Planning Commission - Regular Meeting

¶¶

you

Okay, good morning. We will call the committee on appointments to order at 8 a.m. We have two items on our agenda this morning. First, a resolution approving the City Commission's appointment of Raina Watanabe as an alternate to the Utility Advisory Board. So moved. Moved and supported. Comments on this resolution, colleagues? Yes. Yes, Ms. Bosker.

I'll just mention that Raina is a city staff member who was recommended by the Director of Utilities to fill this role.

Wonderful. Thank you, Ms. Bosker. Anything further? Seeing none, all those in favor? Aye. Those opposed? Motion carries. And now, Ms. Bosker, if you could lead us through a discussion on the current board and commission vacancy list.

We're still a little bit in the space that we were at the last meeting, still waiting for... for a couple of vetting to wrap up and appointment decisions, um, hoping to move forward with land bank soon and fill in the last space on the housing appeal board. Um, and then we're still keeping on the radar, the local officers compensation commission, which will be down a couple of members soon next month. Um, and then working on just sort of moving forward and, making progress towards the end of the year, getting everything in a row. The members, current members will receive their regular reapply notification in the next few weeks and then we'll power through the vetting and receive feedback from liaisons and be prepared for that end of year meeting in December.

Wonderful. I did have a great discussion with the mayor yesterday on a lot of these appointments, such as the possible for folks rolling off of mobile GR, for the local officers' compensation. I highlighted, Commissioner Isasi, that we need a second warder for that. And he also is in conversation about the land bank authority as well that has an appointment coming up. So we have several bodies that will have some pivoting and shifting, but it is good to see that we have most of them are full. So thank you, Ms. Bosker and the clerk's office and everyone here on this committee for your work on this. Any comments regarding our current vacancies? Commissioner, yes.

Thank you Mr. Chair. Thanks for this overview Ms. Fosker. So we just got done with the primary election and November seems like a far time away and it's not and we know the election really starts at the end of September when those absentee ballots go out. Do we want to put for this committee you know and City Clerk and Ms. Fosker you let me know what you all think in terms of what should be the expectations of this body as we move into this general election and You know, Ms. Bosker, you talked about, you know, sending out those reminders to individuals, getting those things together. And, you know, I think we've been doing it earlier, and especially since you've been here, I think the process has been greatly improved. And also people don't respond. So do we want to put some parameters or some timelines? Do you think that's necessary, City Clerk, of there's a bit of a period where... you know, we can't expect that we're going to move forward with an appointment because we've got this or that. And if we, there are some bodies who we know, like there's going to be three that roll off. We need to really make sure we connect with them, others that are not, nor concerned. So just looking for a little bit of prioritization and direction. Um, so then our expectations can be clear as well as liaisons expectations about what is realistic from the clerk's office. Thank you.

Well, I think a couple things. I think we can keep doing our normal, even though it's election year, we're busy. It's changed a little bit with... with the pre-processing of absentee ballots that really took the pressure off. I mean, we're busy during it, but there's times where things are happening where we can do other things while we're doing it, whereas when we were doing absentees all at one time, it was like, we couldn't focus hardly on anything, but now we have some, there's some space, which is helpful. I don't want to talk for you, but... but I, I think we can keep moving through our normal process. Um, and I think you said you're going to move it up just a little bit to like the renewals or just so, just so we can start the process a little earlier.

Yes. Yeah. I think that the, like our system, I think it's 90 days before the end of the term, which is the end of December. So then I was going to move it up and probably send it next week or maybe right after the labor day holiday, send the email. So move it up by two or three weeks. Um, Hoping to just give more time for a reminder and to get those reappointments in or the requests for reappointment.

Thank you, Ms. Bosker, and thank you, Clerk. A great question, Commissioner. And then, Mr. Clerk, how many days do we have for that processing now for the absentee ballots?

Oh. Well, now you're taking away my thing for the September 8th Committee of the Whole. No. So we're going to start on Monday, two Mondays before. Gotcha. But, like, for this last August election, we started on a Tuesday before, so we counted on Tuesday and Wednesday, and then we were dark until Monday for the election. So it gives us lots of options. Okay. So we can scale up and scale down and move. And the election inspectors were great with being very flexible. We're like, we want you to come with us. And then we didn't start again on election night until 5 o'clock at night. Oh, wow. So that freed Ms. Bosker and Mr. Ellis to help do other things from city staff that we didn't have them available during the day to do other things.

Nice. I think it's a great tool. It seems like it just helps folks who do elections be even more effective. Well, thank you all so much. Any further comments, questions, concerns? Yes, Commissioner.

As I'm looking through the list, I'm just wondering if there's any particular committee that we need to prioritize. I see that there's quite a few still in urban ag, stormwater. I don't know where we're at with our forestry or parks. Maybe scroll up, yeah. And then just a reminder that we do have our quarter improvement authority still. There's a lot of rollover I think that's going to be happening there.

Yeah, good notes. I don't know about prioritizing them. I think, you know, it's hard. They are all very important. The ones that the public most frequently interacts with or is excited about, I think of like the land bank, mobile GR, and we do have those in motion. But I would certainly bring that up with the mayor as the large percentage of them are his appointments. But thank you for the note. All right. Seeing nothing further, we will adjourn the committee on appointments at 8.07. Have a great morning.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Bye. Thank you.

Good morning. The time is now 8.30, and we're going to go ahead and call our fiscal committee meeting to order. Man, Mr. Davis, look at you. I like that, being sharp. We have a number of things today, and let's start with the first one, which is a resolution authorizing a contract with Cure Violence Global in an amount not to exceed $125,000 to provide training and technical assistance to support the continued effectuation of the Cure Violence model in Grand Rapids. Do you have a motion? So moved. Support. Moved and supported. Mr. Davis.

Thank you. Good morning. As the title suggests, this is an item to continue our contract with Cure Violence Global. Cure Violence Global is the parent organization who created the model for Cure Violence, and they provide training and technical assistance and licensing to be able to run this program in Grand Rapids. There will be an annual report from Cure Violence Grand Rapids at the Urban League. That happens in November, and we'll be bringing forward their contract at that time.

Thank you, Mr. Davis. This is a number of years relationship that was a number of years in the making. So thank you for highlighting, you know, obviously there's this was something that was developed in another part of this country to be able to use those technical details. Colleagues, questions on this one for Mr. Davis? Hearing and seeing none, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Item carries. Thank you so much. Thank you. Item number two is a resolution authorizing a budget substitution of $700,000 for improvements to the Grand River Riverfront Phase 1 US-131 to CSX Railroad. Do you have a motion? So moved. Support. Moved and supported. Ms. Clearan?

Yes, I'll speak to items two, three, and four all at once, if that's all right. This is simply just moving around types of money per project. We are working with the DGRI, who is managing their projects. their tranche of ARPA money called the Greenway Project, and we have to get this money out the door. Spent by December 31st, they have an internal deadline of October 1st to begin their final closeout compliance work, so asked us to take a look at the projects that We are co-funding with them along with a lot of other different kinds of money and see if we could advance their money forward just because they wanted some extra time to make sure they're satisfying the ARPA grant appropriately. This doesn't put any of our funds at risk right now. This is really just accommodating the Greenway funds with DGRI. So these three items, two, three, and four, are just simple budget substitutions.

Thank you, Ms. Claren. I know that is something that when those ARPA dollars came, we thought 26 felt like a long time away, and here we are. So I would say this is in line with other administrative actions we've taken to ensure that no money is left on the table. Colleagues, again, Ms. Claren will take each item individually and vote on it, but any questions about this action or activity? Okay, hearing none, so I'll call the question number two. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Item carries. So next, item number three is a resolution authorizing a budget substitution for $2.9 million for construction of Grand River Edges Trail East. From Grand Rapids Eastern Railroad to Ann Street, do I have a motion? So moved. Support. Moved and supported. I'm going to call the question. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Item carries. And item number four, resolution authorizing a budget substitution of $2.9 million for improvements to Oxford Trail from Wealthy Street to Hall Street. Do I have a motion? So moved. Support. call the question all those in favor aye any opposed item carries thanks so much Thank You miss Clarence let's move on to item number five which is a resolution authorizing pardon me a budget substitution and the amount of $40,000 for the Irene and Linda water main extension so moved support moved and supported and I see mr. germberg coming up it's a nice blue Grand Rapids blue, like the water. Thank you. Appreciate it.

The item you have in front of you, there is a project, I believe it's on the CD, awarding a contract for construction of Water Main and Cascade Township. This is an area impacted by PFAS in the groundwater there. The funding for the construction project is being handled through a grant from the state. Unfortunately, not all of the city's costs associated with project management are covered by the grant. therefore $40,000 needs to be transferred from the IIP to be able to cover some of the overhead at the city's level.

Thank you for that overview. Questions colleagues? Hearing and seeing none, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Item carries. Item number six, thank you. Item number six is a resolution authorizing a budget substitution in the amount of $263,000 for phase four of the headworks grit pass upgrade.

So moved.

Support.

Moved and supported. Oh, you guys just switched spots. Mr. Roots, nice to see you.

Good morning, commissioners. Good morning. Today we bring before you a request for a budget substitution for $263,000. This is for engineering services. This is for phase four in the final phase for the upgrades to our headworks and grit screen. This is a critical part of our treatment process. It eliminates the debris and the grit from our influent prior to our treatment system. This extends the life of our assets.

Thank you. Thanks for that overview. Questions, colleagues? Hearing and seeing none, all those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Item carries. Thank you. Item number six is the bid list resolution for August 25th, 2026. Just missing a six there. Do I have a motion? So moved.

Support.

Moved and supported. Ms. Claren, anything? that you'd like to highlight, or colleagues' questions on this one?

Sure. We have nine items this morning. All of them are fairly standard in nature or routine. Number six I'll just highlight. We are increasing the West Michigan janitorial contract to accommodate the Martin Luther King Community Center. So that's the only thing.

Thank you so much. All right. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Item carries. Item number eight is the ordinance amending section one of the budget ordinance for 2026-11 for fiscal year 2026, amendment number two. Do I have a motion? So moved. Support. Moved and supported. Ms. Claren?

Okay. We have a lot of grants this morning. So with Public Works Department, we have the Next Cycle Michigan grant through Eagle, that's just $10,000. Next one, engineering department improvements to Grand River from Fulton Street to I-196. Part of the Grand River revitalization, that's 12.9 million right there. Pickleball Club, Parks and Rec, we have the Pickleball Club donation for Belmont. I believe that was 36,000 in the Parks Capital Fund. Fire Department, we have a FEMA hazard mitigation planning grant, $150,000. Then we go back to the Parks Department. Supplemental funding for capital improvements to Lincoln Park, that's $55,000. And the Parks Capital Improvement Fund, I believe we are... pulling from the parks operating funds. You'll see a corresponding fund balance decrease in their operating fund. For the fleet department, we do have this annual carry forward request. It's purchases that were in flight at the end of the fiscal year that didn't get All the way over the line so we roll forward that budget to complete various purchases in our fleet department That's number six and number seven support for South Town arts and culture initiative with third ward equity fund allocation. So this is Carryover from budget discussion as as far as allocating those third ward equity investments as 20,000 right now. We're handling today number eight the parks capital bond and millage funding realignment Again, this is just $1.3 million, I believe, towards the capital improvement bonds. So we are appropriating money associated with the bonds as well as what's being funded with cash in the Parks Operating Fund. Number nine is community development program income put into work for the Michigan Indigent Defense Commission Fund, Community Development Block Grant Fund, Home Investment Partnership Fund. and the Lead Hazard Control and Lead Hazard Reduction Demonstration Fund. So there's the very appropriate, I won't go through each appropriation, but very appropriations to each of those. Number 10, support for South Town, sorry, South Prize event with Third Ward Equity Fund allocations, so $30,000 related to that. You'll see a decrease in General Operating Fund with an increase in the South Town Corridor Improvement District Fund. So we had budgeted for that in the General Operating Fund, but we're just pushing that money over to get spent out of the other fund. The Economic Development Department, we have the business district signage for North Corridor Improvement Authority, CIA, the economic business district, so $150,000 being appropriated there, putting some of that fund balance to work in that fund. Number 12, the Wege Foundation grant and matching funds for the wood chipper procurement. This is $335,000 being appropriated in the other grants fund. This money is being transferred in from the revenue or refuse fund, appropriating $590,000 from their fund balance. and also transferring the match of 50,000 from the parks operating fund, we have a contingent balance of 1.5 million. So that was a lot.

Thank you so much. Thank you for overviewing that. Colleagues, any questions? Yes.

comment it's clear and thank you so much for viewing all of those yeah the wordy it was a lot of words so I get it and I just want to highlight a few I'm very excited to see some of the third ward equity funds that we allocated rolling out I think it's exciting to now be able to share that with the public especially not a part well yes a part of the third ward equity fund the South Prize I'm excited about that I raised concerns last year that ArtPrize was not reaching down into the third ward and I'm really excited and thankful for our city staff and the folks at South Town for working to make this happen. So I think it's nice to be able to see your you know, your tax dollars and your money in action. And this is just a great way to showcase that. And if folks maybe aren't the most loving of art and culture, my hope is also that this South Prize also helps our local businesses in the South Side as well, just as our downtown corridors are helped by our prize being all over downtown. So a great way to see our dollars in action. So thanks for reviewing that.

Thank you. I'll just second that, even though, you know, I think this is where things like the third ward equity fund, just because I'm not a third ward commissioner doesn't mean that I don't care about it. I know that doing this South Prize engagement was something that past Commissioner Lanier really worked on. They weren't able to get it done last year, but it was something that they, you know, when we were in different parks and how do we bring it to the south side? So I'm really glad that it's coming and it's going to be exciting. And yeah, just another good reminder of like why, just because if you're in one area, you can support all these other areas and understand how we are all connected. I look forward to joining you one day when you're not cooking for us or something.

I can cook first and then go.

Okay, sounds good. All right, you heard it here. It's connected.

It's coming.

Thank you for that. Commissioner, did you have any questions on anything, Ms. Claring?

Well, thank you. I just, you know, would like to also highlight that it's great to see the parks funding and the parks millage and the improvements to, like, Lincoln Park and all. And I know they're going to be working on Roosevelt Park and other things.

So thank you for highlighting all those and yeah, thank you for running it through for people who might want to pay attention Thank you, I'm gonna call the question all those in favor aye any opposed item carries next all of our business is done But I'm gonna turn it over to item number nine, which is the comptroller's warrant report for the period of July 28th 2026 through August 10th 2026 in the amount of a hundred and eighty nine thousand I'm sorry 189 million two hundred thousand one hundred and fourteen dollars sixty four cents. I Mr. Comptroller?

Good morning, commissioners. Good morning. So for the period reference, approximately $189 million was released. That amount includes just under $6.5 million for employee payroll expense and approximately $291,000 for income tax warrants. In terms of quantity, 608 income tax refunds were issued and 1,151 checks and electronic payments were issued. These funds were issued for payment by individuals not in the city comptroller's office and not in accordance with the city charter. I did note in the memo the applicable section of the city charter that does assign payment issuance responsibility to the city comptroller. And I've also noted that the fiscal services department does not have authority to issue payments or have permission to sign. and place my signature on checks. And as always, the detailed information on these checks and payments is also included in the report. And that is the only report that we have this morning.

Thank you. That report is received and filed. Let's go to the treasurer's report item number 10 for the period of July 29th, 2026 through August 11th, 2026. Mr. Treasurer.

Good morning, Commissioner. So I get to, like always, I get to take us home, bring us into the end of this fiscal committee meeting with our report. For the report today, our interest rates are still holding at 3.5 to 3.75% with the Fed. The latest jobs report being a negative 23,000 jobs in July really kind of has now raised some of that pressure to increase rates. So we're really looking at the probability is kind of 50-50 right now. Again, it's going to change depending on what the next set of economic data comes out is, I'm sure, as to where the... thoughts and feelings of the Fed commissioners are. We still are working with a brand new Fed chair and really we're still waiting to hear more information of the direction, although he has said he's not going to give a whole lot of information. So we tend to hang on every word that he says, whether it's giving a presentation to different groups or whether he's issuing official statements from the Fed. Some of the things that I put in our report today, we're looking at consumer prices are still up 3.4%. We see that ourselves as we watch gas drop down to $3.90, then bump back up to $4.39 a gallon. And we're still seeing that pressure all around us. But some of the things, I just did a new type of table for you to say here's five different areas that would be impacted in terms of the city budget and city spending and kind of things that we should maybe be looking at. And I want to point out one where we talk about fleet and utilities. And I'm not calling out fleet as a department. I'm calling out my own personal contract in the treasurer's office with our courier system. They have escalator clauses built into the contract that, depending on the price of fuel, will escalate the price I have to pay each month for those types of services. Those are the types of things that are embedded in some of our contracts that we really should really pay attention to that because that type of thing is going to catch us by surprise when all of a sudden we see the bill, and here's another 5% or 7% or 10% added just for a fuel surcharge. So those are the kind of things that creep into contracts that we want to be aware of. And so that's kind of why I point this out is the things that we as an organization should be looking at. Investments right now are doing really well, still at the 3.5% to 3.75% with a Fed rate. It means that we're still investing our money at great rates. We do have $721 million right now, but I do want to point out $50 million of that is fiduciary tax money that we send out of the door. So really with the comptroller's report today, his issuance of $189 million, $157 happened to be. property tax disbursements and we'll see another 35 million that we've dispersed just yesterday and so that'll show up in a future report but we're getting the money out the doors is by state law to the local taxing authorities but I really have to call it Grand Rapids because we are really a blessed community when it really comes to people's responsibility to pay their property taxes and pay them on time and the businesses that are paying their taxes. As of last week, Friday, we were 94% collected in our summer tax cycle. So that is huge. That is huge for us that we have a response from our Our community and our taxpayers to pay that money on time and get it to us appropriately so we can get the money back out to local taxing authorities. So now we're ready for grass public schools to open up and all the six other school districts that we collect taxes for. They're getting their funds as they get ready to start their school year. So really, Grand Rapids, we're blessed in this area to really have a taxpayer that comes forward and gets those bills paid. And my staff does an incredible job working with each of them to talk them through the different types of exemptions or deferments they might have. For folks that are seniors on fixed income, they have the ability to pay their tax bill fully over the eight months without an interest charge if they fall within a specific category of folks. But we work with all of our people like that, and we also send out a notice to every taxpayer that has that residential property to make sure that they're aware of those exemptions every year. So those are the kind of things that we stay up on. But really, we're in a very good position right now. We're waiting to receive the next bond monies that Ms. Claren has put out there. So we're getting ready to get more bond monies to start more projects and help the departments fund those. So with that, you have my report for today.

Thank you, Mr. Treasurer. Colleagues, questions or comments? Okay. Hearing none, that report is also received and filed, and we will go ahead and adjourn at 849 today. Thank you.

We'll be right back. Thank you.

? ? ? ? Bye.

¶¶ I'm not sure if that's the right way to do it.

all right good morning everyone we'll get our community development committee going at 9 15. um our first item is resolution approving a fireworks discharge permit for pyro pyrotechnico fireworks inc for special effects at the gillette bridge in connection with art prize on september 18th 2026. can i get a motion

I would like to make a motion to amend the date that was originally in the packet from September 19th to September 18th and replace it with the new agenda item.

All right. So move. Any support? It's you. That's me. So move.

I support it.

I'm in support.

All right. We'll call. Go ahead. Oh, okay.

Good morning. Good morning. Yes. So fireworks will be on the 18th on Gillette Bridge. They're going to have about 5,000 shells that they're shooting off, about an inch and a quarter to three inches. And I think they're going to start at approximately 930 is their start time.

All right. Should be exciting. Yes. All the questions? All in favor? Aye. Aye. All right. No closed. It passes. Next item is the resolution awarding a contract with CL Trucking and Excavating LLC for Water Main Extension in Irene Avenue, Linda Avenue, and Public East Bend Southeast and Water Services in Burton Street. Irene to Linda Water Main Extension in the amount of $1,259,200.76. With a total amount not to exceed $1,724,980. So moved. Support?

Yeah, good morning everyone I just wanted to share this project has been a partnership with Cascade Township our water department and the Michigan Department of Environment Great Lakes and Energy Eagle where PFAS was detected in residential wells and They want to protect public health and safety Eagle is providing a grant which we accepted in July of 2025 and Once we bid the project they amended the grant and added additional dollars and this allows us to provide water main to customers to remove their wells and We're excited for the project and we appreciate the partnership Thank you, and this was teed up on our fiscal Committee this morning, so we heard a little bit about it any questions Call the question all in favor aye So passes

Resolution number three, item number three, resolution approving an increase of $20,000 for Richmond Park parking lot for a total not to exceed $620,000. So moved.

Support? So this project is substantially complete. They're doing some final completion, and there was just some additional cost.

Okay.

Any questions? This is just for the parking lot resurfacing that was done? That was the primary project, yeah. Yeah, okay. Thank you.

All right. Call the question. Aye. Passes. We'll move to number four, the resolution approving a construction agreement and accepting four public utility easements for 45 Vista Development located in the city of Walker, south of Lake Michigan Drive and west of Wilson Avenue. Can I get a motion?

So moved.

Support.

This is a pretty standard development agreement where they're going to be adding public utilities on private roads. Okay.

Any questions? Call the question. All in favor? Aye. All right, it passes. Number five is a resolution releasing a sanitary sewer and water main easement and accepting a utility easement at Cross Creek Condominiums at 3723 Portman Lane Southeast in connection with storm sewer relocation for $1. Can I get a motion?

So moved.

Report.

This is a project where we have to install new utilities, and when we do, we'll abandon the old easement. And have a new easement over the new utilities. Okay. Questions?

All right, call the question. All in favor? Aye. It passes. Number six is the resolution accepting a sidewalk and utility easement at 1555 Wealthy Street Southeast in connection with Wealthy Street Ethel Avenue to East City Limits Reconstruction for the nominal consideration of $1.00.

Motion so moved in support, so this is a project within one of our business districts where we are reconfiguring the street and Worked with this property owner to provide some inset parking so some curbside parking for restaurants and With that they are granting us an easement so we can shift the sidewalk back up against their building And what building is this again? It's 1555 Wealthy BC Pizza is in that building, in that area. Yeah.

All right.

Any questions?

All right. Call the question. Motion? All in favor? Aye. Aye. All right. It passes. And number seven is the resolution authorizing execution of a no-cost agreement with VEO for shared micromobility services. So moved. Support? Missed. We should have kept Max.

Good morning, everyone. Well, I'm going to ask Max and Trent to come up anyway because they have all of the details. So come on up. This is our new micromobility vendor, VO, and what you're doing here today is just approving an authorization so that we can send it up to the mayor's office to be signed. But I just wanted to give a chance to you all have seen Max many times, but Trent Serra is actually the program manager for our micromobility program and has been taking a little time off for family, but is back now. And so is there anything you all want to add?

Good morning, everyone. No, this is a really exciting opportunity, I think, for the city. When we started this process back in March, we wanted to highlight safety and affordability as our key considerating factors in the RFP process. VO really shined in both of those areas with some really exciting safety technology. Excuse me. that's available on their devices hopefully to prevent incidents in the road on the sidewalk and to prevent sidewalk riding in areas where we designate and they also have a very exciting pricing model that is pretty much across the board cheaper for all of our users and especially for those in situations of particular financial hardship with their VO access program. So we're really excited to roll this out. They've been a great partner getting things set up behind the scenes and I'm excited to move this program forward into the next chapter.

Anything else, Ms. Smith? Questions?

No, thank you. I don't have questions, but I just want to say that this was brought before us for our briefing last meeting during, I believe it was Committee of the Whole, and it was a very good presentation, so I want to say thank you to the staff, thank you to VEO. I think that this is an interest in the community to have more safety around our micromobility to help reduce speeds where needed. And to force that to happen sometimes as well as the options. I love the seated options the Affordability planning and all that so I can tell a lot of thought and care has been put into this so It's good to see that it is ready to move on to the next phase, and I'm ready to vote for that I'm excited to try to use it

See how it works. Every time I think about getting on one, then I'm like, you know, helmets and all of the things. And I'm like, is it really worth the time? But actually, when I was mapping it out, it's less to use weekly, even doing the membership, than the amount of gas that I have to put in my car. So I'm excited to see how this works out and how our community receives it. All right. There's no other questions. I'll call. All right, no opposed. It passes. That's it for us this morning. That was short and sweet. 923, we'll call this meeting closed.

Thank you. Thank you. Mm-hmm. you

Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

City Attorney, am I going to get thrown in jail if I start the meeting 30 seconds early?

I've got all these people here.

Don't want to waste anybody's time. We've got this respectful silence. It seemed like a good time to start the meeting. If we've got to watch the clock, I'll watch the clock. Here we go. Should we count it down? 10, 9, 8, 7, 6... All right. Calling this meeting of city commission to order. Committee of the Whole. And first thing on our agenda is probably going to be a tough resolution. This is yet another resolution for a development liquor license. And this is for 1415 Plainfield Northeast. That's the location. And it's Hoxie House, LLC. Mr. Clerk, do you want to give us any details? Yeah. Thank you.

Support. Support. Great. Yeah, so this is going in that Crescent area, and so basically it's a historic 102-year-old building, and their concept is a cafe by day, bar by evening, run by owner, and first-time restaurateur, Angela Tramper.

Great. Any discussion, colleagues? All right. All in favor, say aye. Aye. All opposed? Motion carries. Thank you. Next is a resolution adopting the 2027 City Commission meeting schedule. And just so the public knows, this is our schedule for the next year. You know, things can change. But it's good to have a default schedule well in advance. Again, to refresh everyone's memories, the purpose of city commission meetings is to do city commission work. And we have public comment as a secondary function. But we historically have not had all of these meetings happen at the times that they're currently in this calendar. And sometimes we... Cancel meetings if there's not sufficient work for this body That doesn't mean we're avoiding public comment people can come all the other meetings and talk to us about it about issues and of course they can also reach out to commissioners anytime they want and all of my colleagues are very good at responding to constituent concerns So just want to put that pin in there, but otherwise I assuming that all my colleagues have looked at this schedule I'd ask for a motion

so moved support any discussion colleagues I do have one thing to add to the one thing that we did that I did add to the calendar that you normally isn't on there is the beginning of May budget work session so then we want to call a special meeting later so that that budget work session since that that's been our flow that's that's um that's there and then usually that the the first meeting of the month is at two o'clock but in May we haven't switched to have the public hearing for the budget and then the approval at the two o'clock meeting So that's the only one that's kind of changed.

Thanks for the detail.

Let me also thank you, Mayor. Thank you, City Clerk, for helping develop the schedule. There's likely one special meeting that we will have to call in November. It'll be after the election for our annual workshop work session. And right now we are. targeting the 12th of November, but we'll confirm as we get closer.

Great. Thanks. Any further comments, colleagues? Otherwise, all in favor say aye. Aye. All opposed? Motion carries. Next is a resolution approving Election Day polling locations and early voting sites for the 2026 election and fixing pay for early voting. Absent voter accounting board and Election Day inspectors. Mr. Clerk, you want to first of all motion? Mr. Clerk.

No changes to the pay from what I requested for the August primary election. Two changes in polling locations that are different from August. First of all, we're adding a fourth early voting site. So that fourth voting site will be at New Hope Baptist Church, which will give us a voting site and then all four quadrants. of the city, and then we're also adding, we're moving back from Yankee Clipper Library, back to Yankee Clipper Library. They had a flooding issue, and so we had to temporarily move that location for the August election, but we'll be back in there in November. And then just for a note, early voting will be for 13 days instead of nine days. So we're adding four more days. That coincides with the 14 days they have to register in person.

so plus it's easier to start on a tuesday than a saturday morning so great okay thanks for the clarification um any further discussion colleagues commissioner thank you mayor um i just wanted to comment as you all know this was a topic of a lot of discussion last year um and you know i think where we ended was in a really positive place things happen whether they be flooding or different situations certainly wayfinding with construction we know at least in the primary that happens I received one call on the day of the primary and it wasn't about the city of Grand Rapids it was about a neighboring community that I won't name and city clerk was generous to say how could he'd get in contact with the other municipalities' clerk. So people are calling us to figure out stuff for other communities. And just a reminder that the city clerk is really seen as a leader in this space, and other communities look to his experience during these times. So I'm glad that we were able to get to this point. I'm glad that these locations are working. We have the boxes. There's so many ways for people to come through. So I just want to lift up that work. Thank you, Mr. Clerk.

Thank you. And I think, you know, the robust discussion we had a year ago, certainly the Senate and the majority of the board was that this new plan was going to increase access to voting and ease of voting. And I think one of the simplest metrics for that is turnout. And we had very impressive and probably record turnout in our August primary. And so that's obviously a sign that things are working well. And I haven't, I'm not aware of any, boy, I'll date myself here. Like I was on the city commission in 2007, 2009 era. And back then we had voting at, there were precincts where people were waiting three or four hours to vote. And so it's worth remembering that that's a long time in our rear view mirror. And anybody at this point who, is waiting three or four hours to vote, missed chances to vote by dropping it in the mail, which is what I do, or go to an early box. So it's really exciting, frankly, to see the reforms that Michigan's done because for decades we had this sort of general drumbeat that, oh, people will participate less, oh, people... fewer people are voting and we're seeing a sharp reversal of that and a lot of that's just got to do with better planning for access um so it's really it's really great to see the fruit of that so thanks uh city clerk for your part of that and so any further discussion otherwise all in favor say aye aye all opposed motion carries that brings us to a resolution approving art prize as a special event from september 1 to october 10 2026 And we're going to get a presentation, but as they come up, support. There we go.

Good morning, Mayor, Commissioners, City Manager, and staff. Before you today is a resolution approving ArtPrize 2026 as the City of Grand Rapids special event. The purpose of this item is to establish the event boundaries, dates, special rules necessary to support the safe, and orderly operation of ArtPrize, including its installations, public space activations, opening events, parade, and commercial-grade fireworks display. ArtPrize is entering its 17th year as a community co-sponsored event and is expected to welcome more than 900,000 visitors. The Office of Special Events has worked closely with ArtPrize and city departments to develop the resolution before you, and we recommend its approval. This year also marks an exciting new chapter for ArtPrize with Tyler Loftus serving as its executive director. Tyler brings a long history with ArtPrize and a deep connection to the artistic community. At this time, I would like to invite Tyler to share with the commission what to expect from ArtPrize 2026 and the vision for this year's event. Tyler.

Thank you, Yvette. First and foremost, just want to say thank you to the City of Grand Rapids, Mayor LeGrand, and all the commissioners. This is something that takes all of us. I've been around this event for a decade. I grew up here in Heritage Hill, then moved out to Grand Haven, been in New York half my life, and came back here now. I live in both places to support this wonderful event. I just want to give a bit of an overview of the event this year, and I'll be followed by my two deputy directors, Ellen Trumbo and Coleman Brook to give you more details. So again, starting out, just a big thank you to all of the city, the county, all of our major stakeholders. They're incredible people, including all the venues here in town that go through a lot of work to produce this event. I think it's something that goes kind of unrecognized a little bit that all of the venues actually choose the art. They are the curators of this event. So, you know, a very a very city-wide, very integrated art event that in my experience in the art world does not happen anywhere else. So as we all know, ArtPrize is a major thing for our community. We had 967 visitors last year with an economic impact of 82.6 million. This year, as part of my leadership, one of the most important things to me is put Grand Rapids as a whole on blast as one of the reasons that this thing continues. It's the spirit of Grand Rapids, it's artistic direction that I don't think has been highlighted quite enough. I think it's almost felt like this is something that has just happened here, not because of here. So in that spirit, and the spirit of America's 250, we incorporated President Ford into our branding and our poster this year. We hid some Easter eggs actually in the Blue Bridge. We have the Roman numerals 38 representing our president, which also, as some of us may not know, was instrumental in the arts in the United States. He brought some of the first great public sculptures, not only ours here, but throughout the entire United States. So fascinating, again, one of those secret quiet things that Grand Rapids has been continually doing in the arts that hasn't quite got the love. that it deserves. So speaking on that love, our passion is to create an art community all year round, not just during ArtPrize. And I feel like one way to do that is to highlight all the incredible arts orgs that are present in our community all year round. We have Michigan's only professional ballet dance troupe. wild. I mean, how incredible is that? We have a world-class opera and obviously a world-class symphony. So incorporating all of these and giving them a little bit more pride of place and allowing them to do the curation where our prize does the support, but they do their own curation. Just allowing them to really shine. So in that In that spirit, the four weekends now of our prize are dance, music, the visual arts, and fashion. Each one having a dedicated focus to each one of these art forms and allowing our great art orgs to curate. The opening weekend, dance, the Grand Rapids Ballet is putting out a dance festival at Rosa Parks. Super, super, super excited about that. Again, I'll go through the entire event as we go. Our opening celebration, which falls on our music weekend, we're turning the Pearl Street Bridge into a large musical instrument. The world's largest stringed instrument is going to be covering the top of the bridge. We're all going to be inside of it while somebody plays it. It's called Earth Harp. Pretty spectacular. After that, there'll be the fireworks. But before that, to kick off, we're going to be at Rosa Park Having a celebration, and we're having these six puppets representing the six commissioners of our city. Symbolically, symbolically. But they are decorated by the children from all of the different wards. And so having representation there, the faces will actually be faces that Calder actually designed. So tying all that in, they'll be 14 feet tall, and yeah, it should be fun. Just wanted to highlight a couple things happening in the different wards that are exciting. The first ward, for our halftime show, we are going out to the zoo, where we'll be declaring our top 25. Super exciting. Our closing show will be at Akashir, which we'll talk about in a sec, the new amphitheater. Our clubhouse is on the west side. And something I'm really excited about, 1111 Godfrey has a lot of art over there, right next door to the new Hispanic chamber. In the second ward we have Cura, our designed, we have 45 artists in there. Our design gallery, this sort of highlights our vision so the artists can kind of come and feel what our curation looks like as our prize, sort of give them a little bit of a professional understanding of what a gallery out in the wild looks like. That'll be in Silva. Obviously Rosa Parks is gonna be highly activated every single Saturday. We're gonna have things happening there. And then the third ward, which is super exciting, we are partnering with South Prize, this new endeavor to sort of activate and activate alongside ArtPrize, where, you know, ArtPrize, there's only so much that we can do to maintain the integrity of an artist driving four states over to come for a competition. But that doesn't mean we can't support all these other activities, so I'm excited about this new partnership and excited about developing things like this more in the future. We're going to talk more on that. My commissioners, my deputies. So moving forward here. A big part of my life, so I've spent all my life in New York as an artist. I grew up here as a painter. It's all I've ever done. Right after high school, went to New York. I have a active gallery there in Lower Manhattan. So for me, the artist experience has always been very important. I've been around this event, supporting it for a decade, been on the board the last two years. And I just really felt that it was important that we make sure that artists continue to have a great experience Again, driving four states over, they pay for everything, they fabricate everything, they have to pay for their food, they have to pay for their stay. Getting a little bit more in tune with that experience and finding ways that we can help them. We've been going to local businesses downtown and asking them to support. They'll be on the back of a badge where the artists can go in and get specific benefits. working on a whole list of things. But that's a big thing for us because they are the ones that make this happen and they are our true advocates that will help us grow in exactly the right direction. Because I've been saying this a lot, our prize is the road. We need to consider where we're going on that road and I think that art and artists are what's going to guide us to the right place moving forward. This year we have a mascot, Artie. Yeah, we have the plushies for the kids, and then we're actually gonna have a mascot that's gonna be in our parade. These cutouts here that the kids can put their face in, we're putting them all over on the furthest reaches of all the districts of our prize to get people to go around. If people get all four of them, or five of them, I believe, and bring that to the clubhouse, they get a poster. So really trying to activate and make sure that the love throughout all of our districts gets spread. And then, yeah, again, I mean, I've been on the outside of this event in a very intimate way as far as helping the artists and then obviously being on the board. But now being inside, I've realized something that I just didn't fully comprehend before is how many people it really takes and how amazing the city really is as far as supporting this event. MobileGR this year, in the beginning of, I think, a really fun partnership, has helped us with some walking maps and some ways that Local Grand Rapidians can experience ArtPrize on a multiple day scenario where it's not just coming for one or two days, they can come for three days and get different walking paths that encourage them to get their steps in. And with that, I will conclude by just saying thank you again to all of you. This is something that is for all of us, by all of us. And this new environment of the city stepping in has been something that is super, super exciting. And I think for this to continue, we have to focus on all of us, not any one of us in particular. So thank you very much. Appreciate all of you.

Great. Thanks for the presentation.

We do have a bit more. My name is Ellen Trumbo. I'm deputy director. I'm gonna talk in a little more detail about events and exhibitions. This is the schedule of our major events. I did pass out a few highlights for everyone so you can know the major, major things that are going on. The first weekend, we have an exciting show called Fragments of Displacement III. I'll talk about a little more in a second at Grand Rapids Art Museum and the Kendall College of Art and Design Galleries. We have the Dance Fest with Grand Rapids Ballet at Rosa Parks Circle that Tyler mentioned. We also have a really exciting gift for our artists. Frederick Meyer Gardens is hosting a free party for all the ArtPrize artists out at the gardens during preview week, so that's a very exciting thing for us to give them. Friday, September 18th is our opening celebration, beginning at Rosa Parks Circle, the parade with the puppets that Tyler mentioned, and the earth harp on Pearl Street Bridge ending with fireworks. That's highlighted in red as one of our largest celebrations, that and the awards ceremony. Saturday the 19th we have Opera Grand Rapids Festival at Rosa Parks Circle and the Merchants and Makers Market which you may remember from last year will be up and down Monroe Center and Ottawa Street. That will be every Saturday during ArtPrize this year. On Friday September 25th, we're working with two of our large sponsors this year, Rockford and Pioneer Construction, to celebrate the work they've done building the city alongside the work ArtPrize has done building the culture. They're gonna be lighting up the tops of 20 of the buildings that both companies have constructed, and they'll be hosting a party for all their subcontractors on the Gillette Bridge. All the lights are gonna turn on at once, and we'll also have a watch party at Rosa Parks Circle for the general public. Downtown Market on Saturday the 26th, we have a children's event called Doodle Street. We're partnering with Grand Rapids Public Museum, Children's Museum, West Michigan Youth Ballet, Granville Ave Arts and Humanities, Grandma, Gardner White Storytelling. We have a whole roster of people that'll be participating and we'll be doing a lot of children's art and craft activities. The halftime show is at John Ball Zoo this year and again they've generously hosted that for our artists, our venues, and our art patrons for free. That will be a ticketed event for the general public. South Prize, I'll talk a little bit more about that in a second. And the third ward is also that Saturday the 26th. And then finally, Saturday the 3rd is our ward celebration at Accresure Amphitheater, which features a fashion show alongside symphony, opera, dance, and we'll have a drone show at the end. So that's kind of the brief rundown of our events. For exhibitions, this year we have over 1,100 artists and 1,025 entries. That's actually the largest number of entries we've had since 2018, so we're very proud of that. There's 159 venues. City sites this year include the Blue Bridge, Sixth Street Park, Peckage Park, City Hall, Veterans Memorial Park, Calder Plaza, and 87 Monroe Center with the mobile GR space. This is a map of what the venues look like this year. You can find this on our website. ArtPrize has curated four venues this year for the artists. Grand Rapids City Hall, the MobileGR space I mentioned, the ArtPrize Clubhouse, and Cura Gallery at Silva, which is the large activation that Tyler mentioned. As he also mentioned, there's a new venue cluster at 1111 Godfrey, which we're very excited about in the Black Hills neighborhood. And another venue highlight is the Westside venue fees this year were waived through their CIACID support, which we were really excited to get. This is just a little info about Cura Gallery, which is hosted by Silva. 56 entries focused on the art of care and wellness. There will be a space for artist professional development workshops and a podcast studio for artist interviews. Our featured public project this year is by Detroit artist Yasmin Dababneh. She's doing an immersive public artwork throughout the city, transforming public lighting into colors. So that's pretty exciting and a nighttime activity for everyone. We did award 30 seed grants to artists this year. Six grants were awarded to venues. We had pitch nights in Detroit, Phoenix, and Oklahoma City, and $126,000 total in grants given to artists this year. This is the special event at Kendall College and the Grand Rapids Art Museum I mentioned. This is the third installation of this event. The first two were in Miami. It's a video and sound installation by top tier artists, primarily from Mexico. The artists in this show have shown at some of the top museums in the world, such as Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Guggenheim, MoMA, and many more. And we're really grateful to our partners, Graham and Kendall, for hosting this show. South Prize, again, we're super excited about this. It's 24 businesses will be hosting artwork in Alger Heights, Boston Square, MLK and Eastern, Madison Square, Seymour Square, and South Division. This artwork will be up through the duration of Art Prize, but the voting for this event takes place on one day, which is Saturday, September 26th. The South Town CIA is hiring trolleys to take people throughout the six different districts so everybody can easily get around. That trolley will also go downtown to ArtPrize so people in SouthPrize can visit ArtPrize and people in ArtPrize can easily get to SouthPrize. And then in the evening, there's a celebration at Hub 07 where their voting day will conclude and they'll have an arts market. New murals this year, Art of the Table, Bridgewater Place, and Etta Smith Wilson Way. So we're always excited to add more public murals during ArtPrize. Our clubhouse is at 428 West Bridge Street Northwest in the old Jolly Pumpkin space. We're getting that cleaned up as we speak. There will be an artist lounge, social media interviews for artists, volunteer lounge, visitor support, and we have 15 ArtPrize entries there. This is a quick breakdown of the awards. They look very similar to last year. We are hosting again the Community Awards by the City of Grand Rapids. Thank you very much for supporting those awards as you have historically. At our awards ceremony, we'll also be presenting the South Prize Awards. And we have a new award this year, Delta Airlines Award, which is an artist whose piece will get to hang in the Detroit Sky Club for one year, which is a very highly curated space and we're very excited about this new partnership with Delta Airlines. And I'll pass it to Coleman to tell you a little bit about marketing and then we'll wrap it up.

Good morning. Something that Tyler and Ellen have talked about during their presentation is really leaning into a lot of the partnerships that we have this year. Not only the city of Grand Rapids, but all of the amazing arts institutions that are here the other 11 months out of the year. So with our messaging and communications, it's no different. We really want to elevate some of these partnerships and highlight some of these amazing institutions that make Grand Rapids the city that it is. So with that, we are partnering even further with MobileGR to do some wayfinding signage and the maps getting around, including the walking paths that Tyler showed earlier. We have several collaborations for social media and also making sure all the visitors that come to our city know where to park, where to find public transportation, where road closures are, and leaning on that data-driven information that has been compiled and made the amphitheater launch such a success. So partnering with them, partnering with all of our hotels in the hotel district and arena authority to distribute our event guides, making sure all of this information is publicly available and accessible in multiple different formats. For our marketing overall, another amazing Grand Rapids institution, Experience GR, which helps drive a lot of the tourism traffic here, which we definitely see the benefit from. Definitely expanding that from previous partnerships, they had LED trucks and taxi toppers in Chicago just a couple weekends ago for the big Air and Sea show, which was great to see Grand Rapids and ArtPrize represented in such a big event down there. Also partnering with them on various digital campaigns, managing influencers during the event, magazine placements, making sure the word gets out all over West Michigan, the east side, and beyond. We're running our own digital campaigns through Meta and Google. We are publishing our own print ads in a few different gallery, magazine syndications. We have a very full, robust social media calendar that leans heavily on collaboration posts with many of these arts institutions that are helping us with programming this year. We've seen fairly frequent local media coverage already and have a lot more scheduled as we sprinkle out press releases. And definitely excited to see some of those partners help us get the word out. We are utilizing some of those relationships to connect press directly with artists so that they can produce their own organic content and also allow artists to feel the elevation on their own platforms. We have a broadcast documentary getting worked on from a local Emmy-winning reporter. I don't think I can disclose too much on that, but definitely a very exciting venture when we learned of it. We are partnering with Wood TV to get some airtime donation as well as digital ad placements. And they will be running a contest for a VIP experience at our awards ceremony that was briefly touched on. One thing that I think got skipped over with our award ceremony, it is at the Accresher Amphitheater. It will be ArtPrize's largest award celebration ever. And we are in talks with the Guinness Book of World Records to have it recognized as the most attended fashion show in the world. The current record being 3,000 and our amphitheater holding 12,000. We're feeling pretty good about getting that accolade for our city. We've already seen some national and international press engagement fairly early on in the season. We had an article in Entrepreneur UK highlighting how much our prize is growing this year, as we've talked about a record number of entries in eight years. We're collaborating with different partner PR firms, both one that we work with as well as a couple sponsors, to kind of help put some weight behind some of these broader national press pitches. Of course, we'll be using our normal newsletter network, socials, and media contacts to get out any important city updates and alerts as we see necessary. And then our last slide here is kind of just highlighting all of the amazing partners that are helping make our prize happen this year and years before that. And like we've said before, we couldn't do this without the city, but also couldn't do it without these institutions that are here the other 11 months out of the year. And that's all we have.

Thanks. And yeah, a lot of information to digest. Very exciting. You know, I often, when I talk about what, you know, world-class things that Grand Rapids has, I say, well, you know, not trying to throw shade on the fact that we have a beautiful library, but many communities have libraries. Many communities have art museums, but ArtPrize is a world-class and unique thing to our city. The other thing that I really don't see any national comparable for is the Meyer Sculpture Garden, but you are one of the two things that really make Grand Rapids national and a global leader. I mean this is this is a big deal and it's great and it's great to see this thriving and continuing and spreading out to the neighborhood and neighborhoods more aggressively. I love the, I mean I'm sure we all love the South, the South City, the South Price connection, but lots lots of good stuff here and love the love to see the I mean, this is an artist thing, right? So we should be creative. So it's great to see the creativity of new ideas and new energy. I also love the four weekend themes. That's great. I can't say often enough that I think that the reason we all came down from the trees and learned how to farm and all of those other things is so that we could do art. Art is not supposed to create economic development. Art is the reward we get for having created civilization. Art is ultimately about being human and nothing I can think is more important than that. Um, and, and cities are the places where art happens best because it's where we have the most people come together. So, um, I could not be prouder of, uh, being part of a city that has this amazing arts initiative that just seems to get stronger and stronger and better and better and, um, I know that everyone on the dais, including our city manager, is supportive of figuring out how to make it even better next year. So thanks for the continuous creative improvement. That's really, really apparent. So, city manager?

Yes, thank you, Mayor, and thank you, commissioners, for your continued support. As you're aware, the public... Entities really had to step in a few years ago to keep this amazing experience going in our city and with our other partners. So I want to thank the commission for not only the support we do around the permitting, but also the financial support that has a significant return on investment for our community. I also want to thank the many, many city departments that are involved. in ensuring the safety and mobility of pedestrians as well as the permitting of this event and using all of our public spaces and parks to make sure this wonderful experience possible for our community and certainly I want to thank the ArtPrize team and Miss Pittman in her special events office, but also Mr. Loftus and all the other presenters that you heard today as well as C. Joe Lee out there in the audience as well. And really looking forward to this amazing experience. I do want to, I was talking to Commissioner Knight and I we've talked about this thing several times, and there is one event that I think is happening in one of our parks on the 13th. The Commissioner Knight mentioned to me the African American Music Festival that's happening at MLK. Can we ensure that that is also highlighted as one of the musical experiences people to enjoy while the festival is going on and make that as significant another aspect of community engagement outside the downtown area. In the past, it's been downtown, but for various reasons, I'm sure Commissioner Nykens can expound more than I can on the reasons why it's at the MLK Center this year.

Absolutely, thank you. Yeah, I noticed that and saw that that was amiss. I don't think the communication happened for that to be on there. We have partnered the African American Arts and Music Festival probably since ArtPrize's inception, and Typically, it has been at Rosa Parks Circle. However, because of logistics and that being held so that we weren't able to do that. And then also looking at the new space over at MLK Park and the lodge, we thought it was great to really take that historic entity over back into community. I remember a couple of years ago, actually speaking to the South Prize, when ArtPrize decided to do on and off years, so they did a smaller installation on off years, and MLK Park was one of the places where they had a number of installations. They actually did a wrap on that lodge, and then they had another installation in the park, and so that was a really, really amazing opportunity to continue to connect with community as that is its mission, And to make sure that we're doing that but this gives us a great opportunity to just highlight the work that has been done On that new facility over in that space and in that park and really get back to connecting with community Thank you

Thank you, Mayor. Well, thank you all so much for the presentation and all of our staff as well. I have a lot of thank yous. And also, my colleague is doing some professional development on policy. I forgot where Commissioner Perdue is. Yeah, thank you, Commissioner. I'm really thankful for her leadership on South Town, working with folks like former Commissioner Lanier and all of the members on the South Town board to make sure the South Prize happened. So seeing here that we have 24 businesses hosting artworks throughout our business corridors is really meaningful to me. If I remember correctly, and to our community, If I remember correctly, there was one mural that was really in the heart of the third ward last year. I think it was a mural in Link Up. So we've at least multiplied our chances of interacting with meaningful art by 24 times. It's a good math equation. I feel very mathy. But that's huge, 24 times and beyond that. some of the mushy-gushy stuff is meaningful right now. There have been so many social scientists who have talked about how we're experiencing a loneliness epidemic. And so I'm hopeful that by multiplying these art pieces by 24 and the Third Ward, that we have 24 more times of points of connection, making new friends, meeting romantic partners, and then also the economic advantage coming into the Third Ward is huge. We have seen businesses close down in the Third Ward and really continue to struggle after COVID. So I'm hoping that these thousands, excuse me, millions of dollars that come into our beautiful city through ArtPrize will then also Trickle and even more into the third ward with this. So I'm very thankful for all of our partners Multiplying by 24 is huge and last year at this time. I was not in the same space of I really did not feel as though the art prize was really speaking to and supporting my constituents so I'm very happy that that has changed and that all of us through an equity lens can now take a part in our prize it's really meaningful and I think it is a really showcases what this city and all of our staff and my colleagues we also allocated in the fiscal committee earlier the money through the third word equity fund so I want to thank all of our colleagues for their support with that to you know get these wheels greased and going I really appreciate that but I think this showcases just how we are looking at the work through an equity lens from the city staff and my colleagues so thankful for it and I look forward to checking some of them out yeah absolutely I think the power of art to place make and place keep is

a very intense and very interesting conversation that happens all over the world, but certainly in the United States right now. And this is a great example of that. Highlighting the talents in individual communities instead of asking them to sort of take their talents and go other places. Primarily like in New York and LA, where we're really trying to keep the arts in these communities because art reflects the community in a way that has been happening for 50,000 years plus. You go back to the caves and it's a very physical, very universal language that we can all tap into and relate to. Time out of mind. It never gets old. So those things are very important and as an artist myself and as somebody who's from here and loves Grand Rapids, I think that we can also be a bit of a leader across the United States, and them activating other arts things. So I feel like we're not only doing it for ourselves, Michigan and the Midwest, but we're also setting a precedent for the rest of the country. And I'm very excited to see what we can do as far as bringing other parts of the country more involved in ArtPrize, and again, showing what we've already accomplished, but adding some of that leadership. So. Yep.

Commissioner?

Thank you. Thanks for the presentation and the updates. And also, again, you just talked about kind of some of the leadership and the structure. So I know you all were going through transition. So to be able to present this knowing that, kudos to all of you. Hope you get a break after October 3rd. Totally second all those comments about South Prize. We talked about that earlier. I know that was, I just have to shout out my very good friend and past colleague, Commissioner Lanier. This was a dream to really make that happen. And I'm really glad to see it. And so I will be there supporting. And I want to say thank you, city manager. I think, you know, From the point that you came to the city, you've always said, what could we do different? How do we get people in the room? How do we not let something go away that had been so invested in? So thank you for your leadership in this area as well. I want to make sure that goes recognized. And then I just had a few questions. One... was just, you know, I think we always talk about how do we design the city for anybody who's eight years old to 80 and how do people engage and how do they connect? And so just thinking about mobility issues and different, like if people have different, accessible needs is there a certain way that they can kind of connect in or I think in the past you all have done stuff with disability advocates of Kent County so if you could share any thoughts about that and then I had one question too great to see the artists primarily from Mexico as a proud Mexican American and I wondered if we're connected at all city manager you all can tell me to Tyler with our sister cities with Zapopan where, you know, we have these kind of cultural connections already. To your point, Commissioner, what is the multiplier in those situations? So I wanted to know about that. And then I think that's about it. So thank you.

Yeah, thank you. So on the first, we're going to be having somebody signing during our big presentations. And we actually have a support link on our site that somebody is manning all the time if anybody needs any extra help. One of our teammates will come over, provide for them wheelchair assistance or whatever they need. But yeah, that's definitely a huge thing as far as making art accessible to everybody with all of their different needs. As far as the sister cities, I was just walking in here, it's incredible and I would like to, I've only been in the job now about four months, so that is something that I would like to lean into moving forward because again I think that we're doing something very unprecedented and very special and I think that what our prize does that we all have to remember is we are showcasing some of the most heroic and incredible aspects of the United States in the sense that we have all these different voices, different ethnicities, different walks of life coming together in an unprecedented way, sharing their experiences through art. That's something that art can do. as well, if not better than anything else. And the United States, in the form of New York City, has only been the capital of the art world for 80 years. Before that, it was almost all white men for thousands of years of European Western art. And in 80 years, that's demonstrably and almost completely changed. And ArtPrize is putting that on blast. And we're actually making history here. And to experience some of the great aspects and some of the things that we all aspire to as Americans, coming to ArtPrize is a big, big part of that. So showcasing that more on a world stage, for me, is very important.

Mayor, if I could just add. So your question is... You have good timing. We actually had, the mayor and I met some representatives from Zapopan who are in our city this week for a few days. And so we'll make sure, see if they can come back out this evening and be recognized. But we'll also follow up with sister cities. I think traditionally we've always alerted all of our sister communities of the Art Prize Festival. Occasionally we've had a delegation come. I know more recently from Zapopan, we wanted to bring artists or bring community members from Zapopan for our Day of the Dead celebration here in Grand Rapids and help us with memorials. And so we've thought about how, you know, because of the timing of ArtPrize, it's got a month, almost a month before, roughly 30 days before the actual celebration. We're trying to plan that this year, but we'll work on it more intentionally next year.

Well, thanks. Thanks for the presentation. And, yeah, looking forward to this.

Thank you all. Hopefully we'll see you at the amphitheater to break that record. Yep.

Pardon me. Right. We do need a vote on this, having had the presentation. So we've already had a motion on the table. All in favor, say aye. Aye. All opposed? Motion carries. Thank you. That brings us to a vote that we're going to add, a walk-on vote, and that is to move into closed session after this meeting for purposes of litigation, discussing litigation. So can I have a motion?

So moved.

Support. Mr. Clerk? Commissioner Kilgore? Yes. Commissioner Knight?

Yes. Commissioner Belichick? Yes. Commissioner Asasi? Yes. Mayor LeGrand?

Yes. And that will be in Law Library? 601. 601. Okay. Thanks. That brings us next to an update on the SAFE Task Force, the annual update. Ms. Lipscomb's coming up.

Well, good morning. It is an honor and a privilege to be before you all today again to update you on the Safe Task Force Body of Work for Fiscal Year 26. I am Letitia Lipscomb and I am the Civilian Violence Prevention and Intervention Manager for the City of Grand Rapids and I also have the distinct pleasure of serving as the city's liaison for the Safe Task Force. In my presentation today, I will walk through SAIF with a few stops along the way for the year-end review, where we will talk about many things like the SAIF gathering, pitch partners and projects, as well as SAIF's reach, just to name a few. But because no one person can successfully accomplish the work of violence reduction in Grand Rapids alone, you will also hear from two community stakeholders today about a partner spotlight on a special pitch project, as well as an RFP reflection from our partners at Side Strategies. So let's begin. First, I'd like to honor and uplift our distinguished members of the SAFE Task Force who have been committed to implementing anti-violent strategy to move Grand Rapids toward peace. The peace pillars represent SAFE's commitments to prevention investment, eliminating violent acts, activating economic opportunity, community engagement, education and empowerment, and affecting positive change in public institutions. SAFE has been around since 2015 and was pioneered by then Third Ward Commissioner, Sunita Lanier, whom I affectionately coined as the fairy godmother of SAFE, who was empowered by Mayor Hartwell, who equally had a heart for pushing the community forward and keeping the community safe. So shout out to them both. This past year, the task force has been chaired by Commissioner Isasi, whose time and dedication to shifting the narrative for more safe communities does not go unrecognized. Many of the members of SAFE couldn't be here with us today, but I want to thank you all, even in your absence, for your continued service to this amazing task force. Moving right along, let's talk briefly about Safer Life. It was our annual gathering this year that was an evening of food, fun, and fellowship, hosted earlier this year at the 1530, which is a premier destination for community events in the city's third ward. In terms of growth and expansion, the Safe Task Force continued its upward momentum this year, bringing together nearly 80 community stakeholders while expanding its communications reach by 32%. We entered the evening with two primary objectives. First, to bring the SAFE Task Force together with community stakeholders to collaboratively strengthen efforts to prevent violence in Grand Rapids. And then second, to engage in violence reduction partners through meaningful dialogue and interactive activities that elevate community voices, broaden perspectives, and deepen cross-community partnerships. And as an added bonus, thanks to the much appreciated push from Steve Guattar and the city's outstanding communications team, the gathering also generated significant local media coverage, helping boost awareness and support for violence prevention and violence reduction efforts across the city. So overall, the event was a tremendous success and created a strong platform for building deeper relationships with residents grounded in mutual respect and trust. The SAFE Task Force's most prominent investment, however, is pouring into everyday people who work diligently on a daily basis to be the change they wish to see in the world. Every year, through the Pitch Night program, residents have an opportunity to pitch their violence reduction project ideas for a chance to win big and fund their bright ideas to push the community forward. The funding pot is budgeted at $50,000 and up to five community projects are awarded with $10,000 each. The first winning project that I'd like to highlight is ADT Logistics Drive Your Future. This program is a program that takes young adults, ages 16 to 21, who are drifting towards risk and puts them in a workforce development system where they are licensed, insured, mentored, and paid. The ability to earn money and learn a skill that can continue to serve them is critical because we know that mitigating financial stress is an efficient way to address one of the primary root causes of violence in our city and nationwide. I'd like to point out that this program has full enrollment, created a new center, and a website was born out of this investment so that the work can continue beyond the initial time constraints of this grant. Next up, the African Resource Center, which has brought us Safe Youth, Your Life, Your Choice. The goal of their Safe Youth project aims to empower vulnerable African immigrant youth ages 16 to 24 in Kent County to recognize the dangers of unchecked emotions and illegal firearm possession. and equip them with the constructive tools for responding to emotionally challenging situations. During these equipping sessions that you see featured on the screen, participants develop socio-emotional competence, access to mental health resources, and they find a sense of safety and belonging amongst their peers and elders in the community. and because it really does take a village to raise a child. At the elders forum that they hosted back in May, which I was so impressed by, the elders of the immigrant community and refugee community met to learn about the challenges posed by unregulated youth and discussed practical ways to help and support African youth transition responsibly into Kent County. And there's still more. I'd like to highlight for you Breaking Chains Building Crowns, which has been meeting with young girls in various safe spaces around the city, like Innovation Central High School, to build self-worth through affirmation. These young women explore positive affirmations in groups and learn that their value is not determined by their circumstances, their mistakes, other people's opinions of them, or what they might be going through in their lives. This project is co-facilitated by two dynamic young black women who work tirelessly to empower youth to transform pain into purpose through mentorship, creative expression, and personal growth. And while I could personally go on and on about these extraordinary safe pitch projects and partners, the best stories are always told by the people themselves. So at this time, I would like to introduce to you Duke Turley Jr. to the microphone to tell you a little bit about his project, Let's Talk King. Duke is accompanied this morning by one of his mentees who is getting a bird's eye view of how city government operates and influences city outcomes. After that, the next voice you will hear will be from our partners at Side Strategies who will provide a brief RFP reflection on what has been a pitch perfect partnership in terms of technical assistance and grant readiness for all of the pitch partners. Duke?

Good morning, city officials. Thank you, Leticia. Thank you all for having me. So Let's Talk King was a eight week mentoring program where I walked alongside with young men, black and brown, in various different ways. Some of them were struggling with things at home. Others of them wanted to earn money, so I help them connect with employment. I have with me a future Art Prize winner, this year's South Prize winner, Kyrie. Him and I have been working alongside all summer long as well, helping him start his business. He's an artist first, an entrepreneur second, so just helping him get all his things in order. Like Leticia said, it's just really important for us to show them young people for them to see us black and brown men in this community we know how hard it is to connect and build here so for them to walk alongside or for us to walk alongside with them as they do what they want to do is just very important to me this year we took a different approach instead of being super vendor heavy we pour our funds directly into their pockets so giving them stipends, helping them start their businesses up, taking them out to dinner, just supporting them in various different ways, whether it be transportation, interview clothes, and things like that. You want to speak a little bit, Todd?

So I was able to start my own business through the funding of Duke. And he was also able to teach me of the educational value of what it takes to start a business, what it takes to know how to make money from your business. And like Duke said, I'm an artist. I got artwork throughout the city. And he said it's real important to incorporate that through my business. So I was able to Learned through Duke, and I'm still learning through Duke, and it's a great mentorship, and I'm glad he got me under his wing. Thank you all.

And I'll just close with saying again, thank you all. Just double backing on what Jerry said the last time we was in this space. The city invests a lot into business and infrastructures, and I just want to encourage you all to pour more into the people who live in this city as well. So thank you.

Well, good morning, I guess it's still. Yeah, good morning. Good morning. Thank you for allowing us to be here. Thank you for your support of SAFE. Frankly, as one of the founding members of the SAFE Task Force, it's really exciting to see this momentum continue. The fairy godmother, I'm sure she's smiling somewhere, for sure. But no, no, really. But I'm here representing, not necessarily as a founding member of SAFE, but as now an associate at Side Strategies. We partnered with the city to provide some technical assistance to the pitch winners. That technical assistance was a combination of sort of workshop development and facilitation, as well as some one-on-one organizational assistance and support. With our workshops, we focused on some of those things, as the teacher said, about trying to help them to be what we call grant-ready. The idea, of course, people have great ideas, they have passions, they have things that they want to do, but there is sort of a business side or organizational infrastructure side that someone has to have in place in order to sort of reach those goals. So we went through a series of topics, four topics in particular, that are really essential. Vision and mission, ensuring that they really have a clear sort of, I won't even say a roadmap, but just a clear vision and understanding the X's and O's to to execute that vision. But with that, that also includes program documentation, org documentation. Again, just really not just having all that in your head, but really being able to have something that you can present to funders, you can present to partners. So really just walking through templates that we develop for our clients to help them to clearly identify their program offerings, understanding the difference between an offering and an outcome, understanding the the essentials behind metric development through utilizing data and getting feedback and just a whole variety of things that really help people to really structure their organization so they can be attractive to not just other partners to do the work with, but attractive to potential funders. And like I said, so that was a workshop format with four different in-depth topics. a library of resources that we developed that they can use beyond our workshop time, but then also some one-on-one technical assistance to help them with a particular project, a particular task, a particular problem that they may be needing to go through. Last night I was actually on a virtual call with one of the folks at 9 p.m. because they have busy lives. She's a mom, has all sorts of things. So we really just make ourselves available because me, frankly, being in community service is really exciting to help people who are trying to help people. So I'm really just excited to be able to do that. We just make ourselves available to help folks develop, ideally, some strategic priorities and, again, sort of a roadmap to get there, but also, again, providing some structures, some templates, some guidelines, some assistance, some thought partnership, and, frankly, whatever it takes to get a little bit more momentum so they can be shining stars as they continue to support the young people throughout our city and hopefully, in turn, reduce the impact of street violence as well.

So I'd like to just quickly go back to Duke's initial slide real quick, because I just want to point out something. All of these projects have deeply touched my heart, every single one of them. I've fallen in love with all of them. But there's just something to be said about a screenshot during a participant's first day on the job. at Cascade Engineering. There is something to be said about when a young black or brown man is actively a mirror and a window for other young black and brown men. When we talk about ownership and accountability and standing up for our own communities, I feel like funding programs like this from a task force like SAFE is really what is actively pushing the community forward. It's giving individuals an opportunity to really, truly be the change they wish to see, to be the person that they did not have. This young man at his graduation from Next Tech High School, it means the world to him to have somebody doing life with him. And I believe that in public service and our efforts to deliver excellent city services, these are the types of ways that we should be empowering everyday people to be the change. With that being said, let's get into this gun memorial project. Thank you, Renard. Speaking of RFPs, thank you, Duke. Thank you, Mentee. Speaking of RFPs, I want to highlight another one from this past year. SAFE has been actively engaged in the Gun Violence Memorial Art Installation Project. As a brief update, the City of Grand Rapids is launching a comprehensive RFP, seeking proposals from qualified artists or artist teams to design and fabricate a memorial artwork honoring lives impacted by gun violence in all its forms. We're seeing far too many of it, too much of it, in all its forms, including interpersonal violence, domestic violence, street violence, and even unjust shootings. This memorial aims to hold space for the weight of these losses, offering the community a place for collective reflection, healing, and remembrance. You should know that the SAFE Task Force will allocate a total of $20,000 for investment into an RFP with an artist for the creation of a 3D sculpture and art installation. Next steps include a formal release of the RFP in the coming week, a community informational virtual meeting for candidates, an artist selection, and then contract signing, finally, and then an artist reception with community stakeholders that is tentatively scheduled for Thursday, October 1st, at the very tail end of ArtPrize, hosted by the city and the SAFE Task Force. As I prepare to close, I do want to hit briefly on Safe's reach this past year. I'm so proud of all that we've been able to accomplish together. We launched a successful Safe Summer Violence Prevention poster campaign, where a total of 150 posters highlighting free, safe, and engagement activities for youth were posted by Cure Violence staff all throughout the city. We even posted phone boards here in the lobby at City Hall and the county building so that residents would be informed of opportunities to keep our community's children safe while waiting in the lobby. I'm also really proud to inform you that we curated and distributed 200 safe community kits with safe literature and violence prevention safety items, including emergency whistles, personal alarms, and key ring flashlights that were distributed throughout community. You also found the Safe Task Force being represented throughout tabling opportunities in the community, like Commission Night Out at the Grand Rapids Public Museum, and Neighborhood Night Out in collaboration with GRPD and other city departments in the Roosevelt Park neighborhood. Lastly, I'll mention a small but mighty financial investment in creating a safe space for youth in the city's third ward. SAFE allocated a $500 hospitality sponsorship to the Grand Rapids Public Schools Foundation, helping to bring a transformational, 100% accessible playground to life in 49507. Our reach this year as a task force is proof that going alone may help you get there fast, but going together helps you go far. As we look to the year ahead, you can expect that the Gun Violence Memorial Art installation will be fully implemented. And as an added bonus, a neighbor was awarded a neighborhood match fund dollars project to create a Gun Violence Memorial mural installation in the MLK Park area. And that mural will be created in conjunction with area youth. We will also welcome another cohort of Pitch Night winners in October. We'll continue to serve alongside KConnect and their youth justice team to evaluate what happens during out of school time for youth that have been expelled or suspended from school. And then we will close out the year with a community stakeholder holiday meeting and celebration to acknowledge our work over the past year. So this brings me to the end of my presentation. I'm so grateful for your time and consideration. I would like to thank you for your attention, and we would be happy to entertain or respond to any questions you may have at this time.

Commissioner Ussasi.

Thank you. I know this is a packed day. I want to say thank you to all of you for coming to this. I was an original Safe Task Force member when I was a young adult back in the day, Raynard, with everyone. And I just want to say thank you to Leticia for putting this together. Leticia has just been working on this really you've been with the city now a year right and so you got to think about the onboarding and all the other you know this is really I think a reflection of how this body city manager I want to say thank you to the police department Deputy Chief Baker has been an active member. And many of the captains you saw were at our gathering event. So I just want to say thank you. I think one of the words that I would use to describe you is relationships. You've really pulled that thread on relationships because there are so many things happening in our city. There are so many different initiatives. And SAFE was always about how do we be a supporter and a connector. And I hope that you all got to see this presentation as part of it. Anybody's always out of this body and others to join our monthly meetings that we have if you ever would like to come and to talk. But I just really appreciate all the effort and the work that you have put into this. And I'm excited for the next year. So thank you.

Thank you.

Commissioner Kilgour. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Ms. Lipscomb and everyone on the SAFE Task Force for their work. I just want to say even before this presentation, I've been able to follow the work of Mr. Turley and Ms. Lipscomb because it's been extremely accessible on social media and TikTok. And I think this is a really good example of getting the amazing work that we do here in City Hall and all of our staff does daily to the public to show them what their taxes mean and what their city is working on for them. So that's been great. I'm also an MLK Park neighbor so I've seen it firsthand as well and it's been fun to talk to neighbors about who's working out or what folks are at the park. It's been a very positive contrast to we also had some violence challenges at the park with the same demographic of youth. It's a good contrast and comparison and also good to show that the city is really putting their support behind it, the funding behind it, and I'm happy to support it. But I think a lot of our partnerships throughout the city who are working on grants or who are working on programs can really learn from this. because I do think we talk about that a lot at the city of how do we make things exciting? How do we keep things modernized? And this program has really shown that you can do that through TikTok. I've really enjoyed it. So thank you all for this. Thanks. Commissioner Knight.

And I'll just make my short and sweet. I echo what my colleague said. And, you know, as we know that more things are being taken away from our youth, it is really important that we continue to innovate and do things that are keeping our youth engaged and out of trouble. But I also want to highlight that Ms. Lipscomb had received an award last week at the Positive Impact for Life's GALA for being a mentor and connecting people in community to different resources. So congratulations on that. Just wanted to highlight that.

Thank you. Thank you, Mayor, and thank you again. I echo what everyone has said here. You have really done an amazing job in your first year, and I really want to thank Commissioner Nassasi for your chairmanship and the team. This has been something that's been going on, and it's just really good to get the storytelling part of that, so thank you for bringing those stories here, and thank you for... being brave enough to come to the mic, both of you, all three of you. And I think that we cannot underestimate or overshadow this announcement that you have made today here for the RFP on the Gun Violence Memorial. I think that this is something that we've been talking about for probably more than a year, but certainly as I've been on Community Development Committee for the last year, We've had incidents and people are hurting and people are in pain and people have, we need community places to grieve, to have conversation and to come together. So I'm really glad to see you highlight this and make this a part of the welcoming as we wrap up ArtPrize and making that note too. So I hope you get some really great artists replying.

We're excited. Thank you so much.

And, yeah, I'll echo all of my colleagues' sentiments and also point out the gun violence epidemic in North America, it's really hard to have it without guns. They're kind of the core element of that process. And, you know, I think the other thing that's worth pointing out – You know, a community conversation about just not walking into situations armed is something we can't ever do too much of. A friend of mine had his son just shot dead at a random minor road rage event. You know, he just... rear-ended him. He got out of his car and he got shot dead. People, you know, guns accelerate people's anger and violence so easily. And they accelerate despair so easily. I mean, I know that we have a, you know, everyone in this community understands the increase we've had in mental health issues and I'm going to point it out later today, but I guess this is not a bad point, not a bad place to say it the first time. Some of you may know that our city manager did what very few people in our community are willing to do and directly intervened in a violent situation this past week. And fortunately, that situation resolved positively, but it's also fortunate that, I mean, it's fortunate that there wasn't a gun involved. The individual in question wanted to commit suicide and Our city manager was was a key part of stopping that man killing himself. Well He had hit scissors and You know if he had had a gun Our city manager might be dead right now Um, there are, I just think that we can't over ask, I mean, if we're going to be honest in our community about how we're going to reduce violence, I think we just have to be honest about, um, about the, about the importance of, of really, really questioning. Um, you know, the fact is that, that any weapon is a violent thing, uh, and is a terrible thing to have. Um, but Scissors have other uses. Knives have other uses. Guns are instruments of violence. And it's terrible but necessary that we have to have our law enforcement agencies have guns because of the hard, hard situations they get involved in. But the... the over-emphasis on use of possession of proliferation of guns in our community is something that if we really care about our brothers, our sisters, our children, we just have to step up and be clear about. So, thank you, City Manager, and thank you, colleagues, for your support of working on a gun violence memorial, but When I look at this issue, there's just so much we have to do as a community if we really want to be a community of peace and not a community of settling beefs, settling grievances, trying to stand for our honor or whatever. Building peace is really, really hard work. And so I'm really grateful to everybody involved in the SAFE Task Force for doing the hard work of trying to build peace. And it's complicated. And it involves many different strategies, whether it's mentoring, whether it's naming the problems, whether it's exploring different ways to break that cycle. And Mr. Ross is involved in an organization called Cure Violence that simply looks at violence as though it's a pathology, as though it's a disease, because In many ways, that's maybe the best and most powerful analogy for what violence is in our community. It's transmissible. It's something you can catch even by seeing violence. It turns out that there's a connection between seeing violence and committing it, which means that that old instinct we all have to put our hands over our kids' eyes in the violent part of a movie. Turns out that makes sense. If we can stop violence, and that means it's something we all have to be involved in, just like we all have to be involved in trying to wrap our arms around stopping COVID. If we're going to live in a city that's peaceful, we've all got to wrap our arms around a lot of different and positive behaviors. So thank you for all of your work in this. I mean, We're about to hear from another group concerned about this, but I think that community safety is maybe the most important conversation we can have in city government. I can't think of one that's more important. Keeping members of our community safe and feeling safe is something you have to have in a city, or cities don't work. So this is foundational work you all are doing, and I really want to thank you.

Agreed. Thank you.

So that moves us on to an update from JustGR, another group trying to address dynamics of public safety and justice. And Mr. Davis, our quarterback on all this work, is here to kick it off.

All right, well, good morning. I am excited to introduce an update from JustGR. JustGR is a data-driven project that works across professional sectors. to help Grand Rapids continue to thrive while being safe and just. And this work is not only important, but it's collaborative. That's one of the things I like most about it. There are people not only from outside of our organization involved, but there's lots of people inside of our organization involved. We have representatives from the police department, from the fire department, from community development, our community children, and of course from OPA who are all involved in this work. And I would guess there's probably other people from the executive office that have been involved, I would guess other departments as well. This has been an all-hands-on-deck effort, so we're grateful for everyone in the city who's been a part of this work, and we're also grateful for the partners outside of the city, including our chair, one of our chairs, Pastor Paris McMurray, who will be presenting today, along with Raphael from Corwell, and Corwell really quarterbacks this work for us, so we're grateful to them, and I'll turn it over to them at this time.

Good morning, everyone. Thank you all so much for this time and your attention to this important work. Mayor LeGrand, I definitely echo your sentiments around community safety, right, is one of the lynch points of what our community, what it means to have a community that thrives for sure. Again, I am Paris McMurray. I'm the senior pastor at Renaissance Church here in the city of Grand Rapids, also administrator with Grand Rapids Public Schools and serves as one of the chairs for AdjustGR here in Grand Rapids. And I'll Let Rafa introduce himself. He doesn't look like this, however.

I am not Judge Ross. Judge Ross is in court right now. She may come through towards the end of this presentation. She's wrapping up right now. But I'm Rafa Castañon with Corwell Health. We help facilitate JustGR, the work that they do.

Yeah, for sure. And so today our intent is to run you through and take you through and brief you on some of the information. I know that we were at this conversation maybe last year, maybe a year and a half ago now. Just want to provide some updates and some information around some of the findings that we have been able to address. But before we jump into that, I just again want to give the overall mission is to create a thriving, safe, and just GR by working together, right? We hope you all understand that a just GR is a collaborative effort. You will see so many sectors represented on this chair and on this committee. Similar to what we talked about a little bit earlier, there are so many hands that are involved in this community safety work. And so this collaborative effort, you'll see folks from our mental health institutions, you'll see people from our educational systems, you'll see people from our faith-based organizations, you'll see grassroots people as well as policy makers and decision makers within our city as well as our county. And so the intent is to expand neighborhood safety and crisis response across all of our neighborhoods so that we can ensure outcomes are equitable for everyone in our community.

So over the last summer and fall, we had over 50 community members and institutional leaders meet periodically to review quantitative and qualitative data related to public safety processes like arrest and jail use, as well as neighborhood level crimes and their underlying causes. And we found four major issues facing Grand Rapids residents, and those are seen on the right. So urgent crises such as violent crime, they need a crisis response intervention in the moment. However, some lesser offenses such as trespassing, they reflect a lack of access to basic needs and crisis intervention alone is not enough to address the problem. So that's the lens that these work groups use to identify how resources and policies can be best coordinated to support healthy and safe communities. So the items on the right, they represent the priorities that emerged during these first rounds of data analysis. And over the next few slides, we're going to talk about those findings in more detail.

So within these priority findings, as you see, and I know that you all have information there in front of you, these priority findings have been identified. There have been four priority findings that have been identified. And we're going to take a look at some of those findings. One thing that we do want to note, though, As we look into the details around neighborhoods, understand that our data is organized by U.S. census track, which is most times more critical and smaller than the overall zip codes, all right? So we will see that sometimes Grand Rapids, the way that we organize our neighborhoods, some of those neighborhoods may be a bit smaller. For example, you will see information around the Hartside neighborhood in particular. The Hartside neighborhood, according to the data that we were able to pull through the census tract, includes a few blocks and a few streets within the Heritage Hill. So you may see the Heritage Hill neighborhood represented in the data, but please understand that this, again, hyper-local data allows us to drill down even further within each of those neighborhoods. So the first thing that we'll be discussing today, and we'll try to give this enough attention, but then also be respectful of everyone's time as well. The first one of the priority conditions that we identified was overreliance on arrest and pretrial custody. The first highlight or element of that is short stays within our jail systems. The work groups were able to identify overreliance on arrest and pretrial custody. The data analysis revealed that 45% Nearly half of all jail admissions, if you want to give a number to that, nearly 3,500 jail admissions over the course of a year were booked, placed in custody, processed, interviewed, assessed, and then processed out and released within just 24 hours. So 3,500 across a year all went through that entire process, and they were released within just 24 hours. Another thing that has been identified is that these are non-DUI violations. So the work groups were able to find and discover that low-risk, non-violent offenses, such as trespassing, violation of law enforcement practices or conditions, noncompliance, et cetera, they attributed to all of these different arrests. Did it move forward on that? They attribute it to all of these arrests. One thing that is important to highlight is that the high costs of this process is something that is represented, and I'm sure that we will be able to see if we were to do some budgetary analysis and see how much money this was actually costing our community. Not only money costs, but also personal costs as well. We understand the trauma that goes into someone being arrested. booked in jail and then released from jail within 24 hours. Okay. To continue with that, what we've been able to see, geographic analysis shows that 33% of all of the, so nearly a third of all of the custodial situations or people going into jail come from just these seven neighborhoods. And again, This information is presented in front of you, presented in just seven neighborhoods. These seven neighborhoods represent only 10% of the entire Grand Rapids community. So you can see the ratios that exist there. Only 10% of the people are going through this a third percent of the time. And so we see that these key findings, and we understand that we must address the underlying issues within these seven communities in order to appropriately address this pretrial custody.

So domestic violence was identified as a critical concern, particularly in those neighborhoods experiencing concentrated distress. The data analysis revealed that domestic violence and related child and family neglect and abuse cases unexpectedly make up more than half at 54% of all violent and person crime jail bookings. And yet surprisingly, domestic violence cases also constitute the highest proportion at 28%. of all cases denied for prosecution. So work groups have concluded that while criminal justice interventions are sometimes necessary to ensure the immediate safety for domestic violence survivors, that those responses alone are insufficient to more aggressively address the problem. Geographic analysis also showed us that more than half of the domestic violence victimizations, they're concentrated into neighborhoods that are home to only one-fourth of all Grand Rapids residents, where high rates of concentrated domestic stress and instability persist. So work groups have concluded that any effort to reduce domestic violence victimization must go beyond criminal and legal solutions to also underdress underlying behavioral health, housing instability and economic insecurity in these particular neighborhoods through coordinated, preventative and community based supports.

Another one of the four points or priority points we see is community and police disconnect, all right? The work groups highlighted police community disconnect in highly distressed neighborhoods. When we asked most neighborhoods or most members of neighborhoods, they identified the GRPD community relations and engagements to be one of the biggest public safety challenges that exist. That is either through perception. as well as reality and experiences that have been experienced by some of our community members. And so you can see one of the greatest threats to that. You can see the list of things that were given to them as responses, and the community relations are there. Understanding fully that there have been significant attempts and significant strategies to engage community differently, still there is something and some question that needs to be answered and responded to as to why people feel that disconnect, all right? Some of the data that goes to support some of the disconnect, and I don't know why it's cutting off on the screen. Hopefully you're able to see it clearly. The cost of violation of law enforcement condition arrest. Again, some of that non-compliance, some of that low risk, some of that lower behavior that we've been able to identify through the data show that where violations of law enforcement conditions are the top charge, The estimated annual jail costs alone is over $1 million per year. And I know we're talking about dollars, we're talking about money, but that's highly important for us to analyze so that we can really see are we allocating funds appropriately so that we can be addressing these crises that exist across our community. Work groups concluded that frequent arrests for these offenses often fail to advance neighborhood safety. and trust between the GRPD and the residents specifically in these highly distressed neighborhoods, noticing how the undermined community willingness to engage with law enforcement limits not only the effectiveness of the response, but also the effectiveness of dealing with the crime that some of these neighborhoods might exist or might experience. The neighborhood concentration. Again, we see that most of the incidents occur within these three neighborhoods. As a matter of fact, almost half of these confrontations are occurring within these neighborhoods. Repeat offenses, repeat offenders, etc. And so that's one of the lines that we need to really discover how to open up the lines of communication between these distressed neighborhoods in particular, as well as our responders to these different incidents of violence.

So analysis also revealed that the Hartside neighborhood is ranked highest in combined eviction case filings, jail bookings, and ER visits, where jails, emergency rooms, and shelters do not communicate with each other regarding who is repeatedly cycling through all of their systems. Work groups concluded that As a city, we must address the absence of systematic information sharing and coordination among shelters, hospitals, the jail, and other crisis responders if we want to interrupt the perpetual and costly cycles of emergency care, shelter use, and detention that emanates from the Hartside area.

What you see in front of you now is a neighborhood mapping tool and cross sector problem solving. This map allows us to look again at this hyper local data. So not just a zip code, but a few blocks within a zip code so that we can truly see some of the conditions that exist. We need to understand how pivotal, I don't know why our slides keep progressing without us, want to see how pivotal it is to bring everyone's data together to combine across the 58 neighborhoods. All right. 58 neighborhoods within our city so that all of this data can be combined. One of the things that it helps us do is to move from blaming systems to then naming problems and solutions. Because typically when we analyze data we would like to say that the educational system is failing here. The mental health system is failing here but when we have all of these different points of data together we can get out of some of that blaming and we can get into truly naming some of the issues that exist as well as most importantly some of the solutions that are there. And so this collaborative approach to problem-solving work group members were able to drill down to any neighborhood in great detail to discuss the implications of their shared data and how important it was for the community to build the trust and the enthusiasm needed to truly work collaboratively across our neighborhoods and across our sectors. And it's our intent, through sustainability, through investment, et cetera, to provide and have this data tool available for all community members on an analytical data tool site so that when we're doing projects like Safe Task Force, when we're doing projects like Realism is Loyalty, when we're doing different projects across our city, no longer will we have to do this deep, wide search for where the data is. They'll be able to access this site. And again, some of that sustainability that can hopefully be built within our community can make that accessible to everyone.

So now we're going to talk about what's next for AdjustGR. So we've identified our priority findings, and AdjustGR is going to partner with community to talk about solutions. So we're gonna do this through a series of listening sessions that we call action sprints. And we have three types of action sprint partners, nonprofit, institutional, and neighborhood partners. Our nonprofit action sprints, we're gonna talk to clients of local nonprofits like TaylorMade Reentry, and the Urban League to talk to residents about the data findings and then listen to those solution ideas from the residents that are impacted by those findings. We're also going to hold action sprints with our institutional partners. Those are folks like the police, ERs, housing shelters, other governmental orgs, and we're going to get together with community organization leaders to talk about potential solutions that could impact multiple priority findings. We're also going to hold open style action sprints with our neighborhood partners, places like neighborhood organizations, to gather residents to talk about solutions that can positively impact the priority findings. And then on the next slide, we're going to show you what we're going to do with those solution ideas.

And so you can see the timeline that's available here. So right now we're in the solutions data collection phase where we're having these action sprints. The intent and the goal of the action sprints is to gather as many solutions as possible, right? So we can figure out, we want people to bring all of their ideas to the table so that we might be able to present those. In the fall, we will then take all of those ideas, organize them, synthesize them, and then discover which ways we might be able to move forward and boil down the list of ideas. As you can see, the star that is on the priority actions determination, we will have our second justice summit. This past winter, we had our first Justice Summit that was able to identify these four priority findings, and that was inclusive, I think, of over 50 members from community that were able to identify these four priority findings. Our intent in the next year, January, is to have that same Justice Summit so that we can identify what solutions are actually viable and what solutions may actually bring some change to our community. And then from there, we'll share a shared action plan and development. We will get agency agreements to start talking about what it looks like to truly share data across agencies, what it looks like to truly have and develop some MOUs across agencies so that we can do that before we do any implementation. Understanding this timeline, you see that it starts in July, September, and then it goes on to April, but we got to understand that this is a sustained approach to crisis management within our community, and that's the intent around moving in a methodical way, if you will, to make sure we're addressing problems appropriately.

So there's some ways that folks can connect with us. Organizations can contact us to become an Action Sprint partner through the email that you see there. Commissioners, you're welcome to join us at the Justice Summit if you want to hear some of the solutions that have been generated by community. You can also contact us. And of course, we have the QR code, which takes us to the JustGR website, which has information on the Leadership Council and the project as a whole.

There was something that was shared at an event, and I always like to bring this up, something that was shared at a digital justice event that was held, I believe, in last fall. There was a young man in community, actually a former student of mine. He raised his hand during the presentation, and he said, Mr. McMurray, that's how he knows me, Mr. McMurray, how can I trust that what I tell you, you're going to take it to the right people, and they are going to provide the change that I'm looking for? My response to him was, well, it's not my sole responsibility to take it to the right people. Come along with me and let's go and do this thing together, right? And that was one of the early, early critiques, if you will, of the project is, where is community voice? And so that's why these opportunities for engagement, that's why these opportunities for people to get engaged and plugged into the work is of a high priority for us simply because we want everybody with lived experience, without lived experience, et cetera, to be and engage in this community safety work. With that, any questions? What questions do you have?

Well, thanks. I suppose most of my colleagues know that I was the phone call that recruited this organization to come to Grand Rapids and to convince them that if they came here and we we'd have a community that would actually listen to the analysis and try to take action. So it's been a long slog. I don't know when that conversation was, like seven, eight years ago? It was a long time. And I chaired this organization for a while, and we're onto new leadership now. It's great, but it's also great to be able to see that we've got some rough cut assessment. There's an old joke about sculpting an elephant, which is you take a big piece of rock and you cut away everything that doesn't look like an elephant. So we're sort of chipping away at the outside parameters here. Exciting for me, because I look at this and I've got seven or eight places I want to go for a lot of these things, but that's not what this presentation's about. I'm really glad to have a group with some deep analytic expertise be able to walk alongside of doing work here, and I guess I don't think we can stress enough the importance of like examining so we know what we're dealing with before we come up with theories on how to deal with it. I mean, it's so, so important that we don't make assumptions. One of the things that I just wanna emphasize, there's this whole basket of question of like, why do we keep people in jail for very short periods of times? And that's not something that, that's way past the scope of your presentation today, right? This is something that you have to name and then we have to discuss. Now some of those reasons are gonna turn out to be very important, so for example, having done domestic violence prosecution for a couple years full-time, we have something called the domestic violence hold, and that's to let cool-offs happen in situations where law enforcement has identified, like, this is a dangerous situation, we need to get these people apart, and we need to really, really know that they're not gonna reconnect in the next few hours. And so that's a really important tool that can feed into some of that data about short-term stays. On the other hand, if we've got people who are, we've got short-term stays and we don't have a great answer for why we're doing that, it's not too hard to name the consequences from that. So, you know, if I got locked up for 24 hours, I could probably call in to various people and pretend I had the flu and maybe no one would notice that I was gone. I don't have a no-call, no-show job. But anybody working in food service, If you don't show up for your shift, you're done. It's called no call, no show. And not a lot of people who get arrested are going to call their employer from the jail and say, hey, guess what? I'm in jail. So there's my call about why I'm not showing up. Those are probably pretty rare phone calls. If people go to jail for non-compelling reasons, we're really sticking a spoke in the circle of their life, and all of a sudden then they're falling off that bike pretty quickly. They're very, very vulnerable to losing their jobs, and if they're already living paycheck to paycheck, They're vulnerable to losing their housing. If they don't pick up their kids at the end of the day from whoever their child care provider is, then Child Protective Services gets involved in their life. And so there's sort of this cascade failure that can come out of even a short-term stay in jail. And I'm sorry to be leaning on this so much, but this is one of the reasons why we really, really need to reform our system our pretrial detention models. It's one of the reasons why we need to, I think frankly, abandon a cash bond model nationwide and certainly in Michigan because we should be assessing whether people are a danger to the community or that they're a flight risk, not how rich they are. There's no reason to be confusing wealth and liberty. And that's not the topic of view, but that's a feeder into why we have people stuck in jail. Sometimes people are stuck in jail because they failed a wealth test. and that's immoral, unacceptable, and we should not be putting up with that in the United States of America. We certainly shouldn't be putting up with it in this community. So there's a whole big ball of wax here that we're gonna have to keep talking about, but thank you so much, and thank both of you for the time you put in this, and I know that, and I see Judge Ross is here too, thank you for, you know, I know that there's a big group of people involved here, and I wanna thank GRPD, they've been involved, right from the outset on these discussions and engaging on this. And I know that one of the things that JustGR has really focused on right from the beginning was if you don't get everybody in the room, you're not going to actually be able to get to solutions. You're just going to get to... chaos and opposition. So thank you for working on really, really being inclusive. And I want to just say that I think from my perspective, it's really, really urgent that we get, I'm glad for all the community engagement, but I think I can't overemphasize how important expert engagement is here. So like the people who are like the judicial system, Commissioner Kilgore's mother was a probation officer, like getting probation officers and people like that who can say, well, yes, that may look like you're tracking this, but in fact, this is what's going on. So there's data, and then there's the complexity behind the data. And then there's the question of like, if we're going to do improvement, we really, really have to be careful that we do this in an orderly manner. So I know it's taken a long time for you guys to get to this place. I know there's a lot of work to do ahead. But it's because it's a very, very complicated conversation. So thank you for the presentation. I thought it was great, very informative, very challenging. And there's a vista of possible work we can do here in the future that's exciting to look forward to. So Commissioner Knight.

Yeah, thank you for the presentation. These are the things that really excite me but then also make me sad because I think about all of the silos that we have in this community that are doing bits and pieces and how to get them to here, right? So they had the housing summit just a couple of months ago, right? And this should have been a part of even that conversation, especially as we look at our economy right now and the things that are happening across our country and thinking about, you know, one, income being a common denominator amongst all of this, right? And people not being able to take care of their basic needs, which then spiraled them into another space because of the amount of bandwidth that people have, right? And then access, you know, to services, that impacts it too. But then I'm also in a conversation that I was having yesterday looking at, you know, some of the changes that are getting ready to happen with people's WIC and with their SNAP, right? And how people are going to be kicked out of the system and now back into this place of scarcity, right? Because they're not going to be able to meet their needs, which is going to cause people to go this other route, which is going to then, and the cycle just continues, right? And I'm glad that you all are trying to really bring these other voices to the table and make sure that everybody is there. My concern is, you know, a lot of these conversations have been going on for a very long time in our community, again, in silos, and that it's not one person looking to be the savior or champion. But how do we collectively come together and make sure that we're linked up appropriately so that we can address what really needs to be addressed? Because I think we know what the thing is. The thing has been named, right? It's who's really willing to address it and do what's necessary to make sure that our community as a whole is whole. Yeah. Right. But I mean, I'm grateful for this. I would love to be continue, be a part of the conversations and in these meetings, because I think it's important for us, even as we're, you know, voting on policies and different things that happen here at the city, that that piece is heard as well so that we can make the appropriate choices the first time. And I have to keep coming back. You know what I mean? But thank you. Thank you all for all of your work on this and yeah, I appreciate it.

City Manager?

Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Rafa and Mr. McMurray, for your words. I'm going to quote you here in just a second. But this is very, very important work, and I want to start by reminding him of what Mr. McMurray said about it's easy to blame systems, but it's harder to name and implement solutions. And I think what this helps us do for me is to identify where those opportunities to implement solutions are. The county is having a countywide discussion around increasing the millage and the cost of housing and booking inmates. And that's going to be a significant cost. And the way that we address it is by increasing taxes or we can reduce the occurrences. Mm-hmm. And that can happen in a couple of ways. We've named some solutions earlier from the SAFE Task Force. The best way to reduce our booking costs and our housing costs for inmates is not to have them enter the system. And I think that's the important work of the SAFE Task Force. The other part, to the Mayor's point, if we want to really, for those who unfortunately do enter the system, we have to continue to evaluate the severity of the acts that they're committing and determine whether or not those are really criminal acts that require people to be detained, arrested and detained. adds to our costs of housing. And so I wanted to thank Judge Ross, who's here in the court, for implementing a solution to notice people more automated and frequently of their court reminders. Doctor's office does it all the time, dentist's offices. I mean, you get text messages, reminders all the time. And people are busy, and God knows that if I wouldn't get those reminders, I would miss appointments. And certainly, you know, there's very few appointments more important than a court date, but things happen. So I want to thank the court for implementing that tech solution, and hopefully that will result in less people having failure to appear.

And actually, I'm going to name something else here because it's something that I've done a fair amount of thinking and research on. And that is, and I'll just start by citing, the Vera Institute did a study that concluded that allowing face-to-face visits from incarcerated people dropped recidivism by about 5% to 10%. And so one of the real things that we need to be working on if we're looking at the jail population is reducing recidivism. The Kent County Jail has spaces to do face-to-face visits. They stopped them about 10 years ago. And it takes a certain amount of human power. It takes a certain amount of guard hours to make face-to-face visits happen. But the payoff is lower recidivism. And unfortunately, I think that one of the things that our system often does is when we look at the cost of crime, we look at things like how much does it cost to incarcerate people, not the trauma involved, because you can't easily put a dollar figure on the trauma involved. So I think we, as a society, we tend to massively underestimate the value of a not committed crime and the value of not having somebody get traumatized. And, Raf, I know, frankly, you know, you are a victim of a fairly traumatic crime. And, like, that's not something I can fix for you, right? Like, no amount of money is going to stop that. I can't unmake that have happened to you. If somebody stole your glasses, we could buy you new glasses. But I can't unassault you. And that's not something that gets tracked in systems, is the cost of trauma. And so things that we can do that prevent recidivism are really preventing trauma in the community. And so as we look at that jail millage, I think that that's something that I'm really gonna keep shining a light on. It's like, okay, if we're gonna pay more money for a jail, there are things we can do better in our jail. So the top for me is reinstituting face-to-face visits. The other is We, the MDOC policy for reentry policy roughly boils down to don't let the door hit your butt on the way out. People simply get released from MDOC back into our community. And those are things that I hope that your group are gonna be able to track, is like, when people come back out of MDFC, if the state of Michigan isn't gonna come up with a reentry program for those folks, everybody has basic needs, and if you don't meet those needs, you fall back into crisis behavior, right? So if you don't have housing, if you don't have a job, if you don't have people to surround you, you are in insanely high risk. I got tons of people who love me and take care of me. So I think that also examining, like, can we do reentry better from the jail? Because we know almost all those people in the jail are coming back into our community. They're not catching a bus to go to Arkansas. And so really making sure that we have lined up resources for people as they exit the jail is a critical opportunity for us to do better, to make sure that if people don't have housing and they don't know where to go, we give them a list of options. We make calls for them. People can get paralyzed by complexity. They can get paralyzed by, and so it's easy to sort of have indecision and feel like, well, or people can be over-hopeful. They can think, ah, I'll go stay with my brother. And then they get out and they find out that their brother doesn't want them staying with them. Well, stress testing their exit plans is another area where I think, honestly, the Kent County incarcerates people. But the city of Grand Rapids should be willing to own reintegrating people. That should be a core value that we have as a city. Like, if we really want to be a welcoming city, we've got to be welcoming to people who are coming out of our incarceration system, too. So, thank you. Commissioner Iassassi.

Thank you. You see, you guys got Mayor LeGrand really excited. No, and I was just going to say, you know, I know you said it, but thank you for your leadership on this, Mayor, and also for me and Rafa's, County Commissioner Legrand, who I find the County Commission, who I know was the leader in this space, too. So we live in a small city where we all get involved in issues like this, whether they've impacted us personally. or we have family members who've been impacted, or you heard in that presentation on SAFE. So full disclosure, Rafa's my husband. We have a different last name, and I don't know if everybody knows that, but in full transparency, I want to say that. And I also want to say I know our colleague Commissioner Perdue also was a part of some leadership on this work as well. She's not able to be here today, but I know, you know, she'll be ready to dig into this. So thank you. I want to say also thank you to our police department and the fire department for the work on this. I think, you know. City manager you talked about like where do we put these resource points in because we are being asked to respond in so many different ways to you know, how How do we prevent these things from happening? Right and so commissioner you talked about Snap benefits and all those things that are changing. We also have seen a let's call it defunding of domestic violence supports to our major domestic violence agencies Department of Justice you know violence a violence prevention against women those things have gone away and we still have these incidences and I know that you know these are a moment in time I can't imagine sort of where that is now Commissioner Kilgore we're talking about what is it you know just things are more expensive how are people able to you know pay for these things and so we see this compression that's happening from probably when this data came to today so I think it's gonna behoove us to continue to focus on this I want to just mention a few I'm glad we talked about the the the corrections millage I think that's absolutely important and then I just want to say I know there were also some connections to when DART, the domestic violence, I can't remember what the acronym is, and maybe one of you, and maybe Judge Ross remembers, but I think there was also some state money or federal money that was something you were leading, Asante, with Judge Faber, I believe, around domestic violence and prevention engagements. I'd love to see, we don't have to do that right now, but I'd love to see how that connects. And then to this point, we talked about how neighborhood associations and corridor organizations have been a part of. I know you've presented Rafa to the chamber. Grand Rapids Chamber but love to make sure like how do we integrate DGRI you know there's Heartside Business Association so would love an update too after this about how those entities are engaged in this work because we have a lot of we have people who respond like our police department and fire department we have those that invest and try to attract and then we have the community that's experiencing these things so just want to continue to highlight that as well as how do we connect to GRPS you know it's the start of school and we know as you said mayor it can impact a job but if something like that happens it impacts that child going to school so I just want to lift those things up and thank you for the work this was the best presentation I've ever heard at City Commission

So I think we're going to do our closed session in 9.01 because we're bumping up against public safety here, and that will make it a little quicker logistically. So just so you know, we're getting close to public safety. So, Commissioner.

Thank you. I'll make this very brief. You know I'm excited about this stuff, and thank you very much for helping provide more information and just super grateful. But among all the things here that I think is underlying all of this and has been brought up a little is the need for basic needs. And where does that meet? And so I have two questions. One is, have you worked with or connected data that the Pathways for Housing is working on? Because that was part of the chronic homelessness issue, which, you know, when we're looking at the Hartside neighborhood, that's often part of it. But also, and I think this is a larger policy conversation, For us to consider, I personally think we should be talking about housing and basic needs as a community safety issue. And I think your data is showing that. And how do we de-escalate the stress that people are going through? Because when we are all triggered and our amygdala is taking over in our brains, we're not thinking straight. And then you have these cycles of interpersonal relationships and or whatever else out in the community that then escalates. I think that that would be something I would like to offer our commission to continue talking about is community safety, including public housing or housing availability and things like that.

Yeah, and we have had some discussion with Josh Lunger and Ryan Kilpatrick about the Pathways downtown project and potentially being a part of the institutional action sprints around disjointed crisis management in the heart site.

I would encourage it. I know that they've been working very hard on a streamlined process for that communication and data sharing, too.

Yeah, they mentioned they also have a lot of data.

Yeah, so I'm excited about that dashboard to see more of that as we go forward.

It's cool. You guys are going to love it. All right.

Thank you. Thanks, everyone. I'll adjourn the meeting and move us into closed session.