 Mr. Brennan, Madam Clerk. President. Mr. Rickman. I'm here. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. President. Mr. Vine. Here. Mr. Davis. Here. Mayor Benjamin. President, thank you. Councilor McDowell, would you give us a word please? Yes. Creative thought for this day and for all that you've done for us, for your tender mercies that showers us each and every day. We thank you, Lord, for these persons who are sitting vigorously around this virtual call to make decisions, to discuss, and to have lively interaction so that this our city continues to expand itself and grow in peace and in love. Lord, we ask that in your own way you might touch us individually and collectively. Allow us to feel and to sense your touch. And for the many residents in our city, please, Lord, sensitize them and us to your will. We ask it and claim it in your name, amen. Amen. Thank you, Reverend Dowell. Yes. The adoption of the agenda. We got like a couple of amendments sent to you, Major. Yes, sir, Mr. Mayor. We would ask Council to consider adding item 24, adding two item 24, the noise ordinance, adding two item 26, whitewater, and then deferring item 16, which is a zoning map amendment for 1232 Whitaker Drive, as well as deferring item 17, which is a zoning map amendment for 901, 903, 911, and 919 South Edisto Avenue. Okay. All right. With those amendments, is there a movement, is there a motion to adopt the agenda? Move. Is there a second? Second. All right. Any discussion? Seeing none, we'll move the previous question to part of the call roll. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Aye. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Aye. Mr. Vaughn. Aye. Mr. Davis. Aye. Mayor Benjamin. Aye. Thank you. Thank you. Moving into a period of city council. I'm sorry, I'm not doing the minutes. My apologies. Approval of the minutes. Council is asked to approve the June 16, 2020 council meeting minutes. So moved. Is there a second? Second. All right. Any discussion? We'll move the previous question to part of the roll. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Aye. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Aye. Mr. Vaughn. Aye. Mr. Davis. Aye. Mayor Benjamin. Aye. Thank you. Mayor Benjamin. I know Mr. Davis had mentioned this and I'm sure you probably would want to do so as well at an acknowledgement of China Phillips and the complete count committee. It's not on our agenda, but as the census count has wrapped up, she did such a phenomenal job. And Mr. Davis, I saw your note about that. Is that something you wanted to take up? No, I think you've covered it. The fact that it was really organized and from the ground level on up and I attended one of them in particular and everything went well. Great participation. And I think it says a little about how we reach out and get and take advantage of the talents of some of the people that we generally work with and represent the city well. And from where I stand, I thought we did our best and everything's well accounted for as far as I know. It was very good. And I think we should take some time. Maybe the next meeting, I actually spoke to China earlier. I think she's taken some vacation, much of the vacation time, but introduced to China. Obviously, she served as a fellow for Ms. Divine and we all saw how talented she was then. And when she took on this task, working closely with Krista and Theresa and the rest of the team at the city, it really became a this odd year in which the resources to run the census just were not being made available nationally. It showed within a governmental and sectoral leadership can be China stepped up, the rest of her team just really volunteers stepped up, tap into Ms. Green and her amazing wisdom and experience. Sister Charity was very, very supported by making sure that China was able to spend the time and it's what you want to see in a real community. So I agree and I appreciate Sam raising it. We've got to take some time, maybe in our next meeting, whatever that happens to be, to properly thank the complete community for their incredible work on the census. Yes, sir. Okay, and with that, we will move into our discussion and action items. The first being our normal COVID-19 situational report. Mr. Harry Tinsley with our emergency management department, our director. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, sir. Thank you. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, members of council, Madam City Manager again. Thank you for your time. I'll be brief. There's additional information in your inbox. So as far as worldwide, we're at over 40 million global cases of COVID-19 with over, unfortunately, 1.1 million deaths due to the virus. The US stands at over 8 million confirmed cases. There have been over 220,000 deaths here in our state to date as of the numbers that purported out. There have been over 1.7 million tests resulting in over 158,747 cases, which includes the additional 666 that reported out today as of last night. So the average 14-day percent positivity rate stands right now at about 10.9. The average daily test standard around 6,700 per day. Unfortunately, as of yesterday, there were 25 new confirmed deaths reported in our state. That reporting period goes from September 21 to the 19th of October, and that brings the total confirmed deaths to, unfortunately, 3,475. There are additional 221 probable that they're waiting on the results on. For Richam County, there have been over 161,000 tests resulting in 15,741 confirmed cases cumulative. That includes 67 additional cases reported in Richam County as of today from yesterday. And our death count total confirmed deaths stands at 246. And on the testing side, staff continues to increase testing sites here in the city and all that information. The interest of time is on our social media platforms and all our websites and on the DX website. So overall, the current recovery rate for our state is estimated at 92.2 percent. And the state case fatality rate is estimated at 2.22 percent. And as a note, South Carolina continues to remain stable, averaging 600 data or new cases each day. The overall state hospitalizations remain high, however, there is sufficient physical bed space in hospitals. The data will be adjusted. And as of today, tomorrow, we'll report out the hospital bed utilization rate. And state public health officials, along with local partners continue to monitor case counts, percent positivity, and hospitalizations. And that concludes my report. Harry, thank you so much. Mr. Mayor, as part of our COVID report today, we're honored that we were asked to participate with the University in some data analysis and hopefully the ability for us to be predictive with how the virus is spreading. And so with that, the Metro Wastewater Treatment Plant COVID-19 study update will be given by Dr. Shawn Norman with the University of South Carolina Molecular Microbial Ecology Lab. He's the director in his work with Clint and team out at Metro on this. I'm sorry, Mr. Mayor, I think Mr. Brennan has a question. Yes, Ms. Wilson, real quick before you move on, I wanted to ask Harry, are there any zip codes that, Harry, are there any zip codes that are trending that you've noticed that deserve special attention? I'm sorry, can you hear me? Yes, I can hear you. Hey, the last 14-day reporting document is in your inbox. Let me pull that information and I'll click. So for Richland County, sorry, I didn't have that immediately available. So there are, overall, over the last 14 days, it looks like we are several zip codes are standing 50 or above new cases over that 14-day period. And that is the 29016, the 29063, the 2901, which is the downtown area. The 2903 is 73. That is the highest report out for that 14-day period. And then 29021063. Did I answer your question? You're welcome. You did, thanks. Ms. Devine? I just had a quick question. I know we kind of talked about this a few weeks ago, but knowing that the winter shelter will open or inclement weather shelter will open before our next meeting, are we getting out, I guess, the protocols that the shelter will have regarding COVID precautions? Because, of course, we'll assume that we're going to be doing things vastly different than we've done in the years past, and how are we disseminating that information? Yes, ma'am. Our staff has been very involved with our partners, obviously, the United Way and Transitions and all of the normal partners we deal with. Harry, do you want to talk about the real briefly, the protocols that y'all put in place at the inclement weather center? I know it's been a team effort with Harry, Kelvin, Keesler of Support Services, as well as Director Roth with Safety and Risk. So, Missy Kauffman also is always our go-to in between with the service providers, though, and then, of course, CPD as well. But Harry, do you want to take the lead and just get kind of a brief, very brief outline of how that's going to work this year? Sure. Can you hear me again? I think I'm using myself. We can hear you. Okay. Yeah, so we've been working with our partners, as Ms. Wilson said. We are increasing the social distancing safety and risk. We've done our Safety and Risk Director, Rump, has done an assessment. We've done a walk-through prepared facility with added additional awning to make sure that we can maintain social distancing to the exterior, the traffic pattern of how we flow through the drop-off location, the temperature checks that will be taken, the additional tablespacing to try to increase the social distancing there. We've provided some disinfecting to prepare the location, some other PPE and assistance items so they can do proper testing there. Craig Curry in Transitions has implemented his protocol. They are communicating those out also through United Way. They will be helping with case management. Also, the Risen County is coordinating with Prisma on any kind of testing they would need to do. Someone presents a symptomatic or as a temperature site before they enter the congregate space. They will isolate them in a location provided, and then they'll come and do a expedited test. And then along with Risen County, us and DHAC will provide lodging, if you will, for an isolated case or quarantine case. But the temperature checks will occur before anyone can enter, correct, Harry? Yes, ma'am. We are providing additional throughout the Filment Center additional wand testing capacity, as they have requested, and some additional items as far as the feeding and additional stuff. We've gotten a list from them and we've helped them with taking care of that. And this is helping us out, you know, communicating that and tracking that. And as far as in the past, the volunteers that did things, are we anticipating still having volunteers this year with people not doing things they've done in the past? And how are we accounting for making sure that we have enough support to run the Center? That is being coordinated through Jennifer with United Way, and it is my understanding that they've got staffing measures in place to assist with that. Okay. All right. Thank you, Harry. Appreciate it. Right. Welcome. Thank you. Any other questions for Director Tinsley? No. Other than this maybe more of a statement, obviously my inbox is blowing up and with some of the pitchers from this past weekend that certainly the concerns around public health and the way in which we're trying our darnedest to manage the long-term impacts of COVID-19 backdrop of working with our student body. And we're going to have to spend some time revisiting our strategy, what we can do and can't do, obviously, recognizing that there are limits. And certainly as the governor's alleviated some of the controls that he has in place, it's created a challenging situation. And we're going to have to go back to the drawing board and think about ways in which we can continue to work on some thoughtful partnerships to help us address the challenge. So I just wanted to raise that so folks expect some deeper dive conversation. Mr. Duvall. Mr. Mayor, I had an interesting email from a constituent this morning that I thought had a very good suggestion. He suggested that we set up a testing tent on Hardin Street from about five o'clock to nine and ten o'clock in the evening. Maybe working with the social clubs down there, the bars, that if the kids went over and got tested, they'd get a sticker and get in ahead of the line or something like that and make it an incentive for the test. But it would also, by having the people out there versus and other people administering the test, show that this is a very serious public health crisis and we're serious about taking care of the public. That's an innovative idea. I thought it was too. We did a football game as well. We did a football game as well. You got thousands of people out there gathering around and it looked exactly like the pictures we saw from this weekend. That would be a great place to do it too. But I think the challenge before us is obviously in the evolution of any issue or crisis, you've got to be iterative. Some things will work, some things won't work. It's how do you continue to, I think it's going to take that level of creativity and collaboration. Let's meet people where they are and figure out so it could be, the game could be at five points. It could be wherever it happens to be. But wherever folk are, the interface. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. So I'm fine. Ms. Madal? Hey, go ahead, please. Yes, I would simply, yeah, may I? Yeah, I would simply say that it's an innovative idea. I would be more concerned with the logistics of setting up wherever we set up, whether it's one place or two places. But primarily in places where there's a huge number of folk. So yes, I think very creative, I think. Yeah, well, my emails are more so about increasing penalties on masks and even our hard-working and esteemed state senator wants us to really push the act to use some of their significant authority on the state code. So we're going to have to get that much more creative and it's a hell of a balancing act. So let's pledge that between now and the next week or so we're going to spend doing a deep dive and it's going to require all of us. So thank you. Thank you, Ms. Wilson. Yes, sir. Okay, Dr. Norman, sorry about that. We will have you go ahead and give us your briefing at this point. Thank you, sir. That's okay. I like the lovely discussion. It leads right into a novel way of monitoring the virus as well. So I am going to try to share my screen here. So hopefully this will work. Let me see. Okay, can everyone see my screen? Yes. Well, first of all, it's a pleasure to be here speaking with all of you this afternoon. So what I want to do is give you a brief update of the work my group's been doing here at USC where we've been using sewage surveillance of the SARS-CoV-2 so the virus that causes COVID-19 and more specifically give you an update of the Columbia metropolitan region that we've been sampling. But I'll put that in context with the overall work that we've been doing across the state as well. So oftentimes I get asked, why sewage? This is not something that most people think about when you think about a respiratory infection. So what I thought I would do is give you kind of a brief overview. And also, by the way, if you know me, you know I'm a fairly informal person. So anytime when I'm talking, feel free to interrupt me and ask questions. Okay. So basically how the sewage surveillance work as a public health tool for a respiratory infection. Well, first of all, we know that the respiratory infection SARS-CoV-2 virus is shed through fecal material. So a person that is infected will shed the virus through their fecal material out into feces into a waste stream. So that's how this technique overall works is that people shed the virus into their fecal material and it gets into a sewage system. Now if that sewage system happens to be connected into an urban area, so a municipal catchment population, then we will be able to identify that through our monitoring process. And what I'm showing in this slide here is what all of you are familiar with, a wastewater treatment plant within an urban area that catches the waste that is produced by a catchment population of people. So this circle here is the catchment population. So it's all the people within an area that's connected to a wastewater treatment plant. In this case we'll be talking about the Columbia Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant. So you could think of this at the end down here is the Columbia Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant. Because everybody within all these different regions here, we got community services that would be hospitals, universities, nursing homes, prisons, those kind of things, your residential areas, your industrial areas, your community facilities, malls, hotels, apartments, so on and so forth. Everybody in those areas, the waste goes to this wastewater treatment plant, the centralized wastewater treatment plant. So if you think about this, really everybody that's within this catchment population within a 24-hour time period will provide us a sample. We get a community pool, a pooled community fecal sample from this entire area. And if we're able to get a community pool fecal sample, that means we can identify the virus that's being shed from that population of people within that community over time. So this allows us to get a component of the entire community population. It's not a novel process. This has been used to track opioid usage. It's been used to track illicit drug usage, as well as norovirus and polio as well. This is the first time it's been used for this type of virus, an envelope virus. So there's been a lot of tweaking that we as scientists have had to do for the methodology. And I have to tell you that, you know, when March rolled around, I was doing something completely different. And then I got a call from the CDC asking me if I would be willing to help them do this. So this has been a rapid transition from my lab, as well as my colleagues around the world who are microbiologists who have been doing other work, all kind of switching gears to see what we could do to help the pandemic in the fight against this virus. So this novel concept of sewage surveillance came out from some studies in the Netherlands, first of all, show that this might be able to be used for the SARS-CoV-2 virus. And that's where everybody, including myself, started trying to look at this. And it's gotten so big now that the CDC has developed, just got federal funding to establish a national sewage surveillance system. So they're going to be coordinating with all the sites, including me here at South Carolina and colleagues around the world at, I believe, eight different states that are going to be partnering with the CDC for this. And I'm happy to say that South Carolina is one of those states. So that said, if we collect a sample down here, and we have an auto sampler, and this only works when we have good collaborations with our utilities. And I'm fortunate that I have been working for the last several years with many of our utilities around the state. And I've developed very good working relationships with utilities. So the operators at these utilities collect samples from us. So this is raw sewage that is coming into these wastewater treatment plants. They collect that over a 24-hour time period for us so that we get that composite sample. Not to get into too many details, but most people will likely provide a sample within 24 hours. So we're collecting that composite sample. Now, if we look at this and we look at the benefits, so we always do a cost-benefit analysis with everything. And so if you look at the benefits of using sewage surveillance to track community abundance of this virus, there are multiple benefits. It is an efficient pool sample, as I just mentioned, of community or sub-community. Something I haven't gotten into yet is that you can scale this type of approach to whatever granularity you would like to scale it to. I'm doing this type of monitoring on our campus as well. So we're down to monitoring building level. So you can monitor buildings, you can monitor nursing homes, you can monitor prisons, you can monitor basically whatever you have the resources to do, you can monitor. So you can scale this approach. The really good thing about this approach is that it captures subclinical infections. And what do I mean by that? I mean that those people who are not showing symptoms at all that may not be feeling the need to go get tested because they feel perfectly fine, we're going to catch those infected people. So you don't not have to show the symptoms to pass the virus through your fecal material. So you could be carrying the virus and releasing it into your fecal material and not even know, but we will capture that in our dataset. So we capture material from symptomatic as well as asymptomatic individuals. And the reason, again, this works so great in parallel with individual level testing is that it's independent of the health care seeking behavior and testing access. So we all have heard there's not always uniform access to testing available. We also have heard about the testing fatigue that's kind of taking part on our campus as well as across the nation, the state and across the nation. So this process is independent of all of that. As long as we're collecting 24-hour samples, we're collecting from individuals whether they want to provide a sample or not. That material is being captured by our sampling process. And then lastly and pretty importantly for trying to control a pandemic is that the data available from this type of approach is within days of shedding onset versus a two week lag for some types of other surveillance. So we will see virus being shed through fecal material before symptoms arise and those people are then deciding to go get tested. So not only my group but the CDC as well as many other people around the world are seeing suicide surveillance for providing a leading indicator of cases instead of a lagging indicator. So case counts, somebody go gets tested and they're symptomatic. That is a lagging indicator. It's already late. They're already showing symptoms. If we can catch it before symptoms arise, then you're likely to be able to pull those infected people out of a population and then mitigate the further spread of that disease before it really takes hold. So that's really the basis of suicide surveillance, these benefits here. Now, as I mentioned, my group as well as groups around the world transition into this monitoring very quickly. So because we transition into it very quickly, we had to start applying the science because in public health we are after prevention. We're not after reaction. We're trying to prevent and because we're trying to prevent, we actually started rolling out the methods in suicide surveillance before all the methodology was fully optimized because the benefits far outweigh the consequences in this case. So as all science is, there's still more optimizing to be done. So these are some considerations that we have to take into account. And I'm not going to go into every single detail here because I know you all have other things on your agenda. So we have to look at dilution, viral decay, viral recovery, and also the fact that 25% of U.S. residences are not connected to a sewer system. So a lot of people are on septic systems like I grew up on a farm in Middle Georgia. So we were on septic systems there. So we will not capture this approach. We'll not capture people who are on septic systems unless you find another alternative way to capture that sewage. And so the science is still ongoing. We're trying to understand that. I'm working very closely with the CDC with our data that I'm collecting across the state and we're modeling those data and trying to understand how we could come up with a national model that will then be rolled out at a national level to try to see how to use sewage surveillance as a public health tool. So going forward, I always want people to know the benefits and the considerations you have to take with any approach that we're taking. Now that being said, this is the project I've been working with since, I guess, started optimizing late March and really started sampling early April. And this is a collaboration between the CDC and South Carolina DHEC. I'm under contracts with both. The CDC approached me first. Then DHEC found out what we were doing and they wanted to kind of come on board, which was great because it's really opened up my approach here in the state of South Carolina as far as being able to collect samples from across the state. And you see the sample sites shown on this map on the left hand side. And the numbers are the populations of people for those catchment populations, the people who are being treated by the wastewater treatment plants that are in these areas. So if you take this into account, all the numbers across South Carolina, I'm missing one on here, and that would be Eastover. We're also sampling Eastover. If you can't take all this into account, we are really sampling about a little over a million individuals twice a week. So we're doing this sampling two times a week, which represents, based on the population census data for the zip codes, we're capturing about 1.2 million people twice a week. All right. So that's independent of any, you know, healthcare seeking behavior and testing. So to give an overview, because I always like people to know a little bit about how the science works. I have to say, my kids have about 11 and eight year old. They know a lot about sewage and what they like to call the poop factory of I-77. So we get these samples collected by the utility workers, and we work, my lab ourselves, we actually go to the Columbia Metropolitan Wastewater Treatment Plant right down the road. So I've been working with them for quite some time. So we work on that site, but South Carolina DHEC actually goes to the other seven sites we have across the state, collect the samples that have been collected by the operators, carry those to my lab. And then once all these samples that are allowed, we blend it and take it through several processes. So we end up concentrating sewage down to a very, very small amount. All right. And from that small amount, we're able to extract the, the nucleic acid. So the RNA that comprises that the virus is comprised of. And then we analyze that the same clinical labs will take a nasopharyngeal or saliva sample and analyze that in the lab through molecular mechanisms. So we can identify markers of the virus. Okay. So the bottom line here is that we take sample collected over a 24 hour period, which is a community pooled sample. We bring it to the lab, and then we could quantitate the number of viral particles in that sewage over that period of time. And when we do that, we get figures that look like this. So in the top panel shown here is the number of virus copies. So you can think of it as a viral titer or just the number of virus particles per liter of sewage. Okay. So that's what you're looking at on this axis here is the number of virus particles per liter of sewage. And this top graph is showing for the collective samples we've collected across South Carolina. So everything together, all eight sites that we're monitoring are represented in here. And when you start looking at these data, you can see some trends. And that's really where the power in this process comes into right now is trend analysis. So we can identify trends. So here, I'm pointing when South Carolina started reopening, we started seeing a little bit of an uptick. And then a bigger uptick in number of cases and viral abundance in sewage Memorial Day. And this has become known as the Memorial Day Bump. This is something that was recognized across the nation. Increased cases occurring after Memorial Day. And we see that in the sewage. We started seeing slow increases across the state of South Carolina after Memorial Day. And if I were to dig in in this little deeper and show you more details of all the sites, we can actually pick up on when beach season opened up because we can pick up on the increases in the abundance of the virus at our coastal locations that occurred during beach season. But regardless, you come up here and you look and you know, we started peaking in around July. And this is the point of time when Mr. Mayor, thank you. And a lot of the other city officials and across the state passed mandatory face mask ordinances. And you can see that once that was put in place, about one to two weeks later, we saw a precipitous decline in the number of cases. And like I said, this is across the state of South Carolina. So all the places where we were monitoring, we kept track of when face mask ordinances were put in place. And all of those sites that we monitored show showed a really sharp decline in the viral abundance in sewage, which is a good secondary way of verifying the success of a policy that was put in place. So not only did we see case numbers dropping, we saw the numbers in sewage. So a lot of people could argue that case counts could be biased because people aren't getting tested or not enough testing is being done. You can't, you can't really say this is that biased. This is, this is less biased in the fact that people are going to provide a sample. So we see the numbers going down and the numbers have steadily been decreasing over time. And I'm trying to move that window out of my way there. So you can see that over time, the numbers have been steadily decreasing in across the state here. Now you can dive into it a little deeper. Like I said, this bottom graph is showing specifically the Columbia metropolitan wastewater treatment plant. So the data is the same thing is the viral copy numbers per liter of sewage here. But the only difference here is on the secondary axis shown on the right. That is the number of cases that were observed in the zip codes that are captured by the Columbia metropolitan wastewater treatment plant. So this was provided to me by DHEC. And we can see here the same trend that the state saw. We saw increases occurring, then decreases occurring after face mask ordinances were put in place. Interestingly enough, we saw a second, second peak occur at Columbia metropolitan site. And that corresponded to the move-in date for USC. And I can tell you from my monitoring on campus, that corresponds to some of the highest numbers we saw on campus. So we actually picked up what was happening on campus at the municipal level. So we can't say this is causation, but it certainly correlates with move-in date and when case counts and sewage data suggested that we were having a lot of cases on our campus on the USC campus. But now since that point has been steadily decreasing. So I'm happy to say that all indicators from the sewage standpoint are suggesting that the abundance of the virus in the community is decreasing. The last thing I'll bring up on this slide is that this really points out to the usefulness of sewage surveillance, because the sewage surveillance or the blue bars where the case counselor is the line here, our data is left shifted, which means we see spikes occurring in sewage a little bit before the cases occur in the community, which means that we are able to provide a leading indicator. So if we see a spike, we can pass that word around, which I have done on a number of occasions to some of the municipalities we're working with saying, hey, we just saw a spike. You might want to be on alert. We just saw a spike in the sewage. That might mean something's coming down the pipeline for you. So we were able to do that using data like this. Okay. Any questions on this slide? I know this is mainly about updating on the Columbia Metropolitan site. And this is the most current update other than the fact that my students are actually in the lab right now running the numbers from the last sampling time point, which we pulled, I guess, yesterday. I find that on the data compelling and encouraging. I know that early on I had some outreach to our great Columbia water staff about the importance of utilizing the stool to indicate where we might see some disturbing trends. And they had already had some great conversations with the university. And to see over the last several months it bear this kind of fruit that keeps us really looking forward in a very unique way. It is satisfying. So thank you. Yeah, well, you're quite welcome. So this approach, you know, with the contracts I have right now, we're going to continue monitoring this through early next summer. That's when the contracts run out. I don't know if it'll be extended or not. But I'm hopeful that we'll have a vaccine occur. And if so, it's going to be really nice for us to be able to continue this type of sampling through the vaccination program, which will allow us to test the efficacy of the vaccine as well. Yes. Yeah, Dr. Norman, I just I think you said it, but I just wanted to confirm that I heard you correctly. So based on the data that you have and the zip code accounts that are reported out by DHEC, are you seeing that trend the same? Or do you see that maybe the DHEC numbers are not necessarily the things that are reported out poorly or not the same thing that you're seeing with this data? No, I would say that the trends are very similar. Matter of fact, I'm oftentimes amazed at how closely the data match up. We just get it a little early. So we get kind of an early indicator. If we start seeing a decrease, we know that DHEC is probably going to be seeing a decrease in the next couple of days as well. And sure enough, that's turned out to be the case. Now, what the modeling is going to be able to do that I'm working with CDC right now, and I'm not a modeler, so I'm relying heavily on their modelers at the CDC is that we will be able to then start projecting forward how many leading days indicator do we have. So we can get four to seven days lead time. So we have an idea of what might be occurring in the community seven days before it appears in the cases. But to get directly to your question, our data is very similar to what DHEC is showing. So they've been showing decreasing counts. We've been seeing decreasing counts. There is variability in the data, just like DHEC shows variability. One day at my case counts might be up a little bit. Another day it might be down a little bit. We see that same pattern in the sewage. So I think the two approaches are really a good marriage of the two types of science that are occurring to give an indicator and support each other. I have people ask me that question all the time because a lot of people don't trust the case count data because, you know, they say, well, people just aren't testing. If you don't test, it's not there. Well, you know, I'm happy to say that our data is backing up what Sakhalin DHEC is suggesting. I'm not saying this exactly, but I'm saying our trends are there. And we've been analyzing everything the same way since early April. We haven't changed anything. So there's no methodological change in our studies. So the trends are in what we were doing here. And so now we've developed the confidence that I'm happy to sort of kind of releasing a lot of the data. Yes, question. Yep, you're welcome. All right. You know the question? Yes. I miss it. Yes, sir. Dr. Norman, that was extremely interesting presentation. And I commend you for putting together that methodology. One thing I wanted to point out to you is the usefulness for us as policymakers for you to put those points in there like Memorial Day, when we put the mask ordinance on and other events like that. I think that a lot of policymakers around the state are going to be under pressure to relieve the mask ordinances. And I think that the graph that you showed with the great decline in the virus after we put mask ordinances on will help bolster the courage of elected officials to keep us masked up until we have a alternative like a vaccine or some treatments that will cure this virus. I agree. And I think that's really why I'm doing the science here is try to help you all provide evidence for you all in the policies that you're making. You know, I can only do so much with my public health approach without the policymakers. And that's where I think I'm happy to, you know, step in and provide those data. So I will put this on target. That was great. That was a great point, Mr. Duvall. And I think we're going to continue as we have sometimes completely in concert with public opinion and sometimes not in concert with public opinion. We're going to follow the data and do what's right for long-term health interests of the city. So I couldn't agree when the data marries up in a way like this. We have to make sure we highlight it as much as possible. Dr. Norma, I think it's also important to state for everyone's edification that this is not a study you should conduct at home. We're going to leave this to the professionals, okay? That's right. Well, I'll leave you with the conclusion slides up here. And the last slide I want to show, well, I want to make sure I end with the conversation being that you can scale this process. And I have a proposal in right now to one of our funding agencies to take this process to what we call the sub sewer shed to be able to go in and start targeting areas within the city of Columbia based on an epidemiologist's approach of finding an infectious disease vulnerability map based on socioeconomic factors, healthcare, everything combined in to then direct our sampling to those areas. So then we could talk about really targeted mitigation strategies that would allow, you know, there to be less social burden on a community. If only one section needs higher levels of mitigation than another section, trying to balance, you know, opening an economy up versus trying to be, you know, safe and have good social responsibility. It's very exciting. It is incredibly exciting. And there we go. That's the last picture I'll put up. That picture was taken a number of years ago by a babysitter that had to drop some paperwork by your office. And my son came back saying how he was excited to have met the president of Columbia. And I recognize your son. Who's the chubby guy next to him? And Councilman, I recommend your wife has been the pediatrician of my two kids for more than I guess about 11 years now. So they're indirect connections to us there. Well, you definitely got half of our family. Now, I will say, Mayor Benjamin, before I end my talk here, right before this meeting, I was on a meeting with the university administration, and they are wanting to start displaying the campus sewage data that we're collecting here on their dashboard. And I mentioned to them that I believe the city has some interest in doing something similar. So there is interest at the university to work with the city to see how we can roll out kind of a mutual displaying of sewage data. And as I told them, I will report back to them about the level of interest that the city might have. And then then you all can start meeting at pay grades higher than mine. Sure. Well, I think that would be very helpful. And obviously, City Manager along with Assistant City Manager Shealy, Director Tinsley, and Superduper Son Young on the case. And I think the reality is that if in fact we are required, and we had robust discussions already today about more work that we need to do to be creative, and you got this good data, the reality is that we know that spikes in virus concentration, you know, is testing data by at least today is maybe a week or so. So they have ability to move very actively. So I'm sure we can find that ability to collaborate. Teresa, I want to take that on from there. And thank you. Thank you so much, Dr. Norman. Okay. You tell those babies that me and some doctor recommend, not councilman recommend, and the rest of them. And send out very, very best. All right, we'll do and let me know if I can do anything more for you. All right. All right. Thank you. This is fantastic. Thank you. Okay. Take care. Thank you, Dr. Norman and Clinton. I will definitely be in touch with you about moving forward next steps with the dashboard. Sounds great. Mr. Mayor and Ms. Wilson, can I just say as we do move forward, also make sure that maybe we loop in Dr. Witherspoon and Dr. Davis. I hear from a lot of parents and as schools move to phase two and eventually phase three, you know, everybody is really concerned. And I think having independent data that might be a little bit instructive of a week or so may help them make some planning decisions regarding what they're doing and can alleviate some of the concerns that parents have in the community. Yes, ma'am. Absolutely. Awesome. Awesome. All right. Thank you so much. Keep it moving. Turning corners a little bit with some additional analysis that has been a long time in coming, but we're very thankful we're at this point. We will have the property tax capacity study presented by Dr. Rebecca Gunlotson. I hope I didn't mess your name out, Rebecca, with the quietest economics. And I know Mr. Reconmen has really taken a lot of leadership with this, Mr. Mayor. So I don't know if you had any opening comments or if you want us to dive right into the study. Well, I just, first of all, I just, I wanted to take a minute to thank the mayor and council. You know, this is another example of true leadership where we have talked about the concern issues and the effect it has on our economy, which we are the center for this MSA. And it's very important that and just, you know, I really want to thank everybody for pushing it forward. I mean, this is some real raw data that we should be using to move forward policies with our, with the jurisdictions around us. I think this is a tool and I can't reiterate again that how I believe this is, you know, one of those things where we're leading, we identified a problem instead of sitting around trying to put it under the rug where we're going forward and staff and council has put a lot of time and effort and discussions to get us here. And it's a long time coming. I really look forward to taking it and hopefully we can, we can build a task force out of this really to work and really use this as a tool in our toolbox for the future growth in Colombia and really attacking and continue to make our city better and better every day. And I just, I wanted to make that statement because sometimes when we get raw data and realities of things, it looks tough. But the reality is, is this is, this is because we know we can be better than we are. And this is our, this is our springboard. And I just appreciate the leadership of everybody pushing this forward. Let's jump right in. Okay. Well, thank you very, very much for having me today. I'm very, I'm genuinely honored to be part of a discussion on, on tax policy, which I surprisingly really enjoy. I am going to try to share my screen with you. So hopefully everyone sees that now. Okay. And I also like to say in particular, thank you to Jeff Palin and for all of his incredible support and oversight during the project, as well as to the city's GIS department. I really cannot stress enough their level of skill and expertise, and not only that, but their genuine desire to provide assistance and data. I'm very appreciative and we as a city are just very, very fortunate to have such talented staff. So, so thank you to them. So now before I begin, I'd really like to give you a little background on the study. So coming out of the great recession, the US has seen a particularly large growth in construction and capital deployment and jobs and income. And South Carolina in particular has grown more rapidly than the nation, ranking eight fastest in compounded annual GDP growth. The Columbia area, however, has witnessed much slower growth than its counterparts in South Carolina. Now the question is why? And high property tax rates have emerged to the forefront of discussions behind the driving factor in the city's lower growth. And in fact, you will see that Columbia's combined city, county and school rates are indeed significantly higher than pure city. So this study set out to evaluate Columbia's property tax rates and their impact on property owners and economic growth and the resulting tax revenues. And in fact, Columbia does currently find itself caught in a continuous loop. We have high property tax rates. Rebecca, before you go back, can you go back one slide for a quick second? I sure can. Yes. You make the best of it soon. Can you show us, tell us real really quick what each of those colors represent? I'm sorry. Yeah. Just yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Okay. Yes. No, no. And I guess I should say at this point, please, um, interrupt or, you know, bring up questions at any point in time. Rebecca, don't don't tell this crowd that we'll we'll we'll interrupt every other. Well, this is just foundational. So I just want to make sure as we start this discussion that that was clear. Okay. Okay. Excellent. Excellent. Yeah. No, thank you. And I probably look at this so much that you will need to stop me and remind me to point things out. So the dark blue at the bottom is the city millage rate for tax year 2019, the one that we are in currently. The lighter blue is the county millage rate. And then the the brown tannish color is the school millage rate. And that for Colombia, that you're actually seeing a an average rate between Richmond one and Richmond two school districts. And don't worry, I break it out into more detail for each of the school districts later on. But so that is what you're seeing when you see the fine millage rate, so property in the city, that would be the average tax rate that they would say. Okay, great. Thank you. Oh yeah, absolutely. So as you have high property taxes, and it does put the area in sort of the continuous feedback loop of high property tax rate leads to slower growth and depressed property valuations, which then in turn result in smaller tax revenues, and it prompts leaders to increase tax rates, which further deters growth and depressed valuations and on and on it goes. So today, what I'd like to do is examine and evaluate what might be the possible causes of our high property tax rate. Then we're going to take a look at what affects those high tax rates have on the city and the area and its people. And then finally, we're going to go over some solutions to help chart the path forward. Okay, so why might Columbia have high property tax rates? And there are really four possible causes that I came up with, and I'm not saying that the city or the area has all of them, but I want to go through each one to verify whether or not it is actually a factor, and if so, how much it might be. So first, we might have more exempt properties that owned by government or nonprofits or colleges or so forth than other areas. And if the city has more taxes than property than other peer, than other peer cities, it would require a higher tax rate on the remaining taxable property to generate the same level of revenues. So that's one, one possibility. Second possibility is that we can have lower property value. So if the values of our property are lower than the properties in other cities, again, it would require higher tax rates to generate the same level of revenues. A third possibility is that we might have fewer other revenue sources. So maybe we don't use sale taxes or licenses or fees like other cities. And if so, we'll have a lower revenues in these sources, and much more of our revenues would be skewed towards property taxes. And then fourth, it may just be that our area spends more. And if we do, we would need higher taxes for that spending. Now, again, I'm not saying that we have each one, but I want to dig into and evaluate each one of them and see which ones do affect Columbia and our surrounding areas. Okay. So first of all, does Columbia have more tax exempt property? So I'm just going to, when I ask you for these questions, I'm just going to go ahead and give you, give you the short answer. And the short answer is a little bit, but not enough to drive such a high tax rate there. And I want to warn you when I go through this that comparing this equally across cities has a huge apples to oranges component to it. So we're just going to have to work through and point out the deficiencies in data as we go through it. So if we look at the city of Columbia, we have 45,662 parcels of land within the city of Linus. 7.8% of them are fully exempt. There's another 16.5 that have some sort of partial exemption on them. Now the listed market value is much higher. Now, I want to give a note about that. State law does not require exempt properties to be appraised. So the Richland County Assessor's office said that the value on these properties were not accurate. We've had two comparison cities that Greenville told me the exact same thing. And they said that many of their properties just had hero values on them. Rock Hill said the same thing and said they weren't even going to give us that value because it was inaccurate. And since then I've actually spoken with someone in Spartanburg who also said they will not report the market values because they are inaccurate. So I really went back and forth on whether or not to include it because it's not correct, but eventually I'd say I prefer to get everything out there and then discuss the data's shortcomings. And so finally, from acres totals, it's 35%. Now this does not include Fort Jackson, which is 51,883 acres. And if we included Fort Jackson, we'd have something like 76% of acreage exempt. But while the city limits, it is an independent entity and the city does not provide services to it in the same way it does other parcels. So it was excluded from an analysis of the city. Now thank you very much to Jeff Palin. We are able to get properties from Greenville and from Rock Hill. And so if we look at Greenville and Rock Hill, we see that they have slightly fewer exempt parcels as well as acreage. And just from my recent discussion with Spartanburg, they have in their city limits 9.55% of their parcels are exempt. Now, I looked a lot for national data and surprisingly, there have been very few studies done on exempt properties, which I'm guessing is likely due to the fact that each entity categorizes and assesses properties in a very different or slightly different way. However, governing did do one back in 2012. So a select number of large cities. Now assuming that these cities again truly account for their exempt property in the same way. And if we can compare them to the 2019 data from our three South Carolina cities, we can see that first of all, all of the South Carolina cities have more exempt parcels as a total in the national average with Columbia being the highest. Now, Rebecca, again, so we're looking at but we're looking at fully exempt parcels. And as a percentage, if you look at fully exempt market value, Columbia agree, but you're still talking a 300% increase, aren't you? Oh, okay. Yeah, I've got that graph coming right up. Yeah, those are the last the last page. So okay, there you go. Oh, you want to go back to the last page? Okay. It's on both. It's on both. But but that's not insignificant. I want to make sure we point out, right? It's not. Yes, so that is three times. But we in order to verify, we would have to go through a parcel by parcel analysis, as you know, Greenville said, they don't actually have that many of their exempt parcels have zero values on them. I don't know how many of their exempt parcels have zero values on them. So since each assessor office or independently of each other, I just don't know the history of how they were assigned or how they're kept up or even if they are. So that again, I debated whether or not to include it because Columbia could be much higher, it could be much lower, Greenville could be much, much higher and could be much, much lower as well. But again, I just felt it better to get that information out there and then discuss the inaccuracies in it. But you can't see, if we do take it as that, then we actually are right at the median among all of these other cities again with except for the South Carolina cities, we don't have that for Rock Hill. And then if we look at exempt parcels per capita, again, all of the South Carolina city seem to have more exempt properties in the parcels per capita per person. And then finally, if we look at what's actually taxable in South Carolina, the city, South Carolina city seems to in general have more taxable parcels per capita. Now remember a parcel is a parcel for Jackson is one parcel. And then a small, you know, a tenth of an acre downtown is one parcel as well. So given, just we understand again, the difficulties in comparing these exactly in this, but this is sort of the general information that we have. And again, I think that probably the difficulty in interpreting this is why there really have not been a significant number of in depth national studies on this topic. But I do think it helps to break down the type of exempt properties that we see in Colombia. So if we again, we have, you know, 45,000 properties in the city of Colombia, and we can see that 20, almost 23,000 of them are owner occupied with a 4% assessment rate. And that's a $4.9 billion value. Next, commercial properties make up just over 19,000 parcels, but with a higher value of $5.4 billion. We have other which includes agriculture, utility railroad, manufacturing, all of your fee and lieu, NCIPs, et cetera. There's 356 of those parcels with a combined effective value of $246 million. And then finally, fully exempt, we have 3,500-some-odd fully tax-exempt properties. And that's again, what's currently there is $3.4 million. And we can break it out by exactly what those entities, what entities own them and how many own them. So the first thing that you'll see is these are all of the ones owned by government. So we have municipal owners. We have county owners, Richmond County, Lexington County. We have school districts. We have the state of South Carolina and the United States. And we have sort of other qualified governmental or somewhat governmental entities, special purpose district, the Columbia Housing Authority and Development Corporation. And we have colleges and universities as well. And we have hospitals. And then we have several other religious organizations, 771 with non-profit profits and private schools, et cetera. So all of these are the makeup of the fully exempt properties within the city limits. And if you want a full breakout, the full study has got an exact list of every single parcel summarized in appendix. If you look in appendix B on page 72 to 74. Yeah, I think some folks will obviously be very trying that number, particularly city-owned. And it goes from obviously significantly developed parcels down to even a number of parking spaces that we own. So it's wide and varied, including parcels owned by our component units, the Development Corporations. But I'm glad it's attached to the back of the study. So thank you. Yes. And it is very, and I do have a breakout of all of the, you know, city of Columbia at once. But to your point, yes, of those 560, 150 some odd of them are would be a, you know, covered parking space in a garage. So again, that is the, you know, the the idiosyncrasies of using parcels because they can vary in size dramatically. Okay. So what does this mean? So ultimately, it is true that Columbia has more exempt parcels than acreage. It is also true that it has more taxable parcels per capita nationwide, but fewer among subterranean jurisdictions. And then finally, ultimately, there's not that significant enough a gap for exempt properties alone to be the primary force driving that high of a property tax rate gap or, you know, leading to difficulty in raising sufficient tax revenues through property taxes. And, you know, I do want to point out that there are a number of positive stillovers from the owners of some exempt property in the city. And then we have a large hospital network that has a lot of, which is our largest employer in Columbia, we have the University of South Carolina, you know, a number of state and federal government, which for a lot of follow on developments. So, so exempt properties alone are not necessarily a bad, a bad thing, but I, there would be opportunities to dig down into each type of exempt property is to see if you wanted to look at the economic impact of each one and how the tax revenues from additional private or taxable development offsets the unpacked property at the entity itself. Okay, so the possibility number two, does Columbia have lower property valuations? Here, the short answer is yes. So this first chart shows the total value of all property in Richmond County per person. Richmond is lower than all of the other counties. Now, often people will look at this and say, well, this proves that we have more exempt property, otherwise we'd have a higher value per person. But it doesn't take into account the valuation of each property. And here is the average value of each piece of real property. And it's generally less valuable than it is in other counties. And that's real property in blue. And then in the brown, that's personal property, motor, motor vehicles, cars, both. And that's actually lower in Richmond County as well. And compounding this issue is that we say that we say a growth rate that is substantially lower than all of our peer counties as well. Between 2010 and 2018 tax years, we only grew overall 3.4% in overall assessed value growth. And we've seen this trend across most property types, except for motor vehicles and utility. You can see owner occupied assessed property value growth only grew 2%. Now, that's that would include all new construction and the valuations. Commercial property, we lagged Charleston and Greenville and Newark counties, motor vehicles, we right there at the median business personal property really has been rather stagnant. And that is just that's that's would be furnishings and equipment. It's really a reflection of this growth in the area. Large growth in utility railroad pipeline, you'll see a decline in manufacturing. You see that actually along a number of the counties, which has a lot to do with the shift in manufacturing assessment from from that to the sea and loo and industrial park structures, which you'll see there's been pretty significant growth in those in other counties. And Richmond County has lagged that as well. Now we're actually able to take a deeper dive into just owner occupied parcels. And you can see that Richmond County, the total value of all under occupied housing increased only 1.9%. However, the average value of a home owner occupied parcel property declined 1.3%. If you look at all the other counties, they all experienced very, very significant growth in both the average value. And I'll say the total value are the bars. And then the average value is the line in the front. So you can see we started the period at 158,000 average value for a home and finished at 156,000. Now if we look at units, this is quite interesting. We can see that Richmond School District two and Lexington School District five actually gained a significant number of owner occupied units during the time. Well, Richmond one actually lost under occupied units either as they converted to commercial or they came off the tax roll. We can do the same thing, fortunately, for commercial and rental properties. These are all the properties that are valued at six or have a 6% assessment rate. So you can see over here in the corner that the commercial rental property increased 11.7% in total value. And that was pretty much right in line with the average value increase. But you can also see if you look at all of our peer counties, they experienced much higher increases. Now, again, interestingly enough, if you look at unit growth, you see Richmond District one actually increased in units and Lexington District five increased a bit. And Richmond District two actually lost commercial units as either converted to under occupied or ceased to be developed. Now, you may have seen something right here in 2013 to 14 on both for all the property sites. And it's actually quite disturbing to me, but but the average property valuation in 2014 fell. This is for commercial properties. You see it went from 136 to 134 on average. And then for owner occupied properties, it fell from 160 to 143 on average. So this is when Richmond County underwent its five year reassessment. Now I'd like to look at home prices starting in 2013. This is the year over year increase in the home price index. Here is the Charleston MSA. You can see starting in 2013, they start to rebound from the recession. And here is Greenville. You see a similar although not as rapid growth in pattern. And then here is the Columbia MSA. And you can see in 2013 and all the way through the third quarter of 2014, the housing prices were still in decline. And that is when we had sort of this perfect storm of factors that combined with the poor state tax policy. Richmond County had their five year assessment come due. It occurred in a time when our home prices were depressed. The Columbia MSA's home by three miles from the Great Depression really didn't occur until 2015, later than both Greenville and Charleston MSA. And then Act 388 limits increases in property valuation for tax purposes to 15% over five years. So the 2014 reassessment locked in these depressed values. And due to the 15% increase limitation, that can never be fully made up once the market rebound did arrive. And there is a slide later on. We have some 31.6% of properties that have a taxable value left in the market value. And a number of them are driven by this five year 15% limitation as well as the accessible transfer of interest exemption for commercial properties. Okay, so number three. Does Columbia rely on fewer other revenues? In other words, are our property tax rates high due to the fact that we have very little in the way of other revenue sources? And there we live too heavily on property taxes. And here the short answer is no, not really. And in fact, actually, it seems to be a bit of the opposite. So if we look at this is the City of Columbia from the CAFR revenues by force. And then mostly I'm just focused on that bright blue 19%. So it's just 19.4% of total revenues come from property taxes in the fiscal year 2019. In fact, we rely on a lot of other revenues. Just for comparison, Charleston, the City of Charleston had 46.6% of revenues from property tax. Greenville was 52.6. And Rock Hill was 36.1. However, if we look at revenues per capita just from property tax, Columbia and Richardson receive far less than their city-candidate pairs despite having much higher rates. You can see right here the City of Columbia in Brown, 275 per person in revenues, and the county 238 per person in revenues. Whereas again, much smaller than all of these other areas. So in a manner of speaking, we're kind of seeing that Columbia has tried to make up for the lack of property tax revenues through other sources. So does the last possible option, okay, does Columbia spend more than other cities? Okay, well, the answer here is that it's complicated in some ways, yes, and in others ways, no. So I'd like to recall that property tax rates are made up of three separate villages. We have our city and our county and our school. So I think to get a good picture of this issue, we really have to go through each of them. So we start with school revenues. Here we see school revenues per people. The school districts in Columbia do generally have higher revenues per student. And you can see they're highlighted in blue, and then we have a state average highlighted in the pan. And you can see, we'll break this down a little bit. You see the dark blue at the bottom, that is local revenues, revenues raised per student, and it almost entirely comes from property taxes. And then we have state revenues, right here, the other blue in the middle. And that's, and then up at the top, that's again per student. And then finally at the top, we have federal revenues. So we see we have very, we generally have higher revenues per people. And that doesn't actually play out as exactly the same, not a one to one ratio between that and millage rates. Our millage rates are actually much higher than the revenues would necessarily suggest. Again, you know, due to lower valuations of property, it takes more to raise the same level of revenues. So we can see rich one to and this is often like I'll take a minute to say this is broken out in the school operations and the school debt millages. So you see rich one to has the highest highest school operations is 331.7 mills. And then we have the school debt one of four combined for 435.7 mills for school. Then lexington one is next after that, then lexington five and lexington and rich one are pretty similar. And then finally the other you see the other ones and Charleston really is, I think they are the lowest in the state and they might might be rivaled by Beaver County, but they are significantly lower, which largely is driven by the significant level of valuable or property that they have in Charleston County. Rebecca. Yes ma'am. I don't mean to interrupt, but I guess this might be just another one of those points to point out. So in Charleston and Greenville and even New York, are there multiple school districts in the right in the region like here in the Midlands? You're already showing right there 123 or districts and then I can think of several more than on here. So does that play into the comparisons made here? Well, yes. So what I tried to do was to pick the school district that was located in each of the city comparisons. So for Rock Hill, that is specifically York 3, but you were right. There are York 12 and 4. And and and yes, I will say that the the there is interplay amongst them, which is a big driving point that I want to talk about in more depth coming coming up. Greenville, the whole county is just a single school district, same with Charleston and then same with Lexington 1. There are five of them, but the one that the town of Lexington was located in was Lexington 1. So that I just picked that one. But I did since Colombia is lucky enough to comprise a part of three, I included all three of it. Okay. So that is school. Now, this is city and county pairs. So I find it's very difficult to break out and just look at cities or just look at counties because they they they really work in combinations. So you see right here we have what the county revenues per person are in blue at the bottom and the city revenues are in light blue at the top and Columbia and Richland do combine have a greater level of revenues per capita than the other city pairs. But again, I really think that looking at this requires looking at both the city and the county together. Each one of the pairs is different in how they distribute services and costs between each and even among federal districts. So ultimately, it will be more involved than just comparing the city to city or the county to county, but it just kind of gives you a general idea of where the city county pair matches up across the peers. And this is a detailed breakdown of the millage rates by city and county. So the municipals are always rolled out the counties, you know, again, each county wants to break certain things out and then other counties don't break certain things out. Some of them break out recreation, some of them have it rolled up. But ultimately at the bottom, you can see that our combined millage rate is higher than all of the other city and county pairs, which leaves us back to the continuous loop. And I really want to look at how that loop has actually played out since 2010. So if we were to look at area property tax revenues, there are really three ways they can be increased. So first of all, we can have an increase in commercial or housing units. We have new construction and increases tax base, we get more tax revenues. The second thing is we could actually have an increase in the average value per unit. So property becomes more valuable and it produces higher tax revenues. And the third thing that we can do is we can actually increase the tax rate. So I did a component analysis on commercial and residential units from 2010 to 2018. So you'll see the dark brown at the bottom is the percentage of increase in tax revenues due to the change in units or unit growth. So in Richland, we actually, again, lost units overall in commercial rental. So we had that contributing negative 0.2%. Lexington actually lost a lot of commercial rental units, York and Charlton gained significant amount. Now the green is the value growth, the change in the value of the unit. And you can see that we gained 32 of our tax, of our increased tax revenue, 32.5% of that was due to changing value. And then finally, tax increases or increases in millage rates, 67.7% was due to increased tax rates in Richland County, which is pretty significantly higher than in the other counties. So the negative 2 for Richland County, that's taken Richland 1, Richland 2, and Lexington, and Richland 5, and I guess highlighting the significant decrease in Richland 2, that gets you that negative 2? Is that where we are? That's exactly right. Yeah, the decline in commercial properties in Richland 2, again, the Richland 2 portion of Richland 2, yeah, the Richland 2 district, that is what's driving that. So again, this is looking at a county wide, the county wide impact. So it's worth noting that, but for that, the numbers would be, I guess precipice, I mean, they zeroed out pretty much every, all the gains in Richland 1 and Lexington, Richland 5. You could say that, yes, yes, across the whole county, it was pretty, very slight, slight decrease in commercial units, which decreased, yeah. Rebecca, I believe I read the, in your executive summary, where the city of Columbia had a 4.3% decrease in taxes, and that 67.7% increase was the school districts and county, is that right? Yeah, so between 2000, so this, so the data, so here is all the nuances of the data. The data set I'm looking at right now is the data set from the Department of Revenue, and it's used in calculating the index of tax payability. So it only goes through tax year 2018, which is last year. And at that point, Columbia's military was still 98.1, so it actually is flat. It did not change at all. So all of the increases that you're seeing here are primarily coming from county and school districts. Now, once we get to 2019, which again, I can't wait until next year to do this component analysis again, but the military did decline to 93.8. So yes, and I cover that just on the next page. But yeah, you were exactly right that the majority of these increases are being driven by county and school districts miller grade increase. And that's a point, I know Mr. Duvall is important to him, is important to me. It's not a majority, it's all of it. We have not raised taxes or increased our millage in a decade, and I think it's important in the city, that's worth noting that, but please continue. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that was what she was showing earlier is that from a property tax value, unfortunately, we had a fee structure, but if you look at the bulk, I think that's part of our discussion really is the bulk of it being school district. And that's why I think it's going to be real important at the appropriate time. I'm getting text messages and emails from people appreciative of the data. So that's good to get the data. But I think it is worth noting that in the city we've been holding the line and been doing it rather aggressively over the last decade. So, but please continue, Rebecca. Okay. Okay. No, thank you. Those were excellent comments. I appreciate you pointing it out. Again, the top graph just shows the exact same thing, but for owner-occupied housing, and you can see that here between 2010 and 2018, 92.5% of the increase in tax revenues have come from increases in property taxes. And just so you can see sort of the difference amongst the growth and property tax rate amongst all of these areas. And this does go through 2019, so it is the current rate. But you can see first in the green, we have the millage rates for all the municipalities. And with Columbia's recent decline, it is now decreased to 4.4%. We have all of the county growth rates. We have all of the millage rates, growth rates for school districts. Now, one thing I do want to point out is in 2019 we did have our Britson County reassessment. By state law, you are, you do, once the new appraisals comes in, the millage rates are supposed to be set in order to maintain revenue neutrality. And so we did see a decrease in the county, at the county level between 18 and 19, and at the school district levels also between 18 and 19. Now, all these other counties are actually getting ready to go undergo their 2020, their five-year reassessment for 2020. So it's possible that we'll see some declines there. Although Charleston, the city of Charleston I know has already announced that they are not going to do that. And they're going to keep it even, which effectively amounts to a tax increase on their cities. So that is, this is the breakdown. And you can see that we, among counties, only York, outpaced Richland, and we can see that among school districts, Richland too is one of the higher ones. And Richland, and actually their growth rate is actually one of the lower ones, not just above York. Okay, so what effects do high-property tax rates have on the region? Because the effect of this continuous loop can be seen in various economic indicators. The first one we're going to look at is population. So both Richland County and the city of Columbia have grown significantly slower than other cities and the state average. So you'll ask, you can see actually the city of Columbia has seen three straight years of decline in population. More so than just overall population is, something that's even more important is the make up of the population. And this shows prime age population. Those two are between 25 and 54. Those are the ones for most likely to work and drive GDP. Now across the United States, in the bottom left-hand corner, the U.S. has only seen 1% growth in prime age population over the time period since 2010. South Carolina has a far outpaced the nation at 3.5% growth in this population demographic. And then if we break it down by all of our metropolitan areas, you can see that they've all grown honestly like hotcakes. Charlotte, the South Carolina portion of Charlotte has grown the fastest. Greenville, 33%. Charleston, 15%. Even Myrtle Beach, which we often think of as a retirement destination, it's 13%. The Columbia, again, the metropolitan statistical area, so it branches out and takes several counties around the center of the city of Columbia, has only grown 2.5% in this country. And it's significant because the city of Columbia actually has a significantly higher population of 18 to 24-year-olds. It's 26.9% versus right around 13% for Charleston and Greenville and Rock Hill, which is no doubt driven by the population at the University of South Carolina and its students. But this advantage fades out in the 25 to 54-year-old age group. They are not staying as prevalently here as they would be, as probably they're being attracted to other cities. Rebecca, do growth rates also anticipate annexation? Well, these growth rates are based on the metropolitan statistical areas. So I suppose if the MSA, which again, the Columbia MSA has surrounding counties as well. So I guess if the MSA has, I don't think that any of these MSAs have changed during that period of time, but I can double check that. Well, I should agree the Greenville MSA has changed. It's grown. It's put off from Spartanburg, but yes, that is taking into account here. Yeah, but I was actually more so referencing the chart before this one as it relates to population. I know Charleston has been incredibly aggressive in the annexation strategy of the last decade or so. And we've been kind of stopping the start and often times threatened with civil war with some of our partners here recently, as we've talked about annexation and the like. I'd be curious to see how, while I noted that wheel broke there, more and more people live in the city, exactly how annexation also informed those numbers because another footprint of the city is dramatic. That was that question. It was less of a primate population than MSA and the question from the previous slide on the city's growth and how much of it's been formed by annexation. Okay, yeah, I see that. Yes, that's an important point and annexation could indeed drive some of those factors. Thank you. Okay, and we can also dig into some additional statistics on the city. We have higher educational attainment rates than Rock Hill, but lower than Greenville and Charleston. Our labor force, that's both in bachelor's degree and in high school completion. We have a labor force participation rate, which is pretty significantly lower than the other areas. And except for Rock Hill, our employment growth, now again, our employment growth has lagged behind the other areas. Now just a quick aside about labor force participation, this could be due to several factors. One, we could have more retired individuals, a population 65 and over who are not in the labor force. However, we actually do not have a higher percentage of those individuals than our peer cities. We could have early retired individuals in the military and I don't have specific stats on that, but it is likely we do have a higher percentage, but we would have to have a very significant number drive the participation rates this low. We could have a greater percentage of single earner families, dual-parent single earner families in which one partner stays home to maintain the home or homes with the children. And then we could just have more people not working because they either can't find or don't want a job. And this is the most troubling category, but each way this issue is very, very important to focus on, you know, in driving, you know, future, charting future paths for Columbia, Columbia and the Columbia area, because the more people who are not in the labor force, it lowers the productive capacity of a region and it decreases output and GDP. And now, yeah, I'm sorry, I'd be interested in seeing maybe a little bit more data on the percentage of folks with a bachelor's degree or higher. And obviously, this is, this is, this is those are aggregate numbers on the first line, but I've always looked at data and I'll have to pull up some of the other data I had here, I think I can find online. I've always thought that the number of master's degrees and PhDs or some other postdoctoral that we were significantly higher than our peer cities. And so I'm just curious about that number, if it's changed. What's this all about to pass you when we get 54 years old? But what's that? This is not all of you outside of prime range. You're still in prime range. I'm feeling really discouraged because I'm not prime anymore. That number seems, that number seems significantly off from what I remember and maybe that's just, maybe it's just bachelor's and not a significant number or more bachelor's degrees in Charleston and or Greenville versus Columbia. I was postgraduate numbers. That number you were talking about, I think they're from a doctoral and MBA when it separated out and then compared as different than when you include the bachelor's. Yeah, it was, I mean I'll pull the numbers up while we're here talking. It was, I find that number surprising, but nonetheless. Okay, you go ahead. Oh, no, no, I think that's a good point. I'm certainly reasonable of having the University of South Carolina right here in the middle of our city would certainly drive the number of PhDs higher for the city versus these other ones. So those are the cities. Yes, go ahead. Just on this point, I think that goes back to what one of your findings, that particular age group between the bachelor's PhDs, that's the majority of the population that we tend to lose. Am I correct? Yeah, it is person 25 and over. Yes, that we're looking at. So yes, you are correct. And they tend to earn very good salaries. Elsewhere. Yes, I mean, no, no, you're right. You bring, it's a whole ecosystem of economic growth. You need people with, you need people with the appropriate education skills, you need the jobs that they can fulfill, you need, and it really becomes sort of a cycle. And if they all work together, yes. Thanks, Rebecca. Go ahead, please. Thank you. Okay. Well, yeah. So again, with data, you know, we have some data that's at the city level, and but this is the data at the MSA level. And we can also look at employment growth across the entire MSA. It's been slightly higher, but it's still been muted compared to the other MSAs. And then finally, we can look at wages. We have the hourly earnings are slightly lower in our MSA than Greenville, pretty markedly lower than Rock Hill and Charleston. And then the growth in wages has lagged behind Charleston and Rock Hill, but has surpassed Greenville. And we can look at similar stats on business and economy. And this is at the county level. So we can see that total private firms in Richland County have increased 16% since 2010. So this is markedly slower than the other counties. And then we can actually just the change in GDP. And I separated out private versus government because we are so, we do have a pretty significant government sector. But our private growth, private GDP growth has lagged the other areas. And oddly enough, our government GDP growth has lagged the other areas as well. And then we have all our industry breakout. And we do tend to be a little more heavy on, you know, say, retail rate and accommodations and food services than some of the other areas, which typically are not lower growth opportunities for workers. So how do we lay the groundwork for sustainable growth in the future? And not just temporary spurts of growth that can fade away, but growth that's self-sustaining. So here are, I guess everything seems to come in four, but here are four steps that we can take to put the local area on that path. Number one is to make our property tax rate competitive. Otherwise we will keep losing investment or preventing it from happening. Second is to look at our school system finances and make sure that they represent the economic synergies that take place across the region. Third, we can look for ways to be more efficient between our city and our county. And then finally, we should seriously look at actively petitioning the General Assembly to help with some of the state tax law issues that are hampering the ability to have an equitable growth-inspiring tax system. So I'll go through each one of those. So first, making property tax rate, particularly commercial property tax rate, because owner-occupied tax rates, again due to 388, removing the operations component of the school millage from owner-occupied property, we now have some of the lowest owner-occupied rates in the nation. But as a result, we have some of the highest commercial property tax rates in the nation. So in the significantly high combined city county school tax rates are causing a crisis of disinvestment, which we've seen in declining population and slow income and job growth, and the depressed asset valuation. So here's what would be required if we, in terms, here's some options. If you wanted to reduce your tax rate, you would require a 48% reduction to get it in line with Charleston, a 33% for Greenville, and an 18% for Rockhill. And I'm not advocating for one or the other of these. I'm just showing you these against the benchmark that we've shown in the study. And Rebecca, we as a French word, we would need to reduce taxes, meaning the school district, the county, and the city is what you're saying. Again, acknowledging the fact that ours, the millage is down 98.1 to 93.8, what have you. So we're talking about the aggregate again, that whole stack is what we're talking about, not the city. Yeah, it is. The we is genuinely a combined rate of city, county, and school districts would need to, the combined taxes would need to come down. And again, I'm not advocating for one particular reduction or another, but where it comes from, but it needs to come from somewhere, I suppose, in order to get to one of these competitive levels. However, whatever target you set your site on, it's going to inquire just that that we part is going to include a joint agreement on between all of these entities on the targeted competitive tax rate on the phase in period being relatively quick on the pace of rate reduction over that phase in period, and on either a limitation on spending or identification of some other areas of savings during that phase in period. Now, now here are two possible ways that could be accomplished. Okay, so the first is we create a an extension just for commercial and rental properties, those are assessed at 6%. So these are the properties with the most on earth rates. Now, that would require developing some sort of special county level legislation to phase in a property tax exemption to all the 6% properties, and it would effectively reduce their assessment rate to say 5% or 4% or some other target. Now the tax, legislation, we can't do that at the county level. Well, so I'm not a lawyer, but I talked to I have talked to some, and they seem to think that the county has pretty wide latitude in enacting legislation. And it would, the thought is that it would be implemented similar to the way that Act 40 of 2017 was implemented, which effectively reduced the 10 and a half percent manufacturing assessment rate down to 9%. And it did that by giving manufacturing property owners an exemption of a certain percentage of their property tax rate, and they face it in over 16. So they didn't actually change the assessment rate, but they gave all the manufacturing property tax owners an exemption equal to ultimately 14.2857% of their property, which was effectively reducing the rate. Now, again, all the details would have to be worked out and and again, a lot of discussion with tax lawyers would be my guess. But but they're there, it seems from my discussions, it seems likely that there might be some sort of legislation that could be passed at that the county level that could provide that exemption that effectively reduce the assessment rate. Again, not actually reducing the assessment rate, because that's written into the Constitution, but it would be an effective reduction the same way the state did it for manufacturing properties. Now, just for an example, if you got commercial properties down to an effective 5% assessment rate, that would reduce the tax burden on commercial and rental properties by approximately 18.5% over what they're paying right now. If you went down a 4% rate would be double that. So about 37%. So a second option is creating some sort of. Before you go before you go to the second option, I will. Yes, I'll stop. Okay. Sentence of the first option. Tax revenues from new development would fund exemption increases. So that that exemption would be for existing properties, but new properties would not benefit from that. Well, you can do it. Yeah. Just be new money, new money at 5% or 4%. Is that what we're expecting? Well, so what the state, for example, phases in over six years. So, ultimately, they were targeting a reduction of an exemption of 14. something percent. And so they just did one sixth of that each year and for all manufacturing properties. And then the idea would be that as new. And once you do that, yes, you're reducing your revenues right away, but as new construction comes online and that new tax revenue rolls in, you can use that to again, fill the coffers for the next, you know, one sixth or whatever reduction of the increase in the exemption. I think what I think the way I understand it in the way it's trying to be said is that if we, if you do that reduction, you have a reduction in collection rate in the beginning, but the opportunity to create more businesses even at the 5% level will make up for that. You got new investment coming in and it'll balance it out over a period of time. So you're not penalizing by existing. You're just really, at that point, trying to use that as an enticement to get more investment in and that enticement then will grow the base and make up for the difference. I understand the concept of growing the pie for sure, but we're talking about new development at the new rate at 5% or 4% of where we're at. You're talking about, oh, everybody. Yeah. Including new development. But obviously, if in fact this was a strategy that, say this strategy, you've wronged the bell. If it rings the bell and you see significant growth because of it, it doesn't mean you're going to have any less services. Obviously, we bust our humps to provide effective and efficient services all day, but if you see that grow, so obviously the mantra is going to be more with less, but it's important. And obviously, we're also going to be finding ourselves on some type of a continuum where that's going to catch up with you at some point. So hopefully, you are recognizing those efficiencies very effectively every step of the way. So I just wanted to get a, but some of the tax revenues from new development would be at the new rate as well. Right, Doc? That would be at whatever 5% of where we were. Yeah. So an example might be, say we want to get to, we want to ultimately get to, let's just say 4.5%. I don't know. But so year one, we might start off at an effective rate of 5.75, exemptions to make an effective rate of 5.75. And again, that is going to be a reduction in revenues that year. But then the next year, as new, anything that's new that's built that can help fill that coffer. Then the next year, we might increase it to 5.5% for the exemption, increase the exemption so that the assessment rate falls to 5.5. And again, that's on all properties, including new ones coming in, and then 5.25, et cetera, until we get to the target rate. And you can, I mean, there's multiple things you can do. You can just set up a schedule if we're just going to do a quarter point assessment, decline year after year after year, or you could set in triggers so that, well, if we get this level of new revenues, then we will bump it down to this assessment rate. And if we get in far more, we can bump it down more rapidly. And if we get in far less, we can slow the timetable down. There's numerous ways that you could set that up. Or you could cap the rate and keep it capped for x amount of years as well. And reverse go that way, said there's going to be no more increase in the next five or whatever it years it is to try to flatten it out so people make, you know, investments. So, I mean, there's probably a half a dozen different ways, but at the end of the day, we've got to figure out, you know, with our collective entities, how do we attack that? What's the best way to do it over the period of time? Not only levelizes our costs, but it is a real attractor for investment. It just can't be done at the county or municipal level. It's going to have to be done by the state legislature. I think, Rebecca, I mean, you know, Dr. Goodlawson made a good point, Howard. And I think we ought to explore that before we say that's not possible because, you know, we're able to do a lot of different things, including multi industrial parks, this and that. There's a way to do it. I think we just got to explore what are our options because we need to do what's best because, unfortunately, we are uniquely different. And that's what we're trying to figure out is the different things. So, I would suggest that we see what's in our quivers along with our partners, which are, you know, the school district and county before we reside. Just a legislative thing at the same time. Well, that point can be on slide one or slide four. So, whether it's here or there, let's leave all options on the table. And once you've got a vote, option two on slide one. Oh, okay. Well, and that, I mean, someone just mentioned that. But the second one is create sort of like the citywide multi-county industrial park that at a targeted millage rate. And again, all new developments, and I think to be fair to all properties, you want them all to be given that rate. And then all the new development that comes in again would help to refill the coffers of what we've lost to that. I find this one to be a little less optimal because here we're targeting millage rates. And when we do that, we provide a tax decrease for every single property, including all of the owner occupied property, which already has some of the nation's lowest rates as it is. And further, it is going to require a very significant amount of ongoing coordination to continue to make sure those rates are reduced at the city and the county any to the school district level. So, but that is another, another option. Okay. And I, you know, this is very important because here's what we've been doing in the past. We've been providing large, collective tax breaks to a few big developers in the hopes that they will encourage follow-on investment and create local jobs and income. And very honestly, it is not just the city of Columbia. We do this across the state because our state property tax system is so skewed away from industry and commercial that it encourages all localities to do the same thing. Now, here's an example of the 50% SSRC that we granted in Columbia on a sample of $40 million property. And if we count for city and county and school millages and the lost tax credits, the annual tax is 636,000 versus 1.27 million under the original water rate. Now, clearly the actual tax rate is onerous to the point that it deterred investment prior to us granting that tax break. But, but here are the problems with addressing the areas much larger tax problem scope with a single one-off tax incentive. First, the discounted tax rates are actually lower than all of the peer cities, including Toronto. In other words, they might be a little more generous than is competitively necessary. And businesses who are not eligible for the CELO or the NCIT or the SSRC pay a much higher rate. So it drives unequal treatment of business and citizens. But, and that has both the short term and longer term implications of depressing growth of startups, particularly among smaller and local businesses. It doesn't necessarily guarantee the creation of jobs and income. So employment and income vary by industry. And so industries like manufacturing and high tech tend to produce numerous high paying jobs for local residents. They have an agglomeration effect. So they have a lot of still on effects in the economy. While there's a number of other industries that really don't produce that same number and extent of wages in their industries. And then finally, it's unlikely that large projects, the large tax rates, are going to necessarily attract the desired follow-on projects. Because those smaller new entrants will end up facing the exact same high tax hurdle that prevented their larger counterparts from developing there in the first place. Is it not, is it, is it fair to say that the the discounted tax rate is much lower than peer cities? I mean, it's a $14, $16 difference between Columbia and Charleston. And does that include the blended rate, I would say, and we discussed this in our call several weeks ago, that you're looking at the first 10 years, but not the second 10 years. Most communities, when they're dealing with them, Parker, a special source revenue credits, we don't have a much longer horizon. The fact that this is limited to 10 years, does this number account for the at least a 20-year horizon when after 10 years, these projects go to full freight? Well, so I guess the same, what's the saying, there's nothing more permanent than a temporary tax break. So, you know, 20-year high horizons are difficult to, I typically don't go out 10, 20 years when I do projections or any type of trends. And, you know, even from a business standpoint, I think there's a limit to how far you can look into the future, and not knowing all of the things that are going to be changing. So, I mean, with the pandemic, with a lot of things that are factoring the pressure on higher education, it may very well be that when these SSRCs are up, that all of these developers come back and say, well, you know, I can't go back to paying 1.27 million on this property because I won't, I'll just go out of business, and they will get their SSRC renewed. I'm not saying that for sure, I'm just, but, you know, my experience is a lot of, you know, CELOS, et cetera, that are granted throughout the state is that once they come up on to their expiration date, they all come in and renegotiate. So, I mean... Yeah, I mean, I'm not discussing 2-4, but I just find it hard-pressed to look at a parcel of land on Assembly Street that was produced in $15,000 in tax revenue that's now paying $1.5 million dollars or thereabouts at full freight more than that, and not see that as a win without any additional infrastructure investment, without any significant other public spending. And we have, believe me, we have seven members of council, and we had 20 different opinions on student housing, okay, 20, at least 20. So, we disagree significantly on the policy, but I'm just curious as to how that is not a good thing, particularly as we look at the significant amount of revenue, not just in the city and the county, but also to the school district, especially overlaid over the previous slide that show the number of owner-occupied parcels that have gone to rental as well. So, there apparently is enough competition there that the folks are taking properties offline and making them rental. I'm just thinking through that. We've seen $200 million, the $300 million of activity in that space, and I believe it endures to the benefit of our overall issues. We still got to deal with all the macro issues that you're discussing here, but that's just, that's one man's opinion. Oh, no, no, I mean, I see what you're saying, but yeah, I think, you know, if we, this is sort of a one-off short-term solution to a single parcel rather than sort of a comprehensive, sustainable long-term solution for an entire economic area. And if we built the growth, if we had the appropriate long, you know, broad, broad-based, low-tax environment where we were encouraging, you know, organic growth, ultimately, we see not just this parcel, but more parcels grow and develop and increase in value and generate more revenues as we move into the future. All right, so the second thing is coordinate school system finances. So right now, we have economic and demographic dynamics going on in Richmond County, which are working against each other with regard to school system finance. Richmond District 2 is gaining pupils and owner occupied housing while losing commercial property, and commercially rich in school district 1 is losing pupils and owner occupied housing while gaining commercial property. We have many families that work across districts, but that's not reflected in the financing. So some sort of cooperative financial approach to recognize this, I think, is going to be necessary going forward. And a lot of this is really due to Act 388. So here you see, Richmond District 2 has gained, it's up 14.9% since 2010, and Richmond 1 is down 4.4% since 2010. And this trend really reflects, it reflects trends that have been moving this way since at least 2001. R.S. District 1 is seeing 14% decline since 2001, and District 2 has seen a 64% increase since 2001. And it's reflected in the property changes too. So Richmond District 2 is gaining owner occupied housing. Now due to Act 388, that provides no new revenue to support the new growth. Richmond 2 is also losing commercial property as it either converts the owner occupied or uses to grow, which causes it to lose school operating revenue. And it prompts school leaders to increase millage rates in order to help regain that revenue. Now conversely, Richmond 1 is losing owner occupied housing as it's converting to rental or nonprofit or something. And due to Act 388, this conversion to commercial actually increases its school operating tax revenues, even if it results in fewer pupils. And finally, both districts tend to earn more in revenues than their peer districts and the state average, particularly Richmond 1 owing to this outside level of local revenues. So ultimately, we need to examine opportunities to make the finances reflect the regional economic synergies that we have here. Third, identify and implement competitive efficiencies. So again, the depressed revenues from property taxes have made the city and county more reliant on other fees and taxes. And many of these are generally higher than pure city and county payers. And they further increase the cost of doing business and can depress in investment. And some options may be to consider conducting a city and county efficiency study to identify opportunities to merge overlapping services or target service fees specifically to those who use them or somehow make the provision of these services less expensive. You may also consider reexamining city and county operation processes with an eye toward modernization of systems. I know from my experience with the Richmond County Assessor's Office that they really wanted a new computer system and they were struggling with an antiquated system. And they thought that it would very much increase their productivity by allowing integration with GIS or auditor or tax or other data to provide basic and comprehensive analysis of property. So there may be other opportunities for this as well. And then finally, you could look at remodeling, permitting, zoning, and licensing processes with sort of urban development best practices in mind that would increase taxable parcels. So if business growth is the goal for the area, then working towards modeling processes to assist them and encourage their development. I also know there's an extensive literature on how zoning can negatively impact lower income housing that can encourage sprawl and drive-up services and infrastructure costs for cities. So that may be an area to look at as well in implementation going forward. And this is important because we do have the highest combined city and county payer tax rates among these. And we generally have a limited capacity to increase revenues from other sources. They are also relatively high compared to our peers. Thus, looking for cost-saving measures during the phase-in period of implementing competitive property tax rates is really the point of this whole number three. And then finally, actively petition the general assembly. And I really didn't mean this as a joke, although everyone tends to think that I do. But Act 388, passed in 2006, limited property valuation increases to 15 percent every five years unless the property is sold. It creates an unequal tax burden among those who own the same types of properties. It requires a higher millage rate to make up for lost revenues due to depressed appraisals. And it permanently prevents counties from being able to make up for declines in property values. And that's not to even mention the impact that it has on our two school systems and their different growth patterns. So among options, one is the full repeal of Act 388. I'm just starting with the one that's most unlikely to happen. But that wouldn't able accurate appraisals and broad-based equalization of school operating taxes among all property types. More realistic options may include trying to make smaller bites like perhaps a partial repeal of just the 15 percent valuation limit. And then an even smaller bite, somehow looking for a one-time waiver to do an accurate appraisal of all properties and apply the resulting revenue increases to a corresponding millage decrease, which would some of the net revenue neutral. And this is important because 31.6% of the City of Columbia parcels have a taxable value less than the fair market value. And that's shown in this chart. Now, most of them over here on the left-hand side are close to full value. But then as you move over, you see some, there's quite a few that have almost, that are almost have none of them. The taxable value is no way, it's just a few percentage points of the entire market value. It ultimately amounts to a $541 million gap between taxable and fair market value. So wouldn't that, that would have the effect of raising taxes on our businesses here, wouldn't it, Rebecca? Well, actually on business. How so? Go ahead. If you took away the 15% cap, that would make more money in municipal and county. Residences, I apologize, our tax payers, our presidential tax payers Howard. But we're talking about- Yeah, it would. It would make it equal though. If you have a $400,000 house sitting next to another $400,000. I'm not advocating for Act 3D8, obviously. But it's important to know that we would be talking about significant increases to individual taxpayers and residential owner-occupied. Yeah. So just please continue, Rebecca. Okay. Well, actually, I want to say, I don't think that we're talking about overall tax increases. I think we're talking about fairly valuing properties and then decreasing the tax rate to be revenue neutral. So example, in the example you just had, we have a $400,000 house that's valued at four, taxable value of $400,000 because the people just moved in last year. And then next to it is a $400,000 house that the people moved into in 2001. And it's still valued at $100,000. So they're only paying, one is only paying taxes on a $100,000 worth of the house and the other is paying it on $400,000. So if we fairly assess fairly valued, they both be paying taxes on the $400,000, but they both be paying a lower millage rate because they made up tax revenue from the taxpayer that was not paying the full value, that made up tax revenue would help reduce taxes for all of the rest of the 70% of people who are paying the actual rate. Does that make sense? It would probably increase taxes on the people who are receiving an artificially low assessment right now, yes. But for the other 70% of people who are paying full value, it would reduce everyone else's taxes. I'm going to put you and Howard in charge of calling them, okay? This is the same thing that the state did in the mid-1970s with the equalization program that got the commercial, at that time the commercial rates were the only people that will be in appraise fairly and the state chamber of commerce sued the state legislature and they passed the equalization thing and got everybody on the tax rolls at the fair market value. And it worked well for about 10 years before they started screwing it up. Howard, you're dating yourself by talking about things that happened in the 1970s. Tamika was also born in the 1970s. No, no, actually, I mean, I've just chopped one of the three legs of the stool out from under the tax policy. Mr. Davis, and then let's go back to Dr. Gunn-Luxen. You know, when I read this, I kind of fell asleep on it last night also. I had some eye openers here and I fully understand it. I get it and I get, you know, the citywide, multi-county parks, industrial parks and all that that we've been attempting to get the best mileage out of. And I like the idea of trying to fairly increase taxes, which is a challenge and will be. But one of the things that I thought we were going to try and get some better understanding and a unique way of trying to make something happen, that is with exempt properties. And I don't, I'm not, I know that's something we don't have much experience on or don't see, but are we still going to try and find some answers to that challenge that we have? Well, that's a policy decision obviously that we have to make. I understand, but I was hoping to. That's our call. That's our call. The challenge is the report. This report does suggest that that's not an issue for us. And I mean, I disagree with the portions of that. But if in fact the council decides to take a more aggressive approach in some way to slow down some of the trends we've seen, that's our call. Well, I just think to continue to focus on that or move away from it, I think it would be helpful if we've had some examples of how that particular challenge has been massaged by certain municipalities. Because if we don't, some of these other options don't happen, you know, 388, for example, then that will continue to be on our plate. I know that Dr. Genlongson is taking a deep breath that she's actually finally at the last page. Well, this inquisitive bunch, but let's say now and then we'll let Dr. Genlongson have it. And then you can take it home and we'll wrap up. So Ed, you had a question then, then Daniel and Rebecca will bounce back and put a bow on it. Thank you. Okay. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for this very informative report. Let me ask you a question about the, I think it's the, it's a 7.81. Could you go back to that slide for just a moment, please? Sure. Which slide was it? It was a 7.81, not exempted. Back earlier. Yeah, back earlier. Earlier. Does it have a slide number by any chance? No, it's all the way in the beginning. The list of exempt properties? Yeah. Okay. Hold on. He's on page eight of the report guys, page eight of the report. The Monbie of Greenville, Rockville. There we go. How's that? All right. Let me ask you a question with the fully, fully exempt programs, properties, parcels. The 7.81 comparative led to the 7.222 with Greenville. What was the, was there the number of properties in the Greenville, in the Greenville number was how much? Yeah, that is in the, that's in the full study. And I don't look, I haven't written on my notes. Let me, I think I'd have to pull up the study to get that exact number, which I might be able to do if you. And comparatively to the 7.81. Yeah. Give me one second to flip through here. No, no, it's not a problem at all. Here we go. Okay. Greenville. Let's see, we had, Greenville had 1,952 exempt parcels. Okay. In Colombia? Has 3,568 exempt parcels. Well, I think it's in the, I'm sorry, go right ahead. No, no, go ahead. No, I think what I'm getting at is what the man was possibly looting to and what Sam was getting at. And that was the whole issue of creating a policy where that number, the 7.81 is either, is that number, does the figure show a trend of increasing that 7, that 7.81? Yeah, that's what I'm looking for. Well, so, so I only, okay, so I only have data for the tax year 2019. But what I would need to do is go back and get snapshots from several other years from the Richmond County Assessor. And, and then we could see, then we can see if we can see a trend in the number of parcels that are tackled. Yes. That was a pretty big number. What was the difference between the two, between Colombia and? Right. So it is, there's 1,952 in Greenville and 3,568 in Colombia. Now, the thing is, remember, Colombia has got 45,000 parcels and Greenville only has 27,000 parcels. So Greenville has a much smaller parcel parcel. So it still comes to 7.8% in Colombia and 7.2% in Greenville. Okay. Yeah. And it's actually on pay, if you look at page 48 of the full study, Greenville actually was kind enough to give us a breakdown of their, all their exempt parcels by, by entity type. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much. All right. Daniel asked you a question before I have to Dr. Deloxin perhaps. I'll let her go ahead and finish. All right. Super. Well, I guess I'm pretty much finished to be honest with you. But I mean, I can go to the last page and, and, and, and so essentially, you know, what, what I think one more comment about the, you know, the, the lack of full evaluation right here is that this is going to get, continue to get worse as time goes on. And ultimately it will eventually discourage land ownership transfers, or it will encourage people to find legal ways to get around it. Because again, if it's sold, it's revalued. And if you can hold on to it for much longer and not sell it to get redeveloped or, or to, to move to a new house, a new or bigger house, you, you, it will encourage people to do that again, or the final ways to get around that transfer. So these all do seem like heavy lifts, but, but they really are all doable. And the policies and the phasing periods will need to be crafted using, using data driven solutions, again, looking at gradual implementations, looking at triggers, looking at certain small percentages as you move through it. But most importantly, it really will take a collaborative and coordinated effort on city, county and school districts to develop a solution that promotes sustained economic growth for the region, for the future. And I guess that that's really it. Oh, no, thank you. Thank you, Dr. Galarsson. I think I'll call you Doc in Rebecca and Dr. Galarsson. Yeah, please call me Rebecca. No, but thank you for your work. And I agree that all of council agrees. I want to thank Mr. Bayland and all the rest of the GISRILs for their work on this. Daniel, you want to take this home, Daniel? Yeah, I just once again, I want to, I want to thank council. I mean, this is forward thinking. This is what Columbia has done over a period of time, led and this is one of those things where we're gathering the information. And to, to Sam's point clear, I think this shows us what is tax exempt. It really drives it down for us and how we address that it's going to be part of this multi solution. But what it also shows us that it's not the only thing. And we've always looked at it geographically and geographically, 70 plus percent is when you count vaccine. And now we've got data that shows there's, we've got to work with our partners to create that different atmosphere and address each one separately. And I just, I think this is, is really a good tool. It's not, it's not an easy thing to read it. This is what we're supposed to do as elected officials. And, and I think, you know, I don't know how many other people that would take the time to do something that really evaluated and then come up with a solution. And I think, you know, this, this council has done this time after time. And I appreciate Dr. Good-Logson's work on it. Jeff Palin, Ms. Wilson and her team all around everybody. So we've got to, we've got the beginning and I think there's going to be certain things in here that the council's going to want to dig in too deeper. And I think our partners and I, you know, look, we all, we all have a share in this. And, and I think we all want to leave office one day knowing that, you know, this city continues to thrive. We're thriving in our own ways and our things. But, you know, it'd be nice to be able to set this for the future. And I think that's what this tool is for. Well, let's, let's figure out and we'll spend some time dialoguing with, with Teresa and our whole team on, on the next steps. Because obviously most of the, of the solutions, other, most important ones, leadership leading from the front. The, but most of the solutions are going to require some serious intergovernmental work. So it's a, it's very important that from day one, and this is day one for us, since Dr. Demlach's presented her information to make sure that the table, that everyone has seats at the table, the school districts, that the county, that, that enough of our state legislators who care about tax policy or those who don't care about it. Once you explain it out to them, they get a whole lot more concerned because, because they're the ones who are going to have to make some of these significant changes. So let's make sure it's not just us talking to each other and admiring the problem, but, but really trying to find some ways, particularly if it feeds obviously a larger and overall goals around, around growth and building more inclusive state for all people and everything else. There's, there's, there's a lot to be done there. But, but Dr. Demlach, again, on behalf of council and city, thanks for your work. We look forward to speaking to more, hopefully the engagement includes, you know, you know, constant, we spend more enough time talking to us about it. We've got a whole lot of the people we need to hear, kind of the, the, the, the, you know, doing a look back or so, kind of with the way forward. So hopefully as we begin to facilitate these, these conversations, we can, we can have you boys in the room then too. Well, thank you. It's genuinely my pleasure. I really appreciate it. I would just ask Mr. Mayor, maybe we consider down the road, once we've had a time to share it with everybody is trying to pull a committee together made up of all the entities and, and, you know, some private sector folks, you know, in the university and everybody, because this really is a collective opportunity for us to affect change. It benefits every aspect of this MSA. Let's be really, I think really creative in how we constitute that, really get some folks who on the table who want to live some weight. Let's get the chamber at the table. Let's get our business leaders. Let's get some folks who've been innovating. You know, I mean, I give, I give Martin more a lot of credit, you know, when we're thinking about the creative approach to student housing, the table, we got, we, you know, putting some ideas on, on the table. So let's, let's be thoughtful and inclusive. And again, with our eyes on, on 2020, on 2030 and 2040. Absolutely. Thank you. Very good report. I enjoyed it. MSA manager. Yes, sir. And I would echo everything you all said. Thank you for your leadership. I always tell Jeff that he makes finances, most of the time, easy for our staff to understand and our citizens. I think Rebecca has done that with taxes and some very hefty conversation here that I agree with you based off y'all's relationships with your partners. We now have a document and a tool that's a bit easier to understand. It's been hard to communicate some of this over the last several months. So I'm thankful for the product. With that, we will have another presentation. I know y'all are hanging in there with me today because we had some of these on hold that I wanted to get on the agenda previously. So I could have spread some of this out. So bear with me. We also have Ms. Margie Reese, another wonderful consultant and someone who does a great job with the arts to explain and present to you amplify a cultural plan for the Columbia area, allowing Mr. Lee Snowgrove, executive director for one Columbia. So I'm not sure if Lee or Margie are going to kick us off. But Ms. Margie Reese is joining us from MJR Partners. I'm just going to start and say thank you for having us today and then just hand it immediately over to Ms. Margie Reese, our consultant, who most all of you got to the good fortune of having some one-on-one or small group time to talk to throughout this like two and a half, three-year process that we've been working on amplify. But we're happy to be able to present it to you today. So with that, I'll hand it over to Margie. Welcome back, Ms. Reese. Welcome back. We're back. Good. It's so good to see everybody. We've been through a lot since last we met. I've moved a little bit closer to you. I'm no longer living in Texas. I'm now living in Atlanta with my closer to my daughter and her family. Those grandchildren, you know, kind of have a pull. So I'm a little bit closer to you guys and can't wait to get back to visit you in Colombia. Thank you, Madam City Manager and Mayor Benjamin for allowing us a few minutes just to review this document with you. The good news is that you don't have to approve anything. You've already done that when you approved the Compass Comprehensive Cultural Plan for the city. But we were asked to bring closure to this process, which was very exciting and important to our team as we crawled around your city and talked to just about anybody that would listen to us talk about arts and culture. Um, so Lee's operating the deck for me. I'm sure you've seen this document. If you haven't, we'll make sure you get a hard copy of it. But this is just an overview of the work that we did in Colombia. The primary objective of our work plan was to identify effective and efficient roles for the city of Colombia in focusing on cultural development. And what we found of course is that there are a number of systems already in place. But we were looking for ways to provide a more powerful approach to amplifying the rich cultural sector that you have in Colombia. By the numbers, we did take a look throughout the city and talked to a large number of people through online surveys, through meetings at 72 different locations throughout the city, which we have to say a shout out to the planning department for helping us identify neighborhood centers and community-based organizations to host these conversations, as well as the park department and other local arts organizations. Our town hall meetings attracted numbers of people with lots of questions about what we were planning and doing, and then individual interviews with citizens over a thousand individual conversations with citizens. And some of those conversations were done by a strong core of local artists who facilitated these conversations across the nonprofit sector with seniors and children and educators, with the business community, and with elected officials. So the key elements of our planning process, the primary area of work that we heard from you early on, was that you wanted to make sure that the community at large, not just the cultural community, was involved in thinking about the future of the arts in Colombia. We took a look at some analysis of your current city funding processes and how you were distributing public tax dollars to support the arts. We took a look at your public practices and processes to look for new ways to use public art to establish Colombia as an inviting city for both tourists and for businesses. Heritage and preservation was also an important aspect of this work in Colombia and in South Carolina specifically. There is a very proud history and heritage, and we heard that message very strongly from the preservation community about how Colombia could continue to embrace its new citizens and at the same time focus on the traditional heritage of the region. We wanted to investigate the status of the arts and cultural sector to date. What are their capacities for growth? What are their needs? What are the stability factors that would help sustain existing organizations and grow new innovative organizations and provide spaces for individual artists to stay in Colombia and not continue to migrate away from the city? We talked to the philanthropic community and the corporate community to understand their priorities for arts and culture, and we considered this work through the lens of racial and cultural equity, which since this plan was done, I'm proud to say that Colombia was almost on the front end of our conversations that we're continuing to have more and more now about racial equity and how the city can balance its allocation of arts and funding to make sure that it is as inclusive as possible. And then we identified additional partners within city government. Often we think about the city arts budget as the only city funding that supports arts and culture, but what we found was that there are other departments, the tourism division, parks and recreation that were also providing contracts to artists and supporting the work of local artists in the city. So moving past all of the conversations that we gathered along the way, both from individual artists and institutions, the data from those conversations led us to the following recommendations. And top of the line is defining a cultural policy for the city. This is just an anchor from a longtime bureaucrat myself. It's an anchor exercise that should be seriously considered. In fact, if you want to continue to grow the cultural sector, it's going to be important that you as policymakers set some guidelines, some guiding principles for how and why the arts funding should continue and how those dollars should be allocated and accounted for. This is a policy document that is created by you, perhaps with some advice from external sources or local investors in the arts, but it will set a set of guiding principles that you as a city council want to establish as your work plan. Colombia is rich in public art. A lot of that work is being done by one Colombia, some of it is being commissioned by other city departments and private entities. As that work continues, you wanted to think about a policy for managing the aesthetics of the city, managing how artists are chosen, what neighborhoods lack public art and how public art can help enrich a community. So right now you've done a lot of work that's focusing on the downtown and central core, but we could find, we found a lot of interest from the public and more opportunities for distributing public art throughout the city and in fact throughout the region. Those are our top two recommendations. If you did nothing else, you would have made a huge advancement toward establishing consistency in your policy and in your practices. And what we found related to those two things is that there were some established practices that because they continue to be implemented in the same way year after year, the public has come to accept those practices as policies, allowing uneven distribution of funding, allowing uneven attention to different communities and different ways that your very diverse community expresses itself through the arts. So the dichotomy between do we have a policy or is this just a practice that we have adopted that the public assumes is policy? The next two recommendations also are aligned together. The one is the creation of an office of cultural affairs within city government. And as we talk more about that, I'll give you a recent example about the opportunities that come from that kind of structure. As we all faced the issues of the pandemic, the national endowment for the arts received additional funding to distribute to cities to offset job loss and to keep artists working. And the city of Columbia was not able to apply for that funding because it doesn't have a dedicated office of cultural affairs that has traditionally applied to the national endowment for funding. That application could have also come from looking at the next recommendation at a local arts agency designated by the city. So in this case, that takes simply a policy action on the city council's part to designate an agency to serve in that role as a convener, but also as an applicant for state and federal funding. And so these two recommendations are connected. Some cities have both as you'll see in the full document an office of cultural affairs and a nonprofit local arts agency. And some cities decide to have one or the other. And I think one Columbia has been acting as a local arts agency without the full without having been approved by the city council with official language noting that status for the organization and giving it the authority to act on behalf of the city in cooperation with the city manager. The next two recommendations are also aligned together. Promoting greater arts leadership development in Columbia is a really important nugget for us to think about here. There are a range of institutions in Columbia that are decades old and their leadership has not changed over time. At some point, the leadership of those organizations will begin to transition away and there will be a void of practice and knowledge about arts administration within the cultural system. And so we think it's important not only to nurture and we're not talking nurturing artists here. We're talking about nurturing and building arts administrators with the knowledge and practice of how to manage a local nonprofit arts organization, how to do a better job at grant writing and strategic planning and board development and financial and board development. And then the next recommendation that's connected to that is this consideration for developing neighborhood arts plans. Well, we heard a great deal from your community organizations and in those conversations particularly in the African American community and the communities of color that's growing in Columbia. That there's a lack of representation of the cultural expression that represents this diversity of cultures and perhaps neighborhoods where kids live, where seniors live, providing arts programming that's closer to where people live, those programs being designed by neighborhood leaders is something that would really help enrich the experiences of your residents. The next bullet focuses on the individual artists in Columbia. We know that the artists really are the lifeblood of a city's cultural sector. We heard a lot about artists again who are leaving the city because they didn't have the ability to maintain a decent livelihood. So they've moved to other communities where they could gain greater art commissions, establish studio spaces and be more visible to new markets. And so this recommendation focuses on the ways that the city might consider supporting individual artists to retain the practice of some of the really rich artists that you have in your city. And then the final recommendation is an umbrella recommendation that looks across the region. We had several convenings where we talked about arts learning for children. What does Columbia as a city want for its children, not just in the arts, but to help establish critical thinking skills, 21st century learning skills, reasoning, self-accountability skills, all those things happen through the arts. And so how could the city lead a regional conversation that might help design an equitable approach to providing high quality arts learning experiences for the children in your city? And we say equitable because some children have immediate access to the arts based on their family's financial abilities. Some people, some children have access to the arts in the schools that they attend because that might be a focus for parents of that school. So we're looking to see how we can respond to the public that said time and time again we want our children to be more creative and to have access to creativity, but either we can't afford it, we can't get to it, or it's not offered in our schools. And so this would mean a multi-layered partnership between school systems, the private sector, the artist community, and the foundation community to create this kind of network. And we provided some models and examples of that in the document. So these are the high-level recommendations of the plan. As artists are known to do, we want to step further and provide some thinking about bigger ideas as a part of this plan. And the two that are top of the list and we want to share with you today is the idea of creating destinations. Destinations for tourists and visitors and destination spaces for your residents. The one is the idea of a need for a downtown cultural center. All of these recommendations I should have prefaced with saying we're created pre-COVID. So we're giving you back the conversations that we heard and later we'll talk about how we might make some adjustments. But the idea is to create a downtown cultural center that would allow space for community-based artists to perform and present and to incubate their organizations. In exchange for that, providing classes, workshops, and performances for the public would happen in this space. We don't have a specific place that we say this is the building that you should adapt. We looked at several possibilities but we thought that it might be a better process-oriented question to ask for a full review of available spaces, city-owned inventory, or other spaces that might be available and suitable for such a facility. And the second bigger idea which has actually begun to see some traction already is develop a sculpture park and art walk along the riverfront properties. Some of this work has already begun but we think this is an opportunity to actually commission some major sculpture pieces that in and of itself would create another attraction to visitors to the city and help create that sort of label as what's unique about Columbia. So these two ideas are offered for further exploration and consideration. We know that as we said this process was this plan was adopted as part of a larger compass plan. We felt that it was necessary and important and respectful to come back to you to just say once again as an advocate how rich of a cultural community you have in Columbia. In some cases it is very segregated and separate. In some cases we see the development of major cultural institutions that really are the flagship institutions for the city and those you should be very proud of. But there is this rich undercurrent of midsize and new organizations that have the potential to grow and to become part of the larger fabric of the city and of the region. So I know that was a pretty high level and quick overview of our work. But we also want to call attention to the fact that since the time of those recommendations we realize that funding opportunities and obligations have changed. Other human centered issues have taken greater importance. But this is a quote by Toni Morrison who is a really important author that you all know that this is not the time for artists to shrink. This is precisely the time when artists go to work when there are times of crisis in our communities and in our nation. That artists don't look upon themselves with self pity. They are motivators, they are communicators, and organizational healers. And I know that at a time when you have such huge responsibilities and I've learned so much listening into this meeting this afternoon that I would encourage you to continue to think about the arts as a vital component of civic life in Columbia. You can't erase the fact that you have a cultural history. And as we come out of this process, no matter how long it takes, artists are still going to be an important part of building a strong civic environment. And this is just an image of the artist facilitators that worked with us. So if I were able to make some revised recommendations based on the response that we all know we'll need to do around COVID-19, I would say that your priority for the next two to three months is to think about developing an ordinance that officially names one Columbia, which is probably a selfish recommendation. I make it selfishly to you because one Columbia has built the infrastructure that's necessary to operate as a local arts agency. But without that official adoption of them as the agency you will lean into to provide specific services under your guidance, they'll only be able to operate in a tangential way. And so this is a zero cost except for the funding that you already provide to one Columbia and or renegotiation to their contract that you might feel important to do with their board. But this is a short timeframe goal that would give them greater responsibility for implementing some of the recommendations that you might see important as a part of this planning process. It would send a huge message to the community that you as a council continue to consider that the arts are a priority in Columbia. These are some of the services that that designation could provide. The local arts agency could be your grant making system providing the kinds of accountability systems that I heard when I visited with council members that you're seeking. They would continue to present programming but with the idea that as you see further down that you want to make sure that there is equity in accessing those programs. This agreement could also allow for greater advocacy, forge more partnerships and actually be the go to agency for all new public art projects in the city. There may be a need for more more development in one Columbia. You may want to assign some additional requirements for that agency's work but for the time being acknowledging them as the official local arts agency of the city could at least push for receiving and for applying for greater state and federal funding on behalf of the city. Which is not the city itself could do all of these things that I'm suggesting to you. But given the time that we're in and being sensitive to the limitations of the city's budget you have an infrastructure in place that you could look to to provide some of those services. And here this is just just a statement of how that might work. You would define a scope of services through the city manager's office that would specifically enter into contract for one Columbia to expand the work that it's already doing and take on any of those services that we just mentioned before. If I hand crystal ball we would say that all of these things are important and I would encourage you to look at all of these recommendations today. But I understand the time that we're in and I think that the public itself is still going to look to you to say how this plan will become realized. And over time there may be a lot of opportunities to implement many of these things but the two things that were top of mind in this conversation with you and with the public that I want to just emphasize is accountability and equity. And if your community felt that you were moving toward those directions I think you would have reason to believe that you're moving forward. The arts are always going to be important in cities and in our country. It's understood that often the arts have to take a second seat to some public and union services. But artists are troublemakers in one way. They keep making things. They keep finding solutions to things and they're tenacious community builders. And it was my great joy to work in Columbia and to almost feel like I needed to just buy a house and move. But short of doing that I really want to say a thank you to the city manager's office and to the office of planning that helped usher this process forward and to each one of you for the time that you allow me to have in conversations with you. So I'm open for questions and deep dive into what you see in this document if you have any. But short of that we're really really proud to have had the chance to work with your communities. Fantastic. Mr. DuVall and Mr. Davis. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Reaves. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Marge is delighted to have you with us. I wish you were here in person. I have read this from cover to cover. Excellent. And it even exceeded my high expectations of a product that you would put your name on. Thank you. I loved everything about it, especially like the way that you gave concrete examples of things that we can do immediately and in the long term and gave links to people that have already done it for us to make our job easier. I wholeheartedly endorse naming one Columbia as our agent. I think many of us already thought they were our agent and whatever legal documents or ordinance we need to pass, I certainly will be a supporter of that. We always have a place for you here in Columbia if you just want to move up I-20 a little bit further you'd get home right here in Columbia and can straighten us all out. It's very tempting. Mr. Davis. Good to see you again Margie. Thank you. And I like your approach to making us take a look at ourselves and try and figure out a way to exhibit and show all that's good about us. The arts is one of them. One of the things that I'm pleased with is the mandate of taking the arts to other places in the city, the capital city. In fact, Hyatt Park neighborhood last night were pleased to hear that and you came in using existing resources to some extent. But I think the challenge I think is going to be how we really involve people who already feel that they've been left out or being left out of in terms of the arts and the ability and opportunities to display their talent. So I don't have a problem with that. I'd just like to talk a little more about how that's going to happen and I think be able to show the difference from what we're doing now because there are some I think quote-unquote established arts entities and I understand this recommendation because there are talents and people who feel that they are not a part of all of that, although they have a heck of a lot to contribute given the history of Columbia. So I appreciate that but I think there's still some things that we need to look at and be as successful as I think y'all intend to be. I'm not going to speak to the arts agency issue. That's just a conversation we do need to have but I don't think now is the time. Thank you, Sam. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Ms. Reese, thank you very much for your presentation today. Thank you very, very much. One of the things you alluded to in the conversation was the idea that there is a tremendous need for a cultural center in downtown Columbia. Did I hear that right? You did. Okay. Well, one of the things that I thought in terms of where we are, what's going on now and the possibilities of what could possibly happen in reference to a cultural center and I think I heard you say that you all were going to be evaluating in the city where that place could possibly be housed. We did take a look at a number of facilities just to get a scope of what already exists, what brick and mortar already exists, what opportunities there might be but I decided that it would be better for me to pull back from naming a facility and allowing the community and this body to think about timing real estate development opportunities, other federal funding opportunities that will come along to really nail down where that might be and how it could be situated so that both the visiting public, which we want to help increase the hot tax pool, H tax in your city, but we also want young people to be able to have access to that kind of facility. So that was beyond the scope of our work, but I think that you have the resources within city departments that could continue to lead that research. Okay. So Lee is going to help us to identify and undergird possibilities then. Is that right? This report actually is shared by both the city and one Columbia so it may be that that's a request you would make of him, but I think also there are some resources in the city planning department that could also be tapped. Okay, thank you very much. Brennan. Hey Ms. Reese, Will, Brennan and I unfortunately have not had the opportunity to meet you, but our friend Larry Henry speaks very highly of you and this whole Amplify Columbia process. So it's great to see the final products. I wanted to ask you a quick question. Form an office of cultural affairs, you say we have the structure already in place through one Columbia. Can you describe what leverage that structure has towards, I guess my question is what funding is out there that we're missing, whether it's public grants, just if you could speak to that for a second. The idea of a non-profit local arts agency is that you have a designated entity that can, on behalf of the city, with the city manager's approval and the mayor's approval, seek specifically and pushing for federal funding because even in this political time that we're in, arts funding for communities your size exists and you've not been accessing it. And the prime example is the one time sort of shot in the arm grant that was part of the previous stimulus package that cities could apply for up to $50,000. General operating support to keep artists working. And Lee and I talked about it at the time, but in order to be eligible for that, you have to have been a previous recipient of national endowment for the arts funding. And so whether it's one Columbia or whether it's an agency inside city government, I'm applying for humanities funding, which is a separate agency. I think it's quickly say there are four anchor institutions at the federal level, the national endowment for the arts, the endowment for the humanities, of the president's committee, which is on hiatus right now, but it'll come back. And the Institute for Museums and Library Services, which the libraries of the county apply for, but the city is also eligible to apply for that funding to support exhibition in public spaces. So that's just one layer. The state arts commission funding is another layer. And while those dollars go up and down, it's still as I am sort of a good housekeeping seal of approval for your city. And you use that kind of approval to seek other sector foundational grants. There are a couple of national foundations right now that are zeroing in on Black Lives Matter and how the arts can be a convener for those kinds of conversations. The Mellon Foundation, for example, is providing resources to cities to help look at ways that the arts can continue those conversations. So it does take a concerted effort and focus on grant seeking. And this conversation is not just about the city giving out money, but it's also about how the city can diversify its funding pool and identify new sources to support some of the recommendations. I completely agree with that. Thank you so much. All right. Margie, thank you. As usual. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good to see you. We're a better community because of your leadership and as well, the Columbia. Thank you so much. And thank you, Ms. Wilson, for the tenacity to get us on an agenda. I really appreciate all of you guys very much. Thank you, Margie. Enjoy your grandchildren. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye. Talk soon. Thank you. Okay. Mayor Benjamin will take up our next arts related item, the City of Columbia Public Mural Projects. Honorable Mayor Stephen K. Benjamin. I know Mayor Benjamin, Assistant City Manager Simons is available to assist if you need him to. Absolutely. I want Henry to do the heavy lifting and walk through the discussions. Obviously, it's perfect. I mean, with a perfect segue from Ms. Reese's presentation, really. I'm excited about the work we're going to continue to do as a result of Amplified Columbia. This is a result of several conversations we've had with constituents and citizens and artists and others. Yes, looking to give a waste to the time that we're living in. I mean, obviously, not only the incredible social unrest around systemic issues of racism that we're dealing with, but the economic challenges that so many of us are seeing and the greatest disruption in an election year, certainly since 1932, and the ages that we're living in as we communicate via digital platforms and unable to collaborate and coalesce in person. It's a wonderful time for a propelled expression. We asked staff to look at several options to engage some of our artists locally. And as usual, and Theresa and Assistant City Manager Simons and the team came up with a number of options that we wanted to present. We initially started talking about one location downtown. I apparently lost track of the discussion and we decided that maybe we would look at all four districts and maybe also downtown. It's a living process, but I think we're representative of our collective desire to be an inclusive city and also not only inclusive, but also move with haste. And certainly there might be some more opportunities. The current prospect we've been looking at working with Parks and Rec Foundation, I think we could possibly very easily, if we're able to meet some of the timing desires of our council, we could possibly work with one Columbia and some others in making that happen as well. So I agree with you, Howard. I think one Columbia would be a wonderful agent for the city in a way in which you can pose it to meet our long-term needs. But when Henry moved forward, and I want to obviously, I want to say it was a conversation, maybe Ms. Devine chimed into my eyes with Charles, who's just a representative of the amazing talent pool that Ms. Reese just referenced out there. We have so many dynamic artists. And Sam speaks up for every single day, throwing arms and artists himself. Mr. Davis just throwing arms, elbows for including more voices that aren't the those who've always received funding for decades and decades, but new voices. And so he used Isha's work as an example of what we expect to be a much more, much larger, expansive, inclusive list of potential artists we could work with and looking at some public buildings that we might do some work in. So I'll leave it there for our sister city manager assignments. Thank you, Mayor Benjamin. Can you all hear me okay? Yes, ma'am. We can. Thank you so much, Ms. Wilson, for your opening comments, as well as you, Mayor Benjamin and our city council for providing us with an opportunity to briefly discuss some recommended locations for this work. Our goal with this presentation is to simply provide recommended locations in each city district as you alluded to with murals that depict African American history, heritage and culture. As Mayor Benjamin indicated, Isha Charles is a local artist, native of South Carolina. And this presentation actually has some examples, as you see on the screen here, of her work to give the public an idea of what we would like to express in our communities. Keeping in mind, we have not definitively decided on what artist that will be used. We certainly have a desire to use local talent as much as possible. Also keeping in mind that these locations are only recommendations at this moment and subject to change, of course, pending additional assessment from our mayor of most city council. So as we get into the presentation, our first location that we recommended, of course, is in the downtown Main Street corridor. We wanted to establish some presence in our downtown community. So as you see the picture to the left, the proposed location is 1401 Main, which is a city-owned building. It's actually, it's at the corner of Main and Washington Street. And as you look at the actual arrow to your left, it's actually on the side of the building that's adjacent to the Wells Fargo building. This location has some advantages from the standpoint. You have a lot of pedestrian as well as vehicle traffic coming off of Main Street. And this is a good opportunity for this type of work to be displayed. It's lower to give that eye view, eye level view for our citizens to enjoy. We did not want to display any of the work on the windows throughout the building of 1401 Main, but the lower portion of this building gives us that opportunity. So that's one location that we provide as a recommendation. Secondly, there's two additional locations downtown, which these two locations, first off 1600 Taylor Street, is one of our city-owned garages and provides some opportunities. There's space at the lower level, which we think that's the desire, but there's also space at the higher level of this garage. One opportunity to provide some type of mural that depicts this culture, as well as 1136 Washington Street. This is another city-owned parking garage. This is this side of the actual parking garage faces Assembly Street, which you see those three columns you have. You have a higher view and you can get into a lower view, depending on the resources of the actual artist. So this gives us a lot of visibility from the Assembly Street side as well as the Taylor Street side. We also wanted to tap into our North Main corridor. This is Hyatt Park, and this is the actual side of the building that faces the parking lot. Our citizens have to introduce the parking lot to get into the actual gym. So this gives a lot of visibility from the parking lot for the North Main location. We feel like that is certainly an opportunity at the lower level, at the pedestrian level, to display some of this work as well. In District 2, this is the Vista Greenway, the Lincoln Street tunnel, as well as to your right. There's a lot of visibility in this area. There's a lot of traffic, pedestrian traffic, as well as vehicle traffic coming off of Lady Street, and then just an opportunity for our citizens to enjoy. So these are two additional locations on the right and left, where we can potentially display some of this artwork. And also our Charles R. Drew Center, which is located off of Hardin Street. We have the picture to your left, which gives several opportunities for some artwork to be displayed. This is the adjacent to the parking lot, where our Savalot location is located, and it's also the side of Hardin Street. And then the right picture is the picture displayed to the parking lot and the side where the actual parking track is as well. So there's visibility to the community, and there's visibility for citizens who are driving up to the facility. And there's also visibility off the Hardin Street extension. There's people driving both ways. So there's an opportunity there, as well as Valencia Park. This is actually in the Rosewood community. It's one of our parks and one of our baseball complex buildings. As you see, this gives a lot of visibility from Montgomery Ave. And it's very visible to pedestrians coming down South Carolina as well as Montgomery Ave and also the Rosewood community. This is definitely an opportunity. It's a lower level view where an artist can do their work. And we have a lot of traffic, of course, in that area that gives us an opportunity to make this an option as well. Willing Park is one of our parks in District 4. And this particular location faces the park area, the tennis courts, all of the activity that comes to this building. There's a lot of visibility from citizens that are coming to the location of the gym, coming to the tennis complex, as well as the park, and also citizens that will drive by the actual facility. It's very visible to all of that traffic. So we felt like this would be a good location and a very diverse location to display some artwork as well. So these are all examples of all recommendations that we have. And of course, as I said earlier, these locations are subject to be changed. So these are just recommendations. But of course, they will have to be endorsed by our mayor and council. So depending on any questions, that's our presentation on location for our work. Thank you, Henry. Very much. I'm sure we've had individual discussions with all of you all and very happy with the direction of staff. And certainly, I would maybe miss Wilson if there's any reticence or concerns or different ideas. I'd love to hear, have council share with you their thoughts about their respective districts, at least the district members. Mr. DeVall and Mr. Rick. Mr. Mayor, are we talking about one artist doing all this? Are we going to have a whole bunch of artists doing them? I think it would be as many artists as possible. However, yeah. I agree. I agree. I need to split it up. Yeah, absolutely. Mr. Rick. You're on mute, Daniel. You're on mute, buddy. I wanted to throw out an offer for y'all to think about if you possibly could. And I'd be interested to work with an artist and create a moving billboard that could go around my district instead of just being in one place so that it creates an opportunity to hit all aspects of the district. With the vinyl boards they do today, they can move them around. And I'd like to look at that option as a thought process because district 4 is pretty widespread and I'd love to share what these artists create throughout the district. And maybe a moving billboard option is something and then making it a hunt to one of the parts where we could frame it up. But just a thought worth exploring. Daniel, how about doing a piece of art that could be put on the electronic billboards and have them shown on different parts of the city? And we could have, if you did that, it would be a small piece. It could be a small piece of art, but you put it up on an electronic billboard and you could have four or five different themes. You know, I'd love to highlight whatever we do anyway that way. So when people are driving in or driving around, I think it would be fantastic. I'm excited about this opportunity. I've started doing some research on artists so really excited when we can get to the point of pulling the trigger. All right, good deal, good deal. All right, Mr. Dowd had a final word. Henry, is Henry still there? Yes, sir, I'm here. Henry, good selections. Good, very good selections. I commend you all for doing that. I've got three of those properties that are listed in district two. The Main Street property, Tarzadru, and of course the Vista Greenway. All three of those pieces, all three of those sites, of course, are in district two. I think that you probably want to look at, perhaps centralizing wherever that sign is, wherever we're going to put it that is centralized somewhere. I'd love to have all three places. That'd be great. That'd be great. That's a four, Ed, with 1401 Main Street. You're the mayor of Main Street. Yeah, that's right. That's why I said Main Street District. I think we need to, Henry, like I said, I think you've done a good job with that. If we could if we could talk a little bit about centralizing where that place or those places are going to be, and perhaps, as Daniel said, it certainly gives him an opportunity to move wherever if you want to do a moving sign. But I think you've got all three places in one district. And of course, thank you all so much for your faith and your judgment and your view of what's going to take place in district two. Thank you very much. All right. All right. David. Just one question. Maybe I'm missing it. These artworks, they're local. The artwork is local. And they are an outward gesture of where we are and whatever. I'm not going to get into a personal preference. Are the artists local? For each one of these locations? Yeah, the goal will be yes to a local artisan process, obviously, that we're going to have to develop. The demology that we discussed obviously was articulation of where we come from, where we are, where we're going. And so it's going to require some more diligence with our staff, loving as much advice and counsel, one Columbia, but whether we use one Columbia or if we use the Parks and Rec Foundation as a fiscal agent, it's to be determined because we also want to move the pace. But this is meant to tell the story of inclusion, but specifically the story of African Americans and Columbia in a way that is edifying, pulls us together, it's empowering. And we can do that. But I think it's so important to have as many artists involved. It's been towards creativity and let's make sure our folks are local. All right. Ms. Devine, you want to get the final word? Yes, sir. Just really quickly, I just wanted to add is, you know, this is just identifying locations that we have control and ownership over. This doesn't limit the project. I mean, we certainly have folks that can also add to public art on their facilities. I just wanted to, you know, as we're talking about locations, this is just the beginning, but it certainly can be expanded as we have lots of local partners who may want to be a part of this. Yeah, absolutely. I think that would be exciting to try and spur that type of private sector activity and continue to encourage it. We're seeing a great deal already. So that's great. Let's keep it moving. We got a lot of good stuff on the agenda today. A lot of deep diving, Ms. Wilson. I mentioned that earlier, Mayor, it worked out that way. I don't, I know y'all like the deep dive, but I try to not deep dive too much on many topics, but some of these couldn't wait. So I want to keep it moving. And I will work with Taylor, Mr. Mayor, to get maybe you to give this kind of initial thought and some, I guess, parameters around the process after we, Henry, and I make some attempts at putting that together, because I know timings of the essences I've heard y'all say. And I know we had asked for y'all to suggest some artists. So if you have some, please get those two of them. We'll probably just, you know, put out kind of a call for projects and get this moving along through the Parks and Rec Foundation. And certainly Lee is on that board and also works very closely with us through one Columbia. So we'll get, I guess what I'm saying is what we need to get a process together and finalize that so we can move forward. Thank you. Yes, sir. Okay. So our final discussion action item, and I do think number six is an action item for you all, which will be pretty quick, Accommodations Tax Committee Recommendations for Fiscal Year 2020-21. Ms. Missy Kaufman, our Budget and Program Management Director, can provide those recommendations quickly. If you're talking to you on mute, Missy. And thank you all may have been provided a memo in your email this morning from Erica. If you want to use that as a reference. Yes, thank you, Ms. Wilson. Good afternoon, everyone. Yes, the Accommodations Tax Committee did have a meeting yesterday. I'd like to thank Chairman House Stevenson for pulling together his committee quickly in order to make these recommendations for City Council consideration. The Accommodations Tax Committee met and discussed recommendations for the FY 2020-21 Accommodations Tax. We did discuss that the projected revenues for the budget for this year are deeply reduced of course pending impacts from COVID-19 and that the budget this year is $1,374,703 which is again considerably less than prior year budget as we continue to monitor of course of the future. Any revenues that come in over that will also be considered or allocation. The recommendation from the committee is in line with City Council's desire to fund the two primary organizations at 85% and 15% which would be Capital City, Lake Murray at 15% of the available funding, which is $206,205 and Convention Visitor Zero on the Spirit Columbia at $1,168,198 for a total budget again of $1,374,707. That's recommendation from the committee. Missy, could you repeat that you kind of break maybe it's my system but you kind of broke off at the last very end as you were coming. Okay. Go ahead. Yes or so. So the recommendation from the committee is to fund Convention and Visitors Bureau at 85% of the total budget. Their total their allocation is recommended at $1,168,498 and Capital City, Lake Murray is 15% which is $206,205. The total available funding from Accommodations Tax this year is $1,374,703 again that's a deep reduce from prior years but we will we're continuing to monitor. We only have we receive revenues from the state quarterly and we're still are looking to get the first quarter collections for this this year. Missy, I'd like to ask Missy. This is we've already subtracted out the $25,000 that goes to the general fund plus 5% and this is the remainder of that money. Yes, sir. Okay and they understand both the Empower Columbia and Lake Murray country understands that this is 85 and 15 of whatever we get in because we're just guessing at the amount. Is that right? Yes, sir. Okay. We've had discussions. I move we approve the proposal of the ATAX committee. Yeah. Second. Discussion are we only I don't want to do a deep dive into on allocations. Have we given some thought to the CCN? Are they going to be funded this year? Council neighborhoods? They were not one of the applications for this funding. All right. So be it. Okay. Good job. All right. We'll move the previous question. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Hi. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Mr. Vy. Hi. Mr. Davis. Hi. Mayor Benjamin. Hi. Thank you. Mayor, let me try to move that speditiously along. The consent agenda items 7 through 15 are up for approval. We'll move. Second. The consent agenda moved and seconded. Any discussion? And we've taken off against 16 and 17 deferred, right? Yes. Yes. We'll move the previous question. Part power off. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Hi. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Mr. Davis. Hi. Mayor Benjamin. Item 18 is an ordinance first reading. Mayor Benjamin. It's this year's bond ordinance for water and sewer. Move approval. So move. Second. All right. Any discussion? I think Ms. Duvall is is is recusing. So from this uh uh with briefs question for power off. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Hi. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Mr. Vy. Mr. Davis. Hi. Period of resolutions item 19 is um opening public comment or input uh Mayor Benjamin for resolution number R 2020 08A for an unopened portion of Sloan Street in Richland. Thank you for saying that back with the good information on that. Is anyone uh on line Erica to speak on on on uh item 19? No. Sorry. No one has entered this speaker queue. Neither in favor of or against. All right. No one signed up to speak. Uh we're uh closed that uh public hearing uh for the request for public input I would say. Um uh do we have a motion? Motion approved. Motion second. Any discussion? We'll move the previous question. Call the roll. And this we the council has advised that this is just for a public input and that a vote is not required at this time. I think he was just closing the public input Ms. Ms. Hammond. Is that correct Mr. Benjamin? So do you get it? So we do not have to have a vote for the resolution? No sir. I've understand your your questioning that I asked legal counsel while we put it on a resolution. This is this is true. So we don't council doesn't vote on the matter but I understand the mayor would just open it for public um input and then closing it for public input. So emotion on that is fun. Right which is what I thought he was doing. But if we want to make sure they're clear on what they're voting on. There but there's no there's no no effective responsibility of us to vote on the on the on the matter on the closing itself that it hasn't already. That's that's that's correct. You will the memo received mayor indicated it's also on your executive session for you all. All right all right so we don't need uh don't need to act on let's have your first ten years. I mean you can vote to close the public. Oh no it's all right let's let's keep let's keep on let's keep on moving. Yes sir. Item 20 resolution number R 2020-092 approval. All right. Is there a second? Answer this. Gene Hopkins. Oh yeah. The one and only Gene Hopkins. They go move the previous question. Clark Colorado. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Aye. Mr. McAul. He is. Mr. DeVall. Aye. Mr. Vines. Aye. Mr. Davis. Aye. Mayor Benjamin. Aye. And just in the interest of efficiency I want to go back to step number 19 and we're going to have a motion that we've opened and closed public input on the on the item. Is there is there a motion? Move. Move. Seconding discussion. I move the previous. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Aye. Mr. McAul. Yes. Mr. DeVall. Aye. Mr. Vines. Aye. Mr. Davis. Aye. Mayor Benjamin. Aye. Thank you. Now that program is scheduled. They're going to have a little service there at 10 o'clock on the 24th of October. Are there any people left in your district that aren't remain? Let's move on, Mr. Mayor. I'm going to see the manager. Oh, we got the island 20. Yes, sir. I was trying to check to see if Mr. Rex had joined us on seeing Mayor Benz and Ben Rex. I think there were some questions for staff and Ben but this is an item to approve an economic development grant agreement for the creation of a new technology training and apprenticeship program within the City of Columbia as requested by the Economic Development Department award to create opportunity LLC in an amount not to exceed $40,000. The firm is located in Columbia. Ryan, do you have any additional input for council? I think I'll say this real quick in the interest of speed. I know this is something new, something different. Are they innovative? We're going to have to make sure that we communicate through Theresa and her team but through Ryan, Director Ben and others working with that connectivity. I mean, you all have awesome and incredible grassroots connections throughout the community. So really helping to create opportunity, reach out and touch folks out there who are looking for this potentially life changing opportunity. It's going to rest on us to make sure we connect those dots. I know there's some older nonprofits and some fledgling nonprofits who talked to Ed about one earlier. Let's make sure we're connecting those dots to see some type of the success we want to see in our respective parts of the community. Yes, sir, Mr. Duvall. Mr. Mayor, I asked if this would be taken off the consent agenda because I thought we needed to talk about it. The way I understand this, this is a private group that's starting a very innovative thing and I certainly endorse the idea of training people for coding in this market. I think that this is something that the private sector can handle, especially during this pandemic year when $40,000 is a pretty good part of the economic development budget that we have for the city of Columbia. And that $40,000 could probably be better used to incentivize some of the things that we've used that fund for previously. So I think instead of giving eight, is it five people, $8,000 or eight people, $5,000? I think it's eight people, $5,000 as a scholarship for this coding thing that we keep that money and use it to incentivize something that might help several hundred people. I appreciate that. Taking the spirit of this offer, I think the important thing we have to recognize here is that we're not just talking about five people, we're talking about eight people rather. We're talking about what we expect will grow, but we're talking about people who live in the bottom quintile, or bottom two quintiles of our society. If you look at this date over the last year alone, we talked about the new normal, the old normal wasn't too good for a lot of folks. Those of us who live in the top and the second and middle quintile are holding the line, but this is potentially a transformational opportunity for folks who never could have imagined this type of opportunity. So I mean, I think it's a way as we talk about equity, we talk about inclusion, we talk about really reaching back amongst least of us. I think it's a pretty innovative way to attack it, but I sort of understand your concerns and respect them. Mr. Davis and Ms. Devine. I'm sorry, I've never got to read the meat of it. I'd like to just see what it is, some kind of description, and so forth. I'm just not aware of it. I don't necessarily have anything to any reason for voting against it. At this time, I just really don't know what it is. Conceptually, I've had one or two conversations with some other folks, and I just want to make sure anything that I may support down the road is not a duplication of what I think I'm hearing about this project. We've never tried it like this before, but please, Ms. Devine. You're on mute. Yes, sir. I had just a couple of questions and concerns previously. So I called Ryan and spoke to him, and I just wanted to just offer that. I do think this is innovative. I agree with the mayor. I think those of us who have the connections with the community, and we know where folks that who could really benefit from this program are being comment upon us to work together and do that and connect those. But when we think about the presentation we just had about our tax base, when we look at the wages in our community and how low they are in relative to our sister cities throughout the state, I think that we're going to have to do some different and innovative things. We invest in other things. So, and this doesn't prohibit us from doing other projects, but I do think that based on my conversation with Mr. Ryan. Blank and his last name. My conversation with Brian and the information that Ben Rex has submitted, I think that this is something that we need to do when we're talking about actually elevating economic mobility for our citizens. So I understand the concern, but I just wanted to say, and maybe the questions that are raised, maybe a conversation more in depth with Mr. Rex would be prudent for you, but I think this is a good project. And I think that we need to move on it so that we can get folks ready to be employable in these types of jobs. Thank you, Mr. Rick. Yeah, I just, you know, I haven't had an opportunity to talk to Mr. Rex. And I guess, you know, I mean, that's a pretty successful company. So I'm surprised that they would need money for us to create this program. And there are a lot of other grants out there. And, you know, if this was another time and we were flushed with cash, I would probably say, you know, yes, let's start another incubator, but there are a lot of small businesses that could use two or $3,000 to stand longer that are hurting out there. So I struggle with this. I get planning the seed and the growth, and that makes all sense. But at the same time, I mean, I think that Mr. Rex and their business are pretty thriving. And could this not be a private sector venture versus a public sector when, you know, every little bit we have, I mean, we got people who can't pay water bills. We got people who are struggling to keep their businesses open. And these are micro loans that could come out of this. I just struggle with that. And so I don't know if this has to be done today, or we can have a deeper understanding. I'm sorry, y'all. We've discussed this. I mean, so this is nothing new. So if we have fundamental disagreement, I'm not talking to you, Daniel. I'm just saying that if we have different opinions as to how to approach this, so much that we do, and not just Colombia and those of us who try to make economic development decisions, so often we're talking about the haves. And there's not a program, a significant program we've seen that talks about reaching back and pulling people literally from the lowest income earners in society, or even those who are not employed, and potentially in just a couple of years, taking them to 70, 80, $90,000 a year. We've never seen that. We've never had to even propose that. So I mean, I think let's keep in mind that this is a chance. If you want to talk about great social programs, you give someone an opportunity to earn a really good living, a really good living. It takes care of themselves and their families. So it's going to require us being somewhat innovative. I don't think you start chopping this up and saying that someone else should go do it. When this is probably the first real and significant opportunity I've seen, and I know Ben's in the queue. If you guys want to pull him up, I don't think we should. But I mean, I wish I'd heard these concerns before, because we've talked about this, and just as a development project, but I'm prepared to move forward with it. I think it's a smart move. I think it's again, you're not going to catch yourself in the prosperity. We need to be thinking about the future. I think it'd be a mistake if we missed the opportunity to have the private sector who was investing in this, the public sector, Midlands Tech, and others. And obviously the goal is to seek significant philanthropy where one piece of the puzzle, if we fall out of this, it potentially falls apart. I think that's a huge missed opportunity for Columbia. Other funding then? I mean, we're paying for an insurance cluster that hasn't produced anything. Let's put it in. That's a whole other discussion. I mean, if you guys want to talk, we've had that discussion. If you guys want to go out to ensure the tech cluster or ingenuity would have you, that's all right. I don't think that they're mutually exclusive or should be treated as such. And certainly, yeah, that's why we have a democracy. I think it'd be a huge mistake to miss this. I mean, if there's some significant unreadiness, y'all let me know, but I'm prepared to move forward. And I think it'd be a mistake if this is opportunity. I'll just be honest with you. I'm moving approval. Is there a second? Second. Second. Second. This is the previous question. Quick follow-up. Second. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Davis. Mr. Duvall. No. Mr. Vines. Yes. Mr. Davis. Aye. Mayor Benjamin. Aye. Would you know, would you, we're going to go ahead and get Ben, I don't want to do it tonight, on a call with or meeting with Mr. Davis, Mr. Duvall and Mr. Rickerman. And whoever else wants to have that conversation, but obviously given due respect to public notice laws to do a deeper dive. And I don't think we'll ever find, you know, we won't find unanimity. That's all right. But let's, let's, let's see if we can find more comfort with their approach and with the, with the open appointments. So, Mr. Sorry, Mr. Wilson. I was just going to ask Ryan to coordinate that, Mr. Mayor. Make that happen post-A. Yes, ma'am. Thank you. Let's get going. Yes, sir. Moving into a period of appointments, you all have the Board of Zoning Appeals and Planning Commission. I want to say two appointments each. Ashley, are you on the line? Yes, I am. There are two appointments each and there's one re-appointment also for both. Okay. What question? Who's the reappointment? I'm not sure I saw that. It's, it's listed on the memo. It says reappointment of Marcellus Primus. Oh, yes, ma'am. Thank you. He's eligible for reappointment. He is eligible for reappointment and he re-sent in his application for reappointment. So move. Let's do a second. Discussion. We'll move the previous question. Court call roll. Mr. Vernon. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Hi. Mr. Mcdowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Mr. Vines. Hi. Mr. Davis. Hi. Mayor Benjamin. Hi. Thank you. I'd like to nominate Katherine Center for one of the other posts. She's a district three. We have no district four representation on this board. Which board? On the zone. On the board. Yeah. I'll, I'll hold this until we can make sure we get some district four reps. It needs to be at least one from each district. All right. I would, I would say let's go ahead and get Katherine. She's district three and district three is one of the ones coming off and they'll let Daniel appoint district four in the next meeting. Second that. Just for clarification, coming off when is it coming up now? I don't say, I don't, I don't see that on here. So I updated the memo, the, the current reappointment that you just made is outside of the two vacancies that you can appoint. The people aren't listed. At the bottom of the menu of her memo, it says district three and district four are the ones that the last appointee represented district three and the last appointee represented district four. So I move Katherine appoint district three and let Daniel do the next one. I will go ahead and submit John Gignard. Prepare John Gignard. John Gignard. Does he have an application? Yeah. All right. So the, is there a second to Mr. Gignard's nomination? Second. There's a move for the nominations of Ms. Spenner and Mr. Gignard. Little group question for parole. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Rickerman. Hi. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Hi. Mr. Byron. Mr. Davis. Hi. Mr. Benjamin. Hi. Thank you. All right. Is, are you all done? Mr. Mayor, I'm sorry with your appointments. No, we have. Okay. Thank you. Please. Good, good. Good, actually. We actually have two appointments for the planning commission. Okay, I'm sorry that I thought I had moved to that. And then at the end of the memo, it's listed the two vacancies because we had to update the planning commission information to food mason harp, which was one of the latest appointees. So there are two vacancies open. And last meeting, we discussed how we need representation from district one and also from district two. I'd like to recommend Ms. Anna Davis. All right. And do we, we're the whole in district one. Is that right? Yes. Yeah. You haven't had a very good candidate relative to the young engineer, but the borders didn't work out. So we've got another advocate we'll have by next meeting. Thank you. Mr. McDonald's nomination move forward in the name of Anna Davis to the planning commission with the previous question. Corporal. Mr. Vernon. Yes. Mr. Rickman. Hi. Mr. Mcdowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Mr. Vines. Mr. Davis. Hi. Mayor Benjamin. Hi. Thank you. Are we done, Ashley? Yes, sir. We are. Thank you, Ashley. Thanks, I talk again. Good talking to you. Thank you, Ashley. Thank you, Ashley. Thank you, Mr. Risa. Thank you, Councilman Mcdowell. Yes, ma'am. Okay. At this point, Mr. Mayor, the public input part of the agenda will open, and I know that we have reserved some time this week for Mr. Jared Johnson to discuss a community art project. Erica is Mr. Johnson on the line. Yes, ma'am. Great. Jared, thanks for joining us. I'm not sure you expected to be waiting four hours to talk to us, but that's a problem for the cause. Please. Oh, no, it's fine. I've learned a lot, actually. Good deal. All right. Patient. Patient. Microphone's yours. Yeah, absolutely. Can everyone hear me? We sure can. Okay, fantastic. Well, I'll go ahead and get started. Um, thank you, Mayor Benjamin, Madam City Manager, and the Council. It's humbling to be here and representing Rosewood. I pray that my words are taken in the spirit they are given. Words from the position of an advocate for the Rosewood community art project. I genuinely look forward to working with all of you, and I value the relationships and connections we have made thus far. I wasn't running to be the first African-American female. The youngest person I just was running to make a difference in my community. This is a quote from a recent interview. Councilwoman at large, Tamika Isaac Devine, gave to SCETV. When in a position of power or authority, it's imperative that we exercise our ability to influence and advocate on behalf of those who may not be able to do so for themselves. Remember that leadership is not about titles. These temporary positions are fleeting. A thoughtful leader recognizes that we are the manifestation of loving families, neighborhoods, and communities that recognize that we lift people up. We don't beat them down. These are the words of our Honorable Mayor in 2019. It's clear from these words that city leadership believes in the power and importance of community. Community is the reason why all of us are here today. If these words are to be believed to be true, the City Council and the leadership must support the Rosewood Community Art Project. In June, my neighbors and I came together to create an inclusive art project that would recognize and honor the lives of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Amal Aubrey, and the countless black lives we have lost to police violence. This effort was collaborative on every level, location, visual, and implementation. To support the project in an attempt to make sure that there was a real hunger for a street mural, we created a petition, met face to face with the businesses on Jim Hamilton and businesses in the greater area of Columbia. Our petition has 2,836 signatures, and we have the support of Hunter-Gatherer and City Roots, the two main businesses on Jim Hamilton where citizens go to fellowship. At various stages of the project, I've been in contact with various council members and also the mayor and city manager, and most in this meeting are already familiar with the project. So with that said, I won't take up your time with presenting the project. I want to take this time to briefly talk about community. Municipalities are the closest form of government to the people and should be working every day with those same people in order to do the endless work of perfecting cities. This council has a unique opportunity to actually work with the people of this city and the Rosewood if they support the project. When was the last time the city had a grass root petition to reach almost 3,000 signatures? Other than when protests were at their height in June, when was the last time the community came together to directly contact their representatives in a coordinated effort? This city is evolving. Rosewood is evolving and the citizens of this city want to be heard. We can't ignore the voices of the people and it's not enough to just listen. Action is expected and required from all of us. I understand that a municipality power structure is different from the power structures we see in federal and state governmental forms, but mayors, managers, and council people are still representatives of the people that live in their city. We risk so much when we don't listen to our fellow citizens. Individuals begin to lose interest and faith in the very government that most directly impacts their lives. Columbia is better than that and I refuse to let that happen to the people who live in Rosewood and the people of Columbia. Some say the Rosewood community are projects to be on a building, but limiting the words or phrase Black Lives Matter to privately owned buildings shows that the city doesn't truly believe that Black Lives Matter. I completely understand why some would prefer that this type of artwork be placed on a building. It's easier. All you need is an artist, a building owner who's willing to cooperate, and a few meetings with important groups and important individuals with power, titles, and clubs. I completely understand that change isn't easy and is never easy and fundamentally change should have community at its foundation. Where's the community and belief in Black Lives if you limit or segregate them to privately owned buildings? Let's be leaders in the sphere of municipality. Columbia is no different from Washington DC, Charlotte, Charleston, or any of the other cities that have moved forward with street murals. There are now murals in Spartanburg and Florence and they aren't even the state capital city, but the beauty of this project, it is community based from conception to protection, and we've done the work. Move forward with Rosewood and let's get this done. Will Brennan got his seat at the table with 2,516 votes. As I stated earlier, our petition has 2,836 signatures. Lend us the power that communities inherently have and gratefully give to individuals like Brennan and the rest of the council. Empower this community and move forward with us. The city is dealing with the pandemic and racial unrest. We cannot add unresponsive city leadership to the list and I have faith in our leadership to do the right thing. At every stage, various council people, especially the city manager, thank you, thank you, responded to emails, calls, and that same help along with my neighbors helped get the project on the agenda. I am beyond thankful. Let's continue the spirit of teamwork that got the project as far. Remember that this will not cause the city a single dime and the groundwork has already been laid if anyone questions if this has real neighborhood support. And keep in mind that Rosewood strongly believes in free speech. The fear of a counter mural or retaliation is not an issue. If someone has an alternative message, I request that you hear them as well, but hold them to the same standard Rosewood held itself. A petition, local business support, and presentation to the city for input critique and judgment. We even have a plan in this department with the university and local school districts to offer community service on selected days to maintain and touch a proposed mural. Everything about the project centers around community and I'm so proud of that fact. Art has an impact on critical thinking and sparks conversations and thoughts that have never been had if not for that art. Far too often that's not enough funding or support work such as this, but thankfully the Rosewood community project is a project that is free and begins the conversation of healing for all in Columbia. Art is vital, is a vital part in any great city. Let's put our artists to work and allow them to take part in the democratic process of community building. And also projects like this one should not be an either or situation or pivot against other ideas that want to do similar work. Projects like this should not be limited to just downtown. Projects like this should include the community who artists hope to inspire. Community has to be the foundation if you honestly believe Black Lives Matter. The location of Jim Hamilton offers a bird-eye view in street level and is the perfect companion art teach to go along the Jim Owens part. If the city wants to give community an opportunity to have this kind of art, let us decide with democratic values the way we want to represent our own individual community. And have I gone over time just checking in. Yeah, you have. Are you rapping, Jared? Are you rapping? I'm so sorry. It's okay. Are you done? Are you done? Yeah, I am rapping. Just do more for me. I'm almost done. It's like maybe like 20 seconds. I'm done. All right, go for it. Nevertheless, we persist. The road to council agenda isn't an easy one. I thank everyone for sharpening my skills as my community pushed me forward. With that said, I also would recommend that the city seriously considers granting one comb via the authority to handle art projects like the Rosewood Community Art Project. I've traveled the world and have seen on the ground level what happens when we empower our art slash cultural organizations. I've seen amazing things in Copenhagen, Paris, London, and even a small town in the UK called Sherbourne in the Dorset region. Columbia can do the same. We're with the trust of the leadership of the city and we ask that you take our hand and partner with us. We're ready to continue the work. Please just join us. And with my remaining time, I'm not sure if I have any left, I will commend encourage questions from the council. Thank you so much. You took up the time of about two or three people and it was joyful. Jared, send over those comments. He had some recommendations and some different thoughts and some that I know that I personally fully embrace and some we might, you know, we've had some good friend conversation. I love your energy. I love the fact that you're leading. Yeah, man, let's figure out how we can continue to do things together. If you wouldn't mind sending to me or to the clerk, your written comments, I sent your email over. Make sure your email is including the official record, but I like that as well. And we'll have some dialogue. Okay. And don't get don't get used to the habit of tuning the city council meeting. Most of them are not this much fun. I assure you, okay? They're not happy to be here. They're not. But that was that was eloquently and articulately stated in heartfelt. So let's let's talk some more. Okay, brother. All right. Okay, absolutely. All right. All right. Thank you. And thank you, Jared. In the the the the hotels we have, we have no other citizen sign up to speak right now. So we it's really important we get through the executive session agenda. So Mr. Duvall. Mr. Mayor, I move we're going to executive session for receipt of legal advice related to matters covered by an attorney client privilege pursuant to 30-40 78 to COVID-19 Sloan Street, Bull Street Park, renaming monuments, memorials, National Park Service. And I believe this was Finley Park added. Yeah, yes, sir. No, sir. The city always say noise ordinance to 24. Yes, sir. Okay. Discussion of matters related to proposed location or expansion of services to encourage location or expansion of industries to policy and gray first reliance discussion of negotiations incidents to propose contractual arrangement pursuant to 30 days forward as 78 to 221 Divine Street and PRB underwriter. Yeah, yeah. Second. Second. Second. Question on the previous question for Colorado. Mr. Brennan. Yes. Mr. Rickman. Hi. Mr. McDowell. Yes. Mr. Duvall. Hi. Mr. Vine. Hi. Mr. David. Hi. Mr. Benjamin. Hi. Thank you everyone for tuning in. Hopefully you find this fun. This is a great meeting. I have to be honest with you. I think a lot of really good stuff. So a whole lot more work to do.