So I'm still in contact with her as I have questions, but I do want to introduce the team that I'm working with from the office. So Charmaine Clark, which I think you're all familiar with, Dolly Herron, which I know you're all familiar with. Dolly who? Dolly who? I have to get used to that name. And then Dolores Chavez, and she must have stepped out, but she's also part of the management team of the department that I'm working pretty closely with. We also have Aisha Driggers, who's director of OBO, and the two department works closely together and a lot of their activities relate to how we impact our community. So she will attend these meetings and the economic development. So the position is posted. So, and Dolores just walked in. So Dolores Chavez is part of the management team that's working pretty closely with me. I am, I'm toggling both offices right now. So I'm down in community development a good bit as well, but also working out of this office until we fill the position. So the position is posted. We've created a brochure that's in draft form, so hope to finalize it this week. And it's really for a widespread outreach effort to see who will apply for the position. We will also promote the position with various associations and partner agencies that are listed on the screen. To try again to cast a widespread net and get applicants that may not otherwise know about it if not for using those organizations. This is a technical point. It's municipal association of South Carolina, MASC. Correct that in the future, okay. Thank you, Mr. DeVall. Not that I noticed. You had something to do with that, yes. And so if we had a timeline with it, what would that timeline look like? As soon as possible, but we want the right candidate as well. I mean, I would, and we will come back and report monthly as these meetings occur. I would think several months, but again, if we get the right applicant sooner, I'm anxious. I know the team's anxious and I think Ms. Wilson is also looking forward to filling the position. Some of the priorities that came out of our work sessions with council and vision sessions, was that included in the posting of duties and what we would like to see in that role? So our job descriptions are pretty broad as we looked at it. We intended to make some tweaks, but it really didn't need tweaks. I mean, it's a very broad description and covers the gamut. But as we're working on the brochure, we will be deliberate in talking about the city's vision and some of the focus areas that we'd like to achieve. Do you think that it's unreasonable to have it filled before budget years to new budget year starts July 1? I would hope not. I mean, I'm toggling the two offices and the management team being patient with me and everybody's pulling double duty. So I know we all would like to have it filled as quickly as possible, but again, we want the right candidate as well. And as far as functioning, we're still able to do everything that we've been doing before. We are. We are keeping track. Fortunately, we're approaching a time that DR should wrap up. There'll be a lot of closeout activities. But as far as rehabilitation and reconstruction, we should be wrapping that up. The last house should be finished by the end of April, which we're all excited about.  Again, there will be a lot of closeout activities. So it doesn't mean it's over, but having construction complete will certainly be a welcome. Yeah, we're keeping up. We're working together and everybody's doing their part. Thank you. Next, we have Community Development Month. And I think, is that the same thing? I think I put Fair Housing Month. Is that kind of the same thing? So we have Community Development Week, which is, and Sermon, you want to come up here? And Dolores and Gloria Yauer, I mean Dolores and Dolly Yauer, welcome to you as well. There's Community Development Week, which is April 10th through the 14th. There's also National Fair Housing Month, which is in April, and National Financial Literacy Month in April. So we've created a draft agenda for activities throughout that month based on some activities that have taken place in prior years as well as some other conversation. So you want to talk about what we have here? Yes, well, we have a draft agenda for a calendar for CD Week, National Fair Housing Month, as well as National Financial Literacy Month. So we are in the process of creating proclamations for National Community Development Week, as well as the Fair Housing and Financial Literacy Month, which we do every year. We are in talks with possibly creating a video highlighting some of the projects that were funded with Community Development CDBG block grants, as well as doing a segment on some of the people that were able to secure housing, affordable housing through our loan program. We're also talking about doing a day of service. These are some of the things that we have in place that we are talking about doing since we work closely with the food share committee, possibly doing like a food drive or something of that nature, possibly through harvest hope, as well as doing something with collaboration with the Upworth Children's Center. I have a question. The day of service recommendations, this is what we're recommending to the community that they do? No, these are something that we are talking amongst staff. Okay. And then we'll pick one or two, possibly, day of service to do. So these are just some of the things that we highlighted that we are talking amongst staff. And y'all have time to do that. And we really want y'all to stay back. Yes, just a day, but yeah. Okay. Okay. We'll continue to go through. Uh-huh. Also, we are talking about doing for the month, doing a home buying workshop as well as a financial workshop, just to highlight that's what the Fair Housing and Financial Literacy Month. So we're going to do some workshops, possibly April the 20th at Busby Street from 6 to 8. And as that time approaches, we'll be giving out more information on that. Every month starting from April to October, we do the community improvement projects where we collaborate with David Hatcher, Group Code Enforcement, as well as Public Works. And they come and do a clean sweep within a neighborhood for the entire week. So I'm in the process of putting that list together. I know Councilman Brennan contacted me a few months ago about adding Farsills to that group. So we will do that this year as well. And if you're taking nominations at some point, Belmont Community, they can be at it. Okay. Uh-huh. Yeah, our first one is going to be in April. Uh-huh. Is this around April the 5th? Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. And the reason why I asked, because I did have a meeting with Columbia International University a few months ago. RAMServe, and I think it's around April the 5th. Yeah. Okay. That's what it is. Okay. There's good examples out there, Ms. Wilson. Raleigh does a service Raleigh, which they do a big clean sweep of the whole city that we might want to look to for that. I completely support that initiative. I think it's, it'd be great for Columbia. Okay. And those are some of the events and things that we have planned for the month and community development week. So I want to specifically talk about, so this is the cross-section of Affordable Housing Task Force and community development. But one of the big things that we wanted to do, and I've discussed with the mayor too, is a campaign during this month. Okay. About the face of affordable housing. And I think we talked about it maybe in our housing meeting, but putting together a video of source. We always help. I prefer shorter one, like 45 seconds. But what we're realizing is as developments are coming. We are trying to find ways to approach not in my backyard. And as housing prices continue to increase, I tell folks affordable means a whole lot of different things to some people. We want our college graduates to be able to afford a place to stay, whether they want to rent or purchase. And so out of that group came the development of a campaign of sorts. Now I've never put together a campaign, so I'm going to look into some of those options. But the other part too is we have people over there who can assist. I just need to know how to pull those pieces together because we have two people. I think it's Miss Bean and someone else, but there's like a committee specifically to work on the campaign. We just need to figure out how to get them together. And we intended after this discussion, we've got the community development week video as well as the faces of affordable housing. We've got a segment, but we'll change that to campaign. We need to get with our public relations department and identify the path forward for any work we're going to do. Probably using a consultant, but we'll reach out to Miss Bean and Sue to see if they can be part of a discussion of how to move that forward. Okay. I mean really I think what we've discussed is something real simple. And it can be done different ways. It can be short segments of various people in various stages of life who are looking for affordable housing, people who have been through affordable housing. And then maybe one longer video, but I think it's important to have the mayor, like one where we're talking about the mayor basically explaining how important affordable housing is. So we have to lead that discussion. Yes, sir. Is the new term attainable? Is attainable the same thing as affordable? I don't get into all of those definitions because it confuses people. So we interchange those words a little bit. There's a defined HUD definition of affordable. There's such a bad connotation by some community members. Yeah. We use attainable a lot. It's honestly, we've talked a lot about the faces of, this is our firemen, our police officers, our teachers, our public works workers. I mean it's a large portion of our employee base and people fail to recognize who affordable is describing. So we really want to know. I think that is the exact point of the campaign to show people the faces of people who really need affordable housing so that they don't automatically have that negative connotation when they hear it. And that's what I usually tell people. I want people who work for the city of Columbia to be able to live in the city of Columbia and not have to come from Kalamazoo. I'm sorry. I think layering in the school district as well would be a good idea. The faces of our teaching professionals. Oh yeah, yeah. Our teachers and teacher assistants. So as many clips that we can have of various people in various stages of life, I think would be helpful and we can just kind of blast it out different ways. But I think it's also important to make sure we get leadership involved and so that they understand. It is a constant struggle in district one. But we need affordable housing. So but again, that's the whole point is changing how we see and think about affordable housing. The next item on the agenda will be a discussion about what's going on with the development corporations and as most of you were actually all three of y'all will remember from different roles you played. There was a decision prior to covid to reorganize how we funded development corporations. It was important to to recognize that while we could not restructure them ourselves outright we could certainly change the funding stream by which they were funded. So our decision was to consolidate and instead of funding five different corporations we would fund to one would be a residential. Focus Corporation and one would be commercial. I do point out that both of those can include multi family so there would be some collaboration among them as well on some larger projects. The intent was to enhance collaboration not only among those two organizations but with the city of Columbia proper and more efficient use of city refund city funds to help support. We're in the process covid slowed us down there were a lot of slowdowns it's taken a little bit longer actually a lot longer than it should have. We're in the final stages of the merger between CHDC and TNDC that should be completed on March 6 from a legal standpoint. There'll be some tidying up of assets and deeds and all of that following that date but we're approaching completion of that merger. So they will form the residential corporation. There's members of both boards will form the new board is the intent is it going to have a new name. Right now the name is TNDC that doesn't mean they may not change it as they looked at the structure of both organizations TNDC is more stable TNDC will be the surviving corporation. They will likely then change their name once the merger happens and the new name may end up being CHDC but for reasons of financial stability it was important that TNDC is the surviving corporation. Again probably with a future name change I thought they would be here I communicated effectively. And those two corporations have always worked under the direction of one director so it's not changing a lot about their day to day operations from a staff standpoint. It's just changing the legal entity that exists. At least she's doing the commercials. She's doing CEZ so CEZ is the commercial arm and they will remain CEZ. Can we please consider something other than Columbia having both the corporation not to confuse. And that is really their decision but we can certainly guide that decision. I don't know if in the past it's caused confusion so something to consider. Yeah we can certainly do that. So the and then CDC decided that was Columbia Development Corporation they decided to become independent and that was totally their right and they did not want to be part of the reorganization so they're an independent entity now. So the last corporation is Eau Claire Development Corporation. They took assets that they had developed during their terms out with them. They did corporations own their assets the city of Columbia does not. So when they decided to become independent the properties they owned and their assets belong to them. So the last corporation that we will need to work with is Eau Claire Development Corporation. We're in the process of doing that. We've performed title searches on their properties. They've passed a resolution to acknowledge that this is going on. That board has not been active in quite a while so we'll need to recombine the board because they'll have to take some votes to actually effectuate. They'll be dissolving and they'll be dividing their assets into the commercial and residential corporations. So that should be complete by the end of this fiscal year hopefully sooner but we're working with an attorney on that right now. And the Eau Claire Development Corporation is that mostly residential? It's mostly residential. There's three commercial properties that will go to CEC and everything else is residential that will roll to the new residential corporation. As we were casting the vision for that restructuring there was a lot of concern from different boards and different members of our community about the lack of focus that would take place on North Columbia. And that is far from true. All of these corporations have always functioned in North Columbia. They own properties in North Columbia. Their board members have they've had board members representing North Columbia. So certainly we have stressed the importance of representing the entire city but they understand the concern that existed in North Columbia. And there's there's been no there's been nothing lost during this process for our North Columbia. Right. And I think that to North Columbia. They were reassured last week that we're on top of the North main corridor and as far as economic development because I had gotten that question. People wanted us to come speak on how do we plan on handling that. Is this I mean I haven't done this in the past. I don't know if other council members have but I guess giving kind of the development corporations sort of a vision of what we would like to see on the kind of let's just use Rosewood as an example. They get buildings giving them kind of a hey why don't you go check this out to see if you can make something of it. Is that is that within reason that we as council members and can engage our development corporations to get to do. We can. There's limited resources. So many times the projects they undertake they're going to need some funding source to help with it. And that's been some of the challenges in the past. They do own their own properties. So they have income outside of the city. But they're in short term like that is that we've done in the past. We have mainly with CEZ. Right. And these are all I'm just thinking commercial limited funds. But yes we can certainly have that conversation. Okay. I think my my overall concern would just be to make sure to the extent possible that the development corps in the city are working towards the same vision because previously I don't I have not felt that way. The development court wanted to and we've had situations where we just didn't agree. So I do think that and I think I've said this before if we pay the salaries. I think we need to have some input. And if we don't have any input then when they're separate I have no problems with it. But that is just Tina Herbert talking making sure I'm clear about that. I do think that if if their development corpse for us that we should be working together towards what what the development corpse are trying to do. That's just my two cents that I'll throw in. And I don't I don't know what efforts have been without being overreaching. But I just feel like and it kind of goes back to the discussion we had with community development and making sure community development is in line with what City Council is talking about. I just want us to make more efforts in that area. Absolutely and I do think the restructuring will it lends itself to that being better received and a little bit more collaborative. And I well yeah. And I remember when they had problems with council members being too involved and almost taking over the boards and none of us would do that. But I do think that over the years what I have seen is that we're working in two different directions. And I just that's just Tina Herbert. I don't think that's acceptable to work in two different directions. I don't think that's going on right now. I mean CEZ is an example on the state funds that came to the city for the Atlas Bluff project. CEZ is taking that project on because we asked them to. I mean it's a great project. I think it's good for them as a corporation. But we went to them and said is this something you'd be interested in. And they never hesitated. So there's example after example as we move to the discussion about the residential lots. As Wilson just said we can't tell them what to do. So we've got to remember that when we move to this next discussion. And while I've got a list of lots that city on some so we can do anything we want to with those within the limitations of the funding source that we acquired them with. But the corporation on lights we can't do that independent of the corporation. So we'll talk about that in just a second. That's important to remember. Who appoints the board members for the corporation. They self appoint. So city does not do that either. And again that's those structures they are deliberately for a reason. And our legal has a check and balance to make sure all their policies procedures everything is in place. They have our legal does not represent them either. I mean again independent council they have their own attorneys. They are arms length. We fund part of their operation. Which is a really weird. I mean if you're the director of a corporation you've got this board very independent of the city. Still should hear our vision and listen to us. But you're also reporting up as an employee to the hierarchy of the city. It's a unique position to be in. Well I have no doubt that we can work well together. So the next conversation we'll be talking about residential lots and I do I don't have. We'll go through to two separate list shortly but there are a lot of residential lots that are vacant that have been owned either by the city and or by the corporations for some time. We have in the last year had lots of conversation actually prior to that even but the last year specifically conversations about how to create new affordable housing homes on those lights. So we're in the process of doing that we have worked with the corporations. Mainly CHDC because they own the majority of those residential vacant lots. We've released an RFP a few months ago for very targeted communities and lots. We received a response to that and we're in conversations with that respondent. We released another RFP on Monday for other two other communities and our communities right now are. Booker Washington Heights Belmont and then the King Street area crossing over to a little bit of MLK and those are using lots that again either the city or the corporations own. When we decide to proceed for those lights the corporations own it's not a city of Columbia or city council action. It'll be a board action by the corporation so we will work with them in a collaborative manner and they're aware we've talked to the boards. They're aware this is going on and they're supportive. The request from the builders will likely be the land gets donated. So I think the city is going to have to make a strong position that that's our request of the board as well. So we'll be having those conversations shortly. You have any numbers on how many lots and how many owned by the city and how many owned by the corporation. So the next two sheets these are city online city proper related to CDBG activities. I'm not going to tell you this is all inclusive of all city residential properties but these are related. So two of these the King Street property and the Cherry Street property are included in those RFPs. King Street you may remember was three duplexes I believe we bought a few years ago with CDBG money. We've demoed the duplexes and the intent is for new homes to go back on those lights. So that's included in the RFP as well as Cherry Street. And then the next list which I know is hard to read from the distance. These are lights owned by the corporation. So all of the lights in Belmont will be included and there's probably 30 that are in Belmont. And then the lights in Booker Washington Heights I believe there's six lights that are corporation owned. So we're excited about what that means about the possibility of putting new homes. It is going to be very critical that the city's affordable home loan program remain intact. Because in order to make these homes available we're going to need that resource. Commercial lenders are going to have a harder time making loans that remain affordable if not for our partnerships. That's one thing we are hearing from the respondents is they're asking that we go ahead and get some people pre-qualified in the pipeline. So when the house is ready there can be people ready to move in. So we're working through that conversation as well. So will the ones that are owned by the corporation still need they will use the affordable home loans that the city makes? They will. I mean we'll pre-screen well I don't want to tell all the steps of the process but we'll pre-screen and pre-approve hopefully as many as possible so that they stand ready. And if our home loans I mean you don't have to be on the city on property to use our home loan program. As a matter of fact if you know anybody looking for an affordable home I welcome their names because we would love to get some folks pre-screened. So we will work with Columbia Housing Authority with Richland One and our own employee base to promote those opportunities. Thirty years. We have put a ceiling on the amount, price point of the homes and the law sure don't have to handle that. But instead I would not be able to go to the city and get a home loan. It would have to be within that affordable housing component. In the past we've had employee loan programs that were above that affordable housing bracket. So we did add a ceiling to that. Would the city owned lot stay in CDBG and the corporation owned stay under the corporations or are our lots going to the corporation? Our lots are not going to the corporation. The intent is that those will be made available for these new homes and they will be sold as part of the effort to create new home ownership.  The total number. Absolutely. So just the Belmont community again there's 20 to 30 lots in there. Now I will tell you that these lots aren't sitting vacant for no reason. These are some of our most distressed areas and distressed communities and they're going to have to be affordable homes and we're going to get creative on who wants to live there. Specifically I've talked to one of our consultants about the Book of Washington Heights community when these new homes are built. I make a big difference to have that presence. Once the homes are built and the loans are made these lots will no longer be city of Columbia or corporation. They will be privately owned. Which means that's taxable revenue for the government. You want to talk a little bit about the home loan program? So the restructure we eliminated the employee loan but we've expanded where employees can use the City Lender 1 or the City Lender 2. Also during that transition. I explained both of those. So the City Lender 1 is specifically for applicants that are 80% below the area median income and those income limits are set by HUD. They change every year. So anybody that reach that's 80% or below they can use our City Lender 1 or our affordable home loan program. So the difference between those two the City Lender 1 our partner lender holds 80% of the mortgage. We hold 20% to keep it a conventional loan with no PMI. Which helps with the mortgage cost being more affordable. And then the affordable loan program we hold 100% of the mortgage. And we do that at a 3% interest rate to also help with affordability of the mortgage loan. And is there a range for that? For eligibility. It's 80% for both of them. For both of them. 80% are below the area median income levels. Talk about the folks who use our loan programs as far as what would happen if our programs didn't exist. Okay, well one example we have in the pipeline. Two gentlemen they lived in a home. They've rented it for five years and the owner reached out to us because they don't have what we call traditional credit. They don't have credit cards. They don't have any type of credit but they pay their rent. They pay their bills on time. They're good and responsible with their money and the owner wants to sell them the home. If they go to a traditional lender it would be very difficult for them to get a loan. So they can use our affordable loan program where we can use non-traditional ways to check their credit and make sure that they can afford to purchase this home. So when we think about the interest rates which are very high now. That takes away from what you can be approved for. The amount so it's harder to find homes. Also the credit criteria. Most traditional creditors you have to have a 640 or better. Our program you have to have a 600 credit school. But we do pull the credit. We do look at it and anybody that may need some credit counseling we're able to work with. Our partner lender or nonprofit operation hope to help them get the counseling they need so that they can be in a position to be mortgage ready to purchase a home. So that's an example of why our programs are important and how it can help people that just don't have those traditional means being approved through a traditional lender. Where does the appraisal fall in that process? Making sure that they are purchasing a home at a correct market value. So that's part of the process that we take on? We do appraisal and we do inspections. They have to meet certain HUD required guidelines. No chip and pill and pain. And we do require a termite letter where they have to do the inspection and say there's no damage. We also it affords us the ability if there are repairs that need to be done we can require those repairs to be done before they purchase the home. Are we using a pool of money that we get from HUD or from other federal things? And it's our pool of money that's used to make these loans or are we just backing a loan that's made by a traditional bank? Yes, both is revolving. Yes, both of our. So we do use the CDBG funds for our city lender one and affordable home city lender to which you can have a higher income bracket 81% up to 120 again of that area median income. You can use the city lender to and there's more higher down payment and the price point of the home. I believe the maximum is 275 with city lender to it's set up where we hold 20% of the mortgage. The partner lender holds 80%. Now that is the general revolving loan fund. And that's how city lender to respond. Is there any restriction on let's say you have a young person. You know police officer something that wants to buy a home and we do the loan through one of those programs and then he gets promoted up to. Captain and major and chief. Yes, that's all right. Yes. Yes. It's just the time of the purchase. Now we do require that while you own the home and use the loan that it stays as your primary residence. You can't rent lease or sell the property. If you sell it to pay off the remainder. And then if you could to for lay people. 80% of AMI for maybe like two people what what's a range of what that is that number that number is about 50 right. Maybe $54,000 a year. Approximately one person is about 45. And so when we're looking at 120 of AMI. For one person. It goes up a little bit maybe 60. Well, and I the reason people in Richland County would qualify. And that's the whole point is affordable housing. Right. And that's the point I'm making because people automatically assume they hear affordable housing that people have no jobs. And we have a ton of jobs. I think the average pay in South Carolina is 25,000. They're working working class people. Are there limits to this program? I mean, can we can we do as many mortgages as we want to via this? As long as we have funding. Funding limitations. That's my question. So if we go out and we do this marketing campaign, we get, you know, 100 essential workforce responses. There's 100. How many can we do? I believe we set up to do like 20 a year. 20 a year. About 20 a year. And of course, we always want to use one pool of money before we use another pool of money. And that first pool of money we need to meet timeliness with is the CDBG fund. So what is that? What is that 20% coverage number? It depends on the amount of the loan. Right. So let's say it's a $200,000 loan. So we pay 20%. So I think that's maybe that's cash out cash to know they pay a mortgage on our 20%. Okay. Yes, they pay more than 40,000. And then we do it about a four percent. We used to do 1% below the partner lender's interest rate. But when rates went up to like 6%.  The last one we did, I think it was a little over $200,000. That brought his payment up to at least like $600 on ours. He ended up with about a $1,500 mortgage payment. So we went down to just a flat 4% on our 20%. So it can keep it at least under $100 or $120 a month. I guess the reason for me asking is that I think there's avenues for philanthropy here through the school district foundation. I think that's the type of story that people would want to donate to, to create those housing options. They would donate to the pool of money that we have available. And some of the effort as we release these RFPs and we're looking at really focused effort on certain neighborhoods, we've talked about can we provide extra assistance for down payment? I know the consultants working with the state housing to see if they too can bring some money to the table for down payment assistance. We're looking under a lot of wrongs. Yeah, look at district two foundation. I don't think district one has a foundation up and running, but great way for corporations to donate and make a true change. And that fund has predominantly been used to help assist multifamily projects with grant applications. If all three projects were committed to proceed forward, that fund is currently one of which we're in the process of actually doing the loan for. So the other two, again, there's a commitment there, but they have not. And we would keep those funds separate because they wouldn't have the same restrictions or obligations as the funds that originated or are coming through city to G or other. We would operate the same type of programs. But again, we, we decide which fund to use based on the criteria. Was there an avenue for those a donation to be made that would be tax deductible? We need to talk with legal and figure that out right now. There's not today. If you brought us to check today, I mean, we'll figure it out. But no, that has not been an effort. Figure it out. Yeah. Well, and I wanted to say to one of the reasons that that this program has been so successful is because number one, we have a mortgage. And if folks don't pay, then we get the house back, but that it replenishes itself with the payments that come back. So that's why it's been able to be around 30, 35 years. I did want to have, I had a question for Missy going back to developing the vacant property and using the consultants because I, I think at some point we thought the development corpse could really handle all of that. But are we moving to a model where we start doing the RFPs to get the properties developed? Because we have torn down a lot. And now it's time to, do we have a strategy for that? Or do we need, is, is that a part of what we need to come up with? The decision to do RFPs, I think, I think it was recognizing how long these lights have set vacant. And while the corporations want to build on them, again, there's limited funding. So right now the RFPs that are on the street, the builders will build these houses on their dollars. What they need from us is probably a lot donated, taps provided, and they need pre-approved applicants ready to buy the homes when they're ready. So there's a lot of upfront costs that will not be needed by city or corporations if this model proceeds forward. And it looks like it's going to be successful in the first neighborhood. So I've had conversations with one of the corporations recently and they still would like to also do some of this on their own. They just have limited resources. Builders are standing ready to help. So I think it's a good opportunity maybe to find the hybrid of maybe they'll do some on their own, but they also make their lights available. Does it mean they give them all the way? Probably not. Maybe there's some middle ground. Because the corporations, again, they're independent and they get to make their own decision about whether they donate them or not. But they have been vacant for quite some time. So they've got some expenses associated with those vacant lights cutting the grass and keeping them maintained. So there's a lot of justification. We don't treat them any differently via code. No, absolutely not. Especially our own properties. Every now and then Theresa might get a letter about one of our own properties, which she doesn't appreciate, obviously. But no, our corporations get code violations as well. The violation exists. Yes. Yeah. It's never good when she gets one saying we haven't cut the grass. All right. So Miss Missy, does that mean we have completed, you know, we were talking about in the economic and community development five-year real estate plan? Are we almost done with the residential inventory side? Do you think? I think so. And I've made a note that those properties listed that are CDBG, are city owned through CDBG avenues. There are some additional properties that the city owns. One, which comes to mind, which Councilman Brennan is involved in, Saluda Avenue. We bought that through because of a drainage problem that we had. So it's now time to sell that property. We've got some other scattered lots like that that for reasons of utility work or some other reason outside of CDBG we may can add those to the list as well. But this list was created. The conversation about community development and what they were working on and what they own. Do y'all have any other questions? What's the next action item from this conversation about our list of properties we own? Yeah, there are RFPs out. I think we get responses to the RFPs. And for the city owned lot, city would have to take action on that. For the corporations, the city will have to make a request of the corporations, which I will make a recommendation be out of what that request should be. Well, and I think too is more about having a strategy. Like, you know, maybe if all of them in a particular area and we want to have a big impact in a particular area. I do think we have to have a strategy on how we do it. And so maybe we would want some recommendations and I'll put some thought into it as well. But because we don't want to act like we're trying to sell everything off and get everything developed next year. But I do think we need to have a reasonable approach and then have something to really be able to discuss with the development corps, you know, to have that discussion on what their strategy may be or could they develop a strategy. I like giving people input and ownership. And the intent for what these RFPs is, we're going to hire a builder per area, not five builders in the same area. We really want somebody to be a partner with us and the corporation. And so we're anticipating three different builders. No, I was making sure one builder wouldn't be doing them all. We anticipate three separate. All right. So can we put that as a part of our follow-up? Thank you, Mr. Brennan, to just ask the development corps since they have the majority of them. If they put any thought into a strategy of infill, particularly for properties that have been held over for a while, how long we've had Randall those 20 years? At least. Yeah. I mean, and I think I would put an emphasis on things that we've had for a really long time and coming up with a strategy. And again, that's a distressed area. We've also talked about the community development that manages the SHIN program. You all may remember it as the MAP program. We've rebranded it and changed some of the criteria because the old MAP was, I think, a $20,000 cap on the SHIN program's $50,000. We may also layer that on some of these communities with a targeted focus. Limited funds there, too. That's another opportunity, Mr. Brennan, that if we were to try to take donations, hoping folks make major repairs on their homes in areas that we're also building new homes. Building the new is good, but there's some existing homes that also need a lot of work. We will do as much as our funds will let us do, but they are limited. And y'all, feel free to speak up on that, too. One general question while we're talking about community development and community development. Do we have any collection of data that shows how much money has come in through community development? How many programs? Something that we can build on for some PR? We do. And we've talked a lot about the need for some positive stories coming out of all of the good work that's going on. It's been a hard year or two with one of the programs in particular, but it's time to celebrate. And we have, I think there'll be a key turnover this week of a new home that's been constructed, which is really exciting. So over the coming weeks, we will start having more and more of those key turnovers for new construction. We've had them for rehabilitations already. But, yes, it's past time to celebrate all of the good work going on. And I'm sorry. I had to go back to the community development week and just wanted to confirm that we are going to be doing a community development home buying and financial workshop, because I had someone to approach me, and I'll follow up with you, Ms. Wilson, but I had someone to approach me to see if we would donate some money towards an organization having one, but we are doing it ourselves. We typically do those ourselves. Do y'all want to talk about that? So we don't... You gotta come up to the mic. That helps with this answer. Yes, we usually do all Access Colombia events where we do credit counseling, financial literacy, home buying workshops, things of that nature, to promote our affordable housing loan programs. So we wanted to do that this month, the month of April because of Fair Housing and Financial Literacy Month. So we have that schedule for April the 20th. And do they go to different locations? Well, the past ones we've done at Busbee Street because of the location, the parking, of course, in the space. But we aren't in talks of doing something with the employees as well. We're gonna be going to different departments. We're gonna schedule that to talk about affordable housing loan programs, targeting police, fire, public works, things of that nature. So we also talked about that as well. Sounds good. All right. That helps me with that. All right. And the last thing. Four minutes. Yes, I will not take up much time. We got to get to the municipal association. In general, I wanted to bring this up. It's kind of good timing over in District 3 with the growth of the university campus as it gets closer and closer to neighborhood borders. The unintended hopefully consequences of growth into our neighborhoods and our city because Columbia is such a destination for higher education. We are lucky to have so many higher ed options here in the municipality, Allen Benedict, CIU, Columbia College, Lutheran Cemetery, Millens Tech, USC. So I think, you know, we've talked about a town and gown association working group in the past and the town and gown in general is a collective of higher ed participants and neighborhood participants driven by city leadership to come together and talk about just general quality of life issues, how we can foster the best quality of life for citizens and students. Because at the end of the day, I think we all agree on council, and I know Mayor Rickman does, retaining the talent that comes through our higher ed pipelines could do so much for the city. So with that, the discussion, I just want to put it out there and move it forward, come back with something better to present at the next community development. But the participants, what's the advisory board look like? Howard and I participated with the executive director of the International Town and Gown Association, which funny enough is just right up the street in Clemson. They provided a lot of wonderful structural information for us. We are an association member. I did not know that until the call, so... Longstanding association member. Yeah, we are. Yeah, I didn't know that when I talked to Beth, and she said, well, that's the reason I called you back.  I said, okay, well, fantastic. I thought it was special. But anyways, what the structure of that looks like, the higher ed participants, the neighborhood participants, University Hills, Waverly, Hollywood Rose Hill, Hyatt Park, Kenan Terrace, city staff participation, and then Mayor Rickman makes a wonderful recommendation of business leaders as well. So I guess the overall drive is to come up with a mission statement and then have goals that we can start looking at. Because of the growth of the university around the neighborhoods, the Ambassadors, USC Ambassadors program is something that's being talked about. And that's a way to engage with students that live in the neighborhoods to make them feel welcomed, more community-oriented. The Ambassadors, is that something USC is doing or something that Town and Gown would do? That would be, and I think this is a great place for the Ambassadors program to come from, the recommendations from the Town and Gown because it's something that could be mirrored with Allen, Benedict, all the other surrounding areas. Columbia College, right here. Columbia College. So I think that would be one of the short-order goals once we put this together. And I would push for late spring to bring this together. Campus Village, the university 2000-bed facility will be up and running in August. So you can see we are on the flight path to that pretty quickly. But in general, I'm just putting it out there. I'll work with the mayor's office, with fellow council members to bring together and staff, obviously, to really realize what that structure should look like and if there's any expenses to be incurred for that. USC has stated that they want to participate, not only with their faculty and their leadership, but also financially with that. So look forward to learning more as we move this forward. But I guess today's conversation is just to make sure that this committee would like to spend some more time on it. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Now, the only requirement that I would have is when I was an ambassador. I had a nice blue laser with the emblem on it. They would need to have that. Were y'all ever ambassadors? I think we pay that membership through the planning department budget, if I remember. As the staff person transitioned, we had talked about it landing with planning. I had been involved in the planning. Right. Well, we just put Shanique's name down for now, from our call. Perfect, because she has nothing going on. And we can move it once we decide. Working order. Just came out of it. Absolutely. Mm-hmm. Okay. Great. They recommended a smaller structure at first, and then throw it out. We talked about the number of universities we have in Columbia. Putting them all together. Initially, I think, would dilute the efforts to get supported. And I think the mayor has a working group of students from all these universities, which could be a great fit to participate. All right. Well, thank you, Mr. Brennan. Anybody else have anything else? If we adjourn. Thank you, Mr. Howard. Mr. DeVall and Mr. Brennan. Thank you.


All right. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to our next EDW session called build an information architecture for AI with IBM cloud pack for data, which will be presented by Emma is at hand and I'm sorry, Michael hand and Emma Tucker. I'm sorry. Michael is distinguished research leader for IBM and Emma is AI governance leader IBM cloud and cognitive software for IBM as well. All audience members are muted during these sessions so please submit your questions in the Q&A window on the right of the screen and our speaker will respond to as many questions as possible at the end of the talk. So let's begin our presentation now. Thank you and welcome our speakers Michael and Emma. Let's give them some claps. Thanks, John. Thanks. So I'm Michael hind and I live in IBM research and we're going to talk to you about some of the things that IBM is doing around AI governance. If you were here early in the day, we had a session with RBC where we talked about AI governance in general the general topic and now we get to focus a little more on what IBM is doing here. I'll turn it over to you, Emma. Thanks. And I'm Emma Tucker and I've been working with Mike. So he's looking at this AI governance from an IBM research point of view methodologies, understanding what open source technologies we can build as well. And then I've been working on how do we build tools to support AI governance and make sure that you're successful. And so today we'll get a sneak peek into both sides of why each of our teams have been building in this space. So I wanted to set us up a little bit with the IBM perspective around AI governance and trust to the AI. So we view the larger initiative as trusted AI. How do you trust the data you use and the AI that you build using that data? And so it kind of has three components. So understanding ethics and how you should build out your AI strategy and all of that would be surrounded by tooling and the technology that you use. And that's kind of where my personal focus is and then also around making sure you have an ecosystem and open source ecosystem, diverse ecosystem of tools that you are using in order to accomplish governance. And so moving into the next one. And so at IBM, we kind of view this trusted AI as having three different parts of it. There's first, or not first, it's kind of no order really, but trust in data. So that's we've been talking a lot about data strategy, data governance here, but then also trust in AI models. How do you make sure that the models that you build using that data are trustworthy, that they're not biased, that they're meeting your business goals that you've set out for it. And then also trust in the processes that you have built around in the workflows that you have in the life cycle that you have around AI models. And so, Mike, you can take it away from here and talk a little bit about what we've built. So we've been working on four distinct areas, and there's actually other areas as well, but the ones that are most visible right now are these open source initiatives in the first three columns. So the first one is looking at the issue of fairness or bias in AI. There's been a lot in the press, good and bad about various companies that have had issues with bias in their AI systems. And so what we did is we took what the scientific community has done in this space, ways of detecting bias and also potentially mitigating bias.  This is open source, this is bleeding edge. It is a way for practitioners to give feedback to researchers and also for researchers to feed out cutting edge technologies that are publishing in top conferences and practitioners can try them out. We spent a lot of time on documentation and examples, because we know that this is not necessarily accessible to everyone. And so we want to make sure that we can sort of bring these two communities of researchers and practitioners together. This complements nicely IBM's product in the space called OpenScale, which is an industry enterprise ready platform that allows you to monitor for bias and also explainability. This one here is more of a, you know, cutting edge bleeding edge sort of sandbox where people can can play with ideas and a large a larger collection and diverse techniques. And it has a Slack channel and a Slack channel that will allow people to collaborate and ask questions and learn. So even if you don't want to play with the code, you might want to join up on the Slack channel. Right now there's almost 1000 people that are on that Slack channel communicating answering questions and so on. The second pillar is explainability, which I mentioned a second ago. And that's looking at the problem of, you know, how can you find out if what you're, why your AI model is making a decision and get some insight. And if you think about that problem, it's a very hard problem because explaining for humans is actually hard. It depends on who you're talking to. And so in that toolkit, we also have a bunch of different explain explainability techniques that have different strengths and weaknesses. And again, same kind of thing with lots of documentation tutorials and so on. The next one is looking at the problem of robustness. This is a scenario where an adversary is trying to sort of trick your model or understand things about your model, understand maybe where the decision boundaries are. And there's been a whole research community working in this space of trying to defend from these attacks. And so once again, this toolkit is bringing these all together in the same place. It's very, very popular and you can see there's lots of notebooks and examples and so on. And then the last pillar is what we're going to focus on in this session, which is this idea of fact sheets. This is looking at the space of transparency, which is very much related to governance. This is not an open source toolbox yet. It's a website with a lot of information. I'll walk you through that. And it's going to feed exactly into our product. And Emma will show you sort of the beginning of that in the last five minutes of the session. So if you just bear with me for a second, I just want to go to the website. So you can of course view this yourself. If you just search for fact sheets 360, this website will come up. So what is it? There's a lot of information here.  What are we talking about? And the way to think about it as a fact sheet is it's a way of getting transparency for your model development process. So let's say, for example, you just acquired a new company and that new company has an AI model. And you're trying to figure out, you know, how good is this model? What was it trained on? Did we detect bias? What's the accuracy of it? All kinds of information you might want to ask. It would be nice to have some kind of document or some collection of information that tells you the answers those kinds of questions. Right. So a fact sheet is basically that kind of information. And just to make it a little more concrete over here, we have various examples of real models that are all publicly available. And you can click on one and get an idea for the kind of information. Okay. So take a little while to load here. Okay. There we go. So, you know, at a high level, you can see there are these different categories, all different things you might be interested in. And then you can see on the right, you know, this goes on for a while, a very detailed piece of information about the model. This is particularly relevant in industries that have a validation requirement like in financial industries where they'll have a separate role, a model validator that's trying to look at these kinds of issues because they really want to control risk and mitigate risk. And so this is an example of that. But before I go into other examples, I just wanted to touch on a few topics.  Or is it something else? And the answer is it's more general than that. It's often we make an analogy to something like a nutritional label where in your mind you say, okay, I get it. That's the most important information about, in this case, packaged foods. In our case, it would be an AI model. But what's implied there is some kind of standard. And we feel right now that there's not going to be sort of one standard that's going to fit all uses. In some cases, you'll care about, let's say, bias. In other cases, you may not. In some cases, you almost always care about accuracy, but the way you measure accuracy may vary from situation to situation. So our view of a fact sheet is this sort of malleable idea of it's the information that your consumers, whoever they want to be, want to see. Right? So that consumer could be a regulator. Maybe you have to convince them that you're doing things well and you're mitigating risk. Or maybe it's actually one of your customers who wants to see how your model was trained because they're concerned about something. Or maybe it's a model developer on your team that is now looking at reusing a model. And they're not sure exactly if it's safe to reuse this model. So they want to know some information about that. Each of those use cases may have a slightly different view on what facts are important. So we feel that a fact sheet can deal with all of those, but you want to tailor it to those particular use cases. And that raises the next question. So if a fact sheet is this sort of general mechanism, how do I go about building one? I don't have these set of questions, these magic set of questions I should answer. What do I do? And that gets to this section here called methodology. And it's basically a methodology for creating a fact sheet. It's an idea that basically says, here's a process that we think you should go through with the appropriate stakeholders to understand, to get to a point where you're actually producing something that someone wants. So if you're familiar with user-centric design, it's basically using that idea. So the first step is to understand who your consumer is, why you're building this fact sheet, who actually wants it, and what do they want? What does the regulator want? Talk to the regulator. Find out exactly what they want. And then understand, okay, that's great. Maybe some information that they want, you can't produce. It's just it's not possible. Maybe it's going to be giving away too many IP secrets. So there's this tension between producing information that your consumer wants, and also understanding what can be produced. And then the methodology goes on, and there's actually a paper that talks about it further, where you're creating a template. A template is basically the set of questions tailored to a use. You go and fill it out and use a lot of iteration here. So there's more detail. There's some dimensions you may want to think about in understanding which of these so-called facts, which are these atomic information about a model you want to record. And you can look at this at your leisure in terms of methodology. The second thing I want to mention is governance. And this is the thing that's quite interesting. And we hear from many, many customers a real sincere interest in this space. And that's the ability to control and relate to that, understand what's happening as you build models. So there's a nice little video. I think it's three minutes here that explains what we're productizing. But I'll just go through this briefly over here. So here's a typical life cycle where you've got a business owner, a data scientist, a model validator, and an ops person. So your life cycle may differ. You may have more roles. But this is kind of the basics. Someone requests an AI model. A data scientist goes and creates it. She sends that to a model validator who does testing and QA, looking at risks. And then if all goes well, things get deployed. Unfortunately, in practice, there's a lot of iteration going backwards. That's kind of a very simple life cycle. And what we see is that each of these personas actually have interesting information about the model development and deployment process. Even the business owner who's not building a model, they're requesting the model. They have some really useful information that can be used by consumers of this model, such as what was the purpose of this model? What's the risk level to the enterprise of this model? And so on. And so our view is you would collect this information from each of these personas, even runtime information, what happened, and collect that in some central place. And then you can actually serve that up in various ways to various stakeholders. So if you noticed above, we had four stakeholders. And down here, we actually have six people consuming. And that's to signify there are other people outside the life cycle who might be interested in this, such as a chief risk officer or a regulator or even a customer. And to make this concrete, let me just go through an example. We'll go down to here. Sorry, this one right here. This is just a snippet of a fact sheet. And what it shows here is sort of four different dimensions, four different ways of measuring the goodness about the model. So one of them is performance, and we have four different ways of doing that. Another is about fairness or bias. Another is about robustness. And another is about explainability. And what you see in these columns is for that same model, basically different data sets that are testing the model on these dimensions. And you see these values and it doesn't matter what the values mean. But what's happening is as you move to the right, going from the data set, test data set from the data scientist to the one the validator used to the actual live traffic, you see things change. And in this case, they don't change too much. But the idea is you'd be able to track this and see if our processes are working well. You know, generally what a data scientist is trying to do is test the model in a thorough way that would be predictive of the model's power when it actually gets deployed. And if you see those values kind of matching up, then you say, OK, I think we've got a process that seems to be working, at least working well right now. And this could be something you track over time. OK, just give me a second here. So there's a lot more information and also links down here to, you know, IBM offerings in this page. There'll be more coming in the upcoming months. And I just want to point out in the examples, there's one over here that's a mortgage evaluated one with a governance slant. Right. So the idea here is this fact sheet was actually created automatically by a research prototype to basically collect these facts. And you can see there's many, many, many, many things.  But here you actually can see the details coming out and you can see some of them were collected with our product open scale. And then lastly, before I turn it over to Emma. This website also contains a lot of other information, you know, links to papers, news coverage and is also over 24 hours. If you're having trouble sleeping, you can see a lot of videos that came from from IBM research on this topic of transparency and governance. Just overviews on AI in general, trusted AI in general, things about fairness, explainability and so on. And then finally on the right here, there is links to these those toolboxes I mentioned earlier in case you didn't copy down the URLs, you can get there pretty easily. So I will stop over to Emma to talk you through some of the some of the things we'll be seeing in the product. Great. Thank you, Mike. All right, I'm going to show you how we've envisioned this becoming part of the product of cloud pack for data. So cloud pack for data is our platform for data in AI and includes a lot of different applications within it, depending on your use case. And so we imagine that it's especially if you're a financial services company, and you have to follow SR 117 and set something up around model risk management, where your model validators are kind of a separate organization, or perhaps you're already doing that anyway because you want to have this validating group from the data scientists who build your AI models. Then you might start with this kind of model entry saying, okay, we want to build this model, data scientists will take it, and then we'll go through the validation process. And so right now you're looking at an offering called open pages in cloud pack for data. And this is what we use for the AI lifecycle management of being able to understand exactly what step we are at in the process and be able to capture metrics along the way. And so as part of that, we might have started a review so you can see we have this initial validation process that we've already started. And so a model validator will then want to go into, and Mike had mentioned it, watch an open scale, our offering for capturing a lot of these metrics automatically. And being able to monitor your models in order to evaluate AI model before it goes into production. So in this case, we're looking at this German Chris credit risk model in pre production. So open scale will capture a lot of those metrics that you saw Mike share that came on the fact sheet. Now we believe that a fact sheet is more than just explainability of each transaction, but showing these metrics that you capture in a single evaluation and over time. So as well as who does what is all kind of part of this fact sheet and view of what your model is doing. And so in open scale we're able to see the key metrics that we captured automatically. And this is taking advantage of a couple of those open source tools that Mike had shared in order to capture fairness and explainability, and even to help the bias different algorithms. So I'd be able to dive into one to better understand, you know, this is really low, what's going on, how many counts of risk or no risk have we seen. And then I can even go back and I would be able to compare this to a challenger model because you need to make sure that you are putting your best foot forward and that there aren't any other models that could be doing a better job. So this does look like our pre pod model a model might be doing better but it really depends on your organization standards. If this even meets the bar this is blow threshold so I wouldn't I wouldn't approve it at this point, but it also depends on your business KPIs and the specific ones that are critical for your organization. And that's also the most important part is making sure you choose the right KPIs and metrics to follow for your AI model. Otherwise you might be introducing something that you're not quite aware of or maybe hurting in ways that you didn't expect it to happen. And so the fact sheet is a way in order to capture what's important and all of these automatic metrics that we can do in open scale. But from here a model validator might approve and that would mean that you would update the process within open pages and move it at one point back into production. And so once an AI model is in production, it's best to be able to continue to monitor it over time and be able to capture all of these metrics and see what might have changed. So you can see the threshold went below or the fairness metric actually went far below the threshold that we have set. So we'd be able to get alerted and do a review sooner rather than later and be able to actually click on details to understand exactly what might have happened at that moment and the different outcomes that we got. You can go into each evaluation if it makes sense. But then also we showed you a document that IBM Research had kind of come up with and you can produce a similar report here within open scale. And it's really important that you be able to have kind of something that you can keep in hand because this will show over time so you can create a report maybe on a regular basis and be able to see historically how things are changed and I do have it here. But also oftentimes organizations will have a regular committee meeting where you review the AI models on some kind of regular cadence, whether it be every quarter every six months depending on the classification and impact of the AI model. And make sure that it's still meeting your business goals that isn't showing or below threshold in the bias or whatever it is that's really important to your organization. And so you would be able to share this report beforehand with everybody so that you have a chance to review before understand the training data and the features that are used as well as all these metrics that we've captured and you would be able to then use the dashboard to dive in and even get explainability of each transaction of the model. Because this is what we traditionally think of when we think of explainability. What was the outcome of every single transaction, but we're challenging our customers say that explainability is so much broader than that. It's about the entire AI lifecycle. What's the purpose? What data assets did you use? What metrics have you captured over time right now? What are your thresholds? What's important to you and all the information like that? And so that's what we have today in Cloud Pack for data in order to capture this fact sheet view of all your AI models. So I'll switch it back now. Looks like we have about five minutes left and we can go to questions. While we're waiting, Amber, I was wondering if you could talk about how this relates to data governance. Yeah, I and I've come from the data governance portfolio and I'm working on now what we do around AI models and we're actually trying to use a similar motto. We say know your data, trust your data, use your data when it comes to data governance. And so you in order to get to the AI model, it's really expanding on that. And oftentimes we even see maybe some organizations will start out with having a CDO and some head of data science. But as you mature, you bring that together and the CDO starts to own the data science pieces as well. And so that's where data and AI governance are kind of two pieces in the same pod and that you have to have data governance in order to say that you're governing your AI models, because you need to be able to trust the data that was used that was high enough quality that it wasn't biased. What was used be able to show that it followed the proper data privacy rules as well that you understood it was the right data asset. But then also be able to expand your policies. So just how we have policies that we need to write up around how to use data assets in the organization also have similar policies and glossary in order to put context around your AI models. Right. And I think one of the challenges and I wonder if you can comment on this is that when you're talking about policies, your governance, you need to have something, I guess, concrete. This probably gets into the glossary because I could think a policy might be I should not use data in any bad use cases. I could write that down. But it might be hard to implement. Maybe you can talk a little about that. Yeah. And that's where we're so you might see it and similarly and data governance and so you can explain and be descriptive with your policies. But then we also have ways and cloud pack for data for automating those policies for anonymizing data and following data privacy. And so we're researching ways that we can do similar policy automation with AI models and what that actually looks like on that type of asset within cloud pack for data. But it's really that's where having an AI ethics board within your organization and setting up a clear AI strategy is where you'll kind of nail out some of those details and regulations that are coming up. There was you release their proposal for their regulation today. So if you want to go research that we'll have a post about it on our site. But also, you know, feel free to go and research it because it clearly defines some use cases that you can't use you AI for. Great. All right. Thank you, Emma and thank you, Michael for this great presentation. It does not look like we have any questions for you. But if the audience does have any other questions later, I recommend that they find you on your speaker pages and you can continue networking from there. All right, thanks everyone and have a great day. Thank you all. Bye bye.