Recording in progress. We are now streaming one minute till broadcast, 30 seconds till title sequence. Again, title sequence. Thank you, good afternoon everyone. The mayor is going to be a little bit late this afternoon. He's attending an event with the governor. So I'm going to preside until he joins us. And two of our members have excused absences today. So it's just gonna be the four of us for a little bit. I will go ahead and call this meeting to order at one o'clock p.m. on November 4th, 2021. Madam Clerk, would you call the roll please? Absolutely. I'll start with you, Mayor Pro Tem. I'm here. Come to member Freelon. Here. Come to member Freeman. President. And come to member Middleton. I'm here. Thank you. Thank you. Are there any announcements by members of the council? Council member Freelon. Yes. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem Johnson and good afternoon colleagues and community members. I just wanted to offer my congratulations to council member Middleton, Freeman and Williams, our newest council member who will be taking over here in word three, as well as our first black woman, mayor, history-making, Elaine O'Neill for your victories on Tuesday. And for all the candidates who threw their hats in and ran races and really just did a wonderful service to our city in exchanging and lively debate around the issues that matter to the people of Durham. So this was just really, I think, just a great week for our democracy and just wanted to acknowledge my colleagues, my new colleague and the candidates. So thank you, Ms. Mayor Pro Tem. Madam. Thank you, council member. Are there announcements? Council member Middleton. Thank you, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. Good afternoon. Good afternoon to my colleagues here and to everyone watching in our community. And thank you for the Freelon. Kind of anticipated some of the remarks. I want to make, I just want to celebrate the wonderful and incredible week we've had here in Durham. I think it was a victory for our city and for progressivism and for just the process here. I want to also celebrate all of the candidates first off who stepped forward to run for office out of love for our city. It's not an easy thing to do. People in your business, they put your address in the paper and folk always scrutinizing you. So I just want to celebrate anyone who has the gumption to run for office, particularly in the city as Durham, where we can get a little rough in politics in Durham, but we love each other and we love our city. I want to celebrate the historic threshold that we crossed this week in electing our first African-American woman mayor. I'm going to salute her honor mayor elect Judge O'Neill, who'll assume the gavel in December for her family and for all of our well wishes and congratulate her on this historic threshold that she's crossed. I also want to congratulate my colleague, Council Member Freeman on her reelection and welcome and anticipation Council Member elect, Leonardo Williams as well. And again, thank all who sought office during this election cycle. Durham's a special place and it's a privilege to be able to sit in one of these seats temporarily, just for a season. We don't own them. We're all here for just a season and hopefully we'll leave it better than we found it. So God bless our city and God bless everyone who will be assuming office and everyone who sought office. Finally, I just want to shout out the Eagles who are in the midst of their homecoming celebration this week. I want to shout out all of my... Yeah, I see it. I see it to all of the Eagles who will be celebrating homecoming to Doc Ock and Lea, entire faculty and staff over at Central, all of the alums who will be traveling here to Durham to hopefully spend some money in our local businesses and our restaurants and our hotels. And I hope you guys whip up on whoever you're playing this weekend for your homecoming game that you will have a safe and enjoyable homecoming. And we thank you for how special and what you mean to our city as NCCU is one of the centerpieces of Durham. So Eagle Pride, God bless Durham. God bless all of you. Thank you so much, Madam Mayor Pertim. Thank you, Council Member. Any other announcements? Council Member Freeman. Thank you. I also want to just echo, of course, what a wonderful, wonderful opportunity to serve again. I am greatly appreciative of our city and I want to thank all of our voters for creating this wonderful new council that will continue to do this work and just acknowledge that we will have a majority of women again. Just acknowledging that when we lost Council Member Bernetta Austin to the house, we kind of became the minority on the council and I do enjoy the majority of women being on the council. So I just want to just add that to the list of accolades around how this last election was great. I do want to also congratulate all of those who are participated in the race, all the candidates, all their teams, all the volunteers. I feel like we actually increased the engagement a mere 5%, but I'll take it and keep pushing to engage more voters in our process. So thank you. Thank you. All right, are there any priority items by the city manager? Good afternoon, Madam Mayor for 10 members of the County Council. I do have one priority item for you this afternoon and it is agenda item number 20. It is ribbon paving, water main and water and sewer laterals on a portion of Ardmore Drive. Attacks for number five was updated to reflect changes in the dates when the public hearing notice would be published in the newspaper and mail to the applicable property owners. Madam Mayor for 10, that is all the item. That is the only item excuse me that I have for you all this afternoon. Thank you, Madam Manager. Can I have a motion to accept the manager's priority item? So moved. Second. Second. Moved by Council Member Freeman, seconded by Council Member Freelon. Madam Clerk, would you please call the roll? Mayor for 10 Johnson. Aye. Council Member Freelon. Aye. Council Member Freeman. Aye. And Council Member Middleton. Aye. Thank you. Thank you. Any priority items from the city attorney? Good afternoon, Madam Mayor for 10 members of the City Council. It's good to see you all today. I have one priority item for the Council. I would request that you all hold a closed session this afternoon for attorney-client consultation regarding the handling of two litigated matters. The first is Michael Edward Kelly as administrator for the estate of Brooklyn Maynard versus the City of Durham. And the second would be Tony Scott Jr. and Tony Scott Sr. versus the City of Durham at Al. And the motion, if you would like it right now, would be to hold a closed session pursuant to North Carolina General Statute 143-318.11A3. So moved. Second. Thank you. Council Member Freeman. Seconded by Council Member Freelon. Madam Clerk, would you please call the roll? Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Aye. Council Member Freelon. Aye. Council Member Freeman. Aye. And Council Member Middleton. How about that? Thank you. Thank you, Madam Clerk. Thank you, Madam Attorney. And any priority items from the City Clerk? Yes, I do have a couple of priority items today. Oh, he did. Yeah. That's a lot. I'd like to take a point of personal privilege and introduce our newest members of the City Clerk's office. And we have Javon Pratt and Wendy Zaragoza. And would you mind if I bring them on camera? That would be great. Yes, thank you. All right. Hi, y'all. Would you like to just introduce yourselves real quick? Sure, I'll go first. I'm Javon Pratt. I'm one of the new Assistant City Clerk's for the City of Durham. I'm actually from Southern New Jersey, so I'm excited for the opportunity Durham does have. I actually graduated from North Carolina A&T State University. So I'm not new to North Carolina, but I am new to Durham. I've done a lot of work with the children in the inner city back in my hometown. So I'm excited for the opportunities here with the youth. And I thank you for the opportunity to introduce myself. It's a pleasure meeting you all, and I can't wait to see you all in person soon. Thank you. Welcome to Durham. Welcome to the city. We're glad to have you. Thank you so much. And our other Assistant Clerk is Wendy, Helen Zaragoza. And I do not see her in the queue. She's here. Wendy, are you here? Yeah, she's Ashley Wyatt, but she's not. She's Ashley. I don't know how bad she is. Hello, everybody. My name is Helen Zaragoza. Everybody knows me as Wendy. I am actually today is my one month mark here in this amazing team with the city clerks. It's been an amazing trip so far. I'm originally was born in Mexico, but raised in the south side of Chicago. I'm also a neighbor veteran, a mom of five. And I'm currently on my last semester pursuing my B.A. in Paralegalism at Regent University with the hopes to aspirations to join Duke University for law. I'm new to Durham, just recently moved here back in March. And I'm actually getting to know a lot about the city and hoping that my girls and I can get into giving back to the community like we did back in Chicago. And just thank you so much for this great opportunity. I'm looking forward to having a lot of fun and obtaining a lot of knowledge. Thank you. Welcome to Durham. Welcome to the city. Yeah, we're excited to have you both and appreciate all of your work in the clerk's office. I'm sure we'll be working with all of you on the many, many things that go through that office. Yeah, it's a lot. We appreciate you all joining us and thank you for your work. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you for that warm welcome council. I did want to add a couple other priority items. Item number six, the workforce development mayoral appointee is being requested to be returned to the city clerk's office. There was a discrepancy between the state regulation and council procedures. And to satisfy the process advocated by workforce development, we are requesting that the item be returned to the office for proper processing. Item seven is the Durham open space and trails commission mayoral appointment and the appointee's name has been revised to Brian Lucanin and the backup materials relate to Mr. Lucanin. So I would appreciate a motion for those two items. Thank you, Madam clerk. Can I have a motion to accept the clerk's priority items? So moved. Seconded. Thank you. Moved by council member Freelon, seconded by council member Middleton. Madam clerk, would you please call the roll? Mayor Pro Tem Johnson. Council member Freelon. Aye. Council member Freeman. Aye. And council member Middleton. I will aye. Thank you. Thank you. And two more items that are just announcements of sort of housekeeping nature. I wanted to give you an update on the board committee commission and task force appreciation gifts. The clerk's office and myself, we are all wearing our t-shirts. I'll show you my bowl t-shirt. Love it. And those have gone out to our staff liaisons, our board committee and commission task force members, as well as city council. So if you haven't received your t-shirt yet, you should be receiving it soon. That was the brainchild of Ashley Wyatt. So let's give Ashley a round of applause for that. And secondly, I have an update on the third annual board committee and commission racial and social equity survey. It's going live on Monday, and it'll be open for responses until Friday, December 17th. And a few of the questions have been updated to reflect more of an equity lens. This year, we are not requesting our members' names on the survey. It's going to be completely anonymous. And we are separating race from ethnicity. And we're hoping to get some better input along those lines. And then finally, we're adding a request for voting precincts with a link to the state board of election site instead of requesting zip codes. These ideas were given to us by the Human Relations Commission. And they all were valid and the survey has been revised. And I'm looking forward to the results in January. So I did want to give you that update. And those are my priority items. Thank you very much. Thank you, Madam Clerk. We look forward to getting those results as well. And yeah, I just want to appreciate you and your staff and especially Ashley for the gifts. The last couple of years, we haven't been able to have our annual appreciation event for the boards and commissions because of COVID. And so having at least being able to send folks a little gift of appreciation has been great. It was a really great idea. I want to appreciate y'all for making that happen. All right, I'm going to proceed through the consent agenda under city clerk's office. Item one, approval of city council minutes. Item two, Durham Cultural Advisory Board appointment. Item three, Durham Historic Preservation Commission mayoral appointment. Item four, Durham Workers' Rights Commission appointments. Item five, Mayors Hispanic Latino Committee appointments. Item six, Workforce Development Board mayoral appointment. And that will be referred back to staff. Item seven, Durham Open Space and Trails Commission mayoral appointment. Under departmental items, budget and management services department. Item eight, fiscal year 2022-23, budget development schedule. I'd like to pull that item under city council office. Item nine, discussion of the tenants bill of rights. And we'll pull that for discussion. And we have a number of residents signed up to speak on that as well. Under community development department, item 10, conveyance of 2312 Crane Street, 706 North Elizabeth Street, 704 Eva Street, 1012 Gurley Street and 701 Mallard Drive for the purpose of affordable housing development. Under finance department, item 11, installment purchase contract series 2021 fleet. Under general services department, item 12, contract with HR&A Advisors Inc. for consulting services regarding the disposition and redevelopment of 505 West Chapel Hill Street. Do you pull that please, Madam Member Tim? Absolutely. Thank you. Item 13, lease and license agreement with new singular wireless PCS LLC at 1701 Coal Mill Road. Under public works department, item 14, municipal separate stormwater sewer system, MS4 inspections, SD-2021-06. Item 15, stormwater infrastructure repairs, SD-2021-05. Under presentations from the department of transportation, equitable pedestrian infrastructure update, and we'll pull that for presentation. Under human resources department, item 17, 2021 employee engagement survey results, and we'll pull that for presentation as well. Under public hearings, city county planning department, item 18, unified development ordinance text amendment updates for applications and permits. Item 19, zoning map change rose walk two. Under public works department, item 20, ribbon paving, water main, and water and sewer laterals on a portion of Ardmore Drive. So I have pulled items eight, nine, 12, 16 and 17. The item number, I'm sorry, item number nine, the discussion of the tenants full of rights, the mayor requested, the mayor would like to be here for that discussion. So if staff is amenable, I'd like to do the council pulled items eight and 12, and then move into the presentations before we go back to item nine when the mayor arrives, which should be before 2 p.m. So the first pulled item is item eight, the budget development schedule, and I pulled that item. Do we have a staff person who could answer a quick question on that? Yes, I'm available. If video could be turned on. Good afternoon, Madam Mayor Pro Tem, members of council, John Allure acting budget director. Good afternoon. Thanks John. Before COVID, we had been planning to do a round of budget engagement sessions along with the county and the school district, community conversations, which we did for the first time a few years ago, had been planning to do another round in 2020, and then COVID kind of threw that off track. When we had discussed the 2020 round, we had considered moving that engagement to the fall in order to allow residents to have a little bit more of an authentic engagement on the budget before a lot of decisions were already made by departments so that residents could weigh in kind of pre-departmental decision making rather than after the departmental decisions had been made and it was just coming to the council. I was wondering if y'all have had any conversations about reviving the community conversations process or if there are other kinds of budget engagements that you're planning that you feel will be sufficient to not have that engagement continue in the future. Certainly, I'm happy to address that. You're quite right, our ambition, our expectation was to do a second round of community conversations in the fall. But three things happened to impact that. The number one was in our department, in the budget department, we experienced our own great resignation. We were at one point down to, we had 55% vacancies, we're building that back up, but we still have six key vacancies. A lot of that had to do with three staff members going over to the community safety department and of course the resignation and reapportment of former budget director Bertha Johnson. So that extremely impacted our ability to effectively initiate this program. The second thing that happened was the emergence of the Delta variant. So at a time that we very much wanted to go live into the community, we had to set back there. And the third thing was we observed an awful lot of engagement in the fall already going on with the community safety department doing two engagement sessions with the planning department wanting to continue their phase three of engagement around the comprehensive plan. So those were the major impacts that made us to the press pause. Going into the new budget year, what we've come up with as a plan is for the first half, we need to go virtual until something changes in the COVID environment. So what we've said is, let's keep it as the game plan as we did last year up until say the end of March and then make an assessment of what we can do in the spring based on new information that comes along. So what that means is definitely the retreats being virtual and certainly trying to further or what we've learned in the virtual environment through YouTube sessions and expand on that through the budget healing events to further that into the community. It's not our favorite thing. We like to be in contact with council, with the community, but for now, I think it's the best approach. And then we can reassess as we go into the budget public hearing, something I would say that would be not virtual and live. That's our approach right now. And we went back to the traditional public hearings. As you know, the second one we must have, the first one is optional, but we thought the public hearing is at the very least the forum where people get to express themselves on the budget. If you recall two cycles ago for that first budget public hearing, we envisioned that more as the community event where people would have access to budget members in city hall to different departments, we would take them through a budget exercise. If that opportunity presents itself because it's on the calendar as such, the potential may be still there to do something alive on March 21st, but we figured that was our best bet to be able to engage. And then certainly as we continue, yes, we would like to do eventually around a community conversations. So long winded answer to your question, but that's what it is. No, that was very comprehensive answer to my question. Thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to say, I think we get the best kind of engagement through these kinds of round table discussions, the work that y'all did around the budget healing and the ARPA events where people have more of an opportunity to really think about priorities before a lot of decisions have been made and talk to other people about them, as opposed to a public hearing where it kind of feels a little bit, the public hearings happen at a point where a lot of the budget decisions have already been made and there's not a lot of opportunity for people to really collaborate with us and with staff. And the format isn't as conducive to solution building. It's more people who come in and say, I don't want you to fund this, I don't want you to fund this, but there's not really an opportunity to like have a more comprehensive conversation. So I understand if what's safe to do this year isn't as comprehensive as we would like, but would love to continue to have those kinds of engagement opportunities as a priority rather than just public hearings. Completely agree. Thank you. Any other thoughts or comments from council? Thank you, John. Our next pulled item is item number 12, council member Middleton. Hold that item. Thank you so much, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. And Ms. Poston, good to see you Stacey, as you can, hey, how are you? Good to see you. Thank you so much. So the memo and supporting materials are pretty comprehensive in terms of filling in the blanks of some of the questions I asked, I didn't want to ask a little bit about the process. And I know that if I can pull up my notes, I'm sorry. It has disappeared. HR&A are top of the game in what they do. How much, because there is already significant history with this project, this piece of land, how much more of this new contract is safe to say that they have to do less work than they did before because of their familiarity with this particular project than now. And is that reflected in the price of this contract? Good afternoon. Stacey Poston, General Services Department, Mayor Pro Tem, members of council, thank you for having me today. Thank you for that question, council member Middleton. The department has been working with HR&A advisors since 2017. The pieces that are different as we move through this section are, the front end engagement that we went through that was deliberate and protracted and identified and helps council identify the five priority goals is an element that we are not revisiting. We are continuing to move forward with the resident initiated and council directed goals. And so the contract reflects that we are taking those existing goals and moving directly to the RFQ process. So that component is not being repeated. And so that the contract, I guess you would say is does not, there's not a replication of that cost as you move forward into this contract phasing. And so what we will see is that we moved through an RFQ and RFP phase, which are fairly similar and require the same intense level of due diligence around team evaluation, company evaluation, financial evaluation. So those things you see reflected in the contract, but it is less expensive this time because we do have, as you mentioned, those identified priority goals that came from the engagement sessions. Additionally, we also have a draft master development agreement, which was approved by council at one point. And so we have that framework that we are gonna to pick up and move forward so that developer teams and individual companies who want to submit can reflect on that as a starting point. So we don't have to create that document from scratch. So I'll pause there and see if that helps. No, that's incredibly helpful. Thank you so much. So would it be safe to read the drafting of an updated request for proposal from developers by updating, I guess we mean just changing dates. I mean, there's not a whole lot of updating that needs to be done since we're not revisiting the community engagement piece or the goals of council. I guess updating the RFP is how intensive is that? Updating it. So what I would say is that the RFQ and RFP are largely similar to previous iterations. One variance this time is that in the original proposal we asked for teams to form and submit the RFQ as an intact team. This year what we're doing is we are asking individual companies to submit their standalone qualifications. So if you're an affordable housing developer you will submit an RFQ as an individual company or if you're for instance a commercial developer you would submit individually. And so those companies will submit on their own standards. We will invite the teams based on their own individual performance in the past to advance to the next phase or to not advance. And the team formation would happen at the RFP stage. So essentially we sort of have been talking about like you try to go to the dance, you get invited into the dance. The teams that are in the dance are the best of the best dancers or the best of the best housing developers or the best commercial developers. And then they form the teams such that we don't end up with a team that may have a very strong affordable housing developer and maybe not as strong a commercial developer or vice versa. We are trying to elevate the teams to the next level because we noticed in the last time for instance we may have had someone do was an apartment construction apartments for commercial colleges for instance. But maybe it wasn't in the affordable housing business. So we're really trying to step up the teams this time. So largely the documents are the same but there are some new iterations. And then the analysis obviously of the teams that do submit and the individual companies that do submit, we will be starting from scratch on that. That was an excellent exposition by the way. Dancing teams, you need to keep that. So just so I'm clear. So the contract will run from November 2021 through August 2022. And I see the listing of services that would be provided in the contract. And the first thing is listed is the RFP. I don't see RFQ, where would the RFQ process fall within this timeline? So the RFQ has been released. I've had pre site meetings. We've had site walkthroughs with the developer companies that are interested whether they're affordable housing developers or commercial companies. So that actually is actually on the street. The RFQs are due on November 9th, which is next Tuesday. Those documents we anticipate coming in. We will be working obviously in collaboration with an equity inclusion once we receive those to make sure that the information they have submitted is correct and the financial forms are correct with the finance department. And from there, we will be starting our evaluations. So that activity and exercise has been happening under our previous contract and is currently underway. Got you. All right, I think that's all. I have, you know, it can't really overstate how important this project is and how much is emotionally invested in it from the city. So thank you. I just wanna thank the staff so much for running point on us. And I know we've had some hiccups, but I think this is gonna be an incredibly important development. It's gonna be something we can be proud of for generations here in Durham. And I wanna thank you for your leadership on it. So thank you. Stacy, good to see you as always. Thank you, council member. Thank you, Madam Mayor Prudence. Thank you, council member. I just received a note from the clerk that someone would like to speak on item 12. But I only, I don't see any item 12s in the attendees list. Is there someone present who would like to speak on item 12? Yes, this is Stella Adams. Hi, Ms. Adams, welcome. You have three minutes. Thank you. As you all know, I have been tracking 505 West Chapel Hill Street like a hound dog since it began. I am very concerned about this project and process. The RFQ is coming out before the contract. This best of the best status is going to may have an adverse effect on minority participation in the team process because there is, there may not be the past performance or other indicators that would allow minority builders and affordable housing developers, commercial developers to proceed through this RFQ RFP process as the best of the best quote unquote. I'm also concerned, as I have stated in the past, that the condition of 505 West Chapel Hill Street, the requirement, which is from the past priorities from community engagement, the priority to historically preserve the entire building with its dilapidated condition is cost inefficient. It makes the project less affordable. And again, I think that there's some facade that can be maintained. Certainly the historic preservation facades have been the main in way we preserve history here in Durham. I am opposed to making that a requirement because the building is in such poor condition that to bring it to standards raises the cost of affordability. And so again, I'm like keep a facade, tear building down and construct some really high quality affordable housing and mixed use purpose space. Diversity inclusion, we were, when this first came up, there was a good team battle around black investment, partnership ownership, retail space participation. I don't wanna see that lose its focus with this new process that's been discussed. I want the focus to remain on affordable housing, making it affordable at 60% and below median income. I want there to be a specific focus on units, but also on economic development for people of Durham, for real people of Durham, for long-term people of Durham. And we wanna make this space an inviting space into our city, but also a very important space also for the people of our city. And we also want to make sure that low and moderate income people are not displaced from downtown where the jobs and the growth is. We also wanna maintain the commercial space as an opportunity for a job hubs and for as an opportunity for high tech and good paying jobs conveniently located across the street from or in the building where you live. So there is so much opportunity that can be used with this site that I don't want us constrained by the expense of trying to maintain that abominable building at Fava Pobliss. Hill Street, save the facade, make the project as affordable and as reasonable in terms of increasing the opportunity for affordable housing downtown and increasing the opportunity for minority business ownership downtown and investment downtown. Thank you for the opportunity to speak and know every time Fava Pobliss Chapel Hill Street comes up, I'll be speaking on it. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Adams. Thank you for being here and for your comments. All right, I think we have other other comments by members of the council on item 12 for questions. Council member Freeman. Thank you. I just wanted to appreciate our Miss Stella Adams and voicing the concerns and then just noting that I also share those concerns and will be committed to keeping an eye on how this process moves forward. I also wanna just note that I think it's really important to acknowledge how close and proximity to the North Carolina Mutual Building and all that has occurred there the kind of emotional ties to how this project will come forward. It has to be at the center of the conversation as well. So it can't just operate as if this is just the building. I think that the community has raised a lot of issues and hopes and dreams around it and I wanna make sure that that's honored. That's all. Thank you. Thank you council member. All right, since we have a number of residents who would like to speak on item nine and the mayor's arrived, I'm gonna reverse my previous thinking on order and go to item nine, which is the discussion of the tenant's bill of rights. I don't believe we have a staff presentation. I think we're just gonna be talking about this among ourselves and asking questions we're needed. So would anybody like to start us off? Council member Freeman. I can start us off, just acknowledging I know that I brought this forward just in conversation with folks in the community and I'm excited that we're even having the discussion and just acknowledge that. I appreciate the work of the city attorney's office to bring forth their kind of like decisive recommendations around parts and pieces of it. I know it's come in many formats and in many different emails. And so this is really like a good way to clarify against the topics, the authority, whether it's state or federal. And then also just some additional comments based on some of the housing subcommittee of the racial equity task force. And so I look forward to hearing from the rest of my colleagues on whatever questions you have or anything that I might be able to add some clarifying comments to. So please feel free to ask questions. Thank you council member. Wow. Anybody have any questions or thoughts? I have a lot, but happy to defer to other folks first. I think you should just start. I will go right ahead. All right, thank you. Yeah, thank you council member Freeman for working with our local tenants union to bring us this item. We received an email a couple of days ago with some more detailed recommendations in addition to the summary recommendations that were sent to us before. And so, and I don't know if that email has been received by our city attorney's office. And the email also referenced that this is still a draft that's kind of in process. So I don't know, I'm reluctant to have our city attorney's office review it now when it might change later, though I also feel like I would really like some guidance on some of these questions because I feel like the detailed recommendations give us some more ideas for things that might be legal without the specific, it doesn't really go into the specific legal, I'm sorry. There are things in the detailed recommendations that might be legal notwithstanding the city attorney's ruling on some of the pieces that were in the summary recommendations. So the city attorney has just let us know that she's not gotten those more detailed recommendations and so we'll go ahead and send those along. Before we get into too much discussion, let's go ahead and hear the members of the public who have signed up to speak on this item. I have a list in my email and there's some folks here as well. I'm gonna first call on the folks who signed up in advance and the first person on my list is Irene Lawrence and I see Irene Lawrence in the queue. Hi, good afternoon. Hi. Hi, we actually had a slightly different order. Could I actually ask my colleague Howie Mockdinger to start? Sure, yeah, that's fine. Mr. Mockdinger is also in the queue. Can we get his microphone activated? Thank you. Thank you, you have three minutes. Thanks, my name's Howie Mockdinger. I work with the Bull City Tenants United policy team and I became more interested in housing issues when working with the Housing Subcommittee of the Durham City Racial Equity Task Force. So today I wanna clarify that the point of our proposed tenants bill of rights is not to argue legalisms, though we will engage with the city lawyers who responds to our initial ideas. Our goal is to figure out ways to support tenants in the short and long run who are facing multiple crises, rampant gentrification and pending evictions already. There's over 750 evictions since the moratorium ended, rising rents and homes and disappear. So my remarks will serve as an introduction which others will follow up on. Let me begin with our first principles here. When we speak of contract rights, do we only have in mind the rights of the landlord? We wanna shift the balance of power in the landlord-tenant relationship and expand tenant rights. For instance, when we shop for toys or food, we have assurance that they are not toxic. What assurance do tenants have about their close and intimate living spaces? This needs to change and our proposals move in that direction. Everyone in town is aware of the diminishing availability of decent and affordable housing. This is a snowballing crisis dramatically exacerbated by the pandemic. So the time for real action is now. Tenants rights is one key arena for action. The big issues we wanna focus on are the following. One, expanding the housing code to ensure tenants have habitable living spaces. Two, expanding the use of emergency repairs by the city when landlords are unresponsive. Three, preventing landlords from charging rent when units are in disrepair. And we'll talk about that more in detail later. Four, expanding access to inspections for people, including coping with issues of language and also make it when people are available. And finally, supporting the right of tenants to organize. We understand that much work needs to be done at the state level. We hope that our work will help form the basis of a statewide agenda, but the city can and must do more to support tenants and provide affordable housing. It must be open to innovative ideas, including the development of city-owned or controlled housing in which rent control is allowed under state law. Our proposal is mainly the first step in dealing with the housing crisis. And we hope that you will join us in figuring out how to act robustly and courageously. Let us not get lost in what we cannot do. Other speakers will follow up with more on our proposals. Thank you. And Alex, do you wanna pick up the ball here? Thank you. Is Alex Perlman the next speaker? I hope so. Madam Clerk, can we activate that microphone? Hi, y'all. Thank you for this. My name is Alex Perlman. I work as a nursing assistant at the UNC hospital and I'm a student at Durham Tech. And I'm also a volunteer organizer with Bull City Tenants United. And I would just like to share the stories of three people today to stress the urgency of improving the minimum housing code here in particular. The first is from my own experience and the other two are from folks who are both working and couldn't be here today. The last apartment that I lived in had major leaks in the roof that went unaddressed for years. Gradually, some of my roommates started to get sick and we weren't sure why. Then the ceiling started to rot out and there would be water coming out of the ceiling all throughout the house each time that it rained. The best that we could get from the landlord was roughly a quarterly spraying of a thin sealant on the roof. This sealant would work for about two hours worth of rain and then it would start raining inside our apartment again. Over time, we started to fear for electrocution and tried to minimize our appliance use while it was raining and more of us started to get sick. It was obvious that the attic was becoming a mold factory and that it was causing the asthma flare ups, respiratory infections and the other mysterious symptoms like constant fatigue and rash that severe mold allergies can sometimes cause. Frankly, I think it is a failure of public health officials that mold itself is not a part of the current minimum housing code. The two other stories are both from tenants who are renting at 1808 Chapel Hill Road, which is a 47 unit apartment complex in the Lakewood neighborhood. One of these two bedroom units houses a six person family and earlier this year, both their stove and their refrigerator were broken. It didn't seem to matter how many times they would call their email to ask for replacements week after week would go by turning into months without them being able to cook anything or keep anything cold. Could you imagine trying to feed six people under those circumstances? How would that make you feel as a parent? It took the landlord three months to decide to replace the appliances. And during that time, the family was living out of coolers, their grocery bills doubled, which was a major problem for a large family with a small income. This is a kind of passive violence that must be aggressively penalized by the city. It's not okay for landlords to get a slap on the wrist for making people live like this. Functional kitchen appliances must be a part of the minimum housing code. And right now they're not. The last story that I want to share is just a comment by another tenant living in the same apartment complex. She's been dealing with broken appliances, leaks and other plumbing problems. She moved down here from New York and had previously been a part of the tenant's rights movement up there in the past. And what she had said to me was that up in New York, the landlords are nastier. They're more openly disrespectful to their tenants than the landlords here, but the actual conditions here in Durham are much worse. And it's because the city of New York will actually go after slumlords for abusing their tenants. But here in Durham, the city has yet to pick up the tools to aggressively stomp out slum loading as a business model. Our organization has made a list of proposals based on conversations that we've had with hundreds of tenants over the last year and based on a good amount of legal research to make sure that it would be legally possible for the city to enact them right away. I wanted to emphasize the need to expand the housing code today, but the whole document is important. And I want to pass this off next to Emerson Goldstein if they are still on a call. Thank you, Alex. I do not see Emerson in the queue. Is there someone else who would like to go next? I do have a copy of Emerson's comments here. Could I read these on their behalf? You can. I also have a message from Lee Ganz who said that they could read Emerson's comments. Either one is, yeah, either is fine. Cool, you go ahead, Lee. I'm Lee Ganz. Thanks for letting me read Emerson Goldstein's comments as well who had to jump off the call. So this is Emerson's comment first. So this is Emerson speaking. I'm also a volunteer organizer with Bull City Tenants United. Thanks very much for taking the time to hear our comments today. I'm going to speak a bit about the urgent need for the city to step in to ensure that minimum standards are met in housing. And I'd like to start by sharing the story of one of our BC2 tenants. One of the tenants that I work with lives with her nine-year-old granddaughter. Every day, her granddaughter logs on to Zoom for school in an apartment full of mold, water damage, and cockroaches. Issues that their landlord refuses to address. She has gone through all the proper channels to request maintenance, report these issues and try to get them fixed, but nothing has changed. She lives in Durham with a Section 8 voucher and she has lost track of how many times her apartment has failed inspection. She's afraid that she will have to move again because her landlord refuses to ensure that she and her granddaughter will live with a very basic quality of life. The cycle is patently unfair. The landlord refuses to make repairs. The Senate still lives in substandard and dangerous conditions, and ultimately she also faces the consequences for those conditions. The landlord faces virtually no consequences for choosing not to make repairs. Instead, she faces displacement because they refuse to remove the mold and exterminate the cockroaches. When her apartment fails as inspection again, which it inevitably will, she is not sure where she will go. Durham City Government can and should do more to help tenants like her. It has the power to step in and ensure that minimum standards are met, that things like mold, leaks, pest infestation, a lack of heat, or structural problems are defined as immediately hazardous conditions that require abatement by the city within 72 hours. Not only should the city step in to make these repairs when landlords fail to do so, the city should make sure that landlords are ultimately responsible for paying for the cost of these repairs. The city has the responsibility and the authority to issue and aggressively pursue leans on landlords who own defective multifamily properties like the one this tenant and her granddaughter live in. There must be consequences for landlords who knowingly collect rent on substandard housing, and tenants must have access to repairs when living in substandard and dangerous homes. These proposals are only part of the many things that the city council can do to ensure that all Durhamites live in safe housing and that landlords are held to a minimum standard. I'll invite you to imagine how it might feel to live in a home full of mold and pest with no recourse and urge you to take courageous action to make sure that no one in Durham has to. The city can and must do more to ensure that tenants in Durham live in safe and dignified homes. And now I'd like to, that's the end of Emerson's comment. I would like to read my own comment. Thank you. All right. So I'm Lee Ganz. I'm a member of Bull City Tenant Union's policy team. I'd like to thank the city council for putting tenants rights on the agenda today. I also want to voice support for the comments from Howie, Alex and Emerson. I am speaking today about the need to ensure all tenants have access to inspections. In December of last year, NIS found 120 over 120 code violations in just 17 units at Garden Terrace Apartments. These violations were serious and constituted a severe threat to tenants' health, safety and quality of life. So how could so many serious violations get ignored for so long? One reason that Garden Terrace was long overdue for inspections is because for most of the tenants living there, the city's inspections process is virtually inaccessible. Most tenants at Garden Terrace have to work during the limited hours NIS provides to schedule inspections. This means that if tenants want to be present for an inspection, they have to take time off work, put their jobs at risk, and lose pay for the hours of work they missed. Many tenants at Garden Terrace speak Spanish or other languages and need an interpreter to communicate with inspectors. However, the city does not guarantee tenants' access to interpreters during inspections. Despite these obstacles, tenants at Garden Terrace have continued to request inspections for their units. To handle the scheduling issues, the Garden Terrace Tenant Union appointed a tenant to act as their representative during inspections of multiple units in the building. It was a struggle to get NIS to agree to interact with the representative. Eventually, a series of inspections was successfully scheduled for May 17th of this year. On that day, I received an urgent phone call from a member of BCTU's organizing team asking me if I could get to Garden Terrace within 15 minutes to interpret. I was told that an inspector was coming to Garden Terrace, but that we had just been notified that an interpreter for the tenant representative was not available. Furthermore, I was told that if I could not get to Garden Terrace in time for the inspection, the landlord was going to send his head of maintenance to act as an interpreter between the tenant representative and the city inspector. I, by the way, am not a certified interpreter. In fact, I am not even fluent in Spanish. I was just the only bilingual person who did not have a gross conflict of interest as an agent of the landlord that was available to show up for this inspection. Any tenant bill of rights must include the right to access inspections. We understand that state law limits what the city of Durham can do with regard to mandating inspections, but there is a great deal the city can do to ensure all tenants have access to the process for inspections that already exists. We demand the city provide night and weekend hours for inspections and guarantee that interpretation is provided for tenants who need it. We further demand that the city pass an ordinance protecting the right of tenants to form unions and designate their representatives to interact with government officials and landlords. Thank you for your time. And I believe Irene Lawrence will speak next. Thank you. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Irene Lawrence and I'm the policy team lead at Bull City Tenants United. Thank you all for your continued attention to the lack of safe and affordable housing in Durham and for uplifting our proposals at this work session. As my colleagues have already discussed, we are here because we believe there's a great deal the council can do to address the crisis of unsafe, unhealthy and unaffordable housing, which faces many Durhamites. I'm here to talk particularly about our proposal to change the city code to make it illegal to collect rent while a unit is in violation of the minimum housing code, language which already exists in Charlotte city code. While the analysis the Durham city attorney has given you suggests that Charlotte doesn't enforce this provision directly. According to Bill Rowe from the NC Justice Center, this provision greatly helps tenants in Charlotte recover rent paid during the time that they had an imminently dangerous condition in their unit. He says, the practical effect of the provision is that it allows them to make the argument for $0 rent owed during the time that imminently dangerous condition existed on the property and the landlord failed to fix it. If the tenant has paid rent during that time, they will file a claim for breach of the implied warranty of habitability and unfair and deceptive trade practices and argue that the tenant is entitled to not only all of the rent back but three times that amount for trouble damages under general statute 75, 116. Since the landlord is not legally entitled to collect rent during the time an imminently dangerous condition is present, they also argue that the landlords that tend to collect rent while that condition is present constitutes an unfair debt collection violation pursuant to general statute 75, 55, which can lead to civil penalties against the landlord between $504,000 under general statute 75, 56. In closing, Mr. Rowe said that this is a powerful tool in Charlotte and tenants attorneys wish it was in every county. As BCTU advocates for other proposals like emergency repairs and expansion of the minimum housing code, which you've already heard about, which would fix some of these bad conditions, we will also continue pushing for mechanisms like this to account for the ongoing realities of many tenants who are currently living in units with violations of the minimum housing code. According to general statute 42, 41, the tenants obligation to pay rent under the rental agreement and the landlord's obligation to provide fit premises are mutually dependent. Landlords are not entitled to make money under any circumstances. The contract between tenants and landlords is a two-way street. If landlords aren't holding up their end of the bargain, tenants should not have to keep paying them. We ask you to emulate the courageous example of other municipalities in North Carolina who have found ways to protect tenants using the same state laws we have. Thank you for the opportunity to make these comments. Thank you, Irene. Is there anyone else from Bull City Tenants United who would like to speak? We have a few other residents signed up. Yeah, I think that was it from BCTU. Okay, thank you. Our next speaker will be Ajax Woolley. Can we make Ajax Woolley's microphone active, please? I'm here, can you hear me? Yep, thank you. You've got three minutes. Thank you. Good afternoon, Madam Mayor Pro Tem, Mayor Shull, Councillors, I'm here to express support for the tenant organizing work by BCTU. That has sparked this discussion and their summary recommendations are bold and aspirational, promoting a healthy public debate. Durham Cairns' affordable housing research action team is engaged with many of these same issues and will continue in support of the incremental change that eventually leads to breakthroughs. We applaud Bull City Tenants United for being consistent and persistent with this work. And we can also recognize and appreciate the thorough work by the city attorney's office to respond point by point as shown in the memos. It sheds light on where we can create change, although the response may be no today, tomorrow can bring about a maybe and one day it will become yes. As last year's racial equity task force report showed we're confronting the limitations of a power structure created and maintained through systemic racism and the legacy of white supremacy. These limitations won't disappear willingly. We must address them with respect to summary recommendations one and two. The CAO response memo describes in detail the statutory preemption of local rental inspection programs. And I just wanted to share that in 2020, our team joined key leaders from NIS to attend a 12 week workshop on proactive rental inspection programs through the Bloomberg What Works Cities initiative. We joined a cohort of cities who also faced the dual challenge of a powerful real estate lobby and a legislature that usually tilts the table in favor of landlord interests. Other cities from the workshop have since developed innovative approaches to address preemption. In particular, I wanna mention the example of Tulsa, Oklahoma, where bold municipal leadership and grassroots problem solving has produced a unique example of public-private collaboration to create TAO, an acronym for the Tulsa Authority on Economic Opportunity. So Tulsa is focusing on incentivizing landlords to participate in rental best practices. This aims to benefit tenants by blending public revenue and philanthropic funding to support landlords to do the right thing. They have data-driven goals and documented successes, including an increase in the number of landlords renting to housing choice voucher tenants, or Section 8, increasing rental opportunities for renters with low income or other perceived risks, providing free mediation services for early settlement of concerns between tenants and landlords and voluntary participation in safe and healthy homes programs. So there are many near-term doable actions that are appropriate to the city's role in stabilizing affordable rental opportunities. We can't just build our way out of this crisis. As the important work of tenant organizing in Durham continues, we must work together to find creative changes to get everyone pulling in the same direction while pursuing these long-term structural changes identified in the Tenant Bill of Rights. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Woolley. Our next speaker is E.E. Oon. Is E.E. Oon in the queue? I don't see them there. Madam Mayor Pro Tem, I don't see E.E. Oon. Okay, thank you. Our next speaker is Thomas, or perhaps Stella Adams. There may be two people. Thank you. Hi. Hi, it is me. I don't know why it's coming up that way. No worries. Thank you all. First of all, I want to say that I want to focus in on the family right now. If I'm a mother and I have a housing option that's safe for my children or one where I'm stuck in a situation where there are roaches and mold, if I could move somewhere, I would. If I could take that voucher and go somewhere, I would. I wouldn't be worried about, oh my God, I'm gonna lose that voucher in the next inspection. There's nowhere to go. And so it's incumbent on us to talk about the things that the city can do now, how we can help people now, how we can make the process simpler and easier for people to participate in and protect them from retaliation. Court is not a solution. It's going to court and winning on the general statutes and all that. That's lovely as a last resort. But that doesn't save you from having the housing issues now. We had our public housing residents have been living in affordable conditions, unsafe conditions with stones that are 70 years old. Endangered every day, maintenance, nine months, 18 months out. And yet that's public housing. That's public money. One thing that the city doesn't need the state or the federal government to do is that anytime a city dollar is spent on a property, you require as an assurance and certification that is kept in a safe, habitable condition. And that if it is not, then you can force that those city dollars are returned. That's something you can put in contract. That's not something that requires state law to do. That's a contract requirement. Assurances of safety and habitability. You need to beef up your inspection's office and instead of going and go after inspections of properties that have repeated complaints. You need to have an anonymous tip line so that people can call in without facing retaliation from the landlord to complain about uninhabitable conditions. You need to, these are things that don't require anything from council except to do it. This is staff. Staff can do what they want. They have tools. They don't even use the tools they have. Use those tools aggressively, make the landlords and start with public dollars and public money. We can control that. We control that. And then let's go after blot tech. Then let's go after these private corporations that are on Wall Street because there's a federal and state dollar somewhere. Then let's get these mom and pops. But what we do is we aggressively go after mom and pops and let corporate landlords get away with bullying and these families. We have to protect the families first. Get safety for the families first. I put people before policy. I love policy. Nobody loves policy more than me but I will not do a policy piece before a people piece. And we've got enough tools right now that we can get rid of mold. That's an emergency. The city can go in there, clean that up and send a bill. We don't have to wait on a general assembly. We don't have to wait on council. The inspectors can go in, do the send in folks to make the repairs, to clean up the mold, to get rid of the pest and then bill the landlord. That power exists. It's not something you got to worry about. It exists. Do it. It's time to act and stop thinking about what and kindness guy. We can do what we can. We have the ability to help families today. You can't even get the ERAP money out. Don't get me started people on the failure of our governmental institutions to do what we have the power to do to help tenants right now today. Thank you. Thank you, Ms. Adams. There, I believe, is one more speaker on this item, Jacqueline Wagstaff. If there's anyone else who is planning to speak on this item, please let me know. Thank you, Ms. Wagstaff. You have three minutes. Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor. Always a pleasure and thank you. I want to say this in advance. Thank you for your years of service and commitment to our community and also would like to congratulate Ms. Freeman and Councilman Middleton for their successful launch of their campaign on this last election. But on this matter right here, I just wanted to address some of the issues that I heard from the previous speakers and thank you, Ms. Adams, because you hit it right. You hit the nail on the head. And I don't know who this group is, Bull City, Tennis United, but everything they said, unfortunately, is these are the issues that have plagued our city for years. Back when I was a city council woman, like Stella said, there are some tools that we can use as council members. We have a bully pit and there are some tools that we can use. I remember we had two notorious apartment complexes that sat right on Austin Avenue and people were living in these inhumane conditions and they would call us, call us. And so what I did was as a council member, I convinced my colleagues to agree with me to do a citywide inspection of these apartment complexes. That's why garden terrors, this council can send out every inspector that they have in their disposal to these units. And when we had the inspectors go out to these two notorious complexes, there were thousands, not hundreds, thousands of issues that violated all city codes. And we were able to address it. And one of the issues that I saw that we had, and I'm not saying it still exists, was that we had a lot of inspectors, unfortunately, that were dealing with landlords in a more favorable context. They were giving landlords the heads up to when we were coming to inspect. I had one incident where we came to inspect and the landlord after they contacted the inspector and asked the inspector to ask the city council to wait, give them time to do some repairs. And that's problematic for a tenant. When you have situations that's going on in these apartments and these properties that are consistent with multiple violations of city codes, we don't need legislation for it. That's one thing that I've noticed about this council over the years. Every time there's a big issue that they really don't want to address or just put their foot down, oh, we have to talk to legislators. We have to get legislation to do this. There are things that this council can do that would eliminate some of these problems immediately. Most should not be something that's not inclusive of our codes now. There are a lot of things that this council should and could be doing with some of their tools that they have at hand. And I'm hoping that that will happen. One other thing I'd like to ask about this Tenant Right Bill, does this bill include Durham Housing Authority properties who has multiple problems when it comes to their house? And the reason I asked that is because I know there are federally mandated properties that have certain federal guidelines. So I would like to know if the Housing Authority properties would be also subject to the same mandates that this Tenant Right Bill would force upon these negligent landlords, because one of our biggest negligent landlord in Durham would be your Durham Housing Authority. So hopefully that some of these questions that I've been asked today will be addressed. And I hope they get addressed without legislation approval. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Black staff. Are there any other folks who are here that I missed to speak on item nine? All right, thanks folks. So we will continue the conversation with the council. There are city manager and our deputy city manager, Keith Chadwell are here. There's not currently any staff from inspections or NIS, but we can direct any questions or thoughts to those staff and requests for follow up. If it's all right with folks, this might take a while, but I feel like this issue is important and worth the time. If we go through each of these points and have a little bit of discussion and decide what we want our next steps to be on each item, does that work for people? Great. All right, the first one, improve the inspections process. Recommendations are provide night and weekend hours, provide interpretation, make it easier for tenants to call anonymously to report issues and mandatory informing of tenants before inspection. I believe that all these things are within our power as a city, welcome the city attorney to correct me if that's not the case. And maybe our manager, manager, pager, deputy manager, Chadwell could give us a sense of their thoughts on implementation of these recommendations. So good afternoon, Madam Mayor Pro Tem, Mr. President, we certainly have heard the comments made by who were posted in 10 of tonight, as well as the other residents today. And we certainly are listening as the council goes through each one of these points by point. I do think it would be a better response if we had an opportunity to take all of the commentary and everything that is being said today and come back with a more research store or comprehensive response. But I can assure you that both Mr. Chadwell and myself are taking notes. If you have some specific questions that we feel confident to respond to today, we certainly do that. So maybe we could just provide questions that we would be interested in hearing responses to after y'all have a chance to do some more research and look at the documents. Okay, that's great. Yeah, I mean, I think my main question for number one is just what capacity increases would be required in the inspections department to provide the night and weekend hours and do we currently have the services for interpretation? I know we recently budgeted additional funding for language access and interpretation in last year's budget. But yeah, I think most of this feels like a capacity question more than anything. Any council members wanna make comments on item one? Can I just ask a question, Madam Mayor Pro Tem? Of course, Mr. Ryan. When you say at item one, I'm looking at the attorney's response. Gotcha. I'm looking at the Bull City Tenants United Ordinance, which was sent to us yesterday by Eileen. And then on the second page, there's detailed recommendations. Yeah. Yeah, that we, sorry, got it a few days ago. And the city attorney has now received these as well. And have we, can someone also forward this to manager Page, just in case she hasn't received it? I have not received it yet. Okay. Okay, thank you. Yeah, we'll make sure that you receive this. Mr. Mayor. So I think this and many of the recommendations, so many of the issues that people raised today, I think are capacity issues. I wanna just say that I wanna talk about our staff a little bit. We have a fabulous staff of inspectors who do a great job. And we may not have enough to do everything that we need to do. And if we don't, that's our job to make sure that we have enough. And if we don't, we don't have the people. When I heard some of these stories, and I really appreciate the folks that brought forward these stories. Yeah, we can't have a situation where somebody is not getting a response quickly to an important need. But many of the things that people talked about, we know are against code. And if we're not getting there soon enough, if we're not doing the job, I really think that's on us. But I don't think it's that our inspection staff doesn't care, isn't working hard, any of those things. They are working hard. They do care, and they're inspecting a lot of units. So I think that for this item, the one you mentioned, and for many of the items that people spoke to today, and for many of the ones that I think are, there are several in the analysis that the attorney had that I think are capacity related. Yeah. And so that's my comment. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Any other comments? Council Member Middleton. Thank you so much, Madam Mayor, to Broke Tim. And I want to thank our friends from Bull City, Tenants United for coming before us. And really, beyond a policy issue, it's a moral issue. I mean, decent and safe housing. And Mr. Mayor, you mentioned capacity issues. And as I read, I'm seeing a lot of no's in terms of actual legal authority as well to the city. So I guess I'll, first of all, let me just say this. I want as robust and impactful in ordinance that we can deliver, whatever that looks like in every area. So whatever we can, when I was working on issues with affordable housing with Durham can, back before I was elected, one of the things we realized in doing research on issues where there are a lot of things that we can't, that we are preempted from doing, particularly in North Carolina, by this legislature. So that's what actually led to the conclusion that the most powerful thing we could do as a government when it came to affordable housing was use our own land to do affordable housing initiatives. I mean, that conclusion came from a lot of the roadblocks that we faced in terms of compelling developers to do affordable housing. I don't think there's, Durham will ever have another council, they may have councils as committed as this one, but another council who if we could vote today to codify these things, I certainly will vote for it. We do it. So I think it is combination capacity and legal barriers. So I'll just say that whatever we can do, that is as robust and as impactful as possible, that doesn't run afoul of the law, but can bring the resources of our city to bear. That's what I want to do, whatever that product looks like. Now, capacity is real. When we pass the anti-discrimination ordinance, one of the things that was raised was if we pass this ordinance, we've got to have the people to actually deal with complaints that are raised under that ordinance. So, and for every time we do that, that means we've got to, we don't make anything as a government. All we do is collect taxes and spend it. Every time we do that, we've got to get that money to increase that capacity from somewhere. Every area we choose to increase capacity in, we got to pay for. So we know that with a robust ordinance for anti-discrimination, when citizens and residents make complaints, there's no need to have an ordinance that we're not going to enforce or have the capacity to do it. So if we do this as well, we don't want an empty token kind of ordinance. We want an ordinance that we're actually committed to enforcing and to have one of the books. So I didn't want to ask a question. However, to the city attorney, I remember I had, when I was renting in Durham years ago, over 20 years ago, there were, I had some issues with the, maybe even longer than that, I had some issues with the landlord. And one of the things I chose to do that I found very motivating to the landlord was, I didn't withhold rent, I put the rent in an escrow account and demonstrated that, okay, I'm not just out blowing the money on whatever. Here's the money right here, but you're not getting it. It's in an escrow account until you do the things that you're required to do. And almost instantly they, you know, they started becoming more responsive. I'm not saying that'll work in all cases, but is that something that's available to, to bull city tenant, a bull city united, bull city tenant united activists paying their rent to escrow accounts? Council member Middleton, I am not aware that tenants who have disputes regarding the conditions and contract terms of their lease can escrow monies, escrow rent payments until those disputes are resolved or issues are addressed. We can certainly look into that, but I have not heard of that practice. So I don't know whether that was something that, and did you say that was here in Durham? You were doing that? Yeah, a lawyer actually advised me, demonstrate that you are setting the money aside for the court that you're not blowing and demonstrate that that money is growing each month by the prescribed rent amount. And the court was, they found that compelling. So, okay, well, here's the money. It's yours when you bring things up to code. So I- And so did you, did you have to file a legal action in order to do that? How are you informing a court of what you were doing? Well, when the attorney, and I don't get too detailed, when the landlord noticed that the rent was not paid on time, we forwarded a letter that we are exercising our right to pay into escrow, whatever the language of the art was. And then when the court date came up, we demonstrated that the money was being paid into an escrow account. We also demonstrated the code violations, which we documented and the court found that compelling.  They demonstrated good faith, a good faith willing to honor the contract, but you guys need to fix this stuff if you want the money. Sure. I mean, if I would venture a guess, you were the beneficiary of some very creative and bold wiring, which is amazing. And I know that, you know, many of the folks who spoke today are speaking on behalf of people who don't have access to those resources, right? We all know that. Generally, there is not a construct in the statutes that we're aware of. I'm looking at Chatter from Sophia and Krista right now. There is not a construct in the statutes that we're aware of that allows all tenants to do that, right? Because usually an escrow account is tied to something. Right. You know, it's either tied to a legal matter, like a filed case of some sort, or it's tied to a contract of some sort or some sort of legal engagement. Everybody doesn't have an escrow account. You can't, you know, I mean, you have to set up, it's a legal thing to set up an escrow account. So we're happy to research that, but my guess is because you were represented, because you had an attorney who was speaking on your behalf, you were able to push the envelope a little more in terms of tenant exercising and a little self-help that got the landlord to be responsive, but I just don't, that's probably not a tool that's gonna be widely available to everyone. Absolutely, I appreciate it. Yeah, we created the legal matter. We knew that non-payment would occasion an action by the landlord, and it was at that time that we demonstrated, but that's either here or there. I guess what I would say again to you in our city attorney's office and to my colleagues that one, however much teeth we can put into an ordinance that does not run afoul of the law, that's what I support, but I would also say to my colleagues that we've got to put the resources to be able to enforce it, whatever we do as well. One without the other is just symbolic. And I don't think our friends are here for symbolism at this point. So that's what I would say. I've got a couple of other things, but I'll yield now, I've taken up a bit of time and I look forward to the rest of the discussion. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, council member. So I feel like we've consensed on wanting to improve our inspection process and asking our city manager to come back to us with an assessment of the capacity that would be needed to do that. Folks, so good about that. Great. Mr. Mayor. Thank you. I wanted to appreciate what the Bull City Tenantunian folks said about the Charlotte Ordinance. I think it will be worthwhile for our legal staff to check in with Bill Rowe at the Justice Center, who is an expert on this and who was quoted by the Bull City Tenantunian folks. I know that he does great work in this area. And I think that is, it would be, if that language is, I know it is in the Charlotte Ordinance, if it's effective in some way, it will be good to know and understand that and understand how it's working. And I think Bill would be a good source. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, that's actually, that's the third item in the list of recommendations. And I agree absolutely that if this is something that Charlotte can do, it's something that we can do. And if it's helpful in Charlotte, it'll be helpful here. Do other folks have thoughts on that while we're talking about it? Council Member Middleton and then Council Member Freeman. Thank you, Madam Mayor Pro-Tube. My only question would be, and we kind of ran into this when we were looking at amendments to our charter when we were doing business assistance. Is there something germane or specific about Charlotte's charter that allows them to have that provision or is it something readily available to us already, just by virtue of a state law, if it's a charter issue, then obviously we're gonna have to do some other work to get the language. So I just wanted to put that in record. Thank you, Madam Mayor Pro-Tube. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, I'm sure our city attorney can give us an opinion on that. Council Member Freeman. Thank you. I was just gonna add also Greensboro and just acknowledging their minimum housing code kind of being above what the standard housing code is. And so just acknowledging that there's an opportunity still local to us in Greensboro as well. So I definitely also am acknowledging that this is probably a whole lot more than just a discussion. And so I do wanna make it the same offer I made when I first started this conversation kind of years ago. And that acknowledging that a lot of what we were doing with the Northeast Central Durham subcommittee was trying to ameliorate some of the kind of weedy lots and parking violations kind of conversation that this could be expanded across the city in kind of a way that addresses some of the tenant needs or the, even if there were landlord questions but giving a space where there was a subgroup of us that were focused on specifically how to move some of this forward. So it didn't have to all happen at work session but it was still public and accessible to anyone who wanted to come and offer comments essentially. Thank you council member. Okay, so do people feel good about on item three asking our city attorney to consult with Phil wrote the justice center and come back to us with a recommendation about whether we can implement this ordinance, the same ordinance that Charlotte has. Council member Freeman. Also just noting the city attorney that was I think I believe working on Charlotte's actual ordinance is actually in Chapel Hill and I'd be happy to make a connection there as well. Thank you. Whoops, thanks everyone. So let's look at item two, expand the minimum housing code. I have a question for our city attorney about this and I'm wondering if there's anything in this list that isn't already in our housing code if these things actually need to be added or if we have an enforcement problem. You know what, Mayor Pritcham, I think that senior assistant city attorney, Sophia Hernandez is probably better positioned to address this than she advises NIS on these issues could enforcement issues. And if I could ask, thank you, the maybe to turn on her camera. Hi council, good afternoon everyone. Sophia Hernandez of the city attorney's office. So taking a quick look at these detailed proposals we did just get them from my quick view. So mold is and I know mold has come up and it's obviously a very serious concern but unfortunately we are pretty limited in how we can address mold specifically. Our housing code does address moisture but as we noted in the spreadsheet that was provided and should have been attached as well to this agenda item there really isn't any state or federal regulations that really like set up standards and training or certifications on how to test for mold, what levels are mold are appropriate or not appropriate. There is a lot of that testing and certification processes are private. And as we noted, there was a law that it was introduced two years ago that unfortunately got stuck at committee with the legislator that intended to give municipalities authority to site for fungal growth for mold. And to us that's indicative that the general assembly felt that it was necessary for authority to be given indicating that authority currently doesn't exist. The law didn't move forward from committee and as of April 2019. So we're kind of strapped with the process of enforcing mold paint. We do have in our minimum housing code appliances are a little difficult as far as what kind of appliances if certain appliances are provided, they have to be kept in good working order but the requirement of providing certain appliances is it on there? Is it in the minimum housing code except for heating units? I'm sorry, not air conditioning, just heat? Correct, I think well actually HVAC. So it would include air conditioning if air conditioning is provided that it has to be in a good working order. But they're not required to provide air conditioning. Correct, okay. And I think that that's one, the code has existed in such a way for many decades and law can sometimes be slow to transition but also our housing stock is slow to transition and so there are certain things that we would have to consider about requiring certain things from homes that were built in the 1950s which many of our single level Brook branches are. Carpet is not directly addressed in the minimum housing code and that was something that in our spreadsheet to city council, we noted that we could look at directly addressing soft floor coverings such as carpet insulation is in the minimum housing code as well as plumbing and they're both individual sections that are pretty robust in the housing code regarding plumbing. All of our code enforcement inspectors that work with NIS are certified building inspectors and have training in different areas. And so I do think that having more conversations with the administration about what they're currently doing and have capacity to do would be quite helpful. Thank you. Council member Freeman. Thank you. I appreciate that. Sonan this, I just wanted to see, I don't know if there's any conversation with the county around this because they're all, they're mostly like mold and lead and kind of some of the other health hazards in a home are tied to some of the public health testing. Is it possible to have a conversation with our county attorney's office to see how their I guess process works I guess in addressing how it's written into their code or how it's written in because I don't know if there's any way we can tie it back to us just based on what the county's doing or if it's just talking to the county health department. But- Right, certainly we can discuss this further with the county office. I do know that NIS when they come across certain conditions where more sure is present have a process in which they refer that to the county health department and the tenants are informed of their rights and steps that they should wish to take regarding public health, the public health department. Thank you. Other comments or thoughts on this recommendation? So what's our next step here y'all asking NIS to give us a little bit more detailed information about what they are doing. And it seems like we're preempted from adding, adding the things that aren't in the code to the code but we may be able to improve the process that we have now for dealing with violations. And if I can, Mayor Pratam, I do believe the city attorney's office and I'm gonna say two weeks ago but with the way time goes now it might have been six weeks ago provided a document to counsel. It might have been 11 pages in which we detailed the current existing efforts and ordinances that we have on the book per these proposals. And so in that document, and I do believe it was attached to this agenda item when noted, the amount of, for example, citations as far as moisture or pests that occurred within the last couple of years and further detailed the language of our ordinance. And so I do feel that that document would be quite helpful to review as we look at any future changes to the ordinance. Thank you, yes, that is in our packet. And there are several references to mold and leaks, citations that NAS has processed on properties. All right, thanks, y'all. It seems like, oh, but the carpets, y'all will get back to us about any potential regulation we might be able to do in that area. Yes, absolutely. I do want to reiterate what we noted in our spreadsheet is that as we're looking to, you know, creating a more robust ordinance as far as the minimum housing code goes, we are limited in what, how did, if we distinguish between owner occupied versus rental units and single family homes versus multi-unit dwellings. And so I think it's important because right now we are here all concerned about tenants' rights and the eviction crisis and dwelling affordable housing capital in our city. But the state law does prohibit us from saying, okay, only in carpeting are we going to site, you know, moldy carpet and we can't just limit it to tenant occupied. And so we also have to think about, I know that this is a concern for our council of how this might affect owner occupied units and what a citation for these things might mean for folks with limited income that are having a hard time occupying their own homes. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, that's absolutely a consideration and the funding that we have in our repairs program and rehab program may not be enough to deal with some of those challenges. So we'll definitely have to think about resources. Thank you. Any other thoughts on this from council? Great, all right. The fourth recommendation is expand and reform the use of direct repairs. And our city attorney says that this is something that the council has the legal authority to do. Are there thoughts or questions from council members on this recommendation? Council Member Middleton. Right, thank you. Madam Mayor Pro Tem, I guess in this particular one, it seems to fall more under our purview of community action more so than kind of, I don't want to say this, we can support community development. I mean, we can spend a lot of money if we want and help folks, and they're federally, there's home and there's other programs that help folk do repair. And I guess if the city wants to put, I guess what I'm saying, this is kind of a low-hanging fruit. This doesn't really involve legal compulsion as it were. This is the power of our purse to spend money on activities. We want to set up a fund to help do repairs. That's something within our purview, I guess. So it seems to me that this would be a low-hanging fruit and some things that we kind of already do as a council and as a government. And I certainly, if we want to talk about doing more, that's a conversation I would welcome having. I guess that's all I was going to say about this particular one. This one seems like kind of a gimme to us. So that's it, Madam Mayor Pro Tem, I won't belabor it. Thank you. No, thank you. Other thoughts? Yeah, I agree. This is something that we already do, for example, in NIS issue citations, like if my grass is too high, they say if I don't cut my grass, they're going to come cut my grass and they're going to send me a bill. And if I don't pay the bill, they're going to put a lien on the property. It seems like we're essentially expanding that function to do these things more quickly. And again, it feels like primarily a capacity question. Given the capacity, do folks agree that this is that expanding the use of direct repairs is something we should pursue as a city? Mr. Mayor. I guess I think I'm not sure how kind of rolled out what we're what we've already got budgeted is. So I think that when we hear the response to the administration, you know, we'll we'll be able to understand, I think, better. But, you know, Councilmember Milton's right, we have a lot of this. We do a lot of it. And we're we've budgeted to do a lot more through our affordable housing program. So what is the status of that would be a really good thing to know when we hear back from the administration. And yeah, and then thinking about what the need is compared to that and how we're going to how we're going to meet it. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Councilmember Freelon. Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. I've just been, you know, primarily listening and definitely want to thank the folks from the Citizens, Citizens, Citizens, Tenants United Group for coming out and speaking. That testimony was really powerful. And I mean, what I heard from City Manager Paige was that she was taking copious notes during those while those comments are being offered and was going to come back with something that'll help provide more context. So basically, I want to echo what Steve is saying, with what Mayor Schulz is saying about I think that broader context from staff will be helpful for all of these decisions and to make any kind of broad strokes absent that context, you know, might be premature. And that was that was kind of my that was what I took from what a City Manager Paige said. So, you know, obviously, two of us won't be here when those when those recommendations come back. So it kind of puts the ball back in y'all's court to make these decisions. But I do think that context would be helpful. So that that's that's where I am. Thanks. Thank you. But so you'd like you'd like the admin to look into it. Yes. Yes. Councilmember Freeman. And thank you. I appreciate Councilmember Freelon and Mayor Schulz comments. I think it's important to note that, I mean, to be clear, like we can't do it all in one year and we can't do it all for the entire city. But I think that there's probably some of our programming, like as as Mayor Schulz was mentioning, especially around the affordable housing bond that could be expanded with funding from, you know, whether it is ARPA or some other funding source, but having a plan ready or some information ready so that the council can make that decision is probably the best next step. So thank you. Great. Yeah, I think we we have a consensus that we'd like our staff to look into it and get back to us. The next item, our city attorney recommends that it's entirely preempted. And I don't see a way past that for item six, the parking and towing. Though our city manager. Also, City Manager's Office also stated that this was preempted. There is a precedent in Chapel Hill where there was some, there was a towing ordinance that was passed that required certain notifications of tenants before being towed in parking lots. I'm not sure whether there are any, whether anything about that legal precedence could help alleviate some of the concerns that folks have expressed around towing, primarily that, you know, apartment complexes will tow tenants cars for things like expired registrations.  But I've asked our city attorney to look into that case and to also give us advice about whether there's anything that from that precedent that could apply to try to help alleviate that issue. The seventh item is also appears to be entirely preempted. I'm sorry, Council Member Freeman. Also on item six, I just want to make sure to note that there may be some leeway around how we mandate our parking spaces by contract or essentially when we're doing new building permits, there's something we're doing and I'm not sure what it is exactly, but there's something we're doing that makes it mandatory for an apartment to have a parking space. And I'm not sure what that looks like on the side of once it's built. But I would love to see if it's possible to look into that as well. Do you mean our parking requirements for new construction? Exactly. OK, yeah, I'm not sure that that I'm not sure how that's connected. Can you say a little bit more? So just in an acknowledging that we have something in our under the municipal authority to mandate that those units that those units have that each unit has a parking space. There should be something that says what happens with the parking space and whether that's tied to the tenant or tied to the property owner, how how we might be able to kind of have any whether or not there is authority authority in that same framework. Gotcha. My yeah, my understanding is that there isn't, but we can certainly can get that confirmed. Like as opposed to new new construction, but existing construction. What does that look like? Um, great. The the seventh item, the city, according to our city attorney, the this is largely largely preempted. The city cannot make the city cannot force certain lease terms on the tenants. There are a couple of other things in here that we can come back to. And item eight, the right to organize and non-retaliation. This though this item, though we can't pass an ordinance that would actually protect tenants. And there there is some legal there's some state law that allows tenants to like protects the right of tenants to organize and says that they cannot be retaliatorily evicted, though it doesn't protect them against any other kind of retaliation. This seemed like an opportunity for a similar declaration, like our Workers' Bill of Rights, where we would, you know, proactively state that that we believe that these rights that we believe that these rights are are important and that we that we support them, though it wouldn't be legally enforceable, could be a statement by the city to that effect. Councilmember Freeman. Thank you. And I would also add that there's probably to Councilmember Middleton's point earlier about putting his putting funds in a like a I forgot the word an escrow, but putting the funds in escrow, they could similarly be a private rights action that the city is supportive of or making it making it simpler, similar to how we have our deal program in place at the courthouse or even with legal aid, having some some form of information and literature that makes it simple for our tenants to actually file it with the courts if there is a retaliation or what have you. Thank you. So you're saying that that's something you would want to include in the resolution that we think that that we would support that. That we would support that kind of legal authority being given to tenants. Yes. Yeah. Great. Councilmember Freeman, do you want to work on that? Sure. Great. I think I already have. I suspected you might. Yes. Awesome. Great. Our next item, rent control. This is something that we've put into our and our legislative agenda, in addition to inclusionary zoning that we would like for for state level changes to to allow us to practice rent control, though, unfortunately, that has not been enacted so far in North Carolina. We do in all of the units of housing that we subsidize have affordability periods and affordability requirements so that the rent cannot be raised beyond the 30 percent of the income for the income level of of the folks who are authorized to live in the apartment. So while that's not explicitly rent control, it is it is already an existing it's it functions so that rent cannot be raised higher than than folks are able to pay. For item 10, our city attorney says that we are not able to require resident approval for repairs or renovations. Item 11, the ban the box second chance ordinance. There is a possibility there to add justice involved persons or persons with criminal history to our non-discrimination ordinance. Do folks have thoughts or comments on that option? Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. Yeah, when I read that we could do that, I was I was happy. The I think I've told the council not long ago that when. A couple of months ago, I took a one of the I took a walk through with the Bolshevik United Staff at McDougal Terrace and that included staff, the new staff, but hired in other communities. And at the afterwards, when I was asking them, what was on their mind, what were the things that are most important to them? They talked a lot about the fact that having with the income that they have as as a both city and I'm members that they are they're feeling like, you know, they can get up into the middle class, but. And they could afford to rent. But that they can't they that many of these people, Bolshevik United folks, we're talking about our peer. Violence interrupters are not able to rent in Durham because they have. You know, something on their record that shows up every single time they apply for so many of them are in the situation that a lot of people with who are formerly incarcerated have, which is that they. Or couch surfing with somebody else in one of the cases. The guy told me that his sister is on the lease. He's not couple of them talked about their girlfriends being on the lease that they can't have this on their own. And it's just terrible. And so I had actually had some sent and previously sent a communication about it over to legal aid a few weeks ago after that discussion and they've been busy with other things. But I think it's super important and would be a great addition to to this. I also will say that I've heard previously a little resuscible and a couple of other people had come to see me about this not long before that. And I think this would be a hugely important reform and I hope we can do it. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Other council members, council member Freeman. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. You remind me to to to make sure that I share as soon as possible. I'm just hearing about just from conversations around this band of ox on the tenant side that there has been an expanded expungement process that's available through the dear program. And so I do want to make sure that we're talking about that as much as possible and encouraging all residents that have convictions on their records to consult our dear program on the sixth floor in the courthouse to see if their records can be expunged so that they're not facing that issue on a consistent basis as well as moving this forward. Thank you. Thank you, council member. Other comments on. Band the box. We feel good about asking our city attorney to give us to look into adding that to our non-discrimination ordinance. Awesome. Um, item 12, eradication of unenforceable lease terms. I had a question for for our city attorney about that. Thank you. I am not a mayor for term. Hi. So if the lease terms are unenforceable, does it matter if they're in the lease? Like how does that if the if the landlord can't enforce them, aren't they just void? As a matter of law? Yeah. I mean, if they're illegal terms as a matter of North Carolina law, then they are void. But I think we're kind of preempted in the space because the state has a landlord tenant act. So yeah. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I think that the memo indicated that we were preempted. I wasn't sure if they're, but in addition to being preempted, I wasn't sure what this what doing something like this would actually accomplish. Got it. Right. Yeah. I mean, if they're actually legally unenforceable as a matter of North Carolina law than us trying to regulate it. It's just an extra pronouncement, you know, I mean, it doesn't accomplish anything additional beyond what's already in our statutes. Gotcha. Thank you. Council Member Freeman. Thank you. I would just ask if it's more of a public education or a public kind of like public kind of like a PSA, like we're doing public service announcements that do note that that if it's illegal by state law, I don't think a lot of folks even know, especially if there's a language barrier, what is legally permissible by the state versus not. And so maybe it's just literature that's available, but I do agree. Thank you. Yeah, perhaps Council Member Freeman, that's something that's something that you could take up in your in your resolution already. And our last item is 13 notified tenants of zoning changes relevant to their homes. We talked about this. We've talked about this before for rezoning cases where we only notify owners and our staff has told us about the challenges that notifying tenants that some that we don't always have good data on on residents of multi multifamily buildings, that it's just a little bit harder to notify tenants because we don't have like a registration law where people have to tell us where they live or landlords have to tell us that they're running a particular property. We could certainly ask our planning staff to come back to us and give us an opportunity to consider this again. If folks think that that that's something that we should do. Council Member Freeman. If I could actually just nail it down a little bit further, just to make it a little bit slimmer, it might just be acknowledging that if there are if there's a way to kind of do a data analysis of if there's different addresses for owner and tenant, like owner and and property, that there's some just kind of follow up to send a notice to the resident of as opposed to just doing like a blanket. Now, maybe simpler to do the blanket, but in the long run, I think the cost would probably be prohibitive. So maybe we're talking to someone like DataWorks to pull lists for us that kind of I mean, it's all public information, pull lists for us that make it available for our planning staff on an annual basis, some but something to that effect. Sorry, you're saying like a list of residents so that we could so that we would know who was living where and be able to notify them. So like even if it's just specific to a case or even if it's specific to a zip code, having a list available on an annual basis that says that these are the folks whose addresses are different from the owner and the tenant or the owner and the property. The property owner versus the actual address for where the property is. OK, yeah, we do have that on the already. Like if you go on the internet and you look up a property, the owner, if the property address and the owner's address are different, that can be that can be parsed. So our planning department could tell us which properties are tenant occupied. But it's it's trickier. For example, if it's a multifamily building to like notify all those tenants in that building. But I think I think in those cases where it's like multi tenant buildings, it's kind of like resident of ABCDFG and yeah, that's it. Yeah, and we probably yeah, I mean, it's it's a question of the resources that we want to put into it. If we think that it's if we think it's important whether we want to continue to pursue it and I'm not I'm not clear on what the consensus is on that yet. I do think it is important acknowledging that there were a couple of cases where there were tenants who would have liked to have been made aware of the property zoning changes or the upcoming cases. I leave that to my to my colleagues. So anyone else have an opinion on that question? Given no further opinions, I don't know what to do. Do we want to ask them? Now. Sure, do do do we want Councilor Mayor Schultz? Well, to me, that's, you know, it's totally a resource question. No question, it will be great to do it. It's hard. You know, we've heard a lot from staff in the past that it's difficult. And we're, you know, all these things are going to have to be balanced against each other. You know, we've talked about a lot of different things right here that we might want to spend more money on. We might want to add to what we're doing on repairs. We might want to maybe we need to be adding inspection staff.  So which are the ones that are going to give us the most help? What are the things that are going to help our tenants the most that we can afford? And so I think it's worth trying to figure out. You know, what would that would be like? What that would be like in terms of staff effort and cost? Thank you, Mr. Mayor, Council Member Freeman. Thank you. Also, I was just thinking about I know that staff had shared the city attorney's office staff had shared that they were doing it in Raleigh. And so I really would love to hear exactly what they are doing in Raleigh that makes it makes a tenable day or not here. All right. So let's put that on the list. So that that's the last of the recommendations. And what I have written down right now is that we'd like recommendations and more information from our city manager on items one, two, four and thirteen from our city attorney on three, six and eleven. And that Council Member Freeman will be working on a resolution related to number eight. Does that sound good for everybody moving forward? Great. Thanks, everybody, especially want to thank our speakers today. The folks from both City Tenants United and Durham can and other organizations. We really appreciate your advocacy on this issue. We know it's a critically important priority for for our residents and that our housing, our housing situation has to continue to be at the at the top of the list of priorities for this council in the city. So we really appreciate all of your work researching and developing these recommendations and look forward to continuing to work with you to do whatever we can to to help make the situation better for Tenants and Durham. But thanks y'all so much. Our next item, sorry, is a presentation item number 16, equitable pedestrian infrastructure update. Good afternoon, Mayor Pro Tem Johnson, Mayor Shul and members of council. I'm Sean Egan, Director of Transportation and I'm joined today by Brian Taylor, Principal Planner and Doug Bright, Transportation Specialist for the Department of Transportation. Slide. Earlier this year, council shared an interest in making investments in green and equitable infrastructure and Deputy City Manager Bo Ferguson provided a series of presentations to council on the types of projects that could be candidates for this funding, among them sidewalks and pedestrian safety improvements. Dating back to the 2017 bike and walk plan, the city has undertaken a series of community engagement efforts through the Move Durham study, the engaged Durham process in support of the Durham County Transit Plan and Comprehensive Land Use Plan and the sidewalk inventory and assessment earlier this year. We have heard consistently from the community about the need for sidewalks and pedestrian safety improvements. Today, we plan to share an update on our work to reprioritize the many needs identified through these engagement efforts. Slide. In June, council adopted a budget that raises additional revenue to support green and equitable infrastructure as we prepare project submissions for the upcoming Capital Improvement Program CIP process to utilize this funding. We wanted to respond to some of the concerns we heard earlier this year during council discussions around this topic. Slide. As you can see in this slide shared in April, sidewalks and pedestrian safety were the top priorities in the council member survey of potential project types. As we discussed at that time, previous prioritization efforts did not include a race equity lens and council shared concerns that it would be critical to incorporate race equity in the prioritization process for the use of equitable infrastructure funds. Since then, to respond to this guidance, transportation staff have been working to ensure race equity is addressed by looking at census data for neighborhoods around project locations, used by transit riders, 80% of whom were people of color, and traffic violence that causes disabling injuries and loss of life that disproportionately impacts Black residents. Today we want to share the revised approach we have developed and presented to the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission to include race equity and identify projects that will respond to the needs we heard from the community and the policy goals of council and to hear your feedback on this revised approach. With that, I will ask Brian Taylor to present our work on sidewalks. Hello, everybody. I'm going to cover our 2021 sidewalk prioritization process. And as Sean touched on, there's a clear call for more sidewalks for the people who need them most. And the Transportation Department is developing a list of additional sidewalk projects for funding. Using an updated prioritization process from the 2017 bike walk plan that incorporates a more sophisticated lens for equity. Next slide. The 2017 bike walk plan, which we used to make funding decisions for sidewalks, included two rounds. Round one prioritization included 900 sidewalk order gaps based on a wide range of variables used to measure four factors that you see here. Safety, connectivity, demand, and equity. And as you can see, equity was included as a factor, but poverty was the only variable used. It was around two review of sidewalk corridor gaps by a committee that considered all these factors together in context. And public input was also considered as part of this process. And this led to development of 16 sidewalk corridor projects that were included in the adopted 2017 plan. This list of 16 sidewalk corridor projects is, however, a small fraction of what we need to build. Next slide. You can see these 16 sidewalk projects from the bike walk plan here in blue on the map, and their status is shown on the table to the left. There are also sidewalk projects from past plans, and these active or completed sidewalk projects are not shown on this map. And when we filter out all the sidewalks that have been built since 2017 that are in design or in planning, we are still left with 670 sidewalk order gaps in the city, shown here in orange. It's about 300 miles. And our starting point for the 2021 prioritization process was here with this list of all these sidewalk order gaps you see in orange. We began our prioritization using an updated round one process that placed greater emphasis on equity variables, including households and poverty, which we already had included under equity, minority households, which was added to the equity factor, and bus stops and bus stop ridership within 200 feet. This was included under the demand factor, but as Sean has noted, we believe that bus stop access is an important equity variable in Durham, considering that 80% of go-derm riders are people of color. The weighting was doubled for all three of these equity variables as part of the scoring process, and I'm going to share some maps to illustrate the impact of their revised prioritization. This map shows the equity factor scores for sidewalk order gaps. Above average scores are shown in pink and red. This equity score for each sidewalk gap is specifically based on the average percent of minority households in census blocks within a half mile of the sidewalk gap and the average percent of households in poverty in census blocks within a half mile. And when we added minority households as an equity variable, this gave higher priority to sidewalk gaps in several majority minority neighborhoods, including some outside the city center where poverty may not have been as acute, but there was a very high percentage of minority households. Examples being Ross Road, Junction Road, Dearborn, South Roxborough Cook. These were the type of sidewalk gaps that jumped up high on our lists. Next slide. This map shows how different sidewalk order gaps scored on access to transit. The transit variables are part of the demand factor score, but as we mentioned, we are also using this as an equity variable. And the transit score for each sidewalk gap is based on the number of bus stops within 200 feet and the sum of average daily ridership for all bus stops within 200 feet. And our refinement to this transit variable and our increase weighting gave greater priority to sidewalk core gaps on streets that directly serve go-to-room buses and go-to-room riders. Next slide. We summed up the scores for safety, demand, equity, and connectivity factors to calculate total scores and rankings for all 670 sidewalk corridor gaps. We went through several round one scoring iterations and refined our methodology with feedback from transportation department staff. And we then selected the top 200 sidewalk corridor gaps shown here in blue for the round two working group review. Next slide. A working group of transportation department staff was set up to review the top 200 sidewalk corridor gaps. And as part of this review, factors and variables from round one were ground truth, so to speak, and considered together in context. We also considered the feasibility and scope of sidewalk projects and also referred to existing public input from plans in recent surveys. And this review is being used to develop the preliminary list of 50 sidewalk corridor gaps. And I'm going to share a few examples from that round two review. Each sidewalk corridor gap was reviewed using street view aerial GIS layers, existing plans, public input, in some cases site visits. And the working group attempted to answer several questions for each sidewalk corridor gap. One being, does the round one score make sense? For each factor, such as safety, demand, or equity, can we build a sidewalk here, thinking about constructability? And then what type of project is the best fit on this street, thinking about scope? And our first example here comes from Junction and Ross Road. You can see the light blue lines show that there is no sidewalk on either side of Junction Road or Ross Road. The red diamonds indicate pedestrian crashes on junction at Ross and at Holloway. So we can look at this map and confirm that there are serious safety issues here, the back of the very high safety scores that were attributed to these sidewalk gaps on these streets. We also know that people need these sidewalks to access the bus stops and grocery stores shown on this map. So we know that there is a clear demand for walking here based on the nearby destinations shown in the bottom left-hand corner of the map. We also use street view to assess demand, which is a great resource for transportation planners that we use about every week. And this is indicating this image from Dearborn Drive. We're also, we're often looking for a well-worn path, often called a goat path on the side of a road, or we're looking for a pedestrian in the street view or in this case bicyclist. So the goat path and the bicyclist in this image help us confirm that Dearborn is a street where people do in fact want to walk and bike. And that touches on another one of the issues that we need to investigate, the scope or the alternatives. Does Dearborn need a sidewalk or does it need a side path of 10 to 12 feet that can accommodate people on foot and on bike? And this touches on yet another issue. A sidewalk could be difficult to construct on Dearborn, given drainage issues and property impacts that would make a side path of 10 to 12 feet even harder to construct. So for this reason, we need to assess the constructability of each sidewalk gap. I will say in many cases, especially on Dearborn, there are places that just absolutely need a sidewalk and will be built regardless of constructability questions. There's also an image here from Alston Avenue. You can see that there is no sidewalk on the west side of Alston Avenue here and building a sidewalk would have a significant impact on the residential property shown in the picture. So we need to be considering drainage, property impacts, topography, utilities, and railroad right away when we're thinking about constructability. We also considered existing public input from plans, surveys, and emails, but we still need to develop a process to engage communities and collect feedback on the priority sidewalk corridors that this working group will identify. So that's the summary of our round one and round two process that we updated and revised. And I'm going to hand it off to Doug to talk about some of our other pedestrian improvements we've been having a second look at. Well, as Brian mentioned, I'm going to be talking about pedestrian safety and accessibility improvements. So we're looking back at this list of priorities that Sean had shared at the start. There's some overlap, certainly, with sidewalks in terms of pedestrian safety. But because I'm going to be speaking a little bit more broadly on that, I'm also going to provide a little bit of context on previous commitments to pedestrian and other traffic safety that have been made in the past in Durham. So Vision Zero is a traffic safety approach that the council committed to in September of 2017. Its ultimate goal is to reduce traffic fatalities and serious injuries to zero, that's the name. And it really parallels work on racial equity in that it's a systemically oriented program. It recognizes that there are systemic causes and thus a need for system-based solutions to the issue. This is a table that shows the difference between Vision Zero and a more traditional approach to traffic safety. Highlighting a couple of these items, Vision Zero, emphasizes that traffic deaths and serious injuries are preventable, whereas traditionally, they have been thought of as inevitable and an inevitable cost of having to get somewhere. We also recognize that humans make mistakes, that they can't be expected to always act perfectly and that a system should be able to protect them from severe consequences. And the bottom line really is that the solution is systemic change, as I mentioned, and that we can't rely on individual responsibility to improve outcomes. I'm just going to share an example of how this plays out. So Vision Zero deals with wanting to reduce outcomes, deaths and serious injuries on roads to zero. But one thing that plays into that is behavior. We have a graphic here that shows that the likelihood of dying when hit by a car increases, of course, with speed. It's not very surprising, but it drives us to want to change that behavior, to change speed and the speed of cars on roads in order to reduce those severe outcomes. And speeds can be impacted certainly by speed limits and by enforcement that comes along with it, but it can also be impacted by road design, so separating cars from pedestrians, tighter roads, speed humps, things like that. And so in a Vision Zero approach, we want to really recognize all of these potential tools to change behavior, to thus change outcomes. Zooming ahead to this year, there was a UNC group that did a community readiness assessment on Vision Zero in Durham. It interviewed a number of experts in the field within Durham who had knowledge on traffic safety and came out with some recommendations about where to go. One of those recommendations was to center vulnerable users, which included certainly low-income people, those with public health issues, including housing and security and substance abuse, as well as racial minorities. And the reasons why racial minorities are a vulnerable user on roads is complicated, but the bottom line is that the data shows us in Durham that when we're thinking about Vision Zero and pedestrians, we're thinking about those pedestrians who were killed or seriously injured. In this 13-year time span, we see that Black people in Durham represent more than 50 percent of the deaths in serious injuries as pedestrians, while representing less than 40 percent of the county's population. And that bottom line when we look at the problem through the lens of race is powerful. And it's one of the reasons that we embarked on this kind of data analysis to recast our Vision Zero approaches in a racial way. So this is a map which I'll explain. The red areas represent the high Vision Zero crash rate areas. So these are areas where pedestrians have a higher risk based on crash rates in the past. And then the blue areas are block groups that are higher minority population. And the places where they overlap are the purple areas. And these are what we're imagining to be priority neighborhoods for Vision Zero going forward, recognizing that they both have high proportions of minority residents and high proportions of crash rate and impact on pedestrians. And so this is a map that I'll bring up again and we'll hope to guide neighborhood-based approaches to traffic safety going forward. This is just a zoomed-in version of those two chunks, the northern chunk and the southern chunk of those priority neighborhoods in order to give a little bit more context. And so the question is how do we tackle the issue of pedestrian safety more broadly? What kind of tools do we have? One of the tools that I'll talk about are intersections. So Brian had presented on the 2017 bike walk plan prioritization for sidewalk corridor gaps. And this is the same context that I'm providing for intersections. So in that bike walk plan, there were 480 intersections that were considered as needing some level of traffic safety improvement. Again, it did include equity, but it was only limited to households within poverty. There was another round of further evaluation to kind of narrow things down to provide a little extra nuance and that resulted in a list of 25 projects that ended up being in the plan itself and recommended for prioritization. And the map on the right is providing that scoring process from the first round, really a lot of emphasis on the center of the city. For a little bit more context, this is just sort of an example of what one of these intersection projects looks like. So at Mangum-a-Dillard, this is one of the 25. Phase one of this project is already completed as of earlier this year and there's a picture of it on the right. But it's very simple stuff. It's adding high visibility cross-box, push buttons, an overhead signal, signage, etc. And then a little bit more in terms of phase two being kind of changing the distribution of lanes on the road, adding a bike lane and so on. Fairly straightforward and simple approaches here, but just wanted to provide kind of what kind of intersection improvements we're talking about. Adding visibility for pedestrians, essentially. So coming back to that list of 25 projects, the purple areas on the map here are the same purple areas that you saw before. These are the priority neighborhoods that we imagine based on our analysis. These 25 projects in the blue crosses are throughout the city, but five of them were in these priority neighborhoods. Four of the 25 projects remain unfunded at the moment and zero of those unfunded projects are in those priority neighborhoods. So what that tells us is if we are serious about angling towards racial equity in our Vision Zero approach, in our traffic safety approach, then really we need to come back to this list, perhaps in the same way that Brian has presented on sidewalks and implement racial equity in terms of the prioritization scoring and recognize kind of what intersections fall within areas that are of higher risk. And there are plenty of projects from that initial list of 480 that are in those neighborhoods. So 65 intersections were in those priority neighborhoods to start. And like I mentioned, five of those intersections were actually chosen within the bike walk plan. And so we recommend, as I mentioned, coming back to this list of 480 or even more and reprioritizing, as Brian has done with sidewalks, using an approach to include some nuance and recognize the same kinds of complicating factors within each of them, but really coming back to it and using re-implementing race in terms of the prioritization method there. One other thing I'll touch on briefly is traffic calming. So traffic calming is kind of a collection of approaches that are outlined in this traffic calming guidelines document that came out in 2017. But there are things like speed bumps and raised crosswalks and traffic circles. The document on the right came out in conjunction with Vision Zero and that commitment. And on the left is a snippet from the 2017 bike walk plan, which recommended using traffic calming guidelines, a traffic calming within neighborhoods in order to slow speeds and reduce impacts. What we recommend is really embracing these as kind of low-cost, more speedy methods to be able to make impacts, especially in places where an analysis like one Brian presented on might suggest that a sidewalk isn't appropriate or isn't as feasible as we hope it to be and can reclaim the road for pedestrians and others who need to use it, even if there aren't sidewalks available. And providing a little bit more context, there are some of these implementations existing in Durham, of course. These are two of the implementations, raised crosswalk and traffic circles that we imagine to be most impactful and have really excellent application for neighborhood-level traffic safety improvements. So these aren't necessarily on the biggest streets and the biggest intersections, but even at midblock crossings and things like that. So the bottom line is kind of re-implementing and making sure that traffic calming is brought back into the tool set as we move forward. So with that, I'll pass it back to Sean to wrap up. Thanks, Doug. So what we really wanted to hear from Council today was following up on the conversation that we had in the springtime. We've gone back based on what we heard then and looked at incorporating race equity, reprioritizing and revising this approach. We really have a strong inventory based on what we have heard from the community through a series of community engagement efforts over the last several years. So the challenge is making sure that this prioritization approach is the right approach for this. And we'll continue to engage with the community to make sure that we are on the right track with this. And our hope is that we'll hear from both Council and the community that this is an approach that addresses priorities. And so that when we move into the CIP request process, we do that in the understanding that these projects are responsive both to the needs and the priorities of Council and our community. So with that, we're happy to take any questions that you have. Thanks, y'all. That was a really great presentation. I'm really excited to see how this work is moving forward. Comments or questions from Council? Council Member Freelon. Thank you. I just wanted to share some appreciation for the team. Sean, I was part of the Vision Zero task force that the mayor asked me to join a couple months ago. And it was really illuminating to me how the Vision Zero idea, the whole concept that this is all preventable and that we can just kind of radically transform our habits. It just requires a lot of radical imagination and faith because we just take for granted that these deaths and there just is, I mean, some years more traffic accidents than shooting accidents in the state of North Carolina. And it's not something that gets, you know, it's much kind of an urgent attention. And that's what that was my biggest takeaway from being part of the Vision Zero team. But just really appreciating the radical imagination that went into that process and was really felt very privileged to be a part of that team and very gracious of Mr. Egan and the rest of the staff for the work that they've put in to implement its tenants into our policies here in the city. So thank you. I'm thrilled, a wonderful presentation. I love that we're going back and that our CIP will be informed through an equity lens. I think that's great. Really aligns with our values and important, especially for some of the areas of Durham that have been historically divested from, those black and brown historic communities that Brother Middleton is often talking about. This is one of those really important places where we can, you know, put an influx of city resources in to help right some of those historic wrongs. So I look forward to, yeah, just thumbs up on the process and look forward to more immersive community engagement moving forward and keeping this equity lens front and center, because this is so, so important. And disproportionately, as you mentioned, affects, you know, certain more, some communities more than others. So, yeah, that's all. Just really enjoyed the presentation and appreciate your work. Thank you, Council Member. Council Member Freeman. Thank you, Equin. Council Member Freelon's comments. I appreciate your work on the Vision Zero task was actually got involved with it early on. Just as a resident in the community, and I can't say enough how devastating traffic accidents have been, whether it's pedestrian or bike or car or motorcycle. I think we've been devastated in the loss of so many residents in our community. And so I'm really grateful for this work and wrapping that into this whole conversation around equity and infrastructure. I am really like excited that you were able to kind of parse it out and put so much data behind how we would even look at it in the race equity lens. And so I'm grateful for that as well. And I just want to say that I was, I was given to ask all the, you know, the questions and you were covering it as we were going. And I just want to say thank you. So I look forward to continuing to support this work and figuring out how to make sure that traffic calming is a huge part of that. I know that there are a lot of folks who like to speed, including myself sometimes, but, you know, just trying to make sure that we're all safe is important. And so I thank you. Thank you, Council Member. Other comments? Council Member Middleton? Thank you, Madam Mayor Pro Tem. Sean, good to see you always. And Doug, good to have you here with us. I want to thank you for, you know, this is, this is a really exciting presentation because it kind of goes to, I'm sure this is true for all of my colleagues. This is kind of why I ran. You know, in a city that's over 150 years old, it's very easy for some things to just kind of function by inertia. There are some systems that are already in place and it's very easy to, you know, come into office and kind of just rubber stamp what's already g