Board of Commissioners · Regular Meeting · March 6, 2023

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Board of County Commissioners

March 6, 2023 · Full Transcript

I'm going to call this meeting to order work session and I'm going to read the public charge so the Board of Commissioners ask us members and citizens to conduct themselves in a respectful courteous manner both with a board and fellow citizens at any time should any member of the board or any citizen fail to observe the public charge the chair will ask the offending person to leave the meeting until that individual regains personal control so decorum fail to be restored the chair will recess the meeting until such time that a genuine commitment to the public charge is observed so we are going to get started that we have a very very packed agenda today and I am going to really ask the commissioners and anyone else that's presenting to really be committed to the time allocated in order for us to get through this packed agenda today I will do my best to keep us on time not to offend anyone but if I ask you to end your conversation.

Please be courteous and let's do that because otherwise we won't get through this agenda today okay so the first item is we have citizen comments and we have 30 minutes allocated for citizen comments today and I have one person that signed up Sharon Hunter a few yes ma'am if you will go to Podium and give your name and address.

I'll be brief this situation started in February of 2020 with my neighbors trying to criminalize my son's mental health status in December of 2020 I wrote the district attorney asking what's the basis for this amount of restitution that seemed random and arbitrary because there was no actual damage I hired three different lawyers the charges were dismissed on February 10th we were told to go to the clerk to request a refund on February 13th we were sent to bookkeeping we went to bookkeeping the person says oh well that money was paid out in 2021 with no basis in the beginning no matching to charges because the charges were dismissed and we were following instructions of an officer of the Court we could and would have paid the money into escrow if we thought it would just vanish that way I left a message for the the clerk of courts on the 13th I left another one on the 23rd of February no response I emailed the county manager on.

The 13th no response the real issue I've already touched on it is we were following the instructions we were given if there was an inability to account for the money it could have been paid into escrow and we would have known precisely where it was my ask of the commission so let me one last thing on the 13th the bookkeeper sent us upstairs to the district attorney's office as if I would be afraid to go up there and ask the same question somebody in the district attorney's office said that there is a form that can be completed to request a refund of the money and my ask of the commission is if you can just help me find the form I can fill it out I can get a lawyer to fill it out but this process to keep away is disturbing and distressing and I've written all of you before so you've had Communications for me probably the last communication I sent to all the Commissioners electronically I'm going.

To call it mid-october of 2021 I sent a hard copy to the commissioner Howerton because she was the chair and I did get a response back from commissioner Jacob so I know people are aware of the details the back story.

Oh thank you Miss Hunter and this is this is a tax situation is it not. Okay okay so we will have staff follow up with you on whatever this issue is I'm not clear what it is that you're asking but we will have staff follow up with at a later time thank you all right Monica did we have anybody online is commissioner Alam online okay all right.

For this to be a discussion item we submitted the report okay you all to read but if you have questions we can certainly respond to them gone through the report I don't have any questions okay well I guess I I guess if there's a rep on the report I really just wanted to Express gratitude for the incredible work and commissioner Crowder know you're the representative to that the list of all of the work that this commission had has done was really incredible and I also want to lift up the fact that we have had so many bike and pedestrian fatalities and accidents in Durham this is a really really serious concern and I I know the mpo got a Federal grant Safe Streets Grant but we have we really have to work on this you know we have a vision zero plan and we are failing here in Durham so I just wanted this is a health and a health and safety issue but I really just wanted to lift that up and.

Also encourage the bpac members to be involved in the 7D study and that's happening right now good okay great and I was very interested in the fact that Raleigh has now included in their Udo separate bike Lanes being protected bike Lanes being included in all developments so I just and maybe you know commissioner Carter where where are we at with that because that's a really great idea and how do we do that so I guess I'm asking you or somebody from bpac I'll get back with you later on that okay okay all right Mr Jacobs moving on to 230113 approving amendment of 15 744.96 to the West Staffing contract to continue the contracted services for county-wide I.T related training assistants increasing the total contract amount to fifty three thousand eight hundred eighty dollars and ninety six cents two three zero one one four authorize the county manager to enter into a eight eighty three thousand five hundred dollar contract with infotech group.

230115 authorize the county manager to enter into a three-year contract with carasoft a technology reseller in the amount of 271 578.95. Last year Jacob said something I just this sounds really Innovative and interesting and wondering will resident will but this also impact residents or it will just be internal for staff I'm not sure if we've identified if it will include residents I do know it it is a software that can help us identify how we can make Community engagement more efficient but I'm not sure if we have a specific plan for that yet I'm just thinking about the the results from the community survey and some of the areas that were identified for improvement and wondering if it could help us and if if we find that we already have a specific plan I will certainly follow up let you know.

All righty two three zero one one six Durham County Sheriff's Office Grant adjustment modification with the Bureau of Justice assistance BGA for the 2019 Edward Byrne Memorial Justice assistance grant Jag. Please two three zero one two three Board of Elections equipment purchase request I got one it's ma'am see I I told you I did my homework I only have three questions today and I see hey Derek how you doing I I see that it look from this the links that I clicked on it looks like we are going electric looks like we are going to be able to do push buttons so two kind of quick questions and maybe I'll get follow-up when will we get these 70 back and what kind of education will we be doing around them and did I just look at the picture wrong thanks Mr Burns so I mean it's exciting so congratulations it is so I've got actually an esns representative here with us today to answer any questions regarding the machine but I can give.

Up the the quick rundown so these 70 machines Durham County will remain a paper ballot County I want to make that clear the machines that we're purchasing were first manufactured I believe in the late 90s we bought in a 2007 I believe so they've definitely reached end of life These are ballot marking devices only so there are ADA compliance system so they would allow touch screen there's an audio option so basically it's the an upgrade to the auto mark voting system which the county has had for multiple years and it's well beyond its life cycle so those 70 units will replace the 66 auto mark units and they are they pair with the DSD 100 which is the precinct tabulator that we currently use but I can let the esns rep give a little bit more details if you like not unless you really want so my only question which was the last one any back order issue I'm sorry is there any back order issue no ma'am that's all I need is readily available.

Congrats on the new machines I can't wait for folks who might be seeing a hearing impaired to be able to utilize these thank y'all yes and on training you did mention training commissioner Burns we will definitely do some try to do some community events where boats can come in and test out the units if they'd like. Yes they did thank you all so much. Moving on to 230126 budget ordinance amendment number 23 bcc00066 to recognize five thousand one hundred seven dollars and ten cents in grant funding from the North Carolina Department of Public instructions Child Nutrition program for the youth home.

Two three zero one three six contract approval with Shi International Corp in the amount of 259 824.51 for licenses and services for the Enterprise agreement with Microsoft for the office of the sheriff foreign budget ordinance amendment number 23 bcc-00073 Public Health to appropriate 293 776.39 in general fund fund balance to provide additional funding for Grants awarded in FY 2021-22. Budget ordinance I'm sorry 230144 budget ordinance amendment number 23 bcc-00072 Public Health to recognize four thousand eight hundred twenty dollars from the ncdhhs division of Public Health epidemiology section slash communicable disease Branch for active TB disease screening and treatment.

230148 budget ordinance amendment number 23 bcc-00070 to recognize fifty three thousand six hundred sixty four dollars of a grant award to the Criminal Justice Resource Center's local re-entry Council and to authorize the county manager to sign and execute the sub award agreement between the city of Durham and the Criminal Justice Resource Center Mr Jenkins yeah I really just wanted to lift up this one this item and the next one this is so exciting I think the 53 000 doesn't give enough credit to the whole item because it's really about a bigger package of over over six hundred thousand dollars that the city is providing to cjrc and I I'm just so excited about the collaboration between the city and the county with arpa funding that we are helping each other with things this is a great example of that re-entry housing and also I wanted to ask if I love the data that's being tracked I think this that's a great example as well and if we if it's possible for us.

To also get the whatever reports quarterly or whatever they are if they could also be shared with us as well because this is very exciting and then the next one is about the peer support network and this is a national best practice so kudos to cjrc staff great thank you Vice chair Wendy Jacobs so we'll go ahead and move to 230151 budget ordinance amendment number two three bcc-00069 to recognize twenty five thousand dollars in additional funding from the North Carolina department of adult correction ncdac formerly part of the North Carolina Department of Public Safety ncdps for the Durham local re-entry Council okay 230156 approve capital project amendment number 23 CPA 00019 and budget amendment number 23 bcc-00071 decreasing the open space and farmland preservation Capital project 4730 dc083 by 142 500 and transferring 142 500 to the general fund to support the purchase of the second phase of the Alston Glenn Farm conservation easement as well as approve the final budget for the Austin Glenn phase two form conservation easement.

Commissioner Burns this is number two I just wanted to say thank you to staff for being creative enough we all know whether you all agree with me or not land is the one thing God ain't making no more of and when we think about land ownership especially for in the African-American Community is getting taken up each and every day and I just want to say thank you to the staffers because I remember when y'all bought phase one to us about this Century's Old Farm and I appreciate the fact that we're moving along with phase two and I want to say thank you to my board members for recognizing how this is something that's important for us so it's just a huge thank you and a congratulations to the Glenn family and as projects like this come up as we can help our Farmers or our landowners in Durham preserve what they have please continue to bring us items like this.

I just want to Echo what commissioner Byrne said and I noticed that you're partnering with nccu on some type of a documenting the history of the family and I would just encourage and I know commissioner Lam is our liaison to the history museum but it would be really cool to see an exhibit focusing on the family and also I don't know if you're looking for any in touch with Durham County episode it's Deborah but it would be neat to just to do something on this as well because it's really an amazing what's happening there thank you and I don't know if you have any response I see sure yeah I just wanted to mention that the last time when we brought Mr Day's second phase to the board to y'all for approval the board had really commented on how historically significant the ownership of these African-American families who have managed to maintain their Farmland during really really difficult times and you all were struck by the significance of that and so we are partnering and.

Reaching out to NC Central they have a public history department and in collaboration with them and their chair of the public history program we have a graduate student who through an internship with us is preparing oral histories with the with Mr Glenn and Mr day and Clara Glenn and then as part of the histories they're also going to be creating a short documentary so that will be done maybe at the end of the summer we actually met this past weekend to kind of do an overview with the families and get their concurrence that they were willing to have their family histories captured so we're really excited about it because it helps to tell the part of the story that it's about the Farms but it's also about the families and so I just want to mention that it was you all that really planted that seed that this was really something we needed we needed to capture thank you.

This is all just getting me excited I'm trying to sit here quietly as you help you admonish us chair Howard Tim but boy our open space and you know and and and that that department can think of the real name of it right now but you are a strong but a small But Mighty team and Celeste Burns is sitting back here too and I feel like Celeste you you really bring the passion that helps continue to make this about the families not just the Farms which we're so glad about the preservation of the open space but this personal Focus too is is is just heartwarming and incredible so thanks just want to say that okay thank you thank you all for that moving to 230157 approval of the contract to purchase the Enterprise Inc StreetWise MBA program in the amount of fifty seven thousand dollars number three won't pull anybody but I did want to ask I looked at all the material of course there's a train coming through now.

Okay so I did one congratulations on purchasing any curriculum that will help you know some of our small businesses as we all know a lot of programs that are out there right now are for-profit programs and it's really hard for an entrepreneur to sharpen their saw around their finances around compliance because they are in fact the small business trying to run a business so I do appreciate this type of investment because as people pivoted in the pandemic we want them to be able to keep what they have what I would love to know because I saw that it said 39 weeks whoever can come back I don't know and maybe we throwing this into Tammy's lab because it's new or you got it or because I saw Shannon was research I'm just I want to know how we're going to roll it out I would love to know how many people and what does 39 weeks look like to a small business owner so I can come back to those I want it to be.

Really successful I want us to roll it out in Grand fashion but that's almost a year and I'm just curious we can bring back once we have all the details finalized but what I can tell you is I have participated in this program about it and so it really requires that the entrepreneurs commit about seven months so the 39 weeks is really from the time that we signed this contract through graduation but it's a monthly commitment of about two days a month for the entrepreneurs and there are about five modules that they'll go through to help them for those that don't have a business plan to help develop the one for those that do to help develop more of a strategic growth plan but it is really to prepare them to the point that they can compete for contracts with the county with the city with people in privacy and use it to my ears yes ma'am so we'll come back once the contract is signed and we will.

Be working with CJ Broderick from the Black Chamber I've already spoken with him and his board chair and some other critical Partners in the community to help us identify kind of the criteria for who will participate so it won't just be staff making these decisions right and the only reason I can think of one that's going on right now this week and it is a good one that's going on right now at Duke but you know I think one of the requirements was you had to you know have bought in 250 000 or 500 000 for some of our newer folks who haven't gotten there yet you got to have 50 employees you know at that point you're looking you're not looking real small so one I would love to see the criteria I don't need a whole presentation in fact she would be good and the last thing I did click on the PowerPoint Texas did a graduation for their program I would love if we did a graduation for hours absolutely we will.

And you only need two Pro employees to be eligible for our program so that's a great point you made me any other questions Vice chair Jacob yeah great I had questions too and so I'm glad to hear about that I'm wondering is there a limit on how many people can participate up to 20 entrepreneurs or the for this cohort yes they do all right great moving on to 230172 utilities contract Amendment with Sanford Electrical Contractors Inc to increase the contract by thirty thousand five hundred dollars to a total contract amount of sixty thousand dollars twenty three zero one eight zero additional funding for contract with Express Employment Services Inc 230186 Durham County Sheriff's office revenue contract Amendment with via path Technologies and increasing authorized strength for the sheriff's office by one FTE.

Mr Jacob again this doesn't have to be provided now but I was really curious about the kinds of programs that people can access on the tablets because it was described as their educational programs and things like that so if we could just get you know more information about what people can access on there that would be helpful thank you. Okay is that it okay Madam chair that concludes consent agend items great job great job manager and just for the public to know is that we get this we get this information Thursday Fridays so we have an opportunity to read through it and get back to staff and ask questions so if you don't hear us asking a whole lot of questions it's because the staff has been so great at making sure that we have the information we need to to answer all those questions going on in our head that we would take half a day to get the answers we need so just want to say thanks.

To the manager and staff to making sure that we do that all right great job so we're going to move on to our discussion items and these are the items that we want to make sure that we stay on task the first item is Alliance this is a 30 30-minute discussion and I'll ask the clerk just to start the clock when this when you start to speak and we will hold it to 30 minutes and Rob if you good to see you it's been a while if you want to introduce your team that'd be great.

All right good morning everyone Commissioners Madam chair manager so well it's really good to be here today it is it is good to be here for those of you that don't know Alliance started here in Durham our Legacy agency was the Durham Center which was the local mental health agency several mergers Acquisitions multiple system changes and here we are today we've been very fortunate to work with some very good and compassionate people around the work that we do so I do have a team today we're going to give an update on a couple of things I'll kick it off just providing an overview of who Alliance Health is and then I'll talk a little bit about Medicaid transformation you may be over overhearing about Medicaid transformation so I'll make it brief then I'm going to turn it over to Diana white who's our SVP over Finance this is her first time ever at County Commissioner meetings so she's ready to go and then I'll turn it over to Sean Schreiber who's our chief operating.

Officer he's going to talk about programs and services here in Durham and then and OSHA is going to take us home to talk about the work that we're doing in the community all right so about Alliance Health so we are a lme MCO we serve Cumberland Durham Johnston Mecklenburg orange and wake counties Bellamy stands for local management entity and that is about managing care for people who are uninsured underinsured the MCO stands for Managed Care Organization and that's about managing care for people with Medicaid we do manage services for people with severe mental health severe substance use disorders peop just about everybody with the intellectual and developmental disability and those with a traumatic brain injury again the people that we serve either are on Medicaid or they do not have a means to pay we pay for those that who are uninsured underinsured using State dollars and then you give us a substantial contribution to help serve the uninsured as well we are about a staff of a thousand.

We are not a service provider I said we contract with about 3 000 providers who are actually deliver the care and we once we go live with a Taylor plan which I'll talk about in a minute we'll have an operating budget of almost two bit two billion dollars all right here's the region Alliance Health is one of six lme mco's across the state you will see us in the I guess the purplish color what's interesting you'll see that we have the smallest number of counties but we are the largest lmemco by far given our where we serve right we're primarily in urban settings the rest of the counties are primarily rule all right Medicaid transformation again I think you're you're been very versed in this this is about bringing managed care to the Medicaid population up until this point the only managed care that was available was the work that the lmese did again managing Behavioral Health substance use and intellectual developmental disabilities under Medicaid transformation the state.

Would like to bring managed care to the entire State their plan consists of two types of health plans or Managed Care organizations standard plans and and tailor plans both the standard plans and Taylor plans are responsible for managing the physical health mental health and Pharmacy services for people with Medicaid the big difference is around who they managed for people with mental health or standard plans they manage folks that are mild to moderate which is defined as people with Medicaid who are not accessing Mental Health Services or just receiving basic outpatient Taylor plans which is most of interest to us because that's what we're going to become we're responsible for people with severe mental health severe substance use everybody with an intellectual developmental disability and a traumatic brain injury we're excited about this group this is the group that we we feel like we're best equipped to serve we've been managing this population for several several years now and we're excited to move into a whole person care all right with that I'm going to stop.

And turn over to Diana and she's going to give a financial update. Good morning up here we have the alliance fiscal year 23 approved budget that was approved back in June well the mic up will on a I'm slow sir please this was alliances approved budget back in June for 1.4 million for fiscal year 23. we will have budget amendments and actually we did last Thursday evening due to the impacts of the Taylor plan delay. This was the fiscal year 23 approved spending from the Durham County real quick to go over the different programs we have the recovery Response Center for 5.5 million the system of care this is to fund Alliance salaries related to the system of care the supported housing for 214 000 is actually two programs it's a health and housing and the coming home programs we have Pharmacy Services which are as the contract with girlies the Community Health Network this is funding Lincoln services in the crisis center the Latino Services is the contract with.

El futiro the threshold County Grant was the originally started in the non-profit Grant system and then our administrative support and that's based on a percentage of the services provided and then we also have a care coordinator that partially funded by DSS as well. This slide shows our year-to-date spending as of February 21st and our projected spending for the end of the year you can see we have a couple of items that are projected to underspend the first one is the system of care that's due to a staff vacancy at Alliance we had a staff leave at the end of August the new staff person is starting on March 20th the second one is the Supportive Housing as a reminder that's two programs the ones that is projected to underspin is the coming home program the providers submitted a large salary budget but they have not been submitting large salary reimbursement requests so we do need to work with the provider more on getting those reimbursements requested and in the administrative.

Support as I mentioned it was just a percentage of the services provided so if we don't spend everything then our administrative support doesn't spend all as well. This slide shows the last five years of spending that we've done of the Durham County funds and you can see through 2018-20 we have spent all of the funds beginning in 2021 we started receiving additional covid funding in 2021 we received a lot of funding and in 2022 we were still in covid funding years which is why we had excess funds not spent of the county funds so now that the kova dollars are not coming in we do project to spend most of our Durham County funds and working with those programs to get it to spend almost all of the funds I just speak to that real quickly one thing we were surprised about is during covet the amount of spend or the number of people seeking Services decreased maybe it wasn't a surprise it was to us there's a couple things for.

That people were trying to just deal with the with the with covid the other thing is some of our providers did not have access that there was more of a provider capacity Workforce issue and providers were not able to see members that we thought they were going to be able to see we did take some action use Telehealth as the solution but it didn't get us to the numbers that we'd hope we are seeing it now that we're coming out of covet I guess if you say you're coming out of covid that we're turning back up and we'll be where we need to be on spend in the coming years.

Good morning thank you for the opportunity to present this information I'm going to cover a couple things I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the numbers served for Durham County and then some of the new initiatives we have in place really across Alliance and particularly in Durham as everyone's been hearing there's really a youth Mental Health crisis going on in our country right now it's impacting number of children in emergency departments number of children Social Services Juvenile Justice I appreciate your comments commissioner Carter about really the goals of ultimately keep kids in the community and not in these facilities so we'll talk a little bit about what alliance is doing there and some of the changes so as Alliance is responsible as you know for providing services and arranging for services covering services for individuals who both aren't covered by Medicaid and the uninsured population and and there's been some movement obviously in Medicaid with the standard plans coming in there were some individuals who used to be covered by.

Alliance who now are covered by the commercial plans that administer the Medicaid Program and this was kind of more in the mild to moderate range also during the public health emergency there was increase in Medicaid rolls so the combination as Rob said of service people really being a little bit apprehensive to access services to go into the community to go to facilities we did see some decrease in the numbers served in our state spending but also there's an increase in Medicaid enrollment during that time as well so some members traditionally served under the uninsured kind of state pool and the and the contribution that Durham provides to us we're likely covered by Medicaid and so what we did is just to give you an idea for the state funding we didn't include Medicaid just because we're not the only Medicaid payer anymore but you can see there was somewhat of a gradual down crease that coincides with both covid and the change to standard plans and again some of those uninsured members likely receive.

Medicaid during the public health emergency so one of the primary source that we use Durham County funding for is to support our crisis response Center as you know this is really the primary diversion point from the emergency department in the county so while Duke is state of the art of having Behavioral Health Emergency Department we still believe individuals with significant mental illness should not be going to emergency department and we we've put a lot of emphasis on diversion and again you can see the trends follow what Rob was saying so there's really actually three components we highlighted too at the crisis facility the first is the crisis and evaluation and that almost operates like a psychiatric emergency department anyone in the community 24 hours a day can walk in to get assessed and if it's felt that they maybe need some time for greater observation they can stay for up to 23 hours what we call crisis chair then either get referred on to other more intensive services or go back to.

The community additionally individuals can be brought who are considered on an involuntary commitment so they've been picked up by law enforcement quickly dropped off at the center allowing law enforcement to get back into the community and individuals to get the service they need outside of emergency department so you can see that that number had a small dip that coincide with covid but has really kind of come back and we're still getting the rest of the data for fiscal year 2022. the other program that's not highlighted but it's important component there is the Durham crisis Recovery Center implements Suboxone so individuals who may show up who are there with the opioid use disorder they can be put on medication and release you know go back into the community so it's a really important service that's provided at a facility as well and then the other component is with the facility-based crisis beds these are akin to inpatient psychiatric beds kind of a lower level of care that there's not quite as much nursing and staff and.

Durham has really a state of the art model it's it's really a peer run type Center so many of the individuals who work in the facility-based crisis and work day to day to help our individuals have lived experience with either themselves or family members with substance abuse or mental health and that's really considered a best practice for crisis services in the country and you can see there was some decrease in utilization over the course of the years and this was really particularly due to covid they had to at times because of members being in the facility with covid had to begin to isolate move to one bed instead of two per room and some staffing challenges so and additionally we're also seeing the impact of we only now have the the numbers for the facility-based crisis of individuals that we cover with Medicaid on the chairs we get a report of all individuals because it's pair blind anyone can show up in a crisis and at least get a screening and evaluation.

Regardless of their insurance coverage so just a quick overview this is just some of the services that are available to citizens of Durham County whether they're covered by Medicaid or not talked about crisis Services we contract with Duke University Health System for access to their inpatient Psychiatric Services Alliance basically also contracts with every psychiatric hospital and every psychiatric unit in the state so members unfortunately if the local units are are full can get their needs met in other communities we offer a bunch of team-based services I won't go into detail but the ones we have listed here really are for individuals who have more significant and complex mental illness they not only do they address mental illness they provide counseling case management sometimes medical support in the community in a much more intensive fashion so as opposed to people kind of showing up for an outpatient appointment these are typically services that go into members homes in the communities we serve as Rob said basically everyone in the Medicaid in the unsure system who.

Has an intellectual developmental disability would get served through Alliance and we have an array of services again the goal is for individuals with those issues to remain in their homes in their communities and not going into institutional levels of care and we offer the same for individuals with traumatic brain injury as well and then the last part of our service Continuum our residential services so for children we offer an array of Residential Services all the way from Locke residential to treatment foster care in the community the largest number of children are served in treatment foster care which again is considered a best practice we have seen an uptick really since covid in children needing residential services and you probably hear about this you may hear back from the Department of Social Services there are children who are awaiting these Services because there are finite numbers them in the state Alliance and every other lme MCO basically contracts with the same network so we're often competing for beds so we've done some specific things.

To basically purchase beds just for our children and with the county Support or opening a home that's specific for Durham County Youth so here's one of those programs we call these our crisis stabilization and transition programs unfortunately there's times where children primarily in Department of Social Services are awaiting in an inappropriate placement they have Behavioral Health needs but there's not a treatment bed available they don't meet kind of inpatient psychiatric care but they do need residential kind of oversight sometimes 24-hour supervision specialized counseling when they're in settings these children unfortunately sometimes have been waiting in Department of Social Services offices emergency departments or shelters not getting the care they need in response the lines began opening these transitional group homes where we've hired our contract excuse me with provider organizations who have especially working with youth and they develop homes specifically for Alliance that nobody else can use so we use County funding to help kind of the startup and the renovation costs and then Alliance uses our Medicaid dollars.

To fund the ongoing operation because children are coming here it really a really rough point in their lives offense right after they've been taken out of their home or Had A disruption of a placement we almost we pay for double the Staffing so typically there may be you know two individuals to one staff are almost running a one-to-one staffing ratio so the first home specifically that will only serve Durham County members will open late in Spring offered by a providers called breakout LLC and you can see it's where it's located in Durham and this will have four beds that only can be used by children who are in Durham County Department of Social Services and to make sure the provider is sustainable whether there's a child in the bed or not we pay for those so they're available again we you'll see all we're going to focus on today mostly is child mental health we do have initiatives around adults and OSHA will speak more to that in our housing realm but based on what.

We've been seeing out of the pandemic we felt like we had to make greater investment in child services and this is a really exciting service that's spreading throughout our region and actually the state is moving on board to funds Statewide it's called the mobile Outreach response and engagement service and the idea of it it's really a mobile crisis service that's specifically designed for children and families so if a family is having a crisis with a youth it could be a foster placement or even a residential placement and they're thinking about sending the child to emergency department instead they can call and they get a 45-minute response time which probably doesn't sound great compared to things like EMS but the next best response time in the behavioral system is a two-hour response done by adult mobile crisis so it is an improvement on that number and the idea as a trained therapist goes into a home begins to work to stabilize crisis and then they follow the family for another.

30 to 45 days until they can be really well matched with the treatment provider and the crisis is resolved so the provider who will be doing this is kids piece they'll also be doing this in Wake County and kids piece also is the operator of the child crisis facility that will be opening hopefully sometime in in the coming months this program will be available towards the end of April in Durham so individuals will be able to families will be able to either call Alliance to get the service implemented or they will be able to call the provider directly the other thing we've been doing in response to these issues of children who are not be able to get into immediate placement is building some therapeutic Support Services again Durham I think has done better at moving children keeping them in various residential placements at some of our communities our children who are sleeping in offices and hotels with DSS staff we've contracted with a provider entity who has behavioral health staff on Call that.

Goes into those settings and basically provides behavioral health support to the children why they're in these settings they also take them into Community outings to give some respite for the staff who are I think basically 24 7. so we're using an agency called Pinnacle Services they're currently operating this in two areas with an alliance cashing area and we'll be bringing this on in late March early April in Durham it's just they had to find staff and get people trained up in the model I believe this will be my last Slide the other thing we're doing is you've got about you've got about 10 minutes okay I want to make sure I keep answer yeah we've got 10 minutes to complete and your presentation and we'll wrap up with this yeah so the last thing is a child to serve Community treatment team it's just an intensive model in home services for children that provides psychiatric support medication management skill building and family therapy case management so with that I will end my.

Comments and turn to Ann thank you.

So for those of you that know me you know I could have used our whole time to talk about our community efforts so I really will be brief that's okay that one since since Alliance kind of grew out of the Durham Center we have remained committed to having a local presence we don't want any of our key public Partners to have to think about our 1-800 number to wonder who an alliance can help them navigate a system or service and so not only do we have some of our community staff embedded in the in Juvenile Justice and and DSs but we also have a local team who does nothing but work here in Durham and these are our our team our community health and well-being teams at Alliance and I want to just highlight a couple of really quick things Community Education and Outreach this is our team that does all of our disease prevention and early intervention to Behavioral Health Training Durham is a hot spot for all of our training initiatives there are.

Constant requests last year we trained 180 Librarians who completed the adult Mental Health First Aid training we go back and do twice a year in service trainings on de-escalation and communication for Library staff several years ago we trained the entire African-American Faith congregations and Mental Health First Aid we are going back and redoing that circuit starting this month we have trained 40 staff from our local Faith groups and so that continues to be a huge need of helping people understand the signs and symptoms of mental illness for both young people and adults as well as understanding the Community Resources and how to access care so I wanted to highlight that because we have more requests for for education and Outreach in Durham than sometimes we can do we also continue to support the Detention Center in Mental Health Training specifically around Mental Health First Aid there's a public safety module that we do and we are still the host Agency for Crisis Intervention teams which is our Partnerships with First Responders part.

Of that effort is you know around community paramedicine so lots of things that we do I did want to there we go I did want to highlight the around social drivers of health and and five years ago Durham recognized the importance of stable safe decent and stable housing that is conducive to improving People's Health outcomes it is very hard to give somebody an antipsychotic injectable when you're looking for them under a bridge much less get them to dialysis and help them with diabetes education and so the county is generously funded three positions related to our Supportive Housing efforts I'll talk about that in a second but we've been using this quote from the World Health Organization that just points to the importance of housing as the key intervention to interrupting poverty chronic health issues addictions all those things that at times unnecessarily inflate the cost of Public Services if we could just use housing as an intervention and I don't say just like it's so easy and it's cheap but I.

Say just in terms of if you really want to isolate an intervention you should begin with housing So speaking of which I want to talk for just a second about our local Supportive Housing efforts we have an ongoing partnership with the Durham Housing Authority for years Alliance has administered a shelter plus CARE program on behalf of the Housing Authority last year that program ended we also are the recipients for years of a HUD funded grant called Dash that serves 31 chronically homeless families and single adults many of you are familiar with our independent living Initiative Program which is both eviction prevention and Rapid rehousing for the people that are involved in services so far this year we've offered over 145 thousand dollars just for Durham households we serve 150 households in our transition to Community Living Program which is the Department of Justice settlement agreement between the state and North Carolina and the Department of Justice surrounded Olmsted violation for people unnecessarily living in institutional care with a severe mental.

Illness and one of the most exciting things that we continue to do is the capital housing investments totaling almost 1.2 million dollars here in Durham and creating 39 exclusive set-asides in total Alliance has spent almost 7.6 million dollars creating 91 set-asides with a 15-year deed restriction which does a couple of things one it mitigates housing barriers for people with severe mental illness so we can negotiate tenant selection plans around criminal records credit history eviction histories all those things that often prevent people from accessing housing when we purchase those units for 15 years it mitigates some of those barriers especially for the people that we serve who are often marginalized or discriminated against in housing the other thing that it does is at least for the units that Alliance bought with a 15-year deed restriction if that property is sold to the private Market they have to our units have to remain affordable for that period of deed restriction so and we've had we've had several properties where we've had a long time presence in.

Affordability in Durham that have been sold to the private Market in in and displace the people that have been living there for a long time so that was an unintended but has ended up being a really good thing with that we it was mentioned earlier that the county has funded three of our Supportive Housing Programs which are administered by resources for human development we have a and it is too lengthy to go into but but we have this whole array of Community Living options which is helps for people coming out of institutional care both our state hospitals or state detox facilities certainly as a strategy for people who are in and out of homelessness who are high utilizers of hospitals inpatient and other crisis systems so EMS can call us and say you know this is the and this is really true this is the 51st time that we've responded to this household on a 9-1-1 call can you help us out and we do we got a call last week.

From the heart team which is the behavioral health Outreach team with the city of Durham that had encountered a mother and seven children living in a household that had received a notice from the public health department around the Hazardous levels of lead so I mean there are many ways that we all networking are connected around this issue of safe decent and affordable housing for us though it really is creating alternatives to institutional care for people to so that they can live their best life in the most dignified of ways everything for us points to the to the work that we do with permanent Supportive Housing we have one program that is unfortunately is ending in may we are a sub-recipient of Samson money during covid that housed 11 families who were impacted by covid with emerging mental health and their children called rise and so that program loses its funding in May and so we're in the process of ensuring that that all of those families are able to support themselves ongoing so many exciting.

Things just around the issue of health and housing here in Durham with multiple strategies that we've been in implementing for years in Partnership and then all the other work that we do around our community presence and I don't know where that took me commissioner Howerton probably 30 seconds left so yeah you've got about 30 yeah 30 seconds but you did great great job what would what I'll what we'll need to do with the Commissioners because allocating 30 minutes what we did not do staff is had time in there for discussion so given that we've got seven hours of allocated today in 30-minute increments the staff if Commissioners have a question I'm asking if you'll take one minute ask your question and have them take two minutes to respond and let's not use up no more than 10 minutes if you could set the clock Monica and each commissioner have a question that they would like to ask if you will do that and have them respond two minutes for you guys one minute for us.

Okay commissioner Carter I Just Want to Thank The Alliance team I think you are incredible and very capable facing amazing challenges both financially and just in with the depth of need in our community and you're leading the way with moving towards you know managed care and and the therapy and the tailored plan opinion what does TP stand for thank you Taylor plan and I'm so glad that I even though I'm on the board I heard this presentation because I learned so much I feel like our board meetings when you have a two billion dollar budget it the the discussion is much higher level and not really County specific and so it's this is great to get this report Rob or any member of your team I wondered if you could just speak a minute to the Statewide foster care foster care bill issues and what you know what what your recommendations are around that and how your work with DSS is going related thank you related commissioner Carter I could speak on this subject.

For an hour but I'll keep it to 30 seconds as best I can so the the state is put out a proposal there's a piece of legislation that requests the development of a Statewide Health Plan to serve kids in foster care and I will be the first to serve there are been there have been challenges trying to serve kids with very complex needs in the foster care system even though we we serve successfully tens of thousands there are a small group of kids that that do have complex needs to get caught up in DSS offices or EDS we would like that opportunity to serve those kids or our kids we've been serving them for years we've got a multi-million dollar plan to try and best serve them the the Statewide the issues that we've experienced have had to do with provider capacity and provider Workforce issues I'm not sure how a state wide plan is going to be able to solve that issue and I also believe that this work is.

Local the things we do to help better serve this population have to be done in local communities and again I'm not sure how a Statewide plan responsible for 100 counties is going to solve that problem I've and I guess the takeaway message is that you believe that these children these youth will be better served through a local plan rather than a Statewide plan and may need some advocacy from us I would love support and advocacy from from this body if if you're willing to do that.

Commissioner Alum do you have your Honda do you have a question. Commissioner Lam okay why don't we go ahead and if she can get on we'll go ahead commissioner Burns mine is relatively quick I know you all mentioned that you all had trained some clergy I don't I'm not familiar with that Network I don't know if some of my networks are completely because you said two names so my only request is as those classes become available could you at least send those to us so that we could send them out to the clergy that we know because I can think of three churches right now that are doing a series on Supportive Services and mental health for both parents and children and I think it'd be great if they were linked into you all so that's an easy yes or no I'm happy to see that you all are working with the samhsa fund and the last time y'all were here I did ask whether or not there was going to be a.

Second iteration of that funding until we're seeing that it's not I do hope we can get those folks on their feet and congratulations on this mobile Outreach unit that you all are going to have please let us know how we can be supportive with the services that we have 40 seconds y'all be blessed Mr Jacobs I mean I have a lot of questions so I know you can't answer them now one is just what is going to be the impact of Medicaid expansion on your ability to serve people you know the capacity providers just really curious about that I'm just going to list my questions because I know we don't have a lot of time really glad to hear about what you're doing to support children in crisis and I'm wondering about when what the plan is for the child crisis facility and what how Durham County will be able to access the the capacity there and I know right now we don't have a fact team that's really functioning in Durham County.

And a forensic act team and and how do we get that going again I'm on the access to Care Group for stepping up and we've talked about the gaps in the iprs funding the integrated payments and Reporting System and that's a real barrier for care and if we had more funding is that something we could rant route through Alliance to serve more people who are uninsured that's that's another question Jacobs yeah I'm not going to have enough time to answer your question this is from to follow up with an email okay with an email on these questions and I'd like to get make sure that commissioner Miss yeah has a chance to speak and and just wondering I see you're partnering I hope you will partner with the assessment center with the youth home also the community the whole schools that's happening at Durham Public Schools I know we're going to talk about faith-based community centers and I do want you to talk about Anne about the trip you're helping us organize to go to.

More place which the whole board and other folks will be invited to in Charlotte if you could just mention that for a minute you're going to email her okay if you got one quick response sure I'll do follow people. Madam chair can you hear me now.

Foreign. I hear you go ahead perfect wonderful had one most of my just wondering like what resources and cultural training the providers have to support in the care for youth of color you know especially including what resources are available for the families of Youth who are struggling with mental health issues that may be patients and in the Alliance Health Care system so that was my question and then my second was more so common I was really happy to hear the alliance partnership with the hearts program under the city and you know I would love just for our board to have a broader discussion and conversation in the future just to see how we could possibly expand Partnerships with the hearts program and maybe even expand it into the county.

Thank you for the question commissioner I can start one of the things Alliance has done is we've done some significant investment in in developing cultural competence toolkits for our providers and additional training but also we've been looking more at the needs of providers who are typically underutilized consider minority owned and small businesses it made some significant Investments to help them be viable and succeed in this new environment about a year and a half ago we put out a million dollars for these providers to help upgrade their information technology systems so they'd have better record keeping be able to track outcomes and data and actually more recently very excited about we're actually helping to fund something called a clinically Integrated Network in an administrative Services organization that purely used to serve and support historically underutilized businesses where they'll be providing some of the back office functions Care Management platforms analytics and pooling resources the idea it's allowing smaller providers who are actually really quite skilled at serving underserved communities comfortable in.

The community duties parts of the communities but have maybe lacked some of the specification technological infrastructure need to do so in a very complex environment and so we're putting actually almost three million dollars into this group over the next two years to support this infrastructure to help our smaller providers so we are at about at the end you got 30 seconds if you want to wrap it up with something else and what I would like to do is have you come back at another time there are so many questions I think this board has and so much information that you have that can provide us with and having to rush you it it's just doesn't work for any of us but that's the time schedule we're on today so we would love I would love to schedule for you to come back at another time thank you chairman Howard and we'll come back anytime thank you for having us I do want to walk away just the crisis facility over located on Duke.

That was one of the first facility-based crisis in the state it is still seen as a leader across the state in the work it does to help people with mental health and then the system of care Durham has been the leader in implementing system of care that's where I started my career here in Durham is working on system of care and Anne's been involved with that and that is also seen as a recognized as a as a state-of-the-art initiative as well so thank you for your time we appreciate it look forward to coming back thank you so much.

Hey Commissioners and next item is 23071 community mental well-being hub and that is Miss piers who is County manager will Deputy counter manager will be assistant County Manager I'll get it all right and amended Deputy assistant which name name you've been given lately we'll present that to us and that is a 30-minute item as well yes good morning to the board to Dr Sowell attorney Andrews and everyone present I have my trusted timer here so I want to also allow time for the board to ask any questions or make any comments I'm glad that I I go after Alliance I'll partner because they've touched on some of the things so I'm just glad to be here today and thank you this will not come come to you as a surprise because around a mental health crises because the board this has really been a priority for you you've discussed it sound sounded the alarm so I'm just going to provide an overview of some issues and potential opportunities today there have been conversations at the.

National level with the National Association of counties they had a recent Summit on Mental Health Solutions just last month and also created a Commission on mental health mental well-being and also at the state level there's been some activity and also at the local level conversations so just going to provide an overview of that and then talk about some local conversation so certainly you all are aware that there are we have we're in a mental health crisis and there are a number of reasons or inequities that exist as you see and even you know Alliance a partner talked about you know certain barriers as well we know that covid-19 exacerbated or really Shine the Light on the inequities that we have seen and you know just people being having to navigate through covet and so these are just some of those issues that you've all brought up about what can we do recently and a few of you participated in the recent Summit that Naco held and overwhelmingly what we.

Heard from the it was a packed room we heard that you know many jurisdictions and counties said what will we do about the Mental Health crisis it's pervasive and we we need Solutions at that Summit there were Congressional Federal agency leaders and National thought leaders you know having conversation and so I just want to share that your concern over the you know several years is in alignment with what those conversations were and so the commission that Naco just established last month on mental health and well-being really wants to reach out to counties bring counties together to hear you know what are some potential Solutions and so Naco is looking to counties and counties are looking to Naco to figure out figure this out and overwhelmingly what we're hearing is that obviously we can't do it alone government can't do it alone we need our community and Faith leaders and partners we need public-private Partnerships to really imagine what is possible to address those who may not have insurance whether it's Medicaid or private.

Insurance and they're uninsured underinsured and really are not able to receive care two bullets here that I really want to highlight for you is that this commission really wants to Showcase County Innovations and solutions because many I hope you can hear me very well oh thank you many counties are looking for whether it's rural or Urban we're all faced with the same issue and so this commission is looking for Innovation what can we do because you know sometimes what we're doing now is is not is not reaching everyone we need to reach so that's that's something that they're looking for and then the other bullet that I want to highlight is the last one about Partnerships how do we partner with each other and what are those policies that need would need to be addressed so that more people can receive care.

The commission that was just established in February by the current president of Naco they've used these bullets as maybe grounding or context for why the county is should be involved and has would have a role as you see 75 percent of the U.S population is relying on county-based Behavioral Health Services that's a lot of people so that means none of us is untouched by the crisis also it talks about the Investments That counties make to ensure that people receive care Alliance mentioned the World Health Organization and those of us in the public health world it's good to see Public Health Partners and about and over here the World Health Organization or who defines Health as a complete physical mental and social well-being of a person and not the mere absence of disease or infirmity and sometimes we look at the physical health and and not realize that mental health is critical so that people can thrive in our communities Naco also talks about and we've heard this from our director.

Palmer and certainly from our Sheriff that fought in far too many instances County jails and other Public Safety Services are used as Frontline treatment providers for our most vulnerable residents living with mental illnesses and substance use disorders and so the question of course you know what what can we do to close gaps and address the inequities that we we see at the local level just lasts Monday the Department of Health and Human Services and the Health Equity team with the state hosted a a black Faith leaders town hall meeting a few of you participated in that as well and the goal of that or the purpose was to re-engage with leaders in the community there were hundreds of people on the call and the state really wanted to ask those leaders what are you seeing what's what are the those issues that you're seeing or facing in your communities what barriers are in place and what would you you know if you had all the resources what would you do and.

Of course the one of the top issues about health related issues was about mental health that's no surprise to you and so the state is committing to work more closely with faith leaders and faith-based organizations and also Community to figure out what can we do again we can't do it alone whether it's government or community so there's that. So what opportunities exist right now there are there are many there are many conversations happening and we know that there are people falling through the cracks under underinsured uninsured and so fine-tuning what those opportunities are would probably look little like this you know this is also Again part of your priority to promote safe and Equitable inclusive access to Services Partnerships we know that's important how do we build capacity for our partners and for ourselves and I bolded the faith and community-based organizations because this just allows me a moment to acknowledge our faith and community-based leaders and organizations in our community because often they are the ones on the ground.

Addressing the gaps they see them they call it to our attention they do it paid unpaid they do the work they see it even before it becomes a thing they're doing the work and so I just wanted to pause to just acknowledge that the work that they do in the community. And then this is when I talk about the local level now so community community mental well-being Hub that's not really a title it's just what it's called at this moment of space so there are some in a community who are and again the conversation has happened at the state and National levels looking at what can be done locally and there are some models or approaches that other areas are using one I can think of in Mecklenburg County and Charlottesville Virginia and surrounding counties they've partnered with each other and with whether it's the state or government to figure out what can we do to build a coalition and create spaces within the community based organizations or faith-based organizations where there are licensed.

Therapist who would be available to provide services to those who are least likely to receive care and so that's what you know a hub would be a space where people can go right in the community to receive care who would normally not be able to access the care. And I believe that the pre the previous presentation talked about or the question I believe commissioner Alum asked about about cultural competency and the this type of mental well-being hoe would certainly ensure that people who wanted to receive care would have a way to access individuals or therapists who would be culturally competent.

Strategies related to this type of space or Hub that would be based in a community community based Hub would really involve these four strategies about investing in the actions to create or increase access it would mean partnering with a few faith and community-based organizations to establish spaces and places where people can go right in the community and so it's not an Institutional environment where they go where they normally would go or write easily accessible it would be identifying again culturally proficient providers to offer this service licensed culturally proficient providers and also there has to be a component to evaluate the effectiveness effectiveness of some type of program or projects such as this.

Oh before I do that I did want to close with I know I went very quickly I just wanted to make sure you had time to make comments I wanted to close with something a Surgeon General shared at the mental health Summit in in February and I'm looking at Vice chair Jacobs because I think she knows what I'm going to say he really as he closed Dr Murthy as he closed his presentation he really spoke directly to County officials and he said that you know as you are you know these past couple few years particularly you've worked very hard to ensure that people were safe that they were fed that they were housed all of these social drivers and trying to you know fill in the gaps and address inequities and all of that work that you've done that you were also part of you also experienced the pandemic you also experienced things in your lives and your families lives and he said that you know we need you all need to notice that and.

Remember to take care of yourselves because as you're moving forward and and you know working this to address all of the issues that come before you that you might not have paid attention to that and so he just really just admonished all of us and especially County officials that your well-being is important as well so I think that's what you were probably going to say to Vice chair Wendy Jacobs and that was just a moment that was really important so I went through that very quickly and I certainly would love to entertain any questions or comments thank you thank you Miss Pierce bring it back to the board for questions or comments commissioner Burns that is just really quick on the last slide where we were talking about strategies I mean you went through a lot and you went through a lot kind of sort of the 30 000 foot range and then we dropped down to Durham so what I'm it I see partnering with five.

Or seven faith when you pull your mic up a little bit commissioner Burns we can't hear you I don't think I'm gonna get it no closer than this so I'll speak up you spoke at a 30 000 foot level about what we should be doing about what naco's doing about what Congress is doing and then you dropped on this last slide to the partnership and you stated that there would possibly be five to seven faith in community-based organizations that we would be working with so I I know with the Rumblings around the county are about funding around around this opportunity I'm trying to figure out like so this is is there a request coming later are we identifying is this something that we're going to open up so that's just the one I want to kind of sort of focus on because I imagine if we want to do this in the way that you've presented it we want to do it right and it's going to take substantial funding.

And let me be clear I love that we're doing this because you know I when I think about one of my my closest friends you know he he became a senior minister at the same time I became a county commissioner and I passed to set us down and he said it is a privilege for people to tell you about his problems if things sound real profound that day you can sound profound a year later because we were both pretty tired but I think that this is a perfect Niche because people don't always go to their psychologists their parents they go to their Pastor what they're dealing with so I'm excited that we're primed and ready to do this I'm just trying to figure out exactly what are we primed and ready to do because we didn't really go over that so like what's the strategy behind this partnership I hope that was loud enough for everybody thank you commissioner Burns that's a really important question I will say that this presentation was.

Informational just to kind of try to pull together the conversations and discussions that were happening at the national state and local levels and to that point again there are conversations questions concerns and I'm glad maybe our partners still hear from Alliance that there have just been conversations around what can we do on the ground to have these kind of faith and community-based spaces for individuals to access care that number is just you know thinking envisioning what would it look like if we did have that how many would we start with if it's a demonstration project and what you know potentially that's still kind of in the works what would it cost what would it look like who would access the care who who would be the particular population so that is their it could have just not been five to seven it could have been faith in community-based organizations but looking at that those numbers you know you know who yeah just kind of finding a number for a demonstration project and for two to.

Three years and evaluating it I don't know if I've answered your question no that's good okay so this is all preliminary yes all right well thank you I'll hold the rest of my questions thank you thank you. Commissioner which way commission Jacobs thank you Joanne and I know Deborah you and I were there for the mental health Summit in Naco which was really great one of the other things that the Surgeon General said that I haven't I just keep thinking about was that that we need to invest in Social relationships and that you know that is something that is also the heart of the impact of the pandemic people being isolated and the more that we create opportunities for everyone our youth our children our seniors everyone to just engage and and connect that that's a protective Factor that's a resiliency Factor because that what we learned was that now the biggest cause of death for our youth ages 10 to 14 is now death by Suicide so it's shocking.

But the good thing is we are good at engagement in Durham we are a community of people that like to be together that was the positive thing for me I was wondering if you could tell us a little more if you think there's going to be federal or state funding opportunities that might be connected to these initiatives an awareness around Mental Health and are you looking at partnering for instance with Alpha Touro because you know and also obviously Alliance and also Carolina Outreach because as you know and I've we've been communicating and I have more things to send you about the LA the crisis with behavioral health providers in this country and especially of culturally competent or you know providers of color that was talked about in The Summit so yeah just and and wondering if we'll be able to do Telehealth and will the do you think that the you know the the places of worship like will they offer like free or reduced costs spacing I mean maybe I'm.

Getting two in the weeds already but this is the way my brain functions is like I'm I can't help it thank you for that Vice chair Wendy Jacobs and you know I'm shaking my head you know nodding those questions are all important the first question I believe you asked was would there be any federal funding coming certainly hope so I certainly hope so because I mean we have a national crisis a National Public Health crisis and there are conversations happening obviously at the federal level and we will be on the lookout I'm looking at Dr Soul we will be on the lookout for those opportunities because we I think we're really well poised in Durham to apply because we do have strong Partnerships community and Faith Partnerships and because you know I believe you know that we were really ahead of that noticing the board I'm noticing that hey what are we going to do about this so I think we're poised for that and we have again really strong.

Partners the other question you asked about is you know what would it look like and I it certainly didn't have time to talk about what would that look like if if we did operationalize this Hub or space but you're absolutely correct those Partners would allow allow space and we would need you know a Fiscal Agent someone oversee the work agreements it's all possible it sounds hard and long but it's possible and we have models and approaches that we could follow that others have have done and been successful and you had a few other questions I'm sorry I didn't think that's okay I yeah I was asking about the Telehealth and you know I just I think it's a great idea because kind of like what we're doing with the whole schools put making sure we have resources in our schools in our faith organ I mean we want to go where people are at and where they feel comfortable and the big thing of course is the stigma absolutely trying to.

Address the stigma and part of this conversation locally is about Telehealth part of having also a unified system for those appointments to connect with licensed professionals and the Telehealth piece was certainly a part of that conversation so yes. Yes thank you for the presentation and thank you for doing this work I really appreciate the focus on you know innovative ways to try to do a better job with making sure people are having their mental health needs addressed I do feel like five to seven seems like a lot to start with I don't know how others are feeling about that but there seems like there's a lot to figure out and I'll be sure we you know do it really well so maybe a smaller Focus that's just my initial reaction to the number make sure we're working with Alliance you know I just wonder how how Titan partnership is there and also Lincoln you know and I and I couldn't also help but think sometimes when we're trying to.

Be Innovative we think about you know the flavor of the month or starting something new when we have some things that are working and maybe we just need to expand those or invest more heavily in some of those and in you know along that line I just really believe that it's great to work through a system like the faith-based system you know so that's you know a systematic approach which I always endorse I think we need to do more with our school-based mental health here in Durham their school-based Mental Health Services and the whole school approach and using our schools as hubs for services and there are opportunities to expand there there either in addition to this or you know as a primary focus so this was this was informational and those are just my reactions thank you so thank you Miss Pierce for your presentation and the research and the information that you bring for before this board this is an idea this is not just.

An idea that has been thought up this is very effective and there's websites that I can get to the board out of Mecklenburg County that they're being very effective in this model and the the thing that I think about and I hear from a clergy in this community is that we don't use them we don't allow them to participate with us you know they have their little cocoon and what the folks in Mecklenburg County talked about is how they were able to work with the pastors which are able to get to more people get two more children when we talk about keeping our children in the community and keeping them healthy and whole there's just some parts of our community that will not come to the systems that we set up but when they have services in their Community they have access in their community they're more prone to take advantage of those Services so this is it's it's something that I really hope the board will entertain to get all the information they need.

Because mental health is one of our top priorities and if we Community Driven Mental Health is so needed and when you see that it's happening in other communities Durham can do it and there are we have partners that are ready to invest we've you know we've been having I've been having conversation with different entities and it's not that Durham has to Finance the whole thing so we've got Partners here we just wanted to we wanted to present it to you today so that you understand what it what's happening the conversation that's happening if you have questions get those answered and then it'll come back to you at another time yes I just wanted to follow up on one point that commissioner Carter made since I'm on the Lincoln board of directors and and she has a really good point I didn't realize until I got onto the Lincoln board how many community-based clinics they have and just just to list some of the locations Hillside Holton lime Park wall town.

And we're opening a new clinic at Lakewood and there's the recovery Response Center they operate clinics all over the community so also looking at how we may be able to strengthen those because people do feel comfortable going to the community clinics at Lakewood I mean that Lincoln runs that are in the community so good good point Thank You commissioner Carter and and thank you Vice Jake Jacobs and commissioner Carter for sharing that about Lincoln I had the pleasure and honor to serve for two years on that board and I I agree with you that they have several clinics that people aren't aware of the general public and partnering with Lincoln Community Health Center is is key in our community thank you yeah and and you can do the model also talks about the churches but also community centers to be able to use community centers as well so it's it's so I hope you'll go online and check out the model it's your Harrison if I can just say one.

Thing and this is not to generalize black churches but I want to say another important reason for this to be in a faith-based institution in the black communities because historically black churches have not made it okay for people to seek mental health assistance and so to have this as a part of the conversation in a black church it helped people to be more receptive to accessing Mental Health Services just wanted to make that point yes ma'am absolutely in addition part of this project or work is to apply Mental Health First Aid training to congregations and and leaders and also faith is inclusive of you know they're saying Faith leaders because it's across it's an ecumenical approach.

Okay any other questions okay thank you very much we'll come back it'll come back at another time all right all right let's see we are down to a next item is. Okay what is that. 230158 proposed name change for the Criminal Justice Resource Center and gudrin I see is here good morning Madam chair good morning Madam manager Commissioners Mr attorney thank you for giving us a few minutes we don't have a presentation we just have a brief proposal to you and but before we get started Roshana will have will present this item but I want to introduce you to Roshana because you know covet kind of changed everything and so many of you have not seen Roshana ever or in at least in the last three years so this is Roshana Parker she is the assistant director at the Criminal Justice Resource Center so yes thank you it's been a while well good to see you good to see you too good morning thank you for having us this morning so as Goodra mentioned we.

Don't have a formal proposal but we do want to talk about the possibility of changing the name of the Criminal Justice Resource Center the Criminal Justice Resource Center back in 1999 started out as a day reporting center with some wraparound services and since that time the center has definitely grown and our mission has changed over the last 25 years as far as the services that we provided so we want to broaden the scope of what we're doing not just saying that we are we don't want the name of the location to stigmatize individuals that would then be prevented from receiving services or seeking services so we wanted to be more inclusive and more welcoming to those individuals that we're serving so we think that the name Justice Services Department is more inclusive and not stigmatizing because we don't want individuals to feel that as soon as they walk through the door they're being labeled so we really want it to be reflective of what we're doing and also the the term.

Center really focuses on our location at Main Street but the the Criminal Justice Resource Center provides many more services across the county we have services in the Durham County Detention Center we have services in the Durham County courthouse and then we have services at our main location so we really want to focus on service provision and not just enter so although we would remain we would keep the center at Main Street as a center but maybe change that name to just the Services Center and not just criminal justice so again the reason why we're bringing this for today is because the Partnerships we have developed over the years with other agencies in the county and the city that provide services for justice involved individuals we all are having the conversations about being more inclusive and so we think that that inclusivity starts with a name change and we took this item to the criminal justice advisory committee back on January 31st commissioner Alan was present at that meeting when we.

Discussed the possible name change and the proposal received unanimous support from the criminal justice advisory committee they welcomed trying to do something that would make us seem more inclusive other individuals were serving in the community yeah we have reached out to some of our internal departments to ask what the impact would be we want to Chisel off the criminal justice on our sign outside but everything else is really just an electronic change letterhead commissioner has her hand up letterhead and and and everything is digital so it will it will take some work but we're proposing that this this change if you agree and if you support it would be effective July 1 that way we can close out this fiscal year with the with the current name and then have a new budget and and work through finance and all the other internal functions to make sure that we have sufficient time to make this change adequately.

It was quick it's ma'am you're trying to get you back on track commissioner Alam yes thank you so much and yeah I just want to Echo. First language resolution that we passed several months ago and I really hope that our board will be supportive of this because it will open up the doors of just the way our community sees the Justice Resource Center and the services that are available for residents across Durham. Commissioner Carter I couldn't agree more with what commissioner Alam just said and I think the proposal makes such good sense I remember when I was a new commissioner and would hear about cjrc you know Criminal Justice Resource Center it's such a gem in the service provision of kid Durham County which is so accurate but you know criminal just sounds punitive and it's the it's the opposite total opposite of of that and so I was confused by the name you know as an incoming commissioner and I just think I I'm surprised no one has suggested it.

Sooner honestly I think it makes such good sense and I'm 100 behind your proposal today and I think we should also think about this when we reopen the the youth center you know we sure we youth Justice Services Center or something but you know nothing related to Criminal so great great job thank you I again agree with my colleagues I commissioner Carter actually started out the same way I was I was going to say I couldn't agree more it is in line and I do think that language matters you know words matter especially since you know we've used this facility as a polling place right and so then you think to yourself you know if I'm a senior from somebody else and I'm like I want to go vote let me list which one I'm going to go to first right and that might not be the first one on somebody's list so I think you know this is a you know it's a place where I've been to.

Vote it's a place where people my community vote I think it's more welcoming and I do think it does take away the stigma because once you were once you were when you become formally incarcerated you want to really start to take on that moniker of being formally incarcerated and to walk into a space that is labeled criminal even you yourself who are now no longer incarcerated you now have to put on that cloak again so I hate that Perry is not here but I don't we're just going to get him to get us a new sign instead of just enough he left too soon we're gonna come to Perry and say we need a new sign thank you okay so hold on we don't have to pay for demolition commissioner Carter said somebody get that in right and she looked real strong down there but thank you ladies we were going to come at night and just you know with a little with a little era.

Commissioner Jacobs ditto on on what my colleagues have said and I I just also want to use this time to really recognize the incredible work you and all of your staff because the vast array of programs and services that you all offer I mean is really incredible you know just reading the you know the the agenda action forum and you know everything that you provide in the community but also the way you operate is so much based on collaboration and integration I mean you are modeling it you know working in the court system working in the Detention Center partnering with non-profits like the religious Coalition and providers in the community partnering with the city I mean it you are really modeling what we everyone everything that we need to be doing and you also apply for a lot of Grants and you get a lot of grant funding so and you're saving us money so all of the program you know so many of the programs end up saving us us.

Money they're cost effective like the pre-trial release program of course everyone who doesn't re recidivate you know the the diversion courts but anyway I just want to really thank you all for your great work and wondering the you're saying my one question is you said that you want to just call the building the resource center not the Justice Resource Center so could you explain how people will refer to to the building itself we're thinking the name of Justice Services Center OH Justice Services Center located at the Justice Services Department okay so Justice Services Department Justice Services Center sounds great thank you.

Doesn't seem to be any other questions thank you so much and you know I miss I miss being on your board I was what was it 12 years I served on that board yeah yeah so I miss being there but I know you're still doing the great work so thank you all right Madam chair yes this was an ass but I know this is a name change of a program and it's not the naming of a building pursuant to our renaming policy I just wanted to record reflect that I think this is my understanding within the sort of general power of the manager to run to operations it doesn't it's not a honorific or something like that or something that requires your vote so I just wanted to kind of Express that if anybody had it so we don't need to vote on it we just say okay and you just go do it the manager go do it I said you to go do it.

Do it I am in full support of it all right so you've got to you got what you need you're welcome all right all right now we are have a presentation 230132 Durham County gun safety team presentation and this is presentation from the gun the Durham County's gun safety team has been in operation since 1999 established through a resolution from the Durham County Board of Health the gun safety Team Works to reduce the number of deaths and injuries from Firearms especially those stored unlocked in homes we have our presenters here Donna Roser Rosser is it Roger or Roser Rosser okay in inquiry prevention public health education specialists.

And we're going to have our health director to help us out here too great. As she gets ready just want to say good morning to you all again and just let you know that so proud of all the efforts that have come as a result of this award-winning gun safety team we have been really the model for the state if you will and that most recently with the white paper being published by secretary Kota Kinsley I know you can talk a lot on that okay I know you can talk louder than that I can come on but we have to strain my ears here I'm sorry I'm sorry but you know with the recent you know white paper that was created at the direction of the governor they did ask Durham County to come at a convening Roundtable convenient I think I want to say this was toward November and Durham County was proudly represented by Willow Robinson and they were just recognizing the fact that we go from state from County to County.

Training other gun safety teams most recently we've been in Hope County and you know again so proud of the work that we've been doing since 1999. so just wanted to tee that up and pass it on to those who are able to better articulate the finer points okay thank you madam chair all right thank you. I'm Donna Rosser with Durham County Department. And I'm an injury prevention Health educator Jenkins shop and I am also a part of the health promotion chronic disease and injury prevention program of education and Community transformation I also chair the Durham County gun safety team since June of 2019.

And I have with me my program manager Robinson as well can you all hear me okay you could pull it up a little bit closer yeah is that better it's better. So. The team with you in 1999 the Durham County gun safety team or GST was count was named a county program was established as a county program through a resolution from the Durham County Board of Health to address the issue of the rising trend of I'm sorry I just need to. Okay to address the rising trend of deaths and injuries of children where Firearms are in the home unlocked and loaded.

Indeed this was gonna happen I'm sorry running into some technical it's all right he's with my screen reader. Sorry take your time see if this helps.

Okay so I was back with the history of the gun safety team in 1999 the Durham County gun safety team was established as a county program through a resolution from the Durham County Board of Health to address the rising trend of deaths and injuries of children where Firearms are in the home unlocked and loaded.

So the mission statement for the gun safety team is to reduce death and injury related to Firearms through broad-based and preventive strategies to promote a safe violence-free environment for our children.

Who we are and what we do gun safety team is an interdisciplinary apolitical apolitical community group of partnering agencies and concerned citizens led by the Durham County Department of Public Health team works with Partners on education and public awareness initiatives in an effort to increase the safety of children and reduce the incidence of gun violence in all its forms in the community just a few of the team members include several partners that spoke here today Alliance Health will City United Criminal Justice Resource Center Duke's Children's Primary Care Duke health trauma Services Duke violence recovery program the VA Health Care system the County Department of Social Services of course Public Health sheriff's office Durham Housing Authority Durham Public Schools inside Human Services North Carolinians against gun violence project build and the religious Coalition for non-violent Durham team meets on the fourth Wednesday of each month from 9 to 10 30 A.M.

Some of the first gun safety initiatives included the following a storage of firearms messaging distribution of free gun locks and the asking saved kids which is ask campaign safe storage of firearms reduces unintentional death injury and hospitalization additionally Firearms are stored safely they are less available as a means of suicide unintentional shootings or intentional harm to others this is especially true for children and you. With regards to the NC safe storage law the team provides information on safe storage Firearms during events and tons of educational sessions in addition the distribution of gun lines so to date gun safety team has distributed approximately 25 000 free gun laws in this community they were originally provided to the team from Project child save kids Durham use grant funding to provide gun locks to the team as well now they're provided mostly through Durham VA Medical Center.

Beginning the team was established from my understanding it was required by the Board of Health that law enforcement be a part of the gun safety team because they were the only ones who only entities that project Child Safe would provide we've done Lots so there were a lot fewer gun locks that we were able to offer at that turn but over the years we have been able to offer more and now we just Supply so that we can. Our arms in the home Firearms are the leading cause of injury related death in children and teens one in three homes in the U.S has at least one firearm 4.6 million children lived in a home with Firearms unlocked and loaded however more than a third of the unintentional shootings of children take place in the homes of their friends the neighbors or relatives that's why it's important to make sure that kids are safe and they spend time where other people live.

Just ask campaign which is now asking saves lives it's first established by the American Academy of Pediatrics 2000 and it's currently administered by the bradycard this initiative encourages parents to ask about firearms and the places where the children's visit play make sure that they're properly stored locked and unloaded ammunition separately it's been a part of the gun safety team educational initiatives almost since the team's Inception. Slide here shares a little bit about some of the spaces where we've done education and then also where the gun lights unlocks are provided so corporate public health fairs schools that also have health fairs activities and the ptas Civic organizations health care clinics religious and faith-based communities Child Care Centers and also neighborhood events.

The program the health care provider program started around 2014. Where the providers ask their patients and families about storage of firearms in the home as a part of a preventive strategy assessment based on the Durham County gun safety team health model Duke to date there's roughly 20 health clinics in Seven Counties that are providing this service sharing of a few recent activities still call this recent but the skills and knowledge of injury prevention Partners skip in the fall of 2018 through spring of 2019 UNC Gillings School of global Public Health worked with us and it was a project that was supported through a grant funded by the John Rex endowment goals were to create an implementation guide that could be replicated in any County and this guide of course was produced in by Durham County gun safety team and it's been used throughout the state in fact it's housed on the on the State Health Department's webpage and so the other goal was to start an Orange County Safety team based on this very.

Same model we're very proud that several other Counties have just used this guide alone to start their gun safety teams. In North Carolina until 2019 when the Orange County gun safety team this morning 2021 Pitt County formed their gun safety team using this guide and in 2022 Polk County started their team using this guide and now will have said lots of other countries. In 2021 we received the comprehensive Suicide Prevention Grant we were awarded about two hundred thousand dollars implementation of these strategies so part of the deliverables was to develop a curriculum for virtual and in-person trainings for a minimum of five counties to establish their own gun safety team based on Dura model as of November 22 we completed the very first one it's a five series Workshop we met our goal Seven Counties and we had 10 waiting so we're in our second one now and we also were to hire a part-time coordinator and we were able to do that so our next steps include continuing to expand.

Durham's gun safety team but also to work with additional counties and we have had wonderful support from our leadership to be able to do just this we hope to also provide a campaign around gun safety in Durham this brings us to responsible gun ownership in January of 2021 gun safety team member Jim site mentioned the need for the gun safety team to consistently educate the community on responsible gun ownership so he mentioned during that time 2020 report felony possession of a firearm jail bookings in Durham one out of four worked on this charge in possession of stolen firearms stolen Firearms were ending up in the wrong hands resulting in increased suicide homicide and other shootings it also brought up the importance for the community to lock their vehicles and they have guns in them.

And also a better way to secure those those guns while in the vehicle Sergeant Michael Beal of the Durham Police Department's Unity service Division and data obtained from the Durham Police Department January 1st through November 26th of 22 there were 331 cases of one gun or multiple guns being stolen 56 percent of those cases those were stolen from the cars 62 percent of the instances are was unlocked meaning these are highly preventable products. So as part of the campaign that we're committing to establish the team wanted to develop a multimedia campaign to emphasize information and increase of community awareness and to address this very same thing so that campaign may include radio ads social media PSAs and then a Content creating contests and informational skits as well.

So additional recommendations. So some additional recommendations that wait a minute did you already cover the multimedia okay so I just wanted to go over a little bit of that the gun safety team had a discussion about what we would like to do and we were thinking about doing this multimedia and social media campaign and one of the ideas that we had was to use some local celebrities that would appeal to the younger population in Durham and I'm talking about younger I mean young adults who may be gun owners to promote Community awareness and encourage them to store their firearms safely we also wanted to appeal to people who are not necessarily young adults but would like to I mean you know how it is a lot of times we like to see people that we know in commercials and campaigns and PSAs whatever so it was suggested that perhaps members of maybe the sheriff the County Manager Board of County Commissioners it's all good start in PSAs where they share safe storage of firearms messaging.

Especially messaging around prevention of theft or Firearms review to be included in this campaign.

Additional recommendations discussed lock box distribution which is a standard that's recommended by law enforcement and then the last media and Donna just mentioned that.

All right so there were recommendations made from the Durham City Council members to reduce violence in Durham and I just wanted to share some of these many you may have heard of already but significant investments in heart increased city funding from for Bull City United increase 9-1-1 operator pay affordable housing education to better engage and enrich our youth and the infrastructure so that our neighbors can walk and bike and take transit all of these are being worked on and there's so much more of course that we can do.

So I did want to also mention the name change for the Durham County pen safety team there you noticed that there's been some confusion over the years and we have been calling us to find out on firearms training that safe storage of firearms but how to use firearms what we discussed in in our most recent and our previous iteration of our gun safety team training was that probably changed the name of the team to want that more reflects what the gun safety team actually does and so to vote and we decided that the name and safety Commission Now the firearm injury prevention partnership so that is the name that we are using now and just wanted to just run through the Durham County Department of Public Health and that's going to be yours truly Donna Rosser also education specialist Giovanna Rosario who's our comprehensive Suicide Prevention coordinator and Willa Robinson Allen our program manager health promotion chronic disease and injury prevention and where I take any questions I want to thank commissioner Jacobs for inviting.

Me to share information on the firearm injury prevention partnership and to share recommendations for addressing firearms students thank you thank you for your presentation it's good to hear the work you're doing appreciate that because we we all know we do have a problem with gun safety that our young people that our children have such easy access to guns it's just it's not healthy for a community it's not healthy for our babies so thank you for the work that you're doing Commissioners questions comments commissioner Burns one thank you ladies so much for coming in today Donna I get your emails it's finally nice to put a face with a name I do want to I I love some well I love all the ideas you have I want to congratulate you all of being a beacon you know 20 years of doing something and then that you all get grant money to teach everybody else how to do it I love that right 10 on the late waiting list you know pretty soon.

There'll be none on the waiting list because we will have covered everybody and we will have played our part in making you know North Carolina a little bit safer I do know that my colleague along with the sheriff often brings up how many guns are actually stolen out of cars and it is a real problem and I do remember last year when I sheriff and our Public Health Department got together and they were giving out gun locks but I'd like to throw out a little idea not too long ago I was at Hillside High School and they had a presentation day and the presentation day was in the large and foyer and I walked around and I might get the number wrong but I don't think I will because I did not get to every presentation but there were at least three student groups that were that did presentations on gun locks and gun safety and gun cases so as you all seek to figure out what celebrities you want.

To use I'm telling you right now they are at Hillside so I know you saw me typing I actually took pictures with the kids took pictures of the presentation I think they wanted to ask the County commission for 10 million dollars to buy gun safety cabinets and I said have y'all heard of locks and so you know and so I had to take out my phone and kind of sort of explain it to him they said well okay that costs lesson yeah listen I mean the cabinet was like bigger than me you know so these are kids who do but they they get it right and then there was another set of kids that were talking about gun safety and that was in one of their recommendations and then it was another set of kids and it was in their recommendations so I would just say you know this is an issue that they are acutely aware of so as you're doing your multimedia campaign there are some beautiful boys and girls that I think.

Could add a lot of credence to this work and I hope that you will add them to your campaign and I I do have their pictures are on my social media so I know that parents are okay with it if you all are okay with it I would love to share their names it was a group of latinx girls and a group of black boys all athletes but all acutely aware of the fact that guns are a big issue in their community so if y'all open today I would love to share that thank you Mr Jacobs thank you so much Donna and Willa and I will just say that Donna is a rock star she is also our staff person for Durham joins together to save lives and I've had the privilege of working with Donna for a long time and I kept seeing Donna and her team at community events book Harvest I saw you at I saw you at the recovery celebration at Central Park I've seen you many places and.

And really was pleading with her to come report to us because again this is another you know Little Engine That Could but we have you know such a crisis going on and I have to be honest I am sick of sitting in you know gang intervention meetings and violent crime range round tables for six years now and hearing people talk about the guns getting stolen out of the cars and I really want to know Donna and Willa do you have enough funding to do an adequate campaign because you know we we need an all-out robust fully funded adequately funded Community awareness and education campaign so you know I I would like County manager if we could make sure that we are making sure that they have all the resources that that we need we did this with back on the bull we provided extra funding we had Billboards we had a lot of TV I mean not TV radio ads and I I think you're totally on target with using social Messengers celebrities commissioner.

Burns had a fantastic idea we don't need Board of County Commissioners I'm sorry guys we're not going to have any influence I will be in the commercial she's speaking okay commissioner Burns can be in it but I I'm I just think you know and and I so I I just want to make sure this is important if we have I think the number something like 800 guns getting stolen out of cars and most of the time they're unlocked this is something that we can do something about but we have not had an adequate campaign around it and we need to get everyone involved so I'm thinking about you know Durham Public Schools Pio the city the county of course Public Health the police the sheriff we've got lots of great pios but we need to have you guys need to have the funding that you need and I I just there's there's nothing more important really for us to spend money on so we're coming up with our budget and if you need extra funding.

For this please don't be shy and also do you have enough funding for gun locks and for this the boxes that. Adequate supply of gun laws but lock boxes which are the gold standard as far as law enforcement and gun safety experts are concerned you do not have a funding for where and would like to be able to add that to our to our interventions once upon a time we didn't have enough gun laws. There was a limited Supply now we have plenty of gun laws we could put gun locks in every Durham public school if they wanted us but lock boxes we would like to be well that sounds like maybe a possible use of arpa funding because it's a one-time cost and it ties into what we said we wanted to do around reducing gun violence so ask us put a proposal appreciate that Madam Vice chair Madam manager you will have that submission to you in due course thank you and and I also was wondering about.

I with your partnering with health care providers I think that's so important I was thinking about Lincoln our pediatric clinics and even our child care services Association and during Pre-K just any way you know let us know if you need extra support because this is just so important and we and we can do something about this thank you thank you again thank you so much for your presentation not just your presentation but thank you for the work that you do daily appreciate it okay thanks Rob okay we have another presentation 45 minutes why don't we go ahead and do that one and then after that we'll go to lunch Brenda can I say something real quick about the guns this is Heidi down here oh that's okay will and Donna before you all leave I also just wanted to thank you so much for your important work it is critical and I agree with commissioner Burns and Jacobs that we should pull out all the stops on the.

Campaign and I also think that the the clinics you do clinics we more of them need to be on board that there wasn't nearly enough you know that should be an easy one right there get them all doing it for God's sake right and I also want to thank you because I think that this is an example of public Health's work in the same way that we in this country made inroads against you know episodes of violence with with other dangerous objects like cars and cigarettes and alcohol even you know there were Public Health campaigns around all of those that that made a difference and it's a long slog but you know that you're these broad-based efforts you know it may take a long time but it's it's what we have to do especially when you know I know your work's not political but your your task is almost just a fan in a sense because you're up against a lot of political challenges that prevent us from putting.

Restrictions on who can have a firearm that's what we need to do the same way we restricted access to cars you have to have a license you can't drive until you're 16 we need to do more of that with guns and if there's anything you know as that's part of your work that we can do around political issues like that advocacy I I would like to hear more about that as as well because I do think that that's needed to really enable your work to flourish and make a difference thank you.

Okay I'm sorry commissioner cardi I didn't see your hand so the next presentation is to review the review of the 2020 City County residence survey results and Deborah Craig Ray is here our chief Communications officer and it's Jason here okay so he's going to be oh okay so he's going to be on screen. Good morning.

Foreign.

I think it's important that we know that we have received some good information and we use this information in our planning for our departments and our budgeting we see where we're strong we see where there are areas that we need to fortify and so it's always instructive when we get this so Jason I'm going to introduce you and let you go ahead and move quickly through the presentation as I've been asked and the board will ask questions on the other side good morning and thank you and welcome.

Yeah sounds sounds great be ready for me to ready to get started ready okay thanks my name is Jason Morado I'm an Etc Institute and we're a marketing research firm that specializes in conducting Community surveys for local governments and we just finished for the eighth time adopting a resident survey for Durham County so today I'm going to go through the results of the survey the full report is very detailed and comprehensive so today I'm going to walk through the key findings at a fairly high level next slide so Etc Institute I just sent one slide about us 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 40 years and in the last 10 years alone we've conducted surveys and more than a thousand communities across the country and that includes a lot of work throughout North Carolina so this is really the type of work that we specialize in next slide.

This is just a quick rundown of what I'll go through today I'll go over the purpose and methodology of the survey what I call the bottom line up front is our I mean inclusions from the survey and then I'll go through the major survey findings to show how we can with those conclusions and of course I'll be happy to answer any questions as well next slide so there are several reasons to conduct a survey like this one is to get an objective assessment of how satisfied residents are with Catholic services and to determine what residence field are the top priorities for the community we're also able to measure Trends from your previous surveys each year we change a few of the questions a little bit but most of the questions remain the same so that we can measure Trends over time and so that we know what residents current priorities are for the camera and then we're also able to prepare your results with other communities across the country next slide.

So I mentioned this is the eighth time we conducted the survey for Durham County we've been doing this every year since 2015 that annasa City and County Joint survey so we're surveying City and non-city residents in the county and then the question focuses on both city and county circles we administered the survey by combination of mail and online to randomly select a residents throughout the county our goal is to receive at least 800 completed surveys we had a very good response we ended up with almost 900. surveys and the results of the 891 commit surveys at the 95 level of confidence has a margin of error plus or minus 3.3 percent essentially this means that if we conducted the survey the same way a hundred times 95 times the result would be plus or minus 3.3 for what we're reporting so even for a statistically valid survey the results are never perfect but the margin of Mary is very small next slide so one of the types of analysis we.

Provided is we've broke results out by geographic area we wrote the results out by residents who would unincorporated or accounting and then for City residents we broke results out by Pac here it was Partners against Crime one of the reports we provided shows the results for every question on the survey asked on a five-point scale broken down by these areas so there's over 100 maps and that report there's just a few that I'll go through today and as they were administering the survey we made sure we had a good representation not only geographically but also by key demographic areas such as race ethnicity age and gender next slide so here we have a map of the county the red dots or households that completed the survey so we had a good distribution throughout the county and this is similar to the distribution we've had your previous surveys next slide.

So here are our main conclusions from the survey we found our residents have a positive reception of Durham County over 80 percent feel Durham is an excellent or a good place to live 77 are satisfied with overall quality of life in the neighborhood overall the satisfactory ratings this year are similar to last year's survey in a little bit we'll look at some of these specific areas that had the biggest increases and increases in satisfaction compared to a year ago but when you look at the overall level it's similar to last year which is a good thing most communities that we've surveyed recently have had more decreases in increases past few years another survey we also compared your results to other communities across the country one of the things that really stood out is that you rated 12 percent higher than other large communities for the overall quality accounting services and that's one of the most important questions on the survey because they are asking residents to take into account all the.

Services that you're providing and given overall satisfaction rate another area that really stood out and this is one of the areas where you wait among the farthest above other communities is customer service for having employees you rate a 26 percentage points of other large Communities Customer Service next slide so the top overall priorities for the community including Public Schools affordable housing police protection Street Maintenance and then the top priority is more specifically for County Services or public schools share protection and Department of Social Services next slide so first we'll look at some general perceptions that residents have of the county next slide so we asked residents to write their perceptions of Durham in a number of ways the dark blue remains are very satisfied lifeless satisfied the gray is neutral and we interpret neutral as average or meeting expectations it's a rating of a three and a five point scale and then the light pink and dark pink are those who are dissatisfied or very satisfied so overall there's more blue to Pink So.

The positive ratings overall by far I mean the negative if you look at the top of this chart most respondents are satisfied with the quality of life in their neighborhood and then if you look at the fourth row down 54 of respondents are either very satisfied or satisfied with the overall quality of services provided by the county and that's compared to only 11 percent who are dissatisfied so you've got about a five to one ratio those who are satisfied versus dissatisfied overall quality accounting services which is a very good ratio oftentimes that ratio is more about four to one next slide here's some more perceptions of the county again overall the positive rate is probably the negative you look at the top of this chart over 80 percent of respondents rated Durham is an excellent or a good place to live most respondents also gave positive rate in to Durham as opposed to work as a place to visit as a place to play and as a community that values the diversity of residents.

Next slide this was the very first question on the survey here we asked residents how satisfied they are with major categories of City and County Services so again overall the positive rate is far away the negative there's a lot more blue than there is pink the highest rated areas are Library Services fire and EMS Water and Sewer Parks and Recreation customer service federal employees and Public Health Services the only areas that had more negative responses are positive were schools and then a couple of Transportation related services such as streets public transit system pedestrian facility which includes sidewalks and that's similar to what we've seen on your previous surveys next slide.

So we also found that satisfaction with the overall quality of County Services is high in all areas of accounting next slide so I mentioned earlier that we wrote the results out into these Geographic areas there's over 100 Maps like in this report like the symbol full report so just a few we'll take a look at this is for the overall quality accounting services and you can see the entire map is blue which means that residents in all those areas are satisfied with the overall quality accounting services this means you're doing a good job providing Services equally throughout all parts of the county next slide this map is for the overall quality of life in your neighborhood again the entire map is blue meaning that residents overall in each of these Geographic areas are satisfying the overall quality of life in our neighborhood next slide and this map is for how residents feel about Durham as a community that values the diversity of residents and again when we break it into those Geographic.

Areas that I mentioned earlier in each area residents are satisfied with Durham as a community that values the diversity of residence next slide so we also compare your results to other large communities and overall these results are very very positive next slide please so for these next few charts a dark blue line or Durham County residents who are either very satisfied or satisfied so the rating of that four or five on the five point scale and then the green on the satisfaction ratings for residents in large communities across the country by large we mean communities with a population of at least 250 000 residents so this first charge for major categories of city and county services and you can see in each area your ratings are significantly above their large Communities Bank includes Library Services Fire EMS water sewer Parks and Recreation and then customer service is one of the areas where you raise the wireless 59 of your respondents were satisfied with the customer service they received from County Employees the national.

Average for other large communities is only 33 so you're nearly double that next slide I'm going to come to share of protection your ratings are a little above the national average Uranus are farther above when it comes to communication and codes and ordinances the only areas that are rating below other large communities are public schools and then the public transit system and again this is similar to what we've seen on your previous service next slide we'll be here for parises for perceptions of the community your ratings are similar to other large communities when it comes to image appearance and then management of development growth you do rate almost 12 percent above the national average when it comes to customer service it's our overall pollinate County Services which is this top Rail and again that's one of the most important questions on the survey because they're asking residents to take into account all the different services that they're providing another area where your ratings are significantly above the national average or the value received.

39 of respondents were satisfied with valuable property taxes that might seem like a low number compared to some of the other numbers on your survey but the natural average for larger communities is under 30 percent so 39 is actually a good number for that question next slide and then here are more comparisons for the perceptions Durham you can see your ratings are significantly higher than other communities as a place to live it's a place to work as a place to visit as a community that values diversity about two-thirds of respondents feel at Durham is a community that values the diversity of residence the national average for large communities is just barely over 40 percent and then as a place to retire it's another area where your ratings are significantly above the national language next slide so I mentioned that that overall the satisfaction rate was this year are similar to last year's survey having said that this next slide will show the areas that had some of the biggest increases and satisfaction.

Compared to last year so the ease of travel by bus the overall image of Durham the condition of public schools and Facilities Library services and programs yard waste collection respondents experience engaging the County government process and then Public Health Services and then this next slide shows the areas that had some of the bigger decreases in satisfaction compared to a year ago timeliness of response to Residents resolution of issues and concerns of residents we saw overall satisfaction with customer service is significantly higher than other large communities but there have been a couple of areas where the mains have decreased a little bit compared to a year ago even though the result ratings are still very high overall other areas with decreases were enforcing traffic safety laws Durham is a place to start a business overall communication condition of parking and then management of development next slide so now we'll look at the overall top priorities for the community next slide so earlier we saw on the first question on the survey how satisfied residents.

Were with major categories of City and County Services as a follow-up actually we asked which of these Services should received the most emphasis from city and county leaders over the next two years so the top three priorities are police protection Public Schools maintenance of city streets those have been the top three priorities for a number of years in that same order the other most important services for pedestrian facilities which include sidewalks and share protection next slide some of you might remember this from previous years this is what we call the important satisfaction analysis this analysis is based on two different types of data first we asked residents how satisfied they are the services as a follow-up question we ask which services are the most important becoming leaders to emphasize over the next couple of years so what are the most important and the idea behind this is those areas that have a combination of the lower levels of satisfaction but at the same time are the most important should be the highest overall credit.

So the areas in pink are the highest priorities waste protection Public Schools city streets the areas in yellow are a high priority as well for residents didn't rank those is quite as high of a priority as those that make so the ones in yellow pedestrian facilities such as sidewalks public transit system if any ingredient you have the medium priorities share protection just missed being in the yellow now this doesn't mean that the area is in green don't need attention but make the improvements to areas in yellow and pink will impact the greatest number of residents next slide and then we asked respondents which government services should receive the highest priority for increased funding and you can see the top two are public school operations and affordable housing by a pretty wide margin those are the top two priorities and that's also consistent with previous surveys you know the highest priorities were Street Maintenance on job creation training program next slide so that's everything that I had just a.

Quick recap we saw that residents have a very positive perception of the county overall the satisfaction ratings are similar to last year we saw the areas though that have had the biggest increases and decreases compared to a year ago when we compare your results to other large communities your ratings are much higher when it comes to overall Colonial County Services and then customer service we kind of employees it's one of the areas where you rate among the farthest above other large communities next slide and then the top priority is overall for the community our Public Schools affordable housing police protection Street Maintenance the top priorities for County Services Public Schools share protection and Department of Social Services so that is every move that I had and I'd be happy to answer any questions if anyone had thank you very much Jason and so we've heard a wonderful report overall and I don't think any of us are surprised and we're very delighted that we fare very well against other communities similarly.

Sized so certainly we will take all of your questions thank you thank you both for this presentation and and you're right Deborah I don't I didn't see any surprises nothing that made an eyebrow go up and it's glad it's good to see that and also the in the top priorities are the things that we're working on and it's good to know that we are in the right lane and and the things that we're taking on one thing I didn't see on there is I didn't see mental health mentioned oh was that did I mention did I miss that piece because that that's an important piece in this community right now you are correct I'm not sure that we actually asked that you didn't have that that question wasn't the questionnaire I wasn't on there no.

No coming up later this year yeah trauma informed Care Mental Health is is is a big concern for this community and I didn't see that on there thank you thank you yeah we did ask yeah not directly we asked about public health services and Department of Social Services but not specifically about okay thanks Commissioners questions concerns commissioner Carter yes I just want to First congratulate our staff and say hurray and how wonderful we are you know great Services the community believes that Durham County is providing and great customer service so both you know that's fantastic and I just really want to thank our staff across the county for being so devoted to providing excellent Services answer and customer service and I was I thought it was very curious you know we've really been focusing a lot lately on the fact that we're having difficulty filling positions in EMS and some of our sort of first responder type positions and yet you know we scored highly there still as as services that.

We're providing that people were satisfied with those and I that has happened in the past but I wondered if maybe we'd slip there and we really didn't so we know that the people that are working in those areas are certainly working super hard as well there are rock stars they are all rock stars like you say you know libraries was at the top that's not surprising but right after that was fire and safety and EMS so it's really interesting to me we had decreases in satisfaction around for public schools and decreases in satisfaction for public transit both perhaps you know among our most critical services that we're providing and we're investing a lot in both of those areas especially public schools and public transit really with our Transit tax and and and and such one question I have about that is if we if we eliminated the number of people who put what's the middle gray area like you're not sure your net you're neutral neutral maybe if we eliminated the.

Neutral area and if is there any way to ask that question broadly and then ask are you actually a user of public schools are you actually a user of Transit and then see well what's the satisfaction rating of people who are actually you know using these Services is that ever done Jason we do include an option of don't know and typically those are people who just aren't familiar with the service or don't have an opinion these charts that I went through today show the results excluding the don't know responses so these people do at least have an opinion now we also could break the results out for younger respondents to see what the results were for those who have kids we do have a question of the survey also asking the kids are attending public schools and several other questions related to kids in schools so we could break the results out that way as well but typically since we excluded don't knows these are people who are at least.

Familiar with these services or at least have some with schools in particular I've always read you know for a number of years that satisfaction ratings are always higher for families who actually send their children to Public Schools than for others who do not so if that one in particular I would be curious about especially because yeah you might not you might say don't know with transit or DSS services but everybody thinks they know everything about public schools because they've all been to school right and so they all have an opinion pretty much about education so that that just that one in particular I would be curious I expect it'll still be among our lower satisfaction ratings just based on you know the number of families that are sending their kids to our schools or and anyway that's a that's one of our main Community challenges honestly is being sure our public schools are strong as strong as they can be and being sure that the strength of our Public Schools is adequately understood in the.

Community I think that's a good point because I was just thinking about that in the context of you know we just had our bond issue and we did really well in that area people were very supportive of that funding yes exactly so that's curious to me it's not a surprise that it's low also because there's been an enormous political campaign to discredit Public Schools since 2008 at least you know it's it's you know part of this effort to move towards more private funding for private Services privatization of public education so I always keep that in my mind too when I'm looking at these numbers but thank you these are always so interesting and it will be you know I'll be curious to see how we as an organization respond in ways to improve performance even more thank you so much Deborah one other question I didn't see anything else in there about poverty was that a question not asked I don't believe we did now I'm not sure if it came up.

Jason you can correct me I know some of the questions were a little different with the city than ours and I'm not sure if that actually came up because I know they're actually working on developing their new strategic plan so they had added some questions around that issue but I don't recall and I didn't look directly at the city's results I looked at hours so I'm not sure Jason you may have a better answer yeah not not really specifically about poverty what type of like what type of question did you have in mind well we still have a large percentage of people that live in this community that live under the poverty line yes and I mean if you look at this report and if someone's looking at it they would wouldn't think that we have any poverty that everybody is making great money and wealthy and all that right and that's not accurate yeah well we did include a question that asked the income households break results out by different income levels.

About 12 percent of respondents didn't answer the question which is typical to people just don't feel comfortable answering that but 17 of respondents make households make under thirty thousand dollars a year and we asked that all the way up to those making over a hundred thousand so we can run across that break the results out by households of different income levels to see if there are you know differences and what their priorities are different types of households yeah because if you're making 30 or or under that's poverty in this community yeah thank you commissioner Jacobs yeah I mean related to that point you did ask on the survey about what percentage of your income are you spending on on housing and a key marker of not being economically sustainable is to spend more than 30 percent on housing and actually so that point it was 30.8 percent of residents said that they were spending more than 30 percent so that that's an Indica indicator and also related to not being able to you.

Asked not being able to make household repairs and that was 28.7 percent so I I would I would look to those as being good indicators of of need in our community I also want to follow up on what you asked what you mentioned I I would say to me one of the good news takeaways of this is actually the Improvement in the trends related to Durham Public Schools because the three-year Trends and even from 2017 we are moving in the right direction on every almost every single point where we are in Durham Public Schools is improving actually related to people's perceptions of the schools and obviously we are making the right decisions in our board with prioritizing the facilities needs and school funding because that's what people say they want so that was good news to me I just some of the things that I I just want to follow up from where we what we can learn is I thought it was really interesting Deborah that people.

Said that they get in terms of what we're doing that people said they get a lot of their information from next door I know that Randy spends a lot of time on next door God bless you and Randy and that much more on next door than on our in touch our social media our Facebook page so it's just important to see where are people getting their information and then mailings we're much higher than everything else and we'll be boosting our social media because we're getting some more horsepower if you will we have a new person starting on March 20th we'll be adding to our staff so we'll be able to do even more fantastic so I guess I do you know digging into some of the especially the area around customer service not a manager I'm just wondering because there were certain areas that we we can definitely improve on and just I was wondering what your approach is going to be how do you what are your.

Thoughts on how you you and and your you know your team are going to use the information that's in here so we'll take the information and dissect it thankfully we have you know a great executive leadership team on board now and kind of develop an implementation plan for how we will approach and address the areas that were trending kind of downward that we need to address sounds fantastic and I also just want to say I hope that we're going to celebrate these results because there really is a lot to celebrate I mean you know here and also as as commissioner Carter was mentioning the fact that we've been able to maintain the satisfaction levels you know kind of during post-pandemic when we're so understaffed is really amazing to me so I hope we'll we'll take a moment to celebrate and then also just thinking about what we can learn from here to help inform our decisions around arpa funding around the budget I think there's some good indicators in.

Here as well for us thank you. Then no other questions and commissioner Alum I dropped off so she's not there there's no other questions is it anything else for you just like to thank you all so much for your support and as we go forward we certainly will continue to tweak the survey to make sure we're asking the questions and asking them in the right way that will provide the best information for your decision making thank you thank you very much okay Commissioners thank you Jason yeah thank you all right so we're going to stop now and go to lunch it's 12 15.

It'll take 30 minutes and come back so we should be back by 12 45.

Okay.

Now we all right we're back. Where's commission Burns did she leave. All right so we're going to reconvene and since we've got new people that will be presenting I'm gonna repeat what I said this morning to the others we've got such a packed agenda that we're asking individuals to present when they have if you have 30 minutes please don't go don't go over that because I'll call you out we are trying to keep the time consistent so that we can get all of the things that we've got on the agenda done so I appreciate your support I appreciate the board working with me today so that we get through this agenda if you go right up to the 30 minutes that has been allocated then I'll have the allow another few minutes for the board to ask one or two questions and give you two minutes to answer is that that work okay cool all right so the next item is 220133 stormwater update and we already have.

Folks right here in front of us so Ryan if you want to go ahead and do the introductions and and get started it'll be great all right thank you madam chairman Commissioners Ryan Eves I'm the division manager for stormwater and erosion control with me I have Annette Lucas from McAdams just a real quick introduction then I'm going to turn it over to Annette as you hopefully are aware I know I've had to say it many times the county is in three separate watersheds the Jordan Lake Falls Lake and news River each of those have a watershed management strategy that requires us to have different nutrient requirements different development requirements for new development we're going to be talking about our new development ordinance today for storm water and so it creates a fairly complicated complex ordinance what we've done with this project and what we're going to be presenting on are some revisions today that we hope will simplify that ordinance a bit and we'll make things is easier for not.

Only staff but the development Community as a whole to do that we've hired McAdams to help us simplify go through a process of revision and with that I'm an alternative to Annette and let her explain what we've done good afternoon I'm Annette Lucas with McAdams I'm the stormwater program practice lead and we were very happy to have been selected to work with Ryan and his team to update your ordinance for you and the Ryan came to us and said that he had some different he and his team had some different objectives for the ordinance updates so first and foremost was to be compliant with all of the state rules and in Durham County that's a lot of different roles you have news you have Jordan you have Falls Lake and you also have water supply watersheds we also wanted it to be clear concise and well organized they shared that sometimes it was hard for their development Community to understand everything they had to do because of all the layers.

And then in addition the ordinance updates were to encourage green infrastructure and I'll explain what that is as well as Equity so those were the goals and then there wasn't really actually a choice as to whether or not to do this project because the new news stormwater rules require some updates to your program by May 1st of this year so there's some changes and where the program applies there are some changes in how the nutrient loadings have to be calculated project density and then some other some other aspects like the way plans are reviewed the way that stormwater control measures have to be maintained all of that has to be accomplished by May the 1st so Ryan and his team wanted to get all that done together and make a better product for your development community and for your team in Durham County as well so this just kind of this is a map here it's very colorful it shows the various watersheds like I said you have Falls Lake which.

Has one set of rules you have Jordan Lake which has a different set of rules and then you have a small corner of your county in the Southeast where that's the lower news Basin it's part of the new space and like the Falls Lake is but it's Falls Lake then you also have stormwater rolls buffer rolls and then there were County Udo requirements and those were all kind of piled on top of each other too and sometimes folks who are using your ordinance had to go back and forth between what's in the Udo what's in the storm water ordinance and it wasn't always clear how they linked together so we wanted to coordinate all of that together and they they let us know that they wanted the ordinance to be a One-Stop shop that someone could know they needed to do a stormwater plan go to the ordinance and find out everything that they needed to do without necessarily looking back and forth between the Udo and the stormwater organs.

So this this just shows we we did a reorganization this this slide will show you a little bit more kind of where things went we did some reorganization to make it easier and probably the most important thing that you see about the reorganization between current and proposed in current section 14-155 or the design and performance standards and Jordan news Falls we're all kind of lumped together in one subsection and so what we decided would work better for everyone is to pull out each part of your county and have one section that was just Falls Lake one that was just news River and one that was just Jordan Lake and in some cases there's a little bit of repetition where requirements were very similar but this this kind of went to the objective of a One-Stop shop someone could go to the new section 14-154 if they know they're in the Falls Lake and find out everything they need to do we also added some a new section section 14-157 which is requirements for.

Designing stormwater control measures so that's kind of the the engineering geek out section but it lets people know how they have to design the stormwater control measures it's mostly from the state rules and again this makes the rule your ordinance more of a One-Stop shop that your your developers don't have to go to the state rules to find out the minimum design standards they can find it right here in your ordinance so those were some of the the big changes we also clarified in new sections 14-158 14-159 you all have a two-step process you have one step of a stormwater as Bill our stormwater construction drawings where there are the store more construction drawings are approved and then after the development is built the developer comes back to the county to get the operational stormwater permit which is to for the ongoing operation of the storm water control measures those are some highlights about the reasons I'm not going to walk through these flow charts but the flow charts are here to.

Help the development Community understand the one on the left shows when stormwater permit is required and walks people through the process of figuring that out because applicability was one of the challenges that the county staff were facing letting people know when they might be subject to a stormwater permit and then the flow chart on the right shows the process for obtaining a strong water permit and flow charts will be posted to the website and potentially some other locations just to make it easier for the development community a lot of definitions were added to the ordinance we realized as we were going through it that there were a lot of terms used in the ordinance that weren't defined so we wanted to make sure everyone knew what the definitions were in a lot of cases these definitions were taken from the state rules and then a number of rules were modified so that they've matched the state rules because the county wanted everything ordinanced compliant was we made those updates.

And then I've never done this before I have a lot of experience writing rules and ordinances but it was kind of confusing to project density is a very important part of stormwater management because if project is low density then agitative and more passive types of treatment can be used but if it's high density that's what an engineered stormwater control measure is needed so that's why project density is so important but explaining in words how to calculate project density was kind of challenging and hard to understand so they have the idea hey let's just put a formula in the rules and I thought it was a brilliant idea so we have actual formulas in the rules and the County Attorney reviewed that and because it comes up so we're grateful for that and we think that'll clarify things for the development Community as well for green infrastructure we wanted to have an ordinance that encouraged green infrastructure and we brainstormed a lot about how to do that so first of all.

What is green infrastructure that's when you build a development project that tries to mimic the natural water cycle we develop land we we pave over soil that used to infiltrate the water when it rained and we we cut off that process we create a lot more surface runoff and keep that water at the surface and that's in the long term not great for the streams because water picks up pollutants and it changes the hydrology so streams often a road when that happens causing more sediment in the streams I know sediment has been a big issue here recently so the state rules talk about greenstorm or infrastructure they use more technical sounding term runoff volume match but that means that we're trying to make sure that the surface runoff that comes off the development is very similar to the surface runoff some surface runoff after development I should say is similar to the way it was before the development happened so runoff volume match projects that are designed this way automatically meet all of the nutrient.

Rule requirements so the way the wardens was previously written and even the way the state rules are written the fact that you can use runoff volume match basically is your trump card that's not always a good word to say but as your child card. Can you can replace any of the nutrient requirements with runoff volume match that wasn't really that clear so we updated the ordinance so right out of the gate in the Falls Lake section in the news section in the Jordan Lake section it says if you do run off volume match you're considered to have met these requirements so just by bringing that out into the open and making that more clear we feel like we encouraged green stormwater infrastructure so what would a green infrastructure project look like what you would see is instead of having one of those wet ponds at the bottom of the hill and sometimes they're in a if you see them in a shopping center they're behind the strip mall behind a fence.

Instead what you would see is more utilization of the entire site to treat the storm water and the stormwater being treated more in a closer proximity to where it's created so like for example this is just an example diagram but you're seeing treatment measures right next to roads and parking areas right next to roofs you're seeing a lot of vegetated systems such as biorection cells piercings cistern that actually scores the storm water and it used as when it's needed so it takes a little bit more thought and effort in the design but then you what you're not seeing on this site is a wet pond so the developer gets to use more of the site to actually for the development and the stormwater the brainstorm stormwater infrastructure that's in the site is an amenity to the site rather than the eyesore that you see behind that fence on the strip mall oh yeah and I already said this so so it's up in front now in all the rules and lets people to do this.

And there's actually a spreadsheet tool that the county is going to make available on stormwater website what these ordinances hopefully passed that that folks can go to and find out very easily if they've been at the right time. Okay and then in addition there's some efforts being made in the your Udo it sounds a little bit counter-intuitive but there's free safe areas can be reduced if greenstormer infrastructure is used that's because it's for one to provide an incentive but also because a green GSI site will be using green spaces it just may be that there's a need to cut down larger trees that are on the site and create smaller vegetated areas with Shrubbery or smaller trees.

So I I try to be well under my time Madam commissioner so but I'm more than happy to answer any questions that you have and Ryan is here too and he can answer questions great job you're doing wonderful Commissioners questions Mr Carter trying to get to the page where I have a question first of all thank you this is very interesting very nerdy but very interesting nonetheless and it's really important I think too because there is this balance of needing to protect the environment absolutely right but also we need more housing and so how to sort of manage both of those needs on the float the flow chart thing and I I looked at it only because I was trying to figure out well what would exempt some developer from needing to comply with the rules could you just talk a little bit about that like for example Redevelopment is one that would be exempt and what is Redevelopment why is it exempt it doesn't seem like it would be to me but.

I'm sure I'm not understanding it properly that's a great question commissioner Carter so Redevelopment means when there's a site that already has development on it and that whatever whatever is currently on the site with built upon area is being removed and replaced with another project so can you think of an example maybe it just seems like that site doesn't necessarily have the green storm water infrastructure that we're looking for and so why would it be exempt yes so so say you had a two Acre Site with one acre of built upon area on it and that one acre of built upon area were removed and replaced with one and a half acres of built upon area for example the first acre is exempt if there wasn't stormwater treatment before the first acre is exempt from needing stormwater treatment so why is that the reason why that exemption exists is because the state legislature has legislated that and so wow and so they've also they've also said the State Legislative because not all.

Communities agreed with that exemption yeah in some communities said hey we see Redevelopment as an opportunity to put stormwater control measures in places that didn't have them before and we think that's a good thing in our community and then the state legislature noticed that and they said actually no local governments can make the choice to not exempt Redevelopment there's a double-net yeah yeah yes yes okay well thank you this is a it was a very clear presentation even of a little bit yes yes it's kind of Tweety yeah okay commissioner Jacobs well thank you and I I'm really excited about this I went to my first low Inc impact development conference in like 2005 when I was a member of the Planning Commission and here we are 2023 and we are finally incorporating it officially like this into into our storm water ordinance so you know this is I'm really excited to see the the green infrastructure being integrated into our ordinance it's you know other communities have frankly.

Been doing it for a long long time and so I guess my question is is there anything that we that we left out related to Green infrastructure that we may be could could have put in here or you know I know I know it's in here this is like incentivizing people but do we know are the incentives going to be enough you know because I just worry that you know it's hard for people to change and and especially Engineers are used to doing things a certain way I mean how are we really going to change behavior and have people really start using these because this is what makes sense you know to keep the storm water on site and you know and then possibly even reuse it you know so so I I just want to hear a little bit more about that from you that's a great question too I I think when Ryan you may want to chime in your time and developers see a few of those.

You know I don't even know if we could call them early adopters at this point because let's say we've been talking about this for a long time but when they see others being successful doing a GSI project I think they are going to want some of that as well so they're going to want that opportunity and you know you think about the things that incentivize developers and I think you know when you're on the development side and you have to carve away you know you have to meet the density requirements restrictions UVO and you can carve away some treats today areas you know you wind up limited and so I think they want to push the envelope I think what you've done with the tree safe area is a good idea and attractive to your developers but it's always hard when when you update ordinances and rules it's hard to figure out how people are going to use them until you experiment so I think it's something important to.

Keep your finger on the pulse of that and Ryan you may want to jump in as well I was just going to say we spent a long time talking about this and how how we could incorporate it we obviously would like to take as many carrot approaches as we could with we also aren't opposed to the stick approach of because we know how important incorporating green green storm water green infrastructure is in our sites unfortunately we're somewhat limited back to that state legislation how far we could push push the envelope and so this was one way we could do that by really putting the runoff volume match out there putting it out front really trying to to incentivize its use and and and incorporate it into our ordinance the Udo amendments that we're we're talking about you'll see more in the you know next coming months though we're still working on with the planning department are going to have even more I think carrots that that will encourage the use but I do think.

Annette's right that we are seeing it more often and I think the more often we see it the more often we're going to see it I think people are going to see that it's working that it is there is an ability to potentially use more of a site if you incorporate these these kinds of stormwater approaches and ultimately that's what a lot of developers want to do they want to be able to use more of a site for parking or for their shops or you know commercial Enterprises for houses and things like that so the more we can encourage it the more we're going to do it a try I know you you're already understaffed Ryan but I guess thinking about are there ways in the future to do you know highlight do demonstration projects or lift up the you know examples that of people who have done it to try to you know show folks how to do it and also to kind of illuminate those positive examples.

I just throw that throw that out there the other is to commissioner Carter's point we're going to be seeing more and more Redevelopment of you know old shopping centers strip malls parking lots so how do we further incentivize if we can't make make people I guess maybe it's not for now but just thinking about how can we still incentivized people to do the green infrastructure when they're redeveloping I mean I was just reading last night because I live nearby but the hill the Coca-Cola building on Hillsborough Road is going to be redeveloped into a mixed-use development and I'm like that's really exciting to think about Hillsborough Road being reimagined and for mixed use but there's a lot of pavement there a lot of parking lots with no trees and things like that so I don't know I mean I know we can't do it in this go around but it would there do you think there's ways to even if it's not required that we could try to re you know incentivize the Redevelopment.

Yeah and that's something we will continue you know again we briefly mentioned our our core principles for our stormwater program you know those are resiliency being one of them particularly with our stormwater projects that the county is going to be working on you know we're going to focus on green projects where we can and things like that so it's it's definitely something we're going to continue to encourage and as you know as we work with you know the city folks with the stormwater association of North Carolina has fade in other other groups will continue to kind of push the legislature to you know allow us to do more where we can and and then locally we'll continue to encourage that use I do think that we see you know particularly in RTP where we will see that development I think there is a an appetite and an understanding that some of these things are amenities some of this green you know people want to work at places that are environmentally friendly that do.

That that want to add these kind of green storm water infrastructure projects to their you know to their overall projects so I you know we're going to do everything we can to encourage it and then when and incentivize it and then when when and if we get the ability to require it then we'll we'll take that next step yeah one other thought is if it's if you're able to track the costs because if it's cheaper for developers to implement some of these than the others then maybe that that will be you know I mean I don't know I imagine some of them might be less expensive than typical bmps so I don't know if that that would be something and the last thing I was going to ask is will do you think that any of these these changes will help with what we're seeing with the Triassic soils in East Durham I certainly think they can what I would say is a lot of the the issues we're.

Seeing out there and I won't speak either way about the city's ordinances I think their the city's ordinances are strong as well as a result of a lot of that that area is being annexed into the City and so these ordinances only apply to the unincorporated portion of the county we are you know and so a lot of that area is going to be ultimately when it comes to stormwater going to be hit the city's requirements okay how do we get these incorporated into the city too okay we we have those conversations and we can certainly have those conversations with them I will say you know it's not that I don't think that the city has you know bad ordinances I think that you know their their ordinances push a lot of the same things they have a lot of the same requirements from the state that we do and even more so than we do.

Thank you anything for you commissioner Burns. Y'all got your work cut out for you we're up to it we're up for it you up for it that's a good thing because it keeps changing on us well thank you I don't have any questions right now thank you so much for your presentation and do you have anything else you want anything else to present I just want to know we I think we have to adopt this right by May 1st we have to do this we have to do this today no no no I think by May 1st yeah okay so we don't have to do anything today though okay so we'll bring a regular session yeah all right all right thank you all right appreciate it all right I know I didn't see anything in my package to adopt it so our next item Commissioners is 230108 the transit plan governance interlocal agreement and I see that Ellen is here and this is in 2011 Durham County approved a county-wide Transit plan which included.

The development the orange Durham orange light rail Transit project in 2013 and in the local agreement was developed and approved by the Board of Commissioners and so on and so forth and all kinds of attachments we got and we've been reading and reading and more reading so now we will hear from you and you have 30 minutes on this one and we've kind of penned you back to back on the items so that you won't have to you don't have to leave so you can keep your seat when you finish this one will roll and Commissioners ask questions and we'll roll over to the next one okay all right okay thank you yeah I'll give a quick introduction so there's Ellen Beckman Durham County transportation manager we got four Transportation items on this agenda all of them are somewhat related to each other and they're all related to the Durham County Transit plan and the county revenues for Transit so starting off we got the transit plan governance interlocal agreement this is the.

Agreement that establishes how we work together in the ongoing implementation of the County Transit plan and the funds it's between the the Durham County Board of Commissioners the mpo board and the go triangle board we've been working on this for some time now about 18 months or so and we had a this is replacing the original interlocal agreement approved in 2013. that agreement was very short didn't have a lot of details in it this one is much more thorough we went through a very extensive process with our partners to develop this Adam Howe from Atkins was our consultant and he's on the on the zoom and we'll be giving an overview of the changes that have occurred in the document the Board of Commissioners did approve this document in November and so subsequent discussions resulted in a few changes to that so it's back before you again for reapproval and then it will go to the other two boards for approval the go triangle board and the mpo board so Adam's presentation will review those.

Changes that have occurred since November Sandra Freeman and Chuck latuca are here from go triangle sandras will follow Adam with a presentation specific to some of the go triangle issues in that agreement so with that yeah turn it over to Adam Howell had a very good Madam chair can you confirm you can hear me I can hear you very good it's a privilege and pleasure to be in front of you all again today I will keep this presentation quick to offer questions and segue to the next topics but we're going to go over a quick status update as Ellen outlined earlier give you some of those specific updates to the Ila and then we'll talk about some of the next steps that are happening with your Regional Partners next one so back in the fall of 2022 you were actually brought a version of the interlocal agreement in November 7th during one of your work sessions similar to today to receive an update on this Ila and then on the 14th you all.

Took action through consent to adopt that governance Ila that version was not adopted by your Regional partners and so it was never fully executed and during that same time Regional Partners both into a triangle and dchcampo sought clarification and some critical edits to the Ila as it was presented to you all and so all the partners have kind of let's take a step back let's make sure that we review this closely and so the version has been presented to you today is the one that incorporates all those changes that everybody has concurred upon as we speak next one I'm not going to read all of this to you but I'm going to give you the highlights and so one of the critical edits that was made was regarding a specific definition and this just falls under the dedicated local Transit funding sources where we are aiming to Define explicitly which revenue streams are able to support local implementation or Regional implementation of trans services throughout the county and so this added.

More adequately defines the role of the vehicle rental tax funding source and it acknowledges go to Triangle and their Board of Trustees to have sole expression of future allocations of that funding source as it relates to local Transit plan implementation efforts next slide this is some just critical information to make sure we updated for execution purposes but let me just make sure that everybody was incorporated appropriately from an official standpoint for addresses and parties to notify for anything and action related to the IRA and then for an amendment purpose the partners decided that it was critical for them to make sure that there was a process and cycle that would outline a commitment by the parties to the governance agreement to coordinate a review of this interlocal agreement that aligns with the frequency of the multi-year transit Vision plan updates which is scheduled to occur every four years but it does also allow for a process if there is a need from any one of the partners or parties to the Ila of.

A critical amendment to then take place outside of that four-year review cycle excellent getting in Article 5 of this governance agreement there are three sections that outline the roles and responsibilities for each of the parties to the agreement in section 5.03 this is go triangles outline rules and responsibilities and there's a little bit longer because of their role as tax District administrator and then this once the extracted chip in 5.03 M was to make sure that we enhance the language that Define the responsibility for a good triangle to not take that service or use local Transit funding sources to fund costs associated with capital facilities outside of Durham County unless otherwise agreed to through appropriate agreement documentation with you all as the County Board of Commissioners next slide and then throughout the document it was noted by a couple of regional Partners as we are evolving as society and we want to make sure that we are sensitive to use appropriate language in developing policies that impact everybody around us to make sure that.

We're using positive language moving forward and so we were using the word Master to reference a couple of different things and so what was originally considered to be a master participation agreement which is kind of the next step below the Ila that invites the city of Durham to be a partner in implementing party for the transit plan purposes that is now being called the comprehensive participation agreement and then what we were calling Master operating Air Capital agreements which was the concept of essentially bundling several offering and or capital projects into one standard type of agreement to allow for streamlining and efficiency purposes we're now referencing and defining those AS Global operating Capital agreements next line and so those are the five critical edits that were Incorporated and agreed upon by all the partners there is continued coordination to go on through the spring and then these a few of these things will come back for you for approval but all of them will definitely come back to you for review.

And for information is looking at that comprehensive participation agreement a set of bylaws that informs how the technical group the staff working group based forward Communications which are where you'll hear some of that today Financial policy procedures to outline how everybody is to make sure they spin and report on the Project's work program and mental policy is critical to allow for all Partners to make sure that if there's a need to amend there's a process to allow for that to occur and then formation of some type of project agreement templates to inform steps moving forward getting all of these things in place so staff doesn't participate needs to presented back to the board before the end of fiscal year 23.

Next one and with that I'll turn it back over down okay thank you Adam that's the kind of things that have changed Sandra now has a presentation to review some of the specific I items on. This is regarding the Ila or is it to another project another so it's specific to the rental car tax issue and the change in the language there and the financing language that's in the Ila okay I just want to make sure that we stand within the same yeah they're all kind of related to each other but I think this flows best but specifically we're not moving to item two three zero one five we're still on items yes we're still on the interlocal agreement so that we can ask have our questions get our questions asked and as we move to the next one yes okay yeah after go first.

Afternoon just a few things I want to quickly talk about on the go triangle side before we go into the Ila you may be aware or you may have heard the term Fiscal Cliff what we're hearing from a lot of Transit agencies is that they are facing potentially facing what is a fiscal cliff I was on a call from APTA with APTA Financial people on last week and we're learning that the impact of covet suspending Bears driver shortages what had to be done to accommodate covet has put an undue impact on many Transit agencies and now that the cares act funding is no longer available that one time influx of funds we're now facing a new reality so go triangle is in the same boat we took a 10-year look at our forecast this is just the operating forecast and if you look at the line at the very top the red numbers indicate the go triangle is forecasting just for operating a deficit each year out through 2033. so in a.

Situation like that what do you do we have very limited resources we're unable to have a property tax like the city of Durham might do so we have to look at the resources that we have in place that are fun and go triangle those are the five dollar registration tax the rental tax which you've heard a lot of discussions about our fares and those are the three main areas so just real quickly on the five dollar registration tax that five dollar registration tax has now been indexed to inflation so since 1989 that five dollars is the same five dollars which is about 2.79 now if we were collecting at the rate that you would anticipate it would be closer to nine dollars so we're working on that with the legislature to see what we can do to get that index you will see in blue that actually 70 of the gold triangle services that we all experience in Durham are paid for out of this Revenue source there are only 30 percent or shouldn't.

Say only 30 but 30 comes through the transit plan but the majority of the service that you see in Durham go triangle Services coming through these Legacy revenues so we obviously want to keep them healthy so that we can continue to provide the regional service. Real quickly on the transit plans for those who may not be as familiar with the revenue sources there's a half cent sales tax that comes out to each of the Three Counties there's a seven dollar County our registration tax in Durham up to 50 percent of that tax can be used for increased cost of existing service for the city of Durham there's a three dollar vehicle registration tax which allows go triangle to expand Service as identified in the transit plan for Durham and then there's the five percent vehicle rental tax that's been a lot of the discussion that we've had the five percent vehicle rental tax at one time our board made the decision that when the dollars came in 50 percent would be.

Retained for go triangle the other 50 will be distributed to the Three Counties based on population and what we have determined is that that 50 percent that go triangle board at one time excuse me determined was available to reallocate We Now needed to keep our own operating funds healthy you can see here that the Durham Transit taxes are doing fantastic and what we really noticed is that the half cent sales tax is growing by Leaps and Bounds above what we anticipated at the time that the transit plans were put together so it is a very healthy Revenue Source it's the second one from the bottom it's a very healthy Revenue source for Durham in specifically regarding that tax if you look at the performance compared to the current the 2017 Transit plan document that was approved back in 2017 Durham has to recognized an additional 19 million dollars in over performance of that half cent sales tax beyond what we anticipated even with the updated plan that we're currently reviewing.

For 2023 we anticipate that there will be an additional 34 million dollars in additional half cent sales tax revenue above what is currently in the plan so it is a conservative plan and we anticipate a lot of growth in the half sales tax with that being said when we look at the impact of the go triangle board making the decision to retain the rental tax we didn't just look at it as what is the benefit for go triangle we also wanted to look at it as what is the impact to the transit plan and what you can see is that if you look at the first box between FY 23 and FY 30 there will be about 13 million dollars collected in the rental tax we anticipate but if you look at between the two plans what the anticipated amount is above that is 15 million above what was anticipated in the 17 plan and it's 25 million above what was into what is anticipated in the.

23 to 30 plan so there will be a 12.4 million dollar additional amount of our vehicle rental tax over what what is anticipated so we say that to say that when we run the financial model the Durham Transit plan will still be able to deliver on all of the projects that are in the transit plan with no issues even if our board makes the decision to retain the rental tax. Just real quickly go triangle as it currently stands will be responsible for doing all the debt financing associated with the projects in all Three Counties unless a certain County makes a decision that they want to take on some themselves and there have been some discussions about that so we've spent a lot of time working with our bond Council looking at what financing options are available for go triangle and once we get to a point where we're ready to do some financing it will be a few years down the road there will be a lot of discussion with the impacted.

County there will be a lot of discussion with our board and with the County Commissioners board to come up with a financing package that people feel comfortable with it will not be done in a vacuum just by go triangle so that's one reassurance we wanted to make to the counties when we went through this process it will be collaborative understanding that the expectation for now is that go triangle will take on the debt but it will be a collaborative process one of the areas of concern that has been expressed is how does wake and Durham align there is a concern and for us as well that wake in Durham are treated equally through the processes that involve go triangle so we spent a lot of time on this first one here the rental tax we made the language very explicit in terms of how the rental tax was going to be addressed in Durham and orange we at one time anticipated that we were going to have to renegotiate the entire.

Ila with wake to get assurance that we have the same level of ability to do that our bond Council and our general counsel went through and reviewed the language in Wake County and feel very comfortable that the language in Wake County will allow us to retain that rental tax just as it does in german orange the language may be different but it acknowledges that it is an allocation from go triangle and that we feel very comfortable that we won't have to change the language in order to get that done so the Three Counties if and when the go triangle board makes that decision can make it for all three counties without us having to renegotiate in Ila in Wake County second Point had to do with the ability to finance at one time when we first looked through the documents we had some concerns that the way the Ila was written in Wake County that there would be an issue with any debt outside of Wake County that the boundary line was.

The Wake County and so we were going to have to potentially renegotiate for that as well however we scrub through the language we look at the wording and what is very particular is that it says if it's in the transit plan and if it's in the work program it will be funded so for instance commuter fail is a perfect example commuter rail will be it is already in the transit plan and the work plan for for Wake County that will allow this to be a regional project and not just limited to Wake County we put the language up here for the vehicle rental tax as I mentioned the language is different over here the language in German orange because we worked on those two simultaneously are exactly the same the language in Wake is slightly different but if you will see what it says and portion of vehicle rental tax collected by gold triangle pursuant to and allocated to Wake County by the go triangle Board of Trustees it.

Is an allocation and is an allocation that is done every year based on the discretion of our board so with that language we feel very comfortable that we won't have any issues retaining those dollars and all Three Counties if again the board makes the decision to do so additionally we wanted to highlight the Equitable use of net proceeds which is another area where again there was concerns about Cross County projects we feel strongly that the language in the Wake County Ila as it stands allows for cross-county projects without them just being limited to Wake County our bond Council has reviewed it and our general counsel has reviewed it as well finally cost sharing agreement this language is pretty much exactly the same that says there is nothing that will prohibit any of the Three Counties from entering to a cost-sharing agreement with other jurisdictions and again as long as they're in the transit plan and the transit work plan it will allow that to occur it's my last slide we are certainly open.

To any questions thank you so I want to start I've got a few questions Commissioners you have questions I'll I'll start and then we'll pick up whoever wants to pick up I'll start with I wanted to be clear what I jotted down here was the the changing of the comprehensive participation.

To be clear of what that meant and start changing the language and I you guys saw it somewhere yeah it's not on your slides it was on Adam's lights will I get to it if I go back let's go back to the to the beginning because that's where it started so the the comprehensive participation agreement all we did was change the name of it in this document compared to what it said in November that is what that is is an agreement with the county the mpo go triangle and the City of Durham so what we're bringing in entities that may be project sponsors and serve on the staff working group so the city of Durham you know isn't a party to this you know governance Ila but they will be a party to that agreement and so what it says is like what are the responsibilities of of the city of Durham and and the other three parties in serving on the staff working group and being a project sponsor things like.

Project agreements and Reporting requirements so it's we got kind of multiple layers of agreements this is the overall agreement and then there's some documents that will follow that are supplemental to the agreement so between that change and and both of these are mpo changes to the document that one and then the master operating contract agreement and that's you said so that multiple projects it's a bundling of agreements of projects is that what you said yeah so again the change from November is really just in the name of that agreement what is required is the same so this is saying that when we have a project there will be a project agreement with between the project sponsor and go triangle and then in some cases the mpo in the county depends on the project and that in order for it to be an efficient process we're going to bundle things together like we have a lot of projects you'll see you know the next agenda item is the work pro program.

And you see those tables of all those projects so you know to minimize the paperwork you know our intention is to bundle some similar projects together in what we're calling Global agreements but there will be some projects that definitely need their own agreement anything that requires debt you know anything big that involves Federal funding like commuter rail we expect there to be a specific individual project agreement that we will bring forward and that the Board of Commissioners would approve and so that's kind of what Sandra was talking about anything related to financing and debt that's a big effort and it'll come later and we'll work together to develop the any requirements or language in that agreement and it will have to be approved by the Board of Commissioners okay move on to the next one okay I think I so the Board of Commissioners provide you they have to have a three months notice before suspension of the vehicle rental tax that's a three months notice from the day that a decision is made.

Our board meets if they make the decision that we they want us to move forward at that point we would provide a three-month notice it's really at the discretion of the go triangle board we're in the middle of our budget cycle obviously our budget ends June 30th so you know they will be making decisions about whether we're going to include it in our budget or not but again that's up to the discretion of the board I serve on that board as well and I think the the Board of County Commissioners whether it be dermal or orange should have at least the three months notice rather than just say I'm gonna I'm gonna take the money today and not give counties a notice this doesn't work correct and and even though it does not say that specifically in Wake County all Three Counties will be treated the same there will be a three-month notice and our board will tell us when that needs to be but there will be a three-month office.

And how how often do we get an update it said every four years is that every four years that there will be an update of the Ila I saw something yeah it would be and I saw something that said 17 years the four years is an opportunity just to revisit that was some language we all agreed on that sometimes the document sits on the shelf and it's just an opportunity to take a look at it everything looks great we keep moving along but it's just at a minimum of four years we want to just revisit the document but if it's a 17-year agreement if I'm not with you yeah that's true and every four years is lined up with the mpo's long-range Transportation plan cycle so we intend to look at the transit plan look at this Ila along the that same schedule now you know I'm still struggling with that we can we can change hours every four years but we cannot change so there's ever for you I'm I'm still.

Struggling with that answer that I'm getting back from that is that if they can't change theirs but we can well I'm still having a problem with that I don't think I don't think it's that they can't it's really the ilas were drafted at different times and so I know that Sandra I've heard that there are 12 municipalities but yes it it it just doesn't compute to me it doesn't compute that it's okay for Durham and orange to change theirs but because of whatever conversation that is being had we're not being collaborative we're not being in sync across the lines and we're supposed to be doing this as a as a region it concerns me I would just say commissioner that awake Ila can be changed at any time if they choose to but they are sorry I can't hear you Chuck I'm sorry the Wake Ila could be changed anytime they the parties agree to make an amendment to the Ila wake's taking the position that they choose not to open.

Their Ila at this time but if they wanted to make an amendment to their Ila I think there's opportunity to do that but at this time because of what the what we've learned about the Ila and our ability to you know remove the sharing or stop the sharing Arrangement on the rental vehicle tax there's no need for them to open the Ila right now but if they needed to they could there's also the aisle all the ilas have provision of termination if one of the parties is not satisfied with how the Ila is working but so I think the four-year requirement or the four-year provision for orange and Durham to just review the ilas to make sure that they're current to what's happening I think is an improvement on the older ilas like wake has and I based on what folks have learned that things do change over time and taking that four-year look it just provides an opportunity the Ila may not change every four years but it just provides an opportunity to have.

That discussion so I think it's a real good Improvement for the orange and Durham Isles and I think when wake does change their Ila that may be something they want to take a look at too well I do I know that we did hours because we we passed a sales tax before wake did so we did a lot of things before they did theirs so I'm I'm pretty I'm aware of that it just there's there's just something there there's just bothers me as a you know I'll move on to let's see which it was was it.

Changes to making we're talking about a holistic and coordinated plan that so the other issue had to do with the funding of financing around the the bond so I know that the staff Bond counsel it's kind of had a conversation with staff he has not had a conversation with us with this board and that was one of the things that I had requested when we talked about it at the Go triangle board is that that conversation we had with this board so that we understand what that meant and that has not happened we had a conversation with the manager and staff but this board has not heard that conversation right and we we did have a fantastic meeting with Dr Sewell and staff we also we had a Financial Consultant in that meeting just to talk about some ideas that were we were looking at in terms of how again go triangle has taken on all the debt so we want to have it be as low cost as possible and as easy as possible.

And so our next step in that process is to have our bond Council meet with your bond Council to go into more specifics so that is on the agenda we started with the Financial Consultant just to provide an overview of you know what we were thinking about how the financing some of the financing options that we have and the bond Council will be next and then once that conversation has happened we would like for our bone Council to come and talk to the board about it because we feel like there would be a really good comprehensive understanding of all of the parts so are you asking us to prove our Ila before we had that conversation so right it no it's it's not yep not addressed in the Ila all right it it is hey is that Doug I think it's a is that Adam God is that you talking to me sorry I just wanted to convey that the triangle Bond Council on financial consultants were also involved in reviewing the Ila.

In its current version and so a lot of the feedback and conversations that were provided from them have been conveyed to myself and my team and the edits were made with their thoughts in mind so I want to make sure that that was made clear as well so that their their feedback was transcribed yeah anything that would impact financing for the county right we don't have to cover that or address that in the Ila that would be done on a project by project basis yes and the the Ila specifically says that there will be project agreements so in that they have to be approved by the Board of County Commissioners so that that's you know the we don't know everything about any project that we might want to do you know at some point in the future so that's how we are addressing it that will be able to facilitate those conversations and develop a specific project agreement at the time that we have a project to consider.

Okay so I'm going I'm going to let go and let some of the other Commissioners talk just one answer one other just a clarification talk a little bit more about projects that with the bond you said that and and I may not have it right but across boundaries the funds can be used in other counties so the money the Durham County's money can be used in a different County for regional projects only for our regional we'll talk a little bit more about that I'm sorry oh for instance commuter rail is the perfect example there's going to be a cost sharing agreement between wake and Durham will there be boundaries or will it be all the money goes in a pot and the the commuter rail goes from here to here it allows for those types of conversations at the end of the day the counties will make the decisions on how you want to do it but it allows you to fund a project that is does not stop at the Durham line.

Or does not stop at the Wake line and that's the intent of the language to allow for regional projects and money perhaps to be used collectively on a project that would still be subject to a cost-sharing Arrangement okay as as is described here yeah because our La says that but and orange does too but wakes doesn't wakes does it does wig says that yeah if this design even the last sentence about caution different language because it doesn't say it doesn't read the same way right but it does it allows for the same thing the one I have up here about the cost sharing it says so long as they're detailed in the County Transit plan so as long as commuter rail and I keep using that as an example because that's the one most people are familiar with it's in the Wake County Transit plan is in the Durham County Transit plan you make an agreement on what type of cost sharing Arrangement that you want to have for that project even though it.

Crosses two counties okay I'm gonna stop now and let some of the other commissioners ask their questions commissioner Burns how you doing y'all I know it's not always fun at Durham because we have a lot of questions and by the grace of God I actually only have one for y'all today I do want to say thank you for the presentation Sandra especially with you I think you've done a great job there's always Nuance to Transit and you always come in here and I feel like you're the great explainer I feel like I've you know grow 10 feet tall and understand the money better the same can be said for you when we're at the special tax board so kudos to you and I want to just hearken on something that we had you brought up at the special tax board but you only brought up some here the five dollar tax that right so you know we haven't moved that since the 70s to 80s now so the inflation the.

Equivalent of that now is 299. I know you say you're going to the general assembly to see if we can move that up to nine dollars I would love for you to or someone to tell me what that plan looks like and in the event that you can't hit the nine since we are so far behind can we shoot for seven that way you all can make up some of the ground and how can we be supportive okay you're right on point we are shooting for seven nine if we could get it all we'd be in shooting for seven Mr latuca and our general counsel have met with several legislators that he can go into more specifics on that and I think they may even had a meeting this week a couple of things the DMV has it great they have what they call a quadrennial so every four years they do a three-year look back and based on that three-year CPI average we probably don't even notice it but our tax is automatically.

Get increased we'd love to have some legislation like that so we don't have to go back every three or four years begging for another three percent increase so that's what Mr tuca is working on and I don't know if you want to share oh you're you hit it right on the on the button there it's seven seven dollars is the is he I think it was a reasonable ask you know it's not too onerous on the people who have to register their cars and it would be we are asking to be indexed so we never have to go back again and ask again this is for go triangles first time back in front of the legislature for anything in quite some time so so I we've gotten a good response so far and we hope that we can get it done this year quick follow-up I know that we have a lot of people coming into this area for jobs a lot of migrants are we seeing that folks not registering vehicles and is there.

Anything punitive that can be done so one of our issues that we are focused on and I'll turn it over to Sandra because she has some information is people are not registering their vehicles and a lot of people driving along our highways with their you know transplants and they haven't registered their vehicles so we are working with the DMB we've had a couple of meetings with them about electronically are there other things that we can do to ensure that everyone who gets the benefit who's supposed to get the benefit of the registration tax is is doing that but they've acknowledged it it's a problem it is and it's very difficult to audit well thank you all for looking for Creative Solutions the only other thing I did want to add you spoke about how you are working towards making sure that there's some Equitable treatment amongst the counties and I think this based on what I saw today I've often been a pretty loud critic of that and I just.

Want to say thank you for these first steps and I thank you for your intentionality and I look forward to see what y'all do next and that's all I have commissioner Jacobs well thank you everyone I am I cannot wait until we can approve the Sila you know it is a huge step forward and it has taken a huge amount of work but I think that it is really going to lay the foundation for us to really track the kind of Investments that we're making for the public to understand you know what we're doing for us to be responsible for our dollars and to have really with the comprehensive participation agreements be able to really understand you know really understand what we're doing and because I'll tell you what when I looked at this is an item that's coming up but when I looked at your annual report and I if you look at that and you look at wake Orange County Durham County and then you look at the report for Wake County.

I'm like salivating like okay it's very clear the deliverables you know it is extensive it's detailed and that's what the Durham County report needs to look like it needs to be very obvious exactly what what did we say we were going to do what what did the agreements call for and how much did it cost and what do we get I mean so the the Ila is going to lay the foundation for that and I appreciate the work that everybody has done to address all the concerns I feel confident from what I just heard today and what I see in the report with the change in language that that we have done that and you know that's what we did with the light rail we had cost share agreements with Orange County and you know that's what that's what you have to do so I just really want to say thank you and I want to ask Ellen what is the timeline now because we can't approve this until we approve the transit plan.

So what do you foresee as the next steps in the timeline so the intention that we've communicated throughout this process is that we want this new Ila approved before the transit plan so we the the timeline would be that this would go to in one of your regular meetings this month for approval then it would go to the DCH the mpo board and the go triangle board for approval following that will bring forward the final Transit plan the final Transit.

Plan's been out for public comment since December and it's kind of been delayed pending this discussion and this issue so approval of this will allow us to move forward on that you know I'll talk about the sum on the next item it also allows us to start to implement some of those changes in how processes are done and who approves what including you know the approval of the annual budget by the Board of Commissioners so this is a critical document for us to start to make those changes and incorporate you know new processes and generally it does bring us closer in alignment with how Wake County is doing it you know our our current Ila I think is four pages long right and this one's like 25 pages long and it a lot of the language is very it has been taken from Wake County and Incorporated from Wake County there's a few things that are a little different that we've you know talked about today but for the most part.

It is much more in closer alignment than the 2013 one so staff are recommending approval of the document and these other Transit planned and items will be coming forward in the coming months great and I hope we'll make it clear when it's presented I see Doug sitting here that the County Transit plan will not be adopted until this is adopted so I it's going to be important for all the stakeholders to understand that and then my other question was Have You Chuck and Sandra looked I mean we need more funding we need more funding for Transit I mean you know we're going to have to at some point be able to have increased the the County Transit tax our 2050 MTP for Campo and dchc mpo includes one and a half cents I know mecklenburg's mpo needs it I mean everybody we all desperately need more money do you all have you looked at other states do you have other ideas up your sleeve and and related to what you're working.

On right now if you send us something I mean are you working with all of our state reps that are part of the I mean because we can reach out to our own Durham reps if you give us you know kind of the language or whatever you're you're looking for we can we can help with that so so the short answer is not yet on the sales tax increase for Transit we or the registration yeah anything you're doing well the registration is something we're doing this year right and that would generate you know approximately 2.8 million dollars but something more comprehensive to fund Transit projects because there are so many Transit projects in the region that we need to do and and not enough money certainly I know the way you mentioned Mecklenburg County they did a blue ribbon commission to decide you know how they should increase what the need was how much they should increase it and what they put the money toward this region has not done that yet.

But if we do do it right if we do have that discussion regionally I think I've heard some Commissioners have had that discussion amongst themselves but if we did it my recommendation would be since we need to act as a region we might want to talk about if another half penny is added to the sales tax for Transit and transportation that we maybe put it into a Regional Bank where maybe a different group would administer that bank but if we're going to be Regional build Regional projects act regionally I I think we need to make sure that we can supersede the county lines and put it into a bank where we can do projects that benefit the entire region at least a portion of that money should be because we have seen that the sales tax has the capacity to create a good Revenue stream I mean wake is generated about what 120 you've got 40 10 in the orange so that is a very good Revenue stream and if you.

Add another half penny you double that and we can get a lot done and relax that sounds like a great idea and then related to what you're doing right now with the vehicle registration fee or is it a tax. Tax okay do you are you reaching out like I'm just saying can we help with that with the Durham wraps do you have language that we could send to our our delegation or just how are you approaching that yeah I was just mentioning to Chuck maybe we can draft something that is a letter of support that maybe some of the Commissioners city council folks and others might feel comfortable supporting what we're going to the legislation with so maybe we could work on something like that yeah absolutely we can we can do a letter that we then send on to our delegation any way we can help with with that please I think let us know thank you I don't really have much to ask that hasn't already been asked but I really.

Appreciate you all working through the points of contention and getting us to a good agreement that's an improvement over what we've been using in the past I am worried about the fiscal cliff that Transit is facing across this nation and wondering how we're gonna all deal with that thank you for helping us see that we can absorb this change with the increases in tax revenue that we'll be getting with the half student sales tax alone although it would have been nice to have both but but we understand we're in this together and so thank you so much.

112 do we set the right one or no okay we'll back up for yeah as zero one five four the draft FY 24th room annual Transit work plan yes thank you so this is the fy24 draft annual work program it is the annual budget for the transit plan so the new Ila includes a change to the process by which we do this it's the most significant changes that it will moving forward it will require approval by the Durham Board of Commissioners and the go triangle Board of Trustees so we are proceeding as if that will be that will happen the draft work plan is going to be presented today by Doug flichinski executive director of the dchc mpo for review and comments it will then be finalized by the staff working group and come back next month with a request for approval so this month is a good opportunity for you to ask any questions provide any feedback provide any you know more information that you need ahead of being.

Asked to approve it next month and I'd say all the project sponsors are here today too so we got the city of Durham you know we got go triangle get the mpo in the county all here so if there's any specific questions about any project we got the right people here today so with that I'll turn it over to Doug.

Oh see sometimes if they're red they're on I wish yeah they're all different I'm pleased to be here today to present the fiscal year 24 work program as Ellen suggested these are all projects that were submitted by project sponsors we met at the staff working group and discussed the projects go triangle reviewed the funding amounts that were requested and we reviewed them against the soon to be adopted Transit plan to come up with a initial fiscal year 24 work program that we are releasing for public comment tomorrow officially we've coordinated that with go triangle I really want to thank their team for helping us get it out the door for input our goal is to open and close the public hearing or public comment period in about three weeks and we'll have it back to the staff working group to review with public comments and make recommendations based on those comments and adjust the proposed program if necessary so this will cover the time period of July 1st this year to June 30th next year.

We have Transit projects that have been funded in the past along with service expansions and we also have some new Transit projects this programs Durham Transit tax revenues which you you review the four Revenue sources that go into the funding program in under the last presentation and under the new governance Ila the work program is adopted by Durham County and go triangle the mpo board does not adopt the work program although they will review it we have a lot of current Transit fund projects these are a lot of the projects that go into the approximately 26 million dollars that will be spent across the program this year the go Durham bus stop improvements continued service expansions on both go Durham lines and hours on those lines additional services on go triangles routes a senior shuttle and connect Pilots youth Go pass and fair collection improvements we have ongoing better bus projects like the transit emphasis corridors on Fayetteville and Holloway we would like to initiate a recommendation from the transit plan that looks at.

Significant bus speed reliability. Corridors and see how we can both upgrade service not just with vehicles but also with facilities and traffic operations and then some bus stop access points like you know for example out on Junction Road that my school bus drove down every day for many many years there are some issues with accessing bus stops there's ongoing Durham station improvements and then the Nelson Road bus maintenance improvements from go triangle we do have a few new projects implementing the goderm access and study pilot go triangle Corridor improvements on on the 805. the Woodcroft Park and Ride lease I mentioned already the bus speed and reliability study that the partners asked the mpo to submit a project sheet and anticipate being the project leader on that effort the Durham County Transit Tracker website that will come in a reorganization of how the mpo interacts with the staff working group where up to date the mpo has been the only partner in the staff working group that was fun not funded to participate.

But only to be the administrator we've proposed handing those staff working group administrator roles and functions off to Durham County and Orange County respectively and then we have several hundred hours of mpo Staff working group participation time allotted in the budget which is actually a net decrease to NPO funding there of course are the go go triangle Tax Administration and Transit plan Administration costs that are increasing as everything is right now with inflation the Durham County employment and educational Access Project sponsorship and then also as I mentioned Durham County assuming the staff working group administrator role All In All We project that this plan will receive a little over 44 million dollars we'll spend about 14 of that on Capital expenditures we'll also spend about 14 of that on operating expenditures leaving us a fund balance to a fund balanced transfer of about 16 and a half million dollars when added to the projected fund balance in the transit fund at the end of this fiscal year of 88 million dollars will leave us in.

Between 104 and 105 million dollars in fund balance expenditures by agency go Durham city of Durham would receive 15.6 million Durham County and access would receive a little under seven hundred thousand dollars go triangle would receive a little over 10 million dollars in dchc and po would receive 1.1 million with more than a million of that going to the bus speed reliability study or total of 27.6 million dollars as I mentioned we're releasing for public comment we'd hope to get it out today but it will be out tomorrow the mpo board will review the work plan and public comment in April the staff working group will recommend the final work program and we anticipate that this will be in front of the Durham County Board Commissioners is April still and then the go triangle Board of Trustees will adopt it at their June budget meeting when they approve their budget the plan will be available on the mpo and go triangle websites and comments we have a dedicated public information comment website or excuse.

Me email address set up at the mpo so what we are asking by this presentation and certainly not necessarily today although we welcome your comments and questions is it the County Board provide input on the draft work program thank you thank you thank you for this presentation one question about the the go Durham access study is that the same will that be the same goderm access as we've had before or will it be something different I'm going to ask Ellen to explain that better because yeah so what we heard in the transplant development was a desire to improve service on the Paratransit service so go Durham go triangle access for go Durham it's operated by the city the county pays for some of those trips for County Services but the majority of the trips are City provided access trips what we intend to do is to work with stakeholders to figure out if we can Implement some improvements in the next year Brian Fahey is here he's going to be presenting later he's actually.

Already initiated a working group with some of the Advocates who use access to talk about ways that we could improve the service so that the funding for next year is in order to implement what comes out of that process so it's it's to be responsive to what we heard in the transit plan development that paratransit service you know there are some issues with on-time performance and picking up trips you know getting trips picked up on time stuff like that yeah I'm glad you're doing this study I've you know we've all heard some concerns from people that use it so it's good to do in a study about it thank you questions commissioners concerns commissioner Carter yes thank you very much very interesting presentation helps us focus in on you know the work program to have it summarized in such a nice way I feel very excited about a number of the things in the work program I would say top of my list is the BuzzFeed and reliability study.

Will that be County what's the geography for you know where the what would the network or the lines where would we look to serve you know what I'm saying are there certain corridors along which we're studying is it more widespread than that we haven't identified the specific corridors yet it is anticipated that it would be countywide and it would focus on significant public transportation corridors as well as how they connect regionally so how they interface with you know not just orange and wake counties but also Granville potentially you know what what opportunities are there so I think what our vision of the mpo is to initially develop a scope based on feed feedback and input from our stakeholders including local Transit providers and then I think ideally a component of our study is not just operational improvements but identifying any potential corridors that could see project development towards a small starts or a new starts Grant application through the Federal Transit Administration so that would be a potential output or rule out a potential.

Application to that program and then take a look certainly what comes to mind to me immediately is how to address public transportation on 15 501 in between Durham and Chapel Hill with the absent the the Light Rail Project that Corridor is potentially undergoing a lot of transformation right now and we need to get back into train being Transit forward great Improvement sir glad you highlighted that I was going to ask is that likely to be an area of focus because I certainly certainly hope so I mean when we were When leaders were working towards the Durham orange light rail Transit that was lifted up as a project we absolutely had to have and so I'm sure that the corridor still has heavily traveled and there are opportunities for Transit oriented development along that Corridor and so you know a bus Rapid Transit sort of approach seems like you know I'm glad we're looking into the possibility of that it seems like it could make sense for us and I really am excited about the transit.

Tracker too you know that's not a big expense but I'm very excited about that and I think the community will be too and also the Paratransit improvements on bpac there's a lot of discussion meetings about the need for improvement so I'm glad to see we're building that in and I just you know I really think we gotta have a public transportation system where we have buses that go where people need to go and they get them there when they need to be there and and they can count on it especially for the number of riders in Durham that we have that don't own a car and really do rely on public transit and it's good to see also that we're building in additional staff so that we can get the programs the projects accomplished sooner I do feel like we're being responsive to the Outreach efforts and the input that we've received from the public and really appreciate all the all the work that's going on here I think our you.

Know work towards improving our public transit system both locally and regionally is some of the most critical work that's going on so I really appreciate all the expertise and hard work thank you okay there's nothing else you got something go ahead thank you and you know I'm excited about a number of things that are in in the plan as well there's a lot of kind of diverse a lot of diversity there in in the initiatives I'm wondering what you would say about how the work program will look differently when we want once the Ila is in place because I have to admit that when I read you know the detail where it has each project and what's going to be done with the money that the project sheets it's still pretty squishy for me and I I'm just looking forward to when we're going to really get a clear definition of what is being done and not only that but how is that project going to get promote you know reliable effective.

Efficient Transit because that's what we pass the transit dollars for and I I just hope that we're going to see that laid out very clearly in in the description of what we're spending money on and what the outcome is going to be I think that's a great one I'd like to point out that the transit program that's presented this year is is an update from last year's Transit program it's not a new format it's not additional information some of the projects have changed in descriptions but generally it's a very conceptual program for for an annual review I could definitely see something in the future of a multi-year work program for both both operations and Transit with you know approving the year that it's before you every year then having a working multi-year program beyond that and being able to explain those projects with more definition and more description in them and I think that would be very valuable I think that also one thing that we have discussed as.

Partners at the staff working group is how to incorporate performance measures ideally those suggested by the public input from the transit plan to be presented both in the documentation and then on you know the exciting tools like the transit tracker and I know that Durham County had gotten some recognition about the public input during the transit plan development and I would expect them to deliver an elite an equally award-winning presentation of the transit tracker when it's ready to go so we look forward to working with them and getting them all the information we can great and also especially also related to like the administrative costs for everything to understand you know especially with our partners I'd like to understand benchmarking like okay we're getting charged this much for this person like what are what are other I I just would really like to understand that and make sure that we it is being done fairly and again I think I'm hoping that getting back to the Ila we're going to.

Really that's going to just be or gonna be an outgrowth yeah and I I'm really curious to know can I ask we ask Ellen about that we had we talked about that being as part of the Ila is that going to be that kind of reporting is that going to be a part of the Ila yeah so the new Ila does require project agreements and Reporting back a few of the things in there are that there will be an annual report which is already required and that's actually next on the agenda and there will also be bi-annual reports with project implementation metrics that will ask each project sponsor to provide us so we'll be able to use that data to populate online Transit Tracker website this is similar to what you've seen in Wake County so we hope that we can kind of adapt what they've done for our purposes and have kind of parallel type of information out there to the public so yeah the new Ila does make that kind of more.

Of a requirement than it currently is so that's the intention there I guess the other thing I want to point out is that the staff working group administrator is the mpo right now that's why Doug is giving this presentation but one of the things to change for next year would be that Durham County would take that on so in the future it would be Durham County giving this presentation and the document would would be developed I think with more input from the county in partnership with go triangle I do want to acknowledge go triangle puts in a whole lot of work with all the financial details here so it certainly will be a partnership so that change will definitely allow like the county to kind of have more influence on what the document looks like more work to do more responsibility too right so that will be coming next year I think Doug is correct that one of the things that really could be done better is showing that multi-year Capital.

Improvement program so you can see all of the projects that are happening and when they are actually going to be implemented because we have a lot of projects and some of these projects have projects within the projects right like you don't there's a lot of detailed layers here that we could provide to provide a little bit more clarity of what's happening to you and to the public so that's something I would like to see moving forward in the coming years and we'll be working on that thank you thank you and if I could bring up just on that note to clarify if the questions come up at all in discussions well the Capital Area mpo performs a lot of this work for Wake Transit and that's absolutely correct they do they have three full-time dedicated staff people that they cap an expense of 150 000 a seat you know for for three of them a piece to perform but in Wake County the county itself has essentially subcontracted or subbed.

The work and management of the transit program to the mpo and that hasn't happened in Orange and Durham County our counties want to stay very involved and we appreciate that so that's why I believe in or Durham and orange counties respectively they there's been interest and and capacity built up to take on that staff working group Administration so we really applaud our local partners for for doing that yeah I had a few more questions it said in the report that it was not clear who is going to implement the plan is that correct that that wasn't clear who was going to implement the Durham County plan I think I read that similar I think so what you might be referring to is that in the Durham Transit plan we anticipated that there would be increased Staffing costs to implement the governance study recommendations so we we put a placeholder you know in our Transit plan that's you know roughly one and a half positions you know so that we were modeling that.

In our financial model we did not say who specifically you know what agency would receive that funding okay and you know what you see in this work program are increases in staff requests from go triangle from Durham County from the mpo so that's just pointing out that we've modeled that and this is what is being you know requested now that corresponds with that okay so everyone will be implementing it then I'm just it was unclear to me like are we expecting one entity to kind of be in charge meaning Durham County or it was just confusing to me it's a partnership we can take a look at that line and maybe okay I read it somewhere and I wrote it down and then the other thing was it was mentioned in the memo I think that there's a suggestion that there be a a work session a future work session that all the all of the the transportation work representative should hold a work session in the future.

Yeah yeah can you explain that well so that is an outcome of our discussions with the city of Durham right that on an annual basis before the Durham County Board of Commissioners approves this there's a desire to make sure that there's good communication the staff and elected official level between the city and county on these projects so it's not required but it's something we've talked about as being a good idea so if if that's what we want to do we need to arrange that in the coming months month or so okay all right well then we got to get that on our schedules okay and I you know and now you don't have to answer this now but I'm really yeah the best speed of liability project I'm with the I'm on there with commissioner Carter I'm so excited that we are doing this this is also like I'm so jealous of Wake County all the brt project that they're moving forward with and getting Federal funding.

For and I just want to make sure with us you know the 15 501 Corridor study the 70 quarter study with improvements being made thing happening in 147 70 like if we don't have adopted brt routes if we don't have plans that like have them in them like we it's really hard to get funding when we have the opportunity so I'm just wondering do we have enough planned for this study and and then you know some internal brt between let's say duke Central and Durham Tech and nccu something like that or even getting out to RTP like do is this enough I'm just asking well I think all those are what we want to take a look at you know where can we look at all those an enhanced bus experience and and we can also be a little jealous of our neighbors in Orange County as Chapel Hills implementing a north-south brt application which they do anticipate to get new starts small storage funding for so you know we do have a even localer.

Example right over there in Chapel Hill so we'll be tapping all those resources I do know that our modeling group and collaboration with itri is hosting a user Forum on the 13th for the stops model which is required for FTA new starts and small starts applications so we're really diving in and trying to understand this process better so we can field a competitive application in the future okay right and my last question is thrilled that Durham County is going to take over the employment and education project sponsorship and just would like to hear and not now but whenever what are your thoughts about that because I don't know vanpool's is the answer and whether we should be looking more at on demand for people but that and and I hope you'll work really closely with Andy miracle and his crew on that okay let me move over here to Heidi just had another question I thought so when we say bus Rapid Transit are we referring to the.

Like official what I think of as bus Rapid Transit where you have a you know dedicated Lane and priority at the light and a special kind of boarding platform that's more streamlined or is that what we mean or it can be can be as we look at brt and then there are also other operational improvements that can be made even just have safe trains of stops you know without being necessarily what you would expect so a good landing pad for kneeling bus to come to shelter passenger information you know I think there's a big stretch between you know just a sign on the shoulder of the road and then improving that Corridor a big part of bus Rapid Transit is dedicated space which you mentioned whether it's a dedicated lane or whether it's dedicated access like a platform and there are differences are are the those dedicated Lanes on the inside Lanes or the outside Lanes of a roadway some of those discussions are happening right now on 15 501 is ncdot's moving.

Forward with conceptual design for interchange at Garrett Road and then interchange it 40. so this is the time we've got to talk about it because once you know once those designs are set and they move forward to construction it's a generation plus before we can effectively change them okay so just to add on to that real quick try to be okay right we're going to study the whole County and all the opportunities we're going to study if there's a a project that may be only in Durham County you know that's possible we're going to study if there's good connections to wake and Orange County more like replacing the 15 501 Durham orange light rail project and then another opportunity area is to look at ways that we could partner with ncdot like there are some Highway projects that are desired along these corridors and I think it would make the most sense to see if there are partnership opportunities there that we could you know if we're going to reconstruct 15.

501 I think we only want to do it one time right we only want to do it the right way so maybe there's there's a way to work with ncdot in implementing some of those facilities together the other thing is this is in the Durham County Transit plan I do not believe it is in the orange Way Orange work program at this time but we would welcome their participation in the study so if that's something that you know the mpo Can facilitate that could be a good addition that's our goal will be to facilitate all right we got two more two more to go thank you very much thank you so much all right Ellen you've got another one here and it's the FY 22 Durham County Transit progress report okay so this is an annual report that is done to the Board of Commissioners it's required by our current Ila and it will be required by our future Ila as well so this is a go triangle oh or we're on the.

We're on your your next your afternoon yeah I'm sorry also wrong chair wrong he said okay so who's supposed to all right oh you weren't ready for them yet not not yet not go Durham this is the Durham County Transit progress report right 23-011. they were ready now ready short hopefully okay so Jennifer Hayden from go triangle yeah is here to give this presentation it's the annual County report for FY 22. Thank you thank you very much good afternoon Madam chair members of the board everybody thank you Ellen I'm Jennifer Hayden go triangles Director of Finance and administrative services and I appreciate this opportunity to present the fiscal year 2022 Durham County Transit financial report go triangle is the tax District administrator for the Durham County Transit plan and in accordance with State legislation and collaboratively prepared by the Durham Transit Partners the annual report addresses the progress achieved toward the implementation of the transit plan it includes the collection of revenues the cost of the projects and Transit operations accomplished and the contributions to.

Fund balance the Durham County portion of the annual report in your packet begins on page 22 and it goes through page 27. I am very hopeful that I'll answer all of your questions during the presentation but if I don't I will ask for them at the end so on the slide that you see before you it shows that the Durham revenues in fiscal year 2022 totaled 43 million dollars the breakdown of these is 40.3 million or 90 percent of that was from the half cent sales tax 1.7 million dollars was from the seven dollar DMV vehicle registration tax and 719 000 was from the three dollar DMV registration packs that was too confined equals 5.4 of the total revenues 1.4 million dollars was collected from the vehicle rental tax and that equals 3.2 percent of the total other Revenue totaled 7261 dollars and investment income was six hundred thirty six thousand dollars which is 1.4 of the total the last line on the left of the slide shows 1.75 million dollars classified as.

Unrealized investment loss although this looks startling the loss is what we call a book value rather than a cash value the other revenues that I just mentioned will be received as cash on the other hand this 1.75 million is not a cash transaction instead an unrealized investment loss is the decrease in the value of unsold Investments on June 30th the loss or in some cases a gain is only realized after we sell the Investments for cash so if the investment is held until maturity the principal investment is returned in full and even though the big number here shows the 43 million that actual Revenue not including that unrealized investment loss totaled 44.8 million dollars next slide please foreign the total expenditures in fiscal year 2022 was 43 million dollars the largest portion of that was 30 million dollars in unspent revenue and that 30 million dollars is allocated to the fund balance so the end of the year on June 30th the fund balance with that contribution contribution totaled 108 million dollars.

Just for clarification the fund balance is made up of assets well those assets 99.3 million dollars of it is cash and Investments and then we subtract out the liabilities so it's the same thing you may be familiar with the owner's equity so that is what the fund balance is and it did grow the remaining 13 million dollars in expenditures were spent in a variety of ways to further the transportation needs in Durham County for the residents and businesses of the largest is 6.5 million dollars and that was spent on transit services that includes sustaining previous improvements increasing the frequency on trips expending alternative transportation services like the go Durham senior shuttle and the creation of the go Durham connect pilot which provides an on-demand transportation for Eastern residents transit services were slightly impacted by the driver shortage but we have every hope that that's going to be recovering in fiscal year 23.

The next largest category of expenses was bus infrastructure and that included bus stop improvements the Raynor Street sidewalk project which would improve access to the Village Transit Center there were planning and design recommendations for the Fayetteville Street and Holloway Street Transit emphasis corridors and the regional Fleet and facility study addresses needs such as establishing low or no emission Fleet composition which includes the fueling and the charging facilities so that is definitely Forefront on the mind the next category is Transit plan Administration and that had expenses totaling 1.2 million dollars and those Services include marketing and other Communications legal Capital Planning Development and even updating the Durham County Transit plan there was additionally 1.2 million dollars spent for bus acquisitions and a million dollars was contributed toward the commuter rail Transit project eight hundred thirteen thousand dollars was for other Capital planning and 241 000 for tax District administration and that includes but isn't limited to the auditing or the old the official Financial audit at the end of the year receiving the.

Revenues paying out the partner invoices and financial reporting such as this so you can find more expense details in the annual report again on those pages beginning on page 22. And that is the end of my presentation so if you have any questions I invite those thank you so much that was quick. Any questions commissioners commissioner Carter yes thank you Jennifer for your presentation I'm looking at you up there yeah okay I I just wanted to make sure I'm understanding this correctly and if I am I think it's a really positive you know development it looks like you know this this past year we allocated 30 million dollars to fund balance and spent you know closer to I don't know 10 million let's say on on local bus service Transit service but we're going to be like doubling that and cutting in half like doubling the amount of money we're spending on actual transit services for our residents and cutting in half almost if I'm correct what we're putting into fund balance.

Am I am I is that right yeah I feel like we've said that we presented that yes as the expenses increase the contribution toward the fund balance will decrease but what you get in return is greater service to the community which has been requested yeah and the other purposes for the fund balance are for future projects that are or will be in the next transit plan and so that the funding would be available which would reduce debt obligations or also it can help get things facilitated quicker and Jennifer would you say that the FY 22 expenses were lower than budgeted due to the bus driver shortage and not being able to put as much service out there as yes that that was one of the situations that occurred we monitor that all year long and often in particular on the capital side because of covid we have had some delays in getting things accomplished but it is partly because of the driver shortage and then of course we've got you know.

Other supply chain issues that we've been facing and of course the Redevelopment of the transit plan so I think things are going to really start picking up here mid-year this fiscal year we're already there and continuing to grow thank you commissioner Jacobs thank you I had a few questions one is it looks like the the regional Roots When I I can't remember was one of the slides that just showed the the ridership numbers was pretty low and at the same time I've gotten emails from people complaining about the decrease of of those of that service so I'm concerned I I think that the regional routes are really important because you know go triangle is supposed to be a regional transit organization and I mean I know we've had challenges with operators but I I just like to hear what are the plans to really bring that service back and really support that of those Regional routes so that's one of my questions okay certainly the driver shortage played a huge.

In in any changes to the routes that were not increasing trips that is being resolved we do see operators returning to the workforce and that the number of them are growing a lot of it is requiring training so once the training is finished we'll be able to continue to grow and we do work with Joe Durham we work with the rest of our Transit Partners to make sure that we are continuing to expand because we all agree that providing the transportation service is absolutely critical within our region this is Catherine Eggleston from go try girls she probably knows the specifics about when the routes will be yeah absolutely I can provide a little bit of it together I can provide a little bit of additional detail to the overview Jennifer just provided back in the fall go triangles board did approve a significant increase in operations compensation as well as a change in our operations compensation structure for new employees so that has had a positive impact on our recruitment as well as our retention.

We've been having much larger pools of applications and much larger groups of new operator trainees coming on each month since that change was made so we have a lot of momentum to be able to begin implementing our service Restorations the first of those will be later this month on March 26th the CRX and DRX service between downtown Durham and downtown Raleigh as well as downtown Chapel Hill on downtown Raleigh will be restored to the fall 2022 levels so we're very excited about that we're already starting to look at a few months down the road what additional Services may we be able to put back with the goal of restoring to our full budget level as soon as we're able glad to hear that and do those routes have priority bus on shoulder those those buses on portions of I-40 so those two words I just mentioned do have bus on children on I-40 and we have participated in a regional Bus on shoulder study with the mpos within the last couple of years.

Since we had other opportunities to add a bus launch shoulder plan for bus on folder as ncdot does upgrade to projects also manage along i-540 for our Raleigh express route as well so we we've had good success working with DOT where the infrastructure can support it like where there's adequate shoulder already to support a bus on shoulder we've had good success working with them to identify where the signs need to go and how to implement that the bus on shoulder operation okay great because anything we can do to get as close as possible to brt right thank you also it was really interesting to see the boardings have you know leveled out so which you know makes the argument for for with changing work Pat patterns that people are not muting at the same time and it's more kind of all day long so when we look at rail making sure that we have have that for people all day long is that is that continuing are you continuing to see that.

Same patterns yes yes we're seeing some of the pre-pandemic. Period return but not really as much as it was pre-pandemic and we're seeing higher levels of ridership on go triangles Regional routes higher levels of ridership on the weekends even though we're currently operating less service on Saturdays than we were before so that's a very interesting Dynamic for us we're definitely watching that and we'll be thinking about that a lot in the context of our future planning for short range right yeah I mean we're really going to have to respond to people's changing habits right and I was just curious in the in the Wake plan I saw the description of something called the the smart shuttle service could you tell us what that is maybe something we want to look at for Durham sure Morrisville implemented and on-demand program within the last year that is a node-based program where they have a shuttle that operates on demand and be you know order a ride on an app other nodes within their Mortals martial.

Zone that operates similarly to other online programs around the country or locally go triangle and managers and a couple of on-demand zones where we use Uber vouchers and a pilot kind of phase through that but we're looking at the potential for directly operator or contract operated microtransit zones as we expand that program so that's definitely something that we're looking at coordinating with the city of Durham to look at for the goderm micro Transit implementation and we'll be coordinating as well as well and that's free is that free yeah I think that's I think it's very yeah wow and I'm I'm wondering do you collect data on I mean this is really for everything that we're doing but I'm just curious like the senior shuttle how many people are really have benefited from it the you know I I'm just wondering how much data is out there and because and if that could be shared with us yeah I do have that data available I can work with Ellen to pull together.

I mean that's the kind of thing that would be good to have on the dashboard when we have one you know who how many people are actually benefiting from these things and using them yeah thank you okay thank you thank you very much just one question when these numbers are put on your web on the website will it have a little bit more Clarity underneath as to what influence the transit service will it have more information about what that means or is it just going to be that one line on on the website the full report is there and the report is broken up in narrative for what progress was made particularly regarding the services that were provided and on the financial Pages we list them categorically so it's a complimentary report by by and large you should be able to tie the two together but on the financial page we just categorize it so that you can see how much was spent per category and then the details are in the progress side.

Yeah it would be great to have some details itemized details so that it people can understand what it means okay okay all right thank you so much for this one I got one more thank you are you okay do you want to stand up before we go to the next one do you want to go to this next one and then stand up what's your pleasure. Theo.

Will get us moving. Those of you that haven't been around us we have we've made a commitment to our health and to your health that we don't sit in a chair all day long that we stand up move move. All right. Don't do any jumping jacks so so let's get let's get through this next one so that Ellen can so Ellen will be through and then if anybody wants to run in the back and grab something to drink or whatever we'll do that then all right so Ellen the next one is 230174 go triangle annual report you got it right this time you you know you don't have to leave this time right go Dura manual all right so similar to the last update this is an annual report this time from the city of Durham Transportation Department they've they gave this to the city council earlier this year and have asked to give the an update to the Board of Commissioners so with that we have Brian Fahey and Evian Patterson from the.

City of Durham who will give the presentation just want to begin by saying thank you from the city of Durham we are excited about the work that we've continued to build Partnerships with the county and thanks for your support on a lot of our Transit Focus programs which is a priority for our department and we are excited to provide you with the annual report to show work I'm turn over to Brian thank you good afternoon I know this is the end so I'll make sure I try to make it exciting I'm Brian Fahey I'm the Mobility Services manager for the city of Durham Transportation Department while this report is mainly the go Durham bus service annual report I'm happy to answer any questions about goderm access so I know that is an important topic for all of us so I'm happy to answer any questions on that at the end as well okay.

Okay sorry we've seen throughout the pandemic how Transit can be critical for essential workers who keep our community healthy and strong we continue to provide personal protective equipment and Fair free service to Aid our community's recovery from the pandemic you've seen there just in FY 22 we've distributed over 500 000 masks on board our buses as well as hand sanitizer and install driver barriers on All Buses with the city's carbon neutrality and renewable energy action plan we are moving forward with the electrification of our Fleet you can see here the benefits we're already seeing in the major Milestones so that our first two electric vehicles did go in service and spring of 2022 and we've seen them in reliably in service since October of 22.

In December the City Council approved the design contract for 10.8 million dollar Durham station renovation project we are very excited to move forward with this transformative project for our Transportation Hub a Hot Topic that was discussed is our food access for seniors this is obviously a partnership funded by the Durham County Transit plan IT addresses the importance of access to Fresh Foods for our residents of senior living communities who have limited Transportation options the program was launched in 2022 with five communities and we're continuing to grow and see significant interest in the program there was a question about usage we saw just over 2500 trips to grocery stores in FY 22 and we're averaging right now about 250 per month for the first two months of the year.

The award-winning Durham comic is part of our effort to improve Outreach and engagement in our community particularly among families and youth our comic book stories emphasize what we already know to be true that our operators are heroes. By population Durham is the fourth largest city in North Carolina and if you look at bus ridership go Durham is the second highest ridership in North Carolina we saw nearly 5 million trips in FY 22 which is still below our pre-covered levels which were around 6 million however we leave the the state when it comes to passengers per hour.

And that also just highlights it indicates a strong desire for more and better Services provided thanks for support from the Durham County Transit plan so the remainder of the presentation just focuses on some of our key performance indicators that we've established for the go Durham system as shown here rates are cons excuse me safety is our top priority of course we track incidents at Durham station we really we nearly have 12 000 boardings per day as well as onboard incidents we are consistently below our targets for both and we continue to develop training and customer engagement tools to reduce the frequency of these safety incidents in the fall of 21 we actually saw a substantial increase in the number of operator assaults and from that we actually improve training and coordination with our law enforcement partners and that help to limit the number of assaults since then to only one in April of 2022 however as we know one is too many but as you see with onboard incidents the vast majority are General.

Disturbances or minor rule violations such as someone refusing to wear headphones when they're playing music on the bus. Foreign. Note in this slide when it comes to our preventable vehicle crashes per 100 000 miles and September 21 we had zero preventable crashes we're working to make this a regular number rather than the exception that you see here we also created a million Miler program that recognizes operators who've gone consistently a thousand excuse me a million miles without a single preventable crash and the city joined government celebrating 16 bus operators earlier this month who have achieved this Milestone which is amazing there are very few peers around the country that have that many operators reach that milestone.

Due to the importance of transfers at Durham station the target for on-time arrivals is 99 or better for all time points across our system it's 90 or better obviously we have work to continue to get these numbers up and improve the timeliness of our service. This is a key Slide the orange line here represents the published service levels provided taking into account our announced service reductions in July of 2021 due to Staffing shortages we consistently delivered 100 of the reduced levels that we share with our community but as you can see here in FY 22 we were around 81 percent of our budgeted levels while we have had the budget to Liver More service without the bus operators be consistently under delivered our service we made significant improvements since the end of FY 22 though goderm has been adding staff and added back service in November of 22 as well as February of 2023. we are currently near 90 percent of our June 2021 service levels with the goal of restoring full service this year.

And adding planned expansion funded by the Durham County Transit plan in the first half of 2024. Understand Revenue hours delivered all right vehicle Revenue hours of very important statistic you use in transit and basically that is just saying every hour if so that your bus is in service where it can pick up passengers or drop-off passengers that doesn't include the time a bus may go from the garage to the first stop or coming back in the afternoon or other training miles that may be used on buses.

The reliability of our Fleet is one of our standout performance areas we set an aggressive Target of 20 000 miles between failures and we consistently exceed this target keeping the fleet in a state of good repair is critical to avoid service eruptions disruptions that can impose significant hardships for our Riders. In FY 22 goderm added a new executive position director of customer engagement since taking on this role Sangeet Duda has brought a strong Focus to addressing customer complaints in a timely manner and using customer feedback to improve training procedures to better to provide a better customer experience.

On the top you see the passengers per Revenue hour which I just described what Revenue hour is so this is system-wide for the entire goderm system where we average right now over 30 passengers per Revenue hour this measure can continues to climb while we have now exceeded 30 most of our peers have rates in the teens adding additional frequency and Crosstown routes funded by the Durham County Transit plan are excellent opportunities to reduce crowding and improve the customer experience. Our Focus today is now on advancing major capital projects such as Durham station and the better bus improvements while continuing Recruitment and Retention to restore 100 of our 2021 service levels and prepare for expansion we are also upgrading our Fleet and planning for a new operations contract managed by the city that is designed to incentivize significant improvements and performance indicators you've seen today and with that I'm happy to answer any questions thank you thank you and it's so glad it's good to see you see you both I just.

Saw you on on on the zoom from the conference we went to Miami they have it on the on Zoom right now I just I have one question about safety I've been hearing from our partners that they're having a bit of a challenge around safety on the buses what see that's happening see what what we seem to with our peers a primary concern as you as you continue to provide Fair free service as sometimes people utilizing the buses just as a shelter and just increase traffic because it is free and sometimes you see some more incidents than normal I think we've kind of curved that with our coordination with the law enforcement both Durham County Sheriffs and Durham city police to address some of the incidents we see at bus stops but also on board and then just having sound policies when it comes to when someone has to get off the bus and utilizing our other you know our community safety program in the city of Durham to assist us and when people.

Are staying on the bus and they don't need to be but providing them with other alternatives for shelter and mental health support great thank you thank you Commissioners questions comments commissioner Jacobs thank you I like the way you structured this Ellen with with everybody presenting together thank you so much it's really helpful I was wondering if we could get follow-up information about the Fayetteville and the Holloway Transit quarters like a more just you know sending sending it to us like more detailed the budget and exactly you know what the plans are for those projects what are the planned you know outcomes and all that so that you could get that and also I assume the city has an adopted annual Transportation plan and budget or I mean I guess what what does what do you all do annually or I mean I'm just thinking you know we have our County Transit plan and the annual work program if there is there some equivalent information that you could share with us.

I I will say we do not have the the equivalent Transit plan but we do go through extensive Transportation Planning efforts to identify projects that are in need of capital Improvement and need of operational improvements and we follow the city's Capital Improvement program which we submit projects to the city manager's budget for consideration that helps us keep the work moving it's not as extensive as the transit plan but we do find Opportunities to focus on certain areas like the bike walk plan that gives us information about the the areas where there are sidewalk gaps or need for sidewalk Improvement as well as some other bike planning efforts where we're getting an opportunity to engage with the public and have and here have their input heard and implemented in some way with our our Transit plan and also I'm sorry with our our plans and then moving forward from there regarding the the tecs we're happy to provide more information we're still happy to be working with the county Transportation director to work.

Through the the elements that are included in that came out of the recommendations from the planning phase so we're happy to as we progress on that to come back if Ellen agrees to to provide some more information okay so you so the city doesn't have like an adopted Transportation plan or a manual work program or a budget I'm just yes there actually is that one large piece of guidance and and this is done primarily with our partners at go triangle since they handle a lot of the planning activities we have what's called a short range Transit Transit plan okay the last one was adopted in 2019 and if I'm correct we have our kickoff meeting this week so that will guide it's basically the next five years of where the go terms service is going so a lot of that is looking at existing routes reconfiguration we're also go triangle sponsor to bus optimization bus stop optimization study which also looks at all the bus stops across the system.

And how to make our system more efficient by how we do bus stops spacing making sure they're Equitable making sure they're safe and accessible so those plans actually go into kind of what we developed for the city budget and how that drives the process for okay yeah and anything you can share with us would be great sure and then I know you all it's fantastic about up updating the Durham station it really needs to be done I was curious and I know you've already got a design but had you all considered incorporating affordable housing into that site and you know over where the buses are and doing more of a doing that is such a prime location there foreign location but it's not included in in this design work and construction work but always looking for opportunities to improve what we call the the front porch to Durham with building up the Durham station and the the new canopy ideas so willing to explore okay affordable housing would make a nice canopy.

I was I went to the revolution conference in Vancouver and went to see where they had a huge bus station with affordable housing on top of it and people just get out of bed and go down and get on the bus but it was it was really really great and then I was going to ask what is what kind of changes will we expect to see now with the city taking over administration of the buses what will that look like and also what are the plans around being fair free well I'll definitely speak to under a new contract we're actually in the active procurement we're currently evaluating proposals as we speak with the hope of we issue a notice notification of intent to award but no later than March 20th and I I think the one thing that's really going to bring to this is an improvement in kind of trimming down the layers and making it very clear of how your oversight your Administration and your operations occurs I think.

Bringing in more corporate support from a Transit provider to help with HR matters especially with hiring and recruiting is going to be crucial and with these National companies that are out there there are a lot of activities they're doing right now that will really help us there there's also a lot that will gain on the safety end maintenance being more efficient there and then more importantly we're actually including certain things in this contract to be more specific to our Durham County residents one is marketing and customer Outreach will be part of the contract and the second is actually our bus stop amenity maintenance it's one thing where it's been a frustration for me over the years is seeing how many trash cans are overflowing at bus stops what we hear from our customers we've actually established a clear accountability for our contractor of three different tiers of bus stops that we have and expectations for keeping those stops clean and maintaining shelters are there any other questions because if.

You have two minutes there was one additional question about the fair free one minute's answer yes okay that we're currently in budget season and the council just met last week with to pull the proposals together it is a commitment by our Council to continue with Fair free but we will have to wait for the city manager's budget for that final decision. Express how much I enjoyed your presentation and reading it I think you have great key performance indicators in the data that you collect is really interesting and clearly you try to respond when you're below your targets and that's fantastic congratulations on the grant funding for for the the new center improvements and I think it's amazing that we have the second highest ridership also in in the state and the leader with the passenger per hour is there any way if I were trying to distinguish transit services in Durham that were funded by the city like through Legacy dollars I heard that phrase today and I liked it versus you know new Investments.

With Transit tax revenue where would I where would I go I bet you guys presented it to us and I'm sorry that I don't know where it is there will be information published when this annual report is published to the go Durham website and we'll obviously share that but also with the transit tracker that will come about that's going to be those same performance indicators will be available just for the expanded service so you can clearly see what we've done with expansion what has been Legacy okay so there's not it's not in the report somewhere right there's not an existing report but we can't produce it if not well okay sounds good thank you and Welcome to our friends from the city back there it's nice to see our partners all right thank you so much Ellen this has been.

Can hear you in the draft Transit plan that's going to be brought forward for approval the amount of funding from the transit plan that goes to go Durham over the next six years will increase five times what it is today so it's a tremendous Improvement you know investment in go Durham services in the in the next few years we could hire the bus drivers thank you so much thank you and Ellen this has been a long presentation for you thank you for all the work that you do a lot that's a lot today.

Thank you.

She just went to go get some water.

Yeah I need some water.

In my mind. I mean the ninth ending y'all this is the World Series I'm counting on YouTube. We got one more to go here and this is 230093 this is update potential joint partnership with the city of Durham on affordable housing initiative so Claudia and let's introduce your folks and let's get going good afternoon board members I'm here to share some updates from potential Partnerships with the city of Durham as it relates to housing projects I have with the our colleague Reginald Johnson with the city of Durham and their Community Development Office in England of course and also we have City colleagues Bertha Johnson and Keith Chadwell also with us today and so we'll get started real quickly we'll present some information about the city's rfps process that happened last year and which brings us to the point of considering joint partnership in some arpa fund usage we'll also talk some about permanent Supportive Housing and we're looking into potential Partnerships in that space as well into your next steps in.

Coming back with the board and updates I always show this slide where there are priorities and how funds can be used arpa will not go into all of them but for our public I always like to include those and we will also highlight the plan that the board adopted almost a year ago and we've been moving through that process with allocation funds we will in our April meeting have a Reconciliation period where we will go through funded what we've have left to fund and get some direction as well on those items we come to you again with some potential Joint City County affordable housing projects and we have partnered with the city throughout this whole process since 2021 with joint conversations with our residents as we have explored projects through their RFP process look to see if we could partner in in a local agreements on areas in one area throughout this whole covet environment is has been how we handle housing whether it is affordable housing Transit housing housing for our homeless.

Community and we've also looked and partnered with the emergency rental assistance program as well so that our Partnerships have been ongoing that there was a I will shift to Mr Johnson in a moment there was a conversation with the board back in November and we recommend it to the board that we consider moving forward with some exploration of projects for shovel ready projects that the city had already done in RFP with you asked that we sort of go back explored some and our partners in engineering Jay Gibson is where he paired as well as Perry Mann's looked at the projects as well as well as some others and we suggested that we move forward with having the board consider it further and so with that I'll turn over to Mr Johnson to share further thank you Claudia always good to be over across the street I would say to visit with you all again I'm Reginald Johnson director of the Department of Community Development for the city of Durham and I'm joined by.

Keith Chadwell Deputy city manager and Bertha Johnson Deputy city manager and a couple of things that I wanted to say before I get started wanted to thank you all for your Indulgence and consideration in considering partnering on these projects for a much needed affordable housing in our community I just want to say thank you for for taking the time to consider I know we have details and all that those sorts of things to be worked out but nonetheless we appreciate the consideration what I want to do in my brief time here is to share just a little bit about the multi-family request for proposal process so you have some grounding in that and then to talk about the schedule then the results of our RFP process what was funded and what was not funded and then talk about the product project status and the requested information that we have ongoing now as we're vetting these projects again.

So we had a request for a proposal I'm not going to go to through all of these bullet points but just to give you overview that we had we anticipated having at least 15 million dollars for multi-family rental projects the sources of funding on for the city included dedicated housing fund if you recall that's the two cents on the tax rate that the City Council has dedicated to affordable housing funds from our affordable housing Bond that was the voters voted on and approved and then we also would include home funding that's U.S Department of Housing and Urban Development funding or a combination of the funding depending upon how the projects presented themselves in the process going through the process we reserved the right to move funding from this RFP in order to fund projects that most align with the city's priorities the city reserved the right to fund additional proposals above the 15 million stated if the qualified responses were received and the use of City funds and this is a key Point.

Were to use be used for new construction property acquisition property Rehabilitation refinancing to a lower debt burden in order to enhance affordability and then existing income restricted low-income housing tax credit projects latex that are seeking to extend the period of affordability that's the proposal process this is the dates that just so you have in your for your information that we are issued to RFP in December 2021 and the proposals were due in February of 2022 we did evaluation and under agonal proposals completed in March of 2022 and the Council of approval was April 2022 an anticipated commit commitments all started in in May of 2022. these are the projects that recommendations that we had with the intend to award the four and yellow are the ones we actually funded it actually totaled 16.7 million dollars that we were able to look at of course that goes above the 15 million one of the things we wanted to do was to of course fund whole projects in terms of the requested.

Gaps that's how we got to the 1627 to have JFK Towers Fairhaven walk to see the trace Sandy Ridge station and all those four projects totaling 16.7 million produced or will produce a 682 units at an average cost of 24 611 a union we had received additional proposals but we were not able to fund those proposals these included the ones listed in the green Dearborn family East gear Street Sandy Ridge Villas and 902 South Briggs Street Durham Technical Community College you can see there the amount that the requested substitute amount and you see that the park that we didn't have to fund was about 20 million 21 million dollars at that time as you know I have a quick question on that slide yes this when it says per unit cost that that's not the cost to actually construct the unit that's just the cost of subsidy subsidy okay because there's no unit the cost of no today eight thousand dollars we wish right that's correct yeah I just want to clarify that.

That's the the price unit cost is just the subsidy not not actually how much it costs to build something new okay thank you absolutely so the project status of the four recommended developments you can see see the trace closing March of 2023 this month Fairhaven walk closing December of 2023 JFK Tower was closed in February of 2023 in Sandy Ridge Station closed in closed in March of 2023. Well again I think you are familiar with this slide that I just shared the information important piece is after that we started having conversations about the possible partnership what we needed to do is to request additional information from each of the projects that we did not fund we have been talked with each of the developers and had conversations with them this is a list of the information that they are providing and have provided to us that we are in the process of reviewing as as it comes in all of them received positive we receive positive responses but be mindful that the information we.

We had in our files was a base almost a year old and so we're asking to basically update the information to make sure and see what's current what has happened in the interim some projects have moved on to other type to keep in this environment keep trying to make progress some have you know kind of stood still a move slower but you can see particularly the documents requested information requested we needed evidence of site control standard site plan site survey and elevations the most important thing is the product detailed project schedule although in this particular case all of these projects we're not concerned about the time frame and matching with the upper time frame they'll all be able to be meet that with no problem of course project sources and uses and then the 20-year new to 20-year pro forma and and then cost estimates from the therefore their sources including cost per eligible unit and cost per square foot those types of that type of information and then whether they.

Did any changes to their Market study and then what we do is analyze that information and we're working with them and we'll hope to finalize and revise the number that we had from a year ago and be able to share that with you but we're still doing some analysis but like I said they're all providing the information and good partners about it and so we should be able to conclude that shortly Mr Johnson you've got we've got four projects here we're not you're asking us to partner on two is that correct further than all four so this is from our standpoint R4 that's not what that's not what I heard from the mayor it's supposed to be two that's it so would you clarify that for the record yeah and I've had conversations with manager page as well and I think there are certain members members of the city council that have gone back and said they would like to fund some of the additional projects if possible so manager Paige said that she's asking.

Staff to go back and look at and I think those projects were ranked yes right yes ma'am they are in rank order right and so those top two projects I think manager page said that they are looking at or will will make a request for Council to fund those two projects as well but I don't think that has been the vote has occurred well I I because I talked to the mayor this morning and she said there were two projects not all four so there needs to be some clarity is what it is that you're asking of us because if the mayor says too and then you tell us this four what is it and perhaps you all haven't been privy to those conversations yet like I said apparently the chair has spoken with the mayor and manager page and I had a conversation about it as well so I think you all are going to be asked to submit those first two projects I'm back to the council for consideration all right well.

I appreciate you sharing that I just you know the information that we provided that we were looking at a 10 million dollar partnership with with both entities and when we look at that and we look at what an amount of projects we have that's how we come up with the with the four it's an evolving process yeah there's only thing that I would add that from our perspective and going through this RFP process this is a ranked process and it's still still ranked yeah are we using them are you using the money that you have to use by the end of March we're using my understanding that from the city is using this ARP funds as well this is the county is considering and the council council did to make a decision to do that in the amount of at least 10 million dollars yeah I mean we we definitely the county definitely want to partner with the with the mayor with the city I think there's just a little bit of confusion about.

What we're partnering on if we could just Clarity around that I'd appreciate it did you raise your hand thank you so much really appreciate your work and your willingness to partner with us around one of our community's most important and pressing challenges the need for more affordable units of these eight projects what am I would they be affordable for generally they're at 60 and below 60 below even though one at Briggs Avenue same that one may have I'm trying to remember if I'll have to check my notes may have some combination with it going going up to 80. but we'd have to check that but one of the things that we have to go back and look at they have to provide specific numbers of units at particular Ami levels okay that would be interested in that yeah that's that's a requirement with requirement of the RFP gotcha okay that'll be interesting to see and how about the length of restricted affordability length of time that the it's restrict between 30 years wow good.

All right that's all for now thanks commissioner Jacobs I'm just really excited about the partnership I mean just before you know we're talking about Transit and all of us working together and now we're here talking about housing and you know the community resident survey that we just got back and our community is telling us they want us to invest in housing that's that's one of the priorities and thanks to the arpa money we we have the ability to do that now it's really a once in a generation opportunity that we have and I appreciate each of us using our expertise and sharing that and the process that you all have gone through looks like a really great process you know you've done your due diligence and I'm glad that we can partner on that and you know in our arpa money we we fun we're funding some Durham parks and recs program I think it was like a million dollars or something like that what was it remember the amount not a million it.

Was close how much was it it was closer to a couple hundred oh okay I'm exaggerating you're mixing I apologize but you're mixing stuff here okay but we're supporting some parks and rec stuff and you guys are supporting some transitional housing for re-entry so this is great and I'm all for you know you all coming back and you know whatever you recommend for us thank you thank you okay commissioner Burns oh wow so his is really loud let me memorize the serial number on this one mine died one thank you so much to to our partners from the city I do remember when Deputy manager Hager and manager so will bought these to us I remember it could change but again my recollection was 4 and 10 million and then when I talked to some folks at the city council so I think for me one of the things that I'm probably most excited about and Claudia we talked about this is at the arpa funding the document that we came up.

With you know it is a living document you know we can make changes we saw offsets that we were able to get from the state in the great grand and so we're in a position now to make the investment that we need to make in affordable housing that we might not be making in Broadband or in some other spaces I love the creativity because we we really can't do it by ourselves right like we have no choice in a in a unique County like a Durham not to work with the city on this I think sometimes people when they see so many houses going up I always remind people when they ask me about the condos going up on Main Street I remind them hey come three blocks up and you'll see 300 and 500 East Main and you know you say.

You say it for a couple of years and people say okay what do I get this time this is because that was two years ago that was the last board and so now we are in a position to give something to them here it is three years later so I will be voting in the affirmative for this and I think somebody else already asked my question about the subsidies for the housing but the fact that we can do I think four of them it was 24 000 another was thirty three thousand like that is the subsidy that we're providing for this housing so we get to walk out of here today and while there might be somebody else who's approving 200 houses that's that'll cost a million dollars we just worked together to approve 1187 units and I just think that that's a good day's work so thank you thank you thank you to the staff that came today and I'm just happy to say that you know we're building back better here in.

Durham and I can't wait to tour those 1200 spaces.

Thank you all right the original ask was that the county contribute 10 million so that all four projects could move forward and as a reminder for the board counties are limited in how they can invest in housing efforts the federal dollars offer an opportunity that allow us to actually do this particular partnership and so that was another advantage and we talked about that some at the Strategic Retreat back in November and that's why we wanted to Leverage The partnership so that we could do it in a major way and yeah yeah sure.

Yeah all right yes ma'am and so we'll follow up on that because it may have been that they were going to do the first two and we do the second two I know there's just a desire to create that capacity with the shortfall so so we'll we'll firm that up and circle back quickly to the board foreign yes absolutely.

Okay okay I have one other quick item that we're also having some conversations about and it's permanent Supportive Housing we have about three slides and goodrin will sort of walk through that. You're going to have the conversation later we're just going to just teeing out another partnership that we're working on thank you it's it will be very brief this is just a kind of just like Ellen combined all the transit here is affordable housing and then there is a Nuance that permanent Supportive Housing you heard from Anne and and from Alliance earlier and and this is permanent Supportive Housing is permanent housing but it's it has housing assistance and then Supportive Services that are provided to people with disabilities and disabilities are defined not only physical disabilities or idd but it is it can also Behavioral Health it's also considered disabilities so what we have found is individuals that are placed in affordable housing often cannot sustain or stay successful in this housing because they don't have the wrap around support services that.

They need to be really successful in in in in independent housing so there are different types of permanent Supportive Housing single size scattered sites there are tenant-based and Project based and explains all of this and in in your agenda item you actually have a very good report that was done I think on behalf of of Reginald's Department back in 2019 that looked very much deeper into permanent Supportive Housing and then also Define the need and and what we have now and what the capacity of what what the anticipated need is and that was 2019 before years in it probably the the need for 1100 units plus is probably significantly higher now there are permanent Supportive Housing the best practice says you should have a mix of different models you should have the scattered side is as well as so basically a campus and and and then individual units there should be well-trained staff and then the the key is the collaboration of services and the on-site Services primarily so.

Individuals don't have to go to each individual service provider but services are right there on site and easily accessible here is the report I mentioned and then here is the current inventory of permanent Supportive Housing and this is kind of 355 I just mentioned the report in 2019 mentioned 1100 plus units needed so we already have significant defage that what you see here is a lot of them mentioned batch. So this is half of these 355 units are for veterans only so so the universe already shrinks even more so we probably have yeah 150 like 170 units for individuals that are not veterans in Durham County and the need is so much greater than that we all know that so you will we will come back to you with an idea a proposal in and and for a discussion in in the very near future.

And here is a one model this is a coming out of Charlotte they have actually they have had this for quite some time and if you have a little bit of time there is a great summary in there that talks about the cost savings that this this project created in just the first year so and this is a partnership I think Alliance is involved with them as well now so Urban Ministry UNC Charlotte and then Alliance and many other partners so yes and I believe Wake County is also embarking on a permanent Supportive Housing campus model that we are quite jealous of yes maybe.

Yeah this last slide this just stated that we wanted to get the board's appetite for this and it sounds like we need to get some clarification but we'll come back to the board either at the 27th meeting or in April and also address some additional areas. I did have one really quick one I just want to put a bow on something we had a presentation this morning where somebody said that housing is health care and gudrin just hit it on the head perfectly this more place if you all do get a chance I did look at the document and the 80 some individuals that were able to go into this space in Charlotte the their average emergency room bill was forty thousand dollars after being placed in this space it was twelve thousand dollars so we active we can actually see that you know we get better determinants of Health Care and it's a million little nuggets like that in there so thank you all for bringing this to us and I hope it's something.

That we can come back with because we do have chronically homeless people here in Durham.

Foreign.

Oh my God okay this one is good I know we didn't we didn't have time for commissioner comments but there is one time sensitive issue that is really really on my mind Adam manager if at some point we can have our staff come and talk to us about our plan around the freight that comes through Durham through the railroad that comes to Durham now we just had a second Norfolk Southern accident and so it's something that I I think we really I'm sure that our Emergency Management is already looking at but I think it would really be good to hear what our plan is what our plans to strengthen our our safety but that's just something that I've been thinking a lot about thank you.

I have to adjourn ing.

Everybody we got through a lot of important topics.

Board of Commissioners · Regular Meeting · March 6, 2023

▸Call to Order2:50

▸Consent Agenda8:29

▸Discussion Items17:33

▸Public Comment4:59:09