ing the coverage area uh a small footprint compared to the entire city but where the gun violence would be primarily located so those offices on those beats with some degree of heightened activity but we usually see a suppression in gun violence activity after a pilot period or during the pilot period because now the shooters understand they're going to be seen a squad car whenever they shoot their gun and that's the goal the goal is suppression uh and intervention when necessary but when the community sees the engagement with the police and the where it gets out we predict you'll see less gunfire endure and that's the goal and we can do that i hope with less incarceration i'm going to take a break for a minute mr mayor um and let some of the folks get in okay thank you other questions colleagues or mr teachman or for the chief at this point okay i'll ask a couple mr teachman just to follow up on what council member reese was asking if they're i'm not following you in terms of the the uh the response to calls if there are four times as many shots that are identified but come to the system are you saying that this is not requiring more police to respond to them well mathematically you you'd see more calls for service uh but it will allow the chief to allocate the resources in the area where they're most needed so i'm not suggesting we need to expand the police force i think the chief can be very uh selective about how she allocates them and show how the data to drive those decisions do you have some sense that that's not happening now well i'm sure she's doing the best allocation she has with the data she has available but our experience across our client base is that chiefs now with shot spotter see they have a much better picture of what's really happening and if i could add to that um you know based on our deployment right now um our deployment it um really depends on the calls for service that we currently get as it relates to aggravated assaults robberies and you know just um a full gamut of various types of crimes that are committed with guns however there is we know that there are incidents that occur that we don't get calls about because the call doesn't come until the person is at duke or um a neighbor or somebody else is calling about a person who's injured so um and we don't get the call about the shots that were actually fired when it occurs so um our deployment has not been based on you know that information you know after the fact it's really based on the calls for service that our officers respond to like aggravated assaults to robberies and homicides and so forth and they typically um are in certain you know geographical areas but you know in the last several months we even though we've seen um uh an increase of shots fired they've been sort of all over the place but we believe that some of the individuals that are committing and repeat repeatedly commit some of these offenses are sort of um you know attached to certain geographical areas that um are associated with you know some of some of our gangs and i'm just going to be quite honest with some of the gangs where individuals that are involved in that activity um confess that they are part of this particular gang or this particular group uh of in the city i think the additional data that that we would get from shot spotter would help us to be more proactive and what i would have hoped would be a deterrent to individuals wanting to um fire weapons or be involved in that type of criminal activity because they know there's more of a rapid response or that somebody is going to respond to to to that type of call and it's not always that a resident picks up the telephone some of our residents have gotten used to hearing gunfire and they don't call it all thank you chief mr. mayor if i might calzmer freeman i appreciate the clarity i just wanted to touch on the point that the chief made around callers who don't call it i don't call anymore and i was interested in the shot spotters ability to decide between firecrackers versus gunshots and i'm not sure you talked about that at all but if you could explain a little more around that uh capability and how that operates that would be helpful sure can you understand that mr. tageman yes i heard it thank you uh i'll be brief in my remarks so we've been doing this for 24 years we've listened to millions and millions of bangs and booms uh last year alone hearing a lot of noises across 100 cities we qualified that is we determine those noises were gunfire and not something else but 141 000 alerts and we did that with a 97 accuracy rate a false positive rate of 0.5 percent and we published those alerts on average in just 34 seconds we guarantee to the chief we'll get it in 60 seconds from trigger pull to notification but our average is 34 so how do we do that a number of ways and i went through it quickly but first of all when we put up a sensor array it's it's really mathematics the gunshot takes time to reach the various sensors that time differential we can mathematically determine because we know we put the sensors on rooftops utility poles we know where they're located we have those gps coordinates and as each of those sensors announces that it heard a noise the computer then calculates this is where the person's standing that's location side as far as determining it from fireworks the human ear can with skilled acoustic technicians you can actually hear the difference as a on the back end of fireworks the computer can analyze it and the acoustic signature is unique to fireworks versus gunfire and probably most telling among the several steps is that when you shoot a gun that energy is directional when you set up a firework it's omnidirectional so the sensors participate in a more directional or linear fashion when it determines gunfire and those are just some of the tests but again it's two factors there's a machine classifier that reviews the event suggests gunfire and then a human because we want to be accurate then listens to the event reviews the event looks at all those variables and then pushes a button to send the information to the Durham police department did i answer your question yep thank you thank you any more uh council member Freelon so uh you're saying that uh between the you know the shape of the waveform and the redundant you know human screening that an a 97 percent level of accuracy has been achieved how do you determine like you know if you yeah how would how do you determine i'm just curious how you determine that so let's say yeah is it shell casings like what's the evidence that helps you confirm that so the number of levels of ground truth it's victim testimony it's witness testimony it's the ground truth it's uh uh the spent shell casings of physical evidence all that establishes that what we dispatched them to was accurate but we also consider are we missing anything not just misclassifying what's fireworks and gunfire but do we miss anything did an event occur where the police chief says hey there was a shooting here someone was shot or there was property damage you didn't notify us we're not perfect sometimes we miss things sometimes the energy of the gun doesn't reach the sensors we need three sensors on a multiple gunshot case for in a single gunshot case and if the energy is such that it's suppressed like shooting into a vehicle or point blank we meant we missed missed those so our contractual guarantee is 90 percent of external and suppressed gunfire of a 25 caliber within a 25 meter radius and the speed is that we're going to get it up to the police in 60 seconds okay um i i have another question um so uh we've been getting some emails from some citizens who are concerned about this and they reference uh well a couple things one that the the kind of free trial has hidden costs to the city uh and also something that i've seen come up several times is uh is charlotte as uh you know a sister close by north carolina city of ours that that tried this and found that it it didn't have a substantial impact um on the crime rate there um were you involved at all with with uh implementing the trial period in charlotte and could you speak to from your perspective why uh the police department there didn't decide to continue with the shock spotter well let me say this and i hope my bosses don't spank me because no we're a we're a public health company and i i can't speak much on speculation but i can tell you that my travel arrangements that'll be in charlotte on the 22nd of this month that we are in communication with the current chief and i'm not disparaging the previous one but what i know and i was actually still a chief when charlotte deployed years ago but what i know about that situation quite frankly and objectively was that implementation was tied to the democratic national convention okay it may not have been deployed where it was most effective to resolve the gun crime in that city but it was meant to uh it was part of the coordinated effort to make for a safe area where the convention was being held secondly i think shots but it takes some ownership we didn't onboard that client effectively we've learned and i've been a shots for a client back in 2010 i can tell you how much they've evolved in 10 years about properly onboarding what i mean by that is unlike with any technology you need to teach it you need to make sure everybody understands how to use it that's why i frankly have apple products because i have an apple store i can go to and they can train me on the utility i get more value out of the devices because i have that level of training we're committed to onboarding during police department properly as we will do if we get back into charlotte training the officers from patrolmen up through chief with different modules for different assignments training the dispatches and call takers and even training the prosecuting attorneys both local and us attorneys on how our solution works and we provide expert testimony down road if that's needed in court we didn't have those facilities when we deployed in charlotte years ago we've learned to improve our service did i answer your question yet yeah thank you councilmember caballero yeah what's the cost for the subscription after the six month period so it'll be seventy thousand dollars per square mile per year and the overall cost would obviously depend on the size of the footprint whether the chief shrinks it or expands it depending on how we view the success of the pilot and i'll let the chief comment further on any future plans right now our um we we spoke extensively about what that geographical area would be we had some options to cover two areas um two separate areas where we we see the most gunfire but what we elected to do and shot spotter work with us was to come up with a geofenced area that caught you know um the gunfire in that one south part south side of the sea and then a portion of the east side of derm as well so it's um a combination of our district four and our district one communities that's what we see most of our gunfire chief what what what would be the the cost then per square mile after that if it's seventy thousand so what's the total or have you all run those numbers yet actually we haven't done an analysis of expanding um that that fence stand area as of yet i don't know that the city will see um such an uptick around the city that that we would move or expand or even enlarge that area some of our communities that have repeatedly been you know um communities that experience the most gunfire are the ones that we are most concerned about and i will also add that um you know the uptick in the increase in gunfire just this year since the pandemic has been you know a major concern and that that gunfire is still in those same areas mr manager uh thank you mr mayor i just was going to add i i've not talked to chief uh teachman but uh and the previously as we've talked to phil daly with this company i thought the uh information we received was there was a three square mile minimum for the uh deployment i don't know if that's still the case or or what the experience is but i believe in an earlier presentation that was represented as the the minimum deployment for uh for effectiveness so i don't know if anybody could speak to that i think i think that's correct and that's what what um i requested tom um and they work with me in order to ensure that that that three square mile area was absolutely the area that we were mostly concerned about is there a minimum is there a minimum uh area uh square foot or a square mile area chief teachman yeah we're in cities of Durham size we still hold to a three square mile minimum thank you and and also uh with that it's contiguous uh which is what she was alluding to is we look at the map a heat map of most amount of the gun violence and try to bring all that in our costs of base upon redundancy of the sensors and that's why we try to establish uh contiguous footprints thank you uh so council member of the race chief have you taken a look at what the what the cost to the to the department will be if we went ahead and started this six month trial like what what are the additional add-on costs that the city will have to bear in order to implement this free trial yes so as you know we submitted a you know a proposal a couple of years ago about shot spotter and we had done some work ahead of time then and that proposal was really based on adding permanent positions so that we could ensure that we had you know the correct response you know to um the shot spotter technology anytime there was gunfire that we had dedicated individuals will actually go out because that's the effectiveness of the of the um technology that you respond get the evidence correlate the evidence and so on so um as it relates to the cost for the pilot because we haven't added any additional personnel to our staff what we plan to do is utilize some of the reallocation that we've done internally anyway with our staff as it relates to the details that officers are working right now responding to the increase of gunfire that exists now so uh what what what we what we have in play now is investigators who typically work um you know various investigative units they are dedicating a week of patrol time so that we can have more officers working and patrolling in these areas where we've seen an uptick of crime so we have basically just done some reallocating of staff internally and that's where we plan to pull the resources that we need have other individuals that are sworn employees in the department to actually work in that capacity outside of their normal work to dedicate time in order to help suppress some of the gunfire that we see which we're doing right now and um we plan to keep this detail going you know until we see and we've seen a little bit of of a reduction in gunfire but this is the mode of operation that we have to be in right now until we until we see you know less gunfire so if this program is rolled out that's how we will end up staffing it through other individuals in the department to actually supplement not just calls for service but to supplement responding to various gunfire calls or aggravated assaults anything dealing with a gun i hope that i hope that answered your question it did so there's no there's no additional equipment cost to the city or anything like that with this system it won't be an additional equipment cost we will continue to utilize our supplemental which is outside of our normal staffing which is supplemental is you know a overtime cost but that's how we're operating right now in order to make sure that we are meeting our staffing levels i guess if i'm having a kind of a fundamental difficulty understanding how this isn't gonna dramatically increase response times in other parts of the city can you help me understand like walk me through why that's not going to happen so we've decided that in order for this to work that officers that are responding to calls for service just regular calls for services to our community we will continue to have those officers respond to service so it doesn't interfere with regular you know residents needs the the shot spotter detail or or operation will be part of the detail that i'm talking about that's above our regular staffing which we have working right now we have a detail that's working right now where we have investigators who are working not to respond to calls for service but to specifically deal with you know gun calls and various types of aggravated assaults anything dealing with violent crime so um we don't uh we are not going to interrupt what our normal staffing levels are that's that's one thing that we continuously try to do is make sure that our staffing levels are at that 75 percent whether we have to staff it with supplemental or or you know have our regular staff at work does that help a little bit i'm not saying it's not going to cost us in the overtime because it's costing us an overtime now it's just that we're going to redirect those officers that are working those violent crimes to respond to shot spotter as a priority because we really want to see whether or not this technology is going to help us as it relates to our visibility in the right place at the right time our community engagement with individuals who are experiencing gunfire on a regular basis without anybody showing up and um and yes it took some internal discussions of how we could make it work without getting you know um those additional permanent positions for six months what so what are those officers doing right now that that are going to be shifted over to responding to shot spotter calls they're responding to violent crime so there there'll be a sort of a mix they're already responding to shots fired they're already responding to you know um aggravated assaults robberies but this is just so that and it sort of makes sense for us to use those folks because those are the individuals that are are um investigating the more serious crimes anyway this gives them additional evidence that might be associated with the individual who was uh participating in a robbery or some kind of aggravated assault so that we can collect the evidence at at at one crime scene and correlate it with evidence at another crime scene evidence that we would not have had if it weren't for maybe a shot spotter alert okay thank you mr mayor thank you councilmember any other questions or comments uh sorry did you call on me council i'm free line okay thank you mr mayor um so i just wanted to circle back uh uh to the money um so it's 70 000 per month was that what you said per square mile per month so it'd be a minimum of 210 uh yeah math per year per year per year per year per year wasn't my strong city the council president if if i was put in math maybe in the finance department that's why you're in law enforcement right okay okay got it so 200 a minimum of 210 000 per year okay that's going to be transparent uh there'd be an additional cost for the connect program that my colleague wendy was talking about and the last thing that would be on the lr cart if you will and it's free during the pilot is an api that is allowing the chief to integrate shot spotter alerts with the cad and rms system in-house with perhaps a city-owned video management system to pan tilt zoom those cameras and so forth um if there's a future for UAVs or drones that's something else you can consider but because we'll produce a latin long uh we can integrate through the api with any of those other technologies thank you that's 9500 a year for three licenses any further questions or comments any further questions or comments council member carbillero and then council member milton so post six-month pilot um we'll try to enter on the costs uh i was being turned i have a lot of reservations especially right now i appreciate the six-month pilot potential but um we're not in a great while we just heard we're in a better financial situation than maybe we thought we're still not in in any way out of the woods um so just trying to think through so the minute it's the two hundred and ten thousand dollars a year plus the whatever you said for the extension program plus eventually there would be a need for increased officers because you're relying on a staffing model now that you had implemented but that isn't sustainable in the long term yeah yes what is the time what is the timeline to do that analysis i'm assuming that would at least get done some what some at some point during the six-month pilot so that you had a plan post and and just wondering what what you're thinking chief around that so that six-month period we would absolutely conduct an analysis because we want to know whether or not this is a good fit for Durham and whether or not the technology has improved um as it relates to the numbers of calls that we have to respond to in various communities and i have no doubt in my mind that the data is going to be able to show us either or and but if this becomes a permanent program of course at that time we would be talking about how do you sustain a program that would require an additional one officer per squad which is like four officers and we talked about that before but of course that would be down the road if that were to happen because we wouldn't be able to sustain um this program just you know working our officers over time you know we i mean for six months we can do right now we're we're working officers over time to help suppress some of the gun violence and be in places they that they need to be and respond quickly to gun violence but uh we wouldn't be able to sustain a program like this permanently for for uh more than a six-month period thank you i appreciate that all right councilor middleton thank you mr. mayor thank you colleague so much for for your questions and for allowing this conversation to go forward um so colleagues i speak not just as a member of this body but again as one of your constituents uh to you my elected leaders of the city um when and for those that are watching this broadcast who may not be kind of policy wonks or public officials when you hear us talking about the possibility of needing to hire more people or more officers or what's it going to cost to implement this in terms of response what we're really saying is we know there's a problem when we talk like that it means that we expect that what we suspect is actually real and that is that we have a gunfire problem in this city that uh a lot of folk have just resigned themselves not to do anything about now if that's not true if the 80 percent is incorrect then we'll find that out then we won't have to hire more people because it's just a fantasy it's just you know we were wrong but if we're right then we now have the moral obligation if we know that we might have to get more people to respond to this problem that means we know the problem is real and we we don't have the the the luxury to pretend anymore stick our head in the sand like an ostrich when we know folk are out there suffering it's kind of like well if we don't document the problem we don't have to respond to it but we know the problem is real and what does it say about us as a city if we know that there are fellow residents and citizens living in a condition where they have resigned themselves that this is just what life is like in modulate and not doing anything about it so the blinders are off so for those watching let it be known that we know that what you say about what those the black mothers i talk to every week uh and the young children who come to my church every week and say past i heard gunfire last night they'd be shooting like that uh all the time tonight when the sun goes down folk will hear gunfire in Durham i grew up in a neighborhood like that i grew up in the crack capital of america and i'd hear uzi's going off in the park when i went to sleep and we didn't call the police because that's just what it was and i remember one of the most searing memories i had going to ps 58 uh going through coffee park uh one morning in red hook uh was seeing you could see the blood through the sheet of a body of somebody who bled out now i heard gunfire the night before was it the shot that killed this person i don't know but a person bled out because somebody actually did get shot but because we live in the neighborhood where that happens all the time we just stopped calling the police um it's interesting when when i first asked us years ago to consider this it wasn't even about violent crime it was a quality of life issue i never causally i never suggested that this would causally be linked to uh uh uh reductions in crime or that there's a causal link between a particular person getting shot and shot spotter i was just trying to to express that folk had kids that had ptsd who hadn't been to iraq or afghanistan they just went home after school and they were being trained to jump off of bikes being trained to these are children being trained to jump into bathtubs when you hear a loud pop uh like they were soldiers so the issue for me was a quality of life issue about what our children were dealing with night after night that that many of us participating in this conversation we don't live in those kind of neighborhoods um so the the phenomena is real uh it's been real uh and it will be real tonight when the sun goes down when we log off of the zoom call and go home um so i want to i want to submit um uh to my colleagues i think this is the question that i think uh one of the questions that needs to guide our deliberations and what we decide to do and here's the first question how is knowing precisely where gunfire is coming from in our streets a threat to our democracy why is it a bad idea to be able to pinpoint where the least private act i can think of there's nothing private about discharging a firearm in our public streets this isn't a privacy matter why is knowing where that happens a bad idea and how does that make us less safe or less able to secure and defend our values by knowing that um i've read and i want to thank those that have sent emails to uh inboxes and to allies and friends the activist community some who have pressed me rather directly about my record and about why i've called for this and and and you know why you know some other things haven't been called for so i want to be very clear uh to those that have sent email i hear you and one of the issues that have been has been raised is this extension of government surveillance and um you know i started thinking about that and i realized that as of today i'm the government we're the government um it it's up to us that are in office to make sure that these things aren't abused i know we're the government because the government argument did not work to exempt us from our responsibility when it came to mcdougal terrace um when when nobody was having it hearing the explanation that this was a federal government issue this is about federal money folks said no you guys are the government uh you're who we elected locally fixed the problem so we didn't get to kind of create this straw boogie government entity this kind of amorphous kind of no we're the government um we didn't get to put it on the federal government from mcdougal terrace we didn't get to put it on the federal government when when we said our police and the sheriff wouldn't cooperate with ICE detainers you know we didn't get to say oh it's the government uh our people said no our police aren't going to cooperate and rightly so so in this issue as it is with with ICE detainers and mcdougal terrace um the government is us they elected us and if we can't do the work to make sure that this system is not uh uh um abused that's that's what we're here for and not just the system anything the guns that we put on our police officer's sides the cars that they drive of the data that we collect from people when they pay their water bill or use parking meters all of that stuff the people depend upon us to make sure because we're the government isn't abused many of us when we left our houses this morning if if we left our house turned on a monitoring system some of us have cameras in our houses some of us when we go to sleep at night have other eyes watching us so if a fire happens it's going to wake us up uh they monitor our homes and we depend upon those companies that we've contracted with to do the work to make sure some pervert isn't watching us while we're sleeping or listening to our conversations in our house but we still use those services to safeguard our homes and our families and our possessions um confident that those companies that we pay will do the work well we're the people who the the taxpayers expect to do the work to make sure that we can safeguard our communities and protect against abuses i think it's it's incumbent upon us to do both of them um and and and and listen we we're the government so so government surveillance if it's if surveillance is going on it's us doing it do we trust ourselves uh to firewall and to protect the privacy of our people colleagues and friends this is this is i believe um well let me just be be be clear i don't know what's going to happen with this experiment but you don't either because we don't have any and i i want to allude to councillor reese we don't have any Durham specific data because there is no data without an experiment and that's the point of experiments to get the data and as as as vociferously as i have called for this experiment for this city for our children i will i give you my word i will be the first one to call for taking it down and scrapping it let's try something else if it doesn't work if it doesn't uh yield positive results and if we see any type of abuse count me to be one of the first ones there to call it out because that's what we're supposed to do as a government but that carries for anything we do as a government not just shots or anything we see being abused we should speak up on so i i i you know this six month period uh is an opportunity for us to see if we can make a difference for free and the fact that it's for free now it great the question that we have to ask ourselves is whether we agree with this or not we have philosophical differences because we have the opportunity to see if we can help our children for free the question must be what harm will it do will we do more harm than good now if we if we use it and if we can't answer that question in the affirmative yes we'll do more harm because i think it raises a whole other set of considerations why would we not try this if it's seventy thousand dollars a year if we decide to keep it two hundred and some thousand dollars a year that's about the the the same amount as what we pay the top executive in our city actually less for the salary of one executive we can engage uh uh uh in in practices that will help us better direct our resources and to my friends who sent me uh emails uh suggesting that that i have uh pushed back on um resources for root causes allow me to reintroduce myself because this this is part of a comprehensive multifaceted approach that i have uh and many in the city have called for for years shot spotter is not a panacea i know that but but let's do the work also on a ubi let's do the work on on expanding violence interruption and and i would just respectfully put to those that have sent emails and and and colleagues in the activist community the next it's very easy to say what we're not going to do but the next time somebody talks about we need to address root causes i want i want all of us in the city to ask an activist this question how much money did you get in the last budget where is our massive investment uh in root causes we can stop things celebrated as a victory and still be broke for as long as i've been talking about shot spotter we've also been talking about investment in root causes and community-based organizations and community-based initiatives how many of you community-based initiatives watching me and listening to me right now got money in this last budget where's the money in my community that's called the oaky doke that that's that's the hoodwink that's that's being bamboozled and we have to stop celebrating what we can stop and start celebrating working on what we can fund i am asking you on behalf of the thousands of conversations i've had with with with with members of this community black and brown people that some of the most uh um challenging stories and compelling stories i heard were from latino brothers and sisters i work with in durham can who are afraid to call the police even when they need to and what does a human being do when you hear gunfire what should a person do when you hear gunfire call the police that's what shot spotter does it calls the police and if every person in this city did what we tell them they should do that all the concerns we have about a spike in workflow and and and having to deploy police all of those things would exist organically without shot spotter because if everybody called the police every time we told them they should call the police if everyone of my brothers and sisters uh uh in these communities started doing what we say to do then you're right we would have a spike but we that would happen without shot spotter but we don't have that spike because so many of our people have resolved themselves to the proposition that this is just what life is like and i reject that it is unconscionable it is a moral that we would allow folk to to to believe that this is just what life is like in my neighborhood that that's an editorial on our city i implore us colleagues to take advantage of the listen we've got the best city attorney's office in the country i know that they will make they will read the contract top the bottom and they will make sure if anybody can find any small print that's going to obligate us unwittingly it's our city attorney's office they said no cost no obligation i i implore us to see if it would work if you if you have questions about the data let's get the data for free if you have questions about the efficacy then let's see about the efficacy for free for six months and i give you my word that if it doesn't work i will say hey that didn't work well then let's get on let's get on let's in the meantime let's still work on basic income let's work on violence interruption let's work on fast-tracking shared economic prosperity plan that helped me get thousand black men together so we can do some other things it's not just this piece let's throw everything at this emergency this scourge that is robbing us and robbing our city of our next mayor and next council people and next engineers and next police chief i'll say this one of the one of the heartbreaks of what we have learned about our national leadership in the last 24 to 48 hours uh the heart one of the the most heartbreaking aspect is when we asked a question what could we have done with that wasted time how many lives could we have saved if leadership had acted and i will put this to you respectfully friends if we don't do this and some future generation of leaders decide to try this and there are positive results if they try it and it turns out to be a good thing then may god have mercy on our legacy as leaders because history will not and the people will not i encourage us in conjunction with a whole bunch of other stuff to try this to see if we can give childhood back to thousands of our children in this city i yield mr mayor thank you councilmember any more comments sorry comments now comments or questions okay yeah i don't have questions i just have general comments um so again thank you for being here and for sharing um this information with us this is the second presentation that we've received and at least our third or fourth conversation about chat spotter so it's definitely been something that we've been thinking about a lot on city council i feel like i've made my thoughts clear in previous conversations so i'll just reiterate a couple of things um here today the data from the chat spotter company and the data from independent research that you can find online is very different with regard to the efficacy and effectiveness of this technology additionally it's clear that this technology primarily functions by moving more police officers into neighborhoods that the that it's a it is a technology that is designed to create a police response to most of the time what is going to be a gunshot but not all of the time um i don't call the police when i hear gunfire generally because i don't know that the police are going to help the situation if it's close enough to where i live so for example a few months ago there was a shooting across the street from my house um my neighbors and i came outside we made sure that no one was hurt um and we had a conversation with the people who lived in that house about what had just happened and another neighbor who had not been a part of the conversation that we were having decided to call the police what the people who lived in the house wanted to do was leave and so they left and that was their safety plan was to get away from the person who had come to their house with the gun and threaten them by the time the police got there there wasn't really anything to do the so the situation the immediate threat had been had been resolved by the people who were in the situation with the support of the neighborhood i'm not interested in putting into place any technology that's going to increase the amount of policing that we're doing in Durham we have for the last 25 years used police as our primary method of of ensuring public safety and it is past time to try new things and that is why we are creating a community safety and wellness task force that's why we're talking about participating more in the county's violence interruption program that's why we're talking about crisis response teams that would be unarmed traffic response teams that would be unarmed it is my vision and the vision of this broad national movement supported by thousands of people right here in the city to move us away from this kind of response to gun violence and towards a response that is community-based that focuses on health and wellness and opportunities to resources for people in communities and i want to invest our limited resources in programs that do that i don't want to invest them in five times as many police officers responding to calls for gunshots i don't think that that's an effective i don't think that's an effective response if our calls for service action like if 80% of gunshots aren't being reported and actually start being reported there's no way that's not going to take a huge amount of police resources to respond to all of those calls with very little result at the other end besides more police officers in our neighborhoods and that's not something i'm excited about moving forward with again i feel like i've said all this before but i'm happy to say it as many times as we have to have as we are going to have this conversation um i don't think the technology is very effective and i don't think that the intended consequence of the technology is the direction is moving us in the direction that i want to move in as regards building a safer community in Durham thank you mr mayor thank you mayor pro tem is there anyone else who'd like to be heard councilmember freeland hey thank you mr mayor um yeah i i um i really hear you mayor pro tem johnson um you know when uh chief teachman was talking about the ways in which this technology could scale it really like made me shiver thinking about you know right now we're capturing sound as brother middleton mentioned you know we could choose to use the cameras or not um you mentioned drones just got me thinking about an or willian kind of uh environment of um constant surveillance and not a direction i feel comfortable going in uh and the the conversation particularly around uh for me beginning as we wish to proceed thinking about root causes like transformative justice centers therapists trauma informed care mental health folks youth programs i think that those types of investments really create the type of safe communities that that i want Durham to to embrace as a as a new direction if we're going to talk about a new direction um and you know uh it was mentioned i forget who mentioned something about uh you know ptsd um i mean interestingly enough we're going into closed session after this call uh to review some kids who may very well be experiencing some ptsd uh from an interaction with police that uh you know who knows like we'll we'll see how that pans out but it's um it kind of strikes me as a as an ominous uh irony that uh we would be discussing this thing that could potentially quadruple police presence in communities of color on the same day that that will be viewing this uh body cam footage granted we don't know what's going to be on there um and the last thing i want to say about the Durham Beyond Policing Coalition just a personal story i remember uh i remember specifically it was last summer that that community members from throughout Durham many who are local natives and hail from the communities that are most impacted by this violence converged at north star church of the arts which um you know i remember it being last summer because my dad was uh was sick with al s he passed away in july and it was in june when the coalition gathered you know all of us are non-spirit house harm-free zone you know several organisms dozens of organizations came together and it was so exciting to to tell my dad you know which north star was something that that he helped found that we're changing Durham we're doing something different we're we're plucking from what other cities have done to to create a new paradigm for the city that i was born and raised in and it was such an amazing visionary experience to be in the space i remember seeing jillie and charlie and a few others there and what what they proposed was perfect was prophetic it was it was before george floyd and before uh the national uprising that we've seen happening uh across this country before the movement for black lives were making national calls for radical transformation or sorry not before that's been happening since forever excuse me let me clarify but i think it's taken a radical shift this year after george floyd um for those calls to be amplified so let me clarify that um but you know they were making these calls in 2019 and it's not because they were profits it was because that they're not clairvoyant it was actually looking back to the past there's this west african concept san kofo you need to look back in order to move forward and and looking back we can see that increased police presence has often been uh the call and the solution to this issue and as mayor pro tem pointed out um you know the solutions have had dire circumstances especially for the black youth that um council member uh middleton referenced in terms of getting mired in the prison industrial complex and in experiencing their own ptsd uh moments through uh kind of violent interactions uh with that that come with increased surveillance and police presence um and so i just want to again acknowledge the the the organizing um paradigm the paradigm shift that those organizers kind of prophesize and have been putting in motion and uh and those are the same people filling up our inboxes um you know that with critiques about with real data about the uh some of the uh ornerous implications of moving forward with something like this program and uh you know it just makes me think uh about um trusting uh the the black queer radical feminist organizers and their vision for the city and their advice those are folks that i feel very accountable to uh in addition to the folks um you know that uh some of whom are also kind of calling for increased police presence i hear both of those calls coming from the black community specifically um uh but but what i haven't seen is is a significant investment on the city's part to dive into alternatives as opposed to going into through the normal channels that were used to um so that's kind of uh i'll close my comments there and and uh and just say thank you for for coming and presenting um but uh yeah i'm feeling very uncomfortable personally thank you thank you councilmember councilmember freeman it's good to see you councilmember freeman you're out of your car thank you i appreciate your flexibility in this situation it's kind of an unplanned situation but i just wanted to thank my colleagues for sharing their points and acknowledging that this this conversation has continued for a while and i really appreciate councilmember freeman spelling out why it's always felt so uncomfortable and acknowledging just how diverse the conversation is around police presence and i i just want to center some of the voices that that i keep continue to hear in district one and district four who are facing the the increased gun violence and in south side and in east germ that that specifically the gang violence task force was put in place to kind of address the the level of gunfire we're seeing in east germ and and in south side i i don't hold this in attention with the the work that folks who are black and queer and and very visionary and where they want to see us go but i do hold attention in the fact that i i have to continuously look at those folks who are who are lining up right now at derm children's initiative to pick up pick up food acknowledging that they're going home to that similar situation that councilmember councilmember middleton outlined and knowing the continuous tears that i've cried and different shooting incidences i acknowledge how emotional i'm tied to this to this issue but i take a step back and acknowledge that that there is a need for an investment and it's not on one side or the other it's on both and if we don't acknowledge that the voices of the people who don't come to our meetings is not here they're not sending us emails they're not organizing they're just frustrated because they can't send their kids outside to play and so for every time that i've heard a mother say that i can only send my kid outside when there is a police officer outside i don't want that for them and if what it takes is a device on a utility pole or a building i'd rather much try that for six months than to say no and so i i appreciate the uncomfort i understand the complete disregard for the prop like for the product but what i can say is i implore all of my colleagues to consider who does not send you those messages who does not make those pleas to you until there is a shooting and who is i mean who is continuously saying i mean just didn't think about the mother then i don't want to call names but the the the visual that i had to had to attend this summer knowing that there were two shootings within hours of one another what a difference could have been made if the shot spotter would have been in place to catch the first shooting incidents and to kind of curb the the response that might have took place a few hours later i mean that was three children and i can't i i can't not do anything and so i am i am open i've been open and so when we talked about the additional officers so that we're not using overtime to cover this or the the community health and safety task force that is actually community at the table or if it's the the different outreach programs that are in place none of that is happening though none of it is moving and here you have a national provider of a product saying we'll offer it to you for six months to at least analyze your data and what i'm hearing is a very consummate that's not what i want to do because of a national context and i just ask that you pay attention to to the voices that aren't always at the table center those voices that say things like my child has to jump in the or knows to jump into the to the tub this is ridiculous we cannot keep doing this i i'm i'm just frustrated because there has to be a solution and whether it's shot spotter outreach teams uh i mean community painting on the streets like whatever it is none of it is happening right now and so i am grateful that councilmember middleton continues to press on all of the fronts i'm grateful that councilmember um freeline is bringing up all of those things and i appreciate may approach him spelling out why or how we can see a future where we should be going we're not there yet and i want to be beholden to those voices that continue to say those things at the derm house and authorities town hall meeting and in the spaces after a shooting i can't i can't ignore their voice and i'll leave it at that but i thank you thank you councilmember any other comments anyone else want to comment troops mayor councilmember reese thank you mr mayor i want to thank uh the folks from shot spotter for coming back to talk to us again about this program uh chief i want to thank you for your perspective on how you might integrate the product into your public safety plan for the city also want to just say how much deep respect and admiration i have for each of my colleagues who spoke today obviously the subject matter we're talking about is incredibly painful and difficult and i think no one is is blaming anybody about trying to find a solution that will help reduce gun violence in the city so i don't fault councilmember middleton or the folks from shot spotter at all for coming before us to make this pitch i think it's a mark of leadership that that they're willing to come back after we voted overwhelmingly last year not to not to go forward with the product i will say that that last year my biggest concern about this product was false positives and that concern was driven by some of the research that i've read but also about the the kind of lived experience of the officers police officers in charlotte i will just be honest with you i did not find the shot spotter representative here today i did not find that explanation helpful at all to be the what the what the police officers in charlotte reported was that one out of every 41 times they responded to a shot spotter alert they were able to substantiate gunfire i'm willing to accept that half of that was bad training bad placement lab timing all the things that the person from shot spotter identified but i i refuse to believe that that those are the only explanations and so i think about as councilmember freelon said i think about the the reality my fear that this technology will send armed police officers into communities that are already reeling right now officers who are responding as if this was a shooting because that's how they'll have to do it and and what that will what impact will that have on those communities with that level of false positives you know i think councilmember freelon pointed to the one of the things we're going to be talking about later i will just tell you that i've spent some time with those families over the last week or so and i will tell you that i can't imagine what how they would react to that kind of arrival of officers under that scenario and i think councilmember freeman reminds us that there is more to the community that we are here to represent and protect than the folks who email us absolutely but the mothers that were shall manner have not emailed us either and so let's remember that there's no monolith out there there are lots of voices if we were if we could make everybody happy by making these decisions these jobs would be a lot easier and they're not let's don't pretend let's please don't pretend with each other or the public that the weight of public opinion is one way or the other because we don't know we hear the voices we hear both those that come to us and those we seek out and that's how we do this job and so i will say that i do appreciate chief davis and her the fact that she had to my mind has done a good amount of work to get us to this point and come up with a plan that she thinks will work my fear is that is that the system will be overwhelmed with false positives which i think was the experience that folks talked about in charlotte and that that will lead to a reduction in the effectiveness of police response in Durham and i know that that is something that weighs heavily on me especially as the fact that those are those are the communities that i think need our help the most and i'm just not sure this is the help they need it's certainly not the help that i've heard them asking for but obviously as i said we'll all listen to different voices so i i'm still let me just end with this i i voted against purchasing this product a year ago and when i was sworn in for my second term of office i said that i was gonna kind of keep an open mind of things that we had previously decided about and i said that when council remember milton mentioned this i think on our july 23rd work session where he talked about the things he wanted to try he wanted to talk about shot spotter again he wanted to talk about violence interrupters he wanted to talk about a crisis response team and i think what i think i said i think most of us said at that time was we kind of went around the table and talked about which of those things we were interested in doing and it's unfortunate this is the thing that comes first um but probably because there is a vendor uh eager to access our market and eager to make themselves available for this um and uh and so i think that's probably why but um i i do wish that one of the other things that that we talked about that afternoon had come first so that we could talk about things that we were all excited about rather than this idea that i think the council had previously said they weren't interested in and now it's come back um i will say that i have approached this with an open mind i've tried to be uh as forthcoming with everyone i've talked to about it as i can uh but that the the experience uh that charlotte had weighs heavily on my mind um and i i don't accept the explanation that that chief teacher and came to us with although he did the best he could he's selling a product god less america that's that's that's what his job is but but i'm i'm not convinced that that that that the explanation is charlotte just got it wrong um my fear is that it's the technology that false positives will overwhelm our system and i don't think that'll make anybody safer um and so that's that's where i'm at right now thank you mr mayor thank you council member all right colleagues uh council member cabillero i'm going to be brief because i'm looking at the time and i know we still have potentially one more item depending on what we decide about that item and then we will be moving in a closed session um i just want to acknowledge it's something that council member risa i went back uh said i went back and listened to partially to the july 23rd work session which is where shot spotter was kind of uh reintroduced as a concept or idea um and and then that same meeting and violence interrupter crisis response to him there are other ideas and i i hear council member freeman's frustration i'm frustrated as well that we have not gotten further than we all want on this issue i am more interested in those options because it moves us in the direction that we are hearing that there's a groundswell interim and across the nation we spend 75 70 million on police every year and i don't think that this solution is going to help us and my fear is that we are actually just going to expand our police force which then means we have less money to put into other options um i appreciate the shot spotter presentation today i appreciate chief davis's um time today we've kept you a long time again chief we've done that several times this last few weeks so i very much appreciate it uh but i and i'm eagerly looking forward to the conversation around violence interrupter programs um and some of the other things that we as a council have all had consensus on there has been you know seven i think at the time six votes six voices i should say saying we really want to know more about these things and so those are the solutions that i'm most interested in hearing about uh and i will not say anything further because i'm looking at our time thank you thank you thank you councilmember anyone else want to comment councilmember milton thank you miss mary and i think my colleagues for their indulgence in this discussion i want to piggyback on and use as an on-ramp uh and utterance of council reese so let's not pretend that uh any one particular group i'm paraphrasing of course uh that that um one opinion holds sway um i don't i also don't want to pretend that one city out of 100 is determinative um there are a number of other cities in this state that have used the technology greensboro uh a greenville pardon me uh rocky mount wilson chicago not norcan obviously new york there are a number of cities that have had um positive um implementation of the program and one i've heard a grand total of one city that has not had um a positive uh experience now i know the level of debate this council is is uh capable of i know the rigor of mind and inquiry that we bring to discussions i see it on a regular basis never have i participated in a debate where in the universe of almost 100 data points is one so rigorously held on to and lift it up as the example uh as to not to do something if that were the case there are a number of initiatives we would not have pursued uh because there was a one particular city or example that was not so favorable any number of things we would not have done so i i'm just curious about this this embrace and lifting up of one city uh out of 100 american cities here let me be truthful here's what i think and and we we kind of alluded to it there is a national discussion going on in a national movement and there are leaders in this city that are vested uh in those national movements listen i've used those national talking with before i was on council you know i participated in the police reform movement uh in this city um those nationalized talking points are are being adopted and applied to our city which is fine um but i'm a Durham council person i'm i'm elected to represent the people of Durham and to serve the people of Durham and to use the data points that Durham presents i will not pretend that the Durham Police Department is the Ferguson Police Department i'm not going to pretend that the LAPD is is the Durham Police Department is the LAPD in the 80s rampart division um i'm not going to pretend that i don't know uh this chief and his command staff when we talk about armed police responses we have to put that in context of our city now if a person picks up a phone and dials 911 and says i heard gunfire the responding officer is going to respond as if a gun's involved if shot spotter tells the officer that a gun's been fired they're going to respond in the same mindset that a gun is present does it make a difference whether it's a human that reported a gun or technology that reported a gun is there a difference in the demeanor or readiness of the officer once they hear that a gun uh is involved um so i want to be very clear and and the notion that um we're going to be um overwhelmed with false positives we don't know that i don't know that you don't know that that by definition is the purpose of an experiment a free experiment to see and if we are overwhelmed the beauty of having a wonderful city attorney's office is that we don't have to buy it we can back out of it we can say thank you and and walk away the question for me is are our nationalized talking points and our adherence to uh prophecy and i'm big on prophetic utterances uh our adherence to prophecy more uh uh compelling than an experiment that could possibly improve the lives of our children our arch for me that's a simple question are our children worth a free experiment to see if we could possibly improve their lives my friends that consideration is going to win over any philosophical utterances on any day of the week and twice on sunday here's what i know tonight whatever prophetic vision we have for our city whatever hopes we have for our city tonight when the sun goes down uh uh gunfire is going to be going off in our city if we keep trending this way tomorrow next week next there'll be another family who will be burying someone or have an empty seat and i'm not i'm not really feeling going to them and explaining hold on help is on the way we're going to transform the city with a vision of of transformative justice and all other kind of things which we've been talking about for years so i put this to you my friends and it's clear probably we're not going to do this free experiment it that's i you know we haven't counted votes yet but that's pretty clear here's the deal we have a progressive majority on this council we have progressive unanimity on this council we're all progressives uh uh uh you know uh so what's our plan where's the money what what are we going to spend money on that's going to directly bring the number of gun incidents down in this city is it jobs how long will it take to put the jobs online is it mentoring where's the million millions of dollars in the mentoring for why didn't we do it this past budget why didn't we do it the year before that why didn't we do it that we've been talking about transformative things and rewriting the city as long as i've been talking about shot spot but hold up i have not just talked about shots but i've been talking about those things as well so so congratulations we can stop shot spotter we can do we have the power to do that congratulations if we do that where's the plan though where is the root cause marshal type plan and the millions of dollars to keep these young brothers and sisters out of games tell me that and forget the vision where's the money when does that begin when does that when does that work start and and you know and i've heard listen i've been with the best of them in terms of you know putting eloquent visions and where we want our city to go you're in charge you've got the votes where's the plan you're in charge we don't want to send 70 million dollars on policing where's the seven million dollars for the uh the community based initiatives how many community rooted program initiatives watching this broadcast right now how much money did y'all get last year how much money you get in this year how many of our community rooted partners uh uh uh will put something on facebook next month asking for grant writers to get 10 000 to do what where's your money where's the plan where's the plan meanwhile we still dying we still getting shot i'm not here to get popular or here for for perpetual re-elections i'm here because black kids are dying so i don't care about all that other stuff really in the final analysis i'm here because there's a segment of this community who doesn't write emails as councillor freeman said who doesn't who doesn't organize and with all due respect you're right we hear from uh uh uh uh certain people and we talk to who we want to talk to but i've been hanging out uh with those folk as well before some of y'all even got to the city so so i hang out with everybody all y'all folk and what i know is that at the end of today no money for for for root cause initiatives no shot spotter know this know that we have demonstrated our ability to say no and please let us not pretend that charlotte is the bellwether no this isn't about science or data this is about ideology this is about vision which which i'm down for i have no problem with that but let's not pretend uh uh uh that this is an empirically scientifically arrived at conclusion it's an ideological one which is cool i have no problem with ideology show me the money don't talk about it be about it for everybody watching this broadcast for every family that's going to sleep tonight in a community where you're going to hear gunfire the next time somebody talks about well you know what we need for our young men are jobs and community rooted initiatives and so ask them where the money at ask them how much money did how many emails did you write asking the council to do universal basic income how many emails did you write the council asking for millions of dollars in mentoring flooding our communities with with whatever type of workers unarmed workers that you think we should have and if you have no if you haven't had any money after all these years talking about it with a progressive majority you should go sit down somewhere because our kids are dying and this isn't this is an academic discussion so it is what it is uh in terms of this piece but but there are uh and i'm glad to hear that we're going to be talking about other things violence interrupting there's a number of things we have uh proposed but tonight we need to start talking about what our response is to folk whose children will be in bathtubs tonight and if you plan on telling them about your vision for Durham good luck let me know how that works out for you thank you mr mayor thank you council members i'm gonna i'm gonna end this discussion we've all had our say i don't really think we need to do this again um i want to thank the chief chief thank you for being with us today thank you i want to thank the folks from shot spotter um let me just say that the the way for the folks from shock spotter you all came to us through one of our council members who brought this to us um the way that we work here in Durham as you all are i'm sure aware is through our administration uh and if they have a recommendation they've heard the discussion today uh they can certainly bring that to us they would fully vet any plans that the that you all want to present whether the chief has as well i do want to say one thing to my colleagues about this idea about what we're doing and what money we're spending and those kinds of things so we have in the last couple of years uh been thinking a lot about things that we can do for our community to make our community safe in what i will call um non traditional ways for us but there are things that we do that are making our city safe all the time and i think it's a real mistake to for any of us to be saying that we're not doing these things we are we're doing a huge amount of work around homelessness we're doing a huge amount of work around affordable housing we heard all about that this morning and units are coming out of the ground we have an enormous parks erect program where young people and not just young people but especially young people hundreds thousands of them every year when it's not coveted are able to participate and many of them participate for free we run a bus service that's absolutely critical and we do it extremely well and we do it extremely inexpensively the average fare is about 32 cents a ride we keep people safe through our police force this is a major contribution that we make to people's safety we have job training and business support we've got driver's license restoration and expunction services free we've got misdemeanor diversion court and other kinds of reforms that are that we have driven the city is driven in our in our court system and in our police system thanks to the chief in a normal summer we have lots of youth employment we want to have more i could go on and i think you all know that and those are all things that contribute to community safety those are the things that the cities have traditionally done that contribute to community safety and now we're challenging ourselves and we're being challenged by our community to look in a different direction as well but i want to just point out that the county has done for years and has a giant public health mental health and social services structure mobile response all those kinds of things criminal justice resource center that helps people who are reentering we haven't done that work because it hasn't been our job we can make it our job and we put a million dollars aside in this budget to help make it our job but i do want to say to people two things one is this notion that somehow we haven't contributed this the safety of our community with all those things i've outlined is just dead wrong and then i also want to say that if we want to move in these new directions i think it's a great thing to do but i also think i will say and i think we all agree on this doing it without our county and our public schools is a bad mistake they have been doing it for years they have been putting tremendous efforts into it and we need i'm really glad that the city manager reported us that he's working with the county on on the thinking about violence interrupters that's really really important we can't lose sight of the fact that much of this work is being done in our community and we feel on this we feel that our community is putting us on the spot and asking us to do it part of it is they don't know anything about what the county does they don't know anything about those services you know many of them and you know we're we're we're very quite visible and so people are coming to us for it i'm all in favor of us rethinking that and figuring out how we can make that contribution and i was really glad that we put a million dollars in the budget as a down payment but i i think it's really important to think through you know working on this with other people and i i think that's you know that our rhetoric ought to reflect that okay thank you very much everybody chief thank you especially we appreciate you and thank you everybody for being here we'll now move to our next item which is the duke franchise agreement and this is also an important item we got a we got a big meeting today folks but that's because we talk a lot okay um i see both fergusson here and are you introducing this item bow hi mayor thank you nice to see you good to see you good afternoon mayor my pretend members of council and certainly welcome to councilmember freelon my name is both fergusson deputy city manager for operations and i'm before you today to introduce three documents that are coming for your consideration as part of the franchise with duke energies carolina i will ask the clerk to go ahead and bring up the presentation on this and get to the second slide please i'm going to begin talking in the interest of time uh diana if you can uh perfect thank you i say coming up so we are here today because the franchise agreement with duke energies carolina's is expiring on october 5th 2020 uh that um document was last ratified on october 6 2005 so it was a 15-year term and that term is expiring we began working on a renewal of these documents in february of 2020 at that time a large contingent of staff and uh city staff city attorney's office representatives and members of duke energy came together and discussed items of interest to each entity and of mutual interest we formed teams around a number of those items and those teams began working on finding consensus around ways that we could improve our relationship improve operational issues and address any concerns that i had their entity brought to the table as i said previously that included a number of staff and experts from duke energy representatives from the city manager's office city attorney's office public works general services planning and transportation next slide please as those groups began to reach consensus uh the solutions uh the language that was agreed to was placed into one of three documents uh either the franchise agreement the operating agreement or the memorandum of understanding and i'll take a minute just to introduce uh each of those but then we'll spend a few slides on each first there's the franchise and this is a document that regulates duke's use of right of way within the city that document is narrowly tailored to how duke uses the right of way within the city and donald tool from the attorney's office in just a moment is going to describe that but because that document is narrowly tailored and construed that way there is a companion document that we've always had an operating agreement and this agreement is a more flexible tool it allows us to address issues like utility relocation tree trimming emergency response and a number of other operational sort of meat and potatoes issues that that uh describe the way that the utility and the city of Durham interact new to this suite of documents is a memorandum of understanding or an mo u and this is a new document that duke and the city jointly agreed to create and propose because over the last several years the city has adopted several guiding strategy documents along our sustainability agenda that meshed well with programs that duke already has and and values and direction that duke has been moving in and so we found areas of agreement and areas where we felt like we could cooperate those have been outlined in the mo u and we'll describe briefly what some of those initiatives would be uh let's go to the next slide and i will ask donald tool to take the virtual mic and present a little bit on the limitations of franchise authority good afternoon mayor and council uh donald tool with the city attorney's office um just wanted as bo said just gonna give you the legal landscape of what's permissible with respect to a franchise agreement very early on in this process the city attorney's office looked at state statute the city's charter provision related to franchising of utilities and also we reviewed applicable north carolina case law there were there were a couple of north carolina court of appeals that address sort of the limitations of municipal authority in light of utility commission authority and those cases were reviewed one of the things that's clear from our general statutes is that the north carolina utilities commission is given and i'll just quote it general supervision over the rates charged and services rendered by all public utilities in this state back in the 1970s one of our sister cities uh to the west of us um wanted to uh regulate duke energy if another uh utility provider um more strictly and a case went to the court of appeals and one of the arguments was that the city had the right to franchise an electric utility and that gate the city made tried to make the argument that that gave them a whole bundle of rights and things that they could include in the franchise and duke energy took the opposite position and one of the uh statements that's quoted in that case and it's repeated over and over again is that the north carolina utilities commission has the authority to say when and under what conditions power companies shall furnish services and importantly the case said in the city and outside of the city so the city was trying to make the argument that it's franchising authority gave it a great deal of power within the city and the court of appeal court of appeals rejected that argument next slide please um so what are what what can a city do through a utility franchise one of the things that our charter provision specifically says and as we know a charter provision is the legislature specifically giving a city certain authority so this is durham's charter authority on this topic it says that the city is authorized to grant franchises upon reasonable terms and consistent with applicable laws for a period of no more than 60 years so a franchise could be from zero to 60 years um it goes on to say i i guess the bottom line summary here is both durham's charter authority and the applicable case law appear to restrict municipal franchising authority to regulating the use of municipal streets and city property parcels that the city owns next slide um so just quick review what are the key provisions that are in our franchise and i know council is used to seeing license agreement basically um a franchise agreement is not dissimilar from a license agreement it's just there are certain entities that under law a city has given the authority to franchise rather than license and um some of the key provisions are it grants duke energy the right to use city right of way for its infrastructure it addresses just very generally um relocation requirements so if the city is doing a street or sidewalk project um duke has the obligation to relocate those utilities that is addressed more specifically in the operating agreement it goes the operating agreement goes into much greater detail about how the parties will operate with respect to utility relocations uh under the franchise duke is obligated to make repairs to the right of way or city property and duke is also obligated to indemnify the city so if a third party claims that they've been damaged and they wind up making a claim against the city or they sue the city duke is agreeing to indemnify those cities those is agreeing to indemnify the city for those types of claims um duke is required to provide a claims process for Durham residents to the extent that Durham residents have issues with their service um and the the franchise as currently drafted includes a term of 10 years and as i said before a franchise can be anything over zero years up to 60 years um in addition there's an appendix to the franchise agreement and in that appendix um duke specifically acknowledges the city's right to generate power and the appendix goes on to say that when legally authorized to do so under north carolina law duke will agree to distribute power purchased and stored by the city next slide thank you don so take the baton back the uh the operating agreement then follows as a document that helps um helps tease out the relationship between between duke and the city helps establish common procedures for our coordination uh and sets forth more detail in the obligations of the parties related to various facility operations in and uh near city owned rights so this can be things like coordination of infrastructure planning both uh both duke's infrastructure and our infrastructure it further delineate requirements for how duke does work on their infrastructure in the city's right of way and what processes they need to follow it streamlines the process for relocation of duke facilities to accommodate city projects so when we expand a road or when we uh you know implement a trail or a park and we need to use uh need to relocate to facilities this describes that uh it requires duke's compliance with the city of Durham tree trimming ordinance it also establishes an emergency response plan for the restoration of electric service in Durham and gives the city access to certain resources within duke uh that um that speak to that now i'm going to ask stacey poston uh and we should be on slide nine uh for whoever's running the presentation i'm going to ask stacey poston to talk a little bit about the memorandum of understanding thank you both good afternoon mayor members of council my name is stacey poston representing the general services department we're excited today to be here to talk about the memorandum of understanding which we feel like really sets the foundation for creation of a green new Durham that the mayor illuminated in his state of the city speech and that we have been working towards with a number of adopted goals over the past several years including the city's you know roadmap to sustainability which was adopted in 2018 and which featured engagement with more than 1300 of our residents through four tabling events uh communications were happening both in english and spanish and really got a great understanding of what our community was looking for regarding sustainability and uh additionally we then presented to council and council adopted in 2019 carbon neutrality goals for our municipality and then in the mayor's 2020 state of the city address in february uh he illuminated seven specific things that he was looking for and we feel like all of those things are represented in the documents whether it's the mo you or the franchise agreement and so the memorandum of understanding really it's the first time the city's ever done it it's an opportunity for the city and duke to work together to implement a shared vision where we take advantage of their programs and we talk collaboratively about things that the city needs to be able to advance our carbon neutrality and renewable energy goals next slide please so what will happen once the mo is approved by city council we will work with duke energy to create a tactical work plan and so these next two slides outline some of the opportunities that we feel like exist where we could have collaboration we know that we are seeing more and more of our residents having electric vehicles and that we want to continue to embed these in our public infrastructure and our garages and our surface slots and in other places so there's an opportunity to collaborate there we know that duke energy has been involved with duke university and charlotte taking advantage of the green source advantage program and the general services department on october 1st will issue a request for information to look at our usage and to communicate with the private sector to see what availability there is for us to partner with a solar provider to also have the city of durham partake in such a program duke has been partnering with us for a number of years on energy efficiency programs where we weatherize more than 3,500 households impacting almost 8700 residents in our in our town additionally duke donated $100,000 and we have planted more than 700 trees with those funds so we've got some energy efficiency programs that have come through the pipeline and we look forward to creating continued opportunities around that additionally there's opportunities as technology continues to advance for multi-use poles and lighting and we've been in conversation with transportation about things that they're interested in seeing moving forward in that arena next slide please next as battery storage costs continue to decline we want to look at what sort of resilience opportunities might exist for our city you may remember that we received a grant earlier this year and did some research on what opportunities there were but this is an area where we think we can continue to collaborate with duke we also are looking at transparency and data access this is an area where the environmental affairs board said to us we are interested in looking at what data exists around energy uses for individuals and small businesses to see if there are areas where we have high utility bills and that we could then dovetail and partner to create programs that would help people reduce those costs and and so we think that there's some opportunity to do some work in this area additionally looking at just undergrounding electric distribution facilities you know overall what areas we have we can take advantage of that and then finally what we hope to see in the work plan is some coordination continued coordination around construction projects and then disaster preparedness planning so those are all opportunities where we feel like once the mou is approved by council we could create a work plan a tactical work plan i also want to just remind ourselves that we have a consultant right now working on for this year is doing some work with us on carbon neutrality and renewable energy creating an action plan for our city portfolio and that dovetails into the into the mou and the work that we're going to be doing here next slide please and finally i wanted to share that paul cameron is the environmental affairs board representative from general services who is the staff liaison to that council board he and fred lemar on august 19th presented the mou to that board and the franchise agenda we have incorporated changes and and clarified some language based on that conversation that we have with the environmental affairs board i believe also that council has received a memo from the environmental affairs board sort of illuminating that they were interested in having a little bit more opportunity to have feedback a little bit longer duration i believe that there's some strategies around that so so we're excited about the opportunity of having you know an mou it's new territory for durham but it's really a great opportunity for us to work collaboratively on things we're trying to accomplish thank you thank you stacey and so i just want to describe the next steps uh the uh the adoption of the franchise does require a public hearing and that is an opportunity for members of the public to speak on this on these three proposed documents that public hearing has been scheduled and advertised for september 21st 2020 uh so at your next regular council meeting this uh this will be a public hearing where comments can be received um before we go to question and answer if we could go to the next step it's my my pleasure to introduce and ask indira everett from duke energy to speak to you indira as the district manager of government community relations for duke energy indira has been our partner in this effort since february has done a tremendous job of bringing the right resources from duke energy to the table to have these conversations uh and has uh has really helped us keep the dialogue moving in order to make sure we could get to this point and indira i'd like to hand the mic to you thank you so much bow um can you hear me you can great thank you i was having some bandwidth issues earlier um good afternoon mayor shul city council members and all of our officials the hour is long so i will uh just stick to my script but before i do i would like to certainly say a fun farewell to city manager uh tom bonfield who has certainly been a partner and a colleague i think we started working in derma around the same time and so i wish him well certainly want to welcome uh councilman freeline to the council and certainly want to extend birthday wishes to councilman reese uh today it has been a opportunity for me to address you briefly and i certainly want to start by commending the city of derma for working collaboratively with me and my colleagues who are joining today from duke energy in fact they have been on the call for the last four hours or so so i want to personally thank them these conversations started back at the end of 2019 and into over seven months of this year by way of virtual subcommittee meetings where we addressed lessons learned and opportunities for improvement and it is certainly nice to see that that level of commitment has come to fruition today in producing the three agreements you have before you now it's worth noting that even during a pandemic both the city of derma and duke energy's staff's department heads and legal council agreed upon and finalized revisions to our franchise and operate and agreements as you just heard both mentioned each of these documents further assist the city staff as well as the duke energy staff and clearly laying out the foundation and the framework for how we will continue to work together in an even more efficient and beneficial way ultimately benefiting the citizens of derma day to day whether at their residents or at their business most of our franchise agreements as done touched on around the state are either 60 or 30 years in length for derma we currently have a 15 year franchise agreement and duke energy would love to see a revised agreement for the same length of time by nature of our business we make long-term investments to improve and modernize our facilities to serve our customers so long-term assurances in a franchise agreement is preferred these agreements allow us to serve the customers of derma from generation of the power all the way to turning the lights on in each home without having to come to the city every time to negotiate or to involve ourselves in any delays for service that could lead to budget overages or the city and even our customers these guarantees and these agreements guarantee that we'll do the work right and if we don't we'll fix it it allows us to do preventative maintenance install and remove streetlights and do what is necessary to provide 24-hour service to all customers 365 days a year and on behalf of duke energy we genuinely appreciate the rights and privileges our franchise and operating agreements provide us and we trust that you find the merits in them as well and lastly I am super excited about the clean energy mou agreement you have before you because it lays out as stacy mentioned what we've already accomplished and the foundation for what we hope to accomplish through ongoing action plans and innovative tactics we certainly thank the eab members for their input into the draft and we look forward to future engagement with them and community organizations this document is not meant to stay stagnant but to evolve as new technologies and innovations become available i'm proud to say that the city of derm is one of only a few municipalities to have a clean energy mou with duke energy should it be approved duke energy leaders encourage the continued exploration of great innovations and encourages our students to join us in creating answers to the complex tasks that lie ahead the next invention is right around the corner on how we will expand battery storage and how we will find more environmentally viable ways to safely dispose solar panels so that there's no unintended harm to the environment there's a role for everyone to play and we are delighted to be a part of the discussions i thank you for your careful consideration of these documents and i ask that you unanimously pass each agreement and work with us as we move forward together to create a green new derm that we all can be proud of in the end i think you'll find that duke energy wants the same things you do we want clean energy and technologies safe and reliable energy and responsible ways of producing even more green energy we are on track to exceed our 50% carbon emission reduction goal by 2020 in the carolinas and have been working with stakeholders across the state so that with a balance of new and existing technology and supportive public policy we can retire co-early add substantially more renewables and prepare the grid to advance carbon reduction while continuing to meet customer needs of reliability and affordability this is reflective in our recently filed integrated resource plans and we will continue to work collaboratively with stakeholders and customers to ensure a clean energy future we actually had a meeting with some residents in Durham in march right before we got into the pandemic um challenges that we had and so we were pleased to hear from those citizens together we have the opportunity to make great things happen and so i want to thank you for your attention and certainly for your time and the opportunity to provide these written comments thank you so much mayor and mr furbusson thank you indira appreciate those comments appreciate you guys sticking around we also have a large contingent of staff or on the call who can answer questions for council and finally before we go to that phase i do just want to thank and acknowledge the the tremendous work on the part of city staff as indira acknowledged for duke energy staff in particular staff from the city attorney's office who were in the lead on drafting these documents taking the feedback from staff and working with duke on them so with that mayor our presentation is complete we're happy to field any questions answer any concerns from the council thank you very much mr furbusson and thank you very much miss everett we appreciate you being here with us and uh and thank you so much for your words thank you for helping uh lead the negotiations from the duke energy side and i want to really thank all the folks that have hung in here with us not just our staff but uh folks from duke energy uh who are on the call as well um we don't intentionally torture you like this it's just something that we um can't help sometimes but we are so glad that you uh stuck with us and uh are appreciative of you i'll now um open the floor for any questions uh for uh our staff council member reese and then mayor pro tem and i think you will start with those two thank you mr mayor i want to thank our staff and of course indira everett from duke energy for sticking around uh we're going to be here a while longer so um if you feel bad imagine how we feel um the first question i have is about the city's right um to be an independent power producer is that that is that written into the agreement and if so do we have the right store and discharge power and to sell it on the grid um at independently established prices i expect that's a question for mr otul but yeah thank you don hey um fred lemar i actually was thinking this was a question for you it is written into the franchise agreement but fred is sort of taken over the green energy part of these negotiations so let me let me just say that uh i passed fred and two of his children on the trail the other day moving in a really good clip i was very impressed fred so i know you're in shape for this um i don't think i was looking as good as you were mr mayor but you definitely were mentioning that fred um and perhaps in answering uh council member reese's question uh not only could you answer but maybe point out the part of the franchise agreement uh that you believe speaks to this so that he would be able to see the language and others as well yes um yes and again thank you for giving the opportunity to respond mr mayor and um council members um miss uh council member reese that um is a reservation of right that uh is stated in the addenda on the addendum of the franchise at the end among along with other reservations and that would be something that would would be exercised pursuant to gen the general statutes and conformance with authority given by the legislature as well as regulations promulgated by the North Carolina utility commission i think that's the statement there is um to say to the extent that the law allows for it um the city may be interested in in both uh collecting purchasing and storing um energy possibly solar power energy and thereby uh work with duke energy on transferring that energy to the residents um to the extent that the North Carolina utility commissions would would authorize that or promulgate the appropriate regulations for that fred am i to infer from your statement that um the North Carolina utilities commission and or state law does not currently permit that it would have to be allowed yes it had to be something that would be allowed and so currently we can't unilaterally make that decision i'm going to ask again current law doesn't allow us to do the thing i asked of this agreement let's us do is that right that's correct okay great um excuse me a second uh council member uh mr. Lamar could you point out in the in the franchise agreement uh we're we're looking at so colleagues this would be in what's all ordinance in your attachments i'm sure you're aware of that but it's it doesn't say franchise agreement it says ordinance in your attachments and uh fred we're looking at uh we're we're looking at the addendum there can you show us yes this is the end there page uh 14 perhaps um i had right now had the operating agreement open so i'm having to go to thank you kind of we're good you're exactly right mr. mayor you identified it correctly from what i can see here i guess my point in asking the question is just to make it clear that just because this agreement says it's something we retain the right to do doesn't mean we actually have the right to do it that's correct i mean it would require quite a few legal hurdles to get over yes um can some thank you mr. Lamar can someone talk to me about um the if does this agreement um require duke to cooperate with the city to create a community solar program that serves homes and businesses um in the in the city of Durham fred Lamar again uh that would be addressed in the in the uh mo u where we talk about uh participation with duke energy on the possibility of implementing that community type solar program and there right now the law does provide for that but it requires going through um negotiating with duke energy and establishing uh the community solar generator uh and um the subscribers to that program council member race since you use the word require the answer is no the the mo u does not require them to do so it expresses mutual intent on the part of the city and on the part of the utility to pursue a program like that it is not a requirement thank you um one last question it's my understanding that the fred if i understood you correctly state law you're saying that state law doesn't allow us to purchase solar power from independent producers right now is that part of the thing that the law has to get changed allows to do it if we wanted to become a um if we wanted to establish our own uh our own be our own energy producer produce electricity ourselves we could certainly uh do that but we're currently we don't have uh a uh we don't operate a electric utility as the city so if we're going to do it in concert with um duke energy's existing grid we would have to uh we don't have the legal mechanism to do that right now i guess i was talking more about uh power purchase agreements with independent producers of solar energy does the city have the ability to enter into those contracts no not not currently we do have let me not precisely in the way that you describe it we would have to have there would have to be legislation as well as uh north carolina utility commission regulations defining that what we do have is we do have programs whereby we can contract with developers to uh generate create and generate electric or solar power energy for the city to use as a consumer that's part of the the um the green tariff um uh program that duke has which i think uh stacey referenced but not to independently purchase from a solar power producer and then turn around and require duke energy to sell that power to residents using their grid well what we could do is enter into some kind of agreement like the city of charlotte did earlier this year where i think that was in cooperation with duke and another and in some way can you describe how that works in charlotte and is that something this agreement allows us to do the um the mo u the mo u talks about partnership to do that so yes we legally can enter into an agreement with duke energy and a third party developer that would be the generator and of the solar power and the city would be the consumer of that um it's a three party basically a three party agreement that's something that i believe general services is interested in in uh in um investigating that's what stacey was referring to when she talked about issuing an rf a request for information on the the possibility of of uh proceeding with that great thank you fred i guess um just to eliminate this for some of my colleagues i went through a list of things that um the mayor identified in the state of the city address in february as things that the city ought to be able to get out of duke energy during the negotiation of our franchise agreement and i guess i was trying to understand how we did um and maybe the person i really should have asked was the mayor um looks somewhat unusual for us to ask each other questions mr mayor you you're the one that kind of put these marks out there and could you talk a little bit to us about kind of how you feel about where it ended up um i'm happy to talk a little bit about it um i don't want to be the definitive word on it because i have some questions myself and what i would say is it hasn't quite ended up um we have a public hearing um we uh i have a meeting with a lot of our energy and environmental stakeholders scheduled for next week the way i'm interested in hearing from them i know that you all will be hearing from them as well um uh let me just say that uh from my standpoint um from you know what i have read and i've read it all you know twice um is that uh our staff has done a fantastic job of moving us a long way along with in in with our negotiating partner in the direction that we want to go i think there are many things in here to like it's the question that you asked um i believe that uh and in particular in answering that that durham i'm sorry that that charlotte power that has produced is to power solar power that is is purchased is to power city facilities um municipal facilities and so i want to put that question uh to our attorneys uh but in a minute i think there's also the question of the the length of the franchise um right now the franchise length is 10 years um uh miss everett uh wants 15 years for the utility i understand that i don't want that length i think that 10 years should be the outside length so i think that's good i'm also interested in whether or not it should be shorter and the reason it might should be shorter is that the the energy landscape is changing a lot it's changing really fast and it's changing in directions that we like there's more renewables renewals are more affordable so to me that's and and and there's you know opportunities for legislative change so i think that uh one of the questions that i'm about to ask our administration is why 10 years and why is there an advantage over five years i know that they believe that that is an advantage which i'll wait to hear from but i do think just to um i i just think that uh in a lot of ways um this definitely moves us in a good direction um it does uh include our right to be an independent power producer given the legal restrictions um it expressly reserves our right to store energy and discharge power and and it reserves our right to produce solar power and purchase solar power from independent producers at least that's the way i read it and i'm gonna be it's what you asked about i want to know more about that um it also i i'm encouraged by the mou these are not things that are legally required but i think they are um clearly uh areas where mutual cooperation is desired and they include some of our really important goals that you'll appreciate councilmember including the extension of the electric vehicle infrastructure um and um so i think all these things are good i think that there is a commitment from duke to help the city successfully utilize the green source advantage program uh i i am concerned that it doesn't go far enough in terms of the community solar but these are things that i want to continue to learn about in the next couple of weeks uh and uh and be educated on by our staff and our community so that's that's my thought um definitely really good progress definitely great work on a half of our city by our staff and i still have a few questions so maybe i'll ask a couple of those questions uh one of them is and i'm not sure about who the best person to answer this is but is in terms of the length of the franchise agreement why is it that you all believe that 10 years is the right time to learn so i'm happy to take a stab at that the obviously we went into these discussions working from duke's duke's preferred term of 15 years certainly have heard community interest and advocacy for a shorter term i think i think the reason we're at 10 is you know we have had extensive conversations with the attorney's office and reviewed the existing law we've reviewed what north carolina allows franchise agreements to do and we've compared that against the the the voices in favor of a shorter term and what a shorter term might might accomplish might give the city an opportunity to do in the eyes of those voices who have asked for a shorter term we have not seen a legal landscape where revising the franchise agreement on a shorter term accomplishes those things and so as your administration making recommendations to you we see the downside of a shorter agreement which is a great investment of staff time and resources and those of duke energy as well as potentially a lack of predictability on duke energy's part as far as what their future looks like in the city and their ability to make investments and we feel like a reasonable outcome of that is is a shorter term than duke requested but not a short term and because we see downsides and no real upsides to that that's where we ended up at ten thank you very much um so um i'm not sure who the appropriate person is here it might be uh fred it might be don um could you point out to me the language in the franchise agreement that that addresses our ability to use large of off-site solar to power municipal facilities like charlotte does fredle margen mr. mayor that would be part of the uh i think you referenced it as well the duke's green source advantage program which is the program that charlotte is using to be able to contract with third party producer of of solar power and gen and be a consumer of the energy that's created um that is a program that we are eligible for and that is referenced in the mo u and that's something that i think the city is is will be considering so we certainly have the authority and ability and duke energy has the reservation of solar um credits to allow for that to happen for for uh durham and i see in the chat uh from christie daniel that uh charlotte is not pairing their facilities they're retaining the uh renewable energy credits to offset their facility power i see how about that uh mr. lamar so that's and that's the way that it's not a direct uh i guess um it's not a direct consumption of of the uh solar power that's generated the the it's as i mentioned before it's a three-way agreement between duke the city and whoever that solar power generator would be and so the consumption of uh electricity that the city would um would have the city would be given credits for that electricity through the solar energy generated by the developer um and so it's not we don't directly we're not like directly connected it energy goes into the grid essentially and i mean christie if you want to elaborate on that you know you're you're more expert in this than i am so thanks fred and hello to all um i manage our duke energy renewables team and uh the way fred described that uh is correct is an agreement a three-party agreement so the power would be going into the grid the customer in this case the city of charlotte um is helping to um you know pay for that facility they are the third party on the agreement so they were the ones that sought out the solar developer negotiated the contracts the ppa with the solar developer um and agreed upon the price with the solar developer as well as term so how long and then they receive a credit in the form of an hourly energy value as well as the renewable energy credit for the power that they will be receiving but the power is going to the grid not specifically to their municipal buildings and that was through green torch advantage that yes that's correct and what's ppa mean power purchase agreement so that's just the legal document that is set up between the solar developer and the customer as well thank you thank you very much thank you miss daniel all right other other questions colleagues at this point any comments or questions from um from any colleagues uh customer middleton thank you mr mayor uh thank you uh indira and others and staff but what is the uh indira perhaps you can answer this question is there a a industry standard as to how long these franchise agreements normally last is there best practices or how long do they normally last um thank you for the question um i did a little bit of digging into our historical files and we have several hundred franchising agreements and as um i think it was fred mentioned they can go up to 60 years the majority of ours 302 to be exact are 60 years and then the second highest length of time is 30 we have sixty six zero yes sir and then the second highest number of length of time i looked was 30 years and then there are some at 40 and one at 43 and several at 20 there were absolutely only two at 15 Durham being one and the other was down east and i cannot remember the name of the small town but i can certainly gather that but for the majority it is 60 and 30 years hmm um okay that's all for now mr mayor thank you thank you council member colleagues other questions at this point any other questions uh mayor protam thank you i just wanted to make sure i was clear on the timeline that you're proposing for for this that it would that we wouldn't hear it at our next um work session our next meeting but the next one was that right well here's what i've proposed and uh with the i've discussed that i've already uh not just proposed it but uh in my meeting with tom and Wanda on this week uh we uh agreed on this timeline um the franchise agreement expires on october 5th um and uh the eab got this about three weeks ago so there would be uh the timeline would be a public hearing on september 21st which is our next council meeting we have a work session following that if we wanted to more discussion we could have it then and then we would vote on it on october 5th so this extends the timeline by two weeks and gives people from today 25 days to make all the comments that they would like including at the public hearing so that's that's the timeline that we're operating on thank you Mr. Bondfield no i didn't i concur mr. mayor just wanted to see if there's any questions but yes that's that's what we discussed thank you uh councilmember freeman thank you i i just wanted to make sure there was going to be a document attached to this conversation i know at the environmental affairs board meeting we had a long discussion about what was what was possible and what wasn't and just making it a blanket like just share your comments might create some frustration in the community if it's not understood what exactly we can and we can't make adjustments on and so i'm concerned if when if we're pushing this out to the community without any additional information that we're going to create a uprising or stir for folks around some of the things we hope to see but know that that based on our general legislature and the state we live in we're not be possible at this moment well thank you for that comment i'm not sure um how that might best be accomplished uh but we'll ask our staff to think about that i agree people need to understand what the parameters are that we're working under and maybe there's a way to make that easily accessible councilmember reese mr. mayor i i stepped away for just a moment so um i don't know if i missed this but is there some reason why we can't extend the current agreement another month i'll let mr. otul answer that question sorry it took me a while to get the video working again again dono tooled city attorney's office the way the current franchise is written it expires on october 5th and there is no provision for extending it um it specifically says it terminates on october 5th and a franchise agreement has to be approved through an ordinance can you walk me through the consequences of what happens if we turn if the franchise agreement terminates without us passing another ordinance you know given my earlier comments that the franchise essentially regulates duke's use of the right of way i would say relatively nothing because they're still subject to regulation for work conducted in the right of way under the city code um what we would lose is getting the new operating agreement in place and the green energy mo in place um on october 6th okay thank you thank you very much did you bring the cake back second just talking to charlie oh do you bring us the birthday cake no poor guys here with us my family i wasn't gonna have dinner with them tonight so i'm so sorry okay let's keep um colleagues other questions at this point we're gonna have uh we're gonna hear this at a public hearing on the 21st and then if we want to talk three days after that the work session again which we may well want to do uh will be more educated by the public's comments and uh also will have had more chances to more chance to have digested what we've heard today any other questions or comments okay thank you uh thank you to everybody that has worked on so hard on this this has been an enormous effort uh paul cameron facie jena bow don fred all the folks at duke energy were here with us uh i see other members of our staff i see daniel here uh just very grateful to all of you all who have worked on this thank you so much and uh we'll see you at the public hearing thank you thank you indira we appreciate you thank you so much have a good evening you too all right friends uh we are now at the appointments no i'm sorry we're now at the city manager search uh and we'll uh let's discuss that uh as you look at the city manager's priority items you will see as i'm sure you have the list of the um it really in thanks to hr for doing a great job listing uh eight different search firms uh describing in good detail information about these firms giving us some pros and cons and then also providing us a second attachment the chart about these firms clearly we're not going to make this decision today but what i would like to do today is figure out a timeline for making the decision uh and i believe that regina young blood is with us i see regina is here uh miss young blood welcome thank you um i hope it's not your birthday as well is not all right good um we really appreciate the work that you did to um just to describe all of these firms and to tell us all this good information about them and to you and for the chart as well i think you've given us a lot of good options and i would like a recommendation from you for the council about what you think next steps are and how we should proceed and what you think our timeline should be or not our timeline exactly but what our next big step could be and in how we choose this firm regina young blood human resources i would suggest that you convene as a group if that is possible certainly the clerk or the city attorney will determine what kind of a session that needs to be but to discuss what it is that you are looking for in a city manager and also in a search firm that will help you to make a decision about which one of these search firms or which ones you might want to interview uh and then make a decision about which one you want to hire so i would do that you know again depending on how far out you're looking to hire the city manager you may want to work backwards from that day so many of these search firms have told you that there are time for a city manager level search is anywhere from 90 to 120 days so there's that time for the search there's when you want to have the city manager put in place and backing up from there to to work on your process for selecting the search firm thank you and so your recommendation is i understand it is to have a special meeting which i think is a great idea where we would discuss the qualities that we want in a city manager and then discuss what that means in terms of the search firms what would be the next step in actually hiring a firm the next step in hiring a firm would be in deciding where the funding is going to come from to pay for the cost and then contracting with the firm but how about in the the process of actually selecting the firm how would that happen what would be what would be your recommendation so a recommendation for how that could happen is um i do believe that with these types of amounts you may not have to do an RFP but i would defer to finance to confirm whether or not an RFP would be necessary we typically have not done RFPs for searches in the past so we already have the quotes so you could come up with some evaluation criteria that you wanted to use internally to decide how you pick your search firm based on the qualities and criteria that you've established and i also though assume we would might come up with a few finalists among the search firms and then we would interview them that is correct how long would you say uh and i won't hold you to it but what would you typically say the time period is for choosing a search firm in terms of making the the job description uh or the the you know having the meeting you talked about where we talk about what we want in a city manager decide what we want in a firm what qualities we want um choosing some finalist firms and um and then uh interviewing firms and making a selection how about that process how long do you think that should typically take two to three weeks okay that's quicker than i thought um all right um thank you colleagues i'm going to call on councilmember caviaro i know she's been doing a lot of thinking about this and has talked to me some about it i'm going to ask her first if she has any questions or observations or any questions from this young boy at this time i do not i appreciate i i've read through the firm offerings that you all put together i really appreciated the pros and cons for each firm that was really useful information um i cc both you and city manager tom bonfield on a rfp that comes from a different a school district but a governing body and their criteria for choosing a firm that i thought was helpful uh and i also shared that with my colleagues i will i plan on using that to kind of dig in further to the firms that you uh listed in the attachment because i felt like that was pretty especially with the diversity component um really clear and i'm happy if folks are if it's helpful um i have some additional questions again i'm looking at the time so if we do set up a separate time i'm leaning that way because i have some things that like i'm curious to know uh around you know some of the firms what are what are their what's their success rate of placing candidates of color what are those actual pools with actual statistics and numbers and i don't want to have that conversation right now i just don't think that it's prudent no we're not having that conversation now totally not thank that's why i think that yeah we're gonna we're gonna have the special meeting i'm my i'm i'm asking now for questions and comments mainly around the process once we i think we're all gonna agree that we've got another big job to do tonight and we don't want to dig into the pros and cons of the individual firms councilmember freeman thank you i i appreciate um councilmember capriero's comments and uh acknowledgement of the time just noting that was exactly the direction i was going in uh with the rfp it'd be it would be easier to have like a workforce statistics kind of look at things and that's what i was more interested in so i'm i just want to make sure that that preference is known upside thank you thank you other questions or comments colleagues at this point for miss young blood i'm gonna um miss young blood let me ask you if you could help advance this a little bit for us i think what would be good is if you could let us know um pros and cons of an rfp process versus simply making the choice because i agree with you with this amount of money i don't believe it's required we could just i believe just choose among these eight firms or other firms versus an rfp process so i know that one of the issues would be time but if you could if you could perhaps educate us a little on that with the help of uh as you say maybe the city attorney staff and that's necessary but the administration and if you could spell out a timeline not necessarily exact dates of what the steps would be as you've just told us verbally and then maybe you know it'll take a week to do this it'll take two weeks to do that and then once we know that uh we can work with our our administration uh and to set up a special meeting uh to begin those discussions and maybe if you could outline for us what you think i think yeah as you already have but just put in writing what should happen at that first meeting that would be extremely useful we really are going to need your guidance through this process you've guided us through a lot of great a lot of great processes here on the council and we're going really there's nothing that this council is going to do that's more important than this uh as you know i also want to say that we don't need to be in a hurry we have one to page not everybody has one to page and so this is a i think that this gives us a real cushion in terms of time because we know uh that we have a super capable uh interim city manager councilmember middleton thank you mr mayor you just perfectly uh captured what the sentiment i was about to express um in having you know we have an embarrassment of riches in terms of leadership um i was going to say that for our i would like us to spend a be very intentional about having robust conversations about what type of city manager we want um and even perhaps involving the public in those discussions having opportunity for the public to sound off about what type of city manager we're going to the final quarter of our city i don't really see a rush you know taking the rest of this calendar year going into 2021 to have some robust discussions about before we even talk about firms what kind of city manager we want this is a critical decision so uh i uh whatever timetable of course we come up with a you know obviously a support but i would i would really um strongly lean towards taking advantage of in a good way taking advantage of wanda being with us and really using this final quarter of the year to have some intense conversations about who we want in that chair and also hearing from the community about who they'd like to see in that chair as well thank you mr mayor yeah i think i just want to um i would just uh modify that a little bit which is we we really need to hear from the community but i think one of the things the right search firm will do will really help us do that um i'm i'm i'm i think will um the searches that i've been on that have succeeded the best have had a search firm that can really help get the community involvement um and actually i just see mr bonfield put a comment in the in the chat the same thing so um that has got to be yes huge i mean i thought that we i was really uh i thought with when when chief davis came that that selection process was very wide open uh in terms of community engagement was just right um it was clear to the community that we were gonna that the in that case the the the manager was going to make the choice but that we were very interested in their input and i think we have to have the same dynamic and i know we will but uh okay councilmember cabillera yeah virginia could you send us the most uh update job description for the city manager when you send us a timeline and then any other type of um uh kind of those types of you know competence competency type or skill set type documents we may have yes for the role thank you so much and i i i just want to agree with um tom's comment in the chat a good search firm they're going to help us really define those qualities match it to what we have now make the updates and and and help us really design a process that gets us to what we we name as our core qualities that we want in a city manager can i also suggest thank you for that can i also suggest that we um you know some cities near us have had uh and i don't necessarily to be near us but some of our peer cities have had city manager searches um in the recent past rallies was not that long ago maybe you could also try to find some of those job descriptions miss young blood i'll do that that would be great anything else colleagues yeah just real quick mr mayor um i know everybody on this call knows this but we are the council has received a number of emails in the last weeks um by a resident intimating that i want to be the next city manager i just want to make it clear our job is hard enough i can't do that job and have no interest in it um uh so just want to put that out for everybody to understand that's not i'm not about that life so okay thanks you already were not on my finalist list i just want to make that clear mine either mr mayor mine either okay colleagues any other questions or comments i just want to make council member milton's not on that list either it's not just you i was just gonna add we keep it interesting i was sharing with i was i would like to share with um miss young blood that it would be helpful if you do find additional resources similar to what council member caviero pulled together because it is very in depth like it's very detailed and pulling together that type of timeline and what we're looking for so just feel i'm feel free to to to make inferences based on other communities that's what i'm getting at okay thank you thank you council member all right colleagues have we done it miss young blood do you feel like you have a good direction to help us i do and before i go i would be remiss if i did not thank james o'Donnell jem o'Donnell who's on the call he did all of this work thank you jim all of the work that you have just assigned to me jim thank you thanks for being with us also jim for five hours now we thank you not a problem we really do appreciate the work a lot thank you so much thanks thank you all all right colleagues uh i think we're now uh about to move to the appointments and why don't we hear from the city clerk on the appointments other than on item two madame clerk okay good evening everybody i'll start with the carolina theater during board of trustees that one we had a split vote on and uh do you want to hear the breakdown sure okay there were two selections for darin berlin two for shila crossby and two for kasey decosmo um can you say that one more time yes there were um two nominations for darin berlin two for shila crossby and two for kasey decosmo and then um one council member did not vote okay i did not vote that was me because i wasn't sure if we would readvertise or not and i would uh would like to put my vote in for uh kasey i i want to say that i'm actually for readvertising it um i i meant to bring that up earlier given the the diversity of the board and the the the lack of diversity and the lack of diversity of the candidates actually we have some good candidates um but i think we should re-advertise and especially since we're all our votes are all split i think that makes it easier we had re-advertised this is the second time madame clerk that we had yeah i went back that's one of the reasons i didn't vote because i i went back to listen to our last one it's the same yeah i'm sorry yeah i'm sorry i'd forgotten that thank you okay we've tried um diligently um and who did you cast your vote for council member cabillero kasey um i'm not sure how you pronounce her last name decosmo maybe decosmo uh i'm happy to change my vote also um i had voted for darin berlin but i'm happy to change my vote okay thank you very much thank you madame clerk the environmental affairs board you have agreed to nominate chaston wane swain for the homeless services advisory committee you've agreed to nominate herald briscoe and then you wanted to re-advertise the dha board and then did you want me to go ahead with the a