 One, oh, two. Madam Clerk, please note that all three of us are present and we will move right into our committee discussion. So the first agenda item, we are very excited to have Ms. Melanie Huggins who's the executive director of Richland Library. And as you all may know, they do some great work with connecting our citizens to different social services within the library given that it is often a safe space and a community point to engage with different resources. And so after the task force completed its report, I had the opportunity to sit down with Melanie who presented this do-good Columbia grant opportunity that they had. And so many of our task force members participated in this process, I'll call it, of really thinking about broadly what we wanna do long-term to address some of the various issues and ideas and challenges that were raised around homelessness during the task force meeting. So I'd like to invite Ms. Melanie Huggins to the podium to share a little bit about what they found. Yes, please. Good afternoon, so good to see you all and really good to see you. I'm glad you get to sit down for a second, Kamisha. So I'm Melanie Huggins, the executive director of Richland Library. And it's my pleasure today to be here to give you an overview of some of the findings of a three-day event that we held called Do-Good Columbia. First, a little bit about Do-Good Columbia. So Do-Good Columbia is a human-centered design, problem-solving, design charrette, for lack of a better word, that the library has designed and we have implemented several times since 2017. The first time we ever did it was about how do we make the rivers more enjoyable and accessible? And that led to what you now know as the waterworks building being renovated, the mural down there. So the process of what we, the library's role is to be the neutral convener. We don't normally have a dog in the fight, as it were. We are the neutral facilitator of how do we get lots of diverse voices and we really focus in the Do-Good process on making sure we're hearing from people you typically don't hear from in civic engagement. And we think about what we do as participatory democracy. So we've done it several times now. The most recent one is the one I wanna talk to you about, which is Do-Good Columbia 2023, which we held February 1st, 2nd, and 3rd. And on those three days, we had 66 participants and we were very deliberate about who those participants were. We invited everyone that was on the city's task force to participate, and many of them did. Plus, we had over 33 service providers that serve people facing housing insecurity or experiencing homelessness represented. Camisha, I think it was your first or second week on the job. I mean, it was really early. I think you started in November maybe and you were still just getting hired, but she was there. She participated and it was fabulous to have you there. We divide them into teams. And on every single team, there is a person with lived experience. So we went out and found people experiencing homelessness to be on every single team and we paid them for their three-day participation. They got a stipend. We also paid people experiencing housing insecurity to come be interviewed. At the end of the three days, every team gives a pitch of what their idea is. And the idea has constraints because we know it's easy to think outside of the box. It's easy to come up with ideas that cost millions of dollars, but it's really hard to come up with ideas that have time constraints and budget constraints. And so we asked them the question of how might we strengthen support and collaboration among service providers working with people experiencing homelessness and people with housing insecurity? That question came directly from the city's task force work when what you found was that people were working in silos and not working together to solve this issue. So that's the question we spent three days exploring during Duga, Columbia. All the teams presented their ideas. We used a program on our cell phones to vote for the winning idea. And the winning idea actually gets $30,000 to turn their idea into something useful for that community. What you have at your homes and themes that we heard in every pitch. And again, while the library certainly serves this population, this is not the library's recommendations. This is what we heard from the people participating the service providers and the people experiencing homelessness themselves. And over and over in each pitch, and I just wanna walk through a couple of those with you and tell you what we're doing next. And then if you have any questions, I'd be happy to answer them. So over and over again, we heard what you heard in the task force too. And this was not coming from city staff. This was coming from the providers themselves saying we need to do a better job collaborating. And I think it means a lot when it comes from the providers themselves. I mean, it's like you can't call your own. You can't, you know, somebody can't call your own child ugly, but you can. Same thing with this. It's, you can say we're not doing a good enough job, but it's hard to hear it from somebody else. So over and over again, they talked about ways they could connect and share resources. They talked about the role of mock a lot. And there were several executive members of the Board of Mock that were there all three days. And talking about what is really their role, it's not just to distribute HUD funding. It is also to strengthen collaboration. And the Mock Executive Board and I have been in close contact since this day. And that is exactly how they want to position themselves as the convener, as the key collaborator. Every single pitch that we heard at the end talked about how we use technology differently and more effectively. And actually the winning ideas idea was to create an app and QR codes that if you're homeless, you can use your phone wherever you are to shoot a picture of a QR code, get up services that you need right away. However, that won't work if we don't have good source data. And that's when you see the part that says consolidate resource documents. The city has a service catalog. The library has a service emergency services catalog. Reggie Solis, who is a member of the community of people experiencing homelessness has a wonderful website called Needful Things. There's a national platform out there as well that tries to catalog Columbia's data. So which one are we using? And how do we keep it up to date? The service catalog, the city commissioned was fabulous, but it's already dated because it was printed in July of 2022. So how do we use technology? And then how do we incentivize all of those service providers to actually make those updates and say, hey, we don't have money for this program anymore. We're not doing this anymore. And that was a key message we heard again and again. And then lastly, the client control of their own data. We all in an emergency probably would know where to find our social security card, our driver's license and our birth certificate. If you are experiencing housing insecurity or homelessness, what we heard over and over again that having access to those vital documents is key to your being able to get permanent housing. And what we heard, it was a surprise to me and probably not to some of y'all during those three days was getting those documents can take up to a year. So saying that you're going to put someone in housing for 90 days while they get it all figured out, they're not gonna have all the documents they need by the time that they have to leave necessarily to get an apartment despite the best efforts of the service providers. I do not know the answer to that. I mean, do you have any response? I don't know. It's a federal thing in some, it's a state issue in some ways. I have not, let me just, how does the... The different, if you're from South Carolina, it's a fast process. I'm from New York, so it may take a little bit longer. But then remembering that we're working with individuals who have been experiencing homelessness for five years and they come, they're older and sometimes parents didn't put things together properly. So I have experienced that we actually had to go to documentation to prove that this is who they are. And the reason I asked that is several years ago I wanted a birth certificate. I went down there, filled in whatever paperwork that I needed to fill in. And within a day, I think, I went back over there and I got a copy of my birth certificate. Now, and that's, and I guess I probably see more of that. You see probably more of that now, especially if a person has been homeless for three to four or even two years and how that process could very well speed up itself. And if it could speed up itself, what benefits? And if you're a transplant here, that's the other thing. And you probably had to have your driver's license or social security card in order to get your birth certificate. So it's kind of a, it's a trick, it's a domino effect. You gotta have, is that when clients go to a service provider and they say, oh, you need this document in order to get this funding or this housing opportunity, the client, the service provider might pay whatever it costs to get those documents because they're not free. So they might cover the cost, but then they'll hold it because the person, and that makes sense, right? They wanna keep it safe. So is there a way that clients can, we take for granted that we have agency over our own documents, that's the takeaway. And that there are a lot of people experiencing homelessness that do not hold their own documents for safety reasons or security reasons, cause they're living on the street. They might be in the cloud somewhere, but they don't have access to it because the service provider has access to it. So that was a theme we heard over and over again. Is there a way to, lives in the cloud that if I'm homeless, I don't have to keep it on my person, but I can also bring it to hold about HMIS is that the management system that is being used or some of those management systems. But then the other challenge you'll see is that not every service provider uses HMIS or has to use HMIS and it's clunky and they don't like it or they haven't been trained on it. So it's, the thread through all of this is we wanna give the people experiencing homeless more agency, whether it's through their own, owning their own documents and having access to them whenever they need them, but that's gonna require investment in technology. Who is gonna train all the service providers to use this, you know, module if it gets added. And then I think the last thing I'll just share is that the winning team, and you can see all of the trends and themes and trust and transparency and an among service providers came up a lot too, is that, you know, I know from the libraries and we do know because my staff has described the Rapid Shelter team as responsive, friendly, fast. They're like, when we call them, they get back with us, we know they're gonna take care of any, we've referred over 60 people to the Rapid Shelter from the library and we even have a screen like this in our social work center where it shows where you are on the waiting list if you've applied. So anybody that comes in the library can see where they are on the waiting list. And I can't say enough about what good job they're doing. But we need that trust in all of our service providers. We need to know that if we call you and say we're sending somebody over or we wanna know if you can help somebody that that's gonna be a warm handoff and they're gonna get taken care of. They don't all have the same service standards is what I'm seeing as an outsider. The service standards very, very different from one service provider. They all care about the homeless but the people experiencing homelessness but they might not all address it in the same way or treat people in the same way. So I'll just lastly say that the winning team is continuing to work with the library staff. We're gonna project manage their idea to fruition and because their idea was about an app which we know with $30,000 will not develop an app. But what we wanna do is try to figure out a way we can take that service catalog that the city has developed, take Reggie's Needful Things website, take the library's emergency services catalog and make it a living usable, useful database. Because if we're gonna build an app someday we gotta have good content. We've gotta have a good database to go by. And thankfully the library's job is information referral and information retrieval and information architecture. And so we can help guide that piece of the process so to make sure we're all literally working off the same page. So that when you refer someone somewhere you have timely, accurate information about what services they provide because it changes so frequently. So I'll just stop there and say, again, I'm just representing the person who facilitated the three days and one small piece of the service provision puzzle, these things that we heard the providers and the people experiencing homelessness and housing insecurity say over the course of three days. And that winning team gets $30,000 to spend to figure out how they're gonna start putting some things into action. One idea they had in addition to QR codes was having a decal on business windows or organizations windows where it was a place where you could get a referral. Where it was a place where you would know, oh, the library can help me. Oh, this organization is one of those partners that can help me get into the system and start getting my case managed by all of these folks. So I will keep you posted on the winning team's idea. I'm sure this is the first iteration of that and I know there will be opportunities to invest in what that online access point looks like in the future. This hypothetical, how would that be a particular process in itself? So what we're thinking is that the winning team's idea was that you would be able to on your phone, scan a QR code and get access to a database that would say, here's all of the services, like no matter what time of day, you could scan something and you would go, oh, I need food. Here are the places that are open right now. Here's somebody I can talk to right now about that. But that's kind of the big, that's the big nice swanky model of the project, right? But we've gotta boil it down into what's doable. So a low-tech way of doing that might be just a decal that doesn't lead you to necessarily an access database or a database online, but leads you to a person. Like you might have one downstairs on the window of City Hall, so anybody who needs help knows this is a place I can walk in and at least somebody can say, hey, go to the library or whatever, it's a starting point. So a business who wanted to be welcoming could say, here's some places that I know of, you need your clothes washed, I know where that is. So there's more people that have eyes on it and more people that can be referrals. So I thought it was interesting that one of the biggest challenges we saw in the task force discussions was the after hours and weekends. And this on-call model for providers, I think is worth exploring. But it just seems like we're kind of at an a halt there where there really hasn't been a solution yet to identify ways in which we can fulfill the needs and the city can't do it itself. So I'd be interested to hear if there was anything else you heard about potential solutions to address after hours and weekends. So we did hear several, every person's pitch had a scenario in it where the person needed help on the weekends or in evenings. And some of their ideas were subsidized ride share which I think we've tried some of that before here in Columbia where if I'm after hours and I need transportation to a shelter or transportation to somewhere that there was a way you could get subsidized ride share, that was in a lot of people's ideas in this three days. We did talk about in some of the tables it didn't make it anybody's final pitch cause I think they just don't know how to make it happen which is that on-call model. Could you have a group of partners that just like doctors and surgeons and other people where you agree to have somebody that's on call after hours or on certain weekends and if you have enough it might only be once a quarter because not everybody provides services from nine to eight like we do every night or nine to six on Saturdays or two to six on Sundays. So what could we structure something like that? But again I think it's going to take someone like the mock or someone who is a neutral convener of that that has influence and resources to put that together. I think it has to be about coalition and collaboration building first so they trust each other and they really do want to make that work together. I know commission might know of models like that that already work that are like on-call models that we could learn from. When you first thought you said how the partners themselves said that they can do a better job at collaborating, did they talk more about what that looked like and if we were going to go after that model that provided services after hours it would have to provide all of the services. So not just me being able to make contact with Mary where am I going to take Mary to see that for the night. So it. Some and 100% you are so right and I think that's what stops us is because we want to solve the whole problem and not put constraints around part of the problem. Part of the problem is to talk to each other unless they have to and that's what they said over and over again like mock is great but mock has become more about HUD funding than it has been about convening and collaboration. So one very simple thing that all the providers said is we just need to go tour each other's facility. We don't even know what your facility looks like. We don't even know what services you provide. And so we talked about using some of that $30,000 as simple as it is to incentivize people coming together they talked about doing it over Zoom if you can't do it in person or having you know breaking bread together. So they were like we don't know what you provide so it's hard for us to trust that if I send somebody to you it's all gonna get worked out. So I think what I heard the big problems are the ones we all know of but it's how do we get there and steps and increments and I think part of that is how do we incentivize more collaboration more sharing of data more sharing of information and it's an agreeing to have one access database that where all the services for homeless are. And again, is it gonna be Midlands? Is it gonna be just Columbia? Is it gonna be Richland County, Lexington County? That's another thing. I think the one that y'all funded had a hundred service providers in it and I think it was across Lexington and Richland County. But what is that is if we build it if we build the database you gotta keep it up to date. You gotta make sure that if a program runs out of money you put a line through it in there so we're not sending people to something that you no longer have money for. That is a first step into doing anything more elaborate with an app or a QR code or even an on-call model. Just having that one place where all of us can go and see that we know this is an up to date list of services. We've got a lot of great information to start with. We just don't have any incentivizing of people to use it and keep it up to date. So we've gotta figure that. And that's part of this group that's getting together next week that's working on this project. They're gonna have to figure that out. And some of the people working on it again are people experiencing homelessness right now. Some of them are service providers. And then we're inviting the mock leadership to also be a part of that conversation and you are welcome if you have the time to come be a part of that. And I'm sure they're gonna say you by name anyway once they meet next week about coming. But we've gotta have the service providers bought into it. And who do they trust to do that? You know, this is Councilman. Thank you for what the library does because when the commission sends out her weekly report usually Richland County Library is the number one referral. So I know that y'all are doing a good job over there. My concern is that the city of Columbia does not have the resources to do all of this. And how do you bite off a piece of the elephant so you can chew that up without getting the whole elephant involved? Well, so you spend what 30 something million dollars annually by your account on homelessness? It was not the city just in terms of the top five or six. Okay, but whatever the city spends on that and who out what are the requirements of getting that money? You know, can one of the requirements be that as a partner of the city in this work you have to commit to whether it's using HMIS or keeping whatever this database is we get cleaned up and out there. I mean, you do have policy and practice influence. You can't make people collaborate but you could certainly put in some constraints or some criteria in those grants and reward awards that would incentivize people to contribute to a shared database. Because until we have it, we're just, we're still, we're just, we can't build on bad information. I mean, that's librarianship 101. You can't build on information that is not current. We have to keep it up to date and we have to all contribute to it. Councilman, the lack of collaboration is at a very basic level at this point where Camisha couldn't even get approved as a member of the mock yet to formally represent the city. So I think that we start small and look at some of the ways in which we have, you know, political and social influence in order to address some of these things and ensure at least that we have a seat at the table as we are the only provider in some ways that's providing some of those after-hour rapid services. Oh, no. That's right. I agree. I think that sounds great. And the $30,000 I should say came from the Nord Foundation as a grant that the library wrote and the $30,000, if you looked at all of these trends and themes, they overlap and some of them are just values. Some of them aren't even things to do. They're just about valuing collaboration and acting differently as an organization. All on that one theme of consolidated resource documents, even we so. I mean, I still think it's thinking about where we started and how, you know, like you said, I don't know the exact phrase you used about it's easier to call your own baby ugly or... That's probably a terrible way to say it, but yes. But I think that speaks to some of the work that we've been doing because it's easy to be defensive in the beginning. Like, no, everything's going great. And the fact that you're having providers admit that, hey, we don't even trust each other. That to me is like the beacon of hope in this process that people recognize that things aren't perfect. So hopefully we can channel some of that momentum into moving in the right direction. And I think they wouldn't have said that if they didn't trust the library and they didn't trust that process. They would not have been as forthcoming. And they didn't say it on the first day. I'm sure. But it came out over the course of the three days that, you know, we've got some fundamental collaboration issues. And I can't say enough about the mock. So I'm glad that you're gonna be involved. There is new leadership and they really are trying to take it in a little bit of a different direction. So I hope that that coincides with all this work that we're doing. But thank you for your time. And I would love to come back another time and talk to you about the social work team and what they do because Camisha, they love working with Camisha and her team. And they do a lot of things I don't think people are aware of. So it might be a venture. I would love that. And I'm sure we'll stay in touch about the within team. And if there's an opportunity where we can align some of the work. We will let you know. Thank you so much for your time. I appreciate it. All right. Well, we can then move into our next agenda item. This is an update and overview on the Alliance for Healthier South Carolina. I have been fortunate to work with Mr. Monty Robertson for many years now prior to coming on to council. One of the things that the mayor expressed as well as councilman McDowell was wanting to get more involved in terms of the public health role that the city should be playing in terms of addressing some of the adverse health outcomes and disparities that we see across different zip codes. And so I thought that the Alliance may be a great place for the city to formally get involved but of course would love both of y'all's feedback and support for us to make a formal recommendation to do that. So I'm gonna pass it over to Monty to talk a little bit about what the Alliance does and how the city can play a role. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me here to talk about the Alliance but I'm also a resident of Columbia. I live literally three blocks away. So this is personal for me too as well because of course I want to see the city grow and get better and improve the health and well-being of Columbia, South Carolina. So I'm gonna hop right in and I got some slides. Hopefully this keeps you guys awake. This is interesting, we're gonna stay awake. Yeah, and Dr. Bust is I know I'm speaking your jam with this but I like to show, before I talk about the Alliance I really like to show this to really describe to you all what was the impetus behind developing the Alliance for a healthier South Carolina. So let's go back to 2015, a bunch of leaders from mostly hospitals to try to understand how do we improve the health of our state. We're doing a lot of great work but just really weren't seeing the needle moving. And so quickly that group realized that in order to improve the health of our state we're gonna have to go beyond the walls of hospitals and clinics, right? That's clearly demonstrated by this document from County Health Rankings and Road Maps where you can see only clinical care that contributes to 20% of your health. And of course there's all those other factors like social and economic factors, the environment, health behaviors that really play have a huge impact on your health and wellbeing. And so that was really the impetus behind forming the Alliance for a Healthier South Carolina because we knew hospitals couldn't do this on their own. We need to work with other partners in order to improve the health of our state. So as you can see what our mission and vision is we convene and connect diverse stakeholders to align and catalyze effort to improve the health and wellbeing of communities across South Carolina. And certainly we have a vision of an optimal, a South Carolina would often equitable healthcare for all and we like to stress the word all. So independent of your race, your age, where you live, any of those factors we want to ensure that everyone has a fair and just opportunity to be healthy. So this is share a little bit about how we were built. We were formed on the collective impact model, which you can see the five components and certainly I'm probably preaching to the choir here, but just want to reiterate how we were formed. So and this play into what I share about the state health improvement plan later, but of course that common agenda, what measures, what are we trying to improve, what are the different activities that all our partners can contribute to improving the health? And of course, gotta have great communication. Melanie set me up for that. So we gotta have really good communication. And then lastly, really that backbone organization. So just give you guys some historical context. The South Carolina Hospital Association serves as the backbone organization for warmer month. So we have grown, we brought in more members, more revenue and really matured. So we are time for us to fly away. So in a month from now, we will be branching off as a independent nonprofit. So we're really excited about this opportunity. Just to give you guys an idea of what our membership looks like, we have a couple of new members that added or joined recently, so we haven't added everyone, but we're up to 63 members, ranging from hospitals and healthcare systems, state agencies, universities. We even have AstraZeneca pharmaceutical company just joined us as well. So we're really trying to broaden what our membership looks like. I know we have a lot of state level organization, but we're now making a more direct connection to our community organizations as well. So we're excited about those opportunities that are coming ahead of us. So here's our approach to how we do our work. So first, education and awareness. We are very intentional about raising awareness about the emerging issues that are going on across our state and communities. We also are very intentional about data. So we have a very close relationship with DHEC. I'll share a little bit about a project we're working on now. So we wanna get data into the hands of decision makers like yourself. So if we don't know where we are, we can't know where we're going, right? And we can't understand what improvements that we've made. So we certainly want to make sure that we have data, but make sure we have disaggregated data. So not just the population level data, but let's break this down. Let's look at high breaks down by race, ethnicity, down to the zip code level if we have access to that data. So we can have more informed decisions on how we do our work and how do we address those emerging issues. And then thirdly, that cross sector collaboration, which is really the meat of what we do. We wanna bring together leaders so they can work collaboratively for health improvement. And then that last piece around policy and advocacy. So we as organization, we don't lobby, but we certainly are in the position where we can influence policy through education and awareness. We do have some members who do lobby, but we as the Alliance will never, we don't lobby. So just wanna make sure we share that. But we also have an opportunity to influence policy at the organization level. So I'll give you guys one example. In the middle of COVID, we have a lot of our members that came to us expressing the need to expand telehealth coverage because certainly people couldn't go to the doctor at that time. So because we have Medicaid at the table, we have Blue Cross Blue Shield at the table, we're quickly able to connect with those members and make those changes very quickly. One other example, we were looking at expanding postpartum coverage for women. South Carolina's Medicaid's rule right now is 60 days postpartum. We were able to get that expanded to 365 days. And we didn't have to go to legislators. We simply had those connections with Medicaid. We were able to pick up the phone call and just have a conversation about it. So that's just really just a couple examples of the power of collaboration. And then we've created this space so that people have built relationships, have built trust where they can call each other, have those conversations. And then just wanna share a little bit about how we convene and connect. So we have a quarterly meeting where we bring together senior leaders to represent those 62 respective organizations. So we bring them in a room together so that they can discuss emerging issues where they can network. It also gives you an opportunity to have a seat at the table where you can influence the work that we do as an organization. So many benefits to being at the table as a member of the Alliance. We also have a couple of action teams which I'll share briefly about those and those meet typically at least once a quarter. And then we host several webinars and conferences through the year. So that's just an expanded way of providing education but also as a way to provide a space for folks to connect and network. And then lastly, we share lots of updates. So we do it on a monthly basis. So if you remember, you have an opportunity to share about what you're doing but also as an opportunity to get information about what's going on in the state. Yes, sir? That's right. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So we have those members. So me as the director leading the organization, I'm not gonna be doing boots on the groundwork but we have Officer of Real Health. We have hospitals. We have other community serving organizations who are at the table. And so when I gave you guys the example of telehealth coverage, that's an example that was a decision that was made at the state level but it trickled down and was able to help folks at the community level. So we're really in the position to make system level changes that are going to impact your communities across the state. And so having access to folks who are in the decision making positions, we can better serve the community. So one example, we have several foundations or grant makers. We can influence where the money is going which I'll share a little bit more about how we're doing that. So it really is a place where we can make system level changes that then help and improve the community. And so one thing we're trying to do is have a better bi-directional communication between what's going on at the community level. So really leaning on the community to tell us what they need. And so we have certainly organizations who are community serving that are at the table with Alliance to help inform us on what the greatest needs are for the community. And so like data, so you're gonna need data. We can work with DHEC to make sure you're getting the right data. So it's really that kind of system level changes that we're really aiming to do. Hopefully that, does it? I agree with everything you said. The bottom line for me, of course, how do you take, and of course, Councilwoman Bussells and I've had this conversation several times, how do you take usable data and turn it into hepping entities within the community? Now, I understand, I understand the importance of having an Alliance with 62 neighboring collaborating entities. I understand that. My thing is, how do we get at the heart of it, Monty? How do we get at the heart of it and folk reasonably can sense that not only do you have an Alliance that is usable and friendly and doable. How do you get, there are things and processes that you have to go through. I'm looking at somebody's man, somebody man who has hypertension or diabetes and you cannot collaborate, you can collaborate on resources. Get this guy some help, or this woman some help. Absolutely. Does that make any sense? Yeah, totally, and one of the, I think we might be getting a little step ahead of me. Yeah, I was gonna say, the State Health Improvement Plan and some of the, Yeah, I was gonna have, I know one of our charges. Well, I don't wanna get beyond you now, because my issue is, get some help for the folk. Right, and some formal, informal recommendations that I think will answer your question. So I'll go ahead and address it. So one of the things that we're doing at the state level, so we have this state level coalition, right? But there's also local coalitions that are gonna be the folks who can get down to the local level, right? So to my knowledge, I'm not sure, I don't think we have a local coalition here. So I know, rest is so, Vince Ford had a letter charged to develop Rise Up Richelon. I don't know if any of you guys were part of that. So I was at the table there. So to me, and I was thinking about this the other day, maybe we need to dust that off and get that back in running. I am willing and able to help get that up and running. I have years of coalition experience and I can certainly help and be a resource to get that local coalition up and running. So I think that's gonna be a more local solution. And Ms. Huggins talked about it too. We really gotta focus on that collaborative piece of what we do. So I hope that answers your question. In my eyes, I see that as a great opportunity because the city can't do it by itself. The library can't do it. We're all gonna have to come together. And it's gonna be a multi-sector approach. We had to work with different sectors to bring them together. And again, I don't think that's in place now, but certainly that will be my recommendation as a way to address some of these immediate issues. Council Member Duvall, I know you've been waiting. Monty, thank you for your presentation. Erica sent the presentation out this morning and I've looked through it before I came to the meeting today and it reminded me of a committee that Council McDowell formed about two years ago now. And we looked at different ways that we could provide direct healthcare information and have impact on certain illnesses. And Pam Benjamin did the staffing of it and she came up with what I call the Baton Rouge plan. In Baton Rouge, they have something like your alliance that has the top dogs in it. The head leaders in the center of the circle, and you've got a slide in here that shows something like that. And then they had underneath that little bubbles that had different particular diseases. Diabetes is one that had heart disease, obesity, hypertension, teen pregnancies, all of those. And each one of those teams had a leader and that leader goes back to the executive team to get it. But that's where you get boots on the ground on a particular disease in a particular city. And we have not progressed on that but I think that is the model we need to do. That's the model we need to do. I'll double check. So there is an effort through the Duke Endowment. It's called Healthy People Healthy Carolina and they actually provide funding to develop community coalitions. So what you're describing, there's several coalitions across the state who actually operate on that model. And so, and I was gonna show you the state health improvement plan real quick. So essentially what communities have done has mirror what we've done at the state level. So at the state level, we've completed a state health assessment. From there, we're able to identify what the biggest priorities are. And then we develop a health improvement plan. So at the state level, we now have a plan. We're gonna create a new plan now because that is a five-year plan and then we develop strategy. So in equivalent to that, for Columbia may be the same thing, what we did, we did a data walk. So we brought leaders from across the state together. We share the data from maternity and child health, chronic health conditions, education, income, everything we get. We have the structure in place to do it. We would just have to do it. DHEC can provide the data for us. So we can do that here. Like I say, I can be a resource to help get something like that. But I think in order to see improvements, greater improvements, again, it goes back to collaboration. Yeah, so right now, we are funded primarily through membership. So organizations pay, we have a tiered structure of membership that they pay. And then in the most recent years, we've started to go out to grants. So one of the cool grants that we got recently was through the Duke Endowment for us to actually improve our data. So I talked about how we're working with DHEC. So we're working with, we got funding to build a publicly-facing dashboard. So we'll now take databases and they'll link them all together and you can go to one centralized place. So we need information from City of Columbia. We can pull that data and we can go to one centralized place to do that. So these are the types of things that we're doing to build at the systems level to help folks at a local level do their job better and provide them with the equipment and the knowledge and data to actually implement strategies for health improvement. So that's one thing we're gonna do that's gonna benefit the whole state. Another thing that comes out of that grant is we're gonna have a performance management system. So right now, we don't really have a centralized place where we can keep up with what's going on across the state. So every county will now have a way that we can track different efforts that are going on so we can see if there are improvements in the state. We can now see of the 46 counties, how many have ranked diabetes at their top efforts. So then we at the state level, we can help bring in resources that are gonna go to the community. So we're getting more tools to be able to do our job a little bit better in South Carolina. So we're really excited about those opportunities as we haven't had those before and they're doing this in North Carolina. So we have a blueprint, kind of what has worked in North Carolina and we can certainly refine it and improve it for South Carolina. I think that we were probably, two years ago when Pam was leading us through this Baton Rouge situation, they did chronic conditions. They had diabetes and they had a committee working on that particular thing. Your program would provide the data to show whether the most chronic of the chronics for the city of Columbia or the Richland County. Yeah, absolutely. And I know there's Healthy Tri-County down in the Charleston area and they're set up the same way. They have different committees working on the different priorities that came out of their community health assessment. So certainly I think that could be a great opportunity moving forward. So I see here that you have the summit coming up in a couple of weeks. Yes. And did wanna flag for my colleagues the great health equity pledge that you all take as you've shifted some of your efforts towards advancing health equity. Yeah, so one of the couple things that you're a pledge to, but you as an individual can also make this pledge. So you can go to our site at healthiersc.org to find out more about developing a kind of learning collaborative where we're gonna be very intentional about making connection with folks at the community level to our state level folks because they need to hear from the community directly. And so we're being more intentional about making that community and state level connection. So we're in the process now developing what that learning collaborative of community wherever you wanna call it, what it looks like. But it's gonna be a place to learn how do you help those who need help the most, but also how do you influence changes specifically at the policy level. So there's a couple of things that tangible things that we're gonna be doing going forward. And then the other part that we're, the other thing that we're doing is the opportunity to provide education awareness. We're specifically looking at intersection of health equity and mental health. So got a community level, community level leaders, state level and national level leaders will be attending that conference. Could be a good opportunity for some of us to attend as well. You all? Yep, and I talked about the state health improvement plan. Certainly provides a blueprint for our state, but we'll have a database that we can keep up with all the great work that's going on across our state and help deploy resources to the right places. I think that sums it up. So my question to you both is, is this something that you would, you think that we should recommend we as a city get involved in the alliance? Yeah. Certainly, this is a statewide organization and we can need to pattern it after what we need in Columbia. And I like the Baton Rouge program, which fits in real nicely with that. Montez's organization could help us pinpoint which are the top five thing. And the thing about the Baton Rouge plan is scalable. Yep. You might start off with two or three. Priority here is, yeah. As those committees get up and work in here, say, well, we've got two or three other problems over here, let's get a committee working on that. The key to it, I think, is having the executive team include the leadership of the smaller teams so that they can communicate with the statewide organization to get funds and to use the dashboard. We love dashboards. Yeah, absolutely. That's one of the things we help with too. So we get information about grant opportunities and other ways to fund the work that's going on. So we certainly will be a resource there and as a resource to build a local coalition as well. But the other thing, Dr. Boster, the other thing that I think is no great, I think, yeah, we need to move forward with this. One of the things that I like is that you look at the 46 counties in South Carolina, and bridging all of that information into one, for lack of a better word, general hub. Yep. It gives us a more, it gives us a better picture and a better look at what's going on locally in the municipalities everywhere. The other side of that, Pam, I think it gives us an opportunity to go back and revisit the micro in a small way, that whole issue of what we did in New Orleans. We backed off of that for another emphasis, another direction. But it was certainly to be good that we could perhaps. Sure. Thank you, man. Thank you, Monty. Great, thank you so much. Please feel free to reach out if y'all have any questions. Thank y'all. All right, we've done our social, we've done our health, and now we'll move into environmental and we'll pass it over to Ms. Dana Higgins to give us a overview of washable utility marking paint, which hopefully is as exciting as it sounds. Thank you, Dr. Bussells. You can take Shin up here. I guess we'll hold up for a minute. Okay, thank you for letting me come today to talk about utility marking paint, just to give you a little bit of background. I know constituents sometimes contact you as council people, about what the purpose and background and what kind of control we have over that. So we're here to kind of talk a little bit about that. So the different colors for each utility is dictated by our APWA uniform color code. So the paint markings are color coded based on what type of utility. So electric would be yellow for, we have blue for water, green for sewer for the city of Columbia. That's typically what we mark, but then you'll see the other paint markings, pink typically when there's Tebre survey markings, some of our capital improvement program projects, but then you also have electric and gas. There are two type of paint materials, one solvent based and one water based. The city uses water based, but like Dominion uses solvent based. So diving into a little bit more about what we have control over as a city, we researched with legal and in June of 2012, the underground facility damage prevention act was passed. And part of the reason they passed this is for contractors digging, excavating underground to have a central notification center to notify of the location, giving utilities an opportunity to mark their utilities before they put their backhoe in the ground. And the requirements of this law, this act is for utilities to go out and mark their utilities are given three full business days. And on the fourth day, the contractor is allowed to start digging. So as a utility, we go out and mark our water and sewer lines within those three day windows. As a utility that also has water line breaks, we wait till the fourth day before we dig so that other utilities can mark their lines. And the requirement is for the paint markings to last 15 working days. They have to last 15 working days. Another important part of this law is that as a municipality, we cannot pass a local ordinance requiring what type of paint these utilities are marking with and we can't make them wash them off after a certain period of time. So that was definitely something we were looking into hoping that we might have a little bit more control. But unfortunately, this law had already thought of it and we don't have that opportunity. But what we are working on is, the city uses water-based paint to mark our own utilities as water and sewer. And we request that utilities working within the city limits also use water-based. On our utility application permit, we have a statement and that's highlighted below. We worked with legal on this. We prefer for you to remove your utility part paint after construction and we would prefer for you to also use water-based. But unfortunately, there's not, we can't say shall just because of that Damage Prevention Act. And one other thing that we are doing is looking into other paints. Right now ours is water-based, but typically that last one to two months, solvent-based I think is more closer to four to six months. There is some materials out there we're looking into that will meet the 15 day working period, but also maybe we can remove it after that construction period. So that's something that we're sampling now. So that's just the update, just short and sweet and I'm happy to answer any questions or yes. Dana, when you call Pups, does Pup, do they come out and mark all of the utilities or just the electric commit thing? You have to go out and mark water and sewer. So Pups is the central notification center that was created as part of the 2012 Prevention Act. Pups sends out to all their members, which is us and Dominion, all the utilities are members, they get a ticket request. Okay, in this location, a contractor's gonna be digging. So then we have to deploy our utility markers to go out there and paint the lines. So the Pups people just tell you go mark. Yes sir, they're the notification center. For example, you said that Dominion obviously works very closely with us, but they continue to use solvent even though we encourage water. We do encourage water-based. That is something that we're actually starting to have discussions about a little bit deeper just because of the need that has been presented to us from council, solvent-based. So oil-based basically, yeah. What types of questions, are you all getting questions from constituents about the paint? I have not yet. Of course. I'm just curious what it is. Well, I'll go back to my experience. We built this beautiful building on Gervais Street, 1411 Gervais Street. We were in it about two days and then they came by and marked on the sidewalk out front, one end to the other with solvent-based paint that stayed there for probably a year. Months, yeah. Yes sir. And that was my, I reckon my first experience they gotta have something else that will wash out quicker than that because you look around the city right now, all the telecommunication companies that are burying these lines all over the city, go cross over here to where we're working on the emergency communications center. There's lines everywhere, yep. Yeah, that's right. It's full of markets. Absolutely. So we'll do our best to work with our partners. Unfortunately, we can't require them to use the water base, but certainly we are gonna try to work with them and ask. Typically a preemption of the local authority to control their own right supply. Home rule. Thank you, Dana. Thank you so much. Any other questions? Thank you. All right, I will take a motion to adjourn. Move we adjourn. Second. All right, let the referendum reflect. We all agree.