 know what matters in life, friends. Thank you, Beverly. Good afternoon, everybody. I want to call this work session of the Durham City Council to order at one o'clock on Thursday, September the 23rd. And I certainly want to welcome everyone here today. We're glad to have you with us, virtually. And it's good to be with you. Madam Clerk, will you please call the role? Absolutely. Mayor Shul? Here. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson? Here. Councilmember Caballero? Here. Councilmember Freelon? Here. Councilmember Freeman? Councilmember Middleton? I'm here. Councilmember Rice? Here. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Clerk. And welcome, everybody. We will now have announcements by members of the Council. Is there anyone that has an announcement? Mayor Pro Tem, Councilmember Rice, and then we'll move it on from there. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to remind folks that we had asked to set aside some time at this meeting to talk about implementing a few of the Race Equity Task Force recommendations and have sent out a resolution as part of that, but also have a few other recommendations that I think we can move forward pretty quickly. And update Juan and I had a conversation as well about some of the recommendations that the admin is moving forward. Pursuant to a request from the mayor, we're going to have that conversation later in the meeting so that our staff can get to other things. And we'll, I'll just wait until the mayor says it's go time on that. But yeah, we'll have that conversation later. Thanks. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. And thank you for your flexibility. We're going to all have to be a little flexible with today's meeting. We've got a lot of things to do. And people, we have some people who have some other deadlines at the end. We're going to try to accommodate everybody as best we can. So thank you. Councilmember Reese, you're up next. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good afternoon, colleagues, staff and folks watching at home and online. Monday night in our council meeting, I encouraged Durham residents to complete the 2020 census. And I'd like to take a couple of minutes to delve into a little more detail about how that's working in Durham. Obviously, as most folks know, Durham needs a complete and accurate count of the people who live in our city in order to receive our fair share of federal funds for programs and services over the next 10 years. And that's why they call it the decennial census because it lasts for 10 years. It's in the Constitution. Our response rate so far is 61%. And that's not great. And I think it's fair to say the coronavirus really hurt our efforts to get more of an accurate count going. And so now time is running out. The deadline for responding to the census is this coming Wednesday, September 30th, which is a little earlier than expected. And that's why this is so urgent. I think this is our last meeting before that. Community partners are working across Durham over the weekend to ask people to complete the census. Census workers will be going door to door as they have been for folks who have not already responded. They'll be doing so in a social distance manner with appropriate PPE. So folks don't need to be concerned about that. And leaders of the census effort in Durham have also reached out to our faith community to remind residents during their services this weekend to fill out the census. And if you've already completed it, thank you for helping Durham do this really big job. We're really grateful. But the job isn't done yet because we need you to check with your family, your friends, your neighbors to make sure that they're responding. The easiest way to fill out the census at this point is to go online at my2020census.gov. It can be completed in about five minutes. It's very easy. You can also call if internet access is difficult or if you're just not sure how to work it, that's fine. You can call the English line at 844-330-2020 or the Spanish language line at 844-468-2020. And if you're listening to this and need additional language support, please email me at charlie.reeseatdurmanc.gov and I can send you the appropriate phone line. They have phone lines in every language. So I'd be happy to help you help provide that to you. This is super important. It only happens once every 10 years and it's really critical to making sure that we get everything we deserve out of our federal tax dollars. So I thank you, Mr. Mayor. Appreciate your patience with that. Thank you very much for that important announcement and for your continued good job on publicizing that, Council Member. Council Member Freeland. Following Council Member Freeman's great example. That's all. Council Member Freeland. Yes, thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to share kind of an announcement and reflection. Tuesday, September 22nd was the equinox. It was the point at which the sun sits exactly at the equator and shines equally on the northern and southern hemispheres. So the day and night are equal length transitions from summer to autumn and many traditions represents like a balance between lightness and darkness. And I know I just wanted to acknowledge that it's been a very hard summer and that many of us have lost loved ones and jobs and homes, especially here in Durham. Our summer has been marked by violence. I was at a Durham committee hosted forum with Chief Davis and D. A. D. Barry and Sheriff Burkhead about a month ago. They said, believe it was Sheriff Burkhead who said there were 18,000 shootings in Durham this year. And over the past week and a half, we've had a dozen more. And two days ago on the equinox, we received a terrifying text message that a beloved member of our community, an 11-year-old girl was shot in the head. And she was caught in the crossfire and hit with a stray bullet. And I've been struggling to find the words for that 11-year-old girl and her family and to other survivors of gun violence. And I just wanted to say that I love you and I'm grieving with you. And I've only been on council for, you know, three weeks. But I'm going to work really, really hard to interrupt that cycle of violence that has traumatized so many people in our community. And last week I mentioned at our city council meeting that I was at Hoover Road. I've reached out to the families at Rochelle Manor. I talked to my aunties and spirit guides from Spirit House Durham committee. I've been at the bus stop on Fayetteville Street. I reached out to the nation at Islam yesterday, just literally yesterday. I was at a funeral at East End Park off Alston Avenue. And I've had dozens of conversations with community members about what to do. And again, because I don't live in these communities, I'm talking to folks who are closest to the violence, what options are available to us, what can we do. And on Monday, I mentioned coach Kenan, who's a football coach at Neil Middle, who's been doing some great work in Durham Housing Authority properties to provide meals and activities and stuff for kids. And Community Dijana or Councilwoman Freeman was there with me on Friday. And they do something really interesting that I think our safety and wellness task force will do, which is ask community members, what do you need to keep your community safe? And when they asked that question on Friday, they said resoundingly, I would say 75, 90 percent of the folks said, we need something for these kids to do. We need some activity to to engage the youth in our communities. And and I know that the safety and wellness task force will be asking more questions about that. But coach Kenan has been doing that work in our housing projects. And that was the and I asked him, I said, how often do you get that response? He's like, Oh, 95 percent of the time that they've done around Robin to the Mac Cornwallis all over all summer. And hands down that is the number one thing that people are asking for. And indeed, this Friday, they're taking a bunch of kids from various projects in Durham to the Durham Bulls Stadium to watch the Chadwick Boseman movie 42. So I just want to commend coach Kenan for doing that work. But and I and I wanted to to communicate to counsel into the people of Durham that this is something that folks are calling for activities for kids, especially on nights and weekends, which is when a lot of shooting happens. That's violence interruption, because once the shooting starts, the damage is already done. And we need to address the root causes of that violence. And that's what we have the capacity to lead with love and to interrupt violence before it starts. And so just the last thing I want to say, because there is another relevant update to as far as city business is concerned, is that I had a long conversation among my many conversations with community members. I also called our interim city manager, Wanda Page, who feels like my auntie now. Thank you, Wanda, for for taking promise an hour to chat with me yesterday. We had our violence interrupter presentation scheduled for November. She called the county last night after speaking with me, and they bumped that meeting up to tomorrow. They're going to be meeting tomorrow to discuss the violence interrupter program and how we can put money and resources behind that. They understand that for me and for many members of this council and community, that this is an absolute urgent necessity. And we've our meeting that was scheduled for November will now take place to October. They bumped it up because of that urgency. And there are some other things in the work in the works. And I just wanted the people of the city of Durham to know that this is a top priority for me personally. I invite you to reach out and share your ideas and solutions and visions for how we can make our community safer with me. And I wanted to acknowledge the wonderful work that's already happening in the community. And most importantly, to express my grief and condolences and love for the young girl who was shot on Tuesday. And I hope that this time of transition after the equinox into autumn is one of peace and love and respect for everyone in Durham. So I know we have a long meeting today, Mayor Schuyl. I apologize for taking up so much of the time, but I just really felt like that needed to be said. And I appreciate you giving me the time to say it. Thank you, Councilmember Freelon. And for those important sentiments and also for talking that through with Deputy City Manager now to be Interim City Manager Page. And I'm glad that we've been able to move that up. Thank you so much. Other announcements by members of the Council? Anyone else? Councilmember Caballero and then Councilmember Middleton. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. I just wanted to say how much I appreciate Councilmember Freelon's words. And I appreciate that he has dug right in and is helping us move these conversations forward. And I very much looking forward to the conversation on violence interrupters that we'll be having in a few weeks. I will be leaving the meeting early today. So I apologize. I was invited a few months ago by an organization called New American Leaders. That is a leadership development group for immigrant elected leaders or encouraging immigrants to run and then build collaborative relationships with other immigrants either first generation or newly arrived. And when I said yes to the invitation, at the time we had shorter work sessions. So I apologize for having to leave early today. Thank you. Understood, Councilmember. With the length of this work session, you may be able to come back before it ends tonight. Councilmember Middleton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good afternoon, everyone, colleagues and everyone watching. Mr. Mayor, firstly, I want to congratulate you on your bold and well needed statement today on the vandalism that occurred in our city last night. I also want to associate myself with your comments. I want to send love and light out to those who are absolutely devastated by the news that came out of Louisville regarding the Breonna Taylor case. We clearly have a lot of work to do in this country, but I also want to put on notice those who would take advantage of our tears and those who would take advantage of our pain who would exploit our tears and pain for their own agenda and for their own outcomes. And that's what I believe happened in our city for the most part last night. So Mr. Mayor, I want to thank you for your statement. Somebody said they can only hear. Can you guys hear me? Cool. All right. I want to thank you for your statement and associate myself with them. I totally agree that our police department have done a wonderful job in creating a wide birth for Durham-centered and Durham-loving activists who have a long history and a long footprint and fingerprint of how they do things in Durham. And we know what Durham activism looks like and what outside agitators look like. We know what the difference between a struggling local business and a Confederate monument. And we have not put money into businesses in our city by day to help them recover from COVID, only to come out at night to destroy them and have them spend the money we put into them to fix windows. These folk are engaging in theft against the people of Durham and against the business community here in Durham. So I want to associate myself with your calls to our police department to do what is necessary. One of the sacred responsibilities of government is to protect life and property underneath establishing justice. And I whole heartedly agree with having our folk do what is necessary to create the space as we always do for folk to engage in righteous protest. But also to understand that we will not watch you burn our city down, not on our watch. So I thank you, Mr. Mayor, for that. I also want to acknowledge and thank Brother Pierce for his words about the continued scourge of gun violence that goes on in our city. On Tuesday, on my way to my office, my other job, I drove right past the shooting scene on Sheik Road, actually saw the blood on the side of the car. I thought it was a traffic accident. The car looked like it was squished up under a trailer, but I actually found out later it was a shooting literally right around the corner from my office. On Monday nights meeting, I issued an apology to folk in this city who were dealing with the nuisance and the inconvenience of lights, very bright lights in their neighborhoods, which were engaged in fixing. I also want to issue an apology today for folk who are also living under another type of nuisance that has continued gunfire in their neighborhoods. I want to encourage those that have been victims of this, what I think is the number one threat to quality of life in our city to let us know what you want, to bombard our emails and encourage us to give the attention to this issue that it deserves. We are currently changing light bulbs and fixing bulbs at cost for folk that have complained and written emails to us, wrote emails to us about their lights being too bright, which is a legitimate concern, not being able to sleep, children not being able to concentrate, not being able to be on the porch, and the city has sprung into action. Now, of course, we don't want to spend more than we need to, so we've been going on a complaint-driven basis and spending, I forget what the amount is, maybe $100 on putting shields over lights. But we're not doing all of them because we know that it can be expensive, sometimes fixing problems. Oh, that we could do something for free to fix people's problems, but we know that that's not how it is. But we've been very active in doing that. I want to encourage folk that are living under the scourge of gunfire to be as insistent as folk who are dealing with bright lights in their neighborhoods and in their houses, on their houses, in their homes, and contact this council. We're revisiting the issue of the Duke franchise agreement, which pretty much has been ready to go for some time, but because a very active and engaged and powerful board is engaging us and wants us to make some more changes to it, so we've honored that. And I think that's appropriate because when folk are organized and speak with a powerful voice, we honor it. So here we are, again, we're going to discuss that issue today. My point is, is that folk who organize and make noise get attention and get results. No matter how dramatic your issue may seem on its face, the folk who are organized get the attention. And I'm calling on everyone in this city that is dealing with gunfire that has, I keep speaking to victims' families that has an idea of what you want your city to do. Send us an email at council at DurhamNC.gov, council at DurhamNC.gov, and flood our email boxes. Call us at City Hall and demand meetings like these other groups of demanding, demand action like other folk in the city or demanding action until you get us to do what you want, like any other vested group, like any other interest group, like any other group of citizens in this city that organized and want us to do something. Sometimes folk can get messenger fatigue if it's just one voice saying it all the time. Sometimes people get tired of listening to one particular voice or a group of people. Let your voices be heard. Thank you, Brother Pierce, again for your words and for the energy you brought to this debate. I'm excited about the accelerated timetable with violence interruption. I hope that the violence interrupter model is something that we will embrace, but I hope that it will be a part of a comprehensive, multifaceted approach to dealing with this issue of gun violence. Let us be as vigilant and let us be as forceful and addressing issues downtown, issues in the neighborhood as we are issues downtown. Let us be forceful as forceful and addressing issues of lights and trees and whatever it else may be and franchise agreements. Let us be as forceful with the issue of gun violence for those who may not be writing emails, who may not be organized and who may not be wealthy but are just as impacted and just as desirous of our assistance as a government. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, colleagues. Thank you for those important remarks, Council Member. All right, any further announcements? Council Member Freeman, since everybody hadn't gotten in, now everybody is going to get in. Go ahead, Council Member. Glad to have you here. Have you. Thank you. I wanted to make sure that I let folks know as well. I will be leaving early around three o'clock and so I'll leave you to those debates and discussions as well and then also I just wanted to make sure that I know that I appreciate and Council Member Freelance and Council Member Middleton. Didriana, we can't hear you that well. I was just, can you hear me now? That's better, yeah. I was just noting that I will be departing early at around three o'clock today and for an appointment that I have for one of my kids. I just wanted to also appreciate Council Member Freelance and Council Member Middleton's comments around the violence that we've been seeing in our community. I actually left a darkness to light training earlier today with DCI and acknowledging the effects and impacts of sexual abuse and my concerns considerably around child abuse and any time that a child faces violence, my antennas and everything in me sets off. There's a lot of triggers and I just want to note that where we are today, I'm hopeful that we will move forward with a comprehensive focus on how we're going to impact the gun violence that we're seeing in the city, noting that we're not Ferguson, we're not any of the other cities that are experiencing different situations with their police officers. I'm very grateful that we're in Durham and I know that we'll come up with a Durham solution that's honoring our children and the future generations of children who we failed. Children who we are failing if we don't come up with the solutions today and so I just wanted to thank you and appreciate that and I just wanted to make note that I really appreciate Council Member Freelance's ability to move this along because I know Council Member Middleton has been pushing on this violence interrupter conversation as well for a long while and it's great that the the date has been moved from November to tomorrow or what have you and I just want to say that the item number 17 which I tried to in a similar fashion move forward over the summer. If you note we're now three months later and it's just getting on to the agenda. I just want to give you a little bit of a heads up to say keep pushing as hard and as fast as you are because it's going to take a while with the system in place to maneuver in a way that gets it into place before or as it's needed and so there's a lot to happen that needs to happen and I appreciate Mayor Pro Tem bringing forward the recommendations from the racial equity task force and I'm looking forward to hearing what recommendations will be moving forward. If I do miss that conversation I just wanted to make sure I do let you know that I am very supportive of moving forward with those recommendations. Thank you. Thank you so much Council Member. All right we will now move to we will now move to our priority items first by the city manager and in the chair tonight this afternoon is Miss Page who as you all know at our next city council member will be our interim and so she is sitting in the chair today and we're glad to have you Miss Page. Good afternoon Mr. Mayor, Madam Mayor Pro Tem members of the city council. I'm happy to be here as deputy city manager today and I appreciate the confidence that you all have in me to take take the reins of this organization as interim city manager starting October 1st. I do have five priority items for your consideration today agenda item number six fiscal year 21 participatory budgeting PB process attachment number two has been updated agenda item number 11 high pressure zone improvements phase one contract for professional engineering services and attachment number three has been added to your agenda package agenda item number 24 update on cities addressing fines and fees equitably that project work we are requesting that that presentation be made at 115 we may have passed that time by now but at the earliest time we do have some guests and on many of these items but we wanted to hear this one hear this one first if possible agenda item number 27 which is the franchise with Duke Energy Carolinas LLC attachment number seven through number nine have been those have been added to your packet and finally agenda item number 34 consolidated annexation sites property is a supplemental item that has been added to your agenda that is all I have Mr. Mayor thank you very much madam manager and if I could now have a motion on the manager's priority items so moved second been moved by councilmember Freeman seconded by Mayor Pro Tem Johnson that we approve the manager's priority items Madam Clerk please call the roll Mayor Shull ah Mayor Pro Tem Johnson okay I think you're muted councilmember Caballero uh and I think it was my second yeah I was the one who seconded not Mayor Pro Tem not me okay um councilmember Freelon aye councilmember Freeman aye councilmember Middleton aye councilmember Maurice thank you thank you very much uh madam manager uh after we do the priority items I'm going to come back to you for advice on uh you're thinking about how best to structure this meeting but I'll now move to the uh city attorney to ask if there any priority items good afternoon Mr. Mayor Madam Mayor Pro Tem members of city council it's good to see you all today the city attorney's office has no priority items thank you madam attorney madam clerk are there any priority items good afternoon Mr. Mayor and city council the city clerk's office has no priority items thank you very much madam manager why don't we talk now before we go through consent about the the presentations in the order in which you advise that we uh that we have them I know we want to do the cafe first and I believe we want to do the Duke franchise second would you have any other recommendations Mr. Mayor at this time based upon the length and breadth of the agenda today and the rich conversation we would recommend the other presentations go in the order of the agenda all right thank you very much okay now we'll move to the administrative consent items under the city clerk's office item one human relations commission appointment item two mayor's council for women appointment item three under audit services department fuel usage performance audit June 2020 item four water mill meter billing performance audit June 2020 Mr. Mayor yeah Mr. Mayor I don't want to pull that item I just want to thank the audit staff for producing a really fantastic report that details the underlying causes of some of the problems that we had with our water billing systems last year in this year and thank the administration for agreeing to those recommendations the other thing that I missed was on item number one human relations commission appointment we had one applicant generally when there's one applicant no matter how awesome they are I try to ask that we re-advertise this applicant is especially awesome so I don't know it's just a just just their application looked great so I don't know what the group's pleasure is but I wanted to raise that as well thank you thank you I will just say that I thought about that as well they did seem like a very qualified applicant so I felt a high level of comfort everybody's okay with that okay item five under budget management services department amend the FY 2021 budget internal service fund spending plan and other grant amendments item six this is a the FY 21 participatory budgeting process this is a discussion item so that will be our third discussion item participatory budgeting or rather presentation item item seven under department of community development contract with moss and Ross LLC for communication consulting services item eight under department of transportation move during transportation study this is also a present also a presentation item non-supplemental agreement with WSP USA Inc for go Durham planning and operations analysis it's great to see this moving along and of course closely connected to the item above it that we'll be hearing about other department of water management item 10 amendment one of the interlocal agreement with Chatham County respecting water sales item 11 high pressure zone improvement phase one contract professional engineering services and item 12 nutrient analyzer service agreement with the HACH company under the finance department item 13 bid report august 2020 under general services department item 14 construction contract with bar construction company at valley springs park item 15 construction contract with geo surfaces southeast ink for the c.m. Herndon park field conversion project nine of 16 construction services with engineered construction company for the weaver street and w d hill recreation center renovation projects i just want to comment that all three of these items previously are are it's great to see these improvements and renovations to our parks and recreation facilities moving ahead and want to thank our folks in the general services department for that item 17 i'm going to give a shout out here to councilmember freeman during celebration of black artistry public art project proposal item 18 proposed conveyance of property located at 505 west chapel hill street to west chapel hill development LLC and madam clerk i don't believe there's a a presentation schedule on this but i think we all acknowledge the incredible achievement that this is the and i'm just really proud of the council for our actions on this that i think is leading to a fantastic outcome i will just i'm sure we'll have more discussion of this in the future but this is a great moment mr. mayor item 19 proposed lease agreement with the arbor warehousing and storage LLC for the police department property and evidence storage facility and outfit of additional space there was a presentation in this item madam manager but i don't believe we're intended to hear that presentation is that correct that is correct mayor thank you office of economic and workforce development item 20 city of Durham employment training 2020 to 22 grand project ordinance mr. mayor public works department yes if we're not going to hear that presentation i just wanted to make a comment that uh in our legislative agenda if we might want to address uh how much it's costing us to keep all these guns that we can't destroy um just noting that word for the rest of council if we're not going to do the presentation that was all super idea let's put that on our legislative agenda um office of economic and workforce development item 20 i think i did that one already item 21 under public works department contract sw 77c for sidewalk asset management plan and condition study 2020 with precision safe sidewalks llc item 22 contract amendment number one for st 264 favorable road improvements with carolina sunrock llc item 23 contract amendment to at number nine for st 264 c for professional services related to felt more road improvements again sidewalks uh sidewalk planning sidewalk construction all great and uh especially appreciated i just wanted to add that i really appreciated the work of be pack on all of those things as well thank you exactly uh presentations budget management services department item 24 update on cities addressing fines and fees equitably we're going to do that first item 25 under city county planning land use and infrastructure issues in southeastern Durham uh this is the serals presentation uh under finance department item 26 f y 2021 capital improvement plan uh this is also a presentation under public hearings public yes sorry could we i know that i think we have pb slated as third and i was wondering since councilmember femen and i both have to leave early if we could switch the order and hear the serals presentation before that and i apologize to the pb folks because i know they've worked really really hard yes we can do that thank you for that suggestion yeah um so we will move serals up third after cafe and duke franchise under public works department uh item 27 franchise with duke energies carolina llc which we're moving up city county planning department item 28 consolidated annexation leaseville road assemblage item 29 consolidates annexation consolidated annexation national national heritage academy's nha o grove charter item 30 consolidated item chin page road um item 31 z19000451310 uh west north kelton of 54 or w nc 54 citizens matters to be heard at one o'clock heath night we've also added kasey collins to that list and supplemental item city county planning department item 34 consolidated annexation sykes property and this is a uh public hearing item which we will hear at the council meeting then we have a closed session general services department item 33 closed session to discuss negotiation of contract terms for a proposed contract regarding real property all right uh thank you all yes council member reese i had anticipated that someone would pull item 18 that's the proposed conveyance of property at 505 west triple hill street that didn't get pulled and i don't i guess i don't necessarily want to pull it but when it did get pulled what i had intended to say um was that a durham can sent us some extremely detailed um comments about i think it was three different contract provisions that i was thoroughly prepared to forward on the staff but then i noticed that durham can had done the work to actually copy staff on it um i just wanted to put a plug in right here in the during the meeting while i know while we have staffs direct attention that i'm really interested in seeing the response of staff to those concerns uh they seem like very very uh easy items to address and i just wanted to put a plug in for that thank you mr mayor thank you very much council member and i'm sure staff will respond to that thank you all right um colleagues uh madam manager uh what i have now is that we will have the citizens matters to be held at one o'clock we'll then move on to the cafe the duke franchise the serals participatory budgeting the move durham and the capital improvement plan presentations is that what you have that's what i have mayor and that will be followed by the uh discussion of um mayor protem's resolution so thank you very much uh i want to just say to our staff we really appreciate you we got to have a long one today and we hope that you can get away and do your actual work uh while it's not your turn uh but appreciate you all hanging with us all right um we'll now have citizens matters to be held at one o'clock and we will hear from first from heath just one moment i'm sorry heath night madam clerk could you make heath night available to be heard and mr night you have three minutes we're glad to have you with us mr mayor i see two calling listeners and i don't have their names though if um this heath could raise her hand i would appreciate it uh if heath could raise their hand is heath night present uh if so could you raise your virtual hand we don't have uh your name on the list and there are two calling uh participants in the meeting but so madam clerk is is heath is heath night available to be heard you know um not to my knowledge all right um let me just check the chat real quick mr mayor yes if if um if that person is calling in like on a phone yeah they're gonna need to be told the the like the dial commands to do some of the various things you're asking i think um madam clerk like i don't know you can't you have to know what keys to push on your phone to raise your hand i think or i don't know i haven't done it it seems likely to me okay i know the clerk has let people in through the phone um on several occasions madam clerk is there anything that you need to do to let this person in i've just unmuted both callers and they can respond if they are the appropriate all right yeah perfect is heath night on the call if you are please yeah i'm here all right he's not i'm here took a while thank you for your persistence and thank you madam clerk and uh miss night thank you glad to have you here and you have three minutes thank you on september 4th at about 2 30 p.m i heard a loud rumble rumble rumble boom from outside my house i thought a power transformer had blown or there had been a traffic accident second later i was in my living room on my way to look out my front windows to see what the commission was when i heard a very loud pop and instinctively hit the floor i scrambled in a backwards crawl to a back room i could smell a strong pungent odor i knew something bad had happened inside my house and i was terrified when the police arrived they found a bullet fired from a rifle had entered my house through the front wall struck a second wall made of brick which sent the bullet ricocheting around that room causing a lot of damage the bullet shattered a when a mirror my grandfather made me when i was six debris tore several holes through an original and valuable painting by my grandmother both precious and irreplaceable things as you know i have already lost most of my things to mold because google hit my waterline when illegally installing fiber on my property and they never fixed the damage now i have lost even more of my sense of safety within my own home it turned out the moment i hit the floor i had been in the direct line of the bullet's trajectory only a single pane of glass did between me and a rifle bullet twice in the 10 minutes before the bullet entered my house i had stood in the very same spot where the bullet entered the came through the exact spot i am absolutely terrified i am also extremely disappointed in fact in paul that none of the numerous communications i received from the city on a weekly basis alerted us citizens to the rash of violent flagging our city the city and each of you has a duty to inform its citizens of such critical issues and a duty to keep us safe obviously whatever you are doing to address the violent crime spree and durham is not enough and i implore you to do more both times i previously appeared before this council asking for your help with total disappointments please do not let this be a third strike many people are being traumatized and most horribly lives are being lost you have a duty to do much more much more so all Durham citizens can actually be safer at home this must be your top priority and obviously you should have should have been for quite some time so i asked what have each of you done today so that we can have a safer tomorrow in Durham you should each ask yourself this every day all day long thank you thank you miss nye i'm so sorry that you had to deal with that that's terrible and i know it must have felt awful um and i i appreciate your admonition uh as well and i know the council takes it very seriously so uh i know you're heard thank you thank you all right uh we'll now hear from kasey collins mr collins um are you able to be heard yes sir can you hear me yes we can thank you for being here uh and you also have three minutes yeah thank you mr mayor uh i'm here today on behalf of the environmental affairs board really speaking directly to your agenda i'm dealing with the duke energy franchise agreement and mo u um i think the the eab would like to reiterate our position that the documents in front of the council uh the franchise agreement and the operations agreement can with with minor comment uh address uh the needs of the city we don't think that's the vessel for change however with regards to the memorandum of understanding that the city is considering between uh the utility um and and the city there seems to be a disconnect which i'm hoping the council will consider uh as they uh direct policy back to staff and that is um i think while a lot of the community in particular eab feel that that memorandum of understanding should reflect the values of the community uh there seems to be some uh thought from the staff that it should just reflect um city operations and so if the council might clarify that for staff i think uh you might save some time as you deal with that um and really that memorandum of understanding can be um a start of of the conversation an important part of uh during addressing its goals um with regards to renewable energy and climate change um and so uh you know with that being said i'd also like to add that um the eab and and uh the folks on the board many of which have professional experience in the energy industry we we do stand available to support the city staff even being directly in the room uh with the utility during negotiations as desired so that's that's all my comment um thank you for your time thank you for your service and we look forward to helping you wrap this up so you can get a get a long address on the uh the things that um matter i'd say even more to citizens thank you very much mr collins and thank you in particular for your fabulous work um you've made a big difference in uh in this in this endeavor uh in the shaping of the priorities that i put forward at the state of the city's address about this franchise agreement and subsequently so thank you and thanks to all the members of the eab and others who've been so active on this so really appreciate it yes sir i'll pass along the compliment all right um we'll now move to our first um presentation which is the presentation about the cafe program and um i believe we're are we hearing from ryan smith i see ryan has popped up in our screen uh yes yes sir uh good afternoon mayor shul mayor pro 10 members of council my name is ryan smith i'm the innovation and performance manager in the office of performance and innovation and we are excited today to provide an update on the city's addressing fines and fees equitably initiative that city staff and other community partners have been working on now for more than a year i'm joined today by heidi hackett who is the utility finance manager as well as by michael daily who's been one of our partners who is a researcher at duke university and we also have some colleagues from the um uh from the national league of cities economic opportunity and financial empowerment team who are with us today and will have a chance to speak it at the end of it i would like to start off with some thanks there are a lot of people to thank in this has actually been a a big team effort across the city and and with community partners i cannot name all those names today in the interest of time but you have a detailed report and i would point your attention to page three of that report that lists many of the people who made significant contributions over the last year plus on this project i would like to acknowledge one person in particular tony thompson who is our budget analyst and bms tony could not be here today because he's getting married and we are also happy for tony on that new adventure if tony were here he would be leading this presentation because tony has really been the leader behind the scenes he's provided amazing project management and i wish he could be here today uh to share the great work that he has really helped move forward so i just wanted to acknowledge tony since he could not be here today and express my gratitude to tony for the really important role he's played on this project uh madame clerk we have slides are you able to share those while the clerk is getting those slides ready can i say that tony thompson is one of my former students i guess that means you'll take some credit may or she'll i think i'll try to take full credit okay mr smith now tony with tony was an awesome student and he's a wonderful member of our city staff thank you sir next slide please so a little background so the city's addressing fines and fees equitably which we'll now refer to as kafi is an initiative of the national league of cities um it was launched in the spring of 2019 um it provided 40 000 dollars in grant funding and technical assistance were joined again but today by some of the members of the nlc team that have been providing that technical assistance and we're so appreciative of them making time to listen to our presentation derm is part of a six city cohort um you'll see the cities listed in the report and we took this opportunity so this uh the kafi initiative is really aimed at identifying one area of municipal fines and fees of conducting an in-depth equity assessment to understand who is bearing the burden of those fines and fees to surface any inequity in any inequity areas that we need to address and then to work collaboratively and together to identify potential uh policy or program reforms that might address some of those inequities we chose to work with our water department and to understand water related fines and fees through this project next slide please uh so i already actually talked about this slide i think we in a kind of the goals of this next slide please let me provide a little bit of um background to set the context so this was a when we started off we conducted a three-year analysis looking at data that the water department provided to us and i'd like to thank kathy compden who has consistently been amazing at getting us all the data that we need kathy thank you uh so we looked at two different types of fees late fees and disconnection fees so over a recent three-year period uh there were 750,000 late fees assessed on 73,325 accounts the late fees are calculated at one percent of what a customer owes or five dollars and i would you know like to note that our water department has chosen that when a late fee is to be applied to use the one percent as opposed to five dollars because one percent of a water bill is in almost all cases less than five dollars in fact i believe the i believe the median late fee was about 80 cents for those individuals who paid a late fee uh so in that universe the average number of late fees paid over a three-year period uh was about 10 late fees uh per account and i'd like to talk about disconnection fees so disconnection fees are a flat $50 fee that you are assessed when your water is disconnected uh the city assessed over 36,000 of these disconnection fees on 15,000 over 15,000 accounts over a three-year period collected over uh nearly 1.5 million dollars from these disconnection fees and on average for those who had a disconnection over this three-year period they had a little they had roughly two disconnections over that over that time um i think some important legal context is that uh under state law we we have to treat every resident equally we know that treating people equally is not the same thing as is equity but it does put some options off the table for example um prorating or having differential utility payments based on ability to pay was not an option we were able to do under that kind of state uh legal limitations and i think Heidi will be able to talk more about that today but i just wanted to provide that the thing i want to say at the outset is while we've been working on this for over a year i can say firsthand that i have seen our water department and and certainly Heidi has been very proactive and before we even started this has been thinking about what to do and ways to address this and ways to address the hardship that prevents in their water bills and i want to acknowledge that work that we have been building on and so thanks to Heidi and her team for the work that gave us a good place to build upon i'm now going to turn it over to michael daily to talk a little bit more about some of the quantitative research we did to better understand this challenge michael thanks for joining us thanks ryan so as ryan alluded to the most important aspect of this work was determining whether these fines and fees from from the water department impact during residents negatively um the water department does not currently collect demographic data so the project team had determined had to determine other methods of investigation um the first ryan exploratory survey of during residents which indicated that non-white residents and residents under 200 percent at the federal federal poverty level are cut off significantly more often than white residents and wealthier residents and to check these results we collaborated with the city's gis team to compare cutoffs to demographic consensus layers um that they had available next slide please so this first map displayed um shows cutoff density in purple with darker purple indicating a greater density of cutoffs and then the second layer here is median income with low-income areas being shaded in blue um so as you can see this map indicates that cutoffs are concentrated in lower-income areas of Durham next slide please uh this next map shows cutoff density again overlaid on the percent of the population that is african-american where the lighter the green means the higher percentage of african-american residents oh sorry could you go back to the that one um and as you can see on this map the lightest green census tracks are located in areas with the most cutoffs next slide and lastly this map shows cutoffs in comparison to the percentage of the population that is non-hispanic white and you can kind of see the opposite of the previous slide with darker red areas indicating a higher percentage of non-hispanic white residents in those areas having lower densities of cutoffs next slide please so in summary um we have found that cutoffs are concentrated in the center of Durham and east of downtown cutoffs occur more often in low-income areas in areas with higher concentrations of people of color this matched the team expectations but and it was repeatedly found in the three or four ways that we looked at it um and that's in conclusion water cutoffs do seem to be inequitable in the city and incur a greater financial mental and emotional burden on these residents resident groups um next i think i'm passing it back to ryan yeah thank you um so in addition to this work so survey work and looking at uh quantitative data we also spent time to try to understand individuals lived experiences uh who have been who have been dealing with water cutoffs we hired Durham residents who had experienced water cutoffs to lead this work to coordinate to facilitate and to conduct interviews with other residents who have experienced water cutoffs we've conducted over 20 interviews to date through this process and we compensated residents for their time not only those residents who were leading the work but the residents who were taking time to participate in these interviews provided food and were needed child care next slide please i want to say that the report provides a lot of quotes uh a kind of important things that we heard and learned through these conversations i'm not today going to read these quotes uh but i'm going to talk about you know at a high level what this is i would encourage you all to please take time to read the quotes that we have pulled out from these conversations i think that they are very powerful um and highlight the importance of this issue and and the impact that it has on residents lives so um just to highlight some of the things that we heard from these conversations uh we heard a lot about how it makes residents feel when their water cutoff was cut off uh feelings from embarrassment and panic as you see in these quotes um to feelings of being ashamed um and so i want to lift up those feelings that we heard another thing that we heard uh numerous times is what one resident described as money magic and i think what money magic really refers to is that when an individual uh who is facing hardship pays their water bill after it's been disconnected uh we do not see often the difficult decisions that they are making that the difficult trade-offs that they are choosing between uh paying multiple essential things and they cannot afford to pay them all and so they are having to make decisions in a moment about what they are going to do without and the things they are choosing to do without um are are essential things and i'll highlight that because one thing that we hear on occasion is a comment that will be uh so in the data you see that a 51 percent of individuals whose water is cut off they they are able to pay make the payment within one day and get their water turned back on and one of the comments that we heard on occasion was well that just shows that it's not about economic hardship and i think that what you hear from these stories is there are important things that we do not see and that the ability to find money uh to to reconnect water is not indicative that uh that you had that money that there are all kinds of difficult decisions and things that families have to go without in in order to get their water turned back on and we heard that from uh uh in many different conversations and these are a couple of quotes that i think make that point well next slide please we heard a lot of residents talk about how hard it is to get by without water and maybe things that some people don't think about about what it means to not be able to wash your clothes what it means to have to wear the same clothes over and over because you can't afford that what it means to think about the water that goes into your toilet and many other things so just how hard it is to get by without water and for those of us who haven't experienced the water cut off i think it's important to lift that up we also heard about how hard it was on families and the the emotional uh and the kind of stress and and distress that it put on family units um next slide please we heard about the unique toll that it can take on children um and i think both on children and on their caregivers who have to watch the reaction of of children when they learn that their water is disconnected i can say that all of these quotes when i read them over again um that that they all have a an impact on me this one in particular as a father of a young child always breaks my heart um and so i just pause to lift that up about the emotional toll it takes when you have young children and they're not able to provide water and the final quote is about the unique challenge renters face so some renters who have leaks um if they have leaks and they're renting and their landlords are not being responsive to that leak they can face a very difficult um situation where their water bills are mounting very quickly they cannot afford to fix that leak and uh in some cases are evicted or just leave because they can't get there they can't afford to get their water turned back on these are some of the challenges that we heard through our time listening to residents of some of the things that we have worked to respond to i'm going to turn it over now to hidey hack it to talk about some of the efforts that we have been taking and that we recommend that the city take thank you hidey are you out there good night oh i did unmute myself sorry i wasn't sure if i could do it or if i have to have someone do it um thank you ryan good afternoon mayor and council members um i appreciate you taking the time to um hear our presentation could you please move to the next slide so i'm going to start just talking about our water hardship fund because our fund uh was initially um when i came in 2017 we were funded at 200 thousand we were told that it the funds went unused and again in 18 we had 200 thousand didn't use it so in 19 it was reduced that was a concern to me because talking to customers and hearing the things that um ryan heard when he did interviews i used to hear them all the time from customers i couldn't get my head around why we weren't using that so i did some research and because the fund was initially administered by dss it was my um hypothesis that people were um concerned about going through dss so um one of the things that we decided to do with this project um next slide please was to change that process and allow people to access the fund online and this coincided very nicely with the malware and the covid because we were able to implement this very soon after um the malware happened and covid was keeping offices closed so people could not go to dss and apply so we allowed them to apply online and these applications are processed through the water department which was something we did with our interaction with dss anyways to check to see if people met the eligibility requirements unhappy or maybe unhappy to report that as of today we have used almost our entire $150,000 allocation just in the first quarter of this year now as you all know it's probably related to the difficulties people are having with covid but i also think it proves that my hypothesis was true when people didn't have to go through dss they would more readily um access this fund um to deal with their hardships next slide please at the same time we were looking at um our disconnect letter because we received um feedback on several occasions that the disconnect letter was confusing to people so there were a lot of things about the disconnect letter um that people didn't understand um it wasn't clear when it was due um and some things were confusing so thanks go out to michael and the center for advanced hindsight they helped us come up with a new disconnect letter and i don't do we have a next slide that overlays the new letter yes there it is so we've improved this letter greatly where we tell people exactly when they have to pay and and we call it out again if you can take your attention to the bottom of the page where it shows the payment date and the disconnect date very clearly there so people know exactly when they need to pay unfortunately we haven't been using this letter very long because we just started using it when we returned to cut off so i don't have a lot of data but i definitely know when the letter started going out we started getting phone calls so we're very pleased um to have eliminated some confusion there with that disconnect letter um to our next slide please one of the other things that the CAFI team is working with nlc on is the it's called the lift up program and and this is designed to provide local interventions for financial empowerment um and in our case obviously we're doing it through utility payments we're trying to enroll at least 100 Durham residents in our pilot program and what the residents will be offered is debt elimination of their the water debt in exchange for attending free counseling and coaching sessions there's two types of counseling that will be offered there will be sort of what we were calling in person counseling through the community empowerment fund which is now going to be the zoom in person or a digital version that they can do self-paced through money map and we'll offer them the opportunity to choose either one of those two programs um we're working with our partners um at this time um to launch this program we're hoping to get it off the ground in october we do have a list of people that that we're going to work with to send invitations to join the program so we're excited about launching this very soon next slide please and we want to talk about leaks a little bit just because ryan touched upon that and it's most difficult when it's nine um owner situations because they have to work with their landlord because a lot of times the renters are responsible for the water bill but the landlord needs to fix the leak so if the leak is large or difficult to apply the renter continues to get high bill after high bill after a high bill and they really don't have any reports a lot of times people either get addicted or they just try to move out um but that financial obligation follows them um and so that that's very difficult for people so what we're doing with this is we're working with nis do we have a next slide on this as well to show okay so there we are we're working with nis to develop a process so that we can refer those situations to them so that they can get involved and if need be actually provide the needed repair and then work with the landlord to get those funds back um we think this will provide landlords incentives to fix the leaks more proactive and then reduce the financial burden on the tenant we also explored some other strategies but as ryan alluded to earlier there's some legal implications of some of these things um so we are not able to just put the water bill in the landlord's name if they refuse to um fix it uh we also are exploring um providing leakage insurance or offering legal insurance to all of the customer base but obviously it would be a big help to renters next slide please um so what we have proposed after this exercise is that we basically eliminate the $50 disconnection fee um although it would represent about a half million dollar loss in revenue based on the data that we analyze we feel that that cost can be spread over the entire um customer base and and still there is a penalty for non-payment which is the actual cutoff but we don't need to add insult to injury by tacking on an extra $50 when that happens um it's a minor source of revenue but it is tied to the rate model so eliminating the fee would mean that we would have to cover that elsewhere in the rate model when we looked at some early modeling what that looked like was about a $50 increase per customer per I'm sorry 50 cent um which sounds much better doesn't it 50 50 cent per customer per month um increased in in their overall um bill next slide please so I just again wanted to echo Ryan's thoughts of saying thank you I know Ryan's going to close and introduce our friends at NLC just want to point out here that if you are trying to reach me there is an H in the front of my name for my email address so please um feel free to reach out if you have any questions thank you very much thanks Heidi I know that we are at time um we do have colleagues from NLC they've asked they have 90 seconds of comments and I would love to invite Courtney Coffin uh with NLC to share briefly and just express how appreciative we are of the support we have received from the National League of Cities over this past year Courtney thank you so much and I think Courtney was having trouble with her camera I don't know Madam Clerk um she was having trouble turning it on it's not a big deal thank you Ryan I can just go forward with audio um thank you everyone I know this is a long day so um we're just going to roll with it um oh start my video thank you all right uh good afternoon everyone um mayor um city council members interim city manager and residents um my name is Courtney Coffin and I'm the senior specialist for economic opportunity and financial empowerment at the National League of Cities I would also like to extend my thanks to Durham's CAFE team for their perseverance and creativity in the face of this year's many obstacles um I mean it's it's been a privilege to work with Heidi Hackett Ryan Smith Tony Thompson Michael Daley and many others as we've seen in cities across the country and in Durham the coronavirus has negatively impacted the health and financial well-being of family and continues to disproportionately impact communities of color and compound historic racial inequities with this context in mind the CAFE initiative identified opportunities for the city of Durham to support and improve outcomes for residents experiencing financial instability three top examples include eliminating that $50 water disconnection fee to help reduce the amount of debt residents incur when a payment is missed and prevent the harmful snowball effects on families that can come with losing access to water two increasing funding for the water hardship fund to assist more residents in paying their water bills so they can get back on a path to financial stability and avoid a cycle of debt three expanding the lift-up program by integrating financial coaching and debt restructuring into other municipal services through an external evaluation lift-up as a nationally recognized model that improved residents financial health while also increasing utility payments by 33 to the city this win scenario also reduced the likelihood of termination of service by 53 reduced water bill balances by 31 percent and on average the residents saved $100 in late and shut off fees these recommendations represent some of the many debt related reforms that can help Durham redefine its relationship with residents while helping families who the city may not always engage with closely realize financial stability thank you very much for the opportunity to speak with you today and I look forward to any questions you may have thank you that concludes our presentation what a great presentation thank you so much thank you to Ryan to Heidi to Tony to miss coffin and I believe you have some other colleagues here with you miss coffin as well yes um yes denise belcer and me tall lions warn apollo great we really are so first of all to the national league of cities and it's really great to be part of these collaboratives we've been so fortunate uh to be part of these on several different things in the last few years and they make a big difference to us and so it's great to have that funding support um I'm now going to ask uh colleagues uh for any questions or comments that you might have uh for Ryan or or or Heidi or anyone else on the team councilmember freeland yes I just wanted to give you all props for this work um I had two really quick questions I know we've got a long day so I'll just make it fast um I'm wonder well I'm glad you did this with water and I'm curious if this research will extend to other services or departments I'm just thrilled that you're doing it and I wanted to happen more on that question I saw that councilmember freeman let their hand councilmember freeman is helping us advance this work and and took initiative to for us to apply for another kind of another national court for policy link and there is a another team working um on a on a more comprehensive look across the city on fines and fees so you will see that work continue and build off this work so thank you to councilmember freeman awesome thank you colleague freeman that's dope uh this was so exciting to hear um the other question I had was about the um the debt uh you know the do the the training in order to get the debt eliminated I'm wondering if that's just does that not matter how much whether you're $50 in the whole of 500 um you do the training regardless of the amount and that debt is absolved is that mine hi to your Courtney could you speak to that thank you um so in the lift up pilot what we what we asked for was uh yes the completion of um a budget in consultation with the financial counselor but then the city utility agreed to that and so while there is a you know perhaps a minimum amount of debt uh this debt restructuring can be um reorganized depending on what parameters the city wants to put around it so um I yes you have to attend in many cases three coaching sessions and agree to a budget um agree to an amount that you need to pay every month in consultation with the city uh okay thank you for cutting could you speak more to the debt elimination part that yeah one was asking about so one of the things that we really wanted to do was to be able when somebody finished this program was for them to have sort of a fresh start so their debt will be looked at sort of in a um I'll say case by case basis because as you know it could be different for each person but the the idea is that when they complete the program their debt is eliminated so we would use all the tools that we have at our disposal today which the hardship funding point that I already talked about so they might be eligible for amounts from the hardship fund but we also know that we hold security deposits for people so that was one of the tools that we've used um in the past to help people so applying their security deposit early um to get them back on track because it's their money right so so we allow them to use their own money and we don't hold a security deposit in these circumstances because they've completed the program so um there's different things like that that we're going to try to utilize again if it's a leak situation we're going to get into you know how can we help with that how can we provide those types of adjustments if the leak is corrected so it's it's kind of an all-encompassing thing that we we're going to do everything and anything that we can do for them based on their participation in the program thank you thank you other uh mayor pro tem thank you mr mayor and thanks y'all so much um for all this work it's really great to hear about and so important for our residents just really want to appreciate y'all's efforts um I just had a couple quick questions I noticed or maybe I missed it but it didn't seem like there was information like the link to the online um application for the disconnection fund or for the heart to fund on the disconnection letter and I was wondering if y'all um had thought about doing that and then um also had a question about whether residents will still be required to pay an additional security deposit um after a disconnection so I definitely can speak to that and I'm glad that you brought it up because it gives me an opportunity to get on my sub box so the reason it's not on the letter is because we don't have enough money so the worst thing we can do is advertise the program that we don't have funding for so as I said to you earlier we are almost out of money we actually have 65 applications pending right now if those 65 applications were to get approved we could only help eight more people the rest of the year so as you can see we're going to run out of money so putting it in a letter would would really be detrimental um should you decide that we're going to have additional funds I think that's a fantastic idea I would love to follow through and do that um to the point about the security deposit again that's going to have to be on a case by case basis if people make payment plans and keep their payment plans we're not going to get them to do additional security deposits if they use their security deposits so it is going to be sort of a credit based need rather than an automatic yes we're going to charge a security deposit like we have in the past thank you that's really helpful and I think we should give you more money uh we've got some funds left in the COVID relief pot so we'd love for our staff to take a look at that and and if you could let um our city manager know how much more you need um so we can look at that pot and see and see what's left but yeah water water in a pandemic is you know is crucial this should be a a priority for us so thank you all so much thank you thank you madam mayor pro tem um other questions or comments councilmember capillero and then councilmember freeman yeah I really appreciate this I'm most excited about getting rid of the $50 reconnection fee uh while not in this moment in my life I've definitely played which bill are you going to pay when to get through the month um and so I very much can empathize with the hard decisions that lots of families are making right now with so many folks having lost their jobs um wondering if we can also start like on our own water bills like many other places that share the funds you know there's the share the warps and we can do a voluntary um kind of residents who can just pay into this water relief fund because I know it's something that I would definitely do with my water bill every month um so that was one question and then what if you are not a predominant English speaker and you need like what are the processes for those folks with the coaching classes and things like that so I'm glad you asked about the um donation fund because that is something that we're looking into we're currently not set up to be able to do that through our system like a roundup thing or an automatic donation that's on the bill but it's something that we'd like to be able to do um people citizens that are interested in donating that fund can just make a check directly out to the city to the water hardship fund um the other um I'm sorry what was the other question just what what were you all anticipating around us like language supports for folks yes um thank you very much uh we actually have Spanish speaking um customer service reps that are able to help anybody who calls but we're also a lot of these things we're translating into Spanish so that like the letters can go out with English on one side and Spanish on the other side we do that with many of the what we called our nice letter just kind of warning people a month out that cut off was going to resume so we've made um great strides in trying to get the communications in English and Spanish as far as our um counseling sessions we are trying to work with our vendor to be able to have um counselors that can offer in Spanish Michael can maybe speak to it but currently the digital platform isn't offered in Spanish so we were to our Spanish speakers to the um online um in-person um type sessions thank you and I just had one last thing I'd like to add if that's okay just as we're thinking about folks who are renting and and the leak situation which I can imagine is is hard many of our folks have um the added layer of not being documented and fearing that their landlords may report them and so that's just one thing I want to raise as we think about how we're helping our residents thank you very much council member and now we'll ask uh any questions by council member Freeman thank you I appreciate the that uh the work has been done and building off of this work I just wanted to know uh just on the back end of council member Caviera's question that it's important to acknowledge that Spanish is not the only language that people from other countries speak and so just acknowledging that the translation can also need to be in other languages and we need to figure out what that kind of building that platform up around selecting what language you speak and then noting that often there are folks who speak a language other than Spanish from like Mexico where it's not translatable and so there's been a lot of um issues around that and and and then just um just in my question I wanted to really ask the question of our city attorney and acknowledging that the renter situation is specific and I wasn't sure if there was a state statute in place that prevented us from actually tying the water to the property owner um as we move forward and looking at some of the options that might be available because I feel like that's that could help in a lot of cases so council member Freeman can you re reiterate your question I didn't follow all of it so I know that you might not be able to answer it right off today sure but if there's a way to look into uh if it's possible for us to set up uh ordinance or what have you where the water was tied specifically to the property owner as opposed to following a renter uh okay um and I think we discussed that previously we touched on it Heidi's shaking your head yes I think there was um a work session maybe a year ago where Heidi and Sherry Rosenthal were presenting and and they touched on that issue we can certainly um revise that research right now we don't have the mechanics to do that or the authority to do that um and I'd have to go revisit it to you know to sort out the statutory mechanisms that we'd have to navigate to even address it thank you I would appreciate having that and moving forward with the look at um other fees that we're talking about within the CAFI work with um policy link so thank you we will do that we'll follow up with a memo that was all of my questions thank you Mr. Mayor thank you council member any other questions by members of the council so um uh council member Middleton sorry mr mayor thank you mr mayor first let me say hi to my friends from the national league of cities uh miss getting together our get-togethers around the country um however long I have in public service one of the fondest memories I will have was being able to sit on a symposium of one of the panel discussions at one of the national meetings right I don't remember whether it's Texas or LA or whatever city it was uh to sit and represent Durham and talk about our work related to CAFI so I want to thank NLC for giving us that opportunity um and for the incredible work uh they're doing I let me at the outset very quickly say I I'm wholeheartedly for doing away with the the late fee I think like health care access to water should just be a basic human right um for folk so so however we can if we can make that happen as a city I yeah I'm wholeheartedly uh in agreement with that um I also want to thank council Cavalier who actually kind of anticipated what I was going to my question uh uh I was going to ask and her continued advocacy for language access I think has has made us brought us closer as to the city to who we say we want to be and who we say we are so I want to thank her for that um first person I was going to ask I noticed in testimonials I could read them they were all in English I was wondering in the testimonial interviews were there any people interviewed who who were non-english speakers uh or with all of those testimonials um of English speakers all right I should say non-english uh uh when any members of the Latino community in those testimonials council member Middleton that is that it's a great question um I'm going to have to look at the list of residents that we spoke with because it's been over it's been a little while since uh and I don't want to provide the wrong answer but I will follow it by email with all of city council to let you know and if uh if it is the fact that uh none of them were Spanish language speakers we will we will certainly um work on on speaking with more residents and making sure that we take language access into that piece of the work as well so thank you for that question absolutely let me tell you why I just recently I spent some time with some Latino residents who who have a a commerce linked environment uh engaging in commerce at a spot in our city here who are engaged in in negotiating finding a space where they can permanently um um engage in commerce to feed their families and I was just amazed at the number of folk who who wanted to came up to me who actually had water bills and wanted to talk to me um through an interpreter about their water bills even more so than being able to be in a space to to sell their wares and and engage in commerce and this issue of leaks of landlords having leaks but these enormous water bills getting passed on to these residents who who were being taken advantage of and one did indeed you know uh divulge to me that they were concerned about calling authorities because of their documentation status so I really really am am am want us to lean in and if we're going to use nis fine about making sure that folk aren't exploited and and and resolving the situation with water bills at a link to link uh leaks um as well as um the um augmenting the fun um yeah I definitely want to think we should give more money cheers to the mayor pro tem uh in our fund but also what we can do to to eliminate uh the late fee as well so those are my three issues again cheers to nlc thank you for this this great work on letting Durham uh be a part of it thank you mr mayor thank you council member other comments colleagues uh I really thought my colleagues had great questions and comments and I really appreciate all the issues that you raised um miss hackett uh it seems to me there are two budgetary items and maybe you can tell me if I'm right one is the uh the issue of having more money for the for the fund which is something that we could for example remedy through um expenditures from our COVID-19 really fund if we so chose um let me ask you is that fund now and you may have said this how is the how are that is that fund generated now is that from water uh it's not part of our rate base tell me you probably said this but it's it's funded through the general fund fund to be and that's again we could talk about our state's status forever but the water yeah so it's yeah that's what I was thinking okay thanks and then the second budgetary issue is for if we were to eliminate the fee then the $480,000 cost would have to be covered somewhere through the rate base and so and your and your estimate that would be less than 50 cents per month for our rate payers and that would be something that is there some timing you all are recommending on that well so at the point in time because the rates of fees have been set I wouldn't recommend that that we try to address that this year which interestingly enough given the directives from the governor we are not charging those fees through the end of the calendar year anyways so there's going to already be a half year's relief on those things it is my hope that between now and the end of the the um calendar year that we're going to help these people with their payment plans with the hardship funds getting everybody current and perhaps it won't be an issue going forward um but that's certainly something that the council could address you could amend the rates of the schedule at any given time so we'll wait some uh advice from you all on that yes through the administration thank you is there any other budget issue that I missed those are the two yeah so we'll really look forward to hearing from you all on those things uh through through our city manager and uh through the department management and uh I would appreciate any recommendations that you have you heard the sentiment of council to help with these things as much as we can so please advise us thank you very much yeah mr smith anything else oh sir thank you and I know that we took more than our portion time but I appreciate the time to talk about this important issue I appreciate it thank you well I think you did a great job on the presentation and uh again want to thank the nlc folks for being here with us and for helping us get this make this happen we couldn't have done it without you and I just really on on behalf of the whole city want to express our gratitude to you thank you so much please include us in your future projects we like them thank you all right and thank you to miss hackett and mr smith and to tony to mr daily we're very grateful to our staff for this great work and mr daily thank you for being a part of this team all right um we will now move on to our second presentation which is the duke franchise presentation let me just say uh because um council members freeman and caballero need to leave um at three that I it's we're not going to be getting to the girls presentation by three I'm certain uh you know or we may start it but we're not going to get to much of it so I'm going to suggest to the staff that um they're able to get separately briefed uh that they're we're going to need this you know I think we all understand we've held several um zoning uh matters until this presentation could occur and so I hope that staff can brief council members caballero and freeman prior to our next council meeting on the serles uh project so madam manager could that occur mr mayor we we can make that occur thank you very much all right uh now uh we will hear from deputy city manager bo ferguson mr ferguson welcome and we're looking forward to hearing about the franchise agreement thank you mayor members of council good afternoon I am bo ferguson deputy city manager for operations and this is not a formal presentation but a but a brief discussion uh to summarize the administration's response to feedback that was received uh Monday during the public hearing as well as written comments that have been submitted by the eab I appreciate the uh meeting adjustment that was just made but we'll endeavor to keep our comments very brief uh in order to keep things moving but I'm happy to answer any questions at the end of our presentation um there are three documents as part of this the franchise the operating agreement and the memorandum of understanding significant comments were provided on the memorandum of understanding uh with uh some minor comments also offered on the franchise so I'll be briefly discussing the franchise and then uh staff from the general services department will be discussing the comments received on the mo you um at a summary level the the the comments offered by the eab on the franchise agreement are comments that are very much in in league with the desires of the staff and the desires of the uh city council as expressed in previous policy we you know we concur with the spirit of those comments um however at this time we are not suggesting any modifications to the language of the franchise agreement and that is because we believe and have continued to confer with uh our partners in the city attorney's office that the franchise agreement already maximizes our ability to pursue those goals under north carolina's statement that as written we are pursuing and believe we have the tools to pursue all of the initiatives that have been referenced I think by the eab by the council and certainly pursued by the staff and our negotiations so at this time we have read through and acknowledged and at this point that don't feel as though modifications are necessary we will be happy to answer specific questions from council about those comments have staff available and also our partners from Duke energy in this meeting but we'll we'll wait for comments to get into those specific details the one detail that that has been discussed at length of course is the term at this time the administration recommendation still remains at 10 years um that is again somebody I can provide more detail on in questions if there are questions about that and we can we can walk through the administration's thinking on that but but we have not recommended a change from the the 10 years that were presented in the documents that went to public hearing on Monday so uh so that is a very brief summary of the franchise agreement there were a very few comments on the franchise agreement again we'll be happy to address questions but at this time I am going to transition over to Stacy poston in the general services department to talk about the memorandum of understanding thanks by Stacy poston the general services department here wanted to just thank the eab for their continued contributions and partnership and expertise you know their advice continues to strengthen our thinking and challenge our assumptions Casey Collins in particular is a resource that we utilize frequently whether he's showing us solar arrays on parking garages at Duke University or serving on the selection panel for the selection of our consultant who's crafting our carbon neutrality and renewable energy action plan he's he's really been a great resource for us have as other members of the eab and since we received their comments over the last several days we've been in direct communication with our mo partner duke energy regarding the various suggestions and I think we're optimistic that there are areas where the eab comments can be incorporated we also want to note that the mo is a partnership agreement whose primary focus is to help the city realize its stated green energy programs and goals this is going to be accomplished largely through the implementation of a work plan which is referenced in the mo the mo does touch on community-wide issues and community efforts that the city wants duke energy to undertake however you know the city has greater control over our own energy usage as a consumer with duke energy the mo is a living document you will see in there the responsibility for both partners to create a biannual work plan and then you will see an annual reporting requirement where both parties will identify things that we've accomplished on annual basis and so those are areas where we will continue to partner with the environmental affairs board as they continue to challenge us we're really you know excited about moving forward in the implementation the first thing that we will be doing is taking an rfi public the rfi is to take advantage of the green source advantage program that charlotte and duke university have both undertaken which is a program of duke energies and then we will be doing that in collaboration with durham county so that will happen here in the next week or so and the mo you know also contemplates that the city is going to engage duke energy and you know community-wide clean energy concerns to the extent that you know they have that the city has influence over those issues we feel confident that the current mo you with some um incorporation of some comments from the environmental affairs board that we've received this week will address the overall foundation and spirit of the green new durham that the mayor envisioned for us and laid out for us in the state of the city plan so happy to answer any specific questions from council thank you so mayor that's that's a really quick run-through of how we responded to those comments we could have addressed every comment and are prepared to do so but in the interest of time didn't want to start there so at this time we'd be happy to take questions from council members about specific feedback that we received in the administration's position on those but that does complete our comments thank you very much mr ferguson and miss poston we so appreciate your work and the work of the entire staff on this um colleagues questions or comments at this time for um for our staff council member race thank you mr mayor um hi bobe thanks for being with us and thank you to all the staff uh with the general services and in the city attorney's office for their incredible work on this agreement um i did want to see if you could give me a little more context on the term of the agreement question i've read a lot of all the emails that we've received about this and looked through the eab's recommendation the one that i keep coming back to around around the term the one argument that seems pretty compelling to me is that things are changing so rapidly in this space both technologically in terms of state and federal legislation it seems unwise at some level to lock us in to this particular mode of relationship especially with the specifics around um renewable energy generation resale etc and to not uh it seems unwise to lock us in to such a long term given the changes that are happening as we speak so i'm hoping you can talk a little bit about that thank you sir i'd be happy to uh so we too acknowledge that the the interest in a shorter term has been around the the possibility of industry change i think our uh our desire to stay at 10 years or our support of staying at 10 years comes from the fact that we believe that when that industry change comes if it comes that we will be able to address that more through the mou which is more of a living document and something that we can amend as we go forward um because of the type of document that is the franchise agreement is at its core much like the many licensed agreements that we've brought before to council it is a pretty meat and potatoes document about the rules of the road in terms of how you use our right of way it really is about your infrastructure and so in duke energies case it also speaks to tree trimming it speaks to uh how you have to get permits to do types of work it is not a document that governs our relationship with duke as an energy producer and provider outside of the scope of the poles and the wires and the and the infrastructure and to duke's interest you know those rules are very important about how they maintain poles and wires uh and it is a significant capital investment on their part to do so so for them having a longer term on the rules of the road of how durham will treat them in our right of way and what we will require them to do is very important to us the a good deal of our interest and i think many of the interest that the eab has support is really captured in the mou and the mou is a document that we believe and and have very clearly stated to to duke that we expect can be updated to reflect the opportunities that may come forward uh it is also a collaborative document it is something that we want to encourage duke to participate with us in uh and very much hope that they will uh follow through and and they have given us every reason to expect that they will so we we acknowledge the industry may change we believe those changes if they come will come specifically with tools for us to take advantage of from the state legislature if they are making those changes with the intention to give municipalities more flexibility we think they will come with avenues for us to do so and that the franchise agreement will in no way be an impediment to take advantage of that so our position essentially is it's important to duke and we don't see an advantage to us uh to have it's important to do to have a longer term we don't see an advantage to us to have a shorter term we believe those things that are of interest to folks who want a shorter term are are things to be legitimately interested in but that we will take advantage of those in the mou so that's a summary of our position on staying at tony that's that's a pretty good answer uh thanks bo thank you mr mayor that was the one you shall want to tease out a bit thank you thank you councilmember councilmember middleton thank you mr mayor and thanks both for being here um so i i i spent a lot of time thinking about this and i've i've read not like sure i didn't read every email but most of them uh and a great deal of the eab comments um and i also want to acknowledge the incredible amount of work the staff has done uh in crafting these instruments and bringing us to this point of decision and it is decision time and i just want to talk a little bit about what what's going into my sort of matrix of decisions um on this particular matter one first and foremost the city's strategic vision for us as a a responsible um um environmentally friendly environmentally responsible municipal player an actor our goals for car reducing our carbon footprint that first and foremost was was my guiding kind of light secondly i thought about uh duke's long duke energies long relationship as a corporate citizen corporate partner in our city um i thought about the the the rate of change in the energy industry and production and seems like you know every we're always on the threshold of some new uh a breakout uh movement in energy over the last as long as i can remember 20 30 years we're always on the threshold of something so i'm while i understand that things move quickly just as a lay person watching the energy and as a citizen watching the energy industry um there's still some stuff we're waiting on to break out so i understand the the desire for us as a city to be to have agility and want to be able to take advantage of new opportunities but i am absolutely convinced at least in my reading of these instruments that that i think bow was right that we we our ability to take advantage of other opportunities new opportunities that new opportunities that they present themselves are enshrined um i'm codified in the uh the mo u moreover as i look at the the franchise agreement i mean duke doesn't really need us to give it permission to do what it's going to do the utilities commission of course regulates uh in that area and and i believe that good faith negotiations have gone on between the staff on our behalf the staff on our behalf uh with duke to bring us to this point i also looked at the history of some of the links of these um of these uh agreements they've gone as high as 20 years sometimes so so i uh i i think that uh the agreements that our staff has negotiated uh with duke one honors i think our commitment our long-term strategic commitment as a city energy use i think two it preserves our ability uh and enshrines our ability to to exercise agility and exercise of the options if if if we need to i think it also honors the good faith negotiations and the good corporate citizen they've been um um these many years while also um you know making sure that we keep faith with our goals and and aspirations as a city and moreover even if i'm i'm not clear even even if all those things weren't true it's the seven years relative to the 10 years seems rather arbitrary to me i don't understand i didn't see any real science or metric that or equation or algorithm that may seven more palatable than 10 based upon some observable uh empirical data it seems to me if we had said seven then you know somebody would come back and said four um it just seemed pretty arbitrary to me so if if there were some more compelling um uh argument why seven would be better than 10 based upon some you know really clear opportunity that's coming down the pipe that we would miss out on because we're locked into 10 rather than seven i just don't see it and moreover if those opportunities do come i think that our ability as a city to exercise agility and exercise opportunities have been marvelously protected and represented in our mo you um uh so i want to i think that staff has done an incredible amount of work um i think that that they've gotten us to a good place particularly relative to how long these things can be and have been in the past so i'm prepared to support it as it is with great deference and great respect and appreciation for the work that's been done particularly by eab and others but i'm i'm pretty confident that our values and our goals uh will be well served by this instrument as it's currently crafted uh and obviously as well as as duke energies um so thank you mr mayor thank you staff for your work thank you very much council member other questions or comments at this time mayor pro tem thank you mr mayor um and thanks bow and everyone on the staff for for getting this agreement together um and thanks to our eab for providing some really um useful comments and feedback i feel so just looking specifically at the the comments of the eab sent us i feel like i know what's going on with one four and five and i still feel a little confused about the extent to which their recommendations in point two and three which is about the city being an independent power producer and about suggestions for undergrounding of electric power and improving the quality of led lights how the extent to which those recommendations have been incorporated into the agreement or not um so if you could uh give us a little bit of clarity on that um that would be great thanks sure so i'm going to take your second question first and i will ask uh i believe fred lemar from the city attorney's office to talk about power generation so as far as undergrounding utilities go um you will hear from us that that we have had no problem getting duke to be willing to underground utilities at our request um we have all the uh authority that we need to ask duke is receptive of any request that we have uh to uh to underground utilities the the the major impediment is always cost we have to pay for that if we are undergrounding utility and so we have never had a situation where we have expressed interest in undergrounding uh a a piece of infrastructure where duke has been in any way of a an impediment to that so the the language that we have uh is really sufficient in the franchise uh to get us the the ability to ask that question that we need uh and so we don't really need stronger language i think obviously um the cost impediment is one that uh is is not really addressed by the franchise but is is really the reason why we don't have more underground infrastructure frankly and so let me pause there and see if you have any follow-up question on that and if not then i'll ask fred to talk a little bit about how this document addresses power generation thanks that's really helpful um could you briefly address the led lights question uh yeah so it's essentially the same answer um it is that we have um we have the resources from duke uh we have the options from duke that our transportation department has requested to be able to run an led conversion program uh bill judge uh who as you know is uh extremely knowledgeable about the program um has assured me that you know a range of options that we can choose from as far as the quality of lighting and the color of lighting um that all the further that much of that program and the rates for that program are set by the north carolina utilities commission uh so again we feel like the language in the uh in the franchise agreement is sufficient to get us all those uh all those options how we administer those programs those are really more operating questions but but not really necessary for changes in the franchise and fred if you are able to unmute i think if you could address the power generation question i'd appreciate it sure i will try my best um good afternoon mr marron council members with regard to the question of uh the city as an independent power producer that that is addressed in paragraphs three and four primarily of the franchise um and uh the statement the the way that i think it's a paragraph three and four of the addendum isn't that right of the addenda of the franchise i apologize yes of the addenda of the franchise and uh and uh those statements are written in such a way that they're reservations of rice rights um of the city um in the case that uh regulatory uh structure um changes to allow such um generation storage and distribution of energy through duke energy's grid system right now that's not something that the city can can do that's not something that's authorized by state law um although the city as a municipality can be an independent public enter i'm sorry an independent um electric power supplier under the public enterprise statute it is not acting in that capacity and electricity for the most part in city of Durham is being delivered generated distributed um by duke energy so we're largely beholden to the public utility and the public utility regulations that govern um the distribution in sales of electricity uh through duke energy in the city of Durham so that i would i would say that these uh the addenda these paragraphs and gender are are our reservations just to be clear that we want those rights if and when they ever we want to exercise those rights if and when the legislature ever um allows them or that there is otherwise some deregulation that would make that happen got it thank you so much okay other comments and questions council members at this time so uh i have a few questions one is miss poston the the rfi related to the green source advantage did you say that that will be happening next week so our plan is to issue the rfi on october 1st we are doing that in conjunction with our consultant who is on board and we will be doing any collaboration with Durham county so rfi for the green source advantage to see what sort of private interest there is in um helping us participate in that program i understand um i believe there's something like 32 megawatts uh still available under the state program for green source advantage is that correct that's our understanding so the way that works is you you know there are some forms that you have to complete to get into the program and so right now no one has completed those forms so we believe that that is the available current availability additionally there may be an opportunity depending on what happens with some of the military universities for additional capacity depending on if those are not taking advantage of so but right now you're you're correct and is 32 megawatts i assume is sufficient for what we would want at this time yes sir and and the fact that we're uh moving quickly on this i assume is good because eventually somebody else is going to want to get in and get this as well correct and we have also been um using also kasey collins as a resource has identified some solar providers and so during the last two weeks we've interviewed i believe four different solar providers who we anticipate might respond to our rfi so we've been laying some of the groundwork to understand what's happening in the private sector great i would hate to miss the opportunity to take advantage of the existing supply so i'm glad that you all are moving with dispatch in terms of so mayor pro tem asked a couple of the questions that i was going to ask regarding the some of the specifics around the language suggestions that the eab um made uh around the franchise agreement you you all talked about the fact that you're working now with duke energy uh negotiating some of the language in the mo you when will it be available to us i know that this is we're on a tight timeline and but i don't want to see it you know at first thing right before our next council meeting and i know that that we don't have a lot of time so i'm wondering uh when do you think we'll see the changes that you all will be suggesting in the mo you oh would you like me to respond yes please stacey if you could i i know that you have been in communication with duke and i know it's just a matter of of everybody uh getting final edit so if you could advise the status of that be grateful i i believe we're we're close we have been on the phone with the attorneys trading documents back and forth and trying to understand what the objectives were of the eab and trying to merge that into the objectives of both duke energy and ourselves and looking at opportunities where we can incorporate that language so i would expect that we would see something early next week um based on where we're at today but we have all the comments incorporated into documents and we are trading them back and forth actively please councilmember cabillero thank you and i have to go i just wanted to say thank you and and i guess one of the things so while i don't i understand the obviously the difference between the franchise agreement and the mou and i think it's correct that we're putting our energy towards getting better terms out of the mou even if it's non-binding um because it sets the spirit of where we need to be uh i just as you said i know that kasey collins is a extremely i have had conversations with kasey about this it was has been helpful for me as a layperson to really help wrap my head around what we're we're really covering here and if it's allowable uh i would be comfortable with allowing members of eab into that space of negotiation again i don't know what the parameters are but i just hope that staff considers the expertise there that we are extremely lucky to have such knowledgeable professionals in our on our resident boards thank you thank you councilmember um so uh i'll look forward and i know we'll all look forward this post into getting those edits um i just will express that i i believe that that the changes suggested by the eab that many of those changes do a good job of expressing the vision that we want to express and that um i hope that you can uh integrate those um you know in as much as possible into the mou i think that they really did um alter the tone a little bit in a way that i thought was really very positive so what thoughts do you have about you're muted stacy i apologize um i think we we both parties agree that there are some areas where we see some improvements but we also have to recognize that you know this is a partnership and there are you know two two different entities involved in the conversations and there are regulatory considerations as we think about how we're going to state things and we we want to be aspirational and we are i think each individually um have individual goals around carbon neutrality and renewable energy both the duke company and our adopted council goals and so we are trying to look at opportunities that exist but also recognize that for instance if we had proposed to accomplish a pilot program and the language might now reflect something that we are requiring our partner to do but they're not within their own company set up to actually accomplish the thing that is being requested that a pilot program we feel like is better than not doing anything at all and so we are trying to reconcile some of those considerations as we move along i do want to reiterate that we are going to have a work plan that we touch that is active that can incorporate changes as we see them come through the pipeline and that you know i think both parties are serious about this partnership and this collaboration and we're excited about the the first time to have this mo you thank you i understand those our constrictions and i look forward again to hearing you know to looking at the actual language um i have a high level of comfort with uh one of the the answers to one of the questions you gave that that fred lemar gave to uh to the mayor pro tem uh in terms of our our rights as an independent power producer and so forth i feel like we have indeed reserved should there be the kind of legislative change that we all uh which is uh devoutly to be wished uh that we are in a good position to take advantage of that um so that's a good thing and thank you for that um i think that's i think those are those that those are my questions i i think that the my other observation is just in line with the the question that uh council member recess earlier about the time about the time frame and um i um and cognizant of the fact that duke this is important to duke as as for the reasons that mr ferdason stated and i also believe as the as the eab said that the the franchise agreement is not the real vehicle for the change that we want it's really through the mo you and that is something that is a is a living document and can be renegotiated it will be renegotiated i'm sure that those things are going to change so uh for that reason i think that the uh you know my my preference is for a shorter time the seven years but i also can understand this this is negotiation um and um i certainly the 10 years of time that i can live with um i think that's all i think those are all the things that i have other questions this point comments so my hope then is that we're going to see this uh as soon as we can the mo you as soon as we can i don't want to be the last day or two trying to uh you know figure this all out and so i know that the the lawyers are looking at it and so forth but quicker the better we will get this to council as soon as we get that that result and and i am confident that it will be we'll give you plenty of time to review those before the uh october 5th meeting thank you finally i just want to say um to stacy um if we had i'm assuming that if we had pulled the the fallon agreement you would have been on the hot seat for that uh now you're on the hot seat here and i just want to appreciate you as a uh as an incredible uh let's just say generalist your ability to step into these big problems and solve them for us as uh and you're many of air many the many other areas the many areas of expertise that you've had to acquire to do this work just want to recognize that thank you thank you mayor i really appreciate you're here mr mayor here here we have great people on the team i happen to be the one that does most of the talking on these items but you know summer also needs to be recognized for the five of five project she's been a part with me all the way through thank you and i know that summers uh i saw summer on the call as well and absolutely thank you summer and thank you everybody on the uh on this team uh the especially fred dawn uh the city attorney office paul cameron daniel valera everybody who's been working on this from the administration side want to express our gratitude so looking forward to see uh thank you daniel looking forward very much to see what's what what's next um and uh hope that we can incorporate as many of the environmental affairs board uh recommendations into the mo u as possible in their language so thank you very much thank you both all right colleagues uh we will hear that we will get that as soon as possible we'll be taking that up at our october 5th meeting and that will be a public hearing item at that um next we have the uh serles presentation good afternoon mayor mayor pro tem and members of council my name is sarah young i'm with the planning department as you know and i am joined this afternoon by colleagues from water management to talk to you all about development in the serles area that are past and future planning in terms of land use and infrastructure and what that may mean um for projects yet to come so um i think the clerk has our presentation um so as soon as we get that loaded up don grily and bill judge are here with me um and they will be uh we'll be taking turns in the presentation um talking about various aspects of development in this area we're waiting for the slides indeed in the meantime you all look amazing madam clerk how we doing with the slides are we getting there mr mayor i will take this opportunity to say that don grily clearly wins the zoom background award today that is very nice very nice nick mickey so uh absolutely beautiful there we go all right share take it away all right um we can go ahead and perfect so i want to start by talking a little bit about our past land use planning for the area as you know the 2005 comprehensive plan which is the the plan in effect right now um it actually did plan for growth in this area i think some folks um maybe under the assumption that we didn't really intend for this area to develop or intensify but in fact we did um however modestly and so this area was intended the old urban growth area which was the limits to which the city would extend utilities um which in the comp plan um was turned into what we call the suburban tier the suburban tier encompasses the vast majority of this area so it was all the way basically to the county line and the critical watershed boundary the area was envisioned to be kind of a mix of lower and kind of moderate intensities you'll see the the lighter yellow was very low density residential that medium yellow was low density just about four units to the acre and then that more intense orange um is kind of low medium you know four to eight units to the acre or so but um those areas obviously of higher intensity are concentrated down towards us 70 and along Sharon road um but all in all we did expect some growth in this area next slide please so what happened um and there's you know I think we can all agree that we probably have gotten more development interest than we had anticipated even with the comp plan and interest actually in the area started before the comp plan was adopted the bright leaf at the park development was actually approved in 2001 uh raven stone in 2003 um and then the the original the precursor to fendall farms was actually approved in 2004 and one of the things that we saw happen in the around that same timeframe was the development in adjacent wake county was taking off hopefully you can see in that aerial shot the grade out is our neighbors in wake county um and that is the briar creek development which started in 2001 there's a mix originally of commercial and residential um and that spawned a lot of additional development on the wake county side um alexander place and briardale which are also commercial ventures there um a lot of office development around 2006 um some medical development in 2007 including a wake med satellite hospital in 2011 so just just on the outside of our county line there is a lot going on which has spurred a lot of interest in this area next slide and in return you know the market responded um we you can see there these are all the developments that have been adopted approved um that's resulting in over 2500 residential units that have been approved in this area since just 2011 um if we go to the next slide this may be slightly terrifying to some folks but we currently have an additional 3700 units proposed either under review some of these cases have already um moved forward for public hearings but there are others that are still under review um that you may not even be aware of so there is a ton of interest in this area um for a variety of reasons we'll talk a little bit about that some more next slide so regardless of its popularity there are some pretty significant development challenges in the area um the first of it which is a series of environmental constraints that I will go into in a minute but also some concerns around infrastructure um sewer in particular and Don will talk a bit about uh I think the perception versus reality about the Searle's project um roadways the fact that those really need to be modernized and Bill will talk a little bit about that in his slides you know and then some other things that we won't touch on today um but certainly um how we deliver other services that are not hard infrastructure we all know the story of having to build fire in EMS station 17 to serve um the needs of residents out in this area and we've heard a lot of concerns about transit availability and feasibility as well so we're going to touch on a few of these and hopefully give you all some more insight next slide please and so the first one that I'm going to talk about is kind of the environmental challenges in this area and this this map should be very telling that overall this area is very burdened environmentally there are lots of streams there's lots of flood plain a lot of steep slopes there's natural heritage area um what am I missing here they uh this area is covered by the eastern Durham open space plan which in addition calls for 300 foot corridors um for wildlife um along streams um so in in addition to an extreme buffer when you start to add up all of the environmental regulations that are at play here um you start to take away a lot of land from development um and what you are left with is really kind of chopped up bits where you know land further south um and and for the west which is a little flatter has less stream encumbrances there you may be able to have some higher density development or some commercial development but really in these um kind of from Leesville road north um this is a property where in order to work around all of the various environmental protection requirements um probably the most realistic choice is residential at moderate densities that can be designed to work around all those environmental constraints so I want to put that out there as kind of the first of the series of challenges for development in this area um and now I want to I think it's time to hand it over to Don to talk about surals okay thank you sir um good afternoon mayor uh mayor pro 10 members of council Don Grayley department of water management um we'll leave this here just for a second because there has some features I just did want to point out is Leesville road is a is a high point through the basin where every the property south of Leesville road uh flows to the south and property to the north of Leesville road flows to the surals basin as far as gravity service so next next slide please next slide please um first of all just a some I'll be using some terms in just in case people out there don't quite understand um some of the names to some quick education um ideally we would love to have wastewater coming out of people's homes to flow by gravity to our water reclamation facilities um that's the cheapest most effective way to provide service of course with its topography and derm um you know we don't have that luxury we're we're full of rolling hills and rough topography here and there and certainly this area is has a lot of relief topographic relief we currently have 65 lift stations in our system mostly around the edges where we have to pump wastewater um back these a lift station is basically a pump station that collects an area of gravity service and then pumps it over the kind of over the next ridge line through of what's called the pipeline which is called the force main and then at that point there it'll it'll flow to to the treatment plant and occasionally it'll pump to another lift station so there might be several lift stations chained together of course the risk with that is if there's one of the downstream lift stations if there's a problem um it could cause a you know a SSO which is sanitary sewer overflow so just just FYI so there's been a lot of interest in this area really starting in the 1990s um as development started to move out um away from the city it's nine to ten thousand acres depending on which parcels are included it's close proximity to the research triangle it's close proximity to downtown and to rally itself um there's a lot of interest what kept it from really developing was number one the topography there was some higher elevations so we in the 90s we could not serve it um in the year 2000 from serve a lot of it because of the pressure we didn't have enough pressure here to serve the parcels uh wastewater um any wastewater here has to be pumped six miles to our north Durham plant um and certainly the topography itself um because of all the challenges of just being able to to put gravity lines in so um there was a decision in the early 2000s to solve the water problem for the city to solve the water issue as far as topography we created a separate um pressure zone out here to be able to boost the the water pressure to be able to allow growth in this area and that's been installed and completed um but the decision was at that time to go and let have development um address the suicide prior to the 2007-2008 economic crisis a developer or an engineering firm had assembled with three other large developers to actually build the Searle station to solve this but would the economic crisis happen that project went by the wayside um after that um we started to see was development wanting to come back but much smaller smaller parcels not being able to afford the larger cost of the southeast original lift station um next slide please so what we what we there's a number of lift stations here um the the lift stations that are here um south of leisville road all pumped to the what's called the del web lift station del web pumps up to the bright leaf station and then bright leaf pumps to our creek lift station and then eventually you know the creek pumps to our north term water reclamation facility um this is a slide at the time that's the searls um basin was established the tan is the area that the searls covers um next slide please at the time that the searls basin fee was established there was an additional five other stations that were coming in to to be served with uh different development coming in um there were now the city was now faced with two issues one is the capacity of the smaller stations because these small stations come to um larger stations but they're all smaller even bright leaf is it's the largest one in the area but all of a sudden there's capacity issues um all of and we also have since that time can easily have imagined that if this was allowed to develop by itself we could easily see anywhere from 15 to 20 lift stations all kind of chained together all pumping to different points um north of sharon road which would have caused um capacity issues in and of themselves the other big concern is that if we allowed all of these lift stations to be constructed 30 40 years from now when all of these stations go towards the end of the useful life this area would be developed and probably the most cost effective solution for the city would be actually to build the searls project itself to take all of these lift stations out of service but as much gravity service into the area and eliminate a lot of these pump stations the problem with at that time you know if that was to occur 30 years from now well now we're trying to retrofit infrastructure into existing development um which was is very problematic especially you know trying to um acquire all the easements that are necessary to put the gravity lines in um you're cutting through neighborhoods that weren't planned to have those in themselves um and it provides a lot of environmental challenges also to put all that that pipeline in so the the city chose to um be more proactive and to look at putting searls in um with funding with the you know utility funds to prevent this from happening next slide please so the the searls project can see on the upper right hand corner is is the lift station location itself off of kemp road um initially we would construct the lift station itself um build gravity sewer lines to take the rondolais sagewood brightleaf and brightleaf um track number eight out of service so they would all be removed um building about 14 000 feet of force main which would allow the southeast regional lift station to pump into the lake creek force main to actually get it to north Durham um but it also and we would build a connection point up to olive branch road which will eventually allow for other um outfall which are gravity lines to be extended out to not have any of these lift stations constructed next slide please um here the the red dotted lines show how some of the gravity line could be extended up and eliminate the need for any of these lift stations um the lift stations that are south of once again south of leisville road um have uh would all pump to the del web uh lift station and then del web lift station would pump into gravity line that would flow into the southeast regional lift station next slide please um here's the current construction progress um we're about 35 complete with the lift station itself um it'll be completed in may of next year and the pipelines a little over 60 percent um the green line is the outfall line we've gotten a little bit farther than that um right now and then the light blue and the purple which is the force main pumping it to the creek so making good progress next slide um is just some pictures of the lift station site under construction um as you can see some of the structural um concrete that was poured in the right hand picture and left you can see we back filled um now up to uh closer to where the the final grade is going to be um but still a lot of work needed at the lift station next slide please um just some of the pictures showing some of the pipeline work that's going on through the project next slide so the overall cost of the project is uh 48.5 million dollars six of which is the phase two of the project um that'll um extend the force main from the lead creek um site all the way to north Durham um next slide please um so the basin fee was to establish um to have the all of the 48 million dollars uh as a cost recovery for the city um so we look we met with planning to look at the existing um how the existing property that wasn't developed um could be developed and what it's most likely to be developed um there was about 14 000 um at the time uh units that were identified six of which had already been um either committed to or constructed that left about 8 000 um dwelling units so based on that um the basin fee was established and um it was approved by council and that was the basin fee increased each year by five percent um currently the basin fee is 5 437 dollars per single family dwelling unit uh as i mentioned five percent we've collected 3.5 million dollars that's money that we've already collected with the a number of other utility extension agreements that figure is much higher now um but the developments aren't at the point where the developer is required to pay the fee but overall um that will provide the reason why the fee increases is to cover the cost of the financing of the project as you saw 48 million dollars is a significant amount and um you know certainly we're using our revenue bonds we're trying to do a full cost recovery of all the infrastructure that's out there and with that i think i will be turning it over to bill thank you so uh as sarah indicated um the concerns we've been hearing between the planning commission and city council is the uh concern about the lack of roadway infrastructure this first slide is from our comprehensive transportation plan and it's a typical cross section for sort of the minimal um modernization that we would recommend for for the types of existing farm to market state maintaining roads and in this area and as you'll notice it's it is very minimal um it's widening to provide minimal 11 foot travel lanes uh five foot uh asphalt area for bicycles curving gutter to deal with drainage and flooding and then uh five foot sidewalks on on each side of the road for pedestrians the uh uh as you'll note there's no bicycle buffers or additional widening for for roadway capacity this is just basically the the minimum that you would need to provide safe accommodations for pedestrians and bicycles uh next slide this is a good example of a picture of a road andrew's chapel road in 2012 um near prior to the del web and i believe that mi home's uh very representative of the existing conditions you'll note the uh pavement condition the the narrow travel lanes of lack of any sort of drainage features lack of any accommodations for pedestrians and bicycles and also if you look along the left side you'll see the overhead utilities and where it passes through the trees uh in the in the distance go to the next slide so this is basically taking from that same vantage point if uh looking at those power lines you can still see where they pass through the trees um we were able to work with the developers to to make some minimal improvements you'll see the a little bit wider lanes for for travel vehicles better pavement condition uh four or five foot paved shoulders i think in this case they're actually only four feet our standard has since changed the the five feet for for bicyclists um curving gunner on the one side the other side they were able to get by with a swale ditch and um and sidewalk so um so this this is an example where we were able to get some minimal improvements uh if you'll go to the uh next slide so you might be thinking well that's great why don't we just do that with all their development well um we were able to do that there because the developers had a significant amount of roadway frontage not all parcels are created the same you'll see some of these uh highlighted in green here uh where their large developments with very minimal frontage so if they're only making their frontage improvement they're doing a very small improvement compared to their overall impact and then there's also particularly along dock nickels uh you'll see a lot of those parcels in white where they're old old farm not old farms but old single family houses um or single lots that the developers haven't acquired and they're building around so if uh if those remain they're very difficult to fill in the gaps later um so if you go to the next slide so so one option around that is this is from our adopted weight neuron collector street plan from 2000 um the left side's larger image and right side's just a blow up of sort of this dock nickel solid branch area it's a little difficult to see but you'll see some particularly dotted blue lines um extending north south through um from olive branch road where it connects near dock nickels all the way south crossing leesville which is the red line and goes further south off the bottom of the page well that is essentially a collector street that um the portion south of uh leesville road is now delweb arbor's drive um it's uh it was an opportunity so it's an opportunity where we can provide internal pedestrian and bicycle connectivity and connectivity uh to the north and south or east and west um as developments adjacent building building develop and opportunity for good internal um options similar to our neighborhood bicycle routes uh problem with this plan um if you'll think back to that environmental slide and those features that we were looking at before this plan was done uh prior to the area with good gis mapping so they didn't have a lot of access to the streams and they just drew pretty straight lines right and ignored ignored all those environmental features so we often have difficulty as developers come in we're trying to work with them to the extent possible to keep to the spirit of this plan provide those connections but um particularly where there's large streams or other things like particularly right along their property line or other types of things very difficult to build for a developer to build half a culvert um or and very expensive to get the permits in the process so um so it's been a challenge but we're trying to work through that um so then i'll turn it back to sarah and she can on the next slide she can go a little further mute it sarah sorry just caught myself my little screen popped up you're muted um so wanted to pivot now and uh talk a little bit about kind of what what the future might look like i mean i want to start first with a little bit of context um there's there's been uh some talk i think among certain folks that you know if if we're not really ready um to make investments in terms of additional roadway infrastructure maybe or other upgrades in the area you know could we just deny annexations forget the rezoning and let this area lie dormant and i showed this slide because i think there's still um a lot of potential for development in the area even under the buy right zoning so what you see in that aerial photograph when you look at there's kind of this diagonal line almost that runs through this is actually a gis image from wake county and all those white parcel lines towards the bottom and right um those are all the parcel lines in wake county and so this is the area immediately adjacent to us to this uh searls basin area and on the wake county side it's been developed um uh mostly all of that um it's zoned you know rural just like ours portions of ours they have um 30 000 uh minimum square foot lot sizes um an acre on septic and basically they've developed all of this without utilities and so what that's resulted in on the wake county side is large lot large predominantly subdivisions um so this could happen on the Durham side and i don't say that as um you know any sort of threat or admonition but it's just a reality i think we need to understand um that that is possible now um on our side it just hasn't really happened yet but that has been the prevailing pattern um on the wake county side because they do not have utility so next slide so what's our plan i think that's the the the million dollar question that everyone's wondering and um this definitely is an area that we've recognized for some time needed some more attention we had always planned as part of our comprehensive plan rewrite that we're currently um undergoing to do a series of small area plans for areas that are experiencing particular development pressures or need a fresh you know rethinking in terms of uh land use or infrastructure um however as you can imagine we're still in the goals phase and so small area planning um still a ways away but um we are going to actually work to advance the small area plan portion for this area um and begin that work this fall kind of concurrently um with our development uh finalization of goals for the comprehensive plan um in large part because a lot of the issues in this area are technical in nature in terms of the environmental constraints and the infrastructure issues that we talked about so we think that we can do tackle a few things in that small area plan i think first of all we need to recognize that and capitalize on kind of some regional land uses i mentioned earlier in the slide that kind of showed the briar creek development um you know our andrew's chapel development is only a couple hundred feet away from several office developments and only a few thousand feet away from some commercial and so looking at areas like that that could potentially have higher development um intensities um where it might make sense to capitalize on something that's going on immediately adjacent to us i think makes some sense um you know the the publicly people they don't um they don't pay attention to those imaginary lines that we call divisions of boundaries between jurisdictions so um the other thing that we um and again i alluded to this earlier we can identify the the prime areas for non-residential uses and that's predominantly going to be um towards highway 70 maybe um some isolated pockets along 98 but those are the areas that can take larger paths of development that you typically see for commercial and other non-residential uses we're not i don't think you're going to be able to see those uses kind of internal in the center of that of that area there's just too many environmental features but then i think we can also identify the appropriate densities based on those environmental constraints i think i i a little bit about the the gradient as you move from northeast to southwest um how the land starts to open up a little bit more um and the future land use map that we have now recognizes that um but there may still be um ability to intensify some beyond that um so that's something we can can look at and then lastly and i think maybe this might even be the most important thing which is um we need to modernize our UDO in terms of its residential suburban standards i think there will always be a a role for suburban um development some people may be freaked out hear me say that um but the truth is when you have areas like this that are so encumbered environmentally um it's really not feasible to do a high density you know super walkable traditional neighborhood type development um and so there are places where conservation subdivision might be really appropriate and this may be one of them um but having said that um there are a lot of things suburban doesn't have to mean um unwalkable it may mean less well connected um but there are lots of things i think that we can still tackle to make these these neighborhoods more livable um in terms of trees and sidewalks um in terms of um green infrastructure etc um so those are things that i would propose that we look at as we tackle the small area plan for this area next slide um as the you know once the small area plan was is developed um as far as the searles basin fee um we can certainly evaluate what that what implications there are to our current methodology um we can recalculate the fee based on the new plan up or down um certainly we would then evaluate the the current boundary line whether it needs to be adjusted and or additional land either taken out or pulled in and uh and also evaluate at that time the the cost recovery model right now as i just mentioned there it's a full cost recovery of the city by um what is currently planned as far as capacity we have designed the station to incorporate some future expansion or upgrade if the the whatever small area plan that's actually creates a higher density than was originally just between us and planning in 2015 um you know we can uh you know make those adjustments to the lift station and it provides some flexibility there so um as far as the lift station and the the fee we would um you know once the small area plans come we would look at all of that and make the proper adjustments and any any recommendations to council um based on the outcome of the plan next slide so in terms of the transportation the here's a couple options uh as you're aware the uh cost to modernize or improve these roads are extremely expensive we estimate just theseville road dock nickels isla branch which are sort of three major roads through the the middle of the sorals basin uh collectively are about 11 many-year miles of roadway uh cost estimate of similar projects for um the warren road bike pet improvements hillandale uh corn wireless and carpenter fletcher are about seven eight million dollars per mile to sort of make these types of improvements uh that would easily be in excess of 80 million dollars or more just for these three roads in there so um one option is to continue requesting text commitments from developers to make improvements along their site frontage as you saw on andrew's chapel road it does work in some locations particularly where we have large amounts of site frontage um but they're we're going to have to realize that there's going to be other places where we're not going to get it either um they have where they have small amounts of frontage or where they proceed with buy right development such as um conservation subdivisions or other types uh subdivisions where they don't have that where we're unable to get those text commitments for those roadway frontage improvements um we do still have the collector street plan that will provide some of those internal as sarah said the the internal streets will be walkable and bikeable and to the extent that developments are able to connect to each other you can piecemeal and um be able to get from one neighborhood to another safely on walking and biking which won't necessarily be able to get to uh long distance remote uh facilities um could we look for ncdot ncdot all of these are ncdot roadways um that's not likely a very realistic option as many of you are aware ncdot's sti and spot funding process um these would be local roads those are more geared towards capacity improvements there's very little money for these types of projects at the state level so they would be competing against much larger highway capacity projects so um it's probably not a likely scenario um street impact fees we do uh collect street impact fees those are generally intended though for capacity improvements as well um taking roads from two lanes to four lanes not necessarily providing these types of improvements that we're talking about um another i guess potential area concern is this is in the north zone where the fees are quite a bit less so we've generated uh quite a bit less money in the north zone than we have in have in the south zone so um there would be limited opportunities to utilize street impact fees um i know you have a cip um presentation later today um we can um see the cip or the federal lap funding 30 mpo is always potentially an option but those funds are very competitive very limited lots of priority needs throughout the city um we have lots of other other roadways within the within the city that might be higher priorities that are in similar condition roads such as a Dearborn drive cheek road hearty street um cook road picket road south austin avenue these are all very similar two lane minimal roads that that have large amounts of development around them and then a number number of cities have utilized transportation bond charlotte riley in particular for the leesville road i think they they have transportation bond on the leesville road corridor for for doing that but then once again um we'd have to balance whether or not this would be our highest priority area compared to all the other needs within the city i think that's about it i think that was the last slide and i'm sure sarah don't have anything else but i think we're happy to take any questions yeah thank you all that was a fabulous presentation so comprehensive and i just really want to express my appreciation to you all for doing that it's really great to to get this in perspective rather than just hearing uh you know hearing about it one by one when we get these developments it's it's really very helpful so now i'm going to ask my colleagues for any questions or comments that they may have who would like to start us off mayor pro tem thank you and thanks everyone so much this is definitely a helpful presentation and gave us a lot of the context i think that we needed to think about development decisions in the area um i just have a couple of questions so if if the environmental features limit us largely to low density development anyway do we like how much do we really need to think about the roadway improvements if we're not really planning on putting a lot of people out here like what are what is the the how much how much do we really need to consider like transportation and then i wonder like if we're not really putting a lot of people out here then um is is transit even really an option because we're not you know are we going to get to like transit supportive densities in any of these areas i think i'll start with that and then sarah may want to follow up but um so yeah certainly um the lower to density to the less likely the need for roadway widening capacity for for vehicles would be we still have this problem or concern of these um these are still major roads around and adjacent to the communities that would not necessarily be walkable or bikeable particularly where you have gaps between developments and meaning to fill those in um the lower the density obviously the more difficult it's going to make it to be uh transit supportive even the the previous comp plan at you know most of the densities or four units or less per acre those really are not transit supportive developments um where we would in particularly with housing prices and other other issues i don't necessarily think that we would think that this would be a high priority candidate for for extending transit service with the many other needs within the community yeah i'll chime in and say that i agree with bill um this is not an area that you're going to get any kind of density that i would consider transit supportive i do think that we do need to look at there is a little bit while we may not put enough people out there necessarily to warrant um you know maybe huge roadway re-thinks i think one of the things that's happening is that because of development that's happened to the south and wake county there is a lot of traffic that is making the the linkage between the briar creek area for instance and highway 98 and they're using um you know a lot of these roads all of branch in particular to do that and so that's one thing that we've heard from residents of these areas on cases is their concern that um that there is a lot more traffic of folks that don't even live there they're just trying to connect from one area to the other again because the road network here is is pretty sparse um so that may be something to to consider you know whether we need to make improvements maybe in a particular area to help make that connection and then worry less about kind of the finer grain road network and let neighborhoods kind of um establish that as they are developed thank you um just another question around the small area plan i really appreciate y'all moving the timeline for that up and starting on it in the next couple of months what's the so like what's the time i know it's you know it's a big project so like what's the timeline for that being finished and then how do we avoid approving developments in the meantime that don't fit what the you know that don't fit the plan given that we don't really know what the plan is going to be um like i worry about um our ability to to do that kind of planning if we have already um if we've already approved a bunch of projects in the area that have that have kind of set things that we can't change i think that's a great question um we i'll be completely honest i don't have a timeline um fully worked out for when we might have the small area plan portion for this uh complete um i would likely say um i would anticipate it you know if we're starting at this fall um that we would have a draft of something to move forward hopefully by the spring um but again you know we're still under kind of the challenges um of covid um and uh regardless of the fact that this is um i think there's going to be a lot of technical issues that are going to drive um planning in this area we still are going to need to do community engagement that's important um and so that is uh all you know additional challenge i know that we've talked a lot about whenever i've given updates on the comp plan in general um in terms of how you treat current um cases i think that's that's the million dollar question right um knowing um and we were hoping that some of the information that we shared today um could maybe help um illustrate that i don't think that this is an area that's going to be um really highly developed and so the densities i think of most of what we see coming through um are probably going to be in line with the densities that we propose uh moving forward i haven't seen anything really proposed that it was really high density um in fact i've heard a lot of concerns about how low the density is of some of the things coming through um but i think particular you know looking at things like conservation subdivisions when they come through um since they are trying to really set aside and protect those sensitive environmental areas um i think those um would be something that we would probably encourage um a favorable look upon because they are trying to protect those resources that um we've identified in our plans and policies that we that we care about as a community so um i don't have um you know i apologize Mayor Brotem i don't have the answer to that question um but i i work on your psychic psychic ability yeah my crystal ball i ordered it from amazon is not here yet but um i put that out there to say that i don't think that the development that we're seeing is really that scary um in terms of from a planning perspective what we eventually envision this area to realistically develop that that helps it does thank you um and this is kind of like a sorry i would like to follow up on the trend sure sure sort of issue um based on the densities that sarah is talking about while we don't necessarily envision this to be a good location for sort of traditional 40-foot buses with 15 or 30 minute type service um there are evolving technologies and and programs we're testing right now at the eastern connect where we can utilize smaller vehicles or more on-demand vehicles so that's not to say that we would not provide any transit in this area just would likely not be the traditional 40-foot bus with regular fixed route service thank you that's great um so this is kind of a bigger like regional sustainability thinking question um your point about the development happening on the on the wake county side at like super low density 30 000 foot lot well in septic is well taken i wonder though like so so here's another million dollar question if we can't develop this area in a way that we think is gonna be sustainable long term should we not just let it develop super low density on well in septic and try to direct developers to build higher density um development at other places in durham and that's kind i mean that's sort of the so similar to the i'd like the rural boundary idea that they have in orange county though in in orange and you know and they also prevent density so you end up with complete unaffordability but if we were to allow like higher density development and as we do in and other parts of the city that are more supportive for that development and just let these more like rural and environmentally complex areas be you know be farmland and like you know little houses with ponds like big lots would that be better so so would that be i feel like would be better environmentally i'm wondering what are the other costs of that like we obviously have a housing shortage and we need more housing and we need more affordability do y'all think that we could replace the potential the housing potential of this area with higher density housing in other parts of durham and would developers like start doing that rather than building tons and tons of low density single family out here if we were to if we were just to decide we're not annexing this you can build on well in septic but that's all we're gonna do y'all are good with the questions today um so i'll say that that's why we hired the mayor pro tem we know we know she's going to ask these kinds of questions i love it um i think that's definitely one path that could happen and certainly that you know low density development gets a bad rap for a lot of reasons right but it the one thing it does well is kind of protect environmental uh environmentally sensitive areas by not just over developing them so there is certainly that benefit now whether or not we'd be successful in kind of channeling developer interest elsewhere to densify in other areas i don't know i do know that even with um rising housing cost and um rising housing cost particularly in this area that this is still some of the more market affordable ish that's a super technical term area uh in Durham right and so you the further in town you get and the more you're trying to do infill the more expensive it is the more expensive the land is um so channeling developers to do more work further in closer into town and less out in the suburban area um while they could develop more densely i don't know that that would result in more affordability not with a capital A obviously but um so like i said my crystal ball is on back order um but i i do think that there is a little bit of intensification you know we've seen some cases for townhouses in this area for instance which i think is a reasonable level of intensification um that would provide a bit of housing stock that's going to be at a price point um that is not necessarily exorbitant potentially um whereas you know certainly if this develops as um large lot um development like on the Wake County side those are going to be a pretty high price points that's that's what's happened on the Wake County side so i think that's what we have to weigh thank you big big questions i appreciate all of your um expertise and thoughts on it thanks everybody thank you madam mayor pro tem uh councilmember reese absolutely thank you mr mayor um sarah bill don um this is the kind of presentation we need more of as a council um i think some of the frustration that i used to feel before i joined the council and that a number of our neighbors feel about how the council operates on zoning and annexation issues is um i think it flows from a misapprehension of the role of planning staff in this process because we all know that the planning department's role is not to tell us this particular annexation or rezoning is a great idea and fulfills germs goals in this part of our community instead as i understand it the role of planning is to tell us whether or not a particular proposal is consistent with the unified development ordinance in the comprehensive plan and that is a distinction that certainly alluded me before i ran for public office and i know is not at front of mind for many of our neighbors and so all of that is to say that this presentation comes as close to what i think most folks think the planning department is doing for us which is it said you have provided us with an incredible multidisciplinary look at this one part of Durham currently Durham county for the most part um and said here are the opportunities and challenges with development in this area here's what we think it can sustain and here's what we think it can't and here are the challenges that come from trying to do some of the things we don't think are a great idea including the fact that it's hella expensive and um and there aren't really a lot of good ways to do it um and i just have to say put a marker on the idea that where i started which is we need so much more of this and i know it's got to be staffed in 10s and i can't imagine how much work it took for y'all to put this together in the time that we asked for it and so i'm just really my first response is how grateful i am to the work to the work product um and to the idea that this comes closer to what i think we ought to see to the extent we can get it now obviously if we expect to see this more often we're going to need to make investments in transportation and the water department and in planning to put us in a position to get more of this um and so i think that's something i hope that my colleagues in the administration can think about as we enter into i hate to say it but the next budget cycle is how incredibly helpful this kind of thing can be to us as we think about what we're approving and what we're rejecting in a particular part of town um i will say that i i i'm really sad and disappointed that um that council members call the year and freeman couldn't be with us today and i hope that they will get as much out of their briefing on this as i got out of this presentation because i think you know we i met with staff about this earlier this week and um and the question that i got was what is it you hope to get out of this presentation that you know staff said we think it's going to be great but what are you looking to get out of it and my response was i hope that we can create and come together as a council around a consensus for how to go forward in this area um i think there has been one mindset that i've heard expressed which is and and have occasionally expressed flavors of myself which is if we can't get what we think we want out of development in this area we shouldn't say yes to things we don't want but obviously that's the rub isn't it what do we actually want in this part of the city and that's why this presentation is so helpful is that it's great to have ideas about what you might want to see but it's much more helpful to get real facts about what can actually happen and so that's really helpful the other side of that that i've also heard my colleagues say and i have also said sometimes although maybe not in this part of town is that the process that we ask developers to go through is hard it is it creates capital is attracted to the current situation and the facts on the ground and the decisions that we make as a council about things that either discourage or encourage development in a particular part of Durham and for years now the plans for this part of the county have been on paper and we are now in a point in our kind of market cycle in real estate in Durham and in the economic place that we find ourselves in as a state and a country where this part of Durham is now right for the kind of development we're seeing and we know that because we keep seeing it the market is giving us a very strong signal about what it thinks is appropriate and shockingly enough it lines up pretty well with plans that we made many years ago about what ought to happen here and that is so we i hear that and have said before that that when developers invest time energy and money over a period of time off and spending years to bring a proposal to the plant and the staff the planning commission and the city council that that deserves serious consideration what i have resisted since my first days on the council is the idea that just because a developer has played by the rules that they deserve an annexation of rezoning and i know that all my colleagues agree with that that the fact that that that developers have followed the rules and gotten to a hearing for the city council is really the table stakes for that game that is the bare minimum threshold for getting in the door if you don't play by the rules we're never going to see your presentation and proposal so the the tension that i think we've experienced in this part of Durham is between those two ideas and i think has been an interesting conversation because it has led to this particular moment and having our staff put together so many actual facts instead of bright ideas and i think it's been it's extremely it has been extremely helpful to me it is certainly clarified for me some of my uncertainty about the piecemeal nature of the the way that development has to work in this part of the in the this part of the county for all the reasons here that you talked about um i uh the last thing i want to say about it is i don't know that my goal for this presentation is going to be able to be reached without our colleagues being part of that conversation um and so i don't know what the path forward is maybe we have it uh on october 5th after our colleagues have received their briefing maybe we meet in one on one or groups of three to talk about some of this stuff may i don't i don't know what it looks like but i do know that for me this presentation the information it's contained has really helped firm up for me the some of the ideas about what can happen here in this part of Durham and how i think we can better guide developers about what we want to see the the last thing i will say is that um looking at that map of the weight county side of the county line with Durham was it was a revelation um it i don't think i conceived that that kind of development could happen with well and septic um on the Durham county side of the line and that map strongly suggests yes it can uh generally speaking my strategy for a little while has been um if we say noted things we don't want we will get other things that we might want better that photo uh strongly suggest that maybe if we say no to some of this stuff we're going to get extremely low density well and septic um that's not really in Durham's interest either uh and so um again i don't i don't i'm not gonna obviously in this form take a position on any particular project proposal that we're going to see in the weeks and months ahead but i just thought it was fair to give staff and my colleagues kind of a little bit fuller picture of how my thinking is evolving um especially as a result of this particular presentation so i've talked a long time mr mayor i'm not i'm going to stop now but just again wow this was incredible um very very helpful to me personally and i hope my colleagues got something out of it too thank you mr mayor and we're good comments so thank you very very valuable um other comments uh or questions at this at this point colleagues councilmember freelon yes i just have a really quick question uh like charlie i was really struck by the juxtaposition of the raleigh border and um sarah when you were talking about the kind of aggressive development strategy that they're doing to the south of us and how septic reliant that is i was just curious curious from from your perspective is uh what is the environmental implication of allowing the septic style development to continue you know versus us coming in is there a preference there from an environmental standpoint about what's preferred or better a good question let me clarify though that um there were two different slides with kind of two different aerials of um development in wake county one was bryer creek predominantly south and that is where there was high intensity that was annexed by the city of raleigh and had city of raleigh utilities and so that's how they were able to do all of that office a commercial etc um in addition to residential the the the slide towards the end of the presentation um that showed kind of the large lot subdivisions um on wake county side that shot was actually taken um further north um carpenter pond road runs kind of north south through there and becomes more or less the dividing line the wake county line um wake Durham line jumps kind of back and forth across carpenter pond that's that's there that is not city of raleigh that is just unincorporated wake county and that is what is developed on on septic um and i think they may have their water service may be aqua or something like that um but um so i think that you know the the reality is um to get to get anything other than residential you're going to need um the infrastructure of water and sewer to do it though if we're talking about septic we're definitely talking only residential and only kind of um larger lot probably larger price point um so i'm not sure that i answer your question because i realized i got rambling to clarify no no it's it was it's helpful your rambling is helping further clarify my understanding um and yeah i mean yeah we've all been to briar creek i i'm i'm familiar with the areas you're talking about and that's helpful i guess my question was really about the environmental impact of septic it's the it's a utilities question like yeah if i if i could jump in here too is um you know because we have a gravity service or sewer service in that area with some of the list stations especially along the wake county um border there as well as what searles be able to provide and we have water lines in and around the area um that even if they go to low density development i because of you know the land may not perk very well it may it may be low density but it may be served with city utilities and uh you know especially long term you know septic systems don't do well in our clay soils from perspective so ultimately you may end up having to extend um water and or sewer lines to take care of failed wells or failed septic tanks so it's always better environmentally to not have those to start with and have public utilities in there um so that you know it reduces the environmental risk significantly great that was that was my question thank you very much thank you council member council member middle 10 thank you mr mayor and thank you team for great work um a lot was was uh billed uh about this presentation and i i think it's met um all of its billing uh there are some decisions that were hanging in the balance predicated upon this presentation i guess the question for me is how do i operationalize what i've heard here today relative to the decisions that are pending now one of my concerns has been avoiding the appearance that we're starting the game and then changing the rules once we started the game uh and and i'm i'm just very concerned about what we convey as a city to to folk not just developers but our residents and citizens and and the nation and folks that are thinking about coming to Durham as well i do not think that the udo and comprehensive plan are valued neutral i mean that they they very much they're not documents that are generated by some disembodied kind of you know just factory churning out uh uh rules i mean they represent conversations and and value-driven conversations often for example we just spent a great deal of time considering a udo text amendment to reflect our values relative to development agreements so so these documents uh i think the planning commission has done a great job also over the years of of of conveying our values the values of the council um as they do their work they're very wonky detail oriented works and insofar as the udo and comprehensive plan are not value neutral then i think it's important to us that if we make a decision uh about the fate of a particular area or the city um that we do our due diligence and do the work necessary to codify it and and and enshrine it uh to protect us legally uh to give us credibility when we deal with folk um and to avoid again um looking capricious or arbitrary or things are kind of just going that way because that's the tone of the meeting that day um with that said all of the concerns that my colleagues have brought up from environmental uh to traffic related to i think there was even uh questions about design concern design commitments and then in certain developments all of those things resonate heavily with me uh and are deeply deeply uh important um and i think that you know if we're going to continue to take developers fees and let them do their due diligence it's been a lot of money to get to a decision and we know whether we've stated it or not or it's just in the air that we know that we have made a decision to contour this particular part of the city in a certain way without having it reflected in the udo or udo or comprehensive plan this is kind of a a thing we do then i i think it's it that's not the planning staff's responsibility it's our responsibility to communicate that in a full-throated way um and in a way that that's unambiguous um for the sake of the credibility of our city and those that are that are playing on our field um so with with that said i think the um the presentation today definitely has has has given me um um a better view of what we're looking at the area i think that that but the question is our vote's going to change our decisions that are pending uh that we've that we've put off until this presentation of how was this presentation out impacting those decisions that are currently active before us um i think um council priest makes a good point that our other colleagues aren't here uh but whatever we're going to do um i would just encourage us to to say it out loud and and if we need to codify something about this area uh then that we do that um and and in the ways that are are available uh to us um you know the area is is and i think somebody mentioned the market um you know i i i i live in this area first i also invested really invested in this conversation but um you know there's a reason why folk want to develop in this area um a price is one thing but you know accessibility to to rolly they're a major interstate connectors in that area briar creek isn't itself a draw so i don't know how much incentive you know how much success we're going to have and say why don't you go somewhere else i mean that you know location location location is what my friends in real estate always tell me there's a reason why folk uh want to be in this area um and and i want to i want to and i'll just in here i want us to just be clear um uh in in and honest and open and transparent that if we make a decision about development in this area that a future council may agree with or may not agree with but but if we call a list coalesce around a set of principles and values for this area that we state that um uh and that we we you know we govern ourselves accordingly but the presentation has been very helpful um it's up to us now to operationalize that relative to the decisions that are pending that we put off until this presentation so thank you much i appreciate you guys for all the hard work thank you councilmember so um right now the first developers into these areas and anywhere um are often required to do a lot of very expensive improvements at major intersections which future which future developers then benefit from so it can be more costly for you to be the first one in it could be more costly in a big way you know if you had a tia and it it demanded certain uh big big improvements and i wonder if there's a way that there can be some cost sharing of these kinds of improvements among developers and i wonder if the development agreement is a potential tool for that um you know we we we uh we talked the other day about what are the potential benefits of the development agreement and um i'm not sure exactly how that would work but this would be you know we would want um you know i'm trying to think about how how some how some of this cost sharing could occur and wondered if you all had any reflections on that i guess i can start unless uh and sarah and don may have different opinions but um i don't know that we've talked or explored too much on the development developer agreement aspect because it is so so new i think that's definitely something we probably need to do some more research with our the attorney's office i do know as particularly as it relates to transportation it gets a a little more difficult to sort of regulate capacity or assign capacity or or those costs um then it does maybe with water or sewer um because water and sewer you can control who who taps into your who taps into it versus um folks still having my right development that could still generate traffic and and avoid those impacts but uh but that is definitely something we can explore i know we had similar issues on page road number years ago um with the best page development um having to be sort of the first one in making a lot of those improvements and then second and third developments behind it often often benefit from it so it is something that we hear over the years our street impact fees do do give the credits to that developer that makes those improvements so rather than pay street impact fees they they get credits but the cost of the improvements are often far in excess of the cost of the actual improvements so we're it's often cheaper for the second third developer to just pay the fee yeah may or if i could just jump in too is some of the um concerns we've heard from developers in the past and what we've seen especially along with when there's been expensive water and sewer improvements that they've had to do is um number one is some developers because of the extra cost they may not have the financial um or you know whatever financial package they put together to try to develop it they may not be able to afford those so we've heard pushback on that um number and whether they could carry that for a period of time and get reimbursement i know if they have the capacity a lot of times they assume little risk in that and they just take that cost and don't assume that a whole lot of cost is going to be recovered and we'll just put that back into the housing um cost itself so we've we've heard that as well so um a lot depends on their ability to you know to carry that and finance it and what level of risk that they they want to take to be able to uh and what are the chances are that they'll be able to get their money back or their portion back that they uh is it a tribute to them so there is some concern you'll hear that from developers i just wanted to point out for you thank you all for that i appreciate those reflections um yeah this has been super helpful i will second what my colleagues have said it's definitely laid out i think what the kind of parameters are for the choices that we're making and that's really very useful and i appreciate it um and i think uh having this discussion with council members caviera and caviera and freeman is going to be very important over the next uh you know week so they'll be informal we take these up all right anything else thank you all so much we appreciate you definitely the best-looking group we've had present today congratulations i give that as you know i give that crowds out every work session i believe you all won this time i hope ryan's not listening thank you all thank you all thank you guys so much we appreciate you all right thank you don't worry charlie ryan's a former winner okay uh we will now move to our uh participatory budgeting um presentation i see andrew mr holland welcome thank you thank you and miss baker welcome great i see you i see the whole family's here we're good we're glad to see you all thank you mayor uh good afternoon mayor members of council um my name is andrew holland serve as the budget engagement manager uh with budget and management services um also would like to introduce rovin baker who also serve as the budget engagement coordinator as well as um introducing uh sarah ma who is actually one of our pv stand committee members so we're glad to have her um on this presentation um we actually have a powerpoint um prepared if the clerk's office can set that up for us yes thank you so um in regards you can go to the next slide please so in regards to our agenda we're going to be extremely brief especially with the first section of the pv derm cycle i want to recap um i'm sure that you all have seen um a lot of these slides especially within this area uh rovin will really dive into uh discuss some pv cycle two uh which will be a shift of scope in which this was put forth by our pv stand committee members so uh we welcome any questions um that you may have in regards to uh our presentation next slide so in regards to um the goals of pb derm uh approximately two years ago the stand committee developed goals to serve as the fabric of pb derm the importance of the goals were to really design a process to include residents who have not been traditionally involved in government decision making and also ensuring that marginalized communities have a greater say so in how resources are allocated and with these goals uh pb staff and also the pb stand committee uh really made a true effort in assuring that these goals were integrated throughout our pb process for cycle next slide next slide please thank you so this is a timeline of pb cycle one um of course the first step within a pb is the ideal collection um you know according to our outreach strategy you know we were very intentional in assuring that our outreach and engagement was intentional and uh reaching folks in where they would usually congregate or worship or recreate or even do business especially to those folks who come uh from marginalized communities and during this process we had a goal of receiving 500 project ideals and actually we were able to surpass our goal of receiving 548 ideas so the second step is proposal development and this is where residents also known as budget delegates had the great opportunity to work with technical staff for four months to uh vet those projects and to uh look at those projects um in regards to looking at an evaluation criteria in which they look to see whether uh each of the projects were equitable also they looked at an impact and also uh they looked at the feasibility of each of the projects so for the entire month of may of 2019 uh approximately 40 projects uh trans transition into a public ballot in which our pb stand committee set a goal of receiving 10,000 votes uh we actually surpass um that milestone in which we were able to receive a 10,168 uh votes and it's also important to note to participate in pb cycle one you had to be at least 13 years 13 years and older next uh we're transitioning to implementation and where we are currently implementing uh projects at this very moment uh we're very excited to uh work alongside our technical staff within the city they've done a great job of ensuring that the projects are moving along and also we had an evaluation which no carolina central um had a great opportunity to conduct uh the our third party evaluation in which they evaluated uh the ideal uh collection process the proposal development process and also voting next slide yes next slide thank you ideal collection so this is just a snapshot of uh of ideals that we receive um as I said it before uh we receive uh 548 ideals um this was an opportunity for residents um to really comment on some of the projects that were submitted so if you see uh the comment section of support is similar to what you will uh see and experience through uh twitter or even on facebook next slide uh this again this is a snapshot of uh the demographics of our ideal collection submitters um as you can see uh 28 percent of our submitters um we're a black afro-american we have 13 percent Hispanic Latinat Latinats and also 28 percent of white and it's also important to note that 28 percent um did not respond to our survey next slide all right proposal development um not going to stay too long on this this is really to give you a true understanding of how rigorous our proposal development was um again um our budget delegates work closely with our technical staff in vetting each of those 500 projects and this included again uh meeting on a weekly basis and really looking at each of those projects and developing those projects so I definitely commend not just our budget delegates but also our internal staff for being patient uh with our residents as well as um pv staff next slide so in regards to proposal development uh this is the racial makeup of the individuals who participated um as you can see um you know we had a very diverse group of budget delegates 47 percent were black afro-american we had 28.3 percent that were white and 15 percent that were Hispanic it's also important to note that 60 percent of our budget delegates identified as female also um a very uh unique and I would say very innovative um aspect of proposal development was uh we provided a need-based stipend uh to individuals to participate in this process in this process uh we understand that when it comes to volunteering especially on the local level when it comes to our more marginalized communities volunteering is not free so we were able to provide 150 dollars uh to some of our budget delegates to participate it's also important to note that child care was available while they met um on a on a weekly basis and we also uh provided uh bush passes for our budget delegates to ensure that they had reliable transportation uh to um to the proposal development meetings so I would say that we were very proactive and identifying this need and we understand that again volunteering is not free and we understand that there are natural barriers especially whenever you're trying to involve you know underserved uh residents next slide boating I think this is uh one of the most important slides um through our presentation um when it came to our outreach and engagement strategy we were very intentional on how we went about in engaging our residents specifically our more underserved uh residents uh our focus was again meeting folks and where they congregate where they worship where they recreate where they do business and we wanted to step away a little bit from the traditional way in which we see a lot of local governments um engaged residents where they have uh community um meetings at six o'clock we understand that if you're trying to engage you know the more marginalized residents they may not have the access to even get to those meetings um they may not even have reliable transportation to get to the meeting so we were intentional in ensuring that we went to the bus station to engage um our residents because we know that folks who uh take public transportation are usually low to moderate income in our minorities we also um uh took advantage of going to the courthouse canvassing neighborhoods specifically medupa terrace osford manor again we wanted to go and meet people where they congregate next slide um these are the boating demographics and i'm sure you all have have seen this um doing our previous uh presentation um it's important to note that these numbers do not paint a uh i would say a true reflection of the of the folks who participated in voting um as you can see um 60 percent who completed the survey were white but it's also important to note that the folks who did not respond or did not complete the survey was at 46 percent and i am confident to say that the reason why is if you look back to the way in which we conduct that conduct an outreach and engagement we went to the bus stations we went to dhhs where folks would usually congregate specifically our more marginalized communities and in the engagement arena we know that on average you usually usually only have three or five minutes to engage with residents especially whenever you're at the bus station folks are in and out so in most in the most cases you know residents did not have enough time to even you know complete the survey but we thought it was more important for them to have an opportunity to decide what projects would be beneficial to their communities and it's also important to note um dps and um our youth um were not required to complete the survey and this is because um the superintendent's office made a decision for um for the students to not complete the survey next slide so if you go and look at these pie charts as you can see dps is a very very um diverse uh school system as you can see the majority of the students are black at 41 percent uh you have 33 percent that's hispanic and four percent that's um that's um a multiracial now if you go and look at the debt uh uh pie chart you will see that if you look at the seventh seventh and twelfth graders um you will see that these are these were our eligible voters again to be eligible to vote in our process you have to be at least 13 years and older and as you can see this pie chart basically mirrors what the overall demographics of the dps student population again the majority of 43 percent uh next you have 33 percent that's hispanic it's also important to note that a quarter a quarter of our votes um did come from students we did not not only include dps students but we also included several of the charter schools that's in Durham for an example um students from kept Durham College prep had a great opportunity to vote also if you go and look at their student population 49 percent of these individuals are hispanic and 48 percent are black 97 percent of these students come from low-income families another charter school that had the great opportunity to uh vote in our process is marine joy 50 percent of their students are hispanic 42 percent of the students are black and four percent or other in 85 percent of these students come from low-income families so I think it's important to really um you know let folks know that um you know we had a very diverse group of individuals to uh vote in our process next slide implementation um as i said before we're still in the process of implementing uh many of our projects um this is uh this was really our first go of identifying what projects would be implemented um you know last fiscal year and also current fiscal year due to COVID there have been some delays uh with some of these projects but uh we are confident that we will uh we'll be able to implement these projects by June of 2021 next slide we wanted to share uh can you go back yes we just wanted to share some of uh the activities that have that have gone on um since implementation to your left you can see our assistant director Tom Dawson um he is uh speaking with a group of residents about identifying where to put a pump track at Belmont Park to your right have car minorities she's at a Drew Granby community event in which she's getting ideals from residents and determining exactly what park amenities they would like in their community as you know in the Drew Granby area you know there's a uh a heavy Hispanic population and I'm glad to let you all know that parts and rec are um at this moment they are currently installing ADA park equipment amenities in um at Drew Granby Park next slide next uh we have the street trees in which um the goal was to plant 1500 uh street trees and were one specifically in eight underserved neighborhoods uh would like to thank general services for taking the lead um on this project I am um glad to let you all know that all of the 1500 trees have been planted and we are excited um about you know assuring that you know the residents in these communities take advantage um of these trees and it's also important to note that uh there are several projects um that uh we are in the process of uh completing uh such as the installation of security cameras um at several of our DHA communities and we've also allocated funds to El Fratero um to use those funds to provide mental health services in our community next slide and next I will uh let uh Robin Baker talk more about evaluation hi good afternoon everyone Robin Baker and so Andrew focused the first part of our presentation on a summary of cycle one and so now I'll discuss how we have used the information that we've gotten back from our evaluation and work with our steering committee and other stakeholders to revisit the scope of participatory budgeting and learn how we can incorporate some of those recommendations and so here you'll see just some of the ones that came out of our report and so in February at the city council retreat North Carolina Central University's NPA program presented a report and evaluation recommendations on how we can improve our process for cycles in the future and so here are four of those and on the next slide you'll see an additional three and then I'll talk about how we'll be integrating those recommendations throughout um later in the presentation next slide please next slide please so our steering committee has continued to meet throughout COVID-19 virtually after the kind of transition to our virtual setting we have met on a monthly basis and we also have uh conducted a full day retreat in which our steering committee really dived into our evaluation and discussed how we can incorporate the recommendations but also discussed the impacts of COVID-19 and what changes should be made for the upcoming cycle and looking to redesign the process to make it more responsive to our community needs next slide please and so now we're going to shift into the proposed scope change for PV Derm cycle two and so I really want to highlight the importance of participatory budgeting in the city of Durham it's important to note that PV is the only process that allows residents to directly decide how a portion of the public budget is spent and so this process has really served as a gateway for local government decision making in an increase in participation in other avenues of engagement such as our engagement ambassador program led by our planning and transportation departments we've also had budget delegates and participants go on to become part-time employees and assist with designing and creating engagement strategies we also have a number of board members budget delegates and participants that are now applying to be on boards and commissions and so it's important to note that one of the primary goals of participatory budgeting was to increase engagement overall on the city level if we are happy to see some of these results and another antidote is just that we are also looking to partner with NCCU and look at a longitudinal study of how civic participation has increased with the introduction of PV specifically given that youth 13 and up are allowed to participate in our process next slide please so in conjunction with our steering committee recommendations and feedback and work that they've been doing ongoing since our evaluation we also have participated in a number of trainings webinars and extensive research with other PV processes to learn how they are transitioning into operating in a primarily virtual environment and so participatory budgeting project is essentially like the other governing board that we look to set parameters and recommendations on how to implement participatory budgeting specifically in the united states and so here are just some of those next slide please and we have also worked on coordinating with other participatory budgeting processes in the city and in the united states it's important to note that participatory budgeting now is becoming more of a focus in the united states and this is because of the economic social and as well as the racial issues that are going on in our country and so metro areas like portland as well as atlanta cities in california are looking to implement participatory budgeting as a way to increase resident engagement in local government decision making and so pb organ is looking at how can they expand participatory budgeting in their state to reimagine how public safety is being invested in communities and creating equitable solutions as well as in atlanta they actually work in the midst of a process when covet hit and decided to keep the schedule on track because of feedback from the public that participatory budgeting is more important than ever to get direct feedback and results from resident gathering information next slide please so what we are proposing on behalf of the pb steering committee is to allocate one million dollars for nonprofits and community organizations who are directly serving residents have been impacted by covet 19 as well as organizations that are addressing underlying issues that have been exacerbated by covet 19 related to racial economic and social injustices so we would like to use the allocation of one million dollars for residents to provide feedback on what are the most critical needs as well as looking more forward and future thinking and thinking about how the city can allocate resources and partner with our community and nonprofits to get programs and services around the specific areas of need next slide please we are looking at partnering of course with our city attorney's office to analyze the legal framework but also other similar programs in the city so oed currently has the non the small business grant and loan program that they are administering and so we are working and partnering with them as well as our county to understand the parameters that we are able to operate in and what municipal sort of authority we have and we're also working with our internal departments such as nis to discuss what capacity building looks like to ensure that community organizations have the infrastructure to be able to receive these fundings and so what that looks like is approaching people that are already doing the work in the community such as reinvestment partners and so in addition to us outlining the framework of our nonprofit eligibility program and criteria for community organizations we are also working with our participatory budgeting steering committee to draft the rulebook which will establish the framework for program requirements applications scoring matrix and evaluative criteria and so jumping back to how are we applying the recommendations that we received from cycle one as well as what is going on in our climate currently and moving forward with cycle two and so we look to partner with other other city processes that are also going out into the community and having touches and asking for information back so we have been coordinating ongoing with the planning department as well as transportation and other city agency city departments that are looking to coordinate engagement activity this fiscal year we're also in the process of onboarding a collaborative digital engagement platform that will have metrics such as sms capability voicemail to text and translation services so with the hopes of reducing the barrier for participation giving the increase of an online environment we're also looking at partnering with community-related partners to assist with planning designing and implementing outreach strategies as well as designing a hybrid engagement model for in-person and online participation in addition we are continuing our partnership that we established last cycle with dps and have future conversations with them on what is a continued relationship look like in cycle two and how can we get the youth participation increased and integrate pb into the curriculum at a larger scale than we did last cycle next slide please here is a preliminary timeline for pb Durham cycle two we hope to go out into the community both in person and online and acquire about inquire about what specific needs that the community has that are not being met by certain programs and services that are going on currently and so what that looks like in practice is conducting a needs assessment that'll be a survey as well as a series of round tables where we invite the public to give us feedback and so once we get the feedback those will coordinate into focus areas and we will invite and support nonprofits and community organizations in submitting grant proposals specifically that address those key focus areas identified by the public and we will also assist community organizations by hosting virtual grant writing sessions and having continued coordination with our internal staff committee to review the proposals and work with them through our proposal development process which we tentatively have scheduled for spring 2021 to vet the proposals the feasibility as well as the overall project budget we intend to continue in the spirit of participatory democracy and hold a public vote in April of 2021 allowing for greater coordination with DPS as well as other school systems we noted last cycle that the May timeline in addition to end of great testing presented some areas for improvement and so we hope to apply those recommendations this cycle with this proposed timeline and lastly we will have our implementation and evaluation phase which will happen in May 2021 and throughout 2022 so we would like to announce our grant recipients and draft those contracts and coordinate the dissemination of funds so we can ensure that the needs of the community are being met through the expansion and creation of programs and nonprofits excuse me the expansion of programs through nonprofits and community organizations that are currently doing amazing work in our community however that may need some supplemental funding or have great ideas that do not have funding next slide please and so just to reiterate some next steps we're looking to finalize our program structure of course receive feedback from you all today and use that feedback and work with our steering committee to continue to draft a rule book for cycle two which will serve as kind of a governing document or program requirements and eligibility we also would like to conduct a needs assessment and partner with stakeholders to survey community organizations residents and nonprofits to get the feedback on what are the most critical areas for our residents and what can we focus our efforts on and allocate resources on in terms of what feedback we get we also would like to finalize our bylaws which I'll talk about in a second but PB was essentially founded on a two-year scoping document and so that two-year scoping document has expired and so we would like some feedback on finalizing our bylaws and then advertise for a couple of vacancies that we have on our steering committee and we will also of course continue to coordinate with city engagement activities to maximize participation from a diverse group of our residents and develop our communication and outreach plan in conjunction with community stakeholders next slide please and this slide just outlines some action that we would like you all to provide on today specifically direct feedback on the proposed scope change as well as feedback on the preliminary timeline and also just a discussion of what an extension of the current board term will look like for our PB steering committee members excuse me a mouthful and just lastly before I conclude I would like to recognize our steering committee members that weren't able to be in attendance today as well as Sarah who is and also one of our members our former members who was no longer with us for the array that passed earlier this year he was super important to the fabric of this community a public servant a veteran I'm sure we you all know him so I just wanted to just take a moment and recognize his work that is all I have I will we are happy to answer any questions that you all may have thank you Robin thank you as Baker thank you Mr. Holland it's really great to hear this report and I really appreciate both the explanation of the both the both the history of how we did and then your plans going forward and seeing what they are so now I'm going to ask if there are any comments or questions by members of the council if I want to start us off Councilor Middleton thank you Mr. Mayor and Andrew and Robin Sarah good to see you all congratulations on what continues to be just a fantastic piece of work you guys were given the charge and you did a I was going to say yo men's yo person's job uh on the uh on the task at hand I'm going to congratulate you I'm particularly excited about the recommendations for the next cycle I'll say a little bit about that in a minute but I do want to ask a question about uh nothing Andrew you were handling this part of the presentation on the voter demographics and I think that slide 13 yes and I I really appreciate the contextualization it's no secret that that I have raised the number uh in a number of contexts as my first time I raised it was during our budget retreat I think back in February at which point there wasn't any contextualization then and I've I've entombed it a couple of times since then a few times since February so this is the first time I've actually heard um a contextualization of it so let me ask just I'm going to ask a couple of questions one about just the the nature of presenting um data and numbers um the the 58.8 percent white um the contextualization usually when I hear that much explanation of a number it usually has an asterisk next to it um you know it either speaks for itself or if it requires that much explanation then you put an asterisk next to it and then at the bottom you kind of explain I'm wondering moving forward because I think the explanation you gave is important if we if we need to have an asterisk next to those numbers uh to direct folk to those explanation uh but I'm going to let the two bullet points on the side be treat them as if they were de facto asterisk it says only approximately 4,700 participants completed the survey usually in in uh in graphic depictions of numbers and data like this you don't usually see the word only right it almost seems a bit defensive almost like you're responding to something so I'm wondering what number of the 10,000 voters what number of the survey is completed would you have dropped only what what threshold would you have crossed would that have been acceptable yes thanks council member milton I think you bring up a lot of great questions and um you know we do apologize for not addressing um that 58 percent during the buzzer retreat we were mindful um that we you know we had a guest presenting you know our fondens and um even with that you know we had to really go back and conduct our research and to really dig into those numbers um in regards to as far as that 4,600 number as I stated before um you know going in and to engage in our residents even during ideal collection and you know you know fast-forward to voting we really didn't have a threshold in regards to how many people should complete the survey we just felt as though it was important to have an outreach and engagement strategy where we went to you know we we reached people you know where they would congregate and we knew that we only had a few minutes with these individuals um and as I stated before um you know nothing against you know community meetings during the afternoon we understand that even with that type of venue you know you have more dialogue with residents but just knowing the type of program that we were developing we just felt as though that we wanted to reach as many folks specifically folks um who come from low-income areas to have a chance to really have a say so in exactly what projects they want in their community so there was no particular threshold basic no I appreciate that and let me tell you what my concern is because I don't in any way want it to be construed by anyone in the city that my highlighting or mention of that number was in any way an attack on the staff or your work or what you're doing you guys have done amazing work and I think it's important that we're careful not to enlist the staff and political arguments I want you guys need to be insulated from that and on a report in a a report that's graphically depicting numbers to see the word only um kind of comes off as kind of being engaged in argumentative or or you're being defensive and you guys have nothing to defend yourselves against you've done an amazing job an amazing work and you're continuing to do amazing work and I'm excited about the work that you're going to continue to do but but only implies either a threshold that you didn't meet and if you didn't meet it just let the numbers be the numbers we don't have to call attention to what you didn't do because you've done so many great things uh secondly approximately 4700 do we not know the exact number of surveys that were completed uh robin do you know that number by chance yes I can get you that exact number okay but it's approximately 4700 yes and finally finally on that um and I don't I don't want to mischaracterize what you said were you suggesting that black folk didn't have enough time to fill out the surveys well what was the explanation for the differential between black people and white people filling out the surveys well again um if you if you go and look at the previous slots um it the the voting sites or the venues in which we conducted our outreach and engagement um was really focusing on those uh those venues where we know that you know predominantly the majority of the folks are of uh you know minorities as far as Hispanic or African-American such as DHHS or even at the bus station where we know that you know predominantly minorities take advantage of those public transportation and just knowing that these folks are coming in and out we understood that we really didn't have enough time we only had three to five minutes to go and get them to go and participate in voting so that's what I was implying okay fine thanks for that thanks and and and for whatever those uh other things were worth about when we when we kind of depict this kind of stuff publicly you know the the language we use and and and stuff just for that but let me move on to the part I'm excited about I think the the shift in focus and the one million dollars for for organizations that are engaged at the grassroots and stuff I think is brilliant I think it's a wonderful wonderful trajectory uh for PB congratulations on on again being on the cutting edge for preserving democracy in our city and I look forward to supporting uh that new and improved trajectory thanks a lot great great work guys thanks councilman thank you mr mayor thank you very much councilmember um mayor pro-cham thank you mr mayor and thank you andrew and robin for your presentation and for all your work um I just wanted to flesh out a little bit more I know that the y'all and the steering committee are proposing um this shift specifically in order to respond to covid because the community needs um as related to the pandemic feel so much more urgent to folks than city capital projects and totally you know think that's important can you talk a little bit about like what process um implement like what process changes or other things that y'all might think about implementing in order to make sure that we are responding to those needs so like how are we what kind of engagement are we going to need to do to make sure that the proposals that we get actually meet like the broadest community need as relates to like the pandemic and the economic crisis and all the issues that we that we see now in our anticipating people are going to continue to experience for a while you know robin I believe you would be the best person because I know you've been working closely with nis and planning the transportation about um you know identifying ways in which we can still conduct outreach engagement in this um pandemic sure I think your question was twofold so in regards to the communication and outreach strategy we intend to improve on our previous cycles by increasing our internal capacity and using some of the things that our other departments have piloted to build upon for example the community rooted partner program to ensure that we are getting grassroots engagement and increasing our reach through those informal informal networks in the community we anticipate on having the digital tool to increase specifically youth participation and also people who are not able to have broadband access so they are going to have the ability to have voicemail to text as well as sms capabilities and also address addressing some language barriers with our immigrant populations so we anticipate getting feedback at every stage of the tv process before we even begin our application process we intend to hold several community meetings both virtually and potentially in person depending upon of course health concerns but we anticipate getting feedback through um that medium and partnering with other engagement activities that are doing similar work and asking similar questions so for example the planning department is currently going out to um the community and drafting objectives objectives can be used very similarly for focus areas in the pb cycle so we want to build on those internal capacities as well as utilize new marketing and advertisement mediums now that there's been a shift and kind of online mediums there are a lot of opportunities i think that we are going to be able to capitalize on for example targeting geospatial data that we have from our first cycle that we didn't have before and so through idea collection proposal development and voting we anticipate having a resident driven process by having our budget delegates partner with these nonprofit and community organizations to shape each proposal and ensure that it speaks to a specific focus areas that it's outlined by that needs assessment that we're going to get and i think i think i have forgotten your second part of the question but happy to address it yeah that that was pretty much the whole thing yeah just how do we make sure that we're like addressing the needs that are most relevant in the community given COVID and yeah like how do we do outreach given COVID it's all yeah i mean this there are a lot of community engagement programs that the city run to are dealing with similar challenges and you know i think y'all are doing a great job figuring it all out and i really appreciate all the work that you're doing and that the steering committee is doing to make sure that this process is responding to the moment and what our community needs in this moment so thank you thank you madam mayor pro tem other questions colleagues or comments all right i have uh just a few questions um what will the community needs assessment consist of but what is you spoke a little bit about that but say say a little bit more about that sure so we're actually working with a subcommittee of the uh COVID-19 task force and they have developed some potential survey questions that are related to mental and physical well-being unemployment status food security and other social ills that may be happening so we're using the framework of that assessment and of course tailoring it specifically to what feedback we'd like to get for participatory budgeting which of course is what are the immediate needs but also asking residents looking into the future where would you like the city to invest and using that to pivot and serve as our focus areas for allocating the resources as well as how we evaluate the grant applications that we'll receive from non-profit and community organizations and we're also partnering with planning department to coordinate engagement as noted they have their community objective so there's a series of feedback and questions that they're looking to get so we're we're doing kind of a cross-departmental disciplinary approach but we're we're happy to share we also uh are going to get feedback from our steering committee at our next meeting in october so that will dictate a lot of what is included on that assessment okay thank you and how long is the voting period to go the one that begins in april of 2021 um how long would it last yes yes we're looking to uh really replicate uh what occurred in pb cycle one where uh resident students would have the entire month of april uh to vote okay yes all right and then there's a there's a long time between the voting and the implementation after may of 2022 and on slide set slide 27 refers to covet relief assistance and you all have talked about that do you have any concern that those kinds of issues that are on people's minds about covet relief assistance aren't going to really be the things that they need after may of 2022 so i think it's important to note that we anticipate in the next fiscal year so july beginning to draft the contracts and disseminate the funds and i think it's also important to note that uh a good portion potentially of our residents are still going to be facing food insecurity unemployment and other longer term issues and issues that were happening prior to covet that have just been exacerbated by the moment so and also in conjunction with that looking at other grant um kind of pots that are running low on funding we anticipate this serving as a supplement to that and also you know the potential for a second wave of covet i think is important to note so we anticipate that the needs of the community will still be the same or even more greater um in next fiscal year and there's also i think the potential you know for council to move up the dissemination of those funds um but i'll leave that of course to you all in our budget director yeah my bet is that your budget director already has had when y'all came to us she had a plan that this was a schedule she wanted it to be on knowing our budget director i doubt if she let y'all come up here without already knowing what she wanted um but um let me just suggest that i i think what you're saying is right but i think what you said is a little bit broader framing than we see in this presentation that is the way i read the presentation and it was we want to try to meet the community's covet related needs but we're not going to start funding them to not start implementing until may of 2022 so um i think that it's going to be important in the framing of the outreach and in the voting and all those kinds of things to emphasize the long-term needs just as much as a code related i don't know this but by may of 2022 i have a feeling i am hopeful that you know a lot of the immediate effects that we're feeling now of covet will be in our in our rearview mirror in other words i hope we'll all be meeting in in person for example you know hopefully a lot of those things and i believe a lot of those things that we're experiencing now won't we won't be experiencing so i think when you when and and i just have us have some concern that the way that this is framed it sounds like we're talking about things that are you know very much related to our current covet situation and i also agree that while it's quite possible we would have a second wave um again you know i could be wrong uh but i'm very hopeful that by may of 2022 that you know that's that that's you know 20 something months from now that that danger will have passed and it will have a vaccine and so forth that's what most people you know most that's what you know i don't know what that's what dr. Fauci thinks for example you know so i think that i think it's going to be i just will suggest a little bit broader framing than the way i read this as you all go out to the community in may or if you don't mind me just responding of course yes so um voting will take place if approved by council um april of 2021 and the funds would be available um on july 1st of 2021 okay so did i just read that wrong i i said that i i read that uh implementation will have to have to may of 2022 did i just read that incorrectly or yes it should be may of 2021 through may of 2022 all right well maybe i read that wrong or maybe the slides wrong check it out yeah thanks um okay well that's that's very helpful um why did why is $50,000 the the uh the amount that would you know that i guess that could mean as few as 20 grants um are you i was curious as to why that number was chosen and was wondering if more smaller grants might not be more worthwhile for our nonprofits but i don't i don't know that at all of course but just was interested in your um in your perspective sure the the number was based upon kind of a comparative study with other participatory budgeting processes and how they're shifting and other cities and their nonprofit grant relief funds um in deeper discussion the and how we chose that threshold in our first cycle was based upon kind of cumulative staff hours and wanting to ensure that in addition to our neighborhood matching grants project that nis has which is up to 2500 that there is something for those larger scale projects and that number is also up for feedback and so we look to you all of course to to give us guidance on that okay well that's helpful thank you okay uh miss my do you have anything you would like to add you have been uh present and listening any thoughts that you would want to offer we appreciate your leadership uh thank you so much mayor i just want to say that robin and andrew have been amazing throughout this whole process and i just wanted to thank them for all the hard work and i wanted to say on behalf of the steering committee we're really excited about this switch there was a lot of enthusiasm because the first round was very much focused on capital projects there was a lot of enthusiasm from the steering committee about the idea of giving grants to local nonprofits we think that this will be really great for the community thank you miss my well it'll be very interesting to see once you've done two things very you know different from each other uh what what you'll discover from these two two processes so thank you all righty any further questions or comments for our pb folks councilmember reese thank you mr mayor i didn't have any questions i think my colleagues have covered the waterfront as far as i can tell um i just wanted to say how grateful i am uh to the administration and especially to the y'all who have worked on this project um it has exceeded my expectations y'all put so much passion and energy into it and um and i'm really grateful for that uh and looking forward to see how the project continues to evolve thank you mr mayor thank you very much uh agreed and uh i just want to appreciate you all and tell you all that uh that i i feel like and i've said many times that we've done this as well as anybody in the nation and i'm just very grateful to you all and uh looking forward to this year thank you so much all right we'll now move on to uh and by the way that's an action item which we will take up at the uh at the council meeting so thank you we'll now move on to uh the move Durham presentation got our agenda friends just to remind you is the move Durham presentation the cip presentation the discussion of the resolution that mayor pro tem introduced uh and then the closed session uh after the usual end of meetings agenda settling and well not that sort of agenda settling but there's another kind of agenda settling that we do here at the Durham city council meeting uh okay uh move Durham i see miss beckman welcome yeah thank you uh Ellen Beckman transportation um i have a presentation so if that can be pulled up i'm appreciating it okay great okay so here today i'm pleased to present the final move Durham report with the recommendation for council to adopt the report today uh so this project has been in development for about two years and was created in coordination with many city departments notably nis uh city county planning oewd public works and then our transportation and funding partners at the npo and ncdot so alter planning designs Durham office was the prime consultant for this report um so there were two phases of study development a first phase of vision and goals and a second phase with recommendations there was extensive public engagement during both phases and i'm not presenting a lot of that information today as it was previously presented and it's also well documented in the report i would say that this was the first transportation plan developed subsequent to the equitable engagement blueprint um and i'm proud of how we tried out a lot of new and different engagement practices and achieved more diversity of input than previous transportation plans so the last time this went to council was back in february of this year which was a very different time and uh we presented the draft final report with the intention of soon publishing it for public comment so that ended up getting delayed a bit and we released the report in june had a month of public engagement on the final document um you know we mostly relied on online engagement for that final round um however you know i think due to the extensive in-person engagement we were able to do earlier in the phase um it worked and um you know when when more of the decisions were being made and the direction of the report was being made there was able to be more in-person engagement next slide so again this is a vision plan so it unlike some transportation plans it doesn't have any funding associated with it this is more a plan to establish priorities and establish um what the transportation department would seek funding for in those local state and federal processes um it will feed into other plans like the mpo's plans and the comprehensive plan um it also includes some policies that could be implemented by the city next slide uh so the study area is central Durham and we picked this area for a number of different reasons um first of all is the anticipated opening of the east end connector which is under construction uh maybe open later this year or next year and a primary purpose of that roadway is to divert through traffic from these streets and that open opens up new possibilities for how these roadways will function in the future there is also a funded uh tip project that ncdot proposed for the Durham freeway through downtown that was uh for operational improvements which you know they were looking at things like closing and consolidating on and off ramps in the downtown area and so this was concerning and we wanted to establish a city position on that project before it got too far along um also at the time uh the the Durham Orange Light Rail was in development and we wanted to look at how the roadway network could complement that project so a lot changed during the course of this study in relation to transit in addition considering the earlier presentation in about southeast Durham this is obviously the most dense area of the city has the most transit service has the most sidewalks the most connected road network the biggest employment centers and it really has the most potential for shorter trips and trips that can be accomplished through walking biking and transit it's this is in contrast to the southeastern area i would say this is the lowest hanging fruit for shifting to more sustainable transportation options however there are still many missing facilities and issues in this area that incentivize driving next slide so the equitable engagement blueprint guided our public engagement process and we also looked at a lot of different transportation statistics in light of providing more equitable access to services and destinations and focusing on areas of greatest need next slide this was the vision statement that was developed after the feedback from phase one of the of engagement so notably this vision is focused on moving people over moving traffic improving safety and improving equity a lot of our traditional transportation planning processes that have focused on traffic have nearly always resulted in decreased convenience and safety for other road users so this study is in contrast to how we've done some previous transportation studies and it really elevates the importance of people riding the bus walking and biking next slide in phase two we evaluated several priority corridors these were selected based on engagement as well as based on opportunities associated with the east end connector and the light rail project so these were selected before the light rail project ended and those had more detailed analysis looking at different improvements next slide and really next slide so the recommendations in the report there's two different types of recommendations there's policy recommendations and infrastructure recommendations policy recommendations generally have minimal capital infrastructure costs but require staff attention resources and they may require a reallocation or a new approach for how we use existing resources the infrastructure recommendations include some some items that are more for the entire study area like the priority bike network and the priority sidewalk network and then there's those specific detailed cross sections for each of the priority corridors next slide so in terms of policy recommendations here are some examples these are all detailed and more in the report one that I want to draw attention to is the speed management you know traffic calming on neighborhood streets has always been a high priority of residents and we hear that in our department all the time our current shared streets project is a good example of our department working with neighborhoods to slow traffic and address some of those traffic calming desires you know many of those streets have been previously evaluated for speed homes but didn't qualify and so you know an example of a policy recommendation in this report is looking at more options for traffic calming and a more neighborhood friendly implementation process also the priority bikeway network is one another thing I want to note um this is I think the first plan that where we have a guideline for where to when to provide protected bike lanes based on traffic volume and speed and so the intention is that this could be applied by the city and cdot or in the development review process next slide so the infrastructure recommendations for the priority corridors there are short term recommendations and long term recommendations so short term generally means that these are improvements that the city does routinely or there's existing funding programs this includes like sidewalk repair sidewalk gaps striping bike facilities through resurfacing projects bus stops stuff like that however you know it's important to note that that many of these short term recommendations still require additional funding you know for sidewalk gaps for example there's really no funding available right now in the cip beyond 20 23 for new sidewalks and all of that funding up to 23 is already dedicated to projects and design from the bike walk plan so there's really no capacity right now for new sidewalks so all those sidewalks are routine they still require money uh next slide long term recommendations are the more ambitious higher cost projects uh they may involve new types of projects than what we do routinely so streetscape improvements two-way conversions are recommended in the report uh transit priority streets and separated bikeways so we uh do have some good news here this is not all bad news because it's not all stuff we can't afford um the the good news are on the transit priority projects on halloween faple streets you know on this agenda is the planning and operations analysis design phase and that includes initiating design for those two streets and those projects and that that is funded through the county transit plan however there are some long-term recommendations that are going to be very difficult to fund through traditional funding sources so two-way conversions are a good example of that improvements that are focused on people unless on vehicular throughput don't score well in ncdot's processes federal grants are very competitive but you know the downtown loop is a good example of a project that's really hard to get funded so uh we may need to look at other options if we want to fund projects like that like a transportation bond um and then lastly on some of these long-term recommendations there are ncdot approval concerns and associated future roadway maintenance implications that really need to be considered um and may uh require that these be more long-term improvements next slide so i think many of you are aware of this ncdot was coordinated extensively throughout this study and they were one of the funding partners however um they were not willing to give us you know blanket approval for the recommendations in this report um you know they some of the more aggressive proposals are running counter to what they view as the primary purpose of the state roadway system which is to move traffic um in addition as you know they have financial difficulties and they have long and desired to turn over streets to local governments and i think they see this the the city's desire to make changes here as an opportunity for leveraging that discussion so um in the report we did include some rough estimates of what annual roadway maintenance cost may be so that that was well understood um and i don't think this would apply to every project or every improvement in the plan by any means but uh we we do know it is a concern on the two-way conversion projects recommended in the plan next slide so the Durham freeway was one of our priority corridors but it was considered very differently due to the scale um our public engagement process on the Durham free freeway identified four main themes and those are um trust and that the original construction of the freeway and the negative impacts really has led to a distrust of government especially transportation agencies and that any future project needs to focus first on community engagement and rebuilding trust um secondly equity that any future project needs to result in positive impacts to those most harmed by the original construction of the freeway and that we need to consider all the indirect effects that might occur like housing economic development um that may be initiated by a project on the freeway um connectivity was a high priority from our survey that improving connectivity across the freeway was important many of the existing bridges and underpasses lack sidewalks pedestrian crosswalks um lastly access you know with the opening of the east end connector the purpose of the freeway can shift a little bit it can shift more towards providing access to and from this central Durham area and less about accommodating through traffic through traffic will be able to be diverted to us 70 85 and that um maintaining and improving access to central Durham was important so we didn't make a specific uh infrastructure recommendation in this report you know really we felt that the potential impacts were were great and really required further effort so we are recommendation recommended um further study of this in the comprehensive plan especially at those indirect effects that could occur and also coordinating with ncdot on a valuation of transportation evaluation of the Durham freeway that includes um more equitable engagement than traditional ncdot processes so we are recommended recommending in in this report that ncdot delay their project um conveniently ncdot's financial problems have led to them suspending the project and delaying it right now anyways next slide so that concludes the presentation of the recommendations we did receive a lot of comments in that month of engagement over the summer and made a lot of changes to the report to edit and clarify things and now today we are pleased to present the final report and let me know if you have any questions thank you so much miss Beckman really appreciate it um madame clerk can you take the slides down now we may need them back but thank you and i want to thank the clerk she's been doing great job today under a long day of lots of lots of switcheroo's and really appreciate it madame clerk uh it's here the Wizard of Oz there behind the screen um thank you so much for that horrific uh this this is an amazing report um it's 162 pages i would just want to tell you alan i read it okay uh and uh it's a lot um and let me see i'm trying to get back to my notes here um hang on stick stick with me for a second here and i'll um so i'll just go ahead with my questions and comments and then open it up since i'm bumbling around here looking for stuff um so what i would say is that this report unlike a lot of reports that we get are a lot of uh it really has enormous long-term implications i mean you've got uh you know we're talking about everything from repurposing 147 to getting the maybe you know figuring out how to deal with the the the ncdot's roads that you know come through city and make the changes that we want there or do we want to take them over and what will the cost of that be um you you know the the cost implications are huge the 30 to 80 million dollars just in planning costs kind of caught my attention um most of that uh in improvement you know planning improvements in the priority corridors um one of the things is that it just we've just got to have a change in the state funding for us we're not going to be able to do this as long as four percent of our you know available state funding is for non non highways and so that's one thing you know uh legislative change wouldn't hurt um one of the things about the report is it calls for dedicated funding sources for sidewalks for realization of vision zero goals and so forth and um i wondered if you would like to comment on that i mean uh we what would a dedicated funding source potentially look like uh you you mentioned a couple of alternatives you know you mentioned a transportation bond is that the kind of thing you think of when you think about a dedicated funding source or do you think about uh you know like a penny for example like we have on for affordable housing or are there other sources that you're thinking of when you think about dedicated funding sources for these things um you know i wouldn't say that this report is at all specific about where that funding could come from right and i would want to confer with our finance and budget departments on a question like that um i think i think that what's important that i wanted to emphasize is that a lot of these transportation transportation projects as you know take years right and we might start design one year it might take a year or two right away might take a year or two and then construction and so to implement a long-term program of projects and keep having things be built having that certainty of funding is really helpful so that we can plan out and plan ahead also you know there's a lot of coordination with maybe other efforts like roadway resurfacing that are planned out and and making sure that our plans are ready to take advantage of opportunities like that that are that you know we're looking two three years out on that's really helpful for planning these big transportation projects right so yeah go ahead and just as a point of clarification the cost that you referenced is not for just planning it's just that that's a a cost developed based only on a planning study that you know as we do that engineering and the design costs become a lot more certain and you know you find the cosmic change okay i got you thank you thank you that's helpful so um so it seems like there's several issues that need to be joined one is the state roads issue one is the dedicated funding source issue one is the the 147 issue although as you say we're kind of getting a break there that on all of our other projects we didn't want but on this or we do want uh which is an unintentional delay due to mcdot's funding problems but still it seems like we that's still that issue's got to be joined with them there has to be some discussion of how we begin to get what we want or how we begin a planning process as you described it different than what we usually have um so just taking those three alone and maybe there are other big ones that i'm missing but the but the dedicated funding source the nc 147 planning and the and the and the planning around the uh the the um ncdot roads or the the discussion around that how do you envision that these issues now get joined you know what are the appropriate uh mechanisms forums um i don't want to i don't want this is a fantastic report and it's so important i don't want it to get lost because we're not taking action in the right venues you know so how would you think we should push these issues ahead um i think as we move forward on the Holloway and Fayetteville transit priority projects in terms of what uh improvements ncdot may approve and which ones may not um because like i said they really wouldn't give us any categorical um approval at this point and they and i would say they do approve you know many things like we've done many road diets on ncdot roads um and we meet with them monthly right to talk about safety and and improvements like that so that there are some i think lower hanging fruit that that we can all agree upon that we can get done without having to address that ncdot issue um but i think if we are looking at two-way streets in particular that is very likely going to be um something we need to address and that we need to um budget potentially budget for those ongoing maintenance costs i think there probably is some creative way areas where we agree with ncdot um you know if like taking over the streets certainly has costs but we also get a lot out of it we get a lot of control um and and ncdot wants it too because they don't they can't afford to maintain the streets either um so there may be some areas where we can come to agreement on that um it's just it's going to cost money and um you know maybe there's opportunities to work on work with ncdot for them to improve some of the roads and bring them up to like adequate standards first before we took them over so that you know to lower our costs potentially yeah so i think that i just think i'm just going to ask that you all in transportation give us a strategy for that you know what is what is it that we need to do from policy perspective that will advance this because we've talked about it a lot now we have a report that makes it much more concrete i think than anything we've had before um you know i can see all kinds of possibilities one of the things that you said seems important that this last point you made about them bring it up to you know good condition before they hand it to us um uh yeah i'm not sure exactly but i know that i really feel like we need a strategy and not just to kind of let this go now that we've got this really good report about it and then similarly on 147 how would that discussion get joined um so you know when we reviewed this final report with them and uh they they were in agreement that we needed to coordinate better on that and do a study together um you know they seem very open to a more equitable engagement process um i do think this will be like new territory though so we'll see for them particularly um so it remains to be seen how how that will evolve um so who has those discussions is that a is that a discussion that the MPO has with DOT is it city staff is it how how does that happen and how do we how do we encourage that the discussions that does the council need to take some action to you know try to move that along what would you suggest Ellen yeah i do think we should talk uh with the MPO obviously nc 147 is a really major road and you know nc do to tell you it's the highest um traffic volume nc route in the whole state so it's certainly of regional importance and i think funding any um study you know concentrated study to look at 147 we're probably going to want um MPO funding to help assist with that yeah so yeah um i was thinking that this report would be presented to the MPO so we could um start the conversation there okay and then the and then the um you know i was uh got an email earlier today and i might as well talk about this now as well as in the cip from bike Durham saying you know more beyond a few years from now and i'd already noticed this in the cip that we don't have sidewalk we don't we don't have a stream of new sidewalk funding and i would assume that that concern dubs tails with your idea that we need a dedicated funding source so we're continually having a pipeline of this you know your your study is more particularly geared just towards one section of our city uh but you're the what you cite there certainly uh jobs with what we heard from bike Durham and um wondered if you uh yeah so what i'll say about that is i would really like our administration to help us think about this dedicated funding source and what the potential options are because i really think that what has been outlined in this study is our truly priorities of our city this this you know the central core which is bikeable and walkable uh where it's safe for pedestrians where the vision zero uh uh goals are are made real um yeah so i would just i'm looking i'll be looking for some guidance you know over the next months and about that and a way to to get these things into our cip i think that's gonna be really the only other thing i'll mention is that it was interesting to me to see the high level of support for rail transit um it was one of the highest ranking um i think was the second highest ranking uh objective or you know what people like the most and wondered if you had any comments on that yeah so that was uh asked early in the study development process so when the light rail project was still very much active and on people's minds and in the news a lot so yeah i think that is was partially influenced yeah by that um okay you know i would say that you know bus service was still very high on that list as well um and that um you know especially black residents listed increasing bus service as their top priority yeah and they were slightly underrepresented isn't that true in the survey as a whole yes yeah but we we did like look at a lot of our um survey data broken out by different demographics and outcomes so that we could try to address some of that um a disparity in yeah well it's a fabulous piece of work congratulations um and to you all the consultants um i wanted to you know live and make things happen and so i want you all to give us guidance as to how we should do that okay colleagues a council member freeman thank you mr mayor i um appreciate that you've all held it down i had to step away uh i i really appreciate the mayor's uh intensive questions in this and i want to echo his his support or echo support and acknowledging that there needs to be some dedicated houses like some dedicated source towards the streets and also the roads and so um noting that you said transportation i was thinking that uh if there was some conversation around the transportation and infrastructure bond that might be a little bit more um helpful i missed some of the serals conversation but i think that that's part of that as well and then also noting that there was a recommendation for a task force towards vision zero i think uh mr mayor when you're saying you know you don't want it to to sit this report to sit that that could be in a way that um that this moves forward and it could be something that sits with the planning um the not the uh with our planning advisory um board where there's probably a subcommittee to start and could build out some type of task force around uh you know moving towards a vision zero and the transportation around um and and zoning and planning but i think that there's there's some there's some way there's some coalescing that's that could occur that could make it a little bit of a easier lift and and actually getting some of the recommendations moving forward and getting us to a place where we have a whole set of projects that could move forward in a bond so i'm hopeful that that staff is hearing hearing that from from the mayor's questions and asking for directions and i would not leave it to just staff i would say that we have some boards even if it is um environmental affairs or like just pulling folks from those tasks or from those groups to get us a similar to a task force but some type of committee to gather a subcommittee of folks who are focused on vision zero um by bike pad all of those groups have folks who are interested in this conversation we all participated in these conversations over the years and i know that the community improvement plan used to have like a whole host of streets listed for sidewalks and assuming that we've been successful and moving through most of them so i do believe that's coming up but um we know that there are more and and i think there's a process and i really feel like we can do this with existing you know advisory groups that we have so that it does move a little bit quicker than trying to set up bylaws and all of that so just to offer that up thank you thank you council member mayor pro tem thank you and thank you so much for the presentation and this really excellent report i just wanted to say i was struck by one thing you said about how our goals around like pedestrian safety and um and bike access and slowing down traffic through the center um city don't match with the state's goals always of moving people as quickly as possible from one place to another and um just wanted to i mean i think that's something that we're going to need to consider and we need you know our department the state department of transportation and all of our federal you know partners have to be participants in this work we obviously you know the the scope of it is beyond the scope of what our budget can manage um and if we have very different goals for how we want um transportation in germ to develop it's just something that i wanted to highlight for my colleagues is some stuff we're gonna have to work through um and with the issues around you know like the the downtown loop and like whether we two-way gregson and duke street like those those are the questions that like that um disconnect or like difference in goals is going to be a big question as we move into those conversations one uh thank you mayor pro tem one one thought i have about that you know i think about the difference between housing and transportation so with housing we have very limited state money right we basically have you know the low-income housing tax credit availability that kind of thing with transportation there's i don't know what the number is you know any millions you know a large number right billions of transportation dollars that if it were repurposed you know by a sympathetic legislature even a little bit we in other words what i'm trying to say is they don't even have to totally share our goals can't they just share our goals just a tiny windy little bit more um and that would make just an enormous difference to us so um i i'm just and when i think about housing i think okay we just there's no money we just have to do it ourselves when i think about transportation i just think there's we just don't have any money we got to get some of their money um and so the strategies you know we we certainly can have a local strategy too and you know the transportation bond or some other sort of local dedicated funding sources absolutely you know a possibility but let's get some of that state money too and get them to share a little bit more of our goals so that's one thought. Councilmember Reese. Thank you mr mayor uh first of all i want to thank the staff for a fantastic report this has been in progress for a while i've been following it very closely and i have to say the finished product is fantastic really appreciated the efforts that went into community engagement and a big chunk of the report is about that and i think it can be a real model for how other jurisdictions can engage their communities about this very important issue so i want to thank staff because i know that that was been a sort of top of mind priority in creating this study was making sure that it reflected the views and opinions of the folks who make the most use out of our systems i want to say that as a member of our regional npo i don't anticipate the funding priorities changing significantly at the state level um i think these have been the priorities when there was a democratic majority in the general assembly when there is a republican majority in the general assembly when there is a democrat in the governor's mansion and when there's a republican in the governor's mansion i don't say that to disparage any elected official um many of these folks i voted for and continue to support but the reality is in north carolina um the legislature is dominated in many ways by folks who don't share our values and by that i don't mean just republicans many legislative leaders don't come from large urban jurisdictions and increasing bike ped spending at the state level is tantamount to increasing support for large urban communities that many lawmakers already see a system that is tilted in favor of those jurisdictions so mr mayor you're absolutely right we need to get more statement and we need to keep pushing that rock up the hill as much as we can but in the meantime our streets are not going to get any safer for folks who buy it can walk and and take the bus and to me that really draws a lot into the need to focus on local funding sources um and so that's why at every opportunity i've been clear about the need for the durham county transit fund to fund projects that are actually in durham um and at a level that can really make a difference in making our community safer and more bikeable walkable and more able to use transit and i'm actually very happy with the spending choices that have been made out of the durham county transplant this year i've been i'm just overwhelmed by how great that is gone and we just need to make sure that any big ticket items that are on the horizon i have a cost share relationship with the other jurisdictions involved in them that allow us to continue to vote significant amounts of money on our local needs i also understand you have anything particular in mind absolutely mr mayor um the um the commuter rail project currently under review between wake and durham county is a project that has the potential to eat a huge portion of the durham county transit fund every year and i think we just need to make sure that we're vigilant when we negotiate with wake county about the cost share that's perhaps a conversation for another day mr mayor for this day um even if we continue to get a good portion of the durham county transit funds each year we are going to need a a dedicated funding source for the capital needs of building um an infrastructure for transportation transit in the city that meets the needs of our community and so i really appreciate your call your calling on staff to present us with that plan i join in it this is uh and as i've said before every dollar we put into our local bus system is a dollar that that helps our low income communities and communities of color about as much as anything else we can do and um and that i think also given the service area that this move durham study represents is also true for bike ped projects and so i look forward to hearing staff's ideas about how we might do that um and supporting those in the cip with funding that we figure out where it's going to come from and i know the options for local governments are pretty modest um we can't add another increment to the sales tax that's already done um we can't we can't we can't really cannibalize from other projects because they're also important um and so we have to find a way to raise the money ourselves um and unfortunately that generally ends up being uh by a transportation bond which adds to the tax burden to our residents some of that um heartburn we get out we have about uh the tax burden on low income homeowners might be um addressed in part by the tax deferral program that we signed on to not too long ago it might be addressed somewhat more significantly by a broader expanded low income home homeowner grant program that we're hopefully talk to the next county commission about um in the months ahead so i think there are ways to um lessen how much the the tax increase resulting from a transportation bond would impact low wealth communities as soon as we get some more tools in place so look the the long and short answer is um we have a lot of work to do we need a lot more money put into this area and how we do it in a way that is equitable um is i think the task ahead so i look forward to working with staff on that and of course my colleagues are going to have great ideas too thank you mr. mayor thank you council member other questions and comments for our staff all righty thank you so much thank you miss bagman and thank you to all who put this great report together and i'm glad that my colleagues mentioned the the public engagement process it really was exceptional and it really was uh it's it's going to really help us with all of our public engagement processes because you all did it so well and you you saw what worked and what didn't work as well and everybody can learn from it so thank you thank you fun report to create it was very well designed also just want to say i really yeah appreciated the work that went into the layout and the and the design flat flat more fun to read a longer point it's pretty you know it's really interesting because we've we've we've had a long council meeting we've had an awesome council meeting can i just say that our staff is amazing every single thing we've done today has just been fantastic and if i could okay now we're going to move on to our next fantastic report oh yeah i'm sorry council member freeload i was just going to echo council member freeload i was just going to echo that and saying that i was trying to listen as i was driving and doing the things and i have to say that listening offered a very different perspective and hearing just how much of a master class is on this council and acknowledging like there's a lot of information that that we really dive deep into and i really appreciate the questions that folks ask and just being a listener was a little different so thank you thank you thank you for being back with us okay um thank you so much and now i think we're ready to move on to our cip report and i believe mr boyd is here mr boyd thank you for waiting and waiting waiting waiting we're glad to see you and thank you all for for listening and listening and listening and listening um so uh i'm going to go over the the 2021 cip um normally john allore and i would be doing this dogged and pony show for you uh at at the budget workshops and uh by the way mayor if he wasn't on vacation i think we would have been pretty good contenders for best-looking presenters but we didn't get a chance to compete before you awarded it you really don't need him you really don't need him mr boyd i think you're right up there i'll buy yourself but i don't know you said that if diana if you could bring up that presentation please so um we you folks have already adopted the the cip for our enterprise funds when you adopted the the budget um back in june but next slide but if you um but we we intentionally delayed the um this presentation and and figuring out that the the cip that's funded from the 11 cent tax rate and and our you know the 10-year cip that when you normally talk about the cip um because of a number of things mainly because of the uncertainty around covid and and what kind of revenue are we going to have um what kind of costs might we need to fund from um the dollars that would normally go to the cip and so we really wanted to wait till we got through the end of 2020 to see where where are we what what happened in 2020 um how much did we spend how much um how much capacity do we have so we could do our best to to maximize the the dollars that we have to try to accomplish this as many of the prior priorities that that had been identified next slide um so some of the highlights um that that we found were in 2020 our our spending on cip was was well below what we had expected it to be um partially due to the fact that that covid happened and some projects got got delayed that that would have otherwise fired up um but there's a lot of uncertainty with with many cip projects you know ellen talked about all the uncertainty in the transportation related projects and the timelines um we also uh had as john highlighted in the in the q4 report you know higher property tax revenues than we had projected to be generated from the tax rate that's dedicated to the cip um we did um based on council's direction established that five million dollar city covid relief fund uh and that came from dollars that were that were sitting in the cip and would have been allocated to to future cip projects so so we need to do establish you know what what do we need to take out before we started building uh the new plan and then we really wanted to to focus our priorities um and at this point i'm going to let both ferguson deputy city manager on operations where most of the projects come from um talk a little bit about that boke and i'll keep it a real little bit given the hour uh but just as we looked at the cip this year uh certainly as we were evaluating things over the summer you know not long after we had adopted a very pared down budget you know we felt that the primary focus of the cip in this year uh should simply focus primarily and you'll see that there's there's a fair bit of variety still in it but but to put our dollars behind maintaining infrastructure that we have um and that is simply an acknowledgement that while there are a number of exciting projects in the cip a number of projects that expand our offerings uh that we also have a number of maintenance needs uh in our core infrastructure we have some replacements that are necessary in both equipment and infrastructure and so we took that as a as a guiding principle in developing this year's cip given some of the uncertainty about future funding i think we are optimistic that that there will be a recovery i think the timeline of that is still a bit unknown but so that in this shortened fiscal year for the cip that focusing those resources where they maintain infrastructure that we know has needs was going to be our main priority thanks dim thank you bow uh next slide please so so what you see here are the uh the projects that we're recommending that council appropriate funds for in the current fiscal year um the the projects that you see there in bold are projects that were not previously in the the 10-year cip plan that that were identified this year and i'll draw your attention to to a couple of them that might be confusing uh or or so you can get some more clarity there there's a couple projects number nine 18 and 19 that that talk about cost overruns um those are previously appropriated projects where we just need to appropriate some additional funds to uh to close them out the last two are our ncdot projects where uh it's we don't have a lot of clarity as to what their ultimate bill to us is going to be uh number nine there is um is some funds that we might not need all of but to finish up the hernan park work um my intent wasn't to go through uh each of these projects but i believe with with the people that are on the call or or bo fergusson if you have questions about any of these specific projects we could answer them um but before i do that the other project i want to notice here it isn't so much a cip project but it's uh four million dollars of funding for street paving uh in the cip um so normally when we talk about street paving we're talking about that coming from the general fund and you know a call in the conversation about the general fund operating budget that that was adopted for fiscal year 21 we weren't able to recommend using four million dollars worth of fund balance from the general fund to fully fund the the ten million dollar paving request as we work through the cip and what resources we have we were able to identify four million dollars of funding from the cip to augment what's coming from the general fund to get that total paving budget back up to the ten million dollar original plan uh from from public works um any questions on on anything you see on on this page just one on seven i'm not familiar with the river parks playground is that a new one they uh i can uh answer that bo if you need me to yeah let's go ahead tom thank you and uh tom dawson assistant director for Durham parks and recreation uh there are uh two um they were existing uh playgrounds along the along the eno river um river park river forest park and old farm park um these playgrounds were essentially washed away by the eno river instead of throwing good money out of after bad uh to replace them in situ we work with public works to identify locations that public works purchased expand the park and we'll be placing these playgrounds out of the floodway uh while we were there since there was a dearth of uh playgrounds um in the north part of town we identified a location at west point on the eno these are eligible for impact fee funding because they're technically new locations uh so we'll be um and we we've already met with the community in river forest park and old farm park to discuss uh the essentially renovation of these parks they'll look very different by the time we uh we get through with them so we're very excited about this project and i think it'll be a way to work with the river and highlight the uh the recreational assets there thank you all right next slide go in the wrong way thank you um so in in addition to the projects specifically that need appropriation in 21 um these are some additional projects that have been added to the 10-year plan um while not in fiscal year 21 they weren't previously in the plan that that you saw um when uh when john and i spoke with you at at the retreat back in february so these are some some additional projects that have been added to the plan uh since that time next slide so this is where we have i would normally uh hand you the giant ledger size piece of paper um diana and i are going to try to do a dance here to um see if we can get this giant sheet somehow up on the screen but i think you all have it in your your packets and i believe diana might have emailed it to you all um as we try to virtually look at a giant listing of all the projects that are currently in the 10-year plan um uh first of all mr mary you won't be able to tie this list to the other slide that you saw because this list is presented in a different format in that the the list on the big sheet i'll just we'll just call it the big sheet so you know what i'm talking about is based on when dollars will be spent as opposed to the other page that you saw which is which dollars need to be appropriated in fiscal year 21 um the spending gives you a better idea of when the projects might actually get delivered um and this shows you the whole 10-year planning horizon and uh here we go and the the colors on here are significant and i'll i'll tell you what that means so if the if the if the dollar amount is in gray that means it's a project that you have already appropriated and it's either underway or about to be underway and it's already council has already taken action to approve and move forward with the project and those dollars are are laid out in the years that we expect them to be spent if it's yellow that means it's a project that was previously appropriated and in addition we're recommending that we add additional dollars in fiscal year 21 so this would be previous appropriations plus some of the money that was on the previous slide um the green projects are brand new projects i'm sorry say that one more time i'm sorry yellow is old projects that we're adding new money to okay now so like the very first one there um accessible pedestrian signal improvements i believe there were six hundred thousand dollars worth of um of monies that were previously appropriated and we're appropriating an additional six hundred eighteen thousand dollars this year okay got you thank you old money and new money um the green art is brand new money brand and if there's no color those are projects that are planned for the future um that that could change so so that significance of the colors okay um so if you look at that at the very the last page there if you could go down two pages diana um so in total we've got like 135 projects that are in the 10-year plan and and what we would expect then if this uh is exactly what happened in fiscal year 21 we would spend you know just short of 77 million dollars on on capital projects in fiscal year 21 um and then what we do is each year we add the 10th year onto this and um and as you can see the dollars get smaller and smaller as you kind of get out there because as you might expect you know departments are more able to see the stuff that's that's more uh current and in front of you than perhaps what we might need in in future fiscal years questions on any of the specific projects that are on the list or or that the the timing of any of the projects that are on there it's a lot a lot to do yet yeah is uh i'll start um the i'll just i i'm the the just what i said earlier about the the sidewalks and you know we go out um i'm looking on mine i'm in a hard time reading the one on your screen because it's little and um this one's a little too but you know we go out um um maybe three years with sidewalk projects number 85 say again number 85 on the list is new sidewalks yeah thank you let me find that yeah we go out through 2023 uh i just want to flag that i don't have any particular thing other than what i said earlier which is i think we need some some guidance from our staff as to how to continue to fund these critical needs which we know are a high priority from us for our city offer with sidewalks that some of that has to do with the the kind of the first batch that we brought to council several years ago coming out of the Durham walks plan we have uh kind of generally agreed amongst those of us who helped pull the cip together that there will be a need and we will need to find funding for additional sidewalk construction but uh given some of the transition that that you just received the presentation of in terms of transportation priorities um we couldn't reflect those in the cip this year uh so i i feel comfortable advising that that there will be more conversations now there there may need to be trade-offs i can't that that's not you know a promise of instant new money and resources uh but the this plan probably does not accurately reflect that we will we will you know anticipate spending more resources on sidewalks in in in this plan beyond what's shown uh what's in front of you that's super helpful thank you so much i really appreciate that the um the new trails i'll also just mention the the funding is in the out years um and um we've got the uh the belt line though is or where is let's see if we can find that duke belt line yeah that's earlier and then the other trails aren't until i think our line 80 something also 86 or something um they're pretty far out and just want to say that i hope we can move those up um i know that there's there's more than just when the money is available there was there's where the planning went you know the planning for each of them is hard and uh sometimes there's you know federal money we need to get and those kinds of things but i'm really hopeful that we can move our our trails up up sooner um had the duke park to the end previously been on i was glad to see that yes i believe we added it either last year or the year before uh and uh it was added in the tenth year and then that is generally what we do with projects that are coming in uh from the staff or from the community where we really haven't gotten a lot of council discussion we put things in the tenth year and we move them up a year each year but it gets them in the plan and makes them available for discussions uh and feedback in sessions like these so that we can uh find out if they're appropriately placed or if they need to be slid forward or backward great so i think the plan looks good i agree with you uh but what you said about our priorities for this year and um with the the uh acceptors of the concerns i expressed about sidewalks and appreciate your comments on those and trails i'm i think we're you know in in good shape thank you colleagues any comments or questions for mr boy um diana if you could switch switch back to the presentation um a couple other things to cover um and council member freeline i'm not sure if you're a fan of spreadsheets but um the mayor and the mayor put him would be disappointed if i didn't do a presentation with a spreadsheet on with a bunch of numbers they would think that perhaps the finance director's not doing his job so once diana gets up gets the the presentation back up um what i might have a quick question while we're waiting for that to come up i was trying to get your attention you're sure you can thank you um david first of all thanks the cip looks uh good um kit item 108 sidewalk repair has current numbers current a current allocation for the current fiscal year of about seven and a half million dollars is that is do we expect to be able to deploy seven and a half million dollars worth of sidewalk repairs in the current year that seemed like a lot it's it's some previously appropriated dollars and some new dollars but i'll let that bow and perhaps someone from public works comment on that uh they've pretty much covered it um there are a number of contracts that have been prepared throughout fiscal year 20 that did not get out the door uh with some substantial funding in them those uh those contracts carried forward as did the money but there are a number of contracts that i think are going out now uh there's always a little bit of carryover so i won't commit public works to spending all of this but public work has expressed a great deal of confidence that they intend to spend almost all of that this year but now that you mentioned that i remember the string of sidewalk repair contracts we approved not no it seems like about 10 years ago now but it was not that long ago uh so that makes a lot of sense thank you mr mayor uh this is this is a picture of the current funding model for for what you saw on on the big sheet and just to remind folks that that we use a combination of cash funded and debt funded um dollars to pay for the the capital plan based on the the revenue that's generated from from 11 cents on on the tax rate and um just to remind you the the current funding model has us issuing for lack of a better word a line of credit for for a couple of years where we can borrow the money as we need it um and pay interest only followed by a longer term take out fixed rate financing to uh to refinance that and because much of the capital plan is is based on borrowing money we have a much longer planning horizon than you would see say in the general fund and that's why we look at this on a 10-year basis and the bottom line is is that the bottom line has to have a number bigger than zero in every year to show that this plan will work um so so what we did during the time that that we um in this delay in bringing this to you is was maximize the amount of clap capital we could get into the plan after um taking out the the money for the covid relief fund and trying to to fund that full paving ask um is we've got the plan balanced and maximized up through 2026 so that is to say that that we have um no real additional capacity between now and 2026 if we move forward with this plan and it and it rolls out with this set of assumptions now hopefully as bo kind of alluded to hopefully we've been conservative um in terms of how much we'll need to borrow how fast we'll need to borrow the interest rates that that we borrow and and we'll be able to to come back next year and show you that we've got a little bit more capacity um but i think this is is uh reasonably conservative but not overly conservative projections on where we are uh with with the 10-year plan next slide um just piggybacking off of off of what um ellen had um had mentioned in her presentation i didn't want to uh fail to highlight for you the the projects the new projects that that you'll need to appropriate that are 100 funded with county transit tax dollars that will that are not included in the in the big sheet that you saw because they have a completely separate funding source and these are all transit tax funding projects that that we will need appropriation from the council from that were previously approved in the the county transit plan that that will need you to appropriate so that transportation and public works can move forward with with executing on on these projects um and then um finally what's next um i believe in your your uh next council cycle um the actual ordinance to appropriate the dollars for these projects will come forward um so it'll be the projects we talked about today some cleanup housekeeping stuff um we are going to continue monitoring when we spend money to to optimize when we need to borrow money um again that's one of those variables that that affects our capacity and then also we're looking at the current interest rate environment to see uh whether or not we can do any refinancing um in fact in your upcoming cycle you'll you'll see a refunding opportunity that that should help uh perhaps our parking and ballpark funds um based on that the current interest rate environment um any other questions that's all i have colleagues any questions for mr boyd well uh it's it was an opportunity for myself and the mayor pro tem to break out a glass of champagne as we always do as we review the uh cip uh and uh great report councilmember reese i just wanted to take a minute to thank you david and your staff um being able to get that full a paving amount back in cip i don't know how that worked but i'm really glad it did so thanks a lot that's that's a big deal um and so uh thank you for all your hard work thank you thank you for mentioning that first priority for our for our residents in every year's survey and so it's good to see we're funding it and congratulations on being the runner-up and the best-looking presenter i'm your first loser today thank you david great to see you thanks all right um colleagues we're now at the uh we really have had some marvelous presentations today we're now at the uh that we're going to take up the mayor pro tem's resolution which he had uh talked to us about at the previous work session and then email to us um if you know what possibility would be to put it in the chat just in case everyone hasn't had a chance to see it do you want to do that sure and um diana said she could also try to screen share it okay either one would be good just so i know everybody's received it but just so we're we're all looking at it would be sure and i have a couple of other things to mention too yeah uh the floor is yours thank you so much um and thanks everyone for giving me a few minutes at the end of this very long meeting um to talk about some of the recommend moving forward with some of the recommendations from our race equity task force um so there are about 50 recommendations and a number of them are i believe actionable in a fairly short term and the administration has also already started moving forward on a few recommendations and um wanda's uh got some updates on that but we might want to save those for later given the given the hour um but there are a few so of the of the list of recommendations there were 12 that i picked out that i thought could be moved forward by council at a fairly quick pace and the first of these the first four recommendations that i'm proposing that we respond to in the form of a resolution to our federal leaders are um items specifically relating to from the economic inequality the the wealth and economy committee of the task force which dealt specifically with things like the wealth gap um and made recommendations around how to increase the equity of wealth of white people and black indigenous and other people of color in the us given the status of our current federal government um i felt that the best way to move this forward now would be and a resolution and a commitment to future advocacy give depending on how how things go i think that you know there there's very i think that all of our race equity task force members would agree there's very little chance of these initiatives being acted on um by the current administration however there are some opportunities in the future um at the federal level that you know might that might provide opportunities for for some of these programs to be more um more realistically considered and that at that point we could engage in further advocacy so this is a resolution responding to for um recommendations from the wealth and economy task force which is that we advocate for reparations universal basic income a federal jobs guarantee and um increase to the federal minimum wage um there are also some recommendations some other ones that i think we could probably move forward pretty quickly that i'm looking for feedback on how to do that so there are two pieces two recommendations about state level advocacy advocating at the state level for decriminalization of cannabis and advocating at the state level for subpoena power for civilian review boards my proposal for those two is that we um talk about them when it comes time for our legislative agenda and have them as part of our conversation with our um with our state delegation because we obviously have a much closer relationship and more access um to our state delegation than we do to our federal folks and more opportunity to kind of you know to to have a back and forth in a conversation with them at that point so that's my proposal for what to do with those two rather than a similar thing like this just a resolution i think we could do a deeper a deeper dive on advocacy for those at the state level um a third kind of chunk of recommendations that i think we could move forward with pretty quickly are three commissions or boards that the race equity task force recommended that we create and as i have mentioned to a couple of people i think it would make steve cry if i proposed to create three additional boards and commissions so i'm so instead i am proposing um some subcommittees so so one new commission which would be a permanent race equity commission to replace the task force which we have all agreed is something that we want um but the other two that were proposed are a history and story gathering commission and a cemetery advisory board and i feel like the history and story gathering commission could be a subcommittee of maybe the cultural affairs board or the human relations commission we'd have to obviously go and you know talk to those folks about whether this is a piece of work that they're interested in taking on but i feel like those two are the kind of the first two that i think of around history and story gathering and then the cemetery advisory board i think could potentially be part of open space and trails um so that's kind of what i'm thinking on those would love would love for some feedback or thoughts and then finally there are three recommendations asking the city to either apologize for or acknowledge the harm done to black communities by past decision making by the city um and those that's in three areas the neglecting of gear cemetery the um building of highway 147 and the city's um implementation of redlining housing and racial covenants urban renewal and um and neglecting black communities more broadly i feel like in order to in order to write acknowledgments or apologies that would that would be meaningful and would like encompass the scope of the history that it would be helpful for us to bring in some Durham historians and experts um and like long-term residents in our black communities who have more of a sense of the history and could give us um could give us advice on how to specifically like word and phrase those things in a way that they're not just like i don't want them to just be lip service i want it to be like meaningful and informed by informed by people's real experiences of these of these situations so my proposal for that is that we reach out to some of the folks um who we have worked with before on historical issues yeah um and Thomas suggesting eddie davis who'd be perfect the folks on our um confederate monuments and um commission like to reach out to those folks and try to get some ideas around language and what might be a a way to move those recommendations forward in a meaningful way so that's a lot of proposals love to hear thoughts and feedback and whether people specifically about this one resolution um whether people want any changes or feel good about it as written so thanks and thank you for the suggestions for people that was an awesome report i think we should take them one by one um so let's start with the resolution any anyone have anything to offer about the resolution any changes anyone would like uh any any uh any thoughts about it that anyone would like to offer i thought it was very good i certainly support it and agree that given the the federal nature of it it's an appropriate approach thank you i'm happy to move it on to our next council agenda but want to make sure if there's anyone that has any any other comments before we do that council member middleton no i think it's a brilliant piece of work and i think it's spot on i think it clearly reflects the all of the kind of touchstone issues um that that kind of encapsulated justice movement i mean i you know i've said it in other contexts i do uh plan on asking us to consider um municipal experiment at some point uh with ubi funded by private money um as well as perhaps some some public money as well if we can legally do that but so cheers i think it's i think it's spot on thank you thank you council member caballero i welcome back yeah i'd like to know i was gone for about three hours went to a whole other training and came back i just want everyone to know that okay um you you owe us i'll be listening later um i just wanted to say i appreciate this resolution i think it's great i also appreciated the spreadsheet that mayor pro tem shared up probably about two weeks ago that helped kind of categorize the buckets the the report was amazing and it was really helpful to kind of see a path forward of how we do this work um so just really appreciate her leadership on this i i feel really great about passing this on the fifth i really appreciate the idea of bringing in our local historians and storytellers to help us craft um you know really appropriate language that that speaks to the suffering that our folks in our community especially our black folks have felt um many from many many many decades so thank you let me some spreadsheets council member freeman thank you i also want to echo uh council members comments and saying i appreciate the work that mayor pro tem has done around spelling us out and moving some of this forward i i do want to acknowledge i know that the staff is working on bringing us some report on the things that are moving forward i look forward to seeing that i i just have one angst one one question about the language around the $15 an hour i just want to make sure that it's clear that if we were pushing for 22 it'd be perfect and i understand we're not right now but um just some language to a to kind of expound on um why it says $15 an hour and acknowledging that and this climate you know for folks to be able to come off of you know medicare or or um any housing assistance that it would need to be 22 so i don't know how to do that real quickly but just something that does say that the reason in that is $15 is acknowledging that they can't live at minimum wage so that it spells it out a little bit more because i feel like even though we might not get that movement in the um senate right now it's possible that in january you know things could change so i just want to make sure that it's it's a little bit more robust yeah thanks for that feedback i can definitely add something about like you know a minimum a minimum wage sufficient to you know yeah so so even if you don't put $15 an hour that it actually spells out what it is so that they actually knew yeah yeah there's pending $15 an hour legislation which is why i use 15 but um yeah i mean i agree with you and in addition to however however it worked we're just making already out of date yeah yeah other than that i think it's it looks good i am excited about the the addition of this of the committees that will not make steve cry and um and look forward to supporting those forward i hate crying thank you i hate making you cry i like to make you cry steve i just want to do it today thank you so much council member all right mayor pro tem um you're going to do a little more drafting um sounds like is that correct yep i'll add that i'll add that change and um then send it to diana for my frozen agenda are you frozen you're not frozen can y'all hear me all right okay yeah i'll i'll add that and i'll send it to diana for the agenda super thank you very much thank you all right now let's let's move on to the second um the two other things that you brought up that would require state approval i thought your idea of moving that ahead through our legislative agenda process it was a good idea is everybody okay with that can i see thumbs i got a thumb up for that green is kind of frozen did i see thumbs yeah and we're gonna have charlie crying after all this legislative agenda okay so we're going that way thank you mr mayor it's it's i should say that there's been some initial talk about this a month some folk on on uh the league it'll all be in tears forever okay good i think that sounds good did i freeze steve now i think the mayor is frozen steve can you turn off your camera because we're losing yeah are we frozen he's frozen i think he's frozen yeah why don't everybody i thought everybody was frozen for a minute you're just waiting for something to happen we talk to hear you you may have gotten the boot he that was a challenge one time remember that challenge like the frozen challenge mm-hmm there's some really good videos on the harlow sneaky grand central station that yet we love all right he got all right now that's an improvement right there oh that's nice all right now i have to do something well i mean i feel like we shouldn't continue the conversation and still he gets back because the main point of the next little section is trying not to make him cry so yeah i think we're he was in agreement that you know that the subcommittee's format would work so we if we could all give thumbs on it yeah and you love the way it comes do y'all have a thought about whether history and story gathering would fit better in cab or in hrc i think hrc you're back you're back okay yeah no we're internet sometimes has has sad moments i think the history is more more hrc and the cab is the storytelling so i'm not sure if maybe there's a way to pull representate i'm all about pulling folks from one to the other so having the artist in the like human folks working together also they may also like each board may have a position on that so we both of them could be approached mm-hmm i have an idea on that which y'all may have already said which is that we have a master storyteller on our council who happens to be the liaison to both the uh hrc and the cab and so maybe we could ask councilmember freelon to maybe consult a little with the racial equity task force folks see what they had in mind and then try to bring together the right people to make this happen would you be willing to take that on i'm on it fabulous give them the microphone so we can bust like a bubble we're going to be doing this one on friday night dad that'll be a board that everyone applies to right that'll be the most popular board in the city um javier are you willing to check in with dust about cemetery advisory yeah absolutely great and then for the race equity commission should we just ask our city attorney to draft up some bylaws for that yes sounds good do we want to ask the current folks if they have any like suggestions too i'm like yeah there may be i don't think there is too detailed a description in the in the report um but we could maybe um kim if you're willing you could get and touch directly with um with karen and elaine to see if there's anything specific that they were imagining we will do that thank you so much all right that takes care of that thank you madam air pro tem efficiently done and i think we got a good plan and it's good to be moving some of these things thank you so much thank you and i'll go ahead and reach out to the historians on the on the public apology and acknowledgement um peace hey man before you've grown up i was just saying that um at the league level in cbmo uh a black elected municipal officials have um already floated um interest in pursuing a decriminalization of marijuana and um the subpoena power uh for the civilian review boards as well as the ability for uh you know the few body cam footage so there's definitely some on ramps that already exist at the league level um with those issues so be more than happy to do that whenever i have yeah that's super thank you everyone really glad to be moving some of this forward and look forward to hearing more um from staff about what they're doing there are already some some really exciting moves happening on the staff side as well so on work we'll schedule a time to hear from staff thank you so much thank you for moving that along mayor pro tem and thanks everybody i think we have some good opportunities okay uh before we go into closed session i'm going to ask the clerk um if she could report back to us on the situation with our two appointments good evening everybody uh yes we have um the human relations commission um position has been nominated by four votes for ferra cambell and the mayor's council for women we've got some um we don't have the majority of votes yet we've got three for brena kasey two for margaret brunson one for two times diana if you have three i can change my vote for human relations or yes okay thank you council member was that for for for brena kasey all right thank you very much council member freeman um thank you ma'am thank you madam clerk um shall we settle the agenda before moving into closed session uh madam manager yes mr mayor uh i am ready to set the agenda it's been a long day but a good one so i have for our city council meeting consent items one through 23 gba public hearings item 27 through 31 and item 34 thank you very much madam manager you have heard the manager's agenda can i have a motion that we settle the agenda a move second moved by council member caballero seconded by council member freeman madam clerk we please call the roll near shul i near pro tem johnson hi council member caballero hi council member freelon hi council member freeman hi council member middleton i vote aye council member east hi thank you thank you madam clerk the eyes have it the motion passes unanimously um um madam manager is there anything else that we need to do before we move into closed session other than than just notice that council that that city manager bonfield couldn't help himself he's still on the call he is he was gonna be a participant today and was ready to jump in if he needed to but it looks like he uh i saw him in the chat a couple of times but he didn't actually need to jump in uh with his voice but he is here every step of the way mr marron counselors i do want to thank you for uh for extending this meeting so i could keep piling on my uh my career record of hours spent in council meetings i feel like cal ripkin now you know that i've now got a record that probably will never be surpassed after today well mr manager you're truly a hall of famer exactly um yeah so uh another another final moment for you mr manager and thank you we uh we appreciate you we also appreciate you uh enter a manager page and uh it's going to be a really great transition and i just want you to know wander that we we have your back and you want you let us know how we could support you i i know that and looking forward to uh working with each and every one of one of you all right thank you all right thank you tom i think now we need a motion to go into closed session i'm going to ask our city attorney if she can help us with the appropriate wording i can i apologize mr mayor um so my understanding is that the city council is going into closed session in order to consider a real estate transaction yes so moved so motion to and you don't need to cite the specific statue if i sleep it's 143 318.11 a 5 123 18.11 5 thank you council councilmember freeman is there a second second there are lots of seconds but we'll give it to councilmember reese uh madam clerk please call the roll you're shul hi you're pro tem johnson hi councilmember caballero hi councilmember free lawn hi it's a member freeman hi it's member middleton i vote i it's member reese hi thank you thank you so much we're now going to move into closed session um and i think we will just try to move right into closed session as soon as we're able to lock the meeting and so for those of you all who are not