budget retreat on the FY23 budget process. I'm John Allure. I'm the Director of Budget and Management Services. And if Mayor O'Neill is ready, I will turn it over to the Mayor to call the roll. Good morning, everybody. Happy Thursday on this beautiful Thursday. Madam Clerk, we are ready to call this meeting to order and call the roll. Thank you, Madam Mayor. Mayor O'Neill. Here. Mayor Pro Tem Middleton. I'm here. Council Member Caballero has an excused absence. Council Member Freeman. Council Member Johnson. Council Member Reese. Right here. Council Member Williams. I'm here. Thank you. I believe we have a quorum. Very good. So again, welcome everyone. In a moment, we'll pull up the agenda for today and I'll briefly go over that for everyone. Just a couple of reminders that we are streaming live on YouTube and I just chatted that out to everyone if they want to share it with people. And as well, our entire process for all four retreats is available online at City of Durham's budget development process page. And if you go to the city's web page and search on the budget department, you will find that in the materials for all of the retreats so far, day one and two. And now day three are up on the site. So residents can follow along at home at their leisure and they will stay up for the entirety of the budget process. Just a brief overview of what we have in store for today. I'll quickly turn things over to opening remarks from the City Manager, Wanda Page. We'll have a presentation from Interim Director of Human Resources, JJ Scott on a pay discussion. We'll turn things over to a language access update. Then we'll have a presentation on council budget requests followed by a parking fund overview and discussion. And there's a break as you can see put in there, but we can put that break wherever we decide is appropriate if we're running a little behind or head on anything we can break as you feel is necessary. And those are the end of my comments. If anybody has any questions, very good. I'm going to turn it over to Wanda Page. Good morning, Madam Mayor, Elaine O'Neill, Mr. Mayor Pro Tem, Mark Anthony Middleton, council members, city staff, and our wonderful residents in the Bull City. We have joined together for budget session number three, a continuation of last month's sessions, and we hope to spend the next four hours today with you presenting information, reports, responding to your questions, and even facilitating conversations that will continue to provide us the budget development guidance that we need in order to propose a budget for fiscal year 2023. I'd like to thank you, John, Laura, and Christina Reardon, the budget department staff that have been working hard in the background on coordinating what you will see today. The deputy city managers who are always present working with department directors and leaders and contributors all throughout the organization for just being a team. We could not do this work if we were not a team. I could certainly not lead this organization without a team, and we are a team in everything that we do and we try to accomplish. But today, during this budget session, we will be, again, listening. That's where we get our guidance. We will be listening. We will be reviewing with you material that we have put together, that we've analyzed, and bringing our best material to you to help you be able to make decisions and give us guidance. And we also never forget that it is our responsibility to continue to innovate and bring new ideas to the table as we put together these budgets in very difficult times. As I was introducing myself to new council members, one of the things that I always do is I bring out the budget document because sometimes the conversations that we have don't always do justice to the document that has to be coordinated and put together in order to make this presentation to the community, which will happen in May. But it is a document. It has more than 400 pages in it. It reflects the values of our organization and our community. And it reflects, it is really our roadmap for a year, for the most part, that holds us accountable for using the resources that have been provided to us for the purposes that they have been provided, which is really to serve the residents of this community. So we do anticipate discussion. This morning, John has referenced four topics that we have prepared just for you today. And as we finally begin to put the pandemic behind us with so many of its economic uncertainties, central to this year's budget proposal, and we talked about it last year, we talked about it mid-year this year, is the statement that does define one of our core values. And that is our employees. The budget proposal that you have before you today or will have as we continue to continue to develop it, it reflects changing market conditions for market conditions for salaries. And it reflects our need to be changing with those conditions in order to attract and retain city employees all across the organization. We focus sometimes on certain sectors of our organization, but we all know that their employees all over this organization that serve every single day, as the mayor often says, when we're sleeping 24, somebody's working 24, 7, 365 days a year. And as the city manager, I thank them. I thank them when I see them. I thank them in settings like this. And I thank them whether they hear my voice or not. Today, the human resources staff have worked to analyze employee pay and some of those market structures. And they really have prepared a detailed presentation on the paying benefits that are included in the current budget draft. So last month, you received the sort of a big picture view of the current budget draft. And we talked about that budget draft, including some things already. We talked about it, including annualizing the market increases that we made for our public safety, our police and fire department employees. What you will hear about today are some additional market pay adjustment scenarios that will be presented for discussion. Because before we leave at the end tomorrow, you all will be giving us guidance on sort of narrowing down the guard rails that we need to work within as we prepare the final budget proposal. So to continue to serve our growing and diverse community, we have made some key investments with your guidance and direction to enhance our language access capacity. We are excited today to bring you an update on our progress in that area. So that will be one of the things on the agenda today as John has referenced. Discussing and prioritizing your city council new budget requests, it will be a continuation of the decision making and prioritization that we have incorporated recently in our budget preparation guidelines. This will be the third consecutive year that we've done that. And it has worked well for us as we receive new budget requests from our departments. We receive them from you. We receive them and when we receive them from you, we always know that they are reflecting the residents that you are in constant contact with and that you engage and communicate with on a day to day basis as we do. Every successful organization must seek out and implement strategies to solve its most challenging problems also. So we are often talking about things that we dwell and things that work out well for us. But we will conclude our session today discussing one of our bigger challenges that we have before us. Our parking enterprise, and I call it an enterprise because it is one of our business type activities, has been one of the activities that has been hardest hit during the pandemic over the past two years. There are some things that we will probably get into as we have that discussion about potential ways to resolve some of those issues. But it is an issue that we will face this budget season along with future budget preparation years into the near future. We are prepared today to begin to meet some of the challenges that we have, discuss how we will balance the needs of all of our residents, our stakeholders, our customers, and just get it done. So I am pleased to have this team with me today. There are about 34 of us, I see, on the call. And before I turn the mic over to Interim HR Director John Scott, J.J. Scott, to get us started with the first presentation, you have said goodbye to some very great leaders and employees over the last year or so, or two years. And we've also welcomed some new leaders into the organization. And we have recently welcomed a new finance director to our team, Tim Flora. I would like for Tim to click his camera on. I'm told he's here and introduce himself to this group. And then the next voice you will hear will be John Scott. Thank you, County Manager Page. Hello, everyone. I'm Tim Flora. I'm excited to be here. He's nervous. He meant city. That tells about my past. So I am very thrilled to be with you today and thrilled to be a part of this organization. I have over the years heard so much about it and was just so grateful to be accepted as part of this organization. I've got several years of local government experience in county and municipal, even have a few years of federal government experience thrown into to boot. So I look forward to getting to know you more as we move forward and and excited to be again a part of this organization. I guess that's my cue. Good morning. Welcome aboard, Tim. Good morning, Mayor O'Neill, Mr. Mayor Pro Tem. Members of the Council, my name is JJ Scott and I'm currently serving as the interim director for Human Resources as Wanda mentioned, I'll be speaking with you this morning on some of the compensation issues that we'll be considering through the FY23 budget process. Before we dig in, I want to thank the HR staff, particularly Joyce Baker, Alithia Hardy and Veronica Jackson. They've done a ton of work on this presentation and also wanted to shout out the collaboration that we've had with the budget team and all of the guidance that we've received from our leader, City Manager Paige. This has really been a team effort. And with that, I will see if I believe budget is running the presentation. There we go. Excellent. Thank you. And you can go to the next slide please, Christina. All right. So here are the main topics that we want to hit this morning. Compensation can get complicated quick. So I'm going to try and hit the high points of each item. But of course, please stop me if you have any questions at any time. Wanda alluded to this earlier, but one caveat before we really get going. I got to acknowledge that we are early in the process here and there are a lot of moving parts. So this is going to be an overview of some of the options that we have. And I'm going to provide you numbers but they're ballpark estimates of the cost. We'll also be taking a look at some of the data that we'll be considering throughout this process. But again, the data is changing as well. So as decisions get made, the numbers that you see will be refined. So with that, let's go ahead and get started. Next slide, please. All right. So first, this is just a review of the numbers that you have already seen. So this is what is included in the multiyear projection, which was shared by budget. So everything that you see here was included in the gap that you saw. So we've got the full year costs, the structure adjustments for our sworn employees. You see those up top. We budgeted for increases for pay for performance, that pay for performance program for each pay plan. You see those in the second group of bullets after that. And we're going to talk more about what exactly pay for performance is in a little bit, but just wanted to reconcile these numbers since you've seen them already. The multiyear estimate also does include some round numbers about possible benefit cost increases and the amount might change for what the city pays into the state retirement system. But I didn't want to get too specific there. Let's go back one more slide just for a second. So I wanted to make an important note. This is the general fund. A lot of the numbers that you have seen are the general fund only, but we have 30% of our employees are not in the general fund. So when we're looking at the pay for performance amounts, for example, so we have employees in the open range and the step range who are in, for example, the water and sewer fund, stormwater funds, and some of these various other funds. And again, I'm going to show you that detail later, but just something to keep in mind that a lot of these numbers, and I'll try and be specific when it's the general fund only, but they are actually larger when we're talking about the entire employee population. All right, Christina, we can go to the next slide. Great. Okay. So at this point, I wanted to just take a step back and acknowledge that, although paying benefits are extremely important to the employee experience of the city, they're not everything. And we really can't neglect these other factors. So EngageU is the name of the umbrella program, and that houses all of our engagement and development programs here at the city that come through HR, I should say. So these programs have changed substantially over the last couple of years, and we're going to need to continue to invest more time and energy in them to make sure that they're relevant and effective in doing what we need for our employees. From the beginning of the pandemic through, at least through this year, a fiscal year 23 that we're talking about now, we can see more change in the workplace, and we've seen in decades for at least portions of our workplace. How these types of programs are delivered is going to need to change to reflect that. But I do want to highlight real quick just two ways that we are adapting. Midday Moments, probably familiar with, so that is our weekly live program hosted through Zoom. And that lets employees connect directly with important issues from around the city. We appreciate Mayor Neal was just on. And I wanted to shout out our host, our current host, HR employee, Andrew Woods. He and his team have done a really good job of keeping this program going and just offering this outlet for our employees and for important news. And then I wanted to jump to the bottom bullet on here, flexible work policy. We've been pretty aggressive in developing and implementing a flexible work policy. As you know, many types of jobs can now be done partially remote. And something that we included is that jobs can also be done partially, possibly outside of standard working hours. We already have 350 flexible work agreements that we've received. And we're going to continue to try and develop this policy and refine this so that work can be done when and where it's most beneficial for the city and for employees. Because we see this as an important way that we can help improve employee well-being, as well as our competitiveness in the market. All right, next slide. So I wanted to take just a second to talk about benefits. I'm not going to talk about our benefits a whole lot. In this meeting, we're going to come back and cover this later in the process. But I wanted to put up this extremely busy slide to make a point. And that is that we have really generous benefits. They're great, and they're very affordable. As I mentioned before, we don't have the rates set for the upcoming year. But I am pretty confident that we'll still be able to say that we provide exceptional benefits and our rates are better than most other organizations of any kind, really. And so we will be back later in the process once we get some of those numbers ironed out. So let's jump to the next slide, please. And for the rest of the presentation, we're going to focus on pay. We have a lot of options when we're talking about employee compensation. These are kind of the big picture items. So pay for performance is actually what most employees think about first when they're thinking about their pay and raises. These are permanent increases to salary. Usually it's a percentage and it's applied annually based on employee evaluations. But there are other things too. So we can do structure adjustments. And we talked a lot about that during the police and fire process that we just finished up. And that's when we move the minimum and the maximum amount that we will pay for a certain type of work. Usually that's in response to market pressures. Those are permanent changes generally. Well, pretty permanent. But then we can also do more short term or more targeted items. So incentives and incentive is when we want to either reward an employee for getting specific certification, education or some other qualification. And then we can do things like bonuses. One time bonuses, we can do them around hiring or retention or sometimes just as part of the general compensation plan. So again, these bottom two are options that are temporary and won't permanently add to our long-term costs. All right. Next slide, please. So we're going to be referring to four pay plans and I've made some reference to them already. And these are the four pay plans for full-time employees. We do have a part-time plan, but work on that is still going on. So we'll have to come back later with some more info on that. So here you see some just basic statistics on the four plans. And it's important to note that these plans are set up like they're different because they represent different types of work. And so our set plan, that's mostly that's general employees. So these employees are primarily in operations, administrative support, some trades positions and ends are generally not exempt employees. The open range then is mostly exempt employees and they're doing work that's been defined as professional management or executive positions. And there's some highly skilled technical work that falls into the open range as well. And then we've talked about the sworn police and fire a lot. So again, you can see the relative size, salary tenure and age. And again, of course, this is for current employees only. So on the next slide, we'll get into a little bit more detail. I just wanted you to be able to see, this is again a pretty busy slide, but I just wanted you to see some of the job titles that are within each pay plan. And top jobs is really, that's just referring to the number of current FTEs that we have for each job. So fire and police, pretty self-explanatory off to the left. And then that open range you can see. So we've got those jobs like engineers, a lot of analysts, some of the AD positions show up their AD classifications, I should say, show up there. And then over in the step plan, that's where you can see a lot of the biggest jobs are maintenance type jobs, admin support, and then some more technical roles like inspectors or mechanics. So they all fall in that step plan as well. So let's jump to the next slide. And I apologize, this slide is actually out of order, but we're going to cover it right now. Anyways, this is the fund slide that I had referred to earlier. And so what you can see is that definitely the majority of our employees are in the general fund. Over 70% are in the general fund, but we do have a good number over in that water and sewer fund, the solid waste fund, disposal services, and the stormwater fund. And then a couple of others spread throughout some of the other funds at the city. And the reason I mentioned this, so again, the general fund gets a lot of attention, rightfully so. And when we're talking about property taxes, sales taxes, that's what funds any changes to employee salaries that we might discuss or might implement. For these other funds, they have independent rate models that determine what they're going to need. And so those rate models would have to be adjusted if we do make changes. I can't say, I certainly can't say if any rates would go up or down based on this, but it's just something to be aware of as we consider changes to employee pay. Next slide please. And so we are back to looking at the demographics of the pay plans. And so what we've got here is it's the same data two different ways. So on the left is just the raw numbers. And these are broad categories of both race and gender, trying to simplify it so we could get it on one slide here. But you can see the relative size and the relative makeup, the numbers on the left, and then the percentages on the right. All right, we can jump to the next slide please. And here we'll start getting into a little bit more detail on the options, the compensation options that we have. So the first is pay for performance. And this goes by a couple different names. Some groups refer to it as merit pay, or you'll hear this P4P or see that. But what we're talking about here is a percentage increase that's applied to an employee salary. So a lot of our employees that manifest as step movement. And so for all the public safety, sworn public safety employees, and then for the employees in our general step plan, they're going to go up a step within their pay grade. For public safety, that's 5%. For general employees, that's 4%. The open range is different in that there are no steps. It's just it's wide open. And so the amount that an employee in the open range can go up through pay for performance can vary. And that's going to vary based on their evaluation. So in typical matrices that we've used the past couple of years, 4% to 6% has been the amount we usually budget 4.8% as the average. So you see some cost estimates at the bottom. And again, these are big round numbers. But the amount that has been included in the general fund, the multi-year general fund plan that you've already seen, and then an estimate for what it might cost overall if we include the other funds. All right, we'll jump to the next slide. And this is just a quick history because the last couple of years have not been normal for pay for performance. But as recently as FY20, we had full implementation of our pay for performance plan. So everything that I showed you on the previous slide, that happened for employees at that time. That was, of course, also the beginning of the pandemic. And so we did our first round of premium pay, which I want to emphasize is not part of pay for performance. But I wanted to acknowledge it because it was a substantial amount of money for our frontline employees. And those were, that was not permanent ads, of course, I should add. In FY21, we did not do any pay for performance. But we did do, again, premium pay. And we did both percentages and bonuses for FY21. And then for this current year, we did not do our regular pay for performance. But we did provide bonuses to all employees who are rated effective or better. So let's jump over. So this is pay for performance. And then next slide, we're talking about structures. So I'd reference the structure movement. And again, this is what we did for police and fire. So you're familiar with this. And so I just wanted to give some history of when these different plans were introduced and what their movement has looked like over time. Now, we had had some rough timing and that we had the pandemic come up when some movement would have happened. And so we saw that with police and fire, where we did a little movement at the beginning of the year, did the study and then did some substantially larger movement. But we did also move the step plan by 2%. And so those employees saw a direct 2% salary increase. And then we moved the open range by 7%. But again, those employees don't move with the range. So we instead applied a direct 2% adjustment to their salaries. So now let's get on to some approximate costs for some other things that we could do. What we've looked at previously is included in the multi-year. Nothing here is included. So this would be an add. So this would require additional funding or decrease another cost to make any of this happen. So something that we could do is do some additional movement to the structure. So you see the step plan and the open range plan on here with some sample costs for what it would take if we moved those ranges one, two, or 3%. Again, this is general fund only. So you can add a little, an extra 30% on there for some of the other funds, just as an estimate. As I noted before, the step plan, you can see the cost is considerably higher for a structure adjustment because that's going to directly increase their salaries. Whereas with the open range, it's only anyone who would fall under the new minimum, they'll be brought up to that minimum. And so that's the estimated cost that you see there. The bottom set of bullets is to do that direct salary adjustment to the open range. This can be combined in any way, but again, this just gives you some sample costs, some ideas. If we did want to move the employees in the open range salary directly, that is an estimate of how much it would cost. All right. And then we had mentioned incentives of bonuses. This is something that we currently use. And these are just some examples of places where they are used across the city. One of the advantages of incentives and bonuses is that they can be more targeted. So a structure adjustment and even pay for performance, those are big kind of blunt force movement of salaries across an entire pay plan at a minimum. These give us opportunities to identify and try and address specific issues. And so you can see some of the places where we've used this so far across the city. And we will be discussing additional possibilities throughout the budget process. Next slide, please. I wanted to quickly bring up the Durham minimum livable wage. So this wage will be going up. It's going to jump to $17.60 as of July of 2022. And you can see the annual rate equivalent there as well, just above $36,000. And just an example of how we adjust for that. So we know that in the general step plan, one of those steps, one of those grades is going to be below this minimum livable wage. And so we, at a minimum, will be bringing that step up to meet the new amount. Next slide, please. All right. So as we've been saying a lot in HR and in the city in general, there's a lot going on. So these are some of the other things that we have talked about and that we'll be discussing with the city manager. We've got some reclassification studies going on. So this is when the work that an employee is doing changes. And so we can actually go in and study that and see if they actually belong in a different job. And so we can just change them in place, change the title and the classification and the salary for that employee. We've also identified some hard to fill classifications. Some of these have been going for a while. Some are new. And so we will be looking at some possible solutions. And these are just examples. It goes across the organization. And so we are trying to be creative. Compensation isn't the only solution for all of these. So we're trying to be creative with our solutions, but it will be part of the conversation for sure. Compression and bypassing. So we know that this can occur when there's not movement in a structure or of a structure. And so again, we're going to be looking across the organization, looking at our data, looking at the issues that are arising and seeing if there are ways that we want to try to address any of that. And then I mentioned the part-time structure. This is a big thing. Our friends in Parks and Rec do a lot of work on that. And so somebody, either we or they will be up to discuss this at some point in the future and just let you know what's going on with the part-time structure. All right. Moving on. And to wrap up, I just wanted to give you a little bit of insight into the numbers that we are looking at when we look out across the organization. We're paying attention to a lot. This is just a small bit, but wanted to show you because it is important. And it does get a lot of press. And so we wanted to get some of these numbers out to you directly. So let's start with turnover. And as noted, this is full-time turnover only. The bar chart on the left is our annual turnover, FY22. It's just a year-to-date number. Note that this is without recruits. So you could see a different number, depending on if recruits are included. This is without recruits, just because that tends to be highly volatile. And we do, but we do look at that. It's just not included in these numbers. So that's overall on the left. And then on the right, we've broken it out by the three major types of turnover that we see. And so the light blue line is resignations. The dark blue line in the middle is retirements. And then the bottom line are disciplinary terminations. And so you can see, I mean, this is being driven by resignations. A lot more people are resigning now than had been in previous years. Retirements are also up. We saw a real jump. The most retirements we've ever had on record in one month was in January. And some of that was just people shifting from maybe doing it earlier or maybe doing it later in FY22, and instead just doing it in January. But regardless, it's going to be an elevated number for us. So let's jump to the next slide. And we can look at turnover in a slightly different way. So now we're looking at it by pay plan. And so what we're looking for here is our different things happening in the different pay plans. And when I look at this, the first thing I was actually struck by was how similar they are. I didn't really expect to see it quite so similar. But on the left, that's that overall turnover number again. And you can see it, it's not the same, but definitely very similar patterns across our four pay plans. The middle set is resignations only. And so you can see a little bit of the variation there. But again, it's a pretty, pretty consistent pattern that we're seeing there. And now in the final slide over there, we see that retirements have really jumped up in fire and police. And that jump that we saw there in January that I had mentioned, that is where a lot of those retirements were. So we would expect to see a little bit of reversion to the mean, as they say, like that'll probably smooth out a little bit just because people did kind of clump around that January date. But it's absolutely something that we are keeping an eye on. And the reason I bring this up is because you would do different things if your turnover is due to resignations versus retirement or if it's happening in different locations. So let's jump to the next slide. And this is just a broad look at hiring. And again, we're looking at buy pay plans. This is just a number of new employees that we are bringing in by pay plan, especially in the sworn pay plans. We actually see a lot of promotion. So it's really just the recruits that are coming up and then they're promoted up through the ranks. So this is only considering new employees coming into the organization. And what we see is a pretty, pretty strong downward trend through FY21. And then it looks like a leveling for FY22. But the important thing to note is that, you know, this is a this is an actual number and it's only partway through the year. So we are actually seeing hiring pick up a little bit more, which is great. So we are very excited to see that happen. Next slide. We've heard a lot about vacancies and we definitely do have a lot of vacancies. This is probably a slice that we don't look at too much just by pay plan. And so you can see we do have a lot of vacancies in that step plan. And then sworn police is next open and fire. What's important during the budget process is the duration. So this is one of the things that we we really look at. And if a position is vacant for a really long time, you know, we take a good hard look at it, we do budget does city manager does and see if that is a position that could possibly be repurposed in a different way so that we're not adding positions to the budget, but we're more adapting to the types of work that need to be done. So yeah, so that's that's vacancies. Again, very high level look at it. Let's jump to the next slide. And just wanted to share, you know, that's a little tiny bit of data, but there's a lot more stuff that we're going to be looking at. Again, it's it's pretty early in this process. Normally, we wouldn't be speaking with council about compensation until much much later in the process, but we wanted to get ahead of it and get a little bit of guidance. But these are some of the other things that we are going to be considering. There was just a discussion earlier this week among some of the HR professionals in our region. So we're going to be putting together a survey so that we can all see what each other are thinking of doing. And then of course, we're all keenly aware of the more regional and national numbers around inflation and the consumer price index and all that. So of course, we want to be responsive as the situation changes. So I will wrap it up there and open it up to any questions that you may have any additional detail that I can provide. Good morning, Scott. I do have just a general question in terms of the vacancies that you're seeing in the step arena. Are there jobs? Are they in clusters or just across the board? Are there specific positions that we're having trouble filling? Yeah, it's a combination there. For the most part, well, this is changing a little bit. But for the most part, the positions that have been harder to fill are more technical positions. But we are seeing, I made mention of a CDL issue that we're attempting to do. This is a new thing. There's some new requirements around that. And so we're anticipating that there's going to be some challenges in that arena. I'm pulling up my vacancy report right now so I can tell you what some of the bigger vacancies are. We love our data in HR. I want to try and get you the most accurate data. So it's the positions that we actually have the most of. So the top six are all maintenance positions that are vacant. So what we're seeing there is probably competition with construction. And so they can be much more dynamic with their salaries. And as we know, when you walk around, there's a lot of construction going on right now. And so that is probably driving at least some of those issues there. JJ, you probably didn't see it in the chat, but Council Member Reese requested vacancies by departments. And I know we can do that. Yes. Hey, I just had a quick question that you made out of the answer to this, but I'm wondering if that leveling out and potentially increase in hiring in 2022, is that happening broadly in the labor market? Is that something we're seeing? Because obviously our trends are mirroring the national trends. And I'm wondering if this is an improvement that we're seeing across the board or if we're just getting lucky. Yeah, I think generally, and so it's very variable for different organizations, different industries. But the churn, so that turnover, so every turnover that can involve, that's a new vacancy that we then hire to fill. But if that person leaves, the vacancy, the hiring, the vacancy rate and turnover are all intertwined. And so what we're seeing is really that churn. So yes, a decent amount of hiring, but in some cases, people not sticking around as long. And we have seen some of that as well, just lower 10-year, less connection to the organization. I mean, the last two years have been rough for everybody, but if most of your work has been over Zoom, for example, there's just not as strong a connection to the organization. That's not everything, but that's part of it. Thank you. Madam Mayor, if I might. Good morning. Thank you. Good morning, colleagues, friends, everybody watching. JJ, good to see you, man. I don't know if I've done it publicly on record. Let me just congratulate you on your assumption of leadership. You're in the department and congratulating a great job you've been doing. Really hit the ground running. I want to also personally thank you for the assistance you've given me. I've had a couple of inquiries to HR and preparation for this budget process. You and your entire team just do really bang up work down there. So thank you for the work your shop is producing. So a couple of things. Firstly, I'm curious as to how much, I'm sure we've always been invested in flexible work policies, but I'm wondering pre-COVID, post-COVID, how much more of our workforce is being recontorted or impacted by flexible work policy? Is it much more now than pre-COVID? I'm sure it was a value of ours, but talk a little bit about that if you would. It is much, much more, much more now. We had some flexible work in the organization, but it was nothing like this. It was in the tens of people maybe who would take advantage of it. It just wasn't something that we did generally. We have made a point, and I think the city manager and deputy city manager have been very clear that when we were even developing the flexible work policy that it was meant to be a beyond COVID thing. This was not purely around keeping people out of the office to keep them safe. This policy was designed really to optimize work. I think we have really, especially among cities, been pretty aggressive in this front and can really be leaders on understanding how we can get the work done and serve our residents, but also it can be really beneficial for the employee experience, employee well-being. Well-being is a big concern right now, and so flexible work can move us in that direction if it's done correctly. Like I said, we have 350 agreements that we've gotten in, and so agreements are kind of the process where we make an employee define what they're going to do. They have to work it through with their supervisor, get it approved by a department director. There's definite structure to this. We would expect another 100 or so in this initial batch, and then we're going to monitor. We're going to see over time how this works. If we need to, if we can expand it, if we need to pull it back a little bit, what kinds of... Am I frozen or is JJ... What are the issues? Oh, did I? He froze just for a minute, but you're back. Okay, sorry. I try to come to City Hall and hope it's better, but sometimes you get caught. But yeah, so we'll be evaluating the program over time to see how we can do it better. Thanks for that. When I've spoken to business owners throughout the city, and one of the things that we're discovering is they want customers in traffic back, but because folk are kind of re-contouring and reconfiguring their work life, not coming into the office more, there are ripples everywhere. Speaking of ripples, I was also wondering as we make decisions about compensation and budget, are there economies that we're realizing in other areas? If we've got more people working at home, how does that impact in terms... I know we've got to still pay benefits and salary, but the less light's on. How does that impact equipment costs and things of that nature? Are we realizing economies, maybe not of scale, but economies and other areas' impacts because of that? I see the manager's pops on. Yes. It's hard for me to stay in the background when we start talking about some of these things that I wanted to pop in to say, when we talk about what JJ has mentioned, we got 2,600 employees and we have about 350 that have these flexible work plans. So when we talk about, are there efficiencies or are we saving? It's not really that measurable because regardless of where someone has to work from, they still got to have equipment. We're not really saving power or those kinds of things. Potentially, if there's no lights on in one office for a day or so, we may be saving it, but I don't know that it is really measurable. It will be a very, very minimal amount, if any. If I could just touch on your earlier question when you asked a little bit about people coming in, the public coming in, it has been made very clear to us and to staff that customer service levels can't be impacted. We saw that a little bit through the resident survey a couple of weeks ago. Our customer service, our employees are doing just a fantastic job. We want to do this and we want to do it right and the customer experience is absolutely a part of that. Let me try, I'll find a question about actual the step in the structure plan, kind of, I guess, mediate or be a whisper for some of the questions I'm even getting now from members of the public watching. As things, our status quo was 5% for step for public safety and 4% for general. I'm looking at the potential numbers of a 1% increase, 2% increase, 3% on the step plan, open range, open range market. Is the looming decision before us going back to status quo that 5%, 4% and what it would look like plus that 1% or 2% on the structure? So, in other words, 5% be 6%, 4% would be 5% and the cost. Is that ultimately the decision we need to make as a council? Yeah, that's absolutely part of it. So, everything that's on that initial slide is baked into the gap that you have seen. Anything that's on the later slide, so those options, those would be ads, yes. So, if we already said we're going to do the pay for performance, the step movement, but additionally, we wanted to move the entire step structure that for general employees, yes, then those numbers that you see on that slide would come into effect. And is it the staff's intention, and I saw the caveat that it's still early in the process and there's things that need to be done, is it the staff's intention ultimately to bring us a recommendation or is this purely resting with the council to prescribe what that increase or non-increase should look like? It's in about a I'm sorry, go ahead, Linda. I wanted to say tomorrow we will have budget guidelines and what has happened in the past is there the range of increase because we have a lot of work to do to balance the budget. And what you would typically see is an increase or a market adjustment not to exceed a certain percentage and then the recommendation coming forward will be within that range. And that would be a discussion that we would actually have tomorrow with you because it does have such an impactful, you know, it's so impactful on the on the budget. Right. And I appreciate that. And let me tell you what animates my question. I knew that, but when I saw that there's still some eyes that need to be dotted and teaser need to be crossing variables that need to be substituted. I didn't know how that was going to impact tomorrow's discussion if we were still waiting on market studies or regional studies or if it was early in the process, how early in the process actually are we because I was anticipating that discussion tomorrow. So that's the only reason. Yes. So one of the reasons that we, you know, we have not actually done market studies for those pay plans that are not police and fire. So you will recall, we did specific market studies for the police and fire positions. We have not done that for the other positions that we have, but we know that because, you know, we only increased the structures to 2% last year. And, you know, we all realize what's happening around us that there's got to be some need for to increase some of those positions, even without a study being put in place. You know, we can't we is particularly in our regular pay plans. We have over 200 different job types that we have very many more job types than we have when we talk about our police and fire personnel. We have, you know, less than 20 job types in those, you know, in those pay plans. But in our general and our open pay ranges, we have over 200 of them. So, you know, we don't always do a full pledge market study on them, you know, every year. We did last do it in 2019, which was part of JJ's presentation here this morning. So the reason we have the range there, there will be some of our other cities and counties that are making decisions about market adjustments. And those are some of the competitors that we have for employees. And we just kind of want to stay in, you know, in balance with with, you know, with Raleigh and others. And some of those decisions have not been made about their pay increases at this point. So I think that is the, you know, specific answer to why we say we're not, you know, we're not quite there. We, you know, we'll never be there today when we're actually putting the budget together. But we do want guidelines, you know, regarding the things that you have not, we have not already told you that is in what you've seen in the current gap that we presented. And so that's what is meant by that. Well, thank you so much, Madam Manager and JJ. I'm going to yield now, but I do want to say that, you know, this, what we see here today really does not do justice to the incredible amount of work and how nuanced these considerations are and how fraught really this is, because, you know, you think you just throw more money at it, but then you've got compression issues and bypassing issues. You guys just deal with so much stuff down there. So we're really grateful for what you do for us and for helping us get through this, perhaps the most important part of our budgetary consideration. So thank you. Appreciate it. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'll yield back. Well, all right. If there are no other questions, we can proceed. Well, JJ is on the screen. I'll just say the only reason I didn't pop in in this discussion and you should, I think you are already aware of this is our staff and JJ staff have been meeting weekly since the fall on not only this issue, an entire variety of issues where budget and human resources intersect every week we met yesterday. And so everything that was expressed by JJ and by the city manager is aligned with budget thinking. There's no need for us to provide additional comment. And with that, thank you, JJ. And we're all right to move forward. It's 10 o'clock. I think I'd like to turn things over to Director of Communications, Beverly Thompson, and she's going to do an introduction for us on the Language Access update. Thank you, John. I really appreciate it. The morning Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, City Council members and City Manager Page and Stout. John, thank you so much for allowing me the pleasure of introducing the city's first ever Language Access Coordinator, Michelle Gomez-Sespadez. Michelle joined the Communications Department in September and has done an absolutely amazing job. I believe she and the work she does fit perfectly in the communications department. You know, at the heart of communications is being able to share information in a meaningful way, so that the person on the receiving end can be informed enough to engage in some way. That is also the goal of Language Access, providing information and the right language, the correct language, to enable a person to understand and be informed enough to engage with the city. I'm so excited for you to meet Michelle and hear about her accomplishments and her future plans for ensuring that providing Language Access in Durham is just how we do business. Thank you. Thank you so much, Beverly, for that introduction and thank you all for allowing me the opportunity to be here this morning. I'm really excited to share with you all the work that's been done so far regarding Language Access. But first, I would also like to thank Beverly for her incredible leadership of the Communications Department and for the work that she's done so far with Language Access and leading us up to this point, as well as thanking my team and the Communications Department as a whole for the incredible efforts that they've done as well and also welcoming me as part of their team. So thank you all. It looks like the budget team is also going to be presenting the presentations. I'll wait for that to show up on screen and then we can get started once that's online. All right. Thank you. Alrighty. So thank you again for this opportunity and again, it's an honor to be present here and to present to you all the city council members. And so let's go ahead and move forward. Please go to the next slide. Thank you. So I would like to take an opportunity to share a little bit about myself and my role. As Beverly mentioned, I started with the city of Durham back in early September and I'm housed in the Communications Department. I began my role head on and taking a look at the LAP and analyzing what that work looks like. And so as I move forward with my role as LAP coordinator, my role is to direct and guide the language access plan implementation, as well as offer strategic guidance, training, and departmental support on language access efforts across our city. And I assist in identifying bilingual staff, language service vendors, and other resources for our city department. Next slide, please. And so before I share about the city's language access plan and what we've done so far, I want to share with you some of the things that I've been sharing with our city staff to inform us and get us all on the same page and get familiarized with the concept of language access to help us understand why we're pushing forth this effort here in our organization. And so taking a look back at what language access means, when we talk about it, we mean providing individuals who are limited English proficient, reasonable and equitable access to our services and resources. Similarly, as we do with our English-speaking individuals. Next slide, please. And the term limited English proficient, or LEP, as I'll be using from here now, is one that is used and heard a lot throughout when we discuss language access. So I've taken the time to, I've also taken the time to share what this term means with our city staff so that we can all understand what we are referring to when we say someone is limited English proficient. And so as defined by the US Census and the American Community Survey, LEP speakers are individuals who speak English less than very well or in much simpler terms have the limited ability to read, write, understand or speak English. Next slide, please. And so one of the things I like to say is that our goal for language access is to provide language services to all who need them when they're interacting with our agency. But one of the common questions that we do get asked is how do we determine the LEP population group in which we are to provide language services to. And so our language access plan points us to the Safe Harbor Guidelines by the Department of Justice that state by offering language services to at least five percent of the city's population or a thousand people, whichever is smaller, and who speak a primary language other than English and have limited English proficiency is strong evidence of compliance with Title VI, which is something I will discuss further in the next slide. And so taking these guidance from the DOJ helps us identify the language group for our language services and who we are to provide language services to. And currently, according to our policy, Spanish is the only language group to meet this criteria. When we take a look at Durham's demographics, we see that we have a Hispanic population of 14.4 percent according to city data from 2019. And when we take a look at the American Community Survey from 2019, 5.3 percent of that population that speaks Spanish at home is limited English proficient. Next slide, please. And so there are two legal bases that support providing language services to LEP speakers. And the first one is Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. This prohibits agencies that receive federal financial assistance, like us here at the City of Durham, from discriminating based on race, color, or national origin in the provision of any program or activity. And so when we take a look at how the federal government interprets discrimination based upon national origin, it defines it as the failure to define or, excuse me, the failure to ensure LEP individuals can effectively participate in or benefit from our federally assisted programs. And then when we take a look at the second legal basis, the second legal basis is the 2000 Executive Order 13166, which affirms Title VI language access requirement and provides additional guidance for how agencies can fulfill those requirements. And so as I mentioned, the Department of Justice is the agency that oversees compliance of Title VI. And while these two legal bases do exist, most of the time states and individuals, governmental agencies enact their own language access plans and policies to best support the populations that live in their communities as well as basing them off their available resources and efforts. Next slide, please. Thank you. And so bringing it back to Durham and what this means to us. So we know that here at the City of Durham, we have residents that come from all over and that speak a variety of languages. And so as part of our commitment to effectively communicate with members of our community, we're working to reduce this communication gap with our LEP residents and the city through our language access plan. And so next slide. And so a little bit of background on the LEP, as we all know, the City adopted this plan back in 2019 to better serve the community and advance a language access effort that helped make our city be a more welcoming and inclusive place for us to live and for our immigrant and refugee communities and those that are non-English speakers. And so when we take a look at the LEP, we see that it serves as a tool to ensure compliance with Title VI, as well as helps us meet the City Strategic Plan Goal 3, which is creating connected, engaged, and diverse communities. However, the main purpose of the LEP is to ensure that we are providing limited English proficient individuals meaningful access to our services and our resources. And so I'd like to point out the term meaningful access because it is another term that is used a lot when we talk about language access and it's what drives us in terms of what and the efforts that we're pushing forward. And so similarly to that of the language access definition, meaningful access as defined in our LEP policy means providing LEP individuals the same ability to use and enjoy the services that our English-speaking individuals do. And so and the way of course that is achieved is by eliminating communication barriers that ensure our residents can communicate with us and that we can communicate with them effectively. Next slide please. And so now I want to take a closer look at some of the key parts of the LEP that guide our organization in bridging this communication gap and helping us push forward towards meaningful access. And so for starters, the language access plan outlines that we provide interpreting services to non-English speakers either through a language service or the assistance of a bilingual employee. It also sets forth in interpretation standards where interpreters must meet both linguistic and culturally competency standards, where they should also be able to accurately and impartially interpret to him from both languages, as well as test bilingual employees for language competency to receive a language incentive pay. And then another way that we are to provide meaningful access to our services is by also providing written translation of vital documents, which are documents deemed necessary for an individual to be informed, to be able to access a service or a resource from our city. And so examples of vital documents can include information such as city policies, brochures about city services or emergency preparedness information and more. And so it's really up to departments to identify what their vital documents are and ensure that they're translated into the language that meets the substantial number of the LEP population group, which in our case is Spanish. And the plan also outlines that we place signage and notices that inform and invite our residents to request interpretation and translation services as they were to need them. And of course, the only way that the LEP can truly be effective and help us move towards meaningful access is to have staff informed on policies and procedures. So it outlines that we provide opportunity for staff to be trained on the LEP to ensure knowledge and compliance and provision of language services. And we are to also track and collect data from the monitoring and updating of our language access efforts. This is so we can measure how we're doing as an organization and bridging that communication gap and identifying any areas and for improvement and for us to work on. And then lastly, the LEP also notes having a complaint and investigation process in place for residents that may not have been adequately been provided language services according to the city's LEP policy or FACE discrimination based on their LEP status. Next slide, please. And so since the adoption of the LEP, I do want to highlight some of the work that has been done up to this point to move us forward with our language access efforts. Next slide, please. The city established a language access plan steering committee to provide inside on language access efforts that were taking place in that were taking place across the organization, as well as help push out the implementation throughout their departments. And so our committee has grown up to 30 members that represent 20 of our public facing departments. And we meet monthly to discuss matters of language access, how to support departments with language access efforts as well as get them informed about new resources or progress on where we're at with the implementation of the LEP. Next slide, please. And the city also has contracted with language services for departments to use for interpretation translations needs. And so these services are contracted through the communications department. And the first one is one that most departments have already worked very closely with and that is language service solutions. This service provider provides interpretation and translation services in Spanish. And then the second provider known as language line solutions got established as a second service just a few weeks ago, probably early February, to be exact. And so they provide telephonic and video interpretation services for instantaneous access to an interpreter, as well as interpretation and translation services. And so they also provide language assistance or interpretation and translation for languages outside of Spanish, if we were to need them, including ASL. And so that's one of the key benefits of being with this language service providers that we have access to other languages if departments were to ever engage with other communities that may need language assistance and other languages outside of Spanish. And so for departments to be able to use this service, though, they have to set up an account and then they'll be able to gain access to all the services, including a toll free number where they can access an interpreter over the phone. And then as we know, bilingual employees often get asked to help with interpreting and translating. And so we do have a language incentive pay in place for bilingual employees to get tested for language proficiency and receive an incentive for providing language support in our department. And so we do have a page on our city's internet site where city staff can locate qualified employees that provide bilingual services, as well as find information about our other language services, such as the rate sheets, or even guides on how to get started or use the language services. And that's available to all city staff and departments for access. Next slide, please. And I also want to highlight some of the work that has been done in the past few months to increase awareness and understanding about the LEP both externally and internally. And so as part of a communications plan, we developed and launched a language access webpage, well, two of them actually, one in English and one in Spanish. And this was done to inform the public about the city's language access plan and our efforts to make our programs and services accessible to non-English speakers. Next slide, please. Our department also produced three videos. The first one was part of a communications of our department's news program, Bull City Today, to inform the public about our new language access webpage. And the other two videos were where one was in English and one was in Spanish. Those were used to inform viewers about the available language services and our language access plan. And so all of these videos combined received a total of over 3,000 views. And the English language access plan video was even picked up by WRAL and shown during the evening news. So that was really exciting to see that the video was picked up and helped amplify our message about language services being available here at the city. Next slide, please. And so we also published these videos all across the city's main social media channels, including YouTube and the Roku app. And along with general information about cities, our city's efforts on language access. And so all of these posts linked back to the language access web pages. And we also even developed a communications, well, the communications plan also included a partner package that we shared with local organizations so that they could help us spread the word and among our Spanish-speaking community so that they could also be informed about language services here at the city. Next slide, please. And so when we take a look internally, an effort that recently just finished up this week were city-wide webinars on language access. And so there were four opportunities for city staff to join in and learn about key parts of the LAP as well as receive tips and best practices for providing language assistance to non-English speakers. And after each webinar, there was a survey for attendees to provide feedback and we received about 50% of responses. But from those responses, 92% of survey respondents noted that their knowledge and understanding of the LAP increased as well as 90% of respondents said their knowledge and understanding of language services and resources also increased. So that was really, really exciting to see the impact there as well. Next slide, please. And so part of what I showed up to this point has been a small portion of multi-phase action plan that I put together to help us move forward with the LAP. And so I'd like to share with you all what's coming up and what's for us to look forward to as we move forward with the LAP and the implementation. So next slide, please. And so when I began back in early September, I had an opportunity to speak with departments and review a report on where we stood as a city since the adoption of the LAP. And that helped me identify an action plan that to determine our next steps in moving forward. And because this is a large scope of work, I broke it down to three phases where phase one has focused more on targeting, more so on targeting the immediate intangible needs of the city's language access efforts. This has included updating the LAP policy and identifying any emerging language groups that may fall into our substantial number for the provision of language services as well as looking to increase awareness and understanding of the LAP. Because as we all know, COVID put everything on the standstill for many programs, including the language access plan, which was created and stopped it back before the start of the pandemic. And so we've been working to bring this back to the forefront of everyone's minds through the language access web pages, the videos, the social media push, as well as the language access webinars to inform staff on the LAP and our language resources. And another tangible need part of phase one have also looked at establishing the tactics outlined on the plan, outlined in the plan. And this includes creating taglines that go out and important information, as well as increasing signage and notices about available language assistance and much more. And also taking a look at improving the provision of translation and interpretation services. And so we've been collaborating with HR to support the revisions of the language incentive policy and program as well as recently contracting with a second language service provider so that we have more opportunities and more resources available for departments to meet, to help them meet their interpretation and translation needs. And so taking a look at phase two, when we take phase two centers on the long-term efforts of the organization. And so this is much more taking a look more in developing in-depth staff training, a training plan, as well as assessment, looking at data, data collection and reporting, and then also working more closely with departments to be able to tackle their unique language access needs. And then lastly, phase three is looking at overseeing the maintenance and assessment of the language access plan and continuing to support departments with their needs. And so with all of that said, this work is large and it's going to take time for us to reach a place where this work becomes more so the second hand nature for a lot of us. And so as we move forward, it's going to take all of our organization to be committed to language access and increasing meaningful access so that we can continue making our city a more welcoming and inclusive place for all of our community members. And so now I finish off with sharing my contact on the next slide and I'll open it up to any questions. Very good. That's a lot of work. That's a lot. It is, yes. Very good. That was excellent. Excellent. Thank you. Yes, I see a question from Council Member Johnson. Oh, hi. Thank you. I don't have a question. I just wanted to thank you for your work. I'm really excited to have you in this position. This is something that we've wanted to move and the city for a long time is to have a staffer who can dedicate themselves completely to this effort. So super excited to have you. And thank you. We're really making progress. And I'm sorry that Council Member Cabello isn't here to see the presentation because this has really been like her baby since she got elected that she's been trying to push us to do more in this language access piece. And so it's great to see how much work has been done. And we still of course always have a lot more to do. But I'm really excited about where we are and I'm really glad to have you here to keep moving us forward. So thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much. I see a question. Handray from Council Member Freeman. Yes. Thank you. Thank you. I also want to echo Council Member Johnson's comments and saying this is phenomenal. I think it's great. I know that this conversation has been going for a long while and this issue does not limit itself to just Spanish. And so I do want to ask how exactly are you identifying non-white or black language speakers in the population? Because it seems like a little bit difficult. Yes. And so the language or the limited English, the Department of Justice has a webpage called LEP.gov where they provide resources and information on how organizations can identify populations. And so really it depends because of the guidance they have, the guidance that they provided, which is a 5 percent or a thousand people of a city's population. That's what we're referring to to help us identify. But we do utilize the tools from the American Community Survey, taking a look at our city demographics internally, taking a look at schools, school data in their populations, and specifically taking a look at the languages that are spoken at home. I know for other cities and municipalities, it really varies. And so sometimes that information is not provided by the US Census. And so they refer to their county health departments, school data, as I mentioned previously, and an overall of what are some of the common languages that they interact with in terms of their agency. But since we do have some data from the US Census, that's what we've been looking to to identify the population groups. But we have noted that there has been an increase in Arabic speakers and Korean speakers and most recent data. And so that's why we push book to have a service provider that could provide interpretation and translation services in other languages if we were to engage with with other communities that would need language assistance. Yes. And thank you. I really want to highlight that. I think it's important to acknowledge that most Hispanic, most of the Hispanic community may speak Spanish, but they do also speak Portuguese, French, and other languages. And I don't think that just translating everything to Spanish is the solution. There are many villages in the Mexican community that don't speak Spanish at all. And so I want to make sure that we're not kind of glazing it over. And I know that the work that I've done in Eastern highlighted it for me in a ways that which I wouldn't have thought we would be so deficit on in the city. But I know that we continue to be deficit. And I'm going to be hopeful that we'll continue to move this ball along and the work that you're doing is phenomenal to include Portuguese, French, and Arabic at the very least. So thank you. Absolutely. Thank you. I see a question, a hand raised from Council Member Minnan, please. Thank you so much and good to see you. Congratulations. Thank you. A really great presentation. It's so great to be here. And my colleagues have captured a sentiment I think I definitely need to be echoed. I want to on the record just thank in her absence, Council Member Caballero for her for her shepherding and stewardship of this something that really, you know, goes to the heart of who we are, not just as a city, but as a country. If there's anything unique about the, at least the American or North American iteration of the Democratic experiment is that the proposition that a whole bunch of people that are disparate, not connected by a single bloodline or dynastic land grabs at least not now can come together and govern ourselves and live together. And the ability of folk to be heard and to participate in interface for their government is absolutely critical. So this work is really it's beyond government is sacred work. It goes right to the heart of who we are. I don't also want to miss the opportunity to comment that title six emanates from the 1964 civil rights bill with that flow directly from the work of the civil rights movement and Dr. King at the Testament to the need and the importance of black brown unity and coalition building and cooperation. Of course, after President Kennedy was killed, a lot of gas was given to passing the civil rights bill is 64 and then 65 public common voting rights and 65 public accommodations is 64. This is really, really important work. It's proud to be part of the council that that adopted our language access plan. And and you're right, this should be second nature. This should be part of our DNA as a city. I want to also say that I hope that one of the things that will come out of our budget considerations is an increase in the language incentive bonus from $1,000 to $1,500. Something that I've asked for, I think it pairs nicely with what we've done in terms of increasing our pay for our first responders and what I anticipate we may do in terms of our overall pay plan for the city. I think it makes us a much more competitive employer and it demonstrates how serious we are about accessing our democracy. With that said question, I and you touched on it in the presentation about us us kind of monitoring doing reports and catching stats to make sure that we're in compliance with the language access plan. But how many avenues or portals will members of the public have to grade us on how we're doing? I remember a couple of times hearing from residents and constituents that we didn't have interpretation here or you didn't have the document in Spanish. I know we're still ramping up. But in addition to us kind of policing ourselves, will we be issuing surveys to the public as well? Or would you be looking for on-ramps for folks who are outside of City Hall to score us as well? Great question. I do think that is definitely in the plan and conversations that we've had with our team here. Part of the work plan includes developing a system for us to collect that type of data. And so part of it too includes taking a look at what other agencies are doing so that we can learn from them and be able to identify how to capture that. I know from taking a look at compliance reports from other agencies, they typically only from what I've seen so far that they report on the instances when interpretation and translation was provided and having complaint forms where people can submit their information and be able to share when language services weren't provided. And so that's certainly part of the plan and figuring out a system and a way for us to capture that information. My hope too is that when we take a look at the immigrant refugee communities, which tend to be the large LEP populations, we also have to be cognizant that they can be a little bit hesitant when it comes to sharing personal information. So also taking a look at other avenues where we can probably have small group meetings or conversations in the community where we can engage that information and have opportunities for them to provide input and share their thoughts in terms of where we're at and how accessible we are as an organization. Thanks for that. That's good to hear. And that's all I have. This is such critical work and we're so happy that you're leading this for us and if this council could be of assistance in any way. I know I speak with the entire council. Do not hesitate to ask. This is so vital to our mission as a city and indeed as a democracy. Thank you so much. Madam Mayor, I'll yield back. Thank you. Thank you. Madam Mayor, I just also wanted to chime in. Pretty much my colleagues have said everything that I was going to say. As many of you know, my wife is a former immigrant herself and she speaks multiple languages, fortunately, but she got here. English was a bit tough for her. So I think council member Freeman sort of touched on what I was going to say, ensuring that we have some option of accessibility for other languages. Being said, I think that the work that has been put forth here is nothing short of amazing. And I'm just learning every day how to keep it magical. You make it look so easy. The magical ability that you just have the ability to do it here. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I just wanted to go on record and show my appreciation. Thank you. Thank you. When I see your hand raised again, did you have a comment? I did. I was just trying to leave space for others who hadn't spoken yet, but I just wanted to also follow up. I realized when council member Meadowton mentioned the compliance, just acknowledging that the ADA compliance probably is a good compliance model to follow. I don't know if you're partnering with the conversations that are occurring in the city around ADA, but it would probably be good. I don't know what the work plan looks like, but yeah. Some of the staff around that. Absolutely. Thank you for that. I'll make sure to reach out and start conversations around that so we can take a look and see how we can combine it. I know recently I'm part of a language access network with language access coordinators from other agencies, and I know this was recently a conversation that came up too in terms of how to combine language access with ADA work. I want to say that we have an underutilized office in the building. It might be. Yeah, I would just like to have some more conversations about this. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions for Michelle? Well, thank you so much. Michelle, I appreciate you coming here today and giving us that overview. I don't think this body needs reminding, but perhaps some others aren't aware that this is specifically addressed in our strategic plan as an initiative to expand the outreach and engagement to non-English speakers in our communities. So it's very, very important. We're happy to have you here. Yeah, absolutely. Thank you and thank you all again for the opportunity. Thank you. So before moving forward, I just wanted to check the temperature of the mayor, mayor pro tem council members. Do you want to press on or would you like to take a break now? I'm good. That's up to you all. Let's continue. Very good. So moving on, we're going to give an update for you all on the council budget requests. And I will be providing that for you with the assistance of assistant director of budget management services, Christine Reardon. Christine Reardon. So just as an overview with this, as you know, you've were provided the presentation in advance and also a packet of we were able to use a tight turnaround, but we were provided to do some analysis within budget of the items that were submitted. And I hope that is helpful to provide sort of some some ideas around it's not a full analysis. We didn't have the time to do that, but certainly we were able to take some time to kind of flesh some things out and give give some of these things, some context, some of our ideas around what some of the challenges would be. And we did some scoring. We'll get to that. Take the scoring with, you know, with a dash of salt. It's scoring is not the be all and end all. But again, we tried to provide you with some basis to make a decision. So the city manager alluded to this, but some background on the history of council budget requests. We began this process three years ago in the budget process for FY 21, which began to almost precisely two years ago in calendar year 20 council members wanted to be more transparent with the types of requests that they had submitted in each budget cycle. On March 5 council, there was a work session where they discussed individual budget requests and came up with a prioritization methodology at a city council work session. And then the coronavirus pandemic hit and that process was suspended that year. So moving on to last year in FY 22, we initiated the process again beginning in December 2020 and council submitted 11 requests last year, totaling $2 million. On February 4, a methodology for making decision was selected using a scorecard ranking. On the 25th, BMS staff vetted the requests through this ranking and shared it one of the budget retreats. And there was a discussion at that retreat with city council on the requests to provide guidance to staff and just if that's a tip to say that's the direction we want to head in with today's discussion. And then on May 2021, that was, I'm sorry, Christina, I forgot the last item there. I think city manager used the guidance in developing the proposed budget. So this year, substantially fewer requests, you see, I believe, seven there that one of them has been broken out. There are actually six items that were brought in. So I'll briefly go over them. One has been referenced already, city language incentive pay increase, advanced by Mayor Pro Tem Middleton, a reoccurring amount of $40,000. An item, the Durham open space and trails land acquisition, which was advanced by council member Caballero. And I've split this because a part of the request was $1.5 million for land acquisition. But in addition to that was a request for an FTE for a full time employee. Where that would be housed, there's some discussion about is where that would be best served. But with benefits that position would be approximately $108,000. That would be a reoccurring thing. The question mark next to the land banking is, DOSC submitted this item and they said, well, for now, that's all we would need. But there is some question about future land acquisition. So that's why there's a question mark there. Continuing increased funding for boards and commissions, that was advanced by council member Johnson. Just in addition to an amount that already exists of $4,000. Increased funding for council interns, again, advanced by council member Johnson, the increase would be about $26.5,000. And that is to provide an intern for all council members. An employee ownership technical support pilot program, that would be a two-year pilot housed in the Department of Office of Employment and Workforce Development. For, there's a one-time amount that, well, it's $75,000 over two years, I believe. And then finally, shot spotter technology, partially subsidized a pilot, so a one-year pilot advanced by Mayor Pro Tem Middleton. The one-time expense for the pilot would be $197,000. But there is an option that you see fleshed out in the materials of possibly extending that to a four-year contract. And that's why you see, I think, the high on that is about $700,000. So the current process, BMS staff reviewed the requests provided by council with an analysis for each of the requests. And we scored submissions for council using the scorecard methodology developed. I know in past years, we asked council to do some scoring. We simply didn't have time for that this year. Also, we didn't know that there was as much value. Scoring is more useful when you have 11 items. I don't know how useful it is with five or six items. That's why I said I would not pay too much importance to the scoring. It was just something to help you. So the scorecard rating, this is the same system that you had used in past years, scored on impact, population served, advances in equity, strategic plan alignment, funding frequency and administrative impact. And these are how it kind of parses out, whether an item is transformative, the population served, to what degree advances in equity as a yes or no question, strategic plan alignment, whether it's at the level of a goal or an objective or an initiative. The frequency is a big thing. One time funding is easier than reoccurring. And administrative impact is a very big consideration, I would say. Allowing departments, and I think that would probably take up the most consideration in further evaluating these processes. We would probably want to do a much deeper analysis of how departments, our department's structured to take on some of these things. Some of them are easy, $4,000 for language incentive, I don't think is a big consideration. Whereas taking on a program, a pilot program and OEWD, that's something we really want to engage the department on more on to see if they have the capacity. So this is how the staff scored these things. One would be ranked the highest, five would be the lowest. Again, I will stress to you, when we score things, you kind of take a lot in consideration. Scoring is helping you to prioritize, but it doesn't give you the context. You need discussion over these things. The flip side of that would be that sometimes simply discussion can lead to anecdotal information, that's why you want a scoring. And we could certainly over many of these have differences of opinion about whether something is transformative. I think in some of these cases that you could make the argument that that remains to be seen, whether it serves a full population or not. Those are typically in CIP discussions where we have a lot of history of scoring methodology usage. That is a lot of the struggle that we go through. But this is just internally what we came up with. And just the next slide kind of gives you a different look at that. So the OEWD program ranked highest. The internal funding for the intern funding came lower. And then just some of these I've alluded to, but some discussion points, some things to consider as you're going through these, the language incentive pay. I think there's kind of two trains running here. It was already something submitted by the communications department concerning this. So we certainly want to consider Council or Mayor Pro Tem's item in consideration with that. They will probably inform each other. The open space and trails land acquisition. There's a lot of consideration that needs to be done with that about it's a DOST initiative, but exactly where that should is the proper place for that program to be housed. There would be county involvement in that. So I think a lot of discussion we would need to initiate with the county to see whether they want to come in on this. The funding of boards and commissions, the funding for interns, somewhat simpler. It's just an increase to something we're currently doing. OEWDs, the employee ownership, it's a two year pilot. So and I've already alluded to this, we want to engage the department on that shot spotter. There's a host of considerations here. It's something we've considered before. Police Chief Andrews is available on the meeting. Should you want more information on that? I know Mayor Pro Tem Middleton in his submission suggested some community engagement around this initiative. Certainly I don't think it's ready out of the box, but we certainly want some community discussion around shot spotter. Our next steps would be to get some guidance from you, some agreement on these requests, which ones you'd like to continue moving forward if there's any you feel are not, there's not a consensus around moving forward. We've also alluded to this. We can include the recommendations in the budget development guidelines document that we will visit tomorrow. Last year, I believe the language was City Manager will consider approved or those items that were deemed to move forward. I think we're recommending similar language. And then the approved requests can be considered a possible discussion in the proposed budget, which will be presented on May 16th at the City Council evening meeting that evening. So with that, I believe that gives you a framework, a structure for discussions and we are happy staff is available. As I say, the Police Chief budget staff to answer any further questions on these items. Thank you so much. I'll open up the floor for colleagues, comments, concerns. And I'll kick off. That's all right. Just real quick. John, thank you so much for this really important work and for the work the staff has done. I did just want to clarify something with respect to the initial shape of my initial request relative to ShotSpotter. It was a million-dollar placeholder. I appreciate the due diligence that the staff did. And I think the four years, you said possible four years, whatever, it's still south of a million dollars over four years. But I did just want to clarify for the record that my appreciation for the specific cost for this fiscal year would be if we did it, but that it was a million-dollar placeholder. Not knowing how things would parse out ultimately, but I just did want to clarify. That is correct. Thank you. Absolutely. Thank you. Thank you, Madam Mayor. I'll have more to say later. And I see Council Member Johnson has her hand up. Hey, thank you. Thanks for doing this work. Appreciate the analysis. Just wanted to give a little bit more context to the OEWD proposal. I have had some conversations with Andre about it already, and it would be a contract with an outside provider to provide the services. So OEWD would just manage the contract, and they indicated to me that they have the capacity to do that.  And then the thing about interns, so I had a brief conversation with Diana about interns, and we realized that it was difficult to, the amount of funding we had, it would be difficult to hire somebody who could be there for the entire semester, just because we didn't have sufficient resources. I don't know what folks' plans are for hiring interns. This is kind of like, if everyone wanted an intern and everyone wanted them for the entire semester, this is the amount of money we need. But if people don't plan to hire interns, for example, I have no plan to hire an intern, then we don't really need to move it forward. So I feel like we should just have more conversation about what people's actual plans are for interns over the next year. We might not, I mean, it's a small amount of money relative to lots of things, but we might not need it in the budget. And given that the analysis was pretty, like that it was kind of a low score, I wouldn't want to prioritize it over other items if we're, and it's a small amount, so maybe it doesn't matter. But we should have more conversation about whether or not people want interns. Thank you. Yes. Should I go or should? Yeah, sure. And then, and then Council Member Williams, sorry. Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Good to see you all. Apologies for being late. I appreciate the patience. I just wanted to share that the items that I brought forward are actually asks from, you know, Durham open spaces and trails with the supportive environmental affairs board and I think some other commissions. And those are longstanding requests. I think this is now, it's the fourth year that those requests have been made. So I do feel like that is a priority. So I just wanted to add that kind of clarification that I am acting. And so as Council Member Freeman, as our liaisons to those boards and just helping them route those items versus, you know, I want to acknowledge the work that those people have done because they've been very diligent advocating for that. I also want to share that I know with like the fund, you know, there's the, there's the position and then there's the fund. And I think that honestly any amount we can dedicate would be a win, quite frankly. So I want to just share that so that people aren't like, oh, that's a lot of money up front. I think the idea is that we just make a commitment that we could build upon. I think that the position is something that folks have been very eager to have because even if we dedicated some funding to an actual, more funding to a fund for open space, if we didn't have a person who was really dedicated in doing that work, we're not really going to hit the targets that I know that the folks were advocating that we do more, that we won't want to accomplish that. So I just wanted to provide that extra context. I do think it should be a priority because it's been something that's been advocated for for several years now. It scores very high on equity. I think because we've been doing so much work around our CIP and other things like that, we're well positioned to do that work extremely well. So I hope that we can get some agreement on that on council. However, we wherever we land on funding that we do at least make a commitment to start to apply a little bit more to the actual fund and then to create the open space and implement her position. And I expect that we will see some some advocacy and some emails and some public comment on those issues because those folks are are are some pretty hardcore commissioners for our city. And I do want to acknowledge that council member Freeman has also been in many of those conversations. Good morning. Good morning, everybody. Questions. Have we I guess, and I didn't submit any budget requests this year because I'm still learning the process and I want to fully appreciate it. But are we submit the budget request? It's this a matter of us initiating something or or have we assessed if there are any external partners that are willing to take the initiative to maybe at least some of these initiatives for us. So by by making a decision today to move forward with these, what you're deciding on is is that the that the process will continue to analyze and consider those in the preliminary proposed budget by by saying by saying no to any of them, the process would stop right here right now. We would do no further analysis or no further consideration. Okay, that's good. I think that answers my concern. I just I again, I I'm more so physically physically logical in a sense. So always try to make it make sense for me. And I know that we've done some pretty cool things in the past, you know. And I know that we have some community partners knocking our doors down. And I'm seeing some of the things they're offering, you know, to work with the city on. So that's why I asked the question whether we need to initiate these things or do we invite partnerships. And as I'm personally focusing on building more corporate better corporate partnerships. The fact that this is considering whether we consider it moving forward is what I wanted to hear. I appreciate that. So thanks, John. I have to like Councilman Williams did not sit any, send any budget requests. And basically, because I felt like I was just too new to this process to begin trying to spend money or ask folks to spend money. So kind of wanted to go through this process and kind of learn before doing that. So today, you're saying that we need to make a decision on the budget requests that have been submitted to move forward or not. Will you guide us through that process? And we take them one at a time. I think what is what do you all normally do? How does that process work? I'm happy to facilitate that in the past. Council is somewhat self facilitated. I think what would be helpful would be to put the items perhaps on the screen. Yes. And another thing I would suggest is to see if there's any consensus around. Well, we just know we want that to move forward or we just know we don't want that to move forward.  And then there may be some, you know, spend the majority of your time on the gray areas where you need discussion. That would be my suggestion. Okay, let's take them one at a time, man. So if Christina can pull up. Yeah, we have someone putting them back on the screen right now. Thank you. And just a reminder that the DOST one is combined and as Council Member Caviero said, the 1.5 could be any amount. Okay, I guess the first question I will ask is if anyone in my colleagues have any questions regarding the budget request that have been submitted, any particular ones? For me, I definitely like the Durham Open Space programs. Those are kind of non controversial in terms of moving forward for me. Also, I think most of them are as a matter of fact. Okay. But are there any specific questions about ones? We may not have any questions. And I think the open space one since that's the longest standing one that you all have been talking about. Maybe that's the place to start. That one's been before us before well before you before folk before. Is there any any questions about that? Adam, are there a hands raised? Did you want to acknowledge in order or just let's jump in? Let's jump in. Let's just have a discussion. Let's round round Robin. Let's go.  Let's see. I had a quick question about the city language incentive pay. That's like a clarifying question, because it might be able to pull it off our queue. If I'm not mistaken, last year when we when we did the language access coordinator because it was getting routed through the department just says it's stating here. All right. And I do want to acknowledge Mayor Pro Tem Middleton because I very much believe we need to fund this. So this is not a I'm pretty sure you're the one who who prioritizes I want to thank you. And so it's not a question about whether we fund it or not. I just know last year we did it through Beverly. And so it was we were basically able to take our language access coordinator ask off our deck for lack of better terminology because it was going to get routed through the department. So I want to hear from staff if that's an option for us. Since it's going to get routed through a department anyway potentially if that's if we're in the same position. Thank you. You are in exactly the same position. So in the matter of the language access at one, even if you said no today, it's there's it's still going to be considered as a submission from the communications department. That clarifies the one that submitted it. John, so are you saying that because I was unaware that the department was going to ask for for $1,000 to $1,500 specific precisely that's what they were going to ask for. And I just got lucky. And I can speak to that, John, if you would like. We did have our communications and our HR department has submitted a request. It's not exactly the same as your request Councilman Middleton. It's kind of more of a tiered approach and there's kind of a it's it's a little bit more complicated than just adding another $500 to the incident. So but it is something that would be considered as part of their their request that they have submitted to the City Manager. Thank you for that. John, I'll lead you to kind of direct if you want to. Certainly. So perhaps that's the easiest. And do you want it to you could say, well, since it's it's already coming forward, we'll leave that one off. I don't want to be presumptuous. Well, yeah, I as the one who kind of initiating it, I, you know, I, I trust that the department whatever the department brings force is going to be generous and on point. But I'd like to see the specifics of the ask relative to, you know, before just kind of taking it off. And that that's not an indication of no trust of the department, but I just I just wouldn't know, you know, what what it looks like relative to my ass. So. So so, Mr. Mayor Pro Tem, I think the discussion around that has to do with if I am correct, then staff can correct me. If I'm not, your specific ask is, you know, we have a certain number of employees, we always have a certain number of employees who have qualified based upon testing that they can speak a second language, and they receive a language incentive because of that. That is right now $1,000 in the assumption here is that your request is to basically change that base number from 1000 to 1500. I believe that the department of communication and Beverly is here as well was working to refine a proposal that as as Christina has mentioned, that was a tiered proposal based upon how employees actually use the language, the second language or the multiple languages in their job. And that was work that the steering committee had been working on, you know, during the time that they have been in existence. So I do not think that it is the identical proposal, but it is, you know, it crosses over and you all will have to decide, you know, if you want, you know, this particular item to advance to simply bring that incentive that we currently have from 1000 to 1500, or you want us to continue to evaluate the tiered program that the department is advancing. Right. I guess my point is I would like to juxtapose it too. I mean, I have no idea that the tiered program that the department is going to advance that the 1500 would be the floor, like the lowest floor of the tier. I do not know what the, you know, the floor would be or the ceiling would be. So just for, you know, decision making purposes, I'd like to just see the two juxtaposed. I'm city manager, if I might add on to what you said, we did do a survey among the the people who have qualified to provide language information or to translate or interpret on behalf of the city. And they did tell us that they preferred a tiered approach because some of them actually work a little bit more than others and they were still getting the same amount. And in addition to that, they are either better in translation or interpretation or they can do both. And they wanted to see them. We wanted to see them compensated for the ability to do more. For example, if they can provide both interpretation and translation, they would get paid more. However, if they could do one or the other, for example, translation or interpretation, they would get paid a little bit less. Let me ask my question this way. And do you know, can you forecast today in the department, whatever the department's going to propose, that the lowest amount you can get is $1,500? Whatever the tiering is, what do you know today that within your proposal $1,500 will be at least the minimum? We are still working on that with budget. And I would have to defer to them to determine what amount in total would be appropriate. And that's my point. Absent that number today, I would need to see the plan juxtaposed with, I mean, if we could say today, it's going to be no less than $1,500. And if you go, you can go up from there. But if the floor is $1,500, then we're good.  If I could interject, I would just like to say that I think this would probably be a good one to hold off on and to just allow the staff to finish their process, because it feels like it's a large undertaking with a whole team of folks, as Councilmember Cavillero explained, and I'm here in Beverly explain as well. And I think that it's probably better to go through their process and figure it out internally to their language access plan, rather than us as a Council kind of over or kind of top down pushing that it should be a minimum of $1,500. So I would just let them go through their process. I think it's already been, you've raised the issue. The request has been heard. I don't think it'll be any lower than $1,500. But that's just my thoughts. Thank you. Thank you, Councilmember. I appreciate the assistance. But that's what I was getting at in addressing the staff. And I'll put a fine point there. Beverly, did you want to respond to that? I agree. We definitely will do more analysis and work with budget and the city manager to determine how we can proceed with implementing the tiered report. Cool. And then we'll juxtapose it to at that point. Thank you. Thank you. A couple of hands raised. I don't want to certainly acknowledge them. Councilmember in no order, Freeman and Councilmember Reese. Councilmember Freeman, will you let me just talk about the pay increase real quick and then I'll step aside for the other things you want to talk about. I just wanted to say first about how grateful I am to the Mayor pro-temper initially raising this issue. It's important that we incentivize these kinds of skills. And so I'm grateful for that. But it's even better that our staff is already working on this. As is often the case, we identify problems and propose solutions that our staff is already hard to work on. My assumption is that after hearing the conversation today and hearing unanimous enthusiasm for additional incentives for our employees to acquire these important skills that the city manager in proposing embedding the budget proposals that come before her will prioritize that in an appropriate way. And of course, once the city manager's budget proposal is released to the public and to the council, the council will have every opportunity to kick the tires to vet that proposal as it relates to language incentive pay. And if the council believes that the amounts proposed in the city manager's proposed budget are insufficient, the council of course has ample opportunity at that time to increase the floor at whatever level and whatever time they see fit. That's why I think it's probably a better idea. And again, with gratitude to the Mayor pro-temper moving this forward and for prioritizing this and for putting this on our agenda today is something to talk about and to reinforce with the city manager and our budget staff how important it is to us. I think it's probably best that this particular council budget request fall by the wayside today so that staff can continue to do their work, put forward the best proposal as they see to encourage the acquisition of these skills on the part of employees who need them. And then for the council, I say the council because it won't include me, for the council to review the budget, the proposed budget from the city manager determined at that time, does this meet the needs that we see in the administration for encouraging and incentivizing the acquisition of these skills? That's just my take on it. It just cleans out this particular process. It simplifies it for us going forward and obviously all of our staff that are involved in preparing the budget process are on notice about how important this particular item is. Just my suggestion. Thank you. Appreciate it. So there are a couple of other items here that are fairly low dollar amounts.  I was just for the next item, I was just going to ask a couple of questions. Very briefly, so there's a couple of items that are very low dollar amounts, the boards and commissions grants and the interns and would not require a lot of work around the analysis. Meaning, I don't, if it's your pleasure to move them forward, I think you should possibly try to get some consensus now on those. It will be my pleasure to move those forward. Does anybody else want to comment or not? I do. And I think I took to heart council member Johnson's comments about kind of gauging what our desires are with respect to interns. I plan on hiring an intern next year. And I think the threshold that these amounts are under, I don't have a problem moving it forward and just having the bandwidth and the bandwidth to do it if we decide. If we don't, it's not like it's a gazillion dollars sitting there or so. I think these amounts are ones that I can live with being in a budget, whether council chooses to avail themselves of an intern or not. We don't have to spend the money, but I don't have a problem with it being there. I was just going to agree with Madam Mayor and just agree to move them forward. Charlie, that's a yes. Leonardo, Jillian and Javier. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I've already, I've already, you know, just started seeking folks that would be interested. I think it's a great way to engage, engage folks that, you know, younger folks that would be interested in the political process. I think this is important. Okay, that's I think three decisions. I see some hands up and I don't know who went up first. So council member Reese. Sure, I wanted to talk briefly about the open space and trails items because it feels like that's next. The I am full support of the new FTE as that's been advocated from our friends at open space and trails for a number of years. I think it's important, but I think it's also important that the administration determine the very best home for that position. I think one thing we have to understand is that we here on the council, I left the door open, we're on the council have all kinds of great ideas about what could happen and what what what priorities might work. But this is the kind of decision that really needs to happen at the administrative level. We need really need to let our staff guide us on that. But I think the position is great. I think the case that DOS has made over the years about how having the position in and of itself generates activity and focus and makes it possible for us to do this kind of work. That's those are also arguments that our colleagues, council members, Calvier and Freeman have made over the years. I think that's really important. So I'm in full support of that with respect to the acquisition amount. I really appreciate council member Calvier's clarification that that's not intended as necessarily a recurring amount. But I do think it's important to put something in the pot to start with, because we don't know how active will this position be in acquiring this? What are the opportunities? What are the costs? How often can we expect to see an amount get used up, get spent through and need to be replenished? I think I can foresee a time when it would become a recurring item. But right now, I just don't think we know enough and I appreciate council member Calvier has been clear about that. I think whatever amount the council decides to put in, I do believe that given that we don't know that this is that we don't believe this is a recurring amount and that we're not sure the best way to fund this going forward. I think the best source of funds for that, I don't think it's beyond our brief to talk about that. Now, I think the best source of funds for that is probably fund balance, because it is the kind of one time cost that we're using to get a program up and running, see what opportunities the position itself can generate through activity and community engagement and looking at that parcels that are on the market or might be might be able to be on the market. This is the reason why you have a position like this. The county's been done a great job with their work. And I think we should we should get into this game as well. So those are my thoughts on those two. Thank you. So with with that, I think I heard four votes now for the DOS item. And again, all that means is and I'm sorry, I heard the mayor, I heard council member caviar. I heard council member Freeman now council member Reese. I just want to be I just want to be clear that the item, the item I support is the open space and trails FTE. I do have concerns about the land acquisition just acknowledging that three pieces of property could be that that 1.5 million. And I would really rather have a process in place through our real estate division that highlights those items. Because I noted there was 44 parcels mentioned in the write up. I know when I submitted this a couple years ago, the land acquisition piece was not with it. And so I would love to have more feedback on that from our real estate division from general services essentially, around where those pieces of parcels are and all of that before we move forward with an amount. Just acknowledging that I don't know that the 1.5 million is necessary today. I agree with Charlie that council member Reese that it would be a better use of fund balance to use those dollars that way, rather than in our budget, well, in our regular budget. And so I just want to look at the process and probably go about this a different way. And so I would vote for the open space and a different process for the land acquisition. So I believe it's so we again, we would just consider this consider both pieces. And I think we've we've heard the sensitivity around the land council member Middleton and then council member. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm going to also add my thanks to council member Caballero and Councilman Freeman for for parroting and carrying a DOS very important ask. And this this is a huge issue for us as a city in terms of equity in terms of our health and well being as a city, I do I'm in full support of the FTE as well. I do have some questions about the acquisition fund. We do we we've taxed ourselves to do affordable housing initiatives. We have a penny for housing. We have a half penny for trails and parts. I'm just wondering. I don't want lazy money just sitting around in anticipation of something that we do all the time as a city where we're poised as a city through other channels to acquire real estate and acquire things when we need. I'm wondering if us as a council may be making it one of our city's goals and values to be vigilant for opportunities to acquire land for open space use would be a better way forward rather than kind of determining some amount, some predetermined amount that sitting at non-interest bearing, I assume, or just sitting somewhere. We don't know what the real estate market is going to look like with it might need more than 1.5. And if we're not going to if this is going to be a fund that's something we're going to look to that's dedicated, it might be better to look at what we do for affordable housing or our trails more so than kind of have, you know, just just fill in the blank amount to sitting somewhere being lazy. And I don't remember that not bearing interest. So I definitely support the FTE, but I think we do need to consider what is our goal. And if it's I mean, as a city, we acquire real estate and things all the time. Is it possible to just use the mechanisms and apparatus we already have in place to acquire real estate with an understanding that this is now one of our priorities and values as a city that as we see these opportunities arise? Because you're going to have to come back before towards anyway, even if it's 1.5 million, you have to come back towards anyway to for any purchase agreement. So we already have a significant war chest as a city. I'm just wondering, do we need to say 1.5 million for this or do we need to say the city significant resources will now be used as you know, in pursuit of this is one of our values. That's where I am on the 1.5 million, but I definitely support the FTE. Thanks. Thank you. I'm glad to hear that folks are in support of the FTE. My understanding and this is a conversation that's happened at the DOS level quite a bit is that we're trying to mirror, I think, in a way what Raleigh is already doing. Raleigh ends up having a fair amount of dedicated land at Durham because Falls Lake is their water. And so they are very interested in purchasing stuff around there. And so it was a if I'm not mistaken, an idea or concept that was mirroring what's already being done by another municipality. But my guess is staff would be able to provide more context for colleagues or even DOS commissioners. I think the FTE position was definitely a priority for those folks just because there's not, you know, there's not anyone identified to do it currently. And we're missing opportunities because of that. But open to whatever, you know, I think that having staff come back or thinking about other ways to do it, I think folks would be happy. I just think they just want a commitment that there's a city commitment that we're going to look aggressively at land that can be purchased and preserved for open space within the urban core, especially because money of the things that we have preserved are out in the county. And so folks who have who lack transit or access to those aren't able to really use the open space that other folks with a car can. I did also want to thank city staff for helping with these items. I did a lot of work and I didn't want to not acknowledge that. So thank you so much. I just wanted to thank the mayor pro tem for putting some thought into what it looks like to try to fund the acquisition portion of this FTE over the long term, because I think he's 100% correct. It makes no sense to be doing this arbitrarily on a periodic basis. And I don't think it makes sense to do it periodically as an ongoing basis from fund about. He's absolutely right. And I think once the position is created, which sounds like it not will be, which is fantastic. And once the position itself, I think the rationale for it is that it generates opportunities to acquire open space. That's why the position exists to do the engagement in areas that need additional open space opportunities to work with city staff to identify opportunities for acquisition and then to engage with staff in the acquisition process. And as the mayor for Tim said, it's something we do a ton of already. I think the justification for putting some money in at the beginning, some again, as rightly pointed out, an arbitrary amount at the beginning is that we don't really know how many opportunities are going to be generated, what the speed to market is going to be in terms of acquisition, what the costs are going to be out there. And I think that's why Councilmember Caviera said from the very beginning, the $1.5 million is a number that they picked seems pretty good to me given what we know about kind of the real estate market right now. And I suspect it won't cover a ton of opportunities. But I think it gives us at least a start. And I think the other benefit we have in setting some money aside at the outset is that otherwise, the mayor for Tim is absolutely right, we've got a ton, we put a ton of resources into real estate and acquiring land across the city as an organization. But I think one of the great things about setting aside a particular pot of money for this work is that then those acquisition opportunities don't have to compete with the other important acquisition real estate acquisition work that the city's already doing. This creates a whole separate channel for the work that the city is not doing right now in an intentional and directed way. That's why the position would be created and that's why the money is important. But I do agree, I absolutely agree that once we seed this work with an additional, and whatever the amount is, $1.5 million is what's in the request that seems fine to me. But once we do seed the request, we've got to start making some really intentional planning efforts about what happens next. And I would anticipate that that work would go, would continue throughout the next fiscal year as we plan for the next next budget. Not this, the one we're working on with the next one. By we, I mean the city as a whole and y'all specifically. Because I do think it makes sense for us to consider some regular funding mechanism exactly like we do it on our affordable housing programming. Obviously, we probably wouldn't need a penny every year, although I'm sure Dost would be psyched about that, but some increment on our tax rate also has the benefit of allowing that, those resources to grow as the underlying tax base grows. So anyway, those are my thoughts about that. It can be done a bunch of different ways, but I think that's the path that makes the most sense right now. Thank you. Council Member Middleton and then Council Member Freeman. Thank you. I want to thank Council Member Riesfer, as usual, is on point, incisive comments. I guess for me, I'm wondering if once we onboard the FTE that the conversation about initial amounts might be better had with that person. And the reason why I say this is because I think at this point, I mean as the council we can determine what our values are and what the priorities are in terms of acquisition. I mean, if we tell staff that we really want to focus on acquisitions that are in support of, you know, protecting our watershed or expanding our holdings in terms of for open space, I mean, we can do that. And I'm confident that the staff will govern themselves accordingly. My concern is that, you know, 1.5 million is 1.5 million that if it's spoken for in the budget, that may or may not get spent, or it's an amount that we can actually, the purpose of the amount is a purpose that we can achieve in other ways through mechanisms already established. Then that's 1.5 million we can't put in a budget somewhere else. And it's taking up space symbolically, if that makes sense. We don't know what, you know, what the acquisition is going to be. We haven't onboarded the FTE yet. And 1.5 million, that's going to go toward our half billion dollar budget. And when we look at other things we need to fund, I just think that giving ourselves that 1.5 million space somewhere else, while still in a position to accomplish what that 1.5 million is aimed at, would just, you know, from a, from a, from an agility point of view, a mobility point of view as an organization, but just put us in better shape. For me, at this point, 1.5 million would be a symbolic nod to the work. And if we don't put it in, I don't think in any way we do violence to still meeting the very noble and necessary goals of what DOS is asking for. We still have the financial wherewithal. We have the agility as an organization. We have a council that can tell this staff, we want you to be vigilant, particularly for acquisitions that serve this purpose. And now we've got 1.5 million of bandwidth that we can use somewhere else in the budget without doing any violence to the noble goals of DOS and the intended result of this ask. That's my position. Thank you. But Council Member Freeman, just before you speak, I just, we, I think we've certainly heard you that that we will pay particular attention around the process for that land acquisition. All of that would be questions that we would ask. And just a reminder on the time, I want to be sensitive to the fact that there's still, I believe, two, two remaining items, the last two items on that list that we need to discuss. Council Member Freeman. Yes. Thank you, John. I just wanted to circle back to Council Member Cavallero's point and just acknowledging the FTE role and the kind of wherewithal of all of this. I do want to make a pinpoint that I do feel like if we don't make it for, I guess, a clarifying point around where this seat, like this seat, like this position should sit. I do want to say that I know that this FTE, and the reason I've been so adamant about it, it has to be someone, someone in planning. It has to be someone engaged in our zoning and development in our city. As Council Member Cavallero mentioned, our urban area is depleting. And without a plan in place for this open space, the dollars won't matter. We won't be able to afford the areas that we're trying to keep available for folks in the urban core. And so that's just one point. And then around the 1.5 million, I do want to be clear, like my main area of concern is that each and every year, if we add $2 million to our budget, where are we going to stop it? I mean, how is this going to trickle out into our community as tax increases? And so I do want to be mindful that if we're going to add that 1.5 million dollar fund, there needs to be a fund that depletes a little bit at the very least. And so just putting that out there. Thank you. So there are two items, the OEWD Employment Ownership Technic Support Pilot Program and ShotSpotter that remain. John, I had a question. And I was having a little dialogue with Councilman Wood Johnson and Mr. Pettigrew in the background. So I'm asking this question because I'm still learning the process. So when it comes to, I guess I sort of alluded to this earlier too, when it comes to initiating programs, if you were to identify an external partner that is doing some of these programs in the community, and this is not just specifically to this one, but just in general, do we have to continue or is it a way that we can identify some of these efforts that are already happening basically? And I'm asking that question because it may be an opportunity for us to get more, to do more, to reach more people or to do less. I'm just trying to get an idea around how this works. And I'm also asking because I may when I do submit a request in the future, I'm trying to learn the process of how I can best expand it and maximize it. I mean, I certainly at this point, I mean, I don't know because I haven't looked in depth, but certainly I think that would be a component of the analysis. Always a consideration in any of these things is there somebody in the is there an external entity that can do the job better? That's part of, but you know, rather than taking on a program ourselves, that's kind of a core component of analysis and a question that we typically ask. Okay, thank you. I love this idea, this concept. I want to make sure that we could get the most out of it. So as we're moving with it, I hope that we could potentially do more, maybe not necessarily in our budgets, but with a corporate part there or so. Mayor Pro Tem, I appreciate, you know, from the floor. Oh, no, John, John, I am a council member, I'm a proud council member that the mayor pretends a new thing. So council members and what a stick. So I appreciate you. No, no worries, buddy. So I did have a question of the technical support pilot program. I did have a question about bandwidth within that department because I know we've got shared prosperity on the menu. We've got built to last on the menu. There's some deliverables we're still waiting for on some pretty big initiatives from that department already. So I did, and I was glad to hear council member Williams and you talk about the possibility of shopping this out. But I guess my question is, is the goal of this pilot to to to prescribe proactively prescribe this model of business to business owners or to help those who ask us for help in it. In other words, are we advocating this as a city, or are we providing support? And what's the market? Have we been getting a lot of ask regarding help in this area? Because I know we get asked all the time about startup capital and capacity, you know, building capacity to, you know, compete for RFPs and things of that nature. But is this something that we're getting a lot of asked for? And is the goal to prescribe it, advocate this, or just be there to help people who proactively come and ask for help? If that makes sense. I can try to respond to some of those questions. No problem. And Andre is not on the call. He is watching, but I told him I would try to answer the questions and then refer anything that I can't answer over to him. So the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center, which is the proposed contractor to develop this program, is a group that supports people who want to start cooperatives and advocates for cooperatives as a business model. I don't think it would be appropriate to say that they prescribe the model to businesses. They are advocates for the model and will help people who want to start cooperatives and other kinds of employee-owned companies start them.  They want to create, to help people create cooperative businesses. It is not an organization that does small business development of all sorts. They particularly focus on employee ownership. They're already part of some work that the department is doing regarding the legacy program, which was to help legacy businesses, particularly focusing on Black-owned businesses transition to employee ownership as a succession strategy. So that's what OEWD has been doing so far and has participated in a fellowship with the National League of Cities and Democracy at Work Institute called SEADS, which trained a number of people and they've been a part of that fellowship program for a couple of years. This would expand the effort beyond just helping legacy businesses transition to also advocate for employee ownership as a model for new businesses and for existing businesses to convert, not just as a legacy strategy. It would be shopped out. It would be a contract with the North Carolina Employee Ownership Center in the city of Durham. And they're currently, Andre clarified for me that we don't have a contract directly with them. We have a contract with another provider that subcontracts with them as part of the legacy program. So I'm not sure exactly how OEWD would want to structure it, but this would allow that partnership to expand to reaching out to additional businesses that might want to start up as cooperatives or convert to cooperatives outside of just that existing legacy framework, which is also an ongoing project that OEWD is doing. They're still building out the legacy work as well. Councilmember, thank you for that excellent primers. So is it your sense that we get into this contract with NC Works or whoever you said that we stroke them and check for $75,000 is part of their job? Do we have an existing caseload or queue of folk that are approaching our planning department or OEWD asking for this assistance? Or will part of the contract be to canvas Durham and find potential users of this service? Yeah, not to my knowledge, Andre could answer that question. But I would be surprised if people wanting to start cooperatives were coming to the city of Durham because we don't have a program. And it's a particular set of technical skills and technical assistance that employees need. And it's different from other small businesses. So I would be surprised if anyone's coming to us about trying to do th