 Good afternoon. Mr. Brown. Here. Mr. Herbert. Here. Dr. Bustles. Here. Mr. Brennan. Thank you. Mr. McDowell. Present. Mayor Rickman. Here. Thank you. Mr. Brown, could you give us a little invocation, please? I'd love to. Please bow your heads. Dear Lord, thank you for this gathering of public servants. Help us to always be mindful of what our obligations are to the people of Columbia. Please bless everyone in this holiday season. Keep us also mindful of your gift to us, your son. In Jesus' name we pray. Amen. Amen. Moving forward with our city council discussion and we're going to softly start rolling back into some work sessions. We'll be the first before the holiday and, of course, in January, I don't know that we have one schedule in July going on and swearing in and a little bit of movement with the dates in January, but I'll say this real quickly. Mayor, I discuss my desire for us to start as early as the first or second week in January. We're going to have a meeting where it looks like a mini retreat, where not like the retreat where you go into your strategic outcomes, as those are still in place and we're working well with those. We'll get in a cadence. We'll have that type of retreat again later on. This would be more to kick off the budget season and to talk more about the operations, kind of do a temperature check on the things that we have accomplished, things that are pending, and also to give some perspective on the economy and market from some outside folks that some of you are probably familiar with, like Mike Shealy, who worked for the state legislature for a long time. We're in the works, Missy Kaufman and Jeff and I are working through an agenda and we'll float that with y'all and make sure some dates work for a day and a half is what we're thinking of, which would be a longer version of a work session. Got it. So with that said, some of these items we're trying to work in before January are things that will also continue to be discussed leading into the budget, the first being parking services and a long awaited update. Missy Gentry will introduce our assistant city manager for development services will introduce our wonderful staff to give a parking operations overview. So good afternoon. We're glad to be here. I know it's been a long time coming and I will do a very brief introduction of our staff and then they'll come up here and give you the presentation about our parking system operations. Parking is an enterprise of the city. It's made up of 45 employees, 11 decks, 14 surface slots, over 3,600 parking meters. They also manage residential parking, all of the event parking, bag meters, valet permits and the current revenues are around $9.6 million. I want to introduce the team who manage the parking system. Elle Matney is our parking director for parking services and Tori is our deputy director Tori Salvant. So they work together on the operational side. And under Henry Simons, we have support services who help with the maintenance of the facilities and Kelvin Keesler heads that up. So you're going to hear from those three folks shortly. So Elle, you want to jump up and take a. Thank you ma'am. Good afternoon mayor, city council, city manager. We appreciate the time today to provide you with an overview of the parking system. It's been a good moment. So we're quite excited. The first thing I'll jump through real quick. There we go. The agenda, what we're going to review this afternoon is an overview of the parking system itself. Our economic development partnerships, project highlights, activities that are taking place in parking as we speak, and our capital improvement plan. We'll start things off to let everyone know parking services division is broken down by two departments. We have operations, which would include enforcement, the meter shop, the front office customer service events are parking business liaison. And we have a total of 34 staff members on the operational side. Facilities under the direction of Kelvin includes facility maintenance, cleaning, and they have a total of 11 staff members. This gives you a broad overview of the entire system itself. For example, as Missy mentioned, we have 11 parking decks. We currently have 14 surface slots over 3,600 on street meter spaces over 1,400 passport only spaces. We have 47 in and out blocks throughout the city. We have six residentially permitted areas. Our average number of monthly parkers is just over 3,400. And the system as a whole has over 11,000 parking spaces in the system. We accommodate nine. Yes, sir. So those are 47 blocks throughout the city that you can purchase monthly for $35 and they're designated maybe not utilized for turnover, but in a business district maybe that doesn't have a parking facility. So we have those designated and we only sell at 50% of the block occupancy so that there is public parking available. How many parking spots in the decks total? I can have that for you shortly. Between decks and surface slots, how many parking spots is that total? So we have over 11,000. 11,000. That includes the street then. I can have that for you momentarily. So the number of hotels that we accommodate in the city would be nine. We service over 500 staff members with the city. The average number of events that we support monthly, though that fluctuates dependent on the time of the year is 29. The average number of monthly citations that we issue is over 8,700 citations monthly. Bagged meters, very popular here in Columbia, we bag over 500 monthly. 10%. And the number of passport transactions monthly is now just over 70,000 each month. What I'll do now is I'll turn it over to Tori and she's going to break down some of the new innovative things that we have going on with regards to operations. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. Let me draw your attention. I went back. So our passport parking. Passport parking is something that we utilize throughout the city of Columbia. But what we have not had a lot of participation in is our merchants buying validations. We have validations. Merchants can buy validations for their patrons just for patronizing their facility. It's just a simple thing of signing up at passportink.com and selecting what type of amount of money they would like to put on their account. From there they can designate whether or not they want to give $1 or $2 off for parking for their patrons. Are there no merchants or very few or you're disappointed in the numbers? Give me a better idea. We put the information out there but we haven't really had a lot of bite behind it. OK. They wouldn't have like a predetermined spot. So it would just be somewhere. No. It would be just say for instance if it's a business on Main Street and then decide they wanted to use a validation parking. It doesn't set the parking space but what it does is it would allow them to say well I'm going to give you a $1 off for that parking. They can just put it in with their passport code. Got it. I just think that the customers are going to pay for that as long as customers are going to pay for the parking. I would think that if I was like Granger Owens. If I was Granger Owens I don't think I'd want to pay for somebody's parking four blocks away. But I might be interested in paying for somebody's designated spot or something like that. I might do that. But I don't know that I would sign up for that either. I don't know that I would increase my traffic. You know what I'm saying? But it's an interesting idea. I like the concept. I just don't know that I like the application because unless you advertise it ahead of time people don't know. Logistically because it used to be folks would give out tokens back in the day. I would do that if I had like a jar of cards. Here's a dollar off. I'll pay for your parking on the backside. But there's got to be a way to make it work where it becomes enticing for the thing. Maybe we ought to work with the vendor when they've done in other cities to promote and try. It can be zone specific. So if you were Granger or Owens and you wanted to offer your validation for the block in front of you guaranteeing the space. I don't want to cut Tori off. She does a great job. You can make it zone specific with regards to passport. So if you wanted to block the zone in front of Granger Owens, yes you can do that but it doesn't guarantee them a space would be available. But you could make it applicable to the zone in front of your place of business. The answer is if it was really easy to maneuver like the concept if I was Granger Owens and we could go back 20 years and I had a jar parking token jar I would do that. In other words, if somebody could come in and take a token and leave or whatever. I don't want to waste time in today's world. Nobody likes working for free. You don't want to waste your time dealing with something for a dollar. Does that make sense? If we can make it, like I said, I like the concepts. I'm not sure how to apply it in 2023 where it seems like it would make sense. And also I just don't know what the incentive is for them to do it. It's just kind of like people get aggravated with parking. We know that. Columbia is a weird town and I find myself doing this. I used to do it a lot when our business was in west Columbia where I would go to Zestos for lunch and I would go one lap, three lap and I'm gone. And two laps, she does a two lap person. I'm a three lap person. The same thing if I'm going if I was going to go to Granger Owens after this meeting and I was driving down there, I would probably take two laps and then if I might go to Assembly Street, but I might not and then I'm gone. Park in the parking lot in the back. I didn't know about that. See? Daniel, now I'm going to complain next time there. Daniel's got a parking spot in the back. Anyway, I'm glad to know about it, but I just want to think about it. I got a parking spot out. Now we have text apart. Currently, you can text 30843 and put in park and it will send your code. You just click on it and it asks you your phone number. Once you put your phone number in then you can do the workflow and do your text apart with Passport. And what's the number again? 30843. Does that mean I don't have to use the app? I see that. Now we can deal with that. Now how would our customers know that? It's on the meters and on the signage. Okay. Now we have our Passport numbers. We have been utilizing Passport since 2015, which is about 99 months. In that timeframe, we have had 6.8 million total transactions, 382,000 total activity users and $9.4 million worth of revenue. What's the average transaction do you know? 70,000 transactions. I mean like dollar amount. 85 cents. I can get that information for you. I'm just curious. I think it's about 190,195. The meters I noticed when I was at Gourmet Shop this weekend, you can only go up to two hours. Right? Is that everywhere? That's just five points. We have some meters that only allow you to go with certain times. We have five hour meters, two hour meters. So it varies. Because we won't turn over in those areas. And how do you distinguish when you're on the street? Far as the meters, it's the colors. Because I was just I guess making that compared to what the mirror is saying about what's your average time. So I wonder if people know because I'm planning to shop for two hours or their vows. And this is net numbers based on 2015 through 2023? Yeah. Okay. If you just read it and you don't know, I mean that's about what our whole parking system does annually. So I just want to make sure I was reading that correctly. Now I bring you to Park Hub. Park Hub is a cashless event modular that we have been using since probably about December 10th of last year. As you can see it's very seamless when a parker pulls up for an event. If it's a $10 gate, they can tap or they can swipe. If they decide they want a receipt, we can pull up a QR code. They scan the QR code and then they have their receipt. It's very seamless. It's fast. And it cuts down on a lot of time. As far as reconciliation on the back end it's real time. So we don't have any problems with seeing the revenue that we picked up for today's event. So I have a question about this. It seems to when I was seeing some of the messaging around Park Hub as well, it seems like it could be confusing that there's two different platforms. Did you all explore the possibility of one app being able to do all of this? Do we have to have two? Do we have to have Park Hub and the parking passport app? Well, looking with what we do in the city we went with something that was more reasonable and seamless. We want to make sure that the parker exchanged with the staff is seamless and doesn't take a lot of steps. Because what we find is that when we have people coming into events it starts to get a backup. So if you can just pull out a car and tap or slide on through it makes the event. So this is the only point of sale. So this isn't an app that somebody who's parking would also have a Park Hub app. No. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. As you can see we have had over 220 events. On-site revenue is $447,000 with over 34,000 cars parked. These are three of the top events that we have had so far this year with the Jonas brother in October 10th of 2023 which on-site revenue was $15,000 with over 700 cars parked. WWE smackdown of May of 2023 with approximately 13.9,000 on-site revenue with over 600 cars parked. And then Monster Jam April of 2023 with 13.82,000 on-site revenue with over 600 cars parked. That says something about our citizens. Monster Jam is really cool. That shows you that we're not hitting all the events that we should get is what it really shows. What they want. Now we move on to the barnacle. The barnacle is a mobilization device that we're using in conjunction with towing. We started using the barnacle approximately September 15th of 2023. Since then we've had over 68 deployments with a revenue of over $18,000. We're currently using six devices. Did you get all six back? We've had some interesting things that happen. There's one in the back of my wife's car right now. We know that. We can train. Just check there first. We're only using these devices currently in designated areas such as Santy and Saluda Avenue, all of our parking decks. Our main street district. Ladies Street and gentlemen, we have our T2 and 1,000 Hampton Street. Coming soon. We have our T2 citation collection services that are coming soon. This is for our parkers that get their citations and decide they don't want to pay it. On the 61st day, those citations have been transferred over to them. From there, the collection services were sent out a letter letting them know that their citations have been transferred over to them and work with them when trying to get the revenue due to the City of Columbia for those citations. You said on the 63rd day. 61st. How does that differ from sent off debt collection that you can reuse and make even more money? We already utilized T2 for our enforcement and for them to pay online with their citations and it just made good practice to go with this in order to keep it in line and make it seamless for the parker as well. How do they pay? They pay online. Cash preferable. Can't pay cash off. Kind of computer you got. Got a floppy disk. Also coming soon is our citation appeal. Currently for citation appeals, we do it the old fashion way as e-mail. The parker was sent if they believed that they got a citation incorrectly or whatever the case may be. They would e-mail our parking services e-mail box and let us know the reason why they feel like the citation was given incorrectly. How many e-mails you get? Sometimes to the 300 a day. Wow. You said a day per day? It depends. How many citations that our enforcement officers write depends on how many citations appeal processes we get. Whether they know they deserve the ticket or not. With this right here. You're in a handicap zone is $200. Yellow stripe is $50. Wait. It's not just $8 anymore. With this process the system will deem that you cannot appeal a citation after seven days. Currently that is what we already have. That information is listed on the back of the citation. However we still get those citations that can be 30 days old that they're trying to appeal. But with this system once you go in you must have your tag number You put your information in if the system would deem it if it's over seven days old. It would give you an automatic response stating that you are unable to appeal the citation. Ask a question. How could you deem some of the appeal as legitimate? Given the information that they provided and we look into the officer that wrote the citation looking at every aspect. So if you see you got a citation stating that you was parked over time and you state that no I was and I paid through passport parking and whatever the case may be. Nine times out of ten what happened is if you're a person that utilizes passport parking you have multiple vehicles. So instead of selecting the correct vehicle you selected your wife vehicle. So when the monitor goes and run your tag So when the monitor goes and run your tag to see whether or not you have passport rights and notice that you don't that's when they give you the citation. What we do is we work with people once they come in we tell them if you're going to appeal to send us a copy of your session to let us know that you did pay with passport parking and then we walk them through with changing to make sure they know which vehicle to change and how that works and then we'll go ahead and board that citation as one time. Why is always the meter never worked? It does sometimes. You hit it with a hammer two or three times it doesn't work. I use the card. Well even if the meter doesn't work you can notify us and we have when I meet a shop text come out and look at it but also you know those meters do have passport parking information as well. Yeah we should write it to the app. You could hit the you could hit the meter with the barnacle. That's right. It's lightweight. I now turn the presentation back over to Elle Matney. Hallelujah. The beginning of a new day. Very exciting. I just used one of these in Asheville, North Carolina. It's pretty straight forward. It tells you your meters about the spot. Yeah they give you a little print out putting your cards. It's also expensive but it did text me parking in Asheville lately. $40 an hour. Downtown. It wasn't cheap. For the record I was in Asheville in recent weeks and I left with a beautiful envelope on my vehicle. Did you appeal it within seven days? Did you have a base? You have a barnacle from Asheville? It was poor signage was the reason for my appeal and I was denied that's reason 39. I've heard that one before. Kind of like I'm sitting next to you. No comment sir. So we are going to talk about something really exciting that city leadership has been inquiring about for quite some time and we hope to see this project through in 2024. So let's dig in. We are using Main Street the seven blocks of the Main Street corridor as example. For example to include 238 parking spaces just along those seven blocks that corridor along the Main Street itself not including adjacent blocks. We have 104 parking meters which include 19 30 minute and we have 15 loading zone spaces along Main Street. And this gives you the breakdown by block if you want to take a look whether you're on the 1200 block seven spaces or you go down to the 1700 block of Main and there's 38 parking spaces and then also the number of meters that we have on each block. So that's where we are today. The number of meters adds up more than 104 doesn't it? Parking spaces and meters some are double head. What's the Ash Creek Main on 1600 block? The 1600 block the number of spaces with meters the 1600 block is two hour free parking there are no meters on the 1600 block. This next slide is for reference only. We wanted to give everyone a look at what a dynamic pricing tier looks like and this is just a proposal along Main Street so let's say we have Main Street where the blue line is and again this is when we implement the pay by blocks keep in mind the looks that we are currently looking at we already have nine in the city so they work very well for us they're very efficient they reconcile easily they have great customer comments so we're moving forward with the T2 looks when we do implement the looks we'll have the option in the future to offer dynamic pricing as some of us have had conversation the blue line could be $2 an hour except for during a lunch period it may be $4 an hour and we determine what those prices are this is as example while if you park on one of the pink blocks which could be Sumter or Assembly maybe that's only $1 an hour and if you go out to the orange it would be free parking so again those that are willing to Yeah free I did say that AARP coordinated well I was going to say I'm 100% for this and if you use my Sumter Street example it's two blocks off of Main Street going down Sumter Street today you won't see one car parked because people do what I do which is drive around three times and then leave but if it was $4 on Main Street and $1 on people like walkability they talk about it all the time they talk about it all the time they just don't do it so anyway if you look at the bell curve parking in space is available I promise you it's a very very distinct bell curve I just think the convenience factor and the beautification I mean there's nothing worse than riding down Taylor Street and you just see a line of meters that's what that's all you see and having that dynamic parking on those blocks single I think is just going to make our city look much better I mean and the convenience factor have a multiple thing that meter I love it because it'll text you and let you know your meter is about to run out so you don't end up with a stack of tickets the last thing we wanted we wanted the other ticket business too passport we do we seek compliance it's really what we attempt to do on a daily basis but passport also will send you that message make it up on a variety exactly 100% so again we have a lot over in five points for example on Thursday Friday and Saturday evenings after 4pm it's a $7 flat fee so whether you park in that particular lot for 30 minutes or for the entire evening it's a flat fee of $7 that's what every other lot in hospitality districts do Tori let's make that we're aware we have those opportunities and maybe we do that along Main Street so it's interesting to talk with a certain land owner who believe parking needed to be cheaper until he was able to get $125 a month per space I'm aware and there are other cities also that I recently visited that don't offer the pay by block they're passport only or a mobile app only so they have the signage that you don't even have the machines on every block and these are pretty large cities that they're mobile only so whether you're a passport or another mobile app that would be an option moving forward so all of this wonderful technology comes at a cost so let's take a look we have a couple of options that are estimated investment to the parking system the T2 Luke pay stations on the top is what we currently have nine of those and it gives you what the estimated rate is they do come solar and powered the Luke pay stations accept cash no coins and no changes provided credit cards and passport some of you recognize the smart card and utilize the smart card moving forward with the Luke pay stations these will no longer be accepted in the Luke pay stations there's not an interface in the near future so the smart cards would go away for the Luke pay stations the change given is the life way saying we just rounded up for you look at that 20 cents I'm going to be stated they're going where's my change there's clear signage on the pay stations that they do not give change I should take that back two pay stations that we have over in PJ and do accept coins but when we move forward along main street will no longer accept coins it'll all be if we go with the Luke pay stations and you can still do the T2 extend by phone do the coupon validations if we move over the cosmos are an option which are popular in a couple of nearby cities little cheaper but they do not accept cash and coin so you're going to be paying credit card passport or a tap to pay so it's you know I mean I have to be honest it doesn't bother me about accepting cash and change to I mean almost everything I mean you go to places today so many places don't take anything but cards correct I would I would agree I think at this point in life I mean you look at credit card works pretty well and my gut tells me that there's more options for the machine to be broken later on with cash and coins. The money we save on this you can get eight more stations. I would go I like the Cosmo I'll be honest. Are we choosing between the two or these are two different ones that we have? No we have an option we are looking and we currently have the T2 Luke pay stations the Cosmos are an option we do not have any Cosmos. The Cosmos don't have solar right according to that. They do. They do it doesn't say it on there. Where's the Luke now? So we have a Luke over in the Harden lot in five points we have a Luke in the Washington parking facility there are two Luke's in the 1129 Washington lot behind 1401 we have three Luke's on the whole street and we have two Luke's at PJ Cannon. In current use. In current use. Sorry I'm sorry council I'm just one quick question so the no use of the smart cards that's where the Luke's are you wouldn't be able to with those but for example if you're doing holiday gifts and stocking stuffers this holiday season you could put the smart cards across the city and you wouldn't for example if you're over in five points and you mentioned recently parking on saluta you could put this in a meter and park on saluta but you could not utilize the smart card in the Harden lot though it steps away around the corner you could not utilize the smart card but you can in the on street parking meters yes ma'am I'm concerned about not taking cash at all some folks function kind of like me I've used the one at washington small majority that's there are more people like me I've been well yes so especially like folks who may in places where they may be paying bills or something like the type of if you're coming in to pay your bill a lot of times related to a cash transaction can I say it now I would just be leery of getting rid of all of the ones that take cash because there are a lot of people who are still transitioning and then there are a lot of people who just don't trust cars old school I call it yes yes ma'am so we have the estimated cost for both for the feedback and the interest in the cosmos I think on behalf of staff it certainly would improve efficiency because we are not responsible and accounting for the cash and coin so if you're only reconciling credit cards is much more efficient for staff than what we currently do with cash and coin just a perk for staff there okay so I guess well quick question tell me how much cash you're using because I think like if you say no one is using cash then that to me is obvious that we don't need it so based on past usage so we can we can split for instance passport parking and coins passport parking now is about 62% of our on street revenue so passport has grown just in my few years in the city by leaps and bounds I think in working with conjunction with USC and getting the word out to all of the students in the community in general and now that we have text to pay we've seen an uptick in passport but we do have the ability to tell you the coinage what I was about to say so what is the other 38% coins just for record if I was parking today I would use a coin if I was parking tomorrow I would use a credit card but I would tell you that you can't really look at the cash for a car because not all the meters take cards and not all of them are you can't I guess what I'm saying is if I was parking today I would use a coin but if it was more expensive in a certain area I would end up using a credit card I'm not going to use a credit card for 25 cents well if you could park somewhere in Columbia I can't I can't right now street meters accept credit cards so these credit cards that are at these pay stations they're in surface lots or parking facilities so of the 3000 plus meters we have which we could conveniently update those to accept credit cards but none of them so we can tell you what coin when people are dropping coins in none of that is credit card look at that picture right there that picture ought to tell you what our blocks would look like instead of 100 200 meters going down everybody's pro pro-cosmo can I ask a question can I also assume this would greatly reduce the number of daily appeals because you got a record of what's really going on versus I took a picture of a broken meter no because it took me a long time to do that using it so if we go a good point sir if we go to some of the pros and cons that we've already talked about the real time reporting with iris that's an internal platform that we have to monitor parking behaviors which I think is important going forward for Columbia there is a parker convenience it's easy to use again the current nine stations we have are very popular in the city we do have the ability to offer coupons and validations with T2 it does have the passport mobile integration you can read down all of the advantages and again the smart cards do not integrate and nor do the tokens are the only two cons that opportunities we see with the weeks I feel like we're bringing parking into the 21st century so I'm not concerned about the tokens and the so that's what we that's what we already have now we have yes ma'am nine of them in a facility or in a surface lot but we don't have them along on street parking and we're going to start with main street that becomes the discussion to your point of how widespread we go everywhere I hope eventually you have everywhere everywhere I mean just think about just the aesthetics what it changes in the way the city looks I mean stand on your a street and look down all the meters and just so I'm clear if you're talking about on street parking that means if I parked on this end of the block but the machine is in the middle this is my example the machine is over here there to do my whatever and then go to wherever I'm going yes but you would not return to your vehicle to put a slip of paper in your vehicle but you would want to the pay station walkability and exercise but again you can use your app yes you just kind of ding ding ding alright I'm going to go shopping and you'll get a reminder with the passport app you're right three phones you don't know which one to use I'm not afraid of all of my stuff let me I'm trying to we're going to flip over now to Calvin and Calvin's going to talk a little bit about our facilities and CIP improvements thank you good afternoon mayor city council about city manager first I want to say thank you for taking the time today to let us present on behalf of parking facilities I also want to recognize Mr. Chris Izer he's here today with Emily Horn they've been very instrumental in the help that they have provided us with investigating our facilities we work very closely with them over the last several years to put together a five-year capital improvement plan and excited to share that with y'all here today so but first I want to start out by what we're doing right now in parking facilities we have several projects underway about $1.2 million worth of work looking at elevator replacements at Lady and Sumter street those are equipment is scheduled to arrive right after the first year and installation will begin as soon as that equipment arrives we also have two water sealant projects at PJ Cannon and Lincoln street those are being bid out now and we'll hopefully have those in front of y'all here before long to approve as well for sealing the deck yeah we're sealing the deck to keep that water infiltration from moving through the parking facility yes sir there are also two exterior cleaning and painting projects those are at Lady street and Taylor street parking decks Lady street project has been completed and the contractor is now currently working on the Taylor street deck very happy about that Taylor street deck that needs a little love and attention so that's great absolutely yes ma'am general services has also completed stairwell repairs at lady street deck there are more to do support services working on those on a regular basis then we have general services also working on improvements to just in and around Taylor street deck as well and that leads me to that that leads me into the capital improvements and maintenance needs for our facilities facilities I want to ask a question and then kind of answer it what is our most pressing needs in parking facilities and that is by far funding in my opinion and just looking around we've had deferred maintenance at our parking facilities for an extended period of time and we have CIP projects that we need to get done in our facilities our oldest facility is Taylor street deck it was built in 1965 and it's hard for me to believe but our newest facility outside the two new facilities over at bull street is our PJ cannon parking deck which was built in 2011 that's just hard for me to believe time flies by so quick here yeah it's on the corner of Lincoln and Sumpter street Sumpter and Taylor a lot of people think that's the Taylor street but it's not yeah general service has worked with our consultants like I mentioned with Kimberly Horn to identify capital and maintenance needs at our eight oldest facilities and that's what you're looking at here we've worked with parking operations and to determine that we need about 2.5 million in our year one for renovations at Sumpter Lady Washington and Taylor focusing on our most critical and pressing needs while also being cognizant of available funding for those facilities with the increase that we did how does that balance out on to the maintenance we haven't had an increase so we'll talk about that I thought we increased parking this summer we'll talk about it I thought you approved it and then the other question is are you putting in the infrastructure and taking advantage of the grants for the electric charging stations because obviously the stations we have are outdated certainly mayor, yeah we are putting in for any grants that are available for electrical charging stations that covers just the charging stations themselves and we need to look at improving the power at the facility we need to look at the inflation reduction act I believe that we can get connectivity the cost of the connectivity included in that that's a direct pay, it's not a grant that gets us 30-40% of that cost back in a cash we'll definitely go into that as well we'll be charging so we would not be going to a level 3 in the parking facilities that's pretty good I wasn't even impressed by that I am in charge of the TV the heritage you got a power point you want to send this I have taken it to the board several times did you get it passed? nope, shot down with that $75,000 price tag $130,000? definitely you're driving your EV to your pickleball we need to put them out in the pickleball he's getting a new bumper sticker I break from pickleball so infrastructure has to be looked at being upgraded for electrical vehicle charging stations at our parking facilities we look at that too in conjunction with Mr. Shealy about the overall solar and how we make and use some of that on the canopies on the roof as we look for our new RFI we just got a lot of advantages to take a lot of ability to take advantage of a lot of money coming out of the feds but it really needs to be started in 2024 for us to take advantage of it so we need to be thinking strategically certainly and we can definitely look into those things I do want to point out that the needs at these facilities currently are structural water proofing operation systems and aesthetics they're not those aesthetics for sure correct, they're not those technology items, EV charging stations we need to look at grants and other ways to fund those items okay the money's there it'll be interesting to see the breakdown in surface lots in garage and revenue and really how it where it is because I have a feeling we're going to find there's a big gap there can we look into doing like public art or something on these because they are like they are facing kind of that's the first thing you see when you could come in that way one of the things Clint's exploring is there's some new solar technology that actually is a skin that goes on the outside so kind of like what Starbucks puts on the other but you get it in different colors and so you can wrap a parking garage like that so it makes it look like it's new and modern but at the same time you're getting the solar off of it yeah I mean anything like that I just think the older cement I don't know what the material is just looks a little bit dated especially I don't think the rock bottom there from 1965 so we do have some public art at our facilities Taylor Street is an example one and then on I just think it also get folks to park there with all the investment we're making with Finley Park right so encouraging people to build that kind of connection between Main Street and Finley so just something to think about in terms of you know leveraging some of our local artists or some of the technology that Clint's looking into or a combination certainly we just did with the 1201 building if anybody's been in the Lady Street internally all of the four murals that are new to the Lady Street facility it's when you pull up right as you're entering the doors again you're inside that's pretty phenomenal local artists and we did that the gates there the gates at Lady Street the gates number one complaint I get going out on to Lady we've had some little finicky at times scary it's denoted but those murals are wonderful just wanted to make sure we included those and they're pressed I mean the painting and the washing all that makes a difference absolutely and then in the capital improvement are there any plans to the restrooms there's none in the capital improvement projects that we have planned right now that's something we could definitely look at the Taylor Street garage we actually looked at opening that up and allowing that to become an artist space so there's activity there we looked at the bathrooms there it costs is pretty hefty and it's right across the street from Oliver Gospel and the majority of women and families would not feel comfortable going there but we do want to make use of the funding because we don't want that to disappear and we do have the restrooms open at Washington Square as well they're open during the week and then also on Saturdays as well and we're letting people know because I have explained that to somebody and they didn't realize that it might be worth another blast to let people know yeah but I think it's balancing people that need to use it because they're on main street for Soda City versus being I think that's a good thing for Soda City to have their information but hey by the way even if it's like a little thing a little I think there is definitely more of the effort to put that out there for Soda City I think we've softly probably shared it for the week days but it is available and there is signage outside on main street we have the security guards put signage out on main street on the weekends okay thank y'all again very much thank you Calvin are we ready for Howard to do something come on let's see if it's your last one come on now let's do it who can read I can't draw straws I got the prayer draw on the line I might be real I may have to start reading I mean listen very closely Mr. Mayor I make a motion we go into executive session for receipt of legal advice related to matters covered by attorney client privilege pursuant to ST code 30-4-78-2 convention center discussion of negotiations incident proposed contractual arrangements pursuant to ST code 30-4-78-2 WGI engineering firm emergency services consulting international second Madam clerk could you read the roll here yes yes thank you I don't read that you don't have to you don't sound commercial yes you can just take your time take your time you can even stop in the middle we can self practice sessions Howard will come in to interview you