Town Council - Regular Meeting

Heat. Hey, Heat. Hello Garner and welcome to the town council regular meeting of April 21st, 2026. It's another beautiful evening in Garner and if you don't like the weather in North Carolina, just give it another day. It'll change. It'll be here. Having said that, would the town clerk please call the role?

Mayor Gupton here. Mayor Pro Tim Dinger here. Council member Matthews here. Council member Singleton here. Council member Stallings here. And council member Vance here. Thank you. And our pledge of allegiance this evening will be led by our council member Kelvin Stalins as well as the invocation. Stand if you're able.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Please bow your heads if you may. Dear heavenly father, we come before you tonight with gratitude, grateful for life, grateful for peace, grateful for this community. Grant us your divine wisdom as we make decisions, especially in moments where we cannot fully see the future or all the implications of what we do. Help us act with clarity, integrity, and a steady focus on what is best for this town and the people who call it home. Guide our judgment, steady our conversations, and remind us of the responsibility that we carry as we do what's best for and the work of the people. Amen.

Amen. Thank you, sir. Excellent job. Uh, brings us to item B on the agenda, which is the adoption of the agenda. I believe council members have had a chance to look this over. Uh, is there a motion to adopt the agenda? So moved. Second. Motion by Mr. Matthews, second by council member Stalins. All in favor of adopting the agenda, please signify by saying I. I.

Any opposed by nay. Passes unanimously. The agenda is adopted. We'll start out with a presentation this evening from our fire rescue. Our fire chief Barrett Penny will tell us about the strategic plan and to help us moving ahead and maintaining the fine, highly accredited and effective fire department that we have. Chief K.

Thank you, Mayor. Uh, members of council, uh, we'd like to take this opportunity tonight. We've been working over the past several months on a revising and and redoing our strategic plan for the next five years. Um, so we've got a kind of a a new way to envision our strategic plan. And, um, this couples with months of research from external and internal stakeholders. Um, and what we've what we've come up with is basically seven goals. Okay? And those seven goals center around operational readiness, workforce readiness, health and safety of our people and our citizens, communication and consistency, capacity planning, looking at growth in the future of the town, continuous improvement, and then we need to we need to hone in on our records keeping and optimization of that. So, um, we we can show you the what I say is the bland of just the paperwork of the plan, but we've got a a new presentation, and this is going to be how our citizens, our management can look at our plan and and keep track with us as we move through it. So, I would like to introduce our deputy chief of administration, Jason Hathcock. Going to say that he has he's the mastermind behind this plan. So, how it's envisioned, how how you get to interact with it, and how we can be held accountable for achieving our goals. Um, so I'm going to turn it over to Chief Hathcock, and he's going to walk you through the interaction of of our plan. Chief,

thank you, Chief Penny. Uh, thank you to Mayor, Council, Town Management, and and those in attendance as well. Uh as part of your agenda packet, you did have our um our what we call our paper strategic plan, which we understand traditionally is always of importance. Those electronic versions that people enact uh interact with are always going to typically be part of any strategic planning process. uh intentionally as we challenge ourselves to improve organizationally and and honestly personally uh one of the things I found over my many years in the fire service connected to continuous improvement is you have to find a way to uh interactively engage people in things that they might not uh normally want to take part in. So one of the things that I had envisioned for this strategic planning process was how do we go beyond just that paper copy that we know we provide. It's a fairly static document even though the intent of a strategic plan is to be very dynamic. and we had a goals and objectives management report which was a separate document from the paper plan that was a mechanism we used to track progress and share progress uh during the 5-year period. So really uh through through a lot of networking and and um different conversations with people on unique ways to showcase strategic plans and really outside the box thought processes. uh I decided to embark on an application that's really built for GIS professionals. Uh it's called an ArcGIS story map. So, um, what that allows is a online a sharable link that we intend to post at some point, uh, on our, uh, Facebook or on on our fire department page that will provide

the opportunity for anyone internally or externally to be connected to everything about the history of our plan, updates along the way as we meet, our goals, our objectives, our task. Uh it also has a connection to what we call an S3 operations dashboard which I'm really really excited about because one of the things that our accreditation model challenges us with is how we share progress along the way and that's really been a challenge for us. Sending static spreadsheets is not necessarily always the best way to share progress. So as we meet quarterly and we update our plan, the operations dashboard will be updated as well. And we also have an interactive survey, just three questions at the end throughout the entirety of this plan that will allow stakeholders to interact and provide feedback. So again, I'm just going to do a pretty brief uh highle overview of the plan. Uh first, just a little bit about us. The video clip this here is about seven and a half minutes of just really me talking uh explaining what the plan's for, how to interact with it, and of course encouraging feedback along the way. One of the things that I'm really really excited about is our 2020 to 2025 plan. With that goals and objectives management report we had, we completed over 90% of what we set out to accomplish within that plan. So less than 10% of the old plan carried into the new plan which obviously for us made us very proud. So as I just scroll through this our founding principles, our mission, our vision, our values as you saw in your agenda packet, uh our intent is this is the cover page for the paper version. uh after presenting to you all tonight, our intent is to make sure that there's uh embedded link here

so people will know if you want to access the paper version of the plan, the PDF version, you'll be able to do that by clicking on this cover page. Also, another thing we're challenged with in the plan is to make sure that our plan is connected with the town plan and with any other associated plans. Uh that also includes community master plans, which I just learned about recently. the Garner Forward plan. We're being challenged uh in the 11th edition of our model to make sure uh as we create this that we're looking at some of those pieces in addition to the specific strategic plans that we take part in. Overall, the town plan, although we fit into different avenues depending on what the objective or task was, overwhelmingly our fit was under the efficient and timely service delivery piece. And then within Wake County's plan, the safer community together component. So, we've got a historical timeline here, which really just kind of is a brief overview of progress since we started this. Um, in June of 25, we started to become aware of our latest model in accreditation, which is for this 5-year cycle. One of the things that we're challenged with in in any of the processes is making sure that uh we've got a plan that other people can connect with and also we have to submit to our authority having jurisdiction. So that is a core competency for us. We can't create a plan in a silo. We have to make sure that we involve stakeholders and also that we submit that plan to our AHJ. Uh we are also challenged to create smart goals as you well know as specific, measurable, attainable, realistic and time bound. And as I mentioned earlier, we're challenged with creating a process that people can stay connected to along the way so they can see the progress that we're making throughout the duration of

the plan. So I won't read over all of these. I will highlight some of the key components. Uh as far as our internal stakeholder feedback, I completed 22 sessions over 78 hours with staff for uh what we called a a sore analysis, strengths, opportunities, aspirations and results. As a result of that effort, uh we also had an external stakeholder survey and we ongoing we keep customer service surveys available all throughout the year. We distribute over 10% of the calls that we respond to each month. We send surveys to customers. They also have the opportunity at any point during the year to go online and fill out a survey. So, we got 101 external stakeholder survey responses specific to the strategic plan. We had 717 over our 5-year strategic planning cycle. And as a result of all of those sore conversations internally with staff, we resulted in the 137 strengths, 175 opportunities, 160 aspirations, and 155 results, which was a lot to put together. Uh but you know it it was uh it was really really successful with staff spending time with them letting let letting them see a little behind the scenes and how they are a much larger part of the plan than what they may be aware. So as you can see for tonight April we've we've already put on that uh tonight we present to council. The goal is after tonight once we finish is to get that sharable link up on our website so people can begin interacting with that. Uh I try to explain goals, objectives and task. I use a ice cream shop analogy to staff but I in generalization a 30,000 20,000 and 10,000 ft view uh is kind of how I try to explain it. now may be a little

subjective in the 10,000 ft piece. There's a lot of um you know human elements that might not be identifiable at at 10,000 ft but as it compares to 30,000 ft it's just zoom levels we get deeper and deep deeper through each piece. So Chief Penny mentioned earlier seven goals seven overarching goals connected to 29 objectives. So each goal has objectives attached to it along with critical task. uh the 29 objectives uh all of them generally have about four uh critical task a few have five that is how we will measure progress along the way. So what you see here is purely for demonstration purposes. The colors you see uh really just kind of show the different uh variations of levels we have built within this progress tracker. So the blue is on hold, the red would be not started, the yellow is in progress, the green is complete, and the gray would be cancelled. So that is what we will update at minimum each quarter as we have our own strategic planning meetings. We will come in and keep this piece updated. So at any point when you're clicking on that link, that will be most reflective of what we're doing. And you can click on this and it will take you outside uh and let you interact at a little deeper level. But for the sake of this uh review, I'll just show you this part. And I won't go through every one of the goals, but uh the seven goals, you can see here what goal one is. We've got seven objectives connected to goal one. And the deeper dive into those objectives, uh you use the right arrow here. Each objective has who it's assigned to. It has the time frame. It has the specifics of what are associated with those critical tasks. We have our correlation with the plans and we have anticipated

outcomes. So we have that for for every single uh objective within the plan. And as I said I won't uh belabor the conversation by going through all seven but goal two workforce readiness. Goal three health wellness and culture. Goal four, communication and consistency. Goal five, capacity planning. Goal six, continuous improvement. Goal seven, records optimization. And then finally, as I mentioned at the beginning of the presentation, another piece that was really important to us was getting feedback along the way. We didn't want to make it an exhaustive survey because we felt like that would deter people from completing it. But what we wanted to know is they had the opportunity to interact with it and what their thoughts were on it. So just three simple questions. Uh did you did you find the plan clear and easy to understand? Uh did it did it help establish a strong framework in your opinion for us as we move forward? And of course the open text box where they can share anything whatsoever they choose to with us. and then of course our social media connections on the bottom for both the town and the fire department. So just a brief really high level overview, something different we're trying to create in addition to the uh paper plan. So I will now open the floor for any questions or comments.

Thank you very much, Chief. It's always good to remind all of us that job number one for any town government and especially for the town of government is public safety. and you guys are right there out front with the police, the public works, the inspectors. It's all about keeping our community safe. We can't thank you enough. It's not just a glamour of riding the fire truck and putting out fires, fighting fires, going to rescues. It's about planning and education and evaluation and continually striving to be better. And that's where all of our departments and especially the fire department have really excelled. So, thank you for what you're doing. We'll take comments and questions from council. We'll start with Mr. Matthews and come right down the line.

Thank great presentation by the way. Y'all put a lot of effort and time in it and the fact it's it's an ongoing and working document. That's that's good planning because you don't have to recreate it. You can work with us and the fact that the town manager or anybody or in the audience can go online and see what's going on and even make comments. I think it's a great idea. times come and good leadership on the fire department to come up with something uniquely different and it's a great job because one thing people want to see the blue lights and the red lights when they need them. So, and both agencies do a fabulous job of it. Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you, Mr. Sleton.

Yes, thank you for all the information. you do put a lot of time into it, countless hours, and greatly appreciated that your presentation and hope some members of the public will look and and see all the planning that goes into the work that you have to do. So, greatly appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Stout.

Um, great presentation, extremely comprehensive. Um, I did have one question and I I love this this feedback element to it as well, too. So, when it comes to the continual um improvement element, um, I see it. Can we scroll up a little bit? Um so when it says did you find the strategic plan clear and easy to understand? Um if you had an overwhelming amount of f people that say um yes um is it something where we might develop a one pager or or or something that we can distribute to the public that's a little bit more easy to digest? Is that

absolutely I think we would we would definitely be open to to anything based on the feedback that come in and a better way to communicate with stakeholders because that's all this is is just a different mechanism to communicate other than the paper version. So if although we felt like this this version maybe was a little easier to digest and a little more intuitive, if it if it was uh believed based on the feedback that it was a little too much, we would certainly be open to change whatever we need to to make that more digestible. That was definitely amazing document, great presentation. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dinger.

Yeah, I agree with my colleagues. having the digital interface available to people is just so much more accessible to so many more people. Um, and I want to appreciate give appreciation to the amount of effort that probably went into this strategic plan versus the others coming in with the town. I know there I don't know, but I assume there's a lot more work involved in in making this document than there probably has been. So, hats off to you all for doing that new and extra work. Uh I did one question just around and senior goals. Um it's about recruitment and retention and just I don't know if maybe a quot question for both of you. Where do we sort of stand in the county with regards to recruitment and retention? Is it something we need to really lean into? Are we doing really well? Is everybody jealous of us? It how how are we doing in that that department? So I I think specific to the recruitment conversation, uh we until we migrated to the the 48.96 schedule that we're on now, we we were struggling a little bit to recruit folks mostly due to travel. And when we made the change to the 48 hours consecutively, it allowed us an opportunity to get people from further out. Uh I I think that offered some advantages, but what it also created for us that uh I don't think we were aware of at the time is it also gave them an opportunity to truly disconnect when they were away. So um you know, we're dealing with some of that now. Uh from a from a retainment perspective, you know, recruitment and retention, I compared to national statistics, uh and that's what I'll base that on. I don't think we have any uh retainment issues within the fire department like anywhere else. You know, we may lose someone, but it's not necessarily to another fire department. It could be because they tried it out and just maybe

it wasn't the line of work that they expected, so they want to try something different. But most definitely, I think we could stand to improve our recruitment efforts. One of the things that uh we've tasked our training officer with and we have an expansion for a division chief is a focus on uh true recruitment and professional development beyond just a hiring process. How do we get out and get in front of people? Uh and we are also attracting people that we prefer to be certified fully ahead of time which comes with its own challenges because we don't host our own academy which is another reason why the training facility we have as part of this plan and the capital improvement plan. So, I guess a short slashlong-term goal is when we get that facility, we would be able to host our own training academy with the intent of uh providing people with no training whatsoever in the fire service the opportunity to work with us.

Thank you so much and and good luck. And if you ever need anything, lean on the town with those firefighters. Thank you. Thank you so much. A very thorough briefing. We really appreciate all the work that went into this strategic plan. have one question. As Ghana continues to grow, how confident are we that our current system can keep up and where do we need to go ahead and get ahead of that growth? Well, spec want to speak? Yeah. Yeah.

Thank you, Mr. F. So, I think it's important that that we have an accurate growth. You know, we we keep up accurately with growth. can talk growth all the time, but it one of the main advantages is that we more and more involved in the town now. So, we get to see the growth participating in TRC. When I attend these meetings, the council meetings, I'm hearing about things and we know what's coming down the pipe three to five years down the road as developers and y'all are approving projects. We get a more accurate account. So, I think that that's important, but the the challenges that we face are predominantly call volume. We're a very busy fire department if you look in our stats as compared to everywhere else. Um, so I think we're we're we're on the right track for predicting growth and being more involved. But it's going to be it's always a challenge, right? You're you're dealing with with a budget and you're dealing with service demand. And those two those two things have to be, you know, weighed in accounts for each other. I will say town management, the managers and the budget team, you know, they're working with us day in and day out to to to make sure that we're achieving our goals.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much. Uh yeah, quite a presentation. Makes me want to go and work through the strategic plan and give you a rating here. Only three questions, right? Only three questions. I like it. I like it a lot. Any other closing comments from you, gentlemen? just thank you for the opportunity to to to show the town and and the the council the uh the way we're going to be able to to track this and keep up with it. I'm excited about it and I'd like to publicly thank Chief Hathcock for you're right the many hours that he invested in putting this together and making it a a public live document where we can interact with. Chief, what's our strength uh right now?

I mean, what is our staff number? So, we're 81 line staff and we have we have eight full-time administrative staff and one supplemental administrative staff. Okay. Okay. Fantastic. Gentlemen, you you may be seated and enjoy the rest of the show.

Thank you very much. Uh and next on our agenda is item D, which is petitions and comments. And uh we always like to read this disclaimer to explain what this is. This portion of the meeting is to receive comments from the public on items not included in this agenda regarding matters germanine to town policies or business or subjects within the town council's real or apparent jurisdiction. Individuals are group spokespersons must sign up with the town clerk prior to the start of the meeting. The council is interested in hearing your concerns, but will not take action or deliberate on subject matter brought up during the petitions and comment segment. Topics requiring further investigation will be referred to the appropriate town officials or staff and may be scheduled for a future agenda. And have we anyone signed up?

Yes, sir. Yes. And who is our first speaker? Cleave Avery. Yes. if you would please approach uh the podium there and introduce yourself by name and address, sir. And of course, I think I didn't mention, but you've probably seen the threem minute limit. There's a little timer there. Thank you for There you go. It seems to be on. It's working. All right.

Um my name is Cleveland Avery. I've been a resident of Garner for about 40 years now and I live in the older part of the community. It goes way back number of years. And uh I'm at 104 Turner Street, Garner, NC 27529. And due to the time constraints, I just want to go straight into what I consider a proposal to this council. Okay. And I understand you've already made uh the point that the action would not be taken at this point. But the main concern is there is um recently upgraded park um called Jackie John's seniors senior uh public park at the u on uh Rand Mill Road adjacent to Smith Drive. And I'm sure you guys are all familiar with that. Um the problem that I see with this has to do with public safety of course and that is uh the park nicely built and put together but no parking lot. And I've traveled this throughout this nation extensively and I've seen different parks but I've never seen a park without a parking lot. Right now it's a narrow street going down to that park and it you can barely pass each other just uh in a in a vehicle. But when they have gatherings

in the park, whether it's uh events that's uh uh authorized or just general events with people, you've got cars and vehicles parked on both sides of this narrow road. Sometime the vehicle is part of the car is in in the street. Sometime they're stopped in the street and it kind of impedes traffic. And the safety feature here is you got to navigate yourself through all of this and then the pedestrian a lot of kids walking around they could get injured or even lose their life. So this is one of the uh primary I consider a major issue in the town of Garner that needs to be addressed. So I would propose to this council that we put together some kind of plan or study at least uh to begin the process and try to eliminate this problem. Um and the main goal here is to establish a safety safe parking place place for all the people that's not only in the area but people that comes into the area and as you said earlier someone said earlier the town is steady growing a lot of things are happening right now and I think it's good but we have to keep up with the growth so I'm open for any comments or questions. Thank you very much for your comments. They're well taken. Safety is important and our parks are important. It's hard to use one without a place to park and you want to be safe in there. So, thank you very much for your input.

Thank you. And is there another speaker signed up? Yes, sir. Carol Holloway.

Yes. If you would please approach the podium and uh introduce yourself, name, and address. Good evening. Uh my name is Carol Holloway and my address is 102 Conway Circle in Garner. And I'm here tonight to uh compliment the board council and I want to um say that transparency is very very important. uh the new elective councilman. Um I want to encourage them to not be discouraged uh of the negative comments that may come your way. And I would also like to um ask you know just continue to hold your head up and stay confident of yourself uh that you know you the new elected u councilman you were elected by the people of Garner and not by one particular segment. Um, we want to continue I will continue to watch the progress because I uh think you all are doing a great job and um want to continue to encourage the council uh to be uh transparent uh because transparency is the action to take in every situation. So I just come to compliment you all and let you all know that um I am a citizen since and for 36 years here in Garner and I consider it a very um really good town to live in. And so I would just like to see continues working together see all continue to work together and for any all that's newly elected to feel confident and continue to do your job. Well, thank you very much. We we don't get that many people coming with such a positive message. We greatly appreciate you coming in and sharing your thoughts with us.

You're quite welcome. And do we have another speaker? Yes, sir. Ricky Pierce.

Yes, Mr. Pierce, if you would uh come to the podium, introduce yourself, name, and address. Your clock's falling down here. I'm Ricky Pierce. I live at 1810 Bandor Springs Road. Of course, I've been coming up here past few months. U I actually thought the other day, you know, I said, "Am I doing any good? I'm not going to change the results of the last election. I'm not happy with it." There are a lot of people who are not happy with it. But I've had people tell me that don't want to get up here and speak. Keep going. Keep putting word out there. So, I'm going to be here. Thought about words and different things. The lady mentioned transparency. Well, the definition of transparency is the quality of being easy to see through both literally and figuratively. Openness, honesty, honesty and the lack of hidden agendas. It implies accountability, clarity and communication and the disclosure of information in business, government and daily life. The other words, integrity, the quality of being honest, having strong moral principles and maintaining consistency in action and values, adhering to high moral principles such as telling the truth, keeping promises, and avoiding deception. Cheating. The act of using dishonest, fraudulent, or unfair methods to gain an advantage, break rules, or violate trust in relationships, academics, or gains. It involves breaking established commitment or boundaries to deceive others for personal gain. Legacy. We all talk about a legacy. We can talk about the legacy. My dad bet for me and all. Money, property, or intangible assets. For example, reputation, culture, or trauma handed down from an ancestor, predecessor, or the past.

Here's one. We hear a lot of this. We see a lot of it. Narcissist. I had I heard that word a lot before I finally looked up the definition of it. An individual with excessive unhealthy and preoccupation with themselves characterized by a deep need for admiration, an inflated sense of self-importance and a distinct lack of empathy for others. They often exhibit arrogant behavior, exploit relationships for personal gain, and ma mask a fragile self-esteem. You know, this last election, I'm here, like I said, can't change anything about the last election, but I'm here to make sure it does not happen again. Our town is too good for the dirty politics that went on. Mr. Matthews, Mr. Vance, you're excused from this. Three of you in the middle, minus the mayor. You know what I'm talking about. Trey, you're dirty. You're a little spat with Mike McGyver this town.

We got Mr. You listen to me. This is my time, right,

Mr. We got Mr. Stallions instead of Mike Mcyver, a 25-y year servant of this town. That's like the New York Yankees trading Aaron Judge for Melvin Hernandez. Who? That's what I'm saying. Mr. Stalin, you say you're here for 5 years. Where'd you been? I'm all about this now. I never knew your name until I saw you. Talk about transparency. Why don't you tell us the real reason you're here in the party put you here? We know that transparency. Why did you take your name off of the people searches? Afraid somebody might find out something about I got money. I could you know only cost a couple hundred leave this town. Your legacy would be you came here. You cheated. Great. You helped him cheat it. That's the legacy your children endure. Thanks for staying within a time limit. Uh thank you. And as we said, this is not a debate. This is where we get to air our feelings. Is there another speaker this evening?

No, sir. No more speakers. And we will move ahead to item E on the agenda, which is the consent agenda. This normally contains some uh fairly straightforward administrative issues. And as our council members have already seen, the only one on here tonight is approval of the uh minutes from the last meeting. So, this should be pretty straightforward. Uh unless anyone sees a reason to pull that out for separate discussion, uh we'll entertain a motion to uh approve the consent agenda. So, move second. Uh there's a motion by Mr. Stalins, a second by Mr. Vance to uh adopt and approve the consent agenda. Uh all in favor please signify by saying I.

I.

Any opposed by nay. Hearing none that passes unanimously. Thank you. Moves us along to section F public hearings. Uh and we can read the the heading here under legislative hearings. This is a public hearing this evening and these are legislative hearings which do not require sworn testimony. However, all persons in interest interested in speaking must sign up with the town clerk. Town staff will present a brief presentation followed by the applicant and other persons who wish to comment on the item will be recognized to speak. Council request groups of individuals with the same position to designate a representative to speak for the group. And the first item this evening is 1.1 is the animal control ordinance amendments as sponsored by our town attorney, Miss Terry Jones. if you would like to make a comment or two and I get the feeling you may be ready to pass the podium and the microphone to a certain police captain here.

Yes. Uh Captain Castelline will be doing the staff presentation uh before you open it up for public comment.

Okay. All right. So, good evening uh town council management u garner citizens. Uh thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak with you again about the animal control amendments. This is a lot briefer discussion than what was provided on the 31st in March. So just a little bit to re recap what would the process was and why why we did this. Um we there was a request came in from Wake County through an interlocal agreement and um that wanted a Garner to be more aligned in its ordinance with other municipalities within Wake County. So, we're kind of consistent across the board. So, it allowed us the opportunity to to look at our ordinances and make improvements, provide better guidelines for our officers to make professional decisions when they are looking into these matters. Um, so that's when town staff completed that comprehensive review. And then we proposed these amendments on the 31st to council here during the council session. Some of the revisions that were looked at were the definitions. I'll look into uh backyard hens prohibited actions. And what I discussed these these are stuff stuff that was already in place in an ordinance. Just some wording was added to make it more clearer and understandable and to to um provide those better guidelines. So we just let's go through here the uh our penalties having the structured penalties uh proof of uh vaccinations uh reporting of of and the symptoms of what rabies is and then the the destruction of a wounded or deceased animal or an animal that cannot be seized by a

reasonable means meaning an animal that may be exhibiting behavior that that is dangerous to others. So and then confinement of animals and uh the appeal pro process related to dangerous animals. So some of the definitions that that were broadened that were that were expanded for a little bit more clearer understanding was the abandon abuse at large bite empowerment empowerment owner and then restraint. Right? I think if you had remembered having that actual leash law, not control based upon voice uh um but actually having a physical um leash on an animal to allow for uh better public safety and control that animal in case it may do something it may not normally do. And then the penalties we it offered a a more a structured guideline um to to follow related to uh to penalties related to first offense, second offense, you know, third offense. We we always want people to um to correct these actions to be more responsible, you know, pet owners. Um but if they don't, we need to have something in place to to help move that along to make uh for public safety. And then if we we discussed the the procedures for these hearings, you know, that was that that that impartial group that meets to to talk when it when stuff is appealed and added some days in business days and appeal process that's consistent throughout Wake County and other municipalities to to allow for that for that citizen that is involved in this to be to be heard. and then make sure that everything was

handled correctly and the fair treatment was given. So as I move into these next steps before before I do that you we had mentioned that that that with with these changes it allows us it allows the officers to have more guidelines to make those professional decisions. But it also allows us the opportunity during these changing times to provide education not just to our officers but also the community. and and it's not always what these changes are during those educational opportunities explaining the why, you know, why these ordinances are in place and then allowing giving them explanations if they have any questions and um to see to make more uh responsible pet owners. So, the the next steps moving forward was that we received public comments. Um I I believe you guys have received the the public comments. We have reviewed those. Um they were provided by a person. Um we met with that person and had had a conversation about their experiences that they have had and um and through that they also showed support of of these ordinances uh the the changes and um they they wanted to me to provide that to you that they you know they we had that conversation with them. We discussed different experiences that they had but but after they had reviewed the u the ordinance and the changes they were in support of that and I think they have provided that information to you. Um

at this time it' be appropriate um to receive any any verbal comments from any members who have signed up. We don't have anyone who signed up for this. Okay. Thank you. No one no one has signed up to speak. Uh we've heard the summary here and uh I'll be glad to entertain comments while while you're up, captain. Uh comments or questions from council members. Let's start with Mr. Vance.

Uh yes, just thank you so much for the your update here. And uh one question, how are repeat offenders handled today and what changes with the amendments? Yeah. So, the the amendments with the we're currently uh repeat offenders are are fined. Okay. But with the with the changes, it allows for a more structured more more uh fiscal responsibility per se, a higher penalty if if there's additional um repetition of the behavior that's reported. Gotcha. It would allow for a lot better guidelines and in assisting with cases where there are we don't have a lot of repeat people that um but it would assist in those particular

you have more structure in a more structured um guideline on how that's handled. Gotcha. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Dallinger.

That seems to be a theme of safety and community tonight. And so I just want to thank you for this much needed revision of TDM that keeps our community safe. Uh I think that it the mayor had mentioned it's kind of our number one function. We had Mr. Avery who came and spoke and you know it's it's this attention to detail that that makes the difference and I think we've seen what happens when you don't have it and so it's good to see this change. So, just hats off to the police department, hats off to our legal department and all the hard work that clearly went into this revision. It's very much appreciated. Thank you, Mr. Stance.

Um, thank you so much for answering my questions at the last meeting. Um, and thank you for these amendments. Um, I know I could ask questions around what if an animal was left in the car and and you pretty much elaborated that it protects the animal from being in a hazardous situation from giving the off the officer the authority to make a professional decision on if they need to take the animal out that situation or whether the windows may be cracked and it's a sufficient amount of um provision given to the animal. So definitely want to thank you for these amendments. Okay. I would just add one thing with that. We also have a a device that measures the temperature the vehicle too. So that's taken into account. Very scientific. Mr. Singleton,

I want to talk about section 3 uh 3-13. The number to be kept on premises, which is dogs. Is that is what's stated here under a section A. Is that what we currently have in the animal control ordinance? Number one, two pets on a lot 20,000 square foot or less. Is that new or is that uh what we currently have? That's that's current. And that's been in the ordinance for quite some time.

Okay. I think I voted against the last ordinance and the reason I did was because of that because there's only a two or three people in this room that remember the you on the council 2001 2002 brewhaha over dogs. Mr. Chief Adams may remember that too. Uh somebody in Cloverdale let the dogs run at night and it created all kinds of issues. We had in the old town hall four straight meetings that were packed. It was there. was not pretty and that it was proposed at that time to do two dogs or less any lot and we had people who had four Dodson and it didn't pass. It changed later, but I voted against it and I voted against this one, too, because that same person talked to me just a few months ago. He reminded me of that uh those dogs that he had, four dogs, four Dodson's. And you know, the thought that the proposal was he'd had to get rid of two of his dogs back then. And so again, we're looking at 20,000 square foot lots and there no new lots and new homes now in Garner. Very few being built 20,000 square feet. Fact, there aren't that many period. So I think I voted against the last one because of that. And that all goes back to the issue with what happened in 2001 and 2002 is that people had small dogs and they can have more than two dogs in their house. You know, I like telling people if they have indoor cats, they can't have but two cats. I mean, you know, I mean, if they're indoor, doesn't matter. And most of some of the pets are indoor. So, I I that's I I'll vote against just for that because it goes back to that years ago when we had several people who were very upset that we were going to limit dogs and they had more than two dogs. And uh so I I'll I'll I'll vote against it for that because I've done it before. But anyway, that's the concern is that I I remember what happened over 20 25. It started in December of 01, went all the way through the first quarter of O2 and uh it was very lively, was it not?

It really was. So, That's that's my opposition to that is limiting dogs. Somebody's got three or four small dogs in their house. No, but we knew some of it because we saw some of these people walking their dogs. You see, there used to be a gentleman down off of Amosboro had four longhead dosons. They didn't have them any longer, but one time they were had four, so wouldn't an issue. Anyway, that's why I vote against it because of the what I learned years ago. There are some people here who have more than two dogs and I'm would guess most of those lots would be less than 20,000 square feet. I understand the intent. Uh, Attorney Jones or Captain Castellon, would you like to address this issue in any way?

Yes. So, the um the next council options are continue a public hearing for additional input, close the public hearing and direct staff to make changes of the ordinance or close the public hearing and adopt the ordinance as present presented. So, if I can add the the amendments um there no are no amendments to that particular section, but if council collectively wants a change to that, we can go ahead and and make that and bring that back to you at a future meeting.

U okay, that's good input. This is not a new thing. It's something that's been there a while and apparently two decades and more ago, it was an important issue. Uh, I'll I'll pass the microphone to Mr. Matthews.

I remember those days well and uh that the chambers were packed, the lobby was packed. And uh I asked the mayor at the time, I said so many people have signed up to speak and everybody's right. I said, but unless you live in the city limits of Garner, that's the ones I want to hear from. And at that time, don't weren't that many. But the the uh press had got wind of and it went all over to join encounters. It was it was quite a night and a lot got out of control a couple of times. But I think the intent back then with the uh two dogs was the uh some people had some of these larger dogs, you know, and they had the Rockweilers, they had uh some of the the Bulldogs and different things. and and that's how we came up with that number back then. I don't think we took in consideration dachshunds or anything else, but right then it was it was a hot topic and uh if this is something we can uh tweak like the attorney said and I'm fine with that. Other than that, I'm I'm fine with what you got. Does this align with the county and sister municipalities? Pretty much.

Yeah. Yes. Yes, it is. Okay. So definitely just to clarify, it is a restriction on dogs, not the number of cats. I understood this and I realize it's not going to be enforced when there's an issue happens where someone turns someone in. This is not the police and animal control not driving around knocking on doors counting counting dogs in the backyard. So we do realize that you have more important things to do.

And just like just like with backyard hens, unless you get a complaint, you're not going around counting hens in the backyard. and Garner is growing and I know like Lake Benson Park and other parks everybody likes to let their dogs run and play Frisbee and all that it's some tough calls sometimes understand but uh safety is paramount and uh so if we need to tweak that one little item I'm okay with that. Well certainly we continue to hear that people are very concerned about their pets. They take this very seriously. Uh with that being said let's see if there's further questions or comments. Let's start back over with Mr. Vance and see if there's any other question or comment

for clarity. This is this amendment is to get us in line pretty much throughout the throughout the county with Wake County. Is that correct? Some of the changes were prompted by that and some by um additional research and um conversations with the police department about issues that they uh needed clarification on to and also needed to give that professional discretion uh and oversight to the police officers who are actually dealing with the issues in the field so to speak. And the concern that's being brought up that was that was addressed 25 years ago. Why was was there any remedy then provided at all?

Any limiting? No, the limitings were taken off. We decided not to limit them back then. That's that's coming as it got updated that the limit got put in. That's why I voted against it previously because the limit got put in because of what happened back then. So that's all that's just me. I remember. I asked because I didn't know the history that far back. Yes. People are passionate about their pets. We found out. Oh, yes, they are. Yeah.

My question is, what is the specific change Mr. Singleton and Mr. Matthews are asking for? And is it a change that we could draft, get in writing and do tonight instead of were there some other type of repercussions it may have on the what's what language are we looking to add to the ordinance?

Attorney Jones. Well, I mean, we would be seeking direction from council, but I I do believe if we're doing that, we might want to have some additional public comment on that particular. So, I wouldn't advise to try to do that tonight and and put it into this particular ordinance, but it's certainly we can bring back another ordinance addressing that section if there's a consensus of council to move forward in that direction. I guess Mike in my question if Mr. Singleton or Matthews know the language? What what language are we looking at?

Originally, it was really aimed more for the larger dogs at that time. There's a lot of dog fights going on and different things. Y'all remember all all that? And people living side of them worrying about kids getting in the fence weren't high enough and you got four Rottweilers out there or four pitbulls. That's why it hit like it did. And uh so so you had to have a minimum size of a lot and we're only allowed two animals, but those were animals that were I think we were focused on at the time was that size. But I do understand now that you can go anywhere you want to now. You see the little ones and that's what they've got and a lot of those are in the house. So I I don't know how we we can if you limit it to two large dogs, but all others I'm I'm you help me out here. If it's two large dogs or a number of small dogs, I don't know how you'd want to word that,

right? I mean, I think that becomes a difficult thing to define what a large dog is. For instance, if you do it by weight or by breed, then you have to like measure the weight of the dogs and that would be difficult. And then um breed specific standards are also difficult for officers to really know what the breed is. Captain Castline wants to weigh in further on on how you would define the number of dogs by different criteria.

Yeah. So there's so many different types of dogs, right? And um unfortunately from what is out there in in public space about breed specific issues may be and they may see a dog doing a particular behavior and may think in their head well that looks like this type of dog you know but it it may not be. So I think that's if you do breed specific it's hard and then I don't know how we do weight and all that. So there there's some difficulties which which which may look into more research is needed.

This is what we dealt with back then. It's not no right answers. There's a lot of motions get played into it. And uh uh have we had any issues with it written as it's written like it is. I'm fishing here. That's I don't have any um any numbers or anything before me to to provide you the the okay the best response on that. Not that I'm aware of off the top of my head, but that's we had 92 animal service calls last year. So So we got uh we can just leave it as is and vote on tonight and any if you know let everybody vote their their conscience and move forward on it is the right answer.

My my recommendation would be that we vote what we have and if we want to do more research and bring it back for another change. I I'm constantly trying to think about the resources of our police department and legal department and prioritizing limited bandwidth. So I I would be in favor of voting on it tonight. If there is a need or desire to add another amendment or change, bring that back. Let's get the what we have into place so that it's changed and updated and provides the transparency, the opportunity for the hearings, all those systems in place that we want for dog owners and all that stuff just get in place and if we want to make tweaks later, we can make tweaks later.

I support that recommendation. Okay. Well, well, thanks. That that's good observation. Captain Castelline started his presentation by saying we have uh three council options. One is to continue the public hearing for additional input, close the public hearing and direct staff to make changes to the ordinance or close the public hearing and adopt the ordinance as presented. And as just as this one has come back uh for a modification, it can come back again for modification or amendment as necessary. Uh there has been a lot of work go into this and there's a whole lot of items in here other than just a number of dogs. So I I concur with what you're saying and Mr. Charles, I think it was your turn to make a comment.

Um, just for clarification, we're just voting on the amendments as presented. Correct. Not an entirely new ordinance. No, you'll see the strike there's a strikeout underlying version that shows you the entire existing chapter with the changes. But what you would be voting on is subsequent in your packet is ordinance proposed ordinance 20265382 which shows just the specific sections of the existing chapter that are being amended proposed. So we're voting on the amendments. Yes. Right.

Um I I I support um what my fellow council members have have outlined. Um, I think what we have is good, especially with the expanded definitions, giving officers the professional judgment to make decisions in some of these situations. Um, so I'm I'm supportive of I am I'm also supportive of um at a future council meeting as well, having conversations around some of the um outlined um portions that some of my fellow council members may find problematic um at a future council meeting. Okay. Thank you. I continue down the road. Further comments or questions? Mr. S?

Well, I had no problem. I was just going to let you know why I was going to vote against it. That's all I was bringing it up for. It wasn't that derail or cause this, that, and the other. Just I'm going to vote against it because of what lessons we were learned. I learned back then. I voted against one before. That's that's fine. I know how it works. So, that's that's the concern is again, you know, when you say two dogs, somebody's got four, three or four or five small dogs in their house. I mean, that's technically breaking the law. So, you know, that's just that's all I'm just going to vote against. I'm just telling you why I vote against it. That's all. Well, Mr. S, also I would add this the history that you bring up is also uh good to to know as well. Yes, it is.

Because back in those days there were people who the two dogs that running Green, excuse me, Cloverdale Knight were large dogs. They were mint. They were muts. They weren't a specific breed. But that's when pit bulls was bad. And we were going to talk about banning pit bulls. Then we learned that you just can't ban pit bulls because of how many different ones there are and the breeds and so forth that are associated with it. Wasn't two or three. It was I don't know 40, 50 or 60. It was very very intense discussion. So I just let you know why we vote against it and that's all. Mr. May comment other comments or questions? No sir. I'm good to go.

Okay. Well, that was a lot of good discussion, a lot of good comments. Uh at this point I think we can close the public hearing. Uh we so we close the public hearing and we I will see if there is a motion from council to take one of the three actions that have been outlined before us. I move to adopt the ordinance 202265382. Second.

Okay. Is there a motion by Mr. Vance and a second by Mr. Dinger to adopt the ordinance? Uh is there any further discussion? Hearing none, uh let's call for a voice a roll call vote on this and let's start uh if if you're in favor of adopting this ordinance as before us now. Uh signify by saying I opposed by nay and we will start with Mr. Vance. I. Mr. Dallinger I. Mr. Stalins I. Mr. Singleton no. Mr. Matthews I.

Uh the motion passes 4 to one. There's always room for another uh amendment, another review as we go forward. This should be a step forward. Uh thank you very much for the attention paid. People do love their pets and we do try to protect our community and do try to do what's best for everybody in the final analysis. So good job. And attorney Jones, if you wouldn't mind refresh our memory on the amount of time and who did this kind of an unusual situation. We heard the details of this review uh at a recent council work session.

Yes. Thank thank you, Mr. Mayor, uh for this opportunity. I'd like to commend our spring legal intern, Ammani Henderson, who spent a great deal of time, effort, and research u on working on these amendments. She's taking some time out of her exam schedule right now to come and see. um she was very hopeful that this ordinance would come to fruition and be adopted and kind of close out this project she she worked so diligently on. So we were very pleased and fortunate to have her with us this semester. And I said this is something that we haven't had an an intern do in the past is you know work this much on ordinances and make a presentation to council and actually see um the ordinance get adopted during the internship period.

Excellent. We are very thankful to her and I appreciate this opportunity to thank her in public as she as she is here present today. Absolutely. Thank you very much and thanks for the citizen who went to great lengths to give us some other input. Uh people are passionate about their pets. So we want to be cognizant of that. We want to keep an open mind. We're always ready to hear another adjustment as you go through this whether it's a week or a year. If we need to fine-tune this process, that's what we're here for. Thank you, Chief. Thank you very much, Captain. Appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you. And that brings us to item G on our agenda, which is new and old business. Item number one is the 2026 National Community Survey results. Our presenter, our sponsor is our very own public information officer, communications director, Rick Mercer, and our assistant town manager, Matt P. Good evening, Mayor Gup and members of council. It is an honor to be before you tonight to prevent to present to you a summary of your 2026 National Community Survey Benchmark study. Um before I begin the presentation, I'd be remiss if I didn't thank the team um that helped develop this and and deal with our vendor. Uh first off, I'd like to recognize Mory How, our strategic initiatives director, uh her staff member, Lewis Mutter, and then most importantly, our communications director, Rick Mercer. So, that was the team that worked with our vendor, helped develop the survey, make sure they stay on track, and manage the project. Um it's my honor that Mr. Mercer gets to co-present with me tonight. A lot of times he works behind the scenes in these meetings and people don't get an opportunity to see him and so it's it's a great opportunity for him to to do this. I would say he he led the charge and facilitated most of the communication with the study. A little bit of history about this. If you'll recall in 2024 the town made a decision to do a national community study. um it was the manager's vision that we would use that as a baseline to do benchmarking every two years. And so now we're in 2026. It's been two years since your 24 study. And so we created um a similar study hopefully and improved as

we will do each two years and we'll start creating benchmarks for the community. Uh so what Mr. Mercer and I will do tonight is to go over a summary of the results of the survey. Um, just a little some facts. We we hope to give you comparisons between how you compare nationally among local towns, but also where we benchmark internally with 2024 to 2026. So, that's what we're here tonight to go over. So for those um are not aware of our 2024 survey in 26, we we went with the um Polico National Research Center in partnership with the International City and County Managers Association to conduct these two surveys. So this uh Polico is a research company that we've used um they've conducted over 400 community surveys across the country and to your table to the right are examples of participating communities in North Carolina. So they are comparable communities to us. So this is an interesting map and I'll refer back to this later in the presentation as well. Um our team decided to focus on four areas um to attempt to get surveys based on our citizens. And so area one is what we would call south garner uh more older established garner. And this is this red area here. It does also incorporate a newer develop, the new Bethl Church Road area in this this quadrant here. Area two focused on what I would call the McCull's area, your 401 corridor, um where it was into town ETJ and is now in the town limits. So, this is area two. Area three is what I would call old Garner. So it is your uh most um that where historically Garner originated

from and and began its development. And then you have area four which is another pocket uh growth area what I would call the Auburn area. So what we did was we attempted to send surveys out into these four areas to get information back. To your right you can see that we selected 3,000 households. um our a little bit of analytics about the survey. We had 130 returned. So, uh 2,870 residents received invitations to to produce the survey. Uh we received 227 responses. That comes back to an 8% response rate. Generally, your response rates are in between 6 and 12%. So, we fell in line with national response rates. Um and what we tried to do and the next slide will will attest to this. We tried to weight responses based on the demog demographic profile of our uh citizenry. U it has a just basic analytics of a margin of area error of 6%. So this is who we tried to target with our survey. Um we tried to do weighted estimates based on our 2020 census and along with the 2024 national community survey. So if you look proportionate we tried to send equal representation with all three age demographics both genders um ethnicities and then also during this survey we wanted to break out our types of housing. So whether they are owner or renter or the housing is attached uh or detached. So there's uh pretty close proximity um to each other to try to get to avoid biases with the surveys.

Mr. Oh, I have a question. Yes. Can you go back one more? Yes. Slide to the map or to Yeah, the map. Okay. Um, these areas you all created these in house. We did and I've done something similar on my own. I would make I think it's a very useful tool for looking at our our growth in communities. The only recommendation I would make is to break that South Garner area into its own region going all the way down to 540. Yes, sir.

Okay. We we were um we were we had parameters that we had to pick four. So uh based on based on what we were allowed to do with our consultant, we chose to to shoot these four. But I agree completely that as Garner grows further towards Johnston County, we need to make sure we're capturing that. Okay. Yes, sir. That was on the parameters of Polo that we pick forward how we would target four different areas. Okay. Thank you.

Yes, sir. Uh so at this time um I'm going to introduce Mr. Mercer to come up and he's going to talk about how we compared against national comparisons in other peer communities and then I'll be back to talk about how we benchmark ourselves in between 2024 and 26.

Good evening Mr. Mayor and Council. Um so just like in 2024 part of the survey consisted of um benchmarking ourselves against all the other communities nationally that that do this survey this year um we did something a little different or additional. We we did that national you know pool of communities and compared ourselves. We also asked PCO to to pull out sort of a subset of communities that that were a little more akin to us. you you know population size um their rates of growth um you know not not a lot of communities are growing as fast as us but we wanted that to look at communities that are growing year-over-year at a at a pretty good clip. Um what what uh what we looked at or and what our vendor PCO looked at was you know where we stood in relation to them. uh in most areas we kind of fell within the the range of what is considered similar to the benchmark you know within a 10point plus or minus range. There were um a few areas where we scored either higher or lower than the benchmark by by 10 or more points and then a small small number of areas where we uh scored much higher or much lower and that was when um our scores were 20 or more points percentage points uh above or below the uh the benchmarks. So uh this is where we stood above the benchmarks in a few areas. Again, in this chart to explain it, we have um our peers, that subgroup of 27 communities that are close to us in population, growing at a decent clip. Um and then also the national the big pool of everyone that they they able to pull data from. Um then the last column is is a reference to the page in the report where you can see um see this information. So we we actually do pretty well according to the benchmarks anyway in terms of cost of living. Our

community believes that we're a pretty affordable community overall. Um we have street repair compared to our peers, we do well. Um availability of affordable quality housing. Uh the respondents both uh you know both compared to to our peer communities and that bigger national pool. Um we we did you know pretty well. Um couple areas that we don't directly provide services for internet, drinking water. We we did well. Uh yard waist pickup always popular. We always hear if anything folks just want more of it. It's they they like it so much. Um and this next one, we're going to touch on this a little bit later when I talk about the um the quality gap analysis, but the importance of focusing on the overall design and layout of residential and commercial areas in the coming years, coming two years is how they asked the question. That was a big priority for our community. and when when compared nationally against all the other communities in this that that do this national survey a real big priority. So something to something to uh to bookmark. We'll come back to that. Availability of affordable quality childare and preschool. We did we did well and uh just like in 2024 we we scored well uh in on the question of attracting people from diverse backgrounds and being a generally a welcoming community. So um I think that's something we can be very proud of. Uh and then then there were these areas where we uh were below the benchmarks either the national or the peer um benchmarks. Most of these fall into the uh you know that the area the facet of um community livability that they called mobility or you know transportation related things are overall the quality overall quality of a transportation system. uh ease of travel by bicycle uh walking or or whether um residents have choose to to walk or bike to a a

destination instead of driving. So, and then that was actually the last uh slide in the benchmark section and uh I'm going to hand it back to to Mr. P. Thank you, Rick. So this portion of the presentation what we want to do is we want to talk about how we measured up in from 2024 to 2026 as our town. So this is internal benchmarking where we improved or or did not improve from 24. So when you look at these stats this is purely how we measured uh internally against ourselves. And so there were several different core areas of focus. You can see at the bottom of the graph are these um areas. Quality of life, governance, economy, mobility, community design, and utilities. What we wanted to highlight tonight are what I would consider outliers. Either we did above or below about a 10% range. So, if there were nine points difference, higher or lower, we noted those as outliers. And we we brought that to your attention tonight. There are pages and pages of of these surveys uh that you've received, but we did want to highlight a couple areas. Probably the largest uh increase since our 24 uh to this 2026 benchmark was our governance. And there's I've got a slide coming up that will explain that. But overall citizenry um approval of local our local government increased dramatically. It went up 17 points. Community design, as Mr. Mercer said, um it went down 10 points. So it just fell into that outlier that that outlier um of a a below average. So these are what I we consider significant changes. Other areas um that didn't have any significant or outlier changes but there there were uh increases or decreases are these other areas too. So you can take a

look and see where we improved uh mo in most all areas we did improve somewhat or we maintained the standard deviation from the last time. So a couple a couple talking points one of the most notable trends that we saw as an improvement of 2024 to 2026 is a overall confidence in Garner's government. that study um talked about local government and federal government and your local government um confidence increased much higher. Uh so we want to make sure we noted that there was a 17 point increase in the last two years of what citizen rehab uh said overall confidence in our government is. Some of the other um areas where we're uh we're nine points or higher that are worthy of noting is our community connection. Um and so it's interesting that we saw that when Mr. Mercer talked about national benchmarking, but internal we saw that as well. And so all these areas we improved upon internally from 2024 safety um and and we know our public safety does a great job with police, fire, and Wake County EMS. Uh and that's always been recognized by our community and that was evident here. Uh, another area is solid waste. In the study, solid waste received great feedback on um on how they're performing, but community connection and safety. These all areas improved uh greatly. Education, arts and culture improved, mobility for as far as car pooling with other adults and children instead of driving alone improved. um three areas of focus where we decreased was in community design, mobility and natural environment. And the next slide I wanted to pick on what one of our I would

consider one of our challenges as we grow um that we we've got to recognize and understand based on our community. So the second slide of our presentation was this map. This is the same map. And what I want to show is what my opinion of where why we are in the place we are when it comes to walkability and bikeability of our of our community. So I use an analogy of Dallas or San Antonio. If you've been to both of those, they are both similar in population, but Dallas is 300 square miles and San Antonio is over 500. So Dallas is much more dense. It has a downtown area. people were able to walk and bike in that type of environment where San Antonio has a similar amount of population but much larger in scale. Well, that is that is what we've become. It's it's suburban sprawl is what we have. If you look at these four areas, we have a you know an area of Garner that is miles from the heart of Garner when you look at the McCullers or the Auburn area. And so as Garner, when you look at it as a community, as urban sprawl, walkability is difficult. We're not a densely populated downtown community. Um, and so that's something that's going to be a challenge regardless. The same thing with your ability to bike across town. It's it's a large surface area. And so that's one of the challenges. And it could be a strength or a weakness, how however we want to to quantify it. But I think and when you look at 24 and 26, we both had these same areas about mobility. Um, and that's really a reason why and we've probably created more difficulties by by growing the way we're growing uh just in these two areas of focus here along with the corridor. So those are we've got a lot of improvements that we've uh approved upon and then we've got some

areas that we're still need to focus on. These things help drive our strategic plan and and how we develop and grow. So the last piece that we have for you tonight is looking at a gap analysis. So I'll turn it over to Mr. Mercer to talk about the gap between quality and and importance.

Hello again. So um we're going to look at what PCO calls the quality importance gap analysis. So to put it in simplest terms uh this looks this asks questions um of of the uh participants in the survey. How important do you see these different facets and you know rating them as essential or very important and then also you know how do you what kind of a job you think we're doing you know rate as excellent good um etc. and and then it looks at the gap, right? And so we have we have pretty big gaps here um in a couple of areas. And you know, ideally in in the perfect world, we'd have almost no gap or very small gaps between, you know, the importance that the community assigns to a facet and then the job they you know, the quality of the job they think we're doing. Um in two areas, we see pretty big gaps. Uh community design and mobility. Uh and I'll jump to the next slide and and talk a little bit more about the community design and mobility. So uh you remember they asked the qu the question and we showed it uh earlier on um when looking at benchmarks you know rate the importance of um focusing on community residential and commercial design over the next couple of years. Our community thinks that's a really important thing for us to focus on. So it was rated really high in terms of importance. And then of course they also asked well how do you think we're doing now and um there was a gap that 44 percentage point gap between how they how the importance they assign it and then how well they think we're doing. Um and that gap has widened significantly over the 2024 survey. In 2024 that that gap between importance and quality was 22 percentage points. this year in 2026 it's risen to 44 points 80 88% said it's really really important or essential 44% this year said it's we're doing either excellent

or good job at you know managing community design um so that gap has grown and so it's an area for us to focus on of course in the next few years especially as we're doing a strategic planning refresh similarly with mobility there's there's a large gap um it actually narrowed a little bit over 2024 but close to the same. Um but these are these are two areas of of us to to look at and um dig into a little deeper and and focus on uh takeaways overall. Uh why do we do this? It's it's an important way for us to gather real actionable data that we can use for for budget development, for strategic planning, um to to think about service delivery and and performance metrics and all all those things that we're trying to do as we we become uh more data driven. U and and of course it's just a way for us to look at uh ourselves, compare ourselves nationally, compare ourselves to peer communities that that are similar in size and and growth rates. Um and then just to kind of rehash some of the most notable things and areas for focus, um that increased confidence in in our in our local government and our municipal government really went up a lot this year. Uh something again I think to be proud of. And then um residents view overall, you know, as when Mr. P showed the slides about how we our scores in public safety were which were already very strong went up quite a bit this year. Um, but overall, you know, residents see Garner as a safe and welcoming community. And I think that's a that's a great message to share over and over and over again. Garner is safe and welcoming uh to all. Uh and and then of course at area for focus and and uh improvement uh community design and and mobility. Uh finally uh next steps we uh we we have actually already posted these results on the website and we'll continue to use the results in in uh

establishing departmental goals in our strategic planning uh and in budget development in future years. I'm going to jump very quickly over to this the interactive dashboard that uh people will be able to find on the website. Actually, you know, a better way I'll start from here. So, if you go to garterc.gov um backncs, it'll redirect you to here. You'll see these big buttons that um these are the PDFs, the results and the supplemental reports. These are PDF documents that that I believe you all had in your your packet and the public can review. This interactive dashboard is something I just wanted to take half a minute to to to glance at. This is pretty useful because um it's available on the website as as we showed and what folks can do you can um you can select a facet an area and then get you know we jump down to governance you can um it'll load up it'll show you some of the questions that were under that facet including you know things like u public you know public uh information services were in there. So you know you could click on that and go if you scroll farther down on the page you can also get into a demographic comparison. So if you want to select a subgroup you can see here it shows how we did by area on that question of public information services. And so my team for example could look and say oh well area three that's a that's an area for for growth over the next couple of years. Um and you can uh use this drop down to select other um demographic subgroups and and you know do some cross tabs. So, that's a useful tool. I just wanted to point that out to our residents. Also, before I hand it back to Mr. P, I wanted to just take the opportunity to thank the rest of my communications team, um, Miss Soulzen and Mr. Ketler. Um, also, most, you know, first and foremost, our residents who participated in this. We don't, we

don't have a survey without their participation. So, thank you to everyone who participated and um, be on the lookout for it in 2028. And I will jump Okay, excellent. Well, we don't have a specific action we need to take on this, but there certainly is room for questions or comments. And let's start with Mr. Matthews this time and run down the line. Comments, questions, sir.

Again, a great presentation. There's a lot went into this obviously and pulling these numbers up and it does give us some idea where we want to focus going forward because some things we're knocking it out the park on and uh some things is some room for improvement. that having this information and coming from the public means a whole lot and at least that percentage will know what they're thinking and typically those that respond to these have a genuine interest in the town and uh and it's that's glad to know they're confident in their government because we sure try awful hard. So great presentation a lot of valuable data here.

Thank you Mr. Matthews and you're exactly right to identify the areas of improvement is one challenge in itself but how to maintain those positive interactions and how do we keep those services that's a that's another task in itself. We've got to make sure we're providing those things to to to even improve that benchmark. But it's not just where we're falling short but it's maintaining where we're where we are excelling. Mr. S 3,000 limitations will not that's the same number as in 24 right? Yes, sir. And 227 this time. And how many was it in 24? Do you remember? It was a lower response rate. Slight slightly lower response rate.

Yeah. Because it was I remember y'all said 8 the 10 12%. We we got 8% this time. Last time was a little bit just a tad lower. Yeah. And and Mr. Mercer was instrumental when we get returned um back mailings back. He was in constant communication with the company to try to pivot and make some of these changes. So he he stayed on top of that throughout this whole process. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Tal. There's 227 last pardon. 227 20 in 2024. Okay. Yes. Thank you.

Great presentation. Um like I said earlier, it's always great to continuously improve. So having these numbers will help us improve and it's great to see that um our residents think that we're doing amazing in in some of these aspects of service delivery. So um thank you for the presentation. Yes, sir. Thank you, Mr. Dallinger.

Practice my compliment sandwich, great presentation, great data. Um, you know, and it it's impactful, limited in scope, but it's very helpful when you see those deltas, not just from 2024 to 2026, but also with regards to other communities. And we've got to stare directly in the face of our community design problem as a as a as a council and a town because the results have are not only not good, they've declined and they're worse than our peers. That's like the worst of all worlds. We're in the 20th percentile of our peers on community design. And there's some element, it talks about residential commercial development, but there's some tie to mobility in that too. You know, they're they're related in some ways. So I think for me for that particular one it's looking at it dead in its eyes and saying we need to get more data on why people think this way why do they feel this way do we need to do cherettes what do we need to do what is it about the community design there are elements in there if you go to page 13 shopping opportunities not good place where people want to spend time 32nd percentile right it's like Garner is a great place to live, but I wouldn't want to visit there. That's kind of like what it kind of comes out, right? Where do you go when you're here? Um, so I think this has undergurred some of the conversations we've had about commercial development, amenitizing the community. The people are coming. We've laid out the neighborhoods. Now, they need places to go and shop and be entertained and live. Um, and I want to use that phrase. We need to amenitize the community.

Yeah, Mr. you actually it's interesting you said that when we were debriefing as a group we were talking about what's next steps in our strategic plan and it's to find the why right so if you ask why five times generally you can get to the root of a problem and so our group talked about how we take this information and then do a deeper dive of to the why and create goals and objectives to improve some of this so I I'm I'm agreeing with the why

and you know I'll make one more comment and we can go back around. I think for me when I was reading through the data that community connections piece was powerful. The openness of the community, the welcomeness of welcoming nature of the community and even more impressive with that increase is the fact that we are growing so fast. What that means is we've been very intentional at getting ahead of this because once you lose it and get behind it's start it's really hard something to catch up on. So that was reassuring, not just from the work that council and staff do and volunteers do, but just the fact that we have clearly leaned in and even in this 15,000 new people we have in the past 5 years, we're maintaining our character as a welcoming community that values residents of different backgrounds and takes care of vulnerable residents. Those are the kind of things. Um, so it says a lot of the work we've done. So that was it was actually really powerful to read that. It felt good. Uh

thank you for the report. Very thorough review. U major takeaways for me that public safety remains top priority and that we it's imperative that we stay ahead of that. Also, the survey gives a clear road map to guide our decisions going forward and to provide how we going to provide our investments and uh sure that we continue to meet the expectations of the community. So, it's a great tool to use in our decision-m process. Thank you very much for all the hard work that went into it. Yes, sir.

Thank you. And I'd like to double down on tool to use in our decision- making process. That's very important. My one request uh to all staff and particularly to you two gentlemen who have spent so much time in this help us remember what we learned from this remind us once in a while will the people felt this way about that topic well this was of great importance we they remind us how to use this as a tool in making good decisions as we move forward that's why we spent this time why we try to reach out to get some scientifically uh information from our citizens and we want to continue to hear from the ones who came just like the ones who came and spoke tonight and the ones that we stop and talk to every day, the ones we receive emails from and calls from every day. We really want the the citizens, the residents input. Thank all of you who have come this evening. Thank you for pulling this together. And with with that, I think we'll let you guys sit down and enjoy the next part of the program. Everybody loves parks unless there's more questions. Yes,

I do. I was going to let y'all go back around. Hey, we're always ready for more feedback. Let's jump to Mr. Don. While while while we have you, um I did want to also as we continue to do our housing affordability work, look into this data even more closely. So while it may on the surface say that we do have uh abundance of affordable housing, there are also some data points in there particularly around uh the housing cost in G are too high for young people andor families and 77% of people strongly or somewhat agree. So and we had the fire chief up here saying that firefighters are living far out.

You know, things like this that are in the data. Um, so we don't want to just see what we want to see, but we also want to interpret that as we're doing our housing affordability work and dig deeper into those numbers and really pay attention to them.

Yeah. And I agree and one thing we talked even with um the housing conversations is education, right? So we hear a lot about the school system, but as a local government, what we saw in the is our affordability of child daycare and child care was actually very high for us in that community. So that's something to be proud of because when you're you are looking a house to buy, you're looking at the school system, you're looking at daycare and all those things. And so it looks like some tools or some some uh areas of our town and are working for that. And that was something that I think we were surprised to see based on general, you know, community feedback about the school system. So I agree. That's all I've got.

Thank you. Well, yes. And and while it is important for citizen input, we also like input from elected officials. I'm sorry if if I cut it off too short and let's go about the order in which people raise their hands. Now, Mr. Singleton,

I I was uh Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I talked about uh well planned residential growth and neighborhoods and that has they have both dropped, particularly designed neighborhoods. I remember it's about four years ago I started hearing from people subdivisions that we had approved years before that where we had no open space in the neighborhood and they were packed and I had people come up to me and say look I I bought a house down here the first four or five were in the south corner area our neighborhood has nowhere for our kids to play the only open space is the uh riparian buffer which falls down in the creek and why did y'all do this I'm like that's a good question and I voted for it and so I remember talking with Mr. treesburg and then talking about where my office is behind Garner family position and the town homes there. There was nothing and the kids were playing on the open lot and I took pictures and video and showed him and uh that open lot behind Garner family positions neighbors for square and said we need these in neighborhoods. What do we how do we do this? So I brought it to the council. It took some time in the last couple two and a two two and a half years they have been incorporated in most all residential neighborhoods. But those neighborhoods as we know can be approved take a year to get started with permits and two or three years to get people in them. So I just think sometime on some of the neighborhoods maybe some of that impact is hey we got a nice neighborhood but guess what there's no place for my kids to go and uh depending on where they are. I told the people with the town homes beside us that you know South Garner Parker's over here. They said yes but our kids are eight and nine and we don't want want them riding the bike down by themsel, which I understand. And so I just I wonder if that is some of the neighborhood stuff. Who knows? Maybe it's maybe some people used to have more than two ways in and out of a neighborhood. I don't know. But I do remember that, you know, years ago hearing from people talking about not having the open space and thank goodness that's been incorporated and maybe maybe that is a part of it. But as Mr. Dinger asked about getting more detail if that's possible. I don't know if that's possible, but but that can always help us in how we figure we're doing with our with the unified development ordinance.

And we we talked about feedback of um you know, how we can improve just education and messaging to our citizens. So, for example, about the open space, we don't think a lot of residents know that the parks recreational cultural resources advisory committee when a developer comes into town looks at the amount of land versus money that it's contributing to a park or to maintain our parks. And so, that's a piece that that maybe we need to do a better job of educating. That's already an existing resource that you've put in place. Thank you. Excellent. Other comments, questions? Thank you. This will be a work in progress for a long time to come. Th this is a tool that we will use to help make good decisions. Thanks again for the great input.

Yes, sir.

And now we'll move along to what we really like to hear about is parks. And here comes uh the Jurgen Park operations update. We're going to call on our sponsor, Miss Maria Munes Blanco, and her team to bring us up to date on this item. phone just shocked me. Um, good evening, mayor, council. Uh, delighted to be here to hopefully bring you some good news about Jurgen Park. This is one of the most exciting projects that our department has been involved for gosh uh, for about five years now, I think. Uh, so we're we're really close to the goal line and we're really excited about that. Joining me today, uh, it's Zach Pritchard, who's our superintendent of recreation and athletics, and Eric Anderson, who's the program manager, who will be the on-site manager for the park. Arrows. I'm an arrow user here. Um, so a little bit about the agenda for tonight. I'll try to uh be fairly brief in the interest of time. Uh, but I wanted to uh give uh a bit of a background on the project. uh particularly for those who are at home who may not be familiar with the project. Uh and then we'll give you an uh sort of general oversight of the park operations and talk to you about the proposed fee schedule. So as you may know uh uh Jurgen Park the land was acquired in 2019 uh and the town uh undertook a master planning process between 2019 and 2020. ultimately adopted by town council in May of 2021. Um there were multiple uh work sessions, town council meetings, stakeholder meetings, um meetings for athletic partners, uh online surveys. A

lot of community input went into that master planning process. Uh and Jurgen Park is one of the key projects as you recall of the 2021 park bond and we have been able to leverage um park bond uh with some grant funds to again augment the funding available for the construction of the park. The image in this slide is the adopted master plan for the park. Uh and this is a bit of a timeline again for historic uh documentation. And if you look at the pictures at the bottom of the slide, uh the top um extreme left is how the park used to look uh or the site when we acquired the land. Uh the middle one shows the grass fields as they were planted and they're looking lovely these days. Uh and the um picture to the right uh shows the parking as it has been completed. Uh the natural grass fields in their dormant stage this winter. Uh and then you can see the sort of work that has been uh going on uh in the turf fields in the back of the property. And if you look at this today, um it would look significantly different as those turf fields have advanced tremendously in their construction. And we're still on target to open this park late uh late summer, early fall. We're targeting September. And this is what it's being built. Again, phase one, it's a reminder, two natural turf fields, two artificial turf fields. We have a lovely picnic shelter, um, very large. Uh, we have, uh, what'll be a really fun playground. Uh, and as you can see in this image, there's plentiful parking, uh, for the facility. Bringing you back to the master plan and the proform. Uh one of the components of the master plan was a proformer that sort of provided some guidance as to how

the park um the framework for the park uh future operations. One goal was to become a regional destination uh that would provide some really exciting opportunities for athletic tournament play. Uh but we also wanted to provide high quality athletic experience for our community. Uh we also wanted to further develop the unique brand and identity of Garner. As you know, we are a town that really loves youth sports and this park will have a role in that. Um we were going to our plan was to manage the park as the owner and operator using contracted services needed. Uh and then we were looking at a good mix of sports um as it relates to tournaments, local league play, conditioning and fundamental clinics as well as some sports camps. the logistics of it. Typically tournaments are weekend activities Friday to Sunday and then we would uh use the rest of the week for local activity and then some transition days maintenance uh to make sure that we maintain those fields in top-notch condition. And again, we want to be u market driven as it relates to the um fees that will be charged for the use of the park. Um, general operation, uh, all our parks are open by town, uh, code, uh, from sunrise to sunset. That's our general policy. And obviously, if there's athletic activity, uh, the parks that are, uh, that have lights, uh, they stay open until the game uh, or the practice or whatever's happening on the field uh, concludes. Um and then the amenities, the um picnic shelter, the restrooms, and the playground will be accessible when the park is open to the public. For the athletic fields, again, we have uh we want to be very mindful to maintain the quality of the fields and accommodate multiple uses for tournaments. Uh so, typically, we'll do

um we'll have regular operating hours. Uh we we tend to be open a bit longer during the summer as the sun sets much later allows for people to partake in sports later. Uh and then Saturday and Sunday will pretty sure that we'll have a lot of schedule activities. Uh one thing that we want to make sure is that the field use will require reservation. Um and we're going to be scheduling similar to what we do at the GRC with open gym. We plan to have some open play hours to make sure that again there is some access um not necessarily access control but we want to make sure that the fence fields don't become dog parks which is a problem that we see in some of our other facilities. Um and then the picnic shelter will be available for rental um as needed when there's no uh other activities booked in the facility. um for all our parks as you know we have a a really good partnership working with the department of public works uh where there's different sort of activities in park management some we take care of some public works takes care of and this slide just gives you a general idea of how we sort of see the the collaboration and the key responsibilities that fall on each department and I'm going to ask um Zach uh to talk to you a little bit about the local programming opportunities that they have been researching. Uh and then sort of uh go into the fee schedule that we're uh recommending for the park.

Thank you, Maria. And thanks, excuse me, everybody for uh the time and looking forward to sharing, you know, what we've got planned uh come up here uh hopefully later this fall. Um, we did a cross analysis of our market um and looked at some new opportunities for us to really expand some of our um existing programming looking at some adult leagues. There are several different opportunities that we have where we're not competing with our program partners. Um, for looking at like the adult leagues for flag football, kickball, soccer, ultimate frisbee, most of these fall in line with, you know, the spring and fall schedules. you know, we allow that open time in the summer where we should be busier with the tournament play. Um, at that point, we're really, you know, doubling down on that spring fall season for those type of play just because people will be around. People won't be on their vacations and hopefully we're driving that tourism uh through that tournament play in the middle of the summer. Uh, we're also going to be investigating the emerging and niche sport development. You know, one of the unique challenges that we have is that we do have a lot of program partners and we highly value their programs and we're excited to see them continue to have growth. Um, but we also know that there's opportunity for us to start hosting some more programming of our own. Uh, we have opportunities to look into lacrosse, ultimate frisbee, field hockey, cricket. There's a lot of different opportunities we have with the structure that we have at the facility with the artificial turf and the way that that's set up. We were able to do a lot of additional play just due to the fact that we're not as concerned about maintaining those surfaces because they're designed to be a little more multi-use, used a little more frequently and more heavily than than the grass fields which will need some additional uh maintenance and care. We also have some opportunities to look into looking at the speed and performance camps. Uh CrossFit's still a major player in the fitness industry. They're often looking

for places to do some annual regional competitions, um, hosting different camps, different clinics, things like that to help prepare our student athletes and our our adults who want to participate at the next levels. Um, also looking at some unique things, you know, we because like I mentioned the turf is so versatile, you know, we can do things like portable targets for disc golf, air bad mitten, different backyard sports, cornhole, whiffle ball, you know, the the fun games that we used to play growing up, too. Uh, we can also put out there at the park. So, this slide represents kind of the uh main the transition into our fee structure. um several different um things here. So, first the top section reflects the price point for a hourly rental for just a Garner nonprofit. You know, one of those local groups are looking to use it on a a weekday or weekend. Um and as you guys follow through the flowchart there, really I want to focus more heavily on the tournament side, which is that bottom half of the the grid. Those represent the really the lifeblood of what we're going to be doing. As Maria mentioned, the Wake County Tourism Grant that we received has very um specific terms for what we have to achieve in order to meet or exceed their expectations. We have 350 special event days as listed by theirs where we're driving economic impact, driving tourism, and bringing people back to Garner. So, as such, we've developed a strategy in coordination with Greater Raleigh Sports. Um, and they are really the the measuring stick that we have working with Wake County. That group reviews and analyzes

the different fee structures of not just our own facilities, but all of the different sports and tourism facilities across the region. And they're typically really involved in the um booking and the hosting side. So, they're very familiar with the finances related to this. The proposed numbers that you see in front of you today are in line with the industry standard as presented by Greater Raleigh. Um, what we found inside of this is you're going to be receiving a four full four field package. Basically, you have all day. We're going to try to do it turnkey as turnkey as as possible so that everybody has an opportunity to show up, come play their games, and get in in and out throughout the day. We're not trying to nickel and dime beyond that. We're just here to play the games. Um like I mentioned earlier um you know we've benchmarked these against places like Pleasant Parkl Soccer Park. So two of the larger um competitors in our market with similar um structure and size. Uh like I mentioned 350 days of events that we need to have. Those events must draw people from a 50 mile radius. So we're trying to create a system where there is more heads and beds inside the area. people going to restaurants, people going and spending their time and their leisure time here in Garner. So, like mentioned um the strategic rental structure that we have um we've identified two different tier points to help us achieve our um goals related to this tourism grant. What the measuring stick is for our um overall development is how can we prove how many people we're having from coming from these areas. The industry standard

is to go to the hotel data, work alongside folks like Greater Raleigh and get that hotel data for these groups. In order to do that and help incentivize folks to come in, a lot of organizations and we are proposing being like many of them as well is presenting different rental rate rebates. These rebates would be structured in a way in which an organization presents usund and 100 100 to 250 room nights. We'll give them a 20% rental rebate on the back end of their tournament after we have done the the due process of checking and verifying data. On the flip side, if you bring a bigger event in, 250 a night or more event in, we'll give you 50% off those rates. When we did the um comparable analysis of our overall expenditures and operating costs, that was in mind as we built this. And then so just leading into uh kind of what's next for us as we keep diving in. Um next couple weeks we'll be working on getting some folks hired. Obviously we brought Eric on here in October. We have another four specialists that will be helping support him serve as league coordinators, event coordinators, help support the operation there. We'll also look at uh part-time supplemental staff as well as we get to that point. obviously working on developing our marketing communication stand uh plans. Today was an important day for us so we can start getting some of that materials together so we can start moving forward with some of our ideas and our perspectives that we need as we start to plan and develop these programs. Uh we have continued to work on our relationships with Greater Raleigh Sports Alliance. Um we've starting to build those networks. We're starting to get an idea of what opportunities we have that we might be able to get into. Is it working with existing soccer clubs? is that having some regional groups come in that are new to the area. Uh we've got

opportunities there. As Maria mentioned, we are targeting a late summer, early fall um grand opening. So, we're starting to just have those early level discussions and then hopefully as we uh get the timelines together, we can start launching our program. So, with that, pass it back to Maria. And we included as uh appendices here uh a lot of the data of the sort of comparable um other park systems and there are various rates uh for the use of of athletic facilities. So again we're really excited. This is a uh a labor of love uh for many many uh town staff. Uh you all may see us here, but building this park has involved uh extensively the team from the engineering department, uh the budget office and the finance director who needs to sort of make sure that we have money uh to pay our general contractor. Um I'm sure there's many more people obviously the town manager's office and and certainly the support of this council to make this park a reality for for the community. I know it's been a long time dream and we're almost there. So happy to answer any questions that you may have.

Wow, fantastic information. Great news coming in right on schedule. Clearly, there's a lot more goes into running a park than just putting some grass out there. A lot of thought goes into how do we get people here? How do we pay for it? Thanks for all the good work you've done. Let's take a round of questions and comments. Let's start with Mr. Vance at this end.

I was just say that it was a very encouraging briefing. Uh there's a lot of progress that's been going on to drive by it periodically to see everything that's happening. I would love to see a fly over, but I may not get that. But anyway, love to see a fly over with a drone and but I I'll wait I'll wait until for the grand opening. Like I say, I also appreciate all the hard work of the staff and all the partners and what you're doing to make this park a success. Looking forward to it. I know that we have a council led by Mr. Singleton and his support of the parking parks of situation within the town to be one where families can come together and just have a great time. And this is no doubt going to be a place for that port that portion of the northern portion of Garner which will be going to be a great gathering place as Garner continues to grow. But keep up the good work.

Excellent. Mr. Dallinger trying to get some clarity on the the grant piece, the compliance piece. So it's 350 planned event days within a seven-year period. Is that how that breaks down?

Yeah. So it is uh 700 it's 350 over the seven years but there are projection targets that we have to hit and maintain throughout. So we actually have to hit and stay within a deviation of 50 per year through that seven. If we go above that they're happy. They're super happy, we're great, good shape. If we start trailing, put us out of the development plan and move forward.

So 50 planned events. Is there a size? I here my questions are going. How much time will the fields be used for outside events versus recreation for residents? So it's 50 event days uh that are sort of they consider an event day depending on the um number of hotel rooms. So that sort of tier one number uh would constitute one event day. Uh we just have to track that information and give to them. But typically tournaments would only happen on the weekends. There's going to be very few instances where there'll be tournaments that are booked for the entire week. Um I mean it's typically travel sports is weekend based but uh so there will be time we certainly are planning to to as we schedule the facility um early part of the week would certainly be for local play uh whether it's league whether it's adult league or a partnership with um I don't know Raleigh lacrosse or gardener lacrosse or or whatever sport comes into play for the fields. Yeah. Okay. That that helps, but it's high volume weekend use for outside.

Yes. Okay. Um, also I'd like to see an act like a breakdown of that revenue and then the actual operating cost of the park to see how close we are to a break even. I doubt we are, but it would be helpful to kind of see how understand what you're doing. I'd like to see those numbers and how that actually works and sort of getting the park to pay for itself. That's why I asked a question about use by residents who are paying on the bonds for the park. They want to be able to use the park. Um, so that'd be helpful just to kind of see full operating costs and and revenue generation that balances. Yes, we can put that together. That'd be great. Thank you. I've got a couple more questions, but I'll I'll pass on. Okay, Mr.

Um, I have a question. It's kind of along the same line of um reprompting. Um when it comes to a park basic operations, it says open play hours will be scheduled based on rental demand, facility preparation and maintenance needs. Will there be set um free play open play hours during the week or will it be sporadic?

No, I think that's our goal. Uh at the uh Garner Rec Center, we have what we call open gym. uh that obviously sort of structured hours that are set for say you know pickle ball from 10 to 12 uh or whatever is the appropriate sport volleyball, basketball um badminton that we do now at um at the GRC. Uh so we plan to do something similar um we couldn't call it open gym because it's not a gym but it'll be sort of I don't know we have to come up with a catchy title uh open field so that people would know that if they want to I don't know kick the ball with their uh nephews and nieces they can show up on Tuesday between I don't know 5 and 6 or whatever is the time that we uh and we'll post those schedules as we do for open gym so the public can become familiar of how how they can partic participate in the park um at their leisure.

Thank you for that. And and I definitely do appreciate um us looking at some of the the niche sports. I know we've heard from residents about the appreciation for offering bat mitten. So definitely want to thank y'all for that. Um my last question would be in terms of um and it's very oddly specific, but in terms of I know we said we want to look at CrossFit style programming. Is that equipment that we currently have or will we have to purchase that equipment if we went that route? So, some of that is stuff that we'd have to to purchase, but also there's groups that would come in and partner. So, there's opportunities to go both directions on that. Thank you, Mr. Sangleton.

Yes. I think everyone knows how I feel about the Jurgen Park. Uh bad to see it coming to fruition. We started on it many years ago. Talked to Mr. Jurgen about, you know, the availability of the park came here. So, it's great to see it moving forward. It looks good out there. Uh, I know this isn't in relation to the new water restrictions, but the the grass fields are sprinkler, correct? They are. Okay. I just want to make sure. Um, and some people may ask why we have two grass and two synthetic is having been here for years and help coach soccer and mainly the kids that we coached were South Garner and at times there would be three teams practicing on the same field at one time. The last team I had was freshman through seniors in high school. And then we practiced. It was a girls group that was 14, 13 year olds, younger boys group. And you had three teams on the field at once. So you rotated. One team took half the field. The other two teams took a quarter of a field. And so the need for for field space was was great. And and at South Corner Park, it has a wet spot that's been there for years. Everyone that's familiar with South knows where the wet spot is. And so when it rained, a lot of those practices would get cancelled. And so it was hope hopefully having some a couple of synthetic parts will help with practice and and teams will be allowed uh you know to practice on those fields if there are is rain and people I think have a mistake they think well synthetic fields have no maintenance synthetic fields have a lot of maintenance you have to clean them do a lot of things to them um and they have a lifespan of so many years but anyway uh I'm looking forward to it thanks to the detailed information thanks to the comparison to other parks because I've been most of those and uh there there's some really nice facilities in the area and this will be another one of those. And maybe one day after phase one gets done, maybe one day when phase two starts, we'll have the tournament field uh that that other additional one other additional grass field along with the big round field, whatever that may turn out to be. So, uh thank you for the information. It's uh looking forward to it opening here in the next six months or so.

Yes, sir. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Matthews. Uh yes. uh when we're talking about grants and what have you. This is coming from county. Is that correct? Yes.

And having been served up there and part of that giving out that kind of money. I know they look at these numbers, but the the revenue is there and first come, first served and getting some people to help you out a little bit, so to speak, uh can help you on that. I I like the economic development portion because u events and what have you with our hotels uh our restaurants all the things going on in Garner that packages can be put together with these teams whether it's uh uh soccer or any number of sports whether people are coming in and getting them for the whole weekend uh that could be a tremendous draw offset a lot of the cost and be a big economical boost so I don't know if you coordinate with our economic development team or how you got a game plan for that because uh it it will it'll book up and develop fast because word does get out and uh they already doing that all around the county Marsville and different areas. So to have a signature event that they want to do every year they want to book up 300 rooms and where we get them get them a package and what have you. So I think being proactive on that's going to be really important. It's gonna be a full-time job just about just managing that portion of it. And and like Grace says, as if the park expands even more if other things, whether it's cricket, field or whatever, those demands will still be there because

I see. So it's a great opportunity here and uh what we do with it. So there in lies the challenge, but nothing that can't be handled if if it's planned. Thanks for the presentation. Very good. Thank you. Good questions. Let's come around again in case you thought of another question or comment, Mr. Vance.

Oh yes. Um, how are you ensuring the uh the safety of the park? You know, sometimes you have situations where individuals are in the park at odd hours and things of that nature and what what type plan is being thought about or in place for that? So um so the parks I don't know if you have noticed at Lake Benson Park we have installed uh automated gates um to sort of physically close the park for parking uh at the end of the day. Uh and in this particular park there will be um more security cameras than we have in other parks. Okay. Are are the current resources sufficient to manage the park effectively once it opens up?

Um I believe so. You believe so?

No. Yes, we do. As part of the proforma was to sort of develop the staffing model for the facility uh and thinking of of this being a 7-day operation. Our idea or the the approach for staffing was to have one full-time manager, Eric, u and then we'll have four um coordinator level positions that will sort of be there dayto-day. And that would allow us to again operate and have a full-time staff at the park seven days a week. Uh to again address both uh whether it's a tournament or whether it's local play um whenever we need for example if we need to augment the staffing um complement because we will have to be assisting with I don't know parking for a tournament that's when our ability to hire part-time staff in the sort of as the park comes into play. um will be able to address that. Uh and then public works will have dedicated staff that will be um just taking care of that park. And I'm sorry I don't have the number of staff that public works has uh but again uh it's part of the development uh of the operations that our um public work um director Forest Jones has been working on.

So you don't see a problem with with staffing of the park? I do not. Okay. Thank you. Mr. have a a question on the the site plan or overlook on page six, I think. Yeah. Is that the most recent layout for the park? Is that what it is that the final? Yes. Uh so there's actually Yes. A is the bigger overlook. Uh but there's another one that doesn't show here that it's kind of I cannot I guess I can do this. Nope. Yep. I have a question. This one's an overlook and then there's a tiny tiny one here.

I have a question because I look back at where the original master plan for the park and what I'm seeing in this rendering is looks like we've lost two to three acres of trees for storm water management or control centers that wasn't in the original master plan. That is uh interesting. But my and it probably was necessary and required. My question though is if that's the situation for the first phase and there was a large storm control measure on the back side of phase two, what are the implications for what we've learned on storm water management on phase one and what potential impacts are there on phase two and what can be done in phase two. I think there were conversations as the design progressed about whether the storm water measures or phase one could handle phase two and because of the topography and the way water moves and the way this side is sort of not the flattest one um they could not address phase 2 storm water on these particular ponds. Uh so whatever phase 2 storm water needs are will be very dependent on uh whatever is built on phase two. Uh one advantage that we actually got here in um in this project at some point in the design of this facility uh the state legislature changed uh some storm water um code uh to allow for artificial turf not to be considered uh an impermeable surface. So, we were able to really not have to build more because those fields have underneath, uh, some suitable, uh, storm water management stuff. Um, so, um, that was one advantage

I would recommend because I think you're talking about a revenue model for the park and so then you have a question of what does the revenue model look like when you have phase two and does it make it even better? and it probably does, but then you start looking at maybe the configuration changes or amenity changes you'll need to make um with the storm water considerations. I was hoping you were saying we took care of part of phase two with phase one, but that's not what you said. So, I think the sooner rather than later, um, looking at what phase two looks like, um, and what what how much land we're going to lose, useful land and tree preservation, which is what we like about parks, too. Uh, what that reconfiguration might look like. Um, because that's a it's a sign, like I said, what would you guess? Two or three acres of additional storm water land been taken up. I mean, land being taken up for storm water.

I don't I don't know, but I can get you a number from our design team. I do know that for the rest of the property, there are two blue line streams, so there will always be fairly um robust buffers. There's also some pretty steep ravines uh around those uh streams. So, um phase two in terms of development will likely be much less in terms of footprint than this. And I would just encourage us to to kind of look at all options for storm water management. Some that might be more expensive might actually be better if we're preserving land that we can use to make money. So don't just kind of go with the cheap option and say this is what we need to do, but any say when phase two starts that's as soon as possible sort of look at that. That's all.

Yeah, good good question. and storm water control. Uh that that's the the new infrastructure. We have to look at it. We have to keep thinking about it. Thanks for bringing that up, Mr. Stalins. No questions, Mr. Singleton. Second round. Yes, sir. Uh the the uh improvements along East Garner Road, including the curb and gutter and the walkway. The walkway will basically go to the sidewalk of the existing town home, White Oak Town Home Villas. And then whenever the Jones Saucers Road project is done, that'll be on Garner Road from Jones Saucers Road down there'll be curbing gutter and the walkway will go all the way down there. The walkway will be the sidewalk be improved to a walkway down to that intersection. Correct. Yes. Okay.

I'm looking at engineering for that answer. I thought that was the case, but the the 10 this has a will have a 10 foot walkway in front of it. Correct. Yes. Okay. All right. I just want to make sure. I thought that was the case that the additional improvements along Garner Road wouldn't happen until they fall under the Jones Road project. Okay, thank you, Mr. Matthews. Okay, need another round, Mr. Dinger. Okay, well, great. That that's a lot of great information. This will be a work in progress as well. Just because we start playing ball that we're finished thinking about, you'll be refining this as you go. Thanks for the great work that you've done there. Thank you very much. Thank you. We look forward to setting a date for our ribbon cutting.

I know. We're so excited about it. Uh we'll let you know. You'll be invited for sure. All right. Thank you. We appreciate that. We may be even run a lap. Who knows what we'll do. Uh it's about 12 after 8. We typically take a recess at 8. We will take a a expedited 8m minute recess if we would be back in here at 8:20. Please. We have some very important items on on the remaining portion of the meeting tonight. Thank you.

and we're back in session. Thank you for hustling back from our recess and we pick up where we left off. We'll come now to updates to council section 8. Item number one is committee reports and let's recognize council members uh with any committee reports. Let's start with Mr. Matthews. Uh don't have a committee report at this time. Mr. Mayor. Okay. Mr. Singleton. No sir. Mr. Stalins.

Um so the Garner Youth Council met on April 15th on Wednesday last week. Um I was upset because I wasn't able to make that meeting because of a mandatory work obligation. But currently they're um preparing for their executive board elections that will happen in May and doing great work in their committees. Um the downtown Garner Association met on April 9th in preparation for the April food truck rodeo that me and my wife thoroughly enjoyed attending. Got to enjoy some ice cream and cake and deviated from my my diet, but I don't regret any of it. Um as well as the parks and recck um committee. We met yesterday um at the GPAC. Um the parks and recck committee didn't have quorum um but they tore the facility the GPAC as well as um Avery Street but there were some questions and comments from members in attendance around the struggle for them to make quorum and with there possibly being a possibility for us to consider having alternate members on the advisory committees so that if a member is removed for non-attendance there is already a vetted member there with no voting rights that's ready to fill that void. So, that's something that they thought we could we could possibly consider in the future.

Good idea. I like it. And and I second your motion on the food truck rodeo. My wife passed it off as her family reunion. Instead of her cooking, she took them all downtown. Said he give get whatever you want. It was a big hit. Mr. Dinger, I don't have a report, but in response to Mr. Stalling, I'd say if you could reduce those concerns to writing and send them to the nominations committee, that'd be really helpful for us. Yes, most defin. Excellent. Mr. B.

Oh, yes. I'll also say the food truck rodeo was great. I had a good time. The weather was fantastic and a great variety of food and u a lot of activities for the families as well. Just like to say that the nomination committee has started the interview for the various boards and commissions that have openings and we will continue to interview uh for the for the applicants we currently have that that will be before us this week. Okay. Excellent. Thank you. And that brings us to item two under updates. That would be manager report.

Yes. Good evening, mayor, members of council. We have three reports for you this evening. First is our quarterly financial report. And I'll ask Mr. Beck, our chief financial officer, if he'll come and briefly review with you the quarterly report.

Thank you, Miss Miller. Good evening, Mayor and Town Council. Um, you had the Q3 financial report in your agenda. Hope you've all had an opportunity to look at that in advance of tonight's meeting. Just wanted to hit a few highlights for you and then um glad to answer any questions you may have. So, on the revenue side of things, I think we are uh in fairly good shape. Property tax revenues are are tracking uh really close to what we budgeted. Um and so I think we will hit our budget target uh possibly with a with a small surplus in property tax revenue. Uh that is a you know slightly different than what we've seen in recent years where you know we budget conservatively with our tax collection rate and we've had some larger surpluses in that line item because of that but it's a it's a more challenging environment right now for Wake County to make those collections on the taxes and so the collection rate is is coming down a little bit. uh it still puts us in good shape budget-wise as far as our conservative approach to that. But just wanted to bring that to your attention that we benefit greatly from the relationship with Wake County. They do a tremendous job collecting taxes, but it is a it is a tough environment for them right now and uh that historically high um collection rate has come down just a little bit and you know that does make a little bit of a difference uh for us on our bottom line. A couple of other revenue streams I wanted to mention. One is investment earnings that continues to be very good for us to outpace our budget projections. U I think you know we've all seen in the news that uh it was expected that that interest rates would be going down and the Federal Reserve would would make a number of interest rate reductions and they did that and then that's kind of paused. So, we've benefited from that with our uh

investments that the interest rates have not come down quite as quickly as uh maybe what was anticipated. So, that's a that's been a strong revenue stream for us. And sales tax, we've sort of settled in at probably what uh in most years would be a a normal growth rate for sales tax, which is in that four to 5% range for Garner. Uh we obviously had some years with historic growth. uh during COVID and postcoid, but it's kind of settled back into that normal growth rate now. And like I said, we're at about 5% uh year-over-year growth in that line item right now. On the expenditure side of of the equation, I think we're in good shape there. Departments continue to do a really good job managing their budgets, um staying within their means, and I think budget-wise, we're in good shape. Uh on the expenditure side of things, obviously everyone's seen the news and and and you know feels the the volatility in the economy, the national economy, worldwide economy. And so we're taking all those things into consideration as you know now we're into the fourth quarter of the fiscal year. Obviously budget work is uh underway and and we are finalizing a recommended budget for town council. Um, but it it is a challenging environment and obviously we're we're trying to be wise and conservative and prudent with our budget projections. Um, but did want to let you know it it is challenging right now. It it's very difficult to kind of predict where things are going to go uh with sales tax, with um prices on certain goods, fuel, things like that. And so, uh, just to just to let you know that we we are monitoring all those things, taking those things into consideration, not only as it impacts the current year financials and budget. uh just to make sure that we um you know

manage things well to finish out this fiscal year, but also as we look to next year and preparing a budget for that that um we're keeping a close eye on those things. And um we'll have a um a budget that takes that into consideration to present to you. And uh Mr. Mayor, that's all I had as far as comments and answer any questions you or council may have.

Okay. Yeah. Let's start with Mr. Matthews for questions or comments. Um, thank you for that report. I do look forward to quarterly report. People a lot of times say, "Well, you and government with issues happen with other towns. Uh, how do how are we?" I said, "You ain't got to worry about Garner. We're just fine." I said, "We got so many checks and balances like your report, our management team, Davenport, looking at what we do. If if a dollar is in the wrong place, we'll try to find out where it's supposed to be. It's not missing, just where it goes." But that's reassuring. But but and being cautiously optimistic, you got to prepare because who knows what tomorrow is going to bring with oil and everything else is it's setting something waiting to happen one way or the other and and uh most certainly oil drives just about everything one way or the other. So thank you for the report and and being cautious because you know it's kind of tough times now and so you guys got your hands full. So keep on doing what you're doing. Thank you, Mr. Sand.

Yes. Thank you. As always, M Mr. Beck, the sales tax numbers are interesting that the first month of July, all three of the different uh sales taxes, I had double digit growth and then after that almost like dropping off a shelf and you're right, averaged out a little 5% of what we've done so far. So, it's it's consistent through the rest of the six months. You know, that's 5% better not 5%. So, thanks for the information as always, sir. Thank you, Mr. Talent. Thank you for the presentation and the information.

Yes, I have a question on in our packet page 204, the statement of revenues and expenditures. And just wondering if there's some sort of balloon expenditures we can expect. I'm looking at public works in the budget $18 million. The actual to date is 10.9 which is a delta of 7.1 million and then parks and wreck budget 4.6 million actual today 2.6 which is about a delta of 2 million. 60% of the budget spent for public works and only 56% for parks and wreck. And we only got three months left in the year. Yeah, I don't think there's any, you know, one particular line item that's that's standing out in those departments. Regarding like public works, it's fairly consistent across some of their divisions like solid waste, for example. That's a monthly invoice that's that's pretty large. Uh, typically the the cost of that resets on a quarterly basis based on the the number of units they're serving and things like that. Um there have been, you know, some staffing uh challenges as far as filling positions. We have like the positions for Jurgen Park, you know, that were hired in advance of that park opening. Some of those positions have taken a little bit longer to fill. So there's some lap salary money that you're seeing there, but there's not any particular large looming expenditure to come that's that would impact, you know, one or two particular line items.

That that's sort of my question. So through nine months is in public works, $10 million has been spent with $7 million left in the budget. So throughout the year, that's a $1 million per year spend rate. On that spend rate, three more months, there's $4 million. Is that what we're saying is by the end of fiscal year, we'll have a surplus of $4 million in public works?

I needed I probably needed to look at the detail a little bit closer to answer that for you, but I do know Some of what you see there with the budget number, that's the revised budget. So, we do have expenditures that roll from the prior year into the new year. Sometimes those projects will carry out longer, some has to roll again. Um, so there's some of that that you see as far as budget, original budget versus revised budget that kind of inflates that potentially a little bit when you're looking at budget actuals. But I'll certainly take a closer look at that and follow. Uh I'm I'm curious on that one in the parks and rack. I can know I know we did significant budget increases last year in preparation for Jurgen. It's not going to open until the next fiscal year. So I'm looking is there is there money there? One, this is my qu my questions. Is there money there that we should be looking at as we have our budget discussions? And two, did we overbudget last year? And if we did, does that mean our base budget that we started this budget with incorporates that over expenditure of funds and we're building on top of an already inflated budget?

Right.

Okay. So, this is going to be a point of conversation when we get into our budget conversation. If we've overbudgeted Parks and Work by four million, public works by four million, and parks and rec by a million, then we need to look at what our base budget was and start taking money out of there because we've already overbudgeted. And so, we got I think we're not in as bad a shape as we may have thought we were, but I think we also need to evaluate what our how we're approaching our base budget approach to calculating and formulating our budget because we're starting at what looks like to me just based on this an inflated uh floor as we start this year's budget because we go into this next year budget you got $5 million surplus you shouldn't start at your base budget so high so I think that'll be part of our conversation I think during the budget retreat is what what's still left to come out of here that you know like you're talking about these adjustments and actuals and all that um but then we need to sort of look at how we're approaching our budget Um,

yeah, I think we may have started with the budget too high and then we're trying to add on top of it. So, Mr. Dinger, let us look at those numbers for the parks and recreation and public works and just verify the information you're looking at and we'll follow up with with you and the rest of council because your your review and analysis of that work is the same thing that we're doing right now in terms of preparing the recommendation for the FY27 budget. So, uh, let us follow up on that and provide some at least some initial feedback and information as we continue to put the recommended budget together. All right. Thank you. This may be a repetitive question, but I'm going to ask it. So, are there any departments that are over budget at this time?

No, we don't we don't have any departments where they're in total for their for their department or over budget. No further questions. Okay, good observation. Okay, any other comments or information from you, Mr. Beck? Uh, no sir, not from me. Okay, if no other questions here, we'll move along uh continue with manager report. Yes. So, the next quarterly report is the capital project update and I'll ask Miss Harrison if she'll come up to the podium and review the highlights with us.

Good evening. I always feel like these quarterly updates come faster than quarterly somehow. I don't know. Quarters go faster. Um, but here we are again. And, uh, as Miss Miller mentioned, I will hit the highlights as usual. If y'all have questions about anything that I don't go over, just stop me um, as we go along or we'll talk about it at the end. Um, all right. So, we have a lot of projects in construction. So, I'm going to make sure that I touch on those because I know that's a lot of the activity that you see. Um, starting with transportation, we have the Aversboro Road and Garner Road sidewalk projects. Those are again two different locations just bundled as one project. The sidewalk on Aversboro Road that's near the YMCA is has been installed. So, the sidewalk itself is complete. You will notice a section of that that is still closed off because we are waiting for the handrail that will be installed next to it. Um, and that needs to be installed before it's open for for public access. For some reason, there's a complication getting handrails delivered. We have the same problem at the police department. So, some some shortage there, but as soon as that arrives, it will be installed and then that sidewalk can be open. Construction has started on the Garner Road section of sidewalk, primarily with some demo and some utility work. Um, no sidewalk installation as of yet. the Brian Road improvements project. You will see this one on your May 5th agenda for award of the construction uh contract. So, that one we look to be starting construction on this summer to be complete by the end of the calendar year. We have the Main Street parking project that was recently awarded. That contract has been executed. This does require a right of entry from the railroad. So, we issued what's known as an administrative notice to proceed, which allows them to proceed with um making that application to the railroad, but not to proceed with construction until that permission is

received. So, that timeline is somewhat unknown, as are most things through the railroad, but um it could be up to 6 months, hopefully shorter. As soon as that is obtained, then we can start construction on those parking spaces. Staying downtown, we have the Pearl Street and Parker Street improvement project. This one is substantially complete, so you will probably see it fall off your report um coming up soon. We have finished all the punch list items. They've completed those in March. So, finished up all the the final items and just working on close out of that project. And then the Randmill streetscape and parking improvements project is also underway. We have started phase two of that project which includes some utility work in the parking lot area but also moves the contractor into the intersection of Rand Mill and Main Street. And so if you're downtown, you'll likely see that work going on. We don't have any planned road closures because of that, but there will be some of the parking spaces that are closed and some potential periodic lane closures, but no full road closures. Uh just a quick note on the resurfacing contract. You probably all have noticed that we completed the raised crosswalk on Fifth Avenue. That was part of the 2025 resurfacing contract and the first raised crosswalk that we've done. So a new a new um tool in our traffic calming toolkit to provide both a pedestrian crossing and the function of basically a speed table for for slowing cars down at the same time. So that's something that we look forward to potentially implementing in some other locations around town as well if we see that it's effective on Fifth Avenue. Let's see. Moving forward, we have a couple items in the in the park section. So the Garner Recreation Center playground is complete. That one you will see come off your report as well. Um, I know when I

was downtown for the food truck rodeo, there were lots of kids enjoying it and a birthday party, I think. So, it seems to be getting good use for sure. The White Deer Park improvements are under construction. The splash pad is largely complete with a planned opening date of miday. The playground is expected to be complete late summer, early fall time frame um, and is currently under construction. And then of course we have Jurgen Park under construction. Y'all heard quite a bit about that one tonight. But um a whole host of activities that will occur over the next quarter because this quarter we will be mostly wrapping up construction on that project. So a lot of finishing the playground installations, the interior finishes, the structure, sidewalk, a lot of finishing work. And then looking at a couple of facilities, we have the Garner Police Department steps. So the step work is complete. The final piece of those is to get the the stair treads delivered so that we can install those. So that that makes the steps ADA compliant. So we need that to get them open and then those will finally open back up. Um we have so the public works facility expansion was a new project on your report last time. This is a project that we've been talking about with you all on the horizon, but we are doing some preliminary work to start looking at a consultant that we would like to work with on that project ahead of it um you know showing up on the the CIP. So actually tomorrow we are doing interviews of consultants. We did an RFQ to get interest and we received 16 submitts for that which was a lot. Um which is a good thing. That's that's a great thing. People are interested. we have a lot of options to look at. So, we've narrowed it down to the top five and are having them come to do interviews tomorrow um so that we can dig in better to which one would be the

the best option for us. And then we have building 109 or the town hall annex. We are getting so close. So, uh we are currently hoping to have staff moving into that building in miday. We are very close to having the building itself turned over to the town. The contractor has a few finishing punch list items inside the building and we have a a back check of that walkthrough next week to hopefully have that finished up. It is very close to being ready for a certific certificate of occupancy. We will still have some site work to finish up um at the same time as staff is moving into the building. So, it is it's getting close.

Question, is that on budget?

Um yes. Yeah, currently on budget. And then your last couple pages are some of those external projects. So a couple things just to note on the NC DOT project list. You'll see the top one um in the design category is U5302 which is the work on 401 between old stage and mechanical. I know this has been a long time coming and long awaited. Um so that project was awarded. Construction has not started yet, but the contract has been awarded. So it is on its way to getting underway in the next few months. And then the last page is your Raleigh water projects. The difference the new information that you see highlighted here is Raleigh has started giving us anticipated construction dates for all of those projects which is helpful for us to look at timelines. So those have been added so that um you can have an idea of when that work will be taking place. And with that I'm happy to answer any questions you might have.

Wow. Let's start with Mr. advance this time. Questions, comments? Yes, I have several questions. Are most of the capital projects on schedule?

Um, I'd say it varies. Uh, so most of our construction work has stayed pretty well on on schedule. We had several capital projects that got behind schedule during the design phase. Um, we've found that in general, I think the the engineering and design community was very busy and we've struggled with consultants to get work delivered on time. Um, but in general in construction, we haven't had a lot of projects fall behind schedule with the exception of a of a couple like a town hall annex. That one's been notoriously behind. So, I would say the majority have have been on schedule.

Gotcha. Are there any projects that that has a possibility of going over budget or are there any over budget at this time?

Uh let's see. So I would say we have um you know with some of the further out projects there's always the potential. Um so we have projects like the South Garner Greenway and Jones Sausage Road. we are getting into the point of looking at right-of-way acquisition for those. So funding for that has been set aside, but I I always think until you get into that process, there's always some potential for those are unpredictable costs, right? Um and a lot of those larger projects and the further out they are, those the con construction costs go up as well. Um but for the most part, we have projected budgets that are updated regularly. Um, and we're having quarterly budget meetings with our project management team as well as budget and finance and um, some legal in there for procurement as well. And so we've been able to keep pretty good tabs on keeping the budgets up to date as we get new engineers estimates and and updating those as needed.

Okay. All right. Thank you. You have a question about me.

Sure. and I've read the notes and there have been recent activity and going back and forth from McAdams. I think my question is more on the project budget part because I I don't know if it was a formal council action per se, but I think we had given sort of a range for a budget for that work for the whatever planning part of that work and then the actual build out. So, I kind of I'm wondering what what number goes into that budget number and when I'm I'm sure you'll have a rhyme or reason for how when you put money in those buckets, but I'm curious as to what that when a Meadow Brook would have a number in its project budget.

Sure. Um, and this one is probably more complicated than some of them. Um, so a few different things on Metobrook. We have we do have some grant funding that was originally granted when we were doing the dam work. So the portion of the project that is looking at doing the the trail, the first thing we would hopefully do would be utilizing that grant funding. And I think that would be the work that's done there is basically going to be tailored to be able to fit within the funding provided by the grant. So we will use the budget to guide the scope as opposed to the other way around. Um, we do have some funding for the interim use section of Metobrook as part of our CIP conversations. Um, I don't remember right off when we have that programmed in, but we can definitely get that back to you, but I know it has been part of our um 5-year CIP conversations for funding for for some of that portion. Um, we also had some possibility of, you know, if we have funding from Jurgen, depending on how that all washes out with the grants that we've received there, that there might be some potential to use funding that was freed up by the grants received for Jurgen to to fund additional pieces of Metobrook as well.

Yeah. I'm just curious like with the conversations with Nick Adam and scoping it's like you kind of scope from a budget and so what numbers sort of given been given to them for scope this out on this budget. Um so that would be just helpful because I know again I don't think it was a formal action but I think there was talk of one or one and a half million or something is what we had talked about but if that number it'd be helpful to see a firm a firmer number for an output. So, if we know if we it's got to be two million or a little more. Um, and I have another question. It's more this for other Jurgen. It may not be for you, but I saw the funding sources for Jurgen on the slide and talking about funding sources for Metobrook. Where what is sort of the primary fund flow for our fee and loop? Like is it does it get in is it just a general parks budget? Where does how is that revenue?

You are right. That is probably not a question for me. We don't budget using fee and loo as part of the operating budget or an annual recurring budget. It comes in as a revenue into a dedicated line item and then it basically becomes part of a restricted fund balance. And so if we do find a particular use for it, like when we bought the land for Jurgen, um we bring an amendment to council to appropriate that money at that time. But otherwise, it is never budgeted for use unless a specific purpose comes up. Thank you. That's helpful. Appreciate that. Okay, no questions.

And Miss Harrison, the Brian Road improvements look like uh the opening date was uh last week, was April 16th. Nine plan holders construction in the summer, so about a six-month uh period of construction by the end of the year. Correct. Yep. Um, yeah, we ended up getting seven bids for that project, which was a a good number. Came in a little bit under our engineers estimate. Um, so you'll see that on your May 5th agenda for award, and we'll look at getting that started this summer. All right. Thank you. All right. Back to you. Uh, thank you, Miss Harrison. And our final report is your April talk of the town. I'll ask Mr. Hodgeges to just briefly go over that.

Okay. Thank you, Miss Miller. Um, mayor and council members, one of the things I wanted to draw your and and the uh public's attention to is the burn ban update. In addition to the statewide burn ban, the county earlier um this month did enact a local burn ban. There are details about what that con uh consists of on the town's website. So, we encourage everyone to be familiar with that and be mindful of the extreme condition, dry conditions that we have. Um, also on our website, but not listed in this report tonight because it happened after the report, um, are the new water restrictions from Raleigh Water, our partner that began on Monday. So, there's again, there's detail, um, that our communications team is placed on the website. So, both of those you'll be able to find on our website. Uh, the community organized uh, Garner Relay for Life is this Friday at Lake Benson Park. Um, we also have some great news u from our launch Garner program. two of our participants um were winners in a um Wake Tech uh program. I'm going to let the economic development team tell you a little bit more about that next month when they give you their report. Um also good news that the downtown garner assoc association received a $15,000 check from the Duke Energy Foundation. There's going to be a check presentation later this week and that's going to go towards u being able to provide grants to our business community in the downtown area. And lastly, there's some shows upcoming at GPAC that we just wanted you to draw your attention to and the public's attention to. Uh the second page of your report are your statistics from Garner Info. Um we're um seeing sort of some of the usual things there with pothole repa pavement repair um street sign maintenance and tall grass. Um, I will just note as I always do that even though we're getting into tall grass season, you're not seeing the numbers jump on the Garner Info report. And that's largely because our team has been taking a very proactive stance on addressing those before they need to even make it to Garner Info. So, when we give you our development services report um at next month, you will see some stats about the proactive work that our

code compliance team is doing that will be um supplemental to the things that you see reported through Garner Info. If you have any questions, I'll be glad to answer them. Okay. Any questions from Mr. Hodes? Back to the town manager. Those are all the reports we have for this evening. Certainly willing to answer any other questions that council may have. And that brings us to attorney reports.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor. I just have um two brief reports for you. um our deputy uh town clerk, she sent you some information about the school of government's planning and zoning regional board workshop. Um this year it's on legislative zoning decisions. Uh it's about a three-hour course. There are two online opportunities coming up April 30th and May 14th. So I'd encourage council if you're available to attend those even if you've attended those in the past. Um, we just need um you to reply to uh Miss Murray so that we can get a group discount um on the on the registration fee. I will let you know that members of the planning commission and some of our newer planning staff have already been registered for that, so they'll be attending as well. And then my um second announcement is that I'll be attending the zoning planning and land use conference this Friday uh that is put on by the North Carolina Bar Association.

Excellent. Thank you very much. And that brings us to item four under update and that is council reports on items other than committees which we hit earlier. And let's start with Mr. advance down here for uh any council reports. No council reports. Mr. Dinger.

Yeah. Did want to comment on Mr. Avery's comments on Jackie John's park and the parking situation. Um and then we've had some conversations about that park with the assistant town manager on any ways we can improve that field and their limitations on the parking and those types of things. So I think if we can look at that in the context of um our public works facility redesign and maybe incorporating parking or something. So I think it's a good people use the park and he makes a really good point. Um so I think looking at interim options but I don't think there are many but as we look longer term kind of look at that campus as that park and public works and see if there are accommodations we can make to make the park safer. if not a still make it a community park, which is what it is. Um, but also just accommodate some of the higher volume uses that occur with that park when people come out there. So,

yes, now is the time to address that. You're exactly right. Anything else? That's all, Mr. Don. No report, Mr. Singleton.

Yes, I have several. uh one uh I think I mentioned we were elite softball uh ball day a few weeks back and then on April 11th we were at both Garner area sports league and Garner baseball. So we're there at at Ball Day. Uh big crowds as always. One I think Garner Base had 550 kids and Garner B Garner uh sports league has about 450. So that's a level that's that's a thousand plus 200 volunteers at one and 100 plus at the other. So you're talking 13,400 people that are involved. So that's important. And they always recognize public works because of the work they do and help. I want to thank Mr. tool for we had some discussions at these ball days. He sent us all an email about temporary outfield fencing at south corner one batting cage construction future field dimension expansion and the project funding. So I appreciate Mr. P and his work and getting that information to us. Uh Mr. Hodgees sent us a email that uh I had inquired. I've talked with both attorney Jones and also Mr. Treasonberg about moving forward and considering strong consideration with data center moratorum is happening. Apex I believe Windendell's moving forward with it. Wake County is moving forward with it. And uh I just I'll put it out there. I don't know how the rest of the council feels. I'm making an assumption that we would want to do that. But if so, we have to give Miss Jones and Mr. Treesburg some direction because as he stated here, it would take at least six probably a couple of months. Well, he said okay something on May 19th. That may be early. I say 60 days. So, I reckon we just need to give y'all some direction if that's what we would like to see happen. Is that what you need some direction, right?

Yes, we would appreciate direction on on not only that you want to go forward, but what are your goals in going forward because there are certain statutory requirements that we have to meet. Yeah, thanks for the good information you've sent us already related to that. Thanks for several council members who have expressed concern. This is certainly something that's on the horizon. Our neighbors are dealing with us. uh if you would please set up more dialogue with us to figure out what do we need to do next and what are the options anything you can do to help us move ahead we're looking for that there's a consensus to move forward with options on a moratorum I'm that's what we're looking

for and for clarification would it be a moratorum or any options that would help better address control over data centers because I think I think there might be some interim solutions that could be done shorter er term that we've talked about that that might help facilitate addressing some of the concerns why this longer term issue is being addressed. Yes, I I think you've said the same thing that attorney Jones has said that part of our application for a moratorum or justifying that is what other steps could be taken have we taken. So certainly we want to look at what can we do in a week and a month and in 90 days kind of thing. Yeah, we definitely want to

because as you said any any changes would require a zoning text amendment which is a process that has to go through public hearing consistency review by the planning commission and then adoption. So a moratorum, a targeted moratorum would allow for that work to be done without allowing projects to potentially submit for application and then opt for permanent choice and not be under the appropriate regulations. Um could we be provided options um because as these things are occurring currently um and people are or may be still applying um we would probably want to know what our options are um with this being such a huge issue. I will say I'm I'm completely 100% supportive of a moratorum currently at this point. Um, but I would definitely love to know what our options are. Um, especially our inter room options.

Yep. And I would just say also provide some guidance at some point on um options for expediting whatever decision we decide to make, but also sticking to the legal process that we have to follow as well. And we're having a work session a week from tonight. Maybe we get a little more feedback or a little more specific information. Is that kind of what we're looking for? What are our options? What can we do in the short run, the medium run, and the long run? So, any any specific questions that you can address to us would be helpful. Certainly can give you some options on what the process would be for either one. Um, I don't know that we'd have language ready for you to review,

right, by next week and definitely not to get into the agenda packet. Correct. Yeah. Yeah. We want to do what we can in an orderly manner to be moving ahead steadily on this very very critical issue and and one got approved by Vance County what Monday night last night yesterday I'm sorry yesterday Tuesday and that was uh the the residents were rather spicy uh to say the least. So that was a 40acre site that I got approved. Okay. Thank you for listening to us in that. Thank you for the council supporting it and how we decide to move forward. That's all, Mr. Mayor. Okay. Thank you. And I think we're back to Mr. Matthews for any other council. We're

good to go. Okay. Uh if there's no other actions we need to take or discussions we need to have, uh I will accept a motion to adjourn. Well, if there's another question, let's let's let's talk about it. So there is there no closed session tonight? Yeah, I I somewhat prematurely put that on this week's agenda. It's probably more appropriate um for next week's agenda. So, we'll move that um if council agreeable to that to move that to the work session next week.

Yeah, good eye. That that was on the original I think maybe on the latest draft. Uh oh, it still shows there, but we'll get a crack at that soon enough at appropriate time. Good good question. Uh if no other questions I would accept a motion to adjurnn. So move second. I moved by motion was made by Mr. Delinger, second by Mr. Stalins. Uh all in favor of adjourn, please signify by saying I.

Any opposed by nay. Meeting adjourned. down. Get it for me.