 If you all can take your seats, we'll go ahead and get started. If you all can take your seats, we'll go ahead and get started. Can anyone whistle really loud? Anyone? Okay, all right, thank you. Thank you, Johnny. I appreciate that. So before we get started tonight, I do want to welcome up Council Member Nettles. I want to say thank you all to everyone for coming out tonight. We've been having these meetings annually. Time to give you some updates about where we're at, what our process is going to be going forward. And really, this is an opportunity for us to get some feedback from you all. We've heard over the past few years, specific things, alignment on that as we go in our process moving forward to get a developer. So so this mic is only for the camera. Okay, I was making sure I didn't hear nothing, you know. Good evening, everyone. And I know there's a lot of uncertainty here tonight, but we're here, the mayor, she's here, our city manager is here. We want to show you that this project, Evans and Rose, is dedicated to making sure that something takes place on this plot of land. And so there might be some uncertainties, but we're here to talk with the city and let us know how we continue to move things here inside. And so we're here to make things move forward. So one thing we want to get through tonight is that we want to hear from you and we want to hear your concerns and we want to understand what do we need to see on this part of land. And so we want to thank Robert. He's been working diligently three or four months, six months to make sure things happen. So I just want to give kudos to economic development to the city of Fort Worth and even to the community and to I've been meeting with this while we're here tonight. And so ask those hard questions, let's get to something. And so that's my welcome. So thank you, Rob. And to the hands of you. Thank you, Councilman. I appreciate that. So we do have a full agenda. I think you have copies of the agenda, but we'll go through a quick project update. But as Council Member Nettle said, this is really an opportunity for us to hear from you and to talk about what our process is going forward. So that's the goal that we want to try to get through tonight. All right. So again, here's our agenda. We'll do Q&A, get some community feedback. And then we also have a community survey that we will ask you all to fill out and again, just to get some takeaways for the staff as we begin to talk to some other development teams about the project. So you all have been here, you live here, you understand the long history of this project. So I'm not going to spend a lot of time on this. You all know that we have had starts and stops with this project for the past 20 years. Many of you have been in the neighborhood 20, 30, 40, 50 years and you've seen these attempts to move things forward and it's frustrated. I know that I've been working on this for a while. I get frustrated with it. We began assembling the parcels of land in the site back in the late 90s. Our first attempt to redevelop the site was about 2002. We went out again in 2006, thought we had a good team at that point, then we had the economic downturn. So things fell apart at that point. We then entered into a master lease agreement with the team and that's how we were able to have the Jack in the Box and the 7-Eleven there at the corner. But as I've said, too many of you all that have been working on this project, a Jack in the Box and the 7-Eleven, while it's nice to have, that should not be the end objective for what we're trying to achieve here. We've had a number of different proposals come forward, some smaller things that didn't pan out, some larger developments that just weren't a fit and that's the one thing that I want to stress to you all tonight. Over the years, we could have done any number of things at this site, but it is important to get the fit right. We understand the history of this area, we understand that the long history of business development, black-owned business development, and we want to make sure that anything we bring out here is a compliment to that history and a compliment to the community. So I have to thank Council Member Nettles, City Manager, City Council, who have kind of held fast on some things that we didn't want to see here and I have to thank the community for holding fast as well because there were some other developments that you all weren't happy about. So again, this has been an effort that we've all been trying to work on together to bring the project forward. Back in 2018, we began a new process of issuing a request for expressions of interest and RFEI to select a developer for the site. That developer was selected in 2021 and as you all know, we've been working for the past few years with that development team. We ultimately decided to terminate those contracts at the end of 2023 and I do want to thank the Historic Southside Economic Development Team who was meeting on a regular basis with city staff and the developer, worked through issues and concerns. I want to thank Ms. Lorraine Miller in particular for her help in helping to guide some of these discussions, but we just didn't feel that we were making a lot of forward progress with the former development team. So since that time, as Council Member Nettles has said, we've been going over what is our process moving forward. We thought that we would be able to maybe pick a couple of developers and have some discussions with them about moving quickly on the site. What happened was when the contract was terminated and that word got out there, the phone started bringing in, the email started coming. I think we're up to 14 or 15 developers that have expressed some level of interest in the site. So then we're kind of presented with, how are we going to vet all these different proposals that we got? And so we settled on kind of a hybrid of what we did previously. So we do want to look at an abbreviated RFEI, which will allow us to kind of vet these development teams apples to apples to see what we've got, what they're proposing, and what we can bring forward in a quick manner. And I think that's one additional thing that I want to focus on. We don't want to be here in 2025 still having this same conversation about why we don't have development happening on site. For those of you that were in the Neighborhood Association Economic Development Committee meetings, you heard me pressing time and time again, when we're going to break ground, when they want to break ground. That is key to moving forward on this project. But we want to break ground quickly and we want to do it right. So as part of this selection process, we're going to have developers clearly talk about or execute their ability to execute the project. We want to make sure they have strengths in urban design. Again, the importance of responding to the historic and cultural nature of the neighborhood. Community engagement, which has always been critical to this project, is another key piece. And then we want to make sure that we honor the history and be in alignment with what the neighborhood wants. And really that is, as I said, the reason why we're having this meeting tonight, to ensure that whoever we move forward with, they understand these are the specific things that we're looking for and that it aligns with what you want to see as well. Some specific things we'll be focusing on. Again, their experience, references, past projects of similar size, their financial strength. Can they get this project financed? That's going to be a big piece of this. The minority contractor engagement and experience. And then really that financial information to support the concept. So we want to make sure, as we've heard from you all, that we continue to have discussions around mixed use and commercial development. We're not interested in seeing just a plain residential development with no commercial aspects. We've heard that loud and clear over the past few years, that that is something that the commercial piece is very important that you want to see. So that is what we're going to be focused on in trying to get those commercial aspects into the project. We will pull together a selection team, which will review those proposals and that would be comprised of city staff, some business organizations and members of the historic south side. And that would be the team that would bring forward a developer for final selection and negotiation. Very quickly, I talked about the timeline. So we are moving pretty fast. We have the community tonight. We have this survey that we want to get some information from you all on. Our goal and objective is to issue this RFEI on the 20th. I give the developer team about three weeks to put their work together and we've already had conversation with them so they know that this is coming. And then we would get that response back in early March, go through the analysis and then have a recommendation by April. So that is April is the timeframe that we're shooting for to have a new team in place. That will kick off some additional community engagement, final approvals by the city council before they go and break this summer. And our goal, if we can stick to this and we have a good team, is that we will be standing here January or February 2025 talking about a groundbreaking date. So that's what we're keen on. And again, a lot of things have to happen in order for that to take place. So again, this is general proposal timeline of what we're working on. Again, some of this may shift as information comes in. But this is our objective to try to have a groundbreaking in 2025 on a project that the city supports that is financially doable and that the neighborhood supports. So with that, I am going to open up the floor for some Q and A for you all. I understand James Walker had a few comments that he wanted to make. So James, I want to turn it over to you real quick and then we'll get into the comments. Thank you. Appreciate that, Robert. Oh, my name is James Walker and I'm the president of the Historic Southside Neighborhood Association. And what I want to speak about or speak to the city is in regards to what the Historic Southside Neighborhood Association have been meeting about. And Thomas is going to pass out what we discussed. And one of the things that we met about because we are really true to our community. And it's a lot of things we hold value to when we try to maintain the American African American history here in the community. We have a lot of key establishments, which we have indicated on the document. You can take these documents back with you and review them. We have a lot of key establishment here. We have the Williams Barber College. We have the Fort Worth Taren County NAACP. We have Evans Avenue Cleaners. We have the Kappa House. We have over 18 different key African American establishments in our neighborhood. And what we want to try to do with this new development coming to the area is to maintain that. However, we can make this a nutrient African American cultural district. That's what we would like to do. However that looks again, we've been working on this for years to come. We went and pulled up some information in regards to the city. And if you look at this pamphlet here, the city did a master plan for Everson-Rosedale back in 2000. We're here in 2023. And it's the exact same, pretty much the exact same design as our developer, her global, had designed, which was to make this a historic area for the culture. So we would like to continue to maintain that. And we want to say from a neighborhood standpoint that we're not here to say who dropped the ball or when they dropped the ball or how the ball got dropped. But we want to try to figure out how do we work with the city from a community standpoint in order to ensure that we continue to move this forward. We have the Juneteenth Museum that's going to be coming, which we would like that to be the anchor. We don't know if Juneteenth Museum could be here at this site or the Juneteenth Museum could be here at this site or the site where they looked at for the community center. But we would like that to be the anchor of what we have here, just like we have the stockyards. You have that as a tourism spot. You have near Southside. Mike Brennam has done an awesome job with developing the near Southside. We just not for sure why it's taking so long to develop our side over here with it being over 23 years. So we would like for you guys to really take our time to come up with some type of plan that's going to be able to move forward. Now we are on a time frame what by 2025. So it's going to take a collective of everybody. We're not here to stop anything, but we want to make sure and to make sure that the community grows. You have a lot of vacant land between Evans, Rosedale, and back down to 35. So we have a lot of vacant land. You guys proposed or the city proposed back in 2000. We think we can make that happen. Now we have had a couple of conversation as to well we got to make sure that we have a lot of commercial and residential. That is true. We don't want to take that lightly, but we're going to have to come up with a master plan just to see exactly how much residential we need because from a community standpoint we would like to have more restaurants. We want it to be a walkable in our neighborhood. Now we're not trying to say that our neighborhood is going to be able to make the stockyards and just like near Southside. They didn't depend on just a neighborhood. They built out for everybody to come and that's what we want to do. We want to make sure that we're building this for everybody to come and be able to take part in what we have put together. If you walk up down Evans right now you have plaques on the streets with people that once lived in this community that now they can kind of see exactly what that history is about. We want to ensure that we're not here to point fingers, blame or anything, but we do want to work with the city to get this project to move forward. We gave a couple of ideas for you guys to take a look at. Taking into consideration when that time comes. We're open. We meet every second Monday there at the community center. Chris knows. Robert knows. We'll love for you guys to come over if we got to sit down with the committee members so that way we can get things out to the community. But we've been doing a lot in this community in order to get this going. We're working hard with the Glenwood Park. We're working with cold compliance to clean up the streets. We just got an ordinance passed for the homeless to be taken care of as you know. So we're working hard. We just want you guys to take us to serious as any other part of the city and know that we are here to work with you guys as well. I just remind you all to speak into the mic when you ask your questions so they can pick it up on the camera. Okay, I need a little help because I feel in some ways and I'm not trying to be a Debbie Dahmer. Like an abused wife that has been through over and over. We've seen it. Oh okay I'm sorry. I feel like an abused wife has been through the scenario over and over and again and I'm gonna just be frank. I just feel like there's a lack of respect even from the time in the meeting. I know we have a CP time but at least somebody make an announcement. We say 530 because I gotta leave in a minute because something else going on but it's not fair to the community that there's not that goes to the harder point. There's not communication and there's lack of respect. What I'd like to understand is can we have a little bit of acknowledgement of mistakes that were made and how do we avoid that happening again? Because there were red flags along the way that many of us tried to say hey this doesn't look like this is gonna work because we've been down this road before and I felt like there were excuses coming from all of our officials that made excuses and we never seen the progress. So I'm asking our city council brother we need you brother to walk alongside with us while we move through this project but at the same time let's take some ownership so we can feel a little sense of Usar relief that we figured out some mistakes that we made that we're not going to go down that road again. Thank you. So you don't think that we have just been sitting around for the past a few months and nobody's been actually doing any work or consideration. We have been and I'm sorry I don't have my glasses on I wish I wish we had more for these for everybody else but I've been informed that if you'd like to have a copy of this we can get it to you. Our community faces several challenges that need to be addressed urgently. Currently we have we have vacant land but no developers. We are food desert and lack of businesses however we believe that our location is excellent with plenty of green space and a great geographical location. Years from years ago we discovered and this neighborhood is established so you can get to anywhere when they had all the malls you could get to the malls you could get to the airport. We knew how valuable our land was and we have been fighting for years to make sure we tried to keep it. Now to achieve our vision we have identified specific goals that we want to accomplish. Our primary focus is to create a walkable neighborhood that is safe and reflects the black culture. We envision small restaurants sections and uh and townhouses. In other words that thing about where you've got businesses on the on the bottom floor offices here and at the top you could have residential that will support that building until until that time the way you've been pushing it might you you've been around you know what I'm talking about and those of you who are in business understand what I'm talking about. We're not talking we're not begging we're not asking anybody to give us anything we're saying let's work together to make this happen. To make our community more vibrant we aim to attract businesses that that cater to the needs not only of our residents but those who live in southwest northwest northeast and want to come over here and see some other culture we got more than cowboys let's face it we got more than cowboys okay we envision why not why can't we have FedEx over here why can't we have restaurants office spaces a jazz club right now we got one jazz club downtown and I think they might be trying to move that out so we'll move them over here and also there are some other people who like to help upbeat jazz as well traditional jazz so let's do it well we are we are determined to achieve our vision and we know that we do not want out we we do what we do not want in our community we do not want uh the sexy hotels parking in the neighborhoods and that's another thing we have got to work out that as we become popular you can't have everybody parking in front of my house if you do I'm putting the parking meter out there and I'm collecting and you know y'all know what I'm talking about TCU you can't do that in TCU okay there's some other things that we we also do not want and we do not want as I go as I go as I drive to Atlanta going out 20 you can't tell when you leave from one city going into the next you know what I'm talking about chilies uh all the other restaurants all those other stores we want to encourage businesses that to move into this community and as you begin to talk to those business those people who you're going to make who you're going to make one more to contract to we want to be at the table too because we want to let them know and and address to what you said earlier we didn't ask for the jack in the box of 711 let's get that straight now I ain't putting them down because they want to make money and they found a location there's a lot of history goes here a lot of pain and suffering but like you said we want to try to get past that and start doing some things that need to be done in this community we got a youth group here keen to kids environmental education network can't get funding have to beg for funding we shouldn't have to do that we should have monies that should be able to come in from um from mics as they say that that those other groups to support youth programs in this community we've never had youth programs here okay all in all our community is diverse 19% white 46% Hispanic 39 30.5% black and we know that things are changing but we want to see something and those who are moving here can have can see that we who live here have fault the last thing i'm going to say people those elderly people who took me under their wings 50 years ago when i was working at the fire hall on hattie street when we were members of the united front fighting to get things at taren county college i was uh there was a there was two groups of us that was the major militants and the junior militants my friend knows what i'm talking about i was i was a junior militants but those are the things that we want and we've been asking for you have been having meetings trying to have some meetings so we can get we can get what what you want and we still want to have meetings until the day you close this thing we've got to figure out ways to get people up here to this live up to the library the community center to tell us what they want to see in this community before you finalize anything it's important that we do that we can't you can't just say johnny lewis won't you just can't say geraldine wants it uh or he wants it we got to get people we got to get off our butts and do it and and uh mr. councilman we need your help we need people to see that you care about this community the way they care about other places now with that said i will shut up and sit down we have any other questions in the audience yes uh yeah overall um i just wanted to say that i think what the community is looking for is just a more collaborative partnership i think in this first round we um basically during the the meat of this project we were given over to a corporate handler that's what happened we didn't even deal directly i don't think in my opinion with the city and that's just that's just not the way to really collaborate if that's really what you want to do if you don't want to do it you just say it you don't want to do it and not going to do it but we need that real collaboration um one example that i'm gonna be i'm gonna i'm proud of myself i'm brevity i'm but i'm going too long now um evans plaza redesign we hit the person over parks i can send you my chain of emails that were ignored on that project that that's ridiculous that can't happen we're using our time we spend our money that that shouldn't happen um the second thing i would say is um we need to look at the entire site we just we just picked up another pad site possibly right if the museum moves here there's another pad site here but the point there is we need to look at this whole thing not just one development there's stuff up at pinksons there's stuff all over and when i know when we were looking at traffic studies it was like well we're just looking at this development no we want a bunch of stuff to happen here so we need to think about it ahead of time and the last thing i'll say is the timeline to try to take something that admittedly has taken 23 years and compress it into six weeks is ridiculous we need to acknowledge mistakes slow down and back this thing up a little bit and see where we're going to go with it that's my opinion yeah um good point thank councilmember so i read about the timeline and kind of why we're kind of pushing on this so y'all may know we had some federal arpa dollars tied into the prior development team those dollars have to be allocated committed by the end of this year and spent by 2026 and so part of what's driving some of this aggressiveness on the timeline is to ensure that we still have those dollars available for us to utilize for this project but i say that say you know at the end of the day i said this earlier we want to make sure we do this right so you know i don't want the arpa schedule to be the complete driver on it but just understand that's that's kind of where we set that that date for any other question jesse and joe who in the room was a part of the 2000 master planning one two three four five okay now who in the room has been a part of any planning that has happened outside of that set of plans in from 2000 to now al i think you you're a new person in that count so for those of you so what mr lewis just told me was he said they don't want to be sacrificed for a dollar and end up with something that they don't want i'm here tonight um i grew up going to bake a chapel my family's part of the linorawala heritage museum and i'm also a neighborhood president um like my brother james and i i too would love to collaborate with this community um mayor councilman i don't know how we make that happen i don't know if there has to be an rfp or if this is something but i would love to um work with you guys to help facilitate the communication i think we have a translation issue um and i i i do think mr lewis that we should work aggressively to take advantage of the dollars but i agree that we should not come back with something subpar mayor i think you would agree with that too um and the reason i say that is because we want to be able to leverage dollars in the future right we want to be able to um compound on the museum and compound on other projects and other sites and um i'm still a young and growing developer i'm not whole global i'm not mccormick barron salazar but i am being mentored by mccormick barron salazar and other organizations and i think some of the lessons learned that we've learned and the stop six choice neighborhood improvement could be mirrored here and i think given the the opportunity we would be able to um bring the collaboration that you see um i think it it is it is a scheduling issue i think one thing that i've learned in the stop six cni is that we need sustainable communication right so historic south side is a sustainable organization but we may need to add some communication points additional to the committee to um ramp up that communication and that's where i think they're asking for councilman nettles and your assistant's mayor fernando robert about just making sure that the community has access to city staff i've recently experienced um the issues that happen with turnover in the city different people being replaced people growing to new positions growing to new areas and that affects and impacts the communication in a way that citizens are able just to engage your offices and sustain that communication so um i think we can find the solution um it took us seven years to get the stop six cni application approved um but i i definitely think we could do something here and i would be willing to work with you guys good evening uh Danielle Tucker here um will tourney habitat bring in affordable housing because uh we own some property here on luder street and the owner next door purchased the property but if someone buys it it's going to be three hundred thousand dollars so i want to know as a upcoming construction manager in the cornerstone program with tourney habitat well we'll be able to come over here and build some affordable housing for the neighborhood because that's what we need it's it's been a key sorry that's like you have a lot of me uh yeah i mean affordable housing has been an element of what we've talked about so again you're going to need some mix of both market rate housing and affordable housing if you all remember under the previous agreement there's about a 20 commitment to affordable housing 10% of those units that's 60% am i and 10% at 80% am i so again we understand that the goal of this is not end up displacing folks who want to make sure that the people that have lived here uh continue to live here we'll be able to take part in some of these developments one more question too will this uh development go down to hillside neighborhood down all the way down evans no no so the development our particular area that we're talking about is really just from here from rosedale going uh going north so we're not hitting on on the southern end of rosedale now that's not to say that as other things that yeah yeah as other things happen as you have this development you have the juneteenth museum and other things that you won't get that opportunity to have some additional development down those corridors everybody know me as miss jerry i am the secretary to the neighborhood assault uh historic south side neighborhood association and my thing is we need accountability i know i send out emails i call we can't get anybody to answer and i have made statements and i've actually done it you know like hey i need somebody to answer me if it means i need to come downtown every single day and i've had to do that in order to get we have been trying we've been at this part of this for over what right at a year and a half and it's like if we were going up and all of the sudden things just started falling apart okay we have this we don't have that and this is ridiculous it is truly ridiculous we had a charrette here at the school what happened to those papers we know what we want nobody should have to come in here i can't go to nobody's house in here and tell you this is what i want to go on at your house don't come in here telling us that get with us and let's get a plan together because this is ridiculous we don't need nobody to come from anywhere else get with us and hey okay we can do this together but it shouldn't be somebody from another side of town i am the secretary johnny lewis is our vice president james is our president miss laraine here is our economic development person uh where is he he spoke a few minutes ago walton uh is our uh environment person all of our telephone numbers and email addresses are at the hazel harvey peace building if you want to get in touch with us you can there's no reason that nobody is able is unable to get in touch with us accountability here you go thank you i'm not a resident of historic south side but i speak as a stakeholder who's been involved in the community for 20 years in the nonprofit realm so i just wanted to give that context as as an outsider's point of view um i'm really glad and and um to hear that preserving the history and the black culture that is foundational to this neighborhood is at the forefront of the verbal and written plans um and we can talk about affordable housing and and you know certain portions sectioned off but my question is what is the city doing and preparing for to ensure that the actual wealth generated as part of this development stays with the residents to whom it belongs historically not just in terms of making sure that 10 of houses 20 percent of houses are affordable to rent but that the wealth remains in the hands of whom it has belonged for the past 100 years that's uh yeah good question and so a lot of the work a lot of things we're talking about even even recently when it comes to one just the contract inside the house so again we want to ensure that we have our local business equity firms involved on the contracted piece so again there should be an opportunity for community members to not only live here but to help build the area as well and then as johnny and jayson was talking about you know one thing that we we didn't want to see is we didn't want to have an influx of chilies and all the chains and nothing against chilies are fine but the idea was the thought was that we want to ensure that businesses in the neighborhood will be able to take part in this development that they would be there along with some of those national chains and so that again is another opportunity that we're taking to ensure that this isn't just something we're going to come in just place the neighborhood bringing a bunch of chains clap our hands on clap ourselves on the back and say yeah we did a good job it has to be intentional and it has to ensure that the neighborhood and the business owners that are already here can take advantage of those opportunities so yeah good evening my name is alanda massie i'm the president of the hillside neighborhood association and i wanted to ask because miss tucker asked if whatever you guys talked about i'm sorry i was late i came as soon as i got off work but i'm and i may have missed this but did you guys talk about anything that would be beneficial on the south side of rosdale going up into the hillside area because i want to i want to i wanted to come because i wanted to make sure you guys knew and understood there's not a lot going on up there there's not a lot and there's opportunity up there we had i met with our board members and we had to go to a coffee shop in 76104 because there was no place for us to meet in our boundaries so for me for us that's an issue so i'm i'm curious to know if or when will you guys consider the hillside area and going south of rosdale so that we have things in that area for our people thank you no good question yeah so the project as we're talking about today is really confined thank you to this area that's rosdale heading north because that's the property that the city owns right so but that's not to say and i understand that there is there is not a lot of development that's happening on the other side the southern end in the rosdale so as i think walter was saying earlier this this really starts to become a collective effort so it's not just the acreage we have here but how does that spread out beyond the existing city-owned property and my friend knows this concept very well that once you get some of those catalytic developments whether it's what we have here at evidence of rosdale whether it's the juneteenth museum once you get those catalytic developments in place other people then become more interested and you can make some things happen our challenges we got to get the first thing off the ground first and make sure that that's done right to ensure that we continue to get that investment now and they don't have said i can cause every single day and they call me every single day so south side hillside must be something coming over there must be something coming i mean something is coming over there they won't and they call all day all right i think that's the cause and they call all day and they won't so something's going on from south side hillside do you have you all heard anything hello my name is demetria i live in the area um of course i grew up in the area from profit street i went to mornin side anyway um the first time i heard about i mean like i said the neighborhood been like this since i moved out it been like this and nothing has been done i'm 50 50 57 and nothing still has been done and um i feel like there's a another vision for the area that's unspoken reason why this vision cannot go forward so it's a bunch of detain delay you know i feel like we need to all tell what we're thinking and share the information so we're know what we're supposed to be going because if you're not going to start it because you have other visions we need to know that because we're not getting any younger but anyway um i just think that needs to come to the table about what are y'all thinking too at the city and what we're talking about over here in the neighborhood and join those two two plans together and about um the other what y'all call it hillside unfortunately we can't even think about hillside because we can't even get fish area so y'all can't even unfortunately you can't be in the plan because we we haven't organized something for this side of rose deal and then so this happened there's nothing they can do on the other side it's not even a and i understand what you're saying they contact you about your land and uh y'all talking about a yeah and y'all talking about affordable housing i really don't see affordable housing for this area in order to elevate the area unfortunately i really don't believe that's in the plan we say it but i don't believe it's a part of the actual plan because unfortunately you cannot elevate a neighborhood unfortunately with affordable housing because whatever you're trying to elevate sometimes affordable housing brings it back down so that's the that's the dive vision we have two visions here and what when you say elevate and then you's like keep it down here for everybody else i understand what y'all saying i understand what both sides are saying but unfortunately until we do something like this and figure out what truly we want to do here nothing is going to happen let's be honest that nothing can be done in the hillside area i just want to respectfully say that i disagree and that i'm hopeful that you guys will will continue to consider the hillside area because it's not just something that we want we have a need in that area so i just i want to respectfully say that don't discount us because things haven't happened as you guys have planned here don't discount us for that not that you were saying to discount you but i'm just i just want to respectfully disagree go back to uh what mr. weaver walked away and said a few minutes ago one of the things this thing on can everybody hear me okay one of the things one of the things we've got to do excuse me one of the things we have to do is have meetings like this with some tables and we have got to be willing to give up sign give up our time on saturdays and on wednesdays and on tuesdays to do what walters saying to work with some large maps to see what is what what we want to work with nobody can make a decision tonight but i'm just saying i'm open to sitting down and saying okay we need to look at what can be here what can be here when can it be put there how long will it take to develop it and then and then be serious about saying we don't want that we're not going to take that we're not we're not going to take this but we do want that and the other it's going to take some time it's going to take some patience now i'm saying i've been i've been at this since i like i said when i came here in nineteen but i bought 69 got out the service worked at that old fire hall on hattie street with children who didn't have anything in this neighborhood and we still don't have anything thanks to miss lord the norrower and dr a.i harris hoodwink mean kidnap me and put me down now but the bottom line is if you want to do it you got to have you got we got to get with all of you we got to start having those visions like jared had for the juneteenth museum we got to start and then we've got to harness that energy and yeah it took me two years to shut down annison lab two years of but those little old ladies who are like the ladies are here now were the ones who actually did it now if you want to do if you want to do it here outside it's going to mean we're going to have to start walking the streets knocking on doors getting to know your neighbors and then develop and start to develop and i plan pretty much like we've been doing the past few weeks i'll be willing to work with you and i'll be willing to give up my time i got a couple of trips i'll be willing to cancel one or two no you but i but i'm not also be willing to train but we've got but if you want to do it and you're going to have to have some spirit and you got to follow your gut and do it and it may mean going down the city hall uh knocking on finando's door and say we got a cup of coffee for you so let's sit down and do some work okay and also with the city manager and if we can find if we can find the mayor and the council person getting out too but you're going to have to be willing to do it this didn't happen overnight and it ain't happened yet but they know we're serious now i think they know we're serious right james okay johnny we've we've known you serious for a while johnny trust me i will we we've got about five minutes left uh i do want to note we got shan last year so braver together uh has been working is engaged with the city they're doing an urban streetscape work on evans avenue so part of the discussion around what could happen around hillside and other parts of southeast besides this particular block that's some of the work that that's john and braver together do it i just want to make sure y'all need that correct yeah right in the underpass underpass murals yeah let me get this one last question ad a god they need to look at i imagine you will will you be will they be able to meet with the future developers because he was able to bring some ad a stuff to their attention yes definitely yes anyway my son lives in alana georgia and we were talking about the hillside neighborhood association the neighborhood area he called me and said mama i'm reading this where he lives in alana georgia this is forward texas that the hillside area they wanted develop and he said and they and he said they're gonna start calling you about buying the home and they right then that was two years ago and i've been my neighbor and i've been getting cards and phone calls from from that time on so somebody knows something somebody knows something that he's in georgia and he's telling me about where i'm a hillside again i'm not aware of anything specific going on in hillside but i will say once i mean we've been very vocal about this development about the juneteenth museum so i think when you hear that type of investment being proposed you're gonna have investors that are saying okay i want to buy up the property now before something else comes in so so that could be it all right we've got time for maybe one more question good evening my name is madison hogan i grew up on maddox up our hillside park we moved down to canton about four streets over the south side has it was it was booming it used to be it was booming all black businesses booming when i left and went to vietnam twice and come back i still lived on the south side but it was in the glengar department 76104 i've been to you talk about museums now these people talking about hillside you're going to do get that look like you're going to get this first this area here what you're talking about now you already got that in mind get her up and get that developed because i've gone to five or six i went to the the civil rights museum in jackson mississippi i went to the lorraine motel up in Memphis i went to central high up in arkansas all these places are making money off of the off of the tourists that come in there we need to hurry up and get this project off the ground where we can get to the hillside and the other other areas that we're going so we need to hurry up and get this going where we can do that okay thank you all right all right we got that one more get every one more to get one more right there that's real quick it's nothing spectacular trust me it's not going to make y'all shout or anything but my husband and i live in a neighborhood and we've lived here for about five years purchased this fixer upper we absolutely love it in this neighborhood we could be living anywhere when we chose here there's lots of culture and we live close to the lanora rola museum i watch tour buses unload at that place so that goes to show if you give them something to come to they're going to come here so i hope it happens for all of us thank you thank you all right y'all i appreciate it we do really do just stay on time we got it we got to cut it off but we'll be here uh afterwards so um you can uh grab any of us if you have any questions you want to talk about the project a little bit further oh okay well i have to let miss lee talk i want to piggyback on what hogan said and here you take this you need to know that the juneteenth museum is going to open 2025 come hella high water i wish he could show you don't don't come on here what do you want me to show you the portals are reminiscent of shotgun houses that we lived in here on the south side and other neighborhoods it's going to have beside the museum it's going to have a business incubator it's going to have an open space this kid could tell you more about it well they they pretty much know about it miss opal you don't believe it well the national juneteenth museum is more than just a museum it is an economic development driver for the historic south side and the goal is to not only bring the country here to know what juneteenth is about but it's to also service the community in which it's being built so the the business incubator for small businesses the food hall for business and entrepreneurs to get started the gallery space of course but it's also going to be a campus with retail and living inside of it so we have a vested interest you know she's had her land on evans and rose dell since before the war she would say and first world war okay you're gonna put a time on it but to understand the significance of the value of the historic south side and why revitalization not gentrification is important and so as we work together to bring this vision to pass know that it will spark the eyes of the nation they're already on us because of juneteenth the walk and everything that we do for celebrating the holiday but more than that it's going to be why is juneteenth still relevant why come to understand the history of the nation it's american history and not just black or african-american history so we are building we are solidifying and we're not changing we just have to get it done anything else miss opal yes it's gonna open have i said it's gonna open 2025 come hella hot water it's a 70 million dollar project we've raised some 33 million here in fault worth we plan to go to the nation for the rest of it when i come with my cup don't shut me down well they tell you gotta know where to be quiet i think i just know where to be quiet so yeah yeah she want to go ahead okay we're gonna invite the mayor up make some closing comments how's everybody okay good to see you um i wanted to say a few things because i thought my presence was important and thank you so much for your bravery and speaking and holding truth to power because i think that's important here first i have to commend my colleague councilmember nettles because he inherited this project and immediately decided it was a priority for him and candidly and even in the years i worked for mayor price i never worked on this project it was not something that was really outside of district eight and because um my friend wallace mentioned it i'll own it the city does need to apologize i think that we do hard things in this city across fort worth and when i think about our ability to do private public partnerships take dickie's arena for example that's fully built and operational take a beautiful new city hall that we've moved into and are moving into in the next few months take stop six as an example that is a transformative project for community this project will happen and i think that i think that the the timeline while aggressive and while maybe causes pause i think you need to hold us to that at the same time demanding that your wishes and vision are the plan right it's not melding two plans it's your vision and any developer that is worthwhile will meet the need of this community only and it is possible i can't go back in time in 2000 i was a junior in high school so i wasn't here for those plans and i wasn't here when hoag was selected i don't think it's actually helpful to go back in in time except for i have to say that economic development and to mr. sterns and his staff they have bent over backwards to try to get this thing on the ground i don't think we've delivered them the resources they need but in this room tonight you have neighborhood services you have dj with development services you have your city manager you have fernando costa you have your councilmember you have your mayor i could go on so this city is committed to it actions speak louder than words i don't expect you to believe me many of you don't know me that well that's fine but we're going to get to work and we're going to find the right developer for historic south side to make this evans rose del project catalytic so that we can also build juneteenth so we can also go to hillside that's what it takes to build transformation and community so let's get to work i really appreciate all of your time tonight i know you could be anywhere with your families meaning if you're like me you're supposed to be cooking dinner right now we'll hope that the pizza i ordered delivered on time but um you have the city's commitment and you have my office's commitment we're going to partner together in district eight to get it done okay so i appreciate you being here tonight thank you to robert thank you mayor and again uh i i just want to echo the mayor's comments thank you all for coming here tonight i know uh we've been meeting on this a lot and so just to continue to hear your feedback is very important to us so i mentioned where's my clicker at hold on left it over here all right so uh one thing that we talked about tonight is the importance of uh community feedback so we have a survey uh that we have available for you um so again we've had a number of plans since 88 again we just want to make sure that we're in alignment so we're not we're not trying to push something on you we want to make sure that what we bring to you is what you want to see and if it's not then we have to go back and make sure that we're we're focused on trying to achieve what it is that you all want to see uh so the survey is out there um it will close on thursday february 15th uh you can access that online at forward texas dot gov evros survey uh we also have some tablets in the back so if you want to take some time tonight to fill out some survey questions you can do that we also have some paper copies so if you don't want to mess with electronics and and that you can fill it out via paper we just want to make sure that we get this feedback from you so we can begin to start giving this information out to these development teams and again this is step one of feedback this is not the only feedback we're going to get but just to get we want to make sure that we're still kind of in alignment with what we've been hearing from you all for the past few years so uh andra anything you want to add uh as far as the survey uh thank you all for coming out we really appreciate it again there are tablets you can take photos of the qr code the url is on the screen we'd really love to hear from you thank you thank you all i appreciate you all coming out tonight and we'll be here answering questions you might have