Town Council - Regular Meeting

Welcome to the town of Garner regular council meeting on February 3rd, 2026. It's a beautiful night in Garner even if we didn't see Snurd yesterday. Uh somebody said he slept through the whole event and I take that as a good omen that he did not see his shadow. So spring will come early. That's straight from Snert. You can take it to the back. He's never wrong. So, that being said, uh, we'll jump right around and we will ask our town clerk to please call the role. All right. Mayor Gupton here. Mayor Pro Tim Dinger here. Council member Matthews here. Council member Singleton here. Council member Stallings here. And council member Vance here.

Thank you. At this point in the program, we typically have the pledge of allegiance and the invocation. Um, our council member Vance was in charge of this and he has recruited some top level talent for these events here this evening. If you wouldn't mind introducing those, please Mr. Vance. Thank you, Mayor Gupton. Uh, tonight we have with us troop 320 out of FQay. Uh, Mr. Kefir Fume was going to lead us in our pledge of allegiance. You can come up now followed by our invocation. And our prayer will be given to us by Reverend Tracy Bell who is the pastor of life tours ministry immediately after the pledge of allegiance. You

if we would all rise for the pledge of allegiance please salute those not in uniform right hand over your heart. Please join me in the pledge of allegiance. I pledge algiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands. One nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Thank you. Appreciate that.

Well, I want to say good evening to everyone and I want to also salute the greatest uh mayor uh in the state of North Carolina, Mayor Buddy Gupton. Can we just put our hands together for him? And all of these fine councilmen. Uh, I've been here for I know I didn't wasn't asked to say all of this, but I' I'm proud to say that I've been here for 64 years. Graduated with that young man right there, Grace Singleton. Wave your hands, played football with him. And this is just a great place to call home. And uh I know that the seat that you guys fulfill is not easy. So we pray that not only will we open up in prayer here, but you'll remember to pray uh every night so that your work that you do here will be be even easier. Amen. Amen.

Amen. Let us bow. God, we thank you for this grand opportunity as we gather together your presence to do your bidding and to settle your business concerning the town of Garner as you lead and guide these councilmen and council women and uh our great uh firemen and police department and city workers. God, we pray that you would continue to lead us and guide us and help us uh as they try to make the right decisions for your people in advance for this meeting. God, in advance, we give you the glory and the honor and the praise in Jesus name. Amen. Amen.

Amen. Thank you, pastor. Uh and that brings us to item B on the agenda, which is petitions and comments. And I ask the town clerk if anyone has signed up to speak this evening. No, sir. No one signed to speak up. Okay. Uh that being said, we'll move along to item C on the agenda, which is the adoption of the agenda as it stands. I think our council members have had a chance to look this over. Uh I would ask for a motion and a second. So move. Okay. Motion by Mr. Stalins and second by Mr. Matthews. All in favor of adopting the agenda, please signify by saying I. I.

Any opposed by nay? Hearing none, the agenda is adopted. And we're glad to start out with the presentations. And we're starting out with a bang. Tonight we are introducing Miss Garner, Miss Wake County, Miss Garner's team, and Miss Wake County's team. And I'm going to call on our their business manager for the program, Lisa Messik, to please introduce everyone.

Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Uh, my name is Amanda Watson Bailey. Um, I had the privilege of serving as Miss Garner 2008 and then Miss North Carolina 2008. Um, Lisa Messik is our business manager and she could not be with us this evening. So, I it is my joy to um introduce these wonderful young ladies that have come before you tonight to talk a little bit about what they will be doing as uh representatives of Garner and Wake County. We have crowned the very first Miss Wake County this year um that has joined with Miss Garner Association and we're really really excited to see um the new opportunities that will be um coming about because of that new title in adoption with also being a wonderful representation of Garner which is what is so important to us. So um these four young ladies if they could stand and join me here in the center we are going to introduce each of them and then each of them will speak. Um ladies, could you all stand up and come to the center and I know that there may be some pictures taken. Um and we'll begin with our current Miss Way County um Gianna. And then we'll have the other young ladies sit down and then they'll come up one by one and present a little bit to you about their plans this year. And we thank you for letting us be here this evening. Hi, my name is Giana Buff and I'm honored to serve as the first Miss Wake County and to have the opportunity to represent and serve my community this year. Through this role, I have already learned so many valuable skills and it has truly been a pleasure to attend and participate in meaningful events, especially being able to speak here tonight at the Garnertown Council meeting. So, thank you guys for your attention and for your time and for welcoming me and my sister Queens here. My community service initiative is called building balance and it's all about supporting wellness and empowering confidence. I chose this initiative because as a college student, especially being in a sorority, I've seen firsthand how many people, especially young

adults, struggle to find balance. Over the past year, I've learned that wellness isn't about restriction or perfection, but it's about balance, consistency, and growth. I've also learned that my journey isn't like everyone else's in terms of my physical health, mental health, and emotional well-being. So, really finding what works for you and what supports you the most is extremely important, especially with social media being so influential these days and holding people, especially young people, to unrealistic standards. So far, I've hosted a community wellness drive. and I was proud to involve my sorority at North Carolina State University, Zeta Tao Alpha, and participating in my efforts. In the coming weeks, I will be donating to the Women's Center of Wake County, helping provide essential wellness and self-care items to women who may not otherwise have access to them. In addition, I've also started a social media series on my Miss Wake County Instagram called Wellness Wednesdays, where I highlight other local title holders and how they build balance. So trying to make my social media a little more interactive. I also share practical tips for living a healthy and balanced lifestyle. And I do mindset moments such as affirmations and inspirational quotes to really encourage confidence in others focusing on that mental health aspect. Looking ahead, I'm currently planning a fundraising event that will be held in May benefiting school meals for alln supporting nutrition education and food access for children and families across our state. I believe wellness begins with access, education, and community support. So supporting this organization really does mean a lot to me. I will also be attending their meetings on Zoom where they speak about building the case for policy change nutrition standards and policy change food security. Something I've learned is that many kids growing up don't have access to nutrition education and healthy eating. So really

instilling this early on helps them to build those healthy standards um early on, decrease health risks later on, and also support them to have the mental energy to perform well academically, which is something that School Meals for AllC really focuses on. What I have learned through all these experiences is that service doesn't always have to be grand to be meaningful. Whether it's refilling a local blessing box, volunteering at note in the pocket on an early Saturday morning, or even just showing up consistently for those in need, every act of service truly matters. These moments of connection remind us that building a stronger community starts with showing up and being willing to help. And through the Miss America organization, every title holder that I have come across truly does want to help. And that is what makes this organization so special. That's part of their purpose and their passion. So, I am incredibly grateful for the opportunity to serve Wake County, and I look forward to continuing to work alongside community leaders, organizations, and community members to build a healthier, more confident, and more connected community. Thank you again for allowing me to speak this evening. I'm so honored to represent Wake County and that Garner is a part of Wake County because I grew up here. So, coming back here always brings back the best memories. And I love how this small town has grown and it's filled with so many opportunities and love. So, thank you again, Hi everyone, my name is Cheyenne Hudson. I'm Miss Wake County's team 2026. I wanted to say thank you for having us today and I wanted to talk a little bit about my community service initiative, Different Minds One World, promoting autism acceptance. Different Minds One World was started because of my little sister who was diagnosed with autism about two years ago. I saw how much it greatly impacted her lives with having a label and being

mistreated and not having the same opportunities as other kids. She went to a dance studio and they wouldn't let her try out because of misbehavior and not understanding how her brain works or figuring out ways that she's able to learn better. Um, she went to a school where they would kick her out in the hallway and they would tell her that she had to finish a different subject while they went on to the next. So, she was falling behind greatly in schools. Um, she also went to another school that wouldn't give her a 504 and an IEP plan. My sister is now homeschooled. Thank you to my mother. And my plan for the next couple of weeks is I have a donation starting and it'll be at Dixon Road Elementary and we're doing a fundraiser for the special education program. We're going to have little activities for all the kids and I plan to partner with Vance Elementary and start a fundraiser over there. And I just wanted to thank y'all so much for having me. Hi everyone, I'm Isvara, your Miss Garner's team 2026. I proudly promote my community service initiative heartto-he heart let's make a difference because I believe that we shouldn't start by taking care of our hearts only when it's diagnosis. We should know knowledge about our hearts starting young. Which is why I want to promote heart-healthy habits to the younger generations. Whether that's maintaining a healthy weight, getting regular phys activity, eating healthy, and not smoking. My original goal was to just go to elementary schools and make a little heart-healthy promise bracelet. Well, each bead represents a little promise of like, I promise to go outside more. I promise to eat my vegetables. But I was recently told that you can tell kids something and it'll go one ear and out the other. So having that physical memory of I promise to do this, it really leaves an impact on them. And I

got to see how heart attacks can impact someone firsthand, my best friend personally, and I just want to give those knowledge on how to take care of your heart. And it's not just about one big thing of I just can go outside and take care of my heart because I was asked recently, how can you tell someone who has hereditary heart problems? Well, that's sometimes not something you can prevent, but to take care of your heart because you only have one makes a big difference. And I know personally because this January I started a 26 mile challenge for 2026 where throughout the month I was able to compete in against multiple other title holders where we competed in 26 miles and it was so fun. And this month being the heart month, I got to wear my amazing red jumpsuit to show the heart health. And I challenge everyone this Friday, please wear your red for the National Go Red Day. And that's all. So now it's Aaron's turn. Good evening, gardener. Good evening. My name is Arena Morolu and I have the honor and privilege of serving as the 67th Miss Gardener. There's been a lot of support from this community over the last almost seven decades. And our organization truly cannot thank you all enough for pouring into us and supporting our title holders year after year. As you've already heard, we were able to add the titles of Miss Wake County and Miss Wake County's team this year. So, we're just looking forward to providing more opportunities for young women to experience what the Miss America, Miss North Carolina, and Miss Gardenardner organizations have to offer. These are organizations that are scholarship organizations at their core. So, we might be in our crowns and sash, but we also walk away with scholarship dollars to advance our higher education goals. As title holders, like you've heard us talk about, we have what's called our community service initiatives, and these are the things

that we are the most passionate about. My CSI is entitled Elevate Ed and it's all about providing access and support for students in their pursuit of a college degree. I was a first generation college graduate, the first and so far only person in my family to have a master's degree. And now I work full-time at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as the youngest staff member in the graduate school. I really work every day with students and I see these unique challenges but also the triumphs that they experience through higher education. and it's what led me to create my CSI Elevate Ed. So, in my time since its creation, I've been able to launch an online resource collective with free resources I created myself for our students. So, it's helps them with everything from the college application process to being successful while they're in college and even that career search after their time. I've also been able to present to students across North Carolina um at a few different high schools and specifically title one high schools to give those special students the support that they need to access higher education. And more recently, I've been able to meet with some of our state representatives, including Lieutenant Governor Rachel Hunt to talk about the state of higher education here in North Carolina, ways that I can work together with her and Elevate Ed to promote this. And just looking forward to the opportunities to promote college access for our students across the state and hopefully across the nation. This is something that is extremely personal to me, but I think is very important to all of us. Education is not just the private good, but it's the public good as well. We know that with a more educated society, we have people who are more civically engaged. We reduce incarceration and recidivism rates. And that's why I'm very honored to be able to use this platform to be able to talk about something that isn't just so important to me, but is so important to so many of us. So, thank you again for your time, your support, and your support for this scholarship organization and what it does for young women. So, thank you.

Don't go far. I'm going to ask council members if they have any comments they'd like to make. And then I understand there is a photo op here. There's no none of this is complete without a photo op. So, let's start with Mr. Matthews any comments or questions you might have. Sir, how come you always get the photo ops? Hey, hey, what can I say?

But, uh, great job ladies. You all speak well. You present yourself well, very articulate in your work. You don't read script. Just occasionally check your notes. That goes a long ways. And your eye contact, it's amazing how I know these things, but that lady and I go back a few years. And uh but uh congratulations and we look forward to seeing you going on to your next level. Uh Wake County, Miss Garner, y'all might be competing, but that'd be a good problem. Hope you're in the top two. And the teams, go get them.

All right, Mr. Singleton. Congratulations to all of you. Uh you also second Mr. Matthew said y'all did a great job presenting the platform and that's something to be proud of. Wish you the best of luck as you move forward uh serving the town of Garner and also Wake County and congratulations again to all of you. Uh thank you all for being here. Um thank you for representing Garner and Wake County so well. Um we can tell the confidence and the passion that you have for service. Um, so thank you for being here and thank you for all you do, inspiring the young folks that look up to you and the things that you're doing.

Yeah, thank you all so much. Um, I think it's always a misconception that beauty pageantss about external beauty, but it's about internal beauty and the passion. I think that's what you guys bring and it's really great to see you using your platform for your passion. you can tell you really care about the things that you're pursuing and regardless of what you do in competitions, you're going to be helping people and that's what it's really all about. So, thank you all so much for your time and commitment that you're to do what you're doing.

Thank you for being here. Thank you for your presentation. Very well done. Wish you all the best. You're representing you're representing Wake County and Garner Well, continued success. And I'm going to ask our public information officer to get us arranged at the right place to look our best. see why I did that job.

I'm telling you. All right. Thank you. Thanks again, ladies. That's fantastic. Moving right along to item uh uh D, presentations. Item number two, the future of the Wake County EMS. And uh Chief Chief Penny, I tell you, you got you got a hard act to follow here. you're going to have to really pull some radish out of the hat to keep our attention after that. So, I'll turn that over to you to introduce our special guest here this evening.

All right. Thank you, Mayor. So, um it's my pleasure to introduce our inner medical director, Jeff Williams. Uh he not only provides medical direction to all EMS staff, but he's also provides medical direction for all the first responders in Wake County. So, uh, he's going to talk a little bit about the future of Wake County EMS and some changes that that I think the, uh, users are going to see. So, if, um, at the end of it, you have any questions for me, I'll be glad to step back up and talk with you about them. Doctor,

thank you, Chief. Um, thank you, Mr. Mayor, and council members. I appreciate your time tonight. I want to take a quick brief moment just to introduce myself and our team that we have here with us. I'm Jeff Williams. Uh I'm an EMS physician and emergency physician. I've been serving the Wake department for about the last 15 years or so as the deputy medical director and with the departure of Dr. Kabanas uh just a few days ago actually um stepped into the interim medical director role. Um with us tonight we have Daryl Alford, our interim deputy county manager, uh Don Garner, our chief EMS operating officer, and Dr. Andrew Godfrey, our associate medical director. Um I send regards from uh Dr. Studick, who is our department director. Um the slides you have in front of you are the slides that we've sent to all of our elected officials across the county. Uh Dr. Studnick is um a pediatric EMS researcher amongst many of his other hats and he is uh out of town tonight leading a pediatric EMS research conference. Um so without further ado, we'll we'll jump right in. Um, what I would like to do today is talk a little bit about Wake County EMS, just give you kind of a reminder of who we are and what we do. Um, and then talk about kind of the purpose uh, for being here tonight, which is some changes that we see in our future. Um, and then talk about kind of next step for those changes and how we're making sure to engage everyone as we as we go along. Um, so first of all, who are we? Probably most importantly is who do we serve? U, we serve the entire county. um all 857 square miles of Wake. Um that's about a hundred uh uh sorry 1.2 million residents in Wake County. Um and about 66 new people per day. If you guys I'm not telling you anything you don't already know, but if you Google, you know, uh lists of the largest growing counties in the United States, greater than a million people, we're on the top

of it. um and and a lot of those a lot of those lists um to to ballpark 66 new people per day. If if if that growth rate were to continue, that would be like adding another garner every two years uh to our county. Um hopefully the growth rate won't continue quite that high, but that's a lot of folks coming to our county. Um obviously 12 municipalities of of which you're one. Um, and that rapid growth means uh and and frankly large system at baseline means that we need a large EMS system to um take care of all those folks. Um, at Wake County EMS, we have 90 ambulances um in our in our fleet. U, about 54 or 55 of those are on duty at any given peak time. Um, we actually have a very low uh vacancy rate. I believe it's still near zero, which is the lowest it's been in a decade. And the reason for that difference in number of ambulances versus fleet ambulances is there's always one getting serviced, right? We put a lot of miles on them. We uh remount the the uh the the back end of it on a new chassis every once in a while. Um so it requires um almost twice, not quite twice, the number of ambulances to to be able to staff that many at at peak times. Uh we start out of uh 40 stations around the county um every shift. Um but it is important to note that we are not stationbased dispatch. Um we change shifts at fixed locations. Obviously people have to meet their ongoing and offgoing crew. Um but we use what's called um closest resource dispatching which means that we send the closest ambulance to whatever the next 911 call for service is. So whether you start in Wake Forest or Zebulun or Garner or Raleigh, whatever call you're closest to, uh that's the ambulance that you're going to get. We have about 550

almost 550 uh full-time equivalents in the department, FTEES in our department. And we're pleased to say that um almost all of those 500 plus of those are field level personnel. The county supports the department with things like HR, um I mentioned fleet already, GSA, uh you know, facility services, all of the kind of support services so that we can we as a department can kind of focus on our mission of of taking care of people. Um, a little bit more about who we are. More recently, we have been very fortunate, continue to be very fortunate to have the strong support of the manager's office and the board of commissioners at Wake County to uh, sort of help us through this period of uh, rapid growth uh, in the county. The graph on the left there, apologize, I know some of you will be behind your head, but I'm going to use my my pointer here if I can. Uh, maybe maybe not. The graph on the left there shows um both our growth in patient transports over the last four or so years as well as our growth in EMS funding. So in the um kind of early 2022 period uh right after COVID as we were kind of getting things back to normal we did about 80,000 80 plus thousand EMS transports to the hospital per year. Uh now in uh early 2026 we are doing about 120,000 EMS transports per year and that's at a call volume of about 150,000 per year expected in 2026. Our budget has grown um commensurate with that which is really fantastic um up to a budget this year of uh just about $88 million. You'll see on the graph to the right that our um field EMS personnel are reflected in that funding support. So again, coming straight out of COVID, we had a little bit of a flat hiring period. Um in our profession, we called it the great healthcare migration. Um people wanted to be EMS or didn't want

to be in EMS, wanted to work in the hospital, didn't want to work in the hospital, you know, postcoid. And so it was a big shift there. Um but we were able again with support from our uh county management to um really go on a hiring spree quite frankly and have some of the um highest uh pay rates for paramedics and EMTs uh in North Carolina and really even in the southeast um that allowed us to kind of continue to hire in 2024 and 2025 um to to where you see it now. Um and again those 450 folks are our field EMTs and paramedics. There's another 50 plus or so who are advanced practice paramedics and our supervisors. Um and then again just a handful of us administrators to make up that 546 FTEES. So what do we do with all those all those people and and trucks and money? Um the answer is that we take really good care of people. I'm very proud to say that as the interim medical director. Um compassion is in our mission is in our mission statement. um we have had for a long time and continue to have some of the best clinical outcomes when you compare our system to other systems. So our cardiac arrest survival rate is something that kind of gets compared nationally in EMS circles um as a way to kind of apples to apples compare EMS systems one to another. We all are a little bit competitive. Um and and we like to say um that if you're if you're going to have a cardiac event, a good place to do it is in Wake County. Um, and we're we're very proud of that cardiac arrest survival rate. Um, we also are innovative and have been innovative for a long time and will continue to be innovative in thinking forward about how to best take care of the population of folks in Wake County. Um, we've had advanced practice paramedics for um, now 10 or 15 years. I think uh, Dr. Godfrey is in charge of that group. Um, that group of folks responds, redirects and reduces. And what that means is they respond to high

acuity calls with our other ambulance units to provide an experienced set of hands on those most critical calls. Um they reduce uh transports to the ER uh for patients who may not need to go to the ER. Our mental health and substance use patients often benefit for going directly to a mental health facility or substance facility as opposed to sitting in the ER for a long period of time. And then they redirect patients as well again to better sources of care, better access points for care. Um, work with our high volume utilizer patients to make sure they have primary care, make sure they have social workers, that sort of thing. Uh, so that they're less reliant on the 911 system. And I want to spend another second talking about nurse navigation because we'll talk about that again here in a few minutes. Our nurse navigation program uh, was started in 2022 and has been ongoing now for about three and a half years. And what happens when you call 911 is that a telecommunicator at the 911 center has about 90 seconds to talk with you, which is not a very long time. Um, and in those 90 seconds, they try to determine exactly what type of emergency you may be having or not having, and then they give you a dispatch code. And we'll talk more about that in a few minutes. And what it turns out is that many many of those dispatch codes do not necessarily predict a super sick patient. And so some of those patients who are less sick get to talk to a nurse, which is a really great benefit because, as you all may know, if you've called the nurse triage line at your own primary care office or your pediatrician's office, you can talk to a nurse for a little bit longer and talk in a more familiar and narrative way. And those nurses can really help you figure out what's going on and might even be able to off you offer you alternatives that don't involve a trip to the emergency department. So things like self-care instructions, things like um you might not need to go to the emergency department, but you might need to go to

an urgent care. And if you need to go to an urgent care, the service that we contract with will provide you transportation to that urgent care at no cost to the patient. uh they will come and pick you up with a lift, take you to the urgent care, take you to the pharmacy, take you back home. Sometimes you might not even need to go somewhere and you could have a tele medicine visit with a doctor uh online and uh and and get your problem solved that way. And sometimes by talking to a nurse for a little bit longer than you get to talk to a 911 dispatcher, you do indeed need an ambulance and that's okay, too. And so about half the time or a little more than half the time, those nurses will send the calls back to the 911 center for an ambulance dispatch and then we go and take that patient to the hospital. So lots of innovation in care delivery over the years. Um and that's something that we're going to talk about again here in just a couple of minutes. Um certainly um what we will continue to do as well with support of the county manager's office and our commissioners is to continue to increase those numbers of personnel, continue and increase those numbers of ambulances uh as well as uh the numbers of stations we have in our community. Um so that's a little bit about who we are. I want to transition now to talking about what we're here for for the last half of the presentation or so and talk about some changes that are coming in 2026. Um we just said that uh there are a couple of different ways to manage growth in the EMS system. Uh one of those is increasing budget. One of those is in hiring additional staff. One of those is building new stations. A fourth strategy to continue to manage growth is making sure that our response plan and the way that we go to calls is the right way to do that for a population of 1.2 million people and 150,000 EMS calls per year. Um, and that's what I want to focus on for the next couple of minutes. It turns out that um, well, let me back up. This slide basically shows you that there are broadly two categories of

people who call 911, categories of of of patient complaints, uh, when when patients call 911. Um, and it turns out that it is more common um, in our volume of patients for people to call 911 for uh, a need to access care, but not necessarily an immediate time-sensitive life-threatening emergency. So, people call 911 for things like uh, belly pain that started three or four hours ago, belly pain that started yesterday, belly pain that started a couple days ago. Uh, people call for nausea, vomiting, and diarrhea. A lot of people call during flu season because they have the flu. and they may call 911 because they don't have a way to get to the hospital or because they don't have a primary care doctor and we are their access point. One of my mentors always said, "Why would you not call 911?" Of course, you would call 911. You call 911, you got talk to some really smart people, and then somebody shows up at your door not too terribly long later to help you. That is a great reinforcement for calling 911. And we honor that and we want to take care of every single one of those people. Less commonly, people call 911 because they are in cardiac arrest. They've had a major heart attack, their heart's not beating, they require CPR. Uh they call 911 because they're struggling to breathe and they need help with with with that. Um they call 911 because they've been shot or because they've been in a severe car accident. Those are the 911 calls that we think about when we think about EMS and fire first responders. Um but they are much less common than the than the other type. And it actually turns out that out of about every 100 calls or so, only 10 or 15% of those are the ones that require that time critical life-saving intervention. The other 80 or 90% are important to us and uh are patients that we need to help and patients that we need to serve, but they are not those most time critical, most life-threatening emergencies. Um, and it turns out, and this is why we're having the conversation, that the current way

that we respond to calls treats almost all of those calls the same in terms of having the same urgency. And our our director has said, and I'll repeat him here, and and you guys can tell me I quoted him, uh, that if you treat everything like an emergency, it's hard for anything to be an emergency. And so what we want to do is make sure we're prioritizing those most important calls while also still serving the needs of everybody who calls 911. And so this is where I'm going to use my laser pointer. I apologize. I know that means you guys might have to turn around a little bit, but um what we have now is what we call a first come first serve EMS system. And in a smaller EMS system with fewer calls, this works well. And what happens is that this person here, the first person to the left, calls 911, and they have uh some belly pain, and we send an ambulance to that. Call 911, get an ambulance. The next person over here calls 911, they have a minor injury, maybe they have some bleeding, it's controlled, and they get an ambulance. And this next person over here, they had an event and it was scary and now it's over and they're calling and they want to get checked out. And so they send an ambulance. And then all of a sudden, this person here calls 911 is having severe shortness of breath. And we want to send them an ambulance, but the ambulance that was closer to them might have been one of these three ambulances that got sent on a different call. If you if you send ambulances on a first come, first serve basis every single time. Um, and so what we really want to be sure of is that this person here who's having the most serious emergency gets care first. Um, I mentioned that we have about 150,000 calls a year. What that translates to is about 400 EMS calls a day. And if you average that out, that's about one EMS call every 3 to four minutes of the day that's coming into the 911 center, getting processed, and getting sent out. The problem is, or

a problem, is those calls don't come in on an every 3 to four minute average over the day, right? They come in at peak times. They come in actually right about now while while we're meeting and talking about this sometime in the afternoon and early evening hours on most days. And at peak times these four calls are happening all together simultaneously. They're happening one after the other after the other in a 10 to 15 second interval and not a 3 to four minute interval. So what we need to move to is an improved triage system that is a better model for large modern EMS systems so that we make sure that we get the best care to the patient who needs it the most the first while still serving everyone else. And so this is prioritization called through telephone triage. Patients call 911. They answer a series of important questions. Again, they got about 90 seconds or so to do that. And some recent clinical research that we actually participated in in our EMS system has demonstrated that answers to those questions can accurately predict whether those patients are super sick and need one of those time critical interventions or whether they don't. And so using that evidence-based practice can make sure that we get to those sickest patients first. This is the most sort of busy slide in the presentation and the one that I want us to focus on for a minute. Our new response plan uh has four levels, four categories, E1 through E4. And it provides a plan, the words at the bottom here, I'm going to say first, uh for us to focus on our most critical patients to address multiple calls that are received at the same time and to make sure that at times of high demand, we have the resources we need to respond to every single call in the system. Those E1 calls are the calls that we already respond to today with our first responder partners immediately with lights and sirens. And we're going to do that tomorrow. We're going to do

tomorrow just like we do it today. Um and and and there's going to be no change in those in those call types. That's about 20% of our call volume. You might remember me saying a few minutes ago that we know that 10 or 15% are truly the ones that are that are that are the most sick. That 20% allows us to cast a broad net. We don't want to miss any of those people. We're going to send um um all of those folks an immediate dispatch and lights and sirens. I'm going skip down to the bottom. These E4 calls are our nurse navigation patients. We already send a whole lot of our callers to nurse navigation today. Um and by and large, uh 90 plus% of the time, they're very satisfied with that. They love talking to the nurse. We actually had a patient call back uh a time or two that said, "I don't want an ambulance. can you just reconnect me with that nice nurse? And we said we would do our best. Um, so th those are the folks that that we want to send to nurse nav and we we think that we can increase the number of folks that we're sending to nurse navigation. Our E2 calls are patients who are very likely to not need an immediate life-saving intervention, but we're not 100% sure. And we're going to send our fire first responders on some of those with us. They already go to some of those with us now. already now today. They don't go on some of those and we're going to go to those immediately as well uh from the EMS system standpoint. And that leaves us with the E3 calls and these are people who pretty obviously need access to care and they're not proper or not best for nurse navigation, but we may not need to go to them immediately. Um and as we're preparing this presentation, we're looking through the calls, just the calls that are happening in real time in our system. And the best example that popped up to us as we prepared this talk was somebody who needs their stitches out. And that was really a patient uh three or four weeks ago um who called 911 because they needed their stitches out. Obviously, we can't send that to a nurse. That can't be handled by tele medicine with a doctor. And this person didn't have any other way to get to the hospital. So, they called us um and we said, "Sure,

happy to come get you and carry you to the hospital, get your stitches out." But clearly that's not a higher priority than somebody who may be having a heart attack or trouble breathing or those sorts of things. Um so to conclude uh well let me let me finish one more slide here. Um I want to talk about lights and sirens because that is a part of this that's going to be visible uh to our community. Um right now today we already run a decent number of calls without our lights and sirens. We go to those lowest acuity calls without lights and sirens on. Um, and we get there in an appropriate amount of time. Um, much like uh a medicine, there are risks and benefits to lights and sirens. And we want to use our lights and sirens when it's going to benefit people and not necessarily where that risk is going to outweigh benefit. Some of you may have seen um unfortunate news stories where an ambulance is proceeding appropriately through an intersection um doing everything they're supposed to be doing, going slowly with their lights and sirens on. But that's a very distracting thing. And that ambulance can get in a wreck. Other citizens and and residents of the county can get into wrecks just by simply watching firet trucks and and ambulances go with their lights and sirens. And so we only want to use our lights and sirens when it's most beneficial. And so we're going to reduce our use of lights and sirens going forward. in uh conjunction with this plan. Um this plan is fair, it's accurate, uh it's clinically excellent for everyone. And I know I'm at my time here, but I just want to conclude by talking about the work that we've done uh specifically with our fire first responder partners uh with folks like y'all um and how we plan to move forward. Um our 911 center partners are integral in this. um regardless of any sort of response configuration changes, we meet with them monthly, if not more than monthly, uh to talk about um answering the phone and all of these codes that we're discussing and ways to make sure that calls are being processed as efficiently as possible to get the right resource to the right patient in the right amount of

time. Um, I would say that our fire first responder partners, including Chief Penny's crowd, obviously are uh our closest um colleagues and partners when it comes to the healthcare of our citizens and residents in Wake County. Um and um we uh have had several uh presentations with with uh our fire first responder partners and uh those presentations uh caused us to have a a working group that's actually been met uh meeting over the last several months, a smaller group of fire chiefs and EMS leadership u to kind of talk about how uh this plan may or may not affect the fire departments um concerns uh that that the fire departments uh and their leadership have heard from either um residents or from you all and how we might address those together. Um, and really we've I feel like we've had a great working relationship with those folks over the last uh several months. Um, there are a couple of working group highlights that I want to just hit quickly. Um, we agree with our fire colleagues that the current system needs improvement. And when we say that, we mean that we need to be more reliable. We need to be more reliable in how we respond to our residents. We need to be more reliable in making sure that we're appropriately utilizing our fire first responder resources. Um and and part of that means making sure that the fire department uh personnel can uh handle their high priority incidents as well, right? We would much prefer our fire colleagues to go to a high acuity fire response like a structure fire at somebody's home than have to be caught up with a more low acuity EMS response that EMS can handle by ourselves. And that patient again, maybe they need their stitches out, maybe they can wait a few minutes um for a response. Um, we're going to measure all of this, I think, is what this slide says. And I apologize. I'm just going to cruise through here for the sake of time. Um, we're going to measure all of this with our fire first responder partners. We have several performance metrics that we're going to be evaluating starting in the summer, uh, going through the end of the year and into next year. measure

time on scene, measure call volumes for each of our departments, uh measure call volumes for ourselves, uh and measure patient impact and make sure we're not having any changes to those clinical outcomes that we're that we're very proud of. Now, um we've met with local government leadership, obviously, including yourselves. Um we uh continue to plan to meet with the community as part of next steps. Um uh we're actually working this week and I'm just clicking through these slides that you have available to you there in front of you. Um to uh working this week with our county communications department to schedule public meetings around the county. I think there's going to be seven now, not the six that you see there on the screen. um to uh hear feedback from our residents and make sure that we're understanding their concerns, make sure that we're explaining things to them and make sure that we're available for every single one of those patients, whether they're high acuity or whether they are lower acuity. Um we plan this uh process to sort of take kind of the rest of the year. Um we plan to kind of start some of these changes in the spring. Again, measure each step as we go, make sure that we're having the impact that we expect that we'll have. Um, and if for some reason something needs to change, uh, the roll out is phased so that we can make changes as we need to to make sure it's having the effects that it's intended and not putting an undue burden on anyone. Certainly not our patients, but also not our public safety partners either. With that, I am a couple minutes over my time and I apologize. I'm happy to take any questions. Um, if you have questions now, that's great. If you have any questions later, certainly um Director Alford can can help you uh kind of route those the right way. And we're always happy to be here and provide feedback to any of you about our EMS system.

Well, I'll start out by saying Wake EMS is one of our most valued and most often worked with partners. Well, we really appreciate what you do. You even cohabit one of our buildings with our fire department and a little known the police department is right in the same building too, sir. uh as well as the big facility that you have off Timber Drive that's very very conveniently located toward my house. So just in case something goes bad, you're there. I feel good. So we we really appreciate what you do. Appreciate you being here this evening. I'm going to start down just then ask for questions or comments for Mr. Vance, we'll come down the road. Have no questions. Thank you so much for the briefing and for all you're doing for Wake County and for Garner. Yes, sir. Thank you.

Thanks so much for the information. I did have one question. You you mentioned it as a it's almost like a pilot. Is this a pilot of a new model that you're implementing or is this implementation of an existing model that's been done in other places?

It's a great question. Um this idea of telephone triage or of uh separating dispatch by um acuity is not new. Um there is actually a um network of folks around the country that have done this in various ways. We like to say an EMS, if you've seen one EMS system, you've seen one EMS system. So things are slightly different depending on the population and the land area that an EMS system serves. But many people around the country have done some form of improved triage of their um 911 calls. And frankly, we're a little bit behind. And part of that is COVID and part of that is just us making sure that we match growth. probably our most uh close uh partner uh around the state, most like system has done something like this is our neighbors in Charlotte. Um they have about the same size system and about the same um type of system, not exactly the same. Um and they've been doing telephone triage for quite some time. Um they're not to get too far in the weeds, uh unless we want to, but they're doing something a little bit different with the way that their fire departments assist with calls versus what we are doing. Um we are not planning to send our fire department partners on uh some large number of EMS calls without EMS. Um Charlotte has has done that to some extent. Um but they have indeed had uh great success with telephone triage over the years.

Thank you. Mr. Tall, um no questions. Very comprehensive um presentation. Learned a lot. Um definitely looking forward to the implementation. Matter of fact, actually, as I'm speaking, I do have a question. Is the reduction of the lights and sirens already a thing that's been implemented or is that going to be implemented?

Uh, no, not exactly. So, as I mentioned today, we already respond to 20 or so percent I would say of our call volume without lights and sirens. Um, those calls that are very clearly low acuity um andor calls that, um, we've gotten more information about from that nurse navigation program I mentioned. um with some of the clinical research that we've done over the last couple of years, we know that that fraction can increase pretty dramatically. That's something that we haven't done yet, but something that we plan to implement in phases as we go through the kind of E1 through E4 implementation. So, thank you for being here. It's pretty informative. Yes, sir. Absolutely. Thank you, Mr. Singleton.

Thank you for the presentation. Uh I can tell you from my family's unexperienced the past two years we've had to use both Garner fire and rescue and wake MS transport from my parents with their serious health issues. Came to my parents house multiple times and then both parents had to go to health facilities for their serious health issues and wake me had to transport both of them multiple times. So appreciate the work and and what y'all do. uh it's greatly appreciated by those of us who have had to use it and and uh those who you may not have used it in in the past uh we get really really good uh level of service and I want to thank all y'all for all the work that y'all do.

Thank you very much. Appreciate that. Thank you for great presentation and uh appreciate all you guys being out here. Have all of you especially that gentleman in the back and I go back a little bit there but uh back in commissioner days but I remember the first time you made that comment and I was at Memorial Auditorium had a graduating class that year and they first come out said if you're going to have a heart attack you want to have it in Wake County because your survival rate is much better than anywhere else in North Carolina. And I never forgot that. I'm glad that's still continuing on, especially at my age now. So, uh, but I'm not looking forward to having one, but I know I'm living in the right place. But thank you for the presentation. Thank you for what all you guys and ladies do. We appreciate it and glad to share joint facilities with you.

Yes, sir. I I would just add that I wish the young lady was still here. She's not wrong. Like prevention is most most one of the most important parts and we work with our um public health partners and all the rest to to have a a very healthy county. But if you do, heaven forbid, have that heart attack, we'll be there to help you out 100%. Excellent. Thank you very much. And you know who to talk to. Uh Chief Penny is always a good place to start and contact us when we can help you in any way. Thank you very much. Yes, sir. Thank you for having us. Thank you.

And that brings us along to item E, which is the consent agenda. These are a couple of items on here of a little more administrative nature. uh council has had a time to look at them and if there's uh any items that we need to remove off of the consent agenda for further discussion uh let me know. If not I will accept a motion to accept the consent agenda. So moved second. There's a motion by Mr. S by Mr. Matthews and a second by Mr. Stalins. All in favor of approving the consent agenda please signify by saying I.

I. Any opposed by nay? Hearing? None. The consent agenda passes unanimously. That brings us down to item F. And these are several discussion topics. These were brought forward from the January 27th work session that was cancelled at a public safety regard. There was quite a bit of snow and bad weather. And we'll start this out with item number one is capital and debt model update. And I believe our presenter tonight is Miss Sharon Warren, our budget director.

Yes. So, I am here to introduce um Ted Cole from Davenport, um our financial advisors. He is no stranger to many of you. Um he's going to give an update on our uh financial model and uh offer some information on future borrowing um for potential uh CIP projects. And then after that, we'll have some information related to the CIP for you. Um, so with that, I'm going to turn it over to Ted.

Good evening. I appreciate the opportunity to be here. Um, we have presented to um, this body many times before, but this may be new for some of you. Again, I'm Ted Cole with Davenport. We've served as financial adviser to the town for a number of years and by and large the work that we do tends to focus on capital planning for capital projects, developing funding plans, um looking at financial policies, bond ratings, and then actually helping execute financings when you all determine you want to go out and do a borrowing for a project. So, what's on the screen is exactly what's in your book. Some of these slides will be a lot easier to see in the book. There's some small numbers. Um I believe this is allformational. Lot looking for any action from you all, but happy to take questions along the way. Um and try to address those as we go. Um and I'm going to cover a a just really a handful of topics. I'm going to start with a little bit of overview on the town's bond ratings. Um we're going to talk about your existing debt profile. That is what debt has been issued. What are you all already obligated to? And then we're going to introduce two concepts that are related but but slightly different. One is debt capacity. So that is the ability of the town to issue debt and stay within compliance of your debt policies and sort of rating agency best practices. So sort of on paper, how much could you borrow, what capacity is there? And then there's a separate but related question which is debt affordability. How do you pay for it? And a lot of times with local governments, we see there's ample debt capacity, meaning on paper, you could take on additional debt and still demonstrate you're very sound financially, but it's a separate question of do you have the

money in your budget to repay that debt? and we'll cover debt capacity, debt affordability, and then we'll get into a high level discussion about just the various financing options that are available to North Carolina local governments, a little bit about the local government commission, and we're going to talk a little bit about um a potential uh not a potential, but a hypothetical bond referendum schedule were that to be something you all would want to pursue in the future. And then as Sarah said, I think this will dovtail nicely with the projects uh the the presentation behind me which is um capital projects. We're really not going to be talking myself about any particular project. We're talking about bigger picture financing capacity and affordability. So with that u page numbers are in the bottom right corner. Um on the left hand side of this slide in the bottom left um there are three national rating agencies. Moody's standard and for pores and Fitch. They're the three most commonly used. You all in many local governments um have two ratings outstanding. One from Moody's, one from S&P. Um you'll notice that AAA is the highest rating that any local government or state or federal entity can achieve. And you are AAA rated from S&P. You've been AAA rated um since 2018. And you're a double A1 from Moody's. You're one notch away from that AAA rating. And that is a I believe a reasonable and achievable goal at some point going forward to get Moody's to that AAA. I don't think that is something that is beyond um your reach or our reach. Um these ratings are pretty if you will fresh. Um Moody's you'll see in the upper left published um on the about the town in March of 25. So it's very current in that regard as did S&P that was tied to a bond issue. So, very highly rated. Um, the right hand side,

we subscribe to a database that Moody's maintains. And there's a few slides in here where we do some comparisons. That upper right will show you for Moody's um nationally how many different cities and towns they rate AAA, double A, and single A. Um, so for example, there's, you know, 1,316 double A's, one of which is Garner. Little more relevant just below that would be the North Carolina cities and towns. Moody's rates 43 cities and towns that are AAA and double A. Um you're one of 24 there in the double A category. So it gives you an idea of your rating peers. They are not necessarily your geographic peers or they they may look very different in terms of population or budget size, but they're your rating peers. Um, these are important for a number of reasons, but as it relates to our presentation, the ratings, higher ratings correlate to lower borrowing rates, which correlates to more ability to fund capital with the same number amount of resources. Okay,

I have a a question. You mentioned that the AAA from the Moody's is sort of within striking distance. what in the structure of our current finances is sort of dinging us to be slightly lower. Moody's um is pretty simple in their analysis. They look at your economy and and that's going to grab things like your tax base, certain demographic like median family income, median household income and assessed value per capita.

So you all are very well situated in the state, right? This is a high growth area in the state. Um your assessed value is growing. We talked about the growth. I think the one thing in that air in that factor that maybe lags a little bit is some of the income. Um and that is not something you can control um in the short term or overnight or even through a budget. That's a little bit of a longer term play. So I think that's one of the primaries um that and that economy that's worth about um 30 to 40% of the rating. Finances are worth 30 to 40% of the rating and you all scored very well. You have very strong reserves, very strong financial history. That's something you control and you've you are controlling it well. And then the last piece is debt and and that is also you control that well and you you score well. So, it's that economy piece and within that economy generally some of the um income um metrics that um are I think moving in the right direction but maybe not quite where they see AAA. Okay. All right. Um now we're going to talk about debt. This is debt that's already been issued over the years. Multiple bond issues that have occurred. And on the bottom left, you'll see there's about $84 million of debt outstanding. Um, within that chart, you'll see the majority of that is general obligation debt. So, bonds that have been voted in the past and have been issued for various purposes. Um, about 77 million. And then that second category, cops, lobs, or installments, those are all different ways of saying it's some sort of nonvoted debt secured by a mortgage on a facility. let's say, and you've done a little bit of that, as many local governments have um across North Carolina. And then you've got a little

bit of debt outstanding associated with some water capacity um that dates back a number of years. So, you push all of it together, it's about 84 million. You can see graphically in the top, every bar is a fiscal year starting with the year we're in, 2026. It's relatively flat from 26 to 27, but then you'll see your annual payments have sort of a steady decline. And that's a pretty common attribute for a North Carolina local government. The way the local government commission in Raleigh, who has to approve and oversee debt issuances, like to see that annually your payments are stepping down because that always positions you to have a little bit of additional affordability for something new in terms of debt that will inevitably come. All of your debt is fixed rate. There's no variable rate debt. Nothing is going to change unless you change it. And historically, um, we and you have done a nice job of staying on top of opportunities to refinance debt for lower interest rates. Um, and we will continue to do that, you know, as time goes forward. But absent doing a refunding or an early payoff, there is nothing that's going to change your payment structure. And, and you can see on the right hand side by fiscal year, the principal, the interest, and the total payment, right? So all in we're talking about give or take about $8.5 million a year for this debt in the aggregate. And under the principal you'll see you're advertising a little over $5 million a year. That very far right column has to do with that amortization. It's called a 10-year payout. And what it's measuring is for this $84 million of debt, if you make the payments according to this schedule, which you will, you're paying back 5 million a year. 10 years from now, how much of that 84 million will have been paid back. It's about 63%. So a higher

percentage means you're paying the debt back more quickly. You're not backloading it. And you have a policy tied to that that I'll show you in a moment. But this is a nice place to sort of explain that concept because $5 million a year, 10 years from now, absent any new debt, 63% of this debt will have been repaid. Okay, again, please stop me if you got questions. The next slide, um, page four from left to right are looking at three key debt ratios, all of which you all have adopted policies on. On the left hand side is that 10-year payout ratio. That is how quickly you're advertising the debt. The bars you want it higher. Higher percentage is better. You'll see the red line which is your policy which says we don't want to go below 50%. So you want to be above the red line and you are. And you can see every year that passes that payout gets a little stronger. So for that one higher is better and you're in good shape. The middle and the right hand side lower is better. The middle one is debt to assessed value. So the amount of debt outstanding that was about 84 million as a percent of your tax base which is very close to 10 billion and we do that math. Your debt to assessed value is 86%. It's under 1%. That's those green bars. And your policy says we don't want to go above 2%. Lower is better. you're well below that policy, which is the right side of the policy to be. And in a vacuum, we would look at that and in the one on the right, and say we have capacity to issue new debt in the future and still be able to demonstrate compliance with this policy. Now, it's not unlimited capacity, but there it is a very reasonable conversation for you all to be having going forward that

there might be debt in the future to fund capital. Um, and the capacity is there. What we're going to turn our attention to in a moment is all right, well, where's the affordability land, right? How do we repay that debt? Um, so the middle you are well in compliance. Again, lower is better. And you can go all the way to the bottom there and see Garner in that gold bar. And you can see those national and North Carolina rated towns in the light green and the dark green. and you'll see that you line up very well with these various rating categories. You're not an outlier certainly on the high end. Um and you are lining up to the median and a little bit on the lower end particularly of the North Carolina communities. Um we are assuming some growth rates in your tax base and your budget. Those growth rates are consistent with what runs through all your other planning documents. 5% growth rate for a number of years and then we've stepped it down to more of a a CPI level 3%. And then finally the right hand side this measures your annual payment that was 8.5 million a year give or take for the debt as a percent of your budget. You're sitting a little over 12%. The policy says that you don't want to go above 15. You're below it. Lowers better. And again, there's some capacity there to take on additional debt and and maybe that ratio increases, but it doesn't get to 15%. So capacity exists and and what we really want to focus this discussion on is the affordability of potential new projects or debt funded projects. a question and just I don't know if I'm reading the chart wrong in the chart on the far right looks like there's a debt to service expenditures that's around nine then sort of 8 and a

half to 8 but then the text below says fisc 26 and 27 at 12.86 and 12.41 41. Yeah, you're right. I'm sorry that that those bars should be a little bit higher than that. Apologize for that. That was an oversight.

Talking about 8.5 million on on about a $65 million um tax base. So, I think I think those bars should be a little bit higher, but regardless, still under your 15% policy. And and in the bottom right corner, I'm seeing like the sort of high debt to service again below our our policy, but significantly higher than the North Carolina and the median for the national. We seem a little out of step there. Is that couple things on that? So the dark green is North Carolina. The the green bar is the median. That's the midpoint. Half are going to be higher and lower. So you're you are you are higher than the median, but you look at those blue lines which show you the min and the max. You you've got North Carolina cities and towns that are triple and doublea rated that have a a a debt service to expenditure ratio that's upwards of 15 and even 20%. So yes, you're higher than the median, but you are not an outlier on the high end for that universe of North Carolina communities. the national, the lighter green, you lose a little bit of comparability, just different states, how how debt is issued, how debt is booked. Um, so there there may be a little bit of just inherent difference from stateto state. Um, that picks it up. The the North Carolina comparisons are going to be a more relevant look at where you stand relative to um, you know, peers that are truly under the same structure as you are. Thank you. Okay,

I appreciate that. We'll clean that up.

Okay, so we want to talk about on page five, affordability, and this is maybe where your book is going to be a little bit more helpful. Um, this is just dealing with your existing debt. Um, starting on from left to right, we're starting on fiscal year beginning with 26, which is the year we're in. Column B is in boy is the annual debt service, right? Of all of that debt together. Um, we have placeholders under columns C and D for new debt that might be issued in the future. Um, we'll get to that in a moment. Column D is future investment of PIGO or cash funded capital, right? Debt would new debt would be under column C. PGO funding for projects would be under column D. So right now, column E is a sum of everything to the left. It's just the existing debt. What we're trying to demonstrate here is how you're paying for just your existing debt. So column E are the payments you've got to make. And column F really at this point, a very straightforward and simple debt budgeting model for you all. you have one source of revenue that is budgeted under column F and it's the equivalent of 8.5 cents on your tax rate, right? And in FY26, that's about $8.2 million. You can see that it's growing year-over-year because again, we are assuming growth in your tax base of between three and five% per year. So the revenue derived from 8 12 cents under column F is growing based on a taxbased growth rate. Um in 2025 I believe um this debt model was reworked um and and in a lot of ways simplified to just a a single stream of

revenue. So kind of maybe the way to think about it is off the top when you go through the budget there's 8 1/2 cents that's that's uh siphoned off to cover debt service as a clarification. So if the growth rate is based off of anticipated growth in revenue you're saying tax base and revenue growth interchangeably. Do you really you mean revenue growth not necessarily tax base growth? No, we're we're in this case we are dedicating eight and a half cents right every year as the tax base grows the value of each penny increases right each penny generates more dollars

theoretically if the tax base grows theoretically every penny should generate more dollars so it is tax base okay so ultimately part of our revenue it's it's it's filtered through our revenue

the The reality is we need those revenues, right? Right. 8 million in change every year to make this work. The way it's been benchmarked is that's equivalent to 8.5 cents. Now, if the revenue growth if the tax base growth is such that to generate that same revenue, you only need seven cents, that's fine, right? And and that will be things that you deal with periodically through the revaluation process. the model works because we need that 8 million a year and growing to support the capital program. Okay.

But but for now it is a dedicated 8.5 cents. I think I'm right about that. And every penny uh it's footnoted there. Um 9

$970,000 per penny. So that's how the math works out. So those column F are annual revenues going into the debt model. And so what you end up seeing is you got payments under column E and you've got revenues under column H. And we compare those under column I. And there's a little bit of a shortfall in FY26 about $100,000. But after that, if you are able to budget um those dollars in column F, and this is part of an overall long-term plan that that we've worked on year after year and is is implemented as your budget process unfolds. Column I, you'll see there are some excess dollars that um are available. If you continue to budget like column F shows and your payments are actually stepping down a little bit, you start to have some surpluses in column I. And those are dollars that are going to give you an opportunity to start to do some new things without finding new revenue. Right? It's it's sort of the natural debt affordability or capital affordability you have under this budgeting mechanism. That's column I. Those are annual, I'll call them surpluses that could evolve if you budget in accordance with this. In addition to those annual dollars under column I, you all have also over the years accumulated a balance in a debt service fund there in column J of a little over $9 million. Those are dollars that are outside of your general fund fund balance. Those are dollars that are dedicated to capital and debt service. So that's a one-time, if you will, revenue source that is available for your capital planning going forward. So you've got these annual dollars and you've got a one-time um debt service reserve uh debt service fund balance of a little over $9

million. Okay, so this is setting us up for what might we want to do in the future that might require new debt and how do we pay for it, right? And and I think what I would want you to take away from this is you've got debt outstanding, the payments are fixed, you've got a um you've got a debt service budgeting mechanism of that eight and a eight 8 1/2 cents that is incorporated in your budget over the years. It's it is sort of uh I think a a known budget action item to include as the budget is being built. And if that continues, you have dollars to cover your debt service that you've already committed yourselves to. That's covered. And you've got the ability to have some surpluses in future years that will give you a bit of a running start on some new projects. Okay. Any questions on that? All right. So talk a little bit about your remaining general obligation bond authorization from 2021. So in 2021 there was a referendum. It was approved for a grand total of $69 million worth of bonds. Essentially the voters said you the town future town councils have the authorization to go out and issue debt. Um and that that was for public safety, parks and wrecks, street sidewalks and storm water. Um you can see on the right hand side each of those um purposes how much was voted right public safety was 6.5 million. We already issued that debt in 2023. So there's no remaining public safety authorization that's in that green box. Um parks and wreck the voters approved 35 and a half. We've issued a couple of different times against that. The

remaining authorization is the 8.8 8 in that darker brown box. Streets and sidewalks voters approved 24 and change. You've issued twice against it. You've got 7.9 available. And then bottom blue storm water was authorized for 2.95 and you have 2.34 remaining. So the remaining authorization that you have not yet issued from 2021 is that bottom right corner 19.1 million. That is the remaining general obligation bond issuance authorization you have from the voters and once you win and if you issue that your authorization for geo bonds will be completed and that's the 21 referendum and at some point you may start discussing an additional bond referendum in the future. We're not making any assumptions about that. We're just simply saying for the referendum that's that has occurred, there's a little over $19 million left to issue for parks and wreck, streets and sidewalks and storm water. Okay? You don't have to issue that. The voters have simply said you are able to do that. If you don't issue it, it lapses and it goes away after a certain number of years. But you are absolutely authorized to issue that when you're ready, if when and if you're ready to do that. Okay. So, as it relates to making assumptions about issuing that, we've assumed that that could be or would be issued in FY27. So, the budget year you're going into FY27. I'm on um I'm on page eight. Uh we've assumed that it would be when issued a 20-year debt issuance, which is pretty standard for general obligation bonds and and typically what you all

have done in the in the past at a 5% interest rate, which is about 1% over the current market. Um and what we call level principle, which is how the local government commission would want you to structure that debt. So off the bat in our planning model, we're assuming this 19.1 million is issued in 2027 and the total payback over the life of the bonds there in the in the right hand side is a little over 29 million. That's principal plus interest. So 19 million and change of of money for projects over 20 years with interest you pay back about 29 million. Okay? And you can see in the upper left graph, the blue is that $19 million bond issue layered on top of your existing debt profile. If you were to do that, going to page nine, we go back and revisit those three debt ratios in your policies. And all of those um still work. And and you'll notice the bottom one, debt service to expenditures. We've got that one properly graphed here. Um the dark green is your current debt, little over 12%. Um the light green starts with the first payment in 28. Um it's close, but we're still sitting just below our policy of 15%. So in the upper left, the green bars stay above the red line, which is what you want. On the other two, the bars are below the red line, which is what you want. So, I think the takeaway here is your policies would would enable or provide that this 19 million could be issued and you could still demonstrate compliance with your policy. Okay. And then finishing out this discussion on the 19 million, what we've done on page 10 is we've added that to the debt repayment plan. All we've done is add

the the the annual debt service for that borrowing in under column C. It starts with a million9, then it's a million 8, million 8, million 7, and so on. We've added that to the model. And you go over to the far right, you'll see under column I, we got a couple more years where the annual revenues aren't covering the annual debt service. But remember, you've got that reserve of a little over $9 million. And we can use that in certain years where we need it to supplement the debt budget and demonstrate that this works from a financial perspective. And it I say it works because column J never goes really anywhere near zero, right? That that that balance we do use it for three years, but it never drops below about 7.9 million. So with the existing debt you have under column B the potential to issue the remaining $19 million under column C budgeting the revenues in F the 8.5 cents between the the current revenues and your debt service fund you have you would have that covered. Okay so the capacity is there for that borrowing and your policies and the dollars are there in the debt repayment plan. um such that no additional revenues would be needed. Okay, so that was our base case and now we're going to go into some hypothetical additional cases. Remember I said we are not talking about any projects in spec specifically. We're just going to be talking about generically the potential to issue new debt. And and page 12 here kind of lays out our cases. Um case A and B in green. It's it's really just perspective. We're showing you how much debt you could issue and still be in compliance with your

policy. That's not really ever anything you would do, right? You wouldn't just issue debt to to the to the max of your policy, but we wanted to give you that perspective, right? How much debt would your policy actually allow? And then I think the more meaningful cases are in blue, cases 1, 2, 3, and four. What we're doing here is under case one, we're not assuming there's any new revenue coming into our model. It's the 8.5 cents and that one time $9 million. Nothing new coming in. and we're going to show you how much debt that would support. And then cases 2, three, and four, we are incrementally adding a new one penny to the mix worth of revenue in 2029. The assumption is if you were to do this and you brought in new revenue into the model equal to one penny, three pennies, or five pennies, that that might occur in fiscal year 29. We pick that year because hypothetically it's the first budget that you all or or your the council would consider after a potential bond referendum. And again, not saying you will do a bond referendum or advocating for one, but the next real opportunity for a bond referendum would be the fall of 27. Fall of 27. I think you have municipal elections in fall of 27. Um that's fiscal 28. and your first budget after a referendum would be fiscal 29. That's why we're assuming in cases two, three, and four that maybe there's an FY29 additional pennies committed just to give you perspective as to what that means in your affordability. And then the last case at the very bottom case, Roman numeral one, we just said, what does it look like if we borrow for $75 million in fiscal 28? Um

and and that was meant to be able to give you a little perspective particularly going into the next conversation about capital projects that might be um in the near-term higher priority category. Okay. So take all of that lot of numbers here but I think you'll you'll get the gist here as we go through it. page 13 from left to right column. Um, case A and B. Remember those are just the cases that said what would happen if we borrowed up to our policy. So case A is if you were to borrow and get all the way up to your 2% debt to assess value. Um, you'll see that it's something on the range on line 10 of $310 million. So for that particular policy, given your tax base, the capacity within that policy is $310 million, but the affordability would require almost 13 pennies worth of revenue on the tax rate, right? That's not a scenario that really we we need to spend a lot of time talking about, but we wanted to show you what sort of debt that policy would allow for. Case B is a more limited case. It's maxing out your debt service to expenditure ratio and that would take you over the next roughly six or seven years to almost another $95 million worth of debt. Um, but you would need at the very bottom there, you would need a little over one penny to be able to afford that. So A and B are just looking at issuing debt up to our policies. Again, I think the more relevant cases are going to be on case 1, 2, 3, and four. And remember what case one is. We're not bringing in any new revenue beyond what we're already budgeting. Case two is we're bringing in the

equivalent of one penny worth of new revenue beginning in 29. Case three is three pennies in 29. Case four is five pennies in 29. And what you're going to see as you go down any of those cases on line two in all of those cases, we're assuming you issue that last remaining GO authorization, the 19 million. We assume that's happening in every case. And then what you've got beginning in 28, 29 on down the line, we have backed into how much additional debt that case would support. Right? So for the case one, no new revenue, you could issue the 19 million. You could then do about 27 million. You're on hold for three years. Then you got a million, 8, 7, all in. It's about 64 million. And the 45 million in the blue is how much you could issue on top of that 19. So the 19 is sort of a given in our scenario. And then we're measuring how much additional debt could you issue and when. And remember, case one is no new revenues. Case two, you got one penny of additional revenue. And you'll see the net effect of that is you go on line 10 from 64 million to about 80 million. That one penny of additional revenue buys you about another $16 million worth of debt affordability. Three pennies would take you up to that 113 million um on line on line 10 and five pennies worth would be about 145 million. All right. So again the thought is issue the remaining geos and then we solve for what else could you do under those scenarios and win. You will notice at the bottom your debt service to

expenditure ratio on all of those cases goes above 15%. Um so in some cases more than others and for a longer duration than others. Um the other two policies um work under those scenarios but the debt service to expenditure policy is the one that is um a little bit more of a limiting factor. Far right remember what this case is in in targeted cases the 19 million of goss and then what does it look like if we want to do 75 million right behind that in fiscal 28 and you'll notice at the very bottom it's the equivalent of about 3.8 8 pennies worth of new revenue you would need, which is right between case three and four. So, take a step back for a minute. The county had, excuse me, the town has a pretty substantial amount of debt capacity, right, within those ratios. Your debt service to expenditures is the more limiting factor. And then what this page is trying to convey is what's the affordability of different debt. No new revenues will allow you to do certain things over the next several years. Incrementally, a new penny, three or five pennies grows the amount of of debt and capital investment that you can make. Any questions on that? Sort of see how we're we're sort of setting that up. I'm happy to go back through any of those scenarios if you think it'd be helpful. All right, last slide on debt specific is page 14. All we've done here is we've spaced out the borrowings. So look at case one. We've got the 19 million that we keep talking about as the remaining go. And then rather than

issuing as much debt as we can, we we issue every other year. 28, 30, 32, 34. That's probably a little more of a likely scenario, right? You can't just go out and borrow a bunch of money because you want to or because you like the interest rate. The local government commission is going to make sure you have projects. So, the every other year cycle maybe reflects reality a little more. And the net effect of that when you compare pages um 13 and 14 is the spreading out of the debt issuance all other things being held constant gives you a little more debt that you can issue because it's not quite so front-loaded. That's the only thing we wanted to demonstrate here is the pace of issuing that debt um works in your favor if you're spreading it out over time versus trying to frontload it. Okay. And again, these numbers, right, the line 10, you know, that those are going to be good benchmarks when you start thinking about the projects that are on the list or under discussion and their amounts. You'll start to figure out, hey, where do these projects land under these different scenarios? What's the affordability of that? And a natural progression of this may be we move towards funding an actual list of projects rather than this hypothetical borrowings. Right? But we felt like for tonight's purposes this was a better approach rather than getting into any particular project priorities. All right. So I'm going to wrap this up with a little bit about financing options. Those of you that have been on council and a part of the bond referendum in prior issuances probably know a lot of this, but page 16 front and center on debt is the local government commission right under the state treasurer. They have the fiscal management side that looks at audits and

budgets. They have the debt management side that basically oversees all debt issuance of local governments. They have to prove virtually any type of debt that you would issue. There's a few carveouts. Um, but whether you're going to go and ask the voters for approval of a Roth Geo bond, the LGC has to approve that. If you decide to issue debt through non voter um debt, like an installment or a limited obligation bond, they have to approve that. There's a number of findings that they have to make when they're considering your application. Um, and a plan like this and one that is further refined goes a long way towards helping them make those findings. So, there's some method to the madness here. Not only hopefully good information for you all in in in approving capital projects or prioritizing projects, setting your budget, but also when the time comes, if you do decide there is a debt issuance in your future, this planning exercise goes a long way for the LGC. Um, page 17, long list of the different types of funding available. Grants, pretty obvious, right? That's free money. Um, if you can get lots of that, all the better. Um, you know, you got to manage grants. That's not always the most straightforward process. There might be limitations on the purpose, but obviously grants, PIGO is just our term for cash funding, right? We're going to pay cash for this vehicle or or this improvement, what have you. PGO is not dead. And then really the the two most likely types of debt um for Garner in in in in the future would be either a general obligation bond, which you've done before. You've got to go to a voter referendum to do that. Um when you do that, if it's approved, um you then have seven years to issue that debt. You can

get an extension to 10 years. Um, and that debt is backed by your full faith and credit as a town. It's backed by your taxing authority. It's not secured by a mortgage on a building. So, it gives you a lot of latitude to issue to fund projects like storm water, streets and sidewalks, parks and wreck type things that are not brick andmortar buildings, right? You know, a fire station, you can put a mortgage on that. A an admin building, you can put a mortgage on that. It's more difficult to put a mortgage on parks and wreck and streets and sidewalks. So, general obligation bonds, you've got to get through the referendum process. If that is approved, does give you a lot of flexibility and the lowest cost of borrowing. The other alternative that's often considered and used is installment financing. Y'all have done that before. It's not voter approved. There's a public hearing, there's a resolution, so it's certainly in the public eye, but it's not voter approved. Um, and in that financing, what you're doing is typically putting a mortgage of some sort on a building or a facility or an asset just like you might for your home. So, it's um you got to you got to generally have projects that lend themselves to um being good collateral for a a mortgage um you know, just just like your home. Those are really the two most likely types of debt that you all would consider going forward. um you don't have a water and sewer system. So, the revenue bonds really probably are not in play. Uh special assessment bonds that that authorization at the state level has actually sunseted. It may come back, but it's not um it's not um permitted as we speak. And at the very bottom is something called special obligation bonds. Um lesser used, but that is where you might borrow money and you secure it with say your sales tax distribution from Wake County. Um, we've seen places that have done that for

things like convention centers or baseball stadiums, things that might be public private partnership. You can't really put a mortgage on it because somebody else has a joint ownership. So, you are willing to issue debt secured by some non-tax revenue. And in your case, one of your biggest non-tax revenues would be the sales tax distribution that comes from the county or the state. You could pledge that for certain projects and issue debt. Again, it's a tool. It's not terribly widely used and it tends to be used for very specific projects that might not lend themselves to either the go or the installment. Okay. And I'm going to wrap up with a little bit about referendums. The last one that was done was in 2021. Um, since that time, there's been state legislation that's been enacted that um has created a few more um steps in the process for doing general obligation bonds. There's more transparency associated with um the effects and the impacts of the general obligation bond. Um, this page 18 talks a little bit about the timing. Um, there are a number of communities that are getting ready for the fall of 26 to hold a referendum. We're getting close to being, you know, kind of late to the game for that because there's a number of steps you've got to take for you all. Maybe it means November of 27 as your next true opportunity for a GEO referendum. Um, the ballot questions are very specific. You've got to have a purpose. You can't mix purposes. So, public safety would be different from parks and wreck. Those are two different questions. Streets and sidewalks would be a different question. Um um and and so on. There could be

multiple questions on a ballot depending on what you want the voters to uh um consider. Like in 21, there were four different questions. One could pass, three could fail, or somewhere in between. They are not dependent on each other. If you have multiple questions, 19 is a good example of what's evolved since your last referendum. The pre previous ballot language is on the left. It just basically says we've got the authorization to issue X million of bonds for this purpose. Yes or no? Today on the right hand side, X million of bonds for this purpose. But then you get into over the life of that loan, there'll be x million dollars of interest paid and it could have an impact of x pennies or x dollars of additional tax uh levy on a property. So it it has really gone to a place where more detail is provided to the voter at the time of the referendum about the impact over the life of the bond and the potential impact to them as a property owner or a taxpayer. Little bit about the process on 20. Um, this is assuming a November of 26 referendum. As I said, we're getting a little bit out of the range for that possibility, but you'll notice November of 26 is when the referendum would be held. And you'll notice that the first official action of the governing body would occur in May of 26. So, you've got to you've got to get some things rolling in the spring to understand what the referendum might be for the amount, get out and communicate with the community and be in a position to start taking formal actions as early as May, and the

final actions have to be wrapped up by the summertime in order for the board of elections and others to get the ballots ready, etc. So, it's it's it is a little bit of a process. you're starting, you know, a half a year, 3/4 of a year ahead of the actual referendum in the planning work. That's why I say maybe if there were a consideration for a referendum, maybe the fall of 27 would be a more likely timetable. U we thought this would be interesting. Just going back to 2020, all the different referendums that have occurred in North Carolina, you'll see the total number of questions by um by the referendum date. There's been 101 uh 92 approved, nine um failed, and you can kind of see, you know, how many different units of government were involved, and how many different questions either passed or failed. Remember when you did this in 21, you had four questions. Each of them was voted on individually. In your case, all four of them were approved, but you could have a situation where one was not approved and three were approved or or any combo thereof. And that's something you see. And then a little more detail on the specifics behind those numbers. The locality, this is all public information, the amounts, the purpose, and whether it was approved or failed. And some of these are pretty unique project specific referendums. Others are much broader categories. Um, and you know, some of them in the more local area you probably follow and you might have a good idea, you know, why some might have passed or failed in certain years. Remember, you're you're you might be having a referendum as a town and the county might be having a referendum as well, right? And so all of those things

are showing up on the same ballots and and and folks are being asked to consider multiple referendums, not just necessarily that for their town. So that's something to think about particularly in light of the new referendum rules and all of the um information that's provided as part of the ballot. Purpose of this part of the discussion was to try to give you a a quick intro on the different types of debt so that when and if you get to a place where you're ready to do financings for projects, you've got perspective on one option versus the other. And really the last slide is if you were to do a geo bond, it's about a 15 16 week process from start to finish. Again, that means this slide assumes a referendum took place and that it was approved. And if it's approved and you say, "Okay, we're ready to go." You're talking about, you know, um, three to, you know, three to four months from start to finish. Any questions? I know that was a lot of information, but it

was a lot of information indeed. Thank you very much for doing your homework there. And I'll start out at this end this time with Mr. Matthews if there's any questions we'll come this way

a lot to digest here so thank you very much for presentation good news from you is always good news thank you again for presentation you've been coming here what I've been coming about 15 years it seems like uh and this is always really good information it's nice to have it updated uh plugging the uh information in to see what future debt capacity to be. And uh I know somebody will always say, "Well, how come he's using 5% when interest rates are four?" And you've explained that to us over the years because that's called covering your your backside to make sure you're covered uh in any uh scenario that may come up unexpected. And with what's going on in the economy nowadays, you you know, it's better to be safe than be sorry. So, I appreciate that. Also want to let you know that Mr. Kennedy used to be up here with us. I told him y'all were coming and he got excited and Miss Gibson has provided me information I'm going to take by his house so he can read. Uh he will he will uh

you got an extra book there. I have got information that he will be he will appreciate that because uh he hopes to come to our retreat when we talk about items maybe for the morning when he has a a caregiver for his wife that day. But uh he's excited about uh looking at new information. But anyway uh thanks again for this updated info. It's greatly appreciated. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Stalins. No questions, Mr. Dinger. Yeah, thank you for the updated information. It's going to be invaluable as we kind of get into budget time and planning years out. Um, we'll have a lot of tough decisions to make is what it looks like. So, thank you very much for this. Great, Mr.

Thank you for the preview. No questions. Yeah, a lot of information, but as Mr. Dyl said it's good information and we can only make decisions that are as good as the information we get. So, thank you very much for what you're doing. Thank you. Okay. Uh moving right along to number two under discussion uh is capital improvement plan Horizon project. Our sponsor is Miss Sarah Warren, the budget director. And before we launch on it, I'm going to ask if this takes over 15 minutes, we might take our our little intermission, our little recess. It will take longer than 15 minutes. It will take longer than 15 minutes. So, if you guys want to take a break,

well, in that case, let's go ahead and take a 10-minute recess. Uh, I had an official complaint last time when we went over two hours. Uh, so we're going to stop a little bit short this time. If you would be back in here, please, at 5 till 8 and we will resume with the next important presentation. Thank you.

from recess. Right on time. Thanks for your punctuality. We're back to agenda item F, discussion, and it's item number two, capital improvement plan and horizon project update from our budget director, Miss Sarah Warren. Take it away.

And um I'm up here with Leah Harrison, our uh town engineer. she's going to be tag teaming this presentation with me. Um so thank you um uh mayor, members of council. Um what we want to do today is provide information on identified capital project needs. So during the budget development process um for FY26, we got some direction to start looking into our horizon project list and start formulating some needs and identifying um where those projects are are going to be headed in the next few years. Um so that's really the purpose of today. Uh we are going to just briefly overview what's currently in the CIP. We'll talk about our staff's process to review all of these projects and then we're going to give you some project summaries. Um and then at the end we'll talk about next steps. So real quickly the current CIP um if you recall um Leah did a presentation a couple weeks ago on just project updates on the capital improvement plan. So these are all of the projects where there is work underway. Um, so all of these projects have been funded um either through the bond program, cash grants, or a mixture of all of that, but these projects are underway. Um, and uh we did provide the uh that information that Leah gave a couple weeks ago in your packet. So you should have that handy if you have any questions. We've also got a few u projects that are going to be uh new projects. They're planned um in the FY20 I'm sorry, they are planned in the 2021 bond program, but we have not allocated funding to them yet. Um, so we will be in the FY2731 um, uh, CIP that includes uh, a park

master plan update, the Centennial Park playground, Metobrook, future greenways, uh, design work for the Lake Benson boat house, and then there's some money set aside for future street projects. We do want to just touch on Metobrook um briefly. Right now there's approximately 3.7 million in the 2021 bond program uh beginning in FY28 to go towards that project. The work will include addressing the roadway access from Habron Church Road and we'll also be looking to update the original master plan that would move towards a lower impact use uh including multi-use trails and open space. Um, this was something that was directed by council in July of uh 2025. So, looking at how we reviewed these horizon projects, I want to give a shout out to our CIP steering committee. Um you'll notice there is a very um diverse set of skills in this group of people which really helps bring uh unique perspectives to these discussions and I will talk about some of the aha moments that we had throughout the the process. Um but I do think it's important to bring all kinds of people together to discuss um things that could impact varying parts of our services and functions as a town. We started with the why. Uh so looking when we are thinking about developing the next round of capital projects, we need to understand what are the highest priority projects. We wanted to understand what the potential costs would be and then look at any potential gaps in service delivery. Again, we wanted to utilize the cross-dep

departmental CIP steering team to really help um you know, poke holes in things and help us understand what implications may occur in different departments. Uh one of the biggest aha moments we had was in discussion about some roadway projects. Um, having those in an open setting allowed our public safety departments, our police and fire chiefs to see, hey, if we could do these projects, it would really help with our response times and then it could potentially impact future locations. So, just having those conversations where they wouldn't normally happen was really beneficial. But then it also helped the entire team understand what's really of high priority to the town as a whole and where service delivery is most important and how we can all work as a team to get there. And then most importantly continuing to maintain um our our transparency and being transparent to our community about the value of these projects and their importance. We wanted to start with the purpose statements. So for each of these projects, we thought about what are the goals and objectives, why does the project matter, who does the project benefit, and what are our intended outcomes. And these are uh all questions that we provide uh or statements that we provide for all of our projects. I do want to pull up quickly um it's in your packet, but this is just a bigger version of the Joan Sausage Road. You can see here that there is we do include a project description. So we we talk about what is the project, what is it going to do, and then we talk about why are we doing it. So here we're looking at improving the service level of the intersection to provide safer pedestrian uh safer pedestrian connections for

schools, neighborhoods, and additional places of interest. So, we're really looking at trying to create some of these same statements for projects that are on the horizon. And finally, we also wanted to think about how are the residents going to feel about these projects? What things are important to them? How are they going to use um the services provided by the project? and how are they going to respond to the benefit. We always want to make datadriven decisions. So we looked at all the elements of the data or all elements of data availability including our master plans, any studies, facility condition assessments, um looking at our calls for service. Uh we also included the national community survey results as well as the housing inventory analysis. and we're looking at the value and importance of each project. And then we had to talk a lot about what what did we not know and in a lot of cases we didn't have a lot of information on costs and then we also didn't have a lot of information on what funding would be available. So that kind of goes back to the conversation we just had with um Ted Cole on what are our funding availability and in some cases we needed some initial design work to help us uh determine what the cost may be and look at some feasibility and then also with that feasibility thinking about who do we need to develop partnerships with or where can we leverage those partnerships and so thinking about the county any other regional partners and state and federal agencies Please.

And as always, we want to make sure that we're aligning to our CIP criteria for projects. So, every project has meets one or more of these criteria. Either it's aligned to a plan that's already in place. It's addressing some level of life safety concerns, compliance, or regulation. Um, it has had some community engagement. Um, it addresses council priorities. there's some availability to leverage outside funding. Looks to address needs uh that mitigate any long-term impacts or consequences on the operations and then looks to help address our growth and our economic um footprint in the area. So, we're going to get into the project summaries for the uh recommended high priority projects. staff has uh identified two projects as high priority. Uh they include the public works center and the Sauls Road public safety station which is also known as the station the fire station 2 rebuild. These were ranked highest priority. They had the highest impact on service delivery and community benefit. And in the case of the Sals Road public safety station, we have already secured funding from Wake County towards that station. So what is the public works center project? So that is looking to redevelop the current campus as many of those buildings have reached their useful life and are facing significant maintenance, repair and replacement costs. Uh we're also out of room to house staffing in that facility. The current estimated cost is 55 million. So looking briefly at the history conversations to about the public works

center began in 2019. At that time there was an RFP uh issued to help look at what the need was out there. And it noted that those buildings were reaching a 40-year lifespan when they were only meant to accommodate uh about half that. And so at the time, a new location was recommended and staff uh began exploring uh land opportunities. We did purchase land in 2024 for 1.2 million. And with our great partnerships at the state, we were able to secure $900,000 from the state capital and infrastructure fund to help with that property acquisition. And then once we acquired the property, we uh it we had a dam issue that we had to to start working through. Obviously, this is uh probably one of the most expensive projects the town has had to face. Um so really a big barrier is just the sheer cost to construct it. But things to think about is that we've already uh begun the damiation. $125,000 has already been committed and we are looking to add um another 155,000 for FY in FY27 to complete that remediation work. We have issued an RFQ to look at preliminary design. Um, we determined that in order to really fine-tune that cost estimate and look at what the true scope of that project was going to be, we likely needed to to start looking at what uh working with a consulting firm to do that preliminary design. Staff has also talked about potentially phasing the construction to make it a little bit more cost uh manageable. But then we also have looked at uh as was presented by Davenport the potential for additional tax increase to help with project financing.

One thing to also consider uh with a phased construction it is required by the local government commission that the entire construction package uh go to bid at one time. So, if we did choose to do a phased approach, we would need to work with a consultant to help um package it um in a way that we're still able to construct what we need um but in pieces. The second high priority uh project is the Sals Road public safety station. Like I mentioned, this is a rebuild of fire station 2, which is a pre-engineered metal building. And so this will bring the facility to a modern facility to meet minimum standards and p for public safety and fire locations. And as always, we would look to accommodate uh fire, EMS, and police functions at that station. The current town cost estimate is approximately 7 million. The right now the only barrier we have is identifying that 7 million um for the town's portion of the project. 4.9 has already been provided by Wake County for a total estimated cost of 11.9 million. So this is really already uh in the t in the county's uh capital improvement plan beginning in FY29. They have the county has also already um done the preliminary design work in the land study. Um and so there's it's been identified to just rebuild on the current site and it was also identified uh as a priority project in the 2024 fire lo fire station location study. Some challenges that we're currently facing with that is looking at uh expanding the current property and then connection to an access road that was recommended as part of the preliminary design.

I'm going to pause for questions before we go into the next set of projects. Question question on this. Um since the town's at right today, the town's commitment would be cost would be 7 million. When we started fire station 5, which started at 3 1/2, 4 1/2, we put in the bond for six and a half and I believe we were about 8.8 million committed to that. So I know got to eight and a half and we had some additional funding. So I believe our our part was over $8 million. So I'm just wondering that's part of that building. I'm assuming this building is not going to be as big as station five. Is that correct? Um, Mr. Singleton, that's my understanding. I don't think you could fit the same size building on that property. It's a smaller property. So, um, smaller footprint is going to reduce the cost.

Okay. Just want to make sure because I know how the other one increased over before we had the bond referendum and where the final uh the cost were. Thank you. Also, Mr. S, the station design is for a two-story building versus one story. So, it's it's just a different type of construction footprint. This would be a two-story building. Okay. Goes to the smaller piece of property. Thank you. Other questions?

Yeah. On the SS road that lists the challenges as expansion of current property connection to an access road is recommended through preliminary design. Can you elaborate on what that challenge is and if there is a potential solution even if you don't have the exact potential solution? I'm gonna let um our assistant town manager Matt P answer that. He's been involved in in that.

Yes. So um Wake County, we utilize Wake County facility and design um to do and assess the the existing property and so we came back with a with a vision for what could go on that site. Also, there's um some adjoining property that would potentially could be purchased for for extending that. And then also for secondary means of egress. It's community garden which is currently a private road and Wake County is recommending that we obtain access to that road for units to be able to circle fully circle. As it is now um it will be very difficult with the new construction to circle the building. So they would have to turn turn around on Saws Road and back in. And so access the community garden would be advantageous to be able to to access that. So we were we have established communications with the owner of that road just have informal conversations until we got to a formal point.

Thank you. Question in reference to the public's work center uh pertaining to uh the phase construction. Do you do we have any idea right now the advantages and disadvantages of phase construction at this point?

Sure. Good evening. Um a high level idea. So I think the biggest advantage of phasing is it would probably make um the spending more palatable or easier um for us to manage because that is a very large project and a large sum of money for the town to commit all at once. Some of the challenges with phasing are obviously we're rebuilding the public works facility in the same place that it already exists. Um so it gets difficult to start taking one building offline if you're not replacing it in the same exact location. So it it does tend to limit your flexibility on how you can creatively lay out the whole campus um because you have to plan that phasing in. um some level of phasing will be necessary no matter what because we don't have anywhere to move the entire public works staff and all their operations to while it's in construction. Um so we will have to incorporate some of that into it as well. So I think there are a lot of options. It's just something that we'll have to think about fairly early in the project so that we can go into the design phase knowing what what approach we'd like to take.

Okay. Thank you. I have a follow-up question on that. So what's sort of the anticipated interruption or of of service and difficulty of service delivery under both of those scenarios? I think just rule of thumb you kind of rip the band-aid off and do it as quickly as possible to get it done versus you know if you could do it in two years versus four or five it is probably better for everybody and you know financing aside I think the disruption is of a fa I think that's one thing to look at is what what's the impact on delivery of service

it is right there's either a shorter impact but it's more impactful or it's it's longer but may be easier to manage. Um, I think some of it will depend on what outside areas we might be able to locate for public works to operate in in the interim. We haven't really gotten far enough to explore what facilities might be available around town for them to utilize, but that will probably factor into that heavily. Thank you.

Are so far here. Are we thinking more about far as a priority? We thinking more mechanical garage type stuff is needed more so than administrative or do we are we at that point trying to figure what that priority would be?

Um we haven't talked about priorities. What we are looking at for this project right now is to do everything. So really their administrative building needs to be redone. All of the you know um maintenance buildings they need additional storage. So redoing what is there and then providing additional um space for for different things. Also um we've grown so much that what is currently at the public works facility is not really meeting the standards that they need it to meet anymore. Um so I would say we haven't prioritized necessarily or thought about timing of all of those different pieces. The request for qualifications that we have out now lists all of that as potentially part of this project. Everything that we would like to see as part of it and then once we start getting into design, we can decide what's really feasible for us to take on.

I have a question. Sure. If we talk about the public works center, is it possible or are you giving any thought to perhaps using some of that area down there storm water control on a regional basis related to the main street area? Is that even in a consideration?

Sure. So, I'll go back to where that's not a a great map, but you can see a little bit the um you see the existing public works facility on the right there. And then it backs up to the property that was purchased that Sarah mentioned, which we refer to as the Peacock property. You can see the pond there that had the dam that was failing. Um so, our intention at this point would be to utilize some of that area immediately adjacent to the existing public works facility to be able to expand their footprint. That still leaves us quite a bit of space north of where this portion of the picture is taken on this same property to be able to um utilize that potentially for a regional storm water solution if that's the route we end up going.

Okay. So, that is on the table and being looked at. Yeah. Thank you. I do see other towns and other places where they make a creative use where there's parking on the top and there's storm water retention under the actual parking lot. It does. It doesn't all look like ponds, right? I know it costs more, but you know, that's going to be our next big strangle hold is how do we get more storm water control for our main street area and this is the closest available and it's downhill. It is. Yes. Thank you.

Followup question that so that possibility is that it part of the RFP that's going out or is like or not? the the regional storm water piece is not so we have and we'll touch on this a little bit later I think but um we have a project currently under study right now to look at providing a regional storm water solution uh for the downtown area we're looking at several possible locations for such a facility but this property is definitely one of the primary ones and so that is currently underway with a consultant doing that work right Mr. Single,

I thought we did some work a few years back uh behind Monu Street and the shopping center where the handy goes there was for the regional pond storm water facility and it would help with the downtown and maybe before you were here.

It I think it was before I was here. I think um what we have done in that area is to do retrofits to some of those existing ponds or to provide ponds um to meet some water quality requirements that we were mandated to meet. Um so it's fairly recent that the rules have changed to where we do not have to do all of the treatment on the site um that is being developed. So that opened up some possibilities for us to look this is really more of a proactive um approach to h to providing regional storm water. So this is not something that we would be required to do right now but potentially could be provided now and then as development comes in it could utilize the device.

So the some of the laws rules have changed now where they're back to regional storm water rather than individual storm water. Correct. There's more flexibility to allow for that. So, who else in here beside me? Remember what that's what White Deer Parkway was going to be? White Park was going to be a regional stormwater facility. Not be a park. It was going to be a regional storm water facility. They're going to be two ponds there. That's what it was. Who remembers that besides me? Wow. That was a long time ago. That was the original use there. And then they changed. Well, we don't want to go regional now. We want to do individual. Right. So, so we're back looping to regional.

Yes. Okay. It's just interesting and that was talked about for many years at White where White Park is currently located. Thank you for the update. Sure. Yeah.

All right. So, we are going to go through several other projects in addition to those two high priority projects um that Sarah discussed. These are the other projects on on RCIP Horizon. and you've probably heard of most of them, but I'll refresh um everyone's memory about what they are a little bit as we go. So, first of all, we have the Acriman Road Extension. Um Acriman Road runs east west through Garner. It currently ends um at the Grove at White Oak subdivision and there's a gap uh before it would connect to 50. So um this would provide an additional east west connector through town which is something that we generally lack uh mostly because of a lot of challenges with streams and topography that that run north south through the town. Um so this would allow for better management of traffic um on parallel routes and also as Sarah mentioned this could improve emergency response times because it is quite a long ways around to get um from where acriman ends now to where it would connect. There's there's no short way to get around that. Um, all of these cost estimates, as was mentioned, are very high level at this point because we don't have any design, even conceptual design. So, it's it's just us looking at what we identify to be the needs. So, right now, our estimate for this project would be $10 million. Um, some of the barriers, this goes through a private property currently that connection would so there would be cost of rightway acquisition. Um, it does cross a stream and there are wetlands. So we have some challenges with um permitting and just construction of a structure to appropriately traverse that. Um and then also conversations about whether that would be a DOT maintained road or a town maintained road. Some other considerations um we have mentioned this but it could impact future public safety facility locations because it does provide a route that

currently doesn't exist anywhere nearby. There also is potential for private development participation in this project. So we have talked with several people over the years um who were interested in developing the private property that this would pass through. Were that to develop, there would be an obligation for that development to participate in the construction of this road and the crossing. We do not have anyone identified at this point. There's nothing that has been officially submitted, but there is a possibility for us to leverage that opportunity if it becomes available.

Have a couple of questions, Mr. Mayor, on that. Did I know there have been a few projects that have come up in the pipeline and looked at that and I think the participate was the participation that they had to have done would be to construct the road. That's like not really participation. It's built a road. Mhm. And now we're talking about subsidizing potentially that if is that what we're saying?

Um yes. So if that parcel, which currently sits on both sides of where this this road would extend, they would be obligated to build out that section of road. Um additionally, they would be obligated to pay for half of the crossing that would exist between their parcel and the the existing portion of the road. And so I believe that has been a challenge with developing this property is it's been hard for um people looking at development to make it viable because of those improvements and the improvements that would have to be done on 50 as part of the UDO requirement as well. Um so there is some potential to to talk about how that is leveraged.

Well, I'll I'll spare the town attorney using the the magic words on that project. Um, another question I have, you mentioned the public safety piece and I guess there was probably conversation around increasing response time and all this, but also what's the status of the sort of location assessment for another fire or station or satellite in South Garner? And I know we've talked about it and what's the status and what's the status for looking for land for that? and I didn't see it on the CIP. So, I'm kind of curious as to where that fits because I could see how this could potentially, you know, maybe do away with the need for that.

But I think it a fire station or substation is probably faster and more realistic to happen than this without a private partner. So, I'm kind of curious what were some of the conversations around that for that part of Garner. So we'll talk about um the future station six. Um that is one of the challenges is trying to identify land um for that. So I think those are still things to consider in the future um as we look at building the next public safety center after station two. So is that all so the station six isn't in the CIP?

It's it's in this presentation. It is um it is considered um it is part of one of our service delivery enhancement projects but um funding hasn't been secured and land hasn't been identified.

So I and that goes to you know that part of Garner. We've talked about it for a long time the bottleneck challenges of White Oak and 50 and need for service and response times down there. And I think we really really need to prioritize identifying land for that project. And I think we need as we look through the lens of any projects that are in the pipeline or developers are coming to us, we need to be our number one priority needs to be securing land for that facility above and beyond any other development growth because it there's there are thousands of homes already down there, thousands more to come. The traffic situation is not going to get any worse. And I have a little challenge note question. It was always said that when 40 opened and 540 opened, it would alleviate traffic on 50. It'd be interesting to see an analysis of has that actually happened or has it maintained? Because if it's maintained, then again, it's going to only get bigger and bigger. Um, so again, I just I say that to say we need to prioritize that land location for that part of town. And there the options are shrinking every sort of month for finding that property. So, I'd like us to make that a priority or we'll run out of options, good options potentially. All right, thank you for that. Anything else on Acriman before we move to the next?

Okay. Um, the next project is the Wilmington Road extension. Um you have we've talked about this one before and this is become kind of a hybrid of two projects that we call the Wilmington Road extension and the Creek Road Realignment uh because really at the at the north end those two things need to happen together. So the purpose of this project would be to connect Wilmington Road um from where it ends currently north up to where Creech Road goes around the tight curve. uh Wilmington Road would then become the through movement so that we eliminate that curve and we would realign Creech Road to have a T intersection into Wilmington. So a combination of purposes the the realignment purpose is mostly to eliminate that curve for safety reasons. Um, also the purpose of having Wilmington Road is to provide that parallel corridor to Creech Road, which provides some relief to Creech Road. Um, and also provides that connection from Creech to I40. Um, there are a couple of other benefits to this um, including um, you know, opening up opportunities for public transportation. So, this does give us the opportunity to have a circular route. we have um a path between Creek Road and Wilmington Road, so that we could look at additional transit opportunities, especially in an area that we have a lot of development coming in and a lot of um development that is focused on affordable housing and would be well served by public transportation. The estimated cost for this portion at this time is $11 million. And we'll talk about this a little bit, but there's kind of a lot of variables in that. But work-wise, this includes building a portion of Wilmington Road that does not currently exist, building a bridge over a ra rather large stream and wetlands um that it would have to cross and then

realigning that portion of Creek Road. So building that section as well. Some barriers we talked about constructing the bridge. Um that of course requires a lot of permitting following federal and state regulations. It's also costly. additional considerations. Um we've talked about a couple couple of these, but um an important thing to note is that we do have approved development in this area that is completing a section of Wilmington Road. It is not yet constructed, but that project is fully approved and has started construction. Um and they will construct a portion of newly aligned Creech Road and have contributed a um to the cost of the stream crossing. So we do have some existing funding and work toward this project being completed by a private partner. Any questions on Wilmington before we move on?

What's the timeline for that development to start their work? Have they started

They have they have started um clearing and grading. They have not installed any infrastructure yet to my knowledge, but but work has started there. All right. Next, we have the Lake Benson Boat House. So, uh, this project would replace our current boat house facility in a new location, um, to provide a facility that both both meets our needs and a new location that that meets our needs. The estimated cost on this we have at 5 million. A couple considerations there as well that we will talk about. So that is just the cost of the facility and that was developed assuming that we would be using a pre-fabricated structure. There are a lot of different options for what type of boat house we could be building and what that looks like. So that will impact the cost of course if we are adding additional you know size amenities things of that nature. We also have not identified an an location for the boat house yet. So if there is real estate acquisition required to relocate the boat house then that will be additional cost as well. Um so a couple barriers completion of the master plan for Lake Benson Park is still pending. So this will really inform the the vision of the final design and the whole park facility. And then of course decision on location will have to be determined. We do have $200,000 planned in FY27 for preliminary design of the boat house, but construction funding has not yet been identified. And I mentioned the pre-fabricated structure. Um the ALS also the current plan does not consider any implications to the overall park layout. So, for example, I know we've all talked several times about um restrictions on imperous limits at at Lake Benson because it is as close to the drinking drinking water supply lake as you can get. Um if we did add the

park um a boat house to the park and then we would have to probably have storm water management as well. So, there's potential for there to be other things needed to go along with the actual facility. Another question. Um, and it's tangentially related because what's the sort of progress for the greenway on Buffalo Road? Because I know at one point there was talk of potentially using this site as some of the impervious surface storm water management or something like that. So what's sort of a

the status of like the greenway and how it would you know align with any sort of site design for post boat house move. But

um so the greenway is in design. Um we are currently resolving some utility conflict issues getting approval of those plans before moving to getting rightway authorization through NC DOT because we do have lap funding for that project. Um the current plan does not include utilizing any of this space for a storm water control measure. Um we are handling that sort of along the corridor um instead of having a a device as part of the greenway construction. Um we also looked as part of the greenway design that spurred some of this conversation about relocating the boat house. Um because if you recall we would have had to route the trail around the boat house where it currently sits. So the decision was made to pursue building the greenway without accommodating the existing boat house because we know we want to move it.

Um Okay. Yeah. Thank you.

To touch on the boat house. So this is again another flashback but in the early 2000s is when this Todd was manager. We had it before us in the budget to relocate the existing boat house at the time, which is the same boat house as it is now, and included purchasing a piece of land across the lake. And the budget was $250,000. And we back then, this was early 2000s, we like, wow, people will lose their mind if we do that. And we didn't do it. Hindsight's 2020, but that was who knew that was a blowing opportunity. But that that was the force at one time. $250,000 that included the land and everything.

Yeah, that's not going to get us very far now. Unfortunately, we couldn't even No, it's not. I'm just saying that's the difference in a decision back then like we didn't

project where we are now. N anything else on the boat house and I will pass it back to Sarah. So the next project on the list is the Avery Street renovation. Um the project scope currently is updating the restrooms at the rec center and then renovating the Avery Street annex. Um there's some mill there's some building requirements as well as a lot of ADA compliance issues. We're currently looking at a $3 million cost for that. Um the biggest issue here is that we currently have an agreement with the school system for them to use the facility. Um so that is what and really they're using the annex portion. So not the gym uh rec center portion but the the rest of the the campus. Um so we would have to work with them um about their use of it if we needed if we wanted to go in and do some renovations. There's also some historical designations on part of that property. So, what we are looking at is u we've got a very old building that has it's in need of a lot of repair, but we also have an outside partner that's using it. Um we also need to replace the roof. Um but that is becoming more and more costly. And so looking at how that stacks up to the value of the building is something that's consider worth considering. um we are able uh to go ahead and move forward with a separate project which would be just to do the restroom renovations and meet some ADA compliance issues there in the Avery Street Rec Center. So, we're actually making that recommendation to go ahead and split this project where we can do what we need to do in the rec center portion of it of the property while we still work

towards some other issues with the remaining um annex portion. And that's $3 million. We would have to rescope everything um to see what the restroom cost would be, but it would be likely Oh, I'm not going to make any estimates, but we would rescope that. Rescope. Gotcha. So, the the roof is that 3 million includes like roof work. That the 3 million does not include the roof work.

Okay. And so the Avery Street, just to be clear, there's the recreation center and then the annex part that's on the other side that the county has at least four that we want to do renovations to that they use that they expect us to do without contributing anything. Yes. I mean, I think I I think there's some challenges. I mean, it's it's a very old facility. It really needs a lot of repair, but but yes, they are in it using it, and I think there's some opportunities Um we're a lot of legal requirements on whether um that agreement could be revisited. Yeah, there could there's some conversations that could be had there, I think. Yeah. Thank you. And the roof replacement is just on the annex.

Yes. Yeah. Looking for Yes, just the annex. Thank you. Okay.

Uh the uh the next project, so Mr. Dr. Dinger, this is to your point would be the next public safety center. And we've combined that with a future fire station, a fire training facility, and an emergency operations center. Um, would be this location. And again, like the uh Sals Road station, it would likely accommodate fire, EMS, and police. Right now, we're looking at an estimated cost of 15 million. One of the the biggest barriers uh is the feasibility of scope and the associated costs. So we don't necessarily have um some uh experience to fall back on on doing all of those things in one facility. So we'd have to spend some time doing some preliminary design at looking what that scope would be and what the associated costs would be. And then as we mentioned earlier, uh the land availability and trying to locate where that would where that facility needs to go. Um it was identified as a priority project in the fire location study and that was also included as part of the fire e merger agreement. Uh Wake County will likely partner on this future facility. Um though unlike the Sals Road Station, they have not yet um put any money towards it in their CIP. Um but we we see that as a likely uh next step with the county. And then just to note that the uh Garner Fire Department, Inc. um which was created post merger has donated $200,000 towards that facility.

How large is that Arc Acriman property, that parcel that people keep looking at not developing? I'm not sure. Um, we we can we could find out. I don't remember how how much the acreage is right off the top. What would be ideal is to have a combined project that would include that facility and some other type of development. Build the road, build a facility all in one. I don't know how large the parcel is. So, it's it's fairly large. Um the Got it. The proposed developments we've seen the proposed road basically bisects the property and they have development on both sides.

40 acres. 40 acres. So anyway, thinking out loud. Probably shouldn't do that in a council meeting, but that's that's definitely something worth considering.

All right, back for one more. So um storm water infrastructure this is a lot of different things all things storm water um together on on one slide. So um as you all are aware we have been working through a storm water infrastructure assessment that is really intended to inform what storm water projects we need to complete over the next several years that is still underway. We have some of the information but it's not complete yet. So um this will be it will generate a combination of pro projects. So a lot of what we're looking at is what is the condition of our current storm water infrastructure and we anticipate having a lot of repair and replace projects that come out of that because we have a lot of infrastructure that is at its lifespan or beyond. In addition to that, we have identified several high priority areas that we asked that consultant to take a look at uh because they are areas that lack sufficient infrastructure, maybe don't have really infrastructure at all, um and have a lot of known drainage challenges. Um so these will also generate specific projects. We have five of these that we have preliminary designs back for. So, um those are things that um will go onto this this list for storm water future projects. And then the sixth identified project that you see there is the regional downtown storm water which we talked about a little bit but we could talk about more if you would like to. Um a few considerations for storm water infrastructure. Um, we have discussed that the potential adoption of a storm water utility could provide an ongoing funding mechanism for storm water projects and storm water maintenance and all things storm water. Um, so we will be talking more about that in the near future. Um, you see the projects that haveident been identified so far, but we definitely have a lot more needs for cost estimates and additional analysis

to identify further projects. ask a specific question about is Curtis Street not Curtis Drive, right? I'm just I'm just curious there the difference. I I don't know because Curtis Drive is it Curtis Drive or Curtis Street? I think I think street is correct. Okay. I'm just saying it's back where they redo North Garner. Does that have anything to do with that? I mean, I'm just on Curtis Drive. I'm just curious. I mean, he's talking you're talking about a stormwater cases that that has anything to do with the block that's north garner that's going to be redone. That's why I'm asking.

Yeah, these are just specific locations that we um have responded to, you know, drainage complaints and we knew that there needed to be something done, but we have not had um projects or had funding to do the projects to to provide those solutions. Um, so we we do have and I can definitely provide some more information about what exactly those proposed projects look like. Um, but they all address a lot of them are in older areas where there really was not a lot of infrastructure. You have a lot of straits without curbon gutter that maybe had roadside ditches and a few a few pipes to outfall the water at some point. And so there's really just not enough management of of the water to keep it off of private property. I was just asking about that because we had that discussion here when the North Corner project was in front of us. We specifically talked about Mr. Dinger beat that horse over over about the storm water and and he was right because the questions maybe because the slope of the land. So I'm just assuming this is has nothing to do with that,

right? Okay. All right. Thank you. Yeah, that that may be something else to look at as well. It's it its own issue, but Okay. All right. Yeah, I noticed all these are older places. No curbing gutter. Yes. Thank you.

So the next set of projects um these are projects that are on the horizon list that we are looking at keeping on the horizon list for a variety of reasons. One, there's uh we still may need to do some um more uh feasibility digging. uh we may need some time uh to uh understand the need a little bit further. Um maybe the um funding availability is not reasonable. Um so we've got some uh there's consistently been some money um uh that has been earmarked and now spent for a transit circulator infrastructure. So there's um that's going to continue to be something we need to look at with our regional partnerships on transit. Uh we've we've talked about the need to expand current town hall uh whether it's expanding this building or um uh moving into some space around this building. We've also got the projects uh on Jones Sausage to complete that uh roadway. Um, so the south side would be the uh realignment that would involve working with the railroad. Um, and so that's just a challenge in and of itself. And then on the west side, that is the project that was scoped out of the current project um, which would require annexation and utility um, implementation on that west side of Joan Sausage. Jurgen Park phase 2 is is still out there. the need there is continuing to or wanting to get the first park open, the first phase of the park open um and see what that looks like. And then we've got some um identified needs with future greenways and greenway connections. We also do have some money in the upcoming CIP that can help address um any kind of immediate needs related to greenways.

And then two other things to uh think about is we've got the Jurgen Homestead on the Jurgen property. Uh right now the FY27 budget will include some um funding to uh meet some of the state requirements um on the regulations for that homestead, but any kind of future use um that council has um desires for, we would need to to work through and and consider. And same with the future of the Rand Brian House. So, those are just two other projects that are worth thinking about um in the long term. Any questions um on these items or other projects that we've presented to you tonight?

I'm just curious about the Horizon project, Jones Sausage Road South. How did you come up with the estimate of 15 million? Leah did it.

I'm sorry, ma'am. Um so this came from some preliminary design work that we did um before we started further design on the phase that is is under design now. So um we took a look at the kind of whole corridor. Um I think also this is a project that we know the town would not do on its own. So we are anticipating that that could likely or potentially be our contribution to the project. The entire cost would be be greater um because it does require going over the railroad and realigning all the way down to 70. So um this is one that we will definitely be looking for partner funding for.

Thank you for the clarification. Sure. Any other thoughts, questions? It appears we will have this as a discussion point at our retreat as well. Is that correct?

Yes. So, the next steps is we will be bringing this back um to the retreat to to really get you guys um moving get you up and moving prioritizing things. Um and then look at funding options and where council has some desires to move some things forward in um either the upcoming CIP or in future years. Um we've heard there may be uh one to add when we think about some land acquisition. So we can certainly add that to the list of things to prioritize um at that at that retreat as part of the discussion.

Excisions to be made. Thank you for bringing it up. Look forward to seeing you at the retreat. Thank you for your time. And I do want to also thank um all of our CIP steering committee. Um we couldn't have done it without all of them and and all of their time and energy and dedication. So I just want to say thank you. Some of them are out there in the audience. Nothing is a billion dollars.

Hey, thank you very much. And I believe the next item is number three on the discussion list has to do with the affordable housing task force final recommendations and our sponsor is our town manager Jody Miller. Yes. Good evening mayor, members of council. I'm going to turn this over to Mr. Vance who was the chair of our affordable housing task force to make a few introductory remarks and then myself and assistant manager John Hodgees is going to review the recommendations the final recommendations from the um housing uh task force with the council.

Okay. I just want to say u as a co-chair for the affordable housing task force I want to thank uh all the members uh for their time and commitment and their thoughtful work. The group brought together different perspectives uh to the table and stayed focused on what is the best for the people of Garn and I'm proud of the respectful and collaborative way the task force worked through uh the challenging issues including both the creation of a new affordable housing and pres preserv preservation of existing home the creation of new affordable housing and preservation of existing homes. Uh the recommendations shared today reflect the careful consideration and practical approach to the town's role. Uh it it has been my honor to serve as the co-chair again and I believe this work provides a strong foundation as the town moves forward with the new housing and community development specialist position and our continued commitment to uh our housing affordability. Thank you all for all the hard work. It's been a long journey, but I believe that we have reached a great point for the town to move forward positively in the area of affordable housing.

Thank you, Mr. Vance. Um and um as I mentioned um before, mayor and council, uh this this information this evening is provided for your information, an opportunity for us to share the recommendations that were coming out of the affordable housing task force with an opportunity for council to have more discussion and to provide guidance and direction at your February retreat. So, um let me just spend a few moments um bringing everybody up to speed on the work that was accomplished this fall. If you recall back in August during your August work session, council endorsed re-engaging our affordable housing task force under three topic areas. First was resource investment uh with the resource investment focus looking at answering the question what should be the role of the town and affordable housing. The second area of focus was partnerships and collaboration. Uh recommending strategies for engaging with the development and notfor-profit communities to support affordable housing initiatives and Garner. And then community engagement, a goal of developing and implementing a strategy for community engagement focused on affordable housing. And so once council endorsed re-engaging the affordable housing task for task force um on these specific areas, we met from October to December of this past year. And what you have before you is a consensus of the recommendations from uh these three uh topic areas from the task force. So first let's look at the area of resource investment. Similar to the work that was done early in 2025, we broke up into a series of subcommittees for the task force to work on specific topic areas and bring back recommendations for discussion for the larger task force. So uh first uh area of focus was resource

investment and that we really spent a lot of time in the resource investment work group. I was a part of that. Mr. Vance was a part of that and Mr. Carson was part of that. Uh talking about u what is some what are some guiding principles in terms of the town's role um in affordable housing. And this is what we brought back to the task force that was endorsed by the task force um members. Um the role it the town's role in affordable housing looks at support and facilitating private investment in affordable housing. Making sure that we serve as a lazison to on affordable housing projects that are coming into our community. Facilitating affordable housing opportunities that focus on in particular town employees, active duty military and veterans. Assisting with maintaining our existing housing stock by implementing housing and neighborhood preservation strategies with partners and stakeholders. Coordinating town infrastructure projects that support affordable housing in conjunction with other town departments. Manageable manage affordable housing community engagement initiative work uh working with our communications team to do that. uh tracking and reporting data on on affordable housing annually in the town and then advocating for housing initiatives and projects. So those were the areas where recommendation came from the task force. When we think about what is the appropriate role for the town to play in terms of affordable housing, these are the areas of support and strategies that were recommended. In addition to that, um a creating a more permanent advisory committee also came from the task force. The task force was created to uh provide some specific guidance and priorities over a short period of time and it was designed to bring uh bring a group of people together to help council um focus on areas of direction regarding affordable housing. But as we all know, affordable

housing is an ongoing challenge and it's an evolving challenge. And so, uh, thinking about this in terms of how do we continue to have these discussions, understand the needs and opportunities in our community, and make recommendations to council. Um, it was the recommendation of the task force that we create a a permanent advisory committee to help provide guidance and um, recommendations on housing affordability issues and preservation issues. In addition to creating an advisory committee, uh staffing resources came up as a another uh recommendation. We talked a lot about that this past fall with a recommendation coming forth at your December meeting to create the housing and community development specialist position. I'm excited that council approved that position. It's been posted and we're actually now in the process of starting to interview for that position. a lot of the recommendations that you'll see before you this evening that are coming from the task force. That's going to be a key position in supporting and implementing a lot of these recommendations moving forward. And then the final area under resource investment is looking at leveraging financial and operational services. We know that we can't do this by ourselves and that there are key partnerships that help us be successful and affordable housing uh opportunities. continuing our partnerships with Wake County, uh, preserving home in terms of our housing preservation, our work with Habitat for Humanity, uh, looking at other po possible partnerships with land trusts, um, and others that, you know, other opportunities and other organizations out there that will help us maintain affordable housing within the town. So, I'm going to turn the partnerships and collaboration uh, committee over to to John to share with you the recommendations from that committee. So, John,

thank you, Miss Miller. Um, as Miss Miller said, our second subcommittee was partnerships and collaboration, and there were several areas that we focused our conversations on. One was afford affordable housing developers. So, the recommendation there is to continue working with developers of affordable housing uh to support their projects coming into Garner. Uh we the recommendation was to focus on the development pipeline. So projects that we may be aware of that have some potential to have affordable elements. Um and also on the horizon projects that were included in the Garner housing inventory analysis. As you may recall, we had a horizon category in that inventory because there was some interest from some housing developers of affordable housing uh to do projects, but they were not far enough along for us to consider them um approved or count them in our work. And so they were included as horizon projects. uh so we would continue to work with those developers who understand the development of affordable housing to bring those projects forward. There was also focus on working with the traditional developers. We did a focus group with traditional developers early last year and some of that information has been shared with council. Um but but trying to determine what are best ways to include the the traditional developers in this and one specific recommendation was development of a housing fund that could retreat could receive contributions from developers and others. Um and so we'll be working this year with our legal services and finance department to figure out the the structure for that fund and create it so that it's available for us to use. One idea that was discussed was also a cash out option for developers who've committed to affordable units in market rate developments um so the investments can be targeted for strategic opportunities. I think for a while uh we were uh asking or expecting of developers to make some contribution of units for to be some level of affordability. I think in discussions that the task force had and subsequent discussions that council had, I think we've realized that um we may not be

moving the needle as much as we had hoped by having some of those things sprinkled in market developments. And we don't see that as a long-term sustainable way to address housing. Um, so taking a uh an example of a uh a project that our our neighbors in Raleigh did where an original commitment was made for some affordable units and a market rate project, but Raleigh evaluated and determined that potentially having an opportunity to have um let that developer cash out that commitment and the town be able to use the city in in Raleigh's case be able to use those dollars in other places might be more advantageous to Raleigh. So we wanted to further investigate that to see if any of the existing commitments we have in market rate projects would be good candidates for that. And then also um partnering with Habitat for Humanity or other entities to develop affordable forale units in market rate development. So, one of the conversations that came out of our work with Habitat was for um single family developments or town home developments. Um if there was an interest from the developer to provide lots for development, partners like Habitat can go in and develop one, two, three, four, whatever the units would be uh intermingled within the market rate for sale uh development. And so we want to pursue opportunities there for any of our development partners who might want to provide lots to entities like Habitat. And then lastly, uh preserving home and our housing preservation strategy. Um it was noted uh that that preservation strategy is important to maintain our affordable our housing affordability and home ownership. And we've talked a lot about that um over the last couple of years. And we've had an investment focus with our our partners at preserving home. Um and so we would continue working with them to reduce the number of Garner homes on the waiting list. Council's additional contribution uh to them is helping with that, but as you heard in the report back in November, we

still have a ways to go before we have uh reduced that weight list. Um and then also looking at other housing preservation strategies to focus resources on some of our naturally affordable uh naturally occurring affordable housing. Um, and there was a recommendation for us to do some more proactive work using um, surveys, mapping, and other tools that we have to try to help prioritize and predict the likelihood of where some of the preservation work might need to be done prior to applications being received by entities like preserving home. So, I'll turn it back over to Miss Miller uh, for the community engagement subcommittee.

Thank you, Mr. Hodes. Uh the final topic area that we focused on this past fall was community engagement. Uh this committee was chaired by Mr. Dinger and Miss Joseph and Miss Johnson were members of that committee as well as Miss Doninas was part of that committee as well. And so some of the recommendations brought forth from that committee looked at uh developing a model for community engagement. Uh specifically creating a plan and a timeline for what this engagement looked like for the community community and prioritized listening sessions with the with the faith community was one of the first recommendations that came from this from this committee in terms of kicking off the engagement efforts. Also determining messaging and outcomes u looking at opportunities to draft key messages for promoting the engagement efforts. How do we get people engaged? How do we let them know that we're doing this work? Adopting a listening first approach and framing conversations that prioritize community perspectives. Looks at data like our national community survey as well as our housing inventory analysis as well. and then look at connecting affordability challenges to the local realities of the market including looking at including residents outside the Tim limit town limits who also interact with Garner services and then ensure that messaging reflects Garner's needs and initiatives as council recalls we did commission that inventory report that had data specific to the town of Garner and making sure that we were providing information regarding our specific needs and opportunities. uh making sure that any engagement efforts really focused on diverse audiences and looking at uh including our residents but also those in the workforce sectors, faith-based communities, nonprofits, and advisory groups were all provided as examples and opportunities. And then also an opportunity to tell our story about affordable housing. uh working with our

newly uh approved housing and community development specialist position as well as our communications team on educational materials that communicate the town's efforts in affordable housing. What we've done in the past, what we're currently working on, what is the vision for the future. uh creating an inventory of all our actions to date, programs, partnerships, uh funding, those types of things and uh outcomes and then looking at creative ways of sharing that information, whether it's videos, handouts, newsletter. We talked about the importance of data and sharing information um and data annually. So looking at opportunities for how do we tell our story here in Garner. So, those are some of the actions that were recommended and outlined um by the affordable housing task force. Um it was a great pleasure to be able to serve on that task force and work with Mr. Vance and Mr. Dinger and the rest of the task force members in order to help provide recommendations and guidance to council as we continue to work on affordable housing programs and journey together. So, I'll turn it over to Mr. Vance for some closing remarks and then be available for any questions that council may have. So, Mr. advance.

Um, again, I would just say it was a a great great opportunity uh to work with some great people uh to put together this uh this outcome that we have brought before you on this day and I just say that uh I couldn't ask for a better group of folks to work with and with that turn over for questions.

Thank you. Thank you. Yeah, as you I think one of the key takeaways, not only the great job that the task force did, but this is an ongoing project. It there's no end in sight. This will be with us for a long time. You've laid a great foundation. We're off to a great start with the position that we've created and are filling this spring. A lot of good things are happening, but there's a lot of work left to be done. And we'll be talking about this again at our retreat in a couple weeks and many times after that. So, in the meantime, we'll start with Mr. Matthews if there's any questions or comments here.

Great presentation and appreciate all your efforts to make this thing happen. And looks like Garner's taking the lead on something a lot of towns don't want to do anything about. And a lot of good stuff coming out of the meeting here. I look forward to discussing it further at our retreat. And uh I see a lot of workable items in here we can work with. And uh is it going to be an overnight deal? No. As the mayor said, it's going to take a while, but we we pick our battles and pick those things that we can generally do something about and follow through and uh to give us uh new person some guidance, understand how that that's going to work. And uh so we'll get there just a little bit at a time, but I think everything we do should be uh a a a good process that we can maintain. So and uh but it's going to take a little time, but we will get there. And thank you for what y'all did on this this thing here. Was time consuming. I know.

Mr. Sleton, follow up. Uh Mr. Miller just the position advertised and closed and you do have resumes. So you did get some you did get multiple applications. We did. We got several applications and very strong applications. So we're excited to go through the interview process. Good. And that pro and as you stated here sometime in the spring of this year we hope to have that position filled and the person starting. Yes. We we would love to have someone on board in the next 60 days or so. Okay. All right. And thank you for this uh these final recommendations. Yeah. a very a very concrete step, very affordable. Mr. Stal, what is the timeline for establishing the affordable housing advisory committee?

I would foresee that actually being one of the first things when our new staff person gets on board um when we talk about their priorities and work plan. I would see that being one of the first ones. We we've been able to make sure we've got the staffing for the position. The next step would be then what is the what is the vision for that advisory group and being able to bring that back to council for further discussion and endorsement. I don't know the sentiments of my colleagues, but would it be possible for that to be something we could discuss at our retreat as possibly getting established before that position is hired?

We we could certainly add that. We're going to talk about the recommendations and we can certainly talk about that further. Um, and we can provide some some information and guidance as to what it would take from a from a staff workload perspective in order to do that. So, happy to do that. Okay, Mr. Dallinger.

So, I'm going to keep it real here for a little bit, too. Um, because we've worked years and years on this and we've made a lot of progress. We've come to a good point. Um, but I'm just disappointed in the community engagement, how that has rolled out of the gate. And to be honest, it's giving me flashbacks to last year's recommendations being presented to council. And there not being even enthusiasm and embracing of that and not a default towards action and urgency. And you know when we in anybody body body of this town volunteers show up and do work and they put their heart and soul and blood, sweat and tears into it to make a plan present that plan to council which was done in December about the timeline for the community engagement and council nodded and said the timeline looks good and for that to not proceed we've got to do a better job of implementation and being consistent. in being respectful of our volunteers. And I'm excited for this new person to come on, but we've got to bring them on into an environment we're 110% supportive. And that means supportive of them, supportive of council and its recommendations and its work plans that it approves. So again, I I'm I'm enthusiastic about what we're doing. I think it's taken too long for us to get here, but we need to be more diligent on implementation plans. You have a plan, you implement. If you have questions, anybody has a question on what we need to do. If it's a council project, you come to council and say, "What do we do?" But we always default towards action and overcommunicating. Um because just again to the year ago, we had our we we lost a member of our committee just because of the sort of uh feeling of lack of appreciation. And I

think that's something we never want to have on any border committee and anything we do in the town. So I think we just need to re be hyper conscious and aware of the message we're sending in how we're communicating what we're doing. And if people are committing their time to do something, we reshuffle our efforts and time to support them in that. So again, I I'm enthusiastic with the direction we're going. It's never going to move as fast as I want it to move. That's fine. Um, but it needs to move as fast as our volunteers are willing to move at in any given time. And to Mr. Stalling's point, I think that a lot of these things don't have to happen in series. They can happen in parallel. We need to start now. We should have started last year on forming this housing advisory committee, soliciting interested folks, setting time aside, having those conversations so that there can be we get the expertise we need on board. they can start having dialogue and the person comes in, they bring in their expertise to to make the machine work. But I think we there's no other lesson that we've learned in the past year and a half is that by delaying you miss opportunities. And when we miss opportunities, we're not missing opportunities for us. We're missing opportunities for our residents. How many people have lost their homes in the past year? How many people have not been able to afford a home in the past year? Urgency, urgency, urgency. What are we waiting for? And if we overextend and we move too fast, then let's slow down. I' I'd much rather us be in a position of moving too fast and making a few mistakes than making errors of omission or or delay. So again, it it's put the foot on the gas. Let's set a timeline immediately for setting aside getting this ad. I find people reach out. They're interested in being on the committee. Let's set a time to have a discussion with HR committee. How are we

going to recruit these people? Let's get a draft recommendation. Let's let's move. Let's start having conversations with people so that when that person comes, we've got enthusiastic people in the community who are knowledgeable and part of the process, new to the process. How can we help you succeed as you've joined the town of Garner? We have got your back. You've got our support. We want to lean on your expertise to make this the best experience and best affordable housing community in the entire state. Bring them into that environment. And we can do that. But we need to decide we're going to do it. And that's the other disappointment on the side of the outreach committee is we could have started doing that and recruiting people, putting the word out that we're doing this for affordable housing. Get soliciting that interest. That's the outreach piece is getting the excitement. So let's move, keep moving, keep moving. Urgency to be the number one word default to action and urgency. And and is a affordable housing needs change. The strategy we're have now would not be the same one we had earlier in the year. The market has changed. That's good. But we have to have people having those conversations actively and seeing all these things through the lens of housing affordability and opportunity. The Habitat specifically the Habitat one where they might go into market rate communities. I remember sitting in the room over there. We were talking with Habitat and I was like, they brought up about how they were doing market rate in their development in Garner and you know mixed use affordable and mixed use. I said, "Well, do you ever do it in other places?" Oh yeah, we do. Well, if we had somebody on staff and whose focus it was like, what are we doing? How are we integrating affordability into everything we do in this town? And having that conversation with all of our department heads and outside partners, I mean, we need to seize the opportunities we can't even see. And we can only do that if we start moving. I get so frustrated looking back at what we've missed. But I'm encouraged by where how far we've come. But we've got to move. So

let's move. Let's put this at the top list of our priorities. Let's do something. That's all I got to say. Thank you, Mr. Vance. Comments, questions? I'm done. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Great presentation. Great stuff. Like I say, we still have miles to go and we're we're all enthusiastic. We're going to keep it moving. We're going to get citizen involvement, all the things. Hard to make everything happen today. I I understand that urgency. We we'll keep moving. Thank you.

And just I want to add my thanks to the staff that participated at the task force. It was um it was a commitment of time and expertise um added to their already full workloads. um but they did an outstanding job being on the task force um working on the subcommittees and bringing forth the recommendations for the task force. So I just want to acknowledge and thank them. So thank you.

And I'll second that too. I think that one of the things that have impressed us the most with both versions of our task force was the presence of staff in those meetings and the engagement and the facilitation and the commitment with the town attorney being there, town managers being there, planning staff being there. um it if it was all hands and what I want to see is the fruit of that effort. That's really what I want to see is that they see that their time and commitment is having results. That's really what I'm looking for. So, thank you.

Well, and I would be remiss if I didn't mention and he's with us tonight, Ben Austin. He was our MPA intern who worked with the task force who really was the glue that put out, you know, kind of kept us on track. Um really provided the support we needed to do the work this fall. And so I just wanted to acknowledge him and thank you. So Ben, it was great working with you. He deserves a round of applause. Oh yeah.

Yes. Mayor Gupt. May I also add that he showed an example of what it what it's like to have someone spec specifically focused on affordable housing and doing the research uh that others don't have that time to do. So that actually added to the uh show the need to have someone who's doing that full-time and doing it professionally. Did a great job then. It makes a difference, doesn't it? Makes a big difference. Thanks again, Ben. Good stuff. Anything else? That is it for this evening. Thank you for your time.

Okay. Thank you. That was a lot of great discussions, a lot of great time spent. That seems to bring us along to item G on the agenda, which is updates to council. We've got a couple of little things starting with committee reports, manager reports. Uh I keep looking. I don't see where it says mayor's reports up here. So, I'm going to break in line here at the very beginning and just to to make uh two shoutouts, two shout outs here. Uh, one of them was the emergency operations center. A bunch of people have spent a bunch of time over the last couple of weeks and we're looking at a whole lot of them right here tonight at staff. Uh, the first three day John I think it was the first storm. People forget it's not just the three days that's in operation. It takes a day or two to get it set up, a day or two to break it down, think how it went, and then we had to jump back in with another EOC just over the past weekend as the weather worsened. So, my hats off for all are off to all of the staff. It was staff who did this week. I don't know of any volunteers. I don't think council members were too involved. So, uh, town manager Miller and her team are really the ones that get the shout out. The two assistant town managers, John and Matt, were there every step of the way. I look and see our fire chief, uh, Penny over here, and our chief of police, Adams, that were with us, public works director, Forest, uh, the finance guys were there, Leah was there, Jeff was there, all a lot of work went into this. Can't thank you enough for the outstanding job. Uh, it turned out to be less catastrophic than we thought, but a good place to practice on. So, so great job. your your your citizens, your residents were greatly appreciative. They felt that their roads were better and safer than other ones in the community. They could tell when they got to Garner and the roads were clear. Ben Bryan and Ben. So, my hats off to all of you there. The other shout out last

week, we were well represented at the North Carolina City and County Management Association. Had over 500 attendees of county managers and city managers uh and their assistants over there. We were represented by our town manager, Miss Miller, and both of our assistant town managers, Mr. Hodes and Mr. P. And I had feedback from people who were not them. I do know some other people that were there uh and the may and their mayors, and they come back with one comment that caught my attention. They said, "Wow, your people stood out. Your people stood out. They were represented well. You have one uh town manager Miller is the incoming president for the coming year. Mr. Hodgeges was the conference program chair on this great event that went on down there and it got rave reviews. It was well spent. Even though your heads may have been back here in the emergency operation center, your bodies were over there going through the motions uh and kind of multitasking. So, great job to the people who who were there doing that. You don't hear it enough. We didn't see you doing it, but I heard about it and I communicated with you while you were there. Thanks for that. Being said, we'll move right along to committee reports from council members as usual. We'll come back for other council reports. Uh but we'll start with Mr. Matthews on committee reports. Any news from your end?

Um I I was going to comment what you said in the council reports. I just want to echo it and I don't have to go back there, but uh it was great to see this town in action. Strong leadership. Uh boy, the public works director. I don't think he slept. I told him I said he looked good on TV. I think was living with Garner all week with ice storm and everything else. So, they came to the right place to see it in action. So, congratulations to all of you. Police, fire, public works, the management team, just all of you. It's uh it showed. And uh so, like the mayor said, we're ready if it happens again. And uh yeah, so

and and I would just like to add um Paul Padet, who is by day our inspections director, but in all things emergency, he's our EOC manager, did an outstanding job in terms of his coordination, his leadership, his communication, and really helping us plan for, activate, um and respond to the events over the last couple weeks. So, I just wanted to acknowledge Paul and all the efforts that he's put in. Thank you for coming right because I saw his face when I was thinking about it but then suddenly he disappeared and I forgot. Ju just like that. Just like that. Okay. Mr. Singleton comments committee reports.

No committee report but I second what you and Mr. Matthews have said and I thank the staff for all the time the hard work preparation. Uh and people ask questions. They get asked when they going to come scrape my street. I said I don't know priorities. they have their priorities and they will get to secondary roads streets when it's time. Uh but yeah, no complaints. People just couple people ask do you know when they're out there? They're out there working just riding around. You can see they work because the roads are clear the main thorough repair. So greatly appreciated uh the work and the time. Of course uh police and fire are out there constantly because of calls. I believe I read a report where the number of uh emergency room visits the last few days were directly related to sledding accidents. So that was not a surprise with with youth with young people. So that's not a surprise. Thank y'all.

Thank you, Mr. Tyler. Committee reports.

So I I'll follow the trend and do both. Um so we had a parks and wreck meeting that was um scheduled for Monday, January um 26th. They had to be rescheduled because of inclement weather. Um but they were planning on discussing all of those items at the next meeting which will be um February 16th. Um also last week a couple of um DGA members met um discuss items in reference to upcoming events downtown. Um it was a great conversation. We stayed about an hour um but big shout out to April and the team um just working through those details and how they work to make those amazing events happen downtown. Also, the Garner Youth Council had their second meeting um where the topic was the structure of town government, which was exciting and learning about the process that we do as leaders. Um so, shout out to Bella and Rick and the team for all the work they do to make that program a success. Um but I also do want to give a big shout out to our our town manager and the staff, especially public works, fire, police, everyone who helped keep our community safe um and informed throughout this weekend's winter weather. um the council via email was very well updated which allowed us to respond quickly as we got questions that came in um because that coordination really does matter especially informing the public. Um so hats off to manager Miller and her team and Paul um for their steady leadership and hard work um in a few weeks of interesting weather I will say

putting it politely. Yes. Thank you Mr. Dinger.

Yeah, I like all that. Um it's just you know there's never any concern or question that everybody's going to jump into action and put the residents safety first and everything whether it's closing facilities and closing parks and roads. So um excellent job by just everyone as usual for for jumping into action and putting in those long hours I'm sure to make sure that everything goes smoothly when it could have gone a lot worse. We really lucked out although you know we wanted more snow but whatever. Um uh only a report I have is a Junth committee's been meeting since November last year. Is that right? Rick, we met a couple meetings. Um we're building up our momentum to um top that MLK celebration that was just absolutely amazing. Um but we're engaging our so a lot of our old committee members and new committee members and looking forward to a good program this year and uh have a good engagement some good ideas. So looking forward to that.

Thank you, Mr. Vance. Um I have no committee report, but I also would like to uh give a personal thanks out to the town manager Miller for being in that EOC uh along with the entire staff for everything that was done. Outstanding, outstanding leadership and the dedication uh during this period was was just great. The communication, I just can't say enough about it. It was tremendous and everything was on top. I know that it takes a lot uh bringing back my old military days with working in the EOCC. It takes a lot to pull information together and to get it out in a concise form to communicate a clear message to uh to your audience. But so thank you all for all your hard work and everything you've done.

Okay. Thank you. And that brings us to item number two, manager reports. Now you report back to us. We've been talking about you. So we have our development activity map update and Mr. Treasonberg, I believe, is going to briefly review that with council.

Good evening, mayor, council members. Um, yes, it's been a couple of months uh since we've had an update on this. We didn't have a work session in December, and the January one got delayed here till tonight. Um, so we do have a few things that have uh popped up on the map and so I'll briefly um go over those. Uh, the first two in your report I will note are applications in progress. Um, so they have not been formally submitted yet as as a as a project in the system. Um but the first one is a proposal for a uh Primrose school daycare facility um to be located here's our um very well-known Brian Road White Oak intersection um the apartments um off of Salt what was Salt Hill Road. So this would be on the parcels just opposite. We had the approval um for the self- storage facility right here in this location. Um I would expect that this one will be coming in as a tier 2 reszoning. Um so it will have a uh it already they do have a sketch plan which I'll bring up here. Um again this is very early. um we talked to them. I know specifically about needing to coordinate with NC DOT um on their access. I would highly doubt that this access here off of White Oak would be approved and that it'll probably be required for them to have their access off of Salt Hill. Um but you see generally here just kind of the concept with the school in the middle um the recreation playground facilities, playfield uh and parking associated with it. Again, very early. Um so do expect this to to change over time. Um but they are very interested in pursuing this site.

Uh the other one that is in development, we had a what I would say is probably a pretty fairly early meeting with Wake County Schools um regarding East Wake uh middle school. Um you may recall that they acquired some adjacent property here. Um it's a very tightly constrained uh school site currently, but they almost doubled uh their acreage by by uh working with Mr. Jurgen um to get the balance of the property. Um the balance of the property is currently zoned industrial. Um so they will be coming in for a reasonzoning. It is not expected that this one will trip any special use permit requirements. Um but because of the reasonzoning, you will have the opportunity at that time during a reasonzoning hearing um again likely to be looking at a master plan um of a proposed site plan. They have not yet put any pen to paper. This initial meeting was mostly just focused on making sure that they understood the processes that they were going to have to go through and talking through some very high level things. So, you won't see um any kind of sketch attached to this yet, but as soon as we do have one, uh we will certainly update and let you know. In terms of applications under review, um I know there's probably been a little bit of chatter about this one and I'm There we go. Get myself oriented here. Um, so the first one on the list is the Chick-fil-A uh uh over here at the Target uh shopping center um off of 70 in Timber. Um for this they are working with the uh shopping center owners to obtain some additional property um behind the current Chick-fil-A

building. So the current Chick-fil-A building is going to be kind of located in the center of this area you're looking at now. um where they have the proposed building that would be on the property they're looking to acquire. So, I fully expect they're going to try to do as much construction of the new facility while they keep the old facility open. Um there will have to probably be some downtime uh to allow for the demolition of the existing building before they can fully open up the new one. Um but they are looking to expand. I think we all know that's a very heavily traveled site and is often a little bit of a traffic nightmare in the actual shopping center. Um so this should uh help that situation. There's a few uh things that they need to pay attention to. The amount of imperous surface um for the entire shopping center is very tight. Um so they do need to go through some I would say a little more detailed analysis and looking at their total impervious uh and the amount that they can increase uh and not throw the shopping center out of balance.

Yes. I believe so. I think they were talking about possibly a second floor of my grandson works out there. Okay. He said it's going to be a unique Chick-fil-A one of a kind. So I mean what they did the one at Cameron Village, but Cameron Village was really land constraint, right?

Uh just curious because I I see the footprint. It looks like they're adding at least a third of a third more land, maybe maybe 50% more. So anyway, just curious because they sure yes, they have traffic flow issues. Yeah, I'm not um we can check on that. I don't think we've seen any elevations yet, and I don't see a note on their sketch that indicates that it's multi-story, but it's not to say that it's not. Okay, quick another flashback. Just directly south of that was going to be a Crispy Cream one time. Not not a big one, but a smaller Crispy Cream drive-thru, whatever. Yep. Back in the day, that was Crispy Cream and Chick-fil-A.

Just saying. Back in the day, we saw a footprint anyway. Never came to fruition. All right. And that have been dangerous. Chick-fil-A. You need to write a book about all this stuff. So, so it ain't wasted. You'd have heard all the things that were come to Greenfield. Well, you some of us. Yes, sir.

Yes. Um, the next two projects are out um over in the Auburn area and I suspect that they are probably in John's queue perhaps um for for potential meetings um pre-development meetings with with council. Um they are in review but very early in review. Um the first one here is titled the village at big branch. Uh this is on the corner of East Garner Road and Auburn Church Road. So the northwest corner. Um not backing up directly to the quarry, but just about there's a little bit of property in between. Um this is a project that um is looking at a mixed uh bag of residential. Um they apparently are aware of our discussions about the R8 district. um and are seem to be aware of the current proposal perhaps of of the minimum density requirement um because they do have a commitment to a minimum of four dwelling units per acre as part of that. Um but at this point in time they are envisioning a mix of single family uh which are 60 foot wide lots uh duplexes on 80 foot wide lots and town homes. Uh they have an amenity center area kind of identified here up front along Auburn Church. Um pretty sizable tree save here as well along Auburn Church further north. Um again, very early in the process. I don't believe we've even uh returned one full set of staff comments back to them yet. Um, but again, if you have any comments on this one, we're more than welcome to submit them to us and we will certainly relay the information. Um, we

have had, again, like I say, the usual conversations about about things, so we'll see how they how they respond. The other project is down here at the corner of 70 and Auburn Nightdale. Um this is the former driving range. Uh the property was purchased a few years ago by State Employees Credit Union. Originally they were going to do a traditional um bank branch here and on part of the property and then look to just kind of develop the rest of the property over time. Uh they have since kind of backed away from that. They're not pulling completely away from it. Um but they have talked to an apartment developer who is actually willing to do some mixed use. Um so what you see here is um there would actually be a state employees credit union uh incorporated into uh this apartment building here and would also still include a drive-thru um for service there. Um there is an additional space in the building next door um for some ground floor commercial. The one that I'm not sure about cuz I did not attend um this particular meeting. There is another space back here in this building that appears to be um available for um ground floor commercial. At first I thought maybe it was more amenity oriented, but it seems like more of the indoor amenities are located in this building here. Um, so I'll try to get some some more information on this. Um, these are roughly anywhere from 800 to,200 square foot spaces. Um, but they did not shy away when we told them at the very beginning that we were looking for some integrated u mixed use. It's I wouldn't

say that it's a lot, but it's definitely um a step in that direction. Um so again would definitely encourage you if they're in the queue um for your meetings and you would like to provide them with some feedback and input please please take advantage of that opportunity. Mr. Tenberg the house I believe there is on the national historic register. Is that correct? It is that land has to stay like it like it is correct with the house. Okay. Yeah. Thank you.

Um the last and the last two just very briefly I'll highlight these. They're not super exciting to look at in terms of the plans. Um, but it is exciting to see uh the progress of Wake County with the Swift Creek Greenway plans. Um, so they have submitted site plan uh applications to us for two trail heads. Um, so the first one here is located along 401 directly across from the Swift Creek Apartments. Um, this one is is a little more activity oriented. Um, it certainly is a traditional trail head. It has the parking. It has the bike rack um parking spaces. Um, but it does have a picnic area. Um, some playground uh dedicated areas and equipment and what looks to be bathroom maintenance um type buildings here. Um, so here's kind of the the proposed uh greenway path. um the direct access off of the Vandor Springs extension and again the parking and associated facilities and the second

all right can I get the time out here the proposed Vandor Springs extension the mystery road that never will one never see so is it's not directly on 401 but are they supposed to build a section of the proposed indoors ring extension to get to the trail head yeah so they won't have to they should not have to build any portion of that because the apartment project will be building that full cross section. Um, but they will be taking advantage of that to have their driveway from there. Okay. Yeah.

I sure hope we don't call that Vandor Springs Extension because I don't think that they will ever connect and they will really confuse people where to delivery. But anyway, that's just Grace two cents. Yep. Um, that's just the name that's in Okay. in the Campo MTP system. So, we continue to use that for now. But

old stage could certainly be a breaking point should it ever connect. That the name, even if it did connect, could change. Um, and the other one uh is not far from uh Vandor Springs on Old Stage. Um, so it's kind of at the other end. And this is on the property that was originally supposed to be a food line back in the day. Um the county has purchased it with some of their open space funding. Um so again here now this one of course the Vandor Springs Extension does not exist yet. Um, and so one of the initial comments, major comments back to them is that, well, we can't, if you're not planning to build this, um, you're going to have to plan for your access a different way. Um, so they are aware of that. But again, this one, not as many amenities planned. There are some benches and they're looking at um, workout stations. Um, but again, another convenient hopefully trail head location for this major greenway construction project. So, that's what's been added to the development map. Um, certainly if you have any questions, feel free feel free to reach out to me or Aaron and um, we'll get you hopefully the information that you need.

Can I ask you a question? Yep. Uh, Cabllas from that shopping center where the hotel was. understand there's going to be some things going in there on that corner lot maybe in the restaurant world. Is there anything we can elaborate on that little corner? The Jeff the Oh, the old former hotel. Thank you for Mr. M. Yeah. So, there's a Bank of America um and I think some kind of restaurant and the third space. There's they created three lots out of that former hotel site. And I know we have a restaurant and the bank and I'm not sure if we have the third a user for the third one yet. Have they named the restaurant yet or it's just to be announced? Yeah.

Okay. There's a s one of them is a sitown restaurant. Believe so. Yeah. I think your site plan shows all three buildings, Jeff, if you do it. Yeah, they did submit something early that showed a concept, but then we've been getting individual plans for each parcel. Two two comments. One, I saw something at the Vandor Springs Timber Drive intersection. There's like a commercial grocery or something. There's like this huge wet pond on the site plan. And I'm thinking about like the quality oil project that where they were able to integrate that underground.

Can you open up that site plan? It seems like a lot of wasted space. It's not only cool to have it on that corner, but seems like a disproportionate amount of that property that is being used for. So it might that'd be the feedback I'd have to immediately is can you have larger footprint or you know do something because it's just not really efficient use. The other one is the one to the north of the greenway access on timber. I mean sorry Vandor and old stage. Mhm. Those apartments.

I'll tell you right now vote for that project with those town homes like sitting right on old stage like that. Right. I'm thinking I'll need to check on this one. I'm not sure if this is potentially a buy right or if it if it needs a resoning. Well, if it needs a resoning.

Yeah. that that I still have people talk about what happened on old stage before and now imagine coming down Vandor hitting old stage and then seeing the back of some town homes. So, we'll see. Do you know? Yeah. Find out what that is because that that site plan was see I don't see the zoning on that map. I mean, yeah, that that's Yeah, I can find out for sure and let you know. All right. Thank you.

On the other one, I will say I do recall we us having conversations um with that developer about the storm water and I think they were already kind of weighing that possibility depending on particularly how much parking they really needed. What I thought was so yeah, it kind of comes down to that. Do I need more parking? Is it worth the cost? Um, is that something that if they came would that is that going to come for reszoning or is already zoned? Um, no. That one is zoned NMX already. So, that is a just a site plan. Is that the type of thing where like a parking exception could be made or something if they needed?

Um, it could as long as they're meeting the typically in commercial we see that they always want to do more than the minimum. Um, but if they're having trouble meeting the minimums, we would we would still accept a parking study, but it would be those are typically harder than apartments to prove just because part of their one of their buildings is completely flex space. So, are they going to have a, you know, a salon or they can have a restaurant? Um, it gets it gets a little harder in those cases. Thank you. Thank you.

All right. Thank you very much. Always always fascinating. I believe was there anything else on the manager reports? Those are all the reports this evening. Okay. And that takes us to attorney reports.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I am pleased to introduce you to our new assistant town attorney, Diamond Spain, who's in the rear of the chambers. Um she comes to us from private practice as well as being an instructor at the um Fabil Technical Community College in the parallegal studies program. So looking forward to um increasing our connections with potential parallegal students um in the future. Um so we've put her to work in the week that she's been here. Um and we're very pleased to have her join our legal team. Thanks. Well, welcome aboard. Glad to have you. Okay. Anything else from your

No. And that brings us to council reports. We had the committee reports. Let's start back over with Mr. Vance and see if there's any other council report. No council report. Mr. Dallinger? Nothing to report. Mr. Stall, no report. Mr. Singlesson? Nothing. No, sir. M. Nothing. Well, that being the case, that kind of completes our regular session and I believe that we have a close session on the agenda this evening. Uh, Mr. Attorney, would you give us the details on that and the proper motion to make?

Yes. Um, town attorney is requesting a close session pursuant to North Carolina General Statutes Section 143-318.11 A3 to consult with the town attorney to preserve the attorney client privilege. So move. Okay, we have a motion by Mr. Stallins. Is there a second? Second. Second by Mr. Matthews. Uh, if there's no discussion, I'll ask for a voice vote. All council members in favor of moving to the close session, please signify by saying I. I.

Any opposed by nay? Hearing none, we will move to a close session and we will return uh when completed and go back to an open session. Thank you. Let's see if we can get in there in about five minutes.

And we return to the open session from the closed session and I'll call on our town attorney to give us a summary of what occurred in the closed session. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Um, town council met with um, town attorney management staff um, to consult with the attorney on matters um, pertaining to the attorney client privilege. No formal votes or decisions were made in close session. Okay. Thank you very much. Uh, if there's no further uh, business to be dealt with here in the open session, I will entertain a motion to adjurnn. So move second.

Motion by Mr. Mr. Stalin, second by Mr. Dallinger. If there's no discussion, I'll ask all those in favor of journing to uh signify their approval by saying I. I. Any opposed by nay? Hearing none. Meeting is adjourned.

Thank you. Wow.