 that there's a community engagement office presentation that will not be on today that is scheduled for April 4th. Next, we have some organizational updates and employee recognitions. And the first thing I'm gonna do is call on William Johnson to introduce our new TPW director. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. William Johnson, Assistant City Manager. TPW is what I often refer to as the quality of life department because the things that we do impact so many of our residents' lives. And we've been fortunate to be able to build a really strong team of talented independent leaders that are part of that department. People like Marty Hall and Jennifer Dyke, Raj Gupta, Kelly Porter, Lane Zarate, Martin Phillips, Michael Owens, Zett Acevedo. And when you have that many strong leaders, you have to really be thoughtful about who you're gonna bring in to take over a leadership role and allow them to continue to grow and flourish and do all the great things that they do. So after our national search, a number of interviews, a number of candidates, and an extensive review, I'd like to announce that Lauren Priar has been selected as the new TPW Director for the City of Fort Worth. Lauren comes to us. She's a licensed professional engineer, a PMP. She has a master's in public administration. She worked as interim director since August, I wanna say, of last year and before that as assistant director over our capital delivery programs. Prior to coming to the city, she worked with the Corps of Engineers as a dam engineer, I think. It's always funny. That's odd. And also with the City of New Orleans and also at a stint as a engineering consultant. She's demonstrated consistent follow-through and commitment to our residents. She's demonstrated over and over again that she really not only deserves this opportunity, but she's up for the challenge. And I think it's ironic that in this women's history month that we were able to announce what's probably our first woman leader in this position. So congratulations, Lauren. Thank you. Well, every engineer loves this much attention. Let me tell you. But Mayor and Council, thank you for this opportunity. I am so excited and honored to lead a fantastic team of superstars who are on their way to become legends. Thank you again for this opportunity. So funny story on Lauren. I intercepted her in the hallway after David Cook had offered her the job officially on Thursday or Friday of last week. And of course, I come bounding on the hallway so excited and she goes, yay, that's about as excited as an engineer gets. Jokes aside, she is a real rock star and I hope now the rest of the City of Worth will really get to work with her in this permanent capacity. We are lucky to have you, Lauren. So congratulations to you. Well, next I'll call on Brandon Bennett to introduce the new assistant director. I hope this one works. Hey, I'm really excited to introduce the new assistant director for co-compliance and animal services. But I also wanna make sure that I give a shout out to our prior assistant director and that was Dr. Timothy Morton that he worked for us for a number of years. He came on board when our live release rate was around 50 to 60%. He got that number up to 97%. We were able to maintain that for a number of years, built a brand new shelter up on the north side. That's become a national model for all new shelters for disease control and the well-being of animals. And so with him going back into private practice, we knew those were some big shoes to fill. We did a national search, interviewed people from all over the nation. And at the end of the day, we picked a local Fort Worth employee, Chris McAllister, that many of you and your aides already know, Chris, from Coat Compliance. He started with the city in 2011. As an officer, worked his way up to supervisor, up to superintendent. He went to University of Texas at Arlington and got his master's in public administration. He is a Marine Corps veteran. And he's just an all around super guy. He's got a lot of lean Sigma experienced as a lot of lean evaluations for us and has stepped into that new role with both feet running. And so I wanted to make sure that we put a face with the name and for you and your council aides, anything you need that's animal control related, you let them know. Now I'm not gonna make him speak today. He was all worried about that. Apparently he's having a bad hair day. So with that, I just appreciate the opportunity to introduce him and congratulate Chris on the promotion. All right, next up is Diana Giordano to introduce the new assistant director. I actually have two assistant directors that I'm going to introduce. And one is not new to the city but she's new to the human resources department. She's been a rising star with the city of Fort Worth. And that's Casey Bess. Casey joined the city about 10 years ago as a management, as a budget analyst, promoted and worked in fire administration, promoted as a senior administrative services manager with park and recreation. And now is the assistant director of human resources joining our department in July of 2022. She holds a bachelor of business administration degree from the University of Texas at Austin and a master of public administration from UT Arlington. She has overseen the compensation, classification and civil service division of HR as well as the HRIS and records division. And in the short time that Casey has been with us, she has looked at things through a critical lens, has made some process improvements and really created the space for the team to do things differently and better for the contributions of the city of Fort Worth. So join me in welcoming Casey Bess. You wanna say anything? I was just gonna say in my previous roles, I've always done a variety of things. And so when I came to HR, I thought, I don't know if it's gonna be interesting enough, but there is so much to do in HR. We have a really great team who are really excited about the city of Fort Worth. And every day we get to come to the city and figure out how to make this a better place to work for our employees. Thank you. So our latest addition also as an assistant director of human resources is Holly Moyer. And Holly Moyer has over 25 years of public sector experience. She also holds a Bachelor of Arts in government with a minor in business from the University of Texas at Austin, completely coincidental that they both are graduates of UT at Austin. Holly has subject matter expertise in compensation. She served as a labor relations coordinator. Also a benefits administrator and joins our team overseeing the benefits and wellness division of HR as well as talent acquisition, organizational development otherwise known as Fort Worth Employee University as well as our HR business partners. So join me in welcoming Holly Moyer. Thank you so much, Mayor and council members. I am excited about being here. This is day seven. So just getting one of the things that I have from the past has worked for other cities. And Fort Worth has always been known as a city to work for because it's a great place and opportunity for not only employee recruitment and development but also as a wonderful career as a public sector employee. So I appreciate the opportunity here. Okay. Now I'm gonna call on our TPW director to talk about a recently received award. All right. So the stormwater team recently received a community rating system which is a voluntary incentive program that recognizes and encourages community floodplain management practices that exceed minimum requirements of the national flood insurance program. So Ben Thompson with our stormwater division managed the five year verification visit last April and improved our program from a class eight to a class seven. So the best part is, and you know I love a good deal, this improvement increased our discount for Fort Worth residents from a 10% to a 15% discount on all flood insurance policies. So this equates to an annual average savings of $216 per policy. Over $152,000 saved each year by residents citywide. Thank you for that. And next is Dave Lewis, our Parks and Recreation Director to announce something about Bunch Park. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor Council, Mr. City Manager. I'm very proud to announce that Bunch Park has been awarded with a Lone Star Legacy Award designation. This is heavy, so I'm gonna go ahead and put this in a proper spot. So the Texas Recreation and Parks Society annually gives out these designations to parks. It's one of the highest honors that can be bestowed on a park in the state of Texas. Park must be over 50 years old and you must prove the significant impact that it's had on the community. A panel of six statewide judges judge all the applications that are turned in. Parks professionals, landscape architects really look at the history of the park and judge its character and its contributions. This year there were six parks that were added to the class, of course, Bunch Park. Park in Austin, San Antonio, and even a state park as well. Bunch Park 2023. Out of the 72 parks in the state that are designated as the Lone Star Legacy Parks, the city of Fort Worth has seven, pretty good percentage. Along with Bunch Park, we have the Botanic Gardens, the Nature Center Refuge, Tandy Hills, Trinity Park, Marine Park, and of course, Lockhevin Village. This is a picture of us at the Traps Conference last week accepting the nominations of park staff here. And I want to give a special thanks to Sandra Youngblood and Omatayo Ajayi for their hard work on the application and their constant dedication to keeping the parks in shape to win designations such as this and obviously Mayor Pro Tem Bivens and Park Board Member Pastor Michael Moore for their constant advocacy for places like Bunch Park. Thank you. Thank you. Mayor Pro Tem Bivens. Yeah, I want to share some history with you all. We didn't have this park on our roster when I came into office. It had been given to Fort Worth ISD to help with desegregating of schools. And that was a weird explanation for me because we had been desegregated. And so I told Richard Zavala, we're integrated now, I want the park back. And I had opposition from the late beloved Ribi Carey. He said, Gina, if you reopen that park, they're gonna sell dope again. And I said, Ribi, that just got you a seat on the planning committee for the park. And he was so proud of it. It is a non-vehicular park and we are delighted to see kids playing in the park again and for those of you who don't know, I don't know if the minutes have changed, but if you live more than 10 minutes away from a park that you can walk to, you are being underserved. And that was the argument that we made to really work. Is that right, Richard? Okay, that's how we were able to get Bunch Park back and we worked it. And Richard Zavala was the key champion, swiping money anywhere he could from any department he could, figuring out ways to get the council to manipulate funding for the benefit, not just of this park, but all parks. And so my head goes off to the entire staff and especially that committee who worked on it. So thank you so much for this recognition for Bunch. All right, very good. Now we're gonna go through informal reports. The first informal report is on the ad hoc fire staff and committee and Valerie, excuse me, Valerie Washington is available if there are any questions. Well, Valerie, yeah, I think Gina's thinking the same thing I am coming up and tell everyone else what we've been working on. All right, good afternoon, Mayor and Council. In response to this IR, we have been working to set up the Fire Ad Hoc Staffing Review Committee. It was a committee the mayor requested as we were wrapping up fiscal year 23 budget preparations. It's taken a little time. We needed to spend time reconciling the City Gate Staffing Report that we paid for. We also spent time working with the local 440 on their Fitch Staffing Study. We're at the point now where we've convened the committee. We have our first meeting on Friday, May, or March 10th and then we have about six meetings scheduled, already pre-scheduled, where we can provide an update to Mayor and Council at the June work session with potential staffing recommendations. Any questions for Valerie? Thanks, Val. Thank you. All right, next informal report is on the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport Bond Financing Package and we have Chris Poinsettia from the Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport. If there's any questions. I don't have any questions, David, but I do recall at one point in time there was on the table to create a Terminal F and do some other renovations as part of it. This may not be the right time for that, but maybe bring back a presentation and just talk about where things. Chris is gonna come up. Okay, perfect. Oh, out of abundance of caution. Good afternoon. Just one second, please. Sorry. I'm sorry. It's a caution. I want to recuse myself from this item. I didn't know, we would be talking about Project F, but my wife works on that project. So I want to recuse myself from this conversation. We are, we did get, excuse my voice. We received approval from the Airlines to do a $27 million planning study of Terminal F and that work, that is in, we're in process and we are having conversations with the airlines about the timing of that. Hopefully if we get a new use agreement put together here in the next couple of months, they'll be more to talk about. Remind me what time of year we usually do an annual report, David, from DFW airport. Chris, do you remember when we do an annual report from DFW airport, what time of year? We usually come at budget time in August or September. Yeah, so I think that likely will be a good time to come back and Sean can come and kind of give a presentation and hopefully by then we'll have some loosens tied. Perfect. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate you. The next informal report is on the enforcement of marijuana laws and Latisha Brown is available if there are any questions. David, I have some questions. Thank you, Latisha, for this IR. One of the reasons why we requested this IR so that we can bring it forward to council and have a discussion about it. I do want to request before we get started a formal presentation on the completion of this IR. I did some more research with asking some additional questions. But if you can real briefly, and I have a couple of questions I wanna put out here, give us a high level review of your IR that you presented. So basically the IR covers several part what state law says about marijuana possession. As you know, marijuana possession is still illegal in the state of Texas. It is a class B misdemeanor starting off and could go up to a felony. There's a provision of law section 370 of the Texas governmental code that says that cities are prohibited from adopting policies that do not fully enforce state and federal law related to drugs. You probably also know that there are a lot of cities that have, where the citizens have put forth propositions that went on the ballot last year to vote on whether or not to decriminalize marijuana in their cities. Cities such as Colleen, Denton, Austin, all did that and their voters voted overwhelmingly to make it so that those laws, marijuana laws could not be enforced. Those laws have run into problems with their legal attorneys in some cases such as Colleen the County as to whether or not those are enforceable laws. And so those cities are having their issues as to whether or not they can enforce it. Some of those cities have decided to repeal those laws. Some of those cities have decided to amend, to make them easier to deal with and some are just left in a quandary. Here in the city of Fort Worth, we have adopted formally the police department has adopted a policy that is in line with the code of criminal procedure which allows police officers to stop, cite and release individuals who are found with small amount of marijuana in their possession. They also for practical purposes because of the issues with testing have adopted a policy to primarily give Class C drug paraphernalia tickets when they catch someone who's in possession of marijuana as long as that person is not a violent offender. And that is primarily the only violations other than maybe a traffic violation that they could be guilty of. So still enforcing in this city, primarily as a Class C, small amounts could be done as a site and release under the code of criminal procedure in the police department general orders. Okay, thank you. And I think that small amount is two ounces. Yes, sir. Normally police declare it as a usable amount. Usable amount is generally two ounces, four ounces or less. Okay, so one of the proposals that I'm proposing is that it be four ounces. And I tell you why. And I'd ask you for this report and that's why I want the presentation to come. So that the council can see it. Because I asked for a report for marijuana arrests from October 21 through October 22. And I believe we had a total of 230 marijuana stops. And out of the 230 marijuana stops, 16 was actually the site and release. And so I kind of went through your breakdown of which ones were narcotics only and which ones were nonviolent and violent. And so when I looked at the breakdown, I believe it was about 146 around that were nonviolent, but they still went to jail with the different ounces. And so I think it benefits our community because four ounces is not a lot. It's not something that's normally sold as driving around trying to sell four ounces. It's normally recreational use or whatever it is that that should be site and release and given a ticket as the Class C. Because what I have noticed, and we can't fix state law, we can't fix our jail system here at the local level, at the city level. But these individuals are sitting in jail for six months sometimes to a year because they can't afford an attorney and they cannot, they have to wait for a court appointed attorney. And so with COVID and jails being formed, if we can do something as a city, if they're nonviolent, they should not be sitting in jail. And so I don't know what is the issue from moving it from two to four ounces and how can we make that a must with our officer not as a discretion? Because it's now as a discretion if our officers chooses or not chooses. So I wanna do two things, one of them is these numbers are, a lot of these numbers are recent. And so I'd like to be able to, and so presentation wise work with police department to do a deeper dive on that because it is, part of it is their general orders require site and release under certain circumstances to find out what if anything that would have made those not site and releaseable so to speak or why they didn't give a Class C so we can give a more definitive answer about that. And then also to work with police department or maybe definitions, they probably are keeping it under two ounces because that's what the law says to keep it a Class B anything else would make it a Class A or a state jail felony. So it could be that they have four ounces but what you're seeing is an offense where they say two ounces to keep it at a Class B. So they may be doing that but classifying it differently. So if we can take a deeper dive into answering that question for you. Okay, I appreciate that and I think that's fair. I will say, and this will be another question I won't answer and I don't know chief can answer now but how are the officers measuring these ounces? Is it by site or is it by scale? So they're saying scale. Okay, so each officer has a scale in their vehicle. I'm going to chief is coming up so. Mayor and council on your looks chief of police forward PD. So the scales are used normally at the property room when they are weighing the evidence before it's submitted. So the actual official weight would be done there. And if they take it and they say they assumed it was 2.5 ounces or three ounces and they show up there and it's less and that's that can be a change in the paperwork or anything else they need to do. Some officers do have scales with them in their cars but I can't say that every officer has a scale with them as part of their usual equipment. So generally it's by sight and then once we get to the department is way. And so once it's way you said change of paperwork at that moment can the individual be released because the paperwork has been changed? If the officer went to the jail spoke with the supervision of the jail and the magistrate and that was a determination that was made with agreement of the magistrate. That is a possibility to be quite honest that probably wouldn't happen but they could pursue that if they chose to. Okay. Well, if we're using this policy or the policy that you have with the two ounces would it be reasonable to provide each officer or with the scale or is there a supervisors that have scales if an officer call for backup to weigh these scales so that we're not taking individuals to jail that's less than two ounces? I can check and see if the sergeants have them. They do have additional equipment. We provide to the sergeants but I don't know if a scale is one of those pieces of equipment I can check on that. Okay. Thank you chief. And I won't prolong this item but like I said Latisha I sent you quite a few questions and I think that when we looked at the number of states that are legal I think it was around 26 and nine that decriminalize and again this is I'm not speaking on behalf of the state of text I'm speaking on behalf of the city or for my district or for myself or whatever you have you. I think it's worth the city of Fort Worth looking into this issue. If we can get to a point where we're not crowding jails for nonviolent individuals people who are just I don't know what they're using for a recreational or whatever you want to have you if we can have a policy or procedure that I believe and I understand the two ounce and the four ounce like we can really home in on that definition at state level if there's any loopholes or anything that we can move forward with that I think that's a great discussion if we can get that in the presentation so that we can have a bigger discussion on this. Yes sir. I think just for a point of clarification maybe to minimize misinformation having had a really comprehensive meeting with Tarrant County and the sheriff's office last week including Tarrant County Jail the individuals that are currently at Tarrant County Jail are not the individuals you're talking about. I think our magistrates are doing an excellent job right now to make sure we're setting appropriate level bonds to keep these people out of jail. The site and release policy is I would call it fairly new and so it probably is also a matter of communication with our individual officers. And I think LaTisha made an excellent point that the difference between two and four ounces in the state of Texas is significant and the way our officers are usually maybe using a cider skill process on site and giving them a two ounce rather than a four ounce to create that policy in general orders would actually create more problems for the people you're trying to protect here Chris. So maybe in the future we'll just come back with a presentation or just a whole discussion as a city. We don't want to, we want to create more problem with the site and release policy. And I certainly don't want to be in a position like some of these other cities that are going through a pretty painful process after a citywide ordinance that they actually can't implement. So thank you. And I will only say with the 214 that are in jail that you will give us if they're still currently in the system. We'll see what we can find out. Okay, thank you. All right, our next informer report is on the proposed permanent supportive housing project in Las Vegas Trail and Victor Turner is available if there are any questions. I don't have any questions. I just want to say thank you. This has been a lot of work. Thank you to the mayor for going to bat for this project and knowing all the work that we put in Las Vegas Trail and what the difference is going to make. Mary Margaret Lemons is here from Fourth Housing Solutions. I don't know if anybody from Ohala is here. Ohala who's the development partner and to the county too for ensuring that this project stayed on track, stayed together so we could make, it's just really a important part of revitalization that we're doing in the area. So I just want to say thank you for that. You're welcome. Kudos to you too, Michael. As we've stated many times before, it takes pretty bold investment from a lot of different partners to make these projects work. And I know wholeheartedly that this project will be transformative not just for Las Vegas Trail but also how we house families in the city of Fort Worth moving forward. So, a special thanks to Tarrant County and to Manny Ramirez for believing in this project and for the city and Victor Turner and staff for making it all happen. So thank you very much. We much appreciate it. The next informal report is on the preparation of the 2023 to the 2027 consolidated plan for submission to the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. And Victor Turner is available if there's any questions. I would appreciate a presentation. All right, Victor. Tell me everything. Mayor Counsel Victor Turner, Neighborhood Services. Yes, ma'am. Any particular questions you just want me to give or review? Just an overview and you might even mention that there's a project on the ground right now that people can see, touch and feel. Okay. And I want to, we did hire a consulting firm, Jake White Planning Group to help us with the five year consolidated plan. I want to ask James to come and join me. So each year we do what's called an annual action plan to our five year consolidated plan. And so now we had a year five of the past consolidated plan. So at this point, we will need to develop a new plan, submit it to HUD so we can continue to receive the four grant programs from HUD, which include community development block grant, the home investment partnerships program, emergency solutions grant, and the housing opportunities for persons with AIDS. And so part of that process include community engagement. Our plan is to have public meetings in each of the council districts. Also as part of the five year plan, we have to do an analysis of impediments to fair housing. So we'll be having sessions to get public input on barriers or suspected barriers that the city may have to prevent people from obtaining housing. So those are some of the aspects that we'll be discussing over the next few weeks. James and his team will be working with our department on getting input from the public on what are their priorities, whether they're housing, childcare, other types of social service projects. One of the things that Mayor Pro Tem mentioned, anytime an agency, whether it's the housing authority or other agencies apply for funding, there's a form we have to fill out. Does your project or is it consistent with the city's consolidated plan? And so of course choice neighborhood initiative is one of those projects that would have to be consistent with our consolidated plan. And that is a difference between our comprehensive plan and our consolidated plan. So this is specific to HUD programs or programs that support HUD initiatives. Do you wanna add anything? The only, James Gillian with Jayquat planning group, the only other thing that I would add is that our particular emphasis will be on engaging the community over the next several weeks. This plan is, as Victor pointed out, is only completed once every five years. So we think it's important to make sure that we engage the community. So we'll be kicking off our process with meetings within each of the council districts and making those meetings available to anyone to attend in other districts if they're unable to attend the one that's scheduled for their district. But that will be our first initiative. We hope to be back to you by the end of June with a draft plan for your review. And then in July, a 30 day comment period for the public to give input before you take final action in August. And I do have one question there. And Victor, you know that people can hardly afford a newspaper subscription today. We have very few beat reporters who cover city council, glad to see media here today. But for people who want to know and follow these steps and know what's going on and know how to give input, what is the best way for them to know? Because I get tired of people saying we didn't know. Yeah, so we're gonna have a really aggressive marketing campaign. We're gonna be using social media. So Facebook, Instagram, all of those, as well as they can contact our office, we'll have on our, in fact, we already have on our website, information on how they can reach out. We'll have a list of all the public meetings. So we'll use our community engagement office to get that information out to the various neighborhood associations. One other thing I want to mention, you got that award for Bunch Park. So part of these funds that we receive went into Bunch Park. So CDBG dollars went into that particular project as well. So I wanted to point that out. It'll be in my office. Right. David, I wanna thank you for meetings in every district. As you know, people around this table complain on a regular basis when some department heads try to compress these meetings and make us go to centralized locations. Meetings in every district is gonna be beneficial so that people can understand how their input is important. So thank you, and thank you, Victor. Good to see you again. Thank you. Nice plug, Victor, about that CDBG money. Yeah. The next informer report is on the office of police oversight monitor in the director recruitment process. Deanna Giordano is available for any questions. I have some questions, David. Deanna. Thank you for the report. And I wanna thank also Valerie Washington for working with this office while this position is vacant. I think this is a crucial position for the city of Fort Worth, for any city that creates this office. One of the questions I had, and I mentioned it to David earlier when the vacancy was announced. How are we going to allow council members to participate, those that are willing in this process of hiring at the early stage? I for one, I'm not sure any other member on the council wants to participate, but I for one wanna be a part of the entire process to make sure that we have a great candidate coming to the city of Fort Worth. Okay, so we can create a virtual opportunity for you to meet with Pamela Wideman, who is the recruiter with Ref Tellus. She's done an excellent job with meeting with the city manager's office. She's met with members of the O-POM team as well as the chief and the chief there in PD. So we can certainly engage, if you have an interest in meeting with the recruiter in advance of creating the process of the candidate profile, please just send me a quick email and we'll get that set up. Okay, and not just to, and maybe you can give us a high level of what you have on here, because I see the dates for March 23rd, April 23rd, May and June meeting with the team and then a virtual in June and July. And I think it's more than just meeting with the crew, but being a part of the entire process. Is there a plan for council members to be a part of that process, the entire process? Yeah, we're refining the plan. So we're looking at kind of just very high level, what the overall process will entail. And so what you see there is just really some target months of what we'd like to have, at least the candidate profile developed. And so March is what we've identified. We can engage council as they as, once you notify me of your interest, but at the tell-in, we're gonna have a very robust engagement process to include stakeholders, members of city management, mayor and council. And so that is all still being formulated because that's where you have a more vested interest in who we pick to slot into those positions. Raph, tell us, we'll do a very thorough job in vetting candidates and providing those resources and identified individuals to the city, but certainly at the end of the process, we want a lot more engagement from a number of different stakeholders and interested groups to include this body as well. Okay, and when you mentioned stakeholders, I do want to make this very clear, the city of Fort Worth has a idea of stakeholders, but there is a wide community members who have a different idea of who stakeholders is. And I think it would be very important that we reach out to community members, not just the known stakeholders that we have already identified. Yes, and it'll be a very open process. So it won't just be a single invitation, there'll be opportunity for even members of the public to participate, but we're still formulating what that's going to look like. And so as we get further into the process, there'll be more marketing and communications that go out to the community and to this body as well. Okay, one last question. You might not know the answer to this because this is a very specific job. How is the pool looking? Is it a wide pool of candidates that are out there? Are we looking at a very narrow, small candidacy? So at this time, we don't have a candidate pool just yet. The reason that we did pick Raftalus though is they've operated in the space of police monitor recruitment at least three times. And so they were the only recruiting firm that had that level of experience. So we're hoping that they do attract a number of individuals that could be able to competently do the job. And so it is a small niche, it is a very specific role, but we're confident that Raftalus can bring us some good candidates. Thank you so much. Our next informal report is on the reappointment of substitute judges and Judge Danny Rogers is available if there are any questions. Moving on. Next informal report is on Tarrant County 9-1-1 district in the transition to next generation 9-1-1 technology and Valerie Washington is available if there are any questions. Next up is an informal report update on the timeline for streetlight repair and replacement in law and pre-orders. Available if there are any questions. I'd like an overview. Okay, so this is just a follow-up IR to questions asked at the previous work session. Primarily the ARPA funded neighborhood streetlight LED upgrade program. So the timeline for that is the LED conversion projects are assessed, designed if needed and constructed in the same fiscal year. So we've also attached the projects to be done under that program in this IR. The Altamir Capital Replacement Program. So this is from on I-30 from Las Vegas Trail to Green Oaks Road. The city of Fort Worth has funded and completed the design. This is now moved on to Textot. They will be programming this project in the near future with no additional city funding needed. And then the last two, Terminal Road at Blue Mound Road in Loop 820. So that project, that lighting project has been completed. And then lastly, the Old Main Street Bridge, also known as Paddock Viaduct, those repairs were completed yesterday. Lauren, I know back when we started the Neighborhood Improvement Project, now we were able to get tremendous enhancements to streetlights in 5-8-2. And I know this is about ARPA funding, but at some point in the future, can we get a complete list of what we've done with streetlights because our city has been very dark for a long time. And when there's no light, you have shootings, murders, all things like that. But we got significant in streetlights and so I'd like to see a complete list whether it's ARPA or not at some point in time. Yes, ma'am. And probably the easiest way to describe that quickly is in our burn rate. So the burn rate is the amount of lights in the city that are on. Right now we're at about a 65% burn rate and we're removing up every day. We're getting more of the streetlights on and so we'll continually be updating you as we improve that burn rate. And how are we addressing the theft of copper? The theft of copper, so yes, we can. Where we notice that copper theft is an issue, we'll substitute it with aluminum. Now the downside to that is aluminum has a shorter lifespan, so about 10 years. So we will have to replace it more frequently, but it isn't as attractive to copper thieves. So thank you, ma'am. While you're up there, I actually got a question while you were up there. The replacement, the four-year plan here is just replacement of existing lights, not adding new lights into neighborhoods, correct? Correct. Okay, just want to make sure and clarify. I think that was your point too, but. And when you talk about burn rate is 65%, what's the most feasible increase annually that you can make that closer to 100? Oh, my team is going to get mad at me for misquoting this, but I believe we're anticipating to get up to about 80% burn rate by the end of the fiscal year, but let me get those exact numbers to you. And I believe we did talk about them in the last work session presentation. That's great, thank you. I was, sorry to piggyback on that question about the 80%, is that, is this is all ARPA dollars or is any of this tied to the efforts that we allocated, the funding we allocated in this year's budget to address street lights? It's specific to Mayor's question about the burn rate. Yeah, so the burn rate is, regardless of funding program, it is how many streets across the city are on. But yes, the dollars that were allocated under the fiscal year 23 budget will go to improving that burn rate significantly. Okay, and then my second question is, how is the defective diode issue that we're dealing with, is that impacting the speed at which, I know that contractors fixing those, but is that one, is that fixed? Are we gonna have to go back and have them redo the purple lights? And is that in any way impacting our delivery on the updates? As you said, the manufacturer is handling all of the repairs to the purple lights. So that is not impacting our crews. We are merely compiling the list and handing it to the manufacturer for them to address. Thank you, Lorne. And the final informal report is on water account transfer process and Jan Hale is available if there are any questions. All right, Mayor, that concludes my report. Thank you, David. Get back horses to go here. I think their first item is, any questions on zoning cases coming up next week? Council, Jared? Not really a question, but I saw that we're having to postpone the zoning commission meeting. So I would just like to ask that the comms team help get that word out. Our office will be doing the same. I know we have an important case coming tomorrow, but I think it's worth doing some relatively expedient communications about that. Go ahead. Hi there. Yeah, we'll take care of that. We've got it on Facebook. We posted it on our website. We've contacted the applicants. We've contacted the neighborhood groups. So we've done a, trying to do a good job of getting out to those folks to let them know that that zoning commission meeting has moved to the 22nd as opposed to the eighth. What was the reason attendance from zoning commissioners or? No. It was a notification issue. Okay. Very well. Thank you. Any other items, council? Okay. Anything on the MNC log that's problematic? We won't bring up now. Okay. Then our first presentation is Alliance Economic Impact with Mike Berry, CEO of Hillwood. Thank you for your patience, Mike. Thank you, mayor. Always. It's my favorite day of the year, by the way. At least when I'm delivering good news and fortunately I am today. I always learned something when I'm here. You all cover, I told the mayor yesterday, this is a big city with a lot going on and you all are covering a wide variety of issues and we appreciate everything you do. Just for those who don't know the history of this presentation, why we do it. If you go all the way back 34 years ago, thanks to the leadership of the council that preceded you 34 years ago, Fort Worth helped put together and lead the development of Alliance Airport, which was the first industrial airport in this country built in a unique public-private partnership between City of Fort Worth, FAA, and Hillwood. And from that, from that initial public investment, we've developed what you'll see today 34 years later is a pretty great story. So we do this every year because we want the city to understand that original investment and what it has created because we truly see this as a partnership. So know you're behind and I'll try to go quickly. There's some good numbers in here that I'll just touch on briefly, but you have packages I think in front of you and you're welcome to, I'll be happy to take questions today or later, but there's a lot of positive going on. Just to refresh, the whole Alliance platform is 27,000 acres. The airport sits in the center of that blue area there. Most everything south of 114 is in the City of Fort Worth, the pieces of development and inclusive of the Texas land around the Texas Motor Speedway, which is shared by Fort Worth and North Lake. And then everything else that we're doing, primarily residentially, is north on the way to Denton. So it's in some of the other cities. But what I'm talking about today is really the core development of Alliance. Just in summary, after accumulating these numbers over the last several decades, the total economic impact generated from this project is $10.8 billion. And that was just last year alone, that was in 2022. So if you add up all those years, it's $111 billion. And this depicts really the growth. The good news for all of us is once this thing gets going, it just becomes exponential. So this curve hopefully continues to grow and rise like that. I think the other number that you all would be most interested in, or the total taxes paid, this is the cumulative number. I don't have last year's Fort Worth specific number on this chart, but it's in your package. But you can see over the period of time, it's to the City of Fort Worth alone, $684.6 million. And total taxes paid to all of the governmental agencies in the region, $3.4 billion. It doesn't seem like too long ago that I stood in front of this council. I think Mayor Price was just in her early part of her term and we had just surpassed a billion dollars. So now we're over, we're almost three and a half billion. So like I said, it's exponential at this point. And this sort of further reinforces that point about the city's share of that. The other number that I think is noteworthy are the jobs created because that's really what it's all about. It's all about bringing in business and growing business that create a wide variety of good quality jobs. We're now a little over 66,000 total jobs working, coming to work and in Alliance Texas every day, which once again, that number continues to grow and there's some new announcements underway that will even make that number bigger. I think this is important. Last year's activity was unique in that two of our bigger projects were manufacturing and high tech manufacturing. The first was MP Materials, which I think a lot of you on this council know a little bit about because you were big supporters of it, but it's important. Because I don't think many people, not just in the city, but in the country, realize the significance of rare earth mining and what that means for the future of US manufacturing. You probably read articles about how China is sort of the center of the world in terms of controlling and capturing the mining of rare earth minerals, which goes into the manufacture of battery of magnets, which in turn make batteries, which in turn powers a lot of future technology. So we've got to recapture that and MP Materials has the largest rare earth mine in North America. And the materials coming out of that mine are coming to this plant here, which are manufacturing the magnets, which will actually go, the initial orders will go to GM and Arlington to go in the vehicles being manufactured there. So it's an important part of our future economy and we have a chance to build on that and bring more of that industry here. I'll skip over Target and Truckyard. Beauty Manufacturing is another deal, which you all also are familiar with and supported. But it's unique in that it's high tech manufacturing, it's beauty supplies, but it's high tech manufacturing, created a lot of great jobs and it's another example of this sort of wave of manufacturing deals that are coming our way and maybe signaling this reshoring that we all read about. I think it's real. I think we have a chance, both here in Fort Worth and in this country to recapture a lot of manufacturing that we lost over the last couple of decades. A lot, Fort Worth Alliance Airport became parole field, Fort Worth Alliance Airport. Once again, thanks to your support last year and the airport activity is off the charts. We became ranked 20, number 20 in US airports for cargo operations and you might think, well, top 20, that's not that great. You ought to be in the top 10. Well, we are only an industrial airport. The bigger cargo airports in this country get to count all of the freight that comes in the bellies of passenger airplanes. We don't get to count passenger because we don't have any. So to be a dedicated cargo airport and to be in the top 20 is pretty significant and I think you'll see us continue to grow. Gulfstream, another big deal. It's not pure manufacturing, but quasi-manufacturing because basically they're bringing airplanes in to this center and enhancing them with new technology. So it's a great user. We're working a lot and I've talked about this last year. Mobility Innovation is a big initiative for us. We think we can capture and become the center for the next generation of innovation around mobility and transportation. We're primarily focused on freight, not people. So we're looking at truck technologies that will move freight autonomously, both long haul, middle mile and short haul. But you can see here, and I won't read them all, but there are a huge number of accomplishments and new companies who joined us at the Alliance Mobility Innovation Zone last year. And we've got a lot of momentum both in our surface activities as well as our aerial activities. And this is just another slide that depicts the diversity of the new companies. All of these companies are basically new to us in the last two years and are partners in this whole mobility innovation. So if you think about what Texas A&M's doing downtown and the research and academic component that they bring to the table and what we're doing sort of in the real world environment testing and developing and manufacturing new technology, there's a real opportunity, I think, for Fort Worth to become. What I could tell people, we could be the Silicon Valley of mobility innovation if we really do it right. Last week, Mayor Parker was there. Last week, we hosted our second annual Ford-Fort Worth Conference where we bring in a lot of these people that I'm talking about, these innovators and leaders in mobility, but it was outstanding. It was even better than year before and so hopefully we can keep bringing momentum. So lastly, I'm gonna show this short video which just gives you a visual of some of this technology after I show the smart port, which is our next big thing. I'm not even gonna talk about that today. I'm gonna go straight to the video. So even though that's high tech, that's a demonstration of technology. It's not a very high tech use case where they're basically delivering catered meals to the FBO at the airport. Some of those meals end up going on aircraft. But I think the importance of it is, this is a company out of Estonia, which is a hotbed of technology and innovation. They moved here because they were able to have a platform to work in like Alliance where they could develop this autonomous vehicle and show how this technology could be used in a wide variety of deliveries. So these are just some of the things that are going on that we can really grow and build off of. And we thought it'd be a pretty cool thing to show. So with that, I wanna thank you very much for the opportunity. I'm happy to take any questions you might have today. Any questions, council? Okay, Mike. So you come in, you show off today. It was very impressive. I just wanna say thank you for the time you spent with District 5 during our leadership meeting. We're still benefiting from that. And I did find that interview with Perot. I'll get it to you. Oh, great, great. Gina reminded me last year that we first met the very first time at the Fort Worth Opportunity Center, which we worked on with the city down near Dunbar. And we've had a great working relationship since then. That was several years ago. Thank you. Leonard. One quick question, Mike. Thank you for the presentation. If you could describe the difference in maybe a couple highlights of the difference of last year's forward conference and this year as it reflects on the people coming, the companies coming, the entrepreneurs, any highlights there that you would recognize? This year it just got bigger and better. Last year, for instance, we had maybe four or five representatives from the same companies. And this year, because we wanted to get more diversity, we limited attendance to like one or two per company, which gave us the ability to bring in more corporate folks. So we had a lot of big companies represented this year as opposed to just entrepreneurs and innovators. We also had a lot more venture capital people there. So putting the entrepreneurs and the capital together. And I think the most amazing thing is whether it was an OEM or a big corporate or a venture capital or an entrepreneur early stage, most of them didn't really know each other. So we put them in an environment where they could just network and a huge number of business opportunities come out of that. We actually just get out of the way. We say, hey, we're putting you in the room. We're gonna give you some content with some great panelists. We're gonna serve you dinner. We took them to Tana Hills and let them listen to live music. And then we just get out of the way and let it happen. And I think we can really build on it. Well, it's just fantastic. And I think we all can't thank you enough. Thank the Peros, the Hillwood team, enough for everything that you do for our city in terms of this kind of innovation, but the history and the contribution to the city from a tax base is just extraordinary. And I think just this is an example of the future playing out in front of our eyes. And we're gonna look back on this moment and this time as you're looking back maybe on the airport and the forward thinking vision that that was, that mobility and innovation is just gonna be as dramatically impactful to the community. So thank you very much. Thank you, appreciate it. Either questions or comments. Now, we appreciate you, Mike, as usual. Thank you for the very good update. Thank you Mayor. Thank you. You bet. Bye. You're not gonna stay? I'm kidding. Joking. It's okay, run. I've learned enough today. I know, I know, it's okay. Thank you, Mike. Okay, next up is an update on Terrain Area Food Bank with Victor Turner Neighborhood Services in Julie Butner is also here with Terrain Area Food Bank. Also, Victor, before you get started, I will be recusing from this item due to my employee relationship with the Terrain Area Food Bank and my forums are on file. Good afternoon again, Mayor Counsel. I have Julie Butner here with President and CEO of Terrain Area Food Bank. Wanna take us back in September of 2020, the Fort Worth Star Telegram had an article in a newspaper talking about food deserts in Fort Worth and the lack of access to healthy foods. So we had a conversation, our department and Terrain Area Food Bank latter part of that year in early 2021 about having a mobile market to deliver fresh produce to those areas of the city that lack grocery stores, lack access to fresh produce. And in fact, in that article it highlighted a gentleman that spent about an hour on a bus trying to get to a grocery store just to get fresh produce. So Julie accepted our challenge about trying to get a mobile market that could serve about six zip codes in Fort Worth to get fresh food to those areas. And I wanna point out also the red bus as it's called, and she'll talk a little bit more about that, also allows individuals to apply for other types of assistance as well. In addition, we were just talking about the five year consolidated plan. We invested a little over $400,000 for operating costs for the red bus. So they would be able to operate that vehicle over a three year period. So we're very pleased with the success of it. Julie will talk a little bit more about the numbers and our future plans for Terry Day Food Bank. So Julie. Thank you, Victor. And thank you, Mayor and the council and to the city staff as well. I don't know, Victor. We might need to talk to Mike Berry about the delivery method. I don't know. Okay, let's see. For those of you who are not familiar with Terrent Area Food Bank, we started 40 years ago. In fact, this year was our 40th anniversary. As a grassroots effort right here in Terrent County, today we serve 13 counties, almost half a million food insecure families in this 13 county area in our attempt to alleviate hunger by providing food, education and other important resources. The Terran Area Food Bank is affiliated with a network of food banks called Feeding America. It's sort of an industry association. 200 food banks are part of the Feeding America network. This is especially critical for Terrent Area Food Bank because it unlocks the door to federal and state commodities and subsidies. Over half of the food that we receive free comes from the federal and state governments. We are also part of Feeding Texas, which is a shared infrastructure of the 21 food banks that are right here in the state of Texas were one of the most populated states in the country, so we have a lot of recognized food banks in this state. They are our lobbying arm, and right now all down in Austin, working very hard to lobby on policy changes that impact the populations that we serve, especially within the Farm Bill. Right now in the Terrent Area, one in six people are struggling with hunger. They're going to bed at night hungry, one in four children. If you think about the four basic necessities, rent, utilities, gasoline for your car to go to work, and food, which one of those things can you readily do without is food? And so often these families are making a decision to do without a meal or two in order to get by and pay other very important bills. And again, for those of you who do not know us, I hope you walk away just remembering this one word, Alice, which stands for Asset Limited Income Constraint and Employed. This is our number one client. She is a female, she is a working mother, typically with one or two children. She is working, she is employed, she is Alice, she's Asset Limited Income Constraint and making very difficult decisions about what bills to pay, including her food bill. So now on a happier note, we were very excited to receive funding from the city of Fort Worth. And so I wanna say thank you again to the council, to the mayor, and to Victor for championing our cause. We signed a contract in July of 2021. We launched the program in August of 2021 and the program will continue through 2024. So this is my update on this program. We have spent about 60% of the funds that were granted to us. We have served close to 5,000 neighbors in these six zip codes that Victor mentioned earlier. We have dispensed over 50,000 meals in that period. And we have signed community members up for various Texas benefits, but most particularly the SNAP program, which the SNAP program provides nine meals for every one meal that the Terran Area Food Bank can provide, and that number, the 1432, results in a local economic impact of $11.6 million. So when folks are signed up for the SNAP program, they are eligible to use those dollars in our local grocery stores. And so it does fuel the local economy. These are federally appropriated funds that come directly into our city and into the counties that we serve. And in this case, the 11.6 is all for right here in Fort Worth, Texas, and can all be attributed to the red bus resources and education delivered. I was at a conference a couple of months ago down in San Antonio hosted by the Southwest region of the United States Department of Agriculture. And I knew we were in need of the benefit, the SNAP benefit, but I didn't realize to what extent in Terran County, only 46% of the people who are eligible to receive SNAP are actually enrolled in this federal program. And if you compare that statistic 46%, if you compare that statistic to the national statistic, which is 82%, we are certainly behind in getting this important benefit out into our community. When I look at the Terran Area Food Bank, and I started three years ago, we had three dedicated resources for the 13 counties that we serve to help community members enroll in this very important program. Today we have nine. When I compare myself to Central Texas Food Bank in Austin and San Antonio Food Bank in San Antonio, equal size, we're serving the same number of food insecure populations. They have 20 and 26 resources respectively. So we are behind and we're trying to catch up on this very important benefit for our community members, but also for our local community, you can see the financial impact. I don't think I've ever in my 30-year career in corporate America seen a 1,906% return on investment, and that's what your dollars did for us. So thank you again. The other update I wanted to give, and several of you, including Mayor, were at our groundbreaking that occurred inside. We didn't actually break the ground, but we had a good time with the groundbreaking. It's making really great progress. This is a public-private partnership. The city of Fort Worth contributed 3.2 million, and Terran County contributed 4.8 million to purchase the building and the property, which coincidentally is right across the street from our administrative offices and our distribution warehouse. So we felt very fortunate that we found this location. In addition to that, the Texas Department of Agriculture has invested $3.5 million in the renovation to make the facility food safe, and we've had private investment of $1.5 million. We're about a million dollars shy of total dollars needed to complete the project, but this agricultural hub will pull produce from the Texas Valley and also from Arizona, Nogales area in big quantities. So this is product that is donated to the food bank that retailers have decided to take off the stocking shelves because some other produce has come in that has a better margin. So they have to do something with that excess produce. That produce comes to the food bank in big 18-wheel quantities, and we have to break it down into smaller case slots so that we can give that fresh produce to our over 500 partner agencies in this 13-county area. So we will be changing the mix of what we're giving and what we're providing into the community to the tune of about 40% once this is fully operational of what we distribute into the community will be fresh, nutritious produce, which as you can imagine, will have tremendous impact on the health and well-being of our community members. The Ag Hub is also very beneficial to the community, and one of the reasons why Texas Department of Agriculture has made their investment in this project is because they would like to see food banks share product across state lines. So the Oklahoma food bank processes beef and the Arkansas food bank processes chicken. So we will be able to stock in excess so we can share the excess with Oklahoma and Arkansas. And this is an initiative that is also obviously very important to the Feeding America Network. So again, we're super excited about it. Thank you for all of those who came out to our groundbreaking. It was a fun event, even though it was inside. We certainly appreciate it. And I'm just here really to give you the update and just say thank you very much for the support that you've provided. Elizabeth. I just, thank you. You mentioned, so you said that only 46% of the people that are eligible for this benefit are enrolled to receive the benefit. Yes, correct. Yes, ma'am. And so do we know why that number is, why it's not higher? And then my second question is, what can we do as council members, what can we do as a city to help that? Cause it's federal dollars, correct? Yeah, these are federally appropriated funds that have been earmarked for Texas, Tarrant County, city of Fort Worth. And so if we don't grab them, what happens to them? Then they get reappropriated, right? So it is very important that we use these dollars. And there are a couple of reasons. The first one I'll say is that Texas as a state has additional barriers to accessing the benefit when compared to other states. And so that's one of the things, I'll give you one example, mayor. There's a vehicle asset test. And if you have a vehicle that's worth $14,000 or more, regardless of your income, you become ineligible for the benefit. We are a state that has this provision where other states do not. Now you can imagine if you're Alice and you're working, you have a car and you know today's car market. Even if it's used in 15 years old, it's worth $14,000. And I'm assuming that number hasn't changed over a period of years. Yes, ma'am, that's right. Okay, because do you think that's something that your advocacy organization is working on this session as a change? We can talk about that offline and then we can do as a city to help on this. Yes, we advocated for it last time the state was in session and we're not successful. But we think today, especially with the rapid car values, right? I think today we will have a better shot at getting that reversed. Do you happen to know why the state, because if it's federal dollars, what's the state's role in setting the requirements for that? Is it just because they're passed through and they get to make the rules? I think it's a really antiquated provision and they just have never taken the liberty to really look at trying to unwind that and what it means for the state. I think this year we're in a better position than we've ever been in in getting that reversed. But that's one. So there are some restrictions within the state law that are more stringent than other states. But right here, we have a resource issue, right? When I came into the food bank is the number one source for signing community members up for SNAP. It takes about an hour when you have assistance. You can do it long format. It takes longer than that. If you do it online, it's an hour. So think about the same issues that we had during COVID and people accessing online education. Do I have internet? Do I have an iPhone? Do I have a computer? Do I speak a foreign language? So that's why my staff is out there with the red bus enrolling community members in this important resource. Have approximately how much money are we leaving on the table by not being at 100%? I don't have the answer to that but I can get that for you. I just don't know it off the top of my head. And then are your, do you have any staff members in our neighborhood services community centers to help enroll folks there? Yes. In fact, we use the community centers frequently. We schedule the red bus to go there. You know, we're working with John Peter Smith at their intake center so that we can be right there when community members are enrolling in Medicare, Medicaid. We can also enroll them in SNAP. We have many community partnerships that are helping us be in the neighborhood where people are the importance of the bus and it's been brilliant. Right after you approved funding, Arlington approved funding, Parker County has approved funding. Denton would like to get a bus because it allows us to roll into the neighborhood where folks have barriers to access food. They don't have a grocery store. They don't have transportation. There's not good busing system. So we're right there at the library or at the elementary school or at the local health care clinic. So we are meeting them where they are to help them with this. So to answer your question, there's some state barriers, but there's some resource barriers as well. Can I answer anything else? Any other questions from Julie? No. Thank you for the update. Thank you so much for your support. I really appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, now we have a briefing on commercial development study. Dana Bergdorf is gonna kick things off for us. Thank you, Mayor and Council. Dana Bergdorf, Assistant City Manager. Happy to be here with you today to talk about commercial development. We know that this is a high priority for Mayor and Council. It's certainly one of David's top work program priorities along with the entire management team. So we've got a lot of work to do, but we also have a lot of great success to build on. I wanna recognize that we have our real estate council partners here with us today in the audience. I believe we've got Joel Haydenberg who's the current chair for the real estate council board, Tom Galbraith, Bowie, I see you back there, and then Travis Clegg as well who will come up in just a minute. So I wanna say that we agree with most all the recommendations that you'll hear from the real estate council today. So we're in lockstep on the need to continue the improvements that we've made so far and to continue to streamline the experience for our customers. As I talked with Travis about recently, there may be some characterizations, there may be some specific methods that we might not agree with, but at the end of the day, we're on the same page with the outcomes that we're trying to achieve. And as a quick side note, before I asked Travis to come up, I wanted to let you know that we need to give some kudos to development services and IT solutions. This last weekend, they completed the major, really massive shift of our Accela software system from multiple servers to the cloud. So all of our development processes, probably hundreds of thousands of development records, all transitioned over. So while the system was down for a day on Friday, DJ and his team put on a one day in service customer service training and team building effort to continue with the improvements that we want to see for our customers. So with that, I'll ask Travis to come on up and share the report that they have for you. Good afternoon. My first time presenting in this forum, I do it a lot at city council meetings. Travis Clegg, representing the real estate council, a greater Fort Worth. We represent not only Fort Worth, but also Arlington and surrounding areas. And my daytime job, I'm an engineer, so Peloton land solutions. We do developments. We represent big developers who process plants this year at Fort Worth. So we spend a lot of time working on, working with city staff. I'm a civil engineer, so I'm not a damn engineer. Smell a little bit. I like the excitement too of coming up here, but so let me give you a little history of who real estate council is. We are mainly a commercial based group. And so we have 550 members as part of our program. We've also had David and Dana as part of our group that we meet on a monthly basis. We're very thankful for that relationship that we have with our city. Through our 17 year existence, we've worked on all kinds of topics. And a lot of topics are on this report. But I wanted to hit some highlights. I'm not gonna go through every little detail of the report. This is actually a summary of the report that council has already received. And that staff has also received as well. So again, this is a summary of what the real estate council's kind of engaged in. We did a study here recently. And that study was going out to our development community. We surveyed roughly 87 respondents who responded back to us with regards to how the processes of getting developments through the city of Fort Worth were working. And so what we did is, and since 2019, we did our first study. We skipped it during the pandemic process. But then we came back here recently to the same study, asking questions like, where do you struggle on getting your projects through the system? How long does it take to get a project through the system? Most of our respondents were seasoned developers or seasoned consultants. They've spent a lot of time here at the city of Fort Worth. They've done three or four projects. They've also done projects outside of city of Fort Worth. So they had something to compare it to. And so we kind of broke it down into three different sections. One is the development of the, sort of the council development professional survey. Two is the org chart, so I want to kind of spend some time on. And three is a tax study that shows the deferred revenue to the city by a slower process. So the development professional survey, again, went out to a number of developers in the area. I'll skip to the next slide real quick, but so when asked which department has improved since 2019, the most, 82% of those said development services had the most improvement over that timeframe. When asked if inter-department cooperation across development departments has improved, 68% answered no or is getting worse. And so we kind of came up with some recommendations with regards to our initial survey. One was to expand the positive trajectory that development services has already gone through and get that through all departments, not just development services. Two was to instill a culture of problem solving across those departments, across the different departments. And then three was to resolve city's internal process conflicts. So again, you hear process, you hear inter-departmental quite a bit, but you also hear a lot of successes that we've had over the past few years dealing with development services. Permit times have gone down substantially. IPRC review times have gone down, but there's other pieces, whether they're out of our control or in our control, that have gone up and we've also created some issues. So one of the issues that we kind of came up with was who's in charge of the development process in Fort Worth. So when we get phone calls from angry developers who are saying things take too long, a lot of times they just say, permitting is horrible in Fort Worth. What does that mean? Does that mean just the whole entire process? Does that mean permitting? What we find out is it means everything. It means preliminary planning process. It means the studies that you do from water and sewer. It means IPRC. It means permitting. There's a lot of processes that go into place when you actually do a full development project. And so what we found out is we worked with city staff, DJ, to come up with, more or less an org chart of how the city is set up. And we found out that there's not one department that handles development. There's nine departments that handle development. So there's several assistant city managers. There's many directors involved, but it doesn't go through one department. It goes through nine different departments for decent sized projects. So if you fix development services and things are moving quickly, you could have issues hung up in other departments as well. So I know you can't see this, but this is the org chart that we worked on with DJ. The green area where I wanna highlight is the development services department. And that handles roughly development services. And then Dana also handles the water department as well in her ACM role. The rest of it, these other eight departments are not involved in development services. So DJ wants to go and, or Dana wants to go and fix something or try to move a project along. They're going across interdepartmental, department lines. And so all these different groups touch a regular project in the city of Fort Worth. So we came up with some additional recommendations with regards to how the city is kind of set up. One is silos. We hear this word a lot in Fort Worth. We're stuck in different departments. We can't cross these silos. I can't get one thing from one department, get it to the next department, or I gotta wait for this department to do what they need to do before I do my work in my department. The other word we used is the one stop shop. We hear that a lot. Some cities have a group where you submit everything to one central location and that group takes you around to the different departments. So instead of your consultant or your developer having to find out where to go to fix things, you have a one stop shop. I think the facilitation group was kind of that idea that we set up under Mayor Price. I think she called it the shepherd group. It's called today facilitation group, but we don't utilize it as well. I think we could utilize it. And some of the cities do it pretty well. Additionally, for the silos, so again, we're on different departments right now, we would like to have all those departments rolled into or at least people who are working on specific development issues to be within the development services area. And I'm not sure how that's gonna work. It might be pretty tough to go from different groups, but it would be nice to be able to go to one person to solve some of these problems. The second part of that is the new city hall. Can we have everybody who works on development projects on one location? That might make it easier for developers or consultants to navigate the system versus going to different buildings or maybe different floors to find solutions to their projects. Number six was scheduling staff meetings to review workflows. We already do a lot of this in development services, BPIs, we look at the issues, we look at the processes, how do we fix those, make them more efficient? But I wanna do that through different departments as well. Invest in proven customer service training. Again, there's a lot of training that goes on at city hall. I'm not privy to all those different training meetings, but there's definitely a lot going on. I heard recently, DJ, there was a training session of people building boats out here or something. So I thought that was pretty interesting. City manager to work on a two-hour form attended by all development personnel, kind of working across the internal departmental lines. Number nine was something that came up pretty often in our survey. We're losing a lot of staff, and we're losing a lot of staff not only outside the city of Fort Worth, but from internal departments, going from one department to the next, looking for a job raise, looking for a promotion, and we're losing a lot of historical knowledge from those people who leave either the CFA group or development services, the water department, and they go to a different group, and now we have to look and work with a completely new person and all the discussions and history you've had with that person to fix certain issues are all gone. You're having to retrain those same people. And the last one was, it's not reflected, what is actually on the work chart. The legal group, not to get too detailed into this, but things can get complex, whether it's easement changes, whether it's the CFA change, or whether it's a public-private partnership. Legal departments involved in a lot of different aspects of development. You may not think that all the time, but there are times where we need to get an easement language approved through the city of Fort Worth and that takes some time as well. So oddly enough, I did some research and in 2006, a Zucker report was done. I'm not sure how many faces we have from the 2006 era, but when I went through that report and that thing was 250 pages, a detailed study, it took a year to get through, a lot of consultants involved, a lot of stakeholders and customer groups. But I saw some of the same words that were in 2006 and I'm seeing today. You're pushing good people out, cooperation, problem solving, lack of communication, change in attitude, people not part of meetings that they should be. So there's a lot of similarities and a study that was done in 2006 that I wonder if I could just take the cover off and put today's date and we could find a pathway to get some of the stuff through. Oddly enough, a lot of these things were done. So the facilitation group came out of that, the development advisory committee came out of these reports. So a lot of things have happened, but I think there's some similarities between 2006 and today. The only difference I see is the amount of work. So 2006, if you think back, 2005 was a heyday. We had a lot of residential development, a lot of commercial development. We were pulling permits and I think the numbers were roughly, we always called it the benchmark, right? It was 500 permits was like this huge number. We were pulling 800, 900 permits last summer per month. So relatively the same amount of staff, twice the workload, the projects were much larger, much more expensive. And we just had kind of a bog down in certain areas from getting projects from A to B. So we have some conclusions in here. Again, I kind of went through mainly the order chart situation and how we can fix working across those other eight city departments. Again, we continue to work with city staff. We continue to work with our council members to find ways to improve our processes. And I think the next part of this is what the dollar figure is when we delay projects. So we also did another study. It was called the Highland Study and we engaged a consultant to look at what the cost would be for delays in projects. And so based on our study, we had a 10 week development process delay which impacts roughly 20% of the projects. And ultimately you'd have a $1.4 million delay in revenue to the city of Fort Worth because we can't work out processes. The other part of that is $600,000 in fees we don't collect on that same 10 week process. So we're losing $2 million every 10 weeks on delays for projects not getting to the ground quickly. Thus not getting the tax revenue from those projects. Last but not least, we're working with Dave. He probably hadn't seen this yet but I put it in his inbox before I walked over here. But we wanna continue to work with David and his staff and the directors on process improvements, finding metrics and how to measure those metrics. The real estate council is gonna continue to survey this membership. So we've historically done this every two years. We're gonna start doing it every quarter to see if we're improving on some of these areas. So with the help of David and Dana, I'm hoping that we can kind of move that needle a little bit. I already know there's been conversations that David's had with department directors. I've already had several calls and several meetings with department directors asking how can we improve the process? Are we the problem? If so, what can I change? So I appreciate again, the teamwork and all the help that the city has given us. And hopefully we can start removing this needle a little bit quickly. That's all I'll leave it for any questions you may have. Thank you, Travis. Questions or comments from council? Michael? Yeah, Travis, thanks. Appreciate it. DJ2, I know Joel and I see Bowie and Tom from the real estate council. If I missed anybody, sorry about that. I want to say thanks again, I've been on this for a long period of time, but appreciate the increased investment and development services as part of the budget this last year, David. Spent a lot of time with DJ and what that means. It's funny that you bring up those two reports and it's the same thing a number of years later, talking about One Stop Shop and silos. We still have that. I think the One Stop Shop is a great idea and I'm hoping that we're getting there as we're moving, as I've been told through to the new city hall where that's a possibility that they can be on the same floor. The silos are still frustrating for me because I hear again and again about the holdup that happens and I know, David, you've got a printout of this in your office that I've seen of all the different departments that touch this. I spared rolling it out on top of the desk like I did in the mayor's office. I've rolled it out. It was 14 feet long when I rolled it out. 14 feet long, but the silos bother me a lot because I've said this, I don't think you need to be a certain department employee to understand the policy in that department. And I think we have to keep breaking down those silos because of the numbers you just put up there of $2 million every 10 weeks, basically, that we're losing them when we can't get these businesses open. I understand having a bottom line that this is the bottom line for a lot of people getting their business open. These might be big commercial projects, but they're also creating jobs for other people that it's a bottom line putting food on their table. So... Or getting frustrated and not coming back to this. Or getting frustrated and saying they're not gonna be here. So I do want to see too, you point out there the increased customer service aspect because I think that lends itself to a lot of people that wanna be here. They might be frustrated with the system, but if they know they're getting the answers they need in a timely manner, we can work that out. So I think that's an idea too. One of the ideas that you brought up was this forum to discuss resolved ideas. I don't know, how is that accomplished? Now you may not be able to answer that, but I know for a fact I'm, it's like I'm beating groundhogs of that little game. Every time an issue pops up and I know that we do a good job of trying to address it. I don't know if DJ wants to talk about that, but the more we can do to make sure across the board that people understand the employees, whatever the issue is with whatever, everybody understands it, I think it helps. One of the neat things we're doing now is this Development 101 program. So we're gonna bring the different development groups into the city hall and have these conversations about how we move projects across from one department to the next and where things could get held up. And then if you do get held up, how do we navigate? Because right now what I do when I get held up, I call that guy. Yes. And he can't solve every problem. Or I call him. Oh, he does. Or he need department head. So it's just, it can't be that way all the time. There's gotta be some path forward. And just like Travis said, it's just investing in training, right? And we do have a high number in our turnover statistics, right? And so we're constantly bringing folks in. So we're constantly having to train that institutional knowledge is also leaving, right? And so the same way we've got the development community turning over. We've got developers coming from California and other locales, right? And so we're needing to train our staff up on our processes and our policies and the reason why we do the things we do. But we're also having to train the development community concurrently, right? And so again, like the development 101, some of the staff training with the boats in the hallway, right? So we're just constantly trying to figure out how to engage folks and make creative solutions for training and moving things forward. Well, I'd like to understand a little bit more why the turnover, what's happening? What are we not doing? Where they're going, et cetera. And so that might be something too to let future, if we can study that, then we might be able, is it pay, is it something else that time off, whatever? What are we not doing? I'm sure it's all of it. We have it on our company as well. Yes. You're constantly fighting people leaving the company to go get more money and do less work. Yeah, I won't believe it. The last point I'll make, well, two points. One, this idea, which I make sense, but the legal department across the board is involved. We don't need to discuss it here, but the idea that's being brought up at the state level of a court that just deals with business, we should probably look at that for our own legal department of just dealing with business questions. And that might streamline this a little bit too. The last point that you didn't bring up here, but I'll bring up because I can, is inspectors and how we do that and what that process looks like because they're in consistency, again, with our inspectors that probably goes back to training, that probably goes back to problem sharing. One of the ideas that we've talked about in the Small Business Task Force is a ticket. So when they go to that business, they cross off all the stuff that they don't need that inspector does. So when a new inspector shows up and says, why don't you have this? They say, well, the last inspector told me I didn't need it, but they don't have any proof of that. So I think that's something else that might help. It'll help in the commercial world too that we could look at. But I would suggest this too. I look at your timeline, I think it's great, but we go into the budget process in August and I'd suggest you come back and give us another sort of progress report in August as we start the budget to see where the seven months has happened. You had a meeting, too many is it looks like for the city manager, you worked with staff, but that gives you about seven months to give some more data and put it together then see if there are other suggestions we need to do with development services from there. Absolutely. Thank you. DJ added to what Michael just said, you provided an update a few months ago about the state of affairs with inspectors, a number of them. Maybe you can give us some more timely, you know, update then. Yes, sir. I've got a question or a comment. Sorry about having to leave my car as ready, so I'll be leaving in a few. But one thing I'll mention, Michael in terms of why people leave, a McKinsey study tells us that there are more jobs available in this entire country than there are people qualified to take them. So they're leaving everywhere. I don't think you'll get any unique reasons as to why they're leaving that department because they're leaving. So that's just FYI. One thing that I've noticed, I sit in on pre-development conferences. I don't think many council members do and you shouldn't, but I have two projects that are really important to me. When it comes to coordinating these meetings, it's really important that we make sure people know how important their presence is. I've been in too many PDCs and the main person is not there. You know, if you're in an area developing where there is high floodwater concerns, you know, we need to make sure Claire is there. And that's just one example. And so coordination is very important. I don't know how you get the level of efficiency you want unless all these people work for you. And so that becomes a problem. And I don't know if you're gonna build a kingdom or whatever, but if I work for the fire department and DJ says, I need you here, but my fire chief says, well, you work for me. How do you, I don't know how you fix that. And so you may, I'm not asking you, I don't want you stretching yourself right now because I'll hold you to it. But it's important to know that when it takes a team and so I may have missed something Travis during my call, but unless people are working for you, they don't have the loyalty to that project process because they have another boss. So that's just food for thought. I'll just say this, council member. We don't know what that organizational structure looks like in the future, but we're all leaning in to figure it out, right? All the directors, the chiefs, right? We're leaning in to figure it out. But David's been very clear that we are going to figure it out, right? So he's been very clear with all staff. Let me give you a little dirty water then since you brought on and gave me a comment. There is a zoning case coming through the process right now. And this zoning case has been given tentative approval from staff, but the people who gave that tentative approval are no longer here. And the ones remaining are wondering, how the hell did this get approved? And so I asked for the mailing list, who sent out the notices for a zoning change? And there were only eight notices. And I think four of those were industrial, where I know there are about 300 homes within that reach. And so again, this process has to be cleaned up. And I'll share those details with you. This was near Lake Arlington. And it is so unbelievable that anyone could think that this could go through the process. And so more than likely, it's a good thing that that zoning commission meeting has been delayed to get more time. But process has to be pure and people have to be committed to it. And it's bad when they leave because you can't blame anybody, but you know who did the bad deed. Yes, ma'am. So it's messy. Leonard. Yeah, just a couple of comments, questions. Have we looked at other cities? Have your research taken you to other cities to see what they're doing right or wrong? Yeah, not so much research as we do projects in other cities. So we know the process. I know that some city staff have gone to other cities to see what their processes are. I know DJ has done a field trip on several occasions and reported back to the real estate council group. But we've done work in San Antonio and Austin and Dallas and other smaller cities. It's hard to compare yourself to smaller cities that are a little more agile and one person handles eight different tasks. But the larger cities, I would say that some cities do some things better and they do some things worse. And so we wanna capitalize on some of the good habits and maybe not take all of our direction from certain cities and how they do things because they do take quite a bit of time. And what happens then is the state gets involved and writes legislation that slows everybody down. Right, but that's part of the process in terms of how we are approaching solutions by taking the best thing, so to speak, of what others are doing and try to apply that maybe. Yes, sir, we do a great deal of benchmarking, not just organizational structure, right, but also metrics, right, turnaround times. We look at their volumes versus our volumes, what's practical as far as review times go, right? We also, even with the future city hall conversations, we work with Tanya and the Athenian group to make several site visits across the country to look at how those one-stop shops shape up, right? And so we spend a great deal of time internal to the department and then external partnership with DAC and real estate council to look at other cities and what they're doing as well. Yeah, terrific. And I would just also comment on the ORC chart kind of representation of the system because as it appears to be kind of simple and just laying it out on a page or a very long page, it reveals so much. And I think it's an opportunity to talk about the organization when you're focused on process and efficiencies versus structure, right? And one may require a big change to improve the others. So structure, improving process and efficiency because just something you mentioned, DJ, that got my attention was with turnover and with getting people up to speed as to the way we do things, well, we're perpetuating the problem, right? If we're trying, we're always playing catch-up or whack-a-mole was what you were thinking of instead of taking the Band-Aid off and looking at the structure and looking at the best way, I think to attack those problems, just two cents. Okay, Jared Allen, either one. Well, thank y'all. Just to comment, I know that we're quickly approaching the budget season and DJ, you've shown me not only the ORC chart, but also the process chart and how that process kind of interweaves between different departments. I personally would like to see us take a look at what it would take to make a one-stop shopping, consolidate some of these functions, if not all of these functions underneath one umbrella. I don't know what that structure looks like, but I personally would like to see if we can get to that timeline of August so that we can discuss that in the budget process and see what improvements we can make next year. So Travis, thank you for coming today. I really appreciate the work the real estate council's done putting this together. I think it's been illuminating. I think it's been incredibly helpful. And I also want to thank DJ and David on the efforts they've been putting forward over these past months with the new budget and your staffing up to help solve this in the development service department specifically, I think that the survey showed that there was decided improvement there. I look at the org chart and Jared just touched on a little bit, but I can't imagine what an optimized process flow would look like and even more so can't imagine what the reality process flow actually is. So that would be my challenge is kind of to really workflow it, whether there's organizational change or not, a great process flow. And so everyone really understands could be beneficial. Had discussions with Travis about best way to benchmark this and it sounds DJ that you have thoughts on that already, if there is a good way to metricize and benchmark the process so we can see the tangible improvements over time, I think that would be incredibly beneficial to us. So anyway, I just want to thank everybody for what's been happening here and I don't want us to lose any momentum. Anyone else, Elizabeth? So we added upwards 30 plus positions in this current budget cycle to development services to help address this issue and we're still dealing with the issue. Now, granted it hasn't been a full year and like patience isn't my virtue but we have allocated resources to this. I have seen the infamous org chart because it is taped up across David Cook's bookcase in his office and I walked in one day and it's like what in the world is going on here? And it is complicated and a little convoluted but what we know is that we put a whole bunch of additional staff members into this process and it may have alleviated some but it hasn't fixed it. There are a lot of different moving parts to this because it takes so many specific expertise to come to this conclusion, right? So while it may seem easy to put everybody under one bucket, I would venture to say that Fernando Costa is not a stormwater engineer expert. Is that fair to say? Right, okay. So we have to make sure that we're continuing to keep that professional continuity together, however we do that because we can't lose that professionalism at the sake of expediency because then we get bad development. What I would be interested in knowing is what other cities or charts look like because this may be a situation where we've got this and this is great and I think we're always really good at tinkering with stuff but maybe the solution is not to tinker but just take a sledgehammer to it and start all over. And so I would be interested in knowing what those cities that we look to that don't have these lags in the process. What are they doing? How are they structuring it? And how can we do that better? And then to David Cook, I would say if there are silos in anything, then it's indicative of a culture not just when it comes to development services but across the city. And so my charge would be to help break those down across the city, not just in the development services because it shouldn't matter who you report to. The end goal is providing top notch customer service to our residents. And so I don't know how you fix that, David but we're here to help. Great comments. Any other questions? No, DJ, thank you. It was great to see your staff last week. I know how hard you're working. A lot of these changes you are implementing and I keep saying it but the environment matters and you're gonna be in a new city hall, the one-stop shop and your employees are gonna be very excited to come to work every day. And I think that while some people maybe have not visited as many times as Travis has, downtown into the basement of our city hall, it does make a big difference. So special thanks to city management for recognizing that the investment was gonna be maybe one of those critical pieces of all the changes that we're gonna take place in your department and just keep doing what you're doing. I know it takes a lot of time and effort and you're only one person but I know you have a lot of other directors and people that are right behind you making these efforts and to other folks that are maybe not in your department, thank you as well because in some cities I'm sure they'd say pound sand, we don't really care what you're doing and that's not been the case at least when I've talked to the department heads, they're all really willing to make a difference in this sector and because of that, economically the city will flourish and all the other things are working on will come together. So much thanks to you. Thank you. Thank you. We have another one, sorry. Next up is economic development. Sherry Gordon is gonna present on Carhart. Good afternoon. You're ready. The purpose of this presentation is to discuss a proposed tax abatement with Carhart and I would mention that we do have representatives in the audience from the company and so happy to welcome them to Fort Worth. Carhart's a US based apparel manufacturer known for its work close, family owned annual revenue two billion, number of employees 5,500 based in Dearborn, Michigan and they're partnering with a third party logistics provider to lease a state of the art distribution center space to meet their growing long-term market. So that location is at 16101 Wolf Crossing that's west of the Texas Motor Speedway off Highway 114. On the project overview, Carhart is to partner with that third party logistics provider. They'll manage the building construction and design of a 1.2 million square foot building. They'll be investing in business personal property including fitting the facility with machinery and equipment. Their proposed capital investment is 80 million that'd be 50 million in taxable appraise value of business personal property by January 1st, 2025 with 500 full-time jobs by December 31st, 2024. And did wanna note that those 500 jobs are to be organic and local. They're not having transfers for those jobs. The average annual salary for the jobs will be over 55,000. The company commitments are the 50 million in taxable BPP by January 1st, 2025, 500 full-time jobs December 31st, 2024 and all those full-time jobs would have a minimum average annual salary of 55,000. So what staff is proposing is a seven-year tax abatement up to 75% of that BPP. The abatement capped at 2 million. That 75% breaks down 30% is based on the BPP at 50 million. 25% is based on the 500 full-time jobs being over 55,000 and 20% is based on the 500 jobs. So for the summary, there's private investment by Carhartt minimum of the 50 million in BPP by December 31st, 2024. As a part of this project, there is expected to be another 60 million in real property improvements by the 3PL and property owner at the site and that 60 million estimate is also included in the future projections. The employment is 500 new FTEs again by December 31st and average annual wages 55,000 with the proposed seven-year incentive proposal. So that public-private ratio is at 1.7 at present value 1.3 with an estimated ratio of 29, almost 29 to one with net new taxes of 3 million MPV 2.5 and that payback is just 2.3 years again with the real construction costs in addition to the BPP. So our recommendation next steps are to enter into that seven-year tax abatement agreement 75% with a public hearing on April 11th and MNC on April 11th. And do we have any questions? Any questions, council? No, very exciting. Thanks for the update and special thanks to Economic Development for making it happen. Thank you. One more presentation on FY 2020 annual COMP financial report. I think Regi Zeno is up first. Good afternoon, mayor and council. I'm joined by Tony Russo, the assistant director of accounting, actually, the accounting bureau. And I'm here today to present a quick overview of the FY22 annual comprehensive financial report. The agenda today, we'll just go over the purpose of the annual comprehensive financial report. We'll review some highlights from FY22. We'll briefly go through financial performance of on an entity-wide basis and then several of the individual funds. And then we'll turn it over to Tony to review the audit findings and results. The audit itself was presented this morning to the audit committee, but we'll provide a brief overview of that presentation. The annual financial report is prepared in conjunction with the generally accepted accounting rules that govern its preparation. The document itself is audited annually by an independent auditor. And the purpose of the financial report is to provide a detailed description and accounting of all city-wide expenditures. Obviously, several bodies use the document, in particular, bond rating agencies, bondholders and investors, as well as granting agencies. Just to highlight a few of the accomplishments in FY22, the auditors provided an unmodified clean opinion, which is the highest opinion provided on financial statements by an external auditor. The city received the award, the certification for achievement in excellence in financial reporting that was awarded to the finance department. And then additionally, the planning unit, planning and data analytics department was awarded the distinguished budget presentation as well. As a part of the annual audit, the city was successful in implementing the new GASB statement number 87 as it relates to leases. From a financial performance perspective, this is a really busy slide, but the document itself is prepared based on generally accepted accounting practice. And that's a set of accounting standards that's administered by what we call GASB, the Government Accounting Standards Board. Revenues are recorded when they are earned and expenses are then matched up within that same period to match revenues. This accounting that you'll see is slightly different from the budgetary basis accounting reports that are presented through PDNA to council periodically. And those revenue and expenses are recorded as they occur or as we collect the revenue and the expenses as we pay bills. On an entity-wide basis, we've seen a net increase in net position city-wide of approximately 273 million. That's attributed to several factors throughout the organization, but generally an increase in revenues from, as compared to prior year, net pension liability calculations, which caused the fund balance, the balanced net position to increase slightly related to pension and the OPEB, which is the basically the Retiree Healthcare Program. We have recorded an unrealized loss on investments of approximately 59 million. And that's an unrealized loss. It's not an actual loss on the investments because we hold all of the investments until maturity. And then we've seen a slight increase in expenditures, which helped to increase the balance. And as total, we've seen a net increase in the net position. From the standpoint of outstanding debt, we currently as of September 30th hold approximately 2.3 billion of outstanding debt. 45% of that debt is attached to the water and sewer rates. That's a billion, slightly more than a billion dollars of outstanding debt. Geobonds as well as Geo government seals account for approximately 32% of the debt load. It's a significant balance of debt. We saw an increase due to bond issuances of 360 million, offset by payments of approximately 264 million. The next, this slide just provides a really high level view of the general fund. On a gap basis, we've seen the fund balance increase by 2.7 million, with the resulting 2.243 million dollar fund balance that's attributed to a variety of occurrences. We've seen property tax collected generally at the budgeted target. Sales taxes, we saw a dramatic increase in sales tax collections. We were able to aggressively manage the budget to the credit of all city department heads. We actually were able to build a fund balance up by approximately 25 million. And then within the general fund, we had the unrealized lost on investments. This slide basically is attempting to provide council with a crosswalk. Probably two months ago, city manager presented the estimated balances on a budgetary basis to council. And there we reported an unassigned fund balance of 192.2 million, all within an ending fund balance of 244.4 million on a budgetary basis. And we're simply providing the crosswalk of all of the various adjustments that are required within the gap basis accounting. We are several non-cash transactions or actually embedded into the accounting record to basically reduce the fund balance slightly, but then additionally, we're required to report the endowment gas lease within the general fund on the gap basis schedules. And so the resulting gap basis is the approximate $243 million of fund balance. Culture and tourism had a great year in FY 22. The hotel taxes were up dramatically, approximately 12 million, and ticket tax as well increased by approximately 3 million. That all to lead to an increase in the culture and tourism fund balance by 19 million, which left a resulting 46.5 million in its fund balance. And then of course, this is all based on the gap basis of accounting. CCPD ended the year as well with the positive fund balance of 40.3 million. That fund balance is slightly less than the prior year, and that's due to obviously the sales taxes being collected over and above the budget. The expenditures were slightly below the budget, and then the resulting use was primarily due to the use and purchase of vehicles, I believe, with the CCPD funding in fiscal 22. On the risk fund is the one fund that is continuing to be somewhat problematic. This fund ended with a deficit of 12.4 million. That's attributed to increases in cost. We actually were required to pay 3 million out for hail claims. We're experiencing a dramatic increase in commercial insurance premiums, as well as self-insurance claims. Liability increase dramatically by 219% and then as well, work as compensation. As I've noted, these statements are based on a gap basis, includes some non-cash adjustments, however, from a cash perspective, the fund does have sufficient funds to cover its current liabilities, but this fund will require some really serious budget analysis during the 24 process, FY24 budget process. But as illustrated, we've seen some dramatic increases within this fund. Water and sewer had a very excellent year again, ending with a $2.9 billion net position. That was an increase of 222 million. And again, I'll note these are on a gap basis with additional revenue contributed due to a drier than normal year, which generates additional revenue. There was a cash defesance, which generated some additional long-term savings. The pension liability decreased by 32 million. Which all resulted in an increase in the fund balance. There was an additional net invested in capital assets of which 86 million approximately was contributed by developers. Pension, which is always of interest to all of us. The generally accepted accounting practice requires us to account for pension differently than the actuarial report that is prepared annually through the retirement board. This calculation is based on an assessment of accrued liabilities that is then offset by the market value of the pension at the end of September 30th of 21, 22. The actuarial report that council will receive, I believe in May, from the retirement board will be a better illustration of the pension scenario. It'll be much more updated. The actuarial values are calculated differently in that the investment returns are smoothed out over a five-year period to avoid any major adjustments or any major impacts to the liability. It's an effort to smooth out the effects of any investment scenarios. And as you may be aware, the retirement investment fund suffered a pretty significant loss due to the stock market. And all of that data will be presented on the May 16th joint meeting of council in the retirement board. But based on these calculations, which is the accounting standard by which all governments must follow, we are representing a slight decrease in the unfunded liability. And these calculations has a one-year lag in it. So much more current information is forthcoming. The post-employment benefits liabilities basically is to retiree health care. Overall, the health care is a closed plan. Employees hired after 2009 are no longer available of eligible for city-funded health care. So therefore, these expenses are paid on a pay-as-you-go basis. There's approximately 28 million budgeted in the budget to fund these health care claims. At present, at the end of June, September 30th, the city had basically an 89% unfunded liability, but the payments are made on an annual basis on a pay-as-you-go. The city currently manages a portfolio of approximately 88 million that's used to help offset future liabilities. But as I indicated, this program will, the liabilities attached to this program will decrease dramatically over time. And we're projecting that by 69.70. This fund will have sufficient assets to fund insurance, health care, payment insurance expenses without a need for a general fund allocation. Reserve compliance within the general fund as was presented several months ago by Mr. Cook, that we will end fiscal 2021 with an undesignated fund balance of 21%. As the chart depicts, we have attempted to grow the fund balance over time. The goal is to reach a 25% of projected expenses as our unassigned fund balance, which would represent three months of reserves. And as you aware, the government needs is required to have sufficient reserves to cover any unforeseen issues that may come about. This is simply a depiction of the general fund balance with the unassigned at 192.2 million, which represents 21%. As it relates to the other government funds, all of the funds represented are well within compliance, the green check marks. The debt service funds are compliant with the policies as well, enterprise funds are primarily within the target, except for the solid waste, which is off slightly by one day of cash on hand, but well within a reasonable performance. Internal service funds as well, are well within current policies, except for the risk fund that I referenced earlier. And I'll turn it over to Tony to briefly discuss all the findings. Okay, so I'll start with just some audit terminology. So material weakness is in deficiency in internal controls, such that there's a reasonable possibility that a material misstatement in the city's financial statements will not be prevented or detected and corrected on a timely basis. And a significant deficiency is a deficiency or combination of deficiencies in internal controls that are less severe than a material weakness. However, they're important enough to bring council's attention to it. So for fiscal year 2022, we had a total of $140 million in grant expenditures. There were 267 active grants and managed by 17 departments throughout the city. So all of the audit findings identified and previously have been addressed and corrected. So in the past five years, the city's averaged four audit findings. And since I've worked on 17 annual financial reports for the city and we've always had numerous findings, we've never had no findings. This year we came close, the auditors found one finding which they considered a material. We'll talk about that next. So this is regarding the Airport Improvement Program where the contractor did not submit certified payrolls for itself and for subcontractor work as required by the Davis-Bacon Act. And the city didn't have internal controls in place to ensure that we received them. However, since this finding's been brought to our attention, aviation received the certified payrolls, finance reviewed them, and we've determined that there is an issue all employees were paid at least the minimum amount. But we still to prevent this from occurring in the future. So one thing, departments are responsible for the operational compliance of their grants while finance works with the financial management part of the grants. And the aviation department was already in the process of reclassifying a position to a contract compliance specialist, which would assist in this area. And in addition, finance will establish a process where we are communicating deadlines for compliance related items up front. So then once we receive it, then departments will send them the finance and finance will review for reasonableness and then we'll load them into PeopleSoft. And in addition, we'll continue to provide training to grant personnel and reinforce the key concepts of grant compliance. And this is just an update. The auditors also provide five separate agreed upon procedures. They're in process right now. So there's not really an update, but it's something we don't anticipate any issues with them, but they're not completed at this time. Questions? Questions. Questions from council? No. Thank y'all very much for the hard work put in and to staff that's here too. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Reggie. Council, I think that's the last of our presentations. We can move to future agenda items. Go ahead, Carlos. I had brought this up some years past. I guess it's directed to both TPW and police department. When I go to conferences, I take a close look at what applicable technologies there are. Since we're talking about street light, infrastructure improvements now, I know that the state of current technologies have changed. Talking about maybe lower cost sensors that can be installed to help us with locating, triangulating gunshots. Is that technology? Is it, you know, Matoors keeps getting cheaper. I know that there is a collaboration between AT&T and General Electric on that front. I don't know any other further details, but my request would be that TPW and the police department get together and give council an update as to whether or not those technologies are, you know, can be feasibly implemented at a good price point. Anybody else? Go ahead. Yeah, I'd like an IR on on what the process and the procedure is for our police officers following a CPI or other type of traumatic events. You know, what type of time off they're allowed, counseling or other type of supportive services. So if we could get a list of the types of triggering events and then what is available to them afterward would be very helpful. Yes, I want to, well, yeah, I guess our own procedures are and there's a better way of doing our meetings such as like the CCPD meeting last week. It shows as follow. And instead of the four o'clock time that most people are planning to be here. And so I got a lot of comments about they were not prepared to be here. So what does that look like moving forward? Is there a better way that we can do that? Also an IR on when we have formal presentations come to this council, when does it go to council for a vote? I know I think one of them is we talked about a consensus but is that the only way? So I want to IR on the procedures of when presentations come to council and work session. How does it go to the council for a vote? Also, I want to IR on all of the CPs that have been presented to council from the last 10 years. Anyone else? Nope, okay, thank you. Meeting adjourned.