How are you doing, Your Majesty?  Good evening. We'd like to call the Durham City Council meeting to order. 7 PM Monday, May the 2nd, certainly want to welcome all of you that are with us this evening. If we could just take a moment for a silent meditation, please. We'll ask the councilman, Davis, if you would lead us in the pledge. Madam Clerk, would you call the roll, please? Mayor Bell. Present. Mayor Pro Tem Cole McFadden. Council Member Davis. Council Member Johnson. Council Member Moffitt. Council Member Rees. Here. And Council Member Shul. We have several resolution proclamations present this evening. The first is presented to Tika Demson. She will join me. This is Children's Mental Health Awareness Day proclamation. And I want to read all of the proclamations, but it speaks to the fact that to promote awareness of positive mental health, well-being and development for all children, youth, and young adult ages, birthed through 26 years in North Carolina, whereas leadership in Durham, North Carolina, recognizes that mental health needs and treatment be on par with medical needs and treatment. It speaks to the fact that whereas available school-based mental health programs and positive behavior, interventions, and support should be considered as best practices and be encouraged to be practiced in every Durham, North Carolina public schools, whereas children are recognized for having unique needs for recovery of mental health, emotional, behavioral, and substance abuse issues, and not being combined with adult mental health population for treatment. Whereas effective mental health treatment services to strengths and families, youth leadership development and family partner peer supports. Results in children and youth overcoming trauma, becoming successful in contributing Durham, North Carolina citizens, and its safe environment in their homes, schools, and communities. Whereas the city of North Carolina and their Wienbyville, North Carolina mental health planning, advisory council, national federation of families for children, mental health, alliance of behavioral health care, naming North Carolina and North Carolina families united, North Carolina state children's collaborative in the families and communities. We have children, youth, and young adults struggling with emotional and behavioral health issues, joined to recognize children's mental health awareness week and safety. And therefore, Wienbyville, Bell, and the city of Durham, North Carolina, do they ever claim May 2nd, 2016, as children's mental health awareness day in Durham, and urge all the citizens to take special notice of this awareness, and with my hand, Corporate City of Durham, May 2nd, 2016. And I'm going to present this to you for... That the city council continues to give and acknowledge... Now that's a new one, where people couldn't hear me, so. Again, I'd like to thank the city council for their continued support of families and our children and our systems of addressing mental health and behavior challenges. It's a wonderful day when the door is open to provide families an opportunity to remain employed, because their employer understand that when they leave to go to school, it's just not just something that's made up. We've also opened the doors for our medical facilities to ensure that the appropriate staff is being hired, as well as our lustrous police department, who you know, our CIT officers are phenomenal. They have done so much to help support our community. So if you ever question, are there any good things happening in Durham, I promise you they are. Thank you. Next recognizes National Drinking Water Week. Lee Lam operates at the Williams Water Treatment Plant, and we have certificates to present also. So let me briefly read this proclamation that speaks to the fact that whereas water is basic in essential need of mankind, and whereas our health, confidence, standard of living depend upon an adequate supply of safe, clean water. Whereas throughout the years, the city of Durham has taken a lead role in source water management and protection, as well as production of a consistent supply of high quality drinking water. Whereas our drinking water and water resources are undervalued, whereas we're all stewards of the water infrastructure upon which future generations depend, whereas dedicated individuals in organizations such as city employees, industry leaders, scientists, environmentalists, and students have made significant contributions in developing, operating, and maintaining our water treatment and distribution systems, protecting and conserving this precious resource and educating the public on the value of this resource. Now, therefore, I wouldn't be billed by our mayor of the city of Durham, North Carolina, to be billed by proclaiming May 7, 2016 as National Drinking Water Week. In the city of Durham, there's all citizens that joined me as a partner in the Water Use it Wisely campaign and the pledge to embrace the water conservation ethic in order to extend the life and protect the quality of our most precious natural resource. Again, with my hand, Corporate City of Durham, North Carolina, this is the second day of May, 2016.  Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And City Council. My name is Lee Lamb. I'm a certified operator at Williams Water Treatment Plant. And I'm honored to accept this proclamation on behalf of the Water Supply and Treatment Division and all of water management. As you know, producing clean and safe drinking water is a 24-hour, seven-day, a week, 365-day year commitment from our staff. We work every day to make sure that when our customers turn on the tap, they're getting a clean and safe and high-quality water flow. This requires teamwork throughout the departments. It's not only the certified operators, it's the distribution system, the lab analysts behind the scenes, the chemists, the conservation staff, the engineers, and the managers. They're all committed to protecting and preserving the precious natural resource of water that we have well into our future. And we thank you so much for recognizing the vital role that safe drinking water plays in all of our lives. And we appreciate the support and the continued support of the city council and the city administration. Thank you. And I think now we're going to transition into giving out some poster awards sponsored by Water Management. Good evening. As part of the city's annual celebration of the National Drinking Water Week, the city's Department of Water Management always sponsors an annual water conservation poster contest. And tonight, we are very proud to present the award-winning poster contest winners with their certificates. So we're going to start with our K through 2 division. And in third place from Kestrelheitz Elementary is Leah Clark. In second place, Avery Perkins. And in first place, unfortunately, she wasn't able to join us tonight, is Grace Pressinger from Creekside Elementary. Oh, she's here. I'm sorry. Surprise. And in our 3 through 5 category, in third place is Mackenzie Harver. Excuse me. Sorry, the wrong age group. Third place was Allison Hall from Durham Academy. In second place, Siomar Rivera-Soria from Bethesda Elementary. I don't think she's here. And in third place, Allison Hall from, or excuse me, first place, Alma Mensa Boone from Durham Academy. In our 6 through 8 division, in third place, Mackenzie Harvey from Voyager Academy. In second place, Lauren Steiner from Voyager Academy. And in first place, Amy Rosie Scott Benson also from Voyager Academy. So all of these winning entries were represented during the statewide competition. And what some of our winners up here don't know is we also have some statewide winners, which continues our streak of winning at the statewide every year as well. So in second place in the K through 2 division, Avery Perkins. And in first place, Grace Pressinger from Greek side elementary. Winning at the state level in the 3 through 5 division is in third place, Allison Hall. In second place, Siomar Rivera-Soria from Bethesda. And in first place, Alma Mensa Boone from Durham Academy. And in the 6 through 8 division, we also have some statewide winners. In third place, Mackenzie Harvey. In second place, Lauren Steiner. And if you haven't guessed by now, in first place, Amy Rosie Scott Benson from Voyager Academy. So congratulations again to all of our winners. The winning posters are on display in the lobby and are also displayed on the city's website. Thank you. I don't know who's gonna accept this. I might accept this myself. This is about Old Americans Month. Everybody can stand up for this, right? I don't know if anyone is here, too. Is someone here? Oh, OK, great. Well, you can stand up. She doesn't qualify, right? Whereas the city of Durham includes a community of Old Americans who deserve recognition for their contributions to our nation. Whereas Durham recognizes that older adults are trailblazers, advocating for themselves, their peers, and their communities, paving the way for future generations. And whereas Durham is committed to raising awareness about issues facing Old Americans and helping all individuals thrive in communities with their choice for as long as possible. Whereas we appreciate the value of inclusion and support in helping old adults successfully contribute to and benefit from their communities. Whereas our community can provide opportunities to enrich the lives of individuals of all ages by promoting and engaging in activity, wellness, and social involvement. By emphasizing home and community-based services that support independent living and ensuring community members can benefit from the contributions and experience of old adults. Now, therefore, I will be billed billed by the city of Durham, North Carolina, to have proclaimed the month of May as Older Americans Month in Durham. Hereby urge our residents to take special note of this observance by recognizing the Durham's Park and Recreation Department for their commitment and dedication to the Old Americans living in our community, and for the planning of the many events commemorating May as Older Americans Month. With my hand, the Corp. of the City of Durham, North Carolina, this is the second day of May, 2016. And I'll present this to this younger Old American. Thank you, Mayor, and as well as City Council members. My name is Deertra Spellman. I am the Special Programs Inclusion and Mature Adults Recreation Manager for Durham Parks and Recreation Department.  They kicked off last week, April the 18th, and we actually broke another record this year when we had 208 registrants for the program and the sports that we had. We have 208 people registered in a variety of different sports at a variety of different locations. I'd definitely like to thank the Durham Parks and Recreation staff for helping out with that program and a special thanks to our mature adults program, coordinators Bridget Robertson, Michael Honeycutt, Christian Dixon, and William Jeannette. And I would also like to welcome you all to come out to our closing ceremonies, which will be Thursday, May 5th, at the Durham Center for Senior Life. And that starts at 5.30, it ends at 7.30. Again, thank you all so much. First proclamation recognizes Police Week, Peace Officers Memorial Day, and I'm not sure, Chief, are you gonna bring this up? The proclamation reads, whereas the Congress and President of the United States have designated May 15th as Peace Officers Memorial Day, and the weekend in which it falls on National Police Week, whereas the Office of Durham County Law Enforcement planning such a role for safeguarding the rights and freedoms of the citizens of Durham, whereas it's important that our citizens are aware of and understand the dangers and problems encountered and the duties and responsibilities incurred by the law enforcement officers, whereas it's equally important that our law enforcement officers recognize their duty to serve the people by safeguarding life and property, protecting them against violence or disorder, and by protecting the innocence against deception and the weak against oppression or intimidation, whereas the men and women of Durham County Law Enforcement unceasingly provide a vital public service. Now, therefore, I, William V. Bilbell, Mayor of the City of Durham, North Carolina, the year by proclaiming the week of May 8th through May 15th, 2016 as Police Week, and April 29th, 2016 as Peace Officers Memorial Day in Durham, and called upon our citizens to join and commemorate the law enforcement officers, past and present, who have rendered a dedicated service to their community. I encourage our citizens to attend the Peace Office Memorial Day on April 29th, which is just past, at Graston Baptist Church, and to honor those peace officers who have lost their lives and have become disabled by the line of duty. And witness my hand in the Court of the City of Durham, North Carolina, this is the 29th day of April, 2016. We want to present this to Chief Smith and for any comments that you may have. Thank you. I want to thank Mr. Moffitt, Mayor Pro Tem and Mr. Reese for attending. I know your schedules are busy and I know everyone can attend, but thank you for helping us honor and never forget our officers who paid the ultimate sacrifice in the line of duty. And I must say here that whenever we receive this, I always remember Mr. Clement, Mr. Howard Clement, until he just physically was not able, he never missed a service. And we've never forgotten that in the law enforcement community. So thank you. Good evening. My name is Captain Robert Gatt. I'm the Vice President of Eternal Police. And again, to the Durham City Council members, thank you all for your continued support of law enforcement to the city. Thank you for your continued support of law enforcement. This service is very special to us. This is the 30th year that we've had the opportunity to remember these men and women that have offered and have gave their lives in the performance of their duty for our safety. And so it's a special time for us. We also, it's a chance for us to let the families know that we'll never forget their sacrifice. This year we had to move the service up a week due to the state service being held. It would actually be this Thursday at 11 o'clock in Cary. And I actually sent you all an email for that and an invite as well. And hopefully next year we'll be back on schedule to have our service, which is normally the first Friday of every month. But they're again due to the state service, we had to move it up. But thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing you at future events. Thank you. I just want to thank you all for coming tonight. We have sometimes difficult meetings and sometimes good meetings. And it's a good meeting when we can honor the work that all of the young people like y'all are doing. So thank you for coming. Comments by many members of the council. What can I say to the approach, Jim? Some of us attended the funeral. Some of us attended the funeral of Angela Langley today. And it was a beautiful celebration. I would like to offer a motion that we do a resolution memorializing her. The big thing that we do for people. It's been properly moving. Second, Madam Clerk, will you open the vote? Close the vote. It passes seven to zero. April 28th, the Durham Public Schools Board passed a resolution in support of black boys and young men. I have that resolution and I would like to offer that we do a resolution similar to this in support of black boys and young men. Without a motion and a second. Recognize Councilman Moffitt. I appreciate that, I think it's great. Can you, you said something similar to it. Can we have something, maybe by the work session to see or? Okay, excuse me, I'll have a copy of that. Would you prefer a general motion in support of the resolution or? Well, that's fine. Whatever you feel comfortable with as long as we are supporting the lives of. Totally. Black boys and young men. Yes. Yeah, okay. Any further discussion? Not called a question, Madam Clerk, will you open the vote? Open the vote. Passes seven to zero. Are there any other comments by members of the Council? Recognize the city manager for any prior items. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Good evening, everyone. I don't have any priority items, but I do want to take a moment of personal privilege to recognize our newly appointed chief of police, Sarah Lynn Davis, is with us this evening in an unofficial capacity, but here's an observant. Well, welcome to Durham. That's the real one. Recognize the city attorney for any prior items. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. No priority items. Likewise, City Clerk. No items, Mr. Mayor. In that case, we will proceed with agenda as. Mr. Mayor. Recognize, I'm sorry, I recognize Councilman Mark. No, that's all right. I just wanted to say, since we welcome Chief Davis, Chief in Atlanta, soon to be Chief here. I wanted to say, I know that Mayor Pro Tem and you were both at the press conference today, but for those who weren't there, I wanted to say that I was very impressed with your openness, with your lack of defensiveness, and with your straightforward discussion of the issue, some of them very difficult. So I took that to be a great sign for community relations in general. Good moving forward. The concern agenda consists of items that may be passed with a single motion. If a council member or a member of the public asks for an item to be removed, we will remove that and discuss that later in the meeting. I'll read the heading of each one of the concern agenda items. Item one is approved City Council Minutes. Item two is the Durham Planning Commission Appointments. Item three is the Mayor's Nominee for Appointment for the Recreation Advisory Commission. Item four is boards, committees and commissions, attendance reports for the period January 1, 2015, through December 31st, 2015. Item five is to have penny tax for parks and trails performance audit, March, 2016. Item six is FY 2016, 2017 award and sewer rates. Item seven is FY 2016, 2017 award and sewer capital facility fees. Item nine, item eight is the bid report for March, 2016. Item nine is design construction contract with Barber design bill for the fire station, number 17 project. Item 10 is Omnisource Southeast LLC, hauler for white goods for the city of Durham. Items 13 can be found on the general business agenda. Item 19 is an item that can be found on the general business agenda. Entering a motion for approval of consent agenda. So moved. Second. It's been properly moved and seconded. Madam Clerk, we open the vote. Open the vote and close the vote. It passes seven to zero. We move to the general business agenda. Item 13 is 2016, first quarter crime report presentation. And recognize Chief Smith. Good evening. Mr. Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem. Ladies and gentlemen of the council, my name is Larry Smith and I am the Interim Chief of Police. I'm here to present the first quarter crime report of 2016. The crime report consists of part one index crime. That's a total of property crime and violent crime. Part one index crime was down 12% in the first quarter. That was driven by decreases in larceny, burglaries and aggravated assaults. Report homicides, rates and robberies and motor vehicle thefts were up. And as I go through these, we'll have some numbers to go along with it at any point as I go through. If you have any questions, feel free to stop me as we go through. Part one violent crime. Part one violent crime consists of homicides, rates, aggravated assaults and robberies. Violent crime is up 7% in the first quarter of 2016, driven primarily by an increase in robberies. I'm sure you all remember at the last quarter of 2015, what we were dealing with mostly was aggravated assaults and homicides. And you were aware that we put together an operation what we did. We had every investigator who had a homicide or a robbery and we included our intelligence unit and we went through every one of those cases, case by case, looking at both suspects and victims. And 19 particular individuals rose to the top of that that had either been suspects in multiple cases or victims or both. And we put together an operation and we targeted those 19 individuals who had been involved in that to include submitting their names to some of our community partners like CJRC, Project Build and some others for an opportunity if they wanted to come out of that lifestyle to do so. And that has been very successful. Of those 19th four, I think are in federal custody, about 13 of them have been arrested. One of them did take advantage of those services and the last I heard he's working with a plumber and doing quite well. So I gotta ask, was that successful? Well, for that, I think it was. If we measure success by crime, violent crime, did exactly what we wanted to do? No, but as far as those 19 that were actively involved in violence at that time, I think we had some success. We have since done that again last month, we did the same thing we took and we looked at all of our aggravated assaults, our homicides, and this time 23 unique individuals came up. However, six of those were carried over from the original 19. We have repurposed the heat teams and all of our proactive units to try to deal with those issues. I think that's resulted in a decrease in the aggravated assault which we'll go through shortly. Unfortunately, what is driving us this time is robberies. And we've also been trying to address those as well. These are the numbers that correspond with the violent crime. Homicide is up 10%. We had 11 by the end of the quarter. Rape up 35% with 23. Robbery, 192, up 22%. And aggravated assault down 2% for a violent crime increase of 7%. However, as of the last crime report I got of April the 23rd, at that point homicide was up 27%. Rape, 47%. But let me mention this with rape. Rape are low numbers, so it doesn't take a lot in the numbers to affect the percentages. Typically over the last three years, our rapes have run almost the exact same number. So robbery has dropped down to 15.8% from 22%. And aggravated assault has decreased even further to 3.3% down for a 4.9% increase in violent crime, which come down a little bit from the 7% increase that you see. The robbery issue, we continue to have some of the same problems that we had actually all of 2015. And that is our Latino population seems to be particularly targeted. We have put together several operations for robberies. If you'll look in your summary, you'll see multiple arrests that we have made. And we've had every proactive unit, our heat teams, our special operations division, our tactical teams out dealing with these problems. Either working on the 19 and now the 23 or trying to do high visibility surveillance or covert surveillance in the areas where we're having the robberies. And we've had some success. The robberies have decreased a little bit number wise, including recently our CID unit, which their task was actually investigating these crimes after the fact over in district three where Captain Gaddy is the captain, that unit decided to go out. We had a Hispanic couple coming back from church. It was a normal robbery, they shot him. And based on that and the fact they'd had some others in that area, they did some surveillance. They heard some gunfire and indeed it was another robbery where they robbed and then fired, but the bullet grazed him. They were able to take him in the custody and they would clear that one and the one previously and where they shot him in the stomach. So we've had some success, but we're putting everything we have at trying to deal with the violent crime problem that we're facing in this city. Also last time we included some demographics. I did not include maps this time, but I will tell you, we will do that on the annual report, but the mapping would be much the same. Most of the violent crime occurs down into the central most parts of the city. But we did include the demographics to get an idea of what our victims and suspects looks like. And it mirrors the report that we gave in 15 and this time 67% of all victims were black, 17% were Hispanic and 12% white and then 1% Asian. You may know, and we did make the arrest, we had an Asian robbery string at the end of 2015 and we have arrested four or five people on that. The federal government has taken the lead in that case, given the fact that it involves some businesses. So they were able to tie it into what they call a Hobbs Act and they're gonna be taken into federal custody. And then the gender is 56% male and 44% female. And then as far as suspects, and then once again, this is named suspects where the victim either named their attacker or we made an arrest. And the demographics of that are, and mine is really small, 86% black, 6% Hispanic and 8% white and then 79% male and 21% female. And that is an overview of the violent crime in the first quarter. Do you have any questions as it relates to violent crime at this point? Chief, do we have, you probably don't have it here, but if you go back to that, it'll be interesting again, well, no, to your pie chart. Okay. Again, you don't have to have it here, but it'll be interesting again to see the ages of the suspects as well as the victims. I guess I'm more concerned about the suspects. I don't have that here, Mr. Mayor, but typically what we see, as you've seen when we do a violent crime round table, and also what we see in our gang reduction meetings, typically starting around 16, it starts to move up, peaks around 22, it starts to come back down and levels back up in the mid-30s. And I would imagine that would hold true in this, but we can get that. Any other questions? Yes, Mr. Mayor? Mr. Mayor? I just can't go around. What is causing this, Chief? I am just... I wish I had an answer to that. I don't, I don't have an answer to that. I mean, I think we all know there's multiple causes to that, everything from filelessness to poverty, to lack of education, all those things are some of the root causes of it. Where does it start? That's a bigger question than I can answer, but most of the time we deal with the symptoms, not the causes, but typically, typically the suspects we encounter, most of the time have very similar backgrounds in that they come typically through filelessness and then the streets have been very involved in their lives and then lack of education and all those things that... I guess I didn't really want you to have to answer that. I knew most of the answers, yeah, okay. Property crime. Property crime is made up of burglary, larsenite and motor vehicle theft. Property crime is down 15% in the first quarter. It's the lowest it's been in 16 years and burglars are the lowest in the first quarter they've been in 16 years. We've seen a 31% drop in the number of burglars and 9% drop in reported larsenites, so that's good news. Burglary is a home break-in. That's typically what that is. And property crime actually touches more citizens in our city. Property crime makes up the vast majority of our crime, although it's violent crime that gets the most attention, but property crime makes up the biggest majority of our crime in burglars and larsenites are down significantly. These are the numbers that correspond with that. Burglary is down 31%, larsenite's down nine, motor vehicle theft up seven for total decrease in property crime in the first quarter of 15%. As of April 23rd as well in the last numbers that I have, that property, that burglary has actually dropped down now to 33%. Larsenite's down by five, so it's down a little less. Motor vehicle theft has increased to 15% and property, overall property crime is down 10% as of April 23rd of this year. But however, at the end of the quarter, our total index crime was down 12%. Clearance rates. We are meeting our clearance rates in all areas with exception of rape and aggravated assault for the first quarter. As you know, at the end of 2015, we had several areas where we did not meet it. The first quarter is not a good indicator of how you're gonna do in the whole year. It's only three months. And so there'll be a lot more cases coming in the next three months. But for the first quarter, we were able to meet that. However, we do have a target of 50% clearance in total violent crime. And as of right now, we're at 40.6%. So we're a little below that. We have a target of 23% of property crime clearance and we're at 24.8% in that. So we're meeting our target in property but not meeting our target in violent crime for clearance rates in the first quarter. Chief? Yes. When you talk about your targets, are we talking, are your targets on this chart? It's not, but it's the six performance measures that we report on. And we report on one of them is being our clearance rates and our target is to clear 50% of all violent crime and 23% of all property crime. Okay, thank you. Response times, 6.25 a minute average response time in the first quarter, our target is 5.8 minutes. So we have not met that target. And then also we hope to respond to 51.2, I'm sorry, 57% of all priority one calls in under five minutes. But in the first quarter, we were at 51.3%. So we did not meet that target either. I will say that we are utilizing the staffing that the budget office and the manager's office cleared up for us to put some additional officers out. I think it is making a difference. I would like to see those numbers increasing even more. But what's happening is as we got those officers in, if we got some of the officers out of the academy, we're losing on average about five a month. So in a couple of months, that's 10 officers that we lose. But the staffing and also the staffing level, the additional staffing starts on Thursday and it runs through Sunday. So Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, we don't have the additional staffing out. But typically prior to this staffing and prior to us getting some recruits released out on their own, our rosters, it looked like we were running anywhere from 50 to 60% staffing. Now we're running high 60s to 70s. I had seen some 80s right when we first started it, which makes a big difference to the officers out there. But we're starting to see it creep back down just a little bit in our staffing levels. And then as well, just because we are fully staffed or just because we have 80% staffing or 90% staffing, that doesn't mean that every officer's at work. For example, tonight, the staffing level is 70%. But each district has a person out sick or a couple of people off on a holiday. We've got some people on administrative leave. We have a couple of female officers who are pregnant, so they're out on that. So there's a lot of things that affect the staffing and how many officers are actually out there doing the job, which leads me to the staffing levels. Right now, it's sworn we're fully staffed and it's non-sworn, we're 90%. However, we do have 39 operational vacancies. That means there's 39 officers that are not out there in the field working in some capacity. That is due to the fact that we have several in some form of training, either they're either in the academy or they're riding with a field training officer. Or since I was before you last three months ago on average we've lost about 15 officers due to some form of, whether it was retirement, whether it was leaving law enforcement, or whether it was leaving for another agency. So really a little bit challenged right now at the attrition rate and trying to catch up and then recruiting has become quite the challenge in law enforcement and it's a struggle. So it's gonna be some challenges for us. We have gotten the ICP report. It's 285 pages, it's very comprehensive. We gave Chief Davis her first copy when she came so she could enjoy the reading and it will be going through it. And many of their recommendations are some of the things that the executive staff had already looked at at some changes we thought could be beneficial as it relates to the staffing and we'll just see where it leads in the next few months. And that is it for my presentation unless you have any questions for me specifically.  First of all, thank you for your service to the city. Thank you.  Thank you, Mayor. Appreciate it.  Are our salaries competitive? You know, we're doing a salary study now. I think our starting salaries are competitive and I think I don't wanna speak uninformed. I think they are competitive. However, I do think there are some agencies around here that are paying a little bit better. I've had several of the officers who've leave lately to come into my office because I wanna talk to them and find out why you leave in our organization. And, you know, Pay is part of it. The last one that left said that he actually left, he's gonna be making a little bit less, but that department's pay structure moved him up a little bit more. And you know, there's just some concerns. Some have left the profession altogether just because of some of the negativity associated with the profession here lately. So, but those are things we'll be looking at both with the pay study and going forward. My last question is, what now is the role of the heat team? They are under the Special Operations Division Commander. He monitors what they do and their primary function is to deal with, to look at the previously the 19, now these others work with probation, look at associates where they're at, where they may work, or working in these areas where we're having the robberies. So. So they are focusing, a part of what they're doing is focusing on those 19 or 23 people. That's correct. Or their associates in the places where they frequent, where there might be violence. Okay. Thank you. I want, thank you. I wanted to ask about the staffing, because I noticed the two things. One, I noticed that the response times had gotten a little longer. Two, that we begin to implement over time with the, starting in February. And three, that you've been able to implement 1,300 foot patrols in that time. And then whether, I mean then the foot patrols are good. That's good. We're glad to see, or I'm glad to see it. I think we all are. Is there kind of a, is that kind of a push and a pull? Like the response times are getting longer in part because of the foot patrols or? You know, I can't say for sure, maybe. You know, what we, what we, what we, obviously when we asked for the money, we wanted to have some performance measures in there to see. One of them where we would track our response times. We haven't seen much change in that, quite frankly, in the, in the three months that we've been monitoring it. But we also ask each officer, and we met with the supervisors, and said, listen, is this a possible trade-off? You know, we wanna hear from the officers who are actually doing it. And that trade-off was when they come, when a squad comes to work, the captains will pick the areas where they feel like they need the foot patrol. And each officer in a squad and in a district would do 30 minutes to an hour of foot patrol in a shift. That doesn't mean each day. That means if they've worked three days in a row, one officer off that squad in that three-day shift would get out of the car and walk somewhere 30 minutes to an hour. And they may do, they may pair up and do it. And they said they felt like that they could do that with the additional staffing. But, you know, I mean, does that mean that that's affected, I can't say that's affected the response times. I just don't think we are where we need to be yet with staffing and uniform patrol. And I've been part of that. I've been part of the executive team now for five years and I've said this in the last six months and I think we're committed to it. And certainly we'll be working with Chief Davis. It is really time to make our uniform patrol division a priority. The city has grown, it's gotten busier. It's a good thing, but we've got to get our men and women who are out, they're running to call some help so they can get to the calls quicker and have some more time maybe to do some proactive things and some more community things. I think if you're not careful, and I'm afraid that's kind of where we are here, when you run officers so much, that can start to affect them around. It starts to affect how they feel. They feel like they come in, run from call to call to call and don't have any downtime. And I think we're at that critical point with our patrol officers and I think we recognize it as an organization. Thank you. I wanted to, you talked about robberies in your report. I think we're all concerned by that. And you list a lot of different arrests and I just wanted to lift one up that I was really impressed with, which was it followed on a 50-year-old woman being robbed and assaulted and they got videos of the suspect and put out a description and one of your officers, Sergeant, I think it's Molay. Molay. Driving into work the next day, just happened to notice somebody walking down the street and through that by paying attention to being alert was able to affect clearing that particular case. And I just really appreciated that kind of alertness. I can't remember somebody from one hour to the next so I thought that was pretty tremendous. And I thought there was one more thing, perhaps not. Oh, yes, I sent you an email today or copied you on an email and I just wanted to just, and I can't remember, Chief Sarvast sent me the name of the officer and I can't remember who it is right now, but somebody in District 2 who I'm sure didn't know who I was, but I was, several of us were helping a motorist and they stopped and helped and the fact that they didn't have to, they did. And the fact that they were bilingual, which just helped everybody relax because then we could communicate, it was great. And not only helped that person, but somebody came up on a bicycle and they got their car off the street, got tools out and worked on the bike for the person. I just thought it was tremendous sort of community service. Thanks. I'm sure. I'm sure. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Chief, I appreciate it also as Don has highlighted some of the incidents that you reported on and I appreciated reading the thorough description of those and I'm constantly reminded when I read those that there are a lot of jobs I see people do that I feel like I could do, but I read this and I think, this is a job I can't do. This is a hard, hard job and I'm so appreciative of the people that are willing to do it, have the courage to do it because so many of those incidents really involved not just good thinking and quick action, but courage, tremendous courage. And so I just wanna say that one more time. In terms of the staffing, excuse me, I think we're anticipating that the manager will bring us a budget that includes more uniformed officers. He's told us that. We have checked it off, I would say in our preliminary meetings and we are looking forward, I think, to being able to support that. I know I am and really appreciate the manager for working with you all in that direction. It just, again, I know we've all said this and let me ask you this, Chief, what's your retirement date? June 24th. June 24th. That's my last day, July 1st officially. Okay. What do you think? Well, you talked about the vacancies and the people leaving and your vacancy will leave a tremendous, tremendous gap. You have brought such integrity and forthrightness to your work. And I've especially appreciated the time since you've been in the interim chief position because it's easy to just be a placeholder but you've done so much more than that. You not only have you held the department together but you've really advanced the work of the department. And I know that our whole community is appreciative of that. And you're really, you're leaving the department even just from your interim role so much better than you found it. And I just wanna wish you Godspeed and a lovely retirement. And don't hesitate to send us emails to give us advice once you've retired, we'll be happy to receive them. I may take you up on that. I know you will. Go ahead and send them. But Chief, really, we're so grateful for your service. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Chief, for the work that you continue to do. You and the entire police department staff. I want to let you know how much I appreciate all of the openness that you all have had to many of the issues of concern and in some cases even demands that have been placed upon you by members of the community, legitimate demands and concerns, particularly around the issue of bias and other kinds of things. You all have responded very favorably and have invited people to offer suggestions and even criticisms. But I hope that you will continue, even with that concern for the issues that are raised, will not stop trying to be ever vigilant in our communities. It appears that there are lots of communities that complain about over-policing, but I also hear from lots of people in this city who want more people to patrol their neighborhoods and to make sure that their neighborhoods are as safe as any other neighborhood in the city. The geographic distribution of many of the crimes that we've seen show that we need to make sure that we not target, but we certainly need to look at those areas where that crime is being perpetrated upon the citizens, many of them innocent citizens along the way. So I would encourage you and the rest of the staff to continue the great work that you're doing. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Davis. Recognize, Councilor Rees. Thank you. Chief Smith, I want to echo what my colleagues have said about your service during this interim period. As the Mayor Pro Tem said, it would have been very, very easy for someone in your situation to just kind of go with the flow, mark your time until we hired a new police chief and you've done almost exactly the opposite, sir. You have grappled with difficult issues. You haven't shied away from the problems that you've seen. And I also, I really respect that, that at the same time you have raised up important and compelling stories about how our officers have gone above and beyond the call of duty, you've also been not afraid to confront real issues that are facing our department. And for that, our community will always owe you a debt of gratitude. I did want to ask you one question about the report. And that is in connection with, is my microphone really loud or what? In connection with the increase in robberies, do you have any sense of what proportion of those in the first quarter were armed robbery versus just common law robbery? I could get you that number. I think the vast majority of them were armed, yeah. That was what I feared, and I wonder if that has something to do with the drop in burglary and maybe, and I don't know if you're seeing this on the street or in your reports, but are we experiencing an influx of firearms such that it now is easier to commit an armed robbery than it is a burglary, I wonder? Well, I don't know about that, but I will tell you, because I know it's an issue that Sheriff Andrews took up is a lot of the firearms come from burglars. Breaking, that's always a hot commodity in a burglary is a farm. But is there a connection between those two? I couldn't draw that. Earlier today, I noted that, I hope that our RAP, our Residential Awareness Program, which we've had in place for a couple of years now, is maybe we're starting to see the long-term fruit of that and the fact that it's bringing our burglars down. And you've heard that program where we go into an area that's experienced burglars. We notify the citizens, we do a lot of high visibility patrol, and then we monitor that for six months to see, because statistically it shows if there's been a rash of burglars in the neighborhood, it'll continue. It's a kind of predictive policing model, and I think it's worked, it's shown that it's, so I'm hoping maybe that's had something to do, but outside of that I really don't know. It's probably more pop psychology in my part, trying to create a relationship where the data doesn't really bear one out. I do wanna point out in the report, and I don't know if you mentioned this in your presentation, but I really appreciate you giving us those violent gun crime initiative statistics through the middle of this month. I think that's an area that can make a real difference, and I saw in the report that you've had 68 firearms confiscated, it does my heart good. I'd like to see that number doubled and tripled. I know you would too, and I hope that that's something that our next chief can focus on as well. So I appreciate that, and just again, thank you for your service to our city. Thank you, Mr. Reese. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Recognizing me of pro term. Have you seen an increase in just gunshots being fired throughout the city? Oh, I don't know. I don't know. We'd have to check that in our CAD system to see how many calls for shots fired that we've had. Yeah, check that out. I know I heard eight on Saturday night in my neighborhood, in that area. Sounded like they were in my backyard, but they weren't. It's hard to tell where gunshots are coming from. Yeah, it's hard to tell. I'd like to know. Chief, the good thing about being on the council like this, you have so many articulate council persons. You don't have to say much more but say I agree with the comments that you've made, and I sincerely do. I think you've done an excellent job doing your time as interim chief. You have an act like an interim chief and we appreciate that. I just want to maybe go back to incidents that have occurred over the last couple of weeks in this community. And is there anything you can share with the council and the public in terms of any ties to what, I'm talking about the homicides. They won't jeopardize you. I know we had the homicide on Ash Street, then we had to run the shootings. We do know there was some relation between those and we're still working on that. It doesn't appear that the Broad Street homicide was related to that anyway, if that helps you. We do have some good leads on that. We're still working those, but you had the homicide on Ash. There was some drug turf dispute there, some families and some people who had been disputing over that area, and then the gunfire rups once dead in one shot, and then there's some retaliatory. And so the rash, the run of shootings that we had last week, most of them were related to that one incident on Ash Street. How about the Dearborn? Yes, the shooting on Dearborn we don't think that shooting with the three was necessarily related, but the one where they ended up in the chase at the Duke, the wreck at the Duke at the VA, we do think that was related to something else. And we do have a couple, we got a couple in custody for that and we're looking for some others. Have you had community support? Well, I will say this. I know our district two staff went down to a community meeting in Old Oxford because of the violence they had, they were very well received and they were asking for more police officers and they were very pleased with our response and some of the things we've done. So immediately the district command staff did get out in front of the residents out at Old Oxford and that was, I understand they had a very good and informative meeting. MacDougall is quieted down or we just haven't... A little bit, but we still have some issues in MacDougall. We do, we do, but we haven't had some problems that we've had at the end of 15, but MacDougall tears still has, we still have some issues there. And the foot patrols that we've mentioned, where have they occurred? All over, they're all over, yeah. The district commanders are tasked with deciding where they need to be and we've asked them to do both residential and business areas as they can. And once again, sometimes if staffing's down and they're real busy, they don't. But if they have time, we've asked them, because early in the morning, it's not a great time to do a foot patrol in the residential area and neither late at night. So some of the foot patrols, if they could do them a little early, they may do them in a business district when the businesses are open, you know. But then four or five when that would be peak time to do a foot patrol in a neighborhood or even six, is when you have the highest calls for service. So that makes that hard sometimes. But our heat teams do a lot of foot patrol, a lot of foot patrol. Our district one heat team has done a tremendous amount of foot patrol over in Bentwood on Junction Road, 322 Junction Road. We've had a lot of violence seems to be tying back into that area too. And they've been spending a lot of time out there trying to get some intelligence to find out what's driving some of these things. You mentioned that a lot of this is related to, you think it's related to drugs. What kind of impact are we having on drugs in this community? Are we getting to the drug deals? Are we clamping that? What's happening there? Yeah, I mean, we do. We have quite a bit of success in getting, we have our special operations division that works. And well, we have our federal task force that works at some of the large-scale traffickers. We had a very, very large drug arrest and a very large amount of money that involved a federal investigation recently. And then we try to look at the mid-level traffickers who are supplying the street-level dealers. But most of the violence centers around you street-level dealers. That's where they've got that territory set up and that's where they make their money and you move into that. And then that's generally what causes violence to erupt. And a couple, several of our homicides over half of our homicides had centered around that very scenario. Well, let me tell you what I hear. I hear that as long as these guys are able to make money dealing drugs, the violence is gonna be down. When they can't make money dealing drugs, then the violence goes up. I don't know if it's any correlation there or not, but I hear a lot about, you mentioned the fact about territorial and some of these things seem to be driven by that. And that's why I was asking, are we clamping down on the drug dealers such as making hard for them to make money as a result of people going where they can and causing this type of stuff? Well, we always try to work those areas where street-level drug sales are prevalent and it doesn't take as long to know about those areas as people call. But if somebody's making money, somebody's not. And typically that's what's causing this. I'm making money here, I'm selling here and along you come, that's not gonna happen and move into my territory. And that has also, what we're getting is that's increased with some of the people being released. You know, we had about 600 people released from the penal system last year, it came back in just to Durham. And coming back in some of the areas where they were established before and some of the things that we're hearing out there. And weren't set back up where they were before. Well, now somebody else is running this now. And typically that will result in violence. Step out, give them what you know, what you've experienced. Do you see things getting any better? Wow, Mr. Mayor, that's a hard question. I would like to think so, but my fear is it just seems that the underlying factors that I think drive this seem to be getting worse to me. And so that makes me wonder going forward is will this get better? I think this will only get better and you may have sensed my frustration in the last press conference when people really say enough is enough and get busy trying to do something with the young, particularly young men and particularly young black men that seem to be so heavily predisposed to that type of violence. And we've got a lot of resources here, we've got a lot of churches, we've got a lot of organizations and I hope that they can do that. I think a lot of the churches that I know and there's a lot of people doing that, don't get me wrong, there are. There's a lot of people doing it. But then I talked to some of the ministries who try to do those things, they're almost tapped out. And you know our social services systems are bursting at the seams, you know that, you've seen it. So I don't know, Mr. Mayor, just don't know. Do I think the police trying to keep it stamped down is gonna make it any better? I know we're not gonna make it any better. We're not, we can't keep up. But I'm hopeful, I'm hopeful. But it's a big challenge. And it's just not a challenge for Durham, I think you're seeing cities across this nation deal with it. Okay, thank you. Okay. And so. Just have your command staff stand for the police week as well this week. I'm sorry? Do you have the police officers who are here standing? See how many are here? Sure, I have all the officers standing, it'd be great. National police week. So I would like to say before I leave, I thank you for your words. I wanna thank this council and certainly your predecessors of the last 28 years for managing the city of Well to give me the opportunity to have a fantastic job. I have loved this profession, I still do. Chief Davis said she loves her department in Atlanta. She's gonna love Durham because I love Durham and I love the men and women who do it. And, but thank you for managing the city of Well and giving me that opportunity to have a job where I could raise a family and enjoy life. And to the men and women of the Durham Police Department who are here and who may be watching this on TV, it's been an honor to serve amongst their ranks. I never saw myself being a deputy chief, much less an interim chief, but here I stand and it's been an honor.  And I'm gonna miss it and I'm gonna miss the people who do it, but I say to you, God bless you and you certainly will be in my prayers going forward. Thank you. Okay, we've moved to item 19, proposed new downtown parking garage. Turn it over to you. Good evening Mayor Bell, Mayor Pro Tem members of the city council. I'm Thomas Leathers with the Transportation Department. The item we bring before you tonight for your consideration is seeking council approval for the administration to continue with the current approach and timeline to deliver the new mixed-use parking garage downtown on parcel 14. And to that end, I'm here to answer any questions that you may have or provide additional information. Well, let me, since I was not at the work session when this issue was discussed, and I know we have several people have signed up to speak. I think what I'd prefer to do is hear the speakers and then get back to any conversation with the council unless someone else on the council has something to say prior to that. If not, I'm just gonna call your name as they were, as you signed up. And if you could limit your remarks to three minutes initially please and we may have questions. Robert Chapman, Lou Meyers, Bill Kalkoff, Marisa Seibel, and Melissa Mills. Is there anyone else that would like to speak to it and sign up on the card? If not, I'd recognize Rob Chapman. If you could state your name and address as you come forward please. My name is Bob Chapman. I live at 2525 Lanier Place in Durham. I am a new urbanist, Sprillo State developer with 25 years experience, been involved in projects with a couple thousand units of housing in them, and I'm currently involved in Greensboro building two 550 space parking decks in a mixed unit environment. And I wanted to tell you when I found out about the RFP, I was motivated to think we could do more. First I looked back at our last year's charrette for fixing the loop. This was the most prime spot. This was the place that had more potential than any other space place along the loop. Then I looked at the Kimley-Horn massing study in the RFQ and realized that it had an area, if you look at that drawing and see the green roof to the right, that's a roof on top of proposed ground floor retail, which is a good idea. However it's empty space above. So this is a drawing of what Kimley-Horn proposed. The green area is that roof, but there's nothing built on the top six floors above it. So we just looked at what would happen if we could put six apartments there at no loss of spaces and realized, well, for the five floors, that would be a total of 30 more apartments. If you did it on the roof, it actually would be 36 more apartments. And then looked at the budget. This is a close up, ample sized. And then we did a few drawings. These are just massing studies showing what it would look like compared to what it looked like in the Kimley-Horn massing study, which was open plates, perhaps with some skin to hide the place, but nothing above the ground floor. So this would be looking for Morgan at Rigsby. Another view. We contacted one of the best designers in America, Torti Gallus of Rockville, Maryland. This is one of their parking decks at Rockville Town Center, just to give you a comparison. Then we looked at the price, and I've confirmed these numbers this morning with MetroMont. We actually thought we looked at a price for a cast in place. If we did a precast, it would be substantially less than this, but there was enough money left over to build those 30 units of housing, and we would still have $400,000 left for amenities and streetscape. I organized this simply out of civic duty. When you see something about to happen that will last a long, long time and affect the community for a long time, and it could be done better at no cost, I think you'd have to do what you can, and that's what we've done. Thank you. Thank you. Lou Meyers. Good evening, Mr. Mayor and Council. I'm Lou Meyers. I reside at 208 Riggs v. Avenue, downtown. I'm here this evening representing downtown Durham, Inc. I am the interim president and CEO of that organization, and I want to speak in support of the Council moving forward on the proposal to award a contract for the design of the parking deck on surface parking lot 14. Our parking situation in downtown is critical. Needless to say, the parking has not kept up with our explosive growth. The shortage of spaces is already having a negative impact on our ability to continue our robust growth. The success in bringing needed hotel rooms, businesses, restaurants, retail, commercial, enterprises, and entertainment to downtown is seriously threatened by the lack of available parking. This is a crisis that cannot wait a couple of months while the study is conducted about including affordable housing in this project. And let me state here that this is not in either parking or housing. Parking is critical. Housing is very, very important. And DDI has supported affordable housing. We will do so in the future. We understand that diversity is a key and does a lot for our community. And affordable housing will help contribute to that diversity, so we are for affordable housing. Our concern is that there are too many questions and too few answers regarding affordable housing at this particular time, at this location. However, the critical parking shortage can be addressed immediately by moving forward with the proposed deck, which the city has invested time and money in bringing to this phase. Bringing them on in the summer of 18 is certainly better than bringing them on in the fall of 18 or the winter of 18 or 19 or 20. So on behalf of DDI, we urge you to vote this evening to proceed with the development of... Bill Calcoy. Good evening, Mayor Bill, members of the council. I'm good to be back. My name is Bill Calcoy, 39 Westridge Drive, but I'm coming for you tonight as chairman of the Durham Convention Center Authority Board of Directors. As one of the partners in the convention center, you know over the past five years, the city, the county, spectra management, and the authority board have made significant progress in the management and financial position of the convention center. Something, frankly, we can all be very proud of. During the same time period, downtown Durham has welcomed the long needed influx of hotels. These hotels are critical to the recruitment of increased well-paying conventions to our convention center, creating jobs and tax revenues for the city and county. Maintaining this positive trend is a major fiduciary obligation of the partners of the convention center, including the authority board. Unfortunately, members of the authority board feel that this growth is in jeopardy due to the parking crisis we have now in downtown. On behalf of the board, I'd like to thank Thomas Leathers, Durham's parking manager for a very informative report to our board last Thursday on the parking situation in downtown. Simply stated, as you know, we're out of parking. Just when the future of convention business for downtown looks so very bright, we place this opportunity in jeopardy. The lack of convenient parking will hinder our ability to attract and capture business. In fact, in the last month, we've lost three pieces of business due to the lack of parking. The city administration, led by Tom Bonfield, at great cost time and effort, has completed an analysis of the 750 space parking deck with 15,000 square feet of retail and office space on the lock 14 surface parking lot. If this process is allowed to move forward, the deck can be ready to go in the summer of 2018. Recent discussions of the council have addressed the important issue of affordable housing as a possibility to include in the building of this parking deck. As our board understands, and as Lou had said, adding an element of affordable housing to the deck will require the city administration to go back to the drawing board and start the process to design and build a parking deck all over again. At best, this decision delays a parking deck from coming online until 2020. Let me be clear, as Lou said and I agree, this is not a debate between parking and affordable housing. We all know we need to do both. Currently, the city has received an important consultant report about how the community should address the issue of affordable housing. For example, questions in front of you. Do we focus on 30% of median income, 60%. Do we focus on rental? Do we focus on home ownership? The authority board applauds the council for addressing these affordable housing questions and unfortunately, we do not have the answers in public policies in place at this time to begin solving this critical issue. And we do have a critical parking issue that needs resolving yesterday. The authority board is of the opinion we cannot afford a two plus year delay in addressing a crisis in parking downtown. We recommend that the council proceed with all due haste to develop block 14. Thank you. Welcome. Larissa Saabel. Good evening. I want to speak in support of affordable housing and housing for working workforce housing downtown which is the way I see this proposal at 80% of area median income. I don't think it should require a subsidy from the city or any special policies or procedures. I would hope that this will be considered that you ask the staff to look at is the proposal to add affordable housing or any kind of housing physically possible on this site. And we hope that you will look at every city owned property from this point forward as an opportunity to increase the diversity of downtown and to include housing for workers and for others who come and want to live downtown. It's an extremely desirable place to live. There is extremely limited affordable housing. I know because I looked for housing for working people around downtown and could not find any. And you know, you get the calls too. I do want to say that I am representing the coalition for affordable housing and transit although we didn't really get an opportunity to discuss this, we have policies to encourage you to use your land for affordable housing for every opportunity as well as to preserve affordable housing in the neighborhoods around downtown. And so we look forward to working with you and hope we have an opportunity to talk about this as an opportunity for housing downtown in the future. Thank you. Melissa Mills. Good evening, council members and mayor. I'm Melissa Mills. I live at 109 North Driver Street. And I have come here because I'm interested in affordable housing and I'm interested in parking. I'm interested in the welfare of the city. I'm for both. What I worry about is I worry about making decisions in haste driven by fear. And that's a little bit what I'm hearing. And I certainly agree with the comments that have been made earlier about the dangers to lost revenues in hotels because of lack of parking spaces. I had the privilege of being at the working session of the county commissioners this morning and heard that in this past year, 300 people, visitors have been turned away from the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science because there wasn't enough parking. And so there's a lot of discussion about can there be shuttle buses? Can there be this or that? There might be some creative solutions. What I'm worried about is I'm worried about the opportunity cost of taking some real estate that is really right downtown at a time when we're trying to add density to the city for the light rail. And this would be just a prime opportunity when we talk about affordable housing. We are also talking about affordable housing for young entrepreneurs who just add life to the nightlife downtown. And affordable housing, as Larissa mentioned, would be something that added apartments that were livable for these young entrepreneurs that we are attracting from all over the country. So I'm not saying we shouldn't do it, but I'm saying that the difference of two months in 2018 isn't, that's already we have the problem between here and 2018. We've gotta come up with a solution. We can't wait for 2018 to solve this. So what I'm suggesting is that we move ahead and come up now with a solution of shuttle buses, remote parking, something, free valet parking. And look again at what could we do to add density of affordable housing at no cost to the city at this very attractive location. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Let me ask again, is it anyone else that wants to speak on this item that hasn't had a chance to speak? Okay, this is not it. But it is a public hearing to a certain extent. Let's come back to council. Let's, the administration has something you wanna add. Okay. Questions or comments from the council person? I don't recognize the mayor, Pro Tem. I have a question for the attorney. Mr. Chapman's company has submitted on this project. How could we include that proposal without allowing the others to have the opportunity to respond the same way? Will we have to go back out again or? Speaking off the cuff, Madam Mayor Pro Tem, you wouldn't necessarily just take Mr. Chapman's proposal, but you would come back and start the process over again, be more inclusive as opposed to, I think the direction that you're getting and the manager can speak for himself is that you've been given a proposal of the direction that the administration is going, and they want guidance from you as to whether to continue on in that direction. So if you're gonna take pieces of a different proposal, you would be talking about. Going back out. Essentially starting over, yes. Okay, that answers the question. Councilor Maurice. Just to be clear, the RF, the request for a proposal went out, we've received proposals from various vendors to build this parking deck, is that right? That's correct. Was one of them the group that Mr. Chapman was discussing tonight or is that just extraneous to the process? No, one of the proposals received was from the Torti Gallis group that Mr. Chapman's referring for the design RFQ. Okay, and the proposal that they put forward, did that include the residential units that Mr. Chapman discussed tonight? It included approximately 25 to 28 residential units in their proposal. Okay, but did it otherwise meet the requirements that were in the RFP for the parking deck itself? That it did not. The team of seven independent reviewers, reviewed all eight of the proposals against the established criteria as it was outlined in the scope of work. One of some of those criteria were around the qualifications of those firms to build a cast and plays post-tension parking garage that was misused. So we were very specific in that. It was not that the RFP team was biased against affordable housing. The affordable housing component was not one of the elements that we were scoring the proposals against. So if the responded firm would have addressed and would have demonstrated their capabilities and capacities to deliver a parking garage, we could be having another conversation because we would have viewed the affordable housing element as a value add to the proposal. So it scored low because it did not meet the basic foundations of the scope of work. Can you, I don't know if you have, can you help me understand how they failed? Like what specifically did they not do or did not have the experience to do? Sure, all of the proposals were pretty much qualified. I don't have the delineation of the exact rankings with me tonight, but we can't provide that to council. Some of that would be delivery of a misused parking garage of a certain size in certain municipalities with a commercial office component to it being a cast and plays garage. So then we had other criteria that cascaded down from that that I can share. And so even though the, so they were qualified, but they just, they didn't match up to the other. They weren't the most qualified, correct. They were not the most qualified. Correct. And you indicated that an affordable housing component would be a value add on top of that. Right, we did not have any criteria or measurements to judge or to rank or evaluate an affordable housing component because that was not in our original scope of work for the garage. So in order for us to be able to have that type of capacity as a team, we will have to do another assessment to include that, which was not a part of the original scope. Thank you. As council will share. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thomas, you talked about two different, at the work session, you talked about a couple of different types of garages and there was a type of garage that we awarded the, or that you recommend that we award the RFP to or the contract to, as opposed to the type of garage that this group was planning to build, this build, this group has offered to build a much less expensive garage. And I wonder if you could talk about the differences between those two. Sure. In the original scope of work, we wanted a post-tension cast in place garage versus a precast garage. The difference is in the longevity of the garages. We understand that industry research tells us that a precast garage, which was proposed by Mr. Chapman's group, usually have a life cycle of about 25 to 30 years and requires massive maintenance, preventive maintenance with the expansion joints approximately every five to seven years. We opted based on the research that we had conducted in consultation with Kimberly Horne to do a post-tension cast in place garage to give us a garage like a last 70 to 75 years and require less preventive maintenance and about every 10 years. Also, when we talk about cast in place garage, we looked at security, we looked at sight lines. The precast garage would give you little panels that would be connected by expansion joints. With each one of those panels, it also reduces the sight line. So we would have increased lighting costs and then the garage would feel more closed in and not open. A cast in place garage is more of a slab. So we have fewer expansion joints that are required to be connected. We have a better aesthetic where we can have less lighting costs and also the visual aesthetic in the garage would be a more open canvas inside the garage so it'd be a more of an open airy feeling of a garage. So based on, since it was being built with the parking enterprise funds, we wanted a garage that we could put in our life cycle analysis, that we could plug the maintenance into our model and be able to project for the horizon where we could have a garage that would be durable for years to come. Thank you. You always do such a great job in describing these complicated things. I always appreciate it. Mr. Mayor, I just want to make a comment, is it appropriate? I'm gonna vote to move this forward and I just want to say why. I really appreciate Bob, you all bringing this to us. I think that the mayor will probably call you in a minute, but I can't call on you. But I will just tell you that I appreciate you bringing this forward because I agree very much that you said you're doing it as a civic-minded thing and I appreciate that. My feeling is this, that subsidizing units at $144,000 a piece for 80% of the area median income isn't our target. It's not, it wouldn't be a priority for me having nothing to do with this garage. And the thing I feel about our affordable housing and I really feel this really strongly and I wish, and I feel like I would like to have more of a discussion with our housing advocates about it is this, we've got to keep our eye on the ball. We have Liberty Street and Oldham Towers that we need to redevelop. We need to help the Durham Housing Authority do that. We need to get control of Fayette Place, 19 acres and figure out how to redevelop it. We need to figure out how to redevelop McDougal Terrace. The Housing Authority is working on the, you know, McDougal Terrace, Cornwallis Road, Oxford Manor, all very large projects that are all gonna take tax credits. This deal is too small for a tax credit. All the subsidy would have to come from us. That's a very large subsidy per unit for a very few units. And the thing that, you know, we have our whole plan. We have 1,000, I think over 1,200 units coming out of mandatory affordability this year that we need our staff to be concentrating their time on to figuring out how to keep those 1,200 units coming out of affordability within the next year affordable. We have very limited staff capacity, both the Durham Housing Authority and in our Community Development Department. Great people, but very limited capacity. So my feeling is that that's what we need to keep our eye on is to try to how to build that capacity and to take on those big projects. 25 units is too small for a tax credit deal. So it's all gonna come from the penny. All they have to be general fund money. And I just don't think that's a priority for our general fund money. And I really don't figure it, I don't feel it's a priority for our staff. I think our staff ought to be thinking about the things that Karen Lotto talked to us about. How do we work with our Housing Authority to redevelop these very difficult, large projects on a tight timeline? Rental Assistance Demonstration, the 2019 Rental Assistance Demonstration is phasing out. We have three years to develop probably $120 million worth of housing property. The staff capacity issue is huge. And I think we ought to use it for the priorities that we know are in place. We need to use the land downtown for sure. But we have so much land downtown that is much bigger and more important than this for the housing. We need to do those things. And so I think we ought to move this forward and continue to press forward really hard on our housing plan. I feel like we have a great roadmap that Karen's laid out for us. And we're gonna hear a lot more from that soon. Set our guidelines for that. And I just think that's where our time, energy and money ought to be spent. So I'm appreciative of this. But I feel like it's a plan to support moving it forward. Recognize Councilwoman Johnson and Councilwoman Davis in that order. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I agree that we should move forward with the parking garage plan. But I am hesitant to completely close the door on having housing there in the future. Could we suggest to the folks who we choose to build this garage that we would like the opportunity to build housing on it in the future such that the garage is designed in a way that could hold housing on top of it and that we could do that in a separate process through a separate process at a later date so that it didn't delay the construction of this current project. That's great. We can entertain, we can explore that option. That's something similar that we did with North Garage. We're able to add additional levels at a later time. I would caution the council that we could, that was one of the tenants of the Durham Center Garage as well to have a mirror tower. So if we have, depending on the time element, some zoning could or some code could change in that time. But we'll include that with the design firm that we select. Can I ask Councilwoman Davis? Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I'd like the concept that Councilwoman Johnson just mentioned, if that is possible. But I really think that we need to move ahead as was the issue that was brought forth by the comments from Kalkoff and Meyer's, Meyer that we need to make sure that we get moving on this so that we don't lose any more businesses along the way because of the lack of parking and that we continue to deal with issues that would increase the revenues that come into the city through taxes. So I would encourage the members of the council to vote to move ahead. Well, I recognize, I have some comments I wanna make, but I wanted all of the council members to speak first. Councilor Rees and then the mayor, Pro Tem. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Councilman Mark. Mr. Leathers, I have to tell you that the idea that we're gonna build a parking deck in downtown Durham, specifically for the purpose that it lasts 75 to 80 years breaks my heart. We are in the midst of transforming the way that we do public transit here in Durham. And it's my hope that in 25 or 30 years, the way that people get to work in downtown Durham will be completely different. So in my mind, when you describe a choice between a parking deck that is built to last 25 or 30 years and one that's built 75 to 80 years, the choice may be clear to you, but it's clear to me as well in the opposite direction. Maintenance costs, all that, the lighting understood. I also think that our system of public transit as it exists today could do more active outreach to the folks who, to businesses who are moving into downtown Durham, who are the folks who have appealed to us, we need more parking availability. And I understand that there have been at least five instances in recent months where we've been unable to accommodate requests for additional monthly parkers. And that's of course a concern, but I wonder what process we have in place to offer businesses like that a suite of options for their employees about other ways they can get to downtown to work other than drive their cars and park them here for eight hours a day. And more broadly, as I said, I do think within the next 20 to 30 years, we're in the process of rapidly changing, okay, not rapidly, of changing, dramatically changing the way that people move around in Durham specifically as it relates to downtown. And so that's one of the things that disappoints me about this proposal. I was disappointed about it at the budget retreat, which was the first opportunity I had to hear about this new parking deck. I don't believe that I ran for this officer who was elected to build more parking decks in downtown Durham. Add to that the idea that if we delayed for some period of time, Lord, I hope it wouldn't take two years given how closely the guidelines that would be necessary to add affordable housing would be to the existing, at least from a technical engineering perspective, put aside the administrative concerns about how we do that within the city government and make those units affordable. I don't understand and quite frankly, have been unable to get someone to explain to me the two year addition in time, but I'm not asking you to do that again today. You've tried, you've done a great job. It's my head, not yours. Having said all that, I do take to heart what my colleague, council member Shul has said about our need to focus our efforts where we get the most bang for our buck, where our city staff can be best focused on our goals in this area. And despite all the stuff I just said earlier, which would make great reasons to vote against the staff's proposal, I will support it tonight. Thank you. I recognize council member Moffitt. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I have different thoughts here. The first is I'm a little concerned about the idea of building a structure that will accommodate additional building in the future, unless it's not gonna add substantial costs, both to the project today and to building residential in the future. To me, the optimum time to do it is when we cut the site, when we're trying to do everything that we need to do, we can do it at the same time. So I wanna be careful as we move forward with that, that it's a, if we do move forward with making it feasible to build residential in the future, that it's done in such a way that it's not cost prohibitive in the future, I just don't wanna add costs. But I have five major disappointments here that I wanna talk about for a moment, and these are in general not directed to anybody in particular, but first is council's made it clear that affordable housing is critical and especially downtown. And I haven't really yet, I've yet to see that really have an impact on things that are being brought to us. My second disappointment is that there's no, what I'll call cross silo work. The parking deck is clearly in transportation's wheelhouse. Affordable housing is not. There's no indication that community development has been involved. The result is a parking deck with required retail and an office for transportation uses. No surprise, that's what I would expect. But what we need is for the departments to be working across silos to figure out how to do things that have a much broader impact on the community. And I will say that, I mean, I do think that I was elected to help understand, to work on what are the issues that are facing the community and addressing those needs, whatever they are. But I think that we can do so in a way that makes everything stronger. But we need to work across silos. The third one is that we tonight don't have any real information on which to make a decision. There's talk about a two-year delay. It's very back in the envelope estimate. We have no idea, as my colleague pointed out, what it really takes in terms of money or time. The first that we've heard about, my next disappointment is the first that we heard about it, the first that this has brought to our attention to my break election is February. It's been in the work since last July. And because now we're in what's called a crisis, our hands are more or less tied. So we haven't really had the opportunity, we get to anoint it, but we don't get to really have an impact on it without doing what everybody is telling us that's involved in downtown real harm to our businesses downtown. And the crisis is our fifth disappointment, my fifth disappointment. It stands in stark contrast to the generally very orderly management of the city. Just as one example, the water department appears to work hard to forecast future demands and to stay ahead of that demand. And our convention center, our D-Pact, Bob Kloss emailed me and perhaps all of you, but he emailed me about the impacts that parking is having on their daytime rentals. And we've heard DDIs talk tonight about that. So we know that it's having an impact. But somewhere along the way, we failed to project what our needs were in such a way that we weren't in a crisis needing to move forward without being able to be, to bring in the impact, excuse me, to bring in the input from council and to have a thoughtful process here. So that's, thank you. Did Mayor Perkin want to say something else? No, sir. Well, let me say unfortunately for me, I was not at the work session so I didn't have the benefit of the council discussion and the response that I've heard from the administration today relative to what they asked for, what they got and what was being proposed. I hadn't heard that information even. But I've always been a strong opponent of parking for downtown. I think when we had that little scenario some time ago where we were asked to give our top priorities, you go back and check my list, parking garage was at the top of the list. So it's not a question with me about whether or not we need parking downtown. But I think I've also been equally strong about affordable housing downtown in terms of mixed use. So when I heard that there was an opportunity to do that, it caused me pause to try to maybe explore that a little bit better. I'll have to confess, until the last week or so, I haven't heard the specifics of the critical need of parking downtown and impact you could have on some projects. I mean, I just heard that within the last week. I've heard that we need parking, but some things have been brought to my attention how critical it is that we have parking in downtown so that it doesn't have a negative impact on some proposed developments. But I still have not been totally convinced in terms of the delay and the impact it would have on exploring the concept of having parking garage as proposed, a level of affordable housing and what are the trade-offs in terms of what costs it would be for that approach versus what we have. And when I say that, there are still a lot of unanswered questions. I mean, affordable housing, this is the first time I've heard this evening we were talking about 80% median incomes. It wasn't clear to me what affordable housing meant when Bob, what's the proposal for. And my question is, will it work for 80% median income? Will it work for 60% median income? Other question was, how's it gonna be managed? Who would own the apartments? Would it develop on departments? Or would it sit on departments? And I've heard that right now we're considering doing the parking garage, so we'll come out of the parking fund. If we did affordable housing, where would the dollars come from there? And it's been alluded to that will come from the penny for housing. Those are the level of details that I haven't gotten an answer to. And I think that we've been in a better position if we had time to really go through and explore that. I'm not convinced that a months delay is going to impact this garage moving forward. It's gonna impact the units that are down there. But Bob, I'm gonna recognize you. I see your hand. Trust me I do, I see you. But I just wanted to lay out some of the concerns and thoughts that I had when I first heard about this project and still some of the questions that in my opinion need to be answered, even if we wanted to move forward with a combination of garages and affordable housing and retail. And when we get that tonight, to me, it would take a certain amount of time to get that information. And the question is, is council willing to take that time to try to get that information and then make a decision or do we just wanna move forward with what we've got based on where we are? I have some other things I wanna say but I'm gonna recognize you, Bob, if you, since you have raised the question. Thank you, sir. I appreciate it. First, I wanna address the timeline. We've looked at the timeline. I consulted with the vendor who built the Columbia, South Carolina deck that was used in the RFQ as an example. From the notice to proceed, that was built in nine and a half months. That means that if we were able to say go, six months of which was used in ordering. And that deck, by the way, was a precast deck. On the other hand, we budgeted for a cast and place deck in the proposal we submitted. And by the way, we're not in the running for this anymore. We didn't make the cut, we're not looking for that. I'm trying to get the city to make a better and wiser choice at this point. The timeline would be finish it in 2017, not in the middle of 2018. And I'm absolutely certain that that is doable. That's what I do for a living. If you can wait to address these questions and add a month or two and still get it done by February, that deck will be in operation in 2017, not middle of 2018. The question about precast versus cast and place. The only deck I know of around here we have problems with is the cast and place deck on Chapel Hill Street. I'm not sure, and we had that, I went and examined it this afternoon. It's not a precast deck. The income limits, we didn't mention any income limits in the proposal that we asked C.T. Wilson and Tortigales to present to the city. There were no income limits mentioned. It was just to say that based on the savings that we project based on our experience, you could build these units at no additional cost above the $23 million. If you wanna make them 30%, I'm all for it. Absolutely. As to management, we did mention, I believe I mentioned to several of the council people that the Durham Community Land Trustees is more than willing to manage these units. And they've said they actually could pay the city back for the cost of them over time. These are all intriguing, exciting things to me. And I'm really very much along what Charlie said. I don't think we need a 75-year deck, although every apartment developer in this area, including Berkshire, which just built the most expensive apartments ever sold in America, 269,000 each. That's a cast-in-place deck that was put up in about 12 weeks. I don't think they wanted to build something that would not last as long as the apartments they just built. So I would tend to agree with you, Mr. Mayor, that it would make sense, and I would volunteer my service to meet with the staff and to share all the knowledge and information that I've gained. It may very well be a very simple thing of saying, let's use this airspace that we will have on the flat roof of the first floor retail, and look at what the cost would be. I truly believe that we can bring this in way below, or substantially below the budget and include housing units that would be a real asset. Thank you. Let me ask, pre-set your input, Bob, the mess administration. If we were to ask you to go back out with an RFP for a proposal for the number of parking spaces that we've been asking for, to include the retail portion that you have in there, and also to include a certain number of affordable housing units, and I think we need to be very specific in terms of what incomes we were talking about. Is this your gut feel? How long would it take for you to do that and get a response back? From our internal discussions with our general services, and I did have a brief conversation with Reginald Johnson and Community Development, for us to develop that scope and do all the research, we probably would not be able to release the RFQ till early 2017, given our current projects that are in queue with our existing staff resources. We have a lot of other programs that we are scheduled to roll out later this year. So for us to do that research, we have to work with the city attorney's office about the legalities around the ownership of those residential units, if there would be residential units that would be for sale, if there'd be residential units that would be for rent, how we would have to vet the management companies for those, what type of process that would be, or would it be a master development agreement? It's a lot of diversity of issues that we would have to navigate with and get some type of resolve and some type of conformity around to be able to give an educated answer to you, but it would take us months to do that. That's disappointing to a certain extent, but I can't talk about how much work you've got to do, and if that's your, you're the one that's gonna do the work. And if you're telling me you couldn't get it done until 2017, I'd be reluctant to try to push you in that direction based on where we are. That just seems an awful long time for me though. It really does. Mr. Mayor, could I say, just at this point, I do think that there are a lot of issues, a lot of very valid points that have been raised this evening by all parties, rather than go back and do a complete forensics on how we got here, I think there's some good explanations for how we got here, some intended, some unintended. I would like at least maybe a couple of weeks to try to think through all of these issues and come back to you, nothing else with a complete explanation of why it's gonna take until 2017, but to see and better articulate all of the issues that we feel that we would need to have addressed. I think it's been a little oversimplified in terms of just get it designed and get it built, but it may not be as complicated as others have suggested it might be. So maybe we'll take two weeks, come back, I don't think, certainly I'm not gonna be ready by Thursday, but and maybe at the work session, two weeks from Thursday, we'll try to come back with a little more explanation. I don't think two weeks is gonna hurt anything in this regard, and it could be a situation that if we could provide adequate explanation, one way or the other, you'd be in a position of taking an action at that work session in two weeks and not have to kick it all the way into the June Council meeting for an action. Mr. Mayor, would you entertain a motion to that effect? Since this is on NIO, it would be. So moved. Sure, it's been a proper move in the second discussion. Recognize the council, Mr. Mayor, I think fine to do this two weeks, I'll vote for it. I just, in your deliberations though, when you're thinking about this in this two weeks, one of the things that we'll be thought about and discussed is, when staff does the work on these 24 units, what work are we not doing on Liberty and Oldham?  What work are we not doing on the, you know, the keeping the 1,200 units that are coming out of affordability affordable. I hope that we'll think about, think about what is the staffing needed for those things, not just the parking aspect of this. Because I think that that's it. I think that's it, Steve. Thank you. Again, if it was simple, I think we would have done it. And I admit that, you know, there are questions I still need answered. You thought this term affordability means different things to different people. Somebody that got paid for it, got to figure out where it's coming from. I completely agree with that. So I don't have an issue with that. I just think we ought to ourselves as well. And I know the staff is doing the work. So when he throws up that number, I can't say no, it's not gonna take that amount of time. But I just think we ought to ourselves that we've least explored that possibility and see where we go from there. And if the administration is willing to spend that time and come back to us within two weeks, I certainly would appreciate it. The other piece, Mr. Manager, I think you might want to come back and tell us what, if you don't do this parking garage, what specific developments get delayed or get harmed? I think that's really important for people to understand. Any further questions on this? I have not, we've had a discussion and called a question. Madam Clerk, will you open the vote? Close the vote. It passes, seven is zero. Thank you. Thank you. Are there other items to come before the council tonight? If not, we're adjourned at 8.55 p.m.