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 next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. 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 hope everybody had a good weekend. I would be remiss. Well, hello everybody. I hope everybody had a good weekend. I would be remiss if before we go into executive session, if I didn't acknowledge the celebrity presence here today. Mr. Buie Hogg. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Mr. Buie Hogg. I am a little bit disappointed that you didn't wear that to pay to counsel today. It could be a permanent hairstyle of this. Well, thank you for supporting our community out there. And if you can't see, the back says Arlington Jail with a lot of rhinestones and many people proposed those were our new jail costumes. So I don't know if that's in the budget, but rhinestones were requested tray in the Jail. So we see. So you'll definitely want to see some. Yeah, we'll go ahead and call the city council session to order now that we've started it off right. It is 12, 20 on January the 28th. We're gonna go ahead and go into a executive closed session pursuant to VTCA Government Code Chapter 551.071.072 and 087. you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you 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 next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. 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I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. I'm going to go to the next room. 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. We're going to move on down to 3.1 on a budget update. Thanks, Mayor and members of the council. I've got a pretty lengthy update for you today. So I'm going to just jump right in and get things going. We've got this information for you, uploaded into your gendermanager so you can follow it, and all of that. But, you know, there's a lot of challenging news out there, some things that are some good news and some challenging news, but we're going to need everyone's collected help. You're helped out of the public to kind of help navigate the things that we're working through. And, you know, as guess I would joke with folks, my God, the suggestion box is open. So we need everybody's collective ideas. You know, we started on this challenge. Last November, as we kind of had our fall planning retreat, we kind of knew based on how we ended fiscal 24 that there were going to be some challenges. So we started foreshadowing that and we got a few questions from you all during that time. So I want to try to provide a little bit of response but also kind of some follow up on that. So one of the questions had to do with was kind of the venues and events and how revenues from venues and events are going to help us kind of over the hump. So we've got a few pieces of data here to kind of highlight. This is a trend line as it relates, or bar chart as it relates to showing hotel occupancy tax revenue history. And it's divided into two pieces. Kind of the darker blue is the traditional 7% city tax. And the lighter blue is the 2% that's attributable to stadiums right so when you hear a little bit about well how are the stadiums doing and kind of what's the you know how's the performance etc you can just really go in here and you can point at a couple things right here. Let me get a better color. Here's when AT&T Stadium opened, right? So it was starting to kind of improve a little bit in this area, but really very flat for the decade before, the 15 years before. Globalife opened in this window, of course, against headwinds of COVID. But as that quickly rebounded, you see a new trajectory established not only in the growth of hotel occupancy tax, but in the growth of that that's generated by the venues, right, which are indications, not of what, you know, Indie cars worth or what FIFA's worth or any of those things, but it's an indication of kind of how it's working systematically, right? So to me that was one way to show you all a little bit about how the clear trajectory that has changed in that way. And if that wasn't enough, I thought there's another way to show this. It's also equally as interesting on sales tax receipts. If you will go with me on kind of how this kind of will uncoil a little bit. Similar story, let's look at kind of pre-18t stadium. And what we're looking here are some lines that are one, three, and five year moving averages over a decade, 15, actually I think pending about 10 to 15 years in this area. You see a very kind of flat deal. Not a lot of growth here. So then what happens? Well, this is our trajectory. Left to our own devices. This is where things were headed. In the pre-AT&T stadium world, you can see the trajectory, how the growth was pretty modest. Then in 2009, AT&T opens. And you start to see kind of a notable inflection point, all right, a little climb up from that. You have to remember AT&T also opened in a really bad time coming out of the O809 housing crisis. And there was a lot of serious financial issues. But nonetheless, you can see a really clear increment that's identified in this area that's a change from the trajectory that we were on. But even when you factor that in, you kind of take a look and say, okay, well now what's our trajectory? You can kind of see how it tilted up, all right? So then we take a look at, well, okay, well now, globe life and the new Convention Center and other things going, how's that helping us? Well, again, that all happened kind of May of 2020, COVID year, and you see the COVID dip, but then you also see a really strong COVID rebound and a really strong economic performance that are driven at least anecdotally from the things that are going on in our community. This incremental revenue is what's being driven by venues and events in town. It's not exclusive, but there are clear inflection points in here that demonstrate that. So when you look at it in summary, kind of before AT&T stating we were averaging around a 2.7% sales tax growth after that since it's about doubled 5.3% annual growth. Those are dollars that we now have to invest and to put back into our economy and in the things that we do. So logically, well what did we do with the money? Because I get that question a lot when I go out and speak to rotary or things like that. Well, what did you do with the money? Well, as you saw, incrementally grows. Every year at incrementally grows, it's put into the budget. It's put into the budget every year. So when you look back over the trend of what we did since 2009, so I'm just going to take that same window. And so, okay, since that time, we've added 91 police officers, 172 firefighters. We opened fire station 17, a new downtown library, two new rec centers, constructed 65 lane miles of streets, maintained another 3,000 lane miles of streets, plus more, plus more, plus more CPI and inflation on contracts, keeping up with wages for our employees and a competitive world. Those things are all collected every year and appropriated every year. It's not like we have an event piggy bank over on the side that we kind of put money into and out of, right? It's a, it kind of goes with that flow. And so all of these things that we've done are all exactly why we've been in the business is to grow our revenue so that we can provide services back to our residents that they expect. And that's where the money has gone is back into services. So as we take a look at some other feedback where we see from the council, you all have talked to us about looking at some, some of the administrative areas, Ms. Boxon, in particular, talked about some of the overlap, this perceived overlap of administrative analysts or analyst type functions. And we are going to definitely take a look at that to make sure that there's not any redundancies that aren't necessary. I would tell you that generally speaking, we treat our business units in a very decentralized way. If you were to compare our finance department and our budget office in particular to that of City of Dallas, for example, you would say a very stark difference in the level of staffing because ours has kind of got a central piece, but then it's got a lot of embedded pieces out in the department. So you use a smaller decentralized leadership group with those that are embedded in the department to kind of achieve similar goals. So on the surface, it looks like well, why does that department need this and this and this? And it's because otherwise you'd kind of pull them out, you rotate it up to the overall overhead. And maybe you could, maybe you could get rid of a couple of positions and we we'll evaluate that, but that's why you've seen and evolved the way you have is in that way. We're a, you know, as a city, you know, we're not a big company like a Coca-Cola because you just have bottles and water and syrup. Really more like a general electric. We've got washing machines, nuclear subs, insurance policies, we've got very disparate businesses. With the only commonalities that we exist to serve our residents, right, in the most effective way. So that decentralized approach has really worked well because of the disparity of the businesses that are out there as opposed to be one very wrote, very routine kind of system. And then, so we're gonna explore those and look for some redundancy and overlaps and see if we can identify some. And then we're also going to really go in as best we can on leveraging some of the new AI tools that are coming out. You know, just emerging tech. I mean, it's a thing that's hopefully going to improve productivity and in some areas that we can find some savings we will. I got an email from a staffer just a little earlier. For example, there's a very long and lengthy report that got generated and they decided to upload. some savings we will. I got an email from a staffer just a little earlier. For example, there's a very long and lengthy report that got generated and they decided to upload it into an AI tool and have it spit back out in a summary format in a page. And I'm like, oh, that's great. It's very helpful. And they spent less than five minutes doing that, right? Wish I had a note, get it to a new yesterday. so I didn't waste an hour reading it all last night. But anyway, all this to build into kind of what we're working on for the budget. So I'm going to an hour reading it all last night, but Anyway, all this to build into kind of what we're working on for the budget So I'm gonna talk to you about several things these these budgets We're gonna have it's gonna get a little confusing so if I get confusing let me know We're gonna be talking about some fiscal 24 some fiscal 25 some fiscal 26 issues and they're all different but related So I want to talk to you a little bit about that. So first, you know, when we start talking about proposing our budget, we always look at the 25 as built off some historical analysis out of 24. 26 is going to be based on performance out of 25. And we look at things like trend history and economic conditions. We take very conservative of approach and we target our investments in ways to do it. We've shown you historically very good, I think performance data, and instead of going through all that today to save some time for those that are interested, I'd tell you to look down here on this stuff, and now we've got a ton of information that shows you our favorable tax policy of how it compares senior exemptions, homestead exemptions, tax rates, how it compares per capita performance on various things. So I'm sitting going through all those. I'm just going to refer to them there for everybody to go look at and research for themselves, but you're going to find a very well performing organization and a one that has a very favorable tax policy for its citizens and the data on that is clear. But as we look forward to some of the challenges we're going on in 25, 6, and 7, I get questions like, well, what happened? How did you mess the budget up? Or couldn't you have anticipated these kinds of and I want to kind of go through all this and let you know kind of how it all how it all builds. There's really fundamentally three issues that we're managing through in this window. One is the American Rescue Plan dollars. I'll talk a little bit each of these separately to a senior tax freeze, which is part of that favorable tax policy. And then the last three bullets there are all connected to kind of strategic changes, structural changes that the Turner and the Paisal District has undertaken that effects are tax-based. And so we'll dig a little deeper on each one of these. So first, as it relates to the ARPA Rescue Funding, you all know it was a a boy, what a lifeline when it came out, $81 million of ability to restore services to target investments to make some things happen that we were going to really have a hard time re-bounding out of COVID. One of the things that we did as we restored services, we also expand strategically some public safety assets. And we took a little bit of a risk that's based on what's happened most recently. Gonna come back and buy it a little bit. And that is putting a recurring expense out of one-time dollars. The grant is getting ready to run out, right? So we had a phase plan. This was gonna be a three to four four year phase in. And it was working great. Right until this last year when the structural change has occurred, which causes a problem on the back end of this. So we have to adjust that a little bit. But we will essentially be complete with ARPA funding in 2026. There is one last tranche of absorption, which is this $3.8 million worth of expenditures. We grew $15 million worth of restoration and expanded services for public safety, significant investments, particularly in police and fire. And as we kind of incrementally build that into the base budget so that we can pay for it going forward, that's how we've done it. You see it feather in. You know year one we did that, year two we did this, year three, year four and then we're done. So it's a little bit of a catch up to smooth out those grant dollars has been kind of part of the impact last year and this year in particular as these changes with the appraisal process have have impacted. Other piece has to do with the senior tax freeze. This is part of that favorable tax policy I was talking about. This was approved back in I think 20 2004 or 5. Subject to the voters very handily approved. And of course in the beginning it was not a very significant amount. In fact, I think the first year it might have been like $60,000 or $100,000. Something very, very modest. And now it's three and a half million that came out of the FY 25 budget. And you can see the trajectory. And with the favorable tax policy that we have, 20% if you're a senior 20% homestead right off the top a $60,000 senior exemption and then a senior tax freeze. So it's a very favorable tax policy for our seniors. The senior tax freeze though it's voted in it's irrevocable once it's once it's done it's done and so this is this is not not knowing knowing you're an assumption, it's certainly just a variable. We have to do it, it's just a matter of kind of what the level was going to be and you can see that trajectory. So just looking at it from even 2015 there it was 500,000, 8,518 and now it's 3.5, a five over 500% increase just in the last decade as our population has aged and those that helped build this community you're now getting relief from that, right? So absorbing the senior tax freeze, $3.5 million of loss revenue last year, 3.3 the year before, those are real dollars, right? Those are real dollars that shift around in your budget and how you absorb them. So that's an important factor to think about. And then the other one to pay attention to is how our city is aging because this area that I've bracketed, these are our seniors are, those are everybody above that's kind of subject to the freeze, or I guess actually right along here at 65. So a lot of people headed that direction. So I'm a little worried. The finance people tell me not to be worried about it so much. They think that's going to slow down a little bit this year based on what their analysis is saying. But I'm nonetheless, I'm still a little worried about how fast that is going to grow. So all that said, a lot of very favorable things, this chart I like showing because you all as a council have elected over the years to do a number of things, homestead exemptions, disabled exemptions, senior exemptions, tax rate reductions. And last year we granted the most tax relief on an annual basis that we ever had over $80 million that would have otherwise flowed into our budget because of your choices. It stayed with taxpayers. And we managed with less and they kept more, right? That's how it's supposed to work, right? And it's a successful city. You grow your tax base that relieves the tax burden. But at the same time, I also understand that any tax dollar is a tax burden, right? And so we're always going to strive for that efficiency and to do to do better. So that leads us a little bit to some of the things that are going on that are kind of a man-made challenge that has has occurred. When you look at the overall history, this average is out around 4%. had some bad years back after 0809 had the COVID bad year and then we had some really great years as it rebounded there between the teens and early 20s but where we're at today this last year the budget we adopted was 5.3% growth and where we project with high degree of confidence because we know based on the appraisal plan a large amount of the base is frozen. So we can really focus on these numbers right here for fiscal 26 and fiscal 27. So if this year was difficult, it's going to get a little more difficult here in the next couple of years. So all of this makes you ask questions, right? And you start looking at that, I like the geeky city manager does, and I drive the staff crazy. Can you get me something that looks like this? Can you tell me this? And so they do. They bring me back interesting stuff. Here's some interesting stuff. In the region, 16 county region, but the four most populist, we take a look at how things are going. And in 2025, we felt a change, right? We felt it here. Terrent county down 0.6% on the appraised value, but yeah, Dallas County, Denton County, Colin County averaged 10% up. Well, you heard the appraiser here a month or two ago. This is all an opinion. It's an educated opinion. It's an educated guess. They all follow professional standards, they do the same things, but in this case, Tarrant County came up with a different result than the other appraisal areas. So it's curious, it makes you look at the challenges that we have and again look deeper, what else is going on, right? So we ask more questions, and you start taking a look at a protest data, Don't get me wrong. We want people to protest their data. There's not anybody here who should pay a dollar more than what the state approved amounts suggest or the state approved processes suggest. But we want to make sure that it's all fair and level and equitable across the way. What's interesting here is you'll take a note of a couple of things. In 24 and 25, tax-based in Terrick County starts to flatten out. That's what the orange is, is the residential market. Starts to flatten out after a really good deal. And then you see the amount of loss that has occurred based on the changes. Well, if you average this out, 1% looks like the norm getting COVID in 2020 was a bad year. But in the last two years, and this past year, we are worse than the COVID performance, even though economically you would say there was plenty of activity, right? It was not certainly a COVID year by comparison. This upward trajectory right here, off of a historical norm, when I say how do you prepare a budget, you prepare it off historical norms. You look at history as an indicator of the future. But when you have such a dislocated variable, it causes these kinds of challenges that you're following that we're dealing with. So why do we see some of this out here? I mean, people should protest when they don't think it's fair, it's right. We also got feedback that, well, it's just good business. Especially if you're in a commercial property owner or multi-family property owner, it's just good business. You should protest. And that's a lot of what you see is a little bit of the, in the commercial areas, a little bit of the role of the dice, you know, to kind of see what we can do. And I'll show you some more about that here in just a second. But every dollar that shifted from one account to another account, one account wins and another account loses, right? Because it's all about how it all moves around. So, tax levy is a similar chart, loss of levy, percent loss, the last two years, notably different. So it just keeps you asking, tell me more, why is this doing what's going on? So we kept digging and you keep digging some more. So let's take a look at what the protest activity was. And I'm just going to point you to a couple of areas. And these aren't the protests where you kind of just do it online. These are the ones where you got serious. You like talked about a lawyer, you talked about some, you talked about going to ARB board, et cetera. And the things I want to point to here are multi-family and commercial, in particularly, notably stand out as it relates to the pattern here. And the feedback that we receive from the appraisal staff is, well, why is it that way? It's good for business. It's good business, right? That's what you should expect people to do is to try to save costs because the same way, we try to lower costs. They try to lower costs to the consumer. It's just lower your cost. Okay, hear it? I understand it. Let's keep digging. is going on here. So let's take a look at those accounts and just look more detailed about multi-family and commercial accounts so we had 218 Here and we had 172 here These are the top 10 top 10 accounts so in the multi-family area we were talking about this a little earlier in committee. We had one account initially get proposed at $59.6 that finished at $41. Down $18.5 million. One came in at $90 that finished at $73.7 million down $17.5 million. So on and so forth. You can see those top 10 all are well over, you know, averaging $10 million of lost value because it was good business for them to go in and protest their value to get it the lowest possible cost. On the commercial side, you see a similar effect. One large customer, 127 million, it went down 11 million but in 127 million, that's not a huge amount. It's a 7% or so, so it's not huge, but in the dollar amount those are real dollars. And you can see on the commercial accounts how they kind of phase down. The other thing I really want to point out too, this is something we've talked, and been talking with Mindy in our housing area, of the multifamily which is not even in this list. There's also 40 multifamily properties throughout the city that has a tax exempt status. A lot of those are at the university. Some of those are kind of nonprofit chodotip things. Some we've been involved with with housing finance corporation, but that represents a lost value of over $400 million, which is about $2.5 million of lost property tax revenue that would otherwise be there. So again, all kind of comes together and it's something that we have to continue to watch, particularly as we've got a staff report later on where we're going to talk about out of area housing finance corporations doing things that one account that's in that report is over $400,000 worth of lost revenue to our taxpayers. So it's a complex issue, but that's why I try to dig a little deeper and be curious. And let's pull out the data. Let's see if we can't tell the story here a little bit and understand it. So let's keep looking. So especially when you're preparing a budget, the green chart or the green line is 10-year rolling average. That's a really stable history to based on, right? Because when you pay your taxes, you mostly pay it what in December and January. So that's going to be the peak. Most people do. So we got a little less conservative. Let's look at a five-year rolling average and you see it plopped down a little bit. So five to ten would seem to be a pretty conservative thing to predict off of, and then the blue line is what happened last year. That's really kind of a figuratively, the rug being pulled out from under the process of a stable history that structurally changed, and you can't adapt that quickly. You can't adapt. So that's what we're doing now, and that's what we're working through this process as it is. And you can just see the information very, very clearly. So we essentially have a three year property tax freeze on residential property in Tarrant County. They froze this year's activity to keep it the same as last and then adopted a new plan which says, we won't re-apprise for two years. So that's part of what's out there that we're dealing with. The next appraisal will occur in January 1st to 2027, but as you all also know, every property account is subject to a 10% cap. So while it's being kept down artificially for a couple of years, three years, when it starts to bounce back up, it'll be kept down by that 10% cap. So even when it starts to rebound, that it rebound at a slower pace, right? It'll be really a flat future looking out as opposed to one that's really more market resilient, more indicative of how market performance is. It really gives people a false sense of strength or less strength depending on how things are going. You know, on the one hand, in a bad economy, having frozen taxes would be a bad thing, right? Here, it a hot market freezing taxes is a good thing. So we have to we have to watch all of that So I talked a little bit about things that have changed protests and the lawsuit data clearly has changed and based on that change what we saw this year and it, and it's complicating our fiscal 25 budget, our current budget, is complicated by how we finished 2024 because off of that history, we lost $1 billion more in value, which is about 7 million property tax revenue that we came shorter on. So we really struggled to make it to the end of the year. Last year, through making reductions and all that to make it work. But when you adopt a 25 budget on a 24 number that's lower, we adopted it at a higher amount. So now we have to go in and lower the 25 to get down to that newly established base. So it compounds itself. And so we're working through that. And again, as I said, there won't be any adjustments for two years. And so when we talked back in November, we had estimated a gap, budget gap of around $15.5 million. That's been updated now to be more like $21.5 million that we're solving for. Between for fiscal 26 is the issue that we're solving for. So let's talk about that. All these kind of efforts are really an effort to reduce our revenue by design. And then as you do that, it forces a reduced expenditure to match the lower revenue. And as you have a reduced expenditure, you have to do that through reduced services, reduce employees, and there's other benefits that come back to our residents. And so the art of the deal for us is to figure out how you turn that down, how you lower it in a way that's not disruptive to the workforce and to the services of our citizens, right? Because that's what we're in the business for. And the grassroots front line we're there. So structural changes like what we're experiencing requires a structural response, not a temporary band-aid type of response, so you have to kind of match it for what it is. And so that means that as we talk about some of the things about to address, we're going to lead ourselves to candidly some necessary endings and some of the services that we have to provide. And I'm not going to tell you that we're going to pick the lowest performing, you know, what it's just like some things that we're doing really good work in. We're not going to be able to do because we have to match what we're doing, right, with the revenues that we're going to pull in. And so we'll need to have good honest conversations about which areas of work are not as essential. Good work, great work, Maybe not as essential to meet the needs of what we need to do. So when I talk about essentials, again, my curiosity, always hear folks say, well, public safety, police and fire, the other thing, just fix the streets, right? I hear you, we spent in this current budget proposed proposed or the one that we're in now 138.6 million police 73 on fire and 77 on streets. Put it in context. We pulled in 196 where we project to on property taxes and 123 on sales tax for 319. Which basically means that if you pay for police firing streets, you have $30 million left to run the rest of the city. Code compliance, finance, HR, parks, libraries, and that is not a realistic outcome, right? You can't do that. You can't run the rest of the city on $30 million. So it requires us to be thoughtful and methodical and have structural solutions that we feel good about. And that's what we started back in November. And we're gonna continue a little bit today, but we won't finish until September, right? We're gonna iterate on this over the course of the year while again, the suggestion box remains open. So a few things that really at a high level, back of a napkin kind of area, when we say $21 million challenge, kind of what's what's factor in all that, we've done a few things. Very conservative sales tax growth, and then those very conservative property tax growth that we expect, really shrinking the revenue. I talked a little bit about ARPA. I already hit that. We do still have a 3% compensation adjustment plugged in for the out years. We have, for example, our last year of active adult sustainable funding that's in here. We've got some grants for COPS grants. We have to continue to fund. We have a new electric contract that we're going to have to absorb because our nine year really good deal is about to end. We've got to keep up with reserves. This is something we're going to talk about in a minute, but every new dollar you've got to put one dollar aside if you're going to stay at 20 percent. You know, five dollars requires another dollar for reserve in order to keep our fiscal policies right. And then that property loss that I talked about, the $6 million, it says right there. All of these factors just on a back of an applicant kind of way leads you to that $21 million challenge that we're addressing. So as a quick reminder, the current budget there we in, we already have started the budget cutting. $5.8 million in base year savings was recrued this year. A lot of it was in the health area. We also had some departmental reductions. We eliminated 22 positions as well as a legacy IT system and broke out the airport into its own enterprise fund so it would sustain its own operations and would not have to compete for other general fund dollars. Those were all part of what we did the balance this year's budget at $5.8 million. The challenge we've got now is because we've finished the year so much lower than we expected based on that protest that I showed you earlier, we're probably looking for another $6 to $8 million to balance this year's budget, about double what we thought it was going to need to be done at. We've done, started to take a few actions. We've requested a tomorrow foundation contribution for clean corridor trucks. We've closed out the ARPA grant to pull in some one-time money. Chief Stedom has started early, a hazmat fee implementation for accident recovery. We've made a decision to not advance fund a new convention center. We had actually started a process to kind of try to, like we like to do some, like to pay things off early. In this case, it's probably gonna not work on paying it off early. I'm gonna go ahead and keep the traditional payment plan and go ahead and slide that dollar till the next year. And then we've gotta take a look at some of our grants and public safety hiring timing as it relates. We'll make it clear, we're gonna continue to hire, we're gonna continue to fill. But we're gonna need to look at doing it at a slower pace than what we have been up to. And so to show you what I mean specifically about that, this is an interesting chart that we monitor the police staffing on. One of the things always here, hire more cops. We do. We hire more cops, constantly hiring more cops. And we did a really good job at that this past year, a huge uptick in our staffing. And I'm proud that we were able to do that. And I would wanna continue to sustain that, but given what we're dealing with now, I think what we have to do is we have to let this start to fall back to the norm, right? We're not gonna cut people, we're not gonna lay anybody off, but we have to not fill as quickly as we have been and let this fall back to the norm trajectory that we're on, which was an upward trajectory, upward hiring trajectory, but we can't sustain this gap right here with the conditions that we're challenged with as an example. So where does that lead us for 26? Those are 25 strategies, what we're dealing with right now at this moment. And by the way, on that policing, I'm hoping we go back. This line here will toggle based on performance of the organization. And if we see that we're doing a little better than we can, we'll flatten that out. If we're doing a little worse, we'll have to incline it some more. And I got some data later this morning that would indicate we might be able to go out a little flatter on this than what we had anticipated, but it's just calibration, right, based on activity. So for 26, as we prepare to solve the $21 million problem, the overall strategy is kind of multiple-faced, multiple layers. We're looking at city-wide efforts. We're looking at different kinds of financial restructuring, different kinds of departmental reductions, different kind of fee adjustments and revenue enhancements to the use of reserves, and also preparing for furlough and rift procedures if those are required. This should look really familiar. It's a very similar plan that we laid out when we went through COVID. We added one layer here, which was around the revenue fee adjustments. So that one's a little different. Otherwise, this is the exact thing we did to work through in a very conservative and proactive way on managing our costs with COVID. So when we met back in November, we identified about $3.8 million worth of savings towards what was then a $15 million problem. We've updated this to show it's larger, but we started at the. You know last year we deleted the code enforcement, Code Compliance Director Job. We deleted vacant city manager, deputy city manager job. We eliminated vacant deputy chief position and we looked at developing a short-term strategy that's different than we've historically done on how we're managing our capital program. So that's how we started. It was kind of a good down payment. Some some easy win trajectory kinds of things. So now where do we go? Following my chart, those one through through five or six items, we just start breaking down some newly identified areas that I want to get your attention and reaction to. I'm going to look at right sizing and standardizing fleet. Fewer vehicles, a lower mileage car is getting out of the fleet. Standardizing some of the police fleet in ways where we minimize some of the some of the upfit. There's still a lot of upfit that's required but standardizing it. Looking at leasing of vehicles instead of acquiring vehicles. As an example, consolidating utility locates, we have people in IT, water, maybe one other area that are doing all that. So we're gonna look at a consolidation effort to our Sydney One group out. For that, also looking to consider converting to city holidays to PTO, which would let us reduce over time that's required during those times, all right, and I would be thinking mostly like presence day and Passover. Those days the city is closed when the city is closed. Everybody who's working those days are making time and a half. So in this way what we would do is say let's go straight times, let's go and open the city back up. Let's reduce to holidays when we're very competitive in the pay area about holidays. So citizens get more service. We get back to some savings as it relates to those kinds of cost. And it's not inconsequential. It's almost half a million dollars worth of savings that are there. So that's the kind of thing that we're thinking about in the phase, you know, kind of phase one trunch. in the phase two trance, some of the financial restructurings, these cause things like funding source. And it really goes to general. we're thinking about in the phase, you know, kind of phase one trance. In the phase two trance, some of the financial restructurings, these cause things like funding source. And it really goes to general fund last. If we have a grant source or a proprietary fund source that we can allocate money to, we'd rather we would rather do that. So that what's left for the taxpayer to pick up and the general fund is less. There's a few things I want to make mention here. Looking at it, we have normal, a lot of rates for water as it relates to residential commercial industrial, looking at establishing a city water rate for ourselves, which would actually let us not pay some of the retail charges that we pass through to others, which would save us some serious money. Alliance for Children, this is a great organization. But we built their building, we own their building, we've invested tons of money in that building, and then we also lease back space in that building. It's too much layering that's going on there, right? And so the lease payment that we do on annual basis needs to come out, and need to figure it out because we have put millions of dollars in the building itself and they're going to need to kind of help us all the help we've given it's time to kind of turn that around. So Mary is in library that we're going to look at recent restructuring you know when you think about libraries we're going to look at things here about staffing as well as inventory is buying new new books. But when you look at the city, I don't look at just seven libraries throughout town. I look at, I don't know, 80 of them because you look at all the schools. The university has four or five themselves and people's access depending on if you're a student at AISD, MISD, you've got library benefits. You can come to our community libraries and through the TechShare programs, everybody has access to the university library systems. So kind of having to look at that more jointly instead of separately as it relates to a library system. So, I want to make sure that we're thinking about that. We're also going to need to look. We've got fortunate and unfortunate. Some opportunities to look at command restructuring. We've lost two assistant chiefs in the last couple of months. And actually, if you go back the last couple of years, you have a pretty notable turnover in the command staff. A lot of young commanders there. Spanner control is a little thin in some areas. We might want to span that out just a little bit more. So starting to talk a little about that as well as holding the holding facility of the people who would know of it as the jail, but technically we don't only have a jail because it's a meeting of the state jail standards. It's really a pass through facility. You're there for a short time until you can go to county or until you can get released. And so with the county's program of video registration. We've had a much lower population in the last couple of years and I'm just kind of saying, well let's just keep that good thing going. What other relationships do we might have or we might use the jailed out at Mansfield which does meet state jail standards or that we find a way to do a little more transportation over to county in a faster way and we're minimizing the time that we're using our holding facility for that. So there's some efficiencies. By the way, the holding facility, the jail budget's a little over $5 million. So when we're talking about identifying around $400,000 of savings, that's what we're talking about doing, and finding some efficiency. Speaking of efficiency, as we look at departmental relocations, there's a couple things I'll highlight on this page. One actually speaks to the Terry and appraisal district budget itself. And we are in a position where we're kind of an collective there, where we don't do anything individually ourselves, but we do it with all the other taxing jurisdictions. And the way it reads is there's a very tight window of which time you really have the opportunity to challenge any questions you might have in the budget. And it's almost an impracticality unless you make a proactive decision that you're going to exercise your right, if you will, because it's good business to analyze the budget. So I'm going to you that I think we need to target some reasonable level of savings there, just the same way that we're going through these processes. I know others in the county you're gonna have to do similar processes and we would expect the appraisal district to have to go through similar type activities to find things of how they can save them and we prepare ourselves and talk to some of our neighbors about injecting ourselves in the budget process to make sure we're comfortable with that and that they've done some things to save money and we've targeted a small amount of $37,000 that we'd be trying to identify there. I've heard feedback from you all about school crossing guards and we've debated these over the years. I still believe that crossing guard programs, our model is a really pretty good model, but it's a different model depending on if you're AISD, GISD or MISD. So what I think we ought to do, our overall program is a little over $600,000. And I think what we need to do is just focus on identifying what we believe our priorities are. What are the areas that seem to have the most risk based on traffic and those kinds of things? And let's find some way to lower the cost of our piece, prioritize it to the more serious intersections. And then either leave it at that or ask the school district for some partnership, where it's more of a 50-50 kind of deal. If we're doing 300, can they do 300? Talk to the superintendent about it. I can tell you they're not going to be a fan of this. But at the same time, you know, when it's fair about, we're there doing crossing guards because of the student population. Is it fair to split some costs? Maybe it is, maybe it isn't. But I threw it out there because I knew y'all have asked about it and a place to start would be in a good partnership at $300,000 a piece. And if they don't do it, either we just prioritize our work or we make a decision that that's no longer on the board and we pull that off. So that's something else I wanted to highlight. Some other areas, action plant, action center closed on Saturdays, reduced library content, another position vacancy, etc. are all items. In the revenue area, don't have a ton of work in this area. We haven't really gotten a ton of focus on this, but I'm going to hit that pretty good this spring. So in April and we come back, we're going to have a lot more information here. What I would tell you on the positive side compared to some of the challenges we've had all the conversation we had at the end of the year we finished 24 in a much better place in court and we thought we would and we've seen sustained effort by the police department given your concerns about traffic safety and compliance. There's a very solid trend line there of sustained effort in that way and so they believe as a result of that that we can make a revenue Adjustment projection that's different than what we had we had been really almost straight down now We're kind of flattening it out a little bit and start to come off the floor and then lastly in the reserve area You know we have about 66 million dollars in reserve. It's a combination of things, but we have a fund policy that says we have to keep between 15 and 25% fund balance for reserves. That's good for the public. It's good for our bond rating agencies and stuff like that. In addition to that, you all know, the Arlington Tomorrow Foundation is really an augmentation to that reserve. Another hundred million dollars that's there that we use in an endowed kind of way. So, you know, $166 million dollars with a capital that's available to be used in a strategic way to help us assist. And so one of the areas that we're going to suggest that we talk about is a use of what we call the business continuity reserve, about $4.1 million. That would draw us down from 20% fund balance to 18.7. Still well above the 15%. But nonetheless, would let us do a couple of things, either look at one time matching of needs or it would give us a much more orderly shutdown of certain programs or services. Meaning instead of giving someone a 30 or 45-day notice for furlough or RIF, we would look at something that's much longer could be almost 12 months where we say we're gonna identify and we did this back. I think it was Oedo 9 housing crisis where we put together some what we called challenge grants we targeted a group for sunset essentially and we gave them time to orderly shut down the unit and and either find another job elsewhere in the city or or or not be with the city any other and we think we did really really well there during that time we found a lot of other placements inside the city I think we did really, really well there during that time. We found a lot of other emplacements inside the city. I think we only ended up laying off one person during that time, which is one too many, but nonetheless, a very orderly process that we went through. And I think the challenge grant utilization would help us. So when you look at the whole list, we've advanced our amount from 3.85 to 12.93, assuming all these ideas are interesting ideas to you, that you would want to pursue it, that you kind of make sense. And of course there's plenty of work to do, and I would tell you this is some of the easier work. There's a lot of hard work that's about to become difficult to close this last eight and a half million. But I wanted to get some feedback from you on the list. Also let you know that we're still working. And as you hear from us in April and again in June, you'll hear discussions around fee reform, cost recoveries, looking at franchise fees, all the self-help kind of fees and development in those areas. You'll see us looking at total fringe benefits for employees, looking at overtime costs, refreshing furlough and rift policies. And you should also know that we've started our comprehensive financial forecast here in the last week or two and instructions have gone out to departments that there's no new funding requests, that there's only a list of 3% reduction requests that we're trying to find thoughtful, meaningful, new revenue or reductions to help us achieve the objectives that we got. This is not going to be a year to really consider expanded services based on the structural changes that we're dealing with. And then the failsafe, which I know we don't want to do, but I also, I'd just like to tell the whole story and be kind of radically transparent about all of it. At the end of the day, if you like everything we've got and you don't like anything else, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? $6.9 million of that remaining gap is a 3% pay raise. We have not given pay raises before. Or we have not given pay raises before. That's certainly an option. It's not what we're working for. It's not what we're trying to strive to. But it's an option and it substantially closes the remaining gap. Or like we did last year, you could take a look at a one cent adjustment, which is $4.3 million. Again, not where we're starting, and what we're trying to do is to avoid both these in the end. But in the fail safe of going through the whole alphabet here at A to Z, how does that work? We've still got lots of ways we're working through. But at the end of the day, if we didn't come up with one other really good idea, this is how we would figure out kind getting to the point where we need to be. And then last quick thing, the ending on a little bit of good news, and that is on the economic development front. We've left for you a package at all your places that looks kind of like this. It's following up on Marty's briefing earlier in the year and some of the continued work that Lindsay and Sarah have done to demonstrate in a tangible way how economic development works and how it's good to grow our base. It's part of why we need to do what exercise I just went through is why we do economic development to take the sting out of the revenue challenges and actually to grow more revenue. So when you take a look at some of these things, since we got in this business, or we were able to track back in this window to 2006, we've added over 15,000 jobs, over 3.3 million, billion of new capital invested that was directly induced by our agreements, one to 29 ratio, as it relates to what we spent versus what the private sector spent. And they're not all giveaways. On the second page here, almost 60 million that was actually paid to the city during this process. They're not all freebies, right? They're still a co-investment type model. The average return, 2.6 years, lots of increased property value that was created 1.6 billion, but unfortunately we have to continue to kind of double down in this way so that we have the resources to make things happen for our community. I know that was a lot, there's a lot to work on, there's a lot to do and I need you and the communities help to give me some feedback. Are we headed in the right direction? There are other areas you want us to probe in, those kinds of things, but we're trying to close the gap and do it in a thoughtful, methodical way over the course of the year instead of just the month of August. Any questions or comments from Mr. Ellerton? Go ahead, Mr. Trog. Yeah. Thank you, Trey, because I feel like it's all I think staff is probably tired of any meeting we're in. I start thinking about it. I start asking revenue and it's something as we were that fall tree. We have to be thinking about it. Budgets are never a small couple of month process as a year-long process. And we have to be thinking about it. Budgets are never a small couple of month process as a year-long process. And we have to get to some of those things because I think we all have the same goal of no riff if it all possible. That's our goal of what we're trying to get to. And I appreciate some insight. And the reality is the worst thing starts happening when council starts picking things and choosing. Sometimes that is the worst decisions that can happen. So I appreciate you and staff for looking at those. One of the things I really, you know, you start thinking about it. It's revenue generation is what we have to think about our cost cutting and the two things on those and so I think we do have to look at and I look forward to hearing the fee. What we can have some increases on fees. We've been a very fiscally conservative city for a long time and I think we'll continue that but it doesn't mean some of our fees may be low from what we have on some of those comparison. And so I think we have to look and say, what can that cover from some of those? And a fee is still a tax increase. There's no hiding behind that from what we're doing, but I think it's a critical factor. You hit the nail in the head of what we have to still find. People want safe streets. They want police, fire, and they want streets they can drive on that we have to have. So we have to continue those. We also have to look at revenue generation. And then, you know, trays that we look at, the biggest cost of FTEs, right? And we look at full-time employees. Have we, and I appreciate you saying no, real extra ads being added. Have we in essence placed a semi-quasi hiring freeze on any new, any positions being filled currently right now because the more we can do this the more nutrition, natural nutrition the better. Yeah. There's a, I call it semi every every position that is being filled has to get my specific approval. So it's frozen and less I prove it. What's been interesting is you know we had such a hard time during COVID to fill positions. Yeah. We actually have seen a slower attrition rate in this past year. We actually got back to where we used to be. We carry about 61 vacancies on any given time and during COVID, we got up to about 140. That's a pretty notable change, but it's been rocking along in the 60s for a while. So we're not seeing the normal turnover that we have had normally seen, so it's a little more and maybe it's a function of all these newer people coming and staying and all that. I don't know, but it's an interesting thing. But we are definitely evaluating about how we can not fill a position and you know, I pick on the jail a little bit, but I got a question the other day. How many jailers do you have? 34? We have one vacancy. How many have left now? 33? Okay, well, why do you need to fill the 34th? You know, don't fill the last one. You know, and even if it drops down to three or four, there's a spot at which you do need to fill, but you don't need to have the full complement necessarily. For example, those are the kinds of conversations that we're having on a position by position basis. I appreciate that. And I think of the US most city employees, they would say we're willing to do a little more with a little less to save some jobs, and at all possible. I think that is the will of our employees. And I think it's the goal. And I think the council would all say that's what we're gonna try and push towards and do. And trade with this as we still keep exploring. Is there a need as councils we explore to have possibly one of our already standing committees taking some deeper dives with you and some taking some reviews, such as, we always get thrown to NPC, but if another committee just to really continue that or are we gonna continue just these group more updates on that? It's Charles Will, whatever y'all wanna do. In that sense, we can to continue just these group more updates? It's Charles. It's Charles Will. Whatever you all want to do. In that sense, we can certainly do that in a more systemic way at committee level. I was trying to do this as kind of a committee of the whole. Yeah. Because it's such a big issue. And I thought, November, January, April, June, it's not weekly, but it's certainly a systemic review. But if you've got areas that you want to study or you really want a deep dive on, then maybe it's better to systemic review. But if you've got areas that you want to study, or you really want a deep dive on, then maybe it's better to kind of pull those off or for you to get a special briefing, particularly on the financial elements of whatever a certain program might be. Happy to do it. I think because it's so significant, we might want to keep it as a committee of the whole, but you just give me the topics and you put them in the suggestion box and we'll run them down. Not a problem. And the budget book is open a little more on my desk than it has in here. So I appreciate the insider. I appreciate more importantly the transparency. When you go through times like this, transparency is a key issue. So I appreciate it. Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Tray. I agree with Mr. Hogg, you know, truly, even when I was on the school board, I just couldn't understand how I could tell the superintendent where the money needs to be spent. You're here. You're in the trenches. You know when these be done. So I think, you know, you give this report, it's important. One of the things I know we need to, I mean, we probably know this, but I just want to be able to say it. Even as a city council member, we got to look at our budget. You know, maybe less trips, maybe less. It's not a lot of money, but you know what? Everybody's going to be giving something. So I think... just want to be able to say it. Even us as city council members, we got to look at our budget. Maybe less trips, maybe less. It's not a lot of money, but you know what, everybody's gonna be giving something. So I think, I just want to be on the record saying, hey, we need to do our part also. We talk about all the different money that comes in from the different buckets. And we've talked about the biggest one obviously the stadium rent. You know, it goes in this bucket. So I'm hoping you guys look at all that, where the money's going and everything else. The same thing with CVB, the same thing with... about the biggest one is obviously the stadium rent. You know, it goes in this bucket. So I'm hoping you guys look at all that, where the money's going and everything else. The same thing with CVB, the same thing with, I mean, does not look at the general fund, but let's look at everything because you just talked about general funds. So, you know, we will, but I want to make it clear, the problem is in the general fund. So our goal is to figure out how those other funds can benefit the journal fund in a legitimate lawfully able to do that in a way, right? Yeah. I mean, this So our goal is to figure out how those other funds can benefit the gerophon in a legitimate lawfully able to do that in a way, right? Yeah. And I mean, this is one came up last month. I came up with the answer. I mean, it's not at a lot of dollars, but I know it's come up with like the grant matching grants for our neighborhood. I asked last time, it's like, okay, we're paying 80% of the cost. Is that money from us or is that grant money? Because I mean, and that, you don't have to answer that question, but those are the kinds of look at it. It's like, okay, why would we pay 80% when it's supposed to be matching? So those are the kind of things we need to look at. Okay, thank you. You couldn't have chosen a more appropriate background on your slide presentation than having the pieces of the puzzle in there. This is a puzzle that is not only difficult to put together, but not any fun at all, because we're dealing with a lot of challenging stuff. So I thought this was a great presentation. Thank you and the staff for what y'all've done on this. I know we still have a lot of work to do. Try to bridge this gap that we're faced with. But I'm confident with y'all's help that we're going to get there. So thank you for that. And for me, to answer your initial question is you're absolutely going in the right direction. You're looking at the areas that we need to sort of peel back a little bit and looking at the areas that we can push forward a little bit. So I appreciate that. Yes, Mr. Belante. Good question. Thank you for the representation. I'm very interesting looking here how you deep you dive deep into where we're bleeding right where we we're not collecting the money that we should and we have the motor family properties that has they have taxes and status and the commercial properties I look here is at a sixty four million loss, right? Revenue because they protest. Is there right to protest? Totally. You guys cross check any incentive that we did for commercial developments and how is the status that protesting? What I'm going is, if we give in a performance agreement to a commercial development, it comes to town. We expect him to collect that amount of money. But then he protests. And I see each property here. Some properties are saving. They save 11 million dollars, but we're not collecting 11 million dollars. Do you have a criteria on the performance agreement to avoid those things happening? I think it's a little bit at a halt but mostly no. But to your point, we had this conversation last week with the finance staff. I hadn't had a chance to get to Molly about it just yet. But I do think we want to create a standard provision in future performance agreements that has, for lack of a better phrase, offset language. So for example, if we say we're gonna do this transaction and it's based on you expecting to pay an avalorum tax of X and you don't pay it in tax abatements, it's really pretty clear because you didn't hit the performance so you don't ever get the benefit. In a 380 agreement or some other type of agreement where there's actually cash, you could have a scenario where money went out and then there is an appeal and you actually ended up not being in that greatest situation. But if you have offset language that would say something like, this perform is all based upon your public service dollar amount being like this. And you appeal, well, you gave yourself an abatement. If you appeal, you gave yourself a tax reduction. And we don't want a double count. We want a single count on something like that. So we'll figure something out if we don't already have it. Molly might say we've already got. I hope the government will learn instead of by thinking of what goes in the market. We have a floor in the agreement. So a minimum threshold that they have to hit and add the Lauren to be able to receive the incentives at a trace point if they don't hit that, that they don't double dip, they don't get the incentive as well. So we don't restrict their ability to protest, but we do have a minimum and that's that number that we're expecting based on the performance that they sort of sold us when we offered the incentive. Yeah. We're going to tighten that up going to tighten that up strictly on the 380 or the sales tax kind of elements to that to that point because you can't can't save yourself on the left pocket and then you know, kind of hurt us on the right pocket. We got a total total thing from our perspective. Yeah, that makes sense. We, you know, we're looking at $21 million short here, but in a perfect ward, If nobody protests, we have $64 million in the budget. Right, so that's the money. We found the money. Yep, and I agree with you. We want everybody to protest when they're rightfully do that relief. There's certainly no complaint about that, but I do believe that there's very clear evidence that the appraisal district this past year in particular didn't really fight back. And they had a much more accelerated level of protest, which had a direct feel in the bottom line on the one hand that's helping taxpayers. On the other hand, it's not helping taxpayers because it just reduced our ability to provide services or it turned right around forced us to talk about Making up for it on another way, which we don't really want to do what we really want to have happen is very straight up legitimate property tax appraisal and let elected elected leaders determine levels of service and cost of government. That's what we really need to have happen. Yep, just finish here. I don't want to take you along. Again, so they save money for the taxpayers, but commercial properties, a lot of them are corporations for outside state. They really not benefiting the taxpayers. Taxpayers really, the residential, single family, and multi-family residential. Sometimes, most of the time, it not local on our day of corporations from outside. Thank you. This box will. Thank you, Trey. I know I've mentioned this probably a dozen times, but are we taking another look at third-party verification? Because we've a lot of our our code compliance You know tracking down code violators and just making sure people are following the rules Which we could recoup that with third-party verification because that the cost would be paid directly by the people that Generate those services being needed in the first place. Let me double check on staff review on that and we'll include that as part of our April briefing as what we think we can or can't do on that. Okay, and finally do you have any thoughts on what's going on at the state legislature with proposals to go to a sales tax? I don't know the specific details of any of that just yet, but let's just play it out in theory, right? That you have either a property tax that completely goes away and it's either in favor of a higher sales tax or some other kind of, you know, share. I mean, the sales tax is a, it's a leading indicator of what goes on in the economy. Property tax is a lagging indicator, so that's why some of that stuff shows up late. But leading indicators are good. It's kind of just in time, but it's also just in time in a negative way also. So your ability to adapt as an organization to a market shift when you're largely only sales tax funded, would probably lead us to need to build reserves in order to take the edges off of a down market trend. It also I think has, you know, those are open for scholars to argue about, but kind of what the proportional disparate treatment might be on a lower income person versus a higher income person paying the same flat tax, right? Right. So those are those are things but you're saying there's just more volatility. Absolutely, more volatility. Okay. And we would have to we'd have to take a plan to remedy that a little bit if that's where it went. We'll adapt and perform to whatever the rules are. I just like to know the rules and we'll play by the rules. But when you change the rules in the middle of the game, like we have experience with this, it's hard to adapt to. So let's... perform to whatever the rules are. I just like to know the rules, and we'll play by the rules, but when you change the rules in the middle of the game, like we have experienced with this, it's hard to adapt to. So seeing the train come in, adapting, stacking our dollars in a certain way to help meet the continuity of business operations for our public is what we want to have. Thank you. Any other questions or comments from Australia? We'll be back in April with another next tranche update and reminder where we've been. If you guys have any feedback for me or suggestion box items, it's always open. So thank you for your time. Thank you, sir. 3.2,. Doublefield. Good afternoon mayor and council Sarah Stubblefield manager of strategic initiatives and the research and analytics division. I'm going to put more information in your heads about our multi-family profile. A few months ago we brought you the single family profile, which is based on TAD data and the American Community Survey from the Census Bureau. This is sort of the pair to that, the multi-family profile. It's just informational, something that you can use, take with you, as a part of how you make decisions. A variety of things including our housing stock. just a very high level summary kind of how we've changed. We did a multi-family profile in 2012, and this is the first update that we've published since then. So as a sort of comparison, we've seen our population increase about 8% up to 394,000 just under that 395 threshold. Our median household income has increased almost 4% to 73.5. And then also median rent has increased 35.7% in that same amount of time from 892. Monthly rent to 1200. As I mentioned, we used a pretty small set of data to keep things consistent with the 2012 report and also moving forward, it's very tight within the American Community Survey data, TAD data which we use to define multifamily as anything categorized as B or BC property codes. And we will also see some information in here from our housing authority in our planning department. So starting off with the housing stock itself, the age of our multi-family properties in Arlington are about 43 years old on average, most with that average being built in 1981. Over 76% of our properties that are zone multi-family were built between 1970 and 1990. So pretty common when you ask people when you think apartments were built in Arlington, it's kind of in that same area. Our multi-family development is also consistent with the overall city development with the oldest properties in central Arlington and the newer developments spreading out throughout the city consistent with the rest of the development. Looking at the age or the appraised value, we want to see kind of what is the value. I will say based on Tre's presentation that he just gave since it's fresh top of mind. These are 2023 numbers so these are not the numbers that are reflected in the protests from 2024 so we can look at that again when the new data comes in. This is pre- those protests. The 1894 multifamily properties that we assessed, 1300 of them are duplexes so that does ske our numbers a little bit. But if we left them out of this and we left them out of the single family, we would have a good chunk of our housing stock that we weren't talking about in these profiles. So the median appraised value for all of our multi-family property is $283,000. But if we take those duplexes out, that shoots up to $2.2 million average appraisal value for our multi-family properties. Kind of sticking with the value stuff about 77% of our multi-family properties are less than $500,000 in value. But a lot of them are very small parcels. So I wanted to just point this bottom table here over 1,600 properties that we're talking about of that 1894 are less than an acre. And so a lot of the big guys at those 18 and a half, 15 acres, there's not as many of them, but we do have a lot of multifamily sprinkled throughout the city. We also took a look at the appraised improvement value only so we took out that land value since there's such a big gap between the one acres and the 18 plus acre properties. So when you look at just the improvements on a property at a per square foot basis, Arlington's multi-family improvement value is $117 per square foot. For a little bit of context, that's about, it was $139 per square foot for single family housing. So that's sort of the state of the stock, but we also wanna provide context. What does that mean? What do these numbers mean for the residents who live here? So we shifted to the Census Bureau and the American Community Survey to look at the rent prices in light of sort of the stock that we have here. I will say that our median monthly rent for this data includes single family and multi family. They are not able to be separated with the data that we have available for this level of comparison. So I just wanted to put that caveat of our data in there before filling in the links. So our median monthly rent, that is just the contracted amount that you sign with a landlord and say this is how much I'm giving you per month it doesn't include electricity water or gas or any of those other fees. And so we as I mentioned that did increase in Arlington's from 2012 to 2023 35.7%. We see the lowest rents in Central and East Arlington, where we also tend to have the lower incomes and portions of North Arlington also. You'll see the bright yellow census tracks of the far north and the far southeast where we have the highest rents in the city. We also wanted to take a look at, well how is this compared to other cities in our same market the surrounding cities? So in a comparison of the 10 surrounding cities we have had the fifth highest increase in median rent. So are the 10 cities kind of right in the middle? But we are maintaining the second lowest median monthly rent of the 10 cities. So we're still dollar for dollar towards the bottom there. The city of Colleville has had the highest rent in 2023 at $2,700 per month. However, Greatvine had the highest increase from 2012 to 2023. And they saw 47% increase. So again, kind of right in the middle with people in the same market as us in neighboring cities. We also wanted to look at some affordability figures when we talk about multifamily housing. And so we looked at growth rent as a percentage of income. Growth rent takes that contract rent and adds water, electricity, gas, other fees that's your total housing cost. And when you look at that as a percentage of income, the industry standard is that you want that to be 30% or lower of your total income. If you go above that 30% threshold, it's considered rent burden and it's some financial strain on those households. We've actually seen this number go up for our residents and renter households that are facing, are going into that rent burden status from 51% in 2012 to 57.8% in 2023, which is a 6.5% increase in renters that are experiencing some rent burden. We do have some assistance programs out there to help with renter rent. And the biggest one of those is housing choice voucher, the Section 8 program, as some people know it. And so we got the data from the Housing Authority. In 2023, they distributed 910 housing choice vouchers with 630 of those going to multi-family units. We also have a map here that shows where those vouchers were distributed geographically with some areas of concentration, but I didn't really say it spread out pretty well throughout the city. It's also important for us to look at income, and this is actually a preview of the socioeconomic profile update that we will be bringing you in February To see where our incomes are distributed by census tracks across the city and to also highlight again that our Current income median income is 73 519 which isn't a 1% increase from 2010 and in 2010 we dipped down 2012, and so it's actually a little bit higher from 2012. So we're continuing to see an increase in our overall median income. We also wanted to incorporate this data from the Planning and Development Services Department related to kind of where we're headed with multifamily development. This is data that was provided to you last summer where in July of 24, 23 projects with 50 or more units were under construction in the permitting stage, plating stage, or at some point of the zoning change process. To be rezoned to multifamily. From 2021 to 2024, 11,000 multi-units were approved for construction and 265 acres of non-residential or single-family zone land was approved in rezoned to residential multi-family. In that July report, Jensi's team reported that 16 acres of RMF-, which is our standard multi-family zoning, remain in the city, which doesn't include a 55-acre tract owned by Kennedy LISD down in the southwest part of the city. So those acres are pretty limited when you look at it in the scheme of the whole city. This is truly meant to just be a snapshot of where we're at with our multifamily housing stock and using conjunction with our single family housing profile. Both of them are available already on our open data center so they can be viewed by the public. You should have a copy of the complete report, not just the presentation at your places, which is what is posted online. And I'll be happy to answer any questions that you may have. Questions or comments for Sarah? Thank you so much, Sarah. Appreciate it. Well, Dr. Oden Wesley. Thank you for this report. And I guess when I'm asking for your professional opinion, looking at where we are now and where we're going, have we averted the housing crisis in Arlington? You always get me with the gotcha questions. I mean for it to be in that sense. No, no. I think it's first of all, is that a housing crisis or not? Housing affordability is an issue, but also a limited amount of land that we have and how we balance it. So it's really a policy decision of where you want to go. There are people who are experiencing rent burden in our city and that's evident in the data that it's limited land and what you do with it. Those are choices that are policy driven for you guys. And then you reported a big gap in the percentage of increase in income compared to percentage of increase in rent. And I don't think there's anything we as a body can do about that. Right, you know, on the income side, bringing in high paying jobs is a good way to do that and rent and we have programs that can assist with that. So it is a balance of assistance and making choices that bring in higher paying jobs and better housing. And it's challenging. And I think we're not the only community that's experiencing that. Thank you very much. A lot to think about. Thank you, Sarah. 3.3 MWBE report, Prophez Scullier 2024 with Ms. Thompson. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council, Erica Thompson, Office of Business Diversity. I'm I plan this afternoon to walk you through the data for contracts awarded and spend for the fiscal year 2024. Following that, take a look at the city wide spend under the MWBE program outside of the program and then community with and with program numbers. Following that, we'll take a look at some of the outreach that the office has been a part of for the fiscal year 2024. I had the opportunity to speak with some of you on the latter part of the year. So hopefully this presentation will address some of the questions and discussions that we talked about during our time together. So I'm looking forward to any questions you may have after this. So I'll go back really quick. As you all know, the mission of the Office of Business Diversity is to help reduce barriers in foster participation with minority women owned companies as well as to ensure that MWBE businesses are part of the city's procurement process for basic goods and services, construction-related contracts and professional services. So for fiscal year 2024, we had 134 contracts under the program. And if I can remind you guys and take you back a little bit, noted to be a contract under the program, it must be for a good or service, professional service or construction related contracts, over the amount of $50,000. So for fiscal year 2024, we had 134 contracts awarded of those 134 contracts, 51 contracts were awarded to MWBE Prime. It's important that we take a look back and look at the numbers for previous years. Fiscal year 2022 we had 133 contracts awarded, 57 of those went to MWBE Primes. Fiscal year 23 we we had 113 contracts under the program and 50 of those went to MWBE primes. When I use the word prime, prime is the primary holder of the contract. That is who this city is under contract with. A little bit deeper into the prime awards. again we had. I'm going to go ahead and ask you to go ahead and ask you to go ahead and ask you to go ahead and ask you to go ahead and ask you to go ahead and ask you in the Asian about 22%. Awards and spend are a little bit different regarding spend. Contracts from different years can roll over to our spin numbers. When we let God awards, we're only looking at what was awarded in that fiscal year. But when we let God spin, we're linking that contracts that may have been awarded previously but still have activity in this current fiscal year. So for fiscal year 2024, we had 272 contracts with spend which gave us an average goal of goal of 35% MWV in participation for fiscal year 2024. Going back in time, fiscal year 2022, we only had 99 contracts under the program that had SPIN. For fiscal year 2022, we actually had a 27% MWBE achievement goal. Fiscal year 23, we went a little bit higher. We had 224 contracts under the program, which gave us a goal of 31.64. Circling back to this past fiscal year 2024, 272 with a 35% goal. I've also provided the breakdown in Fred and the city, so you can see that as well. For Asian American we have 13.58% of our spin went to Asian Americans. 13.13% went to African Americans. 31.76% went to Hispanics. 1.84 went to Native American and 39.69% of our MWB spin when women own businesses. This is a very detailed comparison when of our countenewars asked to understand the number of contracts that these numbers affect. So I will not go into full detail on this, but I do want to highlight the orange box for you guys. It has a number of contracts. So when you're looking at it, again, we had 51 contracts for MWBEs that were awarded. And then we had 83 non-MWBEs. And you're looking at how that breaks down. For Asian Americans. We had for contracts that we awarded to that specific ethnicity. We had seven that we awarded to African-American ethnicities as a prime. 24 Hispanic, one Native American, and 15 women owned companies. We also track our subcontractor participation, so the prime has the opportunity to bring in sub consultants to do work with them on the project. It's a contract between the prime and the sub. For Asian Americans, we had 24 contracts that were awarded to vendors of the Asian ethnicity. 29 awarded to African American ethnicity. 77 Hispanic ethnicity, three Native American and 75 women owned. Go into the second box for the spend. I'll do the same thing. I'm looking at the number of contracts that had spend. Again, we had 272 contracts under the program. 102 had MWBE primes that had payments. 170 were non-MWBEs. Looking at the number of contracts as a prime that had spined. We had 15 contracts that had Asian ethnicity spined. 11 that had African Americans spined. 46 that had Hispanic. 3 that had Native American and 27 that had women owned as a prime. Going deeper, the sub-consultant level, we had 61 Asian sub-consultant companies utilized for this fiscal year, 62 African American, 174 Hispanic, eight Native American and and 205 women owned. This slide talks about our MWBE spin that's going to be outside of our program. So this is going to capture data in a local agreements, cooperative agreements, emergency spend or indie contracts that come up under the amount of $50,000. We did see a small decline from the past two years of our non-program MWB spend. In fiscal year 2022, we had a 3.64 percent non-program MWB spend. Fiscal year 23, we had a 3.82 percent. In fiscal year 24. We had a 2.70. When we take the cumulative program in non-program MWBE spend, for fiscal year 2024 you will see an increase of 22%. I do believe that that increases due to the high amount of MWBE spend that was done under the program. For fiscal year 2024, whenever we were able to meet the goal of 35%. Fiscal year 2022 was a little bit lower, 14.08 cumulative. Fiscal year 2023, 19.52, and then also 24, 22%. I've also had this spend breakdown that you can look at as your convenience. So ION Wave is a database that we use to reach new vendors and notify them about potential bid opportunities and encourage them to submit their bid submission packets. We do track to see how many new vendors that we are reaching for the City of Arlington bid opportunities. For 2024, we had 916 new vendors registered through the Iron Wave database. 228 of those were MWBE. 61 of those were all in some local. Of those 61, 13 were MWBE. You'll see an increase from the past fiscal years. In fiscal year 2022, we had 561 new registered vendors. Fiscal year 2023, we had 636. And then finally, 24, we had 916. I also want to to provide a snapshot of where those 916 vendors came from. Again, Arlington had 61. We saw 103 from Dallas, about 65 from Fort Worth, 30 from Houston, 25 from Irving. Out of state, we had the majority 284. And then small cities, we had a little over 90. Taken a deeper dive into the MWBE breakdown vendors for the King firm. We had 13 again from Arlington local. Dallas was the highest number. It was 40 from Dallas. 22 from Fort Worth. 11 registered vendors from Houston. 24 out of state, and 27 small cities. One of the biggest initiatives that we targeted was our community engagement. And we wanted to make sure the community was aware of the program and of the city's opportunities to procure as well as knowledge of what we're looking for when we bring them to the city to do business. So the Office of Business Diversity and Tendent about 35 monthly meetings with various city organizations. We hosted five business diversity workshops, spotlighting different city departments. We held eight monthly supplier meetings with vendor engagement. We represented the city at 12 local construction expos. We attended 32 community events hosted by local chamber and advocacy groups. We participated in training and certification programs such as the American Contract Association, as well as coordinated 28-1-1 meetings with registered and interested vendors. Additionally, we joined the Small Business Resource Group in the Women's Alliance Group with Allington, excuse me, greater Allington Chamber of Commerce. Some of you asked that we provided even information to you on when we're hosting programs for Frisco Year 2025. So we're working with City staff to make sure that our future programs are on your calendars in case you're interested in sharing that information with your citizens This is just a sample of a few of the events that we were able to host We worked and partnered with our economic development to host the Bell vendor day That's our second year. This is our second year doing this event and we had a great turnout. Registered Vendors were able to meet with Bell directly, hold one on one and see about potentially doing business with Bell Flight. Additionally, we partnered with the Office of Precurement and held a monthly supplier meeting every first Friday of each month. We also spoke and advocated with our local chamber and advocacy groups. It was also recommended by council members that we expand the location for our outreach program. So this fiscal year we're looking at hosting our events in various districts and not just here in downtown Arlington. Our business masterclass with the prosperity of bank was the highlight of our 2024 fiscal year. We had 14 local businesses that varied and experienced and trade services come together to learn best practices For developing successful business growth Each week they focused on different initiatives from loan applications to marketing Prosperity bankers are Partner and they provided participants with a complete series of additional financial services, even a savings account match and a line of credit for our participants. Since the completion of the program, three participants have received direct contracts with the city of Arlington and four participants have received their MWB certification. We are happy to announce that prosperity has chosen to partner with us again this year. We just kicked off our 2025 program last Thursday. So where are we going next? Our future focus. For the last couple of months, we've been surveying our community and just trying to get a feel for what they're needing from the Office of Business Diversity. We're looking forward to bringing a veteran strong initiative to help provide resources to our veteran owned businesses. That would include anything regarding business formation, naming with the Secretary of State as well as opening their business accounts. Additionally, we're seeking to work with the Texas Cooperative Program and provide training and education on the cooperative agreements in ways in which we could be beneficial to our small businesses to make sure they can maximize that opportunity. And lastly, with all the great things that are happening with the city, we're partnering with our economic development corporation to ensure that we are connecting our small and local vendors with opportunities that are coming in their areas. We also have our monthly supply meetings that we will continue to host with the Office of Precurement to ensure that all of the city's good opportunities are available for those that are interested in doing business with us. So before I in, our Office of Communications has helped put together a little testimony from our vendor community. My hope is that it will tie together efforts undergone in the last three months, excuse me, three years, and share the excitement that the vendor community has of working with the City of Arlington. Our experience with the City of Arlington has been amazing. We're really grateful to them. We wouldn't be in a position that we are without them. They're very extremely helpful. They always reaching out making sure we get a ticket carer. We really appreciate them. We're very grateful. Getting to work with City of Arlington at the Get Co. It was really, really important. They got to know what we can offer. They looked at the type of work that we performed. And it's definitely helped us from on to continue to get projects. Since I'm a minority, I'm having this type of opportunities pass and pack tremendously. Because again, you guys open doors to other municipalities around because you're recommendations, so we very thankful for that. So almost like our life line, we wouldn't insist without this opportunity because we're a small company and it's really difficult to compete with these large companies who have these large budgets. We're really grateful for that opportunity that the City of Long took advantage Because of the office of business diversity, I feel it's been very beneficial to pool in the community as a whole right. This is a very diverse community. We have different minority-owned businesses and women-owned businesses that can see this as an opportunity to give back to their city. It is so important for local governments to have these programs for minority businesses. It's been extremely important to us and it's very important that these types of programs continue so that other people can enjoy them and also profit from them. This program helps women, helps minorities, and it's impacted. But I'm just so thankful for that because it really impacts positive to everybody. As we have gotten these subcontracts, it's put us in a position to be able to hire more people and give more equipment and it's got us to appoint to where we were able to get a primary contract. So we're very blessed, very grateful. The biggest thing coming from a minority is the fact that you're being included. They appreciate you as a person. They appreciate your experience. If you can bring that to the table, then they welcome you with open arms, and I really, really appreciate that. That's all I have for you. Thank you. Thank you, Eric. Any questions or comments for Eric, Dr. Odom Wesley? Thank you so much for this report. And for all of your efforts, looks like we have a substantial increase in participation of MWBE businesses with the City of Arlington. Given the current climate that we're in, state and federal, with the pushback on DEI initiatives, what impact do you think that'll have on us and our programs? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good question. She's loaded with all the tough questions. All the great questions today. Absolutely. You know, I think that's a question that everyone's thinking, like the timing of this presentation, right? Everyone's that's on everybody's mind. We're right here to do a job. And we're gonna continue to do our job and so we have direction from leadership to do something different. And thank you for doing a great job. Eric, I remember it wasn't that long ago that I just took office and we met with the black Chamber of Commerce and we had less than 1% of black-owned business doing contract work here in Arlington. And I didn't have a full understanding of how difficult it is. You can't just say, well, you're black on business, you're in here, they have to be a part of our program. And there's a process to be able to recruit MWBE businesses to come out and y'all have done a wonderful job at doing that. The testimonies that we saw in the video are, I think, are indicative of the appreciation and the need for this type of work. So thank you for that. We're not done. We still have a ways to go. But I agree with you. I really don't care about climate elsewhere. I care about Arlington and what we're doing to do the right things here. And Yoll will certainly help us helping us do the right things. So thank you. Mr. Gonzalez. I'm gonna put questions. So, what happens is that when we were in Hispanic, Black, Asian, so is that all of you? Absolutely. So we try not to, we do not double report. So we take ethnicity first. So women own. Thank you. Okay. Thank you. Easy answer for you, man. That was great. Just fam. Well, uh, thank you for what you for what you do and the number increase so that this is great. And so like Dr. Barron Wesley talked about DEI, that's staying fair today. We worry about that. This is all intended and we do what's right. And if you do a good job, you put in the bed, you got to just do it and keep continuing to do what you're doing. I appreciate it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. Anybody else? Thank you, Erica. Thank you. Okay. Y'all have all received the staff reports, the informal staff reports. We're going to go through those and answer any questions or let you have any comments that you have on any individual staff reports. We're going to start with the Petty Cap reports at 4.1. Any questions or comments for Keith or is the chief out there Keith or is he just giving everything to you? I believe he's around the corner. Okay. Questions or comments on Petty Cap, Mr. Hogg? Yeah, thank you Mayor and thanks Keith and Trey and team for putting this together. Keith let me ask the question. Joel, we've had a young man come up and speak with some ideas of how to do this because we hear the request for these also and understand the risk of, you know, in the past it did not go well. And reading your report you see it and I kept going back to it, didn't go well. It seemed like because of the actions from the Petty Cap operators, right? And I think everyone addresses that's the largest concern. So the young man who's spoken to Council multiple times, you know, he kind of has the idea of one operator being in charge helps control that. Have you Spugging with Emmy Vox forward that or thought through that at all. We did. Keep. one operator being in charge helps control that. Have you spoken with him, have you explored that or thought through that at all? We did Keith Brooks, director of Polar Works. We did, yes sir, we did actually spoke with him last week, me and police. We sat down and met with him. He didn't have like an elaborate plan on that. When we talked to him, it was basically, hey, I'm gonna try to run my company with integrity. If there's issues with any of my drivers, I'll either remove them or discipline them or whatever the case might be. Wasn't really much of a plan from him from that perspective. And just to give that a little perspective, when we were having all of our meetings with the different Petty Cab operators and drivers at the monthly meetings, they all kind of told us that. You know, we'll do, you know, we'll do things right and stuff like that. We still have a lot of issues out there, actually in the field. But the, a man, you know, is there a possibility that something like that could possibly work? I'm not sure. I mean, like I said, we tried everything we could with the Petticap community and any V community at the time. And it was just hard getting compliance. There's always traffic issues, but the real issues that we ran into was saying one thing in a meeting and then getting out there and doing something totally different. Yeah, I just look and I understand the concerns and I'm probably one that doesn't like the idea of we can't do something when I see other entities that run most of stadiums and as I travel around the country, I'm entertained a lot of clients and so I have to go to a lot of events at large stadiums. I see other function entities that are able to operate that and so it's probably a little frustrating for me that we can't find a way to operate that even if it's scaled down side because there is a need. There's a reason they function, there's a reason there's a business because it does provide support for a lot of individuals who do use them. They are a popular thing around the country to be able to utilize. It's not worth a huge challenge, but I do think it's something with the right opportunity. I go back to the example of, we didn't like micro-mobility moving that and then as we've tweaked that and changed it, it's performing pretty well so far of where we're doing that. So I thank you for the report and I think you feel exploring it and maybe it's something we continue to explore. You know, I certainly can empathize with Mr. Hogg and looking at it. I personally, as the older I get, the less I want to walk around, do all that, so I would ride a Petty Cab. But I also think that there was a big difference between the micro mobility that we've done here in downtown and that we had a partner with UTA that wanted to do something like this. We hadn't tried it. It was a new effort. We were out there. With the Petty Caves, we've done it. Then it worked very well. We've had a number of problems with it. And our partners in the entertainment district are not a fan of it. And I'm cautious in trying to force feed those partners into something like that. So I agree that it certainly has its place. I don't know that its place is in our entertainment district because of the complexities associated with previous problems and from the lack of desire from our partners in the entertainment district to participate in that again. So I would be one that would say thank you for the report but I don't know that I'd want to push it any further than looking at the report. I would just say, you know, I also think our partners have a much more vested interest in receiving funding for their parking and some of those things. And they've also had a bad experience. And so getting them over that and having the right plan in place is something that has to be explored. I'm not saying we have the plan in place, but I think partners are looking and saying, we had a bad experience. Why do we want to take that on again? But with the right plan, things to be done. Because I still think it goes back to others can do it, but we can't. And that's probably something I'm not very tolerant of. I'm not willing to go down on this one and make a huge fight, but I do think it's a miss that we have from our panel district. And I guess it's just matter of perception because I don't think it's a matter of we can't because we have. We've done it. We've decided, I guess, collectively not to do it because it wasn't benefiting our community in a way that was keeping everybody safe and all of that. So we've done it. It's not that we can't do it. We certainly could turn that faucet back on. It's just, is that something we want to do in light of the fact that we've had a lot of problems and that our partners in the entertainment district don't want that valve turned back on. Yes, sir. Thank you for the report. Just have a question. It might be related to the police. When you guys sit down with him last week, at any time, any come up, the complexities or having a petty cab running around when you potentially have an incident, an incident with with a lot of people in the stadium. Did you guys discuss this? What are the complexities in the in the consequence of having cars, you know, vehicles, pedicabs around traffic and try to control a chaotic situation if arises anytime? Yeah well what we discussed and the owner that we talked to he was part of the old program so he's well aware of he was out there before so he was well aware of all the complexities and the challenges and even some of the challenges that we mentioned in the report he was aware of that so he understood all of that. So we kind of focused on, you know, what do you think we could do to remedy that and things of that nature. But some of the complexities, we went over all of the challenges that we all faced, that staff faced, that PD and code faced as far as enforcing out there. And then, of course, as the mayor was alluding to the different venues, I personally received a lot of complaints from the venues after all of the events. And so we were just trying to work with them. And we talked to the owner about that, how we sat down, we even sat down with with the ordinance and went over the ordinance and make sure it was crystal clear as far as what we expected Things of that nature as far as what we expected out in the field and we just we just couldn't get compliance out there So we went over that with the with the petty cab owner and discussed all those complexities with them Just last question Do you explore possibilities of having a dedicated corridor just for the patty cabs in certain areas that way they are not loose to go anywhere they want in this rough traffic? Well we did that. That was part of the communications meetings that we had monthly. We had maps, we had patty cab stands, we had certain roads that were restricted. They weren't allowed to be in any of the venue parking lots. So we had restricted areas and we had maps showing where they could be and where they couldn't be. And when we were working traffic events, I personally was out there working, you know, different events at the stadium. And I would witness, you know, Paddy Cab owners and any of these, not where they're supposed to be, being in restricted areas on a regular basis. So we already, you know, we had, you know, places where they could be, maps showing exactly where they can be. They had copies of the maps, police had copies of the maps. So everybody was on the same page. It's what we expect it. So we made it as clear as we could as far as designating areas and where they could be and where they couldn't be. Anybody else? Thank you, sir. Four point, well, they're misnumbered here. I see I have two four point ones, but we'll move on down the panhandling mitigation update. Any questions or comments for Jennifer? Jennifer, wait, Mr. Gonzalez. I just want to compliment. Thank you, Jennifer, for exploring this and expanding the program. It's obviously working. So I just want to thank you for doing that and your staff for doing it. So I appreciate you taking it on. Sure, and I did want to Jennifer Wickman, Deputy City Manager, Mr. Gonzalez, I think Mr. FAM, Mr. Galant, I all three of you, and forwarded some of those intersections that you're constituent, said things aren't about, and those are included in here. So we'll hope the pilot continues the success that we've seen at the first three intersections. Do you have a time frame on these seven new locations where we're going to be? We'll hope the pilot continues the success that we've seen at the first three intersections. Do you have a time frame on these seven new locations where we're gonna be installing signs? We're gonna see if we can get Mr. Brooks back. I know he's already working on them, so those are in fabrication. Well, I think it said three were up, but there were seven that were gonna go up. So, new ones up? Do you know about new things Pretty, pretty, pretty quickly. Yes, sir. We have a, there's already three existing signs that we have, I think, seven more that we're going to install. We already have a work order that's out for those locations. So, it should be fairly quickly within the next, I would say, a couple of weeks, if not sooner. Thank you. Dr. Odom Weissley. Thank you. I'm happy to hear that the signs were effective in reducing the panhandling activity on those corners. Do we have any information on whether or not there was an increase in donations from those websites? Yes, ma'am. We had looked into that when they initially went out these first three intersections with all the signs that were at the intersections. We did not hear from the non-profits that they got additional donations from that. We can check again and perhaps we'll wait till the next seven go out and then check with them a couple months later to see if that has made a difference. Thank you. How many total will we have when those seven go at that'll be 10 right here. We already had 10 10 10 inner sections and I will say there are multiple signs that each intersection because they have to be in you know all four corners and all of that. So that'll be 10 total. Mr. Gonzalez. Mr. Sanchez, you asked that question. We looked at looked at the ones that were usually the ones that we put it out were the ones that were in cars that they would collect money and then they would be back in their cars. So those are the ones that we've noticed have quick coming here. You're still going to have the pantowanas everywhere. at the cracker barrel. They'd walk over there, collect the money, and then take off from the car. So that's what we've noticed, the big decrease of those individuals. So. Okay, thank you. Housing and finance corporation, the out of jurisdiction activity. Any questions or comments for Mindy Cochran? Boy, this one gets my blood flowing. Yeah. But, go ahead. Maybe you can, like, take in a blood flow. I will go down and fight on this one, unlike the Petty Cab Mayor. This one is... Brother, I'll stand shoulder to shoulder. Yeah, we, this one is unacceptable. I know we have legislation potentially coming through. Molly, is there anything legally we can do? This is one of those where if we have to put the legal fight on something, I think we put a legal fight on something because it is a housing finance court from outside of the city taking advantage. They get money from those fees that are coming in, we then receive zero revenue from that entity coming in, and more importantly have no jurisdiction over what is coming in to our city from those respective. So if there is a legal fight, if there is legal, if there is anything we can do, I think it's something we explore to try and shut this down. Because I do think, you always say, the word J knows, the worst thing you always do is rely on our legislature, right? Like goodness gracious, if that's what we're relying on, I'm real nervous. But if we have some legal precedent, you know, we don't get a legal fight before that. But boy, I think we've got to explore every option on this scenario. Completely agree. And we already are working alongside Mindy's team to try to identify how we... fight before that. But boy, I think we've got to explore every option on this scenario. Completely agree. And we already are working alongside Mindy's team to try to identify how we might be able to, and I'm going to use the word protest. It's not the appropriate term, but protest the exemption that Tad might grant. Sort of protest the public purpose that this HFC partnership is arguing for Tad to apply. So we're evaluating and I would just that we'd be able to bring that back to you in a possible executive session to kind of further give you some of the analysis there. Use that legal brain and that team to anything. If Jinsi and I would hope, you know, like we review on everything, but boy, every single thing on planning better be to the T on that from that perspective. And, you, I maybe not so say extra scrutiny on something. That's probably a bad legal thing, but boy, that's where I wanna go with this, when someone is trying to go around the system and just truly gain the system as those are what they're trying to do here. I think this is absolutely horrific of these smaller jurisdictions who are trying to scam the system. And that's exactly what they're doing. With the help of Mendy, we fired off a nasty letter to Pecos who did it recently to us and I would be willing to go after them in any way that we legally can to get that. Now we have since this Pecos issue, Jay and I and Natalie have had conversations with the number of our senators and representatives about some of the upcoming bills that are in place to help restrict that they're aware of it. Recently, we met with Senator King, who says he's very aware of it. He wants to help with it. And I hope we can get something out of this legislative session. However, I think that these entities who are doing this, these small municipalities, these small jurisdictions that are doing this, have a sense that restrictions are coming down the pipeline on them, and they're expediting their process to take more advantage of it throughout the state. And they're trying to get as many out there as they possibly can in the meantime. And that's where I really agree with what Mr. Hogg was saying is I don't know what other legal remedies are available because my understanding is the current law is so vague that it makes it difficult in some way shape or form. But these people coming in and poaching on our territory, our jurisdiction here and taking our tax dollars away from us is absolutely horrific. I'm going to ask one thing and Molly, maybe it's a little piece. If we sent, in essence, a no asking them, I don't know the legal term to save all their documents, make sure it's not deleted, and then we also open record request them. Let's put a little pain on them on what we're doing, so we can see how they're coordinating this because this is not. Spoliation letter. This is not this is I think you I don't know the legal terms this is not a fly by the CD or pants idea this is a hardcore gamesmanship strategy that we need to put the full force on them to go after them. Yeah. Maybe you didn't have to save much did you? Thanks, Mindy. Mindy, Cockatoo, executive director of housing is nice. How many times do you get to walk up to the podium? And automatically, the entire council like jumps behind the front seat. Let's get off. What's going to be very clear, Mindy, you've never applied for another city, correct? That's correct. That's all I wanted to make. But I would say I wholeheartedly agree because the problem is getting bigger faster since we sent this ISR. There have been more than 20 additional LLCs formed. Don't have any indication that there's activity in Arlington but working with Hilltop, monitoring it as closely as we can. So we do know of one in Arlington, and we're trying to shut that down. And I think from our count, sorry, Mayor, I'm, no, go, go, go for it. I'm actually restraining what I really want to say on this thing today. Or you say the less I have to come on. I think as council members, we have to really be calling on Texas Municipal League also to remedy this because this is a game they are playing with smaller cities, smaller rural cities to play this game. And we have to call out Texas Municipal League because there may be a lesson and someone may have talked to us at a Texas office will be a smaller city training and so I think TML has to be involved in this and they are not allowed to sit there and take a back seat which they seem to do often so. Absolutely. Anything else? The drug? Going once. Boxel, 4.3. Thank you. Thank you, Mayor. The community and neighborhood development committee met. We had two items on the agenda. The first was the the neighborhood matching grant program If you remember from our last meeting we had five applications and we agreed to go forward with four of them Two of the four we had additional questions for so today in today's meeting we had some of those questions answered and we resolved one of them and then we still have additional questions on one. So the bottom line is that we hope to make a decision in the next week when we meet again again and bring all of our recommendations before the full council and get your approval on the ones that we recommend to go forward with. Thank you. Any questions or comments from Ms. Boxel? Thank you, ma'am. And the second item that we looked at, we looked at one proposal for tax credit project that is being proposed off of 360 and Parkboro area, you know, 360 and Pioneer area on the east side and we just discussed it briefly. We're going to discuss it in more depth next week when we meet again. So there's no recommendation at this time but we will be coming forward with the recommendation either next week or the following council meeting. Thank you. Thank you, ma'am. Okay, 4.4. Dr. Odom Westley. Economic Development. Thank you, Mayor. The Economic Development Committee met this morning and I was standing in for our chair Andrew Peel. All other members were present. We had two items on our agenda. Got a nice report on the SCORE program where we just graduated 15 out of 21. I think I'm trying to make sure I got the numbers right. And just to remember, it's a six month program. They met once a month, the cohort, and it was small business training and development. And they will have follow up in six months and again in 12 months. And we have a new, what's her title? Assistant Executive Director, K. was K's last night's year. on her way. In fact, she's on another meeting. She may walk in while- To meet everybody. Yeah, her name is Kay Brown-Patrick. She is, we condensed our, some of our staff. And so she handles two duties. She's assistant executive director. She's also director of small, minority, and women-owned enterprise development. And so Kay did a great job of presenting today. We can give you more detail if you'd like. She may come walking while I'm here, but in addition, we shared some good data that we got from the cohort as to how they lacked the program and gave us some direction on how we can take what score did and take it, make it even better tailored to Arlington's needs. Yes, it was a good report. We also got a report on the lift fund. You want to share anything on that, Marty? Be glad to. We're thrilled that to see two businesses have been selected that made public for their grants from that interest rate buy-down that you guys approved months back. Sylvia and Sylvia Interprises and Young and Rue. We have two others that have been chosen, haven't been made public, but one is willing to share his story, Bryant Griffith, who y'all are familiar with, our Teresa Bernat in the communications department, pushed out a great story on her. You're going to be seeing that in the next day or so on him, I'm sorry. And his process, I told the committee that it's somewhat of a poster child, he goes through and talks about how he and all of these applicants cases, they have to have applied for a loan privately and shown they had difficulty and are willing to come in and go through the lift fund process. And so he's really a cheerleader in glowing support for what came through there, too. And so we anticipate more and look forward to bringing you up more information on other applicants that we know are going through that process. Thank you. Great. It's a great program and a great report. The other items on our agenda were discussed in executive session. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you. Any questions or comments for Dr. Odom Wesley? Gus, did she forget anything that your name's down here on the agenda? Thank you. 4.5 of Arlington Housing Finance Corp. Update. Miss Hunter. Councilmember Hunter, it's got me to do the report out for her. So So back. Today there were no action items other than approval of minutes, but the board did have a conversation about transitioning general counsel and bond council. David Patreskin associates has been bond council and general counsels for the HFC since it began, literally since it began and he is retiring in May. So he is going to stay on as co-general council with the City Attorney's Office through May, and then Chapman in color with Ryan Bowen will take on bond council, she would need those services between now and then. And then in May, we can revisit the topic and see if that's something that HFC wants to go out for bid for or RF at that time or or leave things where they are. So that was a conversation that we had. And then we also had a conversation about out of jurisdiction, housing finance corporations activities. And the purpose of that was you as a body as city council have made it clear that you are opposed to that type of activity. And as an HFC as as a body, had the opportunity to also say we as an HFC also opposed it. And Council Member Hunter has sent a letter similar to the mayor's letter. In her capacity as president of the Housing Finance Corporation to the PAKO's HFC and their City Council as well. So two bodies that are impacted because we do have an HFC in Arlington and they could have reached out to your HFC how they wanted to do that business in Arlington. And then we had a few project updates. One on the single family bond program and there's been why do you want to just stir it up again? Do I need to email the Pagos City Council? I'm still fired up. I have the email address as I think he'd like to do that. Quick update before I get in trouble here. I have the email address as if you'd like to do that. Quick update before I get in trouble here. A single family bond program, 49 new home buyers, amazing that program, which is fantastic. We had an application for bonds through the HFC from Campbell Place, which the developer was Penrose. They've withdrawn that application. And then finally, the reserve at Mayfield, a 220 unit, senior development had its grand opening on Friday. Mayor was there to give some welcoming comments. So it was a nice open house there. And I do wish to want to clarify that the housing finance corporation, it's a good tool if it's something that you all want to use for the development of affordable housing. And I would hate for these bad actors to really taint a program that can really be valuable if it's used in the right manner. So. It was interesting at the grand opening of the Reserve on Mayfield running into a resident who I've met at other places was so excited about being in the new place. Had his granddaughter with him. He was there just thrilled to death to have an affordable place that he could live. So thank you for what you did. Okay, 4.6. Mr. Buskin, any appointments, boards or commissions this evening? Yes, there are no appointments this evening. Thank you, 4.7 Mr. Randolph. Thank you very much mayor. Let me a round up deputy city manager. At your place, you will notice a packet that is fronted with this list of projects. So we wanted to give you a little overview of kind of what's included here. So this includes the list of projects that you recommended for the May 2025 bond along with a map of those projects, as well as some collateral that describes the projects in more detail, and then a copy of the draft ordinance. So as you'll note on next Tuesday, you'll have a question on the docket relative to the ordinance regarding the bond election. And that'll be a first and final. And so that will be the opportunity to vote affirmative on that if that is your choice. And then we've prepared or are preparing a number of different communications that will go along with that, assuming that the vote is affirmative for the bond, including a water bill insert. That will have a full page flyer of voter guide, significant social media graphics, billboard graphics, et cetera as well as a video that our office's office of communications will produce. All of these materials will be available in Spanish and Vietnamese as well. But just wanted to give you kind of that update and put a marker in for next Tuesday's decision that you'll have to make. So I can certainly take any questions that you might have on any of that. Questions or comments for Mr. Angle? Thank you sir. Appreciate you. Evening agenda items. Anybody have anything you'd like to talk about on tonight's evening agenda items? I'll go slow. No, no, no. Okay. We'll move on pass. So legislative update is Natalie gonna do that. Jay is she out there? Hi. You want to talk about Pacos or the HFC or anything like that? I will answer any questions you haven't already discussed. I don't even know where to begin. Natalie Rawson and her governmental relations manager. So just somebody hit me please. Anything for Natalie? Mr. Gonzalez? Quick question. AI. I mean, you're obviously having to use it now with this. Is it working well? I'm not using it that much really. You're not? Not yet. I'm still getting integrated with our new tools, so I don't have, right now I'm still relying on departments to analyze bills and that's really the plan for this. It's more of a backup tool for this. I just haven't gotten fully onboarded yet in order to use it, but I've planned to. We're looking forward to see how it works. Yes, sir. Thanks. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Natalie. All right. I just haven't gotten fully onboarded yet in order to use it, but I've planned to. Looking forward to see how it works. Yes, sir. Thanks. Thank you, sir. Thank you, Natalie. All right. Well, Trey, you want to speak a little bit or in order to say about kind of how you're going to be used to track some of these executive order things as well as statutory kinds of things. melding activity in the federal and state areas here with all next to Jay. He's going to take the lead on federal stuff right now because there's just a lot coming at us from both housing. Yeah, I mean, right now we're kind of in a wait and seam on. I mean, just today since we've been in the room, you know, President Trump has shoot a freeze on federal grants and loans, federal judges come out since we've been here and frozen that freeze. So there's just a lot of moving parts with these executive orders and not a lot of detail has been attached to them just yet. So it is a part of our process to go through them, review them, working with our consultant in Washington DC capital edge to see potential impacts and then relay that to the different departments that would be impacted by that. Clearly, the one today could have had a financial impact on the city and some capacity. So those are the types of things we would certainly want to be keeping an eye on. I want to make sure that as you all see headlines or things that are particularly worried about, just know that Jay and Natalie will be treating that like state file bills and federal file bills. It's all kind of in that area that will be tracking and reporting back to you on a routine basis. Any questions for either J. or Natalie on that? Thank you. Mr. Gonzalez, you want to talk to us about RTC? Yes to go to the council. I'm going to go to the council. I'm going to go to the council. I'm going to go to the council. I'm going to go to the council. I'm going to go to the council. I'm going to go to the council. I'm going to go to the council. I'm going to go to the council. I'm going to go to the council. The real-world great separations in NS and 183 improvements Betlite interchange and Irving, the real-world-grade separations in NS and 183 improvements in Ternant County. Council government staff also requested RTC approval to allocate up to $1 million in funding to hire external legal assistance and preparation for potential litigation against COG from the Hunt Wheel T Group concerning the high speed rail planning. The Hunt Wheel T attorneys have sent numerous letters to COG I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. I'm going to start with the first one. for potential litigation against COG from the Hunt Wheel T group concerning the high-speed rail planning. The Hunt Wheel T attorneys have sent numerous letters to COG asking for documents to be preserved among other requests that are offering percursor's litigation. The ROTC approved the request for the stipulation that the approval will be sought from the RTC after the expenditure of $250,000. After discussion and disagreement from several RTC members, which included Mayor and myself and the county judge from Parker. The members agree that one fall, from several RTC members at the full one million was not authorized. The RTC also received information updates on the federal and state legislative sessions on the new 5-11 DFW Traveler Information System. I did not know this existed. 5-11, it's an app on your program, on your phone, that if your car breaks down, you can have all your information on your car, you can include what kind of gas it uses and everything else and they come and fixed tires. It's just everything that you have but hearing DFW so it's really, they're trying to push that a lot. All my kids have since installed them, my wife's installed it, including myself. So if you're not familiar with the 511 DFW travel information system, it's a little better than waves and all that gives you all the information about traffic. but this allows also for any type of health that you need on the highway to make sure if you're carpets on the highway that you don't get out of the car and you can remain safe. The next RTC meeting is scheduled for February 13th. Any questions or comments from Mr. Gonzalez? I've instructed my office to forward you an email with the correspondence from the law firm representing the Hunt Reality Group. So y'all should have a stack of that. It makes for interesting reading when they speak about Arlington and our desire not to be a team player in the region and to siphon business away from Dallas, which we all know is not accurate and we certainly are a regional player and want them to have a very good development because we all benefit from that. So, but I thought it important that you be able to see what was being said. US Conference of Mayors, I'll handle that one. Weekend before last, I was in Washington, D.C. for the winter meeting of the US Conference Mayors. The president of the US Conference right now is Andy Ginter, out of Columbus, Ohio. focus of the U.S. Conference right now is, Andy Ginter, out of Columbus, Ohio. The focus of the conference is on housing. They are saying that housing isn't an important issue. It's the national issue with the mayors around the country. That housing is or lack thereof is impacting all of us tremendously causing problems with homelessness, etc. There were strategy sessions on preparing for the transition of the old administration to the new administration and what does that mean and strategies on how just like Jay was saying earlier, how the execution of some of the executive orders may or may not impact us on a local level. from an Arlington perspective in the 82 years that the conference has been around. We've only had one Texas mayor who's been president of the conference. I'm currently running against the St. Louis mayor for the second vice president and we'll know in June whether or not we get it but that will put us in position to have the second mayor in the history of the conference to be from Texas to be the president. So hopefully that will happen. Any questions on the conference? Dr. Odom Wesley, National League of Cities. Yes, thank you Mayor. Ed. conference. Dr. Odom Westley, National League of Cities. Yes, thank you Mayor. At the October, no, November conference. I was elected to the Board of Directors for National League of Cities. And our first meeting was called meeting to replace the president. The elected president for NLC lost her reelection bid. She was mayor of Baton Rouge. So once she was not reelected, she was no longer eligible to serve as president. So the executive board met, moved up the first vice who is Steve Patterson from Athens, Ohio. He is now the president, and then moved the second vice to first vice. And that's Kevin Kramer from Louisville, Kentucky. And then we elected a new second vice who actually had run for second vice and got the the next highest highest number of votes. Van Johnson, mayor of Savannah, Georgia. It's first time in the 100-year history of NLC that they had to do that. But the by-laws covered it and that's what we did in December. So our orientation was held in January and for those who are not familiar with NLC, it is the representative body for municipalities. They call them cities, towns, and villages. And I'm always asking where are the villages? But I guess we do have some. So they represent 2,700 cities across the nation and influence federal policy, strengthen local leadership and drive innovative solutions. And they have been working closely with the new administration to advance legislative priorities that municipalities have and see how they work along with this new Trump administration. They have eight pillars of excellence to provide quality service and resources for our members and all of our 200 million constituents, 200 plus million constituents. And I know Rob Wogan-Solachis asked the question about AI. They just recently published a resource to guide municipalities and their use of AI in local governments. So providing resources for municipalities is one of their primary purposes. It is a nonpartisan group and is focused on what matters most to member cities. It works with the state municipal leagues, have representation on the board from those municipal leagues. By the way, it's about 40 people on the board. So they represent all of the small cities, medium cities as well as large cities. It is visible that main offices in Washington DC, relationship driven forward leaning, financially solid representation of our municipal bodies. And since I was appointed, I have been placed on the membership committee for the board. And the board liaison to NBC Leo, that's the National Black Council, National Black Caucus of Local Elected Officials, and also a representative to Rio, which is an affiliate of NLC, and it's race, race, racial equity, and leadership. I also serve on the Human Development Committee. Our next big meeting is in March in Washington, DC. And I hope we have some other council members that are playing on going and will visit our representatives up on the hill. Let me know anytime you have any questions or any information you want me to take back to NLC. Thank you. I forgot issues because I didn't write anything down. That's what happens when you're old. While I was in Washington, D.C. at the conference. I had the opportunity to meet with other host mayors on the FIFA World Cup. There is a panel that was there and on the panel was the FIFA representative who was the director of government affairs. She and I have known each other through a number of these conferences that we've been to. I approach. of the government affairs. She and I have known each other through a number of these conferences that we've been to. I approached her and we had a very candid conversation about the naming of AT&T Stadium. And our desire to ensure that the Arlington name was a part of AT&T Stadium. She assured me that she had spoken with Monica Paul, the head of our FIFA committee here locally and Dallas Sports Authority, that she had spoken with them and that Monica has taken it to her committee. I, in turn, sent Monica an immediate text and I said, what's the status? Alex has told me this and Monica has said she's waiting to she should be able to get something back to us shortly. Now, I don't know what that means, but I anticipate and then that to distant future we may have a decision on including Arlington's name on that. Also last year at some point, other folks had attempted to do a mayor symposium with the Griffin Institute a part of the Medal of Honor Museum that didn't make the Medal of Honor Museum's Griffin Institute has a wonderful leadership program. So I've taken that program. I chair the Veteran Affairs Task Force for the U.S. Conference Mayors. And I've brought in the VA to help on this. So we're pitching a program here to the conference, already pitched it to the conference. That will be a two and a half day leadership program with the Medal of Honor folks teaching that. And then I followed up with a half a day from the Veterans Administration that teaches mayors how to take the character traits taught in the leadership program and apply them with the VA playbook and going back to your respective communities to do good things for veterans in your community. Here in Arlington, if y'all don't know, Long helps me out with this. We have the Arlington Valor Alliance, which is our group of veteran service organizations that have come together. The City more or less acts as a conduit for those veteran service organizations. We're work, we have put together our own playbook, which more or less emulates what the VA playbook is, and we've done it in a way that will allow other municipalities around the country to take this playbook and implement some of the things that we're doing here with the Arlington Valor Alliance. So if you're interested in helping out and looking through our playbook here in Arlington, it's in one of the final draft versions that we have of it right now. and let me know and I'll get you a copy of it and you're welcome to come to any of our AVA meetings. We do it down at the east, and it's a good group of veteran organizations from Mission United, a part of United Way to everything from the Elk Slodge to the unayment of VA, everybody's a part of United Way to everything from the elk sludge to the you name at VA, everybody is a part of this thing so we have a good group going in Ireland. Any questions? Issues relative to city or tech stock projects, anybody have anything on that? Future agenda items. Mr. Gonzalez. Thank you, Mayor. As a future agenda, I would like to discuss how the city can help residential developments or redevelopments with outside roadway bill requests leading up to their access drives either with roadway impact fee waivers or equivalent. I know the city is not in a position to make a put money up front, but I think if we can think creative ways to help the development get started because I know I've got two developments right now for residential homes and they're asked, they're being asked to redo the road which will publicly kill both projects. So I know of two in South Orleans and so we can look at that. Role and I talked to Jensy earlier today on that. I think that's a good thing to get at some type of ideas and staff report on kick it around because you get a good developer coming in wanting to do something a nice single family housing development in an area but it necessitates the development of a portion of a roadway that's gonna lead into that subdivision there. The cost of building out that roadway is prohibitive from doing the project because it could add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the project and not making the money's work on that. So are there other fees or other things that can we get creative as a city to help not eliminate the cost but help share and a burden of some of those things that can be cost prohibitive for some of these developers because we are getting a situation where we would otherwise have good development going on in there, but for the fact that we're having to take a 19 foot wide road and expand it to 28 feet and put more drainage things on there and I get it, I understand why, but sometimes having that burden for the developer just prohibits them from being able to get the development done. And I'd just like to be creative with that if we can. We may decide there's nothing we can do about it, but let's see what we can do. Anything else future agenda? Just on that one, Mary. We probably can't turn that for next week. so let's look forward to that at the end of February because we'll probably a little more time to pull some information and update it. Cool. Thank you, Trey. Anything else future? Okay, well then with that we're going to adjourn this after-new session and'll see you're by downstairs at 6.30. you you you you The American History We stay in American history. Over 22,000 Americans were killed, wounded, or missing an action during that battle. Marcus Haskell had been wounded earlier in the battle, but during one of the most intense parts of the fight, he saw one of his friends was wounded in the open Con open battle field so he left cover ran across open battlefield during the peak of the battle to save his friend Pulls him off the battlefield and he comes home with many of the Civil War stories We don't have a ton of details about these individuals for example That is the only known photograph of Marcus Haskell all we know about him He's from's from Massachusetts, he serves throughout the Civil War, he's wounded six times in various battles, and then goes home and lives a quiet life and dies in the early 1920s. Well speaking of the life before and after, that's one of the things we aim to do is to tell those stories, right? Like the entire life of a recipient, and we have one right here that fits that bill. Tell me about Hershey. For sure. So one thing that's unique about our museums, we're not a military museum. We think of ourselves as a biographer museum. We want to tell the full-life stories of these individuals before they join the military. Obviously we will talk about their Medal of Honor experiences. And then once they came home, what do they do with the Medal of Honor? He was in Korea in 1951. He was in a in 1951. He was in a pretty intense battle and charged with several machine gunness. It was very clear that it was time for them to get out of there. He stayed behind to make sure to give his guys that he was with enough time to get out. He was last seen fighting in Hand to Hand Combat, and it was presumed that he was killed in action. It wasn't until several months later that his name finally surfaced on a prisoner of war list. He was a prisoner of war for two and a half years in a Chinese prisoner of war camp. Now the artifacts we have here, of course, his Medal of Honor here that the family shared with us, but these are some of my favorite artifacts in the collection. These are three letters written by Hershey's wife to Hershey Wally was in Korea. Now, if you look at the dates, this is three days before his Medal of Honor action. This is three days after his Medal of Honor action. This is about a week. written by Hershey's wife to Hershey while he was in Korea. Now if you look at the dates, this is three days before his Medal of Honor Action, this is three days after his Medal of Honor Action, and this is about a week after that. And if you look closely, you'll see return to sender and then down verified missing in action. So that's one of the ways that the Mia Muraf family figured out that their person Hershey was missing in action and eventually a prisoner of war. Now what's unique about about these letters is that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were that they were