City Council - Regular Meeting

morning everyone those councilmember patrick harman called order the meeting of the transparency engagement a communication committee here in chambers with me a customer chris williams councilmember brit moore cast member michael holmes is unavailable therefore items today on the agenda they're all information only no vote is required First item is 2026-170, an update on community engagement initiatives and Mr. Jaron Hollis is going to update us.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Jaron Hollis, Managing Director. I just want to go over a few things that we have with community engagement and to give some updates. The first thing we want to talk about is our ADA website compliance. The WGAC, which is the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines that the federal government establishes, sets efforts to make sure our accessibility and website usability are up to par for residents, any users of the site. So we have, with our current web vendor, we've got Working with departments, we've got two products that we're using that are, one, providing accessibility and monitoring for things on the webpage, and then another that converts PDFs when people try to connect with them into accessible, searchable formats. So the technology supports screen readers, mobile accessibility, and language translation. The federal compliance deadline, has been extended to April of next year, so we're continuing to work to try to make sure that we have all the tools necessary for compliance. And so that's going well. Just wanted to give you that update on the city website. Any questions about ADA compliance?

No, but I guess it fits in with the conversations we're having with the Special Populations Task Force.

Yes.

Good to know.

Okay, the next thing I want to talk about is the merchandise store, our merch program. So we have, we've done, we did a soft launch, we did an official launch last week, and this is part of our ongoing goal of strengthening our civic pride and our city branding. So we have Rakia in our marketing division has some samples of the products, the shirts that are on the website. We've seen significant engagement. We've had over 13,000 unique users that have clicked on the link to check out the store. We've had more website traffic and the Shirts and hats are what we have in this initial launch, of course, and if you want to feel that material, those will be after the meeting. The popularity of the brand continues and if nothing else, the visibility, the continued visibility of High Point's brand, even if they look at the site and don't purchase shirts, they are able to see that the brand is out there and it keeps it front of mind. So the online store is currently available and that's the website just for reference.

Do you know how many orders there have been?

The orders that we have right now, we get a quarterly update from the vendor, so I don't have the real-time count of the orders right now. We'll get that from the vendor and see how many products have actually been sold, but we don't have that information right now.

Okay, thanks.

Two questions.

Yes. Can you scroll all the way down to the bottom of the screen? Okay. Okay.

I'll figure out which one you want.

Nope, I saw some sold out stuff last week. What size do you happen to have in your hand?

I'm asking for a friend.

Not the right size for you. Well, I bought one of them. Everyone's creative in High Point. I bought that one.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. If there are no other questions about the merch store, the last thing we wanted to talk about is High Point 101. It is our resident academy for High Point residents that's focused on education, transparency, and engagement. The program will occur from August to November, and you get sessions, tours, demonstrations on some of our departments, police, fire, economic development, transportation, and others. Just wanted to show a quick video of what the residents will see and what we have to try to encourage them to apply.

High Point 101 was an amazing experience for all of the people that work for the city, for how the city operates. It's so many people behind the scenes and we got to learn so much. I appreciate everybody in the city at High Point for allowing us to be a part of this program. It was absolutely amazing.

I'd like to thank our marketing and our organizational advancement division for helping put that together. Any questions about HP 101?

So the application's open for this year?

The applications are open, and there'll be 25 applicants that we'll be accepting.

Just out of curiosity, do you get any kind of approach from a neighborhood association group, the kind of groups that We constantly get calls from, you know what I'm saying, about questions with the city and so forth. You have anybody that comes through to say, like, I'm representing whoever, and I'm interested in taking this course. Have you ever had anything like that? Because I'm looking to approach that. That's the reason why I'm bringing this up.

We have. We have participants that are very active in the neighborhoods. We had some in last year's class, so we do. Yes, sir?

I think it's a good way to kind of disseminate that information through these reps to more and more people. Thank you. You're welcome.

That's all I have, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. Hollis. Any other questions from you guys? Okay. Next item is 2026-167, HP collects application and web browser update. Ms. Melinda King will update us.

Hello, good morning. I'm sorry I can't get Damon's head off that screen share there, but... I'm very excited about this. This has been a long time coming and a labor of love. So you all may have received something like this in your mailbox recently. We have launched something called HP collects. It's an app that is supposed to help us communicate better with the residents as far as trash collection, recycling, things of that nature. These are what we give out at the tabling events. We have also provided these to code enforcement so that they can hand them out when they go to talk to residents about issues and they often get a lot of questions of how are we supposed to dispose of this or that and so they can have this at their fingertips to give out. What I've got up here on the screen is the app on my phone. You can also do the majority of this stuff from our website. So if you go to the City of High Point website and click on the trash and recycling icon that's on the splash page there, it'll take you directly to this. What I have in here is my address, actually. So when I open up the app, what it's going to have on there is a location to search how to dispose of separate items. And then it'll show me what my schedule is. If I click on View Calendar, it's going to pull up the calendar. And as you can see, next week is a holiday. So it's pushed my items to Friday. And then tonight, I will get a reminder on my phone that says to put out my garbage and yard waste. Next week, it will tell me to put out garbage recycling, yard waste in bulk. We can also add events. If I go to November, you can see the red, oh, it's taking a little, it's a little slow on loading, but hopefully when this comes up, it'll show a red icon on November 14th, which will be our next HHW event. So you can print these calendars out. You can download the calendars. I apologize, it is a little slow. It hasn't loaded yet up there. I'm going to go back to home. If I click to say how do I dispose of tires, I can just type that in. It's loading on mine. I apologize. Okay, so then it will say, hey, you can't dispose of these just in your regular garbage. So it's going to tell you how to dispose of these in this situation. They can bring them to our HHW events, but since we only host those a couple times a year, it lets them know that they can take it to the Bishop Road location. If I go to... drop-off locations, it'll bring up the address, it'll give them the phone number, it gets them the website and additional details on there as well. If I want to change the language, I can go to settings and based off of a study you all did last year, I can't remember which, I think it was Race's group that did that, Community Relations, those are the three most popular languages that are in high point. So you can change the language. I can put in my address. I can determine which notifications I want to receive, whether I just want emergency or general. And then, you know, it'll let me determine how I want to get my reminders so I can say, hey, give it three hours before I'm supposed to put it out or the night before, however I want to do that. One of the other things that we can do through this app is send out notifications. So I'm just going to pull up a photo real quick. Sorry. So the other day, I sent out a notification on Monday letting everybody know that Public Works Day was yesterday. We can also send out notifications to residents, say, when we had the snow, letting them know that services are delayed, we will begin picking up on this date, and it's only going to be certain items. We can also schedule notifications to simply go out to certain zones. So say we aren't able to run our Wednesday bulk route, we could just collect the Wednesday bulk route members that are on here and it'll send them a notification letting them know services are delayed. We will have it picked up by Friday. So what the other thing that it allows residents to do is if they have an issue they can I want to report a missed pickup. Sorry, it's a little slow. But they can put in, I want to report a missed pickup. My cart is damaged or missing. If they're having technical issues with it, they can do that as well. Right now, all of those reports are coming directly to me through an email. But we are working with the software company to integrate with Kayenta so that it'll go directly into as a work order. We've had a huge increase. We launched this in April. All these were sent out in April. We've had a huge increase of people downloading the app. I get a lot of information from residents, and everybody's been very appreciative of the information they've received back. And I even got a I love the app email the other day.

Always good.

Any other questions?

How many folks have downloaded the app? Do you know? Roundabout?

I have it on a PowerPoint. That was on the slide deck that you had on the internet, right? Oh, yeah, here we go. So these are the statistics that we have since March, between March and April. So we've had, and this was just the other day, so we don't have what's through May, but you can see there we've increased to 1,500 since we sent out the information in the mail.

Are people preferring this versus going to the website and using kind of the app on the website?

Yeah, I can't tell when it comes to me whether it came through the website or through the app. But it keeps them from having to call customer service directly. So obviously, so many people are, it's a quick, easy thing to do on their phone versus having to call. So this is our hope that it kind of creates less call volume in the customer service center and gives people at their fingertips the ability to report things.

So you're saying you can send out emergency notifications. What type of emergency notifications, like if there's Because we had a presentation a while back about sort of preparedness when a big storm happens and letting people know.

I have not tested that, thankfully. But, yeah, I can definitely look into seeing and get more information. You know, obviously we'd only go to people that have the app. But, yes, yeah, any type of notification could be sent out, and I can find out if there's, you know, a sound that goes off with it or how it works if it's an emergency communication.

Okay, thank you. Any questions from you guys?

You're saving a whole lot of people running outside in the mornings.

That's right.

Exactly. A lot of kids getting in trouble because they forgot to take the trash to the street. I think it's really excellent. Thank you.

Yeah, this is fantastic, yeah. Particularly because I can never remember.

Yeah.

Recycling, and if a neighbor puts it out, but they're wrong, and then, you know. Thank you. The next item is 2026-169, Advanced Metering Infrastructure Update. Mr. Jeremy Kobel will present.

Good morning. Good morning. And thank you, Melinda. As one of the customer service representatives here, we have heard so many fantastic things about HB Collect. So kudos to her and her team. It's very wonderful, and wonderful for us, and wonderful for them. So thank you. So today's presentation really connects two related efforts. It connects the AMI project and our customer outreach work that we did in association with these new tools. I've stood in this room and talked about AMI several times. Today, I am most excited. Previously, we have really talked about infrastructure and future benefits. Today, we're going to talk about seeing those benefits right now and how we've improved those things. So where are we? We are about 99% electric meter deployment. There's a few miscellaneous ones out there, a few businesses that we have to coordinate with timing and things. They can't go without power for certain amounts of time. But we're very close on that, and that's working very well. Our water AMI deployment, that number is actually up to 68% as of yesterday. We have more than 53% of our water accounts now providing us hourly water data. And I will touch on that here in a few moments. And AMI has really given our staff better visibility into what customers are using. So we're really targeting the substantial completion of this water development around, I would say, mid-summer. And we should have all that done. That is dependent on field conditions and some of our network optimization, which we're still working on. Like someone, maybe Collins. I'll keep going. So project timeline. We are shifting from deployment to optimization. The next phase is about completing the remaining water development, as mentioned earlier, improving data quality, and refining workflows, building SOPs, and expanding on automation where it makes sense. There's a lot of automated tools in our toolbox. We need to crawl, walk, run with these so that we make sure we're managing our processes and delivering good service to folks. So let's talk about some operational wins. These are where it really gets exciting. We have had, and I'm sure more since a few days ago when we put this slide together, over 3,200 automated leak alerts, which are sending an email or a text message, mostly text, to a customer letting them know that they have some abnormal water usage and they should probably take a look. And we're going to touch on some examples here shortly. We have had over 16,000 remote disconnects and reconnects. What does that really mean? So a customer moves in, a customer moves out. We have to cut the power off for a non-pay situation or some other type of necessity. We're using our technology in-house to cut that meter off remotely, back on and off. A lot of field visits, a lot of drive time, a lot of truck usage saved in those scenarios. We hope to, as time progresses, work with fleet and really see what kind of mileage did we reduce in our vehicles over the course of six to 12 months and look what that is as a dollar savings piece. Let's talk about our water loss program for a second. This is probably, I think, what I'm most proud of. And before I say any more, I'll give a couple shout-outs to some gentlemen over there. They have taken this and ran with it in a way that I don't know that any of us really truly imagined, the fantastic job that they're doing. We are able to identify continuous usage or leaks in folks' homes and places of business without them maybe ever recognizing it. I have a picture here. This is a, as you can kind of tell, there's a pretty bad water leak under this individual's house. This was an elderly couple. They had no idea. What you can't really see in this picture is the water is being sprayed onto their air handling unit, which was going to destroy their HVAC system. What's so amazing about this is within two and a half days, this leak was created, fixed, and confirmed corrected. That's how fast this happened. And I mention this because this couple is very humbled and very thankful to the city for the work that we did. And kudos to those two gentlemen right there. This is really what this system was for, is upfront proactive communication. We are doing this all day, every day. I hope none of you experience a leak at your home or business, but we all do. In fact, I had one in my own house earlier this week. We hope that we're able to recognize this and communicate this. I would say this to any public or anyone watching. Make sure we have your phone number on file. If your phone number that presents on your bill is not your text message, please, please, please, you can go right on the website or our portal that we'll talk about and update that because that will ensure you get these leak alerts.

Yes, sir. An email. An email, yes. What about commercial properties or multiple People that have multiple homes that rent them or whatever.

Yeah, great questions. So for, I'll address that in slightly two different categories there. For folks that own multiple properties, and I'll even put in the category sometimes folks that are maybe watching the utility bill of a parent or something like that. I know myself, we do that. So you can, in our portal, you can have your account and then you can also, someone can give you permission to look at someone else's. And so that's how you can kind of connect to someone else and see their views and usage. And from there, you could actually look at the exact hourly water data and electric data. From the commercial side of things, this is where it does get a little trickier. So every commercial property really has a different need and a different use case. And so we use best case parameters based on some other utilities when we factored in what the leak alerts look like for a business. So for a home, if your leak is over a cubic foot, over an hour, you're going to get a notification. That's not necessarily needed for a commercial property, so those parameters have been adjusted. We have already worked with some commercial properties, and we will probably actually have some custom ones, especially for our larger customers in town, so that they can get identified reports.

Back to the example you gave of helping an elderly parent or something. You've got to get permission to... Do they have to sign something for the CD?

No, you can go on their login with their account. They would have to have an account themselves on the portal, and then they just simply just give you access through that means. And so in that case, that may mean you sitting down with that parent or whomever you may be working with to kind of log in and then give you permission for that.

Is there a way if these particular people in that certain age category or whatever don't do computer stuff?

That's an unknown. I will say that that's where we start getting into Information security. You know, we want to be very careful with that. And so we would need to get some thought on how we approach that because if we start being the gatekeeper of individuals, personal information, that's a slightly different scenario. So for the portal itself, the customer owns this portal. We have view only. We don't have access to the information that goes in there necessarily. Now, certainly there are some admin rights on the back end, but that kind of gets out of the normal procedures of things.

Thank you.

Mm-hmm.

Do we still, Councilman Williams, do we still, yeah, do we still, like, make adjustments to bills if, like, a leak, massive leak is found? they show proof of repair?

Great question. We have this conversation a lot. So how bills are adjusted is the sewer charge can be adjusted if it was a concealed leak or the leak did not go into the sewer system. So for example, the picture we have on the screen here, this water didn't go into the sewer system. It ran out on the ground underneath our house. So in this case, they would be able for the reimbursement for the sewage portion of that increased usage. Now, I will say that we have learned with this water loss, if we did not know already, there are a lot of toilets leaking in the city of High Point. Everyone check your plungers. And in those, there can actually be very substantial water usage for a toilet leak, more than folks would think. And unfortunately, that is not a scenario where we can reimburse because that water did go into the sewer and that has to be processed by our water department.

Thank you.

The data is only valuable if it becomes useful to the customer. And AMI supports the customer portal, which we've talked about a little bit. Usage information, leaking high usage alerts. You can go on there and set custom alerts outside of the ones we are watching ourselves for your own personal usage. Folks love to do this for their kids to tell them to get out of the shower. This is really where Celine's work comes into play. And this is where our output here kind of pivots to how we got this information to the customers. And so I will, at this time, turn this over to Celine. And as she comes up, I would like to say it has been a privilege and honor to work with this young lady. And I look forward to the remaining sin of her time here at Hubbard.

So good morning everyone. My name is Celine and I am the lead for NC fellow that was assigned to the city of High Point to work within customer service this year. So today I'm gonna give a brief overview of my work with the city of High Point, especially in customer service. So first, Lead Frenzy. That is a fellowship program I am a part of. It is a highly competitive fellowship program that is in partnership with the UNC School of Government that seeks to connect promising young leaders into a state's local gov. This fellowship supports communities and strengthens our public institutions, as well as develops young leaders into public service. I am part of Cohort 7. Cohort 7 is made up of 30 fellows that were placed all throughout North Carolina ranging from Western North Carolina where they work with natural disaster relief work to Central North Carolina such as myself where I work a lot with customer engagement, digital communications and accessibility and as well as Eastern North Carolina where they work in any capacity to help in their towns. Fellows are placed within towns, cities, counties, and councils of governments throughout North Carolina. The program also requires us to have two deliverables. One of them is the community needs assessment, which main purpose is to understand our community needs, but instead of approaching this as a problem solution, maybe just approaching as an understanding where these problems came from, kind of having a general understanding maybe where they came to be. With this, I will say I enjoyed this project a lot just because it got me to connect with a lot of our stakeholders in our community to kind of assess where these community needs come from. With that, I will say it was really interesting to complete this project just because I got so many different perspectives. But their answers were very similar, so that was really nice to look into. As well, another one of my projects with the fellowship was a project overview. So with this project, I focused it on reimagining customer engagement in local government. What I liked about this was that it gave me off where we were, where we are, and where we're going. So that was good to approach. It really gave me a good sense of where to go with my projects. And with that, I'm going to jump right into my work with customer service. So a major focus of our work was customer outreach and engagement. As Jeremy kind of mentioned with AMI, it gives us a lot of new tools. And a big goal of ours was to help residents understand the available utility tools and services. Customers can't use what they don't know, and we realize that, so we really wanted to build that awareness on these tools and services that we can provide now with the help of AMI. As well as, we know one approach doesn't work for all, so we wanted to target this by building a stronger presence at community events and outreach activities, which is something new, and I really enjoyed it as well, really connecting with our customers, seeing maybe what we can better, what we are doing good, and what we can do moving forward to improve. Another focus of ours was customer engagement. So identifying customer challenges and areas of confusion to improve accessibility and communication effectiveness. Really kind of focusing on gathering feedback on communication needs. We don't want to just put information out there. We want to build on it. We want to communicate, listen, adjust, and improve. With this, I'm going to go more into specifics in the following slides. With customer engagement, our customer portal was a major achievement of ours that launched this year, March 3rd. We are two months in within our customer portal. Our customer portal was a really huge success because it allowed customers to have more control and convenience of the utility usage than ever. With that, I would like to kind of highlight some of the features of our customer portal. Customers were able to do online bill payments, account management, view the real-time usage data, as well as set alerts. And our portal has leak detection tools, which are really helpful to our customers. So with that, our customer portal had a really high adoption rate. 34% of customers registered on our portal. With that, looking through the following years, within five year comparisons, we've realized that the way that most customers interact with us is through a digital channel. So with that, we realized that 83% of payments are made through digital channels as of right now, with that giving us more accessibility to our customers with this new customer portal. With that, I'm going to touch a little bit more on my work with our customer portal. So leading to its launch, we really had to build that awareness and marketing for the customer portal, kind of building educational content, letting customers know that it was coming, that it is here, and what it's going to do. So with that, I worked closely with our communications and public engagement department to market our custom report and kind of strategize how we could let everybody know about it and its features and what it can do for everyone that is a utility user with the City of High Point. So with that, we worked on press release, news interviews, creating decals, posters, marketing through our social media, website updates. Even with community events, I talked to a lot of people about our portal and what it could do and what to expect. And I think it was a major success. I think that kind of led to our high adoption rates. With that, I would kind of like to talk a little bit more about our digital communications, which follows on to our next slide. So another focus of ours was digital communications. With that, we wanted to improve access to communications within us and our customers. Another tool that we have is text messaging. Text messaging is a tool that our customers can use to receive outage updates, balance and due date increase, as well as receive information about their account With that, as we can see in the example in the image beside, if customer with this text high point to the number that is shown right there, they can receive this information if their phone number is up to date in our system. That is why Jeremy kind of emphasized maybe highlighting that if people can to update their phone number to receive these alerts and have these tools at their disposal, Another focus of ours was website updates. We wanted to provide easy to understand and navigate, providing clear information on AMI, what it is, how it works, and what it can do, as well as kind of put more information about the customer portal, how to navigate it, put videos on its features, how you can go through our portal. I'll also talk a little bit more about leak alerts, how you can maybe talk more about its functionality and its benefits, as well as understanding usage data and billing changes. So we wanted to kind of provide that up-to-date speed information on our website. Another focus of ours was accessible online forms. That is something I've been working with our IT department to get going. Easier to use forms with multilingual accessibility options. As we know, High Point, ranges a lot of different customers from number one in languages is English, second Spanish, third Urdu. We wanted to be able to better serve our diverse community in this way with these online forms. It does have our pull top off form, our concealed leak adjustment request form, as well as our pool repair adjustment and our feedback survey. So that is housed within online forms that we are currently working on. This is an overall improvement we wanted to do all throughout, kind of improving our communications. As I talked, we did provide materials in our collections area, for example, talking about our customer portal. In this handout, it talks about exploring your customer portal, but at the same time, in the back side, as in Spanish version 2. And with our decals and our collection cereal, where our Spanish speaking staff is at, we've put Spanish ones too. Just kind of wanted to kind of gather that information to everyone that comes within City Hall. So with this, I wanted to highlight that this is something we want to do within customer service, really kind of build that accessibility when it comes to multilingual accessibility. And I think that is something I'm really proud of in the work that we do. Cater to all and kind of make this information accessible to anyone. So with that in overview, I'm very thankful that I got to work. in the work that I do. I do think it improved transparency, accessibility, and communication within High Point and its residents. I'm very thankful to all the people I've got to work with. And I will say, it was not a sole effort. It was definitely an effort of all the people that I've worked with to kind of get all of these projects going. And I think that's what led to a success, being able to collaborate with many. And with that, I would also like to give a huge shout out to our customer service team for their hard work. And I'm very thankful for the guidance and being able to work with them. And I've learned a lot. So with that, thank you all for your time and attention. Thank you.

Thanks, Celine.

Thank you again, Celine, and thank you all. And any further questions on AMI or any of the work we've done?

Any questions? Not right now.

So what's next for you, Celine?

I do hope to stay here. Yeah.

I'm glad I set you up for that.

We'll hook you up with a local realtor.

That's right. Yeah. Okay. All right. So the next item is 2026-168-2427, a strategic plan update provided by Ms. Meredith Martin.

Good morning. One second. I'm trying to. There we go. All right. So I will present to you all this morning the third quarter of the fiscal year strategic plan update. This update includes any going ons from January to March of 2026. So as always, for our general overall progress, we've increased our overall progress 48%, so we're continuing to move ahead and achieving some of the outcomes with our strategic plan. We've had a few projects move and transition back to on track. Last quarter, they provided us some new deadlines. There was some disruption with a few of them, and so now they're back on track with their new deadlines, so we're illustrating that with this quarter. For overall dashboard visits for our public dashboard, obviously we kicked that public dashboard off in November. So for quarter two, which was November and December, we had about 1,750 visits. We had a lot of media there pushing that dashboard. And so we've seen a little drop. For quarter three, we're around about 1,100 visits. We're still trying to build our Google Analytics to get more specifics there so we can continue to track that. and continue to work with the marketing team to push our dashboard to the community. So to jump into the updates for this quarter, first off with goal one with thriving economy. For key accomplishments, we've had industrial park development. We've had our economic development teams had multiple site visits. And there are two active prospects within distribution and manufacturing. For private sector investments, we've realized expansions within Davis Furniture, James River Equipment. There have been new tenants at Palladium South, as well as the closing of the deal for Showplace West. Workforce development, our economic development team has been working with GTCC, Guilford Works, and various other community partners for site visits, tours, events, presentations, and so those continue to be ongoing with workforce development opportunities. Challenges, kind of a general theme you'll see throughout the presentation. We're realizing very similar challenges from last quarter. So we're continuing to try to match any industries within our industrial parks with our utility capacities. And then development projects continue to be dependent on external factors with funding and timelines, as well as policy updates. Upcoming priorities that you have to look forward to, catalyst area activation. Our economic development team is continuing to support the Carolina core and expanding their presence within the catalyst area as well as looking at new entertainment, hospitality and mixed use projects within that area. For the commercial shared use kitchen, this past quarter we reviewed the bids for an operator for that facility and that should be coming forward in the near future. And then finally, just continued updates to our development ordinances. The most recent update there would have been the Southwest Mill overlay that took place last fall. And so our planning and development department is continuing to work on that area. For goal two, effective communication and engagement, key accomplishments in the third quarter of this fiscal year, we've had four major events. And looking in the details, we've technically had five because we also had the Walk for Peace that should have been added in there. And so those included the Martin Luther King Celebration, Ferndale Career Fair, YWCA Faith Action Event, as well as the Future Forward Expo. So we're well on track for the fiscal year as far as hosting those festival events that are within the initiative of our strategic plan. We've also launched some branding initiatives. You heard about one earlier today with the launching of our merchandise merchandising. Challenges again. Funding constraints for full implementation of the Ocala Festival Park Master Plan were kind of, it touches on upcoming priorities as well as working on an action plan for that with the funding we have available as well as some staffing challenges within our CPE area as we continue to move forward. And the other upcoming priority you also heard about this morning was High Point 101. The first year was a success and so we're in the planning phase and obviously the application phase for the next iteration of that program. For goal three, proactive urban design and planning, key accomplishments, build grant, geotechnical work's underway, and we are coordinating with a consultant for assistance with the right-of-way acquisition process. These sidewalk and bike lanes projects, they're set to begin this year. A bike lane's being proposed on South Main Street as part of the repaving project for NCDOT, and so we're continuing to move forward there. And our plan review efficiencies continue to remain and surpass our goal level set of processing any plan reviews within a day, rather than the five-day goal. Challenges, project partnership coordination with the reviews and approvals with those standards set by NCDOT, as well as the National Environmental Policy Act. And so just continuing to process those timelines with greenways and whatnot and with those approvals required. And continuing to look at transportation improvement projects with the decrease in funding from NCDOT that is available. Upcoming priorities, the bike and pedestrian plan update, that will begin this summer and be completed within the next year. And so that's something you have to look forward to, as well as the updated development ordinance. Our planning and development department has the final draft. We're reviewing that internally. That will then go to the work group for review and then come forward later this year, this calendar year. For our resilient community goal area, key accomplishments here, code enforcement success as we kind of reach our busy season four code enforcement. Staff initiated cases continue to surpass the complaint driven ones, which is a goal of that department. So we're continuing to work there. um, property improvement partnerships. So our community development department has contracted with housing consultants group to administer applications in this area. Um, and so that's, that's an accomplishment for our home buyer assistance and homeowner repair programs. Mental health initiatives, the library mental health or social work team handled over 200 interactions in the past quarter. Those ranged from de-escalation opportunities, employment areas, housing areas, and benefits areas. And so that program continues to succeed at the library. Some challenges, recruiting for our alternate response team, our police department has worked really hard to set up that program, and we've had a few applicants who have not passed our department standards area, and so we continued our recruitment efforts to fill the vacancies on that team. Upcoming priorities, the continued construction of the Center for Active Adults. The exterior of the building is now weatherproofed and construction continues on the inside of the building. As well as development of programs and policies for our five by five affordable housing implementation strategy. And as a reminder, that's a program with a goal of creating 5,000 affordable units within five years. For goal three, effective infrastructure and public utilities, our bridge inspections item was completed for this fiscal year. We are awaiting the final results and those should be received over the next quarter. As far as updates for some road projects, Burton Avenue water and sewer construction is progressing with road widening grading beginning on the west end. Gallimore Dairy Road should be complete this month, so that should be an accomplishment also for next quarter. And then Johnson Street widening utilities are being relocated and construction is underway there. That also leads into a challenge because with that specific project especially, The community is realizing some congestion there, and that will be ongoing with that project. So again, a challenge for this area, environmental reviews with our CMAQ projects, so our sidewalk projects, just working with NCDOT for approval for environmental reviews in those areas. Upcoming priorities, once those reviews of the CMAQ projects are complete, we'll begin construction, hopefully this fall, on some of those sidewalk projects. The West Green Stormwater Project design plans have been approved, and bids were received, and we're hoping that construction begins in this upcoming quarter. And then easement acquisitions for Shady Brook Lift Station, that should take place this fall.

Are these the CMAQ sidewalk projects, are those the ones that were, I don't know about it, announced, talked about a few years ago, these are the same ones that are still waiting, yeah, still waiting final approval, North Main and a few of the others? Are these different sidewalks?

These are sidewalks on Main, Fairfield, I think there's three on East Chester.

Okay, so it's the ones from a couple years ago, yeah, okay.

And then another accomplishment you also heard about today was our AMI project. So that's also a big part of our strategic plan. And then our final goal area, high performing organization. Accomplishments here, we have a new employee onboarding process. HR's worked to make it less human resources driven and work with departments to make that process a little bit more seamless. The compensation and classification findings were received. They were included in the proposed budget. And then finally, the annual audit was presented earlier this quarter, and so that's an accomplishment there. For challenges, in this area, really a lot of internal things are remaining, and they're kind of open-ended as far as being completed. So it's primarily just development opportunities and our human resources department setting those up. It's just logistics of scheduling here and there and then building on that development program based on the budget. which also leads, again, into our upcoming priorities of developing the next fiscal year's development opportunities for employees. And that will, again, be based on the budget that's adopted, as well as the implementation of the compensation and class findings. And so with that, that's the general overall review of where we stand with the strategic plan as we continue to move forward. I'm happy to take any questions you may have.

Thank you, Meredith. Any questions from you?

No.

Very good.

Wonderful. A lot of good progress going on. Thank you. Thanks, Meredith. Appreciate it. Any announcements from you two before we adjourn?

Just the importance of the upcoming Memorial Day weekend. It's a lot of fun and a lot of good things happening, and we owe a debt of gratitude to those that sacrificed.

Totally. All right. Well, the meeting is adjourned.