've also had a meeting with the mayor. One of the things that we're going to look at doing is we will be putting forth a recommendation for the pre-counsel meeting on May 1st. There's some research that we still need to do in looking at what other cities have done. Austin was one of the examples utilized at our last meetings, but we have found out that there are some other cities that have done some similar work in what they've done to redistricting putting citizen committees together and so forth. So we do want to do a little bit more research so that the recommendation that we put forward would encompass some of those best practices utilized so that we can also try to see what fits your footwork. I do want to ask Charles, since he was at the meeting with us and with the mayor last week, if he'd like to contribute any comments to that. I think it was a good meeting. I think she was actually more up to speed on the Austin approach than I knew going in. At the meeting, we found out that the city secretary has done some research on these other cities that have maybe not gone as fully independent as the Austin model, but kind of a hybrid between an independent commission and the city council. So we want to take a look at those and then come back and maybe make a recommendation. Bob Ray, Rabbi Bloom, do you have anything that you'd like to add? I do. What was the purpose of even talking to the mayor about this? We just wanted to brief her that we will be looking to make a recommendation on the redistricting process that we would like for the city maybe to take with the next We've got two new council seats that we'll be coming up. I think they take seat 23. And so we want to be able to be proactive in looking at what processes can we do differently so that we can maybe have better representation. You mean with the whole city council? No. Just a minute. Corey, and I know where you're going because that was one of my main questions when we had a suggestion to meet with the mayor about this. The purpose was not for the mayor to tell us what she wanted. She expected what we ought to do. And as I said in our previous meeting with the committee chairs a few minutes ago, our job on this task force and the committees, your job is not to anticipate what somebody may or may not want and decide that we should or should not do something. We should do what we think ought to be done for this city. Now, whether or not the mayor and the city council accepted, it's on them and we can still lobby for what we think is right. But as I think we said at the very beginning, we do not want the mayor or the city council telling this group what we ought to do except bring them recommendations. And I think that was made clear at this meeting the other day. Very clear. And she already expected us to have some recommendations. There was nothing that was a surprise to her at all. Any questions? Next thing on the agenda is an update on public engagement. Michelle and Estrus? Ladies first. Okay. We had our first of our additional meetings which were calling continuing the conversation. We had Thursday night. It was a lower turnout than I had hoped for. And Arturo was there so he could speak to the evening. But even though it was a small group, I believe that the conversation was very good and that the people who attended seemed to get a lot out of it and were actually saying that they were going to tell others about it. So I've been passing around. We're doing everything we can think of to spread the word. But if you all could help and I know I sent an email, if there's anything that you all can do to help spread the word, it would be most appreciated. And so this is just a little sheet on some ways that each one of the task force members can help us when it comes to telling people about the meetings and encouraging people to come and participate in the process. So we have our next meeting on Thursday. I have flyers outside. We've sent copies of the flyer to all of our community centers and all of our libraries so they'll have them out for residents that happen to come in. We also are doing a lot of electronically pushing. And for those of you on Facebook, I would encourage you to like the page. The more likes and the more shares the higher our visibility gets on Facebook. So that all helps and we're actually something we rarely do in the city. We're actually doing paid boosts on Facebook so that more people will see it. We did that for the first meeting. The first meeting was going to be predominantly in Spanish. And so we actually did a target Facebook promotion for people who are dominant Spanish-speaking adults living in Fort Worth and we reached about 1200 people through that paid post. But still had some challenges in getting some people to attend. So I'm open to any suggestions and ideas you all might have on how we can spread the word. Right here. Can you guys get those posted? Now that we're going to the neighborhoods and the community centers and to the next store. I know you guys do on that. They are on next door. Okay. I haven't seen mine on there yet. But I've actively been in the next store. And another thing as task force members, a lot of you guys are in some private neighborhood community groups. So you guys can be sharing these events in there as well. Because I know that you have to actually be a member of some of those private groups to actually share information into those. Especially those neighborhood and enjoying groups. Yeah, we share it on Facebook. The city has Facebook, Twitter and next door accounts. And so we're sharing it that way electronically. We also do it in a community engagement newsletter that goes to all neighborhood leaders every week. And the meetings are in there. We've attacked the meetings on Facebook for the location. So it will show up on those libraries and community center Facebook pages if anybody goes for information on those pages. So hopefully we'll reach some new people. I know it popped up on my face for three times today. And to compliment Michelle's update, we said from the beginning that this is about listening. And so these series are designed a little differently in a very significant way in response to feedback that you gave about the structure. So these are one and done. Well, not well, that didn't sound exactly right. They're one time structure. They will keep talking, but these conversations aren't part of a series. They're still two hours out of respect of people's busy schedules. We open it up. We started with some basic core structured questions and there's ample space for them to add whatever other points perspective questions they might have. And this is shifting more so toward ideas for solutions, recommendations for solutions, getting their voice in that direction. These are small groups, a little bit larger small groups and more of a modified town hall meeting. So each of the groups will have opportunities to engage and report out to all the others. They won't be tasked with writing down the feedback. We'll have city staff that will be capturing that high level feedback to bring to the next level. So these have been streamlined without compromising the voice of. And I just want to say too that I need to show an email. Small size, I mean, while we want as many people as possible to come. If we have great conversations with eight people and we get that feedback, I'm satisfied. The fact that we have 14 of these conversations going on, plus we're going to have another town hall meeting, it shows that what we're doing, what we're still going to do, we're going to reach out to this community. And what you said we ought to do is change more city-wide. So that's happening with these 14 other conversations. And if we get three or more together in my name, not my name, but somebody else, it's all good. I'm satisfied with that if we're getting good response. Quality versus quantity. Also the city-wide town hall meeting, we have put in a request with TCC for their for their facility. Because that was the recommendation from the task force for location. We gave them an option of some dates in March and we're still waiting to hear back from them. It goes to a central scheduling location and they just have not gotten back with this yet. But as soon as I have that information, I'll send that out to everybody. And this will be the south campus break. Yes. Any questions? Is there another meeting that's directed towards Hispanic? We can. There's going to be a meeting in Diamond Hill. We talked about maybe using the Diamond Hill as another opportunity to do a big outreach. So what we did is the facilitator that we had at that meeting was able to facilitate in Spanish or English. So I can get with the extras to see if we can have that same capability at the Diamond Hill meeting. Richard Gonzalez. And we have four others in addition to Richard that are able to do Spanish. Good. Any other comments? Okay. Committee reports. We're moving along. Criminal Justice. Todd. Yes. The Criminal Justice Committee, we had the opportunity to meet last week. I think we had it was our first meeting. We had a lot of good conversation, a lot of good ideas to move forward. Some of the issues I think we're going to be focusing on moving forward. And this is not a complete list, but initial issues that we kind of identified early on is the officer training regarding the cultural diversity and the leadership. Police interaction with at-risk youth, the field training of new officers and how that's made up and the officer's experience, gender, race, and other makeup of those field training officers. Community engagement, which we consist of, how the police department is interacting with the community, the makeup of various police advisory committees and other four work PDs, citizen committees, and also exploring the creation of a citizen review form is something that's one of the issues that we're going to be trying to address. And also looking at and identifying the officer's disciplinary process and guidelines. Some of the subject matter experts that we find on meeting with are the Deputy Chief over Training Division, the Procedural Justice Trainer, and various law enforcement, eight officers with a four work PD. We've even thrown out the possibility of having our own individual community conversations in various communities to kind of gauge and see what communities feel about their neighborhood policing, their police officers, or their interaction with police officers. We've requested data breaking down their arrests by division, by types of arrests, by ethnicity, by gender, and by age of bone and records. We went back to request additional information to extrapolate the arrests of juveniles and the type of arrests and traffic statistics as well. And Corey Walters, feel free if I'm missing anything. Corey may have something. I don't think you missed a thing. We have our next meeting planned for February 12th where Chief Krause is going to be providing us additional information that we've requested to review. And we have our hands full, but we know that we're going to be able to get it done and hopefully bring back something to the committee that we feel that the City Council and the City would like. Thank you, John. And if I may add some things that we hope to come up with that may be something that we could put into action pretty soon rather than later. Good. Good. Charles, thank you for that development. Yes. We had our initial meeting last Wednesday. In addition to three other committee members, we were also joined by Salton Cole, who's the Chairman of the Board Metropolitan Black Chamber of Commerce. I had reached out to D. James, the President of the Black Chamber and John Hernandez, although I didn't give John very much time. But he is interested in being involved. Also, I spoke to Reginald Gates, who's the TCC now, but his background is such that he would be a great resource for our committee. Of course, Robert was there providing great expertise. I wanted, what I told the committee I was looking for, what I thought our purpose was to be able to make some meaningful recommendations to the City Council regarding improved policies or practices related to expanding economic opportunities for disadvantaged businesses and communities in Fort Worth. And that the scope of what we were looking at was looking at our economic incentives for incentives for policies with a whole range of tax abatement statistics and everything. And also our Minority Business Intergrime Program, any changes in policies or practices there. We're able to get some good up to the minute information from Robert on changes that have already been made, some changes that were being looked at. And we'll have to wait for the minutes to come out, but we actually have some recommendations come up that we think are actionable pretty quickly that hopefully at our next meeting, which will be the 31st next week, that we can get the committee to go on record and endorse them. So I think we're off to a good start. Let me know if John Jacinto in his office would also be a good person to run on. Okay. Okay. All right. Education Bob and Robert. Bob. He's looking at you, Bob. So Robert and I have met. We have started to meet with subject matter experts. We've met with Erica Beltran from Leadership ISD, who is on the State Board of Education. We've got a meeting set up with Sherry Green, chief of equity, and excellence with Portland ISD. And we have our first full committee meeting date set, which we will share with our fellow committee members here in a moment on Friday the 2nd of February. I think right now our objective is to listen to our subject matter experts, ask a lot of questions, get from them as much of their expertise and research as we can before we formulate a plan of action. I think ultimately it's about what can we do as far as recommendations to make sure that there are equal opportunities for our students across the board regardless of where they live and sit. Any questions? Health. We have already had our first meeting and very productive meeting, and in that we had a collective conversation and really just discussed where we would start with the whole topic of health because it was pretty broad. So we determined that we would just look at access to health and we were talking about reaching the basic healthcare transportation, but even after this committee meeting we might rethink that a little bit. I'll share with the committee about that later. But access to healthy and nutritious foods and access to parks and recreation. So when we look at health we did have lots of reports on the disparities and the percentages of obesity rates and certain zip codes. So we didn't want to get necessarily overwhelmed with that because we already had that data. In fact, you know, why do those numbers look like that? And we kind of narrowed it down through conversation. There was access. So that's where we're going to place our focus. We have the reports and we do have some publications and websites and databases that we will refer to. And we've also identified our subject matter experts of who we'll be interviewing. Again, I mentioned we did have our first meeting. We before last, and we have our next meeting on Thursday and Ann Sawyer Caldwell will be there for the first interview of our SMEs. Thank you, Ms. Yolanda. Any questions? All right. How's it, Katie? I mentioned a lot there also to step in. Any time during this report we've had two meetings of our committee. We have identified many, many experts that getting arms around the huge topic of housing has been a challenge. We have heard a report on the assessment of affordable housing. Affordable housing is the issue that embraced that out of the many community meetings that and implications lead into one another. And how can you incentivize developers around the affordable housing in our housing market like we have right now? A self-market plan. They don't need to pay attention to all this. They don't need help. And how do you spread the goodies of economic development throughout all classes of people in the city? I mean, it rises in time. It brings all those. But it certainly does put people in housing equally. We heard a report because several people had mentioned it to us. So we thought we'd find out about the tiny houses idea that is being flooded out. And in fact, it's being done. They're spending eight million dollars on the development of tiny houses in Dallas. So we've heard about the pros and cons of that. Which are many. Putting a small house in an urban environment raises a whole lot of issues. Not the least of which is if you put them in a little village together, or you're just recreating segregation when we have homeless people. So the more we learn, the more we know we don't know. So we're continuing to bring in the housing experts. We have another need to schedule the event date, which I don't have in my head at the moment. But we'll be meeting two times a month, at least as we go forward. Because right now we're just learning. And learning about how state laws impact what cities can do as the state legislature increasingly tries to control what cities are able to do and not do. So it's becoming increasingly clear to me, if not other committee members, that our suggestions will impact not only policy suggestions on the city level, but at the state level as well. And ethically, I don't know how we're doing that. So we're looking at dealing with the state county and city level. I suspect. Do you have anything you want to add to this? I wasn't able to attend the last meeting. The first meeting, I think Katie summed up, it's a big issue. And it's where do you start, but at the same time, a lot of it does boil down to the accessibility of affordable housing. And I'm not just from what a lot of folks think of, but a recent college grad, being able to find somewhere to live. Working families being able to find somewhere to live that's convenient to work. And then where does that work? Take them. Do they have to be dependent on cars? And if something happens to their cars, so it's that whole ripple effected. So it's where do you start and stop? I think that looking at things a little differently than we've looked at before, I think is one of the things that is really going to push us. Because we have zoning laws and master plans and all those kinds of things. So how does all that work together? And then you don't also have the kind of stigma, the kind of backyard, you know, if you bring something new on the table. And the housing connection report that we heard at this last meeting was very useful too. And their work in helping people navigate financial institutions and learning what subsidies might be available for them, particularly for people that are in like the 50 to 60% of the poverty level that are paying enough rent in an apartment nowadays that they can move into a house if they can navigate. And people who had never owned a home before, whose family never owned a home, getting them into a house for the first time, discovering other issues of having a proved-up deed for a family that has inhabited a home generation after generation after generation and trying to track that clear deed back so that if they have an opportunity to sell it or need to apply for a subsidy, can they prove they own that home? Even though their great-grandmother owned that home and then their grandmother and then their mother, there are whole levels of those issues. And I think that sometimes, Charles, maybe the housing committee and the economic development committee might meet together because, I mean, we could meet together with all of you, frankly, particularly transportation. But I'm thinking economic development, maybe as we get further down the road, it might be useful for our groups to meet together. I agree. Awesome. Remind me to tell you about a problem called Mount Pleasant afterwards. Okay. Any questions of housing? Transportation? You know, you must not hear. Do we have somebody that can give this report? We do. You were all picking up the rest of the second. So actually, you can have to get to issues because I think I can remember a couple of them. But we met last Tuesday at the city, which is an important point because the city council meeting was canceled, but we were cracking in there so that we had some good drama. We mainly heard, of course, from the transportation authority. And, you know, I have listened to transportation speeches. Several of us have, you know, for many years, but we got more details in this small group than we have for years. And I think the main thing we heard was the flexibility and the fact that they have been given and charged with being more flexible on how they talk to employers, how they seek answers, how they work with some of our smaller cities that actually, you know, the T goes through to get to, you know, Ridgemore and offering them a different way to fund some of that. In the past, if they had gone to their city council, they would have just said, no, we cannot pay pass and tax. But if you said, can we pay for, you know, what do you call them? Shelters. Shelters and other things and signage and all that, it has a whole different sound to it and they've been able to do that. And was it river oaks that took them off on that? There also, there was a lot of conversation about increased access and, of course, safety. And I think everybody hit them up on better mileage and signage. And that's actually what they changed in their budget for this year was some of those kinds of things that we talked about. You know, and now putting on the workforce hat, you know, one of the things that we talked about, of course, was, you know, all the jobs being in alliance and yet it stops, it actually stops at our career center and TCC, but I can't get them with employers out there. We talked about maybe working with Uber and Lyft and seeing some ways that I know others have when the bus isn't there or there are other ways that we can get transportation to those in need. With all these different ideas and solutions, one of the things that first started out with, okay, we need the city to help us promote some of these things. And in the end, we talked about that there needs to be a whole education campaign that would be much more comprehensive than just putting it on the city's back. You know, you need some more lunch and learn, some real opportunities for people to learn different ways to access the transportation authority. And that was one of the issues we actually put out. Y'all remember what the others were? Do you have your notes? I found mine. She covered it. We'll probably trigger your brains a little bit. Kate Beck was really good about getting this. Arturo was really good about how does it all tie back to the race of culture passports and Kate was really good at getting this and trying to zone us in. So we are focusing on funding opportunities and what does that look like? You mentioned the different structures and models with the different partner cities as you look at the piece map and where the gaps are, the service and things, but also where ways to approach those other smaller municipalities to get more buy-in that then spreads some of the wealth around and can increase overall service. Education and awareness, we talked a lot about that because so many of us, you know, like myself, we didn't grow up taking public transportation. So yes, when I go to New York City or Washington D.C. or other cities, you have to navigate it, but here you can get away from having to do it. So as a way to increase ridership and demand through education, and then we also wanted to talk, again, kind of as Katie was mentioning, overlaying with maybe Charles was screwed around the new economic development plan and strategy and the key areas there to make sure that there's some good overlap. We talked about how Charles's presentation and a few meetings back, overlaid education, poverty, race, and all those things. So not reinventing the wheel, but how are these things also overlaid with those so that we can drive our recommendations along those lines? Jeff Davis has his group, Tarrant. He was mentioned as a transit alliance. He may be wanted to get in touch because I know they're going to be partnering with TTC and TTC on education outreach and enhancing community's awareness. He's on our list, too. I attended that meeting last week at TCU that was Tarrant Transit Alliance. And so it was interesting, several city council members attended former bar chamber commerce folks were there. So the attempt of this group, because I understand it, is to create kind of a coalition of advocacy entities to push for transit improvements. And, you know, my training is you always try to figure out where the money's kind of coming from. So the transportation authority has a great plan. Nobody's funded. And that's kind of where they're at. So the advocacy push is to let's find the money, let's develop the strategies to implement this. But it does, I think, so many of what elements there relate to us, the transit-dependent population, the equity and access and all that stuff. So I think having a robust, equitable transportation system is vital. That's obviously why we have a committee that's focused on that as well. So just something to be much loved into what. Right. I'm glad you attended that. I had a meeting with Jeff, but I got sick and had to cancel it. So we're very scheduling now, so. And we're working on our next meeting. Our office is coordinating with the city to see if we can have them in our office that it looks easier than the actual city hall. Get it out, though. Get it out. Understand. Okay. Any questions on transit? I just wanted to apologize for calling Jeff or Yolanda. I realized Yolanda's name was right in my eyes. I'm sorry. It's been a long day. I'm sorry. It's the first day. I'm honored to call people if you want to. Intentionally. Anyway. Don't worry. Don't worry. Don't worry. As you've heard, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done. And as y'all are aware, we were tasked to make a recommendation in August of this year. When we spoke with the mayor last week, we did talk to her about coming up, coming to pre-counsel in May 1st, as I mentioned earlier, and also giving them a preliminary of where we're at and some of the things that we've discovered, but some of the things that we may still need to investigate before we can really come out with some recommendations. So we did ask her also that we may ask for some extra time where maybe we go on until the end of the year instead of in August, based on where we're at come April. So we will keep y'all informed of that, but it's also going to be based on all the research that we get between now and April. But we will be making a preliminary presentation to them on May 1st, that will also include the redistricting issue. So that will be there as well. So just to let y'all know where we're at and what we're thinking. Because there is a lot to cover, as you've all heard, all the different committees and things that they're going to be researching and so forth. We just want to make sure that we do our due diligence to get it right the first time. As you'll note, our future meetings are on Monday, February the 19th year. You all have meetings in between. And I will say Angie and Michelle have been very great about sending us the calendar invites of all the meetings that are going on. So if you can attend them, great. If you can't, at least you know that they're happening. Okay. And cultures, do you have any thoughts on this? I'd just like to say, it's obvious that you're already working hard and that the real work is going to happen in these committees. So we're looking forward to seeing what you come up with in terms of recommendations. And for all the people who are wondering, is this thing really happening? Is it really working? I think we can put out the work, yes. It is working. We don't know how well it's going to work if we actually come up with recommendations. But I'm very pleased with what we are. As one who was doubtful, even cynical at this whole prospect, I'm feeling pretty good right now, based on the work that I've heard that you're already doing. So I'm proud of this. And I do want to say thank you to Bob Ray and to Michelle and Angie, I think, for helping us write that op-ed piece that we all distributed to you all. And you saw that it was in the paper as well. So please help me thank them for writing that. No, I was going to thank him as well, because I think he was going to thank himself. Oh, the others, but it was a beautiful piece. And I just wanted to, not only second to say thank you, but I just want to remind ourselves, we have a large task force. We have subcommittees. But in essence, the most important committee is the committee of one, the committee of ourselves. Because if we live what we're trying to bring about, then we can be a task force every moment we meet someone else. And if we're able to be a task force every time we meet someone else, then maybe that person will become a task force person themselves. Because it's not really what we preach, it's how we live. And if we can do that, if we can leave here, living what we're preaching, I have no doubt that any person we meet will eventually go in the same direction. Well, with that, again, I just want to say thank you all for being here. This is our first meeting of the year for many others to come and follow. And we appreciate your time and commitment. And on that object piece, I will let you know that we will be setting up a meeting to meet with editorial board so that we can keep them in the loop of what we are doing in our process and what status we have. And we'll be looking at that probably sometime in April. But thank you all again and we're adjourned.