you you you you you you you you you you Thank you. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm going to go to the next slide. I'm I'm going'll be fine. You could take this. I don't want such even. That would be better. You could take a soy. I don't want such a even. That would be better if you have been coughing in your sleep. Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, I have it. It's not as... 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 go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the bathroom. I'm going to go to the Yeah. I'm going to call the afternoon work session of the Arlington City Council to order. the next section. Now to call the afternoon work session of the Arlington City Council to order. City Council will now go into closed session at 12.33 p.m. on March 17th, March 17th, 2020. In accordance with the following sections of VTCA government code, chapter 551.071, consultation with attorney, 0.072, deliberation regarding real property, and 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 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 other one. I'd now like to reconvene the meeting of the Arlington City Council. And I'd like to call upon our fire chief, Mr. Don Krausen, to give us an update on our COVID-19 response. And then as a reminder, anyone that comes up to the microphone, if you can refrain from touching the microphone there. Thank you, Chief. Look forward to hearing from you. Thank you, Mayor of Council. I'm Don Krausen with the Fire Chief and Director of Emergency Management. And today we're going to talk about the city's COVID-19 response. With me is Dr. Cynthia Simmons. She is the Arnick and EMS system medical director and your appointed public health authority. Presentation today will include a discussion about COVID-19 itself. We'll be presented by Dr. Simmons and then I will follow up with the city's response to COVID-19 and what we're doing. So with that, I'll turn it over to Dr. Simmons. Good afternoon. Thank you, Chief. As he said, I'm Dr. Cynthia Simmons. I'm the Medical Director for the Arlington EMS System in Health Authority, and I've been in that role for about 13 years. Next slide, please. I would just want to give, if you haven't turned the news on or heard anything, we're in the face of COVID right now, currently, as you should be aware. Briefly, I'm just going to go through a couple of things so that we are aware and all on the same page as we go through this. First of all, COVID is a novel coronavirus that presents with cough, fever, and shortness of breath as the most common symptoms. Currently, as of this morning, and these numbers are rapidly changing as you're aware, we have about 190,000 cases worldwide. As of this morning, we had over 6,000 cases in the United States and 64 cases in the state of Texas, not including repatriation cases. There were 13 individuals who repatriated in the state of Texas. We've currently had one death in the state of Texas. That was as of this morning, but it's also very rapidly evolving illness and disease. It's spread through respiratory droplets and this morning actually may be potentially aerosolized. There's new data that supports that coming out from the WHO World Health Organization just this morning. People that have immunocompromised or otherwise health conditions are at highest risk of this disease. So people have cardiovascular disease, people that have weakened immune systems, people that have hypertension or diabetes, are the ones that are most concerned and having the most complications associated with this illness. Next slide, please. This slide again, this is information that reiterates the symptoms that are associated with this, primarily fever, cough, shortness of breath, and also fatigue, associated with generalized fatigue. So flu-like symptoms is primarily what people are having and presenting with. Next slide. The largest case fatality rates that have been done to date are out of China. So this is Chinese information. They have the largest experience currently. Now we have experience that is increasing with several European countries. But the most published data is coming from China currently. This indicates those people that are at highest risk and which percentage of those people had mortality rates. So 10% of people with cardiovascular disease died from COVID-19. Diabetes, 7% respiratory illnesses such as DOPD or asthma, 6%, excuse me, 6% and you can follow that down. Next slide. Overall mortality rates, I wanted to brief you about that. So the mortality rates have fluctuated. They are variable. The data is fluctuating based on the experience, based on the country. There's a large subset of people who see at the bottom of the pyramid that are not getting tested. We don't know what number of people there are. Most people have mile cases. The vast majority of people, 80. Most people have mild cases. The vast majority of people, 80%, maybe even as much as 85% that are diagnosed have mild cases. They're sick for a period of time. They do well, and they recover from this illness. About 10 to 14%, depending upon the data that you read, actually have severe illness. They may require hospitalization. They may require oxygen. They may require hospitalization, they may require oxygen, they may require supplemental medical care. And about four to five, two, four, five somewhere in their percent die. And that's the, those are the, and again, it has changed based on time and based on country. It is very hard to, as this pandemic develops to understand the death data. Next slide. Fatality rates versus seasonal flu, that comes up quite a bit. If a transmissibility and fatality rate for this is higher in the experience that we have, you have to remember we only have a three-month experience with this virus. So our experience is that overall the transmissibility and the fatality is higher. We have a much greater, broader experience within fluenza. And this data reflects that, so presented for your information. Cases and deaths are, as we have more cases, we will have more deaths. There's no doubt about that. And this depicts that. And on the next slide, we've gone into a little bit of detail that's up to date as of today, with several countries including China, Italy, Spain, and the United States. The people have talked about shifting the curve, and I'll show you that curve, the pandemic curves shortly. This is the curves that we've seen. You can see worldwide is the top line, China is the second, and then Italy is the third. You can see the Italian experience, and we are learning immensely from the Italian experience currently. We hope to not have that same experience here in the United States, which is why we're currently implementing substantial social distancing policies. As we've done here in the city, China, you can see as well, once they implemented the social distancing that they implemented, the curve instead of rising and flattened out. So to there, that is the effect of the social distancing that they implemented, the curve instead of rising and flattened out. So to there, that is the effect of the social distancing policies that we currently see in place. That's our goal here in the United States. With what we have implemented is to try and flatten that curve, lessen deaths, lessen the infest, lessen the dependency of the healthcare system, and lessen the catastrophic nature of pandemic. Next slide, please. This reiterates where we're at currently. In the United States, in the last week, we've had over 1,500 cases. Some of that is a reflection of the amount of testing that has occurred. Some of that is a reflection of the cases that we've had that we know that are already existing. So right now, we're on that upslope of that is a reflection of the cases that we've had that we know that are already existing. So right now we're on that upslope of that curve. The good news is that if you look at the other countries, particularly China, if you look at the recovery rate, look at the total number of recovered, 86% of people in China are recovered. So I want you to have the awareness that although this is significant, this is serious, there is recovery, and there will be recovery of this. In Europe, it's about 7 percent. In the United States, it's currently about 1 percent. So we are on the beginning edges of this process, of this pandemic, but we will recover from this. Next slide, please. Since there is no vaccine currently, since there is no pill for this currently, since the treatments that we have are experimental, what we can do is flatten the curve, as we've talked about, to prevent a couple things. The goals of that is to slow the impacts to our community. The goals of that are to not overwhelm our healthcare society. So what we do now as a community, as a society, and as individuals is important and matters to flatten that curve and lessen the impact of this novel coronavirus on our communities and our healthcare systems. And I would love to have y'all support in helping relate that message to our communities. Please. Thank you for your time. Okay, so everything we're trying to do is to flatten the curve. All the efforts that the city's employing. First, I want to go to our history in Arlington regarding the Merge operation center and how the city has responded to a number of virus cases dating all the way back to 2007 with the avian flu. Since 2009 and 2010 with the H1N1 event, we have been properly resourced for our pandemic emergency. In fact, we've done numerous tabletop exercises and we've had a significant experience over the last decade from West Nile to significant type A flu events to Ebola, to the Zika virus, and now we're with COVID-19. Let's move the next slide, please. What is going on so far with the President has declared a national emergency so as the governor, so as the county judge and the mayor. Currently in Arlington, we've identified two human cases of COVID-19. In Terrent County, there are six cases from a from a perspective, from a city perspective response effort. Public health authority and the fire department of emergency management are working together to control this issue. We've activated the EOC, we are at a level two, our COOP is in play and all the city departments are collectively working together to address the issue. We'll go ahead and move to the next slide. So for the region, we've had one case is still currently in Arlington. One of our individuals has been moved to another location within Terrent County. The total count of Terrent County is six. Colin County is eight. Dallas County is 24. Denton County is one. We track these numbers daily and we are working through cases daily. Next slide. As I said, we've had a continuity of operations plan since about 2007. We updated periodically and in fact it was just recently updated before the COVID-19 event and it's an action. I mean, regular discussions with the other department directors and the city is working together in a unified effort to address all the issues that we are concerned about as we try to manage this issue. There have been a number of cancellations and closures and postponements in the city. Most of our corporate partners are working hand in hand with us. We appreciate that in the interest of the citizens. The park mall is reduced hours of operation. Other major venues such as the Rangers and the Cowboys and Six Flags have closed their operations or post-pollum operations temporarily as we try to muster up a response to the virus. We as a community are collectively working together. School districts have extended their spring breaks, both new TA and AISD and some of the other schools and we're all in constant communication together. Our public health authority, the current county public health through the EOC and we're working together as a unified community to address our response to the issue. Next slide. Within the city, the Parks and Recreation Department have closed the recreation centers, because that is a potential spot of spread. Libraries have done the same, and we're constantly monitoring the length of time in which we'll commit to these closings. Things could get worse, things could get better, and we're constantly trying to stay in a state of flexibility. Action by other agencies, the school district, we tell our partners and we're all, we all understand this. A lot of this we have to do on our own school districts are responsible for their business model as the city is responsible for our business model churches are etc we're all working in a concert effort doing our jobs together and from a school perspective they're one of their biggest issues are feeding the kids both AISD and MISD are actively working on that. Our partners in the utility district, including the city, are suspending actions where they would stop services. So the camp, you can't pay your water bill will withhold suspending service. Same thing with that, with that, with energy AT&T, most of the utility groups are coming together to help out that issue. APD is one of our closest partners certainly and they are part of our EOC operation. You'll notice that in our EOC we're not typically doing the ways we typically do it. We're more virtual now because of the social distancing issue. We connect through computers, through phone, and through other methods to help limit the spread of virus potential here in Arlington. APD is also helping the school district. They're monitoring the transition of food to the students during this temporary event. They've done a number of voluntary suspensions of their own activities, their volunteer groups of suspended community room meetings are being suspended all in an effort to suppress this curve that Dr. Simmons was talking about. Next slide. So Dr. Simmons is doing a lot, right? We we tasker with a lot. She's she's our primary contact with Tarrant County Public Health. Collectively, we're all connected with the federal agencies. I'm talking with federal representatives about once a week. We're all connected with the state, local health providers, the hospitals. We are all connected as one giant health care community trying to solve and address and lessen this issue. We have two local labs in Arlington doing are doing significant amounts of testing for the virus. And we're hoping that their capacity and ability to do more tests will grow in the near future. From the fire department perspective, I wanna tell you that we've been constantly for the last month and a half and watching persons under monitoring. We've traveled from other countries who have been directed to self-isolate. And we tracked those individuals, and we were careful to make sure that the responders respond to those locations that they know there is a person of potential there. Like I said, we've had two cases here in Arlington. The doctor and our entire staff are constantly investigating incidents as they occur. In fact, today we're investigating a never-ending incidents. We determined exposure levels for responders and other individuals to ensure whether or not the person was actually exposed, was the patient actually infected, and all these things are a regular, ongoing effort as part of our team trying to keep pace with changing reality. As you know, a few weeks ago, the CDC standards were at a certain level, and now they've changed. So our methods and our approaches are changing as the national direction changes, as the information and the science changes. We're trying to adjust to that. We're not only managing the public's issue, but we're managing our own employees' issues. Certainly there's concern with our own employee base. And we're working with the doctor and others to make sure that the decisions we make are the right decisions and are not simply just following some sort of unfunded belief. And then lastly, we're paying attention to the hospitals. I can tell you right now that what the census is and the emergency departments in the hospitals, what kind of bed space availability they have. And I can tell you right now it's been consistent and we're okay. We're currently in a good position. The hospitals can take patients, the ED departments are not swamped. I'll tell you a few years ago during a major flu outbreak, emergency departments in Arlington, we're having a tough time staying at capacity. I mean, they were beyond capacity and the reality was they can be overwhelmed. So all of this effort that we are doing right now is to protect the health care system, to protect our ability to serve sick people, and because the system itself only has a limited amount of capacity. So all these efforts are meant to preserve that capacity. Next slide. So our experience, this is our current level experience. We've had 55 related incidents in February 28th. We have a screening process. Dr. Simmons worked with a 911 dispatch in our own medical operations teams to develop a screening process where 911 operators are screening callers and if they answer certain questions we identify those individuals as they possible. Okay, so that alerts our responders to be a little extra careful. And then our own responders when they arrive on scene they also put the patient through a screening process to further confirm whether or not they are a possible COVID patient. So you can see 11 callers were identified by our 911 dispatch center. Our responders in the field have confirmed three individuals as a possible. And then you can see the the trend lines that we're identifying were quite frankly were remaining relatively stable. We like that. That is a good thing. Hospitalers stable, our processes that we've developed over years, and in fact, some specifically for this event have been in place before the outbreak, and now we're in position to manage this issue in an effective manner. We believe we are at this time. Now, that doesn't mean we're going to be able to control this. The virus is going to do what the virus wants to do. We are going to do the things we can do to prevent it spread. And we're doing those things now. Not only are we trying to protect our citizens, but we're trying to protect the responders that they've response to these calls. Next slide. So our preparation efforts now and moving towards the future, we know this, we're going to have to be adaptable. We're going to have to change. Just this week, things have changed and we're changing with them. We're gonna stay on top of the hospital system and our EMS activity will let you know how things are going. If the trend lines are moving upwards or they're moving downwards or they're staying the same. You'll know about that from me. We're evaluating issues of potential testing sites here in Arlington. It's a little more complex than what you hear on TV. There's a process, there's a chain of effort and there's a logistical effort that has to be employed to make those things happen. It's a little more difficult than people believe. We will develop a triage process associated with that. We have already created specific response units that are specific for these type of patients. So I'm not sending a 40,000 pound fire truck to everything. We'll send a specialized unit with an ambulance, a specialized ambulance, and we'll deal with these individuals as needed. And then we have a Decon process to decon the equipment that's touched, the individuals are touched, everyone's involved, we're trying to exercise a sterile technique approach and limit the spread if there is the potential for the spread. And then lastly, we're focusing on things like surge planning. What happens if we do have a sudden peak, a sudden event, or an issue where we have to exercise a quarantine procedures? All those things are constantly things that we look at, we prepare for, and we do our best to mitigate the potential of them happening, but still, if they do happen, we wanna be ready for those things. From a general activity report, Tarrant County Public Health is constantly issuing guidance on various issues, including the homeless. 211 has been activated. Life Shelter is here and accepting new individuals. We're watching a night shelter, of course. Regular communications between all the city departments is occurring, certainly the school districts, medical facilities and all other agencies. We have designed specific guidance for this disease, for our responders and we are managers and leaders are ensuring that those policies follow closely because of their followed closely, we'll limit the potential spread within our own workforce. And then we're trying to capture all the associated costs because this event will be costly and is costly. The mayor has already done a communication to the community and we appreciate that because of one of the biggest components that and is costly. The mayor has already done a communication to the community, and we appreciate that because of one of the biggest components to stop this is public communication and awareness of the COVID virus and why we're doing things. So we're here before you today telling the public and you why we're doing things and how we're doing things. Next slide. Lastly, we're doing things following this. These are all the CDC guidelines that we follow. Obviously, you can't read them, but they're on the website. They're in the updates I send to you. They are changing. And so we're adjusting with the changes they make. And we're staying flexible and on our feet to address this issue because your organization, your fire department, your city, your police department, all the people I've worked with for a very long time have many of them have trained in a pandemic preparedness sort of way and we're exercising the things we train for and I feel from a response perspective we're about as in good a position as we could be right now but that no way does that guarantee what the future is going to be like. You're going to get a 110% effort out of your city employees and we've got a very knowledgeable doctor and we're very well connected with medical community we expect to get information as it occurs and we expect to respond to it as quickly as possible to mitigate the future spread. So with that, Dr. Simmons and I will both be available for questions you may have. Mr. Sutton, thank you for that briefing. Dr. Simmons? I noticed this new and it's fluid obviously and I know Dallas has implemented certain measures as far as our restaurants and gymnasium and the president come out yesterday I believe and said 10 feet for the minimum of 10 people in mass groupings. Where do you see, I know the CDC said 50, do you see 10 or 50? And I know it takes about 14 days, I believe, in correct me if I'm wrong. It takes a shed to virus. And the more we can contain the distance or maintain that distance and minimize the gathering, what is your recommendation versus 50 or 10 and as far as telecommuting with our employees? What is your recommendation? So I think that the guidance issue from the CDC is intended to focus on places where there is intense community spread. And currently we don't have intense community spread. We have one case of evidence apparently that was just reported this morning of potential community spread within Tarant County. There is potentially one case also in Dallas that has community spread. So I think that the decision has to be made by people to determine what's the actual risk with community spread is, of course, there's consequences associated with this intense social distancing if the consequence and we have to weigh the risk and benefit of those two things. So at this point I think that we should take a look at all of the variables associated with that. We don't have a huge cluster in this area now could that change very quickly? Absolutely and would we take more social distancing measures if that were to occur in this area? I think we probably would Can I ask one follow sure I bet the chief has some dad to that too I actually do so whatever the Decision is council today. I will also say to L.U. that under the disaster declaration, I have certain powers. I will send fire marshals to certain locations to evaluate the social distancing issue, yawkepsy loads, and we'll ensure that proper safety, precautions, and hygiene measures are taking place. And we'll evaluate each situation in a way that serves the public's interest. And we'll do that in a real time fashion. Which is that you have a follow up. So since we don't know the number of cases because we're not testing individuals right now, so there's still that unknown. So would it be beneficial to start either restricting the major gatherings to maybe what the White House suggested or basically have people to either stay within their residents if they can obviously with certain restrictions obviously but I go I guess my my statement is since we're not able to test the people we don't know the true number that are positive we don't know the true number that are positive. We don't know that because we hadn't tested until we've tested, we won't know that. So moving forward, what would be your recommendation? I'm going to jump in here on this one also. I think the other thing we're watching also is the actual activity experience at the hospitals. I think collectively as a group in Terrent County, we want to work in Unison within the medical's. The I think collectively as a group in Terrent County we want to work in Unison within the medical community and I think we're part of that equation so you know we certainly have guidelines from the CDC we're looking at those and we certainly have other tools available to us. If there's a need to ratchet up our response to the issue on how many people can be in a mask gathering. And I think that's what we're trying to do. We're trying to keep a consistent approach within the Terrick County community this time. Thank you. Ms. Molyse. Just a quick question I want to add to that. So if we have someone who is ill and is the symptoms, what is the likelihood that we can now in the city of Arlington get them tested and if we wanted to have them tested, how long would it take us to test them? So we do have the ability to test. There are definitely criteria for testing. There are several, as Chief Krasnman mentioned, there are private laboratories that are doing testing, and we have local testing with Terrent County LRN Laboratory Network. So we can get that testing. With the laboratory network, our turnaround depends on their capacity. That's anywhere from one to two days has been our experience with them. But they also have to meet criteria to be tested. So just because you have a cough, doesn't necessarily mean you're going to get tested. We want to make sure you have flu, do you have strep throat, do you have other viruses that may be potentially causing your symptoms and reserve those, the few tests that we do have, the tests that we have on people that really need to be tested. So can we get them tested? Yes. Our turnaround time can be as short as 24 hours. It can be as long as five or six days, depending upon which laboratory is doing that testing. And then I think that deserves a follow up question. If someone gets tested and you're waiting on the results, what happens with that person? So what we recommend is that they are at home pending the testing. We are there at home assuming that they're able to go home or they're in the hospital and they are waiting their testing. And so we're monitoring that person pending testing of those results. They're at home caring for themselves isolated from other people at that time. Yeah, isolated from others. Did you have anything else, Ms. Moves? Yes, Dr. Myers. Thank you, Mayor. I have a couple of questions. One for you, Dr.. In terms of the access to testing, is there any financial resources for individuals who cannot afford to be tested? I know this is becoming an issue in homeless populations, but certainly there's been a lot of questions about folks who can't necessarily afford the test on their own. My understanding is that the federal government has authorized funding for testing for everyone. And would they access that through the county's public health or how would they, through the hotline or how would they access that? Public health, I believe, through the public health department. Okay. And then second question I had was in terms of the first responders themselves and this is maybe for you Chief Krauson. I heard you talk about the particular measures we're taking to ensure the health and safety are our first responders. Are there anything in particular that we're doing to modify shifts or to do things to decrease the stress load on our first responders. Yeah, I think we're fortunate. Everyone's coming to work. Firefighters care about their community, and they're stepping up to the play very happy about that. What we're doing is we're trying to create these specialized units that takes the load off the rest of the team. And so when if they do encounter a situation unexpectedly, they can call on this team. This team will be called into assist with the issue and essentially take the call over. Dr. Marsh. And just one last question. In terms of the interactions between our citizens, is there any recommendations that you would make in terms of, there's been questions about the size and number and social distancing question, but there's also in terms of monitoring long term for going out to restaurants and others. So we've gotten some questions from our constituents about, do we need to limit access to restaurants and others. So we've gotten some questions from our constituents about. Do we need to limit access to restaurants? Do we need to limit access to other types of locations? At this point in time, given what we're seeing here in Tarant County, is that we're seeing obviously a different type of scenario in Dallas County. So could you differentiate the Dallas County scenario from the Tarant County scenario along those lines? Well, I think I'll just speak generally. I think as long as the social distancing issue is properly addressed, the sanitation and the hygiene issues are properly addressed. I think there's some reasonable level that some level of participation and operation could continue to occur. But you know, that's based on current conditions and current reality. And last question Mayor if I may. The last question is in terms of accessing I know there's been coordination done by the county to access cleaning products throughout other things like that. Are there efforts? I know a lot of church based in faith-based groups. A lot of people want to step up right now and help, but we want to make sure that they help in a positive way and make sure that they're not spreading the virus themselves. So could you speak a little bit about how we might make sure that people who want to do well and do good in our city by donating products that they do this so safely? Absolutely. If any citizen wants to donate to a hygiene products or things that will help in this issue, we certainly would appreciate that. They could contact the Emergency Operations Center and we would direct them to the proper location. I think that I want you to know from an emergency responders perspective, we have to be prepared for a substantial duration of that. So we are and we have to be prepared for a substantial duration event. So we are and we have access to resources to keep our responders safe. But if the citizens want to contribute to this and help with the issue, we welcome their participation and we can if they contact the Arlington Emergency Operations Center, we'll work through a donation management effort to make sure those things go to the right people. Sure. Thank you. Yes, Dr. Wesley. Thank you for your presentation. And thank you for all that you're doing in this pandemic emergency for our city. I had a couple of questions. Have we identified our most vulnerable citizens, the at risk population, and do we have a plan to proactively test them as opposed to waiting for someone to show symptoms? We have identified the population, which would include people over the age of 60 would include people with chronic illnesses and people that are immunocompromised. Those are the people that are at highest risk in our community. There is no preemptive testing for people that are well. So we will test people as they become sick, but unfortunately we don't have the capacity to test everybody who's well currently. I was really thinking about our senior population. As you mentioned, they are at a high-risk group nursing homes, senior living facilities, or have we gone in there and given education? What are we doing in those situations? Absolutely. So the CDC has very good recommendations. As does this DSHS that has been provided to our counterparts in terms of nursing homes, long-term care facilities, in terms of recommendations for limiting visitors, screening visitors, not having community or large cafeteria gatherings, meals together, limiting social addings and activities for those populations. And so those communication and that information has gone out to those partners. Yes, ma'am. Miss Kaye Park. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Chief and Dr. Simmons. You guys, I'm sure haven't had a lot of risk recently, but we very much appreciate all you're doing. But Dr. Odom Westley kind of touched on a subject that I have an interest in and that is for our seniors who are living not in assisted living or nursing homes but we recently have had a focus on senior living and have zoned and approved several multi-families and so while those are healthy adults have we reached out to the operators of those facilities in providing them some additional tools and education? I think the emphasis has been on kind of the more informed but this is just like a multi-family complex of seniors and I just don't know have we reached out to those complexes at all? I can double check. We've done two. Every fire district, every fire station has been given a number of public information documents. We've sent those to a number of businesses. The fire trucks have visited locations and I would expect senior living facilities to be one of those locations. In fact, today, yesterday and today, we're sending out new informational brochures to these locations, and I'll double-check on that for you. Yeah, if you would, I'd appreciate it. But thank you again, both of you. Sure. Any other questions? Dr. Nunez? I want to commend both of you for everything that you've done for our community. As a physician myself and as a member of the Texas Health Resources Hospital System Board, I am absolutely impressed by how you're handling this. All of us here have gotten emails from our constituents. They're scared and are rightfully so. And there's enough public information out there and enough information from the CDC, in Tarant County website, and the city's website that those who have access to the internet are fully aware of the fact that they need to be careful, self-isolate. And as we know, we don't have enough testing right now. It's supposed to come out towards the end of this week. I know from personal experience that there are a lot of private physicians who would love to test their patients, but don't have the kits. They just can't test. So the only place that anybody can go to get a test is drive down to the Tarant County Public Health system or go to the emergency room, which is what the city of Arlington, any other city in our area will continuously and daily as you guys are helping us assess the situation so that we can go to the city of Arlington and go to the city of Arlington and go to the city of Arlington and go to the city of Arlington and go to the city of Arlington and go to the city of Arlington and go to the city of Arlington and go to the city of Arlington and go to the city of Arlington, any other city in our area, will continuously and daily, as you guys are helping us, assess the situation so that if we need to shut down the bars, if we need to tell people don't go into anybody's nursing home, if we need to activate our volunteer services to get meals to those elderly people in place who are afraid to get out to go to the grocery store because I could get infected those are all things that I know that the city of Arlington will do and I want to reassure those who are listening We're here working. We could have not come today, but notice for those who aren't here, we're sitting six feet apart. We're normally all hot closer. We're all keeping our hands clean. We're all coughing, we're trying to cough into our elbows. We're doing all the right things which every citizen and audience should be doing. Mayor, I applaud your leadership. Thank you for what you're doing. Thank you for that video. And I know Arlington's going to be okay, but we do need to all do the right things. So thank you again for everything that you've done. Dr. Nignia, I think it's great timing to pick you back on what you said. First of all, when you're looking at Chief Krausen and Dr. Simmons, you're looking at veterans who have been through this before. And then thank goodness they have. And they prepare and drill and prepare for these times right now. There are unknowns about this virus, and of course we're finding out about it as they both said. But they are on calls every day. They are talking with people both at the federal state and local level constantly. And our county is taking a leadership role. Judge Whitley has done an awesome job in leading our county. But he has really opened up great communication and that is so important. And I have never spent more time on the phone than now because you know I think each one of us have because we have our organizations that we're members of and we're hearing from some of the foremost medical professionals in the country that are weighing in on this. This isn't just relying on on just our region. This is national authorities that are coming in, working on this. But however, it is so nice to have our professionals here that know Arlington and know our situation that are weighing in on it. And we are getting great cooperation and I'll just mention first of all our schools, you know, both private and public schools are cooperating well. They're communicating. We just talked to our major superintendents here this morning and yesterday. There are two and that's been going on on a regular basis there with it. And then something that is very encouraging is that our churches, our mosque and our synagogues are all mobilized, Joe. It isn't that they're going to, they are. And one of the big things they are doing is trying to help our at-risk citizens and get them food, run errands for them. And it's been very encouraging too to see a lot of our young people volunteering for their neighbors to be able to run errands for them to help keep them inside and follow the guidelines of the CDC to stay in if you're at risk. Well our churches there have taken a leadership role there in that and also our faith-based community is looking at other roles they can play such as child care. And then they also are calling for a night of prayer on tomorrow night there. And of course when we say that too, this will be wherever we're at. We're not all coming together for a change. We are going to come together in spirit, but not physically. And I thought that was great to see that too in these times of need. And then getting down to some of the things that we have, our businesses have cooperated very well. We see the chief shared so many closings that we have there that many of that was voluntary. They they stepped up before we had to. They're for them to close and then others of course are following the CDC guidelines and the guidelines frankly that we're putting out they're with it and when one of those groups are our restaurants right now our restaurants are working very hard and I'm getting reports from all over the city of how they are actually moving their tables apart getting the distance that they have sitting people at every other table there to be able to to be able to be in business and then the other part that I think that we need to think about is that use the takeout. They're frequent there and take it home. And that's a way to support our small businesses here and still go to your house and be a part. We don't know how long or what's going to be that you heard Dr. Simmons say that this is what it is today because it is very fluid and we hear that term and then yet none of us know the timeframe and that's very frustrating for each of us but it's the truth. We just don't know what the timeframe is and we hope that as more data is gathered that we will have a feel for that. In addition to that, it is very important that we do consciously try to restrict our activities and stay away from the large gatherings, whatever it may be. And then of course, another way our businesses are cooperating a lot. Many are able to work at home depending on the business it is. Others are able to actually do a lot of their meetings by teleconference or telephone. And that is a new way of life for us. Also it's very hard in Arlington, Texas not to shake hands and hug. But we're doing it. We're getting the elbow pump. We've seen the foot deal. Well, we've got to create new paradigms for ourselves to keep ourselves safe. And some of these are going to stay here because we've got to continue to adjust here to a way of life that is going to keep us safer. In addition to that, there we need to be able to work together in the midst of this. We also need to stay calm and reasonable. And then in the mix of this, I would encourage our citizens to go to our website because we are putting on the pertinent information. Our council members can help share that, but we are getting it directly from Tarant County from our own local and then also our surrounding cities. There's we move forward, but our website is a real critical way for you to be able to stay informed and know what is going on here in our community. But as usual Arlington is going to have that can-do spirit. And we're going to come out of this the other side. They're stronger than we were before, but it's not easy. And so we're going to have to be patient. And that's a quality I generally don't have. And so I'm going to have to work at being patient. And I ask each of us to be patient, but also to trust our medical professionals. You know, each one of us have a different profession. Well, most of us are not medical professionals. And yet, everywhere I go, we're all trying to be that. Well, let's listen to our medical professionals here and try to follow those guidelines so that we can come out stronger at the end as we move forward. Chief, Dr. Simmons, any other things that you would like to share here in finishing up? No, thank you for the time. We appreciate you caring forward the message that we've discussed today, the messages to the constituents to our citizens. We realize there are inconveniences associated with the message that we've discussed today, the messages to the constituents to our citizens. We realize there are inconveniences associated with the things that public health have asked for. Please know, you mentioned there are world-wide medical and public health leaders working on this issue. This is a worldwide issue. This is not just Arlington. And so our little part of our little world, the simple things that we can do, washing our hands, covering our cough, staying home and taking care of our children, taking care of protecting the elderly and vulnerable in our populations in our small little area can have a huge impact worldwide. So thank you and please thank you for carrying that message forward. And I would say the same thing Dr. Simmons said, and I'd also say Mayor Council, you can help call our community. We do have a plan. We're working through the plan. They'll have information. We'll be transparent with everything that's going on here in the city. And we'll do the best. We expect to come out of this too. And we'll work through this in a very diligent and thoughtful way with our one goal as a positive outcome for our community. Chief Dr. Simmons, thank you and Lelokou just walked in. Jay Warren, our Director of Communications, Jay, what is on our website? And how can they access this information? Thank you, Mayor and Council. Jay Warren, Director of Communication and Legislative Affairs for the City. We have picked up on a real great thirst from our community for information about this. Obviously you can turn on the national news and learn about what the CDC is doing with the White House is recommending. But our residents are really looking for what's happening here inside Arlington, whether that's closures that we're seeing from our local businesses or from our parks and rec department or in other city programs or services. But also what it was the latest information from Terrent County Public Health from Dr. Simmons and from our fire department and emergency management office. And that's what we're producing on the city's website. website. We have a special page dedicated to Coronavirus and that is where all that content is going. As of yesterday, I think we already had 30 stories on there and that will continue to grow as this is a developing situation. We're approaching this similar that we would to all of our communication that we want to be frequent, we want to be accurate, we want to be timely and we want to be everywhere. And so it's not just the website but the content we have there will also be on Facebook. It will be on Twitter. It will be on next door. If there's a video component, it will be on the cable channel. It will be on YouTube. You see the website here. And it's, we really set this up much like the rest of our website and the most user-friendly way possible. You see the quick links there that get you to or that you want to see what's happening in Terrick County. If we scroll there, you can also get to the CDC or the Texas Department of Health Services. If we scroll down a little bit, you'll see all the latest news. And again, as I mentioned, we have got a lot of content on there. And then finally, we've got some content related to video and so forth where people can learn and really emphasizing and continue to emphasize the three Cs and the things that you can do to prevent the spread of the virus and from certainly catching the virus yourself. So we're trying to be very robust about this. You saw the message from the mayor. We'll be doing more messages with him to communicate directly with the community. And I just have a few stats. I'll throw at you already in just the past week. We've had 14,000 views of our overall news site, but this coronavirus website has had over 30,000 views. Between Facebook and all of our social media entities, we've had about 640,000 impressions. So that gives you a good idea of the real interest that there exists within our community on this topic. and we're here to provide that information to them. And Jay, as usual, too, you'd like to ask our citizens and to be able to share this interest. One thing to view it, that share it, too. Everyone who's listening, everyone in this room, if you will please, is we're putting that content out, sharing it with your social media networks. I know how many followers we have, and you've heard me say this many times, but you may have different followers, and everyone down the room may have a different set of followers. So if you're sharing the information, that continues to mushroom out. And we're getting, and then we'll have the most informed citizen that we can, which will then, again, help us combat the spread of the virus. Jay, again, share with the TV audience about our reach here in Orlington, with our social media. We've got a lot of different platforms, but social media is probably one of our strongest. We have more than 60,000 followers just on the city's page, but when you start adding that together with the followers that have a fire page, at the library page, the Facebook page for police, we will well over 400,000 followers. So the reach is really high, but there are a lot of other people out there that may not be on those platforms or may not be following us from those platforms. So again, that sharing that we're all doing helps us get that word out even more. Very much does, Jay, shares with me many times that if we don't get it out, we don't share it and you don't eat from the menu, you know, nobody sees it. And so they produce incredible content here for it and it's an incredible asset for Arlington. So let's be sure and continue to share it for all those you there at home. It's an amazing thing when you're able to read it yourself, but then to share it is a great community service. Thank you, Mary. Appreciate it. Thank you, Jay. Appreciate it. Oh, your work. In closing, there's something else it needs to be said is that the safety of our citizens is number one. And then next, we've got to continue to be able to provide the vital services that we have to continue on. But then there is a third thing that's always under on our minds and that is our citizens being able to provide for their families. And yes, we are constantly thinking about how we can keep our businesses going and what we can do there and thinking about how we can keep our businesses going and what we can do there and and thinking about how our families need to need to move forward. So know that that is and all of these discussions that's still there to try to move ahead so that our especially our small businesses can continue to go so that each family can provide for themselves. And then in addition to that, we know that we are going to have to be able to reach out to those who can't. Because through this, we've got to be willing to continue to be generous and to be able to help those that are in trouble here as we move through these waters. Thank y'all very much. Appreciate it. Next we'll move to the city's electricity contract. Call upon Will Velasco, the purchasing manager finance. Good afternoon, good afternoon Mayor City Council Will Velasco, procurement manager. Joining us today we have our energy management consultant who's under contract with us. They're here to provide us with a presentation on our current electricity contract with TXU. They've been under contract with us since 2016, and during that time they helped us procure the current contract we have, and they also provide day-to-day contract administration, such as market analysis, and administration of as market analysis and administration of our properties and stuff like that. So I'm gonna go ahead and pass it off to John. And Jeremiah and they're gonna go ahead and talk to us about the contract. And of course, as always, there'll be available for questions afterwards. So I thank you for your time. Thank you, Will. John, for you, start. I just gotta say thank you. You could come on up to the mic. Don't touch it though. Yes, sir. I'm supposed to touch that mic, but I just want to say thank you. You negotiated a great contract for us and and save citizens a lot of money up here when you did that. And thank you for still being here and helping us here and decisions we make. So looking forward to your presentation. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. So thank you for having me. We're going to do a quick review of what the current contract is. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. So thank you for having me. We're going to do a quick review of what the current contract is. And then we're going to talk about some new things. But first, so the contract was executed in 2016. It was a competitive RFP process that we went through with several suppliers. TXU ended up winning the bid just as reference the evaluation criteria was both quantitative and qualitative. So there was various scores that were driven that led us to selecting TXU and they had the best price. It was a nine year term that start we so we executed in June of 16 but it didn't start until January of 18 and it will run through the end of 2026. So the price is 3.935 cents per kilowatt hour. It includes a 25% bandwidth meaning the city's electricity volume can swing up or down 25% and you would still receive that same contract price of the 3.9 cents. You also have a feature in there that's called a ad delete feature that allows the city to either add or delete accounts up to 10% of the total volume of your contract. And then the last piece is $150,000 in greenbacks. And essentially what that was was TXU offered. And TXU was the only one of the bidders to offer this. It's $150,000 of cash rebates to be used for energy efficiency projects. So when the city invests in like retrofit lighting to LED or that kind of thing, the city can submit paperwork to TXU based on some formulas will help fund a portion of that capital expense for that specific project. One of the questions that we had asked was, well, how does that contract price compare to what the current market is? So we went out and we got a quote. We had TXU just quote the same volume. And today's, well, a week or so ago, the price was 3.359 cents per kilowatt hour. So the market's a little bit lower. And if you go to the next slide, we can look at some metrics here. So the city uses about 72,348,000 kilowatt hours a year. We talk in terms of megawatt hours a year. So that's 72,348 megawatt hours a year. Your electricity bill is made up primarily of two components, which is the competitive retail commodity piece, which TXU provides. And then there's the delivery component, which is a regulating component, and that's the encore wires that allow electricity to go to all your facilities. And it's about 50-50, generally. So about 50% of your bill is supply and about 50% is delivery. There are some taxes, the PUC assessment tax and a gross receipts tax. So on average, the city's currently paying $74.57 per megawatt hour or that's $7.5 cents a kilowatt hour delivered all in taxes, whole shooting match. If we were in the market today buying power, again, the price is a little bit lower. So you're out of the money, let's say, about what is that, $400,000 a year or so, something like that? To put things in perspective, the contract prior to this one was like over $70 a megawatt hour for just the supply. So you're saving a lot of money, but times have changed, prices are lower now. money, but times have changed. Prices are lower now. A lot of things have changed. So next slide. Please. One of the things we met several weeks ago with the Sustainability Committee about, well, how can the city, the city wants to embrace being a sustainable community? What can we do to help achieve some of those goals through our electricity contract? One of those things is to purchase renewable energy credits. It's something that we looked at on the last contract and it was evaluated. Essentially, a renewable energy creditor, what we call a rec, is a, basically it's a certificate. It's the environmental rights that come off of either a solar or a wind project or a renewable energy project. And so that, when you buy those certificates, it provides an additional revenue strain back to the project to help finance the project. So one rec is equal to one megawatt hour. So you would have to buy 72,384 megawatt wrecks to cover 100% of the city's load. When we went through the RFP process last time, a wreck was $1 megawatt hour, so it would have cost you $72,000 a year to be 100% green. The city decided not to do that. But today those wreck prices are lower. So before taxes about 87 cents after taxes 89 cents. So to cover 100% of your electricity usage with renewable energy credits would cost the city about 64,320 per year. Next slide. This is just a real rough graph. So when the city buys electricity and you don't know if those electrons are coming from the handly plant over here or if it's coming from a wind farm or where it's coming from. So renewable energy credits are a way to for a customer to say I am buying renewable energy credits from X number of plants. And there's a process that the USGBC has, and it's called a green e-certified process. So it's a third party that goes in and certifies that the power is coming from a specific renewable energy plant and that no one else has ever received that energy. And so that you're not double dipping, you're not buying something that somebody else has already bought. So the electricity, the physical electricity from the wind farmer's solar farm, it still goes on to the grid, but separately you can do a transaction with a supplier to buy the environmental attributes that come off of that facility. by the environmental attributes that come off of that facility. Next slide. One of the things that the EPA has done is created this Green Power Partnership program. And it's a way for customers to be recognized for their sustainability efforts. And so what I did was, if you go to the next slide, I'm giving you some comparisons about, well, if the city of Arlington were to buy renewable energy credits for 100% of your electricity usage. And these are national, these are national lists. The city would rank number 12 nationally among local governments for buying the most renewable energy electricity. You can see that city of Dallas and city of Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth Airport, city of Austin, and then you guys will be number 12. Next slide. There's another list and that's and again these are national lists. These are on the EPA's website. You're welcome to go look at them. So there's another list for customers that buy 100% green. So you can say okay I just want to instead of spending 64,000 I'm okay spending 32,000 and you would be 50% green as an example. But if you were to buy 100% Rex, nationally, you would be number 48 out of 891 companies that I have done that. You'd be number five in Texas, number three in Texas government, and number four ranking in government nationally. Next slide. One more list. These are long term contracts. So you have to, if you were to buy renewable energy credits for longer than five years, then this is where the city would rank. Number 68 out of 405 nationally, number 3 in Texas, overall, and number 3 in government nationally. So through the EPA's Green Power Partnership program, they have a marketing effort if you go to the next slide. They will help the city market and give you the tools to let all the citizens, the community know, let the chamber know, give the chamber and the economic development folks tools that they can go try to retain new business for the city of Arlington based on some of these sustainability efforts. It's hard to figure out, okay, well, what does that really mean? So these are some taking what the City of Arlington's electricity usage is, and if you win 100% green, it would be similar to taking 10,905 passenger vehicles driven for a year off the road as an example in terms of greenhouse gas emissions reductions and offsets Or what's one interesting six six point five billion? Smartphones being charged, you know, so or 8,696 houses of electricity per year. Another slide. And a few other equivalently metrics that you could use to try to deliver the message about what this really means to the environment and how you're achieving what your sustainability goals are. Next slide. So I'm open to questions. Ms. Moeys. I have one. Thank you very much. You answered some of the questions we had the other day. Yes, ma'am. Appreciate your frankness. So how much did you say if we were on a contract today, we might be saving if we were just, was it just about $400,000? Okay, so what I used to do and I used to buy for hospitals and, you know, major systems, so half the size of these contracts, we used to do what we call blend and extend. So if we didn't want to add 62,000 a year to what we're spending to cover the green credits, what could we look at what it would do to our cost extend for two years? So we're back to a nine year contract. And while rates are so soft, take that 400,000 a year and roll it in and maybe end up not owing anything to go 100 percent green. Sure, you can do that. I'm not a fan of blending extends. I can tell you why because I want to know. Because usually my, here's the other thing I should clarify with. Because I was buying for commercial owners and we were very cognizant that if we sold a property, we might not be able to sell the electricity contract. That our contract's for use of two to three years. So if we blended and extended it was typically for another year, not seven. So, basically what happens is you're buying down your current rate. So when the city entered into this contract with TXU, it bought power at $3.9 to kill whatever. TXU went into the wholesale market and backed to back that hedge. And so that is a futures contract that's out there. If today's market is $3.3, and we say, okay, we're gonna blend that, we want to extend our contract to blend the price down. TXU is going to be basically loaning us money for the delta between the current market and the current contract, and they charge a finance fee for that. So unless there are situations where a customer has a challenge but from their budget, they're challenged or some other reason like you want to get renewable. And that's okay as long as everybody knows up front, it's costing you money to do that. Right. Yeah. What if you just re-hedged it to the point that you're absorbing the 62? Because there's at 400,000 a year in savings, there's more than I think we probably would be ahead on the contract. So what if you said, I mean, what's the minimum number of months we could extend to get down to where we want to? You know, we can do some analysis on that. Yeah, just to see what it looks like. Because I would love to do this, but I'd love to do it without it costing the city more right now. Yeah. I'd be happy to run some scenarios. Yeah, that's what I'm, thank you. I appreciate it. And I appreciate you bringing all this great data with you because it's interesting to look at. Yeah, when we met with the committee, the sustainability committee, I was explaining that there are customers like the George W. Bush Presidential Library in Dallas where we're they're consultant and we had split out, we want to buy regular power from this person and we want to go buy renewable energy credits from this person. So you don't have to buy the renewable energy credits from TXU if you don't want to. If you do, it gets put onto your bill. If you don't, then you have to write a check to somebody else. So let me ask another question. As we bring some of these new facilities on, that we're getting ready to open up, is it best to put them on a new separate contract at the 3.3 cents with the encore charges, which would make it about seven cents? I killed a watt hour instead of seven and a half. You certainly have that option. All right, so that might be a way to save too, is just put everything we do in the future. While it's so low, take advantage of that with the new properties. Sure. Thank you. Other questions, comments? Miss Capehart. Thank you, Mayor. In the committee, when we had these discussions, we really felt we were interested in the renewable energy parts of it as well. But it's obviously very data-driven and almost data overload at times. And but we felt like it was something that the council needed to hear and kind of weigh in on and see if there was interest in kind of going back and taking a second look. And to Miss Moise's point about, you know, do you try to extend the contract or you carve out some new facilities that we have coming online under a different contract. And we were rather impressed with what the renewable energy credits basically, tandem out was just 6.5 billion cell phones charging or whatever. So it wasn't just the cost and it wasn't just so you could say you were green. It really truly did have an impact on a significant impact on the environment, at least the data that we were shown. So we wanted to roll that out separately to the council to let you guys have the same kind of data we had and still just having it in our deliverable at the end. Because I think it's, there's a lot to digest there. And particularly going forward and I'm sure Mr. Finley and Mr. Yowerton will have lots of comments about how we might want to handle that. But that was the reason we had asked him to come and present to the council mayor. Okay, Ms. Moeys. Just one more quick comment. So I think what you said the other day was our total cost, if we went to go 100%, was about 1% of added to our current contract. But if we chose to put our new facilities for bringing online on this contract, and we were able to go green and keep it at the, would we be able to keep it at about the seven and a half cents instead of the seven point nine? For kilowatt hour. For just that one facility. Yeah, if we had a, oh yeah, no question. Yes, me. So, so some of that would would go to offset this too. We might be able to get to the point where we, by putting our newer facilities on a new contract with the savings there, we might almost offset this if we really don't want to spend any more money. Sure. Possibly. Thank you. Other questions, comments? Okay. Thank you, John. Thank you very much. Okay. Thank you, Will. Thank you. Okay. Next we'll move to the 2019 police annual report. And we'll call upon Chief Will Johnson, our police chief. and we'll call upon Chief Will Johnson, our police chief. Mayor and council. Will Johnson, I'm your police chief. I'm privileged to present to you the 2019 annual police report. Typically this is the most exciting presentation I get to give you every year from my perspective because it just kind of highlights the good work of our community, the good work of our officers, and just kind of the accomplishments that we've been able to make together. You know, clearly the current state of affairs has gotten, I would say, everyone distracted. Right, and rightfully so. There's a lot of impact in our community right now. From a variety of things, but not the least of which caring for our loved ones that might be in at risk populations and then just our fellow citizens, right? And so I present this with a degree of just a little pause if I can. And hopefully you'll indulge me for a few minutes to celebrate just kind of some of the work that was done collectively last year given through the lens of all the current state of events and so with that if we could just start the brief video Arlington ISD and the Arlington Police Department announced a partnership to help prevent school shootings. It's a program the district and police say has been more than a year now in the making. It's a comprehensive threat assessment plan to identify out-risk students. There's no training in the world that an officer would have been able to readily distinguish that that was a BB gun versus a gun. Chief Will Johnson tweeting late this afternoon, a picture of such a gun you see it here. He says a 15 year old student took it to Lamar High School today in a backpack. The chief in the department now echoing calls they've made in the past to bolster laws on fake guns. And Arlington police arrested a man they say was behind a unique scam. He was renting houses he didn't own and pocketing the money. Detectives say they know of at least four victims. Still a line number one. The city created a task force that issued around 10,000 citations in its first year and they've gotten hundreds of calls to a new road rage hotline. Really trying to take steps to nip some of the stuff in the bud. Well we say a better view from a bud will help them protect you better during concerts, special events, and cowboys and rangers games. The department launching three new Skywatch towers that have advanced technology. Sergeant Chitty ran toward the burning van and according to Arlington Police Chief Will Johnson helped pull four people out of that minivan. That is, until a group of patrol officers noticed that Miss Mary Joy needed help. They dug deep into their own pockets and then began digging up ground. Yeah, I need to have time to shoot. And so, I mean, it was a small gesture, but I mean, I had a long way and parade to go and definitely saved me. Instead of keeping the gifts, they decided to give them away. All the kids who don't have toys say thank you. Inviting the Arlington Texas SWAT team to come and collect dozens of toys, a surprise to Elliott, their way to say thanks. Welcome, darling. Hello. We caught Arlington, P.D. having a little too much fun during their shoot. It allows them to let their hair down for just a minute. Just having a good time. The kids open presents. It was awesome to see that. While he spends time with his wife and kids, the Arlington Police Chief is patrolling the streets in his place. He chose to work Bill's shift to show his appreciation for all the things he's done to make Arlington better this year. So as you can see from just this brief video clips, we had a great year last year, but also it was a very challenging year. You'll advance next slide, please. I'm constantly challenging the organization to answer this very basic question. How can we make Arlington better today? It is truly difficult to capture all their efforts in a two minute video. So let me begin the presentation. Last year we received the International Association of Chiefs of Police Leadership and Human and Civil Rights Award. This prestigious award recognizes agencies that have demonstrated with demonstrated leadership in protecting fundamental rights of all people in our community. This department is recognized as a best practices agency in promoting human and civil rights and improving social justice. And our commitment in providing procedural justice and equal protection under the Constitution places us in a strong position to continue to build trust in every segment of Arlington. We implemented mandatory training to address hate crimes and hate incidents during last year's end service cycle. This training has been recognized by the Department of Justice as the best practices model for other agencies to replicate throughout the country. And later this year, the Department of Justice and Arlington PD will publish this training and a practice guide for the profession to be able to replicate in their agencies. Forging strong relationships with young persons continues to be a top priority for us in the department. From mentoring kids to programs where our officers read to grade school kids, our department is making positive difference into the lives of children. We were awarded a third place finish for National Night Out from the National Association of Townwatch with communities for a population of over 3,300,000 residents or more. Last year we recorded 252 neighborhood parties, which was an increase of nearly 50 parties last year. And in the last eight years, we've placed in the top five every year, including twice in the number three slot, twice in the number two slot, and one overall winning submission. This is an impressive organizational history that many communities would love to have. The Commission for Accreditation on Law Enforcement Agencies or Kalea is the gold standard for third-party accreditation for public safety agencies. Arlington received its ninth consecutive Materias Award for Excellence for Law Enforcement. We are a triarch calia agency, which means that the department is accredited as the department, as our training center and as the dispatch center in all three areas. To put this into perspective, there are 18,000 police departments in the United States. 905 of them are Kalea certified. Only 22 agencies nationwide have a tri-arc reward. This puts Arlington in the top 2% of all Kalea accredited agencies nationally. In December. Wow. That's great stuff, isn't it? That's awesome. It is good stuff. In December, our Santa Cows program assisted 450 families to make sure that they had a great Christmas. And in a new partnership with Arlington Independent School District and My Health, My Resources, Tarrant County, MHMR, with the Department launched a multidisciplinary threat assessment team to promote school safety and to help intervene with at-risk kids that might need some additional assistance within their educational learning environment. The team has already conducted 308 risk assessments since August, 308 shows the need for that program. We hosted a diversity and inclusion for law enforcement training in conjunction with the Department of Justice Cops Office and the Center of Public Safety and Justice out of the University of Illinois. This training session promotes our ongoing efforts related to social justice and civil rights. Next slide. In 2019, Governor Greg Abbott recognized Corporal Alex Quintanilla and Officer Chris Feigley with the Star of Texas Awards for Injury Sustained in the line of duty. The governor also honored 11 additional officers at the state capital for a variety of outstanding acts of service and heroism. Sergeant Robert Walsh and Janay Powell McGee received the T. Col. Achievement Award for Public Safety for the Bridge Kids project from Lindhelm Elementary School. Corporal William Brewer, Leonard Blake, Heath Cook, David Henzie, Ben Baskins along with officers Robert Phillips, Eric Garcia, Jacob Williams, and Brett Mayorga all received the T-Cole Medal of Valor. Very significant accomplishment. Our media office has recognized as an industry leader and we host agencies from all across the United States that want to come here and learn how we manage corporate communication and public messaging. Additionally, our own Lieutenant Christopher Cook was represented our agency and our community as he was elected Vice President for the National Information Officers Association. This professional membership organization represents a thousand communication professionals from around the country. D.W.I. and Forthman Officer Stacey Brown received the 2019 Texas Impaired Driving Safety Champion Award. She was also recognized from mothers against drunk driving along with Officer Jerrick Wilson and Officer David Henson for their commitment to making our roadway safer from impaired drivers. Deputy Chief David McGinty graduated from the 276th session of the FBI's National Academy, which is the most challenging professional development course for any law enforcement executive in the United States. Lieutenant Kyros Branch received the Arlington Kindness Award for his participation in organization and the Linhell Elementary School, Daddy Daughter's Dance, and Nancy Green and Anita Ty volunteered every week with meals on wheels to make sure that those individuals that could not get out to receive food were well supported within our community. As I summarized, it's clear to see how the department is viewed as a best practice agency and how we have employees viewed as national experts in policing on a variety of topics. I'm honored to serve as the Vice President for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. Arlington has a long history of influencing national police policies and this year I'm serving as an advisor for the Commission on Law Enforcement and the Administration of Justice that President Donald Trump created through executive order in October of 2019. In fact, before this outbreak of coronavirus, I was supposed to get on the plane tonight to fly to California for a commission meeting. We'll be doing it virtually because the work has to continue to get done. We have much work to do as a profession to continue to build safer communities, but it takes more than just the police to create public safety. This commission will look at all aspects of creating public safety within our communities and identify barriers impeding our success as a nation. I'm proud that Arlington is in the forefront of sharing our experiences and our community's perspective in developing these national policies. Next slide. Last year officers were dispatched to over 120,000 911 calls and over 60,000 self-initiated calls and conducted over 117,000 traffic stops. That totals nearly 300,000 formal contacts with the community. Through this work, officers arrested over 15,000 people and took over 1,600 people in mental crisis to the hospital for emergency the city of San Francisco. The city of San Francisco was the first to be visited by the city of San Francisco. The city of San Francisco was the first to be visited by the city of San Francisco. The city of San Francisco was the first to be visited by the city of San Francisco. The city of San Francisco was the first to be visited by the city of San Francisco. The city of San Francisco was the first to be visited by the city of San Francisco is 14.2 homicides per year. And officers dealt with, and this is a really frustrating point, officers dealt with over 2700 repeat offenders throughout the year. Those are individuals that we arrested for some variety of offenses. Subsequently, they were released, reoffended, and officers had to deal with those same individuals again within the calendar year. As you're aware, we implemented a new hate crimes policy that allows for better reporting and classification of hate crimes and expanded our local reporting to include hate incidents as well. We captured 16 hate crimes last year and reported 25 hate incidents that were deemed hate acts but not a violation of criminal law. There's a breakdown of this hate crime and hate incident information on page 18 of the annual report. Next slide. We'll discuss the reported FBI crime statistics over the next several slides, and then we'll transition into our violent crime initiative that we presently have ongoing. As a reminder, we submit our violent crime numbers to the FBI. If you go back, slide. Thank you. The price of not having a clicker. I'll tell you when to move forward. Thanks. As a reminder, we submit our crime numbers through the FBI National Incident-Based Reporting System to the Texas Department of Public Safety. Texas DPS converts this neighbor's information into the FBI historical uniform crime reporting crime statistics which is being phased out of use nationally. Both systems collect crime data but they cannot be compared to one another. Nibers is more robust and it supports deeper levels of analysis. In short, comparing these two different crime systems is like comparing the U.S. standard measuring system to the metric system. They both measure certain things, but they are not comparable. To effectively communicate crime issues and to assess our community and understanding crime statistics, during this national transition from UCR to Nibers, we publish both data sets. And so I'll go over both of them for transparency purposes. Now, next slide, please. We'll start with the UCR summary, which is the historically used model. Since 2011, overall crime in Arlington, which encompasses all aspects of property crime and violent crime is down 30%. Overall crime in 2019 to 2018 was statistically flat at 0.3%. Next slide. UCR violent crime, which is composed of four offense categories, including murder, rape, robbery, and aggravated assault, is up 10% from 2011 and 15% year over year. The main drivers of this increase is aggravated assaults and robberies. Many of those aggravated assaults were aggravated offense because of the use of firearms. Next slide. Arlington experienced a 3% reduction in UCR property crimes last year. Property crimes includes burglaries, thefts, arson and motor vehicle thefts. As you can see from the graph, property crimes have been significantly trending down since 2011 with a reduction of 34% that is a significant lower rate of victimization of our residents in our community. Next slide. While UCR consists of eight offenses divided into two broad categories, violent crime and property crime, the IBERS consists of 46 offense categories divided into three distinctly different groupings, crimes against persons, crimes against property, and crimes against society. Using neighbors, the department experienced a 1% reduction in overall crime in 2019 compared to 2018. Under crimes against persons, we experienced a 3% increase with an additional 262 offenses as compared to the UCR's 15% increase. Aggravated assaults were the main driver for this category. Next slide. Under crimes against property, we experienced a 4% reduction. However, robberies continue to be a driver in this category. Oddly enough, in the Nibers system, robbery is classified as a property crime, not a person's crime, as it is in the UCR summary report. Next slide. Crimes against society we experience a 2% increase. This is the category of crime that I as police chief want to see an increase in every year because these offenses are primarily discovered through officer self-initiated activity. Our focus throughout the year has been on finding illegal guns, illegal drugs, and known offenders. This crime increase largely supports that the cops are in fact heating our mission and out there digging up and trying to find the criminals that are doing those crimes against society, which largely are going to be your weapons, your vice crimes, and your drug crimes that are happening within your community. Next slide. In this slide, we benchmark UCR crime in other major cities across the United States with population to 400,000 to 600,000 compared to Arlington. Bear in mind that the data in this slide is from 2018 because the FBI will not formally publish 2019 crime data until later this year. I wanted to share it in tabular format for your review but I understand it's difficult to consume quickly in a presentation and so we'll move to the next slide. Here's another way to review the information presented on the previous slide. These cities are arranged in population from left to right, based on size, and the bar graph represents crime per 1,000 residents. Comparatively, Arlington remains in a strong position reporting the third lowest crime per 1,000 residents out of the 17 cities that were polled across the United States. Next slide. In this slide we benched Mark Texas cities between 185,000 and 400,000 to serve as a comparison. We also included Dallas and Fort Worth because of their close proximity to Arlington. In this comparison, Fort Worth ranked as our closest comparable city and so we'll dig a little deeper into that comparison with the next slide. In analyzing the two largest cities in Tarant County, Arlington and Fort Worth, you can see similar trends are happening throughout Tarant County. This chart also demonstrates the reality of crime reporting. Petty thefts drive overall crime statistics. Arlington reported lower crime and all classifications of crime except for theft. But we reported slightly higher overall crime because of that elevated theft category. This is why benchmarking is so valuable, but it's not independently definitive. As chief, I review all data points to seek opportunities for us to improve as a community, and for us to improve as an organization. Through these benchmarking, it's clear to me that we are both doing well and that we have some clear challenges ahead of us particularly as it relates to violent crime. Next slide. You can see from this picture why our focus on the threat of violent crime in our community has been at the forefront of our activity. Nationally and throughout the state and communities, we are experiencing rise in violent crime. I'm chairing the Texas Police Chiefs Association Violent Crimes Committee, which is taking a comprehensive look at the various components of the criminal justice system related to violent crime in an effort to seek effective public policies to reduce violence in our community. Bond reform is critical component of this conversation taking place in our state, and there are competing perspectives on this topic. And while I fully support a fair bond system for all people, I also support the fact that individuals in our community should not be subject to revictimization because of a flawed bond system releasing violent offenders back into the community. It is difficult to reduce violent crime in a community if our officers are repeatedly having to arrest the same offenders over and over again, particularly with weapons. The use of firearms and the commission of violent crimes in our community is a serious threat. Our partnership with the ATF and our gun crimes unit continues to look for innovative ways to address prolific offenders and file cases at a federal level when warranted. Additionally, almost one-third of all the violent crime that we experience in Arlington has some nexus to illegal drugs. That is a significant number and an underlying social problem that's driving violent crime in our community. Gang member involvement in violent crime is also an issue. Presently, we have over 500 gang members in our gang database. This is why our gang unit and our gun crimes unit work so closely together to comprehensively address this problem within our society. Finally, our violent crime initiative has geographic accountability as the foundation for success. And it is crucial for citizen engagement and police accountability to come together to make sure that we have shared goals, shared vision to reduce violent crime. This photo represents a group of four suspects that committed violent takeover style robberies within 90 minutes within our community. Officers were searching the city for these offenders when a vigilant citizen reported their presence just prior to the fourth robbery. Officers responded to that location, arrested the offenders, and seized the weapon. This is the data point that causes me the most frustration. That gun was bought on Snapchat. was bought on Snapchat. And in the regulatory environment, that's a completely legal transaction. That person in that photograph could not pass a background check to buy that weapon to a legal gun store. But it was not illegal for them to buy it via social media on the street. That's a problem. And it's a problem that my cops are facing every day when they're confronted with this sort of issue. Next slide. Traffic safety is an organizational priority for Arlington. We continue operation safe over the last two years. You'll recall this program focuses resources on our highways and major arterial roadways based on crash data. We've experienced 26 fatality crashes last year with almost half involving some sort of alcohol, drug, or polydrug impairment. You can see by these numbers that crashes pose a significant harm to our community. We average about four to five DWI arrests a day, and our officers conduct bar checks to ensure compliance with all applicable liquor laws and establishments throughout the city. Road rage continues to be reported throughout the community. Last year we mailed 187 road rage letters to suspects identified on our road rage hotline. Many of these incidents occurred on our freeways and operation safe, targeted these aggressive drivers through their good work. Next slide. This slide contains two different maps. The map on the left represents approximately 117,000 traffic stops conducted in 2019. The map on the right is the violent crime density map overlaid on top of the traffic stop data. You can see from this map that our highest traffic stop activity is on our major roadways throughout Arlington, to include areas in Arlington with higher density of violent crime. It's very productive in terms of how we drive resources to focus on multiple topics with limited number of cops that we have, focusing on violent crime and improving roadway safety. Next slide. This slide is similar to the last one. However, it represents the DWI crash hotspot map on the left and the actual DWI arrest on the right. You can see that our freeways and our high commercial areas typically yield higher density for impaired driving and impaired driving crashes. Next slide. for impaired driving and impaired driving crashes. Next slide. Project RAIS is a multi-disciplinary team that intervenes at repeat domestic violence locations. Detectives identify five locations in each district and investigators conduct home visits with a multi-disciplinary team. In 2019, officers made 217 visits. By staffing these cases in a multidisciplinary fashion, we're reducing the probability for future domestic violence incidents to occur at our most high-risk locations. Mental health calls continue to be a challenge for our community, with officers responding to over 5,400 calls that contained some sort of mental health component. We took over 1,600 individuals in custody on notice of emergency detention and transported them to a mental health facility for treatment. In many of those instances, there was also the opportunity to take these individuals to jail for underlying criminal behavior, but it was more important for us as a community to take them to the hospital for treatment versus taking them to the jail. Officers trained as mental health peace officers partner with MHMR, Law Liaison to form a co-responder team to address individuals in our community in need of mental health treatment. Last year we conducted over 2600 follow-ups in community with mental health providers to try to reduce the burden on the criminal justice system and the mental health system for those individuals in the greatest need of service. All officers received enhanced training on autism awareness last year. This training seeks to have a positive outcome when dealing with an individual who has autism or an intellectual development disability. Next slide. A topic that is very important to me is an employee wellness and I appreciate the support that this council has given me as we work on this critical issue. As you know, we implemented the Blue Chip program, which affords employees the opportunities, the employees the opportunity to access mental health services anonymously. As a profession, we fight the stigma that cops should always be okay, no matter what the visual trauma they experience, they should never be weak and they should never seek help. That's the way it was whenever I entered the Academy nearly 26 years ago. And that is a stigma that persists today. And we're trying to break that stigma to let cops know it's okay not to be okay. And many times through professional services you can help with that trauma and reduce the employee transcending to really, really deep places. And so much like you go to a doctor for a checkup, you can go to a professional for mental health checkup as well and that's kind of what we're trying to see in the workplace. This program complements other city services offered to employees and helps remove the stigma that we just discussed. Additionally, we've revamped our peer support team and added capacity and additional employees to help serve. Our team is led by Deputy Chief Jeff Petty, and they have conducted site reviews across agencies throughout the United States and brought back some of the best practices that we can blend together to create an effective Arlington model. We also have bolstered our corporate communication efforts to enhance employee knowledge on this topic. And at the end of the day, we've made great strides, but much, much more work is required. Next slide. Last year, we launched a mobile app that allows employees access to internal department information of resources in the field. Council approved the purchase of new digital video recorders for all of our patrol cars. These new DVRs integrate with our body-worn camera system so that officers only have to deal with one system as they're managing their digital evidence. We added a new search tool on our website for the community to research crime in their neighborhood and we transitioned out of several paper reporting systems within the department so that we can enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of administrative reviews through electronic reporting. And finally, Council will approve refreshing our license plate reader or LPR technology last year. This new system has already demonstrated great successes. In one particular case, several individuals were robbing stores within a brief period of time. We were able to query the LPR database, quickly determine where the suspects were saying, went to that location and arrested them. In another success story, one of our fugitive detectives was looking for a suspect wanted for felony domestic offenses and entered, licenplay plate information into the LPR system within one minute, one minute of entering that, a deputy in Smith County, which is Tyler, Texas, got a hit on an LPR system for the suspect vehicle traveling through their county, stopped the vehicle and affected it and arrest. That person was brought back to Arlington to face those felony domestic assault charges. This would not have been possible without your support and without you authorizing us the ability to acquire and refresh this technology. Next slide. The department is not without our challenges. Repeat offenders who get out of jail only to reoffend and commit more violent crimes remains a significant concern for the department and for me personally. The potential for the overuse of public reconnaissance bonds or bonds that do not require a cash surety for certain offenses can pose serious issues for both the community and for officers. We will continue to advocate our position on this topic both locally and with our state legislators as we confront this very challenging topic. The explosive presence of digital media evidence throughout police work and unfunded mandates continues to be a significant concern. The sheer volume of media that our detectives and supervisors have to review is enormous. This digital evidence is being generated both in the community and within the department. And quite frankly, our detectives are struggling to keep up. In 2019, council made a significant investment to address this issue by adding detectives in the budget. We appreciate this support. You also supported our submission this year to request grant dollars from the Department of Justice Cops Office to see if we can continue that support and enhance our detective workforce to address this emerging issue. Hopefully that grant submission will be approved. We'll find out in August or September. Fear of crime as compared to actual crime is always a challenge for us. Social media and unverified crime reports compound the problem of community fear. We have seen in many instances where someone's perspective of a few police cars on a street can transcend into misinformation and instill fear in a community. As a community we have to constantly be on guard for this issue and we have to work together to communicate the actual facts of what happened versus the perceived facts of what happened. Additionally, and this is probably the most challenging part for all of us, we have to recognize that sometimes this information occurs by accident, but other times it occurs intentionally. People are intentionally spreading misinformation for their own personal or political gain. I don't really understand that, but I understand that it's happening, and it harms the larger community, and it will take all of us in leadership positions and all of us in neighborhoods to confront that issue. As I close, I want you to know that the State of the Police Department is strong. We have the most talented employees that are serving daily with integrity, compassion, and fairness. Our employees live out the model service before self and honor above all. We reflect on that model on times like this whenever they come facing the unknown, serving with constantly changing information, but they're prepared to do the best that they can with the resources that they have. Because they're committed to this community. They're committed to serving well. They're committed to the integrity and the honor and the nobility of policing. And more importantly, they're committed to each other to make sure that we do the job well. And as we do that, we have to constantly stay grounded that even in times like this, where it's a public health challenge, public health crisis. The downstream effects of that public health is anarchy, disturbances, hoarding, and all of the criminal behavior that can go along that is contradictory to the sound medical advice that the mayor talked about earlier. And we have to give that calming presence in our community that our medical professionals are prepared. Our plan is prepared and we're prepared for 2020 to be equal or greater than what we accomplished in 2019. Thank you for your support and I'm prepared to answer any questions that you have for me. to the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city of New York and the city as well and I know that you all take that job very seriously in terms of your interaction with the community. Lastly, thank you for your transparency and most importantly, thank you for recognizing that although you've done a great job to this point that there's much work still left to do and I think that speaks highly of yourself and your staff. So thank you. Thank you, sir. Don't you for our minors? Thank you, Mayor. I just a comment. Chief, thank you so much for this detailed thorough report. You always do a great job of setting the scene for our city and our understanding completely from top to bottom what is your perspective as well as where we should focus as a council. Specifically wanted to point out the blue chip program. I thank you for implementing that and destigmatizing that amongst our cops. I think it's a wonderful testament to what we can do and what we as citizens should be doing to help our first responders, especially even in these times, as you say. I wanted to specifically point to one aspect that you talked about, which was the 54, 5400, excuse me, mental calls, 16, 100s, detentions. I know that a number of communities, I chair the continue of care for Tarant Park or County, a number of the communities are moving towards creating these sort of response teams. And I know you've been intimate in helping train other cities in that area. So I want to commend you for that. And I'm really call out that as a model. And I'm hoping is that going to be adopted more nationally or internationally? You're seeing people more adopting more of our approach to it or would you see any kinds of changes in that area going forward? Both, frankly. So it is the best approach is the co-responding model based on the present framework of the medical community and the medical communities capacity to deal with the mentally ill right now. I would tell you ultimately cops need to be out of the business of this right? We need to get out of the co-responder model because we need to have improved capacity in the mental health system to provide services through the mental health community for those individuals. But in the absence of that happening we can't just say that we're not going to do anything. And so that is kind of how the co-responder model really emerged. And we have to be practical that we're not going to get increased capacity in the medical community overnight and so it is going to be a realism for some time to come. But our work in the President's Commission is working on this very topic about how do we increase capacity? And then my testimony for the Texas Police Chief's Association on Violin Crime is specifically focused on the lack of data, the lack of data sharing across all the different entities, particularly the medical community, in terms of how do we measure just what the threat of this is to our communities. In 1935, there was 650 psychiatric beds per 100,000 US residents. Those state hospitals were atrocious, and they were shut down because they could not deliver quality medical care in constitutional settings, and the well-intentioned effort was to transition it to community care. Well, the fact of the matter is, is the money and the capacity didn't follow the change in public policy. And so today we have less than 50 psychiatric beds per 100,000 US residents. And if you look at the corresponding graph of the US prison population, they are completely inverse. So we moved them out of the psychiatric hospitals. We put them in the community. We didn't provide community resources for them or increased community capacity in the medical community. And then what do people in crisis do? They typically violate the law. Cops respond, we apply the criminal justice system to them, they transition to the criminal justice system. We've got to break that cycle. Thank you. Okay. Dr. Odom Wesley, I didn't see you over here. Thank you, Chief, for that report. Very thorough, very encouraging. I'm always proud of our world class award winning police department. And one takeaway that I have is that Arlington is becoming more urban and we're seeing more urban crime. There's one crime that either, I don't know if I missed it, but I didn't hear anything about human trafficking. Where is Arlington in human trafficking? Yes, sure. So I would tell you that human trafficking is both present in our community and difficult to track, right? So the I would tell you that human trafficking is both present in our community and difficult to track, right? So the statistics will tell you that officers, undercover officers, vice officers will come in contact with the prostitute and or make an arrest for prostitution six to seven times before a prostitute that is being trafficked will come forward and share that information with officers to be able to advance a human trafficking case. Very difficult, right? But not impossible. Within the last year, in fact, one of our detectives received a Departmental Award for his total case work, but in particular, a case where he was able to arrest two individuals that had bought and sold a girl twice in Arlington for drugs and guns and where she had been trafficked and then in turn prostituted in our community. So it's present. We're working right now with the United States attorney for the Northern District of Texas to reconstitute the North Texas human trafficking task force. At one point in time, that was a federally funded task force that was a national award-winning task force, but the grant funds went away, and it was not sustainable at that point in time. We're looking to try to overcome that, and there's a lot of interest in other jurisdictions to come together because we think that we can be more effective in a task force model than just an individual agency response. And so I anticipate that sometime in 2020, there's a high likelihood I'll be coming back before council requesting your permission to send one of our detectives to a task force specifically to help with human trafficking. Thank you. Mr. Sutton. Thank you Mayor. Chief Johnson I appreciate the robust presentation. It was enlightening you and I had conversations about what we can do is council members about the citizens on patrol as well as the crime watch groups help mitigate some of the crime that goes on. I think we had a conversation that were in the past a large number of crime watch we've seen that diminish and in my particular district I think you and I have talked to a gentleman call you about a drug house that's been going on for two years. The frustration he feel about, I don't know if it's a lack of airferd or just miscommunication in that. I've got at least two or three known who are problematic in the district. I know you do an outstanding job of trying to mitigate that and I believe that's what we're here for. I appreciate the service that the entire force does for our city to keep us safe. But could you speak on the fact the conversation of how we can help with encouraging groups to organize and become active in our community? Yeah, absolutely. You know, and to your point, there's so many times whenever we have localized crime that occurs in a neighborhood, right? They become very, very disruptive and frankly, if you're living next to that person, your sensitivity to that crime activity taking place is far greater than anybody else that is in proximity. We even see that when we talk about engaging the residents and engaging neighbors, that if I get 15 houses down from a target location, the interest is significantly less. 15 houses down than it is, two houses down, right? And so I think to your point and to the conversations that we have, helping to engage neighborhoods so that they understand that yeah, you might be 15 houses down, but you need to care about that house helping to engage neighborhoods so that they understand that, yeah, you might be 15 houses down, but you need to care about that house as much as the guy that's right next to it. Because if the guy right next to it loses, he moves. And if he moves, then you have the chance for that one house become now two houses and now three houses. And before you know it, the problem that was happening in that neighborhood is spread 14 houses down. And the guy that wasn't too interested in it whenever this thing is now all of a sudden wanting to know what is the police department gonna do. Well, frankly, we're only as effective as what the community allows us to be because we're not there 24 hours a day. We try to be, We try to keep up the pressure. But frankly, our pressure is reactionary to where the last complaint is, the last crime stat came in, the last crime trend came in, and it takes that community involvement to constantly keep it grounded, and also just kind of community relations, right, in terms of knowing your beat-offs or understanding what the strategies are that are happening in that neighborhood, and really having a co-shared value about what are the goals, right? Because sometimes, well, we think might be the most pressing issues or not the most pressing issues. Residents have a different perspective entirely, right? And that's why we have geographic policing because we also have to have the flexibility that what is happening at Filder and Randall Mill may not be the same thing that's happening, you know, down at Mat Law and Sublet, right? And we have to be able to tailor our response to the needs of those individual neighbors based on what they're dealing with within their community. And so that's what I would ask of all of counsel, is to help channel that either interest or frustration, right? Because that's typically how you get contacted into a positive solution-oriented banter that understands that most of these issues are not going to be quick fixes they're going to take take time and then frankly if we make a arrest That person's going to get released on bond right now. I mean that's kind of what our experience is And they're going to go right back to that house and we're going to have to effectively start over from the residence perspective Because the arrest didn't solve the issue Miss Cape Art over from the resident's perspective because the arrest didn't solve the issue. Miss Cape Art. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Chief. You know, I couldn't be proud of APD. You guys and women do incredible work. I couldn't do what you do, but we're so proud, and fortunate to have each of you. But I have a couple of questions. One, when you showed the new video equipment and how it now interacts with the body cams. Yes. When we approved the body cams what three or four years ago now, we had concern about storage, capability and reduction and stuff. So how is that working? So the storage issue was largely mitigated through the contract negotiation. So we don't have a storage challenge. But it's kind of like your garage, right? The more you add to your garage, all of a sudden, you can't park your car in it because you got so much stuff, right? That's kind of what we've got with storage for video. Us not having storage problems, it creates a lot of videos. And so our biggest challenge is, is we have legal mandates, not only from open records requests, but in case filing issues, district attorney constitutional issues that we've got to, and we've got to review every last one of those. And so, because we can't take for granted that there's not some sort of exculpatory information that would show somebody's innocence on a film that we have in our possession. And so we spend a tremendous amount of time reviewing body camera footage, reviewing in-car DVR footage. And if you just think about, if we go back to that picture of that armed robbery, right? They're probably with 15 cops on scene. Every one of them drove a car. Every one of them had a body camera. Every one of them drove a car, every one of them had a body camera. So we had 30 cameras rolling, a period of time until we could get the scene stabilized, and then by policy start turning off our cameras. But I guarantee you we had over an hour of video per camera on that scene. Our robbery detectives have to go and review all of that. Even if it doesn't capture anything of significance, they still have to review it because I got to turn it over to the district attorney and be able to testify as to what was on it. That's the challenge that we have with with digital evidence. So this challenge, do you have a solution? Well, yes. I mean, we've got a couple of solutions that we've been working on. One, we are continuously trying to refine our policy on, okay, when is it acceptable to turn it off? Right? And that's a balance. And that's because soon as we turn it off too soon, something happens and somebody says, you intentionally turn it off to avoid capturing this issue. We don't want to do that either, right? So we want to capture and use the technology that you guys have authorized. Number two, we have tried to increase the volume of cases that go through our jail workout detectives, which are civilian positions within the police department, that we can operate at a lower cost than our sworn investigators to try to lower caseload volumes. And then we've added detectives to try to address that. We've added a significant number of detectives. But the entire business model of policing is shifting based on this technology and the use of the technology within the court system. And I don't know that any of us know kind of where that in zone is, if you will. But we're trying to leverage several different streams of solutions to reduce the financial impact of the video coming in. Okay. And then recently, as you know, the game room issue has come back up and because of some things the legislature has done. And of course, we've had game room issues in the past. We don't currently have them. Don't know what the future holds. But did you guys have to do like special task force or anything like that when we had the game room issues? Oh yes ma'am we had an entire task force stood up and because at one point in time I think we had over 50 or 60 of those throughout our community and game room is one of those nebulous terms right some game rooms are literally a speakeasy that you got to buzz to get buzzed in the door and there's 50 machines in there and totally gambling operation taking place. Some of them are a gambling machine or an eight-liner machine that's in a corner of a gas door, right? Those don't have the same impact, but the criminality might be the same, right? And the resources it takes to work those type of cases can be different. And so our vice and undercover operations have been focused on game room operations. Even within the last 12 months, it hasn't risen to the level of much public discussion. I certainly didn't mention in the end or report because it was a fraction of just kind of the overall response. But just because I didn't mention it, don't think that we didn't take folks to jail and seize machines last year because we did quite a few and we will continue to do so for those that are acting in violation of the gambling ordinances or the gambling statutes of the state. And thanks for that update. And then lastly, so has the last K-19 fully deployed now? So the answer is no. It hasn't. We have the dog and we're continuing to train handlers to make the right fit. And so we, the complexities in the science behind and frankly just the relationship between an animal and a human to effectively serve as a team is not a one plus one is two sort of equation. And so sometimes the chemistry, just like in marriage is really, really good. And you stay married together a long time. Sometimes the divorce is inevitable. And so we're working through that, but we've got all the resources at play, if you will, for us to hopefully be successful real soon. Okay, great, thank you. Thank you, Chief. And again, congratulations on a great work. Thank you, ma again congratulations on a great work. Thank you, Mr. Sutton. Thank you again mayor. Chief on this report is there way I know you do publish it the average response time on a priority call and is there a way to get like an overall survey of how citizens feel about the service we provide. So one of the things that we're working with the Vera Institute is to create procedural justice through our contacts throughout the community. And through that research that we worked on for about 18 months, we really got a pretty slick idea out of it. We're currently at print right now for all of our business cards that are issued to employees to have a QR code on them, to where people can just take a picture of that with their phone. It'll instantaneously take them to an online survey. They can tell us how they think, right? It'll take to commendation or complaint and if they thought the service was great, love to hear about it. If you thought the service was terrible, love to hear about it. If you thought the service was terrible, love to hear about it, and so that we can try to make improvements. And that really brings me to a visual that also ties back into your last question about, how do you engage the community? So we printed these up in bulk and we dropped them off at your office. And this right here is that 100 page report that you've got in your hand right and so you can very easily take this with you to community meetings and the people have questions and they're challenging you about what's going on in the police department what's going on in our community I mean this is really really easy to put in their hand and say all the information that you're asking for is right here. Review it. Talk to your beat officer. Talk to your beat sergeant about how does that overall report transcend down into your neighborhood? And then you also have a true place and tri-fold brochures that have other reports that we have that we have found to be equally important in the community. They quite frankly, most of our community members just don't know the information is available, right? Or they know and then they forget and life gets busy and they lose where to find it. And this is a really, really easy way for them to get to the website and navigate all the different options they have and get to the meat of what their concern is. Any other questions, comments? Chief, one thing that I want to highlight is the fact that you are involved on the federal and state and regional level and working to solve some of our major crime initiatives throughout the country. And with that, not only do there's the rest of the country get to benefit from one of the best police chiefs in the nation, but also you are coming into contact with some of the best experts in different fields, including mental health, as Dr. Farah Meyers mentioned. And that is so invaluable here to our city, but also the fact that Arlington is contributing in so many different ways and we really appreciate you taking extra time to to be able to do that and to serve there in addition to doing an incredible job of leading our police department and then also if you can convey to our police officers that we really appreciate the sacrifice and commitment that they are making and the police department. And then also if you can convey to our police officers that we really appreciate the sacrificing commitment that they are making and the families to there with it. And then as we saw there, so many things have been accomplished. And then it's an amazing thing of the challenges that are there. And it continues to be a very tough profession there and we appreciate the service that are men and women are making of the Arlington Police Department. Thank you, Chief. I'll convey that. Thank you, sir. And I'll just close with this. We never lose sight of the fact that we have a successful theater to operate in because of this community. And I'm telling you, there are police officers all across the country that would like to serve in Arlington, Texas because the threatened risk that we face here is present, but it's not nearly the same as what some other of our colleagues face in other communities. So thank you for your continued support of the Department. I appreciate it. Thank you chief. Next we move to The annual service animal services live release rate update and we'll turn to Brian Doherty from interim code compliance administrator Yeah, is there any questions from the Animal Services Live release update? Anybody have any questions? Mr. Sutton. Thank you for that wonderful presentation. No. Thank you Mayor. No, Brian. The partners that work with the Arlington Animal Services and how would you classify the relationship with our animal service and partners that actually help us kind of reduce the, actually increase our release rate? It's great. We work with a number of agencies, whether it's private rescue groups or if it's even pet co where we have our adoption day set up where we run the mobile adoption out there. I mean, there's times where you don't always see eye to eye, but we have to function as a city. As far as how we process the animals and make sure all the information is accurate and it's not at the expense of the animals or people adopting them. But no, it's been a great relationship. And we rely on them quite a bit to keep our live release rate at the rate it is. Thank you. Miss Cape Hart. Thank you, Mayor. And thank you, Brian, just a comment. So with Petsmart, we have the remote adoption unit out there in the Highlands. I guess it's one to month on Saturday. And then Petsmart also takes cats from animal services. And so we populate the cat adoption unit at Petsmart, which is great. And last count I heard every cat that went to Petsmart gets adopted. So it's just pretty incredible. And then recently, and I should have said something when John Thomas here, we reinstituted with the police department. They come in and sponsor a dog. And anytime that happens and it gets up on our social media, the dog has always been adopted. It's just something about having the police departments say, hey, this is a cool dog kind of thing. So there's, to Brian's point, there are so many varied partnerships, everything from rescue groups to corporate citizens and it makes a big difference and that's why we've been so successful, I think. But thank you and all of animal services was really great work you guys do. Any other questions comments? Thank you. Appreciate it, Brian. I'm back. And I'll get back. Okay. And then, uh, yes, then, uh, we'll move to the multifamily inspection program update. Mr. Brondord. Again, uh, if you've had time to review it, does anyone have any questions on the update for the multifamily health? Mr. Cape or Mrs. Cape Art? Thank you, Mayor. And I had asked for this one, and my question, Brian, is when we do multifamily inspections, does that also include student housing that's obviously not UTA student housing? It does but in a sense that once it's not student housing through UTA it's looked at as if a 40-year-old man or a 50-year-old woman or whatever once they it's classified as a multi-family then it's it's expected just the same so students can be there there like one of one's out center and stuff like that. And it's inspected at the same protocol that we have for all of our multifamily families. So the new units that we have going up that are just going to be exclusively student housing. They do get inspected like multifamily or they do not? They do if they're not on state property. And I don't believe those are on private property so we will be inspect it. So they inspected are they inspected on an annual basis? Yes. Yes. Once a year. With this new program that we implemented there's different risk ratings and if you're on the standard one and you score a high score then the following two years they'll only be inspected on the exterior in the common areas because they got a high score and the point of the tears being that you know if you have a lower score. And the point of the tears being that, you know, if you have a lower score, we're inspecting more units you can get into compliance. Whereas when you have brand new complexes, whether it's right here, whether it's the new ones off Lamar, I mean, you guys can imagine we're not really gonna find violations there for a while, so we're not gonna dedicate resources, which was why the new program was adopted. Okay, great. All right. Thank you for that update. No problem. Any other questions comments? All right. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. Appreciate it. For sake of time here, we've got 4344 and 445 that were all reports that we got in our packet. Does anybody have any questions on any of those three items? Okay, then we'll move to discussion of committee meetings and I'll call upon Miss Capehart for finance and audit Thank you mayor today. We had Our presentation from our external auditor And so at your places you have lovely reading material our presentation from our external auditor. And so at your places, you have lovely reading material. So I'm sure it'll be very entertaining. But the good news is the audit was a very clean audit. They found one minor. I wouldn't even call it a discrepancy. It was put in fiscal year 2019, and I think it was supposed to have been put in fiscal year 2020, or maybe I have that backwards. And so that was just a moving of that accounting. So we had no questions. Grant Thornton did an excellent job again. He had very high praise for staff, particularly our internal auditor and department heads and city management for everything that they needed. They got a very timely and thorough response. And again, he said that's kind of the standard in Arlington and they've come to expect it. So very good report and it's all right there and black and white if you want to read through it at your leisure and Mr. Finley do you have anything to add to my report? No the mayor just coming short so we went quick didn't we Mr. Finley I'm sorry you had to run down here that fast I just hear in sport of Miss Cape Art today great well thank you Fendley. You are amazingly fast. There are anybody have any questions from Ms. Cape Arter, Mr. Fendley? Okay, thank you very much. Mr. Fendley, you can walk slowly back. Oh, we do have one. No, it's no. It's not for him, then. Okay, Mr. Fendley, thank you. It's not on that. Dr. Mr. Finley, thank you. It's not on that road. I actually did have a question on 4.5, but we speed it by a little quicker. Okay, well anyway, go right ahead. 4.5 gave us some data on MWBE spending and even with all the outreach efforts and everything that the city is trying to do, African-American businesses still are engaged at a level that's just, it's less than 1%. Okay, here is, let me just share this with you. We need to celebrate successes too. It has gone up to 24% and it is mainly Hispanic companies that have been getting that work. We need to work hard to find our African American companies that will provide the services so we can get it up. I know our chambers are trying to find those companies. We also have made an appeal to companies to look at our services to go out. But the Hispanic companies are going hard now. That is working, and it is not, you know, but however our women owned and our African American companies are not getting as much of that work. Mr. Cleveland, do you have anything to add to that? Yes, good afternoon. Mayor of City Council, Reginald Cleveland, I'll be a coordinator. As a such right now, at least for that particular quarter, yes, we're our winding down on a number of projects, but we still dealing with in some cases companies who are not being some of our larger projects, which is our, using our construction projects. So we're still diligently reaching out to companies on a number of projects. Now for the recent quarter and moving forward, we are starting to see a little more traction as far as company bidding, but again, it all ultimately means those companies winning the BITs or proposals. So there comes in the other part that we're still working on is companies being able to be competitively provide pricing or proposals that will get them to the finish line. As you're right, Dr. Odomusly, I mean we we need more African-American companies doing it. It's just I think we need more of them out there providing the services that we need is our basic problem. And where are we with the disparity report? Collector brought that up. Right now, they've recomplete it. Our consultant has gathered all of the contracting data and so we still should be in line to have a final recommendation made August, September of this year. You know, unfortunately we had to gather a lot of data for them. And so that, unfortunately, delayed the time as far as they'll make an recommendation, but otherwise, they are on track to meeting this one. Okay. Any other questions, Mr. Sutton?'m sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I Association to, I take them back. Because of the fact that we are doing more quotes now, I have seen a few of their members have submitted, responded to some of our smaller projects, but not necessarily our larger projects. Particularly, again, most of our major construction projects are used in our street projects. And so there lies in, we do that scenario that we don't have as many minority companies, particularly African Americans that I've seen actually bid those type of work. Now if it's more on the lines of facility construction, definitely there's a larger pool of firms and so you'll see more of them with respects to coming in potentially having opportunities coming in as subcontractors. How's the successful are they embedding for those particular contracts? So far right now I've seen at least with our recent, the fire station number one, we did have African-American firms who have submitted a proposal on that one. And we have more that start coming up. So I anticipate that there will be interest, especially with the active adult center project. So it's just a matter of really those firms coming to and really submitting a competitive proposal. So we don't know how many they've actually been awarded to them or if they have not had any awards unfortunately in African-Americans. Now they have some have they responded yes but not into the level or the numbers that we would have comfortable or easy to say large amount. Any other questions, comments? Okay, thank you. Thank you. Next we'll move to municipal policy, Dr. Fror Mars. Thank you, Mayor. The committee met today all but when member was present. We continue to our discussion from February 25th, regarding some issues with the Universal Development Code or the UDC regarding multi-family and some of our sizes as well as our parking. We went through a few issues for some foremost, we looked at revising the definition of independent senior living to say 55 years of age or older instead of our current definition which is 60. This is in line with the federal standard to make sure that we're allowing ourselves with the federal recommendations. Second thing we did was we revised the parking requirement for independent senior living. Currently we had one per unit and one per 100 square foot of common indoor space. We're finding many of them are coming to planning and zoning and then coming to council subsequently and saying that that was too much parking. So we moved to a 1.2 space per unit, which will allow for the accommodation of visitors in that calculation. And it's in line with our exigent and our cities surrounding us. The third thing we looked at was for multi-family developments. We were looking at revising the minimum square footage for two bedroom units. We decided on an 850 and again, staffed a wonderful job of presenting us with a comprehensive look at cities surrounding us as well as those of a like build. And so for the two bedroom unit, 850 square foot instead of a 900 square foot. Left the efficiency though, however, at 600 square foot because it was equivalent to our nearest neighbors and Left the one bedroom at 750 square foot Our currently our UDC is silent on the minimum unit size for three bedroom units So we added a minimum of a thousand square foot and with an additional 70 square foot per bedroom size over three bedrooms. And why 70? Because the international building code, 70 square foot is the minimum you can have for a bedroom size. So that's why we went with that. And then the last issue we looked at was about enclosed garage requirements. We decided currently to keep the enclosed garage requirement of minimum of 20% total, recommendations that we provided as a committee. And then once they have done their work, it will come back to council for a first reading on April 28th and a final reading on May 5th, if possible. I'd be happy to answer any questions or if I missed anything, please speak up committee members. Dr. Nenez. Just a, I don't know why I want to word this. A point of, I'm concerned about garages in multifamily units, specifically tax credit senior apartments. There was a discussion at the last planning and zoning, or February planning and zoning meeting, where a developer presented information to the Planning and Zoning Commission that if you do, if a developer qualifies for a senior tax credit, 9% tax credit property, that if they put garages in place, a senior tax credit, 9% tax credit property, that if they put garages in place, that they cannot discriminate amongst the people who live in the individual units, they can't charge for the garage space because they're not allowed to discriminate. Therefore, the developer had a concern that, depending on the number of garages that are required by the city, that it's an expense that's very difficult for them to recoup because they cannot charge individual apartments or individual units for the use of that garage space. So I want to make sure, or if there's the use of that garage space. So I want to make sure, or if there's an answer to that, but I want to make sure that our planners were aware of that concern and how that may impact the U.D. City. Dr. Myers. Dr. Nguyen, we did actually, that was the very example that we used to utilize this morning's committee discussion because the TDHC has changed that recommendation where you cannot charge a premium for garages. The case that is before us tonight is making an argument about how do the fairly and equitably provide those garages. There certainly a first come for serve. Planning and zoning made a recommendation that the developer could give it to the three bedroom apartments Certainly, there could be a lottery system so that is not a fundamental fairness question It is really a development question and certainly I'm seeing miss Opal shaking your head. Yes Is there anything you'd like to add to what I just said or have I adequately expressed it? Thank you miss Opal appreciate it. Thank you Gina Good afternoon mayor and council. This is Ginsey Dopal, planning director. Just wanted to add one more thing. Per the qualified allocation plan requirements, it also says that if you have more than the required number of spaces per local code, then those can be charged. But anything that is required by the city cannot be charged as a premium. So, and the case that we have tonight, they are providing the exact number of required spaces. So that's another reason they cannot charge. Thank you very much. Thank you, Ms. Dopo. Ms. Shepper. So Dr. Myers, a couple of questions. So, and I was absent, so I may have missed something here, but I thought the idea was to reduce the number of parking spaces. But we've instead increased them? No, we've left them alone. The original question had been, should we reduce that? And we decided as a committee to make a recommendation to leave the minimum at 20% for the garages. So. OK. All right. And that's fine. That's fine. We can talk a fly on that. You can help me better understand it. And then secondly, I thought the reason we didn't have three bedroom units mentioned when we adopted this whole senior living thing is we don't really want three bedroom units in senior living facilities. So if it I don't understand why we need to have a minimum unit size when we don't or we we shouldn't have three bedroom units in independent senior living facility. Let me take a shot at this. So the first recommendation was for senior to the age. The parking issues dealing with tax credit and multifamily, the minimum sizing is dealing with multifamily, not adults. So it's multifamily. So currently the UDC on multifamily standards have no minimum square foot requirement for a three bedroom. And so it was thought that if we were going to adjust the others that we should provide a minimum for three bedroom and then if they're going to build any others that they would have to add 70 square foot which is the minimum international bill and code requirement per room. Okay, all right, Thank you for that clarification. So I have Ms. Moly. A wide quick question of Gen C. So I know that when we're dealing with HUD housing and it's senior housing, which is 55 plus, that because it's federally funded, it cannot be changed to general. But if we have a senior project that's built as a senior project and they can't lease it, isn't that developer allowed then to lease it as general? To, I mean, just change the type of project it is or reclassify it? I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just, I'm just,lassify it? I'm not sure. I'm just concerned about if they ever wanted to would they have enough parking? I'm not clear on the question. Sorry. So if you're building like overture. Correct. And it has been slow leasing up. If they decide it and I believe they can because it's not federally funded to change that project so that it's general and not senior. If they have a much much lower parking standard, how would we address that in the future? So independent senior living is a separate land use per the unified development code. So if they want to change the project from an independent senior living to multi-family they will have to go through the whole process of resounding. Where that? And they would have to meet the requirements of multi-family. That was my question. It's okay, hard. Thank you, Mayor. And, Jens, to share with the rest of the council. Would you kind of give them the background of the other cities that we surveyed with regard to the garage issue as Dr. Nunez was asked about? So staff did a research on other multi-family projects in the Metroplex. What the current trends are. So we looked at projects in Far branch, we looked at projects in the skit, Las Calinas, Plano, all of these projects, multifamily projects do have enclosed garages. Many of the enclosed garages are now being as in the apartment building itself, the ground floor of it becomes the garages. The detached garage building was a trend 10 to 12 years ago. That's kind of now changed where the garages are now included inside the building itself. So that is something that all most of the projects in the Metroplex are including. And some of them are tax credit projects as well. Any other questions? Dr. Myers, anything else? Okay. All right, next we'll move to community and neighborhood development, Ms. Moise. So community and neighborhood development met this morning with all members present. Mindy Carmichael talked to us about the Housing Tax Credit Application Update. We have developments in Arlington that are still in consideration at the state level. We had three developments West Abram Senior Living, Arlington, Blue Daniel, departments in Gray Park, Villas, that received opposition letters from the state representative and are no longer a competitive. What really hurt us on this is that two of those, West Abram Senior Living and Arlington, Blue Daniel, if you look at this list, there's a cutoff line on this list. They were in this top portion of the list. So we essentially had a risk of losing those three projects. And so the companies have withdrawn them and they are no longer being considered. Kestrel on Cooper, which was number one, Melissa, before it and remains there. Received a letter of opposition, but later received a letter indicating no opposition, support or neutrality. So it is up to the state now whether to continue with Kestrel on Cooper. That was one that the committee really supported, Hannah supported, one that the committee really supported, Hannah supported, because we were tearing down some substandard commercial buildings along Collins and building, I believe it was 90 general apartments that 14 were market rents. So we're hoping we can salvage that one project, if not Arlington may miss this cycle on the housing. Anyway, the final scoring won't be available from the state until probably mid-summer, I think last year it was July. Secondly, the HUD 2020 to 24 consolidated plan was discussed. Mr. James Gilligan with J. Quad planning, brief the committee on the analysis of impediments to fair housing and spent a lot of time on this the Fair Housing Act, demographic data analysis, target areas and recommended actions to address impediments. We have a draft summary of this report now and this is coming out for a 30 day public comment on March 20, which is a couple days from now. So the documents will be available on the city's website through local newspapers and its city hall. Residents are encouraged to submit comments on this five-year plan. Although no action is required at this time, the committee will continue to review the plan and then in the next several committee meetings and we will take the plan, final version to the plan on May 15th, the plan goes to HUD. I want to take a moment just to say thank you to Darwin Wade, who's worked so hard on this and has met with the committee a number of times and helped us understand how this process works. Because again, this is a process we only go through every five years. And everyone on the committee was new. So it took some hand holding, but I felt really good about the questions that were asked and, oh, you were on the committee last year. Sorry, Dr. Myers. Last four years, all right. Well, for me, it was due and I've learned a great deal and I appreciate all of the great input from all of the committee members and the great questions. Thank you. Any questions from Ms. Moeys? Dr. Odom Wesley. I guess I have some concern about the process. And we talked about it briefly and why we got a letter of opposition on several of our projects. And going forward, I guess, what have we learned? How can we keep that from happening again? We actually, Mindy, is Mindy here? Yes. Mindy has really followed up closely on this and I think we have the answer to your question, but if she would come to the microphone and kind of tell us what she's gone through trying to verify for this particular state representative that he did in fact have the information. That's correct. Mindy Cochran, executive director of housing. The response we got from the representative's office was that they felt they hadn't been informed throughout the process. We had quite a big conversation with them, come to find out they had conversation, emails, correspondence, back and forth with the developers, beginning as early as November 26th, and they realized that they had overlooked some of that and regretted their error. And then just to point out, Ms. Cochran did send over what we were planning on doing ahead of time. They didn't want to wait till after we did it. And so we actually, she gave the best input we could beforehand. So the decision was made by the state representative and he did have the information. So every year I can already tell because we learned last year and we're learning more this year and we're getting you know We really if I'm and correct with I'm wrong we really just started participating in this program in 2017 So it's a complex program and I think we're still learning and I I think next year we will have a few things we'll do differently. We've tweaked our process every year in part to engage with the developers more and have them understand more what city council is looking for in these developments. Next year to their credit, the State Reps Office has asked to engage with us, sit down face-to-face meetings sometime during December so that they're fully informed by staff early on in the process. We're happy to do that. That's great. Thank you, Mending. Any other questions? Thank you, Ms. Moise. Next we'll move to environmental task force update, Ms. K. Partt. Thank you, Mayor. Environmental task force met yesterday. We covered a myriad of topics, including the tree ordinance, which is now part of our task as well. We've given staff a lot of feedback and asked for more clarification and recommendations. We also had a really good presentation on lead certification, what it really means, what it really costs, what you really get for it. So several of the deliverables will be bringing back to councilors from recommendations with how we deal with lead certification and what those costs are that are involved. And also we dealt with the natural environment, was one of our other topics. We had scheduled a gentleman from the Texas Parks and Wildlife who was going to go home and speak with us, but he was not able to do that. But Ray Rinchler from our animal services did come. And it was quite interesting. And I think the council will find it interesting as well as we talk more in depth at our strategic planning. But the animal services group has developed quite a GIS mapping process that you can go online and say, oh, I've seen a coyote in my neighborhood and you can go out there and say, oh, yeah, we've seen one back in March of 2014 in that particular neighborhood, whether it's a coyote, a bobcat, a possum, a skunk, or whatever. Ray gave us a great presentation about possums and how great they are. We even talked a citizen out of having him remove the poss possible once he told him how great they were. So it was fun, but more than fun, it was very, very, very informative. And I think it's helpful for us to understand wildlife in this urban environment. So we continue to work there and we're going to have a lot of good information delivered to the Council for even more robust discussion. Thank you, Miss Cape Art. Dr. Farah Myers. Yes, I'm sorry, in our least discussion. Miss Farah Myers, Dr. Farah Myers, I had a suggestion and I said, that's great. I'll let you offer up that suggestion to the Council. I meant to go back to her, so thank you. Thank you, Miss Cape Art. Just wanted to bring back a recommendation. We often get a lot of inquiries from our constituents about the ongoing construction projects for our various buildings that we're doing at any given time. And I know in some, like the library and some of our others, we've done time lapse photography or showing certain snapshots at certain times. And so one of the things that came up in our discussion is especially regarding, I think it was Miss Moise's questions regarding the new clubhouse at the Texas Rangers golf course. If we could have up online pictures put up of the status of buildings so that our constituents would be more informed about where things are in the process of completion. So that was the idea that came from the committee and we wanted to ask staff that that could be be able to be done. I think that sounds great is everybody in agreement and then of course Mr. Yovrton is that possible there? All right so good suggestion it's great. All right anything any other questions from Miss K-PART? Okay, thank you, Ms. K. Part. Next, we'll move to appointments to boards and commissions. Mr. Baskin. Thank you, Mayor. We have three appointments to boards and commissions. Okay, evening agenda items. Yes, Ms. K. Part. Tonight, on your evening agenda, we have an item for the monument for the service box. So this has been a project that I undertook about eight years ago and it's finally coming to fruition thanks to the generous donation and hard work of a lot of people in the community and one donor in particular. So if the council is happy with the location, it was finally chosen, which is out here in the plaza, and it's on the west end of the plaza where the boulders are. There will be two dogs, one for fire, one for police. You have to separate the dogs, and that there will also be an emblem for the police and the fire as well. And so if the council's happy with all of that I would hope for your approval this evening so we can go forward. Mr. Prowlis do you have anything to add? The only thing I was going to add is that thanks to all the donations for making this possible. It's all with donated funds. Yes, it's none of its city money. It all was donated. Yes, Mr. Dr. Barbara Odom West. I did have a question about the location. In front of City Hall, why not the police station or the animal services? We wanted to be more visible than that and you really can't. We were trying to find a location where it was jointly police and fire. That put it out on green oaks but that wasn't terribly visible. And it just didn't, it wasn't ill suited for the monuments. And so it was suggested by several people to put it out here in the plaza, particularly as we're doing the improvements and trying to make Main Street more walkable and to add kind of yet a different venue, but separate it from what's happening on the east end. And so it was kind of a natural environment for the dogs to be kind of on a boat or it's more natural than being on a pedestal,'s more natural than being a pedestal which is more formal. So quite frankly the sculptor who is local and has done many sculptors around town had presented that option to us. It certainly saved a great deal on costs because originally the cost was going to be $100,000 and we raised right at 60. So not having that bigger pedestal, which was going to be bronze, probably, which is a much more expensive thing, and to put it kind of more in a natural environment. So that's how the location came in. It was really kind of a collective discussion between police and fire and myself and with the sculptor himself. But thank you for the question. Okay, also on evening agenda items, I'd like to call upon Ms. Silesse to go over a couple of items that will be continued. I'm sure Jensi is probably, yeah, she's back there. Am I correct, Jensy, both zoning cases, the applicant has requested a continuance, is that correct? Which I think is great. A lot of our citizens would have trouble getting up here because of our compliance. So I think that is great on both ends there that they have requested those continuance. So we have no zoning cases tonight, right? Okay. Good. That's great for our citizens to know. And I know that you all been communicating that today to appreciate that. Okay, yes, Dr. Odomuslin. I also had a question on tonight's agenda, 8.12, where we're getting services for a phlebotomist for the police department. It talked about funding for a phlebotomist for the police department. It talked about funding for the phlebotomist at 70,000. No mention of supplies or spaces that included or chief Johnson. Our council will Johnson the phlebotomist services in the jail is to try to divert our officers from having to go to the hospital facilities to draw blood for DWI purchases. It's a not-to-excede contract to $70,000 that includes the philbotomist and any associated materials that are required to draw the samples in the facility. And we already have space for the vitamins. Yes, ma'am. We've been operating in a pilot environment for the last nine months for as many service hours that we could afford with the money that we've got. OK, OK, thank you. OK, any other questions about evening agenda items or comments? Okay, any other questions about evening agenda items or comments? Tonight we're going to of course have our emergency ordinance dealing with COVID-19 Realize that things are very fluid that continue to be fluid. So as we move through that and and you know policies have been changing almost every day at a national level there in addition to almost that way here with a with a local level. So As we move forward understand that we're gonna have to continue to be fluid and we may be have to be calling some emergency meetings here to continue to stay up with what we need to do next. And we do have the procedures set up to be able to handle that, including there to be able to have phone in type meetings there. I'd love to call upon Mr. Yeilverton to talk a little bit about our opportunity now because the governor has also given us ability here with flexibility on our public meetings. Mr. Yevrton. I may need Mr. Least to help a little bit, but I do believe there was some relaxing of the Open Meetings Act that the governor put out either last night or today. And it, more or less, let's us have telephone meetings for routine business. In the past, I think it had been interpreted to be primarily for emergency business only. So it may be as we look forward to our routine agendas that, at least for the next little while, our next meeting may be done via telephone. We have to work out the logistics to make sure that there's a public participation process there with a phone in kind of opportunity, but doing it just via kind of a conference call, as long as we have that phone in connection, we're working on the technology aspects of that and vendors who can provide that for us. So that's likely what you'll see for the next meeting on the 24th should we hold that. And then we don't meet again, it's not scheduled to meet again until April the 17th. So there's a little bit of a break after the next meeting unless we need to meet for an emergency purpose to validate an updated emergency declaration. Those by definition are usually good for seven days and then have to be reauthorized by the full body. Mr. Lee, do you have anything to add to that? No, the main distinction is you could do telephone conferences before, but you had to have a quorum physically present and you still had to allow the public to come. So everything the governor has done has been very beneficial in stopping the face to face to provide other alternatives that the act didn't allow All right is anybody else have anything on evening agenda items? Okay issues relative to city and textile projects Okay, and then projects. Okay and then wellness council. I'll call upon council member Odom Wesley there. You had a great idea here that was proposed before the virus but could be very beneficial to us here. Yeah I think I think it is quite timely for us to discuss establishing a wellness council for the city of Arlington. As we know, in this day in time, we have learned that your zip code is a stronger determinant of your health, your lifespan, than your genetic code. And there's something wrong with that. Your health status, your lifespan, your life expectancy shouldn't depend on where you live. So there's a lot of research out there now on how we can influence social and environmental determinants of health so that where you live does not dictate your health status. So I thought of the word wellness, because wellness is multi-dimensional. And we've talked about the quality of life of our residents, which means different things to different people. How can we elevate it? And I know that in order to elevate the quality of life, it takes a coordinated effort. It's going to take multiple agencies working together, the faith-based community, the business community, as well as the governmental entity and neighborhoods. So when you look at wellness, we're thinking about social wellness. Most people will think about physical, which is nutrition, activity, but also there's emotional wellness. We heard a presentation from the police today about the impact of mental health and mental health facilities and professionals and how that impacts our wellbeing. Environmental health, we've been talking about that. Spiritual, occupational, intellectual, these are all elements of wellness, along with physical and even financial wellness. All of that contributes to the quality of life. When I first thought about this, I thought the solution to address all of it and coordinate all of these resources was to seek the Blue Zones designation. And I did visit with the executive director of the Fort Worth Blue Zones project. And I think, let's see, Jennifer, Ms. Wickman provided me with some information. It was discussed by City Council in 2017. And the cost is what, I guess us from going going forward on that. So maybe I'd say some more around 10 to 15 million was the cost. I could. It might have been even more than that. I don't know. But because we loved it. We really did like it. Go ahead. It's a it's a good comprehensive way to address all of these wellness components and to look at elevating the quality of life for all of our residents, but it doesn't have to be blue zones. And we're Arlington. We can create something that would be customized just for our citizens, just for our city, and bringing all these components. And I'm not sure how complex it will get. It may just be a matter of coordinating the resources we already have. We've got 211, but a couple of weeks ago, we heard a presentation from the Disabilities Council that 211 didn't have the information that they needed. They didn't have enough information on local resources. So it may be something as simple as just making information that they needed. They didn't have enough information on local resources. So it may be something as simple as just making accessible the resources we already have in place. And as our population ages, we need to look at healthy aging, how do we help our seniors, and all of the components. Let me just tell you a quick story. I know it's going to take a village to elevate the quality of health. Not any one thing is going to make the difference. It has to be a coordinated effort, all of those things. I learned a lot when I volunteered with the United Way for 16 years, but there's one project in particular that just left it indelible, impression on me. We were trying to eliminate childhood obesity and that was after we gave up with on the adults because we decided behavior modification was just too difficult. We couldn't tackle it. Maybe we could help the children. So we studied children for five years, started with third grade, we identified a high-risk elementary school here in Arlington. Got the third graders, menus changed in the school cafeteria. We talked them about nutrition and making healthy choices. Then we realized we had to bring the family in. Because when they went home, they didn't have those same opportunities. So we had to teach families. We got 300 bicycles donated for these third graders. Then you realize they didn't have a riding trail. They didn't have sidewalks. They didn't have a park in their neighborhood to ride the bicycles. So you see how you have to bring all those components together. And even though we taught nutrition, they didn't have a grocery store in their neighborhood where they could go make nutritious purchases. So it's going to take a coordinated effort. And my thinking is that if we had a wellness council and my thought is citizens participate on it, just like all of our other council appointed committees and councils and task forces. And look at a holistic approach to elevating the quality of life and get this wellness council to address all of these issues and come forth with some recommendations. And with the COVID virus, I mean, that's just another we would have had a structure in place to respond to a pandemic of this nature. So I'm just presenting it for the council to consider and think about it and see if that's something we want to move forward on and just what do you think? I think it'd be great to explore it has all kinds of I think What the task is or task would be very important on how to explore it has all kinds. I think what the task is or task would be very important on how to analyze it. We also have looked at a lot of different fitness programs. We have nutrition, diet and then of course our health care providers here in town are usually very anxious to help and be a part. I think we could really get a lot of great partners there and also our educational institutions there with it without a doubt. So it would be another layer and that we could have to help with wellness. But what does Council's thought? Mr. Shefford. I think it's an excellent idea, but to your point, I think we need to figure out what problem it is we're trying to solve. I think sort of along the lines of adult obesity, if we make the task too enormous, then I think it's a fruitless task that we've asked the council to do. And I don't know how we arrive at what problem it is we're trying to solve, but I think it's a great idea if we could start with something that's solvable and sort of work up from there maybe the council along with other partners helps us figure out what role the city could play in this problem. You mentioned in your example no parks, no riding trails. You know, and so there, I think there would be things that the city could do if resources were available and there are other things that the city can't do. We can't fix a grocery store not being, again, going back to your example. We certainly help try to figure that out. But so I think it's a great idea, as long as we make the task something that's achievable by the council and not just turn nine people loose to go solve this giant, giant, unsolvable problem. Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem. Yes. So let me make a few comments. How many of you know what a blue zone is? What is a blue zone? And who does? So you know. So it ended up costing somewhere around $40 million. And I spoke with Berkeley, Burdan, when this topic came up, who's the CEO of THR. Initially, when the blue zones were initiated over for Earth, the initial seed money was in the range of one to two million dollars. And the idea was that it would, that entrepreneurship and that the local community would then fund the difference. It didn't happen. And because of that, because it was a difficult, nebulous type of a project. THR ultimately ended up committing $40 million of its own corporate money to that effort and it had a significant amount of success. The goal is to increase the lifespan of the people that live in those particular zip codes. And the way you do that is you really have to go into that particular neighborhood and you have to figure out, okay, what are the needs? And you identify food deserts. You identify loneliness. You identify all those social and health issues that you can attack and improve and how you involve elderly people in the community. That takes a significant financial commitment in order to do it. It can be done. It has been done. Fort Worth has done it. But it takes a significant financial effort. I communicated to staff, you know, just because THR is unwilling to find another effort because I asked and the answer was a resounding no. It doesn't mean that another healthcare system in the community might not think that that's a really good public relations move. So that requires part of this committee, part of this exploration. Being able to sit down in a room and say why don't we approach Baylor and say wow if they invest a significant amount of funds they're gonna get a lot of public goodwill. Just like THR got a lot of public goodwill. And so it's a thought. So I'm willing to explore the process, Barbara. And it would take someone, I think, coming to talk to us, whoever that committee is. I think we ought to meet first on our own. What is it that we're trying to accomplish? Second, then ask for someone who, ask of Luzon representative to come in and give a presentation. And then third, market it to those people who might be able to help fund us. Because once it's up and running, it needs to be somewhat self-sustaining. That is a, could be a budgetary line item for the city that we might be able to afford going forward. But once you set up certain things they are self-sustaining and we might be able to find sources of funding grant money to continue those things. So I'm willing to take the journey with you. But you're right. We need to meet first and decide exactly what we want to do. Ms. K. Park. Thank you, Mayor Putnam. So back in the day, we had David Tessmer come and talk to us about Blue Sons. And I don't remember who the other person was. We did it as strategic planning meeting. And while it was a great concept, and we talked to some people of Fort Worth who were doing it at the time, I think a council member, Dr. Nunez, but I don't remember who. We clearly did not proceed with that. It was a significant financial hit to the budget. And while David was great to come present, he didn't offer to fund it in Arlington, right? And we didn't expect that he would. But more than that, I think any time that we can create a more healthy environment for our citizens within reason we ought to do that. But it's not going to happen on my watch, but it's going to happen on the watch of the rest of you that you're going to have some extremely difficult decisions you're going to have to make as an outfall of the virus. And there may be far more pressing needs that you're going to have to deal with. And so while proving up the concept, I think it's the first good move, I don't know that you're going to be able to take much action on it within the next 12 months or maybe longer because you've got a huge outfall. I mean, we didn't give pay raises for two or three years. We could only give merit raises. We close libraries. We close swimming pools. All of that in sales tax went in the dumper and we're already seeing it right which is all the more reason I think We need to really be out there promoting we need that last quarter cent Not not to help improve but to maintain So I think that's critical and that's those are difficult challenges each of you will face. Robert and I have been through it and it was ugly and it was heartbreaking and but we got through it and where we could, we hired people back. I don't think we actually laid off that many but we did lose some. So, some. But before you go, two had long into this really good idea. You know, you might need to pull back and reflect about what your challenges are, because we've had a really good ride for the last six years, but it's coming to a screeching halt, just for Arlington, but across the nation, just like it did after 9-11 and 08. We're going to need to adjourn this meeting. We are out of time here and we've got to be back at 630 so we will adjourn this meeting and we'll come back it. In fact is I think we probably can we do that 645? You can move the light. Yeah, okay. Probably is going to be 645. And are we meeting here or down there? Downstairs. Downstairs. So we're staying the same downstairs. Okay. Thank you very much.