 Thank you all for being here, I know the holiday seasons are upon us and so forth and very excited that we're coming to this conclusion here today because we're going to start doing some work come January, so excited about that apartment. Before we open it up to the rest of our agenda, I'd like to ask you about being able to say hello, bossy. Thank you for putting me on the spot. In the book of Genesis it says God created man in his own image and with the image of God he created man and female he created them. It tries to show us that each of us are individuals but in the end each of us come together as a community. In the season and festival of light let's beseech God that he should bring the warmth in for our lives and that he should allow us to be a beacon unto others and the lights of our Hanukkah lights, our Christmas trees and all of the winter solstice and holidays should be a beacon that we walk towards that of equality and equity that of fairness and community and that each and every one of us should be able to light the not only of ourselves our families but for our entire community as we reach out for the morality of life and the goodness within us and the ability to bring goodness around us as well. Amen. Just quickly I'd just like to say to all of you who have agreed to serve as chairs of committees and on committees we thank you because that's where the work really begins. You've got a job to do in analyzing up front of the curio. I put myself in mind today the stack is about this high just with what we gathered already and I'm sure you're going to be gathering more so we're depending on you the community is depending on you. I'm looking forward to attending some of these committee meetings to see where we go but really looking forward to see what recommendations we come up with for the city so thank you for taking on extra work that you probably don't think you're going to do to buddy us to do but it's more work and I appreciate you for doing that. I'll just wish everyone a happy holiday season each and every one of us are blessed by the fact that we have a home to go to in the evenings each and every one of us are blessed that we have the fellowship of each other. I hope that we're able to bring that blessings to others so on behalf of myself, my community, my family, I wish all of you all of God's blessings. And I did know what Barbara has said about your volunteering to take lead of some of the committees and serve but some of you who have not signed up we do have one participation and we hope that you will participate on one or two committees and thank you again for that. The next thing on our agenda is a approval of minutes from the November 20th task force meeting. I hope you all have a chance to review those as we've sent out my email to you earlier. Welcome a motion to accept. For what? All of that work and of course that update on community conversations so Estreous and Angela. I'm going to invite Angela's voice to go first. She's done an incredible job with the charts and everything that we've reviewed before. Just welcome her updates and then I'll have some remarks. So under tab one in your binders towards the back there is a chart. It'll be after it looks like this. It's a summary of our participant statistics. I'll try it. Is that better? If not I'll just project. Okay so this data was collected by those that filled out the participant questionnaire online and also by those that signed in at community conversations and or filled out participant questionnaires at community conversations. So we had 330 and 332 entries and of those the majority were entered online 210, 122 were manually entered. Of those the people that filled out online they were asked the question were you invited to participate in a conversation and of those that responded 146 said yes and 64 said no. Now I do want to say of the 64 that said no I drilled down on that data additionally and really some of those actually ended up attending a couple of conversations. So we're really down to 42 that have not attended a conversation that I can tell from a sign-in sheet and not everyone that filled out the participant questionnaire actually filled out every item on there. Some provided addresses some didn't some provided contact information some did not and some did not provide the demographic information so I'm just going to give you the information on what we do have. So on the second page you will see a map. This map is of those that actually attended a community conversation so you can see that it's pretty well dispersed within the inner city. We do have a lack of participation in far north Fort Worth which is when I say that that is outside of the loop and we also probably have not as much participation far west but everywhere else there there's pretty good participation so far and we do have additional conversations that will be occurring we will be having a couple of them at Hazel Harvey piece in January and so if you have not been able to attend one and you did sign up you will be getting an invitation. You still have an opportunity to sign up by going to onefortworth.org is that correct Michelle and you could submit a participant questionnaire there also. Now under the demographic information of the 300 and 32 284 provided demographic information and 48 did not so of those that did you can see the age range. There's a pretty consistent age range 25 to 34 we had 52 participants 35 to 44 we had 58 45 to 54 we had 47 55 to 64 we had 62 65 to 74 we had 45 participants and then 51 did not provide information so those that did it's pretty dispersed towards the middle we don't have a we only had five participants in the 18 to 24 we had three that were actually under the age of 18 and we had nine that were 75 or older. Under race and ethnicity the majority of those that have attended have attended our African American and then the next is white or Caucasian and then Hispanic Latino or Spanish and then actually we had a really good representation from Asian or Pacific Islander and then you can see the rest of we had one he one person that said Hebrew another one that said Haitian American we had two Native Americans but the majority are those three main categories African American Hispanic Spanish or Latino or white or Caucasian education you can really see a big gap there the majority of the attendees either had a bachelor's degree a master's degree of bachelors we had 83 masters 86 we had 24 doctorates 18 professional and then 34 some college graduate but there is you can see that if you didn't have the higher education there was probably a little less participation in these community conversations under marital status the majority were married or domestic partnership we had 166 71 indicated they were single and 30 indicated they were divorced under employment most everybody indicated the majority employed for wages there were 45 retired 32 self-employed 12 students and then two unable to work they indicated that they were disabled and unable to work under sexual orientation the majority at 224 was heterosexual and quite a few none of your business but the majority were heterosexual under gender we had 176 female 104 male we had one transgender individual 51 did not provide information we didn't break down the remaining page by charts because there were so many responses we asked religion we had quite a few that said again none of your business but we did have those that did respond we had 39 Catholic 89 that simply said that they were Christian 27 that said they were Baptist 24 Methodist we had 10 Protestant but 86 did not provide provide that information under political affiliation again quite a diverse response and they were quite interesting I got a few trickles on some of these we had 81 Democrats 43 independent 12 that indicated Republican though one indicated Republican moderate and we had a couple of liberals one we had someone that said they were conservative but currently a raging liberal I thought that was an interesting response and so there's a variety of responses there but the the major ones are Democrat and independent so now estrus is going to talk about the actual results some of the feedback that we have received at the community conversations and as individuals have attended they have filled out feedback sheets and those have come back to me we they've been scanned and they've been actually looked at by estrus to come up with some patterns so estrus do you want to take over starting with the vision and mission and how we're defining community conversations and then lifting up the intent behind these because we continue to have some feedback that would suggest you want much more of an engagement you want this person who has this opinion confronting that person with that opinion and that wouldn't the deal so we talk a little bit about intent and invitation and then list all the questions that these three series of feedback sheets contain I underlined the ones for this first feedback because they point to particular patterns particular perspectives about the city of Fort Worth as a relation race and culture so the second page as you turn over is how I've clustered these and these are not isolated comments these are clustered so there are several comments that led to these being the ones that emerge and the same thing for the next two pages around ideas and solutions these are not singular ideas these are clustered of ideas I haven't prioritized any I just listed them as I read through the different files the different feedback reports so the first one looking at page two looking at the first and second conversations the one that were underlined here's what the strong consensus that little or nothing is being done by the city to improve racial relations racial equity or cultural awareness or most people don't know about anything being done by the city the city continues to be reactive rather than proactive these community conversations are one step by the city of Fort Worth the second area clustered a number of topics related to critical areas of racial ethnic disparities reflecting racism and other biases from their perspectives which includes public school education housing and gentrification with society several times transportation fair employment and economic development infrastructure investment in black and hispanic neighborhoods and overall a lack of transparency the next big pattern a long term and trench segregation patterns in residential housing education schools neighborhoods businesses churches organizations and city celebrations and little interaction at the large scale between different races and especially wealthy and poor um other than a few select events and groups our celebrations and gatherings reflect segregation patterns and then the problem that was made early on in response is systemic structural and institutional racism and not simply personal individual acts of racism leadership know the difference uh often cited with the lack of diversity in arts music cultural events and there was a good pattern that suggested to continue and expand continue expand and deepen community conversations and clarify measurable outcomes and to create a platform to continue these race and community conversations and one that came up in some conversations with host organizations and it came up with particular participants and that is a need for more efforts to bridge the black and hispanic divide so the overarching reflective question that i would offer is what might the city of fort worth look like if it champion racial equity how would the city look and function differently now you're fine again if this landed kind of negatively it softens when you read some of the other feedback so this is just those mostly actionable items that point to the problem but it but it's not all about problems and you'll get a flavor of that as you look through these read through these 38 ideas and suggestions that different neighbors that offer and i question them in communication and engagement diversity inclusion and equity economics poverty and disparities and there's some other ideas in general uh just that didn't fall neatly under all of them they're not prioritized but you'll find substantive perspectives uh that can give some insights on what's possible and then last but not least again we've said from the beginning uh that we're this is not a new game in town for some of us we've been on more race and equity and culture committees than we can name onto the hands and there are systems that have been recently involved in substantive work around race equity and culture and so i just lifted up a few of these uh max is here uh somewhere all right uh and so at the very top the tcu diversity equity and inclusiveness committee and i just did a little bit drawer about what their focus but i can't capture all of it it's significant uh and their alignment and connections with the fourth ic racial equity committee and then division of equity equity and excellence we know about the police department um national initiative for building community trust and justice some of us are aware of the early learning alliance racial equity task force they have some particular language and these all of these processes are well into the uh be on a be on a one year um fairly recent as taren county college is intercultural student engagement and academic success program targeting male students of color one target population and this is on all their six campuses so just to give a flavor of how do we appropriately align with what's happening and and connect the the different voices and community conversations and then then later as we begin uh to get insight on the disparities assessment that leon would be lifting up so this just gives you a flavor of the content of community conversations and i just welcome any questions anybody have any questions angela or estrus based on the information that you're hearing about i have a question just for on all of these committees that are surrounding the city as far as connectors do they are they ever in the same room as far as in planning and because these are a lot of different stakeholders within the forward communities so to some degree some of those actually were host organizations sure and we've had participants from all of those that participated community conversations so there have been linkages and the key is how do we for example align some of the subcommittee work with these with the work that's going on um i also want to name when we selected host organizations you know we had criteria but part of that criteria was an intent to do something more than just this first round of community conversations because we've gotten models and approaches for civic engagement around race and ethnicity and culture already within our communities and so we're we're we were hoping that some of the host organizations would take it to the next level and just as a sample and so i sent this to you for the last meeting we didn't really discuss it but there are various models that we also would be looking at to include um general conversations community conversations in the arts courageous conversations that's been a powerful resource within our schools that i think both Walter and Katie and a few others each have suggested some models so part of the possibility is as we move beyond these first round of community conversations what are the models what are the distinct models might we offer our broad community rather than assuming one size will fit all what are some unique pieces and also included in that is seeing God in one another i think that's an episcopal model for racial equity so we don't have a shortage of models what we need is clarity and focus and then following those models to see what's uh what's uh what's been affected i know the city's especially when it comes to race and equity and also there's social justice as well um it sounds like this committee or committee like it is one that's going to be continuous uh be uh interacting or standing for a few years and what i mean of this committee we're we are to terminate after a year i think we need to be planning on another committee or whatever to continue the effort because these problems are not going to be solved in one year this is going to take a lot of time to get in in in depth and all the things that are going on and i agree that there needs to be coordination done because everybody's out there working if they all working on things then nobody is really understanding because you're working in silos so you've got to be able to bring it on to the effort right and so part of this in your job probably i can't take your job and i know you're doing it it's to see what's out there and bring it to you well you remember early on we've talked about that you know if we see that we need more time we will be able to go to the council and ask for another year uh whatever the time frame is that we might need to come up with our asking for more time sorry watcher oh no definitely i mean and i think that's going to be one of the recommendations exactly our agenda is briefing of additional opportunities for public engagement yes when we um when we originally mapped out the plans for the community engagement we talked about doing the large town hall which we had and then we talked about the series of community conversations we've had a lot of those we still have two organizations uh leadership port worth and potter's house who are going to host community conversations so we'll be able to include more people in that we had a lot of people submit um online requests to participate in the community conversations and as i told you all at the last meeting we provided those names and contact information to all the host organizations there was still a large group that had not been contacted so what we have done is we have scheduled a community conversation to happen in january and you have the dates i have a handout everybody's place um january 11th 18th and 25th at hazel hardy peace i'm working with estrus on facilitators and so i sent an email to each of the people who had submitted an online um questionnaire and gave them the option of participating this month telling me if they weren't available but they were still interested and then letting me know if they had already participated in a community conversation and didn't need to to be included in this group so um we're putting that community conversation together for january um the ones we're doing with leadership forward than potter's house that will allow us to target some of the areas where we have a low representation whether that's geographic or demographic because they're very open to um the people on their conversations not being limited to like their membership so we'll be able to to improve our demographics in some of those areas where we haven't really reached out on some of the groups we want to the second item on your sheet at the last meeting um it was suggested that we do additional town halls we have scheduled 12 mini town halls at community centers and libraries um on the one side of the handout that i gave you it shows the dates and locations along with the map that shows the geographic um location for all of those meetings this will be happening in january and february and then i am going to have the next large town halls scheduled for early march um i haven't confirmed that yet but i've been talking with us and we think we're leaning towards the tarrant county community college south side campus because that was recommended by a number of groups so we're hoping to have that scheduled for early march um the website um the the tool that i needed to upload all the documents i got today so before this meeting i was able to upload most of our meeting agenda meeting minutes and presentation handouts and the rest that i haven't gotten to i'll get those done this week so that information will all be available on the website along with all the meetings we're taping all the meetings now we'll have those available for viewing on youtube and on the on the website so um i tried to take all the recommendations that came up at that last meeting for opportunities to engage more of the community and um if there's other ideas that anybody has who are definitely open to adding those to the to the list that i'm available for any questions anybody has any did we do the app have you guys started the app will we go in the app like we can go into let's do an app will you put questions on there we to develop an app to develop an app i'm going to visit the website but we can definitely look at to see if there's some kind of engagement tool that we could have that would be we'd be able to be a little bit more interactive but on the one forward dot org though it doesn't have a space you can have a place to submit comments right for comments on that that's been in place and i've had a few people who specifically have used that to sign up to to be part of the community conversations to let me know they're interested to just provide comments um but mostly they've seen on the video a presentation they wanted a hard copy and i've just gone ahead and sent that to them when they request it so but we do have that email option for people to ask questions without making the assumptions with the mayor's stance on sb4 uh do we again not making the assumptions how are we reaching i'm looking at this uh chart here with the hispanic and latino spanish population are we doing any not necessarily extra efforts but what are we doing to engage the hispanic population out of these conversations i mean besides some of the organizations that host it community conversations united fort worth and get there is what downtown fort would think so was a totally different population uh because i was going to ask that question here because we were missing the north side of fort worth and even some of the inner south side uh which is predominantly hispanic market uh word that would be a opportunity to hear them in hispanic in their own language okay we can definitely add some um some town halls specifically um off of them in spanish so that we have the the staff available to do the translations and stuff so we can definitely add that and i think it'll be wise to utilize some of hispanic organizations um i forgot who we were on the email shade which next grante yes i think we need to tap into some of those hispanic organizations to let them know that the first and foremost it's a safe environment to come i think that is one of the things we deal with with blue zones is no one wants to give their name and information and put that submit that to anyone so in some kind of way we need to let them know that this is a safe area a safe place to come and share their concerns about their community so academic annuals would be better dollars academic annuals would be enough those two groups would be good and i know too when we were working on our initial as before communications it was suggested that maybe in some communities people actually have like meetings at their homes to reach out just to their neighbors because being in a public meeting in a public place there was still that that element of fear and so we can definitely look at those options if we want to have smaller get-togethers and in a safe environment one of the things you might think about is the latino peace officers association because back in 2004 and five they worked with the banks and the hispanic chamber in those markets because they were able to get a particular card to be able to open a bank account in a whatever bank whether it was a bank of america world fargo or some of the others because it was a safety issue so they really did a great job of competing there in latino peace officers did we reach out to uh taren county sheriff the police chief came but have we reached out to the sheriff to have him come before this commission so we know what his head is thinking you know i i don't know that we did but i actually had a call in the past couple weeks asking when the sheriff was going to be here because they understood that he was coming which i didn't know anything about so i actually didn't know that he had been invited any other questions of michelle are the town halls that are listed in the blue box there are they going to be similar to how the first one was held and we're attending or not so many or have been compared to what we had before on the on the original town hall we asked people to um to let us know what they wanted the task force to address what was the when did they think the main issue was for the town hall for the task force to address we have a question prompt that came up during the co-chair meeting and i i didn't feel like there was a consensus on having a question prepared or just letting people speak freely about issues that they thought were facing the community so we can do either way well i almost wonder if some of these might even be better served as a community conversation given some of the locations too and mirroring with the demographics that we've seen and where you want to actually improve the response so the far north areas as well as the diamond hill areas and some of the southwest and the other parts of town if these are town halls like what we had before where people just came and gave comment versus the dialogue so that's versus the community conversations that will be held at the table every piece so i'm just wondering if we need to flip flop it maybe or i'm not sure what the format is well and we also have the opportunity like with um we could host another community conversation in another area if we'd like to be at well i know we also talked about the the format and as Tristan you talked about me you're structuring a little bit so because that was one of the barriers for some folks to participate was you know three nights six hours all those kinds of things and even some of us that participated some of us got through it faster than others and so i just i'm glad to see that we have more dates and times and things already locked in but as far as utilizing them the best way we can that's why my question was really focused on so making these work kind of a hybrid between the town hall and community conversations versus just where people come and focus on a one one time one event instead of multiple yeah i think why don't we work on something of that nature because what concerns me when you look at the number of people that have participated in these community conversations uh or leaving comments and so forth it doesn't reach the population of our city so we're not hearing from a lot of people and we need to i'm just going to go along with what jennifer was asking about and anyways i i assume that these are going to be smaller uh smaller number of people which gives an opportunity for dialogue indeed and depending on who the moderator is you can have that dialogue and you can get a lot of questions and answers uh i don't see the reason why that can't be dialogue i would just like i looked at the meeting location i just wonder would you consider stop six or metterworld because you kind of miss that area altogether the stop six community center or metterbrook because you got to the north you got the east regional library which is actually above i-30 and then you got McRae which is more south to 287 yeah i had a conversation with you missed the core of the population right had a conversation with the historic stop six and they're interested in hosting one at the at the community center called calls that would be that would be the best spot yeah stop six community center so are they looking to host a community conversation uh the host what what what we designed i don't think they would be open to a one event rather than a series of three that can be modified okay all right can you get us that modification uh so that we can take a look there okay yeah yeah yeah yeah is there anything that is going out maybe in the water bills coming up next year early next year that might provide an opportunity or a survey of some time for people to provide back or some things that we could get to more people possibly as well their insights i mean well if you're going to go there you could talk about some of the marketing balance that he uses for the billboards or the bus stops or the bus wraps those are that the bus wraps and the bus stops are totally separate from the city because that's the forward transportation authority okay so thank you for trying to get the word if we're mailing already if we were to mail something i mean it would obviously take some funding but that would also provide an opportunity for people to provide input that might not be taking a lot of time which seems that's maybe the biggest issue that people providing the amount of time but the insight people would be willing i'm sure to write something and we could get a little bit more information for people as well i think also if we put some stuff in the community centers maybe where they can a postcard really can write where it's already they don't have to put money into it it can just be sent back that might be a great way to get in different communities more information as well well and one of the other things is the people that have posted us in our community conversations if we can send them something of a small little survey or so forth then they can send it out to their memberships and their contacts so that we could try to get more information yeah i don't have like a question but more so i don't want to submit other everyone else's time but do we think that the task force should have some type of presence at east town all means that it's at least two or three people because you know i i don't know what people that show up to the request you'll be getting the first list that we're passing around so you get your first voice right there we will be passing around on this just like the conversations where not all of us need to go but some of us can go to different ones so there is if you can make all of them great if you can that much better i think that goes back to what we were talking about on the email conversation on how if we begin to partner with one another as a task force and utilize our relationships there are some people who we know in our circles that have not been able to for whatever reason to participate in the community conversations but we picked up the phone and called and said hey i got this going on on this night i'm thinking we can possibly get more voices by utilizing our relationships it's one thing just saying there's a meeting going on because they know that we get a personal investment that we have and it's a personal invitation it might get a higher representation of participation from those that we know that we're missing their voice right i have a question for the guys from the league of cities uh you all have heard us talking about this before and how we get communication out uh what are your suggestions as to how we do this to get more participation i mean y'all have done this before so so thank you for i was going to weigh in with my time to speak but thank you for asking so i do think there are two reactions listening to how you're having the discussion the first is commendable which is that you're really thinking through creative ways how to leverage your partnerships how to find the right locations making sure you're not um putting it in traditional spots but looking at non-traditional places where it needs to needs to happen i do think the larger question of our resources of promoting is one that should get resolved like what resources are available uh through the city to try to whether it's going through uh water water utility bill or other other ways of getting the message out part of my measure when we come into town is uh you know we we talk with different people around when we're coming in just like who is aware of what's going on as relates to the race and culture task force um and so there isn't a buzz yet right there isn't yet a buzz that i could ask an uber driver and they would be aware of that they they've heard about something about this happening so what needs to happen to create that level of buzz attention even if people can't show up but they know what's happening and they know either they shared with their friends or that they but so what level of investment is there to be able to do that and i think you're asking yourselves those right kinds of questions that i think will be important uh the second that i was going to mention um as well is not to rush this process um and i know that there is a lot of time that's already been invested obviously a lot of sacrifice it's already been made there is pressures of timeline of this only being a year and wanting to make sure you are you know moving through a process thoughtfully that gets you to a set of recommendations that you want to make but this is such an important part of what you're doing legit it it had it legitimizes the level of commitment that the city and this task force is making to hearing from every person's voice that wants to be heard in this space and so the message and oh we're running out of time we can't do it wrong message to be communicating to the community so i don't know how you revisit that in whatever space you have but it would be my recommendation not to rush this process clearly the demographics looking at what Angie presented you're missing a large percentage of lower income populations lower educated populations you have the higher educated people that are attending in that natural right and so you got to be able to push yourself to find the um to where that that balance is a little bit better and be committed to that before moving on so those would be the two recommendations we would make based upon the work that happens in other cities i appreciate that but let me just go back to clarify i'm i'm also i agree with you but i'm asking what are some of the things safe answers we have what are some of the things we should be doing we could be doing to do this to get the information out so i'm happy to i think would be helpful this first maybe to send something back to the task force uh that provides a more list of what some of those best practices are in engagement and we're happy to do as a way of sharing best practices that you are looking for other creative ways to do that so we can pull that together and send that back to the task force you have that to us by the end of the year uh by the end of the year i'm gonna yes i'm gonna introduce adio alviero in a moment make sure you get that by the end of the year i think i think we can make it i can name one thing as a best practice is in other places that involves a budget that has been affected but it's not always used we're familiar with focus groups that and from a marketing strategic marketing perspective but around race and equity there are some areas that actually use focus group where the participants are compensated as we're getting them in and getting their voices and targeted areas that is not about building it and they will come they go and hold the focus groups where people are where the institutions and organizations that they already trust that they're already involved in but it's a simple focus group fine designed uh questions uh and it's been effective in getting the voice and to that point it couldn't it could be uh gift cards you can pass up right so they cashed it right to grocery store local grocery stores or it could be other kinds of financial incentives in the areas that you're targeting but could be another strategy all right i'm going to go ahead and um go on to our next one now because we do have a couple presentations to go to so um if you have any other questions or comments on that one line item let us know after the meeting number six is an update on assessment disparities and service delivery and Linda Johnson and Leon Andrews departments completed a survey related to the data they collect and specifically data that we're currently collecting that we disaggregate by either race or ethnic so and the results have been turned into MCL they have uh done their analysis and so Leon can present the findings like that yeah so thank you Linda so we uh uh under tab two is the report uh that we sent to the committee uh that shows our data governance um analysis from the survey that uh Linda just mentioned uh so i do want to just acknowledge that the process here was to ask each agency 23 agencies within the city uh to commit us to complete a series of questions that really really assess their governance strategy for disaggregating uh data by race and ethnicity uh and so this was kind of part two of the work that we've been doing for those that heard the update the last uh last part uh last meeting we just completed the city conversations that have happened over a series of over a three-part series similar to what was happening in the community uh this data piece um is a really important really us being able to what we hope align with where the task force is going um and so what i want what i asked um Ariel Vieiro who's our newest member to our team he's uh leads our tactical outreach and our support support team tactical support in our outreach team um we'll kind of walk through some of the data kind of some of the results at a very high level uh my big takeaway is i do think there's some good examples in particular agencies that are disaggregating the data and some areas where we're not seeing disaggregation happening by race and ethnicity uh that we want to highlight and we want to go a little bit deeper so ideal will walk through some of that highlights and uh we'll talk a little bit about next step what we're looking to do going forward going into the new year um and how we hope that this data can align with the structure that you're creating here that connect to your six community uh your committee uh committees so i'll turn it over to ideal to walk through some of the highlights of the data thanks leon um and thank you to the committee at large on this task force um so i want to so as leon mentioned there were 23 different agencies that we looked at survey um we broke them down into kind of four buckets if you will city governance goods uh goods providers business planning and management and then service providers so as you'll see in the appendix in the back appendix a you'll see how we kind of subset those groups um now part of this was as we went ahead and looked through the server we had kind of two core objectives that we really wanted to kind of analyze and get to the core of one that was understanding the existed data collection practices um within these agencies and then two was to discern whether that data um had already been collected or was being collected that examines the racial impact right of their programs a lot of this piece has been around service delivery and how that's affecting said communities um now though these questions were centered centered on these objectives um what we found was there are some stark differences about how um agencies have responded right who is collecting data who has the ability or was actively doing that where there is some transition space with agencies collecting some of this data um or again this data that they are collecting is not disaggregated so it's not breaking down to the level that we'd like to see in terms of being able to support the task or especially the committees as they go into uh what they're looked charged to do in terms of looking at potential recommendations of how their programs are impacting the communities that they're serving what i want to do is um what we heard again overwhelmingly um was that no most of the agencies are not disaggregating the data um there were kind of three core questions here that kind of stood out does your agency track does your agency track age your city city leaders outreach to residents by rate ethnicity and or geographical region has your agency the impact of economic development programs and differential impacts by race ethnicity or gender and third one was has your agency analyzed equity within agency city um city leadership outreach so again 65 percent of the responder 23 responded no um now you'll have each of you has the full survey question each of the respondents when we broke down to these four different um subcategories that I had outlaid before those last three got some specific questions directly they're kind of directly related to their body of work if you will so goods providers got um had one question that was different for example than city government agencies city governance agencies have three additional questions outside of um outside of the seven standard questions that each agency was at so again this is an appendix b um so i know it's a lot so i'm happy to answer questions on this um i think one of the highlights that i want to kind of pull out here is that again the the disaggregation of data is not across the board overwhelming the majority is not disaggregated data and as you look at your charge on this task force and the committee is getting ready to work into the new year that's important right that data is going to inform some of these conversations as leon mentioned one of the pieces that we're looking at in terms of next steps that we have highlighted some agencies that have a number of areas um that are that do collect this data and are disaggregating so we've made three recommendations um in terms of agencies that we're looking to have some continued in-depth conversations about the data they're collecting how they're doing it the process the staffing you know all the different um components that go into that how they're collecting the data that's going to be the neighborhood services department municipal court planning and um and development department these are three agencies that again based on their responses we're seeing that they're collecting a wealth of data um and we want to understand what they're doing with it how they're using it to inform policies and decisions right again the structures that are going in not necessarily reinventing the wheel how can we then take some of what we're learning from what they're doing and then use that to scale across the board for other agencies um at the same time we want to learn about some of the challenges why the majority of the agencies are not right or they're having struggles or challenges in terms of not being able to disaggregate the data and so outside of just those conversations that we want to have in-depth with the ones that are doing it well or at least that are that have a wealth of data um I don't want to say that necessarily doing it right to have a wealth of data that we can look at we want to understand the challenges from the other agencies um and so we're looking to the task force um we've highlighted some that require some further analysis uh financial management services the internal audit public convention center transportation and public works department and the library right we're looking to the task force to think through right what agencies you'd like to have more us to have more of those conversations we also recognize that the impotence to the task force development right so we don't have the police department as one of our recommendations for the three in-depth conversations that are collecting data now we know the police department is collecting data they are collecting disaggregated data i'm part of that thinking or rationale um and again these are only recommendations for the task force so happy to work with you if you want to include them in here this is a piece but the thinking is the police department being involved um in the work that they had been involved with uh that i'm just blanking on the other initiative the national building sorry building a trust initiative so the work that they're doing the national building trust initiative right not necessarily wanting to duplicate the work now does it mean that we can't go dive into their disaggregated data because we know that they have been doing work around that already trying to understand how that disaggregated is informing policy decisions and so we might not necessarily be at a starting point the same way we are with the other three departments it may be a different conversation that we have with the police department and then what does that mean as we work with the committee moving forward we are going to obviously work closely with the committee in terms of being able to inform and share the data and obviously the interviews and the kind of focus groups that we have with the departments and what information is coming out of that and how that can inform um the committee's conversations really around what recommendations we'd like to make coming out of you know the task force in its year of work so that's a very high level um i know there's a lot this is i think part of the beginning steps of this and i think as the committees jump into the next few months and what's really dive into the data and what it means in terms of policy decisions that's going to be a space where we're going to start to dive into not only disaggregated or again the lack of and understanding how that's affecting policy decisions where that may lead in terms of the conversation or recommendations with committees so and so that's um for me just want to uh talk a little bit to be very clear for us as our ideal walks through the kind of the details of the survey the hot for us uh if you go to page six of the document um in the document we sent uh what we were able to the chart broke down the list of the agencies that had identified data that they are disaggregating um within each of their agencies um and what we did initially was on this under tab two uh for those uh page six and so we identified at least initially where that data was that they have identified that they are disaggregating by race as it aligns with the different committees that this task force is creating to try to begin to show kind of what at least what's been reported of data that's being disaggregated by race and ethnicity where potentially could align as the committee's charge is to begin to look at um the understanding of that the disaggregated data as it relates to your committee so you count the number of agencies that say that they're disaggregating it's about it's 11 right 11 of the 23 say that they are disaggregating what we don't know is to what extent right we don't know uh the disaggregation is happening by race and ethnicity is it being done at a geographical level is it being done by zip code is it being done um at um other layers that helps us begin to do some kind of analysis uh so the follow-up next step for us going into the new year is to begin identifying at least the three agencies that seem to indicate that they are disaggregating a number of things by race and ethnicity we want to be able to better understand what level of disaggregation does that look like um as we work with them to do some initial analysis around what that uh what that narrative is as we understand uh whether or not disparities do exist by race and ethnicity so that level of in-depthness within those agencies are important but also want to make sure what doesn't get lost we're not ignoring the work that's happening with the police department what we are because the police department is also very critical in this space um and so we are the work that we're doing with the police department has a different starting point um they are part of this national building trust initiative uh so we uh the chief has approved uh that the evaluators that are doing the data which is the urban institute uh that they can give us access to that data so we they we are now working with them we've signed off on some paperwork for us to now have access to the data that uh the police that they have been collecting on behalf of the police department so it will give us a different sense of what level of data is being disaggregated by race and ethnicity and our goal is is to then follow up with the police department to better understand um that level of disparity and uh and be able to report that back to the task force so you have that information so it's not while they're not listed here there's still one of the agencies that it's important for us to follow up and understand the level of data that is being disaggregated and what the disparities look like within the police department as they're doing the work so we're just working differently with with that department but it's also important for us that we are not only looking at agencies that say they're they're disaggregating data we also want to identify at least one to two agencies that say they're not disaggregating but we think there's opportunities for them to disaggregate data by race and ethnicity so we want to go into the new year sit down with them with a couple of those agencies to see if we can better understand why they're not disaggregating data by race and ethnicity are there opportunities that they could be able to do disaggregate by race and ethnicity and we want to make those set of recommendations back to the task force um based upon what we've learned from those from those interviews so a lot of the work that Adel and our team will be doing will be in that follow-up the in-depth work that will provide some more insights into where these agencies are as they're disaggregating data by race I want to provide two quick clarifying points so one was so on the on this chart you're seeing um transportation was the one unique space where they're not disaggregating any data so you will see that on the chart um though it's part of the right the larger picture of who is they are collecting data but they are not disaggregating I think that was a very unique issue that we clarified by that the other piece of this was we got two responses from in the aviation space if you will because you recognize that Fort Worth right the airport and then the aviation department are two separate so we got two separate responses so if you look at the data we say 23 agencies is it you know two different respondents in the city agency because part of it wasn't also there was autonomy we didn't know if there was enough to add and maybe in terms of cool so I just want to make those two quick clarifying points as you look at some of this data okay does anyone have any questions some presentations do you happen to have a when I'm looking at the information provided other cities that might be exemplars to some of this that you can provide to the task force so that when we're looking at this we can see what it compares to yes that would be yes we can do that I'm just telling you my part but I looked at the transportation and public works and I think of public works I think of the streets I'm thinking of and I know when I drive around I know you do there are neighborhoods that are neglected in terms of streets and other infrastructure so are you saying that those that the department that oversees the building the streets is not collecting the data by ethnicity or race so that's what's what they've indicated which is to your point one of those agencies we want to sit down with understand why they're not and to explore ways that they can we know in work we do in other cities it's an important agency to disaggregate data by race and ethnicity as you're making decisions about street lights that are going out and roads that need to be fixed and etc etc and even if you're not it's so some of the questions that we asked were even if you're not connecting it by race and ethnicity are you least connected by collecting data by geo codes by looking at zip codes or other ways to help you make some analysis so it's a little bit surprising that that's not happening so we would want to be able to sit down to understand that and maybe Linda might have something yeah and so I think that's why we need to take a different guide so yes the street department does collect a lot of data sometimes to look at it in ways like they're talking we've got to combine two different data sets to come up with the results so when the department answered this the data set they're thinking of that they're collecting the data in they may not have a race or ethnicity in that because usually you don't get some of those databases they would have to combine it based on some other databases we have and GIS and that to come up with those maps and that yeah so it's a combination of other data sets and again the other part that's really surprising and I deal here on this point but I don't want to get lost while there are agencies that said that they are disaggregating data by race and ethnicity the glaring part of that was objective two and some questions a hundred percent in some cases sixty five percent of those agencies are not doing anything with the data right so even if you're collecting the data you're not using the data to understand the impacts of disparities right and so there are sets of questions of what can you do to better if you are collecting the data to the extent it's good data that you can be least using that to help inform your decisions using the tools so part of that in-depth uh conversations is to better understand is the data collected at a level where they can do some of that analysis and part of what we want to be able to do is to offer some of that analysis with the data that they currently have to see if how do you tell that narrative but then also to make the larger point about how does this translate into some of the other agencies that are disaggregating the data by racing at this point. Thank you Leon. Go ahead and go on to the next line out of briefing and strategy to increase minority representation on Fort Worth City Council so we've got Charles Ball, Lossmore and Casey. Thank you for giving us an opportunity tonight to explore for a few minutes something I think is very critical. You'll call a couple of months back I think I introduced a concept related to a different way to do city council redistricting that is citizen driven and really takes the politicians out of the process. Why this is so critical is this is where policies for the city of Fort Worth start with your elected officials which are the mayor and city council so they are going to drive policies on all the things we're talking about here economic development health transportation what what have you we to reset the stage a little bit we have a historic opportunity coming up as you know the census in federal census is conducted every 10 years so that'll be happening again basically two years from now 2020 the the lines always have to be redrawn after the census to because those districts have to be in proximate equality in terms of number of people I think we have a rule we try for no more than a 5% deviation from the average but this is even more special and truly unique because by virtue of what the voters of the city of Fort Worth did in the charter amendment election this past May we will be going from an 8-1 council district mayor structure to a 10-1 so there will be two more districts added following the 2020 census the first actual election under that 10-1 plan will be in May of 2023 so everything is going to change right so I'm well aware of the fact that this is not one of the charges that the city council has asked us to weigh in on however I'm being presumptuous enough to say this is an opportunity to address a very critical issue related to race and culture if you look at the situation now we have out of the nine elected officials we have two African Americans and one Hispanic we know our city is majority minority or minority white now and it's trending that way more in the future so it's not just a situation where if we stand pat the the status quo is going to maintain it could actually get worse in other words if you end up with say three of 11 that's less minority power on the council than three of nine right so how these lines get drawn is is extremely important so beginning with the end in mind I would like us as a body to be able to say to the city council that when you approach this redistricting process the goal ought to be to end up with an elected body that reflects the population of the city they're governing one way to do that perhaps is the method that Casey's going to talk about in in more detail based on the Austin example that he he was someone involved in where the this was a citizen driven process it in this is a recall in the case of the city of Austin this was done through initiative and referendum in other words citizen signed a petition that said we want to do redistricting this way they called a charter amendment election and that passed with over 60 to go that way what we would be asking for the Fort Worth city council is to not make people go through that process but on their own to say this this would be the fair the equitable way to do it and do it on on their own initiative so I'm going to stop there and let Casey talk to you about the some of the specifics of how this works and try to answer questions because I know there will be some and Tacey Casey tongue yet thank you Charles and thank all of y'all for the for the opportunity to come and present this idea to to you guys again as Charles mentioned my name is Casey tongue it and I'm a commercial real estate broker here in Fort Worth I focus on office leasing in urban land and so you know I'm coming at this initiative just from I believe it's the best thing for Fort Worth and for democracy moving forward and I'll kind of start from the from the biggest picture and then come come down into into where our opportunity is here in Fort Worth but gerrymandering is the biggest issue that's facing our politics right that's facing democracy right now uh this the supreme court just took up a second partisan gerrymandering case last uh last week they are now hearing uh one from a republican plaintiff one from a democrat re plane if on two separate uh uh uh two separate amendment violations and it is uh it is something that that could change politics that could change democracy could change politics and how we choose our elected officials in 2016 in the march 2016 texas state primaries that march election decided 35 out of 36 of our congressional seats it decided all 16 of the state senate seats that were up for election and decided 135 out of 115 state house of representative seats that makes the november election just a formality and the only way that an incumbent can lose is by getting outflanked by a more radical version of their own party because they know that they're only competing for a smaller set of the of the of their constituency knowing that they're safe to to win in november and fort worth is in a is in a unique position right now with uh with adding our two additional council districts for worth is always uh strived at the city level to remain nonpartisan and this is a this is a solution to to continue to to be a nonpartisan city government you know it it is uh it's a way to go through the process the right way and this is what's going to affect as charles said what is going to affect our future policies for the next decade as he said this is the 2023 election the city council members right now have to get reelected twice before they're even worried about what these what these new district lines are going to look like and so i think that there's a roadmap for how we do this and it's what austin just did in 2014 austin has had a six city wide council members in one city wide district mayor they just moved to a 10 single member district 11 member council setup similar to to the setup that we'll have when we add our two additional seats they went through this through an independent citizen's redistricting commission and and as charles said that completely takes the choosing of voters out of the hands of politicians and puts it in the hands of citizens the um the way that they went about it was at the complete dismay of the austin city council austin city council historically ran under a gentleman's agreement seat one was reserved for an african-american seat two was reserved for a hispanic and then all of the white guys ran in the other four seats and that was the gentleman's agreement for how they for how they divided up the city uh the city the um the city council did not want this to happen so austin forced it to ballot uh by an initiative and referendum and as charles mentioned passed by 60 percent because the question is pretty easy do you want to fairly and equitably uh you know choose how you're going how these districts are going to be drawn or do you want to let the politicians pick their voters so the the big the big piece of the big pushback that that we uh that we get a lot is well we're not we're not austin and austin didn't invent this they they just took an existing roadmap the first uh the first state to do this on the state level was arizona and no one's ever accused arizona of having you know a liberal policy agenda like austin continue california continued to uh continue to uh to do to do the exact same thing on the opposite end of the uh of the poll of the political spectrum what people don't realize when they hear this is that in austin this was actually a conservative initiative because there was no way for a conservative to win a city wide city wide seat in austin now they have they have uh they have 10 single member districts that is that is divided representation up equitably i think that that the opportunity that we have in in fort worth is is is going to be incredibly important and the way that we can then present to to our state and the larger picture how we do this process correctly if you all if you all have been paying attention to the uh to the spring court down in san antonio and the texas districts that have been that have been ruled unconstitutionally gerrymandered we we are we are in a place in fort worth to show exactly like austin did that they did that they that this can happen successfully the crazy thing about austin's map is they drew this brand new map with 10 city wide or 10 brand new districts from scratch and it did not get sued no one complained everybody accepted it and and they moved on forward because it was a fairly drawn map the when i when i'm coming to you guys on the on the race relation uh task force four is the way that austin was successful is they got the three faces to come together to push this in our for the vote for the vote about and it was the vice chair of the travis county g.o.p. party the chair of the travis county in double a cp and a long time hispanic state senator barrientos those were the three united fronts that that move forward to put to push this agenda and the what i have found out is that we would actually require almost three times as many signatures for an initiative and referendum here in fort worth as as in austin therefore i i think that that that it's a that is a possible route however the the path of least resistance is to get that fifth vote at the city council i've i've had conversations with four of the eight city council uh city council members right now and i get the the feeling that your vote lands on the same lines of the sb4 vote will on this initiative on this specific initiative i think the path of least resistance is figuring out how we get a fifth vote and take the politicians out of choosing of choosing who elects them and bringing in a group of independent citizens and i'll kind of open it up for uh for questions from there i kind of tried to give you guys a 50 000 foot view on it all i've spoken with um with gene abivens uh and zeta denise singleton and carry moon no though those are split two and two on how they feel on the uh on the idea uh so can you repeat the question bob i think i think that time is of the essence on this as y'all just heard this is a mouthful of a subject for for somebody to get out i've been having conversations for coming up on two years with people in the business community getting getting opinions on on how to on how to most effectively move forward with this it's a hard thing to to even get across for people to understand i don't think that that we can start this soon enough not to mention the sooner we start this conversation the further away they are from actually running for uh for these new district uh this new election the pushback is the city council giving up the complete authority of the final map i'm sorry well i i think that i think y'all can kind of guess of the of the four that i've talked to how those how those are going to come down you know they haven't all given me uh you know official positions on on my you know just just uh conversations with them but it's come with a you know some of the some of the pushbacks are well we're not often we're not we're not going to do any any of that stuff some of it has been well we don't want to give up the uh we don't want to give up the authority of the city council we are elected to make these type of decisions you know we are elected official we can so we can make make the make make these uh these districts as fair as they're supposed to be and so those are those are some of the things that that you'll that that i've run into just in my initial conversations so far um and i you know i think that it it comes down to to authority and and power ultimately and and and safety okay uh tam i actually you know i want to address this really to rosa but you know it's important to be honest with me i'm actually very interested and very passionate about this but city council said we're supposed to talk about community conversations assessments of disparities leadership training i think this is a great conversation but is this our conversation i i think we could all get interested in it and want to but i i'm passionate about these things that we've been assigned to do taking on this are we just the strongest organization in town to do that this time and would it distract us from doing what the city council asked us to do and that's my basic concern i don't want this to be a distraction it'd be great there's there is another organization to do that and this is the organization it's about disparity and it's disparity if you don't if you have an opportunity to increase minority representation on the city council you do it my sister happened to be the city attorney in austin when this was done so i'm very well urged on and it is it's common sense i worked at the capital in 1990 when we reached through district and it was a joke everybody knew it was a democrat it was going to be challenged this is racial disparity representation on the city council we have two blacks how many is that how many whites how many people in this city black and white so it's this disparity all in favor say i think we all talked about this we all talked about this early on about writing this topic here and why it was important for this group to hear the rationale about what happened in the city of austin and we at that time felt that it was important that this task group don't do take a look at this and start looking at making some recommendations now does it fit i mean the community conversations and everything that we've outlined are things that our consultant estrus has put forward for us to gather the information but we've also said that you know we're looking at what the city does but we can also recommend what we need to do so that we do make it more equal for race and culture in the city well i just think that part one of the things we were talking about earlier was what policies and could we suggest what strategies what programs to the city this is exactly fits within our purview as we talk about racial cultural equity i don't see how there could be any question now just for clarity it did come up on community conversations by several groups so it it unsolicited uh came up from community conversations Charles we had a good answer yeah i said this earlier let me let me have a repeat i think what's appropriate for us even though i'm very mindful we were not asked is to go on record saying the race and culture task force would like the city council to commit to a process in the redistricting effort that would lead to an end result of an American city council that reflects the community they govern further that they seriously look at this awesome model now we as a group we can do the the work that's going to be required to go through that but i think it is probably it for us to go on record with that recommendation otherwise we're missing a vote because we're only going to be in existence perhaps for a year this is our opportunity to weigh in on something that's going to be significant for the city for generations to come around right and i just want to add one thing uh that i talked to both of you about before is that Fort Worth was the first city in texas to vote in single-member districts against the will of those who were in power it was because there are a handful of people who decided that we should have full single-member districts they asked for an election which the city agreed to thinking it would be overturned the people accepted it and we ended up with full single-member districts when other cities like austin and dallas and houston had partial single-member districts so we we we've had to set the pace with representation now we didn't live up to it mean our single-member districts mean we limited spaces spaces on the council for two uh blacks two of the most hispanics but generally one now the population has changed so no matter how they draw them i expect some difference but it won't be a majority of minorities on the city council in 2023 unless there is something done regarding that so i agree with charles that at the very least we can suggest that we all to have and i don't know what committee this will follow and you may have to determine that but at the very least we can suggest that the city of full worth should have an independent redistricting group to draw the lines and take it out of the hands of the politician but i move that we go ahead and i know we are we have our committees and we're going to have our list of recommendations but it sounds that the majority of us i don't want to assume that but can we go ahead and list this as one of our recommendations as we deal with others or do we wait until later on and this is something that we're all or we can come to a vote but i feel like if this is something that we need to i mean the way charles just put it we just need to put that in writing and explain it as a recommendation but i said we just go ahead and move forward let this be one of the recommendations we've got a motion and a second any other discussion could we get some clarity Mr. Boswell put the idea in general terms as i noted it committing to a redistricting process not specifically citing an independent citizen driven initiative but a redistricting process that will result in the council reflecting the composition of the population i think i heard Mr. Sanders make specific reference to an independent citizen commission which reflects what Mr. Tuggett was describing so i want to be sure that we clarify the motion yes you just said yes i would like to culmination what charles said with the motion that the gentleman presented as well but did Fernando captured yes okay so it's so we're reflecting the general language not specifying a citizen driven well i don't know because i'm wondering if i would i would have a second part to urge them to strongly consider if you make an amendment to Yolanda's motion and okay word your amendment the the the two the two biggest pieces of this being one ultimately the the authority of that final map and two using incumbent addresses as a criteria in drawing districts we're about to blow up these eight districts and the worst thing in the whole wide world is if the way we start to draw 10 the 10 new districts is with eight dots on the map that have to that have to fall into the right right ones i agree that we need to do something i think we are going way too fast just trying to say okay whatever he said i will amend and whatever Bob Ray said maybe we'll amend i think i have a lot more discussion if at the least more than two minutes to think about what we're going to learn through the city council i know that we all want to say we just did this but i really don't want to say we just did this without actually thinking about it because if we don't think seriously about what we're going to offer even more seriously about the words we're going to use you know i think we're shooting ourselves in the foot also for the future what they're going to say well they didn't really discuss this very seriously why should we take anything else to say seriously i just i just think this is a discussion for more than five minutes is it possible to add it to as a future agenda item yes we can add it to future agenda item but then also when you look at the committee structure this is something that falls at each of these committees so what i would do is i would respectfully ask you to pull your your your uh motion so we can do this seriously due diligence i think all of us are serious individuals and i don't know if we want to put our names to something that isn't seriously considered thank you thank you thank you our presenters so from us the process of timeline where are we in a spectrum of timeline from i don't know since this is two years away redistricting would then follow right after that for the 2023 election so where would we i mean just based on what you've seen with austin and maybe cori even through way in on this i don't know but from a timeline standpoint when does the city for worth have to be doing something actually so so why i said i think we started as soon as possible is because if we find out that we can't get that fifth city council vote and the and the route to go is through initiative and referendum we have to get 87 thousand signatures and and take it to ballot that ballot measure passed at six by 61 percent when it when it got there in austin it's just the process of having to go through that process and getting it there the census data will come out in 20 uh they'll we'll excuse me the census data will be counted in 20 we'll receive it in 21 redistricting will happen in 22 for this 23 election and so you know time is of the essence to to get the to get this going get this conversation started so people actually understand that there is another option yeah i just have one question just out of curiosity do you feel like you have not gotten the reception from the council members that she has spoken to because you don't have the backing of an organization or a task force like this or just kind of just curious to hear your thoughts on why you believe you received the pushback that you got you know i think that i think that that the pushback comes from from something new and and from you know from from from stepping on the status quo i think is is what some of that pushback comes from i i have had some some support that i've gone into these meetings with through through business leader conversations that i've had that i've been able to to kind to kind of have have behind my back but i saw how austin did it and austin did it with a with a united front which i don't think there there is anything more more comparable to to the face of austin initiative than this group here in this room and i think that you guys are are the group that can that can have the voice that can really be you know be what what drives it forward you know for right now it's been me talking with individuals for the last going on two years you know now if we can get a group a group like you guys of community stakeholders that really want to see this happen you know this is the opportunity and this is the this is the setting i'm sorry i was going to ask you any other questions i've had to say one final thing i know if you said they told you this is not austin but seven streets sure looks like six street in austin and magnolia sure looks like austin texas to me so it's moving that direction so i thought your efforts and uh if you need some signatures you've got one with me thank all y'all for the opportunity attention thank you next on our agenda is a briefing and fair housing barbara good evening ladies and gentlemen my name is barbara asbury i am the compliance and planning manager with the city's neighborhood services department and i'm here this evening to talk to y'all about the assessment of fair housing um my role with the city and with the neighborhood services department is to ensure that we continue to receive a certain amount of federal grant funds that we get from HUD every year we get about ten million dollars in HUD grant funds and that is dedicated specifically to help low and moderate income persons in the city of fort worth a hundred percent of that ten million dollars and as you know with federal money you have a lot of strings attached and so my role is to make sure that we dot our eyes and cross our t's and make sure we continue to receive the funds so one of the things that hud requires us to do is to do a lot of very specific planning and reporting documents and one of the things that we now have as a requirement is to do a fair housing plan and so what this is called is the assessment of fair housing so i want to give you an overview please excuse me um so as i said we have a whole series of plans that we do for hud so this i'm going to talk about the role of the assessment of fair housing which i call afh for short what were some key findings in this process that we went through how we developed the plan the fair housing plan and what are some proposed strategies and goals i'm going to give a very 30 000 foot level um we're going to be talking very broadly um i can talk about this topic forever and ever but i know um it's uh getting later in the evening so i'm going to hit the high points and i'm happy to answer questions later so this graphic demonstrates the hud planning cycle the bottom one here is the orange is the action plan the action plan is basically our budget for how we use our hud grant funds so it's a list of money and activities that we will do for instance we do home repair for elderly low income residents in their homes we spend about a million dollars a year on that so every year in our action plan we have that in our budget the consolidated plan which is on the right the black box the dark gray box that is a five-year plan that specifies our broad goals that our budget has to be directed toward the green box is the consolidated annual performance report that is the list of who we helped and how we help them and so it's a list of how many housing units we did how many homes we repaired how many people we helped to buy houses how many people got got youth programs and so on so the new planning document that we have is represented represented by the blue box that's the assessment of fair housing and hud's goal for this is to ensure that all cities that receive these funds proactively plan to help use this money to ensure access to opportunity for all people in their community so they've asked us to plan proactively for fair housing strategies that we will use our hud grant funds to achieve so it proceeds that consolidated plan next year we're going to be turning our consolidated plan our five-year strategic plan into hud in august so we have to proceed it with the assessment of fair housing okay so what were some key findings this graphic demonstrates what has been happening with the level of segregation throughout the region this the hud considers the region to be dallas fort worth that both big counties and as you can see fort worth is the light blue line and we have a very good trend going from 1990 to 2000 to 2010 so more recently there's been a increase in concentration of minority populations hud uses something called the dissimilarity index which basically measures the concentration of minority populations vis-a-vis the white population when you look at that you can see that arlington is becoming a more segregated community that overall dallas has had a steeper curve moving upward since 2010 the best reason that i can think of for this is we all know what has happened to the housing market i am i work with affordable housing and that's kind of my key issue is affordable housing and there is a very significant overlap between fair housing and affordable housing and fair housing choice and when you have populations that are disproportionately low income and minority populations are disproportionately low income then they have fewer choices and so then you have more limited access to opportunity and our housing market has changed significantly in the past 10 years fort worth used to be extremely affordable and now it has become much less so there are two other key findings we have strong community support for existing strategies that the city is using our hud grant funds for for affordable housing and neighborhood revitalization we did a survey we got 1200 and some responses from city of fort worth residents and there's very strong support for that direction and how we use our funds and there was also definitely recognition by the community by the survey respondents that we need to do additional education and community outreach regarding affordable housing and particularly regarding publicly supported housing in order for people to understand exactly what is fair housing because there is some community opposition to affordable housing programs and so there needs to be a lot more proactive education this is something that the city can take on so what was our development process i heard y'all talking this evening about how we engage the community we worked very hard all this summer to try and get people to become involved we did five focus groups on some of the topics that y'all will be discussing we invited subject matter experts to attend one of the things that happens when you organize focus groups is not everybody can show up you invite people and you invite people so we invited probably about a hundred people we ended up having 40 people participate in our focus groups we did monthly consultation meetings with representatives from tarrant county and forth housing solutions and other regional entities that also work with affordable housing we got fabulous assistance from the community engagement office they posted a website for us they excuse me a web page for us they posted our survey monkey online they helped us develop all our community meetings we did community meetings throughout the city we did a series of about 8 to 10 meetings we co-hosted the meetings with fortwood housing solutions because they obviously work with affordable housing and we had about 165 people attend all of those meetings we also as i said did a survey i'm very proud of the survey results we had 1600 responses 1268 of them were from the city of fort worth what i will tell you about that population that responded it was a set of i would say 60 to 70 percent homeowners and only 30 percent renters however we did get pretty good representation i would not say excellent representation we got fairly good representation from minority communities particularly the african-american community in the city of fort worth about 18 percent of the population is african-american and 14 percent of our respondents were african-americans so i thought we did okay there unfortunately the hispanic population we worked hard to get respondents but we only got 11 percent response from hispanic population however when you look at 1268 when you have a response that's when 25 percent of your respondents 300 and some respondents are our minority population i think that we have a fairly good representation of minority opinions in our survey so overall what is the recommended strategy that hud that excuse me that the city has recommended that the city council approved and the city council has voted on this overall strategy on december 12 and i hear mr. tucker talking about the need for focus and that's also a key issue for the hud staff the hud grant staff we want to focus on a few achievable goals and strategies there are lots and lots of factors that affect fair housing lots and lots of factors that affect access to opportunity as i said we get 10 million dollars a year so i want to focus like a laser on things that we can definitely accomplish and we also wanted to focus on topics that our community respondents that the people who attended our meetings that they felt were important and things that we think will really affect fair housing choice throughout our community so there is a broad emphasis on that overlap and intersection between affordable housing and fair housing because as i said persons in protected classes minority populations are disproportionately affected by lack of affordable housing and then there's a profound intersection between neighborhood revitalization and fair housing when we have neighborhoods that urgently need reinvestment and uh they're not getting it then the people in the communities have fewer choices so this was a key question we asked in our survey because in part the survey was determined by some key parameters and key issues identified by hud in their new regulation and one of the key questions that hud asked is what methods do you think will best affirmatively further fair housing and again we're talking about what can we proactively do y'all know angie rush and her human relations unit they do fair housing enforcement so they're kind of on the back end we're trying to be on the front end what can we proactively do and as you can see the yellow and the blue represent two areas where 80 percent of our respondents on our survey wanted preservation of existing affordable housing and wanted neighborhood revitalization the top concerns raised in community meetings and again the the list on the left in this blue chart those are areas that hud wanted us to specifically ask the question and i've listed here uh concerns from the community meetings because when someone shows up at a community meeting they're really expressing a concern you know they they're really invested in the issue their concern their identification their care about that is very strong so as i said we had 165 people attend meetings and 115 of those 165 said that lack of investment in specific neighborhoods is a key barrier to access to opportunity and then the next one there is location and type of affordable housing a couple other issues again loss of affordable housing and increasing rents the need for local education and fair housing enforcement by private housing providers deteriorating housing stock availability and frequency of public transportation and again lack of community revitalization strategies so you're seeing here over and over the theme again of neighborhood revitalization and affordable housing when we broke down our survey responses by race and ethnicity one of the things that i was glad to see is there's really broad agreement on those major factors we have a lot in common what i will also tell you clearly is that minority populations have a much greater intensity of concern about the issues identified so location and quality of schools has a major barrier to access to opportunity everyone thought it was important african-american and hispanic populations had a higher percentage voting for that deteriorated and abandoned properties community opposition as a major barrier to access to publicly supported housing and economic pressures once again affordability of housing so the broad goals that were presented to city council on an mnc that they approved on december 12th which was this past tuesday would be on in these areas and we're going to be taking very specific measurable actions toward these broad goals but again my goal is to give you the big 30 000 foot level we want to continue partnerships with fortwith housing solutions and with private developers for development and preservation of affordable housing we want to focus on locations that are near employment and transportation and when projects are proposed inside the loop we'd really like for those projects to help contribute to neighborhood revitalization one of the things that we found out through our survey is there is a significant need for additional accessible housing and additional accessibility in public facilities for persons with disabilities so with our HUD grants we're going to start dedicating a specific percentage of our HUD grants toward a variety of accessibility initiatives we already do some of that we're intending to increase those investments we want to continue visible native neighborhood revitalization efforts especially in racially and ethnically concentrated areas of poverty now this is a particular thing that HUD has come up with a what they call a racially and ethnically concentrated area of poverty that's an area of poverty where it's the excuse me an area of geography where there's 40 percent or higher poverty and 51 percent or more minority population and so we want to try and target our funds to those areas to the extent possible it's not always possible but that's going to be our strategic goals and again we want to do more education surrounding the affordable housing issue we want to educate property managers regarding fair housing so that we can maybe break down some barriers encourage more landlords to take housing choice vouchers help Fort Worth housing solutions increase landlord participation in the voucher programs right now there will be people who have a section eight voucher who had a housing choice voucher and they'll go and look they get a certain amount of time like six weeks to go try and find an apartment and they're turning that voucher in because they cannot find an affordable apartment even with that voucher so we want to partner with housing solutions to help them with that and we also want to do broader community education regarding the whole issue of affordable housing so that it becomes less an issue of opposition and more of an understanding create more understanding throughout the community so what are our next steps as I said City Council approved the broad goals on January 2nd we're going to be submitting the AFH to HUD it's electronic submission we have to put it in into us into a software and from February 2018 on where onward I'm prepared to provide the data that we collected through our survey or any other data that we have to any of the committees particularly the housing committee so that's my presentation I'm happy to answer any questions thank you Next up we're going to go over the my unit Human Relations Unit annual report we are a certified fair employment practice agency which means that we can investigate complaints on behalf of EEOC and the Texas Workforce Commission and we are a fair housing assistance program which means that we can accept complaints on behalf of HUD and do investigations on those as well as on behalf of the Texas Workforce Commission and just so you know we have been a FAP agency which is that Fair Housing Assistance Program for at least 33 years we were one of the first in Texas and we have been a FEPA for over 40 years so in order to become a FAP or FEPA you have to have substantially equivalent laws which we do and then once you have established those substantially equivalent laws you have to show that you have capacity to do the investigations the reason I mention this is that there are several cities in the state of Texas that you would think that have a FAP or a FEPA agency but they don't San Antonio does not have a FAP or FEPA neither does Houston in Texas FAP there is only Austin Corpus Christi Garland Dallas and us and then the Texas Workforce Commission and FEPA that's even less Dallas is not a FEPA we are Corpus Christi is Austin is and the Texas Workforce Commission so you have to prove that capacity San Antonio is working on it but they just recently got the substantially equivalent law so they've got to now prove that they have the capacity to do the investigations so in fiscal year 2017 we took in 198 fair housing complaints and and for the fiscal year that falls in October 1st 2016 through September 30th 2017 the basis for those fair housing complaints people can fall file a complaint on multiple bases they could file say on I'm disabled and African-American and that is why I'm being treated in a unequal manner so the numbers don't add up to 100% but in our fair housing complaints the number one protected basis that people file under is disability at 40% then that's followed by race at 34% and then at sex accounted for 13% of all our complaints filed national origin accounted for 12% of the complaints filed and Hispanic accounted for 50 50% of those Mexican accounted for 21% and other included Puerto Rican Sudanese Cuban Colombian and Nigerian and they accounted for 29% of the remaining cases filed locally 5% of the housing complaints were filed under retaliation and what's that means is I filed a previous case of discrimination and now they're retaliating against me I exercised a fair housing right I participated in an investigation and now I'm being retaliated against 4% filed under familiar status and the remaining 3% accounted for religion at 2% sexual orientation at 0.5% and transgender gender identity at 0.5% so when someone files a complaint they have to base it on an issue so the number one issue for fair housing complaints is discriminatory terms conditions privileges services and facilities in the rental or sale of property I'm going to explain that just a little bit farther because you can't really tell that from the screen the majority of the cases we receive are on multifamily properties people are not being refused to rent most of the complaints that we're getting are after rental they're being treated differently after they they have signed that lease so I want to make that clear because sometimes people think oh well they're not being allowed to rent that's not the case we do get a few of those but the majority of them they're they're alleging that they're being treated differently after they sign the lease then failure to make reasonable accommodations and failure to make reasonable modifications is next at 30.81% then refusal to rent like they won't renew their lease or or some reason along those lines is 27.27% and then intimidation interference coercion 17.17% refusal to sell is only 0.51% and then other includes steering false denial or representation of availability at 4.55% now in fiscal year 2017 we closed 179 cases and you can see that it's really varies that you look at the numbers the reason there's a big dip in fiscal year 2015 down to fiscal year 2016 is HUD changed the rules on how we could file cases we used to file companion cases like not only what I file against say a manager of an apartment complex but I could file a case against the owner too now they say unless there's something very significantly different they have to be filed as one case so that caused that big decline from fiscal year 2015 to fiscal year 2016 closure types there are several ways in which we can close a case we can have administrator closures and this happens if someone withdraws a case we can't find them we can if we don't have jurisdiction over it if we took the case and then as we look into it the individual the property only owner only owns two properties that's not covered under the Fair Housing Act if those are the type of administrative closures so in fiscal year 2017 we had zero administrative closures or someone could conciliate settle or withdraw with resolution 65 percent of our cases in 2017 were closed that way also no reasonable cause that means it went through the whole investigation and we weren't able to conciliate so 34 percent are no reasonable cause to believe discrimination occurred and then reasonable cause determinations that is we based on the evidence that we have we reasonably believe that there's cause to believe that discrimination occurred so in 2017 we did have several cause cases and one was I pulled the information because I figured you'd be interested in it we had a case that was on let's see oh this was based on national origin it was a pretty egregious case the manager was Hispanic and we had the individual filed on on basis of Hispanic and we found that there was the statements that were recorded that the manager says I don't like Mexicans I think they're filthy I don't like written to them the wouldn't make repairs wouldn't give the name of the owner so the people could complain to the owner said if you don't like it I'll call immigration it was pretty egregious and we ended up causing this case we contacted as we dealt through it we were originally dealing with the manager but as we got towards the end of course they got a lawyer once we found cause and then we were dealing with the owner and we got four thousand dollars for the individual and she wanted to move out she said I just give me my four thousand give me neutral reference I went out of here and so she moved out but what we do is called substantial relief and public interest relief we made them go through fair housing training we made them go through customer service training we made them put up our fair housing posters throughout the complex we made them disseminate tenant and housing information cards we also we had them prepare a fair housing policy statement they have to give all new tenants and then because of some of the problems that had to do with repairs like instead of fixing a lock on a front door they put a padlock on it which is definitely a safety issue we had a code do blitzes on the property and subject them to these blitzes until they got this property some of the major code issues fixed then we had another cause case that was based on familiar status this was overly restrictive rules and this particular property said if you unless you were 18 years old you could not be out like walking the dog you could not go to the laundry room you could not use the swimming pool and we said no no no no and we found cause and there's some pretty good legal cases out there on that and we got compensation the individual got two months rent reimbursed to her we made them revise their policy go through training we asked that they do affirmative advertising and then oh and we also and all these ones that I talk about the things that we required them to do we monitor that and we can monitor that up to a year or so we have access they have to agree to give us access to their records we ask that they provide us proof of training so we actually monitor all these conciliation agreements so the timeliness of fair housing investigations we're required to do hopefully to do them within 100 days now there are some cases that are just complex and we can't but the HUD's measure is 100 days so our average is 79 days so we did pretty good there we did have some age cases this last year we have been down a full-time housing investigator we filled the position and then the individual did not work out so we still have that vacancy and that's been a vacancy for almost a year because the original person in that position went out on medically for months and then when they came back they came back for a couple of months and then they notified us they were leaving so that really has impacted our timeliness of our cases and then our settlements now these are settlements for the people that have provided the information some in their their settlement agreements they have a nondisclosure cause and they don't let us know but for the ones that do in fiscal year 2017 we collected $124,000 on behalf of our complainants so fair employment in 2017 we had 125 charges they're called charges and employment we deferred 43 cases when I say defer there's either a conflict of interest or it's usually not jurisdictional to the city of Fort Worth EEO asked us to take those complaints perfect those complaints and then they pay us to do that on their behalf and then we send them on to EEOC so we had 43 complaints that weren't jurisdictional to us that we sent on to EEOC and the basis for employment charges and there's a I see a error there it's fiscal year 2017 on the bottom the majority it was pretty much a tie between disability and retaliation basically I opposed a discriminatory practice at work and because of that now they're picking on me and then we had 17 percent that were based on national origin we had 22 percent based on age 34 percent based on race and 21 percent based on sex and we had smaller numbers for sexual orientation three percent and we had religion at two percent so those those are typically pretty small and there's the full report in your binder under five and you'll even see HUD statistics in the column so you can compare what our numbers are to what the national numbers are also so the number one issue and employment was terms and condition at 81 percent and that's been consistent for years and then discharge I was let go 59 percent or I was disciplined 27 percent constructive discharge the difference between discharge and constructive discharge constructive discharges you've made my life so miserable I had no option but to quit that's what constructive discharges then sexual harassment 10 percent reasonable accommodations eight percent suspension eight percent assignment six percent demotion five percent hiring four percent and then all others added up to eight percent and that included harassment wages layoff benefits reference training recall from layoffs so our closures we closed 95 cases in 2017 fair employment cases 7.5 percent of those cases were administrative closure similar to the housing we might have trouble getting getting someone to return calls we've had people file that then will not reply back to us and so we may have to administratively close that because we can't get any additional information settlement and withdrawals was 23 percent no cause was 66.5 percent and we had three percent cause and of those cause we had a couple of really interesting ones we had one against a recycling company the complainant filed under race black and retaliation she alleged that twice she was called a nigger by co-workers she did not prevail on her race discriminate discrimination claim because those co-workers were punished but she however she prevailed on her retaliation claim because after she told her manager she had misgivings about working in an environment where she was subjected to those type of remarks he told her she needed to think about that she's not seven she's 27 and she should go home and pray and ask God to steer her heart on what to do when she returned to work they fired her so she the respondent claimed that she was discharged for performance issues but then we found no evidence that there was any performance issues we looked at all of her performance reviews and we saw nothing there and there was never any complaints about her until she did complain of a unfair employment practice and they the respondents also declined to participate in the conciliation process and what's a little different about employment cases is when they we find cause they can you can take it to court the individual can ask for a right to sue or eeoc can take it up and this particular case the respondents said i'll see you in court they just didn't care so it that it's been turned over to eeoc and they've taken it on from that point the next case was a nursing and rehabilitation like like a nursing home and the complainant claimed she was denied a reasonable accommodation under the ADA her job was doing laundry and but the respondents begin requiring her to also supervise the residents outside while they smoked and she was diagnosed with lung cancer and she requested a reasonable accommodation to be kept away from the smoke and she also provided a doctor's note saying that she should not be around the smoke they responded denied her request and said uh they said you can wear a mask and so she the the complainant felt that she i just can't go to work so she quit going to work and then they said she abandoned her job and she said she called him and said i'm not abandoning it i just cannot work in those conditions with my lung cancer and so what we did is we looked at the essential functions of the job and in nowhere does someone doing laundry require to supervise people outside smoking that that didn't fly and then um they said well we'll reassign her to a housekeeping position but eeos position on that is reassignment is the last ditch you don't reassign um that you should consider it's the accommodation of last resort a reassignment and because supervising smokers was not the essential function of the job um we determined it would not have created an undue hardship for the respondent to remove that duty from her her everyday assignment the parties ended up successfully conciliating she did very well i don't know the exact dollar amount but we worked we conducted a mediation and they worked through it and she was very happy with her settlement and then we made them go through training and also we made them revise their pro their policies and practices and then we had a sexual harassment claim that was pretty egregious um this one she was complained that she was sexually harassed throughout her employment and she had to constructively discharge discharge the respondent ceo'd make numerous inappropriate comments concerning her body and looked stared at her tried to hug her touched her inappropriately told her what your legs don't look good enough your butt looks better in that outfit and um then numerous witnesses came forward and substantiated all of it and complained of their treatment and they were all young female recent college graduates there seemed to be an issue with the ceo and these young college graduates and we found cause to believe that discrimination occurred based on the widespread allegations and the documentation and the evidence that we were able to collect um and the the charging party's attorney declined to participate in conciliation and decided that they wanted to file a lawsuit after we found cause so they've moved on to the next step is they're taking this to court um and then the eoc is so interested in this case they're considering pursuing a lawsuit on behalf of all the other people witnesses in this particular case so that was a pretty egregious case that we had so those were the cause cases in employment and our timeliness we have to do 180 days for employment and we did it in 142 days we only have one and a half and I say half employment investigators this is a smaller side of our investigations we have one full time and one part time and our settlements we collect the other ones that we know now we know there were settlements that were not disclosed to us we know that there's 33,623.50 we don't get a we also investigate public accommodation complaints under the local ordinance we don't get a lot of these and I'm going to be honest I don't go out trying to find them because of limited staff I have to assign them to the staff I have and we are pretty strapped but um in fiscal year 2017 we had two public accommodation complaints um other cases filed one was under national origin and one was filed under sex and they were both alleged they were denied equal access to a place of public accommodation and we closed one case uh disability equal access and we closed it no cause we did not find um any discrimination in that particular case are there any questions that's any place under our ordinance we can any place that charges money any place a city facility a public facility any place like that there are exemptions for churches and some schools um but pretty much any place that someone goes a convenience store a restaurant any place such as that that's a place of public accommodation thank you angel uh next next is the appointment of task force committees so uh today we have tides dinson who is going to be chair of criminal justice thank you tides charles boss school will be chair over economic developments uh bob goldberg and Robert Granatis are going to be co-chairs over education and yolanda harper over health and case chair over housing uh we did have a meeting a little bit before our meeting at five o'clock to go over some uh information over transportation mima now sir yes ma'am we'd like to remind all the task force members that in our most recent communication by email you should have received a table with the names of task force numbers assigned to each of the committees if you want to change anything about the table now is the time to let us know manager we did hear from mr vansky before he had to leave that he would like to be added to the economic development committee we're happy to do so in his request otherwise we should let you know uh as we rise the task force chairs uh earlier today uh that the purpose of each committee is to study each of the six topics that the community has identified as critical to the advancement of racial equity in court work and thereby provide findings and recommendations for a management of the proposed racial equity plan being prepared by the full task force each committee uh accordingly should perform recap first to analyze available data and assess resident comments about the assigned topic as it pertains to racial equity second to determine the extent to which racial disparities exist to assess the causes of those disparities and third to make recommendations to resolve identified disparities each committee would be once or twice monthly from january to april and mutually convenient venues and provide monthly reports to the full task force probably the biggest challenge for the committees will be to complete this work within the designated time frame of four months this is an extremely ambitious challenge the coach here is debated uh on the basis of comments that task force members provided about the scope of responsibilities to be assigned to the committees and the the coach here is elected to undertake a broad challenge the broad scope of responsibilities that is to say not narrowing it to the appointment of city boards and commissions or uh the uh the hiring of minority contractors those are within the scope of responsibilities but the coaches wanted to broaden that scope to include uh all of the topics that we've identified obviously these are very broad topics health education housing transportation and so forth are very broad each of these topics has been the subject of extensive study by various groups not only nationally but here in Fort Worth so the charge to the committees is not to reinvent the wheel not to re-study all these topics but rather to to review all available studies to review additional data that you may wish to assemble to interview subject matter experts in the community that you would identify and on the basis of that process summarize the major findings that you can make about your topic as it pertains to race and health if you can stay focused upon that charge and I think you can accomplish the work of the committee within a four month timeframe it's going to be a major responsibility of the committee chairs to keep the committee focused on the topic and on track to complete its work within the defined time period toward that end each committee will be assigned at least two city staff members one would be able to provide administrative support in scheduling meetings producing minutes for the meetings in producing the monthly final reports for the committee the second city staff member would be a subject matter expert who would not only be able to provide expert advice but would also be able to connect the committee with other experts in the community whom you may wish to interview and you have the names of the support staff and the technical staff on the table that you receive manager would be happy to entertain any questions that the task force may have about the appointment of these committee committees does anyone have any questions comments thank you Monday January the 22nd here and then as you all get your meetings scheduled we'll be sharing that with the whole task force as well so that you'll be able to see when other committees are meeting and you know if you want to attend one of the meetings you're more than welcome to do that as well we as co-chairs will probably better twine in several of those committees and so you'll see us throughout those as well okay manager if i may add i think i think our intent is for each committee if possible to hold an initial meeting before the next task force meeting on january 22nd the committee chairs may need to schedule that initially just another thank you to everybody but i also want to add a special thank you to the staff we just added a lot more work to this i just got to say i've been impressed my about my binder's got it overwhelmed now i've got a file cabinet that's getting overwhelmed so we're getting a lot of information and work that you've been doing so our thanks to you for all that you've been doing and happy holidays everybody yeah i just want to wish everyone a happy holidays as well thank you everything you have been doing everything you will continue to do and i feel blessed by all of you and i thank you for sharing with us i just want to just make sure that we all know the seriousness of what we're attempting to accomplish you know a lot of people don't have a voice we become their voice through the work we do so please take it seriously if you've identified the bias that the information seems to be coming in into so thank you to those of you who are going to be out all right we do have one last announcement and i'm going to turn it over to chief crosser just to chief crosser the patrol girl uh chief it's gerald he's not here today he's going to deal with the personal issue most of you have this evening i'm not on the agenda today um we had an arrest that's eerily similar to the uh shaggy gray video that was served this past year um this incident was uncovered by one of our commanders and sent internal courage for the team to face the sentence chief uh predicted the sergeant that was involved in that incident he also decided we would go ahead and release the video and that is being done as we speak the media outlets will have it this evening along with a statement from the police department now we will make an opportunity if this commission has this task force wishes to provide an opportunity at a future meeting for the chief to come and discuss the incident and review the video as a group so thank you cause disruption and harm and pain i pray that your peace will overwhelm your wisdom will be upon every person who needs to make the right decisions at these times and i pray god that you will also bring restoration to whoever has been hurt whoever has been harmed and i pray that they will be surrounded with good counsel with wise counsel and more than anything god i pray for peace in my city during this christmas season especially i pray for peace in my city peace on earth for all people and jesus