All right council members it's 716 we are I'd like to call this work session to order We have already had the pledge of allegiance in a moment of silence Reporting in the comment roll call please miss Lawrence Mr. Oz Mr. K. Here Mr. Let's Gavin Miss McDermott here Mr. Perry here Mr. Savitino here Smith Mr. Davidson here Mr. Perry. Here. Mr. Sanvatino. Here. Smith. Here. Mr. Davidson. Here. Mr. Thornton. Here. Mr. Lovic. Here. Mr. Lombardo. Here. All present. All right. Thank you. Are there any additions or deletions from the work session agenda? Is there a motion to adopt? Somebody. So they're motion to adopt. Thank you. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Jen is adopted. We will now have the Division of Reports for August 2024. Manager Gropel. Thank you, Chairman Lovardo. As usual, there's any questions or comments from the Plotl, Taxi text, or email me. There are some things that I want to highlight first is that we'll be having our 10th hall meeting on the 18th, if I can, at our operations building. Everyone is welcome. I also want to acknowledge that our county controller. Senator Baker introduced a bill to ensure fair compensation for lawn support for an agency serving the FAA orders. I share a student at the New Yeoman's work. But in her statement, she said, and I quote the need for the change was highlighted following at the 2022 audit by the Missouri County Controllers Office, which recommended that any enforcement and law enforcement agents could be after the order other than the sheriff should in a way to share its And I know that those are counting as not a place to avoid any more, which I've been saying that for a while. The final thing that I want to know is that 23 years ago this evening I had a work late. I had a brief due to cord and peels. I've gone 70 second floor of the 100th state building and there was raining that night and I had the view of the World Trade Center. I could see the Arizona Bridge. All we saw call it the Arizona Bridge. Fly with me. Yes. And of course, the Stetcher Liberty and the East River. And it was raining and the lights and the tower flickered. And in the next day we all witnessed devastation and bravery. And I will always remember that. So tomorrow morning we are going to have a special memorial for the anniversary of the attacks on September 11th and we're specifically going to honor our first responders. I saw the look in the eyes of the firefighters who were driving down with Avenue South to the Trade Center and they knew exactly what they were facing. And they were facing death. And they went in with their equipment that hundreds of pounds that they carry up. And they went into those buildings to try to save lives. And they didn't leave for days because they'd stay there in the rubble, trying to find their comments. So tomorrow we will have a memorial of A30 and here I'll invite it, and they're all invited and it's something that we individually collectively can never forget. And we can never forget that those days and weeks following those attacks we will win this. Thank you. Thank you, Manager Crocomo. Once again, I'd like to join us tomorrow at 8.30 in the morning outside of the courthouse. I think it will be a beautiful ceremony. Okay. I'll manage a Crocomo. I just did have one question. What time was the Manager's Hall of all that? On the 18th? 5am. Okay. Thank you very much. All right, next up we'll have the loser and county housing study presentation by the institute. We have Ms. Goons. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. My name is Mary Almsman. I'm here with my colleague, Bill Irvisaus from the Institute. We were the recipient of an ARCH Award for the county and we thank you for the opportunity to use those funds to develop a countywide housing needs assessment for the Reserve County. Housing is one of the major social determinants of health that impact individuals at every age, and it's their physical and mental health ability to perform academically in school, and their ability to be productive workforce workers in our society. So housing is a critical component of our economic development future as a region and housing has been a challenge for a number of years, which is why we really wanted to do this study to bring to light the state of housing in a region and potential opportunities to improve the housing for all individuals. So to give you an idea, we're going to do a very short summary of the study. I know you have the PowerPoint in your packets. There is a 200 page document that really goes into significant detail. If you would like to read it at your leisure and of course call our office or email us at any time to respond to any questions that you may have Miss Alton we would want to copy that if you want some talk. That's fine. Yeah, yeah You're right about this anyway, so let's talk a little bit about the study background. So, housing changes have really been a challenge for decades. Housing stock in Luzerun County is old. It's the amount of housing built before 1940 is twice the state average, three times the national average. So, we're dealing with an older housing stock that potentially has structural issues as a result of the population decline that occurred between the 50s and early 2000s. There was really no incentive for real estate development. So housing did not grow. While our population had grown some prior to COVID, it still did not warrant significant investment by private sector or even the public sector to COVID, it still did not warn significant investment by private the private sectors or even the public sector to to create different types of new housing. COVID hit and we saw change. We saw an increase in population where people from the major urban core of New York, Philadelphia, and even to some degree, the high values start continuing to move in this direction. The ability to work remotely created opportunities and we saw population growth. So you couple that with the other phenomenon that we've been watching slowly since the early 2000s and we call it the Westford migration, which are individuals that lived in New York and New Jersey. First year suburbs started moving east because the cost of housing in those communities was significant. And continued that movement through the polka-nomes where you saw that increase in population from the mid-90s to the early 2000s. And they continued to migration here and we first noticed that increase in early 2010. It was stagnant for a while and then COVID bumped it up. What we noted are an increase in populations in two different demographics. One, the middle of the upper middle income families that moved here for lower cost housing because they could buy the housing in our suburbs with a half an acre of land for $3,400,000, $500,000, they're a million in New York and suburbs in New Jersey. We also saw migration of the low-to-moderate income individuals that were primarily moving here, again, for the cost of housing, but we're moving into more rental housing or very small, single-family homes. The population that fell into that low of moderate income population was primarily of different races and ethnicities. It helped create some of the incredible diversity we have here. There are a million populations, so you often see multiple generations under one roof because they can't care their elders. With all of this growth within the past two decades and no development, there's obviously shortage. And you couple that with the availability of a older housing that may be blinded and we've got the perfect salon. So the opportunity to do the housing study was based upon this data and the need for examining what types of housing are really needed, what price points are really needed, where optimal areas for development, and that's where the focus of the study is. So we used a mixed method approach. We studied a lot of data. We read a lot of zoning codes. And our stakeholder interviews from people that are involved in housing from real estate developers to real estate agents to nonprofit housing organizations to get their feedback on housing. There was a significant emphasis on zoning because of some of the solutions to mitigate the housing challenge involved changing lot sizes, reducing lot sizes to increase step by density to look at more infill development adaptive development and reuse. of private developers was the fact that zoning is really a problem that has impacted negatively, impacted housing development development in the county. When you have 20 of the communities that use the county for the zoning, you have four cities that have their own zoning departments and those four cities that count really for nearly 23% of the real estate transactions and accounting on any annual basis. The remainder of the municipalities also have their own zoning home. Some of the land that is available for new development is in multiple jurisdictions. I for one can attest to part my driveway being in a piston township of the rest of my houses in DuConn. Things like that were developers have to go to multiple jurisdictions to get zoning approval for different kinds of developments regardless, whether they're single family homes or multi-family units becomes a deterrent to the private sector for investment. So we studied zoning very heavily and there are many applicable recommendations to support changes in zoning and to encourage more municipalities to come to the county to have their zoning all under one umbrella. And as I mentioned there are other interviews as well from in a folks engaged in housing from different perspectives. We completed a synthesis of the data and then what you're going to see in the report is analysis of the supply of housing that is currently available, housing characteristics such as age and size, whether they're primarily single family, multi family, high rights apartments. If any of them are age each related or inclusive for individuals with disabilities, and then looking at the market analysis, studying the sales transactions, noting the price changes, where the volume is taking place. I probably went too much into zoning, so I want to tell that any more, but we did it is in there. We included the qualitative input, and then identified case studies from around the country where communities like ours, regions like ours, have had housing issues and felt success in developing different types of housing at different price points and both for more urban, suburban, and rural areas of different counties. And then based on all of that data, we made some recommendations that we thought the county of different counties. And then based on all of that data, we made some recommendations that we thought the county could be a partner in. We certainly so don't see the county as the entity that has to fix the problem, but can work with other partners in other jurisdictions, with a private sector, with a nonprofit sector to improve the housing. And then the report ends with the appendix of profiles of all of the municipalities within Reserve County. And they're housing characteristics and socioeconomic characteristics of their current community. I'll bring Jill up next and she'll be able to tell you some more of the findings that we uncovered in some of the recommendations. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So the full report again is kind of a heavy lift and I'm just going to touch on a few highlights to give you just a very higher level general understanding of what you can find in the overall piece. And we do know from our analysis that most county white home sales are concentrated in just a fraction of municipalities. The top three of those are the cities of Hazelton, Wilkes-Barre, and Butler Township. And before I touch on 10-year, I do also want to point out that the rise in point sales has coincided with inward migration that Terry discussed. And the growth in interest rates really had put or relieved some of the pressure on those rising rates. They still remain very much out of touch for a lot of mental income and lower income individuals. Ten year, which really refers to ownership versus rental status, that has remained pretty steady over the years, even despite incremental growth in the number of housing units that are available in the county. And really, I should say that the tenure for the overall the general population has remained steady, but the tenure for older adults, the older community has not been so steady. Aside from that outlier, there that you can see in 2014, generally, the ripple status among holder adults has decreased and home ownership has increased over the past several years. And that also coincides with growing opportunities for aging in place. They can see rates have remained fairly elevated over the years, so you can see the drop at the peak of the pandemic when the market tightened up. And most of those vacancies are specific to single-family detached units. And of course, most of the county units are in fact single family detached units. There is somewhat a rural urban divide, however. The age of the housing stock is quite high, but in the rural areas, the building there does tend to be a little bit more recent than the building and some of the more urban areas that is also consistent with fuel usage although utility gas is the most common resource across the county fuel oil is much more common in rural areas so there was a reason to recognize some rural urban divide during our analysis. Our qualitative analysis that encompasses the interviews with developers, representatives of the public and private sectors did reveal some pretty common themes as well, and they did also confirm a lot of the findings from our secondary data. And that is that the housing stock currently is not meeting the needs of the population. There's a certain insufficient supply of middle housing, in particular for housing for middle- income individuals. There is a lot of confusion surrounding zoning, a lot of conflicts surrounding zoning, even direct conflict in terms of codes and what those codes mean. And a lot of interest and light radiation and adaptive reuse as well. So there are some recommendations summarized here which again pertains to adaptive reuse, bringing vacant properties to market potential for CDFIs, accessible housing, regionalization, and so forth. So again, I just wanna reiterate that these are some very general highlights that probably do not even come close to capturing the full picture of the story that's available through the study, but I hope that'll kind of give you an idea and that you can take some time and read it more thoroughly. We do have it available online. We'll also be forwarding it of course to Council and we'll be happy to answer further questions and to be connected. Thank you. I actually wanted to ask questions or maybe in the comments. So in the very last slide I do know that the county does do a couple of these things and one of the things that we did actually with our ARPA funding was to give grants to several of the land banks in the area but they would give them lighter properties. And although that's kind of a drop in the bucket, that is something that we have done, and we certainly would like to be able to partner with them in more ways than just that. The other thing that has come to our table frequently, here on County Council are issues of zoning, which Council doesn't deal with, we have a zoning work that deals with those issues, and we have a planning zoning department. And my understanding or at least my opinion on that issue was always that it would be better for the individual municipalities to control their own zoning since you know the issues that they typically deal with when it comes to having a variance for like a construction site or a waste transfer facility for a recent example but when they come to the county the zoning ordinances is there are actually 22 municipalities in the county that do use our county zoning but I was under the impressioner had the opinion that it would be better for the actual municipalities to control their own zoning is there is there a reason why it would be better if it was a countywide or regionalized approach? Yes, as a matter of fact, there is. So we were studying communities in regions across the country and we found that the most successful ones are ones that have regional planning entities where everything is consistent across all municipalities within a particular county. And in some cases, multiple counties where there can be seen as a strong economic under dependence. A primary example of what we see is in the Lehigh Valley. The Lehigh Valley Planning Commission has been an incredible success story in handling regional planning for the two counties out in the Lehigh Valley, and they've extended their work into regional transportation and workforce and economic element. And on December 6, the Executive Director of Becky Bradley is coming up for a work session, which we've been inviting all members of Council to, as well as La Colone County commissioners to talk about regional planning. One of the things that we astouse are regional solutions to problems that could be more cost-effective, cohesive, and really connect the communities, especially since there is such an incredible economic interdependence between the business community and workforce among the counties. So she was buying and coming up and give her presentation and talk about how the Lehigh Valley Planning Commission started, why it started, some illegal hassles they faced in combining all of these efforts under one roof and then talk about the lesson for just what those benefits they saw. All right, thank you. Any other questions by Calc members? Ms. McDurron? I don't have a question actually. We did have the presentation for several of us and we do have the whole report. I think we're going to do it for Mr. Santino and the students. And we are trying to put this together as you know. I think that a couple of times it's a little more difficult than I thought. We're in the process of trying to get by loss. So I did reject out of housing coalition, it's coming throughout the state, kind of their by loss. It seems like they do a lot more work than what I would envision, you know, housing coalition heroes are counted too. So that's kind of like where we're stuck right now. And then you connect it with Shane Powersy, executive director of NeighborWorks, sort of these PA. And I believe there's some other meetings coming up on NeighborWorks offers great financial literacy and budgeting programs for individuals looking at buying housing and trying to establish a program post-honorship, post-honorship up to 12 months to be able to continue to provide that advice and guidance to keep people in their homes so that the eviction rates go down there. Port closure rates go down as well. Mr. Osset, could you tell your potential talent? I really appreciate your annual report that you do every year, so I look forward to that. Thank you so much for that. I have a couple of questions because this is a great place to live, our metro area, all the way up to screen, all the way down to Ailton. And I've been seeing those for years, those of us involved in political life will make the rounds. So I have a real pulse on things like one of my colleagues do too. And it's really neat to see, and my fighters are going to miss out Looksbury. They're like, two big homes for a week. One little, they're all filled out today. We've gotten what's mostly Dominican immigrants, but other groups too. And we see that the older residents here are leaving the city areas. We don't have the suburbs when we see this too. And what makes this such a great place to live is that we have like our cities, our cities, our countries. I really appreciate that. We had the bait last week about other times, about property we own. The consensus is that we really like our room space here. So I don't know what advice you have for that because I would hate to make the same mistakes that are other metrics that have made across the country specifically with the Veli high value. We've got people running away from Veli high value that's congested. I was down there for Dr. Swant last week. It's a mess and a couple of things I wanted to ask. Have you, as in soup dummy studies, on the negative impacts of our warehouse development here, There's a lot of tax data programs where artificially stimulating that industry and it's bringing workers to fill those roles, right? So my question is, so the government is creating a situation and then it seems like we're looking to government to create another solution to that situation and it's a big circle. I don't know if your studies have done, I really would learn more about that to be honest with you. And then secondly, a lot of our new immigrants, they're concerned with these federal relocation programs. And if you look at this too, the new immigrants are coming in and it's making like difficult for a lot of our immigrants and our seeking asylum because the board's situation, whatever's going on there. So have you looked at the data from Catholic social services and these other like we sell them in groups that are artificially bringing people here in other places. I'm gonna be looking at that. Your report speaks to that. We haven't looked at the data on immigration, although it has been a topic on our anchors for equity meetings, which are economic mobility projects with the Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia. And looking at the growth in the immigrant population and trying to identify ways to teach English, educate, and yet I'm working in our health care systems, which are dire need of employees at every end of the spectrum, including a bunch of entry-level workers, like personal parades and community health workers and things like that. But we haven't really looked at the numbers. We do have enough data, I think, to be dangerous on the challenges that the immigrants are facing as they move into the area. Obviously, the languages of huge barrier resources are barrier individuals that are working would come across an on-clave of Pudgeride and Hindu individuals with many with incredible credentials that are really recognized in this country that are working in distribution centers at $18,000, $20 an hour. And they- Multiple jobs. Exactly. Yeah. So they work the Monday to Thursday shift in one distribution center and then the Friday, Saturday, Sunday shift and other distribution center just to be able to vacance me. So we do know as a challenge, there have been a work pressure on distribution wages, starting salaries now seem to be in the average of $18 an hour for a warehouse worker and shift differentials for swing and weekend. Obviously the growth in the distribution and logistics industry has been phenomenal throughout the whole quarter of 81 from Hazelton, actually all the way through La Volana County. And it has created opportunity not always looking wage jobs, but in some cases they have improved to that degree. But that's also another reason why housing is such a critical asset. And going back to your first question, we agree, there definitely needs to be delineation and keeping the Irma Corps perhaps more dense to subversive a little bit more dense in the world, less dense. There are opportunities for depth reuse and the bunch of geek vacant industrial buildings. I mean, what's happening downtown Wolfsbury right now where all of the old banks that have left those high-rise buildings are being turned into apartments, which is a great start. There's many more buildings like that. But the challenge is for the private sector to develop our is they're coming in, well they say it's market-grade. It's actually a high market grade because individuals coming into the workforce is like recent college grads or even those earning the average wage for loser county can't really afford those rents. So that's where the challenge and the middle income counseling comes into place whether it's rental or home ownership. ownership, but I think there's opportunities for that in-field development to do exactly what you're saying and keep the rural area rural. I don't think we need to lose that. Yeah, because I think, and I really appreciate what you're sharing, because I like this dialogue. I don't think it's too much more time, Mr. Chair, but you know, we're looking at, I hope federal policy is part of this because the government is causing a lot of this situation. This is not natural a lot of this growth and we have to deal with it here at the county level and sometimes we make bad county policy too, but for the most part these are issues that if they're if they're going to If they're going to stick their hands in our backyard the fun should fall And I'd like to see more studies not on that. But really what's funny is we have these flights that were flying illegal minors into our area and the whole humor of that story come here. This is happening. It's still happening, that kind of stuff. And I get reports of this. So I hope this can be part of the conversation because it is a tough job. And we do this to support people. You have to spend your people. Yes, we have companion studies to this housing study, which do address recommendations for both state and federal policy changes to mitigate some of the challenges that we're seeing in housing development. Thank you so much, ladies and gentlemen. Mr. Sette, you got me. Just to follow up on something that Mr. Cox thought should have had the study looked at the impact of where it is on housing, like the property tax abacons that are council approved? No, it's study date and have done that. Thank you. Any other members council? All right. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you. Would council like to take a quick recess? We can take that venture outside. Yeah. Yes sir. All right. Take a five minute recess. We'll come back at 7.50.