City Council - Regular Meeting

Good evening. Good afternoon, everyone.

It's great to have you all here. We have fairly lengthy agenda today. So we're going to go ahead and get started. Colleagues, I was entertaining the idea to start with closed session because I'm gonna have to leave early. However, I'm unsure how long we will be in closed session. So I'm gonna just rely on you all and I'll get an update. Right? Big questions. All right. Madam Clerk, can you please call the roll?

Good afternoon, Mayor Williams.

I'm here.

Mayor Pro Tem Caballero.

Here.

Council Member Baker.

Here.

Council Member Burris. Here. Council Member Cook. Here. Council Member Kopach. Here. And Council Member Ruiz.

Here. All right. We'll go to announcements briefly. I just want to say again, folks, we've been working diligently on the budget. And we have, actually I can say it confidently, I've never worked as hard on a budget as this one. It's one of the most challenging ones. We met this morning, we just left here to take a quick break and we're back for work session. And we did have some technical issues to where we couldn't stream live this morning. So we did record it and staff is working on uploading that to the YouTube page. So you'll see that soon. It was quite a rich discussion, but I feel good about where we landed. I don't feel good about where we landed, but we landed. That's what I feel good about. So, and of course I'll be leaving early today for some mayoral duties and we'll leave the meeting up to the mayor pro tem once I depart. Any other announcements?

Good afternoon. Just a short announcement. Yesterday I had an opportunity to volunteer at Forest View Elementary for Books on Break, a part of Book Harvest. And so super excited. It's a program where the youth are able to select up 10 books with the promise of reading those books over break. And so I'm really a big fan of literacy. And I just want to thank them for an amazing time, but also seeing the excitement on little kids' faces. Good to pick out some new books. And it's something about a dog boy or something that's really popular. So yeah, I didn't know that. But yeah, so super excited. I had a moment to do that yesterday. Forest View Elementary.

Thanks, Mr. Mayor. Good afternoon, everyone. Good to see you all again. For those who are here this morning and good to see the folks who are joined, staff, my colleagues and citizens watching online. Just two things. Yesterday was a great ceremony at American Tobacco, the American Underground, which first launched in American Tobacco years ago. has now come back to American Tobacco. So it's a great reopening of their space, great new space for the folks who are doing startup work, entrepreneurship work. That's a key part of our innovation economy here. So it's great to be there in American Tobacco for the grand opening of the new space for American Underground. I also want to say that there's a big groundbreaking tomorrow. Durham Community Land Trustees will be breaking ground on a property on Alma Street at 11 o'clock tomorrow. So come out there if you're interested in the importance of affordable housing in our community. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you.

Yeah.

Just very quickly, thanks, everyone, for being here. Tonight is the Families Moving Forward Gala. So folks, this is their big rip fundraising push for the year. This is our partner in, in, in homelessness. Wow, gosh, Joe, my brain is already fried. And homeless are homeless providing partner who does how housing for families. So this is the there's a couple of other rooms in other spaces. But this is pretty much the main place where folks who are experiencing homelessness who have families are able to stay. So would encourage folks to look into families moving forward and consider giving a donation tonight with their big fundraiser. Thank you.

All right, any others? All right, Mr. Manager, priority items.

Thank you, Mayor, Mayor Part-Time, members of council. The manager's office has several priority items this morning, or this afternoon. The first is for agenda item number two. This was public comment period. Speaker Jay Lusk, he has requested to withdraw his request to speak. So that item will not move forward. For agenda item number 21, that's the letter of credit for Durham City Transit Company Insurance Program. We have a request to suspend the rules and vote on this matter during this work session due to an expiring letter of credit for the city, which must be replaced due to a change in banking providers by June 19th. agenda item number 31 this is the approval of the first amendment to the contract for administration of the eviction diversion program with legal aid of north carolina we made some revisions to the agenda memo the background section performance outcomes for legal aid event of north carolina and an eviction diversion outcome chart were added uh and in the issues and analysis section the correction regarding durham county rental assistance funds were made were made agenda item number 38 this item includes a presentation for the item number 47 this is the contract with hrna advisors a supplemental item was added for agenda item number 48 amendment to the city of durham's housing code this is a supplemental item that was added it includes a presentation that will be made during the work session to today and then finally agenda item number 49 is a resolution governing the use of law enforcement technologies that staff drafted in response to monday evening's council work session or council session and it has been added for your consideration today those are my priority items all right all right uh madam uh tony

City Council, the City Attorney's Office has two priority items today. First, the City Attorney requests that the City Council hold a closed session. I have the motion language if you'd like me to read that into the record. The motion is to hold a closed session pursuant to North Carolina General Statute 143-318.11 for attorney client consultation regarding the threatened but not yet filed liability claim.

I'll entertain a motion to proceed into closed session at the conclusion of the meeting. And we'll then probably second that. All in favor? All opposed? All right, second.

All right, second is a point of personal privilege. Before we wrap up council's work session, I would like the opportunity to introduce our three interns that are with us this summer, serving us, if they could stand. So we have Camilla, you might wanna wave so they know which one, okay. First we have Camilla, she just completed her first year of law school at UNC School of Law, having earned her BA also from Carolina. She grew up in Greensboro, she has an established interest in local government and in particular in land use and development. She comes to us with experience serving as a policy and strategic initiatives fellow for the Cleveland City Planning Commission two years ago. Next, I'd like to introduce Ramya Krishna. She just completed her first year of legal studies at Central. She is a double eagle, also having earned a master's of public administration at NCCU. A Durham native, Ramya has a strong commitment to public service in the city. She has served on the Durham Racial Equity Commission and the Durham Juvenile Crime Prevention Council, and she has volunteered for Durham Teen Court and the Durham Board of Elections. Diana Acosta-Mendez has just wrapped up her first year at Campbell University. She earned her BA from Carolina and grew up in the Fuqua-Varina area. Diana is very passionate about ways local government assists those most in need. She comes to us with experience with the Food Bank of Central and Eastern North Carolina, the Carolina Hunger Initiative, and the North Carolina Youth Violence Prevention Center. We are very excited to have them with us this summer and to introduce them to the practice of municipal law.

Thank you so much. Madam Clerk.

Good afternoon, Mr. Mayor, Madam Mayor for attempt and members of city council. I am still working on the nominations. I am missing one vote. I only have six responses so far, I believe.

Don't say it out loud. Don't say it out loud. But can you resend the email to all council members?

I don't know who has not submitted theirs yet. It's you, Mr. Mayor, who hasn't submitted it yet. So once you, there are just a few that I need a majority on. And since there are a few items, I would love to not have to put them on GBA. So I can announce it at the end of the session if you can work through the time to.

I'm gonna go ahead and. I don't know what mayor you're talking about, but I'm going to go ahead and submit another one, just in case you didn't get my first one that I did not submit. I'll find it in the email. Just call me out. Don't see it. All right. Thank you so much. All right. All right, so I'll read the consent agenda. I'll read the consent agenda and I'll come back to address that one first. Right at this time, I'll read the consent agenda. Item number one, public comment from Eric Plough. Item number two, public comment from Jay Lusk, which will be, has been rescinded. Item number, item number, I'll tell you, I'll come back, well, The administrative consent items for the city clerk's office will be read out at the end, but I'll read them now. Durham Workers' Rights Commission appointments, Citizens Advisory Committee appointments. Number five, Recreation Advisory Commission appointment. Number six, Durham Convention Center Authority appointment. Number seven, Participatory Budgeting Steering Committee appointment. Number eight, Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau, Discover Durham, appointment. Number nine, Workforce Development Board, appointment. Number 10, Housing Appeals Board, mayoral appointment. Number 11, Housing Appeals Board, appointment. Number 12, Durham Homeless Services Advisory Committee, appointment. Number 13, Carolina Theater of Durham, Board of Trustees, appointment. Departmental Items for Budget and Management Services, Number 14, Fiscal Year 2026-2027, Budget in Fiscal Year 2027-2032, Capital Improvement Plan, CIP, and other related ordinances. City Manager's Office number 15. Appointments and reappointment to the civilian police review board number 15 revision to the 2026 City Council meeting schedule. Number 17. I thought we did and we're not sorted out.

You want to pull it? Yeah. Item number 16.

And Mayor, there was a speaker.

Yeah, Mr. Mayor, item 14 is also pulled. Yeah, 14.

I'm sorry, LaManda, I totally missed you there.

LaManda's crossed out.

LaManda. Oh, Daniel Lam, was that? Daniel Lamar, okay. It's cut off on the air, okay. So number 14. Number 16 has been pulled. Number 17, contract for landlord engagement services with HOM Incorporated. This has been pulled. Number 18, continuum of care and continuum of care governing board interlocal agreement. Number 19, Superseding Grant Project Ordinance Number 16193, Fiscal Year 2023-2024 of City of Durham and North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality Food Waste Reduction Grant Project Ordinance Number 20. Amendment Number 1 to Contract Number 18858 with Dynamic Cleaning and Maintenance Company LLC for Janitorial Services. Financial Department number 21 letter of credit, letter of credit for Durham City Transit Company Assurance Program.

I know that one's going to be dealt with early, but I also wanted to pull it.

Item number 21 has been pulled. Number 22, eminent domain action to obtain two temporary construction easements and two permanent drainage easements from a land corporation for the SW four or five biking sidewalk project. Number 23, Number 22 has been pulled. We pulled them a 17 to eight. Okay.

Um, 22.

It appears our comeback, but it appears that alien Corporation is the the contractor here. And the group represented in signing up Brian lamb luck night, blue night.

I helped him sign up. He wanted to speak to the site.

Okay.

He did.

So he's representing the group?

He filled that in himself, yes.

Okay.

All right.

All right. Number 23. Acquisition of two temporary construction easements in two areas in Fee Temple at 311 South LaSalle Street for the SW52 sidewalk project. Number 24. Imminent domain action to obtain two temporary construction easements from REA Residential Incorporated for the SW53 Sidewall Project. Number 25, imminent domain action to obtain one Greenway easement and one temporary construction easement at 1500 Avondale Drive for the Durham Rail Trail Project. Number 26. Number 26, land lease with new singular wireless PS, PCS LLC 6605 Farrington Road. 2626 has been pulled. 27 network, network network, hut lease and license agreement between the city of Durham and Google Fiber North Carolina LLC, which has been pulled as a resource. I'm sorry, it's not pulled. 28 source 28 proposed First Amendment to lease between Yarborough warehousing and storage LLC and city of Durham for the Durham Police Department. Number 29 contract with Symmetra life insurance company for stop loss insurance coverage. Number 30, designation of certifying officer for National Environment Protection Act, NEPA, environmental reviews. Number 31, approval of First Amendment to the contract for the administration of the eviction diversion program with legal aid of North Carolina. Pull that one. It's been pulled. Yep. My 32, contract with Preserving Home Incorporated for neighborhood preservation home repair program.

Hold that one.

It's been pulled. My 33, utility extension agreement with CF2REO at 210 North Driver Street, LLC to serve 210 North Driver Street. My 34, utility extension agreement with ORDSI Incorporated to serve Channel Road sewer extension. Number 35, utility extension agreement with Dove Creek Properties to serve 509 South Breaks Avenue, Dove Creek Warehouse. Number 36, utility extension agreement with Sunrock Industries LLC to serve Sunrock Camden Plant. Number 37, Utility Extension Agreement with GKI Building Solutions LLC to serve Truth Street lots. Number 38, the Police Department 2026 First Quarter Crime Report. This will be a presentation. Water Management Design Deal Services Contract with State Utility Contractors Incorporated for the per in, yep. Pali Floriaki, Pali, yeah. PFAS, Polyfluoroalkyl Substances Treatment and Electrical Upgrades Project. That work triples up every year. Number 40, Professional Engineering Services Contract with Kimley Horne and Associates Incorporated for the South Durham Transmission Main Project. Number 41, 2025 City of Durham Disparity Study Final Report Presentation. Number 42, Request to Permanently Close the Eastern Terminus of Gibber Street, 225 Linear Feet, East of North Austin Avenue. Number 43, Consolidated Zoning Map Change, Garland District. Number 44, TC 26-00002 Development Moratoria. Unified Development Ordinance, UDL, text amendment. 45, modification of tier boundary, Palmer Edge Light Industrial Park. 46, zoning map change, Z2600002, Palmer Edge 2. Supplemental items, 47, contract with HR&A, advisors incorporated to develop an affordable housing plan and investment strategy. 48, amendments to the Durham Minimum Housing Code, and number 49 resolution governing the use of law enforcement technologies level 49 49 all right well took a while to read all of that uh colleagues I will entertain a motion to notice number 21 else I entertain a motion to accept the consent agenda with the exception of items 2, 21, 31, 38, 47, 48, 49. Oh, sorry. With the exception of 14, 16, 17, 21, 22, 26, 28, 31, 32, 49. So moved. You know what? Sorry.

These are the pools.

So you guys let me go through the whole process of this as if it's a Monday night. All right. All right. Those are the board items. I'm going to start at number 21. Number 21. And then I'll come back to that. Get that knocked out of the way. Good afternoon. I'll entertain a motion to suspend the rules.

I pulled it. I pulled it. So we're going to suspend the rules to vote on it. So he's going to do it first. Yeah.

Hi. Hi. Good afternoon. Heather Galeotti, Finance.

Thank you. I am just curious about the setup of this because we have insurance in a lot of different capacities across the city. Can you just speak a little bit to why this is done this way, why we're doing these claims, we're paying for these claims in this method?

sure so um the claims that were that were spoken to in the memo are historical claims from 22-23 when dctc was managing go durham so at that time the city backing dctc decided to go to a high deductible policy for liability and so that policy required us to have a letter of credit to fund any claims that fell under the deductible does that answer your question

of um. yeah I guess I guess i'm confused because we, I mean we would see this quite frequently, are we doing these um.

grants of sorry rain letter credit yeah are we doing these letters of credit in other in other spaces too no we're not so historically again these two insurance programs are separate so dctc have their own program city of durham's liability program is separate we have a self-insured retention program whereas they have a high deductible program so it's two different types of coverage we don't require a letter of credit or any collateral for a high deduct i'm sorry for a self-insured plan as a government agency um for the city of durham

Okay. And so we're just, we're, but we're having to retroactively cover for the, well, the policy is still in place because it's an incurred space policy.

So essentially anyone can file a claim on that policy up through the statute of limitations, right? So the policy is still open and active. And as long as we have open claims, the carriers requiring us to put up collateral, so to speak for those open claims. So that's what this letter of credit is for.

And what is the statute of limitations and will we then receive that?

It expires at the end of this month. Oh, okay. Yes. So again, that's part of the delay and why we're here right now for this priority item. Yep.

Okay. Thank you. Those are my questions. Thanks so much.

You're welcome. All right, colleagues, I'll entertain a motion to suspend the rules so that we may take a vote. So moved. All right, so moved and properly seconded. All in favor? All opposed? All right, at this time, I'll entertain a motion to authorize the city manager and or his designee to apply for a letter of credit from JMP JPM Chase and company not to exceed $450,000. So move. We move to probably second it all in favor. All opposed. I'll also entertain a motion to authorize the city manager and or his designee to issue the letter of credit agreement to Travelers Indemnity Company. So moved. And moved and probably second. All in favor? Aye. All opposed? And lastly, I'll entertain a motion to authorize the city manager and or his designee to execute any applications, renewals, amendments, and other associated legal documents as necessary to meet Travelers Indemnity Company's letter of credit requirements and to make changes to any of the legal documents prior to execution, so long as the changes are consistent with the intent of the agenda item memo and the existing versions. of the documents it's been moved the property second all in favor aye all opposed all right thank you okay um All right. Thank you. At this time, I'll start with our virtual speakers. All right. Daniel, I only see LAM. Is it Lamont or Lamar?

I think you're just on regular. That's right.

Okay. All right. Eric Plough.

Good afternoon. I'm going to speak on a subject you've probably never heard anybody speak about before. It doesn't matter if you live in a $100,000 log cabin or a $1 million home. If you pay property taxes, cities are supposed to provide equal services to everyone. Are you aware that this is currently not the case? If you call 911, does the police show up no matter where you live or the cost of your home? If you have a fire, does the fire truck show up no matter where you live or the cost of your home? People who live in multifamily housing with five or more contiguous units do not get trash pickup, just like everyone else who pays property taxes, just like they do. They have to pay at least $416 per year for trash pickup, whereas the city provides trash pickup for single family homes, no matter what the cost of the home. And why does the city provide trash pickup for four contiguous units, but not five? Who came up with that threshold and why? As a matter of fact, it seems even more absurd. Why? Picking up carts from contiguous housing is much more efficient and takes less time than going street to street to street. I've spoken to several people in city offices, including Stephen Williams, who was very kind, friendly, and tried to help. But in the end, he and others have said that every city has this policy and that this is the rule. Just because it is a rule doesn't mean it's right or it's fair. I will spend the last three minutes of my presentation in silence to give you all time to think about whether or not you would feel it would be right if you had to pay $416 per year for trash pickup in addition to your property taxes while your neighbors down the street get trash pickup from the city included in their property taxes. If you agree that this is not equitable and right, then please change this rule that your staff keeps referring to to back up this policy. And I'm going to be silent for the rest of my talk to let you think about what I said. And tell me when my three minutes are up.

Thank you. Next speaker is Ajax Woolley. I'm sorry, one moment. This is for an item, yeah. So these are the, I don't think you have any, correct?

I noted it on the in-person, I scratched it out and I wrote public comment.

Oh, at the bottom, okay, got it. Ajax Woolley. Welcome, you have three minutes.

If only you could get rid of me that easily. After Monday night, I felt moved to come and speak with y'all, not just on the items, but also in this open session. offer some gratitude and admiration actually i don't uh maybe an unpopular opinion sometimes i'm not sure about the manager he seems like kind of a hard task task driver but i'm he's growing on me um i wanted to share some uh particular admiration for the heavy lifting in holding the community memory That's being done by Councilmember Burris and Mayor Pro Tem Caviero. In Durham, the most accurate and the most complete database is the community's memory. The best and the most validated strategies and frameworks, survey summaries, property records, they're only partial markers of our stories and of fuller truths. And Councilmember Burris and I have some shared history and who taught us about that we act on secondary data at our peril if we don't understand the intent behind its creation which is service to the community and you all are doing some of the hardest work i've seen council do in years and conversely if we in the community are not engaging with our institutions our policies and our political architecture if we don't take the time to master and interpret administrative and institutional data including memos scopes of work tables and so on and so forth that you all are also reviewing then we are not going to be in a position to deal with the onslaught at the state level at the federal level and to advocate for all of the things we really need in the community based on that memory And it isn't until communities own and validate and interpret their own data within the context of their stories that they can effectively lead the institutions that represent them in truth to restorative and thriving practices. So community memory is the key to supporting all of this work. And I wanted to put that out there before coming back to it a little bit later on in the meeting. Sometimes it's hard to know what to wear to come and see y'all, but it was easy choice today. I think everybody sees the whole left by DataWorks in the system. And so I'm shouting out John Killeen and Ernie D this afternoon. Thank you.

Thank you. Right now, All right, we'll now go to our port items. Item number 14 fiscal year 2026 2027 budget fiscal year 2027 32 capital improvement plan CIP and other related lots of ordinances. All right, well, this one speaker.

Okay.

Daniel Lamar, can you hear me?

Mr. Mayor, he's not on. He's not in the queue.

Ajax Woolley. Oh, sorry. The first one is crossed out. All right. So, all right. The next item is 17, 16. All right. Item number 16, revision to the 2026. City Council meeting schedule.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And just would appreciate just getting some finality on this date. Maybe this is giving us that because it's on the agenda. You know, we should not have and we should look in the future to make sure we don't schedule council meetings on Yom Kippur or other important religious observance days. There was a proposal to move it to the next day. And I think council member Cook and I had both sent messages just requesting if other dates had been considered since I would not be available on the rescheduled day. And so just curious if other dates had been discussed and if council members would entertain alternative dates, because I would very much like to be present, but certainly understand if that is the will of the council to have it be on the 22nd as an alternate date.

um good afternoon uh mayor mayor pro tem council members mary grace stone king with the city manager's office um so um i did want to note that we have had direction from the city manager and after changing the state that we will be considering these in the future so when we come to um to you all in august with our next year's agenda schedule we will have accommodated for jewish holidays as well so i just wanted to note that but also i wanted to know there are two options we could have other than the date proposed on the 22nd that would work, which would be either doubling up like we've done in the past on September 24th or pushing the meeting to September 28th. I just want to note that if we do that, we just need to be clear in communications because it could be confusing because you'll be voting on you'll be uh holding a work session with new items before voting at the next council meeting on prior items so I just wanted to note that um but those are two other options for that date

Thank you, and I appreciate that. As Councilmember Kopach stated, I also didn't see if we were asked about alternative dates. I do want to appreciate, by the way, that this is complicated calendaring, and I would agree with my colleague that we shouldn't be here doing it, but I also, the reason that I noticed it is because I always look for this because Jewish religious holidays are generally not on people's radars. And they do change every year. And if you are a Jew, you know that the Yom Kippur 2026 is the most common Google thing that you do in all of the fall. But all that being said, I did respond after Mary Grace sent out the additional email with the information. To me, the confusing aspect of having the meeting after a work session that does not apply to it feels very complicated. So I, though I was like very much interested in hearing about other options that week, those two options of the of the meeting later do feel it just feels very confusing, feels hard to communicate to the public. So that is kind of where I'm at for now. But is there?

That's the

So I think this might work.

either. So you can't do the 28th. So then the question is then the 17th or the 22nd or without two council members. So okay. And we'll return to that for GBA.

Yep.

All right. Thank you.

Let's resource resource.

Who was 17?

Speaker.

Oh, yeah. All right, Ajax Woolley, you're back.

So it's exciting to see, you know, the homeless framework and the intersection of housing justice and real estate development coming together. Back in during pandemic days, I was very involved with eviction resistance, saw how bad it can get at the courthouse, and had a bunch of opportunities to engage with tenants throughout the community during that time. Not a lot has changed. I mean, if anything, I think the upward pressure on the economic environment that we're all living in has increased. will say that landlord engagement is one of the strategies that we who were doing that work at that time and I think even now can can validate from the community memories perspective as being super important and there's been different versions of this that have happened over the years I remember Mary Shules landlord roundtable as an example I will note that the The entity that this RFP award goes to is based out of Phoenix, Arizona, and I don't have a problem with that per se if they're the best awardee. I think that the trick is in recognizing that also a lot of the property management firms that are dealing with our multifamily complexes right now, including the mixed income multifamily recent developments, are also out of town entities. And so we have developers who are out of town, we have investor owners who are out of town, we have property management firms who are based out of town, and now we have landlord engagement contractor who's also out of town. I'll return you for a moment to this idea of the community memory and how important that is to understanding the experiences that people are having in their families and their homes and the street, et cetera. And so I'm just making myself available. And I think I speak for others who would say that if there is a group and we understand they're supporting the community safety department and the homeless framework and so on and so forth. So it's not really about the money. It's about. The people and how will you get connected to people who can vouch for the community memory that won't be out of town property managers? They're still learning. They're getting up to speed on what it means to try to rep a DHA RAD development apartment building. And there's going to be a learning curve there, so we're going to need everybody to come together around this issue and act as a resource for these contractors for the Community Safety Department, even for the property managers themselves. And we'll speak to this at item 31 as well when it comes to things like mediation as a strategy right to counsel. Appeal bonding for tenants who really need to be heard in district court versus magistrates court. All of this works together. Thank you so much.

Thank you. Regina mates.

Good afternoon. I'm representing members of the Council, Regina Mays, speaking as a Durham resident today. So I looked at the scope of work and then I would say that on paper, this is exactly what we've been asking for. since I started community engagement in the housing sector when it comes from everything to gun violence, to evictions, to domestic violence, to anything that you can name that residents face on a day-to-day basis. I do recognize also, as Ajax Willie just stated, that this firm is out of Arizona. Most of their work, according to their site, is along the West Coast. And one thing that I found where organizations come in from out of town, they usually find this place that they get stuck in because they do not understand the Durham environment. It is usually not enough time given that it takes to really get to know the community and know who the community trusts to even do the work. You can have all these wonderful ideas and plans and strategies, but if you can't get the people to engage with you, it's not going to work. And trust is a huge issue in Durham. When people say we hosted this event, we planned this event, we put this money into this program, and they wonder why residents don't show up, first, they do not trust you because they do not know you. And if they think that the city of Durham is sending them as the messenger, that's also another red flag for some people. And so yes, my phone rings, Ms. Burr's phone rings, Mr. Chavis' phone rings, because we are the ones that community trusts and they will say, can you validate, do you stand with this organization that's coming in? So my only ask, I love the plan, I love what it looks like on paper, is think about those things and learn from the past. I have brought many residents to this county, I'm sorry, this council and the county commissioners with the issues that they live on day to day, and they are still fighting those same battles. I sat in Durham County Courthouse yesterday with residents from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on one case with out-of-town management. Think about that. Thank you.

Thank you. All right, next item is we address 21. But was it? Yeah, we did 21. Item number 22 is next. I do have a speaker. Bram love night.

Hello. How are you guys doing? Good to see you again. Nice to see you again. So the I guess the item here that we're talking about is the condemnation of a small portion of two lots that I own on the corner Cornwallis and Stewart. Sure, I am. I'm not opposed to selling this property to the city for the public good. I have had issues with the consultant that was hired by the city to try to acquire these easements in terms of not responding to me or getting the information that I need in order to be able to make an informed decision. So i have surveys from them i've asked for cad files so that my surveyor can overlay it this is a very small piece of piece of property and it's very hard for me to be able to tell what the restrictions a use of my land will be without that they've not furnished that to me i also became aware today when this item came on the agenda that appraisals were conducted on the property i would like to have a copy of those appraisals and at least be able to review them and additionally I'm not sure what sort of stormwater facility is proposed on the corner and if planning would have setbacks from that and I have not been able to get that information either so I'm here just to ask the city manager or council to direct them to provide that information to me so that we can move forward yeah yeah thank you staff will be in touch with you thank you thank you

All right, next item is item number 26, pulled by Councilmember Cook.

Good afternoon, Selena Jones, General Services, Real Estate.

Thank you. So this is probably a quick question, but I saw on the contract that we're looking at an average of a two percent increase in this. And I'm just curious how we come up with that, because that increase doesn't really match the increase in value in other properties across the city. And I'm just wondering about the sort of creation of this contract and how we ended up on that on that increase amount.

The increase is it's actually 3% is the escalator for the rental rate and that's been the standard 3% that's been applied to leases and research and other municipalities that's consistent with what's being charged as an escalator for cell tower leases.

Okay, so this is like a standard for this particular type of lease as opposed to just land value in general.

Correct.

Okay. Question. Thank you.

Thank you so much. Next item is 28.

It's me again, Selena Jones, real estate, general services.

Which one of you want to go first?

Hi again. Okay, so this one is also sort of a question in valuation. So we knew the purpose of this building when we rented it at the onset of this lease. And now it seems like there's a state crime laboratory standard that we have to meet. So I'm wondering, first of all, if that's a new standard to require air conditioning, and then also whether this is now the best space for that because the air conditioning is required. And I've been in it, and I know that it's a massive space. And the cost to do the HVAC in this space is pretty high. And I would imagine it's because it's going to be difficult to cool. It's a really, really large building. It's meant to be a warehouse. So I'm just wondering what the calculations are there and whether this space is still

ideal given that major expenditure that we'll have to do in order to meet these standards i'll answer initially and then i may defer to police staff but from what we've gathered from the client department the police department the space is still conducive to their operations for property and evidence it does allow in 2020 we ex It added additional space about 20,000 square feet additional to to what we releasing. So it does give them an opportunity to continue to expand. The location is ideal from a security standpoint. It's proximity to District two as well as downtown. So physically speaking, which is a challenge with real estate, it does check the boxes for physical location as far as the the The dynamics of the space. Yes, it is a complicated space as a warehouse. And so now we're trying to turn it into conditioned space. But we feel that this is our best decision when you're taking into consideration if we went out to lease other space, the cost that would be associated with that would be significantly higher.

Okay. Yeah, that was that was kind of my question. So is the is this standard a new standard?

The effective date of the standard was August 2020, and we've been in the space like well before that. I may defer to Charles Soule to give some details on the standards.

Good afternoon. I'm sorry, could you repeat the question?

Yeah, I'm just, I'm wondering about, it sounds like the state crime laboratory standards of having this space be air conditioned happened kind of a minute before we are planning to redo the HVAC system. So I'm just wondering about when that standard changed and why now on the HVAC?

So the standard, as it's reflected, was in 2020. There's also the National Institute of Justice standard as well. And it addresses the conditioning of the space as far as a temperature, but also the humidity is the big thing that we want to keep in control as well.

And so is there a reason that we waited the six years to move forward on that, or?

I wouldn't be able to answer that. I came to the unit in 23.

Okay.

Thank you.

If we don't have anyone in the room who can provide some history on that, I'd be happy to provide that as supplemental information before the council meeting, what the history of the standard and our progress towards getting up to speed. Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. Yes, it's a somewhat related question to Councilmember Cook, but probably for Ms. Jones again about the facility itself. Just wondering what else we have sort of assessed and are planning to do around energy efficiency, both the HVAC system and the building itself. Are we evaluating what other steps can be taken to up the building for use with conditioning? um we modeled what the energy costs might be that we'll be taking on otherwise i'm concerned that if we're not taking the steps that you know we're going to be you know pumping a lot of conditioned air into um inefficient building and therefore pumping a lot of dollars out into the atmosphere so what other steps have we taken to kind of think about this piece of it

We have in our bidding process or evaluating adding HVAC to those spaces, we did include a member of our sustainability team in all of our meetings kind of assessing the space. As far as what those costs are going to look like, we're well aware in it that's been included in the item that we won't really have have a sense of what those costs are going to truly look like until the space is fully conditioned. But we did have an active role played by our sustainability department in evaluating that. Mr.

Thank you. Would that be perhaps then a follow up question for DCM Probst or? Okay. Well, you know, if you know anything now or otherwise as a follow up, if that's what you're head nodding at, I'm fine with the follow up on it. So, okay, thanks.

Just making sure Matt Yarbrough's a resource. Item 31.

Yeah, I had a question. I'm sorry. So this is, we're leasing from a private landlord and then making improvements. landlord's making improvements and we're reimbursing them for it i'm just thinking long term um because it's you know obviously probably not going to go anywhere for for a while has there been any look at um owning our own uh warehouse for this kind of thing um so that we're not um you know paying the prop the um you know profit on top for the for the landlord and also we're able to make improvements that then belong to us as well

Yes, we're actively having discussions with the landlord about two things. One being extending the term of the lease, but also concurrently we're working out the final details of a right of first refusal for this property. And then also taking a look at what is out in the market as well. But to your point, we have significantly improved and we're looking to do another improvement on this property. So yes, that we're evaluating that.

All right, thank you. Item 31. I'll start my virtual speakers. Thomas Hennessey, can you hear me?

They're not online, Mayor Williams.

All right, I'll move to in person, Leah Bergman.

Good afternoon. My name is Leah Bergman. Oh, do you want to start the clock? You don't have to start it. I'd love five minutes. Good afternoon. The eviction diversion program is designed to resolve housing disputes, prevent displacement and promote housing stability. The program's intent is to achieve these goals through a combination of neutral third party mediation, legal advocacy and educational support with the overarching aim of diverting cases from formal eviction proceedings whenever possible. However, the current data suggests there's room for improvement. Last year, Legal Aid of North Carolina opened 768 cases, but only 11, less than 1.5% of total cases were resolved through mediation. This is a significant concern as mediation is intended to be the central tool for resolving disputes early and efficiently before they escalate to formal legal action. The no low number of mediations indicates that most cases are still being decided through the legal system, which is not the most practical or cost effective approach for either party. The concern is not with the goals of the eviction diversion program, which I fully support. But with how these goals are being implemented in the specific role legal aid of North Carolina place currently legal aid in North Carolina access both the media via third party firm and representative for tenants, which can create a conflict and limits the neutrality that is essential for evict of mediation. Additionally, most clients are only being reached after legal eviction proceedings have begun. Ideally, the program should help resolve disputes before they ever reach the court system, with mediation playing a key role in that process. With that in mind, I respectfully request that the City Council consider two specific actions. Restructure legal aid of North Carolina's role and reallocate a portion of existing funds to support a neutral third party mediator selected through an RFP process. Increase monitoring and accountability for legal aid of North Carolina, particularly regarding mediation outcomes, to ensure that the program's goals are being met and mediation is being utilized as intended. For the first request, reallocating some funding to a neutral third party mediator would allow tenants to continue receiving legal advocacy while also ensuring that mediation is administered by a qualified independent party. For the second request, I recommend inside enhanced oversight over the city's housing and neighborhood services department in collaboration with the Department of Social Services. By working together to reach tenants facing non payment issues before formal eviction proceedings begin, the city can increase the number of cases eligible for mediation and better fulfill the program's objectives. Part of this oversight should include an analysis of the plaintiffs and or landlords involved in the eviction cases. This analysis is particularly important as many of the plaintiffs and landlords are nonprofit organizations, affordable housing providers, and other entities that also receive city funding related to Tennessean housing, including the Durham Housing Authority, Housing for New Hope, affordable housing developers like DHIC and Self Help. Understanding Thank you. I'll email the remainder of my comments.

Thank you, Jack Foley.

Can't get this much air time unless you run, huh? Okay. I want to mention community memory as a shared language proposal, and I want to mention another term called security of tenure as a shared language for us in this space. We'll come back to it maybe over the years. Many of us with secure tenure in our homes, whether we're renters or homeowners, we have little notion. of how swift the economic violence of an eviction proceeding can unfold. And it's very easy for Durham landlords to get an eviction judgment, a summary ejectment in small claims court. A landlord can file eviction paperwork, have a quick process, and avoid hiring a lawyer. A tenant who gets a summary ejectment judgment could have as little as two weeks before the sheriff padlocks them out. They may find a couch. or a bed with family or friends, but they may have no place to put their stuff and it gets thrown out on the curb. Because of rising rents and surging demand for many Durham households facing eviction, homelessness is the next stop. Landlords and property managers also have a legitimate claim receive rent owed to them when they faithfully fulfill their side of the lease obligations and i think that the idea that mediation needs to be promoted and pursued as a primary path toward reform on evictions in durham is 110 percent and If you attempt to do that without putting some policy teeth behind that, it will be very, very frustrating. I would quote one of the university civil law clinic professors, it would be a train wreck. What Philly did was they made it so that if you want to file a summary ejectment notice, you have to go through mediation. This is kind of similar to if you want to get a divorce. You can't just go say, I want to get divorced. You have to go through mediation. The court requires it. Now, the other thing that we have is the possibility of funding appeal bonds. Because if you can go through the magistrate court and get your claim dismissed, that's very frustrating for the landlord. But the tenant still is not secure. it's gonna go they're gonna go back through that process if you really want to iron some things out you might want to go in front of the district court judge but to do that you have to pay an appeal bond well if you can't pay your rent how are you gonna pay the appeal bond so those are two examples policy teeth for mediation appeal bond funding and maybe even in lieu of rental assistance in some cases okay these things are what would be the backbone and I think legal aid is still the right entity to provide the oversight on that until we get to the future state. Thank you.

Thank you.

Yeah. I'm just going to kick off the conversation. I don't have a question, so should we proceed? Yeah. Is there staff? You have a question? Go ahead first.

Yeah, I have a question for, I guess, Director Vines. This contract is with her, right? Am I right about that? Good to see you again. I have a couple of questions. First, I would like I know that we're in I mean, it's on our agenda contract with HR&A about a housing plan. So I know you're in the middle of doing that. And is this work around eviction diversion part of that plan for your department?

Yes, good afternoon. Sarah Venus, director of housing and neighborhood services. So our comprehensive affordable housing plan will look at all strategies, including stabilization strategies. The idea here is to have continuity of this eviction diversion services until we have our new plan in place.

Thank you. And then I know this morning, and it's in the memo, and I knew this information already, but the whole piece around the requirements for rent assistance from the county and how it does drive folks to have to have, you know, they have to have that formal eviction already happening versus showing up, you know, I'm already late on my rent, I need my rent now. And so you said this morning when you thought maybe those kinds of conversations were going to happen, but I don't remember what you said.

We will be having those conversations as soon as we can get them scheduled this summer, so that if Council were to choose to proceed with the contract extension, we could have our new system in place as soon as possible.

Thank you. And then is eviction diversion on our JCCC agenda? City Council Chambers, Okay, so we also have an opportunity on Tuesday of next week at joint city county as an agenda item, so I do plan on bringing it up there to go ahead and have those come because ultimately it's going to come down to elected making decisions, and so we can we can kick start that conversation on Tuesday. City Council Chambers, Those are all my questions for now, thank you.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yeah, this seems like one of these topics that there's, well, maybe the first thing to say is, like, I appreciate your comments. Like, obviously, stabilization, tenant protection is one of the key pillars of our housing strategy in Durham. It's a key piece there we've got to provide for renters. Having said that, there's so much going on with not just the JCC conversation, the Joint City-County Committee, but also your strategic plan on housing. there's also the homeless framework there's a lot going on um we've heard this has been a topic of a lot of conversation we talked about this this morning actually in our conversation about the budget for next year it seems like there's maybe the need to sort of pull this back to staff and just have a larger conversation about how eviction diversion how it's how it's practiced and how it fits in with our larger these different frameworks there was covers some of the comments this morning were about some of the policy changes we need to allow mediation to work better and so is that so with all those things moving around it just seems like rather than sort of extending the contract now for legal aid for another 12 months, then maybe we pull this back and think about how does this contract fit within these larger frameworks and systems and plans we're developing around a whole set of housing things. So that's my, I want to throw that out to the council for consideration.

So I think I've been pretty clear about it. We need all of these services because just, structurally in north carolina um if you are a landlord you do have more protections than a tenant which is why we've made some of the rules some of the uh the policy changes we've made here locally uh where we are i said a little uncomfortable is we are doing so much in so many different spaces that i feel like we are not making i i'm not going to say we're not making the best investment i don't know how efficient our investment is Are we throwing funding behind the idea of something or are we being very targeted, very, very targeted in actually creating impact? That is what I struggle with. For example, people, you know, we all say, you know, we have a homeless problem, but no one can answer why people are becoming homeless. Um, or, you know, we, we need to make sure that, you know, people who are living somewhere does not, you know, if you can't pay, all right, people can't pay their rent. So we need to make sure we help them with eviction diversion. So why can't they pay the rent and maybe target that more? And sometimes saying that very simple, but very logical object, uh, observation, it's like saying a curse word in church. So me, I want to support all of this, but I just want to make sure that we are streamlining. I keep saying that. And right now, we have what we hear, and then you have what we're actually doing. What we hear is from landlords, it's like, wait a minute, you know, legal aid is just continuing this, continuing that, or, you know, or... We keep seeing this battle between DHA and legal aid. And then we have, you know, we have mediation services offered by the same folks that are actually doing the legal assistance. Then we have the homeless framework that's going to do case management and other areas of support. And then we go, then we pack up and we travel down the road to a different department. And that department is doing homelessness services and housing services. And it is a lot. And it is a very tight time. And I do want to dig into it more. And I think digging into it to make sure that we are providing the best options and resources for everyone is not saying we don't want to do this. But I do think that sometimes government can get really bloated and just start just doing things and say we're doing it rather than actually creating impact. And that's been my biggest concern. On this, you will not find me not supporting eviction aversion. That is definitely going to happen. I just want to make sure that one, we're not duplicating services. I think we talked about that earlier. And two, I want to see the efficiency of it, and I want to make sure that we're creating impact and not just saying, yes, people are struggling with rent, so we're going to help them in court, which is the last resort. I didn't see it. Did you have a unit?

I did.

Oh, I'm sorry.

Go ahead. I just had a couple of questions and I don't know if you're the right person or if there's a someone here from they could speak to the data. But can can we go back to the number of closed cases, open and closed cases? And can you speak to this might be a better question for legal aid, actually.

Sarah D'Amato from Legal Aid is here.

Hello.

Could you speak to those numbers that we heard earlier and also a bit more about the mediation component of the RFP?

Sure. I believe that the data or the figure that I heard cited that there were 11 cases that were resolved through mediation. And if you'll look at the memo, those 11 cases were actually just cases that went directly through mediation. Our data of the cases that we close, and I don't know the number off the top of my head, but historically over the course of our program, we typically negotiate with the landlords. And so those outcomes come from over 50% on a general basis of the number of cases that we settle. with landlords through negotiation. Those are not cases that get sent to mediation. So the 11 cases that were closed that were resolved for mediation, those are cases that did not go through us directly. Those are cases that were referred by the magistrate or some other community partner that went to mediation and that we did not touch. And so that's a distinction between and those numbers again. From a legal standpoint, mediation is there's a neutral third party and within lawyers and there's two lawyers on one side or both sides, lawyers negotiate all the time. It's required of our rules of professional conduct. So we do have a lot of cases that are closed because we've settled them. They are not a product of a court decision. So there's a distinction in that I'd say probably on average about 400 and 500 of our cases that we have closed have been closed as a result of negotiations. With regards to the mediation program, I do want to clarify that in the most recent contract, we do subcontract with the El Nispalning Conflict Resolution Center. They are a trained settlement center. They have trained mediators. they are the ones who are conducting the mediations that were part of the mediation services that were provided and so they have and we've been trying to do landlord engagement a lot of the mediation issues are The landlord's the one who files the complaint or issues the notice of lease violation. They at any time within our project and our program, the way it's set up, they can contact the Conflict Resolution Center directly and arrange a mediation should they want to. They do not have to go through us in order to do that. We have done a few landlord education programs to let landlords know of this. We've informed the magistrates, the clerks, A lot of people are really on board for it. We have another landlord education session on June 18th so that we can educate landlords about this option and make sure that it's known that if they have a tenant and they would like to initiate a mediation program, they can contact the Conflict Resolution Center directly. We're not involved in that at all. It is absolutely a trained and neutral third party mediator.

And just for the right, you can't require these parties to go to mediation?

That's correct. There's no requirement at this point under our laws. And then again, I think one other thing is, again, to be clear, is that DSS, which is our primary source of funding at this point, in order for tenants to get the max amount, which is $2,000, they require a court filing. So there's not really an opportunity for them to access those funds until they have a court filing. And so then when somebody comes to us and they want our representation, then we have that communication with DSS. then a lot of times we are able to you know it's it's not uncommon we had a few cases dismissed this week we had one last week where you know the landlord was really really patient with with dss and getting those funds they they understand that there's some problems with that so there's a lot that's also dependent on the landlord being open to accepting um those funds and being patient with the process because it's not just it's not just us

Ms. Thank you. Yeah, I just want to make a couple comments, and I think that that is a good segue. These issues with the funding, they're not new ones, unfortunately, and a lot of advocates in this space have been raising them for — we've been raising them for years. I want to be, like, really frank about that. The maximum amount of $2,000 also hasn't increased in a long time, and $2,000, when average rents are about $1,400, does not really give you any wiggle room. Because if you think about the fact that you have to a lot of leases in North Carolina don't require a significant period of notice, but they might require. They certainly are. You're not late until after the fifth day of the month, and then they do require some demand. And so you're looking at a filing at its most efficient. by mid-month, and then you go to court. And if you get one singular continuance, you're now two months behind. I mean, it's pretty immediate how quickly this happens. And so the amount is not enough, and then also the parameters around that money are just not really serving. They're not functional in the real world. But I also want to say that North Carolina, and Mayor, you said a little bit about this earlier, North Carolina is one of the most unfriendly states for tenants in the country. I mean, we are currently I think we have the fastest turnaround of any filing in this in the country. Two days notice is all that's required in North Carolina. And so if you are a tenant and you can't get child care or miss your notice or whatever it is, you don't go to court. And then we also have this nice thing in our law that allows for folks who are behind on rent to get default judgment if the tenant doesn't show up so if you miss your court date you're getting a judgment entered against you if you're not there so this is like when we talk about slowing this process down we're not talking about like slowing it down for ages we're talking about trying to get close to some other states baseline of time to give folks the ability to like get another paycheck or potentially move out or have some dignity in the way that they move through the world. And this requires legal assistance. And it's not it doesn't matter if there's rental assistance. And it would be my argument that if there's not rental assistance, that the legal assistance is even more important. Mayor, you asked this earlier, and I think there was an answer and conversation about why are why are people facing higher rates of evictions? We are in an eviction crisis. in North Carolina and in Durham. And the reason that people are facing eviction is because the cost of everything is going up while wages are staying the same. And this is causing an impact. I talk about this a lot, but it's causing an impact on every system. It's putting a strain on every system. But I want to read a really interesting statistic that just came out of Chicago, there was a major study done that tracked eviction rates and and violence. And so for every one percent increase in eviction rates in a census track, they saw more that was associated with two point six six more shootings. And that's neighborhood specific in a census track. So we're not talking about broad correlation, but this is directly related to violence prevention. also want to say is that mayor i appreciated you saying this um that we have heard from a lot of landlords we've also heard from some tenants and i want to lift those voices up you all have gotten some emails from folks who are advocates in the community we also did hear from a couple of tenants at the public hearing but it's really difficult for tenants to come because if you are in a housing insecure environment you are in crisis And so that is a huge burden to ask folks to show up to speak to these things. And I also want to raise the fact that there are a lot of landlords that I don't see in court. So this is something where we heard on Monday night, like the sign of a good landlord is to not be in eviction court all the time because a lot of landlords are negotiating with folks. They see that someone's getting a month behind or that tenant comes to them and says, hey, I'm about to be a month behind, and they work with those tenants. And so we don't ever see them in eviction court. But there are other landlords, and this is a particular issue with corporate landlords where They don't have flexibility in their policies, and so we do see those people in court in a major way. So just some things to be thinking about as we're moving through the conversation, but I appreciate all of it so far. Mr.

Thank you for that, Council Member Cook.

Let's go back. thank you mr mayor and thank you councilmember cook for those comments um and i appreciate you know everyone from the public who has commented on this as well i really see and hear a a shared desire to get to a better place that first and foremost serves our most vulnerable residents and i think in order to to do that i mean we need all of the the pieces of the puzzle here i mean we we desperately need legal aid to provide legal services We need that independent mediation. We need mission aligned property owners who are going to participate in this program and providing housing, including our nonprofit partners. And we need rental support, which I think we heard earlier today has not been sufficient in its own right. And so I want to make sure we get to a place of greater success in this. And I know there's been reference to Philly and other model cities that I'd like us to be looking at to learn from. And I also believe that Durham used to be in a better place when some of this work was initially developed under Mayor Schewel with the work of a lot of community partners that kind of had these three legs of the stool of legal services, mediation, rental support, and having those working all well together. um and so I I'm not quite sure where we are in the question of kind of you know moving this forward as is or taking time to evaluate what would that mean or do we move it forward and then we think ahead for next year I'm not quite sure where we are on that as a council and I'd be interested to hear from staff like what would be helpful for staff but I'm concerned that we're also not setting up legal aid for success um which is the agreement we're talking about today which You know, in that agreement says over a two year period, there will be at least 100 independent mediations that take place, which would mean in the second year of the contract, 90 additional mediations. But it sounds like there are barriers that are in place. And I'd love if legal aid would like to speak to this again that are not setting you up for success to be able to facilitate that. And whether that is the restrictions through DSS on use of rental support, you know, before before eviction proceedings are started, you know, you know you mentioned having landlords reach out directly to uh the mediating organization but the way our agreement's written is that legal aid will uh ensure that at least 100 mediations take place over the two-year period so i'd just be curious from legal aid perspective like you know what are you what do you need from us to help you be successful in order for this you know this other leg of the stool uh is present along with the other really essential pieces

Sure. I think one thing that's really important to keep in mind is that this year was the first year we've done this. And so it requires a lot of getting everybody on board. And so that's been what Raquel Dominguez, she is the executive director of the Conflict Resolution Center. She is she's brought on an additional staff member to help directly with this landlord engagement mediation outreach efforts and so more landlords are becoming aware of it i think that in the next few months we will start to see more of an uptick and the number of mediations that are initiated by landlords i think the other thing is that while rental assistance is really helpful the a lot of the mediations that are getting referred to the mediation center it might be the tenant who goes to the mediation center in order to to engage in that but then they don't hear back from the landlord the landlord does not want to show up and that's okay and when there's nothing we can do about that given our current structure in the courthouse because a lot of landlords don't want to negotiate and mediate if they can go into court in a week and get their property back so that's that's one thing and that's where the conflict resolution center with their experience and their training is they are trying to make sure that landlords understand the the other benefits of mediation but the one thing that is also not it we don't see in the data is it's hard to know how many evictions are prevented from mediation or from our services um when they're not in court so sometimes a lot of that education results and landlords and tenants may be talking things out a lot more and so they we don't see a filing we don't see them coming to our clinic so there is some especially because of our constant presence at the courthouse we are referring a lot of people to community resources that already exist and so and that's we're able to do that because we have such a constant presence and so maintaining that presence is really important because in addition to sending folks to mediation sometimes we're sending them directly to dss and then at that point they are able to communicate with their landlord and maybe the landlord accepts the money and they don't participate in mediation but they are avoiding eviction in part because they came to us first and we gave them that education the the one other thing too is what we're seeing these um the The mediations right now, the most common type of mediation is not a non-payment case. There are a good number of cases where we have somebody who's lived in a house for 15 years and that house gets bought. and the new owner does not want to maintain that tenancy and so money isn't really going to help that problem rental assistance isn't going to necessarily slow that and so where the mediator often in those cases negotiates that is to say is to give the tenant some extra time to move out and when that tenant has the opportunity to have extra time to move out because in north carolina they might only have seven days notice And so if you've lived somewhere for 15 years and you get seven days notice that you need to move, then having that ability to talk through that is really important. It reduces the strain on so many other systems. So mediation, we're seeing right now that that's being utilized and referred to. Like the magistrates, we see siblings or parents trying to evict a child and that's not the appropriate legal mechanism. And so a lot of times the media, the magistrate will refer that case to mediation and that becomes more of a a good forum for that discussion. And they're able to work things out. So there are a good number of landlord tenant or eviction cases that actually aren't solved by rental assistance. And so that's that's the other reason why having that service available is good and it's also um again just to reiterate we once they are with the with crc we have no involvement in that so those 11 cases that were mediation i don't know anything about them that's all very helpful and so first of all with you up here i just want to thank you for the work that you and legal aid are doing so it sounds like we're asking you to deliver on work that you lack visibility into and often control over to get parties to participate in that under our current system there are a lot of different barriers that that make that have have made this first year challenging um i do think that we are making inroads um there was reference to dha dha as we know they're ramping up a lot of their enforcement At this point, they do have new in-house counsel at this point, and we've been in a lot of discussions in terms of how we can improve that relationship. So those cases are often cases that you're not going to see the data as to the evictions that... don't happen because we're involved with those. And so I think, again, our continued presence, we've been there at the courthouse now for four years, I believe. So community partners really rely on us. If we are not able to be there, then then you're losing a really strong nexus between residents and the resources that we do have. And so I think as we continue with this mediation and then perhaps, you know, I'm always open to these continued talks with the county about I've had many conversations with the county about the barriers with the rental assistance. But as we continue to have those conversations, then I think it will make when people understand what we do and what we see, it makes it easier. I know there was a property manager who who commented in the session on Monday and I've reached out to him. We are going to have a conversation and those are the conversations that I think will help make it easier for us to continue to do the work in the coming year.

Yeah, thank you so much. And I think, you know, as much of that communication as possible seems really valuable. Thank you for your answers to your questions. I know that Mayor Pro Tem has already mentioned that this DSS question, which is not a new one, right, about use of funds is one that you're discussing around Joint City County Committee. And something that I think we should have in mind in those conversations with county to about the level of support for rental assistance. And also, I just would look for staff guidance and also your input and input from you know property owners and others about like, how do we evolve this question of mediation to do it as effectively as possible. uh whether you know within the the constraints of this agreement or something else and what that looks like you know I'd love to explore that further dig into that to to help support all of our partners who are working really hard in helping to address um and reduce the amount of evictions so um so I don't quite have a note the next step is on that but I would love us to explore that thank you thank you um what other cities in North Carolina are you all doing this type of service with

Within Legal Aid, there is a program in Mecklenburg County. The Charlotte program is similar to ours in size and scope. The city of Greensboro recently It's been about two years ago. They have a program. Their program, though, is different than ours in the sense that what they do, they have a really robust collaboration with their Department of Social Services in such that they have, when they have their clinic, there is a person from DSS who is there who is able to access the, connect the tenant to rental assistance. So that is a model that I have i have proposed i think it would be a good idea there was oh i don't remember what what i think it was at the time when the city administered the first round of erap funds and those were administered through the city there was at that time dss was or no that was the part that was through the county and the county then had somebody at the courthouse who was able to process those applications and when we helped administer the erap funds we also had somebody there and it was it makes it so much easier because then you could pull people right from the courtroom the landlord and the tenant can go right there and talk with the agent to figure out like what what documents do we still need so greensboro does that we're the those are the three main cities at this point okay and i there are some other comments i i just i want to continue to uh just sort of restate um

one, my support for all of this, but two, my not reluctance to support it, but just my focus on having a better understanding. The more I listen to you, the more I'm wondering, so what are we doing with the community safety department? You know, like we're setting up Everything you just said you all are doing, it sounds like we're trying to set up in this plan as well. And you're working with Director Vena's department And, you know, we're putting millions behind a new strategy in a very tough year. And also, and I appreciate your remarks as well as Councilmember Cook's, but I don't want to pretend that everything is pie in the sky. I don't want to pretend that every situation is, oh, you know, someone is just, you know, this and that. It just couldn't make ends meet when I've personally seen where there have been, you know, Some just neglect on the on on both sides basically and and I I don't like governing and assumptions and I don't want to pretend that we're here because. There's 1 side doing something wrong to the other all the time. I, I want to be very clear in how we can get to the root of the problem and not just. Throwing funds that something because we've identified it. I want to be able to get to the root of the cause root of the problem so that we can stop it. And so I appreciate the work that you all are doing. I still want to see better streamline between. Directive Indians, your department director Smith with community safety and how legally you guys are going to play a role in that and how landlords are going to play a role in it. Um, I, I, I know for a fact, there were some, in some instances, there were folks that not paid red in nine months. And we're crunching residents into a situation that's unattainable. Because if you go to DHA and there's a rent where someone is paying 200 bucks a month, they haven't paid in nine months. And then the federal government is demanding that they pay or they evict them. They have to go to you guys and we're making sure we pay you guys to support them. and it gets continued whenever, and then at the end of the day, the resident is stuck out, hung to dry. And I wanna avoid that. So what does that look like? Maybe making sure that the reason why that resident could not pay their rent at $200 a month, we make sure that doesn't happen again. So that's why I'm asking these very driving questions or making these comments, because I'm not gonna pretend that there are not issues on both sides of this.

Absolutely. And I absolutely welcome those questions. I think one of the things that happens, particularly with DHA, I'll just really briefly address that, is that there was a time during COVID era when their offices were not staffed. And of course, with public housing, subsidized housing, the amount that a person has to pay for rent is based on their income. But in order for that to change, it has to be processed by DHA. And I think historically there have been backlogs in a lot of that. So a lot of times this somebody might be waiting to process, but they're not able to make the correct connections. And so I have always, you know, in my conversations with DHA folks at DHA and anytime I get the opportunity to talk about this, that particular issue is near and dear to my heart. because at the end of the day, I believe we are stewards of the city's money and DHA should also, and it will frustrate me sometimes, my team knows this, when I'm like, why are we spending all of these resources on one one tenant when we could cooperate better and i i do say that um in the past few months we have had a lot more conversations about that we're trying we have one paralegal who is absolutely 100 dedicated to the dha tenants and reviewing their ledgers and we are hoping in many cases um we are able to resolve those or the voucher terminations and so um that is it is There was there were a lot. There was a lot that went on in those few years and we're starting to see the effect of that. And so I just anytime I open my doors open, I I so near, you know, I'd love to talk about this and and I welcome the conversation as well with DHA. You know the city and DHA so that we can talk about what that looks like and how we can be more efficient in that.

Thank you.

Thank you. I just I'm just going to say it, you know. looking at the amounts of money we have increased to this program while not having rent assistance. I mean, we heard today it's two hundred and fifty thousand dollars is what the county is giving to rent. It is a completely lopsided scale. And so I have a lot of concern that we're giving over a million dollars to this. It's one point four million dollars. We could take half of that and put it towards rent assistance and do more than what the county is doing with their dollars. And so seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars additional for legal additional legal assistance, and tenant landlord education activities. Is that also then covering the landlord engagement, or is that separate? So it's like you start to add, yeah. Mr.

I think it's 750-250, because the 1.4 is over two years to extend the current. Ms. Okay, so it's 750 per, okay, thank you.

Mr. 750 and 250 is the apples to apples, yeah. Ms. So that, I think, and we're not in a place to really, We are kind of run out of runway. I do not like the contract in front of me. I think that we have to be better with our dollars. I think that rent assistance, because right now the way it's structured is most folks aren't going to DSS. They're going to go to the churches. They're going to go to the community partners that have small cash funds to help you out. If that's what you want, that's what you're going to do to pay your rent. And that's what we know community is doing. And I've spent, I'm not an eviction attorney, but I've spent many days in eviction proceedings watching. And there are some really bad actors in our community. And there are others who legitimately try and work with their tenants. And I also know, I mean, I had to rent my house out for a few years. I could have maybe covered somebody for a month, maybe two. But after that, I'm going to lose my house. That's what's going to happen. And that's also not fair. We have to do, I'm going to say yes to this now because we don't have a pathway, but I don't want this back in front of me in the same structure. This is lopsided. We need better rent assistance. We need better mediation. And honestly, the attorneys need to be the last recourse. If you have gotten to the point where you are needing an attorney, it is like anything else in life. When you are hiring an attorney in your life, it's because something messed up before. and so what are the supports that we are providing to residents so that they're not at that point and we need to have hard conversations with our county partners we need to really engage our landlord communities we really need to do honest work with our residents which is hey if you're in a subsidized unit the hundreds of people who are waiting for a unit you got to pay your rent That's the commitment we made to you to give you subsidized housing, and there are lots of folks who could also be in that housing. Times are hard for lots of folks right now. I'm okay with moving forward with this, but when we're doing our new housing plan, the conversations need to tighten up. I know we did a huge rework last year moving homeless services into community safety, and we're still in that struggle, but this cannot be how we're doing it moving forward. It has to change, and it has to be that the attorneys are the last recourse and the smallest piece of the funding.

Thank you. Thanks, Mayor Pro Tem. I think you said it well. Whenever DHA comes up, I do want to make sure publicly I... And we've talked about this a lot, Ms. D'Amato. I want to make sure these conversations aren't dwelling in the past. There's new leadership at DHA. The board of DHA is working hard to make sure systems are up to snuff, that our staff are up to snuff to do the work they do. Even with all that, rent collection percentage at DHA is around 67% currently. DHA, a third of their budget is from rent from tenants. And so it's impossible to keep up these facilities residents who live there are not paying their rent so it's a complicated pickle right there's no simple answer here i just want to make sure we're all aware of that because dha is not some kind of bad actor they're dealing with a complicated set of challenges that we need to we we all as a community need to support because there's 10 000 residents a night that live in public housing properties that are critical that's critical support for them to have safe affordable housing so

I think it's just, I appreciate my colleague's first conversation. I'm just like thinking about some of the language used and we're skating along the lines of class a little bit in some of the conversations and context, because we think about, yes, DHA is the large provider of affordable housing, but some of those units, if you honestly are really delighted and if you talk to code enforcement sometimes they're one of the most egregious landlords when it comes to quality of housing so i just want to like hold that tension and it's not to go back and forth i know you represent the board for whoever else but it is like when we start saying folks just pay their rent it's like we know what happened in 2020 in dj properties we see what's going on right now we drive through mcdougall terrace like a war zone and most of those houses properties being boarded up so i want to make sure we have this very nuanced conversation that we don't necessarily insinuate or insult people who live in these communities as well.

Absolutely not. No, but my point is that like that it's DHA like every other landlord has a budget. And so the ability to maintain property is partly dependent on revenue from rent. And so it's that's that kind of balance there. Yeah.

Yeah, I want to appreciate those comments because that was striking to me, too. And and I want to be really careful when we're up here placing blame on folks who can't afford their rent and their subsidized rent, like I mean, everyone except for one of us up here or two of us up here are homeowners. It is impossible to understand what folks who are housing insecure are going to if you are not in it all the time. I'm going to read the statistic. This is from Durham just last year. We've got, of renters, we've got 77%. 77% of our renters are cost burdened. 77%. Almost everyone that rents in this city is cost burdened, which means that if you have one medical emergency, you're done. You're done. You can't pay your rent. If your car breaks down and that's what you're relying on to get somewhere, Are you going to fix your car or are you going to pay rent? Like this is these are the choices that people are making. Are they going to feed their kids? We saw all SNAP benefits getting cut last year. Are you going to feed your children or are you going to pay your rent? Seventy seven percent are cost burdened. And out of that, we see 47 not out of that, but 47 percent as a whole, almost 50 percent of our renters are severely cost burdened. like that is an incredible statistic we need to have a real serious conversation and we can't fix that unless we could set rent prices and uh get medical get free medical care and like lower the cost of like eggs and all of the other things i mean we we are not fixing all of that upstream we can fix some of it and i don't want to say that we can't but i want to be really careful doling out blame to folks who end up in eviction court because they are not there by choice. They are just not there by choice. It's an incredible, incredible burden to be in eviction court and to not know if your children are going to have a safe place to land.

Just so we can clarify, because as one of the renters on here, some of us rent because it's actually more economical to rent, opposed to being a single woman, a single income, and owning a home and trying to cut grass and stuff like that. So I don't want to paint it as that all of us can't afford to buy a house. That's not what I'm saying. Well, just when we said it, and you said only two of us own, it's like... that was a straight for me and Leo. So I just want to clarify, like some of us, it's like you have to do what's best for your preference in your household more so. We want to make sure we have options for everyone to find the type of housing that works best for their family.

Yes. And this is not a, this is not a statement against renters because many people make decisions to rent for many, many reasons. That's not it. But if we have a system where 77% of our renters are cost burdened, then that is us failing. That's us failing. And it's not necessarily a local government issue statewide and federal government for sure. But, That's what we're dealing with. Those are the statistics from Durham. Mr.

Thank you. And as we are having this conversation and as we have other conversations, we also should be able to have tough conversations without adjectives on them. I don't think anyone is blaming anybody. I know I've been called a dangerous black man before and I have I talk crazy to people. That's normally what happens at the council meetings and people get on Facebook and talk about it. We should be able to have these conversations. And we should be able to say not every landlord is a bad landlord and not every tenant is a bad tenant. Not every tenant is a good tenant and not every landlord is a good tenant, period. I don't think that's blame on anyone. What I'm trying to make sure we figure out is how do we best utilize the money? And I don't think there's an issue with asking the question, how do we stop this crap from happening? We're funding an entire law firm outside of the city. I'm okay with supporting that because they're doing the great work. But I also don't think there's anything wrong with saying we have two departments doing very similar work. Are we making the best investment to help the actual people in need? That's clearly what we're asking. I don't think that anyone is attacking anyone. I don't think anyone is throwing blame. I don't think anyone is, I mean, yes there are people who have not been able to pay their rent in nine months and sometimes even longer that is an issue it's not an issue with the person it's an issue with the the fact that they can't pay their rent and we need to figure out why so that we can really support them there's nothing wrong with asking that you know and and and so we're my my idea is just trying to get to the bottom of it so the folks aren't struggling You know, so I appreciate the comments, but I want to make sure that we aren't, you know, that we're actually talking about it and not taking issue with what, you know, what questions are being asked. Mayor Pro Tem, go ahead.

Thank you. I really appreciate everyone's comments. It would be helpful if staff and I know there's lots of conversations that are happening. It would be great to get some kind of update in the next few months from both housing and neighborhood services and community safety, because there's this overlap around these housing questions. and really digging in through the homeless strategic plan and the housing plan. I know y'all are brilliant. You're going to do it. But to provide us kind of insights, where is the duplication? Are the dollars being as used as effectively as possible? Here's where we could trim on this side to use in other ways. And I don't you know, we have a really hard budget. We don't know what's going to happen economically next year. And so these are the kinds of questions we have to ask because at the end of the day, we have to be able to support our residents and the the the money that's um oh good lord the housing subs i forget what it's called in the homeless strategic plan the um flexible housing subsidy you know how is that going to be utilized how is that going to be shared with housing neighborhood services is that going to be shared how is the data going to be communicated there's just all these big questions and because this is a lot 1.4 million dollars i mean this would have closed everything we were talking about this morning Like right there, like let's just be honest. That 1.4, we were at what, 1.8 or something? But over two years, right. But it's still total, it's two years, but it's still 1.4 million over that. The money is still a lot of money. And so I think that's the request that I have for staff is to really help us have, that this can't be the last conversation and then there's a contract in front of us again. Like that's not how this can go. So that's all, thank you.

Yeah, thank you. Um, did you okay? Yeah, no, I appreciate this and I appreciate that request as well because I think there's like 8000 people on the waiting list for public housing right now. It's a serious issue. And let's be clear. This is one area that did not take a cut in the budget deliberations. So I think we're all on board with trying to make sure that we support our residents. Um, how we get there and and can we get there in the most efficient ways where we're actually helping people is the nexus of this conversation. I hope that we all can, um, have that conversation as a council. All right. 32.

It's me.

Go ahead.

I also pull it. So I'm going to start.

Um, I think this may be for director Venus. No home whomever. I had some questions about the contractual amount that we're allocating to the program.

Hi. Hi, good afternoon. Alexis John, Housing and Neighborhood Services Assistant Director.

Hi, Alexis. Thank you so much for joining us. I just want to get some clarity in regards to some of the contractual amounts. And I did some math, so everyone should be concerned right now about that. So it looks like at this point, we have utilized about $377,000. And on average for the 36 homeowners, that comes back like 10.5. And I know that we can go all the way up to $29,000. I just want to know that even with that math, and let's take into account that we have three line, I think three more projects to be completed by 26. we would still be around $409,000. So I'm trying to figure out the need for the excess all the way up to $495,000. I know that maybe rising costs or something, just trying to figure out the need for adjustment if we're still kind of under budget with it.

I would say that prior to this the maximum amount was 14,900 and we are able to specifically dictate how much money goes to a specific property and the repairs so it varies depending on what the repairs are.

And in this program, because I know we have a couple like preservation programs throughout the city. This one is citywide or is it located to a specific geography for this?

This is citywide. It focuses primarily on code violations. Okay.

Because I'm thinking about someone to work on the Fayetteville Street Court. I know they have some money for preservation work that also addresses the code violations. So I was trying to see like how, and do you all, yeah, that's all my question now. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Cook.

Yes, thank you. And council members asked a couple of questions that I was going to ask. I actually talked to one of the code enforcers about this at the Housing Appeals Board. And so just want to give some context and John, you can kind of correct me if I'm incorrect about this. But my understanding is that this is for individuals and they have to meet a certain AMI. And so what we're seeing at the Fayetteville Street corridor and other programs across the city are that specifically the one that is through Hey, Ty, promise. Thank you. Hey, the CDC is for business owners, and so they don't have that AMI restriction. Is that right?

They don't have an AMI restriction, but also they're for vacant properties on the Fayetteville Street corridor.

It's only for vacant properties.

Ours is owner-occupied.

Owner-occupied. Okay, yes, thank you. I knew that there was a distinction there. And are we seeing 80% AMI is still relatively low. Housing repairs are expensive, and I'm going to... go to the same chart that I was looking at before, which is that in Durham, we have 61% of our low-income homeowners are cost burdened with their properties. And so if you do have a repair, that's a pretty significant cost. Is there any information or anything that we should think about changing that AMI requirement? Do you know if there are tons of people who are right over it, who are needing assistance and can't access it or anything that would be helpful for us moving forward about this contract?

I would say that the 80% AMI is working for the program, but we're definitely open. We're open to considering other options.

So most of the people who need the assistance are able to qualify for the program? Yes. Okay, that's helpful to know. And then just for our knowledge, how is the information disseminated about the program?

Mainly, so this program focuses specifically on code violations. So it comes from a code enforcement officer once a case is already created. So it has to have an active case and that's when the information is shared with the neighborhood preservation manager if the homeowner expresses financial difficulty in bringing those violations into compliance.

Okay, so it has to be an affirmative statement by the person who has been who has received the code violations that they have difficulty affording the, okay. Is there any, has there been any thought about maybe sending that information out with the enforcement violations? Just like a preliminary of this program exists, you might qualify it, qualify for it sort of thing?

Yes, we have considered that. However, we currently have properties that we are working through and so we have a maximum amount that we're able to process at this point. However, we are able to do that after doing an assessment of the cost analysis of that cost for it being sent out to those property owners.

Oh, so we're worried about the added cost of having to send out more mail?

We're in the process of doing that analysis, yes.

Okay.

Couldn't just be like a couple lines at the bottom of our thing. Okay. Thank you. Those are all my questions. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else have any questions? Okay, thank you so much. Next item I have pulled is item number 49, and that is both Council Members Wrist and Cook. We'll let you decide who amongst you wants to ask your first questions. I'm sorry, what? We can take a break as soon as we're done with the pulled items. This is the last pulled item, and then we'll take a break before presentations. And just really quickly, since I'm on it, we are going to do presentation number 41 first. Then 38 and then 48.

Good afternoon, Mayor Pro Tem and council members. Mary Grace Sun King with the city manager's office. Happy to answer any questions or comments.

Thanks, Mr. King. Yeah, I think I just pulled this. This was the late breaking out of my nose added. So I don't think I had a chance to review this. I think I appreciate you preparing this after we talked about this at the I think at the meeting the other night. Right. So this this seems to make sense. Um, I need to review it, um, more thoroughly, but I appreciate you doing that. I think this is the right way to go, given our conversation. So I think that's it for now. Yeah, I don't know if you have more questions.

Yeah, exactly the same. I just would like to put it on GBA and have an opportunity to kind of review it more thoroughly.

Okay, go ahead. Thank you. Council members cook and risk. Go ahead. Council member Baker.

thank you I also need to have more time to review it I'm just curious about this being a resolution versus an ordinance how that's treated differently and then to that there is language in here that uses the word shall for example and shall within a resolution what exactly does that does that mean I'm gonna ask the city attorney to address that

Give me a second, please. Hi, Sophia Hernandez from the city attorney's office. And so I believe that the choice to pursue a resolution was because the Asheville resolution was highlighted as a good go by or that another municipality had done something similar. And so if I am not putting words in Mary Grace's mouth, but I believe that that was a good starting point, seeing it as Asheville had done a resolution. Would that be fair, Mary Grace?

Yes, and I mean, I would say that the in the resolution our policy commitments that the city manager and the city have agreed to make if that i'm not sure if that helps with the shall versus but yeah.

Let me layer on there. So just for full transparency, I believe the conversation we had Monday night was about a resolution. I didn't specifically have a conversation about an ordinance, and I would defer to the attorneys about what what could legally be captured in an ordinance and whether or not that would be a more stringent or appropriate guidance. I think my. Uh, so we just pursued a resolution because resolutions capture the direction of Council. So whenever Council, uh. adopts a resolution, they are formally stating their intent, and anyone who is beholden to the Council, like myself and the staff, are obligated to follow resolutions of Council. So shall means that I am receiving a directive from the Council that is captured by a formal vote that clearly I would have consequences for if I were to violate. I I don't want to opine on resolution versus ordinance and would encourage you to have that conversation with the attorneys. But I think the as we discussed loosely Monday and now firm more firmly today, this I consider this binding on the administration. So because it is, you know, this does not give me discretion to do something different without the clear understanding that I have violated a directive from the Council.

that so i think that's as much as i'll say about it and i interpret shall to mean i shall so and if i could add council member baker yes we generally see resolutions as policy statements that guide a lot of the internal workings financial policies resolutions an ordinance we certainly could explore and we can talk about that more but generally when we think of an ordinance it's sort of what Other folks can or cannot do not necessarily what the city can or cannot do. And then we would be thinking about what teeth does the ordinance have and what enforcement mechanisms are behind it. And I did not from Monday's Monday's council meeting think that that's the direction that we wanted to go as far as enforcement mechanisms, but happy to have a conversation offline.

Yeah, I was just I was curious. I think of I think of a resolution as should in a ordinance as shall. And so I just wanted to get some. We have the Durham and livable wage ordinance, which is guiding us. So I was just curious and happy to have this conversations till Monday.

Thank you. Thank you.

I would before we leave this item, I would say I do acknowledge the short amount of time councils had to see this. I would ask if you have specific questions before Monday, given that Monday will be the last meeting before break. I would love to get those questions in the interim. We'd be happy to get responses out to Council, especially if there's a need to tweak language or go back and forth. So my request is that any proposed changes or questions about the ordinance come to us as quickly as possible so that we can be thoughtful in our response to those.

OK, sorry. I just want to also say I appreciate this. while we could have a conversation about an ordinance, I do not feel like we have enough time to get that done before June 15th. So that may be a decision that council says they're interested in. But at least for me, I don't want to rush staff and I don't want to do a thing quickly. I feel good about the resolution where it is. And so if there's interest in an ordinance, I still think we pass a resolution and deal with that broader question after the break. I will colleagues if you go ahead.

Sorry. I did just want to note to the reason for at this workshop session and for the next Council meeting is because of the conversation around having a resolution before the execution of the Exxon contract. So I just wanted to remind Council of that in terms of timing.

Thank you for that reminder. I'm colleagues, I think does anyone else have any questions on this item? Yeah, it's on GPA. Yeah. On that note, we're going to take a 10 minute break. Are folks good with that? And come back and then we'll do our presentations. Thank you. I'm going to call this back to order here. Okay, y'all are going first, sorry.

Somebody might wanna go get Tate.

I need Police Chief Tate.

What? She just made the change.

Well, cuz we're being told that they did some horse trading amongst themselves, Madam Clerk. Sorry about that. OK, colleagues were and I apologize, but. That's what amongst themselves they decided. Apologies, there was some discussion amongst them. I'm going to call us back to order. There was some discussion amongst our presenters, and between them, they're comfortable just following numerical order. So we are going to start with number 38, which is our... Where am I? Sorry. With our first quarter crime report. Good afternoon, Chief Tate.

OK, thank you. Good afternoon, Mayor Pro Tem, council members, staff and community. All right. I will be presenting our first quarter crime report summary for January through March. And on the screen there, you will see part one crimes. I will start with our homicides. There were 13. That is a 44.4% increase From what you see from last year. Um, and it is how you did not three year average. We had 13 reportable homicide offenses. 12 were almost 12 homicides. And two of those were domestic violence cases incidents and one was a negligent manslaughter. We also had one of these, um Incidents that occurred near a homeless encampment near Fella Street. And then we had a second one that you would see that was near a homeless encampment, not on this report, but it would be on the second quarter report. One of those DV cases was a murder-suicide between a boyfriend and a girlfriend. Yes, excuse me. And one of those other DV cases was a mother and involving her three-year-old child. The negligent manslaughter was a negligent firearm discharge. Go to the next one. Is that robbery? Stay right there. Stay right there. So go to robbery. Our robberies were down 26.2%. excuse me, I'm gonna start with rape. Our rapes were up 26.5%. And a lot of times with these cases, we have some delayed reporting. Um, and also the clearances of these reporting was five out of eight of the cases, uh, were cleared. That was 63% from prior years. So in all we had 43 victims, 36 were, um, No suspects involved. And then we have four cases where the person involved did not want to cooperate with the case, so we could not identify the actual suspect involved. But the key to this is there were no stranger rapes. Moving on to our robberies in the first quarter, there were 76 robbery offenses. That was a decline of 26.2%. And one of the things that's significant in this is that we made some significant arrests. We had one gentleman that was responsible for six commercial robberies that occurred from December 25 to January 26. So when you start making arrests with the people that are involved, you start breaking down the network. And I would say that's not just good work. It was good work from our department, but it was also help from our community because we can't do anything without them. So when you see numbers decline like that, that means we've had some help from the community to help solve crimes, which is important for us. 78% of those robberies were from individual and 22 of those robberies were commercial. Moving on to aggravated assaults, you will see that there was an increase of 14.8% And even though the number of incidents went down, we had more people involved. So what you see in here is you're seeing more high capacity firearms being used and it might be more rounds that were distributed into a certain area. So you might be pointing at a certain a certain particular target as a suspect and might hit a house. We've seen houses here. You have a house instead of having one person there. There may be five people in there that will drive that number up. 30% of those aggravated assaults were domestic and 70% were non domestic. Key to this is 61% of all aggravated assaults involved firearms. 61% 31 gunshot wounds. Go to the next slide. Here you'll see a chart that has numbers for violent crime during the first quarter for the last 10 years. And what you'll see significant here is what I said before, is you'll see that our robberies have steadily trended down overall. And you can see the bottom number there without homicides where we are currently, the numbers I mentioned with the 13. Go to the next one. So our shooting incidents. We had 123 compared to 130 in 2025. Person shots were up 64.5%. One of the keys to this is there were 190 gun seas in the first quarter. That's up 4% compared to 149 incidents. 176 of those cases in the first quarter, which are firearm evidence was collected. 51, which is 29%, produced a NIBIN lead. And NIBIN is our National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, what we use to test firearms. So that's real significant. This chart shows the cumulative gunshot wounds by week in 2026 for this first quarter. What's significant here is nearly 40% of the gunshot wounds in the first quarter occurred during the two week period from late February to early March. So it was the first part of the quarter where we really saw a mid part where we really saw, coming into the mid part where we really saw a lot of the actual gunshot wounds. Property crimes, again, you see the numbers are declining, and they're in blue. And I would like to say that it was all police department, but I think it was a mixture of community, again, and good work that we had with folks going out, actually knocking on doors and doing what we needed to do. The property crime includes burglary, larceny, and motor vehicle theft, and there was a decrease overall by 6.1%. So one of the things that stood out during this time was larceny for motor vehicle incidents are producing far more victims. Then two, we're seeing a lot of juveniles represented amongst identified suspects, and that's huge. Um, three guns are offered to target in those break-ins. So we're seeing a lot of guns being taken again. Um, we had 72 guns that were stolen out of vehicles. Um, we only had like 8.3% of those guns recovered so far. Our Larson is this court again. 43% of those losses were from motor vehicles. And then our motor vehicle theft was down 19.8%. 87% of the vehicles stolen, not including attempts or vehicles not registrable or have been recovered. So they have, a lot of them have been recovered already. And again, it's the Honda that's been stolen, Kia, followed by Honda. So we had 52, 29, and 29 for those makes, the amount that was taken. We'll go to the next one. Next one. Clearance rates. So when we look at our clearance rates, again, you'll see that these numbers are down. We're clearing 70, we cleared 76.9% for our homicide, 18% for our rape, robbery was 46%, aggravated assault 41, burglary 22, larceny 13, motor vehicle 15. Again, when we're talking about property crimes, that's gonna take a lot of help from turning down networks. We had a lot of groups that were targeting apartment complexes, businesses, and that's why you see those numbers. But we did get cooperation and the things that we needed through an investigation to actually help clear a lot of these crimes that were occurring. And we're at about 76.3% staffing. We have an authorized number of 531 officers sworn, and we right now have 405 non-sworn. We're at 91% for our non-sworn, so that's good. We're authorized 145, and we have our actual number of 133. One of the things that is good for our department, which is not unique to Durham is recruiting. And I've said this before, but we were lucky and through luck and hard work from our department, we were able to graduate 30 recruits. There was Academy 62. That was the largest recruitment class we've seen in a while. In March, we started with 33 recruits for Academy 63. So they're ongoing now. And our recruiting efforts for 64 remain strong with 24. And I think this is a positive for the department when we look at recruiting and to our apartment and getting people out on the street to help with our community. So I think that's very important. And those numbers, I commend the people that are doing the work and doing the recruiting. We're having to be very creative when we're competing against other agencies in the surrounding area. And nationally, I think that's very important to recognize that they're doing a great job. Also with our recruiting initiatives, our 30 by 30 initiative that we have that we've talked about for a while, They're still going strong. I run DPD, which officers love. A lot of officers here in the department, they love to run. They have a passion that I probably don't, but they love to run. And so our lateral officer initiative is also thriving. We only got one, but I'm proud of that one person that we got in. For our lateral class, we only got one this quarter, but it's great. We had seen this young lady throughout Durham, and we were asking her to come, and she finally did. So I'm happy that we have a lateral transfer, a new one this quarter. That was great. That is it for the report. Any questions?

Go ahead, Councilmember Baker.

Thank you. Thank you for coming in. Good to see you again. Good to see you. Just a few questions. I'm curious about with the homicides motives. I'm just curious about what you're seeing as the primary motives behind some of the homicides that you're seeing.

Well, I think that's different. You see that there's one that was a negligent manslaughter, accidental discharge, apparently. There was also a domestic violence case, and you really never can tell what's going to go in someone's house. So it's a different, it's kind of a mixed bag. So we've seen where there were arguments, and then someone stabbed someone over an argument. Then also we've seen the gunshot wounds. So I don't think that there's one particular thing that's going to narrow down why a particular person decided to murder another person, commit a homicide. It's a mixed bag. And you can tell that from actually the numbers that are there from the different type of homicides that have happened are the negligent manslaughter that have occurred. There's not one particular thing that sets it apart from another. But I will say this, one thing that we are seeing that firearms are being used in these cases.

So you're not necessarily seeing any trends in the motives whenever there's a spike in homicides?

That's not a particular trend. You will see an argument. You will see there was, like I said, a case with the mother that had nothing to do with an argument. The case with the negligent homicide, that had nothing to do that we know of with an argument. As far as domestic, that was an argument. The other ones, there's various things throughout those investigations, and all of them haven't been solved yet. Okay, thank you.

And then, do you know where guns are, from where guns are being stolen?

One of the things that we're seeing in Durham, and we've seen for quite some time now, are the cars. And a lot of them unlocked. And that's what I mentioned before, as far as a theft from motor vehicle and larcenies. Guns. taken out of vehicles. Yeah.

Okay. Yeah, I'm not surprised by that. I think probably people in this room have experience with people breaking into their cars and just rifling through and not actually taking anything but looking for guns. And then What are the incentives for recruits from the police academy to stay with Durham Police rather than go through our academy and then move on to a different police department?

I don't want to brag, but I think we have the best agency in North Carolina. Probably in the nation. That would probably be the first thing I'd tell them. But I said the best agency in North Carolina and probably in the nation. That's the first thing I'd tell them. They're going to be well trained, for one. And we can offer them incentives as we do, you know, a bonus. We give bonuses. We can offer them a take-home vehicle, which a lot of them, if they live within the correct mileage from the city, we can offer that. Those are all bonuses that we offer. But one thing I would say that we offer more than anything is we offer community and a family. If you want a career and you want a family and you really want to be a servant type person, this is the place for you to be, right? Because it's about, yes, it's about finances for some people, but also sometimes it's about a career. Thank you.

Thank you. Council Member Wrist? Oh, no. Council Member Burris and then Wrist? Okay. Okay. All right.

Thank you, Chief Tate. Appreciate the presentation. Yes, sir. Obviously, the first quarter was a rough quarter with respect to violent crime.

It's Captain Packard or...

Yeah, I read I read those those, uh, the watch ports every day. So I know there was a phase there in, like, February, March, where things were a lot of stuff going on. So, so appreciate you giving us that. It's not easy to see that information, but it's important to hear that. Um, sometimes and I know I know that we and we've seen we see these reports every quarter. Things tend to go up up and down for different reasons. And sometimes it's hard to see that the trends, the patterns with the sort of the quarter to quarter data. I know that in the past we've had a report. I thought a report on sort of like a 10 year analysis of violent crime per 100,000 population. And I didn't see that slide in this report.

We can, we can, we can get that to this. I can get there to you.

I appreciate that. Yeah. Because again, with the spike here, just to see how we're. Doing in that sort of 10 because the 10-year trend has been largely going down, but we'd love to see that Yes, sir. That figure appreciate that. Yes, sir.

Thank you. Thanks for this Presentation sorry, I'm speaking phasma. I'm just I have a question and just wanna well two questions really So are we seeing an uptick in recruits have been rejected by other municipalities from their academies?

I am NOT aware of that, but I can find out I We do a good job of vetting and they have to meet. So one of the things they have to meet is they have to meet the state requirements, right? So if they didn't meet a state requirement at another law enforcement agency, they won't meet one here. So we wouldn't be able to say that they didn't meet the training and standing commission requirements to be a law enforcement officer. So it wouldn't be like you could not meet it there and then meet it here. But if something happened with another agency,

that is something that we would have to find out okay and then my second question i'm trying to phrase it so i don't sound ageist but when i was at the last um academy graduation the recruits were like babies to me almost like so young and so i'm just thinking about and not trying to compare like millennials from like a younger generation because people always try to do that but like what does support look like for them honestly for the younger officers who were like 21 22 Frontal lobe all the things like how do we make sure that they are best situated to be out in these environments?

So we have a mentoring program throughout our agency and we have a peer support program in our agency so that really helps young officers and We encourage them, you know, I always tell them I have an open door for everybody, you know for the right things right and so Everybody that's in here with me, we are always trying to reach out and talk to our officers, our leadership, our senior leadership, our middle management, our frontline supervisors, the programs that we have in place. we are always reaching out to them to let them know there are services there are resources for you and if something happens we're going to do a debrief to make sure that their wellness is first and so we do have a wellness program inside of our agency for that but i welcome the youth because that's the future no i appreciate that um i asked that question because i did when i did my ride along i hung out with an older officer into younger officers i have not laughed

that hard in my very, very like belly laugh when hanging out with them. So thank you so much. I appreciate it. Yes.

Yes, of course. Can I elaborate on one of those answers? So I know there was recently been some negative press about problem officers going from agency to agency across North Carolina. I want to reiterate that we closely that anyone that has experience in another North Carolina department, there is a state database that tracks any sort of behavioral issues. And I think that's something our department has excelled at. So While I was disappointed to see that article about some of the agencies in our state, I'm proud to say that it is something that our department screens very carefully for. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else? Oh, go ahead, Council Member Cook.

Thank you. I have two questions. One is the clearance rate seems to be just going up and up. Do you have anything that you credit with that?

So a lot of times when you see a clearance rate like that, it's usually you're tearing down a network. So repeat offenders committing crimes. And you go back and you find out through evidence and investigation that they also broke into this string of vehicles.

Okay.

And so that's why when you see the clearance rate looking in a negative manner, that's what you see.

Okay.

That makes sense. And then... Any progress with giving away firearm locks? Any new movement to doing community education? I know that we have like, I know we're doing it, but it sounds like, We're not we're not close to where we need to be. So are we thinking creatively? What are what are y'all doing?

So so we I attended some of the officers attended a youth explosion at Mount Gilead Baptist Church off Dow Street. It was it was it was a great event. And we went out there and we talked with Miss Gilmore with the Sheriff's Department. I've talked with the sheriff briefly, briefly. We want to partner with them as far as what they do, as far as like gun safety. And they were out there giving away locks. And that is something that we're going to partner with. We're also attending an event called Wallace to Grace and Miss Swoops the 17th. And so when we attend these events, we're going to try to make sure that we have information to provide to citizens about gun safety and try to partner more with our surrounding other law enforcement agencies inside Durham to kind of do what you're kind of talking about going towards those type of safety measures.

Yeah, I mean, I just remember going to like a community event a couple years ago, and this was 1 of the main things that folks were talking about. I do think there's a lot of creative ideas in the community about how to get this messaging around. So I'd like to hear the other sort of partnering with. Some advocacy groups that I would encourage that, because I think folks have good ideas and I want to make sure that we're like. finding every pathway we can to get that firearm safety education out there. So, it does seem like that is a major problem. But yeah, I appreciate that. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else? Okay, thank you. I just have a real quick question. Around domestic violence, are we seeing increases?

I haven't seen a spike, but that those two homicides in the first quarter is alarming and it's something to keep our eye on as a department that we need to track and that we will try to make sure that we're doing everything that we can from from our standpoint.

Thank you. I just know sometimes we know when economies get tight, we do see domestic violence increase in homes. And so we know that people are struggling. And so whatever you need also from us around messaging and things like that, I will just say I know that in Um, immigrant communities. Unfortunately, you also see, um, spikes in in domestic violence, especially around stress and what's happening in those communities. And so, uh, and those are a lot of those people are not going to report right now. Um, and so I that's just something that's been weighing pretty heavily on on me just thinking about what might be happening in in homes across our city for folks for lots of reasons, just not feeling that they can come forward. Uh, and just we might be seeing some, um, bad outcomes right now. So I'm something that I'm glad that y'all are also worried and as we get subsequent reports, there'll be something I'll be asking about. Thank you. Yes. Colleagues, anyone else before we move on to our next presentation? Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Good afternoon, Mayor Pro Tem, Council Members, Sheila Fawcett, Deputy CFO in the Finance Department. As you're aware, over the last 11 months, we've been working on a disparity study, and today we have Miller III, Mr. Dave Miller, here to give you our final report and give a presentation in reference to that. Thank you for having us, and I'm going to turn it over to Mr. Dave Miller.

Thank you for being with us. Good afternoon.

Good afternoon, Mayor Pro Tem, council members. As Ms. Fawcett mentioned, my name is Dave Miller, and I serve as the Chief Executive Officer of Military Consulting. We started a process with the city back in July of last year to conduct a disparity study. The disparity study generally takes about 12 months. I'm happy that we're here before that time, so kudos to city staff who have supported us throughout this engagement. My goal today is to walk you through what the data shows, what it means for Durham's procurement operations and what steps the city can take to take strong policy into stronger performance. We structured today's discussion around five pillars, beginning first with the findings. I always like to start conversations with the truth. I'll tell you what it is. Second, we'll support that truth with the evidence that we gleaned through the execution of the disparity study. And then third, discussing the implications. What operational, fiscal, legal, and community impact related concerns that you should be aware of. Fourth, the path forward. Our recommendations and the roadmap, we understand that cities and municipalities are not speed boats, and so sometimes it takes a little time to change the direction, but we encourage you to actually take action. One of the worst things you can do is to commit funds and resources to a disparity study and place it on the shelf. So I will challenge you to move from awareness to action. This is the central thesis of our findings. Durham's procurement system is legally compliant. It successfully attracts minority women-owned businesses into the process. They are competing, they are certified, and they're actively bidding. And so what this says to us is that your EBO program and your SBLE programs are working as they are intended to work. The challenge becomes how you convert that participation into tangible opportunities and awards through your system. This slide just lays out the core findings. We'll look at where disparities occur, how participation drops along the pipeline, and some of the structural conditions we believe are driving the gaps. And all of this is supported by statistical evidence, by group and by category. And so the disparity study doesn't just look at your total spend, but it breaks up your total spend by industry. So we look at your architectural engineering, we look at your construction activity, your goods and services, professional services and non-professional services. So we examine activity through fiscal year, from fiscal year 2021 through 2025. And across every category, MWBE shows statistically significant underutilization when measured against those who are ready, willing, and able, pointing to a clear opportunity to improve the bidding to conversion. Now the center number is the 31%. So at the bidding stage, which is where your foreign procurement opportunities, your higher value opportunities, we're seeing minorities participate, either as a part of a team, as a subcontractor, or as a prime contractor themselves. But when we broaden that to include your informal procurements, those things that are below your formal threshold, it suppresses that activity down to roughly 10%. So that 21% drop is where we want to focus some of the efforts. As I mentioned, this is a drop along the procurement pipeline, focusing solely on ready, willing, and able. That is the availability measure. So at the bid stage, 16% of the awards are going to minority and women-owned businesses. That is split between prime activity and subcontract activity. So your EBO program, where you have goals in place, where there's additional layers of oversight, you're seeing minorities compete and be successful at a higher rate than some of the informal opportunities that exist, where relationships are more an attributive factor to success, incumbent bias may exist. And so we want to just be mindful of that as we move through. So what's actually causing the gap? It comes down to roughly four conditions. The procurement framework itself is sound. And more importantly, none of these conditions mean that the system itself is broken. So in a decentralized environment for which the city has, it becomes a little bit difficult to ensure compliance consistently across all departments. And so varying departments are applying the rigor with reporting, particularly as it relates to subcontract activity, It makes it a little bit challenging when it's decentralized. The informal practices limit competitive access. So for example, where you are below the formal threshold and policy calls for quotes, those quotes are being requested by departments and received by departments. And sometimes the oversight isn't there from a centralized perspective to ensure that, as policy states, maybe for five quotes, you get three from an order on business. It becomes difficult to ensure that it's happening in a decentralized manner. Data system can be strengthened for accountability. I am excited to learn and know that the city is moving forward with the ERP implementation. I believe you're in the throes of that right now. And a lot of the challenges that we've assessed through the disparity study, some of them may be addressed with this implementation. But connecting the solicitations and promoting those and making sure that the business community is aware of opportunities is critical in ensuring that you have diverse suppliers. And even when you have minority owned businesses, you don't over concentrate by leveraging a handful of firms to achieve your objectives. The last point, capacity differences do not fully explain disparities. We conduct a regressions analysis, and what that does is helps us to appreciate whether or not age of a firm, experience, net worth, revenues are factors in determining whether minority women owned businesses can compete fairly in the private sector. So this matrix is really where the rubber meets the road, where you see under utilization those red boxes coupled with an asterisk. That means that for those procurement types you see across the top and the ethnic groups on the left hand side is where you can institute race conscious initiatives to mitigate and remedy some of the past inferences of discrimination found through the disparity study. So for example, African-Americans in construction, non-professional services and goods and supplies, you can begin to put forth race conscious initiatives to address these things. Conversely, Asian American owned firms and non professional services, professional and goods and supplies. The goal is to try to maintain and keep that significant over utilization isn't a ding on the city. It is a representation of some communities have an ability to compete. And it also considers the types of goods and supplies and services that the city is looking for to solicit.

OK.

So let's sort of connect the dots here. Why does this matter? And I like to do this through the lens of not just a case for equity, but as a business case. Many municipalities are finding themselves in budgetary constraints. And procurement, as an economic driver, plays a role inside of this. So pricing efficiency comes when you have more people competing for your opportunities. What we found through the studies that in some of your formal opportunities, particularly for goods and supplies, professional service and non-professional services, upwards of 70% of those are being awarded with three or less proposers. And so what we are offering is that as a strategic business lever, the more people you get to compete, that puts downward pressure on pricing, which is a positive for the city. Innovation and access. In the informal space, where you're below your former threshold in terms of the value of the opportunity, relationships matter, right? And so you get used to having a certain vendor provide goods and supplies, but you want to be mindful that you don't become too tied or married to that vendor because it can impact the ability for you to bring innovative approaches from new businesses into the atmosphere and ethos. So you want to be mindful of that. The legal compliance and risk. The reason why you conduct a disparity study and not just establish goals without a basis for that is it creates a foundation. The 1989 Richmond v. Croson decision is a legal precedent that is still the law of the land today. And so because you have conducted a disparity study, you now can move forward for those groups you saw who were significantly underutilized in establishing race-conscious initiatives in your procurement opportunities. The fourth bucket here, economic development, I'm really passionate about this. What we find oftentimes is municipalities have the ability to change the trajectory of their growth by how it spends its money. We evaluate in a relevant market slide, which I'll show a little bit later, where your dollars are going. And so of the $1.3 billion that was spent by the city over this five year period, roughly 30% of that stayed local in the city And once you expand it out, I'm sorry, to your metropolitan statistical area, which is the Durham, Chapel Hill, MSA, that went up to about 35%. Now the question before you is whether or not that mark of 30% or 35% is consistent with this council's priorities to ensure that money stays local, that it benefits local, that the city benefits from that from a sales tax perspective, as well as a property tax. Net performance management. Disparity studies is a backwards look over five years, but the ability to see what is happening in real time is very, very important. It allows you to see where bottlenecks are in your processes. It helps you to drill down into maybe particular departments that may be driving some of the findings that we are seeing through the disparity study. So here's a proof. We'll talk about the methodology we deployed for this. This is our 10 part methodology. It is both qualitative and quantitative. The numbers tell a story and shape the story, but the numbers aren't the entire story. And so we must buttress the statistical findings with qualitative evidence that we glean through surveys, through focus groups, and through public hearings. And so we move from an industry analysis where we appreciate what the legal landscape is, what is allowed, we consider your procurement policies and procedures, but more importantly, your practices of staff. Because oftentimes there could be a gap between what your policies are saying and the actual behavior of staff. And then the statistical analysis is where my stat team has a lot of fun. We identify where your relevant market is, where 70-75% of your activity is taking place. We look at who you're utilizing. We consider the capacity of those firms. And then, as I mentioned earlier, the ready, willing, and able, those who are available to do work with you. Now, we take a very conservative approach in defining availability. And I say that because we define it based on those firms who have demonstrated an interest and wanted to work with the city, which is different than a marketplace availability. Businesses have the option to elect whether or not they want to pursue public sector work. They could view it as cumbersome, it could be a lot of work, it could be a number of different reasons. But the point here is taking a conservative approach puts you in a better position because availability is the denominator in the disparity study ratio. And then we also look at the market factors. I mentioned the anecdotal interviews that we do in the surveys. What are what are the markets for the city of Durham? Where are your businesses coming from? So, we don't reach 70% of your businesses. Until we get to the state, we expand that out from the state starting a very, very small city, expand that concentrically out to the MSA and then broaden it to the state. And once we get to the state level, architectural engineering services and construction service and professional services is when we reach that 70 to 75% clip. We have to move beyond the state of North Carolina for nonprofessional services and goods and supplies. Now, that's not surprising for goods and supplies. It is a bit surprising for nonprofessional services. When you think about landscaping services, janitorial services, et cetera, there tends to be an upside of you being more local.

I'm sorry, that 70% threshold, can you again describe what's that threshold?

So it helps you to define where the relevant market is. That means where the crux of your vendors are in a particular procurement type. So you won't define your relevant market based on 10% of your spend. But it's safe to say where the lion's share of your spend is occurring once you reach the 70% to 75% threshold.

So 70% of our contracting expenses. Yes. And so what that means is that, for example, if you look at architectural engineering and surveying services, so if you look at 70% of our spend there, that's within the state of North Carolina. Yes. But if you're looking at non-professional services...

It extends beyond... To get to 70% of that bucket, we have to go beyond the state. Correct. Okay, thanks. Feel free to stop me at any point in time. It's a great question. The Ready, Will, and Enable framework that I mentioned earlier, these are businesses who have demonstrated interest, and I keep harping on demonstrated because oftentimes, some consultants would use the marketplace to define it. And it's almost as if you call everyone in the phone book and ask, would you want to do work with the city of Durham? Most likely everyone would say yes. But have you taken a step to demonstrate that? Have you come forward and registered as a business? Have you competed for an opportunity? Have you submitted a quote? And so that conservative measure generally means that what we're seeing in the studies at 31%, that represents MWBE's 31%. And then once you add in moving from level one to level two, which includes your informal, those who were issued a payment, those who were issued a purchase order, that number drops down to about 10%. So that 21 point gap between level one and level two reveals the structural dynamics of it. So think about informal, think about relationships, think about operating in a decentralized manner, all of those things factor in. This is a visualization of what is happening for the three largest groups that we're evaluating, looking at non-minority women-owned businesses, minority women-owned businesses, and then small businesses. And what you're seeing is the jump or decrease as you move from the conservative measure of level one to level two. And so I'll highlight non-minorities, for example. At level one, at formal procurements, they are roughly at 59% of those firms that are available. But when you add in the informal, that grows up to 83%. And that's just a mere factor of having your informal, some relationships, et cetera. Now, this slide really highlights the impact of having a program. And while I realize goals aren't hard fast currently, it shows that the program themselves, the tenants of the programs are working. And so the far left bar for each of the procurement types here represents what's happening at the formal level. there's additional oversight where good faith efforts may be required to continue participating in the process you are seeing a lot more utilization of minority women-owned businesses in that realm but as you move to your purchase orders and your eventual payments you're seeing those values begin to decrease the anomaly in that state is in goods and supplies where you see the inverse their MWB participation at the formal stage was very, very low at 0.1%, but it doesn't really move the needle as it moved up to 3% in total as payments. So here, this is participation versus realized dollars by life cycle, and life cycle is what is happening at the bid stage, what is happening at your purchase order and contract award stage, and then the third bucket is what's happening by actual payments. I do want to note that the purchase orders and payments are issued to prime contractors. The city does not pay subs. So the impact of not paying subs directly is being revealed once you move to the PO and the payments. The point here is that looking at construction, roughly $305 million was spent through the bidding process. And at the bidding stage, 81% of those funds went to majority-owned firms, about 4% of that to SBEs and 14% at the very top to minority and women-owned businesses.

I had this question previously, and I just want to make sure I heard you correctly. All right. In the in the percentages that we're receiving, does that include subcontracting, even though that's not we don't have direct control over that?

So it includes subcontracting at the bid stage.

OK.

So I'm a business, I come forward with my team, I detail through responding to the requirements of the EBO program, who my subcontractors are, the ethnic designations, so we can capture their contracting spend in that regard. Once that prime, I'm a prime contractor, I $100 award, I sell about $20 of that. Once you move to purchase orders, the $100 is solely attributed to the prime contractor, because that's who the city engages with. But the bid dollar, only $80 will be attributed to the prime, and the $20 will be attributed to the subs at the bid stage. So this slide is showing what the current goals are and what the performance against those goals were in the period upon evaluation, so 2021 through 2025. And you see in some spaces, the city's done quite well or very, very close to achieving its objectives. So when you look at professional services, for example, comparing 7% against the 6.97, it's really good there. But there are a lot of opportunities on the woman's side to really make some headway and achieve some gains in that regard. Now, the disparities that it requires for race-conscious initiatives a tenet of the crossing decision is to narrowly tailor that. So whereas the city currently has minority goals and women goals, you can only begin to put forth race conscious remedies for those who have been impacted. So think about the red slide at the beginning with the asterisks. So what this is invariably showing, if the city elects to move forward with race conscious initiatives, what the actual goals would be that the disparity study supports.

Just to clarify, from previous definitions, when we talk about women, that's mainly white women, right? Correct.

Okay. So in studies, just to elaborate on that, the ethnic designation drives your representation. So if I'm an Asian American male or female, I will be placed in the Asian bucket. As I mentioned earlier, capacity matters, but it doesn't explain the disparities that were found. You see some of the elements that we control for, firm size, revenue, number of employees, startup capital, bond and capacity. And despite controlling for these, the findings resulted that race and gender remained a statistically significant predictor of contracting outcomes across several procurement types. I mentioned that the study itself is both quantitative and qualitative. And qualitative is really where we're out in the community, understanding what their perceptions and experiences have been when trying to do business with the city of Durham. And this slide is really just showing what the businesses say, what the vendors are saying. For any business, access to capital and cash flow is a concern, and most times it's just about how often businesses can be paid by those who they are engaged with. My personal experience with the city has been a positive one, and so I hope that it extends for all businesses who are looking. We have tools that help the city to evaluate whether or not your net term 30s, you're being very successful in paying folks for goods and supplies that they're delivering to the city. One of the largest concerns that we heard was just some limited awareness and communication of opportunities. So how do I know what the city is buying and when? And we talk about in the recommendation section we'll get to is how do you begin to chip away at that perception? Because one of the things you would want to avoid is being out in the community, a city council member in a business saying, you just awarded paving, but I didn't know that opportunity was there. I would love to have participated in that. So how you go about sharing opportunities and notifying businesses is a critical component on a number of different factors. One, it creates some awareness. It also demonstrates some intentionality by the city. But more importantly, it widens the net that you're casting for folks to bid on these opportunities, which again, pushes down pricing and pressure. Oftentimes, bonding insurance can be a factor in whether or not a business can compete. So we heard that as a barrier, and we've made recommendations previously to figure out ways to lessen some of those requirements or share some of those requirements between prime and subcontractors, such that you don't alienate any groups who would like to participate in the procurement process. So here's some of the implications. This area is not meant to scare anyone. It's really just meant to help you to appreciate the robustness of a disparity study. So it's not just whether or not you have the basis for a program. We look at a number of different things. We talked about the legal environment. We look at your policies and procedures. We interview staff. Talk to the community and so what the implications section is is highlighting is some of the operational fiscal and community considerations that shape the path forward and Here's what we believe some operational refinement will help unlock greater impact. So in this hybrid model, you have a centralized policy, but a decentralized execution from a department perspective that can create some gaps there. And ensuring that you're aligning the rigor across informal procurement with those that you're doing on the formal side is critical. Secondarily, opportunity to enhance post-award visibility. Connecting the solicitations, awards, and payments end-to-end will reinforce it. One of the reasons why we do disparity studies and look at utilization at three distinct points is because it can tell three different stories, right? Each of which are important. And then lastly, we hope that as a result of this disparity study, the shift from procurement ready to evolve into a strategic function. said differently, how does procurement ensure that the city's priorities, maybe for working with local businesses, maybe taking that 30% was current spending in the city is elevated over time. So you wanna track your progress against that. I think this point we've made pretty strong just in terms of expanding competition, how it strengthens fiscal performance. On the right side of this is the sort of haymaker, if you will. I believe that procurement is one of Durham's strongest economic development levers. And the question is, how do you bring back into the local area the non-professional services or the goods and supplies commission of risk that you're asking about that currently extends beyond your MSA? So what this means for council. Accountability and policy direction. As a result of the study, the question before you is how quickly or is there an appetite to move to begin to institute race conscious initiatives to identify some of the inferences of discrimination found in a disparity state? And what does that look like? So policy choices have to be made to position the city for sustained legal defensibility. Now, I also talk about this through the lens of all these programs must sunset, right? And so this isn't a program that lasts forever and an infinite item because you would think that if once you embed some of these practices and behaviors into the process, there's less of a need to rely on a program, right? Execution of ownership. I've had a really good working relationship with the finance office, CFO and procurement, but shift from a compliance base to a performance driven system. No longer have we met our goals, but what are we doing from an operational perspective to ensure that we are embedding the behaviors and activities that we want to see inside of this? Marketplace confidence, what the vendors in both majority-owned firms and minority-owned firms told us about this is access to capital for every business and bonding is a challenge. But to the extent that there can be some more consistency and transparency across departments, that enhances vendors' trust in the process. And then economic inclusion factor, which is really about the community. A broader vendor base expands local job creation. It expands sales tax. It expands property tax revenues. And all those things are benefactors to the city. action so here we took a selfish approach of trying to define a path forward for considerations and create some recommendations as well as some ownership for those recommendations but the core of this is to consider establishing and embedding what we call the four pillars of inclusive procurement it is mission driven so not solely about Compliance, but embedding inclusion and accountability into the governance. That leadership has expectations relative to this, and it is measured by departmental performance. Opportunity driven. We heard from the community that is at times limited awareness of what the city is looking for. So expanding forecasting, early vendor engagement, and where available, unbundling some of the projects will help minimize the impact of our capacity challenges. Relationship driven. Oftentimes when we compete and are successful, the first thing we do is try to have a debrief. To better understand what went wrong, such that the next time we pursue, you are better suited and have a higher chances of being successful. And you can do that through debriefing, but having matchmaking and mentorship programs is also critical. And then data. We have a procure to pay intelligence system that we would love the city to consider. It is a real time tool that helps you to appreciate what is happening at each stage. And when you begin to look at that real time and measure that against the performance, there is always positive strides being made as a result of that. And here are five recommendation themes with some expected outcomes. Governance, legal compliance, and program design. Codify or make that decision whether or not race-conscious initiatives is where you want to go, and then begin to reassess the need for those initiatives every three to five years. And what that does is it puts your program in a legal, defensible, structured place to move forward. Some of the other themes and ties you see here, data integrity systems, the procure to pay tracking. We don't have a suggestion whether or not the city should move from a decentralized to a centralized procurement environment, but oversight needs to happen to ensure that there's an alignment between city priorities and what is happening on the ground. So the narrowly tailored remedies must work in concert with race and gender neutral initiatives. So on the right side of the screen, you're seeing some of the race and gender neutral components. But the race and gender conscious can only be applied to those groups who experience significant statistical underutilization. So think about the previous slide where we were showing the proportions that or what prospective goals could be for those groups. But outreach, forecasting, contract rightsizing, capacity building, subcontracting enforcement, all things within the city's control, they can begin to execute. Here's a version of our phase implementation. I'll think about it from the build, scale, and institutionalize. The building momentum is to take the results from the study and begin to act on them. I understand that the finance department is going to evaluate some of the recommendations and then make some decisions around the path forward. Mid-term, sort of begin to strengthen the systems and scale participation. In each of these buckets, we try to segment between access and transparency. the systems and data that are necessary and need to support them, and then what the program capacity components will be. This slide here is solely about accountability. Who executes, who monitors the reforms that are made? The recommendation errors are those same themes that I discussed earlier, and we try to take a stab at identifying who the primary owners are and then the supporting stakeholders to ensure that from a data integrity and systems perspective, we recognize that finance department and technology solutions will most likely lead that, but it's definitely supported by the actions and behaviors of purchasing the UBC division and those who may audit. So thank you for your time and attention. I will open the floor up for any questions that you may have.

Colleagues, anyone have any questions? Go ahead.

Thank you. Um, and I really appreciate this is, uh. It's an interesting, it's a thing that I feel like we all probably, well, I'm going to speak for myself. Something that I figured was happening and it's very helpful to see exactly where it's happening and the data behind that. So I appreciate you all did a lot of work here. I'm hearing you talk about some potential solutions and policy ideas. I'm curious if there are jurisdictions that have done some things well. Are there templates that we can look to to sort of develop this? And yeah, I'm sure it's not like it doesn't transition easily across different places, but I'm just curious.

Well, there are some jurisdictions that have done some things well. particularly in the state of North Carolina. And so I will point to the city of Raleigh in some sense where they've taken the disparity study and have moved forward with implementing some of the recommendations and we're currently supporting them on that. They've also taken us up on the procure to pay intelligence system that helps them to see real time. So the downside of disparity study is it could be viewed as cost prohibitive and it's also a backwards look. Having tools in place that helps you to see what is happening today will help you begin to guide and understand what is contributing to some of the findings that are there. There are other municipalities who elected to move forward, but ran into roadblocks from reasons out of their control. So we've seen some changes in the administration, federal administration's perspective on these types of things. And what some people are having to consider is the juice worth the squeeze. Right? And I would suggest that it truly is, because when there is a pothole, you may call your public works department as opposed to calling DC. And so these are sort of real considerations that council will have to think about as it is elected to move forward. You know currently what your what your goals are and how you performed against those goals. And so what that says is absent race conscious initiatives, you can anticipate those types of behaviors and continuance of your current performance. So this group, this body will have to decide if current performance is consistent with your priorities. Is it consistent with what you would like to see the city do? Some of these choices are hard choices, but there are a few options. Councilmember Cook, people are doing really well in this space, but oftentimes it takes courage and commitment from folks around the table like you are.

Yeah, thank you. I appreciate that. And yes. Yeah. And I actually my next question was for you.

So if you want to speak to that and yes, I'll add that when we do our action plan, part of that will be benchmarking. So we will make sure we include that when we come back with our action plan and our recommendations to council.

And what will that action plan look like? Will we get sort of a, will y'all have already developed the types of methodology or will you kind of come for guidance first and then?

We'll come with a recommendation first. Again, we're just receiving the report, so we don't have all of that outlined. But a lot of the things that you see, like recommendations, we're already moving forward with some of those recommendations through our ERP system. So we're already connecting those dots from the beginning of the procurement process to the end with Oracle. We're gonna make sure that that data's there. We're planning to have a dashboard included in that. So we're already working towards a final product.

Yeah, I appreciate that and I'm not expecting y'all to have it in front of us right now How long do you think or like when do you think that that will be ready to for us?

Yeah, we are planning to do that within the next six to twelve months I would say but again with working with maybe Miller three some other consultants and myself as well as the steering committee committee the EBOB steering committee will be a very integral part in coming up with that plan and again we'll be laying that out and bringing it back before you thank you so much i really appreciate y'all

Thank you all so much for your presentation I found to be particularly interesting so i'm excited about that, and I want to watch the quote that you made around. Procurement is an economic development driver thinking about excuse me going back to before my time but Maynard Jackson. In Atlanta as an example of how economic development help like set people up for generational wealth and so things good example to think about is like some of these things been done before. way like predating us and so think about how we model that for the future and also thank you for highlight in the situation around the Decentralization, but also how the people who have the informal connections for contract because I have heard that from some kind of report concrete. And he's like, well, the city now always uses this one vendor. So I don't know. He's had contracts in the past, but he was not currently able to get some of those contracts. So thank you for uplifting those realities of what's actually happening and the harm we do and how we kind of do go get some of our goals when we don't have this practices embedded deeply in our process and policy. So I do look forward over the next six to 12 months and seeing how we can address and remedy some of these situations. But also I'm assuming this is going to, will this work help advise the OEWD overall? Okay, so I just want to be clear on that. So I look forward to more intentionality and strategy. But thank you for uplifting those things and helping us reimagine like how, like we have some major development coming here. What's the opportunity to make leverage and support formally for some of our minority women-owned business as well? So thank you.

I just want to emphasize that last point. When we received this presentation at the executive team, we had a really good conversation about the intersection between these recommendations and our opportunity as a major funder in Durham of a lot of this work and the opportunity that creates or should be creating for our local businesses to receive that wealth, create that wealth. It's obviously a virtuous cycle. And so I know that as we move forward with these recommendations, We intend to do it in close coordination with OEWD and to really think about how we can make sure that that ecosystem is one that we are both benefiting from as the contract, as the organization issuing the contract, but also as the community that receives that wealth. So thank you.

member wrist temper time um yeah the customer verse your head was exactly where my head was like this is this is really good stuff this and then we've been working on this for a couple years now so presumably some really coming back sharing this data really rich I was trying to process all this as you're going there's a lot here But I know that part of what we need to do is to have this study so we can so we can set clear goals going forward to do this work. So this is really important stuff. I totally agree. We've just had a conversation before about how do we make sure we're leveraging our resources across the city? We've got a new strategic plan that that is developing. This has got to be in the heart of that, right? Because, as you said, on slide twenty three, I wrote this down. This is one of the strongest economic development levers we have. And that's absolutely right. So I really appreciate lifting that up. I have a couple questions here about all that. So on slide 18, you had some goals there, post-study goals. Are you suggesting those goals would be appropriate goals for Durham, or what's the nature of those goals?

yes sure answer your question yes so these goals reflect what the go-forward state would be and in some cases it is lower than the minority goal but the requirement to narrowly tailor it it only can be applied to those businesses who have been found but based on the study based on the study so your current seven or eleven that you have now in some cases will go up and in other cases it may go down a bit

So one goal, for example, the one for AES, which is architectural.

Yes, Architectural Engineering Services.

So you're suggesting the goal would be 8.33%, right?

For African-American-owned businesses.

And so forth. And if I go with the previous slide, so we know right now the actual disparity study utilization is like 2.28, right? So that's a big jump, which is I like aggressive goals. But again, that speaks to the fact that, like, we won't get there without some really strategic efforts on the part of the city to make this a part of what we're doing in terms of our larger economic development strategy. There may be others there, but that's the one that I noticed. There's like, that's a big jump and I want to see that. But we, it won't happen by by accident. We need to strategize. Right?

Yes. And the. The disparities that allows you to put teeth into your, your program that says absent you meeting these goals and your proposals. You don't continue in the process now you there's still waivers that can be applied There's still good faith efforts that can be applied but it requires a a stringent review to meet that bar as opposed to I'm just not meeting it and if the city stays where it is now You can fully expect for you to be a little bit shorter than some of the aspirational targets that you have.

Yeah, I And so so these are some of so so miss Fawcett when you're developing this action plan these these goals Or at least that this sort of like this these suggestions will be embedded in the plan you're developing.

That's correct Yeah, just like we have in the past.

We will bring goal recommendations back Yeah, and I hope that can be like closer to six months and twelve months I think this is like this is mission critical stuff And so I hope we can do this as fast as possible That is definitely our goal to do that as fast as possible The other so that because I do again, I think, and we, I think we've talked about this in the past. I think to me, the pipeline is a big part of this. Like, we're not going to get there with this existing firms. We need to build that pipeline. One thing that really that I've noted in your slides was that, like, they're not a lot of the high value contracts are going to minority or women on enterprises. So, so. Again, it seems to me we've got to build the pipeline apart. But any other strategies or suggestions for how do we get not only more contracts, but more of the high value ones to these key firms?

It's a number of different factors. Part of it is just awareness. Part of it is ensuring that there's a long enough runway that is coupled with awareness for people to put together solid proposals and packages. I ask this question of many of my clients. If you don't know today how many of your contracts are going to terminate within 12 months, you're kind of behind the ball, right? Particularly for large capital projects. If we don't know that. If you don't know that. Yeah. And I will go as far as to say you should know at six months, nine months, 12 months, 18 months, and up. Because oftentimes we find that when you don't know, particularly when there's a renewal option, you unilaterally just renew the contract because you don't want to have a lapse in services.

You don't have the runway. Yeah.

So there's a lot of opportunities here, Commissioner. I'm sorry, Councilmember. But the thought here, and I raise this slide only so you can begin to see that the economic impact in terms of leverage over five years, over a billion dollars spent. how much of that could be local. And then you look at where you're performing well. Which side was that, that was number? This is in the appendix section. This is extra coloring for you. But you can begin to see where those distributions are and decide where you will want to be a year from now, two years from now. So this serves as a really good baseline.

So that shows that of our total contracting spend, essentially 30% is in the city of Durham. 35% in our MSA. So there's a huge opportunity to redirect that more to local firms.

And in some cases, you're doing well. Nonprofessional services in the city, 43 points, which is what we expect. But those are some of the smaller projects, because the marketplace

beyond the state yeah I just want to add when you talk about awareness again our new ERP system will give us that and so we're in the midst of implementing that now to where we will have a centralized process where we can send out notifications and solicitations to minority and non-minority vendors so again awareness will go directly to them through our new system

And then the last thing is to say that there's a lot of the slide you had, which one that was, but that showed different sort of who's responsible for what? I mean, I think the council can provide leadership here, but I think a lot of this is a lot of the detail. A lot of the sort of, like, execution is on staff. So I just want to say, as 1 council member, like, I think this is really important stuff. And I think shifting from this to compliance driven system to more performance driven is certainly like a key objective. And so I want to yeah. Mayor Mrakas, Beg the manager and staff to really to like make that happen, because I think that's one way to make sure again we're not just sort of. Mayor Mrakas, Checking the box and fill the reports out, but I really making sure that that whatever billions of dollars for spend is actually coming to firms minority owned and women owned firms in our Community so. Mayor Mrakas, yeah mission critical stuff so appreciate this and look forward to to. Mayor Mrakas, High performing city government on this on this one, thank you, thank you, Council Member copac.

Thank you so much for your presentation today, and then my colleagues for your comments. It's already covered most of the ground I wanted to cover, so I'll keep it relatively brief. I do really love, Councilmember Ritz, what you just said about looking at this explicitly as a measure of high-performance government, which is a really key part of our strategic plan for city government. But I'm just really glad we're doing this work. I'm glad this study was commissioned. I'm glad to be the beneficiary of the information, because that really sets us up for success in these next steps. I want to see us translate the study into practice using a race conscious approach and going beyond compliance to focus on performance. A couple levers that stood out for me that I think were valuable were the communications piece, just letting folks know what opportunities are available and making sure that we're sort of stepping outside of some of those informal kind of relational networks that can of perpetuate some of the disparities that we're seeing um and just make it more visible and also the capacity building piece to think about how we can train and support um you know to build capacity but also recognizing that the capacity itself is not major barrier right so i want to highlight that too that was really interesting to see um for me like the most crucial piece of this is the action uh but i'm also just want to encourage us to think about language that we will use as well around this like because i see that you know we talk about kind of nwbe and non-nwbe but i think it's helpful to be just be transparent too you know and you know you often kind of refer to kind of majority business enterprises but that we're often talking about majority male or white male business enterprises think sometimes you're saying like this percent is going to this group also just makes very clear what we're talking about can be helpful as well but for me ultimately language is one thing but the the action that we take and the role we can play as counsel is like the main thing so so thank you this was very informative and educational for me so I was just thinking about that and just thinking about sometimes in some professions that like it's kind of like medical terminology right and so it may not be as easy to so just like giving grace and that component of like

Yeah, just yeah, that's what I'll leave that at.

Thank you. I think we're good. Anyone else? OK, just thank you so much for the presentation. I look forward to staff coming back with goals and planning. And we, I think from the conversation here, you definitely have the full support of the council and we know how critical this work is. Thank you so much for presenting to us. Have a good afternoon. Thank you for having us. Absolutely. And then our last presentation is Number 48. This will also be a public hearing on June 15th.

Good afternoon. Alexis John, Housing and Neighborhood Services Assistant Director, and I am joined by Clarence Harris. We are here to present the proposed ordinance modifications of the City of Durham's Minimum Housing Code. Okay, so this presentation will start off by providing an overview of the Code Enforcement Division. We will also provide code modification process that we use to get to this point and share the goals of the modification process and then present the key proposed modifications, keeping in mind that the full list and documentation of the modifications are in your packet. That includes the bold and underlined version. And we will also propose next steps or share next steps to you. The Code Enforcement Division is made up of 13 staff members who enforce the quality of life ordinances within our city to ensure that residents have safe and healthy housing. And the two chapters that we enforce are Chapter 10 and Chapter 26. But today we'll be talking specifically about Chapter 10, the minimum housing code. So what did the ordinance modification process look like? First, we started with our code enforcement officers. They are the ones in the community every day enforcing the code and they have the most experience with conversations with staff and receiving feedback. So we started with receiving that feedback and compiling it and identifying any pain points of the code that we could see. We also worked with the city attorney's office to receive suggestions and feedback from a legal perspective and compared our code and utilize the international property maintenance code as well as the national healthy housing standards to compare and also look at the pain points pain point areas that we had in our code as a relations to theirs. And not only is it focused on the structures and the property conditions, it also focuses on the health of the residents as well. We also worked with the city's planning department to review the information in the feedback of the comprehensive plan. Sorry, thank you. Comprehensive plan feedback to incorporate that into the modifications as well as receive feedback from various organizations, groups, and property managers. And we also took a look at the ordinance just to make sure that it flowed properly, easy to understand, and there are no conflicting areas. And that is what we did for the process. We had three main goals for the amendments. We wanted to focus on alignment, clarification, and simplification. So these were our North Star or our guiding lights on what we would do with the modifications. And at this point, we will start with the key proposed amendments. The first one is elimination of minimum area requirements for kitchens. This speaks to the desire of additional efficiency homes, which are the smaller homes, the tiny homes or the ADUs. And so it removes the area requirement and allows for more space in other areas of the home or allows for the home to be a lot smaller. The next modification is the interior keyed deadbolts, and that speaks to a safety hazard. You want to make sure that there are no key deadbolts on the inside. It prevents occupants from leaving the property as soon as possible if need be. And this modification also addresses locking devices are not required on secondary exit doors. Air conditioning is not required in the current code and it won't be required moving forward. However, if it does have an air conditioning unit, that air conditioning unit must be in good working condition and also be free of leaks. exterior wall conditions this modification speaks to unsanitary conditions, as well as visible deterioration and chronic or persistent excessive deepness which could cause an environment that could be conducive to a substance that appears to be mold. interior wall conditions. This speaks to visible deterioration in unsanitary conditions as well as the excessive dampness and moisture. This modification speaks to the flooring installation and maintenance, making sure that it doesn't have a tripping hazard or other physical hazards. And it also speaks to the deterioration, unsanitary conditions and persistent dampness as well. And at this point, I'll turn it over to Clarence Harris, the housing code administrator.

Good afternoon. Clarence Harris, Housing Code Administrator. Property drainage. This ordinance modification, we're looking to address drainage problems. I mean, drainage issues before they create a damage to the structure. In particular, we're trying to address erosion control, potential flooding or standing water that may impact the structure of a home. Property drainage and neighborhood and neighboring properties. This amendment, we're trying to address drainage as it relates to property not impacting, negatively impacting a neighboring property as it relates to water being diverted onto adjacent properties. These conditions can generate erosion and potential flood to the neighboring property. We want to ensure that these conditions are not occurring. Slope requirements. Here we want to make sure that in the event that there is grading, that they're not creating unsafe conditions as it relates to erosion and or flooding associated with property conditions. In this particular amendment, we're trying to provide requirements or criteria around the slope. And in this particular case, we're trying to create a one unit vertical and two units are horizontal, which is a 50% slope. Fences and accessory structures. This amendment we're trying to clearly define the difference between fence and accessory structures. In particular, we're trying to make sure we address the conditions of both the fence and accessory structures. We want to make sure that they are maintained and get repaired in safe conditions. physical hazards in yards and courts. Here, this amendment, we're trying to define what physical hazards may consist of in scenarios such as accumulation of tools, debris, equipment, and these conditions that may present a physical hazard to both the adjacent property and immediate property conditions. And also we want to make sure that we clearly define that tarping such cited violations does not constitute a compliance of the cited violation. Premises identification. Here we want to make sure that properties are quickly and easily identifiable by our emergency staff and also that the numbers or lettering of of the identification or clearly in contrast of the structure as it as it relates to the attachments. Water pressure requirements. Here we're trying to address water supply systems. We want to make, we want to ensure that occupants are receiving an adequate pressure and or fixture from the fixtures in addition to providing safety and sanitation needs for that occupant. Pest elimination. This amendment, we're trying to clearly define or create an easy understanding of pest elimination and or precautions made taken to prevent re-infestations. Responsibility of pest elimination in single family dwellings. Here we're trying to clearly define and address concerns as it relates to structural defects and requiring that the property owner is responsible for both the extermination and reinfestation of those conditions. Respond. Responsibilities of pest elimination and multifamily dwellings. In this scenario, we're requiring that property owners are responsible for elimination and prevention of reinfestation. Issuing of stop work orders. We're clearly addressing or providing authority to code enforcement staff to implement stop work orders in addition to support of building and safety department. next steps a public hindering public hearing is scheduled for june 15 2025 for for the city council meeting and we also are working with city staff to update muni code to reflect approved amendments thank you colleagues any questions or comments go ahead council members

Hello, thank you for your presentation. I just have a question around, we'll just need a little bit clarification on the lock requirement on secondary doors. Just from a base setting, like thinking about like, so what do we classify as a secondary door? Like a secondary exit?

would be a storm door, the exterior door.

Okay, I was thinking about like my new builds, we don't really have storm doors. So I'm thinking about like, did you mean to say I can't have a lock on my did like on my balcony door. So I'm just trying to clarify that whole thing, right?

Right. And you could have a lock on it. It's just not required. Okay. Yeah. All right. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilmember Cook. And then Councilmember Kopach.

Thank you. Um, I have some curiosity about adding some things in here, but I might talk to you all offline about those. My one question is the And I want to say also that a lot of this stuff is really awesome. I mean, y'all know because you talk to the folks and or do the inspections and know that this stuff comes up a lot, particularly the first few and the moisture on the walls and the external, internal and the floors. So I want to appreciate the work done on this. And yeah, a lot of these things are super important. The premises identification piece, are we going to assist folks in doing that? I know that there's like, sometimes there's been programs like helping folks get paint that is obvious or something like this. Are we are we going to be assisting in any way for homeowners that might need help doing their clear identification?

We don't have a program currently. That's something that we can explore. It is a small change, but we're willing to assist where needed. I will say if it's a property owner that is qualified for the neighborhood preservation program and they are cited for that violation, that is something that could be repaired.

Okay. Yeah. I feel like I remember that it was fire that used to do it where they would offer to paint on the larger area.

Right. OK. That is actually the reason for that modification is to ensure that emergency personnel are able to identify the home.

Yeah, that makes sense to me. And then can you talk about the the pest elimination piece a little bit more? So that was already the responsibility of the landowner. And and can you just help me understand what these changes, what you'll see these changes doing?

I'll start us off and then Clance if you'd like to add. But for multifamily homes, that is the responsibility of the owner to bring those violations into compliance. For single family homes, it's the responsibility of the occupant to bring those violations into compliance. However, if the infestation has to do with a defect of the structure, that's when it would be on the owner to bring that violation into compliance for a single family home.

And that wasn't already the case?

It wasn't fully explained in there. So that's one of them of providing additional explanation.

Okay, because I was like, that is what I understood it to be. Yes. Cool. Yes. All right. Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Go ahead, Council Member Kopach.

Yeah, thank you for this work. Excited to see these updates and clarifications. And also just going back to your early presentation, you know, I love how this is paired with the emergency repair support, which is critical for many of our neighbors who we've identified there are issues, especially safety and sort of health issues that we have support to try and help make those repairs. So I'm really glad we have that emergency repairs program. My only question right now was about the air conditioning. And if you could describe what kind of leaks that are being monitored for

so any of the tubing that's used for the air conditioning unit must be fully intact free of leaks and it must be in good working condition okay alrighty so it's like it's like looking at

the equipment to make sure that it's all intact. Because I know that it can be notoriously difficult to identify refrigerant leaks, even though that can be a huge driver of cost and also climate pollution besides. But I wasn't sure if it was just looking for a water leak or also looking at the equipment for refrigerant leaks. So that's helpful. Thank you.

Absolutely.

No questions. Just want to say I really appreciate the thoughtfulness of this work and the intentionality behind all the time it takes to work with all the different partners and make sure that these are as high quality as possible. And these changes are in line with best practices. You know, we've been talking about the emergency repairs program and bolstering that. And I think this laser strong foundation strengthens that as we move forward and think more comprehensively about building out a system of housing where everyone can be safe and secure in their housing. And so I think this is a really good place to start. So I appreciate the work. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone else? Okay. Thank you so much for the presentation. Thanks for being here with us today. Glad to see these updates. And with that, colleagues, that is all of the Um agenda items before us, so I will pass it to our manager to settle our agenda.

Thank you, Madam Mayor. Part time members of Council. The Yep. Sorry.

Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. Oh, yeah. Thank you.

Um So as of right now, I don't have general consensus on items three, four and um 11 i'm sorry i don't have a majority i have majority on some of these items there's multiple categories on them so i don't know if you just want to move these three items over to gba and then we do another vote on it or i can do um split these up so i have i have majority on two of the three categories for item three

Let's split it up so that we do the bare minimum on GBA. If that's okay, Madam Clerk.

Sure. All right. So I have that for item three. For item four, I do not. And I have it for one category for item 11. So item four will have to go on GBA. It's going to be the Citizens Advisory Committee appointments.

Okay.

So I'll announce for item three. This was for the Durham Workers' Rights Commission representing diverse backgrounds, low wage industry in Durham's largest workplace. I do not have a majority for I have so you could choose up to five for diverse backgrounds. I only have a majority for four of these seats, and that would be Conlon Fenerty, Italo Medelius, Brianne K. Morrell, and Marcus Speights. So I have a split between re-advertising the seat or choosing Yusuf Abdur.

We can just re-advertise that. I think I was one of the persons who voted. You did. All right.

So we're good on this one then. So. I'm sorry. We're good on three. So for low wage industry, I have a majority to re-advertise that seat. And then for Durham's largest workplace, I have a majority for Nicholas Conti.

Item number three does not have to go on GBA.

Does not. Item four does.

Okay.

All right. Item 11 for the... I'm sorry, item four, it was multiple seats. it was multiple seats i had uh for people to choose three of them i have a majority for kayla rudisell and a majority for uh lily burdick and then i don't have a majority for a third seat um it looks like the the i have three votes for david j mccall um tyria g mccray has two votes tori swain has one miranda blankenship has one so we're good on two

And then you said item number 11.

Madam Clerk item number 11. I have the Housing Appeals Board appointment. I do not have a majority vote for the at large member. I have a majority vote for the homeownership.

Can you tell us where we stood on at large at large?

I have three votes for Rugby a Simon and two votes for Samantha R. Elias. One vote for Benjamin King.

I know I voted for Rugby A. Simon, so I'm one of the three, or I would flip my vote.

I have you for Rugby A. Simon.

It looks like it was Council Member Kopach and Council Member Rist who voted for Samantha R. Elias. Okay, so this one will be fine without going on GBA as well.

So far, only item number four. Is that right? That's right. All right.

And then I can just go down the line here for the rest of them. For the Recreation Advisory Commission appointment, Council has nominated Karthik Sundaramorthy. For the Durham Convention Center Authority appointment, I have Jonathan C. Leach. Patience with this one. This is now appointing 11 vacancies on the participatory budgeting steering committee. I have Juan J. Arango, Warner Collier, Joseph W. Giles, Jenny Rose Halperin, Denard Haney, Robin Lacey, Danny R. Love, Tanya S. Kelly, Ann Rebeck, and Raven Smith for the at-large seats. And for the youth category, we have Ezra Green. For the Durham Convention and Visitors Bureau, Discover Durham, we have Andrew Strickland. For the Workforce Development Board, representing private sector, we have Jerry Bland. For the Housing Appeals Board, the mayoral appointment, we have John R. Griffin. For the Durham Homeless Services Advisory Committee, for the nonprofit organization, we have Tasha D. Melvin. And for the corporate slash private sector, we have Humphrey B. Truitt. And for the Carolina Theater of Durham Board of Trustees, we have Courtney J. Mitchell. So looks like we only have item four to go into GBA for one nomination.

Perfect.

Thank you, Madam Clerk. Yeah, thank you. Now I think we're ready.

Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. Members of Council, so to settle the agenda on consent, we have items 3, 5 through 20, and 22 through 40. On GBA, we have item 4, 16, and 49. And GBA public hearings, we have 42 through 46, and item 48.

Thank you. Can I have a motion to settle? So moved. motion a second all in favor any opposed okay thank you that is all that I know but we already did the thing I'm just not joining us that is all before we have before us we will take a do you all want five minutes yeah yeah five minutes maybe oh we have food do you want five minutes okay then okay all right