Does wearing a mask help stop the spread of COVID-19? We're five months into this pandemic and it's had a huge impact on all of us. It's affected our schools, it's affected our workplaces, it's affected our social environment. We're not able to easily and freely go out and eat. And so the one way that we can continue to get back to normal and reduce the spread of this virus is by wearing masks. It's shown to be very effective and so by wearing masks, by social distancing, by washing our hands and performing the hygiene, the simple things that we've been preaching this whole time, we can get back to normal. We can reduce the transmission of the virus and get back to normal. We can reduce the transmission of the virus and get back to normal. So don't be afraid, put the mask on, wear it. Cover your nose, cover your mouth, and let's reduce the transmission to get back to the lifestyle that we all love and appreciate. How will North Texas communities work together to ensure hospital space doesn't become... Hi, Dr. Farmer. Can we get a mic check from you real quick? Great. Thank you. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. 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I'm going to call the meeting of the Arlington City Council to order and I'll ask Ms. Martha Garcia, Deputy City Secretary to please call the roll. Thank you, Mayor. I will now call the roll. Council member Moeys. Council member Moeys. Are you muted, Ms. Moeys? Thanks, Ms. Moise? Okay. Council member Cape Heart. Pressure. Can you hear me? I can hear you now. Thank you. Hello. Council member Moise. Yes, we can hear you, Helen. Thank you. I'm going to go to the next floor. Thank you. Thank you. Turn your speaker up. Councilmember Moe. So you can hear us. This is Helen. But you're getting my sound. We hear you very well. Can you hear us? I'm going to go ahead and finish roll call and then uh councilmember setten president councilmember peel president councilmember nunez president mayor pro tem shepherd president deputy mayor pro tem for our mires president councilmember oden wesley president Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. President. Deputy Mayor Pro Tem for our Myers. President. Councilmember Odom Wesley. President. Thank you. Martha. Before we begin, I'm going to ask Martha to explain the format we are using into layout some housekeeping rules. aspects of this meeting. I'd like to mention a few items before we begin. This meeting is being held by video conference so that we can advance the public health goal of minimizing face-to-face meetings, also known as social distancing. To slow the spread of the COVID-19, Governor Abbott has suspended some of the requirements of the Texas Open Meetings Act, which allows us to meet in this manner. The link to the online location where video of the meeting is available can be found by going to the city's webpage at www.arlingtontx.gov and clicking on Agendas. This information along with the agenda packet containing materials to be discussed. During the meeting is posted on the city's website. The meeting can be watched on AT&T youverse channel 99, and Spectrum Channel 16 and 15.1. It can also be watched by going to the city's website at www.arlingtontx.gov and clicking on the I Want to button at the top right and selecting watch city council meetings. Here are some pieces of basic information we want you to know about this meeting. This meeting is being recorded and the recording will be posted on the City of Arlington's webpage. The City Council will not be voting during this meeting. For the members of the council, please ensure that you are in a quiet place where you will not be disturbed during this call. Background noise can be very challenging in a meeting like this. If you can have your own device on mute when you are not talking, that would be helpful. If any members of the council has to leave the meeting, you are requested to identify yourself at the time you leave the meeting, as well as the time you return. When a member of the council wants to make a comment, please hold up your card and wait until you are recognized by the mayor before you begin to speak. Do the members of the council have any questions for me? Thank you, Ms. Garcia. We'll now begin the meeting. And for each item that is presented, I will call on the presenter for that item. And once the presentation is completed, I will ask if each council member has comments by asking you to hold up the red card that was provided to you. I will call on each of you as I see your card and does anyone have any questions? Okay, with that, there our first item on the agenda is to go into executive session. So the city council will now go into closed session at 11, 12 a.m. on September the 29th, 2020, in accordance with the following sections of VTCA government code chapter 55 0.072 deliberation regarding real property. 0.087 deliberation regarding economic development negotiations. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little bit of the same thing. I'm going to do a little Thank you. I'm Mr. Parker. Can we have you? I'm Mr. Parker. Can we have you? I'm here already. I'd now like to call the afternoon work session of the Arlington City Council back to order. And it's my privilege to introduce Dr. Jason Shelton, who is chairman of our Unity Council, but also from the University of Texas at Arlington, where he serves as a director of African American studies. And before we begin, I just want to say thank you to you, Dr. Shelton and the rest of the members of the Unity Council, who have been working so diligently now and our quest for an equity plan and to work for justice and to try to work on squelching out any sign of racial discrimination. I'm very grateful to you for the extra effort that's being put forth now to make Arlington a better place. So with that, Dr. Shelton, looking forward to hearing about your report from the Unity Council. I'm not going to talk too long today. I'll probably talk for 10, 12 minutes and then open it up for Q&A for you all, but I do want to give sort of a big picture update So the great things that have happened thus far Matt you can slide you can move to the next slide sir. So as a quick Refresher for you all the unity council has four main Purposes and that is to gather community input on the need to use equitable measures to study equity strategies that the city could implement and promoting greater equality report to the city council on our findings and recommendations and create an equity plan which includes the strategies to eliminate racism and other forms of discrimination and of course to advance unity in Arlington. So in general these are the four big picture points that we have been charged with. Sir, you can advance the slide please. And with that there are 29 people on our committee, but ultimately it's boiled down to five areas of analysis. And those include economic disparities. And within that category, there's a specific focus on minority and women owned business enterprises. We also look at education and workforce training, housing, health and wellness, and policing and criminal justice. And of course, each of these subcommittees are led by a member of the Unity Council. Our Economic Disparity Subcommittee is led by Pastor Kennedy Jones. Education and workforce training is led by RLECure. Housing is led by Sharon Rashard. Health and wellness is led by Cynthia Golden. And policing and criminal justice is led by Cynthia Golden. And policing and criminal justice is led by Pastor Ronnie Goins. All of them are doing an amazing job. We're meeting tomorrow in our first sort of meeting with subcommittee chairs, my meeting with them. And, but things are going really well so far, and I'll tell you more about that in a few minutes. Please advance to the next slide. Of course, as a professor, we're gonna do a research-based project, right? And so what I've done is sort of organize this along a two-pronged approach that being quantitative analysis, the statistics and in-depth analyses on one end. And we'll marry that with a qualitative analysis, which is the in-depth analyses on one end, and we'll marry that with a qualitative analysis, which is the in-depth interviews and focus groups in town halls. But to go back to the quantitative analysis, there are some questions here that are really important and interesting, for example, how does Arlington compare nationally and to other large and diverse cities? We are well down the road to this portion of our study. Been working very closely with research and analytics teams in the Office of Strategic Initiatives. Amazing data that Tony Harald and his team have produced. And I'll share some of that with you in a few minutes. We've been looking at data from the US census. We've been looking at local surveys. We've been looking at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Texas State Data, a great number of various sources, which have been great. In terms of the qualitative analysis, the real questions that are driving this portion of our analysis are, how do Arlington residents explain conditions in our city? What are their recommendations for closing, racial, and ethnic divides? And so in accomplishing this goal, we're about to begin conducting interviews with vocal residents, business, and community leaders, town halls, focus groups. It sort of puts a face on the findings. Data is important, don't get me wrong, the numbers speak, but the numbers don't speak, unless they really translate with a personal face and a personal story of the data. And that's the other part that we're really beginning to work on here. You can advance the slide, please. So here's what we've done so far. Mayor Williams, he gave us our charge on July 29th. And since then, we've been very active. We've had meetings of both the full Unity Council and various subcommittee meetings as well. On the 29th, of course, you gave us the charge. A month later, we had another meeting that was August 25th. And City Councilman Robert Level of the city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania came. I call him Rob, he's one of my best friends. 25 years ago we were college kids and sitting up in dorms, talking about race, religion, and politics all night, and he went back to his hometown of Pittsburgh and ran for City Council and is now serving his third term. And his city, he's led the racial equity task force there among other things related to the city of Pittsburgh and how they've dealt with matters of race and ethnicity. So of course he was the first person that I called. And he's had tremendous insights, a tremendous help to me thus far. And I thought he could share some great points. And he did that same meeting we were joined by Rita Ossolinsky of the National League of Cities and she also had some tremendous insights to share That meeting I also presented some preliminary statistical data We had a meeting a few weeks ago with had that featured Secretary hiddenry Cisneros who during the Clinton administration was the HUD secretary But also more importantly he was the mayor of San Antonio, the first Latino mayor of a large metropolitan area here in the United States. And so he had a lot to say as well. He could speak to all five of the subcommittees, charges, and the topics of study. A few weeks from now, we'll be visited by Richard Florida. He's a very esteemed researcher who looks at cities and and how they grow, why certain cities decline, the role of diversity, how to use it to your potential, to grow or how cities can fail to use it and how they decline. And so he will be here to share some of his insights as well. As we get near the bottom of this slide here, our subcommittees have been charged with two different tasks. They must develop three to four questions for our interviewees. This in other words, this is when we go into the field to ask questions. So after they've done all this homework and they've heard from speakers and studied and seen data, what are some of the leading topics that they feel are important that they need to engage right here in the city of Arlington? And of course, those questions will ultimately lead them to three to eight causes for concern and recommendations for addressing racial and ethnic disparities right here in our great city of Arlington. So again, all of this is in flux. We are in the middle of this project and it's all going pretty well. Let's advance to the next slide, please. So to give you a bit more specific information of the next steps, recently I completed a proud of the role of the community. I'm also proud of the role of the community. I'm also proud of the role of the community. I'm also proud of the role of the community. I'm also proud of the role of the community. I'm also proud of the role of the community. I'm also proud of the role of the community. I'm also proud of the role of the community. I'm also I'll have some approval on that very soon and that will allow us to go into the field and execute this next part of our analysis. Mr. Estrus Tucker of DEI consultants has been a great help to us on this particular part of the project. He is helping us to conduct some of these interviews. He's hiring folks that will be essentially violent volunteers, some will be volunteers, some will be paid. Also, I'm in the process of recruiting some UTR-Lington students to help out with this. Some of my colleagues in the sociology and anthropology department are also training some students to go out into the field. So we're really excited about that as well. And hopefully you all as members of City Council, we've got a great list of people who we want to interview, but of course would love to get your feedback as well. The first homework assignment that I gave members of the Unity Council was to list five people here in the city that they thought we should talk to about various issues and of course would love to hear you all as well to give your feedback on individuals that we should speak with. Probably some of you all as members of City Council would be great as well. So look forward to hearing from you about folk that we should sit down and talk with. Let me talk a little bit more about the focus groups in the town halls. The subject matter for these will primarily revolve around race and ethnicity which of course is our charge. That being said there are other topics that we have the opportunity to explore here, things like gender, things like things like LGBTQ, things like faith traditions, and even particular ethnic communities. So we're really beginning to get into that. And again, that goes back to Estrus Tucker. Estrus is going to be a tremendous help with running these focus groups, the town halls as well. We're probably, even though we're going to do five town halls, we'll probably break them up and do two or three early on to help let the community know that we're in the middle of this project to get them involved and then do the final ones on the back side of the project as we introduce some of our findings and of course doing those town halls to get people to weigh in and grasp their opinions. So the focus groups in town halls are really important. And again, we'll begin getting those off to the ground by mid-October. We can advance to the next slide here. All right, so that being said, I want to share with you some findings. I'm going to give you two or three that a lot of people have commented on. And they sort of share with you how far we've come some findings. I'm going to give you two or three that a lot of people have commented on. And they sort of share with you how far we've come and sort of the direction that we're going. There's a lot of rich data here already. You see the on to the right, the pie chart that essentially breaks down our city's distribution of racial and ethnic groups. Not going to focus on that too much because we sort of know a lot about that already. But I do want you to look at the bottom of the slide. Each of those 100 lines represents the largest cities in the United States of America. And as you look towards the left side of that graph, you see that orange bar. That is us, the great city of Arlington, Texas. So of the largest 100 cities in the United States of America, our diversity ranks higher than the vast majority. We are number 11 in terms of our city's racial and ethnic diversity. What does that mean? We are larger than places like Los Angeles, or more diverse than places like Los Angeles. We are more diverse than places like Miami, places like Tucson, Arizona. So you see that our diversity is really important. And this is why we've got to learn to make sure that we use this as a strength and asset to grow with the passage of time, rather than a limitation that some cities have not been able to grasp and use to its potential as its city has grown and developed with the passage of time. Please advance to the next slide, please, sir. So, of course, you are looking at a map of our city here. And as a quick sort of discussion of the legends here, you see that white circle right there in the middle. That's essentially where I'm sitting right now, UTR-Lington, the legends here. You see that white circle right there in the middle. That's essentially where I'm sitting right now, UTR-Linkton, the downtown area. And you see to the far left, there's Lake Arlington over there, that light blue. And then you see some lines that are running east and west. That's essentially I-30 to the north, or 360 in north and south and Cooper that runs right where through the middle of our city. I'm sure you also see the colored dots there. Well, what are those dots? Those dots essentially reflect the distribution of racial and ethnic groups in our city and where people live. So in essence what you're looking at here ladies and gentlemen is a map of where folks live by race and ethnicity and as we see sort of west of Cooper is predominantly white, we see in sort of the central downtown area that concentration of green is the Latino community in our city. Look down to sort of the southeast quadrant there and you see a lot of red and you see a lot of yellow there. That's predominantly African-American and Asian. So again, we're seeing here this is important because researchers have talked for decades about what we call the segregation index. And I'm looking to explore this a little bit further segregation where we live in the city have a lot to do with quality of life indicators among other factors. My good feeling is our city is not as segregated as a great number of other cities in the U.S. And of course that's a good thing, but of course we've got to confirm that and that's where we go across different cities and look at our analyses. Also, with that side of Arlington that west side that is predominantly white, I'm sure you can see the red that's in there. I'm sure you can see the green and yellow that is there. So again, that's part of the reason why our city is probably not as high on the segregation index as other older cities are in the U.S. Not to say that Arlington is old, but when I say older cities, those Midwestern cities in the Northeast and Midwest in particular. So anyway, this is a really interesting piece of the puzzle that will help to tell us a lot about a number of things related to diversity in our city. Please forward to the very last slide, sir. And this one I think is really interesting and tells us a lot. There's a lot of detail here. I'm not going to go through it. I wish I had my PowerPoint clicker. But what I would like for you all to do is look to the left. And as you'll see to the left, you see the 85%, the 81%, and the 76%. What those numbers tell us in general is that between the years 2011 and 2013, 76% of whites, 81% of Latinos, 85% of African Americans rated living in our city as either excellent or good. This is really great data. Like you all know this as everyday Americans. Show me any surveyed, it says 75% of Americans believe anything in unity, right? We're not. We're a very diverse and wide-ranging group of people. So to show that 75% of Americans believe anything in unity, right? We're not. We're a very diverse and wide-ranging group of people. So to show that 75% of members of any group feel that way on one particular topic, it is really informative and tells us a lot about the high level of quality of life that these folks perceive about our city. Look at the middle column. look at 2014 to 2016. The number for African Americans actually jumps higher. It does increase for whites as well. It decreases for Latinos. I'm not that bothered by the decrease for Latinos because we're still at 77%. So there's still a good high number there. But what's also important about us is African Americans that 91% increases in light of a tremendous number of other inequities that I've already shared with the committee and they have seen in and in our nation overall, the African American population here still loves living here. But that, ladies and gentlemen, must be interpreted with a grain of caution, because look at the far right of the graph. The numbers decline significantly, and steadily for all three groups. Between 2017 and 2019, the African-American level of belief about excellent or support for quality of life declines by 11% for white 7% for Latinos to climb even further. And so we've got to get to the bottom of this. Now, I think there's a silver lining here in that the slope of the decline is essentially the same for all of the groups. So something is moving here. If they're all moving down at the same time, maybe they can all move up at the same time. And we've got to figure that out. But that being said, ladies and gentlemen, those are all those, that was what I was gonna present for you all today in terms of where we are as the Unity Council. and I can answer any of the questions that you have for me right now. Mr. Sutton? Thank you, Mayor, and thank you, Donald Shelton, for that informative briefing. I want to go to the last slide you presented, where you're showing 85%, 91% and 80% or is that from the fact that we're going through different stages in our life where we're coming out of college we're working then we hit that middle class or middle life stage and then as we hit the senior stage our demand for service change and that change how we feel about the city or is that something else? I think Mike I feel it tells me that that's something else because at all three stages you have people across all age distributions and stages of life. So at that first line of point of demarcation 2011 to 2013 you've got younger people older people you know you've got them all everybody is right there so at each of the stages, age is not a factor or an even distribution at each of the stages. And Mike, Mike, that feeling tells me that something's going on on the ground here in our city, or it could also be, of course, nationally, because our city is not immune to national trends as well. We've got to get to the bottom of whatever this is because we don't want to see, you know, similar to clients, we don't want to see this continue. Right, and one more quick question, Dr. Shelton, well, I got you. So it's my population is continuing to grow and we've grown for almost 300,000 to 400,000 with the migration into Arlington, the mindset, change the way we feel about the city, the new people coming in, dilute how we felt initially. Wow, that's a great point, sir. And I think you could be in the ballpark with that. Of course, as a researcher, I'm not gonna say there's a silver bullet answer to anything, but I most certainly believe that our city has changed dramatically over the decades. So for example, one of the findings that I'm hoping to present soon that we're working on shows essentially that imagine that same map that I showed you. What does it look like in 1950? What does it look like in 1960, 70, 80, you get the idea? And what's going to happen is we're going to see how much our city has changed over the decades, how fast it's changed over the decades and of course for people who have lived here and have those long routes to go back to those earlier decades they're probably less satisfied with how much the city has changed. So we've got to sort of grapple with that as well but I definitely think you're on to something with that sir. Thank you so much for your leadership and thank the committee members as well. Yes, sir. Thank you. Miss Moe's. First of all, Dr. Shelton, I just want to tell you how much I want to thank you for this presentation. And mostly how impressed I am with you, I have not known you before. So I hope to get to know you better and definitely want to spend some time with you. I like it. Yeah, when I ran in 18 for the first time, I sent that somewhere, and I talked to some people about this, that there was a shifting in the sands in Arlington, and I'm in the North Arlington District, and it was difficult for me to explain, and I knew it didn't have anything to do with partisanship particularly, because it was across all groups. And so one of the things that I'd like to have you look at is, you know, during that period of time, our wage growth across the country was stagnant. And our property taxes were increasing and our rents were increasing exponentially in some cases which left people feeling a little bit disenchanted and like that just couldn't catch up. So I'd like to look at that as part of it because that's what I saw when I campaigned two years ago is that people were just saying we can't get ahead but it was across it was everyone so I appreciate so much and thank you for calling attention to these things in such detail. No problem and I think I definitely think you're on to something with that point as well. In one of my previous presentations to the Unity Council, again, we just sort of shared a lot of the data about a month and a half ago. And we shared some really important data that showed that essentially our money doesn't go as far in this city as it went 20 years ago. That essentially we didn't describe it as cost of living but essentially that's it that's the idea that more people in our city are rent burden or people in our city are burdened are burdened by mortgages there are a great number of factors and we've got more people with the passage of time at a greater extent and your right race has something to do with it or it's affecting a great number of people. But what we're also seeing is that with the passage of time, people of color in the city are more affected. The gap is getting even wider between whites and people of color in our city over the decades. So I can get into the technicality of it, but it is a factor. It is something that is affecting all of us in terms of particularly lower income people, but it as a result, it's getting wider with the passage of time between whites and minorities that difficulty is sort of staying afloat in our city. Well, and one of the things I've said since taking office is like everything else, not all jobs are created equally. And it's really important for us here in Arlington to seek ways to create jobs or ad jobs that have higher incomes associated with them because people not all people want to leave the city they live in to go to work. We need to really, you know, that's why I'm interested in how we might spend this next quarter of a cent sales taxes. Bringing in something that will help us bring in jobs so that people will feel like there's some hope to elevate themselves. So, education is a part of it and jobs and job training are definitely a part of it. I'm really grateful to you. Thank you. I'm really grateful to you. Thank you. I'm really grateful to you. I'm really grateful to you. I'm really grateful to you. Thank you. I'm really grateful to you. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Dr. Shelton for this. I'm really grateful to you. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you, Dr. Shelton for this. I'm And so the findings, I think will give us some clarity on what needs to be done. I really appreciate the rigor of the research methodology. So it'll give us data that we can depend on. And I'm going to ask a question that I don't know that you'll be able to answer. I don't know if anybody on the call will be able to answer it. But I've been asked this question. And I also heard the question asked at one of our Unity Council meetings, and it is how can we assure our citizens that something is going to be done with this information, that this is going to make a difference. I've had some citizens say to me, oh, it's just another report that we're going to put on the shelf and it'll gather dirt dust and nothing is going to happen. Everything's going to continue just the same. What would you say to us, the city council? What can we do to assure our citizens that we are here to make a difference? That's a great question Dr. Odom Wesley. I would remember I've been asked that question a couple of times. My answer is that I don't sit on the city council. So I can't enact or move forward with the recommendations. So we will leave that to you all. However, what the Unity Council will do is produce the most comprehensive and research based project that we can, that lays out the dynamics of inequality by race and ethnicity in our city, that hopefully moves you all to the point that you say we've got to do something. That also being said, the research is important here because we've got to be able to justify what our recommendations are. So in other words, you all know that when we're sitting around the table at Thanksgiving, we have that hot button political conversation with a family member or a friend, and they just run in their mouth because it's just their opinion, and they can't prove the opinion. Well, we've got to get beyond that, and that's what the research has to allow us to do is to show us broader patterns. So hopefully what we can do is present to you all a strong set of data that is numbers that also tells a story with people in our community who's what their opinions are, are matching up to the numbers. And then there are these recommendations that are reasonable and within reach, whether they are short term or midterm or long term. And that you all will as a committee or as a city council will say, hey, we've got to move here to do something about this for the betterment of our city not only today but tomorrow. Absolutely, thank you so much. Mr. Peale. Okay, sorry about that. You know, one of the the great tragedies of racism is that there's an entire segment of God's children who are given gifts by God who have never had due to racism, the ability to truly grow and prosper using those gifts that God gave. And whenever our country finally gets to where it allows everybody, no matter their race, creed, or background to take the gifts that God gave them and live their life to the fullest, to the greatest of their potential, all of us benefit, that matter what color we are. And I can only think of all the decades and centuries of embedded racism where there was a young boy or girl who may have had the mind of Einstein who could have been an incredible contributor to our nation's knowledge base, but yet because of racism, never got the chance to go to school, never got the chance to go to the university, and all of us have all missed out because of that. So whenever I look at racism in Arlington, and what we can do in the future, there are a couple of things that I'm curious to know what the Unity Council thinks. Along the lines of helping people from backgrounds reach their full potential with the GIFs God gave them. And we have an economic development sales tax initiative coming up. And, you know, we also do economic development activity in Arlington. And I know that small businesses provide more of a benefit to a community because some guy up in Chicago doesn't close the Arlington store when they try to tighten the bell. When somebody has grown from within their community, when a business has grown from within their community, they stick around in a city. They sponsor, you know, the junior high football team. They show it to the parade. They are there. And what I'm deeply interested in is what kind of residents in Arlington from the communities of color have God given gifts that want to start a business in Arlington and are dedicated to growing that business and how the city might in the future be able to foster that, to make the ground fertile for that kind of growth. Yes. And I'm really interested in that because I think that, you know, if we do get the opportunity to have an economic development arm, that I think a lot of the focus of it has to be on small businesses in Arlington. And that means businesses from the community of color. Yes. And I'm interested in understanding how that will work. I don't know how this fits in your charge. This is all kind of useful. You like to come stumbling around a bit. But I'm just kind of putting this out there because it comes from a deep place. And the other thing is, part of the issue that I see is that an Arlington racism comes sometimes from a fear of the other, the fear of people that are different, whether they look different, sound different, walk different, have different tastes and art or music. And I'm really interested in knowing what other metropolis is in the United States that have had increased diversity. What do they do to break down barriers between various communities? I mean, when I look at Cooper Street, I live in fear that Cooper Street becomes the dividing line like North Dallas and South Dallas. Right, I don't want that here. I want to find some way to break down that barrier in that map you showed us. Yes. You kind of be as one and I have no idea. I'm looking on that, I'm Google that, trust me. You know, what cities can do to build trust between individual communities that might have some hesitation about mixing because they have this fear. Mr. Pill, we're going to. Interest. He comes up with. Okay, Mr. Pill, we're going to need to move on. Dr. Farr Myers, Dr. Shelton needs to leave. Well, the last one will be Dr. Farr Myers here. Go ahead. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Dr. Shelton. And thank you to the Full Unity Council for your works thus far. I do just have one question slash expectation, hopefully. I'm very much looking forward to your committee coming out with an equity plan that is specifically directed at activities the council can do to affect the city of Arlington. A lot of these larger issues that we're discussing are, you know, or national, they're international. So I really have been looking to you all to help us identify specific needs here in the city. And that being said, I do like your idea of tracking the map as you show the geographic map. But I'd be very also interested for you using GIS to do some overlays with economics, with age, with disparity growth, perhaps level of, maybe level of economic distribution. So some of the, I'm not sure how much of the quantitative modeling you're going into, but I didn't see that. It perhaps it's already in your plan. I had heard that discussion so far in the Unity Council. So I just, I know you're a data guy. So does that sound reasonable to produce that back? And also do you think that that will help better inform a Arlington specific equity plan? So I want to take on, I want to address your question. And I can also get to Councilman Peales Point. Let me figure out, let me start with you, Councilwoman. I want to call you victorious, so bad, for our viers. When we talk about, okay, so I've, and Jim and Jennifer can tell you, I've had this vision of essentially, we want to go use the stats, no question, the stats are an asset to us, but we don't want to go so deep that we lose the regular average everyday person, right? And you know this, that world of quantitative statistics. So imagine this, imagine a map, five maps in front of you. We've got five subcommittees, each deals with a different topic. And imagine a map in front of you related to health and wellness of the city of Arlington and where the disparities are strongest in front of you related to health and wellness of the city of Arlington and where the disparities are strongest in terms of zip codes in our city. And next to that is one on policing and where we have the highest rates of arrest or whatever the measure will be and then one of economic of poverty, right? So imagine these five maps in front of you And I'd imagine what you're going to see is a pattern of where in our city the problems are most pronounced. And that's sort of the low hanging fruit of where to begin. So in the United States of America, we have a long deep-seated problem and issue of race and ethnicity that ebbs and flows at different times over the centuries. We can't start and just say, hey, where do we start in the United States to fix this? Well, we have a, we can do that here in Arlington if we isolate the issue using the data to say where are the problems most pronounced. Maybe there are some pilot programs that we can begin in this zip code as a test drive to see what happens here might be able to be sort of the model for what we can use in another community or another zip code later. So I hear you, I want to use the data, but I don't want to go so overwhelming that we lose average everyday citizens. So that's point number one. Also to Councilman Peale, your point about business and entrepreneurship. No question is one of the cornerstones of the American dream. But I will say, sir, that I have seen data. I presented it to the Unity Council recently that shows that for example, African American own businesses and Latino own businesses, Asian own businesses and the city are not getting those contracts. They're not getting sort of not in that the inequality between the companies that are owned by whites, white males in particular and white females to a far lesser extent, clearly out numbers that of other people of color. So I think the point here, sir, is that a great number of these people are trying to get into that game, but they haven't gotten the ticket yet. And so that's one of the things that we need to address as the Unity Council. Our Economic Disparity Subcommittee is clearly working on this and they have some ideas about it. But I definitely think you are a correct, siror that we've got to make sure that small business and entrepreneurship is something that is a part of the future, it gives a buy-in for everyday people that like few other things can in our nation. The last thing I wanted to say, sir, is you mentioned about the fear of the other. And I thought that was a very powerful point. At our last Unity Council meeting last week, and again, the sort of taps into Victoria, your point earlier, about the numbers. We don't want to lose the fact of the hearts and minds of everyday people, right? We want to make sure that the numbers speak, but we've got to also, we want to make sure that, that while the report is a research-based report, the town halls in particular have got to be the kinds of things where we as Arlingtonians connect to other people. And we've got to be able to be able to say, hey, look, this is, you know, I'm an African-American male and Victoria, my daughter and Victoria's son are in the same building at the same school right now, right? And these kids have, they are connecting in tremendous ways. We've got to make sure that even though there are lines of distinctions between us, that we realize there are lines of commonality. And we've got to connect those lines of commonality, whether we live in North Arlington, South Arlington, where Black, White, Asian, Latino, Gay, Straight, Muslim, Christian, whatever the backgrounds are, we've got to make sure that it's okay to have differences, but we've got to appreciate our similarities. We've got to find that hearts and minds argument. We can't be so overwhelming with the numbers that we lose that. So my point here, sir, is that that's a part of the equation as well. And it's it's it's something that we've got to be mindful of as we move forward. Dr. Shelton, thank you so much for your work. And then of course, I thought it was very telling the very first slide when you said, we're the 11th most diverse city out of the top 100 by population here in our nation. And that is an opportunity that we need to take advantage of, that we need to celebrate the various cultures that we have. And then again, to be able to reach out that hand of hospitality and kindness and help each other in all walks of life. So we look forward to taking action and again demonstrating that Arlington is the Can-Do City city and that we will get this done and move forward and make a difference in this time of unparalleled opportunity. In the midst of difficulty, we have an opportunity to step through this door and to really make a difference in equity and justice. So thank you very much. Appreciate it. Pass that on there to our council. Thank you. All right, with that, we'll move to a related topic right along the way. As you can see, we have continued to work here on this council here on these various issues. And the next one is availability and disparity study. And I'm going to ask Mr. Yeilverton to introduce this topic. Okay. All right. Will Velasco, your purchasing manager or finance department. Good afternoon, Mayor, City Council will Velasco procurement manager. Today we will be presenting the results from our recently completed availability and disparity study. Joining us today is Colette Holt, the consultant who conducted the study for us. About a year and a half to complete the study. And today she's here to provide us with her assessment of the MWB marketplace along with her recommendations for us as an organization going forward as we move to develop a formal MWB program. Just a little bit of background on CH advisors before I pass it off to Colette. CH advisors is a national consulting firm specializing in issues related to minority women disadvantage and small business enterprise programs along with supplier diversity initiatives and affirmative action issues. The firm itself has conducted court approved disparity studies and approved programs for over 25 years, including many DFW locations around us, such as city of Fort Worth, DFW Airport, TechSdot. She's also done something recently for Harris County, down in Houston. So she has a lot of experience in this realm of MWBE participation in public organizations. She has a BA in philosophy from Yale University and she has her JD from the University of Chicago Law School. So a lot of experience were lucky to have her on board with us to help us conduct this study and provide us with some recommendations. So on that note, I'll go ahead and pass it off to Colette so she can begin her presentation. Afterwards, she would be available. Of course, with any follow-up questions or clarifications you may have. Thank you. Great, well, good afternoon to everyone. Hopefully, can you all hear me? I'm trying to make sure I can see the screen. Miss Holt, we can hear you loud and clear and just anxiously await your presentation. Thank you very much for your work after this year and a half. Thank you. Wonderful. Well, thank you. And I'm trying to figure out a bunch of monitors. I'm trying to figure out how to get you all over here. So I'm not turned away from you the whole time. But thank you for the opportunity to speak with you this afternoon. And we were delighted to be chosen for this project through a competitive process. I also believe that we have with us our wonderful local partner, Pam Irvin Davis, from Nervi Consulting. Pam has worked with us on our studies for many of the other Texas agencies, including DFW Airport, the city for Earth Study and TechStyle. So also if you're interested in seeing any of those, they are all on their website. I want to say thank you to Will and Reginald. They were wonderful to work with. I really appreciate all the support that we got as well as from the city manager and everybody else there at the city of Arlington and conducting the study. So I believe maybe Will somebody's going to be my human clicker here. So maybe we'll go to the next slide please. Wonderful. Okay, well our disparity study objectives really were for fold. The first one was to present a legal defense for you if a study based, excuse me, a program based upon the study were to be challenged in federal court. As many of you probably know, the federal courts are extraordinarily hostile to these programs, and many, many dozens have been struck down over the years, and I certainly don't anticipate with recent developments that the courts are likely to be more civil rights friendly. So it's very important that an agency have the quality and type of evidence that you would need should you be challenged in order to defend your program. An important additional objective is to meet the constitutional requirements. These race and gender-based programs are subject to equal protection analysis. I don't know if any of you are lawyers, but if you are, think back to 14th Amendment jurisprudence and the fact that the courts look at any government decision making that is based on race with a particularly jaundiced eye to make sure that the agency's motives are good and that the program that you develop is narrowly tailored to the evidence that you present. We also try very much to provide recommendations that are actionable and effective and reflect national best practices for these types of programs. One thing that I think actually an exciting opportunity and I tuned in a little bit late to the prior presentation but was absolutely fascinated. So I really want to stay in touch with Reginald Will to find out what your ultimate findings are and where you go with that. But we think it's important that you city has not really had a full-fledged program, certainly, not like you would see it some other agencies, but that also gives you the opportunity, I think, to learn from what works and what has not worked for other cities so that you really can hit the ground running with programs and tools that are going to be effective. And lastly, we do try to write the study in halfway, plain English. I have to be honest, my smile a little bit to myself, when your prior presenter talked about charts and that people don't necessarily want to look at all of these numbers and whatnot. Well, if you like data, we got data in here and lots and lots and lots of charts. If that makes your heart go flutter, if it doesn't, however, like most normal people, we do have an executive summary that presents on the major findings for folks as well as, of course, this PowerPoint presentation. Next slide slide please. So you see there we have our data methods and sources and I won't read through those, but we really did use utilize two major forms of information. The first is quantitative or statistical information. The courts require that we take a look at the city's utilization of women and minority-owned firms as a percentage of all firms measured by dollars. And that we compare that to the availability of MWBEs to see whether or not there is a disparity or how tight a fit there is. That's a type of evidence that the courts look to to determine whether or not the city has a strong basis in evidence to enact any program at all. We also looked at qualitative or anecdotal data where we talked to real life people about their experiences. This is also important. It can in the words of Justice Powell, give life to cold statistics. It's also a way to find out what really works with people. I think too often in our industry, on the contracting and disparity study side of things, we talk a lot about minority women firms, but we need to talk with them more to ask them. What are your issues? what are your problems, how can we help? We also interviewed majority on firms as well to make sure that we obtained everyone's point of view and we're able to see the problems through the lenses of all different types of firms. Next slide, please. So here you see our disparity study elements. We have a very lengthy legal chapter. It might be something only other lawyers could love. But we think it's important that a court understand what our view of the law is and how our methodology fits within it. So certainly if you're interested in the case law, there's lots in there to keep you entertained. We also looked at the utilization, disparity, and availability data, as I just mentioned, and took these various steps that you see there. We included an economy-wide analysis. This can be important to demonstrate what would happen in the overall Arlington economy. happen in the overall Arlington economy? Should you look like them and actually take no affirmative intervention steps to make sure that everyone has a full and fair opportunity to compete for your work? We talked about anecdotal data and then we also made use some extensive recommendations. Next slide, please. See, see, there are utilization findings. We looked at data from 2014 to 2018. And you can see there what our final contract data file was. So we looked at a very extensive number of your contracts and gathered well over 80% of your contract dollars. I always want to be sure that if I have to go to court and testify for you, then I can say to a judge that the report really was based on a comprehensive review of your contracting activity, not just a little slice or just a year or two, so that we can be sure that we're presenting an accurate picture overall. The federal courts require that a local agency can only remedy discrimination in its local market. For those of you who may have ever heard of the Richmond, a city of Richmond versus Croson case, that started us down this road 31 years ago, to doing these types of studies and gathering this type of evidence. One of the things that upset Justice Sandra Day O'Connor was the fact that Richmond was taking minority contractors from anywhere in the country. So as time has developed, the cases have told us that you have to focus on your local market, which is defined as the location of your firms by counties. And so you see there that those three counties made up well over 75% of your firms by counties. And so you see there that those three counties made up well over 75% of your spending. So those are the counties from which we drew the available firms. And the courts also require that you limit your program to your product market. Government is in some ways a very specialized market, especially in how much construction services you buy. So we looked at your industry codes. We used North American industry classification system codes or NAICS codes, but I'm familiar with that. And we found that about 21% of codes made up over 85% of your spending. So again, that's what we concentrated our research on. Next slide, please. So here's what we found. Overall, minorities and women made up a little bit more than 22% of the dollars spent. And that includes prime and subcontracting opportunities. And you see there how it's broken out with the majority of that MWBE spend being with white women. But again, that means that the majority of your overall dollars almost 78% were spent with non-MWBEs. And I want to be precise about why I say non-MWBEs as opposed to white males. Because that number does include large publicly traded firms, firms that are employing on or that otherwise do not have a race or gender ownership. Next slide, please. So we determined the availability of minorities and women in your geographic and product markets so that we could compare them to utilization. And you see there what we found overall that minorities and women make up about 30% of your actual market, which would give you the ability to set an overall annual goal of 30% for women and minorities. You might choose to break that out into a minority goal and a woman goal. I see people do it different ways. I think that's a policy choice, not really a legal question, but probably the most prevalent way to do it would be to have a minority goal and then a woman goal. And then you see the availability of NON and WBs is about 70%. Next slide please. So now we're able to conduct our disparity testing, which just means how tight is the fit between who is available and who got used. And there are various statistical tests that we apply there. Least squares, regressions from anybody who remembers that from college statistics class. But really what you're trying to figure out is how likely is it that these results come from just chance. So throwing the balls up in the air and how many times they land. And the courts have told us that if you get a disparity ratio and is under about 80%, that that provides a solid basis to conclude that discrimination might be operating in your market. I always want to stress to people that statistics don't actually prove anything. All they can do is support an inference of something. And so I think what you can infer from these numbers is that there are still discriminatory barriers in the overall market for goods and services that you purchase. I want to stress that does not mean that the city itself engaged in any kind of discrimination. It simply demonstrates that there's discrimination in the market and without some type of affirmative intervention on your part, you are likely to be a passive participant in that discrimination, which is in fact the legal standard. I will make it the comment that when we see ratios like this, it's for white women in particular, we will often dig deeper because what you usually find is that there is one industry code or one or two and a couple of firms that have done really well. I do not take from that, however, that therefore racism and sexism in the in the contracting marketplace has been fixed. It just tells me that there are a couple of people who are managed to break through so to speak. So I've got a couple more slides about that as well. Next slide slide please. So we looked at Asian and white women firms to see what was going on and why we would get ratios that looked like that. And you see there for Asian firms that they were highly concentrated in one industry code and that's for engineering and that there were seven Asian firms who had gotten a lot of contracts and certainly compared to how they show up in the rest of the contract data. Next slide please. So you see similar results for white women-owned firms. Heavy civil, couple firms did well, same thing with plumbing, heating, and air conditioning, and then landscaping. But again, we don't take from that, that therefore you don't need to have some type of a program or that you couldn't legally support a program. We just say, you know, bless isn't buzzing us to them, that they've done well. But that doesn't mean that other people have had the same opportunities. Next slide, please. Once you remove these firms from the calculation, the disparity ratios fall dramatically. And we have all of that in the study. I didn't think it was worth putting up on a slide. But also in addition, the economy-wide information and the anecdotal interviews that we conducted. I think really demonstrate that these are sort of one-offs. I use this the other day. I said sort of like the Jackie Robinson phenomenon to a much younger group of people who have the further blank expression. So that tells me something, but that's the idea that somebody managed to blake break through the glass ceiling so to speak. But I don't think that that means that you cannot have a program just because a handful of firms have been successful. Next slide please. So that's the analysis of your own data. But as I mentioned before, we also try to look at overall information in the economy to see what happens where the remedies of MWB DBE type programs are really not practiced. Yes, there are some large companies and sometimes some very large projects like my understanding it's the stadium expansion that we're able to obtain significant amounts of MWB participation. But overall, there's very little of that. And what we found, not surprisingly, is that there are very large disparities for minorities and women throughout the greater Metroplex and the Texas economy. Frankly, this is what we see everywhere. I mean, we've done studies from Washington State to New York, to Florida, to Texas, you name it. And you see the same thing everywhere, especially for black owned firms, that these barriers are very deep. They are very entrenched. And it is very difficult for these firms to be able to have fair opportunities to compete. So you see the two databases that we looked at, both of them come from the United States Census, and then we also did a review of literature on barriers to access to commercial credit. Any of you have ever run a business know that money is the lifeline, and if you can't get adequate financing, it's going to be very difficult to be successful, and that's especially true on government contracts. So we thought that that was important And if you can't get adequate financing, it's going to be very difficult to be successful. And that's especially true on government contracts. So we thought that that was important to include in the study. Next slide, please. So that's all of our quantitative or statistical data. But as I mentioned, we also talked to real-life business owners about their experiences and solicited their recommendations for what the city might do to reduce barriers and help their firms to grow and to thrive. And you see there what we found. Not surprisingly, people told us that there are still barriers on the basis of race and gender, that there certainly seems to be kind of a good old boy network out there. We also saw that there are biases that are displayed and entrenched relationships that make it very difficult for women and minority firms. Again, especially black on firms to be able to break in to city contracting. Next slide, please. So, we asked also people about their experiences doing business with the city of Arlington in particular. Many of the small firms that we interviewed think that the city has a preference for the big national name firms and that not enough consideration is given to small local businesses. They wanted debriefing so that if they were not successful, they wanted to learn how to better themselves. And I do know that under Will's able leadership and the procurement department has been making more strides to do that. So that's something I think the other contracting departments might want to take a look at as well. Contract size is a major barrier. City projects are large. People wanted them broken up into smaller chunks, both so that they could perhaps be successful as prime vendors, as well as be able to work as subcontractors. And then a lot of folks want to better access to city staff. They want a more opportunities to directly interact with people who make contracting decisions. And maybe gear those towards specific industries. Certainly, regional manages to slice themselves very thin, going around to all these different meetings all over the area. But I think the contractors would really like to have some more focused conversation with city staff that actually are responsible for making the decisions about to whom to award the work. Next slide, please. There was pretty much unanimous agreement from the minority-owned firms that the city needs to set goals on contracts to make sure that they have opportunities. People reported that they were often successful in the programs of other agencies, but that the prime contractors who solicit and use them to meet goals often don't even bother to solicit them if there's not a goal. You know, well, we'll do it if we have to kind of mindset, but if we don't, then we won't. And so many people really believe that you do need to actually set goals on your contracts. And again, more targeted outreach. Next slide, please. We also talked to majority-owned firms again to make sure that we had a well-rounded picture and got everyone's input about what the city might want to next. Most of them told us that they rarely meet the target aspirational 25% goal that the city has set. They were pretty candid, frankly, about the fact that because it's merely aspirational, you know, if they don't mean it, there's no penalties, there's no real good faith efforts, that kind of thing, that they most of the time did not in fact do that, which is certainly what we saw in the contracting records themselves. Some were concerned that they're not sufficient qualified, ready willing and able, my Lord and women firms to do the work. Some people have reported not being able to meet roles on the contracts issued by other agencies in the area. Several of them objected to having to try to subcontract at what they considered to be, quote unquote, their work, that they kind of saw their projects as sort of belonging to them, and certainly did not want to have to stop contract to another firm to meet a goal because it's less profitable for them quite frankly. programmatic idea violated what they described as the sanctity of the bidding process, by which they meant that they would always take the low bid and then it had nothing ever to do with race and gender and if an ethyl minority firm were the low bidder that they would they would take that quote. So, if some concerns from firms about whether or not that would violate that practice, some people believe that minority firms do poor quality work and they were concerned about being forced to utilize firms that in their view, really were not qualified and could not adequately perform. Conversely, they said that if the MBEs were qualified and they were the cheapest, then they would use them. And so I think there was a sense from some firms that there's no need to have any kind of a program. And the market will also sort itself out that way. There was agreement that if you are going to set goals, that they need to be set on a contract by contract basis, and not just use the same goal in every contract. And I would note that that actually is a legal requirement. So I think that was certainly one point on which everyone could be, could have agreement. And lastly, they wanted flexible standards. They didn't want the problem to operate as a quota and be rigid, but they wanted the city to be reasonable about setting goals and then reasonable in considering whether they had made good faith efforts to meet them. Next slide, please. So that's all our data and our findings. So what were our recommendations? Well, we divide them into two types. And the first are race and gender neutral measures or remedies that would benefit all small firms. And this is important because the courts require that an agency use race and gender neutral measures to the maximum feasible extent. That's the phrase from the caselo and that race-based or gender-based goals only be used as a last resort. Now that does not mean that you have to try everything and have it fail before you can adopt goals. But you do need to hand solid, good faith, erase neutral elements to your program. And you should anyway, because those are the main things that you can do to help firms to obtain primeworth. So you see there are suggestions. The very first one would be to procure and implement an electronic data collection and monitoring system. This is just key. If you don't measure and you can't monitor, then you don't know how well the program is working, and so you can't make any adjustments to it if you need to. It's also a way that you can monitor prompt payment, which of course is your obligation to ensure that your prime contractors are promptly paying your subs. The systems have outreach components where they'll send a notice to every certified firm in your or every vendor that has a code that is applicable to that project. This is very helpful to small firms, so they're not always running around on the web, trying to find out about work. There's a goal setting, module, and I understand a name you, as well, maybe you want to say something else about it, that you are in the process of moving towards that, so that is excellent. I think you need to create a real office, and you can call it business diversity or whatever, I don't think the name matters terribly much, but it really would be to run your minority and women business program. But there is a point of accountability that can provide transparency as well as oversight and leadership about the program. The most successful programs really do have a separate office that is just focused on that. I think you probably need in addition to Reginald, probably three more staff members, they'd work on outreach and so that more people can have interaction with you and you can get out there in the community more. Someone needs to be involved with the departments when they're drafting their project specifications so that everything is looked at through that diversity and inclusion lens in the contracting process. Someone's gonna need to be responsible for setting the contract goals because you cannot put the same goal in every contract and that can be a process that laborious isn't exactly the right word but attention has to be paid to it, someone has to do it and be responsible for it. Then once the contract submissions are in, those need to be evaluated, did the bidders meet the goals, did they make a good fate effort? If they failed to meet the goal? And all that kind of review has to be the responsibility of some staff person. Then once the contract is in performance, we will need to monitor that. Make sure that the firms that were listed on the compliance plan are in fact the firms that are being used, that they're being paid, what they were supposed to be paid, that there's no cash, those are fraud. I'm an entire file full of cases and articles about MWBE fraud. And you see a fair amount in this across the country, so it's very important that you have someone who is tasked with that kind of of monitoring. And so I think that's probably about what you're going to need in order to run your program. Also, then you could focus on either serving as a clearinghouse or perhaps providing some technical assistance yourself to these firms to assist them, to do work for you. How do you do business with the city of Arlington? I'd practice the public contract law for 35 years and every agency is different, and especially small new firms can get tripped up like that. So it's important to have someone that they can talk to on about how to be successful with the city of Arlington. And then we would suggest that you partner with some of the other local agencies out here. There's a lot going on in the Metroplex in terms of support for minority women firms. And so find out about that. I can certainly give Reginald some ideas. He's very well versed and well-known and respected in this area. And you might be able to form some good partnerships to really help these firms to succeed. Next slide, please. So those are our race and gender neutral program recommendations, but we're also suggesting that in our view, you have ample evidence to have a full-fledged, minority women business program that sets reasonable and achievable goals, enforces contractual requirements, provides support to MWBEs, and really is able to move your community forward. So you see there's sort of the elements of that. You certainly want to have some overall annual goal. Again, you could have it combined. You could separate it out. Whatever you think is the appropriate approach. You need to set your narrowly tailored contract goals. You will have to determine what certifications you will take. I would do anything to talk you out of doing your own certifications. It's just to burdensome and you do have the North Central Texas Regional Certification Authority there. So you can just continue to accept certifications from there. You're going to have dot new policies and forms and have the ability to monitor your contracts. You will have to train your staff. You can't skip that step and make sure everybody is on board with the program. You will also have to train your vendors. One good thing is that most of the agencies in that area already are using the same electronic data collection system. So your primes are probably probably pretty well versed in how to use it. So at least that's a good step in the right direction. And then lastly, you're going to need to decide what does success mean for you. They're different metrics. One obvious one is, are you meeting the overall goals? But there are other things that you might wanna take a look at. Like, you know, how many new firms are coming in? Are firms branching out? One thing that you'll see in the detailed utilization charts is that minority and women firms tend to be concentrated in specific industries. Is there a way to get people a broader base of work? Are they getting more prime contracts? So lots of metrics that you could use. But I do think that that's an important element that you do need to try to figure out what success means for the city of Arlington. And then you're going to need to figure out what success means for the city of Arlington. And then you're going to need to probably do a new study, and sorry there are a lot of animals in this house, and they don't like it when I'm not paying attention to them. But you will need to probably do a new study in another five, six years or so. So the course required that you have regular review on your program to make sure that it, one, is still needed at all, and two, whether or not it is narrowly tailored. So I think that is the end of my slides. We'll see. Yes, okay. So I'm happy to answer any questions that you may have. Miss Holt, I just wanna say thank you for the work that's been done here. This is Mayor Williams. If you're wondering where we're. Oh, I see there's a lot of people here. We're very small. Yes, we're very small here at the end, but really appreciate all the work. And of course, this fits right in with the presentation we just had on our Unity Council here and a part of that. And of course our council is taking a leadership role here and what a great opportunity that we have to be able to move forward there in achieving many of these goals. And we have shown a propensity there for being a leader. There's we go but the first question I would like to have too. And you've named several of them, but are there any other barriers that you know, you had a general comment there at the end there are barriers there that exist here in our community for MWBEs and you've named several. But are there any that you haven't talked about that you could share with us? Well, you know, certainly, obviously the ability to get financed is just key. The Federal Reserve's had come out with a note yesterday of the Survey of Consumer Finances, which if anybody's interested, I'm having a send it to you. They really talked about the continuing just extraordinarily large wealth gap between especially black families and white families. I mean, so this is data as recent as yesterday. And while the gap has narrowed over the last few decades, a little bit, it hasn't much. And so the ability to tap into sources of financing is really critical. And one of the things that you'll see in the anecdotal section is a gentleman who was sort of questioning the need for any programs. And you know, he talked about how he got started. Well, his dad loaned him money and he was sure that if he hadn't gotten it from his father, he would have gotten it from somebody else and that anybody could do this. And I thought, well, that's nice. If your family has money to loan you to start a business, but certainly for most black households and probably Latino households as well, that might not really be an option. And you might not have any other sources. If you're broken, all your friends are broke. It's really kind of hard to get started. That's exacerbated by redlining because the single biggest source of startup capital for a small business is home equity. Well, if your homes are worthless, you start out behind. So financing is just really key. Shurdy bonding is another barrier for construction firms, although in some way, such shorty ship is really a financing mechanism, so same kinds of problems. Access to networks. How do you find out about work? And that's one of the things I think your electronic system is going to be very important because it is a way to increase access. Because what the minority firms tell us is, nobody's picking up the phone and saying, hey, I hear the city is going to be doing X and X amount of time. Let's talk about this. Let's get together. Let's figure out how we can bid this job and make some money. That doesn't really happen for minority firms. So that's another huge barrier. Then there's the comfort of city staff with people that they know, that they've worked what that they know can get the work done on time and on budget and obviously that that's critically important. But it can be difficult to get people to try someone new. So I think all of those are barriers that are out there that the city can't completely eliminate and then you don't run the banking system, for example. But I think that if you really develop your program and do things that are critical for these firms, like pay net 30. So first question I ask any new client is, what is your net turnaround time? If you tell me it's more than about 45 days, then we need to have a conversation about that before we talk about your program. I have seen over the years, many small minority-owned firms get completely strung out on government contracts. So I live in San Antonio now, but I'm really from Chicago. Like you've been to Chicago, and you've seen our glorious park with the bean and all that stuff. And it's just, it's spectacular, Millennium Park. Millennium Park took out the biggest black contractor and the biggest black engineering firm in the Chicago area. It bankrupted them both, because the city paid so slowly they couldn't make it. So there are some things I think that you can control, and it's important that you try to do that as best you can. Then, Miss Holt, the second part of my question is that our chambers here, including our black chambers, have identified the fact that we need to be working to create new firms there, and some of these larger established firms need to help. Regardless of the larger firms ethnicity, they need to help to be able to do that because we have a shortage there in some areas of services that we need here at the city that all cities need. And so that's another area we're working on and what are you seeing in other cities? Are you seeing the same thing there or what would you say about that effort and program? Well, you certainly do see the same problem and I think often the same the same focus It's not an easy thing to do because government is a very difficult client. You know, it pays slowly. It's got a lot of paperwork requirements. You know, if you've got a job, you're going to get prevailing ways. There's all sorts of things to do. And so it can be a real challenge to have these sort of new little firms that really aren't ready in some sense. So I think the things I've seen that work the best are some support programs and helping firms to kind of get their feet wet before they jump into a government pond. And I say that as somebody who's 95% of my practice is government. So I know that it's not an easy thing. I think the other thing is that it's important not to lose sight of working to help support the existing firms that could grow. We hear all the time that small businesses, the engine and the economy, and that's true. But it's also small businesses that get bigger. I mean, we have about 11 people in my shop. We're not going to say the San Antonio economy, I don't care what we do. And we're not going to get any bigger probably, or at least not much bigger. But it's being able to help firms to also ramp up. So I think it's important to have both lenses, but certainly unbundling contracts, putting a lot of stress on the contracts that are under 50,000, where you don't have to go through such a formal procurement process. And I think Will has been making a lot of progress on that. I have a lot of agencies that work small projects. You have to be sure it is to solicit at least two certified firms for every project to make sure that they find out about the opportunities that are out there. And then see if you can get them paid quickly, see if you can reduce any of the insurance requirements. Do you really need a $2 million umbrella policy for a $40,000 job? Really? I often find that the risk management departments of agencies are kind of on autopilot. They just put the same thing in every contract and they don't think about it. Well, again, those are things you control. So I think that that small new firm focus is good, but I also just want to make sure people don't forget about the firms that are when out there that just need a little boost to be able to really become true job creators. Other questions from council members? Mr. Sutton? Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Miss Hope, for that presentation. My question is, and I spent years at Air Traffic Controller in a profession that hadn't been really diverse. And so- And putting it mildly, my husband is a pilot, so I know. I guess my point is the rules that are in play, whether they are federal or state rule outcome, is not what I think this council want as far as when it comes to diversity in the contracts. Is there anything that we can do that change those rules through our federal partners and our state partners that make the playing feel a little bit more equitable and outcome is what we want. Well that's a good question. You know surely one thing I would love to see Texas municipalities get together. Austin, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Ireland to, for all of you, Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Ireland, for all of you, is to try to go and get some change into the Texas local government code. So for example, at least what I have been told, and I don't have a law license in Texas yet. And at 35 years out of school, I might decide to not go get one at this point. So this is a comment, not a legal opinion, I'm about to give you. But my understanding is that the Texas local government code does not permit any type of small local set-asides, not race and gender based, but purely race and gender neutral, for contracts greater than $50,000. Well, that's a super low threshold. And my understanding has been that way for years. Getting that raised would give you a serious tool to do some things. You know, there are other sort of lobbyists, to try to get some relief so that you can join what many other states already do in terms of supporting small local businesses. But my understanding is that right now, you just really can't do much of anything. On the federal level, the good news is that the US DOTs disadvantaged business enterprise program reauthorization legislation is going to come out of the house and go to the Senate. I work with Representative Kleinborn's committee on this. The hearing was last Wednesday. So if anybody's interested in that, we have some summaries and stuff we'd be happy to share with you. But the good news is we got it in and we got it out. Because at one point, we weren't so sure where the administration was going to come down on this. But at least so far, they had not expressed any opposition to continuing the program. There's certainly are some things that could be done at the federal level with some of these programs, I think. But, to be frank, this is probably not the moment to be trying to get any real change in Washington to expand civil rights. But the real the real box is the the the the strict constitutional standards are court driven. Those are federal laws. Those are federal judges. Those are federal laws. Those are federal judges. And that's a much more difficult thing to know what to do about. You know, especially the Supreme Court has become increasingly conservative about civil rights issues. And so I don't know to be honest, serve that there's a whole lot that could be done about that, absent getting some new judges, to be quite frank about it. Mr. Peale. Thank you for that presentation. The clarity and the ability to understand was excellent and I really appreciate that. I'm a construction law attorney. I represent people in the construction industry whenever they work with government entities or as general contractors or subcontractors. And one of the questions I wanted to ask is that sometimes I'm concerned that companies from communities of color don't have access to professional services that provide them the guidance necessary to go through, you know, a bid package from a city project that's like that thick. documents are very sophisticated. They push a lot of the risk onto contractors. And a lot of times I found over my 22 years of doing that, some companies just don't bid at all because they're intimidated by the documents. They don't know where they can push back on the city and get concessions out of the contracting documents. So I'm kind of wondering, is there a way to quantify the lack of access for MWBE companies to accountants and lawyers that help them navigate that contracting with a big governmental entity process? And even when you're a subcontractor with a general contractor that has a contract with the city, the contract you sign says all the, all the, all the, yeah, all the obligations that the general contractor assumes and its contract with Arlington are applicable to you and your sub contract with me. So they go and they look at the the prime contract and it's this thick and they go, I just don't want any of that. I can go do three or four private sector jobs and not have to mess with the Texas bid statutes. You know, what's kind of flown around in my head is there might be a community way to provide MWBE businesses access to that, you know, I'm an attorney and counselor at law. Yeah, very counselor at law. We forget that sometimes, right? Yeah, and a lot of times people when they're trying to grow their business, they need a relationship with the counselor. Just say, how the city, that if they change this portion of this contract, you'll be interested, or push back on this clause in the contract you have. And I'm worried, is there any way to improve access of MWBE companies to professional services that give them that extra lift they need to navigate the complex world of government contracting? Oh, I think yes, and you have no idea how much you are preaching to the already converted on this one. I see it all the time when I when I I actually start out like myself as a construction lawyer, that's how I got into this and I still represent some very large construction companies. So I know exactly what you're talking about. I think, I'll tell you what my happy vision would be. Would be something like this. And the Missouri Department of Transportation did this for a while. I don't know if they still are. I could certainly find out. But the agency had a roster of construction, a new construction accountants and construction lawyers that they subsidized that the certified firms could access for reduced fee up to a certain number of hours. I thought it was one of the greatest things I'd ever seen because it helps to equalize that power problem and that knowledge problem. Because of course you're right people look at these contracts and their eyes glazed over. My eyes glazed over and I operate them. So I know how bad it's gotta be. They don't understand them. People would call me and go, can they make me do this? I'm like, yes, they can because you signed it. I didn't understand it. I don't doubt that. All right, so I think that that kind of thing would be fabulous. And maybe if the city could join together with some of the other cities and agencies to help pay for this and really make it part of a counseling program. I do know that there are some financing and bonding type programs that do that. I've never seen anybody add the component of the lawyers and the accountants, where there's a surety and a bank that agreed to provide this type of counseling and technical support. And if you go through their program, they will bond you because this is sort of the problem with like the bonding education programs and some of you may have seen these US SBA does them. But the problem is that they're sort of like a makeover, but you don't have a date. So they'll tell you all about what you're supposed to do, but there's nobody there to actually write the bond at the end of it all. And so getting people to that next step, I think is really crucial. So I do think that Arlington, if you all are interested in that, that'd be fantastic because I think in putting that kind of a roster together, we just finished Fort Worth study. I know they're interested. DFW. So maybe some of the agencies could bond together. You know, and what I tell the minority firms is, listen, anything worth having is not going to be free and you need to get into the habit of paying for some assistance. But if you want to make that leap, then you're going to need some help. So maybe if the going rate for construction accountants is, I mean, I don't know, more simply I haven't an hour. Maybe they'll agree to work for $75, you know, and the agencies will pick up some of the restaurants split it amongst themselves. So I think there's some great stuff you could do there. Somebody's interested in talking about that, you know, let me know because I think that that could really be a game changer. So otherwise we just turned through. And that's the other thing whoever was asking about encouraging real small firms. The problem with those little itty bitty firms is they don't have this part yet. Guy may be a great tradesperson, woman knows how to do masonry, but it's the business part. And that's where they fail. And so if we can give them that kind of support, I think it can really really go a long way. So yeah I'm happy to talk about that. Great Dr. Odom Wesley. Thank you so much for this report and for your recommendations made it very clear your recommendations made it very clear what we need to do going going forward and just had a couple of questions. Did you have an opportunity to do a comparison between our last disparity study and your findings of this one? Well we didn't do that. I mean I suppose we would have had an opportunity but we didn't do it and I didn't think it was a good use of your resources, which basically means my time. It's been a long time. The methodology is very different. I think we know a lot more now about how to do disparity studies than we did then. I mean, we've had a lot of judicial decisions that tell us what we can and can't do. So we really just didn't think that it was terribly useful, really. Yeah. And especially because it's been so long. What was that? How many years ago? Yeah, I think ten. I was just wondering if we could identify progress that the city has made since the last time. And I don't know, maybe that's something our city staff can do. And look at what we have done. We have tried and what strides we've already made. But my- The only thing I can tell you though about that is that your last to the disparity study really didn't go into the subcontracting data. So what probably the only thing you really could compare would have been your prime contract awards with what we found. But so much of where you're going to get this participation is with subs in the last study really just didn't look at that. So I don't know. But yeah, I'm sure Will and Reninal and I can certainly talk them about it if they'd like. And the other question I have, if we implement all of the recommendations that you have given us, this entire list, how long should it take or would you estimate it would take for us to make a difference and move that number? I know African-American businesses, it's not even 1%. How long should it take for us to show, move the needle, and tell us some difference. Well, that's a really good question, and it's dependent on a couple of factors. One is I don't know what projects you've got coming up. And so what opportunities you're gonna have in the future. I know that you've done the big stadium projects. I don't know if they're more planned. I just don't know. So some of it will be what the opportunity is they're gonna be. But I would think that you should probably begin to see some progress in probably 12 to 24 months because it takes, first you gotta kind of get the program up and going, then you're gonna need projects and goals set and then people have to be put under contract and then they have to start working and then they have to start paying people. So I think people should not have the expectation that you know two years from now you're going to look up and you're going to have parity across everything. I doubt that very seriously, but I do think that you could show some progress with some larger projects that have some good availability and opportunities. And I know in the report, you talked about sunsetting the program so that after five to seven years, we review the whole thing, but then after listening to you, sounds like we need to be monitoring on an ongoing basis. Where we are. Yes, you have to do both, really. You have to monitor on an ongoing basis and then every five or five six seven years take a look and see where you are. I always want to just remind people that they don't have to shut down the program. You just need to review it on some kind of regular schedule. Okay. Thank you very much. Mm-hmm. Dr. Nunez. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Ms. Holt. My question is, in your experience, what have other municipalities and were or state governmental bodies done. In order to assist MWBE companies, obtain the kind of financing that they need to get. Yeah, well, I have seen some relatively successful link deposit type programs where the agency's depository institution will agree to make loans using the agency's contracts as collateral. So it's sort of like factoring, except not hideous like that, you know, I mean, not with those kind of interest rates and really honoris terms. So that's certainly one thing that's possible. So many states have these, sometimes the long limits are so low that they're not that useful. If it's got a $50,000 ceiling on it, that isn't gonna get you terribly far on a city of Arlington contract. But that's certainly a possibility is to use your own depository institution that you run all your funds through as an entity that would be willing to use your contracts as collateral, which may require some of your contracts to be rewritten because you often see in government contracts, they in fact cannot be assigned. So that's something to kind of take a look at. And if you can't assign it, then the bank isn't going to take it. So that's something to kind of take a look at. And if you can't assign it, then the bank isn't going to take it. So that's one possibility. Another thing to do is expedite and pay every two weeks to help people with cash flow, making sure that you've got mobilization money and it actually flows down to subs. A lot of agencies will pay 5% more money, but it never gets to the subs, so that isn't going to help them. So that's another possibility. Make sure you are paying that 30. Just make sure your own processes are going along. So I think if you did some of those things, that would probably really help. I think the other thing you could do, and this is more of a clearinghouse function than really any change in your own behaviors, is to make sure that your certified firms know about the programs that are out there. One of the most depressing things to me was to see those PPP loans that the participation by minority owned firms, especially black owned firms, was just terrible. People didn't know how to get them. They didn't have the existing banking relationships. And it was just, it's really distressing because we know that those are firms that are desperately in need of support. And they didn't get it. And so another possibility with the working with, for example, like the procurement technical assistance centers that are subsidized by the federal government to make sure that your vendors know how to access lending institutions and help them to develop relationships with banks because apparently with ppp that's what the problem was if you already had chase as your bank and your credit was perfect and your receivables were good fine'll loan you money. Well, okay. But that wasn't terribly helpful for so many small firms that were just teetering on the edge there. Other questions. Yes, Dr. Frohr Mars. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Ms. Holt. I have one question for you. In your presentation, you talked about the percentage and we've said a 25%. And you said to look at, could you tell us a little bit more about is that sort of a reasonable goal? Or are you suggesting we do it by contracts? And then by maybe the number of subcontractors, actors versus a prime. I was just curious what your thoughts are. How do you do it? Yeah, that's a great question. I think you really need both types of goals. I think you need an overall annual target for your spending. And I think you could easily support an overall 30% goal here. It's rounding up a little bit. But you know, this isn't physics, these numbers. And there are sort of constantly in flux because on any given day, their more firms are fewer firms. And so I think you could certainly make a very reasonable argument to just around it up to 30. You could decide that you wanted to split that between MBEs on the one hand and WBs on the other. I see people do that. I see combined, I see people do it all kinds of ways. So you can sort of slice that up however you think is appropriate. But you do have to set goals on a contract by contract basis, regardless, which is looking at what are the scopes of work of the project, who's available to do it, and to wait that, and you can actually do it with a formula that will give you an initial number that then you're gonna kind of need to adjust based on what you know about what's going on in the market. Am I pretty, I think we put it in the disparity study, but if not, I can get that to willed, but along with another industry colleague, we actually put together a free website to show people how to set goals because I was so, you know, to seeing all this sort of gibberish goal setting all over the place. And it worried me from a legal standpoint. So if you go to contract goal setting.com, all one word, it'll take you when we have instruction sheets, we have spreadsheets, we've got all sorts of materials on that site to help people set contract goals. Now the, um, electronic system that I think you're in the process of purchasing has a module built into it already. And so what we would propose to you is for us to give you the disparity study data, that detailed six digit data. We know how to work with that firm. We load it into their system for you. And then you have it. And so when the parks department decides that they're gonna put out a contract, they have to put in the dollar amounts of the weights, it will calculate the availability. And it's just a spreadsheet format. It's no complicated math. I mean, I could show you exactly how to do it, but it'll give you a number. But then you need to adjust that based on what you know. So for example, if the private sector market has gotten real slow, which I expect could certainly be happening by this time next year, maybe you wanna raise your goal a little bit, because that means that they're gonna be firms out there that are hungry for work and could do it. If on the other hand, you decide to build three more stadiums all at the same time, maybe you wanna reduce that goal a little bit because you don't know that they'll people to do it, but you have to really do both. You need your overall annual goal, and then you have to set your goals on a contract by contract basis. Let me make one note for you here, though. That does require education of the community because people are used to seeing the same number in every contract and they may say, oh, well, the city of all intents abandoning its commitment because the goal that comes out of a particular contract is 12% Because that's reasonable and achievable for that project, but it may also be that maybe you get a 40% goal. be that maybe you get a 40% goal. I've got a project now with Harris County in flood work, right? Because of course what's used since it's on a swamp. And this project is like 40% dirt work. Well, that gives me a lot to work with. We have a lot of minority contracts that the contractors that do demo and trucking. So we can get that number way up on that project. The bridge portion? Not so much, but that's a legal requirement, really, that you set your contract goals. And one thing that we've seen over about the last, I don't know, seven, eight years somewhere in there, is that the litigation action has moved more away from, do you have an adequate basis to have a program at all to how are you running the program. So for example, New York State has been sued over its goal setting. They put a 30% M.B.E. goal on a project essentially at the Canadian border. Now query how on earth were you were going to get 30% minority participation up there? And that's a good question. And you know, now we're off to the races. So hopefully we're going to get that settled. So, was that where you were going with that? Yes, ma'am. Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Mr. Yelverton. Collette, I was going to see if you could follow up. Yep. I was going to see if you could follow up Dr. Adam Wesley's question a little bit more follow up. Yep, I was going to see if you could follow up Dr. Edom Wesley's question a little bit more about the progress. And I know there's some question in particular that we talked about, which is as things have progressed in recent years, when the program was established, you know, we've watched the numbers move from six, eight percent to this last quarter. We actually, I think for the first time hit the 25% total MWBE goal. The problem as we discussed is that in particular, black contractors are still clearly lagging in that area. But we also talked about the merits or not merits of setting separate goals within that overall area. So could you talk a little bit about what you would bifurcate and what you would not and kind of some of the logic for that? Sure. Well, as I say, I see people do this various ways. I am resistant to setting race-specific ethnic goals. As far as I know, the only city in Texas, at least of any size that does that is the city of Austin, where they had the separate goals. And it seems to me that the problem with it really is that by and large contractors will give you the participation you tell them to. They rarely go over and they don't have any incentive to go over. So the problem is if you have a goal of 2% for black contractors, 2% is what you're going to get. And sometimes people could actually get more work if the numbers were aggregated a little bit bigger because the guys cannot going to split in half who's providing reddimix on the site. That doesn't make any sense, but they will carve it all out into these little chunks if that's what you tell them to do. And I just I have not seen that actually be terribly useful for anybody. Now I appreciate the problem very much of the low participation by black contractors. Know that there is nothing unique about Arlington in this respect. This is a problem I see absolutely everywhere, including in communities that have really good size, black overall general populations. So the barriers for black contractors are the most entrenched, they are the most difficult to overcome. There's no magic answer for that I'm afraid. But I don't know that splitting it off into these little tiny pieces really is useful. Because think about it. First of all, you have to make sure you have at least that many subcontractable scopes. And maybe you don't. That's the first problem. And you really want to be sure you have more than just that so that nobody says you're running a functional quota system. So let's say that so we have a gold for Black Latinos, Asians, Native Americans, and white women, that's five goals right there. Maybe you would want to have at least 10 subcontractable scopes to make sure that everyone has a chance to participate. And it just gets really cumbersome and clumsy to manage. It's very burdensome on prime contractors to have to go and meet on these goals. I'm just not sure that it does anybody any real good, to be honest. I was just looking over here. I've got your study up. Let me go back up to this chart. So if you look at Table 1-4, I'm looking at an award doc, so you may be looking at slightly different page numbers. But, you know, let's say that these were the goals on a particular contract. Again, I really want to stress that they shouldn't be, but let's just pretend for the purpose of the conversation. So you're going to give me a goal for blacks of 9.6. Well, maybe if you would aggregate those together, you know, maybe that would have been a goal of 20 percent and maybe someone would give more than that 9.6 percent to a black home farm because that's how the work fell out. So I don't think it's terribly a good idea. I see people do it. I don't think there's a legal impediment to doing it. I just don't think it's the best practice. Any other questions from Miss Holt? Miss Holt, thank you for this study. It's been very informative and now I'll just jump ahead. Here we'll be looking forward to future agenda item. This will get we need to have staff have time to look over this and to see what we can do And then we'll have some very robust discussions on trying to move things ahead Now I've mentioned before our city is known as a can do city and I think we're looking forward Here to be be very progressive here is we we move forward on this issue So thank you a lot for- Thank you, you guys. We're a wonderful client and please let me know. Will and Reggie know they can call me with questions and stuff anytime. I really want you to have a good program and I think you can. I think you can make some progress. I really do. Thank you. All right, thanks everybody. Bye. Bye-bye. Stay safe. Yeah, why don't we I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I'm going to be back. I you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you the call our all-in-con city council back to order and our next item of business is the community Wi-Fi expansion and I'll call upon Mr. Enrique Martinez our chief technology officer of the IT department of course. Good afternoon mayor and council. I wanted to present before you this afternoon just a couple of initiatives that we really want to highlight on behalf of our community, through some of the CARES monies that have been made available, and then some of the opportunities that really have presented themselves and working in collaboration with some of the other departments. On the agenda this afternoon, we have some planned investments. We're gonna touch on some of the Wi-Fi expansion specific to some of the facilities with existing infrastructure. And also a snapshot of Wi-Fi accessibility within our community in partnership with service providers that have made some data available for us to share before you this afternoon. And then also some examples of some municipal Wi-Fi initiatives that are common in the US that we want to bring before you as well. From a planned investment perspective, we're going to hone in on our libraries and park facilities. The primary driver behind this is we're going to capitalize on our existing infrastructure. These facilities are currently equipped with our city-owned fiber optic cabling and our existing internet services. We're going to continue to identify other opportunities within the community that may lend itself for future expansion. I'll be spending some time on that a little bit later in the presentation. This here is what we're terming to be 21 by 2021. These are all brick and mortar facilities that are currently equipped as I mentioned earlier. This is bright down by library locations to include our parks and recreation facilities. This here is a snapshot and I wanted to bring some attention to some of the census tracks they're highlighted in red. There will be a phase two component that we're working with public works and some of our other partners to really take a deeper dive into some of our vertical assets which may include our street lights to review if there's an opportunity there to equip and outfit some of those facilities with Wi-Fi for our community. Some of the ongoing coordination efforts we've engaged with our partner vendors. We are undertaking some site surveys to identify locations within the exterior of the building to provide Wi-Fi services. The next steps will also include the equipment ordering and the equipment programming and installation. This here is a snapshot of Spectrum and some of the community Wi-Fi. There are some limitations here that if you're not an existing Spectrum customer, your free Wi-Fi is capped at two hours at these locations here and they're down at the left is the actual website that provides our community with access to identify some of these business locations and other locations that provide that Wi-Fi service. Here's another online resource that highlights 859 hotspots throughout our community. Again, this is not unrestricted access. There are some caps and limitations to this service as well. What I wanted to share here is just a market review, an analysis that was undertaken about a couple of weeks ago. As you can see on the lower right hand corner of the slide, the internet services in our community vary from 1799 to upwards of 14499. And that is all vendor driven and market driven. So there are some reduced Internet services that may be tied to the free lunch program. And we've had conversations with AISD to really publicize that and make that known to our community as well. Here are some initiatives that I wanted to share with the smart lighting and Wi-Fi. Really it's about managing expectations as well. Some of the range with the existing equipment that's on the market today is about 250 to 500 feet and the average speed may vary up to 10 megs per second. A couple of other initiatives that I wanted to highlight of some care funding is being used in City of Tucson and City of San Antonio and a lot of that is still under under programming and development and as soon as we learn more if it's something that's a good fit in our community will definitely be continuing to research the capabilities there. From an enhancements perspective in road map prior to the pandemic we undertook an Internet services capacity increase we upgraded our Internet services by tenfold, thus making us prepared to increase some of the Wi-Fi free service within our community. Additionally, we're going to continue to review some continued expansion opportunities that may include street lights. And with that, I'll take any questions. Any questions from Mr. Martinez. Yes, Dr. For our Mars. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Mr. Martinez. Just one quick question. Is there any plans for or current opportunities you're exploring with U. T. Arlington? Um, not with U. T. Arlington at the moment. We did have a conversation with them a couple of weeks ago. There's a learn network that they're currently plugged into and we did have that conversation. About a month ago, I know that they're using the learn network as their internet service provider. As I highlighted earlier, um, we had already increased our internet service provide services. So right now, um, there are no collaboration at the moment but we are reviewing some some other opportunities with them. Okay thank you thank you Mayor. Thank you. Other questions? Well, they'll say this is a very important topic for us Mr. Martinez and we certainly are glad you're here and you're here and leading us through this because the opportunities here are great and we've got to seize them. And then in addition to that, it's a real challenge now because we're moving to a new normal in which we know that increased bandwidth and Wi-Fi capabilities is gonna be so important. Back to our next topic. We started dealing with some of that there too. So know that this is a council that does value putting technology to work. And in fact, Ms. K. Parts said that earlier there too that that's such an important part of who we are now. And it also is providing us opportunities because more and more Technology companies are wanting to come our way and test their products here in Arlington and we certainly want to open our doors to be a laboratory for any technology that might be feasible to help us here in our city Thank you, Mayor. Thank you appreciate it Mr. Martinez Okay, next we move to a report on Fiber Broadband. And I'd like to introduce Mr. Sean Parker from Sci-Fi Networks. And as Mr. Parker comes on, I want to point out that Mr. Parker grew up here in Arlington. And as a special place in his heart to hear for it. And in fact, now as he has progressed and moved forward in his career, I'm glad you haven't forgotten us, Mr. Parker, as you joined Si-Fi and thinking about Arlington as a place to advance technology. So with that, Mr. Parker, share with us what you have to propose here for the City of Arlington. Absolutely, sir. And it's a pleasure to speak with you, Mr. Parker, share with us what you have to propose here for the City of Olington. Absolutely, sir. And it's a pleasure to speak with you all today. Thank you, Mayor Williams. Thank you, City Council. Thank you, Magi, Yolverton and City staff. I am an Arlington Colt. That's where I graduated and grew up right there in Arlington as the mayor said. So I'm excited to bring this opportunity to the City of Arlington. And I am currently Vice President of Business Development at Side-Fight Networks. Next slide please. Who is Side-Fight Networks? Side-Ffi is North America's leading fiber city developer that builds, operates, and privately finances ubiquitous, open access fiber networks, passing every home and every business within a city. We exclude no areas, thus eliminating a digital divide in a city, giving every home direct access to a fiber or a fiber connection on a next generation we are all becoming increasingly aware of in the current climate. Traditional telecommunication and cable companies have historically built out private networks that did not serve everyone. Essentially, they picked the best areas to get the quickest and best ROI possible. Good for investors, but not so good for the sustainability and future of the community. Next slide, please. So, sci-fi in our investors see broadband development as a long-term investment. Financing projects for 25 and 30 years. Very similar to how toll roads are financed. Sci-fi today is backed by APG, one of the world's largest pension delivery organizations. They created the smart city infrastructure fund to fully finance broadband expansion, and if you give it a little tabular to see another arrow that pop up. Yeah, there we go. And the fund is managed by White Pellem capital. Next slide, please. So slide, this slide is Syfie's Fiber City Brain. Is an offering where we are able to 100% privately fund, design, build, operate, maintain, and market a fiber to the home in smart city fiber optic building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, building, The Fiverr City Network is based on a carrier grade infrastructure with an open access architecture that provides diversity and resiliency to support the high dependency services back by stringent services levels agreements. This supports any city's desire to bring last mile broadband competition to the community. Next slide, please. Now, I apologize for this slide being a bit busy, but the key takeaways here are sci-fi networks is not a service provider. We are a fiber city developer that essentially creates fiber optic super highways throughout communities. We then open that network up to competing service providers. Sci-Fi remains completely neutral, ensuring a level playing field for all service providers. And only select cities have the opportunity to become fiber cities and those cities would need to enter into a development agreement with us allowing sci-fi networks access to every street, thus creating a ubiquitous fiber footprint. Next slide please. So slide the next slide. So I apologize for this slide being busy. The-Fi estimates the private investment in the Arlington community would be north of $300 million. The entire network is finance prior to construction. The network would pass everywhere, as I already mentioned. There would be minimal social disruption by using advanced micro-trenching construction techniques. We usually see a little bump in home values for homes with fiber to the home. The ability to track a variety of service providers with leading edge technologies. leading edge technologies. The network would be built in an estimated 24-month period. And then furthermore, sci-fi will work with town staff to identify areas of need in the community to receive high-speed low-cost broadband services to support social inclusion and digital equality. Next slide, please. Other options the city may want. Sci-Fi can build a network within the network, essentially creating a tailored network solution for the city infrastructure. Sci-Fi would work with various city departments to identify current and future demand points. Those being public buildings, Wi-Fi in the parks and other public places, security cameras and street lighting, all of which help support municipal effectiveness and public engagement. This particular network within the network would be a physical and logical extension of the city's current fiber network. Next slide, please. If you go one more, please. Thank you. Open access. What does this mean? I think the best way to describe this is to compare it to the Texas retail electric model. Earlier in my career, I worked with TXU Energy and the model is very similar to this in that sci-fi would be the neutral network operator like on-core. Just like on-core maintains the infrastructure of the electrical grid in North Texas. Sci-Fi would do the same, but for the fiber optic network in Arlington. The demarcation point for Sci-Fi would be also at the home. Sci-Fi would contract with multiple service providers over time to manage the relationship at homes and businesses, similar to that of TXU Energy for Lyent or the many, many electric providers out there today. Customers could go online or call to choose who they want as their service provider. The variety of ISPs would range from traditional service providers offering basic TV, phone and internet to telehealth security and whatever new or cutting edge provider comes our way. Next slide, please. our way. Next slide please. So this slide, the last slide here shows SciPy's current contracted cities where we are either building and turning up services along the way or about to be doing so. The green dots also represent states where SciPy is exploring current opportunities. And then if you go to the last slide, that concludes that, but my final thoughts are, you know, sci-fi believes in helping communities thrive by eliminating the digital divide. We also believe that sci-fi is uniquely positioned to do just that. By creating a privately financed next generation ubiquitous network, that's allowing the allowing for exceptional competition for consumers and it also makes a city a platform for future technologies and opportunities. Sci-fi would provide a city with a long-term partnership that delivers a gigabit speed fiber optic network to every home and every business throughout the city. Sci-fi, the Sci-fi model again is privately funded, designed, built, operated, and maintained by the private sector. We see no need for a city to be in the internet business or bond millions of dollars when they can partner with CIFI, who takes on the financial and construction risk to deliver the aspirations of your city. Like other CIFI projects currently under construction, the network will be typically built in 24 months and we will connect those with fiber, who request connectivity. Service provider partners will offer symmetrical gigabit internet service over advanced design topology and architecture capable delivering mission critical and high demand services that conform to stringent SLA agreements, which attracts innovative and large capacity data driven businesses to communities. High capacity, back all network design, redundancy and resiliency are great, but equally important are the service providers that deliver the range of services over the network to end users. It is for this reason that sci-fi has partnered with highly credible service providers to deliver advanced services over the network. Furthermore, sci-fi is open to working with any credible service provider to support the delivery of a successful fiber project throughout the city. Whether they'd be smaller, large or local or on a state, given the network, architecture is purposely designed to accommodate many service providers. And we believe that only by having an independently operated network that is neutral and separates the infrastructure from the service providers is the city capable, or city is able to achieve such a competitive position and build upon the forward thinking steps the city has already taken. Such steps not only ensure the city is one of the elite communities to have a true fiber to the premise gigabit speed network, but you will also have a fiber rich smart city infrastructure that places the city ahead of the competition and addresses your internal smart city needs. And I'll stop there and I'll stop there for questions. Any questions from Mr. Parker? Ms. K. Park. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Mr. Parker, and welcome home, so to speak, right? Thank you, thank you. You're welcome. So, I'll talk a little bit about how the Fiverr is going to be laid in or along the city of Arlington. So you're going to lay it in our right of ways. I understand totally in our right of ways or some other method as well. No, it would be laid in the right of way. The development agreement specifically would request that we have access to the right of way in the city so we can pass every moment of every business. We would essentially lay that fiber on both sides of every street, on every state street in the city of Arlington. So we would pass every, we would pass every home, we would pass every business. And then when that particular home or business wants service, they would just essentially call the various service providers that are available on the sci-fi or Arlington sci-fi network there. And then we would then connect the, from the curb to the home and place what they call an ONT on the house. And that would be the demarcation point in any sort of bill. And so at that point, the relationship completely in the home is on the service provider. But the network itself, it would fall under the umbrella of sci-fi and we would manage and control and handle any sort of concerns or issues with it. So I thought I understood that possible. You guys were also interested in putting it in our water sewer lines? I know. Look, we have multiple different ways that we deploy a network. That is a possibility, but it's not something that we have to do. There's other ways around it. And we will explore all those with the city. And we will make sure that obviously that we're all on the same page when it comes to how we deploy a network and everybody agrees upon it. Okay. And then the last question I have is so somebody doesn't check before they dig and they cut your line. How long does it take for you to come out and repair it? And do you have the capability to provide repairs in a timely basis? We would be handling all the operations in the city itself. And so the important thing to know when this type of a network is it's not just a hub and spoke type of network. This is a next generation type network that is certified by Bill labs. Words complete, really resilient and redone it and what that means is that if there is ever an issue like a fiber gets cut, let's say. that information would be rerouted back around through the system back to the home so that the home or the business wouldn't even know that there's an outage in most cases. But we have 24-7 knock services so we would be aware of it from an operations standpoint and we would roll a truck out there to repair the fiber that has been, excuse me, that the fiber that has been cut. So if you're going to roll a truck out there and I realize you've got redundancy, which is great. But if you're going to have, at some point you've got to repair that bright, right? So whenever you go to do that, so you're going to have local folks here that work for sci-fi or contractors with sci-fi. A combination of both. Okay. All right. Thank you. You're welcome. Mr. Peel. Mr. Peel. Sean, this is really exciting and a neat opportunity as for Arlington. I'm thankful that you're here. And I kind of had some questions because I'm not kind of ignorant a bit in your industry. I was watching, I guess, a presentation by somebody who might end up being a competitor of yours, telecommunications executive talking about how 5G infrastructure would totally make physical connections to the home obsolete. And he threw out that Google fiber was giving up in Austin and that there was no longer going to be a need for his collection. Now he was motivated and biased to represent the facts as he saw them because of his employer. But I was wondering if you could kind of tell me how Google fiber compares to 5G and how it's competitive, and then kind of end with an explanation of your micro-trinching tactic, because I think a lot of people, when they thank your lane align, they envision a backhoe digging up their front yard, and I kind of, I looked up the technique online, and it's very interesting, I was wondering if you could kind of reassure people who might call up and say, are you not these people dig up my yard? And so those are the two things I'm interested in. Well, those are very good questions, and I appreciate them, and I'll do my best to answer them. So my background also, aside from working at TXU, is I actually worked for Nokia for a number of years as well. And so I do have a fairly good background on technology itself. And my role at Nokia was I was ahead of five or cities. And so I worked with municipalities, I worked with groups like sci-fi. And that's how I became to know sci-fi and its ownership. They were a group that was underneath my work status there. So I know a lot about them. I've known about them for five and a half, six years now, uh, even though I'm relatively new with the company. Um, so to answer your question, though, on 5G, 5G is a, essentially a small cell. It, um, it has a range about, uh, about a city block, generally speaking. And it, and it has to be backed up to five or optics. It has a range about a city block, generally speaking, and it has to be backed up to fiber optics. Fiber optics is the key to making all the tech technology that you have to date work, period. And it's pretty much tells you differently their tone of the story. Fiber optics has to be there. It's the back-gone, it's the life and breadth of any network. So when people say 5G's, the, well 5G, yes, is the future in certain ways, but if you don't have, you know, a strong fiber optic network are endless. They're infinite. You can go as fast as you possibly want to. We don't know of any possible lags in that. Right? So fiber to the home is the absolutely gold standard and will be for the foreseeable future. That you just, you can't go faster than the speed of light, right? Ultimately. So, but that's an excellent question on that side of things. And so hopefully I answer that side of it. And I'll say with wireless, wireless is great, but wireless has restraints. Wireless is subject to environmental issues, be it the weather or whatever or obstructions that might get in its way. So, you know, if you want to have that resiliency, you want to have that redundancy, if you want to have a network that's not going to go down, well, the best option is to have a direct line of fiber right into your own business period. As far as micro-trenching is concerned, yes, it's a really cool technique. It's very quick, I guess, for us to build. We go about a foot down and about an inch and a half wide cut on that. So we're basically above most of the city infrastructure, right? So we're never actually touching any of that. So that's a big advantage. And once we're done, you can barely even notice that we were even there. But it's a really cool process. I can tell you, I can send you a lot of stuff online if you'd like, but it allows us to do about, build about 2,500 feet a day, which is critical in trying to build a network in this size in a couple of years' time. You've got to be quick, but being able to build 2,500 feet a day is, if you speak to any construction person, they'll be like, it's the fastest, it's the best, most efficient way to do it these days for a fiber optic type of connection. So, Dr. Nunez. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, sir, for your presentation. A couple of questions. So, you're the use of your micro-trench micro-trenching that's not something that's proprietary to your company correct that's a different technique owned by a different company. That would be correct actually it's I don't think it's owned by any particular construction company every everybody it's like fracking from a standpoint, certain standpoint. They all have their like certain mixtures they put down in the backfill. So every construction group would be different. And that is where you really separate the really good construction groups from the ones who maybe aren't as good with this technique. We use mirrors construction based down of Houston. They are a fantastic organization. They know what they're doing and there hasn't been concerns. They're back fill on that, but they're very good at what they're doing. In your opinion, maybe you can't answer this because I think it would take a crystal ball to look into the economic future, but You know your competitors AT&T Verizon Comcast spectrum may them or laying their own fiber is your fiber any different than theirs? No, well fiber is fiber generally speaking we use corning fiber, which is sort of the, I guess, the crem de la crema of fiber optics. And I would make a minor correction. We don't see AT&T and others like them as as competitors. We would like to invite them onto the network at some point. So we don't see them as competition. Like I said earlier, we're a five-reucinity developer. We're creating a network. So we would we would walk a MAT&T onto this network if they wanted to be on it. Okay, but there's a possibility that they might not they might choose not to be on your network. Absolutely. Usually most big telecos like AT&T and big cable companies like Charter and so forth. big telecos like AT&T and big cable companies like Charter and so forth, they like to do it their way. But the times are changing. They're getting more and more pressure to join networks like this. And when you have a company like AT&T that's, I think, nearly 150 to 200 billion in debt, it makes you wonder exactly how much they can build out right now. Thank you. You're welcome, sir. Dr. Farrer Mars. Thank you very, very much. Thank you, Mr. Farrer. A couple of just clarifying questions just to make sure that I'm following you. I saw on your PowerPoint it said 1 to 100 gigabytes. You know, I thought I heard you say that it was 1 gigabyte delivery. Can you kind of clarify what because it was on one of your very busy slides. There was like one. Sorry about that. That's okay. I just want to make sure I saw 1 to 100 gigabytes and then I heard you talking about 1 gigabyte. So basically what size gigabyte, will you be able to provide with this kind of? Sure, sure. So that's just the variety. So we can do one gigabit to a home day one. If a certain resident wants 100 gigabits to their home, we can also provide that too. So we can go as high as that. It would mean changing out a line card in our OLT, which is, it's probably more information than you need, but it can be done. It's just a quick switch for us. I was just thinking more in terms of a large corporate headquarters. Could you provide a 100 gigabyte? Yeah, we could do a direct connection with them. We would provide 100 gigabit to them if that's what they wanted to. So like in the case of general motors or anybody like that, we could be able to provide them all the bandwidth they could possibly ever want. And did I hear you correctly when you answer Ms. K-PART that you are going to have a fully redundant system? Correct. You fully redundant. And then the last question I had was more, I know you answered it by, question I had was more I know you answered it by I was in terms of phasing. Is this going to be done in phases? If so where do you expect to start and where do you expect to finish? And I heard you talk about the number of amount of line you can do per day which seems pretty 2500 I think is what you said. Could you kind of give us a sense about where you would start in the city and where would you go? Well my guess so we want to start turning up services right away and we want to get the best take rate as we are building this out so my guess would be one of your more densely populated areas probably more on the if I were to guess I would say probably more on the north side of town and then work towards the south side but again again, we'd be building this out within a two year time frame regardless. So there wouldn't be much lag and yeah, we'd have to take the cruise section by section, but there would be no gaps in terms of building. They would just keep on building, building, building, you know, first quarter, second quarter, third quarter, fourth quarter, 2021, 2022, and so forth, right? So until we've finished the entirety of the bill. But we would probably start, I would assume in the north area, but I can't say that for certain until we started really doing our due diligence on where it made most sense to start building. But we'd be very quick with our build and we'd be getting to every moment, every business. My final question is, you talked about use the phrase network within a network. Can you explain a little bit more about what that means? Absolutely. So currently this city has their own, I'll say layer two, man services piece, where you have a network that's servicing a lot of your own infrastructure. So what we would do is we would identify those pieces. If the city wanted to do this, it's not required by the needs. But every city that we partnered with has wanted to do this. But we identify future demand points and current demand points. And we build a sort of a tailored network on top of the network that we're already building. And the time to do that is when we're building the big city network. So we want to have that all identified and figured out. So we'll sit down with your city staff and city various city departments and determine exactly where those future demand points are going to be and current demand points and all that fun stuff. We would tailor make that essentially, I guess, for the city. It's the best way to describe that. And then we would like that fiber. And then the city itself would put their own IP on that fiber. So you guys are essentially controlling your feeds and your speeds and all that kind of stuff. And we just sit back and let you guys do do that but we light it so we're doing all the lasers and all that fun stuff and and and and identifying the distances that it has to be and putting the right equipment in place so that works properly for you guys. to handle that piece with you. But it's a contracted rate that never jumps up because you're using more gigabits this month or you want to increase services there. No, it's a flat rate from the very beginning just to have access to that network. Thank you, Mr. Parker. Thank you, Mayor. You're very welcome. My pleasure. Thank you, other questions? Mr. Parker, thank you for your presentation. I think I'll turn to Mr. Yeilverton here to do some closing comments here on this. Thank you, Mayor. Mr. Parker, thank you to Council. Just where we'll go from here is we have to work on our development agreement with Mr. Parker, which would I think address many of the questions that you all have brought up regarding how the micro trench works, what land do they have access to, and those kinds of issues would also put clearly into black and white that there's no city compensation from an upfront payment or a backing of any financial instrument. Rather, it would be a little bit about how the franchise fee that would normally come from a telco, how that would be put back to the company over time as they build out the network. So it's a little bit about a Ford kind of co-productive environment, if you will, not so much in the past. So there's a lot of things to work out there, but the good news is some of the stumbling blocks that we have run into in the past, regarding this kind of effort for ubiquitous fiber all over the city, has been issues of not being able to do it ourselves. Finding the right public private partner, one that had their own financial backing, one that did not require city bond backing or city financing as was alluded to. And so those are all things that are not part of any kind of proposed development agreement with SiFa. This would simply be essentially a right-away used agreement and then what what the future franchise fee to the city would be at what smaller level versus larger level over time. So we'll be working on that in the months ahead and as soon as we think we have an arrangement that works for us. We'll be back and have that on your agenda for consideration. And then we'll let sci-fi go to market and secure all the things that they need to and then begin doing the work on behalf of our residents if everything stays in order. So that's kind of how I expect that to work and be happy to answer more detailed questions myself as well. Any other questions? And I take it to it. It sounds very good, Mr. Parker. I think I'd love to counsel members, you know, think that it's a, we need to have Mr. Yelverton move ahead. I think it does answer a lot of questions that we want. And I'm seeing great response there. So thank you, Mr. Parker. We appreciate you coming to one of the most innovative cities in America here to make a difference. And then in addition to that, thank you for not forgetting your hometown either. There. Thank you. I'll never do that. Never do that. So I'm a cult through and through. getting your hometown either. Thank you very much. I'll never do that. I'll never do that. So I'm a cult through and through. So thank you so much. I appreciate it you guys. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you all. Okay. Okay. Next we'll move in to discussions of informal staff reports. And the first report is about the active adult center project update. And I'll call upon Mr. Limiel Randolph. Good afternoon mayor and members of city council. Limiel Randolph your parks and recreation director. At your August 18th meeting, there was a discussion item regarding the active adult center. At within that discussion, a couple of questions came up relative to consideration of Vantigriff Park as a location for the facility, as well as some questions about what's happening in the region relative to senior center operations. And then a follow up question that dealt specifically with the summit and their cost recovery scenario. So if we could advance this refer to to your left. of the Bob Duck Center and then just north of that area in white suggest the potential for developing an active adult center in that location. And then if you look at the next image, the same park and it shows a different orientation for a potential facility more wester, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, more, uh, of that more easterly location within Vandegriff to the residences there. And so there was some discussion about if a facility was considered than the more westerly orientation, more adjacent to Matlock Road would be preferable. The next image refers to a survey that we've completed regarding a number of senior centers in the region. And we wanted to provide a little overview of kind of the operational, current operational predicament of these centers. You'll notice the vast majority are currently closed due to COVID-19 concerns. And only a relatively few have any early projections on when they may reopen. And those that do have that consideration are looking at January 2021. It's as the earliest that they would potentially open. Many do as we do in Arlington provide virtual programming, but certainly that does not serve the number of seniors that these facilities would typically serve. And then the next image is a summary of the last three complete years of operations at the summit facility in Grand Prairie with the relative cost recovery position over those last three years. They have a very different operational model overall for their parks and recreation programs in Grand Prairie and so it suggests a very modest cost recovery certainly very different from what we've experienced in our current recreation centers. And so that concludes the information that I've brought back for your consideration. And I'd be happy to entertain any questions or comments you may have. Any questions from Mr. Randolph, Ms. Mollies? Thank you, Mayor Williams. So one of the concerns I've had in the past with cost recovery, and I don't know if you were able to get into this or not. Do you know how many of their memberships producing revenue are full service memberships where they're paying a monthly club fee and how many are like silver sneakers where a small amount is paid through the insurance policy every year. I mean, did you break it down into types of recovery? And also a second thing is I think there are a lot of East Arlington residents that go to the summit and utilize that facility. How many of those, I mean, what's what has going to impact their revenues if we open our own competing center. So those are just two of my questions right now. So I don't have that data available for this presentation, but I believe we could identify the answers to those questions. I do know that similar to what we initially had proposed, they have various fee schedules, depending on your age, depending on whether you're eligible for silver sneakers or silver fit programs. Additionally, they are, their model heavily subsidizes their programming efforts and so their fees are extremely modest, but I could provide more detail based on the questions that you asked. Okay, thank you. Mr. Peele. Now, Grand Prairie actually subsidized the operation of its adult center, the subsidy with a collection of an eighth of a scent sales tax, correct? the bill. So, I think that's the point. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. The bill is the bill. I don't believe they have a specific formula for the summit, but there was an expectation going into that facility that it would be heavily substituted. And I get a lot of questions about this facility, especially from, I think I've mentioned before my mom. So I have some real quick questions. Number one, if we don't move the current facility from its site near the Pierce Birch Water Treatment one, if we don't move the current facility from its site near the Pierce Birch Water Treatment Plant and we continue as is, when will the facility, when is the facility scheduled to open? If we move to Vandergriff, when would the facility be scheduled to open and which of the two sites is easier and more cost efficient to build on? in which of the two sites is easier and more cost efficient to build on? Several questions there in terms of the timing. We have currently suspended the design process on the facility. And so that design is not currently continuing until we reach a resolution with council on the direction there. The in early January or excuse me in early 2021, you will have an opportunity to review a bond sale that would release funds for the actual construction of the facility and so the funding to construct the facility could be made available in early 21. We would expect for a facility of this type somewhere in the 12 to 14 month construction time period and so upon completion of the design process we would anticipate it would take probably 15 to 18 months to complete construction of the facility. So I don't have a specific time for you because those decisions would need to be made, but funding could become available as early as first quarter of 2021 calendar year. Mr. Yalverton. And if I could, Mr. Peel, just to embellish that a little bit, I think based on where we're at on the green oak site since we've not actually begun any construction and we haven't gotten past just even some of the conceptual design. The time considerations that either location would be similar. So one is not that much further ahead than the other. And to be also a little more specific, the site on green oaks while providing, you know, the debate on access from green oaks versus the centralized location of Vandergriff is kind of six one way. Have does another from your perspective, but from a terrain perspective, as has been pointed out, the fall of the land, the vegetation at the Green Oaks site, compared to a flatter site, less vegetated site, at Vandergriff represent things to consider. But construction timing and such is all the same. that we're going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going to be going because we're still in design, then we would allocate those dollars to more streets. Mr. Alvertone, I think we need to also point out that the steps we have to go through if we go to Vandergriff, because we have to go back for an election, right? Yeah, and the mayor's pointed out just to be clear, because the proposition that was put on the ballot back in 2017 was specifically addressed to the West Green Oak site, that was the on the ballot back in 2017 was specifically addressed to the West Green Oaks site. That was a desire the council had was to make it clear where this was going to be that if we look at relocating the site it is a question that the voters will have to decide. The address location is a voter proposition that will go back to the public. And you know, I was just wondering if maybe we would get better bang from the buck a bigger, better center if we built on an easier to build on site. That was kind of my interest. Thank you. Ms. Mollies. So just real quick. So the other thing that I kind of wanted to let me able to take a look at is and I'm sorry I'm giving you so many assignments, Lemuel, but there was a component I remember of the cost of operating the center that had to do with a senior housing project that was going to be built that would offset some of the costs. Can you assuming we don't have the offset of this because I think we've lost that senior center, I mean, the senior housing component, right? It proved to be a little too expensive to know I understand. If I could... You know, but... Yeah, that's the algorithm. Let me take that as well, Ms. Moise. What you're thinking at your recalling is that the original vendor that we went through a competitive procurement process on that was with us for the last couple of years has decided that they don't want to proceed in that manner. That said there is still site and availability and the ability to use our own housing finance corporation for example to put housing on that site which could help us with offsetting either operational or land cost but that has also, none of that has been moving forward given the question that we have about the location. Okay, so I'm going to go back to Lemiel for just a second because what I'd like to do is wherever this sits finally the operating costs are going to be the same. Can you go back to that old budget and look and see how much of, I think we were budgeting about 700,000 offsets. See if that number changes if we don't have the housing offset. Also, can we find out if there's room on Bandergrill for a senior housing project? I could certainly take the first question now. When we did the initial analysis, the housing perspective was not part of that consideration for the subsidy. And so that's something the figure would stay relatively the same. Right. Okay. And then Ms. Bowies, I'll take the second question. I don't believe that putting housing in Van der Griff Park would be something that we could do again without asking voters. That would have to be a voter question because you'd be using publicly, publicly park designated land for kind of this housing use. Whereas the publicly owned land out on green oaks was originally part of the buffer around the water treatment center It's not designated as parkland and therefore does not carry the same restriction So I think it's different that I don't think we'd be looking for housing as an offset on Vandergriff Park because we would keep it parkland Right. Thank you Dr. Odom Wesley Thank you. Dr. Odom Wesley. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. And thank you, Limio, for bringing this additional information to us. And my concern about the location is related to equity. You know, we've passed the equity resolution and we saw just today the disparities that currently exist in Arlington through the presentation for the Unity Council, as well as through the disparity study that we just heard. So I think we need to look at providing the best service for our citizens. And looking at the map that we saw previously, we saw again today in the Unity Council presentation, it clearly shows that our minority population is predominantly located east of Cooper. And we haven't seen the map about the economic divide between those who live west of Cooper and those who live east of Cooper, but that would be interesting comparison as well. So my concern is that our citizens who are living east of Cooper would have limited access or more difficult access to an active adult center that's located on the west side, the west end, almost to the city limits of Arlington. And I wish we could make a decision about relocating it from the West side of town to the central location without going back for a vote. But I understand that's the only way to get it done. And I think that's a good enough reason to take it back to the voters is so that we meet our obligation for equitable access and make it available to those who are most likely to use it actually. Those those are my comments, Mr. Mayor. Okay. And then I has one last comment here. Thank you. Lemium, the East Arlington Recreation Center and Library. What will seniors be able to do in that facility? Similar to the functionality that we have now with the existing facility. The majority of the senior use within you Smith is for the senior lunch program. And so we have a number of clients that get their daily lunch meal at that facility. that get their daily lunch meal at that facility. And then we have companion activities related to that, whether they're card games, more passive activities. We'll have seminars and workshops. We also have considerable population of seniors that uses the indoor heated pool. And we believe that that will only grow with the new facility online and so those are the the typical uses that we would expect to see within the new facility. Thank you. I know and so my comment is, Ghosts as follows, that particular facility is going to serve the district that I represent in my belief and I also believe that that facility is going to serve the district that I represent in my belief, and I also believe that that facility is going to give a lot of equity to that side of town. I'm not particularly in favor of asking the citizens to put back on the ballot, change in the location. And the reason I'm not in favor of that is I think we're going to pit East versus West, North versus South. And the reason I'm not afraid of that is I think we're going to pit East versus West, North versus South. This battle was fought a long time ago and I'm not sure that it very much has changed. If today you told me there were no facilities in East Arlington, then I would feel differently. But we have a really good facility in East Arlington that's about to have its grand opening very soon. So thank you very much. Okay. Any other questions, comments? Well, we got a bunch. Mr. Shepherd, there could I get you to take over this discussion there. I've got to step out a minute here. Thank you. Absolutely. May I ever be happy to? I saw Miss K parts card up a minute ago. Just I won't believe it the point just a clarifying statement. So the other independent senior seniors like Eunice and we have a few others those will all close. Is that correct, Lemuel? So no active adult center. No definitive decisions have been made on what will happen to those facilities. the community. So, no definitive decisions have been made on what will happen to those facilities. It certainly would make sense and would likely be my recommendation to at least change the focus of those operations from strictly seniors to some other level of operation if they were to continue to operate. I was taking that from a comment, Mr. Yeverton made to me. Is that not correct, Mr. Yeverton? I would tell you that it would be my preference that if we're going to have a significant recreation center for seniors, we would need to consolidate that's I think pretty much the expectation that we sent from before. We would consolidate the two smaller ones into one larger one so that we weren't spreading additional staff resources and having older facilities that would going to require maintenance. So I'd agree that there's been kind of no final decision because as we're having this conversation about this building, it's not final, but that would be part of the plan. Okay, thank you. And I appreciate all the comments I've heard today but when we decided to do the active adults center we did not belabor where it would be built. There was a consultant hired and it was a different day and a different time and it certainly didn't take into consideration the diversity of the community and where they lived and while I it's great that we're getting a couple of two new facilities on the east side of town this not only the east side of town I'm worried about it is for all of the seniors live and what is most central to them and if you take it back to the voters and they like it on the West Side of town they'll let us know they'll vote against it and that's where it'll go but now that you're dealing with not only that but you're we're advocating for preservation of the cross-timbered forest and we're going to take down a significant number of those trees to build that facility at that location. I'm concerned about multiple issues and it's great that we've got two new facilities over there they're primarily used but this will be the major senior center and to put it on one side of town. It's just, it doesn't speak to fairness to me. It should be the most centrally located we could get on property that we own. Thank you, Mayor Perotam. And thank my colleagues for weighing in on it. Centestreet, I believe, divides the town east and west. Matlock puts it a little bit further on the west side, but it's probably the most central location in the city. You're not too far away from UTA. You're not too far from Medical City, Arlington. So you got access from Highway 360 in at Interstate 20. So being at Vandergriff would be an ideal central location because Sinistery actually is the center dividing line for the city itself. I would support my colleagues and even taking it back to the voters and have the voters weigh in on it as well. Thank you, Mr. Sutton. Mr. Moise. And I want to pose even a different question. We talk all the time about being 99 square miles and how spread out we are. You know, it may be that there's not really a central location that serves anywhere near half of the population in Arlington of seniors. And it makes the question for me why we aren't perhaps expanding something like Elzeotum up north so that we do we really need one 60,000 foot center or could we use two or three 15 to 20,000 foot centers. Maybe the central one's a little bigger with the pool but I'm just asking does it should we be looking at this from a different perspective and that's how we reach the most people and not exactly where the location is. Okay, part. Yes, I couldn't agree more, but we that is a question that we got resolved when we had this debate back in 16 went to 17. And it was that you needed, the belief was then that you needed a central big facility where people could congregate from all over town and you could have multiple amenities within that one area. Now if we don't do it that way, I think we still have to go back to the voters. I think the only thing we can do now is and I think that starts really confusing and clouding the issue personally. I would like for us to just, we've got a different day and you can never build it to your point, to all of your points, central. We get as close to central as we can. And that doesn't mean on any side of town. But it certainly doesn't mean on the west side of town we're generally speaking, I think we will find you'll have maybe more seniors, but you'll have seniors with more resources and incomes. And seniors are probably in better health. And to put it, and I love the idea of having senior housing around it, I love it more to put it in a van der Griff, where you have neighborhoods that are already there. And those people who are generally senior don't usually access the facilities we already have, but they could walk to it. There's nobody that can walk to a degree nobs in 303. Nobody. But you could walk to it. And then if the Multigen Center gets built at Vanderbilt in the future, now you have entire families that could come in a central location for these kinds of things. And people who don't want to be that way, we have a smaller rec center scattered across town, although Marvin just now got hit. But now we have a rec center in all side of town. But it just makes so much sense to have resources together. You could share a parking lot. You could share some programming. Grandma wants to go next door and play bridge while her kids and her grandkids are next door at the multi-gen center. I don't know how you have a multi-gen center when you're met primary senior centers on the west side of town. And the fact that it's predominantly white just doesn't speak to me of equity. So that's my concern. Thank you, Ms. K. Part. Mr. Yehlverton, it seems as though we have a consensus, although not unanimous, seems as though we've got a consensus. I suspect the next step would be for you to put something on an agenda for the council to vote on whether or not to call an election whenever. Is that correct? That's the formal action that's required. So we'll be ready to put on something like that whenever you're ready. We of course don't really have to do that till the first part of February. So we have a little time. So it's just on, you know, you want to schedule the next meeting or do you need, do you want to hear more of the information from Lemuel or you want to schedule it? Whatever you want to schedule the question, we're able to, to schedule it. Dr. Perron, mine. Thank you Mayor, Patem. I guess there's two things that I would love to do. One, I'd love to hear all the information that Lemiel could bring back to us, but also given the fact that we are contemplating, discussing taking this back to the voters, would there be an opportunity for us to have a virtual town hall where obviously to weigh in some public comment on this? Because I'm a little obviously reticent given the fact that we've already had a vote on this. I certainly want to make sure that we are proceeding where there's some public comment provided. Would that be an opportunity, Mr. Alverton, that we could afford prior to having to make the call and to put it in the ballot? Sure, absolutely. That's easy to do. And I think I feel more comfortable. I don't know. My colleagues would feel about that. I just thought it would be helpful. Certainly don't want our folks who are invested in it, who voted for it to be surprised. I would like them to have an opportunity to discuss it and let us know if we are reading their perceptions correctly and enable us also to educate them about the things that we've learned now subsequent to that vote. Okay. Thank you, Dr. Myers. Dr. Odom Westley. Yes, I think that's a good idea. I'd like to hear some community input as well. And I'd like for us to get the unity council to weigh in on it in their deliberations and see what their recommendations would be as they look at the equity data. All right, thank you. Miss K-Pard? No, okay. Dr. Nunez. I'd be in favor of having a town hall, at least getting put from everybody. We're all reasonable. And I've heard a lot of interesting concepts. And it is a different era. Smaller facilities, located in a variety of different locations might better serve our citizens. Maybe we need to think about it as the citizens for input. I'm all in favor of that. So thank you. Thank you, Dr. Nunez. Mr. Randolph and Mr. Yevreson, I don't know if it would be appropriate if Mr. Randolph could perhaps respond to the questions that were asked today by email to all of us. So we've all got that data. And then moving forward in the months ahead, weeks ahead, we can look at scheduling a town hall at some point. I don't know if all this virtual stuff really translates very well, but maybe it'll be at a time when we can all actually see each other. Miss K-PART? I'll hold on. Thank you. Thank you. I'm sorry. I did. So if we can get the town hall scheduled, this question is out there and it's gaining more interest. And I think the sooner we get that question asked and answered so we can decide what we're going to do. So we're still leaving it just kind of hanging out there before we get consumed with all these other things That that would be my recommendation if it counts as an agreement But I think the virtual town hall is is a good way to get additional input Okay Very well, mr. Yevroton do you need anything else from us on this? No sir Okay Very good We will now move to the next item on our agenda item 4.2 remote video registration program. Good afternoon, Mary and council Kevin Cole be in our police chief. You have before you an informal report and I just want to provide just a little bit of update on it. We gave you it's we're in the second month of this pilot project and it's a collaborative effort with Tarrant County criminal courts. The information that I provided in the reports was one month of data that we were able to save 385 inmates from being transported from our jail to Tarrant County jail with this program. And we provide four times every day in which our prisoners are able to be bonded out and probable cause reviewed by our Tarrant County judges. And there are really three primary benefits of this program that seems to be very successful is saving a lot of money for Tarrant County to transport the prisoners from our jail to theirs. And today we talk about procedural justice. I think it basically gives a lot of the individuals that have been arrested in our custody, quicker access to probable cause hearing, and quicker bonds to be released. And then probably the third biggest benefit is it's relieving some of the work load from our municipal judges that are not having to do the probable cause review in the county judges are doing that. So this is just one example that we're trying to leverage technology to work a little bit better for us. I'm pending any questions. Thank you, chief Colby. Any questions for Chief Colby? I'm very indicated. Thank you, Dr. Farah Myers. My apologies, I was slow on the draw. Chief Colby, just quick, this is a fantastic pilot program, I think we're learning a lot from it. What do you, what are you for C given the report? Just I know it's only been a month, but is there any particular issue we need to focus upon to improve the program as it's provided so far? You know, I don't think so. I think there are little issues that we're working through. There's a little bit of effort on our end with our jail staff to preparing the information, but it's minimal at this point in time. And so I would say this program has really been successful and looking forward to kind of continue this collaborative effort with the courts. I applaud your innovation. Thank you very much. Thank you Mayor for time. And Chief Colby, yes, thank you for this. It's with COVID and our current circumstance. It was a great time to insert boys and technology in this way and and I'm happy to see that Tarrant County is on board and I hope this is able to continue in the future. It seems like a very efficient cost effective way to handle these things. So thank you very much. Thank you, sir. All right. Next up we have city council priority invest in our economy. Mayor Potem and council. In the interest of time, I'll just highlight that you have your newsletter, your quarterly I'm going to go to the committee meeting. I'll just highlight that you have your newsletter, your quarterly newsletter in front of you, and I'm happy to take any questions. Any questions for Mr. Paragion? None are indicated. Thank you, Mr. Paragion. Great report. Next, we'll go to discussion of committee meetings and I will recognize myself, economic development and report that all matters were taken in executive session. Next we'll move to item 4.5, our LinkedIn Housing Finance corporation update. This is Dr. Min yes. The already housing, I'm a little, I'm gonna say I'm a little unprepared. Mindy is Mindy Concurrent in the audience? That's not. So I'm gonna have to pass that we delayed my report for just a moment. Dr. Nunez. This is Jennifer Wickman, Deputy City Manager of Assured Services. I believe the three items that the Housing Finance Corporation dealt with were the, is this what you were looking for the budget? The easement and the adjustment to the mortgage lending program? That is absolutely correct. Thank you. So stay there because I may need your help. So the first one was the budget was passed or recommended and you'll probably see that report. We did, corporations done very well. We also introduced a new member to the housing finance corporation, Mr. Hublin. And we discussed where the money was coming from and how we were going to spend it. It's just really the very first year of its what I'm going to call its financial existence and we have a balance of, if I could call correctly somewhere in the range of a buff. I think it's 350,000 or is it closer to 500,000? And I'm sorry, but it's a balance that we're going to use to reinvest in other projects that are coming forward. And there are other projects that will be coming forward that we've already had some presentations on and we'll have others to come. The other, the second item, if I remember, there was an easement that was requested from an adjacent multi-family project that was going to be put in and they were requesting that they purchased an easement from the paddock, which is the name of the new, the new name given to the apartment complex that we are refurbishing. And we recommended approval for the sale of that easement. And the last item, what was the last item, General, in trying to remember? Sorry, I believe it was the down payment assistant assistant's adjustment to the homeowner lending program that the housing finance corporation had begun. Yeah, the mortgage investment credit. What we had learned was that data showed us that even though the city had put funds in this mortgage investment program for citizens who live in Arlington, the purchase homes using funds available to them to help them with their down payment, it was not being used at all. And we discovered during some research staff reported that the reason it wasn't being used was because other cities were making it much easier for their citizens to get into first time to be a first time homebuck buyers by setting their rules significantly different than ours. So we recommended that we simply go to a flat rate of approximately $7,500 for a to help aid people with the down payment. And and we were going to make it as simple as we possibly could. So that first time homeowners who tend to get overwhelmed when they're sitting in front at closing, signing the million documents, they're it's going to be extremely simple for not only the the new homeowner, but also the the mortgage lender, but for them to have no understanding how the funds are going to be used. And that concludes our report. Standing, thank you, Dr. Nunez. Any questions for Dr. Nunez? All right, none are indicated. We'll move on to item 4.6 appointments to boards and commissions. We have no appointments on this evening's agenda. Thank you Let's let's skip Mr. Yeverton is Mayor Williams coming back. I don't want to do an evening agenda items if Mayor Williams is going to return. I don't know. Mr. Shepherd, I'll have to check. He did. He left some of his items, but he took other items. So I'm not sure what his intent was. All right. Well, let's move 4.7 down to the end on the chance that Mayor Williams is going to return and in May, want to weigh in on some of those. Let's go to issues regarding city and textile projects. Are there any updates? I guess not. COVID-19 update, Chief Krauson, how are you? Good, Mr. Shepherd. Good to see Council. I'm going to share the screen real quickly and I'll move through this as quickly as I can. I know you're. You're evening meetings about to start. Hopefully everyone can see that. So last 10 days are positive cases have been relatively stable. In fact, actually trending down some lot. Our hospitalizations are down dramatically from mid-summer with some little peaking, but this is to be expected with what's occurring with the school's opening college and other things. In fact, we're 75% in retail and restaurants. What we do notice, county level, Dallas County hospitals overall are down to 317 from 345. Terrent County hospitals are up from 219 to 301. But we notice some of the hospitalizations are actually shorter in length. And it looks to be like some of the some of the cases are, you see, hospitals are seeing younger patients. Those are patients that have very good chance of recovery and generally good news. From a testing perspective, we're still running the park plaza testing site. We still have an agreement with state of Texas through the end of October and we're constantly re-evaluating our position on the testing issue as testing technology continues to evolve. In fact, we were looking very closely at these new cardboard tests that the president announced yesterday. Unfortunately, the federal government is consumed most of those tests and we're looking for an opportunity to get those tests here to help support the school districts and the business community. From an overall perspective in Arlington, we this is a 100% count of all the zip codes in Arlington 76010 still carries most of our positive cases at about 20% of our positive cases and then you can see the other zip codes 9% 0129% in 0144% 01A, etc. Things are relatively stable and but you know we pay attention to all the metrics. From a fatality perspective we are still remaining stable at somewhere below 18% of the death cases in Tarrant County but from a positive case perspective you can see the zip codes in Arlington are still the ones we paid you know most of our effort is in is where the cases are, but Arlington compared to the rest of the county, Fort Worth West, our issue a little less than what you would see in Fort Worth or the Western cities in Tarrant County. From a death perspective, the breakdown demographically, we have apparently have done a fairly good job where early on Hispanic group was the leading group. Now they are the Hispanic group in Arlington is more in alignment with the current county numbers as are the wide African American and others clearly underlying conditions, 94% of the death cases are individuals underlying metaconditions. That has not changed since we started. What is of interest, 42% of our deaths are an age group of 80 and older and we're still paying attention to the numbers, to the degree we can. We hope the presidents roll out of these new tasks. We're supposed to go specifically to nursing homes. We'll help provide the needed services and regular testing in the nursing homes and helping helping those folks and those those centers. What we are paying attention to now is the school districts and UTA. So we're monitoring positive cases and staff and students both in AISD, MISD, and the private schools. You can see that our numbers are relatively low by day for students and for staff. But if we determine that there's trends or issues that we need to take action on, we'll certainly inform the council of what those things will be, but right now things are relatively stable. Realizing both school districts are very large school districts in our overall positive cases, both staff and students are relatively low. and students are relatively low. A UTA similar issues were watching their staff and student numbers. Again, UTA, a very large college university and numbers relatively low as compared to the number of students at the school. Just from a general overall perspective, I think we need to account for certain things. We are essentially almost fully open with retail and restaurants at 75%. UIL or having football games at high school football games, schools are open, colleges are open. We're not at normal, but we are very close to normal like business environment, community activity environment, and we're playing football games and baseball games and fans are attending those games. And our numbers are staying stable. So that's a good sign for us. There's no guarantee. As you know, we pay attention to things like Labor Day, the cowboy event, the first cowboy game, which we think we have a proof of concept model that went very well for that game. And we think that could be replicated future football games and certainly the playoff series and the world series. But these numbers are always something we watch all the time and we pay very close attention to our numbers, particularly here in Arlington. So the active cases are up a little bit still in the general areas that one would expect based on our zip code issues. And our effort have been what I would say, stabilizing and stabilizing influence, not a cure, but a very good work by the entire city team. We are in day 200 of the COVID experience here in Arlington. And our next steps tonight, we're asking for approval of our pod remodel efforts. We are continually testing or looking into potential opportunities for testing materials and ways of doing testing in a less complicated way that would be spread out as far to the communities we can. And as I said earlier, we are 75% in retail and restaurants, the schools are open, special events are open. And we're doing very well comparatively. We're not at 100%. But we have figured out a way to coexist with the virus while we wait on the vaccine. We are investigating an opportunity right now with Terrick County Public Health to do flu vaccinations as a sort of a dry run for us when the COVID-19 vaccine gets here. We are investing in freezing or refrigerator units, freezer units for the potential vaccines, still information we don't have, absolutely yet, but we are doing what we can to get ready for that because we wanna be ready to move as quickly as possible when the vaccines do get here. So with that, I'll share my presentation and answer any questions that council may have. Ms. Louise, thank you, Chief. I just have one quick question. Have you been given any indication of when you might expect to see a vaccination for COVID? Yes, ma'am. we've been told to be prepared for distribution potentially at the end of October. That's not a guarantee, though. And so my assumption is later, but we're going to move and try to be prepared from a planning perspective should they do should the vaccines do materialize? We want to move as quickly as possible. Okay great thank you that's earlier than I thought it would be. Well it's not it's not a guarantee we've been told to prepare for for a potential into October but I I don't think that's a realistic expectation. Dr. Odom Westley. Thank you chief and thank you Deputy Mayor Pro Tem. Do we have any data on the West Nile virus and what's what's happening with that in our population? Yes I'm sorry I don't have the report in front of me but I know we are stabilizing it's the cases are dropping the positive traps are dropping. November can't get here soon enough. But once the temperature drops below 55 degrees, the mosquito activity drops dramatically. So we've had a couple of cold fronts. That's going to help us and our overall positive trap numbers are dropping. So that's good news for us. So that's good news for us. Chief, I want to take a moment to thank you and your team for all that you've done. This has been a long 200 days for all of us, and I was especially challenging for you all. And you've done a fantastic job of meeting that challenge. And we do appreciate the reports that you provide to us. It's invaluable information. and we do appreciate the reports that you provide to us. It's invaluable information that allows us to share it with citizens and be sure we're getting the information out. So thank you for that. Nick, you and I thank you for the council's support. It's been very helpful. Thank you. Also, I'd like to take the opportunity to thank Mr. Warren and his team for all of the COVID-19 content that they put out on the website. That too operates to help us allow the citizens to stay informed about where we are and what we're doing. So, Mr. Warren is kind of behind the scenes there, but be sure to let him know that we're all very appreciative and thankful for his work as well. Absolutely. His team has done a fantastic job and a key part of this, the successor at Arlington is part of their effort. Thank you, Chief. Thank you. Next up, we have Arlington Heritage Memorial Grounds project update. Mr. Shepherd, I'll take that. Recently had a meeting with some of the leaders of this effort, particularly between city and county folks. You all may remember that part of the vision of that project included a small parking area just to the east of the memorial grounds, which is down there off Arkansas near Matlock. They've installed the fence and gotten the first phase of their project going, but this next piece was one of the areas that is on the to-do list. There are a couple issues though that need to get your concurrence before things could move forward. Primarily, there's a division of land on that piece of the east side of the parcel. Part of it is city and part of it belongs to the historical society. One of the efforts that they were working on was to get the county to do an interlocal agreement with the city to put the asphalt down for the parking, but the county will not do an interlocal agreement with a private party, so it has to only be local government to local government. So the historic society proposes to transfer that portion of the land that they are responsible on that parking area on the east side. That's kind of step one. Step two would be an interlocal for asphalt. And then step three, which we're going to need to talk to the foundation more about. It's some of the concrete work that's going to need to frame in that asphalt work. Kind of the concrete ribbon, the curb and gutter, if you will, that's around the parking area as well as the concrete ramp. We've gotten some price estimates on that and they'll need to either raise additional dollars for that or work some kind of partnership with the city and or county relative to that. But the land is the first thing and so I needed to find out whether or not you all were willing for us to accept that kind of gift deed on that person to enable someone to interlocal cooperation to occur between us and the county. Council is everyone in agreement. I see everyone nodding yes Mr. Yellerton so you are free to proceed. Staff, if I could ask you to change the camera location of the city tile to there we go. Thank you very much. That helps. Next up, we'll go ahead and move to evening agenda items. Is there anything anyone needs to discuss? Dr. Odom Wesley. Thank you, Mr. Shepherd. I had a couple of things and I don't know if it needs to be discussed, if it needs to be put on for a future agenda. That's item 8.20, which is about the juvenile justice and delinquency grant. And it talks about funding for community engagement specialist. My question is, do we use CASA, the court-appointed special advocates, to any degree here in Arlington. I don't know. Yeah, I don't think we don't think we have anyone here can answer that specific question just yet, but I do know that we have had in the past a contract with Casa. I think through our community development block grant. I don't know the depth or degree of which we have that. So we'd have to give you a follow up on that. Okay, maybe we can put it on the agenda on the future agenda items. I bring it up because I got a call this week from one of Terrent County's community engagement specialists and there just seems to be a severe shortage of costs of volunteers and disproportionate representation of volunteers to children who need that assistance. So I was just wondering what we were doing in Arlington specifically in that regard. So for the future is fine. The other question I had was on 8.33 and that's about our polling locations for the November election and just curious about what COVID protections and guidelines we're putting in place. And I know we had one question from a citizen about using the stadium and I kept looking in the report for a list of polling locations I never did see that. We got an email Dr. Oden Wesley I think earlier this morning that listed the polling locations I think Martha sent that out. Yeah nine thirty nine this morning. Ms. Warren is here to answer the second part of your question. On the first part on items 8.33 and 8.33 and 8.33 and 8.33 and 8.33 and 8.33 and 8.34 you should have received that email that Mr. Shepherd was referencing and that had the judges and the designated polling locations. We didn't have all that info from the county when we put out your packet so we did the proper posting and so you've got that right those two resolutions tonight and that's what you'll be voting on tonight and then Mr. Warren can address your next question. Thank you, Terrison, Dr. Wesley. Thank you for your question. Per State law, you're not required to wear a mask to vote. However they will be handing out masks at all the polling places, the staffs at all the polling places will be wearing masks. They'll be encouraging social distancing and hand sanitizer will be there in order to make the environment as safe as possible. In addition, they're extending some of the hours as well as offering more time for early voting for the governor's order to start on October 13th. That will allow more time for people to go vote. Hopefully shorter lines and enable some of that social distancing that we're encouraging folks to do. Thank you very much. Mr. Sutton. Thank you. Jay, before you walk away, Ms. Warren Miss Warren on the COVID if someone tested positive for COVID what protocols are in place to allow that person to vote. I have to double check but I believe they can request if an absentee ballot but I'll have to double check on that and get back to you. Thank you. All right any other questions about this evening's agenda? Mr. Shepherd, if I may, this is Terris again. Yes, sir. If I may point out two other things on item 13.1 on your agenda this evening, that's the resolution for casting votes to replace the recalled member from TAD. And I provided you the ballot that TAD had sent to us yesterday that has the two names of the candidates on it, which is Tony Pampa, who the City of Arlington nominated and Dave Gebhart, that the town of Pantigo nominated. And then AISD had also nominated Mr. Pampa. So those will be the two candidates for your consideration this evening. In addition on item 8.26, you were provided today as well a substitute resolution staff report and agreement. This item relates to the school resource officers and you were provided substitute documents and that those documents would be the ones you'd be voting on tonight. Thank you. Thank you Miss Salas. Any other questions about tonight's agenda? questions about tonight's agenda. All right, seeing none, we'll move on to evening agenda. I'm sorry future at least review the gas drilling and production ordinance in particular setbacks, drill zones and protected use. Dr. we have concurrence on that. That's a, that is a, not only is it a mouthful, Mr. Sutton, that is a large undertaking. Miss, I saw Dr. Odom Wesley, do you have a comment on the gas well ordinance or Miss K-PART, gas well? Go ahead. You're muted, Miss Cape. Sorry. Um, Mr. Thunn it's okay with you. If you could just get, uh, we could get an extensive staff report. Maybe you meet with the staff privately, because that will take up a new northern amount of time. I can accept that and I'll meet with staff on it. I'm in particular more concerned with the protected use and setback. Got it, got it. And I think all of us could benefit a refresher in a staff report instead of spending a lot of time virtually. You know, it'd be helpful, I think. If you're okay with that. I'm okay with it, thanks. Mr. Yevroton or Mr. Parishon, could you have someone from staff provide us an email update on that? Yes sir. Yes, which we can flesh out later if necessary. Thank you, Mr. Sutton. Dr. Odom Wesley. Yes, thank you very much. I think the city manager already mentioned next steps on the disparity study. So that would be a future agenda item. And then we all receive this week a copy of the homeless report. I think councilmember Farrah Myers was active in that and provided that for us. And I'd like an opportunity to discuss it and see what we can do in Onington about our homeless procedures and what action items are indicated as a future agenda item. Dr. Odom Westley, a question on the disparity study. Are we gonna, Mr. Yeverton? We gonna run that out ahead of the Unity Council. Are we just going to share the disparity study with the Unity Council to then provide us some additional input on that? I know there were some action items that were recommended, but trying to figure out whether we're going to run this on parallel paths or run one right out in front of the other I'd like. I personally, I'd like the unity council to kind of weigh in on the findings. Before we get too far out ahead of that. And that's just my're doing. So, um, um, um, uh, council, those that that'll be your, you're calling how you'd like to handle it. We were prepared to come back and start to talk to you about the, uh, the kind of implementation measures of what those are. But if you would prefer the, uh, unity council to take a look at that and, and kind of validate or embed in their recommendations. My, my concern on that is really twofold. One is it means that we won't materially be discussing that probably till February-ish or so, so it does delay the discussion. And the other thing that I think we need to be a little cautious of, albeit certainly relevant, is the work that the UNIcil is doing that you all heard from the chairman earlier today is headed in certain directions and they're on pathways and to the degree that we add to their work plan kind of like you add to our planning work plan It starts to distract a little bit and it gets them off and they think they all have got to respond to this that the council hasn't suggested. So I think those are markers to put out there for them to be aware of and maybe it does rise to priority but it also be a little cautious to get them distracted from kind of the core pathway they're on. We'll feed it to the committees and let them do what they want to with it but I also feel like we need to progress as an organization on all variety of topics and not wait for the uni council to tell us kind of what their various recommendations are. Those are those my reactions. Yeah, and that makes perfect sense. So yeah, thank you for that background, Mr. Yevrton. I think we're going to have to move forward. I think we're going to have to move forward. We're going to have to move forward. We're going to have to move forward. We're going to have to move forward. We're going to have to move forward. We're going to have to move forward. We're going to have to move forward. We're going to have to move forward. We're going to have to move forward. We're going to have to move forward. I will see you all in about 45 minutes, I guess. So thank you. With that, we will adjourn the afternoon meeting. See you guys later. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you