City Council - Regular Meeting

appreciate everybody making time this being the only meeting that we have in July it is a robust agenda and then the as has already been discussed there are matters for closed session so I will move us through this as diligently as possible also making sure that we take time to discuss things as we go so with that we will call this to order and we will begin in our tradition with an invocation this time from our fire chaplain Archbishop Anthony Slater

Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, Council, let us pray. Father, we thank you for this moment that we can come together, Lord, with the meeting of the minds, with all that's happening in our city, Lord, the growth and the growing of it, Lord. Father, we ask you, Lord, to bless these who are making the decisions on our behalf. Cover them. Touch them from the crown of their heads to the soles of their feet in all that they do. In Jesus' name, amen.

Please join me in the pledge.

indivisible with liberty and justice for all.

Alright, as we proceed with the roll call, let's remind everyone please silence, phones, tablets, watches, all the other all the other fun stuff that includes me so you know. Alright, Madam Deputy Clerk, would you please conduct the roll call?

Yes, sir. Mayor Gaylor. Present. Mayor Pro Tem Weeks. Present. Councilman Boyette.

Present.

Councilwoman Taylor. Present. Councilwoman Matthews. Present. Councilman White.

Present.

I'll be all who are present. I appreciate your time. And we look forward to seeing Councilwoman Jones very soon as well. All right, next, our agenda. Believe there is one change when putting this down for spill it. I know there's one change that is a requested proclamation celebrating the legacy of Mr. Ernest Lofton would like to walk that on as item 4.4 under recognitions and presentations. That one being requested to to walk that one on to preserve a little bit of the context and text. Mr. Livingston, is there any other requests from staff?

No, sir, Mr. Mayor.

All right, perfect. So with that, I would entertain a motion to adopt the agenda as modified to add item 4.4.

So moved, Mr. Mayor.

Motion's been made. Is there a second?

Second.

All right, motion's been made and properly seconded to adopt the agenda as modified. We will, is there any debate? Hearing none, please vote electronically if possible. If anyone is having any issues, please just let me know.

I forgot to sign in, but yes.

Affirmative? Affirmative. Affirmative. All right. Affirmative as well? All right. All votes being registered and voting the affirmative, the motion passes on the sixth of it. We have an agenda. All right, we will begin with a with a funding report from United Way item 4.1. Mr. Livingston, is there any context or will you go directly to the presenter?

Just that we have Mrs. Archibald here and give us an update on the UCAN program, which has served the city very well.

Good evening, Mayor and City Council. It's a pleasure to be here with you tonight.

Good evening.

I want to start out by just thanking you on behalf of the Board of Directors of the United Way of Wayne County for your trust in our UCAN program, using your City of Goldsboro nonprofit funding allocations to be able to benefit this program and benefit the citizens of Wayne County, or excuse me, the City of Goldsboro. And I also want to start with an introduction. Yamil Dines is our community caseworker, and she has been with us since we started this program in late 2023. The UCAN program stands for United Community Assistance Network. It was started with a couple of small grants from Blue Cross Blue Shield and Duke Energy Foundation. So she started with us in the fall of 2023, really just getting the program started with policy and procedure. And by 2024, we started where we are today, and it has just continued to grow. And I'll allow Yamil also before wrapping things up to say a few things if she'd like. But I do want to thank you. I have provided some information for you. I hope you've had a chance to take a look at it. We pulled data from the specific $50,000 that was supporting the city of Goldsboro. And I wanted to start out by sharing exactly what the UCAN process is. Each month on the first business day of the month we open up this process for funding and we feel like all of the city of Goldsboro might know this by now because we say it multiple times every day when folks are looking for assistance to let them know what's happening with this process. It opens up at 8 a.m. There is a pop-up box that comes on our website at unitedwayne.org, and individuals or families who are in personal crisis can apply for funding. It's a very brief assessment that's online, but it gives us an opportunity to get applications in real time and also to be able to look and see what the needs are quickly. We do assess them and we go with first come first serve Unless there is some crisis that just really takes a precedence and we will move that up if necessary A single mom with children living in a car is likely going to take precedence than some others. And so that's the crisis Criteria that we're looking at and so the first business day is Typically, we have that process open for somewhere between three and four hours. Within that time period, we have somewhere between 60 and 75 applicants each month. Those that we can help, we are quickly getting back to and setting up appointments. And then those that we know we're not going to have enough funding for, we're responding back to them. We're referring them to 211. And then we're trying to follow up with them to see if we can refer them to another nonprofit or some other assistance in our community. As you'll see on the information that we provided for you, it was a $50,000 investment into the UCAN program with statistics of 193 households or clients that were served, but the individuals that were impacted were 411. One of the things that I was hopeful to do that was not a difficult task, thanks to the support of the city and the county being able to look at mapping and determine where folks lived that we were assisting, we were able to outline so that we can share with you where each of these clients are living in each district. So you can take a look to see how many are served in your district. and the total dollars amount that were being processed. And also what we wanted to share with you is where the funding was assisting, whether it was around rent assistance, utility assistance. As you can see, that is the bulk of our processing. But things can range from additional assistance to food, whether it's a food line card as they are one of our community partners or transportation. Some of those needs are also being fulfilled or child care needs certifications for keeping their jobs. The gamut can range, but the priorities have been rent assistance and utilities. So I wanna just take a pause and see if you've had a chance to look at that and if you have any questions or moving forward, if there's something in particular that you can think of that we're not addressing that you would like to see moving forward. Yes, sure.

For the districts, if the individual was unhoused, did you base that district information off of maybe where their temporary housing was at that time? Is that how you did that?

I'll let Emil confirm for me, but I believe what we did is the information they provided for us on an assessment. So it may have been somewhere that they just left or somewhere that they were temporarily staying. Would you agree?

Basically, we try to check where the client lives. If they are on house, we definitely refer them to an organization that would address an emergency housing because right now we do not address that issue. But if they were living definitely in any of the districts, that is definitely in there.

Any other questions you might have?

I have a question, or just more of a comment. You see it a lot in other places. Duke Energy does this when you pay your bill, if you round up to the next whole dollar. Can we set something up like that? Or does anyone else set something up like that where we go into a fund that would also help with people in need?

sure and there are some cities that I've seen that are doing that and I think at one time the city of Wilmington was doing something similar between their utilities bill or they also had information that they had posted all over downtown's just allowing people to potentially give to United Way specific to an unhoused need And then instead of giving it to someone who they may not know if they're able to use it in the right format or to provide the assistance that they need, that was another way that that was happening too. So obviously that would be great. It would be additional funding and we can allocate it specific to city of Goldsboro if that's where it's coming from.

Just a suggestion. We might be able to help a couple more families of people out in need.

I think some of you in the finance charter to be able to take a look at our software and make sure that it's something that is it's operational seamlessly. But before we actually put some in front of council that we ought to take a look at make sure we know what to do.

Absolutely.

Anyone else. I want to simply say thank you so much for the work that you and your staff and volunteers do for this for for our constituents, including this particular program, being able to administer it through you guys where that you have such a broad scope and a broad understanding of the overall needs in the community, being able to then ensure that this is applied in the most laser focused way possible to make the most impact is very important. So thank you for your work.

Well, thank you. We were honored to be able to do that. We thank you for including it in your budget this year so we can continue that process. I did not include these in the packets because I think that I've shared them with you before.

But if you don't mind email passing those out to them, I wanted to bring an extra just just put seven with the deputy. And that way then we can make sure that they are distributed in school.

I wanted to share them because it obviously lists all of our partners on there. And so it does list the city of Goldsboro as one of our partners for this for our program. It also lists ta loving Seymour funeral home, Duke Energy Foundation and Duke Energy. Thanks to the support of others, we were allowed to put all of the $50,000 back into the community. So every dollar went back into supporting someone else in our community in the city of Goldsboro for those needs.

Thank you so much council anything further. If not we'll give you the rest of your evening back.

Well, I'm going to take just maybe three more minutes of your time if you don't mind. I feel like I'm often here with a specific mission. And so there's a few things that I've been wanting to share with you all. So I wanted to take this opportunity to do so part of your packets. Hopefully you also received information about our issue focus transformation, you would have seen a flyer like this, which is basically a summary. I've met with each of you individually, a couple of you collectively over the last year and a half. To share with you that the United Way of Wayne County's board has been working toward a issue focused transformation and after input from the community and from our major investors that issue was the issue of poverty. Recognizing that poverty is very broad we've spent a lot of time in community summits and with our major investors to determine what root causes we would impact. uh... from poverty and so this is a three-year process for us and we are right in the middle of this three-year process but as you'll see there are going to be four pillars that we will address and of those four pillars there are three root causes that we will uh... be working toward one of those is child care one of them is economic mobility or basic needs and one of them is career path and financial growth or employment and income so what initiatives will will be driven out of these root causes I do not know yet because that will come out of conversations that we'll have with the community through additional community summits they'll happen this fall and into 2027 and by the end of 2027 we will be 100% into this issue focus so it's been a very exciting time a little intimidating because it's a very different way of working that we're moving toward. But it is very exciting. And I wanted to make sure that you all are updated and know the direction that we're moving toward. Any questions you might have about that?

Council anything? If not, of course, everyone here has Ms. Archibald's contact information. If not, I'm confident Mr. Livingston does and reach out for one on one conversation if if not right now.

Happy to. Thank you so much. And I'll keep you updated over the next year and a half as well. And finally, you hear us talk throughout the year about 211, a United Way branded call center. It is a statewide call center. And so we encourage all of our clients and we encourage our major investors to utilize 211 when looking for resources that are in our community. United Way North Carolina is based out of Cary and they run this program and they do a wonderful job, but they have really improved their capacity to be able to collect data. And so this is information that we are getting a report on monthly. But I wanted to share with you this report from 2025. And so I've included that in your packets. If you have any questions now, I'm happy to engage in them. But if not, if you want to review that, it's information that I think may be helpful for you all when you're looking at community needs and assessments. That is all I have.

Council, any comments, questions?

Anything else you want to add, Yamil?

Well, thank you all so much for being here this evening. Again, thank you. All right. With that, we will move to item 4.2 on our agenda. This one is a retirement resolution. Following our practice would be read into the record, at which time I would ask for a vote to adopt the resolution, followed by a second and ultimately a vote. It's my understanding that Ms. Pendle is not able to be with us this evening. She is enjoying her retirement, but we will certainly make sure that this gets delivered to her in due time. So with that, Resolution 2026-50, a resolution expressing appreciation for services rendered by Gina Pandel as an employee of the City of Goldsboro for more than 21 years. Whereas Gina Pandel retires on July 1st, 2026 as a human resources technician with more than 21 years of service with the City of Goldsboro. And whereas Gina began her career on November 8th, 2004 as an office assistant three with the Parks and Recreation Department. And whereas on June 16, 2010, Gina was promoted to the position of payroll technician with the finance department. And whereas on March 29, 2017, Gina was promoted to human resources technician with the human resources department, where she continued to serve with dedication in that capacity until her retirement. And whereas Gina has demonstrated exceptional dedication and efficiency in her service, earning the respect and admiration of her colleagues and the citizens of the city of Goldsboro. And whereas the mayor and city council of the city of Goldsboro are desirous on behalf of themselves, city employees, and the citizens of the city of Goldsboro of expressing to Gina their deep appreciation and gratitude for the service rendered by her to the city over the years. Now, therefore, be it resolved that the Mayor and City Council of the City of Goldsboro, North Carolina, that we express to Gina Pandel our very best wishes for success, happiness, prosperity, and good health in her future endeavors. This resolution shall be incorporated into the official minutes of the City of Goldsboro and shall be in full force and effect from this and after this the 13th day of July 2026. Council, do I have a motion to adopt the resolution as presented? So moved. Do I have a second?

Second.

All right, a motion being made and properly seconded to adopt the resolution. Is there any debate? Hearing none, we'll take the vote. Please vote electronically if possible. All right, all votes being counted motion passed on the six over as you would expect. Again, Gina, thank you. And we look forward to hearing about your successes in retirement. Next, we will move to item 4.3. A resolution requesting that the North Carolina Department of Transportation dedicate and name a Wayne County portion of future I 42 in Goldsboro, Goldsboro, Wayne County, North Carolina in honor of Mr. Jack best. This was requested by NCDOT for someone who has served this community, this county, including the Super 70 Corridor Commission for decades, and so I'm honored to be able to bring forward this resolution. Again, this is a resolution. It will be read in, and it would ask for a vote to adopt. Resolution requesting that the North Carolina Department of Transportation dedicate and name a Wayne County portion of future I-42 in Goldsboro, Wayne County, North Carolina in honor of Jack Best. Whereas transportation facilities in Eastern North Carolina are essential to the expedient movement of goods, services, and residents of the great state of North Carolina, And whereas the City of Goldsboro has served as the lead planning agency for transportation in the Goldsboro urban area, which encompasses a majority of Wayne County. And whereas the City of Goldsboro and Wayne County have successfully partnered in their efforts to influence the allocation of funds for the location of superior transportation facilities, which would enhance the attractiveness of the area to new business and industry. And whereas Jack Best, a local business owner in Goldsboro who served the public in the capacity as a Wayne County Commissioner and Village of Walnut Creek Council member, was instrumental in supporting and promoting the planning and construction of a future interstate highway which would connect I-40 to Morehead City through Wayne County. And whereas as a public servant, Jack served his constituents well by recognizing that transportation is the key to North Carolina's economic growth and recruitment of jobs. And whereas Jack Best was involved in the promotion, design, and planning of the Goldsboro Bypass designated as I-42 corridor within Wayne County through service on various boards and as a founding member of the Highway 70 Corridor Commission. And whereas Jack put forth his dedication to making the Goldsboro Bypass, now known as I-42, corridor project a reality through his extensive service to his fellow citizens. And whereas on May 27, 2016, Governor Pat McCrory and the North Carolina Department of Transportation joined state and local officials and members of the Highway 70 Corridor Commission to open the completed Goldsboro Bypass and now designated as I-42. And whereas it would be most fitting for the state of North Carolina and the city of Goldsboro to recognize him in a permanent public manner, now therefore be it resolved by the mayor and the city council of the city of Goldsboro, North Carolina, that we hereby recommend honoring Jack Best by requesting that the North Carolina Department of Transportation dedicate and name a portion of the 42 corridor in Goldsboro, Wayne County, North Carolina, extending from the vicinity of State Road 1719 North Beston Road, approximately 3.4 miles east of the North County line in honor of Jack best. This resolution shall be in full force in effect from and after July 13 2026. Councils this resolution having been read prior to asking for a vote. Is there any discussion? Hearing none, is there a vote to adopt the resolution as read? Second. Motion has been made and properly seconded to adopt the resolution as read. Is there any debate? Hearing none, we'll call the vote. All in favor, please vote electronically if possible. All opposed, please vote electronically if possible. All votes have been tallied. Motion passes on a 6-0 vote. And we look forward to delivering this resolution to his family and back to the North Carolina Department of Transportation. Next, we have a proclamation celebrating the legacy of Ernest Lofton. Whereas the city of Goldsboro proudly joins family, friends, and the community in celebrating the 90th birthday of Ernest Lofton, his remarkable life of service, leadership, and achievement has left an enduring mark on our city. And whereas Ernest Lofton made history as one of Goldsboro's first black professional photographers capturing the people, places, and milestones of our community with exceptional artistry and preserving a visual legacy that continues to tell the story of Goldsboro for future generations. And whereas Ernest Lofton further distinguished himself as one of Goldsboro's first black fire lieutenants, serving with honor, courage, and professionalism while breaking barriers within the Goldsboro Fire Department and opening doors for those who would follow. And whereas Ernest Lofton demonstrated outstanding entrepreneurial leadership as a respected local businessman, contributing to the economic vitality of Goldsboro and exemplifying the values of hard work, perseverance, and excellence. And whereas his commitment to preserving local history and advancing education was evident through his instrumental role in helping establish the Dillard Alumni Building, ensuring that the proud legacy of Dillard High School, its students, faculty, and community remains preserved and celebrated for generations to come. And whereas throughout his 90 years, Ernest Lofton has exemplified integrity, vision, service, and unwavering dedication to the betterment of Goldsboro, inspiring countless individuals through both his professional accomplishments and his lifelong commitment to community. Now, therefore, be it proclaimed that the mayor and Goldsboro City Council do hereby extend their warmest congratulations and heartfelt appreciation to Ernest Lofton on the joyous occasion of his 90th birthday. recognizing his pioneering achievements, his distinguished record of public service, his commitment to preserving the history of our community, and the extraordinary legacy he has built for the city of Goldsboro. In witness whereof, I have hereunto set my hand in the fix and seal of the city of Goldsboro this 13th day of July 2026. This will be delivered in person at an appropriate time that is coming up short. Next, we will move into public hearings. Mr. Livingston, I'm going to turn over item 5.1 to you, if that is okay.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Yes, we have a public hearing on substantial amendments to our CDB annual action plan, and I have a planning director, our development services director, up here to give the presentation. Good evening.

Good evening. Mayor, Mayor Burton, and Council. My presentation is on the public hearing for the 2020 Annual Action Plan. It's a substantial amendment regarding the reallocation of the CBDG-CV funding aspect of the plan. Um... Oh, it's not working, but...

If IT can get here, just step in and help us out with the battery on that one or just simply say slide and let them move it for you.

All right. So it is a substantial amendment. HUD requires us to make the amendment whenever there is a change in the allocation of the funds or there's a new activity not already highlighted in the action plan. And so we will be adding a new eligible activity regarding public improvement, a public improvement project that prevents, prepares, and responds to the coronavirus. Next slide, please. So the proposed change, as you know, we've come to you before. Thank you. We've come to you before. The new activity is the new lighting for the Bryan Multisports Complex building, public facility. The lighting will contribute to making the walking trails safer. It spans outdoor activities for recreation, and it also expands the opportunity for social distancing, which is the most important part. Next slide, please. Again, this is just a copy of what the amendment looks like in the full page layout, but we demonstrate that the remaining funds that were not allocated or previously assigned to an activity will now be assigned to the Bryan Multisports Complex Public Facility. Next slide, please. And you've seen this before. We received four hundred twenty seven thousand three hundred three dollars back in September of 2020. And now the available funds remaining are two hundred ninety two dollars, three hundred seventy two hundred ninety two thousand three hundred seventy eight dollars and eighty three cents that must be used up and drawn down by September 10. Next slide, please. You've already seen this as well. This is just a history of how we spent the funds previously with different organizations and the different multiple different projects back during 2020. And next slide, please. So we've already commenced the public participation aspect of it. We have a 30-day review period, which ends on the 16th of this month. Today is the public hearing. Tomorrow will be the public meeting with the CCRD. To date, we haven't had any additional comments on the substantial amendment. And then once the comment period has ended, we will submit this to HUD. So what we are asking for the council to do today is approve the substantial amendment of the 2020 annual action plan.

Public meeting on July 14th. For what purpose?

We require both a public hearing, which is a city council meeting and a public meeting. So the public meeting is just another opportunity for the public to come and participate and provide comment.

So would our vote this evening be contingent upon their meeting tomorrow night and somewhere?

OK.

All right, so council with that there any comments or questions? I know this has been something that we have certainly debated the the usage of these funds and ultimately decided that given the circumstances, this was the right way to go certainly leveraging these dollars against other dollars from from tourism actually to be able to create what would be a fantastic asset with or without another pandemic that certainly would be able to be used for social distancing if we did have another COVID style pandemic. So with that, are there any comments or questions for staff before we open the public hearing? Hearing no, let's go ahead and open the public hearing. This is a public hearing item 5.1 on our agenda, a public hearing for substantial amendments to the 2020 annual action plan. These are dollars from back then. Anyone to come forward and speak? Second call for anyone coming forward to speak on the public hearing for the substantial amendments to the 2020 annual action plan, item 5.1 on our agenda. Yes, ma'am.

Good evening, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, Council.

And if you would, just say your name for the record.

Phyllis Merritt James, 503 Cardinal Drive, Goldsboro. I just have a concern just about where we're allocating the funds to which is on the outskirts of the city. I know it's a city but it's very edged and the ability for the people in the city that needs really access to expanded services and walking trails, especially inside the city, should have been considered. I know we've had this money sitting there for a while, and I know we don't want to lose the money, but I really wish we would have had the opportunity to allocate it where the old building used to be for the Herman Park Center, swim, a swimming pool, aquatic center, something there, because we put a lot of money out there at the Bryan Multisports Complex, unless you've got a car, because I've got people that I visit out that way. The people that really, really need access to something is not getting that. And I just hate for the brunt of that amount of money gets funneled out that way without having the ability for the people that really, really needs access to those funds and something else in the city to take benefit of it. Thank you.

Anyone else wish to come forward and speak on item 5.1, the substantial amendments to the 2020 annual action plan? I will do a final call for anyone wishing to come forward and speak on item 5.1 on our agenda. Hearing none, we will close the public hearing. Council, any other comments or questions for staff before I ask for a vote for or against?

Just one quick question. Did we publicize the public meeting for tomorrow? Where do we advertise it at? You don't need to.

Let me double check to see if I'll put it in here. But it should have been advertised in Wayne Weekly. We also, when we have substantial amendments, we have a copy of the substantial amendment at the city clerk's office, at the information desk out front, at the housing authority, and at the public library. And it should have been on our website as well.

Any other comments, questions? Aaron, I want to entertain a motion to, in your packet, there's a resolution approving substantial amendments to the 2026 annual action plan. That specific resolution will entertain a motion to approve or not to approve. I'll make a motion that we approve. All right. Motion's been made. Is there a second?

I'll second it.

All right. Motion's been made and properly seconded to approve the resolution that presented in the packet. Is there any debate on that? Hearing none, we'll call the vote. Please vote electronically if possible.

uh votes being tallied there are uh five five affirmatives and one abstention and the motion does pass mayor yes sir now that we've voted can i make a comment yeah um i guess maybe it would be a good idea if we can put um for some information um maybe for the public is based especially based on one of our residents concerns um that how much effort went into making the decision about those funds and the fact that it is going into an LMI area and that our Parks and Rec reported you know how substantially this addition will impact our city children that attend the events and things that happen out there I think it was a very good use of the funds and not just because it was my district, but in general. I think if we could put out some additional information, it may help the public understand how the decision was reached by council on that item.

If you don't mind, at the meeting tomorrow evening, would you be able to go back through the presentation? Yes. Again, just to make sure that there is full transparency in the process, the good, bad, and the ugly.

Yes. And just to confirm, I do want to respond to the comment that the Bryan Sports Campus building is in a LMI area, so it qualifies.

I don't think the comment was on if it qualified or not. I think that the comment, at least the way that I took the comment was, in general, I think you've got to look at those with transportation abilities or an inability for transportation. I think that there's probably some transportation improvements that we could make in general. But that's outside of the scope of this particular resolution. I think the speaker's concern was the ability to allow anyone from the city to be able to benefit from those improvements. I think that's a fair concern. I just want to make sure that all information is shared tomorrow evening as well.

Yes.

All right. With that, let's move to item 5.2, which is our next annual action plan. Mr. Livingston, if you please get us started on that one.

That is also the annual action plan for the new annual action plan for the next year. So we have a public hearing scheduled for that. And I don't know if April wants to address any of the details of that, but that is what the plan is today to give that presentation and discuss that next year.

And correct me, this is not for vote this evening.

I know, sir. I don't think so. I think we're just updating.

Perfect. Just making sure that everyone's aware of where we are in the process. This is for public awareness. Perfect.

Yes, this is a public hearing on the draft annual action plan for fiscal year 2026. So every year HUD requires us to create a summary of how we will allocate funds for that particular year based on activities and actions and how we will use our resources. It applies for fiscal year starting in July 2026 to June 30th, 2027. And just as a refresher, all of our actions, all of the activities in the plan have to connect to or relate to goals that we have set in the five-year consolidated plan. And here is just a summary of the types of eligible activities based on the funding that we received. We received for CBDG home and of course we still have funds for home ARP as well. And we did receive our estimated allocation for fiscal year 2026, not official yet, but it is estimated that we may get $342,181 for CBDG and $240,299.18 for home funds. And here are our goals and activities at a glance. These are the specific programs that we typically fund throughout the year. Home rehabilitation projects, which helps individuals do rehab projects or help bring their homes up to code. We have homebuyer assistance programs that help individuals financially be able to purchase a home affordably. We also have allocations for CHOTO, Community Housing Development Organizations, for the redevelopment, acquisition, rehab, or new construction of affordable housing. Public services, those are services that assist those who are unhoused and for homelessness services and prevention. And then public facilities and public infrastructure. And I did forget one green slide bubble, text box, and that was the affordable rental housing, which comes up under the home funds. And that assists development projects and affordable rental units. timeline for the annual action plan review period today is the public hearing aspect of it tomorrow of course we have the public meeting um the public draft has been out since june 30th and it will end july 30th we have started to receive comments already And we will have a final presentation to council at the August 3rd meeting, including a summary of comments as well. And it's due to head by August 14th.

That August 3rd agenda is also looking robust.

Sorry. That's all right. That's all right.

That's what we're here for. It's a good thing. So with that, Council, any comments or questions on where we are or any specifics in the draft?

I do have a question. Yes, sir, please. And I do know... since I've been on council, that some of these we've always kept on the CDBG fund thing, some of the things that we're doing. My question is, can we begin to think outside the box? And the reason I say that is we have an LMI community on one side of the city that has no, that's in the food desert. And researching our use of CDBG funds, you can use CDBG funds in the LMI community to get grocery stores up to code to help with the actual food desert or food insecurity issues in the LMI community. So I would like for us to try to examine or explore that avenue of approach to help because we do need more grocery stores because it's one side of a city that has none.

And that's understandable. We are able to economic development is eligible activity. So that is definitely something we can begin to explore other uses of the funds. I think we're doing a good job now by envisioning and connecting with connecting with other developers. So we're really starting to use the funds more now. And then with the new changes in development and community development, I think we will be on a path of really utilizing the funds in a more effective way.

Certainly.

Council, any other comments, questions before we have the public hearing proper? Hearing none, let's go ahead and open the public hearing item 5.2 on our agenda. This is a public hearing for the draft FY 2026-2027 Community Development Annual Action Plan. Anyone wishing to come forward and speak?

Good evening, Phyllis Merritt-James. With the action plan, I know that a few months ago they had the vision board out there at the center where people kind of talked about what they'd like to see, what needed to be done. We did a wonderful community assessment. The same thing Councilman White was stating, the ability to focus those funds and that plan to get grocery stores up to code. When I lived in West Haven, I could walk to A&P and get something to eat. There were several other stores and restaurants on that end. There's nothing in a lot of these areas that patients, people could have access to, you know, the bus does not run non-stop. They don't need to be able to go to one of the five and dime stores to get groceries that are like marked up 30% that's gonna affect them. So we really need to make sure that what we're pinpointing is working for those people that are most at risk. We've got access to food, healthy children, healthy constituents, healthy workforce. They can't eat, they can't rest, they can't concentrate. you have the whole cycle that affects them mentally, socially, physically, and emotionally. So please consider. I know we're having this public hearing, and then we're going to have the meeting again on tomorrow. But we've really got to make sure we've got all the people in the community have access. And thank you for the insert this last water bill. Had a lot of information. That was a good start to communicating. But we really, really, really need to make sure we get it out there because everybody don't take the newspaper. Everybody's not on Facebook. People may come down, but they're coming through, pay their bills so they can get back to work. So reaching out to the barbershops, reaching out to nail salons, find other avenues to make sure people are getting the word that they need to get the word because all this impacts all citizens. Thank you.

Thank you. Anyone with anyone else wishing to come forward and speak on item 5.2 in our agenda the public hearing for the draft FY 2627 community development annual action plan. Third and final call for the same. Hearing none, we will close the item 5.2 or close the public hearing I should say on item 5.2. Council Again, this is not for vote this evening. What I'll encourage everyone to do. If you have another public comment that you'd like to make now, fantastic. If not, make sure that you schedule some time with Mr. Livingston. And, and then of course, Johnson choice and discuss your concerns. Let's make sure that we get a plan put together that does the most possible good that it can for the entirety of the city of Goldsboro. So it's good stuff. All right. Well, then with that, we can move to the next agenda item, right? Okay. Then let's move to item 5.3. A big another big one. Told y'all was a robust agenda tonight. So item 5.3. Mr. Livingston, if you'd please walk us through this one.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. This is a comprehensive land use plan map update. Last time we did the comprehensive plan was approximately 12 years ago. So there's been a lot of work over a year's worth of time put into this as we've sought public input and studied the area. And we have our planning manager here, I think, tonight to kind of give us a little backdrop on that. And also there's consultants here to talk as well.

council this should this should feel very familiar this is the subject matter that was our joint session with the planning commission uh with a couple of tweaks that i'm sure mr helmer is about to go through good evening council i hope everyone is well this evening uh yeah so um we started this process a little over a year and a half ago um a lot of public participation and outreach to the public got a lot of good input um we have a good draft document for you tonight And with that, I would like to introduce you to Jonathan Whitehurst, which is the lead consultant for Kimling Horn, which is the primary, did most of the heavy lifting on this document.

So I'd like to turn it over to him. Thank you.

good evening good to see you all once again um as was mentioned a lot of this information is going to be uh should feel familiar um especially for those that were at the joint work session i wanted to start kind of reiterating what mark said that this has been more than a year-long process and as you can see on the slide here there's been quite a few meetings and engagement opportunities really from the very beginning to right here where we are with the public hearing. Next month we're hoping to be back in front of you for adoption. The report itself, I think one of the things that staff wanted us to do is to present this information as concisely as possible, but in a way that is accessible to the public, but also meaningful to staff. And so the draft plan is organized in the The sections that you see there, starting with an introduction that describes the overall purpose of the plan, our community is a deep dive into our existing and projected conditions. Our vision talks about the vision and planning principles that kind of set up that next section, which is our plan. That's where you'll find your future land use map, as well as all of the policies and actions that are organized around those planning principles. And then our time to act, while there was a request that this be a concise document, there was also a request that this be actionable. And so all of the kind of implementation strategy is there in that last section. So just real quick, I know you all probably know this, but the comprehensive plan is about creating a community driven vision for Goldsboro, creating that preferred approach to growth and development, and then again creating those action steps. A lot has changed in the 12 years since this plan was last written. And we probably should expect that quite a bit of change will occur in the next decade plus. And so we want this to be a living document that the city can update in the future. One of the changes now is that the state actually requires that you have a plan like this and that it be reasonably maintained. And so we kept that in mind as we were working through this process. One difference from the previous plan, too, is the study area, whereas your previous plan included the entirety of the county, we kind of zeroed in on the city, your ETJ, as well as some of the major transportation corridors that we wanted to take into consideration. We talk about this being a community driven plan. Every time somebody engaged in the process, dropped a pin on a map, answered a question, we collected that, recorded that data. So you can see the numbers here. I will say if you were to go to the project website right now, you would see the draft plan and you would see an interactive future land use map where people can drop pins. Just a few days ago, we started to promote that. And since then, let me look at my numbers here. We've had 63 visits and 29 folks have downloaded the plan. And so eyes are getting on this document. There's an online comment form to collect those comments as well. To this date, we haven't received any comments, but we do see it as positive that people are going to the site and accessing the information. All of that community input is presented in these engagement spotlights that are sprinkled throughout the report. So anytime that we're speaking in the document about a particular topic or area, we feature the words that we heard throughout the engagement, whether that was in person or online. And so as you're looking at the document, just draw your attention to those engagement spotlights. A lot of good information in there. The vision and guiding principles, I'm not going to read it here. The vision is just intended to be an overarching kind of statement specific to this particular plan and what we're trying to achieve through it. And then those five guiding principles are very important because those are the organizing structure of the overall plan. And so you'll see kind of in that our plan section, as well as in the implementation, we go into much, much more detail about those five specific topics. The centerpiece of this plan is your future land use map. And so we took what we understood about the community characteristics, we took the vision and guiding principles, created that 40,000 foot conceptual growth strategy, and then started to drill down into the future land use map. And that's where you're really starting to understand where and how the city should and could grow. And it really sets the stage for an update to the city's unified development ordinance, which I'll mention again here in just a minute. The future land use map, I want to pause here because we did have that joint work session just a few weeks ago. And just call your attention to some of the changes that were made there. There was some discussion at that meeting about kind of the role industrial could play in those nodes kind of at the interchanges along 42. And so kind of at the city's direction, we have updated by adding some industrial areas to those. So you can see those on the map kind of in that darker gray color. And so the percentages and the acreages that you see circled there have actually increased for industrial. the other change that we made is a little bit more subtle and so if you look at how those land use classifications are described you'll see those slider bars that talk about what types of land uses are appropriate and so we have added industrial to those regional mixed-use areas but as kind of a lower end of that appropriateness I think the the underlying message here is we're trying to provide a good guide for you all in the future but also allowing the flexibility so that you all can kind of consider decisions that you feel are in the best interest of the city moving forward The policy framework, as I mentioned, is organized around those five guiding principles, and that's where you'll find 20 strategies and 72 actions. All of those are described in the Our Plan section when you get to the last section of the report. That's where you see this implementation matrix that you see one example here. So for all of those 70 plus actions, we're talking about what type of action is, when should it be done? Who's responsible for that? And in general, what are the resources? All of this information was presented at our last public workshop, and we asked the community to weigh in on those priorities. And so those are spotlighted in that document or that section of the report as well. The report concludes with this carrying the vision forward. Just kind of a reminder to make sure that this plan is visible and in front as much as possible to use this plan, whether you're staff or elected officials to guide growth decisions. And then I think that last point is also critically important. Elevate Goldsboro. We use that branding, if you will, for a reason. And it is our hope that this is the first step in building kind of long-term leadership and accountability within the community as a whole. With that, I'll just remind you that in the next few weeks, we are expecting or hoping that we get comments or more eyes on the report. This is the final opportunity for the feedback. And as mentioned, hoping to be back in front of you all next month for, this is public hearing, but for adoption at that point. In the spirit of this being an actionable plan, I was very pleased that you all made the decision to move forward with the Unified Development Ordinance. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I suspect that if we looked at all of those 70 plus actions, quite a few of those will be accomplished through that very important process that you should be undertaken very soon. With that, I'll pause and let you take it from here.

The council again, this is not presented for for adoption this evening. This is presented as a public hearing. But before we move into that, are there any comments or questions for consultant or for staff?

I do have a couple. Yes, sir. In District 4, I saw there was some mixed use where they could put some type of retail, but I don't think we made the best opportunities for some of that because some of it was already retail. So I would ask that we go back and look at some of those opportunities. Also, the mayor brought up a point the last time that we met about that being a floodplain. And how can we actually develop that going forward? I think we really need to look at that as well to make sure that we ensure that the city grows together, not just separately. So that is something important because that side doesn't have any retail. So that's something that we really have to look at land that we can have some miscues so we can bring some retail over there. I know you did it on the Slocum Street corridor, but on the John Street, there used to be a convenience store, which should be, you know, still should be some type of misuse. I mean, mixed use. And then A&K Grill is down there on John Street as well, which is in the actual city limits. And the store's still there, so I don't know why we didn't classify that as mixed use as well. So I want I want to make sure that we capture that, that to make sure that we have the best opportunities to bring something on that side.

Understood. And I will mention that in in these residential classifications, we are suggesting that that like those neighborhood scale retail uses and services would be appropriate in those locations. But thank you for that.

Yes, sir.

To piggyback off what Councilman White pointed out, we're getting there. There's been a lot of progress made on this dock and before we adopt it, there's a few other tweaks I think we need to look at along the way. We're getting close, but we've got one opportunity to sort of get this right this time and it's going to last us for a decade or more. I actually have a meeting scheduled in a few days with with the manager and I have some environmental related things that I would like to look at in certain areas that were taken in and get some some clarity on a few things and possibly need if something needs to be changed because you know if we've designated it X and for whatever reason with environmental whether it be blood playing or lack of utility or whatever then those kind of things from an environmental standpoint would affect or have an effect ultimately on a designation, possibly. So I've got a few areas of concern that I'm going to meet with the manager about and get his guidance. And then if he may be communicating some further requests, so to speak, for some drill down just to Councilman White's point to drill down. But we're certainly well on the way to hear that.

Yeah, I echo that. It's a good plan. And I'm glad we're looking at it closely here at the end like we need to and making sure we need to do the fine tuning that this board and the community feels is needed. But you've done a great job so far. Thank you.

So with that, let's move to the public hearing. And then we'll hear feedback. And then if council thinks of anything else that we need to insert, and then of course, we can take all the feedback and go back for additional adjustments. Deputy clerk to get our signup list. We did not have anyone sign up for public comment. Then we will move straight to our consent agenda. Mr. Livingston, if you would please entertain any remaining questions on consent agenda items 7-1 through 7-3.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. We just have a few items on their approval of routine items, approval of minutes, amending a grant project ordinance on CDBG funds coronavirus that we just talked about this evening, and a few minutes ago, and an amendment to approve the manual fees for stormwater fees. Yes, sir.

I just messed up didn't I?

Did you?

5.3. We had the discussion, but I never opened the public hearing data. I went straight to public.

Yeah, we did. We overdid public comment period two.

All right. Well, hold on. I won't back us up. We're gonna go back to 5.3. You got Brian, you got to get louder.

All right, we went to the public comment I got.

If I give you a nerf gun, we can we can more effectively communicate. All right, but it's not gonna be the one that my son attacks me with this can be a gentler version. All right, item 5.3. Apologies to all involved. We will open the public hearing for item 5.3, the comprehensive land use plan. Again, this is not presented this evening for vote. This is presented for the public hearing. So with that, is there anyone wishing to come forward and speak on item 5.3, our comprehensive land use plan draft? Second call, is there anyone wishing to come forward and speak? Third and final calls, is there anyone wishing to come forward and speak on item 5.3, our comprehensive land use plan? Seeing none, we will close the public hearing. Council, again, apologies to y'all. I did not mean to cut you all off either. Are there any remaining questions or comments at this time for staff? Hearing none, we will move on with that one. Again, I do encourage you to take some time, get a little bit of time with Mr. Livingston, get a little bit of time with folks from planning, and just make sure that you're seeing all the different pieces to it. Because some of this also... is things that are labeled neighborhood residential also have some caveats for some, some residential compliant business uses and things like that, that I think is a much more logical way of laying out a map as opposed to how some of our stuff has been in the past. And so I appreciate everyone's everyone's work on this. Next, we'll move to item six. Again, Madam Deputy Clerk, you said there were no sign-ups. No sign-ups. All right, perfect. Then we will go back to where we were. Mr. Livingston, if you would please walk us through and hear any remaining questions on consent agenda items seven, one through three.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. As typically done, our consent agenda consists of typically non-routine matters that have been previously discussed or are aware of. So tonight, we have approval of minutes from previous meetings. amending the grant project ordinance, which is for the community development block funds for the coronavirus funds that we just discussed and must go lighting project at Brian multi sports and also amend and approve manual fees and charges for stormwater fees, which we discussed last meeting on for that for the stormwater erosion sediment control program.

All right. Council, all comments, questions haven't been resolved, I believe. If not, please inject. Otherwise, we'll entertain a motion to adopt the consent agenda items as presented.

So moved.

Motion's been made. Is there a second? Second. All right. Motion's been made and properly seconded to adopt consent agenda items 7-1 through 3 as presented. Is there any debate? Hearing none, we'll vote electronically if possible. That counts as a roll call vote. All right, all votes having been counted consent agenda items seven, one through three are approved. All right, we'll move into old business. Mr. Livingston, if you would please lay the groundwork for a dot one and then we'll turn it over.

Okay, thank you, Mr. Mayor, our friends from investment advisory services, Valley View Consulting are here this evening, I'll let Catherine introduce them and remind the City Council why they're here and what their services are, and what the plan ahead is. Catherine.

Good evening, Mayor, Council, Mayor Pro Tem. Thank you for having us this evening. Tonight we have Valley View here to do a presentation to go over their services and answer any kind of questions that you may have. And in the packet is the memo and agenda resolution that I presented at the last meeting. I have not made any modifications to it, but we did add the presentation. It's my pleasure tonight to introduce Mr. Long, who is the founder and principal for Valley View. And also with him is Mr. Day, who is a registered investment advisor.

Thank you, Council Mayor. Pleasure to be here with everyone else. I believe you've had the pack in. You've got a general overview. I am willing to take questions before, during, or after. So if you've got any to start off with, we'll get going. If not, I'll sort of walk through the presentation real quickly and provide any extra information that might be helpful. So, again, as Ms. Gwynn mentioned, we're an investment advisory firm. Our specialty is public funds, working with local governments of all types, cities, counties, school districts, that sort of thing. The city did a request for proposals for these types of services. I believe there were seven or eight different respondents, so we were very fortunate and pleased that we were the one that made it to the top of the list and being recommended to the council. But I think it's important to understand that our role with the city is going to be may be very similar to the Davenport role on your liability side when you're issuing debt. We will be providing advice and consultation to the city staff on the asset side on your cash and investment management side. So again, we're not taking over any of the management. We're assisting in the staff and continuing to manage your funds. There we go. This is a brief summary of the many things that we think we're going to be working with you on. Obviously, you're looking for us to provide some expertise. We've always been considered sort of the part time staff person for our clients, and they call us whenever they need expertise. We volunteer expertise when we think it's important. And then, as I mentioned, we meet regularly, both live and by teams now, as everybody else does. And we try to move things forward. One of the big basis is for the strategies that we're going to suggest start with the city's cash flows. You've got a natural rhythm of money coming in and money going out. And by using those cash flows and blending them with the investment options that are available under state legislation and your investment policy, you can use it to enhance interest income. Again, we will take a look at your policy and if appropriate, we'll maybe make some suggestions on maybe how to improve it or some different strategic things that could make sense. But one of the important things is that we're gonna work with the staff, we're gonna communicate with them, we're gonna educate them on some of the other products that are out there. We're gonna help with the council if there's any questions on products that are out there or strategies that might be appropriate for the city. Our routine is to come as needed. Some of our councils have us come every quarter. Some of our councils have us come once to introduce ourselves and then we move forward. So a little bit of that will be up to the council on how we interact with you. I think a big component is going to be the assessment of risk return. We'll get into some of the key objectives of the city, but basically you're not supposed to risk your money. You're supposed to earn some interest income on it while you have it. But Ben was joking earlier that we're not going to suggest that you buy SpaceX and hope that it goes off. That's weird. I use that exact same thing. And our main objective is to keep it as safe as possible and make sure everyone's very comfortable with how our advice is guiding how your staff is handling things. If you do CIP, capital improvement funds, it sounds like you've got several projects already going. If you issue debt, if you do installment borrowings, and you've got big projects, we'll help integrate that into the cash flows and how it might impact the strategy. And particularly if you're issuing tax exempt debt of any type, the arbitrage rebate regulations and how they might impact the strategy that would be appropriate for you will be part of our role. ongoing monitoring the portfolio. We talked a little earlier about what will be an appropriate cycle for reporting to the city. We will accumulate data at least on a monthly basis and we might just put together a quarterly investment report that could potentially be shared with the council, but that'll be up to the city and how frequently they want to do it. Some of our clients do get a monthly report that goes to council, so we'll work with you on the best way to handle that. Gatsby County Government Accounting Standards Board. You're probably familiar with that from your auditors. And we'll help with the monthly accounting and accruals. And then at year end, potentially we can help with your footnotes that your auditors are gonna want in your annual financial report. So those are a few things. We'll get into some of our staff people later and how that'll help. Another issue that's fairly important I think to the city at this point is we do quite a few primary depository bank requests for proposals. So many times a depository arrangement is established and years go by and it's not really looked at very much and I can tell you the market has evolved substantially on what bank services are available, how they can integrate with your technology, the fees that may or may not be charged to you, the interest that may or may not be paid to you by the bank and so We'll at minimum review your current arrangement, and if necessary, we'll help you do a request for a proposal from any of the banks in the area that could be eligible. And then finally, as I mentioned, we view ourselves as part of the staff. We're available on a regular basis, and folks use us as they need to make sure that anything cash and investment related is handled. I thought it'd be helpful to provide a client example. And the first thing I want to disclose is this client, when they brought us in, had a substantially different situation than you. You've got a nice array of cash balances. You're earning reasonable amounts of interest income. There's no big flags waving saying, hey, this is not a very good portfolio. This portfolio was the opposite of that. When we walked in, they were using an outside investment advisor that did have discretion. They were just making decisions and then telling the staff what they had done. They had almost 200 different individual investments. The staff time and effort each month just to account for that was, and then they didn't seem to have a very good strategy. So I wanted to use this as an example of how over a short amount of time you can evolve into something we think is more appropriate and hopefully it'll be aligned with what you think is appropriate. But this is the basic cash flow model that we put together. Pardon me, my name tag's coming off. The blues are months that are positive revenue. The reds are months that are negative revenue. It's based on your historical cash flows. Like I said, revenues come in, expenses go out. We net it on a monthly basis. And then we overlay the investment portfolio against those flows. and you can see a lot of erratic nature some months have a whole bunch coming in some months have a whole bunch going out there wasn't any strategic decision for making particular investments as far as the needs of the city we've been working with the city now a little over 10 years and we've balanced the portfolio it's about 70 80 percent fixed maturity fixed rate investments which have been very helpful in the last couple of years as interest rates have come down. Their portfolio, the market goes like this, breaking up and down. Their portfolio goes like this. It waves. So within a budget year, which you just got through with, and you say, hey, how much are we going to earn next year? It's a little bit less of a coin toss. And it's a little bit more of, OK, we know we've got at least this much guaranteed interest income. And then if the Fed raises rates, maybe we get a little bit more. If the Fed raises rates, maybe we get a little bit less. But our margin of error on that budget is substantially reduced by a well-laddered portfolio. You can see the green chart is kind of an assessment of risk. The biggest risk the city can take is maturity. When this city asked us to come in, their average weighted maturity on their portfolio was 600 days. So not quite two years, right? A year and a half, which is pretty risky for a city as you go through different budget cycles and your spending patterns change. And as the market goes up and down, there's all kinds of Gatsby rules that you have to deal with with a portfolio that long. So we dropped the portfolio weighted average maturity to about 300 days. So we have the risk in the portfolio. And this is what that cash flow pattern looks like now. So they have substantial amounts of blue for the next two years. And so they are not impacted when something pops up, the water main breaks or the big storm like the other night, knocks down some trees and you all of a sudden got to spend some money you didn't expect. Because they've got all those blues that say, yeah, we need a little money, great. The other advantage of all those blues is if they don't need the money, They don't need to invest it until next month because they're not real sure because next month is blue also. So right now, they're looking at investing those blues as they mature out two to three years. The current yield in the pool, the CCMT, is about 5%. four and a half, excuse me, three and a half, 355-ish. The two to three year treasury notes, which is again an eligible investment under the act and a very conservative investment, is yielding about four and a quarter right now, 420, 425. So, again, just by being able to take that blue line and say we don't really need it right now, we're going to ladder it out to our next little red line, which is about two years out there. We're going to go from about 3.5 to about 4.20 in interest income. Now, again, there's some volatility over the time, but, again, it gets back to that strategy of we're going to avoid the spikes. We're going to try to smooth out the portfolio. So I know there's some fees involved. And of course, we're not a charity. And I think our fee estimates at almost $40,000 a year for you. In your size of portfolio, if you had the same portfolio that they had, you'd be picking up over $300,000 extra interest income a year. So again, we're not going to go from 3 and 1 half to 6 and 1 half, but we are going to go from 3 and 1 half to 375, 385, 395. Again, strategically, safely managing the money slightly differently than it's being managed now. Yes, ma'am. I can see a question building. No? You good? Okay?

I'm adding something based off of what you just said. Go ahead. Okay.

I won't wait. So again, our role is to keep you safe and keep you liquid. If you think about Government Finance Officers Association, they use the SLI principle, safety, liquidity, and then yield. And those are absolutely the key objectives. Again, we talked about the seven or eight different managers that might have provided a response to the proposal request. I don't know who they were, but I'm pretty confident a bunch of them don't know public funds and they don't know that SLI is supposed to govern what you do. because they're total return-based investors. So again, our objective is enhanced interest income, not total return. And so you've got to keep that risk as the number one priority, and then make sure that you've got money to pay your bills, and then pick up as much yield as you can. Here's a little bit of a synopsis of what we do and how we do it. Again, we talked about earlier a number of the things. Obviously, communication is the key thing. Working within the state legislation and your policy will be the governing body, cash flow, cash flow, cash flow. Those are the main things. We're going to go back historically with what you've done over time. Then we're going to try to work with staff and project forward through this budget year into next budget year. and make sure we get a good idea of those cash flows and particularly some of the potential outflows. Then we're going to develop a strategy, bring it back to Ms. Gwynn and say, what do you think? And then she'll give us a nod and we'll help implement it. We like solicitive, excuse me, solicitations with multiple potential providers. Right now the banks are very eager for deposits, public fund deposits that are collateralized by government security, so there's low risk, getting back to that safety factor. And so Ben has done quite a few of them here in the state, and he's got a list of about

60 or 70 banks.

And we'll make sure we have all the local banks on the list. We'll use all the other banks in the state that we know are interested in public funds. And we'll send out a request. And we'll say the city of Goldsboro is looking to place $5 million at six months Tuesday morning at 10 o'clock. Give us your best quote. Tuesday morning at 10.05, we'll have a team's meeting. We'll go through results. We'll see who responded. We'll see who had the best rate, and then we'll select that one mostly. Occasionally, there's a nuance to, well, it's maturing with Bank B, and they're a little bit lower, and it's a lot easier just to roll it over. So sometimes you don't always take the highest one, but mostly you take the highest. If for some reason we get out of bank CDs and we start buying government securities, treasury bills, treasury notes, or maybe some of the large agencies, federal home loan banks, something like that, then we'll have an approved broker dealer list. We'll do the same thing. We'll send it out to the broker dealers and we'll say we're looking to buy $5 million. Maturing in two years, provide us your best quotes at 10 o'clock. At 10.05, we'll talk to the city, then we'll commit on behalf of the cities. We do the confirming with the groups, but we don't ever touch the funds and we don't ever touch the security. The bank, if you do CD, once we confirm with the bank, the communication is direct between the bank and the city. Any documents flow directly from the bank in the city and any cash flows directly from the bank to the city. We're not involved in the middlemen of touching any of the investments or any of the cash. Then I probably jumped ahead and got onto the right-hand side, which is from a portfolio emphasis standpoint. Again, we think you're probably a little heavy in cash right now as far as the pools. Again, it's earning a pretty good interest given the market. If we can do some laddering, that would be helpful to you. We're going to work on developing a strategy. We're going to work on developing some solicitations. We think right now that diversifying and doing some three-month, six-month, nine-month CDs is very advantageous. Once we get that part set up and we're comfortable, then maybe we'll look at 15-month, 18-month, 21-month. We'll ladder it out again so that you can regularly touch your cash. And then if things shift on how you need to spend any money, you don't have to wait too long till that next maturity. And then back to the primary depository. So again, if that pops up again, at minimum, we're going to review what you're doing right now. And at a maximum, if you think you want to do a request for proposal, we'll take care of that for you. All right. I think that's the emphasis is, again, your staff, your finance director is the one that decides everything ultimately. Our role is to provide the research and provide the information to help make good choices. That's something we still have to say to our kids when we drop them off at elementary school and make good choices. I shouldn't say it quite that way. Sorry. Again, a little bit about us. We are headquartered in Virginia. I'm just outside of Lynchburg. Ben's just out of Lexington. We have a number of clients in North Carolina. We've been very fortunate and grateful. Ben and my background go back in the markets from the early 80s. I began specializing in public funds in 1988. And so we've got quite a history. We were with some larger firms at different times, and then we started Valley View in 98 and got it registered in, excuse me, yeah, 99 with the ICC. We're almost up to our 30 years. We're getting pretty excited about that. But this is all we do, local governments. We don't do pools. We don't do mutual funds. We don't do pension funds. cash and investment management for your operating money, for your construction money. That's our focus and that's what we will work on. We've got over 70 clients that we provide these full investment advisory services to, that's about $16 billion under management. Our average portfolio is probably around 150, 160 million. So yeah, we've got a couple of bigger ones, but mostly we're kind of in the city's range of portfolio and range of activity. And so you will be an important client for us and we'll provide the time and attention necessary um i would say we have an 11 member team and i wanted to get down into uh eight of us are registered reps which is your official sec term uh we've got three folks that used to be local government people we one had retired as the cfo of a city about the size of greensboro uh in texas uh two of his people that work with him we used to be with with a a transportation authority So again, they're very familiar with the accounting requirements of local governments, and they help do our accounting and our reporting. The two CPAs are very good for the auditor footnotes and are really good with the GASB kind of things. And then more importantly, we have two former bankers that used to be public funds bankers for major national banks. And so when we do our request for proposal, they know the market, they know the players, they know how to ask the questions to get back the answers that are helpful to them. So I apologize. I probably got a little excited there. And I hope I didn't take too much time. But I think this is a great opportunity. Like I said, we appreciate it being here. And we'd love to be able to work with the city. Did any questions pop up while I was talking?

I'll just simply add this and then allow Council to take over the conversation. But it's important to remember we're obligated to pay interest on the loans that we use to finance the city and I think it's equally important that we go and generate as much return as we can while maintaining liquidity and safety of public funds. But the public is entrusting us with these dollars and we need to ensure that we are not allowing them to depreciate. So there's You need to earn as much interest as you can while you're also having to pay your interest commitments. And so it's kind of a balancing act. But I don't want anyone to sit back and go, well, wait, why is the city just holding money that it could be spending on doing other things? And so I think it's important that we discuss exactly what these pools of funds would be. Why would we have some massive amount of money sitting idle? And are they project funds? And if that may be a question for Catherine, but I just want to make sure that that question gets answered for all of our constituents that I know we're going to ask that very simple, very simple question.

Yeah, I'll volunteer that your money is not sitting idly. And all of our suggestions just how to help it be a little bit better. It's the local government investment pools function like a money market fund where it's a dollar in, a dollar out. There's theoretically no risk to your principal. What changes is the interest income. And I would say majority of your funds are well invested there. The biggest thing is you can enhance your interest income by taking a little bit different strategy based on your cash flows. And so that's what we're looking at. You're right here and we want to be able to go a little bit more. And you've got a large enough pot that a little bit more is going to add up to hundreds of thousands of dollars. And so it is worth the time and the effort, particularly for the staff to do it and for the council to be comfortable that that's how they're doing it without taking substantial risk.

The next year, next budget year is going to be very tight. We have debt service that's going to need to be paid. Looking and making sure that we're maximizing every opportunity, I think, is important. All right, I won't stop talking. I've already expressed my opinion a few different ways. Council comments, questions. Ultimately, this one is for a vote this evening, given that it's the second time it is on council's agenda so that we can make sure we got the questions answered. But when the time is right, I would be asking for a vote for or against this one. Any other questions?

Here, I just have a comment. This kind of what we're doing here, we're attempting to do something we've needed to do for a few years now easily. But the timing is just better now that we're a little stronger financial position or a lot stronger financial position. But more importantly, We're allowing our staff to use, like they said, an extension of our staff to help us make sound financial decisions and make money for the public so we can reinvest into our projects and anything else. So this is a really good step in the right direction. And it's a big move for us, and it's going to really put the city in a better financial position and help us use our money so that we can reinvest them in the areas that we see they need to be reinvested.

We'll counsel any other comments, questions, if no entertain a motion to a motion to adopt or not the resolution that presented in the packet.

Make a motion that we approve the resolution as presented in the packet.

There a second.

Second.

All right, most of the main improperly seconded to adopt the resolution authorizing the contract investor investment advisory services as presented in our packet. Is there any debate? Hearing no, we'll call the vote electronically, please. All right. All votes have been tallied. Motion carries on the 7-0 vote. Appreciate y'all being willing to be here this evening. Ms. Glynn, thank you for your work on this one. We look forward to getting some updates, and we'll set the actual update cadence for council as well, as y'all are able to discuss what that may entail fees or whatnot. OK. Safe trips. Bye. Thank y'all. All right, Council, as is tradition, we are basically at that 90 minute mark. I am going to put us in recess until 705 that clock right there. We're gonna follow that one right there. That'll give us just a chance for nature breaks and that sort of thing. So we will reconvene at 705. We're back in let's do that. All right. Appreciate everybody and thank you for that quick nature break there. All right, we will continue with old business. We're at item eight dot two, eight dot one having been resolved resolution was adopted. We are now on eight dots to our Brownfields assessment grant update. Mr. Livingston, correct me on this one as well. This one is provided for information this evening, right?

It is an update. It's a grant that we've received roughly $500,000 to do environmental assessments on various areas throughout the city. They're still taking insights and things like that. So tonight is for information and I'll hand it over to Ms. Choice to give a brief update on that.

I just wanted to make sure procedurally that we were all on the same page. Item 8.2 this evening is for information. Obviously it will be a for a vote at a subsequent meeting. So now is the time to be able to hear it, take it all in, ask some questions and figure out what your questions are going to be.

thank you good evening again see city manager basically provided a brief update but we do have qualified environmental professionals here today to provide you an update on that grant and what we've been doing so far mid-atlantic associates following mid-atlantic associates one of our steering committee members Bobby Barnes She has been assisting me in managing the project. She will also review a community engagement survey that we've done to solicit properties to be considered and prioritized for the grant as well. I also invite council members to, while the qualified environmental professionals are here, If there are particular buildings in the city that you think should be considered for the grant, this is an economic development tool. It allows us to take a look at properties that we think might be contaminated and then enter them into the program and then provide some, I guess, preliminary cleanup assessment work to prepare them for development in the future. All right. Give me that one second. Thank you.

Good evening.

Good evening, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem and Council. Thank you so much for having us today. My name is Jessica Single. I am a project manager with Mid-Atlantic Associates. With me, I have Nolan Barefoot. We are your qualified environmental professionals for this Brownfields grant. Make sure I can figure out how to use this. In addition to the two of us, you also get a team of two other folks. Darren McClure, he oversees the entire grant process, checks my work, makes sure I'm on my stuff. And then Dan Nielsen, he also does all the QA, QC. So you have a very in-depth team here to kind of help you make sure that your grant is done, managed, and procured appropriately. Today we're going to run through a background of how we got here, the work that we've done to date, and some recommendations and some future work that we'd like to continue to do in order to keep the momentum and have the funds expended on time and within budget. So first and foremost, as April said, this grant was awarded to the city in September of 2024. It is for brownfields assessment grant funding so that those funds are for creating brownfield site inventories, conducting phase one and phase two environmental site assessments. It also includes community outreach tasks and these site-specific reuse and cleanup planning efforts. Brownfields is a very expansive term, which is good for us. So in that term, the definition means real property is expansion, redevelopment, or reuse of which may be impacted by the presence or potential presence of environmental contaminants on a site. So a little history, this grant, like I said, was awarded in 2024. Mid-Atlantic was selected by a bidding process in October of 2025. After that, we got to really get started and get rolling. So we developed a preliminary site inventory. So what that was is a list of properties, as April mentioned, we're always adding to it, always kind of redefining it. But a lot of it was based on the target area that was listed in the grant application itself. It included the two priority sites that got you guys awarded the funds. and kind of expanded from there based on property owners that might have been interested and just based on areas of blight or potential contaminated areas within the city of Goldsboro. Following that, we did some preliminary community outreach tasks. So that included mailers. So we did 40 mailers to folks and property owners on that inventory list to see if there was any property owners who would be interested in taking advantage of these funds. From there, we got some good responses and were able to actually start work pretty quickly. So we actually were able to do seven phase one environmental site assessments throughout the city of Goldsboro. For those of you who don't know what a phase one is, it includes desktop analysis and site evaluation of potential properties that might be contaminated. This does not include testing. Those are phase two, but that is also available under this grant. And then we held our first Brownfield Steering Committee meeting in April of 2026. It was really great. It's made up right now primarily of city staff members. And during that time period, we were able to develop some additional recommendations for phase two and additional phase work that we're here to present to you today. And now we're at the city council meeting. So a brief budget update. All of that work, we were able to do expending only 12% of the grant funds. So the big bucks are really in that phase two testing some of what we're looking to accomplish here. So, so far we've only spent about 12% of the funds. We have some good momentum under our belt. This grant expires in September 30th of 2028. Here are the seven sites that we have done phase one site assessments on so far. We'll go into these in a little bit more depth as we move forward. But four of these sites we're recommending today for phase two activities and site evaluation. Um, I'm not sure if we're going to be able to actually click, this is an active link. So if you had access to this PowerPoint, this is a link. Um, I created a Google earth map for you all. So you can kind of see project progress in real time of phase one, phase two, and recommendation activities under this grant and how they're kind of situated throughout the city of Goldsboro. Um, and some target areas that we've identified during that process. So at the recommended next steps for our phase two ESAs right now, we're going to focus on these four properties and a larger conversation about the former Goldsboro cottonseed oil site that you see on the bottom. So first and foremost is A Cleaners. This is located at 312 North Center Street, so right north of downtown. This site is being recommended because during our phase one activity, we recognize that this site is a former dry cleaning facility. Our phase two activities would include Sampling that site for any soil contaminants that may or may not turn up some dry cleaning contamination. We suspect that it's going to. It's been a dry cleaner for I think 30, 40 years or formerly was. The really cool thing about this site is there is the opportunity for leveraged funds. So if we are able to find just a little bit of dry cleaning fluid or contamination on this site, We might be able to petition this for DSCA to pick this project up and DSCA could potentially pay for the cleanup of this grant or of this project. The other really good thing is that the owner is on board and willing to sell this property and redevelop this property and is already consented to move forward with phase two activities. The next property that we have is 800 slash 801 North James Street. So this is a warehouse facility. This is right next to that former GE site up on North James. This is also a very proactive and motivated seller. When we did the phase one activities, our report originally stated that we didn't need to actually do further testing in order to determine if there might be some contamination. We felt that there was. But that seller at the time was like, I really want to know more about this site. I have a site next door that didn't come up on your report that I want to make sure that I'm doing my due diligence. So he wanted to move forward. We recommended that we did do testing based on that new information. And again, he said that he was super motivated, wanted to sell, redevelop this property. So we included that in here. The next site is 423 South James. 423 South James is actually one of seven parcels. This property operated as a former automotive garage, lots of maintenance and service activities in addition to a funeral home. So it probably has some nasty stuff underneath there as well. The owner at the time was very interested in actually a deal in progress. Unfortunately, that fell through, but the owner is currently still motivated and would like to move forward with additional phase two testing in order to redevelop this property. Finally, there is 315, 313 North Center. So this is right across the street from 312. This property might actually be impacted by the dry cleaning facility located on 312, known as A Cleaners. So this is a really good opportunity to also leverage the DSCA funding and to potentially have cleanup be funded by DSCA, because it would be able to do that in the entire radius. The owner is still on the fence on whether or not they want to do it, but they are looking for feedback from you all to see if this would be a good project to move forward. Finally, this is the former Goldsboro cottonseed oil and lean agricultural works property. So this is, I think it was eight parcels. This is actually city owned. This is a doozy. So when we went and did this site investigation, we ran into some stuff a dog chases out there was a homeless camp at the time but this is a huge history probably 40 50 years of industrial manufacturing things like acid pits showed up on this as you might be already aware that southern parcel is actually a brownfields parcel it's in the brownfields program purposely so the discussion for this property today would be not whether or not you want to move forward with phase two testing but how you want to redevelop that property you have options on this property since you already own it you can either help the city redevelop this property or position it appropriately to sell and redevelop it with somebody else at that point Part of that discussion would also include, do you want to do face-to-face testing on the entire thing, on certain parts? And a lot of that would depend on the answers to some of those questions. What is the future use of this property going to be? So right there I'm going to stop. Those are the phase one and phase two recommendations that we've done. So we've done phase ones on all those properties and we had recommended phase two work on those four properties today. I just wanted to make sure and see here if anybody had any questions at this point before we moved on to recommended target areas for future phase one activities.

Also comments, questions. So far, there's a lot to this. So feel free to ask. Yes, sir.

I might be getting ahead of the presentation. I had a question on the priority sites that's on page 276. The last bullet point there is South George Street related to recycling center. Can Can somebody tell me which part is that near Cola Drive? Or is that a different one? Just curious, and then my question was going to be what phase? It is near that area.

I'm just trying to think if you know off top of your head, come on up and.

South George Street, I have to look at I don't have the same inventory list with me at the moment.

That property is on our list, but I don't think that the property owners have responded to our letters.

But that is the one that I was thinking it might be across.

I think it's the 800 block of south. I can't remember, but I know what you're talking about. It was the old North Carolina recycling. Yes.

And what phase is that in, do we know?

That's one of the reasons why we're here is we just need to get your input on some other ones because we've got some more that we can continue to work on. We know where they're at and still build that list out. But if there's anything specific that you had... You know we don't have all the intricate knowledge that this whole Council has and looking through the city we we pick in your brains right now.

That was my only question Mister mayor, I do have a couple other did not be interested in doing what if they're aware, but I can have that conversation later with the manager.

It's worth it's worth putting putting them out there. Is there any are there any specific sites that you have in mind that you want to bring up now? No. Councilwoman, the floor is yours.

Yes, just I don't know if you said this already, so forgive me if you did. Are you still accepting potential locations? That's what we're doing right here in this moment. So what if we don't have an exact location tonight? What does that look like moving forward?

Definitely contact us at any point. We have, like I said, an inventory list. So my hope is that any of your suggestions are already on the inventory list that we've identified. A lot of that has been completed versus windshield surveys. And what we recommended as your qualified environmental professionals is a great economic driver. But yeah, you could just give me a call, a shout, talk to April and we'll make sure it's on the list. A follow up question.

Is it possible to see the inventory list? Like I would hate to be sending you guys properties that you've already included. Could we see what that list looks like?

yes and it'd be great to get feedback from you all as well if there are sites on the inventory list that peak all of your interests i'd love to see how many hits some of those sites might have and how much of a priority that that might be so following this meeting we'll make sure that that gets up to all of you yep great

Full disclosure for those of you curious where my head has been, my head has been the LGE site and the cottonseed site. Those two to me are large formerly industrial sites, one of which could be used for redevelopment, could be used for mixed-use commercial, could be used for an expansion of the cemetery, a boatload of options right there on a prime corridor. And then the other one being the GE plant. Again, I'm just putting my cards on the table here for you. The former GE plant site, that intersection as you're coming in from the west, that intersection could use some investments. and that could be a just absolute prime location that already has access to to data to sewer to water to electricity to road infrastructure for something but um you know that's not going to snap your fingers you can't force someone to sell but at the same time that that intersection to me is just critically important as we have folks coming in and out of the city from raleigh every day so

For sure.

Putting my cards on the table, and I've expressed this with them, it's the old homeless site there where Target is. That area is another area that should be on the list. It was on the list before. Of course, they've talked about this, everything on North Center Street going towards the old recycling. That's railroad property that's prime downtown property that's just there for the Maybe we don't get any much action out of the railroad company out of it, but one day we might.

Right. So is there, at this stage, going back to the budget slide that was in your presentation, does all of this money, the available funds there,

is it wiser to spend that on a plethora of potential sites and assessing sites or do you pick a couple of sites and then at some point switch to spending your money on phase twos out of that pot of money so it's a balance honestly um because your biggest investment the higher hitting dollars are going to be your phase twos so i have a slide later on in the presentation that lets you know the four that we've recommended you're looking at spending between 100 to 125 000 for the phase two activities for those So that's when you're going to start drawing down some of those additional funds versus a phase one is running you anywhere between $2,000 to $4,000, depending on complexity. The Goldsboro Cotton Seed Oil, I think, was a $5,000 one. So they kind of vary, but your big dollar hitters are going to be your phase two activities under this grant.

question. And I think I'd asked this for I can't remember the answer. But if we when we get to these stations where we're we've got ones that we want to clean up, you guys are also applying grants on our behalf to get more additional cleanup funds that work more our responsibility.

We can definitely help you do that. But in order for you to apply for cleanup grant funding, you have to own that property and it has to be owned by you. There are situations to where you could possibly acquire that property for $1 and deed it back to the property owner in the future if you have a potential project that you think would be a great economic driver for your area. But it is something that we can help you with for the cleanup grant.

I have one thing you want to target properties that have real redevelopment potential right because she mentioned leverage funds if we conduct one assessment on a property and ultimately a private developer develops that improves the value for the say $10 million to use a round number that 10 million we report to EPA as leverage funds so they look at it as you turn this $500,000 grant into hundred million dollars in leverage funds and then that's part of the criteria and how they select future grant recipients you know so when applying for additional assessment grants they say you know they put this money to good work they've got a plan they can potentially be awarded more or when applying for a cleanup grant they know that the city will make good use of the funds so you you ideally want to target the properties that have real actual development potential the uh one of the worst things that we could do is not spend the money

So that's where your phase, I think it just clicked for me. And I promise, Council, I'm not trying to dominate the conversation. I think that's why it just clicked for me. The four that you are recommending, A Cleaners, 423 South James, 800-801 North James, and 313-315 North Center, is because that has, in y'all's opinion, looking at it surface level, that has the most opportunity for commercial redevelopment on the back end. So to be able to... have that number be as effective as possible for future grants.

Correct. And one of those properties, A Cleaners, she mentioned the DISCA program, that's Dry Cleaning Solvent Cleanup Act program. It's self-funded and they pay for all costs up to 98.5% up to a million dollars. And so we conduct a little bit of assessment, find dry cleaning contamination, petition it to DISCA. They spend up to a million dollars and the city gets to report those as leverage funds at no cost to them.

So the The Holy Grail from y'all standpoint is to find a just a little bit. Find a little bit is a former dry cleaner in a spot that has strong potential for commercial redevelopment.

We can conduct a robust assessment to make sure that we find it, but that would come out of the city's pocket rather than just conduct enough to find what we need to petition it to the state and the state will take it from there and the city will get credit for the funds.

And to build on that, it's not just obviously redevelopment potential is great. Those are highest hitting. Leverage funds is great. We also need to make sure that we have interested property owners and that you've hit the projects within your target areas in your grant application. So we're kind of factoring all of those pieces in together when recommending additional sites for phase two work.

So council again, thank you for allowing me the chance to kind of dominate the conversation there just for a second, but comments, questions from anybody else. Yes, sir.

One more. The North James industrial area that's referred to there, would that be and this may not mean anything to you, but the way I what I'm talking about in my mind is the old break plant, the Grinnell Dixie plant. Is that what we're referring to of that area? Yes. Good.

So there's actually that 800-801 North James is that site in between that GE and that old Dixie site. So we're targeting that entire area. And it kind of brought me to our new focus areas for this grant. So once we do approve or hopefully approve some phase two activities, we want to make sure we keep the momentum up on the phase one work. So one of the priorities is going to be the downtown Goldsboro area around Center Street. That has a good integration with the downtown master plan and kind of work together with the downtown master plan and this grant in order to help kind of accomplish both initiatives under those two plans. And then the Union Station quarter, this was a priority site in your grant application. So we've actually identified additional 10 vacant properties around Union Station that could also be great for phase one and phase two activities as well. And then last but not least, you do have about $163,000 allocated right now for reuse planning. So for example, that Union Station corridor would be a great opportunity to use some of that reuse planning. If you want to focus that funding more on phase two activities, you can. We can reallocate some of those funds in the work plan as well. So that's just a discussion that we would have moving forward as we'd identify new sites and how we want to move forward with phase two activities on how best we want to allocate these funds and if we think that reuse planning is going to be the best use of these funds moving forward as we reach that 2028 deadline. So as a summary of our recommendations, we're asking to focus areas in phase ones in that downtown area, Union Station, and that James Street Industrial Corridor. The phase two ESAs that we discussed, the four properties. And like I said, that estimate for phase two work is roughly 100 to 125,000 for those four projects at this point.

All right Mr. Livingston what guidance if any from council are you requesting this evening other than merely awareness?

Well right now take a look at the list see if you've got any other ideas or suggestions for us and we'll take that and reevaluate and continue moving on with what we're doing already.

and the logic is airtight of you know the the four sites obviously there's there's preferences and other things but the logic is based on is based on the math and the probability for getting the best score for the next round of things i get that i think that we'll probably have some op some ideas for some other sites but again the logic is airtight there i appreciate y'all's explanation on that thank you

And we have engaged GE's consultant. We are tactfully trying to get them to come to the bargaining table, but obviously can't force them to sell. But we know it's attractive.

And their logic for holding might be also self-explanatory. Exactly. All right. Council, any remaining comments or questions before we move to the next item? Hearing none, thank you all so much for your time this evening. And safe travels back. And we'll see you next time.

Thank you. Just one addendum to this presentation. We created, as part of our community involvement plan for the Brownfield assessment, we created a survey to assess what the community thought was important so far. We've received about 31 responses, and we've also asked how they would reimagine spaces. So Bobby is going to do a quick one to two minute on that particular survey.

don't feel limited to wonder one or two i mean if it's if this is content and there's questions keep it going okay okay awesome good to see you good to see you good evening everyone so we conducted a brownfield redevelopment survey

We received over 30 comments and respondents. Here is the respondents information. Most of them are residents, property owners, business owners, employees, and a few of them were visitors to the community. The bottom image shows the respondents time in the community. Question three of the survey was what type of redevelopment would you most like to see in the underutilized or vacant properties? The most we saw was in the parks and green spaces and the retail development for the brownfield areas. Question four of the survey, which community needs should redevelopment address? We saw environmental improvement, neighborhood revitalization, infrastructure improvements, and job creation as our top categories. How familiar are you with the Brownfield redevelopment? Most people were in between. Some people were very familiar. Some people were not. Question six was what concerns do you have regarding development of former industrial contaminated properties? Most of the respondents replied back with environmental safety and groundwater quality. We also heard that long-term maintenance was very important. Question seven was how important is environmental cleanup before redevelopment? And everybody said it's very important. Here are some public responses to the Brownfield Redevelopment Survey. I'll give you a minute to read those, unless you want me to read each one of them. OK. And we got over 18 comments for this. So if you guys are interested in it, I can provide it. Here is the second. And the community's priority sites are listed here, 704 John Street, train station and hotel, board and mills in the building at the end of Williams Street and Royal Avenue. You can read through the list if you want to. The recycling center is on that list. And then we have provided a link to it. Do you have any questions about the survey?

You mind going back to the list just one time? It's neat. There is some overlap. McDonald's specific parcels on areas. It's logical.

Anybody else have any questions?

Comments, questions from council? Hearing none.

Well, thank you.

All right. So with that one, we will move to, we're still in old business. Item 8, so again, item 8.2, you did not need a vote. Right, there's no action to be taken. We're going to move to item 8.3, where there will be requested action. Obviously, that could be the table, but nonetheless, item 8.3, FY27 utility rate ordinance amendment. Mr. Livingston, do you have any groundwork to lay or are we moving to the next one?

Yeah, I do, just a little bit. This came about when we, after we did our work on the tiered rates, we realized there was a, and I think the number is 221 irrigation meters, something like that. 221 irrigation meters. 220. So that was kind of surprising to us. But anyway, this would affect those 220 customers that have irrigation meters. The central question before us today is whether or not with the new tiered rate to build that on the first tier or the second tier, the first tier being the lower tiered rate, second tier being the higher tiered rate. The staff recommended the higher tiered rate. I think mostly because of the idea that watering irrigation system is a non essential type of use and we want to encourage conservation. But you know that that's you're the policymakers. And so that's that's where it stands right now there. There could be reasons other than that, that we maybe consider the lower rate, but that's where we're at. And I'll have Catherine explain any kind of further details to that situation for us.

Good evening again, council. Thank you for having me. We met with our rate consultant and we also have Mr. David Hyder with Stantec in case council might have some additional questions. But we met with our rate consultant to go over with the actual implementation. It's a different person. And so this question came up about the irrigation rates. As Mr. Livingston said, it affects about 220 people. And the question is if you have a separate irrigation meter for which you have paid a separate irrigation tap, should you get the benefit of that lower tiered rate. The manager, the deputy manager, myself met with Mr. Hyder and we discussed it and the general statement was Most of the time, it's been his experience that it would go for the higher rate, so it would be the next tier, so not that bottom tier rate. I don't know if you might have some additional questions that Mr. Hyder could answer based on his vast experience. I also do have an example that we put together for some context purposes. If the council felt like it was necessary, I'm more than happy to share that.

I have one quick question. What's the point of an irrigation tap? Why even do it? Why do it? If you're a homeowner, why not just take everything off of your main tap?

Well, because you're paying sewer. That's the big thing.

So irrigation tap, you're already not paying sewer on that. So there's a cost savings regardless.

And maybe my example helps. I mean, so if we did a thousand gallon example, okay, and you said, well, I'm just going to pay just to water my lawn and I'm going to get the benefit because maybe I only use a thousand gallons a month and I get three, right? So on 1,000 gallons, your basic charge, so that's fixed, is $20.50 a month. The water cost would be $3.50 because that's the lower rate. The sewer charge would be $10.50. So you're going to pay for that 1,000 gallons $34.50 a month. now if at the higher tier rates same example you've got your basic water charge of 2050 the water would be 553 not 350. that cost is 26 dollars so that even with the higher tier if you just paid it okay so you you're talking about eight bucks roughly uh in addition if you just paid it from and just pay the sewer charge because the sewer charge obviously is a lot more If you get the benefit of the lower tier, basic is $20.50. The water would be $3.50. The bill would be $24. So the difference between the high tier and the low tier, so we're recommending, staff's recommending, the higher tier rate. They're going to pay an extra $2.03 for 1,000 gallons at the higher tier. So that's the differential that the council's being asked to consider.

But they're not paying sewer fees?

That's right. The irrigation only. And then just for your own information, water tap is $1,200, which I mean is probably, I think, very reasonable in terms of looking at other towns and cities, what the cost is. And then it's $100 water deposit you would have to pay on that. separate meters so you do have to invest some money if you want an irrigation tap you have to invest some money in order to even get the tap and then of course your benefit is you're not having to pay for the thousand gallons the ten dollars and fifty cents for that usage

Council comments questions on this one ultimately this is you purely a policy decision that will have to vote on but we need feedback to see where one is in order once again.

Yes, sir, well well for me was to me. I looked at it and we we said that we will want to right I think they should have the opportunity to to actually reach the 3000 gallon mark me personally. I think we're seeing when those 221 people out.

So what you're proposing is that they would have 3,000 gallons on their regular tap at the lower rate and 3,000 gallons on their irrigation at the lower rate? Roger that.

Because you pay as you go. So the more water you use, the more money you pay.

Can I also make one more statement? We cannot delineate between what's a commercial irrigation tap or what's a residential. The rate was established for residential customers. We have not addressed commercial customers. so out of the 220 I can't tell you are there 100 that are commercial that would be getting the benefit of the cheaper residential rate and there's a hundred residential I can't we cannot differentiate in that manner so I mean it is possible that you know we could be giving that preferential rate to a commercial customer so

So, Ms. Catherine, are you saying legally we can't do it or we just hadn't broken that down?

I'm just talking about fairness to the customer is really what I am. But it is purely a policy decision because, you know, we have to get these rights implemented on or before August 1st. And so that's why we were rushing to get to this council meeting. So whatever the council decides that our staff can go ahead and get their work done and we can be prepared to bill come August 1. But it's just a policy decision.

So follow up question. Our commercial businesses have different prices anyway, right?

Well, no, they didn't up until the tiered rates at the point that we did it. Everybody was the same. And then we had the commercial and industrial rates. So that's really a heavy, heavy user.

So so we've heard heard a recommendation from Councilman White Each of us has their own opinion. My opinion, I still wanna encourage, I still wanna encourage conservation. And I don't know that anything here would necessarily break anything. Honestly, I think that any direction we go is fine and ethical and financially sound. I think that someone electing to use an irrigation-only meter, they're already signing up for something that's a bit of a luxury. And they're already getting the benefit of not having to pay sewer on that water usage. And the reason we did the tiered usage was to help those who were the least able to pay, the smallest users. And so I think that doing, and this is just me and my vote, I think my philosophy of why I wanted to do the tiered system was to ease the burden on those who are least able to pay the smallest users and encourage less utilization. And so just for me personally, I'm going to remain in that direction, but obviously it's going to come to a vote of counsel on however we choose to go.

So I think my concern with that is, and I hear what you're saying, but what if like some of those users who have the irrigation system still would fall into the category in which we're trying to help save dollars? I guess that's where the question mark is for me. Like, do you think some of those people are falling into that category? Is there a way to know?

if they pay $1200 for extra tap because I know I'm one of those 221 okay I don't I don't think that they would fall in that I don't think the majority of them would fall in that category but there's some people who got irrigation systems that don't have double tap that's correct it's true they get the benefit yeah they do right but you know what I'm saying where the other ones would not but they're also paying sewer on that they're paying sewer so they're paying a higher bill regardless they're paying a higher bill

So the people who have the two taps are still paying a higher bill with the irrigation system. Those individuals who only have the irrigation system, one tap, are not. They're saving it.

I'm I'm get say that I definitely may or I'm in agreement with you about why honor what he says I believe that having that separate tap and using it strictly for on the irrigation is a luxury and we set out to do the tiered system to help the homeowners who We're really struggling in the areas of paying their bills. So I think the irrigation should be classified more as a luxury and it should be billed at that second tier instead of the top tier instead of the original tier that we were talking about.

I agree. But it's still going to be the residential rate. So even because you said you couldn't capture if it's commercial or residential. So even if it's commercial, they're going to get billed for residential rate according to our ordinance.

So they still, it does say it? Well, oh, I'm sorry. So, yes, go ahead. I'm sorry. I was listening. I heard something else. Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah. It says that they will be billed at the second tier single family residential water rate.

Which is the same as the commercial.

So there's somebody still going to make out even if it's commercial.

No, sir, because that second tier is the same as the now commercial rate. So everybody's the same level. And the one thing, too, that I think is really important with the council is that residential tiered rate does help every single residential customer because they get the benefit of that lower rate. the first 3,000 gallons which is nice it's not just one select group of the residential it's every single residential customer which is I think it's a really good thing to conserve your water yeah that's the message

I don't think that only regular I don't think that there is a an unethical or not financially sound option this currently being discussed. The old was he comes down to a vote a motion and a vote of Council which direction we want to go.

I agree with you Mister mayor that is no unethical or financially unsound I agree with that wholeheartedly I just don't like the fact that we singling people We're saying because you can do it, we're going to charge you a little bit more just because you can do it. I just don't like that. you know they they go they all working people just like everybody else and I think we should look at them all you know some that's just my point and I do understand that it's only $8 or whatever it's just me their their citizen constituents here and I just think that we should have seen with them out we should all try to play on the same playing field now we can ask Mister hotter but when I was doing my research for other areas that did tier system they were also

having the irrigation customers pay a higher rate as well in other areas that are participating in the tiered system that I was looking at.

Yeah, Mayor, Council Members, I'd be happy to chime in. I think to what the Mayor said, that is really the intention is that when we talk about that first 3,000 gallons, that's really intended to be kind of non-discretionary essential use. And once you go over 3,000 gallons, that's know discretionary irrigation type use even if you're in a single family home without an irrigation meter so it's to say somebody with an irrigation meter gets that kind of indoor water use would be somewhat inappropriate in terms of how we're thinking about the structure if that makes sense i mean but they still have a meter so they still gonna get charged for watering their grass

Correct so I don't see how will be inappropriate because they still get in charge for the water that they use on the second 10.

Correct, but the difference is it's generally he's water not just water which generally cost more for the city to produce.

That's that's what we don't have to pay for on it.

Well, Council, we have a proposal in front of us. And obviously, Councilman, if you would like to make a motion to amend, then I would obviously honor that motion. If not, then I would honor a motion to adopt or to reject the ordinance as written. But I do want us to pick a path and try to keep going.

I make a motion that we adopt it as is.

I second that.

The motion's been made and seconded that we adopt as is. Is there any further debate? Hearing none, we'll call the vote electronically, please. Vote electronically if possible.

I have my irrigation on a well.

All right, motion passes on a 4-2 vote. The rates will stand as presented in the agenda packet on the resolution, or on the ordinance, excuse me. All right, now let's move to item nine dot one. Mr. Lewis and I haven't skipped anything.

No, sir. I think you're going in order.

All right, perfect. Well, let's move the new business. Item nine dot one. It's the Freedom Festival. Mr. Lewis and if you kick us off and then we'll turn over the floor.

Well, just excited about Freedom Fest. They've got a really great show and great activities planned for this event. We have Mr. Doug McGrath here that's going to kind of give us an overview. Sorry you had to wait so long, but I know you were educated on lots of things that you weren't educated on previously. We have Eric here also, Orsendorf, to give us their update.

Mr. Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, council members, thank you for having us. With me tonight is Eric Ostendorf. So Eric is one of the key leaders in our volunteer group. Our volunteer group literally works year round on this. So on September 13th, the day after our event, we're already talking about next year's event. And Eric will be a key part of what we're doing there. I'll try to get through this presentation pretty quickly since the session's already kind of long. I could get some help with the slides.

I'd say we're gonna need you again. There we go. Are you okay proceeding by just simply acknowledging slide? Yeah, we're good.

So the festival began in 2017, a quick history lesson. So the first couple of years, it was featured as Wings of Wayne and it was tied into the air show. So we kind of played with the name. It was started by a nonprofit, the Goldsboro Elks. It morphed into NC Freedom Fest following the 2019 festival. we really use a model of one community we see it in everything that we do the volunteer structure and kind of how we put the whole program together so it's really cool to see that thread of getting our community to focus on something where we can all we can all kind of hold hands and move something forward in the spirit of a greater good So the festival this year, it's the 250th anniversary of the country. I mean, we all know that. We hear it every day. We just had the big fireworks celebration by the chamber, which was amazing. It's also the 25th anniversary of 9-11. And you remember what it felt like on 9-11, but then shift your thinking to what it felt like on 9-12. when we all stood back up and said, not on our watch. We can join together and we can fight our way back. So we're hoping to kind of recapture some of that 9-12 magic as we do our event. And our event happens to be on 9-12. So we're really trying to make this year's event a big event. Six months ago, as our volunteer committee was working on this, we agreed that we wanted to go epic and then epic fury becomes a reality. We really don't talk epic in our game plan anymore. But the point there is if ever there was a time for us to come together and thank those who serve, this is the time. And we think that what we're doing with the Freedom Fest this year really kind of matches up with that. This is just a quick snapshot of some of our sponsors. This list maybe was a week old, and in the time since it was produced, we have some more people that have joined in. If you can remember back in the early years when I would do this presentation, there might have been 10 or 12 companies on that slide. Our retention rate is really high, and every year we're adding to that. It's really just kind of cool to see how people have embraced this. So what is Freedom Fest? So we turned downtown Goldsboro into an event that basically is a pedestrian or walking event. So Center Street from noon to 5 becomes a street fair. So you can think lots of things, car and bike show vendors, kids zone activity, magicians, clowns, party pals, so Disney and Marvel characters are out, static displays, food trucks, live music at Center and Walnut. So from 12 to 5, and if I've left anything out, I can jump in. From 12 to 5, really think street fair. And unto itself, that could be an event. But then from 5 to 9, we convert Freedom Field into a legitimate concert venue. And we program a flyover. We program musical artists to come in. And we'll talk about that in a moment. We have food trucks, probably something in the neighborhood of 18 food trucks on that footprint. This year we're actually going to program a second stage so we'll have live music that will be more local and regional artists that will go from from 12 to 5 and then we go to the main stage with an opening act there at 5 and then our headliner. So what you see here, I put this slide in just to give props to Eric. A year and a half ago, I walked into a planning session, and he unveiled this 3D model that he had created, a 187 scale model that forever changed how we planned the festival. So we had always planned it with fairly crude tools on paper, and we would kind of imagine what something could look like. And when he presented this, we could now move these things around, almost war game, if you will, you know what happens if we move this tent this way or if we shift the stage that way this really redefined the planning process and uh and it was a lot of fun too so he said you've got a long time yeah i'm retired now fantastic the festival is an award-winning festival i think i've covered this in years past so in the interest of time i'll kind of skip forward but we've we've earned awards at the local the state and the national level So this year our opening act will be Tyler Davis. Tyler was a native resident of Goldsboro, moved to Nashville a year and a half ago to pursue his dream, is kind of making it on the music scene there. So this is really kind of cool to bring him back and have him be part of the festival as the opening act. And then Ashley McBride is the headliner. We try to pick an artist when they're really at the top of their game. And it requires some luck or some skill and a lot of luck. And this year, the luck paid off. She's red hot right now. She's like everywhere. So we really have a legitimate national touring artist, a Grammy award winning artist, over 2 million digital followers. And when I share some of the marketing stats with you, you'll see kind of what that does to translate to the event itself. So in terms of marketing, we have Grassroots Marketing, Friends of Freedom Fest, but we also have traditional social media. We have radio, we have a digital campaign. Radio this year will feature Curtis Media and WRNS, so we really are kind of taking the story to the east. Digital campaign will kick off this week. Curtis Media will kick off one month out, and RNS will kick off two weeks out. We have traveling billboards. So here you see one of the two traveling billboards. This was at the 4th of July fireworks festival. And they're great because we can reposition them all around and keep them in front of the public's eye. When we think about social media, since we started promoting this year's event, we have had over 580,000 views. 580,000 views. Our net followers or new followers is up 14%. That just way exceeds what industry standards are. And part of that is the headliner and part of that is just what's happening with Freedom Pets. It's like kind of grown into a thing all by itself. So to see what's happening with that reach and how it gets outside of the Goldsboro community is really kind of cool. won't present i won't present your material i'll leave that for you that's okay so part of what we're here to do is to thank you for your support in years past and to ask for your support again this year so in starting in 2019 the city really stepped up along with the base to provide support resources for what we do you saw the list of sponsors we asked a lot of people to write checks the event is free So the only thing anybody pays for is what they eat and drink. Everything else is free. So the young airman who's gaming in their dorm room because they don't have enough money to go buy a $150 concert ticket is welcome to attend this, and it doesn't cost them anything. There's shuttle service from the base. We'll have remote parking at Wayne Community College. But we're here to ask for your support once again in terms of production and execution of the festival, and also for the street closure that's required to make this a safe event. Eric has worked with Goldsboro PD to continue to evolve the footprint and the barricades and Jersey barriers. Really two years ago, everything changed in New Orleans. And so our event really kind of focuses on that. We keep people safe. So the footprint, I think, for the street closure is about the same as last year, maybe with the exception of Mulberry.

We have some additions on Mulberry, but again, we've worked the barrier plan and the road closure plan to ensure that the security cordon will still be robust enough to meet the needs of a festival like this.

Any questions? So the application in front of us is a tier for that just as a reminder for Council. That's 1000 or more people, multiple multiple city services. So it must be approved by Council. The street closure component is all of Center Street from Ash to what? To pine. From ash all the way to pine. And that, I'm making sure that that is in front of us as well.

And there should be a map that should show you also both sides of mulberry. Just the initial few feet of east and west walnut. And then the same thing, a few initial feet of east and west chestnut. all of James along Freedom Field, all of Spruce along Freedom Field, and a little bit of Spruce to cover the fire department.

All right. I am thumbing through. I see the special event application. Mr. Livingston, if I'm missing something.

I scrolled through. I couldn't find it either.

The event application is there with those. No issue to present the council but the street closure. I don't see included.

I believe there were 2 files submitted one that had the application and one that had a few slides that showed the power presentation. Yes that showed a maps.

Our point slides that you should for some reason the agenda.

Completely through this not there. OK.

All right, would you state for the record, Mr. Lewis and Ron, tell me if we can do this. Can you state for the record the street closures or should we approve the or discuss the event app as it

i mean we've we've approved it many other ones we've approved with saying okay we've got it and are we going to approve the road closure itself as a as a thing right we do have a map if you wanted to take a quick look at it i can handle it and all i want to make sure is that we can state it clearly for the record and i want to make sure that we're not falling out of our own procedure to approve a free closing i've got it in mind so i don't know why

Oh, I'm sorry. It's in there. If street closure. There's a whole other form that it is. It's just that. Your guys are good. Okay. All right. Thank you all. I appreciate that. I'm used to seeing different forms. This is the single application now. all right so council what we have in front of us is the um event request there's um just the street or street closure and then the approving the app the uh the special event application as a whole council any questions on this application hearing none is there a motion to approve the application or to deny the application All right, motion's been made to approve. Do we have a second?

Second.

All right, motion's been made and properly seconded to approve the application as presented. Is there any debate? Hearing none, I'll vote electronically, please. All right, if you would just state your vote for the record, then. In favor? All right. All votes being in the affirmative, I think. All votes being in the affirmative. We'll get it correct on the screen. Six in the affirmative. Motion passes. Special event application is approved. Guys, thank y'all. Good luck. Have a safe event. Let's have some fun.

Thanks, everybody. And you have the street closure.

It is very clearly in here. It's been condensed to a single block as opposed to its own separate form, and that threw me for a loop. That is my own mistake. I was expecting to see it on the back end. I will get up to date on our forms.

September 12th. Put it on your calendars. We need to see all of you out there. So this is our chance to say a heartfelt thank you to those who serve. That's why we do this event. So you all can help us convey that message. So thank you. Thanks, everyone.

All right. Item 9.2. Mr. Livingston, would you like to brief or do I go directly to Chief Stempion?

I think you can go directly to Chief Stempion.

Chief, if you would.

Good morning, or good evening, Mayor. I'm tired. I figured I'd pre-plant. Good evening, everybody. We're here to preview the findings of a station location analysis that was recently completed. And it's important to note that this analysis is going to be tied to the discussion of the public safety complex, because if and when we decide to build a new public safety complex, it's imperative that we place it in the right location to optimize response both now and in the future. So we selected North Carolina Fire Chief Consulting with Chief Greg Grayson, who's with me to do this analysis. Him and his team are extremely knowledgeable and experienced in these types of things. And he's going to take over. I'm going to step away, and I'm going to let him present the findings to you. Chief Grayson.

If you would, sir, just give me one second, Mr. Livingston, just remind me, this one, there's not a resolution attached to it. Will we be asking for a vote at the end? Or is this information only is making sure we're all on the same page. All right, sir. Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you, and thank you for your service you provide to the people of Goldsboro. Thank you for the opportunity of being with you tonight. My name is Greg Grayson. I'm with NC Fire Chief Consulting. We work throughout North Carolina. We have alliances with the league municipalities and also Association of County Commissioners. But I want to thank your staff for working with us over recent months in this process. They've been very cooperative. It's much more than your fire staff because we look at the planning piece and the GIS piece and And it's a lot of incident data. So thank you to your staff and thank you to, you know, for your service here to the people of Goldsboro. So I've got a few takeaways up front as a summary for you. Your demand overall is increasing in Goldsboro, particularly around the medical emergencies that your department responds to. But the good news is your existing structure, your existing fire station structure is serving you well. It's not a situation of a missed service delivery. but it's really a focus more on the future as you grow and you expand you you earlier talked about your future land use and we were looking at that and we we considered that in that analysis as well so it's much more about moving forward than correcting a problem that exists today So we did determine that there could be a slight improvement with your fire station one in another location. We were able to look at that. And then that growth will give opportunities for you, especially as new developments, new facilities, new complexes are being built. There are some opportunities for future stations, and we're going to talk about that just a little bit. And all of that being long-term planning, your capital improvement planning, and the need for that. So that's kind of a quick overview of what we're going to touch base on here tonight. Again, we work with municipalities across North Carolina, just some of them here that we have served. We've done well over 200 projects throughout municipalities. and also counties. We service the Association of County Commissioners fire consulting provider. We have a team of about 30 of us across North Carolina that work with this and bring a lot of expertise to the table. But when we look at these, we're an independent group. In other words, we look at this, what is the overall best service delivery needs for Goldsboro. We're looking at that as an independent viewpoint, what makes your system stronger, what improves your service delivery the most, just simply protecting and serving the people of Goldsboro. So everything that we do is independent. We look at all the aspects, and we'll talk through tonight, from insurance ratings to to population, to hazard and risk. But at the end of the day, it's all about service delivery. I'm a retired fire chief, so my whole career has been in North Carolina fire service, and it's all about service delivery. And that's really the viewpoint that we look at this work from. There were three pieces of work or three components, major components of the work. One is looking at the historical call data. What does Goldsboro look like? Even though we look at a number of cities, your demand, your trends, they're unique to Goldsboro. And really the best indicator of future demand and future need is your current and past demands. We looked at years of data. Where does your department respond to? Where are the challenges? Where are the needs? throughout your community. And then we very heavily depend on the GIS system or the geographical information system both here in your city as well as Wayne County. We have a GIS analyst on our team and he was able to capture a lot of this data and be able to make the necessary projections. We really use a state-of-the-art model that helps you to see where you are today and makes a predictive analysis moving forward. And it uses this ASRI platform, which you use and most local governments in North Carolina do. And then we put this together. We don't just simply say, well, here's what the incident data says and here's what the GIS data says. All of those of us that work on this are seasoned fire chiefs, 30-plus year folks. And we look at this and help. interpret that data and try to look at what is best long-term and what opportunities might exist for Goldsboro from communities we all served and things that we see as best practices. Since we focus completely on North Carolina, we try to look at what has worked in other places and could that work here for you. So as we noted earlier, U.S. leadership, you're the policymakers and decision makers for Goldsboro. We think you do need to know about your incident demand is increasing, particularly in the EMS area. It represents about 63% of your workload today. That's very typical. Most larger cities in North Carolina are even near 70%. and so there's a lot of reasons and factors behind that, but you do need to recognize that that is a growing need here in Goldsboro. Your stations, we had a focus on are there opportunities for station one and three, and then stations two, four, and five, were more anchored within the study. But we would say to you that that was an appropriate measure here for Goldsboro as well because your overall stations are effective. You do not have stations with overlap or lack of coverage or over coverage. So your station placement today is effective. One of the opportunities could be with your dispatching. Obviously, this is another governmental entity, but we identified that and provided data to the chief that hopefully will help that move forward. We think your future growth will require additional stations. We know that it will. It depends upon where that growth occurs, when it grows, and when the opportunity is to grow. So we have not just looked at what you are today and what today's needs are. We're trying to really look at this long term. As you look at those future land use, I served in Greensboro, you have areas that you anticipate growing. Sometimes they grow as planned. Other times it moves in a different direction. So you have to be very agile with determining uh, you know, where where the needs are. So we've really tried to plan that entire future land use area so that you're aware of where opportunities may be there in your future. And then that is associated with capital needs. Um, fire station construction, uh, post covid, uh, fire apparatus post covid all has gone up significantly in cost. And so that's a factor that really puts all of that into your capital planning moving forward. We look at the modeling, try to look at the modeling as Ms. Smith would, if you will. And that means that Mrs. Smith's husband has collapsed on the floor in front of her, or Mrs. Smith has come into her kitchen and found her kitchen on fire. She's dialing 911. So we focus on what is the service delivery Ms. Smith is getting from the time she dials 911 until the fire department arrives. And so Ms. Smith may not know that there is making the call, a call processing, a dispatch piece, alerting the fire department, turnout time for the fire department, travel time for the fire department, access and setup. And she really doesn't care about those pieces. It's what's the time for me calling until I'm getting help. But we have to break all those pieces down to determine opportunities for improvement. But we really focus on this travel time because station locations are very much about travel time. That's a piece that local governments can have an effect upon when they're planning. And this model hopefully shows, you know, there's a number of pieces, but the station locations are one of the greatest things a municipality can do to help with that travel time component. We looked at the service delivery levels for Goldsboro against the industry standard, and those are not requirements or laws. They're just a consensus industry standard. And so we wanted to look, where are you today? And you see the numbers there. You're about two minutes and four seconds. difference between the industry standard and where Goldsboro is. That just means there's some opportunity for improvement moving forward. We show some of the areas that that can be attributed to, but your department's performing well, you're performing strong, you have a strong performing department, and your stations, as we said before, are really distributed well, but there's always opportunity for improvement. So we focus on that opportunity and the GIS system allows us to do that. So I'm going to show you some visuals. They're going to be small. Excuse me again. They're going to be small. this screen but the takeaway you have the full report the takeaway of this is the the intent behind each of them and let's start with the first one we look at those historical instance where have calls occurred historically on here in Goldsboro the orange and red colors represent a higher volume the warmer colors and those green cooler colors represent lower volume so you can see you have a disbursement all over the the city obviously But we look at where have those calls occurred historically and what types of calls occur. So we break all of those pieces down. We look very closely at your population and this is gauged to look at some of the larger concentrations of population or where your density is. Emergency services follow that density. So where people are, where there's more dense population, you'll have more incidents occur. That's in any city. So as you look at that, we look at that population, and the computer model takes all the population pieces into consideration as they look at the places where most of your people live. That's where most of the calls obviously are going to occur. We look at the hazard and risk analysis though too. We looked at your current planning and zoning areas and where you have industrial and commercial areas. Where do you have residential areas? And we look at each of those and that factors into the modeling as well because there are greater hazards and risk in larger industrial and commercial facilities many times than there are single family 2,000 square foot homes. And so we look at each of those pieces as well. In Goldsboro, consideration for flooding is very important. And so when you're looking at stations, station locations, you have to look at flooding in Goldsboro. Y'all live that and understand it very, very well. So that factors into the modeling as well. And I show this simply to say that that all was fed into the modeling as an important factor for you too. We do look at the insurance ratings. Goldsboro has achieved, make great achievements with insurance rating. You want to maintain and improve that. So we look at all of those and the model is set to help sustain the insurance ratings that you have. We look at your engine company coverage. That's based upon a mile and a half road travel time from fire stations. We also look at your ladder coverage. That's based on a two and a half mile coverage. And so these colors here represent For example, the engine coverage in this one, kind of the orange color, and then the ladder company coverage is in the blue color there. So we look at that and all the insurance piece is factored in as well because that makes a difference to your homeowners and your business owners in the amount of insurance premiums that they pay and your department has worked hard to achieve the levels that they have. We also do look at that industry standard and that looks at trying to reach everyone within a four minute travel time. Now, most cities are all working towards that. The goal is to try to cover 90% or greater of your jurisdiction in a four minute travel time. But we reflect, well here's where you are today. you're really doing pretty well with that so when we look at that that travel time it's based on your locations where you are today all that correlates back into the incidents and the data because that that's really the proving point we can show by the map what the travel time should be but then that's cross reference with all of the incidents is this reflective of what it's actually taking for travel time and all that is is captured as well So we start putting all of those pieces together and this looks like a big honeycomb. What that does is look at the entire jurisdiction and it lays a net over it and those octagon shapes are there simply to capture each area or each cell of your city and the area that we were asked to evaluate and it gives a rating in each of those areas. It's called a vulnerability risk index. I'm going to show a slide in a minute that tells more about that. But each of these represent a larger area and really starts putting all the pieces of the puzzle together. So again, where you see the warmer colors, Those are higher stress, higher demand areas. The cooler colors are less demand and less stress. So this VRI that we talk about, that's just the modeling that's used to determine fire stations as the state-of-the-art model for that. But it really can be equated to a level of service as well. You have a level of service from the insurance standards. You have a level of service based upon the demonstrated performance of the men and women of the department. Well, this is just another way to look at it. But as it says here, you're putting all those pieces that I just showed you together to help make a predictive analysis about where fire stations are needed. And it's all about giving a stronger level performance and stronger capability. So municipalities strive to make 90%. Even the national industry consensus standard is set at 90% and 80% for rural areas, 90% for municipal areas. And so we know that multiple calls happen at the same time. We know storms come in and no department can serve us at 100%. But you strive to hit that 90%. So that's the way the model is built as well. We looked at all of your current municipal limits in Goldsboro, and we were asked to look at opportunities for Stations 1 and 3. And so the good news is both of those locations, neither of those locations were in a poor site or poor location, but there's some opportunities. So with Station 3, that location is good geographically but it has some challenges getting out onto the the intersection you may have in mind where that is it's kind of a multi-point intersection so when you have traffic you have you're trying to get out from that station they have a lot of navigation to do We looked at that, and the modeling overall says that's a good area of interest. That area is good for a fire station. That didn't change, but where the station is positioned could be better to get the truck out quicker and safer, not just for the firefighters, but also for the public. Where it is today in the intersection doesn't give the best opportunity, but the geographic area is good. The modeling also looked at your Station 1 and determined an area just to the west of that could give a small increase. It's not a huge increase, it's less than 2%, but it is an increase in that VRI score or that scoring ability that we talked about. So we look at your current municipal limits and we show where those locations are and what opportunities might exist. For Station 3, we were able to look at that entire honeycomb area and say anywhere within that's going to generate or produce the same type of level of service. And even on the peripheral of that, there's other opportunities that could be in a better location. There's an opportunity that Station 1 could improve slightly in another location as well. But we didn't just look at your current municipal limits. We were asked to look, what's this going to look like long term? As we grow, as we develop, where are those needs? And so we were able to do that in a larger area, a much larger area, using that future land use. And so it has chosen six different areas of interest that could be potential fire stations for you in the future. As you grow and as you develop, Having those areas in place for your fire department, planning department, to know this is an area a potential fire station might be needed. A best practice we see in North Carolina is as you are looking at development and approving development for those areas, is there an opportunity to place a fire station there? Most fire stations for those types of locations are going to require Somewhere around three acres of property. It's dependent on the property, dependent on the construction and everything else. But is there an opportunity to, in this development that's coming up, knowing that we have the need for a fire station in that area, to begin securing property for the future? Not necessarily if you're not ready to build a station yet, the growth hasn't reached a point that you're needing to do that, but securing the infrastructure. Fire stations are community infrastructure, and fire stations have been built and designed historically to last at least 40 years. And so you plan a long time, you construct a station, and it's there a long time. It's part of the neighborhood, it's part of the infrastructure of the city, So we've tried to go through this and allow the modeling to show, as you grow, where may those stations be needed in the future. As I said, this is all about public infrastructure. Just as you look at your utilities and streets and all the other pieces, fire service and fire protection is part of public infrastructure. We encourage you to think about land acquisition and phasing that as you have the opportunity to look at these different areas of interest where the modeling has indicated that stations could be needed in the future. then start working that into your capital improvement plan year by year as you're working on budgets and planning. But you know those that that that progress incremental progress and looking at at being able to prepare for future stations will help you long-term not only sustain your good level service that you have today but also to be able to improve level service as you grow into the future. So a few takeaways. We would say to use the policymakers and decision makers here in Goldsboro. Maintain the system you have. Your system today is serving you well. It's an effective system. You do not have a corrective type situation. Maintain what you have. But we do point out some opportunities. There could be some gains by relocating Station 1, as I said slightly to the west, developing a plan for relocating Station 3. that would be safer for the community, safer for the firefighters, but also not harm the level of services provided. We think that that opportunity exists for you as well. We encourage you to think about acquiring property for future stations down the road into the future, particularly as developments are approved and moving forward here for Goldsboro, and then just integrating that into that capital planning program. And we state down here at the bottom, your challenge here in 2026 is not correcting a broken system. It is sustaining the system you have and planning for the future. So that's a great position to be in that Goldsboro has positioned themselves at. So with that, I'll be glad to take any questions that you might have.

What questions and comments do we have? And this one is not for any specific piece of action, but it's something we need to be aware of. I'm sure that staff will be looking to identify individual parcels, individual locations as they they might hit market. And I think we're going to need to talk about those in a future future council meeting and just kind of have our heads wrapped around where we're where we want to aim and how we want to be able to go about that. But we got a lot of capital improvement programs, the programming that we're going to have to work through the next couple of years. So it's good to have a roadmap. Chief, anything from you? Yes, ma'am.

I just have a fun question that I want to know, like, does the larger so if a fire department is larger, does that mean it meets more need with it being larger? So like instead of a two bay, you got a four bay fire station.

So some stations might have more than one company in more than one truck. They might have a ladder. Your current station one, for example, has an engine and a ladder. So it has two companies responding. As you grow, there may be stations that it's appropriate to do that at in the future. We always try to recommend today, plan at least for what you have and maybe a little bit more. Because again, you want that station to work for 40 years, either building it or position it so it can be expanded for the future.

Thanks, man.

It's also very appropriate that these plans, you've got a great plan now to move forward in looking at that, but that they'd be revisited every three to five years, and your model's already created, so it's a matter of adjustment or tweaks. We've done several of those this year, just updating, but as your growth changes, keeping all those inputs, is this still the right location? This is where it is today, but you'll need to revisit that periodically to determine those needs.

Anything else? I have one that may be a bit of a curveball. And if it is, tell me. I'm not swinging at that tonight. How are you seeing cities, just as an example, right? Our boundaries are what our boundaries are. You know, forced annexation is no longer a thing. I'm not advocating for or against that. I'm just stating that fact, right? You have ETJ, you have volunteer departments around us. Volunteer departments around the country, our state being no exception, are falling more and more away from volunteer status and more and more towards, you know, paid or voluntold status, right? How do we, is there a roadmap for being able to better integrate with some of the other well-positioned volunteer departments as they themselves are unable to remain fully volunteer. Or is that a thing that works? And I don't want anyone watching to go out to any of the volunteer fire departments and say the mayor's trying to make you irrelevant because it's the opposite. But I'm just curious, how are you seeing that play out in other communities?

So I'll let the chief address some of those specifics here. I would just say automatic aid, meaning responding at the initial time of the call, is very important. Mutual aid's always important. Mutual aid means we're here, we need help, come help us. That's one category. Another one was there's a need, we're gonna send you with our people, we respond jointly together. The challenges with many departments across our state, and we've been working about 30 counties, is our volunteerism across the state is losing a net loss of about 3% of volunteers every year, and that's very unfortunate to a guy that started as a volunteer many years ago in the 80s. That's very unfortunate, but that's the reality of today. So I would defer a moment to the chief to talk about how those are being used today, But being able to have mutual aid is great. I think you have a strong system. But automatic aid is really a different category.

At the risk of possibly preserving the chief so he doesn't end up getting into a disagreement with other chiefs, let me ask a question in a slightly different way. Sure. the funding model for volunteer departments uh volunteer departments i mean most of their money coming from the individual parcels or the square miles of dirt that's in their jurisdiction they're able to overlay their tax right once it becomes annexed into the city part of that tax ends up going remaining with them part of it ends up coming in the form of city property tax to us how does that funding model or how can that financing model coexist to where the both stations are able to perform at their peak. That may be the better way to ask the question, because I don't want our friends in the north or the west to think immediately we're talking about them. I'm really asking more on a conceptual level.

In an unincorporated area, I can address, as Chief may want to add, an unincorporated area, the county can choose to contract with a private nonprofit department, or they can choose to contract with a municipality. In studies we do, we always recommend the closest station to respond, wherever that is, and then if they're capable. If they're capable of doing that, to follow the closest station model. And so that's ideally, but the county really determines for that unincorporated area. Many counties are looking or have moved to or looking at more of a single taxing model to allow some of that to happen. Some have put that in place. Others have not. They're looking at it today. So, Chief, would you add?

And I don't mind answering the first question, Mayor, because we have a great relationship with our volunteers and we do have some automatic aid, but it's to specific locations. We have not included bringing them in to the city. It's let me rephrase that. They're coming into the annex parks and obviously we have contracts with them and they do that. So that's not an issue as far as expanding the tax base. would have to kind of rely on what he said because if we start going in there and you start talking about splitting taxes I know years ago that was only for a certain amount of time when you had forced annexation you took over an area they kept some of it for a little while and then it all went to the city Right now, to his point, a lot of people are going to that whole county funding where closest station is being identified as dispatch first. And that's something that I spoke with our ISO rep about, including in our modeling. I haven't talked to the chief, so... That is something that we have looked at. The problem becomes exactly to what Chief Grayson said. Do they have the people in the station? So if I have automatic aid with, we'll just say Elroy immediately to the east. If they don't have four people there, I get a truck and one person, two people, and then I have to wait for their personal vehicles to come on scene. Of course, language can be written into a contract to make that where they can't leave until they have four. But that is an option to help bring more people to the scene.

Oh, sure. The only reason I'm asking is because we live in a world of constrained resources. And there's apparatus that are bought and paid for, you know, there's their buildings that are bought and paid for. And I want to ensure that we're maximizing what our tax base is able to get out of the assets that it's already placed, whether that is, I mean, I'm a county resident, so everybody else, you know, so we, we have paid into into these tax base, I just want to make sure that we are doing everything we can to maximize every piece of this puzzle whether it's City or not and again, like I said, this may be a curveball. So I apologize outside of the park.

There are great models that exist I would say across the state. I mean we've worked with many counties and there's really strong models that I'll use one as I served as chief in Greensboro. We had a department that was a nonprofit department but they functioned in every way as the city of Greensboro unit and it was a case of where we paid for For nine of their personnel from the city, they paid the other balance from their own incorporated area. They always responded four-person companies into the city. They train together. It can happen. The chief's point there, though, that we see challenges with is getting, do they have the personnel to do that? Do they have the ability to either with career, part-time, or volunteers be able to do that and sustain the city's insurance rating overall. There are models that exist, though, that are out there that can happen, and it's very effective and has been for many years.

Thank you. What years were you in Greensboro?

2009 to 15. That's my last six.

I worked under Jim Clark for a while.

But thank you. We appreciate your questions, and we thank you for the opportunity. We thank you for all you do for the folks here at Goldsboro, and we also thank your staff. We'll remain available if you have any further questions or assistance.

Anybody else this evening? All right. Thank you so much. all right Mr. Livingston item 9.3 and operating budget amendments would you have any preface or I notice we have a Catherine for our final agenda item this evening yes thank you so I have a couple of just routine items dealing with the GASB 96

and also transfers for the PFAS class action lawsuit. It was money that we received in fiscal 26 and we need to get that transferred over. Didn't get that information in time in order to get it into a final 26 agenda. But the main reason that we're here is that Mr. Don Willis, who is the director of the Goldsboro-Wayne Transportation Authority, has requested $75,000 to fund the highway use tax and registration fees needed for the urban buses that were replaced through federal funding. And Mr. Willis is here to answer questions or provide you additional information. But the cost, the $75,000 represents less than 5% of replacing the buses, which have a lifespan of eight years or so plus. so we are proposing to fund that with general fund fund balance appropriation if the council so desires so we can move forward with that and Mr. Willis would you like to say something

It's a pleasure to be here tonight and I just want to express my appreciation to the council for all the support that GWTA has been getting over the years. We were able to replace all eight of our urban buses this year after many years. It's probably been close to 15 years to get those vehicles replaced and the cost of those vehicles have gone up 50% and those producing the vehicles are going out of business so it took us quite a while. But we did the board of directors determined that we would like to limit any local matching costs. And so we set aside recovery funds. And that covered 100% of most of these costs. But there are certain things that were excluded from that grant. So for example, the tax tags and fees and there are other costs that to get the new radio systems installed and things of that nature. So the request is to cover costs that we could not cover it 100%. under the grant. The vehicles are 27 foot, RBAC, low floor vehicles, so all of them can quickly deploy ramps and be accessible to the community. 21, 22 passengers, probably three to four wheelchairs could fit on these vehicles. The total was 1.58 million to replace those vehicles. And in a typical grant scenario, you'd need 20% of that. And so it would have easily cost $375,000 locally if we had not taken the approach that we did. But we do need the 75 to cover the unexpected costs.

Mr. Willis, these are the urban buses, so they're serving routes that touch the city of Goldsboro. They may go out and do other things too, but they're touching the city of Goldsboro.

Actually, exclusively, these eight vehicles exclusively serve the five bus routes in Goldsboro. Yes, sir.

Counsel, any other questions for Mr. Willis? Come on up.

yes sir I do have a question but it has nothing to do with the funding but I do have a question about on those five routes yes sir how many go past a school like Dillard or yes sir so Dillard is a school that is on the yellow route and we also serve Goldsboro High School on one of those routes I'll be talking with you tomorrow absolutely alright thank you

Any other comments, questions for Mr. Willis?

I would love to plug where the board has approved a pilot program for monthly passes and many of our riders as we come to the end of the month are not riding as much and so we're trying out a new monthly pass and for a full price if you're not an elderly disabled or a veteran it's $35 so basically a dollar a day you can ride all month all day or if you're elderly disabled or a veteran you would pay $17.50

ride all month all day and so we hope that people will come out and give that a try and see that they get more access for a better price in the future and thank you for letting me share by that I'd like to make a comment I really like to applaud Don's communication work with our public works team you know they've kind of went out in the buses and looked at the routes and determine where we needed to fix things like potholes and cut down street branches that were in the way so I That kind of collaborative work is really essential to get things done for the betterment of the community. So he's done a good job with that.

And likewise, the Public Works Department, they focused right by right so that we could deploy the vehicle on a right rather than hit or miss and having to wait for it all to be done. So they were very helpful, and we appreciate that.

Council, anything further? On item 9.3, the ordinance amending the budget ordinance of the city of Goldsboro is presented in the packet. Is there a motion to approve or adopt the ordinance as presented? So moved. Motion's been made. Is there a second?

Second.

Motion's been made and properly seconded to adopt the ordinance as presented. Is there any debate? Hearing none, we'll call the vote. Please vote electronically if possible. All votes being tallied, motion passed on the 6-0 vote. Ordinance is adopted. All right, that concludes all of the calendar items on our agenda. We do have matters for closed session we'll get to in just a minute. However, before we go that route, Mr. Livingston, your report.

Just a couple things, Mr. Mayor, as we all know, and unfortunately news here that the passing of Laura's dad William Darrell, Darrell, his service will be tomorrow at Seymour funeral home and at the lobby officiating by the faith freewill Baptist Church on Grantham Street. That'll be at 10 o'clock and then the funeral actually be 11 o'clock. So we've kind of moved our staff meeting around a little bit so some of our department heads could you know we may have moved it up so our department heads will be able to attend if they they so choose um a couple other things the state budget we all know is passed um i'd like to publicly thank representative bell for some of the funding that he put in to help our community um specifically some direct funds the park improvements like the gazebo at herman park lighting upgrades and some monies for those things so It's always good to have your legislature looking after you. So he does a good job of looking after us and trying to help us where he can. We have the stand down, the veteran stand down. That's the 15th of July, this Wednesday from 930 to 1030 at the hub. Looking forward to that. It's going to be the first one. Looking forward to having a great event there and many more events to go. And that's it, Mayor.

All right. Mayor and council member comments is the first and only meeting this particular month will begin with the days to my right. Councilman will yet from district to four years.

I'm glad that the manager mentioned miss Laura I would like everyone to continue to keep her and her family in your prayers for the loss of her dad and I look forward to councilwoman Jones being back with us soon she's missed I miss my councilmate here sitting beside of me say hello to her too she's watching also I just want to say acknowledge a special shout out to our Public Works Department in particular, Doug Hendrickson and Bill Peter and the streets and stormwater division. They've been awfully helpful. Right here recently dealing with a couple of things in my district and I'm just like to tell them as always how much I appreciate those guys and every one of our employees that I interact with are always going to extra mile and they sincerely care about our citizens in this city. That's all I'm there. Thank you for yours.

Just want to send my condolences out as well to Miss Laura and her family. I think all of us are thinking and also looking forward to test woman Jones getting and that's real.

I'm going to start mine out upbeat. I am going to wish a happy birthday to the young lady sitting beside me. Happiest to her. Old to be young like you again. So happy happy birthday. I hope it's been a good one for you. And then also I want to honor Councilwoman Hiawatha-Jones. What a beautiful celebration at the James and Pine Black Business District Parklet ribbon-cutting And I want to thank her and the DGDC and everyone who was involved in that. It was absolutely beautiful. And so we honor you with your work on that. And also just to let you know that we did miss you tonight. When any of you guys are not here, we definitely miss you. um thank you to representative john bell um to our mayor um mr gaylor also to our city manager senator buck newton and everyone who was involved over at the governor's mansion and especially governor josh stein and getting julia's law passed whitney toon did a phenomenal job Whitney, you are an inspiration to all of us. So thank you for your hard work. Thank you for being bold, for being courageous. And that law is just really going to impact the work of many people in our community. And Mayor, that is all I have for this evening. Thank you.

Councilor, the floor is yours.

No comment.

just to reiterate the um the veterans stand down on wednesday on the 15th at the hub um there's gonna be a lot of resources out there for homeless vets as well um city manager be speaking i think uh giving some some remarks i think and um and general gaskins the um united states marine corps restart general will be the guest speaker um and then on the 14th Tomorrow at Wayne School of Engineering, I can't get the time, but they're having a transportation meeting for busing to the specialty schools, as they call it now, because they don't have a dedicated route, which is why I asked him about routes going to Goldsboro High School or either the school. So we can try to find some possible solutions. So we're looking for possible solutions to help our kids get to school. That's all I have. Happy birthday.

the the conversation about about buses and kids in schools us one that we actually had with them relate to a different school a few weeks ago and it's a good conversation to have I hope you're able to to nail down something especially if it's older kids like that that They have certain requirements that are placed on them that I'll let Don go through. But good heavens, I hope you're able to work something out. Councilman Matthews, happy belated birthday, as always. Good to be with you. Councilman Jones, look forward to seeing you back. Ms. Goetz, my prayers are absolutely with you and your family during this time. It's an incredibly difficult process to walk through, and I do not envy you. um to our staff and our team you know we've done it's been an incredibly busy stressful incredibly busy summer and uh your your work does not go unnoticed i realized that just when you think things are calming down things ramp up and you know there's a toll on those things so to do make sure that you uh that you actually walk away for a few minutes it's a It's a busy time. Last thing for me as we close out this summer, don't forget Parks and Rec is still going hot and heavy with camps. Don't forget that we are so close to the end of summer with kids going back to school, things like that. Make sure that your churches, your community groups, you're talking to kids and finding out what fall rec sports they want to play. And let's make sure these kids have stuff to look forward to and that these registrations are an all-time high for things coming into the end of summer and going into fall. Because keeping folks busy, keeping folks entertained to the best we possibly can with what we have is, I think, got to be the number one thing. Appreciate everyone being here. That concludes my comments. At this time, I would entertain a motion to go into closed session to discuss matters related to personnel, potential litigation, and land disposition. All right, motion's been made. Is there a second? Second. All right, motion's been made and properly seconded. Is there any debate on that? I don't think so. As such, we will call the vote. Please vote electronically if possible.

Close it out.

He did on all in favor, please raise your hands. All opposed same son. motion carries on what I believe is the problem. All right, we'll go into closed session. We need an answer room in just a couple of minutes if anyone needs a nature.

So moved.

All right. Is there a second?

Second.

All right. Motion made and properly seconded. There's no debate on a motion to adjourn with that. All in favor, please raise your hand. All opposed, same sign.