City Council - Regular Meeting

There we go. Sorry. How's that? Now, batting for the city of Tallery. There it sounds like a baseball stadium. Good morning. Welcome to the Taller City Council strategic planning meeting for Friday, February 6th. Please grab your coffee and your muffin as we get set for our meeting. And with that, on our agenda, as we start with public comment, comments in a special meeting are li limited to items listed on the special meeting agenda. Is there anyone in chambers who wishes to make comments? Correct. Do we have anyone on the phone?

I'll make sure to highlight that. Okay. Mr. Herold's public comment is uh Jason, we notice you're in a coat. Good morning. Yes. All right. Normally, my speaking jacket does mean trouble, but today I have a memorial service. can't do my costume change in time. So, we appreciate that. Yeah, good to have you here, Jason. Um, moving on with number three, strategic planning session. Mr. Mandell.

Yes. Uh, good morning. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Uh, welcome council, staff, and public. Um, this is always an exciting time of the year for me. I look forward to our annual strategic planning session and I continue to look forward to them because I think they're going to improve as we go. You're going to see a a marketed change and how we're approaching strategic planning during this session today. Uh that'll be the session that Thomas is going to be leading. Um I'm going to move pretty quick today because I want to leave as much time as possible for council to share their thoughts and and ideas and certainly ask questions. I want to encourage you to ask questions certainly while I'm presenting each project. Just interrupt me and and ask any questions that you have. We'll try to be mindful of time. Um you know mostly what we do in this session is largely think about the future and what are the projects and initiatives and challenges that we have. Um one of the differences between the last couple years and this year is we're not really looking at the older document that we have. um we we we still want to throw ideas out in terms of things you want us to pursue and we're going to do that under Thomas's session and you'll understand why when once we get to that and how we're doing that. You'll also notice that the project update uh we have a lot of projects that are forward thinking, larger projects, projects that will generate revenue, attract tourists, uh continue to further define our community, uh move that dial forward. Um there's a lot of projects though that we didn't put on that list to talk about and for a variety of reasons. Some of them are smaller, um they're not as forwardlooking. Um, some of them are projects we've talked about recently and so there's not a lot to share. Some of them are projects that we are bringing back in special work sessions into the future. So things like the Elk Bayou Nature Preserve project, that's not on here, but we can answer questions about those if you didn't see it on here and you

have questions, but some of those are going to come back. The Inu Corridor project, our impact fee update, our P bid process. There's a lot of things we're doing. I'm very excited about this the city and our staff and everything we're working on. Uh but we are only so much to go over today. One of the things you'll also notice is we we we have specifically not included some of the projects we have the last few years. We're not talking about we don't have Zumalt Park listed on here. That project is largely done. We're in the operations phase now. The incubator project isn't completely finished because we still have to do the maker space, but that's a smaller component. We'll bring back that to you in the future. Our homeless shelter, big project for us, right? It's not open yet, but it's close. Construction's almost finished. We'll be bringing you at the next meeting uh the revised operator agreement to focus on that. All right. The other thing I want to share with you before I get into the project update. I'm going to walk through the agenda in a second and then I'll get into the projects is I I I'm hoping you will understand that a lot of these projects and things that we're presenting are not things that the community and this city has used to been doing and not things that every city does, right? A lot of cities sort of just operate the city. They just pay the bills. They make sure they maintain level of service and it's sort of status quo and we are not a status quo organization. We still do all that stuff every day but on top of that we do all these other things and so I'm going to give you and show you rough schedules on the projects and how you know what are the steps we're going to take. I just need uh you to understand that we may not hit all of those exact time frames because other things might happen. one, uh, they're very complex and so some of these projects might require us to go in a different direction. Um, our regular workload might get in the way. Uh, there may be changing priorities from council, right? So, please keep that in mind as I show you the schedule and things. So, um, the other things we're going to talk

about today, we're going to have an achieve it presentation that's going to be led by Thomas. I'm really excited about that because that's how we're transforming. One of the things that's important to me is um I I like to have a saying with staff and I I I I mentioned that when Kennedy was when they when the country was trying to put a man on the moon and Kennedy was walking through the space center, he walked up to a young man that was mopping the floor and he said to them, "What is your job here?" And the young man said, "My job is to put a man on the moon." Right? And that illustrates something I'm trying to work hard to get us to, which is complete alignment with understanding what is the goal and what's everyone's job or role in achieving that goal. That's very important. I've only been in an organization one time where we achieved that. And when you do, you can exponentially uh make progress and improvement. Everyone understands their purpose and how important it is to the bigger picture. this this achieve it software which we're going to talk to you about and this redesigning of our strategic plan will hopefully you understand how that moves us in that direction. We also have a presentation today from includus labs. Um, what I'm really excited about with that is we've been talking about how do we further embrace our Hispanic Latino community, about 65% of our population, and incorporate them and all aspects of them into our organization, into our activities, um, into the culture of the community, you know, everything from, you know, our special events to our business incubator, uh, and even beyond when we talk about, you know, working with the Matheni track, for example, and potential annexation in the business park. There's an important component there. We have to continue to build trust and part of that's going to come up out of this second presentation and the work that they're doing to help us nurture that relationship and better understand how do we communicate um with, you know, a

part of our community that really we haven't communicated well with in the past. And then the third piece is our fiscal impact analysis. Our consultant, we're not here to present the final presentation yet. We're just going to update you on reminding you what we're doing and why we're doing it and how much longer. We're not far from being done. We'll have a special meeting on that in the future, but I wanted to touch base on that one. And then, of course, after that, the city council items. Again, ask questions at any time. So, we'll go into the project updates. Now, this first one is the entertainment district, the indoor sports facility. Um, and so, council will recall that we've had a number of meetings and discussions about this potential project. It's very exciting project. You know, we had two studies that were done. The first one said, "Yep, when we compare ourselves to other communities from a demographic economic perspective, we should be able to support an entertainment district." And an entertainment district is um sort of a conglomeration of of exponential and destination retail uses and hospitality uses that come together in a single location that not only serves our community but attracts people to our community. Right? We talked about things like what if we were successful in attracting a Great Wolf Lodge or a Bass Pro Shop or Top Golf and etc. David Busters. And so this is just the schedule of where that's at. We issued the RFQ, which council reviewed back uh in early January. We had our presubmitt meeting this week. It went very well. Um it was not a mandatory meeting, so they didn't have to attend. We had three developers that are big developers, um I would say national level developers who have experience in doing this type of work before. I can't reveal who they are because it's still sort of confidential, but I want to tell you that um they had a lot of great questions. They're doing their research. They have an interest. They see the potential. Um I I'm pretty

sure we're going to get proposals from I think all three. I don't know, but we'll see. Uh they have questions due here the end of this month, next well in two weeks. And then we'll have to respond to those questions at the end of the month. They'll submit their proposals in mid-March. We'll shortlist the firms. We have a committee. If you'll recall, you appointed a committee. We'll interview the firms. Council member Herrell is on that committee. Um, and then we will make a recommendation for selection of developer and then we'll start working on we call a scoping agreement. It's the same thing as a term sheet. We you're familiar with that. We've done that in other projects before that sort of outlines the basic business terms from which then we develop a more detailed development agreement. So, it's trending pretty well. Uh there was a our our consultant um Victus adviserss. They're sort of sitting on the sidelineing right now. If we get really good proposals in because then there's a lot of complexity in these proposals. I'm you'll be surprised. I'm probably going to put them under contract again to help our committee and staff review the proposals and be an independent third eye giving us feedback on those proposals and things for us to consider and then maybe have them help us draft that term sheet. One of the things that came up yesterday I just want to bring to your attention is um there was a discussion about the indoor sports facility and they've seen the study. They understand what these are. These guys, these developers have done entertainment districts that have those kind of uses baked into them. They're a little concerned that the indoor sports facility in this area may not be enough of an attractor to get some of the bigger retailers here. It might not generate enough uh bodies coming through it. And so I brought up to them in our discussion the regional the potential of a regional sports plex. So you'd have an indoor facility and you might have an outdoor facility. And if you can attract tournaments to both basically you're doubling the amount of people. They were very interested in

that. Not that the regional sports would have to be out at that same 300 acres. It could be. You know, I tend to personally think it's better for us to put that on the west side, but the fact that they could be operated by operators together to attract tournaments and bring people to the entertainment district really got them excited. So, I'm just letting you know that's something I'm starting to think more about as well. And we'll probably have to advance that project a little sooner and maybe do a a feasibility market study like we did for the indoor facility for the outdoor regional sports. That's something that's on my mind right now as of this week. Anyways, once we get a a scoping agreement, which you would review and if you approve it, then we'd work into what'll be a multi-phase development agreement, right? You're not going to develop 300 acres at one time. It'll be in time over time in chunks. And you know, it'll that development agreement will explain, you know, here's what the developer does, here's what the city does, here's milestones, you know, how long it's going to take to do environmental review and get entitlements and submit site plans and building plans and all those things. It'll detail all that information. you've seen them before. Um, the other thing we'd have to do is if you know, one of the things the developers are going to want is, okay, if we come, we need to know the city's going to build this indoor sports facility and this regional sports perhaps and and drive these people to our facility because that's going to help them get the big box retailers. So then we'd have to start the process of um getting a consultant on board or a firm on board to be an operator to run e and the indoor facility and or the regional sports plex or both. So, we'll have to develop an RFP and issue that and we'll go over, you know, there'll be there'll be a lot of check-in points with council. You know, how are we going to fund it and how long is it going to take and all of those things. Just so you understand, you know, this is a multi-phase project. It's probably a five to 10year time frame to fully materialize. It doesn't mean it'll start in five years. It's just when you start

a certain phase, they have to absorb it over time. So, it's probably a five or 10 year project in total for it to kind of get completed. Okay. All right. Our business park inland port project. So, council will remember back on November 18th, we had a pretty detailed presentation. We had a lot of information. We had several studies that were sort of tied to that effort and council gave staff its consensus to go continue to further explore the idea of the business park uh in inland port and the possibility of annexation of the Matheni track. So that's still something we're working on. One of the things that I want to remind council is in order for this to work effectively and efficiently, there's a lot of things that I have to do with staff that are that are not involving council members. I have to be able to work. For example, a lot of these corporation CEOs, they want to talk to the CEO of the city, right? That's the that's the communication pattern. It's kind of like for example when you give coun when you give staff policy direction. Let's say you gave it to the city attorney and say we're going to enter litigation, right? You don't sit down with the city attorney and start negotiating or figuring out what is the legal strategy. That's the attorney's job. And then they check back in with you when it's time to talk about what direction do you want to go on a certain point. It's the same thing for me in some of these projects. So there's a lot of things that I'm going to do that I may not involve you in. I will involve you in of course any policy decisions and any public meetings and I'll make you aware of those and some of these are going to start happening. So, you know, in this case, we have two council members that were appointed by council to work with me and through me on this project, right? So, here's what I see as the next potential steps. Um, establishing a working group and that working group would be a group of um a number of interested parties, right? So, obviously some folks from the

Matheni track, right? Uh, we might have somebody from the chamber. You know, obviously we'll have some city staff that have the technical knowledge of the issues that we're going to have to work through. I don't think I'll be on the working group, but I might, for example, ask our assistant city manager to sort of be my representative on that working group. And I haven't thought through all the variables of how many staff, how many people and all that, but that'll come back to you as an agenda item in the future. And the reason for that is we want that working group from the very beginning to be working with us through all of these issues. Like we're going to one of the first things they're going to be working on is a after we understand the the expectations, the goals, the ground rules. Um and just so you know, I've done this kind of thing before. Um I'm not predetermining it, but a lot of times when you involve groups, you're going to be asking them, "What do you want?" But you you can't you can't ask that question in a vacuum. You can't say, "What do you want?" And people say, "I don't know. I I want my kids to I want somebody to pay for my kids to go to college." Well, we're not here to talk about that, right? We're here to talk about this project. Um and so there's a real importance of balancing the reality of what the economics say and what we're here to accomplish and what their their desires are. And so we'll have we'll eventually want to hire in a in a consultant to help us with that process, a third-party intermediary that sort of sits between the city and the working group and the communities and others to kind of help facilitate that process and and because we do want to hear everything that they want, but then we want to go through a process of sorting through it and say these are the things we can address and the things we can't address. Here's what's real and realistic and here's what's not realistic. Okay? Uh and then you know after we worked through those things and were able to get develop an RFP RFQ rather for a master developer at some I mean a master plan consultant then we would issue that m that RFQ and we'd hire a design engineering firm to come

on board and start laying out well what does a business park look like right what's the zoning look like how does where is it at um how far is it away from the matheni track what kind of uses need to buffer the matheni track um how does it financially work. Um, you know, how many acres do we need? How does how much does it cost to put roads and water and sewer? Right? That's the basic document. You know, what's the market feasibility of attracting these businesses to the park? What kind of businesses do we want to attract? You know, we're going to leverage some of the work that's coming out. We'll talk about it later, our economic development strategy. We're going to leverage some of the stuff from the economic development strategy and feed that into the master plan for the business park. Right? So, these things kind of work together. Um, and so that's a lot of work. And so, you know, we might issue the RFQ for the master plan consultant in the fall, but it probably takes them a year to develop that master plan. So, just get I'm just giving you a sense of how long these things might take. All right? And then, you know, when I say this is a project that'll be multi-phase and extend 5 to 30 years, this is our longness project. You know, even if we were to do, you know, because remember, we'd have to build a bridge over the city's corporation yard area. Like even if we build all those things, just the infrastructure alone probably takes 5 to 10 years, let alone attracting businesses. So that takes a long time to do those things. But you got to do all that groundwork planning now if you want to get there in 30 years. Okay. Our downtown mixeduse women's clubhouse project. So we did a detailed presentation on this back on November 4th. council again said, "Yep, let's continue to go down this path and and consider it." Um, is sort of a three project project. It's it's not really one thing. It's potentially doing a mixeduse development on the Neielen site and where the city civic affairs building is. Um, tearing down the old library and perhaps tearing down the

historic museum. We'll see. and you know developing a senior housing project there and then rehabilitating the woman's clubhouse. So they all work together but we we kind of there's different projects so we're taking different steps on each one. Um council appointed two council members to work on this one through the city manager as well and we are working on that. Since that time uh we've had a number of uh meetings and phone calls with Union Pacific. Um they have solidified the price for the land. our lobbyist is working with um uh Congress to develop our legislative delegation to develop the bill that'll have to go through for the act of Congress to be able to release the land. Um we work also with our lobbyists on submitting federal earmark requests so that you can see right there what we're asking for for each of the projects. You know, who's to say if we'll get it or not? I don't know. Um so there's a lot of parts and pieces to this. I've met with the historic society board and the board took a vote to continue to work with the city to explore this possibility. It was not a vote to say we're committed and we're going to move downtown. It was a vote to say okay city we understand your perspective. We understand the merits of this idea. We're willing to entertain this. What they're waiting for from us is a term sheet. And then you kind of see that in the timeline there. So right now our our next thing we're working on is continue to try to have conversations with the owners of the Neil site Neielson site to see if they're willing to participate. Where do they sell the site to us? Where do they put the property in the project and they joint venture with a developer so they're generating revenue. There's all kinds of ways of working through that. Um then you know we got to work on getting the acquisition of women's clubhouse site. I'm I put summer and I put it in highlight because it really depends. Um, our lobbyist is working on that pretty hard right now, but we think that's about roughly the

timeline if things continue to trend the way they are. And then we got to negotiate the terms. So, we have to negotiate the terms not just with the historic society, but we've got to get a a nonprofit builder on board and develop a performance. We've been talking to self-help about this. I think they're the best opportunity for us, frankly. They did a great project just up the street in Vicelia very similar. Um we got to work on the performant which will drive all the term sheets, right? So how does the math all work? What does the city have to do? What do they do? And then we'll come back and buff out the term sheets uh with the board and then with council. So I'm thinking that's probably it's probably more like a summer time frame, but I'm hoping spring. So we're working on that. Again, this is a multi-phase project. probably three to five years for it to go through and it it may take some twists and turns as we go. Our regional sports project, we did a pretty detailed presentation on that back on December 2nd. Um council said yes, continue to move forward with this. Uh right now staff is working on putting together a development program and so they're thinking through, you know, based on the on the m the park master plan and they're working with our citizens. They'll probably do some surveys and things like that with our citizens to figure out, okay, what kind of fields, how many fields, what other park amenities do we think we need to have in a regional sports plex. What are the potential locations? I showed you a few. They're working on potentially others. So, they'll come back in the future with a presentation for council to consider. Um some of the next steps once we get to that point is you know we might want to hire a feasibility consultant um who studies like I I mentioned that before in the re in the um entertainment district who studies how do we how do we kind of like the indoor sports facility it's not just building a regional sports flex for our citizens can use it but if we're going to attract tournaments what is the likelihood of that working in a

marketplace what kind of tournaments can we attract what kind of revenue venue can we generate? What kind of, you know, uh, bodies can we bring to to Larry? So, we probably are going to want to do that piece of the study. We'll need to eventually do an RFP for a master plan consultant to actually start laying it out because they'll be able to say, "Okay, based on this conceptual design, here's how much money it's going to cost you on this at this location, right?" Um, and that's when we develop our funding strategy. So, back in spring of 2017, it may come sooner. I I just that's I'm thinking that's what the timing looks like. and we you guys will pick a site. If we have to buy the site, which I think we probably will, we'll have to go through that and then we get into construction drawings and bid. And so, you know, we're looking at construction possibly starting in the summer of 28. It could happen sooner, especially if we get grant funding. You know, we have not we have because we don't have the feasibility study and the conceptual master plan. I don't feel comfortable going to the legislative delegation and asking them for money yet because you got to show them that you've done the groundwork. You know what you're talking about. um and you're willing to put in the lion share of the money. We're not there yet, but after we do that work, I definitely feel like we could go. I'm not saying we'll get an earmark for it, but we'll be ready to ask for one. So, we're about 3 to 5 years on this project, maybe sooner. Corporation yard, a big project. You know, council and the EPU have not had an official vote on this yet, but it's coming. Um it's been a great project. Uh it's worked for us for many years, but you know, from my perspective, it's almost nearly functionally obsolete. Um both in terms of age of structures as well as site limitations. It's about a 15 acre site and we've offgrown it. I don't even know how many decades ago. And there's

excuse me. Yeah, Trisha is nod Trisha is nodding her head over there. Is it up or no? No, no, it's it's just I'm willing to put the for sale sign. Mark tells me well I love our I love our site but it we are definitely constrained.

Yeah I mean there's room around us you know. So one of the things we need to do I think right what we're doing right now is we are internally meeting a staff doing what I call scoping meetings. We're thinking through each department. Okay if we built a new corporation yard that needs to last us another 50 years or so or more. What do we need out there? You know all the technology we have now. you know, how does that change the future of a corporation yard? So, they're doing research about other communities corporation yards and how do they work and how much do they cost and what do they involve? I mean, obviously, we're going to have to shift to electric vehicles. So that changes the dynamics of our corporation yard and the the the mechanic shop and the people that we have doing the work. Um our training um you know do we want to partner with our local school districts so that they don't have to build their own you know storage facilities and yards where they have all their fleet. Do we want to partner with them and and allow that to happen at our facility? I don't know. What does each department need? For example, right now our police department has its um what do we call that? Oh, he's not here.

Yeah, he was uh our investigation yard, I think that's what we call it back behind city hall. Like, it's pretty small, right? And so, we might need more space out there for them for that kind of use. So, that's what we're doing. We're starting that process now. We're scoping it. What are the things we need? And then we're also developing an RFQ for a consultant to get on board and help us with the process. Now, that consultant is going to do a lot of stuff. They would have to look at, okay, should we stay at the existing corporation yard and buy the land around us and expand it and what are the pros and cons of that? What do you is that? What do you call that yard behind city hall? Not the investigation yard. What the impound yard?

Yeah, sorry. That's what we call Okay. Sorry. Thank you. All right. And then so maybe one option is we stay where we're at. I mean, I think there's some real logistics problems with that, but I do think they need to look at that. What would it cost? Could we save money if we stay there versus we buy another site somewhere else or do we use for example the land that we have out by the treatment plant for a corporation yard that we already own the land right and there could be some uh efficiencies and cost savings if we did that right because we're talking about we have to expand our water treatment plant in the administration building that administration building is part of a new building that's part of the corporation yard. Have you had any preliminary discussions uh just to float the idea out there of city schools, high school district, and the city having a joint yard?

Yes, I've had it with because I know I I think they're having discussions independently.

Yes, I had the conversation with with city schools. I haven't had it with the high school district yet. Um but but that's probably coming sooner than later just to see if they have an I know city schools said they were definitely interested but I have not had the conversation with high school district yet. So that's coming. I wanted to get through kind of like giving you more information about it. This is probably coming in the next few weeks for me to have that discussion. So anyways, once we have some of that going and and we bring a consultant on board, they're going to look at all kinds of stuff for us, right? not just where should it go, but how big does it need to be and and what kind of space do we need in it? And we have to and once we have some of that, we're going to be developing our funding strategy and looking at our debt capacity because we'll probably have to borrow to build it. Um, you know, again, site acquisition, they'll do development drawings, ultimately go into construction drawings and bid. So, you know, this is a 3 to four year project, but we're we're at the point where we really need to start moving this ball forward. It's kind of like the fire station we talked about the other night that Chief did a presentation on. I was like, "Yeah, we've owned the land since 2010, but we haven't done anything with it in 15 years." And so, we're we're getting to the same place with the corporation yard. We start we got to start moving that dial.

Sorry, good question on on the site sort of identification process or or whatever you want to call that. I think my recommendation would be, you know, um to take a look at all over the place. Yeah. You know, I mean, east of Mooney. Yeah. You know, west side because you know, I just want to make sure that there's you know, I think a courtyard would be great off of uh you know, off of Mooney somewhere versus the west side. So,

Oh, 100%. Yeah. They'll look they'll look they they'll they'll do the analysis from a few perspectives. They'll look at it in terms of how much land do we think we need and where does that land exist in the city limits and then they'll look at it from a perspective of um not just okay we have enough land and here's what the cost is but drive time like in the perfect world in the perfect world the corporation yard would be right in the middle of the city because it's equidistance from everywhere you go but we don't necessarily I mean my guess is we're probably going to need probably 45 acres so we may not have 45 acres in the middle of the city Right. But I don't I'm just guessing. We'll have to see what they come up with. But yeah, we'll look everywhere.

And it's easier to build if you don't have to go out and buy 45 or 60 acres or whatever if you already own it. Yeah, there's that side of it too. Yeah. So you guys will see that whole analysis. What we will present that analysis to you. You guys will make the decision of where and then it will go into the next series of design of decisions. U Mark. Yes. uh you know we've continually been talking about uh fast food and things like that on the west side with no we've had no success. Do you think if we got if say we put the city yard at Weston Barzley or maybe down at Weston Page

would they look at the possibility maybe that would generate some interest by some of these fast food places?

Yeah, that's a great point. In fact, you'll remember when MIG, our consultant, looked at the corner of Weston Bargley, uh they they kind of looked at a 10acre piece there that the city owns, the Kron property, and they and we looked at could that project, could that site be developed for commercial use? And their answer was yes, but not today. There's not enough demand today to build that out. Nobody's going to invest their money there today because they're not going to make money. There's not enough critical mass. But if we keep developing the housing that we're seeing developing throughout the entire city, which is just as much development on west side as anywhere in the other side, and if the city did things like, you know, built a corporation yard out there, we're talking about another potential project that we might be able to put out. If you put enough critical mass of things now all of a sudden it becomes more viable for commercial development. And I will tell you right now, I will not recommend that we eat up that commercial corner with the corporation yard. If we were to put the corporation yard out there, we should reserve that. In fact, I sent you guys a rendering like that was a 10 acre, I think we should reserve that much land for commercial development. And if we did a corporate yard, it should be behind it. It should be around it, not on that corner. Yep. Okay. Wastewater treatment plant. Um, you know, so we're this is one of those projects where it's not driven because it's functionally obsolete. It's driven by law, right? And so when we hit a certain capacity at our existing plan, we're plant we're required by law to start designing and moving forward with the expansion or the new plant. And that's sort of where we're at. And you know that because we've talked about that before. So you know last year we completed a water sewer storm water master plan which tells us about you know what's what's the capacity need for the next 30 years or so. You know where are we going to have to how many more wells do we need? Where do we got to put lines in? Where's development going to occur? All the costs related to that. Well, directly tied to that is the treatment plan, right? And so, we're currently in the process of working with our same consultant. Um, well, I'm

sorry, we're working with a different consultant on the water and sewer rate study that that goes handinhand with these things as well. And we're working with the same consultant on the wastewater treatment plant facilities report, which should be done hopefully, you know, sometime next month. And once we have that report, then that goes into everything. you know the existing plant, what do we need to fix at the existing plant to make to stretch its useful life? What are the hydraulics? What are the systems that we can we we're exploring different types of treatment plant facilities and then what are those associated costs? So that's going to be coming to the BPU pretty soon. Right now we're estimating that plant at about $120 million based on their preliminary findings. So you know it's expensive, right? But that's a plant that's going to last us for the next 50 years. So um we are going to we are talking to them about the possibility is if you did colllocate the corpyard out there could we have a could we have a savings and efficiency like some of the instead of building an admin building for the treatment plant and then an admin building for the corpyard two different admin buildings could you build one admin building and do functions out the same you know those functions out of one building. So we're looking at things like that uh as cost possible cost-saving measures. So, the process is we're going to report um the uh we're going to give you guys the report. We're going to go to BPU first, then we're going to come to council with it. So, we're going to give you the report and a funding strategy for that project. And that'll probably be this March. So, it's coming right up. It could extend another month, but that's what we're looking at. And then, um then we would issue an RFQ for the consultant to go out and design the plant. Now, that plant has to be where it is. We're not going to be looking at other property. We're we're putting the treatment plant whether it's an expansion of the existing or a new plan, it's going right in the same place where all the other infrastructure is at right at right at the treatment plan itself. Uh so we don't have to go we don't have to do a sight in sight search.

The our a mitigation policy. Yeah. When we when we use land for that purpose, we're using the land that's farthest away and working in as to make sure we leave land available for this type of expansion. Yeah. So, when we brought you the farm mitigation policy, farmline mitigation, we had already taken consideration the footprint expansion of the treatment plan. It does not have to go into that area at all. The treatment plan expansion, if you I wish I had an aerial, but if you look at where our treatment plant is, we have plenty of room adjacent to it. literally adjacent to it within walking distance to put the new expansion expanded plant. It won't impact farmland mitigation.

Okay, good. He under the circumstances, no matter how much land we've got set aside, I would think we need to start at the back. Yeah. And move in as opposed to the other way around. That way we don't box ourselves in.

Yeah, we will give you that report and we'll show you that in a coming month or so whenever we after we present it to BPU. Okay. Just to answer Dennis's question, there is land uh just west of the existing treatment plant that we kept out of the farmland mitigation. So that's where the proposed expansion, that's kind of where they show the layout. So we left that property kind of in that block with the treatment plant out of the farmland mitigation. So everything in farmland mitigation is what's south of Paige that surrounds the percolation ponds and that's the 500 and something acres. And this project is a quicker project, three to four years, because it's something we have to do by law. So, we're working on it. You're going to start seeing more about it. Our economic development strategy, uh, we're excited about this document. Um, to my knowledge, it's our first real economic development strategy in the city. Um, there's a lot of work that they're doing in different areas. They've been meeting with people during surveying, interviewing. I think they've met with some of you, if not all of you. Now, that's where they're at. They're currently still on the same timeline. you know, we're sort of right in here right now. Um, they are, but they do all this like they they've done components of it. Like down here, we did the industry cluster analysis. We just reviewed that, a little bit of that with them this week. And the retailer metrics, we reviewed some of that with them this week. That gets rolled into the economic development strategy. So, they're still targeting April. It could it could extend a little bit beyond that, but probably not too far along that one. More for that more of that one to come. And our sales tax measure, this is the last one I have. So, you know, I don't have a lot on here to talk about it today, but I wanted to share with you what you can expect coming to you in the future. So, we had a a meeting on December 2nd where you guys reaffirmed your intention to move forward with a sales tax measure with an emphasis on public safety, streets, and homeless mitigation. That doesn't mean exclusively those things, but that was clearly the focus uh from the survey results and council's preliminary or

initial recommendations or suggestions. Um, we have a there will be a number of public meetings on it. We'll have all kinds offormational mailers that go out and social media posts. There's an there'll be an entire information campaign that helps the citizens understand what it is, which will all be driven by council's direction. Um, you know, sharing about our finances and where we're at. We will have draft ballot language for you in May for your consideration and then we need to adopt it by June. We'll develop anformational web page so people can go right to it and you can send your constituents if any questions they have. You'll just send them to the web page. We'll keep putting FAQs and all kinds of information up there. Um we'll have to transmit it to the county by July. Uh and then the ballots will be mailed out in October and then the election will be in November. And we'll keep updating you as we go. There's a time period where we can't we can't share more information. We have to be silent during a certain time period. So there's a lot that we'll get into with you guys. Um, but one of the things I I'm excited about, I've never said this in before in my life. I'm not usually excited about roads and pavement management, but I am now. Um, I mean, I'm excited on one hand, I'm nervous on the other. I'm excited because we're going to have an updated report which has not been updated in a long time and it needs to be updated about all our roads and what are their conditions and which ones what are their costs, what's the priority and which ones could be sort of salvaged and saved by, you know, doing some minor repair and which ones have to be reconstructed. I'm nervous a little because I think we're going to have a lot of reconstruction and that's very expensive. But I'm excited because the only way you solve problems is by looking them straight in the eye and dealing with them. And you can't ignore them. And this is time for us to not ignore these this problem. It's time for us to get our arms around it. So that plan's going to be done, you know, late spring, early summer. You guys are going to see it. That'll play a big role in explaining to the citizens, this is what we need to do now and why, right? So anyways, that's coming. All right, that covers everything I wanted to talk

about. Do you have any questions about any of that before we move on? Um on the last uh the sales tax measure part, what um what is what is the process you envision right now for the uh drafting of the uh ballot language? How do you see that happening? Is it is it uh staff taking a crack at it? The council participating? Yes. Uh yeah. So could real quick because for me that's going to be a that's going to be a very key thing for my constituents, you know, and it'll frankly be something that I look into whether I support or don't support the sales tax. Sure.

And so I just want to make sure that um you know there is a process for us to add or contemplate other type of you know uh funding what it's for explicitly. I don't want to be like measure I where you know people read it certain ways and certain things get left out for measure I funding. So I just want to make sure that we're part of that.

Yeah. I think the best way to do that because of the legal requirements on what the ballot language like how that directly impacts what uh it can be used for ultimately is um we'll take a shot at the language and then what we're really looking for is council input on not rewarding it but you know what do you want to see right? So, um, for example, if you just want to make sure, hey, we can use this funding for recreation or whatever, we'll craft the language so that it's broad enough to cover those things. One of the big things is you don't want to get too specific because then you turn it into a special tax and which has a much higher threshold. And so, um, council can do certain things, you know, um, maybe a resolution of intent of how if if the language, the specific language you're looking for isn't in the actual, um, ballot text, the council can approve certain, uh, you know, resolution that says, "Hey, this is our intent. This these are the things that we want to fund um to kind of support that." And so that would probably be the best way to do that.

Yeah. Because I mean, I just want to make sure u and I think I've talked to Mark about this in the past. uh you know for me priorities would be uh parks, youth and economic development. So how do we incorporate that along with uh public safety, streets and homeless mitigation. So um and I so that's why I want to figure out I just don't want to miss a deadline or a conversation on how for me um you know in my in my constituents talking to folks having money for parks, youth, and economic development is is key for me whether I support or not this tax measure.

Yeah. Ultimately, council will be the one that votes on it. So, we will draft the language working with our legal counsel. We also have sort of special consultants that do this. This is what they do for a living. And so, we'll work with them on all of this. We'll bring you the draft language. You guys will say change this or change that, add this or add that. Whether or not you want to do a a resolution of intent will be up to you. Um I personally like that idea, but it's going to be your decision if you want to do it. So, you guys will have plenty of time. Um, we anticipate it coming in May. I'll work with our consultants to see if we can get it sooner. I don't know if we can. Uh, but we're not going to ask you in one meeting to approve the language we put in front of you. Okay. Any other questions before we move on? Yes. Excuse me. Uh, sorry about that. The one on the clubhouse in the downtown. Um, when you talked about uh the schedule and the request for support from our legislators for for funding, um, I I guess the one question I had is I understand Congress has voted on the budget. So, the government except for the whole thing with ICE, um, everything is done through October 1st. So, there's no more going back. So, in terms of a timeline, if we were to be successful with, let's say, the million dollars for uh the the clubhouse acquisition and whatever, that wouldn't even be until after October 1st, right? So, at and the earliest is maybe at the end of the year.

Yes. In terms of funding because at this point, it's all set. Correct.

Yeah. Yeah. For example, this year the earmark that we received is the just under $600,000 earmark earmark for the police fire dispatch consolidation. This would be for the next year. Yeah. Any other questions? Okay. Then I'm going to we're going to pull down my presentation and I'm going to I'm going to hand it over to Thomas in one second. I'm just going to talk a little bit more about achieve it for one second. Um you know, this is a change for this organization to move in this direction and it's one that I'm very excited about. Um because again it's it's how do you move the dial efficiently where everyone understand what you're doing and why you're doing it. Everything from you know a rank and file staff member to a director to council to our citizens to consultants to people who look at our community. It's a great tool for us being able to show what we're doing and why we're doing it and how we're going to get there. And it's I think we're ripe for it for being able to do this. Now I've asked Thomas to lead it. Uh, one, I think Thomas has a set of fresh eyes coming into our organization new. I think Thomas is also very uh, strategic and um, he has a pretty vast knowledge of all the fields that are part of municipal governance. And so I think he's an ideal person to lead the effort in terms of developing the strategic plan. I will at some point be looking to assign to a staff member the responsibility for overseeing its implementation. And what I mean by that is getting in the weeds and making sure because there's recordkeeping and tracking that's involved in this and and there's account there's a little bit of accountability. That's not the primary focus, but somebody has to be responsible. So I just want you to be aware that's something I haven't figured out yet, but I'm working on. And with that, I'll turn it over to Thomas. Thank you, Mark. Um,

so I'm going to give kind of a an overview of the Achieve It product. Um, and then we have um Joe Krauss, senior vice president from Achieve It on the line who will provide a little more details on um what it actually looks like. Um, and the goal for today is to give you an overview of what Achieve It does and how we intend on using it. Um Joe will be on site later this month for work sessions where we'll really get into the weeds on building out our data in the system. Um one of the key things that achieve it is going to do is provide residents information on the initiatives and activities we have underway. show the administration's roadmap for the community on all of these things that we're doing besides day-to-day operations that are teeing us up for the future. Um, and it's also a way to highlight for the community and employees the progress that we've made on things and the progress that's underway on other things. Um, as Mark mentioned, the the current strategic planning process leaned more towards a lot of projects and tasks that needed to be done. It represented lowhanging fruit and some catching up on things, you know, like pavement management and others where we knew we were behind. um achieve it really helps us look at the broader strategic the themes of all of the initiatives, activities, and tasks we have going on to see how they're related and to help us prioritize them. So themes like infrastructure and transportation or public safety and emergency preparedness

and seeing where all the things we're doing fit within those themes. Um, and the tool will help us determine if something is a true priority, what other initiatives and activities it's related to, and help us identify when it should occur in relation to all the other things um we have going on. And and this was really important to me when we were um looking at the product because um I wanted something where we could really identify and remind ourselves that you can't have 10 number one priorities and help us understand what are those things we're working on because if you start 10 things at once, you're never going to finish anything. and how do we track everything that's underway and what's in the hopper that we're going to pick up next to work on. This is really going to help us get there. Um, having done something like this before, I also wanted to make sure not only the tool was informational for residents and for council and BPU and so on, but also useful for staff in knowing what our roadmap looks like from quarter to quarter and for departments heads, managers, and supervisors to be able to communicate to their teams how their day-to-day work is relevant to these broader goals. Um, and most importantly, this electronic tool that you see, um, that it's something that's easy to use. Um, and it's something I really liked with, um, achieve it because I didn't want to be in a situation where the process of tracking and reporting and and logging what we're working on took too much time. And it does not with this product. It's very straightforward. So that I think it's really going to help us um visualize things in a cool way. Um

and it's also something that staff see being able to expand into the future for reporting on other things that you have right now such as the capital projects dashboard or the quarterly economic development update. some of these things so that when we're presenting information, we can start to get it in a way so that things are presented in very similar visual manners um across the different operational areas. Um so that's kind of my introduction to what achieve it will do for us and Melissa if you want to grab Joe for us to hop on next. Mark, anything else to add? Uh, no, maybe in the end I'll add some comments.

Morning, Joe. Good morning.

And so with that, would you like me to take it from there? Thank you for that great introduction. Yep, you're good to go.

I appreciate that. Thank you. And good morning everyone. My name is Joe Krauss reporting live from the Arctic Tundra that is New Jersey. So, I wish I was out there with you all, but I will be out there on February 25th, as was mentioned earlier. Um, so the goal of my presentation today is to fill in uh all the potential questions or gaps that may come along with the introduction that just was uh uh eloquently laid out. Um, my job here is to explain how this is going to work for you all and showcase some of the great work uh the team has done already in creating the organization strategic plan. Uh, my background is I've been with achieve it since the beginning. uh co-founder of the company been helping hundreds of organizations build their strategic plans and then use our software to track monitor and uh execute said plans. This is the reason why the company was founded which is basically most organizations struggle um especially in the public sector is they'll create a plan and most times they find that less than 10% of what was set forth in the plan actually gets done. It doesn't mean that operational items aren't being completed or work is at a standstill. This is more of the strategic items, the things that will be a step edit into the future. And so, as an organization, we focus on solving this problem, making sure that if we have a plan that has really great ideas and goals that we have a way to track them, hold people accountable, and most importantly, accomplish those goals so that everybody in the organization and the in the community benefit because when a strategic plan is executed, good things happen for everybody associated with it. And as an organization, we help hundreds of uh groups do this very thing. Um so I'm going to showcase in just a moment an example of a generic strategic plan in our software. I'll show you one of our clients that has a public facing website how they're using the platform and they've been using it for the better part of two and a half three years to explain to the public what they're doing and then I will end on uh in showcasing the work at least the preliminary work uh that we've been doing to get your feedback and also just to give you a

primer. Uh the goal today is just to take general highle feedback knowing that we're going to build the plan when I'm with everybody on February 25th and at that point we'll have something more robust to showcase. But we already have quite a bit that's been built by the team. If at any point there are any questions, please feel free to stop me and I'm happy to to pause and go from there. So achieve it is a cloud-based application. Everybody logs in with single sign on so safe and secure and they're able to use our platform to track, monitor and execute plans. So first part of that process though is building a good plan. So what you're looking at right now is an example of a city strategic plan. So being fairly generic um which gives you a sense of how our system works where you basically take your biggest and and top priorities and then you are then to able to cascade down to the more um specific maybe project based items to show the connection that was mentioned earlier. And through that connection, accountability takes shape. And understanding where maybe barriers are in place to remove them is really what this view right here is meant to do. It is called our tree view. And you'll see we in this example, we have priorities, goals, objectives, etc. You'll see what we're using for you in just a minute. But just to give you a general sense, it allows us to break our priorities down into their individual pieces. Go on down into the more specific items. If I were to click on any of these, they would have the person responsible, the budgets, the start dates, the due dates, all the things that make plans go. Every single one of these items has it. But what you're seeing here is the connection between what we're working on and the outcomes we look to drive. In the Tari strategic plan, there will be measures that are being tracked within the plan, which we are in the process of creating, and we will do that even more so on February 25th. But the goal here is not only just to track activity as it relates to projects, which you already have a robust way of doing. It's tying those projects whenever possible to overall measures that are important to the organization and to the priorities

that we're tracking. Um so the goal here is that this view gives you that understanding and that connection. And this will be something you'll see more robust robustly built out as we um have that workshop on the 25th. To fast forward to what the end state would look like. So think of this as a generic beginning beginner state. This is what the system would look like um at completion, which is something that we can work very quickly towards. So this is city of Pittsburgh, your neighbors to the north. Um so not the other one. Um and so ultimately they've been using our system for a number of years. And what they're able to do is create a website based on whatever they think is best. So in this case, they do have um the the pictures of their council and their mayor and they have a a nice address here. But what they're able to do in their case is break down the various goals they're working on. And this is a direct live feed from our software. So if somebody were in theory to make an update to this while we're chatting right now, you would see this um donut chart move and you would see the percentages complete change over here. And so this is generally the overall goals for the city. But if I were to scroll down, they have it broken down by their various uh priorities. And this uh relates very directly to what I'm about to show you in your plan. So they broke it down. So this is this is basically everything. This is broken down by the the areas they care about the most. So in this case, improvement. So improvement has its own breakdown of reds, yellows, greens. So this gives you a sense of status. This gives you a sense in the middle how many of our projects or items that we're working on are past their due date and are not complete. And then if there is any late updates that need to be made, it'll showcase them here as well. But as the organization uses this, they can use this in their council meetings. They can use this with the public. This is a live look, a real-time understanding of how everything is performing within the city. So, we're going to be striving to get get to getting you something similar. And the beauty of it is that you really can really take the shape of whatever you want it to be. So, this is the the design and format that this

group wanted. Um, but ultimately, it comes down to however you want to lay this out. We have unlimited flexibility, but the process here is to give people a real-time look into the performance of the various things we set out to do. gives you a chance to uh uh showcase accomplishments because sometimes those get lost if uh a lot of great work is happening and there's no way to showcase it. This will do a great job of showing that. And in the in the situations where there is something that's yellow or red, it's an opportunity to have discussions around how do we remove those barriers. And the hope is that if that's happening on a regular and consistent basis, which the team has committed to making monthly updates, um you'll spot spot small problems before they become big problems and use data to make decisions going forward. So this is a good example of somebody using it currently within the state of California. City of Torrance also is a client that has a really robust uh website, but this one was a little bit more applicable to the way you have your plan created. So, I'll pause there. Any questions so far on this kind of an example from another city before I jump directly into showcasing what your plan looks like and getting your feedback on what you see in there.

Sure. Mor Council, I had a question. Hi, Joe. Um, hi.

I think this is looks fantastic. uh just from what I initially am looking at but um I had a a couple of questions around the specifics. So when you went back to your original presentation they had the drop- down chart about keeping track and how this whatever particular priority objective interacts with others. Um, one of the things that that we have in our council here is uh the opportunity for council members to bring things forward for consideration, projects or policies or whatever. And so we do have an we have a current tracker that that tracks our council agenda items or things that council members bring forward. So I'm I'm looking at maybe that there's a possibility yes something like that where you create a particular page that allows for that tracking to be you know um done in a in as part of this project to allow um if a council member uh gets support for a particular project or a priority or a program that that's uh kind of tracked as well. So, I think uh maybe uh Thomas will talk a little bit more specific when you guys meet about that. But I think what what I'm also curious is um there's a lot of this looks like there's a lot of input that needs to go into this to make sure that it's working. Um can you talk a little bit about how Pittsburgh do they have dedicated staff or uh because I can you know the other pages showed all the different objectives and priorities. I mean that's pretty impressive but someone's got to input all that stuff. So, how how does it work for Pittsburgh? Um, because I can see maybe also creating a page for council uh for council members that would keep track of constituent requests, right? If someone calls us and they want a stop sign or they want something restriped, you know, how do we I can see this being sort of

an opportunity for us to publicly put that out there, but I'm just on the back end is it it would take a lot of staff time to input. So, how does Pittsburgh do that?

I'm happy to speak to it. Yeah, speaking to Pittsburgh and all the other clients I work with, we try to make the input process as simple as possible as was alluded to earlier. To give you an exact example in your plan specifically, so we're looking at the the draft of the work we've done so far for your strategic plan. And the words in the hierarchy that were determined to be used um for the conversation we include strategic priority at the top then goal then performance measure. We have projects we have initiatives and then in some cases if the projects or initiatives are quite large milestones will be needed because if there's a multi-year project the goal would be to break it down into smaller milestones. So the good news is every time I put something in the system or you as well, let's say it's a project, every single item is assigned to a single individual within the city who is closest to the work. Let's say they have five things they're dedicated to working on in the given year. On a monthly basis, an email from Achieve it, our system comes out directly to that person. It has all the items they're responsible for, if it's one or if it's 10. they click on a a link and they're able to put in a status and commentary without logging in. So from a an upkeep perspective, there really is a need for full-time guidance. To Mark's point earlier, there is the need for somebody to make sure at a high level things are going well and people are making their updates, but the end user is simply clicking a link in an email, providing their status updates. It takes a few minutes. So that's how we're able to get large groupings of data into the platform is because we make it very easy for the end user to input. So that's one point I know you wanted to wanted me to address. So every single item is assigned to an individual and they're able to make their updates via email.

Joe, just a followup to that. One of the concerns I think we would have if we uh uh have a situation to where different council members can use this site to obtain u constituent concerns and informations is that we get dangerously close to a Brown Act violation. Uh Mario, you might address that under the circumstances if uh uh we're communicating in that regard.

Gotcha. So ultimately I know that that the main use case currently is the strategic plan. So, this is a forward-looking road map for the next year. So, that's definitely helpful. The list of projects that were mentioned or even the new ones that come up, a lot of those are going to be incorporated into the strategic plan. We want to make sure that a lot of the work that's already happening finds a home in here. Um, so the goal is to have that connection. As far as constituent concerns, the system has the ability to track any forward-looking road map you can think of. um to say that we can do that right now. I would have to learn more about what you're looking to do because we don't want to run a foul of any any um issues, but ultimately right now it's the strategic plan and once this gets launched, we can speak to constituent plans if uh if it's appropriate that works.

Yeah, Joe. So, just to be clear that I was not uh asking for council members to be part of the system. I know Mr. Maderos always likes to be a step or two ahead of me, but I um what I was asking for is if I get a call from a constituent that says, "Hey, Councilman, uh someone ran over our stop sign and it hasn't been replaced." I call a city staff person, whoever the city manager is signs. Hey, I have a problem on Barsley and West. They input it into the system and then they do whatever they whatever the city does to replace it. So then when a constituent goes on to our website and looks under council constituent, you know, request or whatever the title would be, they'll say, "Hey, yeah, you know what? That that stop sign that was reported has been taken care of cuz here it is on the on the website." So, so I'm not talking about us having an account and going in there ourselves to input and this and that. It's like when we get a call or we report something that it gets uploaded because, you know, I I I I like how the council in Pittsburgh has their page. It'd be great to see the great things that our city staff and that our council members do to improve a community. So, kind of like a keep track of it when it's done and share it with the public that this issue was taken care of. So, that's that's kind of what I was looking at. I wasn't looking at, hey, give Councilman Maderos's uh an account and let him go crazy at night inputting things. So, that that's not what I was looking for.

Fair enough. Thank you for that clarification. And uh this is an example of another client and this happens to be in Georgia, so as far away as possible uh on the other coast, but um they track it, they use the system in a very similar way to what you're referencing, which is they're getting down to brass tax, which is we have to get the stop sign fixed. We have to get this many miles of roads completed. They have that in our platform. So, whatever um level we wish to fly in the platform, we can make it very simple to be able to broadcast the accomplishments uh which I know is a huge thing to let the your constituents know that you're working hard and diligent and this gives them a 247 access to the latest and greatest data at whatever we end up wanting to track. So, the beauty of this is that as we start to roll this out, we'll get everyone's input on what the dashboards need to look like, and then as long as we're tracking it in the platform, it can show up on a beautiful website uh for you to be able to um send to somebody if they're asking for an update, they'll be able to get it on their own time.

Joe, and and uh I think Mr. Sagala should be aware of this. I I don't say these things directed to him. I say them because at times we take steps that result in un unintended consequences that create issues that nobody uh anticipated and the further we get ahead of that the better off we are under the circumstances. So uh uh I would say that whether it's Mr. Harold, whether it's Mr. Ishwood or whether it's council member uh sir it's it's it's just some people are in a situation where that comes up more often than others. So uh that's why I brought that up.

Yep. Thank you very much for the clarification and as we spend the I know we have limited time. So what I wanted to do is now with all that background information and that you all understand the vision of this very very uh uh uh very well. So what we're going to do is go through some of the great work the team has done so far because as I mentioned um picking a strategic priority and to the point made earlier um we don't want to have 15 strategic priorities 50 we have to break it down into uh the most important aspects of what we should focus on. So for today we're going to uh go through strategic priorities and goals just for situational awareness and highle um feedback because then when I come out at the end of February we're going to fill in our measures our projects our milestones. So we basically have the first two levels um built out in draft mode for your feedback and then we'll take that feedback incorporate it as best we can and then build out the rest of it at the end of February. So right now across the top we have our strategic priorities of economic development and fiscal sustainability, infrastructure and transportation, public safety and emergency preparedness, housing and community development, quality of life and community engagement, and last but not least, organizational excellence and innovation. So, we're basically saying to everybody who's looking at this and anybody who's uh suggesting projects is that ideally whatever we choose to work on would align to one if not more of a strategic priority in our plan. And if the answer is I can't make that connection, it's a great way to be able to ask the overall question, well, why are we working on it? What's the case to to make? Um, so this is a great way to uh to focus and prioritize everybody to say, here's what's what's most important. Any questions on the overall strategic priorities? What's there? The way it's worded and anything that would be helpful while we have this time together.

So, council, I'll just give you one quick example. Joe, if you can scroll back towards the other side. Here we Yeah. So, I like for example, council member Sagala when we were in our last presentation talked about for him the importance of recre supporting recreation, youth activities, and economic development. Well, it's pretty clear that on the left side we have economic development and fiscal sustainability. But you you and it's not as clear about where would youth activities and recreation fit in. Well, it could fit in a number of places to Joe's point. For example, you could say, I want us to expand these five parks and build out phase 2 parks. That could be infrastructure and transportation perhaps. Or you could say, I want I just want to support youth activities and parks in general. That might be under quality of life and community engagement. So that's the work we have to do is start figuring out where do those things plug as we go forward. Exactly right. And the thing is that most items that cities work on in my experience will impact multiple areas, but to Mark's point, everybody else is it's question of where does it making the most impact and that's what we'll end up slotting it in into the strategic plan. So that was a great point and the goal here is that we are going to do the hard work of making sure it's in the right place and has the right focus.

We're not asking for your decision today about the strategic priorities, but we wanted to give you a feel for that. Now, we're going to show you some goals. And what we'll do in the weekly report next Friday, not this Friday, is that we'll have this all printed out for you and we'll send it to you. So, you'll have more time. You have another week or two to think through this and mark it up and send us your ideas and then you'll have another chance after that when we bring you back, you know, the whole document as we see fit, but um just we wanted to you started absorbing it. So, uh Joe, if you want to start walking through some of the goals so they can see how they roll up into the priorities.

Absolutely. So for economic development and fiscal sustainability uh we have promote local business growth and attract new investment, diversify the economic base to reduce reliance on a single industry and enhance downtown just as a an example. So these are three things we're saying that if we have a good year, if we've done our work, we should see dramatic strides in each of these areas. And the part that we're not going to focus on today, but critically important and the team has dedicated is below this will be performance measures, which is the number one trend in any state, county, or even at the federal level that I'm working with is how do we actually know we have uh we're promoting local business more effectively. We're going to have measurements below it to be able to say, "Yep, not only are have we succeeded, here are three ways I can prove it with a dollar, percentage, or number uh going in the right direction." So, that's a a preview of what's to come. But for now, these are the goals under economic development and fiscal sustainability, infrastructure, maintain and upgrade roads, improve transportation options, invest in smart city technologies, and proactively comply with sustainability mandates. So, we had a really small working group that helped make these goals. Then, we expanded it to the entire executive leadership, and they were able to then add and word smith and change. So this is like almost like a second draft uh that includes all the all the subject matter experts within the um the executive team. So that's infrastructure and transportation's goals, public safety, strengthen emergency services, enhance disaster preparedness and resilience, foster community partnerships for crime prevention and safety education. That's under public safety and emergency preparedness, housing and community development. Expand affordable housing options. Support mixed use transit oriented

development and smart growth. Address homelessness through coordinated programs and partnerships. Quality of life. Invest in parks, recreation, arts, and cultural programs. Foster inclusive community engagement and transparent governance. Maintain and enhance the level of service provided to the community. Invest in parks, recreation, arts, and that was the one we had up earlier. So, I'll make that take that out. And last but not least, organizational excellence and innovation. Modernize city operations through technology and datadriven decision-m. Develop workforce training, professional development, and individual goal setting. succession planning, improve customer service, improve employee well-being, and ensure long-term financial stability through responsible budgeting and revenue generation. So, this is our starting point, which as mentioned, you'll have a copy of this for your review and to incorporate your feedback. The next step is to create measurements for each of these goals to make sure we can point to it to say yes, we were successful or no, we fell short. And then aligning our initiatives and projects, the work we do to drive those measures will be the next step. And we'll have something more final by the end of the month. I know I'm right up against time, so I'll take any questions that may have come up as I went through those quickly and knowing that you will get a copy um for your review. I think just speaking as an overview. Um Joe, thank you for the explanation, the breakout and the demonstration um of your product, but to our city manager and staff, uh this is great to see because to me that's strategic planning. Um the element of, you know, sometimes it's core commitments, strategic

priorities, same thing. the goals that go with the objectives and then the initiatives of action plans that come from that and then of course measurable deliverables. I think one of the things Joe if I'm correct too is a lot of times the measurable deliverables aren't just uh quantitative they're qualitative as well. And I think breaking that down because your goal could be perhaps an influence or a quality of life or some other element. Maybe it's a a business community found by some other dynamics other than dollars or other elements with that. But uh for me and working from my experience in organizations and leading teams and staff and strategic priority initiatives, um this is the drill that you go through to make sure individual teams know their role, individual groups, staff, and then it gets into some micro focus of like 60, 90, 180 day plan. So, um, love seeing it and I think a lot of times this is great that we're going to get this up on a dashboard, but two is, uh, a chance to see this as it goes through fruition, Mark, as you had said. Um, a lot of times I don't think necessarily a cautious I like seeing it for it's my role to debate it or to go through it, but to see what you're leading our team through on the initiatives that the city council puts forward and how our team is addressing this and working through it, I this is awesome. This is great. Yeah, I I'd like to um voice a agreement in that this is the first time I've felt um as a lifetime educator have felt that things have synced for me. Uh this is a policy in the way that we work in schools. I just that one caution that Patrick also mentioned is the qualitative versus quantitative data because many times the qualitative data

really impacts those performance measures as well as the um the priority the way that it's it's carried out. So that would be one thing I want to be sure we don't take the heart out of the of the process as well because that's that's something that did happen a bit in education. So, uh, I wholeheartedly think this is the way to go in terms of we won't get sidestepped. We won't go off on tangents. Well, everything will go back to the strategic plan. Does it match this? Does it not match this? If it doesn't match, it's not part of the discussion. And that will streamline our council meetings and everything that we do. So, amen.

Council, if I could just share a couple other comments. Um we we feel the same way as staff and we felt you know this is something we've talked about before but we weren't we've been working so hard and so fast to sort of catch up on some things our big five projects and bringing more technology in the organization and we're finally at the point where we feel as a management team yes we're ready to implement something like this so I'm really excited about that one two um you know one of the things that was shared here today was a concern about is it become more busy work and a lot of work for staff that as Thomas mentioned early on that was one of our biggest concerns and through this program and Joe's leadership we figured out how to streamline this so it's not going to be overbearing on any one right it's something we can pretty easily and quickly update and do and it and result in a visual output for our citizen and your constituents um a couple other quick comments you know one of the things we talked about when we first were talking about implementing it was a fear that staff shared some fear is that this was going to be used like punitively like this is all about performance only uh and people are going to get in trouble and I want to make it clear to everyone including council that is not our intention really in the beginning what our focus is is going to be trying to just promote our successes we don't do a great job of communicating to everyone about all the great things that we're getting done in the community and and we this will be a great tool for us to be able to do that right and so that's the first thing I want to share with everyone is this is not intended to be a punitive tool the second piece says I really think you can see now when I talk

before you go any further u when you indicate it's not the intention that intention doesn't deal with results I mean uh the best intended approach to all of this is great uh and I understand what's taking place here but if you have those individuals out there that are looking for reasons to complain about this yes this is a great tool

it is you're you're correct about that. Yeah, there's no doubt about that. And part of that means, you know, that was something like I was talking about earlier when I was doing the project update. It's very easy for folks to, how do I want to say this? Lose track of the big picture, right? Like, um, hey, we just put a man on the moon. It took us 10 years to figure out how to do that. It's an amazing achievement for all of humankind. Yeah, but, you know, it took us two seconds longer than we thought it was going to take, right? Like that is that's that's human nature to do that. And we're giving everyone the tool to be able to point out and say, you know, the city is failing over here, right? We know that. We know that's part of the equation. But but our perspective on it as management team is we we can't hide behind those things. We can't be in fear of those things. We have to be eyes wide open about what's necessary to move this community forward. And we're going to be aggressive and serious about doing that. And to to uh Councilwoman Ser's comment, we're going to say, "Look, this is the plan and this is what we're sticking to and these are the things we're serious about getting done. And if we're behind on something, we're going to figure out how to catch up. That's okay. We can behind. We're we're not perfect. We're human. But look at all the other things. Like if you look at from the color perspective, when Joe showed the city of Pittsburgh, almost everything's green. Yeah, they have a few things that are off a little bit. That means they just got to work on them. I don't think there's anything wrong with letting folks know that, hey, you're right. You identified it. we're we're behind on one of the 20 things we're doing. We're going to fix that. But did you notice that we're on schedule with the other 20 things that or 19 things that we're doing, right? That's just part of the messaging that we're going to have to do. And and to staff, I want them to understand that, you know, we're going to highlight and promote all the great things we're doing. In fact, just to be honest, I haven't decided this yet, but we might just turn on everything that we're on target with. I don't know that yet because I want to focus on how good of a tool this is and how good we're doing. I want to promote the good work of staff at some. And then the second piece for me is making staff understand their role in the big picture. You can

see how this works. Oh, I'm the guy that cleans the streets or whatever it is or put fixes the pothole. And I see how this rolls up into the priority for the city, right? I want that's the second most important thing is they understand it. So they have greater I think we actually have staff that take great pride in their job, but sometimes they think of it isolated to just my job. They don't understand how that rolls up into the big picture. And then the third piece is there is a performance piece. Look, you guys pay us to be servants to our citizens. And so, we want to make sure we're being good servants and doing good job. That doesn't mean always giving to citizens everything they want, but we need to make sure we're taking care of their needs and we're making sure we're taking care of the, you know, we're doing it within the confines of the law and policy and budget. And so, if there's ways to use this tool for us to become more efficient and to perform better and with more heart, then we'll do that, right? And that's that's very important to me. So, I'm excited about this tool. Um, I want to remind you that Thomas is going to be leading this effort. So, I appreciate the, you know, hey, kudos Mark, but this is going to be, hey, kudos Thomas and the rest of the team that are working with him. In fact, when this team put this plan together, I was not in the room, right? So, this is Thomas leading the team to do this work and I'm I'm sitting on the sidelines being their cheerleader. Thomas, any last comments? Um, I just wanted to highlight, you know, one of the things that really struck me as you look at these strategic priorities. Um, as a recovering community development director, one of the things is sometimes in government, we expect the resident or the customer to know way too much about how our organization works to be successful. and this plain language identified in logical ways that someone who isn't entrenched on our organization can figure out what do they got going on here? What's our vision for the future? This really lines it out in a clear way.

All right, council. Any other last questions before we move on? All right, I just want to congratulate the team, Thomas and Joe. Thank you so much for your time. We're looking forward to seeing you here at the end of the month. Thank you for having me. Wish you all all the best. Have a great weekend.

Thank you. Okay, council. We're a little bit behind. I apologize for that. That's my fault. But we're now going to move on to our next section. If you would like to come up, I'd like to introduce to you Basilia Angel. I don't know. I probably didn't do a good job of that. But um she is the president and CEO of including company. Um, she is here a Toeri resident, but she also has offices in the Washington DC area. And I want her to take the rest of the time to explain who she is, what they do, and why she's here today.

Did I turn it off? Okay. Thank you. All right. So, first I'll introduce myself. I am Basilia Anken. Um, I actually uh was born in Southern California, raised in Arizona. And I say that um in a small town uh smaller than Toaryi if you can believe that there was more cows there also. And so you know I know what it's like to grow up and I'm excited that I did move here. My background um so if you go to the next slide is really uh engineering. So I'm a trained engineer systems engineer so I look at everything through systems. Um but quickly right after graduation I decided you know I don't want to be in a factory. I want to work with people. And so through my entire history, I've been applying engineering principles for creating programs uh for people. And so I've spent the past 10 years uh working my my most of my experience is creating national programs um that involve uh diverse people. And so making sure that the programs are inclusive and so when you go to the next slide, so I'm the founder of include us. And so I've been dedicating so I started to do this on my own. I used to do this for others. And so now I'm doing it for myself and really focus not necessarily on national programs even though we are a national organization. Our intention is to go to communities, partner with community organizations, cities to really focus and look at the systems that exist to really connect with people. So our mission is to build a more inclusive world. Um and we do that through we have our fund and we have our labs. Labs is where we do a lot of the design work. And so that's um the partnership that we have here. And so with city of Terary, if you go to the next slide, uh it's an initiative that I'm calling Tary Avanza. Avansa means advance. And so essentially the goal of this program or this initiative is to take a look at Tari's public investments. So you heard all morning all the investments that the city is doing, which is amazing. Um and I love that tool that you just

presented. Um, essentially the goal is to to make that those investments accessible, trusted, and fully utilized because essentially there's a lot of investment that goes in and so the risk is the underutilization. And so you you want to make sure that everything that is being invested on is that it is being utilized by everyone in the community. It's open by everybody in the community. And touching on the tool that was just presented, that's a great tool to showcase and build trust, right? So you say you're going to do something, you do it, and then you show that you did it. So I just want to connect the dots with that. So um kudos to you for also investing in that tool and the strategic planning that you're doing. And so to Larry Ivon's really focused on community engagement and economic development. Those are the two things that we're really looking at. If you go to the next slide. Yeah, you have a mouse right there.

Oh, perfect. Okay, thank you. Um, so why this matters now again the investments and so, uh, and there's also a growing demand for transparency, right? Um, in addition to that, you you really want to make sure that, uh, it's it's really about the utilization of all the investments that are going on. Zoom park and T-Biz are the two that we're really focused on. And it's great to do this work now uh, before more investments actually occur. Okay, great. Um, and so the way we're doing this is two phases. So phase one is taking a look at the program and the what is feeding the system today. So what are the processes in the infrastructure um any barriers that currently exist the shared systems and even talking to community uh ultimately that will lead into a strategy for how to move forward and then phase two would be the activation of whatever strategy is decided on and so the purpose of phase one as I mentioned it's looking at things at for today um and preparing for an effective phase too. The objectives, so the outputs of what we're working on is a clear diagnostic of the current outreach and engagement systems. Um, essentially building that strategy uh for outreach and engagement, a mapped ecosystem of the trusted community stakeholders as well as a preliminary and this is a recommend potential recommendation which will look at a community ambassador model for getting some of the great work that you are doing out in the community. Um and then lean metrics framework. So how are you measuring and tracking engagement which should connect to that strategic plan that you are uh building towards and then leadership ready materials because everything that we're building essentially will be recommendations and we'll have to come to a decision on how

to move forward uh with any of it. And so it is a 90-day process that we're uh working towards. We're 30 days in. Most of the that what you're about to see is very internal focused. So only talking to staff so far. Um and so that's where the strategic that's the diagnostic that we're doing right now. The next phase is looking at and talking to community. Um I'll talk a little bit more how we'll be doing that. And then uh lastly will be the synthesis and then the strategy. So I want to reiterate that nothing here is like set in stone and not validated from community. Um our approach for doing this work is using the community engineering model. Um and what we look at is people and culture governance design the infrastructure systems that are in place and then what are the outcome learning systems um that exist within uh the community. And so the questions we ask are um so when we look at people and culture so who belongs who participates and who feels represented um and then the governance design is how decisions are made communicated and acted on. Um that's policies, procedures, staff. Uh infrastructure systems that's the physical assets digital technical and internal systems in place. as well. And then outcome learning system is what success looks like, how you measure it, and then how it's communicated within the community engineering model. There's levels of where um each organization can be at um level one being compliant or ad hoc. Um level two emerging, level three strategic, and then ultimately where you're optimizing how you're working with the community.

if you could stop there for one second. Um, where do you think we are today? I was about to say I don't want to grade you, but but I want to hear what you think because we're we're essentially the assessment's not really done and I haven't talked to community. So, it would not be fair, but I would say internally just talking to staff, it's the the big finding is that there's inconsistency, right? Whereas uh you know giving kudos over here to to parks that they're like being really strategic with with community engagement whereas other departments are uh compliant right at the compliant level. So it's really from one to three based on each department.

Yeah. And council if I can just up. So this is very important right because there's this the things we're required to do by law. So we have to do those things and we do those things but do we do anything else? That's the question. And what happens if you do other things? Can you get better outcomes? If you if you don't do other things, can you expect to get better outcomes? Right? It's like that's that's this is important to me and it should be important to us that we are thinking through where do we want to be, who do we want to be, and how do we want to communicate and what level of involvement do we want to have with other parties? And I recognize there's all kinds of risks in asking those questions, but I think you should ask those questions and at least eyes would open understand where we're at and what we think we want to do. just to to be clear so that I understand and then folks that might be listening later on or now. We're talking specifically about the Latino community.

So, or or community in general because my understanding that what you're working on is looking specifically at what the city manager talked about our relationship engagement and all the things you're talking about with Latinos. Is that is that accurate?

No. Uh no. So, it it it's the focus. So the reason why it's called Tari Vances is because it is the focus. Latinos are the majority um within you know within this uh organization. But when and this is when you focus on uh the ones that are least represented, you end up making things better for everyone, right? So and and it's and again this is uh looking at it from a systems perspective. It does not make sense to make special processes. We need to look at it as a system. How is the city engaging the community? And then you look at the different demographics now. Are we making sure that everyone belongs, feels represented? And so that's the it's the system. It's taking a look at it from a systems perspective, but making sure that you're being inclusive of all the demographics. Um, but because it is the majority, we are very much focused on the Latino community. And we'll talk about language and what that means. So in terms of what we've seen uh is working well, I will say uh the investments that this city is doing in comparison to other cities are uh really good in terms of like where society is headed in general. There is a lot of investments being made in terms of cultural infrastructure. So you you've hear that you I'm sure you've heard the saying uh culture um eat strategy for breakfast and you know culture moves faster than any policy ever will. The fact that you're making cultural investments, it's a great thing because that means you have somewhat of a control in terms of the culture that you will have in your city, right? And so now it's how do you optimize that? how you making sure that you're utilizing it in the best way possible for that infrastructure. So, the fact that you're

investing in that in the physical aspect, it's great. Um, in terms of the city staff, um, I've heard nothing but great things in terms of the city staff really wanting to engage with the community. And the theme I heard across everyone is trust. they the city staff really wants to build that trust with the community and so ultimately that is an asset um um in terms of how the city wants to communicate and be able to move forward with that. In addition to that, there are also digital assets that the city has. Uh 50 when we did the digital assessment, there's 50,000 followers. When you put them collectively, some are greater than others. Um and so, and there's also currently some strong relationships that are helping the city and will be able to help as they move forward. Um so, yeah, so that's these are the things that are really working well. And then now I'm going to talk about all the things that there's potential for opportunity and insights. And just a reminder, I've only talked to the city staff and then there's more community validation and then obvious and I will welcome you at the end, you know, if you want to contribute as well as welcome any conversations after after the fact as um it'll feed into this assessment. So the big finding so there's definitely active engagement as I mentioned but limited systemization. Uh what that means is uh there's no so there there also isn't a dedicated staff. So other organizations usually have a communications team that's dedicated with the full strategy and has specific skill sets. Now you do have the you the city is doing it as I said it's just not systematic and there are the skill sets are embedded within the team structures. Um and there is a communications plan already in process. Um again it's just in it's in process and there is

opportunities there in terms of uh in comparison to other cities where there's dedicated staff and team members that are focused on actually doing communications and actually doing community engagement. Um so that was one of the big things that came up and then um they they the staff are communicating across and meeting um but there's opportunities for potential doing collaborations um since some uh departments even have more potential reach across the way right in terms of how they connect with community. And so ultimately usually when you have so similar to the strategic plan where there's goals and there's a process in place you you're able to sustain it. So that's something that can also be done with communications and civic um community engagement digitally. I already mentioned the 50,000. There's uh multiple websites and social accounts. um not always cross-linking. Um in terms of the social media um the reach is strong. It's it's more about but it feels right now very much one way not a two-way and uh what's the system? What's the strategy? So there's opportunities there. Language access and trust. So with the community being um the majority Latino and a big portion of it being Spanish speaking currently Spanish um feels ad hoc and uh there is no specific policy for language that that everyone follows. So there could be some systemization on how translation works in general um for the city in all various various departments just in general like what is the city's policy when it comes to translating. Um

so that that could that could potentially be leading to access gaps. Um yeah and I will reiterate that's not a reflection of staff effort or intent. that's really a structural gap in terms of what's needed for the city to be able to have that as a policy and and process and potentially um access to translation and things like that. And so as I mentioned at the beginning, we're looking at the two uh large investments TBIS specifically in Somal uh park. So TBIS is a new concept. So from what I'm hearing um it's not something that the city is used to or is even used to seeing in general. So it's not just educating the not telling the people that it's here but rather what is it you have there's an education component that is required. Um there is a strong partnership with chamber and SBDC in terms of programming and there's a clear commitment to small businesses. um there is no me uh measuring mechanism on where people are dropping off or not joining. So there's a potential there for feedback as well as uh looking at the programming. There may be opportunities because it is so new that maybe the programming focuses on more emerging businesses or people that are thinking about potentially opening up a business. Um and then also the bilingual programming as well would be beneficial to invite more immigrant uh business owners in terms of Zoom Waltz Park. Um again I talked about like the great investment in terms of cultural inf infrastructure. Um but looking at it from that lens in terms of building culture within the community um this is where we need to talk do talk more to the community to

really understand where the gaps are. But many staff report that a lot of the community just doesn't know it exists and um we don't without any like formal quantitative qualitative data that we don't know what exactly or what the gap is. And so that's where we're going to be focusing on the next phase is talking to community about have they heard about it, where did they hear about it, and what is effective in that way. So that's we're going to learn more as we move forward. Um, one of the things though I uh that I did notice that um when you look at best practices from other cities that have these type of venues, it's a dedicated website where you can control the narrative and you have like the one place that like this is where you go for the concerts and events. Um, so currently it's um leveraging Spade Entertainment um website even though the city does have a landing page. I do want to say they do have a landing page, but there's opportunity there for being able to maximize utilization.

Can you differentiate between what we currently have as opposed to what you're recommending? Because prominent on on the first page of our website, it says concert series. And if you click on that, you go to where you need to be as it relates to what's taking place. So it would be the the the amphitheater's own page own um join us. So city pages or city pages and then concert pages. So uh usually for when it's a concert venue or even a promoter. So, so like Spade Entertainment, people are more inclined to to join it because they want to stay aware of concerts and um so it's a different it's different list building essentially that it makes it more attractive for a resident to want to be a part of it to also want to follow potentially uh the social media account of like where you're sharing artist type content. And so it usually is more attractive to uh anyone like members. And so having that dedicated it makes it more attractive. So you'll start growing your list and then you could leverage that list for other things versus the other way around where you're like use city forward and then you're potentially not getting a list because they may not want to be or it just doesn't connect with them. And so it's all about the connection. Well, and that that for people to go to the right site, it presupposes that they're aware it exists. And that's been what I found flabbergasting is the number of people, as you alluded to, the number of people in the community that don't even know we we have the uh amphitheater to begin with or the concert series. What do you have opinions as it relates to that as to where we can enhance uh knowledge

within the community? Yeah. So for so for me just like because I'm new to the uh newer to the city. My personal opinion it's the uh one of the it's the programming right um not necessarily the programming but like you find out things through people you follow. So influencers or um these and I'm not talking your typical influencers. It could be a community member that that potentially has a lot of following, right? So they post about it and so that's where the community ambassador model I talked about could be beneficial. Um so you h it it's how you most people now find out about everything through social media. And so if you have an artist that presents and posts about it and shares and connects people connect are hearing about it. And so you technically it's new and so the current programming I don't have a lot of insight into the current programming uh that existed last year but I know that there was difficulties bringing in to residents and so there's Yeah. Yeah. And so it's most of maj the majority of residents are Latino and so there was limited so what from what I saw for the Latino engagement. It was not culturally I would not call that like it was not connecting uh with the community. I think it was like a the just the the flyer itself it it didn't connect because it was a school which it wasn't. So, it's just culturally relevant marketing uh for those specific events when you're looking at the Latino community specifically. So, like that's like the limited that I have and that's what I'm hoping to find out because again, we're taking a look at not just the Latino, but definitely looking at the Latino and Latino alone. It w it just doesn't connect. The name didn't connect. The branding didn't connect. The artist did, but it wasn't optimized.

Whereas when you look at the the artist posted on Spade Entertainment social media versus their own, whereas if I'm a resident, I'm a fan of that artist, I would have seen it if I it would have been posted on the artist's page versus if I'm not following Spain entertainment. And we we uh my understanding is we had the same issues as it related to the Latino concerts that we had. I think there were two of them. Is that correct? There was two. as far as the local community uh attending the numbers that we were looking at. Yeah. So, I I was just perplexed as to what we were dealing with in that regard.

It was and I'm talking to Todd about it. It's it's the it's the marketing and also it's not just like what the what it faces, but also some of the strategy and the relationships with how you work with the artists because when you're new, you have to anchor on to others who already have a presence. And that could be others in terms of artists or it could be other community members that have influence within the city. And so it's identifying who are those people within this city within the city itself. Correct. Okay. And that's part of the growing of the venue and growing of correct successful

and that and that community ambassador model that we're talking about. It's identifying who those are within this community. So then that way as we move forward they are all like it's it's part of the process and the infrastructure like hey there's an event there's something going on let's make sure that all our partners know our community ambassadors know and that the word gets out and then they have somewhere to go back to

let me let me cut you off for one second share with them really quick where the community ambassador model came from and why. Okay. So, the community ambassador model really is um tested and proven um in the health systems. So, it's called a promas. Um and so promoas right now in the um health care space are people that are not necessarily doctors or even nurses but rather uh supporters um or assistants that and they're they're promote they're called promoters which is literally a promoter that promote good healthc care practice like come in see your doctor like if if they're diabetic you know this is some training that you can take. So they promote certain education and the Latino community is very trust focused. So um if someone within their community that is seen as a as as a leader and that they follow and want to follow says that this is true, usually it's held as this is true. They're very and also very loyal. Um and so it works in the healthc care space and it's also worked in other cities. And so how it works in Tiller would be critical to finding who, how, and who those people really are and potentially how that can work in relation to the the city and the staff and the communications in general.

So in the healthcare industry, they had all the doctors, all the equipment, all everything they needed, and they were saying, "Why are not the Latino community coming to get our services? We're giving them away free. We're trying to help. We're trying to Nobody's coming." until they started implementing the ambassador model and all of a sudden the flood started coming because people trust certain people who were sort of advocating and they were saying yes you can trust Adventist Health or whoever it is that's just one example and so Vicilia is not here to take today to say she's only a third of the way through of her work so she's not here to say here's all the solutions she's just pointing out here's one example an ambassador model that worked for the healthcare industry it might work for us in terms of embracing the Latino community and our all the things we're trying to And in the ambassador world, um the promoter or whoever contracts with these influencers to get the information out. Is is that what happens? I mean, they don't do this for free.

No, there is a free model, but it it it um there is a cost if you have them full-time. U but it could be partnership based also. So, it's it just it it just depends. There are organizations that dedicate time to this like that is their specialty their promotas or but for example like with spade entertainment we spend a lot of money on marketing right so whether we spend it with billboards or radio or print or ambassador it probably doesn't matter where we spend the money we just want to make sure we get the biggest bang for our buck. Yes.

Because that can be potentially part of the marketing strategy for the concerts, right, as we're looking into it. Um, where you spend a certain portion on content creators that then are influencing people to come to the events. Um, and that is a model we've had in the past and it usually works.

But what we're also trying to do here is both directions. This is very important to me. Ultimately, at the end of the day, I think what we want to do is create one taller. So, this is not just about, okay, how do we get more Latinos to come to concerts? It's how do we engage a Latino, not just the Latino community? Because I loved your comment about systemizing it, right? How are we communicating with all parts? Everyone feels included, right? Because when everyone's included, not only we getting more ideas about the things we should be doing, right? But we're also getting inclusion in the culture. We're getting more deeply rooted and rich. Our community is activated. It becomes more alive. That's it's the two-way thing that we're trying to achieve. And we need someone like Basilia to help us because otherwise we're just we're just winging it. We're just we're just kind of it's kind of like this. Like if I if I wanted to be better in my personal relationships, I could try to do it myself or maybe I go to a counselor to help guide me or a therapist. Right. If I want to build a great park, what? Yeah. Right. Or if I want to build a great park, we all know we need parks. I could just be like, "Hey, let's go build some parks. Maybe we hire an expert park director who guides us on where we make those investments and how we do is the same thing that I'm trying to do with Basilia here is bring an expert who can help us see the things we don't see. Right.

Yeah. And so that two-way street, right? Uh there's a lot of so far there's been a lot of one-way investment. And what we're looking at here is where do we do some of that two-way investment to build that trust. Um because even that tool, it's a great tool, but it's a one-way tool. If nobody hears about it, nobody's ever going to see it. So I too I'm really encouraged by the idea of a systemizing uh the approach to bringing all of focusing on demographics your largest demographic your next you know because we have a gigantic Portuguese population as well. Correct. So are they engaged in in this as well?

So I think looking at all components but how do we create a system that brings us all together?

Correct. Um any other comments? And so one of the um so seeing this presentation in was encouraging because one of the big things that I found was the in terms of no consist consistent measurement of engagement. um no formal feedback loops. Um so which then feeds into not we don't know why right we don't know why people are not using t-biz or zumalt or potentially other right so what what are those engagement metrics that could help to ultimately learn and be able to improve as the city continues to invest. I had a real quick question. Um, are you aware of what T business uh, engagement plan is? I mean, they have something in writing in terms of how to attract. My understanding is their goal is 40% immigrant.

That's not the goal. 40%. No. So, there was a percentage thrown out there. 25%. 25%. Up to 25%. Up to 25%. So, is there something in writing? Is there like a plan like, hey, this is we're going to go out and hit the streets. we're going to go and do.

Well, here's what I would say and maybe Bili could speak to this more, but from my perspective, my thinking has been, look, this is a new adventure for all of us and the chamber. Their focus, I think, as I understand it right now, and more of this will come out as Bilia, you know, she's only a third of the way done with her work as she finishes the other two/3s. My understanding is they're developing a strategy about how do they attract and recruit and I think they have four or five leases so far businesses entrepreneurs to come into their business. What I said to them is listen you focus on that. Let me help you through Basilia's efforts to try to figure out how we could further engage on the immigrant Latino side of the equation which we're just sorting through now. Right? We don't have any answers yet. We're just starting to sort through that because why? It's not just for the T-Biz. It's because we have this same goal throughout the organization for everything we do. It's not just T-Biz or the or the concert series or the Matheni track. It's everything we do. How do we systematize this? And through that effort, there'll be some benefit to the T-Biz on that backside. So, that's kind of where we're at right now.

So, so the answer is no. But it's being I don't know. I don't know that answer. I have the chamber. No, no. I'm not I'm not I'm not talking about this effort because you just came on board. I'm talking about TB has been talked about for a while. The chamber's taking the lead. Uh Jose, I don't know specifically what their written policy is. I can find that out for you.

If you can find that out, forward it to me. I'd love to look at it to see what if if there's anything in place. um to to address your your your comment um there's definitely opportunity for improvement in in that in that area which u when I was talking about TB specifically it's the so there's a lot of great programming but the programming right as of right now it's uh potentially for more businesses that already potentially are existing potentially have already offices or running um not necessarily the emerging and or immigrant um because of the bilingual thing, right? So, it's not limited bilingual, limited translation. Um so certain things are, you know, certain things are not clear. So there's definitely opportunities there, but they do have great programming that I would say there's just potential opportunities to grow some of that programming that can be more encouraging to some of these start businesses that are just starting up. because that's where the opportunity really lies to get people in the door, right? Like I'm just starting, maybe I need a place to start working whereas somebody else maybe already did an investment in their home office or wherever they did it, right? So that's the potential opportunity. Okay. So I I think I I mentioned a lot of opportunities in terms of being able to increase uh potential utilization, but we are going to be learning more um as we move forward. Um we did just get started and so um it's very much a system design. Um and yes, it's definitely focused on Latinos because that is the majority. We want to make sure that they feel um included and can participate and there is potentially language access uh language um

opportunities in the language as well as cultural um components to um the strategy as we move forward. And so with that um a lot of the investments have been made. It's more about now how do we communicate, how do we connect and be culturally relevant. So the next phase is community validation um which is we will be hosting a community a bilingual community engagement lab at the T-Biz. It's going to be on February 24th at 6:30. Um, and I have a flyer and I can send send you all the flyer if you want to send it out to anybody um to come to come on on over. It's going to be interactive where people can uh it's for learning, right? What they've heard, haven't heard, and then as well as getting some ideas and cultivating some relationships within the community um to feed into this second phase of what we're doing. Um, in addition to that, we'll be doing resident interviews as well as small uh business interviews. We will have a survey, but the survey's intent is also to test surveys within this city, whether or not they want to take a survey. What are the reactions? Um, because part of it may be a recommendation for a survey. But it's important to understand how surveys are felt within this community as well. um there's hesitations in certain cities and uh certain cities and culture have different um whole different sentiments when it comes to surveys. So that's important to understand. And so when we talk about what we're moving towards, I already talked about like a a citywide framework that is the strategy for community engagement that includes uh the culture, the the governance structure uh in terms of how it moves

forward, the channels and how it learns. Um which that includes then building that what does that governance structure framework look like and then the language access standards and training recommendations that we uh mentioned. And then ultimately a feedback and measurement framework. Um so what does community engagement how is that measured which should you know putting that plug in already for Tomas uh in terms of the strategic planet it should correlate like it should be matched up together and then um exploring a placebased concept which is really taking a look at having programming at TBIZ that looks at bringing in Latino businesses, immigrant um emerging businesses where they could create something especially once there's even a maker space but really create something and then test it at a marketplace which would be at Zoomwalt. So, a weekly uh marketplace that can uh invite uh business owners and invite them to a community, start building a community of uh businesses that leverages the park and then also connects them to T-Biz where they can make sure that they have all their business licensing and they then get in the system to be able to get invited to a lot of this programming that TBIS has. So, it would be a full circle. They come through the attraction is the opportunity to sell but then they get connected to the T-Biz and the educational component the licensing component and then more people get exposure over like oh look there's an amphitheater so that's some of the ideas that we're talking about um in addition to potentially the I talked about the community survey um and there's a potential for doing a focused one on the matheni track um and this could help to really understand um where they're at with the city and how to

build trust um with that. So again, this is all exploratory more coming forward once this full synthesis is done as well as with recommendations. And so in terms of how you can support um and so affirming uh giving feedback content on a lot of the stuff that we talked about and when the full synthesis is done as well as share if there's certain people uh we should be talking to um during this phase uh any community partners as well um that we should be talking to um open to those recommendations and if there's any sensitivities or priorities that um you'd like for us to keep in mind. But yeah, again, this is early signals and uh really looking forward to seeing the full uh strategy come forward. Any questions? Um I think taking the complete summary of what you shared our objectives and process mapping that you talked about would would you say among your travels and your professional experience that this is not unique so city of Tallery per se uh what you've identified in these early stages what we're working through what we're trying to get to and elements that you'd said too, it's really about that cultural connection and trust. So, it's not necessarily what you're doing or how you're doing it, it's that who where connection. Do you find that that a lot of organizations or organizations in your travels that this is a mutual uh

Yes. need and issue and what groups are working with?

Yes. So it's it's definitely a growing need as the US in general just keeps growing more and more diverse, right? And so um so the short answer is yes. In terms of how cities handle it and things like that, I think um can be slightly slightly different, but the what I'm sharing here is not anything like drastically new or in innovative. It's things that have worked for in other cities. Um, and so like even up the road there, they have a community voice survey, right? So they have like an animal survey that measures um whether or not they feel like they they belong. And it has certain metrics um it's not necessarily what they belong, but like whether or not there's a connection to the type of programming that the city is putting out there and whether or not there's need a need to pivot. Um so yeah.

So and and I think maybe some direct examples. one one of the examples you had mentioned which I would say from from my connections being involved in other organizations is the healthcare industry. So the health care industry and and one of the ways that they have found that works through what you what you've described in this methodology and need is promot it captures that trust and connection. So where FHC's are seeing 25,000 35,000 patients in a month in our region. I've also heard in travels at other nonprofits that their specific like workforce investment or department of labor grants and others which are really intended for perhaps farmwork or Latino crowds that those groups are also having the same dynamic which is uh I think your presentation is on the receiving end of belonging trust component of I have a product that's even meeting the need of that community. I'm hearing that there's struggles in that still that direct component. This service perhaps is for this culture but we can't get that culture to take the service.

Correct. And so there's a lot of I would say initiatives selling a product is a perfect example like even businesses struggle with this and hire help in this arena where they look at you know it's a cultural marketing and because they also have to connect with the community which means they I mean they hire that's why they hire artists to do promos right and so it connects with the community and promotes their brand. It's the same. It's the same thing um here. And so back to the social media and the website potentially that's the city having their own cultural brand cultural infrastructure where where it's yours um and making sure that it is culturally relevant and connecting uh with the city because once you you know if you do it right and it builds up that is a huge asset like if and because it won't be just to residents it will actually be like it could this could become a destination for concerts and events and you could amplify what the city of Tiller does and who is the city of Teraryi and you know um on a much grand scale depending on the talent you bring. So yes, it's this is a common problem and usually requires support um that they bring in for potentially that multicultural marketing. If we build an entertainment district, we're going to have the same issue.

Yeah. And maybe kind of different ways as some is listening. Not necessarily maybe a problem, but it's a challenge or a gap. It's currently it's a challenge or a gap that can be fixed. That's a question. All right. And I would say it is unique to other communities because other communities don't have u an amphitheater uh te biz what they're doing down I mean so this is unique in that regard wouldn't you agree?

Yes because not every like as I mentioned not everybody city has an amphitheater. There are cities that do have amphitheaters. Um, one of the things that I talked to Jennifer about was I was um, Ontario just built a baseball stadium for the AAA Dodgers team and um, 200 acres that they acquired to build this mostly Latino, right? And so they also are going through something similar of what you guys are going through. And so, uh, I offered to Jennifer to connect you all to potentially have a conversation, maybe hear some of their learnings, um, and things like that. So, uh, that's a whole different sidebar that that happened, but, uh, they are launching, uh, that opening day is on April 2nd. Um, but it is it's so they have similar, but it's different because every community is different. So, even the Latino community in every city is different. So if you go to Florida, it's going to look quite different. Same but different in a sense of it's a different cultural component. So even the programming is going to have to look different because over there you're talking about more Cubans but you know and here it's uh you're looking at um different generations of mostly Mexican-Americans, right? And so that's different programming, that's different conversation. It's also a different the way you translate is very different. And so um having done it from a national program where we did that whole community engagement for co um was quite hard because what we distributed in Florida had to I mean the Spanish words were not the same as the ones that needed to be shared with California. So it has to be different. Um, and so it will because this is the city of Chaderi, it will be unique to Tiller.

Yeah, we go through the same. I'm Portuguese American and the Azor Islands is where a lot of the Portuguese people come from and of course, you know, there's uh Brazilian Portuguese, there's mainland Portuguese and uh, uh, they're different. They speak, you know, different language and I think to us, like you said, in Florida, it's more Cuban influence. Here, if I'm not mistaken, it's Haliscoco. Is that correct? Jose four which

yeah so we we need to concentrate on those areas would you correct yep y okay anything else thank you so much uh this is eye opening and it's a whole new arena ina for us in terms of our efforts and we're grateful that you're helping to lead us through as we're anxiously looking forward to the balance of your work. Thank you.

Thank you. Okay, council, we are a little bit behind um but I think we might be able to catch up a little bit because this next presentation is not that long. Melissa, if you want to bring on um our fiscal impact analysis consultant, you have met with them before. Sarah Mayers is the chief operating officer for NBS. She is working on an analysis for us to determine if future growth will cover the cost of future public services and infrastructure. Sarah, I'll turn it over to you. Oh, and Amanda, sorry, I forgot both of you are here today. Wonderful. We've got the two brains behind the organization over there. Thank you.

Thanks, Mark, for the introduction. I'm actually going to steal the spotlight for just a minute and share the presentation. Um, but Sarah is also here, as you mentioned, to weigh in if there's any questions. Um, so let me get my screen geared up here. One moment, please. Sorry about that. All right. Can you all see my screen? Yes.

Great. Okay. Um, as you mentioned, uh, my name is Amanda Welker and NBS is currently working on the city's fiscal impact analysis and happy to be here today to discuss the project and the status. So, our quick agenda this morning is to review the highlights of both the city's 2035 general plan and 2526 strategic plan to emphasize how the goals and priorities of the city shape this analysis. And then we'll discuss a little bit more about what a fiscal impact analysis is and why it's so important to a growing city. And then we'll brief also briefly discuss community facilities districts which we call CFDs and how that special financing mechanism can be useful in procuring additional revenue to fill the gap when there's negative fiscal impact. And then at the end we'll open it up to any questions. So when we first start thinking about how new development impacts the city, we generally first think about new revenue and new costs. Um new revenue will be generated from property taxes, additional sales tax, um property transfer tax and other fees received by the general fund. And likewise, new costs will arise associated with servicing um a new residential population as well as a new employee population and maintaining new improvements established in that development area. So in order to estimate those revenues and costs, we need to begin our analysis by understanding the city's plans and objectives and goals not only for land use but also for transportation and open space, recreational facilities and safety standards. And the city's general plan creates a road map that helps us to determine the

planned land uses for undeveloped acreage in the city and where that growth boundary extends and gives us insight on data points such as dwelling unit and commercial square footage densities. Other elements of the general plan define service level policies for roadways, open spaces, and emergency services that also assist in determining future costs associated with development. The fiscal impact analysis supports the city city strategic plan objectives by attempting to understand the cost implications and revenue resources required to support its goals. So for example um goals such as increased job creation will generate additional economic activity within the city but also increases the employment population which are a part of the person served um in the community and that may create additional needs such as housing or other service demands such as emergency response. So in other words, the fiscal impact analysis attempts to analyze the fiscal implications of the general plan and strategic plan objectives from a cost of servicing perspective. And to go a layer further, what we really want to understand from this analysis is whether the cost of services exceed the revenue that will be generated from the additional property taxes, sales taxes, etc. And if we find that to be true, we can define an approximate delta which we call the negative fiscal impact. And that negative fiscal impact again is the amount of servicing costs in excess of the revenues generated by additional service population which includes both new city residents and increase in employee population of those individuals

that live outside of the city but come in to Larry for work. So, um, when we talk about what is fiscal impact, what we consider when putting all of this data together once we've compiled our projected service population is what the current and future service levels look like. So, we want to understand things like what is the current service level of firefighters per 10,000 persons served? Is it one per thousand? Is that what the current service level that's being provided? Um, is the desired service level 1.2 firefighters per thousand? So, we want to look at these types of existing and desired service levels to understand the costs of servicing this new population. And then we want to understand the revenues that are applicable to the project area based on the current and projected housing prices, income levels required for ownership at um at those costs. what can we anticipate to receive from this new population in the form of property and sales taxes and other fees. Then we look at the service levels we've determined um for the cost of the project area and how many miles of roads and trails will be maintained, how many additional emergency response staff will be required um to support the new population and what is that current service level to get us there. And once we have all this data, we put it all together and we determine the net fiscal impact to understand again whether the cost of servicing the new development will be less than or exceed the revenues being generated. Um, as a recap, this slide demonstrates just the steps in our fiscal impact analysis calculation, including first collecting and reviewing the data, determining those baseline service levels, identifying revenue and cost

estimates for the new development, and then lastly, determining the net fiscal impact. And there are a few different ways we can focus our analysis when we're calculating fiscal impact. We can look citywide, which is the analysis we're currently completing. And this takes an overarching look at all future growth and development in the city to give us a general idea of the net fiscal impacts at current service levels. And then we can complete fiscal impact analysis on a development specific basis. And this is reviewing the costs and revenues specific to a single project or project area that can be helpful in defining the impacts of a specific development. and its unique servicing requirements on a more granular granular level. Um this will inform a net fiscal impact that can be divided appropriately among the count of new dwelling units and or non-residential square footage to determine approximate um CFD special tax rates. So, if a CFD is formed, the special tax rates will be levied against the new property owners in that area to allow for the city to receive the revenue needed to fund a negative fiscal impact. So, so far in our analysis, we have some preliminary data points that we wanted to share. Um, so the number of persons served throughout the city or excuse me, the number of persons served through city buildout currently stands at a 59% increase from the current city population. Um, there's some additional work being done on that projection and it's expected to be even higher once we have some more of that data. Um, and there are approximately 4,000 acres of unde undeveloped residential land and over 2600 acres of non-residential land

in the city um that is in the city's urban growth area. This acreage is the preliminary focus of the fiscal impact analysis. Um the current approximate cost for the city to provide services to existing persons served is $77 per person annually. And this cost would increase if current service levels are expected to increase plus standard increase in cost due to inflation. So to recap the community facilities district again the CFD as a funding mechanism for negative fiscal impact. It's important to understand that CFDs don't require special benefit only reasonable metrics and the CFD must adhere to the city's established local goals and policies. um the approval mechanism most commonly used as a landowner voter election if there are less than 12 registered voters in the CFD boundary. Otherwise, a registered voter election is conducted and in both cases the CFD must gain twoth3 approval. A sample list of services funded by a CFD include um police and fire services, park and road maintenance, and flood and storm drain maintenance. So in the next couple of weeks, MBS will work with the city to finalize our data and our calculations and determine that net fiscal impact. And once that analysis is preliminarily complete, we will produce a draft report for the city to review. And after the city's had that chance to review the analysis, uh we may make some edits to the report and then deliver the final product for both council and staff consumption. Um we'd be glad to discuss any project specific

analysis that may be um wanted or needed in the future and um the city's interest in proceeding with formation of any CFDs to fund any potential negative fiscal impact. Um and that total estimated time to complete the report and those steps is about two to four weeks from now. And that is concludes our presentation. So we'd be happy to answer any questions specific to the analysis or our progress. Council, do you have any questions?

Yes. I'm just making some notes. Great. So uh I think one if if this is correct is also that CFDs community finance district is also separate from diffs development impact fees. So a diff is paid at the time of development to its impact overall of community expansions of services not maintenance or repair. Correct. Correct. whereas CFD comes in and adjusts that budget of that continuous maintenance cost that's going to be

think of it like a lighting and landscape district only better. So, getting a a little bit of ahead, but as Manda and the group had mentioned that there's 4,000 acres of residential land available, but I've also heard and I think part of the question I have as we get into uh city council items is that as that residential area is developed, our specific plan that we have for entitlements going into that, the expansion of our water uh sewer systems going into those areas, but at the same time the needed perhaps overlay of roads kind of our development improvement standards. um uh improvements of the the one part is like a a sewer lift station that moves from one segment to the other and and if that being true is that also is like I said forecasting a little bit CFDs really is something the city has not implemented but we're looking towards the future and I guess my question is where you have to go through the voting process is this something really we should be doing now because those 4,000 acres have owners. They generally have some tenative or paper maps that go with that. And at the same time, what I understand is not not knowing exactly where is our master plan of our road improvements overlay, where are there gaps and we can implement the CFD to also for that road maintenance, road improvements, those public common way improvements. I'm just endorsing from what I'm hearing a CFD we possibly should do right now so we're not having to backtrack later and face face a lot of the deficiencies that we're facing in neighborhoods now.

So Amanda and Sarah I'm going to take a shot at this and I'm going to ask the two of you to jump in and correct me or add to what I'm going to say and Thomas is looking at me so I think he's going to want to do the same. So I think of CFDs in two ways. I think of think of CFD in the minor case of replacing our lighting and landscape districts. Right. So now we have a new subdivision come in. It's 200 acres. There's one owner, one developer. They make they vote to annex all their properties into a lighting and landscape district. Yep. Just for that subdivision. Right. So that we've been doing that for years. But the lighting and landscape district technique is is is too limited. It you generate revenue for lighting and landscaping, right? maybe a couple other little things, but no, CFD is going to let So that's when I say to you in the future, I'm not as worried about our future roads as I'm worried about the roads we have right now because the future roads in those future subdivisions, if they annex into a CFD, those property owners are going to be paying for the additional cost associated with their internal road network, right? I mean, we still have arterials and collectors to deal with, but not that neighborhood road as much. We're going to generate enough revenue to help cover some of those costs that we don't have today. That's the minor case of the CFD. And the bigger case in the analysis that they're NBS is working on right now is they're saying, look, we got all this land that's undeveloped in the city limits and all this additional land in the urban service boundary. When and you're going to see the numbers when they come back. When those projects develop, they're going to show how far off we are in terms of having enough revenue to pay for all those costs. One of the things we could be talking about therefore and we got to wait to see the results of the study and what their recommendations are, but we could be talking with the county about annexation agreements that say, "Look, we need to collect we need to keep more of that revenue when these new projects come in to cover all these costs." And we might talk about a a much larger citywide CFD that helps cover some of those costs. Am I off or am I kind of in the ballpark? Amanda,

you're definitely on the right track. And I think um I'll let Sarah Sarah has been um forming CFDs for I won't age her so I won't tell you how many years but she is the expert on CFD formation. So I will let her um weigh in on this.

Yeah. Um, council member, your comments are very astute regarding the development impact fee and the parallel that you're seeing because this is the other side of the coin, right? Where that diff um analysis is looking at those facilities that the fiscal impact analysis is looking at services and how we fund those where on the diff side you're able to implement development impact fees. how we fund the services is through the CFD and and you're absolutely right that you know really this is the way to work with those developers that are coming in so that you do not end up in a situation where you have that deficit as it comes to the current service level that you see right now. Um, of course, all of this kind of goes back to our uh Prop 13 structure in California, um, and and some other factors, but um, the CFD is very flexible and can fund a much broader range of services than like the landscape and lighting district, which as Mark correctly mentioned is really for landscaping, lighting, and park maintenance, and not anything else. You cannot do road maintenance. You cannot fund public safety services. um none of those are a storm drain. You know, none of that really is allowed under that landscape and lighting act. The CFD is a lot more broad application and with that you can fund um pretty much uh most of those services that would need to be funded for a new development. And the way that we have to justify those services is through this fiscal impact because we need to recognize that new development does bring revenue to the community, brings additional property tax, additional sales tax, etc. And what we need to show is that the revenue that that new development brings is not sufficient to pay for the services that are necessitated by that development. And that gap is exactly what we're getting to. And that's what would be funded through the community facilities

district. Real quick, uh am I correct that the developers involved in this are generally favor uh find favor with the CFDs. Is that an accurate statement?

I'll take a shot at that. I would say developers are as favorable to CFD as tax citizens are favorable to taxes. like nobody's thrilled about it. Nobody wants to deal with it. But at the same time, I think the development community understands. CFDs are not new to California. Rocklin was doing CFDs for I don't even know 20 years before I got there. So, I think developers are familiar with it. They understand why it's important. They have a vested interest in communities being successful just like we do, right? Because they're going to build another one and they're going to say, "Go look at that one over there that I did." Right? So, they want it to stand up and and perform well. And these are not taxes they're paying. The future property owners are paying. Now, where they're concerned is when they look at the total tax stack like all the taxes that come in, they got to sell their houses. So, if it's over the tax burden is so great, the infrastructure costs, you know, everything that's loaded onto that subdivision is so great they can't sell homes. They got a real problem with that. That's a balancing act we have to maintain. Again, Amanda, Sarah, Thomas, any disagreements with those statements? I have no disagreement at all. There there is typically some level of um education and outreach with the developer community when you implement a program like this. Um and and they they'll push back a little bit. they'll want to decrease the amount they're paying for services, especially if they want to issue debt to finance some of their infrastructure because every dollar that you use in that overall taxing capacity that Mark just mentioned is a dollar if it's used for services, it's a dollar that can't be used to reimburse them for infrastructure. So there there's negotiation, but they're used throughout the state. Um the Melerus law was adopted in California in 1982. It's been in use since then and there are literally thousands throughout the state of California and they continue to be formed on a very regular basis for developer um projects like

this. And

I was I was just going to say I think it from my understanding from experience a lot of times is what Sarah just talked about uh developers want is at least they know the plan in front of them compared to having to address oh by the ways. um it's uh it can be worked into plans especially when it's a collaboration with developers compared to I'm self-s survival of dealing with this issue so it can spread out costs work through um adjusting like you said the millers and the the point being is if at least we know it ahead of time that is easier to work through and far less cumbersome and troublesome trying to do it after the fact. Um, and a lot of times I think from the BIA, and I don't want to speak for them, but I think I would being involved with that group is coming to the city, can we have a fair plan and an understood plan, an established plan going ahead and I think for the city of Toary and and Mark and your team, that's exactly what we're trying to get to and do. I think for me just uh some questions are obviously I know how the uh lighting districts work and so forth but I mean for uh it takes as the mayor said collaboration and working things out but it also takes a lot of trust uh in the sense that that for me it's like if you build a development and you incorporate uh promises of keeping it up to a certain level and it falls through the cracks then the city has to come in and sometimes clean that up in regards to, you know, the cost of whatever was promised by a developer. Uh, and I guess for me it's I'm just trying to understand how these would work in terms of the funds that are collected um like the the lighting landscape uh districts funds come to the city and the city decides what needs to be done and not the

developer. I mean, I'm just trying to understand that particular process with this this one.

I I'll let Sarah, she can probably best answer that. Yeah. Uh the funds are are city funds and so um there's a couple of different accounting options in terms of how you account for those funds, but um essentially the the developer does not have a say as you're adopting the community facilities district and actually going through the process to form it. There is a list of services that is developed as part of that process and that is the list of authorized services that those funds can be used for. it is a special tax and that means that you have to identify the special things that will be funded by that tax. Um and so that is it's actually outlined in the per uh formation documentation and um the funds can't be used for other things and the developer doesn't um have any control over that. Okay, I think those are all the questions. Amanda, Sarah, thank you so much for your time and for your efficiency in your presentation. You helped catch us up. We're looking forward to seeing your draft final product here in a month or so. And once we do that, council, I want you to be assured that not only we going to share the draft with you, but we're going to share it with the BIA and and take time schedule meetings with them as necessary and then invite them to come to you to to give their input on this important work. Uh so, thank you so much.

Thank you. Thank you. Okay, council, that completes what staff wanted to present to you today. We're a little bit off track by 15 minutes or so, but the rest of this hour is for your use as you see fit. I'll turn it back to the mayor. We're here till four o'clock, right? Whatever you want.

Terry's going to hit me with the gavl, right? All right, council. So kind of going back to what we had on our agenda, but I think specifically amongst council is, you know, we talked about the economic development strategy, there's individual projects and then I think there's also some of the the bigger more umbrella general ones, economic development strategy, sales tax measure. Uh there was other you know elements that I think is we've looked in past budget years going forward in the future budget years maybe questions of the parks master plan um elements with that and a couple of ideas and I also wanted to give a room which I know the city manager had mentioned each council member kind of if there was the you know the couple of bullet points that we had going into the the budget year the strategy for the next fiscal year this is a good time for us to to what's what's the roadmap look like for you in those areas and we can kind of flush that out um a bit going forward. Um for my myself I think with that is one and the budget schedule uh that was sent out to council members and kind of looking at what they had on that schedule for February 3rd, February 16th. Uh Mark, where do you where do you see us of kind of where we're at in that budget schedule? any changes or shift or would how do you are we on track with that come back to the 16th where where do you see our budget schedule going

I'll defer to our CFO uh did you have a specific question about any particular item and I'm sorry as you were saying that I was trying to pull up the budget schedule so there's you know midyear review um in that schedule just those points that it had for the 3rd the 16th March and any significant changes or how do you see that schedule being implemented?

No, the only the only change at this point that we're expecting is that we'll of course the the third has already passed. We'll be delivering the midyear review at the next upcoming meeting on the 17th. Everything else we plan to be uh we we expect to be on track. You will note that we do have some dates there that are like backup dates in the event we we don't make it. We we prefer to be early, but we always like to be do a backup. Like for example, we plan adoption at the first meeting in June. that gives us a backup as the second meeting in June so we don't have to plan a special meeting should things really go ary. Okay. Um I'll kind of pause I'll pause there and go around. Um, I have a couple of bullet points that I just want to touch on, kind of put in front of council. And then, um, as well, I think mindful of I think we're looking for is if there's any key shifts. I think this this discussion session we have for the next hour isn't really about necessarily key pivots or making absolutes decisions. It's really, I think, for the five of us to kind of say, "Hey, this is a bit on my agenda. I'd like us to look at that and uh that way all five of us hear from each other and hear the same stuff about what you see coming in this next year. So with that uh and I I hate to say I just need to step away for a second use the restroom but if um Dennis we want to start with you of uh any items today that we saw or your kind of bullet points or questions or thoughts you had for this coming year. Uh, if we're going to talk about items amongst ourselves,

um, well, you I'd rather I'd rather do it with you in the room instead of outside the room. So, why don't we take a short break before we start doing Okay, we don't want a 10-minute break. So, it's not it's not everybody. You're in charge. We have the guest. Let's just take a three minute break to use the restroom if anybody needs share that cup of coffee and we'll be right back.

I appreciate that.

That was a nine-minute break, not 10 minutes. Great. Okay, so with that, we left off. Um, again, and I and I thank you, Councilman Maderas. Yeah, it's really of amongst the presentation today, topics, agenda, what we have this next f fiscal year. It's a discussion amongst council members. And so I'll start with you, uh, Mr. Maderos. Um, from my standpoint, the things I want to emphasize in reality are completion of projects that have been around a long time. um dating back to when I was first sworn in. When I when I was uh first sworn in on this council, the stoplight at Prosperity and West was mentioned and we were already starting to talk about that and that was uh right now seven years ago and uh we're still in a position to where um Edison's moving poles, T lines, you can go right on down the line. The one thing I do know is we don't have a stoplight there. And I've almost been a proponent of hiring extra police officers to as part of their duty every day go out there and direct traffic and uh and then they have time to do other things through the day. The second um which was an issue when I first started as a council member was completion of the Bella Oaks and Mooney project. I'm more encouraged about that because we not only uh are moving forward, we're getting the engineering costs, we've got it fixed into budgetary uh items. I'm I'm confident that that's going to be completed. Uh last thing at this time around um

I'd at least like to see the uh groundbreaking fairly shortly on international agent away and that means getting out to bid getting last stages done. uh every meeting I go to the the uh as an ad hoc committee member of the international aggra center board the same question comes up where are we at the the original goal was that when the overpass was done our road would be done well that's not going to happen now and I certainly would like to see international agricway done by next year's uh uh a show and we should absolutely absolutely make that a priority because of the economic um income that our show brings to the community and and we we reap a benefit of that and we've got a uh public private partnership that uh can be fragile if we don't deliver. So that that's an absolute priority that I think we should uh uh consider.

Would you like Michael Miller to speak to that or no? Sure.

Kind of I think in looking at time and kind trying to keep it elements of five minutes a piece because that allows kind of I think to come back twice. Well, if you would like maybe what I could do is I could put it in a weekly report. It's now it's f it is four minutes 30 seconds now. Quick quick question. Well, I just want to make sure between you and Councilman Sagala the three of us get a chance to speak too. So, let's talk. So, so Miss Go ahead.

I I can be very very brief on Prosperity in West Street. We're still looking to put that project out to bid to construction um this next month, like within couple weeks. So, at least we'll be starting the construction process. Um regarding International Agra Center Way, we had a meeting with the environmental consultant and CALR and TCAG staff. um to do the initial project kickoff to just kind of talk about the scope of the required studies. It went very very well. Um it was obvious that our consultant knows the process very well. Um there was good uh good feedback from CALR. So I anticipate that's going to go well. We don't have a schedule yet, but that'll be the first thing they prepare.

And you you gave me one and three. What about two? Two. Uh we recently were contacted with CALR. It's going through the permitting process. They're trying to get their encroachment permit for the work. Um, that's a lengthy process. They have initial plan review. That's kind of the stage we're at right now. Thank you.

If I understand one of your your questions was possibly a groundbreaking like groundbreaking ceremony amongst is I think that's what I took of one of the things you were looking at as well. Is that something is that part of your question or something of when we can look to maybe at least have that type of ceremony? Well, I I groundbreaking ceremonies mean you're at the point to where act you're actually doing something and uh uh we're not ready to have a groundbreaking on any one of those three. So, that's kind of uh an indication of progress. Council member Sarah.

So, uh, glad to hear that, uh, the light at Western Prosperity be going out to bed because that's been longer than seven years, uh, that we've been waiting for that project. And I know that it's all kinds of layers of uh, complicity as well as participation by many other entities that have made that uh, such a difficult project to bring to fruition. So, I hope uh I'm still alive when that happens. Uh the other thing that I had on my list, of course, was a very short list, but I'm concern I'm not concerned about, but I'm anxious to hear when the library will be demolished. Uh I know Manny had told me it many times that was going to occur uh long ago, that that was the next thing in the project list to uh to have that happen. So, I'm I'm wondering what's what's happening there. uh to have that then open to the project that we're going to work for senior housing. That's a concern. Not a concern, just I'm interested and want to know where we are at that at that point.

And I can address that when you're ready.

Sure. And then of course number one for me has been the women's clubhouse. Uh the every delay um puts forth the the possibility of deterioration and uh more more money to you know financing to bring that property up to uh if it's when not if when it is designated as a historical uh property within the city. Uh, I know that will allow us to to um eliminate some u constructional restraints that might um be upon that property if it's not designated a historical property. And then also the shelter um the work that we've done for the unhoused. I've been highly engaged in that. Uh yesterday we interviewed uh five five really qualified and excited people to be the administrative assistant. We have the uh lead navigator hired. We have the not hired because we haven't it's not finished but in the in the whatever that is to be hired um the three navigators as well. And so that's moving moving along really well. I'm encouraged by the quality of people, their dedication and passion to the unhouse. Um, so I'm looking I understand it keeps getting pushed back and now it's April that it might be completed and ready to start the work on. So from from December to January to February to March to now April. Uh but you know I understand that as well. But uh those are my priorities and the time I have left um on council is to see the women's clubhouse uh designated as a historical you know the word I can't think of as but uh what's the word I'm trying to think of?

I don't know. But I am relieved you said on council when after the time I have left. Yes. Because I was concerned there at a point that oh when you said oh I may not have left. Yeah. And who knows we only have today. Um anyway those are my three concerns that I want to continue to be the the um pain you know the what is it called? The yeah somebody's pain in their side or whatever to see that uh that those come to fruition. And I think getting the library demolished is really important that we can we address those real quick. We can knock them off. Yeah.

So the library demo uh it's getting the the testing that has to be done. The environmental testing is going to be done next week. Um then we have to let the results we have to post the results for two weeks and then we'll get the final quote for the demolition and we'll schedule the work in March. I can't give you the exact date yet because once we get the final quote we'll have the date. But that's where we're at on that. On the uh shelter, we can't control all the delays. you know that we're all frustrated but it's life and on a woman's clubhouse. Do we have any sense of when that's going to be designated? We can bring it up at the next ad hoc committee meeting uh which we will have here in the next couple weeks. Thank you. Thank you. So check check

vice mayor.

Thank you Mr. Mayor. U of course my number one is station number four. I'd really like to see that thing. I'd like to be there for the uh groundbreaking and also the ribbon cutting and the push in of the first unit. It's been on the books for quite some time. I'd like to see that completed. The other issue is u the traffic issues at Mooney Foster in that area with the addition of I think 86 more homes are going in and then another 140 or something like that up on Mooney and now the new sports park uh the traffic congestion there uh is just unbelievable. So, what we can do with that and something that u I don't believe it's been brought up before, but I've thought about the possibility of maybe looking into moving the animal services to a more centralized location in a bigger area. It's kind of out of the way. People have trouble finding it. Maybe if we had it in a more centralized location, we might be able to get some more animals rescued out of there. I know like Portervilles is almost is right downtown. It's a great looking facility. something along those lines. Those are my really priorities right now along with still, you know, getting Paige Avenue done, which is going to be a nightmare when that uh gets started. I'm glad that Michael's the one that's going to have to deal with it.

You can address all those really quick if you like. Uh but can I make a comment? Is it fair to say when you're talking about the traffic issues on Mooney and in that area, you're also talking about Bars Lane near Barsley also? Yeah. St. Rita, the new St. Re.

And I wasn't aware until I forget what it was the other day that uh Thomas mentioned that Morrison would be coming down and also coming in into Mooney Boulevard. It's it's so impacted. It's uh and they all they all that whole area just ties in together. So, whatever we do to leave it, we know that Barsley is going to have to maybe four lanes might help a little bit, but uh it's going to it's going to take a lot more to get that area cleaned up. Yep. In terms of fire station, the next fire station, you saw the presentation from Chief the other day. As long as you don't pass away anytime soon, you should be at the groundbreaking. terms of the traffic, Mooney Foster, uh, Paige, Barsley, we we gave you guys last year the whole Southeast Taller traffic plan in terms of the things that we want to do and how we want to go about it. It's only coming down to money. If the sales tax measure passes, then we can bring forth the exact plan in terms of the implementation and timeline and schedule, which I don't have that in my mind. It'll have to be here's our thoughts and then you guys will have to vote on that. Uh, interesting you brought up animal service relocation. You're going to see in my weekly report today when I you hired me, I told you from time to time we have to be evaluating well actually annually we have to evaluating our level of service and how we provide it. Do we lower level of service? Do we increase level of service? What are the costs associated with that? Uh do we consolidate services? Do we privatize services? All of those things we should always be looking at. I will be telling you in the weekly report today that I am going to be moving forward with two uh strategic plan and efficiency studies. One will be for animal services and one will be for the library. And those that there is nothing preconceived notions into those studies. The per the purpose of those studies is look we have two operational things that I've heard. We have vested interest in their success and we have we have citizens that are very actively

involved with a lot of different ideas. We hear from them all the time about all this stuff. Let's bring in a third party consultant to look at our operations in both cases and advise on us. You know, are we doing things efficiently? Can we do them better? Should we expand services? What are the costs? Should we relocate them? Those that just happens to be those are two that are going to be coming to you today in the weekly report. I think that covers all of it. Thanks. Good. Thank you.

That's awesome. I think just following up like you said and as Mark had said the southeast master plan I think one of the parts what you had said Mark and Michael if I remember in the in the past a layman's way to say was that Oakmore actually cutting on the far east side was to be like the far east Mooney Boulevard that Oakmore is to tie all the way back as it curves around a center comes up all the way the east side goes up to Tallery Avenue. But that was the plan and in the infrastructure which I think that's going to be in front of us Mark if I remember that though it's also it's going to take our commitment or decision from us because it's going to be money like what as that whole infrastructure but that ties in I think to the CFDs it all plays a role with that money money. Yeah. Is that Councilman Seagull?

Before I kind of share some of the the ideas, Mr. Mayor, I just wanted to get your perspective on what is the realistic goal of some of these things coming to fruition. Um this is my 10th year or ninth year on the council where we've gone through uh a lot of these types of various strategic planning sessions and over the years you know these bullet points have accumulated uh and they're on a document somewhere but they sometimes really don't go anywhere. So what I'm trying to understand is in terms of your vision under your leadership, how realistic is the dedication to these council priorities going to be to move them forward? I mean, I've talked about a community garden in the past. You know, we've we've had good conversation, but then it goes that community garden concept gets put into some other effort, doesn't really come to council for the true intention to talk about it. Uh there's been a number of things that I proposed, a lot of us have proposed that are look pretty on a piece of paper, but I'm just trying to get an idea of what you you feel is going to be the realistic dedication given all the other priorities. You know, we we have great projects, we have achieve it uh coming in to kind of help us with that. I just don't want to throw things out there and then a year later I'm back in the same boat. So, what is your vision for that? I think part of that is it's a group element. Uh there is no one person that is going to either be a hero or necessarily be a deterrent is it's us as five in our discussions that that's with us. Um we give that direction work with the the city manager. So coming out with bullet points and that's what this discussion is is about. Um, it's the

five of us. If there's past items, where are we at with this? What's this going to happen? What's to be fruition? This is the chance amongst the five of us to to be able to do that. Um, we can't three people get together at Starbucks and there's things that we know we can't do to discuss about it. Open open engagement. And I think part of that sagallet is the leadership that I can take is in meetings like this is we're trying to get the group unified. Uh this is what I'm looking towards and maybe that answer is not today but council members this is what I'd like to have on the agenda. This is what I want want to keep in front of us and the conversation needs to continue. So here really it is the influence I think the directive a bit of the vision ideas to share amongst the council members and at the same time is the council members might have a different viewpoint on it that perhaps plays the role but this is the open forum we absolutely love uh your input ideas hey council I'm curious about this six you know maybe you have items that have been on there for five six years. Yeah. What's what's that look like? That this is a complete time for us to

and and I appreciate that because I think for me it's it's it's when things get brought up and there's a consensus of three votes, you know, for me that's very important to get to get the three votes on anytime. As you guys know, I bring a lot of things to council and many times I don't get the three votes. But when I get those three votes, I just want to make sure that there is going to be a dedication, whatever that looks like, to making that happen. So, um, so that's in general. But let me get to just quickly the priorities. So, for me, the priorities that that I want to focus in this year are going to be general. Um, in terms of uh the westside economic development, you know, we've talked about the inor corridor study. We've did the westside economic development study. I have proposed annexation of property and reszoning of property on the west side which um I'm hoping it comes to council so that council can decide what to do. I appreciate the city manager sharing his thoughts on what it should should happen, but if a council approves something, it should come to council for final say uh investment in youth and uh definitely to refurbish the parks uh operate or account that would allow us for operation and maintenance. Uh, I know that the the diffs were under a deadline and the $5 million had to be used for Zuma Park, but I would like to slowly but surely begin to refurbish that park account um over the years to make sure we have money for our local parks. Uh, and then just to excuse me, additional green space on the west side. So, those are my general um priorities. uh I will uh over the year work with specific council item requests, budgetary requests, policy requests to try to achieve them. But uh I'm I don't want to start putting out, hey, I want to build this. I want to I like to see that happen because

I would rather generalize it because I just hate keep seeing I hate to keep seeing those bullet points on those on that sheet for years and years and years. All right, so I'm going to address that just like I've addressed the other council members. Uh, council member Sagala, if there's specific things that council members have given you three votes for to move forward, please provide that list to Melissa, the date when that occurred, and I will immediately move on those items. I think sometimes you think those things happen, but they don't happen. But I'll be happy to address any of those that that is the case. Some of the things that before that, I think uh I entrust staff to do that, but I don't know what you're talking about, so I need help. Let me give you an example. You have to help.

Well, let me give you an example. The city the city council approved that we consider that we agendaize not to not to do it. We've been through that discussion. I understand that. But it hasn't come back. We that but it hasn't come back. Hold on. We uh we approved that the council decide whether we annex and reszone property on the southwest corner of Barsian West. Council said, "Yeah, bring it back to council and then we decide how to move forward." you have decided

or that part it has it has been determined that because of other factors that should not come to the council and so all I'm saying is I would prefer that everything come to council if there is a staff point of view that wants to um encourage the council to go one way or the other that's part of the process but I would like for those things to come to council another example combo bicycle lanes. It it had been brought up, but then it got incorporated into the ATP. I don't know where the initial request to uh um identify additional bicycle lanes, stripe them, make them sa safer is that it gets incorporated into other mechanisms and I just would rather have it come to council and council be told, hey, we we recommend this this or that and that for me would take care of my issues. So, so that's those are two things. So my direction to my

Mark please let let me speak.

So with this and what I I want to prevent is a a debate that goes into the issue especially with city staff is I want to take your question towards us as as council members. So you mentioned two uh approval of annex council gave the update for votes. So with that one is what I understand is much what you touched on is that they're incorporated into projects. council members, we get updates when we meet with the city manager and and we're talked about and we go through that project. You sharing today is what I asked for that if you're frustrated by that. I what I'm looking for is not you're frustrated directly at staff and then staff debate counterproactive with that issue. You bring it to us. I think for us to be aware and for us as council members as you're saying, hey, okay, we hear that, we have that on our agenda and then I think as we move forward and in our staff meetings and you've presented that to me, we can talk with the city manager. Where's this at? Where's that incorporated? U as for us, I don't Yeah. before. I'm confused. When you talk about annexing property at Barsley West, that property is already in the city of Talleria. What are we talking about? It's not the southwest corner and all that is not in the city proper city property lines. It's where that little house is at. That is all county that.

So, we can get some clarification of exactly that property. Okay. The next one when you talk about bike lanes we did have I say we the council did get a presentation it was mentioned about the you know putting in the transportation plan I don't have exactly all the notes in front of me I'm just you know chatting with you on this issue I I feel that the bike lane issue remains in front of us we're working through it mindful again is that comes to us it's in front of us it's on the agenda I'm not aware that any one of us had said no knock off bike lanes, knowing not we're doing it, but it does work in timing and it works in project. So me as mayor in hearing that in the updates that we have, I have that on the list and Councilman Sagala will keep that information in front of us. I not I'm not aware that we aren't doing it or that it hasn't been a in front of us, but surely we keep that on our discussion points with the city manager and keep the council updated on bike lanes. Do you have any other points? um get back to my bullet points that I have as um one of the the items which has been in and council members that has been in front of us and we've worked through is I've mentioned about light improvements to our adding additional lighted service amenities in the community. Um, we had improvements at Live Oak and but in the 40 years since really 1987 when Live Oak was park built, we still have three which is Centennial, Cyprus and Live Oak Park is the three city uh facilities that we have for that. The

school district has others. We have a softball complex that's used for softball. the the point like is as perhaps we move in the future of keeping this uh light services available for youth recreation, public recreation is perhaps Bender Park and then also uh possibly considered the girls softball facility. Both those there are two geographic issu areas of the city. They facilitate many uses, but Bender Park and the softball also have other agencies that we could partner with and collaborate with. Nobody's nobody has said no that we're not doing this, but it's also not an agenda item. I'm just talking out loud that as we work through CIP and we work through projects, you know, over the year, next year, I would like to keep um expansion of lighted facilities um in front of us. Um, along line, uh, the high school district is moving forward to build a a girls softball facility right next to their baseball facility on Barsley Avenue,

which is in the general area that you're talking about. to the extent that partnerships can be created. One of the issues they have is an irrigation line with TI

that runs across uh their property and T has an easement but it's for drainage of the city of Terary. So it's it's somewhat of an and that line is collapsing. So, that's somewhat of an issue that's created a problem for the high school district uh T and it's going to create a problem for uh for the city of Teric just but that softball park on on the west side is uh moving forward. That's and that's good and I and I the part I think to be sensitive about is that what the school district builds isn't necessarily a community project. it's for the school district and for specific use by specific people. Um, relationships, partnerships are excellent. Um, and whereas like right now during during uh daylight savings time or area that we have is it's dark at 5:00 and to 6:00 and so many youth organizations don't have places where they can practice. They don't have lights. They lose that time of lighting and um it's a struggle. and how how as a community can we work through that? Um, again, just keeping that in front of the group. Another part which I I know we do and in front of us and I mentioning this of course is we're going into sales tax and others is uh I think continued support for our police department and I think of of us as a council uh really coming together I think in part of this strategic plan and working with the staff that they're doing of supporting strong goals and strong objectives of hiring our police officers. um from that is we've looked at where we need to go in positions. We've talked about that and of course keeping that um in front of us. Again, I'm not necessarily saying people would go is there something where we haven't said

that, but it's keeping that agenda in front of us of of really looking at from here to there of where we want to go in our police officer staffing. And then another one we that I've mentioned to the city manager just in discussions and I put in front of us here is um keeping the development standards in front of us. Um mindful I think when we talked about CFDs but others is that overlapping planning and I'm being general here. Vicelia seems to have good overlapping maps. So over this area that we have, they put a a map over here's the road infrastructure standards, here's the development standards. They're working through that and as we're having development on the west side to the north, you know, in all areas around our community of us of uh I think coming in front of us and are we all on the same page for what we want those development standards to be? uh corner elements, aesthetic designs, passroughs, lighting, neighborhood parks, community parks. Um the reason I say that so what why would I mention is there some sort of gap is that as we are developing so many pieces to like the southeast corridor and especially as the the westside development how those core transportation elements but also those core perhaps standards from one development to the next that the walls are the same there's there's cont there's continuity amongst that and from what unless I'm totally wrong. Mark, feel free to correct me. Is but those do need to be updated. There is improvements that need to be made and that that is on the schedule to be in front of us over the period of time. I'm just kind of talking to council members to be mindful of that. Would like that to stay in front of us and I know you have shared a schedule for that. Um, but there are priorities that I think we need to push because as development

comes in and we see what's on the map and and as Jennifer has shared, we have all this development coming forward. One of the things that this is just Patrick's concern for it is because as commercial interest rates and others fluctuate at the federal level, as those interest rates drop, movement of money is going to shift and then it's going to be, I think, a huge push towards development. Uh, now is the time to build those homes. Now is the time to build that commercial development. And I'm really concerned. I don't want another Bargley or like an Ino where it's so hodgepodge on on its improvements. It's just keeping that in front of us. Okay. Uh, Mark, any other comments or council members from what we have shared, anything else you would like to to touch on? I I want the time for us because as we get into meetings a lot of times and we can't be here we well I say we can but we don't like to be here till 11 o'clock. It's given us that chance to kind of collaborate. Uh I think what we have in front of us uh amongst bike lanes women's clubhouse and some of these decisions there's going to be pushpull factors amongst the five of us of if we're doing this what's going to happen there. You're going to give us fiscal analysis and uh again at least that belonging that we understand the roadmap and so we're all together a bit on that roadmap. We might debate timing and we might put one project in front of the other, but I do want all council members to at least see, okay, this is the road map. This is what we have

and I think it will be a big part of achieve it will help us with that road map and I think it'll help us for future councils as well. The only thing I was going to say was it's a lot of information today, but getting past that u I I talked to quite a few people from other cities and their councils and I guess it'd be kudos to us that so many of them say how they wish they had a city council and staff like we have that, you know, we may disagree on stuff, but at the end of the day, our decisions that are made are for the best of the city, the people of the city of Toary, that uh when people say, "Well, how's everything going at your city council meeting?" They say, "Well, we only had two people in the audience, as a rule, and unless we're doing presentations." And so many times I say, "Gee, wish we could sit our city council over to see you guys how you work." It's uh compared to what we had previous to uh Jose and Dennis and Terry coming on board and it's like day and night. But I just want to say that it's such a joy and a pleasure to work with such an outstanding group and I mean everybody staff everybody that we get the job done. Sometimes I'm concerned that maybe we might be overburdening staff with some things other than Melissa. She could handle anything we throw at it.

No, we couldn't get along without Melissa. But uh I think we do a great job. We have one interest and one common interest and that's the people at Absolutely.

Yeah, I I agree with that. And I think today for me has really impressed upon my thought thoughts is the s systematic um movement forward. I think you know we're at that place where we can really look at systems and processes and bring things into a coordinated effort so that when we talk about something we say here it is in the strategic plans. It's down here in the the process of accountability. No, it's in the structure. It's but it's under the umbrella of of the system that we're trying to work. I I too have really enjoyed working with this uh this council and our city manager and I'm I'm excited about looking at the strategic plan um the efficiency of animal services and just really gathering data and evidence that we can base our decisions on which I think helps us to be even more systematic and more focused on the needs of of our whole community. So this has been really a good session for me. I I did have a couple of action items and I'm sorry was one um and I know he's here Mr. Beck is here. Uh we had presentations discussions about youth youth commission bring back teens on board um and and Mr. Mr. Beck had presented a great structure to it and said hey let me know about that. So I'm just kind of sharing is I'd like to get back with staff that the ball was in my court and I I did not facilitate that. So I'd like first of the year it's my goal of getting back with staff and getting that in front of us. Um and this one which um other thought of the council members of putting this in front of us is we have a city manager review uh process with that but throughout the years is also the other employee for

which this council hires is our city attorney and putting up forward a city attorney review schedule. Mario that's no preemption nothing bad but I think for us as a council to come and and get that process um going and and in front of us. So, if we can have that on our agenda in front of us, too. Um, with that, just Patrick, really quick, under the youth commission, I don't recall if this was a council vote, but I would ask you, I don't remember all the details of this. I apologize. I remember us talking about it in the pros and cons and how does it work best? Could you put this as a a council agenda item so you can get your peers to support it? Is that possible?

Yeah. Would I and I'm sure the clerk can go back. I think what council did approve was looking to put this together. Okay. what exactly that is. Let us pull them. Let us pull the Yeah. Yeah. Okay. What would you I make sure I didn't misunderstood you. Okay. Yes. Dennis is just saying make sure to cross my tees and dot my eyes. Yeah. Yep. Okay. Anything else or anything else from staff? I know I'm between you and lunch hour, aren't I, by saying that?

No. Nothing to report. chief for anybody anyone from the I'll go back to the public those that are in the chambers does anybody have public comment towards what we've heard discussed here today okay mir do we have anyone on the phone all right well with that then if we are ready all right I will journ our strategic special session