Board of County Commissioners - Regular Meeting

Joining us for our Durham County Board of Commissioners work session this Tuesday, September 8th. I hope everyone enjoyed their long weekend and took some time to share your appreciation with the union for allowing us to have weekends and a Labor Day weekend. i will ask commissioner burton would you like to read the actually i have to read the public charge but will you read the land acknowledgement afterwards okay the board of commissioners asks its members and residents to conduct themselves in a respectful courteous manner both with the board and fellow residents At any time, should any member of the board or any resident fail to observe this public charge, the chair will ask the offending person to leave the meeting until that individual regains personal control. Should decorum fail to be restored, the chair will recess the meeting until such time that a genuine commitment to the public charge is observed. Commissioner Burton.

Thank you, Vice Chair Alon. Land acknowledgment, as we convene for the Durham County Commissioner's meeting, it's crucial to recognize the painful truth of history. We stand on the stolen ancestral lands of the Catawba, Eno, Okanichi, Tuscarora peoples whose deep connection to the land predates our arrival we acknowledge with humility the unjust displacement and violence that occurred leading to the dispossession of indigenous peoples from their homelands their resilience in the face of such adversity is a testament to their strength and spirit may we humbly honor the ancestors and elders of these nations both past and present, by committing ourselves to fostering understanding, healing, and justice for all who inhabit this land. Let us walk forward together with open hearts, acknowledging the past and embracing a future guided by compassion, respect, and unity.

Thank you, Commissioner Burton. We will now move to our resident comments, starting with our virtual comment from Crystal Norford. And while our clerk gets Crystal up on the screen, I'll call the first four names to come line up over on this left side of the podium. And before you start speaking, make sure you press the speaker button. When the mic turns green, it is on. So Kevin McIver, Kara Russo, Tim Walter, and Chris Vitiello will be the first four after Crystal. Crystal, can you hear us? I can. Can you hear me? Can you speak up a little bit louder? It's better. Yes. Oh, yes. And you have three minutes and you'll hear a timer.

Thank you, guys. I appreciate the opportunity to speak. My name is Crystal. I'm an environmental organizer with Clean Water for North Carolina, and I'm a lifelong resident of Davidson County. I'm here this morning to explain why I believe it's very important for Durham County to implement a very strong and real data center moratorium. In the Davidson and Davie County region, we are currently fighting a massive fossil fuel energy buildout. Duke Energy is proposing to build two gigantic gas power plants and the largest liquefied natural gas facility in company history right along our Yadkin River. This is a natural and historic stretch of the river. The expected rates of air pollution from this project would suffocate the health of nearby residents, and the water withdrawal rates and thermal pollution would harm the health of our Yadkin River and the people that rely on it. The thing is, these gas power plants that Duke Energy is promoting to build are only needed for the projected demand of data centers. And without that demand, this harmful gas project would not be necessary. With Durham County implementing a strong data center moratorium that actually works to prevent the development of such harmful infrastructure, this would cut the demand of data centers and protect the communities across the state that are bearing the brunt of this harmful and unnecessary gas development. Please be good neighbors and close the loophole in your moratorium because what Durham decides to do has real impacts on other counties across our state. I appreciate the time to speak. Thank you.

Thank you, Crystal. We'll now start over here with Kevin McIver.

Good morning. Thank you. About a year ago, I stood on this side of the dais and presented an award to the family of DeWarren Langley. and i promise his family that i will continue his work whenever it comes to advocacy and the reason i'm here today is i'm here to speak about the violence work group that is going to be presenting later and advocacy with that and it's about accountability and we're looking to hold folks accountable for the work that's going to be done in this city um i reached out to all of you guys through email and i want to give a special thank you to commissioner jacobs who always answers my emails and reaches back to me whenever that time comes whenever I reach out to them and I'm very thankful for that but what I'm here for is to say that we have had this plan in order for the last few years whenever they did the gang reduction assessment four years ago since that time it's been about 170 homicides thousands of shootings going on and we're still talking about having work sessions youth summits and It's like a continuation. Why do we have to continue on having youth summits and things of that nature when we already have the data? I think, if I'm not mistaken, it was about $42,000 for Michelle Young to come in and do this assessment, and this book has been sitting stalemate for four years while people are continuing to die in our city. Why is it continuing to take so long for the work to be done in this city? How much more time are we going to dedicate to not doing anything? It is about that time that we need to step up and stand out. because it's not making any sense that we continue to have these working groups, and it's not all inclusive. It was not all inclusive. I continued to reach out to them to try to help them and work with them, but they refused to allow me to help work with them for months, for months. Now they're gonna get up here and say, Durham is resource rich but execution poor, and that is continuing to be shown and be seen. So as I end this, and the last thing I wanna say is this. When are we going to be accountable? That is what Mr. Langley stood for, is accountability. We talk about how tight the budgets are, but for the last three years, I've worked with the city's capital improvement budget. Billions of dollars have been spent and put in to different programs through city, but not one for youth violence. We need to start being held accountable for the work that we're doing. So, at what point Do we stand up and we say it is time to be accountable? That is what DeJuan Langley stood for with accountability, and it is that time. When are we gonna stop with the excuses and begin with responsibility? Thank you.

Good morning, County Commissioners. I'm Kara Russo, President and CEO of Discover Durham. On behalf of Discover Durham, Durham Next, and the Durham Sports Commission, we are pleased to offer our endorsement of the Durham Cultural Roadmap. Each of our organizations contributes to Durham's vibrancy and vitality from different perspectives. Discover Durham works to attract visitors, conventions, events, and investment that generate support for small businesses, jobs for locals, and tax revenue for our community. The Durham Sports Commission uses sports to create similar economic, community, and quality of life opportunities. Durham Next focuses on community aligned economic development through the lens of tourism to create the conditions for Durham's next generation of growth. Yet our work increasingly brings us to the same conclusion. Durham's cultural and creative assets are among the community's greatest economic and civic assets. And we can position them to make a remarkable impact if we work collaboratively and with intention. The cultural roadmap provides an important framework for doing exactly that. Durham has all of the makings of an extraordinary cultural ecosystem. artists cultural organizations businesses venues festivals neighborhood leaders and institutions are creating real value for our community our organizations are already partnering with many of them and we are making progress but candidly we are often working to make it rather than making it work through a shared structure. Too much of Durham's cultural and creative work still depends on individual relationships, organizations finding one another project by project, and people working hard to bridge gaps that should be addressed more systematically. The opportunity before us is to create a more intentional structure for coordination. One that allows the city, the county, cultural community, economic development organizations, businesses, and other partners to align efforts over time. The cultural roadmap is Durham's blueprint to begin that work. The Durham cultural roadmap also aligns closely with Durham's destination master plan, which establishes a vision for how Durham can intentionally grow visitation while ensuring that tourism contributes to the community's broader goals. The two plans approach Durham from different but complementary perspectives. The cultural roadmap identifies the importance of strengthening Durham's cultural ecosystem, supporting the people and organizations that make our community distinctive, and expanding access and opportunity. The destination master plan identifies culture, creativity, events, neighborhoods, and the experiences they create as essential components of Durham's destination identity and visitor economy. Together, these plans reinforce an important principle. We should build together.

Thank you.

Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to address you. My name is Tim Walter. I founded and run an art center called The Fruit, which is on the edge of downtown. Some of you have been. Thanks for coming. I'm in an odd position here. I didn't realize we'd be speaking without having heard the roadmap presentation yet. A lot of what's available to the public on the roadmap was sort of done as a review on August 17th. And the details of the request that I'm predicting will be presented today have never been made public. And the, um, uh, the, the bodies that are guiding the roadmap, uh, have, uh, suggested, or actually told me specifically, they will not be engaging the public in a discussion about the recommendations and the plan. including the specificities of the budget request and the like. So for a plan that purports to tackle one of the most important issues that the residents identified, which is an absence of transparency in how funding is provided, I think this process is really kind of nuts. And I just, I really wish that the community was putting forward a more visible, transparent process and let the expertise come in. There are significant problems with it. There's a lot to recommend in it, but there are really some significant problems. And I think it's unfair to ask elected officials to make a 10-year commitment to something that You know, I'm still waiting to hear the details of, and it's just kind of bizarre, and I don't really think this is the way that a five- or ten-year policy process should be implemented. Thank you. Thank you.

Good morning all. My name is Chris Vitiello. I am the current Durham Poet Laureate. I'm also the Poetry Fox and I've been, thank you for the snaps, I've been a Durham resident and a working artist for 32 years. When I moved to Durham in 1994, I had no intention of staying in a sleepy southern town. I'm not really from the south. I was here for a bit and was going to scurry to San Francisco or New York but I did stay because what I found here was a really rich artist community that and a lot of space and time to do stuff so I stayed because this was a place where you could do the work of art you could find other people you could park you could get around things were cheap and just immediately artistic communities started forming I was organizing I was participating in And I've stayed ever since and raised kids that I've sent off to art school, believe it or not. So this is my home. This is the kind of place where I like to do work. But over time, that sort of DIY spirit, you do this enough, And then you start wanting to build bigger structures and bigger artistic communities and working on projects that have a larger impact. Not just doing weird stuff on a Saturday night, but doing something that matters to everybody in your city. And I want to endorse the Durham Cultural Roadmap as the kind of interface that artists who have those aspirations need in order to interact with the city and interact with resources and interact with each other. We need to start building bigger stuff. Durham has a reputation across the country as a place where creatives can make moves and build stuff. And a lot of Durham artists aren't just doing something downtown, we're doing something that has a regional, national impact. So I think the Durham cultural roadmap is important thing to get into place I know there are some details that Tim mentioned that haven't been worked out but but those can be worked out you know we need we need this infrastructure now to be able to interact with some of the entities that we need to interact with to do to do bigger stuff and to grow the creative communities that are just starting here so thank you so much for your time I look forward to the Durham Cultural Roadmap update later, and I hope you all support it. Thanks. Thank you.

Our next speakers are Leslie St. Dre, Abigail Johnson, Tiffany Swope. Yeah, those are our next three.

Hello, I'm Leslie St. Dre. With Community Land and Power and the Stop Data Centers and Durham Coalition, which includes 31 local organizations across Durham, I'm here to demand that Commissioners Lee, Jacobs, Valentine, and Burton stop selling out Durham for big tech, dirty energy, dirty real estate profits. Start by deleting the massive loopholes you passed, which allow 100,000 square foot, 100 megawatt, AI data centers, and all of their known harms by right. Despite your continued public misinformation, this is considered hyperscale within the industry. Any company that submits a permit for a new data center or an expansion before you close your loopholes or pass strong permanent protections is allowed to use 24-7 methane gas generators and cause constant noise pollution. Air pollution, water pollution, PFAs in our drinking water, job loss, surveillance, energy rate hikes, and so much more. All 61 residents, not including the two paid lobbyists, who spoke at your hearing on 824 demanded a real moratorium without loopholes. This includes teachers. City workers, military vets, tech workers, even ones working in RTP, black residents living near RTP, and so many more. The only voices in support of you gutting the protections were two paid corporate lobbyists, Scott Levitin from the RTP Foundation and Ramsey Ritchie from the Chamber of Commerce. Only Commissioner Alam listened to the will of the people of Durham, while you gave Durham County the worst moratorium in the entire state. The only way we can assure everyone is protected from AI and data center harms is to strictly regulate all of it. 100,000 square feet is not small. It is the scale of a Home Depot warehouse. Those use 0.5 megawatts of energy. Data centers of that size can use 100 megawatts or from 80,000 to 100,000 homes worth of energy. NC ranks worst in the country for worker protections, and corporations rank first. Your moratorium vote follows that trend, allowing job killing, exploitative, extractive industry to keep causing more harms here. If just three more of that size are built, data centers will use more energy than all residents in Durham. and we will all be paying for their private use and profits. Close the loopholes. Work with the people of Durham to pass the strictest permanent regulations and protections from all AI data centers. The closed-loop water system does not protect us. They require constant flushing. That flushing puts PFAs into our water system. And also, as you heard from Davidson, 10 to 24 times more water use comes from where the power plants are. So it doesn't mean there's not water being used. It means other neighbors, our neighboring regions suffer.

Thank you.

Hi, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to speak. My name is Abigail Johnson. I also go by AJ. I recently graduated from Duke University. I studied political science there, and now I work as like a writer, musician, and organizer in Durham. I'm here in solidarity with Leslie, and I have three main points on data centers. Well, first of all, I wanted to thank Commissioner Awam for being the only person to stand up to delete those loopholes. As a young person, you give me so much hope, and yeah, I'm just really blown away. I know everyone here is here because they care about our community, but thank you for being the person to stand up for us. Young people, workers of Durham, have a simple demand. We want you to represent your constituents. On Monday, August 24th, 61 residents came out to speak at this county hearing to demand a real moratorium without loopholes. That's a lot of people, and voter disenfranchisement happens in a lot of ways, but having that many people spend hours on a Monday night realizing that their voice doesn't matter is something that disenfranchises people from thinking they can do anything in our communities. Public officials, from what I learned in school, are supposed to represent their constituents, and we all overwhelmingly oppose these carve-outs. You're not supposed to represent bad faith corporate actors who are gladly going to rob our communities of our health, safety and natural resources before ever doing something responsible in the interest of working class people. My other point is on this weird condescension that I feel like we get, especially as a young person, that I often feel like y'all are talking down to us and we're your constituents, as though you're this parent figure making a tough decision Again, and that you know better than us, but even the Wall Street Journal has released articles on how the AI data center boom is actually a job creation bust. They can employ more than 1,000 people in the months or years that it takes to build them, but they rarely need more than 1 or 200 once they open. I just think that the idea that AI is going to create more economic opportunity for people is such a bust. And I think of Greta Thunberg and her statement on the myth of eternal economic growth. When we have finite resources, it just feels really salient here. And the future I dream of as a young person is one where we shape our future, not big corporations. Like Mamdani in New York, they're making... mayor's offices of worker power where they protect workers rights giving them resources to organize we could have more funding for like education public arts um yeah i feel like commissioner alum was the only one who was thinking about the responsible solution for our community and we should look out for um the well-being of the most oppressed in our cities and i feel like i just want you all to protect like your actual constituents instead of corporate interests thank you so much thank you

Good morning. I am Tiffany Swope. I am the founder of Grace Inc. We operate out of the Cornwallis community. I've spoken with several of you one off. As most of you know, I work with youth in the Cornwallis community. I've been in that community for five years now, starting my fifth year. I'm here on behalf of the Violence Reduction Summit, which I was very excited to be a part of. Dr. Lee, thank you and Mayor Williams for keeping this issue a priority. But the priority, I'm going to be honest and say I was thrown off by hearing that the data landed us at a 30 year black male When I'm in the community hearing youth and families cry out for support, it's not the 30-year-old black man that's creating the havoc in the community. It's the youth who are unsupported, who are crying out for help, who are losing their lives on a daily basis. With that being said, I want to share that I'm very disappointed about recommendation number five from the summit because now we have to go through this whole process Circus of summits of focus groups of hearing from the youth, which I hear from on a regular basis. And also on the city side, I was a part of a one and a half year research study that was led by the Office of Youth in collaboration with Youth Mentoring Collaborative. We spoke with providers. We spoke with parents. We spoke with youth from across this city. Laura Khalil did an amazing job pushing that project forth as it was city-funded. Nothing was done with that data. In addition, as a small nonprofit, I have also gathered other sources of information that is regarding youth voices. Most recently, in November, 62... Youth in the Cornwallis community came together at Weaver Street Recreation Center, voiced their feelings about what's going on in their community, crying out for help. Chair, excuse me, Commissioner Valentine, you may remember seeing in my JCPC notes in December that 62 youth showed up. Why do we need more data? Why do we need to keep pushing our youth off? I believe that they should be created, excuse me, treated with the same level of urgency and priority that they are crying out for. I'm not sure why we need to invest another dime in 30 year old black men without considering our youth first. I've been here for almost five years. I've never seen a dime of a strategic or intentional funding And until we break this cycle and start investing in the communities that have been marginalized, disenfranchised, under-resourced for decades, we will continue to have a loss of life and youth stuck in trauma cycles. Thank you so much.

Thank you.

I'm going to leave these extra cards here. I brought enough for each of you. You can scan the QR and see the data for yourselves. Thank you for your time. Thank you.

So we have three speakers left. We have Erica Weiberg, we have Larry Thomas, and then Yvonne Coleman.

Hello. My name is Erica Weiberg, and I'm a professor at Duke and a resident of Durham. I attended the August 24 hearing but wasn't able to stay long enough to give a comment, so I appreciate being able to do so now. As a teacher, one of the great joys is getting to know future generations. And so I want to speak to the harm that leaving a loophole for large 100,000 square foot AI data centers will do for future generations of this county. Data centers of this size are known to require large amounts of water, which is an increasingly short supply. and will continue to be so as climate change ushers in ever more extreme drought. The water pollution with PFAs and other chemicals in our drinking water is harmful for every resident, not to mention air and noise pollution. But as a college professor, I'm also very concerned about the effects that the unregulated development of AI data centers will have on young people's ability to find jobs, as AI is now the leading reason companies give for cutting jobs. So far, this technology has proven more effective at exploiting, surveilling, and targeting and killing people in America's disastrous wars abroad than it has at anything that helps people. And so overinvestment in this technology is not what I want for our community. I hope that the county commissioners will consider these future generations of Durham County residents and they're charged to steward the land and resources of this place for them, to create a better world, not one owned by financial speculators and developers. Thank you.

Thank you. Good morning, Dr. Lee, manager, and all of our county commissioners. My name is Larry Thomas, and I am the leader of the Thomas Mentor Leadership Academy. And we have been doing this work in Durham, mentoring boys seven to 18 years old who's being raised by a single parent or being raised by their grandparents since 2011. And I'm standing here to echo a lot of what Tiffany said. I ask that we keep our youth at the forefront of this conversation. And I remember the first day of the summit and I haven't attended all the meetings, but I remember this. Dr. Lee is the only elected official that I've heard. Like I said, I haven't attended all the meetings and I haven't had all the sessions. but he's the only elected official that I've heard to say not to forget our youth. He said at the very first summit not to forget our youth and let's not forget our youth. We already have the data like Tiffany said we did. We did the work with Lord Khalil out of the city office. And God bless my brothers, late Atreus Good and late DeWarren Langley. We did the work. We talked to countless people in our communities. We collected the data. The data is here. The data is here. So let's not waste our time doing it again, doing it again. And the thing that our youth want, they want some action now. And we need prevention now. We need prevention strategies for our youth, because if we don't, then we're going to have those 30-year-old men that we're talking about. And we keep asking these young kids to go outside and play, to go outside and play. Why are you on the game so much? And here's what they tell us. We can't go outside and play. We're scared to go outside and play in our yards or in the playgrounds. So I ask you again, let's keep the youth at the forefront and invest in prevention so we can support our youth. Again, thank you so much. Thank you.

Good morning.

Good morning.

Anybody here?

I say good morning.

Good morning.

Good morning. Okay, I'm Yvonne Coleman. Thank you very much for your time this morning. I will be very brief. I know that this body is concerned with infrastructure. I hear the county manager from time to time talk about how potholes and things like that are not sexy. And it's hard to explain and to get people excited about it. The reality is that in every great community, In order to have the things that we enjoy, the things that we want to support, we have to have infrastructure. We have to have housing to house our people. We have to have roads to carry our people from one place to another. We have to have education. Lastly, we also need arts and culture to bring us together. Sports is important as well, but arts and culture brings us together in a non-competitive way we need activities to bring our community together the arts are part of the solution for so many things that we're facing particularly for our youth but also for adults so i just want to remind you that arts and culture is part of the infrastructure and the presentation that you will hear today is about the need for leadership civic leadership we're not asking you for the moon we're asking you to pay attention to infrastructure. If we have the right kind of leadership right now, some of the things that this gentleman is talking about and what our kids need, if we had a higher level person in government who can cross departments, cross organizations, and be able to move some things forward. There's no reason that children should be afraid to come outside. There's no reason that adults should be afraid to come outside. But the reality is you're in the business, infrastructure building protecting infrastructure that's what you were here today thank you very much thank you thank you all right

okay so that brings us to the end of our uh citizen comments thank you all so very much for that uh one second thank you for that um i deeply appreciate hearing public comments i mean as you know regardless of what the topic is or what the direction is i take notes and i um it's very important so thank you all so very much commissioner burton

Thank you, Chair Lee, for that. And like you two, I listen to public comments, and I do take in consideration what people say when they come to the podium to speak. I wanted to say this because I feel like it's kind of necessary for me to say, and I wanted to go back to our August 3rd work session when we were discussing the moratorium. um that we subsequently voted on on august 24th so i went back and i listened to that meeting i looked at it listened to it about three times and when i was listening to it i didn't really get a clear that we were directing staff um if we were it was ambiguous and so for me because i want the residents to trust me as a commissioner that i'm listening that i am taking my duty seriously What I'm asking like when we have these discussions because at a work session we don't typically take formal votes It's discussions. It's listening to reports things of that nature So what I'm asking of us is a body chair vice chair All of us if we are giving direction to staff to make sure it's clear. It's not ambiguous and And that will help us as a deliberative body as well as help the staff so they know exactly what they need to do in order for us to make these decisions. Because I take my duty seriously as a commissioner. I do not want anyone think I'm breaking trust and so that will help me that if we can be very clear in stating we're giving direction to staff and it will help us with making decisions so thank you so much for allowing me to say that

I was just going to share what we discussed at agenda prep regarding this.

No, that's fine.

No, I was just going to share that we actually, Chair Lee and I, as well as we've had a conversation also with Attorney Williamson to that point of to provide more clarity at the end of board discussions. When we have lots of commentary going back and forth, the chair will finish the discussion with a summary at the end of saying, Okay, this is what's been discussed. This is the board's direction to staff, so that way we can have more clarity moving forward of what we're asking of staff to bring forward to us at the next meeting.

Yep. Okay. Any other comments from the commissioners? All right, thank you. Next item on our agenda is the consent agenda. Manager Hager.

Good morning, commissioners. We have quite a few items on our agenda for consent and your consideration. The first item is 260384. This is an approval of a governor's highway safety program grant funding resolution funding two deputies with 75% county funding and 25% federal funding, as well as to reduce the sheriff's office authorized FTE count by one position. The next item is an approval to enter into a contract with HR Reborn Justice Movement. There were a couple of questions asked about that and Ms. Harris forwarded me those other items that you asked about. Commissioner Jacobs had a question I sent. some responses last night for that. The item is to approve a $330,000 contract for the Hayti Reborn Rejustice. This will add to an amount that was already authorized of $90,000, bringing their total amount to $425,000 that was approved in the operating budget.

Yes, ma'am. I just want to make sure. I don't think I can look back, but we got a detailed budget for FY26.

For this current year. Yes, Crystal, Ms. Harris, Director Harris, sent information this morning.

Okay.

And it crossed in me getting here, so I'll forward that information. Okay. And if there's additional follow-up, we can do that between now and Monday.

Thank you. Thank you. Apologies for that.

Thank you, Ms. Harris, for being so responsive, because I know you got that pretty late. The next item is 260428. This is an approval of a proposed interlocal agreement and joint use agreement for the new emergency operations center and backup 911 call center facility located at 2422 Broad Street, Durham, North Carolina.

Thank you, Chair Lee. I had a quick question. I know, thank you, DCM Jones, and thank you, Perry, I saw you earlier, for getting those answers to some of my questions regarding this, regarding the 911 call center backup but also of potential facility merging and those resources. I was wondering, I saw the list of entities that the working group has been coming together of Durham Police Department, Durham County Sheriffs, EMS. I was wondering if also, if the HEART team has been part of those conversations and working stuff. Okay, because I didn't see them listed. the other thing i'm doing do we have a timeline of for the last question that asked about the budget um the cost of the total like approvals that we've been doing uh for related to the 911 call center backups and the separate 911 call centers oh no i was looking at who you were pointing at um Okay, wonderful. If we can have, yeah, Perry come up. Just wondering how the approvals that we've been doing off budget cycle, including budget cycle towards the backup centers.

And I will say, as Mr. Mann answers, we can give you that detailed reconciliation in the next couple of days as we prepare for Monday's vote. And we can add that to the system as well.

So, good morning, commissioners. Before I answer the question, I want to make a couple of comments. One, staff is very excited that we're moving forward with a safe, secure, resilient, and purpose-built emergency operations center. I'd also like to thank our team, Joel Jones, specifically the project manager. You all know that it takes years for us to get to this point, and so I want to say kudos to him and our partners in the city and to Blair Bordeaux from Bordeaux Construction. We didn't tout it, but we actually brought this project in about $5 to $6 million below the estimate. And so that's congratulatory, and so we thank him for that. Specific to your question, I think as it's spelled out in the agenda action form, the additional costs for the Sheriff's 911 call center is about $3.7 million. And I think last month you all may have brought a contract forward for an upgraded CAD system. Sheriff, how much was that? Do you remember? It was about $3.5. And so it's very important to note, commissioners, to try to get to, I guess, the crux of your question. The study that's ongoing for the consolidation of 911 and HART We'll be bringing that presentation to you probably around December. As noted in the email, there were a few things that have surfaced as part of our recent workshops that staff has to work through for consideration to really nail down what our staff's recommendations are gonna be into potential consolidation and merging. And so we'll be bringing that forward to you. But what's very important to note is Even once we bring that to you and get some recommendation to proceed, it's going to be an arduous process. It may take us multiple years to actually get to where we are intending to go with this. And so I just want to make that point. But as far as the costing of what you're asking for, those are the only numbers that I'm aware of in terms of 9-1-1. 911 call center and backup call center costs.

Thank you. And so the first $3 million is related to the general operating, annual operating $3 million?

Yeah, that was the CAD system, that upgrades that we talked about. The other costs are associated with the square footage associated inside the emergency operations center. So there's two separate costs that we highlighted. Okay. Yes, ma'am.

Thank you.

okay the next item we have a commissioner jacobs yeah i just have to say you know for the record that unfortunately i feel that we are kind of stuck in this process i agree with you perry these things take a long time and it's taken a long time to get here the problem for me though is that Um, I don't feel in this situation that we are following best practices. We're kind of stuck with what we're doing and it is a, it is an additional cost to have a separate backup center, the 3.7 million just for the space. And then there'll be the ongoing operating costs. And at a time when we have many things which are on our agenda today for this discussion that we would really like to invest in, it feels really difficult and frustrating. to be allegating funding this way. And I will also say that I want to feel like Durham County is always leading the way and following best practices. And right now, when it comes to best practices about response to behavioral health crisis, we are not. We have many case studies and data and examples from all over the United States and other counties. And I have participated at the national level in a lot of these peer learning discussions and visiting other 911 centers around the country. And the best practice is that all 911 calls be coordinated and all mental health crisis behavioral response be diverted whenever possible from our crisis response system to reduce any person in our communities' contact with the justice system. And this ties into our discussion about reducing violence in our communities. we for me there's an urgency around this so i understand we're gonna december it's been a long time and i'm you know i know we're gonna get numbers but i don't know what kind of number we can put on the value of keeping somebody from having contact with our criminal justice system when what they need is mental health support and the road that that we know sets them on through their life. So, uh, just wanted to express where my frustration and again, the amount of time that it's really taken. I really encourage everyone to collaborate on this. I know the NAACP is actually having a forum. on Wednesday night at the Zafta Temple. Unfortunately, our board has a conflict with Durham Tech that night. I appreciate the NAACP taking the lead on this issue. And I just hope we will move forward in a collaborative and really time sensitive urgent matter with this. Thank you.

Thank you, Commissioner Jacobs. And sorry, Perry, before you go, Chair Lee had to step out. He'll be back in a little bit. But also adding, in the meantime, until we meet again when we have this next discussion in December, November, because I know the email shared that the conversation had to be extended because of legal concerns and issues that may have arisen during these conversations. Could those issue areas that came up be shared with the commissioners? to give us an update so we have a greater understanding of what rope bumps are already being identified. Thank you, Attorney Williams. Did I see her head nod?

Yes, we can certainly do that. I'll speak with Perry, and we'll discuss the issues that are ongoing and compile that list and speak with the board about it.

That would be helpful, yeah. Especially if they're more so on the technical side or legislative side, because I know we've had conversations legislatively, the counties in North Carolina only have to have one 911 call center. In Durham County, we have two with the city and the county. So if it's not a legislative issue, that would be helpful. Thank you. We will now move on, pass it back to- All right.

Item number 260438, this is an approval of a budget amendment increasing both expenditures and revenues of the shops of Hope Valley Fund Center by 365,000 to align with the county budget with recent government accounting standards board requirements. There will be a zero net change to the base budget for 2627. The next item is 260439. This is an approval of a capital project amendment and budget ordinance amendment reducing the available budgets of six Durham Public Schools capital project budgets to zero and transferring $48,404.11 to the debt service fund and $12,517.87 to the county's lottery.

fund account for future allocation and then closing the projects in the county accounting system yes i had a question about that because i get a when i'm out talking with members in the community about the lottery funds things of that nature is when schools get the lottery funds it comes to the county first and is it only specifically used for capital funding

Sure. Keith Lane, our budget director, will explain it further. But the county serves as a pass-through agent, and they draw down the funds, and it's a reconciliation process that occurs. Keith can explain it in more detail.

That was a pretty clear explanation, Manager Hager. To go through it in a little more detail, those lottery funds are only for capital projects for public schools. They can't be used for anything else. But they're generally smaller capital projects, HVAC replacements. doing a new floor and a gym and things like that. How it works is DPS identifies the projects. They sign a form that comes to the county that the chair of the Board of County Commissioners signs. Then that document goes to the lottery fund people at the state. They define how much we're gonna get, approve the projects. Once they approve the projects, as the manager said, the dollars come to the county. We create a capital project for DPS from which they spend those lottery funds. and is that funding the same year to year or is it just it's a different amount typically it varies a little bit based on how many people participate in the lottery if i'm going to get a little dig in here it was supposed to be a lot of money but the state has found ways to siphon off most of that lottery funds and they use it for public school support rather than it coming to counties our amount that we get is in the 2.2 to 2.4 million dollars a year it's not earth-shattering money it's significant but it should be a lot more

I appreciate you explaining that. Thank you so much.

And for further context, if we were to look back many, many years ago when the state had school bonds, there was a much larger allocation for public school capital infrastructure. For context, Durham Public Schools has about $2 billion worth of pent-up capital project needs, and that burden primarily falls on the local governments. So just a little additional context. Okay, the next item is 260440. This is to approve budget ordinance amendment 19, recognizing a $15,000 grant from the Burt's Bees Foundation to support conservation crops, North Carolina's ecological restoration work of Durham County's open space preserves.

I just would love to hear a little bit more about this. This sounds amazing. And how many young people are participating as well.

Good morning. Celeste Burns, Durham County Open Space Program. So Jesse Burkhead, the Executive Director with Conservation Corps, was not able to join us today. There will be, I think, two crews that will be working over a six-week period on different county preserves. We'll be sharing lots of photos and have opportunities for you all to come out if you want. But this is kind of an extension of what These youth, they're adults. They work in the field. Right now they're housing at Hill Forest. And they'll be doing invasive plant management, some trail maintenance. It's a workforce development program that gets kids and youth outside. So I'm sorry I can't tell you more about it, but I think in the next couple of weeks we'll be happy to reach out if folks want to come out and see these folks in the field.

And again, thinking about, you know, our discussion today about, um, our violence reduction and focusing on youth. Do you know what the ages are of the opportunities for these are 18 to 24 year olds.

Um, I think North care, I think the core also has a youth program that they do in other parts of the triangle and the state. Um, but this one that we're working where these, these folks are like 18 to 24, typical age.

Well, I think it's something to think about because we know that that's really, I mean, it would be a great thing.

And we're happy to have Jesse with Conservation Corps come and share more about their program, maybe during or after, just let us know.

Okay, just thinking about our own youth being involved in that. Yes, absolutely. Thank you.

The next item is item 260446. This is an approval of capital project amendment 11 appropriating $1.6 million of pseudo water utility fund balance to support the triangle wastewater treatment plant rehabilitation and upgrade capital project. As well as approve the county manager to enter into a service contract amendment with Hazine and Sawyer Professional Engineering Services, an upgrade project in the amount of $1.6 million. Bring the total project amount to $2.7 million with a not to exceed amount of $2.9 million.

is this specifically for like sewer systems that are outside of city limits and only county and do they function and like run into the same systems or do they have two completely different systems that is a great question and we'll have ms stephanie brincey the deputy director explain that in greater detail and it's a yes and and she will explain

Good morning. So this is to amend a contract for the Triangle Wastewater Treatment Plant. So, of course, the county owns the plant. All the county sewer system comes to this treatment plant. We do treat a portion of Durham City's wastewater there, but all the county stuff comes there.

got it so this is to support that so it's not like the county has its own facility that we're running and maintaining we just kind of bought into this triangle no this is the county's wastewater treatment this is the county onset this is the county's wastewater treatment plant which supports majority of the research triangle park in other key areas and so there is and integration of all the systems at certain points. And I think that was part of your question as well. And what we can do too is come back and explain this in greater detail, because as shared earlier, I often talk about folks may not necessarily want to invest in those things that are underground as much, but it is that infrastructure that helps us to remain competitive and meet the needs of our residents as well as the business community.

Absolutely, and I ask also, I mean, thank you all for all the work that you do in making sure that when you're doing the stormwater treatment, you're also keeping our drinking water safe, our roadways safe, all of that. And I ask more so related to our previous discussions of just, I think I have very publicly said that I support, finding as many ways that we can consolidate and reduce not have redundancies between the city and county so just wanting to know like what are ways that maybe these systems could be integrated stronger together that like servicing the same community almost we can come back on that city manager Ferguson and I have had conversations about

looking at areas that we can be more seamless. Some of it may be an evaluation of what can be purged, but a lot in the interim is how can we be more efficient, and there are opportunities in that in a lot of spaces, so we'll come back. Thank you.

I just want to respond to what, furthering the conversation about our Triangle wastewater plant. I, I really want to commend our staff because this is what serves RTP and we would not have, uh, all of the capacity, um, in RTP without it. And what's also, I want to commend the staff is that it's an enterprise fund. So all of these investments, all the items on our agenda today related to it are paid for. through the user fees so it's not a burden to our residents and um there are a lot of innovative practices that you all thank you practice around using recycling water reusing water also saving the solids the biosolids and reusing them so i just want to commend you all for how you stay on top of maintaining all the infrastructure that we have

Thank you. Okay, the next item is 260449, sole source exemption approval for utilities division purchase of 75 HP nor motor and spare parts from Veolia Water Technologies, doing business as Krueger. The next item is 260450. This is a budget ordinance amendment to recognize $171,408 in grant funding and approval of an interlocal agreement for the 2025 Ed Ring Memorial Justice Assistance Grant. The next one is 260451. This is an approval of a contract amendment for financial planning, rate study, and support services for the Durham County Utilities Division in the amount of $44,793.75, bringing the total amount to $99,793.75, not to exceed $110,000. The next one is 260452. This is an authorized and award a contract for easement maintenance services for Durham County Utilities to Stormwater Operations Specialist LLC in the amount of $300,000 and execute any related contract amendments not to exceed $325,000. The next one is a budget ordinance amendment. This is agenda item 260454. This is to appropriate $25,000 to ENO fire tax district fund balance and increasing the distribution to the ENO fire and emergency services in for the purchase of a new multi-purpose response and utility vehicle. The next one is budget ordinance amendment 27 BCC 20 appropriating $210,000 of general fund balance to the vehicle fund center for increased costs related to a pregnancy approved ambulance purchase.

Yes.

I was wondering about this one and the previous one. I don't have any issues with them. Just wondering, because I know we've had this conversation, the sheriff's office and his vehicles and the work that they're doing around trying to get more hybrid and electric vehicles. Wondering if we know for these vehicles if there's the same availability for looking into more fuel efficient

Now I have someone from staff to come up and talk about it. But I do know that we first always try to seek the most fuel efficient approach. We also try to make sure it's responsive from the standpoint to meet our needs. also complements our current fleet structure as well because that can also be an issue and as mark comes up we are always looking at our fleet to determine if there are ways to become more efficient and looking at best practices and i the last note on this the the lead time for these times these types of vehicles often is between 18 to 24 months and maybe even longer i know for those really large apparatus it can be beyond that so mark i'll have you share on that yes ma'am good morning commissioners the um item before you today is on uh the 11 ambulances that were ordered in 2023

Since those ambulances were ordered, there have been some changes made to the standards that govern the equipment and the manufacture of those ambulances. So this covers those changes that have occurred in the last three years. It also has to do with the highway use 3% tax that was not figured into the original purchase. I think to your question about fuel efficiency and looking at hybrid vehicles, hybrid ambulances are still a ways off. There are some that are out there as experimental vehicles. vehicles right now that they're working on. Hybrid fire engines are here, and there are a number of cities that are using them quite successfully right now. But as far as EMS goes, it is still something that's being explored and further work is being done.

Okay, the next item is 260457. This is a budget ordinance amendment for public health to recognize $300,000 from Carolina Complete Health Community Reinvestment Funding for Durham County's Consortium, Project Access Durham County. The next item is 260459. This is capital project amendment, which will appropriate $48.9 million of funding to support the new Durham County Emergency Operations Center and authorize the execution of a contract manager at risk guaranteeing construction emergency operations center at a total amount for the base bid alternatives of $45.4 million. The next item is 260460, this to approve the acquisition of three agricultural conservation easements, Matthew and Brittany Eagle for 64.5 acres and Penny Family for 201 acres and the William Sparrow Senior for 47 acres.

Yes, I just have a comment. I really get really excited when we see these conservation easements before us because I want the public to know that we are very committed to protecting farmland here in Durham County, particularly in northern Durham County. I know that discussion came up during the data center vote. However, we are very, very committed to making sure land is preserved in our county. So I'm always glad when we see these conservation easements come before us and want to encourage other people in Durham County who have land that they want to preserve to do that because that's something that we really want to do here. So thank you so much.

Go ahead, Commissioner Jacobson.

just want to echo commissioner burton's comments this is really amazing over 200 acres of farmland and again ties into our discussion about the um our updated farmland plan that we're going to talk about later today but i really first want to thank the families these are three historic durham county farm families that are making this commitment long term. I mean, this is permanent. This is in perpetuity, this type of commitment. And so I'm, first of all, really grateful to the families, the Eagles and the Sparrows and the Penny families. And secondly, also to our staff. for making all of this possible, and also just the vision of Durham County government for now over 20 years. We have been allocating a half a million dollars every single year that goes into a fund so that when these opportunities happen, we can take advantage of them. I think it's a model for a lot of things, and this works. This really works. And my question is also wondering whether these easements and the value of them and the impact of them will be able to be used for the IAIA program of the Upper Neuse River Basin Association. I see Celeste shaking her head. And that's significant because that actually gives us an additional benefit, uh, for meeting the falls like rules.

Good morning again. I have talked with Brian Eaves about this. And, um, so they know of this work and we're kind of partnering right now. I feel like, and he really should answer this question that at this point, their work and, um, the expenditures for the stormwater for the IAA stuff that we're not there yet, but we're.

getting there so okay that did not really answer your question but it's we'll pull ryan in to get a more specific answer yes so um i'm actually chair of that okay well maybe you should tell me um would it work we are uh so kind of a leading question but um we are updating the falls lake rules right now and what's really exciting is that We have agreement, at least on some of the rules, and related to agriculture and also land conservation. The state is agreeing that land conservation will count towards Believe it or not, it hasn't counted towards necessarily towards some of the requirements. So, yeah, so that is, um, so this will really, again, give us an added benefit and David Harris, who's also, uh, part of the upper news river basin association here. So, and Ryan is the treasurer.

So, so it will be, it sounds like they're getting close to making this approval that land conservation. Well, we've been waiting for years for that, years and years.

We're getting closer. Thank you. Very close. Thank you.

Okay. Okay, the next item is 260465. This is an approval of capital project amendment number 27, CPA 13, appropriating 700,000 of the North Carolina public school building repair fund funding to support five new Durham public school capital projects.

I just have a quick question I was wondering the North Carolina public school building repair fund is does the schools get money from that fund every year is it sporadic or how does that usually work

Commissioner, they get that funding annually. It's all part of the lottery funds. There's a couple of subsets of the lottery fund. They get a larger amount, that 2.2 to 2.4 is straight lottery funds for a lot of different projects. And then they have a separate subset amount called repair and renovation lottery funds. And I think last year in that portion of the fund, DPS got $500,000. top of the 2.2 million for the other ones and just so you know right now currently in lottery funds waiting for DPS to identify projects is 4.7 million dollars that DPS can request to be spent on various capital projects but they need to get that ball rolling

that ball may be already rolling. We just aren't aware where they are in process. Thank you, Ms. Delaney.

Thank you, Ms. Shager. Before we move on from this item, I was wondering, I've been seeing, especially we're in the start of the new year and we're still in the heat, I've been hearing from a lot of parents and teachers that there's been a lot of HVAC issues at schools where several schools have been having to close in the middle of the day because the temperatures are just getting so hot. Can we get an update from DPS regarding what schools have ongoing HVAC maintenance issues and what their estimate would be for bringing all of those systems not up just to i know it says adequately meets the needs of students but worried about if adequate is just not saying this is what dps is doing if that's just to get us through like the next couple months versus fully repairing the systems and getting

We will follow up with the superintendent to get that information. They have the same challenge that we have with aging systems and trying to ensure that they are working at the optimal level. And sometimes even with new systems, things may emerge. We had that recently with one of our libraries. And so it is a ongoing issue. We do work in concert with them to make sure we're supportive, but we'll follow up so the board understands as they're refining their capital project needs, we will have an update on those infrastructure needs, whether it's HVAC or other kinds of non-brick mortar, but baseline infrastructure things. The next item is 260467. This is approval of one peer support specialist FTE for the Justice Services Department. The next one is item 260470. This is a sole source exemption approval for utilities division purchase of lamp sleeves, plastics, and seals for Trojan Technologies. The next one is 260471. This is a budget ordinance amendment to recognize $35,000 from the City of Durham to increase access to food and nutritional support and approval of the interlocal cooperation agreement between Durham County and the City of Durham. And commissioners, this concludes our consent item. I saw Commissioner Jacobs has a question.

i just had a quick comment i wanted to thank the city council for this contribution to food security i think this is a great example of how the city and the county work together we are the we are the ones that have the infrastructure around food security so it makes sense for us to fulfill Um, you know, this, uh, you know, put the spending into action and similar, we've done this with housing where we have contributed, uh, significant ARPA funding to the city for housing. And I think again, this something that relates to the, our conversations in our, uh, the rest of the work session today about how we work together with the city and each, um, take the lead on. areas where we have um the infrastructure so i just want to again thank the city

Thank you, Commissioner Jacobs. I had a comment related to this one around food and nutritional support. I'm wondering if staff could bring back at a future meeting an update to us about, we have the double bucks program that we provided funding for through ARPA funding. It was 480,000 over three years that that funding is coming up to an end. and now with all the SNAP and WIC benefit cuts that we're seeing at the federal level, that money is needed even more. So what our plan is moving forward to hopefully sustain the Double Bucks program or engage in, you know, public-private partnerships with other nonprofits or funders to help us keep this program running, and also the depth of with that $178,000 a year that we were providing how many families or residents were we able to support that we could potentially lose, and they would lose that resource. And I feel like it also ties into our first discussion item regarding agriculture development and farmland preservation, because the Double Bucks program also helped our farmers with families being able to go and shop from local farmers at the farmers markets.

We can bring that to the board. It is our intent to have a very robust conversation at our October meeting about our budget, which will highlight some of the dollars that are winding down, especially ARPA dollars. Most of those funds have been used, but we do have some projects that will wind down soon. As a reminder to the public, we received over $62 million in infrastructure dollars to support our recovery economically from the pandemic. addressed from water sewer efforts to youth serving efforts to infrastructure. And a $62 million loss in federal fundings is pretty significant. And over the past several years, we've planned for that transition, but we don't have dollars to close all those gaps. That presents the opportunity in that we can become efficient in some areas and reprioritize, but it also presents the challenge in who helps us going forward, which is a great segue to that conversation. We also will share known dollars that are going away that will address specifically public health as well as DSS. our need to plan for that as well. So that will be a real involved discussion because we need everyone to understand where we are. Thank you.

Commissioner Jacobs.

Yes, I think also related to the issue of the double bucks program is even more of a systemic issue because anyone who is participating in the double bucks program has qualified for SNAP. And so what I think we really, what I hope maybe in October we can actually have more of a overview of what's happening happening within durham county with our system related to federal snap and medicaid benefits what we see already is because of the new work requirements and having to re reapply every six months the impact on our staff in dss but also we're already seeing a decline of at least 20% already in people who have been receiving SNAP benefits. And even though WIC has not been cut, a lot of times women who sign up for WIC, they do that at the same time that they're enrolling in SNAP. So I think it's going to be really important that we get all of our partners. I know there's been a lot of work. happening in the community around access to benefits and everyone collaborating, and there's a lot of great work happening, but I'm really concerned more about our system and just being really intentional about making sure that we don't lose people. along the way, and it's very urgent. And October 1st is when the new Medicare, Medicaid, System gets implemented around this too.

So it's very time-sensitive Absolutely, and I know former mayor Steve shul is here for another item But maybe in the future the public benefits access working group could maybe if they come to our work session in October to kind of present on the work that has been happening in the community between all the government entities, private entities, healthcare, everyone of how we address, you know, it was already a gap, but now with all these cuts, we need that infrastructure and that working group even more. Thank you, okay. That brings us now to our first discussion item of the, of course I'm gonna lose my place, the farmland preservation And we have 20 minutes allocated for this. And because we are a little bit, commissioners like to talk, we are a little bit behind. So I'm going to say 20 minutes, 10 minutes discussion, 10 minutes questions for the board. Or is that just me?

And while they are coming up, I did want to note an agenda shift. We are gonna ask Dr. Jenkins to share the health assessment county-wide survey results at the Monday meeting because of our schedule, and so he has agreed to do that. Thank you. This will also allow for more of our residents to hear that information.

Good morning. My name is Mark Waller. I'm the owner and operator of Waller Family Farms here in Durham and also have the pleasure of getting my notes straight here. Also have the honor of being the vice chair of the Farmland Preservation Advisory Board that you're going to be hearing from today. I'd also like to introduce Mr. David Harris. Many of you know he is on the Soil and Water Board as well and the representative to the Farmland Board. At this time, I'd like to ask any of the farmland board and staff to stand for acknowledgement because this project took hours and weeks and months to pull off, and they did a great, great job for that. So thank you. I'm also an elected supervisor on the Southern Water Conservation District Board and have the honor of serving as the vice chair there. The board felt a need to update the 2009 plan. and played a significant role in the plan's details of accomplishments and also setting goals for the future the soil and water staff applied for a grant through the ncda division of agriculture development and farmland preservation the farmland board support staff from soil and water uh with the division of open space which you've heard from here today open space and real estate the cooperative extension were also involved in the development of this plan and i also would be remiss without mentioning our chair mr cole conley who could not be here today who was uh incredibly instrumental in putting this thing together she is i compliment on her all the time because she is absolutely cut from the cloth to be the chair of this of this board it is my pleasure now to introduce mr jerry cohn with the monster race i got it right all right uh monster rising the uh he is the consultant on the plan that prepared this document And we're also glad to have him here because he worked on the 2009 plan so many years ago. And I can't believe it's been that long as I was on that plan too. And man, it was like two months ago, it seems like. Time goes by pretty fast. And he has done a great job reaching out to the farmers, the landowners, and all those others that will benefit from this plan. So without further ado, Mr. Cherry.

Uh, good, good morning. Uh, my name is Jerry Cohn. I'm a resident of the Moorhead Hills neighborhood and a, uh, uh, principal of Mazza Rising Consulting. And as Mark mentioned, I helped write both the 2009 and the 2026 agricultural development and farmland preservation plans. I think I'd start this off by saying that Durham County is a great place to farm. It has the land, it has the leadership and it has the market opportunities. Durham is facing the same sort of challenges as other growing and urbanizing areas around North Carolina and around the country. There are rising land prices, there's globalization of commodity markets, and you have an aging farm population. Fortunately, I think we have risen here to meet the challenges of those and create great opportunities for new farmers. And one of the things that we've seen in the update of this plan is the growth in the number of small farms here in Durham County. And that as times are changing on the national and international and local level, that we have risen to meet the challenge here in Durham County. i think these plans which have been done in a number of counties around the state are very important and we're finding out very effective as well one is the process of outreach and public discussion where we reach look at some of the data we get together in groups we talk to farmers and leaders in the ag and business communities individually we find out what's on their mind what's going well what's not going so well And the other piece about this is these plans help us keep the long view, that as things go up and down and there are day-to-day challenges and emergencies that come on, these plans allow us to look out over a 10-, a 20-, a 30-year period and try to figure out where we've been and where we want to go. It was a pleasure both to work on the 2009 plan and then to have this opportunity to come back and revisit these same issues 17 years later. And the first charge that the farmland board gave me as I started work was, how did we do? Let's look at the 2009 plan. Let's look at the specific recommendations and create a scorecard from us. So that's the first place that I think I would direct you as you're looking at this is on page 61. We have a list of the recommendations of the 2009 plan and then the accomplishments that are associated with that. Just a quick run through of what those look like. First, and according to themes, one was generational transition. So there was a lot of work that went into new programs and landowner outreach and education. Leadership development, so the boards have done a great job in developing a new generation of leaders that reflect the population of farmers and people in the agricultural community throughout the county. Strengthening that rural-urban connection, so really working at ag education at all levels, 4H, high school, community college, all the way up and down the line. Developing markets, so in addition to cultivating the growth of new small farmers, we've developed new farmers markets, those that continue to grow and be an important part of the economic and the cultural life of the community. And a number of new aggregator businesses have emerged here in the county that allow small farmers to access wholesale markets. There's regional cooperation, both in education and training, value-added processing, and water quality protection, where we work with our neighbors in other counties in the region. And then also the county government, which has provided steady funding, as you've already heard today, in terms of land protection, in terms of food security with the Double Bucks program, and in terms of agricultural economic development. So as we figured, you know, we've come a long way with this, we're making progress, and what does 2026 bring for us as we look down into the next 17 years or so? First area was in land protection, and that we want continued support of that purchase of agricultural conservation easement, which provides both affordable land for new farmers and also generational transition for those longtime farm families and pillars of those rural communities. On the planning and government side, we want to see update of the guiding documents that determine where we're going. And also the ability to continue providing feedback on decisions that are impacting agriculture. Um, the community benefits of agriculture that, uh, how the important role that agriculture plays in food security programs and vice versa. And that also that local food continues to be a big draw to tourism as people look at local foods and local restaurants and all these elements that make Durham unique. Agricultural economic development is an important piece in the future, so continued support for the Durham Farm Campus, the evolution of what that's able to provide for the agricultural community. Local food procurement at DPS, my first grader at Moorhead Montessori was very excited that today was cheeseburger day, as he knows he's getting it from local ground beef. And also the need for a warehouse facility that can support all these different programs that are providing food into the local community. And then finally, on the next generation side, to continue education and mentorship programs, once again, at all levels of the community as we try to cultivate that next generation of farmers. So we appreciate your interest and support for this project, and we're glad to field any questions or comments that you may have.

commissioners have comments go ahead uh commissioner jacobs um well i just want to say this is a great plan thank you everyone who was involved in it um and i think there's some there's a lot of good news in the plan i mean we we have seen a loss of let's see looking at the reduction in farmland we've lost 71 percent of our farmland in Durham, I guess, since, is that since 2009? Is that correct?

Probably, yeah.

No, that's, I'm sorry, since 1974. Okay, so 1974. to 2022 we've lost 40 000 acres of farmland 71 and the number of farms have declined 46 so that's the bad news right but we know that is a trend nationally and also we are a small county so we don't have a lot of land to begin with and that's very i mean it is It's shocking to see that kind of data. But I think the good news is that when we look at 2009 since the last plan until now, it was really great to see that we have increased actually the number of small farms and that we have not seen a big loss since then in the number of large farms. It's been mostly in between. So I think to me, it says that we need to keep doing what we're doing. And, you know, one of the key things is conservation easements, because if they're So if we have 16,000 acres left right now and we've preserved around 2,000 acres or a little over more than 2,000 acres of farms, I'm thinking, okay, we've got 14,000 acres left of farms that we need to really be focused on. So I just That's one of the takeaways for me is, I guess, so I have a number of questions. One is just how do we be very strategic around the conserving farms with conservation easements? Because the bottom line is that our land values are getting so high and there's so much development pressure that people can't afford to keep farming unless we put them under a conservation easement. And then that ties into connecting the older farmers to the younger farmers who want to buy those farms. So one question is I'd like to hear a little bit more about that. The second is there were a lot of recommendations at the end related to updating our ordinance to protect our farms. And I wanted to know whether those recommendations issues that you identified are they in the ldc that we haven't been able to adopt yet because of the down zoning statute or are there additional ordinances that we need to be looking at right now and then there were also recommendations around the voluntary agriculture districts uh ordinance languages that that we need to um that are recommended that we that we take action on. So I wanted to hear about that. And then also, it seems like there's a lot of opportunities around things like institutional buying. Like right now, it's mostly Durham Public Schools. But what are other options for that? At one point, I was involved with trying to get local food into the detention center and also agritourism. I feel like that's maybe something that's not as tapped with Durham. And I'm on the Discover Durham board, so I'd be happy to take that back. So I guess those were kind of three of my follow-up questions.

You all can sit down here, yeah.

Oh, and the last recommendation was that the farmland board members have direct impact into the development process and you know that is a huge oversight because we have you know dost provides um input bpac you know the eab and the fact that the farmland board does not provide input is a huge problem and i want to note that the feedback in the report talking one of the big concerns not only about the land prices and development pressures, but the fact that even what's happening on the fringe of the urban growth boundary is causing problems for farmers. And I don't think that the city government necessarily understands that. And I feel like that's the voice of our farmers is not being heard around development issues. That's another follow-up issue for us is the farmland board having some input. So, okay, I'll stop.

The easement question was, Jerry, you were scribbling.

Strategic decisions and elements or priorities.

Oh, you know, we're really kind of opportunistic on the conservation easement. We do have a ranking that we use, but if a landowner is interested in permanently protecting their land, we do everything we can to make that happen. Funding sources, I think, contribute towards kind of how we approach those. In most cases these days, we're using USDA funding, so the properties have to have significant agricultural soils Um, we, we, um, that's, I think the biggest factor for those. So we're protecting lands that have significant either state significant or nationally significant prime soils. Um, in some cases, uh, we are working of course, with the national guard on a number of properties around, um, uh, for farmland protection. And those, um, criteria are the same and really it's, it's who wants to work with us? Um, know location we're doing a little bit more down in easter room with a sparrow family farm but it's it's really hard to prioritize we get them in the queue and we just work through them i don't think there has been a property since i've been with the county in 10 years where a landowner reached out to us and wanted to permanently protect their farm or forest land where we Um, didn't figure something out. Does that answer your question?

So we haven't turned anyone away at this point, not turned anyone away at this point.

Now, speaking of dollars, things are getting more expensive and we are having to be a little bit more crafty. And I can anticipate that as the cost of, and we have some bigger projects coming up in the next couple of years, I can anticipate that we might need more funding or need to get some, get more creative about how we piece piece projects together.

Well, that might be something for us to think about, is that that's been a flat amount since the beginning. And I did note, you know, as land prices go up, we may need to look at how we adjust that a little bit. Was that kind of a...

Yeah, you know, I mean, again, as always with these projects, it's just the gratitude that you expressed and that I personally feel for landowners who want to do this. I think it is making a difference. We've had about five of our protected farms transition to new owners, and it's been really fun and interesting to see how that has happened and the stories of that. And it's making a difference.

One other piece I'll add to that is that as I kind of look at how Durham has worked on this as compared to other counties around the state is I'm just very impressed with how creative Durham has been in leveraging funds from outside sources and finding other groups to partner with to sort of multiply the value of the local investment. Yeah, the ordinance update. You want to speak to that?

So you talked about the ordinance at the end, so I'm assuming you're talking about the farmland board ordinance. We have an ordinance that's strictly for our board, and we've been trying to update it. We have a committee that's working on it. However, we were not able to finish it before this plan got finished, but that is our priority to get that done this year.

And it was also related to the unified development ordinance as well.

that's right yeah in the state of also farmland uh uh legislation has had some changes in the past since the original durham ordinance so trying to sort of update to fit some of those incentives and uh guidelines at the state level as well i mean i'll add i know jerry you spent a good bit of time with um planning staff i don't see any of our planning stuff here but um you know we've been working pretty closely with them as as you know kind of farm farm support team here

kind of make sure they understand what is needed in the new LDC and I feel like their voices have been heard early on before they put a stall on that I guess one of my questions would for the county manager is just we've been stalled out implementing the LDC and whether we need to look at just focusing on an or amending our current ordinance that um to address the issues that were identified related to farmland protection because it is again not something we can it's it's time it's time sensitive and we're up against a lot of challenges and um you know this is one of our priorities for durham county government so I would like to understand that.

So Commissioner Jacobs, great question. Let us come back to you with a recommendation and we'll send something in writing, but we'll also formally make that information available in October.

And also related to that is how we can make sure that the Farmland Board is providing direct advice and input into the development process.

if i may add to that um sherry scully with durham soil and water uh the farmland board has written letters um you know this past year and been more involved and even had planners come and speak to them about um the the ordinance so and i should have the soil and water board

both um and the the thing is the the comment needs to be included in the staff reports if it's if it's going to be officially part of the planning process then the comments have to be included in the reports that the city council receives or if it's coming to the county commission either way

All right. I think another question, Arianna, I'm not as familiar with, is about institutional purchases in other areas.

Thanks.

Hi, all. I'm Reena Goldstein-Bedag, County Food Security Coordinator. And thanks for the question, Commissioner Jacobs, about farm to institution. I really appreciate that the Farm Land Board and the plan talks about the importance of that. With DPS, i have been involved for the 10 years i've been with the county the whole 10 years i've been involved with farm to school with dps that was part of my job when i was at public health with dine so i'm very familiar with it and i've seen them go through lots of ups and downs with the amount of food that is able that they're able to procure locally and it is almost all about funding farmer future is an amazing partner and they enable their food hub so they enable DPS to receive a lot of food that from many farms that would be impossible to do without a food hub right now unfortunately DPS is losing a lot of funding both directly and indirectly for school meals there were some farm to school funds cut federally which is direct luckily there was some farm to school funding statewide i don't know in our recent state budget to be honest i'm not sure exactly how much went to dps but i can find out and then indirectly it's concerning the snap cuts because that is how community eligibility provision is determined which is what enables free meals for all students. Every student that gets a meal, that is revenue going into DPS school nutrition so that they can improve school meals and buy more local food. So that is something coming up. I will say we're doing our county food assessment right now and Local food in our institutions has come up a lot. Our county just does less direct procurement than some other counties and cities because, like you said, it's mostly to the detention center. But that is something we're looking forward to learning more about and learning how we can encourage our institutions even if it's something that we don't provide direct procurement for. Thanks.

then i think your final excuse me your final question i think was about agritourism and we're certainly you know the plan talked about that in a number of different areas to try to strengthen those partnerships and do feel like it's a a really strong draw in an area that sets durham out from other places thank you i just wanted to say that i again this is a great report and i think it

really lifts up a lot of things for us to keep building and I want to thank Durham residents who go out and go to the farmers market. We have so many farmers markets now and our local restaurants who buy from our farmers and I also want to just thank our Durham County departments because there's a lot of discussion today about people not collaborating and things being in silos and um fragmented but i really feel like our durham county departments whether it's public health um you know our soil and water cooperative extension our open space and real estate and you all are really working together and it shows and so thank you commissioner burton oh i'm sorry were you about to speak you go ahead good

about that check one two uh syllabus syllabus uh i would like to thank the durham county uh people too because as a farmer in agritourism uh slash you know strawberry producer I can produce berries, but if they don't come out and support us. And the information in the booklets that go around are very important to get the word out for that. And also I want to thank the board for their continued financial support. We have a grant program for many years that directly impact the farmers in Durham. I know Commissioner Valentine was at David Heek's farm this spring when a brand new farm in the Bahama area uh directly because of the funding you guys supply for this he was able to get the infrastructure in place and that's another farm that directly you know was successful because of y'all and we appreciate it i know there was a little a little hiccup this year in our funding and hopefully that'll be uh taken care of soon but uh but anyway we we hope this will continue because it is important so thank you for that

I'm not sure.

Okay, Commissioner Berkshire.

Yes, I'm going to be brief. Thank you all for this presentation and the report. And I'm the liaison to the farmland protection. I feel like there's something, I don't know, missing. Particularly, nothing that you have done. It's about getting this message out about food insecurity in our community. and how, particularly with these SNAP requirements that are now going into place, and what a big, big negative effect it's gonna have on us as a county, and how do we get this word out about food insecurity? I feel like the silos, because i don't think people understand how kids get fed at school their requirements things like that so i'm just maybe i'll have this talk with the county manager about what we can do but yeah because i'm really worried about it so but that's the only thing i wanted to say thank you all for all that you do

Do we have and maybe we've gotten it but I haven't seen in a while a map of Durham County with like food desert heat maps to show us like Where our families are facing the most food insecurity and ways like looking at it that way of how can we help close those gaps working in partnership with our farmers and um because i know there's a lot of communities especially around our public housing neighborhoods that don't have access to a grocery store downtown still doesn't have a grocery store we have so much housing uh here and seeing how do we get more food into neighborhoods healthy food yeah um thank you commissioner lemon and commissioner burton um commissioner burton i was just gonna say i um am open to any ideas that anyone on the board and our leadership has about getting the word out i know um

with us at Cooperative Extension and Public Health and Social Services has been working hard and things keep changing and so that is important so that everyone's in the loop so I'm we're always open to ideas and it's thing we are working on outreach and then commissioner alum we have a food security resources map that the Dine team and Public Health helped to maintain that show everyone in Durham where they can get food. So they have all the food pantries that are part of the End Hunger Durham network. And it's a great map that our awesome GIS team has helped us with. And then with our county food system assessment, we are working on some of the heat maps and types of mapping and resources that you mentioned some we have ready to share and some are on the way but we'll make sure that you all see those yeah thanks okay manager hager you're gonna were you gonna say something i was gonna under the comments were made about the budget and we'll follow up to make sure those issues are resolved okay all right thank you all very much appreciate it

All right. Next item on our agenda is the Workforce Development and Partner. Wait, let me make sure because I'm coming in. Oh, no. Wait.

Yeah, it's the Workforce and Development.

That's right. Okay. Workforce Development Partnerships to Promote Career Pathways. And while they're loading up, I stepped out for a moment. to go to the library for the Declaration of Independence exhibit, everyone, you all have to go there. It was probably one of the cooler things I've seen. I didn't think it was gonna be that exciting, but when I walked in, just feeling it, being in the presence of the one that they have of the original printing, it's like a print, There were 200 made and there's only 40 left. And this is one of the 40 that was actually printed with the signatures and everything. Oh my gosh, it was great. So all the millions of people watching, go to the library and see this exhibit. It stays open until an hour before the library closes, all right, each night. And then it's gonna go to Nasher for a couple months. Right. So I just wanted to shout that out because it was extremely great. All right. Welcome.

Great. Good morning, everybody. Thank you for having us to have a conversation on workforce development partnerships to promote career pathways. Oh, I'm sorry. If you could hand me the clicker there. I appreciate that. Thank you. My name is Andrew Miracle. I'm the Director of Economic Development with Durham County. Today joining us for the conversation is Casey Steinbacher, Executive Director of Maiden Durham. We have Darian Harris, who's the Director of Durham Public Schools Career and Technical Education. We have J.B. Buxton, who is President of Durham Technical Community College. We have Nicole Niwa, who is the Alliance Development and Social Responsibility Principal with Novo Nordisk. And then we also have Dr. Carabato. And if you can remind me of your current title. Vice President and Chief Academic Officer. So thank you for joining us today. We are so excited to have you. So today's conversation will be focused on career pathways. This typically aligns with conversations that fall in the bucket of workforce development or sometimes will be in the same guise as economic mobility. Economic mobility is the goal. And we see career pathways as the vehicle to achieving economic mobility. There's a definition on the screen, but when we talk about career pathways, we're talking about a pathway to a clearly identified entry level position. That includes opportunities for promotion, access to really good wages, access to benefits, And so as Casey likes to say, we're promoting careers and not jobs. So to give the presentation some parameters, in certain cases you'll see a focus on biopharma manufacturing, skilled trades, and nursing. And this reflects some of the specific programming that we have in Durham County and some of our industry clusters. And second, to say this conversation is not inclusive to all local efforts or county workforce development programming. There's a lot of really good stuff happening, but we wanted to give this conversation a specific framework. Last thing I'll say before handing it off to Casey is I wanted to share this slide. I've shared it with you before. This was published in late 2024 by our partners at Central Pines Regional Council. And this is a prediction of jobs that will be coming to the Triangle and to Durham County by 2055. You can see we've got a nearly doubling of region-wide jobs going from 1.2 million to 2.3 million. Durham County alone, we're growing by close to 90% of the jobs that we will have within Durham County. So you can see The growth in employment that's occurring in the region, most of that will be happening in Durham and Wake counties. So this is the opportunity, this is the context for the conversation today.

Uh, good morning commissioners. Thank you so much. Thank you so much for, thank you for having us here this morning. I appreciate it very much. Um, I'm going to kick off this conversation because as all of you are well aware made in Durham is the education to career ecosystem organization for Durham County. So we are the organization that sits atop a lot of all of the institutions and programs that are playing in this space for our youth and young adults. Well, for all of our particular population, but made in Durham's case, we focus specifically on 14 to 25, and we're all in that space. So it gives you an idea of what it is that we're doing. Um, so, uh, again, as may, as the ecosystem organization made in terms job really is to identify the gaps, barriers, and misalignment, uh, that are going on inside this ecosystem. And then work with our partners in the ecosystem to identify solutions, um, and, and work together to actually make those solutions, uh, occur through this process. Um, so how do we do that? Well, I think one of the most important things that's important for everyone to understand is how we actually define the ecosystem, the work, how we do this, what we found in our, we've been in existence 10 years now, a little over 10 years now. Um, and what we found in that process is Durham is unique in that it has a little bit different ecosystem than a lot of other places. Most people assume that we're looking at education, um, to employment, um, in this particular case. Durham is a community of community-based organizations. I don't know the last time you all checked, but if you look at the state statistics that look at Durham and Chapel Hill MSA, there are 4,600 nonprofit organizations licensed in those two areas of the state. Now, granted, a lot of those are large nonprofit organizations like Duke and UNC and things like that, but there are. from our perspective, there are well close to a thousand that are very specific to This kind of work, education, youth, youth focused in a variety of different ways, a whole bunch of different ways. And Maine and Durham has found out through its process that one of the best things that we can do in this process is engage those community based organizations in this work. Because these community based organizations already have trusted relationships with youth and young adults, especially youth and young adults who are looking for economic mobility. So along the way, as we figured that out, we brought them in as a major component of how we define the ecosystem. I can tell you today that we can demonstrate that today, at this point, we have worked actually directly with 65 to 70 community based organizations with our Bulls initiative alone. Um, that I can also tell you that when we get into that in a minute, that, um, almost, I can tell you a hundred percent almost of our recruitment activity comes from alumni in those community-based organizations. So it is, they are a critical component. Obviously education is, is incredibly important with you. The two most important we have sitting here with us during public schools. And Durham Tech, they are huge partners in this work. And then, of course, our employers, super excited to have Nicole with us today to also talk to you a little bit about their role in this ecosystem. And how we work, uh, the other thing, I think you all know this, but just again, for the public who may not, uh, we have three basically arms of what it is we do. We are constantly looking at system effectiveness. What does that look like? How do, how do we create this goal, this North star for our economic mobility for young adults, uh, youth and young adults in Durham? Um, we, we to, to, to, uh, support that work. We do a ton of research and analysis. Um, we do landscape analysis. We do constant economic mobility analysis. We can give you lots of data around this. And then as part of that research and analysis, we also do a lot of documentation and evaluation. We have amazing playbooks put together now as a result of the work that's been going on and the solutions that we've come up with. And then, of course, on occasion, we also have to demonstrate a solution. The Bulls Academy is a great example of that, something that actually hadn't occurred in the past. So how do we do it with our partners so we make sure that we're collaborating in a way that's unique and different and really moving the needle? So last five years, quick update, 21 to 26. This is June of 2026, ladies and gentlemen. That's the end of our fiscal year. So this is our numbers through that last five years of our Bowles Academy work at the top. You can see 280 students enrolled, 234 graduated. Our average is 84%. We started at 55. We average the last two years have been in the 90s. Very, very successful program. You can see that we work with 24 employers in the life science industry, a related life science industry. When we first started off, it was three, four, five, Novo being one of the very first ones, why they're here, have been with us all that time, but we now are up to 24. And we have an economic, our best guess of economic impact is about $5 million a year. And what we mean by that is we request all alumni when they get a job to sit down with us, share with us where it is they're working and what their current salary is. we because we cannot track that on our own which we don't have that capacity um in terms of our ability to track that so we work with our students to tell us that of the students that have told us that we know that they are generating about five million dollars in salaries right now into the community that you did not but we did not have before and thanks to the county and all your support in this program we are we are putting that money back on the street for especially youth, young adults. And with economic mobility as our senior, as our most highest piece of what it is that we do, our most highest priority, I can tell you that of those 280 students that have applied, 86% are young adults of color in Durham. I would also was hoping you could see the alumni employed as of June that we know of that we have a piece of paper and confirmation from the employer that they are actually working there. which we have to try and get through our students on our own. I had hoped that I was going to be able to do a big drum roll here today and we would hit 100, but we're at 99 as of right now. I was going to have Nicole call the office and pick up another one real quick before we got started, but she said, hmm, might not be able to do that case. But we are doing, as you can see, some really great work in the community through the Bulls initiative. So really what I wanted to lay this out for you today before we begin to hear about the work is where we've been. We spent the first 2015 to 20 really building the foundation, assessing the system, organizing the partners, laying the groundwork. The next five years have been about proving the model. Can this model that we came up with as a group, as a group of community education and employers, can it work? Um, and we think pretty confidently, yes, bulls model actually does work. Our goal for the next five years is how do we grow this ecosystem? How do we institutionalize it into all of our partners? So bulls isn't a special initiative. It's an everyday part of the great institutions that we have doing this work and how we expand it. into additional industry sectors. Um, and that's where it is that we were going at this point. What I do wanted to share, share with you, um, is that we're in a little bit of a bridge year this year. So, um, because we are in that process of, in this new strategic plan that I'll share with you in a minute of actually doing a lot of that conversion, a lot of that institutionalizing, we are in an 18 month process right now with Durham tech. Co-designing with us how this gets embedded inside Durham Tech, or Bulls gets embedded inside Durham Tech. as a regular institutional function that they are currently doing collaboratively with us. If we will start to step back, they will start to move forward and take over this initiative of Bulls. We will always be involved in recruitment and selection. We'll always be involved in working with our employers to make sure our students are getting jobs and the alumni are progressing. not just getting a career but we're progressing in that career but durham tech will be the key deliverer of this program moving forward that is going to result require us as we all as i listened to your pro your conversation earlier about the loss of arpa money that's also a big deal for us as well the county i will remind the public invested two million dollars in this work through its arpa funding That funding will be exhausted this year, as you heard, so we are actively looking at how we continue to look and partner with a lot of our foundations and corporate partners moving forward to keep this going. And then the other thing that we're doing really heavily now as we've done this is we've determined that through this process, Maine and Durham can play a role, not just in a larger program, but in pieces of program. We're doing a lot of work, for instance, as a result of our work in career awareness, recruitment, and selection with other programs and other initiatives that call us and say, can you help us get youth and young adults to the table in this? And we have great relationships and are able to do that. So we're continuing to build that out this year. And then finally, last slide, guys. What we're looking at over the next four years, our goals and our strategic plan really are having us focused on institutionalizing the Bulls model. So it's no longer a model, it's institutionalized, it's what we do normally. We're looking at expanding the pathways, working with Durham Tech right now on some really interesting opportunities for us that would be a good fit for a next Bulls Academy. We're looking at finalizing that regional North Star. I think that's what a lot of you as commissioners are interested in. What does economic mobility mean? How do we actually get everybody focused on a singular goal and what that should look like four or five years from now? And obviously the more we can put together our best practice catalog as we learn all of this, we share that out with all of the partners in the ecosystem. And so we start to really institutionalize best practice in everything that we're doing here. So with that, that's at a high level of our ecosystem work that we're doing. The real work, the real work guys are being done by DPS, by Durham Tech, by our employers taking on these employers. I just wanted to set you up for that conversation that you will now hear. Happy to answer any questions now or keep going. Take them at the end.

Next up we have Director Harris.

Thank you, good morning. And thank you, Casey, for the intro. You guys are the folks who connect all the pieces. We really appreciate that. So the pipeline starts with us, Durham Public Schools, CTE. Students actually identify a career pathway in high school. As you can see, we have CTE in 23 of our middle and high schools across 13 career clusters, 38 individual career pathways. When I say that the parents, no one has any idea that students have that many options. And as of last year, we had 10,272 students enrolled in CTE. So again, we start the pipeline from there. Students enrolled in CTE, they earn credentials. that are industry recognized. They take these credentials. Ideally, they then go to Durham Tech and build on Durham Tech's pathways and learn about additional careers from Durham Tech. Then they get exposed to business and industry and they're recruited to work for some of our employers. And then, again, Maiden Durham is kind of connecting all these pieces. And we'll talk more about this later, but we're relaunching one of our initiatives called 321. And so everything we're talking about today for us is the idea that every Durham public school student should be able to graduate having tried a career. Not hearing about one, but actually trying a career. And we're relaunching this 321 platform to have students have the opportunity to try on a career and in these different career identities before they leave us. So framing the conversation around these three sectors, bio, pharma, and the life sciences, we actually have a career pathway at Southern High School in the life sciences that leads to a, we call it BioWorks, that leads to a credential. Thanks to Novo and Durham Tech, students can earn that credential and then be ready to, out of high school, be a process technician making upwards to $40,000 a year. And we're super thankful for the work with Novo and Durham Tech making that happen. The second sector skill trades, we have two career pathways. Again, at Southern High School, we have an HVAC career pathway and a carpentry career pathway. Same concept, students can earn these credentials while they're in high school. These are industry recognized credentials. They can then take these credentials on to Durham Tech, build on those before they leave and work in industry. And you see-

Oh, thank you. Yes.

Who knew? And you see the growth rate for the HVAC. Speaking of HVAC, we talked earlier about the need, our dying and aging systems. We need more HVAC tech. So growing our own, we can do that here in Durham Public Schools and in Durham. And then the third pathway, at the nursing pathway at the City of Medicine Academy. Not up there is also we have the Durham Early College of Health Sciences is another way for students to get access to the healthcare pathways. But speaking about CMA, students can actually get their CNA, their Certified Nursing Assistance credential while in high school for free. and then take that credential onto Durham Tech, become an LPN, an RN, and you kind of see the growth rate for those two careers. So again, identifying a career pathway in high school, taking that credential onto Durham Tech, and then onto industry. So this is wages, we're talking about economic mobility. So we have this idea of this wage ladder for students and parents. So you see at the very bottom of that ladder is that nursing assistant. So these students at the City of Medicine Academy, they get their CNA credential. Again, they leave us, that credential can kind of lock them into a career where they're making upwards to $42,000. And you see the Carpenter and HVAC being at Southern. So showing this to students, because students have no idea about wages and careers, right? So thinking about, thinking backwards, what kind of lifestyle as a student do I want to live? And let me plan my career based on that. And you kind of see the wage ladder kind of going up to the very top where you see RNs making upwards to $83,000. And this is, the data's from 2025, May 2025. And it's for the Chapel Hill Durham area. and those credentials what happens with those credentials in that wage ladder so three two one is a um think about and we use this analogy with students when you're learning to to drive no one gives you the keys and say hey go drive the car you learn the rules of the road in the classroom then you train along someone experienced in driving then you get the keys and your license so three two one is our version of learning to drive We expect and want students to have three career awareness opportunities before they graduate, two career exposure opportunities, and one experience. And that's kind of the gap right now, this one experience. But again, 321 is not new. We launched it in fall of 2019, but we know what happened shortly thereafter. and then changes, and it just kind of fell off folks' radar. So we're actually kind of relaunching it this year, hoping to scale it back up within the next three years. CTE concentrators are those students who are in our pathways, and they take more than one course. They take two or three courses in a pathway. Essentially, they major in CTE while they're in high school. They're a part of our performance indicators. Seven of our eight performance indicators are based on how these students perform some things were putting in place this year we want our eighth graders to see what high school is like so we're trying to set up these these pathway tours so if you're interested in in carpentry and you go to Shepherd why not take a tour of what's going on at Southern High School counselor toolkits for our school counselors and They have no idea that we have 38 career pathways, right? They only know about the pathways at their school, so building a toolkit for the counselors to know how to advise students on what's best for them. Tearing our work-based learning menu, that's what 321 comes in. We have a rubric that we want all of our partners to know how they can engage with Durham Public Schools and CTE. And so this is our ask, and this is where the gap is. If we want every single student to have the opportunity for this one experience, and we define an experience 24 hours, so that could be three days, eight hours, however you want to spell it out, but students are actually on the job, experiencing, trying on a career, as opposed to just hearing about it. So we know there, we have a lot of students, and we have X amount of industry partners, and we know there's a capacity gap. And that's kind of what we're looking to feel is, again, when students leave, they're in public schools. They've tried on a career, and they haven't just heard about one. And 321 is going to be our way to make sure they get a try on this career.

All right. Chair Lee, Commissioners, Major Hager, great to be here. I'm going to be here for a hot minute. I've got Superintendent Lewis and a couple members of Duke's senior team coming to Durham Tech. We've got one of our Durham Early College of Health Sciences leadership team meetings. I thought maybe we were going to get this done by 1130, but that's why Dr. Battle's with me because we're a team and she can answer all this stuff you're probably trading up here when it comes to these issues. So let me just hit a few points and then leave Dr. Battle. First, I want to say with Maiden-Durham, Made in Durham is bringing people into this conversation that don't often make it to us. And there's a lot of important work that happens at the college, a lot of incredible opportunities that connect to transfer work that many residents in Durham don't ever avail themselves of. And they've been able to help us extend our reach and reach into areas of this community to bring to Bowles that I think, frankly, we could not do without them. DPS, I want to say in a moment, is not just a core partner. I think it's going to need to become even more of the core strategy for us as a community moving forward. I was going to make a couple comments there. And the one thing I just want to say about Nicole Newa in Nova Nordisk is when they invested $6 million in Durham Tech, it wasn't because they thought they could get every Durham Tech biotechnology student to come to Durham. It's because they knew they had to step up to help create this ecosystem, help create awareness and understanding of the opportunities. And so there are many companies that will benefit from their largesse and their commitment to Durham Tech beyond Nova Nordisk. But they understood that in this area, we've got to make sure that all of the talent, has an opportunity for all of the jobs. And so I appreciate Nicole being here on behalf of Nova Nordisk.

I'm going to hit, if we can go, I'm trying to get by where it says AbbVie since Nicole here.

OK, good. What I want to say about this slide right here and this partnership between Durham Public Schools, and this really focused on biotech, is in some ways this is misleading because it portrays it as a kind of baton pass, if you think about like a relay race. This is much more of a team sport. This is not a baton pass. And if we're going to, in fact, meet the economic mobility goals that we all have for residents and families in Durham, it's going to be because DPS students come to us earlier or we partner with DPS to offer opportunities like Durham Early College of Health Sciences. Students then get opportunities with us to build credentials and then have already started thinking about their transfer pathway to NC Central. or UNC, especially in these areas of biotech and healthcare and NC State and a couple of key areas for us, or move directly into the workforce. But it's going to be building on the foundation that we already have to do this work together. When a student comes to us from high school, their completion rates at Durham Tech and their completion rates in a bachelor's degree if they choose to do that, skyrocket. Just one experience, and that is a statistic you see across community colleges and high schools to enrollment. When students from DPS come to us during their high school years, they finish at 75 to 80% completion rates versus a 60% completion rate that's an average, and more like 55 if you take high school students out. It is a game changer from an economic mobility standpoint in what they have the opportunity. And if you'll just, we've got, and Kara can hit, Dr. Battle can hit any of these when we talk about what we're doing about technology, healthcare, and skilled trades, but I wanna go all the way to the end if I could for a moment, because this is just biotech stuff that you all know in some ways. One more. We have a joint goal with DPS that 25% of their graduates year after year will also graduate with a credential, diploma, or degree from Durham Tech, a certificate, diploma, or degree, some kind of credential. This is meant to expose students earlier, not leave it till later when they come to higher education to get back into something like biotech or healthcare, but to keep that pathway going while they're with us and have not only an affordable higher education career, but one that connects them to more job opportunities, employers, and transfer opportunities like at NC Central. We are right now collectively underutilizing the incredible platform we have to do this. We should have 500 students a year easily coming out of DPS with a credential. And as a team, we are working together to make that happen. And I'm talking about DPS and Durham Tech. Nova Nordisk has been with us at Southern with our biotech offering. We have an incredible state policy ability to enroll students and not charge them tuition. We have an incredible transfer opportunities with NC Central. We're really working to widen that pipeline for students coming out, whether you think about teaching, skilled trades, healthcare, biotech, advanced manufacturing, all of these are credentials that students can obtain while they're in high school. Right now, most students come to us in high school because they've got the knowledge or the ability to get to us. And if we're serious about using the platform that already exists to go from about 1,500 students that come to us across three school districts, not just DPS, but get to the point where 500 students a year are graduating with a credential from us while they're in high school and graduating and creating affordable pathways into either future higher education or jobs. This is what employers are looking for. We've got the ability to move people directly into high-paying, high-demand careers. We've got strong partnerships. Dr. Battle sits on the CTE Advisory Board. Nicole Niwa's colleague sits on our Foundation Board. Kara and I sit on Casey's Board. I mean, we're not showing up for a meeting together. We are deeply entwined in this work. What you've already done to support us is critical, but I think your continued accountability, holding us accountable, for the kind of opportunity we can create when we continue to work together is as important as the work we're doing together now. So with that, I'm going to slink out. I will give your regards to the superintendent and the Duke folks. And Dr. Battle, anything you'd offer in addition to that. And please excuse me. Thank you.

Yes, you can.

Good morning, commissioners. My name is Nicole Newey. I work with Novo Nordisk. I lead alliance development, social responsibility, and the newest addition to my title last month was local public affairs. So I'm really pleased to be here with you all. Novo is a 103 year old medicine manufacturer out of Denmark. We have been here in North Carolina for 34 years and in Durham for almost ten. We have a facility here that does tableting for one of our newest and greatest products. That product received FDA approval and went to pharmacy shelves in 15 days. That is unheard of in the pharmaceutical industry, not for Durham, not for the US, for the world, and that is because of our team members here. A lot of those team members come right out of DPS public schools, they go to Durham Tech, and then they come to work with us at Novo. You will see me at the Durham Bulls graduations when some of them are like, well, I want to go get my bachelor's degree, I want to go get my master's degree, and I say, let's do that. Make someone else pay for it. and so one of the agreements that we have is that the students have the opportunity to take this in the high schools this started in johnston county when we came to durham we made sure that it got to durham public schools and it is now in a few of the wake public schools as well in the middle and so the reason we do that is because i am invited here today partially because we've been in this organization since the beginning but i think a lot of it's because i have a strange sense of humor and they invite me along But what I call it is coopetition. I represent one of 643 life sciences companies in the triangle and there's more than 800 here in North Carolina. I am one very small person in a very large ecosystem as Casey saw it. And so the word I created for it was coopetition. Yes, that's not a real word, but we're rolling with it. So coopetition is when your competitors also move into the area and they try to take your workforce. That's competition. But what we do is we band together. So that building that's going into Wake Tech is being called the Fujifilm Center. The Fujifilm Center will have sponsorship from Novo. The one in Durham Tech is called the Novo Nordisk Life Science Center. It will have sponsorship inside from Fuji. So that is an example of coopetition. We're in this together. This is our main ecosystem. That is their main ecosystem, but we are supporting each other in it. In addition, you saw that AbbVie that he crossed over. AbbVie now sits on our leadership advisory board. We meet every quarter and we share these ideas and we invite them in. I was the first person to say, Durham Public Schools is having a career fair. You're going to need hundreds of folks. Now's the time for you to start. That career fair is for all eighth graders. I invite you all to attend. It's called Accelerate and it's in October, but they'll be there as well. And so that is what I mean by coopetition. We are working together to make sure that every student who wants one has an education pathway and that they have a career. These are not entry level jobs with a minimum wage. These are entry level jobs with a salary. You saw the entry level rates that the Durham Public Schools shared. In North Carolina, we have 2,400 employees, all in manufacturing. The average salary for Novo is in the 90,000s. That's average salary. And so these are opportunities for us. So JB, a few months back, Volon told me to come to a speaking event and there were two women in the audience, one of which I recognize because she works at our Durham facility. She is getting her master's degree, fully paid for by us right now, but she graduated from Duren Tech. And next to her sat her mom. Her mom is getting her Bioworks certificate. This is the first one of these that I saw. We have a lot of folks right now whose children have started to work for us because we've been here for 34 years and they were in the original crop. They're retiring and their kids have taken the Bioworks program and come to join this. But this was the first time that I got to see a daughter inspire her mom to go back and get a different career. We see a lot of folks that are with us who it's their very first family member to get a certificate, an associate's degree or a degree. That makes us very proud and it gives them that opportunity without impacting their family's financial situation to go back and continue that on. We have one student, I asked her permission today. Her name is Maddie. Maddie came to us through the dual enrollment program with DPS. She started with us at 18. She is making life-saving cures at 18. She was promoted at 19. We have a gentleman who you will see all over the triangle right now on our billboards. His name is Damon. Damon graduated from the Bulls program and he started the Bulls program because he was injured and he wasn't able to continue his delivery job. and so he needed another opportunity and so he came to us damon has been with us for over two years he has been promoted twice the reason they're being promoted so quickly is because they come to us with a certain amount of skills these skills come from the wraparound services that they're given through the Bulls program, through Durham Public Schools, through Durham Tech. They have the counselors they need. They have the childcare options they need. There's even a food pantry there, which the folks before us talked about food insecurity. We contribute to that. Our employees all get 12 paid hours of service every year. They can go and donate their community service how they like it. And then in addition to that, we have our day of service coming up in September. What we did last year was for those folks that were on site. Obviously, we're making insulin and obesity medications so we don't shut down. they had an opportunity to pack bags on their breaks. Those bags were a weekend's worth of food. We donated them to Durham Public Schools and Johnson County Public Schools. And then the social workers were able to put them in the backpacks for the kids to take home over the weekend. We'll be doing that again this September. So it's a point of pride for our employees. Not only do they get to come and support their families, they get to come and give back to the community. And that's very important to us. It's a part of what we're building. And we're a little bit louder about it than we used to be because there's so many other companies coming in. And we want to make sure that they are doing the same thing, that they are giving back as well. And it's going really well with the leadership group and the sharing of ideas. I think that's where I'm going to stop and let you guys ask any questions you have of the panel. But I just want to thank you all for your support of this program. It means the world to us here, and it means the world to our patients. Our medicine leaves North Carolina, and it goes to 84 different countries around the world.

Thank you, Nicole. I've just got a couple slides real quick to close this out. Just to give you a little bit of an idea on how the economic development department is plugging in with our partners here. So our main point of contact is through business recruitment. We've been doing this as a county for 15, 20 plus years. This is kind of our foundational entry point. You can see a number of companies that we've helped recruit both to RTP, Trayburn, and beyond. Our current portfolio includes $4 billion worth of projected private investment and roughly 5,000 jobs that we're working to bring online. And I'll add, too, that you're familiar with that work is led by our economic development manager, Matt Filcher. He's done a fantastic job in that regard. And so this slide is showing you some of the work that we do with our partners in action. The first is NC Biotech, who we would all sing their praises up here. It's just a fantastic partner and such a gem for the state of North Carolina to have them here and what they do in helping us bridge industry success. And so that is an ambassador program that they run to promote life sciences and biopharma manufacturing, and we are part of that ambassador crew. In the middle is a new pilot project that we started looking to pair recruited companies directly with our DPS high schools. And so we did this in partnership with CTE and Durham Tech and others. And so with Eli Lilly and Hillside High School, we were able to kind of create that first one-to-one relationship. having direct access and so this is at a career panel those kind of our inaugural event to kick off that partnership and lastly a new pilot program that we put out there is a higher education roundtable this was at Grail and we invited all of our higher education partners and Grail simply to kind of get to know each other and hear about the programming that everyone has to offer you know and understanding how you know what curriculum is most beneficial where job demand is where employer demand is and trying to bridge that gap and so this is my last slide here and just to kind of give you some some quick ideas on how we're approaching the work this year with the sunsetting of ARPA funding we have the opportunity to realign some of our positions programmatically We did a bit of a landscape analysis and felt the most significant return on investment we can get is really focusing in on community partnerships. And so when we say community partnerships, in this context, it has a very specific meaning. We're talking about fostering the relationship between recruited companies, the workforce development pipeline we've had some really good results here but we feel like if we really dedicate staff personnel to this to really foster those relationships a lot of this work is very relationship based that we can really maximize the potential that we see there so we're really excited about that the second bullet point is just to kind of that last slide to continue to do those things, to grow and scale those opportunities. We also have site visits that we do with staff as well to kind of get out and see the companies hands on. And that's a great experience as well. One of the slides that Director Harris had kind of spoke to barriers. And one of those barriers that we have is for a lot of our life sciences companies have limitations with individuals under 18 being on site. They may be only able to go to a portion of that site. And so this is one of the barriers that we're trying to work around. We know we want to get students off site, off campus, and into employment atmospheres, right? So they can start to feel what that looks like. So we're partnering with CTE, with Made in Durham, Durham Tech, to roll out some new programming to support industry awareness. And particularly in those three areas that we highlighted at the beginning of the presentation, we feel like industry awareness is a great opportunity for low-hanging fruit, where we can impact the most students with efforts there. So we're going to roll out some new programming later this year. Exploring local government as a career pathway. I was 31 before I ever considered a job in local government or understood what a degree in public administration was. I'm starting year 14 at Durham County. I love working in local government and I want other folks to kind of understand that this is a great career pathway as well. and so we'll be working with director everett perry and cte as well just to have the conversation if what can we do here to support local government as a career pathway option and really increase awareness there because we're great employers there's a lot of great job demand great career pathways compensation benefits as well and the last thing i'll say i i didn't actually put it up here um because i haven't had a chance to talk to my colleagues yet but looking at who the next speaker is after us one of the things in our departmental work plan this year is to work with directors harris and humphries and justice services and community intervention support services to better understand that work around re-entry and and how we may be able to support it and particularly with our larger employers just understanding some of those barriers and so just to just to start the conversation there and understand um how we may be able to support that work um so i will uh conclude there but you can see yes we are plugged in on advisory boards and councils as well and we're all very integrated i think that point was reiterated a lot today um so i will stop there and uh questions and comments commissioner burton

Wow, thank you so much for this presentation. It was outstanding and just learning about all the ways that we're trying to support people in their economic mobility. So very informative, thank you. I wanna make it brief because I know we're limited on time. um andy i agree with you we should do something around local government pathways a lot of people really don't understand local government and what we do and there was something at ncacc where i think halifax county had the young county commissioners it was something they did they got an award for it and i was thinking we can bring that back so young people can learn about what we do here in county government as commissioners so Yes, we're gonna work on that. The question I have is around, when I listen to the data, particularly around the Bulls Academy, and also just young people getting matriculated and across the finish line, what are some of the obstacles that you're seeing with people, young people, or people in general, Getting across the finish line, what obstacles? Are they academic in nature? Are they economic? Is it a combination of both? So we can figure out how we can help people be more successful and get across the finish line and get upward mobility, economic mobility.

Okay, there we go. Good morning and thank you for having us here this morning. We always enjoy sharing information about what we're doing at Durham Tech. So some of the obstacles that students face are exactly what you said. Some are economical, some are beyond things that they can control. With the Bulls program and the wraparound services that we have, we provide a lot of those things that students usually have as barriers. So we help them find childcare, transportation, technology, tutoring, 24-hour tutoring because we have face-to-face tutors, but we also have a 24-hour, you can call any time of night, tutoring service. We also offer a food pantry that students can come to twice a day for a snack, and once a week there are three days that they can shop for groceries. We are currently in a partnership building housing, affordable housing that will be open to 25%. of our students to help with that insecurity. And so what we're learning from what we've done with Bulls are things to put in place for all of our programs and all of our students at Durham Tech, not just for the Bulls students. Does that answer?

Yeah, and the reason I ask is because I know that with academics, you know, if you're having challenges with the curriculum, with the reading and things like that, that can be a barrier as well as those economic housing, childcare, and then where we can support and make sure that young people are successful. So thank you so much. You're welcome.

I think the one other thing I would add to that is awareness. Just awareness, and it's exciting to see DPS doing all of this across multiple platforms to get that awareness out. So many of you young adults, our students, are just not aware, to Darren's point, just not aware that there are pathways out there for them, and there are programs out there for them, and there are supports out there for them. So we've spent a lot, a lot of time around awareness, engagement, That's why we created the relationships with community-based organizations who talk to them every day, right? Like tell them about these programs. We have ambassadors and dozens of community-based organizations to help with that. But I think that's the biggest difficulty. And probably one of the reasons that we're, you know, we, we have difficulty earlier on, we've had difficulty in really focusing in on, you know, the DPS path pathways. It's just, they're unaware. There's just so many of them and they're unaware. So I think it's really great that they're doing that. I would also really think that I want to say to Darien, I'm so excited you're bringing 321 back. Made in Durham's worked really closely with DPS back in 2018, 2019 to get that created and adopted by the school board is something important. And you're right, we all know what happened after 2020, but it is an amazing, amazing piece to add to that awareness piece, which I think is a huge barrier for us. Am I right, Darien?

agreed yes and that you mentioned engagement a lot of our students are disengaged from school and becoming more aware about what life beyond high school looks like can help re-engage students so that engagement piece but they have to see it they can't see it it's a tough time for a lot of our students so engaging those students who become disengaged with school uh vice chair long

Yes, thank you all so much for this presentation and also just all your work that you're doing. I had a couple of questions and comments wondering, all this information is super, super helpful. I'm wondering how we can make it more accessible and readily available for residents and especially around our county economic development and the incentives we provide um oftentimes like we get a lot of questions from residents they're like oh you guys are just giving handouts to companies and how we can help assuage those concerns and also explaining like what those incentives actually mean of what durham county is getting back could we have like on our durham county website some sort of like dashboard that shows like Durham County has given X amount in economic development incentives, but this is how many jobs were created. This has been like the average median income for those jobs, how many entry-level positions, how many continued education opportunities, just so people can see what that's actually getting and also explaining that it's not money that's just handed out front, that these companies have to meet those job creation goals that they agreed to.

absolutely and we currently have a business recruitment report on the website that speaks to the portfolio it's about a year and a half old we're actually working on a departmental wide report for the end of the year with have updated numbers but we can certainly you know hearing the need to you know speak to the process I think kind of distilling that down we always when we do a public hearings you know make those points but just including some additional assets and resources to kind of explain what the process is and what the benefits are and we can certainly work with our PO team to make that happen.

I'd also encourage you not to just share the data. So I spend as much time with the students as they will allow me. And I get out of the office and I go and talk with them or we bring them in for tours. Telling a student something is one thing. A student who was in that student's position two years ago who is now in a role they absolutely love is another thing and so there's a lot of videos out there that they've made from the students perspective and things that you can share one of the things that i discovered when i came here is a lot of the folks thought of manufacturing as this very manual dirty And then I bring them in and they get to walk the hallways and it's 70% sunlight and they get free fruit and it's sterile and they get to wear pajamas as the students call them. It's sterile scrubs. But anyway, they think that they're like, I could do this job. But all they saw before was maybe dad was in automotive manufacturing or granddad was in tobacco. And so that's how they think of it. And so sharing those stories, being able to let the students tell their story and what they're doing now, that's your biggest win.

I would add one more thing, parents. Parents, we have learned through Bowles, matter. Parents, once they hear about it, I can tell you story after story of mom that comes up to me at graduation and says, girl, I got a daughter and she's going to sign up, then another daughter, she's next to sign up. Once they get, they're equally oftentimes, they're busy doing their lives and trying to keep a household together to really understand what all these deeper implications are. not just a career, but what that looks like and feels like. Parents are really, really, really important.

I completely agree. The other thing I had, I'm really glad, Narakta, that you brought up around the maintenance-type roles in HVAC, because that's something I know Manager Hager and I had brought together, President Buxton, and also... Adam Klein from Duke University because I've been talking to Adam about how Duke University has aging HVAC systems and theirs are like you their technicians are Experienced on their specific systems. That's not like traditional and how we can establish and then also Durham County. We have a lot of vacancies related to HVAC maintenance services also our EMS fleet those repair maintenance and We had talked about like building out potentially like an apprenticeship or training program because I'm sure there's also companies within RTP that also need these types of roles and they have been contracting it out and that there are additional costs to contracting that don't actually translate down to the worker so how we can support that workforce by creating apprenticeships and job training with Durham Tech because they have all of these programs that already exist it's just making it easier for residents to have scholarships to go get those six-month, one-year certifications and have a full-time job that starts out at like $70,000, $80,000. I know we talked about this last time, and the Bulls initiative is more like life sciences, but

Yeah, we are in conversations with Durham Tech. Dr. Bowdoin could probably answer this much better than I can, but we are looking at what the next industry sector would be as we transition the work that we're currently doing. And skilled trades is super high on our list. In working with the Durham Tech team, they've given us the stats, the numbers that are out there. It's It looks to us like it is not only high demand, it's also high wage. And people don't necessarily appreciate that when you hear skilled, you know, your old version of what skilled trades is. So, yeah, I think it's a little early to say, but I think skilled trades is high on the list. Am I correct, Dr. Battle? That would be correct.

So that includes, it's our pathway building engineering and skilled trades. So all of that. encompasses HVAC and plumbing and electrical and all of those jobs that we're seeing become vacant and have fewer people to choose from to select them.

Every semester we have two maintenance technician apprentices through Durham Tech that rotate through. It's a two-year apprenticeship with us, but every semester we have two more that start. And so I would highly recommend that.

And whatever partnerships you all are able to build also, I think I've shared with JB some connections with the local unions because they also have apprenticeships where they are able to provide funding support for a student going through. So I know IBEW and what is it? The International Iron Workers, I forget all the acronyms, but they also have apprenticeships and are building here in the triangle for more of these trades. That's a partnership that we've been looking to. had two more questions other wondering back to the housing piece also now that the city has an economic development office and team is there an opportunity you think that bringing in the housing and land development conversations. I know they can't mandate worker housing and can't mandate these things, but if there's ways to work into when a developer is coming to build homes, providing incentives regarding worker housing or student housing for Durham Tech students. And maybe this is more so a conversation we take back to the city to hear.

Yeah, that is a conversation where we have yet to explore those specifics. As part of the business recruitment process, we do an inventory of companies' current policies. And sometimes there will be stipends or scholarship opportunities. So we do learn during that time if those do exist. I don't recall hearing about housing stipends yet, but we can explore what's possible there.

And I mean more so from the home developer, the people actually building the homes. If there's a way to tie that into the economic development incentives of, if they're building homes, like how to incentivize those developers that you set aside like five or 10 of these new homes or apartments or whatever percentage specifically to students or workers of like trade skill workers, that type of thing.

We can try to understand if any of our other local governments have pursued that or if there's kind of something we can pull from there already existing.

And then the last piece I had related to child care. And I actually have to slip out right after I say this because I'm going to RTP Foundation and Chamber has a child care roundtable that I'll be participating in that talking about, and I know all of y'all are very focused on this, but that is becoming a greater and greater barrier. And in the triangle, we're seeing a lot of centers that have received funding from during the infrastructure funding time that is now lapsed and these centers are closing down. So we already had a shortage of child care seats. And now with centers shutting down, those are more child care workers out of jobs, center owners not able to make a living, and then also the parents and individuals. So figuring out how we not only talk about childcare centers as the regular centers, but also bringing in home care providers. Because they are really struggling right now and they are some of the providers that we have the most of in the area, but a lot of people don't know about it and I feel like a lot of times we focus on the brick and mortar centers instead of home centers, so bringing those

folks more into the conversation to connect students and companies to those providers thank you i was just going to say real quick nc commerce does have a position dedicated to promoting child care work and resources now and and we're working to integrate that position more so our partners understand that that is available so trying to facilitate that connection there

The only thing I would add is I think you're spot on, especially for the population group that we've been focusing on. Our 18 to 25 year olds, close to 40% or so have children that have gone through the BOLS program. So childcare, which we've been helping out with as best as we can through a variety of sources. And especially with Durham Tech, Durham Tech has great outreach in their ability to do that as well. But we don't see that decreasing in the immediate future. Long term, we're looking at some declines in births. But short term, we have a good 40% of our students that apply for the program have childcare issues.

one follow-up question on that do you have any that i don't know if you collected but maybe in the interview process of how many students who apply that may actually end up not going through with the program because child care was the barrier that's a good question let me get back with our staff we do we collect a lot a lot a lot a lot of data along the way i'm just unsure whether or not they do i do know that we we

track when students get into the program and don't make it through the program what that process is but i don't know about people that choose not say no to the program because they have they have children i'll have to ask that okay all righty um welcome to commissioner jacobs and then i'll i'll go just just so you know we're a lot of 60 minutes we're right at 60 minutes so

uh i just want to say thank you all you are the a team right here i feel like i'm looking at the a team right now um this is one of the most important things that we have been doing in durham county focusing on economic mobility uh it's it's one of the most important things um i think it was i was like looking trying to look back at data 2010 Our poverty rate in Durham was 18.4% and 2024 it was 11.3%. And, you know, to me, this is, this is part of the work that we are trying to do to address poverty and our community. And the fact that Durham County has the highest wages in the state of North Carolina. We have the opportunity here in RTP and Trayburn, Duke University, second biggest employer in the state. And our challenge has always been about addressing the gaps and who is benefiting from these opportunities. And again, if we dig down, we can still see the racial disparities are there. But the point is, thanks to you all, building this system thank you made in durham casey and your team for for really leading this effort when i look at what durham county has been investing in this system it's a system again we're talking about systems today that effective systems it takes the collaboration and the way that you all um are are working together because with if if one of you sitting here was not at the table, then this would not work. And I feel like we are a part of that system, too, because, you know, thanks to our great economic development staff, we have been, you know, intentionally working with our employers to get good jobs here that are accessible to people of all different education backgrounds. And so it's a team effort. This is working. We have to keep at it. And I really like that this is an iterative process. We just have to keep looking at, you know, what do we need to change? What do we need to do next? And just keep pushing forward. And thank you, Nicole, for sharing the stories and Casey, because this is about changing people's lives. And it's not just about the numbers. It is about the people in our community and investing in the young people in our community and changing lives. And so it's what keeps me going. I guess some of my questions are just related to the model. And I also want to add that we also are funding the Durham College Promise, which helps to fund people to go to Durham Tech. So one of the things I guess is again about the scaling up and reaching down. What I hear you saying is we have to reach down further. got to start earlier we really this needs to start in Durham Public Schools because it costs a whole lot of money when the folks that we're trying to help now have children they're updated they have housing challenges and all these other things so when when the kids are still living at home it's going to be a lot easier to do this i so i hear you saying so what are what are and i appreciate what you said andy about what we're going to try to double down on um how how do you feel like we really can start this in middle school like getting seems to me that we've got to get kids and their parents into in to trayburn rtp we've got they've got to see and like casey i've heard the parent at biogen from their kid is now working at Biogen, and they're like, I didn't know about this program. And I guess Director Harris really making that real. It seems like it needs to be middle school. I remember years ago, Avi Halpert from United Therapeutics said, hey, in Maryland, we are taking kids from our public schools and bringing them to United Therapeutics but I don't think we're doing that still in Durham so I kind of want to put this on us that we're still there's stuff that we're still not doing and when I look in this is this great county map book that we get from north carolina association of educators i mean i'm sorry north carolina association of county commissioners and you know durham county we're we're we're in here giving number one in per pupil funding that we're funding locally in Durham County. And then we're still, we're 108th in our high school graduation. The number was, the data is, sorry, only 80.4%. And so, and then I hear JB saying that we know that if we get our kids while they're in school over to Durham Tech and they get experience with a certification or an apprenticeship or something, they're gonna graduate from high school, all right? So I guess, Director Harris, I'm asking you, we really have to take this seriously. We've got the opportunity, we've got the companies, and we're still, we gotta do better.

No, I agree 100%. One of the things, so every high school, every student now has to have a career development plan. It's a promotion standard for eighth graders and 10th graders. So it does start in middle school. I think the conversations need to be a little bit different than what we're having with students. Getting them to think about the future, what it looks like. We know with sixth graders that they're gonna have a limited perspective of the future, but talking about the future. And how it starts with a goal, a career goal and an educational goal. And how does that shape what I do in school? So the career development plans, to me we have all these plans in the school system. We have school improvement plans, we have strategic plans. The career development plan to me is one of the most important plans that we haven't talked a lot about. But to me it's the foundation of what's going to drive that student. So if a student, if we're having a meeting with a parent and a family, Let's talk about these other plans, but how has the career development plan centered that conversation? Because that's where the students, their dreams, their hopes, their goals are going to be. Let that drive the conversation. And to your point about getting, we're in a very well-resourced area. And a lot of folks want to pitch in and help out and don't always know how. So part of that's on us, that awareness piece. But then the... Getting our folks out to see that visual aspect. Our students are, most of us, very visual. So being able to see like, wow, this is what it looks like to work at Novo. I can do this, right? Something that's gonna actually inspire them to do better in school. And Andy and I have talked about what that looks like in scaling these industry tours. because we know there's so many students, there's so many companies, there's school time, instructional time, so how do you balance a principal's desire to have their students always in class, which is kind of an old school mindset, and getting our students out and seeing what's waiting for them, and then they come back now they're more engaged and they can see how this what i'm learning in math one applies what i'm learning math one applies to what's going to be out in the real world so i think that's one of our big goals is to scale students getting out seeing what's available for them and really really leaning in on how do we maximize and how do we leverage these career development plans and they're not just a compliance tool but it's something we're using to help advise students and families about students next steps

Thank you. Nicole, thank you for Novo Nordisk being a real role model for everybody in every way. I wonder with you, your experience with companies, what are your thoughts on what more do you think can happen in terms of the partnership and the engagement and just thinking about when we do these our own contracts, our economic incentive contracts with companies, things that we can layer into them and, and like Abby, like over 700 jobs coming. Uh, we have such an opportunity, like what, um, what, what, what more do you think we can be doing?

i think a part of it is that education piece not just the um creating careers jobs from the start it's also like can some of those tax incentives be used for workforce training for continuing education so making sure that once they get that first entry-level job that there is the ability for them to continue to upskill as things continue to develop ai for example one of the things we're working with right now is automation engineering and making sure that we have mechatronics in the community colleges and in the high schools that's the new thing it's not that we are eliminating jobs it's that we are needing folks to do higher capacities so that we can produce more. But it's also like giving them those problem solving skills to fix the robot that's doing it. And the only reason we hired the robot wasn't to replace a job, it was to prevent a repetitive motion injury. And so the jobs are evolving and we have plenty of them here. It's just making sure that we have that ability for the folks that have been working with us for 12 years to continue to evolve with the industry and the technology. So I think a big piece of those economic development credits is that continuing workforce development through your partnerships. And there's a lot of opportunities with those organizations to continue that. And we're thrilled to upskill someone and go. We have a gentleman who took a high school course. He's been with us for 12 years. He's one of our senior managers now. And so he just kept going back and using those opportunities. Thank you.

That's something we should follow up on. Another question I have is one partner who's not in the room is the city. And the city of Durham has the Office of Economic and Workforce Development. We actually, AbbVie will be one of the first projects economic development projects we're partnering with the city on um so and they have more actually resources than we do in this in this area what are your thoughts on how we can really pull

city and to be at the table with us in in this and even strengthen our system even more yeah absolutely and um the office of economic workforce development is a huge part of the system here in durham and just in terms of offering a consumable bite we we kind of did you know a segment of the progression um and so i will say you know i serve on the workforce development board work very closely uh with development gone and i think you know one important thing to highlight is a lot of the uh business recruitment that occurs is in trayburn and rtp which are outside of city limits right so they cannot participate in those incentive deals but we are certainly welcoming of you know director guns been here for about a year now he's been fantastic to work with he's been very helpful in managing conversations on the development side these conversations involve a number of departments and so he's been a great resource there and and so i'm you know very excited about this relationship and i see a lot of potential here and we've already seen a number of benefits um you know occur so far so we'll keep that going

That sounds great because that's another pipeline, that's another on-ramp into this pipeline that we're creating here. Unless I just want to mention one other thing is I do want to highlight again that the jobs that we have in Durham County, in RTP, and in Trayburn are not to be taken for granted. And they're here because of very, very deliberate, uh, policies and decision-making and investments that have happened over many, many years. You know, we know RTP goes back, you know, late 1950s. Um, and you know, we, everything is changing all the time. We're impacted by global and national and state economic trends and pressures and I do want to say it was alarming when I looked in this county data and again it's 24-25 data but when it came to job growth for it has a table ranked from the highest job growth to the lowest Um, that we, uh, I know nobody can see this, but, uh, actually Durham County, we ranked among the lowest in job growth for this time period. Um, compared to, let's see, Wake County was the highest was between 2.8% and 10%, and then the next level. where Wake and Orange were in, and then the next level after that, we weren't there. We were actually in the fourth out of fifth lowest level, which was we were negative 1.7% to negative 0.1%, which is, I don't know what this means. I'd like to understand it more. I don't know if this is already related to what some of the changes we saw with, federal funding cuts to our universities, to federal agencies that we see that in RTP. But I say that all to say it is a red flag. And we know that we did lose, it was projected like 6,600 jobs since 2024 in Durham County. And I just think we have to pay attention and be very intentional. And I think we are. um and because again we don't have economic mobility and opportunities for young people and for our residents to have good jobs unless we are creating those jobs and we saw the projections the job growth will be hopefully in durham and wake county and also transportation investments we have to make sure that our residents will be able to get to the jobs in Wake County. And so that's why investing in transit is so important in transportation. But I think this ties into just being understanding and keeping in mind the dynamics in Treyburn and RTP with RTP 3.0 and why this board voted the way that we did on the data center issue because we are not allowing AI data centers. We are intentionally trying to fund the data centers that support the enterprise and the edge data centers that support the businesses in RTP that allow them to store and process data so they can keep thriving so that we have jobs for the person you were talking about, Nicole. That's what it's about. It's about making sure we have the economic mobility and that we are not impeding that even during this nine-month period. So it just hits home for me that that's what it's all about and that our employers in RTP, the companies, ag tech, financial tech, biopharma, life sciences, IT, They are employing 72,000 people just in RTP. And I don't know what the numbers are in Trayburn. That's a whole other, you know, advanced manufacturing. But it is truly astounding. And RTP alone, looking at a recent report, creates $15.8 billion in economic value to Durham County. 35.4% of Durham County's GDP is from RTP. That was 2023. And $16.5 million of our ongoing annual fiscal revenue for Durham County is from RTP alone. So we don't have the housing, we don't have the money to fund our cultural arts, all of these things, unless we have the revenue. So appreciate you all, and we're just gonna keep it going.

All right, thank you. And I'll just end up by saying I really like the story you were telling about the... the person who works for you, but the mother has gone through the program. I mean, what if we can... There are so many parents who are unemployed, but their kids are in school. What if we can say, come with me, right? Come see what I do or introduce them somehow to Durham Tech, the parents, focusing on the parents there, even kids in high school. that are doing this, come see what I'm learning, right? That may, even parents who may be in careers that they're looking for a change, right? Come with me, you know? And that could, that may be able to spark some people, because kids know when your parents are not employed, when their parents are not employed. But if we can open our arms to say that, I don't know if it would be marketing or anything like that, but come with me, right?

I really, really love that idea. So what I'm sitting here thinking is maybe, and my team will kill me right now for adding anything, but we have an alumni association. Why do we not have an apparent alumni association? For all of those parents whose students have gone through to stay together, talk about it, learn more, and start creating more parents, how do you get engaged? I think that's a brilliant idea. I think we should seriously consider that.

So bring your parent to school. Yeah. You hear bring your child to work, right? Bring your parent, right? I love the idea of trying to get those, because anyone, right? Because we have it all right here. in Durham. We have the training. We have the businesses. We have the open positions. We have the roles that are being hired for right here. And the infrastructure is right. Everyone here. I think that would go over really well. Can I add just one thing? Yes, absolutely.

I just want to remind everyone that BioWork, the program that we offer, is a 16-week program. So it's not a year, two years, three years. It's a pretty quick credential that you can get and start making in the 40s and 50 thousands and so as you were saying that commissioner lee i was thinking about bring your child to work day but that all the industries are doing it on the same day and you can bring your children to work or the child could bring their parents to work the other way around for exposure

Bring your parent. That's right. That's, I think that, and I mean, I'm really serious about it. I was taking screenshots and sending this to my son, who's a Durham Tech person about, I was like, look at these salaries. Like, you can, you need to come off of my payroll and get your own there i did i mean i actually did send them on whatsapp to my my son so um i just think we can make a make a difference in adult unemployment as well people think school is for kids but it's really for for us as well oh there's one last thing i forgot to say that i think is really important i told you earlier that we have difficulty

through the system that we have to be able to track students and are they really getting a job and how much money are they making. We do our very best. That's why we have an alumni association. We challenge them to come in and share all that with us. But exciting news, we have been asked by United Way, the Greater Triangle, they are partnering up with a bunch of partners to participate in a pilot program that would be, that Deloitte and some sort of mass data company, I can't remember, looking to create a system that would allow us to track that and they asked me to endure and whether or not we would be part of the pilot with our students and our things so kind of excited that's a couple obviously a while away but if that pilot works we could actually get a much better system of our ability to actually do this so I can't that is not my that's not my thing so I can't explain it well but we did say all I know is that at the end of this we should be in a position where hopefully we're going to have in the region some capacity to actually track the data against students across their careers. So we'll not only have, okay, here's what they got when they got a job, but here's where they're at five years later. We'll be able to track them.

That'd be great. Wouldn't that be great? That's great data. Okay, well, thank you all very much. We went over a little bit here, but that's okay, because this was super great. This is great information. I appreciate it. Now, there's a couple of... Our next item is the Violence Reduction Working Group recommendations. But I just wanted to make note, there's a couple things we're actually gonna remove from our agenda and move it to other. And this is coming from Manager Hager, so it's not me saying. Right, I just wanted you all to know. So it's the... Did you want to talk about it?

Sure, I can talk about it. Number 260462, there's an amendment on the transit work plan. We're going to move that discussion. Actually, if board members have questions, let us know. It's a pretty simple amendment, but staff did want to give a quick update in 10 minutes but we can do that on monday if you have questions otherwise we'll just move that off and then we talked about earlier the community health assessment one that will be on monday night and this will also allow more of our residents to join in on the discussion okay and that helps with with timing today all right so we

And so after the violence reduction recommendations, that means we'll, closed session will be the next item. Now, I just want to poll real quickly. You guys want to go straight through? You guys want a quick bio break? Anybody need to take a break? Break. Anybody want to take a break?

It might be we could just do a working lunch. We could grab our lunch since people are sitting here. and take a few minute break and then bring our lunch and come back.

12.30? Yeah. Okay, and then you guys will be ready, okay? 12.30. It is 1230. Let's start to wrap it on up here. Bring it on back. It's 1230. All right. So technically, Commissioner Valentine is in the room, so we'll go ahead and get started because we do have a quorum in the room. All right. So let's get started. Welcome. Let's make sure we're online. She usually doesn't stop it. Okay, we'll just double check here. Make sure we're online. Online. Okay, we're good. Welcome. Welcome. Looking forward to this. All right.

Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Crystal Harris. I'm the director for Durham County's Community Intervention and Support Services Department. And today I have with me Rashauna Humphrey, who's director of Durham County's Justice Services. Ryan Smith, who's the director for the city's Community Safety Department, as well as Deputy Chief Jermaine Jackson, who is with the city of durham police department who was on the work group we also have d.a debary i also like to acknowledge other working group members who are in the room if they would just stand for me and we have some that are online as well I also would like to thank the Sheriff, Sheriff Burkhead, who also participated in the summit during that three-day summit. As I stated, we do have some partners online with us, so just want to do some quick acknowledgements. We have University of Pennsylvania's Crime and Justice Lab, the Violence Reduction Center from the University of Maryland, as well as we'd like to give a thanks to every town for gun safety who paid for a portion of this project, so want to acknowledge them as well. And so we will go ahead and hop into our presentation. So today what we are bringing to you is basically just an overview of our recommendations from our three day summit that was held in June of this year. We'll talk about the current missions values, the vision and the five strategies and the five implementation measures. Secondly, we would like for you all to have a chance to discuss any questions, feedback that you have on the proposed recommendations. as well as to endorse direction on those recommendations. And we will be able to return with implementation plan in October. so leading up to the three-day summit um the working group um the three of us um as well as um our previous chief of police um she was on the working group and then the interim chief and then chief jackson um joined the group we put together 15 community listening sessions over 15 actually that were held in several different locations to invite the community out to hear from them around what some of their suggestions would be, some of their concerns. We did some lessons learned, like what used to happen, what was going on in Durham before, what worked well, what didn't, and why those things are not here anymore. In the spring of 2026, we partnered with University of Pennsylvania to do our problem analysis. And they looked at all of our homicides from 2021 through 2025. Then in June, as I stated, we had a three-day summit on saving lives where a 26-member working group of local leaders gathered together. We reviewed the data, and we heard from some national experts over those three days, and we developed in a consensus on the recommendations that we are presenting to you today. So what did our data actually show us? The data showed us that our homicide rate was double the state and national rates. We had 13 homicides per 100,000 residents. That was the 10-year average. We had 90% of those homicides from 2021 to 2025 were committed with firearms, and then 66% were dispute-related rather than tied to another crime. We also learned that the violence was concentrated among a very small number of people. 0.2%, which is an estimated 430 to 685 people in groups were linked to more than half of the homicides. 57% of homicides involved individuals age 18 to 34, with 14% involving juveniles age 17 and younger. Um, also 12 of those were, um, had prior arrests on average among victims and suspects. Four of them were felonies. So what is our highest risk cop population? You'll hear us say that, um, that term a lot in this presentation. Um, so this, these are the facts, um, per the, uh, in the, uh, the victims and, uh, suspects involved in the homicides were predominantly black males between the ages of 18 to 34. with the average age being 30. about 67 percent of those homicides homicide victims and suspects and 61 of non-fatal shootings victims and suspects had prior criminal justice involvement and on average there were about nearly 12 arrested nearly 12 times prior to the specific homicide or shootings We did have a notable proportion of homicides and shootings that were group or gang member involved. At least 52% of the homicides and 32% of the non-fatal shootings involved gang or group members as victims, suspects, or both. The blood encrypt sets were involved in 33% of all homicides and shootings, and 73% of all group member involved homicides and shootings. As we've heard some today, and as often we hear, Durham is resource rich, execution poor, and that's something that we continue to hear throughout the listening sessions that we held and from our community. And so basically what we determined, well we didn't determine, of course we heard, but we came to the consensus that we needed more coordination in the services that we provide. We do have, not to say we need more programs, but we need more focus, coordination, and then sustain what we already have that's working. So six things that residents asked of us at the summit through those 15 listening sessions was to focus on the few. We need to concentrate on those highest risk individuals, but don't spread the work so thin that nothing is actually being done. We need to lead with support. There was talk about credible messengers, but also paired the change with real income. rebuild what worked there was one comment in one of the sessions that kind of made me think about things differently it was kind of look at what when was the time that durham had the lowest homicides and shootings and what was actually going on at that time as far as resources or programmatically and is that something that we could potentially redo bring back so Don't have to start from scratch, but look at what we've already had and build on those resources. Fix the places, invest in the lighting, cleaning up some of the open public spaces, the housing, looking at transportation where risk is the highest. Earning trust, that is emphasizing fairness, language access, transparency, and of course, community participation, which was our intent throughout this whole process. And then actually building the engine, um, you know, standing up a central accountable coordinating mechanism, um, so that the city and county, um, point as, um, assets in one direction. As I mentioned, the working group were, was a 26 member group of individuals. They were residents and survivors, people with lived experiences. Um, we had faith in civic leaders. People from community organizations who already either work with the highest risk population or potentially have the capacity to work with the highest risk population. We had law enforcement in courts, our hospital partners, as well as city, county and state agencies were in attendance. These are the list of the 26th member of the working group. This did change. We worked through this several times to make sure that we were very intentional about who was at the table, those that we know work in the space, those with lived experience, Initially, we had a lot more juvenile-specific organizations, but once we saw our problem analysis, we were like, okay, we have to kind of shift our focus, being that our high-risk population is 18 to 34. So we do have representation on the juvenile side, but we also needed to look at who could work, who could potentially expand their services to include the 18 to 34, but also who's already working in that space as well. The working group did develop a mission, values, and vision statements. So our mission is to save lives in Durham by reducing homicides, non-fatal shootings, and hospitalizations due to shootings by 10% each year. Our values, our work will be community engaged, partnership based, trauma informed, evidence informed, and data driven. And our vision is to engage those whose lives are most at risk, keeping them alive, safe, and free, and invest in the places where lives are most likely to be lost. So these are our five strategies that Director Smith will go into more detail about. But just to name them, the first one was to focus support and accountability using a focus deterrence initiative. strengthen street outreach, pilot neighborhood partnerships, which you also hear, place-based partnerships, embed trauma-informed behavior change, and then lastly, was to convene a youth summit. So that's separate from the summit on saving lives, but it would address specifically distinct challenges facing our children and adolescents. And so now I will turn it over to Director Smith.

Good afternoon, Chair Lee, Commissioners, Madam Manager, Ryan Smith, Director of Community Safety. So we're going to dive deeper now into each of the strategies. I want to help you understand what these things look like in practice and also what some of the evidence is behind them. What do we know about their efficacy? We're going to start with focus deterrence. Focus deterrence is sometimes known as group violence intervention, sometimes gun violence reduction strategies, but it's the same thing. Focus deterrence is not a program someone enrolls in. There's no eligibility form. It is a highly coordinated process. involving the city, the county, law enforcement, prosecutors, service providers, and community messengers that has five basic parts at the highest level. The first part is about identifying those who are at most acute risk today of being involved in gun violence. This involves weekly shooting reviews that are led by law enforcement to identify the specific individuals at most acute risk of being involved in conflict. This is not a standing gang list that was built two years ago. It is a rolling assessment of who is actively in a conflict this month, and it changes constantly. The second part is communicating directly with those individuals who are at most acute risk. This involves face to face notifications with one message delivered by the people withstanding to deliver it. The shooting has to stop. We want you alive and free. Help is available now. And here is what follows if your actions continue. That message comes from law enforcement providers and community members in the same room at the same time. And part of the intervention is having those people in the same room at the same time. The third part is this is about offering support first. That's not a brochure. It is each person matched to a provider on the spot that could include life coaching, cognitive behavioral therapy, employment, housing, and relocation if the risk is immediate. Support comes first in the sequence and that is deliberate. Focused accountability comes next. For the few who may continue shooting, enforcement concentrates on that group and this is about precision it's not about volume this is not about mass arrest but it is very focused accountability the final part of focus of focus deterrence is about relentless management this is highly coordinated and highly coordinated means that it involves someone who is day in and day out thinking about the kind of coordination that we need across our partners to succeed in this this involves a dedicated team of city county law enforcement community partners Partners meeting weekly to assess violence dynamics, focusing intervention and ensuring follow up, and then reporting publicly on performance. We know the most about this strategy compared to any of the other ones that we're going to talk about today. There's been the most research about it. And what we know from research is that we find meaningful reductions where cities do this really well. We also find that there is no displacement, and that's an important thing. When you do focus deterrence well, it is not that violence is just displaced to the next neighborhood over. We stop it. Baltimore is one example of this. There are many others, but Baltimore launched this in the Western District in January of 2022. Within 18 months, shootings and homicides fell by roughly one-third in that district, and carjackings fell by about 40%. Additionally, they found that none of the violence was displaced to adjacent districts. They also found that total arrests stayed flat. Importantly, arrests for serious crimes rose, but overall arrests did not, which means that the strategy redirected police attention towards serious violence rather than widening the net. The success of focus deterrence relies on sustained police leadership commitment and real provider capacity. And when either of these things is missing, this strategy will fail. Baltimore, where it has been working really well, Baltimore in a city that now is celebrating a 50 year low in homicides. Also, if you scope, go back farther from the history, they tried this two times previously and failed. They tried in the late 1990s and they tried in 2014. They tried again on the third time. They did it better and it worked. And I say that because one consistent theme in what we're going to share with you today is the strategies are important, but how we execute them and do them well really matters. The strategy itself isn't enough. We have to implement it with fidelity or else it will fail. The next strategy is one that I think everyone in this room is familiar with, street outreach. What did we say earlier, Chair Lee, for the millions who are watching online? I don't want to assume anything, so street outreach means credible messengers who are hired for their standing in a specific neighborhood and often with lived experience of violence themselves. Street outreach when done well includes five things at the highest level. You detect conflicts before they escalate, you mediate active disputes, respond after every shooting to interrupt retaliation because that is how one shooting becomes four. Connect people to services and stay with them through the follow through, which is a part that often gets dropped. And you try to shift norms over time about whether shooting is an acceptable answer to a dispute. Again, as Director Harris shared, we know that over two-thirds of our homicides are dispute related, and street outreach works really well in those kind of situations. One thing that I want to stress to the board is that the working group was very clear. Their recommendation was not a simple, let's bring back Bull City United. Their recommendation was let's reinvest in street outreach and let's learn from our previous attempts at this and put in place the necessary safeguards to do this work well. What are some of those safeguards? So in some places that outsource their contract out for street outreach, you look at LA as one example. One of the safeguards is requiring certification. before an organization can be contracted with to do this work. That can mean going through an academy to make sure that the proper training is in place for all staff. It means that you don't get to do this work just because you're willing to do it. You get to do this work because your people have been trained to do it. Another step, another safeguard is having structured hiring, making sure there's supervisor training and providing career pathways to the people who are doing this work, rather than this being year to year contract labor. Right now, often in this country, street outreach is a job that pays poorly, that ends without warning, and that has no career ladder. And that creates a management problem that can create inconsistency in outcomes. But this is a management problem and something that we can choose to do something about. The third safeguard is that outreach never gathers intelligence for prosecution. That's a really important clear line to maintain because no one wants to work with an outreach worker if they think they're wearing a wire providing intelligence to law enforcement. The fourth safeguard is that we have to provide sustained funding and back office support, which is especially important if we're going to be working with CBOs to do this work. Especially for smaller organizations, asking a small nonprofit to run federal grant compliance is how a good program dies, and we have to think about how we resource them appropriately to do this work. There are communities we can learn from that are doing just that. Let's talk about the evidence. Our commitment here is to be as candid and transparent from what we know about the evidence as possible. When we talk about street outreach, the evidence is very mixed. The pattern across two decades of research looking at street outreach shows that there are reductions when programs are well run. And that we see no effect at all when they're not, and sometimes they can even make things worse. That's what the research shows. In Los Angeles, homicides in outreach zones dropped 27% last year against a 19% citywide drop. In Baltimore, Johns Hopkins studied 11 sites over 19 years and found an average reduction of 16 to 23% in homicides. Site results vary enormously. Baltimore found one site where violence grew. What we learn from this is that that variation often tracks program quality. And what it points to, this mixed evidence, is an argument for safeguards. It's not an argument for not advancing this strategy. We just have to do it well with the right safeguards in place. The first two strategies that we've talked about are very people specific. They're focused on the people in Durham, as Director Harris showed, it's a very small percentage of the population, focused on the people who are at highest risk. This third strategy is different. The third strategy is focused on the places where violence is most concentrated in our communities and coordinating efforts and resources into those places where violence is most concentrated. This involves picking places precisely, so we have already invested city and county into a very thorough analysis of homicide data over the last five years. And we can use that to identify two or three places where the violence is most concentrated to start with. The recommendation is for this to begin as a pilot, selecting two to three places to begin, two to three places where, again, homicides are most concentrated. Then to build standing partnerships at each of these locations, which would include the residents who live there, community and faith leaders, civic partners, city and county agencies, law enforcement. To work with the residents who live in these communities to set priorities and to come together and deliver results for those communities. Part of this involves taking an inventory of what are the things that we're already doing across government that we might refocus in these communities. What are things that our community based organizations can bring to the table? This doesn't always require new resources, but it may require that we refocus our efforts in these particular places. The final thing, and this is probably the most important to note from the working group, the working group was very clear that when we talk about place-based interventions, they were not interested in something that was just about physical site improvement. There's a lot of evidence for that, and I'll talk about that. But they wanted to see more than just improving lighting and mowing yards, restoring the physical appearance. They also wanted a deeper investment in social programming and other types of resources into communities where they felt there was a real absence. Things like youth recreation programming, jobs and local hiring. All right, let's talk about the evidence here. There's aspects of this that we know a lot about, and there's aspects of this intervention that, quite frankly, we know hardly anything about with confidence. What do we know the most about? The thing we know the most about is that actual physical sight improvements, there is strong evidence that doing that can reduce gun violence. And that may be shocking to you, but Philadelphia is a great example, Philadelphia ran a very rigorous evaluation of this, they had over 500 vacant lots in Philadelphia. And they randomly selected those lots to get one of three things. Some of them got a more expensive like full greening of those lots and investments. Some of them got simple kind of mowing and very simple site improvements. Some of them got nothing. And what they found across that is the sites that had the improvements, either the greening or the mowing, actually showed reductions in violent crime. If you were in a neighborhood adjacent to that. The specific data is, so in lower income neighborhoods, gun violence around the treated lots fell by 29% from these simple physical improvements. Citywide, greening cut shootings by 7% and mowing yards cut it by 9%. So interestingly, the cheaper intervention outperformed the more expensive one. I do want to note that there is strong evidence that these type of physical improvements can really make a difference, but they are too small and they should not be the entirety of our strategy. These type of interventions work well when layered on top of some of the other things that we've already discussed. Again, the working group did also name, an interest in addition to these types of interventions. Thinking about how can we focus the work of our CBOs, the work of our government agencies, the work of recreation and other things into these communities where violence is most concentrated. And we just don't know as much about that from research about its impact on gun violence, which doesn't mean that it won't work. It just means that we're going to have to do that work and learn ourselves together about what that means. The fourth strategy is about cognitive behavioral therapy. We know that many people at highest risk of shooting or being shot are not going to walk into a clinic. And that is not a criticism of clinical care. It's a design constraint and a reality that any strategy that requires someone in acute conflict to make an appointment and show up at an office has already failed. That's where cognitive behavioral interventions can come in and where models like ROCA that have been working very successfully in Baltimore recently to bring interventions like cognitive behavioral therapy directly out into communities. Programs like ROCA have five basic features. They're all about, one, relentless outreach. Relentless outreach is exactly what it sounds like, which is you knock on doors, you keep showing up, and you keep showing up. You might get turned away, but you're going to come back, and refusal is always just the starting point. It is not a decline. Most public programs will record a no and close the file, but cognitive behavioral intervention when done right in the community is relentless and it's showing up for people. This is about non-clinical skills that are taught by outreach workers on the street. It's been shown to be very successful that way, not by clinicians in an office. That matters, it matters for things that are less important but relevant about cost and scale. But it matters most importantly for whether a person is more likely to actually receive the intervention. And they're more likely to receive the intervention if they're receiving. The training and techniques from someone who they feel has walked in their shoes and understands their lived experience. The skills taught in cognitive behavioral intervention are very concrete. Things like noticing the trigger, pausing, regulating. Thinking through the consequences before you do this. Two thirds of our homicides are disputes and things like these types of practical skills that teach someone to slow down can make all the difference in whether or not someone pulls the trigger. These programs are intensive. These are not short 12 week curriculums. They can often span two years. A good example of this is if we look to, I'm going to skip to the next slide real quick. So the city of Chicago ran a program that enrolled 2,456 high-risk adult men in Chicago into a program that paired employment with cognitive behavioral therapy. They found that the people who participated in this program, that there was a 60, check my notes here, a 65% reduction in shooting and homicides. I want to note that the evaluation was not able to show those findings were statistically significant, which means they're not fully confident that it was the intervention that did that. But these are promising results and we need additional evaluation. They did find that the people who were referred by street outreach, to a cognitive behavioral therapy program showed even better results. There was a 79% reduction in arrests and that these did hold up and were statistically significant, which meant there was real confidence that the intervention was the thing that was driving that reduction. The recommendation from the working group is to take something like cognitive behavioral intervention, And to think of it as something that we are weaving through our other three interventions, that it becomes a core part of how we're thinking about focus deterrence. That is an important part of street outreach and something that we want our street outreach workers to be trained in, and a skill that they are using in an intervention that they are building up in the folks that they are engaging. It's also something that we want to extend to our law enforcement officers who are working as part of focus deterrence with youth who are at highest risk. So think of this particular recommendation not necessarily as a standalone thing, but as something that would be woven throughout all of the work. This belief that cognitive behavioral work, cognitive behavioral interventions are really a bedrock of what we think will help this work be successful in Durham. Final strategy was, to have a separate summit on youth. This has already been talked about, but I want to just name it a little bit more here. So the working group spent a lot of time talking about the real concerns that we all share around youth violence, around prevention and its importance. The working group also took very seriously the charge that we felt was given to the working group, which is, what are the things that we can do to begin saving lives now, immediately in the short term? And when we look at the data, the group was convinced that the data pointed Not that it is exclusive, but that predominantly a majority of homicides today are happening between the ages of 18 and 34, and that we needed to focus our immediate interventions there. And that required real focus of this group. We also recognized. that different populations often require different interventions and sometimes different stakeholders to be at the table. We felt that our group in that moment could focus on the work of what we could do now to begin reducing homicides. We noted the importance of continuing conversations, sometimes longer term work around prevention and that work needed to continue with the same sense of urgency, but that required a separate process. I'm happy to report in saying this, that this is not a recommendation of something deferred to the future and that working group members have already been convening around planning for that, that would involve CBOs, that would involve youth, that would involve city and county. Those plans are already in place. I know Director Harris is engaged in that as well as others who have been a part of that to move that work forward as quickly as possible. We talked about how one of the central critiques that came from our listening sessions was that Durham often lacks execution. This next slide are a set of recommendations and measures that answer that critique. The working group recommends in order to do this work well, These five things at minimum. One, this is going to require some dedicated staffing. We need folks who every day their only job and responsibility is how to manage this work that involves many partners and coordinate it well. It has to be someone's full time job and right now it's no one's full time job. To coordinate something that involves many agencies, many non-profit partners, someone has to manage that well. This is recommending at least two staff across the city and county. who are accountable to the highest levels of leadership that are, again, doing this work. Those two folks are not about service delivery. They are about coordinating a process that requires a high degree of execution and collaboration. The next recommendation is for a multidisciplinary advisory board that would involve city and county staff and leaders, community leaders, folks living in directly impacted communities that would be open to the public. This is how the community holds this work accountable without waiting for an annual report. The next is training and technical assistance. I don't think we can underscore this enough. Every strategy that we have talked about has failed someplace. Why is it failed? One of the reasons it fails is because cities didn't invest enough, or counties, in the type of technical assistance to do this well. These strategies are not easy to execute. There are people out there who can help us be successful, and making that investment upfront gives us the best chance at doing this work well. So training and technical assistance, this is not overhead. This is about making sure that we do this work with the fidelity that it requires to do these strategies and to see the kind of success that other communities are seeing. The next thing is that we have to think about the resources that are going to be required. We know that this is going to require some new resources, but it is also true that we can do some of this work with existing resources that we have. that we can redirect some of the things we're already spending money on to achieve this work. We are not here to answer that for you today. There is work actively going on that I'll speak about, will be coming about talking about what is the cost of this work? What are the gaps? What are the things we can do today with existing resources and what is the difference that we need to make up? But you all should expect that some of this will require additional funding. The final thing is a recommendation that we continue to periodically update Our analysis of gun violence, the work that happened in 2026 will go still. It needs to be regularly updated because the dynamics around violence change in our communities. We need to be committed to updating that so we can understand those dynamics as they're changing and respond appropriately. All right, so our ask today of the Board of County Commissioners is for direction. direction for city and county staff on how to advance this work. Staff are going to do five things between now and I believe the next city-county, joint city-county meeting is occurring in November. Between now and then there's five things that we're doing to lay the groundwork and advance this work. The first is we're trying to identify and secure where possible the kind of technical assistance that we will need to execute these strategies well. The second is we're working to complete by the end of this month a key capacity assessment. This looks at, and I'll talk about it more in a second, what are the new resources that are going to be needed? What is our current capacity today to execute these well? And what is the gap that we're going to need to make up? The third is to identify two or three places where we want to start our play space work. We're going to draw upon the data that has already been done and we'll come forward with specific recommendations for the two or three communities where we believe the play space work should begin. Fourth is, what type of management structure is going to be required to do this work well? It is critical that we get that right. What types of staffing? Where do they sit? What types of authority? What partners are at the table? All of these things are critical to the type of partnership based management structure that is going to be necessary to succeed in this work. And fifth, what are the budgetary needs? So what things can we do with existing resources and where are we going to need new dollars and why? Two things that I just mentioned, so the key capacity assessment, we're working with the Crime and Justice Policy Lab at UPenn to do this work. They have already worked with our law enforcement agencies and others as part of this key capacity assessment, and we'll be delivering results later this month. It looks at six key capacities that are essential if we're going to succeed in the work laid out by the working group. These capacities listed here are political leadership and governance. I can tell you the fact that the city and county have already joined together and that we have supported this work. It's already a strong start in that respect. The second is data driven analysis of the people and places at highest risk. The third is the ability to collaborate both within and between agencies and community organizations. We know that sometimes this work is too siloed and we will not succeed if we do not collaborate. Fourth, consolidated and accountable management of violence reduction efforts. So when I talked about what is the management structure we need, that's what this is all about. Five is infrastructure. Infrastructure, what do we need within law enforcement to do this work? Because law enforcement is a critical partner. And what do we need in terms of community interventions? We know that we, for example, will need to invest if we're going to advance these recommendations into community violence intervention, specifically street outreach. That will likely take some new investment, but part of the key capacity assessment is taking stock of where we're at today. And then finally, what will we need to ultimately sustain this work and institutionalize it over time? And then I already spoke briefly about partnership based management. Both of these things are key to success. You can see the things there that are listed both in terms of what is the staffing that is needed, but what are the regular weekly coordinating structures and accountability mechanisms that we need to do this work well? All right, I'm going to wrap up with, I want to remind you where these recommendations came from. These recommendations came from a really robust intensive community wide effort that the city and county have been jointly doing together for nearly a year, not quite. And these recommendations came from a diverse group of local community leaders who came together for three days to study in great depth to make sure that we grounded ourselves in what we heard from Durham residents to look at the data. Those 26 leaders, if you looked at that list, one thing I want to point out is not only do they represent a really wide array of different expertise, right? We have law enforcement, we have community organizations, we have folks who themselves have been shot in Durham, folks who have who have been survivors of violence, we had a important and necessary group of diverse representatives around that table. The other thing we had around that table, if you know some of those names, is people who are not shy about disagreeing with one another. And that's really important. That group came together over those days, put aside any past baggage, studied the facts, centered around this shared mission of reducing gun violence by 10% year over year, which really stacks up. And unanimously came to consensus that the strategies that I've just outlined for you is a path that we believe can get us there. And I think that's worth noting. And I'll stop there and look forward to answering your questions. We all will, thank you.

quite the work that you all have done. It's exciting. I think it's very complete and very exciting here. Before I get to the commissioners, their comments, I just had a question about, so someone talked about it in public comment, but I had flagged this earlier as well, about the age. It was 30, right? So my question is, why are the ages of the victim and the suspect combined for an average. Because I would imagine if we separated it out, the suspect probably would be a lower average age, and then the victim would probably be a little higher. I think I've seen some studies where activities go down the older you get, right?

crime and so forth but anybody anyone could be a victim right and so i was curious of what what the choice was to combine the victim and the suspect together to create an average age thank you dr lee uh they were not uh i think it was it was said on that slide as a single average but in the we can share with you back the the presentation that was done by uh that was delivered during the summit the more in-depth presentation by our partners uh they looked uh They looked at each group separately. They reported those. There was just a commonality there. It was not putting all that data and then one average across. They reported out in those detailed slides. They broke it down each time by victims and then by suspects. So I think that was probably just a confusing way that we presented. This particular thing is a quick summary slide, but looked at all of the data, separated it out exactly as you're saying. And then the other thing I want to note about that is it was a really thorough process, and Deputy Chief Jackson can speak to that. We looked at every homicide over five years, but also interviewed every investigator that was involved in Durham Police Department over those homicides about information that may not be known in the data or publicly available to as much as we could understand. So it was really in-depth analysis, but

directly answer your question it was not uh aggregated like that okay it's just kind of written yes that's that's the way okay all right i understand that all right commissioners who wants to okay uh valentine thank you chair uh let me first just say uh thank you for your work thus far uh two comments made during the comment period stand out to me And one pointed to the money spent on a previous study and the lack of accountability since that previous study. And another person got up and commented that we should keep our youth at the forefront. And I think we should be laser focused about those two particular comments from people in our community as we move forward. And so my first question is, who sets the environment for this effort? Because I think that's important. And so I know that there's a framework in place, but the environment is really set and created by people who live in our community. And we should be utilizing the skills that they have to bear in this effort in a way that I hope is not lost. You pointed to Baltimore having several efforts at trying to solve this problem before they reached it. What did they do differently the final time that actually made the difference? I don't think you pointed to that. Could you sort of highlight that for me?

Sure, I'm happy to. I think, one, they cited political leadership. They didn't have the right political leadership, in their own words, to do the work well. Two, I think that they, I'll have to go back and I can send you all reports on this to dig in deeper. The biggest thing they cited though was there was a change in political leadership and that political leadership made a real difference. I also imagined that they learned to do some of the work differently and better over time.

respect to your comments about political leadership i think i talked to you at the summit i had an opportunity to stop by the summit on one particular day and we talked resources and from my particular foxhole uh it's i think it's important that you came here today and talked about there would potentially need to be some new resources and so i'll be waiting just to see exactly what what those new resources look like so that we can engage in a serious discussion about how you can be successful at the work that you're engaged in because I think that's going to be work hand in glove together in solving the problem in your presentation you also talked about a concentration of people that we know are involved in this violence and how we strategically go about identifying that particular population is one that's politically sensitive in the sense that you know and I know that the folks who are involved look exactly like me and so our community is going to be concerned about people in particular neighborhoods being targeted and I'm hoping that we can deal with those sensitivities in a way that is constructive towards solving the problem while respecting uh the people in our our community lastly i'll say that uh about the convening of the youth summit this sort of brings me back to my original comments when we're shaping the environment for this work if we in fact decide that a summit is suitable we need to talk to the people who are closest to the problem Some of which are identified in the long list of partners that you identified here today. And I'm hoping that we tie in with that network, that intrinsic network that can allow us to be successful and bring down violence in our community. Thank you and I yield.

Can I just make one comment? One of the things that you spoke about, Commissioner Valentine, was the gang assessment. And so just want to actually put out that in this work, we did take all of the recommendations from that assessment, the task force that the city created to look at gun violence all the work that we've done already we gathered that information to actually look at it to help us move some of this work forward as far as looking at what has already been done like what is the data that we actually have um and so with that there are people will look at and there are some similarities in what that assessment um recommended as well as what we're recommending but the specific groups are different and so the gang assessment was really youth focused it looked at more kind of community based type of things where we're looking at specific individuals We're looking at focus deterrence. So there's some similarities in that, but there's some differences. But I also want to let you know that so the gain reduction strategy was inherited by me and my department four years ago. We did not get the person, he retired, who was over this, but we did get the recommendations. And so our project build has actually been working on some of those recommendations outside of this work. And so hoping that we will be able to lift up some of those recommendations out of that strategy, that assessment that came as well.

Thank you.

Commissioner Jacobs.

Can I also respond to Commissioner Valentine? I participated in that gang assessment. And as you all will know, An assessment starts with a question that it wants to answer and focuses on that. That was not an assessment of violence in Durham. It was just a concern about youth involvement in gangs. And as Director Harris says, There was, I think, political leadership change, but also the people involved, the staffing changed. And so that was kind of put on the back burner. I will also say, to address Dr. Lee's concerns, and what I'm sure is going to be more questions and comments from the commissioners about youth violence, it was really important to us that this be Data-driven. Youth violence is very sticky. It is very much at the top of people's minds. But I will tell you as a prosecutor in this community that it is not children who are driving the violence in this community. And I know that that is what people think. And I don't know if Chief Jackson wants to comment on that or not, but the most violent people in this community are not the children. And I know we want it in the media, those are the things that get the most media attention, but we have to sit with those families for months and sometimes years after shootings and homicides. And these are usually young men in their 20s who have been involved over years in many different things, and they're mostly interpersonal. So they are people who have beef with each other over whatever they have beef with. In this particular time, DPD does a very good job of gathering intelligence on that. And what we hope to do with focus deterrence is really focus down on those people when we know that those beasts are happening. Because we do know when they're happening and there is an opportunity for intervention during that time to kind of cool things off. And that's what we're hoping to do with this work. And that's the real thing that changes the violence and keeps the shootings, honestly, and the homicides from happening.

Commissioner Jacobs.

Well, first of all, I just want to say I appreciate all the collaboration that has gotten us to this place. Great to see all of you sitting here. the city and the county working together, and we need to move forward. I hear the urgency from the community. I hear the frustration, and I share it. Since I've been sitting in this seat, I spent years on the Gang Reduction Task Force, the Violent Crime Roundtable, I've been here to see MBK, my brother's keeper, come and go, Bull City United come and go. I've sat in with conversations with the sheriff trying to start Project Safe Neighborhoods, Chief District Court Judge Pat Evans, the School Justice Partnership. So yeah, we need to get it right. And so I really like what is being proposed in terms of being very focused on a few things that we just need to get right. And I like the idea of a pilot and picking very focused census tracts to work on, using data to focus on specific Um, people that we know about this project safe neighborhoods, uh, is that that's always been the philosophy. Um, and. You know, we, we have a lot of resources. We just heard about them today. You know, we've got, we've got jobs. Um, we've got education, we've got, so, you know, case management and then of course, cognitive behavioral. I mean, that's one of the most important things that, you know, Roshana does over at Justice Services with our Justice Services Department. And even now in the detention center, right? Because, you know, again, this is what we know works. So I do have a few questions. So related to focus deterrence, It's going to take that collaboration. You talked about how it's going to be everyone sitting at the table together with that person saying, hey, we know what's going on, and we want you to hear your options. So in terms of the partnership of everyone, because it's going to take everyone, our justice system, our law enforcement system, everything are we are you envisioning things like some kind of MOA or an MOU that everybody signs on to how do we hold all of the needed partners to make this work how do we hold everyone accountable for being actually part of make a really actually working together

um thank you for the question yes we do um envision everyone coming together not just with mous because we know historically we've always had them but it's more of joint training extra meetings not just you know sending out information sending out lists we're going to actually meet together on a very regular basis we are going to have mous in place but i think one of the things you saw in some of the slides that talked about making sure that we provided training so people know how to do this well so having everyone being a part of the training and technical assistance that will be built into this process. So, yes, we'll have MOUs, but it will go much deeper than just the MOU. We're going to work together. We're going to train together. Everybody's going to be at the table together.

And at this point, every partner has said that they will be there at the table involved. Do we have that?

Yes, every partner has said they're willing to be a part of the effort. We don't have signed MOUs because we're still in conversations. I mean, we have to work through some of the kinks, but we have people that are willing to engage in the conversations, yes.

And when there is the vision of sitting down with, you know, again, piloting with certain people, will, again, having the face of all of our system there just for them to see, I'm You know, I'm from the Office of the Sheriff, the police department, the court system, you know, the DA. Like, will that be there?

Yes, and we know the sheriff is already doing Project Safe Neighborhood, doing some of that work already, and we're not trying to not do that work. We're trying to build upon that. That's already a strategy that's in place and that's working. So we know we're building upon existing strategies to deepen that relationship and partnership and broaden it a little bit to ensure he has the support with Project Safe Neighborhoods that will be needed from being a part of this initiative as well.

And a part of our meeting is having people at the table who can make decisions, not just people who are coming to the meeting. It is people who can, you know, then go forward and investigate, then go forward and indict. There's a recent New York Times article about the Baltimore focus deterrence. I would direct you to read that. If I can find it, I'll send a link to you all to read that. but they interview individually each person who has been involved in the Baltimore work, the people who have met weekly, and what they have accomplished by being in the same room with each other and making decisions.

Awesome. So, of course, we're going to, I mean, you know, we're also talking about case management, right, because that's what, the weekly meetings, putting in the work, following up with people and the resources. So what happens with, hopefully not very often, but the person who doesn't comply? Because the consequences are also going to need to be important, because if somebody doesn't comply, and then what happens? Because that also will send a message. What is going to happen then when somebody doesn't cooperate?

Focused deterrence is very clear that the way that it works is by offering support first and then having accountability, which would mean prosecution for those who continue in the behavior. And that's an important piece of it. But I mean, others can speak to that.

And does that, I mean, all the stakeholders agree that that will be the result? Okay. And I hope that we're all going to hold each other accountable for that, too. The, yeah, and again, all the, going back to this, that I'm looking, I was just looking at the strategies. focusing on the census track. You know, we did that with the Mayor Bell's poverty reduction initiative, and that's where we came with the driver's license restoration program really came out of that effort. The street outreach, where do you envision, could you talk a little bit more about what does that look like to have a different model of street outreach? You were talking about contracting that out. What is the different, what are you all actually thinking about for that?

In our recommendation, we did not specify where that will live. We had some different ideas. Some believe that it should, Let me say this. There's benefits to living in city or county. We know that because there's, you know, the benefits, there's more higher pay, more access to resources, opposed to it living in the community being with like kind of RFP for community organizations. And so that is where leadership will need to give us more of what your your feedback and direction on that but again we recognize that we can see where it can live in either one there's benefits to both and then there's also some challenges and barriers to both and then the strategy around having the you know the CBI

integrated i mean i mean that's a really incredible idea really awesome and we've seen like with cit training in law enforcement and and other areas of course we have a trauma-informed um asus coordinator in durham county who i know could help with this but i that i love this idea of the cbi and maybe you could talk roshana Because I know Justice Services has a lot of experience with this. And even DSS, that's a very important part of the strategy with DSS, with parents. But if you could talk a little bit more about the power of the data around CBI.

Yes, we have seen that CBI does work. One of the things as we talk about making changes to existing resources, one of the things we have not done is taken CBI to the streets. And so that's what this recommendation is because we know it works in the classroom. But we're talking about really training the outreach workers to take it outside of the classroom, to take it to the individuals that we see that really need it. So we will continue to offer it in the classroom based inside detention. But this is taking it to a whole nother level. And when you're training the people who are meeting one on one in the community with them to offer CBI right there on the spot for me, for individuals. And again, The other change to that is that it's not short-term. It's not a structured 12-week or 16-week curriculum. It's however long that person needs to interact with those strategies around changing behavior on the street that will then help them see that change. So, yes, we are doing it in a more structured way inside the department, but we're taking this to the next level and really wanting to train the outreach workers and law enforcement and everyone else on how to deliver it right there where it's really needed in real time.

And, of course, our community paramedics, the HOPE team. I mean, there's just kind of endless. And lastly, I just want to say about the issue about the age. I do think that prevention is also really, really important. And I know the data shows 18 to 34-year-olds, except when I look at the data that you've written, shared also showed that they had 12 prior arrests and four for felonies. So in other words, it didn't just start when they were 18 years old. So if we look at when did they, the, when did these individuals start being arrested? And I'm from what I remember from the gang prevention study or the gang last gang, report um thanks to like incredible data that the police department had uh that you could actually trace the behavior starting in elementary school middle school with you know emotional mental health having learning challenges in school issues with families So I think it's really important that we are recognizing that, and that it started out, they could identify the individuals who, you know, when they were younger, it was trespassing or things like that. And then it escalated to the point when maybe then when they were 18, it became murder. So I think it is really important that we our understanding the roots and focusing on prevention as well. But I know there's a lot of things to be done. I just wanted to say that, and I want us to be successful, and I think our community deserves it, and we need to get it right this time. So to your point, Ryan, we need to get it right this time. for our community. So I'm looking forward to doing whatever we need to do to make that happen. Thank you.

Commissioner Burton.

I am the only elected on the committee and I think I'm the only person who's not a staff member of city or county or working for a community organization. And so part of that is part of my role is that is to say the hard things out loud. And one of the things about what we want to make sure with focus deterrence is that we hear everybody when they talk about all the other things that they would like done. But one of the ways that focus deterrence fails is from scope creep. And we really want to be focused. Our number one job, the primary goal of this is to save lives. And the primary goal is in the moment to make sure that no shooting, that the shooting doesn't happen. And that, you know, to a certain extent, homicides are random. People that you think will die from being shot don't and people that you think won't do. Right. And so our number one goal is to stop the shootings. and to provide those people that we know who are most likely who are high at high risk in this moment an opportunity to do something else not just the person who may be the suspect but the person who is also likely victim and the one thing that we know also is the number one indicator of you being a victim of homicide is you being shot before so We want to really stay laser focused and we appreciate everybody's opinion. And it is going to be controversial as we move forward with this because people are going to think that there are a lot of other things that we should be doing. But the main thing that this group wants to do is make sure that people get the chance to have be case managed and participate in CBI and get a skill set from Durham Tech and get a job. And so that's what we're gonna be doing every week.

And I appreciate that. And actually, Jason's not here anymore. I was thinking a lot about overdoses. and how you know the primary goal is to save lives and how like i was actually thinking about narcan and harm reduction in this conversation and how yes i totally i hear what you're saying that you can't same thing with opioid overdose first thing you got to do is keep somebody alive so i i hear you uh commissioner burton

Thank you, and I'll keep it brief. I just wanna thank you all for your report, and I really am glad that we're focusing on cognitive behavior therapy. I think it's really needed. Being a former, well, I'm still an educator, but seeing what happened a lot in schools with kids, because it just happens in an instant, and trying to get them, you know, calm down or refocus, and it carries into adulthood. So I'm really glad that that's going to be a focus with this. I'm really interested in how will the outreach look with happening, with cognitive behavioral therapy, because a lot of people need help, right? So thank you for that, but I also wanted to know, like, where do we go next? What are you wanting from us, or are we just listening to the recommendations, things like that? There's next steps, so just curious.

So the next steps for you all is to let us know how you would like to move forward. Are you wanting to accept and move forward with all five recommendations? Are there specific ones you'd like for us to focus on as well as there was a resolution that we submitted as well that we would like for you all to approve on next Monday's meeting as well?

All right, so essentially, given direction, right? We'll do this by consensus. Are we good with this? Do we want to discuss it further when we do the resolution on Monday? So you want to sit with it for a little bit? So right now we're okay with it, but we want to discuss it on the agenda for Monday when we do the resolution as well. Is that okay?

and I would ask is as the board deliberates if you can let staff know what areas of interest need fleshing out as we work towards Monday's discussion we can make sure that we're ready for those conversations I have a question because I thought in okay right here that

It seemed like there was going to be additional information that was still needed to be done. Ryan, you were talking about how some of these things still need to be fleshed out, the census track, you know, blah, blah, blah. So I'm not sure.

So right now what we're asking is, are you all in agreement with all five recommendations for us to be able to move forward with the next steps, which would be identifying the technical assistance, getting those people in place, being able to, once we have your direction, we'll also be able to start looking at what funding might be necessary based off of us doing this research on technical assistance, potential RFPs, and things of that nature. So that's the next steps for us once you all say, yes, we want to move forward with the recommendations.

Well, I'll just say I support the recommendations and yeah.

Yeah, I think we all have that. We do support the recommendations. We're gonna let the commissioner sit with a little bit, ask questions maybe for next week if there's further questions, but we're gonna let the staff know the questions in advance so that we can get that and then approve that resolution and then be on to whatever the steps are afterwards. Is that satisfactory? Do we all understand what we're doing? Okay, all right, good. Thank you all very much, appreciate it. And just so we know, so we do have two pieces left. We have the cultural roadmap and then the homelessness resolution. And then the closed session. Then the closed session. So we have two items left. We have two items left and then we'll have the closed session. So we'll do the cultural roadmap first. there we are and I apologize if I didn't mention that when we were going to break up I skipped over but we're okay we're good right and so we do have again we have 45 minutes allocated for this that's presentation and questions so let's make sure commissioners that we are all right when you're ready all right good afternoon thank you for having us here

Thank you for having us here to present the Cultural Roadmap Plan. As many of you may know, Commissioner Burton is our honorary co-chair. We want to thank you for your service and your leadership. We're going to start off, I'm going to introduce everybody at the table. Starting with myself, I'm Brenda Hayes-Bright. I'm a project manager and public art manager with county engineering, and I'm also the county liaison to the Cultural Roadmap Plan. Next, we've got Sarah Martin, the county engineering public art coordinator. Rebecca Holmes, City of Durham Cultural and Public Art Manager. Jackie Field, City of Durham Community Program Division Manager. Steve Shule, Cultural Roadmap Planning Group Co-Chair. Margaret McNabb. Durham Cultural Advisory Board Chair, and of course our illustrious consultant, Marjorie Reese with MJR Partners. And I'll turn it over to Sarah to talk about how we got here.

Hello, good afternoon. Again, my name is Sarah Martin. I'm the county's public art coordinator. So how we got here in 2022, city and county recognize that we need to update the 2004 Durham Cultural Master Plan in partnership with the Durham Cultural Advisory Board. The city and county each allocated funding to support a new plan along with private funders. So from June 2023, to march 2026 the city and county heard from over 3 800 residents through interviews surveys focus groups and all the events this agenda item presents the resulting durham cultural roadmap and its two-year implementation guide for county commissioners consideration Simultaneously, city council are receiving and reviewing the roadmap for consideration. Next up, I'd like to welcome Margaret McNabb, who is the current chair of the Durham Cultural Advisory Board to share her role in the planning process.

Hello commissioners, thank you for your time today. We're really pleased to explore the cultural road map with you. I'm Margaret McNabb, chair of the Durham Cultural Advisory Board. I'm a long time resident of Durham Public Schools, parent, advocate for freelancers and independent workers, strategic advisor to entrepreneurial support organizations and cultural institutions and a voice of the innovation community. So over 17 years, my 17 years in Durham, I've found myself in so many different rooms across the city and county. From downtown to RTP, Bragtown to Bahama, in boardrooms, classrooms, life science labs, at the library, on the bus. Arts and culture have come up in every one of those rooms. in conversations about economic development, education, tourism, job creation, small business, neighborhoods, community safety, quality life, and what makes Durham, Durham. There's tremendous creative activity here and creative energy, and what we're missing is a shared direction for how the city and county government and the cultural sector, philanthropy, Business and other community partners can work together to make the most of this energy That's what the cultural roadmap offers a plan to strengthen our arts and arts and cultural infrastructure coordinate efforts Maximize the resources we already have and put them to work for the priorities of all Durham residents So three city and county resident boards were leaders in this plan and the Durham Cultural Advisory Board, the Public Art Committee, and the Culture and Public Art Program. The planning group co-chairs are former Mayor Steve Schuel and Zena Howard, principal at Perkins and Will. The county's honorary chair is County Commissioner Michelle Burton, and the city's honorary chair is Shenetta Burris, with Mayor Pro Tem Javier Caballero serving as the elected official liaison to DCAB. We're grateful to have received private funding to support this plan from Duke Arts, Triangle Community Foundation, the Mary Duke Biddle Foundation, Fox Family Foundation, and Man Bikes Dog Theater Fund. So now I want to introduce Margie Reese of MJR Partners, the cultural policy expert we engaged to lead this process. Margie's a veteran in the field of arts administration. She served as the executive director of city arts agencies in Dallas, Los Angeles, and Texas. She serves as the Ford Foundation's program officer for media arts and culture in their offices for West Africa based in Nigeria. As a member of the Board of Americans for the Arts, her leadership resulted in the agency developing their first policy statement on equity in the arts. Margie and her team led the engagement process and worked alongside two local artists here today, Monet Marshall and R Stein Wexler, who curated creative experiences to hear directly from thousands of artists and residents. So I wanna welcome Margie to share her work, the work that her team completed and learn more about the ways that Durham can build arts as civic infrastructure.

Margie.

Thank you. Good afternoon. I am Margie Reese visiting with you today from, I think I have to decide where I live, in Dallas and in Atlanta. So sort of working across those two geographic boundaries. I really am here to just try to give you some highlights. You have the plan in front of you, but primarily to say that Durham is ready. It's time, as you've just heard, you have a very active cultural community and resident community of participants in the arts. So I'm going to try to stay on script, which is really hard for me. I am a card-carrying bureaucrat, so I just want to make sure you get the high points. Today we want to talk to you a little bit about the data. and community input, although I'm going to try to move pretty quickly through these pieces for you. We want to talk about a potential timeline for implementing some of these strategies, the kind of budget and investments that are going to be necessary to fully implement the plan. And then just to share with you some decision points and make sure that we hear any concerns that you have that we might want to respond to. these recommendations this roadmap is intended to give durham city and durham county a clear phased approach to enhancing the current state of arts culture and the humanities in this area and we want to think about how do we progress forward some of the strategies that you already have in place that don't need to be reinvented, that don't need to be rethought. You just want to advance and push those things forward. Why this plan matters now Durham, I don't have to tell you, is growing very fast. The demographics are changing. Young people are coming in to the area thinking a lot more about how creativity and technology intersect. The cultural spaces, we've heard from the conversations, cultural spaces, the places where artists make work, where the community participates in the arts, are very limited. And the funding systems are fragmented. So as you saw on earlier slide, the private sector does support the arts and they want to do more. The city and the county also has existing programs that support arts and culture and the humanities. But these systems and structures are not coordinated. They're sort of fragmented, different timelines, different priorities for funding are fractured. And we believe that without this coordinated structure to stabilize the civic growth of the arts, it will continue to be sort of ad hoc. The other thing that we heard a lot about why this is important right now is there's a great deal of out migration of creatives. People are moving to other cities because they can't make a decent living. They can't get large scale arts commissions. Places for them to study and do their work are not easy to come by. So when people begin to leave, the creatives start leaving your city. um that leaves a gap that leaves a big hole so we want to talk a little bit about that as we go along these are some of the numbers and the ways that our team working in partnership with the creative engagement team that the city and the county hired allowed us to take some data that you all probably received from the first set of consultants that you hired in 2022. Our team said, you know what, we don't need to go back and ask the same questions that we've already asked. Let's go deeper. Let's make sure that we're going into neighborhoods, into churches, places where people live and work. And so this snapshot gives you an overview of who we talked to and where those conversations happened. Again, another sort of interesting slide. I didn't want to just put all the numbers up there. But I wanted to make sure you understood that we didn't just talk to artists. Because this conversation is not just about arts organizations or artists. It's about the civic. It's about Durham. It's about how people engage with creativity. And it's also about how the history cultural activity in Durham and Durham County is protected, is preserved, continues to be part of Durham's identity. We talked to government staff, elected officials, some of you were in our conversations, the Arts Council for sure as a major partner and their board, and then the festival organizers that you see can begin to be more and more part of the economic fabric of durham but there are some opportunities there to strengthen all of these conversations as we move forward we utilize social media we sat down with residents members of faith-based community etc okay This is actually a set of meeting notes from, you know, what do you do with artists, but you ask them to document their conversations creatively. So these are actually meeting notes. This is a set of notes from our first town hall meeting at the Hayti Heritage Center. Here's what we heard there. Artists are active. Durham has a strong cultural life, high participation, a strong creative workforce presence. But the systems that support that work is not fully aligned with what the artists and creative community says that they need. And without managing your system of creativity, the infrastructure begins to fail. And I'll just say this as an example of what I mean. You've been funding and supporting arts programs for many years, but there are very few cultural institutions in the city. There are projects, there are strong artists, there are workshop spaces, but a quick understanding of what an institution is. It has a permanent place to present its work to an audience. It has a professionally led staff. It has a fundraising plan. It has a board of volunteer directors. So those are just some of the elements that we want to strive toward and lead toward so that Um, you can see the growth of the arts and it's not sporadic. It's not when some new kid comes to town with a great idea, it's an institution that has, that makes a long-term investment in a city. Those are a couple of the things that we want to keep talking and moving toward.

Was I supposed to introduce myself?

Nah, you get it, right? Okay, keep going. It just occurred to me. I'm Margie. And I love this idea of bringing a systems approach to supporting the arts in any community, because without that, You as electeds, you as managers, don't have a good way to track the return on the investment. You think people come out of this process thinking the arts are a nice thing to have in a city, but we've been sitting here with you this morning learning about the many ways that we can be helpful, the arts I mean, in connecting community goals and aspirations. I want to spend just a minute on this chart. This is a report that the Durham Arts Council with support from the city and county participates in every four years. It's done by our national arts advocacy organization, Americans for the Arts, with no bias toward any group or part of the country. I just want to run through this quickly with you because you've been talking today about workforce development. You've been talking about job creation. You've been talking about how young people get involved in the arts. What I didn't hear, I have a set of notes about what I didn't hear. I didn't hear about how we involve people my age in the arts. Y'all can't leave us out of the equation too, because we've got some stories to tell and some ways to document our history. But if you think about just a couple of these lines here, the total cultural industry in Durham City and County spends about $233 million a year between what the organizations spend and what audience spend. And these are arts related expenditures, so you're generating jobs, about 3,000 jobs between organizations. And the audiences, so the people in the audience, how are they generating jobs? They are cleaning symphony tuxedos. They are providing catering. They are providing transportation. So think about the jobs that are related to the arts industries. The arts are paying about $134 million to Durham City and County residents and generating the taxes, as you see. So the arts are a nice thing to have because they do these things. They contribute to civic economy. They contribute to civic life. And these things cannot be ignored. More about the data related to arts and cultural spending, and you talk about tourism. In fact, one of our earlier speakers this morning was focusing in on tourism. People don't come to your city to see how you paint the stripes in the parking lot. They come to the city to engage with your culture, to engage with the creatives, and to make new experiences that connect with Durham's image and identity. Okay. These are quickly some of the cultural gaps, fragmented funding systems. There is a need to invest in not one-time grants. So here's what has to happen. You create a funding opportunity. An artist or an organization receives a one-time grant. They have to gear up for that, find a space, hire the team, raise the money to match it, and do it all over again two or three times a year. Um, we want you to think about the project based investment being, um, uh, something that needs to be reconsidered. There's very limited long-term support. So if you're wanting to see your cultural community grow, you've got to invest long-term in board development, staff development, facilities, equipment, supplies, et cetera. We did see a gap in the equitable distribution of funding. We've come up with these words, you guys, because we're no longer allowed to use certain language in the arts in America. We also see a gap in funding leadership support for some of those new, edgy, younger artists that want to live here and create business. So a lot of our thinking was around how do we address these gaps? Here's what the community said to us across the board. I'm not gonna read all of these, but there are four major pillars that came out of those conversations that guided our work with the Roadmap Planning Group and with the city and county staff. Balancing asset distribution. We gotta make this thing equitable. Call it whatever we need to call it. We gotta cultivate arts leaders. We have to foster collaboration. If we continue to work in silos, we will continue to be working in silos. And we need to inspire evolution based on where you are, the research center, the work that's happening in this part of the state. Evolution and bringing younger people and elders into that work is really critical. What you have presented to you here are 10 recommendations. We'll talk about them a little bit later. But our key recommendation, shamelessly, is we really want to urge you to consider establishing an Office of Arts and Culture. Again, call it something different. But these gaps that we're finding and the pillars that your public is suggesting requires somebody said it earlier about a different topic somebody has to get up every morning and focusing on arts and culture must be their job it cannot continue to be an add-on task Um, to other staff, people who are very well healed, but who have six or seven other priorities to do. We're suggesting that in order for this area and this community to really, um, lay down a solid foundation, you, you will want to consider hiring professional staff to lead that work and to provide you with a backbone, um, professional advice that you're going to need consistently. Um, we took a look at comparable cities that we heard throughout some of their processes and, um, some of the conversations just to give you an idea of how other cities like size cities, cities with the same aspirations are structured. And it occurred to me as I was sitting there this morning that North Carolina. Leads the pack in all of this, the very first arts council in the United States was created. in Wake County. Sorry. And that establishment of that local arts agency was also quickly followed by Durham in the creation of the Durham Arts Council. so how many years ago was that 70 some years ago and the durham arts council is a major player in the arts they have limitations but they have been operating all that time and still the city and counties opportunities are still great for growth we took a look at some crazy ones like um New Orleans, where the Office of Arts and Culture is based in the mayor's office and all roads lead to tourism in New Orleans. Um, in Birmingham, where there have been a lot of, uh, national, um, museums, historic, a lot of humanities, their office of arts and culture is an independent agency that receives funding from the public, but also a great deal of it from the private sector. So just wanted to make sure that when we were talking to citizens in our. Um, public sessions that we were able to give people some variety of how this office that we're suggesting could be established. We heard a lot about, we want to be like Raleigh. No, you don't. You want to be like Durham. Um, And you want to create a system that works for this community, for this arts, this roster of arts organizations, and for the visitors that you're here to attract. Let me just tell you, my Uber driver gave me a whole spiel this morning about Black Wall Street. That's what you want to protect, where citizens understand their history and they're able to talk to visitors and guests about it. So leaving here today, except for these shoes I've had on, I want to walk down what was known as Black Wall Street. I want to learn that from the shopkeeper next door, et cetera. But we read about that across the country. And so here we are, and you have an opportunity to really capitalize on your history. And so that's why one of my early learnings from former mayor, was to talk to us about humanities. It's a big part of Durham's history and we cannot leave that aspect of the cultural system out. This is just a breakdown of the staffing that is currently on the ground. They have a public art professional, some temporary contract staff, and three full-time staff at the city and at the county uh your full-time public art project manager who spends a quarter of her time on the arts her primary job is is public is a construction construction projects where's perry he didn't want to join us oh i thought he dumped us And these are the current staff positions that have a role in advancing arts, culture, and the humanities. And you can see it's a robust list, but every one of these positions has several other responsibilities to the city and county. the county level these are the staff positions and these two groups of people have been guiding our team and working with us every step of the way to make uh make it so that we can have access to facilities to learn the county and the city and that's been huge hugely helpful One of the first things we heard when we started putting these recommendations together is this is a bad budget year. I've been working as an arts administrator for 40 years, every year. When the arts gets to the table, it's a bad budget year. So we want to help you think through why the arts is not just a standalone. It is connected to civic infrastructure, civic growth. So year one, we're suggesting simply that you maintain the current levels of funding and you begin to look at where and how you can strengthen the foundation that already exists. first you know really question us with some hard questions about this this um plan but begin to think about where do we start and dedicate some time to thinking about that just year one and whatever you consider to be year one if it's a year from today it's a year from your fiscal year whatever that period of time is that you want to stop and focus on this and then begin year two by making a substantial funding commitment to hire staff to implement some new grant programs and get inside of your neighborhoods. Acknowledge that the arts are alive and well and living and thriving inside your neighborhoods. The festivals, the after school programs that you can do more of with kids and then move on to years two and three by increasing funding goals. and just monitor and manage how you grow the arts as a point of pride for Durham, rather than as an afterthought, so that you want to nurture and nourish the artists and cultural workers, historians, and then cultural institutions in a robust way. So just a summary of that, maintain your current, if you don't do anything else, levels of funding. That's something I'm supposed to say because it makes you feel a little bit more comfortable, but we want you to think about how do you grow the arts budget in year one. Working with the Cultural Arts Board, preparing for the rollout of the Cultural Roadmap is really gonna be an incredible messaging opportunity. so that just like people who see the arts as for the elite or for the rich or for the you know academic communities we want to make sure that the Durham residents are reminded that they are creating every day every single day somebody's making something new and has a new idea and that that enhances and grows um the the identity here in durham putting some guidelines in place one of the things that the the cultural arts board wants to see happen is that this group and the city council at the end of a time period can see some return on their investment and that means accountability that means reviewing what are the the key guidelines that you want to see in place and then how do we make sure that the artists organizations and the public that serve on boards and committees are accountable for those dollars so there needs to be some time when the foundational elements are put on the table tested and then rolled out to the community and one of the things i will say here that we heard quite a bit of is your artists do one thing all the time they make things they have new ideas and they create things What they want to know is what do you want from us? How do we service ourselves better by giving you the information that you are requiring so that you feel more and more confident that the artists are in fact contributing to the livelihoods and to the quality of life for the residents in Durham County. This thing about building management capacity is really important to us because if you provide grant funding, if you provide public funding to the creative sector, the public is going to want to know what happened to it. Did that grant do what the organization said it would do? And one of the things that I found in this community is there is not so much management assistance offered to the artist community. And so sometimes they're going to fail. But part of the pathway to success is giving them that kind of instruction, making accessible professional resources. strategic planning consultants. How do we manage the dollars that we have? How do we plan better? So all of those things under building management capacity I think would be a really hard line to work through during year two. And that kind of advice doesn't just fall off a tree. It is education. It's how do you read a spreadsheet? You know, how do you provide documentation of how the dollars were spent? So again, in year two, I believe this will be one of your top priorities is to expand just a little bit to make sure that the organizations aren't set up for failure. By the same token, you can make a huge grant allocation to an arts organization and they cannot be successful if they don't have the understanding about how you run the arts as a business inside of a creative enterprise. Our ideas about beginning to expand the grant process is to put artists and grants inside of neighborhoods where the public can guide the delivery and implementation of those dollars. We don't all have to get up in the morning and take all day to get dressed to go to a formal institution to have a cultural experience. People get up on Sunday morning and have a cultural experience wherever they worship. Neighborhoods that have access to parks, you know, et cetera. We think that by... investing more in individual artists to incentivize them to stay in durham city and county we you also have some major cultural organizations here that can can advance the work with new grant funding to hire choreographers set designers you know etc increasing the number of public program contracts we talked about this a lot you guys um you can choose to provide grant funding because you're a civic agency or you can choose to enter into contract for service with an arts organization we want you to do six exhibitions in three different parts of the city those things are measurable also you can all can provide a grant we think that your work is um is really elevating the history of our of our county and cities and so we're going to give you a grant to keep doing that you can decide which way you want to go many cities do both and then you this group along with city leadership will decide And I think somebody spoke to this idea earlier today. We don't know what is recommended. We don't know. We're not getting enough information. Well, short of me to tell you what the dollar amount should be. We'll give you some recommendations. The arts community will provide some guidance to that. And you will decide what and how much you think would be a reasonable allocation to support the arts. We've got some members of the public here that have good ideas about what that might look like. So two to three core grant programs, which we have articulated some guidance in the plan for how you can decide what those look like. Putting forth a public-facing information portal. Again, we heard artists in these sessions saying, We don't get together as a community of artists. So these sessions about what should the cultural plan look like have also been helpful. We can see you doing some more community workshops, citywide outreach and communications. You would benefit and your public would benefit from actually some branding and marketing and saying that the arts in Durham are uniquely Durham. We don't want to be like fill in the blank. and then looking at coordinated grant review process so you have the public making decisions about the public requests and that public will need to have some elevated systems that prevent the perception of, um, so you got your lawyer here, but the perception of, uh, of being self-serving or, um, you know, trying to provide a job for my friend. So we want to make sure that the conflicts conversations happen. and that the communities that make up Durham, the cultural communities that make up Durham, are represented in these grant review processes, et cetera. So these are the kinds of startup things that can really help make a difference in laying the foundation. You know, you're gonna shoot me anyway, so I might as well say, if you're gonna invest in the arts, you need to invest. And these are some of the kinds of programs and budgets that between the city and county, a $1.5 million contribution to support the arts year two, beginning for year three, would really set the stage for you. It's a big bite, but You know, artists pay the tab at restaurants and grocery stores as well. And so they need to be compensated, but these are some ways that you can begin to think about how to allocate funding to grow the sector. Your two investments look like launching incubator spaces. You've got some beautiful spaces within the county. They're not necessarily inventory that doesn't have a plan for it, but think about how you put artists in abandoned buildings or spaces where the community is beginning to grow and change. there's an opportunity for the county to really dig into a countywide arts learning initiative. And notice I'm not saying arts education. Arts and culture initiatives that would require your education system, the county's education system, private school system, churches, nonprofit organization, park systems, to really think about building a network of places where young people have access to the arts every day in places where they live. I'm not suggesting here that the arts are going to eliminate one of the problems that you were talking about earlier today about lowering the crime rate for young people, but I guarantee you it will have a positive effect. The more police chiefs across the country you talk to, they could tell you what time of day is the highest time for young people to get involved in in crime rate activities and it's that gap between after school time and the time that their parents demand that they're at home what does the city have in place that attracts those young people to making a pot to think about weaving to think about some of those historical creative outlets that their families brought with them to this place Over time, you want to think about how you increase grant funding, thinking about expanding the reach. Here's a fun story. I'm trying not to tell you too many fun things. I worked on a project in Indianapolis, Indiana, where there were miles and miles between a town and a town. The city hired what they called a circuit rider, a bunch of artists, that took arts into those rural communities outside of urban areas. And young people looked forward to those things on Saturday mornings. I, as a younger artist, actually rode on the back of a flatbed truck in a very under-resourced community, taking artists and arts activities to kids truck rolled up, the stage flew out, and we began to work with whoever showed up. And then also thinking about how do we use systems of evaluation and reporting that are non-traditional systems. By that I mean, do people consistently come? So what you measure is always important. How you measure is even more important. So what are those evaluation-informed adjustments that can help build up um the city so these are specific kind of how do we do this but there are dozens of ways to implement some of the recommendations in the plan and i wanted to help help you think about those today because i don't want you going away thinking that this plan is written for just a few artists or just a few communities okay your three you see we're just um promoting growth The mini grant program, creative neighborhood projects, all of these help get public dollars into neighborhoods and spaces that can address, for example, blight. How do you clean up a community? You put an art space, you give kids a brush. How do you give kids an opportunity to have not just a drive-by concert experience, but to achieve mastery? in music. You've got to think about how we put these arts resource centers in neighborhoods where kids can walk to get a piano lesson or a violin lesson or dance lessons, et cetera. And you guys have a roster, I think I mentioned a few of them, of creatives that have come out of this city over the years that are nationally recognized artists. So we should not have just a list. We should have an encyclopedia. of young people who engage in the arts to achieve mastery in it and can make a living and continue to contribute to the tax base in the city and county. Through some of these recommendations, you'll begin to see an expansion of neighborhood pride. You'll see increased programs and activities for young people. because you're planning for that to happen. You spent some time today, I think, on maybe two presenters who did a great job talking about stabilizing programs for young people. Yes, young people are part of the workforce pipeline. When you think about the conversations we heard about festivals, people will want to come to Durham more for festivals. Who are running the lighting systems? Who are designing the costumes? Who's building the stages in the park? Young people can learn to do those things, and those are union jobs. In this part of the country, unions pass through here every day. You don't even know who they are. union members making really highly sought after positions unions have a stake in developing a workforce therefore they're a potential funder for some of this work so thinking about this the full system of the arts um i worked with a mayor in one city that said no more contracts or going out of the city became a policy unless our young people are part of the internship, there's another word for it, apprenticeship core. You can think about how you build the system with somebody else's money by creating non-negotiables. Another way to stabilize, to retain the talent that's here, you've got writers and poets in this city who can't do as much as write a poem or so a year because they don't have the time, they gotta maintain their staffing. But we're saying, how do you think about the marketing aspects of the arts and arts and technology? By technical assistance here, we're talking about the teaching, the workshopping, and providing the artists and creatives with the tools that they need to build their own capacity. These are some of the things that your public will receive by this investment. It's not just enough to say we're going to support the arts. We're thinking about artists in hospitals, artists in senior centers that you contract with to be a resident artist in a senior center or a hospital for a year. That's a part-time stable job that's addressing a critical civic need. And there, you know, there are many, many, many more ideas that your artists and organizations will come to, but providing arts therapy and in the conversation that you just had about policing, you know, police are amazing, but so are artists because they're addressing some of the same concerns. They're involving people in positive thinking activities that allow them to express. So you can hire a therapist, no issue, but you can also give people the opportunity to release and create as opposed to being, um, detained all the time. That was an opinion piece I wasn't supposed to say. Um, let's keep, are we done? Yeah. Bull City, we think you guys have an opportunity to say we are not gonna follow the traditional guidelines of public art policies, for example. We're gonna create new policies that will allow creativity to happen with private sector money. And so I think this is, you know, a real fast summary because I want you to talk to me and I would love to talk with you about why this thinking about creating a stronger footprint for Durham to be a major player in this part of the country and in the USA. You've got history here, you've got talent here. and you have artists who want to participate. You've got advisory committees that already exist. You have professional staff that exists. You have all the human components. My summary is Durham is ready. The 2004 plan was not as fully implemented as it could have been, but I think you do have a place to begin. You're not starting from scratch. You're not thinking about the things that you cannot do, but with the advisors that you have on the commissions and boards, I think you have an opportunity here to address the issues that are in the document that we've heard in very creative ways that can allow the arts to become a part of a civic infrastructure of Durham County. That's my story. I'm sticking to it. The recommendations, I won't go through them, but they have been tested by our team with the community, with the Durham Arts Board, with the Cultural Planning Roadmap Group, And this will just give you a place to begin. The building, the establishment, the launching, all those things. And so my closing argument is that The arts and artists, the story keepers, the humanitarians that live in this part of the country, we read about, we wanna come to Durham and participate in more and more. And we want to see how the city and county can continue to work together as collaborators to build a system that supports every aspect of human life in this area.

thank you i feel like i just sprayed all of you with the water hose but um i'm here to answer your questions thank you so much margie i'm jackie field i'm the community programs division manager at general services and first i want to thank you margie i want to thank you and your team for the extraordinary work that you've done to dream with us to put all of our thoughts and our our wants and our needs for this civic structure into an actionable roadmap that positions arts and cultures as civic infrastructure for Durham's future. As we move into implementation, our priorities focus on the actions that create immediate alignment and set the foundation for long-term success. In year one, we are launching the cultural leadership table to coordinate partners, aligning grant cycles and scoring systems across city and county, implementing creative workforce development trainings, expanding neighborhood-based creative projects, and launching the city's artist in residence pilot. These are practical, achievable steps that build on programs already underway such as training for artists and organizations, creative spaces access, and public art investments, and give us a coordinated structure to steward the plan as a unified city-county effort. The city's greatest value in the first two years is its ability to bring coordination and equity to a sector that has grown faster than its infrastructure. The plan amplifies Durham's creative workforce development expands equitable access to cultural resources across neighborhoods, reduces fragmentation across systems, leverages partnerships to avoid new expenditures, and delivers visible early wins that build trust in the process. These value-add areas demonstrate that Durham is ready, not just to plan for cultural growth, but to implement it responsibly and with shared public stewardship. Today, as we move from planning to implementation, I'm pleased to hand the rest of the presentation off to Rebecca Holmes, who will guide us through how this plan begins to take shape through the rest of the implementation guide. Thank you.

Thanks, Jackie. Hi, I'm Rebecca Holmes. I'm the manager of the city's cultural and public art program. And we're really thrilled that because of all the things that we heard from residents and from Margie's team, that we've started some of this work. We have started an ARPA-funded creative training program, providing funding for 32 artists, businesses, and nonprofits to receive professional development training. We are also in the process of working with the Durham Arts Council on a education-based program next summer. And in line with the Durham Arts Council, they've also responded to the Cultural Roadmap for the funding distribution pillar. They've launched how they've used their actual physical space. They're inviting artists for low cost or low fees to use space to make, to plan, and to dream. We are also additionally planning for a resident-driven creative mini grant in neighborhoods next year. We actually partnered with Duke students through their policy student work to help develop the framework for how that resident driven mini grant would work for our evolution pillar. We know that the plan calls for infrastructure change. And so we've partnered with Durham Next to align our festival funding with the city's own festival grant program to expand the impact and reach for festival organizers. We also are working on an amazing new program, which other cities like Boston have, which is an artist that is a civic problem solver. You embed an artist into a department to help solve problems that they're facing. So we've partnered with parking services in line with downtown Durham Inc's blueprint plan to help make our parking garages feel more welcoming and to help people remember where they actually parked. So it's a Mayanthi is going to be our artist in resident over the next 12 months. So, overall, our final roadmap pillar called on us to develop partnerships with new and established organizations. And these partnerships are critical to realizing the roadmap's actionable goals. We rely on each of these organizations' strengths and and the roadmap will help elevate their own missions as well. So the city and county are proposing to use existing staff as we align our own staff time to develop these partnerships, plan and take action on the roadmap's implementation, and call upon our resident boards, our Durham Cultural Advisory Board and the Public Art Committee, and residents for feedback and policy recommendations. The plan doesn't end here. It really is a longer conversation with all of our partners as we move through implementation. So I'm going to turn it over to former mayor and our cultural roadmap planning group co-chair Steve Schull to make the closing remarks. And thank you.

It's good to see you all. Thank you for having me. I haven't been in one of these rooms for a while. I got a real education this morning. It was great. And it's good to be in the hands of such a strong county commission, a great manager. And it's just really, really good to be here. So thank you. Um, uh, commissioner Valentine, I just couldn't wear a tie today. I just couldn't do it, but I'm, I'm glad that I'm glad somebody in the room could, but, uh, I can't, I can't do it anymore. Um, thank you all so much for having us and for, uh, hearing this report today. And we look forward to your comments and questions. Um, and in 2019, uh, when I was mayor, Lots of artists came to work, uh, to our, to our work session after work session after work session or, or artists and organizations, uh, to request funding, uh, for the, for the, for what they were doing for the organizations, for the individual artists. And the council at that time was very, very interested in funding some of that. And we were trying to figure it out and what to do in the budget, but then came COVID. Um, and. From that, we did get ARPA funds to support artists and arts organizations, which was great. And you all know the importance of this. But we weren't able to do near what we feel like we ought to have done. And it's taken us this long to kind of be back here. I know the importance of this personally, and I know you all do too. I live with a working poet. So in our house, the arts are always on our minds, but I bet you that's true in each of your lives. I bet you there's something in each of your lives that makes you understand how important the arts are to Durham and the lives we live here, the culture we have here, but the lives that we live here, how important it is for us to have the arts and culture of Durham thriving. During this process, we heard from artists about with about the increasing community demand, about the fragmentation, about limited spaces to make art, about a lack of sustained infrastructure and support. And we have really heard, as you've seen from the number of people who have addressed us, a community call for this plan. We want to give Durham residents, artists, and cultural workers something we've never had before, a strategy that is countywide for supporting the arts as a civic infrastructure. We need leadership and partnerships to support our amazing creative community. And without this infrastructure and support, we limit our impact. We limit their future and we limit our own individual and our family's enjoyment of this beautiful, wonderful city that we have, because it's just so absolutely crucial to who we are and what we do every day. A healthy cultural ecosystem creates impacts on the economy, retaining talent, It improves the quality of life. It celebrates Durham as a cultural destination. It has educational impacts. It contributes to our health and our sense of belonging. This actionable roadmap has clear roles. It has sequencing and has investment strategies to reflect Durham's values. The roadmap positions arts and culture as a strategic driver of Durham's future and a driver of our identity as a community. This plan has, I think, only modest financial requests associated with it. It won't do everything we need to do to support the arts and culture in Durham, and we certainly need private investment that's going to be strong as well. But it's an essential start to this continuing work, and we look forward to your questions and comments.

All right, Commissioner Burton.

Thank you Chair Lee thank you to the Durham Cultural Roadmap team it's been an honor to serve as the honorary chairperson I really enjoyed it the arts do matter to me I grew up in a really big city where arts and culture are a big deal. I grew up in Chicago, Illinois, went to the Art Institute, went to the Museum of Science and Industry, all that kind of stuff. So it's really big. And I know that Durham, we are a city with lots of artists. And so I'm really glad that was able to serve and learn so I the question I had and it was kind of answered like the first year it would be just the staff that we have that's works at the city in the county correct and would the the amount that's being asked for would that be split between the city and county Or would that just come from the county? How would the funding work?

So right now we're not putting forward, we don't have a budget request this year, but we will be bringing forward some of the budget requests for both the city and the county to jointly support any funding requests that the city and county manager bring forward as well.

And with regards to, I was wondering, and I know what we're trying to do here is bigger and really make something set in stone. I was just wondering, like with the Durham Arts Council, like how is that set up? Is that a specific nonprofit? And I know the city funds that as well.

That's correct. It is a specific nonprofit that has its own mission and is more limited in its scope of work than the city or the county could be. Um, they are funded through an operational grant with the city. Um, but we know that they are, um, there are partners in this. They've been with us, uh, for many, for, for the many years and months leading up to this moment. Um, and they, we know that they do need additional funding, um, or they, you know, their building is older and they have specific needs that, uh, not only support their, um, artists, but also, um, the, the students in the camps that they run as well.

And then the final question I have is basically what has happened in Durham, Durham County, is it basically just been nonprofits just trying to pull together arts and culture and things like that? They just come and get grants or they find their own grants and it's just kind of been, I guess, you know, just pulled together.

I would say that's an accurate summary. I think that what Margie is proposing is more of a coordinated approach. If you have a new arts venture that's happening, they would know who to go to and who to ask for support. We know that the private sector is a big funder in the arts, but there's not one-stop shop to understand what this funding ecosystem looks like. Thank you so much.

Sorry, go ahead.

I just wanted to add that in our conversations with the corporate community, the philanthropic community, etc., there is indeed an interest and a desire to invest. But there is confusion sometimes about who should be the spokesperson, who to talk to. and how to coordinate those those support systems so if this body the city others have some priorities that the corporate sector and private sector could look as to as a focus the feeling that we heard was that that would be very well received so rather than taking a guess and and providing a $10,000 contribution. Perhaps there is a larger investment that supports a priority that has come from the two legislative bodies.

Okay, Commissioner Valentine.

Yeah, thank you, Chair. And thank you to the Durham Cultural Roadmap Committee. for getting us to this point. And let me begin with my remarks with Ms. Margie, because it actually did begin with you. I remember meeting you along with my esteemed colleague, Michelle Burton, at the Hayti Heritage Center at the very beginning. And I want to say thank you for playing a pivotal part in the growth in our community. Mr. Mayor, I too have a child who keeps me grounded in the arts. And so she was cultivated here in Durham Public Schools and went on to spend time at North Carolina School of Science and Math. And she went on to college to actually major in art history with some influence in chemistry, if you can believe that. and today she is working on an advanced degree in art conservation so our family is or our family is completely grounded in arts much like everyone else's family as you describe let me go back to some highlights from the briefing that i heard today arts and culture as a civic infrastructure oh man i love it I love it. In addition to that, you highlighted or described arts in a way that decision makers can understand. And you talked about the economic impact that the arts have on our community. You're talking my language. You had me hook, line, and sinker when you talked in economic terms. Also, you sort of introduced funding systems as ones that are fragmented and ones that are not coordinated. I think what you are describing, and please correct me if I'm wrong, is, well actually you did describe it, as an office of arts and culture. And so do you see that as a unified effort between the city and the county? What does that look like?

I do see it as a unified office, structured to be determined by the two bodies, but thinking together about what are the priorities for the next two or three years and developing the steps to focus on those priorities. That's a community conversation. You have strong advisors that you have appointed to represent the area of arts, culture, and the humanities. And I want to give you two different examples. One works because it's a regional. St. Louis is served by several different cities and the county through a combined tax base agreement. and the two entities agree on the hiring and the strategies, et cetera. And then there is another example that works and it is, I'm trying to only talk about the ones that work, but it is the public-private partnership that was established in metropolitan Nashville. So a number of cities worked together to create the Metropolitan Arts Council. seven cities or funders in that system again the dollars are distributed and investments are made based on the agreements that are maybe a two or three year set of priorities there are areas of agreement and understanding um i have to give you this last one because i was a part of it in the city and county of los angeles they simply made an agreement The county focused on facilities. They built the buildings, they managed the buildings, the real estate, et cetera. And the city provides grant funding and artist support. And they both pull together the staffing dollars that are required. So I think the opportunity for me was exciting here because you already have that history. You already have a history of collaborating. The way I heard you speak about your colleagues at the city this morning. So that idea and concept won't be foreign here. It'll just be a matter of the two systems and your staffs working through what makes the most sense for each agency. Perhaps one is public art, one is arts education. I do think arts learning um because the city's the the county school system falls under your jurisdiction so beginning to think about how you structure that opportunity is something that could begin it it does take money because you you have to invest people's time in that but that is what i'm suggesting that because of those um ready to find examples of how the city and county in durham currently work together I think that would be the shortest distance to get you started.

Thank you for providing those three examples. And in keeping with examples, you talked about Durham having very few cultural institutions. I'm a member of the board of Durham Arts Council, which I kind of consider a new institution. So maybe you can give me some additional insight into what you're referring to there.

Yeah, and I was careful to say few.

Okay.

and not none, but Durham Arts Council as a board member has a mission. It has a focus. It has a set of objectives and a city countywide stewardship responsibility. And the Durham Arts Council is ready and poised to continue to provide services to individual artists, some space that's needed, but they can't do it all. You're not structured that way. Your budget may be able to accommodate some of that, but we're talking about a full wraparound set of services. that might actually tax your organization in ways that we don't want it to. You want it to continue to be a research agency for the field. They solicit the Americans for the Arts, Arts and Economic Prosperity Study and distribute that information to the field. But you need an entity that can convene artists that can convene the corporate sector bring people together and they may there may be some chances that they would undermine their own missions needs by doing that so you don't want to compete which is also why you want to think about the governmental entities as the umbrella because there are many funding sources that city and county governments can apply for that arts organizations cannot and artists cannot. So you would not be competing. I think the Durham Arts Council has a history. They've been gathering data. We use a lot of it in our own work. But you're not staffed for it as an agency. Um, and so I think where there is a good deal of willingness to partner, we heard from them at our last, at our last civic meeting, um, their director talked about, and they are highly likely candidate for helping coordinate your arts learning programs. hiring artists where it would take government sometimes you know six weeks and a 60-page contract to hire an artist as a non-profit they could move much faster but who does the vetting where does the funding come you know what is the contracting structure they are a ready partner the germ arts council and i think you could you could depend on them we could depend on them because you're on the board i hope we can depend on you um to provide a lot of that service but not to replace it holistically.

Well, thank you again, and thank you to the entire committee, and I'll end my remarks by quoting Ms. Margie.

Oh, dear.

The arts is not only a business, it's a creative enterprise. Thank you, and I yield.

Thank you all so much, and it's great to see you, Mayor Shule. Thank you for stepping up and you didn't have to be part of leading this effort so thank you so much for doing this for our community um there is a lot in this plan i did read it and um i it's there's a lot i mean even just the 10 recommendations there are many many different steps in each of them so i think that um for you know and and i absolutely support that we what you know basic the basic recommendations of this plan um i believe that the arts are the heart and soul of any community in our community and i also believe that the arts build community it's really essential and i'm a big consumer of the arts whether it's theater or music or dance or visual whatever And I want to recognize my children's art teacher sitting out here, Mary Lou Flowers, who was the incredible art teacher at Durham Public Schools at Forest View. How many years, Mary Lou? But total? Total. Okay. Did you say 40? Okay. 40 years. Okay. Um, and so, yeah, I mean, you know, it all starts actually with our children, um, honestly, and having strong arts programs in our schools, as you were acknowledging. Um, so I think, you know, and this whole conversation, as you were recognizing, today has been about having effective systems and I do agree that we have not. What's really lacking in Durham is really having a strong ecosystem to support the cultural arts and having a very effective collaboration between the city and the county and beyond that we really have room to grow in this area. And it's really essential because, and as the poet, the Durham poet, Poetry Fox said in his comments, you know, usually see a lot of artists in communities when it's affordable because artists are underpaid workers and cultural arts workers are notoriously underpaid. and they gravitate towards cities where there's affordable housing and affordable space to do their work. And so Durham, we are becoming a victim of rising costs are affecting artists in our community. And so it is very important that we are able to retain the artists that we have living here and also be able to keep attracting Um, new artists, it is, I see it as, as important as any other sector of our economy for sure. Um, I think that it will definitely, and I would really appreciate you laying out some of the steps because honestly, when I finished reading the plan, I was like, oh my God, where do we even start? So I'm glad to hear, um, about some of the concrete things. that we can do. And I think that's really important to look at the low hanging fruit. Um, and then also just thinking about staffing, like, you know, obviously a lot of this rest structurally within the city, the city is, has traditionally always, you know, Durham arts council building, Carolina theater, deep pack. I mean, these are all city buildings. We collaborate on the museum of Durham history, and that's another piece. That's going to need continued investment. But, you know, thinking about how do we also integrate things, as you mentioned, into parks and rec, our libraries, which is, of course, the county, and our schools, which is where the county does a lot of our funding. And then, so I think how can we think about how to layer in what we're already doing and then also the funding piece i'm very proud that one of the things i championed was the city the county developing a public art policy of contributing a certain percentage of all their capital projects thank you brenda thank you uh perry one percent right uh of all capital projects now and of course that's just one piece of this right but how we integrate it into everything we do. But I think we're going to have to really think how do we wire in the funding. You know, going back to what we do with our farmers now, we have a $250,000 annual grant program for our farmers. How do we protect the farms? We have a $500,000 funding that goes into a land program every year. You have to, we've got to think about some mechanism that we know that is there sustainably. And, you know, we're lucky we have the Durham Next now because that's money that is being hardwired into festivals. And already this year, money's gone out already to small festivals, big festivals, and that they're going to take that, and that's good. Now we know who's going to take that on. But I think it's going to be important for us to figure this out come up with a sustainable model. I really like the idea that was in here about a business roundtable. That's something we haven't really done. How do we bring the business community to the, you know, they could be doing what the city and the county are doing, the way that we integrate arts into our buildings and things. Our economic incentives contracts we haven't talked about, art, investing in art with the companies that we do contracts with. We have a lot of empty space, the city and the county, and we've got empty retail space, ground floor. I know it came up about how people need places to rehearse, to perform, temporary workshops. we've seen what DDI has done with their pop-up space in downtown for businesses so I think again how do we what can we do quickly with space that's sitting empty right now that could be utilized for no no cost or low cost so anyway I think this is really important NCCU and Duke we've got two amazing universities who the arts are central um so i think um thank you for all of your work we have a lot to build on um in that's already happening in durham and i look forward to the next steps

all right um i just have very very very brief comments here i appreciate the i appreciate this i appreciate the road map and so forth just for the community so we as commissioners we sit here and we make a lot of decisions about a lot of different things lots of different things how we allocate money and so forth but there is a um I used to watch a show called A Different World back a while ago. And there was a young lady named Kimberly who she was studying to be a doctor. And she dated this guy who was an artist, right? And they always conflicted. She didn't really appreciate what he did and he didn't appreciate what she did, what he was studying and so forth. There was this one scene that has always stuck with me. I've actually said this before at different places. when she was explaining that the reason why what she was doing was more important than what he does. And he didn't understand. And she said, I am saving lives. I am saving lives. I'm bringing when people are sick, I'm studying to bring them back to life or, you know, whatever, heal them or so forth. And he made a statement. He said, well, if there's no arts, what are you saving them for? What are you saving people for? And I govern by that, right? I deeply appreciate arts. And if we are building a place for people to move to Durham, to live in Durham, to make a life in Durham, and there are no arts, what are we building a Durham for if we can't appreciate it? So I appreciate this, I support this, and I am excited about this roadmap. I'm excited about what it can be, and I'm excited about what it can make Durham continue to be. So thank you all so very much for this presentation. All right, thank you, thank you, thank you. All right, thank you. All right. Woo, boy, we're putting in some time today. Okay, all right, that'll work. You got to go to the audit. I'll be up there in a little bit. Nita will be there. All right, now we have the resolution adopt, oh, wait, wait. Yeah, this is it. The resolution adopting the Durham Strategic Framework to make homelessness rare and brief by 2031. Thank you all for your patience and staying here and hanging out with us. Our meetings generally don't run this long, so I apologize here. Got people shifting around and things.

Thank you, Chair. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Maurice Jones, Deputy County Manager. We're here with our partners from the City of Durham to discuss our community's efforts to reduce homelessness. The county has partnered with the City of Durham's Department of Community Safety and other partners to develop a five-year strategic framework to address the many issues related to homelessness here in Durham. Last year, Durham's Continuum of Care launched an effort to create an evidence-informed strategic planning process. The strategic framework that emerged from that process was developed in collaboration with the community, including service providers, health care organizations, individuals with current lived experiences of homelessness, local government partners, business, and philanthropic leaders. That effort resulted in an in-depth approach to reducing homelessness here in Durham, which you will learn about in just a moment. There's also a resolution supporting this framework in your agenda packet. If the board is comfortable with the resolution, we'll place it on the consent agenda for your consideration at next week's meeting. I'll now turn the presentation over to Director Smith and our a team of folks who will be presenting this afternoon.

Okay. I think I got the right button. My apologies there. Thank you, everybody, for having us here today. My name is Andy Svance. I'm the Assistant Director with the Community Safety Department. This is Anthony Henderson, the Manager of the Homelessness System known as the Housing Opportunities and Pathways Engagement Team, the HOPE team, and this is Ryan Smith, the director of the department, as you all well know. We wanted to begin this presentation actually with a thank you to County Manager Hager, who at the beginning of last fiscal year kicked off the strategic framework process in partnership with the city manager and opened the doors to everything that you're going to see today. We also wanted to thank each of the county commissioners, because without your support and without the county's initial help in funding the strategic framework process, we would not have been able to do this work. I also, forgive me, but sometimes this happens at the end of presentations, but I wanted to make sure to headline it at the top of this presentation. There were so many incredible partners that were part of the strategic framework. process and that have been in the homelessness system for decades and have built such incredible strength in Durham. I just want to name some of them, and my apologies if I forget any of them, but Families Moving Forward, Housing for New Hope, Urban Ministries of Durham, Open Table Ministry, Project Access, DCRC, New to Durham is Family Promise of the Triangle, Alliance Health, Duke, University and Duke Health, all of these entities were part of this process, and many more were part of the process as well. Every member of the Homeless Services Advisory Committee that was at listening sessions and contributed their feedback to this process, and most critically, all of the people with lived experience that contributed to this process. There are many who we spoke to, and there are also many more who, through various means, we gathered their input through different sort of survey methodologies and through different through different onsite at encampment conversations. So with that in mind, I'll start this presentation. You know, the biggest thing about the framework that people will talk about is it's relative audacity and it's relative ambition. You know, it is a framework that we'll talk about, you know, its particular goal of really reducing homelessness down to what we call functional zero, right? And I'll get into what that means, but essentially that, in a nutshell, it means that your system has the capacity to house anybody who's experiencing homelessness that month. And that is an incredible goal and an incredible, if we were to accomplish it, an incredible achievement. Some of the reasons we think that that is actually possible and not just a quixotic fantasy is because of what we've seen elsewhere. We are fortunate to be part of the Built for Zero set of communities. It's 140 different communities across the country that use a particular methodology to try to reduce homelessness. of those communities, they've achieved that functional zero designation for one or more subpopulations. When we learned about their methodology and we started to implement it here, we got really excited, and I'll talk about this more in depth later on, but we said, well, can we do something like that, but can we do it even faster? And so our second reason for confidence is that we've tried this in Durham now two times, and right now we're actually trying it, we're doing it a third and a fourth time concurrently, And, you know, over those two times that we tried that methodology, and we'll get into it, we call it housing sprints. We were able to house 66 people. Of those 66 people, 55 were black or African American and 34 were children. We did this twice in month-long, condensed month-long periods. And I'll get into those pilots like I said, but it showed us that not only is this possible nationally, but it's possible right here in Durham. And then the third thing, and this is part of the reason why I wanted to name all of our partners, and I forgot the AJ Fletcher Foundation and so many others, and so my apologies to the AJ Fletcher Foundation. But there were so many partners that have aligned behind this work. And when we speak at the strategic level, whether it's around champions of the work or whether we speak at the operational level, and it's about who is in the day to day meetings and who's in the housing sprints, you will see time and time again that this is work of many partners, not work of a single department or a single institution. You know, I touched on this a little bit, but there are three sources that really help shape the framework. Many more than this, but these are three that we wanted to highlight. I highlighted the Built for Zero community earlier, and that's a community that's run by Community Solutions, which is widely seen as maybe the leading voice in the country on reducing homelessness. And so we felt very fortunate and lucky to be taken into that community and really have learned many lessons from that community. And when we talk about many lessons, it's not just reading reports. We've had direct conversations with everybody from Denver to Atlanta to Jacksonville to the Gulf Coast, Mississippi to San Francisco and New York and many, many other cities. And then right here locally, we've had the fortune of having very strong and direct conversations with Raleigh and Greensboro and Orange County and Wake County. And so we feel like we've been able to plug into a system of learning that has been really helpful. Our local collaboration, again, through this process has been so essential because the lessons that have been learned in Durham specifically have really carried forward in this work and really build on the strengths that this community already has. And then finally, lived experience is so important in this work. As anybody who has been around the homelessness space knows, people with lived experience have incredible knowledge and wisdom to share, and that needs to be lifted up at every turn and at every venture. So the process took about ten months to create the entire strategic framework. Again, starting at the beginning of last fiscal year, we engaged with over 200 individuals, providers, funders, neighbors with lived experience. If you add in the folks who we engaged with in ways that weren't sort of small focus group conversations, to well over 300, those conversations were really in depth. This was about system mapping. It was about pain points. It was about areas where we needed more resources. And it was also about, well, what are we doing really well? And how can we amplify the things that we are doing really well? Those listening sessions spanned everybody from your high level executives to your frontline staff. They cross sector, healthcare, homelessness, business, philanthropy. And so it really did include a broad swath of stakeholders on this topic. Okay, so we wanted to talk a little bit about the vision, and I named this very large North Star vision, which we can, I think, go to the next slide. By June 2031, we wanna make homelessness in Durham rare and brief. And what that means by rare is that few people enter into homelessness each month. By brief, what we mean is that when people do enter into homelessness, we'll be able to house them quickly. We know that we likely won't live in a universe in which homelessness just doesn't exist. There will be people in households who come into homelessness. But what we can do is we can reduce that inflow, and we can make sure that when people start experiencing homelessness, we're able to house them very, very quickly. Our goal, our system goal is to be able to house people within 30 days of them experiencing homelessness. We're a long way away from that, but that is the ambitious goal that we've set for ourselves in the next five years. Our year one targets and populations of focus includes folks who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness, includes family homelessness, and includes youth and youth adults homelessness. We have very specific targets and goals based off of the number of people we see experiencing homelessness and the resources that we have on hand. I do want to name one thing here. There's a term in here, unsheltered homelessness, that is distinct from homelessness generally. Unsheltered homelessness means that you literally are without shelter. You're not in an emergency shelter. You're not doubled up at somebody's house. You are somebody who is living on the streets. In Durham, we have right now anywhere between 650 to 700 people who are experiencing unsheltered homelessness and who are part of our homelessness system. That's a very different number than what you typically see in the PIT counts, the annual point in time counts. And I do want to take a moment just to note that the annual point in time is an incredible event. And it is a moment where many people can come together, can learn about homelessness, can volunteer their time and their effort, and where we can get these snapshots over time of what homelessness looks like. Our partner, Housing for New Hope, has done an incredible job with that event, and we truly, truly value it. And in addition, as you all are very well familiar with, you know, with data and stats, and you see it all the time, you know, one thing that I'm sure you would recognize is that a one-night count in the middle of January done by groups who maybe are not, done by volunteers who maybe are not super experienced with people experiencing homelessness, isn't going to give a representative look at the number of people who are actually experiencing homelessness. So when we draw our numbers and we draw our targets, we draw them from our homeless management information system. which is the system in which all of our homelessness providers enter into every day. So the numbers that we give are the numbers that have been verified by case managers across the system and are the numbers that are the most accurate and up to date numbers. So when we look at those reduction targets, those are ambitious reduction targets. Those are ambitious reduction targets period and those are also ambitious reduction targets given our current context. In terms of our national context with shifts in federal policy and then also with rising rents across the country. Why do we really feel like this is an achievable thing? So there were two moments that I wanna call out, right? And I wanna call them out really, really specifically. The first proof point came in February, 2026, this past winter. As you all remember, we had back to back winter storms. During that time, the community safety department with a bunch of other providers, including Union Baptist Church, Open Table Ministry, Families Moving Forward, many other folks who came to the table, Community paramedicine, by the way, at the county, which incredible, incredible program all came together and said, OK, we want to do something about this. Let's stand up a congregate shelter where people can can sleep during these two winter storms and and and potentially, you know, a lifesaving effort there. After the two winter storms, what had happened is that it was not only this congregate shelter that had been stood up, but we also stood up two other pilot sites, hotel rooms, for families and for folks who had some medical vulnerabilities. At the end of the winter storms, nobody felt comfortable saying to families, hey, now it's February 1. It's still very, very cold outside, but it's not storming. Please go outside with your children. And we thought to ourselves, well, this is an opportunity to pilot the exact thing that we have been learning about. How do we house people quickly? How do we house people through collaboration? So during that, we set a goal for ourselves. We said, we have the month of February, which, by the way, is a short month, 28 days. In that time, can we house 10 families? In that time, we exceeded that goal. We housed 15 families. That was an incredible moment, I think, for our team, but also for the system generally, to see that, yes, we can move this fast. Yes, we can collaborate this effectively. Yes, we can encounter barriers and in real time overcome those barriers. After that moment, we thought to ourselves, well, there's another kind of population that we haven't tested this out with. And can you, thank you, no, no, you're good. There's another population we haven't tested this out with. What about adult households? And what about adult households who are not in any kind of interim housing, who aren't in hotel rooms, but who are living in encampments? Will this same kind of process work there? So, you know, we worked with three encampments, 15 households total, and we said, well, again, within a month period, we want to see if we can house all 15 of these households. I want to name for you that these were not households that were without barriers. These were households that some had challenges with substance use. These were households that some had challenges with criminal records. There were some of these households that had been on the streets for more than five years. And again, within a period of 30 days, and this is with intense collaboration and so much credit goes to families moving forward. So much credit goes to Housing for New Hope who are core partners in this effort. But within that time, we were able to house 14 out of 15 of those households. The one household that we were not able to house wanted to slow down. And that was their request, but we had a spot for them. So we felt through these two proof points that these lessons we were learning from across the country, some of the experiences that Durham itself had had, we were now able to synthesize into a process that could move people into housing very quickly. What success ultimately would look like by June of 2031, in a very real way, to a resident in a housing crisis is that help would come quickly, and when it did come, there'd be a clear pathway to stable housing. They wouldn't have to wait on a wait list for months on end, they wouldn't have to wait on the streets for months on end, or they wouldn't have to put themselves in any kind of a compromising situation in order to be housed. For a landlord considering renting to the homelessness system, The things that we know that landlords want, and this is through deep landlord engagement that we've done now in both of the sprints, and that also has been done in the system for years, is that landlords want rent to arrive on time. They want to make sure that if something goes wrong, there's somebody who they can call. And they want to make sure that if something happens to their unit, something can be attended to, that there can be some sort of remediation. a provider working in the system, and I will tell you this just flat out, because most of our staff is frontline staff, and also if you talk to the staff of any of our partner agencies, the thing that is most frustrating is when you work with somebody for months and months and months and months and months, and there does not seem to be an endpoint. And let me be very clear about what that means in Durham's context. In terms of our singles shelter, That wait list hovers around 200 people that are on that wait list. So if you started experiencing homelessness today and you got on that wait list, you might be 201, 202, 203. Our family shelter has a wait list of around 50 people. Those are shelters. That is not yet stable housing. When you talk about rapid rehousing or permanent supportive housing, the key tools in the system to get people stably housed, that wait list lingers at around 400 households. So you are talking about months and months and months, if not years, of waiting for a placement into stable housing through the system. What our providers want to know, and they have every right to want the system to work this way, is that we can house people more quickly than that and that their work, their work day in and day out with people who are experiencing homelessness will yield outcomes for those people. Okay. So all of this is to say that what's changing in Durham is a fundamental change in premise. We are moving from a national premise, by the way, where the homelessness response system is organized around managing homelessness. It's a system that is about providing the basic necessities of life, which are very needed, by the way. This is not denigrating that. They're very needed and very important. Meals, shelter, ongoing services for a population that people presume will never be housed. instead of a system that actively searches and actively innovates with that population to see how we can move to housing. And that's sort of the fundamental shift in premise that we are undergoing right now in our system. And we're undergoing it not necessarily in the minds of folks who are working day in and day out of the system. not necessarily undergoing it in the minds of the public either who want people to be housed, but how we're undergoing it is actually through the processes and practices, right? How can we align the processes and practices to the things that our providers already want, to the things that people experiencing homelessness already want, and to the things that the public already expects of us? So it's that premise that we're moving towards. Some key pieces of our approach. we want to count every person in real time that's why we use our hmis data that's why we use the most accurate source and we want that source to become more and more and more accurate over time we want to set particular population specific goals right these aren't vague system targets when we have a real goal that means that we can then measure ourselves and we can measure the resources and capacity it'll take to achieve that goal as opposed to letting ourselves off of the hook Third thing is we want to improve the system, not just the programs. And this is so key here. Our providers across Durham run incredible programs. Everybody who I named, they run incredible programs and they do valiant work day in and day out. Part of the challenge and the real bottleneck is how do these pieces fit together and can we create a system where the pieces fit together such that we can house people quickly and stably and with care. And then the final thing is, and I can't underemphasize this, is we want to sequence our resources around people. And what this means is that when somebody starts experiencing homelessness, you can sequence those resources quickly enough that it matches with the person's life. And here's an example that I'll give you. We have people every day in Durham who we meet who are experiencing homelessness, and who want to be housed, who might have their documents in order, who might have any number of other key pieces of information that we need in order to get them housed. But because we don't have the resources immediately, a month goes by, two months go by, three months go by, and then we can't find the person again because the place they were staying on the street is no longer a place that they can actually stay in, and they've had to move on. So sequencing resources around people in real time becomes incredibly important in a very practical way where we don't lose people and then they show back up again six months later and now they're further down on the list, right? Here's some key pieces of the operational system, and I'll go into more detail on each of these pieces, but I just wanted to quickly make sure that everybody saw them on one slide. The first place that we often come into contact with folks is through coordinated entry and street outreach. My goodness, also a provider I forgot to name, and my apologies to them, are Volunteers of America that run our entry point, our coordinated entry service, and they are fabulous. A particular shout out to Dr. Ron Flack and Nicole Lamb over there who just do really great work. But that's often where we come into contact with people. Case conferencing is a second step, and these are meetings that occur between providers every twice a week, actually, where we go through everybody who's experiencing homelessness by name, and we try to identify barriers and figure out what the next step is going to be. The Flexible Housing Assistance Fund is a key piece of new financial infrastructure that is part of the strategic framework. That 400 person wait list that I just named for you on rapid rehousing and permanent supportive housing, the Flexible Housing Assistance Fund is aimed to make sure that that wait list diminishes over time by providing people with up to 12 months of rental assistance so they can get into housing much more quickly and don't need to wait on that wait list for nearly as long. Fourth component is landlord engagement, right? And this is something that is really, really important. If you have resources and you have the system in place, but you don't have units, you can't place somebody into housing. Housing stabilization case management is another new piece of the framework, and we'll get into this a lot in a lot more detail in a moment here, but essentially, once somebody is in housing, that isn't necessarily the end of the journey for some folks. Some folks might need somebody to walk with them for a year to help them stabilize, to connect them to medical care, to connect them to behavioral health care, to connect them to food or employment or any number of other resources to make sure that they are stable, and housing stabilization case management assists with that. The housing sprints and interim housing, these are what I was referring to earlier. This is a synthesis of the system, a time-bound, intensive push to make sure people can get housed. Okay, perfect. We also wanted to name for you this whole operational system doesn't sort of sit in a silo. It sits in a broader implementation architecture with many, many different people who are involved in contributing to the direction of the system. These folks often have really key stakes in the system. So we have our champions table, which is a cross sector leadership team for strategic direction and barrier clearing. This is a group of folks that are from healthcare, real estate, business, philanthropy, any other number of sectors, including a representative from the county and a representative from the city and a representative from the schools and DHA. all at the table thinking about, well, what are the barriers in place to getting people housed and who do we need to call or what set of actions do we need to take to make sure that we can clear those barriers? It's a system function that we have not yet had in our system and we're really excited about standing that up. The COC governing board which takes the function of HSEC and this is governance and compliance authority for HUD funded programs. This is a really important part of our system. We receive several million dollars every year from HUD that goes directly to providers. And those funds are really important to maintain. They also come with particular compliance and regulatory requirements that we have to meet, and that the COC Governing Board is fundamentally responsible for meeting with our assistance. The executive table consists of all of the executives of homelessness providers, and they meet now. They've been meeting since February, every three months we meet with them. We've had three meetings so far, and that's another avenue for alignment, for shared vision building, and for the work to continue to advance. As a community safety department, we're the backbone agency for the system and the city's COC lead agency. Durham County obviously plays a role that is enormous in all of this as the key partner in this work, as a co-investor, as an implementation partner, as the institution that helps move this work forward in so many different ways. And then we have some other structures here that I want to name. I want to really highlight the lived experience advisory group or lived experience advisory table, as we might come to call it. which is another table, and this is particularly for people with lived experience, centering their expertise in system design and their expertise in decision-making, and also so they can hold us accountable. Okay, we're gonna quickly flash through this because I know I might be running out of time here and my apologies for delaying us if I am running out of time. But we did wanna say, we did wanna kind of go through these operational functions because this is the core of how the framework actually gets accomplished, right? We have street outreach and coordinated entry, and this again is the entry point into the system. There are multiple referral pathways here. It can happen through any number of means. It can happen through a city department or provider. It can happen through a direct call to coordinated entry, but this is the way in which somebody becomes part of the system and then they're eligible for supports and services. When we do engage with people, we have a three-phase engagement model, rapport and verification, which means that there's a verification of homelessness that is a part of this process. And there's also a verification that somebody is indeed living in Durham, so that we can make sure that we're targeting our services to folks who are living in Durham. And that if somebody's living in Raleigh or Orange County and are using services there, they're also not using services in Durham. And we have an engagement phase, which includes a housing barriers assessment. And that gives us the information that we need to match somebody to the right resources. And a case management phase, obviously, which is now trying to actually get somebody into housing. We have a single coordinated entry administrator, Volunteers of America at Entry Point, which has been, excuse me, a single entry point. And then our single coordinated entry administrator that looks at all housing referrals across the system. Case conferencing is what I described to you earlier. I won't go through each of the points here in this slide, but here's one thing that I do want to name for you. When people come together to problem solve around somebody who's experiencing homelessness, it becomes very easy for that to turn into a long conversation on all of the different pieces of somebody's life, and then also to become a long conversation that might be described as sort of venting about the system. All of that is important information and all of that is actually like, you know, emotionally in some ways very important for people to do at different spaces in different ways. But when we talk about case conferencing, we actually want to get to the bottom of things very quickly. So what is the thing that stands between person A and being in a unit? Is it that they don't have their social security card? Is it that they don't have their driver's license? Is it that they don't have their birth certificate? What is that thing? Can we identify that within a minute? And then can we have an action step? So using this process, we went from case conferencing about 5 to 10 households per week to now 60 to 80 households per week. And that's sort of the value of this different sort of methodology. The Flexible Housing Assistance Fund is a key component of this. I described it a little bit earlier, but I want to talk about the three things that the Flexible Housing Assistance Fund does. The first thing that it does is it will offer some diversion dollars. And so this means that if somebody is about to experience homelessness or if somebody is experiencing homelessness and could be diverted to another place where they have family or friends that they could stay with, Those dollars could be used for that. So we have in the past paid for bus tickets to other cities and even other states for folks who have a friend or a family member who can take them in. That's really important. Lowering that number of people who are entering homelessness in Durham is a part of the equation. The second thing that the Flexible Housing Assistance Fund does is it removes barriers to other programs. So your HUD funded rapid rehousing programs or permanent supportive housing programs or other kinds of vouchers might not be able to pay for certain things. There might be a stipulation that perhaps it can't pay for arrears, or perhaps it can't pay for security deposit, or perhaps it can't pay for renter's insurance, or any number of other small things that somehow it can't pay for, but it can pay for the rent. If we are able to braid, and we have done this now, if we're able to braid our funding in with that, it means that we can actually get people into those programs much more quickly and at much lower cost to the city and the county. The third thing that it does is it also operates its own rental assistance program. And that rental assistance program, like I named earlier, offers 12 months of rental assistance plus a housing stabilization case manager, which we'll talk about in a moment. To make sure that people who need that kind of support and need that light touch support can get it and within 12 months be stabilized enough such that in month 13 there is a plan for their life situation. What I want to name about that plan, actually I'll name in the next slide. Oh, actually, you know, just quickly on the Flexible Housing Assistance Fund, something that's important to note there is there's a particular Flexible Housing Assistance Fund administrator that we sent out an RFP for and that is now operating in Durham. They sent out their first payments last week, and so we're really excited that that is actually happening. The key thing about that is those payments go out on time. Those payments go out consistently. Those payments don't take up bandwidth of city staff or county staff to make. And those payments develop a level of consistency and reliability that landlords trust and landlords then look at the homelessness system and think to themselves, actually, yeah, that is somebody I wanna partner with because they can put somebody into my unit fast and they will pay on time, right? Landlord engagement is obviously a key function that we need in the system. One of the things that we were surprised by when we talked to other cities and counties, and a particular example of this is Dallas, Arizona is another example of this, is they had done such an effective job in landlord engagement and bringing in units to the system that they actually were no longer recruiting. because they had been seen as so effective by landlords in making sure that units were filled, and because they were so consistent in their payments and their risk mediation efforts, that the number of units they had in the system was sufficient to house the people who were in the system. And when we started to have those conversations, we realized, oh, there are real targeted ways to do this work. that can make that possible here in Durham. Initially, when you hear things from other cities, you sometimes have doubts. And then when we went through our February sprint and then our May-June sprint, we were able to actually house folks in that period of time through new landlord connections and new landlord engagement and with a deep partnership of housing for new hope it it opened our eyes to well actually this is this is really possible in durham this is not a this is not a dream it's not a fantasy from another city this is something that could work here So in our year one, the thing that I want to draw your attention to is in the year one target, we're targeting at least 300 units to be available in the system and up to 500 that would be available to lease by June 30th of 2027. And so that is, again, an ambitious goal, but is a goal that we're eager to build towards with our landlord engagement partners. Okay, functions five and six here. Now, I talked about the housing sprint initially earlier on in the presentation. And when I went through the operational functions, here's how it works in a housing sprint. In a housing sprint, every morning, you have a meeting that consists of your street outreach team, your case conferencing team, your units and engagement, i.e. landlord engagement team, and your flexible housing assistance team. And in that meeting, they go name by name through everybody in the sprint to identify the barrier and take the next step. So those four operational functions that came before are condensed and synthesized into this intensive moment and into these intensive bursts right now we're running two sprints simultaneously we are running a sprint uh for individuals and a sprint for families so there's actually a nine o'clock meeting and then there's a noon meeting for the two different teams with the goal being to house 30 households across those two sprints a key thing that happens one group that i did not name in those two meetings is the housing stabilization case management team They're also in that meeting. Now, they don't take ownership of a relationship with somebody who's experiencing homelessness until that person has moved into their unit. And once that person has made that transition to move into their unit, it's their housing stabilization case manager who meets with them every week to say, okay, what's our month 13 plan? Are in month 13, are you going to be able to afford this unit yourself? Do you have to take in a roommate? Do you have to move to a more affordable unit? Do we have to get you on a different voucher? What is the plan that we need to create to make sure that you are stable in month 13 without the need for additional rental assistance? And what are our steps towards that plan? That is a critical component of this, because the last thing that you want is to house a lot of people, and then to have all of those people circle back into homelessness, right? It's neither an ethical thing to do, nor is it a good use of public dollars. So that's housing sprints and housing stabilization case management. Here's some of the things that we're measuring that are part of this. And we released a dashboard in close collaboration with NCCH, which by the way is another partner I forgot to mention. They're fantastic, North Carolina Coalition to End Homelessness. They are really, really wonderful and they do a lot of incredible data work. but we launched a dashboard with them. They built it for us, which was just so wonderful of them, that focused on the one number, and that is the number of people who are experiencing homelessness, disaggregated it by any number of different variables, including whether people are family or singles, racial variables, gender variables, et cetera, et cetera, to make sure that we had disaggregated numbers. That updates every month. to make sure that people have that level of visibility into this work. We also have operational performance measures across each of the domains that I described before that we are going to be making public and that are sort of key to whether we're being successful or not. Some of them are named on the slide, but there are many others that we are keen to dive into. And then, of course, across all of our measures, we want to be able to disaggregate by race, by gender, by age, by household composition to make sure that we are serving people in a way that includes equity and includes the voices of those who are experiencing homelessness. I've said a lot there on the operational system, and so forgive this slide, please, because this slide describes some of the things around this work that make it possible, right? We've talked a lot about data and how data drives our work and drives our decisions and our strategies, and that's part of our foundations. And we're going to continue to strengthen that. One of the things that we're really excited about releasing soon is an analysis of inflow into homelessness in Durham. So of the people who start experiencing homelessness in Durham, how many of them were once homeless in Durham and then returned? How many of them are coming through particular avenues? How many of them are coming from places outside of Durham, et cetera, right? All of these questions are really important questions to understand. And that's an example of data driving our decisions and some of the foundations that we want to lay in terms of how we think about homelessness. Sorry, can we... Number two, effective ways of working. A lot of this is not only about us as an agency making sure that we're including everybody, but it's about making sure that all of the right system players and partners are at the table and that we're creating spaces where sometimes there weren't any. A champions table, for example, is part of that. Making sure that the executive table continues to function and that the executives have a place to meet. There had not been an executive table prior to February, right? Just a space for executives in the homelessness system to actually meet and talk, share their concerns, share their frustrations, also share their wins, their celebrations, what's working, what's not working, and then allow us to ask them questions about, well, how should we be doing this? How should we be doing this? Can we get your insight over here? That's a really important space. And it's part of effective ways of working. You know, a key thing in number three is what are our enabling system conditions? And by that we mean, what are the set of narratives, the set of partnerships, the set of policies that we need in order for the rest of the work to flourish? We are putting a lot of time and energy into thinking about those things very deeply. On the policy level, we've clearly already shifted a lot of the ways in which we're working internally in the homelessness system, but there's broader narratives here. The key one being that, yes, it is possible to reduce homelessness. This is achievable. It has been achieved elsewhere and it can be achieved in Durham. That is the first and foremost narrative that we need to be championing at every turn because we have lived under the assumption for a long time that it is not possible when in fact every piece of evidence that we've reviewed tells us that it is. Fourth thing is obviously improved housing outcomes, right? And here we do really lean into our homelessness reduction strategies, which I went over earlier, so I'm not going to speak to this much more. And then a fifth is our backbone operations. We need to make sure that we as the backbone agency are performing up to standard. And we hold ourselves to high account, not only to the city government, but also to public residents, to our homelessness providers. and to the county as well. And so we welcome any opportunity to talk through any piece of the work further if and when the county would like us to. The final thing that, the final slide that we have here is a, yeah, we can go to that. The final slide that we have here is our five-year targets. in terms of how quickly we want to get to this functional zero state. As you can see, those targets shift by different population, right? And some of those populations are overlapping. So for example, the unsheltered population includes families that are unsheltered, includes singles and veterans that are unsheltered. It is across those populations. The all singles population also includes seniors, for example, right? But this is just to show you some of the key demographic groups and how we're targeting them over time to try to reduce homelessness. I will name for you that part of the reason we call this a framework as opposed to a plan is because there's so much more that we need to learn about this work as we're engaged in the work. If we are doing the work in the exact same way now or in the exact same way a year from now as we're doing it now, I will tell you that that is a mark of failure because it means we will not have learned and we will not have iterated. So we are calling this a framework explicitly because we know there are pieces of the day-to-day plan that are going to have to shift and that are going to have to change in response to our realities. part of our realities is the number of people who start to experience homelessness as many of you know the biggest driving factor in whether homelessness goes up or down in a municipality is rent it's really quite it's you know the evidence behind this is consistent and is quite rigorous that in places where your median rent and where the rent of folk uh the rent at you know the 25th percentile and the 10th percentile goes up homelessness also goes up because people can't afford rent anymore right it is a very simple equation that has been documented quite rigorously by by various academics that part of the equation is not within our control and so we know that we might need to adjust some of our goals and some of our targets based off of what happens in on the ground and in reality but we also want to share very transparently what our targets are and we want to share about our experiences The final thing that I'll say, and you'll have to forgive me because there were a couple of times, more than a couple of times, where I had to step out during other folks' presentations, but that's because we are doing these housing sprints right now, and there are moments where you just have to sort of kind of coordinate things, but I want to name some things for you. Last week on Thursday, our team moved in, our team plus, and let me say this out loud, this housing sprint is the most collaborative that we've ever had. We have Families Moving Forward part of it, Family Promise of the Triangle, Urban Ministries of Durham, UMD, an incredible partner, and I don't know if I shouted them out earlier. If I didn't, my apologies to them, because they are awesome, and they have partnered, and they're closely partnering with us on any number of things. Home Inc., which is our Flexible Housing Assistance Administrator, and us have all partnered on this particular sprint. or in this particular set of sprints. This particular set of sprints aims to house 65 people. We had three move-ins on Thursday, four move-ins on Friday, one move-in today. We anticipate up to seven more move-ins through the rest of the week, and then more move-ins next week as well. Our hope, and I just want to name it for you, those are 65 households of whom there are 33 adults and 32 children. The average age of those 32 children is eight. When we talk about homelessness in Durham, we are talking about a problem that affects every age bracket and that affects people as young as newborns. one of the key other things to know about this is all of the evidence suggests if you experience housing instability or homelessness as a child or a young person you are far more likely to experience it as an adult we are talking about an intergenerational problem and what we are hoping to do rapidly with gusto with passion is to help to resolve this problem in Durham within the next five years. So thank you all so much for your time. We really, really appreciate it. And please let us know what questions we can answer.

All right.

Valentine?

Yes, thank you, Chair. So I won't belabor, but I do have several questions. You had mentioned that or highlighted the Union Baptist as one of the Churches in our community are that are engaged in this effort. Are there others?

Yes, absolutely so last year Union Baptist Church hosted the congregate shelter Asbury Church hosted also a congregate shelter every week at Trinity open table ministry operates out of Trinity and And they host free a free Free store. Thank you They host free store right outside of, my God, excuse me, right outside of Trinity every week. We also last year presented to Durham, Cann, and DCIA about White Flag and about what we were trying to accomplish during White Flag. and made some inroads there, which we were really excited about. Really great partners there. And then on our COC governing board, the chair of our COC governing board is Reverend Renee Vaughn, who's also deeply involved in the faith community. And so the faith community in general is such an important piece of the work. And the faith community will have a seat on the champions table as well. And so we're really excited about deepening that work, deepening that collaboration. And if there are other community leaders that you think we ought to speak to, we would very, very much relish the opportunity.

I may take you up on that. Yes, sir. Also wanted to highlight for the folks who are watching today that the county also concurrent with this initiative has a day shelter pilot program. And so we're serious about working with you as a partner in getting to this goal by 2031. I know as a former leader in United States Army, we always say, that optimism is a force multiplier, and it sounds like you carry that as part of your ethos. You talked about 700 being the number that comes out of HMIS, is that correct?

Yes, sir, that's correct.

All right, so consistent with that number, Three years from now, what does success look like in reaching or at least pivoting towards the ultimate goal of having rare homelessness? What does that number look like, do you think?

Yeah, so we would want that number to really look more like between 30 to 50. And the idea would be that those 30 to 50 households, our system would be able to house within a month.

I think you had mentioned that, but I wasn't clear.

Okay.

Yes, sir.

All right. So, Chair, that's all I have. All right, Commissioner Jacobs. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for this presentation. I'm truly amazed because the framework has already changed. It's like every time I serve as our liaison to APSEC, so I've heard a lot of presentations, and every time I hear a presentation from you, it's something has changed something's different so i mean just kudos to you and the whole team everyone who's doing this because you are actually you are you are doing what you said that you were going to do which is to keep the iterative and you know you heard casey talk about how made in durham first graduation with the bulls it was like 50 something percent And now after several years, this, you know, 34 cohorts were now at 96%. Um, so I, I do feel like this is a model, um, the, the, the collaboration, the communication, the case management, um, everything it's, it's a model for, for a lot of things that we could be effective at in Durham. So I'm just so grateful. And for, honestly, the difference that this is making in the lives of people of our community. I mean, just what you said, the sprint now, and I love the terminology, it's so awesome. That, you know, half of, you know, 30-something children being housed, especially when they're starting school right now. I mean, what a difference in setting a child up for success in school. I mean, it's just so fantastic. I find it really fascinating, the work with the landlord engagement. And, I mean, I think it's, you know, look, many of us have been landlords and understand in the past I'm not one anymore because it's very difficult. I mean, the reality is that it's difficult. It's the fact that building that trust and that track record is already paying off. Do you feel like it's also the fact that you are also providing the case management as well? So it's not just getting the rent, but the fact that they can pick up the phone and say, hey, I need help with such and such. Do you think that's part of it?

Yeah, I mean, good afternoon, everybody. Anthony Henderson. I think not only is that part of it, it is becoming sort of a new kind of way of working and people are looking to us for that kind of support. In fact, we did some outreach to a new group of landlords recently and generated dozens of units because of the confidence that was shared in what we promised to do and how we promised to support the folks that would be occupying those units. And so we are very delighted to have a bunch of new landlords and even more units coming into the system already. And just, I think Home Inc. started probably a few weeks ago with some

initial conversations and stand-up meetings and we're already generating dozens of new units so really what does it look like also in terms of the units that both the city and the county have invested in some of the gap financed affordable housing units especially the ones that are you know like the Sankofa landing for veterans or some of the voucher supported units, right? Or even the ones that have been now coming online that were through rezonings, like how are you all interfacing with those as well? Or are there plans in the future for those to be part of the pipeline?

Thank you. That's a fantastic question. So, you know, we're in terms of those units, either whether it's units that are through DHA or units that are through H&S Housing and Neighborhood Services or units through other entities. We're trying to work really closely with each of those organizations to make sure that, not all of those units, but some percentage of them could be used in the homelessness system. Right now, we're really excited that Housing and Neighborhood Services has launched its affordable housing planning process. And we worked closely with them, and especially the new director, Sarah Venius, when she came on board and thinking about the strategic framework, gave some really valuable input on that. And so as part of that affordable housing plan, we'd hope to be able to sort of align what's in that affordable housing sphere to some of the needs of the homelessness system. That's... Is there any other context? No?

Yeah. Okay. Could you talk a little bit... I know the county, we funded half a million dollars Is that going into the Flexible Housing Fund? Okay. And then the other piece of the framework was for us to focus on inflow. Deputy Manager, do you know if we have actually designated a person for that yet?

We have not designated someone for that. We lost our coordinator for homelessness, and so we're working on identifying someone to assist with that.

Okay. And from your perspective, just for us to understand, what do you envision at this point from what you've learned? What does that look like? What would success look like maybe on our end? And also, I imagine once we have that person, would they be sitting in on the sprint teams?

The hope was, I don't know if they would need to sit in on every one of those meetings that might occupy a ton of their time, but certainly having some familiarity with it would be really helpful. I think one of the first objectives in that inflow space is to really be able, and this, by the way, is an objective that multiple cities have across the country, is to really be able to identify populations and households that are most at risk of starting to experience homelessness. There's obviously people who call into coordinated entry, right? And that's one signal. But there are many other signals. Have you stopped paying your water utility bill? Did you just sign up for SNAP? You know, there's any other number of signals that can help us really target those dollars so that inflow can go down and can go down sustainably, right? One of the challenges with homelessness prevention work that people sometimes name is that you don't actually... know if that household will start experiencing homelessness or not and you also don't necessarily know if your intervention uh will then need to be repeated three months or six months down the road there are ways of really drastically reducing that that risk and and making sure that you're targeting the right folks but the first effort on that would have to be that analytical effort in terms of well what are the signals and then how can we very quickly target those folks make sure they are getting their um their prevention assistance

so we can reduce those inflow numbers so once we have that position i think that's going to be really important for everyone to sit down and figure out like what does this look like because i imagine within durham county there's a lot of touch points right it could be dss it could be public health it could be cooperative extension somebody coming in with for the welcome baby program It could be, you know, EMS. I mean, there just could be a lot of points of contact where there could be a red flag about somebody being at risk, especially if there's somebody who's showing up multiple times. I'm thinking about what I saw when I visited Johnson County, Kansas, and I saw the My Resource connection where they internally within their county government track the frequent system users but especially since our safety net is being challenged now and some of the typical supports that we had around you know paying power bills or food or you know whatever like a lot of that is being really frayed so um i think this is this is our i think this is going to be a really important piece and i look forward to durham county really being a part of this as soon as possible even Um, so that we can start figuring this out, flying the plane as we're, as we're building it. Right. Um, you mentioned that part of the goal is 50% reduction for youth. And I know you talked about the families was also, I think 50%. Is that right? Okay. Um, but we, and I know from being on age sack that we've applied, this is really cool. We've actually wake county, um, is. taking the lead on we're applying together Orange, Durham, and Wake for federal funding for youth homelessness. And they're the ones who are going to manage it if we get the money and everything. So I don't know if we've heard anything yet, but I just wanted to bring up the issue about, since that is one of the key areas around youth, have we heard anything? And are there any other plans around addressing youth homelessness?

So we don't have any feedback. The application was due to HUD August 10th, and we do expect to have some feedback sometime in the month of September. This effort that Commissioner Jacobs is talking about is the Youth Homelessness Demonstration Project, which naturally follows the Youth Homelessness Systems Improvement Grant. And Durham, along with the other counties, received that grant a couple of years back. And so this funding that we're applying for now, that was system building. This is implementation of what those recommendations have produced. Recommendations did come forward by that effort and are available. Central Pines helped to lead that effort, and they have published and made those recommendations available. And so we are now looking for cross-sector alignment and implementation. And how that will look in Durham, for example, is that there will be a youth-focused entry point, a youth-focused resources and units effort. So we want to model the exact system that we are doing for everybody else, but have a very youth-centered effort alongside that.

Fingers crossed.

Fingers crossed. It's a multi-million dollar request, so fingers crossed.

Yes. Thank you all so much.

uh of course thank you all so much for this here i um i did have just two quick questions i don't really have commentary everybody said what i needed to say and so forth um one you mentioned about the possibility that you all do you know bus tickets to go to uh family members and so forth is there a verification of that you know i just want to make sure that we're not Just putting people on buses and sending them.

No, we must verify it through a phone call or some type of exchange where folks on the receiving end of that effort have agreed to take folks in and we have an address and a known place where these folks are scheduled to go.

And I just want to clarify, I'm not saying that. I wasn't saying it on the people needing the bus ticket that they were trying to get away. I'm just making sure that we're not trying to send people, you know what I mean? Not that someone's trying to do something nefarious. I was just curious about that. And then I think you may have answered this before, What is the, when we, the rapid rehousing or when we find, when we have a place for people to stay, the temporary, what is the temporary nature of that? How long is that? Now I heard a 13 month plan But I think that was late. I think that was a different part. I think that may be a different part of the program. When someone's found to be in need and there's a quick solution, if it's hotel or whatever it may be, what is the length of that stay?

Yeah, this is great. Thank you for that question, because I think sometimes the way I speak about it is perhaps confusing. And so I appreciate that question and the opportunity to clarify. So if we're placing somebody in a hotel, for example, The length of that stay is typically no more than eight weeks or so, and usually far less than that. And we're placing them in that hotel so that we can work with them closely to then go into some stable housing, right? Once somebody is in stable housing, the rapid rehousing program with rental assistance will provide up to 12 months of assistance there. which is a confusing thing to say because then I also talk about a month 13 plan and it's like, well, how does a 12 match up with a 13? The month 13 plan is, well, the rental assistance is going to last for 12 months. What are you doing in month 13? Okay. And so in those 12 months, our housing stabilization case managers are working really closely with the household to make sure that they do have a plan for that month 13. And that could look like any number of things. It could be a voucher, it could be permanent supportive housing, some other kind of benefit that they're eligible for. And it also, you know, can be and has been in other cities often, okay, you know, you gotta take in a roommate now, you have to go to a more affordable unit, et cetera, et cetera, to make sure that the person can stay housed. And so that's a process that we work closely with people on.

Okay, thank you so much. I appreciate that clarification. Just curious about that. Any other thoughts? Okay. Well, thank you all very much for this. Was there any action that you all needed? Any instruction to staff?

No action, aside from the fact that there is a resolution that's in there, if there are any objections to that. Now would be a good time to talk about that. Didn't sound like there were any objections. I don't think there were. We'll place it on the consent agenda for our next meeting.

Okay. Yeah, I think everyone was in agreeance of that. Anyway, deeply appreciate your presentation today. This was actually really good information. We actually have really good information throughout the day today. Very good. But this was a good one to end on. So thank you all so very much. I appreciate it. right so we do have we did have a on the agenda we had a closed session but the closed session will not be happening today okay we will not be having that today um the work session we don't need them we don't vote for adjournment so i will just call us adjourned thank you thank you sir