 Well, good morning everyone. Welcome to I have lost track of what number meeting this is, but welcome to the Durham Recovery and Renewal Task Force meeting for July 24. We want to just start by once again thanking everyone here and all of the members of our roundtables for the really incredible diligent work that has continued week over week and really appreciate it. We've got a very full agenda today, including what I think will be a really, really good dialogue around budget and budget proposals. So we want to go ahead and dive right in. And we'll start with Mayor Schuyl and Commissioner chair Jacobs. Wendy why don't you start us off this morning. Okay, great. Thank you, Steve. Well, good morning everybody on this rainy morning always great to to end the week with this really wonderful group and again I appreciate everybody and I hate to say that I'm, I'm, I'm sad thinking about we're getting closer to that 100 days. So, but I, when I think back about the past week, and I'm thinking about what we've all been asking Rod to do. The word that comes to mind for me is, I was thinking about this last night slow and steady wins the race. I kind of feel that that's how we, we're at we were holding steady in terms of our numbers and I know Rod will talk more about that. I saw the Duke epidemiological data last night and it's great to see that, whereas our yesterday, our rate of growth was 1% and the state was 2.1%. And that's really significant that here in Durham County thanks to the measures that we put in place early on and things that everyone's doing really the actions of everybody in our community, our businesses are our employers, and everyone in that's doing working so hard public health community groups members of this task force around tables, it is paying off. And that is really important to keep the perspective of what's happening around us. And, you know, in terms of our seven day average and things like that which which Rob will talk about. Again, I think we're we're holding steady or maybe even seeing a trend of slightly declining. So that's great news. I was downtown this this Thursday and I felt like I saw more activity. It was great to see the restaurants moving outside. I got takeout from a restaurant but I saw people sitting in one of the city green spaces having having their customers sitting outside. So that was really exciting to see that that transition. And, you know, we know that back on the bulls expanding will hear more about that and strengthening. And we had a meeting with NCC you, which was really important that Katie will talk about as we we start moving towards our students coming back into town. The distribution for the nonprofits at the county has been leading has been incredibly successful. And there was a little bit of a social media campaign around that. But I think that it to me this is a proof of a strategy of how we get resources out to the community, because the data that we received about the mask distribution is that it will be the 100,000 masks will be going to majority, you know, vulnerable members of our community and to people of color in our community, the black community, Latin X community. So I think working through community groups is this has been, you know, really effective. We had a little equitable convening this week. The mayor and I were both involved with and again, the community is helping to really lead this digital Durham. And they are ambitious they want to have a plan within the next two months. And again this is going to be an important part of our, how we educate our children but also how we make sure that people get connected to jobs and training. And also healthcare. So that is exciting and we have the Durham Public Schools Foundation leading the hope network and Jeff is a part of that as well. Other good news we found I found out just two days ago. The FDA is extending their waiver for the SNAP program through the end of August, August 31. So, sometimes it works when we make our voices known and so that's really great news. Also good news the state is launching their energy assistance program. This is very important because the the waiver on utility payments will be coming to an end. There's a lot of concern about people not being able to pay their power bills and also other great news. The city and the county. Thanks to the city for approving this yesterday at your work session are going to be working together to distribute. Is it. What is the amount, Steve the total amount. I know it's going to be up to $6,000 of rental assistance per resident who is one million $50,000 because the total. That's so that's fantastic that we will have that to for the city for our DSS staff to distribute to people in need of rental assistance. We do need our state and federal government though to step up we have a lot of aid packages that are really waiting on our state and federal leaders that are critical for the ongoing support that we need. But that is things that I can think of and Steve anything else please please chime in and fill in. And I look forward to the next step with us which is how we can also provide further local assistance which will be discussing today. Thank you Wendy you did a great job hitting the hot points I'll just add a couple of very brief things one is, you reminded me that the city did approve two other important expenditures yesterday on an expedited basis. One is the roughly $500,000 for additional rapid rehousing funds for to be administered through housing for new hope, because because we're the we're depopulating the homeless hotel and urban ministries needs to have social distance we're really trying to provide more people into permanent supportive housing are rather into rapid rehousing into permanent homes and so we're spending more money on that, which is great. And then we also allocated about $100,000 to support case management for homeless people who are covered positive. So those expenditures were allocated yesterday. So, I think really that's all I have to say I think Wendy did a great job covering it and looking forward to the rest of today's meeting and especially our budget discussion so thank you. Terrific. Thank you both very much. Great overview of the again really incredible work going on. I can give a brief update on NC central and the meeting that we had with NC central which was a great meeting and I have to just say, you know, I am so impressed with the thought that they've put into their planning and they have a very thorough plan. I was so impressed with the thought that went into Durham public schools. And when I think about the logistics of trying to bring back students and how to do that in a safe way it, it's a daunting task. But again, and NC central I think has done a really nice job with their plans. So let me just briefly overview those plans classes begin August 24 and the semester will end on November 24. So right before Thanksgiving, they will have mixed modes of class delivery with 65% of classes online and the rest either hybrid or in person. They're following all CDC guidelines everyone will be required to wear a face mask, including in the dorms in the residence halls students living in sweets will be considered a family unit. And so they're currently at 85% occupancy for the dorms. No visitation will be allowed includes including visiting room to room. I'm still not exactly sure how that will work in practice but that is that is the plan and and not visiting in other dorms. Move in will be phased in from August 4 to the 23rd with students students arriving by appointment by hall by floor in no more than 10 students moving in at once, and only one helper per student. Testing and contact tracing has been outsourced to a company called apex solutions, and they will actually have a physician on campus to help manage and to collaborate with the health department. They've been assured NC central has been assured of a 48 hour turnaround for test results, which is actually a pretty good turnaround time so that's great. They're, they considered testing students as often as every three days but after reviewing that with health experts they decided against that and instead they will test them out of 10% per week through random sampling. And the biggest challenge they anticipate is that they have some students are who are starting to withdraw from student housing because they're concerned that part way through the semester there could be a closing of the campus, and everything could shift to online and they're wanting to stay in the area so they're moving to off off campus housing. And of course there is less time to monitor compliance with things like wearing face covering social distancing, etc. When students are in off campus housing so that that is one of the two challenges they really identified and the other is is just financial. As you can imagine, as as as with all of our businesses and and institutions of higher education also have have to manage and be able to maintain the margin to be able to reinvest and so financially, all institutions of higher education have taken a hit and so those are the two challenges but they are meeting them and and working really diligently. They've been in discussions with Duke and UNC and are looking to collaborate as well. With both of those institutions so I thought it was a really good meeting. And again, was pretty impressed with their plan. Any questions that folks have. There's certainly a lot more detail they reviewed we we met for a little over an hour with them, but those are the highlights. Okay. Do you have any other co chairs updates before we go into metrics. No additional updates for me. All right, so before I turn it over to Rod, let me just give you the hospital metrics for the week. So currently 72 COVID positive between Duke regional and Duke University Hospital, our seven day average is 80 that is up from 70 last week so we have seen some higher hospitalizations in the last seven days. And currently we are at 88% occupancy between both hospitals and 6% of our patients are COVID positive. And then, as of last night 19 we're requiring ICU level care. Any questions on that. If not, I will turn it over to Rod to give us an update on the overall metrics for Durham. Good morning to everyone. Thank you, Katie for that valuable data. And as usual, I'll give some metrics and then certainly solicit evacuees input expert input from Duke epidemiology epidemiological perspective so I think it's worth noting that within the US we are slowly creeping toward a milestone that is pretty deplorable. We're getting close to 4 million total cases of COVID. We're currently standing 3,952,273, and as we have seen in the news, Southwest Southeast, and we're starting to see spikes in the Northeast who's been doing a fantastic job of COVID. So, so I fully expect that we'll be at 4 million very soon. Total number of deaths 142,755, and that's within the United States, then the great state of North Carolina was still sitting at 106,893 cases. Earlier this week, I believe it was we we we tipped over 100,000 cases for North Carolina, resulting in 1,726 deaths. In Durham County, we continue to hold the line. We have 532 active cases. 4,750 Durhamites have been discharged from care. Now at 76 deaths, we did see a number of deaths from individuals who were hospitalized for long periods of time. And our hearts goes out to the family of those Durhamites. And our total numbers since the beginning of the pandemic is 5,359 total cases of COVID in Durham County. Also, always want to remind everyone about contacts and contact tracing that continues to go extremely well between Durham County Department of Public Health and our CCNC partners, we've made well over 10,434 contacts. And we continue to do extremely well with our partnership with Duke and the Hilton site and referring those contacts for testing. So we started off the week on July the 20th with 5,132 cases which represented 484 increase in cases and as we know, until the pandemic slows down we're going to continue to see the cases increase. However, our seven day moving average did remain the same, which was 68 cases. And we are hopeful, extremely hopeful that that will continue to be the case. Small victories will definitely take them. I think it's important to tell the community that we're really proud of you because my staff and I had been waiting with bated breath on the numbers to show up from 4th of July activities. I think they got tired of me asking them, particularly the surveillance team like where's the bump where we're we're seeing some spikes and they just said we haven't seen him Mr. Jenkins so that just means that Durhamites were listening and they were covering their faces and socially distancing at gatherings and everything so I'm so proud of this community for just being obedient and following those public health measures. So far in the month of July, we have seen 1345 cases. So North Carolina's trajectory of lab confirmed cases continues to increase in terms. We continue to see slight increases but we are holding the law. As far as I was in that work. I know we have a lot to do this meeting. So I'll be very brief. Nothing much has changed. We continue to see half of our cases, evolving our Latinx population, we continue to work extremely hard with advocating and getting the word out to our Hispanic and Latinx population in reference to COVID. We continue to be overrepresented in our numbers at 54.8%. Black or African American community in Durham continues to be underrepresented at 23.3% of all of our cases, and our white community continues to be very underrepresented at 14.8% of all of our cases. I'm proud to report that through our tireless efforts, we're not really missing any ethnicity data, and we're not missing hardly any race data because we continue to come through every medical record to ensure that we get that data. As far as the industry that remains the same for this week, construction, unemployed, individual and hospital workers with our Hispanic and Latinx population representing the most as far as unemployed individuals who are female, 75.1% of those were female total unemployed cases that we saw were 60.7%. In terms of construction industry, we continue to work hard with this particular industry, 90.2% were associated with construction work of the Hispanic or Latinx population representing 93.5% of the males. 41.3% of our cases with hospital workers were Black or African American and 70% were female. So we continue to have work to be done in that particular sector. As far as surveillance, we do believe that we are hovering at roughly about a 9% positive test prevalence rate, that's cumulative. We had 11% in our assured population for last week, and 4% positive test prevalence in our community base. We were a little taken back by the 4% because it represented a decrease from 13% last week. And we attributed that to the nationwide reagent shortage and testing shortage that state and federal officials continue to work on. We certainly hope that we are hopeful with this activity in Congress as far as billions of dollars being talked about being appropriated for testing. It looks promising. So we certainly will keep our eye out. As we say, zip code 27704 continues to be the highest zip codes within Durham County with the highest case rate at 26.29 per 1000 individuals. And we still see stretches of Hamlin Road, Gear Street, Cheek Street, parts of Bractown, Colonial Village, and the Merrick Moore neighborhood. As Chair Jacob has indicated, Duke's model looks favorable to Durham County. Again, the rate for North Carolina's growth was 2.1%, where Durham's growth rate was 1%. And overall infections had grown 15% for the state of North Carolina, whereas in Durham, the infection rate has grown 10%. Ladies and gentlemen, we continue this particular fight. We continue to partner with Katie and her staff. We're so grateful to them as far as standing up the whole site. That continues to be a great partnership where we focus on the whole Durham resident where we're doing the testing, we're providing the food, we're providing the education. We're also providing face coverings. So it's a whole approach that is garnering great accolades from the state. Last week, we were able to see 175 total individuals. On Saturday alone, we saw 80 tests completed. And so far this week, we've seen 72 individuals with 18 presenting COVID positive results and 54 were non-detected. So we continue to do great work with our partners. And I will now turn it over to Dr. Ibeke Akambuyo for additional commentary. Thank you. Mr. Rod, you were a little muffled for me for the most part, but I got all the key parts. So again, thank you for all the hard work you're doing. And I think the general consensus is local data suggests that all of the efforts we've put over the last weeks, months are slowly paying off, but we do need to continue. One thing I know we've talked offline about this before the group to be aware, they're more and more floating questions about children and schools. And as a whole, we may need to start to consider what parts of our data can inform this or their discussion points we need to be aware of. But overall, again, very well done. I have not much to add. We can address questions, of course. Are there any questions? I have a question, Dr. Akambuyo. The Duke data is now tracking the pediatric infections. And I guess it is concerning to see, to see the number of young children. It seems like that's where the predominance of the positive cases are zero to five. Is that, is that, can you speak a little bit about the trends that you're seeing with that data? Thank you for that question. And for just a brief clarifying point, this is all Durham's data. This was Rod's team. And I just want to praise them, including Tara Buckley for all the work that's been done to share data at such granular level that we can think through each subcategory of our population. Specifically, that the data you're talking about has not been included in the weekly report and it's looking at the same numbers, but focusing on children in different age groups, so zero to five elementary ages, and some of our teenagers, all of this kids are less than 18. And the goal here was to see what the pattern of increase has been and potentially predict what might happen in the next three to four months. And what we noticed was that in the, in the age group, zero to five, presumably, as we all know if you have toddlers around, they're least likely to physical to be physically distant from you, and most likely being picked up by all the adults in the household. We've seen the highest increase in that age group. Overall numbers in Durham at the last time we looked at this was still less than about I think it was 350 to 400. That was early in July so this may have increased right now. What we think this reflects is that as we saw increased household infections and increased adult infections, younger children were more likely to pick it up. In this context, we haven't seen a rapid spike in children being hospitalized for severe COVID-19. So it does seem that some of them are handling this well and are recovering. That being said, we, it's an early warning that community prevalence and community infection rates matter a lot. Thank you. There are other questions. I guess I would just add that maybe we should include that in our reports now just in terms of thinking about, you know, schools and how we are supporting our children and our youth in the weeks ahead. So it might be good to start including that. And I didn't know that broad that your team was really responsible for that. Thank you. Hopefully I made a, I made a note to myself to make sure we include this data madam chair and others. Oh, we do is just facilitate the connection. Great. Well, thank you both. Really good report. Just for some additional information from our entertainment venues roundtable and you'll recall we were talking about proposal about two weeks ago around what's the, the earliest date by which we would consider having large events in Durham. And so Susan has an update from that group and I think they have a good proposal for us. Well, thank you. I appreciate that. Yes, we had entertainment events and cultural venues roundtable yesterday. And we had great representation we've had dozens of different venues and groups involved in this discussion and the one of the things that strikes you in talking with them is the enormity of the range of different kinds of activities and venues. Ticketed theater theater style event then events to classroom settings to in there's indoor and outdoor wedding seated dinners. It's just huge and so as we've tried to identify what kind of protocols or what kind of checklist could you put together for this. You just realize you can't create one checklist that's going to work for all of these different activities. So, instead we start thinking about what's the approach or what kind of guidance can we give that is going to allow these venues to start operating again. We know that there's some their massive events that happen in Durham and elsewhere, where there isn't going to be a way to do it safely for quite a while maybe until there's a vaccine. There's a lot of others. The range is such that they're smaller ones that fit certain criteria that could allow for excellent social distancing and contact traceability and safety protocols. So, we started thinking about well how can we tackle this and and provide a recommended approach for ushering events back into Durham safely over the coming months. And how can we use the collective wisdom and creativity of the group and the existence of those is very striking when you sit with this group, so that we can be in safely. So, in anticipation of government orders that allow for events and we'll come back to the recommendation on when that might happen. Here's the path that we'd like to follow. We'd like to establish an advisory team. We already have a volunteers for that represent a wide range of events and event venues. I think it would be wise to add someone from Department of Health or someone who can advise from a medical standpoint to that group. And then we as we talked about what are the planning categories that any event should consider. And we came up with sex. There's one is capacity traffic management guest accommodations are the physical traffic flow of people. One spud and beverage COVID specific health and safety practices which would be in air airflow and some other components, employee preparedness, back of house and performer management. And then enforcement and accountability and one of the things that's really challenging for this area is that there are places where there's an owner of the venue who schedules an event so they have control of the whole thing. But in many cases they're actually renting their facility to a third party and then in that case who's responsible for enforcement. The event owner may have it could be a wedding party. They don't know how to enforce this. So how do you ensure that there are clear guidelines for accountability and how whatever practices are put in place to enforce. So what we'd like to do is with this event advisory team in place. This group to identify the first 10 events that are being proposed, which presumably would come over the fall. And let those be a pilot program. The idea is that each event owner drafts a plan that addresses those six categories that I just said, talked about, and then brings that to this event. Guidance team or advisory team that would meet with the event owner, walk through it together and talk about what other options or suggestions there might be for improving the safety of that event. And then after each one of those events, there'd be a postmortem that would also be conducted to evaluate what did we learn what might have arisen and what insights can we glean that could be used for future events. The intent of this would is not about providing permitting for the events, but really empowering the community of venue and event owners who are highly motivated to get this right as you can imagine. If there were an event that created hotspot that would seriously affect their ability to go forward, but help them help each other using their collective wisdom and insights to plan for these first events. So that's how we'd like to approach it. When should events return? Well, in fact, some events could be held right now and could be just as safe or safer than a restaurant that operates at 50% capacity or a retail store in which shoppers wear masks. One of the examples we talked about is the convention center has 30,000 square feet, but they still can't have more than 10 people in it. And that's really kind of arbitrary if a restaurant that has 2,000 square feet could have more than that number of people in it potentially. So it's not that they can't open safely, it's just a matter of which events and under what circumstances. And also some events can't afford to operate at reduced capacity, but there are some who could and those are the ones who are especially anxious to move this forward. So we'd recommend that events and activities that could meet the current phase two expectations around social distancing and PPE be allowed to return as soon as possible with numbers that might be greater than 10. But with the group size defined by what the venue capacity is and based on what the event is that's inside of it. And then we can look at how to scale that up over time. I think there's still a question here about I understand there are the governor's orders right now that prevent indoor events of more than 10 people. We can certainly continue to develop some recommendations for how large an event we think could be accommodated. But what the group has been looking at is, once the governor's orders and local orders allow for larger events. They want to stand ready to plan for those and and some of this is as you know a group event. You don't lift the orders and then the next event start. We often we're trying to plan two or three months in advance. So if we can have some allowance that it's okay to plan events for two or three months out with the expectation that if they're planned safely we can go higher than 10 people indoors. That's going to help this group open up. There were some other the other comments that came from this group had to do with support that they might like from the city or county. But in looking at the budget proposals the one the risk mitigation fund already anticipates some things like that like hand sanitizing stations would be something that might help be helpful if there were some available equipment for that. And what we can talk about that a little further. I think another issue when we get into some specifics around enforcement is whether it would be helpful to have any officers or some of the groups that we've talked about that could be ambassador on site to help encourage guests to follow the guidelines. So that's where we are right now based on the kind of this came out of our conversation yesterday so it's pretty fresh. I'm sure there are a lot of that need to be worked out still. But that's how we'd like to tackle this. Any feedback or questions on that. Susan. You at a different meeting yesterday you gave some figures about the way the hospitality industry had been hit. I thought it might be useful for this group just hear the couple of big numbers. I can't remember if you told us that last week or not. During the economic recovery discussion but could you just mention those because I think it would be really important for the group to understand the magnitude of the hit. We measure visitor volume in Durham and economic impact and we update those numbers each year. In 2019 Durham had 12.8 million visitors who spent about $932 million and they generated about $106 million in state and local taxes. The forecast for 2020 based on what's happened is that we will have will go from 12.8 million visitors to 7.4 and 553 million of spending which is a loss of 425 million for hospitality businesses in Durham. The loss will be about 48 million. The Durham Labor data shows that we've lost 9000 hospitality jobs which is more than any other segment. By far I think the next segment down was manufacturing that lost about 28% of jobs. The lodging revenue is projected so the hotel revenue is projected to be like 29% next year and not returning to part until 2024. I don't think there's any question that the hospitality as a sector has been hit more than any other and when we talk about hospitality we're talking lodging restaurants, transportation, attractions and entertainment and some retail that is visitor facing. So those are our rough numbers. It's not a pretty picture. And is part of why we want to figure out can allow events and activities to come back that attract visitors. We also think that this approach the advisory team approach for events and venues could be applied potentially to sporting events a little later on and when I say sporting events I'm not talking about the bulls necessarily but I'm talking about all the different sporting activities that that happen around town. Bulls are way more sophisticated George. I just wanted to say Susan that I really appreciate the approach that the group has come up with. You know, it's, you know, I think it's, I think it's a fantastic approach. As you have said, there isn't a one size fits all. And I really like the idea that, that you're all empowering yourselves, and also the support with the approach that you've laid out. So, I think it sounds great. And, you know, in a way it's it's it can be applied to really any of the, any of the sectors that we're dealing with right now. And that's why the roundtables are so important, because each group are really the experts in that area. And I'm wondering, Rod, do you feel like I heard Susan say that it would be helpful to have somebody from public health in some capacity be be a part of the advisory group. The staff is just stretched really thin but do you feel like you have somebody who could be be a part of that. Absolutely Madam Chair I did. I did jot down some notes about some individuals what I thought would be great. There's a lot of concerns of from our environmental health section I mean I know that stretch but at the same time this is important, and the numbers that she just see she put down as far as a loss of 400 million that that got my attention really quick. So, yes, man, we'll find a way to make it work. Yeah, I have a question for. Well, I'll pose it to Rod what what do you think the, what would the trigger be to, to allow this I mean to have this incorporated in an order at some point, what do you think it would require a decline in, in the spread of the virus, or just sustain leveling might be adequate. I'd say sustain leveling. I hear the side of caution because again, what we've seen across the nation is individuals, be it funerals, you know, which they don't socially distance be it birthday parties for grandma who just turned 80. Those events that trigger your heartstrings and you know, you, you, you, you, you throw to the wind, you know all public health measures. Those are the things that can cause clusters. And I think on my weekly message. Last week, I did note that in Catawba County it was a situation similar to this to where there was a family gathering they did in social socially distance to put it short. So 41 individuals got COVID in that one event, and it affected businesses it affected, you know, you know, personal families eight different families cross generations so we just want to be very, very careful with this. And again, the recommendation of having somebody from public health or the ambassador team that we're proposing would be helpful because you know you would have that individual who would be on guard. But to answer your question George, I would want to see some sustained level of, you know, leveling off if you will, it'd be even better to see it see a significant decline, but realistically speaking with everything that's going on in the Southwest and the southeast. We would just have to wait and see. Thank you. Can also offer just one thought about that George. So, you know, we're limited now by the state order. And so, I think one of the difficulties we face is that the state as a whole is not doing as well as Durham at this point, and has such different situations across, you know, so so the governor's trying to prevent people from coming unmasked from these two racetracks. And so there's a blanket rule that covers the state now. What I wish, and I hope that, you know, we could maybe get to this with the state is to is some opportunity to kind of try some things very safely and then iterate on those. With a state with a blanket state. Rule. It makes it really hard. It makes it impossible to do that. So I think that that's some discussion that we need to have going forward with the state. One of the things I think about I'll just give you an example is Rodney wine coup. Wanted to have a coral event where everybody remained in their car. And he thought there'd be 100 people, they would all be in separate cars, and they would sing, and he would be I guess at the front with a microphone. This seems like something good to try. I mean people, I think we need to be doing all the things that we can will help people live as happily and as normally as possible, even though singing in your car might not be normal. It's more for those people it's more normal than not singing at all. I just think going forward it would be good to have some discussions with the state about how to try to create some windows and opportunities to figure out ways to be together safely, see how it goes and then, and then, you know, iterate on what we thought. And that's something we do well here. You know shout out to Ryan and his team at the end and the Center for Advanced Hindsight you know we know how to do a lot of that in Durham. And I wish that we could figure out a way to work with the state on that that's something that I hope that Wendy and I and our public health folks can, you know, once things settle a little begin to have some discussions. The other thing I would add is that we know with Rod's example that the biggest fear is actually the unstructured events, and that when you, you know, even when we look at where where infections happen like on job sites. We've seen that with construction it's not so much when people are working but it's when they're having lunch or when they're driving to work so. The other thing to think about with the events is, you know, how they're structured because it seems like when things are structured. Then that is safer. And so how do we, you know, you know, whether it's having having the ambassadors who are circulating and reminding people, you know, okay. So I think that that also is what we're seeing with behavior is, is that, um, you know, I'm sorry, that was very much what we were talking about an event in which people mingle carrying alcohol is the last going to be the last event that comes back, but where people are seated and registered for the event and you know who they are and the program those can operate pretty safely so those are some of the things we want to look at. Unfortunately, no cocktail parties for quite a while. Well this is terrific. Susan thanks for your leadership and thanks for everything the roundtable has has worked on really thoughtful approach to this so thank you. A big topic for the day I'm going to turn it over to Matisha to lead us through a budget discussion. Alrighty. Thanks Katie. Happy Friday, everyone. So in alignment with one of our guiding principles, which is acting with a sense of urgency. We've pulled together this budget process to provide us with a way to lift up promising ideas that that have surfaced from our work and our engagement with the community. Now by no means are we going to say this budget process is perfect. I think it's pretty good. I think we put together a pretty good process. But we put this together and hopes to keep some of the important work that we're working on moving along because we don't want the work to stall. But before we start talking about the budget proposals that have been put forth. I do want to acknowledge that there is already a lot of important work and investments that our local governance governments are making that's crucial for Durham's recovery and renewal. And I thought it was important for us just to take a moment to reflect on some of that work, because as we evaluate the budget proposals that we have here today, as well as budget proposals that may come forth. We need to keep in mind that there is other work that's happening and we need to figure out if there's ways that we can leverage some of this work. So I'm going to share a little insight into that work. And this is by no means meant to be a list of all the work that's happening at our local government. But I'm just going to start with public health and I'm honored that we had Rod that's part of the task force because that team has been heavily focused on providing expertise, providing thoughts on testing, trying to secure additional contact tracers. That team has been very busy helping support our recovery efforts. I sent Rod an email last week and I got an automatic reply that said, my life is 100% dedicated to COVID-19 right now. I don't have time to respond to your email. He said it a lot more professionally than that, but it really resonated with me because that Rod and his team, they're very, very busy making sure that they help Durham do the right thing. And I will say, while I did get that auto reply, Rod responded to my email within 10 minutes. So thank you, Rod. Some additional work that's happening from a local government perspective and this centers on our vulnerable populations. So a lot of time and funding is being spent on feeding the hungry and combat and food insecurity, which I think is great. You know, that includes making sure that the children are being fed, as well as our homeless population, including our seniors. A lot of investments have been made in sheltering or homeless and working to reduce their risk of exposure to COVID-19. I think we've had some conversations within the task force about, you know, setting up hotels and how do we create reduced capacity for congregate shelters. There's also been work and providing PPE, PPE for our first responders, long-term care facilities, nonprofits, community members who can't afford face coverings. And we've had many, many conversations about additional work that we're doing also to provide face coverings. There's been work centered on ensuring our public facilities are ready to serve residents, including increased sanitation and establishing screenings at facilities. A lot of work focused on residents that return from prison, just making sure that they're able to go into quarantine, providing peer support and cell phones so that they can connect to services remotely. And just providing them care packages to help them transition during this very difficult time. There's been work around helping residents to access federal stimulus payments by holding outdoor clinics at public housing and getting a free tax prep site set up and running to serve low income residents. So that's just a snapshot into some of the great work that's already happening. I do want to acknowledge that Durham County did receive approximately $4.5 million in CARES Act funds, and those funds have already been spent. And the current projection anticipates that we'll need at least twice what we receive in those funds just to cover what the city and county are already doing to respond to this crisis. So I just wanted to share that so that we all have some awareness into great work that's happening in Durham. It makes me feel good to be a resident of Durham, knowing that that work is happening from a local government perspective, but also that we have a task force that's bringing forward some additional things that can be done to help us recover and renew here in Durham. Because as I talked about the $5.4 million in the CARES Act funding and the anticipation that we're going to need twice as much. There's a lot more work to be done and work from the perspective of needing folks time and talent, but also just needing funds that we have access to to continue to move on work along. So I'm going to start with the budget proposals that have been submitted. And the ultimate goal of what we want to do here today is go through those budget proposals. And I'm going to share with you the recommendation that's come from the subcommittee and ultimately just want to get the overall task force support and buy in to move this recommendation forward to Mayor Shull and Chair Jacobs. But if you recall, we, you know, we put together a process, the budget proposals were submitted by this past Monday, and a subcommittee did meet on Wednesday to review, discuss and score the proposals based on predefined criteria. Thank you. Thanks to Polar, Ibukan, Ryan, Katie, and Jim Groves from the Emergency Operations Center for pouring over the information submitted, asking some great questions and helping shape up the recommendation that I'll share as we go through the proposals and as we go through the proposals go through the score and certainly welcome any and all questions that you have because as I mentioned do want your support to move this recommendation forward. So to get us started and Ryan helped us out quite a bit when we met on Wednesday. So, I've asked Ryan, if he could just queue up each of the budget proposal so just give some additional context around the proposal. You guys have the packages hopefully you've had an opportunity to read through all the packages but I'll just acknowledge I've read through the budget proposals time and time again and each time I read the proposal. And I didn't see that the first or second or third time. So Ryan, if you would just start with the very first one will go through the score and and we'll use that approach to go through all of the budget proposals will talk about the recommendation, but certainly want to address any questions or concerns that you have as we go through each proposal. Thank you. Can everyone hear me okay. Yes. So I'll start with the back on the bull communications plan, and Susan may want to add a couple of additional points here. We talked about this proposal a week or two ago, as you know that we, the task force has been working hard on the back on the bull campaign. We developed it with over $100,000 and pro bono consulting and work from McKinney and Duke Center for advanced hindsight and others. And really to fully leverage that to make sure that both our businesses and our residents are aware of the tool that they're using it as a tool to help us reopen and stay open. The, the big picture goal or target reach for the communications plan is to reach 300,000 residents at least six times through the through the detailed plan that's laid out in Susan and her teams. And that's a really thoughtful communications plan. I will say that this plan has been developed. Certainly in large part by the leadership of Susan and discover Durham, but also in close collaboration with many other communications experts in our community. We have a team from the DDI from we have the public health information officer Alicia on our team. We have numerous other folks from Duke and Susan can name them all because now I'm just going to forget them, but we have a group that meets weekly with communication experts across our community who have been a part of these conversations and developing this very thoughtful plan. But at a big picture what this money gets us is six at least six touches with 300,000 people that's the ambitious goal that we're going. We know that we're going to have to people are going to have to hear about this in multiple different ways and multiple times. And Susan and her team have laid out a very thoughtful approach for how we can get there. And the, I think the consequence of not doing that is that we'll have a very thoughtful and some ways unique tool out there with the back on the bullet health and safety checklist. That many businesses may end up not being aware of, or residents won't know to use and consult to figure out which places are safe to visit but Susan, would you like to add any other brief. Remarks about it. And thank you for your leadership on. Well, thank you, Ryan. And no, that was great. I the one other thing I would want to point out is that there is a lot of focus in this plan on how we reach. The other piece of this committee that's been so important is the consulting input from Tilde and others who have helped us with how to target the Hispanic community in Durham. And so what you see is a lot of focus. The messages are available in Spanish and going out through Spanish media. Thank you for that Susan. Thank you, Ryan. And so I'll just ask before we jump to the score and were there any questions that you guys had as you went through the actual proposal. Okay, here are no questions. I think Amber is going to project the score and rubric because I think it might just be easier for us to all see that at the same time so amber can you project that for me please. Excellent. We're going to focus on columns F, so if you slide over just a little bit amber, and I'll quickly step through the criteria that we use because one of the things that we did do when we when the subcommittee came together before we got into scoring we spent sort of just asking questions about the actual proposals to make sure that we were all speaking from the same set of facts and so once we got those questions addressed we moved over to our criteria. And looking at column F, we focused on, you know, how does this budget proposal help us reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission. And we use a scoring system of one to four with one being strongly disagree up to four being strongly strongly disagree is one for being strongly agree. And then column F respond to the needs of those directly impacted so we really want to understand how this proposal responded to the needs of the people that are directly impacted by COVID-19. And the next column, Amber, could you slide to the right. Yeah, thank you. The next column is has support necessary to implement because we wanted to really think about as we focus on sense of urgency. Do we have proposals that are ready to go or do we have proposals that we acquired some additional work so that was the lens that we look through when we got to that criteria. The next column related to connected to our overall work as a task force. And finally, we look that did the proposal reflect our core principles or a guiding principles, which are and I'll just quickly step through those. We were looking to see if the proposal was guided by our scientific community and public health experts. We wanted to see if the proposal was applying a racial racially equity lens and culturally responsive framework to addressing disparities. We wanted to see if the proposal was actually demonstrating that we weren't moving forward with a sense of urgency. And that the proposal also demonstrated that we were working cooperatively and closely with state public health officials, local health systems, local businesses, community leadership to ensure a will coordinator response. So I'll start with the scores that the committee came up with for the back on the bull communications proposal and Amber, this is going to require some tackling back and forth. So if you go back to the first column that we scored. Thank you keep going back to column F, I think it is. Yes. So we started with, okay, when we look at this proposal, how does this proposal reduce the risk of code 19 transmission. And I will say to you guys as we go through this proposal. You know, this isn't perfect. There was no real science to what we did here. And if you think that we have scored something incorrectly. And when I say incorrectly if we've scored something that we said we agree that it did align with one of the criteria. And you think that, you know, it does not then let's have that conversation. But if we have scored something at 3.5, and you say well it should be a 3.75. We're, you know, ultimately both would round up to four and we're good. So we really don't want to split hairs about, you know, it's something at 3.5 or 3.75. But if there's something that you think we've completely missed the boat and less have the conversation. So again, for the communications plan reducing the risk of COVID-19 transmission, we scored that a 3.5 which is between agree and strongly agree. I think the rationale behind that and I'm going to ask my subcommittee members the way in as I go through these criteria in case I missed something, but the, the, the main reason this didn't get a four strongly agree is, as you think about communication you think about education you think about awareness that is certainly the right thing to do. And that by itself won't necessarily get people to comply so we said well we agree that it's going to help us reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission but didn't score as a four because you're going to have to have willing participants that hear the communication and are willing to participate and what's being shared to really help truly reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission. So I think one of the needs of those that are directly impacted, we all agreed that the communications plan did just that. Having the necessary support to implement, we all strongly agreed because I think Susan has communicated on multiple occasions that they're ready to go. And for that column I will say to all of you, me personally I think this was probably the, the, the one column that was most easiest to rate, because within the budget proposal, the budget proposal laid out readiness. And so it was really a matter of looking at what was in the proposal and translating it to our scoring system. Connected to our task force work we all strongly agree that this is very much connected to our work. And we also strongly agreed that it aligned with our guiding principles. So that was a scoring for the communications plan. So I'm going to pause to see if there's any questions any comments any thoughts and total score of 18.5 and I'll explain to you once we get done. Just kind of how that all maps out. Here are no questions or comments. We will move to our second proposal and ask Ryan to walk us through that one. Thanks, Matisha. The, the high level idea for the next proposal is to to really double down how much support we're providing to businesses and establishments and helping them create safer spaces. We have customers for, for their workers, especially our essential workers. And we think that in order to do that we need some in person support we have a great online tool we're going to have a wonderful communications plan. And those things are going to be really important but at the end of the day we also need for lack of a better term some boots on the ground, we need people who are able to visit our businesses and establishments and I say establishments because the idea here is not just businesses but it could be groups that are meeting with nonprofits with our places of worship and others. Any places where people are gathering this would be a team that would be a true support. They would meet with business owners, they would listen to their concerns understand their questions help. We know there's so much confusion out there and it's confusion, in spite of our very best efforts to communicate because things are ever changing. So provide clarity on what the expectations are where local orders are at, but really help businesses understand the best practices and be a support to them and coming into compliance with that. And we really, we want to do this so that we can limit and hopefully avoid the need for more punitive types of enforcement. And I think, you know, just in terms of setting this up, we had a large meeting, maybe a week ago that included our public health department, many people on this call. We had a follow up meeting with some experts from UNC, Pilar was a part of that folks from Duke to dig into this a little more and help develop the initial outline for the proposal that we have laid out. The current capacity of it would help us get to 400 places a week with, you know, 10 people dedicated to this work, it could be 10 full time people or 20 part time people or something like that. But the sense is that places might need to be visited multiple times that we would want to move with a sense of urgency to get to as many places quickly. We would like this to back on the bull, so envision that ambassadors would have back on the bull ambassador or champion t shirts. They would be out in the community this would help continue to raise awareness they would help businesses one thing that we have heard from Pilar is that in our Latinx community, many of them love the back on the bull campaign but they need some additional support to get through the online tool to print up posters and signs. I think there are a lot of ways in which this ambassador program will support work we're already invested in, but also, again, just help places be better prepared to safely welcome back and have safer environments for their workers and for our residents who will be visiting them. And I'll just pause there. All right, thanks, Ryan. Any questions about the proposal before we move to the scoring. All right, so reducing the risk of COVID-19 transmission, similar to the communication plan that we went over we score that a 3.5 because again, you know, we can provide lots of support education awareness but we it's really the people that we really need to do what we are sharing to get to really truly reduce the risk of the code 19 transmission so we score that 3.5. In terms of responding to the needs of those directly impacted, we did score that a four because as we read through the proposal we saw that we were trying to target some certain populations as it relates to the work that would be done by the health ambassadors. Does it have the necessary support to implement? We scored that a 3 because we thought there were some additional I think planning that needs to be done in terms of really confirming where these resources would reside and some additional work that needed to be done. Next column, Amber, I think we've lost our header. Thank you. Connected to the task force work, we all strongly agreed that it was connected to the task force work and certainly all acknowledge that it was tied to our core guiding principles. And so that scored out at 18.5 in total just like the communication plan. Any questions about that proposal or the score and I would like to add there's one thing that I forgot to mention. Leticia and Pilar can weigh in as well, but another another purpose of the health ambassadors is really building trust. And so that our community health ambassadors are largely would be potentially coming from the community we talked about, especially reserving some number of these positions for individuals for whom Spanish is their native language. We know that this can be an important partnership, but that building trust is going to be really crucial an opportunity to hire individuals from our community. One of the things we heard from Mr. Salter in our environmental health department was was his assessment that that doing this work does not necessarily require a type, you know that someone had be certified as an environmental health specialist that there is a lot that can be done by hiring and providing potentially some basic training to community members who are able to go out and who would be trusted by the businesses that they would be meeting with. So I think that that is a key piece of this that I failed to mention and I wanted to do so because I think Pilar has stressed how important that is. So thank you. Thank you, Ryan. Questions or other questions or comments here and then we will move to the COVID-19 risk mitigation fund proposal and Ryan, if you could talk a little bit about that one. So you all know one of the one of the things that we have been working very hard on is running a number of round tables with our with various industries. And one of the things we have heard from these industries and Susan mentioned it today is different ideas and different requests for how government can help come alongside and partner with our our businesses to help them create safer spaces. Many of our businesses are are struggling are barely trying to keep the doors open. And some of the things that they can do to create safer spaces cost money and that's a difficult position for businesses to be in. This proposal is meant to be so we've heard lots of different ideas. And as an example, just on our restaurant round table, we have heard requests for help us create better outdoor spaces. We know outdoor dining is going to be the safest option doing it well is going to cost some money. And we're asking for your support to help us create safer spaces for outdoor dining. So from that same group we heard another proposal help us in as much as we can have indoor space and especially for our essential workers who have to be inside while they're cooking. Help us make sure that we have good airflow. And we have so we've received a number of proposals instead of making the decision to bring turn each one of those into a proposal for your consideration. The proposal was made to try to think about this more broadly as a risk mitigation fund, especially for businesses that are at high risk where we might have the central workers and where we know that those spaces are inherently more risky to provide a fund that can help them invest in evidence based practices. So again not being necessarily specific about one practice or another but we could have a list of evidence based practices that businesses could apply for small grants to help them do that work. So that's you know that a high level. What this idea is again we've heard about this from multiple industries, and we really felt there was an opportunity to present to you a proposal to come along and support businesses again in partnership with the ultimate goal of creating safer spaces for our workers and for our residents who are going to be visiting those spaces. I'm happy to answer additional questions. Thank you Ryan. Yes, may or show. Thank you. Ryan, I don't think that you mentioned this I hope I just didn't miss it but the proposal for cleaning supplies with that. What did you mention that and would that also be something that would come out of such a fund. Certainly could so cleaning supplies could come out I think that this is focused on establishment and we're talking about establishment struggling to find cleaning supplies, then this proposal would also cover PPE so it would cover businesses who might have a large customer base. And they maybe they're experiencing customers who are coming in without face mask. And in addition to the 10,000 that we're going to provide which is great but it may be a drop in the bucket ultimately that they could use this fun to ask for funding for that they could use funding for PPE which could include cleaning supplies. We had a separate proposal for cleaning supplies and I think that was based on what we've learned through our community engagement. In addition, we'll talk more about that specific proposal but I do think at a high level. There are some great efforts now underway with Durham congregations and action, and that they've been working with our EOC and they're going to be soon launching a program that will have five collection sites across our community from places of worship that are going to be gathering cleaning supplies to make available to residents in our community or who need them and are having a hard time finding them. Any other questions. All right here and none. I will move us to how we scored this proposal. And as Ryan mentioned, I think the intent of the proposal included a lot of different items, things that we've heard from roundtables that we were trying to capture in one proposal, and the proposal is written from the perspective of giving funds to requesters. So as we looked at the proposal and looked at how does this reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission, we scored that at 2.5 because we just had a really hard time finding the exact link between specifically what the funds will be used for and how it's going to truly reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission. Responding to the needs of the people directly impacted, we all agree that this scored very high, we all strongly agree with that. Does this proposal have the support necessary to implement and we scored that at 2. And again, that was pulled from what was actually captured in the proposal. Not like in this proposal, there was still quite a bit of work that needed to be done to really vet some of these ideas out before we can move forward with implementing. The proposal certainly did a lot of connect with work of the task force. And I think as Ryan acknowledged, we heard a lot of these things coming out of various roundtables. In terms of aligning with our core principles, we basically said, we all agree that it did align. So overall, this proposal scored a 15.5, a little bit lower than the prior two that we talked about. And I think that was mainly driven by just needing some more work around how do we get this proposal ready to move forward to implement. All right, questions, comments on that. I'm going to go ahead and score a proposal. One thing I might comment on is I do think that there are some, this covers a wide range, but some of these things are absolutely going to help contain the spread and going to be important for helping businesses be successful in doing that. So, I don't know how we pull it apart so that we can identify those things but that seems very important. I agree with you wholeheartedly Susan I think that's an important next step because as we looked at the proposal. There's a lot of great things in there and I think there's some things that we could probably move forward with quicker than others. I think because we were trying to get a budget approval process set up pretty quickly. So what I think was to let's try and consolidate all of this into one proposal, but I think a, a next step that needs to happen, particularly for this proposal is to consider just what you said, you know, let's see if we can break it apart. So we do plan to have another round of a budget proposal submissions. And so hopefully in that submission process we'll be able to break this down and get some movement around some things that we feel like we need to just go ahead and get done. So very great point thanks for raising that. I would just add I mean, just because it scored a little bit lower doesn't mean we're not still recommending this so just. I think I certainly struggled with this one and I think we all did because I think, you know, I feel like it's a really important proposal and it's it's critically important that we're supporting our businesses at this time in this important work. And it's not fully baked yet. So, in terms of how, how a fund would be structured set up there's a lot more work that needs to be done, but that doesn't mean that that, and we had a lot of discussion I don't think it means that any of us felt like this wasn't a good proposal. So a question would be then, do you want to have each individual component in this category come to the task force to decide, or do you allocate some money to some subgroup that can then evaluate the individual proposals because I'm thinking of a group comes forward and they want $5,000 for hand sanitation stations that are going to be shared across a number of different groups. So how each one of those to come separately like it how do we get to our next step. Well, and I think that was the, I think that was the idea of this was to create a fund so that, so that any business could then apply for for small grants for whatever it is that that business needs so if, or multiple businesses coming in together so a few businesses want to come together to work on outdoor dining because their restaurants are next to each other they could put in that proposal, and Ryan correct me if I'm wrong but put in that proposal together jointly to tap into these funds so I have an impression with this one and and again we'll get to sort of how this all wraps up and and looks in a minute but my impression with this one is not that that it's that it couldn't move forward it's just that it needs some additional work in terms of process more than anything else. So that's the question this is lowest I was going to ask is, and trying to better understand this one I'm understanding even the category of support that businesses are requesting for example, are any of these things considered you know, capital funds are all of them. You know, things that would not add to the inventory of that business I'm just trying to think through, you know how how do we even decide or have we made a decision of what grant funds could be, you know, used for. A lot of business but what I'm just trying to get at is, as we're making the decision of how to spend the funds, are we thinking of it by categories in some broader sense of the word. This is I would just turn good. No, Brian you go for first Brian I'll go after you. I would just chime in and good morning everyone thanks for considering this. A couple of points from the perspective of the various different sectors who through the roundtable process we thought this could help serve. You know, first of all, I think that entities in general are experiencing a higher cost of operating under these best practices. And that's, you know, whether it's a business or a nonprofit that's providing services or whatever type of entity it is. And so we want to recognize that in addition to lost revenue. We're also asking them to undertake additional costs in order to engage in some of these best practices. The other point I would just throw out as maybe the potential for a next step is, you know, there was a long process that was undertaken to try to figure out how to use Duke city and county dollars to do grants and loans for businesses through an equity lens. I would suggest that we might use that as a framework at least as a starting point to be able to vet these requests as they come in so we're prepared to do the work to help those who are trying to follow best practices do so in a way that is feasible for everyone so I appreciate the consideration. And I would just add that I think when Ryan was describing this and it seemed like there may be different categories here. But he was talking about this being kind of a risk mitigation approach and that you know also an opportunity to look at best practices. And one of my questions is, would there, would there also be the opportunity for instance, if there was an identified best practice to be able to take advantage of something like bulk ordering of that, whatever the BMP is. And to also that be another effective way to benefit the businesses. I've just, what comes to mind for me I know that they're in this budget proposal refers to improving airflow. One of the things I've been learning about this week is HVC light and how this technology is being used and and being actually put directly on HVAC systems. It's not necessarily even, you know, is it is it is airflow the best solution or is it actually something like an HVC light that actually kills any type of, you know, pathogens that may be in the air and, you know, is that going to be something that's just an essential for anything that's indoor so. Anyway, so I guess to me is also thinking about what is the approach, whether it's just individual grants or the opportunity to do something in scale that's affordable. I don't know if there was any discussion about that, Brian or Brian, or anyone who's worked on this. I think it's a great addition to the proposal, the idea of thinking through how you build in, you can either build it into some type of grant program where after grants are submitted after some period you, you know, you knew how many people wanted something you could try to put orders together and achieve some order of scale and savings but I think that's a great idea, both in terms of, I would put it in two buckets, I think we can take certain extent use this fund to be not prescriptive but to really highlight a set number of evidence-based things that we know can really work and that where possible we can think of ways to achieve more economies of scale and to purchase be able to help businesses purchase things at a larger supply involved to help bring the cost down I think those are great things that we could that could be worked on and given greater thought so thanks for those ideas. Alrighty, thanks for that great dialogue. Alrighty, so why don't we move to project transit. Okay, so I think this is the last time you're going to hear from me today. So, we've renamed this one project safe passage, but it's really about our go Durham public transportation system. A couple of weeks ago, our one of our city city of Durham Transportation Department staff, aimed to the task force with a request for assistance and basically our currently our Durham go our go Durham public transportation system is providing three face coverings that are being distributed from our central terminal and they're they're passing out roughly 500 a week at the central downtown terminal to transit riders who do not have a face mask or forgotten one. They currently are going to run out of face coverings next week. So we've come to the task force to say, can you help us identify a solution to this in thinking about that this proposal has come in response to thinking about where a public transportation system is and where it might be and how we can best support and create again a safe environment for our public transit riders. The proposal here is not only to provide funding for face coverings, but instead of having face coverings distributed only at our central terminal to ensure that every one of our buses as a dispenser where disposable face masks are available recognizing that individuals will forget a face covering and if we only have distribution at our central terminal we face one challenge one important challenge that is individuals are going to have to ride the bus one or more times, often to get to the central terminal, or they would then get a free face covering. And so that's I think, not ideal. So this proposal again would have an and we have also lowered the cost of this and that's just happened over the last week we've realized that we can. Again, we talked about economies of scale and we found a way that we can roughly cut the cost in half of what we thought this would take to ensure that every one of our buses and also potentially our bands have disposable mask available for those individuals who show up without one. This would, this would get that covered and right now we're trying to project a 40 week supply. So that there's a, when you enter on the rear part of the bus, there would be mounted a disposable a box disposable face coverings that we would resupply as it runs out. And again, this is just to ensure that we have really good coverage on our public transportation system because we know this serves our central workers. You know that many people as people are mentioned on some of our calls are taking the bus system to get tested. And so it making sure that we have the very best coverage possible and that we are addressing access and making masks very easy. Again, is I think really key and so that's I think a summary of where we're at there. One thing I will add Maticia just thinking about how we're going to talk about the scoring here in terms of has the support necessary to advance. We have initially rated this a two, but even over the last week and conversations with our transportation department. My understanding is that they are, they are very supportive of this a couple of weeks ago they were, you know, they were not sure that this was the best path forward and they wanted to continue with a central terminal approach. But I think as they thought more about it and also seen what's happening in some of our surrounding communities with go triangle moving in this direction. And it's something that they are, it appeared to me to be very supportive of so I think that that would probably increase as the support necessary to move forward and may or she'll might be able to speak more about that too. Well, I'll just say quickly that go triangle is already on their buses they have already applied this is the dispensers. And they are strongly recommending it and so appreciate that our staff has become, you know, offered their support as well, and it's a great proposal. Thank you. Thank you both. So taking us to our score and for the last, well not the last proposal because we'll talk a little bit about the claims applies but the last one that we actually scored. In the course of COVID-19 transmission, we all strongly agree that providing this on our buses would certainly help reduce the risk of COVID-19 transmission, responding to the needs of those directly impacted we all strongly agreed. And as Ryan just talked a little bit about on Wednesday, when we reviewed the proposal based on what we knew on Wednesday, we rated having the necessary support to implement a two, and it seems like that continues to evolve so we can change that as needed. To the task force work we all strongly agreed and we all strongly agree that it certainly aligns with our guiding principles and I think this one scored out at total score 18. So any questions on that one before we move to the last proposal that was submitted. Great. So we did have the last proposal that we had was clean and supplies and I think Ryan alluded a little bit to this when a question was asked. So we got a proposal for clean and supplies but there was no dollars included in the proposal, which to me just was that more time was probably needed to pull together some additional information. So we didn't go through the scoring process for this proposal, because you know as I think about operating it with a sense of urgency and trying to move things along. We can't move it along until we actually have some dollars around it. And we also know that our places of worship roundtable I think Ryan mentioned this, that they're getting ready to possibly launch an initiative that would help address some of the needs that we have in this proposal and I think there's some other activities that are happening as well. That may be able to help us with clean and supplies and back to you know even a proposal that we talked about the risk mitigation fund. If we're given grants to businesses and they can use those grants to do whatever they need to do to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 and that could include buying clean and supplies. So we basically said for this proposal that we would hopefully get some additional information pulled together for this proposal and consider it in the next round of proposals that are submitted. So we didn't go through the scoring process. So don't let the zeroes fool you to think that we scored everything zero on this proposal because we did not. So with that said Amber I'm going to ask you to go over to the right of the spreadsheet. Because when we started working on this one of the things that I was hoping would happen. If you go a little bit more amber. My hope was that we would score these proposals and things would fall out and we would be we would be able to say, you know, we have certain items that fall between the score of 16 and 20, and we would call those top priority. We would have things that would fall 12 to 15 and we would call those second priority and if we had anything that was less than 12 we would say we're not recommended to move it forward. But as you saw from the scores we have three proposals that fell in the top priority, I think two were maybe 18.5 and one was 18. We had some additional dialogue around, you know, for these three proposals because these are the three that are risen to the top based on the criteria that we've used. We spent some more time really talking about how have these folks that are bringing forth these proposals gone about and try to secure additional funding so we've had some conversations around that. We also talked about so how does this or could this align with other city or county activities. So we spent some time just just going through those items. And after we had that conversation we basically just step back and said, Okay, maybe we should look at these proposals and look at all of them through the lens. What are the ones that we think and Amber I'm going to ask you to go to the next tab in the spreadsheet, but we really started to focus on focus on so what's urgent in terms of moving forward in terms of moving an activity forward that's going to help us with our recovery and renewal effort so what's urgent and what's really important to our recovering renewal work. And we also, again, look that is this proposal ready to implement. And so as you can look here as you see here to the left proposals raise implement. This is a scale of less or more so is this less ready more ready. And on the top, we did you know again proposed was urgent important and advanced endurance recovery renewal. It's a more important less important. And as you can see, from an urgency and important perspective, we thought they all fell and the more category. And I think this echoes what Katie said about the risk mitigation fund, while it you know it's scored out at about I say 15, I think it's 15.5. It was at the bottom of the list it doesn't mean that we don't think it's important work. It is when you look at the readiness to implement it falls to the bottom of the list because it is less ready when you compare it to the other proposals that have been put on the table. So as we plotted this and this two by two, what came evident to us as a subcommittee is that if we had the rate beads, we would say the back on the bull communications plan would be, you know, top priority, followed by the project safe transit proposal the last one that we talked about. Then that would be followed by the community health ambassadors and then the risk mitigation fund would be forth on the list. And I'm going to pause there to see if there's any questions or comments because this is in essence the recommendation that we want to move forward with. Because one of the things that we didn't have an opportunity to do was really when you look at the dollars trying to little down the dollars, we really just went through the process of trying to rank these and some type of type of fashion. So that if we wanted to say, you know, we could technically say, you know, the four that we have listed here, which two would we move forward then I think what this shows me is it would be the communications plan and project safe transit doesn't mean we would stop working on the community or the risk mitigation fund. But to me this just signals that these two that we have in the upper left quadrant are two that we're probably more ready to move forward than the other two that fell in the bottom left quadrant. So I think one issue is that, you know, I guess the next step would be presenting this to the city council county commissioners but one thing that comes to mind for me is also thinking about flexibility when it looks when it comes to even how we approach the funding for these or what are other possible ways to implement all of these, you know, are there other funding sources I mean that you already included that analysis in in in the proposals. And for instance, when I think about the communications plan, you know, their phases. So, you know, that gives some opportunity right I mean because the price tag is big but is there a way to look at the phased approach. And the health ambassadors. Same thing, you know, maybe we can't fund 10 at once but we could do five. Are there other existing staff that you mentioned in the in the proposal that could be, you know, that is a way to address it. And even the risk management fund we have the existing. You know, small business fund that was set up with grants and loans. Is there also a way to look to that fund to redirect some of that money to this. And you know, I know, I know for the project safe transit. The city has received some cove it related funding for transportation that's actually the biggest area. They've gotten so I, I guess I'm sitting here with my, you know, county commissioner hat on, and just thinking about the, the limited amount that we unfortunately have, we're still waiting to get the second round of cove it funding that the state is supposed to make a decision about and they haven't. And as you know, we've already really spent the money we have so I, I feel a certain urgency about all of these things and I think us trying to also kind of be flexible and creative about thinking about different ways to also, you know, get get them moving. So those are just some of my thoughts. If I could jump in for a minute on the communications to respond to that. Even if the task force wants to approve the entire budget ask we would not be planning the entire campaign or making the media buys now, because we feel really strongly that we don't know what kind of messaging we need three months from now. What's important is that we get approval for our phase what we called phase one B, which is would be starting up as soon as we can get it out the door and run through August and perhaps into early September. And then we'd asked for approval of the next phase. And then we had August, that is the set for the September, October timeframe. So we might want to approve two phases or maybe the first one and we can come back in a week or two for the other phase, whatever seems most expedient. But I agree that it is not necessarily about needing to approve the whole thing at this time. Thank you both for that. And Chair Jacobs, thank you, especially for the comments that you may because I just want to emphasize, you know, as you look at this two by two, and how we've ranked things. You know, this is by no means saying the work is done and now we're just going to sit back and wait on funding. To your point, I think we continue to explore ways that we can get this worked on recognizing we may not have readily available funds to help us or there are other alternatives that we should be considering so that when we get ready to if we decide to move, whichever one of these forward, there may be some more information that we can provide that maybe the number goes down because we determined that we can use some other alternatives to help execute some of this work. Yeah, I'll just add that I think that, you know, the proposals are all really excellent and thoughtfully done and I really appreciate the committee that bedded them and I think they're all all of them are very important and address different aspects of what we need to do. I mean, they're all interrelated really. So thank you everyone. Other thoughts for comments or questions. Let me ask the task force a question. As you look at the two by two that we've laid out and I think we I think we all agree it's they all include great work important work. That's going to help us with our recovery renewal efforts, but just based on what you've read in the proposals based on the scoring criteria that we use. Is there any one on the task force that disagrees with just kind of how we blade out the two by two. Mayor school. This is maybe one of those subtleties that you thought was maybe too subtle notation. But I'm on the importance of scale. Urge are the urgent and important. I think that the community health ambassadors are just the more I think about them I just think they're very, very important you all rated them very important. I just wanted to add a very to that very important. And just say how critical I think they are and, but I'm in general, these are just fabulous proposals and you did a great job betting on really impressed with the whole process. Thank you for that. So I don't, I can't see anyone because we have the projection here so I can't see all the screens but thank you. So I based on this conversation, and I don't see anyone shaking their head here as we say and they don't agree with what we've laid out so we can hopefully go forth with that just as our recommendation but at the same time acknowledge and there's still more work that we can do to figure out how we can continue to move some of this forward recognizing that we don't have a pot of money that's sitting there ready for us to just go grab. So we'll continue to work on figuring out how we can continue to bet these budget proposals out and keep things moving along because again we don't want any of the work that we're doing to stall. Alrighty. So where do we go from here. I would say the communications works stalls, if we're not approved, but I haven't heard something I feel I can take to the bank yet. Yep. Great question Susan. I'm going to go to look to Ryan to provide some insight on the next steps. How do we keep things moving along. The immediate next step that I would propose but I'm also going to ask Mayor shul and chair Jacobs for their their guidance is that we prepare and I will support our co chairs and drafting a formal letter of recommendation that would go to Mayor shul chair Jacobs. To the city council counting commission and to the city and county manager outlining the work done today and these recommendations, and we'll do that and try to get that out early. Early next week it seems like that is one next step I think we would also have a follow up conversation later today with Mayor shul and chair Jacobs to discuss these recommendations and to think through what the appropriate steps are within each of our different bodies in terms of would the next step be a meeting with Mayor shul and city manager bondfield and chair Jacobs and manager Davis, for example, or something else. So I think that work needs to happen. We'll have those conversations as a follow up later today, but one concrete next step is a formal letter of recommendation that would come from our co chairs on behalf of the task force laying out these recommendations that would go to each of our local governments. And Mayor shul and chair Jacobs anything you would add or. I think that sounds exactly right. And I spoke to the count actually I wrote to the council as part of our last agenda and spoke to our council we had a work session yesterday about the fact that this was coming they should expect it. And so I know the council is prepared to receive it. And I think what you propose is really good. Ryan as a way to go I know that the council, when we discuss it, I'm sure we'll want to hear from our co chairs as part of the discussion so I just want to let Katie and petition know that that will be coming. Soon. Yeah, I would just add in terms of the process. Yeah, I think a letter and you know, read the recommendations. But I think for us really important next step will be actually getting it before the board and a presentation from appropriate people to do that to present the information and and our our co chairs of our task force also being involved in that. And, you know, again, this is time sensitive important work and our next work session is August 3rd Monday, August 3rd. So that would really be an opportunity I think to I think it's important actually that this be on our work session agenda. To think of you froze on us for a moment. I think we heard everything that you said about there's a work session on August 3rd. Yeah, but that would be my recommendation would be that this would be on our agenda, and that you all would present the recommendations and proposals to the board at that time. So the next work session is August the 6th. So it sounds like we'll work to get the letter, the recommendation letter to Mayor Shul and chair Jacobs and just be prepared by the beginning of August to be able to present what Mayor Shul and chair Jacobs wants us to move forward with. So our meeting to just get on everyone's radar is August 11. We have a joint city council and county commission meeting. So if there was a need for any kind of joint follow up discussion. We have that we have that meeting as well on our calendars. So just one other comment I could make I was just checking offline about when the current buys that were approved in that first 14,000 run run dry so to speak, and what we understand is the end of the first week of August. We would be looking for funding to continue the campaign and would need some lead time before that so we may end up with a little bit of a gap in from a timing standpoint so I just want to make sure that we have communicated our sense of urgency. But I appreciate what everyone's trying to do in terms of making this a thoughtful and fair process. I'm not criticizing just providing the fact base. I mean, can I just ask a clarifying question just for my own knowledge. So if we have that that gas and funding. What happens, does it just delay when we can get things done or does it just stop things from happening. Some of both the current, we've got current buys out there that will expire, as I said, the end of the first week of August, and then how much lead time there is before the next things. And between the time that we have the funding and the time that things start to appear in the media depends on what the channel is some things like digital campaigns and radio can be turned on within a day. And some things like bus advertising or billboards or TV can take much longer. Thank you. I think in that gap what we would be, I mean, there would be work continuing to go on that we would be relying on what our communications team calls our organic reach. I'm not a communications person here. So, but you know, we have a lot of partners at the table. We would be continuing to communicate. We would just have limited reach during that time. Okay, thank you. That's helpful. We have eight minutes left for our meeting today. Are there any other topics that we want to cover any topics coming out of our roundtables, or just any topics that any of the task force members wants to bring forth and have a conversation about the budget discussion is where you come out. Right. Well, hearing none. We'll continue to work on like I said, I taught we talked about the next steps as it relates to the budget process and if there's anything else that comes out about that will certainly let everyone know, but many things to all of you for your continued hard work from every for that contributed to the information that's included in the budget proposals to the subcommittee. That met on Wednesday night to all of you for reading through all the budget information because it's quite a bit of information to get through and so I appreciate your continued commitment and engagement and support of our task force. That said, I hope all of you have a great weekend and we'll give you seven minutes back on this Friday. Make a good use of it. I just forgot I thought you were saying bye. I wanted to shout out Juliet black from our clerk's office who's online and taking minutes. They're always behind the scene and I don't want to forget to notice that Juliet's here and appreciate her. I sit 10 feet from her. This is normal. And so it's great to see her digitally and appreciate I just want to appreciate her. Yes, many thanks to her. I've had the pleasure of taking minutes before and meeting such as this and it's a lot of fun. Trying to get everything right. So yes many thanks. And thanks to Amber as well who always keeps us on track. Absolutely. Absolutely. All right, well thanks everyone and hopefully you enjoy the rest of your Friday and have a great weekend. Thank you. Thanks everyone. Thank you.