City Council - Regular Meeting

There we go.

I'm going to call this meeting to order this City Council Special Meeting and Budget Work Session. And I'm going to take a roll call at this time. Mayor Pro Tem, are you here?

Mayor Pro Tem? Kevin?

Should be. He should be joining us in a second. Mr. Joyner, are you here?

Here.

Council Member Andrews, are you here? Here. Council Member Lyle, are you here? Here. Council Member Santaguida, are you here? Here. Council Member Clinton-Quintana, are you here? And the chair's here. We have a call. We're here and accounted for. At this time, I'm going to turn this meeting over to our city manager, Ms. Halt. Ms. Halt?

Thank you, Mr. Mayor and members of council. There was a request to move a little faster through these Q&As. So we will do that, but certainly want to give them the air that they are due and also talk about some of these things to get them on the record. So we will scroll through these. I'm going to skip questions one and two because we'll be talking about them a little bit later. So if we can go down to question three, there were a lot of questions about the appeals for revaluation and sort of what categories that fell into. So I believe that the table also partially extends below Dylan, if you can see what's on the other one. So if you look at that, there are a number of active versus closed appeals that are in process. So all the ones that are active have not been settled yet. um the highest number was for um progress was single family residential that there are about 16 of those but when you look at the potential financial impact of these you're really looking at your apartments at some of the higher residential properties between one and five million in valuation as well as some of our industrial properties. And so it really kind of varies, but there is not a significant number of lower valued properties that are going through the appeals process still. So the majority of these are higher in value still to be settled. If you scroll down to close, these are the ones that have been settled. These were the determinations and where it landed. So out of the 40 closed residential appeals that were valued at less than $500,000, it was a total loss of about 656,000 spread across all 40 of those. But when you look down, the biggest one that impacts the loss of revenue because of the reduction in valuation is a residential property valued at north of $50 million. That alone, they reduced that valuation by 30 million, so that is about two-thirds, excuse me, three-fifths of the current appeals that are closed to date. And we will keep moving unless you all have questions. Again, just a request for the tax rate changes over time. As you can see, we have had increases as high as about 2.92 cents. But with revaluation, each of the start years, the tax rate has then been lowered. So in the past 10 years, we have been as high as 49.84 cents per 100, and we currently sit at 28.25 after last year's revaluation. Mayor, I know you wanted a map for this one that is still in progress, so we will get that to you just as soon as we have it. But the question was about which properties are exempt from property taxes within Wilmington. About 2.8 billion is federal, state, or local governments. As you look down, we have another 1.2 billion that are hospital properties. And then the others are some lower amounts. But the total amount of non-taxable property within the city of Wilmington sits at about $5.6 billion. You did get the map, pardon me. Surprise of the morning.

Is this it right here?

Yes, yep, thank you for that. I didn't realize that that had been completed.

The ones in green are the ones that are tax exempt?

That would be correct. Props to our GIS team for churning that out in like a day. That is amazing. So obviously UNCW takes up a large portion of that. That would be a large portion of the amount that is considered local, state, or federal non-taxable.

When you spread this out through, and I don't know if GIS could have done this, but when you spread it out through the entire county, would you say that the vast majority of it is in the city? I'm sure there's tax-exempt property, obviously, in the county, in the unincorporated areas, I should say, also, correct? Yeah, if you- But the vast majority of it, Would be in the city?

I think the question would be, how would you count some of that outer barrier island area? I don't know that all of that is really buildable, even though it's- Well, that's state-owned. Right. That's Masonboro Island's state-owned. Right, but just that it's out of city limits is what I'm talking about.

Okay, so it does give me a better view of maybe some of the county properties, too. Okay.

Okay, that's pretty significant.

Becky, can you go back to that list?

Sure. For the tax exempt or the appeals. Yep.

I have a resident who always mentions churches to me and them having tax exempt properties and not utilizing them to the benefit of the entire community and

So you've got about $357 million that is considered religious? Right. $357 million, wow. Thank you. Thank you. Again, that's tax value, so that's not

religious schools, educational religious.

Yeah. And then they were also talking about the little small churches and I guess most churches have some real estate and they do whatever they decide to do with the most just maintain them. They've been entertaining ideas about development and things of that nature, which I don't feel like they should be pressured to do that. But

So, I want to clarify my understanding on this, um, the assessed value of Wilmington is about 35Billion and about 5Billion of 5.5Billion of that is tax exempt. That's.

It would be on top of that.

So, so the 35Billion assessed value does not include the tax exempt. Okay. Got it. Thank you. That's what I wanted to make sure. Yes.

Okay, we will, instead of scrolling, Dylan, we'll get to Appendix A in just a minute, so we'll just keep going. Whoops, if you can go back to question seven, there was a question about when appeals need to be received that the line has passed. It was May 14th at five, so we do expect to have all of the appeals processed by the end of June, but that will of course be after we have adopted a budget. The total cost to outfit police and firefighters, it's about $37,400 for a firefighter recruit. And it is $192,000 for a police officer. A lot of that comes down to a firefighter is going to be sharing a fire truck. A police officer would have an individual patrol car. It's a lot of that difference. But yeah, everyone that you see driving around is about $200,000 just to get them rolling. Design and construction, this is a project that I know y'all get asked about a lot. So 3rd and Anne Streets putting a traffic signal there that is expected to be completed in November of 2026. So that is in progress. Looking at retirement, about 5% of police and fire are eligible for retirement within the next year and about 17% in the next five years, which is a substantial amount of institutional and community knowledge that we expect to lose through the natural attrition of retirement. New Hanover County's current minimum rate, we did say that that was higher. Looking at their pay charts, it does appear to be $17 an hour. I had a conversation with the county manager. This was some months ago, but he said that they had moved to a living wage a couple of years ago. So that's where we are, but they are still paying some folks $17 an hour.

Excuse me, going back to the 17, and I remember when we established that even here with what we did because the county had gone to 17. That's the minimum that we would ever pay anybody. Correct. Correct. So both governments have that minimum separate of 17 an hour.

And that includes?

And that includes part-time, temporary, I mean, everything. It does.

Looking at some of our hard to fill positions, this was pretty enlightening when HR pulled this. So equipment operators and some of our ITS, which is our traffic signal technicians, are some of our hardest to fill positions. They are open for very long periods of time. And when you look at our average pay for the people filling those roles, compared to local market analysis of what they expect the pay to be or what it is locally as well as the Bureau of Statistics for North Carolina, we are low compared to those. So part of the strategy in the proposal related to living wage is absolutely fundamentally about competitive wages and lifting the pay scales up. So that these base wages are listed in a way that are compelling enough that people want to apply. But right now they are low enough that we continue to struggle to get these positions filled. We were asked to look at extending the laptops to a five year replacement plan. And doing that would save $40,600. So we'll talk at the end about additions and subtractions to the budget. And this will be one that we'll talk about to see if council supports that. Unless you all know that you support it, we can jot it down and know to include it.

I think we should talk about it once.

Perfect. Okay, no problem. We will do that. As to look at where folks come from, very limited data. We only capture that in a couple of lots. I won't go through that just in the interest of time. But it is definitely a mix of local and then far, far away because we are very much a vacation destination.

So wait a minute. So on the text to park and on the parking decks that the city owns, most people that are parking, parking, you know, they're putting in their license plate. So they don't, they haven't captured all of that data to be able to show us.

So, so if you go into a parking deck, you just take a ticket and then pay when you're done. So that's not capturing the license plate with the current technology that we use. Chance, is there anything to add to that? I see you.

Mr. Mayor, so the question was, are we capturing everything, essentially? So we only use text to park in three areas of our parking system. Or two areas, really. The two parking lots, the old Ligon Flynn parking lot on 2nd Street, the Hannah Block lot, and our on-street parking. And out of those three, Texas Parks only about 42, 43% of those transactions. So this is just a snapshot of those transactions. In the parking decks, there aren't mobile payments. It's just credit card and cash. So we're not capturing that through our parking equipment provider.

So the parking program that we have, I think the same company that takes care of Carolina Beach, Wrightsville Beach. Correct. And other places. Are they doing a better job in capturing where people are coming from that are parking?

So they are managing the beach parking. I wouldn't say a better job, not at all. They are managing the beach parking in a similar fashion to our on-street and parking lots. So Surf City, Wrightsville Beach, Carolina Beach. Myrtle Beach, there's no structured parking. There's no gated equipment, which means there's no mobile pay being used at those locations. At those beach communities, it's surface lots and street parking, which is exactly what we're capturing here.

So they're capturing the data because they have to put in the license plate.

Yeah. Yes. It's only a piece. They're only managing a piece of our full parking program.

But the pieces that we're not capturing are the decks.

Correct. Correct. And this is zip code related, not license plate related. They're pulling the information from the zip code on the transactions.

Well, I mean, since we're a high tourist area, I think, to be fair to the council, because we have to make adjustments to rates from time to time. I think we need to make certain that we understand exactly where these folks are coming from because it has a definite impact. There are people coming in from out of town, which is a great thing, and they're spending money. have an issue with the 20 percent of sales tax revenue we're receiving as opposed to 50 of it saying that i think one of the ways to capture some of that back is what the beaches are doing which is capturing it back on their parking rates and i just i want to make sure that we're not harming our citizens but then i also want to make certain that the folks that are using the service we have a clear understanding of where they're coming from how much is it is it 50 is it 60 higher than what we think, but we can't capture it because we don't have the variable data here. Unless somebody has something else.

If you were to spread, if you were to assume within some percentage points of what we captured in on street and the two lots and spread it across, which is probably fair, it might be some up and downs with some percentage points. I would say that a hefty percentage of our parking transactions are local in the county city. Immediate area. I mean, I don't know the number if you scroll up They I think budget grouped the individuals that goes into MSA general areas But you can see the Wilmington number there by far exceeds the others and I think eight out of the top ten zip codes on that list that we pulled were city or counties of codes.

Yeah. We have to also look at it from the perspective is if somebody's in the county, the unincorporated areas, there's not a citizen, a city of Wilmington. and they're coming in, I consider that to be, when they're using the service, out of the people that have to pay for the maintenance of these parking decks and what have you. So I look at that as, yeah, they may be from the Wilmington area, because a lot of people have Wilmington addresses, but how many of them live in this actual city and how many live right outside the city limits? Which is one of the reasons we had annexation way back when, that we could capture that. uh, as a, as a community became more urban in nature. But that's of course, obviously that changed in 2010. So I just want to make sure that we're capturing it what we need to capture.

Yeah, we don't have the super granular in terms of county versus city. We can only see it by zip code right now. And that's that's a blend in some cases. So

So page 124 of the original recommended budget includes a $375,000 expenditure from the parking fund for upfitting technology and equipment for city parking decks. Are you going to be able to capture some of that with that upgrade?

Yes, sir. the intent would be to similar to skyline some of that we are pulling data from skyline because it's it's a gateless even though it's structured i forgot to mention that it's it's a gateless facility so they are using the mobile pay um and a portion of the intent of this of this technology upgrade is to go to more of a either gateless or blended gate and gatus gateless gate gated and gateless in our structured parking decks And in those cases, we would then activate mobile pay across the board where we see a solution. So, yes. Thank you.

Okay. Thanks, James.

Sure.

There were a lot of questions about personal immigration fees last time. There's some additional... information that is provided as well as what some of the reimbursement or assistance programs are that exist for that wanted to see if there were any additional questions related to fees for our parks and recreation

information provided in the table in that section and it said that there's a comparison of youth athletics and youth and adult single day events in 2026.

I'm sorry, do you mind speaking into the mic to get it recorded?

Physical year 2026. All of the youth athletic programs were conducted as listed in the youth athletics table. There were no single day event programs conducted in physical year 26. There was a regional basketball tournament planned, but not held due to limited registration. And it is projected that the New Gemma MLK Center becomes better known throughout the region. This type of single day event and others will become more prevalent. So again, my question is the disparity in that fee change compared to other successful programs, athletic programs that we may have throughout the city, like tennis at Empey Park, golf at Muni, things of that nature. It's still not addressing why such a steep increase.

The single day increase from up to 60 to up to 100 was primarily driven by staff wishing to host SWAC basketball tournaments. You're probably familiar with it. Those are statewide athletic competitions. And we benchmarked what other cities were charging for those basketball tournament registration fees, and they were $100. So that was the primary driver in increasing it from 60 to 100. But in the table where you see the bulk of our youth athletic programs, those we consider still very affordable at either free or up to $35 currently. We don't anticipate raising those. much this year but we do recommend having a range just in case there's an unanticipated new program through a grant or so forth and so that we give ourselves the flexibility to have a range of costs or expenses you said not changing them much so there's a there's the anticipation for some change just not much i would not anticipate anything that you see in that table to change and again i want to make sure that council understands there's there's a few different uh recreation athletic fees in the fee schedule and they're meant to address different things and so again the single day charge from $60 to $100 being recommended is for something like a basketball tournament with a team registration. The fees that you're seeing for our youth program that we run for athletics, I don't anticipate those changing.

Do we have pickleball tournaments there or outside?

We currently don't have pickleball tournaments because we recently built new pickleball courts, dedicated pickleball courts at Olsen Park and last year converted the tennis courts at Greenfield to solely pickleball courts. We have added a pickleball tournament fee to the fee schedule.

But there's a lot of pickleball being played within the city. We do know that, right? Yes. So are we capitalizing? Because we're looking at this saying, hey, we anticipate basketball tournaments returning to our facilities. But there is something that's happening that we could capitalize off of.

You're exactly right. And that's why we added that pickleball tournament fee to the fee schedule in our recommendations for FY27.

And there are several other successful athletic things that are taking place that we've only minimized the fee increase. And so my main concern, which since I've been on council, has been just the flow of the money that goes back to the facility. And so I would rather have seen that change than to see this increase that says, hey, this will support adding new employees or the fee structure that goes back to the facility.

So we also did increase that this year. So with youth athletic programs, we're recommending that 20% of those registration fees stay with the facilities where they're collected, such as the MLK Center.

Give me a dollar amount. Because you know, like I know, that that allocation was $1.

And that started at $1, I think it went to $5. And again, that's because there's a balancing act of we want to keep the youth athletic programs affordable. And we have an obligation to not decrease funding that was being contributed to the general fund by Parks and Recreation. So it's a balancing act of how much we can increase that committed revenue. We have a practice of any time we're increasing, recommending increasing fees, we correspondingly recommend increasing the committed revenue to stay with those facilities.

So the committed revenue at this point is $5.

We're recommending that it go to 20%.

Give me a dollar amount.

So for 20% of $35.

Is it at $5 right now?

I'd have to verify that. I think that's what it's at, but I'd have to verify that again. There's so there's so many different parks and recreation fees in the fee schedule. I don't want to misspeak.

So it would be 20% of any fee collected, which would be higher than $5 except for maybe 18 new basketball.

So if it's $35, it's $7 that we would collect. Mm-hm. That's correct.

Yeah, and the reason that the 18 year basketball is a little bit less than many others is by the time you get to that point, sometimes the child, 18 year old, is paying themselves instead of the parents paying. So that's why we reduce it when it gets to that.

That makes sense. Thank you.

And we are proposing to add staff to all of our recreation facilities so they will all have a minimum of two staff members anytime that they're open.

With the road races, you've got marathons, you've got triathlons, Rugby, you've got all these tournaments that play, some at Encino, some in different places. On the road races, because I know that takes a lot of staff time and it takes a lot of resources. How do we...

We collect $1 per registration for road races. And so that adds up very quickly. When you consider Ironman and the Wilmington Marathon, those have 3, 4, 5,000 participants. And then every 5K, every road race in the city of Wilmington, if it's on a public street, trail, greenway, sidewalk, we collect that money, $1 per registrant, and that goes to committed revenue. And we have utilize those funds for improvements that otherwise may have been delayed. I think most recently we used it for the study for safer improvements on Pine Grove Road near the golf course.

And that's in addition to what the race organizers paid.

The race organizers are also required to pay several different types of fees when they're submitting a permit application, that money goes to the general fund.

Okay. So in addition to those fees, we collect a dollar per register. That's correct.

I'd like to go back to the hiring of the additional staff for the recreation centers. Are we talking about full-time or part-time? I know we have one full-time person, but are we talking about part-time?

In total, it's almost four FTEs. I believe that one is part-time and one is full-time and the rest are part-time. One will be a floater. The recreation staff currently has one floater on staff, meaning that we can send that person to any of the centers. They're multi-disciplined. You know, if we need in a pinch to send them from Halliburton to MLK to Fit for Fun to Fitness Center, they can do that. We're going to add a secondary position just like that one. And then the rest would be part-time, and that is just, again, to add for flexibility. These people won't be necessarily assigned to one center just based on the demand that we need. So it makes the most sense to have the most flexible schedule for that person.

I'm asking, I'm asking because I had someone asked me yesterday, was that from a safety concern? But thank you for explaining. Yes. Yeah.

I did say yes, but I just wanted it on record. Officially, yes. We think it's important to have at least two people at every open facility.

Yeah. OK. Thank you.

Thank you. So I had a question a couple of weeks ago about the MLK kitchen. And I was told that because it didn't change, it wasn't in our Um, budget records, but we had the attachment of the full fee schedule and I couldn't find it in there either. Did I miss something?

There are fees in the fee schedule for the kitchen and there are not any proposed changes. Uh, we can get you that information while we're here point.

Yeah, just point it out to me. Sure. Okay. Thank you. I know that that was. a really important expansion for us as a city and as a Parks and Rec to have that both as an economic development tool for small businesses and for people offering a service to the community as far as classes and that kind of thing. So I think it's

Yeah, we're really happy, particularly since the winter to spring, the amount of activity that's picked up there. Programmatically, it's been a success from the beginning with nutrition and wellness classes from preschool all the way through to seniors. And that continues to thrive. And we're now seeing the business rental portion of it, which is the incubator portion that we were hoping for pick up. We have four regular rentals right now.

Let me just ask something really quickly.

Where are those classes advertised? Through the city's website and social media and email lists. Thank you.

So my question is this, as we go back to what, Councilwoman Clinton-Quintana said about the additional full-time positions. And when we look to add the two full-time positions, are we offering the part-time employees the option to go full-time before we bring in? Our current employees?

Yes.

Okay. Because I know a young man that, and so I'm not going to pretend that I'm unbiased about it, I've known him since he was a little kid. He's been spotlighted as an outstanding employee and he really gives his all at the MLK facility. And he's been a part-time worker for an extremely long time. And he works in two capacities, but they're both with children. So he worked with communities and schools and he also worked with us. Over the weekend, I was at the midnight basketball and he pops in after hours. I mean, he was, I don't know, I think he was freelancing as a photographer and he just came in and he ended up playing ball with the kids. So I think it's important that we do put an emphasis on the stability that can be received from working for us and putting precedence on getting him from part-time or anybody in that position because I know a lot of people that work for us and moving them from part-time to full-time where they can gain some. Stability, sorry.

Yeah, I know who you're talking about. He's a great employee. And yet, just so the public's aware, there's varying levels of part-time positions with the city, from 9 hours to 19 hours to 29 hours. So while a part-time person may not automatically go from part-time to full-time, they could change from a 19-hour to a 29-hour. And with that comes additional benefits. But it's been a long-standing practice in our department and I'm sure others to look internally to promote people in their current positions before we look externally.

Thank you. Amy, before you leave, I remember when we were finishing up the Labo Bank Pavilion and then we collected a certain amount of money per ticket through LabNation. And I always understood that part of that money would be used because it was in the park for recreational purposes. Is that money earmarked specifically just for Labo Bank Pavilion to make improvements there? Or can we use it in other park initiatives within the city of Wilmington? Is it just strictly earmarked for that particular venue?

Right now, the way it is structured, the city receives $2 for every ticket sold. One of those $2 stays with the park for landscape improvements, wear and tear, et cetera. The other dollar goes to the general fund. That would be council and city manager's decision whether they want to do something else with that dollar that's currently going to the general fund.

Well, I mean, I think, because actually, Labrador, Vancouver, it's actually a park that's created this park although the highlight is the venue itself but i think that on that dollar that we're collecting or that one that we're taking into the general fund from my perspective i think it ought to be used for parks and rec activities and to be used in other facilities because one of the things that we touted when we built this was the fact that we would be collecting a significant amount of money that we could then put in other park areas you know we had concerns about uh maintenance of some of our parks and now they're maintaining what have you or improvements to those particular parks so it gives us an added revenue stream and i know that we've said that in i think with lab nation for i think 10 years but it would be that's what i think we should do with that added revenue to kind of maybe offset some of these costs when we're dealing with improvements and what have you

What year of the Live Nation contract are we in? Seventh, I think seventh year. I believe 2019 was when we went under contract with them. I believe when Live Nation agreed to commit an additional $2 million, the original contract had them committing $2 million towards the construction. of the park midway through design they committed an additional two million in exchange for uh the a lengthening of their terms i believe their contracts 15 years i think we're in the seventh well i'm happy to explore what the mayor proposed but my my observation with live nation is that we're in a unique position when we're contracting with somebody who's got deep pockets

And I'm not certain that we should just tie up every dollar that we get out of them for parks only. I mean, I think that that's a revenue stream for the entire city. I think I'm happy with the $1 being committed to stay at that location for wear and tear. But before we make any hard and fast commitments with whether or not we're going to leave the second dollar in the general fund, I would like to explore that more. I'm really interested in what our relationship with Live Nation is. I've spoken with the city manager about this several times, and I think that we can leverage that for something better. It's strange, right? Because we have something really good. I mean, I think that we have a good partnership with them. I think they bring a lot of value. But I'm somebody who, I like to travel and go to live music performances, and I see things that are happening at other venues that these folks are major, major players. And even if we're getting something good, they need us too. They like this venue too.

I think that the city manager is planning on talking about this later in the agenda, so I don't want to suggest that we talk about it twice, but there is currently a study underway for improvements in upgrades to Riverfront Park and Live Oak Bank Pavilion. I think one of the situations that is important for people to realize right now is that because it is also a park and because the city had certain design constraints that we imposed upon Live Nation because it was important, to the city that it be a park and not just a concert venue. They have to treat it as what they term a festival site. So they are paying for offsite storage for a tremendous amount of their production and they have a lot of labor costs bringing in things, concert, pre concert and post concert. And so I think there's some leverage there too that if we're able to study the site and see if we can lessen the amount of offsite um, storage that, that they have and the impact that that could be something to look at.

And maybe the, the $2 fee also includes Greenfield, right?

Greenfield also has a $2 per ticket. Okay. Yes. And same thing there. A dollar of it stays at Greenfield and a dollar goes to the general fund. Okay.

Okay. We will keep moving. There were questions about providing additional school resource officers and whether or not that was our responsibility or the county's. I want to clarify that the county does provide a school resource officer to every school. The four that we have are in addition to the one. if you will, at some of the schools that were determined to perhaps need a second set of hands. So we do receive a partial reimbursement from the school system for those four officers. That number has not been updated in a long time. So I would say that as a percentage of salaries that it's covering, it is a very low percentage compared to when this agreement appears to have started about ten years ago was the last update we could find to it. So I think that there may be capacity as part of next fiscal year's budget to engage with the school system to see if that rate can be adjusted a little bit. But these are bonus officers and so I do very much support continuing to have them there. We think that they're a great asset to those schools. but also want to be very careful in pointing out that we do have a great partnership with the Sheriff's Office. We serve on multiple joint task forces with them. And so this is really another example of that type of partnership where they backfill some things that we would otherwise need additional staff to do as well. So it kind of goes both ways.

Thanks for looking into this. I think I'm the one that asked these questions, so this is helpful. I do think it makes sense once we get through this budget cycle to start talking with the school system about whether or not that reimbursement is an appropriate amount. Based on this explanation, I'm not interested in pursuing like removing officers or anything like that. But I do want to make sure that we're looking at this reimbursement amount and that it's reflective of current costs, not costs from 2016.

And while we're on this topic, with number 11, can we just get a quick definition of unified command structure?

Chief, would you like to define unified command structure?

Before we do that, I just wanted to stay on 10 for just a second and say that I think that it's fine to want to continue to support it, and I do. I think we need to still continue to pursue what we're asking for the taxpayers to support. That's really a county responsibility and looking at the equity of what we're getting reimbursed for.

Good morning. So unified command is a term used in what's ICS or NIMS national standards, incident command system or national incident management system. So the idea is basically if we have a large scale incident, let's God forbid, say like a school shooting, there obviously are going to be police resources there, there's going to be fire resources, there's going to be EMS resources there. The idea being that we would have a supervisor, a boss, a manager from each of those organizations that's involved physically together in one location so that decisions are not being made in a vacuum so that we know that Police officers are going here and we aren't having firefighters going there, EMS folks going there, and they're in conflict. So the idea being that the law enforcement folks are gonna be making decisions on law enforcement issues. The medical folks are gonna be making decisions on medical issues, but they're gonna be doing that with each other at the same place to make sure that they're not being counterproductive.

I appreciate that. And I'm certainly happy that we're following best practices from those, I guess, national and international standards. But my question is, you have two law enforcement agencies. So who is the lead? Like at the end of the day, where does the buck stop on site? Who is the chief law enforcement officer over that mission or operation?

How we handle the schools right now is that the primary investigative function is handled by the sheriff's office, and we support them in any way we can. Now, it doesn't mean our officers can't make arrests at schools. We certainly have jurisdiction there to do that, but they're the primary investigative function. But truly, if there's a critical incident, there's going to be a senior leader from each of those organizations, WPD and New Hanover County, and they're going to be making those decisions together.

I'm trying to decide if I want to. So here's my question, and you can tell me if now is the time to discuss it or if not. Evaldi, I don't know all the great details, but the narrative is that law enforcement didn't go in in time and they didn't engage the attacker in time. And if that's incorrect, I'm saying right now on the record that I don't have all the details and I'm happy to be corrected. But what I want to understand, and it doesn't have to be right this second, but what I want to understand is if for some reason there's a disagreement between the two law enforcement agencies about what the best course of action is, who makes the decision?

Yeah, I'd be more than happy from a technical and tactical standpoint to have that discussion with you. But I will tell you, I have got a great working relationship with Sheriff McMahon. My staff and his staff have great working relationships. As the manager mentioned, we have several task forces we work on regularly. I do not foresee that being an issue or a problem. We train together, we use similar tactics, but I'd be more than happy offline to talk that with you.

Thank you. To David's comments, I do remember when we had the incident in New Hanover High School several years ago when there was a shooting in the school. A young man shot another young man. And thank God nobody died. And I remember that whole day because our Chief Williams brought out our command center vehicle. The sheriff also has a command center vehicle also that was also brought there nearby. And in the command center there within our vehicle, the chief was there, the sheriff was there, highway patrol was there. Everybody was within that command structure was in our vehicle at the time. I think we had a newer vehicle. looks like an old bus but i'm not certain what it is but it seemed like the command structure there was within wpd's actual physical structure but the sheriff seemed to have taken the lead on that because it was on county property and the schools fall under his jurisdiction and i like the way the structure went because everybody went through the sheriff and the chief was right there i'm more interested in what i saw that day was the fact that the teams that um the police and the sheriff sent into the building to clear the building to make sure that there was no buddy else in there that was an active shooter or what have you because we didn't know at the time that's that seemed to have been a pretty significant team of individuals that went into that building heavily armed, very professional. Is that team made up of sheriffs and police that work together as a joint task force team? Is that how that works, operates?

Yeah, so every instance can be a little bit different, but what I'll tell you generally speaking, you know, Columbine was a pivotal moment in law enforcement, right? Because what happened in Columbine, if you remember, is police officers showed up, they stood around the outside of the building, and they waited for a SWAT team to get there. In the meantime, kids were dying and staff were dying and other things. So the tactics significantly shifted, right? And it's get in there and try to immediately stop the killing as quickly as you can, right? And so in that situation, literally, as officers and deputies are showing up, they are going to pair up and team up in whatever fashion they need to to get through that school together. you and I showed up and we're wearing different color uniforms and we're the only two there and we're still waiting for other people we're just going to go in you and I together right but obviously as we get more numbers than we there are other tactics we use and we're going to also partner again with our fire and our EMS folks because without getting into all the specific tactics we use right their tactics have changed as well right from Columbine days to make sure that we are trying to Minimally stop the killing and then secondly save as many lives as we can for those that have been injured or hurt. And I'll give you a really simple recent example. We had a protest a month and a half ago, two months ago, maybe a No Kings protest here. And in the command center for that was one of my captains, Elena Williams, who's sitting back here. and a senior member of the sheriff's office sitting literally next to each other in our sting center overseeing that operation with joint personnel involved in both and they were making decisions together on deployment of resources and how we responded if there were potentially any problems with that.

So you folks trained, because we had another incident a couple of, again, another about three years ago when we had an incident where somebody shot somebody at Wrightsville Beach and tried to kidnap a lady and her kids. That person ended up getting in his car, taking off, went into the city. The city then, of course, is part of that whole joint task force, I guess, trying to stop him. The guy gets out of the car. He's in the middle of Market Street. He's shooting at officers and sheriffs. I guess, which they had to take him down. So you folks, I'm sure, trained together on a lot of these things. Because I'm going back to the incident I saw when you entered high school. It seemed to be 100 individuals that went into that building to clear out the entire building, because they had to go from room to room, to the gym, to the cafeteria. I mean, it's obviously a significant campus there. And the same thing I saw at UNCW last year, when they had supposedly an active shooter on campus. I've never seen so many police and sheriffs in my life. So you folks practice this quite often?

Yeah, so certainly whenever possible, we train together. But even if we aren't training together, we're training on similar tactics. it is seamless that you know whether it's a uncw police officer a wpd officer a sheriff's deputy fill in the blank of any surrounding law enforcement jurisdiction which is why we also have an mou with all these areas so we can call them in that way we're using similar tactics to address that and that's pretty standard across the industry

So just out of curiosity, if it happens at UNCW, since they have their own police force, are they the lead command? Or is it because it's in the city of Wilmington? I mean, it's surrounded in the city of Wilmington. Would we be the lead command? How would that work?

Again, in a perfect world, we're going to have a unified command structure. I will tell you a lot of these events are chaotic. Some of the challenges you deal with is everybody wants to come and help, which is great. But some of the challenges you also deal with is everybody wants to come and help. And you get a whole lot of people there and we need to be doing what we call a PAR or a personal accountability report. We need to know what officers or deputies are where and what they're doing so that we don't run into what we would call a blue on blue situation. Meaning where we have police officers that maybe don't know other officers around the corner and they end up confronting each other. which is important for identification and making sure that folks are properly attired. But in those situations, technically it's UNCW's campus. They are the authority there, but they're also a smaller organization in terms of staffing and manpower and expertise in dealing with these things. So they could very well turn it over to us or to the sheriff's office if they chose to do that. But again, we're gonna try every time we can to make sure we get bosses from each of those organizations together. Thank you. Yep.

i just wanted to mention just to make it more complicated the august 2023 incident that you're talking about started in wilmington and there were yeah and the first victim was actually in wilmington right on lake avenue so um you know makes it even more complicated when they move in between jurisdictions and commit crimes in each of them very well remember thank you

Okay, there was requests for traffic count information. We got information from both the WMPO and then some more recent data. If you can scroll down a little bit, Dylan. There were also some point in time counts that were completed in 2025, fairly consistent between the two times. Uh, we will skip question 13 cause we're gonna talk about vision zero later. And then the final question in this group, um, is, um, uh, there were questions about city attorney's office and how their areas of specialization were distributed. And when do we, um, retain outside council? Um, so, uh, all of that is there, uh, for you to read any questions about any of that that was sent out previously. Okay. A couple of the appendices that we wanted to go over. This first one, again, thanks to staff who's done a tremendous amount of work pulling all of this together. So this does go over the combined tax rates of the largest cities in North Carolina by population and includes both the city and county tax rate. We are amongst the different areas. It can be as high as Greensboro at 1.4 cents per 100. So I guess it would be 140 cents per 100 would be their combined tax rate with 67.25 of that coming directly from the city of Greensboro. And we are notably lower than everybody else right now with a combined tax rate of 58.85 cents per hundred. And Charlotte is the only one with a lower city tax rate right now. But when you look at what one penny generates, which is $23 million, that's not quite apples to apples. Looking at jurisdictions local to Wilmington, Bergal-Leland, and Jacksonville, They all have tax rates that are a little bit higher than ours. So Burgon, Jacksonville, notably higher at 1.33 and 1.25 respectively. And then Leland is at 0.6120, which is a little bit higher than us. And if the proposed tax rate is implemented, it would push us just over them by about two pennies. Any questions on that? Okay. And again, different ways to call out the information, looking at what one cent tax, what one cent generates, looking at all of those communities. So again, lots of work by staff. Thank you for that. Okay. We also included the parks recovery policy. Just again, there were questions on that. I do want to do a check-in with council related to the parks fees. Is there interest in leaving them the same? Is there a desire to make a proposed change? Just want to make sure that we're capturing any changes to be made for what's brought forward on Tuesday.

I'm comfortable with the fees proposed in the budget. I don't know where others stand.

I'm not I've still got concern about that single day activity fee and the disparity.

Do you have a proposed number if that's different?

No I think as I said earlier just the the reallocation of the $1 or the potential $5. I mean, even if we change, if we keep the 20% aspect of the fee, but just not increasing the fee, the single day activity fee, everything else could remain the same. But if we change the reallocation, that's fine with me, the funding source, because I've been saying that for years and it never gains traction.

So the desire would be, so the proposal was to change it to 100 and your proposal is to bring it back down and keep it at 60?

Yeah, but just change the reallocation.

Okay. Just for clarification, sorry I came up uninvited, but we did not actually have a single event last year in that $60 single day category fee schedule that we're proposing to change to $100. Again, the focus of that is for tournaments. So changing any committed revenue for that event isn't really going to make an impact on committed revenue collection. So I just wanted to point that out. I did go upstairs and print out some pages of the fee schedule. We are currently collecting $5. So it would go from $5 to 20%. And I have the kitchen fees for you too. And I'll highlight those and give them to the table to pass out.

I have a clarifying question, um, to make sure I understand the concern. The, um, on page nine, the athletics table, that's obviously, um, per person, like $35 to, for baseball, the coach pitch base, that's like per participant, correct? But the, with a $100, um, single day, that is for the entire event. Is that right? Like you get the right. So again, there's $100. That seems like a

Many, many different pages of Parks and Recreation fees. And unfortunately, that's just the nature of the beast. So it can be very confusing, but it's similar from agency to agency. So on page 27 of your current fee schedule, there is a registration fee for different programs. up to $50 and that's what we base the athletic program fees on. So those $35 on down to 15 to free. The single day event fee that we're proposing from $60 to $100, that's intended to be more of a group charge for a tournament, a special event, something like that.

So they get the whole gym for $100 for as many people they want to put in there, whether it's 12 or 200.

No, that's a gym rental.

That's a gym rental.

And that's another fee. That's a different fee. The $60 to $100, if I wanted to enter a youth team into a youth basketball tournament, I'm the coach. Right now, I'm paying $60 to enter my team into a basketball tournament. We're proposing, based on what other cities, other parks and recreation agencies throughout the state are charging, particularly for the statewide athletic competition, SWAC tournament. So our kids who play in our basketball leagues here, they often travel to other cities at the end of the year to play in SWAC basketball tournaments. Now that we have a new gym, we wanna host some of those. Most cities are charging up to $100 per team for those tournaments. So that's why we're proposing to change from 60 to $100 for a registration fee.

Question. So you stated that we did not have any tournaments at that $60 rate.

We did not.

Okay. And so now we're looking to propose the 60 going from 60 to $100 because we have this new gym and we can, you know, we want to host these. Yes ma'am. So if, if we didn't host it at 60,

Well, I wouldn't say that the reason for that had anything to do with the fee. I think it had to do with we just opened that gym last year. And so we started planning for a tournament pretty late in the process. And also people just as other Parks and Recreation agencies and their programs become aware that we have a facility now that has two gyms, including one that's brand new, high school size. We think we're gonna generate interest in those types of tournaments. So we're trying to prepare for that by this recommended change to the fee schedule.

How do you think we will generate interest? Here's my concern. I think that if we just opened this gym, it's at $60. You're proposing $100. We did not generate any interest this past year because it's a new gym, right? Everybody doesn't know. But I'm assuming our fabulous marketing team is going to jump on this, right? OK, great. May I make a proposal that maybe we don't start kick it all the way to 100, but maybe to 75?

I'm fine with leaving it at 60, 75, 100. It's not going to be that impactful at the end of the day. Again, our basis for the recommendation was looking at what other cities are charging. I understand. Thank you. Yes, ma'am.

I would say let's test the waters and see if we become like really popular and gain traction with this. And then, I mean, it's only one year, so then we come back next year. If it's wildly popular, then increase it. If not, then we haven't harmed anyone.

That's my proposal.

I would like to see the comparison with the other municipalities because what I'm hearing is that most of these tournament fees are being paid by people from other places that are used to paying a certain fee. I'd like to know what that is. Sure, I can get that for you.

Well, if it's for a whole basketball team, that's only $20 a person, even if they didn't have a deep bench. So even if they have more people.

The cost of bread and gas and groceries and potentially taxes in this area are going up. So I mean, that may be OK with you, JC, but maybe not the people that are going to try to travel and bring their kids here to play basketball.

yeah maybe rent a hotel room down there so i so i i i think i i think i saw at least four agreeing to keep it at 60. we will we can raise hands if you want it please please do Yep, we'll keep it at 60, and then next year we'll have some analysis about usage and cost recovery.

I've got to ask this question because I see it, and maybe you can allude to it. You've got the empty park and you all have tournaments, and that's a lot of wear and tear. Every time you go out there, you guys are replacing the tennis courts. Or Olsen Park when we have the softball tournaments, and you have all these tournaments that are coming into play, and more and more people are wanting to come here. We've got a lot of tournaments that are going out there. We're trying to recapture the wear and tear on our facilities that we're charging our taxpayers for. That's why it's important that we look at these fees. I applaud the fact that we're finally looking at it because I've talked to some of those folks that work at those facilities and they get sick and tired of having to clean up and do all these things for people that are coming in here using our facilities that may not even be citizens of the city of Wilmington. And yet we're paying for that. That wear and tear is costing our taxpayers. And I want to be very clear because there seems to be a significant way that people looking at the city even though we're part of a county part of a state that we're the ones that should be taking care of all this maintenance and we have to figure a way to start recapturing some of these costs or is we're going to continue to go back to our taxpayers for all of these additional costs and i just want to make sure that we're aware of that i don't have a problem in holding it 60 But we're gonna get more and more play here. And I just wanna make certain that we're fair to the facilities and fair to the people that are coming in here. I want them to come in here and spend all the money they can for the 20% that we get.

I'm totally comfortable keeping it at 60. What I would like to see over the next year, though, so that when we have this conversation next year is some data to support whatever fee is recommended based on the usage that we've had this year. Since there hasn't been usage, I think it's hard to know if we're at the right number. And so I want to make sure that we're collecting data around the specific fee so that when we revisit this next year, we can make a decision based on data.

Yes, ma'am. Mr. Mayor, I would... I would go along with keeping it at 100 if we increase the fees at Muni by $40. $40. $40. i mean we're going we're going up too and they're and they're squawking over there we're going up we're going up two dollars over there and they're really successful might be the most successful athletic program we have in the city yeah and just a little two dollar increase because hey we want to make sure everybody's okay but we're upset about people coming and using the facilities we haven't been mad about people about the pickleballers taking over wilmington because they have

And to your point, Kevin, and that's the dilemma that we run into is that the fact is we want to adjust the fees to maintain the infrastructure. And every time we do that, somebody squawks and says that's way too much. But then they expect us to have a facility of some standard. So I agree with what you're saying, because I think that these facilities need to be top notch, but it costs money. It's either going to come out of the fee schedule or it's going to come out of the taxpayer's pocketbook. I'm in a full agreement that the golf course, since it is an enterprise fund, should maintain itself and that when people are saying, we want this and we want that and we think this ought to be, fine. It's like I always tell people, you want to pay for it? which way do you want to pay for it do you want the users to pay for it or do you want the taxpayer to pay for it and there lies some of the dilemma that we run into so i want to be fair and i do like to i would love to see more tournament playing basketball because one of the things that um i heard many years ago is we love to bring some tournaments here and be able to use the facilities here we didn't have the facilities at the time but now with the mlk gym with the maize park gym Obviously, you've got the school gyms. I don't know how that works in regards to leasing those facilities out. I think we're primed for that basketball tournament kind of concept to come to Wilmington. If it happens, we can look at those fee schedules at that point in time. I don't even have a problem in the teams in Wilmington, as long as it's not this Wilmington-totally-centric thing, not even having to pay a fee. because they're taxpayers and they live in the city of Wilmington. I want to give the taxpayers and the community some benefit too for these things. That's my take on it.

I just want to say thanks. Now you'll have the golfers in Wilmington mad at me. Add them to the list.

You have to go out there and do a little putting over there on the putting green, man.

All right, we are going to quickly flip to the attachment that I emailed out to you this morning. So you do not have a paper copy of this. Actually, you do because I printed them. Here you go. So these were just a couple of late questions that came in in the last 24 hours or so. Cassidy, I do still owe you the compression ladder, but I was able to provide an answer in a different way looking at it through that. So I'm gonna just confirm that the city maintains 744 acres of parks and athletic facilities and New Hanover County manages 1,153. And then we'll skip over this next question and go to the one after it. We'll talk about that with implementation scenarios. So the question has come up about Skyline Center, the debt to pay for this facility and the surrounding properties and parking deck. Is that why we need to raise taxes? Why can't we sell those parcels in order to pay off that debt? And so just wanted to go over sort of what has happened and where we are to officially get that on the record. So the purchase of Skyline Center Campus is in no way causing the proposed tax rate increase. The city initially paid 68 million for the campus and we are over five years ahead of schedule in paying off all of the debt associated with that purchase. We have paid off this year over $17 million in debt, including 100% of the variable rate debt on that purchase. So what's left? The total remaining debt is 40.29 million. 15.32 million of that 40 will be paid with the parking fund because of the parking deck that we acquired as part of the purchase. So the total remaining that will be paid for with general funds over the repayment schedule of the bonds is $25 million. We prioritized paying off that variable rate debt with the proceeds of the sale of other properties. And that was to ensure that we insulated ourselves from any market volatility that might come from variable rate debt. And it also will save us significant dollars in interest payments that we will not need to make because all of that debt is now paid off. And again, five years early. So that's five years of that variable rate debt that we will not be paying interest on. So in addition to bringing a number of city departments under one roof, which was a huge benefit of acquiring this facility, we're also able to rent out about half of the space within this building. That creates a significant steady revenue stream that we are dedicating to the maintenance of our facilities, including this one, to make sure that we are able to keep it in the shape that it is in for decades to come. We are currently about 90 to 95% occupied, which is fantastic. And really what's left is kind of the bits and pieces of some floors where it may take a particular tenant being able to fit in that where if they need more space, that's just not going to be an option. So a few small opportunities left, but by and large, we are almost completely rented out.

So, did I hear correctly the revenue from rent is going directly to maintaining the facility?

Yes, it is now.

Okay. Do and I, I'm sorry I know I'm asking we don't know this right now, but what is that annually? What is that revenue annually for rent? It's okay if we get that later.

We'll have staff look that up. Yep. The other thing that we want to be very clear on is related to the sale of the parcels that surround Skyline Center. Some council members were not on council at the time, but last year the city did go through a process of considering the sale of one of its parcels. We received a number of proposals, but all of them were under the assessed value, or excuse me, the appraised value of the property by a couple of million dollars. And all of them included a significant component of market rate luxury apartments that we did not think was the highest and best use of that property at that time. Also, as the Parks and Recreation Director mentioned, we are doing a needs analysis of Live Oak Bank Pavilion and Riverfront Park because it does not currently accommodate everything that is required to put on shows. And so before we sell the one parcel that we still have control over next to the park, we want to make sure that we can fit everything that we need to on the park. the off chance that we can't, retaining that parcel allows us to expand if necessary at least a small portion into the parcel next door to again prioritize and ensure that the Live Oak Bank pavilion has everything that it needs instead of accidentally selling the opportunity and now we're stuck with less than the product that that park can be. So, we are currently going through that analysis. It will be completed, we expect, by the end of this summer, and that will tell us where we are. Live Nation has expressed a willingness to come to the table in financial partnership, but they would like to see the expected dollar amount of those additional improvements before they commit to a dollar amount, which I think that's fair. So those conversations continue, but we do think that there will be an opportunity to offset some of those costs to fully build out the rest of that park as necessary. We are then, before the end of this fiscal year, going to be issuing RFPs for the downtown master planning of the city on parcels that we've talked to you about back in February. Staff felt it was important to complete the Greater Downtown Plan before embarking on this specific look at how these parcels should develop out as highest and best use. Council will be very involved in that process. The community will be very involved in that process. We want to make sure that it has opportunities for public gathering, public interest, and that we are doing things that complement our existing downtown rather than compete or take away or don't deliver as much as it could to make downtown a place where people want to come and stay for a while. So all of that is very much in the works and is coming. And just to be clear that the 0.41 cents that is proposed in the FY27 budget has nothing to do with Skyline Center. All of that debt can be paid for if you made no change to the CIP dollar amount that they are receiving every year. The 0.41 cents is for additional projects, $31 million in additional projects that we're looking to complete within the next two years. So if you did nothing, we will continue to pay Skyline, but we would not be able to complete all of those projects. Any questions on that?

Well, I think it's important that council members that were not here when we took that vote to not sell that property. I want to make certain everybody understands this because there's been some missing miscommunication information out there. It was a 6-1 vote.

Yes, it was.

So there was only one individual that said we ought to sell it. The rest of us said we should hold back. Let's do the evaluation, determine, because we've been having these ongoing discussions about uh in the improvement to labo bank pavilion several years and if we were to sell that piece of property there's no way that we can make any kind of an adjustment to that park and it's an urban park it's in a very tight area the logistics are challenging although it's beautiful but they are challenging so as we got in there and we started to feel our way through that process and the concerts are taking place and how we move people in and out of the facility. We started to see that we needed to make some changes to the plan. And so this is part of that overall process. But our intention has been to sell the properties as quickly as possible. We've sold quite a few to the point where we have reduced this from $68 million down to $40 million. And I would like to compare that with any other government properties that are out there on the marketplace that you can see what we've done as opposed to what others have done, because I think that we've done a heck of a job in doing it. And we've made a commitment to that. And we've got probably about $30 million worth of property left to sell. We'd love to sell it as quickly as possible. And I believe it will sell when rates get better and we get out of a war and tariffs start to come down a little bit there's a lot of things that are impacting the economy but to do what we have done has been outstanding and you know there was a lot of concern about the variable rate debt and um we have paid that off and we made that commitment that was gone that was the biggest thing here so the great thing about this is we got a parking deck six acres of property and this building for that kind of money i'll put it up against anybody in the state

I appreciate that. I want to add for me the high level takeaways here because I wasn't on council when a lot of these decisions were made. We're ahead of schedule paying the debt on the Skyline Center. We are leasing out portions of the Skyline Center to help with the cost of maintaining property. And we are continuing to look at selling the parcels that the city owns downtown as another revenue source for the city and however that may work out. But we want to do that intentionally so that we make sure that our downtown and it stays Wilmington and it's in line with the vision that we have in the downtown plan that we've heard from the city. Those are my high level takeaways.

That's exactly right. And because the city has ownership of those parcels, the city doesn't need to just put a for sale sign out front and take whatever comes in. We can specifically say, this is the only thing that we're interested in selling it for. and then look for the right buyer or the right partner, whether that's an outright sale, whether that's a P3. There's a lot of opportunities for how to dispose of that property to make sure that it develops out exactly how we want it to.

And I just want to add, I appreciate the long-term vision and thinking about long-term, how do these properties generate revenue for the city, not just a one-time view of this. Because once we sell that property, that's one-time money. That's not something that is going to generate recurring revenue for the city. And so I think it's just I appreciate the difficult yet responsible view that we're taking in terms of the intentional decisions that we want to make with regard to those parcels.

Okay. I would suggest we take a break. Well, Laura's got one thing.

The amount of revenue that we're bringing in are from leases just shy of $3.7 million right now.

It's fantastic, $3.7 million in revenue from folks that are renting space out at the Skyline Center.

Yep, so annually.

So many people said that we couldn't rent out anything. Okay, thank you.

I would also mention a great op-ed that gave staff a- It was that- That really said staff has done a rock star job, and you're welcome.

Great for that, Mayor Pro Tem.

Let's take a break. also take another roll call here. Mayor Pertem, are you here? I'm here. Right here. Councilmember Joyner, are you here? Here. Councilmember Andrews, are you here?

Here.

Councilmember Lau, are you here?

Here.

Councilmember Santa Witte, are you here? Here. Councilmember Clinton-Quintana, are you here?

Here.

Chair's here. Everybody's here and accounted for. Back to you, Ms. Manager.

Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the council. We want to move now to talk about the living wage implementation. We had a couple of requests for some different scenarios. I do want to point out that the chart that is in your printed materials is updated slightly regarding tax impacts. It was rerun and pulled completely with benefits, and so the numbers that are in the packet are correct. They are slightly higher than what we emailed to you early Thursday. Do you have a page number? We are on page two under the Q&A. So I do just want to recap that the $15,000 was not arbitrary. That number was selected intentionally. to try to create as much space between grades as possible to try to prevent as much compression as possible, but still driving as many dollars as we could down to the lowest levels of the pay scale. Want to look at the tax impacts. We had a request to look at what would be the impact of reducing the $15,000 cap to $12,000. Dylan, if you can scroll down just a little bit more. Yep, just stop right there for now. So the biggest issue that we're seeing with that, and there was a request to show like a career ladder progression that I'll have to you all Monday. But the biggest issue that we're seeing is that will capture about 85 of our police and fire personnel. who are sort of in that in-between where they would get something north of 12 if the cap was 15, but nobody gets more than 15, where it would reduce the amount of pay that they would get and it would also reduce the amount of pay that everyone above them would get. The problem that that then creates is all of those folks we expect to be promoting in the next year, two years, whatever, And our historical standard for the pay increases that we give upon promotion is 10%. By lowering that cap, we will not be able to give that full increase without those folks then jumping over people who are already sitting in the role. And so we would then be forced to give like a 7% or 8% increase We already have some trouble incentivizing people to go after promotions because that is already viewed as a small increase compared to the increase in responsibilities that are expected under that promotion. and reducing it to a seven or 8% is very much heading in the wrong direction versus what we would like to be able to give them to make sure that they feel like they're being adequately compensated from what's expected of them. So that is the biggest impact that we see. I'll also show in a minute, actually let's flip to that now if you don't mind. Dylan, if you can go to the handout that I emailed you this morning. So this is what was just handed out before the break, but looking at it this morning, there was a request to look at how have our pay increases, how have our market adjustments kept up with inflation? And so when you go back, we went back to FY22, there was a 0% market adjustment, but CPI that year was 4.7%. So if you look at the starting pay for our positions, they didn't move that year. but the cost of living increased 4.7%. So basically your buying power was 4.7% lower. That put them in the hole at 4.7%. We then started kind of doing different raises for different groups of employees, but CPI and FY23 was 8%. And so if you look at the bottom, it's really charting the cumulative impacts of CPI compared to the market adjustments. And that's basically, how well is our starting pay keeping up with inflation? And so in FY23, police and buyer jumped just above, so it was 1.3% in front of inflation, if you will, but because of the lower percentages that were given for other positions, the others dropped to a negative 5.2, executives dropped to a negative 7.7. Repeat that in 24, 2% market adjustment, CPI of 4.1, The net result was a negative 0.8% for police and fire, negative 7.3 for others, negative 9.8 for executives. FY25 market adjustment of two to 3%. I just went with a 3% for everybody to be as generous as possible. CPI was 2.9%. So your cumulative effect is negative 0.7 for police and fire, negative 7.2 for others, negative 9.7 for executives. This current fiscal year, FY26, 9% increase for police and fire, 3% for senior firefighters and officers, 5% for all others, but CPI was 2.6%. So the net result, 5.7 minus 4.8 minus 7.3. Dylan, if you could scroll to the next page, please. So what we're proposing in FY27 is a market adjustment of 20%, but there's been a $15,000 cap on what folks would be able to receive. The CPI year to date for this fiscal year is 3.8%. So cumulatively, because we're looking to kind of break folks up, so police and fire earning less than $75,000, The net impact would be a positive 21.9%. So that's great. And those are definitely very, very needed. So we like that. And this is again, the 15 K cap that is proposed in the budget. Others earning less than 75,000. So this is non sworn police, non fire, but everybody else in the organization earning less than 75,000. This 20% increase is actually a net positive of only 11.4. Any non-executive earning 75 to $100,000, it ranges, depending on whether they're making 75 or closer to the 100, the net positive is 6.4 to 11.4. But then our directors and assistant directors, taking all of that into account, it ranges from actually a negative 4% cumulative to a positive 1.22%. That is because we've implemented that $15,000 cap for anybody making more than $75,000. So depending on where you are in that range, it is a much smaller percent overall the higher you go up the range. So any questions about that before we move on? Okay. If we can go back to the other document, Dylan. Sorry I'm having you jump around so much. Yep. So these are the tax rate impacts. We of course have the 5.75 cents per hundred in the recommended budget. If we went, if you move over to the second column from the right, that is the 12,000 cap for everybody. It would lower your tax rate adjustment. We would be down to 5.44. If you kind of split the difference and did 15,000 for public safety, that's police and fire, sworn police and firefighters, keep them at the 15, but do a 12,000 cap for everybody else, you'd be at 5.61. JC, I know this was a little bit different than you proposed, but with the compression that we were seeing with the other, we knew that that wasn't going to bear out. But with this one, it was running kind of a different one of could we do $15,000 for living wage, but then a 2.8% for everybody else. Obviously, that brings the tax rate down significantly to a 3.87% increase. But we absolutely do not recommend that one. After looking at the cumulative impact of inflation compared to the increases that have been given, I do feel confident that the budget as proposed is the right thing to do. But understand that that is ultimately council's call. And if you're interested in one of these scenarios versus what is in the proposed budget, we're confident that these are the tax rates that would be necessary to implement those. But certainly open to any others, open to discussion and feedback.

Go back to number three. You said that's a blend between the two?

So the alternative one is a blend between the two.

I'm talking about alternative number three.

So now alternative number three is 15,000 living wage for public safety, but only a 2.8% increase for everybody else.

I have a question about alternative two versus alternative one, because I want to make sure I understand. Under alternative two, you're saying there are 85 folks in police and fire who upon promotion would be making more than somebody that's already at that higher level, which is not in line with typical salary philosophies?

We would not give them the full percentage increase. We would lower their pay so that they were not making more.

So you've got 85 individuals that would experience some sort of negative compression And it would make it, and I think what I'm trying to get at is that's, that's an impact across those departments. It's not just those 85 folks. It's folks move from there. Yeah. There's like a ripple effect to all of this.

And there are other people in that gap and other departments that would see the same thing. Okay. Um, the, the focus that we gave it was just on police and fire. because there's so many of them in those positions. So it's such a big chunk of it. It's a big chunk, but it is more than 85 people.

And then as compared to alternative one, if we went with alternative one, how many police and fire folks, is that number zero from 85 to zero? Is that 85 to five?

What does that look like? It would move all of the folks that are, that 85 that are caught would no longer be caught. So the public safety number would go to zero. You would still have others in other departments.

We would have folks caught in other departments. And then what would that look like if we adopted one of those alternatives? What would that look like in the future to have to steer out of that? What would that cost us to address those compression concerns?

I mean, it would be the equivalent of...

uh what would it be 0.08 so 0.13 pennies which is how much laura and that's before we look at like cost of living or inflation okay so alternative one saves taxpayers a couple bucks a month depending on their um the median household value alternative two saves a little bit more than that and alternative three is

Yeah, alternative one, the yearly impact for a $250,000 household is $4. The median household is $6. And $800,000, it is $11 a year. So I have a couple of questions. First of all, what kind of

retention metrics are we expecting to see because of the implementation of this paper?

So you're always going to have a little. I would expect it to be Certainly south of 10%, I think you're probably going to be closer in this maybe seven to eight. Again, that'll vary a little bit, but I do think that we can dramatically decrease our losing any employees, certainly voluntarily losing them, somebody leaving for another job. You're always going to have somebody moving away or something like that.

Is a retirement considered a voluntary separation?

So that is, but that is pulled out of all of these numbers. Okay. So because that is, they've hit their years, so we're not counting that.

Okay.

And then I just had a follow up to that. What does turnover cost us on an annual basis?

It's gonna depend on the position, but you're looking at loss productivity, you're looking at the cost to advertise, you're looking at all of the pre-employment screening. We pay for background checks, we pay for drug tests. Depending on the position, we pay for psychological evaluations, physicals, lie detector tests. And so depending on the individual, just the cost to get them through pre-employment and the cost of those tests is maybe about $100 up to about $600 or so. And then getting them in, getting them trained, I'd say you're readily not kind of up to speed for at least your first six months or so. So again, lower productivity. So if you look at, say a gap, some of these hard to fill positions have been open for 120, 150 days. the burden and the slowdown that that is putting on coworkers because the work doesn't stop in our fields. And so other folks have to pick up the slack and try to do their best to continue to move forward.

Well, you also told us this morning it costs $192,000 to get a new office- Correct. Up to speed. Yes. In addition to- Yes. All of the things that you just listed for pre-employment. Yes, it's- Pretty striking number. It's massive.

Becky, when we make this adjustment, especially with public safety, in my past experience, there's a lot of other governments that are looking to see what we're going to do. Sure. And as soon as we make an adjustment, they have to make an adjustment. They do. Or they go to their respective bodies, whether it be the county commissioners, city council, Leland, wherever, to make their adjustments. So they say, well, Wilmington has gone up to here. We need to also match that. With this, because I know this kind of helps solve a lot of the compression issues that we've been dealing with for many years, kicking the can down the road. How does it help? I mean, moving forward. Sure. Is this going to be a one-year thing? Or are you going to come in to me next year and say, oh, by the way, so-and-so raised theirs, so-and-so raised theirs, so-and-so raised theirs. Now we have to make an adjustment to keep up with them.

No, what we're trying to do is to create a philosophy that stands on its own, but also remains naturally competitive. And so the figures that we see out of this, we believe are aggressive enough for those hard to fill positions that it will be attractive because there are people who want to be in law enforcement, they want to be in the fire service, they want to be a mechanic, they want to be an equipment operator, but they can't afford to do that based on what we are paying now. And so what we're trying to do is lift these levels up to both a competitive wage, so we're at least in the conversation near the top, but also numbers that they can afford to live on. So if Leland goes up, if New Hanover County Sheriff's goes up, those are very different agencies. And we know that we're offering something different in the city of Wilmington. And quite frankly, they wouldn't get to work for Chief Zutema if they go anywhere else and he's great. And so it is not then this race to the top of they went up $500 or they went up $1,000. We're happy sitting there close. We believe that that will be an effective recruiting tool. Because if our neighbors are even able to do it, a lot of other people across the state aren't. And a lot of other jurisdictions across the country aren't. And so our number looks incredibly attractive to somebody who might be looking for a different opportunity. We're in a great location. We're doing a lot of great things to move the department forward. And so we may not recruit somebody from Leland, but if we do, great. But otherwise, we might get somebody from somewhere else in the state. We've had applications from Jacksonville and whatnot. So it's okay if a rising tide lifts all ships because at the end of the day, it's often a different type of law enforcement officer that might be interested in working for us compared to those other localities because they can be very different jobs.

So when you first got here, there was several positions within the city budget that we have been looking to fill for two years, maybe longer. I know you folks did an evaluation of that to determine why we were not able to fill those positions, number one. And then number two, you would evaluate those positions to determine, are there any of those positions that we could have or could eliminate? from the city staff number. I know you did, I think you did it.

Yeah, we have absolutely done that and we continue to do that. So every position that is vacant has to go through a process of justifying that it needs to continue. to exist and be filled or it needs to be tweaked, the job description needs to change or in some cases we have rejected them and said based on the workload or the operations of the department we don't think this is necessary at this time and those positions are on hold or in some cases with the reorg they were completely eliminated. And so as new vacancies come up, that requirement is not going away. We are going to continue to do that. Now, there are some that are fast tracked, like if a police officer is vacant, you know, straight to advertising. But any of these others that it's a little bit more nuanced or it has sat open for a long time, How else can we get the work done? Does it make sense? Like with surveying, we kept like one surveyor, but then the workload was such that we felt it was appropriate to then contract out some of those other services because it's really on an as needed basis as opposed to having somebody full time here doing that work. But we used natural vacancies to be able to absorb that so that nobody lost their job.

So I think we were what are about 1100 employees now with the city.

We are. We absorbed 29 through our realignment process.

When you absorbed them, the ones that you had in there that we could not fill?

That we have not filled, and then they are not in the budget.

Okay, so 29 have been eliminated. Correct. Overall, okay. And then looking at the turnover rate, it seems like, and it's always been this way, it seems to be, the fire department is the lowest, seems to be at about 5%, somewhere in that range.

Yeah, we showed that.

I think public safety, I think most people get the public safety concept. People want to be safe. They love the firemen. They love the police. Not all the time, but they love them. But they keep us safe. And I think talking to a lot of people, out in the community, it seems that they are very supportive of the public safety component of adjusting those salaries to make certain those folks are getting paid properly. I think what we're missing in some of this discussion with the citizens is there's 1,100 employees in this city government. that do a lot of other things, accounting, tree arborists, maintaining your parks, picking up the trash, cleaning the ditches, a lot of things that a lot of people don't see every single day, but they play a very important role in how this city works and operates. In those particular job descriptions, I would imagine that that that trash refuge is probably up there because I know that we've always had an issue in retaining a lot of those folks in that department storm water is another one that you know those are hard jobs getting in those ditches cleaning them out taking care of them with all kinds of critters in theirs in those ditches at times yes so you know I think showing that to the community that this is not just about public safety but this is the overall management of the city in all departments, I think is critically important. And, you know, people hear living wage and they, oh, that's a liberal thing or whatever they want to call it. I want to make certain that we're paying people properly to do all of these jobs because they all play an important role at some point, whether it be zoning, whether it be the zoning, I mean, the code enforcement folks that have to go out there when they get calls all the time from citizens. I mean, they all play an important role. I just want to make certain that that that I think is being missed in some of this discussion is that all these other roles also play a very important part of running the city.

Absolutely. Dylan, can you scroll down to question four? We went over this earlier, but to just...

And then the other thing is, I think Kevin asked this question, what's the percentage of the employment base for the city that lives in the city? I think it came out to about 28%. I also want to allude to the fact that the cost of living, although I think in the city, Wilmington, the average price of now is $460-some thousand. But those numbers that are in Pinder and in Brunswick, unless you go further and further out, are very comparable in regards to what those costs are.

They are, and the tax rates we saw are not better if you live within town or city limits in those other localities. I was speaking to a police officer not too long ago, and he commutes well over an hour each shift because that's where he can afford to live. And having an opportunity to be a little bit closer, it gets you home faster, it also gets you in faster if there's a critical incident. Wear and tear on vehicle is less, so all of the things are better if you can have a shorter commute to work. But that's what he said he's able to afford. And Dylan, I'm sorry, it was question four under HR, so that's page six.

And I don't think that percentage was 28%. What was it? Could we get some accuracy on that?

Was it less than that, Kevin? I thought it was 20.

The percentage of employees who live in the city?

Yeah, Kevin asked the question at the last budget meeting.

I think it's 28 is what we were told. I think for officers it's much lower, though, is my understanding.

Officers was lower. We'll pull it back up.

Was that the overall employment base of the city of 1,100 or just the police and fire?

I think we pulled.

It was the entire organization. I don't think it was 28. I think it was 38 people, not 38%, not 28%. Okay.

I'll, we'll pull that back up. So Dylan, if you can go to the top of this question, please. So this was just to drive that point home, Mayor, we looked at the hardest to fill positions and aside from police that we have all talked about. The other ones, you're looking at equipment operator one, equipment operator two, you could scroll down just a little bit, equipment operator three, equipment operator four. These are in streets, these are in stormwater. This is page six of the packet that you have.

As we talk about this, Becky, sorry to interrupt. So I wanna talk about equipment operator four, vacant for an average of 795 days that's two years can you talk about what that means to the residents of the city when those positions are vacant for two years like what are what are the residents of the city missing out on with these vacancies sure what what you're seeing are smaller crews with fewer skilled operators to be able to complete the work

So depending on the size and scope of the job, you're going to have at least one crew that goes out to do that work. And equipment for operator is the absolutely most skilled that we have. They're specialized equipment that they have certifications on, and they have passed all of those tests. They tend to be very, very experienced. And so when you're digging around utility lines, you're in the right of way, you're in very treacherous places, there is a level of detail and accuracy that needs to come with the work that they are performing. And when those folks aren't on the crew, it is up to others to perhaps use other equipment because they aren't certified on the one that is actually best for the job. We may have to contract the work out. and the work is going to take longer because you have fewer people doing the work.

I think I want to get more specific. Sure. Does this mean my storm drains aren't getting cleared as quickly as they could be or as well as they should be? Does this mean traffic things that need to be fixed on the roads aren't getting fixed correctly or as quickly as they should? Is it a combination of both? It would be as quickly.

It would be as quickly. So we're not going to ultimately do work that isn't correct. Okay. But it may take us longer to do it correctly or again in some cases we may have to contract it out because we don't have that skill set on staff. which is then obviously a much greater cost than if we're able to do the work in-house.

So there's a delay in response time and a delay in service that we experience when these positions aren't filled. Yes. Okay.

Question.

So how do we advertise that these roles are available? And I'm asking this question in particular, not just these roles, but any roles for the city. And I was talking to Mayor Pro Tem about this yesterday, just in general conversation. We attended, Mayor, I think you might have been there as well. a trip with the Wilmington Chamber of Commerce. We went to Fort Lauderdale. And one of the things we talked about was job opportunities in Wilmington. And I moved here seven years ago. My husband is a trailing spouse. He worked for probably less than $12 an hour, which was very little money with his experience and a degree professional. I won't name the company that he worked for before he went over to Step Up Wilmington, thank God. But in all of that, a statement was made and it was said that we could fill all positions in Wilmington for every job and we would still need to recruit outside of Wilmington. Do you recall that statement?

I recall hearing that statement, yes.

That's right. And so I kind of giggled to myself when I heard that because I thought, and this was one of the arguments that Kevin had brought up, I'm sorry, Mayor Pro Tem had brought up at the time, which was we're not, everyone in Wilmington did not have this opportunity or the opportunities to get these jobs. I'm curious how we're advertising these jobs. Because there are people who are still unemployed that could use some type of education skill set to do these exact jobs. And I understand that if you contract it out, it costs more. So at what point do we, I know we invest in our people to some degree. But in this case, these jobs were vacant for 421 days, 795 days, 111 days. before they were even filled or not still currently vacant. So what actions are we taking to fulfill these positions? How are we marketing those? Are we doing anything with anyone here in the city to say, Hey, we'd love for you to fulfill these roles. How can we help? How can we give you this experience?

Yeah. I don't know. Is Kim in the room? Oh, okay. Are we able to answer that question with existing HR in the room?

Okay.

While you're looking for that answer, could I just throw in the whole background from an old history piece to that because I think it matters.

So at least preliminarily while they're getting more detail, it depends on the level of job. So if it is specialized with like certifications with like AICP or something like that, those will go to those specific professional organizations. Other jobs, I know that they're on governmentjobs.com. They are on our website and we certainly promote them on social media. As far as a comprehensive plan, I don't quite frankly know that we have one. But I am very interested in having one. We have some additional hires that we are making in HR. We're retooling some of the positions using the vacancies that we have in HR that will very much be focused on recruitment in a more intentional way. I agree that there are community outreach that should happen, posting at the community college, going to local organizations and just getting that word, it's boots on the ground and it takes time. But that is work that I have seen work in other places and I don't see why it wouldn't be different here. But to date, I don't know that that has happened to that degree.

I'm not trying to beat a dead horse. I'm simply trying to revive it at this point because I understand where you're coming from. And I'm saying the same thing. And that's what I'm getting at, right? We, again, we talk about one city. We talk about how much we love our constituents and the people of Wilmington. I fell in love with Wilmington when I moved here seven years ago. I will be the first person to tell you I'm not born and raised here in Wilmington, but hang on it. I have talked to more of our community members. I don't care what color they are, whether they're black, green, yellow, purple, or whatever. They are people that want these jobs. And I feel like it is our responsibility to find our citizens jobs. If we want to see our citizens progress, We have to give them a livable wage. We have to help them get education so they can work these jobs in order to buy a home or even rent some of these apartments, not just in the other parts of town that someone doesn't want to live in or want to live in, but also to be able to survive. this is where I'm getting at and to Kevin's point let's rope back in the backgrounds of hey people have been punished for seven years for a crime or more they came out and we're still looking at them with a side eye of you did a little something wrong I don't want you to be an employee here at the city of Wilmington I just need us to like really think about and dig a little deeper and open our eyes to find people to work these positions. I mean, I get it.

And, and I've heard that loud and clear. And so I think when we can, I don't want to take us down a rabbit hole, but just understanding that we are, you know, with the new economic development position and the realignment of that, that's a lot of what that work is. We have already done realignment within HR. So we've created business partners. And so that people are now working with the department from, from start to finish. rather than just having sort of a recruiting function so that they can be under the hood and know what the needs of each department are and then help to be able to guide department heads to the right places we are providing certifications and trainings for certain things like cdls so part of this is figuring out what else we need to do we're going to be rolling out an aspiring leaders program to get people ready to take on management roles who are already within the city so there are a lot of things that are in process that we think will start to help to address those sorts of things because if we do have an operator three We want to make sure they're prepared if they want to become an operator for and that were helped facilitating that because obviously growing our own workforce is preferred. candidly were our own best or worst enemy right, so you are working in this field, you probably know somebody else in this field. And so you've probably said, hey, Larry, Sally, come work with me. And Larry or Sally candidly looks at our pay in some of these positions and says, I can't. I would love to, but I can't because of the specialty that I have and what I can earn somewhere else, whether that be in the private sector or another locality, we're not competitive. And so that's part of the underlying theme here. And I think to your point, what you're referencing on a living wage, our folks have friends who want to come work here and know about these opportunities and they're talking to their friends and telling them come. But if they can't be compensated fairly for that level of work, we're not going to have that opportunity.

Thank you, Dennis. As long as we're looking around our city and surrounding areas, I'm grateful for that. I look forward to the data next year.

I was going to ask, on the Bureau of Labor Statistics, North Carolina or?

It's North Carolina specific.

Okay, North Carolina specific. I just want to make sure. Okay, very good.

And to go back to the previous question, 28% of our total workforce lives within city limits. 16.7% of our police department lives within city limits and 33% of our fire department employees live within city limits.

Thank you to staff for locating that. All these positions that have been identified on page six and seven, are these positions that are currently vacant that you're looking at?

So the ones that are listed are currently vacant. The ones at the bottom were hard to fill, but we have now managed to fill them. But they would have been on that list for a long time until very recently.

Okay, and so Cape Fear Community College has a CDL training. Yep. Do we go over there and try to recruit those folks?

We do, yep, we do. But the difficulty with CDL is if you're a long haul trucker. you're making probably six figures, 80 to 100,000.

But not everybody wants to be a long haul trucker because of the fact that you've got to be away from home.

Exactly, but finding those people who don't, who do want something close to home.

Can I ask this question? On the CDL, if you're driving a truck that's picking up trash, that would require CDL, right? Yes. Okay. Backhoe operator? Yes. CDL, correct?

there's training that's involved in that specialized equipment and some of these folks that have the cdl also have those certifications so this is also something that we're looking at is maybe splitting some of these jobs into somebody who drives the big truck that takes the equipment there and then somebody else who's operating the equipment rather than being one one size fits all to help fill these roles so those are the sorts of things that we're evaluating and we do actually send folks to cape fear to get the CDL.

And then I would imagine that anybody who's driving a fire truck also has to have a CDL, correct?

Yes.

Yes.

Oh, we do?

Yes. Mary, microphone.

Because I understood that...

on the CDL where we encourage it and we've had employees who have been promoted into those roles and we pay for the training and the sport and enabling them to get their CDL. So we do that in-house as well.

And in regards to picking up the trashers is obviously huge. The turnover rate in that, what is that?

I know we've lost 35 people this year. A number of them were.

What's the average pay for that?

The frontline worker is at the bottom of the pay scale, $17.39 an hour.

See, I'm going to tell you something. If you don't pick up my trash, you might get mad at me on some things, but that one right there is going to set somebody's hair on fire. And those folks need to be getting paid more than what they're getting paid. I mean, that's a huge service that municipalities provide, and I just think that we've had a problem there for years, and I think we just need to bite the bullet and make the adjustment. It's not just about police and fire. It's about that, too, and that's a big one. correct and and it's it's some of the hardest labor it has some of the hardest labor but it's also some of the you know it's dirty slave but also it's it's it's a labor that if you can get in you there's a career path there is a career from my perspective that we need to really look at that because that should be adjusted yeah I remember one time you know during the hurricane season when we didn't pick up people's trash and they like I mean I'm glad there was not a noose out front.

It is very much a vital service.

Yeah. We just need to make that adjustment.

And I'd like to know what the adjustment would be though, Becky, too. I mean, 17, I know that's entry, but at $17 an hour, you can't. You can only live on 17.

So that 17 is equivalent to the current, the 37,000 and change. This would bump them up to 45,000.

When my understanding of the solid waste and stormwater. Yes, those salaries are covered by the fee. They are right. So that doesn't even impact our that's that's correct. Yep.

Making those changes are fully covered by the fees that folks pay. So that does not impact the general fund.

So we're making the adjustment to the to that fee schedule this year.

No, no, no, there's no change to the solid waste fee schedule at all, but the revenue pays for 100% of- So if we want to adjust that, we have to increase the- No, no, we can fit it within existing revenues. We can. Same thing with stormwater. So there's a very small increase in the stormwater fee, but that is just because we increase it a few pennies every year. But we are able to also absorb the increases to stormwater employee salaries within the stormwater fund.

Do enterprise funds, do they just absorb salaries or does that include benefits?

So it's salaries, benefits, operating costs, capital projects, it's everything.

And Becky, I remember Chief Williams telling me this too. When we're training a police officer, and it's a pretty significant amount of investment that we're making into that individual. If that individual gets their certificate, they can go to any agency they want to. Absolutely. There is no callback provision that if we've made the investment in that individual for six months or whatever it takes to get them that certificate.

You are not able to do that in North Carolina. We are prohibited.

So I can get trained under the city of Wilmington.

Yep.

And at the end of the training, I can go to any department, federal, state.

And it happens with regularity. And what was that total investment they were making in that? So to up fit a police officer including their vehicle is $192,000.

So you're better off trying to recruit somebody from another agency?

Who's already certified. And it also gets them to work faster because if you're already certified in North Carolina, we would do a little bit of field training just to get you acclimated with the area, but then you're off on your own. If you are transferring from another state, it's a limited amount of coursework, so we can get you on the street faster. The ones that take, you know, the four months, full four months of BLET plus all of the field training, you're looking at over a year before they're up to speed.

And those are the folks that are spending some time here, getting trained here. We've invested the $192,000, and then they move on in six months. Correct. And they start over with that.

It's a question, and maybe I just got this wrong. I know that Cape Fear is doing this program with nursing, where they happen to pay for the education of that nurse, and then they're going to subsidize a certain amount of that salary.

They go to Novot and work there.

So they, in a way, have kind of got a callback provision.

I don't know how that one's structured. I mean, we bring people on and pay them full-time salary with benefits when they're in the academy. So we are paying somebody a full-time salary to go to school and get that training for both police and fire. Years ago, you didn't have to do that. There was such a demand for both police and fire that you could not pay them and they would go through the training. And then if they passed the course, you would hire them. But A, you want to lock them in early to try to keep them because otherwise somebody else will absolutely be at an academy trying to snag them. We've also moved to our own police academy. So we are no longer intermingling with other cadets at Cape Fear. So they are with Wilmington. We want to ingrain them with Wilmington, keep them. here, and then we'll still go to the academy that Cape Fear is running. And if there's anybody who's unattached or looking, we're happy to hire them too. But we're needing to bring them on completely full time. And I've been told by multiple attorneys, including the one at the end of the table, that there is no ability to have a clawback provision.

And that's right. Generally speaking, we will get their car back, obviously. They have to return their uniforms and their guns and all of the physical things. The only thing that we can possibly recover money for would be the actual books and whatever we used for the training. And that is so nominal. It's probably $500 or less that it's just not worth it to try and go back after that. There are a couple of times that it may be worth it if for something like a polygraph um operator that's like a ten thousand dollar training and so the only time that we have ever used a potential clawback is if we're going to spend that much money on your training then you've got to stay here for like three years afterwards and it's like you have to pay six thousand dollars back if you leave within one year you know three thousand within two years or nothing after three years and so because that training is so expensive it's the actual cost of the training that we can get back But that really, because we do our own academy, we're not paying anything for the training other than the cost of their books. And so other than something like that, that's a huge expense of training. We don't have the ability, we cannot get back the salary they paid them or me the benefits or anything like that.

I think the arrangement you're talking about is like a forgivable loan. So they owe this money until they work a certain amount of time, then it's forgiven.

With the polygraph training, yes. But with the regular training that they go through, it's not really a loan, but it's it's an agreement that we enter into with them before we agree to send them to training but um but with the regular training there's nothing really that we can do to get back that money there's no by federal law we can't get back their salary and all of those things what about relocation um I don't know what exactly we pay for relocation costs.

So there's only certain positions qualify for relocation. It tends to be like a department head level or above would qualify for that. Other people who might be moving here for a job, they have to get themselves here.

But generally speaking, that wouldn't apply to policing for the most part. We could potentially do that in an agreement with someone. We were going to pay relocation costs. It would be a separate agreement that we would have to fill out, but I don't even remember the last time we've done one of those, but for anybody that's not a council appointed position.

And Becky, I'm sorry if you've already said this. This is a lot to keep in mind. Do they get a promotion slash pay bump after they complete the training?

They do. They get a 5% pay increase once they complete the training. So they are at a slightly lower rate. And then once they're certified, they do get a little bit.

i want to go back to something that the mayor said earlier because i think it's important to expound on this that 17 is not a lot of money or certain people couldn't live on 17 i think i said previous times uh numerous times of the fact that there's a portion of this population no matter what county but i know what we're tasked with managing but there's a a huge part of this population who have never even made 17 dollars And I'm not saying that our frontline workers don't deserve it. I'm just saying that there's some people within this community that will jump at the opportunity to make $17 an hour. There are some people who are, you know, they don't even make close to that. They've never even made $30,000 a year. And I think we're overlooking that. We were talking yesterday, and we were having a real candid conversation. And I remember it was just, for me, professionally, nine, ten years ago was the first time I started making $13 an apple. And at that time, it was significant. It was life changing for me. So I think we have to look at that too. And I'm not saying that to say that people don't deserve it, don't deserve more money. But I'm saying that to say that there are some things that have impacted How people live their lives in Wilmington? And you know from from a room full of professionals who. Are making. I can't be very nice. I would not say that, but have the potential to to make more to end to live. Are in a good living. There's a portion of this population who have not. And they can't figure out how to get to it. And then they're tasked with seeing other people come to this community and live better than them. And you know, that's why we have to, I always say Wilmington has the potential to be a great place, but it is not great for everybody. But other people who like, I mean, I think, and I'm not being facetious when I say this, Becky, but you said it a few months ago when you were saying we're advertising and people come on down. I saw an advertisement the other day for a tech company in this area and they're saying, hey, if you're on the West Coast, hey, if you're in New York or New Jersey, come on down. The more people that come on down at New York salaries, New Jersey salaries, California salaries, or whatever, the greater the opportunity to displace people who have grown in this community, who want to remain in this community, but they are being displaced from this community, and we're telling them, oh, hey, you can't live on this amount of money, and they've never even gotten to that amount of money. And so they're not speaking up about it.

And I think that's important.

And it's definitely not negating what we're trying to do. And I'm not trying to minimize what we're trying to do as far as a livable wage. But my concern is what we do to ourselves as a community, and I mean the entire community, and what we do to ourselves as an organization.

I agree with what you're saying, Mayor Pro Tem. For myself, I'm really looking forward to seeing where economic development strategy goes because I do think we have a wealth of potentially untapped talent in the city that I think we need to focus on because I think as we create opportunities in the city, they need to include everybody that's already here. So I absolutely think we need to do that. I think part of the conversation that we've been having in these workshops since November, I think one of the facts that I continue to come back to is that we are having a very hard time filling a lot of very critical positions It seems like at every level of a pay scale and the feedback that we get is it's the salary that is the showstopper for excellent candidates regardless of where they are. So I would like us to address that, which is why I'm supportive of the living wage philosophy. um i think we need to address that so that we can continue to run the city i mean that this is the economic reality of running a city that's how i would say this and we need to make sure that as we make those moves and and we address these issues that we are looking inward for for how we can help our community see these opportunities. Um, so I think it's, I think we need to do both. And I'm really looking forward to how we look at our local workforce to help us fill these hard to fill positions and making sure that we've got the right salary attached to them.

And going back to that point, just so we can go back to what we're talking about here. If we make this adjustment, These positions that you've identified that are harder and we've been trying to get filled, you feel pretty confident we'll have them filled?

Absolutely. I do. Because we are getting people to apply and then they are pulling out at the end saying, I just can't make the money work.

Okay.

Yeah. All right. So wait, one question, Becky. So is the salary range for these positions not advertised with the position?

No, it is. You'd be amazed at how many people apply and then ask for something else on the other side.

No.

No, I wouldn't be. Well, it's a negotiation tactic, honestly.

Well, it is, but we mean it. The numbers we put on paper, we mean it.

When we're looking to fill these specific positions, are we competing with other public sector communities around the state, country?

So a lot of these you're actually competing with both public and private sector. So if you look at an equipment operator, those are gonna be on most construction job sites. And so, so you're looking to either convince somebody to leave the private sector or you're looking at somebody who is willing to come over from another locality. These types of positions, you're typically not going to get somebody unless they were naturally relocating to this area, maybe because a spouse is coming here or something like that. Typically, this is going to be more local talent that you're going to see in those application pools.

So and I would imagine that y'all have evaluated how much you can do in house. Is it better to go outside of the house to go into the private sector, talk to them, contract out with them on a particular job? whether it be an engineering firm or whether it be a construction firm?

Correct.

You have evaluated that?

Yeah, we try to do as much as we can with the existing staff that we have. But then when there are specialized projects and we don't have that expertise, or there's a volume issue and we have to get things done on a certain schedule, that's then typically when we're looking to go. outside in terms of like fully outsourcing. We have looked at that, but like fleet was one that, you know, came up and I'll just say like the volume of work that they have to keep our fleet up and running that directly serves police, directly serves fire, directly serves public works. Those vehicles have to run. And when it's our own shop, they are able to squeeze something in right away. Hey, this is broken and we need it right now. We're not competing for our place in line with a whole bunch of other people that you would get if you outsource. And the volume that they're able to go through in getting our things out and back on the road is faster than you would find in the private sector.

So when you're looking at the city of Wilmington, and I knew this day was coming, when your growth rate is less than 1% now, and you're pretty much locked in geographically, you've got $5 billion worth of property you can't even tax. There's no more annexation in the state of North Carolina. You've got a lot of people using the city every single day, or going through the city using city services, especially our streets. From an employment perspective, 1,100 employees. Is it something that is going to grow? Or is it something that is going to be reduced? Or is it going to be about static the way it is? That's one question. And then out of the departments that we do have, the ones that you do see the growth potential in, which are they?

Sure, we believe that we will be able to continue to trim existing numbers from I'd say all departments except for like police and fire as there's natural attrition and we evaluate and with the realignment we have found a lot of efficiencies already and being able to multiply work to go get it done. So we expect to continue to trim there. Where I do anticipate we will likely need additional staff in the future is in the police department. But right now we're so low on staff that we can't do a proper staffing study to know just how much. You want to look at unallocated time, but they're so busy right now that it would show that we need a whole bunch more staff. Well, of course we do because we're down about 40 positions. So our goal would be if we can get much closer to fully staffed, then do that analysis to be able to then see what might we need on the law enforcement front. Chief is also working on some reorganization of his existing staff. that will also reallocate how things are done. So that will be another opportunity that may create some positions that we don't need to add to our payroll, but we can create through that. So it's a both and, but I don't see, other departments necessarily jumping out in my mind as needing a whole lot more staff. I think that we need to get our legs under us with the new organization and do that assessment. But nothing is jumping out right now that says, oh, wow, even with this, all of a sudden, we just know that we don't have the people to do the job. The exception would be what we're trying to add this year, like the staffing for parks and recreation. That was something that we identified as we don't quite have the numbers that we need there and that's important from a safety perspective. But I think short of police, we would be hanging around the number that we are now.

Well, have you evaluated, too, in the past couple of years, some of the partnerships that we've had have either, you know, gone away, they've terminated. We've got issues in regards to the unsheltered. We've got issues with affordable housing. Because when I first got on here, that was one thing the cities, we participated at some level, but there was no need for it at the time because it was there was enough affordability in the marketplace, where we're taking on more of those roles that may have crossed the line into public health, into social services that we were never built for, or the state never built these cities for that kind of a concept, where we would collect the money to be able to take on more of these services. And yet we have other aspects of partnerships that are kind of pulling away from that. How are we going to adjust for things like that? Because we get elected from the citizens that are telling us these are the concerns that we have. We have limited amount of monies that we can spend. You're trying to get the salaries to make certain that we can take care of what we've got today. But now we're getting additional pressures put on us from non-profits, from other groups that are saying we need your help. It's hard for us to say, no, we can't help you, or we can only do but so much. It seems like our roles are starting to change a lot more than I even anticipated. We've got a great endowment here that we're going to be partnering with. We've got a lot of things happening. Are you all looking at that?

We are. You bring up a lot of great points and the biggest issue that I think we need to keep in front of us is we do have a number of critical core services that we have to provide to the community that we need to make sure that the dollars for those services are not having to compete with some of the ancillary requests that we have. We are looking with how we have reorged on the affordable housing side to have the support that that needs. But a lot of it is gonna come down to budget dollars. And I think really trying to assess what is the majority opinion of this community and if others are not stepping up in the ways that they feel are necessary then are they willing to pay more for us to do it because we don't just have a pot of money sitting around for these other requests that we're saying we don't know what to do with it somebody please come make a request So every request that comes in is being pitted against core services. And that's ultimately a value proposition that council will have to decide. I wouldn't begin to tell you where to stand on that. But our ask would be, we absolutely agree that those are critically important things that this community needs. But we are unlikely to be able to be all things to all people unless our tax rate is very, very different than what it is right now.

Just to try and steer us back towards looking at numbers. My number one priority in this budget is capital improvement projects. I think, you know, 2023, before I was on council, constant feedback, constant community discussion about infrastructure and keeping up with growth and keeping pace with just the booming nature of this area and then I want to say thank you to staff and to Tom in particular who in my first I think year or first two years on council took me to every single CIP project site and a lot of people in this room walked around with me and we looked at things and where things needed to go and why things weren't there and that experience sold me on CIP needs to be our number one priority so thank you for getting that point four one in here check I'm good to go on that I am sold and I support the idea of a living wage for city staff members.

I think that we need to put our money where our mouth is.

I think that we need to pay people who want to work in the government sector what they're worth. I think that we need to pay them not just a wage that gets them in the door, but lets them have a career and values the work that they put in and the vocation that they are called to every single day. I don't think that we are ever going to be a cash cow for folks. I don't think that anybody's ever going to Come and work for the city of Wilmington and, you know, become a millionaire billionaire overnight. That's not the role that we're supposed to play. But I do think that we have people the dignity and respect to pay them what they were. And I say that as a state employee myself, and as a son of 2 state employees who. I feel very called to the work that I do and I also just want to acknowledge. I'm rambling a little bit, sorry. I also just want to acknowledge the job security that comes with this and the benefits that come with this. And those are two important things that we can offer that others can't. But I still think that we need to come up to the living wage model. What I'm not comfortable with is 5.75. And so I'm ready to talk about numbers. We vote in four days and seven hours, and we have not really talked about numbers. So I'm a yes at 4.9. So I would say let's put ourselves in that alternative two, and let's figure out where we shave off the rest. And I'm ready to talk about the technology fund if folks are ready to go down this conversation space with me. I know that I'm sort of trying to drive us very quickly in one direction, but that's where I'm at, and that's where I'd like this conversation to go.

it's page two i think is where the you're talking about when you have the options up here so i guess if we're gonna uh thank you david for bringing us back in and making sure that we're making progress on this um i understand the compression issues with alternative two I want to understand more again like how over time we steer ourselves out of that because I am also not happy with 5.75 understanding I fully support all of these things and I think it's important for us as we're making these difficult decisions to to do so with all perspectives in mind. So alternative two takes us down to 5.44. What is it going to take us over time to address some of the compression issues that we see out of alternative two? And I guess where's the other 0.5 cents come from or whatever it is to get you to 4.9?

becky i think the first question is probably for you and i think the second question is for the rest of council so you are at uh let's see 0.25 0.31 cents would be the difference um so third of a penny one point one point four three if you go

Are you looking for a dollar amount? I think what I initially proposed alternative to, what it looked like to me was about 1.2 million. It may be a little bit more when you include some of the other benefits that may not have been in the original spreadsheet that we got.

Are we going down to the 0.49?

Well, I think there's yeah, there's two questions. One is if we choose alternative to how are we in the long term going to address the compression that results of that? And then my second question I think is to the rest of council, which is what else are we going to walk away from to get it below that?

So it's about 1,085,000 is the difference between So it's just over a million dollars. We can do round numbers for the sake of discussion. Yep. But particularly if you're paring down the rest of the tax rate, unless there is unexpected natural growth or an alternative revenue source that relieves pressure on the property tax rate, the only way to do that is another property tax increase.

I have two points that I would make on revenue. I appreciate that you've brought us conservative, conservative estimates on interest earnings and sales tax. I would like us to do responsible estimates on sales tax and interest earnings. And so I'm curious if we adjust those up just 0.1 on each, what does that do in revenue?

And while we're looking at that I think my first question on how do we in the long term address compression, I understand that that is going to cost money, I think what i'm looking for is what is the strategy is that something that we address as. um pay scales that are compressed as as we see folks moving into like making movement in there do we do we address the compression there what i'm looking for is not so much a dollar amount as much as i am a strategy because i what i get from this is that it's it's going to hurt but what i want to understand is how do we How do we address it in the long term if we can't address it right now?

I mean, the only way to do that would be to have the funds to move those pay scales that had been compressed, the additional $3,000, and then having the revenue to move the people with it.

worst case that would mean if we wanted to address compression next year we would be looking at that third of a cent as an increase next year yes or whenever we decided that we wanted to address that compression and that that would be a potentially depending on revenues and other factors that would be a third of a cent increase in the future

But also depending on what else is going on with costs. Sure. And then can we, is the state going to allow us with the ballot measure that we're expecting to be put forward in November? Yeah. What I will remind council of is one penny of this increase is health insurance. Mm-hm. If the commitment is to not bring you a tax increase next year, which I think is very much the desire of council, if we get another $3.5 million increase in health insurance, we're going to have to figure out how to absorb that already. I will just say, when we started this conversation, we were at 6.25. We have worked to bring the recommended budget at 5.75. That was finding things that we could pay for this year with existing revenues. It was trying to elongate the replacement schedules for certain things. We pushed hard to get it down to 575. But health insurance is a variable that we have very little control over. And it is a very significant component of what is driving these numbers this year.

Can I throw this out there? It may sound dumb, but I'm okay with that. When we were talking about Skyline, right, and we talked about being five years ahead of schedule, ahead of schedule, How creative can we be with that money?

as it relates to the financial issues we're facing now or well next year well now so how creative can we be we still have debt payments that would be scheduled to be made next year that we have dedicated debt service revenue to pay those bond payments um we we have to make those payments so there's not um it it didn't It didn't create a pile of money that we now have for other things. Or if we do, that went into the CIP model to drive down the 0.41 cents so we can complete everything else with only that 0.41 cents. Cuz remember when we were first talking about that, it was higher. But we were able to also ratchet that down because of where we stand in the CIP.

Okay, so another potentially dumb question. And I heard Dave talk about the precedence that he's setting on CIP projects. But what's the reality of completing the entire list? Because I know, and as long as I've been on council and been a resident of this community, all capital projects do not get completed in the time that they've been allotted.

so we do have i'm sorry sorry mayor pro tem you got anything else okay so we go ahead we do have we do have some slides on that that we're going to share and we do have a plan that's actionable based on the the 0.41 part of the challenge candidly is that the capital program has never been resourced appropriately and there's a variety of reasons for that that's not things that lay with council candidly those are It's just the reality of the situation. And so we, we feel very comfortable that with that, with this allocation, we will be able to accomplish those projects in the timeline that we've defined.

Okay, and well. So, what what on that list, if anything. Could we potentially look at stall?

Well, candidly, you could stall everything.

I mean, we could, but I'm saying like what was top priority that we really need done that our citizens would say, my Lord, we've been waiting on that to be done for 15 years. Kudos to the city of Wilmington for doing that. And great. And then, you know, I, and I, I don't know, I'm on a road today. So I'm going to say this regardless, you know, I don't want to minimize the importance of trails and, things of that nature. But hey, if we don't complete a trail next year or the year after that, you know, but we do something else that really changes, that really improves infrastructure or impact of a capital project in our community where citizens will say, you know what, I believe that's more important and we've been needing to get that done. What type of items do we have on the list now that we can pick and choose from.

So that list is the list that we shared with the council over time as we did the work, going back to the first budget sessions with the negotiable and non-negotiable, funded and non-funded. And we've distilled that down to, and it's on the slide in your packet, um things like bulkhead replacement bridge replacements so these these are these are bigger projects roundabouts things that that the community has been waiting on i think to your point for a long time a lot of these are transportation bond air quote projects that have been lingering and have been unresolved and have been uncompleted and that the community expects and deserves but the bouquet project is going to be a partnership right with the federal government so potentially potentially yeah yeah potentially right potentially we're applying for a grant right so yes that helps defray the cost but it doesn't absorb a hundred percent of it okay

I'm just going to keep asking dumb questions. Until we get to where we need to be. And I'll be honest. I'm hearing 4.9. I mean, of course, I think everybody knows that I'm not on board with the 5.75. I've been actually thinking around half of that. But, you know, my mind's not made up. If we can come out with something good that... kind of serves all interests, I'm going to be on board. I might be the one lone person that is the sore thumb, but hey, we can all be optimistic about where we can go.

I have a question. We're talking about capital improvements, correct? And one of the projects that I keep asking myself about is the Water Street Park. We're talking about a little over a million to save, maybe put off. This is to renovate the Old River Park space along Water Street in front of the Federal Building between Market and Princess Streets. Improvements include the creation of an event plaza new benches, stools, decorative lights, and river walk handrails, new hardscaping, landscaping, a decorative fountain, and new streetscaping along the road. Help me out.

Yes, ma'am. So my name is Justin Carter. I'm the director of our design and construction group. So as we look at Water Street Park, there's been a project that's been around for a very, very long time, has gone through a multitude of iterations. It is a project that right now is really just hard concrete down there. across from the federal courthouse. The plan is to try to make that area something that it was before. We'll be redoing the street through that area. We'll be adding a green space down to that area. We'll be looking at also having a plaza area. One of the things that had been done in the past were Friday night concerts down in that area. So developing a plaza to allow that to happen. when we look at what the cost overruns are for that project, it is purely driven by the fact that this project has been around so long and has gone through so many iterations that cost escalation from COVID and all of those things have taken that budget that was originally put in there that we have some money in for and really pulled it and blown it out of the water. That number and that growth that you're seeing as a negative is based on cost escalation from just COVID and everything else because this project hasn't, hasn't gone from a final project to construction in a reasonable amount of time.

Thank you. That sounds great. But again, I'm still looking to find a little over $1 million to pull.

So what we do want to point out is the way our CIP projects are funded, if you were to remove that, we don't then have a million dollars that we're reducing. Because we only pay a small portion of it with actual cash, and then that 0.14 cents is borrowing capacity to be able to pay for the rest. And so you would only be saving actually a very small amount of cash if you were to try to remove that to reduce the tax rate. So it's not, CIP needs to be looked at a little bit differently than the rest of the operating budget.

So I'm glad that we're going to sort of be discussing this and getting our hands dirty on this. I don't want to touch CIP at all. But I'm happy to have any conversation. I'm happy to negotiate on anything. But I don't want to touch CIP at all, number one, for the debt capacity and the debt analysis that we've just discussed. But also again, that's my number one priority. And some of these are very high profile projects that not only is it a negative when our community constantly sees them unfinished, but it would be a huge positive to see them finished. So I really, again, I'm happy to talk about any of the CIP, but I think that that is not what we should touch. Instead, the strategy that I think we should take is to start going department by department, office by office, and shaving off a little bit here and there where we can. And we've still not talked about technology, which is a conversation I really want to explore. And before I turn my microphone off, I do know, Mayor, that you, we had a phone call and you did bring up one CIP project in particular that you thought was worth exploring. And I don't know, I don't even remember what it was. I just remember we had a conversation.

Which one? No, the one that I have a lot of heartburn on. I know it was in the transportation bond projects in 2014. It was Pine Grove and Olena Drive. And the reason that I have such heartburn in that one And I can't understand why we didn't. Only in a drive like Market Street and College Road and all the major roadways are a state-maintained road. And we're getting nothing for the improvement for safety on a state-maintained road. And in our past... history with the state we have partnered with them we've gotten we've put skin in the game and when we put skin in the game they usually help us they have said no and i can't understand why and i'm just flabbergasted on that one because that the price on that one or the cost on that particular project i think when we first looked at it many years ago it was like 1.4 million 2 million something like that has exploded what's the cost now

Yeah, I think our cost is just over $10 million. And really, the cost that we have in there was based on what our previous bid was that came in. We do hope when we go back out that we'll be more competitive and bring that bid down, especially as we look at maybe making some adjustments to allow for daytime work. So we do have a number in there that we think is

reasonable based on what the previous bids were um that's a huge number the intersection is working yes it's got we've got concerns about the safety on it my bigger thing is greenville loop road and pine grove rover with that roundabout because that will help move the track if you go down that roadway any day of the week it is backed up And I would also say the same thing, I think, at Holly Tree and Pine Grove. Those two major intersections, because there's so much traffic going north, south, east, west, and there's two-lane roads, it's having significant impacts there. And we want to finish those projects. Plus, it coincides with our cross-city trail project that we're going to finish, which is underway currently as we speak. The one that I thought that we could save some money on or could hold back on the CIP was that Pine Grove Road, because we had purchased the right-of-way, so we already got it. The design is 100% done, and we may find ourselves in a better environment in regards to construction costs, maybe in the very near future, depending on what the economy does and what happens. But I think that one is one, if we could hold back on and save some money on, I would like to hold off on that one.

So, can I just say this? And I hear David, right? And I hear David, he's basically telling us what he wants and what he doesn't want. And I get it. That's your prerogative to say so. But there's a consensus, right? There's a consensus that needs to be made about what we're going to do here. as as it relates to city business and and of course the the citizens of this community do deserve improvements but if it's going to save them money you know would you much would you rather have uh improved infrastructure over a new park i would the the one thing that's that's going to actually improve your life over a park and i'm not saying parks aren't important i take my kids to parks um quite often when i have time but the thing that's going to help us save you money as it relates to paying property taxes or making sure that this community is safer Those, I mean, there's a balance that we have to have here. And, you know, the professionals in the room, they know that no matter how you frame it, there's an approach that we have to have that we have to take. And I understand what you're hearing when you're in the community. But when I'm in the community, I'm hearing, hey, listen, do not raise taxes. Or why don't we have this? Or why don't we have that? Or, hey, I can barely afford this now. So, yeah, I understand your list all fine and well, but, but staff, I want to make sure that you listen to what we're all saying and we all can negotiate, come to an agreement or what we will, what we won't do and what we want as an, as an organization, because that's important based on not just what we want, but what taxpayers have told us that they

And that's totally valid. I think the things to bear in mind is it's never going to get cheaper to do the work, right? So the longer we delay, if the intent is to accomplish the work at all, it's never going to get cheaper. Is there some variation in the market and some periodic fluctuation that we can take advantage of and we can evaluate the phasing and those sorts of things? Absolutely, but to delay something 10 years is only going to drive the cost up for when it needs to be done. So waiting a year, absolutely, or figuring out, trying to time the market, I think those things are valid. The other thing about the .41 that I hope everybody also just bears in mind is it's capacity that's built and carried forward. So, that just rides along and allows us to continue to borrow in the future and helps us to be positioned to address things and be resourced to go faster and take advantage of those opportunities as they come. So, it's not just a for the now and completing these projects, but it's also a long-term play to make sure that we have the borrowing capacity to do the work that we need to do now and going forward.

Well, I'll say this. If you're on Water Street and you're looking for a park, just walk on down to Live Oak Pavilion and we can make sure that we turn on. It's like a little splash. It has a splash pad feature there. You know, it does double as a park when there's no concerts going on. So you just have to take the kids there before some of the bands get there later that night. I mean, we have plenty of parks. So there's, like, it's not like we're dying for parks. Do they need to be maintained? Maybe they need to be upgraded? Yes. But the need for new parks? I don't know.

You know, it's kind of like we hear on both sides. You're developing way too much, protect more open space, protect more green space. You get out here and you protect more green space, you got to improve it, or you're spending too much on park. It's, you know, it's half a dozen one, half a dozen other. And I get what you're saying on the park there on Water Street. Remember, we had to wait for the federal government to finish the bulkhead before we could even get there, or we would have probably gotten to that park earlier. Now that we're into this phase, remember, we have purchased the Coast Guard property to make that a linear park, but we also now have to fix that bulkhead at a cost of $12 million, of which hopefully we'll get a grant to do that. Once that grant, hopefully we get that and we complete that bulkhead repair, then you have, maybe you can go back and revisit that. I mean, when they had the concerts on the backside there of the federal building, that was before we had Live Oak Bank Pavilion and other things going on, and it was kind of a way to get people downtown. I don't think that that's necessary anymore, and we can even change, maybe look at the schismatics as to what we may want to do. to accomplish there or try to do there that doesn't involve more of an elaborate system. Plus the fact is, any kind of water feature that you have in regards to fountains, throw them out the window. Anywhere I've seen a fountain, even at the hospital, they don't even work. And if they do work, they go down within six months and then something's happened to the thing. They're maintenance nightmares. You're down there on the river. Why are you looking at a fountain? You're there in the river. That's insanity. No fountain, Mayor. No fountain. Just get rid of the fountains. We've got one fountain that's challenging enough. And as long as we've been here, I think 70% of the time it's down. So what are we doing with the fountains? Come on, guys.

Yeah, and we can look at bringing that project and being it back, but that's some of the issues that I think has happened with this project over time is it has changed, direction has changed, and that's driven that escalation up, right? And now we have had different things developed down there in the time that this project has been developed over, absolutely. And we can revisit that, but we do so with hopefully the understanding across the board that we're going to scale it back, right? Because if we don't, then we extend that schedule. And that escalation in cost starts to drive that project budget up again. So to your point, we absolutely can revisit that. I just want to make sure we're cognizant of that cost escalation. Sure.

But I've also seen costs adjusted. I'll give you a good example. When we did the convention center many years ago, When we built it, it was in the middle of the Great Recession in 2008, I believe. We ended up, because people were so desperate for work, we ended up building that center of $62 million at the time, $4 million under budget, and we maxed it out because we hit the market right. So you're gonna have market adjustments, and although we've been flying pretty high, and hopefully we'll continue to do well with the economy, you don't know what's out there. And we might end up in a situation where we end up pretty good. Now, we also have to remember there's been $64 billion worth of damage in the western part of the state, which a lot of the contractors that we do business with have gone up there to do significant amount of work. Mike was just telling me they got $500 million in the western part of the state, and I have a 40 corridor study for lane management. We got $2 million for this area, for this area, $2 million. And you gotta say to yourself, it looks like we're the transportation people here, so it all falls on us. And so I want to finish these projects. Just like I told the folks at Love Grove many years ago, that would be the first project done, and it was the first project. If we had to do that project today, I think it costed us five, six million dollars at the time, that project would probably be somewhere about, what, 20 million dollars to do that bridge?

Yeah, probably in the 15 to 20 million range, yes.

And if we hadn't jumped on it first, it would be that much today. So we've completed that project and made a commitment to those citizens in that neighborhood that we would do that, and we did it. So I think we have made this commitment, we should finish it. The only project left then out of the 2014 bond projects would be the Pine Grove readjustment. And I think we're there is just can you get the timing right and hit it and maybe get it at a better cost than we're currently got it at.

Yes, sir.

I want to jump in and just say for the record, I don't want to move away from the .41 for CIP to debt service. I think that's very important. which leaves us with the increases that we're looking at in the general fund i put forth a suggestion that would pull out a million dollars i think we've got to find two to get to the suggested below five the suggested increase getting below five that's about two million dollars that we need to find in the general fund. So if alternative two isn't the way to go, we need to find that $2 million. And I don't know if we need to go with David's suggestion to just go through department by department and cut where we think we can until we hit that 2 million. I don't know if there's a better strategy. i don't know if a better number to try to cut is to start with a million see where we land try to find the next million i to your point we're taking this vote in four days we need to start to make some decisions about i think we understand the problem in front of us and i want to focus on solving that anytime i've gone through a budget process

Anytime that I've gone through a budget process, I've always gone back from the beginning to the end. So through every department, I think that's a great idea. And not just necessarily focusing on one area. So if we can start, I'd love that.

I agree not to touch the CIP money, and I think it's going to come out when we find the things to cut. It'll be like smaller potatoes that add up to a larger potato, so going through some of the smaller items.

i agree and i think that we need to i think we need to start having those conversations around what's coming out and i i do i know that staff has put a lot into this i know that you've already found a half cent from your initial suggestion so i i do want to have that conversation together so that we understand if we cut this what are what are the consequences of that um but if if we don't have the votes as a council for 5.75 we need to find a place where we do have the votes And I think we need to do that.

Becky, is there anything out of the fund for one-time expenses from the fund balance that we can use? Or have we depleted that?

You can. The issue, though, is then you don't then have those dollars for new one-time expenses the following year. So again, you compound. You're then limiting yourself in future years.

I know that the counties, I think their budget was about $27 million in the red, and they've balanced it going through fund balance. I think, so I'm going to ask this question. I have to ask this question. I saw that they were, I think, borrowed a certain amount of money to, I guess, offset some of those costs. How did they do that? I want to see if we can use their magic in some respect, and I want to be fair. And I just want to know.

I want to be very delicate in how I answer this. So I would prefer not to talk about anybody else's budget and talk about fiscal policy and management.

Can we borrow the money to do certain amount of these things? That's what I'm asking.

So the short answer is yes, you can borrow money for a tangible whatever that you are buying. But from a fiscal responsibility and best financial practices standpoint, that is terrible. You are then paying more because you have interest payments. You then the next year have to make annual payments on that plus pay for whatever new things you need. And so it is, it is considered an absolute desperate or it should only be considered as a last ditch desperate act when there is just nothing else that you can do. Often for say a very unexpected large expense in the middle of a fiscal year that you weren't counting on and you don't want to deplete your fund balance. But even then, it is just not recommended because of the compounding issue that you have because all of the things that you're buying that are a one-time expense, they have a shelf life. So they start depleting and often to get that annual payment down to something that doesn't completely kill your budget next year, you're having to stretch out payments for in some cases longer than you own the equipment. and then you're still paying for it when you need new equipment you're still paying on the old equipment it's like getting upside down on a car loan what i'm hearing you describe is like in in a personal budget like living on credit cards correct correct we very much advise against living on credit cards understood i'm i'm not in favor of pursuing that option just put that out there and becky i haven't said this in a while but i agree with you on that Thank you, Mayor Pro Tem. I'll take it. Okay.

I'll just say that I agree with that too and I don't agree, I agree with keeping the capital budget where it is and with not borrowing money for ongoing general fund expenses.

This is ultimately council's budget, and we are certainly happy to go line by line. We're happy to stay here as long as we need to.

Again, it's up to you all. David, did you want to go into that budget item in regards to IT, or have you already done that?

We've not done that yet today. I mean, the mayor's question was, do we want to transition and talk about the technology budget line item? I would like to discuss that. may I just propose, it's 1150 now, why don't we have that conversation, take our lunch break, and we can ask staff to bring us, or at least give us an estimate on what it would take time-wise to bring us a more detailed line item budget for us to start going department by department.

So let me ask this question. We're talking about cuts, right? Department by department. What are we cutting? Let's be specific.

That's what we have to decide. That's that.

Yeah, but but I mean, you're generalizing. Are we are we looking at cutting personnel? Are we looking at cutting? What what are we anticipating cutting?

I think that we have to get into the weeds and dig through it and figure that out. I mean, we could and I am not 100% sure that we want to go down this road, but we could call up each department head one by one and give them a number and have them tell us where to find it. I don't think that's the best use of our time, but I anticipate if we got into the weeds on going item by item, these are tangible things and I hate to call them toys, but specific items that we could forego purchasing.

No, well, that's the question that I'm asking. Are we talking about cutting purchases or are we talking about cutting people? Because I don't know what, I'm opposed to cutting people, most definitely. So that's not an option for me.

Well, I agree with that. Okay, so I just want to make sure we're saying that. Purchases and stuff of that nature is what we're talking about. Can we hold back on purchasing something or doing something that we could hold back on for this year or something?

And I agree with that, I just think that I don't know if we can get there from here as far as finding enough savings to really affect the tax rate. I mean, I'm already looking at, we're talking about saving the average household and even the above average household at most a couple of dollars a month by doing all this exercise. And I just don't think you can find enough light bulbs and toilet paper not to trivialize it, to make up for what our personnel costs are, which are the biggest part of our general fund budget. And out of that, our public safety is the biggest part, which is why we've done all this. all these exercises so far and we're just talking about not saving that much money for the average taxpayer so i know last year's budget we spent a whole lot of time on what each department could give up and we ended up spending i think a couple of months talking about horses um and so i'm just you know I'm just saying I don't have a lot of faith in going back to the departments at the 11th hour and trying to find things because I just feel like a lot of that has already been done. And it's not going to get us that much in savings.

Well, there's a narrative. Go ahead, Kevin.

I was just going to tell Celeste. So the same thing I just told Becky, you can just apply it to yourself. I agree with you now, too.

I'll just say this. There's a narrative out there that thinks that we're just out here just arbitrarily just want to do this.

Correct.

And remember when this first came out, I think it was at 6. 625. 625. We've gone down to 5.7. There's some concerns. I think it's our responsibility and our job that if we want to go through this exercise just to see And if we don't get there, then we don't get there. But at least we have exhausted every opportunity as sitting council members to evaluate it and look at it. And if that's where we end up, we end up that way. But I think we ought to at least give it a try. Because at the end of the day, we know people are hurting. And gas have gone up. Insurance costs have gone up. Food has gone up. Everything has gone up. Cost of doing business has gone up dramatically. And at the same time, people are expecting us to try to do it with less, and that's also unfair too. So we're having to make tough decisions. That's why we get elected for it. That's why you have a representative for Montgomery to give us the opportunity to dig into this thing. So some people think, oh, just slash and burn. People use the buzzwords, oh, they can cut their way to it. And maybe we can and maybe we can't, but I want to at least go through the exercise so the people that are paying attention, that are listening to this, including the media that's watching this, understand that we're taking this very seriously and we want to make sure that we're fair and equitable to all parties, including the staff, including the city, including the citizens. So I'm willing to go through that exercise.

I agree. And I want to continue to acknowledge the cuts that have already happened. 29 positions from the budget, a half cent from the initial tax rate that you brought. I think I just want to turn over every stone and make sure that there's nothing else that we are able to cut. And if this is where we land, this is where we land. But I think it is worth going through the exercise as expediently as possible.

I don't want to do the exercise just to be performative. If we're doing the exercise just to check the box and we end up with the same result, then it's a waste of all of our time.

Okay.

I don't think ending at the same result means that it's performative. I think it is important for us to have a conversation where we understand at the level of detail that we need that every expense in the budget should be there, even if that means we end up at 5.75 after that conversation.

I can tell you I won't end up at 5.75.

Is my chair?

Can we take a break before we get into that? Lunch is here, so we can take a lunch break. I don't know how to formally request that.

If lunch is here, we'll go ahead and take lunch and come back. Tom, it's here? It's 1257, 1157, or 58.

What time do you want to come back?

15, 20 minutes?

Sure, 20 minutes.

Yeah, 20 minutes. Okay, we'll take a 20 minute recess.

I'm going to do the unsheltered presentation first. Sure.

All right, we'll bring the meeting back to order. Okay, I'm going to do the roll call. Are you here? Mayor Pro Tem. Council Member Joyner. Here. Council Member Andrews. Here. Council Member Lau. Here. Council Member Santaguida. Here. Council Member Quintana. Here. Chair's here. Everybody's here and accounted for.

Yeah, I'm here. Sorry.

I got you here. Okay.

Okay. Um, thank you. We are going to pivot just a little bit. Talk about the unsheltered populations update because that may drive some of the other budget conversations. So I will turn it over to Rachel Schuller.

Good afternoon. Thank you. So just to get started, we've talked a little bit about homelessness, exiting homelessness. I think it's always important for us to talk about the ways that you literally exit homelessness as part of this context. And so there are generally three ways. One is self-resolved rapid exit. That's for the folks who may just need to get back in touch with family. It may be someone who just needs to have a month of their mortgage paid, whatever it may be, their rent, whatever it may be, that's small interventions. Next step is that rapid rehousing. That's usually up to about three months of rental assistance, down payment assistance, things like that, deposits, just to get someone situated, and then they're pretty self-sufficient moving on. And when I say self-sufficient, that may include on vouchers, housing choice vouchers or other things like that. And then permanent supportive housing is the most comprehensive where you're talking about the actual units and the rental assistance and that as well as the wraparound services due to the chronic mental and physical disabilities that are associated with the folks who are in that population. So back in September of 2024, council and the board of commissioners were presented the shelter strategy. We call it the strategy to address unsheltered homelessness. This strategy was put together with a number of our partner agencies as well as New Hanover County over the course of several months from March to September. where we did a lot of deep diving into the problem, hearing from those with lived experiences, looking at paths forwards and defining what success would look like. This plan was a collaborative effort through those partner agencies and the county with all of the different players having a different role in this strategy and the outcomes. So just a brief refresh on what that looked like. we had the low barrier options. Shown here are the outcomes, objectives, and progress measures. As you can see, some of these progress measures and even outcomes, some are not necessarily something that you can just put funding behind, but rather systematic and process changes that go along with that. When we talk about empowerment courts, I know Councilmember Joyner could speak a little bit more than I could on what that looks like. But when you're speaking about the folks who are in that situation due to homelessness, there are not typically lengthy sentences like there may be for drugs or some other different situations that those empowerment courts have helped to be successful. And so while there are some communities that have what they call homeless court, a lot of what that looks at is connecting people to services at those places. And so while there obviously are financial implications of some of those relationships. A lot of that is just that the partnerships, relationships, being at court, being able to make those referrals to get to those folks house. And again, there's not necessarily a dollar amount you can associate with that, but just rather that larger systematic change. Again, looking at the 911 calls for people who are homeless, that really came out with how the county was tracking calls. And so again, it's looking at the overall system approach of not looking to arrest your way out of a homelessness problem, but rather intervening in different ways. And so when we look at how we interact with our social workers and some of those street outreach teams and offering the community solutions of who to call rather than just the police. Are there agencies that we can call? Are there people that they can call instead of just that 911? When we look at the case load capacity, a big piece of that is how we move people through the system. When I say system, I mean the homeless services system. So when folks are in, say, a Good Shepherd, and if you have a case manager who has a case of 75, it's going to be very difficult to pour in and assist those 75 individuals. when we are able to get people out of shelters and into permanent housing, that's going to reduce what their caseload is. And so again, the solution is not necessarily always just additional case managers, but it's sometimes funding programs like rapid rehousing or housing units to get folks into that. So that way that they can have the ongoing case management when they're not worrying about the day-to-day needs as well. And so moving on to some of the comprehensive day services and overnight shelter capacity. We'll get into that in a little bit, but again, that is, we can have more beds available if we can get people into housing. And so we'll talk a little bit about that. As far as case management through coordinated entry, a lot of that is through a system that a lot of other communities have used. I'm not sure if you've heard of it before, but it's case counseling. And so when you're looking at the different ways that people are in coordinated entry, which is how anyone who's looking for that permanent housing is on this list. They meet together twice a month, the agencies of how can we place these folks. It's talking about the individual needs of those people to figure out what's the right connection agency, etc. When we talk about the gaps in services surrounding the point in time numbers, in your packet are the updated Continuum of Care point in time numbers. What's interesting about it is we've talked about this in the past, too, where a lot of that since it's in that last week of January, it's cold weather. A lot of those folks are already in services like the warming shelter in Good Shepherd. They are being sheltered, so they are already at those services. And so what we have proposed in the past, and we've been working with the continuum of care, is to do a summer count. see what the numbers look like in a different time of the year. It's not an official HUD mandated, but a local count that we can do within the city to see are people located near the services or are they going to the services? What does that look like? Again, the destinations to HMIS, we'll get to that in a minute. Moving on to the solution of supply and capacity for supportive housing, we talked about reducing the length of homelessness in the population. That's a measure that's in that COC data that you can see how long are people in the system before they're housed. We have a lot of great success when we can get people housed, but again, how long does it take to get them housed? And that is determined by the number of units available. This area here where we get into land use regulations, that was really a county initiative at the time. The city did look at their code and we did not find issues of where supportive housing is permitted. And so that's not necessarily something that the city had to pursue, but we were always looking at on a case by case basis. If there was a conflict with our code, we would examine it and bring forth a text amendment to make that appropriate. Same thing with the referrals to street outreach code of compliance. The city has had a tremendous relationship with that for many years. That was really more aligned with the county zoning getting into touch with some of that street outreach at the time. The number of households assisted with rapid rehousing, I'll get to that in a minute. But that one, the Good Shepherd Center received a significant grant from the community endowment. Sorry, the New Hanover Endowment where they were funding that rapid rehousing and we have seen tremendous success. They have more than doubled the numbers of folks that they have been able to house and stay housed due to that rapid rehousing, again, that three months of assistance, as well as that housing retention. And so we have seen a minimal investment, and I'll get to those numbers in a minute, of a little over $2,000 per individual that's having this tremendous result. And then participating landlords, that is a huge need where just the general understanding of what a housing voucher means. Of what it means to have potentially a master lease with some of our partner agencies where they need to have a number of units available. for their participants and getting over some of the barriers that are on there, whether it's the application fee, whether it is background checks, credit checks, you're basically, as an organization, able to say, hey, we are accountable for our residents, we are going to do that and we need to get landlords involved. So moving on, we also identified in this some short-term outcomes that were sort of going to be talked about and moved forward. I'm going to start with the growing the capacity of the continuum of care. We have had some really great movement and success there. The endowment also granted the continuum of care a grant to help build their capacity. We've had some TA assistance, some technical assistance from HUD that have been able to help take a look at the system performance. Our system performance out of a score of about 200, two years ago, we were at 90. we have almost doubled the score and that's the basis of how we get funding here locally due to that system performance. And so some of it is data cleanup, some of it's telling our story better, some of it is just getting partners on board to tell their stories as well. And then again, the capacity for existing service providers. We talk about HMIS, which is basically the software of how we track folks in the system. There are a number of providers that just don't understand the importance of it. They don't have the ability to do the work. And so training them, having them understand this is the outcome if you do this, that's been another part of that grant as well, to be able to improve that. Looking at the capacities of facilities, I will highlight this second one here, that mental health focused treatment. That really was a county initiative, and they are the folks who do these mental health. They're the partners with Trillium, and so that really was their initiative. But as we look at the partners to increase day shelter and spaces, that has been a number. of our conversations and I'll get to that in a later slide as well. And then finally, again, the regulations, incentives, looking at that, as we talked about, that landlord engagement and housing assistance programs and how we can increase access. So very briefly, I apologize if I talk in alphabet soup, but when we talk about the continuum of care, so there are a number of continuum of care organizations throughout the state. As you can see in this map, we are what is called the Wilmington, Brunswick County, New Hanover County, and Pender County Continuum of Care. That is housed at the Cape Fear Council of Governments. They are the lead agency. Shown here is the administrative support that all of the different jurisdictions have been participating from the administrative. As you can see, the city in fiscal year 26 was at 73,000. In the fiscal year 27 budget, that does increase to 76,000.

How are these numbers determined? There's some big differences in this table, so I'm trying to understand how one government is paying 73,000 and one is paying zero.

It is how much they would like to contribute. There's no obligation, there's no formula, it's just the desire of those boards. Thank you.

Rachel, that's a good question to segue into, but isn't this mandated by HUD?

So there are different models, and I know Dennis has had a lot of experience with this, and Tom as well, so feel free to talk about this. But when you look at the different lead agencies, so it is mandated, but there are different ways you can do it. You can be in the balance of state, which again is that you can see there's a large portion of the state especially with our more rural communities where there's a lot of strength and being in the balance of state because of the tools and resources that are provided. So different jurisdictions have it set up differently. And so you can see we I highlighted us in blue of where our lead agency is the Council of Governments. Other ones may have cities or counties be the lead agency. And that's where you're going to see the different levels of investment, financial investment, time investment, all of those things.

um and so while it is mandated the participation and financial aspect is not necessarily mandated yeah and i think that's the important thing to bear in mind there is is the the likeness of those communities that are generally covered so if you look at the balance of the state that is because it is predominantly rural and so as the coc's evaluate which grants they're going to pursue which nofas are going to be available obviously if you're a rural focused entity you're going to be pursuing those sorts of things charlotte mecklenburg's a very different thing right there is no rural pursuit so all that is focusing on on the the urban dollars we're in sort of this blended thing where wilmington's really the the most urban urbanized And there's tension, I think, to a certain extent just because of the fact that we've got more rural communities there in our COC. So it makes us a little dichotomous.

I don't we don't need to go into this level of detail today because I actually would like to follow up with you and get more detail but I want to understand what mandated by HUD means in this context and what that would mean for if you are not in compliance which agencies feel a pain point so down the road I'd like to talk about that.

And I will, I do want to add that a majority of the funding from the COC is for services and beds and units in the city of Wilmington. We have some success in Pender County with, with one of their domestic violence shelters because of some of the bonus points that they had. But a majority of the funding that's coming from those different sources are going there. What's really interesting, this is just a snapshot of it, but we can send out the link that our continuum of care has a dashboard that compares our performance tracking across the different state, national trends. So you can sort of see how we are performing and where. And so again, this is just a snapshot of what they are looking at. Some of the duties, to your point, Councilmember Joyner, they are the HUD approved homeless continuum of care. It's the collaborative alliance, so it's not just the COG, it's not the continuum of care. They are the lead agency, we are all partners. The city of Wilmington has a C, a designated C on the board. That is, I sit in that role. I'm actually, we just created a little change where we now will have a government representative on the executive committee. So that is, I'll be serving at the executive committee as well. to make sure that we are part of all of those conversations and we have that. And so that way I can provide context to you all to help with some of these decisions and conversations.

And so what that means to be- Rachel, I'm sorry, and I just had a question a few slides back. Yeah. Do our COC dues, sorry, our Council of Government, our COG dues, do they also help support the continuum of care? Or is that the full budget for the COC?

No, the funding that we send to the COG as part of that is not. This is a separate agreement that we have with them for the continuum of care. And so it was a five year agreement. Next year is the last year of that five year and then we'll renew it, we'll bring it forward for you all. um and so that this funding is the administrative support the coc here has two full-time staff members and three part-time staff members some of the funding to pay for that staff is from the grants they get through both the federal government and the state and so their overall budget for everything they put out does include some of that administrative because they are doing the program delivery. So if they are doing the coordinated entry intake, if they're doing the HMIS training, that money is part of those grants. And so that's a big piece of the administrative budget that they have, but it's not all of. There's some additional funding that they get through that, through the competitions. So again, being a lead agency here, there's a lot of different models that are across the state. There are some folks where the HMIS administration may be in one place of government and the actual collaborative applicant may be in another. Here at NC 506, they're doing all of this. And so again, the city is not the lead on homelessness services in this region. We are a partner and a player. And so we, as a collaborative applicant, when folks are applying for these funds through these competitive grants, We are at the table helping with the scoring. We have representatives there. So we are, again, part of this process, but we are not taking the lead on it. When we get into funding, there are several different funding sources that support homeless services and housing. In blue are the funding sources that are coming from and through the city of Wilmington. So we have our general funds all the way on the right. We utilize those for gap financing, for affordable rental development. When we think about that, it can be everything from the SECU, the Sparrow that we just went to the ground or ribbon cutting for three weeks ago. It may be Starway where they are doing, it's a low income housing tax credit, but we have had partnerships between them, the Wilmington Housing Authority for project based vouchers, Good Shepherd and other partners where they are able to house people who may be And so it's important to note that when we talk about some of these units, it's across the housing spectrum and not just focus on homeless services. We also have in our budget this year as part of that affordable housing fund, a ready to rent program because housing is a continuum. And if we can't just look at always putting a bandaid on, we also have to look at preventing that as well through eviction prevention, getting people ready. looking at credit, helping folks that they may income qualify for a low income housing tax credit, but they may not meet the credit requirements. So how do we help them improve their credit by having some of these property developments, property managers participate in some of these credit programs for their residents to help improve that. Additionally, we have federal funds that flow through the city as an entitlement community that include home that we utilize again for gap financing and rehab programs. keeping people in their homes because preservation is a big piece of this puzzle. As people get priced out, age out, things like that, this is what's keeping people in their homes at an affordable rate. Especially if you have a homeowner who doesn't have a mortgage, but they need repairs and their house is no longer gonna be habitable, it's important for us to intervene and not have them become homeless. The Community Development Block Grant, that specifically allows us to fund shelter services, which we are only allowed to do a small portion. It was $134,000 last year because it's capped. So there's a 10% cap in what the federal government allows us to do. And then we also do, again, down payment assistance and rehab programs through that. The funding that flows through the continuum of care is again that COC competition. That's where some of those administrative costs and those operations are coming from that funding source, as well as how they fund currently permanent supportive housing and rapid rehousing, as well as the ESG, the emergency solutions grant, which has the bucket shown there. But of course, this picture is not complete without the private and philanthropic funding as well. And so, Mayor, to your point earlier, as we look at the changes in funding streams and systems, that piece is going to become more and more important and how we leverage some of that. In this region, we have not unlocked all of the potential for that bucket. There are communities that have much deeper pockets of Community Reinvestment Act, the CRA, through banks. I mean housing trust funds that people are able to contribute to that can then be utilized for some of these programs. So as we look at changing trends, that's gonna probably be a piece that we all have to look stronger at. and that's part of the conversation at the coc level of facilitating those discussions understanding the needs and what we're seeing time over time is that these other federal ones are becoming are shifting and so when we've had pauses where in the latest COC competition, it's going from their focus is permanent supportive housing. Well, now it's shifting to more supportive services. So as a city or as a private funder, how do you adapt and be flexible to fill in those gaps to maintain the services that have been happening and then also try to expand? So over the past, I guess, year and a half since then, we've had some pretty good progress and success measures that we want to highlight. I apologize it's a little small on your printout and screen. But as you can see, the presentation was presented in September of 2024. Since then, we have had a HUD technical assistance visit to talk about permanent supportive housing and capacity building. That happened, it was actually in February 2025 when it was right when there was like that federal freeze but then it opened back up so we were able to get the TAs in and they provided a really great baseline. They actually, skipping ahead, they were just here two weeks ago to talk a little bit more about predictive analysis that we're gonna be able to share some of those numbers with you because of the work that has been done there. But in the meantime, we have been trying to update you on the progress through different, through a memo. We did some appropriation of some of that home ARPA money for the Sparrow. We celebrated a success with the Salvation Army grand opening, opening up 75 beds and some community space. We've also had a work session last August where we got into some of the details, talked a lot about the COC data. That was the 2025 data. I put the 2026 in your packet so that you have that updated information. A lot of that was about centering around the conversation about the ordinance. And so at that time, council did request us to explore property conveyance for a shelter. We've provided some updates on that. We also approved the social worker co responder model. We are happy to announce that we've had two folks start with us in the recent weeks and they're getting acclimated and will be again a vital part of this continuum. We also put out a request for information for a low barrier shelter to explore what some of our current partners and potential future partners could do with some of the spaces that we may be able to provide, or are there other sites that we should be looking at, other models we should be looking at, and how we can continue to collaborate. And then finally, we did the housing ecosystem presentation at your planning conference in February, again, kind of updating you on the progress. But what we also want to show is what our investments are. And so when we look at our investments for this fiscal year, You can see that we have made quite significant strides. We have budgeted $500,000 for those social workers as we mentioned. We had a fiscal year 25 reimbursement of just shy of $200,000 for the Getting Home Street program for our portion of that. We also contribute through the MSD $88,000 for our street outreach for Block by Block. Everyone knows about Jack Morris who is a phenomenal asset in this community and the work that he does. And so again, just making sure that you all understand that that is due to the contributions of the city through the MSD. We also did our CDBG funding, as I mentioned, which was that $134,000, our contributions to the continuum of care at the Council of Governments. And through our human services nonprofit funding, we have funded some partners through that. So that's totaled a little over a million dollars in this year of how we've contributed towards those programs. Obviously, that doesn't include the larger projects that we had already contributed to that are opening along the way. So in your packet are these slides, again, talking a little bit about what the design of that street outreach program was with New Hanover County, a little bit about the MSD, and these are slides that I think I showed you either in February or August or maybe both, so just as a refresher. Again, some of those bigger investments we've made, we talk all the time about how when we're funding these low-income housing, affordable housing projects, we're not just funding the folks who are working in the workforce. It may be the folks who are on these coordinated entry lists and who some of them are working. So it's a big mix. But just as progress, we have our low to no barrier progress. We just want to kind of update you on where we are with that. So we did issue that request for information in the end of January. We received six submittals and based on the information provided as a lead partner, we did move forward with some conversations with LINC to explore what that looks like. We did speak with them about potential partnerships with some of the other local agencies that are doing this work that could benefit, that Blink could benefit from by participating with them, whether it is the Healing Place, Living Hope, Good Shepherd, all of the different agencies that sort of have their hands in this. How do we create a place for everyone to come together? We have looked at different site locations, potential budget needs. Through that predictive analysis and some other conversations, I'll show you sort of what that may look like. So that way what we can do is develop a robust request for proposal that has actual numbers, budget, and kind of those ideas. We also want to invite you, I'm working with providers up in Wake County to take you on a field trip. So you can see potentially what some sites may look like. Council Member Joyner and I were able to go to Greensboro on a trip and see a site there that was a low to no barrier shelter. So I think it's important for you all to sort of experience what other communities are seeing, feeling, neighborhoods are experiencing from that and just really have that overall picture. But one of the questions that was asked is if we were to implement the strategy, what would that cost? And so through the predictive analysis that we did, looking at past projects that we have funded that we are just a partner to, we sort of broke it down into different buckets. And so when you look at COC capacity, whether that's talking about their landlord engagement, potentially additional staff, additional training for both them and for some of our partner agencies, Looking at the average cost of rapid rehousing or housing retention, basing that off of if we wanted to estimate about 200 people. Adding new units, what new construction costs for permanent supportive housing, the SECU, the Sparrow is an example. I will note that that $7.5 million did not include land costs because it was conveyed from a former fire station. So when you think of that number, we would like you to think about the fact that land's not in there. So it probably would be closer to potentially that $8 million mark. When you have a site, there are costs associated annually. And so that is probably about estimate about $10,000 per person annually in those supportive services. So again, those wraparound services. Instead of building new construction, if you were doing a rental scattered site, that's probably closer to the $13,000 a person annually. When you look at shelters, looking at what Salvation Army and some of the Good Shepherd expansion, that's in the $12 million range. And then along with that, there's operating expenses of over $600,000. In your packet, I've also included a pamphlet from Salvation Army about their future expansion and Good Shepherds. Because, and I'll get back to that slide in a second, but it's important to note too of some of the work that's being done. When we talk about that potential $26 million to implement this plan, we would be competing against some other projects that are happening now. And so the Good Shepherd expansion on Martin Street, which will include additional family beds, as well as permanent supportive housing units, has this consideration of They already own the land, they're looking to do that, they're in the midst of their campaign. And they need additional funding to get that complete over the finish line, as well as the Salvation Army. So as you know, the Salvation Army opened their 75 bed complex, but they have a next phase, which is their core community center. This is something that will benefit the community in a lot of ways as that hub as we talked about. Think about the Community Justice Center where there's all of these different agencies that are onsite together that can be a place for someone to go, to be referred, to be able to have that. And so more information about that is in there as well. It's also a community place where they can offer after school programs and some different athletics as well. And then I did include some background information. I apologize if I did any alphabet soup, but I did want to give the definitions as well. So I'm happy to go into any more information, go back to any slides you have, any questions you may have.

I have a question. So I see that you included the the pit count for 2026. Do we have any, did you happen to have any overall slides about what direction we're going in? And I know that counting Counting can change what the numbers are, because I know that there's a lot of factors when we do the point in time count. But do we have any indication of where we're going? Are we having more individuals experiencing homelessness in our area? Yeah, where are we going?

Yeah, I don't have those slides here, but I can get them over there if we want to pull up the COC data. If you want to just give me one second, I can get those pulled up. But essentially, our numbers did increase slightly. Again, it has a lot to do, there's a lot of factors that are accounted for in the why. Sometimes the problem, and I don't wanna say the problem, sometimes the better you are at doing a point in time count, the worse your numbers look, but you're just doing a better job of capturing. And when you're looking at this particular count, it happened to be when the warming shelter was open, and so you had a lot of people in one place, which is good because you're capturing them, but it doesn't mean that they didn't exist last year. And so that's kind of a tricky number to always go off of, so. I do want to kind of give that a piece. So our number for this year was 610 compared to 506 last year. But again, we are in year three of our director, Andrew Sao, who is really doing a 180 at the COC and making huge improvements, and some of our partners that have been improving as well. We also had the Salvation Army open this year, so that again is gonna lead to a higher count. We've had new transitional housing beds and then a lot of our shelters were over capacity because they were flexing for the weather. So it's in your slide here, there's the point in time summary and then some of the key changes just for you to highlight that context. And then again, when you look at the housing inventory count, when you look at how many beds were occupied, there's higher utilization because of that overflow as well. But one of the things that we remain extremely successful here in our regional COC is our return to homelessness rate is only 4%. And so what that means is when we get people housed, they are staying housed and they are not returning back into homelessness. And that is such an important data piece that we love to talk about and really should be celebrating that success. We have from an exit to permanent housing and the retention is at 95%. So again, we're doing really well when we have the units.

And I don't think you can say enough about that because North Carolina, you are allowed as a landlord to discriminate your tenants based on their source of income. So that success is something to really be proud of.

Rachel, when we're talking about the rent on the scattered site with 200 people, going back the other way.

I was going the wrong way, sorry.

Okay, right there, back. There, yeah. Yeah, right there. So we're in the process where I believe the housing authority's in the process of redeveloping Hillcrest and Houston-Moore. And I think they're upping the amount of density at Hillcrest to make possibly 600 units from 224. And I don't know what the number is for Houston-Moore. would this be an area when we're talking about scattered site putting people in?

Absolutely.

And have we had that conversation with the housing authority? Cause I think there's a tremendous opportunity on these two sites in addition to maybe some other ones. And with that rent on the scattered site all into play, like what we have done with, um, the units over there at, um, at Greenfield and the Sparrow where you have the supportive services, because anytime we have supportive services, the wraparound services on the supportive, on the housing side, it works beautifully. I mean, it doesn't seem we have any problem. People stay there, everybody's comfortable. Would we be putting supportive services on the scattered sites too? Or would this be a level of folks that are experiencing, um, homelessness on a temporary basis when you're, you know, because the vast majority are usually rehoused within a month, two months, what have you, the case. I'm talking about more of the chronically homeless of what we're witnessing a lot of or feel the impact of.

Yeah, I think it's fair to say that there's a spectrum of people who would qualify for permanent supportive housing. Some are successful in the scattered site model where they may need a, they need to be, have those services, but it's a lighter touch. They can be transported, they can go to appointments, they can do those things. They may be successful in that. There are going to be folks that need it on site. Um, they have different needs. And then we have probably one of our highest needs population for permanent supportive housing at Driftwood which has a totally different population. And so that's why it's important to understand the actual case and the person to know what is success for them. Because there are folks, there are models that have been successful in other parts of the country where they have actually done, it's kind of called moving on. where they graduate out of permanent supportive housing. They may always need to be in subsidized housing, but the services get less and less as the intensity. So it's really important for us to know what our population needs and where they can be successful. And that's what those conversations are at coordinated entry.

So on the coordinated entry, What is the lead agency on that?

The continuum of care.

The continuum of care is going to be the agency that will give us the information, or you the information necessary to decide that.

to help indicate that. So where that's important is that the housing authority is at the table for those discussions. Because it happens around a table where they say, hey, I have this resident. These are their needs. Who is the most appropriate partner to house them? Because everyone knows their clients. Everyone knows their programs. And that's where those conversations are happening at that table. So having all those partners. And I know Andrea has done a great job of bringing the housing authority into those conversations. Tyrone was at our predictive analysis to talk specifically about the housing authority, their voucher program, what their needs are. I mean, we're looking at too with some of these shifting programs of if there's a work requirement associated, what does that look like for some of their residents? How many of their residents are working compared to not? And if if it's what's the percentage? And so having those conversations being at that table, having the board makeup that you have at the housing authority to that are informing these discussions as well have all really helped to bridge some of those gaps.

And on the Cape Fear Collective, I don't know how many units. They had purchased a number of units on the open market that they were rehabbing. We put in some money, I believe, into that program, did we not?

Yes, we put just shy of $900,000 and the way that we had set up that funding is that any rent or sale their property would be reinvested into other properties that they have. So they're not necessarily paying the city back for us to re grant. We had their board set a policy and we said it in the agreement that all of the proceeds would be reinvested into future construction because as you know, they have quite a large portfolio.

So would that fall? Could we use some of those homes for this?

Absolutely. And so that's where some of those partnership and conversations have been of they want to occupy those units with different folks that are income eligible. And so, yes, absolutely. We're having those conversations as well.

I wanted to ask about, I know that a big part of what we talked about in 2024 was a downtown day center with wraparound support of mental health services. And I understand that mental health is in the realm of the county. But we have been operating with a downtown day center at least three days a week between nine and one, which is Living Hope. they're losing their their space as of July and so we've got a situation where you know in the old Stephen Covey graph we've got urgent and important and I just wanted to point out that what Living Hope was doing and is doing until they lose their space is there are a lot of people operating out of that small space. And we all talk about the street outreach through WDI, through Jack Morris. He's actually operating out of that day center. that Living Hope is running. That's his office space. That's his client space. The other thing that I think is pretty awesome that they are able to do, they have several paramedics that are being provided by Novant that use that space and help clients with things like wound care and maintenance medications. So we're losing a lot of services if we lose that space. And I'm just wondering what the city can do to continue having some kind of downtown day center. And I know that this isn't just about the humanitarian aspect of it, of having a place where people can get services and can get out of the heat and the cold and the rain. It's also an economic development situation because we've heard so much from our local businesses that they want us to help these people to have a place to go during the day. Even if we can't find them nighttime shelter, at least we can have a place for them to go during the day. And so I guess that's my big ask, is what can we do to continue having some kind of facility, some kind of day services downtown?

I will add that when we looked at the different options of shelter, one of the conversations was about centering people where they are and having instead of a concentration in one place or the other, looking at small scale ways to meet the needs of different populations. Because we do have a concentration of folks downtown. We also have concentrations of people over by the hospital or sometimes in the unincorporated county and things like that. And so having a sort of a right size in different places to have these little satellites is something that we talked about. Again, how do we get that synergy of all of the different agencies having that place? One of the things when I was talking with Tim at Salvation Army with their expansion is some of the partnerships that they and Eden Village have with Novant with the Michael Jordan Clinic right there. as we look at investing in other transportation like wave is sometimes like how do we get people to there and get them get folks reliant on the services that exist as they are that we have made significant investments as a community into and yes there are there's a need for that on-call triage, on-site triage, but getting them to the actual services is also the next step of kind of graduating them out of shelter and into that long-term care. So I think that's important to note. I think as far as looking at that, I mean, I'm sure the mayor, you remember when Good Shepherd was downtown as the daytime shelter and then they moved over to Martin Street and it seems like we have this kind of a cycle of where we are having this conversation.

I guess what I'm I'm looking at two different things here. We're looking at the permanent supportive housing. We're looking at folks that need housing that can't afford it. So that's, you know, that's one. And then we're talking about the shelters where folks are going, getting some basic services or help. And then after they get that, they matriculate back out into the community, and that's where you see some of that's happening. I think with Tony, because I talked to Tony Perez yesterday with Living Hope, I was asking what is the size of unit that he needs. I think right now he's operating at about 2,500 square feet, and he would really like to see if we could find something at 5,000. He was sharing with me a site at 10th and Dock. which was an old theater there, but that's at $1.7 million, which is on the market, and obviously that's in the neighborhood also, and what kind of impacts it would have. I think, you know, he does provide a pretty good service. I've been there, and I've had a pretty good discussion. I think you've been there, too, and to talk to them about, and Jack Morris was there, and Jack believes in him very strongly. They have provided a significant amount of help for us, but there's also an impact that goes with that, and I think one of the things is I know that they've been housed there at the Baptist, First Baptist, which has been very gracious in working with them, and they also had a certain amount of money that they were getting from the endowment that I understand has now gone away. And then we have First Fruit Ministries that I think we do support through our nonprofits. And I think obviously the Salvation Army, as well as the Good Shepherd. So those are kind of also, I would consider them shelters, have some magnitude of shelters in them. So if let's just say Living Hope does go away, and I agree with you, how do you provide transportation initiatives to get people to those locations that maybe we could offset some of the service delivery to those adjacent sites and at the same time look for some location for Living Hope because I do think they play a good role and getting a better understanding about the low barrier shelter because we had some discussions about that and that comes with its own complexity and issues itself because that is just bringing in anybody and you can't really force anybody to go into a shelter. They have to say I want to go. What does that look like? because I think we need to have a better understanding if we go to this low barrier concept, what are the impacts and what does it look like and what is the security apparatus because I understand now more from talking to Tony and others as to why you need a certain level of security because you are bringing in people that are either under the influence of alcohol or drugs or having some mental issues and just bringing them into a general population with other people that are experiencing homelessness but they may not be dealing in those issues is bringing in kind of a more dangerous situation. i had to get a better understanding about that but i think with living hope they do play a pretty significant role in helping to offset a lot of the things that we're seeing downtown and you can see When they're open, you can walk downtown or you can drive downtown and you don't see people just loitering around. You see them up there at the living home facility.

Sure. And I think part of this, too, is also recognizing that shelter is supposed to be part of an ecosystem, right? Because it's it should be a circle where we're getting people back to some sort of stable housing, whether that's permanent supportive housing or independent living or whatever that looks like. and so the purpose of the shelter should not just be a place where people just go they should be participating fully in the coc and 211 and coordinated entry they should be referring people to other agencies so that people are moving through the shelter so you you also have to look at what the shelter whatever the shelter is is doing to help move people through the system, through the ecosystem and get them more than just a place to go for a day, a week, right? A cold night, those sorts of things.

I'm not, by no means am I recommending this, but We do have the fire station at Prince's Place Drive that we have turned over to Link. I know that Link is trying to raise money for their programming. And I think Link is one of the lead agencies that we are contracting out with or we're working with in respect to some of these initiatives. Is that correct? And I'm just wondering if there could be a conversation with Frankie and his team about a combination of what we have done with the Sparrow, where that work where you could you could go vertical put a certain amount of units for supportive housing, but at the same time help him and his organization on the bottom floor to be able to accommodate his specific needs. I think it would be a win-win for everybody. But I wouldn't do that unless we have a conversation with them to see if we could work in that capacity. But I mean, we're gonna have to start partnering in ways because of the limited amount of space that we have. We're surrounded by neighborhoods wherever we are. But I've seen that the support of housing, wherever you put it, has worked wonderfully. We haven't had the impacts to those neighborhoods that people thought we would have because they've been done well. And we have a good track record with Good Shepherd. But I think that would be one of the things that I would definitely at least explore because we have the property. they need to raise the funding, and they're doing a certain amount of that, and what can we inject into it to maybe accommodate supportive housing as well as the initiative that Frankie has on the books, which I think would be a great thing if it could be done. And then going back to the Housing Authority, because I think they're going to be starting with Houston more sooner than Hillcrest is what I understand. And I don't know how many units that we're talking about there, Rachel, in regards to Houston Moore. And it can, can we take a section of that? Because I know HUD should have that in their, in their, in their core, what they should be doing is helping us with some of these initiatives. You're smiling.

I'm smiling because you obviously didn't see the latest budget predictions for what may be coming out of the House for public housing, but it significantly cuts some of that. But yes, absolutely. And those are absolutely the conversations that we're having of it. when you have people living there permanently as well as some of these day shelters, it provides a different level of impact to the community because you have residents as well. And you have that feeling. And so we absolutely have been having those conversations with that angle because we see the success in that as well. And Frankie sees the success in that. And I think that there's a room, and that's what we're saying, The link may be our lead partner that we're talking to, but it's also yes and. Who else can be a part of that? Because then again, when we talk about whether it's the Healing Place or other organizations, maybe it's Trillium, maybe it's Coastal Horizons of getting some of those other agencies involved to help with some of those other pieces.

So could we find maybe a space for Tony? Let's just say, if he were to identify a space also. where he needs 5,000 square feet, which is not a lot of square footage, but, you know, and we could help on the rental aspect of that, taking care of that side of it, or something along those lines. I'm just kind of throwing in a suggestion, but I think it's something we need to look at.

And that's absolutely the conversation that we were having with Lincoln relative to having somebody operating the day component as part of this because the shelter residents do need a place to go while you're resetting, cleaning, changing, bedding, all those sorts of things. So having the day shelter component as part of the overall project is absolutely where we're trying to go.

What is the capacity for the three that I just, with First Fruit, and when I mean the capacity, the building size, the capacity that they have at First Fruit, Good Shepherd, and Salvation Army?

I think, as you saw, that there are the expansion efforts for Good Shepherd and Salvation Army. So I think they're adding capacity, both physical space capacity, and then, of course, with that is going to come the staff and services. So that is a place where I think if we were to make investments into their expansion and programs, that's when we get to have a seat at the table to say, hey, this is what we want to see there. And so we're kind of buying that conversation. So I think that's a powerful tool. I think it's also a question that we would have to, I haven't spoken with First Root directly about what their capacity looks like, but those are definitely conversations we can have. And I think it's something that we can pull together, all of these different agencies and say, hey, if this is what we need, what do you have planned or what can you do to help expand to help fill those pieces?

So looking at the county's budget from last year when they shared with us the things that they're doing for the unsheltered, when I was looking at some of the funding, where they were getting a lot of their funding, it seemed like it was coming from the endowment side. And that's fine and good. What I'm saying is, can we get the endowment back into that if we partner with the county? Cuz it seems, and Dennis and Becky, I think y'all have had more conversations with anybody. It's my understanding that if there is a partnership with the city, the county, the endowment would come in and help with some of these endeavors, which they seem to already be doing anyway. But I don't know if that's in their budget for this year or not.

I would just say it helps the application, but it certainly wouldn't be a guarantee. But also getting the county back to the table would be a big question mark.

Yeah, those are absolutely, I mean, in the HUD TA, we've had members of the endowment participate. So they're part of these conversations. And so I think what they would value is a comprehensive look at the system, the ecosystem, to put forward a comprehensive plan of how all of these agencies are going to be a part of it. And I think that's part of what we're doing with some of this. And I think that's the natural next step, is looking at that collaborative application to them.

What would be the first step?

Pulling them all in together. We can facilitate another meeting here. And saying, what's your number? What's your ask? And pulling it together. I'm not talking about months of conversation. I'm talking about, hey, come prepared. We have these rough estimates. Are we off? Who's going to own each piece of it? And that's what we do.

Because we've kind of already created the plan.

Oh, absolutely. And then we're just basically saying, if this is our budget, Who owns it? Who owns each piece of it? Who's our partner for each piece? And that's the request.

Any recommendations? We're looking for some.

And so I think part of this goes back to there's structural conversations to be had. I mean, talking about the COC, we have a Wilmington-centric sort of need, and so should we have a Wilmington-centric continuum of care, right? Should we be the lead agency instead of the cog, right? Should we be the collaborative applicant, right? Those are the sorts of, I think, other structural conversations that we have to have because that changes some of those conversations and some of those leverage points because we are the lead. So I think there's more to it than that, but these things can happen in parallel, absolutely. I just think the complexion of the conversations can change depending on who's sitting in the seat. And I've personally done this. So when I was at Mecklenburg County, we took control of the COC from the city of Charlotte because it had languished. and had not worked very well and reconstituted the board, redid the bylaws and saw significant positive change as a result of that with the county being the lead agency and the collaborative applicant go on a forward going basis. So I have been able to see a change in a community because of those sorts of structural shifts.

So you think we should, I'm not putting you on the spot, but obviously we've contributing a lot to it.

I think it merits exploration. From my perspective, it merits exploration.

And then if we were to go that particular route, what is the conversation from the other entities that are part of this? Are they happy to say, okay, you guys take the lead? Or are they, oh, this is upsetting the apple cart.

Sure, and then they have options as well, right? So they could either decide to stay and be a rural COC and live with the cog. They could go into the balance of state. So I think there are different scenarios. What we know is we're in the last year of the current agreement. And this is a good time to start having those conversations and thinking through what that looks like in preparation rather than just mindlessly walking in and re-upping for the way things are.

When does the agreement end?

Next year. We're ending the last year of the agreement.

So it ends June of next year? Yes. The chairperson, I'm sorry. I was just going to say, I think we should start having those conversations given the difference in need within the different agencies in the current COC and understanding that we are a major contributor. I think it makes a lot of sense for us to start to have those conversations.

I think they're chairs out of Brunswick County. Correct. I'm not, I'm not questioning, you know, the qualifications or the goodwill or the hard work of that person, but the resources are here.

Sure. And then, and the needs again are just different based on the community that you're in. So that's, that's something that we have to look at. And again, who is, I think to your point, who's, who's providing the greatest amount of resources, who also is, quite frankly, consuming the greatest amount of resources. I mean, most of it comes here as well. So I think it behooves us to have the conversation and explore the options.

And I just wanted to speak to one of the things that the mayor was talking about as far as the ownership, not maybe in necessarily a fiscal sense, but probably. The ownership of any facility that we're putting significant public funds into. I think we can contract with nonprofits for sure, but I think that first of all, when we talk about low barrier, we are not just talking about active addiction and active untreated mental health issues. We're talking about people who are with animals, with their pets that have become homeless and will absolutely sleep on the street rather than have to give up their only family that they have left. We're talking about mothers who may have a teenage son or even an older son who is dependent on her for whatever reason, maybe a special needs person. Where traditional shelters want to separate them into different gendered dorms. So there's a lot of situations that don't have to do with addiction or mental illness. And I know that this is one of the reasons why we were having the discussion a couple years ago about the God pods, because there's something special about having a door that locks. and being able to have a nice secure place with a roof over your head that you can be with your special needs child or with your pet who's your only family member left. So that's one of the other things and that the fact that most of the nonprofits who are in this realm are faith based organizations and sometimes they impose their own ideas of what a family is and and who belongs together and um you know i feel really strongly if we're going to put public dollars into this we should have some public ownership of it and and make sure that opportunities are available to everybody agree anybody else

I have a question because you've said that you're looking at different sites. If I missed this, I apologize. Are there specific city properties that you've narrowed it down to?

Not yet. There's some challenges, as you can imagine, with a low to no barrier shelter. You're also talking about folks who may be on the sex offender registry that aren't allowed within certain, you know, feet of schools, daycares, etc. And so just when we think we find a perfect site, we look at the Google map and it's, oh, there's a nursery right there, you know, whatever it may be. And so there are some challenges even on parks, near parks, or if we carved out a section of a park. So when you're talking about this population, there are some challenges. that come with actual physical location of it. And that's why we had looked to about even just the number of folks being served there, because it's a lot more manageable. We know that there may be 600 folks who are in the point in time count. But when you look at what's an appropriate scale, whether it's in a neighborhood or something like that, You want to keep it small. You want to be able to pour into people, get them through, move on through the system into success, and then be able to do a next group of folks, or it doesn't have to be a cohort at a time, but just how people move through their systems.

And that also speaks to why we took the shift away from city-owned properties, because it may not be a parcel we own. It may be a parcel that a partner has control of or something that's still privately owned, but it makes the most sense in order to do all of the things, because that is the conversation we've been having. Can we co-locate permanent supportive housing with the shelter, with other community needs and wants in a way that works? PB, Jorge Boone. : Trying trying to figure out the what and the who the partners are and then the where recognizing that it may not be our our property today, but it may very well, I think, to your point, we, we need to have control of that, but.

Yeah, thank you. And I think we also need to take into consideration, you know, when I look at $12 million in new construction costs, I mean, that's a really scary number. And so we need to continually, I think, consider adaptive reuse of other facilities because that's that's going to make the sticker look a lot better question.

So when we think of our point in time count and how many people we are currently looking at that are homeless or unhoused, All of them can't be sex offenders, right? Right. So I think that we could also utilize multiple facilities. You still have Link who is constantly working with or doing most of this already. But are we going to track who is a sex offender? And could we look for that particular location Now, while we have other nonprofit organizations who are already addressing these things.

Absolutely. I think that is part of, and I'll have to take a look at what we are asking as part of that intake. We've gotten away from the old one where we were asking if they had a bookie. I mean, that's the type of questions that we were asking about that, do you owe money to a bookie? So as we're transitioning to the actual questions that we need to know, not that if someone owes money to a bookie is not important, but we need to know some of these actual things to figure out what the right placement is, and that's part of those conversations. So again, we can sort of start, we're starting to look at how we tailor some of these questions, the intake, and not trying to say that we're segregating populations, but there are some that are going to be able to be in whether it's a veteran's or whether it's a family or whatever it may be, that's where you're going to have to have those partner conversations of, I have room in this, in my facility, I specialize in this, or I will take anyone and everything. So that's part of that conversation.

We certainly don't want the bookies shaking down.

No.

No, not at all. And that's why having the HMIS participation is so key, because if you're just taking somebody in and you're not collecting any of that info, we're not able to know. So having those sorts of requirements, too, of our partners is important.

David, I'm going to ask a question. I think me, you, and Celette were at the meeting at the county, at the government center, and you were asking specific questions about a matrix, about information, so we can get an idea about the individual, what are the specific needs, how many of these do we know or need this, how many need that. Do you remember that conversation?

That's the HMIS, Homelessness Management Information System.

Are we getting that information at the level that we need it? I know that you can't extrapolate but so much, right?

I will say that we as the city of Wilmington are not necessarily receiving that level of detail, but we are receiving general information through the C. O. C. Of understanding that when we're having these conversations, we are talking with them to say, hey, when we look at this population, what are the actual needs? Because not we talk about permanent supportive housing, but not everyone is that capital P. S. H. So so not to that level. We can get it. We can have access to that if that's what you're asking.

And the reason I'm asking that is because in the process, obviously we're a growing region. We've got a lot of things that are happening, health and they're talking about behavioral health we all know that we need more beds we need more of that trying to extrapolate how much do we need in addition to what's out there what are the current needs because if we're talking let's just say to Novant or whoever the new provider is going to come to town We need two, 300 more beds. That's a discussion that needs to be had with the endowment, with the county, with the city, because they all see the same need. How do we know what the number is if we don't have it? I mean, it's easy for me to go in and say, we need 200 beds. Show me the evidence where you need 200 more beds or 400 more beds. And they're talking about the possibility of taking behavioral health off of the Novant campus and maybe relocating it somewhere else. So I know there's a specific need there. And we know that if we have an issue, we don't have a place to take folks at times. So those are the things that, that's why I think it was so important that we try to get some of that information, not just for mental health needs, but for other things too.

No, but it also is going to unlock the different funding sources. Because if it is a concentration of opioid dependency, and then there's specific funds that can be activated, whether it's mental health and there's certain funds. So it's such an important part of that conversation, absolutely. One of the really great concepts that Good Shepherd will be doing with the Sparrow is tracking their residents. And so we're bringing 32 folks into this new residence. we're going to track them long term. Are they having lower ER utilization? What does it look like from other costs? Because we talk about how it's going to save money, but until you actually show what that looks like, it's just conversation. And so having that data is going to be really important as we show future success.

Thank you.

So we're on the right track? No, we're on the right track.

I know the frustration. I know everybody wants the, we're the ones that they, when they see the people on the street, we're the ones that they call and say, can you do something? Can you help these folks? Legitimate concerns.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay.

Five minutes.

Thank you so much.

All right. We're back in session. And I'm gonna take a roll call again. I think everybody I can see is here. So everybody's here. Mrs. May I pretend that you're here?

with bells on there we go everybody's here thank you everybody's here in the counter for all right all right miss hawk thank you uh we want to uh go to the line item review uh to make sure that we can get through that today um so laura has moved over to do some driving we do suggest that we focus on general fund departments because those are the only ones that are going to be potentially impacting the tax rate A little bit of level setting, about 65% of our general fund budget comes from salaries and benefits. So you are already down to the remaining 35%, leaving those alone. And then some of these we think will be very quick because they are tiny budgets, very small. There's really no fluff on them, but we do want to go ahead and get started. So we will just go through these one by one in order. And if they do not touch the general fund, we will just state that and then we will move on. So we will actually start with you all. So with council, you have a $47,000 increase, $46,000 increase. The vast majority of that is in personnel and benefits, but there is a little bit in operating. Laura, can you pull that up, please? This is the magic of Laura's work and her staff's work on spreadsheets. Um, so, um, uh, do we have the line items, Laura?

That's what these are right here.

Okay, so it just says Sappho a lot. I was trying to get it away from you.

Those are the travel lines for each of the... The council members.

Okay, so you can see that you've got your initials there on the left-hand side. That funding column, those are dollars. So we've got business travel, we have dues and subscriptions, some other services, training and professional development, printing services, postage, food and provisions is probably your next largest one after training and professional development.

There was disagreement about whether there was a consensus at our last meeting related to salary increases or pay increases for council.

Yes. Do you just want to state that? And that is that is my fault. So I thought that at least four of you had indicated that you were supportive of that. But we do want to put that back on the table for you all to discuss. So if you do want to look at the salaries for that, the the difference was about thirty one thousand dollars. Thirty three and thirty three and change if council wants to talk about salaries.

I will say I brought that forth, so I'm in favor of removing the salary increase for council.

I think for public information, they should know how much we make.

What is it right now? We're about $22,000.

I think we make a lot of money.

What is it right now? We're about $22,000, and then the increase would be a $3,000-ish. I'm looking at others for that.

Sorry. Um, the mayor, the mayor's stipend will rise to 31,783 and then all else would be 25,970.

Well, I will say it's the only thing that we never get complaints about. But anyway, I'm in agreement. I'm okay with that.

You're okay with leaving it or taking it out?

I'm with Cassidy.

don't mind taking it out i do um i am curious about i think in one of the um in the operating expenses expenses is that um the travel expenses like the allowance for auto is that included in that and some a little bit because there's a lot of so it it you've got something for local mileage um but then your your travel is going to include that mileage reimbursement when your training is out of town okay

Are you asking about the vehicle stipend, JC?

Yeah, the monthly.