City Council · Regular Meeting · January 18, 2024

Two minutes till broadcast one minute till.

Streaming.

One minute till broadcast we are now.

Streaming.

Long.

If you all are are ready I will who does the the video thing go by itself or is that yes if you all are ready we'll get started it's 1 o' and I'm going to call this meeting of the City Council for work session to order and and we'll start with a roll call Madam Clerk thank you presiding chair mayor Williams is on an excused absence and mayor protm Middleton is delayed today council member Nate Baker is also got an excused absence and so I'll start with the regular role council member cabayo here council member cook here council member presiding chair Freeman presid council member wrist here thank you thank you and just moving on along announcements by Council if anyone would like to start I'm looking to my left yes council member cabier thank you I just wanted to thank everyone out in the community including City staff city bus drivers our emergency response I know several churches who've opened up their doors and and done a CommunityWide effort there are.

Several lots of residents actually who still do not have power and so the city and the county have opened warming shelters and there's been a lot of coordinated effort and so I just wanted to thank all staff City County CommunityWide this is when Durham is at its best in my opinion when we all work together and I just wanted to thank everyone I also quickly wanted to thank out thank I was able to go to and going to shout these kids out because they I'm going to pull up their I went to RN Harris last week and read to some kindergarten students and my understanding was that they were going to be watching today so I just want to shout them out M Frederick's kindergarten class at AR in Harris thank you so much for having me last week hopefully you all are watching you're excellent students and you have an excellent teacher thank you thank you council member ciero council member cook good afternoon I just wanted to.

Reiterate my great thanks both to my colleagues sitting up here but also the entire staff for this onboarding process has been a bit of a whirlwind and everyone's been taking so much care and time with me and I really appreciate it so I just wanted to say thanks again take your time council member R did you have anything to add if not then we'll move on to Prior I'm sorry I think just a a couple additional announcements just to note I am presiding today because council member I'm sorry mayor Williams is not not in town for us Conference of Mayors and mayor is out of town for a visit with the president so I will request to move a couple of things around a little bit just in case I don't want us to lose Quorum or anything but I do have to depart at about 3:45 today so I just want to give everyone a heads up we're going to move through this meeting fairly quickly if if I'm presiding that's.

All other than that I'm moving to Priority items by the city manager good afternoon Madame presiding chair other members of the durh city council I do have a few priority items for you today but prior to getting to those few items I would like to call Deputy city manager Bo Ferguson up to the microphone to make a brief presentation and update on the CommunityWide response to the power outages in Durham Durham County so B thank you m Madam manager Madam presiding chair members of council appreciate this opportunity to update you and the community on our response to the ongoing power outage that's affecting a large number of customers in Durham and to answer any questions you may have about our plans I will apologize in advance I've got a lot of this information is hot off the presses and so I'm I'm juggling a little bit to make sure I provide you all the information you need and we are still working on some details that we'll be providing to the public as soon as.

Those details are finalized so let me Begin by echoing comments made by council member cabier we are deeply grateful for the partnership that we have seen beginning yesterday when this outage came to our attention in the afternoon outpouring of support from Durham organizations individuals and partners who always step up and always offer their support to their fellow residents we have seen that in droves the city manager and myself were on a call just this morning with some of those partners and we are grateful for that and I want to I will capture in a minute some of their efforts but just wanted to appreciate all that work as well as our partners in government who who are responding to this our partners at the county and here so let me break this update into sort of two phases the right now phase and the phase that will kick into effect this evening right now County Libraries specifically the main library the East Regional Branch the North Regional Branch the south regional branch and the Southwest.

Regional Branch are all serving as warming centers the regional branches are open I just got this updated the regional branches are open until 6:00 p.m. the main library is open until 8:00 p.m. and for the The public's benefit I'd like to read the the street addresses of those locations so the main branch is 300 North Roxboro Street the East Regional branch is 211 Lick Creek Lane the North Regional branch is 221 Milton Road the south regional branch is 4505 South Austin Avenue and the Southwest Regional branch is 3605 Shannon Road those facilities are open as warming centers that anyone may go to the regional branches are open until 6 the main library is open until 8:00 as a reminder City Transit is available for free so people may use City Transit and we are continuing to hear from volunteers who are offering for help with Transportation during the day I'll I'll cover that in a second but but at this time we don't have immediate information about Transportation but hopefully people can use the existing.

Gorum Network to to access those locations there is a tremendous Community effort ongoing now to provide warm food for anyone in the affected area and that is being led by Durham congregations in action they are providing that and doing a tremendous job they are coordinating directly with DHA so there's a direct a direct connection between DHA and the organizers of this effort to ensure that hot meals are being offered proactively at DHA properties that are affected by the outage they are canvasing neighborhoods sending meals into neighborhoods doing some door-to-door work but for anyone who is listening who needs to access a hot meal they may call Durham one call we are receiving we are receiving that information we are prepared to capture that information and convey it to the volunteers who are providing the meals Durham one call is 9195 60120 that can be called now our call takers in dur one call are prepared to collect that information and distribute it so those hot meals are available now and ongoing we've also been made.

Aware that communities in Partnership located at 101 South Driver street is handing out food now both food pantry and I believe warm meals but we've been made aware that that they are that's a location people can go to to to get War meals now so that is the daytime status update that that hopefully will meet the needs of of our community beginning this evening at 8:00 p.m. Durham County Emergency Management is standing up an overnight shelter that shelter is going to be located at at the old North Durham High School DPS has made that facility available that facility is heated that facility is appropriate and and ready to host up to 150 individuals this evening and let me get the street address for you that is at 117 Tom Wilkinson Road in Durham that location will be open starting at 8:00 p.m. residents who have their own transportation can drive themselves we are currently arranging for a a shuttle most likely to Pro be provided by go Durham that will transport individuals from Well's.

Village we have we're finalizing the schedule for that so we will release that information later today but there will be free transportation from wellin Village we also are coordinating with community volunteers who have offered with assistance so there may be additional Transportation options but we don't have that information to present at this time we will release that as soon as we have it there will also the Emergency Management is also working on Transportation directly from the warming centers to the shelter this evening those details also are not finalized the shelter that will be open at 8:00 p.m. this evening will be available until power is restored so this is not just an overnight shelter this will be the potential of a 24-hour operation up until shelters restored and it will at a minimum be an overnight shelter if power is restored early in this event the shelter will remain operational overnight at least until tomorrow morning if power is restored the only scenario under which that shelter would close if is if all the residents.

Voluntarily leave early if the shelter is empty after power is restored but at this point the shelters prepared to be in ongoing operations going forward as of about 15 minutes ago we do not have what I would consider actionable information from Duke Energy as to when they anticipate the outage to be resolved they have a time of 6:00 p.m. on their website but my conversation with the Duke official leads me to believe that that that time I wouldn't consider that time reliable at this time so we expect an update from Duke Energy later this afternoon but at this time I would not want anyone to have any misconceptions about when the power will be restored and would encourage all of our residents whether they rely on these resources or their own planning to have a plan for the evening and overnight hours if they are impacted by the power outage I would not rely on the 6 p.m time at this time I think it would be wiser to have an emergency plan planning.

Pace better to be prepared and and not need it I believe that those are all the details I have at this time Madam manager is there anything we've discussed that I left out and after that I'll ask if any members of council have any questions we can address thank you B seems complete if there are any questions from members of council if not thank you yeah just thanks for the for the comprehensive and and thorough report appreciate that thank you thank you thank you again and I do have a few other agendar related already items for you agenda item number six the US Department of Transportation Federal Aviation Administration Federal airport Improvement program Grant offer 3-37 D 0056 d65 d224 the City Council is being asked to suspend the rules and vote on this item during the January 18th 2024 work session so the grant agreement can be ex executed and returned to the Federal Aviation Administration by their February 5th 2024 deadline agenda item number 15 professional Engineering Services.

Contract with freeze and nickels Inc for the Northeast Creek sewer Basin hydraulic model city council is being asked to suspend the rules and vote on this item during the January 18th 2024 work session so flow monitors can be installed as soon as possible installing monitors sooner allows flow monitoring data to be obtained from the Wastewater collection system for both dry and wet weather flows and having more data assists with model calibration and finally agenda item number 18 update and presentation on the bipartisan infrastructure law B and inflation reduction act IRA and others this will be a 20 minute presentation slide number nine was updated to reflect the award amount for electric buses and slide number 10 was updated to reflect the award amount for the village Transit Center since your last publishing date so thank you very much and that is all I have Madam chair thank you madam manager I'll move through the other priority items and then we'll swing back to suspend the rules and vote on those items that you've mentioned priority.

Items for our Madam attorney thank you Madame presiding chair the city attorney's office does not have any priority items but if I may I'd like to take a point of personal privilege of course to introduce an extern that we have with us this semester her name is Carolyn Calder Carolyn if you would like to come up and just do a brief introduction of yourself Caroline is a second-year law student at UNCC law school and we will have her working on a variet of projects thank you members of the council and thank you madam attorney as Madam attorney mentioned my name is Carolyn Calder I'm a tuel at UNCC law I'm a Durham resident I grew up in kry and I had the privilege of working with the Durham Housing Authority this summer as a law clerk there so it's a pleasure to be here and to get to continue work in local government thank you for having me glad you're doing the service in D thank you that's all I have.

Madam appreciate chair thank you and madam cler if you have any priority items thank you Madame presiding chair the city clerk's office has no items thank you I am going to ask that we move up our approval of the I think of the items for six and six and 15 before 6 and 15 also for item one two three four just so that you can well I just really just need to move item four up CU I just want to make a request of council if we can hold that item until the next work session the racial Equity commission is meeting Saturday for their Retreat and I just want to make sure that that's okay or to make the request if that's all right so mainly for item four that's.

All okay so I'm going to open the vote or essentially it's just a a request for a motion to suspend the rues so that we can or do we need to accept the priority items of the city manager for items six and 15 and does 18 need to be also it's just an update okay so just to accept the manager's priority items moved I hear a motion by council member ciero and a second by council member risk second yes all in favor if you would raise your right hand you're other the right but thank you I think we have a unanimous decision and we'll vote we'll suspend vote to suspend the rules a motion to vote to suspend the rules sove moved second council member risks a motioned and council member cabier second all in favor you raise your right hand and a motion to approve item six which is the US Transportation Federal Aviation Administration Federal airport Improvement program Grant offer 33756 652024 so moved second I heard a mo a.

Motion from council member cabier and a second from council member cook all in favor if You' raise your right hand it is approved unanimously and we'll move to item number 15 item number 15 professional Engineering Services contract with freeze and nickels Inc for the Northeast Creek sewer Basin hydraulic model so moved second a motion from council member cabier and second from council member risk if you could all Raise Your Right hands oh well I'm sorry all in favor Raise Your Right hands thank you unanimous approval so for item 18 we will approve the update automatically and for item number four do that does that just need to get referred back to the city clerk's office is that what we would do is that the proper action yes so request to refer it back to the city city man city city clerk's office if you would just raise your right hand okay thank you I think that takes care of most of that business and we can continue forward with our agenda so administrative consent.

Items include item one the Durham city council environmental Affairs board appointment item two the human relations commission appointment item three the participatory budgeting to participatory budgeting steering committee appointment item three I'm sorry item four racial Equity commission appointment I'm sorry has been referred back and departmental items the City Council resolution in support of black teens and crisis I believe that we had some conversation about pulling that item to have some more conversation so that will hold that one and item seven I'm sorry item six has been dispensed of so item seven FY 24 Capital Improvement plan CIP project closeout and related budget ordinance amendments item eight contract with JP Morgan Chase Bank NA for banking services item nine Cooperative group purchase contract Service body trucks item 10 service agreement for project management consulting services with Turner and towns in hury LLC item 11 amendment to HUD Grant project ordinances item 12 2021 connect and protect law enforcement Behavioral Health responses program Grant and project ordinance superseding Grant project ordinance number.

15905 item 13 contract with Pace Analytical Services LLC for laboratory services for the public works storm water quality program item 14 14 first amendment contract with ratp Dev USA Inc for the management operations and maintenance of the go triangle fixed route transit system ct-1 19910 item 15 has been dispensed of and item 16 is presentations participatory participatory budgeting PB cycle 3 update 20 minutes and presentation on affordable housing Omnibus afford affordable housing deep dive 20 minutes and the updated presentation on bipartisan infrastructure law bil and inflation reduction act IRL and others 20 minutes and I believe that is all of our agenda items and only item five has been pulled okay okay no so I believe there are some folks online to speak to some.

Items yes and are we doing public comment on the items okay before we go into our agenda we're going to move to our citizens matters or resident matters I believe we have two speakers in the audience Rachel zberg and George Robison and then there are three online and I do not have their. Names okay okay thank you for being here you have three minutes minutes as soon as the clerk has that. Up thank you thank you my name is Rachel salsburg I've lived in Durham since 2018 and this is my first time giving public comment at a city council meeting I'm speaking to you today to require that each of you as my elected representatives take the only moral stance on the ongoing genocide in Israel Palestine by adopting and passing the ceasefire resolution submitted by u150 and over a dozen community and labor groups this is not a complicated ask as the US continues to fund the occupation while at the same time blocking International votes for an end to the.

Almost unfathomable violence it is the very least we can do to call for a permanent ceasefire and no Aid to Israel I can share my credential as a graduate of the Duke Sanford School of public policy with a masters in public policy as a member of the Jewish Community who joyfully became a bot Mitzvah at 13 and who subsequently had to interrogate her political education around Israel Palestine who has taken direct action against the institutions upholding the occupation and has been called a self-hating Jew for speaking out but none of that is necessary each of you know deep down what is right just as we know we need to be paying all of our city workers living wages and ensuring our neighbors have access to affordable quality health care and safe warm places to live please pass this resolution thank you thank you I truly appreciate your voice in our community I did want to just pause and just note that I do believe that the mayor's committee met on Monday and.

Council member cabier is part of that did you want to share any details at all you don't have to but I just want to make sure folks do know that the the conversation has not stopped and I do appreciate you being here each and every time to make sure that it doesn't thank you Madame presiding chair I can provide comment after all citizen or resident matters sounds good good afternoon George Rosen Chief Executive Officer of organization ofad Incorporated retained attorney retired representative and Veteran administrative director Larry D Hall I'm here trying to see why the Le Lakewood Apartments has not been renovated by Durham housing rather than go and spend develop a new place for housing why not renovate what's already there why not so with that being said I'm done I just want want to let you know that that would be a great idea rather than going out here spending money on a new area of of property and also this Council the last Council.

Sh took my city to hell in the hand basket crime Rose use their political power for for profit and gain by changing ordinance and then advertising it in the N we talking about Jillian Johnson that's what I'm talking about and collaboration between the nail mayare and B L Davis I just can't stand it I'm darl's number one political pundit pretty much probably the biggest political pundit in America I made a lot of changes my whisper reaches far and wide and if Biden wanted to stop the war all he had to do just move the the embassy back to T so I recognize it as a as a a a state because they are occupants and with that being said I'm just done I'm done done oh no I'm not one more thing I'm going to be seeking indictments on a few folks on this Council for collaboration and using the seats for political G power and gain I'm done thank you Mr Roberson I appreciate your voice in our.

Community you texted or emailed it texted it thank you so we have Betsy arant.

If we could just make Betsy aant available Madame presiding chair we've had a technical difficulty and we're working our best to get her online thank you hey can you hear me we can hear you okay great thanks sorry I I'm stepping aside at work so I will have to get have to leave the meeting directly after my comment but my name is Elizabeth aand I live at 804 Berkeley Street in Durham I've attended or watched nearly every city council meeting in Durham and Raleigh since the call for ceas fire resolutions began and over and over again I hear the vast majority of constituents in both of these cities calling for a ceasefire presenting every ankle of this argument from international relations to human rights to anti-racism to decolonialism however when I hear people speak out against a ceasefire I notice one common theme Hamas I'm not going to waste the council's time reminding them of the many carelessly cited claims about Hamas in the October 7th attack that have since been publicly debunked while this.

Misinformation is troubling it distracts from a more pressing truth this has nothing to do with Hamas there's nothing that Hamas could have done to Warrant the Relentless Mass Slaughter of Palestinian civilians which I shouldn't need to tell you by now are mostly women and children Exterminating an entire population is not a strategy for eliminating political leaders it's a strategy for ethnic cleansing military experts on all sides have agreed that Hamas will not be eliminated through indiscriminate bombing in fact this tactic wouldn't be affected even if it were to take out some of hamas's leaders through pure chance as these military experts say that hamas's power structure is known to be intentionally decentralized the IDF is well aware of this it has demonstrated impeccable military strategy and power throughout most of its history thanks to the support of powerful Nations like the US it knows exactly what it is doing and the goal of its campaign of genocide is to eradicate the Palestinian people not to protect its own freeing the Israeli.

Hostages is another theme I see among Zionist arguments always conveniently ignoring the massively disproportionate number of Palestinian hostages being held in Israel many of them since before October 7th yet Netanyahu has made it clear that his priorities do not lie with the safety of the hostages any historian or military leader can tell you that hostages are not freed nor protected through the annihilation of civilians mayor Williams you have made it clear over and over at these meetings that your greatest concerns are with your own approval and protecting your career as you are unwilling to take a stand that will anger a small but vocal contingent of zionists that come to these meetings to cry Hamas but I assure you that you will not get out of this pleasing everyone so I implore you and all of the council to find the courage to put Durham on the right side of History thank you thank you I appreciate your voice in this in our city Leslie St.

Dry. Hello I want to First welcome council member cook I'm truly excited to see another leader dedicated to tenant and housing Justice on the council I'm Leslie St Dre a Durham resident and member of mothers for ceasefire enduring Beyond policing here again to demand that you all announce you will introduce a resolution for a permanent ceasefire and all of historic Palestine an end to USA to Israel a lifting of The Siege on Gaza and release of all hostages and an end to the occupation of Palestine South Africa has laid out an incontrovertible case against Israel for its genocide in Gaza underscored by over 500 statements of genocidal intent by Israeli officials and political and military leaders here's yov Galant Israel's Minister of Defense we will eliminate everything if it doesn't take one day it will take a week take weeks even months we will reach all places and let's not forget netanyahu's statement that they will quote thin out Gaza the same South African lawyers handling this genocide case are now.

Prepping a separate lawsuit against the US and the UK for their complicity in Zionist war crimes Israel is refusing to let the UN investigators interview doctors about what really happened on October 7th when there are multiple accounts from survivors and even members of the military about Israel's indiscriminate killing of their own people which we also see in Gaza meanwhile our Senators overwhelmingly refused to allow the invest tigation into whether or not our tax dollars are being used for war crimes this along with a 100 children per day being killed 250 Palestinians per day total should provide more than enough information for you to join us in demanding an end to the Bloodshed paid for by our money that should be used to save lives and livelihoods here the mayor has suggested there are two sides to this issue and has chosen a closed door process there are no two sides to genocide and no atrocity is justification for genocide side if like Biden he's not ready to stand on the right side of History we.

Need you council members to take the lead and put forward a resolution that states where we as a City stand on these atrocities happening before our very eyes your silence is complicity 80% of Democrats and even the majority of Republican voters want a ceasefire if you're not yet ready to represent the majority of Durham constituents and use your leverage as our highest public servants to demand an end to the genocide ethnic cleansing starvation dehydration mutilation apartheid and occupation destroying Palestinians in all of Gaza after 105 days you should no longer be allowed to represent us or anyone for that matter Palestine is the litmus test you are currently failing in your leadership roles on this not one more scent for genocide not one more second of Silence let's remember MLK's call for a revolution of values in militarism and redistribute the wealth to end poverty money for workers amilies and housing not genocide please please introduce a resolution today thank you thank you your voice is appreciated in our community and next or last I.

Have Nastasia per Pia hello hello my name is Anastasia Pereira I've lived in Durham since 2019 today is my first time speaking at a city council meeting I am here to speak today to demand that the City Council adopt and pass the draft resolution for a permanent ceasefire and no Aid to so-called Israel submitted by ue150 and more than a dozen community and labor groups I'm certain that you've heard these figures before but they are worth repeating Dr residents are sending $4.3 million in taxes annually to Israel's military while North Carolina North Carolinians collectively are sending over 90 1 million this has contributed in part to Israel's indiscriminate killing of nearly 30,000 Palestinian civilians since October 7th including more than 8,000 children meanwhile residents here at home are in need of housing living wages at least $25 hour for our city workers affordable health care and of course no more indiscriminate killing of Innocents abroad I implore you to do the job that we hired you to do and use your.

Leverage as our council members to demand Congress stop using our tax on genocide and ethnic cleansing invest in the resources that we need here at home that alleviate violence like food Health Care emotional and mental health support housing security fun and affordable after school and summer programs for our children invest in our workers and in our communities here and divest from war and attacks on black and brown people there is no neutrality regarding genocide oppression and Injustice neutrality means siding with the oppressor and in this case that is Israel this is not a conflict between two Nations this is an ongoing genocide made with clear genocidal intent by an occupying State against an occupied population I am not advocating for solidarity with one people over another but rather an affirmation of respect and adherence to the implementation of national and international laws without exception hundreds of thousands of Palestinian lives are at imminent risk of death if a lasting ceasefire is not achieved and humanitarian Aid is not delivered without delay thank.

You thank you and I want to appreciate your voice in our community I think that's all we have for public comments and we'll move to our so pulled item but prior to that I'll just thank you thank you to all the folks who signed up today on MLK day on Monday the group that the mayor was had been wanting to convene finally convened the next steps is that group will be drafting a resolution that will be brought back to council so that we can take it up thank you thank you thank you I want to appreciate I apologize I don't have a timeline on that thank you I I do want to appreciate you sitting or standing in the gap on making sure that that resolution does move forward so I do want to appreciate all those in the room and those who've spoken to us over the last few meetings and just acknowledge that it is it is definitely a a tight tension but I do think think that the voices are loud in.

Our community and we know where we stand thank you madam presiding chair can I just add one clarifying piece the way resolutions excuse me it'll be determined whether it's a resolution or a statement which is different by this Council so just for for clarity a resolution which is the official official document and voice of the city would need to have four votes to be introduced and four votes to pass and I'm just sharing that so that folks can understand some of the mechanics the statement is is less for lack of a better word burdensome it does not require those official motions thank you can can you confirm we need four votes to bring it forward or just two correct so our process around resolution since it's an actual official document and it's a you know introduced into record Etc is that to be introduced in front of the body since it's the Entre ire body speaking in one voice it has to have four four votes to be introduced and then four four.

Votes to pass gotcha thanks thank you thank you we will move to our pulled I'm sorry item number five resolution in support of black teens in crisis thank you Madam president chair I'm just pulling this item it's this is the mayor's item and so he is not here to speak on that and so my my request I guess is to potentially put it on GBA to allow council members opportunity to send feedback via email or whichever way they want to do it to be incorporated this is actually a great example of how a resolution process works so that that is essentially my request is that it not be placed on consent since he's not here to speak on it and then that allows council members to provide feedback directly to him on any language changes that they want and then we can just take it up on GBA I guess whatever February 5th I think is our meeting yes thank you thank you so we're moving that to GBA and that.

Moves us along to our presentations item number 16 for participatory budged Madame presiding chair can we go ahead and settle the agenda is that an okay thing so that's our last task that we actually need to vote on and then we can move to presentation so if we do lose Quorum it doesn't impact anything just I'm wondering on if we need to add anything I guess so yes we can move forward to settle the agenda then so that's items you want to say each one you want to settle agenda okay thank you sorry I just don't want to forget and then we don't have four folks.

While you're getting that.

Together okay Madam manager thank you Madame presiding chair I do have for your upcoming council meeting I for consent items 1 through three and items 7 through 14 item five for GBA do we need to go ahead and settle the appointments before we do that cuz you're saying item one through three so I'm going to check with the clerk on that yes thank youing chair I do have a report on the nominations for Council number one the Durham City County Environmental Affairs board there is a tie currently three votes for Campbell and three votes for Auten and I was wondering if anyone wanted to shift their votes I will note that the the Duram City County Environmental Affairs board did submit a recommendation for art toban and so if anyone would like to move from Campbell to Auten that was the recommendation the only council member in the chamber at the moment would be council member rist would you like to shift your vote what what the only member that was.

What the only member in the chamber who can shift their vote is you oh got you gotcha I guess also wondering about the the seventh vote is that do we if we only have six votes do we have to and we don't resolve does it go back to the clerk council member we need four votes for nominations and right now there's a three three split I'm just wondering if we can keep it open until that that that seventh vote this is cast that would be mayor Williams and he is out of town unless you want to hold this to the next council meeting and put it on GBA yeah when we do that it's up to you so we're holding item one open for GBA okay thank you very much item number two human relations commission the unanimous consent is for asaiah Robertson the participatory budgeting steering committee appoint unanimous vote for Rosemary James and item four has been referred back to the city clerk's office thank you you want to.

Resettle so now I will set the agenda subsequent to the to the council deliberation on the agenda items so now we have for consent items two and three items 7 through 14 for GBA we have items one and item five and that's it that's it thank you Madame measure and if I could get a motion to approve the agenda do we have to approve the agenda right okay call for a motion motion to approve the agenda so moved second council member risk I heard from council member risk motion and second from council member Caballero all in favor raise your right hand so we're all set and we'll move to our presentations the first presentation is the participat participatory budgeting PB cycle 3 update and I'm turning it over to our staff Miss Ortiz yeah okay so good afternoon members of council my and a special welcome to council member cook on your first day today and so my name is Carmen Ortiz I am the budget engagement manager overseeing participatory budgeting and my colleague.

Here felon Thompson is the senior budget engagement analyst and we are here today to provide you with an update on our third cycle of participatory budgeting which I will be referring as PB as well as to announce our winning projects okay and so before I get started I'd like to take a minute to introduce you to to our team I'm very proud to have you know this team by my side PB cycle 3 would not be as incredible as we believe it's been without the hard work and passion of my team and starting with Andrew Holland right here he is the assistant budget director overseeing the house of performance and innovation in the budget office myself Carmen and my wonderful colleague Fallon that I am very excited to work along with we also had Samantha Pace she is our strategy and engagement analyst intern turn Samantha primarily focused on analyzing and working with our data Melissa AMW bank and Matthew Ken were our design interns they created all of the renderings.

That with the visuals that went in the ballot they also supported us with media website management and a lot of community engagement over the summer and we have Nathan orio here he is our data analyst Nathan focused on data management and a lot of the graph that you'll see in this presentation all right and so this is the agenda for this presentation I will take a few minutes to talk about participatory budgeting as primarily for those of you that are not familiar with what PB is I will touch very briefly on PB cycle one and PB cycle 2 but the meat of this presentation is to talk about you know PB cycle 3 so I will touch on the framework the different steps idea collection proposal development voting and then Fallon will talk to a little bit about our voting demographics as well the winning projects and the next steps all right and so PB is a democratic process that allows residents to participate in the city's budget process and so here are generally sort.

Of the steps of what it is usually it starts with an idea collection phase and this is where residents share ideas and projects they would like to see the city funded the second phase is the proposal development and vetting phase so this is when residents our community members work alongside our technical department as well as City staff to look at all the ideas that were submitted and vet them for feasibility the next step is the projects that move through the proposal development phase then they go on to voting and residents get to cast their vote for their priority or you know favorite projects and finally it's the implementation phase so this is when winning projects are actually built and funded and finally there's an evaluation and planning phase so this is when we internally analyze the data data reflect on the process and prepare for the next cycle and so why does PB matters and so PB increases Civic engagement it allows residents the opportunity to participate in their City's decisionmaking process.

It also build stronger and more collaborative relationships between residents government and Community organizations and so our budget delegates you know got to work with you know us the city staff as well technical departments for over 6 months vetting project ideas learning you know what it takes to build a sidewalk learning what the cost of of these things and so it's pretty exciting a learning opportunity for the residents and even us in in as a staff it also builds a more inclusive political participation especially by historically and marginalized communities and so a residents who otherwise would not be engaged in government get to submit ideas and work with the city to develop ideas and finally and my favorite part is that it empowers people to decide together how to spend public money and so community members from all walks of life different neighborhoods and background and experiences come together to look at project ideas develop these ideas and make decisions together to improve their communities and so PB started in.

Durham in 2018 when our Durham city council approved the guidelines and approved 2. $4 million in funding and appointed a PB steering committee to establish the goals and support the administrations and so generally PB funds projects that are related to infrastructure technological improvements and Community enhancements the $2.4 million in our in our first cycle of PB was divided amongst the three WS so each Ward had $800,000 any City Durham residents and all students 13 years old can participate in the process PB cycle 2 was a little bit different it's it you know started in 2020 as you all know there was a pandemic and so there this was an very different cycle and so in order to skip on PB our Durham Council approved $1 million in funding to support the communities most affected by.

Covid and so we started our work in PB cycle 3 in the spring of 2022 during this time we spent significant time reviewing the recommendations from the thirdparty evaluation conducted by North Carolina Central University we had meetings with our internal Department that were part of our PB cycle one and we also met with cities across the country to learn from their PB Cycles our goal was to learn from what we did in PB cycle one and build on the best practices so that we were able to build a more Innovative PB cycle 3 and so we unboarded a a brand new PB steering committee some of which are here we unboarded a new PB steering committee who decided on three different goals and so the goals was to engage more diverse populations to implement projects that serve the most underserve and marginalized communities in Durham and to increase Community engagement in the decision-making process of the city and so additionally our PB SEC revert it back to the.

Original scope of PB which is to fund onetime cap project on city property DHA property and or private land. Donated and so our 15 member P steering committee under the leadership of Axel era Kenneth Webb and Angela Jimerson decided to move away from funding projects based on Ward as we did in PB cycle one and set a goal that 60% of the projects be fall in a geographic area based on equity and so our PB steering committee worked with our data works and our equity and inclusion Department to determine which were the area the focus areas for the parameters of this map and so the three Focus areas that they voted on was communities or neighborhoods with high percentage people of color with household incomes under 48,000 and where high percentage of residents take public.

Transportation some additional Innovations for our PB cycle 3 we extended our timeline to allow for planning and adaptability and more time for a proposal development phase so that we were able to incorporate more Community engagement in the process and so some of the areas some of the additional changes that we did we expanded our Equity Matrix so we did have an equity and impact Matrix in PB Cycle One however we ex expanded it so that we can incorporate so that our budget delegates were able to use data from neighborhood Compass to score project project we also expanded our impact Matrix so that we were able to score projects analyzing the population that would be served something that was also very unique to PB cycle 3 was that we incorporated co-design and so this allowed our design interest to work with our residents to design the projects and so in the spring once we start implementing the projects we're going to go back to the community into additional Community engagement so.

That residents are part of Designing the projects are going to go in their communities. And so some of the other recommendations that came from our evaluation from North Carolina Central and conversations with other cities was to incorporate more appreciation in the process and so we were absolutely happy to do that and so in the summer of 23 we hosted a rooftop rooftop celebration when which we invited all of our budget delegates our technical departments our PB steering committee members our budget director joined us and some of you members of council joined us and this is really a neat opportunity for us to thank our budget delegates and all our volunteers for their hard work and so our budget delegates were with us for about six months including about three weeks of training before we start idea collection and then they spend time going out into the community speaking with residents about the projects doing research for the project as well as meeting with their technical staff and so we wanted to thank them and.

Appreciate them for their hard work and their family of course and that was pretty exciting some of the additional things that were pretty exciting about PB cycle 3 was that we were able to partner with our cities Innovation team who designed three ballot for us and then took it for user testing and so right before we kicked off voting we did a user testing event so we were able to test our ballots before we rolled them out so our Innovation team tested both the paper options as well as the online ballot and here I'm just going to take a few few minutes to just kind of run you through PB cycle 3 and so idea collection took place as I said the fall of 2022 when we collected over 600 ideas so again we went into the community spoke to Residents and gathered over 600 project ideas in the spring proposal development took place we had over 260 ideas that moved onto the proposal development process and were reviewed by our budget.

Delegates committee engagement took place over the summer so what we did over the summer is we took all of the project ideas that had moved forward the project ideas that moved in the in The Proposal development process and you know moved on for feasibility equity and impact we took him back to the community so that we have conversations with the residents that would be most impacted by these projects so we ask questions like you know if this Project's implemented in your neighborhood would you support this project do you think this project would impact your community and so the projects that moved on into voting were projects that again moved for feasibility Equity impact and had high support from the residents that would be impacted by these projects then these projects went onto the ballot for Resident voting and so right now we are in the implementation phase and so we will be incorporating the co-design in the next few months so that again as we start sort of implementing and working.

With our technical department on these projects our resident will provide us more information on how they would like to see these projects implemented and so what I'm going to do in the next few minutes is sort of touch on all the different faces starting with idea collection and provide you with a little bit of the demographic as well as the proposal development and voting and so during the idea collection as I've mentioned we had over 600 ideas submitted most of the most most common ideas were around sidewalk Parks security and lighting and so we engage our we prioritize our engagement in the hard to in the heart to reach community so we understand that there were communities that in order to hear from them we had to put our boots on the ground and go to these communities and so our goal was for everyone in Durham to participate in the process and so what you see here are the demographic information from the 600 ideas collected over the fall of 2022.

And so the data shows that the majority of residents that participated were people of color and the highest percentage of participants were those under the $10,000 yearly incomes and here what you see is the data details for the engagement that we LED over the summer so these were the residents that again we had an opportunity to speak to over the summer and gather feedback about how the projects would impact them and although we you know although about 20% did not complete the raise and ethnicity questions and about 30% of the residents skipped income and the data shows that there was a good representation from residents across raise and income.

And so as I've mentioned very briefly projects go from being submitted by residents in idea collection then through the proposal development phase before they go into voting and so we were 629 ideas were submitted out of those 629 ideas there were over 100 comments made about these ideas that were submitted approximately 200 271 of those ideas Advanced to the proposal development phase and so our budget delegates who are volunteer residents were able to work with our technical staff to vet these for feasibility equity and impact we were very excited to work with our budget delegates our budget delegates were we had a very D diverse group across race gender age education and background and so these budget delegates worked to do the research that these projects and do the scoring so all this came from our budget delegates and not us and so generally the way that it started is our technical departments provided with an initial scoring on feasibility so they basically scored for you know for cost estimates.

So they were able a score for project is way above the cost estimat or around they also provided us with information about you know is this project idea within the city limits which is very important is it within the scope of the work that the city can do and so the projects that move forward will then continue to be analyzed by our budget delegates and so the first thing our budget delegates did was provide an equity score and so just keep keep in mind that every project was scored by at least three different budget delegates and so our goal was that every budget you know had multiple people score it and so our budget delegate looked at quantitative data to identify underserved neighborhoods so they looked at questions like what is the medium household income in this neighborhood or Community what is the percent of of Transit ridership what is the percent of Youth population and percentage of people of color is this a food desert and so our our goal was to analyze.

Equity using multiple data points our budget delegates then scored projects for impact so it did a qualitative analysis to determine the proposals impact so we thought about how will this project potentially impact their residents so they as as ask questions does this provide a missing resource if so what is the condition of this resource will this projects serve just one group of people are Citywide and so they asked a number of questions so we're able to determine who and how will our residents be impacted by the.

Projects and here are the 10 projects that made it to the ballot we're very excited about the projects that made it into the ballot they reflect our resident and their priorities and you know the hard work of our budget elit who spend so much time analyzing over 271 different projects and so what you can see here is that our projects range from you know Parks and Recreation to safety to arts and culture and they also serve residents across the city so they're not concentrated in one specific area but they're all around the city and really serve different community members from the youth to the Elder and different interest points as we're very excited about these projects over here and before we move on to the project and the data I want to take a minute to talk a little bit about about our voting process one of the things that it's very special and unique about Durham Is our commitment to equity and so unlike other cities who only use sort.

Of like an online platform at the city of Durham you know we were committed to also use a paper ballot to ensure that every single resident in the city of dorm have an opportunity to V vote without any barriers and so our paper ballots we primarily used when we were out in the community and so when we were out you know canvasing our neighborhood when we were at the Department of Health and Human Services or at the Duram bus station we went to the Durham County Jail this is what we had we took this into the community with us now our online ballot was more of accessed by those residents who had you know the comfort of their iPads and phones and the comfort of their home and these were the residents that accessed our ballots via newsletters and eblast advertisements through our large social media presence you know Instagram Twitter Facebook and so on and information sent out from our Communications Department we were also very excited to work with dur Public School.

Administration to ensure that students voice are also heard through the PB process and so we work very closely with dur Public School administrators and teachers so that our students were able to participate in the process all right perfect then I'm going to go ahead and F is going to join you to talk to a little bit more about the projects thank. You thank you Carmen good afternoon I am one of the residents impacted by the Duke Energy power outage so if I sound and look a little bit frazzled it's probably because of that so thank you for bearing with me we are excited to highlight our efforts thus far for Pb cycle 3 we had over 12,000 votes with 2,886 of those collect there from our Duran public school students about half of our ballots were collected online and about half were collected in person using our paper ballots we continue to try to keep PB cycle 3 Community Leed we hired seven paid volunteers that helped us with Outreach doing voting and again.

We vocus we focus on our undeserved communities twice weekly during voting you could find us at the Duram bus station and or at the Department of Health and Human Services collecting votes from residents we spent time canvasing our undeserved neighborhoods and our Target neighborhoods including bragtown Merck Moore line Park also we collected over 200 votes from our Justice involved individuals at the Durham County jail before we go into our voting demogr we wanted to show the racial composition of the city of Durham and Durham public schools for the city of Durham we have about 36% African-American are black 44% white and 14% Latino we want to show the demographics for Duran Public Schools since we did not as Carmen mentioned ask any Dem demographic questions from our student ballots for DPS we have about 40% black or African-American 19% white and 34 4% Latino the meeting income for Durham is a little more than $70,000 the data we collected from PB voting is representative of Durham this slide shows our demographic.

Breakdown for both our paper and our online ballots the our racial demographic information here shows that most of our voters were people of color income unfortunately is not a question that's frequently asked and answered on surveys and our data showed here that 22% of our voters left it unanswered up next I'm going to give you a breakdown of what our online and our paper ballot demographics looks like here here is our online ballot we expected our excuse me our online demographics to show residents with higher incomes and our data also reports that 66% of our online voters were white here it shows our paper ballot demographics we spent considerable time prioritizing our marginalized and underserved neighborhoods we primarily use our paper ballots in these areas and we're proud that 66% of our paper ballot voters were people of color you see here that 15% of the voters did skip that race question yet we are confident that those voters were also people of color because we spent time Gathering these paper ballots.

From places like the Durham bus station the Department of Health and Human Services when we canvas our neighborhood our Target neighborhoods and when we went to the Durham Housing Authority properties it's also fair to say that these voters were on the go at the Durham bus station or at the Department of Health and Human Services and that may have that may be the reason why we see that 15% raise question unanswered moving on quickly to income again it's a question that's not very popular on surveys and our data shows that 36% of the voters skipped it it could be that these voters in those areas may have been of lower income and may not have been confident sharing that information with us here I want to highlight our student ballot demographics we reached out to all of Duram public school high schools and middle schools these are the ones you see on the graphs that were represented and participated in PB cycle 3 voting we had 16 out of the 177 high.

Schools participate and eight out of the nine middle schools okay now for the reason why we're all here today I would like to present to you the PB cycle 3 winning projects 77% of the locations of our winning projects are within the target areas that Carmen mentioned earlier our number one project is the security measures at at Durham housing ad D'Orsey this project by far was the most popular project across all of our ballots that's our paper our online and our student ballot the estimated project budget for this is 110,000 our number two project is the lighting at pars with an estimated budget of $887,000 little over that our number three project is a sustainable improvements to pars with an estimated project budget of $110,000 our number four project is The Pedestrian safety on East Trinity Avenue with an estim estimated project budget of $990,000 and last but not least our number five project is the teen equipment at Rex centers coming in a little under $85,000 let's take a little bit of time.

And look at a few details on each of our five winning projects this is the security measures at Durham housing Ador homes this project will install cameras debt boat blcks and lighting to benefit more than 200 families in the corn Wallace Road Community and 80 seniors at Price steel place our lighting and parts project will add lights to the basketball courts at moring Park moring Road Park rather the soccer fields at Holton career center and the parking lot at Edison Johnson Rec Center the sustainable improvements to park projects will install water bottle filling stations bike repair stations and solar power cellular charging stations at several city parks across Durham including lion Park and marmore Park The Pedestrian safety on East Trinity Avenue project will install pedestrian safety and traffic calming measure measures such as sidewalks crosswalks and signage along East Trinity and at the intersection with Avendale Avenue this is our teen equipment at Rec Centers the locations for this project include the Durham teen center at lion Park Holton career and Resource Center.

Walltown Rec Center WD Hill Rec Center and Weaver Street re Center this project will invest in our team populations by upgrading the hardware and software equipment at those Center. Locations we are excited about our winning projects and are looking forward to their implementation we continue to incorporate evaluation through each phase of PB and are very thankful to our department of equity and inclusion for helping us to strengthen the equity in our process Innovation is the bread and butter of PB our innovation team will run two studies about participatory budgeting one about voters impressions of the PB projects and the other to examine if voting in PB builds trust in government we are also glad to report that North Carolina cental University will perform a thirdparty evaluation of PB cycle 3 that is expected to be completed by the summer of this year participatory budgeting would not be possible without all of our supporters and those that help us out throughout this cycle we are so very glad for our PB steering committee all.

Of our budget delegates the technical departments that helped us so much Our Community Partners and organizations the Department of Health and Human Services Durham Housing Authority the Durham County Sheriff's Office Durham Public Schools Kids voting Durham and all our resident and community volunteers we we would not be able to do this without you if there are any of our PB steering committee members or any of our budget delegates that are in the audience at this time would you please stand so that we can recognize.

You thank you all very much for your help at this time we will entertain any questions that you may have thank you for the great presentation lots of details and exciting projects I'm looking to my colleagues if you have questions council member cabier I don't really have tons of questions I just want to say thank you I I was pretty close and personal as one of the liais on to PB and I know it was a huge CommunityWide effort I'm glad that we I know the goal was at least 12,000 votes I'm glad we met the goal I know that pb1 was 10,000 so that's a pretty good Improvement and I'm of course going to shout out Riverside for the responses from the high School role Pirates role and just say that I look forward to the next round I know that there's going to be a lot of lessons learned we we learn each round and I just also want to commend council member Johnson former council member Johnson this was one of her.

Big Ideas that she brought to council and something that she advocated for fiercely and each round gets better and so just want to shout her out because Durham wouldn't have this without that thank you thank you Council M risk sure want Echo those comments and just thank you for the presentation and all the the excitement around participat I can't even say participatory budgeting great projects great involvement in the community so it's a wonderful Pro program and again I I also want to appreciate council member former council member Johnson for bringing this forward I just had two questions so one and I also appreciate the thoughtfulness about doing an evaluation each round to sort of figure out what we're learning how that could improve the program so could you say more about what you learned from the second round evaluation and how that influen the sort of design of of phase or cycle three sure so the first p PB cycle one was evaluated the second one we did not do an evaluation one okay.

Yeah okay so there is a North Carolina Central doing a very extensive recommendation and there were a lots of things so some of the things was an extended timeline so that we would spend more time for example doing the proposal development phase and the engagement phases so that was kind of one of the big things also incorporate appreciation mayb is a lot of work because there's a lot of Engagement so that's one of the things that really came out to sort of have more time so that you're not sort of so one of the big differences is in PB cycle one we were in line with the budget calendar year which was very tight and so with extending the timeline we were able to spend more time during the proposed development phase which was a little bit over six months as well as continue to do community engagement which is the key so one thing that was very different between those two cycles is that before we took the projects to the ballot we.

Went back to the community and ask them do you support these these project ideas and we had two projects that actually did change based on that Community engagement any additional changes that I can think on the top of my head were to continue to strengthen and develop the relationship with the community and so that's also part of why we incorporated Community engagement in the entire process so in other Cycles we didn't continue the engagement in the implementation process and so right now we will be doing more engagement as we Implement every project throughout the process great I appreciate again the thoughtfulness and the sort of the the creativity and the sort of intention about those evaluations and how that influences the next round second question I want to I want to Echo U councilwoman Cabo's comments about Riverside Pirates royal pirat royal Pirates role but the question I had about that was so clearly Riverside had way more participation than other schools and I think one of the middle.

Schools did as well why is that is that just because there's a person in that school that really makes it happen there or what's the what's the secret sauce to make it a little more engage across all high schools and middle schools it's it's a great question and so we spent a lot of time working with Dr Public Schools you know we reached out to Administration as well as principles and so the ones that got more participation were the ones that we were able to have more you know have more principles and stuff receptive to it and so you know some principles for example like Riverside they just let us in and we spend a lot of time other schools weren't as receptive to that and so I think it comes down to hopefully in the in the next round we'll have more schools that are willing to give us more time great thanks again you're welcome thank you I I would just add that I appreciate the demographic information I.

Think it's important that we highlight how how we go out of our way to get that type of demographic information and half of the half of them being through paper surveys is really important to to keep in mind so that we don't lose that paper touch so to speak yeah thank you thank you I just want to Echo the council members that I thought youall did an excellent job and that was an excellent presentation you answered my question as part of your answer to council member wrist but I want to say to to Echo council member Freeman that I think that the paper ballot initiative was was really intentional really important and I appreciate that and youall spoke specifically to folks who are incarcerated and I thought that that was also a great addition to this and I'm glad that those voices got heard thank you very much that's my copy there yeah just real quick when when would the next well obviously be evaluating into the spring.

So would that line up again with the municipal election in 25 am I right on that timeline I think so cuz we would kick off in the spring of 2025 so idea collection would potentially be in the fall of 2025 but you know that's the things where we can always have more internal conversations if there's kind of a challenge with that yeah no I just one of the things that I noted was that I saw folks volunteer years at polling sites and I thought that that was a a very brilliant move cuz folks were already they they're voting and so to see PB people teling I think while you're already voting for this other thing yeah sure I should continue my civic duty and I think it'll give us that that kind of Runway to really incorporate I did a kids voting event at student U with folks I think I did two separate ones around PB voting and and one of the things that I've always really appreciated is how eager our.

Students are and our youth are to vote which is you know we purposely designed 13 and over for a reason and so to give to to watch those kids actually click that oh like this thing that I'm voting for I actually get a say and so many times our youth don't get a say and so having watched that and and watching them make the connection obviously the teen equipment was a big win and and interestingly so was the the security measures like it was interesting to see folks say yeah everyone should feel safe and these were 15 and 16y olds so I thought that was really an interesting thing to observe so again so much respect and gratitude for yall and I'm excited I know it's a lot of work but I'm excited for pb3 thank you thank you I appreciate that and we're moving along to item number 17 the presentation on affordable housing Omnibus affordable housing Deep dive and I'll just give a little introduction I appreciate the clerk on submitting the.

Memo for me I just want to make sure that they can get that presentation pulled up so I'll start with just a little bit more background information to say that this is a cumulative look at the work from the last year of the council in presentations that we received from residents in the community experts and Advocates all throughout fall of 201 22 through the spring of 20 spring of 2023 our presenters today are our interns who were brought in under mayor O'Neal and I know that this was meant to be a fall presentation of 2023 23 and it it's come up in January we're finally here but Bryce mckel is a fourth generation derite and homeowner raising two fifth generation derite girls with his wife Rosemary he comes from a estate family and his parents have owned and operated apple realy on guest Ro for nearly 25 years and Joe Wilson is a master's student in the department of city and Regional planning at UNCC Chapel Hill specializing in Housing and Community.

Development and I'm going to turn it over to you two gentlemen to bring us through the Omnibus all right thank you very much so yes we are the mayor mayoral interns I'm Bryce mckill and and this is Joe Wilson so in 2022 the Durham city council began deep Research into the city's housing issues the council heard 11 presentations from local experts and a number of City departments and local organizations former mayor O'Neal asked us to compile the information from those presentations and compile it into one easily accessible place so we have chosen to make an Omnibus available all of the relevant information from those presentations and this will be going on the city's website so that it is available to the public online so in the 20 minutes we have today we the today's presentation is not a replacement for those 11 presentations but it should serve as a helpful recap of that information so we've divided those presentations into five broad categories that we're going to go over today income and affordability private.

Development subsidized and public housing evictions and finally homelessness so with that take it away Joe all right so just to bear in mind that all of this is taking place amid rapid population growth especially among wealthier residents moving into Durham this has put a lot of upward pressure on rent and home prices and is really one of the driving factors behind the affordability crisis that we see but it's also a product of a long history of housing additions and policies we unfortunately don't really have time to get into those at this presentation but they're important to bear in mind as we consider the present situation there are different approaches toward remedying the housing situation some are based on private practices others on more public intervention but we're going to see across all present ation is that no one solution exists no Silver Bullet to solve all of these issues but with that in mind we're going to move on to the first major topic which is housing affordability so to paraphrase a.

Comment from council member Middleton during the presentations there can't really be a conversation about housing affordability without it also being about income there are two sides to affordability one is how much housing costs the other is how much households can pay so we often hear that households shouldn't spend more than 30% of their income on housing Reginal Johnson for the Community Development presentation said that for individuals that's Financial advice but for the city it becomes a question of how we can actually make that viable for everyone how we can have safe and decent housing available at that 30% income level even for those with lower incomes so for the purposes of programs using money from HUD income levels are defined in relation to the area median income there's a little bit of nuance to that but generally you can see the income levels here for a given household size so we just have a couple of graphs showing Trends in income and rent the first one comes from the data Works.

Presentation and it shows a stratification of income you see higher income jobs becoming even more higher income and lower income jobs becoming even more lower income in relation to that median rent figure in the middle the second one is from the triangle Apartment Association this shows rent from 2017 to Mid 2023 as you can see there's a very large Spike during 2021 in the first half of 2022 which leveled off during the second half of 2022 but is still elevated well above where it was a few years ago and then this is a graph from that Community Development presentation showing how renting versus ownership is distributed at different income levels a big takeaway here is that home ownership doesn't really become viable until you get up close to that area median income level as Regal Johnson pointed out that can make it really hard to save wealth at the lower income levels for a lot of people home equity is the main form of savings and that can't really.

Happen when you can't afford a down payment in the first place so for what the city can actually do regarding the situation North Carolina is a dilal state that means that cities only have certain powers allocated them by the state so Durham cannot require the inclusion of affordable housing in developments but the city does have a special Charter Authority which lets it incent incentivize housing through things like density bonuses or other incentives of value which the attorneys office and the planning department have been looking into all right so briefly on private development we have a chart here credit to Sarah Young for this infographic and this chart describes the development process so development Begins by asking whether something is allow by the zoning so for example if I wanted to build a Workforce housing option like a duplex all I have to do is check the zoning and if it's residential compact Urban or Suburban multif family it's allowed by right and I can build it without special permission if the current zoning does.

Not permit the proposed development then the owner developer has to seek rezoning through Council so this requires site plan which can be expensive and together with application fees realtor fees land costs developer can easily spend 65,000 or more before getting approval to break ground someone looking to build a home might be prepared to spend that kind of money but if rezoning is at the discretion of the planning department then this investment becomes a bit of a gamble so risking 65,000 only to be told no is not a risk that smaller developers are willing to make most of the local developer most of the local developers are going to stick to by right development options which often don't include small multif family housing so if we're going to encourage Workforce housing built by local developers it's recommended by the triangle Apartment Association and the Durham regional Association Realtors that affordable options be made available by right so at the time of writing there is a new development ordinance being written that.

Could allow for such housing this is unfortunately outside the scope of this project but we do have high hopes for that undertaking so development has been occurring at a rapid rate over the past couple years but so far for reasons that are entirely clear density bonuses and other incentives haven't been very effective at encouraging smaller local developers most of that development has been by large corporate outof State developers but a strong pipeline of apartment deliveries has more or less caught up with population growth and as we saw from that earlier chart rents increases have seemed to level off this is good news that it has seemed to hit an equilibrium but of course the bad news is that they've stabilized above area medium income affordability I don't have a whole lot of time to talk much about environmental concerns so for more information on that particular topic I would Point curious listeners to the Lick Creek water quality presentation so finally for this section I'm going to get into a few.

Recommendations most of these came from the triangle Apartment Association and from the experts chosen by the Durham regional Association of Realtors the first recommendation was the most common one bring back the housing roundtables these discussions brought together relevant stakeholders from several different backgrounds to look at housing situation from all angles another recommendation from the apartment association was to invest in affordable housing preservation fund to buy and finance affordable housing the Durham affordable housing Loan Fund already already exists to do this but funds are currently exhausted I believe they exhausted in 2022 another suggestion was to streamline development process for adus and when appropriate loosening some land use restrictions that could allow for more land where Multiplex units can be built by right and finally there was about 2 million from the 2019 affordable housing Bond for adus that went used there was talk of reallocating that money I don't know what happened to it but that could be used to help incentivize adus that promise more affordable rents all right so from the sort of.

Private development picture we're going to look now at subsidize and public housing this is mainly through the Durham Housing Authority which gets H sorry gets funding from HUD and so it has to use those HUD income criteria which can be kind of strict so at the time of the DHA presentation about 9,000 people were using at least one of their services and there were thousands more on waiting lists these residents had an average income of $111,000 a year paid an average of $300 a month in rent about a quarter of them were employed and around 40% or under 18 15% seniors and among overall about 40% had a disabling condition so the first DHA program that we're going to look at is Section 8 the housing Choice Voucher Program this works by giving residents vouchers to fund apartments in the private Market the tenant pays 30% of their income as rent and then the DHA pays the remainder this is the Housing Authority's largest program but it does face some challenges.

One of them is that a lot of landlords don't accept tenants who use Section 8 vouchers which can make it hard for voucher holders to find find an apartment another thing is that the Housing Authority limits what is considered reasonable rent that's because they have to pay a lot of that rent they have the authority to raise that number which would open up more apartments for voucher holders but the flip side is that it would reduce the number of vouchers that they could afford to provide and they'd really like to be able to provide as many vouchers as they can because there's a huge demand they kept the weight list and only open it up periodically but it's estimated that around 10,000 households are looking for Section 8 vouchers the other major program is public housing which has a pretty bad reputation in the United States to paraphrase in exchange during the DHA presentation public housing is essentially a failed model in the United States because of chronic underfunding.

By Congress still a lot of people in Durham use public housing and want to use it the Housing Authority has around 1,700 units almost all of which are occupied and over 5,000 people in waiting lists but in 2018 it was designated a troubled agency because of poor building quality and the repairs that it needs are a lot more expensive than the grant that HUD gave them Mr Scott estimated that the repairs would cost $50 million over 5 years and the grant was only for $15 million it's one of those things that compounds over time when repairs have to be deferred they end up getting more and more expensive and as we mentioned it's a national issue Mr Scott cited a HUD statement that Nationwide HUD had underfunded public housing by 76 billion over its history one strategy that DHA is following moving forward is utilizing more mixed income housing you can see this in the plans for the ddnp development M downtown so on to some recommendations the first one is finding.

A way to get more landlords to accept those Section 8 vouchers whether that's through incentives or as a contingency for city funding there's also a need for partners who can provide things like child care and job Readiness training for people using DHA Services in a couple of the presentations noted that Staffing shortages have caused administrative difficulty the association of realair suggested partnering with local colleges to build a pipeline for city jobs administrative jobs and The Association of Realtors and DHA had a couple of suggestions as far as reforming D payment assistance and utilizing Section 8 vouchers for Mortgage Assistance instead of just rent okay moving moving on to evictions evictions are unfortunately back to pre-pandemic levels according to data works the apartment association and the eviction diversion programs talked on the causes of evictions not surprisingly non-payment of rent is Far and Away the most common cause this can mean as little as a single month and the apartment association made a point to clarify that most evictions are a matter of $1,000 or.

Less the eviction process is usually very quick the trial is often under 15 minutes 90 to 95% of tenants are unrepresented and almost all judgments are default judgments as the tenants don't show up to court the eviction virgin program works to try and prevent eviction judgments and to avoid filings in the first place they keep an attorney and a par legal onsite at court to provide counsel to tenants facing eviction and eviction diversion raises defenses finds facts and sometimes just buys tenants enough time to find another place to stay so the EV eviction diversion program and the apartment association both had similar recommendations for minimizing evictions in Durham since most evictions as I said occur for $1,000 or less in unpaid rents a little bit of emergency rental assistance can go a long way in helping these tenants keep their homes Durham did have an emergency rental assistance fund for this earlier in the pandemic but funds were exhausted in 2022 and now there are only a few scattered means of assistance through.

Social services and other nonprofits the second recommendation is to increase funding for legal aid the legal wing of the eviction diversion program program according to Legal Aid each lawyer was paid at a rate of about 60,000 per year and provided representation for 120 households each year legal aid says their attorneys have historically assisted 85 of those families in keeping their home and allowed them to stay there which at about 500 per family served is a seems to be a very cost-effective way of preventing these people from entering our homelessness Continuum of Care all right and that brings us to our last topic homelessness like with income levels HUD has some specific categories here which you can see below the Continuum of Care is a network which works to prevent homelessness and to care for those who are experiencing homelessness the presentation by Colin Davis went into some detail on how roles and funding are distributed in germs Continuum of Care but broadly it provides a few types of services the front door is entry.

Point formerly called coordinated entry that's where everybody who entering system comes in Street Outreach is a program to help connect those who need services with entry point like we said a goal of the Continuum of Care is to avoid instances of homelessness in the first place that's what divers is about things like connecting people with nearby family or friends who can let them stay until they're back on their feet Emergency Shelters are temporary and only for the literally homeless category from HUD there is some permanent supporting sorry permanent Supportive Housing available but it's only for those who are both chronically homeless and who have a disabling condition otherwise the rapid rehousing program provides temporary financial support to help households move from homelessness to a stable housing situation there are of course a number of challenges facing the Continuum of Care some of them are going to sound familiar some of them are more unique to homelessness the first one is just limited capacity and funding there are a lot of variables in how long.

It can take for somebody to find permanent housing and a big one is how crowded the system is from 2017 to 2021 the time it took to find permanent housing gr by 6 months and part of that like we saw with the DHA is how hard it is to find Fair rent placement the harder it is for somebody to find a permanent home the longer they stay in a shelter and the less room there is for others who need that oops homelessness is also impacted by Mental Health conditions substance abuse and mistrust of the system Colin Davis pointed out that as it stands the homeless system is really a separate entity from the public health system even though the two of them are very closely tied which leads us to our last challenge that the data and support networks are fractured germs Continuum of Care collects some data on what services it provides but partly for privacy reasons it doesn't really talk with other City systems and since people experiencing homelessness have almost by definition.

Slipped through some sort of official cracks they can be undercounted or misrepresented in official data which can lead to a lot of work for case workers and ultimately make it more difficult for people to get the assistance that they need so just some final thoughts unfortunately the housing crisis is very complicated with over 11 hours of presentations there was a lot of data and good points that we just couldn't get to today I hope we've made them all available within the Omnibus for the public to look at but housing is an issue with many different stakeholders and priorities it's simultaneously subject to Broad economic Trends but it's also personal to the individual and it's the case that a lot of times those can frequently butt heads and make life difficult for us all but despite the difficulty and complexity we do want to thank the council for making this priority over the past couple years we really appreciate all the work you've put in and we're hopeful for progress as.

You begin to implement Solutions based on these presentations thank you so much thank you I appreciate the presentation in the time it's taking you to go through the 11 hours of presentations I did want to just first say that I spoke with former mayor Alain O'Neal last night or yesterday and she did say she did share that she wanted to say she would not be here but she was definitely going to be watching and she wanted me to clearly state that she was very proud of you both and she appreciated you going through all of that data and collecting compiling it for us of course I you do it and I'm turning to my colleagues for questions if there are any I see council member cook also an excellent job y'all I thought that was I know yall had a lot to tackle and I thought that was really well done I I had a quick question about the investing in affordable housing preservation and you had talked about the Loan Fund that.

Was exhausted in 2022 could you tell me a little bit more about what that fund was serving and and where the money was coming from and then kind of subsequently with the exhaustion how that occurred and so I would probably point back to the presentation from the triangle Apartment Association I believe that presentation talked more about that particular fund where it went and where it could go in the future yeah not a manager thank you for the opportunity there was a a Loan Fund for a a development loan fund that was made available in partnership with with self-help and that is the fund that is being referred to as having been exhausted so there were multiple partners I believe the total Loan Fund was about $10 million in total with the city having a contribution to that so local developers nonprofit developers were able to access those loan funds in order to do you know their their developments at at prices that allow the projects to be affordable.

It is it really is expected to be a revolving type Loan Fund but it takes time for the developers to be able to repay based upon the conditions we we do have I think there is some funding still left in forever home Durham to help begin to replenish that Loan Fund along with the other. Partners couple comments yeah one Echo council member Cook's comments you you've summarized a lot of information in a short presentation so thanks for doing all that I do feel like I have to admit and I would appreciate comments from councilwoman Freeman I feel like we're we're just kind of stepping in this has been a long conversation for the last couple years right so we're just you know at least Council cook and I are just stepping into this there's a lot of recommendations in here so I'm kind of wondering what was the what's the what's what was the the plan for all those recommendations is that being already being acted on or what where do.

We because there's a lot there and I think that's that's up to the council to either prioritize or figure out what what items or which recommendations we want to move forward or look or look more deeply into and so it'll be a matter of us making that decision I think all of this information is for us in the public because I don't think it all sits in the city to manage as well and so I think it's a partnership though I'm hoping that the subcommittee on housing committee's meetings will continue and that will be a good space to kind of continue this dialogue with all the resources around the Omnibus available to anyone who serves on it thanks and I would also add like ask council member cabier she's been here almost as long as I have maybe a month shy yeah thank you I've actually asked the mayor because one of the recommendations is to kind of reconvene a larger broader housing group with both you know people who have been historically involved in.

Affordable housing but also including people who are doing Transit and land use to be more comprehensive and so that is something that I have asked him if I could lead and so we'll be providing updates in the next month or so around been having conversations with Russell Pierce from housing for New Hope I think council member Freeman was at our last joint City County meeting where we were also talking about the Continuum of Care and some of the gaps within our homelessness work and so we all know that this is broader the idea of like affordable housing there's been conversations around work Force development housing including the county and schools in those conversations so to council members Freeman's point it it's going to be bigger than just the city it kind of has to be and look forward to providing feedback to council definitely sorry and just one last comment I do want to as the council's representative to the durma Housing Authority board I did want to.

Say for the record I think the number is maybe I think one in 20 residents in Durham lives in public housing in Durham this is an important source of housing here the comments in the presentation suggested failed model bad reputation I think that from my perspective there's no reason public housing can't work it works around the world I think we just have not invested in public housing in this country our federal government has really abdicated their responsibility for that but I think as a model there's no reason public housing can't work and I think to the tune of$ 76 billion do when you say underfunded it does kind of hurt itself so I understand council member Caballero yeah just to council member was point thank you for bringing that up a lot of folks come to us and wilda City definitely has a critical role to play so many of these things are are we could put the whole city budget which was last year $610 million last year we could put all of.

That money every cent into affordable housing or into housing it would not cover what we need and so this is a time where I you know ask residents remember elections matter not just at the local level but at your state there's plenty of states that that have got in the game around affordable housing in a much more aggressive way than North Carolina has and maybe why historically in North Carolina it has been maybe Urban centers in the last 10 years that have really struggled those struggles are being felt in rural communities and smaller communities as well as we see an influx of residents North Carolina was the third fastest growing State last year and the year before and that growth is not going anywhere and so putting pressure on our Folks at the general assembly to really be a partner with us local government folks on housing because we all know it's housing underpins so many other things in people's lives thank you and I would be remissed if I didn't add that I think.

That that's where the the the work has to happen is more so at the state level and then pushing around not just the the rent level but the actual tenants rights so there's there's a lot of work there there's a lot to be done and so again if any other questions before I let these gentlemen depart thank you I really appreciate you being here today and a great presentation this information will be available on the city's website and I am working with the clerk to make sure that the links to all of the meetings so that you can see them you can review them I know you weren't here but that information is stored so thank you thank you and we are moving to our final presentation with the update and presentation on bipar partisan infrastructure law and the inflation reduction act and others and I'm going to turn it over to miss Winbush good afternoon presiding chair Freeman other council members Bera wimbush Deputy City Manager for operations at your January 4th.

Meeting city council work session you asked for an update on the federal and state grants from the B bipartisan infrastructure law and Ira inflation reduction act so we have prepared a presentation to update you on the status of the city's efforts to obtain These funds future funding opportunities and how the city will maximize the funding moving forward our presenters today are Mary Grace ston King she is a business services administrator and the city manager's office Mary Grace is responsible for the day-to-day coordination of this work in our office of across the organization and Julia brenman is a grants analyst in the finance department Julia is the former c u Mo intern and she's Pro provided support to this work when she was in the city manager's office Julia also continues to support our arer team as a member of the team so now I'm going to turn it over to Mary.

Grace all righty bear with me while I I pull up our.

Presentation all right great all right good afternoon Madam presiding chair council members and city manager page as Deputy city manager Winbush mentioned I'm Mary Grace ston King and I am the business services administrator in the city manager's office we are really excited to be here today to present to you an all an update on the city's efforts to secure funding for the bipartisan infrastructure law and which will we we will refer refer to throughout the presentation as B and the inflation reduction act which we will refer to as Ira I also before we want get started wanted to recognize we have a lot of support here and the people who really do the work I just help facilitate some of it so I wanted to recognize folks from our general Services Department our Solid Waste Department our public works department our Technology Solutions Department our Fleet department and also our transportation department as well so we have a lot of folks here and as we get more detailed into projects.

I'll defer to them to answer your questions so first I wanted to give some context around these two significant and unprecedented sources of funding so the B the bipartisan infrastructure law was signed into law in 2021 this funding is dispersed through different federal agencies and 80% of the funding available is Formula or non-competitive so this meaning that the recipients of that funding are predetermined as well as the amount of award they receive and then 20% of the V funding is competitive so those are the funds we can apply to with a competitive application additionally I wanted to talk about the spread of opportunities so a majority of those opportunities are transportation and energy funds and then broadband and water making up the other opportunities additionally I wanted to mention that most of the funding is over over 5 years so most of it is not one-time funding a lot of times we even have applications that maybe didn't work out this year that we've gotten feedback on and we can apply.

Again in the coming year when those applications open again for the IRA this was signed into law in 2022 it is a mix of Grants loans and tax incentives and this the focus of ir ra is more towards private investment so reducing costs for energy reduction products for in health care costs for families but there are some opportunities for jurisdictions and I also wanted to mention and note that both B and Ira funding is also available for local nonprofits to apply to and not just jurisdiction all right so now to the city's efforts since 2021 the city manager's office has taken a more proactive collaborative approach to seeking funds we Noti with this unprecedented funding that some of our departments needed some more support so we were trying to centralize the process more by tracking and increasing that collaboration a lot through our our monthly B and Ira meetings we have with departments also since 2021 some departments have either already had or have gained staff that are dedicated to Grant ring and Grant.

Management however we still have departments that either lack capacity because of Staffing restraints or do not have a staff dedicated to writing grants so because of that we have started a partnership with Central Pines Regional Council they have a representative here today so in case there are any questions for them so we the city of the central Pines Regional Council is a a local Hub for support in this region for local governments in July 2022 we entered into a contract with them that renews automatically annually and with this contract they help our departments go for these competitive funding opportunities through federal state and private funding by helping with research funding opportunities project development grant writing external collaboration with other partners Grant editing and reviewing so now for the fun part the update of where we are currently and the results of those efforts I mentioned so we have applied to around $96 Million worth of funding we have been awarded over 56 million and we are preparing applications for an estimate.

Estimated around 63 million and I want to note here two things so for these tables throughout this will apply with the applied that is ones we've applied for and been awarded a combination of those ones we have not been awarded but applied to and then ones that we've apply to and are waiting responses and then second just real quick so I imagine that that includes both B and Ira correct yes yeah and I'll show the distribution of the funding sources as well we've applied to and is that of as of October 2023 or is that current so this is as of last Friday sorry well sorry one more one more Interruption that then that includes the 80% that's the non-competitive or is this just the 20% this is the 20% competitive thank you so also the preparing application this is an estimate because some of the guidance around certain ones we are still rearch researching and potentially looking to apply for haven't released the amounts you can apply for or.

Guidance and criteria around that so that likely that number will be higher so I wanted to point that out and we have this very fancy success rate of 74% and this is of ones we've applied to so that does not include the preparing researching so overall we have been very successful so the funding source distribution as I mentioned so most of the funding we've been going for is be IL or IRA but we are still looking for we also have applied for other sources such as private maybe just other miscellaneous and state funding or federal funding that's not associated with those acts there's also a very small percentage that is both IRA and B and this is of what we've applied to so so we delineated these into categories so we have our climate energy and environment our public transportation roads Bridges and other infrastructure and other programs so other programs right now includes Economic Development Arts broadband and cyber security and opportunities such as that just most of the B and most.

Of the funding coming out right now is for those first three categories and I also want to mention that some of these do overlap as a lot of things do and our for instance our public works department was awarded a $250,000 grant for flood mitigation and storm water repairs we did our best to choose the category felt most closely aligned with those projects so for that even though it is infrastructure we did put it in our climate energy and environment category considering the increasing risk of floods all right and now wanted to show the distribution of funding categories so a majority not well more than half are of the the applications we have applied to sorry are climate energy and environment and then 28% being the public transportation this really closely aligns with earlier what I showed you especially through b their kind of categorization of where they're investing those funds so now I want to get dive deeper into those categories so first climate energy and environment we've applied to almost $50 million in.

Funding we've been awarded over 37 million and we're preparing applications for over 26 million and I wanted to highlight some of these projects that have been funded that we've been awarded for so one very exciting there was a press conference for mayor Williams held last week our general Services Department was awarded $4.8 million for EV charging stations also our general Services Department was earlier last year I guess was awarded 5.3 million for urban forestry and Community forestry programming and then our transportation department was awarded 5.7 million for electric buses public transportation a lot of these are more to even though as mentioned earlier we have climate with electric buses but public transportation is more about making Transportation more accessible reliable and safer so we've applied for over 26 million we've been awarded over 11 million and we're preparing applications for 16 million and I just want to note that we have a different project highlighted than the presentation we sent on Friday so this just is a larger.

Project yeah and then we this is 10.8 million for Durham station and then roads Bridges and infrastructure you'll notice our preparing application is much higher because a lot of these were still waiting for guidelines or waiting for further criteria to apply to these but we've applied to around 8 million and then we've been awarded 3 million and this 3 million we wanted to highlight for the the South lb restoration project more information about that project is on the Public Works website and then for our other programming category we've applied to over 11 million been awarded over 4 million and are preparing applications for around 900,000 So currently we are applying with Central Pine leading this application with digital Durham and our TS Department for a 500K digital and inclusion and literacy Grant to provide more programming for residents on digital literacy also our police department and Community safety department was awarded around $400,000 in for new approach es to involuntary commitments and then our office of Workforce of Economic and Workforce Development I said that.

Wrong was awarded 1.7 million for reintegration of ex offenders into the workforce so now I want to give some some more context around the efforts it takes to apply to these grants these are again very unprecedented they're very new both for federal agencies and for the city of Durham so I wanted to walk through the grant life cycle research funding sounds like we're just looking up funding it also involves understanding eligibility understanding criteria understanding if there are matching funds required and a lot more preparing an application requires not just writing an application a lot of times that can involve project development it can involve having to pay for assessments from technical experts to make our application competitive it can also involve trying to get partners for those projects and then we also have to manage report and that's the actual implementation project management and making sure we're compliant with federal and state reporting and also internal reporting and then that is closing out the cycle so since this is such a.

Commitment the city really has started to think very strategically about the funding we go for so I want to highlight some reasons we may not apply one we're just ineligible for instance I know there was a water infrastructure Grant but it was only four rural communities with populations far less than ours so we you know obviously would not apply to a grant like that it might not align with priorities we've already set for this the city or in our departments with our strategic planning and you know take resources away from those priorities if we were to apply cost May outweigh the benefits so some grants a lot of Grants require matching funds a lot of times they can be maybe even 50% of what you're going to receive and then on top of that we might have to pay for an assessment again and to consider all the FTE and staff resources that would go into implementation so sometimes we just do cost benefit analysis and realize.

That the grant is not going to be worth all the effort to apply for it also we might not be competitive we might get this information where we have a project in mind to apply for but it's just we know it's not going to be competitive sometimes we get that information from the agencies themselves sometimes we get that through our experts at Central Pines and sometimes we do realize that we're just not the best organization to apply so we will share that Grant opportunity and also usually write a letter of support for or local organizations as well so sometimes we're not going to be the lead on a Grant application but we do want a local organization to go for those funds so in October of 23 we held a facilitation through our Innovation team help to lead to help us kind of think about the barriers around departments are having around applying for these grants so the biggest one being matching funds again sometimes these grants are available but then you.

Find out they have required matching funds and our resources in Department are for other priorities and sometimes we it wouldn't make sense for us to apply or we might not have the funds available grant writing experience and expertise we have that but also again this is very very new funding even federal agencies and state agencies are struggling to disperse These funds so deadlines guidelines criteria are constantly changing so our staff is really trying to stay on top of that but it's it can be very difficult landscape even though we have staff who have that experience also we have Staffing gaps potentially so again those resources such as project managers project delivery that is on top of what they're already doing adding these new projects so so and even some times we have constrained procurement because the market is also strained because of all this funding so even if we can contract out some of the implementation it can be difficult to find contractors and coordination again A lot of times we will apply with other.

Jurisdictions other other organizations so coordinating those external Partners as well as internal Partners when departments work together together for applying is a lot of work so with that I'm going to pass it over to Julia to talk about more about our process that we're continuing to improve and. Build good afternoon Madame presiding chair other council members and manager page as DCM win Bush mentioned my name is Julia brenaman and I am a great analyst in the finance department so now that Mary Grace has discussed some of the barriers that we currently face I want to walk through our process for tracking grant information since 2021 we've worked on centralizing the city's Grant process through a combination of meeting regularly and tracking our progress we alert departments with help from Central Pines or departments alert us to Opportunities and then after we meet with departments they provide recommendations on if the city should apply and for what project or program we should apply for for the city manager's office analyzes Department responses along with the.

City's strategic priorities to determine whether we agree with departments and then departments are asked to regularly update their progress in the city of Durham Grant tracker so here is the tracker you can see that it's separated by departments with one of the categories being unassigned even though there are three grants in that tab those grants do have a home they just happen to to live with departments that typically do not focus on Grant funds we have been working to centralize our grant process since 2021 so there's quite a few grants included in that database and we also keep grants in the database as the years pass so that we can reflect on previous efforts in the funding and that helps us with future Grant applications so for the process of this visual or for the purposes of this visual I filtered out the grants under the Do Not qu qualify category so therefore the numbers on the grants that are currently being so therefore the numbers on your screen are just the.

Grants that are currently being researched applied for awaiting award decision or awarded so here in this second picture I have screen grabbed from the general Services Tab and here you can see what it looks like to have all the detailed information listed out this is incredibly helpful for us to quickly get status updates and learn more about the city efforts for specific group grants the first thing I may stick out is the red boxes but this is just notifying us that the application date is passed and actually as you can see in the next column this is okay because all of these grants have been applied for and in this instance all three of these grants were awarded to the city of Durham the charging and fueling infrastructure disc discretionary grant program was awarded to the city late last week after I took the screenshot so also visible here is the amount applied for a brief note on how the funds would be used additional comments and if the grant falls under.

The bipartisan infrastructure law departments are responsible for updating this tool in the city manager's office is able to use specific staff members many that you see here today from various departments to gather additional information or ask specific questions staff does a great job providing updates and answering any additional questions that there may be and at this point I am going to hand it back over to Mary and Grace but I thank you for granting us your time thank you for keeping it within 20 minutes I appreciate that and we're almost done this is the last slide prise all right so I wanted to mention also with the barriers of course sometimes it's worth overcoming those some of those barriers so there are certain grants that we will overcome those barriers for they're barriers they're not complete roadblock but we're also looking at ways to continuously improve and more centralize the city's Grant Grant process so one way is of we started having more focused meetings originally having the all departments meet around monthly.

IRA and B meetings was great because we're all learning now that we're getting a little more focused in and have these grants coming out that are more specific to departments we are starting to schedule more focused meetings along with our Central Pines Partners additionally Central Pines is working with us to upcoming to have some facilitated project development strategy sessions sometimes when those grants come out we don't have projects for them so we'd like to start being proactive about developing these projects so when they come out we have more of a solid base for applications additionally Central Pines is going to be helping to provide more training around grant writing that will be recorded and available for our staff and then we're also reeva reevaluating and streamlining looking at Best Practices of other jurisdictions around City Grant processes and policies and working closely with our finance department around that and with that any questions and now thank you oh and I understand that we do have someone online to speak and I had.

Jennifer carrian with the city's City County Environmental Affairs board if you want to raise your hands we can unmute you hi can you hear me yes we can thank you so much thanks so much for that presentation it was really exciting to see especially all of the the progress that's been made since this October facilitated meeting I think some of my comments or questions are really kind of drilling into some of the identified barriers and next steps so you mentioned at the end that there's going to be some more effort to develop some projects in advance so that it would be easier and more competitive to apply for some of these things and I'm just sort of curious about the overall strategy for Grants capture it sounds like the when we talk about whether these are aligned with high priorities I'm assuming you're talking about the Strategic plan but to my knowledge and I may be wrong to my knowledge we don't have an overarching resilience plan and so many of these funding opportunities.

Are directly Rel related to climate resilience so I'm just wondering if having a overarching existing resilience plan that directly addresses our known climate risks would make this whole process easier because I am curious about how do how does the existing Grant strategy overlap at all with our known climate risks in Durham because I don't know that our strategic plan necessarily directly addresses that and then the last thing I'll say is just to drill in a little bit more on that coordination barrier I know a lot of the upcoming funding opportunities require coordination with local community- based organizations like co- applying and I see that as a potential future barrier if we don't really have that type of coordination for the local cbos to work with and then lastly coordination with the county and DPS because you know we're all one big community so I'm Cur I would also be curious about what the coordination is right now co- applying with DPS in the county thank you thank you appreciate that thank you.

For those questions I'll try to address a few of them and then I'm going to defer to our general services department and our sustainability division for the climate resiliency plan so as far as applying with DPS in Durham County thankfully Central Pines has connected us to the main person over grants at Durham County so we have reached out and we're trying to schedule a meeting because I know they've also have been doing a lot of work to centralize their process so I think we have a lot to learn from them and I'm excited to hopefully continue to collaborate and then with DPS I think we're also again trying to coordinate that will be a part of our Improvement I hope in the future as we consider streamlining internally but also having more solid connections to other folks seeking these grants and now I will and I don't know if Central Pines wants to they also work with Durham County they work with several local jurisdictions and often times they'll help us connect to those.

Folks if they hear of an opportunity they know we can benefit from I don't know if you have anything there's about 14 different counties mhm Oh.

Come hi yeah I'm Taran NIS with Central Pines Regional Council I'm a management analyst and I work in our grant assistance program so yeah like Mary Grace was saying we work with Durham County as well so there's opport unities for coordination there and we've been trying to bridge those gaps and bring them together like she was saying we're trying to connect them her with John who is John Kefir is their grants coordinator he oversees all of the grants they kind of have like a top- down structure for their Grant approach right now at Durham County that's new so that's something that is a potential to learn from and makes our coordination easier with them and as far as coordinating with some cbos we've also helped the city coordinate with some cbos in the area and we have relationships with some of those organizations so that's something we're striving to do as well to increase that thank you and I was just going to say I appreciate the the resource that the Central.

Central Pines Regional Council has been so thank you yeah and I'm going to open it up to my colleagues for questions council member risk first of all welcome mayor PM oh thank you so first of all thanks for the presentation this is incredibly important stuff as you know this is like and I think you said Miss ston King this is all kind of very new at our level for Central Pines for the federal governments it's all new but it's moving fast right so I appreciate your attention all this stuff I want to focus I've got a couple questions on this the more than half of the grants related to climate energy and and environments you mentioned and I appreciate the comments from from Jen carrian from the environmental Affairs board Jen I hope you're still listening thanks for your comments I want to build on her comment about this this question about the strategy right and so so in the in the in the work you're doing the grants you've gone for the.

Work you're doing with Central Pines what's your sense of like how do you prioritize what are the what what's the process for doing that because there's so much out there right so curious first of all about like what's the how do you prioritize these many different opportunities yeah and I might actually defer to Central pintes because they help us do that and just say that it it really depends on a department basis as well because we look at projects they already have we look at initiatives they want to be funded that are not funded or ones that are already funded but could use more funding and again we look at the criteria of the grant and talk to different partners around the city if we think there might be a collaboration potential or of another department applying so I will oh well just kidding Summer from General Services is coming good afternoon Madam presiding chair Madam manager and members of council summer Austin General services so in in terms of the city we have a.

Brand new strategic plan we have a carbon neutrality and renewable energy Act action plan that feeds directly into that new strategic plan and so our road map is fairly set in that way but the reason that Central pins and entities like Central pins the state energy office and others are so important is because you really need that clearing house that umbrella that Aggregates things my colleague Amy says you know the air we breathe doesn't stop at the Durham County Line and so a lot of the efforts have to be Regional as Madam manager knows we've been working with the county and DPS we we spend two years coming up with the collaboration with the county and DPS but in the environment we're in now with the time and the urgency being able to rely on entities like Central Pines to say hey region and understanding that things may be different for Chapel Hill and they have a different elected body that is going to expect different things from them and being able to aggregate that.

Into where are the common threads so that we can go after something that espouses as many of the regional priorities as possible is really really important and and we're relying on it heavily I appreciate that and and thank you thank you m Jones thank you for mentioning both the the larger City strategic plan as well as the the sustainability plan I think those are important guiding documents I will say just for for the manager and my colleagues on the council that this is the the carbon neutrality plan we have is an important plan it's just for the city right so it's just for City buildings and city fleet many communities including Raleigh and Asheville have larger climate action plans for the entire community that includes Community stakeholders as well as just the city so I think it's something for us to consider whether our climate action plan should be broader to really address the broader community and not just our I mean I think our city city fleet and buildings are important.

But a larger plan I think would also be helpful and as as Miss carrian mentioned having included in that plan some sense of climate resilience is also a key piece that I think we need in Durham that would be applicable for some of the federal grants that we need to add to that plan so I think these are all areas we need to grow as a city but I think it's important to know where we are now and how we can expand this work so thank you thank you and I will add that the central Caroline Central Regional Pines Pines central Pines Regional Council does have a regionwise plan and I think that that will be helpful to kind of review as well council member cabero yeah thank you thank you for all of the updates I love when we win always and just quickly is there is there a plan around a resilience I mean this has come up before so I was just curious if if City.

Staff had or is that something that you need direction from. Council good afternoon council member that plan is in the works we the way that we've prioritized Things based on the resources that we have and all of the things that you all know well that we've worked on over the past however many terms that you all have been here yes there might be jurisdictions that are approaching it differently that have labeled it differently that might even be ahead of us but this Regional effort that was alluded to today that Mary Grace talked about is what we are prioritizing right now as the building blocks for a Durham based plan understanding that we may not be entering the conversation at the same place that Raleigh or Orange County might be but they were entering it where it matters because the money is now and so the regional plan will have some Durham specific outputs and that's what we're going to rely upon because if we tried to sort of parse should we have done it.

Three years ago so we would be right exactly where somebody else is that wouldn't address the issue which is the here and the now so is Durham going to be leveraging that Regional plan to our betterment that is that is intended to be the goal thank thank you I have a follow-up question so I know our sustainability road map there's a dashboard is it tying and I just haven't looked at it so it could be there and I just I haven't looked at it since campaigning and is there a place for for residents to directly link from our City website into that Regional plan so that they can see because to council member with Point people don't understand that there's maybe this regional thing going on and so it's always in my mind if our environmental Affairs board which are some of our most Savvy residents around environmental issues have these questions then that means the broader Community might have these questions and so where is that kind of information living this kind of.

Effort which makes perfect sense so that folks are real clear that we are going after these dollars that there is a regional plan I mean Carolina Pines just got rebranded right like I think a lot of folks are used to you know TJ Cog right and so then how are we communicating that where are we communicating that and yeah thank you and council member R had a followup as well yeah just one of the followup so so one thing that wasn't in the presentation and I know there's so much a covery you did a good job of of sort of summarizing all that in 20 minutes but I know the part of the whole stimulus piece and this comes out of the White House is a so-called justice 40 initiative that 40% of all these not all these but many of these grants should go to communities that have been historically marginalized or disinvested in so what role does that justice 40 play in our calculus of what grants.

We're going after related to that I know some of the grant through the department of energy involve actual rebates or discounts to act to homeowners for replacing aging and and sort of more dirty sort of Gas Appliances to replace them with energy efficient like heat pumps and so forth those grants I think require a community partner with the city for example so again this goes back to the question I think U maybe Miss caran ask like if there's a community based group that wants to be involved in that who do they contact in the city what's what's the process for that so so talk to me about the whole issue of sort of these grants for disinvested and and historically marginalized communities so I'll take a piece of it but it it takes a village and it's a whole lot of people in here who have different elements of that in their work plans for for us on the team in general Services because we are so infrastructure-based our biggest.

Priority right now is making sure that any facility whether it be a community facility or our facility has the infrastructure base that it needs to be able to perform in this space but specifically to what Jennifer might be referencing I really think some of the folks here can talk more for example the county just wanton a large grant that is completely Community facing and as we said if if we need to improve our marketing with Central Pines about what might be included in this next big push which is the cprg and resilience plan that comes out of that you know if we need to be more outward in in terms of our marketing we we can work on doing that we have lots of small community facing efforts and so it it it's almost like you have multiple questions in your question and so I'm going to step back and give somebody else a chance to highlight some of the parts and pieces that they know.

Best the justice 40 question oh can you want to take that one well I was going to say a lot of the grants we go for are around justice 40 we also look at our own data through neighborhood maps and we think about and strategize with departments where those areas in need are in Durham so for instance I know the EV charging stations are actually in lowincome historically not served neighborhoods additionally I wanted to speak to the rebates a little bit so I know The Innovation team Lindsey Gavin is over there our Innovation team manager I know they're actually currently working on a project to think about how we can help residents better access those rebates and better access the purchasing of electric stoves and things like that to actually take advantage of the rebates North Carolina has not yet put out guidance for those rebates the federal government has but North Carolina hasn't but we're hoping this year they will if there's any more questions on that I would you know ask.

Lindsay to maybe come up and talk about but I know they're in the early stages of looking at that as a project Justice good on jce Bo oh no I think so I think this and this is probably a longer conversation or the first of many conversations so thank you and yeah I would just add that I think it probably would be helpful to figure out how to track on the other side our Community Partners as well for their applications I'm sure that's part of the I'm sure it's in there but being able to report that back will be helpful especially on EAB side and then also figuring out how to make sure someone from EAB is involved with those monthly meetings that you're having might be a little bit helpful as well that's those are my suggestions I'm one person on this Council I'm just just from being on EAB I think that'll be really helpful those folks are pretty passionate about the work that they do other than that I think one last.

Thing to your thing around EAB and if they can't participate potentially doing periodic updates there so that there's that again that clear communication back to Residents around the work I think is really really important so and if there aren't any other questions comments then I'm going to thank you all for providing this presentation I just wanted to come up and thank Mary Grace and Julia this is their first time presenting in front of city council and they actually volunteered to do this today and so I want to thank them and thank we have such supportive Partners in our departments who are always willing to be here to support us so we can get you all answers in real time so I want to thank our department directors and others in the Departments for being here with us today and I'm sorry I just can't help but to notice there's a lot of th power on that team thank you thank you thanks to the Village yes and I I do believe we just.

Have the one item for Madam Clerk did you want to share yes thank you madam presiding chair and Mr Mayor proam you're back welcome I did want to update everyone on the Durham City County Environmental Affairs board appointment ment we have received a seventh vote from mayor Williams and Tom Campbell has received four votes so we can remove that from the GBA or I'd like to request that we do that which item was that M cler that's item number one there had been a tie but mayor Williams has voted since and we now have a nomination thank you I think okay okay we want to settle the agenda Madam manager you have a majority.

Nomination we don't need to it's it's it's fine to move it to consent agenda just for making it okay okay so now the agenda will be for consent items 1 through3 and items 7- 14 and item five will be on the GBA section of the agenda thank you madam manager Mr Mayor protim did you want to gel us out on ajour I'm just I'm going to let you do the honor I just want to make a quick comment I want to on behalf of the mayor myself thank council member Freeman for what I know was excellent leadership today and bring you greetings the President says to say hey to Durham that's it thank you all so much for carrying on in such an excellent way Madame presiding chair would you land us please yes and.