 Good afternoon. I want to call this meeting of the Durham City Council to order this work session at one o'clock on May the 21st. I want to welcome everyone here today again to another one of our digital work sessions and want to appreciate all the work that's gone into this on behalf of our on behalf of our tech staff, a public affairs staff and everybody in the city that's helped make this happen. Thank you so much. Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll? Just a moment. Can you hear me? Yes we can. Mayor Shul. Here. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Here. Councilmember Caballero. Here. Councilmember Freeman. Present. Councilmember Middleton. Here. Councilmember Maurice. Here. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Clerk. And we'll now move to priority items. First, priority items by the city manager. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to report to priority items. Did you want to have comments from the council? Yeah. Thank you. Yes, I did. I have two priority items, but I can certainly wait. Thank you. Sorry that I skipped that. Thank you, Mr. Manager, for sending me straight there. Yes. First, are there any announcements by members of the council? I have one, but I'll defer to others first. I apologize. Any announcements by members of the council? You can go ahead and unmute yourself and speak up. Councilmember Middleton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good afternoon, colleagues. Good afternoon to all who are watching us. Can you hear me clearly? Yes, we can. Absolutely. Okay. Good to see all of you. Mr. Mayor, firstly, I want to acknowledge that a group of colleagues today, a group of clergy, leading clergy people in our city held a press conference today indicating that many of us will not be engaging in mass religious gatherings, notwithstanding the allowance by a federal court earlier this week. I want to congratulate my colleagues, although I was not able to physically be with them today. I want to congratulate members of Durham Clergy United and associate myself with their actions today. I believe it was an operationalization of love and turning love into a policy. I do want to say that this is no way, is an attack on those who may make a different decision. But I do want to go on record saying that there are a number of us who believe that the purveillance and securing of our faith is not real estate-based and that we are engaged in a quest that deals with the power that reaches to the highest mountain and flows to the lowest valley, whether you're physically together or not. So I want to congratulate them and associate myself with their work today. It's not because they're sitting on a bunch of piles, pile of cash like Apple. Many churches are struggling like other interests. I chuckle sometimes, Mr. Mayor, when I see some experts on Facebook prognosticating about church finances, but the average church in America is under 50 people and has a Bible-cation pastor. Most of them are struggling to fix the roof or fix the boiler. So it's not because they got a bunch of money that they did this. They did this because we love the people we serve and we love our city, so I want to congratulate them. Secondly, Mr. Mayor, very quickly, I had a phone conference today with some small business owners in our city that included Ryan Hurley and Nicole Oxenon and Leonardo Williams who are representing a group of small business owners who are, of course, a concern, like many in the business community here, and asked me to ask us to consider holding a forum specifically for small business owners that they might express what they feel are their unique concerns and struggles. They acknowledge the existence of the of the task force and acknowledge the existence of the roundtables and I certainly made them clear, made them aware of that, Mr. Mayor, but they feel that they need a freestanding forum in which to express their concerns. And I just in honoring what I said I would do for them, I wanted to put that out there at this time and perhaps we can talk more about it during the OEWD presentation in the agenda. And finally, Mr. Mayor, I just want to add my voice of honor and appreciation for the life of Andrea Harris who made her transition this week. I will not even try and eulogize her. She's a huge, bright light that touched so many of us in this community. I want to extend prayers and condolences to our family and friends and to her extended family. She touched so many of us in this city, particularly business owners and minorities who are interested in empowerment, the empowering of our people. So hail and farewell to her. We honor her spirit. God bless her. God bless our city. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for all those remarks, Councilor Middleton. And thank you for remembering Andrea Harris especially. She was a giant as you say. Thank you for that. And I also want to add my appreciation to those clergy as well. So really appreciate you bringing that to us. And in terms of the forum, certainly we can do that. And I agree. We could talk about that during the OEDWD presentation. Are there other members of the Council with announcements? If so, go ahead and speak up. Council Member Caballero. Yes, I just wanted to mention I know folks have been paying close attention to the news. And I know our Durham Health Department or Public Health Department is paying close attention to the numbers of rising COVID positive cases in the Latinx community. It's a concern that many of us are paying close attention to and I've had lots of conversations, including with you, Mayor, in this last week about how we respond and how we move forward. And I just want to say that I have, I'm thinking about many folks in our community who are struggling right now. And the trends are very worrying. And I know that we will respond as best as possible. But I am concerned. My heart is heavy. And concerned about the loss of life that will be faced in the community that is very, very marginalized. Thank you, Council Member for bringing that to us. And it is really important. I'm going to talk about that also in just a moment. And I appreciate you bringing it to us. Other announcements? Okay, I'll just speak briefly about something I know that's very important to all of us, which is kind of where we are with our local situation and COVID-19 and our local stay at home order. Let me first begin by saying that we are going to be extending our local stay at home order through June the 1st. And which time we will go to a safer at home order, during that period of time, we will be our businesses, our restaurants and our personal services businesses like barbers and hair salons and our swimming pools will remain closed but can open on June the 1st. And let me tell you why Durham is going to be taking longer than the state to reopen. Our reasons are public health reasons. And let me tell you what they are. Durham's cases now are growing at twice the rate of the state's cases. Durham's cases last week grew at twice the level that they grew at the week before. And when we look at total cumulative cases, Durham has three times the number of cases per 1000 that Wake County has. We are really determined to do everything we can to keep our community safe as we successfully and safely reopen. And we believe that taking more time to do this will be very helpful. In that period of time, we also want to help our businesses reopen safely. And we will be in our amended stay at home order tomorrow. We will be describing a program of voluntary self certification by our businesses that they are meeting a Durham gold standard of safety for their general sanitation and social distancing practices and then any particular practices that might be relevant to their industry. And we will be describing that in more detail tomorrow in our amended order. We do have some other differences that we are planning from the governor's order, not many, but a few others that will continue, we will continue the face covering requirement, not for restaurant patrons, they need to eat, but otherwise we will continue our face covering requirements. And we will also be limiting the number of people in a mass gathering to continue to have that to be zero inside and 10 people outside. This, of course, is not a plot of businesses, but it does apply or churches, but it does apply to other mass gatherings. So those are the main differences between our order and what the governor has ordered. And we will be spelling out those there are some other minor differences and we will be spelling that out tomorrow in our amended. But our reasoning is very much based on public health. We are not where we want to be. And we're not moving in the direction that we want to be. We need our community to be safe. And it's a very delicate balance. I know there are no our businesses are ready to get going. And we will be looking forward to June 1 when they are able to be and able to be doing that safe. I think that's all I have to report on that, except to acknowledge, as council member have a ghetto has it. In the last several weeks, half of our cases have been within our Latinx community. We still have an extremely strong representation of African American residents in amongst our cases as well. So we are the people are suffering the most from COVID-19 here in Durham are people of color. And we have to be very cognizant of that and take every kind of action we can to be communicated clearly with those communities about safe behaviors and doing everything else we can to keep them safe. But thank you very much. And now, Mr. Manager, I will move to priority items. Excuse me, Mr. Mayor. Councilmember Freeman wanted to make some comments. Of course, Councilmember. Councilmember Freeman. Can you hear me? Now we can. So I had to switch to the phone. My internet has been in and out. And I didn't want to lose you all. I appreciate all the comments that were made. I just want to make sure that I know I feel for Councilmember Cabrero's heavy heart and what the people of color are facing across the community in this COVID-19 pandemic, and especially for the Latin community that that is undocumented. I also wanted to say that I can also see how heavy both hearts are around the loss of Andrea Harris. And it is from a space of growth and continuous learning that I offer, we offer you just a few words around where we are. And noting that Ben Hof said over these last months, you know, I often felt like deep water still on the surface of that relenting current beneath. And I can't help but feel that in this moment. And there is there is a hardened issue that has been pressing me as I continue to serve in this community as a person of color, especially as a woman of color, acknowledging even then, I know that it was just shared United for, you know, for a fair economy. How hard it is to rise above race and class divides that we all we all know live and exist here in Durham and across the country. I just wanted to make sure that I noted that there are folks in our community who have been unable to to share public comment. And one that really stuck out for me was from Miss Wilma in this last week, where she asked how are we all in the same boat? And, you know, how are people asking her to maintain or how she's maintaining the normalcy in this stay at home isolation? And how it calls out a lot of white advantage? When people are talking about adopting puppies versus, you know, food stamps being cut and and communing with nature and flowers when you don't have a garden. And also, you know, being in your backyard when you don't have a backyard. It just really struck me that that there's such a huge divide in how everyone is responding. And I wanted to thank a few members over in Trinity Park on the listserv who had offered some grace. And their conversations with their neighbors around some of the tensions they were feeling with some folks, you know, complaining about the increased level of dirt bikes on the road and acknowledging that people are experiencing this pandemic differently. And how we respond now will matter in the future. So just knowing that that we're all we're all experiencing this this huge extraordinary as someone put it time in different ways. And I want to raise up, in addition to what Council Member Middleton mentioned around people of color in business, that Dr. Henry McCoy posed a very hard to swallow index yesterday in an impoverished meeting around the ecosystem of equity and how fast the disparity is growing for people of color, especially black entrepreneurs, faster than it is in any other city or large town across the state of North Carolina. And it's very concerning. I also wanted to share that that it's feeling real unsafe and many spaces for some who are facing facing that loss of income and realizing that this this economic suppression is based on health and knowing that it was inequitable prior to COVID-19 and it's still unequitable. There's a huge concern has been raised. And a lot of conversation in the community around the way in which people are responding that attacks others personal integrity, their social capital, their public safety, and even just their personhood, I'm really trying to figure out how to get people past fish fixing and giving away fish to make sure that it's more emblematic of the root causes and how and how how we address the long the long term, the long history of oppression and noting that these circumstances are harder are different and are not in the same boat, so to speak. But we all are in the same storm with the rip ties and all and we will get past this. I will say also that the article recently written by James Ford and Lori Thomas COVID-19 exposes the impact of the racial wealth gap. I mean, it highlights just how much of a disparity there is when it notes that the white households have 10 times the wealth of black households and seven times the wealth of Latinx households. And that's that's just staggering to understand like what we do now will matter and how we practice and the policies we put in place over the next year, the next five years and the next 50 years will be what helps us get out of this safely and whole. I know that we can we can step up to this we have in the past and we will. I just needed to make sure that I got that off my chest. Thank you. Thank you for those important comments, Council Member, we very much appreciate it. And thank you for bringing that to us and keeping it in the forefront of our minds. It's super important. Thank you. Mr. Manager, any priority items? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good afternoon, members of Council. I have two priority items this afternoon. The first is agenda item number 25, the request to initiate a neighborhood protection overlay for the Forest Hills subdivision. This item was inappropriately listed in the original agenda as a public hearing item and the motion has been revised to reflect it's not a public hearing item. So Mr. Mayor will need to consider that during the routine consent flow if that's okay. And then agenda item number 27, which is the fiscal year 2021 stormwater rate proposal. That is an item that has been added. There is a brief presentation for you today. And it is an item that will require a public hearing. And that public hearing would be scheduled for the June the first Council meeting. And those are my only two priority items. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Manager. Madam Attorney. Oh, first of all, can I have a motion on the manager's items? Move approval. Second. Second. We're going to have to take a roll call vote. Madam clerk to approve the manager's priority items. Mayor Schuyl. Hi. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Hi. Council Member Caballero. Hi. Council Member Freeman. Hi. Council Member Middleton. Hi. Council Member Reese. Hi. Thank you. Thank you very much. The eyes have it. The motion passes unanimously. Madam attorney. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, members of city council, the attorney's office has no priority items. Thank you very much. Madam attorney. Madam clerk. Good afternoon, everyone. The city clerk's office has two items. And the first one is the discussion about the mask project and the funding thereof. The second is a discussion about zoom bombing in zoom meetings. So let me know when you'd like to address those. Madam clerk, I think we should go ahead and address those now. I'll first take a motion that we approve this discussion of the clerk's priority items. Still moved. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Madam clerk, will you please call the roll? Mayor Schuyl. Hi. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Hi. Council Member Caballero. Hi. Council Member Freeman. Hi. Council Member Middleton. Hi. Council Member Reese. Hi. Thank you. The eyes have it. The motion passes unanimously. Madam clerk, let's start with the go ahead and start with the mask item first. Okay. I had sent some information to everyone from the county. And I can go ahead and read it if you would like to enter it into the record. Sure. Okay, the the covered Durham project phase one budget. This information came from Isaac Henry and and he states the plan for phase one of cover Durham is to rapidly distribute 50,000 face coverings for free low for free to low income communities. This outreach effort will be led by the Community Health Coalition, the CHC, and tandem with the coordinator of cover Durham, Isaac Haran. Procurement these 50,000 face coverings will be sourced from the original mattress factory in Raleigh, North Carolina. This company produces cheap, effective, breathable face coverings that are reusable if hand washed. We estimate that each face covering will last up to two months if cared for responsibly. In phase two, cover Durham will establish a coordinated network of local suppliers in Durham, bringing together a group of independent makers to keep resources in our local economy. These face coverings will be more durable and designed to last up to one year with proper care. Community outreach cover Durham will use CHC Community Health workers to conduct outreach in neighborhoods that have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic, especially areas with a high proportion of black African American residents. In addition, cover Durham will engage 20 community health champions with stipends of $200 each to distribute face coverings in their communities. Community health champions will be everyday people with deep existing relationships in their own neighborhoods who can ensure that no one falls through the cracks. By using this model, cover Durham will maximize impact at the same time as it supports economic recovery. Public health information cover Durham will conduct a public health information campaign through the community outreach program as well as digitally. It is very important to change the culture around face coverings and educate people on how and why to use them. Without a communication strategy, the program will not succeed. Cover Durham will distribute simple flyers in English and Spanish that emphasize the collective health benefits of face coverings, as well as instructions for use and care. These will be handed out as part of the community outreach program. And then there is a grid with different costs. The face coverings by the original mattress factory, the unit cost is $1 each. They expect to produce $50,000, so that totals to $50,000. Shipping and handling is $300. Coordinator salary per month is $4,000. Design of public health campaign is $750. Promotion of public health campaign is $1,000. Community outreach program and administration is $1,800. The community outreach program CHC community health workers per hour is $15 at 180 units for a total of $2,700. The miscellaneous cost of distribution, storage, web design and hosting is $500. And finally, the community health champion stipends are $200 each at 20 units for $4,000. The total is $65,050. And as I was asking council, if they were interested in supporting this project, we received feedback that there would be travel funds of $35,475 available. Thank you very much for that report, Madam Clerk. Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Could we just clarify this funding is going to the county and the county is contracting with nonprofit? Is that correct? That is correct. Actually, the funding will go straight to the vendor who is original mattress factory. Okay. Is this something that we have to like vote on or is our prior consent enough to move it forward? We need to suspend the rules to vote and then to make a vote to approve and authorize the payment of the funding directly to the vendor. Got it. Madam clerk and council members, one of the things that is a real priority for me in terms of using this our funds is making sure that our transit riders have face coverings. And so I'm very supportive of this, but really want to make sure that we caveat our support for making sure that there is a part of this program is that our funding is dependent on significant support for face coverings for our transit riders as part of this program. Other comments, questions? If not, I'll accept a motion. Mr. Mayor, just a comment to say that I am fully supportive of making sure that the mask coverings are available for any and everyone in our community. I would like to have a program that actually sent funding directly to, especially because it's original mattress factory in Raleigh. And we know that LRC, LCI is producing mask here in Durham. And just figuring out how to make sure we do find a way to find local or people of color owned businesses that we could actually support as well. Council Member, thank you for that. And you know, it is I think that that's something I'm not familiar with everybody who's making masks. But I think that that could certainly also as in addition to having as part of our motion, cover face coverings for our transit riders as a priority, we could also make that as a priority as well. I think we this is our money. We can we can make the motion that is appropriate for us. Any other comments? Would anyone like to offer a motion? I move we approve motion to suspend the rules. I'm sorry, I move we suspend the rules. Okay, thank you. Is there a second? Second. Madam clerk, please call the roll. Motion is whether or not to suspend the rules and vote. Yes, Mayor Schuyl. Yes, Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Hi, Council Member Caballero. Hi, Council Member Freeman. Council Member Middleton. Hi, Council Member Reese. I thank you. Thank you very much. And now we'll move to the substance of the of the issue and I'll accept a motion. I move we approve the item. Second. It's been moved in second that we approve the item. Could I ask that we include in that motion that we are as a friendly amendment, Madam Mayor Pro Tem, that we prioritize the offering of face coverings to our transit riders and that we ask the organizers of this effort to make earnest efforts to employ minority owned face covering companies in this effort? Mr. Mayor, I believe the because the funding is going directly to original master's factory that they're that we couldn't this time, employ a company that's POC owned, I think we could ask them to ensure that they're hiring people of color when they're for the distribution. If that would satisfy folks concerns. I think that would help. Great. I'll add those to my motion. All right. Thank you. And the seconder. Are you good with that? I think was Council Member Middleton. Yes. Yes. Thank you. Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll? Mayor, one more question. Could you please clarify the motion? I'll ask Mayor Pro Tem to clarify. Sure. I move that we approve this transfer of funds for the purchasing of masks and that we contact the nonprofit organization to request that they prioritize transit riders in their distribution and that they prioritize people of color in their hiring. Thank you very much. Okay, for the roll call Mayor Schuyl. Hi. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Hi. Council Member Caballero. Hi. Council Member Freeman. Hi. Council Member Middleton. Hi. Council Member Reese. Hi. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Clerk. And thank you for shepherding that through. We appreciate your work on that. And now we have a second priority item from you as well. Thank you very much, Mayor. There was a situation that occurred last night at the Environmental Affairs Board meeting. And it is related to a Zoom bomber that presented his private parts three times during the meeting. And the Zoom license that he used did not belong to the City Clerk's office. However, the incident brings up an issue of Zoom meeting security for council appointed boards, committees and commissions. And currently the City Clerk's office has been designated for general Zoom licenses. Due to public meeting requirements, the City Clerk's office is required to post the board meetings with dates and Zoom access information. Literally anyone can access the board meetings with the audio and video based on the Zoom contacts. With the Zoom general license, there is little or no control by the board share or technology liaison to cordon off Zoom bombers. So the best alternative that I'm bringing forth is this. The best alternative is after this happened last night, I met with the City Manager's Office Technology Solutions and my staff. And we believe that we found the best alternative to the Zoom security loophole that leaves open the threat of Zoom bombing. With a Zoom webinar license instead of the general license, the City's volunteer boards would be protected from illicit participants, whereby the host, meaning the technology liaison or the chair of the committee, would have the capability to regulate persons in the waiting room and to control video and audio access of Excuse me, Madam Clerk, would you suspend for just a second? Sure. Mr. Mayor, if I could get an advisory from the chair, would it be advisable to discuss how we're going to combat or defeat these methods out loud now in this context? I mean, if we do have a strategy on how not to be victimized in this way, should we be discussing it openly? I don't know. That's a good question. Madam Clerk, maybe we could defer to our technology people to let us know if that's problematic. Well, what it is, is that with the webinar software, there are actually two links that go out, one link to the participants, the other to the panelists. So the public link is separate from the panelists link. Okay, let me just ask, from our folks from technology who are on, is there any problem with discussing this further at this time in the sense that we might give aid and comfort to people who are interested in Zoom bombing? Good afternoon. Good afternoon, Deputy City Manager Page. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, members of the council. We have had a discussion this morning around, around this matter. As you, you all know, we are all experimenting and experiencing different, you know, different scenarios around using Zoom. And we have learned or we know that you can have much more control in a Zoom meeting of participants by using a webinar version of the platform. And it is something that we have been using. We started using it at Monday nights meeting. It's not secret. And it is, you know, it is just a way for the host to be able to control participants in a meeting by, you know, allowing them to speak by handing them a microphone and, and, you know, unmuting them to speak. And they, you can also limit their ability to use a video during any meeting. Thank you, madam. Okay, manager. Madam clerk is not secret. Okay, thank you. Madam clerk. Yes, sir. Do you want to go ahead and describe to us? I think you also have a plan for how we might pay for this as well? Yes, sir. There are currently 20 active boards and committees who want to pursue the virtual meeting platform. Webinar licenses cost $40 a month. And they serve up to 100 participants per license. So the licenses would be a sign to each board. The zoom link for webinar panelists will be sent separately from the zoom link for participants. The webinar participant link will be posted on the weekly calendar through the city clerk's office for the public to access the funding portion. In the next budget cycle, there's a $5,000 line item for the volunteer reception. And what we could do is reassign that funding to pay for the zoom webinar licenses. So with 20 boards at $40 each starting June one, which is seven months, it would cost $5,800. My request is that council allow the city clerk's office the purview to fund zoom webinar licenses for the active boards for a three month period or 90 days, and then reevaluate. And then payment is done on a month to month basis. There is no contract involved, besides that one month limit. So council can then decide to continue the funding or not. So it's really what you would prefer. Thank you, Madam Clerk, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. Hey, a couple thoughts. So in our guidelines that we approved, we actually encourage boards to use webinar webinar format for this reason. And I was not aware that the licenses that we were providing did not include that as an option. So I think we definitely should provide the boards with, with licenses that allow them to use webinars. When we looked at the schedule of board meetings, we determined that there is a maximum of four meetings that ever could possibly overlap. And that was given a very generous kind of sense of like how long a meeting would last the maximum number of meetings that would ever need to be happening at one time is four. And so I don't think we would need to provide every board with a license, we would just need four licenses that could be shared and given out by the city clerk's office in the way that the existing licenses are being distributed. Thank you, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. Thanks. I think that's a great point. And Madam Clerk, I think it would be good to pursue that and figure out how we can minimize those costs. Okay. All right. I'll check it out. Colleagues, I think that we'll go ahead and vote on this just to authorize the clerk to spend the necessary funds just to be clear. So can I first have a motion that we suspend the rules and vote? Before you, before we do that, I just wanted to share I was on the call last night, well, on the zoom bomb call. And I think it might be also appropriate to make sure that we're including that. Whoever the tech liaison has to know how to to adjust to this and I don't know if that's been spelled out in the guidelines or not. But it definitely was it was way more than three times. And because the because people didn't know how to address it. It was just it was just really like over like, oh my gosh, this is ridiculous. But there has to be a way to make sure that the tech liaison understands exactly the difference between the web licensing and also the the the platform itself, they like they need to be really familiar with how they operate in this platform because they are exposing everyone on the call. And this is the city's exposure. Right. Thank you. That's important. That training. All right. Can I have a motion to suspend the rules and vote? So moved. Second. It's been moved in a second that we suspend the rules and vote. Madam clerk, will you please call the roll? Mayor Schuyl. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Aye. Councilmember Caballero. Aye. Councilmember Freeman. Aye. Councilmember Middleton. Aye. Councilmember Reese. Aye. Thank you. Thank you. Madam clerk, thank you for bringing us those important items. Mr. Mayor, I think we need to approve that. Yeah, we do. Can I have a vote? That can I have a motion that we approve the expenditure of the necessary funds for this purpose by the city clerk as she described? So moved. Second. It's been moved and seconded. Madam clerk, will you please call the roll? Mayor Schuyl. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Aye. Councilmember Caballero. Aye. Councilmember Freeman. Aye. Councilmember Middleton. Aye. Councilmember Reese. Aye. Thank you, council. Thank you, Madam clerk. All right. We'll now move to our administrative consent items. Item one, city clerk's office approval of city council minutes. Item two, participatory budgeting grant agreement with El Futuro. Item three, interlocal agreement with Durham County for the sharing of sales tax revenue. Mr. Mayor, I don't want to pull that item, but I do just want to give my thanks. I did in private. I wouldn't want to do it publicly to the city manager and others who negotiated with our elected colleagues at the county. I know this issue produced quite a bit of angst for a lot of folk involved, but I thought in the end, we came to an agreement that was fair, I think to both the county and the city. So I just wanted to thank staff for the work they did on negotiating and brokering this revised interlocal agreement. I should say it's just different interlocal agreement with the county. So I just wanted to give my thanks to the staff. Thank you very much. Agreed. Mr. Mayor, it's good. Just going back to item one and two, just hadn't had the chance to share the, there was actually a correction in the minutes for the, I think it's February 20th. It was not the reparations to the general assembly. It was to the US Congress. Okay. Thank you, council member. And please, why don't you send that in an email to the clerk so she can make the appropriate correction? And did you have something else as well? And then just on item two, I wanted to, I guess I'll pull that item. Okay. Item two. All right. Item four, amended FY 2019-20 budget internal service fund spending plan and other grant and capital project ordinances and amendments. I want to pull that item. All right. Item five, loan commitment to development ventures ink for commercial street seniors apartments. I'm going to pull that item. Item six, loan commitment to Durham housing authority development ventures ink for Elizabeth street apartments. Item seven, contract amendments. Sorry for the number one for the installation of federally funded US department of housing and urban development HUD signalized pedestrian improvements. Item eight, Austin Avenue sidewalk project. Item nine, interlocal agreement for mobile ticketing. Item 10, mobile ticketing system. Item 11, transit fair capping policy. I want to pull that item. Item 11, item 12, proposed water and sewer rates for FY 2021. And I believe we're going to receive a presentation on this item. Is that correct, Mr. Manager? That's correct. Item 13, annual insurance plan FY 21. Item 14, bid report, April, 2020. Item 15, cooperative group purchase contract seven, SUTFEN heavy duty fully customized pumpers for the Durham fire department. Item 16, yeah, go ahead. On item 15, I just wanted to note that this was a small organization out of Ohio that only had very few employees. So I just wanted to note that they were all, they were all white and it's kind of blaring to look at their work statistics. And that was it. Thank you, council member. Item 16, contract with linear tree services, LLC for the removal of city trees. And just the same thing for item 16 as well. Yes, I was good as well and would actually. Just a note that Houlton used to have a horticulture training. And I was wondering if there was any conversation around where that was, because I wasn't sure, but I didn't want to pull it because it's not contract related, but I do want to figure out where, what they're doing at Houlton now. Okay, I'm going to pull that item, item 16. Item 17, U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development 2020 Partnership Initiative Grant. I want to pull that item. Under item, under presentations, item 18 FY 19 and 23rd quarter financial report. That will be a presentation under item 19, city of Durham's COVID-19 housing response. That's also a presentation. And item 20, Office of Economic and Workforce Development updated on the Office of Economic and Workforce Development's COVID-19 response. That's also a presentation. Under public hearings, budget and management services department, item 21 FY 2021 budget and FY 2026 out for improvement program to be conducted at the 6-1-20 council meeting at the city county planning department. Item 22, 600 North Roxborough, which will also be conducted at that same meeting. Annexation Falls Village North Conservation. Also, that'll be at the 6-10-20 special city council meeting. And item 24, Consolidated Annexation Fox Crossing. That'll be conducted at the 6-10-20 special city council meeting. Item 25, Request to Initiate a Neighborhood Protection Overlay for Forest Hills. This is not a public hearing item, so we'll be moved to our regular consent agenda. Item 26, Unified Development Ordinance. Mr. Mayor, excuse me. On that item, I just wanna clarify that the staff recommendation is to not move forward with that. And I expect there will be some public comment. So we may wanna put that with a GBA item as opposed to a consent item, but I didn't know if you're gonna pull that today for discussion. I wasn't planning to, but let's put it on GBA. I agree, we're gonna have public hearing. Public comment. Public comment. Yes, thank you. Thank you so much. Good suggestion. Item 26, Unified Development Ordinance Texas Amendment Neighborhood Protection Overlay revisions to be conducted at the 6-10-20 special city council meeting. And that is a public hearing item, I believe. Yes, that's a public hearing item. Public Works, item 27, FY 2021 Stormwater Rates. And that'll be a presentation at the work session today, I believe, and the public hearing to be conducted at the 6-1-20 city council meeting. So we're gonna hear a presentation on that as well, Mr. Manager. That's correct. All right. I have the items that I have that have been pulled are two, four, five, 11, 16, and 17. The items for presentations I have are 12, 18, 19, 20, and 27. Correct. Thank you. We'll now move back to item two, and this was an item pulled by Council President. This is the item brought Participatory Budgeting Grant Agreement with ELFETURA. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I really just wanted to highlight that it didn't, I appreciate the creativity and the adjustment for funding, but I had a concern around who the actual engineer and architect that were selected in this process. I recognize that there was a vote in the participatory budgeting process for the actual building and the work around having the, I think it was, however it was, the vote is very different from what the grant agreement ends up being. And I just wanted to make sure I clarified that if I wanted to know specifically if people of color were selected as engineer and architect. Council Member Rudd, there were no architects and engineers selected because the funds were instead allocated to personnel as my understanding, but let me just double check that with staff. No, I meant specifically for the project that we missed if they were expended on, if the funds that they had to expend on the project that was voted for actually included people of color as engineer and architect. So the vote specifically was for the project that we didn't get to because they did it already. I see Mr. Holland is here. Mr. Holland, do you have some comments? Yes, Mayor, Mayor, Mr. Council. It's great question, Council Member Freeman. I actually have a copy of the contract, but I do not have the details in regards to who was actually hired, but I can definitely reach out to El Farturo and I'll provide that information to the Council. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Holland. Mm-hmm. All right, now we'll move on to item four. Item four is amend the FY 2019 budget internal service fund spending plan. And I believe that was also pulled by Council Member Freeman. I'm sorry, Mr. Mayor, I thought I pulled item three. I must have missed it. You did miss it, but we can discuss it. Go ahead, item three. Just really a note for item three that if 2% is coming away from the county's budget, just to note that the estimate was around 2.4 million. I don't know about if there's any conversation around those funds being directed to participatory budgeting or to tax assistance. That could be proposed, that's been proposed by community members, but I thought it would be important to note that if we're pulling funds back from the county, that those funds could be allocated towards something that would be beneficial to both the city and the county. Good afternoon, Bertha Johnson, Director of Budget Management Services. We actually use those dollars in balancing the general fund budget, and the number is less than we originally calculated based on our reduced anticipation of revenues, but we do have a revenue presentation on Wednesday, May 27th when we start our budget work sessions, and I'm happy to give more detailed information at that time, and we can have a deeper discussion about where those revenues lie in terms of the general fund budget. Okay. Thank you, thank you, Ms. Johnson. Well, now move to item four. I believe I pulled it, I'm sorry. For item four, there was a note that noted, there was a note around, what's going on? There was a note around being equitable, and I wasn't sure what that was referring to because it wasn't labeled in any way, shape or form around race, and I wasn't sure where they were going with that commentary, but specific to the project, hold on, I'm pulling that up. I noted that I had concerns around the parks and rec staff that was furloughed, and what it means in the long run around shared prosperity, and a number of concerns around what happens with community programming not happening this summer for children and youth, and also, that was the last one. And then it's specific to, I think this was, two, three and four can go together. We've already discussed item three, so now we're on item four, and I see Ms. Reardon, are you here to address that? Yes, Christina Reardon, Budget and Management Services. Yes, this is the Budget Amendment, and Council Member Freeman, can you repeat your question when you were asking about parks and rec? I don't believe that's included in this Budget Amendment. I'm sorry, it was like one o'clock in the morning, I was trying to make notes for today. The Budget Amendment is actually in the Dedicated Housing Fund. Okay. And then the risk fund. Ms. Reardon, I do have a question about this. This anticipates a $1 million FEMA grant? Correct, that. And is that a specific FEMA grant that we have not received yet? I believe that we have not received it yet, and if the Office of Finance is on, they may want to answer if you have a more specific question around the FEMA grant. It's something that we're anticipating receiving. Yeah, I just, what I don't know, I was wondering, I'm not, I wondered what purposes it was for, if we had any more information about that particular grant, but I see Mr. Boyd. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of the Council, David Boyd, Finance Director. That is in anticipation of reimbursement from FEMA for our direct response costs. FEMA has announced a program to reimburse us. We don't know exactly what all will be reimbursable, but we are accumulating those costs, and this is a more or less a placeholder appropriation in anticipation of being reimbursed once we know what exactly we'll qualify. Thank you very much. That's what I needed to know. And I apologize, I think that's along the lines of where I was asking, if folks who are furloughed, the income that they forego, is that included in the conversation around what would be this, like what would be covered under FEMA in the COVID response? This particular piece here is just for direct costs incurred by the city for materials, supplies, facility modification, those types of things that FEMA announced initially, similar to the types of things that we would be reimbursed for during say like a hurricane response, that type of reimbursement program from FEMA. Nothing to do, nothing programmatic or outward facing towards the community. In this particular bucket. So for personnel insurance, can you explain what that means then? I'm not sure what you're referring to as it relates to this particular piece of the budget amendment. We can go on, I'll come back to you. We'll be glad to follow up with you on that to get some more explanation in detail. I think it's specific to the page two, just so I'm noting page one and two as a placeholder. And it notes that there's personnel insurance and I'm just trying to understand how that's implemented, like what that means on the other side. Okay, I'll follow up with you next week if that's okay. That's fine. Thank you. We'll move to item five. This is an item that I pulled. This is about the loan commitment to Development Ventures Inc. for Commerce Street Senior Apartments. Welcome, Mr. Johnson. Greetings, Mayor. One of the questions I have relates to, and let me say first, I'm really glad we're proceeding with these items and this item and the following item. The income mix that we're looking at, can you describe that? I know that we're, everybody has to be under 80%. I know there's, I believe, 20 units set aside at the RAD level, but in general, I wanna know with the other buildings on this parcel and the other parcel next door to it on Main Street, will we have enough units here for all of our DHA residents who are here now to remain or to come back? And if not, where downtown is it anticipated that others would go since this is our commitment? Mr. Mayor, I have part of the answer in probably in part. The plan in terms of relocation for folks who are residents, current residents, they will be relocated to other sites and that is part of the relocation plan. So everyone who has a site according to the house and the starter will be moved and have the opportunity to move somewhere else during this construction. So that's the first part. In terms of the mix, there is in terms of the number of units, they're gonna use the income averaging approach. So 100% of the units will be rent restricted and occupied by households with incomes at or below following designations. And there's specific numbers, I don't have those, we would have to get those on follow-up, but it's on by income averaging. So 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, 70% and at or below 80% of the area median income. Thank you. I would love to see if you do have any more specifics on those kind of how the income averaging would work. Okay. That'd be great. We'll provide an explanation on more detail on how that works, we'll do that on follow-up. That'd be great. An email would be fine on that. And then in terms of the, I hear you on the relocation, what I was actually trying to get at is the return. We've told these folks that they're gonna be able to stay downtown if they're relocated either where they are now or in some other similar, you know, in a new property or either where they are now or elsewhere. And so I was wondering what the status of that is. So Mayor, what I would suggest is that we provide a written explanation from the housing authority on follow-up. So one of those things that's particularly has relates to relocation and the return the housing authority should speak specifically to that. That'd be great. Okay. Thank you very much. You're so welcome. Let me just ask one more question. This also might be for the housing authority. And that has to do with green space. I've on their, you know, on their early skin schematics they had green space, fair amount of green space on a combination of these two parcels. I don't see very much on the schematics here or on the site plan. And wondered if they could perhaps provide us with information about the green space plans for this and the other parcel they own adjacent to this, which of course will end up being kind of one, one development when it's all done. Yes, Mayor. I've seen some plans that do have green space and we'll get that from follow-up. So we can discuss specifically. Thank you so much. You're welcome. Any questions? Any other questions for Mr. Johnson? Yes, Council Member Reece. Thank you. I didn't have a question, just Mr. Johnson, if you could relay back to the folks at the Durham Housing Authority that their answer to the basket of questions around what happens to the folks who live there now is the single most important question to me about whether or not I support this item. And Housing Authority is fully aware of the commitments that they and the city made when we were last discussing this with the people of the city of Durham. And I trust and believe that they will make good on those obligations that, as I said, my support for this item will depend on that. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Council Member. All right. We'll now move to item... Before we move forward, Mr. Mayor. Oh, yeah. Uh-huh. Council Member Freeman. Just a note, I was trying to figure out how the maintenance expenses were accounted for, noting that I live pretty close to the current affordable housing that's Eastway Towns and the complaints that have been raised around maintenance and how that would be funded. I didn't see... I know the operating expenses seem pretty low. It was only like around 300,000 a year. And I wasn't sure if it was something that was factored over the whole project or if there was some... I just want to make sure that it's accounted for because it doesn't look like it is. Mr. Mayor, in response to that question, Assistant Director Lotto is on the line. If she does not have a response and will have something on follow-up. Thank you. Council Member Rees, did you have another question? No, I was just going to make sure that Council Member Freeman got her question. But you... She's Ms. Lotto? Well capable of getting herself to score to it. Sorry. Thank you. Ms. Lotto? Yes, sir. We will need to defer to the Housing Authority for a specific answer on this. But the maintenance costs for the property, not just the building itself, but the landscaping in the site should be included in the development budget. And those are fairly tightly regulated by the Refined Housing Agency to ensure that they're at what's required. Thank you very much. And that's important to know. And you'll let us know on the... You all, Mr. Johnson, Ms. Lotto, you all will work to get the other answers from the Housing Authority. We appreciate that. Sir. Absolutely, yes, sir. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Johnson. All right. Now we'll move on to item 11. This is the item transit fair capping policy. Council Member Freeman, you pull this item. Sorry, just a quick note. Where equity is concerned, I was just trying to figure out how they were going to track it and what that looked like so that there was something like a report annually that reported back what that meant for getting it up front so we know what we're looking for. Sure, so this is Sean Egan from the Department of Transportation. Good afternoon, Mayor and members of the council. Good afternoon, Sean. So we've done onboard surveys to get demographic information about our riders. So we get information about race and income and other measures from that. And what we have learned from that is that we serve large numbers of low income and minority riders on our service. And so to the extent that we'll be rolling out these new policies that they'll disproportionately benefit low income and minority riders on our services. So in terms of tracking the account level detail, I think we're going to need to continue to rely on onboard surveys, but we will be following up to ask people about their experience and to the extent that we can collect demographic information from our riders through those follow up surveys. We will be in a position to report that back to the council. And I think the main point is if we're moving to mobile ticketing, I just wanted to make sure that that capability was available beyond the onboarding survey. Because I mean, it's only, you get surveys from the folks that are willing to offer the information. But if there's a way to track it, I would love to see what that looks like so that we are not just saying we're going to be equitable about it, but actually showing what it looks like to show that if we are serving low income and people of color, then we're still showing low income and people of color and the service is improving. That's absolutely something that we'll work to incorporate in our follow up report, I guess. Thank you. I want to thank you, Mr. Egan and everybody who's worked on this. This is a super initiative to support our disadvantaged riders. This is all geared towards helping the least, the people with the least economic resources to be able to ride our buses inexpensively. And it's a huge win for equity. And I want to thank you for that. Any more questions or comments? Okay, we'll now move to item 16. Mayor, can I ask one quick question about the, I'm sorry, I should- Yes, you may, council member. I was on mute and forget. Thanks, Sean, for coming back. The presentation or sorry, the fair capping slides indicate that fair capping will cause, is projected to cause a revenue loss of just over $90,000 which isn't a huge amount, but it's nothing. Is the budget that we're going to be reviewing over the next couple of weeks assume fair capping is in place and that, and or will that be a cost we'll have to address after fair capping has been into place? So we were anticipating this in the development of the FY21 budget. So it was a factor that we had anticipated. I think because of COVID and the changes with the impacts on our system and our fair collection, we will be revising at some point in the future of the revenue estimates for fair revenue. So I think we'll have a clearer picture of how bubble ticketing plays into that. So when we make those revisions and make those updates, we'll bring that back and provide a clearer picture of that. Thank you, Mr. Egan and thank you, council member Reese. All right, he will now move to item 16. I'll pull this item. This is the contract with linear tree services LLC for the removal of city trees. Who on staff will be addressing this? Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor and members of council. Mr. John, good to see you. Good to see you too. Thank you. Alex Johnson, general services department. This contractor has only wide employees. They don't have many employees. Is someone for the contractor able to hear and able to comment on their hiring practices? In this call currently? No, sir. Okay, could you ask them to give us a written report on their hiring practices? And an email would be fine letting us know their outreach to potential minority employees and people who with expertise in their area. I will certainly do so. We really would love to hear that from them. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. All right, now we'll move to item 17. This is US Department of Housing and Urban Development 2020 partnership initiative grant. I believe council member Freeman pulled this item. Sorry about that. I really had a quick question about the GPM and what that meant, who exactly is GPM? Hello, this is Phil Jordan from NIS. The GPM is the government monitor. Thank you, Mr. Jordan. And then just another quick question, just while I'm thinking about it. I know that the commercials or the PSA that you're putting in place will be largely in English. Are there also gonna be provisions that are in Spanish? We're gonna try to have both English and Spanish. Okay, I'd like to hear more about how you're gonna try. Thank you. Okay, thank you, Mr. Jordan. All right, if there are no more questions, we'll now move on to our presentations and our first presentation, Mr. Manager's item 12. And that item is? Item 12. Yes sir, that item is proposed water and sewer rates. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of council, Don Greeley, water management. If I could ask the city clerk to put up the presentation. Welcome, Mr. Greeley. While we're waiting, I did want to extend my appreciation to some of my staff, both Vicki Westbrook and John Young, my assistant directors, Heidi Hackett, the utility finance manager and her team of Cathy Compton and Lori Scheiss, as well as Jerry Morone, our utility engineering staff and James Lim, our water efficiency and conservation supervisor, that worked hard to put all of the information together. And of course, a big appreciation for David Boyd in the finance department and his team in working with us and Raftalus consultants or consultant who works with us to put the utility rate model together. Thank you very much, Mr. Greeley. All right, good afternoon. We're here to talk about the water and sewer fund and the proposed rates for next fiscal year. I did want to also extend my appreciation both to the city manager and the city council for consideration of having a rate increase for next year. Certainly in these trying times, this is a difficult decision to move this item forward. And I just want to extend on the behalf of water management, our appreciation for your consideration of this item. Next slide, please. This will be an abbreviated outline of what we usually present as far as with the rates. I'll touch briefly on our objective strategies and key issues, briefly about our capital improvement program, customer consumption and then the proposed rates themselves. So next slide. As always, our rate setting objectives are affordability, sustainability and water efficiency and conservation. Certainly when it comes to water efficiency and conservation, Durham residents and Durham businesses have long embraced the idea of water conservation and efficiency. And clearly we are almost 50% below the national average with our residents for their water consumption on a per daily basis, which we're very proud of our residents and also all of our commercial industries. Next slide. So we talk a lot about affordability with our rates. We want to meet the needs of the whole utility but certainly we want to meet the needs of our residents. We do that through our tier of rates. It allows the customers to manage their water consumption and to encourage them that as the more they conserve, the more they cut down their usage, the lower their utility bill is. This also provides a lot of benefits to the utility is the fact that it allows us not to have to expand our facilities, both our water treatment plants and our water supply sources. So using a long-term financial model that we do, it allows us to minimize impacts to customers, especially in tiers one and two and three. Next slide. As you can see, looking back on what the rates have been over the last five years, you can see especially with tier one, two and three customers, how little the actual cost to a single family residence that has, they've occurred over the last five years. With the tier one customer costs were just a little bit below $20 per month. And now it's just a little bit above $20 per month. So we're continuing that track on with our financial model and our rates by having small incremental rate increases. Next slide, please. When it comes to affordability, we offer certainly one of the offers that we do to help make our utility bills affordable and can work with our customers when they're having experienced difficult times is through our payment arrangements. Currently we are suspended all disconnections and or late fees currently and we'll do that through until our disconnections are resumed. We work closely with our customers, extend out payments and we're really flexible as far as how those payment arrangements are made. So it reduces the hardship and it rents them when they work with us for payment arrangements so they don't incur any later delinquency charges. It also allows a lot of flexibility for if they have a one-time hardship or depending on when funds come into their households that we can match up when they pay us with how their income comes in to be able to pay the bills. Next slide. Of course, you're familiar with, we also offer the hardship fund. It's a one-time voucher of up to $240 to help our customers pay the bill. There's currently $150,000 targeted annually through the general fund for this purpose. Currently, we have about $58,000 available to be able to help our customers. This provides a lot of our customers with a clean slate to be able to move forward with that. We're also looking at through the cafe project starting the lift up pilot program, which would allow our customers to go through a, if they participate in a financial program to help with them manage their finances, that it would allow them to get a credit towards their water and sewer fund. And we hope to bring that forward soon. We also provide a list of community organizations that also offer financial assistance to customers who are having difficult times when it comes to paying their utility bills. Next slide, please. Of course, the major key issues that we have surrounding utility rates, we wanna be able to cover all of our operating costs, our large capital improvement program, and all increased regulatory costs. We wanna be able to smooth out our borrowing of funds. We wanna make sure we cover our debt coverages for the money that we do maintain. And as mentioned, we expect to be asking council for over a half a billion dollars in capital funds to replace and renew our infrastructure from our water systems and sewer systems to our water plants and dams. Next slide, please. This shows briefly where the funds go annually. The green represents operations and maintenance for the utility. The purple is our debt service that we pay for the money that we borrow to help our capital program. And the light blue is the rate funded capital that's expended annually. The yellow line is if there's no rate increase is an indication of the amount of shortfall. The blue line matches the rate model that matches the small incremental rates that we ask for each year to be able to match our expenses. As we've spent down our reserves, we'll be looking to increase our borrowing, which in turn increases our debt service. Next slide, please. As far as the capital program, next slide. Briefly over the next five years, as I said, it's about a half a billion dollars. As you can see, the water projects are winding up large projects that are water treatment plants. So most of the funding that you see here is renewal and replacement of our water distribution system. Projects coming forward in the near future will be the replacement of the water lines in and around the American Devaco area, the ballpark, and headed into a large Eastern project. On the sewer side, it's a combination of renewing our sewer collection system and continuing to do replacement and renewal projects at our treatment plants. Next slide, please. Overall, here's a breakdown of where that half a billion dollars would be spent over the next several years. Certainly 60 million dollars with probably two thirds of that going into the late Mickey Dam renewal project where we'll be placing most of the infrastructure within the dam itself, as well as replacing the intake gates and other appurtences in and around the dam to bring that up to where it needs to be. Next slide, please. As far as usage and consumption, next slide, as you can see, there's a lot of variability in our consumption. Of course, it's based on the weather. It's also based on droughts. But the overall trend, when you look at that, how much Durham has grown over the last 20 years and if you kind of averaged out all of that, it's pretty flat, which I think is a major tribute to our residents and businesses in Durham to show how water efficient they've become. So exciting to see that every year that we're not growing leaps and bounds. Next slide, please. This just shows briefly where water's being consumed with our single-family residential customers by tiers. As you can see, the tiers rates continue to be successful in that most of our consumption is in tiers one, two, and three. As far as what's being proposed next year, next slide, please. Overall, 32% of the funding for the utility will be going into personal services, 28% for operations and maintenance expenses, 11% goes to debt service, and 29% goes to rate-funded capital improvement projects. Next slide, please. The rates we're proposing a modest increases to all consumer charges over all tiers. I'm continuing the penny per tier for watershed protection. As always, the actual usage and the actual percent increase will depend on a customer's water use. We're proposing to continue the tier three rate for our non-residential customers and double the outside rates. There are different sewage charges for customers that are served by the Durham County wastewater plant. I believe earlier this week or last week, the Durham County approved their rates for this upcoming year, and they're proposing a 6.8% increase. Next slide, please. So the rate, the 2.9 increase for a typical customer covers our operating expenditures, pay-go funding, debt service, and all the fleet replacement fund. It covers all the debt covenants and maintains adequate operating reserves. Next slide, please. Next slide, please. Here we go, thank you. So as you can see, here's the individual rates. We're proposing a 30 cent increase in the service charge for water, slight increases to each tier, an increase to the monthly service charge for sewer as well as a 11 cent increase in the volume charge. Next slide. This is the table where you see the minimum and maximum based on the volume used, and so to a tier three typical customer, the 2.9% equates to an increase of $1.74 over $1.75 over their current bill. Next slide, please. This graphically shows the amount increase to a typical customer in each of the classes. So for a tier one customer, they would have a 79 cent increase on their monthly utility bill, so it equates $22.68. Next slide. And for our commercial customers, for a 5.8 inch meter, a one inch meter, and a two inch meter, you can show the overall rate increases there and what the typical bill would be. Next slide, please. So with the current projection with our rate model, looking out for the next five years, it'd be 2.9% this year, and then creeping up into the threes and then to the 4% as we move. As we move into 24, 25, we start to see the impacts of increased spending to look at Jordan Lake as bringing that online as a water supply. Two weeks ago, I participated in our quarterly utility director call larger utilities in North Carolina. The directors, we were meeting once a quarter. Now we're, of course, doing it either as a Zoom's meeting or Teams meeting. And one of the discussion point was what everybody was doing as far as rates. About half the larger utilities in the state are choosing not to do a rate increase this year due to the COVID-19 and the financial implications. But just about everybody who is not having a rate increase is having close to a doubling rate increase for the following year. So they're playing, even though they're suspending a rate increase for year one or next year, they're doubling in the following year. So if they were having a, proposing a three this year, then they would, they aren't having it. And then the following year, if they were to have another three, then they would have close to a 6% increase. Next slide, please. And this is what the, with the rate model and with our typical customers would see going forward with what those rate percent increases. And as you can see, overall the rate increases are relatively small and slow and steady. Next slide, please. And this is from the UNC, of course, the school government, the environmental finance center as the first dial shows, our bill comparison is much lower compared to the larger utilities across the state. And then lower right, the medium household income for a water and sewer bill should be less than 2%. And as you can see, we're about 1.2%. So which continues to be an indicator for affordability with our rates. There will be, there's no proposed increases for our capital facility fee. And with that, I open the floor for questions from council. Thank you. Mr. Greeley, thanks for a great report and just for a great operation to see the fact that Durham's water conservation efforts are so strong that we are so much below other cities in our water use that our rates are our rate signal, our rates are continued to be very low and very affordable. And that we're able to, even in doing all that, we're able to have this very large and successful capital plan is remarkable and I really appreciate when I see it in totality every year and it just continues to improve. So thank you so much. I'm gonna ask council member Reese if he has questions. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, I appreciate that. Good afternoon, Mr. Greeley, hope you're doing well. Thank you. Apologize that you can't see my smiling face but I'm having extreme bandwidth problems in my home and trying to maintain this connection only using audio. So far it's worked well, but fingers crossed. Can you talk, can you say, so you're proposing an average water rate increase of 2.9%. What is the total increased revenue from rates as a result of that increase? I think it's about roughly $3 million. If Heidi, if I could get Heidi Hackett to join us, she can tell you the exact number. That's really close, Don. I don't know the change but essentially that's right where it is in terms of, like it could be 2999997, but it's right around $3 million. So do you have a breakdown of in the places that, again, I haven't talked to pointing directly to slide 19 in your presentation, what that increase covers. Do you know about what, how that $3 million is spent amongst those various categories? We could do it on a percentage based on those and provide that to you. Okay, so I guess the first set of concerns I have about the proposal is that it funds by my count about $750,000 of recurring new payroll costs for, again, by my count 11 new FTEs in the water department funded by the water fund. I wonder if you can talk about whether or not that's directionally correct. Does that sound right to you, rough numbers? Yeah, for those new, the proposed new positions that's about, it's about 0.3 of the 2.9% is related to those new positions. That doesn't sound right to me. I just, I added up the numbers from our budget briefing of the cost for those FTEs. And I got somewhere in the neighborhood that was $750,000 and that's not 0.3 of 2.9. Okay, we'll dig it deeper and get that analysis to you. So that's my first basket of concerns is that during a time when the rest of the city budget is at pains not to do this in terms of not, we're not proposing the property tax increase, the general fund budgets decreasing, the water department is increasing rates and a big chunk of that is going to pay for new positions. That seems, that doesn't seem consistent to me and I understand the water departments need to continue investing in infrastructure in terms of the capital budget. I got no complaint there, but the portion of this increase at what higher 11 new people is problematic to me. So that's one basket of concerns I have. The second basket is around equity. If you look at slide 21 and take a look at where this rate increase hits customers hardest, it is in the lowest tiers. If I'm reading this correctly, a customer in tier five who uses an average of 2,200 cubic feet per month, does that sound right? By the way, that's almost certainly the tier I'm in would only see an average increase of 2.6% in their water bill. But a customer in tier one would see an average increase somewhere around 3.5%. Am I reading that correct, Don? Yes, and let me, if I could address your back concern and then I'll double back on the positions. Okay, great. Yes, and that's always, usually the case and has been the case for the last 10 years. In the lower tiers, the increase to the fixed charge, which is the, if you could go to advanced two slides. Yep, I'm sorry, one more. One more, I'm sorry. One more, there you go. The service charge, the service charge makes up a much greater portion of the bill for tier one and two compared to the tier five customer. So the percent is always a little, is always shown when we do this table is we want to be clear because we always call out the tier three average customer is what the rate increases. But it's usually higher for the lower tiers because the service charge makes up a larger portion of their bill because their consumption is a much less. Whereas on tier five customers, their volume charge is so large, it appears that the percent is less. Understood, but to be fair, that's a choice. You know, the proposal chooses to increase the volume charge by 11 cents, but could easily have kept the volume charge stable or unchanged and chosen to increase the volume charge for, I mean, the rates for the upper tiers, right? Right, there's a certain amount of fixed charges of operating and maintenance that are embedded in the service charge. Whereas in a given year, the consumption does vary. So that's why the rates are chosen to be broken out the way they are. I think, so anyway, I'd love to hear your thoughts about the previous issue I raised. Okay, so we're proposing 11 new positions. Eight of those are surrounding related to customer billing. And as you are aware, we dealt with our back billing issues before and for the council over the past six months. For those positions are within the utility billing department to be able to do outreach to our customers to help with contacting them and doing the back office work. We've been having people do temps coming into doing that to show that can work. We've been able to show that our whole times are now well below what the target was as well as our abandonment rate. So those four positions are critical to be able to maintain the success that we've had over the last couple months. That's been considered a priority for both the utility and the manager's office. And the other four positions are related to training customers on and off out in the field and two of the positions are related to making sure that we get accurate readings of our meters so we don't have any estimation. So eight of the 11 positions are related to the issues that we discussed when the back billing issues came about. The remaining three, one of which is regulatory driven to be able to meet the new regulations around emergency preparedness and resiliency that have come out of EPA. And the last position is related to the our technology needs. So I asked Vicki Westbrook if I missed any of those positions. I think you hit them all, Mr. Greeley. The one was the, yeah, the biggest one was the technology needs within the department that have been even amplified as we recovered from the malware attack. Right, and certainly the original submittal before this happened was much larger and we paired our ask down 50% to what it is. We still realize it's a big ask in where the situation is now with the city, but we think all of those positions are critical to be able to provide better services to our customers and to meet our regulatory requirements. This is both Ferguson and Deputy City Manager. I just want to also offer, and Don please correct me if I'm saying this wrong, but a number of the positions in customer billing services also supplant some temporary personnel that we have been using this year. So there have been funds already in the budget going towards these purposes, but they are the proposal given some of the success we've had with those positions this year is simply to make those positions permanent. While that's not a perfect wash, there has been offsetting funds that won't be needing to be expended for that part-time staff. Yes, that's correct. Thank you, Mr. Ferguson. Council Member Ries, other questions or concerns? I'll let some of my colleagues get in and I'll take a little break now. All right, thank you. Council Member Caballero. Yeah, good afternoon everyone. Thank you for the presentation. Just out of curiosity, I know we're under a moratorium for water shutoffs right now. What is the plan around that and what is, you spend a lot of time on affordability at the beginning of the presentation and working out payment plans and whatnot. I'm guessing that there's probably lots of folks who have let their water bills slide. And so just what is the plan moving forward? I know we can't forgive bills because we kind of went into that with the issues that we ran into last summer. And so just would like to hear what you all are thinking. Once we have direction to move forward and re-establish that disconnection, there's a couple of things that we put recommendations forward to the city manager's office. The first thing we would do is reach out to all of the customers. We currently have just almost 3,000 customers now that are in arrears. Out of those 3,000 customers, almost 2,500 of them are repeat customers. So most of the customers have been in two billing cycles. So we would like to, as soon as the governor and the mayor feels that it would be prudent to move forward with resuming those services, we would like to do that as soon as possible just so that the customers don't get too big a balance that they have to deal with. And then we can start working with them. Certainly there are some customers and we don't have a feel for it of some customers because they don't have to pay the bill or choosing not to. So we really would like to separate those customers and get them back paying bills. And then for those customers that are having challenges to be able to start working with them and getting them connected with all the various auctions that they have and to be able to work with them through this, we'll be suspending, at least for a month, maybe longer, any disconnection and or late fees for the first month that gets started. We'll continue to have very lenient and extensive payment arrangements beyond what we normally would do. And we'd have more extensive outreach to our customers and trying to work with them calling ahead of time and notifications. Is that what you mentioned that some of the FTE positions was around that outreach? Yes. Okay. I just want to say that, you know, I think we do as good a job as we can. Obviously, although not great for our funding purposes, the fact that we cannot forgive bills is a huge concern for me. I know we're limited around that. But as we move forward that we provide as much forgiveness as possible by breaking out bills, I know that between what folks are going to be facing with back pay and rent and everything else, we have a very serious, a lot of folks in Durham are going to be hurting. And I would hate for our city water department to be one of, you know, the albatrosses around their neck. Right. We totally agree. We want to be able to work with our customers to make it work for them. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member Caballero. Other council members with questions or comments? Council Member Middleton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thanks, Don. It's good to see you. Good afternoon. And I want to thank, Sheila, I want to thank Councilor Rees for, if not in the full substance of my questions, certainly anticipating the spirit of some of my questions I had after reading the, looking through the presentation before the meeting, I do want to ask, and let me ask a question first based upon what Deputy City Manager Ferguson chimed in with. Of the 11 positions, how many of those represent folk that are currently, we're using on a temporary basis? Four of those 11. Four of the 11. I know that water is absolutely critical. I mean, it's, you know, you can't have civilization without water. I get that. But I know there are other departments as well that have had to pare down significantly as, and many in our city would consider some of those departments absolutely critical to the life of our city. So let me ask you a question, Don. How absolute mission critical are these positions? And let me clarify the question a little more. If you didn't get all of them, what would be the impact on terms of service delivery to our residents and customers next year? If you didn't get any of them or all 11? If you had to absolutely rank the absolutely most mission critical, you know, that would be essential in making sure we meet our core mission. How would you present these 11 relative to those standards? I would say the eight that are surrounding customer billing, I mean, it's hard to say, but certainly the goal has been for the last several years to be able to get our whole times for our customers to be able to meet with us and talk to us to get that down to a reasonable amount of time to get it under. I think we're close to two and a half, under the two and a half minutes that we're shooting for and our abandonment rate is down. We wanted to get below 10 and I think now we're down to like 4%. And those four positions in CBS that we have that both Deputy City Manager Ferguson mentioned, we were trying that out as those positions are converting temporary positions that we're using and converting them over to permanent positions. So that's been a critical need identified by the council for the last several years. So for their customers and Heidi, do you wanna talk a little bit more about those four positions? Yes, thank you. Heidi Hackett, Utility Finance Manager. What we've been doing with these positions, Deputy City Manager Ferguson allowed us some leeway in the fall to fill these positions with temporary staff to kind of prove if that was the answer to the problems we had been seeing because what we were previously having to do is to take people off of the phones to do any additional kind of background work. We have work orders that come in through City Works that DERM one call opens and sends up to us. And so if we keep our reps on the phone for the whole time that they're supposed to be, our phone lines are open and those people do nothing but take phone calls, we can cut down on that call time and abandon more rate and increase customer satisfaction. We can help more customers. And you all don't get as many escalations. I think the mayor will tell you in the past three months, he's probably gotten the fewest that he's gotten over certainly the time I've been with the city. And that's directly linked to this ability to have this extra staff that's working on work other than phone calls and the avenues that the work comes in. And part of that is also the outbound calling. So I don't know if you recall us talking about this but one new service that we added was when we go through the cutoff process, right? The customer of course gets their bill but then they get a letter saying, you missed your payment date and your in jeopardy of being cut off. And then they get the robocall that says, hey, you might have missed your letter but here's some info. And then now we're actually making a personal phone call. And the reason for the personal phone call is to really try to connect with them. Like Don said and find out what we can do for them. What is their need? How can we help them? Can we connect them with the hardship fund? Can we connect them with other community services? Is there something else that we can do in terms of extended payment plans? The way it is now, one of our payment plans can be I can pay nothing for two months and then I wanna split my balance over four months. So we need to have those critical conversations with them in order to figure out how to really help folks. So in order to do that, we have to have the staff to do that. That's a labor intensive thing to call every single customer because as you know, we have 16 districts. So we have to, we sort them by district and call them by district based on the dates of their billing cycle. And so we can't do that and provide that level of service just using our phone staff because it's not possible to kind of pick that up and put that down and pick that up and put that down as the call volume goes up and down. So having dedicated staff to be able to do that has really increased our ability to help our customers. And then just as a second right behind that, having the two additional staff members in our water service maintenance division that would be associated with turning customers on and off. Right now, a lot of the calls to come into customer and billing services is when is my water being turned on? I finally got my water bill paid for those customers who didn't reach out and communicate with us and did get their water turned off. Right now, we have a lot of calls for people that are very concerned because it's been a long time, it seems to them a long time since their water was turned on. So those two positions would help greatly improve our ability to get people turned back on if they were in a situation that we had to turn their water off. And the other ones, there's other solutions that are more expensive, but we could get by. Absolutely, and I appreciate the primer in the explanation. And let me just tell you, my operating assumption, my baseline operating assumption is that when any department asks for another FTE that it's either going to increase efficiency or add value. I'm under, you know, I don't think anybody's going to add an FTE just because they're bored or they just want to hook a friend up. So I guess in this current context, given this crisis that we're facing, my metric is a little, perhaps a little stricter than just adding value and increasing efficiency. Mission critical is what I'm looking for in this budget cycle, given what we're going through. So I'll put that out there for whatever it's worth. And I had no doubt everything you just said is true. Beyond adding value, beyond increasing efficiency, is it absolutely mission critical because we're going to have to tighten in a number of areas. The second thing I wanted to ask Don, in your tenure, do you recall a year ever when the hardship fund has been exhausted? No, I have not. And we have done- Can I speak to that? Sure. Council Member Middleton, that has definitely been a problem that we've identified in the recent past because a few years ago, when I first came, we had $200,000 allotted and then it went down to 150 because it wasn't being fully utilized. And what we've discovered is part of that was the process. It was a very cumbersome process. People had to go through DSS. DSS had to make an appointment for them. They had to find out all this information about them. And so when we started talking about it with our CAFE group, which if you recall is cities addressing fines and fees equitably, we started looking at that $50 fee, which led us in the direction of the hardship fund to really take a look at it. And we think people were not taking advantage of it because of the difficulty. So there's two things that are going on right now. Some of it is because of the COVID and some of it is because of the malware attack. So DSS obviously got hit with the malware attack as well. They were slower to come back up than us. And so we didn't wanna wait for them to come back to be able to manage the hardship funds. So we worked with the city's attorney's office to say, does it have to go through DSS? Is there another way? And they said, yes, as long as it's not administered by the general fund, because as you recall, that money comes from the general fund that the water fund could check those qualifications to see if people meet the qualifications and then we could apply the funds to the accounts. So we have made a concerted effort. And so when Don mentioned that 58,000 that we still have left, when this whole thing happened, we had 64,000 left. So we've been systematically when we're speaking to customers finding out if this is something that would help them and we've been administering those funds. I fully expect that we're gonna spend those funds before the end of the year because that's my goal because we know there's people out there that have need. But also we may come back to you and ask you for more because we know that there is more need as council member Caballero mentioned, there's more need out there than we probably have funds. But if we can identify the people with the real need, we can have an idea of what it might take to really help them. So- Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Collin. We haven't used it, but not, we should. And my goal is to make sure we do. Because- Great. Well, I certainly have some ideas about that, but I'll follow up with staff with further questions. I'll yield now. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, colleagues. Thank you, council member Middleton. Thank you, Ms. Hackett, Mr. Greeley. Are there other questions? Council member Reese, I wasn't sure if you had been able to get in all your questions. I don't know that I have any more questions necessarily. I'm just not sure I like this, but that's why I wasn't gonna ask any more questions. Thanks. Okay. Mr. Mayor, could I suggest we move this item to GBA, but that in the next ensuing week or so, or even if you wanna follow up with more questions or discussion during the budget work sessions, if we have time, I'd like to try to answer all the questions we can. But if you, council members could follow up with any other specific questions or concerns that we can respond to, we'll try to be as efficient with those responses as possible, but move this item to GBA so that we can take it up again on the first. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And we will do so. I would just add one more comment and noting, I think council member Reese was headed in this direction and I'm glad he asked the question the way he did. What I noted in the memo was around equitable distribution and figuring out how that distribution is actually equitable. And if what you're using is averages, that's not ever gonna be equitable because the averages don't account for those at the margin. And so I can hear what you're saying around the four additional workers and making them permanent. But the chart and the graph and all of those averages that are laid out throughout the presentation highlight a real uncomfortable disparity for me. So I'll leave it at that. Thank you. Thank you. Any, Mayor Pro Tem? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Is it possible before we have our meeting to get some scenarios possibly from the water department for how we could, if we were to, if you were to hire fewer staff, if that could result in a lowered rate increase and whether we could through the rate increase shift the burden of the increase more onto those higher tier customers and away from the lower tier customers. If y'all could come up with just like a couple of options for us to look at at our next meeting, I think that would help us kind of think through the options. Yeah, we can work with David Boyd and wrap tell us and get back to you. I think we'll be able to get something to you by the end of the week next week. Thank you so much. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. Any other comments for questions? Alrighty, thank you very much. We'll now skip to item 27, which kind of goes with this item at the request of the manager. And this is the item regarding stormwater rates. Paul Wiebke, good afternoon, Mayor Schumann and Council, Paul Wiebke, Public Works. This is a presentation on the stormwater fund and proposed rates for FY21. We certainly appreciate your consideration of rating during this time. The stormwater fund is an enterprise fund. Next slide, please. The stormwater fund is an enterprise fund and receives its funding primarily from stormwater fees. The FY21 annual budget is approximately $11.4 million and supports 103 staff members, which includes one new FTE proposed in the upcoming budget. These funds are for stormwater management, stormwater maintenance and street cleaning. They also support projects for stormwater infrastructure improvements, watershed planning, stormwater retrofit design and construction, primarily to meet the stage one, like falls like reduction rules. They begin to address our response plans for Third Port Creek and Northeast Creek for their pollutants of concern, as well as floodplain mitigation projects and also support activities as requirements of our NPDS permit and the state regulations regarding falls in Jordan Lakes. Next slide, please. Our key issues, number one is we are requesting a rate increase for FY21 to support ongoing operations. The rate increases do support those reductions for falls like just for stage one and they begin to address our total maximum daily loads, that's what TMBL is, and they are for our load reductions for bacteria and sediment, particularly bacteria in Northeast Creek and sediment for Third Port Creek. We have load allocations for those water bodies. Our last rate increase is implemented in FY15. Our stormwater infrastructure is quite old and aging. This includes everything in the right of way, city on property and on private property as well. Falls in Jordan Lake rules are scheduled to be rewritten beginning in fiscal year 22 and 23 and we're continuing our ongoing re-examination of Falls Lake through the upper news River Basin Association. You'll see an item for that coming forward at your next council meeting. On the next slide, you'll see that our capital projects peak during FY23 at the bottom near the middle of that, you'll see approximately $17.5 million in 2023 with $11 million of that being for the South LRB stormwater restoration project. That's why that year is particularly high and that is gonna bring down our fund balance quite a bit. You'll see in the out years of FY24 and 25, we come back down to approximately $10 million in FY24 and 25. Next slide, please. Our customer bill impact proposed for our rate increase for FY21. The monthly increase for tier one residential would be 24 cents per month. For tier two residential would be 50 cents per month and tier three would be $1 per month. The non-residential rate would be 50 cents per 2,400 square feet of impervious surface on a commercial property. For tier one residential, that amounts to an annual increase of just under $3 per year. For tier two residential, that would be just under $6, would be at $6 per year, excuse me. And tier three would be a $12 per year annual increase. Next slide, please. The rate model does include rate increases from FY21 through 26 to help us keep rates low. As I said before, we haven't had a rate increase through since FY15. Typically what happens is, is we have an adjustment period and we have several rate increases over several years out. The rate increases that the model currently has for FY22 and 23 are similar to what you would, what we are projecting for the current, or I'm sorry, not the current, but the next fiscal year for FY21. And that's, those rates are subject to change as the spend is actualized through our projects. Next slide, please. This is a look at what our accounts are by tier. There are approximately 80,419 accounts. Of those accounts, 74,000 of them are residential accounts that account for approximately $6 million in revenue. The remaining 6417 accounts are non-residential accounts and that is an approximate revenue generator of $12.3 million. So you'll see that most of our revenue or 67% of the revenue comes from non-residential customers. Next slide, please. This is a comparison of our peer cities for our tier one residential, which is less than 2000 square feet. Durham, the proposed rate would be $3.50, which puts us on the lower end of this scale. Next slide, please. The tier two rate puts us near the middle of the pack for the tier two rate, which is approximately was, is from 2000 square feet of impervious cover to actually 3,999 square feet. There's an error on the slide there, but so we're near the middle of the pack. And then our next slide will show us the commercial rate for multifamily and commercial equivalent residential rate for our peer cities. We are near the middle of the pack once again at $7.25 for proposed for S521. Next slide, please. This is our rate history back through 2010. Rate history does go back further than this, but in 2010, there was the tier three was created. There was a rate increase in FY 2011 through 2015 and from 2015 or 2016 through 2020, their rates remained flat and we're now proposing a rate increase you see before you for FY 21. Next slide, please. As I mentioned before, our all-leg stage load reduction were goals and we're working through our partners with the upper news renovation association. This is a pie chart showing you where we're going to get our pounds to meet the stage one load reduction goal. We anticipate getting slightly more than a third of our pounds from the South Ellaby stormwater restoration project and slightly over a third from Algo Turfscuber that we hope to find a very suitable site for a full-scale plant. Our pilot study was quite successful and showed results that were very favorable and we've got green infrastructure in the stormwater retrofits and existing projects making up the balance. A lot of our projects are green as they are anyway. I've constructed what I wanted and it's a pretty green project. Next slide, please. This is just to give you an update where the South Ellaby stormwater restoration project is. We're having additional soil borings done as the request of the state. Now we're getting those boring site locations confirmed by the state so we can begin our site soil removal and remediation, hopefully to begin late summer, early fall with overall site construction for the overall wetland schedule to begin sometime beginning in spring of 2022. Our Algo Turfscuber project, we continue the site selection process for a full-scale site. Right now, we're hoping to identify a site by late summer of 2020 or possibly early fall. We're expanding our search site to find a suitable site for a up to a 10 million gallon per day plant to pump water through to remove nutrients from. This is a process that's anywhere from three to five times more efficient moving nutrients and conventional stormwater wetland, although it lacks other features that a reconstructed wetland might provide because you don't get other benefits from that device. But it is quite useful in meeting some of our regulatory requirements. And with that, I'm happy to take any questions you may have. Thank you very much, Mr. Wiebeke. I appreciate it. And I'll start with one question. The Algo Turfscuber, is that one, you're looking for a site on a tributary of Falls Lake, is that right? That would be ideal. We're also coming to the realization is we might have to find a location. We might have to pump from Falls Lake proper into the plant to get a sufficient water supply. What we've run into and found some of our sampling is, is it's a term called recalcitrant nitrogen. It's nitrogen, you can't be too close to a water treatment plant or a wastewater treatment plant because they've already rung so much, so many of the nutrients out of it already that it's the nitrogen and phosphorus and are in a form that is difficult to remove. So, that becomes part of our difficulty and some of it is also a permitting issue because the core owns much of the land around Falls Lake. And how big is a plant like that? What is it physically? What is it like? It's basically a large, shallow pool of water and you pulse water across water at a very shallow depth and it's approximately 500 feet long to whatever width you'd like to make it to accommodate the volume you need to treat. To compare it to the South LRB project, a site the size of the South LRB project would be suitable for treating 10 million gallons per day and we could get three to five times as much removal as we would from the same site as we would from the South LRB project. Although it wouldn't look nearly as attractive because it would look like a plant like you would because you're physically pumping water and you grow algae on a film or it's like a fabric and you scrape it off of it every week or 10 days and it's quite efficient at it but it won't look nearly as nice as a natural wetland or something like that and it would not provide any stormwater detention reduced flows to South LRB Creek per se and wouldn't create any habitat as it either as well. So there's, sorry. That's all right, thank you. That was, I appreciate that. I'm really glad, you know when we first tried that technology, I had no idea. I was really interested in how it would work and I'm really pleased about it. Council Member Caballero. Yeah, this is, I just wanted to say the algae project is basically the build out of the pilot you all presented last year that pilot program. Correct. Okay. I just was trying to connect with you. Thank you. Thank you. Other council members with comments or questions for Mr. Wiebke. Anybody? All right, then I think we'll put this on consent, Mr. Manager and Mr. Wiebke, thank you so much for that presentation. Mr. Mayor, welcome. Mr. Mayor, just to clarify, this is a public hearing item. Oh, it is. I'm sorry. Thank you. Yeah, we'll have it on public hearing then. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Wiebke. And Mr. Mayor, this is Council Member Freeman. I was just going to note that this is a different than the prior item, which is why it's not as filled with questions. I think recognizing that the way in which we treat the stormwater is at such a deficit that we know that we have to continue to push forward on this. I appreciate your presentation and look forward to hearing more. Thank you. Thank you. All right, we'll now move on to item 18. Item 18 is, let me just get myself together here, pull that up. Item 18 is the FY19 and 23rd Quarter Financial Report. And I see Mr. Allure, are you reporting today? I am. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of Council. John Allure, Assistant Budget Director. And I am here to present the report on the third quarter and to just kind of preface things, to remind people the third quarter report. So what we're doing is in the current fiscal year, we're looking at nine months worth of data. And then we're using those nine months to project on the final three months of data to get an idea of where we're gonna be at year end as of June 30th. And of course, as we've said in many, many years in the past, the third quarter report is very informative of what we budget for the incoming year. Having said all that, given the environment we're in, the data we had through March 31st is not particularly informative given the current climate. We entered this situation about mid-March. So we have two weeks of, say post COVID data to deal with. So I will attempt to tell you where I think we're gonna land. Although I would say that financially with a lot of the numbers, I don't really know at this point. And I would caution anyone to get too much into, well, what does this mean for our proposed budget? You've had budget briefings. Certainly the manager's presentation on last, or on Monday on the 18th. And we'll certainly get more into this, particularly talking about revenue projections when we get to the council budget hearings next week on the 27th and 28th. So having said that, go right to the general fund and say that with a lot of these departments, we're seeing savings, particularly savings in operating dollars because in a lot of cases, we're projecting that some things that departments want to do or they're not gonna get to do with a stay at home rule. Where you see overages in some departments, I would caution you to put any blame or responsibility on departments there. Those are typically departments that are small in some, in most cases, and don't have a lot of operating room to maneuver. So they may go over particularly because of two things related to personnel. The first has to do with pay for performance, which is not budgeted at the departmental level in the general fund, it's budgeted at the individual department level. It's budgeted in an account called non-departmental, which you'll see at the bottom. So in many ways that offsets and cushions a loss. The second thing I would say about that is last year was the first full year of implementation of the paying class study. And in some areas, we got that very right. In some areas, our math was a little bit off. And so we're having to supplement some departments who to no fault of their own went over or we anticipate going over on their budgets. And there's detail in the notes that should give you more specifics as to why certain departments are up and down. I'm not gonna go over to them each in an itemized fashion, but you're certainly, please ask questions if you have them. All of this, so that's where we land with the expenditures as anticipating savings of about 2.5 million with a negative variance in personnel costs of about $400,000, probably largely related to the premium pay, I would think overall that is. That's something that we did not budget, but we began to accrue with the payroll on April 9th and we budgeted premium pay through May 31st. So that is an additional personnel expense that we did not anticipate. So I would say the anticipated overage in personnel is largely related to that, the $400,000. And then of course, offset with operational savings of about $2.6 million. On the revenue side, I'll go into more detail with this, but what you're really seeing here with the exception of property tax because we collect the majority of our property tax in January and February is that we're anticipating losses in the final three months. So with property tax, as I say, we're almost completely collected. There's, you can see that the current levy for 2020 at 99%, almost exactly where we were at March 31st last year, which should come as no surprise. Sales tax is a different animal. I would say that it hasn't hit us yet. Collections through March 31st, which is really through February, has to do with how the state reports it in terms of calling it March 31st, but it's really through February, the end of February. But we were doing pretty good. And if you look at the numbers through that period, you would say, well, that's kind of extraordinary, partly because things were so good early in the year, particularly compared to last year where we saw an awful lot of refund activity, et cetera. But we are nevertheless in the final three months anticipating the end of year projection to fall under almost to the tune of a million dollars in the final three months. And more on that is obviously we'll report on the fourth quarter report. So overall, the general fund revenues under budget by a tune of about $2.9 million, as I say, the projected loss in sales tax revenue, projected losses in utility franchise taxes, property tax is up by about a half million projected, charges for services down by about 1.4 million and the anticipation of occupancy tax down by $747,000, all related to COVID-19. Now on the last two charges for services and occupancy tax, I will say a few things, kind of looking into the future, because who's able to do it, kind of looking at, okay, although this is a through March 31st report, what has been going on since March 31st through to date? And a lot of it is, it's difficult to parse out, occupancy tax was down for April, as we would expect it to be. I don't know about May because we don't receive the reimbursement until the actual the end of the month. The charges for services, sure enough, things look to be going well in April, but in May we saw a claw back, we actually saw the charges for services revenue lower for May by about $200,000. And so we checked with our friends in DPR and sure enough, they told us that initially, with a lot of their programs, they offered people, since they weren't offering programs, the ability to get a credit into when they would offer those programs. And initially a lot of customers took those credits or clients. And then the second position they took was, well, no, we'd rather not have the credit, we'd rather have a refund. So DPR has noticed that in May, they're starting to issue a refunds. And to the tune of about $150,000 to $200,000 in May. So a lot of the things that we anticipate happening, although we don't have data to really back it up through March 31st, we are slowly seeing the signs of it. Of course, I can't tell you anything more about sales tax, the last payment we'll see this year will not happen until June 10th. And that's actually after our budget hearings, but we expect to be seeing some sales tax losses with that April report. Fund balance, I'm not gonna go into a whole lot of time on this since I think you've seen this slide or a version of it a lot. The only thing I will say is, if you look at that bottom figure of 8.3 million, that's saying above the 16.7%, that's what we have available. But of course, we're proposing to obligate about 7.1 million of that in the coming fiscal year, which will bring us very close to that 16.7% required level. Moving on to the enterprise funds, Water and Sewer Fund. I'll just briefly say that what we're seeing is that some overages and personnel savings are offset somewhat. And overall, we do see that the fund is expected to be at budget by the end of the year. With transit, somewhat of a similar story, we see revenues down by about $700,000 compared to what we budgeted. And then on the expenditure side, we're seeing some operating going over, but overall the budget has a positive variance for the end of the year of about $141,000. So that's transit, moving on to solid waste, a similar story, operating revenues lower than budgeted. There's some personnel service projected to be slightly over budget, but overall a total positive variance of about $280,000. Stormwater, a similar story here. They're slightly under on the revenue side, with the projection, but seeing here some savings from personnel and operating expenditures. So a positive variance of about $116,000. Parking fund is probably one you wanna know most about. And yes, we certainly aren't, we're anticipating a loss of about $1.6 million. And how that's going to be offset to balance the fund is from fund balance. Fortunately, this is a fund that currently does have some available fund balance to offset that. So for the current year, they will be fine, but this will become a problem that will need to be addressed in the coming year. And then finally, I wanted to give you just kind of an update on some of the other funds that there's certainly more information in the notes, but you might be wondering about some of these funds and how they are doing. With the ballpark fund, a lot of our revenues and activity is actually realized in the current year. So we weren't anticipating payments for a bull season this year. It's really next year that we're worried about with the ballpark fund, but the fund should be fine in the current year. But it's looking forward where we really probably are gonna see some problems. They finance, I know they deferred some rental payments. I'm sorry, I'm getting ahead of my, yeah, with the D-PAC, but they expect to receive the full payment by the end of the fiscal year. So the ballpark fund should be solvent this year. D-PAC, obviously it's tied to occupancy tax, I believe $1.4 million is budgeted in the D-PAC fund for occupancy tax, so there'll be a negative variance there. That is a fund also that has a healthy fund balance. And in the current year, even without a D-PAC season through till September, they should be all right. Similarly with the inspections funds, a healthy fund balance. And then just to add with the dedicated housing fund, you've already heard this with the budget amendment that we have $1.4 million encumbered for the McDougal terrorist project, which will be, is reflected in that budget amendment, which you saw earlier in the afternoon. That, for now, that's all I have. I'm happy to entertain any of your questions. Thank you very much, Mr. Allure. Great presentation. And now I'll ask council members if you have any questions. Maybe we could, yeah, go ahead and speak up. The way the screen is configured, I'm not seeing everyone, but that's okay. Anyone have any questions for Mr. Allure? Okay, I do have one question. The transit operations fund, operating expenditures were down significantly and I assume that just means that we were getting a lot less revenue on the revenue side, but also we're in this last quarter, we haven't been running as many buses, we haven't been paying for gasoline and that kind of thing. Is that what that is? That is correct, Mr. Mayor. Okay. And then the solid waste is also having a positive budget variance. Yes, slightly. And that is because of our operating revenues are negative. Our operating revenues are negative. What is the cause of that positive variance? It's a savings and a contract with it has to do with the transfer station and also some fuel savings. Okay, thank you. And the fund balance for parking that you say we will need to address next year, I thought that it remained pretty healthy. Am I wrong about that? It did. The last time this morning I checked the cathar, so that would be a June 30th of the 2019 and I believe what I saw as undesignated fund balance was around $6 million. Okay, that's what I was thinking. All right. Okay, thank you. Those are my questions. Council members, any other questions for Mr. Allure, go ahead and speak up. I just had a question regarding the dedicated housing fund. If do you have a balance? I didn't, I didn't notice it on the slide there or in the presentation. I do not on that. We typically don't provide a schedule for the dedicated housing fund in this report, but Reginald's gonna have a presentation coming up here. He can either address it there or we're happy to address that at budget hearings next week. And then also noting, I'm not sure if you mentioned it, but I do understand that there's about a $1.1 million loss of revenue that's accounted for in property tax. Not in the current projection for this fiscal year. There's actually a designated surplus of about a half million dollars. Yeah, I think you might be talking about next year. Next year in forecast, yes, because we're anticipating a smaller collection rate. We normally collect about 99%, but we're not expecting that in FY20. So that would be the one million loss, I think that. I just wanted to know if there's any conversation around or with community development around what it looks like to create something so that there isn't a penalty for non-payment for folks who are experiencing COVID related losses or similarly, like rather than having a tax grant that there's something that's in place that accounts for folks that have experienced a loss and demonstrated that it's related to COVID-19. Council Member Freeman, we have the community development department scheduled for the budget work sessions next week. So I think that'd be a more appropriate time when we can see the totality of their projects and expenditure requests to have those discussions. That's fine. Can I just get in real quickly there, Mr. Mayor? Sure, Council Member Reyes, I'm sorry. Yes, please do. I think that's you, Council Member Freeman, but maybe not. I just wanted to remind everybody that the city doesn't collect property taxes. So we can't change the process by which that happens. That's up to the county. Thank you, Council Member. All right, any other questions or comments for Mr. Lore? Thank you so much, John. We appreciate you and the work you all are doing. It's a tough year, and we appreciate you keeping us surprised in this situation. Thank you. You're very welcome. Thank you. Now we will move to item 19, and item 19, I believe is the community development department. Let me get back to my agenda here. Yes, item 19 is the city of Durham's COVID-19 housing response. Johnson, I'm sorry. Greetings, Mr. Mayor, members of Council, Reginald Johnson, Director, Department of Community Development. The presentation that I have before you is a presentation at a high level on the city of Durham's proposed COVID-19 funding that we received from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. I would say that before I began the presentation that many of you heard about the CARES legislation. And in part of that CARES legislation, part of the resources were allocated to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. And through the formula process, entitlement jurisdictions and participating jurisdictions did receive particular allocations. I would also share that one of the things that about this presentation, it will be high level. There are two components that still need to be worked out. One of them is actually receipt of the money in terms of what are those processes and we're working through those. We've submitted probably about 17, 18 different waivers to HUD that were part of the legislation. So once the legislation has passed, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development, HUD also has to promote regulations and also decide what regulations that exist that we need to waive. They will permit waivers. And so with that's one process that we're working through. The second part of it is just a simple program development. The program development means that we decide how these programs are actually to look, what are the contracts, what are the contractual arrangements, whether the guidelines for vendors to sub-recipients to actually execute. So both of those pieces are pieces that we need to still work through. I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank the community development staff for all that they are doing in terms of assessing these regulations and engaging in the program development. I will tell you that and share with you that every day we get new emails from HUD as well as webinars that we participate in to try to understand. And those come out daily. And in fact, the amount is sometimes they change daily too. And so we're doing our best to be on top of that. But the goal for this presentation in this conversation is just to present at a high level the areas that we have chosen based upon what we see are the needs for the city of Durham. So with that I'll begin our next slide. So just as a reminder in terms of the federal CARES Act that's the Federal Coronavirus Aid Relief and Economic Security Act and contains additional funding for several HUD entitlement programs. And this is the amount that Durham expects to receive and we receive communication saying these are the amounts for the community development block grant program, $1,202,601. And for the emergency solutions grants, ESG as is popular known is $602,383. And for the housing opportunities for persons, people with AIDS, Hopwell is $70,000, basically $70,000. These resources in addition to the money that we normally receive that you've seen before. Next slide. So the proposed uses for CDBG. CDBG is more flexible than the other entitlement programs and focus on serving low income people in communities. And the proposed uses for Durham include emergency rental assistance. This will be in partnership with Durham County Social Services and Legal Aid and we propose an amount of $952,601. Then also foreclosure prevention, $100,000. And then the category on EITC earned income tax credits, EITC, income tax and stimulus checks assistance, $150,000. Next slide. The proposed uses for ESG, which is intended to serve homeless individuals and families to prevent families and individuals from becoming homeless. The community development staff are consulting with homeless service providers and with ASAC to define priorities for the ESG funds. And community development is issued in a streamlined application for funding to COC members with the goal of filling gaps or expanding services to meet COVID-19 related needs. And then funding awards will be made consistent with the priorities established by the homeless services advisory committee and community development staff will compare contracts for approval through the city. Next slide. With the hopper funds, the hopper funds, actually as you saw $70,000 in the scheme of what's going on a relatively modest amount, but nonetheless they are funds, additional funds that we have and made available through the cash legislation. And we are working with the current hopper program sponsors, that's Durham County Social Services and the Durham Housing Authority to identify our time and strategies to support hopper eligible activities. We already have some work going on in terms of assessment process with the program sponsors and some other folks involved and who serve this community. And we already had that process underway pre-COVID. And so we're going to integrate that work with the work that we have already ongoing. Next slide. Additional funding for COVID-19 response, we're proposing to dedicate additional funding to support non-profit affordable housing developers impacted by the COVID crisis. We're proposing to include $300,000 in the dedicated housing fund and 162,500 in home investment partnership and total funding for this purpose. The community development will also develop a streamlined application process to apply for these funds. Eligible applicants would include a non-profit affordable housing developers that own properties in which the city has invested funds. The community development will prepare contracts for approval through the city process. So the big picture for this, so some of the non-profits with whom we do business and help to help carry out the functions and create the housing, have faced some challenges. And part of this is to keep them in a way that when this is over that we can still keep the work going that we need to do in terms of creating affordable housing. Next slide. The current issues to be addressed is accessing new funds. I kind of talked about this in the beginning and I'll kind of close with this. It requires a substantial amendment to the annual action plan. I know thank you for the approval of the one last night. I mean, on Monday night, that was just part of some additional work that will be coming for you. Although HUD has permitted waivers that allow for reimbursement of the funds spent to, with prior approval of the amendment. That is not normal, but HUD is permitting that and so we're going to work through that. And then deploying funding rapidly, this involves a selection of funding recipients, contract preparation and approval processes. And then also maintain the fund transparency around the funding use. This presentation of course is to city council as part of that. And then where we're able we'll use competitive selection processes where feasible. Next slide. That concludes the overview. Mr. Mayor and members of council, Mayor Pro Tem, I'll stand for your questions. Thank you so much, Mr. Johnson. Council members, Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Reginald for the presentation. I just have a couple of questions. Could you tell us what effect these proposals will have on the five year housing plan either in terms of funding or in terms of like your staff's capacity and move other things on that plan in light of needing to respond more quickly to COVID related needs? Well, one of the things in terms of the unit production, it will not help us actually produce more units on this funding. So that's number one, but what it does have in the capacity this is work on top of coming behind the malware attack coming behind the COVID-19 crisis. We are also working remotely, the entire staff is working remotely, though I'm in the office at this particular moment. And then coming behind the fact that we did not meet the 1.5 time in this test. And so this is actually a lot of work on top of all of that. And so we are challenged, but I think that we are developing some plans and trying to move this forward. So in terms of the actual output, it basically will help us and support us. It might be worse if we didn't have this funding, but it's not gonna necessarily result in more units and will result in helping folks from being in a more challenged position than they already are. Thank you, that's helpful. Could you also talk to us a little bit about tax assistance? We've been getting a lot of questions about what tax assistance programs the city is planning to implement in our next budget year and whether any of the funding that we're getting from the federal government could be used to offset, could we use that money in some way to provide tax assistance? I doubt we could directly, but in some way take advantage of that federal money. Money, could you talk a little bit about what y'all are proposing for, like what's in the next fiscal year budget with regard to tax assistance and whether this influx of federal money gives us any more flexibility in being able to provide that? Mayor Pro Tem, what I heard was three different questions and I'll try to take those. So using federal money for tax assistance, no, we're not proposed that, wouldn't recommend that, that's not permissible. So we can work, go from that point in terms of the plan from the tax assistance program that we have already existance. If you remember from previous year that this was the third year of the tax assistance program and what the goal was was to evaluate after this third year application process for the third year is underway now. We actually have in light of COVID extended the deadline to June 30th. And so that, and then we were to review, make a report to you all and then decide where, which direction we would proceed. Then the other piece that's working on is that we were having more substantial discussions as pre COVID with the county about having a more impactful program. And we actually are working with the staff to make a report to the joint city county committee on that. I think that based upon where both the city and the county are, that that might be quite challenged now but we'll hear that report when it comes before the joint city county committee. But our proposal for our budget that I'll be discussing next week does not have a proposal to continue the program. But that's, we can discuss that next week. Okay, thank you. And so the federal money, is this the total, like the, this new CDBG ESG and HOPLA funds. This is the total amount of funding that we're getting from the CARES Act. That is correct. So without additional federal- That's related to the US department of housing and urban development. Okay. The CARES Act, there's other departments made in other programs, but this is what's coming from the US department of housing and urban development from the CARES Act. Okay, got it. And are y'all aware of any, I've heard rumors floating and you might know more than me about additional federal bills that may be passed with additional funding for cities? So I've heard that conversation as well. It might go to cities for and in states for more operational purposes. One of the things that's also coming through the US department of housing and urban development and thinking the second legislation was money that goes to states for housing. Okay, so nothing for cities coming that we know of. Right, no, no man. Okay, thank you so much. Thank you Madam Mayor Pratam. Other questions for Mr. Johnson? Mr. Manager? Reginald, thank you for the presentation and by the way, happy birthday. Could you just to set expectations clear, maybe give us the best case scenario on a timing basis, when the rental assistance money might be available to actually flow that's in your proposal? So right now, this is the 21st of May. One of the concerns that we have, I would think the best that we could probably could do would be have something ready when the city council comes back from summer recess to have some contracts ready right now. We're still working with the legal aid and the department of social services and program development, mentioned program development. And so out of program development comes the contracts that we have. I don't see us having those ready in the next couple of weeks to be on the last city council meeting with the budget. That would be very, very challenged. So I would say, honestly, Mr. Manager, looking at having something before as the council comes back on recess. So just to follow up on that separate from the limitations based on the current council schedule, is it possible that that could be moved up if the council was meeting in July or is it still regardless of the council's availability just the time it will take to kind of work through those various issues, both in terms of being sure we understand the federal guidelines as well as the contractual relationships with the third parties? Mr. Manager, if the council was meeting in July, I think we, as possible as this, we could move, have something ready about that time. So Mr. Mayor, that's something we may wanna just pay attention to. Yeah, thank you very much, Mr. Manager. I was, appreciate that. I think that we would all be willing to come back virtually if we needed to in order to get that rental assistance out more quickly. So thank you. Thank you, Senator Sanne December-Cabellano. Thank you. Thank you, Reginald, for the presentation. So right now, mine is basically the $950,000 or so is really what's being set aside for just pure rent assistance. It's not dedicated to Hapua or some of these other components. That's correct. That is portion of CDBG. The CDBG allocation is 1.2 million and 900,000 of that will be go to rental assistance. I would also share that I did not share but it's reflected in the memo that as part of the allocation, we are permitted as an entitlement jurisdiction to say part of the resource is up to 20% for admin costs for administrative costs. With these funding, the department has, is recommending that we not do that. So the cost for admin is the staff time to administer these funds. What we're doing is we're not going to take that cost and that we're going to propose that that cost be used to go to programming. Thank you. I appreciate that on the old end. So just, I guess I have a little bit of concern. What are the, I've heard informally that there's quite a few barriers to access the rent assistance through the county. And so I want to know more about that. I want to know about folks who are formerly incarcerated or justice involved, what their access is to that pot of money, but the access for folks around their documentation status. I would hate to hand over pretty much, at least what we know, the known rent assistance money to the county into a fund that has a lot of barriers. And again, if I'm not mistaken right now, the program is you get a one-time $300 for the year amount of money. And I can say that I don't know anyone who can pay a month's worth of rent in Durham unless you're living with like eight or nine people at $300. So I just have a lot of questions around that. I have, part of me wonders if it would make more sense to find a few partners or maybe one nonprofit partner that wouldn't have as many barriers and then maybe some to the county. So just one of his thoughts around that. So one of the things, so thank you for those questions. We're actually working with the county now. So the program may or may not look compatible with what they have now. The critical component for us as a community is to have legal aid of North Carolina partner with the social services. Because one of the things that is very clear with the resources that we have, the regulations that allow only permit up to three months of rent in the situation with these funds. It can be two months in the rears of money in advance or just the reverse. And so there are some limitations that come with the resources. We are having conversations with the Department of Social Services and that goes into program development aspect that I talked about earlier that we are trying to ascertain how we can best get the resources out on the street to help people. And we are cognizant and have heard about different barriers as well. And so that is something that's on the table. Thank you. Will you share some of those programmatic elements as you get, you know, as you know more? Yes, I will, but welcome to the timeframe that we're talking about. What we're trying to do is have the discussion and bring back a proposal that's comprehensive so we don't have bits and pieces. Okay. Thanks ma'am. Thank you. Thank you very much, Council Member Middleton. Thank you so much, Mr. Mayor. Original law is good to see you and happy birthday, dear brother. Thank you. Thank you very much, Council Member. So thanks for the presentation. Always excited to get more money from the feds. I have a question about the scope and the method of deployment of the foreclosure prevention, $100,000. Doesn't seem like a whole lot of money to me for foreclosure prevention. That'd be big counts, I know. Tell me how that's gonna work. Are we just gonna make mortgage payments for folk and is it city-wide? Are we gonna follow the footprint of our tax assistance program just in the south side? How are we gonna deploy this foreclosure prevention money? This $100,000. Good question, Council Member. Remember that goes into the program development. We have not worked out all the details with that. And I would just share with you, yes it would be rental assistance, but to be quite frank with you, the amount of money that we're talking about you mean foreclosure assistance, not rental assistance. Yeah, rental assistance, right, foreclosure assistance is not a lot of money, it is not. And especially it's not a lot of money in relation to the need that's out there. And so that's one of the things we have to face squarely, but what would it look like? That's the program development piece that we have to delve more into. The vendor and those level of details, I'm not prepared to discuss that right now, I just don't have it to discuss. It's not anything that we have right now. Got you, and I understand that, but in so far as it's before us right now, and the crisis is ongoing right now, I would be interested in hearing about, I mean, the public is watching this meeting right now and we're telegraphing and we're putting $100,000 towards foreclosure prevention. I'd like to get that money operational as soon as possible. And obviously, as we've already said, it's not a lot. So as soon as you work out, how we're going to put this money in the field and operationalize it, I'd be interested and I know folk who need foreclosure prevention. This is what we need more interested in hearing about that. So thank you, appreciate you. Thank you. Just to clarify, Reginald, those funds, as I understand it, and please help me understand this if I'm right, they will actually be used for the counseling as opposed to an actual payment for mortgage subsidy or that kind of thing. Is that correct? Yeah, that is correct. And I apologize about that. That should have been more clear. It is counseling. Okay, and then, and is it city-wide? Council Member Middleton asked about that as well. As in terms of how we're thinking about it, it would be city-wide. We had not gotten to a point to pick out specific geographic areas. Of course, definitely be income-based and it has to be for people who live in the city. There's no question about that. Thank you. All right, other questions for, I'm sorry, Council Member Middleton. Yeah, if I might just follow up, Mr. Mayor, and thank you for your further probing. What staffer will be handling those details, Reginald? I assume it's not gonna be on your desk or if not, who, do you have a specific, is there a working group right now that's kind of looking at that? How that's gonna? They are some, it will be assigned to one of our teams that we have and we're having some high-level conversations about it. Is there a small specific question that you're interested in trying to get to? Yeah, when we're gonna spend the money. I would say on the timeframe that we just talked about. Okay, all right. I think one of the issues is, and correct me again if I'm wrong about this, Mr. Johnson, but you've got to find the, you've gotta put out some sort of the streamlined, assumed proposal for, to find the right partner who can actually do the counseling, is that correct? That's correct. And so that is a time barrier, but hopefully that can be a fairly streamlined process. Is that, can that happen? Yes, I think that it can happen. We have to be sure in what we're asking for and that is consistent with what the federal rules and regulations with the waivers that we've just talked about are permitting. Thank you. Other questions or comments for Mr. Johnson? Council Member Frayma, do you have someone? Yes, can you hear me? Yes. Just making sure that I know and also happy birthday, Reginald. The real council has actually been having conversations across the country about programs that are in place and it may be helpful. I know along the lines of where Council Member Middleton is going to have some tangible programs that have already been set up. So it might be good to have a conversation with Leon Andrews. Okay. I can help with that if you need, but I'm sure you know how to reach him. Wait and I'll see. Thank you. And then also noting, I believe that Mayor Pro-Tin might be referring to the Heroes Act and I'm not aware if you're paying attention or not, but it's sitting in the, it left the house and it's waiting in the Senate. And if it does pass, it would direct local funds to cities smaller than the 500,000 that it initially did. And so I just want to make sure that it is on your radar if it's not. Thank you. And along the lines of a comment that was made around creating flexibility, I think it was Mayor Pro-Tin who mentioned it. You may want to look at how you use the administration cost to create the flexibility with an hour current budget to allow you to do some cost offsets and attacks assistance. I'm not sure why it's not in the proposal, but I know we'll get to that in the budget conversation. I wanted to give you that. Thank you. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Thank you very much, Council Member. Any other questions for Mr. Johnson? Mr. Mayor, this is Charlie Reese. I just wanted to say to Mr. Johnson, first of all, happy birthday to you, sir. Always great to see you come before us. I'm sorry you can't see me. I got technical problems, but although given the state of my hair, probably good that you can't see me. I just want to say that I know this is, you're gonna have to do a lot of work to spend what amounts to actually not that much money. I appreciate the thought you've put into it and know that you and your staff are gonna approach this in the right way. So thanks so much for this. As Council Member Middleton said, every little bit helps. Yes, sir. Absolutely. Thank you, Council Member Reese. And I just want to say, I think you've got the right priorities here, Reginald. I think y'all have done a really good job of figuring out, given the choices that you have for these funds, as well as our dedicated funding source. And I'm really glad we're gonna put nearly a million dollars into rental assistance. That's great. Thank you. I also want to say that you share a birthday with Rachel Ruder-Boris, one of our city clerks. Oh, wow. Our staff members on our side of the aisle. And she's a little bit younger than you, Reginald, but not much. All right. Okay. But it's her birthday today as well. Happy birthday to both of them. It's most definite. Great day. It's a great day. It's a great day. Thank you very much. Thanks for taking some of your birthday to be with us. You're so welcome. Thank you. I'm sorry. Now we're to our last item, item 20. And this is the report from the OEWD on our small business program. And I see Andre. Andre, welcome. Thank you, Mayor. Welcome, Mr. Pettigrew. We're glad to see you. Great. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of City Council. I appreciate the opportunity to give you an update on our local response to COVID-19, as well as the first opportunity for me to present to you a proposal around a local small business recovery loan fund program. Again, what I'm providing is primarily sort of the key ingredients for your consideration. So this is not a fake cake. It's something that essentially I'm welcoming your feedback and comments because my goal is to, again, take those comments and feedback from Council and incorporate it into a formal proposal that we'd like to get back to you. Clearly, I want to sort of go through and set the stage as to why I believe it's important that we do have a local response, including a financing mechanism to support our businesses. And also, again, just give you some small highlights of some of the things that the Office of Economic and Workforce Development is doing to support this effort. Next week, I'll be the forecounsel during the budget discussion to give a much more detailed information about how the department is leaning into supporting small businesses during COVID. So next slide. So again, clearly, we all know that as a result of COVID-19 and the resulting public policies that has forced businesses to close and again, the lost revenue, the lost employees has just been a tremendous impact and quite frankly, is forcing many businesses through no farther their own to the side whether they will continue or go out of business. And it's just been one of the most difficult times. Again, there are patterns that have been emerging in terms of how local government, social communities have been responding to COVID-19 and we'll cover that. I wanted to, you know, because the Office of Economic Workforce Development is working both with the businesses as well as their employees, I wanted to also reference the fact that there has been obviously a tremendous spike in unemployment. I have the most recent numbers here. These are from last week, but for the 20th, through the May 20th, 1.3 million claims have been filed in North Carolina and the one day claim on the 20th was 14,823. Again, I think these numbers as high as they are still understated. They're understated because again, people are having difficulty getting into the Department of Employment Security to in fact file for unemployment claims. And so I suspect that we'll get more. And again, as other businesses, you know, aren't able to continue, we shouldn't be gonna get more. I also want to reference the NC WARN notices. The NC WARN notices are the workers adjustment and retraining notification act. It's a federal act that requires businesses that are, you know, reducing 50 employees or more in 30 days to give notice. We right now, I think we're at about 14 businesses who submitted WARN notices. Again, I believe that number is understated. Because a number of businesses have put people on furlough with the anticipation that they'd be able to come back and keep them hired. Again, as time sort of extends out, more and more businesses are finding out that they can't continue. And so I expect that to increase also. The other point I want to make here is that typically the workforce development team through the career center is actually engaging the affected employees at the workplaces. We provide, you know, job fairs and on-site resume connections. And during the stay-at-home order, we can't do any of that right now. Most of the people who are being let go again have been let go, the operations aren't functioning. And so we've been contacting, you know, departments or companies on the phone. Again, that's not the most effective way to reach their employees. So again, that's just one of the issues that we have to overcome here. Finally, in regards to unemployment, the NC Work's Career Center is in fact closed right now. We are working to develop a plan to reopen it sometime here in the middle to late June. Again, we have to sort of do some rearrangements, you know, making sure that PPE is provided, structuring the reception area around social distancing. But nonetheless, that's a major effort and it's actually linked to a lot of work that our staff is doing on the workforce development side. The Small Business Advisory Council, which the city has organized has extended itself to be a coalition. Again, there's nothing, there's no good that's coming out of COVID activities. But one thing that has worked is the ability for the Small Business Advisory Council and Coalition to work together. We have been meeting virtually three times a week on the phone. It's made up of the Small Business Development Center, Small Business Technology Center, the Greater Black Durham Chamber, the Chamber of DDI, a whole host of advocates in businesses and we've been joined also by a number of financial institutions, obviously self-help, Carolina Small Business Fund, but Fifth Third Bank, Horizon Bank are banks that have been on the call to provide real information about how things are going on. And I think that's been useful to us. Clearly this has been a fundamental threat to our economy, both nationally and locally. Next slide. Again, you heard Reginald give you some background on the CARES Act. Again, for the purposes of this presentation, you all are aware that the federal government, SBA and Treasury put a lot of money out to primarily preserve employees and rescue companies with the set in shock. That program was less effective for small women and minority businesses. The first round clearly showed that these businesses were not able to access these funds, including in Durham. There were two major problems. The first problem is that if you did not have a banking relationship because the SBA used their 7A Certified Guarantee lending program to distribute the dollars, you had to wait in line after businesses that they were working with. And that actually had an effect on the smallest of businesses and minority businesses. Again, we know through the data that most of our businesses are sole proprietorships and that they started their businesses with their own capital and were not connected to a bank or a financial institution and thus that limited their ability to be successful here. And again, that's informing part of what we're gonna talk about here in a minute. The expanded unemployment benefits, the point that I wanna make here is for the first time, both the federal government and the state have enabled sole proprietors, self-employed individuals and independent contractors to access unemployment insurance. That's never happened before. And again, we have a number of individuals who, one, were unaware of their eligibility and also required some level of technical assistance in order to access these funds. These funds do not replace a business, but they do provide some level of cash flow to deal with personal expenses and things of that nature, which, again, it's just trying to bridge people around the independent contractors. Increased management technical assistance. Technical assistance is critical. Again, it's been one of the barriers for our targeted audience, women, minority and small businesses. There are increased technical assistance in the CARES Act, but it too will be delivered through their traditional channels, the Small Business Development Centers, Small Business Technology Development Centers, and actually the Women's Business Center. So the Institute that is since been maintaining or managing the Women's Business Center is actually increasing its availability of technical assistance during this period. Again, that resource is really critical in terms of supporting our businesses. Now, I'd like to talk a little bit more about the lending programs that have evolved to support businesses in the state. The Golden Leaf Foundation actually stood up the first rapid recovery loan program in the state. $15 million, it's a loan program. It was there to sort of provide loans up to $50,000. It was fully subscribed in almost two weeks and it had a backlog. The General Assembly last week approved 125 million to go into this loan fund program. And again, it's statewide. Durham businesses are eligible for it and it's important to me that we try to help our firms get as much of that as they can. Local governments have also responded. And again, this is not a comprehensive list, but these are four programs that we have taken a look at. Again, three of them are all small programs, small business loan type programs. In fact, the program that was announced yesterday by Wake County, the $5 million program has actually been connected to the rapid recovery program that Golden Leaf is doing. The NC Rural Center is in fact running that program or administering that program for Wake County. And so in some ways, it's a part of the 15, 125 million and now 5 million. The city of Raleigh launched the program last week. It's actually being managed by the Carolina Small Business Fund. It's a grant program. They were providing grants up to $10,000. But again, we have looked at all of these programs to help inform our view. Next slide. Next slide. Thank you. Again, I wanna go to a series of slides to talk about the proposed recovery loan program. This is that broad framework, that set of recipe that we think are key ingredients to building the program. Again, we wanna get your input. There are a number of things that still need to be determined. There are a number of things that are worthy for discussion. So we'll talk about the eligibility, loan terms, and the program structure. Next slide. So again, over the last six to eight weeks, a number of patterns have come out here around these programs. Clearly, the federal funds, the Payroll Protection Program and the other SBA programs were targeted at quickly sort of rescuing companies by preserving their payroll. But now as businesses are coming back, in what I believe is sort of the recovery phase where firms have essentially figured out how to pivot their business and services, and they're looking to adapt to the new market conditions. Again, we all know about the restaurants who have essentially pivoted to do grab and go, and also are now doing delivery, as well as figuring out how to do social distancing within their physical location. Again, these firms essentially are now looking forward and less looking back. We think there is an opportunity for a flexible long-term credit facility, and that's what this program is. We'll talk about the terms that provides a longer cash flow repayment career for businesses with some relief in the front end. Again, there's an emphasis for tailored technical assistance. We think it is really as important that the firms who are essentially trying to recreate their business models get some very specific and tailored technical assistance as opposed to the general. And so this program seeks to do that. Next slide. Next slide. So the proposed eligibility requirements, and again, we have listened to the national programs, but we've also listened to businesses in our community. And again, we know that there's not total agreement in terms of this approach, but we are trying to address a myriad of issues here. The first one is that this program is for locally, independently, and physically located businesses in Durham. Again, every business that's physically in Durham and independently owned is eligible to participate in this program. We're seeking to give priority though to businesses that are in the designated neighborhood revitalization program and in opportunity zone. We believe that this connects not just the businesses, but also to connect neighborhoods, low income neighborhoods that also it's important that these businesses are there growing, thriving and providing the services to those communities. Second, this is a program where we believe that the businesses need to have been operating for 18 months, a year and a half prior to March one. This is not eligible for startups. We're choosing to focus in on existing businesses that have been impacted. Size really matters. When we did our business survey last year, the city did the first business survey. The survey showed that over 80% of our businesses were mostly under 25 employees. In fact, most of them were sole proprietors and the preponderance of them have less than 10 employees. And again, we want to try to tailor a program that improves the access to those individuals. Two million in sales is a number that similarly reflects the vast majority of our businesses are under that revenue amount. Again, demonstrating the effect of COVID-19 and that business may have been going well. Again, the documentation of the revenue decline as well as the ability to sustain your business prior to COVID-19 is important. And thus it will require some level of documentation in terms of the 2018 IRS filing. But again, the 2019 filing for taxes is not due until July. And so we believe that a financial statement for the 2019 period would be useful to determining that sort of thing. Again, all businesses can apply even if they've received funding. So PPP and other types of funding, but we will give priority to businesses that have not secured prior funding in an effort to support those who have not been able to go. Next slide. For proposed terms of the loan, we have targeted this program for loans up to $50,000 based on documented needs and the ability to pay. It is a loan program. And so we, again, the ability to pay becomes important. It's available for covering operating expense. I think one of the important things that we learned is that many of our businesses use independent contractors, 1099 independent contractors. That those expenses were not eligible under the SBA program, under payroll protection program. We are including them as a part of our program. Loan terms, again, negotiable up to 10 years. We think the longer the term, it actually sort of flattens out the repayment amount. The interest rate, again, we've not set that. We think that, again, there's a lot of information about the varying loan funds, and we'll let that inform what that loan rate might be. Obviously, it could be lower and preferable. We want to work with a third party administrator with this program to help us sort of figure out what the best terms might be. Again, I talked about repayment, you know, deferred principal and interest payments up to 12 months. Again, you can get this loan and not make a payment for the first 12 months. However, the interest will approve. Again, we're taking sort of standard UCC filings on business assets and a personal guarantee for business owners of more than 20%. Next, third party administrator. So one of the things that we have to acknowledge that many of the communities that are listed with local programs were able to quite frankly get up and running fairly quickly. In every case, they actually had an existing loan program targeted at small businesses, and they were working with a CDFI to deliver that type of product. In Durham, we did not have that. And so in many ways, we're starting from scratch to develop a program like this. And thus, we don't have the fiscal or financial infrastructure to develop a program. And we'll have to contract for services with a certified development financial institution to deliver this. By the way, that's pretty much the standard model. All of the communities that I listed there that have contracted with a CDFI or a nonprofit to deliver this sort of service. So obviously we wanna lean on previous experience. Someone has also worked at targeting diverse and underserved small business communities. Really, we have to have a turnkey system that simplifies the application process. Again, I already talked about the management technical assistance, but the financial management reporting and program performance analytics is really critical. Within the CARES program, PPP, there is no demographic information that's required. We think it's critical to know who gets the loans based on size, based on ethnicity and location, and that we wanna track this program as we go forward. So the ability to provide some real-time financial reporting that also program performance analytics are critical. Next slide. So next slide. So preparing for next. And again, the world of economic development has fundamentally changed. This is not a one and done program. This is something that I believe the Office of Economic Development in the city will be working on over the next three to five years as we try to rebuild our small business community and the ecosystem that supports it. This actually is the work that we outlined in our shared economic prosperity goal, as well as our built the last roadmap. All of these things that are listed are programs that we have implemented in some form. For example, in terms of the minority and small business piece, again, we've contracted with the Greater Durham Black Chamber to do both outreach and training targeted at this community and also targeted at many of our sole proprietor and self-employed individuals to better access the federal programs, the state programs, as well as this local program in some ways building the pipeline. Again, supply chain disruption, an opportunity for minority business development, the supply diversity programs. Some companies are bringing back their manufacturing from overseas to back to the country. Again, there may be opportunities around supply chain diversity and another component part of built the last. Again, training, talent development. Again, I'm gonna maybe shout out for our youth, the ability to do this training, they emphasize this entrepreneurship as well as employment. Again, we think it's gonna be important to go on forward that our youth have both skills and again, being able to start your business in fact, is really one of the best ways to create wealth even in spite of what's happened here as a part of the pandemic. Capital formation and investment resource development. Again, the model, this funding model that we're talking about and working in partnership with the organizations like Duke University and others who are interested in talking with us about investing in this fund is really what I call capital formation. Forming models and attracting capital that we can deploy more effectively to the targeted communities that we're looking at. And finally, the city can do it by itself building a civic infrastructure that brings together the public and private sectors but also philanthropy will be all key ingredients in terms of the next level of community economic development. So let me end there and maybe take some questions and I'll get back on the screen. Hey, y'all, I'm gonna take over sharing the meeting from the mayor. So I'll go ahead and ask for questions. Council member Reese. Hi everybody, my video is back. So goodness knows how long it will last. I didn't tell anybody else in my house that was working again though. So it's all for me. Andre, thank you for some very good work on this loan proposal. I wanted to ask a couple of questions to drill down into some assumptions. But first, I wanted to say how creative I think it is to set in the program's DNA a focus on our revitalization areas and opportunity zones. That is a great way to identify parts of the city that need investment and also identify businesses that are owned by folks that live in these areas who need the support. And as a way to get at the our stated goals of making sure that this program reaches disadvantaged business owners who are people of color, our Latinx neighbors and folks like that. So that's very creative. I think that's fantastic. Quick question, aside from Southside, what are the revitalization areas, Indira? Sure, let's see if I can get them off. And again, we have a map that we'll show you. But Andrew Driver, East Durham, West Chapel Hill Street, obviously the Fayetteville Corridor, actually East Main Street. Again, I'm forgetting the other two, but there are about seven of them. And again, the city designated these areas. I think the last revisit is around 2014. It is the program. These are the areas that we use to implement the neighborhood revitalization program. And obviously the opportunity zones, we have seven census tracts that were designated. And again, we think these are high-poverty areas, low-wealthy areas. But we also think that this could complement the attraction of investment to those communities. I have two kind of awful feet back here. Andre, do you want to try meeting yours for a minute so we can see? OK. Second question I had was around the anticipated size of the loan fund. I noticed that is conspicuously absent from your presentation. I'd like to hear your thoughts about that. Absolutely. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Again, you have made a commitment, or at least a city manager, as a part of the budget guidelines, to put together a sort of a covert relief fund. Again, I will work with council and as well as the city manager to sort of figure out how to size this up. We know that we've been in discussions with Duke University who have committed a million dollars specific to the small business program and has actually essentially challenged the city and the county for that matter to respond similarly. So again, haven't counted all that money yet, councilman Reese, just because it's not in the bank yet. But we think that it has to be in the range of at least two to three to five the more we can get. I think one of the other things that's been important to me in these discussions is how we can, in fact, leverage this fund to attract other investors to the fund. This is a community-wide loan-dedicated fund. If you look at some of the examples, Raleigh, even in Bunkin County, which is actually being run primarily through their foundation, community foundation, there have been folks, individuals, as well as companies, who have been able to invest in a covert relief fund. And we think there's an opportunity here in Durham to do so. Again, we get to terms and conditions right. We've already begun to talk to a couple of groups about joining us. The last question I'm going to ask, and then I'll let other folks get in. I don't want to monopolize the conversation. The one term that gives me the most pause is the collateral provision. It's my understanding, and maybe our city attorney can weigh in briefly, that that's not a requirement under state law for this kind of loan program. And that that is a decision that local governments can make on our own. I know that a number of these programs are out there. Some do require collateral. Some don't. I wondered if you could talk a little bit about, kind of from a programmatic perspective, why you felt that was necessary, because that is an additional barrier to this program reaching the kinds of business owners that we wanted to reach. So my first comment, Councilman, is that, again, we're here to hear your feedback. Again, I've put that out there. And again, we're serving at the pleasure of the Council and the community. This is a loan program, and maybe some of the conditions are sort of standard. And I recognize there are some barriers here. Again, not getting into the weeds. For example, credit scores, we're willing to propose that we go to the fair and above, as opposed to the good and excellent part of the credits to sort of recognize that individuals who may have been impacted, not because of COVID, but just because we've had limited access to funds. And so, again, I'm taking notes in terms of both your reactions and questions, and you can get back to you and start that. Great. Well, I appreciate that. And if you're taking notes, please note that I think the collateral requirement, while I think is prudent from a fiscal perspective, limits the potential reach of the program. And in my view right now, getting support to these businesses is much more important than kind of the long-term concerns around that collateral meant to address. So that's just me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Any other council members with questions for Director Pettigrew? Council Member Middleton and then Mayor Schulman. Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you, Andre. Always good to see you. I want to, let me preface what I'm getting ready to say, Andre, that this is, I want to now just channel some of the frustration of small business owners that I've been hearing. So this isn't about you or your department per se, personally. I just want to give voice to some of the things that I've been hearing and then talk about some of the expectations that I had expected today. Many of the temporary closures have become permanent. Already there are folks going out of business right now as we speak. And they're frustrated. I was on a telephone call before this work session with a number of small business owners that are pointing at Roblin, that are pointing at other cities, that are pointing at other counties, who seem to be much further ahead in rolling out their programs than we are. What I had expected today was, here's a pile of money, and spending that money is imminent. And if my expectations are off, or is this something that we as a council should have been doing prior to today's meeting, I apologize. If we need a certified development financial institution or a third-party program coordinator, I had expected that at least a recommendation to have been today made available for that person or that entity. What I want to know is how soon can we start spending money and getting money in people's hands? I had hoped that this was going to be a hybrid between grants and loans for small business owners who need assistance right now. So I guess if there's something we can do as a council between now and our next meeting to expedite matters, if you need authorization to identify a third-party administrator, if we need to add some money to Duke's money, I really thought that this was going to be, action is imminent today. Here's what the plan is, here's what the program is. Let's go ahead and start implementing it. Because people are losing their businesses right now as we speak. And again, this isn't about you. I just want to vent the frustration that I'm hearing from folks in the street. So I guess my question is, how soon can we start cutting checks? What do we need to do as a council? Do we need to commit funding? Do we need to authorize you to identify a third-party person? How soon between now and whenever can we start writing checks and getting this money into the people of Durham's hands? Okay. Well, I appreciate your comments. And again, the small business community that you're talking to is also speaking to me. So I've heard those comments. Again, this is not an excuse. But the truth of the matter is, when you don't have a program, you don't have a set of relationships to stand up these programs, you're having to, again, build them. We have spoken with at least three potential CDFIs to work with. And we've had in-depth conversations with them, and so the ability to engage them is fairly short-order. Do you have a recommendation? What I said at the beginning of the program, or the presentation, was that the input that I would get to council, get from council, I feel that I can put together the final program in time for your next session. So I guess that's a couple of weeks. Again, in terms of when we can write checks, if we can come to terms in agreements, we can get a fund up to begin to write checks. I think, again, we might be able to start writing checks in the next fiscal year, because it's my understanding that we're not using year-in-money, we're using next fiscal year's money that starts in July. The other thing that during this period of time, and I understand the frustration, and the reason why we're trying to get a provider who's already set up is that we're gonna use their program, their same forms, and what have you, in order to, again, channel these applications. What we've also learned is the importance of making sure that we've got this staged in terms of the capacity to accept and process loans so that they aren't bottlenecked. Again, there are different models that are a part of this. So, again, to get to the bottom line of your question, I think we can put together a program in front of you for your next council meeting with a budget, a program structure with the recommendation, and then once that's done very shortly thereafter, be able to, again, take application and then review those things with the ability to, I guess, as I understand it, write checks coming July one. And again, that seems like a long time, but there's still some infrastructure work and agreement work that has to be done. I hear everything you're saying, and I appreciate you seeking input from the council, but I'm a little confused as to what I'm providing input on today. For example, if you had three recommendations of certified development financial institutions with their track records, they're hiring the demographic that they work for, so we can look at them and say, one, two, three, and choose one and say, this is the one we want, then input. But just telling me that we've got a fine one, I mean, which Raleigh know that we don't know? I mean, we have the fourth largest city in the state. We have a world-class, a budget department, world-class professionals, a world-class city manager. What can't we do in Durham that our neighbors are doing to immediately respond to this crisis and get money flowing? And I can't speak for my other colleagues, but this isn't happening fast enough for me, given who we are and given our wherewithal and given our bandwidth as a city. And that's for all of us. And if there's something we missed as a council communicating to you, I came to this meeting with far higher expectations of this presentation than what's happening today. And I apologize for any part that I may have played or the council played in that and not making clear what we expected. But I would hope that the urgency of moving on is clear to this staff and that the people of the city understand that we get it and that we're in touch and we're doing an incredible job on the health aspects and the public health aspects. Nobody's beating us on the public health aspects, but I just think we should be further along on this economic piece and providing aid and secor to our business community who are not temporarily closing. They are closing permanently right now. So with that, I'll yield, Mr. Madam Mayor, for an excuse. Thank you, Council Member Middleton. Mayor Schoel, you were next up. Looks like the manager may want, do you want to have a comment, Mr. Manager? I just wanted to say, I mean, I think the CDFI piece that, well, that's not an easy discussion because those discussions have been going on with a number of partners that we can't force that to happen. But the piece that I do think we need input from the Council on is, are the parameters of this program, not who the CDFI is gonna be, but are we on the right path? I would not be comfortable with us having designed a program and bring that program that we are negotiating with the CDFI or the Council without some input. And I really feel like it is more than just getting money on the street. We want to be sure that we are meeting the priorities and objectives of the Council before we embark on a program. And I think that's the kind of feedback that I was hoping that we would be able to have a conversation around today. I'm sorry that Council Member Middleton doesn't feel like it's enough detail, but this is where we are. And I know that you all hear individually from people. I'm not sure quite frankly, how many checks Raleigh or Wake County has actually written. I know they've made a deposit of some funds, but there are some processes that have to be followed for us to, I mean, well, first of all, we have to understand the guidelines of the program, but then there are a variety of processes that we have to follow if we're in fact gonna be the fiduciary responsibility for a million dollars from Duke University or a million and more dollars of taxpayer money that we would need to be sure are in place as a direction to whoever is going to administer the program. Mr. Manager, I appreciate that. And I guess even with all of that said, as of now, I still don't know what our deliverables are after having sat through the presentation. I mean, I'm aware that we have fiduciary responsibilities. We pass half billion dollar budgets each year. And I've seen plenty of fleshed out stuff from the staff come to us with a lot of the blanks filled in that were asked to act on or move on. And please understand, my frustration is not with the staff per se, but had I known as a council member that there were more blanks we were expected to fill in prior to this meeting, and I still don't know what those blanks are, right? As of now, and the presentation is over, then I think that there's some things, and I wanna, the apology is no to us. I wanna apologize if there's something, some direction we should have given or been more forceful or declarative on as a council. When I was primed for this presentation, my understanding is that we were being brought forth our plan and we were at the go-no-go phase. We were at the yay or nay stage. So forgive me, but just hearing that we gotta go back and do some more work on this, just I wasn't prepared for that. So I forgive me for my frustration, my ignorance of how this process was going to work. I just thought that this was going to be a more fleshed out at this stage than it is. And you're right, I'm not pretending to know that checks are flowing in Raleigh. They may or may not be, but I know that a million dollars was granted to, was coughed up by Raleigh. Today in today's presentation, I think I heard that we have to decide if we wanna augment the fund with more money that's already out, then is already in the pipeline. I just thought we were at a more advanced stage in this process. So I forgive me for my frustration or seeming frustration, but yeah, whatever we do. The staff is absolutely, thanks. I'll yield, Mr. Mayor, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. Yeah, Mr. Mayor, it's your turn. Thank you, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. So I think that the parameters of the program that you've outlined are good. I like the geographical, you know, the opportunity zones and the impact zones that you've chosen, I think those are all good. I think they will get us the folks that we want amongst our applicants, which is great. And I agree with Council Member Ries on that. I also agree with him about the collateral. I think that we are, if we're going to target the businesses that we wanna target, we're going to have to have, we're going to have to have relaxed, not only credit requirements, Andre, which you referred to, but also collateral requirements. And so I would encourage you to do that. I think for the Council, that means that we're gonna have to accept the fact that we're gonna have a higher level of defaults down the line. I think that's, they're going to go together. You know, even a very good, you know, very, yeah. So let me just stop with that. In terms of the interest rate, I would like to make the interest rate as low as possible. I wish we were eligible for grant program. We're not. My understanding from the School of Government, that's really clear. But if we're gonna have a loan program, I think we ought to have a loan program to as close to 0% interest as we can make it. And I think that we ought to allocate a million dollars of city money. I think that that, and that would, I think that we ought to start, and my understanding is that we had been aiming for early June. I think that we need to be using, we have the $300,000 that we'd set aside already that we've discussed previously for built to last. That money is in our budget. It's spendable, I believe. And I don't think we need to wait for the next fiscal year to start getting that out the door. I do think the CDFI question is important, who that is, but I agree. Other communities have them. They've made their relationships. And we need to make the relationship. And so I'm just very intent on us getting this up and going in June. And it's been my understanding that we were going to be able to do that, and I really want us to do that. So those are my thoughts. I think that a million dollars from the city, which would be starting with the $300,000 this year, and then the use and the rest of it could come from the COVID Relief Fund, or wherever you all think it might best come from. But that's the number in my mind if you're looking for some input and some parameters. So those are my thoughts and we appreciate any response that you have to those. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Again, that input. And I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. Andre, Andre, something's up with your microphone and it just sounds really garbled. We can't understand what you're saying. I don't know, it shows that I'm... Okay, now it's working, keep talking. All right. So again, I understand the urgency aspect of this and the conversations and getting a third-party provider, I think can be executed fairly quickly once we determine the amount of the fund and some of the other things around technical assistance. Some of the programs don't require any technical assistance. We think it's important given the target area that we have technical assistance. So we're working off the model there. I think one of the other things too, that's been helpful in terms of the amount and how we work. Again, I know that there were some discussions about the use of federal funds. Again, the community development block grant money. Again, those flow through community development and not through our office. And again, I don't think a lot of residents and businesses understand that. That's not a source of funds for this. Again, we are looking to general fund money to capitalize this and again, to be able to use an existing source of funds combined with next fiscal year gets us going there. I needed to have that input. So thank you. I mean, that's the way I think we ought to hit. I mean, we've had that money allocated. It's allocated for this purpose. This is now an emergency for that purpose. And we don't need to wait, is my understanding for the next fiscal year to do that. And then I think we can deal with how to make that 300,000 a million, but that's my number. Mr. Mayor, we don't have to wait till July 1st. That's not an issue. Okay, thank you. All right, thank you. I just want to share my sense of urgency around this. It's time to begin to get that money out the door. And I think you've got a really good plan in terms of how to target businesses. So let's make it work. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Council Member Cavillero. Thank you. Thank you, Andre, for the presentation. Just want to say that I wish we could do grants. That has been made very, very clear to me that we cannot. So as low interest as you can make it, I agree with Council Member Reis and the mayor around collateral. I think that whatever money we have that we can use now before the new fiscal year, I wish we could do the same with rent assistance. I know that's money coming from the Fed, so we're stymied there. But as much help as we, and this just goes across the board to staff as quickly as we can get resources out into our community, the better as far as I'm concerned. And I think that I feel comfortable with what the mayor has laid out. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Any other questions from Council Members? Council Member Freeman. Can you hear me? Thank you. I hesitate to say much, but I appreciate the presentation. I also feel along the lines of Council Member Middleton in this conversation where a year overdue from the built-to-last conversation and before that it was still contentious around how we're gonna make sure that black and brown businesses aren't gentrified out of the neighborhood. Essentially from March until now, you're looking at three months of no business, little to no business. So that 20% loss that some businesses are facing looked like 60 and 70% for others, especially if they're cash operated. And my, which is, it's just hard to even understand how we even, I mean, pre-COVID-19, we were having conversations about shared prosperity. And in COVID, we're having conversations about existing this and existing that. And knowing that existing is what keeps our disparities the same. I'm concerned about the way the plan is set up. I'm concerned about the dollar amount. I'm concerned about the way the partnerships are set up. I'm concerned about a lot of aspects of this. And there's not enough information, which is why I reached out to a nonprofit organization to try and figure out how to get some funds available, like available to some of those smaller businesses that the plan that you presented wouldn't even touch. And so I really would like to figure out how you build, build the partnerships around not only the CDFI, but also folks in the community that are doing this work because they're doing it already. And they consistently step up in spaces where the city and the county are not gonna be able to. And based on what you presented will not be able to going forward either. I know, I wanted to note that the other, if the other two areas that were in the plan were old five points in Lakewood and- You're correct. Okay. And then I just also wanted to know if there was any plan around building up unbanked businesses at all, like there's no conversation around where we are as a community noting that there are many people in Durham who do not operate under EIN numbers. And so the 1099s is a step, but it's not enough. And as much coordination as possible is necessary. I know that the Institute, communities in partnership, self-help, Latino credit union, there's a number of folks in this community that have been doing this work. And if we don't have relationships with them by now, there's a problem. And I would love to know what I need to do to make sure that it moves forward because I thought we were much further along as well. The conversations I was having and the conversations I'll continue to have, it feels like we're dragging our feet and I'm not sure I understand why. So I'm trying to understand exactly what aspect of planning. And I hear city manager, when he says, he wants to make sure that it's not just cash on the street because it does need to be programmed in a way that reflects our values and focus for the last, or over the strategic plan. But if you're talking about using standard at UCC filings and tax returns, I can tell you, you're not gonna reach a lot of the folks in the community that I was thinking we were targeting in that shared prosperity conversation. So at least with the bill to last, you're at least talking about black and brown businesses or black businesses at that. So I mean, I just wanna know if we're really serious about taking this on because one million is not gonna be enough. Because I was, I mean, I'm hopeful that the 500,000 mark would be where you're focused specifically on black and brown businesses. And I know that that's only like, what, 5% of the businesses in this community. So there's a whole 95 other percent that needs to be covered as well. There's a, I mean, this is our future tax base. And if we're not investing in our future tax base, then what are we gonna have coming out of COVID? This is a bump in the road for some businesses is a huge gap for others. And we have to, we have to structure this in a way that that attends to not just, not just the middle, but the bottom and just the very near top. So there are some businesses that are just needing a little bit of support to make sure that they know that the city's behind them and pushing forward and making sure that they cover their employees and open up a second location. And then there were other businesses that have been cash flowing and that just barely managing, but they are operating right now providing meals or what have you to folks. And I'm just concerned that the, not just the pace, but the tone and some of the, I mean, it's consistent across the board around how we have these conversations around equity and what racial equity looks like. But I don't think we really understand what equitable means and that we really need to move for the people who are at the margins. And so those folks are the margins, those folks who work for businesses, small businesses who are at the margins, they're losing their jobs. And these are all parts and pieces that sit in your wheelhouse with workforce and economic development. And so I'm not sure if this is all, if this is where we're at, I'm a little concerned. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Any other questions or thoughts from Council Member Middleton? Thank you, Amanda, Mayor Pro Temp. I wanna associate myself with the mayor's recommendation for a million dollars, at least a million. So I don't know if that's actionable today, but I do wanna go on record saying that I support us coughing up a million dollars. Secondly, my understanding is that Raleigh is doing grants up to $10,000. So is there something that legally precludes us from doing grants? And I'm not pushing for it, I support the loan, but I can't remember whether, I thought I heard that we can't do grants, but. That's just not what the city attorney's office, Council Member Middleton. Sorry? The city attorney should respond to that. Yeah, okay, that's fine, whoever. I actually sent her. Hi, Council Member Middleton. So generally, you know, the exclusive emoluments clause prevents local governments in North Carolina from giving privileges or profits to any individual where there isn't another public purpose or some other qualifying thing, like low to moderate income, that sort of thing. In the city of Raleigh, they apparently have a charter provision that we do not have. Krista Kukro and Fred Lamar in my office have examined some of the correspondence that the city attorneys in Raleigh have exchanged on that issue. And they understand what Raleigh is leaning on to support taking the grant approach, but we don't have such a provision in Durham. And it has been long understood in its basic law that unless we have a public purpose, unless we have some other program, like community development or something else, providing educational supplements at the local level, that sort of thing, unless we have something else that is defined by statute, that we have the specific authority to do, we can't give grants. So we're just kind of confined by North Carolina law in that respect. Thank you so much for that, Kim. So Raleigh's charter is what's letting them get away with it. The big charter provision, and I'm happy to share with you all offline a little later what that provision is. If you want to take a look at it, I don't have it in front of me, but yeah, they do. Thank you, Madam Mayor, Pro Tem. Thank you. I have a few thoughts if everyone has a chance to speak. First question, Andre, and one of the guidelines, you said that for one of the qualifications that the business has to be locally, comma, independently owned, does that mean the owner has to live in Durham as well as the building, as well as the business being located in Durham? Again, if that's input, but I was not limiting it to business owners who live in Durham. It was more about where the business was dumbest out. And again, trying to address the issue that came out of PPP where some franchise corporate entities were eligible to apply because they were in the city limits or in the United States. And that's not who this is targeted for. So the local, independently owned in our city was what we were trying to get to. Thank you. That's helpful. I think the... So thank you for the guidelines and for the work on this program. I think just one general comment that I want to make is that the reason that I'm interested in this program and in small businesses surviving in our community is not so that their owners can make money. It's so that our residents can have jobs and so that our residents can have good jobs. And so I would like to see more specific guidance around workers. I don't want city money going to low wage or unsafe jobs and just being local and independently owned does not guarantee that. It doesn't guarantee that folks are being paid well that they're being provided with personal protective equipment that they have paid sick leave, right? Like all these things that we know are even more important right now during the COVID crisis. So I would like to see in those guidelines some kind of standards for businesses who are coming and asking for public funding with regard to how they're treating their workers and the quality of the jobs that they're providing. I would also like to see a preference if possible for people who employ people who live in Durham. I know that we can't do that local hiring provisions with regard to government isn't legal in North Carolina but I do feel that it's important that Durham taxpayer dollars go in addition to supporting owners that live in Durham go to supporting workers that live in Durham. I think the $1 million is a good number. I would support that amount. And but I feel strongly that we need to as much as we focused on the owners of these businesses and the businesses being able to survive I want to see an equal and I want to see an equal amount of attention and concern paid for the people who work at those businesses. And I think that the current guidelines don't do that. Thank you. Thank you for the input. Any other thoughts from council members? All right, thank you. We'll be back the next cycle with more information. Thank you, Mr. Manager. I believe that's our last presentation. Am I right? Great. Thank you so much, Andre. We appreciate your report and all of your work on this. Great, thank you. And again, the input we received today is going to be very helpful to accelerate finalizing our proposal here and so thank you. Thank you. You're the tip of our spear, Andre. Thank you. All right, are we to settling the agenda? I'm ready when you are. I think I'm ready. Let's not forget that the, I think didn't the, did we address the clerk's priority items already? I can't remember. Yes. We did. Thank you. It's been, it's been so long. I couldn't remember. It's true. So to settle the agenda, I have items on consent one through 11 and 13 through 17, GBA items 12 and 25, GBA public hearings for the June 1st city council meeting, item 21, 22 and 27 and GBA public hearings for the June 10th special council meeting, items 23, 24 and 26. All right. Madam Mayor, for important clarification. Sure. At what point will we or should we officially move to designate that one million dollars or whatever amount we're going to do for this program? I mean, at this final thing, is there anything officially that we need to do to move the money so to speak? I think the council will need to at some point endorse that as the preferred initial amount of the city's contribution to that program. But I sensed we had enough consensus even here today to know that that's the starting point. Right. And that's my point. Given the at least tested endorsement, I think it would just be a powerful, even if we don't have the, all of the nuts and bolts worked out, you had a powerful message to the people of the city to at some point punctuate, just put an exclamation point that we are, we at least have carved that money out, even as we're working on it. Certainly your decision if that's today or you want to wait and do that on June 1st. Right. And I was directing actually to the chair. So. I think it would be similar to how we did the same thing with the McDougal terrace and recognizing that the 1.4 million would be coming, but, you know, making sure that folks knew that we were here and we were listening, we heard the cries for support. I mean, I think it would be a good idea to, to at least make that clear to the community. Michelle. Madam Mayor Pro Tem, if you would like to entertain a motion, I would make one. Sure. I move that we allocate $1 million for our upcoming small business relief program. Second. I believe we have to move to suspend the rules that we're going to take an action that way. I move that we suspend the rules and vote. Second. Second. All right. Do we need our clerk to do a voice vote for us on that? Yeah. Mayor Shull. Ah. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Aye. Council Member Caballero. Aye. Council Member Freeman. Aye. Council Member Middleton. Yay. Council Member Reese. Ure. Thank you. Madam Mayor Pro Tem, I'll move that we allocate a million dollars to the small business relief program. Second. Second. All right. Can we get a roll call? Council Member, I mean, Mayor Shull. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Aye. Council Member Caballero. Aye. Council Member Freeman. Aye. Council Member Middleton. I vote yay. Council Member Reese. I vote yes. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Absolutely. So I think now I need a motion to approve the agenda. Move to approve. Second. We have an motion. Second. Can we get our roll call, please? Mayor Shull. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Aye. Council Member Caballero. Aye. Council Member Freeman. Aye. Council Member Middleton. Aye. Council Member Reese. Aye. Thank you. All right. I believe there is no further business. I hope not. In that case, thank you, everyone. I will declare this meeting adjourned at 510 p.m. Thank you, everyone. Thanks, everybody. See you soon. Thank you, Chair and Madam Mayor Pro Tem. Absolutely. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for the support.