City Council - Special Meeting

Good afternoon, everyone.

This is Mayor Cyril Jefferson convening the special meeting of the High Point City Council today for our budget work session. Here with me in the room, every member of council's presence, say council members Johnson, Holmes, and Williams. Before beginning our agenda, I'll actually entertain a motion to adopt. Is there one? So moved. Second. Motion to adopt. Our agenda's been made by Councilman Andrew, seconded by Councilman Moore. Any discussion on those, on that motion? All those in favor please signify by saying aye. Aye. Any against? The ayes have it. We have our agenda. We have a few items for presentation. First is 2026-152. This is the fiscal year presentation for Downtown High Point. We recognize President of Downtown High Point, Rebecca Cansley.

Thank you all for allowing me to be here today to give you a little bit of an update about downtown High Point and what we've been doing in the past year and then looking forward to the year following. So tell you a little bit about downtown High Point. Of course, you've all been involved over the past four years that I've been here. In 2023, we adopted a strategic plan that we worked on for about 18 months. Those major strategic plan goals are place-based placemaking, I apologize, business success, marketing and promotion, and clean and safe initiatives. We follow the National Main Street Program for downtown work, which also includes their four points, economic vitality, design, promotion, and organization. And our goals fit within those parameters. So just going over some of the exciting things that have happened. If you haven't been following downtown, I'll give you a little bit of a month by month in the past fiscal year to So in July, we launched our Downtown High Point Dollars Program. This is a partnership with a grant that we received from Electricities to help fund this. So people can purchase downtown dollars that goes to participating locations. They can use it at over 33 merchants currently. And at the moment, we match 50% of every dollar that they buy. So really kind of funneling that money into downtown. We were awarded that grant from Electricities as a part of revitalization of downtown. We had a wonderful tourist season, a wonderful furniture market, but a lot of our 365 businesses sometimes see dips during those times that we don't have that tourism in that furniture market. And that's kind of what Electricity saw. They said this was a way to continually keep dollars flowing into downtown. As you'll see, we've had $15,600 purchased that, again, has to be spent in downtown. They have... up to a year to use that as well. There has only been 9,788 redeemed, so there are still about $5,000 worth of gift cards sitting out there. They do receive notifications that there's still money in their account. I actually purchased one myself and then totally forgot I had it and received an email, hey, you have money to downtown High Point. So we've had 430 redemptions and the average spend of $22.76 at these merchants. We've seen a lot of success in the merchants that are pushing the program themselves. So it kind of varies as to who has seen them. We've seen them from everything from Brewer's Kettle to Earl's is one of our newest ones. They have not had any redeemed yet, but they just came on last month. We're working on getting revival on this plant as well. Like I said, Brewers Petal, Nomad, Plank Street, Stock and Grain, all of those see regular redemptions as well. And then we have also utilized funds in either giveaways, in working with Social Saturday, where we have purchased downtown dollars to give away to incentivize people to come here. So one of those partnerships was with HBXD and Visit High Point. When they had a networking event back in November, we said the first 25 recipients, we would give a gift card to downtown to incentivize them to go spend additional as well.

Rebecca? Yes. If I may, does the, as Councilman Moore, the dollar program, does it coincide with the district that the trolley covers on social Saturdays? It does. Or is it more concentrated? It does.

It can go all the way from Hurst Kettle down to Cohab Space and We limit it to downtown, but that is a loose description. So it basically will mimic the social Saturday, and if someone is participating in social Saturday on a regular or a consistent basis, such as COHAB, they don't every single time, but they do the majority of the time. We allow them to be considered part of downtown. If someone from the Palladium said we want to join, we'd say no. So it's a little bit. In August, we launched our first movie night. We had 50 to 75 moviegoers at each location. If you'll remember, we did two locations for August and September. We also did a move-in weekend with HPU. We had not budgeted that or planned on that when we did this last year. But we're very excited about our partnerships with HPU. They have reached out to us. This was our first time. And we did another event that I'm going to talk about in November. And they've been very successful. And we love the fact that people are coming downtown. These parents are coming downtown. The students are getting used to seeing all the awesome things that we've been working on in downtown. We also have our very own trolley pub. If you don't know that, it is a curated experience around downtown. They are flexible to where it goes. We're actually partnering with them on our next social Saturday event, which we're doing an art gallery tour. And so it won't be stopping at necessarily bars, but it will be stopping at the art galleries, which is really exciting. And then, of course, in September, one of our big key accomplishments is the State Historic Preservation Office approves the Part 2 for Showplace West or 101 Plaza Center. And that is very exciting. As you now know, we'll get down to April where I have really big news about that. But it was just one more step in the process that showed that this project was on track and we were moving forward. In October, we became the Noche de Vale presenting sponsor. This is a partnership with the YWCA. We were very excited to be the presenting sponsor of this and increase our diversity in events. We had a great turnout of 1,500 participants that night in and around Stock and Grain. And just getting the message that Downtown High Point is not just for one singular person, it is for everybody. We do plan on that in our next budget to be additional presenting sponsor. That actually was another thing that we added at the last minute that we asked our board to support. It was not in our original budget, but we had that opportunity, and so we stepped forward and made an amendment to that budget. In November, we had our Panther Prowl, which we will do again this year. It is an HBU homecoming event. We had over 500 participants in the stock and grain area. We have a lounge. It's got a DJ. It's fun. It's just basically celebrating the homecoming for HPU after the game. People loved it. HPU loved it. They talked about it. So we will be doing that event again. And as I mentioned earlier, we had a partnership with HBXD and VHP and Splashworks for a networking event at our office, which was very well attended. I think we had about 80 to 100 people there at that networking event. And it shows great partnership and I'm really happy to show off our downtown and our office because it's the coolest office around. In December, we took over, we consider it our first Christmas stroll for downtown High Point. It has been in the hands of a volunteer previously, and then it was in Visit High Point's role for a little while. So we took over, we added some train rides, and one of the coolest things that we did was our Visit High Point partnership for winter glow tickets. So if you came out to the stroll, you could go in participating locations and pick up free tickets to the glow that evening. So when you basically have a whole day of Christmas in downtown High Point. And very excited to hear that Winter Glow is coming back again this year. And would love to continue that same partnership where we can funnel some people from our event into the next one. And then we kind of take a break in January. Our trolley goes down for repairs. It is cold. It is the weeks right after Christmas. We find that people aren't really spending a whole lot of money. So we take a little break, do a little rest, and then we start back in February with our social Saturdays. And what a lot of people didn't know is when I'm kind of jumping ahead, but Showplace West actually started some cleanup process in February as well. developers are on a very tight timeline and they asked if they could go ahead and start some processes and we granted that due to the fact that if they had backed out at that point we would just benefit from it so in March we have started a couple things with downtown I'm really excited about these two a large cities planning for 2027 High Point is a location for the large cities of North Carolina have a conference or a meeting where people in my role So the North Carolina Main Street Program has a conference, but it is geared toward populations of 50,000 or less. And then the bigger cities such as Charlotte, Raleigh, Durham, us, Kannapolis, Concord, I think I'm naming some of them, don't really have the support system. So they've come together through the North Carolina Downtown Development Association and created kind of that similar product. And we are going to Wilmington this year, and then next year they are coming here to Hopwood, which I'm very excited about. And the Preservation North Carolina Conference will happen in October. We're planning that as well. That is focused on historic preservation. It has been, I can't remember, I heard somewhere in the tune of about, it hasn't been here in 70 years, maybe. And Showplace West or 101 Plaza Center is going to be one of the key tours on that because it is a groundbreaking project for historic preservation. If you haven't heard me talk about it, it is the first 1970s building in North Carolina to receive this designation and go through this process. Yes, it's been done before on 1960s, 1950s buildings, but we are setting the way for everything that happens going forward for the 1970s era. So it's really exciting in the preservation world, if you are a little bit of a nerd about that. And of course, in April, the biggest news that I have to say, and I can't say it enough, Showplace West, or 101 South Main Street, or whatever you want to call it, it's been called the cult building, First Factors, it sold. And we've been working on that really, really hard for many, many years. And it is now in the developers' hands. I, again, got a lot of questions after the news article came out and said, okay, so when is it going to be ready? What's going to happen? They had the cranes out there. They had the materials out there. The road closures were already pre-talked about with the city. Like, it was go the minute we signed those documents. And they have been rocking and rolling ever since. And it is very exciting if you haven't seen it. Right now, there are a lot in cleanup. What you can see here is actually a very current picture. They have a hard time getting anything into the basement, so they built a dirt ramp down the stairs to get forklifts in. And it's fascinating to see. It doesn't actually look like that. It's very steep at the moment, but if you go down in the pit area, it is very steep. So we are looking forward to our budget. Thank you again for the increase in last year. It's made this year possible. We have basically stayed the same with our city allocation. We do have a county appropriation that we will hear about shortly, but we are planning on that as well. You can see we have an Electricity Smart Communities grant that we would like to go after, as well as Social Saturday sponsorship for our revenues. And then expenses, you can see those down below, and they're very consistent with last year. We haven't moved a whole lot in terms of where our finances are going. And then our future plans. Of course, you heard me talk about the planning and implementation of the North Carolina Downtown Development Large Cities Conference and the Partnership with Preservation North Carolina Conference. We're also looking at the public art project focusing on history and murals. We've kind of discussed this last year but really didn't have the capacity to do that now that we've kind of got Showplace West going and we've got a little bit more free time for some of those larger projects. I'd love to explore that. We are expanding Social Saturdays and other events through our sponsorships. We are focusing on redevelopment of Main Street properties, which is another set of properties a little bit further north that we own. We've kind of sat quiet on those for a while just because a lot of focus was to get Showplace West off the ground. But we're going to turn our attention to those. And then, of course, continue assistance with Showplace West or as it is now going to be called the Elwood on Main Street. So those are kind of our initiatives and goals for the next year. Again, thank you so much for allowing me to present today, and happy to answer any questions.

Thank you, Rebecca. Any questions?

I've got a quick question that I probably should already know the answer to. But anyway, so yeah, Revival was a great addition to our downtown, and I just had an ABC board meeting, and it was great to see how high their numbers were. So that's really great. I don't know, what do we need to do for them to also be considered part of the social district? Does he need to do any paperwork with you, Megan, or what?

There's a registration just to fill out with some information so that we can have them on record as part of participating in the social district. Okay, I'll make sure. We can send a link to the website where he can get the information. I can also help. I have a meeting scheduled with him tomorrow.

Oh, good. Okay, super. Okay.

I have a question. Councilman Andrew, could you shed any light on the focus on redevelopment of Main Street properties? Is it too early to talk about specifics?

It is. We had some interest and some offers and some things over the course of the last several years, but again, nothing really kind of came to fruition. And we honestly have been very quiet and hesitant on that in the last year, just working on the finalization of Showplace West. It is very early in the process to even talk about some of what we have. We've all had our ideas and what we would like to see there, but I mean, it's been a month, so that's where we'd like to go after this.

Great, thank you. Rebecca, you want to remind the public about what's happening with the one on Main, the number of units and how much they're investing? That's true.

Gladly talk about that project anytime. So Elwood on Main or Showplace West is going to be 143 apartment units. It will have two commercial spaces. They will be smaller, about 900 square feet, capping each public right-of-way. So Main Street and Wren Street, those are going to be the two commercial spaces. It is kind of fascinating because they are putting apartment units in every nook and cranny of that building. I've had a lot of questions about what they're going to do with the basement. The basement is going to be apartment units as well. The pyramid is going to be apartment units as well. And there is actually, what is one of the coolest things is, hold on, let me go back there. That picture right there, what a lot of people don't know is underneath the stairs is actually a cavity, a hole. And it's got a wall. You can't really see it. They're going to cut windows into the side of it, and there's actually going to be an apartment unit underneath those stairs. It is going to be a really unique building. And so far, everything's been approved, but it is going to... take up every inch of space.

Will there be amenities? Yes.

So there will be a gym. There will be storage lockers for the tenants. And that's going to be in the basement along the back wall where there is no ability to put Windows, there will be a yoga room. There's actually going to be a sound recording room in there as well. So it's just kind of that dead space that they couldn't use. They found some really cool activations that they could use that will be available to the tenants as well.

Investment numbers. I'm sorry? Investment numbers.

So yes, investment numbers. They are looking at a $30 to $33 million project when this is finished. And they are partnering with a tax credit investor. So this is Got a construction loan tax credit investments, but it will be quite the project when it's done Will these be considered market rate units? They will be market rate units and they don't have a set number right now on what that rent might look like It is whatever the market can bear High Point has one downtown unit that's really comparable which is dr peter's the point um and but they are looking at some of the area outside so greensboro downtown will come into play and it's really just whatever the market can stand and the estimated completion for this project is december of 2027 so that's the that's the goal that the developer is trying to meet to be clear these will be apartments they will not be sold any floors nothing will be sold as ownership they will only be apartments And this development group has a history of just apartments. They don't sell their product.

Rebecca, were we able to put anything into the agreement on this about tenants being year-round tenants there?

As far as our agreement from us to the developer, there is no legal agreement between us and the developer. They asked us to... not put deed restrictions because it actually limited their ability to go get funding for this project however they understand that dynamic and they do not want just someone who's there two times a year. They won't year-round. So they're actually looking at the legal ramifications and what they can do to say that as well. There is also, they've talked about not allowing anybody to Airbnb their unit out, specifically to stop it during market. But they're looking at those, the things they can do legally.

In terms of downtown dollars, I know a big part of The vision there is that it attracts potentially new customers, new patrons to an establishment. Are we able to track any data there in terms of some of those establishments if it is new customers? And I'd be curious to know, and this is another layer down, but if someone got attracted to an establishment for the first time, are they then a returning customer as well? I guess it's trying to understand ROI on that investment Part of it's just trying to get more foot traffic, new folks into downtown. Are you seeing any data there, any of that being tracked that could help inform that?

I can ask. It's specifically tied to the downtown dollars. I'm not sure if I have the ability to track that, but to the purchase, unless it's done by zip code, I can look to see who the zip code purchasers are. But I have not actually looked into that right now. we can track where they're being redeemed at and how many are seeing those dollars come back. So I know who the heavy hitters are in downtown, and it is the businesses that tend to market and talk about that and support it themselves as well as what we are doing. So I'm not sure if they're new customers, though.

Yeah, it might just be, and I know it's not the most exhaustive way to do it and maybe not the most accurate way to do it, of customers who have come in with downtown dollars, are they the usual folks who you see who would have been spending their money down there regardless? Or are they folks who maybe they've not seen before? I'd be curious to know what some of those business owners are saying on that.

I can ask, definitely. I know that I can track who purchases them and I can see who actually are repeat customers. Thank you, Monica. I can see when you purchase them. So I know there are several, there are a couple repeat customers. Now, our matching dollars will not match the second time around. It only is a one-time purchase. So it's not like Monica's going in there and purchasing this and then we keep sending her money. But the number of people that are new is very much higher than the people who are return customers because of that match. However, I don't know if they're high point people.

And to be clear, businesses are being patronized. I'm sure a lot of businesses love returning customers, just to be clear. Being patronized is being patronized. I don't think that's an issue. But thinking about what our ROI is and effectiveness in attracting new customers is what I'm curious about. So thank you for that. I think we're going to transition here in a little bit. Let me say a couple comments. I think thank you again for the work with Showplace West. I think what gets lost in some of these discussions is the conversation regarding housing and that we have such a high demand for housing in our city and in our region. High Point just, the news came out about us being the second fastest growing city in the entire state. And there's demand that folks want to live here and housing, the only way you can do anything to really address housing costs is that you have to address the supply side of it. So that way supply in some ways can keep up with demand. If supply doesn't keep up with demand, then you have scarcity, you have prices go through the roof. And so seeing more housing be developed is a good thing. Seeing housing be developed in our downtown is an even better thing because folks who paid attention 10 years ago when we started conversations about core city revitalization will remember that if your core doesn't have folks wanting to move to it and property values are not going up, there's no such thing as staying stagnant. They either go up or they go down. And so we could have had a situation had we not moved as a city, and our property values would have declined, demand to live in the core would have declined, and that's no good for any city, especially when your infrastructure is so concentrated right in the core of your city. So it's good for that sort of remembrance, for everyone just to remember why we're invested in doing our downtown the way that we are. It's not just for folks to have a good time at the ballpark and enjoy a hot dog and a Coca-Cola. But it is so that the long-term health and financial solvency of our city is maintained. And it's something that we have to project for. And folks wanting to live in the core of your city is a good signal to the long-term health of your city. So Rebecca, thank you for that. And best of luck to the work that you all will continue to do.

Thank you.

Yeah, great job.

Do you do anything with the Charles Ray Music Festival?

We have some partnership with them that we are starting to work with. We have not previously, but we are this year.

Okay, because I know they've expanded that pretty good this year. Yes. Or at least their lineup.

Yeah. And the city's been working with them real good about stage placement and all that good stuff. Yeah. And social Saturdays, if anybody's not gone, you've got to go. I mean, they are so fun. And when I go on that trolley, I meet people from Thomasville, Greensboro, Winston, and it's just so much fun. I love it. Thank you so much for bringing that to our downtown.

Rebecca, thank you.

Thank you.

We talked about folks moving into our city, and our next presenter will tell you that the only way people get to High Point is that it starts with a visit. So that's it. We'll go ahead and welcome up President and CEO of Visit High Point, Melanie Burnett.

Yeah, hey, that was perfect.

Thank you all for giving me time to present our fiscal year 26-27 budget. And yes, Mayor, I totally agree with you. It always starts with the visit. In order to get more people living here, providing businesses here, and investing here, we have to make an introduction to them. And what better than the visitor economy? Our visitor economy is highly supported by occupancy tax. If you're not familiar with that, we have our base hotel rate, we have our sales tax, and then we have a 3% county occupancy tax on top of that. We share that with Greensboro, and that is how Visit High Point is funded. This gives you some history from 1995 up until today. We have experienced about a 3% dip this year in our occupancy tax, basically because of the macro economy. Consumers are just being more cautious about their travel. They're still traveling, but they may be traveling a little different than what we expected. Diving into our budget for this year in terms of the revenue side, we are projecting a little bit of softening even from where we are right now at 3.6 or 2.362 million. to 2.35 million, which is about a 1% dip. Even though there's some softening, we're seeing some flatness in March and April where we think there could be some turning that's getting ready to happen, and our folks over in Greensboro are increasing their budget by 2%, so they even feel a little optimistic as well. We do have some ancillary income revenue streams. That total around $400,000 in support of the occupancy tax because the work has to continue to be done. And we can't be limited to just occupancy tax alone. We also manage a 501c3, which is our drive high point foundation. That gives us some flexibility because the 501c6 has some limitations. The C3 allows us to apply for some grants, maybe for some foundations, and also to award grants to those industry partners that may need support in complementary of our long-range plan from 2019 to 2029. Per our legislation, we are restricted to fund 15% of our occupancy tax through arts and tourism grants. arts and tourism related projects so in the spirit of what we're doing today it's going to be more project based a lot of that designation goes to the stadium debt service of about two hundred fifty thousand dollars and fulfills that obligation so what's left is about a hundred and two thousand five hundred and so we're able to award those projects on the expense side In terms of our administrative capacity, our staffing capacity, it's going to stay the same. We are a staff of 10. We have two part-time in the visitor center. That's a full-time equivalent. We did have one retirement in our office that we plan to fulfill within the first quarter of our fiscal year between July and August. That would be more services-centric because we're seeing more internal sales. in partnership with the Spring Hill Suites across the street from the Congdon Yards events facility. That's putting us back into the small meetings business. So we're seeing more attractions with association government groups. Rebecca mentioned the North Carolina Preservation Society that's coming back. So that suite spot, about 300 people and less, is really a good fit for Congdon Yards and Spring Hill Suites. Basically, that's an internal sales effort. We're not actively soliciting as of yet until we can get some more better product in place around that area. But we do need some capacity to support because with sales efforts come services on the back end as well. Our administrative line item will increase about 4%, and that's in step with our three-year salary comp that we put into place as of last year. So our administrative budget is about 30% of our budget overall, which is well within or below the Destination International recommendations. Our operation expenses are about 18% of our budget. By the time you build in our tenant revenue, that does bring it down about 16%. But again, that's on the income side. This is a picture of our container village. I'm sure that most of you are familiar with our office space. It is in Splashworks building. We still have our building lease. It is on a 3% escalation every year, so we have factored for that within our budget. We have planned our board retreat for 2027. We do that every other year. We always stay in town and we get inspired by the environments here that are taking place in High Point. We have a lot of expensive tools, like economic impact calculators. Those are essential to our business, so they are sanctioned through Destinations International. We have to have them, so we will continue to spend on those tools. Travel expenses, we put a moratorium on that last year in order to amend our budget. We would like to reinstate that. However, the conferences that we would like to attend are in a great cadence where if we had to scale that back, we could do that quarterly. Of course, then we have some equipment and computer needs that we need to address too with the next fiscal year. The next section of our budget is direct group business, and that is the association group's The social market, the military market, education, religious, and fraternal markets. The small meeting markets, we would like to increase our budget by at least 8%. Part of that line item is the support of furniture market, which is about 150,000. And group services is also our event booking incentive. So we want to incentivize any new business that we can attract here that may be in competition with other destinations. We're also needing to increase our literature and printing budget. We're now going into our new fiscal year where we're gonna have to print our destination guide. We have a cadence where we have certain guides that are printed every other year, and this coming up year will be our destination guide. It is pretty costly, however, we would like to scale that down just a bit. Even though our demographic is a little more seasoned, they do let us handheld maps and destination guides. We are able to save some with some QR codes that are sprinkled within as well. And of course, we've got some temporary labor that's built into that budget section as well. In terms of tourism promotion, we'd like to decrease this expense by 7%. Mainly because we made such an investment this year in our new website, we won't need to make that investment again. So now we've moved from implementation to now maintenance mode. We just introduced the new website during National Travel and Tourism Week, which was just a few weeks ago. Of course, increasing printing, we're sharing that cost with direct group booking and tourism in order to print that destination guide. We do maintain two websites. The Live in High Point site is also maintained by Visit High Point. That we are servicing those mail outs for any kind of relocation packets or retirement packets as well. We get curated leads from Visit North Carolina and certain ad placements that we put in from time to time. There's other marketing tools that we need to invest in, such as our events calendar, which is highly used. In fact, it's number one on our website in terms of engagement. We also get research reporting from CoStar, Smith Travel Research, Keydata, and Placer. We would like to offset some Placer costs with a revenue stream for Partners that would like some special research projects ran just for them. Cuz sometimes it does take a lot of time to run those reports. We do have a social media contract with the outside provider. And of course our visitor center, it takes about $30,000 to run the visitor center. I'm happy to say that our visitor center traffic is up 25%. Our concierge traffic is up 41%. And our furniture shopping mail outs are also up another 25%. So visitor center is doing really well. In terms of tourism advertising, the advertising we have budgeted to remain flat from last year of about 102,500. Here are some of the lines of advertising that we have in place for next year, some that should be familiar to you. We always get the question, why don't you just do print advertising in our state every single month? And it's just because we just can't afford it. We have to be very strategic with our state magazine. We do some digital with them and even some special curated work as well. We already talked about printing that's increasing by 46%. We just finished printing the home furnishings and design guide as of this fiscal year. Here's some other guides that we print as well. Restaurant, tent cards, downtown rack cards. Lots of QR codes on that downtown rat card. And of course, we just integrated the little Sally troll rat card as of two months ago. Our events development department will increase their budget by 33%. Right now, we're in a maintenance mode with the events development department. We still want to curate two festivals from Visit High Point being Winter Glow at the Point, as well as Savor High Point International Food Festival. We'd like for the Arts Council to take the leadership role in Maine in Color and us to take a management or supportive role with that, and they're in favor. We're helping Unity Day Festival to grow their attendance as well.

Is Unity Day Washington Street Unity Festival?

That's the one. That's usually in October or in the fall. Stocktoberfest is a new event in partnership with Stock and Grain that will be in the fall as well. And our highly attended events are usually during the holiday months, so Rebecca and the High Point Holiday Stroll, we want to make sure that the High Point Holiday Party goes off without a hitch. And of course, Winter Glow at the Point will be curated from a 20-day opportunity date. Winter Glow at the Point was an investment last year. Thanks to the ARPA grant that we received from the city, we were able to purchase those initial lighting assets in order to implement that interactive light experience at the stadium. We won't have to make that substantial investment now that we have ownership of a lot of those lights. We did find a private donor that wants to add more lights to the experience, so we're delighted about that. So that budget goes from $496,000 in year one now to $299,000 in year two. This is what our budget allocation looks like. In terms of administrative, it's about 30%. Operations around 20%. Direct group booking is at 13%. Tourism is at 16%. Events development is at 10%. And we'd like to curate about $25,000 to go back into our reserve to build our operation expenses up to about six to eight months of operating expenses. We're right now at about four and a half. So at this point, I'd like to ask any questions that you may have of me.

Thank you, Olivia. What's the scope, Brandon?

Yes, thank you for that report so far. You mentioned 25% increase in traffic to your office. Yes. Does that coincide with our annual markets, or are these kind of off-season traffic? Is that kind of year-round?

Locating to our downtown area has been extreme health. Now that the Spring Hill Suites is right beside us, we've become more visible. And that's really a lot of that traffic.

Perfect. Good. I'm glad. I wouldn't care when it came. I just wondered if it was an offshoot of market people more so. But hearing that it's back to that.

The hotel, Little Sally, we're getting a lot of Little Sally traffic as well.

Perfect. You mentioned something about a military market. Can you elaborate on that?

Well, I just wanted to make sure that everybody understood the acronym of SMERF. And if you're not in the industry, you might not know that lexicon. So SMERF means social, military, educational, religious, and paternal. That's just the small meetings market. One example that I can give you would be the Veteran Benefits Live event that we hosted maybe two years ago. That would be a small event. And we still have our partnership with High Point Veterans Initiative and would like to introduce some of that in the future when the timing's right.

Excellent. Thank you. ANY OTHER QUESTIONS, COUNCIL? AND UPDATE ON SALI VISITORS, YOU KNOW, First, it was, you know, you had to wait 30 minutes to see. I was curious how the visitation is nowadays.

As of May the 15th, we're at 64,500, I believe, is the latest count. We just had our board meeting today. We monitor that activity on social media quite often. We have lots of visibility of folks coming out with their Sunday Today show mugs. If you follow that, that is the show with Willie Geist on Sunday morning on Today. They are taking those mugs and taking pictures with little Sally. So stay tuned. We're hoping that we can get some exposure with High Point on the Today show on Sunday morning because there's been at least three families that's done that. So that was just the fun little antidote today at the board meeting.

Yeah, I know anecdotally. Every so often, I will go out there, either myself or I'll take my boys out there. And I'm just curious to ask folks where they're from and why they're here in town. And I have the folks I talk to literally only came because of Little Sally. And either they're a trail hunter or they just heard about it. They're coming from the Triad, the Triangle, Charlotte, and even some folks from out of state. And then other folks I talked to are here for something such as, maybe they were at Condon Yards, or they were here for some kind of sports event at the lake or something like that, or even for market. And they said they heard about the show thing on social media, and everyone said, you got to go see it. So they stopped by to go see it. So it was really cool just hearing folks' stories. I always sound like I'm just some observer from the side, because I don't want to hear their complaints about politics.

I do that too. I like to pick up any kind of litter around Little Sally and I kind of go like this just to hear what folks are saying. I don't want to get in their conversation but just try to eavesdrop to see where they're from and what questions they may have. Most importantly, we're hearing some feedback from our businesses saying that they're getting Little Sally traffic. Our hotels are seeing Little Sally traffic. Our restaurants are as well. We're seeing that the property around Little Sally is being kept up a little nice and neat. And we enjoy that partnership that we have with the city. In particular, our assistant city manager, Damon McCain, has been very instrumental in making that happen for us. I think that's going to sting.

Mel, I have to step out briefly. I am curious about a couple things. I'm curious about the impact of sports tourism on our city. That the line you guys are probably monitoring over the past few years, it feels like between Rockers, Carolina Core FC, what's happening at the lake with the rowing events. I'm probably forgetting some stuff. Do you feel like it's just been a regular steady this or did we at a certain point because of some events kind of become more steep, I guess, in that incline? What are you seeing?

We do have a stronghold on sports tourism, but it is very niche. I mean, we do have some professional sports here like Carolina course soccer, like High Point Rockers baseball. like High Point Rowing Championships, that's not oversaturated in the marketplace. So those markets are growing quite nicely for us. When it comes time to amateur events, that's really where the opportunity is for High Point to grow that section of sports tourism.

Amateurs such as?

This would be high school groups, groups that can come in the middle of the week up to the weekend. Lots of opportunity there, and I'm hoping that there'll be some grant realignment from a state level where we can get into that business, maybe with some product development in the future. Nice.

I wonder if there will be an uptick in, ever since March Madness, in folks wanting to go watch the Panthers play. That might be pretty cool. My other question is just thinking about events with the hotel being developed. right across the street from Cotton Yards and all of these meeting spaces. You may have talked about this already, but did we see any uptake there because of that in terms of the trend or data?

Yes, we've seen an uptick in the small meetings market. Our effort right now has been internal sales. If it lands in our lap, we will service it. If it requires a bid, we'll bid on it. But we're not actively going to trade shows or doing sales calls on that yet. because there's a little bit of lack of product. There's another hotel, perhaps a little bit more meeting space. It puts us in a whole other competitive bracket to go after business that would be a better return on investment, I would say. We have carved out some opportunity for our event strategist to dabble into the small meeting space business as well. She's curious, and we would like for her to have some capacity there, because we see that there's opportunity for growth there.

It's interesting. I've heard you all talk about conferences. I think Rebecca talked about Preservation NC and then the large cities for downtown. I think someone else told me NAACP, but the state is here. BMO, I think, is coming next year or something like that, I think someone says. So we're attracting these conferences, but it's just all internal, you say, like it's something else driving it or...

They will either call our office and be excited, call the hotel, or call Congdon Yards and maybe help us align rates or services, transportation around that opportunity. If we can, we'd love to coordinate things with Rebecca. If that group's coming and overlapping a weekend the first Saturday of the month, we're going to coordinate with her to curate Social Saturday and have them take advantage of that. I would say that we've had at least 10 groups in the last three months that have been booked. Most of the groups are booking close in and not far out in advance. I've been here for 23 years now. I remember the years that we used to book 10 years out into the future. I think that that trend has softened where we're doing more closer in activity a year or two out, unless you're in a cadence of going to Mountains Beach and maybe to Piedmont. Yeah, there's a lot of opportunity there. We're recognizing it in our office.

Well, one comment. The North Carolina Historic Preservation Society, this will be the first time that they've done a conference in High Point in the history of High Point. So that's really super exciting. And I got to meet their board chair in Fayetteville, Arkansas, and so she was really super excited about it coming. And then I also wanted to add, I'm the liaison on the Visit High Point board, and you and your staff are rock stars. Y'all do such You run a tight ship. You do really good work. And I also wanted to add one thing that I loved from the meeting earlier is your engagement with public arts and kind of like spearheading that Viva La Arts committee that kind of helps identify areas in our city where public art can come and trying to kind of help champion that. So thank you for that, too. Thank you. Little Sally is a perfect example of that, public art. So anyway.

I think there's been some renewed interest in public art now because of Little Sally.

Yeah, I think so, too. So thank you.

Any final questions? No, thank you, appreciate it. I don't have a really cool segway for you, Steven. I tried to make it up on the spot, but it's just, it wasn't going there. Next we'll hear from our budget and performance director, Mr. Steven Howard, on the city's proposed budget, and to present also on some outstanding questions that maybe council and our communities have about the budget.

Thank you, Mayor. So get ready for the presentation overview. We'll kind of work through the slides. Just a short slide with some responses to questions from our work session last week. Some slides on the separation allowance. Talk about background and also kind of what one may look like for the fire department and also some other retirement incentives that were offered in about what a potential low-income homeowner's assistance program could look like, and the next steps, which is just our remaining calendar. And so a couple responses to questions that we just wanted to, I think, quite have specifics on last week we wanted to touch upon. There was a question about traffic calming. We also call it neighborhood traffic enhancements. And so there was an allocation in the 24-25 budget, in the transportation capital budget, of $50,000. And traffic calming takes a while between working with the neighborhoods and figuring out what might work and what can be afforded. But there are two neighborhoods currently in the process, and when I say in the process, ready to go to have speed bumps installed. There are other neighborhoods that are having discussions with transportation. Transportation is ready to move and spending some of those dollars within these neighborhoods Two will be installed on Williams Avenue and eight will be installed in the Cedro Drive neighborhood between Arlington Street and Gordon Road And there was also a question on illegal parking fines and so This is actually our city code in the public safety enforcement section. So there is a civil penalty currently of $50, and this must be paid within seven days to not incur additional penalties. Moving on to separate relational allowance. First we're talking about police separation allowance because it's kind of what's already in existence. And so the police separation allowance was authorized by the North Carolina General Assembly and was effective on January 1st of 1987. You see the eligibility criteria. The ones we really look at, if you retire under elder, if you're a full government employer, you're going to retire under elders. 30 years of creditable service or be at least age 55 with five years of creditable service, five years of continuous law enforcement officer preceding that retirement, you have to retire prior to reaching age 62, and at least 50% of your total creditable service must be in a law enforcement position. This is the traditional eligibility. Last year, they did make an additional type of eligibility. This was in an effort to, we kind of heard that, you know, once a police officer would reach that 30 years, they would retire so as not to leave money on the table. And so the General Assembly passed an additional kind of caveat to this that if you reach your 30 years but continue working, you could still be eligible for what you would have received. What does that mean? If you hit 30 years and you're 55, if you retired, you get seven years of payments up until age 62. If you waited a couple years and you retired at age 57, you would still get those seven years. So instead of your benefits ceasing at 62, they would cease two years later. And so that's still fairly new, but it was just another option to provide for that for police. The separation analysis is provided monthly to those who are eligible. The formula is 0.85% of your final base pay multiplied by your years of creditable service. Here are the last five years of actuals for the city, our actual costs, and the number eligible or numbers receiving in those fiscal years.

If I may, these numbers I was sort of looking for, they're not broken out specifically, but they're all under the lease? Yes. Okay, thank you.

Prior to this year, there was a small subset in Parks and Recreation, where the park rangers were listed, who were sworn law enforcement. Park rangers are now organized under the police department. And so all of our expenses are in the police department's budget.

Thank you. On this here, how much could you say is the ballpark of the actual cost per year? Did we get any type of funding support from the state? No. This is an unfunded mandate from the state.

And so there have been requests, several public meetings, for a fire separation allowance. And so we have, in budget, run some calculations using the same eligibility and formula criteria that would mimic what police currently receives. So we just threw an example of kind of how the math works. So if a firefighter retired with a final base year salary of $75,000, you multiply that by 30 years of service. That would be $19,125 per year or just under $1,600 per month. We did look at some data we had based on hire dates and also age of our existing fire department personnel. Our assumption was once you were eligible for either is when the retirement would happen. We obviously don't know what that behavior would be on an individual basis, but if you reach 55 or if you hit that 30 years. Projected costs and number eligible. And again, this is just based on what the budget office ran. This is not an actuarial study or analysis. This is kind of what it would look like initially is what we think from a budget impact.

I'm curious about the, I know you said it's just a kind of projection, but the jump from 2030 to 2031. Is it commensurate with the number eligible? Is that just because folks who might retire in that span would be folks with higher base pay salaries? Not necessarily.

It could be a function on the size of the incoming classes when you have a group of firefighters that come in. One year you may have a smaller class than the previous year, but when you look at when people plan to reach those benchmarks of the 55 or 30 years, this is what the numbers look like based on our current population.

So if you have a year where you bring in... And current base pay or is base pay just based on whatever the base pay is at that year for the city?

We've estimated the $75,000 as being just an average salary. As we continue to do increases or the market changes, that number could change, but that's just an average.

It won't go down.

It won't go down. It won't go down. So, Stephen, do you think an actual actuarial kind of look at this would... I mean, I guess it's an unknown, but would you expect it to be way off from what is sketched out here? I mean, could it be wildly different?

I'm not sure exactly. I do know that one thing the actuarial study or analysis would look at is also kind of what your liability that you keep on the books is. It would kind of be your liability, but also what your expected benefit payments are. I don't know how accurate this will be. I'd be very curious to see based on the information we have versus what, you know, they have potentially.

Well, I think this gives us a ballpark because, you know, we, like, for example, the 10 in fiscal year 27, five might decide to retire 55, so it might go longer. We just don't know. But this gives us an idea where we are. So I think it's good enough to work with for now.

And if the city were to do this, The terms around it are the ones that the city would set because there's no state legislation here. So it could be, like you say, Councilman Andrew, we could do like how the first legislation was, which was at 55 and you get it up to age 62. Or it could be you get seven years after retirement or five years after retirement or whatever it is. It sounds like. If we were to set a policy, it's based on whatever policy we set here. It doesn't have to be seven years after retirement. It could be for five years after retirement, you get .75% of the base pay by 30 years of service, right?

We use Polices as just a model to keep it consistent with not trying to speculate on any changes to eligibility criteria.

Well, if it were up to me, I'd imagine we'd want to match what we're doing with the police department.

That's just, that's a sorry. Well, what they are doing for the police department, that we're waiting to do.

Was there anything going, any conversations in the state currently about mandating the fire at the same level as the police? Is there any conversations or any legislation out there?

Not that I've seen any. Raleigh legislation, particularly this session, I can't recall anything specific to this.

I think the last time that there was a formal discussion in the legislature was in 2019, where it was brought up, but it has been a conversation where it has been expressed to individual members that there's an interest in having that, but it hasn't been actually taken up or a bill put forward that's gained any traction. I think the last one that I was able to provide was 2019. And I think at that point it was referred to a study commission, and I don't know that it actually came back up for action.

So one thing we could possibly do is reach out to our state legislators and ask for them to look into this.

If the council chose to, you could. And there's also... WE WERE, YOU KNOW, GATHERING INFORMATION FROM SOME OF THE OTHER COMMUNITIES, SMALLER COMMUNITIES, BUT SPECIFICALLY MORRISVILLE, THEY ALLOW THE SEPARATION ALLOWANCE, BUT THEY ALSO PROVIDE IT TO THEIR TELECOMMUNICATORS AS WELL. SO WHEN YOU TALK ABOUT CITIES' ABILITY TO SET PARAMETERS, YOU'RE ABLE TO DO THAT. THEY HAVE A LITTLE BIT HIGHER RETIREMENT AGE THAT THEY RECOMMEND FOR THEIR POLICY, AND THEY ALSO REQUIRE YOU TO BE WITH THE CITY FOR 25 YEARS OR EITHER 30, DEPENDING ON how it's structured. So there's flexibility there.

Okay, and I have another question. So as far as like disability insurance, because sometimes, but I guess my question is, if you've got disability insurance, then you wouldn't have to necessarily worry about having something like this. Is that correct? Not necessarily. It depends on the situation. Okay.

It depends on the situation.

Does that money go out taxed? Does that show up to them? Do they pay tax on this money?

We did do some comparisons with some of the cities that we usually benchmark at. I know there were some others that FIRE had noted in some documentation they put together, so we did want to acknowledge that as well. Other than Gastonia and Morrisville, it is not offered. I have asterisks there for Greensboro and Raleigh. They did have Either actuary analyses or full studies completed as part of their review process. Other jurisdictions, Mebane, Statesville, Elizabeth City, and New Hanover County, we did confirm that it is proposed in the New Hanover County budget. Greensboro just put their budget out yesterday. We know it was part of their budget kind of lead up. We did not see any mention of it. We are still reviewing it.

we can actually get their actuarial analysis.

And I know for New Hanover County, they have fire districts that have separate taxing authority that helps to cover the cost for them adding that into their budget.

Okay, as a county, not as a state. As a county.

Right, right. I'm also just mindful, speaking sort of factually here, that for the areas that do have it, the much smaller populations and smaller fire departments and smaller in terms of which folks would be eligible per year, the budgetary impact is a fraction of what we're talking about on our list here. So.

Gastonia is just around, I think, 50, a little over 50,000. Northville is close to 80, 85, I think, in terms of population range. I'm sorry, Gastonia is closer to the 85, 8885, and Morrisville is a smaller community.

It'd be interesting to know the thinking, and I know that goes back, but still all these years later, what they were thinking in Raleigh at the time to push this through, move this through for one set of first responders and not follow I don't understand the logic of that.

Not a question, just a comment.

We also want to provide some information on just a previous retirement incentive stipend that was provided here in the city of High Point. So there was a retirement stipend that was approved by the city council back in 2003. eligible to all employees age 55 and older with 30 or more years of service or age 60 with five years or more of service. The incentive was $412.50 per month or $49.50 per year for up to 40 months. The position that was vacated by the person retiring was held vacant and that vacancy savings paid for that portion of the program. The program was discontinued at the end of 2020.

Do you know how many employees

FROM THE LAST NUMBERS THAT I HAD, WE HAD ROUGHLY 19 EMPLOYEES THAT PARTICIPATED IN THE PROGRAM AT THE TIME THAT IT WAS IN PLACE.

I'M NOT SURE WHERE THE POSITION IS. THAT PERSON WAS ACTUALLY NEEDED.

I KNOW IT TAKES A MINUTE, THOUGH. BRITT, MONICA, I DON'T REMEMBER ALL OF OUR CONVERSATIONS FROM 2020. THAT WAS COVID YEAR. WE HAD A LOT OF CONVERSATIONS. Do y'all remember, or Eric, Greg, do y'all remember why council, maybe you here too, why council did agree to keep that?

I'll just share. I think one of the recommendations was made because we found that over time there were such a low number of people taking advantage of it. And when you think about a retirement incentive like that, really the proper way to administer that is to offer it and then don't offer it for several years and then offer it again. But we had offered it every year. So you had a number of employees who, when they got to that decision point, they said, well, we'll just wait because we're going to have it next year. So the effectiveness was not quite there anymore.

So we'll play the what-if game. If we were to implement this, some payroll savings because we have a person who's making X and then they decide to take advantage of it, retire to be eligible for the separation line so we're not paying them their regular salary, so that would be somewhat of an offset. Was that, am I making sense? Yeah, potentially. It would just depend on, well, yeah, but we generally retire more expensive employees people and you also have to spend some time training your new staff so you're making that investment there too I don't know that it would be a dollar-for-dollar yeah I mean I don't expect to be dollar-for-dollar but I mean there's what I'm trying to get is that the impact may not be as big as the initial numbers but you know again just throwing out ideas there but there will be some pay going to take advantage of it tend to be older and more expensive than, you know, the new guys won't be able to take advantage of it. It's usually the older folks.

In the Actuarial Study, you sort of take that into consideration? That kind of potential payroll savings, would that be part of that study that Greensboro did? Or would it just be expenses when folks retire?

That's a question we would need to reach out to those doing the study and see what would be the kind of comprehensive . The last kind of section for the presentation involves low income homeowners assistance program. And so this would be tax relief assistance for low income property owners. There are programs currently offered by the city of Greensboro and Guilford County. And so just kind of what it could potentially look like could be up to 50% of the current year's tax bill for a single family residential unit. That's considered real property. The assistance would only be applied to the high point portion of your property tax bill and would be administered by the community development and housing department. And then a lot of bullets on eligibility requirements, but it kind of had to be high point resident, must be a primary residence, kind of a threshold on the property tax value, also kind of an income threshold. less than or equal to 8% of the area median income. You don't owe any delinquent taxes or any liens to the city. You can't be eligible for other statutory exclusions or deferments.

Steven, the one, you said Guilford County offers it. Does it just offer to folks who are in the county outside of Greensboro High Point limits?

I believe it's eligible to all, but they also have kind of, it's criteria based. So some in High Point can be receiving it, some in Greensboro can be receiving it, but it property tax.

And Green Spruce is also similar, obviously. I see what you're saying. Okay, I see what you're saying. The part that goes straight to the county, not the part that goes to the county, comes back to High Point.

Do you have any idea how many households might potentially qualify?

We started to try to figure that out, and it's hard to quantify because there are roughly 16... THOUSAND TOTAL HOUSEHOLDS BASED ON THE NUMBER OF OCCUPANTS THAT MIGHT FALL INTO THAT CRITERIA IN TERMS OF MEETING THE INCOME REQUIREMENTS. BUT THEN THE QUESTION BECOMES, WHAT'S THE VALUE OF THEIR HOME? RIGHT. AND THEN THE OTHER QUESTION THAT WE WERE UNABLE TO ANSWER IS WHETHER OR NOT THEY MIGHT QUALIFY FOR AN EXISTING TAX RELIEVE PROGRAM EITHER BY BEING A VETERAN OR IF THEY HAVE A DISABILITY OR IF THEY'RE ELDERLY. SO BEING ABLE TO ACTUALLY QUANTIFY THE NUMBER OF FOLKS THAT MAY BE ELIGIBLE WAS A LITTLE DIFFICULT.

Has Fraser already known this a while?

It just started. Oh. Very recent.

Okay.

And Guilford County is planning to do theirs. This will be the first year that they're doing theirs. So I think people are looking at that and trying to figure it out.

Yeah. Okay. I mean, obviously, if you get to know them.

I don't know that it would be necessarily significant revenue loss because most of them cap the amount of support that would be provided. It's usually either around half of the portion of the parking tax is up to $700, I do believe, is for the program. You know, some go up to $1,000 or more, depending on the area, when you're looking at kind of the Wake County or the bone of the Nashville areas. So those are, again, are parameters that would have to be set by your local jurisdiction. Right.

Okay. The interesting thing about this, which I think most of us know, is that while it would be an opportunity to low-income homeowners, it would not be an opportunity to low-income renters. The property tax would still be what it would be for PROPERTY, THE LANDLORD WILL LIKELY INCREASE RENT, WHICH THEY HAVE THE RIGHT TO DO. JUST ACKNOWLEDGING THAT OUT LOUD, THAT THIS WOULD NOT BE AN ASSISTANCE PROGRAM FOR ALL LOW INCOME FOLKS, JUST THE LOW INCOME FOLKS WHO OWN THE HOUSE. I CAN IMAGINE HOW DETAILED AND MAYBE INVOLVED OF A PROCESS IT WOULD BE TO HAVE TO TRY TO have a low-income assistance program for renters, too, which I can only imagine how far that goes, because you'd have to.

But then you'd be subsidizing the landlord, right?

Well, but the landlord would have to be, whatever it's getting in terms of discount, would have to be directly applied to renters. That's why I said that. You're in charge, Mayor. You're subsidizing somebody in any scenario.

I know, but I mean, this is something. This is a more direct, something that might be income constrained, inflation and all that sort of stuff. What were you about to say?

I think the closest thing that you get to providing assistance for renters is programs that are available through certain nonprofits where you provide rental assistance to individuals. That would be the closest form of support, I think, that you have. And some of those programs exist through different partners.

point the the next steps or the the calendar and so we do have any work session which is the if necessary work session scheduled for next wednesday at 4 p.m and then tentative budget adoption set for monday june 1st and i will say to council that our tentative adoption date i i would recommend that council consider adoption at our second meeting in june

We continue just to kind of follow the general conversations at our legislature. We're usually pretty early in our adoption process, and that helps staff to be prepared to actually roll our budget and get everything transitioned for the new year. But I do think that it would be prudent for this year for us to wait until the 15th just to continue to monitor things. But we can have things finalized because it's still going to be that type of turnaround for our staff to be able to roll everything into our new system. But as long as we know what things are, By that early June date, I think we can still be prepared to actually adopt by our second meeting in June and still make our deadlines for July 1.

With that in mind, then, I'll ask Council, my thinking on that is if we're pushing to June 15th for adoption, we don't need the budget work session next Wednesday because any questions and discussions we need to have, we

discussion on June 15th.

Does that make sense?

So June 1st, we do have our regular special meeting, regular meeting. So we would have to set another meeting date for council to have a work session if you don't want to have...

I'm not saying to have a work session. What I'm saying is when we get to June 1st and it's an agenda item, there can be discussion. And if there's unreadiness, then we just don't vote for approval on June 1st. We wait to vote June 15th, which is what I think we're planning to do. What Right? Yeah.

Are there changes that you all would like to see to what we presented? Because if that's the case for June 1st, we would be preparing based on the budget that has been recommended. So if there are changes in staff, we need to know.

I think where there's still some discussion and questions is about the retirement incentive and special separation. I think the council is still curious about that. I know we asked a lot of questions today, but... leaned anywhere. Could we chop it up on May 27th?

I think so.

I mean, to figure out a program.

I tend to agree if we haven't scheduled, then let's use that time. We also have June 1st scheduled already.

So we're going to be on June 1st. So whatever we could discuss, May 27th, we could discuss June 1st. Okay, it was my understanding...

Sorry. My apologies. June 1st, we have that time for closed session personnel, so we have more. We can discuss it during our regular meeting. During the regular meeting, okay. Yes.

Yes. Okay, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was my understanding that we directed staff to give us some of the numbers from some of those other cities. Was that correct? Well, as for the actuarial study. Yes.

from Greensboro to be sent to you all. Okay. I don't know that that's going to help inform what numbers would look like for us. Okay. It would tell you all what was included as part of that analysis. Okay. But we would not be able to have an actuarial study done by that time. Okay. We can share that report if we're able to obtain that.

Okay. Well, how about, like you were talking about, if we set the policy, then we would do the parameters. I mean, maybe we want to have a discussion about what those parameters would look like and then what... PUSP TO THE BUDGET WOULD BE?

YEAH, I THINK WE NEED TO HAVE MORE DISCUSSION. I THINK WHAT I'M JUST SORT OF PUTTING OUT THERE, AND IT'S UP TO THE GROUP TO DECIDE, IS THAT WE GOT TO BE HERE JUNE 1ST ANYWAYS. AND HAVE WE NOT HAD RALLY THAT WE'RE WAITING ON, WE WOULD HAVE DISCUSSED ON JUNE 1ST AND VOTED THEN. SO IF WE'RE NOT CHOOSING TO DISCUSS ON JUNE 1ST, WE'RE GOING TO COME HERE ON JUNE 1ST. MAYBE WE'LL LEAVE EARLIER ON JUNE 1ST. BUT THAT'S JUST SO THAT WE CAN COME ON THE EXTRA DAY ON and we can spend time here two days at City Hall, Wednesday and June 1st, or we can just take that time to schedule June 1st. I'm fine either way, whatever y'all want to do.

I just think conversation's more conducive around this rather than like this. I agree. Yeah.

All right, so you all want to keep the budget work session for 27? I say yes.

We'll try to obtain the actuarial study ahead of time and provide that. If we don't, we'll make sure we try to have that on the 27th. Is there any information for the income assistance program that you all would like to have? I think we've provided what we know from those other communities. There are some parameters that staff has considered. I think it helps to have some uniformity across the programs, but there is... one current exemption that's provided where staff was a little bit concerned if we would disqualify folks if they fell under that exemption because it actually provides a lien on their property. So if we have a way to be able to help them, if council would choose to move forward, then we would want to make what that caveat in our program if council wanted to move forward there. But we haven't been able to look at it in a lot of detail aside from the existing programs that are available.

I guess if Graysboro's a year in, it might be... Nice, whatever insight we can glean from them. Take, I guess, staff time, because the community development housing is going to be managing this, you know, their counterparts in Greensboro, and probably gnashing their teeth when all these things come in. Or that, you know, fairly, once you sort of get it down, it's not all that complicated.

It's fairly intense during the application period, which is usually kind of that July to October time frame of intake, and you're meeting with individuals, having to verify assets and income After that period of time, then you're trying to verify that they do qualify, let them know what they qualify for, and then usually the payment is remitted directly to their tax office.

Yeah.

And that takes place the latter part of the year, so we would have to figure out what those business processes look like for us. So, you know, standing it up in this short amount of time between a budget being adopted and June 15th and then us open up an application period would be

Right.

Takes some time. Right.

Well, we could have it start maybe before we do it. Wait, not the fiscal year. That would be helpful. I mean, be curious to know if there are any kind of non-profit organization degrees where that's really helping facilitate some of these things too. That would be nice to know.

Yeah, thank you. A lot of work. This must be what it feels like to sit in on a Federal Reserve meeting. I haven't had the pleasure.

I was a vacant position, Britt.