to chair some. Okay, no problem. I'll give you the brutal hard difficult parts. Thanks, Steve. That's how you show your love, right? You're just preparing me. That's right. We are at one minute now. Thank you very much. And I want to welcome everyone to today's meeting of the Durham City Council. This is a work session. It's at one o'clock on June 4th, 2020. Another extraordinary work session of the Durham City Council. They're not as extraordinary as they used to be. Maybe I should stop saying that. They've become routine. But I'm still very grateful to the staff, our tech staff, our clerk's office, our public affairs office for all the work they do to make this possible. So thank you all so very much. And we're really grateful. I know my colleagues are as well. I'm now going to ask the clerk to please call the roll. Mayor Schultz here. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Councilmember Caballero. Here. Councilmember Freeman. Councilmember Middleton. Here. Councilmember East. Here. Thank you. Thank you very much, Madam Clerk. I'm now going to ask if there are any announcements by members of the council. And I'm going to begin by calling on Councilmember Caballero. Thank you, Mayor. I was wondering if we could hold a moment of silence for Aurea Soto Morales. And before we do that, I would like to say a few words. Of course. Thank you. So I'm going to say it in Spanish first and then in English. We're going to do a moment of silence for Aurea Soto Morales, a eight-year-old girl who was part of our community here in Durham, attended the Creekside School and died due to complications from the COVID-19 virus. Yesterday I had the opportunity to talk to the father of Aurea, Mr. Salvador Morales, and Mr. Salvador Soto. And I wanted to thank him for taking the time to talk to me. I told him that we were going to do this moment of silence. And I also asked him if he wanted to share something with the Durham community, with the Durham community of his daughter. And he told me that he wanted to share this, that she always told him, Papi, please carry me, I want to fly. And he also told me that she always wanted to be a mariposa. And at this moment I am thinking that Aurea is now being like a mariposa. We are thinking of the family of Soto Morales. We are praying for you. And thank you very much. Yesterday, excuse me, on June 1st, Aurea Soto Morales, a eight-year-old Durham resident, died from complications of COVID-19. She was a Creekside elementary school student. I know that the community at Creekside is also very, is mourning her loss and grief and grieving. I had the opportunity of speaking with Aurea's father yesterday. And I just wanted to say thank you to him for taking the time to speak with me and shared with him that the city of Durham would be holding a moment of silence in honor of his daughter. I asked him if there was something he would like to share, a story or something about his daughter. And he said that she always told him to throw up in the air because she wanted to fly, that she always wanted to be a butterfly. And so today I'm thinking about how I'm hoping and praying that she is now a butterfly and is observing all of us. To the Soto Morales family, we are thinking of you. We are praying for you. May God bless you. Thank you. Council Member Cabillero, thank you so much for that. Thank you for being in touch with the family. And thank you for bringing us this. And now I will ask for all of us to join together in a moment of silence in memory of Aura Durham's butterfly. Thank you. These are hard times in our city in many ways. And I don't know that there's a harder time than losing a child. So thank you for that. All right. We'll now move on to other announcements by members of the council. Mr. Mayor, can you hear me? Yes, we can, Council Member. Welcome. I apologize. I was wrapping up a call. No worries. We're glad to have you. And I truly appreciate Council Member Cabilleros bringing the Soto Morales family into this space to make sure that we're not missing how much grief our families are experiencing in their community. I'm hard-pressed based on an interaction I had yesterday to not give some more depth to the conversations that I keep hearing around the current unrest beyond the COVID-19 context. And I just want to make sure that I take a couple of minutes and just say that there is a disconnect for folks who are just waking up and just realizing what's been happening and what the impact has been for Black and Brown folks in this community for a long time. I woke up this morning reminded of a trip I took last summer because I was involved with the National Black Caucus of the local elected officials where I had the opportunity to visit the National Civil Rights Museum, I'm sorry, the Mississippi Civil Rights Museum. And I just want to express just how far this goes. When I say to people that I feel it in my soul and I feel it in my DNA, there's a sense in this country that because of the loss in the videos that we're seeing that that's where this is stemming from. And I want to stress to people that they understand that this is coming from as far back as a mega-evers and as far back as that Mississippi Civil Rights Museum was able to list all of the people who were lynched back in front of a panel filling a room of names and people that have been lost in our community across the country and as much as I want to be okay in this, I'm not. And as much as the grief of losing a child, whether the COVID or to gunfire or to anything, doesn't sit well with me, it doesn't sit well with me to see white adjacent people or white people try to act as allies and not acknowledge the full human existence of black people in this country.  I want to be clear that white violence is the violence that people are responding to. And it's not limited to police. It is not limited to these incidents. It is the experience that folks in this country have had for over 400 years. And I just couldn't not say that this afternoon. Thank you. Councilmember, are there any other announcements by members of the council? Mayor Pro Tem, do you want to talk now about the racial equity commission? Yes, I'm sorry, totally forgot about that. So thank you for reminding me. So the mayor and I had a brief meeting with the co-chairs of our race equity task force in order to discuss the work that they've been doing and the recommendations and the form for the presentation of those recommendations to council and to the community. They're going to be ready to report back to us in early July. And after some conversations with staff, we think that it would be best for us to hold an additional special meeting in early July for them to present their recommendations to us. The meetings that we have scheduled already have pretty full agendas and being that we're on Zoom, we don't want to overload folks. So I'd like to propose that we schedule a special meeting on the first Monday in July, which is July 6th in the evening at our normal meeting time, 7 p.m., if folks are available then, to hear from the race equity task force and discuss their recommendations. Thank you very much, Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. I really appreciated in having heard their, having talked to our co-chairs, Judge O'Neill and Karen Haldeman about their plans, I'm excited to hear their report. And I think what we should probably do now, rather than everybody check calendars, is ask our administration if they could see if that July 5th date works for folks. And that meeting we would have the, Charlie's holding up July 6th, is it? That's what you meant? That's a Monday? Monday, Monday, July 6th at 7 p.m. I'm sorry, I said July 5th, I apologize. No worries. Monday, July 6th. And so I'll ask our staff, Madam Clerk, if you could perhaps check with the members of the council and the administration to make sure that that meeting is one that is a date that works for folks. And if not, we can figure out another one soon thereafter. Okay, we'll do, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Thank you, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you. Any more announcements by members of the council? All right, thank you. Then I'll move to priority items by the city manager. Good afternoon, Mayor, members of city council. It's good to see you this afternoon. There are a number of priority items listed in my priority memo that are really just pertain to additional information that is being provided as a result of some follow-up questions from council members. So on the interest of time, I'm not going to go through and read all those. I do want to point out that there are two additional agenda items that have been added. Agenda item number 48 is the city council budget work session reconciliation discussion. And then agenda item number 49 is the Durham Small Business Recovery Fund. Those can be handled at the end of the meeting or whenever you determine appropriate. Those are my priority items. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Manager. Can I have a motion to accept the manager's priority items? I'll move. Moved by Council Member Middleton, seconded by Mayor Pro Tem. Madam Clerk, will you please call the roll? Mayor Schull. Aye. Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Aye. Council Member Caballero. Aye. Council Member Freeman. Council Member Middleton. I vote aye. Council Member Reese. Aye. Thank you. Thank you. I have gotten instructions before I get to the city attorney from Beverly that my volume is too loud. Usually my volume is not loud enough. So I'm pleased to hear this. And I'm not exactly sure how to deal with that. So maybe Viv or somebody can tell me some quick instructions and I will try to get quieter. You can send me a text. Madam Attorney, any priority items? Good afternoon, Chair, members of City Council. It's good to see you all. The city attorney's office has no priority items today. Thank you, Madam Attorney. Madam Clerk. Good afternoon, everyone. The city clerk's office has no priority items today. Thank you, Madam Clerk. All right. I'm going to move through the administrative consent items and after I do that, what I would like is if the manager would recommend to us the order in which he would like the various presentations, unless you would prefer to do that now, Mr. Manager. Mr. Mayor, why don't you start reading and I'll go ahead and glance through those while you're doing that. Okay. That's okay. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks. Under City Clerk's Office Item 1, approval of City Council minutes. And I sent a correction to the clerk. I believe I copied it to Council members quite a while back. At one point it says on page 4 of the April 23rd minutes, it said, City was paying to recycle at approximately twice as much per ton to recycle and to ship waste to the landfill. Should say City was paying to recycle at approximately twice as much per ton to recycle than to ship waste to the landfill. So I will offer that correction. Item 2, Carolina Theater of Durham Board of Trustees appointment. And I said to the clerk before we go through these that we would have a discussion of the balloting process because I think we've got a little bit of confusion. And so before I do that, I see Council Member Caballero. Did you want to comment? I'm going to talk about it in a minute. So it's my question. Okay. Wait until then. Thank you. All right. So for this, Madam Clerk, why don't you describe the process? We've got a tricky, you guys. I mean, it was easy when we all showed up and wrote down who we wanted. Now we're in a situation where it's distant and we've got to fill out ballots and send them in and so forth. So Madam Clerk, why don't you talk about what the process ideal process is from your standpoint and then we can and then we can comment and figure it out. Good afternoon, Council. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. This process has been revised because of the virtual meetings. We were passing out ballots at the beginning of the work sessions and those ballots were completed by each Council Member. What's happened is that we don't have the luxury of being together and to pass out those individual ballots. So what has happened on the actual agenda items, you will see that there is a ballot included in the item number. For example, number two, it was to fill a vacancy to the Carolina Theater Board of Trustees. You will see in your Granicus or the iLegislate app that the ballot is included. What I did last evening was send you an email so that you could summarize all of your selections in one email. The first time we had multiple ballots in conjunction with a virtual meeting, we had a lot of emails going back and forth for each board and it just was very voluminous. So in an effort to streamline, I sent an email with all of the agenda item numbers that dealt with boards and committees as well as the categories that were being requested. So the Council, instead of having to scan your ballots and resend those to me, all you do is submit your selection or your nomination on that email for all of the different boards and committees and then send that single email back to the clerk and copy LeBron Brooks on the email. It seems to cut down a lot of administrative, a lot of background work like the scanning and then the printing and that sort of thing. So if anyone has a better idea of how to process the names, I'd be happy to take that into consideration. But to do the email seems to be the most efficient way for the clerk's office to summarize all of the nominations. Thank you, Madam Clerk. I think that works well. I think what we should talk about a little bit, Madam Clerk, is the timing. And so we all get the work session agenda several days before. Maybe what would be a good day for you to send out that reminder email, Madam Clerk? It's really up to Council. Could you send it out, say the Monday before the work session? We could do that if that's what you would prefer. You might even remember that we are kind of forgetful people. And you might even do it twice, maybe the Monday before and the Wednesday before or the Monday before and the Tuesday before or something like that. Okay. I know that's kind of a pain, but maybe I bet Laverne would would rather have us do it well and write and might be worth for her sending out a couple of emails to us. Okay. All right. Council Member Freeman. Is there a way to do it so that it's actually online and just a click? Like how you would do a poll? Like a Google portal? That could be simple enough. Yeah. I'll ask the clerk to look into that and see if they think that that would be the easiest way to go. And they can let us know which of those two options is best. Because the person out in the signing and scanning with 12 different ones, I know I was definitely not like up for it. Yeah. So just to be clear, the clerk is not asking us to print, scan or do anything like that. All the clerk is asking us to do is send her back an email with our choices. So if you're like for one, there's a few of these that I wanted to be, that I wanted to request to be re-advertised. How are we making that clear? Because if we're just voting, then I mean the person likely gets four votes and then that's it. Yeah. I had the same concern and I'm going to raise that, but I don't want to talk about that now. What I did was I simply put on there, I'd like to re-advertise. And so what I thought is we could, as a group, discuss that as we usually do. So if you get to one, as we go down here, that you think we ought to re-advertise, as we usually do, let's talk those through. I agree with you, that's a concern. Council Member Cavillero. Yeah, Mr. Mayor, I sent my full ballot with all my choices last night and I included City Council only for that reason so that folks could see as they were making their choices. You know, usually we don't, we turn them in and the ballot's the ballot, but just so folks could see where I wanted to re-advertise for that very reason. And I just used the City Clerk's format and just put, I want to re-advertise this position in that stated slot. So, and then I saw your email for a few that you wanted to re-advertise as well. Yes, thank you. Okay. So thank you. I appreciate that discussion. I'm going to go through these now and if there's any that you want to re-advertise, that would be great. We can discuss those. Item two, Carolina Theatre and Dura Board of Trustees appointment. Item two, let's see. I thought this was a very well qualified applicant and I felt that the balance of the Carolina Theatre Board was pretty good. Are there reasons that you're concerned? I just noted that there was just one white woman and there's probably three or four already. There aren't any black males. There aren't like, I mean, well, there's one black male, I'm sorry, but I actually serve on that board and I would like to have it re-advertised. Okay. We'll re-advertise that then. Item three, citizen advisory committee appointments. Item four, Durham City County Environmental Affairs Board appointment. Item five, Durham Homeless Services Advisory Committee appointment. I'd like to re-appoint the person who's applied but then re-advertise the second appointment. Anyone have any thoughts on that? Mayor, I also think re-advertising the second position is a good idea. Agreed. All right, thank you. So, Madam Clark for number five, we're going to re-advertise the second appointment. Really noted, thank you. Item six, Durham Open Space and Trails Commission appointments. Again, I would like to re-advertise for the third seat. How do people feel about that? Yeah, there were two that were reapplying that word. Yeah, I think that makes sense. All right, others. I heard from Councilmember Freeman. Okay, it sounds like we are good. Madam Clerk, I'm sorry to make this hard for you. We have a lot of seats today. Item six, we're going to advertise for the third, re-advertise for the third seat. Okay, thank you. Item seven, Durham Planning Commission appointment. Item eight, Durham Sports Commission reappointment. Item nine, Housing Appeals Board appointments. Yes. I'd like to re-advertise for the tenant position for the Housing Appeals Board. Okay, I thought we had some very well qualified candidates, but there's only one candidate who applied for the tenant position and she also applied for another board, which I thought she would be better on the other one. I see. Okay, why don't we see what the vote is on the other one and then we can decide what happens with this one. Sounds good. So, Madam Clerk, let's see. Cassandra Stokes applied for two boards and depending upon what happened on the other board, we may have to come back and re-advertise on item nine. Okay, Mr. Chairman. Item 10, Human Relations Commission appointments. Item 11, Mayor's Council for Women appointments. So, Madam Clerk, I think just to review, we're going to re-advertise item two. We're going to re-advertise the second appointment on item five. We're going to re-advertise the third appointment and item six. And we may re-advertise for one of the appointments on item nine. Yes, Mr. Mayor. That's what I have. Thank you. Thank you. Under Budget Management Service Department, item 12, Fiscal Year 2020 Budget and FY21-26 Capital Improvement Plan. Mr. Mayor, I assume that would be on GBA? Yes. Thank you. But we're going to be discussing, Mr. Manager, we'll be discussing as an item today, the loose ends that we call them on the budget. Right. There is a discussion item in the later in the session, correct? Yeah. Item 23, FFY 2019 and FFY 2020, FTA section. I'm sorry. I jumped ahead of myself. No, I know. I'm sorry. I'm still reading budget items there. Okay. City Council's office, item 13, Resolution Honoring Andrea Harris. And I want to ask Councilman Freeman to thank her for submitting this. Councilmember, would you like to read this on the following Monday night? Yes. I didn't want to pull it. I just wanted to note, if anyone had any additions, they can share those with me. All right. Thank you. Thank you. Item 14, Department of Community Development Rules and Procedures for the Affordable Housing Bonus. I have submitted a couple of questions about this and about student certification and the level of and the regulation requirements and so forth. Did I receive the, Mr. Johnson, did you email me those and I missed them? We were going to do it on follow-up, Mayor. Okay. That's fine. But I'll provide it to you on follow-up. No problem. Are you pulling that item? You can. Okay. Okay. Item 14. Item 15, First Amendment to the North Carolina Coalition and Homelessness NCEH contract to provide services for homelessness coordinated entry and homeless management information system, planning and administration. Item 16, Operational Assistance Contract with a Housing Authority of the City of Durham DHA for the DHA Downtown and Neighborhood Plan. Mr. Mayor. Mr. Mayor. There are a number of housing authority items that are in the agenda. I would suggest we go ahead and pull those. We do have a presentation coming from Mr. Anthony Scott, but I think it may be helpful to go ahead and just set those aside to be sure in case you have any follow-up questions after that presentation. Agreed, Mr. Manager. Thank you. So we'll pull item 16. Item 17, Relocation Assistance Contract with a Housing Authority of the City of Durham. And we'll pull that in the same category. Department of Transportation. Item 18, Transfer of Ownership of 2017 Light Transit Vehicles from the City of Durham to the Town of Chapel Hill. Item 19 under Department of Water Management, Brown Water Treatment Plant, Electric Service Agreement between Duke Energy Carolina's LLC and the City of Durham. I had to ask Mr. Greeley for some comments on some energy efficiencies and so forth, which he provided as an attachment. I much appreciated those. Item 20, Western Union Payment Services Agreement. I don't want to pull it, but I do want to say what a fantastic service change. This is a great step forward for our cash paying customers who tend to be our unbanked customers. So bravo to the Water Department and the Finance Department. Finance Department, 21, Interlochen Cooperation Agreement for the Collection of Taxes between County of Wake and City of Durham. Item General Services, Item 22, City of Durham and Southeast Sustainable Communities Program Grant, Commended Grant Budget Ordinance. Item 23, Contract with GDS Associates for the Development of Carbon Neutrality and Renewable Energy Action Plan. And let me say this is also very exciting and congratulations to the staff for moving this forward and it looks really good. Item 24, Contract with Rebuilding Together, the Triangle Ink for the Southeast Sustainable Communities Fund Grant Project. And I had submitted a question about that regarding working with the students at Southern and got an excellent response from that. Thank you to Gina. Item 25, Design and Build Services Contract with Environmental Hair Systems LLC for the Durham Performing Arts Center. Item 26, Restrictive Covenants for 505 West Chapel Hill Street. Very exciting to see this progress. Item 27, Broker for Benefits. I had pulled this item and so we'll come back to that. Item 28, Fiscal Year 2021, Contract to Fund Economic Development Program to Services Operated by Downtown Durham Ink Using City of Durham Grant Funds. Mr. Mayor, excuse me, these two items also I think should be pulled. We do have a presentation while not directly related to the items there and somewhat related. So I think I would suggest pull those after the presentation as well. Great. So we'll hold that still after the DDI presentation. Item 28 and 29, which is Fiscal Year 2021 Amendment to Contract with City Services and Programs for the Downtown Durham Municipal Service District. Public Works Department, Item 30, Contract to Amendment Number 1 for ST-288A Bridge Engineering Services for City Maintained Structures. Item 31, Resolution to Support the Upper News River Basin Association UNRBA FY 2021 Budget. Under Solid Waste Management Department, Item 32, Contract with Atlas Organics LLC for the Management of the City on Composting Facilities. Another fabulous step forward. Item 33, Contract with Echo Flow for the Operation the Household Hazardous Waste Facility. Under Presentations, Department of Community Development Item 34, Housing Authority in the City of Durham. A Police Department 35, 2020 First Quarter Crime Report. Yes, presentation today. These are all presentations. Item 36, FY19 and 20, Downtown Durham Municipal Service District Presentation Annual Report. Under Public Hearing City County Planning Department, Item 37, Consolidated Land Use Item NCC, Student Center Building. And colleagues, please note that these all have various different dates that we'll be hearing them. They're not all usually, you know, it's the following Monday, but if you check out each item, you'll see when they're scheduled for. Item 38, 505 West Chapel Hill Street. Item 39, Unified Development Ordnance Text Amendments. On the list changes 14, TC 1900006. Item 40, Historic Properties, Local Review Criteria Update. Item 41, Goodwin Crossing. Item 42, Hebron Village. Item 43, Unified Development Ordnance Text Amendment, Affordable Housing Dwelling Unit Definition, TC 19005. Item 44, Consolidated Annexation, South Mineral Springs and Pleasant. Item 45, Consolidated Annexation, 1432 Ellis Road. Item 46, Committed Element Modification, 1900 Hillendale. Under the Community Development Department, Item 47, Approval of the Draft 2025 Consolidated Plan, 2021 Annual Action Plan. Supplemental Items, Budget and Management Service Department. Item 48, FY 2021 City Council Budget Work Session Follow-up, and that's a discussion. Office of Economic and Workforce Development. Item 49, The Durham Small Business Recovery Fund, and this is also a discussion. Mr. Manager, the items that I have pulled are items 14, item 27, and then after the DHA discussion, items 16 and 17, and after the DDA discussion, items 28 and 29. That's correct, Mr. Mayor. Mr. Manager, how would you like to proceed? Well, I would suggest we first deal with the two pulled items that aren't associated with other presentations, and then as you've requested, that we do have kind of five discussions slash presentations related to the Housing Authority, the Quarterly Crime Report, Downtown Durham, Inc., the Small Business Fund, and then the Budget Issues. My suggestion would be that in large part because we are expecting another large gathering downtown this afternoon, or later this evening, that we let Chief Davis presentation go first in the event that she has additional planning necessities, and then move to Nicole Thompson and the DDI. Similarly, if there's coordinating functions they have for that event this evening, I think it'd be good to move those along, and then the other three probably I would suggest going then next with the Housing Authority, and then the other two would be your preference, either budget or the Small Business Loan Fund, whichever. All right, thank you, Mr. Manager. We'll do the items 14 and 27 followed by Chief Davis, then DDI, then DHA, Small Business Fund, and then budget. Thereby good? Thank you. Mayor, just real quick. Sure. One of the items in the budget and the work session follow-up memo to staff does relate to the Police Department's budget. Mr. Manager, are you going to be prepared to work with us in that conversation if I have additional questions at that time? Yes, I think the budget staff will be able to answer any questions you have in that regard. Fantastic. Thank you. Then I'm good with what you put forward, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Council Member, for that. All right, folks, we're going to move along then in that order, and first up will be item 14. Council Member Freeman, this is roles and procedures for their affordable housing bonus. Thank you. I just really wanted to touch on, I appreciate the bonus set in fourth language. I just wanted to find out really if there was going to be any income or any money that would be attached to this bonus in regards to how we do. I know right now that planners or developers will submit, in lieu of doing the bonus, they'd rather do a payment. I mean, is there any calculations that are included in this, because I didn't see it if there are, but I was kind of hoping to get a handle on. Council Member Reginald Johnson, Director of the Department of Community Development, Assistant Director Carol Otto, will be able to respond to your question. Good afternoon, Council Member. There is no payment in lieu option associated with the density bonus. That is not something that is statutory. We are exercising a provision in the charter that allows us to do the density bonus, but it does not allow us to do a payment in lieu. Do you have any calculations that identify just how much it costs to actually create a unit? We have done that in the past. It all depends on who you're trying to target with the unit and what assumptions you make about how the overall project is being financed. Is there a particular question that we could try to answer for you? We can certainly follow up in writing. I'm just trying to try to make sure that it, I mean as you're setting up, as we're setting up the criteria, the criteria you're setting up is based on some numbers. And whatever those numbers are, whether they're an affordable housing rate based on income versus the cost of a unit, I was just hoping that there would be some cost conversation on this as well. Well, the actual density affordable housing bonus is based on the charter provision, which allows us to do to provide a increase in density to developers that agreed to provide 15% of their units as affordable. So actually the analysis really came from the charter authority that we are working with. There was some discussion back when the bonus was being initially discussed around what is the appropriate level of affordability, but we're really having to sort of hang our hat from an authority perspective on what the charter allows us to do. I'm not talking about what the developers would be allowed. I'm just talking about just the basic numbers. An actual formula that is used. You're saying there isn't one. No, it's 15% of the units affordable at 60% of area median income for rental units and 80% of area median income for sale units. Okay. And that doesn't shift based on cost at all? No. So if it's a million dollars to develop this site and you're doing 15% of those units, it's the same as if you're doing a $6 million project and it's 15%. This is a voluntary program. So it is the developer's discretion and decision whether to utilize the bonus and they will do that based upon their analysis of whether the density that they are receiving offsets the cost of providing the affordable units. And what I'm asking is this community development even looking at how to help offset any of that cost? The cost, the density bonus is based on the concept. It is a very substantial density bonus. It is based on the concept that the bonus itself, the increased density, is sufficient to offset the cost of units. And if it isn't, then the developer would choose not to build the units. And more often than not, in the past, that's what's happened is they've chosen not to use. And you're trying to be more appealing. And what I'm saying is if it's even more appealing would be to figure out how to associate the resources around the cost as well as the density. And that is something we could look at. But again, the question becomes, do we want to put, and this is the policy question the council can consider, do we want to put limited financial dollars towards creating 60% or 80% AMI units for a period of time in a market rate building? Or do we want to try to pursue affordable units that may be either more affordable or lower income? It is a challenge for us to understand what the appropriate subsidy level would be because every market rate building is different. And that is not our wheelhouse in terms of kind of financial modeling. We don't really have a deep understanding of market rate projects. So it would be complex, but certainly something we could explore if council wanted us to do that. I just wanted to, I appreciate that. That's kind of where I guess I need to kind of do some more research. And recognizing that I'm trying to, in a, on the fly, I'm trying to figure out if this is actually going to be beneficial post COVID. Recognizing that so many folks have lost their job. The folks who are going to be, like there's dynamics in this that are not what we were thinking about when we initially started talking about these affordable housing density policies. And so noting that there are, it's much easier to set up the market rate units or what have you from a planning perspective. The cases that I saw on the planning commission is much easier to just do without it. And if we're not attaching some level of finance to this, I don't see how it becomes appealing to a market rate developer. And that's what I'm concerned about because it's getting much harder. It's not as hard. It's not like prior to where we were in, in full straddle of building, it's kind of like you'll see very few, like very few new developments built. And then if they have a choice, they're going to choose not to do the affordable housing. That's what I'm getting. So I appreciate, I appreciate the work on it. I just want to make sure that we're keeping in mind that things have shifted and things have changed. And we may need to really revisit exactly how, how this package comes together before all of the land is developed, especially in our downtown core and surroundings of urban areas. Thank you, councilmember. Ms. Lado, I have a couple of questions I sent to Reginald and maybe it'll save you all some time to ask them now. The student certification, can you explain that certifying that the tenant is not a student? Is that what that is or what is the student certification? It is intended to distinguish between students who are dependents on other household incomes. So essentially college students who may still be dependent on their parents incomes from students who may be, for example, older adults who are working, who are also students, to allow the latter group to be affordable housing tenants, but not the former group. So that's, that's the intention of that. And it's a fairly common practice in a, in fact it's very, it's usually a mandatory practice in affordable housing developments and it's something that given the population of Durham we felt was important to carry over to the density bonus. Thank you. Can I ask everybody who's not speaking to please mute? Thank you. My second question is about the level of regulation. It seems like a big requirement. I think this level of regulation is necessary. It also seems like a big requirement for the landlord to meet and is, and there are issues about enforcement and so forth. Is this model on a system that's working elsewhere? So I would say pieces of it are modeled on different systems. So we looked at, for example, inclusionary zoning ordinances to try to figure out what definitions people were using for income, what definitions people were using in terms of how you set rent, for example. And what we realized was that a lot of communities were essentially defaulting to either HUD or long-income housing tax credit standards. So what we have tried to do is go through and take those standards and then really strip out the parts that seemed unnecessarily complicated. Like for example, we are not requiring a utility allowance. You would normally require that as part of a, you would set a rent, but then you would lower the amount of rent you could charge based on the assumption around what tenants are going to have to pay for utilities. That can get complicated. So we chose not to require that for the density bonus. The principal thing that will be required is upfront really the agreement around what are the units that must be provided and both in terms of their size and their affordability level and kind of executing that contract. And then from then on out, it really is income certifying the tenants. That is the primary requirement that the landlords will have on an ongoing basis. They need to be open to monitoring, but we will only monitor the affordable units and we will essentially be coming in to ensure that they are appropriately income certifying the tenants and that the rents being charged are appropriate for the unit type. I'm sorry, what is our stick? The, because this is done as a under the UDO, it is the stick that we have for enforcement of any kind of zoning related issues. And I would need to defer to the city attorneys for the specific on that. Mr. Mayor, your honor, your honor, I'm sorry, I apologize. Mr. Young, thank you. Yeah, just very quick. Could we have staff, could we have staff kind of look at all the participants and go ahead and mute whichever microphone they see coming activity from the policy because it's getting really a little distracting trying to pay attention to that background. Sorry, sir. No, I appreciate that. Please, if you're not speaking, please mute. Thank you very much, Council Member. Mr. Young. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Members of Council, Pat Young of the Planning Department just to emphasize what Ms. Lotto just said. We in the UDO, we have the ability to send notices of violation and issue civil citations in the amount of up to $500 per day if there's on compliance. So that's that's the enforcement mechanism. Thank you very much. That's what I needed to hear. Thank you. Mr. Johnson, no reason to send me an email about those. They were answered. Thank you. Any more questions? Madam Myprotem, did you also have a question? I thought I saw your hand earlier. Yeah, thank you, Mr. Mayor. My question was also about enforcement. It just seems difficult once we've allowed people to build additional units. Like we can't really take them back. So, yeah, that I'm just wondering how we, you know, how we manage that. Yeah. Ms. Lotto? Yes, sir. I will note that we are requiring two things. As part of this one is the recording of a restrictive covenant on the property that requires the units to be provided as affordable. The second is a contract between the developer and the city that lays out the developer's commitment. But again, as you have indicated, the sort of if we wind up with a non-compliant party, then we have the enforcement mechanisms that Mr. Young has outlined. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Myprotem. Thank you, Ms. Lotto. We appreciate you all. Thank you, Mr. Johnson. We're now going to move to our presentations and we're going to begin with Chief Davis. Chief, welcome. We're glad to have you. And looking forward to your report before you start. Mr. Mayor. Yes, sir. Mr. Mayor. I thought item 27 was pulled. It was. I'm sorry. Do you still want that pulled or? I do. Okay. Could we handle that one? That's I think we just had those two items that weren't related. Yes, my fault. My fault. Thank you. Chief, I'll be with you in just a second. Apologies. Item 27 was an item that I pulled. This is broker for benefits. My question very simply is that the vendor has 11 employees, no minority employees that I see. And I wanted to discuss with the vendor their hiring practices or hear from the staff about their hiring practices and their outreach to minority applicants and so forth. So good afternoon, Mayor and Council. My name is Veronica Jackson. I am the benefits manager for the city of Durham. We have with us today John Gazarowski of IVA, who is our current broker and is also who we are recommending for our incumbent broker as well. Thank you, Ms. Jackson. Welcome, Mr. Mr. Gazarowski. Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of City Council. The question is that we do have 11 employees and none being minorities. And is it okay to respond right now? Absolutely. Please do. Yes, sir. Okay. Thank you. Often we actually, if we do have an opening, well, first of all, I want to let you know that when we first started Independent Benefit Advocates in 2005, we initially set up what we call equality and diversity policy, as well as an equal opportunity statement. And I think you should have a copy of that. We follow that precisely. When we do go out and try to find an employee to fill a staff member, we normally use a service. And the service that we've mostly used was ZIP recruiters or MD. And we haven't had a need for firing a person in over five years. But in the past, I think it's just timing right now, but in the past, we've had minority folks that were part of our staff, but eventually left for other reasons. And we also had an intern that emailed us that wanted to spend their summer trying to understand the insurance industry. We reached out to that particular person, but apparently they were in Durham, but apparently they never gave it another opportunity for them to come over to us. I think it might have been because of the distance from Durham to Apex. And again, going back, one of the things that we're proud of is the minority and women-owned businesses that we actually are able to contract with. And all three of those businesses do offer services to the city of Durham. And those are the benefits enrollment technology that we have, the broker-builder solution. We also use a women and minority group that does all of our graphic design to publish the benefit booklets that we actually produce for the city of Durham. And all of the printing that goes with those booklets, we also use a company called Zebra out of Durham. And all three of them are the minority in women-owned businesses. I can assure you that if an opening does come up, and we've actually offered, most of the time when we actually look at a position, it's positions that require a little bit of experience, some education, but not, I mean, we don't base it on education, we base it on experience. And we've actually reached out to women, minority women, to different health carriers. And often we get situations where we can't meet their monetary requirements and or they select another brokerage for them to go with or a health insurance company. But I can assure you we're always looking at folks to come into our organization to assist us going forward. Mr. Gazarowski, thank you. And thank you for explaining about the minority women contractors that you use. I appreciate hearing that. Did you say, when did you say you, you say you haven't hired anybody in five years? Did I hear that correctly? Yes, I think it's been longer than five years. Okay. Well, first of all, congratulations. That speaks well of you. It's very important to this council that our vendors are employing a diverse employment group and that they're reaching out when they are hiring beyond the normal kinds of general hiring organizations, the websites and so forth. Because we know that that kind of special outreach is often necessary to get good minority candidates that I know you all work in your company. So what are the professions that are that are important for your company? What are the what are the skills and the professions? Great question. We start with the receptionist and then we go into account management and account executives. Account management are folks that actually help manage and team up with the HR people at the city of Durham. And they're the ones that actually put together all of the proposals when we sent out a request for proposals. They have to actually look at the proposals. They have to evaluate the proposals, make the necessary comparisons and evaluate the benefit plan designs, the actual costs, making certain that the contracts stipulate the exact amount of detail that the city of Durham or other accounts have purchased. So the account manager is a very comprehensive position. And in addition to myself, we have two other account managers that work a significant amount of time with the city of Durham, because you're one of our largest case that we have. And it takes a lot more maintenance and management to make sure that you know all of our responsibilities. Mr. Gazarowski, you don't have scientists. You have people who are in business, people who have business skills, correct? That's correct. So right here in Durham, we have North Carolina Central University, historically Black University. And there are many people there who have those business skills that you want. So I'm going to ask that the next time that you hire, that you make a special effort to reach out to North Carolina Central University for your candidates. And to other minority colleges and universities in your area, as you know, we have Shaw, we have St. Aug, you know these institutions. But since you're working here in Durham, especially North Carolina Central University, I want to ask you that the next time you recruit someone or have a position open that you make that outreach. Yes, sir. We actually did that one time. I knew a graduate in the law school over there. And this was about nine years ago, asking her to help me try to recruit some business people there. Mr. Gazarowski, I want you to do it more systematically than that. There's a placement office at North Carolina Central. It shouldn't rely on somebody that you know. It should rely on you going to that placement office and finding the candidates you need. Are the council members? Mr. Mayor, I want to thank you for your question. That's usually the line of questions I ask. I try not to ask them when it's 50 employees or below, but I do appreciate the mayor making sure that it's clear for all of our staff. As you bring forward these contractors, this is important to most of us on this council. And it should be a part of your question or line of question as you're talking to vendors and contractors, because it's definitely going to be something that comes up for us at the council level if money is going towards these organizations or businesses. So thank you. Thank you. Anyone else? All right. Thank you, Mr. Gazarowski. Thank you, and I'm very sensitive to this. And the promise I'll make to you is I will reach out to the North Carolina Central. Actually, we'll call them after this conversation and identify our potential needs going forward. That'd be great. Thank you. We'll count on that. Thank you, Ms. Jackson. Thank you. You're welcome. Okay. Mr. Manager, thank you for reminding me we'd missed that item. And we'll now go to Chief Davis. And Chief, welcome. Glad to see you. And before you get started with your report, I just want to thank you for your leadership of the department over these past very, very difficult days.  I thought what you, the statement you issued from Noble and your appearance on national television, you did a great job representing our city, representing your profession. And but also here at home, we know we're not out of the woods in terms of the demonstrations. And we are so lucky that we have powerful voices for change that are speaking up right now for the kind of change that we need in our society. And at the same time, those voices are peaceful voices. But we also know that without the right kind of police department and the right kind of police department leadership, that we would not be where we are in Durham. And we have been both fortunate but also extremely well led of our demonstrators and our police department. So Chief, I want to thank you, express my gratitude and also express my appreciation of all the hard work and incredible dedication this is taking on the part of our police department. I mean, to be in the crucible as they are and to remain calm and patient and to manage the situation as they have is, I know how difficult it is. And yet they've done it. And I hope you will pass on to every one of them. My appreciation and appreciation of the entire Council. So good to see you Chief and welcome. Thank you. Thank you very much. This has been a very, very trying and emotionally charged week I think for everybody. Anybody that's a human being would be impacted and affected in a most profound way as it relates to this incident. So not just this incident, this incident and others. So thank you for those remarks. We will continue to be committed to what image that I think we all want for Durham is that this is a safe place to live. This is a place where there is obviously just a lot of pride. And I think every last one of you who have contributed in some way to help us facilitate peaceful protests here in Durham. It's not just the Durham Police Department. It's been a myriad of individuals who have been involved in that communication and that boots on the ground communication as well. And a lot of credit goes to some of our organizers who insisted on providing space and leading in a way that didn't create further harm to individuals that turned out and didn't rise to a level that the Police Department had to intervene. And we don't want to have to intervene. We've had these internal conversations and I just thought this would be a good time for me to preface that to this group as well. Thank you all so much. So the first quarter report, our quarter covers the department's five performance measures, part one violent crime, part one property crime, clearance rates, response times to priority one calls, and staffing levels also discuss a little bit about the 2020 first quarter highlights. And as my operators getting set up, wait for the next slide please. Am I able to pass it on to go to the next slide? I think that can happen, Chief. Let's see if I'm not sure who's operating the slides right now. Oh, there we go. Great. Thank you. Okay, there we go. I wanted to take just a minute just to let you know about a few of the personnel changes in the Durham Police Department. We had two vacancies for Deputy Chief, as you know, Chief Assembly and Chief Marsh retired earlier this year. And at this time, I want to announce that Deputy Chief Gregory Pickerel was promoted and is over investigative services and Deputy Chief Sherry Montgomery was promoted and is over administrative services. Also, I'd like to take this opportunity to welcome Amanda Fitzpatrick, who is our new Public Affairs and Communications Manager. So I just wanted to give you an update on those personnel changes. Next slide please. Are we getting the next slide up? Looks like maybe we've lost our screen, Chief. Let's give our tech folks a second to get it back. Okay. Looks like the clerk is donning that. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Great. Thank you. So beginning with reported part one, violent crime, homicides, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault increased by 24% in the first quarter of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. It's the first 90 days of the year. There were seven homicides in the first quarter of 2020 compared to 12 in the first quarter of 2019. Investigators have cleared five of these cases plus one homicide from 2019. The number of reported sexual assaults decreased by 15% during the first quarter. Approximately one quarter of the rape cases reported during the first quarter happened in prior years. Robberies increased by 9% during the first quarter of 2020 compared to 2019. 75% of robberies were from persons. We experienced a trend of robberies from Hispanic victims, particularly in apartment complexes during these first 90 days. 36% of robberies from persons involved, one or more Hispanic victims. So at that time, we increased our patrols in the areas that these incidents were occurring. We also communicated to the public in several complexes and health forums so that we could try to provide information for those residents to try to help prevent some of these incidents. Officers passed out crime prevention flyers in English and in Spanish. And information was provided to Spanish-speaking media. These incidents have decreased significantly. We were able to identify individuals that were responsible for several of these particular incidents and made arrests in that regard. 60% of the robberies in the first quarter involved a firearm. Approximately one, third, 31% of aggravated assault incidents were domestic in nature. Can you hang on one second? Can we have the property crime slide up? Can we also have the is there a slide right before that? It should be. There we go. I'm sorry. No worries. There we go. I just wanted to make sure we got to see that one too. Thank you. Go ahead, Chief. My fault. That's all right. That's what we should be. Okay. The percentage of multi-victim firearm incidents increased during the first quarter this year. 39% of all aggravated assaults during the first quarter were from multi-victim firearms. This was 31% during the first quarter of 2000. That was a comparison to the 31% during the first quarter of 2019. Our target is 30%. The last time our percentage was 30% or below was in the third quarter of 2014. So at least we got really close this time. Next slide, please. Part one, property crime, which includes reported burglaries, larcenies, and motor vehicle thefts increased by 24% during the first quarter of 2020 compared to the same period in 2019. There was a significant increase in the number of commercial burglaries, primarily to convenience stores, specialty stores, and restaurants. The reported residential burglaries were down by 14%. We do believe that the pandemic had something to do with some of the shift in some of our crime during this period. Less burglaries, individuals being at home as opposed to being in retail stores and businesses. The reported residential burglaries were down at 14%. We continued to have an increase in burglaries to sheds and at construction sites. Most of the time in these incidents, it was tools that were mostly stolen. We've seen a decline in burglaries in April and May. Larcenies made up 63% of our part one crimes compared to 61% in 2019. 40% of our larcenies were from vehicles and were thefts of motor vehicle parts. One third of the larcenies were from shoplifting incidents. At least 44% of stolen vehicles were either left running or had keys in the vehicle. Approximately three quarters of the reported stolen vehicles have been recovered. And that's indicative especially during the first couple of months of the year when people are running cars and it's cold outside. We typically have upticks in that regard. Next slide please. Our clearance rates, we compare departments clearance rates to those of departments our size. As you can see, our clearance rates were better than the average for cities, our size, for homicides, robberies, burglaries, larcenies and overall part one property crime during the first quarter of 2020. We expect the clearance rates to improve as the year goes on as well. Just those 90 days doesn't really give us a good indication of what type of investigative process we progress will have during the course of the year. Next slide please. So priority one calls. There were 2,158 priority one calls for service in the first quarter of 2020, which was a 19% increase from the 1,813 priority one calls during the same period in 2019. Our average response time was 5.93 minutes, which was slightly over our target response time of 5.8 but rather close. We answered 56.49% of the property one calls in less than five minutes in the first quarter of 2020. This came very close to meeting our 57% target. In March, our average response time, and I think this had a lot to do with COVID-19, is 5.45 minutes. We had 535 priority one calls in March. Our average response time of priority one calls in April was even less 4.48 minutes, which was a time that we have not seen, I don't think, in my time here or maybe ever. We had more priority one calls in April than March, but less traffic on the roads in April, of course. Next slide please. Our sworn staffing was at 94% at the end of March 2020. Our non-sworn staffing was at 90% at the end of March 2020. 11 recruits graduated from our BLET 50 class during the first quarter of this year. We currently have 21 recruits in our basic law enforcement training academy, number 51. This academy is scheduled to graduate this summer. We've hired two lateral recruits. These are individuals with prior experience from other agencies. Next slide. This is our U visa report. For the quarter, it's not very much to report on, with the exception of the fact that we had, we processed 48 U visa requests during the first quarter of 2020. 67% were approved. Next slide. Two major issues impacted the first quarter, a massive malware attack on city computers in the COVID-19 pandemic. Through all of this, the Durham Police Department continued to respond to calls and provide service to our community. We found innovative ways to serve the community while keeping our employees safe as well. We continue to recruit new officers but have found ways to do much of the process virtually. We conduct temperature checks when employees come to work and we provide masks that are needed, personal protective equipment, and hand sanitizer at all entrances in it throughout the work space. We also changed our 911 call response protocol to make it safer for employees and our residents. We provided information to the public, communicating in English and Spanish regarding our response to COVID-19, the orders that had been distributed to the public, the changes in the orders as well. Unfortunately, COVID-19 forced us to cancel several events in March, including national honor guard training. We planned to host here in the city of Durham and a women in law enforcement open house, which was a recruiting initiative and our women's history month luncheon for our employees. There were other highlights and various activities that are in the accompanying report that all of you have received, but that ends my report and I am open to any questions that you may have. Thank you very much for that report. I'll first ask if there are questions or comments by council members and Madam Clerk, maybe you could take down the slides so we could all be on the thank you very much. There we go. Before we do that, I'm going to again ask our tech staff, Vivian, maybe you can help. Am I still too loud? Is my audio okay now? Apparently it must not be too loud because Vivian maybe can't hear me. Well, this is Beverly. She did inform me that it was fine. Thanks a lot, Beverly. Thank you, Beverly. Thank you. Okay, you're welcome. I'm sorry. My tech savvy is not very savvy. I'm going to now ask for any questions or comments for the chief council members. Councilmember Middleton. Mr. Mayor, thank you so much and thank you so much for capturing, I think, the sentiment and spirit of this city in terms of how we feel about Chief Davis' job and the remarkable job that protest leaders in our city have done, so I will not try and go in again. I've already expressed my appreciation to the chief and thank you, Mayor, and I want to associate myself with your comments to her. Chief, I want to ask, we know we've been talking a lot about use of force in the country and rightly so in the wake of the George Floyd lynching, which we all witnessed in slow motion. Again, it has been in tone about one of my colleagues that our department does not use best practices when it comes to use of force, and I do not want my silence about it to in any way signal to the people of this city that I'm not interested in making sure that we are using best practices. One I want you to tell me just very directly, is the Durham Police Department using currently best practices when it comes to use of force and if not, why and what can we do to get there? Well, I think that the Durham Police Department absolutely is using best practices as it relates to use of force. I think there are different ways of articulating what those standards are and I think this is a great time for us to even take a more surgical look at our policies and really just find out where the discrepancies or the contradictions are so that we can all establish some clarity as it relates to these different standards that we think are best practices in the department. So I'm open to that conversation, but I've looked at our policies and procedures and there have been, you know, several lists and I believe some of the issue is that while we have standards in place, when a person looks for a particular policy, if they're looking for a particular issue that's covered in our policy and it's not in an index form, it doesn't mean that it's not there, it just lies in some policy that's titled something that that person is not referencing, if that makes sense. It does and I thank you for that and I think it's important to be very clear to the people of this city who have put us here to make sure that those type of things are in place and I want to just go on record that I spent a lot of time in my adult life working under the leadership of some amazing people in this city to reform this police department and we know we've got more work to do and you'd be the first to admit that chief, but I think it's important that the statement that we are not practicing best policies when it comes to the use of force needs to be challenged and if it turns out to be true then we need to get to work on making sure we are doing that and I don't think there's a person on this council who would not be for making sure that's in place, but if that's not the case then I think we need to stop saying it or we need to clarify exactly what we mean when we say that. I think we owe that to the people of the city, I think we owe that to our employees who work in the police department, I think we owe it to all of us who work so hard to make this city all that it can be. So thank you for that and I know you'll keep us posted if there's work we need to do, we'll do it. So thank you Chief, thank you Mr. Mayor. Thank you and if I may elaborate just a little bit further too, in no way are we so caught up about what our policies say that we aren't open to clarifying and even tweaking where we all might think that they need to be tweaked so that they can be clearer and what I've done is I've basically provided sort of a cheat sheet for a lot of the issues that have been raised so that we could reference where that policy clearly deals with that particular issue. So I've worked with our police attorney on this as well and we felt like we have captured some very critical issues even issues right now that are before us to make sure that our policies are best practices. I personally advocate for best practices because I know our policies in the Durham Police Department far exceed policies around the country and that was part of my appeal to the nation that we have best practices national best practices so that these issues can be covered not just in our department here what I'm doing here in Durham but all across the country as well as opposed to policies being treated like a smorgasbord and agencies are able to pick and choose. So I am so certainly open to more conversation and dialogue and sharing the department's policies and open to modifying or better clarifying for the public how they can find these policies that currently exist. That's good to hear. Thank you Chief. Mr. Mayor that's all I have right now. Thank you Councilmember. Councilmember Reese. Thank you Mr. Mayor. Chief Davis it's great to see you today. Thanks. I managed to catch your spot in Good Morning America always doing Durham proud. Appreciate all the work that you've done. I was I think three of us were at the first of the Durham protests over the weekend Saturday maybe different times but and I can just tell you that from my perspective kind of in amongst the protesters that the conduct of your officers the strategy that you have put into effect for protecting the the right of the people of this city to protest was exactly what I would want it to be and so I just wanted to say thank you for that. I certainly felt protected and I know the other protesters often remarked on it during the protest itself and I think that's something we can be proud of. I want to ask about some of the specific numbers in the in the in your presentation but I do want to follow up and Councilmember Middleton's excellent question about use of force policies. I know that earlier I guess it was late at some point over the weekend we received an email from a community member who had gone to a website I think it's eight can't wait dot org where they allow you to pull up from a menu the name of a city and then it is doing some kind of an has already done some kind of analysis in the background to match up a set of use of force practices with what is available what the city has on record and I forwarded that to you and I think Charlie's thinking right now and what you wanted to say next but while he's thinking I would add that I also appreciate the work of the officers and I just want to make sure that we're keeping in context and frame of mind how some of the folks in the community who are protesters and maybe rioters and looters just making sure we're not alienating any one of those in our conversations in general and just making sure that we know that people respond differently to grief and whether it's violent or not I think it's hard to cast judgment I try my best not to but I really do want to make sure we're not trying to pit people to like and say how they should protest I really want to steer away from that that conversation and beyond that I I don't have too many questions right now thank you councilmember is councilmember Reese back with us we lost him for a minute there I think he may be calling back in before we before he comes back I'll ask other other council members who have comments or questions mayor protan thank you mr mayor thank you chief for being here just want to appreciate again your work and the work of your officers over the last few days of protests we've seen in a lot of other cities how quickly things can escalate and I'm glad we've been able to avoid those escalations here in Durham I so the policies use of force policies that councilmember Reese was referring to the eight can't wait policies that have been circulating throughout the country which are based on some of the research that's been happening from police reform organizations around the country about best practices and use of force policies the email that we received and the list of policies I had a chance to review it and they have right Durham is having two of the eight policies that they that they deem best practices for use of force have you had a chance to review those policies and do you have any thoughts on implementing those here in Durham those changes I guess it I guess it depends on which two it is or the ones that they say we don't have and I think yeah there's six that they say we don't have now that now that Charlie's back he can maybe give you a little bit more details I don't have them in front of me Charlie do you want to take over yeah I am I'm really sorry about that one of the one of the problems with the world we're living in now is that we're all trying to be online at the same time yeah I think probably for the purposes of this conversation it might be better for rather than ask you specifically about the different standards is just ask you to commit to getting more information to us about that particular set of standards as I said I sent it over the weekend I'm happy to send it again it's just that it's something that a lot of folks are asking us about specifically and and I want to make sure that we are responsive to that desire just to learn more about what our use of force practices actually are versus what a website I never heard about until five days ago says they are and if there are areas where we can improve I know that you and I share the same commitment to making sure that Durham remains as a place where our practices are best practices and so that's I guess I didn't I didn't want to ask you to go through the list with us over this meeting today and figure out like where we were what I all I wanted to do was say this is out there we're hearing about it if you could help us understand where we actually are with respect to those standards that would be great absolutely and I have that and I will provide that for you thank you fantastic and I apologize for for dropping off if I can I can I keep going Mr. Mayor is that okay absolutely councilmember thank you I appreciate it it's um okay um I want to talk a little bit about calls for service and response time over and with the caveat and all this data is that it's one quarter of day and as we you and I have discussed many times this first 90 day report is the least informative in many ways because it is susceptible to the law of small numbers really a 12 month look back is a much more valuable tool to use but that's not where we are today we're at the 90 day point and traditionally we have compared these quarters to each other and I think when we get to what I've seen so far the first five months looks a lot better than the first three months in terms of where we are in crime in our community but let's talk about the 90 day report specifically I want to talk about domestic violence you know we've read a lot during the COVID-19 pandemic about how the the virus and the and the physical distancing required during this time to combat the novel coronavirus means that folks are trapped at home together and I'm sure we're all experiencing that at some level or another and that in abusive situations that can be very very dangerous for folks who are in those types of situations and I just wanted to point to the data in your underlying report that suggests as best I can tell that violent crime related to domestic violence is up about 25 percent over the first quarter of last year I wanted to ask you to comment on that I know last year we instituted the lethality assessment program which made I thought a huge difference in terms of the level of support that a first responder could provide to the alleged victim of domestic violence on scene to help create a safety plan for them and I just wondered what how the COVID-19 pandemic and the specific and this very kind of peculiar and unprecedented limitations that puts on folks how that impacted the progress we were making last year I think it absolutely did impact it because just by nature of officers not having as much close contact with individuals even though our response has been responding to the call after the incident has occurred we haven't been able to do as much of that in your face sort of proactive training we were even developing a Hispanic version of the lethality assessment brochures as well so that our Hispanic community could be made aware of these various indicators as it relates to domestic violence and also the help services that are available to everyone that might feel that they are trapped in a situation so this has been a concern of ours because we did see a bit of an uptick people were at home people were not at work more domestic violence in the daytime hours than in the evening time hours and we just don't really know how much longer and of course we've seen a little bit of a decline in it but we don't know how much longer this situation is going to go on of course but the second phase of you know the stay at home orders being released it might give people an opportunity to just have that that air time that get out of the house time even some of our domestic violence situations have not been between domestic partners they have been between a son and a father or a domestic partner and a child that was not a biological child so we have seen those upticks and it has been concerning but we are trying to make sure that we use our lethality assessment protocols that is very awkward when you're standing at a distance you're trying to get through the call as quickly as you can and provide that person a safe space and then move on. No I appreciate that and I know that the folks that work at the crisis center are hard at work trying to figure out the best way to bridge that physical gap and just wanted to raise that issue with you because it's obviously something that's important to all of us and hopefully the next set of data will help us kind of understand where we are. The next thing I wanted to talk about is response time I think it's remarkable that in the first quarter of this year calls for service are up almost 20 percent that's that's a wow number to be honest and certainly reflected in the underlying crime statistics but what's even more astonishing is that your average response time only went up about 3 percent can you help me understand how that's possible like what is happening there my mind is blown what's up with that we're a little bit at a loss about it too um you know we we saw where where we were hit with the pandemic we had you know supplemental officers were available to work supplemental we had better response times we did respond more to just COVID related calls initially there were several COVID related calls where people were just calling about individuals that were violating the the stay at home orders and even though those calls didn't require a lot of time and it freed up officers to go from call to call they still were you know part of this total aggregate number of responses that that we made for that period we didn't see a significant decrease in activity as far as calls for service during that period which was surprising but with the additional type of calls that we received it sort of balanced things out um but it is uh something that has been sort of kind of a phenomenon for us we just didn't really put our finger on it but your observation it was ours as well well good to know i'm in good company um i have i have one theory about it this could be totally off base but might be interesting to look at is that even though we didn't have the stay at home order till the end of the month the fact that we had the state emergency declaration and local emergency declarations um early in march i wonder if the reduction in travel you know had already general travel chief had already made a study at that point i mean i don't know if you i don't know if it had by the end of march of course travel was down um uh something like 40 percent in Durham um just a theory that if you know maybe if you disaggregated about that that month you might see uh it down more in march but as i say that's a that's just a theory yeah the council ever reads i'm sorry please go ahead no that's okay i appreciate any any thoughts or welcome i just it was such a such a strange outcome i suspect you're right mr. mayor there's something to do with the changing nature of our community's activity during the COVID-19 pandemic even in the absence of Durham state home order um i certainly know our family's behavior changed right in the middle of that second week of march and i know a lot of folks did as well next i want to turn to um the homicide rate during the first three months of the year you know we um the i think comparing the increase in aggravated assault to the decrease in homicide is another real head scratcher um and i don't i i wonder if you have any thoughts about it i just i i mean is it is it just that the number of homicides is always so low compared to you know the aggregate number of crimes that occurred any period of time that it's really hard to look at trends in that number or what do you think is happening there well you know we did see an uptake a serious uptake and just aggravated assaults aggravated assaults that involved multiple individuals and we believe and this is just a theory that during a particular window during this this virus i think people felt that the police department was sort of at bay we've had several conversations because quite frankly our officers were at bay to some degree we had talked about you know making sure that we maintained visibility but we didn't have that same level of community engagement boots on the ground talking to people the kind of canvassing that we've had in the past where we spent a lot of time in the community because of the fear not just that precautions from the police department but also from our community members as well as it relates to exposure so there was a lot of caution however we had individuals that felt like it was open season to just do some arbitrary kind of drive-bys and some of it didn't have any particular pattern to it it was a very different period during a few of those weeks at the beginning of the year of aggravated assaults i've said before that aggravated assault sometimes contribute to our homicide rate in a in a sense that people have gotten lucky because they have definitely been the target of an aggravated assault and you know we've been blessed that that individual didn't expire as a result of it yeah um yeah i don't i don't really yeah it's hard to hard to draw some again it's the 90-day report it's hard to draw a ton of trends here let's um and the 90 days to your point is really hard to draw trends and i'm not saying that this isn't an important report because it does provide information about those 90 days but it's the six months that really help us to get a picture as it relates to trends and and what we're working with as opposed to the the various variables that come into play during a pandemic during a snapshot where a lot of really weird things were going on as it relates to movement and environment in the city no and i i absolutely we're we're just gonna have to to take a look and see where we are in another month or so and um but i appreciate your thoughts on that i wanted to call out one item from your larger report and then ask you to respond to a more general question i just wanted to say that i i always read the above and beyond section of your report that's um often one of the first things i go to because i think during a time when a lot of news is bad the above and beyond section of your quarterly report is always really inspiring and i have talked about this officer before but i will talk about him again because he was one of the officers of the month in the first quarter officer wag staff in squad 2d i just encourage people if you want to pull that report it's on pages seven and eight of the detailed report that the chief provides to us in our materials it seems like every time you come to talk to us officer wag staff has found yet another way to excel in the service chart community so if you just pass along my my thanks to him so the other the last question i wanted to ask and it's pretty open-ended but i think you deserve the opportunity to have an open-ended response to it as you are well aware many of the protests that have happened here in Durham and north carolina around the country have um called on elected officials like the six of us to reallocate a government funding away from local police departments and to other types of government spending that can make community safer in a way parallel to our law enforcement function i know that it's likely that you have a strong thoughts about that and we're going to talk about your budget after you leave which is awkward so i wanted to give you an opportunity to spend just a minute or two to talk about your perspective on that question my my perspective is that it is always my priority and my concern to ensure that the work that has been entrusted to me um is played out in a way that the city of Durham can have victories whatever that looks like as it relates to everybody that's involved the monies that are allocated for me it's about how do we achieve a victory and you know fighting the various elements in our community and trying to suppress crime we can only do it from one angle and we do hope at some point that some of the other fields in our community the social types of issues are addressed and i said it over and over again you know it's it's hard to put police departments out of business because nobody's paying attention to the other things that can help stop crime and and that's not indictment on this council because this council has always been supportive of community and grassroots types of programs but i would not ask for people if i didn't need people to respond to the 47 percent increase of aggravated assaults if there were other types of interventions in place that could help us curtail some of the crime that we see then the police department wouldn't have near as much uh response to certain communities that cry out for somebody to help intercept the bullets to help intercept the drug dealing and those emails come to me on a day-to-day basis so i know our work is important in the community and i know there's balance that that needs to be there i would love to be able to work closer with with any other entities that could help us from a holistic standpoint make our community a better place to live work and play quality of life issues joblessness education you know all of those things come into play when we're talking about crime as well so you know that's my best answer council memories i don't i personally believe that our work is valuable if i turn the lights out at police headquarters for 24 hours we would have some problems in this city so i know that our work is important but i would love to see us reduce that 47 percent and i not have to come and ask for gang officers my requests are only based on the empirical data that's in front of me that this is happening and everybody is screaming at the police department to make it stop and if there were other effective ways to make it stop i am certainly open to that thank you chief natas for that i think that's um obviously a critically important perspective as we talk about these issues um and we are you know bottom line we get those emails too um often right by the ones that say um you know the that they're outraged at the level of the budget of the police department and we have to it's our job to figure out what to do with that and so i appreciate you sharing your perspective with us and mr mayor i'll i'll yield for thank you thank you councilmember councilman middleton thank you mr. mayor thank you council race for your line of inquiry um chief i have a question a couple of members of them well one member of the media contacted me this morning about an incident last night in front of the police headquarters um your officers had established a perimeter and at some point a a a civilian car personal vehicle uh somehow was inside the perimeter and and scared some folk pretty bad there's some stuff floating around that the car was deliberately allowed in the perimeter to do harm to protesters i know that there are people that plan on being in our streets tonight do you have any um info on what exactly happened last night and can you assure our public that that it will continue to be protected as they exercise their constitutional rights this evening in our streets yeah absolutely and you know i think i can speak for all of the um the officers that have been out and working for the last five days about how appalled that we were that we got blamed for what happened last night when our efforts in our strategic efforts over the last five days has been all about trying to keep our community safe and make sure that they had that open safe space to be able to peacefully protest last night was the first night that we had a group of protesters that splintered off into three different locations and what it required us to do even though we followed and and paid very close attention to the path of the group to ensure that the streets were open and blocked off for them to get to and from we ended up having to take other vehicles and go out to the freeway and to some other locations in the city so that we could provide those other groups with that same level of safety somehow we were still looking at footage because when it happened i was sitting in the command center and i just want to want to let you know everybody in the command center was screaming because we're trying to figure out where the car came from and what happened is we believed that the car came from one of the arterial streets hood street we think and they're looking at footage to try to determine where it came from so that we can make sure that if our protesters decide to lay down in the street or whatever we have all of the streets in the area surrounded we basically had to move some resources around and had no idea that somebody would sneak around to hood street and get on the roadway and when they realized that people were laying in the roadway of course they turned around but it scared everybody the police department would never intentionally allow people to be hurt or harmed in the middle of a protest i think we've been able to prove that that i mean a lot of things happened that we didn't intervene in and i think it was a little bit it was kind of disappointing that people thought that it was that that something like that would intentionally happen that would have been grave circumstances there so you know we're still looking at it and and of course the police precinct has five different areas that you can kind of get in and out of towards the main part of the front building so we're we're basically going to be trying to shore up and even ask our organizers who some have communicated with us if this is where you plan if you if you're going to do a maneuver on this particular street or you want to lay in the street let us know because if if something happens that we haven't been able to anticipate we're not going to be able to protect you as much as as we would like to so i think some of the communication also would be helpful but you know we're expecting protesters tonight too and it is our intent to allow people to peacefully protest without those types of incidents from happening and we are looking into it to try to see who this individual was that infiltrated the area well thank you so much for that chief i can't tell you how much self-restraint i have to practice sometimes as i scroll through social media and want to insert myself into some of the conversations i see but of course if i do it'll become a whole different conversation um but to see folk basically blatantly accusing our police department of trying to murder some people even when as far as sorry they're trying to murder protesters and kill protesters i i just want this public to know to a person on this council i think i'm not out of bounds by saying this to a person on this council if we had when that there were any officers that were deliberately trying to hurt protesters we would insist that those badges be made to a mural uh somewhere so so i just want to assure folk that um we'll be taken to the streets tonight uh that i think our record has been established um we welcome this is Durham we welcome free speech and protest in Durham and i i just wanted to give you an opportunity to address what happened and to give folk assurances that we do everything we can in our power to look after them tonight thank you thank you your honor thank you thank you council member other other colleagues questions or comments for the chief anyone all right chief i do have one uh i have a couple things uh first of all um you all proved to everyone that you're doing everything you can to protect our protesters and their right to protest and i don't think there's any question about that and i'm grateful for it um and you've really gone above and beyond and i know it's put a lot of pressure on our police officers and i know the hours the long days the trying to move around the city and able to in order to be able to uh protect the protesters dealing with very difficult confrontations with both sometimes with people who aren't protesting and also sometimes people who are mad that the protesters are out there uh you know blocking off a freeway uh is really hard and please express our gratitude to the whole force for that i just am so grateful i know we all are thank you and our city and our city is chief i don't know how much you this you get but i get so many emails and communication from people saying how proud they are in our force and uh it's just it's over very you have overwhelming support for that and i'm grateful thank you thank you um i do think that the you know the the uh the aggravated assault number is is very uh concerning it's a big worry and uh i'm looking forward to the uh the longer term i agree that you know one quarter is just a quarter uh as council member race was saying he's absolutely right as you were saying chief uh but i am concerned and i will be looking and hoping for better um i want to just tell you in the council that president obama sent a communication to mayors uh yesterday asking mayors to take a pledge that over the next 90 days we would work with our excuse me police departments and communities to look at our use of force policies similar to what we were talking about earlier chief yes and to see what changes need to be made um he has uh recommended a four part process that includes review of the policies engaging the community reporting the findings back and then reform and ask that that be done in 90 days and i'd sign that pledge uh and um i was really i would just tell you that it was so uh it was such a if you haven't seen that any of the president obama's messages for anyone here over the last week uh i urge everyone to do so and it it'll show you what a president ought to be doing uh but one of the things is that uh he did reach out to mayors and ask us to take this pledge which i have done and so um i'll look forward chief to thinking with you about our our use of force policies and reviewing them and uh as you say uh sometimes it's a matter of just clarifying for people letting people know that that uh i think i think what uh calcino re said earlier you know there's a website they don't really know much about durham they look at some words and they pick that out on the other hand we do need to really think about are we doing what is really the best thing because um we know we have the best chief um and we know that you are representing us in amazing ways not only here in durham but nationally and we want our use of force policies to be the absolute best model for the nation and i think part of that isn't just in what the policies are but the way in which they're expressed uh are they clear to people can we make a very clear statement to people about what those policies are so that everybody knows this everybody in the community not just on the forest knows and understands them so i did want to tell you that chief and i know we're all looking forward to thinking together about our use of force policies over the next uh over the next period of time thank you so much mayor thank you council thank you chief we really appreciate you we appreciate everything you do uh you're a great leader we're so lucky to have you and we'll we'll be talking again soon thank you thank you mr mayor i want to thank you for sharing that you did uh sign that pledge thank you councilmember all right i want to thank chief davis again and now we're going to move on to the report from downtown durham ink uh and uh i hope that michael tomson is with us and i'm not sure which staff member is going to help us introduce good afternoon mr mayor and council summer allston office of economic and workforce development yes you're correct uh president and ceo downtown durham incorporated nicole tomson is with us today we are before you as it relates specifically to um an annual report for the downtown durham business improvement district that is required uh by north carolina statue and um we understand that you all have already had a chance to review the presentation and the report and so i believe the expectation based on time is that nicole tomson will um introduce the item herself make a few very brief remarks and of course entertain any questions you may have um before i turn it over to nicole i just want to clarify if there are any questions for staff thank you miss allston it's good to see you thank you sir um is are there questions for staff before we hear from uh nicole tomson i don't think so summer thank you so we'll we're here from nicole okay thank you nicole hi everybody a good evening afternoon i guess good afternoon um afternoon nicole we're glad to see you thank you i can't start my video so thankfully there's a picture there so imagine imagine that talking to you um i am not going to spend a lot of time because i only have a very short amount of time i'm at the request of of staff so i don't i don't want to spend time going through the presentation or the report you all receive that in your packet and i'm more than happy to answer any questions that you might have um but i did want to do a couple of highlights first and foremost i do want to take the time to say just a few words not only from myself personally um from the ddi staff the ddi board um but also the downtown residents and businesses who have been extremely proud of the community of durham and the love that we have all shown durham during these very difficult times and i include covid and its difficulty but certainly the the terrible images that we have all witnessed and how that has again brought to the forefront an issue that really needs to be discussed uh and in saying that our true appreciation for the great work of police chief davis and her team um i have been to and and been um downtown through all but one of the present a protest and to witness her team and how they are working with the community to give them the space to mourn and to remember and to express that pain has been truly uplifting um and then a great shout out to the community uh that that recognizes that in durham we do things differently and we say that quite a bit but we truly do things differently and i'm i'm just proud that that i'm a part and that i need an organization uh that that believes very strongly in that but i did want to take the time to thank our community activists our community leaders our community and our police chief and her team um for how that how we have represented and how we show our sorrow for what has happened and how we are trying to rebuild with that um just a couple of things because i think i now only have like two minutes but a couple of things that i did want to kind of highlight uh and that's pretty much focusing on where we are today i certainly could spend lots of time talking about the great things we've done in the past and what we've got planned for the future and we'd be happy to answer any of those questions but today in light of where we are in downtown um restaurants closed small businesses closed struggling to get back on their feet because of covid um a community that is hurting uh there are things that that i do want to bring to your attention that we are trying to address in downtown uh first and foremost i want to acknowledge the great work that our ambassadors have been doing they remained essential employees um so as the city shut down our 11 ambassadors remained on the street uh doing the work excuse me during the work that they are they were hired to do i'm happy to do that we were able to offer them hazard pay so that they could continue to work um and they were the eyes and ears in downtown when other people were not downtown as everyone was hunkering in place they practiced and still practice social distancing wearing masks and gloves but they kept downtown beautiful and ready for when we started to come back they interacted with the businesses that were open during curbside delivery they reported the gathering of individuals over the limits that the city had put in place um so a constant communication with the police force on on those issues but always foremost that we were keeping the downtown area clean safe and welcoming when people were ready to come back downtown so i do want to take a moment to to recognize that they stepped in and helped the city when the city had its employees unable to come downtown we stepped in and we took over all of the city doing maintenance of common areas so again highlighting that great relationship that we continue to have with the city and with the different departments i want to move on to we have taken it upon ourselves to try to get relevant and accurate information into the hands of the public um since this pandemic started march 13th we have sent out 74 emails that list has grown from our my email list has grown from about 200 to over 500 we're currently sitting at about 550 right now and that email gets spread throughout the the city and parts further i've had people call me from willmington and other parts of the city um but our stance was in order to work together we needed to have the same information and i appreciate all the resources that have been been providing us information that we could then send out to the community that information also highlighted the small businesses that were struggling with pp p applications idle applications unemployment questions all of those kinds of issues that we were able to address and find them resources so that they could find the funding they needed the questions that they needed that was quite a big thing when we first started to deal with the unemployment issue getting them finding them an email that they could use in order to address very specific questions about how do i get paid how do i get through the system what do i do um so we became a resource for those businesses and their employees um we have tried to continue to show that that durham has still got things happening through our virtual performances we do a thing called from the heart where we continue to work with our local artists and on one day a week we have an hour long performance by local artists music performance to remind people that there are still artists and there are still musicians that are doing things in downtown and we ask people to just turn tune that on turn that on and listen to it in the background but it is a way to stay connected to our artist community our buskers who we would have on the street on a third friday but because we're not doing third fridays they continue to need funding and employment we also just to to kind of wrap up very quickly we are doing work around our small businesses so early on we did a little bit of seed money we put some seed money about ten thousand dollars to seed the feed durham initiative which is an initiative to get downtown restaurants to provide food for our health health providers as a way to offset or to have an additional way of having income coming in by offering a large amount of food meals to to our health care workers and we also did a small seed amount of money about six thousand dollars to provide funding or meals to the EOC emergency operations center and the the point behind that was we were noticing that a lot of institutions are using our well-known businesses and not our smaller businesses so that allowed us to allow businesses like spanglish uh dames and of a req assault to participate and offer meals to EOC the long-term hope of that is that when the city or people in that that space need to do a catering event or a large event they will reach back out to these downtown restaurants and have them do those events when we are no longer practicing social distancing and when people come back downtown they'll know that there are other restaurants in downtown um so all of these are looking for ways to one provide income additional income into the the restaurant but also to start making some and creating some uh connection between our downtown restaurants and and employees that are working in and around the downtown finally i will end with the work that we've been doing around the outdoor dining we continue to work very closely with city staff the attorney's office the planning department the department of transportation they have been great to work with in working on how we make outdoor dining work recognizing that this will be all over the city but there are some challenges giving our small streets serve us street infrastructure the small workspaces that we have for a lot of our restaurants how that will work so that we can allow open dining outdoor dining for those uh those institutions so that they can start getting open and start making money and that we protect them and get them um hopefully as close to whole as possible over the next few months um and the final thing that i will mention is that we continue to work and we are very interested in hearing what will happen with the small business assistance fund we have had numerous conversations with a number of different entities and individuals and have provided our input and our guidance and our advice on ways that we think would be very beneficial and we strongly recommend that any program be open to all throughout the city and the county and that the criteria be as specific and clear and easy to follow as possible um that's all i think i have time to share i probably went over there is hours upon hours more than i could share um but i do appreciate the time and i'm ready to answer any questions thank you very much nicol we appreciate it thank you for that excellent report i'll now ask if there are any questions or comments by members of the council um questions or comments by members of the council all right nicol thank you you got off easy today we're glad to have you here we appreciate you very much appreciate your work thank you and thank you to the council uh thank you to um city manager um we look forward to continuing to work with you uh in the in the next year thank you thanks again for the time thank you so much and uh we we we also look forward to it and especially appreciate the work recently uh with our trying to figure out how to help our downtown businesses in this difficult time mr manager uh yes mr there were two agenda items associated with the ddi if there's any questions about those we can answer them now otherwise we'll just move those to the consent agenda that's what i was anticipating mr manager um unless there's objection we'll move them to consent thank you thank you very much our next uh item colleagues uh before we go to our next item our next item is to hear from mr scott uh from the derm housing authority but i realized that there were i there were two things i meant to say during announcements which i didn't um and and so let me just let you know what they are uh because they relate to future work of the council uh one of them is i sent you all an email today as well as to staff around the that had promised you all about the housing implementation affordable housing implementation committee the group that will advise and help oversee and provide transparency for and accountability for the money that we're spending mostly affordable housing bond the dedicated funding source and all of our housing funds i've made a specific proposal to you all it will not be um it will not come as a surprise to any of you all this is the proposal that we had talked about uh uh you know several months ago um and prior to covid uh but i had held up on that after the various events that we've all been experiencing i've now sent you the email and i'll i'm looking forward to talking about this and getting this uh getting your approval of this plan so that we can move forward with bylaws and so forth uh and and um i'm i'm i'm going to ask that it be scheduled uh at one of our upcoming meetings soon so i want to let you know that the other thing i want to let you know is that another item that uh i previously brought to the council uh and a couple of you all have also been involved in uh i want to bring back and get us moving on is the uh the resolution that we've discussed about reparations uh and the uh the work on getting our uh other communities involved with us in that work the uh around trying to make some change in in in federal reparations policy so i want to let you know both of those are coming soon um as as our policy requires that you hear about that now so that it'll come to us uh at a at an upcoming uh meeting in the near future all right i wanted to say those two things and now i'm going to ask uh for the report from the Durham Housing Authority to see Mr. Johnson Mr. Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, members of council, uh Reginald Johnson, Director of Department of Community Development, the presentation that you will hear is from Ms. Anthony Scott at the Durham Housing Authority. A lot has gone on since the passing of the bond referendum last fall of course you have seen him several times as we have discussed with McDougal Terrence. The part about this purpose of this presentation is to give a more comprehensive overview of the work that is going to be doing that the Housing Authority will be doing as part of the bond referendum as well as provide an update on McDougal Terrence and so without any further ado i turn it over to Anthony Scott the president and CEO of Durham Housing Authority. Mr. Scott. Mr. Johnson, Mr. Mayor, Madam Pro Tem, thank you for this opportunity to come before you someone going to bring up my presentation please. All of these have all these things happen on a schedule we're not always sure exactly what the schedule is so let's hang on one second for our clerk to. No problem. Yeah. What I'll cover is as Mr. Johnson mentioned providing a overview starting with McDougal Terrence and talk about the uh the strategies we have around the preservation expansion of affordable housing. So next uh two slides please. Madam Clerk one more slide please. Great. There we go. Thank you. So McDougal Terrence um the emergency evacuation regarding the carbon monoxide concerns began on January 3rd and we're happy to say that the last family member finally went back to McDougal on May 1st. The work that was completed included new heating systems, new venting, replacing gas cells with electric cells, electric upgrades, and environmental remediation. The total cost to date is $10.1 billion so far with that. Uh next slide please. And that cost breakdown is as follows for relocation costs $5.3 million repairs $4.8 million and to date the sources of funding for that we of course received a $1.4 million grant from the city which will be focused on our electrical work and a um $3.2 million grant we've requested now we haven't received this but requested this from HUD this emergency capital fund grant that we are hoping that we will get. We do have a call tomorrow with the local HUD field office as well as the offices in Washington DC to hopefully move this this request forward. We uh that leaves us with a balance of five and a half million dollars and the remaining funds will have to come from the DHA capital funds. The impact of COVID-19 which you know began in March we still had families up until May. The one major impact with COVID-19 is that the electrical conversion work that we were doing which will allow us to switch from gas stoves to electric stoves. We decided to halt that work because it would require families to move out of their homes back into hotels for three to five days but we decided given the COVID-19 concerns that it was wide for us to halt that and so we put that on hold. We still have about 129 more units to go to convert from gas stoves to electric stoves. All of those 129 units I should mention though are new stoves or stoves that have not had any reported issues for carbon monoxide. Next slide please. I'd like to talk about RAD as a preservation of affordable housing strategy. RAD as I've talked about over the years allows us to convert our public housing funding which as you all are aware is very unpredictable. It's up and down. You never know what you're going to get from one year to the next and certainly that changes from one administration to the next to a more stable platform which would be to the housing choice voucher funding. Those two programs are funded separately. The voucher program our belief as housing authorities our belief is because that is a private sector oriented program it is it is typically funded at or near its full funding request so housing authorities came together and said we think it's important that we look at a new way to approach our public housing renovation and development and that is to utilize the housing towards voucher funding program. There's essentially a revenue currently getting for public housing under that program as we convert units to the housing choice voucher funding program those funds would just switch from one program to the next so essentially as a revenue mutual program why then do you ask aside from the ability to have more stable funding when we look to that it also allows us to be much more flexible and go after various sources of financing that housing authorities currently can't use under the public housing program. Some of the things that were built into the law to do the rad law were built to be protections for residents they're based on the history of some of the other programs that housing authorities have been made available such as hope six built into the law rad number one is that you have a one-for-one replacement of any housing in other words if you go down a unit you have to replace that unit going forward you can't go down the unit and decide not to replace it not only is it a replacement of a unit one-to-one basis but you have to replace the same bedroom sizes so if I tear down a two bedroom unit after replaced with another two bedroom unit I can't replace it with a studio apartment for example you also have a first right of return any existing public housing resident who's in a unit at the time that we convert to rad will be allowed as a first right of return to come back to any units that are built on that existing site there is no re-screening meaning that if you're a public housing resident today and we're converting to rad we do not re-screen you if you're eligible to be under their program it is automatic that you are not screened coming back to or being part of the rad program and lastly one of the key things is that the rents for those that are getting a a income-based rent your income-based rent will still be at 30 percent as it is now it also allows a unique feature called a transfer of assistance that means that we can transfer a subsidy from a unit on property a and convert that to a unit and property b and I'll talk a little bit more about that as we talk about some of the other developments that are going on next slide please so we have definitely gone all in and utilizing the rad program so over the course of the years we're going to do a portfolio wide rad conversion that is all of our public housing communities will convert to the rad program again it allows that stability and funding and it allows us to make sure that our rad program that our public housing will be more stably funded over the course of time so one of the things that we're doing is that we are we have actually already converted shoulder-wide units of public housing the former hopes that well the current hope six bills the main street town houses and Franklin Village those sites that those properties that have public housing in them have already been converted under the rad program which means no no real change for the residents there it means that we simply get the public uh excuse me we get the housing towards voucher funding instead of funding under the old public housing program edumon alms is another site that has been converted under that and also warring and damar court warring road and damar court have also been converted and these were the first sites that we actually did renovation work under we started damar court in january warring road in february of 2018 both of those sites have now completed their construction there are 102 units at damar court 224 units of warring road and those have now been completed their construction under the rad program next slide please the broader strategy that we're pursuing however is the redevelopment of our public housing communities we started in the downtown area those properties with the highest value at the moment and as you know as supporters of this uh that involved five sites that are owned by dha or our um nonprofit affiliate development ventures each and two sites that are owned by the city of Durham that dotted area that you see is our commitment that any housing that we're going to build i talked about our transfer of assistance a little earlier any housing that we're going to transfer any units i should say that we're transferring to another site will remain in downtown we're not going to move them further out than the downtown outline that you see here this allows them to make sure that we're keeping affordable units in the downtown area and they don't have the opportunity to outside of the downtown areas and life that they're used to in being in downtown Durham next slide please the overall downtown development plan um calls for seven different sites five of those that are directly owned by dha two of those owned by the city and one site is actually owned by the county this is the schedule that we produced well over a year ago currently we are on track with this schedule and the one thing i would like to point out though is that this is a 10-year plan and the primary reason that this is a 10-year plan is because that column there that says nine percent that represents a nine percent tax credit uh projects that we intend to go after because Durham is only allowed one in a given year it means that 10 different nine percent tax credit deals means that there's at least 10 years in which we're going to be looking to build those those particular phases out if that changes which we hope that it does and we're continue to push the state to make a change we could see that timeline timeline change to be less than 10 years what you see outlined in red are the sites that are are being utilized under that was passed in november um next slide please this is uh the renderings that we have for all the sites at minimum and they're built out this is what those would look like we fully expect however those those designs to change for the better that is maybe more units or more amenities or more more uh commercial retail would have you what we have in our our ddmp is what we determine to be the minimum that we expect any of the work that we do and any developers that we bring in we expect them to meet at least the minimum of what we have in the ddmp plan but our hope is to see more next slide please the first uh of our ddmp plan is the jj henderson towers that building is currently 178 units it is um occupied by primarily seniors we are going to do a top the bottom renovation of that site it is expected to close by the end of 2020 and um the other site where you see jj henderson new construction is a new construction building that will be put on that same physical site next slide please this is an early rendering of what that property would look like that's 80 additional units that will be added to that site as you can see 71 bedrooms 10 to better units we have already applied for tax credits on that we did not receive the nine percent tax credits on this site but with additional support from the city we converted that from a nine percent tax credit development to now a four percent tax credit development and we are still on schedule to begin construction on that on that particular development by the end of 2020 next slide please next on our plans are the oldham and liberty site total of 14 acres it has at least three phases probably four we've applied to two nine percent tax credit deals on that on that development we as i mentioned earlier only only going to get one of those what we don't know if it's going to be the senior site or the family site either one will be happy with and we'll keep this on track with our schedule if all goes well with that application process we should be able to start construction on that in july of 2021 completing that by december of 2022 next slide please the two two applications that we put in is for 172 unit building at a cost of about 16 million dollars and two an 80 unit building to cost about 17 million dollars next slide this is a site plan of the oldham and liberty development the phase one in two that you see highlighted on on the left of your screen is representing um elizabeth's commerce street being the first one currently listed as building d and then elizabeth's street is building actually d and c so hopefully we'll get one or the two of those will get funded this year it will be able to stay on track with our development goals this is indeed a preliminary site plan so what you see today is going to change very likely but this is the early planning for that and over time as we begin to take on phases you'll see the site plan in the ultimately to plan itself for those different phases to change and take shape next slide one other development that we have is doing a renovation is laurel oaks that is a 30 unit building that is being renovated as we speak that work started last month the renovation cost is 1.6 million dollars that includes funding from the city of about 800 000 in dha is contributing as well as funds for about 800 000 this work we expect to be completed by september or this year next please i also want wanted to talk a little bit about roll up relocation because with all of this work that we're talking about with the exception of jj hinderson which we're going to renovate with residents in place similar to what we did with more in damar with more we wrote in damar court we essentially allow those units to become half full through attrition and we had to relocate a few families but we were able to do the renovation of both of those sites with residents in place essentially we did half the work completed it then we moved people into those completed units and we completed the other half of the work the jj hinderson towers will take a similar approach so they'll probably do one or two floors at a time and once those units are completely renovated residents will then move into the newly renovated units and they move to the next series of floors with our other sites with odum towers with four-fill heights those sites will see us having to go through an extensive relocation effort because we're going to be tearing down those buildings and building new developments there we will engage a consultant to work with us to help place residents in other dha properties and in some instances if necessary we can offer them vouchers or temporary relocation once the work is complete those residents will have an opportunity to move to any completed units that we have or if they choose they can stay in units that are currently in or will be in so with that i believe that's my last slide and i will open it up for questions oh got a couple of things just talking about going forward um poober road and corn wallets are already we are also going to engage in a portfolio wide-run plan we want to make sure that we are getting all right units up to speed where they should be many of you may know that in december i hired a new director of housing operations uh mr manuel foster out of out of your house and he had a trial by fire just on being able to do a a plan for going through each of our properties basically unit by unit coming up with a repair plan and making sure that we can get those properties in as best of shape as possible similarly with me do with harris although we talked about everyone is back at home and with the exception of the electrical work what we're going to be focused on is taking care of the other repairs that were needed in the door to health and safety issues and now we are to develop a plan we originally planned on doing that within 90 days of people moving back COVID-19 has put a severe hamper for us on doing that because we are only doing emergency or urgent repairs currently we're not doing more routine repairs that's going to change as we continue to develop our PPE guidelines for how we can do ongoing repairs so that's the work that we're dealing with right now once that's complete we get those protocol work on the dual as well as the rest of our portfolio to get our units into top shape and that includes as you see here this portfolio wide effort Oxford Manor Cornwallets got inside the club boulevard and I should mention it's not just about repairs that we're talking about we're looking at a long-range planning in terms of how do we begin to do the redevelopment efforts for those of you so I believe that is in fact my last slide so I'll open up the questions thank you very much mr scott we appreciate a very comprehensive report and grateful to you for all that you're doing let me first ask if my colleagues have questions or comments for mr scott you want to start mayor pro tem thank you mr mayor and thank you mr scott for being here this report is really helpful and it's been good in the dha meetings also to see all the progress says progress that's been happening on doing the rad conversions um I just had a couple questions or thoughts on the Oldham Liberty preliminary site plan I noticed that y'all and I know this is early in the process but that y'all had planned on separating the market rate units from the affordable units and the senior units in different buildings can you talk a little bit about that choice well actually we are at the wide range of incomes in both sides so they go from 30 percent below all the way up to 80 percent so it's 30 percent cohort there's a up to 60 percent cohort and up to 80 percent cohort so that's what will be in both the the Elizabeth street site as well as the commerce street site and then the market rate but the market rate buildings are all market rate no we that was the initial plan that came from our development but we sat down with them and said that going forward we want to see the market rate mixed in all of our developments going forward that was the original plan that we had going forward we're going to continue to carry that through but these first two phases are 80 mixed and below but the remaining when we talk about market rate will be market rate as well as others great thank you yeah i think that that's um that's the way i would want to go so i appreciate that chain could you talk a little bit about where y'all are at with handling your eviction rate and what your plans are for when you're allowed to resume evictions when that moratorium expires the moratorium that was issued by hud expires in july i believe it's July 24th and what that moratorium does is it doesn't allow housing as well i should be more specific it talks about that housing authorities are expected to collect rent even though there's been this moratorium on evictions and this goes back to the policy that we had going back last summer or something before last what we said that we are working with all of our residents if you are having problems paying your rent then we will work on rent do rent agreement with you so we make sure we do not have to file we have continued to encourage our residents to set up those agreements with the housing authority so that we don't need to go through the process of filing for eviction if you're unable to pay if the resident has refused to engage with us and you know we have to go forward and do the eviction process what we've seen and i did not get the latest statistics i i meant to do that and forgot but i know that um around january or december i think we had about 120 or so families that had gone into a payment agreements with us not one of them had um gone back on that payment agreement and all of them stayed within good standing as a result of that so we think that that that policy change that we made a couple summers ago is the right way to go it provides the housing authority the means it needs to make sure that these families can stay in their housing as well as the means for the families themselves that comes to us let us know they have any problems paying rent if you are dealing with the issue of criminal intent we will evict you and the moratorium that hud issues excludes any resident that is having criminal issues in which we have the ability to evict obviously that is subject to whatever courts are doing but in terms of the authorization that housing authorities have if there is a criminal intent going on we will still move forward with eviction but for lack of payment we simply will work out something with that resident who is having problems paying their rent that includes relationships with the department social services and we're working on something with alliance as well um and we think that that's the right way to go great thank you so much um so you're not anticipate i mean one of the things i'm worried about in the private market is that when this eviction moratorium is over a lot of people who haven't been able to afford to pay their rent who are still not able to afford to pay their rent are going to be evicted um you're not anticipating having that issue come up in your properties well what we'll do is for any who have not and we're we're reaching out constantly to families to see if you're having problems paying your rent particularly because of covid related issues then we want to do an agreement with you even when the moratorium ends we're not changing our policy on coming before us and i'm working out an agreement with us so that we can avoid going through with an eviction process great thank you um i've this is what we want so i'm glad that you're doing it um well you know i think that all of the policy changes that went into effect as as a result of the pandemic um are going to expire before the economic impact of the pandemic is it's you know it's far from over i think we've even felt um the majority of it so um it's yeah i'm glad that folks that live in dhc properties are going to continue to have that a variety of options and um yeah we're we're going to just have to work through it as as it comes but um thank you for being proactive and for your presentation thank you thank you madam mayor pro-chan um uh council member caballero thank you uh hi anthony's good to see you thanks for joining us today uh it was a great presentation provided a lot of really great information um just to i had a follow-up question um so july the moratorium ends by HUD policy but do you as an individual um housing authority could you extend that on your own that moratorium or is that um something that you're barred from doing it is it is well that's a good question i'm not sure if we're barred from doing it but again the policy we feel that the policy we have in place does not make a moratorium necessary because effectively what we're saying is if you're having problems paying your rent we'll work out and something with you so that you can in fact avoid eviction proceedings altogether which is really the goal um we do have an obligation to collect rent that is something that we're monitored on by HUD on a monthly basis and so part of the the thing that we need people to understand is that we have separate reporting that goes on with uh they look at evictions they look at vacancies they look at work orders they look at all those things and they are already asking us about what's happening with your rental collection and so we explai