 Good afternoon. Good afternoon. All right, good afternoon. It is one o'clock. I'm going to just check with our tech people. Are we ready to get going? Nathan. Mr. Mayor, we're actually checking the YouTube stream now. Just to make sure that we are in compliance with recording in progress. The rules around virtual meeting. So can you give us maybe a minute or two? Sure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Wallace. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We'll wait just a moment then to convene. Ms. Wallace, did you say we're ready? Yes, we're ready to stream. Thank you very much. Colleagues, I want to call this meeting to order at one o'clock on September the 9th, 2021. This work session of the Durham City Council. I want to welcome all of you. Welcome our wonderful staff and all the people that might be observing or attending this meeting and some other fashion events. Thank you very much. Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll? Mayor Schuyl. Here. Mayor Proton Johnson. Here. Councilmember Caballero. Here. Councilmember Freelon. Here. Councilmember Freeman. Present. Councilmember Middleton. I am here. And Councilmember Reese has requested an excused absence today. Thank you very much, Madam Clerk. Colleagues, as the clerk has said, Councilmember Reese has requested an excused absence. Can I have a motion for that? So moved. So moved by Mayor Proton Johnson, seconded by Councilmember Freelon. Madam Clerk, please call the roll. Mayor Schuyl. Ah. Mayor Proton Johnson. Aye. Councilmember Caballero. Aye. Councilmember Freelon. Aye. Councilmember Freeman. Aye. Councilmember Middleton. Aye. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Colleagues, we'll now move to announcements by members of the council. Are there anyone who has any announcements today? Councilmember Freelon. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Just really quickly, I wanted to share with you and my colleagues and staff and community members watching that. I've been experiencing some back pain recently, some pretty severe back pain actually, which makes it difficult for me to sit comfortably for long periods of time. So I'm probably going to have my camera off for most of this meeting. And I just wanted you to know that it's not a lack of presence or engagement. I just don't want to be a distraction if I'm standing or seated on the floor or laid out in Shavasana. But I will be listening and engaged, but probably not visible for much of the meeting. Councilmember, thank you. I'm sorry. Hang in there and do what you need to do. We, we will understand if your camera's off, you're here and participating and, but yeah, absolutely. Thank you for letting us know. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Other announcements. Mayor pro tem. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I have a couple of announcements and requests. For my colleagues to put items on a couple of upcoming work session agendas. We just received a letter from our cultural advisory board with their advice on moving forward with the poet laureate position. And I would like to put that item on our next work session agenda for us to approve the, the plan for us to create a poet laureate position and also the process for how that, how that person would be selected. We're still discussing those details with the cabin with the interested community members, but should have a full, should have a full proposal for how that would happen by then on the 23rd. Should I do this one at a time, Mr. Mayor? Okay. So thank you, Madam mayor pro tem. Great. Let's, let's go ahead and do that one. And colleagues, mayor pro tem has asked that we discuss the poet laureate position at our September, the 23rd work session. Do I see some thumbs up for that? Okay. Thank you. I will also just add that I discussed this this morning with city manager page and the, one of the things that we talked about was the possibility that we might want to, that our staff who works with the cultural affairs board, we might want to draw them into the discussion. I'll just say madam mayor pro tem and council member reland before that meeting and they might be able to help us sort out a couple of the procedural issues so we can talk about that later. Thank you. All right, mayor pro tem your next announcement or request. Thank you. So the workers rights commission has been working on a resolution that they would like us to pass in support of the pro act pro stands for protecting the right to organize. It's a bill that's currently in Congress that would protect the rights of workers to form unions and collectively work with the right to organize. And then in the next meeting, we're going to have a public effective bargaining, particularly in states like North Carolina that currently have bans on public worker effective bargaining and right to work laws. This legislation would be really powerful in giving workers here in Durham and across the country. A voice on the job and more control over their working conditions. And so the workers rights commission has been discussing and working on this resolution. And so it would be ready to come to us on the October 7th work session. Just wanted to make sure that that would be all right with folks. Thank you very much. Colleagues again, can I see some thumbs? All right, great. Looks like that will be good. Thank you. Thank you. And I've got one more. I've been working with the office on youth to develop a proposal for goals. Goal setting for youth representation on some of our city boards and commissions. Now that the Durham Youth Commission has changed into a fellowship program. Having more youth representation on our existing boards and commissions seems like a great opportunity for us to continue to engage our city's youth and engage them in ways that are more directed toward their skills and interests. So I'm continuing to work with the office on youth on fleshing out a proposal. The current idea is to take a couple of boards and pilot some training for the boards and for the youth that with the youth in the fellowship program to talk about youth engagement, how to work effectively with youth members and figure out a plan for how we might be able to integrate youth into those boards and then have like a one year pilot program where we would add some number of youth representatives to the boards and then follow the progress and check in to see how that's going, make sure the youth are being integrated well, that their ideas are being heard and that we're doing everything right. And then set some broader goals for the city. So I'd like to bring a discussion about that and hopefully an initial proposal to our work session on October 21st. Thank you so much. Will this be coming from the, will this be coming, will the proposal be something that's coming from the office on youth? It's a proposal from me, but I'm getting their guidance and input as I'm, as I'm writing it and they would have a role in the implementation, which I would make sure that they were comfortable with before bringing the proposal. Okay. And we will have them then attend the meeting. They'll be meeting to be able to. If possible. Yeah. I haven't actually that, that date was just based on when our next check in is the next work session after that check in. So I haven't checked to see whether staff is available on that date. If they're not, then I could, you know, we could certainly change it. If we needed them to be there. Okay. What was the proposed date again? The 21st of October. Okay. I think that I'm, I'm very much for that. And I really appreciate all the work you've done around their boards and commissions with the stipends with the, with this youth, you know, when the youth commission came to us to ask us to put youth on these boards, I really appreciate Madam Mayor, pretend the leadership you've taken. Thank you so much. Thank you. I would say definitely on this. Yes. And we'll see thumbs in a minute, but on a date when we're sure that the, what are we go with that October 21st date and then make sure that staff is able to attend that day. Sounds great. Yeah. I can clear it with staff before, before then. All right. Is everybody okay with that? I see some thumbs. Okay. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Much appreciated. Thanks everyone. Let me just add that we have another matter pending that council member Freeman has raised. We have both a resolution, which the, she has been working with the legal staff on around healthy homes and also the tennis bill of rights. And I believe council members know that the legal staff has been working on both of these things and will be, they will be coming to us soon as well. All right. Other colleagues announcements today. Council member Middleton and then council member Freeman. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Mr. Mayor, before I proceed, I saw that Anna Davis raised her hand. I don't know if she heard her comments were your main to the mayor pro tem. Thank you. I just saw that as well. Ms. Davis. I apologize. That was a mistake with my hand. All right. No problem. Thank you. All right. Council member Middleton. Thank you, Miss Davis. You're getting like me. Good afternoon. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Madam Mayor pro tem and colleagues Pierce. I hope you're feeling well, buddy. Take it easy on that back. And best wishes to counselor Reese, wherever he may be today. I just wanted to, I don't know if this is going to require much deliberation on the council, but I did want to raise the issue of, of as the country starting to open back up and some of our affiliations around the country starting to open back up. I'd like us to consider restoring our travel a lot into their normal levels. That's not to say that we will be definitively going, but I'd like to be in a position in case, for example, the league is meeting in Utah on November are right now, tentatively. And there's going to be some important work coming up. But I think Durham's name needs to be, and Durham's voice needs to be present on particularly supporting national legislation on issues that are critically important to us here at the municipal level. So I'd like us to consider as we're doing it in other areas to restore our travel a lot into their normal levels in anticipation of our affiliates organizations that were affiliated with resuming businesses. And I don't know if there should be the next work session or I'll leave that to your discretion. Mr. Mayor. Thank you very much. Let me think about that best way to handle that. I am, I have to admit that I can't remember exactly what we cut the, the allotments to and can't remember the details of that. I'm not sure the best way to handle it. Maybe can I delegate a committee of two council member Middleton, would you, and since council member Reese is the chair of the council procedures committee, would you mind serving? I'll volunteer him. And would you mind serving with him and, and, and bringing back an idea to us. Sure. Absolutely. I participated in a very short discussion. But yeah, I'll do that. Yeah. That'd be great. I, will you tell him that he's delegated? You're the chair of the chair. I'll be more than happy to tell him that. Thank you. And I'll, I'll, I'll, yeah. Thank you. I'll send him an email as well. I'll video it. Yeah. Let me just make a little note to myself. Okay. Thank you. Um, very much. Council member Freeman. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to follow up first on the tennis bill of rights and the safe, safety and. Safe and healthy homes. Um, resolution. Just noting that, um, there were some questions about around what we're already doing versus what we can add to our legislative agendas. Um, mainly are the, the things I want to make sure I check in with folks and follow up. So I'm just letting you all know how we're following up with with you each. That's over the next two weeks. And then, um, add into this, I would love to figure out how we can get an update as a feel like or a debrief. Around the novel one call center. And, um, some of the, I guess, work that's happening around gun violence, because I keep getting the questions. And I just want to make sure that the public is aware of what, what the changes have been on made. And in a very detailed way. I think that's a good point. And I'll feel like I can cover that. So it would be great to have more information available. Thank you. We will hear some of that today. Uh, and so after we hear that, if you have other things that you think we need to hear. Um, I think the best thing to do is talk to count, talk to a manager page. Um, but let's see if maybe today we'll answer your questions. Yeah. Thank you very much. Other announcements. All right, colleagues. Thank you so much. Hello, Vice President. Let's turn to your party items by the city manager. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, Madam Mayor, Pro Tem and members of the Durham city council. I have a few items. Um, for your consideration today. Um, the first item, which is agenda item number 25. Um, we are the administration is requesting. Um, that you suspend the rules. Uh, today to approve this item. with 19 testing, you know, as it relates procedurally, I know that there will be discussion about it today, but that is the request of the administration. We also have some additional items. Item number 30, the Durham master plan, master aging plan, we have a 15 minute presentation and we have added attachments two and three to that item. Agenda item number 35 is a citizens matter, Angela Vic Lewis, and we have added an attachment number two to that item. And finally, agenda item number 36, Larissa Seibel, a citizens matter. We have also added an attachment. It is labeled number two to that item. Thank you very much, Madam Manager. Colleagues, you've heard the manager's priority items and I'll accept a motion for their approval. Hello. Moved by Council Member Freeman, seconded by Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll? Mayor Schuyl. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Aye. Council Member Caballero. Aye. Council Member Freelon. Aye. Council Member Freeman. Aye. And Council Member Middleton. I vote aye. Thank you. Thank you very much, Madam Clerk. And thank you, Madam Manager. Madam Attorney, any priority items today? Mr. Attorney. I'm sorry to disappoint you. This is Don O'Toole sitting in for Kim Rayberg today. Good to see you, Mayor Pro Tem and the rest of Council and the city attorney's office has no priority items. You're never a disappointment, Mr. O'Toole. We're always glad to see you. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Thank you. Spock. All right. And now we'll move to the Clerk. Madam Clerk, any priority items today? Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. The city clerk's office has no items. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Well, we can now move to the administrative consent items and we'll begin with the city clerk's office. Item one, approval of city council minutes. Item two, Durham Housing Authority Board of Commissioners appointment. Item three, Housing Appeals Board appointment. Item four, Mayor's Hispanic Latino Committee appointments. Item five, Workforce Development Board appointment. Item six, Audit Services Department, Police, Warned Body, Cameras, Performance, Audit, Audit, dated June, 2021. Under Budget and Management Services Department. Item seven, American Rescue Plan Act. And this item seven is a presentation. Under city council's office amending the bylaws of council appointed boards, committees, commissions and task force members related to member compensation. I'm going to pull this item for a brief discussion. There's no attachment to this, as Mayor Pro Tem and I have discussed, but I think a little explanation would be good. Item nine, Resolution and Support of the Durham Digital Equity Plan. Item 10, City Clerk's Office, Boards, Committees, Commissions, excuse me, and Task Force 2021 Annual Attendance Reports. I'm going to pull item 10. Under the City Manager's Office, item 11, Fourth Amendment to lease agreement with the ATCE's Commercial LLC for the Durham Performing Arts Center, DPAC President's Club. Under the Community Development Department, item 12, Approval of a Multifamily Housing Facility, known as Crescent Drive Apartments and Financing with Multifamily Housing Revenue Bonds. Item 13, Approval of a Multifamily Housing Facility, known as 300 East Main and Financing with Multifamily Housing Revenue Bonds. Item 14, Approval of a Multifamily Housing Facility known as JFK Towers and Financing with Multifamily Housing Revenue Bonds. I see that Mr. Noel Henderson-James has put his name in on a couple of these items and Mr. Henderson-James, I assume that means you're just here for questions. If that is not the case, if you could indicate in the chat, that would be great. Item 15, Department of Transportation, Amendment to the Purchase Contract with Gillig LLC for the purchase of eight diesel buses. Item 16, Amendment to the Purchase Contract with Gillig LLC for the purchase of six electric buses. That's great, don't like this item. Department of Water Management, Item 17, Amendment 1 to the Professional Engineering Services Contract with CDM Smith for the Miscellaneous Water and Sewer Rehabilitation Projects, Phase 1. Item 18, Amendment to the Professional Engineering Services Contract with CJS-Convance PLLC for the West Main Street and North Elizabeth Street Water Bound Replacement Projects. Item 19, Amendment 2 to the Professional Engineering Services Contract with Kim Lee Horne and Associate Zing for the Lakewood Avenue Sewer and NC54 Water Line Replacement Projects. Under the Finance Department, Item 20, July 2021 Bid Report. Under the General Services Department, Item 21, Design-Builded Services Contract with SAMHSA Corporation for Lyon Park. I do want to mention here that this is an exciting project on its own but I want to thank the staff and SAMHSA for the aggressive diversity goal, the 30% diversity goal during the construction phase plus the work with the North Carolina Central University Recreation Department on this project. I think that in a lot of ways this is a real model and I really appreciate it. Item 22, Donation of 12 Vacant Parsels by their Association for the Preservation of the Eno River Valley Incorporated. I would say here just great and thanks to the Eno River Association and the people that buy tickets to the Festival on the Eno for preserving this land. Item 23, Lease Extension with Duke University and Duke University Health System, Inc. for the Emergency Communications 911 Backup Center. Excuse me. Item 24, Proposed Sale of Property located at 1310 Stadium Drive to Larry C. Smith and Tammy B. Smith. Under the Human Resources Department Item 25, mandatory weekly COVID testing. This item, I'm going to pull. The manager has asked also that we have, that we suspend the rules and vote on this subsequently. Item 26 on the Police Department, 2021 National Athletic League Mentoring Initiative Grant Project Coordinates. Under Public Works, Item 27, Stormwater Infrastructure Repairs SD 2021-04. I'm gonna pull this item. Solid Waste Management Department, Item 28, Amendment Number 7 to Service Contract, Number 5-270-02 with Central Carolina Holdings, LLC. Under Presentations, Budget Management Services Department, Item 29, 2020-2021 Fourth Quarter Financial Report. And this is a presentation. Item 30 under the City Council's Office, the Durham Master Aging Plan. Item under Emergency Communications Department, Emergency Communications Staffing and Call Processing Update. And this is also a presentation. The Public Hearing, City County Planning Department, Item 32, Zoning Map Change, 1908 Cedar Street. Item 33, Zoning Map Change, 2301 South Miami Boulevard. Item 34, Zoning Map Change, Wine Outlet. Understood, this has managed to be heard at one o'clock. Item 35, Angelo Vic Lewis. Item 36, Larissa Seibel. Item 37, Marie Hill-Phezon. Item 38, Stella Adams. And Item 39, Vanessa Evans. Madam Clerk, do we have anyone else who signed up to speak today that we know of in the public? Mr. Mayor, there are quite a few individuals under the attendee listing. I don't know what exactly they're here for, but... Yeah, I see several of them are here for some of the items that I've already read out, but you haven't heard from anyone else there. No. Thank you very much. All right, Madam Manager, the items that I have pulled are eight, 10, 25, and 27. The presentation items are seven, 29, 30, and 31. Is that what you have as well? Mr. Mayor, that is what I have for today's agenda. Thank you very much. All right, we will now go to Citizens Matters. And we will begin. We're very happy to have the folks here who come to speak. And we'll begin with Ms. Vic Lewis. Madam Clerk, can you make Ms. Vic Lewis available to be heard? Ms. Vic Lewis, are you able to be heard? Can you hear me, Mayor? Yes, we're glad to have you. Welcome, and you have three minutes. Okay, good afternoon, everyone. Mayor and the staff, I come to you as witnessing was going on at the courthouse. I had a whole different script to come to speak, but I'm just have to speak from my heart right now. I've been going down to the courthouse daily since the moratorium ended and the evictions have started. Helping out Ms. Larissa Sabial to assist residents that are facing eviction. It's a lot, as you all know, it's a lot of groups. I don't even want to start naming because I might forget some that are all in together to try to help everyone get accommodated and not end up homeless. The last thing that I ever want to see again from witness from what I helped do last winter for the white flag is anyone being homeless. Durham cannot stand to have another homeless thing that went on like last year. And from being at the court every day, sir, that I can with Ms. Sabial and the other people that are there to help legal ADSS is heartbreaking. Like today we, it wasn't a busy day, but we were able to get a list of all the upcoming evictions that are coming up. And it is, it is terrible. I mean, it's heartbreaking to see all of this. I just want to let everyone be aware that it is so serious that the eviction and the possibility of so many people becoming homeless. I mean, not on the fault of anyone. It's just that the system is not working properly and on time enough for residents to stay in housing. I just want to share this with everyone to just really be aware that we're getting ready to happen in this city. And from what, from last year, it will be a turmoil for people to have to really go through this on top of COVID and this new variant that's coming on. I mean, I'm just truly upset right now. I'm lost for words and the words that I'm trying to say, I can't even get it out because of the vision that I went through and spirits from people. I see people that live better than my dog. My dog is living better than people. That's hard. That's hard for me to really face. I just want to help people. That's all I wanted. I just want to, I just want to help people and be able to be a part of this Durham people, to help people stay in their homes. I'm sorry, man. There's no reason to be sorry. Your words are very powerful and very eloquent. And we know you well, we know your life experiences and now you've taken on a big position of responsibility with an HAC, a leadership role, very important leadership role. And I want to thank you for that and I want to thank you for your words today. They're very, very important and powerful. Thank you. All right, and we hear you. We're going to, I know that later in the meeting, we will probably hear, when we get to the portion of the meeting where we are talking about the ARPA funds, I know one of the questions that we've talked about is, I'm sure we'll hear from Mr. Johnson about the, how the rental assistance funds are being distributed. And we will have some other discussion. Thank you. Next, we have Larissa Seibel. Madam Clerk, can you make Ms. Seibel available to be heard, please? Ms. Seibel, can you be heard? Ms. Seibel, can you unmute yourself? Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Thank you for being here and you also have three minutes. And I know you have a video you would like to share, one minute video. Yes, that's the good news. That's whenever, Diana, if you want to do it first Sure, sure. Madam Clerk, can you help her make that happen? Thank you. My share. Today I was here with my house to oversee his education. But I found, what's the name of it? Legal Aid, I'm a company that will help folks, especially if you are in the hotel. There is funding, just have to ask and ask correctly. But I found out that they're going to help me. And so I was looking at eviction, looking at homelessness. But thanks to Legal Aid, they covered it. So anyone that's out there that's feeling discouraged and don't want to ask for help, please ask for help. Because I was one of those that wasn't asking for help. And now, I'm smiling, if you can see, I'm smiling. That's Legal Aid, it's gonna help me. And I don't know if you can hear me. Can you hear me? We can hear you, sure. Okay, that was today. That was a day when there were only two evictions on the list and there were a couple of other tenants who came for DSS to help them finish their applications. Unfortunately, tomorrow, on Friday, there are gonna be 81 eviction hearings. And last Friday, there were 82 eviction hearings. And it was just overwhelming, I went home exhausted. And you can hear the fear from tenants that their mental health is not gonna come in time. This on Tuesday, this is the reason why Friday is so busy on Tuesday, they were given four days to get their rent assistance funds, which didn't happen as far as I know for the people on Tuesday. So many of them had been pushed to do another hearing on Friday and the magistrate said, I don't know if I can keep continuing these cases. And this day, at least there were two DSS workers for maybe three or four tenants that we saw walk in plus they were on the phone. But it's just not enough people at the courthouse from DSS helping people with finished applications. And there's no one at the courthouse helping people start applications. You cannot do an application on the phone. You have to have a computer. You have to be able to read. You have to know about it. There are so many people who come to court and many more who don't come to court who don't know that there is a rental assistance. Some people do ask for help from legal aid. And that's how this lady was able to find out today. We just learned today that you could get help for people living in a hotel. And so she may get help. She hasn't applied yet, but we are hopeful and she clearly is very hopeful. So we really need more funds, particularly for legal aid because what we're seeing is the people who have legal aid, they know about the rental assistance. The people who have legal aid, they have a good chance of avoiding an addiction because they are represented. But only one out of 10, it looks like are actually getting legal aid. And I think that's the funding that the city gives, funds that one out of 10 person who might be able to stay in their home because of the help they got. We really need to up the money for legal aid. We need much more of that. Also, we need a Spanish interpreters, one of the families that came, they waited 45 minutes for DSS to get a Spanish interpreter on the phone from DSS. Fortunately, it wasn't a busy day. And then the other thing is, is that the rental assistance is not coming quick enough. And the federal government has told local government, get a way to make a way for tenants to receive the money directly so they can pay their back rent, clear their debt, either stay in that housing or have the money to move to another home. And the White House and the Treasury and all the guidance is telling us to simplify that application. It is so difficult. I tried to help a couple of people with the application. I'm leaving it to the trained people. They have to be trained in order to help. And if you don't get the funds to the tenants, they're really shackled to the landlord. And I use that term shackled because they can't get the help that they need in order to either pay their rent or move forward into other housing. And the feds have also given permission for us to use nonprofits like Legal Aid to deliver advanced assistance to households at risk of eviction while their applications are still being processed. We need to use every tool that the feds have given us and we need more people to make that happen in our house. Thank you very much for your attention. And I sent an email that has a link to the information from the feds. Thank you. Ms. Sybel, thank you. And thank you for your continuing devotion to the people who are in such need for being there at the courthouse, for helping them as you do on the ground all the time. I wanna thank you and Ms. Vic Lewis as well for the work you're doing. Again, I know we're gonna be hearing something about this a little bit later in the agenda. So I wanna thank you and appreciate what you've said. We take it very seriously. All right, I will now move to Marie Hill Faizon. Is Marie Hill Faizon with us? I don't think I see her in the amongst the attendees, Madam Clerk. Mr. Mayor, she's not an attendee at all. Thank you. All right, then we will move to Stella Adams, Ms. Adams. Can Ms. Adams be available to be heard? Ms. Adams. Can you hear me? Yes, welcome, Ms. Adams. We're glad to have you and you also have three minutes. Thank you, sir. Mayor Shul, members of the City Council and Manager Page, I last appeared before you in May and I was encouraged to be patient with my concerns regarding the needs of the Bradtown community related to improvements to Route 9 until the transit plan came out. Well, we waited and we were deeply disappointed. Bradtown is a 134-year-old black neighborhood that was established by ex-slaves of the Stagville Plantation in 1887. This community has been abused by the lack of governmental services for over 100 years. The perpetuation of this discrimination for the next 30 years is unacceptable. According to the existing conditions report, completed early in the Durham Transit Plan update process, Route 9 has the fourth highest ridership of any route in the GoDurham system. Behind only three routes, all of which have 15-minute service during the day. Those routes are Route 3, 5, and 10. Route 9 currently only has 30-minute service before branching into 60-minute service. This is completely unacceptable. I am asking that council members with votes on any of the government bodies with authority to adopt this plan to reject any plan that does not explicitly include improved services and infrastructure to Route 9. I am asking council to direct the manager to have her staff prioritize the needs of the Braggtown community as it relates to the inclusion of Route 9 into the Durham Transit Plan and the 2050 MPO Plan. Finally, I find it quite cruel that the city refuses to provide free paratransit services to Medicaid recipients of the city. The city should use American rescue funds to fund paratransit services until a contract can be worked out between the city and the federal government. Thank you very much for your attention to these critical matters. Ms. Adams, thank you very much. I want you to know that not long ago I asked the administration for a report on our paratransit services, which the council will be getting an update at an upcoming work session and we can certainly be taking up the question that you raised. Thank you so much. All right. We'll now move to Ms. Vanessa Evans. Ms. Evans, welcome. Are you able to be heard? Good afternoon, national and city council. The message that I'm going to be speaking from comes from GoTriangle and what we've learned. As Ms. Stella Adams has said, Route 9 has been removed from the new plans to add Danube and the new areas of Bradtown. Route 9 needs to stay in place and new routes should be added. Route 9 has been in operations for centuries and has served numerous of residents in Bradtown that use the services for getting to work, jobs, appointments, groceries, and personal shopping, as well as other needs. The bus services are not what I want, but these are in need for our community, for getting people to jobs that are coming to Durham with better pay so that people can have access to get into these jobs. Durham speaks of equity, but this is truly equity when we're not getting what we need for the people to get back and forth to work or to their appointments. Bradtown hopes that this is a part of what the equity of Bradtown hopes to see a part of and looking for for our future as well as now. Bus times and frames need to change, as Ms. Stella Adams said. Our one-hour services need to change to 30 minutes. Our 30-minute services need to change to 15 minutes because people have spoken in our surveys as we have done with Go On. The Better Bus Project have stated that they have lost jobs due to having to wait for a bus for an hour. During COVID, people were missing the bus because once the bus was filled with people, people were not able to get on. And I've seen it for myself because a bus stops directly almost in front of my house, off to the side. And I've seen people standing six to eight people standing at the bus stop wanting to get on, but the buses have to go because it's too many people on the bus. So that means if a bus is waiting for an hour, they've turned around and they had to wait for two hours. If they're waiting for 30 minutes, that's still making people late for work. The buses in Bradtown are very essential for people getting back and forth to work for the essential workers who work for Durham. And I hope and pray that with all the things that we have asked for, that this can be still in place, that we can have services for people to get around in Durham to get the jobs and what they may need to get to. Thank you. Ms. Evans, thank you. And Ms. Adams for speaking on this important issue. I will just, our transportation department asked for $500,000 in our most recent budget for the allocation to anticipation of funding from the County Transit Plan to make service improvements on route nine. We agree that these improvements are critically important. And we believe that routes nine A and nine B should be operating in the off peak times and begin early morning services at 5.30. And the plan was to begin implementing these in October of 2021. However, as you know, these, and you all spoke to, these have not been approved in the County Transit Plan at this point. Durham, like our entire region and a lot of the nation has had a shortage of drivers. And with the shortage of drivers, this has caused the County not to add any new services to the County Transit Plan at this time. But I assure you, I assure you both. And I can tell you on behalf of Sean Egan, our transportation director who I've spoken to on this on several occasions, as well as our entire city staff in the council that nine A and nine B are critically important routes. We know that and we will be advocating for them in the County Transit Plan. I say we advisedly, I won't be around here to advocate for them in the County Transit Plan. But I know that my council colleagues and our staff will continue to do so and agree with you very, very much on the importance of that. And I'm, Director Egan was on the bus tour with his family of Bractown. And I know that he saw the need and we all know the need. So thank you for that. Colleagues, one further person has signed up to speak on the citizens matters. And that's Mr. Jim Svara, Mr. Svara, welcome. Madam clerk, yes, it looks like you're available to be heard, Mr. Svara, welcome. And we appreciated your email yesterday and you also have three minutes. Thank you Mayor Hsu and members of city council. I would like to encourage you to support the extension of the long-time homeowner grant program for one more year to cover higher taxes paid in 2020 and expansion of the program citywide. These changes should be made as soon as possible with applications processing starting in November and grants paid by the end of the year. And again, please check the letter that I sent yesterday. The council must clearly direct the department of community development to prepare for extending the current program, not creating a new program. If you do not have your intentions, make your intentions clear, you will have made a negative choice by non-decision. As things stand, you will not hear from the community development department until November. The 2020 taxes were impacted by a second property reappraisal in 2019 that affected more low and moderate income neighborhoods than the 2015 reappraisal. I provide data in my letter. The long-time homeowner grant program was flawed by being limited to three neighborhoods and further impaired by requiring that homes be within 500 feet of city investments. Only a small number of homeowners have received grants. Citywide coverage will benefit all low-income homeowners wherever they live without having these arbitrary limitations. Because of the pandemic, there is a clear need to provide assistance to the large number of low-income homeowners who lost income in 2020, as well as paying higher taxes. These circumstances clearly qualify the grants to be paid using the American Rescue Plan funds. The grant paid by the end of this year covers the extra tax they have already paid in 2020. They may also benefit from the new Combined City County Homeowner Grant Program to pay their 2021 taxes. I commend you for seeking to persuade the Board of County Commissioners to raise eligibility to 60% area meeting income. The two programs can support each other as they're carried out and share certain tasks, such as reviewing income to verify eligibility. This will be the most time-consuming aspect of the review process. Please provide this overdue assistance to homeowners in all parts of the city who have been waiting since 2016 for tax relief to help remain in their homes. Thank you very much. Mr. Savara, thank you. And thank you for continuing your advocacy on this, which has made an enormous difference in our community. The issues you raise are very important and we will continue to raise them with staff. We will be hearing on no from our staff soon about this and we'll be discussing them with the city manager or individual meetings. All right, colleagues, we have heard some really good public comment today and I really am appreciative of everyone who've been here raising very important issues. Now we will move to the items that have been pulled and I'm gonna begin with item seven. Item seven is the, oh, sorry, that's great, I apologize. Yeah, thank you, manager. Manager Page, we're gonna, the first pull item is the many of the bylaws of the city council appointed boards, committees, commissions and task forces related to member compensation. This item does not have an attachment so I think deserves some explanation and I'm gonna turn to Mayor Pro Tem Johnson who I really appreciate your work, Mayor Pro Tem. As I said earlier, you've really done a great job helping both the clerk staff and the legal staff sort out all the issues around this and so I'm grateful that once the council made the decision to do this, you really jumped into the phrase. So thank you. Do you wanna give us just a few, would you wanna give us an update? Yes, thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So this item is essentially to authorize the city attorney's office to process bylaws changes for the listed boards and commissions to align with our budget allocation for stipends for our board and commission members. The majority of our boards and commissions have bylaws now that won't allow members to receive compensation. There's a specific section in most of the bylaws that say that members serve without compensation and so we need to edit those. And so this first round are the boards and commissions that are entirely under the city's purview that the city attorney's office determined that we could just edit the bylaws on our own and the next step will be the city attorney's office bringing those individual bylaws changes for our review and adoption. There are some boards that are a little bit more complicated, boards that are joint with the county where there may be or the school district where there may be an interlocal agreement or boards that already have some kind of, some kind of written statement around compensation in their bylaws. And so those are also gonna come to us at a further, at a future date, the CAO will, city attorney's office will be working with the county to change those interlocal agreements or figure out any other kind of regulatory issues that may arise. But these boards on this list are ones that we can change the bylaws entirely on our own and authorize members to begin receiving stipends. So this item is essentially just to start that process. And then we'll receive the specific bylaws changes from the city attorney's office later on. Thank you very much, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. I'm going to just ask our city attorney, Mr. O'Toole. Oh, I see Mr. Hernandez is here. Great, thank you. So this item is this essentially just informational and you're letting us know that you all are planning to do this and you're getting our heads nod, head nods, or is there some motion, Mr. Hernandez, there's no motion with this item. So could you help us? Absolutely. I think part of the intent too was should council wish to proceed that voting on a motion today to authorize the city attorney's office to go ahead and unilaterally change the bylaws. I don't think it would be necessary to then bring the bylaws back to council individually. As Mayor Pro Tem said, the clause that is pretty much uniform across these sets of bylaws is something along the lines of member shall serve without compensation or member shall serve without pay. And so the goal I think today for efficiency would be that council vote on giving the city attorney's office authority to strike that phrase from those listed boards bylaws and we could proceed that way without needing to bring those bylaws back before you individually for a vote. Mr. Hernandez, thank you for that clarification. So we will need a motion and what I would suggest is that you all write the motion and then it come before us next Monday night at the next Monday meeting. Mayor, this is Don O'Toole. There is actually a motion attached to this agenda item. Sophia and I discussed it this morning. I think the motion language could be more clear to state explicitly what Sophia just said. So if you don't mind, I think what we would like to do is to make that motion language more explicit and then it would be part of council's consent agenda if it stays there for the Monday night meeting. Yes, great. Now I see the motion. I'm sorry, right. That's a good idea, Mr. O'Toole. Thank you for that clarification and happy for you all to modify that language that to make it more explicit. But I'm sorry, I know I see the motion, Mr. Hernandez. That all sounds good. And thank you very much. Mayor, question? Yes. First, council member Freeman. Yes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to know, I didn't, I wasn't sure if it was an oversight or if there was some additional explanation but I noticed that the mayor's committee for people with disabilities was not included. So a number of boards, well, Ms. Hernandez, would you want to answer that? Happy to. So what our office did was we looked at the bylaws and interlabel agreements or establishing ordinances for all 28 boards and we categorized the boards according to whether there was explicit language in the bylaws prohibiting compensation. For good amount of our boards, there wasn't. And so for those boards, there was no action necessary. My guess is that the mayor's committee for people with disabilities may be one of those boards. We also then created a separate batch which is the list of the boards in front of you which do have specific prohibition against compensation. And then as Mayor Pro Tem indicated, there's a third batch which the prohibition is in an interlabel agreement or an ordinance. And for those, the process to amend will be a bit more complicated. So that is, that's why you may not see all the boards listed in this agenda item. And if I could just ask for an additional layer, it would be really helpful to make sure that that's all listed out because I feel like folks who serve on those boards should know which bucket they fall in. And whether or not, yeah, they'll be created a spreadsheet that we forwarded to the clerk's office and we're happy to provide the council as well and the boards. Thank you. Thank you, council member. Councilor Middleton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'm gonna thank Madam Mayor Pro Tem for diligence on this important undertaking. I recall that when we had initial conversations about this that there was an equity concern that everyone who served on our boards and commission may not necessarily need the stipend. And we wanted, I don't, I can't recall whether we talked about some type of means testing or whatever, you could self-identify or self-exclude, I just wanna be clear that what we're talking about today merely removes the barrier of being able to compensate folk. This is not the conversation today about how we will determine an equitable way of who receives and who doesn't. Is that fair that we're just simply removing the legal barrier to even have the conversation about what compensation will look like? To anyone, council, is that a fair characterization? Mr. Hernandez, do you wanna comment? Yes, council member, that is a fair characterization. This agenda item is focused on where is there a direct prohibition? Moving forward, I believe that the clerk's office and certainly the CAO is happy to assist on creating a process or procedures for how board members opt into a stipend. But I don't know that that has been finalized yet and I'm happy to defer to the clerk if it has been. Thank you so much, Mr. Hernandez, I appreciate it. And I just wanna reiterate, we need to, I think move on this, but I just wanna reiterate my initial concerns that the, we know that there are barriers that prohibit folk from participating, whether it's childcare or transportation or whatever. And I, if the stipend doesn't rise to the level to seriously, substantively, and significantly overcome those barriers, then we can still have folk that are affluent just getting an extra whatever, $50 or whatever, to participate in a board of commission. And that stipend really is just symbolic because it doesn't really go far enough to bring in some of the people we actually want to bring in. So I wanna just, for again, for the record, just indicate that I'm gonna be very vigilant and insistent that the equity lens that we talked about at the beginning of this initiative is still brought to bear, whatever the final iteration of this looks like. With that said, I think we should be doing it and compensating folk for their service. But if we're just gonna be compensating folk who already can afford to be there and we aren't still reaching those folks who we were trying to reach, then I think that's something we need to be concerned about or vigilant about. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Council Member. So there's been a lot of work on the part of the clerk's office, a lot of work. And I've just been able to sort of watch it through email, the clerk has been working with the finance department and others to try to figure out a way that we could make this both create the kind of equity that you're talking about but also make it in a way that is not labor-intensive for our staff. And so I believe that what we have settled on is what you, one of the things that you mentioned before, which is an opt-out. So that people will, I think you used the word self-identify, that people will be themselves saying whether or not they need it. And there'll be confidential way to do this. And there's been a lot of work done on it. But I think that is my understanding is that's the way procedurally we're heading. I don't know if the clerk or Mayor Pro Tem Johnson who's also been working on this would like to comment further and maybe you could let me know if I have correctly described the way we're heading. Yes, Mr. Mayor, that's also my understanding that the clerk's office will provide a way for new board members to opt in to receive a stipend and will also be surveying, reaching out to all of the existing board members to give them the opportunity to opt in as well but that there won't be any means testing or other action on behalf of the city to ensure that people need it. It will be a self attestation. Thank you. And so that's where we are so far council member and I know we'll hear more from the clerk's office and appreciate their work as well. Other questions or comments on this? Okay, I think we've surfaced mostly important issues. Now that I found out we actually have a motion on it that's good, the motion will be improved and we'll hear about it in 10 days. Now we'll move to item 10, the board's committees, commissions and task force 2021 annual attendance reports and I'll pull this item, I just have a question. First of all, generally, we have so many people on these boards and generally attendance is amazing. People are attending these meetings. We had the Durham Housing Authority is meeting monthly. Every single member attended every single meeting. They had absolute 100% attendance. I didn't see that for any other board, but a lot of boards have 90%, high 80% attendance and that's great. My question is, there are some few people, a handful I would say, on some of these boards who have missed more than 50% of the meetings and I know we're in the virtual space now and there's some new guidelines but I wondered, Madam clerk, if you could let us know what the process is now for people who are egregiously non-attenders. These are important positions and we need people to be at the meetings. Mr. Mayor? Yes, Madam clerk. We can reach out to those who have less than 50% and let them know that we're curious if they're having any obstacles for attendance and then we can get back to you about them. All right, so that would be a first step and then we are, I know that when we've had, we have people now who have most recently, you have worked, I believe, through the committee, either through the staff liaison or the committee chairs to write folks' letters who have not been attending to let them know and kind of give them a last chance before they're removed, is that right? Mr. Mayor, that is correct. The issue is that we have to wait approximately one year until we have the data for their entire term and that is the sticking point. So we just can't see with one attendance report or of a half year, we typically wait for a full year. Okay, I just, yeah, it's not super important but some of these folks just start out non-attending and they never attend and there are so many great people that wanna serve. So, at least on some of these reports where people have been over a year and not attending well, I hope we can move in some recently expeditious faction to get them off the committee and get people on who are gonna come. Okay, item 25, actually I'm gonna first move to item 27 which I think is gonna be a lot quicker. Stormwater Infrastructure Repairs, item 27, I pulled this item too. Mr. Smith, welcome. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Mr. Smith, the contractor in this item failed to demonstrate a good faith effort to meet the diversity contracting goals but was awarded the contract in the best interest of the city and I understand that that sometimes needs to happen and I totally trust they have to make this determination but whenever this is very rare that we see this and it's disappointing. And is the representative of the contractor present today? Do you know? Yes, sir, Mr. Mayor. We've invited a representative from Bruce Allen Construction Company to attend the meeting. His name is Bradley Cohn and he is in attendance as a registered participant. Thank you, Mr. Smith. Madam Clark, could you make Bradley Cohn available to be heard? Mr. Cohn, are you available to be heard? Yes, sir, can you hear me? I can, thank you. Thanks for being with us today and we appreciate the work that you're gonna be doing for the city. It is rare that we read that we're giving a contract to someone who hasn't made a good faith effort to meet the diversity goals. Can you talk to us about that situation? We went through the process and we actually, we pushed back that we actually did fulfill the good faith effort and we appealed it and we were, I've got a letter that actually that we were successful in our appeal. It was, there was a lot of solicitations that we sent out in a, we blind copied ourselves. So when we sent the documentation in the backup for that, that we solicited, you know, so many contractors to for some, for some work and materials, we, it didn't show up. So we actually took screenshots of it and we went through the appeal process and then through the appeal process, we got a letter that we did meet the good faith efforts. Thank you, Mr. Cohen. Mr. Smith, do you agree with that? Yes, I do agree with it from what was shared with me through our representatives that equity and inclusion, although that process is more of a direct process between equity and inclusion and the contractor themselves and more so on the outside of that process. But from what I understand, yes, that is accurate. All right, Mr. Smith, thank you. And Mr. Cohen, thank you. I'm gonna just ask the manager, it would be great to get an addendum to this or new attachment from equity inclusion before our Monday night meeting. Mr. Mayor, when you say a new attachment, can you help me? Yeah, what I mean is just a confirmation from equity inclusion of what Mr. Cohen has said. I have a letter I can share. Yes, we will get that added to the item. All right, thank you. Mr. Cohen, thank you for being with us and for your efforts. I'm glad to hear that you did make that outreach. It's very, very important in the city. And Mr. Smith, thank you for being with us today. You're welcome, thank you. Thank you. All right, Madam Manager, what I see in front of us is item 25, which I think we'll need a significant amount of discussion on item, and then the four presentation items. Do you have a preference for the order of those? We do not have a preference on, all staff are available here in the meeting. All right, then let's move to item 25, mandatory weekly COVID-19 testing. And why don't we do that next? I'll see Ms. Youngblood. Ms. Youngblood. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem and members of the city council, Regina Youngblood, speaking for courses. Excuse me, Benefits Manager will also be joining the conversation. And we'll have a representative from CBS Health, Maureen Hildebrand, if there are questions I am here to answer. Ms. Youngblood, thank you very much. We appreciate it, we appreciate you. As I told the manager today, you are the recipient of the David Boyd Superb City Council Presentation Award. And we always really appreciate the presentations that you make, I'm looking forward today to hearing from you as we ask these questions. So first I'll have a question and then I have some comments. The memo says this is a 12 week commitment, but when I read the contract, I didn't read anything about a time certain for the contract. Can you talk to me about the time commitment and how that works? Yes, so the time commitment that we have arranged with CBS Health is that we will begin testing on October the 18th and we will guarantee that we will continue testing for an additional 12 weeks. And that was how we were able to negotiate lower pricing. The original estimate was quite a bit higher. It was going to be about 87,000 per week. And we were able to negotiate it down to $69,120 per week by agreeing to a 12 week commitment. Did I just miss that in the contract? You may have, I don't see the exact timeframe or dates what is on the contract in page 11. It just shows that the expected number of weeks is 12. And we'd agree that we'd start on October the 18th. Okay, thank you. So the amount of money that we're talking about, is that for that 12 week commitment? It's not variable then. Is that a commitment regardless of the number of people who were tested or is that an up to? So the way that, and this is where I would ask for Maureen to help me with an explanation. So the way that CVS Health has praised their services, it's based on the number of hours that would be needed to staff the various onsite locations that we have requested. And it is my understanding that we do have the ability within this commitment to either ramp up or to ramp down our hours given appropriate notice. Maureen, you can certainly let me know if I have misstated something here. Regina, yes, the way that you communicated that is correct. We have about a two week ask for us to scale down from an hourly perspective and about a three week notice required to scale up from a staffing or hourly perspective. The pricing is tiered, so our service commitment is based on the initial numbers provided, but the hours required needs to be scaled down and that pricing will align. Does that make sense? Yes, thank you. Also, the contract says that the city can terminate for convenience at any time without cause, simply by sending a notice to CVS indicating when the contract will terminate. Is that accurate? There's no waiting period from when the notice is set to when the contract can be terminated. Maureen, I'll ask you to speak to that given the 12-week commitment, how that provision works. I believe that means that the contract, no notice meaning, would you repeat that question? I'm sorry. Sure, let me just say I read these contracts as a, not as an expert. So I'm gonna need your help here. When I read the contract, it looks to me like it says the city can terminate for convenience at any time without cause, simply by sending notice to CVS indicating when the contract will terminate. And I wanna make sure that is that accurate? Is that an accurate description? In other words, is there any waiting period from when the notice is sent? I believe that is accurate though. My understanding is that we do have a two-week notice required. So I'll have to get back to you on the verbiage from our legal team in terms of what that week period means. Okay, but it would, all right. So in other words, this sort of, okay. Well, that's close enough and I appreciate that. So I'm gonna just make some comments before I, open this up to my colleagues for questions. There are two groups of people that jointly fund our health insurance plan and I've discussed this with the manager this morning at length. The Durham taxpayers and employees of the city of Durham who pay insurance premium. And these people fund that these people, the taxpayers and the premium payers are the ones who fund this insurance fund from which this testing, the payment for this testing will come. And we are self-insured and over the least last decade that I'm aware this fund has been very carefully tended and managed so that it's able to get us not only really good insurance coverage for our employees but also at a very good cost. And we have managed to, I'm really proud of the way that our staff has managed this fund over the years and the self-insurance has really worked out with great savings to our city and to the employees and the ability to create really good healthcare. But now I'm concerned that out of this fund our taxpayers and our employees who pay insurance premiums are being asked to pay $69,000 per week to test employees who have chosen not to be vaccinated. We know that vaccination is the best way to keep our economy open, our people safe, not only to keep yourself safe but just as important to keep the other people around you safe. And we know that people who are not vaccinated are 15 times more likely to die of COVID-19 than our people who are vaccinated. And people who are not vaccinated can much more easily contract the virus than they are much more easily can spread it to other people. So people who are not getting the vaccination are not just endangering themselves but they're endangering others. We're not yet under this plan requiring all of our employees to get vaccinated. We're inquiring either a vaccine or a weekly COVID test and this agenda item describes the system at that testing at four city sites. I personally don't believe that city taxpayers or city employees who are vaccinated and are paying insurance premiums, more than half of them vaccinated should be paying for the tests of employees who are not vaccinated. I'm very willing to support a program that requires either vaccination or testing but the people who are not vaccinated and are getting weekly tests are making them the choice themselves to get tested in lieu of a vaccine. These people can simply get the vaccine for free and never have to get tested for this system, for this purpose. Or they can get the weekly test and I believe should be getting it at their own expense. If an employee doesn't wanna get a vaccine which is scientifically supported is the best way to keep themselves and others safe. As well as to stop the COVID virus from mutating again. If people don't simply wanna step up and get the shot, then I believe they need to bear the consequences and pay for their own weekly testing. That shouldn't rest on the taxpayers or the other employers, employees of the city of Durham overpay. It's a matter of health for our employees, the thousands of people they interact with weekly. And it's a matter I think of simple fairness to taxpayers and other employees who are vaccinated and should not have to pay for weekly testing for others who's not vaccinated. So that's my position on this. I am very supportive of the alternatives offered here, but I believe that the employees themselves should be paying for the vaccines. And there's precedent within our insurance system and within the city for people who, for example, if you do certain health activities you're in premium is lower. I believe we ought to be raising the premiums for people who are not getting vaccinated and need to be tested to cover the tests. This has been doing, being done a lot of places. I recently read that this is exactly what Delta Airlines is doing. They're raising the insurance premiums of people who are not vaccinated. All right, so those are my thoughts and I'm happy to now open it up to my colleagues for any of your questions and thoughts. Councilor Milton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Regina. Thank you so much. Good to see you for all the work you do. I was really anticipating this agenda item and kind of just stealing myself for the way it would go. And we'll be saddened. Mr. Mayor, I wanna fully associate myself with everything that you've said. But I also, yeah, I associate myself with everything that you've said, full stop. I also want to give a birth, a wide birth and some leeway to our city manager. I'm well aware of employers around the country that have made this an ultimatum. And that certainly was within the manager's purview. But for whatever reason, she has not as of yet. So with that, even though I fully align with what you're saying, Mr. Mayor, I think I'm going to just on this one from the time being follow her lead. She knows that this could have been presented as an ultimatum. My sense is that she has her finger on the pulse of the organization and has taken into account things like morale and all that with that said, you know, it is a lot of money to be subsidizing someone's personal choice. But I trust the manager and I'm gonna defer to her and had she asked today for us to make an ultimatum, do this or else I would have been fully prepared to support that. But I'm going to, I'm going to, with full agreement with what the mayor has said, follow her lead on this. I do want to ask Madam Manager or Regina, are the funding that we're receiving from the federal government, is that eligible to be used to pay for this testing? Or does it have to come from our funding, our municipal coffers? I'll let the manager go ahead and answer that question. So we, Council Member Middleton, we're going to be talking about a little bit later, the ARPA funds. So at this point, the ARPA funds are the, you know, that would be the only source. All of our other COVID type funding has been allocated out already. So it would be the ARPA funding and Deputy Manager Johnson is going to speak about eligibility on that this afternoon. Certainly COVID activities, any kind of, you know, safety type activity, COVID activity would, it would generally be an eligible expense. We are constantly aligning what we choose to spend with those rules as some of those rules continue to kind of morph a little bit or there's, you know, frequently asked questions that come up that might align to a very specific thing and Treasury gives that answer back. But to be very, you know, directly responsive to your question, most likely it would be eligible, but there's a flip side to that. And that also, you know, is that it takes away the use of that funding for other purposes that we all know are also very, very important to both the organization and even potentially more important to our community that are, you know, that would be our partners in delivering various services related to recovery from the COVID pandemic. So. Okay, thank you for that, Madam Manager. So for right now, as this matter appears before me now, I should assume this money's coming from municipal coffers just kind of bracket out the federal fund and just treat this right now as if it's the city paying for it without the federal money. That fair? That is fair and that is the recommendation that has come from the department through me and it is a recommendation. You know, certainly we are currently paying for testing through our health plan because it is, you know, it's a health activity. If you were to go get a COVID test, if you did not, you know, find one of the federally funded, you know, free clinics or health department type clinics that are being funded through some other source, you will use your insurance card to get that test done, make an appointment, use your insurance card and our health plan would be, would be billed for the cost of that test. So we already used that same fund that we recommended here for every COVID, you know, much of the COVID testing that has gone on in the organization up until this point. Madam Manager, do you have any sense on how long we will keep a testing regime in place for employees who do not want to get vaccinated and is there any escalation protocol that you're comfortable speaking with today? If, how long are we going to do this before we take other steps? So I wish I had the perfect answer, but I do not. A lot of the decisions that we make, you know, we're making them daily, we're making them weekly. We're looking at, you know, our community metrics. We're looking at other employers that some of our employees may choose to, you know, leave us and go to the kinds of decisions that those employers, other municipal governments are making. You will note in some of the industries that, you know, we already know about, such as our hospitals and health, sort of health clinics and those types of organizations made their policy decisions to be very similar because they hire or they employ similar employees. So we have been doing some of that with our partners, you know, City of Raleigh, the other large cities or surrounding cities because we employ similar employees. And when, you know, when we made this policy decision in this organization, we made it, you will note that it is, you know, fairly similar to some of the other surrounding cities, a combination of incenting employees, educating them, as the mayor has spoken about how important it is for the safety of the employee themselves and the residents that we serve every day, keeping them safe, how important it is to the safety of their own coworkers. So we've kind of combined the education, the incentive, and now we're moving into space that is a little bit more, a little beyond incenting but making it less comfortable if you don't make that choice. And we've had some movement. Ms. Youngblood would tell you that since we've implemented the incentive and we've, you know, we moved quite a few percentage points. I don't wanna just call the number out, but I believe today we're at 58% of our employees. So I have, you know, we have a lot of employees who are making personal and health decisions as we move down this road. And it is just my best recommendation at this time that we keep moving, moving down the road before, you know, we have a hard, hard stop with a mandate. But I am saying today that, you know, those decisions are being made as we go along. Thank you, Madam Manager, I'm gonna yield right now. And I am deferring to your leadership in this matter rightfully so, but I do wanna do it with strong association with what the mayor has said. So thank you so much. And I'll yield and I'll let the colleagues when they jump in. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you very much, Council Member. And thank you, Madam Manager. Council Member Caballero. Thank you. I have a few questions. And they're mostly for Manager Page. When is the, I know, you know, there's a, I know we'd said either get tested or get vaccinated or you have to start doing this weekly test. Is that date the October date that was mentioned earlier? And the conversation October 18th? That's October 18th. Okay, so October, so it's October 18th. And then what happens after 12 weeks? So we have this contract. We're just not gotten that far. We're gonna reevaluate. Is that why we just, the decision is 12 weeks right now? Well, the way I would ask, we respond to that is, what, you know, we have multiple goals that we're trying to get here. And one of those goals is to get the testing done at the lowest possible costs that we can get the testing done. Realizing, you know, having people use their insurance card or other ways is not always the lowest. We can negotiate a cost that is sometimes the best way to get any number of tests. If it's significant enough, we would be able to get the lowest cost for the testing. So one of the reasons that you do see the 12 weeks being proposed here is because with this vendor that we're recommending today, that was our lowest, based upon inputs, we gave them. The number of employees we felt we would need to test every week, you know, as our numbers of vaccinated employees goes up, our staff and CVS, they've been working, you know, very hard to estimate that, to actually reduce our cost of testing. And that meant 12, you know, kind of a 12 week commitment with some of the conditions in the contract that you have already talked about. But we certainly, you know, we want to test as few people as possible for as short a time as possible because our main goal is to keep our employees and our community safe. And we want, you know, we want our employees to get vaccinated. So the, you know, 12 weeks, you know, once you deploy an operation and you get it going, the 12 weeks just flies by. So, you know, it was not a magic number, but it is a combination of, you know, how long we really think it's gonna take to get, you know, additional employees, either vaccinated or get our workplace a little safer, you know, knowing who, you know, I may have COVID and who may not have it, but it's not so long that we get to a point where we're just testing the same people over again. And that is not changing hate. Thank you. Out of curiosity, and I'm pretty sure you all received, you and Regina received this letter from UE150 where they asked, they added some additional recommendations, wanted to know what staff thought about any of those recommendations and also what communication was done to workers. I want everyone to get vaccinated. I'm torn right now and I'm just trying to get to it. You know, in my mind, I'm like, we cut the difference and we say six weeks. You've got six weeks, the city will cover you for the first six weeks and after that, you're on your own. You know, I don't really understand why folks aren't vaccinated. I'm just gonna be real clear. Unless you have a really serious immune compromise type situation where your medical provider has told you that you should not get vaccinated, there's quite frankly, no excuse. I don't believe there should be religious exemption. I feel that everyone should just get vaccinated. My uncle died in November. My mother has long-term consequences from COVID. Our public schools are a hot mess right now because there's so many kids who can't get vaccinated and it is spreading quickly. And what you can do for your community and yourself is get vaccinated. So I don't have a lot of patients on this issue but I'm also trying to be empathic for the folks who have hesitancy. And so I wanna understand, you know, is there a way to incentivize more? Would having a $250, you know, the recommendation around department so that peers can start talking to one another. There's pressure from worker to worker to like, hey, we'll get more money if our department hits that 70%. And so I wanna understand from staff, is that another incentive that could work and just wanna hear from you all. So I'm gonna bring, yes, I see Ms. Young-Blood coming back up. So we've had a lot of conversation about incentives and you often only know if an incentive is actually changing behavior until you actually put the incentive in and I'm gonna turn it over to Regina to have her speak to this. So I mean, we started out with some soft incentives for our employees allowing them to earn wellness credit for that towards the lower healthcare premiums. And then also giving them a preventative healthcare day, meaning a day off if they presented proof of their vaccination. That didn't seem to be moving the needle very much. But on the very day that we announced the $250 incentive, we had 200 people turn in their vaccination cards. When in previous months, it would take maybe we might get 30 in a month. So we had 200 people in one day turn in their vaccination card. That let me know that there were a large number of people who were already fully vaccinated, but they were not motivated by the incentives that we were previously providing. So money is definitely a good motivator. We haven't had an opportunity to talk as a team about the recommendations that have come from UE 150, but we are certainly committed to making recommendations about additional incentives that we think would be helpful to the organization. Thank you. Thank you, council member. Council member Freelon. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, colleagues for the great discussion and council member Cabillero. I had some of the same questions about the UE 50 letters. So just wanted to underscore and associate myself with those comments to take a good thorough look at the recommendations outlined there and see what's applicable, what's feasible. I did have some questions, Miss Youngblood. So you mentioned, as soon as the incentive went out, you got 200 people submitting their vaccination cards that day, were those people already vaccinated and they just weren't providing their cards or did they get vaccinated that day because of the incentive? They were already vaccinated and were not presenting their cards. If they would have turned in a car where they got vaccinated that day, unless they had the Johnson and Johnson shot and still there's a waiting period to be considered or deemed fully vaccinated after that shot, we would not have counted it as fully vaccinated. And so these were individuals who had previously been vaccinated, but just we're not motivated to turn their card in because of the incentives that we were providing before. Okay, cause that was a question I had about the rate. If someone hasn't submitted anything, then we're assuming they're unvaccinated. It's not that 55% or 58, if we jumped up a few points, have proven that they are vaccinated. And I wondered, because when we talked about this a couple of weeks ago as a council, we're staff members as well and hadn't submitted, I hadn't submitted at least my confirmation yet until I got a nudge from the mayor. And then I was like, okay, finally, I took a picture of it and sent it in. So I guess you just confirmed that was my question is the rate is the number of people that have actually submitted vaccinations. And there might be others out there that are vaccinated and we just don't know. That is correct. So prior to the incentive being announced, I think we were hovering around 39, 40% confirmed vaccinations. As the manager said, as of today, we're right around 50, 58. And so we were estimating before we launched the incentives that there was probably a 60% vaccination rate, but people just had not gotten their cards. And we still believe that we're very close to that estimate. Okay. So a couple of questions informed by the UE150 letter that I hadn't considered. One is about folks with medical issues. Is it the position of the city that even people, you know, with immunodeficiencies and they get recommendations from their doctors not to get vaccinated if their condition is serious enough. At least I've heard from folks who've got some immunodeficiency issues. Is that, are those folks also going to be, well, I guess we're taking care of their testing currently. So that's just that question. But are they being considered at all as you think about what happens next? Absolutely. So individuals, you know, we're required by law to even in testing to consider a person strongly held religious belief or medical condition that they might have that would prevent them, that they believe will prevent them from participating in the testing. So we will have to go through a reasonable accommodations process on every request that we receive to determine whether or not an accommodation has to be made. We don't believe that there'll be a lot of medical accommodations that would really qualify for an exemption to testing. But we have to wait until that requirement goes in and people actually submit their information for our review. But we are definitely considering that because we have to and there will be a method by which individuals can request an accommodation. Okay. And there was a question about, you know, getting testing during work hours and people kind of going outside of their work hours. I've never luckily had to get a COVID test. I've never exhibited any symptoms prior to getting vaccinated. Thank God. But how much time do these tests take and is this something that folks can do on the clock? Is that something you considered? Yes, we did. And that's one of the reasons why we chose to partner with CVS Health. They have the ability to bring the CVS experience to our designated locations. We are arranging the testing times that are gonna be best for the location. We are asking the departments that live in those locations what times would be best for them to allow for an employee to come like right before work or come right after work. Or even during work as long as they have arranged that timing with their supervisor. So we did wanna make a situation where they didn't have to go too far because we want to make sure that they're getting tested and we also want that ease of reporting so that we know that a person is actually compliant with these testing requirements. So there isn't really that burden for employees to go off on their own time unless they are on vacation or for some reason wanna get tested off site and we'll have to accommodate, not using the word accommodate, but we'll have to make provision for them to submit their testing information into our process so that we can confirm that they are compliant. Well, I would, yeah, I just wanted to, when I read that recommendation, I thought it was a good idea and hearing you say that, if directors basically give them permission and if we could do anything to encourage our directors and the people who lead these departments to be kind of lenient and open-minded about allowing folks to do that during work hours, I think that would go a long way towards allaying the concerns outlined by UE150. Anyway, they put a lot of stuff in there. So instead of just going through all the itemized bullet points, I just trust that you'll take a thorough look at it as a staff and get back, see if there are any other burning questions. Yeah, I guess the only other burning thing I would say after looking over that document is about employee input. There was kind of a critique that the staff wasn't kind of surveyed to get their input on this document, which I thought was interesting. I mean, we're in a crisis, it's a state of emergency, so I understand that things have to move quickly. But I was curious in instances like these or maybe previous instances where new city-wide protocols are put into place, is there a system, is it customary to solicit input from departments and was that, did that not happen this time because of the expediency that was required and just how does that process typically work? Right, so typically if we're talking about putting in place a new policy, there is a protocol and a system that is used to get employee input. And we go through a policy kind of creation or revision process that can sometimes take up to 45 days to get the final policy approved because there's a 10-day senior leadership review, a 14-day all-employee review, there's some machinations back and forth to make adjustments to the policy based on the comments that came forward during the 10-day and the 14-day review and then there's some final edits and then approved by the city manager. And that is what happens in typical times. We haven't been operating in typical times for about 18 or more months. And so what has been happening is that we are making policies very quickly that are temporary emergency policies and unfortunately they don't really allow for input from a large number of employees. And so it's being driven kind of by the circumstances at times. Okay, well, thank you so much Miss Youngblood for answering my questions. I think that goes a long way towards allowing me to communicate with our constituents, you know, the gravity of the moment that we're in. And it sounds like y'all are doing your best to meet the needs under these very difficult times during this unprecedented pandemic crisis. So thank you for your work. Thank you, Madam Manager. And thank you, Mr. Mayor, for giving me some time to ask some questions. Thank you very much, Council Member. Colleagues, before we move on, we do have one member of the public who's arrived and would like to speak on this item, Donald Hughes. Madam Clerk, could you make Donald Hughes available to be heard? And Mr. Hughes, welcome, you have three minutes. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of the Council. I just wanted to raise a couple of questions before you all take a vote on this particular item. The first being some concerns that I have related to the waiver of the equal business opportunity requirements as well as the waiver of the workforce diversity and hiring practices. While I understand that we are facing a global pandemic and similar to the process that was used to select a vendor for the vaccine equity program, I get that there's a desire to move expediently, but in moving fast, we have to make sure that we're still adhering to our values as a community, our values as a city government. So I'm just interested in why these two waivers were put into place and why we're not still making sure that equity and diversity and hiring practices is something that we utilize even in some of these urgent matters. Second thing that I wanted to raise or ask is from what part of money is this nearly $900,000 coming from to support this particular program? Again, if it's not coming from the general fund, if it's coming from the CARES Act funding from December or the American Rescue Plan Act funding, it would just be helpful for the public to know where these funds are coming from. And then finally, while this is a crisis, a health crisis that we're facing in this country, we know that the next phase of this is going to be based in the economic crisis. So how are we gonna recover from this pandemic and the impact that it's had on black and brown folks, the impact that it's had on small businesses in our community, which we know are the main drivers of employment around this country. So what I would ask of you all is to consider when you have these, what I consider, I guess, no, truly, I wouldn't say there are no bid process, but when you are selecting certain individuals to apply or submit proposals for the spending of this money, that we consider small businesses that have track records or the ability to scale up or the ability to provide the services that are being asked because we know that the economic recovery that's going to take place after we're through this public health crisis is gonna be one that really is gonna take a long time. So I would just ask you all to prioritize our local business community and start paying more attention to those folks that have the ability to hire locally, that have the ability to employ the diversity practices and the hiring practices that we see and that will overall adhere to the values of our community. So I know you- Thank you, Mr. Hughes. Thank you. We appreciate you being here. All right, colleagues, further questions or comments from Ms. Youngblood? Any questions? Any comments? Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just wanted to get some more detail from staff about if we were to require employees to pay for their own tests, how we would do that. So according to the EEOC, they're very silent right now on the COVID testing front, but in other situations that might be applicable, if an employer is hosting an on-site clinic, so to speak, or testing center, allowing employees to go during working hours and is mandating this as a condition of employment, it is customary according to the EEOC that the employer pay for the cost. How you allow employees to pay if we wanted to go that route is you have to give up that control and administration of the program. To say, figure out employees where to go, we can direct employees to free testing sites, but we wouldn't be able to guarantee that they would go to those free testing sites. As the manager mentioned earlier, we are already receiving COVID test results from employees on a near daily basis because of COVID exposures and the need to get a clearance to come back into the workplace. By far, what we see is that employees are either going to their primary care doctors or they're going to one of the CVSs or Walgreen facilities where our insurance fund is picking up the cost anyway. But what happens, there's a trade-off. So one, we couldn't guarantee that our insurance fund wouldn't continue to pick up the cost if we told employees to go and find testing services on their own. But what that does in terms of administering the program is it increases the administrative burden. So for us to know who really has been tested, whether or not that test was positive or negative, I gave the example of individuals submitting their COVID, excuse me, or the COVID vaccination cards 201 day. It took us five days to get through reviewing and confirming the validity of all of those cards. And so you lose the ease of reporting and able to manage the system. So if the goal is to make sure that our employees are healthy and safe and not bringing COVID into the workplace, we might have someone who continues, even has tested, but has to go to work if we don't keep them out of the workplace, which could be very disruptive to make them wait at home for test results. And then they are exposing more people while they're at work. And we might end up having quarantine even more people. So there are trade-offs. There's a way to do it, but it limits our ability to track, manage, and maintain control of the process. That's it, thank you. That's super helpful. And if we were to try to recoup some of the cost by raising health insurance premiums for the staff who are unvaccinated and who are on our health plan, is that something we could do, like in the middle of a plan year? I don't believe that it's something that we can do in the middle of a plan year. I think it's something that would have to fulfill the following plan year, like we do with our wellness activities. It's always kind of a year out. I can confirm that with our brokers, attorneys, but I do believe that that would be something that we couldn't do. Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I agree with the mayor. I think that in terms of the social responsibility and the public health responsibility that people should be vaccinated, that our staff should be vaccinated. And I hope that at some point in the future, we will require them to be. I understand that there's a risk in that right now, given that there are a lot of other municipalities and counties, government jobs in the area where people are not required to be vaccinated. And it would be hard for employees who were unhappy with that policy to go somewhere else where they weren't required to be vaccinated. I wonder if we could look at some data from other institutions companies or places that have required a vaccine mandate to see what the actual impact was on employees. I think we have this fear that people who are really opposed to getting vaccinated will leave, but I wonder if we see that in reality, if people who are opposed, who have had mandates placed on them actually leave, because it's a lot of work to leave your job, find a new job, be without paying in the interim period, I think it would be great to get some data from some other places that have imposed a mandate to see how employees have reacted. It seems like there's no good way to require staff to pay for their own tests right now. And I think that I would rather, rather than increasing the cost of the health plan for people who aren't vaccinated in the next plan year, I would hope that we would just be able to mandate that staff be vaccinated for COVID-19 by that time. So I'm comfortable with this now, given that I don't think that there's a good alternative, but I think that the requiring vaccinations as long as there isn't a medical exemption or any religious exemptions that they're required to follow should be our goal as a city. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor Pro-Tim. Other questions or comments? Council Member Middleton and then Council Member Freeman. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and I've already spoken to Council Member Freeman. I'll go really quick, just a question. So to the administration, perhaps to you, young blood. So under this policy, if an employee is unvaccinated and refuses to submit to testing, is it fair to say their job is on the line? You either have to be vaccinated or get to testing. If you don't, you're going to be terminated. Let me speak. So anytime we have a policy, it is not just a policy to not be followed. And whether it's an emergency policy as Ms. Young Blood has spoken about, or whether it is one of our normal policies, not following a policy can cause you to lose your employment. So I wanted to make sure that I go on record to say that. Most of our policies say discipline, discipline up to and including termination. What I will say in this setting is that safety policies we take very, very seriously. And this policy would be considered more of a health and safety policy at this point. Some could say COVID has been around for a long time and you're just implementing this policy, but the Delta variant and our increases in cases and the increases in the community and exposure of our employees in the community makes for it to be time for us to have a higher compliance with the vaccine. And while I did want to also reference some of the other comments that around how much input or how did employees have any chance of knowing that these kinds of decisions might be coming while we didn't go through our normal application that we use for policy review. When I have spoken to employees at midday moments and in other settings, I made it very clear we're in a global pandemic. And when employees have asked, are we gonna have vaccine mandates? My response is always we haven't decided that as of now. As of now, the answer is no. But in the future, we're gonna make decisions as we continue down this road that are gonna hopefully be in the best interest of both this organization and the community that we serve. So I did wanna make that very clear as we proceed to decide about this item. That was more than you asked, but I wanted to make sure that I expressed that. Thank you, Madam Manager. Council Member, any further questions? I'll yield back, sir, thanks. Council Member Freeman. Thank you, I appreciate that last part and I appreciate all the conversation. I'm really torn as well and just acknowledging how vaccine hesitancy has been developed in this country. And so I won't go down that path, but I do wanna note that this is not something that's gonna be just 18 months. And so acknowledging that you're signing on for the 12 weeks and whatever comes next, there has to be some process in place to acknowledge that boosters are due, all of these parts and pieces. And so I just wanna make sure that there's a clear transparent way for employees to see and understand how this is gonna have impact on them. Because if they do need to make arrangements to leave, they should have that information beforehand. And so I don't think a work session in a council meeting is enough time. If I were the person who did not want to be vaccinated and whether it was due to health reasons or faith or anything else, I would want to make sure that I have enough time to make the decision as best for me and my family. So acknowledging that we're still an employer and we wanna be a fair employer, it's important that we are finding ways to create that equity in the conversation even. And so I don't know if there's a task force or some way or shape or form to put that kind of information in an anonymous feedback form, but there has to be something that's in place because as we operate in stress or in this pandemic, we'll operate out. And so this is the time to really show what we're made of and what we have to be made of is focused on equity. And so I'm hopeful that you'll come up with a solution. I can say that based on the memo, I will support a similar council member, Milton's point in that. I know that you're trying to find the best way and that your team is trying to find the best way to make sure that everyone's safe as this is a public health issue. And I'm fully supportive. Thank you. Thank you, council member. I see a note from Ms. Youngblood in the chat that Anna Davis is on some research on attrition. And there was a question about that earlier. Ms. Davis, are you able to comment on that? Yes, I am. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. There is not a lot of data yet on attrition rates and that's to be expected because these mandates, whether they're vaccine mandates or testing mandates are newly implemented. And so what we're seeing across the country are deadlines that are gonna be coming up. And so there's not a lot of data to review, but there is some, those are in the hospital context and I've also seen in the university context where certain schools have some mandates. So as it relates to one case study, I would offer the first federal case that was decided in light of a vaccine mandate was in Texas. And that was the Houston Methodist Hospital case. In that instance, they had a vaccination rate of 60 to 70%, I cannot remember the exact number. But after the mandate, their vaccine rate went up to 97% and they had an attrition rate of approximately 3%. The estimates that I've heard from the National Children's Hospital in DC was an attrition rate that they're anticipating to be about 7%. At UVA in Virginia, when they issued a student mandate, they saw about 2% of students not be vaccinated. So while we don't have a lot of data at this time, I would expect that at the end of the 12 weeks as you were evaluating testing, there might be more data available on a national level that I'd be happy to share at that time. Thank you so much, Ms. Davis, for joining that and for presenting it to us. All right, colleagues, other questions or comments for Ms. Youngblood? Mr. O'Toole. Mayor Schull, you had asked a question about the seeming inconsistency between the ramp up, ramp down provision and the termination for convenience provision. Just wanted to clarify, Anna has continued to negotiate with the attorney for CVS and the termination for convenience provision that Anna has worked out with CVS and it only happened this morning would include a termination for convenience provision that would include a 30 day notice period. So that inconsistency that you were noticing was real, but it would be corrected in the final contract. Just wanted you to have that information. Thank you very much, Mr. O'Toole, I appreciate that. All right, colleagues, other comments or questions? We have been asked by the manager to take action on this today. Madam manager, did you wanna comment further? I just wanted to make one brief comment before your vote and consideration. I have been listening at the council comments and we have talked ourselves on the administrative side about the possibility, doing further evaluation of how we might look at our rates, our health plan rates and have those rates incorporate the testing that you would, if you choose to approve this agenda item, how it would impact our rates. And so I wanted to make that very clear as you made your decision here that you have been talking about that and we will consider that just for the, it's not really reimbursement, I guess you would say dollar for dollar, but how we may incorporate the folks who have to be tested in upcoming rates, health insurance rates. So we will be doing that in addition to what you see here. Thank you, Madam manager. All right, colleagues, I'll just make one final comment and anyone else would like to feel free. I feel like we are, our manager is in a very difficult position. She's a manager of 2,700 people and my feeling, I strongly feel that if we want, what I really want is a vaccine mandate. I believe that a vaccine mandate would work. Would we lose a few people? Yes, I believe that we would and I appreciate Ms. Davis's comments and the little bit of research she was able to do, but it was interesting to hear. And short of that, I believe, again, I will say that we need to find a way and I believe that our staff can find a way to test, if that if people are tested in lieu of the vaccine on a weekly basis that they need to pay. Think about this, $70,000 a week for 12 weeks, $840,000. That is, that's two people's money, two groups of people, it's the Durham taxpayers' money and it's the other premium payers, 60% of whom are vaccinated. And to me, this is just bad use of public money, very unfair and I'm definitely not gonna be able to vote for this contract. My feeling is that our staff can find a way that to help make this work. And that would be my recommendation that we, that our, yes, we'll be able to start on October 18th. It's gonna take a couple more weeks than that. But to me, that's a price worth paying to see if we can't figure out a better way to do this. I don't know that I'm the majority here, since that I'm probably not, but I really feel strongly, one of the things that we can do here is we can take the burden off of our manager. Let's us be the ones who make this decision, which I know that there will be a lot of staff who are not happy with. Let's us be the one to take that burden off of them. Okay, so those are my last comments. Anyone else want to comment? Mayor Prottam. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I would be comfortable with asking staff to, with not voting on the item today and asking staff to think about ways that we could have employees pay. I think that what we've heard today makes it seem like that's not gonna work, but maybe there's something they haven't thought of yet. So maybe we delay this to our next work session and give staff a chance to come up with some more ideas. And then if it really, if it's really not gonna work, then we can pass it then. Thank you. Council Member Caballero. Yeah, especially if they're, I mean, even just providing clarification that it's a, we have to front load the payment because what I heard from Regina, which was really helpful was that the, we will end up paying for it because of the dysfunction in the testing because it won't be done by us. And so that, that does play out. There is a financial cost to that as well. But I am curious to hear if there's a way that we are, that there's clarity on being able to recoup that cost on the backend because of insurance rates going up, not this year, but next year for those employees. So that they are paying and they're just not paying now. And so that's where I would like staff to, so I'm fine with delaying, especially if that's gonna give us that clarification. If we have to essentially front load the money because we need the testing program to be efficient and effective and do what it needs to do. And then basically those employees who didn't comply would be facing a different rate in the upcoming year. I'm fine with that, if that's the most efficient way to do it. And I'm fine also with delaying this a cycle to get that clarification. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Freelon. Yeah, I guess you're, Mr. Mayor, your statement has kind of got my wheels turning a bit. And I'm thinking about a hypothetical scenario where we do this for 12 weeks, we spend a million dollars. And then we end up making the mandatory mandate anyway, three months from now. I know that we've kind of floated the question to manager Page and Ms. Youngblood, like what's gonna happen at the end of this? And I'd like to, I don't know, I don't know if delaying it would help at all, but the idea of getting people to pay for their own premiums feels like, yeah, it just feels like complicated. And I don't know that a delay is going to yield a kind of a magic solution, particularly when regardless it seems like there might be a mandatory mandate in our future. If that's the case, I could see the value in saving the money from trying to nudge people and just saying, look, this is in our future. I don't know, I'm still conflicted and I'm missing Charlie's voice among our chorus of decision makers, but I don't know, I've just been thinking about what the mayor said and also thinking about what's gonna happen in 12 weeks and thinking particularly the point about alleviating the pressure from our city manager by taking the heat from making a tough decision. Yeah, those are my comments. Thank you, council member. I do have an email from council member Faris that I can share. I talked about this with him less yesterday and I asked him since he wasn't gonna be here to write to the manager and he has written to the manager myself, I can share that. He has not had the benefit of this discussion. That may have changed his mind, as we know council member Reese is a thoughtful, flexible council member. But I can tell you where he was 24 hours ago, would that be helpful? Yeah, I'd love to hear it. Okay. I'm grateful to the administration for working hard to craft a policy that attempts to keep our employees and our broader community safe from COVID or acquiring either that employees get vaccinated or submit to weekly COVID testing. But I do not believe that public money should subsidize city employees who choose to remain unvaccinated without a valid medical or religious exemptions defined by North Carolina state law. The use of city funds to pay for weekly COVID testing for city employees who continue to refuse to get vaccinated is such a subsidy and is such I do not believe is good public policy. Neither should health insurance premiums of all city employees go up because some employees insist on going unvaccinated. If city employees refuse to get vaccinated without a valid exemption, those employees should bear the cost of the weekly COVID testing that has been made necessary by a refusal to get vaccinated. In fact, I would go further and simply mandate vaccination for all city employees without a valid exemption by a certain date certain. But this option does not appear to be under consideration. I didn't only read that because he agrees with me, but since you asked. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I wasn't gonna read it, but since you asked, I did. Okay, Calzemere-Milton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And this is one of those moments where the power and importance of being a deliberative body comes into full relief. Why it's important to have, distinctive voices on the council. I, you know, Mr. Mayor, you said something that kind of caused a moment of clarity for me because I have often said that, you know, the duck stopped with us and oftentimes the leadership starts with us and we have to make, that's why we ran for these seats to make the hard decisions. And, you know, when you said the math, you know, it occurred to me that at the end of 12 weeks, we'll spend, we would have spent almost as much as what we're spending to expand the Violence Interruptor Initiative for Boltony United. I have a hard time reconciling that, particularly when it's folk who have made a conscious choice, which is their right. And I don't begrudge them the ability to make a choice, but I also don't, you know, think you should be exempted from consequences of your choices either. During needs of vaccine mandate, full stop. We need to mandate vaccines. If, and a mandate vaccine, I mean, what the or else is, if the or else is, you know, pay for your own testing to demonstrate that you're okay and whatever messiness that might occur. I mean, sometimes, you know, when you make a leadership decision, there's things you have to deal with. But I, no, I agree. We need to mandate vaccines in my assessment, in my opinion, and I'm more than comfortable voting for that. If we need staff needs more time to work out the or else or what the nuts and bolts will look like for that. But, you know, we're the employer that, you know, fought hard for, you know, living wage and to demonstrate to other employers what that looks like and have made a commitment to getting our salary a band to where they need to be and the bonuses and stuff. So I'm comfortable with the totality of our record of being a compassionate, humane employer. Perfect, of course not. But I think on this one, you're right. The manager needs to be relieved of any type of pressure. We need to make it clear to the public that if we do this with us and I'm perfectly comfortable with voting for a vaccine mandate city of Durham. So I put that to you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you colleagues for helping in this deliberative session. Thank you. Thank you, council member Freeman. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, as well as customer Freelon. I was thinking similarly, there was a missing voice. And I do want to note that it's kind of like a Durham thing, acknowledging that our shirt was the first to mandate the vaccine in this county. And so just acknowledging, I mean, it's where I was going in the comment, like in noting, like just making sure people understand what the terms are and what's expected is a whole lot easier to make a decision regarding whatever the case may be. And so I'm torn, but I will go with the body on this. Thank you, council member. Okay, let me, the manager and I were discussing this this morning at length. And I said, you know, I'm pretty good at pulling together all the various threads and we'll talk about it and then we'll figure it out. Madam manager, I'm going to suggest and then you can pitch in. I know we were aiming for an October 18th date, but I think that given what I would describe as the variety of thoughts and opinions that we've heard here today on the part of the council. My thought colleagues and manager Paige would love to hear from you on this is to put this off for a couple of weeks. If we need to put back the testing program a couple of weeks to do that, to try to figure out some of these issues. But I wanna make sure, A, that you're comfortable with that, Madam manager. And B, that the council colleagues are okay with that. Madam manager, what are your thoughts? So thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I certainly always have thoughts. My first thought is, you know, it goes to the number of employees or the percentage of our employees that are currently vaccinated, that is 58%. We certainly have some projections of what might happen statistically. If we mandate the vaccine, we may just lose certain percentage of employees. We may not lose any employees. There's not a lot of data around that. I have also watched some organizations make mandates and they generally start at a higher percentage than where we are. It doesn't mean we don't need to be there, but we are perfectly willing to bring this item back to us, you know, take it off the agenda, work on another recommendation that is more aligned with what we heard here. Certainly the mandate being in the future as we think about timing and the different options that we might have, but not have it be decided today. We would have to communicate with our employees that we're looking at this, you know, October 18th date as when they would have to start testing, so that would go away. We would have to come back to you with another date as to when we would propose to have a vaccine mandate or resign your position because that's essentially, you know, folks that are going to that, even some in this community that are going to that, going to that policy, it is a, you know, vaccine or let us know when you plan to resign and try to provide you some, you know, data from our employees, whether it be, you know, more general data or specific data about what that means operationally from the departments where there's the lowest rates of vaccine. I think that you deserve that information and it doesn't change the decision that you made today. It may change some of the timing around it, but I think we all agree that, you know, vaccines save lives, they make this organization more safer, makes our community safer and we will likely be there at some point. So I am fine with the direction that's being provided here today and we can come back at another work session, maybe the next work session, but with additional information after we've communicated and looked a little bit more in detail as to where our, you know, unvaccinated employees are and what they might mean to our operational departments. Thank you, Madam Manager. That was very helpful. Colleagues, are you all good with that? Mr. Mayor. Council Member. Yes, I might. Madam Manager and I am good with that. I just wanted that there, one other scenario, there's the vaccine or else Rizan or vaccine or if we want, I'm comfortable if we want to have a testing media testing threshold or proof testing that we just don't pay for it. So if just somehow that if an employer, employee wants to keep their job and is willing to undergo, you know, testing and documenting it, whatever that might look like, I'm comfortable with that as an option as well, but I certainly support the mandate by date certain or something needs to happen by that date, whether it's, you know, a letter of resignation or here's my test result. So I just want to put that out there, but thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Colleagues, any further comments? Are we okay then with this, with holding this at this point in the manager will come back to us. Everybody good? Council Member Freelon. Yeah, I just really, I didn't want to, I wanted to underscore again, the gratitude to my colleagues and to you, Mr. Mayor for, you know, encouraging just a robust conversation. I know this is a difficult unprecedented time for, and I know that, you know, city staff may hear about this, come back, watch the meeting. I want them to know that, you know, I feel a lot of empathy and appreciation and gratitude, mixed feelings really about this decision, but mostly just gratitude for colleagues and staff who came to present here today. Because this is a really important decision that we're making today. And I feel like it's the right decision, but it was not an easy decision. So yeah, I just wanted to say that, thank you. Thank you, I really appreciate those words. You're right, it's a big decision and I'm glad that you, you, what you said about staff and our empathy for them and it's really important and thank you for saying that. Council Member Freeman. Just one additional thought is to just figure out how to factor in and I'm not trying to say what we should do, but it would be nice to see if there's an option available to just to know that there are folks who may need to do the testing or the vaccination during work hours and just making sure that that's clear that that's a good thing and that's why, yeah, just reinforcing. Thank you. And I think that's why, as Ms. Youngblood said, we had the, you know, the testing sites at our place of employment and hopefully we could still do that. I heard her about the difficulties that would be created, but thank you. All right, colleagues, any further comments before we move on, we've got only four more presentations. So maybe we should. Thank you all, thank you Ms. Youngblood. We appreciate you. All the work that you've done, most appreciated. As I was, I quoted the, I was talking about this conversation earlier with the manager and I quoted the great store at Scott and saying that Ms. Youngblood would be cool as the other side of the pillow, whatever we did. And I know that you are. So thank you very much. All right, we will now move to item seven, American Rescue Plan Act presentation. And I believe that Ms. Johnson, our new deputy city manager, that's what I'm talking about. Thank you. Is here with us to present. Good afternoon, Mayor, Mayor Pratiam, city council members, Bertha Johnson, deputy city manager. We are very happy to have this opportunity to update you on our proposed process for allocating the American Rescue Plan Act funds. I want to introduce to you, some of you already know, Lila Pedersen are one of our few fellows. Lila is the data coordinator of this work. Lila has also been working with the recovery and renewal task force. And now she's primarily focused on the Vaccine Equity Initiative, which we had a meeting with the coalition this morning. She's also working with the team competing for the mayor's global challenge grant, among other things. We also have, and I'll ask Jeff Hart to show his face. He's our MPA student. Jeff has been a great support in organizing and categorizing the proposal submitted to the city and responding to the emails we received through our ARP at Durham NC.gov email account, lots of emails. Jeff is also working to support our participatory budgeting team as they have some vacancies in that program. Obviously, there are others in the other organizations and departments who've helped us to get to this point today, including our engagement partner, NCCU and Durham County. And we also have assistance from Budget Management Services, Equity Inclusion and NIS departments. Next slide. So just to remind you of the amount of funding allocated to the Durham community, the general allocation, you know, $114 million between the city and the county and we have been working together and talking about these resources as a collaborative effort. Next slide. As you're aware, the funding will be divided into two distributions. We received our first distribution in May on May 11th of $25.9 million and we'll receive our second distribution in May of 2022. The funds must be allocated by December 31st, 2024. And one of the other bits of information we received is that we haven't till December 31st, 2026, to spend the funding. And that is because in some cases, the funding will go to sub-recipients and then we have to give them the opportunity to spend those funds and report back to us. So we present it to you in March. We propose the following process, that internal process with our departments, city council process to prioritize proposals. And we talked about that being the last component of the process and a community engagement component. We have continuously updated our website to keep the community informed of our process and our timeline and the events that we held to talk about the funding allocation. We started with our internal teams to gather proposals that primarily support the community. Obviously, other than the revenue loss. So those teams have met and provided us some proposals. The only internal commitment we have made is the employee hazard pay, which you all approved. And that it was, the total cost of that is 7.3 million. Again, that something city council has already approved. And so that's the only internal commitment we've made at this point. So next I'm gonna turn it over to Lila to talk about the process and what has occurred thus far. Thank you, Deputy Manager Johnson. The American Rescue Plan's fiscal recovery funds are unprecedented. And just to be clear, when I refer to the fiscal recovery funds, we're talking about that $50 million coming to the city and $60 million coming to the county. That's separate from direct allocations that were made through the American Rescue Plan Act for transit and rental assistance. So as you heard Deputy Manager Johnson say, these funds, ARP fiscal recovery funds, as I will refer to them, represent a once in a generation opportunity to invest in the future of Durham. This funding is unique in many ways because rather than being prescriptive about how these funds can be used, the United States Treasury actually laid out a wide variety of flexible uses and encouraged local governments to engage residents and target funds toward addressing the most pressing needs in communities. So what is especially unique about this funding is how explicit the US Treasury was in their guidance about how communities must be engaged in the process. Now, I just wanna start by emphasizing that never before has the city seen a one-time influx of $50 million, which is one fifth of the city budget in one-time non-recurring federal funds. And for the first time, every local government in the country is working to create recovery plans that outline line by line how these funds will be used that are consistent with federal guidance as well as state and local laws. So we know that we are not alone and we are working closely with Durham County, other cities and counties across the state through working groups led by the North Carolina League of Municipalities and the UNC School of Government and others. And it will come as no surprise to you that Durham stands out as a model for how to prioritize engagement at the beginning of this process so that residents are the ones setting the agenda for how these funds will be used. And we see this as an opportunity to serve as a model to cities and counties across the country. So I just wanted to say that I come to this work with a background in community engagement, organizing an advocacy. So I know how long people have waited for an opportunity like this. And everyone wants a piece of the pie. We heard this funding referred to several times in this work session already today. But even as we find ourselves in this position of extraordinary abundance, we know that there is more need in our communities than there is funding to go around. So that's why I'm so grateful for the thoughtful and dedicated city staff who have contributed to this process. The residents of Durham, who we can always count on to organize and advocate for the needs in their communities. And to you, our city leadership, Mr. Mayor, Madam Mayor Protin, and the members of the city council for helping Durham navigate these difficult and uncertain times. We look forward to providing this update and incorporating your feedback into the process. And to be clear, this presentation is about the process. We look forward to coming back to you at future meeting to discuss specific proposals for funding. So initially, this is the timeline that we set up for outreach and allocation to help create some structure, again, to this unprecedented opportunity. As you can see, we engaged first in a phase of engagement. Then we thought about how we would review the community input and ideas that we received, how we would work with you, our city council, to make the decisions about how to allocate these funds. And then, of course, to evaluate how the impact of those investments, not only because there are requirements from US Treasury about tracking data and reporting on key indicators, but because we wanna go above and beyond those requirements to ensure that our investments are having an equitable impact. So moving forward, we will treat these phases less as distinct blocks of time. So just to emphasize that the engagement did not end in July, it will be ongoing throughout the full lifecycle of this funding. And we will come back to sort of our revised vision of this process moving forward at the end of the presentation. This is an example of some of the outreach that has occurred to date. Over the past four or five months, we've engaged in partnerships with Durham County, North Carolina Central University, city departments like neighborhood improvement services, as well as other city departments and community-based organizations. Throughout this process, we have heard from hundreds of residents through community events, like the budget healing events that you'll see in your upper left hand and bottom right hand corner. And we have partnered, as I said, with Durham County, North Carolina Central University and organizations like Spirit House to host these events. We've also developed a survey so that residents who may not have been able to attend those events, still had an opportunity to engage in the process. So if you take out your phone right now and you take a picture of the QR code that's in the middle of the screen, it will link to a survey which has generated hundreds of responses from all corners of the city. And to publicize these opportunities, we placed newspaper and magazine ads and worked with the participatory budgeting team to build on their good work by re-engaging thousands of residents who engaged in the participatory budgeting process and set up an email address, arpatdurhamnc.gov, which allows residents to submit substantive proposals for funding. We have already received more than 80 proposals, which we are still in the process of reviewing. And we have used this first round of idea collection, proposal submission and development as a pilot to identify areas of improvement for future rounds of engagement, proposal development and review. Again, this is not the totality of engagement that has occurred, but it is just a snapshot of some of the top lines. We've also worked with, we'll continue to work with city departments in the county to incorporate the feedback that we've received from the community into the design of our ARP process moving forward. So here I just wanted to remind us of how these funds can be used. Although the American Rescue Plan allows for a lot of flexibility, there are explicit rules about how the city can and cannot use these funds. So just as a refresher, the core ways that these funds can be spent are to support public health, replace lost revenue, improve water and sewer infrastructure, address economic impacts for impacted workers and businesses, and provide premium pay, which DERM has already done, as well as invest in broadband infrastructure. At one of those community events that I referred to, we asked our audience to answer this poll question. And these are the results. As you can see, residents who participated ranked economic impacts as the eligible use that they wanted to see prioritized most, followed by public health and broadband. We take these results into account in our planning and we share them with you so that you can better understand the community's priorities. Now, as we've engaged the broader community, we've identified four core categories to help direct our fiscal recovery approach, health, housing, education and employment, and many proposals for funding cut across these categories, while others fall into a more miscellaneous category. But moving forward, we will continue to engage city departments, regional partners and community stakeholders to collect ideas that proposals and advanced funding in alignment with recommended guidance and community priorities. The United States Treasury requires periodic reports and we submitted our first recovery plan report on August 31st, first, which is available on the website, B-I-T dot L-Y slash A-R-P DERM. We will continue to update this website so that we are making transparent our plans and information for future reports. Now, throughout the engagement process, we've partnered with residents and community-based organizations to ensure that this is a transparent, community-driven and equitable process. Moving forward to the review process, the question that we've really been focused on is, how will we ensure that investments with fiscal recovery funds are aligned with recommended guidance and community priorities? To answer this question, we've worked closely with the Office of Equity and Inclusion to leverage an equity impact assessment tool. And this is important for several reasons. As we begin to review specific proposals for funding, we need to understand how different racial and ethnic groups might be affected. And we also want to minimize the adverse consequences and prevent institutional racism and implicit biases from clouding the decision-making. So this is a vital tool for advancing our long-term racial equity goals. So this is what the tool looks like. For each proposal that we receive, we ask these questions. And where we need more information, we work with authors to collect missing information. So we have already done this with some of our internal departments who have submitted ideas. And we've gone back and said, we need more information about the data that you're seeing that really shows the causes and effects of this problem. And in those cases, we have been able to update the proposal with additional information. So again, this is a poll that we put forward to participants in one of our community engagement events to ask them to rank the criteria they think is most important when evaluating proposals. And you'll see no surprise racial equity is right at the top followed by the measurable impact that this funding would have, alignment with existing strategic goals and the percent of the community that would benefit. So based on all the input that we've received from departments and various stakeholders, residents more broadly, we developed this draft scorecard to use as a rubric when vetting proposals for fiscal recovery funds. And our recommendation is to establish a review committee that will use this scorecard to prioritize proposals and help determine which ideas move forward and are presented to you as a city council for your deliberation and final decision. So we can get into how that review process will work in more detail, but first just wanted to walk through some of the criteria listed here. First and foremost, all proposals that are submitted must be eligible according not only to the United States Treasury guidance, but state and local laws. Second, we wanna use that equity impact assessment tool to make sure that we understand what the impact is going to be on different racial and ethnic groups. Third here, you see strategic goals, the extent to which a proposal is aligned with existing strategic goals. Fourth is community driven. We wanna make sure that residents were not only consulted, but are driving the development and implementation of these proposals. Collaboration, ensuring that stakeholders from multiple sectors are involved. Administration, how easy is it going to be to actually identify key impact measures and evaluate the impact of this funding to ensure that there are equitable outcomes. And finally, the qualified census tract. So just to give you an idea of what we're talking about here, these are the regions that have been identified by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development as areas where people in these regions wake well below the area immediate income and experience extremely high poverty rates. So these areas are specifically called out in the US Treasury guidance as places where funding will be assumed to be allowable for certain uses such as health. And this further allows us to prioritize equity in the selection of the proposals that will move forward and be presented to you as a council. So just to go back to the scorecard itself, I wanna pause here to receive your feedback. We do have just a few more slides in the presentation, but before we open it up for questions on the presentation as a whole, I wanna give you an opportunity to provide feedback just on this scorecard. What's missing, what should be taken out? How would you revise this tool to ensure that this is an effective, efficient and equitable process? So look forward to hearing from you on that. Colleagues, any feedback for Ms. Patterson on the scorecard? I see some, anyone? I have some, but question. And then Mayor Pro Tem. Ms. Patterson, just to be clear on the qualified census track, well, first of all, let me say, I think the criteria is great. I think you've done a really good job. I mean, one of the hard things I think that we have all the time is, we have 80 proposals and one of the things about setting up a rubric like this is it really does its best to try to keep politics out of it and really be able to drill down using the criteria that you all have established, and especially using the equity tool to, as you said, so that decision-making is not clouded, and I really like that phrase, to try to make really good decisions. And I think you've done a great job. The qualified census track, I assume that a bunch of the proposals that we have are probably city-wide, and they probably have some, I haven't seen any of them, so I don't know, but have a focus on certain populations that are spread throughout our city. How would that be, the qualified census tract column here as part of the evaluation, how would that be viewed? Yeah, it's a great question. And that's something that we can work individually with authors of proposals on, knowing that many organizations do work city-wide, what we can do is in the drafting of proposals that are selected for funding, in the drafting of contracts, we can understand where the services that those organizations are providing will be focused. And so even if an organization works city-wide, we may work with them specifically to fund specific services and activities in the specified qualified census tracts. And again, just to give an idea of where we're talking about. So that's an initial answer. I think we can dig in on this a little bit more specifically to understand how to ensure that funding is being targeted in these areas, but there is a process that we can use to ensure that the funding is targeted in these areas, even if it does go to an organization that is working city-wide. Thank you very much. Madam Mayor Prottam. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Leela. This was really good presentation and I appreciate all the work that's happened so far and it feels like we've made a lot of good progress. I'm wondering if we know how much funding is gonna be going towards these community projects versus things that the city staff itself might be proposing. Yeah, that's something that we have the opportunity to decide. And I think it would be wise to set targets in terms of not only how much funding will be directed internally to city departments versus outside organizations, but it also may be wise to set targets based on those core categories that we've identified, health, housing, education, and employment. We have not sort of codified those targets to date, but I think it would be important to think about what the balance should be. Thank you. And when y'all are putting proposals through this process now, are you thinking about the whole or 52 million minus what we've already allocated as being available now or is this like the first half and then we'll do another process for the second? Yeah, I think largely the latter. And so knowing that right now, we have $25 million minus the 7.3 that has been allocated for premium pay. This is sort of the first round. And as I said, we're really using this as a pilot to understand how to improve the process. But yes, we expect that we will have ongoing rounds of engagement and proposal development for the additional $25 million that we expect to come in May or June of 2022. I really appreciated the recommendation about hiring more staff. This is a huge endeavor and it's a lot of funding. And I think bringing in additional people to manage and do this kind of engagement work is a really great idea. Y'all are awesome and we don't want to burn you out. And it's been a very stressful time. So really, yeah, I'm fully in support of bringing on some more staff to manage this process and make sure that we're doing it right. And it seems very worth investing in that. Thank you. And happy to move forward to those portions. If there are any more comments about the scorecard itself, I'll just pause to see if there's anyone who'd like to speak to that. Why don't you go ahead, Ms. Patterson, and people may want to comment on that later. Okay, no, Councilman Freeman. I figured you couldn't see my hand. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Leela. I do appreciate the presentation. The first question is, I know that the scorecard looks a little different from the presentation we received. And I'm assuming this is the updated version. If you could just please make sure and get that version, that would be helpful. And then I just want to make sure that when we say residence most impacted, if we could nail that down a little bit more or spell it out, some type of asterisk that kind of says what that means, because I think it has a tendency to move and it's fine to move, but how it moves and what it actually means needs to be clear. I really appreciate the equity tool being used in this process. I think this was what was missing in our participatory budgeting and making sure that we were using an equitable tool to spell out how we would get to the actual projects that would have the biggest impact to those folks who've been left out of the process. And so I feel really good about the scorecard. I feel really good about moving forward. And I'm this, I'm excited. This is phenomenal. And with just about $17.5 million, I think we get a first round to kind of flesh out what the issues might be, acknowledging there will be some and work through them. So I thank you. Well, thank you for this time. And I would also add, I think it's a great idea to add staff and not try to throw it on existing staff. So thank you. Well, I appreciate that. I know it's been a collaborative effort to date and we could use more capacity and just want to respond quickly to the point about most impacted, that's language that's used in the Treasury guidance and will be more specific to say those residents, most impacted specifically by COVID-19, the health impacts, as well as the economic impacts associated with the pandemic. Recognizing that, of course, many of those are rooted in things that people had been experiencing prior to the pandemic. Thank you. There's someone I asked you to go ahead and move on. Okay, so just a couple more slides here. As we look forward to the next phase of this process, staff is really focused on this question. How will we track and measure the impact of these investments? And to be good stewards of these funds, additional staff capacity is needed to comply with federal guidelines and ensure that funding decisions contribute to equitable, measurable and transformative impacts. So just to give you a bit more detail about the additional staff capacity that we are recommending. We are recommending that we hire two full-time positions. One would be housed in the Budget Management and Services Office and one would be housed in the Finance Office. The position in Budget Management Services would be largely focused on managing the grant-making process all the way from engaging residents to establishing budgets and monitoring expenditures. And the position in finance would be focused on the accounting process, but this team would really work together to ensure that the process is again as effective, efficient and equitable as possible. So to go back to the timeline, just wanted to say that moving forward, we really see this as ongoing rounds of engagement and review and allocation while evaluating all along the way and improving the process as we go. So just to close with our final recommendations, these are the top recommendations that we bring before you today. First is to hire two new positions to build the capacity that's needed to administer these funds. Second is to establish a review committee to vet and prioritize proposals that would be comprised both of city staff and residents to continue to review proposals for eligibility with the most positive reviews using the scorecard moving forward to you that you would make the final decisions about which proposals are funded. And then to plan for ongoing rounds of engagement, proposal development, review, allocation and evaluation. And so with that, I'm happy to open it up for discussion. I know that Bertha and I look forward to taking your questions. Thank you very much, Ms. Patterson. Can you take down the slides? Thank you. We really appreciate your presentation. So I do have one question and then I'll open it up. So to what extent are we coordinating with the county? You know, I see education proposals. And when I see education proposals, I think that's what the county should spend their money on, you know, that's just an example. So can you talk about that a little bit? I'm happy to, I know that in the engagement phase, we've been very closely coordinating with the county to ensure that any ideas or input that we receive is shared. And then I know deputy city manager Johnson can probably say more about what's planned moving forward. Yes, thank you, Lita. And thanks for the presentation. We are, the county is working with us and they have been at all of our engagement opportunities with our residents. They also will be presenting to their county commissioners and using similar many other slides that we have in this presentation. I believe that's on September 12th. What we believe will be the best way to collaborate moving forward is that we have the review committees that we have county staff on those proposal review teams that are county related functions. As you mentioned, particularly health, we talked about making sure that we have someone from Durham County Public Health to participate on those teams. The interim county manager, Claudia Hager has expressed to us, you know, her interest in us jointly funding proposals that are, you know, city county proposals. So there's much engagement to be done. And also, just as a reminder, you know, at the end of the day, they are going to vote on, you know, the final proposals as you are as city council. But we are really hopeful that we can bring forward some joint proposals to the city and county as well as the county taking on some of those proposals that are most aligned with the work they do today today. Thank you very much. Yeah, I just think that's really gonna be important. I could see, I could see, yeah, I worry about confusion and overlap and all that, but it sounds like y'all are doing a great job coordinating and I really appreciate it. And I see some in the chat, Mayor Pro Tem Johnson points out that participatory budgeting does use an equity tool. So I just wanted to mention that. All right, colleagues, other questions or comments for Ms. Patterson, Council Member Freelon. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you so much for the presentation. It was very informative. And I just wanted to first to comment just to extend some gratitude to the city manager. Well, this is like a unique situation getting this money from the federal government. It gives us this kind of unprecedented one-time opportunity to make this big investment. It's really exciting. I'm really excited about the internal shifts that Durham has had to make in order to create space for a really immersive community engagement process, which the city manager has affirmed will continue beyond this process and could hopefully help impact and improve our participatory budgeting process. And I'm particularly talking about the budget healing. It's just a really, like you said, it's something the community has been waiting on and asking for for a long time. And outside of this particular process, I think we need to be engaging community in this way about our regular budget every single year, several times throughout the year. So I'm grateful for that. I had a comment about the scorecard. You asked about the scorecard and you know, I've learned just from listening to community members and community organizers, there are a lot of critiques about how city processes and access to city funds are kind of, you know, privileged nonprofits that are really good at kind of nailing criteria and scorecards like this one. And it kind of, it's one of those invisible ways that white supremacy excludes, you know, working class folks who are putting proposals together don't have the same infrastructure to be able to, you know, to nail seven out of eight of those criteria. So there is, I think there, it would be great to engage some of those folks with the scorecard to get their critical feedback. I don't have any substantive contributions to offer other than to go back to the same community that you spoke to for some of the budget healing stuff to present them with the scorecard and get them to really read into it. And I don't know if some things, you know, equity could be more weighted, for example, than some of the other, you know, some of the other areas. I think there are people in the community that would be better equipped than I am to be able to do that detailed analysis. And there might even be able, there might even be some institutional support that we could garner from the, you know, the Race Equity Institute, or the, or sorry, I'm thinking the Samuel Du Bois Cook Institute for Race Equity at Duke. They just put out a really amazing report about the impacts of COVID on Black Durham, for example. And there's a great organization that put a back in the Black proposal together that talks about, you know, the history of ways in which public policy is undermined Black agency and wealth building capacity in the past and that this could be a restorative opportunity for us to make an intervention in Durham's Black community specifically. And that's really exciting to me. And I would love for our rubric to reflect that as a focus area in a way potentially that's weighted for projects coming from Black organizations, or I'm not exactly sure how to make that happen. And again, I'm just kind of thinking that it would be great to talk to the back in the Black people or the Bull City 919. There's a couple of organizations, the Durham committee, you know, there are a couple of organizations that I think would be really good to run the rubric by to get feedback from folks on the criteria. Yeah, so those are my comments. Thank you. Great comments, council member. Thank you so much. And thank you for that important reminder. Colleagues, other questions or comments for Ms. Patterson, council member Freeman. Thank you, Ms. Mayor. I just wanted to fully associate myself with council member Freelance comments and just noting that there's a lot to the actual like work of doing race equity in our inside of our funding stream. And so just acknowledging that that was what was missing in our participatory budgeting process is what I was getting at. And so you might have used an equity tool, but an equity tool without acknowledging who it directly is accountable to doesn't quite get to the point. And so I really appreciate council member Freelance calling it out and saying that we should be talking to the Black Agenda 919. We should be talking to the Durham Committee on Affairs of Black People. We should also be talking to the people that are in the committee for people with disabilities. There's a whole host of folks who are disproportionately impacted by this COVID-19 pandemic. And the data does tell the story. And so the reason we have to do vaccine equity and the reason we rushed, all of those things were based in that aspect of race equity that we're not talking about right now, but I think the tool does get to that. And so that, which is why I appreciate what you changed in that point, instead of focusing on the 51% community benefit, which is all broad and wide, you're changing it to actually say what the Treasury has already acknowledged is that we actually have to use racial equity. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Any final comments? Ms. Patterson, thank you. We appreciate you. It's really wonderful to have you on our city staff as a Fuse Fellow. And I've just heard great things about your work and I wanna appreciate this excellent report today. Thank you so much. Ms. Johnson, thank you as well. We've heard good things about you too. Over the years. All right, thank you so much for being with us and we're looking forward to the next, we're looking forward to what's next and excited about the proposals and what you're gonna bring to us and many thanks. All right, colleagues, now we're going to move on to item 29. Let me figure out here in a minute what item 29 is. Oh, I see Mr. Allure. This must be the quarterly report. It is indeed. Mr. Allure, good to see you. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of Council. John Allure, I'm the Acting Director of Budget and Management Services. I'll try to be brief here and giving you some highlights of the end of year, the fourth quarter report ending fiscal year 2021. And what I'd say is overall it is good news. And there's some areas of concern that we will not have, I don't think at this point of great concern but certainly things we need to draw your attention to as we move very rapidly onto the first quarter report of FY22 in about a month's time. So as we always do with the general fund, so this is the summary is that expenditures were under budget by approximately 8.4 million. This had to do with a lot of savings in personnel, lap salaries, vacancies, and also some operational savings having to do with departments. In the current environment, not getting to spend all of their budgets operationally. All departments ended within budget naturally. And then the expected revenue surplus, it's approximately $18.2 million. The main drivers here are, as you will see sales tax and property tax, an overall positive variance of 26.6 million. To summary of our revenues, the major revenues for the quarter, as you can see, the blue being the actual, the red being the budget. There's more detail in this, but as we go on, but just gives you a brief visual of where we stand. Next slide. Speaking of sales tax, so 11 months of collection, $69.2 million. And this includes some positive good news due to the renegotiation of our interlocal agreement with the county. The projection for 12 months is $78.1 million. And our final payment will actually come, it's expected to come tomorrow. So we'll know if that bears fruit by tomorrow. As you would imagine, strong recovery from COVID, which led to much higher collections. And this is statewide. I think in all 100 counties, we were, our colleagues were all caught by surprise by this. Property tax, about a $5 million positive variance. And the next following slides kind of give you where we stand moving up, looking at the various fiscal years, actual to budget. So here's the sales tax, is a very large positive variance of about $14 million. Next slide. Utility tax. Saw a reduction there in what we received from the state on utility tax payments. Permits, an increase, almost a doubling, although it's not a lot of money. I will bring it to your attention because as we get down later slides, I would say that I would characterize that as don't count on that. That is a one time thing that is mostly driven by driveway permits. Occupancy tax, of course, down. As a lot of that has to do with what happens in the downtown business core and particularly what happens with the Deepak and hotels, et cetera. Power bill is up. We budgeted very, very conservatively because we thought particularly with the power bill, revenues, the gas revenues that that would be down. But in the end, the state rewarded us with more than we expected, $6.1 million. Charges for services. Better than we expected at $8.8 million. Although I would say that what is hidden in this what was positive was we didn't expect the amount in planning and development fees to be so robust. We certainly saw reductions in our parks and recreations charges for services programs. Just overall with the general fund, just a summary of what we just talked about and then moving on to expenditures. As I said, all departments showed surpluses. Some departments saw great surpluses. I mean, the number that you see right there that would stick out to you is the 2 million in emergency communications largely driven by vacancies. And we will have a report on the emergency communications department shortly after this. And then moving on, you see other, again, all of this, a lot of it driven by the vacancy situations in police and parks and recreation in public works. Moving on. And then just an overall summary, it sort of, it amalgamates everything we were talking about on the expenditure side into the sort of the aggregate areas of personnel services, operating expenditures, et cetera. Fund balance. So at the June 30th of last year, our position was $51.8 million. All things considered, we project fund balance for looking back a couple of months to be $67.8 million, which is about $34.7 million above the policy level threshold of 16.7%. This will be confirmed. This is what our friends in accounting tell us. This will be confirmed when the audit is certified and you'll certainly get a report on that in the coming council work session cycles. It's just looking at the financial position a little differently, budget to actuals don't have a whole lot to say on this other than to say that, you know, a lot of the revenues, the way they performed was not how we expected them to perform. It was a very robust situation and a lot of them and in some areas we certainly saw reductions where we did expect them. Moving on. So moving on to the major enterprise funds, water and sewer fund, overall revenues were close to budget, expenses slight reduction there. There's a large transfer to the CIP, which you will see. Again, the water position with the revenue continue and then overall you have a slight positive variance of $120,000 transit operations fund. This is one of the funds obviously that we're looking at very, very closely. Operating revenues were not even close to what we expected primarily due to the fare free ridership. We were able to balance some of that with a reduction in operating expenses but overall the projection is slightly going over budget. Here you see the revenue side of the picture and you certainly see the reduction in revenues there, 2.6 million. Next slide, thank you so much. Oh, seemed to skip the head there. Thank you, we can just stay, yeah, perfect. Thank you, Christina. And overall the variance is to the red by just under a million dollars for the transit fund. I'll say more about that after we finish with the parking fund moving on to solid waste. Overall the fund blend the fiscal year with the deficit just shy of about a quarter of a million dollars. Operating revenues less than what we budgeted and certainly we saw what I would say is some increases in the overtime on the expenditure side. So here you have the revenues and the reduction by about $600,000. And then moving on to the expenditures, you see the slightly as overall a budget variance of $96,000. Stormwater fund ended quite well. Year end results about 108% above budget on the revenues and then on the expenditures below budget by 88.5%. And overall, you see the increase in revenues here and then on the expenditure side, you see the savings in the expenditures 1.6 million with a positive variance of about $3 million on the stormwater fund. Finally, a parking. So the revenues had a shortfall of 65.83 to budget as you would imagine due to the lack of parking demand. We had a bond risk financing that helped to smooth some of this and obviously a reduction in operating expenditures. So here you see the loss in operating revenues to the tune of about $3.9 million. And then on the expenditures, some slight savings there, but overall a deficit of $2.9 million. So what I would say about both transit and parking quite obviously is we're monitoring this very, very closely. We've met with our partners in both in finance and Sean Egan and Thomas Leathers to discuss the situation because of course we wanna know moving forward how this is gonna look. And a lot of it is not being able to establish a baseline. So where we like to project based on what we thought was normal going into Q1 is not normal because we're not seeing the return of the downtown core as they anticipated. So it's certainly people from transportation are available to answer your questions to more detail. But what I characterize it is say that we're closely monitoring the position with these funds, but it's still very, very difficult to establish as I say what the goal line is. Finally just throw this in the debt service fund to say overall that the debt service fund is performing fine. We have no issues there. Any other fund that is missing here is simply because there's not a whole lot to discuss with them and that they're performing as to be expected. And I think at the year end report that no news is good news with all of this. And that concludes the presentation. I normally we end this with sort of a budget highlights. I'm not gonna do that this time because the picture changes so much. And if I were to give you budget highlights right now they'd probably be stale in a couple of weeks or it would have been stale by the time we wrote them. Other than to say as I say that we're very rapidly we'll be preparing the Q1 report. We very rapidly will be going into preparations for how we proceed with the FY23 budget process. I've certainly heard all of the comments today here about how we open up the budget process to be even more inclusive. How we apply an equity lens and an equity tool to the budget process. Certainly when we talk about ARP and we look at that equity tool that those tools are not done in a vacuum. And I can say that people are advancing on these fronts in iterations and we are learning from each other and applying those things. And what I would say is allow us just a little more time but I would anticipate by the time we get to retreats in February and March that you'll have more information on those things. Mr. Allure, thank you as always for a great report. Excellent presentation. And I know that budgeting through this pandemic has been as hard as all the other departments working through this pandemic and you all have done a great job. Colleagues, questions and comments for Mr. Allure. Mr. Allure, I have one, the fund balance in the $64 million, the $64 million, am I getting that number roughly correct? Yeah, about $34 million above the threshold, yes. Where, what was, when we met at the retreat what was the number that we predicted? How different is it from that? I sense that we are better off than what we had predicted at that time, is that right? We are better off, I can't put you the exact number. My memory seems to say around 55 is what I remember. Yes, it's better off. It's one of the reasons when we talk about ARP that particularly with the general fund in terms of revenue recovery at one time we were considering asking or considering using something some of the ARP money for revenue recovery for the general fund, we are no longer considering that. Because it's such the robust consider, we wanna save that for what Lila and Bertha presented about to you earlier, that there just doesn't seem to be the need for revenue recovery in the general fund. Thank you. Colleagues, other questions and comments for Mr. Allure. Mr. Allure, thank you. It was a great report and congratulations to everyone in the staff who is managing our budget and all the departments. It's wonderful to see that as usual, every single department came under their budget target. So congratulations to you, to all of your staff who works with the departments and to everybody in the city who's make this great report possible. Thank you so much. You are very welcome and thank you also to our partners in the finance department and in particular acting director Emily Desiderio, who has always been a great colleague and is always a great set of eyes as we will continue to work in conjunction on these matters. Thank you so much. Madam manager. Mr. Mayor, thank you. I don't like to pop in on too many presentations but I did want to, as Mr. Allure was speaking about the savings, he mentioned numerous times that much of that savings is because of vacancies that we have in some of our operating departments. So I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the employees who are working in the operating departments with many, many vacancies and that involves overtime and a lot of day-to-day grind, I would call it. It saves us money and we are working to feel positions like other organizations are doing in a pandemic but our employees rise to the occasion day in and day out to take up for those vacancies where John is reporting. We're doing good financially. There's a employee side to that. So thank you, John. I thank John for stepping up to serve in the acting role on a permanent basis and look forward to us moving into our next budget season. Thank you, yes. And John, Mr. Laura, I should have mentioned that. Thank you for stepping up to that. We know you well and we're grateful. We know you got it. Thank you. All right, colleagues, thank you Madam Manager and now we'll move on to item 30 and this is the Durham Master Aging Plan presentation. And I believe that Joan Pelletier is here with us. Oh, Gina, are you, Ms. Upchurch, are you getting started for us? I am going to get started for us. If you can hear me, okay, I'm going to share our slides and walk us through the slides. Thank you. Are you gonna introduce yourself, Ms. Upchurch or should I introduce you? No, I'll do it. Thank you. I'm just trying to get my slides up here. So I'm Gina Upchurch and I'm here as a representative with Aging Well Durham with a team of people and we've got a little bit of time but I just wanna thank the Mayor, Mayor Shull, Mayor Pro Tem Johnson, all the hard work in council folks and Manager Page for having us. This is a lot of hard work you all do and we've been sitting here since one and we see what you do. So thank you for your service to our city. And we really appreciate the chance to get in front of you. We came one time to your meeting and then you got invited back to this work session so we really appreciate this opportunity. So I'm gonna be the first speaker and I'm gonna see if I can get the big screen here for you and from the beginning, here we go. See if you can see it, okay. And so I am just going to start us off I'm the executive director of senior pharmacists in Durham but we are representing a large group of individuals. So I represent one community-based organization but there are many that have been working on what you're about to hear. Next you're gonna hear from Chalisa Howard Martinez who's done a ton of work, wonderful work in Durham but she most recently helped facilitate the Durham Master Aging Plan with Melissa Black and you'll hear about that from her. You'll hear from Dr. Janet Becker who's an associate professor and director of the Duke Roybal Center on Aging. You'll hear from Joy Gardner who's a volunteer not only at senior pharmacists but at the Durham Center for Senior Life and Mr. Johnson is with us I believe also but he's had a medical issue it's not gonna be able to speak to you but he's with the senior Tarhill legislature and he's been helping prepare this for you also. So our design outcomes is we're gonna give you an overview of how two coalitions have become or are becoming one agency called Aging Well Durham. We filed for articles of incorporation and we're going to be working with the IRS to get 501C three status and you'll hear a little bit more about that. We're gonna talk about the Durham Master Aging Plan that's laid out a lot of our workforce. And finally you're gonna hear about a request and we've already made it to you once but it's gonna be for $150,000 a year for two years to match what the county is doing so that there'll be 300,000 a year to get this initiative going and you'll hear more about the initiative. I wanna say on a personal level I think this is a very meager request to take and support very bold action. So there've been two coalitions. One called Durham's Partnership for Seniors and you may know about other names that's been called Keeping in Step through the Years, the United Way Senior Issue Team, Results-Based Accountability Senior Issue Team and then when we work with Duke it was called HIP or Healthy in Place Seniors but it's been a very sort of loose coalition of dedicated people but very little staffing to support it. It's a longstanding coalition. It's been the springboard for many initiatives and it recommends how Durham County can spend our block grant funding around aging services. It's hosted several aging summits which I know several of you have attended and it led the effort to create the Master Aging Plan and the city supported that and now we're asking for support to help implement some of that. Then when COVID hit and some of those same people but other people gathered steam and we called ourselves the Durham's Partnership for Seniors and more COVID response and it really began in response to what was going on with COVID. It began with us training each other on telephone reassurance and sharing resources. Then we started coordinating agencies around food, volunteers, critical resources, handouts, for example, when SNAP or Food and Nutrition Services expanded, we shared that information with each other so that it could get out to the community. We added several very engaged academic partners in our work which you'll hear about today. And then we cosponsored a successful community health worker grant which was initiative of the Duke Durham Fund and you'll hear a little bit about that. The reason this is important, how does wanna bring your attention to this number, excuse me, this number in the bottom right-hand corner if you can see my little arrow of 64%. So from 2018 to 2038, the population 60 and older in Durham County is supposed to grow 64%. I want you, I know in all your free time, if you can spend a little time looking at Chatham County, Orange County, Wake County, Caswell County and see what aging services they have at the county level that are often county departments. We don't have that here in Durham. We are very far behind the eight ball. We have what we need to make things happen in Durham but we need to come together. We don't need to all be necessarily in the same train cabin but we all need to be on the same train tracks going in the same direction. So what we're gonna be talking to you today is about how we coordinate many stakeholders and move in the same direction because we cannot do a good job in terms of what we do for older adults and not just older adults, aging adults, by the way, this whole initiative is around not just older adults but aging adults including people with disabilities whether it's vision problems or different ableness. So they're included in this. That's why it's called aging well Durham but 64% growth, we're not ready for it in terms of quantity or quality and we need your support to get there. So next I'm gonna hand it over to Shalisa to talk about some of the work that we've done. Thank you, Gina. Good afternoon everyone. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about the master aging plan, the timeline and also our process that we use to design the plan. So we first want to start off with this concept around livability and being an age-friendly community. So the focus is on older and aging adults but at the same time making your community more age-friendly, more livable for older adults makes it more age-friendly for everyone and particularly other groups that are vulnerable to social or health inequities or disparities. So folks like people with disabilities but also younger folks. So our goal is to make Durham just overall a more livable and age-friendly community. Here are some of the goals of livability that have been defined by AARP. So feeling safe in the community, participating in community activities, being treated with respect and then having access to key resources like housing and transportation. Also these goals of livability, we wanna make sure as we move forward with developing aging while Durham, we wanna make sure that as we develop strategies and partnerships around these goals of livability that we center the voices and lived experiences of those individuals who are aging in Durham. Next slide please. So here are the other four goals of livability, access to recreational activities and opportunities, health services, knowing what services and activities are available. This number six is really important. Durham has a lot of really wonderful resources but folks are very confused around how to access them and how to access information about them. And then of course, we also wanna emphasize having Durham being a place where everyone feels that they can contribute to the economic, civic and social life of the community and then receiving appropriate support if people can no longer safely maintain their independence and their homes. So this process began back in January of 2019. At that time, there was an application that was sent to AARP and the Royal Health Organization from Durham and included letter of support signed by Mayor Shul and also the County Commissioner, Head of the County Commissioner Wendy Jacobs. And then at the same time around this time, the Steering Committee got together to begin developing the vision, mission and values for the Durham Master Aging Plan. In March, we had a kickoff activity where we basically introduced this process to the community members and invited them to participate. And then the next month in April, we began developing parts of the plan with different working groups that worked on, for example, the domain definitions, but also goal statements. And basically from March of 2019 through August, 2019, we developed key parts of the plan. In August, we also developed and designed, I should say, a midpoint check-in meeting where we invited even more community members to share with them parts of the plan that already had been developed and also received their feedback and put about it. So in September, again, we got back together with the Living, Livability Working Groups where they developed strategies, indicators. The Steering Committee also continued to meet. They wanted to know more about how other communities have implemented their Master Aging Plan. And then from like about December of 2019 until March, 2020, we kind of just wrapped things up as far as the plan. So we had a map celebration. It was virtual because by that time, we were already headed into the COVID-19 pandemic. And we also did a presentation for the Durham County Board of County Commissioners. Next slide, please. Here's a list of some of the, well, all of the, I should say, all of the Durham Map Steering Committee members. So as you can see, is a very diverse group of different stakeholders of different organizations that are working in Durham to improve quality of life for aging adults and also people with disabilities. Next slide, please. So the map, the Master Aging Plan, there's several domains of livability. It's actually nine in total. And for Durham, we took those nine and we kind of combined them. So we come up with five working groups. So on the right side of your slide, you'll see the five working groups that develop each of those different domains. Next slide, please. A big part of our process was making sure that within each domain that we were doing a lot of check-ins and making sure there was alignment between the domain's components and also making sure that at all points, we were clarifying language and concepts, making sure that we were all clear about our common language for what we wanted to do with this Master Aging Plan. We also took time at each session to share information about emerging initiatives at the local and state level. So for example, during this process, the housing bond was an issue that was going to be voted on in Durham. So there was a lot of discussion around how does the housing bond impact, for example, the housing domain. We also had folks who were working on the city's comprehensive plan come in and talk to us about things around transportation. Another key part of this design process was that we wanted to make sure we had ongoing engagement and brought in new perspectives at the working group levels, whether that was new stakeholders, representing organizations and communities, but also individual older adults to be a part of this process. Next slide please. This slide lists the maps, cross-cutting issues. So these are all priorities that we feel should be part of all aspects of the plan. And so another piece of this is that as we developed each component, we also would go and check back in to make sure that these showed up throughout the plan. And I think moving forward with Aging World Durham, we'll definitely try to work on developing a framework that also includes the cross-cutting issues to make sure that this work continues, that these lens of thinking about these different priorities based on community members' needs and identities and situations that they continue to be a priority for our work with Aging World Durham. Next, I want to talk a little bit about how the Durham Master Aging Plan aligns with the city of Durham's current strategic plan. So we took a look at your strategic plan and we thought that we mostly aligned with the goal around connected, diverse and engaged communities and the different objectives underneath that goal. Next slide, please. So for example, for the Master Aging Plan our outdoor spaces domain, the domain definition around outdoor spaces being available throughout Durham and being the needs of all users. Also, green space and buildings are being plentiful, affordable, accessible, well-maintained, beautiful, inviting and safe for all. That is the vision for how we want outdoor spaces to be for Durham. Next slide, please. And so in the city's strategic plan, there's also an objective around cultivating strong connections between neighbors, making sure that neighbors and residents and community stakeholders are able to develop strategies to strengthen and stabilize neighborhoods. So next slide, please. So how we kind of feel like, again, the alignment between the Master Aging Plan and the current strategic plan for Durham is also within the Durham maps outdoor spaces domain, there is a goal around collaborating with public and partner partnerships or partners to support inclusive and equitable access to outdoor spaces and building. And as a strategy for that, we are talking about improving outdoor safety by using aging accessibility and racial equity as lenses for design. And one of our indicators for that is also, again, working with folks who are developing the Durham Comprehensive Plan to make sure that it reflects the needs and preferences of older adults, individuals living with disabilities and communities that have been historically marginalized because of their race and ethnicity. So now I'm gonna turn it over to Dr. Bedker who is going to describe the Durham Partnership for Seniors in More COVID-19 Response Project and also academic partners and their role in this new nonprofit. Thanks so much, Chalisa. And thanks to the city's leadership, we really appreciate your support in developing and endorsing this plan. It has just been an interesting afternoon listening to all the work that's been brought forward and discussions today. And as we were preparing for this and just thinking how the pandemic delayed implementation on the Master Aging Plan, it's clear the areas identified and those that Chalisa just covered are still very relevant, if not even more important. The longstanding coalition of partners that Gina described at the outset were not idle, obviously in these last 18 months. Actually new partnerships were activated to meet the needs of the community and that was really exciting and have continued to meet with the same enthusiasm despite all the hardships over this last year. I was especially moved during this working session, during the citizen matters discussions on housing and transportation and couldn't agree more. We all found, and particularly with the older adult community and persons with disability, it's difficult getting information to people in need and even finding people with unmet needs to be able to help them. And so this Durham partnership for seniors and more expanded coalition, this larger group, came together to support many new initiatives that had not been planned pre-pandemic. I'd like to spend a minute on just specifically on the cohort of community health promoters and how they were brought together to provide support to older adults where they live. Next slide please, thanks. When thinking about this role, community health promoters, it was really, I just want to put in context of who these folks were that came together. So here we were in a time where services were suspended or at reduced capacity, there were even greater needs for food, healthcare access, et cetera. And Project Access of Durham housed a position to support a cohort of 25 individuals to help residents meet their basic needs. These community health promoters spanned generations, they represented different races, they spoke different languages, they lived themselves in public housing or in senior housing, they were volunteers of local organizations. This COVID response project was made possible with Duke Durham funding and was really a signal of how much work we have left to do. It was also an indicator of what's possible with funded positions committed to the health of our community, specifically with a focus on equity and aging. Next slide please. As an academic partner, one of many that were involved and continue to be involved in the coalition, I want to speak in support to the request here today because of the city's commitment to the master aging plan implementation will actually be a catalyst for all of us to think about the many other improvements and investments that we can make in an age-friendly community. You've already had this vision and have committed to it, it's listed with the World Health Organization, it's listed nationally with AARP. So with a coordinated strategy of centralized support, we have the opportunity to be inclusive and be thinking differently. Also bringing forward, I think from where I sit as an academic partner we'll be able to more equitably be able to bring additional resources to Durham so that we can all reach a common goal and move forward in areas that maybe we hadn't yet considered. I think I'm going to transition now to Joy. Joy, you with us? Yes, yes. Okay, great, thanks. Thank you. With support of the city of Durham and Durham County, we are proposing to develop a backbone organization to manage several roles related to map implementation and linkage with city and county goals. Agent Well Durham, it will retain the active community engagement and recruit additional partners to join Agent Well Durham as it implements the map. Transition to five liveability for work groups that design the map to implement work groups of Agent Well Durham. Next, okay. Agent Well will have the vision of Durham as a community where aging adults age well and drive. Agent Well Durham will have, promotes collaborative efforts to build a safe, affordable, accessible, connected and inclusive community for aging adults in Durham. Agent Well Durham will provide a collaborative space to pull everyone together to work on upstream priorities. Agent Well Durham will convene and provide continuous support to work in groups for the master age plans implementation. Agent Well Durham will center community members live experiences with a specific focus on those who have experienced health inequities. Agent Well Durham is requesting $300,000 for two years of funding, $150,000 per year for the nonprofit Agent Well Durham, which assumes the roles and responsibilities of two groups, Durham partnership for seniors and Durham partnership for seniors plus more, COVID response coalitions. Funding from the city will match that from Durham County. County's funding is contingent on Agent Well Durham receiving funds from the city. Agent Well Durham is also requesting the city support with collaboration with cities, initiatives, information sharing, alignment of priorities and strategies and long-term sustainability. We thank you for assisting us today. And if we have any other questions, please let us know. Thank you all so much for a great presentation. I'm not sure who's got the slides up. If you could take those down, that would be great. Thank you. Ms. Gardner, Ms. Uptchurch, Dr. Bedker and Ms. Howard Martinez. Thank you, great presentation. Colleagues, let me just give you a little context here. Those of y'all who are enjoying City County when we were meeting in person a while back, we signed the, we agreed to sign on to the master aging plan. I signed that on behalf of the city as our friends here indicated Wendy signed at the time as chair on behalf of County. And this work has then gone on subsequent to that. The County, both Commissioner Howerton and Commissioner Jacobs have spoken to me about the fact that they have approved $150,000 in funding for this work to set up this backbone organization contingent on the city's funding. So they're asking us to join them in funding this at $150,000 a year for two years. As I understand it, this would not be an ongoing expenditure. This would be a two year commitment. And so I just wanted to let you all know that this is part of the, this is not only a request from our friends here today, but also a request from the County Commission that we matched them. So I think now I see Ms. Pelletier here. Do you also have some comments? No, other than thank you all for hearing our presentation and for considering our request. Thank you. Well, you all did a great job of presenting and putting this presentation together and more to the point, you've done a lot of amazing work and I really am very appreciative. Colleagues, comments, questions at this time for our presenters. Council Member Caballero. Just a gratitude for the presentation and thank you for coming back. I know I remember when you all were here a few months ago. Others? Council Member Middleton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I look forward to availing myself of much of the work product of this group in a few more years here in Durham. So I'm really excited about all the work that you're doing. Thank you so much. Just a quick question. The $300,000 which I certainly support partnering with our friends at the County. What happens after the two years? I'll try to take that and everybody else can chime in. So this work has been done on a voluntary basis except for a small grant we had as the partnership for seniors coordinator. It was a full-time position that kept getting sliced and diced till now. Now it's just about $12,000 from the County. I see it as sort of infrastructure for the work that the city and County need to do but we know that it's not gonna work. We don't start it with some significant funding. I don't see this necessarily as a community-based agency that has to go out and raise money to do basic infrastructure type thing. So while I appreciate the mayor's comment and we are just asking for two years just to make sure it's working and we're creating the outcomes we wanna create to implement the master aging plan but this will be ongoing work. And I'm not saying it's just gonna rely on the city and County, you heard Dr. Betker talk about other funds that could come in but I see this is really infrastructure that supports the city and County's obligation really to support aging adults. But in a lot of communities there are actually departments within the government to get this done and that's not happening here. So something needs to be done and we're just asked for two years to jumpstart it and see how well we can pull it together to get it going. That's an honest answer, so. I appreciate it. Yes, Shalisa may have, yeah. Yeah, I was gonna add on to Gina's response that I think also this group has also looked at, for example, how could we use aging world, I'm sorry, to develop an accountable care community kind of model here in Durham, which definitely looks at developing community infrastructure but also looking at how do you develop collaborative funding relationships with other stakeholder groups in the community who are working on the same priority and also looking at, for example, other kind of investors, including city, County government but also even healthcare systems, health plans. So I think there's a lot of opportunity for innovation and thinking about how do we maintain this over time? But it's gonna take just an initial investment just to get us started on just thinking about all the different possibilities for how this could be sustainable. Thank you all. Other questions or comments, Mayor Pro Tem? Thank you, Mr. Mayor and thank you everyone for being here today and for your presentation. It's been great hearing more about this proposal. We've had a couple of residents come to us asking about it and so it's good to see the progress that's been made. I'm excited to partner with the County to make this happen. Wondering if our staff knows what the funding source is for this and was also, I know this is just a presentation today on our agenda at what point would we actually be asked to allocate the resources? I think they're asking us to allocate the resources soon. Madam Manager. Yeah, Madam Manager. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. So anytime we have consideration to give consideration to any new funding after a budget has already passed, provided we get the direction from council, we will go and look for the most appropriate funding according to the request. If the request as it has been here today is supported by the council and it's one time, obviously we have one time funding and a fund balance which would potentially be the best funding source to fund an initiative such as this. There wouldn't be another place to go. Thank you, Madam Manager. Thank you. I just had one more thing, Mr. Mayor. Sure. There are a number of things that we would like the county to partner with us on and thinking about one that we talked about today with the tax grants and making that a county-wide program. So I'm not saying that we should, there's no quid pro quo, but I hope that they see this as a sign of good faith that we are excited about partnering with them. And I hope that we can also take the county on board with some of our priorities and initiatives. That's a great point. Council Member Freeman. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you all for the presentation. I really appreciate it. I did have a chance to check in on Filer City's services and it looks like they have a council on aging, which we do not have in the city of Durham. And it would be great to actually have that acknowledging that one of our largest populations is of seniors and people who are aging and we would hope would be thriving. And mindful that it may seem like this is a county effort that we should partner on, but I think it's more of a city effort, acknowledging how many folks who are seniors live within the city limits. I had hoped that you could separate out how many that was because it could probably show that more of them live in the city limits and are using city services. And any way that we can ensure that they're thriving, which is the version of, you know, live, work and play that we always talk about as our timeline has to be included in what we're doing with our seniors. And I'm excited as well. I'm grateful for each of you and for all the work. And it takes a lot of time. I will say that I noted, I think this closest closest we get is the mayor's committee on folks with disability. And I would hope that you could come and present there as well. Maybe that could give you a little bit more handles on how to push in on, on departments because I feel like this should be something that came from a department. So if there was something in collaboration with a parks and rec or a, you know, I'm trying to think of what's with other departments or neighborhood improvement services, there, there is, there's definitely some on ramps here. And I would love to make sure that it doesn't just live as just the kind of an all shoot one time, you know, $300,000 contribution. And then you're just off on your own. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Two of our member, two of our city staff were on the, on the steering committee. Miss Phillips from transportation and Miss Stancil from neighborhood improvement services. And many things that we do in the city, of course, touch seniors very deeply. Parks and Rec indeed, transit, affordable housing, many of the things that we work on. I'm going to, it sounds like I'm, I'm not going to let council member Freeland comment because he's too young. We're going to have an age limit. We're going to, we're going to privilege our seniors here, council member, council member, where you'd like to comment. No, that was laughing. Okay. So I hear a lot of support here. And what I'm going to do is council members, I'm going to ask for some thumbs. If you were supportive of supporting this two year. Funding. Could I see your thumbs. All right. Sounds like we've got it. So what'll happen now. I'm going to ask for some thumbs. I'm going to ask for some thumbs. Ms up church and, and, and company is that. This, our administration will figure out how to fund this though. At some point, the, you know, some point in the near future, I'll bring a motion to us. That to allocate those funds, but you see that you have the unanimous support of the council. We really appreciate y'all being with us today. And, and bring us such a great report and thank you for your work. All right. Thank you everybody. We appreciate you. Thank you so much with us. Thank you. All right. We will now move to our last presentation, which is Mr. Randy Beaman. And this is the presentation on, on 911. Mr. Beaman, good to see you. It's really nice to have you with us today. And we're looking forward to your presentation. You're, you're our last presentation today. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And let me share my screen. Can you see that, Mr. Mayor? Yes, we can. Okay. Thank you very much. I'm trying to get an icon move here for a moment. Okay. So Mr. Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, council members, Madam manager and executive team. Today I want to bring forward some serious discussions around Durham Merge Communication Center. Durham Merge Communication Center recognizes it's critically important to fully staff our 911 center with well trained professionals to serve anyone in need of emergency assistance. I know our community members have expressed concerns about 911 call answer times. And that you are hearing from people in the community about their concerns. I recognize and take responsibility that we are not meeting acceptable standards of call answer times. We're not meeting the expectations of our residents and visitors when callers are not able to receive assistance in appropriate time for emergencies. I want to state a few things unequivocally. We are answering 911 calls and residents should absolutely call us in an emergency. While a majority of the calls are answered quickly, we understand too many people are experiencing prolonged wait times. I will not rest until the center achieves a standard of excellence in call answer times that the residents of Durham deserve. In today's presentation, I will outline transparently where we are right now, what immediate steps are being taken to better handle existing call lines and where we are on our journey to permanently achieve and maintain adequate staffing. I also want to take this opportunity to recognize the incredible work of our call takers and the heavy burden they have carried. Our call volumes have served and while we have plans in motion to address our high vacancy rate, I'm going to share with you today that it will take time for those efforts to have impact. In that meantime, the increase in calls has fallen on their shoulders. This team is second to known and they are invested in the future of this center. I want to be sure to take this opportunity to publicly thank them for their dedicated public service. We're staffing updates. I want to talk to you currently through the most recent data. We have a vacancy of 28 full-time employees. Public safety telecommunicator employees. We have 11 part-time public safety telecommunicators who are working at least 20 hours a month. These part-time employees do not reduce our vacancies because they are not considered full-time. But they are supporting us in a huge way. Staffing is not where we need it. Call volumes are high. We are experiencing unplanned and elevated absenteeism, coupled with challenges of attrition. Present to you on the graph here is talking about call volumes for July. There are four areas that I want to wish to point out for you. 9-1-1 calls for July, the total was 27,913 calls. That is the fifth, the most calls in five years that has occurred in a single month. That is this month, 27,913 calls. Moving over to the right side of this table, you will see answered times in seconds. There are two very important areas I wish to point out for you. Answer time in 10 seconds, 75.27%. Answer time in 20 seconds, 81.03%. Industry standard tells us that we should be answering 90% of our calls, 9-1-1 calls, in 10 seconds or less. And 20 seconds, we should be answering 95% of those 9-1-1 calls. I also want to point out to you at the bottom of the graph, you will see average answer time in seconds. Of the calls we answered, 9-1-1 calls in July, we answered those calls in 10.41 seconds. We are supporting this process of call answering by we've implemented an on-call reporting system for administrative staff as well as communication staff. And these folks, our employees are receiving compensation for this on-call process. We've added incentives for recruiting higher skilled individuals, master column officers as well as certified training officers. Those skills will help shorten the training time and also assist us in the staffing levels. These benefits, not only are we looking at for external recruitment processes, but we're also looking forward into our internal promotions and career pathways by offering these incentives. We've also added an overtime incentive to encourage more staff coverage, recognizing the efforts. And we are paying our folks double time for these efforts to help in supporting us in these call answer times and the call volumes. What are we doing now? Here are some of the immediate steps that we're taking. We are streamlining the call taking process by implementing industry standards on how we process those calls. We are mindful that faster call processing provides us the ability to answer more calls. However, certain emergency call types, we cannot consider these call processing standards because we must respond appropriately dependent upon that particular type of emergency call that the call takers and telecommunicators are handling. Most recently, our staff has generated a tracking tool to help support in our mentoring and live training programs through training documentation that will better manage the timely release of our trainees. We're adding capacity. We are taking and have taken eight steps in adding capacity, and we're gathering support and receiving support from our public safety partners. Our fire department personnel are currently assisting us in dispatch. Additional personnel are scheduled actually next week, 13th through the 17th, to take what we call an abbreviated basic training class to help support us. Our Sheriff's Department is providing and offering support from the communication telecommunicators there in the Sheriff's Department. Our emergency medical services partners are willing to provide us and are having people step up to help support us. Duke University is willing to help support us in staffing. We're also utilizing what we call an emergency hire process, wherever and whenever possible. We're utilizing retired and former employees for part-time staff and also to support us in the training. There are 11 part-time staff, and we are continuing to recruit in those efforts. We've modified the schedules for our trainees that are currently being mentored in the academies. We've modified those schedules so that not only are they receiving the job training, but they also are assisting during the peak hours of our call lines. In addition, we're looking at our policies. We're reviewing our policies for procedures. We're updating those on a regular basis so that we, one, maintain our operational compliance that, at the same time, we continue appropriate training. But we also maintain quality of our call management and our call processing. We have to maintain and make sure that our standards of calls processing and the training meets the standards so no matter what type of call surge, we must make sure that we are properly managing those calls within the standards and maintaining those compliances as we review these policies. We must maintain our accreditation as we review these policies, and we are mindful for the need of quality service as we are looking at these processes. The citizens deserve that quality of service even during those call surge situations. Moving on to what is our long-term successes and our progress? First, we want to talk about retention and support. We've implemented pay increases for overtime. We've increased employee engagement. We recognize their work performance, the calls training, regular communications, both written in one-on-one discussions. We acknowledge their value and their importance that they play in the work they do every day. We're providing resources for training, for mental wellness, and scheduling for work-life balance. In recruitment, we've been working, excuse me, all summer recruiting former employees, retired employees, and those employees who've left the ECC for a different career path but are willing to work part-time. We, with the support of HR, have a continuous recruiting process, and we've established a registry. We have recruitment notices posted on professional organizations, the websites, various social media platforms, attending job fairs, and also word of mouth. We've implemented a hiring bonus incentive for our external experienced telecommunicators, master comms, certified training officers, and also we provide a bonus for our internal community, our internal employees who desire to advance their careers and their skills. We continue to provide continuous training academies. We have two more academies before the end of this year. We've increased the academy size by eight trainees that will start this month, September the 20th. That is doubling the current academy. We have a November academy where we have planned to have 12 trainees. We will have 20 more staff by the end of this year. Now, this does not mean that all 20 will be released and functioning independently. However, it does mean that our continued efforts will reduce the vacancy levels in our training areas. We are continuing to recruit certified training officers. Currently, we've increased our training staff by three. One is hired. Two of these folks are scheduled to be in the September 20th academy. We've expanded that to include former trainers, retired staff who are working part-time, and they're going to support the live training of call takers, also supporting us in the cross training to those staff coming from other agencies. Our training curriculum has been streamlined to quickly move callers through the classroom and into the live training environment. Call training now has been reduced from 12 weeks to eight weeks, and that is total training time from classroom and also live mentoring training. Contingency plan. Attrition is unfortunately the reality of emergency communications industry. Attrition planning includes permanent training academies. These academies will be at different skill levels until there are no vacancies. We will continue to utilize the support of public safety partners, Fire Department, Mercy Medical Services, Durham Sheriff's Office, and Duke University. Most recently in the last passing weeks, we have been in discussion with our computer aided dispatch vendor, more addressing alternate routing in a different context. Alternate routing considerations are in discussion, and we will continue to investigate the most efficient and best way of looking at the alternate routing as a source for contingency planning. Our backup center is going to be serving as our training facility. The purpose for that is, is our current facility, our training quad limits us in the size of folks that we can bring into these academies. So we are now moving our training academy to the backup center where we have an afforded larger class sizes for training. September 20 academy is a combination of both call takers and training officers. This combination provides greater utilization of the skill sets and increases the division of training staff. In summary, I want you to know, we are not where we need to be. We are taking appropriate steps to get us to an acceptable standard of call answer time and to meet the expectations of our residents. We continue to training academies permanently with increased class sizes. We're supporting the hiring incentive bonuses, overtime pay considerations, standby pay for both public safety emergency communicators and our administrative staff. I want you to know that I am committed and diligently working and will not rest until we have returned to the standard of excellent in call answer times that the residents and visitors of Durham deserve. Mr. Mayor, at this time I'll be glad to take any questions. Thank you very much. Thank you very much, Mr. Beaman. We really appreciate it. Colleagues, you have heard Mr. Beaman's report and we really appreciate the fairness of it and the very clear explanation. And I'm going to open the floor now to questions or comments from my colleagues. Who'd like to get us started. Councilor Middleton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Director Beaman, good afternoon. Good to see you. And thank you for being with us. And I want to thank the administration, the staff as well. It was me who asked for this talk and this presentation at our last gathering. And I want to thank the staff for so quickly presenting it to us. So first I want to appreciate you for your forthrightness right at the beginning of the presentation. And you know, there's, there's, there's a bit of, well, not a bit, there's a crisis of confidence going on in our city regarding our emergency communication center. And I'm going to appreciate you for just acknowledging that right up front. I also want to appreciate you for the, talking about the incredible work that our call takers do and just the incredible pressure that they're under. This is not an easy job. It can be quite harrowing at times for the folk who take those calls, but they, they remain calm and professional under some really horror movie type scenarios sometimes when that call comes in. So I want to follow them watching and listening. I want you to know that, that there's a, an incredible reservoir of appreciation for just the pressure you're under and the stress of your job. I do have a couple of questions. I, the immediate steps being taken to improve call, answer time performance. The box was streamlining of processes. I, what does that mean? When we, when we say we're streamlining and we're going to be employing industry standards, does that suggest that we weren't doing that all the time using best practices in the industry and, in terms of our processes and, and what's the difference between a call that can be streamlined and one that can't be. And I guess a little bit of the history as to if, if we weren't doing it before, why weren't we? And if you just, just because, what does that streamlining mean? So, and council member streamlining in this process under the industry standard is we have what's called emergency rule. So if your call volumes are reaching such a level, then you can do a shortcut in the processing of a call. And so that is specific as to the, the volume of the calls. And even when you do that, we have to be very careful that we're not losing that quality of the call or the need of the call. So we use our scripted, if you will, priority dispatch, scripts for fire, emergency services and police. And so when we are in certain conditions, then we can do what's called the emergency rule and quickly disconnect. A lot of times when you're with a caller, you will stay on the line with the caller until either the, the responding agencies arrive. But we can do a quick, a quick disconnect. Now there are certain calls such as a respiratory or cardiac oriented that you are not able to quickly disconnect. You must stay on the line because you may need, and we'll need to give life saving measures. Okay. That's helpful. Thank you. I want to ask a little bit about the contingency planning. I think last time we discussed this, I was concerned that we were routing calls to Raleigh. And then we weren't doing that anymore. Not because the conditions that necessary, necessitated a routing were addressed, but because Raleigh just kicked us to the curb, they didn't want to take the calls anymore. And what I was curious about a concern about was that when Raleigh decided to stop taking our calls, in so far as that did not indicate that there no longer existed a reason for our calls to be routed. What was our immediate action at that, at that point? Now I know we talked about, I saw that, you know, increasing capacity and as part of our short-term steps, but was there any consideration of invoking any mutual aid agreements with other cities or other municipalities to step in where Raleigh stepped out? Because my assumption is that the need did not go away, just the partnership went away. So the moment that happened, what were the steps we took to take up the slack that Raleigh had left? And that's not pejorative towards them, in so far as they weren't doing it anymore. What was our action at that moment? So what we were doing is we were engaging our staff where when we were monitoring our call volumes and when we were bringing on our additional staff in the call-taking role, that we believed that we would be able to manage the call volume at that time. However, we are seeing higher call volumes than we have seen in quite some time. Right. So the belief that we could manage the increased call volume just happened to coincide with the precise moment when Raleigh decided not to do it anymore? So we have been, I'm sorry, we have been planning to bring on more staff and we were initially in the planning stages of disconnecting from Raleigh later. And so that was where we were developing and have been developing and training our staff to take over and not need the alternate routing. So I guess when Raleigh, however, when Raleigh decided not to do it anymore, that was not when we had planned on. Were we left in a lurch at that point when Raleigh did that? The scheduling and the timing was different than what was initially planned. So insofar as we were anticipating that the steps we were taking in terms of buttressing staff and getting additional personnel, when Raleigh stopped, whatever shape we were in at that point in hindsight, were we in fact ready to do it at that moment? Or should we have considered bringing in another municipality or another center to give us a more time or more cushion? We were prepared because what we were doing was also looking at adjusting shifts or scheduling of people so that we could manage the call. We had already been in that planning stage prior to the date. So we were already planning for that transition. We were not expecting the date when it occurred. Right. And I guess that's my point, that insofar as we were not planning on that date, was it our position that we would just make do until our contingency plans, our plans on adding personnel caught up with the level of the problem we were facing? No, sir. We were planning to take it over. We were already planning. And so we had the staff. We were adjusting schedules. We were adjusting staff as we added the staff that were coming off of the academies into the training. So we were already planning prior to the actual date. Okay. Would you speak to, and I'm glad that you put the graphic with the recent month's data call volume and answer time. Would you speak to residents and citizens who might be watching, who have heard the anecdotal stories out there and we've heard them a folk calling and not only did it take a long, I can imagine that, you know, when you're in the midst of an emergency, six seconds feels like 60 seconds. And if you call 911, you don't get an immediate answer, folk hang up and maybe call back. Would you speak to the, let residents and citizens know what they need to do. If they call 911 and the phone just keeps ringing. Based upon this graph here, should they just wait to stay on the phone? They eventually will be called or should they hang up and call back again? What would your counsel to them be? They absolutely need to stay on the line. The call will be answered. Because in the call management system, what we call call queue. So if you have dialed 911, you are in the system. And so therefore the next available operator will answer your call. If you hang up and you read out, then you are within the queue at a lower level. So you're removed through the queue at that point. So how much of, if we juxtapose where we are now, with the time when we were routing calls to Raleigh, what is different now, percentage, what do, how many, how in better shape are we, than we were when we were routing calls to Raleigh in terms of personnel, terms of staff and percentage wise, we have four more people than we did now. Quantify for me, our condition right now, relative to when we were routing calls to Raleigh. And I'll do respect. I would need to get you those numbers. I would not want to speak out of turn. Sure. You got ball parks to some sense of? I would say that we are, I would, I would estimate that we are at or better than when we were. But I would rather defer until I give you an exact answer. I think it's possible that we're at at the same level. We are better than where we were better. Okay. That's all I'll yield for now. I want to give my chance for my colleagues to jump in, but a direct to me. Thank you so much. I'll yield for now. Thank you. Thank you. Council member colleagues. Other questions or comments for Mr. Beaman. Council member Freeman and then mayor pro temp. Mayor and thank you. Mr. Beaman for a very brief presentation and a very good statement. I would love to have that statement and, and I'm writing actually. So if you could share it, that would be awesome. I think you stated a lot of process related information that wasn't in the presentation. And then. Just along the lines. I also have been. Any other way to say it, but like last week when I had to call 911 because the gentleman was shot on mainstream. I waited four minutes. By the time I got through. It was so I understand like we're operating from averages, but I want us to be real about how difficult it is. To like say that we're at or not at. And so just making sure that we marry that with actual reality. I didn't want to ask the question about. So as mentioned. Are we working at all with the county sheriff and their call dispatch system? Like, is there any overlap in that at all? They have a different dispatch system or CAD system. They do not have the same. We answer the calls and we transfer the calls to the sheriff. And so what we're working with is that they have staff that we are bringing on board to help us in the dispatch area, but they are not a level where they can dispatch calls or take calls. Thank you. And has, have there been any conversations to maybe discuss how they could be on the same system? Is there it? Like, I don't know whose system is newer. Is there any conversations between either of those dispatch offices? Is that a regular or ongoing thing that happens? Never happened. So I had spoken with the supervisor of the communication center and, and have mentioned about how that might work. And we are still having open dialogue on that potential. And I was really, um, I do want to note for my colleagues that I had, uh, in a ride along a few years back noted to myself that the first responders or that call dispatchers are not included as first responders. And I know that in the lat, like in 2019, a number of communities actually passed resolutions to recognize their call dispatchers as first responders. And I would like to offer, um, to bring forward a resolution that actually does that for the city of Durham, noting that the state does not right now. And so I just want to share that. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, council member. Other comments or questions for Mr. Beaman. Mayor pro temp. Sorry. Yes. You're really cute. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. No worries. Um, thank you, Mr. Beaman. I just wanted to know when we might be able to get data from the city of Durham. Um, I think the comprehensive data that you sent us for July was really helpful. Um, And I would love to see data, that data for August and then for the next few months, um, as we continue to try to solve the problem, um, just so that we can keep track of what's going on and be able to communicate with residents about the progress. Thank you. Mayor pro temp. We currently have out on our webpage, we're working on a number of data issues for complete transparency. And so the August data, we are waiting on information from our provider of that. It's called eCats. And so we work through the state number one staff. To get that information. And they are working on some data issues at the moment. And as soon as that becomes available, we'll be glad to share that with you. And it will also be posted. On our website as well. Thank you. So the, the answer is, I don't know when that's going to be available, but as soon as it is available, we'll be glad to share that. Appreciate it. Mr. Ferguson. Thank you, Mayor Bo Ferguson, Deputy City Manager. I did want to add in the discussion of the August data, I think for transparency and my discussions with 911 leadership, I'd want to set expectations that we think, just from experiences in the 911 center, that the August data is likely to look similar to the July data. I think a number of the short-term measures that, that Mr. Beaman has discussed today. I think we are hopeful that we'll see impact in, in the September numbers, but I want to set expectations that we're not looking to, we're not expecting to see significant improvement from August, given some of the conditions that persisted from July into August. So I just wanted to say that, transparently for the conversation. Thank you, Mr. Ferguson. All right, colleagues, other comments or questions, Council Member Middleton. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And I want to thank Deputy Manager Ferguson for coming on and kind of forecasting what we might see in August. I, I'm just not comfortable. It seems to me this, this, this feels somewhat spectator-ish to me. Like we're, we're kind of watching what happens and hoping for good outcomes. I fully affirm that the steps of adding capacity and, and the training, what we're doing to increase personnel and fill vacancies is absolutely critical. But if you bundle all of that together, we were or should have been doing that even while we were still routing calls to Raleigh. And we were routing calls to Raleigh because we were in an emergency situation. We're still in an emergency situation. So it seems to me it would be counterintuitive, counterintuitive to throttle down what we're doing. We should be flooding the zone with everything. And until these measures that we're doing, the increased capacity, bringing in new recruits, until those things bring us to an optimal state or, or make us bring us to interesting standards or however you want to describe it. It seems to me that, that we have, we have throttled back from all hands on deck when we were, because I assume when we were routing calls to Raleigh, all of this stuff should have still been going on anyway. So it's going on. And now we don't have the mutual aid. And it doesn't seem to me that when we lost that mutual aid, we took any significant or any extraordinary steps to make up for that extraordinary step, which was indicated at that moment. There's a reason why we were routing those calls. And I'm not convinced that the reason why we were routing them has been addressed or there's been a cessation of those, those conditions or an amelioration of those conditions. So I would just, you know, I would respectfully say to staff and the administration and to director Beeman that the, the, I don't want to hope for the best. If we haven't, if we're not throwing everything in our toolbox at this, this problem, I would strongly recommend and suggest that whatever our level of engagement and response was at the most critical time of this, this crisis that we return to that footing. While all of these measures, these, these kind of measures to, to bulk us up and buttress us and get us to industry standards and get us optimal are going on. I still think there needs to be some emergency actions taken. You know, I, I, I'm hearing increasingly more stories and I listen, I understand you got to parse out anecdotal from what's actually, you know, we can document in the period and I know that when folk are kind of in the heat of the things, you know, sometimes we can make stuff up and I'm hearing it too often. And, and, and hearing this presentation today. It seems to me that we are, we are throwing things at this problem that will not yield immediate fruit yet. That will not have an immediate impact. We know they will ultimately and kind of like hoping for the best in the meantime, until they kick in. And I'm, I'm, I'm not comfortable with that. I think that the people of the city aren't comfortable with it. And this isn't about any individual administrator. This is about us as a system, as a government, as an administration. I want to be very clear with that. You know, I'll leave that to the staff to parse that out, but I, I think that the administration and the staff and our, and our 911 call center, whatever we were doing at the height of this problem, I am not convinced that we have receded from the, that level of concern and that level of, of emergency and that we should be doing all those things. If we need to be looking for another partner to help us, then we just no shame in that we should be doing that. Durham sends out help to other jurisdictions all the time when they need it. And if we need help, but I am not, I'm not, I'm not comfortable with just, you know, what we're doing these things and we're going to hope that they take impact. I think we should be doing everything we can. And once upon a time we were doing all of this and had mutual aid from Raleigh. So I'll stop there. I see a director Ferguson, Deputy Ferguson came back on. Thank you, council member. I very much appreciate your comments. And I want to reinforce for you that. There is no stone unturned in this conversation, including alternate routing. And I'd like to acknowledge that Mr. Beaman has had. Significant conversations with, with potential partners along those lines. But there were, there were concerns raised in our community when the alternate routing was in place. There are about how those calls were handled. I think those are realities for that system. I think we are confident that it was the right, it was the right decision and the right architecture for what we had and the circumstances we were dealing with at the time it was in place. And I believe that if we were to, to pursue bringing alternate routing back, we have an obligation to make sure we could do so and try and address those concerns in the process. And I'd like to acknowledge that those conversations have, have been ongoing, but that there is nothing at this point that we could announce about that. It is a conversation we've had. In the meantime, though, I would like to say that a number of the measures that, that we're in Mr. Beaman's presentation today are, are newly conceived and implemented and that we do, that we do anticipate making an impact now and that those are not necessarily measures that we had in place in June or July and that it is not unrealistic that we will see some impact. But I think we want to be realistic about the fact that there are right now measures and there are long-term measures and we want, we want to not, not make promises we can't keep in this setting. And so I think it is realistic to say we, we expect gradual improvement. And we will do everything in our power to exceed that expectation. But I think we want to set the expectation realistically now with what we know. And I think you've acknowledged that, that we ought to be doing everything in our power. And I would just want to assure you that those conversations happened. Deputy Ferguson, I appreciate that. And I appreciate that the conversations are ongoing. I just, I just want to be clear. Whatever the issues or challenges were with our agreement with the Raleigh, the cessation of that situation was not our choice. Was it not? It was foist upon us by Raleigh. Is that correct? I would reiterate, yes. I would reiterate though, Mr. Beeman's comments are factual and accurate. We were very close to our, to our planned switchover date. And that was based on careful analysis of where our staffing levels had been previously, where our call taker volume was, what staff was coming out of training and coming onto the floor. So it was a decision we were moving towards the competence. The switchover from, from Raleigh's timeline to ours was, was not a significant Delta. And Mr. Beeman has captured that appropriately in this conversation. I think in addition, you know, I think while none of the numbers that, that, that we have produced in terms of the call taking performance throughout, throughout the alternate routing period or after, while none of those are where we want them to be, June's numbers were, were not concerning in the way that July's numbers moving in the wrong direction work. And so the initial sense of confidence in, in the June numbers were, was understandable at the time. I think it is since, since that time where we've recognized that more efforts are necessary. And those are the efforts that I'm referencing in my comments. Again, I appreciate that. But the conversations as, as I understood the representation, the conversations about alternate routing are still ongoing. So my assumption is that there's a reason why we're still exploring those options and probing those options. And that wherever we are in terms of our staffing, wherever we are in terms of the efficacy of our contingency plans have not made us comfortable enough to remove those conversations from the table. So the fact that we're still probing those conversations goes to my, back to my point that the cessation of that arrangement and the cessation of those activities, whatever the, whoever's, by whomever's timeline, if we're still discussing enough suggests to me that we're still recognizing that we need to be doing more and some other things need to be happening. So, and I'm, I, you know, I won't go back and forth about it. I did hear Mr. Beaman suggest that we were either at or better where we were when we had that contingency, when we had that arrangement with Raleigh in the first place. It just seems to me that the Raleigh situation has gone away and we still have residents calling and getting the same results that they were getting when we were using Raleigh. And I understand that there were issues with directing calls and routing calls to Raleigh. And no matter what we do, folk are going to, you know, cheer or boo or hiss, no matter what action we take, I get that. But what I'm most concerned about now is that the problems persist and for a number of folk in our community, there seems to be no impact thus far. And I want to give you full credit for the, for the steps that we're taking. But again, I've heard nothing to suggest that when Raleigh went away, our situation has improved to any degree or to any measurable way where we don't even need to be thinking about that anymore, because we are having those conversations still about mutual aid. So again, and I'll stop here. I just want to again impress that I don't think anything should be off the table right now. And I hope that those conversations, whatever they are, will at some point yield fruit. And those conversations will at some point become some concrete type of arrangement or agreement because this is just unacceptable. Point blank. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. You're back. Thank you, Council Member. Colleagues, other questions and comments for Mr. Beaman. Council Member Caballero. Thank you. Thank you so much for the presentation. And I also want to thank manager Page. She spent some time with me on Tuesday, really digging into this issue. And I know we still have a lot of work to do. I know residents are concerned. I know our staff is concerned. And I have confidence that we are moving in the right direction. Whatever we need to do to get it better. I support. I appreciate Council Member Milton for making sure that we heard this presentation. And. Dr. Beaman, thank you for the words at the beginning. We know we need. We need to make sure that. We need to make sure that. Folks to, to feel confident when they call 911, that they feel safe, that their issue is going to be addressed. I know that this is, you know, my understanding is it was an issue. And then with the impact of COVID, it just made it so much harder. And so we are having to. We do an undo a lot to get us in a better place. And so we need to make sure that. We need to make sure that. We need to make sure that we have the word to continue on the progress that we are making. Thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Any more comments? Council Member Freeman. Just a quick question. In your notes, when you were talking about the pay increases across training, I didn't know if you noted that the, I guess the first was that the. In part of that. I just wanted to make sure before I start digging. So are you, when I was speaking about the incentives, the hiring bonus incentives, is that? Yes. To Council Member. Yes. Yes. So that is also relative to both external and internal and receiving the incentive bonuses as they continue to, in their skills and career pathways, they will be recipients of those pay incentive bonuses. Yes, ma'am. Okay. So the bonuses, but there's no conversation about reclassifying them. Yeah. So once they obtain their certifications, say that as an example, they're in a call taker and they move to what we call a calm officer, then that will be a promotion as well as they will receive a bonus. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. Thank you, ma'am. Other comments or questions? Mr. Beaman. Thank you. I have a, if it, when you hear that, when you hear that a call has taken four minutes to answer, what do you all do in that case? We trace it. I'm sorry. Do you go back and look at the circumstances and so forth? Yes, sir. What we need very importantly, and we asked that on a regular basis when we do have a citizen or someone who has experienced that, we need the phone number that they dialed not one one. And once we receive that phone number, then we can go back and find out when the call was received. And also the activity that was going on at the time of the call placement. Okay. All right. Well, I think that's important. You know, if there's a call that takes four minutes, I appreciate that you all do that. And I know that you did that around the McDougal terrace calls. I'm glad to hear that that's routine. Yes, sir. It is. I added my number in the chat. Thank you. And the, we all know that we're not where we want to be as you began your presentation by acknowledging, and I appreciate the steps that you're taking. I know that our community is waiting to make sure that we are where we need to be. We do. This is the kind of thing that our television stations love. If there's a complaint whether or not it's true, they're going to blow it up. And it does erupt confidence. But as I said recently to members of the press, it, it, it, people are calling 911 people are confident enough to call 911 in larger numbers than they ever have. So I think that's the big picture. But I do think that, that erosion of confidence can continue and is a problem. And we need to be, of course, serving people at that 90% level for the, for a 10 second answering. And I know that we'll get there. I appreciate the measures you're taking. I think in terms of what we can do. And when I think about the questions that council member Milton is asking, if there are additional resources that we need to provide, you will let us know. We haven't heard that. But you're already, the administration's administration is providing you with those resources. For example, the, the bonuses that you talked about, but if there are things that the council needs to do, I'll just say to you and Mr. Ferguson and manager page that we want to hear what they are. And I want to appreciate deputy manager Ferguson. He's a fantastic administrator. And I know he's given you all the support that you could possibly want. And I'm just glad he's in that chair. And Mr. Beaman, thank you so much. We appreciate you're being here with us. And we're looking forward to the next month's report and the next months and looking forward to progress. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Council. Thank you. Colleagues, we're not quite done. We, Mayor pro tem Johnson pointed out that I had mentioned, and she had intended to have a, during the, the discussion of the. ARPA funds that we were going to talk a little bit about eviction diversion. As I mentioned to the folks who came to talk about it. And then I dropped the ball and I apologize. Is Mr. Johnson still here? Mr. Reginald Johnson. I believe he is Mr. Johnson. I'm sorry to pull you out. I hope you weren't taking a nap or maybe about to have dinner. No, I'm still here. Thanks for sticking with us. I'm sorry. I apologize. My fault. One of the things that we had done, talked about Mr. Johnson was. That during. We wanted to hear some information about the. Emergency rental assistance. And talk a little bit about that during the, the earlier discussion. In response to. Some of the. Concerns that we have been hearing. Can you talk to us a little bit about the emergency rental assistance program and how that money is getting out the door. Yes, I can. I'm going to share my screen. I have four slides to, to show you, and maybe that can kind of set the table and we can kind of, then I can offer some comments. If you don't mind. Thank you. Thank you. Share my screen. We can see it. All right, beautiful, beautiful. So this is real short. I'm just going to provide a few updates and then we can. Comments. So just as a reminder. With the Durham emergency rental assistance program. This is funding to assist the low income households that are unable to pay rent and or utilities from the US Treasury department. City of Durham received initial allocation of $8.4 million. Then there's a second. Allocation. Yeah, right. Two of 6.6 million. And. During County received the initial allocation of $1.2 million. And a second allocation of just under a million. Dollars. And so what we did was we contracted with the county. The department of social services to administer our portion of the funding as well as, of course, they were administering theirs. So we will have one seamless program for the, for all of Durham. So in terms of the applications and disbursements for the, the. E wrap total of 6,400 applications have been received. And around $6 million have been paid out in rental and utility assistance from city and county funds. Nearly 1200 applications have been paid out for utility and rental assistance. Over $3,600, $3,600 applications alive being other words being worked on by DSS. And to date only 27 applications have been determined and eligible. Of course I'm getting this data from the. Department of social service with them and I meet with them actually every week. To discuss progress and make adjustments. Multiple attempts are made to contact tenants with inactive applications. That means that someone who started an application. But there's been no follow-up on that application. Or there's been a long period of no activity. They do email blasts for tenants who don't respond to calls and postcards have been sent to address. It's a long time. This I'm shifting years to the legal aid of North Carolina eviction diversion activities. This is from January 1 to August 31. The number of new cases closed as of August 2021 is 650. The number of pending cases worked at the start of each month. 751. The number of closed cases with no e-mails. 562 cases. Percentage of cases closed that preserve Tennessee 76%. And we'd add that they've exceeded the target up to this point by 26%. And just as a reminder, in terms of the eviction diversion resources. This grant was to fund five attorneys to paralegals. And community resources. Coordinated salary. And $50,000 in indirect costs to support the households facing eviction in Durham. And for FY 21, it's $500,000. And then we increased it. We will increase it to about $15,000. And another $15,000 in FY 23. It's a 3% increase for a grant year. For each year. So I'm going to stop at that point and stop sharing my screen. And speak generally to our work with department of social services. Well, and legal aid. I think legal aid is also doing a good job. They've been quite busy actually lately since the moratorium ended. And so we're pleased with that. And can say they're doing a good job with the resources that we provided them. In terms of work with department of social services. Remember, there were, of course, there were several comments made. And I would just say in working with them in working with them weekly, you know, even at my level, directed the director with director robes. Normally. Programs that we administer. When we start the program, the program rules and guidelines are set. They do not change. This. Program. The guidelines are changed almost daily. Literally. We'll get guidance on one the week and then another guidance another week. And we're constantly making adjustments. And I would say that department of social services has made a significant amount of adjustments. In terms of how they're reviewing applications and taking information. Of course, I'm not definitely not speaking for them, but being as close to them and in relationship with us. That I think that they are making adjustments as quickly as they can. And they have actually placed. Social workers at the courthouse. And actually going place a third and two there now. And going to place another is my understanding there. But they've also, we have, if you remember, that we had five organizations that we're going to serve as proxies. And they've actually have social workers that are signed to those as well. They are expending money above the money that was the allocation. In other words, expending county resources. They're going to place another. The money that was allocation. In other words, expending county resources to help support. Additional employees to get these funding, this funding out. And so I would just offer that as, as some commentary. With that, I'll conclude my remarks. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of council. Mr. Johnson, thank you. And again, I apologize to you for not getting to this earlier in my fault. I have one question. The, the, the second charge of money that we got to 8.4. And then there's a 6.6. Have we already received that? We received part of the second charge. Okay. Was that pretty recent? Yes, it was. I don't know the date, but it's a portion of it that we have. Received. But it's not been dispersed yet. The county is actually going to receive some additional funding. From the state that I think is the way the guidelines are, they're going to be dispersing that first. Before I look at. All right. Thank you. All right. Colleagues. Council member. And then mayor pretend. Thank you. I appreciate it. I was wondering. I was like, oh, I guess we're not going to hear from. Mr. Johnson. So. No, it's fine. Thank you. For hanging in with us. It is a marathon work session. I appreciate. I will acknowledge. I'm a frequent flyer over at community development with a lot of my questions. And y'all are super patient with me. So thank you. I just want to say, and I, I see some movement. I'm seeing some improvement. And. And I know that the rules have changed significantly from the, the initial. You know what they were originally where you couldn't self act, you know, do self attestation with income. And you needed to have the landlord involved. And now those rules have changed. And what I'm hearing. Still is that that's not necessarily changed on our end. When I say our end with NDSS. And so my urging, and this is urgent as we heard from several residents who are. At the courthouse helping residents not get evicted, our rental assistance program right now, since the Supreme Court, you know, throughout the CDC moratorium, this is all folks have. And so we have to do the best job possible. That does not mean we're not working hard. That does not mean that folks aren't stressed at either the city or the county or the nonprofits who are doing it. And so we have to do the best job possible that does not mean we're not working hard. That does not mean that folks aren't stressed at either the city or the county or the nonprofits who are doing this work. I acknowledge everyone is working tremendously hard. At the end of the day, we have to get as many people rent assistance as quickly as possible. And I would like to have a discussion on, can we give more money to our legal aid partners so that we can have more attorneys down at that courthouse. I want to really lean in on DSS for. Making the process go as smoothly as possible. Making the application be as easy as possible to fill out. So that our nonprofit partners can really do their job and be the ambassadors that we hired them to do. And we can get the rest of this money, you know, these applications that are being processed and then the second tranche out to the community. Because this is, you know, this is a, this is a huge emergency out there in our community. And, you know, I'm not here to chastise anyone, but the burden of, this is our burden to carry as local and as local government. And we have to get those dollars out quickly. You know, there are things that we can't control. I did this last year with our water fund, right? Where I really leaned into staff and folks really did an excellent job rising to the occasion. This is something we can control so much of what we do. Is there's really strict state preemption or the feds aren't being cooperative. And in this case, the federal government has relaxed a lot of the rules that would have maybe traditionally applied. And we have to follow suit. And we have to make sure that our processes are doing the same thing. So that's my, my urging today. I appreciate everyone's work on this. And I hope that we can get these dollars out the door quicker. Mayor pro tem. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Reginald, for, for that information. I read online recently that I think nationally, less than 20% of these e-wrap dollars have actually gotten into the hands of tenants, which was a really scary number in Durham. We're doing a lot better than that. And appreciate that. We've been able to, um, to get a lot more of that money out the door, but of course there's always a lot more to do. Um, and the need is greater than the resources that we have available. Um, but I appreciate all of the work that you all are doing and the folks at the county and legal aid and all the organizations that are helping. People get these applications done. I feel like Durham. Um, though, of course we need, you know, we need to get more money out the door. We've done a lot better than a lot of other states. Um, I'm excited to see that that work continue. I want us to consider an emergency allocation to legal aid for additional eviction diversion. Um, and they are able to essentially double, um, the size of their program. That's what they're, that's what their capacity is. Um, if we were to, um, fund them, I think it's a little over an additional, um, half a million dollars for this year and a half a million for next year. So I want to put that before my colleagues and also the administration for, uh, for evaluation for us to do that. I think that we, um, this needs a rapid response. The end of the eviction moratorium at the Supreme Court was a huge disappointment. And, um, I want us to do all that we can. We can't do an eviction moratorium, but we can help people get lawyers. And I want us to do as much of that as we possibly can. Um, but I also have a question for you, Reginald, about the second tranche. Are we, is the plan to. Also have that money given out through the same process with it going through social services. Um, or are y'all considering any other life alternative distribution ideas? Uh, we're having conversations about that. Mayor pro tem. Um, there's been no decisions, uh, made actually, we have it on a daily basis. Uh, I don't have anything other than add, uh, to that without the discussion other than to remember, there's a major investment in terms of, uh, technology because of the accountability. The challenge with this money, the reason you see the numbers that you do, at least one of the reasons, uh, in terms of percentage. Uh, normally we don't administer programs where the rules change. And that that's one to, uh, I would also say that this program is short on, uh, programmatic, but a high on accountability. Uh, and it actually, you know, even a hood counterpart saying it's the reverse of what, uh, hood does. Uh, it does. Uh, it's big on program description and accountability is not as stringent. Uh, and that's one of the reasons, uh, that you see what you see, uh, in terms of those numbers. Um, so I would just offer that, but no, we don't have, uh, a plan we have in conversations and, but we have to take into account infrastructure. It's the same conversation that we had when we started. Yeah. Thank you, um, for bringing that up. Absolutely understand that we're running a program or trying to work within a program where the rules change every day. Sounds absolutely impossible. I appreciate that y'all have to be incredibly flexible to make that happen. Um, yeah, the county got off to a slow start, but they're doing a lot better now. You know, I get, it took a while to get, to get things moving, to get the software up and running, but, um, that the money is getting is getting out now. Um, I'm sure there are other organizations that, um, that could help. But yeah, federal federal money is hard. I'm sure that they're, I'm sure that somebody has done a study somewhere of how much money is wasted. Actually just trying to meet the requirements of federal programs to try to help people. Like all of the reporting and like all of the money that we spend on means testing people that we could just be giving to people. Um, I'm sure you're more frustrated about it than me. Uh, thank you. Appreciate your, um, your efforts. And yeah, we'd love to hear thoughts from, um, from my colleagues or from our city manager about increasing our funding for eviction diversion as soon as possible. Thank you. Madam mayor pro tem. Um, It's six o'clock. The city clerk had to depart because she is hosting a meeting of the mayor's Hispanic Latino committee. She's doing double duty today. I'm sure you're more frustrated about it than me. Uh, thank you. Appreciate your, um, your efforts. Um, I think that we're going to be doing double duty today. Uh, and we are grateful that Ms. Roland is here with us. I would like to try to not discuss this much longer. Ms. Roland, we'll get to you in a minute. We're not quite ready. Um, Mom. I think that, uh, what I would propose. Um, In terms of. Yeah. So let me just say, I have a high comfort level when I hear that the, uh, There is a $6 million out of the. 9.6 available. I'm thinking. Okay. Things are moving a lot quicker than they were. Um, I Am totally, uh, You know, grateful for their work and feel the same urgency that council member carbhiato expressed. Um, and, and Mr. Johnson, I hope that you'll convey that and that, that, used to get that money out the door. But I am I'm those are better. That's better than I thought we were going to hear. So I'm happy about that. And then the in terms of the eviction diversion funding, I don't think we should have a big discussion about that now. My thought is so um we have heard Madam Mayor Pro Tem we got did we not a proposal from Legal Aid and they said I know that I had when I I had communicated with Peter Gilbert and he had wanted to make a proposal and I believe that he sent it. He did. I only um I only sent it to I'm sorry. Go ahead. I only sent it to a couple of folks because the guidance from staff was that we were going to have a broader conversation about ARPA funding and that we would have this conversation as part of that. So I didn't want to kind of jump the queue. But there are other sources of funding that this could come out of that I think I think it's worth just having our staff take a look and give us some recommendations. Yeah, I mean I think that one of the things that I've appreciated about the manager's approach to the ARPA funds is we all keep saying hey can we send something out of ARPA funds can we can you know I almost every council member has said that today and uh or last week or you know and uh the manager has really encouraged us to stick to the process. On the other hand I did see a really big fund balance uh and uh this seems like it might be an opportunity to you know for a one-time expenditure especially if it's a one-year and not a two-year commitment we you know we could talk about that. But I would ask you then Madam Mayor Pro Tem if you would send that to all of your colleagues and we can and we can discuss that soon. We'll ask for Mr. Johnson and the staff to give us some guidance on that. We'll do thanks. Thank you. All right now we'll move to Ms. Rowland. Ms. Rowland do you have a report for us? Hi good afternoon Mr. Mayor, Madam Mayor Pro Tem members of City Council. I have the report from what Diane or relate to me about your nominations from today so I'll start with the Durham Housing Authority Board of Commissioners. It was a majority vote to reappoint Robert B. Glenn Jr. to keep his seat. The next one was the Housing Appeals Board. There was a majority vote for Teresa Rae Shikarelli to take the spot and at-large alternate member. The Workforce Development Board, there was a majority vote to vote Susan, Amy, and Mark Atkinson to represent a private sector. The last one that we discussed was the Mayor's Hispanic and Latino Committee so there was a majority vote to reappoint Mario Giscogne, majority vote to reappoint Annabelle Rosa to keep her seat. Lastly it seems like the last seat looks like we have three votes to re-advertise that seat, two votes for the person listed on the ballot who is Mo Rivera and then I have two council members who actually didn't vote. Okay, Ms. Rowland, thank you. I think we should re-advertise unless any of my colleagues have any objection. Okay, so let's re-advertise for that second seat. That's good. Thank you. Ms. Rowland, thank you. Madam Manager, shall we settle? Mr. Mayor, members of the City Council, we are ready to settle the agenda. I have for you consent items one through 24 and items 26 through 28 and then I have GBA public hearings items 32 through 34. Thank you so much, Madam Manager. Madam Manager, thank you and all the staff and the City's, Attorney's Office, the Clerk's Office and everybody that's stuck with us today. It has been a marathon. I really appreciate my colleagues. We've had some great discussions today. Very difficult topics. So you've heard the manager's recommendation to settle the agenda, can have a motion for its acceptance. So moved. Moved by Council Member Freelon, seconded by Council Member Middleton. Let's see, I'll call the roll. Ms. Rowland, do you want to call the roll? Yes. Yes, I can if you like. Yep. All right. Mayor Shull. Hi. Madam Mayor, Pro Tem Johnson. Hi. Council Member Freelon. Hi. Council Member Freeman. Hi. Council Member Middleton. I vote aye. Council Member Reese. He's absent today. Yes. And Council Member Caballero. Thank you very much. We have now settled the agenda. I believe we have finally done it. Thank you. I really appreciate it, colleagues. You're an awesome bunch. And I only disagreed with 43% of the things that most of you all said today. So that's not a bad percentage. You guys are amazing and really appreciate you so much. Colleagues, I'm going to adjourn this meeting at 6.07pm. And thank you all so much. Thank you. Thanks, y'all. Thank you. Thank you.