City Council - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon and welcome. At this time, I'd like to call our city council work session to order. We have two items this afternoon. Our first one will be an overview from the Southeastern Public Service Authority in regards to their sort separating organics, recycling, and trash system. Mr. Manager.

Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of council, as you're aware, part of the consideration in your operating budget included the transition from the TFC recycling program over to SIPSA sort. So you'll receive an overview today from Dennis Bagley, the executive director of CIPSA. He's joined by his executive leadership team. Also in the audience is the City of Suffolk citizen member, Mr. Al Moore. Dennis, thank you for joining us.

We've got the Western Tidewater. I don't think I have to do a very good job.

One sec.

Honorable Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of City Council, thank you for having me this evening. I'd like to start out with a couple of things that aren't necessarily on the presentation, but on April the 2nd, we opened the facility on Frederick Boulevard that's processing 108,000 tons of waste a year. We had the ribbon cutting, and I really appreciate the Suffolk delegation that came out. We had you all were well-represented. I know the mayor had let me know he wasn't going to be able to make it, but you all were well represented in place of him. So I appreciate that, and I think everyone who was there got firsthand knowledge of how much this system is going to impact waste, not just in the region or in the state, but in the United States of America. So thank you for being there. And secondly, this is probably of much interest to each of you. That's the flyover. the 1358-460 flyover. We're preparing an opening for that. We had intended for it to be on the 12th, but the contractor late this afternoon asked us to push it back to the 22nd. So we'll be having a ribbon cutting. You'll be receiving, each of you will receive an invitation to that. It'll be on the 22nd at 10 o'clock in the morning. Representing some VDOT, representing some Suffolk, and representing some SIPSA will be on hand. And then we'll actually take a bus ride up to the bridge and we'll cut the ribbon with a SPSA truck and one of the City of Suffolk's new waste trucks. We'll come across the bridge first and then we'll open it to the public after that. It's an exciting time. That's one of the most dangerous intersections in the region and we're very, very pleased to be able to close that U-turn off across the bridge and open the bridge up. So I'll go on into our presentation for this evening. Some of this is gonna be just a follow up from a previous presentation I gave to you all. This is the master plan, the original master plan for the landfill. And the blue area at the top is what was originally cells 10, 11, and 12. And as we began to permit the green section, we ended up having to forego any future expansion in that area and turn that into preservation land. We have a preservation easement on that. So no further expansion of the regional landfill can be made. The area in blue that's right in the center, that's cells one through four. They're closed completely. They're in post-closure, which means that we have to report to the EEQ what's going on in those cells consistently and make any repairs that are needed annually. Then the gray areas are cells five and six. That's where we're working now. And that's what makes this project that I'm going to talk about so critical. That gray area will be completely full in August of this year at the current volume of waste that we're bringing into the regional landfill. And then the kind of orange color at the bottom is cell seven. Cell seven is under construction. It's very close to starting to put the liner down. We originally thought we may be through with that in July. But due to some of the weather and moisture conditions in that facility, we're probably going to be pushing that back some. So we're going to have to continue to work on cells five and six to gain some additional space. And then the green area is cells eight and nine. Wetlands permits have been received on those. We've got the part A permit from DEQ. We still need a CUP from the city of Suffolk, and we need the part B from DEQ. But that will be down the road. But those cells give us capacity through 2060 at the current volume, and 2060 is right around the corner in my business. This is the area that we'll be working in. The remainder of it will be put into the area within the circle. This area that we'll be working with, anything outside of that circle, is going to be preservation area. So future disposal capacity is so critical for the region that we do have a landfill. If we are going to be able to continually get economical disposal rates outside of the region for not just our municipal customers but for commercial customers as well, we have to have a landfill to be able to negotiate fair pricing from other landfills. So it's critical that we maintain airspace there. Because of the hydrological connection between the SPSA property and that property across the street, which is the Great Dismal Swamp, It will never be any further expansion of the regional landfill. So what we have is what we have. We need to conserve it. We need to be good stewards of that land. At the current waste volumes, 2060, as I've already told you, is the end life of the regional landfill if we continue to put 500,000 tons in the landfill. After 2060, the only option we would have is to take waste outside of the region because We've done an assessment of land across the whole SPSA region, and there is no suitable property across this whole entire region to build a landfill except for Southampton County. And when Southampton County found out there were two sites that we could use, they immediately passed a resolution banning landfills from being built in the county of Southampton. So we're down to not having any other option except for taking waste outside of the region. And we did an assessment of what that would look like. In today's dollars, it would cost $125 a ton to haul it out of the region, and you currently were paying $65 a ton for your waste disposal. So you can see in today's dollars, those numbers certainly both would go up, but you could be paying well over $150, $160 a ton if we didn't do something. And that's where this project really comes into play. So as we plan... for the future, what we realized is that if we were going to ensure that we had long-term disposal capacity at the regional landfill, what we had to do was reduce the volume going into the landfill because it wasn't like we could continue to expand. We had to reduce what we were going in and make the best use of what space we had. So as we began to look at how to move forward, we began to adopt this mindset that trash is only a problem if we fail to see its potential. And that is a lot. A LOT IN THAT LITTLE PHRASE BECAUSE TRASH IS NO LONGER BEING LOOKED AT AS A PROBLEM. WE'RE LOOKING AT IT AS AN OPPORTUNITY, AND NOT JUST IN SOUTHEASTERN VIRGINIA AND THE SOUTHEASTERN PUBLIC SERVICE AUTHORITY, BUT REALLY IT'S STARTING TO CATCH ON ACROSS THE WORLD. SO OUR PLAN WAS IN 2026 WE CONDUCTED A WASTE CHARACTERIZATION STUDY SO WE COULD SEE EXACTLY WHAT THE MAKEUP OF OUR TRASH IN THE REGION WAS. And then after we got that report back, we paid about $100,000 to do this. And this is a very in-depth report. We looked at each transfer or several transfer stations across a broad stretch of time. And we determined exactly what the trash was in those transfer stations. Once we got that information, we went out and we started talking about it. We started spreading the information that we had gathered. It was 28% of the waste stream was recyclable material. and another 38% of the waste stream was organics. So how do we reduce what we're putting in the landfill? That's kind of the message and the education we're putting out. The way you do that is to recycle more and add organics into the mix, and then you can reduce what you're sending to the landfill. In this case, we're going to be reducing it by 50% with a Sips to Sort system, and that's by pulling out some of the 28% or most of that 28% recyclables and pulling organics out of the waste stream. Currently, your recycling rates in the region were about 7%. So by pulling out 20% of the recycling rate, we're almost tripling the amount of recycling we'll be doing. So in February of 24, we put out an RFP, and I came to you all. I reported on that. I told you what exactly we were doing and what our intentions were when the RFPs come back. We put together a very in-depth group of professionals to review those. They were staff members. They were lawyers. There were several engineers. There were board members involved in that process, and we ended up making a selection as the most suitable company was AMP Robotics. Then we began to educate our board about what this project would mean and how it would work. After we did that, we came back out to each of you, each of our member communities, and I stood before you and gave you exactly what we were planning on doing and asked for your support, and you generously accepted that and passed our use and support agreements for a 20-year contract, which was necessary in order to enter into the Sips to Sort project. So that brings us to today. What the plan was that we would achieve 50% reduction in waste that was being landfilled by separating organics, recycling, and trash, which is where the sort comes in, separating organics, recycling, and trash. We'll be using AI and air and robots to be able to pull those materials out of the waste stream, and what we will have is about 20% of that waste that we pull out will be recycled material versus what we have been used to in the region of about 7%. So I want to emphasize that. We're going to drastically increase the amount of recycling for the region. We also have a 30% diversion of organic material. What is organic material? It's leaves, it's food waste, it's limbs, small limbs, it's soiled paper, anything that can, that has CO2 in it and is organic in nature. It becomes the organics that we're pulling out of the waste stream. This project will decrease the long-term cost to the region and make sure that our member communities know what the cost is going to be over the 20 years of this. If you go back to what I was talking about earlier, there was a real uncertainty about what the cost was going to be moving forward. Now everybody knows what the cost is going to be going forward. There's an escalator based on, we didn't base it on the CPI, we got a flat escalator in the contract of, 2%. So the cost is going to go up 2% a year for inflation. It doubles the life of the regional landfill and puts the regional landfill as a useful site through the end of the century. This is a big one that we like to talk about. All 1.2 million citizens in southeastern Virginia now are active recyclers. There's no push any longer to try to get people to recycle right and do all these other things, all 1.2 million citizens in the southeast of Virginia are now active recyclers. And this is a scalable system. As the region grows, we can grow this system by, it's put together in modules of 25 tons per hour or about 54,000 tons per year. If we grow as anticipated growth level that the PDC has given us, in about six years, we may be at a point where we add another system, and that may be out in the Western communities. There's a lot of opportunity here to scale this system to make it larger as our needs increase. Some of the facts about the contract. There's 20% of the collected waste is required to be recycled, which doubles the current rate. The 2023 Waste Characterization Study showed that was 28.1% of the waste stream was recyclable. We'll be pulling out about 20% of that. The other 8%, we'll continue to be working on that. But we identified 16 different recyclable items that we require under the contract that they pull out. They're currently pulling out at most four, five. So that's the difference in the technology we're able to use and why we're able to increase the recyclable rate. The alternative waste disposal contract guarantees, and when I say guarantee, I mean there's liquid data damages. If they fail to perform as per the contract, they are required to pay for every ton back to SPSA, a cost that covers disposal of that waste. That's in the contract. Organics will be converted to biochar and sold for alternative uses. I'll talk more about those alternative uses in a minute. And biochar also creates carbon credits that large companies like Google, Amazon, Microsoft are dying to buy because all of the data centers that they're purchasing, they need something to offset their carbon footprint. So they're buying these carbon credits. And Biochar seems to be where most of them are going. As a matter of fact, SPSA, and I'll tell you in a minute, won a slideshow, but I'm so excited about it. Google will be buying every single carbon credit we can produce into this project. And that's going to reduce about 200,000 metric tons of carbon over the next four years. Some of the other facts, as I told you before, CIPSA did not take this lightly. We brought in the experts. We brought in financial experts. We brought in legal experts. We brought in contractors who've done this type of work before, consultants, and CIPSA's team. We had a chemical engineer. We had a lot of experience on this team that selected this amp as the number one choice. The contract contains the liquidated damages for a lot of things, not just for recyclables and for biochar, but for overall diversion as well. Excuse me. They're really constringent reporting requirements in the contract that we receive weekly reports, monthly reports, quarterly reports, semiannual reports, and those reports are used to make sure that they're meeting the requirements in the contract. And one of the things I'm most proud of throughout this process, and you know as well as I know, how hard it is to get bodies, kind of everybody heading in the same direction. When we went to our eight member communities, We had a unanimous vote in every member community from their either city council or board of supervisors with the exception of one, and there was one dissenting vote out of all eight of our member communities to renew the use of support agreements for a 25-year term. And I think that speaks volumes about the knowledge that the bodies received over the length of the time that we were working on this, and they knew what they were voting on. So we appreciate that. So one of the questions we receive a lot of, and I wanted to make sure that I was clear to you all because it's a question that comes up a lot, what is biochar? Biochar is a rich carbon material that's produced by heating organic material under a pyrolysis or a low oxygen environment. It's gained significant attention as a soil amendment, as a concrete additive, as a cover for landfills because it absorbs odor. And it's also being explored in a lot of different areas, like chemical treatments, even wastewater treatment plants as a filtering material. It has a lot of uses. And there's a lot of literature out there, a lot of academia. are doing research about biochar and how else we can use it because it's such a solid material. What you end up with is nothing but carbon when it goes through the pyrolysis process. Biochar has gained momentum because of its unique ability to mitigate climate change by sequestering carbon. You hear sequestering carbon and we went through the process of permitting wetlands, we had to do a carbon sequestration study. And it was the first time I'd ever heard of carbon sequestration. I was wondering exactly what we were being asked to do. But I know well now what it was. And when we started getting into this project, this is a project that really kind of focused a lot of attention on carbon sequestration. Biochar is used as an atom for a lot of different industrial processes. Probably the most meaningful project that we see right now is as a concrete additive because there's been tests that show that by mixing biochar into concrete, it strengthens the concrete and it allows it to cure at a much better rate. If you've ever poured concrete, you always see these air pockets in it. Well, those air pockets are where the water was, and the water dissipates and makes the concrete, but these biochar pieces are holding that moisture, and when the moisture comes out of the biochar, the biochar then fills those holes. So it's really promising in that industry. But it's really got a lot of other positive characteristics like landfill cover and for filtering material and for soil additives. Not all biochar performs the same depending on the quality of the biomass. And one of the things that we're doing now along with what AMP is doing, and we're following very closely, is testing to see how high quality we can get with our biochar. It's kind of tough because you've got to pick through and find out what you really want to put into the kiln to make good biochar, but that's the process that we're under now. And as the quality of the biochar goes up, the price you can get for it goes up. There's $200 to $500 a ton for biochar at this point. So I think you can see where that will lead, why you would want to get high-quality biochar. Again, Google's contracted to purchase all of the credits, carbon credits associated with the biochar that we'll be producing at our Portsmouth facility. Here's just a quick drawing of how biochar is created. The organic material is put in first into a dryer, which is the bottom left-hand corner of the screen. It's just a typical flow chart. As it goes through the dryer, we're trying to get down to about 15% moisture content. That's the reason for it going through the dryer. Then it goes through a grinder, and then it gets put into a pyrolysis reactor. And pyrolysis reactors are very simple. They've been being used for many, many, many years. Pyrolysis is nothing more than the addition of heat and the absence of oxygen. and it turns the material that's inside of the biochar reactor into carbon. That biochar is then sold and for a number of uses and the credits are sold. But one of the things it produces also is gas and that gas that comes off at the top of the biochar reactor is used to actually fire the biochar reactor and produce electricity to run the machine. So once the biochar reactor is up and running, you can turn the gas and electricity off to the unit and it will produce enough gas to fire the burners and run a generator to produce electricity to run it. Then when you shut it off, you've got to use commercial power and commercial gas to fire it back up. So it will be running 24 hours a day. The only time it will go down is when it goes down for routine maintenance. So that's a pretty slick feature of that particular system. This is what Biochar looks like. What the material that you put into it, it could be much more coarse than this or it could be more fine than this. It just depends on the type of material. It looks almost like a coal dust type of material. Our operational timeline, which is important because the sooner we get operating at full speed, the sooner we can process all 540,000 tons of our waste in the region in 2026. We currently are processing 54,000 tons per year. Under the contract, they're required by July to be processed at 108,000 tons per year. Then in 2008 and 2009, the MSW processing facility at Victory Boulevard comes online and will be operating. That will step up in increments of 125,000 tons at each ramp period. And then the biochar processing facility will be up and running in approximately two years. We're currently trying to get our air permit through the EQ to operate that. The draft permit is due out next week for public comment, and at this point we see no issues at all with that. And when it's all said and done, in 2028, 2029 timeframe, we'll be processing 540,000 tons of waste at both the Frederick Boulevard and the Victory Boulevard facilities. One of the things that we've learned as we've been going through the process, and Zach here with us is our strategic communications manager, what we've learned is there's a lot of people who have no faith in recycling at all because of things that they've seen and things that they've heard or things that they haven't heard in the past. One of the things we realize is we absolutely need to be transparent. We need to make sure that the citizens of the region understand what we're doing and how we're doing it and what the results are. So we've developed a dashboard that we'll be kind of showcasing to our board at our June meeting. That dashboard will set us and we'll be able to come on our website and see every month how many tons of waste we brought in, how many tons we recycled, how many tons of biochar we produced, what the recycled materials are. So we're excited about that. It's really complete. We're trying to tweak some of the numbers, and as you as a public servant know, the best laid plans can be nailed if you've got one hole in it somewhere. So we're trying to make sure that there are no holes in the plan, that we can be completely transparent and make sure that citizens have confidence in what it is that we're doing. On that same note, we are working with the city manager here in Suffolk and your communications team to begin to get the message out to citizens about how the system works. We're doing a lot of Facebook work. We're doing some direct marketing going to member communities, but we're working in lockstep with your communications people to make sure they know exactly and we're on the same page and aligned with the goals that you have. There are a lot of myths, and this myths and facts could probably go on for hours now, and you're probably going to begin to hear more and more of that. And I want to be straight up with you. One of the things you're going to hear is that mixed waste sorting does not impact commodity price, or you're going to hear that mixed waste sorting does impact commodity pricing. That's just not true. We're processing material at the Portsmouth facility, both mixed waste sorting and curbside material. They're getting the same money for a ton of both materials. It really makes no difference with the cleanliness of the plastic just due to the way that that material is being recycled. It's crushed and cut into little pieces and cleaned thoroughly. This is the way forward with plastic recycling. One of the things I'll tell you that you're going to hear also that you're not recycling any paper. We will recycle the clean paper, but I will be the first one to tell you, there's a lot of dirty paper that gets recycled. We're recycling it into biochar. That dirty paper is good material to put in the biochar kiln and to produce biochar out of. It doesn't mean just because it's dirty that we're not using it. We are using it, and we are making something useful out of it, and we're not putting it in the landfill. You're going to hear a lot of that. If you would like for me to come back and share with you the results of this dashboard, I'd be glad to do that, but I think you're going to see that we're able to produce what we say we're going to produce. And regardless, and I try to tell people this all the time, even if we don't take any cardboard or any paper, if we've increased recycling by 20% by pulling more plastic and other items out, what difference does that really make? We're still pulling the paper out. We're doing something with it. But our recycling rate is still three times more than what, or almost three times as much as you currently are producing. So you'll hear a lot. especially now, but be assured that we've heard all of them and we can talk about each one of them individually if you'd like. I'd be glad to answer any questions you may have if there are any.

Thank you, Mr. Bagley. Council, questions or comments? Council Member Bennett.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Mr. Bagley, thank you for your presentation. There's a lot going on there at Sipser. And a couple things I want to just ask you about is the waste from construction debris and limbs you were talking about, how is that going to be done? Is that going to still be going to the landfill?

It will for a short period of time, but we've got a lot of plates in there. I think I've shared this with you before. That's on our radar screen. That's the next thing we're going to be working on is what's going to the landfill, what will continue to be going to the landfill, construction debris, that type. furniture, that type of thing, we're going to be looking really closely at how do we reduce that 50% that's going into the landfill. And we have some pretty solid ideas of how to do that, but we're trying to get through this process that we're in now. I think we can get too many things going on at one time and not be able to do a good job at it. But we do have that on our radar screen and we're working on that.

Okay. And the other thing is with changing over in July to all trash going into one trash bin. Yes, sir. The question is being asked to me at some points are the blue cans now that we're using, I know which is not yours, but they can use those same cans for both?

I'm not, that's really, I'm going to let the manager speak to that. That's really in his.

Yes, sir. So moving forward, any can you roll out there, we'll put in a City of Suffolk trash can. Blue, green, it doesn't really matter. So the sorting will take place, as Dennis mentioned, on their side, not at your home at your curbside.

Okay. Mr. Bennett, I wasn't trying to avoid the question, but each member community has the option to do whatever they want to do with those blue cans, and some said they're going to use them as trash cans. Others say they're not. So that's something that we're not going to be.

And the other thing is I know it's going to be strange to a lot of people that recycle, and they're not going to accept this too easy. Yes, sir. And I think the information, getting the information out to, at least in Suffolk, where people will know what the process is going to be like. I hear you saying you're going to do Facebook and other means of getting the information out. But is there any way possible that we could send some type of mailer out to the residents? I know that would be costly, but I'm just thinking of the number of people that doesn't really want to hear it to start with.

Yes, sir. We realize that, and we're working with your communications folks. What we don't want to do is get out in front of you. We're willing to do whatever we need to do to make sure that we get the message out to our member communities of what's going on, but we've got to be really careful with that, that we don't step on your toes or do something that's not in line with what your vision is. So Zach is here. Zach is working with your communications folks, and we will get that out if that's what The city of Suffolk wants to do we'll certainly be working with you to do that I also would say to you that we're going to be doing something special for Suffolk because of the Transition you're making in July. We're gonna have a drop-off site at the regional landfill because what we realize also is is that there are people who are really gung-ho about recycling. It isn't a matter of these cans putting it all in cans. I want to be able to read. I want to feel good about what I'm doing, and there's nothing wrong with that. So what we're going to be doing is we're going to put, and we've talked to your city manager and director of public works about this, we're going to actually put a dumpster, a recycled dumpster, at the landfill. We'll manage it. We'll take care of it all just to make sure that if those folks want to continue to recycle the way they are, there's no problem with us, them doing it. We haven't given them an option to be able to do that. They'll just have to drop it at the landfill, but we'll have a nice area for them to do that.

I'm glad to hear that being added. The other thing, are you still sending gas over to the chemical plant on Wheelroy Road? No, sir. No, okay. And I want to say that to you, thanks again. The odor has been better. You have done a good job so far with that. I have some Some of these warm days now, it's going to really tell the story, whether you're really doing your daily coverage, stuff like we have talked about. But I have your phone number. Absolutely. And I will be calling you.

And you know I've been to your house when you called me. So that's something that we want to be good neighbors. And I don't know if you all know this, but the NARA property that surrounds the landfill, we have purchased that. as part of our mitigation so that it will not be hard to develop because there's only pockets of uplands in all that area. But what Mr. Nara had done in the past was he would go in and log that area, and when he logged it, that's when we had problems because people could actually see the landfill. And when you can see it, then it becomes a problem. So we've purchased that land, put it in a preservation easement, and those trees will never get cut again, so you will never see the landfill from, Nansman Parkway, and it gives us a very, very large buffer for any future growth because there will be no future growth in that area. So we're very pleased about that. All right. Thank you very much.

Council Member Butler-Barlow.

Thank you, Mayor. So you kind of answered my question, and based on Council Member Bennett's, the folks that are really into recycling and don't want to give that up, So I know there's going to be a delay between when we're sorting every bit of trash that gets collected until we're up to 100%.

Yes, ma'am.

So I guess that's a question I want to be able to answer to people. It's like, okay, I'm throwing everything in one bin, but maybe it's not getting recycled now. So if I want to do that independently, I still can. And then the timeline, I mean, 2029 is when it should be, every single bit should be getting sorted. Is that, am I?

Yes, ma'am.

Exactly.

What we've tried to do is align that with some other contracts that other localities may have. So those tons that will be coming on way down the road are really being reserved for those communities who already are recycling using curbside. We're going to grow to 108,000 tons by July 1. And the way we see this is that when a customer has the trash in their kitchen and beside the garage, they put it in the can, it's their trash. When they put it on the street and Suffolk truck comes by and they dump it in the back of the truck, it becomes Suffolk's trash. And when Suffolk brings it to the transfer station and dumps it on the transfer station floor, it becomes SPSA trash. And SPSA brings in about 480,000 tons of municipal solid waste a year. Right off the bat, we'll be processing 108,000 of that. Then next, we'll bring on another 125,000 tons in early 2028 at that point all of them most all of the municipalities will be being processed except for those who are still have curbside recycling so what we try to do is we try to look at it as sips as waste and how much sips is processing and then we look at how many tons each member community brings us but it's also some efficiency so that we have to look at if it doesn't make sense if it doesn't make financial sense to bring all the trash from uh, Suffolk into the plant right now. That's not what we're going to do. We're going to try to make sure that we keep the rates down and they're reasonable because we're operating efficiently. Great. Thank you. Does that answer your question?

I think so. I think I can have conversations based on that. Thank you.

Council member Johnson.

I'm going to be brief too, because I'm, I'm positive about this. I think we're heading in a really amazing direction. The way you've presented, it makes perfect sense. I do think that the important aspect here is to make sure that the people know that we're heading in the right direction and they understand completely. So to me, the dashboard is so vital and what you guys are doing to promote it to the public is so vital. So that means you have to come see us every once in a while, honestly, to make sure that we are kept up to snuff so when we talk to the public, they understand that we're just not selling them something. This is the right way to go. But I appreciate everything you've said and I think Honestly, I feel good about the direction we're heading in with this. We appreciate you being here. Thank you, Councilman. I believe in what we're doing.

I love what I do. I believe in it. I think it's the future, and I'll be at any council meeting you want me to be at. As short as notice you need me, I'll be here because I believe in this, and I want to make it work.

Council Member Richter. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Dennis, thank you again for the presentation. One of the things that I think is really most exciting to me is the longevity that it's going to extend to the current landfill because with nobody else wanting one, if there's no place to take the garbage locally, it is going to create a huge problem for everybody. So I'm glad to see that science is starting to catch up with our ability to produce trash, as it were. The biochar process, with it generating its own gas and electricity, I guess you've come as close as you can to inventing the perpetual motion machine?

That's a good example, perpetual motion machine. I've never heard it put that way, but that's a good analogy.

Is there a difference between biochar and fly ash?

There's nothing the same about fly ash and biochar, two totally different items. Okay.

I know they tried fly ash in concrete before, and it didn't work very well.

It's not anything. There's nothing about it the same. Bioshar is nothing but carbon, and that is not what fly ash is. Fly ash is something that we're trying to get rid of fly ash now everywhere, and nobody wants to take it. I can shake you and show you a number of situations where that's been a problem. That's not the same. Ash should not be even. Fly ash and bottom ash should not even be in the same discussion with biochar because they're two totally different items. They may look a lot alike, but there's never been any direct heat applied to that material that you saw in that picture. It's heat on the outside and the absence of oxygen. So it's never been burned.

Thank you for making that distinction.

Council, any other questions or comments? If not, Mr. Bagley, thank you very much for your presentation. I do have a couple of questions. I want to thank the board for everything that you do also. We've got a lot of talent on that board, and I'm sure from a city standpoint, we're going to be looked after rather well. I think we're represented rather well. I mean, obviously, this is a long-term strategic plan, and we talk about doubling the life of the landfill. I mean, it's huge. I'm going back four, five, six years talking about that. That being a serious concern is when the landfill was going to be filled and what our options are going to be. I mean, that's going to be, if you're saying it's the end of the century, that's a long time for that to happen. So this is definitely welcome. I was actually exposed to the word pyrolysis a month or so ago, and I understood that that primarily applies to the plastics that are being recycled? Is it also other material that goes into that process?

Actually, we're trying to not put any plastic in our material. That's a pyrolysis process that's a little bit different. The purpose of that pyrolysis process is to create pyrolysis oil, to create new plastics, and to sell as fuel. That's not the goal of our project. We're not making any type of biofuel other than the biofuel that comes off that we're using to fire the kiln and to fire the generator that provides electricity. Our pyrolysis process does not take plastic in it because plastic, when you go through the pyrolysis process, it makes a very gummy material, and it causes a lot of problems with the pyrolysis kiln of downtime. and we don't need downtime, so there's a post-sort process that tries to get as much of the plastic out before it goes into the kiln. Some does, and some does get into the kiln, and that's where a lot of the gases come from, but the plastic is what's producing those gases that the oil that we're talking about is trying to get out of.

The plastics is going to be separated from the other recycled? Excuse me? The plastic products will be separated from the other recycled materials?

Yes, sir. Typically, the plastic is pulled out ahead of the biochar. The biochar goes in one direction, and the plastics and other recyclables go in another direction. They'll have a trailer full of material that's called biochar-eligible material. There's little pieces of plastic that may end up in there. That goes through another sort to try to pull that plastic out because we don't want plastic in our biochar for the reason of the oil.

The biochar is one product. the plastics produced oil. Are the plastics going to be sold separately to companies that are processing it for the oil? Yes, sir. It could be. I mean, I don't know where it would end up at. I mean, I would assume that that would be another income source. You have the carbon credits on one side, and then there are companies out there that are buying the plastics and converting those to oil, and I think that's actually – they're not credits, but I think they're actually publicly traded maybe.

Yeah. They may buy a bale of our plastic that comes out of our system, and they may use that for that purpose. I'm not sure who will be buying it.

Has CIPSA contacted anyone about that? Excuse me?

Has CIPSA contacted anyone about selling the plastics? We're not – it's not our role in the contract. It is AMP's role. They have a commodity seller who handles that, and their role is to try to get the best price for all of the commodities that they sell. Okay. Like I said, a little knowledge is –

dangerous sometimes. And I think that's what I was going to ask you. You got to it roundabout way. I was just wondering, are the carbon credits, is there a set price for those? Are they traded as well, or you just have that contract with Google, they buy them all, and that's a set price, and does that price fluctuate based on

No, sir, that's a flat rate contract where all of the carbon credits have been sold to Google that we produce, and the amount we receive is based on the number of carbon credits we sell them.

Okay, so eventually you'll know roughly how many of these carbon credits you're going to have each year kind of once you get rolling so that can be incorporated into your budget process each year? No, sir.

The carbon credits that are received from the purchase of the carbon credits, the money that comes from that is used to drive down the price. That's why we can do this project at the rate that we're doing it at. If we didn't use the carbon credits to offset the cost of the project, then the tip fee could have been $110 a ton.

Okay, so the carbon credits are being used kind of up front to offset the fees to the members? Just like the recycled commodities project. are driving the price of the fees down so the citizen doesn't have to pay as much. Okay. Thank you very much. I appreciate that clarification. Council, one more time, questions or comments? If not, Mr. Manager?

Yeah, just to kind of reemphasize in conclusion. You'll be hearing more on a marketing effort as it relates to outreach for our citizens throughout the month of June as we lean towards July. We've been, as Dennis mentioned, talking with CIPSA and their team. They've had experience both in Chesapeake and Portsmouth, and so we'll be following some of their lessons learned in that output. We anticipate we'll still have to educate people along the way, but we're going to do all that we can to try to catch it early on. The timing is also important for us as it relates to the flyover project. And so as Dennis mentioned, we'll have a recycling location that will allow our citizens to use the flyover that'll be in operation. It'll also be an enhancement to our operations from an efficiency standpoint that Greg and his team in Public Works are looking at because we'll be picking up more cans and the flyover will be a tremendous help for us from a safety aspect for our refuse drivers. So we really look forward for that flyover being open with this new initiative that we're taking on. Thank you, Dennis.

Thank you.

Okay, our next item for discussion, we will be receiving an overview of the community mental and mental health resources. Mr. Manager.

Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of council, Suffolk is fortunate to have a number of champion operations and organizations providing resources for our community. This evening, you will receive updates from three of these operations. First up is Brandon Rogers, the executive director of the Western Tidewater Community Service Board. He'll be followed by Suffolk Fire Chief Mike Baraki, who will provide an overview on the Marcus Alert system. And then finally, Ebony Murphy, the founder and executive director of Rest Assured Foundation, will provide you with an update on the happenings out at our Western Tidewater homeless shelter. Good evening, Brandon.

Good evening. GOOD EVENING, VICE MAYOR WARD AND MAYOR DOOMAN AND REST OF CITY COUNCIL. I THANK YOU ALL FOR AN OPPORTUNITY TO COME AND CHAT WITH YOU AGAIN ABOUT MENTAL HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENTAL SERVICES IN OUR LOCALITIES. LAST YEAR WHEN I CAME AND PRESENTED, I GAVE A PRETTY WIDE OVERVIEW OF THE SERVICES THAT WE PROVIDE. AND THIS YEAR I'VE NARROWED DOWN SOME OF THE SLIDE OR DEATH BY POWERPOINT THAT I WILL GIVE YOU THIS TIME AROUND. I'm always open to hearing some questions and that, but I felt like it was a little bit better for us to have some high-level talking points, and I'll highlight a few services along the way. One of the things I wanted to start with was many of you came out for our groundbreaking ceremony for our crisis receiving center and mental health crisis stabilization campus that we call The Haven on Godwin Boulevard a couple of months ago. Wanted to let you know that that project is moving along really well. We expect some completion or near completion around the end of the calendar year where we'll be able to open up those crisis stabilization beds to our community to start providing care there. There'll still be some work going on at the site, but things are moving along very well. And if you stop by, you'll see a lot of earth being moved and a lot of work being done on the inside. So I'm very thankful for the support that we've gotten there and looking forward to being able to serve Some more folks and to have the grand opening which will be a lot more fun than a groundbreaking I think So just a few high-level overview pieces on this slide The city of Suffolk is by far our largest Catchment area that our community that we serve in our catchment area. We have a hundred and three thousand folks here we're we're spending around nine dollars and eleven cents per capita based off of the local contribution that you give and The value of services, however, that's delivered here in the city of Suffolk by Western Tidewater Community Services Board is around $44 million. So how do we come up with that? That's the cost of the actual provision of care that either is funded by state, federal, or insurance reimbursement for what we provide. So you're getting about $47 for every dollar that you invest here in the city of Suffolk. This just kind of zooms in a little bit on those things. And one of the things that I like to highlight is that we have seen 3,367 individuals in ongoing treatment over the last fiscal year. That is about 66% of the total individuals that we serve in total. So those are all Suffolk citizens that we've provided care to. Something that we're pretty excited about is that we have grown consistently year over year And we're around just a little bit shy of 7,000 individuals served year in and year out across all of our service lines. That equates to 434,297 hours of care. That is a lot of treatment time from an area where we have a really high behavioral health professional shortage area. We retire more individuals out of the workforce in behavioral health care than are being produced by our colleges and institutions. So some of the work that we've done to offset that has been focused on retention of our employees, but also trying to grow new behavioral health professionals. So we've worked on partnerships with Paul D Camp Community College to take a high school through associates degree program and create behavioral health techs that can then move on to get their bachelor's degree and become qualified mental health professionals and into master's degree programs to create counselors. This is one of the biggest areas that has strained behavioral health across our state, and we've tried to be one of the more innovative localities in how we are addressing that need and growing some of our own so that we can help that workforce achieve some of the targets that we've got. Probably the largest risk factor to behavioral health care in the state of Virginia right now is qualified workforce. So when we talk about the dollars that have been spent by the city of Suffolk It's it's helpful. I think to talk about well. What did we actually use those dollars for? You heard me speak last year about our same-day access Department so and in the old days in mental health you would call you get an appointment in five to ten days Maybe 15 days well at the time we saw you you either forget about your appointment, or you wouldn't come in at all and We would lose a lot of people in the process we now offer a five days a week of walk-in intake here in the city of Suffolk, and we actually have a bonus day at our Saratoga Street location where folks can walk in and immediately be intaked into care and walk away with an appointment within 10 days if their schedule permits that follow-up appointment within that time. We have telehealth options available, so if you can't walk into a clinic, we can see you via telehealth and avoid some of that transit time. So 76% of the funding that we receive from the city is actually supporting that intake component of our work. That's one of the lowest reimbursed areas when we talk about insurance and billing for services. And so we supplement that with some of the local funding that we're receiving from the city. The other place that we often struggle is in psychiatric services. Psychiatric care is one of the scarcest resources really across the nation. Uh, we leverage a number of, uh, providers, including psychiatrists, nurse practitioners, and physician's assistant to, uh, support that. And we provide care to around 1600 individuals, uh, a year, 21% of our local funding from the city of Suffolk actually supported those psychiatric services. Uh, the cost of that, um, is our most expensive per provider area in our, um, in our community services board. And it's one of the most valuable services that we have as community psychiatry is also pretty scarce to find. They are working oftentimes with our most seriously mentally ill individuals and providing care to ensure that they don't reenter hospitalization. They specialize in things like long-acting injectables and other evidence-based practices to make sure that we try to stop the cycle of repeating in the crisis. And then around 3% of our local funding goes toward our emergency services. Emergency services in our terms is a mental health crisis assessment and screening for hospitalization. That's available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. I'm required to do that by the Code of Virginia. But just because the Code of Virginia requires me to do something doesn't mean that they pay me to do that work and do it at the volume that it's required to be done. And so we put some of our local dollars in there to help offset some of the costs in that department as well. That's where we prevent people from harming themselves, harming others, and help them seek treatment when maybe they're unable to make those decisions on their own. This was just a slide that I left in because I wanted you to know that last year you met a higher budget request from us. This year we did not ask for another dollar. We met our 10% local match for the first time in several years. It's required of us by code because all of the localities contributed to that. including the city of Suffolk, and I just wanted to say thank you very much for honoring that request, supporting the funding match that we have in Coda, Virginia, and we're using that to support the citizens in the same way in the coming year as we have in the previous year. So thank you very much for honoring that request last year. Oops. I'm going to go back one just so that I don't get into the chief's slides. So to talk a little bit about the work that we've done over the last year, Vice Mayor Ward challenged me to go on a presidential campaign for mental health and developmental services over the last year. I don't think I've quite gotten to a presidential campaign level, but we've tried our best to make ourselves more well-known in the community. I think even Mayor Duman, you must have wore the purple suit to pick our branding colors. I appreciate you marketing a little bit for us with the purple. We've run community connections events that are a town hall style format that we've implemented twice a year in every one of our localities. In fact, we have one of those scheduled for tomorrow night. Mayor Duman, I know you're already committed to attending. We'll be talking a little bit about gang and violence in our communities and how that relates to mental health and some of the work that we can do there, as well as talk about the services that the Community Services Board offers. So we're trying in each locality to think about topics that have been important to citizens. as a way to draw them in, educate them about care that's available, as well as educate them about prevention work that we can do. We've also engaged in some partnership, and I think we're getting very close to launching the OAA mobile medication-assisted treatment van. That's a partnership that the city of Suffolk started with five other cities here in southeastern Virginia, and I think we're just about to the point where we're actually going to see that service come to fruition after a couple of years of planning. We're very excited about that. Um, and we will have prevention staff as well as treatment staff that are riding on that, uh, that van when they're in the city of Suffolk. Uh, the reason I bring that up is because, uh, an ounce of prevention is really worth that pound of treatment. Uh, if we can present prevent one family, two families, three families from having to deal with an addiction, then we have eliminated a significant, um, burden that's going to be placed on not just the family, but on our community going forward. So we can catch it before it starts. Um, we offer revive classes that, um, help with harm reduction from substance abuse. We've been, um, offering monthly mental health first aid sessions, uh, in the, in the city. And we have continued to provide ACEs, which is adverse childhood experiences, train, um, training, uh, that is my favorite training. And I shared that with you all last year, uh, knowing that the relationship with one trusted adult. is enough to prevent many of the ongoing effects of a traumatic experience for a child. So each one of us here is actually a component of preventing that long-term damage that a child can experience if they happen to experience a traumatic event in their upbringing, whether that be from a caregiver, something that happens at school, something that happens in the community. The way that we interact with others is a way to preserve their functioning long-term. I'd really like to work myself out of a job in that way. If we can prevent all of the escalation of substance use, mental illness, and other issues, I would be okay with finding another line of work, though I don't think I could handle the work that SIPSA does. That was a very serious presentation that was good to hear. I also want to share that We are working on a couple of crisis projects that will actually be located in Isle of Wight County, but are important for the citizens of Suffolk. So they're crisis therapeutic homes. In those homes, we serve individuals with developmental disabilities that have some behavioral needs that are more intensive than a group home, can manage right away. And so we do some work to develop behavior plans and do some stabilization in those units to be able to send them home with a crisis stabilization safety plan. So developmental disabilities are those individuals with intellectual disabilities, cerebral palsy, Down syndrome, autism spectrum disorder. Those are some things that are more mainstream than hearing developmental disabilities. And that's one of our fastest growing segments of individuals that are in need. And so being able to provide some support in the community where they don't have to go to a hospital where they don't really fit in is an important piece of our strategic plan. The last thing I'll share just as a general note on services, is that we continue to partner with Suffolk Public Schools and we have clinicians and case managers located in every one of our Suffolk Public Schools. This was the first locality to take that model on and we have now populated that into every one of the localities that we serve in the public school system and we're really proud of that. What we see as an outcome there is that it's easier for our families to engage in service. I'm a parent of three boys, and after I leave here today, I'm going to head out to the Southampton County Board of Supervisors meeting and go hang out with them for a little bit, and I'm hoping to see my kids at some point before they go to sleep tonight. My oldest son's playing in a playoff game for baseball, and my two youngest will probably either be between the baseball game or taking care of the chickens at the house. Figure it out. I say all of that not because it's important about what's going on in my life, but my life is fairly representative of all of the people that we provide care to. They're busy. They don't have time to take extra appointments. They don't have time to take extra days off of work. So if we can reach a child where they're already at and we can help to support the school teachers, the administrators, and others in working through some of the behavioral challenges that we see, then we're going to make a better impact than if they have to take off of work and they have to disrupt the rest of their life. They can continue with the normal day-to-day grind, and we can continue to provide care for folks. It's an important model for us. I'm going to leave probably with a recent study that was just published by the Journal of American Medicine. And if you're familiar with 988, the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, that launched in 2024. And so there's been some early studies that have come out. And what the Journal of American Medicine noted was THAT THERE'S BEEN AN 11% DECREASE IN SUICIDE MORTALITY RATE FOR OUR YOUTH SINCE THE LAUNCH OF 988. THAT IN AND OF ITSELF IS SOMETHING THAT'S PRETTY MIRACULOUS. THAT'S A BIG DEAL. IN STATES LIKE VIRGINIA WHERE OUR CALL VOLUME HAS ACTUALLY SEEN THE LARGEST INCREASE, THAT'S AN 18% DECREASE IN SUICIDE MORTALITY RATE FOR OUR YOUTH. I can't tell you the number of families that have been impacted by the loss of a child because of suicide, but I'm sure that they could tell you how much that's impacted their careers, their home life, and their community service. And for every one of those families that we impact through those services, we have created another productive member of society that's going to be here for years to come. We run the 988 line for southeastern Virginia. It's a contracted service that we fund. And we work really closely with the folks that answer the phones there to make sure that they're delivering the best care. And we've linked mobile crisis services directly to that as well as the other crisis continuum services that is honestly probably my biggest work that I've got in the next year is to better publicize our crisis continuum of care so people know where to go when they need to get there and how to get there. A part of that division is the Marcus Alert program that's offered here through Mark 1, and I'm going to get to hand it off to Chief here in just a second to talk about that. But they go out day in and day out, night and day. It doesn't matter if it's raining, if it's snowing, if it's anything. When somebody's in need and they've called that line and they need more than just somebody to talk to on the phone, there are real people to respond. And I think that's why we're seeing the decrease of not just an 11% but an 18% decrease, and I'd like to get that down to zero at some point, a zero suicide rate. So if you'd like to ask questions now, I'm happy to take them, or we can wait until after all of us have kind of walked through things. That's the council's discretion.

Thank you, Mr. Rogers. I think we'll ask council, do you have any questions or comments right now? Director, Mr. Rogers. Vice Mayor Ward?

Yes, you made a statement that I say you've got to run it like a campaign campaign. You running like a candidate so you're doing well because you promised me a couple of things and you've done it you You was there when I called and you made sure I understood Procedure, so I appreciate that and I just want to know is with the mental illness and dementia is anything that We can help you with all you think we need for what's, I know it's up on the rise, so I just want to make sure because some people, I feel comfortable sending them to you, and I see that you got the five-day walk-in. That's all over? It's up in northern Suffolk also?

Our walk-in clinic five days a week is at our Northgate site, which is over on Godwin Boulevard by the Wawa.

Right. Okay, because right now with the information that you're sharing with me, I'd just like to know that people, I can tell them right away. And often when they ask for that need, I can really tell them to go there. And I'm not a bachelor now. I'll let them know where you're at, and I'll tell them to go over to you and give me a call back. And like I said, you have delivered. And I really appreciate that because it's on the rise. And like you said, you said you don't have no time. The caregiver ain't have no time neither. His life is going towards the person that's ill. So his time is all scattered everywhere. Some meetings I can't meet because there's something going on. So I appreciate your effort, and I like... for you to keep going, and like I can say this here, and I ain't scared to say it, you're better than them before. Okay? You're better than they had before, and I appreciate that. All right? God bless.

Council, any other questions or comments? Hearing none, Brandon, thank you again. Thank you for everything that you do in your service to our citizens. Thank you.

Thank you.

Mayor, Vice Mayor, members of council, thank you so much for this opportunity. This highly successful program started with a team's meeting between myself, Shelly Shelton, who's in the audience right here, Stacey Young from Western Tidewater Community Services Board of Fire. Then a vision was shared, that vision followed by the institution of this transformational program that provides services that are unmatched in Hampton Roads or even in the Commonwealth. Our citizens expect collaboration, coordination, resource sharing, expertise, and results. Captain Ray Ouellette and with his team, he'll introduce a minute. I'll now provide you with this presentation regarding Mark I and its overwhelming success. Ray. Thank you.

Mayor, Vice Mayor, City Council. Thank you for this opportunity. So I'm Ray Willett. I'm the fire captain. I'm also the market coordinator for the city of Suffolk. With me, Shelly Shelton is my co-partner. She works for Western Tidewater. She's the coordinator on their side. And then I have firefighter paramedic Benjamin Riendo. He's our community paramedic that rides in Mark 1. And then Lamont Matthews, you heard QMHP, qualified mental health professional. He's our QMHP that rides in Mark 1. So when you hear Mark, that's actually what it stands for, medical access and resources for the community. So it's a team we put together. It's a collaboration with Western Tidewater. It's a partnership with Western Tidewater and Suffolk Fire and Rescue. They approached us. They had funding through the Marcus Alert mandate. We said we'll set up a team, and we did, and it's been successful. Since July 1, 2024, we've been on the street 40 hours a week, five days, 40 hours a week, Monday through Friday, 11 to 7. So we're actually two teams. Our core of the team is the Marcus Lerp response. So that's our mental health side of the program. Governor Youngkin had an initiative called Write Help Right Now. And as a part of that, he wanted to stand up some co-response teams and some mobile crisis response teams. So with that, we established MARC1. Prior to this team standing up, if somebody was having a mental health crisis in the community, basically police would be brought in to handle it however they chose to handle it. Or if I were to go on an ambulance, I'm not a qualified mental health professional. Our training for mental health is about a half a page in the paramedic curricula. So my goal was to get him to the hospital, which is not always the right place for somebody to be who's in crisis. So with this team, we are now able to give that person who is in crisis the right help that they need at the right time. We bring Ben and Lamont on the scene. Lamont is able to step in and do what he does best. He is fantastic at his job. He's very humble, but you should meet him. He does great work. But we're able to get people at the place where they're at the right help that they need If they need to be transported to the CRC, the Crisis Receiving Center, that's our home. It was our home. It's under construction right now. We're going to go back to it. But Western Tidewater has provided us a place for us to work out of, and that's the place where we take all of our citizens to that need mental health help. So that is the foundation of the team. We transport the CRC, and, yeah, it's been fantastic. The numbers have been picking up significantly. Last week I did work on Friday. Ben was off. did four calls with two transports. I think we did 10 transports total last week. Whereas in the beginning of the program, we were doing 10 transports a month. So our citizens need the help and we are there to give them the help that they need. We also wanted to address something else. We started looking when we were standing up this program, we looked around at our neighboring jurisdictions to see what they were offering on top of mental health resources. And we have a lot of people that have just needs, basic needs that they're not being met. We have a lot of people who are living at home And they're aging in place is what we call it. They've been in their home for a long time, and they have no resources. They have nobody to support them for whatever reason. They have no funding. They have no food. They have no support, social support or anything. And when somebody doesn't know what to do, they're going to call 911, and we're going to respond. So we have a lot of people who will call 911 for reasons. I've helped people go to bed. I've turned people's thermostats up on a fire truck. So Suffolk Fire and Rescue will do that, but is that the most appropriate use of our resources? We have this opportunity, so what we want to do is step in, and we set up a second part of the team. We call it MIH, or Mobile Integrated Health Care. So what we do is we address the needs of our citizens, because they're going to call 911 regardless. So we have two parts of that. We call it aging in place and multi-visit people. We have people who call all the time if they just need assistance, or we have people who don't want to leave their homes. They've been there all their lives, and as long as we can keep them there safely, that's their home and they're entitled to that decision. But typically the way we interact with them initially is through a fall. So we get called for a lift assist. And prior to this program, our fire trucks, the men and women of Suffolk Fire and Rescue would go out and they'd go and they'd help the person back in the bed. They would never ask, why did you fall? Because even if they did, there was nothing they could do for them. Now we can ask that question because now we can fix that problem. We can give them resources. We work with our local communities. We work with our churches. If they're food scarce, we have a lot of churches that have a lot of food banks in our city. We partner with Chesapeake MIH. They have a large warehouse full of donated equipment. If somebody needs a rollator, a walker, a wheelchair, anything that they need that we have the ability to get to keep them in their house as safely as they can, we want to give them that resource. And these resources are at no cost to the citizens. The equipment comes in through donations. We have a lot of resources in our community. We don't want to own any of these patients, so we turn them over to home health care. We turn them over to somebody who does this. We're just the first cry for help because if somebody falls, somebody doesn't know what to do, they're going to call 911. So we address home safety. Ben will go in. He does a home assessment, make sure the rugs are okay. Do you have smoke detectors? Do you have food? That's a question that we have to ask people. Because some people just don't. If they have a cat, or if they don't have a cat, but they have cat food in their cupboards, why? You can imagine why. So we go in, we address these issues, and we've seen significant impact with that program as well. So that's our team. Ben and Lamont, they're our primary response, but we have a lot more people that could fill in. Um, like I said, we started with a market alert mandate. Western Tyler has been a great partner for us. They've been nothing but helpful. Um, they stood up the team. They were able to purchase the vehicle and donate it to the city of Suffolk. They've helped us with uniforms. Um, they also, uh, um, I'm skipping ahead. They also compensate us for, uh, Ben. So when we were looking at stand up this program, we want to be fiscally responsible and make sure that the money that we're spending, um, our taxpayers money is spent well. and every cent that it costs Ben is being reimbursed by Western Tidewater. We did lose a person from operations to bring him over to Mark One, but the funding that is spent, including benefits and overtime, is being reimbursed by Western Tidewater. The only thing that the city of Suffolk pays for is me, so I hope you like this program. So, Suffolk Fire and Rescue and Suffolk Police. Our relationship has dramatically increased and not like it was bad to begin with, but working with police, they deal with much more mental health problems than we do. We only get the call when it seems to be some sort of medical issue. So police see about two and a half times more calls than we do. What we want to do is step in, bring Mark I onto the scene to prevent the ECO because that's the tool that the police have to use if somebody's not being cooperative or if they need to get somebody to resources. That's the way that they do it typically. If Lamont can get on the scene and do what he does, he has an amazing ability to talk people into going to the CRC, and that's the place where they need to go. So we're able to prevent an ECO. We're able to get the person the help that they need. And the way we've always done it had to change. So fire had to change. We've also had to have change with the way police interacted as well. So Major Epperson has been a fantastic partner with police. We haven't met expectations. I was able to call him or email him, or Shelly will be able to email him. And he either has a reason as to why something happened or a fix, and it was fixed. So he's been fantastic on the police side. And then the side note, police love Lamont. He's like a movie star. If you just talk to a police officer and just mention Mark I, do you know Lamont? Have you seen him? They love him. It's been just a dramatic improvement in our relationship on the scene. And they call us now. So we hear it all the time. Mark I, are you available? Police will be calling for us. They know the value of this program. They know the value that Lamont and Western Tidewater bring. As soon as Lamont can get that person in the back of Mark I, we have the ability to transport people to the CRC That's one of our unique things is we're able to take them directly there. If they want to come with me, they don't go in the ambulance. They don't go in the back of a cop car. They're going to come in Mark 1 to the CRC to get help right now. So let's see. Yeah, Western Tyler funds it. I mentioned that. So this is not a new concept. It's just new to us. There's over 2,700 CIT programs. CIT is crisis intervention training. So that's the training that we all go through. Lamont is a mental health clinician, but police and fire, we go through CIT training. And so just in general, CIT programs, there's over 2,700 in the United States. This is not a new concept. It is a proven concept, and we've seen right now that it works. So when you look at our stats, this is from 2025. I just want to reiterate, this is only 40 hours a week, five days a week. We're only in service Monday through Friday, 11 to 7. We have a lot of opportunities on the weekends and nights that we don't capture. But with that being said, this is what we've got so far. We have 10 Suffolk Fire and Rescue personnel that are qualified to ride as the paramedic. And then we have two QMHPs. We have Lamont and our part-timer. He's actually a Suffolk Fire employee as well, Jerome Freeman. He has a degree, and he does mental health work as well, so he's picked up a part-time with us and taught water to ride with us as well. Last year, we did 382 total calls for services with 524 total encounters, and an encounter doesn't always... When I say 382, that's how many times Mark 1 responded in the vehicle. But we can also, when we're doing the MIH side of things, typically it starts with a phone call. So if we're making a phone call for somebody, if we have to go out to Chesapeake to pick them up a walker, we count that as an encounter. So that's why the numbers don't match. But we had 524 encounters. 387 were through the MIH program. And 77 of those patients were referred from operations. So like I said, the lift assist calls, our fire trucks go out. They see a need for something. They're like, I don't know what's going on here, but you need help. Can somebody come talk to you? They refer our clients to us, our citizens to us. And I got handouts out here for y'all. In this handout, on the purple one, it says Aging in Place. There's a QR code right here. This is our referral link for... our program, and it's active right now. If you knew somebody that needed it right now, you could scan that, give us some information. Within a day or two, Ben's gonna be on the phone calling them, and we'll be out there shortly to see what they need. So all of our MIH program right now has been through referrals. For the Marcus Alert side of it, we had 137 calls with 60 transports to the CRC. That's 60 times where a potential ECO was not issued. So I've talked with Major Epperson, and it's kinda hard to prove a negative, If the ECO was never issued, you can't really say, did we prevent it? But in his words, anytime we do a transport, we have prevented ECO because typically that person needs help and they're not going to stay wherever they are at. So by us transporting them, we've prevented the ECO. We've returned the police officer back to doing police officer things. They don't have to sit for 72 hours at Obesee on a patient who's being held under ECO. In total, we've serviced 199 unique citizens across both programs. And then we've done more CIT training. We're rolling it out to the entire fire department. It's a great program. It's very effective the way it works. It teaches people how to talk to people who are in crisis. So we have two per class, and we're just rolling it out as we go. So, yeah. So with that, I would love to answer any questions, or do I need to turn it over to Ebony?

Should we turn the microphone over to Ebony? Would you like to take questions?

Let's go ahead and take some questions now. Counsel, questions or comments? We move on. Hearing none, thank you very much for your presentation. Thank you. I love the direction we're going, working hand-in-hand with our police department in regards to, I don't think everybody really understands how much is involved, what the difference is between that ECO and then rather than that, doing the CRC because that keeps the officers on the streets, takes care of the transport, takes care of a lot of things all at one time. So I appreciate that very much, and hopefully that process will continue to evolve. Let's put it that way. All right, thank you very much. Thank you. Who do we got next? Ms. Ebony Murphy.

GOOD AFTERNOON, HONORABLE MAYOR, HONORABLE VICE MAYOR, DISTINGUISHED MEMBERS OF COUNCIL, AND MR. MAYOR. MY NAME IS EBONY MURPHY OF REST ASSURED FOUNDATION OF VIRGINIA, AND WE ARE OPERATORS OF THE WESTERN TIDEWARDER HOMELESS SHELTER. IT'S BEEN A VERY REWARDING PROJECT THUS FAR. I FEEL LIKE WE'VE MADE A HUGE IMPACT IN SUCH A LITTLE BIT OF TIME. There's a lot of different strategies that we've had to put in place just to make it work. Training that we've had to have to make sure we're prepared for the population of people we serve. And a lot of it starts with the recruitment process. So we have to be very strategic about the people who we hire. So I'm very careful. My methods are a bit old school when it comes to recruiting. It's not just over the phone, virtual. I'm meeting people in person. JUST TO BE ABLE TO READ THE PERSONALITIES, GET TO LEARN MORE ABOUT THEM, SEE HOW THEY SHOW UP. THAT JUST KIND OF SHOWS THE COMMITMENT THAT THEY HAVE. BUT WE WENT FOR PEOPLE WHO HAVE MENTAL HEALTH EXPERIENCE. WE ALSO HAVE FOLKS WHO HAVE WORKED IN THE RESIDENTIAL GROUP HOMES. WE HAVE PROGRAM MANAGERS WHO HAVE A LOT OF MENTAL HEALTH EXPERIENCE AS WELL. Um, so part of our process is to bring them in, get them the training that they need. Uh, we also have folks who have lived experience because the big part of this is being able to relate to some extent to the people that we serve. Um, I feel that that's helpful. They have someone who they can look up to who may have been in a situation before, and they serve as somebody who provides a little hope for them. So I'll take you through our process. when an individual shows up to the shelter. So they come to the shelter. We do an intake. We take them on a tour. Well, during the intake, they get a guest handbook, which is gone through very thoroughly with them. We take them through a tour of the facility. Their items go through a process called hotboxing because there's a lot of things, you know, that's coming off the streets. And for safety purposes, we don't want ANY BUGS OR ANYTHING LIKE THAT, SO WE DO PUT THE ITEMS IN A HOT BOX, AND THEN, YOU KNOW, THEY SIT IN THERE FOR ABOUT AN HOUR, THEN WE TAKE THEM OUT. WE GIVE THEM HYGIENE KITS TO MAKE SURE THAT THEY HAVE ALL THAT THEY NEED. WE PROVIDE THEM WITH A MEAL AND, YOU KNOW, JUST PRETTY MUCH JUST EXTEND A LOT OF LOVE AND CARE TO THESE INDIVIDUALS AS THEY SHOW UP. WE HAVE BEEN LUCKY TO HAVE CARSON DEAN, OF CARSON DEAN CONSULTING, SPEND TIME WITH OUR STAFF TO BE ABLE TO PROVIDE THEM WITH THE TRAINING THAT THEY NEED TO BE ABLE TO WORK WITH THESE INDIVIDUALS. I'M SORRY. We have served so far since opening about 73 individuals have been sheltered since opening on July the 16th. We have folks who have been exited, many of them exited to housing. What we're finding surprisingly is that many of them are being exited back to family members. So a lot of the relationships between the family members have been strained. So what we're doing is We're connecting them back with their family members just so that they can mend those relationships because we're finding is that a nice percentage of people are going back home and their family members are welcoming them back to their homes. Currently, we have all 37 beds full, and that's pretty much the case all the time. As soon as somebody's exited, there's another person who's ready to come into the shelter right away. We've got a few success stories, and I'll go over three of them and let you know of some of the other positive events that we have going on at the shelter. We received... a woman who is from Tennessee. She arrived to the shelter after experiencing conflict with her family due to her religious beliefs. She reached out to a friend who lives locally in Suffolk who told that person that she could come live with them. That wasn't the case, so this woman was actually sleeping in a bathroom. So the Suffolk police actually brought her to the shelter. She's very withdrawn, so we had to kind of you know, talk to her and try to get her to be a little more open. She needed medical attention. She wasn't open to it. So I actually went and spoke to her myself and was able to get her to go over to the hospital to receive the attention that she needs. And then we were able to connect her with a company called Jakafi, and they are actually going to pick her up and, you know, we're going to divert her into their programs. Another story, a pregnant female arrived after being released from incarceration. She was experiencing, she had suicidal ideations. So we've had to talk to her and provide her with a lot of emotional support. We were able to get her connected with four kids who they have a family program. So she's there now and just doing a lot better. Another person who's entered our program is a male with a significant history of trauma stemming from sexual abuse as a kid. He loves to dance. So he's just in the parking lot with his headphones. He's dancing 24-7 almost. But he's easily triggered. Our shelter is 37 beds, but every person has a roommate. So oftentimes, there's conflict between a roommate SO HE'S EASILY TRIGGERED SO WE WERE ABLE TO GET HIM CONNECTED WITH WESTERN TIDEWATER COMMUNITY SERVICE BOARD AS WELL AS MANY OF OUR OTHER GUESTS. AND NOW HE'S ACTUALLY OFF TO THEIR SUPPORTIVE HOUSING PROGRAM. HE'S PROBABLY THE FOURTH OR FIFTH PERSON WHO WE'VE BEEN ABLE TO COLLABORATE AND GET HIM INTO THE SUPPORTIVE HOUSING PROGRAM. WE'VE HAD Samuel's Mobile Dental Services come onto the site, and they have provided dental care to at least 10 of our guests there. They were able to confirm their insurance. They were doing x-rays, basic cleanings, moldings for dentures. So that's something that's been very beneficial to a lot of our guests as well. Just even something as small as just, you know, making sure your teeth look good, it builds confidence. And that's a lot of things that the people come in there without a lot of confidence. And again, we have collaborated with Western Tidewater Community Service Board about two weeks ago. They were able to COMING TO OUR FACILITY AFTER WE EXPRESSED THIS, SOME OF OUR GUESTS JUST AREN'T COMFORTABLE LEAVING OFF-SITE. YOU KNOW, THEY COME THERE, IT'S THEIR SANCTUARY, SO A LOT OF THEM ARE NOT COMFORTABLE LEAVING OFF-SITE, SO WE WERE ABLE TO COLLABORATE WITH WESTERN TIDEWARDER COMMUNITY SERVICE BOARD. THEY CAME ON SITE, PROVIDED TWO ASSESSORS IN PERSON, AND THEN WE HAD ONE VIRTUALLY who spent the whole day assessing our guests and getting them signed up for treatment. We've also been able to utilize their walk-in facilities as well for our guests to get some assistance there. And aside from that, we have implemented what we call Fun Fridays, And this is something that keeps the guests on site. Some of them, we don't want them going outside, getting into more trouble, doing things that they shouldn't be doing. So we have this program within the shelter that it gives them the chance to stay on site and be entertained there as well. And that's, let's see. And then that's pretty much a summary of what we have going on. I'm sorry. It's my first time doing this. I'm a little nervous, but again, everything is going very well. We have a lot of positive outcomes and, you know, we enjoy doing what we're doing. We have recently connected with the planning council again, and we have another level of access, which will also, OPEN UP THE DOORS FOR US TO BE ABLE TO GET MORE PEOPLE PLACED. AND THIS ACCESS POINT THAT WE HAVE NOW, IT INVOLVES US MEETING WITH THE PLANNING COUNCIL ON A BI-WEEKLY BASIS SO WE'RE ABLE TO DO CASE MEETINGS WITH THEM AND PRESENT OUR FOLKS FOR HOUSING WITH THEM AS WELL. And also just the support from people in the community has been very well. I'm not really, we've been actually going to meet with people in person just so they can see us, feel our passion. We've gotten a lot of great support from some of the local folks such as the United Methodist Church, Western Tidewater Community Service Board, SAMUEL'S MOBILE DENTAL SERVICES FOR KIDS, MISSIONARY OUTREACH, BRIDGE THE GAP, CAPS COMMUNITY KITCHEN, WIN ENTERTAINMENT, OAK ROOF BAPTIST CHURCH, JUST TO NAME A FEW. WE ARE HOPING TO DO MORE OF THIS. YOU KNOW, WE WANT TO PROVE WHAT WE CAN DO. WE WANT TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU ALL ARE AWARE OF THE OUTCOMES, AND HOPEFULLY WE'LL HAVE THE OPPORTUNITY TO DO A LOT MORE OF THIS. And I guess that's, you know, pretty much it in a nutshell. All right.

Thank you, Ms. Murphy. You've got a lot going on, that's for sure. And I know that's been a welcome addition as far as the service that we can provide in our city that we hadn't been able to before. With that being said, council members, questions, comments? Council Member Johnson.

Ebony, I just want to say, you've done exactly what you came here tonight to do, so thank you. I SEE THAT THIS PROGRAM IS MOVING IN EXACTLY THE DIRECTION WE WERE HOPING IT WAS GOING TO MOVE IN, AND I AM VERY PROUD OF THE CITY AND PROUD OF WHAT WE'RE DOING. I THINK WE'RE REALLY HAVING AN AMAZING OUTREACH, AND I HOPE IT CONTINUES ON FORWARD. AND WE'RE HERE TO SUPPORT YOU IN ANY WAY THAT WE CAN. THANK YOU.

AND I JUST WANT TO ADD ALSO THAT WE'VE BEEN ABLE TO ACTUALLY WALK OUT INTO THE COMMUNITY ON FOOT JUST TO INTRODUCE OURSELVES TO FOLKS WHO LIVE NEAR THE SHELTER. JUST, YOU KNOW, TO SAY HELLO, ASK THEM HOW EVERYTHING IS GOING SINCE WE'VE BEEN THERE, AND IT'S BEEN A PRETTY GOOD FEEDBACK THAT WE'VE BEEN RECEIVING FROM THEM. A LOT OF THE FOLKS WHO COME INTO THE PROGRAM ARE VERY WITHDRAWN, SO WE'VE HAD TO BE VERY CREATIVE AS FAR AS TRYING TO, YOU KNOW, GET THEM OPEN TO MOVE FORWARD TO THE NEXT STEP. SO EVEN WITH OUR CASE MANAGEMENT, We've been very creative as to how we deal with them. So a lot of them don't want to continue to just sit in the office and somebody continue to ask some questions. So we are sitting outside with them, having our meetings. There's an Arby's next door. We'll walk with them next door, have a burger. And that has been able to help them open up a lot more. Some of them are, you know, they're gaining weight. People who are normally stuck in their rooms, they come out more often. So, again, it's just been a very good experience so far.

Council, any other questions or comments? Ms. Murphy, thank you very much for what you're doing. We look forward to your continued success.

Thank you. And I have some of these just in case you all want something to take with you as well.

Thank you. That concludes our work session. We do have a need for a closed meeting this afternoon. Madam Clerk, will you please read the motion for consideration?

Pursuant to Virginia Code Sections 2.2-3711A1, the discussion, consideration, or interviews of prospective candidates for appointment and the assignment, appointment, and performance of specific public officers or appointees of the city Specifically, the appointments as shown on the attached list for vacancies or term expirations for the Community Policy and Management Team, the Hampton Roads Planning District Commission, the Human Services Advisory Board, the Local Board of Building Code Appeals, the Paul D. Camp Community College Board, the Senior Services of Southeastern Virginia Board of Directors, the Southeastern Virginia Alcohol Safety Action Program, the Planning Council, the Tidewater Youth Services Commission, and the Western Tidewater Water Authority. Item number two, pursuant to Virginia Code section 2.2-3711A3, the discussion or consideration of the acquisition of real property for a public purpose or of the disposition of publicly held real property where discussion in an open meeting would adversely affect the bargaining position or negotiating strategy of the public body, specifically tax and map parcels 33 asterisk 14 and 33 asterisk 14C. Council, motion.

Motion would be in order. Council Member Butler-Barlow.

Move to approve.

Motion for approval. Council Member Butler-Barlow. Council Member Wright.

Second.

Second from Council Member Wright. Any discussion of the motion? Hearing none, Council Members prepare to vote. Please cast your vote. Madam Clerk, kindly record the vote.

The motion is approved by a vote of eight to zero.

That concludes our work session. We will reconvene at 6 p.m.