 Good morning. I've enjoyed the cat conversation and it's actually more fun to see Cal's member Reese as a cat than it was to see that lawyer as a cat. Now they're talking amongst each other. But I'm going to call this meeting to order at 9.02 a.m. and I see John Allures with us. John, are you on tap to get us kicked off? You're on mute, John. Hello. I'm about to turn things over to Bertha Johnson. Some housekeeping, please mute yourselves. If you're not presenting and turn your camera off, welcome everyone. And I will either Bertha's preference, show the agenda or show Bertha. Okay. Good morning, everyone. Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem City Council members, Bertha Johnson, Director of Budget Management Services. Thank you all for your patience this morning. As we dealt with our technology issues, we wanted to make sure we could broadcast on YouTube today for our residents to be able to participate in our meeting. So first, I want to welcome you to our fiscal year 21-22 budget retreat. Typically, we're in the big room together and have lots of food and lots of engagement with each other. So we certainly will miss that, but we're glad and thankful for you all setting side of time to be with us today. And we have a couple more days coming up and we'll talk about those agendas. I want to thank our budget team for all the work they've done to get us here today. Also our department directors who are on the meeting with us and other employees who worked on the presentations and for all the work they do during the year to help us be transparent and accountable to our residents. Before I sent you all the presentations on Monday, I believe you can also access them through Granicus. So if you have any questions or concerns, just drop it in the chat or let us know and we'll make sure we get you what you need. Before we go to the agendas, I just want to share with you where today is in our budget process. We started this process in October with updating our multi-financial plans with our current year's budget and presenting that update to our interim city manager, um, taking the feedback from her and our DCMs and making another update to our plans. In December, we held our first ever CIP stat meeting. We have stat meetings with our strategic plan initiatives, but we decided to do something near to add that to our process. We're departments were able to come and share updates on our CIP projects and any challenges or barriers with implementing those projects. As you can imagine, this is a very different year in terms of trying to get projects updated as well, and you will hear more about the CIP tomorrow. In January, we had, we also had our CIP and IT governance kickoff in January. We had our budget kickoff with all of our departments, and once we have the budget kickoff, they get their budget manual and instructions and start working on their budgets. So they've been doing that really with pre-meetings really since November, December, but then the official kickoff in January. And of course, on February 4th, we had a work session to work with you all in terms of finalizing the process you will use to prioritize your budget request. So a lot of work has been done over the months. We still have a long ways to go. And to that end, I will have John pull up the agendas, because I want to share also with you what to expect in the next couple of meetings with your package on Monday. You only receive the agendas for today and tomorrow. So today is really the day, all about a lot of data to share with you. Our resident survey, as well as our student plan update, will have our gold champions present to you very few updates on the initiatives. And we are certainly available to bring additional information back to you if we need to. And as always, we'll have Shannon share with us, share with you all and our residents and our employees, what's going on with our idea starter project this year. We left this open time on the agenda just in case we first of all had some, we ran over time on any of our topics, but also if there are items that you as city council want to discuss that we will, if that we're prepared to discuss today, if it's something that requires research of course or working with other departments or other organizations, we would not be able to do that today. But, you know, we're just hopeful that there, there are some things that we'll be able to provide additional information to you today, doing that time period. So with that, if there are no questions, I will turn it over to our interim city manager, wanted to page for opening comments. Good morning. I think our technical staff has something that is going to pop up on the screen very shortly. I think I'll go ahead and start speaking. I think that that that visual will come up. Here we go. Still working. So I'm going to go ahead and get started. I think he's going to put it in presentation mode. But good morning, Mayor Shul, Madam Mayor Pro Tem Johnson, council members, city staff that are present and residents that are watching. We are really happy to join with you today as we take another step together toward the development and delivery of our city's 2021 2022 budget. Thank you, Bertha and John department staff, our deputy city managers and department directors for again stepping up and leading in the development of this year's budget that when finalized will without a doubt reflect the values of our organization and this great community we serve a few weeks ago on January 6th at the annual budget kickoff. I challenged our employees who gathered that day to catch an early glimpse of the 2020 2021 budget outlook to return to their departments after the meeting and find a way to actively engage in budget development. I charged them to ask probing questions offer innovative and creative ideas to their departments, budget staff and leadership to help create solutions to our pressing issues while reimagining service delivery to our residents reflective of the times we're living in and working in. What you see and hear today and tomorrow later this month on the 25th and 26th and throughout this budget season will reflect these conversations. Sometimes very tough, crucial conversations along with courageous decisions that challenge what we have become accustomed to in order to move us toward our next normal even in the midst of the unprecedented uncertainty that surrounds us and always with high hopes for our future. If not for the persistent global pandemic that has changed all our lives forever we may have chosen the Durham Arts Council on Morris Street as the venue for our budget retreat this year. If so upon arriving for a day of presentations, discussion and budget deliberations we may have stopped for a few moments outside to once again view the community-centered creative work of art displayed on the screen today led by artist Brenda Miller Holmes and known to us as the Durham Civil Rights mural. When arriving on the grounds of the Durham Arts Council we would have been reminded of the many Durham Civil Rights activists and housing activists like Paulie Murray and Atwater and Virginia Williams and business leaders and entrepreneurs like Aaron Moore, Richard Fitzgerald and John Merrick from decades past whose great vision and sacrifices led to changes that continue to give us hope today as we dedicate ourselves to better understand and address racism in our world including the community that we live in and serve in Durham and yes even city government. We have already taken steps to begin replacing inequitable systems and structures that have been in place and operating long before our time with new more equitable systems. The racial equity budget tool implemented this budget cycle which you will be briefed on tomorrow is evidence of our words and our plans put into action. We are committed to and invested participants in the equity work that we advance and think about every day in city government. As an organization we know we have a lot of work to do and we know this work will not be easy or lightning fast. We know we will need additional investments along with reallocation of existing funding to better support the work of our community partners that share our vision to pilot and implement new community safety solutions and to ensure all of our residents regardless of the language they speak have access and opportunity. But we have started and we're making progress on this journey together along with our community residents and many partners. Continued progress in this work is one of my highest priorities as we shape the 2021 2022 budget. In just a few minutes you will hear the results of our annual resident survey. While it is a county-wide survey the focus of the presentation today will be on city services. Despite the severe challenges brought on by the global pandemic that has persisted for almost a year and during the period covered by the survey results overall satisfaction with city services is high. Let me be clear these high marks are due to the dedicated and unwavering service of our city employees. I have watched our employees step up day in and day out when our community has needed them most approximately 2,600 full-time and part-time employees. Approximately 75% working in the community in a plant or providing on-site operational support. As employee pay adjustments were eliminated last year as the pandemic and economic uncertainty loomed large one of my highest priorities in the final version of this budget recommendation is the inclusion of employee pay adjustments reflective of the market conditions retention of full benefits that support the physical and mental health of our employees and their families and full funding of personal protective equipment and workplace safety modifications due to COVID-19 for employees who are absolutely essential to the quality of life in this community. As you preview your materials received for tomorrow's budget outlook you will see initial projections without budget estimates. This is intentional at this point in the budget development process. Departmental budget submissions are not due until February 22nd. Revenue projections are still being refined with new information literally being received every day and options for restoring pay adjustments equitably within persistent fiscal constraints are still being developed for inclusion. Additional information and pay recommendations will be included on the retreat agenda scheduled for later this month on the 25th and 26th. Time does not permit me in these brief moments to highlight every administrative priority and strategy for pulling this budget together during these unprecedented and uncertain times nor would I try as the very capable presenters and city leaders coming after me will do that. What I will do is take my virtual seat at the table with my phenomenal leaders in team prepare to listen respond to questions and receive guidance from you mayor and council and the thousands of voices that you represent in this community that we all love and call home and in the words of the late singer songwriter and Prince of Motown Marvin Gaye let's get it on. We can all pretty much go home now. That was awesome madam manager and I know I speak for all of my colleagues. You challenged Tom Bonfield I don't believe he ever said let's get it on at the end of one of his budget talks. I'm going to just comment now asking the colleagues to comment quickly Bertha before we turn it back over to you but this is my 10th budget retreat. I'm a 10th year of them. I love them. They're so much fun and I am so sorry we're not together I want to say that first. It's such a wonderful day of work that's also informal and we always depend on our manager to get us going in a way that's both thought-provoking inspirational and sets the mess and sets the tone and the direction and you really did that. I wanted to thank you so much. That was an awesome beginning and thank you for letting us know that we got to get it on. Colleagues any other comments? Here's I'm going with first names today. I'm pretending like we're together at a budget retreat. Okay thanks Steve. Yeah I just wanted to really quickly say thank you Wanda for those inspiring words and evoking the ancestor Marvin Gaye into the space that was really special. This is my first budget retreat and I've really been looking forward to this. I know it's one of the most important things we do as a council and so I'm really excited about the next two days and then two weeks when we go back in but just wanted to put a pin in what you said about the equity work. I'm so excited that the city is kind of moving into walking some of what we've been talking and Wanda and I have talked extensively about the nature of that equity work and how it's going to roll out and for the folks who are watching I just wanted to underscore that especially coming after the you know the race equity task force work that we did the safety and wellness stuff that's coming up that would be grounded with some structural race equity work citywide that I'm really excited about. So yeah I just wanted to echo your enthusiasm for my first ever. This is your 10th. It's my first. I'm excited to jump in. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Thank you Pierce. Anyone else from Mayor Pro Tem? Jillian? Thank you Mr. Mayor. Yeah I was just thinking as I was getting up and logging in this morning about our budget retreat our first budget retreat last year and how we all gathered at the county health department building and had no idea what was about to happen what was about to hit the city with the COVID pandemic and we you know we went into that budget feeling really excited about all the new work that we were going to get to fund and then literally like two weeks later we realized that with the pandemic very little that was going to be possible and so I was just thinking about how different this year feels from you know what happened after after our last budget retreat it feels like we're you know we I see kind of the light at the end of the tunnel a way out of a way out of this pandemic and we're starting to get our community back on track we're getting some federal desperately needed federal money that we've been waiting for for a long time we you know we're seeing possible additional federal relief for for residents on the horizon student loan forgiveness and minimum wage increases and it just it just all it to me it feels like we're we're headed in a much better direction and with all the exciting new work that's happening at the city with our race equity work and our community safety work and the language access plans and I feel very hopeful today even though it's been really really weird year I feel good about about where we are now and I'm really looking forward to having some conversations about where we're going to head where we're going to head over the next year and especially with continuing to fight the COVID pandemic and getting more getting more relief to our residents now thankfully with the assistance of the federal government I think is going to be we're going to be able to make some real changes this year and make a difference happy to be here thanks thank you very much Charlie thank you Steve that's weird thank you Steve um I just wanted to say I don't have anything to add to the substance except to say that the resident survey is probably the thing I look forward to most in these retreats because it really does help me kind of set budget priorities and so I'm really looking forward to that the other thing I wanted to say is that we have been so incredibly well served by our city manager Wanda Page her willingness to take on what is almost certainly the hardest job in the city of Durham and to do it without missing a beat in terms of the management of this incredibly complicated enterprise it's just been extraordinary I found Wanda I found you to be so incredibly open eager enthusiastic and knowledgeable and it's been it's been amazing and and I think this the intro that you just gave is really the epitome of what I'm talking about and I don't want to take anything away from our former city manager Tom Bonfield who was a masterful presenter at these things and always had a great plan a great theme a great a great way to get us into it but I just wanted to say Wanda that what you just gave us was really the kind of open ready you know willing to hear information and make decisions based on information and just an incredible touchstone or history bringing back the Durham Civil Rights mural at the very beginning of this and highlighting that as our on ramp to focusing racial equity and everything we do I'm just so so grateful really so grateful today for you and for your leadership and really looking forward to what these this series of budget retreats can mean for the future of our city so that's all I had Steve thanks thank you Mark Anthony thank you Steve good morning colleagues and friends everybody watching I want to associate myself with everything everyone has said you know Tom Tom always stuck to dismount I mean he had his own genius and brilliance in these things but it just would have hit differently if Tom had looked at me and said let's get it on so you know you got to allow people to stay in their own lanes and and be who they are and this is what I love about our city we have a big enough tent where folk can just express their genius in their own way so certainly hearing Marvin Gaye quickened my spirit alluded to this morning in this conference I want to thank city manager for that Wanda and let me just say I share the hopefulness and the sense that we the winds are blowing for good in our city I think we're at an inflection point I think at least for me we probably for me haven't been at a point where we have been most challenged and yet most prepared to meet the challenge the strength of the organization that's been bequeathed to us by past leaders the the brilliance and ability of this current city manager but the challenges economically from a health point of view still very concerned about the disparities and the vaccine rates the black and brown folk relative to white people a lot of folks still hurting economically but the work has to go on we have challenges on every hand but I have never felt that we've been better prepared and that's a testament to leadership before now giving us a strong organization and leadership now so I share the hopefulness I think we're at an inflection point but I think we are up to the challenge you know every generation has their call to answer and you can romanticize and kind of point to lessons from previous leaderships and administrations but there comes a time when your particular generation has to stand up and meet the challenges of your day and renew any promises and restore any potential that that your organization or nation or city has has built up over the years so I'm excited we've got a lot of work to do a lot of folk are looking to us to make good decisions as we go forward but we have a city manager that that alludes to Marvin Gaye so I think we're in good shape so yes I second that let's get it on thank you Steve and friends thank you Mark Anthony all right I think we've done it I'm gonna I know I knocked us off of our agenda for which I apologize but I couldn't help myself all right I'll turn it back over now Bertha I fear if you are ready I apologize for knocking this off our time but we have extra time you're perfectly okay I want to mention one thing before I turn it over to Sherry Metcalf to introduce our next speaker I decided to hold off on going through the agenda for the next few retreats because as we go through the presentations there may maybe other items that we add to the agenda and so we can add that to the end of the day I think that will be best so I'm going to turn it over to Sherry Metcalf good morning everyone my name is Sherry Metcalf and I am the strategy and performance manager in the department of budget management services under Bertha Johnson and today I am going to be your mc slash presenter as we work through our agenda today and we're going to start with our resident satisfaction survey but I did want to provide a little background um I know we all would rather be in a room together today I'm really kind of missing the snacks that are usually in the back of the room um but one on the upside trying to be positive um with us being on YouTube we're hoping we have a lot more residents that are able to listen in and hear what people have to say and so a little background for any residents who are joining us today we have been doing a resident satisfaction survey since 2005 we've gone through ETC Institute that's our vendor we've been with them since the beginning uh we do used to do it every other year we changed that in 2015 when we started doing it annually as well as joining with the county and so we do now a joint city county um survey and so there are all those surveys can be found online um I was on there just the other day and I didn't even realize but I guess the city used to do surveys internally so they go back even further than 2005 um so some interesting things to look at but um they're found under um the department of um for budget management services department so the whole list going back um quite a while so people can go on and take a look at those um normally we keep our survey every year similar right we're tracking trends over time we always have some new things in there and this year we did add a um a good chunk related to COVID we also added a couple new questions around racial equity um and so Jason Murado is here with us today to go over his presentation and he should look familiar to many of you he's been working with us for quite a while so thank you Jason for joining us um he's going to go ahead and share his screen and um present out the finding so Jason I'll turn it over to you and I'll see you all when we're uh at the end thanks Jason great thanks Sherry um well it's great to be here uh little differently this year of course virtually um that intro will be a tough act to follow but um my name is Jason Murado I'm the director of community research at ETC Institute and ETC is a marketing research firm based in Olathe, Kansas which is in the Kansas City area and the thing we specialize in is conducting community surveys for city and county governments and this past November and December as Sherry said for the 11th time we conducted a residence survey for the city of Durham so today I'm going to go through the high-level key findings from the survey I do have just one slide about ETC Institute we're based in the Kansas City area but we're a national leader in providing market research for local governments we've been doing this type of work for over 35 years and in the last 10 years alone we've conducted surveys in more than 900 communities in 49 states and that includes a lot of work throughout the state of North Carolina so this is really the type of work that we specialize in this is just a quick rundown of what I'll go through today I'll go over the purpose and methodology of the survey when I call the bottom line up front are our main conclusions from the survey and then I'll go through the major survey findings to show how we came to those conclusions and of course I'll answer any questions as well so there are several reasons to conduct a survey like this one is to get an objective assessment of how satisfied residents are with major city services and then also to determine what residents feel are the top priorities for the community with this survey we're also able to measure trends from previous surveys most years most of the questions stay the same year after year but we do make a few tweaks each year such as adding some COVID related questions this year and then also we're able to compare your results with other similar sized communities across the country so I mentioned this was the 11th time we've conducted a resident survey the survey was administered by a combination of mail and online to randomly select a residence throughout the city and that's our standard methodology for these community surveys our goal was to receive at least 600 completed surveys and we actually ended up with 637 and one thing we always do when we're administering these surveys is we monitor the demographics of survey respondents and make sure they reflect the actual population so we make sure we have a good representation by key demographic areas such as race and ethnicity age gender and geographic location and the results of these 637 surveys at the 95 percent level of competence has a margin of error plus or minus 3.8 percent so essentially that means that if we conducted this survey the same way 100 times 95 times the results would be plus or minus 3.8 percent from what we're reporting so the results aren't perfect but really it's a very small margin of error so here are just a few of the slides showing the demographics of survey respondents the blue are the results of the survey the pink bar are the actual results for the city of Durham based on the US census so we had a really good representation by race and ethnicity and then for gender we also had a very good representation very much in line with the actual demographics of the city so here we have a map of the city and the red dots are households that completed the survey so we had a really good distribution throughout the city this distribution is similar to what we've had on previous surveys so here are our main conclusions from the survey we found that residents overall have a very positive perception of the city 83 percent of respondents rate the city as an excellent or a good place to live and 76 percent of respondents are satisfied with the overall quality of life in their neighborhood we also found that overall the satisfaction ratings are similar to last year's survey in a little bit we'll look at some of the areas that had the biggest increases and decreases in satisfaction compared to 2019 but when you look at the overall level of satisfaction it's similar to a year ago and when we compared the city of Durham's results to other large communities there were a couple of areas that really stood out the city of Durham rated 21 percentage points above the average for large cities when it comes to the overall quality of city services and this is one of the most important questions on the survey because here we're asking residents to take into account all the services that you're providing and really give an overall satisfaction for how well you're doing and then another area that really stands out is the city of Durham rated 33 percentage points above the average for large cities when it comes to customer service provided by city employees and then we found the top overall priorities for the next couple of years are public schools maintaining streets and police protection so first we'll look at some general perceptions that residents have of the city if you look at this slide the dark blue are residents who are very satisfied the light blue is satisfied the gray is neutral and for this chart we interpret neutral as meeting expectations so rating of a three on a five point scale and then the pink and red are those who are dissatisfied or very dissatisfied so here we're asking residents to rate the perception of the city in a number of different ways and the blue are the positive ratings the red are the negative so obviously there's a lot more positive than there's negative if you look at the top of this chart 76% of residents rated the quality are satisfied with the quality of life in the neighborhood that's compared to only 11% who are dissatisfied and then if you look at this third row down 63% of respondents are satisfied with the overall quality of city services that's compared to only 10% who are dissatisfied so you have more than a six to one ratio those who are satisfied versus dissatisfied with the overall quality of city service which is a really good ratio typically for large cities that ratio is more around four or five to one here we ask residents to rate the community in a number of different ways again the positive range far away the negative and all these categories if you're to the top of this chart over 80% of residents rate the city as an excellent or a good place to live and to work this was the very first question on the survey and here we ask residents to rate major categories both of city and county services so for this question we're asking residents to rate these areas at the big picture departmental level and then later on in the survey we ask about some more specific areas within some of these categories so most areas you can see receive very high ratings the only areas that have significant levels of dissatisfaction are public schools and transportation related issues such as street maintenance pedestrian facilities which include sidewalks but the good news is the satisfaction ratings have increased for schools and streets this year compared to last year's survey here we have a map of the city and what we did is we broke the results out by census block group these are very small areas and we created a map like this for every question on the survey asked on a five point scale so there are over a hundred maps in the reports this map shows how residents feel about the city as a place to live and what these maps do is they tell us of residents in different parts of the city or rating services differently or have different perceptions of the city so for this map you can see most of the map is blue you have a couple of areas that are the yellowish color which aren't bad ratings those are just more average but everything else is blue which are positive ratings and in fact there are quite a bit of areas in dark blue which is the highest possible so this tells us that residents throughout the city feel like the city of germ is a good place to live so now we'll take a look at some of the trends I mentioned that the overall level of satisfaction this year is similar to 2019 but here are some of the areas that had among the biggest increases and decreases in satisfaction compared to last year the biggest increases were related to the ease of travel within the city the how the appropriateness of city employees response to residents the condition of neighborhood streets how courteous employees are with residents how easy the city was to contact and in the overall feeling of safety when visiting parks the areas with the biggest decreases in satisfaction include yard waste police relationship with the community code enforcing codes uh downtown parking facilities outdoor athletic fields and courts and then aquatic facilities so here's that question about major categories of city services the blue line are the satisfaction ratings for 2020 the gray are the satisfaction ratings for last year's survey in most areas the satisfaction ratings were similar the blue areas are ones that had a significant decrease in satisfaction so communication with the public satisfaction increased by six percentage points uh one of the biggest increases in satisfaction was with the ease of travel within Durham and then also there is a significant increase in satisfaction with maintaining city streets the biggest decreases were with police protection and that's a trend we've seen all over the country over the past six to seven months so that's not a big surprise and then the other most significant decrease was in codes the area overall that had the biggest changes since 2019 was related to customer service the satisfaction ratings for customer service have always been very good they were very good on last year's survey but this year you can see there was a significant increase in all six different areas of customer service that we rated so how courteous employees have been the appropriateness of employees response how easy the city government is to contact the accuracy of the information that employees are providing the timeliness of employees response and then ultimately if employees resolve residence issues and concerns so really great news big increases in all six areas so we also compared the city of Durham results with other communities of similar size these comparisons the blue line are satisfaction ratings for the city of Durham the pinkish purplish color are the satisfaction ratings for residents from across the country and communities of the population between 150 and 40000 residents so there are several areas where you're rating much higher than other large communities that includes the library services EMS customer service of city employees this is the area that really stands out the most you can see that you have a 66 percent satisfaction rating the national average for other large communities is only 33 percent and then communication with the public is another area that really stands out you have a 59 percent satisfaction rating which is almost 20 percent of the points above the national average and then areas where you're rating below other communities are response time fire services police protection public transit schools and then maintaining city streets here are comparisons for perceptions of the city and this looks similar to previous years you rate a bit lower when it comes to the overall quality of life and the image of Durham but significantly higher when you look at the overall quality of city services you also rate higher than other large communities when it comes to the appearance of Durham and then also with the value received for property taxes 42 percent of respondents were satisfied with the value they received for property taxes that seems like a low number compared to a lot of these other numbers on the survey but you can see that the national average is only 33 percent so for this category of 42 percent satisfaction rating is actually very good and here are more comparisons for ratings of the community and here you can see in all of these areas you rate significantly higher than the national average so the city has a place to live has a place to work if you go down to this second row from the bottom 60 percent of respondents feel like the community is moving in the right direction and the national average is just a little over 40 percent and then here are comparisons for maintenance a couple of areas where you're rating above on their large communities include the condition of trails and greenways and the condition of neighborhood streets a couple areas that rating lower are the condition of parks and open space and the appearance of landscape of right-of-ways along streets and just other public areas and then customer service we saw a few slides ago that the ratings have really increased compared to last year and in most of these areas you're also rating significantly higher than other communities the courteousness of employees accuracy of information timeliness of response resolve residents issues and concerns the only area that doesn't rate above the national average is how easy the city is to contact but we saw that had a significant increase from last year so it's at least improved so now we'll take a look at the top priorities this is what we call the important satisfaction rating and this is a tool that we use to help communities set priorities and this analysis is based on two different types of data first we ask residents how satisfied they are the city services which is primarily the type of data we've been looking at so far the follow-up question is which of these services are the most important for city city leaders to emphasize over the next couple of years so the idea behind this is that those areas that have a combination of a low satisfaction rating but are also rated as the most important should be the highest priorities so this slide is for major categories of services and you can see the top three priorities are public schools city streets and police protection another area that was identified as a high priority but not as high as those top three is the quality of pedestrian facilities which includes sidewalks here are the here's the important satisfaction rating specifically relates maintenance the top overall priority is the condition of public school facilities other high priorities include neighborhood streets parking and neighborhood sidewalks so we have something a little different to include missures presentation we drilled a little deeper into the data and pull out the results based on race and ethnicity we actually did this on previous surveys but just didn't present the results during this meeting so for this chart is for the overall quality of police protection and these are the percent of residents who are either very satisfied or satisfied so you can see that 50 percent of black residents are satisfied with the overall quality of police protection that's just slightly above hispanic residents which had a 48 percent satisfaction rating and then lower than white residents where 56 percent were satisfied with the overall quality of police protection this chart is for how safe residents feel when walking alone in their neighborhood during the day now here you can see um oops sorry let me hold this back so here you can see the ratings are high for all groups all groups feel safe walking alone in the neighborhood during the day but there is some difference 86 percent of black residents feel safe in the neighborhood during the day that's compared to 91 percent for hispanic residents and 92 percent for white this shows how residents feel overall how safe overall they feel in Durham now here we do see some bigger differences um for black residents 41 percent overall feel safe in the city for hispanic residents it's also a 31 percent that's compared to 48 percent of white residents who overall feel safe in the city and if you look at the overall ratings for all respondents um 44 percent feel safe so here we asked how residents feel about their overall relationship uh kind of feel about overall police relationship with their community so here we see some really significant differences uh 43 percent of black residents overall are satisfied with the police relationship with the community that's nine percentage points below hispanic residents and 14 percentage points below white residents the overall 50 percent of residents are satisfied with the police relationship with their community this chart is for the current state of race relations uh the ratings are about the same for black and hispanic residents in both cases a little over 30 percent are satisfied with the current state of race relations that's compared to 41 percent for white residents and here's another chart where we see some significant differences this is progress addressing racial equity 32 percent of black residents are satisfied with the progress addressing racial equity that's compared to 44 percent for hispanic residents and 49 percent for white residents and then overall 42 percent of residents are satisfied with the progress addressing racial equity this chart shows the satisfaction ratings for residents experience engaging with the city government process so here the differences aren't quite as significant as some of the other areas but still you can see that 41 percent of black residents are satisfied which is lower than hispanic and white residents which in this case their satisfaction ratings are about the same so for this chart we're showing the level of dissatisfaction with the availability of affordable housing so here again we see some pretty big differences about two-thirds of black residents are dissatisfied with the availability of affordable housing and that's compared to 53 percent for both hispanic and white residents overall for all respondents 58 percent are dissatisfied with the availability of affordable housing now in this chart we asked residents which government services they feel should receive the highest priorities for increased funding and residents had a list of 12 items they're asked to pick your top five so here we broke out the results for black hispanic and white residents there are several things that i think are interesting here the top two priorities among all three groups are affordable housing and public schools and in streets is the third highest priority among all the groups but when you look at affordable housing 74 percent of black residents rated that as a high priority that's compared to 62 percent for hispanic residents and 56 percent for white residents so affordable housing is a high priority among all three groups but definitely a higher priority among black residents it was interesting that streets turned out almost exactly the same for all three groups 48 percent of black residents felt streets was the high priority that's compared to 46 percent for hispanic and 48 percent for white residents and there was some other differences as well job creation was the fourth highest priority for black residents it was fifth for hispanic white residents it was only eight so we also had a few questions this year related to covid-19 here we asked residents to rate how satisfied they are with how well different levels of government have responded to the covid-19 pandemic so if you look at this top row 69 percent of germ residents were satisfied with how well the city has responded to the covid-19 pandemic and only 12 percent are dissatisfied now since mid-march sorry i did that again sorry um since mid-march etc institute has been conducting a national survey all across the country with residents related to covid-19 and this is one of the questions we include in our survey so nationally only 37 percent of residents are satisfied with how well their city has responded to covid-19 so you can see you're doing a much much better job than that um the state and county had high ratings as well compared to our national survey and then here we asked which areas are most important to spend resources on during the covid-19 pandemic and you can see the top priorities are housing and rent assistance preventing covid-19 spread food helping small businesses and then ensuring access to mental health services we've got just a few other findings to take a look at this was a new question on this year's survey we asked residents to rate the importance of various planning goals so the highest the ones that residents rate are the most important are residents learning about new development with enough notice to have their voices heard in the process um make it easy for residents to have a say in new development proposals and then having more racially and economically integrated needs this is actually the slide we saw a few slides ago this is asking which um government services should receive the highest priorities for increased funding on that slide a little bit ago we saw the results broken out by black Hispanic and white residents these are the results overall for all respondents so the highest priorities are public schools affordable housing um street maintenance so that is everything that I had just a quick recap we saw that residents have a very positive perception of the city very high ratings for the city is a place to live as well as the quality of life and residents neighborhoods overall the satisfaction ratings are similar to last year which is really good considering everything that's happened over the past year I did point out some of the biggest changes compared to the 2019 survey when we compared your results to other large cities um you rated significantly higher when it comes to the overall quality of city services and especially when you look at customer service not just overall but for all those different categories we looked at and then the top overall priorities are schools streets and police protection so with that um I'll stop sharing my screen and does anyone have any questions or comments uh didriana thank you uh mr mayor steve it's a little different but um I I mainly I just wanted to say thank you I appreciate the um anticipating my question and breaking out the the data a little further into a race and of course you know I have a another request and and just trying to figure out if you guys look at the income as well and so acknowledging there's difference amongst race race in class and if there's any way possible to get that data that would be even more helpful this has been this is phenomenal I do have a question about um whether you think it might be more of a of a help to split out the city and county survey so that the folks I feel like I'm I think this is my fourth year now so I feel like folks are gonna be confused about what city services are versus county services are if we give them a survey that says everything that the county does included in a city survey and so I know public schools keeps raising up for um folks in the community but is it something that the city covers and maybe it might be a way to split it out so that there is a city survey that can help educate folks on what the city covers sure well we uh the question about the income we we did have a question that asked residents about their income so we can definitely do a cross tab and break out the result by different level um yeah that that's no problem doing that and I'm sorry I was just not to make it like as difficult as possible even if it's just mapped to show a different color or layer out of color it doesn't have to be as detailed as you know you laid out each of those questions that would be helpful right yeah we can do that we can definitely do that um and we can you know once we set up the cross tab and run it we can do it for all the questions on the survey so yeah that's that's definitely no problem um as far as the city doing their own survey compared to the county you know that's certainly could do that I think it's just trying to be more cost efficient to do it this way and trying to get all the questions on one survey um but that's you know that's a possibility I understand thank you it's just it's a cost variable so yeah sure yeah other comments and questions Javier thank you Steve uh good morning everyone um I wanted to say you know these surveys are always super informative um but one thing that struck me is the slide where it talked about uh city services and and and just that it kind of broke down all the different pieces of that and when I think about the year that most folks had in 2020 and I think about the stress and just whatever our city employees were dealing with in their own homes was kids on zoom like many of us the fact that we got that quality of service from our employees this is something I just want to say you know thank you to our employees because you all um you know the results are in in a very very challenging year you all were fantastic and in Spanish I would say thank you so much appreciation and gratitude thank you thank you very much questions and comments colleagues I'll mark Anthony go ahead thanks uh did you want to go ahead Steve or no go ahead mark Anthony thank you thank you sir um so I always uh like others look really look forward to this survey I was placing it in context because you know there's the statistical findings and you kind of hold them in tension with you know what you hear on the streets and anecdotal and we can argue which one is more superior to the others but but um first thing I want to say is that the the findings kind of jived with something that I've always suspected and it's probably not um not different from many American cities is that the narrative of Durham as a as a as an emergent rising city holds and that that it's a prevailing narrative around the country we make lists all the time and I think that sir this survey bears that out we're a city that enjoys a great amount of gravitas and we got swag on the national scene and folk want to be here and a lot of great things are going on here prevailing narrative and then there's another slice of our life you know kind of a tale of two cities in one city um slice of our life that that um speaks to folk who who are somewhat behind participating in that prevailing uh narrative um the fact that schools sidewalks and police protection uh come up as three areas that deserve attention jails totally with what I hear all the time uh at least talking to folk that that um you know make up a large part of of my constituency and and and folk who look to me and did I feel accountable to as well um schools whether it be you know suspension rates or you know the achievement gap or the state of the facilities sidewalks how many times have we had people come before this council and talk about why can't my neighborhood get sidewalks as opposed to others and I mean at jails and police of course from gunfire to uh and it's interesting on the one hand of the the conversation taxed towards how police treat us and then on the other hand it's where are the police when we need them so police protection kind of cuts on on different uh lanes uh so so it's it's not surprising to me that those three areas have come up and and you know I said at the beginning that we're I believe we're at an inflection point and the all those three areas go directly to the heart of equity as well racial equity and the lens that we bring uh to policy um to come to constructing policy as we move forward uh those are areas that are going to certainly um guide me you know as we engage in debate on priorities and funding as we move forward um so I just want to thank you for that for the survey it's useful but I also want to you know be very transparent that I always place them in context as well because of course you know who and I think council Freeman uh touched on this you know who the respondents are matter income matters and who takes the time to respond and that's a truism of course and stats but it's always helpful always useful but uh but not really surprising that those areas have kind of come to the top of the areas we need to pay attention and so I would just uh note that and put a pin there um and thank you for the uh the information uh uh very useful I look forward to integrating it as we move forward in our discussions about policy and budgetary decisions thanks Steve thank you Mark Anthony other comments colleagues anyone else uh did you honor sorry just one follow-up I appreciate um um uh yeah that's not going to work council member Milton pointing out um we're not going to talk about that but uh just um Jason I'm just wondering if there's a way like is there a a threshold of age in these survey respondents because I feel like it's really interested in that youth came in so low um are youth actually active in the survey process like is there like under 24 under 18 survey respondents not under 18 but under 24 we do have that um we did ask the age of survey respondents and we had a good representation among all age groups and that's another cost that we could definitely run you know break out the results by age so but the survey is only attended for um for those 18 or older Charlie thank you Mr thank you Steve um appreciate this presentation it's always incredibly helpful um I gotta tell you the slide that is most interesting to me is uh slide or slide 37 it breaks down uh government services that should be that should receive highest priorities for increased funding the differences between the different demographic groups are sort of interesting but I think what's fascinating to me is that of the top five choices of each group I think there are only six total um areas that folks that folks identified affordable housing public school street maintenance job creation and job training youth programming and social services I think those are the only six in the top five of every demographic group and that's fascinating to me it shows that while amongst different neighbors might have different um might rank those six priorities differently they are all uh super important um and the that's just really interesting to me and of the city services you know affordable housing and street maintenance uh job training and creation and youth programming are obviously the four city services um and that's that's really that's really great to hear because I think it it syncs up with a lot of what we're hearing from the community um and I'm I'm really glad to see that and uh to see all of the data I think the other thing that no one's really talked about um is how well uh relatively speaking Durham has weathered the COVID-19 pandemic I think especially when you look at that slide that talks about how our residents rate the response to COVID from various levels of government um I think it's really gratifying to see that um that our city government uh is regarded so highly by our residents we can it's certainly easy for us to think a lot of ourselves and how we're doing but it's it's somewhat different uh to have our residents tell us that for example as compared to the federal government or even the state government uh we're doing okay not to short change any of our our shortcomings uh in this process that I've talked about uh over the course of the pandemic but I think it's it's good to see that the other thing that I'm I really appreciate is the focus that people have across demographics across geography I suspect will find across incomes around the importance of our affordable housing work and um I think one of the things I'm really grateful to about stat for the staff work during the pandemic is that that work has not slowed down uh and we saw some of that work come through our last work session um we had our kind of the the roadmap uh from community development back in October where they talked about the different uh work that they're going to be doing and we're seeing those projects will throw work sessions so I just want to thank staff for keeping our eye on that particular ball because even during the course of an unprecedented global pandemic the people of this city have continued to tell us that that is their absolute top priority and we should we should keep pushing on it thank you mr. mayor uh steve I guess thank you charlie are the comments um I have a couple the slide that was most striking to me was slide 34 um progress addressing racial equity white people um are wrong um you know just um you're pulling up that slide jason yeah yep is this the is this the one yeah I mean it's just I mean that is such to me that's it's such a stark number uh and and I know who on this slide I believe and so just we've just got so much work to do and complacency won't get the job done and I know we're not complacent but I just want to highlight that this slide was very striking to me um so thank you jason you can take that one down here um it highlights the work we're doing uh pierce mentioned it right off the top um and I just yeah it's just so important uh also a couple of other things that that were oh my mind um the that these these the affordable charlie mentioned the affordable housing and it's it it's always there and again there were some uh differences across race there but it continues to be the highest priority of things that the city funds and we know that we've identified it we're doing the work uh but it is important to to see that again and then the thing that that the street maintenance always knocks me for a loop with how high it is and but it's every year there's not a single year when street street maintenance is not at the top of the charts and I would just say that for this council it's not something that we like to think about spending a lot of money on but our residents really want it we also know that there's some part of you know looking at the fact that there's neighborhood streets there's satisfaction with neighborhood street uh maintenance relatively and I know that so part of this really does have to do with state street maintenance and that that's something that we need to continue to think about but I appreciate that our staff our city staff keeps pushing this at us and reminding us that it is important and that they really work to try to find ways to fund it um and uh Charlie also mentioned the COVID uh the ratings on COVID I was really glad Jason thank you for testing that uh and it was really good also to see how well we've done our or our residents feel that we've done and I feel that we have to um long way to go there still and then just in general uh as people have said what a fantastic uh ratings for our the way people feel about our city staff and the services that they render man a life I mean that's just I mean let's get it on you know I'm saying um I just think uh the way our staff was rated by our city uh one of the things that is really improved was the ease of communication I think with the city I can't remember exactly what the category was and I think we've all seen a big improvement in Durham One Call we we had a couple years or a year where we were really struggling and shout out to Wanda, Karmisha, all the folks in Durham One Call I think that that indicates that that's a you know really really improved um and then a couple of areas that we knew had been problematic uh COVID related uh yard waste in particular we know we've had a lot of difficulties there with making sure we're able to staff up and I think that that our our city staff made the right decisions on that about uh really emphasizing uh trash and recycling pickup it meant that yard waste had to suffer some and it's okay uh that'll come back uh with the with when COVID is passed us by and um we knew that was going to be a struggle it wasn't struggle and it's all right so just you know it's the this is the kind of thing make sure we're going to just brag on city staff like crazy and uh huge gratitude to everybody uh on our amazing staff all right other comments and questions for Jason Charlie thanks Steve you reminded me about something and slide um slide 35 about experience engaging with city government I think shows great progress but also an area where we have still a ton of work to do and I think it reflects what you said about our residents differing perspectives on how we're doing addressing racial equity you're absolutely right Steve the um the white folks got it wrong on that one but we're we're working on it and I think one area where we can try to put some more emphasis is around engagement I think what that slide shows us is that our black neighbors aren't having as much success engaging with city government as some of our other neighbors and that's something we really need to take seriously and um I know that COVID has limited some of the engagement opportunities that we normally I have for folks but I suspect if we looked at that historically it would be um at or about that same number and so I think that's something we really need to focus on but I think one piece of good news I wanted to identify on this chart is the great success that we've had in recent years in engaging with our Hispanic neighbors um I think this chart is extraordinary in that respect and I think it shows that the hard work of city staff in really pushing language access and making sure that our meetings are accessible to folks who speak Spanish that our city materials are published bilingually and I think that just shows a lot of hard work and I think our clerk deserves a lot of credit for pushing those opportunities every chance that she's gotten and I'd be remiss if I didn't say that I think there is something to do with the fact that this city elected its first Latina to the city council and you see this kind of positive experience from uh from that part of our community so I think really we need to we need to be much more focused on making sure that our black neighbors are well engaged with city processes and I know that's something that's going to be a priority for me in the upcoming budget process thanks Steve all right uh didriana thank you uh Steve I um it was going to take me a minute to get comfortable but I also appreciate council uh charlie pointing out that slide 30 so the next slide slide 36 also has that same impact in acknowledging that if we don't if we don't disaggregate the data then even look at it who's actually you know voting one on their dissatisfaction with affordable housing says a lot and noting that that's the only area that blacks in in that section of black or african-american in that section of questioning have um actual like the top like it's like the top vote um is is kind of telling in the way that that uh in the way that mark anthony was explaining and I just want to just go back and just note that how weighted that 53 percent is because that's only 11 percent of the hispanic population even weighing in like I mean it's 11 percent of the demographics um weighing in on this and so it really does I mean we're doing good I'll give us all the pats on the back but if we really want this to be a guiding a guide post in our survey in our budgeting process I do think we're going to have to invest in and creating a survey that actually digs in the way that the city needs to dig in on some of the issues because I think otherwise we're just going to stay at the surface and being overwhelmingly you know 50 percent of the survey population uh being white or you know weighing in being white it's going to skew it continuously it's going to continue to skew that way um if we don't dig in and so just noting um yeah I uh I just wanted to make sure that I the the question I had was really around if we can if we are if we are going to use this data and we're going because we're going to weigh it against what our decisions are especially with staff can we can we really can we really uh say that this is where we are of only 11 percent and what is it 34 or 40 percent of our of our non-white population is engaging in that survey and so I know that there's a survey of what do you call it the respondent or the steps aren't mixing it all up the actual number that that we go by for you know a sample size but I really I really want to make sure that we do have some feedback or some process in place because I'm concerned in this cycle that we're going to miss out on the opportunity to hear from folks and hear the stories on the qualitative side um and so I'm not sure what that's going to look like how it's going to work but I I do want to make sure that that stays in in in this process long way around but you get you get what I'm saying thank you did you have those coffees with council we used to get those very focused like this is what's happening in my neighborhood and I don't know how that's going to happen this year it's not going to happen unfortunately as well as it needs to um COVID related problems and we've seen that uh Charlie already mentioned this and you mentioned it as well that we've got engagement challenges right now I mean even though this year we put more money than we ever have and into the equitable engagement process we've really been stomped and um our staff has done I think a great job uh doing as well as they can but I do think that we have to face the reality this year that we're not going to have that level of engagement and we have to do everything we can to get it but I think we're the in-person engagement that we always look forward to unfortunately we're not going to be able to have that and we're going to just have to do the best we can with the tools that we have and we'll all have to do our best to reach out and and listen okay other questions and comments mark anthony thank you mr mayor sir I'd like to speak up um Steve I'm sorry I'd like to speak up uh in defense of white people uh for for a few moments um the uh I don't think white people got it wrong I think white people got it white uh and I don't I don't think that we should be surprised by um this this result or it's it's kind of like why we don't allow students to grade their own papers in school because they're always going to grade themselves on on a significant uh curve um I think this this precisely encapsulates why we need race equity work to begin with I can understand why this number is what it is we have predominant black people in the city council uh we've been called the most progressive city in the south we just had a very celebrated race equity task force um issue a report and and and you know much celebrated way come before the council was well covered um we have some white brothers and sisters that are in echo chambers they surround themselves with other you know uh white folk that congratulate themselves on being really enlightened uh and you know and and into equity work and they pin medals on each other and and then you ask them about race equity work so this number comes about so I don't it shouldn't be surprising because a lot of this stuff is baked in systemically baked in so so the the the markers that some of our our white brothers and sisters look at as progress towards race equity are not bad markers but from where you know where you stand oftentimes depends upon where you sit um um and and from their seats I can understand them saying this but but it it it also illustrates and underscores just how much work we have to do um and why it's important that we get out of our silos and listen to each other and have earnest conversation outside of echo chambers particularly uncomfortable conversation because as I say all the time we get the sexy part of race equity perfectly in Durham but when it comes time to start actually spending money and breaking down barriers and shifting priorities and and spending here as opposed to there is where it gets really really tough but I think we're up to it so you know and I said kind of flippantly they're not wrong to just white I mean that seriously because whiteness in and of itself and the way it's been been buttress in this country shapes perspective so I can understand why this number would be so high but I would ask folk to keep it in tension with the 32% which I'm surprised is that high amongst black and african americans how much work left that we have to do but I think we're up to it we just can't you know rest on the because we got a black council and we have you know a racial equity task force that is that you're important folk put us on list around the country being the most progressive city in the south we can't be anesthetized or lulled into a false sense of security that we don't have a lot of work to do and I think that this this slide illustrates that perfectly but this is Durham our spirits are definitely in the right place and I know they are and the folk who are in this 49% are allies they are well intentioned many of them work hard every day unheralded and they don't get their names in the paper and they are they're anti-racist but you know they're still white and I mean that respectfully and we have a lot of unpacking to do in terms of what we participated in institutionally and systemically in this country so while I understand this slide you know it I put it in context but I'm still very bullish catch what I did there very bullish on on on Durham and our prospects for being the premier example of a city that practices racial equity and its policies in our country but thank you Steve call what you did there thank you for those remarks all right colleagues have we done it for should we turn it back to sherry jason I want to thank you for another good year and much appreciate your work it's really good to have you back and the survey is always super valuable and we we are grateful for the additional racial racial breakdown that you gave us this year thank you right thanks a lot everyone thank you sherry thank you sherry and we'll turn it over to you all right great um you know jason we're talking about this uh last week about how strange it seems that last year came out to Durham did a 30 40 minute presentation then drove right back to the airport to drive home and I don't know if we'll ever be at that that stage again but it was great for him to join us today um so we're going to take a break we have a we'll do a 15 minute break everyone can go refresh their coffee um so we'll come back at 10 35 does that work for everyone okay thank you thank you sherry we'll be back mm-hmm just a reminder that the youtube stream will continue so please mute yourselves please be aware that you are on camera thank you john jason uh john we have a quick uh sound check we wanted to do is um we'll do that real quick is uh most keeping is fine i just okay good james are you on i am on i'm going to connect my um my computer um camera so we can just do a your sound make sure that we okay great beautiful okay give me a moment i have to reconnect sherry can you hear and see me as well i sure can sherry can you remind me of the time commitment you gave each of the each and remind the teams of the time commitment oh sure so our gold champions they have about 10 minutes um over yeah so they should be ready to go sherry no one needs to share the screen but you is that correct that is correct okay viviness putting some stuff in teams notes just shannon and um hopefully just me but if we have any issues shannon can jump in as well but that should be it is steven williams presenting no okay thanks so james are you all set you're you're good let's see i think i am did i unmute myself accidentally yes you did but you but you sound great so i think you're good okay thank you all right folks when i come back we'll get started i am gonna go ahead and share my screen right hopefully you are all seeing a beautiful picture of downtown Durham right now great right everyone so i am going to spend the next 10 15 minutes giving a brief overview of our strategic plan um i do want to just say that i've i've got um i'm having some computer issues today because of course i'm having computer issues today but i'm going to hope for the best that we can get through this without my computer locking up i i have a someone teaching class and a couple people in class and anyway i think there's a lot of competition for the computer bandwidth today so um so again my name is sherry metcalf and i managed a strategic plan for the city and today we're going to go through um some updates and what our plan is and at the end um i'm going to have some very special people join us to share some highlights um of our strategic plan and some things that we're really proud of um so first what is a strategic plan this is um i'm hoping we have lots of residents listening in today and so just a little background on what a strategic plan um in the simplest form it's a map it's a map that takes us from where we are to where we want to be and it provides a plan on how to get there and that plan should have some actionable um items that we can work on to move us in the right direction and so that plan um strategic plan it should guide decisions for the city it should heavily influence funding and resources it should um it should tell a story if if someone doesn't know Durham but they come and look at our strategic plan if if we're doing our job right they should look at that plan and know what's really important to our community and what's important to us as an organization and so we hope that that's what people see when they see our plan so by the numbers so just to make sure we're all speaking the same language because a lot of organizations use different terminology but we have five goals and these are big they're big topics um and so we break those goals down by objectives so if you think of the goal as a a big elephant right our objectives are those specific parts of the elephant that we want to tackle during the timeframe of our strategic plan and so those objectives are really key it's really um focuses what we want to um what we want to accomplish and so each of those objectives has initiatives and these initiatives are the really kind of the meat of the strategic plan it's those actions it's what you would find on people's work plans it's the projects that we work on and then we have performance measures that really show us um if we're moving in the right direction and in some cases if we're not moving in the right direction um those measures kind of tell us that along the way and so our plan i'm not in here in Durham is we have our five goals which you're going to hear a lot more about later um we have our 18 objectives our 95 initiatives which is a high number and our um 67 um performance measures so our current strategic plan so you all adopted our city um strategic plan in June of 2018 and it ends in June of this year so it is coming to an end quickly um and we are uh we're very proud of what we're able to accomplish um we have 77 of our initiatives are completed or ongoing operationalized or will be completed um in full transparency 2020 was a special year and we didn't quite get as far as we had hoped on some of our initiatives but um we did staff did a great job so we're pretty proud of that we have about 12 percent about a dozen of them that um didn't get to where we wanted them to get to mostly because of funding because as you all are aware there's only so much um funding to go around and so some of those are being held over they might move on to the next plan maybe not we'll have we'll be looking at those and then we had a about 11 of them that uh over time just kind of got picked up into other initiatives so we uh overall though are really we feel good about this number especially considering um last year and the shift to priorities and and you know just everything that was going on so what's next so we're coming to an end and normally how this works is we have a three-year strategic plan that ends in June and we seamlessly roll into a new one in July and that is not going to happen this year um originally we were going to be doing a refresh of the plan um this last fall and we had started that and then when um Mr. Bonfield retired we pushed a pause button we decided and we we feel really strongly that a new strategic plan really needs to have um the handprint you know that the priorities of um the city manager and so we're waiting for um the permanent new city manager to come on board so that um she or he can really have a role in the development of that plan and make sure that it really represents where they want the city to go um in the future so this slide right here really shows us where we're kind of okay our plan's ending but we're a way we're a little ways away before our next plan is going to start and so we've got this big gap in between and so um we're working on a gap strategic plan and clearly I'm not very creative in my naming but we wanted to keep it simple so we are we are working right now on this gap strategic plan it's a it's a small plan it's a short term plan it just gets us to the end of the year um and working on 10 to 15 key initiatives so very different than our current one right instead of 90 something we're gonna really focus on about a dozen um just really important issues that we want to focus on in the next six to nine 12 months and so where are we getting these initiatives well from all of you is the first place uh you all have told the city manager um your key uh priorities and those provide the framework kind of the foundation for this uh gap plan and then we'll also be looking at our current plan we'll be looking at initiatives that have risen to the top and we'll kind of roll those over into this plan and then the third place we'll be looking is um just looking at our current environment today so any kind of um like for example like a pandemic uh related initiative and also listening to what comes out of these budget retreats so today tomorrow and in a couple of weeks we'll be listening to all of you and what your priorities are priorities are and so we'll be um developing that and getting that started pretty quickly in the city all right so I am going through this very quickly so I am I'm hoping I'm making sense here so our timeline and I'm not going to go through all of these but we are we have developed a process and framework we have that in place um and for evaluate the current and future states we have been um working on a project for the last few months called reimagining government and um we uh it's based around a not base but it's a quote from Winston Churchill it's never let a good crisis go to waste and so we've really um tried our best to um take this time as as crazy as it has been but really to try to learn and document um from the experience and how can we carry that with us forward and and make good use of it in the future and so we've been working we've been we've surveyed our employees we've worked with departments individually we've brought different departments together to look at different service areas really asking what's changed how are you doing things differently uh and how will that impact what you do um moving forward and so all that puts us in a really good spot um for our strategic planning um in the fall so we're excited to get started with that um in the fall but we think it's a good time to pause and wait for um our new city manager in the future so let's see so my last slide oh really I'm going to do this very quickly uh this is my favorite slide it's not the nicest one to look at but it's my favorite one because lots of organizations have strategic plans lots of them but really what separates out organizations is what they do with that plan after it's approved um I've been in organizations but we've had gorgeous strategic plans and once it's approved it goes on you know a bookcase and we don't look at it again that is not the case here in Durham so right off the bat from day one when a plan is approved we have goal team meetings now during the refresh we have a lot of people that get together and they work through that and so in most cases a lot of those people form these goal team meetings they meet monthly they're led by goal champions you're all going to get to meet in a few moments um but a lot of the the work happens in these meetings where we talk about our initiatives and um roll blocks or challenges that people are facing uh we have a lot of different departments represented so it's a good way to collaboratively look at things um and so those happen monthly and at the same time we have um our Durham strategy and performance meetings and these are our DSAP meetings because we love acronyms in the city but DSAP is a relatively new um process we started with just this current plan so we started a couple years ago and uh before we started meeting virtually if you can picture it we were in a room and the tables were kind of U shaped and you'd have the initiative owners on one side and the executive leadership team so the city manager and the deputy city managers on the other side and so it was a real conversation back and forth I'm talking about our initiatives and what has happened and some milestones that are coming forward and um making sure everyone is on the same page and getting guidance um from leadership on those so they've been a real um we've learned a lot from them that's for sure you know when you really look at your initiatives that closely you do learn a quite a bit along the way so we're happy with how those are working and um we'll be making some adjustments moving forward with those but um those have been really a positive thing and it says a lot about our our our city right that our leadership is willing to spend every month a good chunk of time because these meetings aren't quick they're they're long so they spend an afternoon um really diving in deep to these initiatives and it's it's just says a lot about their commitment and then our community dashboard we've had the community dashboard I think since the beginning of our strategic plan so for a long time and this is our our online dashboard that's on our website we update this dashboard twice a year and it's for residents to go in and get a status update on our initiatives as well as looking at our performance measures we do a short and sweet little analysis on the the data but then we also include a write-up about um what departments are going to do to improve the data or um you know try to improve on their performance measures moving forward so that's that's something we've had and it's online and available to everyone to look at we'll be updating it uh very soon with uh year-end data from 2020 and then there's our annual report so last year um you all received a um a highlight like a strategic plan highlight I'm sure you all still have it because it was beautiful but um that little the the report there um this summer we will be publishing a full report because it's a it's a closeout report of our plan so we'll be highlighting all of our initiatives and looking at our measures and we'll make that available online for you as well as for our residents so all of these things are happening um throughout the lifespan of our our strategic plan um it makes it so that there's work being done and I was so I was so pleased during the survey um you were talking about uh some of the work with the Hispanic population and when we look at our strategic plan three years ago we have quite a few initiatives that were around um language access and reaching out to uh the Hispanic population and we're really proud of the work that's been around that but that's because it was in our strategic plan it was really a focus area for us as a city and so it was it was nice to see that because we always like to hear and see what things are happening in our plan and how they're working out in the community so I I'm here for any questions because that was super fast but um any questions otherwise I can go into I'll introduce some gold champions but any questions you may have I'm here to answer them. Harry that wasn't too fast I thought you did a great job thank you um and a shout out to you Monica Bertha you know everybody that's involved in this work you guys just do such a fantastic job with our strategic plan colleagues questions um or comments at this point for sherry anybody all right sherry I think we're ready to move into the next part of your presentation it was just that good of a presentation that good so that's great all right so I'm going to go back I do think that for us we we're pretty familiar with the process and uh except for Pierce we've all seen it a lot and uh our yeah real and I think that's a good thing uh that we feel a high level of comfort with the work you all are doing so thank you I think that's a very good thing as well all right let me share this all right you should all be looking at our five goals right now so I have um so I mentioned the gold champions uh to you all um we have two gold champions per gold team and uh I cannot uh stress the importance of these people they we really work them a lot with this plan especially during the refresh phase they there are months when um it is a busy time for them and so but they also help with our our gold team meetings and getting right people ready for d sap and um I'm just so appreciative of all of their effort um we uh in the past have had uh cookouts to say thank you um but this year they get to come in and present to you instead so I mean really who needs hamburgers when you can come to a budget retreat instead so um we're going to start with our connected engaged and diverse community goal which is the gold one there in the middle and uh our gold champions here are Jason Jones from Parks and Iraq and from James Davis in Neighborhood Improvement Services and I think Jason's going to start us out so YouTube head and pop on the screen um and I'll leave it up to you guys good morning everybody I am Jason Jones one of the assistant directors um I'm having a hard time turning it on my video um says the host has stopped it all right great all right so good morning everyone um as I mentioned I'm Jason Jones one of the assistant directors of Parks and Recreation and I'm proud to be a gold co-champion with James Davis and you're going to hear from James in a few minutes um I'd like to say it's hard to imagine that this plan started three years ago but it encapsulated 2020 which seemed like three years in and of itself to kick off the work of our team it helps to think back to the time before this strategic plan to the days where we talked about thriving liveable neighborhoods desapped didn't exist yet city hall was not yet home to the innovation lab where many of our meetings were held we shook hands we could see each other smile they were the healthy on days of dad jokes from josh edwards as James and I took on the roles of co-champions our starting points were tied to preservation of and improvements to quality of life increasing transportation choices and increased access to housing options where we landed was more than a refresh of our goal using these starting points we had conversations around things like quality of life community cohesion and flooding the zone we talked about neighborhoods and communities and how they worked in Durham James and I presented to you that the neighborhoods were the building blocks of Durham with some cool Lego pictures James flew so low one day at a budget retreat and even played music for you asking won't you be my neighbor when we started this plan black lives matter matters wasn't as ubiquitous we had just started to have conversations about equity in the magnitude that equity deserves to be talked about and we had never even dreamed of COVID-19 as our team worked our way through the refresh we presented our ideas to the directors in the city's executive team and we shared the ideas of community capacity inclusivity and equity affordability and stronger connections at the time Keith Chadwell referred to our goal as a goal of art not science personally when we near the end of the refresh just before approval I was worried even expressing to Josh that someone from council the manager's office was going to think our goal was too soft but it was approved in the months that followed our team persevered in the basement of Durham parks and recreation we had new members show up we presented to each other often we built more than partnerships we built relationships in the same manner that we tried to express in our goal over time it worked it built steam and it evolved as our community and world progressed we started talking more about community capacity but our team could have retitled that engagement and printed it in blue we not only talked about inclusion and equity we defined it we talked about affordability and then made things more affordable our subject of stronger connections were focused in on the making of places for connections and how to connect amidst COVID-19 there was a time during this journey that I couldn't see the progress we were making and then during a zoom meeting when we were still stumbling to figure out is that me that's unmuted or wait how do I mute our team showed up gave their reports and for me cemented the fact that the pandemic hadn't held us back our goal wasn't soft it just took time to cure and solidify around what we had lived through locally and globally since those early presentations sure maybe what we what we had done wasn't correctly titled and looking back we would have used the terminology that's now important to us in 2021 but no matter what it was called the work made an impact it made a strategic impact James and I are proud to be here today proud of our team and proud to tell you these three stories of community engagement inclusivity and equity James so before we give you a few updates and highlights we'd like to acknowledge the entire goal team and the initiative leaders this was truly a collective effort the first initiative we're going to highlight is expand outreach and engagement with residents with limited English proficiency now while the city strives to engage the entire Durham community there are some populations we might not be adequately engaged in due to language barriers now this initiative is not about the language access plan which is a major confidence that you're going to hear about later this initiative is about building relationships with the people with limited English proficiency when we launched this initiative we estimated that English is not the primary language spoken by about 19% of Durham's population and that there are thousands of residents who do not speak English at all this estimate was based upon the census data at the time the goal team stated that success of this initiative is based on increase in participation and cohesion among all residents with limited English proficiency within the city of Durham and we made some significant strides for the Spanish speaking population the city through the mayor and the city council reconstituted the mayor's Hispanic Latino committee the city launched a Spanish Facebook site the city now regularly disseminate newsletters and host community conversations in Spanish and have held or participated in multiple events where the focus was to reach the Spanish speaking population and council member reached reference how well we're doing and engaging this population but we realized that this initiative isn't just about reaching persons whose primary language is Spanish to that end the city now participates with the coalition that serves immigrants and refugees the city established a strong working relationship with church world services and also established a relationship with NCA Asian-Americans together and considering the nationally reported rise in assaults against Asian-Americans this is a very important connection to foster currently staff is co-strategized in the second trilingual town hall which would be on February 23rd it would be in English Spanish and Arabic this event presents an opportunity for residents to ask city and county officials various questions about healthcare access the covid vaccination housing education and other matters are concerned it is also another opportunity to engage residents whose primary language is not English but as with many of our initiatives in this goal there is no real end or finish line we plan to continue and enhance this work as a normal course of business Jason thank you James the initiative to identify and low and lower barriers for residents who are justice involved to access programs and services was a late addition to our goal while the initial team didn't specify justice involved individuals as part of our inclusion work it certainly fit within our broader goal we were fortunate to have Ryan Smith join our team and hear more about welcome home and deer the Durham Expunction and Restoration programs two programs that have impacted the lives of over 35,000 residents the deer program has a broad focus on mass relief a crucial tool for eliminating the barriers that so often prevent inclusion the program has helped a father of four get his license back after two decades he heard the program he heard of the program after going to a private attorney to pursue his case but found a barrier associated with the costs of hiring an attorney it was a whisper from a secretary as he left that office that made him aware of the program today he's not looking over his shoulder when he's driving to work is more confident supporting his family and has a higher quality of life within Durham welcome home has a narrower but more intimate focus the program has helped reduce the recidivism rate of the 170 participants to 12 percent compared to the statewide average of 49 imagine being away from your support system sequestered for years and suddenly being thrust back into a community that's changed its physical infrastructure communication methods and has grown into a megalopolis that is connected to anywhere in the world with the touch of the butt in this scenario would you flourish what if coming out of that sequestering you were welcomed by the mayor given transportation options and given the new tools to communicate sometimes it's the small things that help people feel well welcomed home included and give them a more equitable new start speaking of equity i'm going to turn it back over to james to tell the next story many of our departments have have to work within certain frameworks that are often unglazed with any type of equity filter the work of the new department has and will continue to ensure that the myriad projects that the city works on not only fits within their frames but works with the right filter to ensure equity related to the project and for the people doing the work james right so there are several stories to showcase of how departments have begun to operationalize the initiative about identifying or or defining equity and then operationalizing equity but i think one of the greatest achievements is one that we didn't even anticipate when we first composed this initiative and that was a hiring of a full type staff four time staff member whose primary focus is racial equity so through the hire and assure williams and the establishment of the racial equity division of the newly named equity and inclusion department the city showcases desire to achieve equity and inclusion in its delivery of internal and external services we'll now achieve in the implementation of a common language commonly understood vocabulary and an operational and and the operationalization of the definition of the terms equity and inclusion that will be fully integrated in all of the city's work reflected in the city's policies and implemented in all of the city's procedures now i know there are a whole bunch of stories out there and i'm looking at my stopwatch right now so i don't have a lot of time to talk about them but our interim city manager made comments this morning about how equity is infused into the budget process so you also reference the civil rights mural so this strategic goal on the whole continues to reinforce the embracing of our community of neighbors so i'll go back again like i did the last time when i flew solo and say would you be mine could you be mine won't you be my neighbor and it's that middle question that could you be mine is the paramount issue that this goal addressed but it is our intent that the answer to each of those questions is a resounding yes of course you be my neighbor because you will experience community cohesiveness yes you'll be my neighbor because you will feel connected with our city government and this administration yes you can be my neighbor because durham is working towards being affordable for all moreover we aspire to be a city that fully embraces and celebrates its diversity our city has many faces many races diverse life choices many different voices a spectrum of ages wealth and health and communities that are still grappling with the hand local government dealt where differently abled refuse to be disabled demograph is historically without a seat at the table some whose choices cause them to be disenfranchised but have reoriented into society to live positive lives a city's like an orchestra where we can all play a part it's a place where harmonizing can come naturally if we practice of course now as jason referenced earlier this goal of connected engaged in diverse communities seem more aspirational than strategic or perhaps it's a little bit of both i happened to have been born the same year the john lennon released imagine so i'm especially proud to say that the city undertook strategies to bring us closer to realize that a utopia that may only live in our imagination you may say that i'm a dreamer but i'm not the only one so who wouldn't want to live in a city where communities are cohesive where the city government takes intentional steps to build meaningful relationships with all of his residents where the administration prioritizes equity and where we are making a sincere effort to make this a city where all levels of wealth and income can thrive would you be mine could you be mine won't you be my neighbor this strategic goal brought us closer to a core that harmonizes the word yes thank you for allowing us to provide you with our update thank you james that was that was great thank you jason any questions or um i do want i should have mentioned this in the beginning just to keep in mind that our gold champions are in one department but they're talking about initiatives and projects that happen in other departments so we'd love to have questions but we may have to get back to you if we don't have the specific answers so that was that was beautiful james thank you any questions or comments that was fantastic uh james and jason thank you so much for the leadership and the presentation was amazing really great um i don't have questions but my colleagues might Steve i just want more lyrics in the regular presentations that we get at work sessions like the tone of this budget retreat is so festive and energized i'm like where is this energy on our typical birthday work session you know but in all seriousness very great presentation i've got a four hour marathon today and tomorrow and y'all are keeping it light i really appreciate the the vibe that everyone's bringing i would like to say some uh i have some comments uh that was a fantastic presentation um i'm extremely proud of the work the city's done around language access i think that some of the federal cares money that we were able to receive has really pushed us into a whole other realm um i would be remiss if i didn't actually mention a lot of the partner organizations church will service was already mentioned el centro hispano world relief um legal aid there is a monthly immigrant and refugee roundtable that um is part of the recovery and renewal task force and so many folks have dedicated so much of their time and effort they are not city employees these are organization organizational partners their residents and they have done an incredible amount of work and um also some of our city staff including lenin and carmen Ortiz and nis we would not be where we are without their dedication um i'm just really and also ts has just been instrumental we are about to have a trial lingual town hall like we did in august in february my colleagues will be getting uh the flyer as soon as it is complete um and we will be streaming that town hall and it's because of the tech infrastructure we were able to purchase in the fall and it's because of the work in ts which was not easy it was actually not an easy thing to do i was part of the demo a few days ago it's fantastic uh from now on we will be able to stream meetings and up to three languages uh we will also be able to stream three different meetings uh if we ever needed to and so i'm just so thankful to staff it's a huge huge um um it just puts us in a whole different realm and how we can serve our residents thank you and i forgot to also mention our language um justice partner teal day um without them who they've just done fantastic work and being a critical thought partner in this work thank you charlie thank you steve yaha here i was about to jump in for till day until you add them to the end so they've just been a phenomenal partner for the city as we expand uh the ability of folks to access our content and to engage with the city i love love love this particular goal uh because it impacts every single thing the city does and you guys are fantastic champions for it you have been shepherding this work um and i just i love it so much i'm so grateful i don't have any questions but jason i did want to ask you to take a look at the raised walkway at lee farm park on the outbound trail uh over the water it's it's it's dangerous right now it's it's so have folks take a look at that i appreciate it thank you that's all i have is uh steve thank you uh i will say that uh it was maybe a year ago that uh jason and i passed each other he was out with his kids at the sidewalk at lee farm park so i know he knows exactly what you're talking about there thank you uh james and jason what an awesome presentation that was just inspiring and we are so grateful to you we have james come and drop bars at every meeting because that would be awesome uh that would be uh that would be totally awesome and we'll see if he wants to uh sign up for that fire thank you all right sherry all right so we're going to move to our next goal which is our shared economic prosperity and we have andre pettigrew who you all know is the director of oe wd and we have bo de brinsky our senior development services manager from planning all right andre and bo you both can join us great i think i'm up can you hear me yes we can andre yes we can good morning thank you sherry for the introduction uh air air pro temp and city council i'm andre pettigrew the director of the office of economic and work force development and here to give you an update on the shared economic prosperity goal uh i don't sing i can't dance but that was a long time ago uh so again i i hope my presentation is uh at least informative if not lyrical uh you know i i can't drop any rhymes uh for you in regards to this so again uh the shared economic prosperity goal uh was a new goal three years ago uh in in fact uh it was you know quite an audacious goal in that it was considered very big um not really well understood what shared economic prosperity was uh three years ago uh durham had a very strong economy and your leadership city leadership recognize that uh though our economy was strong uh it was not touching the most vulnerable in our community uh our concern at the time was around gentrification and displacement as people moved in prices prices for rent went up uh local businesses were threatened as a part of that so we recognized in this goal that we had to do some things to mitigate those negative impacts but equally importantly we know we had to do some things strategically that better connected the most vulnerable in our community to the jobs and business opportunities that were generating and present now fast forward to today uh this goal not only remains important but it's even more urgent uh it's more urgent because african-american and that in that next communities have been disproportionately impacted by covid-19 uh covid-19 has just essentially taken the covers off of the racial inequities in our country and in our community while we've had the right strategy we need to have again a very urgent and very focused effort in response to uh what we are seeing today via covid-19 the call to action uh in this goal was to again you heard uh uh james and uh jason talked about this more actively engage our community again more direct involvement in order to better understand what their immediate needs were and how we might accommodate that it also talked about the importance of improving access access to capital again that's debt equity and again in the current parlance of covid-19 grants uh it also talked about the importance of new markets uh much of the focus initially was around what was going on downtown um again as we did the work we realized though downtown is important uh neighborhoods are equally important uh where many of our small businesses were located at and again we're struggling because of displacement and and disinvestment access to information critical the issue of transparency much of that is reflected in our ability to let people know what are the market opportunities again what are the contracting opportunities with the city and even broader within the the corporate community and how can i access that information and is it so cumbersome and so bureaucratic that again discourages small women minority businesses the area of technical assistance and wraparound services are important in the area of employment wraparound services represent our abilities to provide daycare transportation and other services to individuals who needed to be trained and again wraparound services for our justice involved community we'll talk a little bit later about that is really again something that's very critical around uh the call to action the technical assistance aspect of of business is again very important uh technical assistance the ability to get the mentoring coaching and business problem solving it's just critical to long-term business success and so the focus on the ecosystem that delivers that service becomes important and again what we found again due to COVID-19 the ability to help businesses recover and pivot in terms of changing their business models again are really critical the final thing uh that was the call to action was the importance of the city taking the leadership role and partnering with a greater civic community clearly the city has I think taken the bull by the horn and has been a leader in this area the work that's being led by Deborah Giles and Sharon Williams in E&I has been critical their engagement of all of our departments in creating a new construct a new set of languages a new shared understanding of what shared economic prosperity now in the terms of equity and inclusion has really been critical to the work that's been done the need to partner with other organizations to help us do it because the city can't do it alone in some ways a living example of that is really the partnership that we generated with Duke University Stephanie Williams vice president of community affairs the county and the city putting together the Durham small business recovery fund again that resource has just been vital to our small business community going forward so we're going to highlight three initiatives and again I'm going to let Bo start and now do cleanup Bo Bo I'm healed yeah wouldn't be a COVID time frame about that uh Bo de Brinsky development services manager I'm with the planning department I was named co-champion about 18 months ago so I was not here in the beginning as a champion but I haven't worked on these initiatives for the past almost three years I'm going to highlight uh one initiative and a little bit of another the first one is to implement a system of digital submittal review and approval for development review and with a lot of hard work across a lot of departments we were able to complete this initiative roughly a year ago we had made some progress mostly by the inspections department they were able to review building permits digitally some other staff we were able to give tentative reviews or minor we reviews but we really want we just weren't there yet so as a response to the COVID-19 pandemic all our development review staff of course began working from home and if we were going to continue offering this service we had to act swiftly I guess that's a bit of a call back to the church I'll quote earlier this morning never let the crisis go to waste so we we adapted by opening accounts with box and Bluebeam box is a cloud-based service that has allowed us to transfer files back and forth between applicants reviewers other staff it's it's been great Bluebeam of course if you're not familiar is a software that allows us to mark up plans digitally and collaborate across departments and other review agencies we were able to use Pimentis which was an existing software that the city was using to accept utility billing so so we were really able to stand us up quickly and and that was a success however with this urgency I will admit there was there were some clunks we weren't able to roll it out and communicate with applicants and residents and customers the way that we normally would and there was some clunky training as it relates to staff and so for that I'd really like to give a lot of credit across the approximately 50 reviewers that we have working across the city that all chipped in and contributed and adapted very quickly as despite the fact that the volume of submittals continued we were all able to stand this process up we of course continued to tweak and we will monitor and we will modify moving forward but are very proud of what the whole team was able to accomplish and like I said just like a reiterate you know we have obviously the plan department and inspections and public works those but we also have departments water management person work solid waste transportation they're all a part of this process and and to some degree everybody really made things happen at a time where there was a lot of things were unknown for sure to say it likely like another initiative that was not listed as highlighted but is very much related to this initiative that we also completed and was the fact that we consolidated our records and digitized it just about all of them if you used to if any of you have ever been to the planning department a few years ago there were filing cabinets everywhere we were able to digitize them and move many of them off site we have a third party vendor that we're using so if we ever move into more precedent at times not only are these files rarely but we've got additional office space for staff to move back into if things ever go back to normal and we were able to do this while still maintaining you know consistency and compliance with state retention laws as it relates to public records and before I can get back to Andre I want to just say a few comments about one of the other highlighted objectives as a lead in assessing the barriers for small minority-owned and women-owned businesses for the last three years we've been having consistent meetings with planning and staff from OWD where we're discussing the most common and unnecessary issues or roadblocks that small businesses or entrepreneurs are hitting when they walk into the development services center and as a part of that our team has proposed and implemented many many minor tweaks to processes the ordinance minor minor changes that that may not have large impact for large development but for for small businesses these tweaks are not minor these are very significant and have helped open doors for these business owners one of the other things as a part of assessing the barriers one of the biggest barriers of course is was knowledge and just knowing about the process and as a part of that OEW and planning staff work together collaboratively and we developed the business startup roadmaps which you'll see to the left of our pictures these roadmaps we chose nine of the most common small business startups that come into development services center or salons vehicle sales restaurants and the like as some of you know you have you must find a location and then that location must be permitted and then you have to receive a site plan a building permit various other permits with the state it could be ABC could be just state licensure and these roadmaps looked at each individual business startup and and really laid out all these processes in an easy to understand manner so that small minority owned low capital women of businesses had access to the same information that some of these large out of town more corporate type of developments and developers have before they walk in the door with that I'll let Andre speak about the two initiatives thank you both again I'm going to continue to talk about the access to bear the access barriers for small minority business but one of the the limas for this particular goal and as Sherry talked about the strategic plans there are a lot of initiatives and at some level you finish in sunset and we have those types of programs and projects in there but I want to say out front that the shared economic prosperity goal is more than a strategic initiative my personal goal is to get shared economic prosperity equity inclusion as part of one of our core values that's on the back of every employee's tag that's there and so I've approached this work knowing that we have to lay a foundation in order to be able to do that again it's an audacious goal and I just told you personally when it becomes one of the core values on the back of my ID pin I know that we have arrived and taken to the next level so the barriers again this is really about the things that limit the success of our small women business community here and one of the things that we did over the last two and a half years was trying to make sure we actually had data again I remember Mr. Bonfield asked me many times well how do you know that they need capital how do you know what type of services they need and again it's intuitive this experience but we got data so in 2019 the city conducted its first general business survey very similar to the resident survey that you saw but that survey became important with over 700 businesses responding providing us the actual data in terms of who our business community is and one of the important highlights we found is that the majority of our businesses that are small women minority owned are truly small 90% are less than 10 employees and less than 2 million in sales that information became very important when it came to us designing both the Durham Business Recovery Fund as well as the CARES Fund where we actually absolutely targeted our effort to make sure we reach the smallest of our businesses sole proprietors self-employed independent contractors and I think that netted out of the you know right now of the two two and a half million dollars that that we have distributed between the grant programs and the loan program more than 50% of those dollars have gone to minority owned businesses and women owned businesses again that high efficiency rate just didn't happen it happened because again we tuned the program based on the data and we listened to the community I think one of the important things about assessing barriers it's not one point in time you have to always continue to do that and again we contracted this year or last year with the greater black chamber greater during black chamber to do a number of outreach events engaging over 114 local businesses majority of which were African-American to determine what some of the issues were and again it's not that these issues are new but they are issues now that we can quantify and measure on an ongoing basis uh there the ability for the first time where self-employed individuals and independent contractors had access to unemployment benefits these same individuals weren't able to access the payroll protection program for the federal government and again the data showed that many of the small minority businesses were not successful in terms of accessing the federal fund one because they didn't have the banking relationships that led into PPP number two they just weren't prepared to be able to get the application filled out in a timely way and so many would bump bumped off and again the programs that we designed have technical assistance in them both in the in the front end as well as the back end for successful borrowers the part of the program um you know we got a lot of input from the small business coalition as well as the mayor's reopening task force around the work that we did in terms of the funding program as well as even the reopening requirements back on the bull this featured on the Durham business 360 website where the information that you see on the uh the the slide here uh we have continued to make that information immediately available readily available on that website and again we uh this is how you get started but we are able to include the the um you know back on the bull sort of requirements also as a part of this we have an african-american legacy program that we were working on the african-american legacy program before COVID was a recognition uh that Durham's rich tradition Black Wall Street was worth preserving and that there are a number of businesses uh that uh you know have been around for a very long and they're a part of it the businesses that you know like the chicken hut Roy's country kitchen are the types of businesses that have been a part of a focus group uh that again has informed OEWD's work and will continue to work with them as we put in place the african-american legacy registry so again my point is is that those the foundation has been laid to collect this information and to utilize it in our programs as we go forward um now I want to talk a little bit about the the justice and ball program and again James and uh Jason talked about the importance of the efforts around the justice and ball so within OEWD we have always had sort of an outreach program a justice and ball program uh in in our department but over the last two and a half years we've actually made a concerted effort uh in terms of our federal program uh the training to work initiative where the intervention is actually uh done before the justice and ball president comes back to the city uh we had a three-year program where we were working to develop plans to help folks when they came back to our community um you know resume you know contacts all of that uh as a part of our program um we also had a transitional jobs program that we piloted where city agencies took on justice-involved individuals uh again we provided the wraparound services for them but I think one of the most important thing about this program in terms of the city being the leader is that all of the individuals who worked who were recruited and got jobs in the city agencies were paid uh at a living wage $15 an hour at even while they're in the training mode they had full benefits uh as a part of it and once they completed their training and were successful they kept the job uh again right now there is no major employer in the city that is doing a program that is paying trainees justice-involved trainees uh at a full livable wage wage and part of training for jobs that are real not training for training but training for jobs that are real and again if they're successful they will continue doing that job uh we want to expand that program we've expanded it in the city but I really think it's an opportunity for us to work with our civic partners to do something similar again the city has taken the lead and the final thing I'll say about the justice involved you all know and you just heard about the welcome home program uh the highly successful program um I'm pleased my staff our team is pleased that they are now a part of OEWD and in some ways uh Chuck and his team uh actually provide a retail face for the workforce development work that we're doing in OEWD uh they have the outreach uh they understand uh this customer group we've got the training infrastructure we've got the connection to the employers and again I'm really excited about how this program will move forward in our city and again looking forward to learning more about the the fixed income program that's being targeted at justice-involved individuals so again I'll in there and uh be available and I'd be available for questions thank you Andre thank you Beau any questions for them I or should I keep moving on just let me know let's see if there are Sherry first of all Beau and Andre thank you for a great presentation okay you didn't rhyme but you told us a lot of really great things and a lot of really important things I'll just comment one thing I did not know about I knew about the work to implement the digital submittal and so forth but I didn't know about the maps that you all created for various categories of small businesses uh that was new to me and it was really great to know that it it says to me one more time all the amazing things that go on in the city that I don't ever hear about that are you know fly below the radar of city council maybe some of my colleagues knew about it but it's just it's really great to hear that and also wanted to comment uh just when we started the development services center how long ago was that Beau uh uh April of 2017 I believe yeah and it took a huge lift to get to the be able to to start the development services center and it has been such a tremendous success it really has and I know that uh uh it's just made a big difference I've heard so many things over the years about people's satisfaction with that way of interacting with us and even in even during the pandemic you all have done a great job and and in trying to make that contact still as easy as possible and that's great and I also just uh wanted to comment can I use one of the COVID jargon words Andre and just say how you all have pivoted um towards the the the uh the COVID relief that we've had to do and you did a really good job of describing how having the information that you all have been collecting and the data that you have has really helped make that possible and um I know that was a real big lift for your department and I'll also just second what you said about I think it's great that Welcome Home is now located in OEWD it really does seem like a great fit and so just very appreciative of everything that you all have said and grateful for it colleagues any questions or comments for our gold champions Mark Anthony thank you Steve and I appreciate you Andre and Bo good to see you both um so this the shared economic prosperity goals is we put a lot on this and we you know over the years we've talked about it a lot and uh anytime some conversation in the city flared up whether it was about you know diversity or economic mobility even crime we've talked about the shared economic prosperity plan as being kind of the tip of the spear so to speak in terms of the city addressing root causes um my presentation earlier by the way you guys were great even without the rhyming of music that you all have your own genius um you know one of the ways you can be my neighbor is if you can afford to and so you know so income and participation in the economy is directly connected to what neighborhood you live in and who lives next door to you so I guess I want to ask um and it seems like uh uh you know there was a lot of attention on shared economic prosperity and you know COVID struck and and things have come up but I want to ask um directly and perhaps you Andre first in terms of assessing the barriers of small minority-owned and women-owned businesses um okay we assess the barriers and the assumption the the underlying proposition is that after assessing the barriers we'll do something about them how are we doing as a city in terms of increasing you know actually numerically from an empirical point of view how are we doing in terms of uh increasing those that participate in contract acquisition and granting from the city in terms of women and minorities you're from where you sit sure so actually Debra's office will be able to give you the precise numbers around it but I will tell you that again the work that she and Sharon Williams has done in terms of putting together the action plan has raised the awareness within all of our departments you know in terms of um you know the challenge of driving the number increasing the number of businesses who are participating uh it is one of those things where again the city total has to be committed all the way through barriers that we've identified that we have to work through again what are the business opportunities I know that Sharon has a great idea in terms of us having a conference or a summit where agencies are in fact talking about what their spend is going to be as a part of a fiscal year we've never done that but that information does give uh you know put possible businesses an opportunity to know how much we're spending and where we're spending to get the bigger picture the second thing that is is always difficult but we have to figure out how to have policies to change this is is how we unbundle contracts everyone knows it's simpler to sort of you know put a contract together and make it large and efficient but that locks out most of the small business that I talked about in our community and so you have to go through the process of unbundling that work again that's an an awareness and education process for those of us in government to be able to do that and then by putting it out you know you know technical assistance and information the third thing I'll say and then I'll stop and let you respond to this again one of the difficulties even in approaching the infrastructure contracts whether it's affordable housing contracts city contract is the ability for those contractors to actually be able to mobilize having capital to mobilize in responding to an RFP again we have to pay fast right 30 days but if it's 45 to 60 days those businesses need to have lines of credit or some ability to facilitate that again in our program we're looking at how we might even consider using some of the loan money that we have in the recovery fund as a possible pilot for a mobilization fund short term again devil's in the details but again those are just three things that require you to change systems change culture and then provide a resource capital in order to make that work to drive that number all right I appreciate that and and I would imagine you can correct me if I'm if I'm wrong the unbundling of the contracts provides more orn ramps along the supply chain for for a folk to participate you know and we've talked about being more aggressive in terms of providing opportunities in the supply chains in service of some of these larger contracts is is built to how is built to last doing is built to last connected to that and how are we doing in terms of that so again built to last is the roadmap that was developing in my office it had a number of elements in it one of the elements is the supplier diversity program then again we recently met with E and I about our emphasis around supplier diversity and their work around contract compliance I guess the short of it is the work that we're seeking to do an OEWD around supplier diversity is really around how we engage the broader corporate community the the non-city agencies around their work their goals again the same issues how do you get the information out how do you unbundle contracts how do you provide enough information so that people are aware of those opportunities that's our focus we actually have a supplier diversity subcommittee within the Durham Compact doing that while Deborah's work and Sharon's work is very much focused on the individual agencies again that piece of the work is going again I talked about the call of action the call of action is really how do you provide the capital how do you provide the technical assistance to your your businesses and again it's really about the means and methods again we are now again due to COVID you know really relying on a lot of the existing partners who are already providing technical assistance services at one time I had a very ambitious plan to actually go out and start a new organization a new nonprofit to do that again the complexity of of that by itself which would have required us to again create a entire new organization and again as I did my evaluation and research that proved to be quite difficult and then on the heels of COVID coming in again it forced us to really focus in on the immediate needs of our community and so again tied to that was the access to capital piece how do you provide monies too small business well we turned our attention to COVID and in that partnership between Duke University and the county in the city we created a three million dollar recovery fund program of which one point six million dollars is out on the street we did that very quickly and again with the support of city council we were able to get that done and right behind that we created a second fund the CARES fund where we were able to get six hundred and twenty thousand dollars of grant money out on the street again different model but addressing the access to capital issue again we're not done yet because we have to continue to explore how we can sustain a persistent issue in minority women on small business and that is how do you consistently provide capital again I'm pleased with the level of partnership that we've been able to develop with some of the banks and some of the CDFIs self-help again the institute has reconstituted a CDFI in their organization and again we're of course are working with the Carolina small business fund these are all organizations that have deployed capital and continues to deploy capital again my goal was to create a new organization you know three years ago that actually I thought was the best strategy but over time I realized that there are capable organization and again because of covid we've been required to work as closely together as maybe we ever have for sure in my time and again I think we actually have the elements that are required we have civic partners that have put the money in because that's going to be required to sort of sustain it and we are actually impacting the businesses that we had originally targeted minority and women-owned businesses so I'll end with that well thanks for that no thanks for that Andrea and Bona and I'll dismount here I do want to finally say that I'm pleased with the redesigning and implementation of an employment program for Justice Evolved residents you may have seen in the media of late that we are we are looking to focus on that population in terms of our guaranteed income pilot we believe and Councillor Freeland and I both have our fingers crossed that we're on the threshold of getting a grant the pilot of guaranteed income program initiative here in Durham and that population is high on the list of being focused on so I'd like to talk with you more in line about that about interfacing when we get that money and do the pilot for guaranteed income here in Durham and I hope we will continue to just push on this I know building a talented and competitive workforce is one of the objectives as well this is so critical I mean this this really gets down to you know where the rubber meets the road in Durham and a lot of other issues will be addressed when we have more of our people participating in our economy through employment full employment so thank you much for this and thank you for your indulgence Steve and friends for allowing my questions I yield back thank you Mark Anthony colleagues any more questions or comments for Bo or Andre DeGriana thank you I appreciate having heard some of I can only call him Middleton it's not gonna work that Middleton is shared and just acknowledging I think what I mean I just want to be honest and saying that this is this is definitely one of those goals that I've been kind of hard on and focused on the most and acknowledging that the shared prosperity aspect of this is what our community needs just in reference to all of the things we've talked about over the years and I think Middleton mentioned most of them and I really am hard pressed on the built-to-last side acknowledging that when you say existing organizations and Carolina Small Business and the CDFIs those are all they all harken back to like to the current system and acknowledging that that system has had a disparate impact it's hard to believe I'm hard pressed to believe that that's going to actually give us the goals that we need or the help us to meet the goals that we need because I I mean I hear the stories and I'm very you know face-to-face with many of the small business owners who are now forced to go out of business and so I I appreciate the road maps I know that we're doing all that we can but I can't I can't I can't sit with because of COVID because COVID is here we need to do things differently and I don't know what that different looks like but I was hoping that there would be more of a response and just acknowledging that it's not just the money it's how the systems operate and so PPP COVID vaccines I mean consistently we're seeing it over and over from local state and federal level that no matter what we've all had the race equity training and we're still having the same disparate impacts it's different disparate outcomes disparate and it's disparately black folks who are losing in this fight and so when you say things like $15 an hour it still doesn't resonate with me because I know that they lose their healthcare coverage and they lose their food stamps and they lose like the the housing subsidy that they have at $15 an hour and that's not enough and so I have frustration that's not based in what we're doing but I do think it's worth noting that those are the things that we can't make excuses and say that we can't do it we have to do it we have to like it's not a it's not a I don't think you recognize like realize the sense of urgency of this is life or death this is the difference between a youth deciding to to continue in school or to drop out and just go to work and then go to work at $7.25 an hour because the federal minimum has not been raised and so I've got a lot of notes and points and conversations going on in the community and I don't feel like there's a connection and I don't know why there's a disconnect I'm not sure what's happening but it's not moving and it feels stalled and I'm not sure why I'm still not sure why I don't get it I just don't get it so I really feel like that's the the main thing I wanted to stress is that there has to be some something's happening but I don't know why council member Freeman as I might may or may just make a comment or again I absolutely understand the frustration of the community and new members of council uh relative to this work I'm not uh making excuses again I I think um we we have to provide more information you know for example uh the Russia of the last five to six months uh in response to COVID again you guys have been there and been a part of this has been you know a significant focus and needed to be I'm optimistic in in this sense with the existing partners just as we were working very hard to deploy our capital and again I'm looking to get the numbers both the carolina small business fund and the institute were deploying CARES funds to hub certified companies yes it's statewide but again because of the proximity of them working in our region again we're trying to determine the dollars that were there that those 12 million additional dollars that got deployed targeted at hub certified businesses and again all businesses aren't hope certified most businesses aren't to hub certified but that's significant capital that's grant money that's been distributed again I'm doing the research and we hope to have a report out before the end of this month detailing where those dollars are and and how many hit our county in our community with that those partners are also providing some level of technical assistance again we're you're always trying to pull together a set of partners in an ecosystem and again I will acknowledge it I think most people will acknowledge that that ecosystem needs to be stronger it needs to be much more responsive and and again that is the premise that we're all working together to to to start with you know to work from um again do we have a new Andre yes I'm gonna I'm gonna I want to move on from this so I'm I see that Deborah wants to be recognized Deborah Giles so Deborah go ahead and then we'll try to move on to our next goal okay thank you mayor thank you so much mr mayor I just wanted to be sure that I stepped in and not let Andre have to take the heat for what is going on relative to the city's participation numbers the the bottom line is certainly that councilwoman Freeman is correct and there are multitude of issues that impact what is going on with our ability to have women and minority-owned businesses engaged in city contracting but certainly in terms of what's happened from last year to this year there there's clearly a loss of businesses because of COVID and those businesses are also making decisions about where they can bid and oftentimes they choose not to bid with the city because they can't get their money quicker or that it's easier to bid something else versus bid the city and so there are a multitude of issues and we're certainly aware of them doing our very best to address them as we hear the issues coming from the minority business community and we're going to continue every effort to be sure that we are as inclusive as possible including some additional things that were included in the equity plan but we're going to have to take a deeper dive and look at what's really going on to make sure that we do what is in the best interest of all thank you very much Deborah we appreciate your comments just one moment Deborah I do want to thank you for that I do want to just share that the triangle J council of government is also trying to figure out how to support regionally and so I think there should be some conversations because I don't think they're happening between the city and them to make sure that there are more resources aligned because it doesn't seem like it would take much to get a a spend you know summit or spend conference moving even in the light of COVID so I think there's a lot more virtual access than we're thinking and if we're not pouring the energy in then maybe there is a community partner that that can do that that's what I'll just remember Freeman I met with them last week on this particular subject again more work has to be done but they are an important partner for this work regionally thank you everybody appreciate you thanks for the excellent goal report and the conversation and I'm going to turn it back over to Sherry all right I'm going to go back to sharing my screen and we are safer okay so we are going to move on to our creating safer communities together and we have deputy chief I am easy with us who's our gold champion and deputy chief Sherry Montgomery is also our gold champion but she was not able to make it today so a big thanks to major bishop who stepped in and to help us out today so I'll go ahead and go over to deputy chief I am easy thank you Sherry good morning mr mayor and members of the council we thank you for the opportunity to share some highlights from the past few years and major bishop and I want to start with a thank you to all the gold team members and the first initiative that I'm sharing is from the fire department it is design deliver and deploy effective community risk reduction programs several years ago our community education efforts were limited to a few programs that were not really reaching many residents because we weren't proactively engaging the community we were installing a few hundred smoke alarms per year we were running some fall prevention programs going to schools for fire fire prevention week but the problem was we were trying to do it alone but then captain carol reardon came along and began developing dozens of partnerships to expand our offerings and amplify our efforts for example we left from 300 to over 1500 alarm installations per year through partnerships with the american red cross to north carolina central university and companies like kidda that has resulted in multiple lives saved and tens of thousands of dollars of property saved as a direct result of that program we began collaborating with the durham police department the durham bike co-op the durham housing authority north carolina safe kids which resulted in nearly 300 bites and helmets given away to kids throughout the city while they learned about bike safety we installed hundreds of car seats per year ensuring our children were safe hundreds of residents participated in fall prevention programs for seniors thousands of residents have been trained in fire extinguishing use with the use of a simulator that the council supported as a budget request several years ago captain reardon started running a program called stop the bleed it teaches residents how to control severe bleeding in an emergency and we know of at least two lives that were saved as a result of that program both of which happened within weeks of the residents learning the skills so these programs really work and the list actually does go on but i'm going to jump to what's going on now because it's vastly different captain reardon retired last october but we have a new champion in captain elaine toutner she took over during a really tough time cove it and we had to adapt to no longer meeting with groups face to face or at least in a very limited size until we went into the complete lockdowns so we develop programs like contactless alarm delivery to help maintain that signature program and the education team had been reaching about 2,500 residents in person pre-covid that uh that dropped into the low hundreds because of the pandemic but during the same time period our virtual outreach skyrocketed with the pivot to video and social media we went from a hunt that by a thousand views per year to over 48,000 views of the fire and life safety videos in the past year there are about 20 videos in our series it's now branded as a Durham fire department wants you to know they're on the Durham fire department facebook page and they are really really good and i encourage everyone to watch them because you're going to learn a lot and share them with your family members and friends and colleagues and here's what you'll get covid safety the importance of working smoke alarms cooking safety fall prevention for seniors the dangers of carbon monoxide firefighters are your friends yard waste burning that came about due to some issues that arose due to the pandemic and it was done in collaboration with solid waste management the um the dangers of leaving kids in uh in cars that was done in collaboration with the Durham police department hot cars is a hot car program firework safety including a really neat video in which we gave an award to an eight year old girl who saved her neighbor's house by noticing a fire and quickly telling her parents and guess how she learned what how to do that uh yep so as you can tell from a few of the saves that i've mentioned the education works uh at saving lives and property and we're going to continue to innovate and the next thing up is battery safety so please look for it soon on our facebook page and uh i believe we'll be tweeting it out as well the next initiative is implement strategies aimed to diversify each public safety agency such that each reflects the community now this is a joint initiative between fire and police police have historically been more successful in this area so we collaborated this year we took some of their ideas we formed a recruitment and diversity hiring committee and we had great results through the time allotment though the gold champions decided to just present the result to the fire department so for this presentation we do want to say we appreciate dpd's help with our program the committee recognized several challenges in the underrepresented groups getting the job was viewed as unobtainable it wasn't viewed positively in the black and african-american community the uh there was a challenge with the written test challenge with the interview so the members went out to meet people and they went to churches they put up posters in gyms college campuses locker rooms bilingual posters were used it was an aggressive boots on the ground effort to proactively recruit in the places that we traditionally did not access and the results uh 20 increase in total applications this is a great profession and we never seem to have a shortage of applicants but this year's efforts had a significant impact on the diversity of the applicants and the eventual hires uh in applications there was a 92 increase in females 38 increase in black or african-american males 900 increase in black or african-american females 150 increase in hispanic or latinx that was primarily males but it is a step in the right direction uh the application success was a great start but we need to reach the finish line with great results to call it a success so the committee expanded on the orientation system to include mentoring and preparation sessions to assist candidates with the three hiring phases these sessions were attended by candidates 344 times and here are the results um asian or pacific islander uh the this is the academy makeup these are this is what was hired 4.35 of the academy was asian or pacific islander compared to 5.5 in the community a black or african-american 30.43 of the academy versus 36.9 in the community hispanic and latinx 8.7 of the academy versus 13.7 in the community at large and white 56.5 versus 54 percent in the academy so to my knowledge these are the best results that we've recorded in my 25 years with the department and very closely represent the makeup of the community moving forward we're going to be tweaking the mentoring program based on feedback from last year's candidates so we can get even better results this year and in an effort to supercharge the program we've engaged our local hbcu north carolina central university because we know there is talent right here in derm that doesn't know about this career we've talked to nccu about many initiatives but as i close i'm going to highlight just two that we expect to pay big dividends nccu is going to sponsor a student athlete virtual job fair for the Durham fire department that we really expect to give us great exposure to a population that is generally attracted to and does well in the profession because of the physical and team-oriented nature of the job and a really outside of the box thinking project uh chief zolders and uh deputy city manager chadwell have gained interest from north carolina central in beginning a bachelor's degree program in fire science at central that program would develop an extremely well prepared source of diverse candidates right here in Durham it will not only give us a boost in our credibility with our recruitment process but it will give our current members local access to a program to boost their careers if they don't have a degree and are looking to get one so uh i'm going to close with a shameless plug the next hiring process begins on march 1st so if you are interested in a career change to another amazing career in public service please visit our facebook page uh or our website at durhamfd.org uh or contact a Durham firefighter to learn more about becoming a Durham firefighter and once again we thank you so much for your time and i will turn it over to major major bishop for one more police initiative all right thank you deputy chief good evening good afternoon everyone i'm melissa bishop the major over administrative services with the police department i will be talking about our third initiative that we will highlight which deals with the increase the use of police engagement unit also known as ceu especially in socioeconomically challenged areas and within Durham's housing community to create meaning meaningful and engagement opportunities when we started this initiative our goals that we developed were to build trust strengthen community relations throughout proactive community engagement reduce the impact and fear of crime through effective proactive policing provide safe and secure neighborhoods and support Durham police department's overall mission the ceu unit started three years ago and we only had one unit with 10 officers working out of mcduchel terrace and cornwallis road communities and supporting other locations as needed a year later we were able to expand it to two units of nine officers the units concentrated efforts around mcduchel terrace osford manor club boulevard cornwallis liberty street and hoover road communities while still supporting other dha properties outreach efforts include not only crime reduction activities but ceu regularly partnered with other groups to address various community needs and provide opportunities some of the examples that we were able to do was junior bulls from april to august ceu partnered with Durham bulls to monthly bring a group of dha youth to watch a sunday Durham bulls game the participants were treated to hut dogs giveaways and sometimes were able to meet some of the players we also did the bicycle giveaway repair clinics ceu partnered as was mentioned earlier with the Durham fire department safe kids Durham county and Durham bicycle co-op to regularly hold repair clinics and dha properties over the past couple of years hundreds of bikes have been repaired many donated bikes are also distributed this program was also awarded the safe kids national carolina outreach initiative of the year for 2019 we also do what's called cleanup days ceu coordinates with keep Durham beautiful and community members to have cleanup days and various of the dha properties we were able to also participate with dpd summer camps the ceu unit works with other dpd units to host week-long summer camps each year the camps encourage not only fun but valuable life lessons and introductions to some of the department's specialized units it's an opportunity for officers and community youth to interact and learn about each other ceu has also been doing what we refer to as community pop-ups ceu and other community service division units host these pop-up events and communities throughout the city planned events may include other departments nis dpr data that offer services and some of the events are held to inform communities of notable crime trends and officer safety tips ceu has also been working on what we refer to as tag and talks ceu uses these regularly scheduled events and dha properties to make note of community concerns such as abandoned vehicles and damaged apartments for example and they work with dha to correct the problems they also take these opportunities to engage community members to exchange with information they have also participated in sleep in heavenly peace bed builds ceu officers volunteer to assist us organization to build beds for dorm residents in need many of these donated beds are delivered to dha residents ceu attends the monthly dha resident council and security meetings to exchange information with residents they partner with dha and other community groups to offer services to residents throughout the year for example the halloween trunker treat back to school backpack giveaways and haircut events and the holiday food drives are just some of what they participate with during the mcdougal terrace apartment renovation ceu not only helped patrol the apartments they also visited the displaced residents in their hotels to interact with them covid restrictions since march of 2020 may have limited the amount of larger scale events being held but ceu has continued its outreach efforts they interact with residents dha site staff and other dpd units to address community crime concerns they support efforts to provide residents with needed services such as food bank distributions some smaller bike rides and clinics are being held and cleanup events are being scheduled in the community we can continue to look at innovative ways and build on our community relations these outreach programs have greatly improved our relations during these past years three years and ceu continues to explore avenues to engage with community members to support a safe and secure neighborhood and we want to say thank you for allowing us to share our initiatives with you today thank you for sharing my screen for any questions or comments thank you very much chief and major we so appreciate hearing from you about these great initiatives i was really uh super glad to hear about the success in the fire department recruiting um that's i know that's been such a challenge for us and it sounds like you're really making extraordinary efforts and that they're working uh and so that's just that it really is the most diverse class of firefighters that i've heard that we've had and on the on the ceu i will just say that i participated in a cleanup this last weekend at the corner of dawkins and umstedt uh with our about 10 of our officers and members of our muslim community and um i think that that all the outreach that you described especially in our Durham housing authority communities is so important and just very very grateful for it all right colleagues questions or comments charlotte thank steve um i just want to thank the presenters and the work that's going on with this i think it's super important and i'd like steve i'm really really excited about uh that recruiting class uh in the fire department i think that's uh exactly the direction we need to be headed i'm really appreciative the one thing i wanted to mention is that i'm going to respectfully decline the chief's uh offer to consider a career in the fire department um as some of you may recall uh last september not two septembers ago uh no in september 2019 i participated in a great event where a bunch of the local elected officials uh went out and um did some fire department training as you may also recall for the next month i was unable to walk uh because the work that y'all do is so incredibly challenging it totally wore me out uh so uh that just gave me a huge respect for the incredible work of our fire department uh same goes to the police department i'm definitely not going out to do the cadet training uh because it would probably be two months before y'all seen me out of bed again uh just wanted to say again uh how great playing for the work that y'all do and look forward into seeing a more progress on this goal over the next year thank you see thank you very much any other comments or questions colleagues please uh offer uh chief montgomery our our appreciation as well uh i know she couldn't be here today but we appreciate we're very grateful to her for helping be one of these gold champions i will thank you mayor mark anthony thank you steve uh thank you uh chief and the major good to see you both uh i really really um uh want to align myself with the comments about the diversity in the class for firefighters um fire department launched an initiative maybe within the last year or so of reaching out to the faith community uh to get uh members uh the use of faith communities leverage to get folk uh to join the fire department and one of the churches they visited was mine so they had two wonderful firefighters and the chief came and kids were excited to see them there in their uniform and we took some cool pictures so i'm really really really uh excited about the outreach as you've done um and to see that our diversity is being expanded in the fire department i actually many people don't know this i actually thought that being elected to the city council would allow me to actually drive fire engines i have been uh uh just utterly fascinated with firefighters since i was a kid um you know after 9 11 of course you know being originally from new york many many many years ago uh you know firefighters were revered but certainly after 9 11 they became even more iconic in our in our headspace our mental space so i i thought that being a member of the city council meant that i could just you know go to a fire department and say yeah let me drive the big trucks but they started talking all the stuff about rules and training and people might get killed if they let me do it so you know so i i wouldn't even run had i known that i just want to thank you guys uh for the work exactly thank you guys for the work that you do and um mayor i passed by that cleaning effort on my way to the um increase the the peace week on umstead street and i saw just a massive amount of our city workers out there cleaning up in that area so it was really heartening on my way to one thing to see our folk involved in another so just just kudos to the work that you're doing and look forward to continuing to support the work that you do as a council member who's not allowed to drive the fire trucks you need to put that in the pamphlet next time thank you actually a lot of us already knew that i just want to tell you that that was i didn't know that was your own private delusion all right colleagues any more questions or comments for these presenters did riana thank you just a question is there a newsletter because i feel like uh there was a lot shared uh in creating safe communities i think i counted at least once i missed a few and so from the junior bowls to the food drafts to the cleanup to if there's a newsletter or a page or anywhere where i could like just plug into that would be helpful uh just because there's so many um so many things happening yes camp remember a lot of times we do share a lot of stuff on our social media page and um i will check on i don't think there's exactly an actual newsletter that we send out but we do share it on the social media page and um sometimes we send out little flyers for some of the bigger events but we can keep it in mind about a newsletter thank you so much let me also i just i didn't say and i think it's important to say in response chris to your uh the the north calisthenic university program sounds amazing i don't think any of us responded to that wouldn't that be incredible uh to have a an undergraduate program at central in firefighting science that would be fantastic and i'm really glad to hear that you all are pursuing that so please tell chief zoldis and and i think you said that uh keith chadwell was involved as well and that's just awesome and if there are ways that we can be supportive let us know we will thank you thank you so much all right colleagues i'm doing a time check and and we're a little behind sherry we are just a little just a little though so i think we're still aiming for a one o'clock maybe maybe you may have to have a little less discussion or may have to go a little long we'll have to consult with our city manager but uh we're anxious to hear from our next gold champions great all right so our our uh next group is uh just vicki westbrook at the moment we lost michelle willfork a little she's unable to join us um but uh yeah so i'll turn this over to vicki and she can talk about our sustainable natural and built environment goal so yours vicki okay um do i have to turn the camera on you can do it vicki come on there's so much clutter here and i got to find the right thing i hope you can i hope you're wearing something duke blue i've been wearing a lot of black this week this month so you understand me better than others yeah so um on behalf of the sustainable natural and built environment um goal team i'm happy to share this information about our success in this area as sherry mentioned michelle willfork who is our my amazing uh coat um team champion had to leave shut out 12 o'clock appointment and um so i'm going to try and pick up on the information she was planning to present on the first initiative and then i will be um carrying on for the following two um i do want to acknowledge some of the earlier comments that were made especially in jason's um introduction because i think that given all of the um work that's taking place in our other um goals that we are using their successes as platforms and a lot of the things we're doing is moving forward with i'm trying to be inclusive trying to be diverse trying to make sure that everything is equitable and it bears out in the latter two of the initiatives the first initiative is to reduce energy consumption expand the lifecycle of buildings with the use of building automation systems sensors and analytics and really you know that is something that really helps to just build this sustainable environment because this is buildings this is hardcore infrastructure and this entire goal is built around you know infrastructure stuff you see um sometimes you don't see under the ground um but the general services department has done a really good job of installing some smart analytics um smart building analytics platform that monitors and predicts energy use maintenance needs for the major major buildings and including chillers hvac systems boilers and it also provides real-time alerts on degradation and failures so that you can immediately respond um for this initiative success looks like realizing savings you know there's some um natural savings from being uh proactively monitoring the equipment to boost operational longevity and improve the energy use and increasing the efficiency of the major building systems through something we use here in water management with predictive and preventive maintenance instead of reactive maintenance so you're staying out in front of things and if you keep it up to speed and do things up front then the costs are generally significantly less also identifying additional sensors to provide valuable effectiveness of building operations through these analytics they've had substantial progress in this initiative that will help track and manage energy used by our city facilities the initiative started with some building projects in general services home facility itself and they built a high level level excuse me level outward facing dashboard to show energy use in a manager in a manner that's easy for those who are reviewing that information to understand um as of january 2021 the general services has been outfitted with these control controls and they've mapped and use the city staff or using the dashboard and someone threw in a fun fact from this information that was provided that the general services building itself is using 30 less energy than it was at the beginning of the project and then there's also the comparison that due to covid there's been a 45 less energy used when the teleworking was implemented at the beginning as of january 21 the police hq with uh building hvac controls have been incorporated into the system and that mapping is 90 in in in place and then general services has also identified opportunities at the building hq for potential retro commissioning opportunity which would include their hot water system optimization in the next year general services will be using um enterprise level hvac control systems and smart building analytics at city hall and police headquarters the city's two largest consumers of energy right now i think with city halls minimal occupation they're seeing some types of energy reductions but they're not tracked as carefully as they will be by implementing these platforms and then the last piece is really to assess the quality and success of the project at city hall general services and police hq in reaching these goals and then rolling it out to the other facilities that general services manages the little snapshot in the left hand corner of the presentation shows that really cool dashboard that people can look at um i know that that will be a really useful tool in making the entire city very energy and conscious saves money and really is makes um as to use something that michelle had planned to say that using these systems throughout the city's facilities provides that's a great like cross pollination between the sustainable natural and built environment goal itself and the overall city sustainability plan so i will pause there if there's any questions specifically about that and would acknowledge that um if you needed additional information that gene approached and her staff could provide you know further updates on the specifics of this particular initiative vicki why don't you go ahead and finish your presentation and then we'll have questions on all anything that people want to ask about yeah thank you i'm more than happy to do so so there are two additional initiatives and these are more um on the outside things that you're going to enjoy being out in nature the first one is to develop and execute urban forestry management plan to achieve equitable tree canopy goals this is the goal that's embedded in urban forestry group within general services and they did complete their urban forestry management plan in 2018 you see the cover of that it's an 18 page report that's posted on the city website and has lots of great information but really the the goal to of the urban forestry management plan that this report out is focused on was to maximize the benefits for all residents by planting and maintaining more trees in high priority areas with the goal of improving neighborhoods livability across the city so the for them the success would look like being able to actively manage the city's existing urban forest to achieve a con just condition rating of good or better for 80 of the inventory trees that's be the trees that are already there that they're they're tracking monitoring the health on an annual basis additionally planting 85 percent of all new trees in identified high priority neighborhoods and those identified areas include very dense urban areas with few trees whose residents may have been historically underserved by the program that encourage you to look at pages 89 of the plan because they do have some mapping of the existing canopy and then have a map showing the identified priority neighborhoods with the implementation of this the outcomes would include improved canopy density resulting in improved air or air or reduced air pollution which is very important for our vulnerable residents who may have asthma and other lung conditions that limit their ability to go outside and enjoy the environment certainly by looking at these plantings in the high priority neighborhoods can further some of the city's overarching socio-economic goals for it addressing some of the equality issues and just making sure that everyone has access to those three canopies something that you might not think about is improved walkability and many of these very dense urban areas there's not a lot of trees and there's no canopy to escape the sun during the summer months whether it's someone wanting to have a short game of kickball or something like that there's no you know cover to shield from the climate that from the sun so having shade for walking or exercise can prove provide great benefits for residents across the city so where are we with this goal the city has this goal has been marked as complete because they have opera general services has opera rationalized this plan within their urban forestry work plan and then I think you know it says a great deal that the effort to really provide these opportunities for people to have an have the outdoor environment brought closer to them so they don't have to travel far to have that the last of the goals that were spotlighting is the to expand and enhance the city's trail network and this is within the city parks and recreation department so dpr trails program management actually takes care of the maintenance replacement and development projects they maintain almost all of their trail assets and they coordinate um intergovernmental trail management which working with other entities can be complicated for them the purpose of this initiative was to develop a reliable system to prioritize to align planning to align construction sequencing maintenance and then financing of their art current trail network for tom dawson who was the manager of this particular effort success was going to look like a well-maintained and network trail system which would connect communities and parks and public services and cultural faith features that are overall consistent with the trails and greenways master plan they had some identified key elements to achieve that success one important was was one was to align cip funding priorities with federal funds so they could get the biggest bang for the buck so to speak another was to develop a plan for repaving and identifying funding for that there were also the goal of identifying new trail priorities like seeking assistance from others for vetting alignment with other projects and estimating costs and they um one of the things that they did do is um look for opportunities to partner and align with public works projects with water management projects so that we're doing all of these things in concert instead of putting something down and then carrying it up and having it cost twice as much to do it at a later date and then they also have a goal of improving the overall trail maintenance program by implementing a half penny funding for the equipment necessary to achieve this though this initiative has actually been marked as complete because they've achieved the milestones that we noted earlier the trail planning renovation and development are ongoing and and just totally a part of their ongoing work plan there are some projects that they wanted us to share with a council and so we want to highlight a few of those projects that are underway which are some proposed projects and some planning efforts and some partnerships one of the projects that's actually underway is a third fort creek trail extension the design is underway with a project delivery schedule of 2026 um they've noted that there is a funding gap um due to some rerouting of the trail alignment along the creek eastward to connect to Fayetteville street but they're um continuing on with development and looking for some federal funds to support our local funds another project underway is the R. Kelly Bryant bridge trail that design is underway and it's on schedule for delivery in 2024 it's also being developed with the combination of federal and local funds the downtown trail which was formerly called the Durham Beltline Trail that design contract is still in review and you can expect a presentation to council coming up in March regarding that there is a funding gap as well and so that'll be reviewed via the CIP process and they're still exploring some federal funding for that project the rock quarry connector trail is currently under construction and it will be connecting the Vietnam Veterans Trail to the LRB trail uh LRB Creek Trail as a part of the rock quarry festival site project and that's expected for delivery later in this calendar year so hopefully that can happen and we can have an outdoor event to celebrate that there are some maintenance efforts to some trails um these were identified as a part of the trail condition assessment report and they're being funded throughout the upcoming years through the CIP process there is a couple of projects Rockwood Trail which is being proposed in the 2021 CIP project that is the one that was selected as a top priority for the Durham open-spation trails commission to pursue um there are a number of other opportunities of partnering with DOS and I think you can expect to see that included in a council presentation that DPR will bring in to you in late March or early April and then there's I think it's important lastly just to note how they're working on partnering some with some development partners out there so when there's private they're in negotiations with some private property owners and developers regarding commitments to future trail construction as a part of the development review process and I think that's a wonderful idea so far so far approximately two miles of new segments in trails have been committed to being constructed by 18 different development projects so this is a great kudo for those partnering efforts and with that I will just say thank you for the time and opportunity to present on behalf of the goal team I'm happy to have any questions which I will probably defer to someone else thank you vicki all right any questions comments we have one more goal to go say again sherry we have one more goal to go so we're almost done yeah any questions or comments quickly for vicki uh-huh didriana thank you I appreciate that vicki and I understand you're standing in uh so I won't ask I won't ask it directly I'll just note that that if there's a request of um I don't know how to like say it but pretty much if if what we're looking for is more support I just want to figure out if there's a way to kind of have this conversation in a COVID context acknowledging that we will need more outdoor space available and especially with the trails if there's a way to kind of give give us some language to speak with legislators about that would be helpful that's pretty much all I wanted to share and I'm sure my dpr colleagues that are listening as well as general services are happy to look into that and and provide some feedback thank you vicki uh okay charlie yeah just real quick steve I just want to say how how excited I am about all the progress that's happening with this particular goal especially around the tree canopy you know this is an area we don't ask about this in the resident survey but you have to believe that so much of the satisfaction that folks have about the quality of life of their neighborhood the quality of life in Durham has to do with our incredible tree canopy and how lucky we are to still have as much of it as we do compared to other other cities in our area and the work that the city is doing to protect and expand our tree canopy and do it in an equitable way is really one of the best examples that we can talk to folks about not what equity means in terms of meeting our sustainability goals in our city and so I just want this is a great thing to be able to talk to folks about it's easy to understand and we can point to the actual planting of trees in communities that have been neglected for generations as as a concrete step that we're taking but there's also obviously there's so much more work to do but I just wanted to say thanks for this important work it makes a difference so thanks thank you thank you thank you so much for the report we're going to move on because we're in a time crunch but I just wanted to express my appreciation to you and Michelle for being the gold champions thank you so much you're quite welcome Sherry before we get going I want to do a time check it's now 1237 I would like us and the our city manager has an important presentation to make after this meeting so I'm really going to try to and and I'd like to end this meeting at 115 I'm going to put a hard stop there and so let's think Sherry a little bit we I know we have the innovation presentation and that's important and we have this goal and then we have the discussion that the council might want to have so let's talk about how much longer you all will need for your part of the program so Anise and JJ are incredibly efficient they can be done in five minutes and then we could take comments and questions and then we can go right into the idea starter conversation okay that sounds good I think you know it can be a little longer than five minutes I think that the real issue is us we just have to be efficient with our questions as well but a good good to um good to have you all and looking forward to this uh to our to our next gold champions great so I'll go ahead and throw it over to Anise and JJ but I do want to give a shout out to DeWay and Kendall he is our official gold champion excuse me but he is home with a new baby so Anise has jumped in to um to stand in for him today so thank you and I'll leave it up I'll turn it over to you guys you too all right good afternoon everybody I'm JJ Scott the assistant HR director and I'm happy to be here with Anise Vance the assistant TS director uh as Sherry mentioned standing in for Dwayne Kendall uh and we're here to talk about the city's innovative and high performing organization goal uh and I just want to acknowledge it because I had to say good afternoon instead of good morning uh we're going to go through this pretty quick uh and then I'll hand it over to Anise to wrap it up so the innovative and high performing organization goal it's a little different than some of the other goals uh and that a lot of our work is focused internally it's on the organization itself and so it might not be as visible to everybody uh both within the organization and to the public uh so we've tackled some internal initiatives like improving our wellness offerings for employees increasing collaboration opportunities among city leadership developing an internal continuous improvement model and doing the research and making the recommendation that resulted in securing staffing for our current racial equity program but that said we also take a hard look at our overall strategy for engagement with residents so some of our externally focused initiatives who included the open data program participatory budgeting and restarting the neighborhood college so we want to speak with three of our ongoing initiatives with you today all right so we wanted to start out with the language access plan so this project has been led by Beverly Thompson our director of public affairs and the goal here is to make written and verbal information from the city accessible to more people uh this process is continuing and will continue for a long time uh but the language access plan steering committee has made great progress identifying areas of need translating documents and setting up translation services the city has created a spanish language entry point for the city's website and has invested over 20 000 already translating meetings and documents and that probably wouldn't have happened without this focused plan um so i think it really speaks to what can be done when a need is identified put it into the strategic plan and then we can devote some resources to it um our customer service initiative is the next one that i want to talk about so this was a collaboration between Durham one call solid waste and customer service billing which is in water management so i'd like to think that some of the great success that you heard about in the resident survey earlier is a result of this initiative the team is led by Stephen Williams from Durham one call but required a lot of collaboration with Heidi Hackett from customer billing services Michelle Hart leak from solid waste Wayne Kendall from technology solutions and Carmisa Wallace in city manager's office among many many others so that collaboration alone was a major win for this initiative but they've all seen a lot of measurable results so in addition to meeting regulatory to address the issues large and small the team has made a focused effort on hiring and all the customer service groups are now fully staffed mr may you referred to several years ago what that experience might have been like if you were trying to reach the city and so that led to this initiative and just the progress has been stunning so they've also implemented some updates to the phone tree to get customers connected to the people that they need more quickly and they've improved the transfer rate by 13 percentage points which is tremendous in a short time period they're also working with technology solutions to implement a workforce management solution so what this will do is allow them to better target staffing levels to meet demand we know we can't just keep adding staff but demand is increasing and so we're trying to be more efficient some of this might sound a little easy and maybe even a little boring but getting a large software system like that to work efficiently across several work groups it's really hard and we would have little chance of succeeding without the close collaboration group that these groups have initiated and maintained on the slide I just want to do a quick shout out so you can see down in the left corner that's our benefits team and our interim deputy city manager Regini Youngblood and so I just want to do a quick shout out to the administrative and support teams we have a ton of incredible employees who are out there serving our our residents every day and now we have a smaller group but equally dedicated group of internally focused employees who are keeping this whole thing going so just a quick shout out to our internal support employees thank you for everything that you're doing all right Anise can you talk about the data academy please absolutely so the data academy is a set of trainings that we provide for free obviously to city and actually county employees as well the training as the initiative said aims at creating kind of a common set of skills and research visualization experimentation data gathering collection analysis that training starts from everything from your basic critical thinking how do you set up a data table how do you just interpret a chart everything from that all the way to kind of your more tool specific trainings for a power bi or a web gis and then even further than that we have trainings online that we provide for folks who really want to get into the nitty gritty of how do I do this function or that function in python or r whatever it is there they happen to be using so we have that holistic training there there are two sets of people who are involved in that one are the facilitators who actually deliver the training and we have about eight or ten eight to ten at any given time volunteer facilitators who are city and county employees a big emphasis of ours was to create the capacity to facilitate in-house so that we wouldn't have to be contracting out to other folks all the time to be able to do this and so we do have that capacity now and are kind of incorporating more people over time into that bucket of folks and that's folks from you know from ts from hr from the city manager's office from really all over the city and as well as some folks from the county who assist with this jj is one of those people and has been really really helpful in this process the second bucket of people obviously are our participants and since may of 2019 when we launched this since may of 2019 we've had approximately 300 participants it varies depending on the day because people are taking trainings and courses so today for example there'll be 10 more added to that number because we have a web GIS course this afternoon that's coming together we also are experimenting with courses on disaggregating data by race and ethnicity we did a first trial run of a of one of those sessions this past january at our it virtual help center that went that went that went well and that also illustrated some of the difficulties in thinking about and disaggregating data by race and ethnicity and that's something that we're hoping to really continue to do and and launch more formally in the future this will hopefully be sort of a year-long kind of curriculum that someone would take right now we offer each of the courses every quarter the idea in the coming years as we get more advanced courses that we teach in person as opposed to online will be that you know you have your first quarter that will lead into your second quarter of of in more intermediate courses that will lead into your third and fourth quarters of even more advanced courses moving forward so we're really excited about this initiative it fills it you know filters into a lot of different processes at the at the city and as well as I'm at the at the county as well I'm gonna I'm gonna stop there we did have in keeping with the musical theme of today the Marvin Gaynor John Lennon we did have a section JJ had prepared a section of Wu Tang lyrics to share with you all but um I think we're just gonna have to cut that for time actually Anise um we would pretty much give you as much time as you wanted to do this Wu Tang lyrics so but thank you all so much for that presentation um great presentation Anise congratulations to you on your new position in the city uh we're we're very excited for you and for us for you being able to do that work a great report um colleagues do you um any questions or comments for uh our gold champions didriana thank you I am really quickly just noting I appreciate the data academy if there's a way to add an income disaggregation aspect that would be great and then just also noting I'm hearing that there may be some uh need or sense because I know that you're not going to tell us that we need to do something but um maybe an ordinance that might spell out what race equity means and how it should operate and why we're collecting the data the way that we're collecting it may be necessary that's all thank you thank you any comments or questions for our gold champions colleagues any others uh I know we could all discuss this for a long time but we're we're short on time but want to thank you all for these super important initiatives for sharing them with us and uh looking forward to hearing more about them thank you so much great okay well then that's the end of our strategic plan but I'm going to go back to share um some slides and I'm going to hand this over to my co-worker Shannon who is going to talk about idea starter sherry good afternoon everyone I'm Shannon Delaney design and performance strategist for the office of performance and innovation within budget um I'm just gonna quickly share a few updates on idea starter today like everything else we've had a wild year we were about a month into our program before everything changed and all the projects sort of stopped in their tracks so I just want to thank everyone who's been a part of the 2020 cohort for rolling with the punches and leaning into the spirit of idea starter to get back on their feet and pivot their ideas when possible and do some really great research and and totally different kinds of testing that they had planned so um you can find some of those updates in city weeks recent city weeks as well as our idea starter webpage if you want to learn more about them I encourage you to take a look there's some great stuff um we do have tanya dot look and mariel client today to quickly share out some very high-level work that they've been doing um just last year this time you might remember that they did their first compost prototype at the 2020 budget retreat which is a little bittersweet to recall but they've done some phenomenal work nudging this forward in really collaborative and surprising ways so thanks to them and before I hand it off I'm just I'll say we're really excited about this upcoming year so not only is idea starter continuing it is leveraging some serious silver linings it will be the first ever entirely remote curriculum where we will have recorded tutorials so staff can learn some of these skills on their own time and hopefully minimize any zoom fatigue that that some of us face and then also so that other can staff can learn these skills whether or not they're in uh this year's cohort which is a really it's a gift that technology has allotted us we're not limited to that space in the innovation lab within city hall which is it's an awesome space but it's not necessarily the most convenient for all of our staff so the idea starters will come together online when it matters most like working through project challenges and exchanging feedback because we've seen the past couple years that the cohort model is really such an integral piece to what idea starter has come to be it's so much more than the sum of its parts and things tend to blossom when staff get to know each other and have fun while building solutions to the challenges that matter to them so it feels really meaningful to have this incubation space space for for staff especially this year um applications close tomorrow we are looking forward to meeting our next cohort which officially kicks off in march and with that i'm going to ask jerry to hit the next slide and then just let mariel and tanya take it away hi everyone thank you for bearing with us as your program comes to a close this morning i'm tanya dotlick and i'm in the general services department with the keep during beautiful program and mariel kline and i were fortunate enough to work with our mentor which was shannon in the idea starter program last year and we collaborated on our idea which we call sustainable city hall and for pre-covid we wanted to look at how we could reduce waste and help our employees our fellow employees develop more sustainable practices in general we quickly decided that our biggest area of improvement was going to be looking at reducing waste in food related and meal oriented activities we wanted to look at reducing waste generated at in office settings where people were having meals for example in break rooms and then also at meetings and events where food was being served so looking at the waste reduction opportunities in break rooms our goal pre-covid was going to be to select three departments at city hall consisting of about a hundred employees total assessing their current knowledge practices and their willingness and interest in adopting new practices and then we would conduct a training probably at a staff meeting all right and then outfit the respective break rooms with a three three bin system trash recycling and compost and which would be a new opportunity and that area would require more training then we'd conduct regular check-ins survey the participants and collect metrics on that program our goal with the green meeting pilot which many of you probably remember from last year a year ago involved working with a budget staff to provide a to start with reduced waste in the meal service plan we introduced our concept at the beginning of the meeting so that everybody knew what to expect and how to sort their waste and then we offered the three waste receptacles with signage and staff to help um for the waste into the appropriate bins and the results from that pilot were promising with 126 pounds of food diverted and very little contamination which is when the wrong item ends up in the bin and so in March we realized that that was not going to be able to continue through both our break rooms and our green meetings so we redesigned our plan and mariel's going to tell you about that hi everyone um so we somewhat quickly pivoted to thinking about waste reduction and composting with city employees now at home because certainly everyone cooking still has everyone at home saw us to cook and eat and is still reducing producing food waste and so we decided to pivot to a home waste reduction and composting pilot which we are actually pretty excited about the fact that now we got to give information to not only city employees but extend that to their children family friends roommates and really get some more city residents on board so we recruited eight city staff members from those original pilot departments that we were going to work with in city hall and developed informational materials for four weeks of a an at-home pilot we organized all you know online in a google doc um so over those four weeks we covered general recycling uh just a refresher because I think everyone is probably guilty of doing some uh we call aspirational recycling or putting stuff in recycling bins because we cross our fingers and hope that it's recyclable um week two and three we introduced people to some different methods of composting including using a worm bin or just creating a pile of compost outside somewhere in your yard and gave everyone pros and cons of each method so that they could choose um to implement a method that worked best for their lifestyle and how their family um wanted to compost and then the fourth week we went over some general waste reduction type materials and introduced a little bit of um equity in in waste generation and where waste is stored um and kind of an unexpected um but actually probably the most successful component of this home waste reduction pilot was when muriel willam in from solid waste management reached out to us um which i'm sure a lot of you have either worked over at least heard of her uh but she is a composting guru and just a wealth of information and so we were really uh excited to be able to work with her because she said oh i heard about this initiative and i i you know i want to help any way that we can that i can so we ended up running two sessions of a virtual compost training with her um that was kind of field trip style so we actually filmed muriel on site at the solid waste facility um because she already had some composting materials set up there um and people were actually able to watch over their lunch break muriel put together a compost pile with some fresh food waste and a little bit of manure and a lot of leaves um and we like i said we held two sessions and had over 40 participants the first session was um kind of minimally advertised because we weren't sure how it would go but uh since we got a lot of positive feedback from it the second session we opened it up to more people using the keepderm beautiful uh listserv as well as the north carolina compost council listserv um yeah and so we were able to do some things virtually which we were excited about but i'm going to turn it back to tanya to close it out with how we're hoping to carry forward in the future thanks muriel and so making use of what we all learned through these pilots the city of Durham has good opportunities to continue this momentum so with designated staff resources um further trainings will be really beneficial because we recognize that there was an interest in learning and a lack of confidence in best practices in some cases clear and consistent signage as the receptacles is essential and we're excited to realize that using the city staff as a pilot audience um really can inform a city-wide educational campaign and um identify areas of confusion and um help extrapolate to the community at large and so there's really interesting opportunities to conduct before and after waste audits for metrics generating and finally we think it's great to keep a focus on these efforts in our strategic plan and in our sustainability roadmap that concludes our summary thank you very much thank you to shannon thank you muriel and thank you tanya we really appreciate you um i'm gonna uh say that unfortunately we don't really have time for questions but unless somebody has something very pressing but i will say that we appreciate this we'd love the idea starter and it's great that you all were able to make the transitions to the virtual to the virtual world i know that was hard uh but uh good for you uh and we're looking back we're looking forward to all being back in city hall and and uh and and obey your orders about exactly what we ought to be doing and so thank you so much shannon thank you as well do you have any final comments i do not thank you for your time and i'm gonna i think we can pass it to bertha thanks everyone all right thank you so much so good afternoon again um may i didn't know if you want to ask um the uh council members for any closing remarks but i did want to remind everyone that we're back tomorrow we start at 10 a.m versus 9 a.m tomorrow we have uh you have the agenda for tomorrow we will have our budget equity tool we mentioned today budget engagement financial projections and budget outlook capital improvement plan and debt and our economic outlook with our speaker dr walden so tomorrow is all about the numbers and so i'm sure it will seem even longer than it did today but we appreciate you working with us just want to shout out uh the topics that we have thus far far for the 25th and 26 so that you all can share with us you know via email or with uh with the interim city manager uh wonder page topics that you feel that we may have missed or you assume would be on the next agendas and so so far we have pay and benefits of course we have the review of some of our management agreements uh dpac ballpark convention center discussion of city council budget retreats the 911 call for service project update with the options the pilot options and of course our budget guidelines um as the last item on the last day um so all of this will culminate to us you know developing a draft for those guidelines to bring forward on february 26 so if you have questions concerns uh want to know more about these topics or there are topics that you all thought will be on the agenda that are not on the agenda uh please uh let us know there are a couple topics that we usually have at work sessions um because they we don't have sufficient uh tom at the at the budget retreats the water uh rate discussion water rate model discussion it will be at a work session and any major discussion around the affordable housing um project or updates we usually push those to a work session because they are much longer than we have time for on these uh our retreat agendas so i'm happy to answer any questions if not that's all i have for today thank you all for your patience for being with us the entire time we really appreciate it bertha thank you i do want to think a little bit about tomorrow's agenda um we uh i've talked to the city manager uh yesterday and colleagues during the cip portion of tomorrow's discussion uh is when we can begin some discussion about the potential for a green infrastructure bond we need to have some time to discuss that and so she and i have decided to have that discussion then as well as discussion about um uh the tax increase for the affordable housing bond there'll be some information about that that will also be available that she and i discussed and um the i'm i'm a little concerned when i look at the agenda bertha that uh we because today we didn't really have a chance for any council uh discussion at the end here that we may need a little time tomorrow so colleagues what i'm going to say to you is that and and we won't need everybody to hang with us tomorrow amount of manager in terms of you know all the directors and so forth that'll be up to you but i believe that we'll probably need another half an hour after that two o'clock tomorrow when i look at this agenda we got a big agenda it is there there are very few days of the year for the city council more important than tomorrow uh this is where we we really get a good big picture of our finances so i'm just going to please put every i'm putting everybody on notice to please be prepared to hang out for another half an hour um after that two o'clock so that if we do need any any uh any additional conversation we can have it uh i i i sort of got us off on the wrong track today when i started making some comments at the beginning and then my colleagues pitched in and i don't think we helped uh but um sorry about that all right uh madam manager uh any any well let me ask first colleagues any comments that you have very briefly javier yeah thank you um i will be mobile for a little while tomorrow after about 115 120 there are or the dentist appointments that have to get done as well god bless you good luck on those um other comments okay uh madam madam manager any comments from you just just a few um you know uh mayor and council after hearing the resident survey uh report this morning and an update of the strategic plan with all the highlights with you know just a few of the many initiatives we hope today really did provide you with a background and it begins to set the stage for tomorrow's meeting as we as everyone has said here today start crunching some numbers and providing future projections using the best information we have at the time again i would like to thank staff here today who do this work with passion because they love the city uh they have been uh recording your questions and insights they've been monitoring the chat as we finish up today and move us a step closer to formulating a budget recommendation for you city council the path ahead will surely not be smooth selling in fact we will have some bumps to navigate and our final budget destination will require much strategy cooperation and likely additional sacrifice with that being said i am confident we have team in place to deliver as we bring our day to a close mr mayor in my head i can hear the 1970s manhattan's soul and rmb group singing i'll see you tomorrow madam manager thank you for that uh in the spirit of full disclosure i was born in 1951 one of the top song one of the top 10 songs of the year was the weavers singing on top of old smoky um that's how old i am and uh but but i do think i should say just in response to the manager and and hurt what she said about the staff uh as marvin gay and tamie terrell said you're all i need to get by and uh with that i'm going to adjourn today's meeting look forward to seeing everybody tomorrow including the cat at 10 o'clock thank you everybody thank you bertha thank you john thank you everybody on budget nine or ten i'm sorry yeah ten o'clock tomorrow thank you madam manager thank you john and bertha and everybody