Board of Commissioners - Regular Meeting

All right, good afternoon, everyone. It's 2.30. I'm going to call the meeting to order. I do want to put everyone on notice. I know we have, well, actually, let's just start with the introduction. I will tell you we're going to be going into closed session just to give everybody a heads up, but what we'll do is introductions first. We'll start with the clerk, and then we'll do the pledge of allegiance.

Good afternoon, I'm Susan Rodriguez McDowell, and I am elected by the people of District 6.

Good afternoon, I am Mecklenburg County Commissioner Elaine Powell, representing Huntersville, Davidson, Cornelius, and North Charlotte.

Good afternoon, I'm Laura Meyer, and I represent District 5.

Good afternoon, my name is Lee Altman, County Commissioner serving at large, and I also have the privilege of serving as Vice Chair.

Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Mark Jarrell. I've been elected by the people of District 4. I also serve as chairman of the board.

Good morning. Good afternoon. My name is Vilma DeLeak, and I represent the most powerful people in the district. It's District 2. Welcome. Glad you're here.

Good afternoon and welcome. My name is Arthur Griffin. I have the pleasure of serving as county commissioner at large.

Good afternoon. My name is Yvette Townsend Ingram. also known as Commissioner YTI, serve you at large on the Board of County Commissioners. I can't hear you, I'm sorry.

Good afternoon, Leslie Johnson, Deputy County Manager. Good afternoon, Michelle Atreid, Deputy County Manager.

You guys will join me for the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. All right. Thank you, everyone. We are going to go into closed session, and then we'll come back and resume with the agenda. But at this time, I'll entertain a motion to go into closed session and consult with the attorney. Moved and seconded. All those in favor, say aye. Aye. Opposed? All right. We'll prepare the room for closed session, then we'll come back to resume the agenda.

Aaron, great to see you. You are recognized, ma'am.

Thank you, Aaron and Mark. So colleagues, I just wanna remind us to look at it certainly for feedback to the proposal. The way we're gonna do this first round is going to be, we're gonna go districts first in this round, and then we'll go to our at-large colleagues. We'll start with Commissioner Powell.

Thank you. Thank you, Aaron and Mark, for your presentation. And I'm guessing that Energy Ed had a lot of work in the analysis part of this.

I want to recognize him because I can tell by all of the projects recommended for a mission that he was really, really being detail-oriented. I appreciate that you're talking about the new technology that will be coming forward because there are things that we probably don't even know of. And I know every year that I've been elected, we keep hearing about the need for more efficient battery storage and how helpful that will be in the future. I have heard of many municipalities shifting their carbon goals. So today's kind of disturbing to me because we tried so hard to be realistic. You know, w

Yeah, we're definitely going to get some hostile words about changing things. And so we have to be smart with the dollars that we have. I'm just trying to think of the best way to say it because the environment is what typically always gets cut first.

Well, I appreciate you and energy, Ed. Thank you.

Let me first say thank you for the presentation. I had talked with you earlier about your initials passing out. My senior's understanding what it is to always spell it out for us. And again, thank you. And I'm looking at page 19 and I'm going to follow that through. So as I follow that through, if I have questions later, I'll come to you with those questions, if it's all right with you. So I can better explain it when we have a meeting with our seniors, if that's okay with you. Absolutely. That's all right. Is that all right with you, Mr. Chairman?

Thank you. Thank you for your presentation. All of these omissions, let's go see, are these just completely off the table or will they come back? We will revisit these in the future.

Thank you. Are we voting on this today? No. Okay.

Just feedback. We're just going to provide them feedback on the options. And there was a recommended option, so I suspect they would like to hear if we agree with that option or if we want to go with any of the other ones.

Well, I'm with Commissioner Powell. I'm very disappointed. I remember all of this, this whole conversation, and I agree. I know you all tried to be realistic, and unfortunately, this is realistic, and I'm just disappointed, but yeah, I guess I would have to listen to the experts on this, so thank you.

Thank you. Commissioner Rodriguez-McDowell.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Yeah, this is disappointing, but I do appreciate when we look at page 15, you know, the differences between between how much carbon reduction there is between the different options, it doesn't seem like, can you speak to what's the difference between 35% to 40%? What does that look like in real life? Any tangible thing you can speak to there?

I don't mean to cut you off, but I guess what I'm trying to say is... In reality, what is, like, can you speak to anything about the difference, you know, like, yeah, specific examples of what's the impact of 5%?

Well, before I run out of time, let me just say that I get how these, like putting on the PV, trying to do the deep energy retrofits to buildings that already exist, doesn't give us as much bang for the buck. But is our policy pretty much in stone that as we do create new capital projects, new buildings, that those buildings will be net zero buildings? Is that our policy?

Thanks so much for the report. Elected officials had a briefing at UNC Charlotte this past week, and there was a lot of talk about all of the money put into research to upgrade the energy grid and things of that nature. So one of my questions is, I wonder how closely or do we work closely with UNC Charlotte? Do we leverage that research in the decisions that are being made since they're taking in a lot of tax dollars that seemingly would go to improve our grid and energy resources and how we reuse those. So that's my first question. How closely do we work with them and how do we leverage that

All right. Thank you for that. And I guess my other question is just trying to understand, in addressing the scorecard and how we – do this and whether this is a cost-saving move. Why do we adjust the goal rather than setting a goal, letting it play out, and then seeing what the repercussions is, if that makes sense? It's like we're trying to hit a moving target and we're adjusting the goal to fit expectations rather than Are we adjusting the goal to fit expectations or to fit resources so that we can fix what we need?

Commissioner Griffin. Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and thank you for your presentation. I didn't have this in front of me, but just going through some of the slides, it looked like a lot of the projects under omission, a lot of older facilities, what appeared to be older facilities, like West Charlotte Center, Amy James, Valerie Woodard, Aquatic Center, et cetera. As you... make this recommendation for option C, what's the implication as relates to timing or scheduling of any of those projects on the CIP for future work? For example, if West Charlotte is scheduled for 2029 to be worked on, when we

I mean, I got that specific from you, but after working with you for... number of years used to always talk about we try to see how to maximize our funding and when we have a number of different issues when we work on a particular space so you know I'm I've learned that from you yeah you're right you're right yeah so I'm just saying if you are looking at West Charlotte not just for HVAC but other things and this energy-saving piece, and I'm just using it as an example, but projects generally, I would hope you'd go back and look at the CIP to see what the implications are.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner Altman.

Thank you, I appreciate Commissioner SRM's comments. I think they kind of encapsulated where my thinking is as well. Obviously, we are trying to do the most good with insufficient funds and we have to be really smart and strategic. about where we can get the most bang for our buck. So, you know, I appreciate staff coming forward with a recommendation because you have the global picture of what we're trying to achieve, understanding all of our obligations, and also trying to do the most good in this particular category. So thank you.

So team, I'm disconnected with understanding when we say there's essentially a 5% decrease, why does that cause us to have to push out to 2050? I'm missing that.

And I do believe that if we go with this option, we'll be, you're saying well above baseline.

Yeah. Okay. I'm sorry. I'm looking, I'm looking at baseline and I'm like, okay, So we would hit our goal by 2050, regardless? We believe so, yes, we believe so. Okay, thank you, that's helpful. So that leads me to making sure that future boards, what is the frequency that future boards should be tracking? I want a recommendation on what is a reasonable timeline for future boards to say, let's make sure that we understand where we're tracking towards the goal so that we know that we're on pace, if adjustments need to be made, if our fiscal condition changes, we can add to take away, but I wanna

Okay. Um, And, and commissioner Powell's like my expert. So, I mean, is that reasonable to say as we're, you know, if we're, if we're on pace for this to hit the goal in 15 years, so that I guess what I'm trying to say colleagues is so that future board members don't get into a position where, okay, then they're moving it out to 2060 and the community's blindsided.

That makes a lot of sense. That's helpful. Thank you. You're exactly right. And that's why we're doing the scorecard. I love it. Were you going to say something, Commissioner?

Yes. And I appreciate the county manager's reminder about the scorecard. And I want to tell Commissioner YTI that I loved your question because we hear that a lot. Like, well, if you can't do it, then you're adjusting your goal. And so you don't want to see that. And so how do we do it in an honest way? And I really feel like that's what we're trying to do right now in an honest way because it's so much harder. We really thought we could do this. People were mad that they didn't think that our goal was good enough, but we tried to be honest about it. And now it just, I think that EnergyEd and

Well, thank you. I appreciate that. And I definitely support option C, to be clear. And I thank you for your work and for presenting options. The manager, I mean, you have been committed to making sure that we have options available to us. I do think we should be transparent with the community as far as where we are and what it takes to get us toward our goals. And if we're not going to reach them, we should let them know and they should understand why. And so I appreciate it. So thank you for the presentation.

All right. Thank you, Michael. What we'll do this time is we'll start with our at-large colleagues, and then we'll go to districts in descending order. We're going to start with Commissioner Townsend Ingram.

Thanks so much, Mr. Chairman. Thanks, Michael. It was an excellent presentation, and I love... The actual magnitude of trying to pull all of that together in-house is monumental, and then trying to incorporate it with two other governing entities, I can't even fathom. I can't imagine. To bring it down to the granular level of where we are, and given what you're asking in the context of what you're asking, you're not asking for revisions or anything like that, I want to understand Because I love the Quality of Life Explorer. I think I've said many times I used to use it all the time. Now it's k

Okay, my time is up. I have so many more questions, but thank you. Absolutely.

So, colleagues, just remember, I know people are going to want to go deep and certainly have a lot of questions, but I think Pyle and Michael will make themselves available to all of us for additional questions. Commissioner Griffin.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman, and Mike, thank you for your presentation. My comments go to the county manager, basically. I like huddles. This is football season. You got the quarterback. You got Kelsey. You got everybody in the huddle, all right? And I think it's phenomenal. But the goal isn't the huddle. The goal is the touchdown. And what we often do is have a phenomenal huddle. You got Project Lift. You had, I wrote down, you got Home for All. You had Leading on Opportunities. I mean, Charlotte is very familiar with huddles, all-star huddles, from human call all the way down. And when I met wit

Before my time's up, I need a bell sound. Ms. Charlton, can you bell sound? You're done. No, you're done.

You over, brother. She forgot. Let me go to Commissioner Altman.

Thank you. I'm trying to remember the details. Once upon a time, Commissioner Jarrell, Chairman Jarrell was pointing out an initiative for sidewalks in your district, which it turned out the city was already doing and we were doing a greenway and it was somehow a wasted or duplicative effort. So I am not a proponent of consolidated government. I think it would not be serving the residents well. I think Mecklenburg County does its work well and we have a lane that we're in. That being said, we can make mistakes if we are not collaborating and we do need a regular framework to share information

Thank you. Commissioner Rodriguez-McDowell.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. So I was just noticing that it looks like maybe this started out with 35 entities, but when I look at the graphic, it's only 28. So I'm wondering, did some folks already drop off because, you know, they said... you know, like they weren't aligned or they weren't bringing it enough to the table? Like has some people self weeded themselves out? How did we whittle it down?

Okay, so there could have been multiple people from one entity. Okay, gotcha. And so, like, I didn't see Atrium on the list. I saw Advocate, but sometimes I hear Atrium and sometimes I hear Advocate. What's the distinction there? Do you have a sense of that? Like, is Atrium, you know, are they also part of it or is it just Advocate? Like, what's the deal there?

Okay, so they're just going by that new name is all you're saying?

Right, okay. You know, I'm just looking at these partners on here and, you know, I really hope, as Commissioner Griffin, I mean, I think his comments were just really right on, you know, that, you know, these are not new things. you know, efforts. But I appreciate that you're trying to pull them all together to pull in the same direction. And, of course, I support that. And I really do hope that, you know, we're able to have a different outcome.

Yeah, well, thank you for that. And I just want to just conclude by saying, you know, I'm profoundly disappointed in some of our partners that are on the list. And so eyes are wide open, you know, that they're not always going to come through in the ways that we need them to. So that's all I'll say there. Thank you.

Thank you very much. Thank you for the presentation. Thank you for your work on this. Really appreciate it. And thank you for all the energy around this. And thank you for bringing up Smith. I did not know that the Smith purchase was... born out of this, so that's actually really encouraging. And to Commissioner Griffin, I just loved your comments on we're really good at handling in this community, and I agree. We really are good at meeting. So I'm glad to hear that Smith was part of this, and I'm watching that go by really slowly. I know it's happening, but as you know, and you've gotten my e

Let me say thank you for the time you've put in, the energy that's gone. I think I've lived through this, heard it before. The quality of life and with whom are we making that reference to? Who are we talking about? We talk about the quality of life for people of Mecklenburg County. Who are we embracing in this process? Because we hear the community say we're being left out of, given pockets of community are left out of. I drive down to an area, four areas, twice a week, and I see my people, my young people, walking the street that have no place to live, number one. Number two, no job, no educ

But Mr. Griffin didn't stop, so I guess I'll stop.

Thank you. Thank you for your presentation and the hard work of you and your team. I can't imagine what it's like when you lay down at night, all the things in your head. But thank you for the positive intention of this. I think everybody loves what Commissioner Griffin was saying because of many historical flops. We spend years on things like Livable Mac and community area plans and Connect Our Future with Centralina, which I wonder why they're not on the list. I guess it was invitation on who would be on the list, but I feel like that's missing, Central Carolina. Anyway, because of all the h

Um, let me come back to, uh, and, and we're going to give you, uh, an additional minute each, um, commission towns in Ingram. Uh, if you want to, Rapid Fire, yours, and Griff, you got one minute?

I mean, I support it 1,000% when people come together. The potential is just phenomenal, the opportunity. And I say this wherever I go when I'm traveling. Charlotte has phenomenal opportunity in terms of the capacity. We don't always live up to that capacity or use that capacity. And I just hope, Mr. Manager, that you're the juice that we've been missing to make this thing happen this time, because the potential is just astronomical if we do it right and be a leader for the rest of the free world. I mean, the U.S. in terms of he is a community that has done it the right way, okay? So I support

Thank you. Commissioner League, one minute.

I commend you also for taking the steps to hope to bring about a change. I think about this song, a change is going to come, but when? And I support anything that you need for us to do to make it better. and you're brave to have done what you've done, and I support you 100%. And to see the picture of three lively people who head up a community and wanting to bring about a change in itself is enough to arouse all of us. But I've seen it, and I haven't seen it, and I still don't see it. Because people are still thinking the same way they did before they started out. Like they did in the 60s. It

Thank you. I want to thank everybody for the comments. Michael, thank you for the presentation and the work of the entire team. A couple comments. I think, Mr. Manager, you heard from... the board on what the expectation is. And I think you've addressed that. One of the things that I would say with respect to that, I think everyone is absolutely right that we have seen something similar within the community to a degree. I do believe that when I look at the list, to me, it's unprecedented, but it's also unprecedented, Commissioner Griffin, when you talk about being in the huddle. The worst thin

Thank you. All right. Well, thank you for that, Mr. Manager and all of our staff. Let's move to commissioner reports. I'll start with Commissioner Meyer.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. I actually do have a report. I just want to give a shout-out to Jenny Harper with our communications department. She did a phenomenal job with my mental health community meeting. She was so patient throughout. I don't think it's really an easy thing to work with an intergovernmental situation, and she did a fantastic job. She was very patient, and she has incredible organizational skills. And thank you also to Chanel Jones, who assisted... particularly that night, and everything went extremely smoothly, and it was all because of them. So that's all. Thank you.

I'm concerned about the condition of our community. And when I say that, I mean from the perspective from education, city council to the county. There are problems that we have yet to address and can't address, but that need to be addressed. So I pray that we will support our community and those who are in position to help us make it better. And I've never seen it this way before as it relates to the relationship and what's going on. So I pray that... Some changes will come and address the needs of this community as need to be. I couldn't let it go by without saying there are problems with us

Thank You mr. Chair just have a brief report I wanted to just comment on some of the activities that I've been involved in and Just welcome any community members that are listening to have more events like the one that Commissioner Jarrell and I attended yesterday with North Carolina Association of African American I'm sorry Asian Americans There was an advocacy day talk to young people Older people they're trying to figure out how to come together to get civic information civic opportunities to get more involved so that they can filter the information culturally to their groups of individuals

Thank You Commissioner Powell Thank you Turn my microphone on So I went to a development meeting at Torrance Lytle in Pottstown and who who was there but Commissioner Griffin and I I was happy to see the turnout. And the reason that I'm even bringing it up is Dr. Johnson couldn't come that day, but she was still there. And she's done such an outstanding job as a county representative, making sure that the community felt heard and really listened to every step of the way that even though you weren't there, I sent you a picture because you were there. So thank you for that, and we'll see who win

And so I'm really proud of our vote, and thank you for being. We're standing in the fire. It's a lot. Thank you for that. And tonight, if you're interested, there will be the State of Cornelius address from the mayor. So we'll learn about the State of Cornelius. And I think that is everything. I also love Jenny Harper and Rebecca Herbert. They're outstanding. So I'm glad you brought them up. Thank you, Mr. Chairman.

Thank you, Commissioner. Commissioner Rodriguez-McDowell.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I want to echo what Commissioner Powell said about our transportation representative. Thank you for keeping us informed, sending us all the updates. I do believe that it was a really difficult outcome last night and very disappointing outcome. And so now we have to just move forward. But I'm proud that this board stood with the people. And I really do appreciate that we can go forward with our same vote and stand against something that was really just completely out of the realm of what should be right in a democratic government. So I continue to be disappointed in our

Okay. Thank you. Commissioner Griffin. Uh, no report, Mr. Chairman. Uh, Commissioner Altman.

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I do have Carapo tomorrow night and so I just did want to share a couple things with my board members since I am representing you and the community tomorrow. And I appreciate what my, I thank you for the comments of my colleagues. It is difficult and disappointing outcome last night and I don't think it was necessary. I feel like if an alternatives analysis had been conducted when the rescind vote first happened, we would have had options and if Charlotte had undertaken legal action sooner, we would have had clarity about the constitutionality here. I was disappointed

No, thank you, and I want to echo what some of our colleagues said and all of us feel by saying thank you for your work, your commitment. I mean, you've been an amazing representative for this board, and I'm appreciative of our colleagues lifting that up. I do want to go over a couple of things. And so not only to Commissioner Altman, but to all of you all as colleagues, I want this community to know how hard you all work Any event that's in this community, there is a county commissioner that's going to show up or county staff is going to be present, bar none. And I will tell you that the comm