City Council - workshop

of the Jacksonville City Council to order. Council, you have a copy of the proposed agenda for tonight and we would like to add an item and we'll put it down at NA. And this is an annexation for Veritas Retail Partners. With that, I would entertain a motion. Second. Any further discussion? All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed? Next we have the adoption of the minutes from the August 18, 2026 regular meeting and also adoption of the consent items listed.

Move approval of the minutes and consent items as presented. Second.

So that brings us down to the discussion topics for tonight. And the first one will be number 11. Do you need to vote too? I'm sorry. I guess we ought to do some voting, Natalie. Thank you. That's what you're here for, to remind me. All right. All those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed, okay. Now we'll move on to the discussion. I was just ripping where I'm ready to go here. This is number 11, resolution to redistricting the city of Jacksonville's electoral vote awards.

Good evening, everybody. Good evening. My name is Caroline Mackey. I'm an attorney with Pointer Spruill. My colleague Nick Tosco and I will be working with you as we go through this process, assuming you all desire to go through this process. There we go. Okay. So, like I said, I'm an attorney, so my job is to advise you about the legal process and procedures that govern redistricting. Tonight's discussion is going to be on council's consideration and potential approval of a resolution to redistrict. And let me just give just a brief background to get us started. So the city of Jacksonville charter contains the structure of city council and how you all are elected. And so, as you all know, you've got two council members who are elected at large from the city as a whole, and you've got four council members who are elected from wards. And those are... considered electoral districts, so the candidate has to reside in the district and only the voters who live in that district can vote for those seats. And let me talk just a minute about the authority that you all have to redistrict. As you all know, the legislature can come in and redistrict, can change your structure at any point in time, but that doesn't mean that you also don't have the authority to redistrict. The applicable statute is General Statute 160A-23B, and it says council shall have authority to revise electoral district boundaries from time to time. Then it talks about if the boundaries are in the city charter, yours are not. So that sentence does not apply. And then the next sentence says that when you have established districts in conformity with the Constitution, so that's generally your redistricting after each census, or territory is annexed to or excluded from the city, whichever event occurs first, then you can redistrict. And in redistricting, you may use the data from the most recent federal census, which would be 2020, and you're not required to use any other population estimates. So even though we know population changes over the decade, you're allowed to use census data. So as I said, the boundaries are not set out in your city charter, and you have recent annexed territory. It is perhaps a good time to be considering redistricting. So what council has before it tonight is a proposed resolution to redistrict. It recognizes the change that has occurred in your municipal corporate boundaries with that recent annexation, the session law 2026-56. It preserves the board system as it currently exists. So four electoral districts, two members at large. It recognizes that the charter language that was added in 2006 relative to two of your wards cannot be removed without making changes to your structure. So again, it preserves the ward structure as it currently exists. And it recognizes an intent to redistrict to account for that new territory and in compliance with law. And it generally describes the process that you would use to redistrict. So that's what's before council tonight. The next time that we meet would be just a discussion of the criteria that's going to govern the process. Some of those are required by law. Some of them are optional. And likely following that would be a resolution that actually establishes the criteria to govern. There are questions. I will be happy to answer those. I have a question for you.

Yes, sir. You were talking about using the census, about typically using the census for this. How do you figure on the population in between, if you could explain that to me?

If you were to use something other than the census? So there's something called American Community Survey, comes between census. It's not an official count. It's more of an estimate. You can use that data. You can also rely just internally on staff who know sort of the planning and how population has changed, where the growth has been, that sort of thing.

so i have one question so the process of how this is going to go we're going to solicit community input um that'll be that'll be discussed at a later day right that that will be yes so when i come back next time we'll talk about criteria and it's up to council whether and when you want to have a public hearing and solicit public comment if you want that at the

The point of selecting criteria, you do need a public hearing at some point in the process, but how you receive that public comment is up to council.

And the criteria would also include whether we have a citizens committee that advises us or not. That's right.

That's right, and that's part of the process that council will decide. Okay, so really no decisions other than the resolution, is that right? That's right, tonight is just simply this resolution to start the process.

You mentioned the population from the census. What was the other group or other data? American Community Survey. That's something that we initiate?

No, that's data that is already out there. Got it, got it. That's just an example of somewhere else.

The Census Bureau does that.

anybody other questions so you're asking for some some action approval there was a request tonight is a decision on the resolution to redistrict to initiate the process.

Mr. Mayor, I move we approve the resolution as presented so we can begin the process.

I have a motion and a second by Mr. Lillingham. Any other discussion? Hearing none, all in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed? Okay. Motion carries. We'll go down to number 12.

If the council doesn't need her further, we're going to go ahead and move this aside. Oh, absolutely. Thank you. Thank you. I will see you in a few weeks.

Mayor, Council. It's been a while since we talked about the ERP, so what I'm coming here tonight to do is provide you an update of where we're at, where we're going to be at, and where we're headed. So right now, we'll get started with... Like I said, this is our update and what I'm here to do is provide you with the current status of our Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the EMP implementation. And then we're just going to discuss some of the challenges and successes that we had during this process. And then probably provide you an update with the schedule remaining as we go through this implementation process. All right, so why the need for an ERP? For some of the council members who haven't been here, when we first started this back in 2022, we needed one to replace the aging legacy system that we had. This system is 30 years old. It's outdated. There's a lot of work around in place to make the system work. There's probably only a handful of people who have been here when we first implemented the system back in 1996. But we also need to modernize our technology. And a lot of ERP these days are cloud-based systems that are no longer done on premises. And we make sure that we wanted to integrate our financial system with our other departmental systems that we have throughout the city. One of the things that we don't have with our current ERP is we don't have a test environment. So having that ability to have a test environment where we can go into the system, test workflows and configurations prior to putting it in production helps us to have a better system than what we currently have. And like I said, we talked about integration. You know, having that seamless integration between multiple systems is what we're looking for instead of the manual processes that we were doing prior to going live with our systems. And then also improve internal business processes. We wanted to go through automation instead of, like I said, manual processes. You know, reduce some of the redundancy that we were having in a number of processes that we were used to complete a task, whether it was in finance or utility building or community development or whatever system that we have with our ERP. And in the improvement of customer service, we wanted to provide a modern tool for our customers and for our staff to use as we went through this ERP process. So right now, I'll give you kind of a timeline of where we were when we first started. So in April of 2022, we contracted with Barry Dunn, who was a consultant for us, to help us go through our business need assessment for phase one and phase two. When we first did this, we were just looking at one big process. But as we were starting talking to the consultant, they decided it was best for us to break this down into two phases. The first phase was our financial utility billing system, payroll, and human resources. And then our second phase was our work order system, our assets at fleet, and our community development system. So with the consultant, they worked with us to determine what our needs were, our needs requirements, help us do our RFP, do vendor demonstrations, scoring, help us with our selections. But ultimately we had a committee within the staff that did the selection of what vendor that we chose. And then they helped us through the contract review. So in December of 2023, we contracted with Uniburst and Neogov for our financial utility building, payroll, and human resources for our first phase of the project. And then in August of 2024, we went through the same process again with our consultant to go through the needs requirement, and then we made a determination as a selection committee to choose universe again for a work order system, assets, and a fleet. And then to have City View to do our community development system for our phase two project. So what have we completed so far in implementation? So in February of 2025, we did a go live with our human resources and our payroll. In July of 2025, we did go live with our work order system and our assets. And that was pretty much our public services department. We put through about three divisions of that, and we're currently working also to get the rest of those divisions in place, and also to include our parks department. In July of this year, we went live with our financial system. At the end of September, as of last week, on the first, we had to go live with our utility billing system.

That sure got some people's attention. Yes, it sure did.

So I'll talk more about that one here in a second. So what was our challenges? Like I said, we were talking about our challenges and our success doing this, but what were our challenges? Some of our challenges was our business process changes. There was a difference of how we did business based off a new system. So we wasn't expecting us to still do the same business with the new system. So we had to adapt and change to those business processes. Whether it was our process that we had to change or how we do business with the system itself. And also departments had to internally look at how they do business and adjust their business processes as well. So we also had to do user adaption and change management. A lot of people had, like I said, most of the city had been using the same system for years. So it took some time to get them trained, to get them to understand and to communicate with them that this was coming and then what the effects of it, when it did finally, go online. So that was always a challenge, and it will always be a challenge to any major software system that you do. But we worked through it, and like I said, through communication, training, and testing, we were able to be successful with that. Operating the Lexi system in a new system simultaneously. That became a challenge because one, you have to do your daily business that you do on a daily basis and also work in the system to test it and validate it and make sure that it works for you when you go live. So that was manpower intensive, a lot of overtime for certain staff members, but it was something that we had to do to make sure that system was ready to go. And then we also had delays in our go-live dates. There was times when we supposedly went live on certain systems at, you know, last year or earlier this year, but we just felt at the time that we weren't ready, well, the vendor wasn't ready to bring the product to where we needed to be. So we pushed our go-live dates back until we decided that we were ready to go. And then some system configuration improvement. So as we went along, we realized there was things that we could change that would make the product even better, make it better for our staff and also for our citizens. So what did we accomplish? This was, just doing the ERP was a major accomplishment itself. You know, this was a city-wide transformation. And this is, like I said, something that hasn't been done in over 30 years. So the fact that we've done an ERP and got to this point, it's not something that you do every two, three, five, even 10 years. It's something that's, you know, you put it in place and then you wait around probably for another few decades before you change it to another one. But we also saw some efficiencies when we did this DRP. We saw manual process become automated process. We saw better integration between systems. We talked about even, you know, being our HR system been online for over a year and a half, we've seen where we've had our HR system, our HRS system, can talk with our NeoGov, which is our application system, you know, onboarding system, where that process is now where they weren't even, the system wasn't even talking to each other or integrating with each other, where now you can go from, you know, an applicant to a candidate to an employee all in one step, you know, so that was a huge advantage over that. And then also just better integration between departments. We've seen that with the new system that we're now able to talk better with each other. We've also seen that even like with HR in the IT department and with finance. You know, IT was... you know, was controlling a lot of the systems, but we went from a centralized system where we kind of decentralized it and gave the departments the ability to kind of be system administrators of their own software system and us supporting them when we need it. So, What do we have left for our remaining implementations? So we're going to go live with our fleet work order system in November of 2026. Right now we're doing some validations, some testing and training. And that's the same thing that we're doing with our community development system, which permitting, planning, inspection, code enforcement, and business license, which we plan on going live on February 1st of 2027. So again, we're going through that validation, that testing and training. You know, one of the things with our community development system we're looking for is, you know, transparency and easy access for our citizens so that they can go through our portal that we're going to have And they can view those permits, those planning documents, you know, anything that's dealing with code enforcement. So they will have that ability that we don't currently have now. So... With that, that's all I have for this. But I do want to kind of thank our staff. Like I said, this has been a truly a four-year process. We've had multiple departments. Every department has been a part of this process. So the department heads and their staff have been working hard to get this done. We have had some issues, you know, as the mayor said, with our utility billing system. But the issues that we had was... wasn't related to the upgrade. We had some network issues last week that caused the utility bill system to have some delays in payments. But that's something that's not on them, that was on us. But really on us, it was really on our internet service provider. But we're working through that. Citizens can pay as they normally pay, minus right now we don't have the ability to do telephone payments. But we're working with that, and hopefully by the end of the week we'll have that resolved. So the system's only eight days old, so we'll see how it goes from there. The same with our financial system, it's only a little over 60 days.

Since I can't do it on the phone, can I get a coupon? You know, we can print one out for you.

Any questions?

Not a question, just a compliment. This kind of process is massive undertaking, very labor intensive, and a high stress process for every department when it's involved. Now that you're getting out of the sandbox into the live environment, I'm glad to hear you're seeing more sun. The light at the end of the tunnel is more sunshine than the train, so that's good. Please commend your staff and everyone who's been supportive in that role. If anybody's ever been through a software migration, it's not easy when it's a small one, and this was massive.

I, too, would echo that. I do have a couple questions. I'm assuming that this system will make us more secure as far as cybersecurity and somebody hijacking our system. And I know that you have some plans to be redundant in case we had a hurricane and things like that. Could you kind of elaborate on that just a little bit?

Well, I would probably want to talk to you offline, or we could talk in a closed session when we start talking about security. So I would... really kind of defer that to a later discussion if you would, Councilman.

Yeah, but it's going to be much more secure. Yes, it should be, yes.

Yeah, the software's got modern securities to build into it compared to the old systems.

And what about performance data? Are we going to be able to, you know, especially, you know, we've taken a lot of heat about our planning department and being able to look at a lot of the data as far as timelines and things like that.

That's one of the benefits of with the system. There's a lot of Availability for analytics to be done so that as we put more data into the system. We would be able to come up And provide that information. We'll be able to have even information for our directors and for our city management office to have Dashboard so they can review and see what What we have with certain processes or where we at with you know permits or planning information

You spoke a little bit about the transparency with citizens, accessibility. What is it that they would have accessibility to?

Well, they would have the ability to go into the portal and they would be able to see where their parameters are at. Okay, so there's a tracking. Yes, that's right.

Yes, exactly. And one of the major issues, Mayor, that we've seen in the state for the last decade has been the shot clock. And that's back to Mr. Nero's comment about how do you track the time it takes to process through a government entity. And so with the software, one of the things that we continuously want to watch is the amount of time that we have a permit request or an application as compared to the amount of time that an applicant has it because we want to return that back to them as soon as possible so that they can move forward with their projects. So hopefully as we continue to grow our systems, we'll have better analytics and better data. the user will have the ability to track on their own without having to call and say, where am I at right now? A lot of times we see it so that the dialogue is there between consultants, whether that's an engineer or an architect, and then our planning team or our engineer on our side. So everybody can look at the same data at the same time without having to call in and ask the question.

Anybody else? I have a question. Who, you said transparency, who can look at the permits? Is it only the applicant or the general public?

The general public can look at it. It all depends on how we want the system to be available to the public. We can restrict it or we can open it up as much as we want. So that's something that's going to have to be determined by staff.

Well, a lot of that goes back to open records laws. And so if there's a permit out and it's accessible through open records law, then we can have that accessible to people and it may make it more convenient. But again, we may want that to go through a records request process still. So back to Mayor Pro Tem's comment of reviewing a policy, I mean, that's where it comes down the analysis of what are customers looking for, what are citizens looking for in terms of transparency, what is information that should be readily available, and then what goes through the clerk's office in terms of that request. We've already changed the open records request process so that that's completely online. Before this, we've had a process where you send the email in or you call the clerk and you ask for information and then there's forms that go back and forth. Now you submit all your forms online and then we track it. So for Ms. Marshburn, she can track those dates, the date that you've submitted it in, the dates it's been reviewed, and then the date to get the information back out to individuals. That's already a new system that increases their transparency and it makes the process more efficient for both the city and for the user.

Reduces human error opportunities too when you've got everything in a system.

And people come through the same door. A lot of our challenges are people come through different doors and they may send something to the manager, to the attorney, or to the clerk. Our goal is we send everyone through for this. They go to the clerk. They get the information. It doesn't matter if there's other staff members that can review it. We have one centralized portal, and that's back to what Terrence was talking about in terms of the efficiency and effectiveness of the system. We just want to get better. We want to make sure we're performing better. And any of the challenges that we have now, we're very confident that the system we have in place will allow us to update those systems a lot more efficiently than the previous systems. Thank you, Church. Mayor Terrence gave that update. He gives credit to a lot of people, but Terrence has led this process for the four years, and that's another duty that he took upon himself, but it's his knowledge and skills and experience that allowed us to have this opportunity. Working with our finance director and the multiple department heads, they've been extremely efficient in making sure that we're coming out with a system that's not rushed, and is incredibly efficient. So I just say, again, kudos to Terrence for taking on this process and helping us navigate a difficult transition.

Next, we have number 13 here. This is a 21st Century Road to Housing Act. Tracy Jackson, please.

Good evening mayor, city council members. Thank you for the opportunity to come before you to answer some questions that some council members and some community leaders have had about the new 21st Century Road to Housing Act. This act came out in July 11th of 2026. And just wanted to just share that this is a policy bill, but not a new funding bill. So this is just a blueprint, not a mandate. And the purpose is to design to address the national housing affordable shortage by cutting some regulatory red tape and expanding funding opportunities. It also gives us an opportunity to develop actions to facilitate and improve our processes within the existing law in anticipation of any additional authorization coming through federal government and guidelines. So we have the National Environmental Policy Act, which governs and directs all of our environmental review processes. We have to do our environmental reviews prior to spending one dime of federal funds. So that process could take up to 30 days. So this is designed to streamline that process and it can take about 36 months for a developer to get through that process. So this gives HUD more authority to designate funds for housing development such as special project funds to help our multifamily developers expand some private capital, and hopefully we'll get more partnerships with that streamlining of the environmental review process. On a small scale such as our projects that we do, including the infill development, those projects may be exempted from the NEPA requirements. So this hopefully will reduce unnecessary delays and also help our projects move faster in the process while maintaining the protections such as flood areas. We also want to expand our community development block grant program to explore our neighborhood renewal initiatives. We want to seek to acquire foreclosures through a partnership with the Onslow County Tax Office for our infield construction and any existing home renovations. There's an opportunity within the bill for funding for a whole home repair program. That is a HUD pilot program and it is the only provision in the Act that comes with some funding. The landlords can apply for those funds and also local governments can apply for those funds. This also allows our CDBG programs to have new construction of our single family affordable housing as an eligible activity. Currently, we can only do reconstruction on existing lots, but now there's an opportunity for us to pursue new construction on undeveloped lot. So this modernized federal housing programs, it expands our housing supply tools, and hopefully it will reduce barriers to development. We also have an opportunity to explore new cost-saving architectural designs for multi-family apartments and condominiums. So we're talking about a structure that use a single centralized vertical circulation core, one staircase and one elevator to access all the units on each floor. So this directs HUD to establish some federal guidelines and award the grants for point access block buildings. And what is that? It's going to allow us to tap into some innovation funding, but I wonder what a point access block building look like. So this is what the concept of rendering from the test floor architects. This is what the new modernized multi-family housing is going to look like. You'll see the staircase and behind the staircase you have the elevators and you can access all of the floors using this concept. There are many more designs out there but I just wanted to share with council that this is what a point access block building looks like. So what's next? Local governments can start discussions to take advantage of the new programs and resources and to incorporate long range housing plans. So HUD will be developing policies, programs, and resources over time, may take up to 24 months, but also they can offer us incentives. We can also share with HUD our proactive efforts, such as our plan unit development ordinance, or our PUDs, to help them incentivize us and give us additional funding to help us along. So many new programs are incentivizing and assisting local governments. Of course, discussions to reform local land use ordinances to produce more housing more quickly, new ordinance for affordable housing. Right now, CDBG have a new requirement to produce and maintain a database of available land And because we have that database, we may see some annual grant funds increase based on documented outcomes. So over the horizon in the very near future, every grantee must maintain a certification of public searchable database of undeveloped land for affordable housing. And that's going to become effective October the 1st, 2026. And we have to include that database in our upcoming annual action plan. That's all I have, if you have any questions.

Questions? I have a question for you, Ms. Jackson. Just recently, it came out in the news that the city of Fayetteville, military city just like Jacksonville, was awarded a $25.1 million HUD grant, as well as the city of New Bern, North Carolina. Was New Brown, I think, like $15 million?

They got about $25 million if it's the housing neighborhoods, the Choice Neighborhood Grant. Okay. Yes.

So what was that that allowed those two municipalities to receive that type of funding, and is that something that the city of Jacksonville might be able to receive in the near future?

Usually that grant is awarded to cities who have some distressed neighborhoods, some distressed housing in a specific neighborhood, but also the city has site control over those properties. So if you're talking about, let's take for example, New Bern. Trent Court is a public housing facilities. That's just the public housing, the local public housing. They have a housing authority and a redevelopment commission. So with that, they have site control to be able to apply for that grant. Money is going to come through the city of New Bern so that they can implement improving those areas that are designated in their application. So as far as Jacksonville is concerned, we don't have a distressed neighborhood that we have site control over in that manner. So that would not be applicable for us to be able to do that. The owner of those type of units, they would need to come to the city of Jacksonville and then ask for that application to be submitted. But they also have to make sure that their rents served, income folks. So as far as the public housing in New Bern, those units are going to serve the low mod benefit. That population.

Ms. Jackson, help me with this one because I may not know all the information. For the housing authority, now we do have public housing, an area where there is public housing, but we don't have public housing authority over, right?

If you're referring to Dudley Court, that is the only 21-unit public housing area that we have, but that falls under the Goldsboro Regional Housing Authority. They built those units years ago.

Okay. Now, what funding can they put in since they're in Jacksonville? Can they put funding in for those units?

They can put in funding to improve those units. But not expand. But not expand.

Okay. I guess at one time we had housing authority. That hadn't been introduced or talked about recently. I don't know if council has talked about us gaining our housing authority back or applying for it. I'm not saying we get projects, y'all. Okay, I'm just saying it.

So we do not have a housing authority. We have East Carolina Human Service Agency that manage vouchers. They are a designated housing authority, but they do not... develop housing. They're dependent on realtors running the vouchers. They handle the Section 8 vouchers. So the city council, they designated themselves as a housing authority so that they have that housing authority ability to develop and expand our efforts in producing houses throughout the city of Jacksonville. So they did that in January or February. I think that it was introduced in January or February. Mr. Blackman, he came and he got the designation.

So, if I may, Mayor, so we have the powers and authorities to be able to buy and sell properties in the capacity, you all have the capacity or powers of a housing authority, but we're not housing developers, so we probably wouldn't be the ones that would develop the housing, but we may be able to secure future funding or do some strategic acquisitions where we could bring in a private developer to develop more affordable housing here in Jacksonville. So you all have those housing authority powers to be able to acquire and dispose of property, but we're not a housing authority in the terms of Going back to the grant that Dr. Washington talked about, the common denominator with those communities where they had public housing authorities or redevelopment commissions, that's why they were eligible for those dollars. Okay, thank you, sir. Any other questions, Ms. Jackson?

I have just one more. With our current, I don't know if you can speak to this, with our current UDO, do we have anything within the UDO that allows for this special type of housing projects to go in within the city of Jacksonville?

But one of the things that this bill also expresses is it does not mandate. So this is only suggestion. So they're not going to preempt any local current ordinances that we currently have. So if we want to be proactive, you can start having those discussions. But right now, they're not as far as a mandate to change, to conform, or anything like that.

But in theory, we could find some of those things, and as we go through our UDO, we could change some things to help us do that.

That is correct. It's always an opportunity and encouragement to do that as far as establishing a new ordinance for affordable housing. Other cities have done so.

The process that we're doing with the EEO dovetails nicely with this opportunity. I think it's important to reiterate what you said at the beginning, Ms. Tracy, that this is policy widening and opportunities and recommendations with no additional funding yet. So it's helped in a way, but we still have to come up with some funding.

Yeah, but the technical, there's a technical, I read in there about a, you know, giving you technical advice. So in theory, we could send our UDO and say what are the... That is correct. And we probably should send it to them and say, what are our obstacles for affordable housing and what do we need to change in our UDO?

And you can also look at other cities and get a guide on establishing some ordinances for affordable housing and see what they have done.

It seemed to me that that would be the first step with this to kind of take advantage of that technical assistance. Because I know in my career we've used technical assistance from DOJ and economic development to help high crime areas. That was the We Can See program and things like that. So I think this is a good opportunity for us to take our UDO, use some of that technical assistance, and see where we can streamline our processes to get more affordable housing.

Yes. And it'll probably also benefit our nonprofit developers that we have here in the city of Jacksonville to help.

To help them and also foster some more partnerships. because of the environmental review process, that clearinghouse will help streamline and those competitive projects will turn into a special project for housing project that HUD can go ahead and directly award some funds to.

what you'll see too is the state will have to change the way that they're doing business in terms of processing. This council and the previous council knows that for a state housing project, that process once approved can take four years before we're breaking ground. We see that right now in Jacksonville waiting for the project in the commons that that the council worked through procedurally, and that's just one project. We've seen another project on Gum Branch that takes a while to get through the process. So for the state to streamline their funding mechanism and their approval process, back to Tracy's comments, and then for us to be ready, that's the partnership that we have to have. We want to be ready once the state says, yes, that the Keith Walkers and the James Mays and the Taft and these individuals that are going to do projects, they can come to Jacksonville and possibly move projects a little bit faster. So hopefully the state will be very aggressive in reviewing their plans and then we'll do the same side by side with them so that we're ready to rock and roll when they're ready.

So what do we do to get that process started?

For us? Well, Mr. Yenero's point's great in terms of reviewing. The challenge right now is to see where the hiccup comes. I would tell you that the main hiccup in a state-funded program is that the state process takes a very long time, one, to get approved and selected, and two, to reach that point. So back to Tracy's points, that this could streamline the state approval process, And then for allowing us, we just have to see what would slow them down on a project. What we're seeing on those two projects that we talked about, both Taft and James Maids, we don't have, we've not slowed them up in the process. They're all going through the state approval and the environmental review and things they have to do at that level. So we just need to look at our development ordinance to make sure that we, A, have multiple areas within the city where development can happen, and B, that we're moving people from the start of the application approval process through the final CO to make sure it's in a reasonable amount of time. So I think we just have to look for holes of, back to Terrence's comments, when we're looking at those development standards, if someone is slowing, if something's being slowed up, we need to find out why it's bottlenecking. And some of that's private review, but some of those things, it goes back to what council has already approved at the retreat in terms of the UDO review. That's happening, I believe, at the next meeting, at the next council meeting, if I'm right, looking for Anthony there. So council's already said, we need to move this forward. You're going to see some things there that hopefully will open up development.

I think we really do need to take care of that, take advantage of that technical assistance because I think that would be very helpful because my experience with those folks is that they have broad experience because they've been to many, many communities and I think that will be beneficial for us to take advantage of those experiences.

And they're interested in what we're doing currently so that they can assist us to move forward.

Thanks, Mayor. I want to reiterate for those three presentations to the council, thanks for allowing us the opportunity to have these discussions. You see multiple things happening at the staff level, just like on the last item there, for Tracy's team to be able to build more houses, to put more people into homeownership. We've got to have the support of council to move things forward. If we want to build four a year, if we want to build six, eight, nine, ten, a lot of these things are playing into the toolbox and they have to happen systematically. So we're very excited to see these things happen and to see things moving forward. up items, Mayor, that'll roll right into that concept for our one city. We just had this last weekend, we had Rock the Block. This was our second event on New Bridge Street, which is downtown Jacksonville. You're going to see people all over the place. And what I would say is there's food, music, fellowship, and it looks like a lot of fun. We see this as a culmination of multiple things happening inside of our community, whereas people are coming together in a downtown district just to have a good time. We systematically plan this on some of the hottest days of the year. We want people to come out and really deal with it. But what we're showcasing here is we have multiple areas within the city that are suitable for bringing in people for quality fellowship. You see the car show, which was located, this was an ad this year, this is something new. You see additional tables and covered areas so that people could have food out in an open environment and not be inside the buildings. We also had the food truck rodeo for the first time. We've talked about this area downtown, which is owned by a local business owner. But we brought all the food trucks into one area. This down here in the bottom left-hand corner, this is what we know as a silent disco. So what for some people looks like a bunch of kids wearing headphones and dancing to their own beat. It's actually they're listening to music together without everyone else having to hear the music. So you hear it on headphones and you dance and you celebrate. I think we could try that at a council meeting just to see how that works out. They're not listening to the same song either, Mayor. Which happens at some of our meetings. Sometimes we're not listening to the same music, but we still have our own dance. And so to bring this group together, year number two, I think this is phenomenal. We have, this is our stage. If you recall, the TDA purchased this stage and we're able to bring live local acts and make people overwhelmingly happy to have A good time on a Friday night in downtown Jacksonville. This is once again just the taste of what's gonna happen. If you go up and down New Bridge Street, you see signs of new businesses coming soon. You see signs and activities with current businesses. You see building owners who are putting money into their buildings. So this is all the culmination of efforts by the city council. just for the last four years but for the last 30 or 40 years it's revitalization of downtown not just in terms of buildings but in terms of activity and the environment to do something amazing exciting for the group and then exciting to see what we do next in downtown for everyone that worked on the committee for the downtown businesses who stayed open and for those people who are partners with us in downtown I just say a job well done and an Excellent event. Can't wait to see more activity in our downtown. These are all the people that did the work behind the scenes and out and about on Friday night. You see our parks crew, you see our recreation crew, you see our police and fire, our... There was a picture somewhere out there that had Michael LaCourte standing around. He wasn't doing anything. You saw him, Dr. Washington.

I appreciate that. He was standing there.

But these people were all working that night. So for these individuals... Thank you. The events do require the city to be active, but that's why we're here. We're here for 73,494 citizens every single day, and this was an excellent event to make sure we can give our citizens a good time. The other thing we had the week before, we had the Montferpois Marine Medal Ceremony. The rain chose to bring this event indoors, but it didn't impact the event. This is one of those events where we're We're given the opportunity to recognize, at one point, the Montford Point Marines, and at another point, the families of those Montford Point Marines. You'll see that from the looks on the faces here, it didn't matter if we were outside at the memorial area or if we were indoors, everybody was still present and able to be active here. These two are not speaking at the same time and dueling microphones. The mayor gave the welcome, as you do every year, Mayor. Thank you so much. And then the county chairman, Mr. Tim Foster, was there as well to provide remarks. But it shows this is another one of those things that's our community. This is Jacksonville. The Montford Point Marines are Jacksonville. And so to have the city and the county together was phenomenal. You're going to see General Ingram here. He's just arrived into Jacksonville as the commanding general, and he is recognizing the families of our Montford Point Marines. And you'll see in our next picture here, you have the President Johnson, that's Major Capers there in the center. And we also had Mr. Hoops, Gunnery Sergeant F.M. Hooper, an original Montford Point Marine that was here for the ceremony as well. That's just added benefit to have him here in the group. But for President Johnson, there's always a mainstay here to recognize the families. I say this collectively, there are certain things that are Jacksonville, and there are certain things that we join in everybody else's celebration. This is ours. These are our people. These are our community members. And the families are going to be our families forever. So no matter where they came from at one point in history, they're our families now. So annually, if there's ever a One City moment, it's right here. You see the cameras and you see our people there to appreciate all that is One City. Thanks, Mary.

Governor, you said Hoover turned 98 years old. Wow. 98. And Major Capers had just turned... 89.

Well, to entertain a motion to go into closed session for the purpose of consulting with our attorney who has been detained by our public body in order to preserve the attorney-client privilege pursuant to statute 143.318.11 regarding economic development update. And I think you have another couple of items on there, attorney-client privilege. Any further discussion? All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye.