foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign foreign foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign foreign [Music] foreign [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] thank you foreign [Music] [Music] thank you [Music] foreign work session I'll call us to order and turn it over to David Cook thank you and good afternoon everybody there we go first off I'm going to call on Brandon Bennett who's going to give a post storm update or status report Brandon come on up and I think everybody at their place has a one-page summary a lot of people here today Brandon Bennett your code compliance director um hey we just wanted to to let you know we're on this storm this was one of those unusual ones last weekend uh where you know there weren't a lot of briefings about uh weather poor weather coming in uh and then the city got hit real hard and we thought it was important to number one you know pat on the back uh the office of emergency management uh transportation and Public Works the parks department uh the co-compliance officers that went out to damage assessment and then the solid waste team um that's out there uh today picking up tens of thousands of of tons of of debris uh that are sitting out on people's curbs we're not waiting for the storm chasers to to get it in a couple weeks we're getting it picked up right now so for all of you we've been keeping your your District directors uh in the loop if there are some areas that you think need a little more attention than others we encourage you and your constituents to let us know they can use both the Fort Worth app or you can just email us we'll make it priority and and we'll get out there the beautiful thing about this is is that last year when you uh increased the environmental fee and we added the additional illegal dump teams and the additional equipment additional drivers that enabled us to respond to storms like this much better so that was an added benefit to just the everyday illegal dumping and litter cleanups that we do so thank you any questions or comments for staff I mean from Council Macy oh Brandon I wanted to publicly thank you and your team for not just cleaning up on September the 8th but reaching out especially to the Chapel Hill residents they'll reached out personally to those citizens and I'm extremely grateful for that so thank you for that I'll make sure the troops get a pat on the back thanks same here and Gina has something too go ahead Gina Brandon one of my residents says her insurance agent talked about a declaration of a tornado I can't see that anywhere but did you hear anything about that yeah we we actually double checked with the office of emergency management who checked with the weather service and there was not a registered tornado but I will tell you the winds uh were great enough that it took roofs off it took out uh old growth trees that that we saw the same type of damage from this storm that we would have seen uh in a a lighter weight tornado well I go back to 2 thighs when we had straight line wins I was still with Encore I can relate to that but you mentioned taking care of slap six in my district I would ask that you also pay special attention to John T White Road Mrs Armstrong had a lot of damage there and I don't know if you guys had laid it there they've been trying to get it hauled off they're out they're out on John T white road right now thank you perfect timing Brandon thank you to you and your team and also to Encore I know they worked incredibly hard to help yes hey Brandon uh thanks for this um for folks who still have a large brush debris in front of their homes um what's the time period that they should wait until calling yeah so as so some of that will get picked up on the weekly yard debris cleanup um some of it will get picked up on their brush week and then if there's an extravagant amount in their particular neighborhood let us know and we'll get our extra trucks in there to help out we're actually cleaning this storm up better than any storm we've cleaned up in the past 20 years because we've had the resources that we didn't have so that's awesome and that's a big deal so thank you for that I'll be sure to communicate with our neighborhoods yeah absolutely let us know be our eyes and ears thank you thank you Brandon thank you Brandon next I'm going to call on Christina Brooks and she's going to talk about a recent award the city received it's the Trailblazer award from the National Association of minority contractors Christina foreign Council it brings me great pleasure to discuss the award that the city of Fort Worth received that it is the equivalent of national recognition for some of the Innovative work that we've done over the last uh several years in our business Equity Division and I have uh some of our staff and I'd like for them to to join us as well as our Economic Development Representatives I think Ori is here from Economic Development if you all could join me the Trailblazer award uh recognizes um the work the hours the passion that we put into making sure that uh there is uh opportunity for all entrepreneurs and businesses um specifically those business Equity firms as well as veterans and other disadvantaged business enterprises in the work that we do here with the city and the the money that we expend and so this team right here really takes all of the big ideas that uh Robert and I come up with to advance those goals and they make it happen so again congratulations to the business Equity Division and the economic development department for winning National recognition for the work that you do [Applause] thank you thank you for coming next I'll call on our assistant city manager Valerie Washington to introduce our new police oversight monitor week number two foreign thank you city manager good afternoon mayor and Council it is an honor to be here to introduce Bon seal um to you and everyone that may be watching at home if you recall back in 2020 we established the office of the police monitor as a way to provide oversight and accountability to the Fort Worth Police Department we had a really good run as the office got started we hired Kim Neal who did a great job getting the office established but as you all know unfortunately she took another position um late last or early 2022 and we started the search for a new oversight monitor we found Bon seal who and I want to tell you a little bit about her she grew up in the air force so she's lived all over the world and through those relationships she's had to learn how to build consensus build Bridges make friends get business done she received her bachelor's degree in public relations from the University of Alabama at Birmingham she graduated from Loyola University in New Orleans for law school she's been serving and the oversight role as the independent Deputy independent Police monitor in the City of New Orleans through there she had to manage through Federal consent degree decrees she had a chance to impact policies and procedures she was really engaged in use of force and we're extremely proud to have her in our city and I wanted to introduce her and give her a few moments to talk about just herself and her vision as she starts working with us francile good afternoon I just want to thank everyone for having me here I'm absolutely thrilled to continue my work in oversight to be able to serve the citizens of the city of Fort Worth I've committed to be a public servant since as long as I can remember I started off in the non-profit world I became a prosecutor and ultimately landed in oversight I am passionate about oversight this is work that I don't think I knew about growing up that as I've looked at my background involving public relations and data and criminal law it's something that I know I can do and I can do well to serve the citizens I'm coming in this is week two and I know that I have a lot to learn so I'm committed to sitting down with everyone here being at the community members those who've been elected to serve and those who are employed to serve and learning from you listening and then combining that with my experience and making sure that we're taking steps forward opal has done fantastic work since 2020 I want to work with the staff that we still have here to build upon it to continue to make sure that Fort Worth has a police department that it deserves and that those who are committed to serving in the department have the work experience in that the experience that they deserve as well so thank you for having me and I look forward to all the work that we can do together welcome [Applause] to Gina go ahead Gina and then councilmember Nettles yeah if you could please ask her to step back to the microphone she's there for you Gina I want to say welcome to my hometown which is of course Fort Worth Texas you're arriving as we honor the debt of a lady named Jacqueline Craig and it's because of the history of Jacqueline in this city we were able to get a race and culture task force and make some promises I welcome you your background is very impressive and I ask that you consider attending some type of forum Thursday with Pastor Michael Bell had a very passionate group that will welcome you as I do thank you councilmember I actually will be there I'll be there at 4 30 on Thursday thank you thank you thank you I also want to uh open with some comments first of all thank you for coming to the city of Fort Worth we are happy to have you I had opportunity to meet you already uh one-on-one last week in week one uh because as you know I am very passionate about uh police oversight as well and accountability and I will like to say that when we had Kim Neal who did a fantastic job with the office but there were some struggles with the city accepting a lot of the changes and the recommendations that she has and so I want to implore our city elected officials our police department and the community as a whole to give Miss Valencia an opportunity to continue the work and let's work with her and on side of her so we can make sure that the city of Fort Worth does what it needs to do and so I want to put that on the record that we're going to support you um with staff with uh money uh budget to make sure you are able to do what you need to do and I think we have a great Chief from the police department that's willing to work he worked with Kim Neal I know he's going to work with you and so we're excited to have you thank you so much we're looking forward to working with you thank you Michael thanks and I just want to Echo uh councilman Nettles I enjoyed our conversation this morning I appreciate you being here and coming to Fort Worth Texas um as we discussed um you have a great background in doing this we have a fine Police Department I think we have some of the finest or if not the finest Police Department in the in the country and I think we all have that same goal to make sure that uh the training education everything they need to make sure that our communities are safe is there so committed to to make sure that you can do your job working with our Police Department to ensure that our community is safe so thank you thank you and for Council on community bun sales not by herself she brings two young children to Fort Worth and her husband and so welcome them with open arms and they're trying to get settled having just moved here in August and I had like Michael had a great conversation with bunsel yesterday and as a reminder of the public her office is independent but it doesn't mean that you can't ask of questions or things that you've seen or concerned about or the ways you want her to interact with the police department you can go straight to Von seal to do those things and we're so thrilled that you're here welcome thank you and I do want to stress that we want the community to come directly to our office so that we can hear your concerns and also the Praises from the police department thank you excellent thanks Juan seal thank you next up we're going to call on Chief Neil Nokes and he's going to introduce some new staff and some recent promotions Chief come on up first and foremost just for clarification yes the forward Police Department is the best department in the country okay without question but we also are very well aware of the fact that we can always be better and we look forward to working with Von seal as we strive for just that one of my goals as the Ford police chief is to make sure whenever the time comes for the next chief of police to be appointed do we have such an incredible executive staff in place in the Ford police department that there's no need to look anywhere else that the decision is going to be so difficult just but choosing between the candidates we have here that the next chief of police for forward PD will be a forward police officer and I'm thrilled to introduce some today and I'm going to start down on the very end we have someone who's come on and joined our Ford PD family on the team working with our forensic science and our crime lab someone who's coming in to deal with a large responsibility someone we believe is going to bring Innovation bring change and bring the leadership that we need to that group and she comes from the Fort Worth area working with the medical examiner's office for quite some time recently retired please welcome Tracy Cisco to the Ford PD family [Applause] we had a very robust selection process and she came out on top and we're very happy to have her here additionally we had some openings in our executive staff we had two positions for appointees to deputy chief because uh it is such an important role we kind of looked at doing things a little bit differently this time so with the deputy chief position we had a couple of Commanders who had proven themselves over and over and over again both internally with the community and with City leadership so we now have former Commander Sean conjura correction former Commander Chad Mahaffey Sean took his spot Chad Mahaffey was in the North Division and he's not going to be our deputy chief over South command and we had Monica Martin as the Commander in East Division and now deputy chief Monica Martin is our Deputy Chief of the community safety partnership when we went to select the commander position we actually had a great deal of candidates that applied that showed some interest so we went through a rather lengthy selection process and this time we did something different I have sole discretion on filling those positions but it's important for me to get input so we had a panel one day we brought together three different panels one panel included internal stakeholders a sergeant from each division with an opening and a professional staff member one of our civilian staff from each division we also wanted representation from City leadership so we had assistant city manager Fernando Acosta and Jessica mccackrin both sit in on a panel and then we brought in four community members two from each of those divisions to come in and ask questions and give us their opinions on the candidates of the five that went through the process we were told over and over this is going to be a hard decision because any one of the five can do the job but there were two that Rose to the top across all three panels and I must say in my interviews with them one on one as well so I am equally proud to introduce the new commander of North Division Commander Sean kenjura and the new commander of East Division Commander Antoine Williams because we have so many were introducing today I did not ask them to speak for the sake of time but they will be reaching out connecting with each of you please ask them the questions you need answered go to them when you need assistance that is exactly what they're here for I could not be more thrilled the future of the forward police department is very proud thank you very much go ahead Gina comments to say I can tell you when we knew that the commander Monica was leaving my entire District was just in wove the folk and John T white and stop said oh they're going to pick her they're going to pick her and they did but you made up for that by bringing us Antoine and so I just say thank you for being very very sensitive to the needs of my very diverse diverse district and I'm excited for them as you can see this is the best I can do but Eastside rocks thank you you're very welcome I'll add some comments too and I'll just um comment on what Gina just said we really appreciate the work the last pick you had with G with Commander Martin was a phenomenal choice and I think this is even a greater Choice with Mr Williams here and so thank you for looking out for the East Side Chief and making sure we have someone that represent uh the police department and represent the community at the same time I think that's very important I think that's why it's policing so thank you Chief yes sir Charlie so first of all congrats to all uh in Chief I agree we do have the best police department so thank you for that um first I want deputy chief I'm having one thank you for everything you've done in the north um so you have uh well Commander now you have big shoes to fill um I mean he was always accessible not just to myself but to those uh in District Four and that was known and so we always had an ally um in deputy chief Mahaffey so congratulations uh we've already talked on the phone and we're gonna you know probably talk daily if not weekly at the very least you know that way we can make sure the north is always represented there uh but again congratulations to all Alan so congratulations all I look forward and I see two former North Division Commanders and a current one and I have been thrilled through my time to interact with Chief notes when he was commander Nokes with deputy chief mahafi when he was commander mahafi and I look forward to interacting with you Commander injura thank you very much we appreciate you in the North Jeanette Tracy welcome to Fort Worth uh congratulations to all of you um I'm so happy deputy chief Martin that you're staying in East Division she's been a pleasure to work with and I'm so excited I can continue to work with you and Commander Williams I look forward to meeting with you soon and look forward to working with you any other questions or comments from Council no yes Tracy welcome we're thrilled that you're here I know that you've got a lot of work on your hands I don't want to glaze over how important your position really is for the city of Fort Worth so thank you for investing your your time and professionalism to our community and I look forward to working with you personally and the rest of you our top brass we're very proud of you also I Know Chief Nokes took a lot of time and effort to make sure he had the right selections here and it's obviously evident in the excitement from Amsterdam Gina up on the screen here since Barbie's so big we're gonna call her Amsterdam Gina from now on I like the energy Gina um but it goes without saying Chief you've made some great selections and I know each of us here are excited to continue to work with them in the community thank you so much thank you Chief congratulations everybody next we have a number of informal reports the first one excuse me his contracts with terms longer than five years and Jessica mcheckern is available if there are any questions uh I don't have any questions I asked for this and Jess and I've had a conversation thank to you and staff for pulling it all together but I'll follow up with you directly about it thank you thank you next up is uh informal report on covid-19 resources for city employees in the community and Brandon Bennett in Diana Giordano are available 30 questions I got a question uh real quick Brandon Diana there are some Senate I want to get up here sure there are some sentiments that in different areas out of the world that covert is kind of on an uptick um so I know we had a great Rebels uh program with us city employees last time what does that look like right now with the rise of covet have we seen a rise here in Fort Worth so we have seen a rise nationally and and globally it's we can't track it like we did before when people were hyper aware of it and everybody got tested and those tests were were measured out it actually started to wane when we went to self-testing because those weren't getting reported but we do know because of the hospitalization rate and the the tests that happened in clinical environments uh that we do have these new variants subvariants that that are uh infectious and that people are getting them uh September 12th is when the new vaccine was made available um if you go to you know the Walgreens the CVS any of those places that provide flu shots they also provide the new covid vaccines for adults and children uh and that is is our best preventative right now other than uh one things that we learned from from dynamic or reminded us to the pandemic is when you're sick stay home and stay away from people and that should apply to any type of illness and that's one thing we want to stress to our employees uh and to the public is sometimes people go get tested for covid and they say oh it's negative I'm going to work no right if it's a respiratory infection and you're sick stay home uh because you don't want to give it to you to your fellow employee that it could be pneumonia it could be the flu it could be any number of things so to answer your to further answer your question though that we have a partnership with Tarrant County Public Health and the other public health agencies they are the lead on this we stepped up in a disaster environment uh to help them out uh they no longer require that assistance uh but I will tell you that we stand ready uh should this get to to the level that they need us to to stand up again we are ready willing and able to do that but right now they have the lead so I'll just make a comment um I know that public health is waiting on the new booster shot to come in and so maybe we can set up a um a table uh downstairs at the entrance whenever those become available CDC will have a bridge program that will provide those um vaccines for those that are uninsured and there would be an administrative fee of 15 and for children it's free but also an admin fee of eight dollars but of course anybody that has insurance will be able to get those for free I just wanted to mention so Diana Giordano HR Director on October the 18th we host our annual health fair and we will also have a provider to provide the the new coveted vaccines in the business or vaccine as well for individuals that haven't received it or that need the booster so that'll be available to all employees Will Rogers Memorial center on Wednesday October 18th okay Jared thanks mayor thanks Brandon for this update um for folks who take at-home tests I know our offices particularly receive some inquiries about different strains and what and how effective the new tests are and are the new tests coming out for folks who are watching or who may watch later on what kind of educational advice would you give about the at-home tests given yeah and that kind of goes back to our general advice that that our doctors and others are giving Which is a test is presumptive right so when you take a test you can presume it comes back positive that's what you're sick with but if you're sick you're still sick and so the advice that we give people um regardless of the tests that they take is right is is to isolate on you know most most the the life span of a typical virus or infection is about 7 to 14 days and it takes you about five days before you start being symptomatic so you know following CDC guideline lines you take about five days where you isolate and then you're probably okay at that point moving forward to be you know more in the public but stay away from people at risk and things like that because remember on the on the testing there isn't unless you're in a high risk category and you're very very sick which means you're going to go to the emergency room or the or your doctor's office anyways the fact that you get ill with covid right you would do the same thing as if you got your typical coal right which is isolate hydrate uh rest you know all of those things um the the key piece isn't in the isolation is we always want to stay away from the elderly the very young and and those with underlying medical conditions so it kind of helps you if you have that positive test I will tell you that we have tests that are a year a year expired right and they're still picking up positive uh on on the current variant so I'm not sure that's as big of a worry uh for us at this point uh more so this having people stay home when they're ill it's helpful thank you for that Jeanette Diane I meant to ask you um what's the policy on if folks test positive or they've gone a doctor and then they're positive for covid is there any flexibility for working at home yes for some individuals yeah so the the recommendations that Brandon spoke of are the same and so we have guidance that we've published since last May and it's not changed and it's basically if you test positive and you have symptoms isolate for 10 days and work from home where it's where it's possible and so we are encouraging directors to make sure that they if there's that availability that they provided and extended to the individuals that's if they have the ability to work so if they are you know have symptoms and are unable to work we want them to you know get rest in between and make sure that they can recover the other piece of that is that if they no longer have symptoms and they test negative they can resume work after five days but that's the current guidance that's consistent with CDC thank you thanks David thank you our next informal report is on the property management director recruitment process and Deanna Giordano is available if there any questions all right next informal report is on heating ventilation and air conditioning there are Assistance programs in Victor Turner our neighborhood services director is available if there are any questions talk to her a full review full report we know that there are going to be many people facing Financial challenges to pay their utilities during the winter and I'm real pleased with the way staff is being able to try to meet those needs and so Victor tell us what you're going to be doing well thank you Victor Turner Davis Services I'm gonna need a full team if we got a full report so I got a couple people here um but no we use a combination of different programs to provide uh heating and air conditioned Services as you can see in the image I mean the IR uh both uh from tdaca and also from our community development block grant money and Department of energy they can apply online or they can contact um our office at 5795 as the extension 817-392-5795 there are different income levels depending on the program some are at uh at or below 150 percent of poverty and then with our priority repair program is uh 60 area median income or less and we have those income guidelines spelled out uh in the IR but uh individuals throughout the city can apply you don't have to live in a certain neighborhood just your household income uh would need to qualify adjusted for household size thank you are there any Common Sense comparisons you can give people for example if you make less than 45 Grand a year you might be eligible when you talk about those Ami percentages the average person at home right now may not know what that means can you make it into Common Sense language yes ma'am okay so for for example it's in the informal report but for one person household uh for our programs that through cap one person household income could not exceed uh 21 8 a four person would be forty five thousand uh for the PRP program which is through the Community Development block grant program which is at 60 area meeting income but one person would be forty thousand two hundred a four person 57 420 and then it goes up based on the number of members in your household any other questions for Victor Jeanette so let's say there's a family of four and they qualify you know would they be able to take advantage of all these programs like for priority repair a water heater weatherization window utility assistance like a t their TXU Bill and heating their AC unit yeah absolutely we tried to layer those programs so we can maximize the amount of systems in fact we recently even emphasized it even more with the additional general fund money for priority repair so absolutely they're a veteran on top of that Edition yeah we recently now it's where we have uh additional grant money from the Texas veteran submission so yes thank you thanks mayor Victor one more question all these programs are absolutely new in our city and um looking ahead to the next year's budget um are there any challenges with like timeline of getting some of these repairs done and um the reason I'm asking is just to start thinking ahead to next year's cycle of what we could do to it yeah absolutely we can always use additional contractors I mean that really weighs heavy on how many we can do and you know the demand there so staff can churn out the applications but it does take time for those contractors to get the work done so yeah folks out there that are interested in participating with our program certainly can apply and get to be part of that list certainly thank you for that I look forward to working over the next year on that question mayor um the contractor piece just as you mentioned how do they apply uh is that can they apply at any time or is there a certain time limit that they need to get on our vendors list yeah we've been doing it with every couple five years so but we want to probably make that a little sooner because of the amount of money we have now so we're looking at working with uh with Joe Gunn and figuring out how we can add that sooner okay I'll be very interested in that so that we can roll that out because there are certainly a plethora of contractors out there that are not uh part of the city that we should add I went and looked at I think you're one person here uh no two persons uh HVAC repair assistance and two people at 29 000. uh that's probably like around if it's one person with the incomes like 15 an hour um do we have a program where we're not completely doing all of the assistance but it's maybe a subsidized so they may be making 30 or 40 000 and so since they don't want to fall under this do we have a subsidized program well the the if you look at the figure beneath that where the incomes are higher that's our priority repair program so they could fit into that particular program council member natals we also have relationships with some utility companies that provide us with funding to serve their customers so our goal is to continue to work on those relationships and get more money because we are able to assist those who are outside the bounds of these income limits sure thank you for that thank you Charlie so I just have just one quick question on the on the process uh you have like an average like they apply today how long it takes and if should they start doing something now in order to prepare for it because what I'd like to do is send this out to District 4 residents who may qualify for nice Graphics very marine proof as far as the entire process um and the timeline that they can expect too a rain proof I don't know if we meet that standard but uh we'll try I'll give you some crowns we can do it we can do it together we'll try uh main thing that they need to have documentation of their income that's one of the first things we're going to ask for anybody 18 years of an age or older in their household that income would count and then as far as the timing now I defer to ladies over here what it's been running lately the the timing weekend has a lot to do with the timing there are documents that we are required to have and getting those documents are very important or they hinder us from being able to determine eligibility for the utility assistance for the weatherization we have to prove that they are a U.S citizen or a legal resident alien that's a requirement of the federal government for those funding so if we have funding available and they have all their documents within 30 to 40 days we can certify them Jared yes the priority repair programs and the weatherization programs where we're making housing repairs does take a little longer um I would say that can range anywhere between three and six months before we're able to get and make those repairs just on the basis of the volume of applicants we have one more question of course and this is the staff we know where the preponderance of poverty is you know in in our various districts but would you agree that there are people in every District in the city who need to know about this Pro these programs yeah absolutely and the program is not tied to where they live so it is eligible for folks throughout Fort Worth provided that their household income meets the guidelines glad to hear that Maureen talk about getting away in the word marine proof but he'll show you how that I don't know if I know I want to okay on the other Quaker Jared yes uh one last follow-up question on the three to six month timeline for the contract work to be done um is that a function of demand plus the amount of contractors we have yeah I would say so okay yeah and contractors do have to qualify for this partner as well okay great make just clarify that thank you yeah and just that the piggyback on that little bit a lot of the houses that we work on are pre-1978 so they may have lead-based painting so there's special training that they have to go through to be able to work on those units so those contractors would have to have completed that as well that's helpful I'd love to work with councilman Meadows and mayor Pro tem and anyone else on I'm kind of thinking through that timeline for the next budget cycle any other questions no thank you thank you thank you thank you next and formal report is on legislative changes for selecting members to the board of directors of appraisal districts and Dennis McElroy is available if there's any questions all right next informal report is monthly development activity report and DJ Harrell is available if there are any questions and then finally the last 10 former report is My H2O portal customer Communications and Chris harder our water director is available if there are any questions not to belabor today but we haven't had an update on this in quite a while I think it's just good to communicate that for our residents Chris come on up why are you coming up Chris just a general overview for folks watching and I'm on the IR yeah um thank you Chris harder uh water director um so you know this has been a multi-year program the remote read meters were all installed in 2022 that was when we completed that all that work the portal to our residential customers was also rolled out in 2022. so when you look at the amount of adoption of this portal it's actually pretty impressive we have over 113 000 accounts that are on the portal but going back to uh 2018-2019 we transitioned from Central Square click to gov in terms of payment processing to paymentus we did that quickly to put this new process in place but what has happened is that we've been actually having two platforms so the time is is more than needed to move to a single platform so what that that's what this communication program is about there's much more functionality on our payment portal there's we can actually look at your usage it's a way for us to communicate with customers so what this communication plan is about is moving the customers that are currently on the paymentus portal and there's about 59 000 customers on that to the uh our true My H2O portal and that's the the goal on that is to move the those 59 000 customers to the portal within the next month or so and then after that uh this new uh portal will actually have enterprise-wide capability which means we'll build a transition all of our commercial customers to it as well and we haven't been able to we haven't uh put that out yet so this is this is a new functionality that we're going to be able to have and we'll be able to extend it to our commercial customers thank you for that it's a quite informative tool also in terms of water use for the individual users so um thank you all for all the hard work over the years and for all of the community engages that you have done on that so the IR does have a communication plan and um you know we anticipate calls going into council members so we wanted to make sure and um make it uh very transparent in terms of what we plan on doing and if you have any suggestions on how to improve the communications we're certainly open to those I know mayor Pro Tim might say this but always send us the materials to our office is helpful so that we can get it out to our neighborhood it's great Chris yeah just one question when you look at the uh at the map adoption you know of the portal where you see maybe a greater adoption or you know migration to the portal versus where you're not seeing as much those 59 000 that still need to be migrated any trends that you see coming out from that if you picture a map in your mind you know I'll tell you what council member Flores I'll need to look at that okay I hadn't even thought about looking at it how it's spread out geographically but that's something that might help us direct our efforts to help you you know get those that happen changed over to do that videos thank you Chris mayor that concludes my report okay questions moving along any questions regarding changes in membership to boards or committees any questions regarding the city MNC log you have in your packet if not we'll go to our first presentation on Fort Worth Public Schools academic performance Report with Pete Guerin and Brent Beasley from the fourth education partnership mayor mayor Pro Tem council members thank you for giving me the opportunity to come visit with you at your work session today Gina to have you looking over my shoulder and in front of me you can be assured I'm going to watch my p's and q's just know I'm with you all the way I'm here to talk to all of y'all about a very serious matter it's not an exaggeration to say it's a grave matter and it's a matter that has enormous consequences for our city and and for our kids I've visited with nearly all of you all about this I know you know where I'm going most of our kids most of our kids who attend public schools within the city limits of Fort Worth cannot read at grade level not a few not some most the numbers 56 percent 12 school districts and a good number 14 18 Charter skills when you see a school bus go by 50 kids it's an easy way to do the math 28 of our kids on that bus can't read a grade level and Brent Beasley's presentation he'll go beyond reading scores and look at all tested academic subjects including reading you'll see in his presentation that there are 39 schools in Fort Worth where the number of our kids pardon me I don't what am I doing that's making this advance I guess I'm touching the screen I thought it had to do it with a clicker so this new technology so a bigger pardon for that um in Brent's presentation as I mentioned he's going to give you at grade level reports on on all the academic subjects that are tested you'll see in his presentation that 39 schools in our city that 80 percent of the kids in those 39 schools are not at grade level there's a school in Lake Worth ISD and I know Carlos knows this and he's he's working this issue but there's a school in the Lake Worth ISD that's within the city of limits of Fort Worth where the number is 87 percent 13 of the kids in that school are at grade level 13 do the math on that school bus you'll see that there are eight Eagle Mountain Saginaw schools where more than 50 percent of the kids are at grade level eight in Eagle Mountain Saginaw in the city limits of Fort Worth and true for Keller as well in Keller Keller ISD schools in the city of Fort Worth there are seven where the more than 50 percent of the kids are not at grade level you look up at Northwest ISD of their schools in Fort Worth seven seven of those schools are not at grade level and nine public charter schools where the number is seventy percent or higher 30 percent or less all within our city limits they're our kids this is a crisis that is unaddressed at present it's a crisis that's hidden in plain sight it's in public records everything you're going to see from Brynn in a moment all public records public data accessible by anyone in plain sight but unaddressed and not well known surprises the parents when they hear it it surprises almost anybody who's looking at it for the first time now I'm going to talk to all of you who's recovering politician to politician and I want to say it's at the outset thank all of you for serving in public office at this time man it's a tough time to do that I really admire you for doing it and so many of you are brand new to it and you stepped into the middle of it and maybe the toughest time that I've seen in my lifetime but thank every one of you for serving why should a city council member be involved in public education again recovering politician to politician people say well isn't this a matter for school boards matter for superintendents a threshold question is you know what do your constituents think about it and so we did a poll and ask your constituents what do you think about it what do you think how important do you think public education is to the health safety and Welfare of our community not looking at it as a parent not looking at it from a school perspective but what do you think it means to our community and I'd like to walk you through these slides now but before I do I'd like to introduce trenace Dorsey Hollins who is in the back and I want to introduce her because I'm going to quote her on my first slide internation is the president of parent Shield apparent advocacy organization here's president and founding member of the parent Shield it's a nice you do a great job for our kids thanks for being here okay now I am going to there we go next slide these touch screens hope I don't get ahead of myself okay I quote trenace with this our babies can't read our babies can't read 56 of our babies can't read foreign 597 Fort Worth kids 12 independent school districts 140 000 kids in those school districts twenty thousand public charter skills 56 percent of the third through eighth graders cannot read at grade level 66 percent of third through eighth graders cannot do math at grade level why does that matter to you as the city council member why does this matter to the city council how do your constituents feel about it 99 believe it's important for our city to have good Public Schools 79 percent consider the quality of the local public schools when they decide where to live what city council District to live what neighborhood to live 79 percent this is a factor parent or not a parent this is a factor in where they choose to live 89 of your constituents believe the quality of public skills impacts property values 87 percent believe the quality of local skills impacts Public Safety foreign believe the quality of local schools impacts Economic Development 89 99 believe the ability to read well is important for Success After High School and there's a lot of conversation in the news right now about the school accountability measures a through f we ask the parents if they knew pardon me constituents broadly not just parents if they knew certain percentages of kids at the school could read at grade level what grade would they give these numbers were from last year so we don't have the updated numbers for our poll but 74 percent of our citizenry would give a school a d or an F rating if only 38 percent of students could read at grade level regardless of what comes out in this accountability measure this is what constituents think when they hear that barely more than a third can read a grade level d f 78 percent would give a school a d or F rating if only 25 percent of students can do math at grade level foreign believe it is a civil right of every child in America to receive a high quality public education in our nation's public skills and before I finish I'd like to address something that I hear all the time people ask me about are these numbers valid I can tell you these numbers are Marine valid they're marrying you know not only are these numbers that are done by a valid 30 third party assessor tea but every school in the city of Fort Worth also does a test three times a year on every kid three times a year on every kid it'll show you the same thing so if anybody challenges you on Star numbers say okay well let's look at your map numbers they show you the same thing department of education does a test too they use proficient not at grade level their numbers are worse than these two these numbers are Marine Corps solid when we uh Shuffle off this Mortal coil I hope we can all say our babies can read it's a sacred obligation we have to those kids I can't think of an obligation that's more important to all of us as Citizens and I know every one of you is is public servants share the same feeling mayor thank you very much council members thank you for letting me join you today I appreciate it thank you Pete any [Applause] any questions for Pete before Brent gets started we can wait till then thank you Brent thank you I'm not used to following the sermon I'm used to giving the sermon um this is our third year bringing you this report on uh how our children are performing academically in every public school that's located in the city limits of Fort Worth and this report includes as Pete's at all 160 000 students who go to school in the city of Fort Worth in 12 different independent school districts 14 Charter Schools or Charter Networks so first of all thank you as city council members and as our mayor for the ways that all of you have leaned in on this issue over these last couple years I've seen you do this in in many ways and we really appreciate it um because you know how important it is and from Pete's slides we know that your constituents believe that it's very very important the report that that we're sharing with you today focuses on the percentage of kids who score at the level of meets grade level on the state test this is the clearest measure that we have that's available every year consistently that tells us whether or not we are fulfilling the the promise of a great education for all students in our city what we really want to know and what that answers is are our kids are eating at grade level are kids doing math at grade level and so since we have three years now under our belt doing these reports let me try to put where we are today in some perspective before covid in 2019 39 of the kids who go to school in Fort Worth were meeting grade level 39 percent and so here are our kids and our school standing in front of a pretty big hill 61 percent not at grade level and so getting to the top of that Hill would mean all of our kids are where we where we want them to be and then covid came along and the year after the pandemic when we assessed our kids it was as if they had fallen down in a hole at the bottom of the hill and so their performance dropped dramatically during that coveted year and so so here they were down down in a hole uh even farther from the top of the hill than when they were standing at on the ground then after the kids went back to school that next year there was a great effort by many students and teachers and school systems and the community and families and the students almost got back to where they were before covid um and that's what we presented to you last year when we did this report that basically the kids performance grew out of that coveted hole back up to almost not quite but almost where they were before so that was the good news the bad news was of course that they were still at the bottom of the hill um they hadn't started climbing up the hill at all but they got back at least to ground level now this year where are our kids today one year later well sadly I didn't have to make a new slide because they are right where we left them last year um they didn't fall backwards into the hole we're grateful for that but they also did not start at all climbing up that hill getting to all kids where we want them to be they're still on the ground at the foot of the hill just like last year almost back to where they were in 2019. so overall in the city of Fort Worth 36 percent of the kids in grades three through eight are meeting grade level standards 36 percent the same percentage as last year um I'm going to go very quickly go through each Council District real quick and just call your attention to each one and you do have a copy of the full report in front of you and it it has every school in your Council District listed there and you can also see on the right hand side a column that shows growth or decline at each school from the year before so Council District 2 Carlos Flores 27 percent of kids meeting grade level in District 2. same as last year Carlos you have you have no schools where more than half of the kids in that school are meeting great level and this is also an example here where some of the schools that need the most attention come from smaller districts that often get overlooked and so we notice those if you look at the list of all the schools at the far right hand side those Lake Worth schools that are way over there at that point um Council District three uh Michael crane 41 percent of kids meeting grade level a couple of percentage points higher than last year out of your 19 schools only eight of them have more than 50 percent of kids who are meeting grade level District Four Charlie lowersdorf 48 percent that grade level there are no fourth ISD schools in this Council District almost all are Keller ISD schools and of those 15 Keller ISD schools that you have eight of them are less than 50 percent Council District Five Gina 27 percent of kids meeting grade level down a little bit one point I think from the year before Gina and your Council District only three of the 21 schools you have are at 50 or more meeting grade level and also it's a time to point out maybe there are some really good Charter Schools who show up well in this report but there are also some not so good ones and in District Five we have the kind of perennially low performing International Leadership of Texas schools that are over there on the right-hand side of your list District Six Jared Williams 34 percent meeting grade level Jared's District you have a lot of Crowley schools um only two schools out of the 20 in your District are at that 50 threshold meeting grade level district 7 Macy Hill 43 percent of of students meeting grade level you have a lot of Eagle Mountain Saginaw ISD students as you know out of those eight Eagle Mount Saginaw schools that you have only two of those are have 50 percent of the kids meeting grade level in those schools Council District 8 Chris Nettles 25 percent of kids at grade level you have 29 schools in your Council District representing four school districts a number of Charter School networks and only one school out of all those is above 50 percent Council District nine Elizabeth Beck 30 percent of the kids are meeting grade level in District 9. there are 21 schools there just four just four of them are at or above that fifty percent line district 10 Alan Blaylock 52 percent at grade level no Fort Worth ISD schools in this Council District it's mostly Keller and Northwest ISD schools notice that that six of the 13 Northwest ISD schools are below that 50 percent line District 11 Jeanette Martinez 24 percent of kids at grade level when you look at the performance of all the schools on your paper I know it's um disappointing to see uh where the where these where the kids are but I also know from your campaign just it's a top priority for you how these kids are doing and and for your constituents so where do we find ourselves as a city I'm going to go back to that 160 000 kids 12 school districts 14 Charter Schools or Networks there are 213 schools overall in our report that are in the city of Fort Worth and only in 100 in 100 or sorry let me say that again in 168 of those 213 less than half of the kids are at grade level so 200 213 schools in 168 less than half of the kids are at grade level and we know what that means for these kids and for their Futures and we know what that means for our city and climbing up that hill is a very very difficult clearly but we can't just pitch our tent down on the on the ground at the bottom of it and stay there and I hate to end on such a somber note but the the facts are what they are and they speak for themselves and and we thank you for giving us this valuable time on the agenda today to talk about this we're happy to answer any questions if you want to take time for that but otherwise um we thank you for for the time councilmember Hill well first thank you both for the presentation both the presentations it's very informative um he you and I've been part of this conversation I think since 2012 and we've tried everything from parent engagement collaboratives to public I mean private funding I think in 2012 we actually initiated a study where there was 26 million dollars of private vending going into Fort Worth ISD alone trying to solve the reading problem the math problem where are we where do you think that we need to be at the table I'm talking about philanthropy I'm talking about government and parents I'd love to get your perspective now so much Gene I want to make sure you hear me you know okay good I didn't I didn't mention this in the slides that I shared with you today but our parents don't know this information National polling 92 percent of parents think their kids are at grade level in our polling it's close to 90 percent a little bit less than that that's true all over the country why don't they know well because all they know is what they get on the report cards you can have a school with 13 percent of the kids at grade level and they get an A's and B's and so parents think it's okay so I can offer you or ask you to do something very specific and I'll say not only do they know don't know this information about their schools they don't know where their kids stand relative to grade level most school districts make it very very hard to get that information um and you have to seek it out they don't share it with you but I would ask each of you to do is is host a town hall meeting for parents in your District and we'd be glad to support it and and those meetings go over this data and then also ask them to bring their cell phones and their child's social security number and we can walk them to the page that tells them where their child is relative to grade level I had a conversation with a gentleman on Saturday I actually walked him through step by step his his two children are in Northwest ISD they've been on the a b honor roll their entire life never gotten a bad grade these are two really concerned parents the last two summers they put their kids in summer school and had special tutoring to make sure they were recovering from covid a b honor School honor roll students so we logged in and he was on the phone you know he was on his computer and we were walking through it his children were below grade level at every tested subject and I could almost feeling gasp on the other end we've been told all their careers they were at grade level if we didn't know we would do more and we have parents that don't know and I just ask each of you to host a parent town hall meeting share the information Brent but then offer them the opportunity to drill down and find out where their child is you know that's one of the things trenace is doing y'all might have seen it this summer she actually did a clinic at one of the libraries you all were so kind of support her efforts there the parents who don't know and while parents don't know they you know they think everything is okay report cards reflect academic performance somewhat but those A's and B's and C's a lot of that's deportment it's his kid participate in class do they show up on time you know a lot of factors go into that it is not a reliable measure at all of whether your child is at grade level and we've got you saw the numbers and yet we promote I'm talking about all 12 school districts nearly 100 percent every year um and I'm accuse me of preaching I want to just give an anecdote from Fort Worth a principal who was a principal at Dunbar when the city of Fort Worth partnered with Dunbar to put in this Aviation Tech program s that mayor was there Bell Helicopter was there all the Press was there and the kids who came up through that pyramid enrolled everybody's excited about it but they all dropped out and that principal told me he actually said this in a public setting they dropped out because they couldn't read the manuals and they knew we knew in the third grade these kids couldn't read we promoted him to the fourth grade into the fifth grade then we have this great program everybody's excited about it and they have to drop out they can't read the manuals our parents don't know in one of the most important things that you can do is help our parents know and you know the mother and father I talked with on Saturday they said well so what do we do one thing you can specifically tell them if your child is not at grade level under the state law a school is required required to give you tutoring with no more than four kids in the tutoring or have all your classes be with a master teacher so the gentleman and his wife were going to be at Northwest ISD the next on Monday and saying I want the tutoring for my kid I want my kids to be in classes and I think it would be a wonderful outcome if we had parents if they knew just that and they went to these schools and said where are my tutors where are the master teachers and that's something that's very much within your hands is helping the people know so that's the specific thing I would suggest to you Macy and I I think you know the we're all in in government we know when it's a government program of any size you don't tweak it you don't throw more money at it that doesn't change it it doesn't change until the people care about it and they don't care until they know you can't hide a pothole if there's potholes come up here you don't tell them you know the person who broke his axle oh there really wasn't a pothole you're gonna believe me or Your Lying Eyes parents don't know and so they don't go to the school board meetings they don't engage with their teachers they they rely on those report cards the parents don't know and to me the fundamental change the fundamental change the only way to have sustainable change is when the parents know I'll conclude with one last thing I my days in politics people ask me what's the most powerful Lobby in America it's AARP I promise you you mess with a social security check and you're going to hear from them and they won't stop well I had no speak for everybody in this room our kids are as important to us as a social security check and the day we're going to have public schools that do what our kids need is when those parents know because those kids are more important to those parents than that social security check is to me that's when it'll change until the parents get involved in my opinion we're just going to be nibbling around the edges thank you any other questions for Pete or Brent Gina you're up I wanted to wait until everybody else had spoken uh what I will tell you guys around the table Pete and I have this traveling Road Show and so I presented him at my leadership meeting in Woodhaven right after the election and parents were just shocked to hear the anecdotal statements then I took him to a Minister's Union black clergy and there are a lot of people who are trying to help with this problem but they really don't know the critical questions and so I tell Pete and others I don't want to learn anything about being a teacher nothing about Academia my dad wanted me to be a teacher I don't do that I'm the one who the relatives take the bad kids to when they misbehave but the cost of Maddie's non-profit and Pete I have this passion and so I would ask you all to put him in front of people I'm trying to get him in front of the links right now and later akas if you can get him in front of people with Brent I promise you we can change this problem and so you know I'm committed to the hills with this and I hope you all will look at ways to expand the reach so that we can get to Common parents who have no idea where their kids stand and I should say children my mother doesn't like the word kids but that's all I have to say Pete Brent thank you for being here well thank you Gina and a lot of this is going to be tedious it's going to be small groups you're going to I spent 30 minutes on the phone with that couple Saturday you all can host groups trenace can be there she can walk them through how to get their children's information um you know it's drops in the bucket but thousand drops in the bucket fill the bucket so Jeanette and then Michael Brent Pete thank you so much um but my question is once we get a mom we'll just say a mom um aware of you know their child's reading status and you know the school's offering tutoring um what else can a mom that's on limited income that doesn't have you know funding for private tutoring what else can they do what free resources are out there that we can share with our constituents well and one of the things we can present in that meeting is there are websites that are very good how to for what a what a parent would do the first step is getting parents inquiring and trying to figure out what to do and they don't start inquiring until they they know there's a problem but there are many resources out there but I think that engagement with the school and not only they'll ask for tutors they'll ask for the master teacher but they'll go to the the teacher himself or herself and say what can I do it might be as simple as well are you reading to your child every night and we're not going to get a 100 percent of parents acting like AARP uh members but we're going to get most of them and I don't know where they're going to take it but they're going to move mountains to get what their children needs we know that and let's let's launch that let's put them on the search and we'll be in a good position if we have all parents asking that question right now they don't a be honor roll great can't read I can give you some anecdotes it'll just break your heart about parents discovering that their their kids can't read in the seventh grade in the eighth grade it's you just break your heart so let's get the parents Let's uh give them the truth they deserve the truth and um and we'll have resources there to help them but I imagine we're going to learn a lot of lessons from parents uh and we watch them we've politics democracy can move mountains and no telling where those parents are going to take it but I think they're going to get it done so Michael yeah thanks for the presentation y'all Pete and thanks for your years of friendship and mentorship and uh it's not lost I I love that y'all put this together the way you do because it's not lost on me with my district I have probably the highest I know I have the highest and then the lowest uh arguably there might be a percentage off between the other districts so there's a huge disparity within that in my district alone and I know that just from the neighborhoods that I work with um but I appreciate you putting this in a digestible format so people can see and I do want to host something we'll figure that out what that looks like at least in our district so people understand what that looks like in real practical Solutions and what they can do and I'll back you up on the idea of of uh well first the AARP for sure from years of in you know working with you in your office and the postcards and all the things you used to get from everybody um but the idea of the really I appreciate our work in the educational field uh supporting all education and especially in the Charter School uh realm because the competition helps I can tell you from Las Vegas Trail area while there is still a big discrepancy in the elementary school and middle schools here um there was a new renewed interest when idea wanted to go into that property and mayor was there from the beginning to of watching that um but you you had the teachers and the principals and everybody in those schools start to understand um there was going to be some competition in the area and I think that's good across the board because then it gets parents engaged and this is important for us I think as a council and and as a city to keep looking at because this is our future Workforce and if we can't if they can't read a manual to get a better job Etc in Excel we have a huge problem down the road we already do but we're gonna have a larger problem so I appreciate y'all keeping this at the Forefront and on our minds and I'm committed to help you out however I can thank you appreciate it um and just two things in Closing one is these numbers are Marine Corps solid the second thing and I don't know if y'all have heard this but I hear it quite often and it just shocks me um people say well a lot of parents just don't care I don't know if y'all have heard that but but I hear it and I'm now ask somebody everybody that raises that with me I say well do you care would you change what you do and how you spend your time if you knew your child was at below grade level oh of course I would what about your friends would they change well of course they would you know they'd do anything they could well who are these other people that you don't know that you think won't care I just it you know have so many people that just use that as a way to kind of turn off and think about something else uh parents care there may be a tiny percent out there but if we give parents this information we're going to see you a reaction um so I just want to arm you with that because once you get involved they're going to say what in the heck are you doing in this field this is for the school board they're going to say these numbers aren't any good and they'll say oh parents don't care well ask them to name any parent any parent that they know that doesn't care any other questions counsel just just a comment correct and Brent for uh coming I I think we know as a city that this Council has been very inclined to support education uh well a lot of us having multiple children me personally having four ranging from second grade to 11th grade all in the education system between public school and Charter School um I like your approach I appreciate what you're doing I also met with parents Shield I think two or three times and went to their events supporting them and so um my commitment is to support what you are doing along with Michael I will have something in our district uh maybe too because I think when I look at my numbers too I have idea at 151 and also have Clifford Davis at nine percent so there is a great difference between areas of poverty and just different School educations that's presented to our kids so I will take you up on that offer and do that but thank you for coming well thank all of you we've worked with nearly all of you on this and thanks for the commitment you'll have already shown and we're going to have to figure this out but we don't know you know Macy we've tried this we know a lot of things that don't work philanthropy keeps doing a lot of those same things over and over again but we have never focused on you know the customer of this product the parents I think they care about potholes they care about the social security check but they care more than anything about their kids let's trust them with the truth thank you Pete Brent before we leave the podium I did have a question uh in regards to the changes in the Stars testing I know that specific to my district dance seen too many changes and I don't mean this in the worst way possible but just feels as though this conversation that you both and I have been having for the past few years just continues very little change but I'd be interested in knowing from your perspective how the changes in Stars testing especially when it comes to reading comprehension why that hasn't resulted in better results it might be the timing of it but not for you to answer right now but it's you know something that I'd like to get more information about well one component of the star test grades is how the kids do academically there are a lot of other things in it our focus is how the kids do academically are they learning to read so you're going to see a lot in fact there's a big story in the start telegram this morning about the accountability do skills get ABCD if but that doesn't change how many kids can read a grade level that's a factor in that grade but you know I won't go through this in detail but one of the reasons that grades are going to be so low this year is because growth matters a lot that's a huge part and as you saw from Brent's presentation it didn't grow there was huge growth last year and so you had schools that were d d as in dog in 2019 that got bees or in some cases A's and they didn't do any better but they grew so much from the covet hole but you know regardless of what happens on that issue the data is there it's on the kids individual kids parents can get this data on every child in real time so the accountability is complicated and frankly I think people are you know attempting to Muddy Waters a little bit but you know we don't work in that space the kids these tests tell you what's happening with the kids what kind of grade this school gets or that skill this data is what's happening to the kids inside of that school so thank you Jared yeah excuse me yeah Pete and Brandon thank you all for um the work that y'all do um day in and day out and I know there's only so much time in these kind of presentations to really share on the work that y'all do um but I really appreciate um the many years that y'all put into really pouring into how do we really wrap alongside our parents and our students to ensure that they Thrive and um you know this presentation every time that y'all presented always has my brain firing on all synapses and one of the things two of the things that it makes me think is having y'all come back as a deep dive with the neighbor quality revitalization committee because there's so many things in addition to pouring in our schools around the bill environment and the socio-economic environment around some of our schools that can really rise the tide and Rise boats of families and individuals living in those neighborhoods so I would love to see us work to kind of um look at the intersectionalities between some of these scores and the communities that we're doing so much important work on especially around this neighborhood conservation strategy that we'll have that'll tee up decades worth of investment that'll help rise Tides the second thing is and this is more enhancement where cranes will house there's so many things legislatively that I think our city can be a big voice on in our entire region frankly to make improvements where we can whether it's on accountability whether it's on human Capital Management whether it's on parent engagement et cetera et cetera there's so many things that get in the way of the basic what my grandma used to say the three R's right and so anyways I say all that to say that I'm I'm committed as a member of this body to continue to engage this work the data that you present doesn't feel good right and it shouldn't feel good I mean that feeling should lead us to action and so I'm committed to continuing to act on behalf of the residents that we served and do something about this so thank you all for y'all's work and know that if you have folks here willing to work alongside you well thanks Jared and you have tremendous in your previous day job experience with with this very issue you know you mentioned what's going on around the school you know look at this slide 89 percent to call believe the quality of local schools impacts Economic Development so it's it's symbiotic you know what the school does for the community what this community does for the school it works together and you know our our fellow citizens certainly see see that that connection and we've tried you've mentioned so many of the things that were involved and that's and you know it in a way that very few of us do but I think it all begins with the parents knowing and then where do they take it if they don't know we don't we'll never know but let's experiment with telling the parents the truth give that experiment a chance and I trust the parents just a few comments comments before we close the first is if you can go to the slide that's the city of or slide rental if it's all in the same deck or not it's not page three of what yeah keep going right there it's interesting Council if you look at um by grade you look at grade three through eight my point in this is while this is the same year captured if you captured third graders today fast forward to eighth grade they stay consistent that's why you always hear how important the measure of third grade reading is moving forward and I think that's an important point the other thing I would look at it for each of you in your districts you might look for Bright Spot schools if you look at council member Crane's district and D3 you look at idea rise at 70 percent and the demographic they're serving and he already knows that all too well but each of you have a bright spot School may not be a 70 school but you have something to look at and it's to me it's very tangible if you look at schools side by side so you might look at idea rise and go to a lower performing campus and Michael could probably walk away or tell us today and I've seen them in person what the the tangible differences are in those campuses principal leadership teacher quality resources on campus and I do think those are things as you tour these schools back to things you can do many you've already done this you need to go to visit every single one of these campuses because I think when you do that you will you will physically see the difference in the campuses you can visit with your school board members and with parents um as well and and lastly is I think because there's been so much contentious well let's be honest our school board rooms have devolved into topics that really don't matter right these are the things that matter and how we can collectively think about how do you raise the bar and all ask the question how are my schools performing and every time you see your school board member ask the question how is DeZavala performing how's Doggett performing and I think when you do that it does raise expectations across the community because you're doing so in a collective way of what else can the city of Fort Worth be doing as a neighborhood in that Community to make sure those students are performing well so I do think that while the the information can be alarming and it hasn't changed in the last four to five years since I've been looking at it unfortunately so what can we all do to work together and lastly I think we should maybe provide this to our city employees um and in a way that's that's substantial to them they each have students or Grands parent grandchildren in schools across Fort Worth and I think we can work with the Communications Department to do that and start with our own employee base in the community and I think I would suggest you consider putting the slides you have at your desk on your website yeah and you know just mad at you the points you made about bright spots I I think that's that's so important um you can find schools at the highest economically disadvantaged rate that are outperforming uh schools where fairly well to do and I'd like to point out in jeannette's districts you can look at Jeanette's page the highest performing School in her District it's 94 economically disadvantaged and it it beats the socks off of schools all over the city of Fort Worth 94 e code is so that's a bright spot what couldn't we learn there so there are so many bodies this is not a shouldn't be a defeated story any socio-economic group you name you look at that idea school out in idea rise they they had and it's I don't know exactly I don't know if the top of my head it's like yes 89 percent they tied Tanglewood they tied Overton whatever the new park you know those are poor kids those are kids that haven't gotten much of a chance so this is possible demography is not Destiny you can look across the state of Texas you can have school districts that have the same economic disadvantage rating as as we have in most of these school districts except for the ones up north they are outperforming in some cases three times what we're seeing in the comparable schools here this is doable I think though if we want that push it's going to keep us going every day it's going to be some mad moms and working the problem so Braille said thank you all very much for coming we appreciate it thank you okay Council next presentation is a briefing about recommendations from the 2017-2018 task force on race and culture I think Fernando Costa is going to introduce some of our special guests thank you mayor after that last discussion I think you deserve a light topic but I'm not sure we're the ones to provide it to you it has been almost five years since the task force on race and culture presented you with their final report and so the time is right to review our progress in implementing the task force recommendation and I'm happy that we have with us today two of the four task force co-chairs to speak with you we have Barbary Sanders and Lily Biggins we regret that the other two co-chairs were unable at the last minute to join us Rosa navajara had an urgent issue Arise at her office and Rabbi Bloom explained that he had a back injury attributable to Rochester Ashana he says that we don't fully realize how hard it is to be a rabbi during High holy days but I'm confident that uh Bob Ray Lilly will do a great job conveying the task force recommendations I'd also like to recognize Karen Johnson Karen is a chair of the Fort Worth human relations Commission which has accepted responsibility for caring forward and monitoring progress on the task force recommendations that's an important role for your appointments to that commission to play and I would like to begin uh mayor and Council by recognizing the recent passing just last Friday of Miss Jacqueline Craig a Fort Worth resident who happened to be involved in a police incident which gave rise to protests which in turn led to the city council's creation of the task force on race and culture and the council member Bivens has already made reference to it I don't know if counselor Bivens wants to add any uh other words to her previous remarks yes Fernando I I would I just closed the windows in my hotel room it's important to me the previous Council viewed the outcomes from the rice and culture task force as a promise to our public and forward and that promise concept came from when the council approved and agreed with those outcomes I think we have broken a promise because not all has been delivered I am honored to have had a relationship with Jacqueline that started the day after she appeared on CNN this incident put our city on global blast everybody remembers where they were when you saw that video unfortunate to her she was thrust in the public light brought about a conversation that the task force members will tell you we had more than 200 meetings across this city talking about how to heal and so I'm hoping we will hear from the task force and talk about those that have not been delivered and maybe educate people new to this topic on just how how special a uniting event this was in spite of it being tragic and so that's all I will add to that thank you American so in the immediate aftermath of that incident in December of 2016 and that isn't did go viral around the globe we had protests that occurred at City Council meetings over the course of several months and it led the council in June of 2017 to hold a special called meeting specifically about this topic at which the council appointed the task force our racing culture appointed four co-chairs and asked the co-chairs to nominate other members of the task force which the council in due course appointed uh to that group the council also authorized staff to hire two facilitators for this process the highly esteemed estrus Tucker Fort Worth resident as well as the national league of cities and in August of 2017 the council adopted a resolution formally appointing that task force and assigning it with certain responsibilities you can see the names of some of the task force members uh on the screen the task force proceeded to oversee leadership training for City officials for Community leaders and for interested residents to understand the Dynamics associated with the race and culture in Fort Worth we undertook an effort to engage the public through a variety of means including 89 public events which over two thousand residents participated and they identified a set of issues that they thought it was important for the city to address including discrimination in education the pervasiveness of racism in our community discrimination Economic Development and criminal justice continued racial segregation in the community and so forth these are the the top issues that were raised in the various Community conversations associated with the race and culture initiative and we heard some comments uh come up again and again the perception that the city was doing little or nothing at the time to improve race relations racial equity and cultural awareness that the problems really systematic and structural institutional more so than than personal and that city leaders at that time in the perception of the folks with whom we had communicated had failed to acknowledge this problem that we needed to continue to expand and deepen the community conversations that we had just begun the task force was given a limited scope of work initially but the task force came back after some initial public meetings and said we really need to look more broadly not just at what city government does but how the community functions with respect to criminal justice Economic Development education governance Health housing and transportation and that this issue doesn't belong squarely to city government in fact much of it really belongs outside of city government in the community in the private sector in non-profit organizations in other public agencies this is a community issue certainly not solely a city government issue but the city government has an opportunity to provide leadership and that's indeed what the city has done we undertook a rigorous data-driven analysis of disparities that are attributable to race and culture we began by identifying and measuring the extent of disparities dug into the causes of those disparities in consultation with subject matter experts and the task force made recommendations that were rather specific in character including a strategy for addressing each of the issues various actions consistent with that strategy identifying potential challenges assigning responsibility to responsible parties and assessing the resources that would be needed to be successful in implementation and then equally important we wanted to measure success we wanted terms that were specific measurable attainable relevant and time constrained with a five-year Horizon coinciding with our briefing for you today and so with that introduction I'd like to bring forward uh our esteemed Community leader Bob Ray Sanders to talk with us about criminal justice and uh if he's able he might also discuss some of the items that Rosa and Rabbi were going to be discussing uh in their absence Barbary Sanders good afternoon everybody and I need to figure out how to do this too okay I think I got it um criminal justice that's what got us here and it'll keep coming and there are those of us who said Fort Worth was just one police incident away from major disruption and we've come close many times but if you look on the screen you'll see that here's what we were looking at when we came into this the extent of the disparity although 19 of Fort Worth is made up of the black community 41 of all arrests in 2016 and 41 again in 2017 for African-Americans who were arrested based upon averages for the past six recruit classes only 13 percent of recruits to the police academy for African-American 26 percent of recruits were Hispanic three percent other 16 female we also noticed that there were no African-Americans in certain parts of the police department none at all and in fact six came up right away SWAT K9 criminal intelligence homicide major case robbery and in one category only one African-American officer served on the Special Response Team where there were 44 officers now as you saw from what the chief did earlier we're making some progress here because when you look at the final panel there the diversity of officer that the first promotional rank Corporal and Detective 16. that's seven percent were African-American colleges for criminal justice disparities well many residents thought the law enforcement targeted African-Americans they didn't trust the internal affairs division targeting efforts have failed to generate much interest among minorities no Cadet programs in the public schools as many cities have minority officers may not wish to be the only minority officer in a specialized unit we hear that from several police leaders the criminal justice recommendations were fairly simple and to the point even though we were told and I'll be very honest with you we were told if you recommend that it'll be dead on arrival and I said if it said on arrival it'll be because they killed it not because we aborted it so we were going to make the suggestions anyway so we did call for criminal oversight of police department a police cadet program diversity within the police department would call for those things and you know what in many respects I got to tell you we've made some progress because even though we didn't have what I thought was really a great presentation in the beginning I thought the city council got on this even though they uh we had some who resisted of course I won't call names today but they know who they are they they they didn't see that civilian oversight of police was necessary or they didn't see it in the way we thought and keep in mind when we recommended that we said we looked at over 20 cities that had these kinds of oversight committees and they were all different and we decided we couldn't make one recommendation so we said we leave that up to the city manager and the person that we thought we would surely get and that was a person who would come in as a police monitor they would help decide and help the city council decide which way we should go and indeed we had recommended that uh monitor we got the monitor she came in in the middle of the pandemic did an incredible job of reaching out an incredible job in fact just three weeks before she left she had a seminar or a workshop out at Tarleton State and I went and she announced all the things they had been doing for the past two years two and a half years and I said wait a minute you're doing all this how come I didn't know about it the truth of the matter is we didn't tell our story very well in fact I just met our new monitor uh and I told her that story and uh and she's she's a storyteller so she's going to help get the message out but that's that's where we are now as it turned out the city council didn't see the need for an independent civil citizens review board uh they came up with the idea in fact they turned it down earlier this year said no that's not where we're going and the chief would appoint his own board of advisors which he has done made up of some incredible people now with that and this is this is me speaking not not the task force and with no disrespect to our police shoot because he knows I love him uh he's a great person a friend we hug when we see each other we have lunch but I still think we're in need of an independent review board regardless of what we have now that's me uh but we we are making progress in those areas we are increasing the number of minorities within those sections in fact I think Christina has done a chart that will show and I hope you will get in the next day or two whenever you will see in some of those areas where we have improved in hiring and integrating and getting things done so we're proud of that and and by the way uh our uh police monitoring office hosted the national office or Association of police monitors in Fort Worth just this past year so we are taking leadership in that area and if we haven't done anything else and I know Gina will probably have something else to say about it because I know I saw her face today we were voting or you were voting this down uh although members of the council who were there then uh we are making progress uh not enough yet but we're getting there Lily okay I'm gonna let you take over because I think I'm excited to say add to that to the police oversight thing is um and Barbara don't leave me but we had all of these meetings with I'm Lilly Biggins for those of you who may not know who I am um and we had lots and lots of meetings where we promised we committed to to do some things and uh I think that's the part that Bob Ray's talking about the civilian oversight I guess I was a little disappointed when we got the vote that said the city council wouldn't support it and I'm sure others in the community were disappointed as well because we basically said we would do that and um and so the chief and and everybody thinks the world of our chief we've got the best police chief I believe in the world he's in the community he's engaged and uh he and I too hug but let's think about who we did the work for the work came on the heels of a lot of you couldn't get in the building for City Council meetings because the disruptors were outside the door and when we met with them in all of those meetings that we did we made some commitments and we made the commitments to the public so it isn't about whether the city council think we should do it or whether we think that we're going to offend Chief Knox if we do it it's all about what we commit to the community and so I was a little disappointed when the city council did not support that and uh I think a lot of people were disappointed as well so do you want to add anything to that no I'll let you take up okay where's The Duda right there okay so Rosa couldn't be here Rosa navajar and uh everybody know Rosa probably she's a community advocate as well who does a lot of work in the community and some of the things that came up that Rosa would have talked about would have been the economic disparities and and again here that we did all of these public meetings and all of these items came from people in your districts they came they they were there now toward the end I must admit I was a little frustrated because we'd have meetings and you'd have two or three people there now that's no fun but I'm sure some of you have had those but we kind of ran out of steam we made the we made the commitments we did the recommendations we heard from the communities and people who were consistently there uh were still coming so thank you for that and and before I get into this one too much I made myself a couple of notes and I wanted to just go on record of thanking the city council all of your new members as well for the work you do and mayor you doing you're doing a great job I tell you that uh public service is hard and I'm on boards and task force and I'm going to stop answering my phone because it just gets to be more and more just piled on but I just wanted to acknowledge the great work that you do because you're the target you're the one who is expected to fix everything and when people that you appoint to go into the community get information for you and come back and bring it to you remember that's what you did you sent us out we bought it back and then you voted it down but I want to thank you for the great work you do it takes a lot of courage to be that leader and to be a public servant the other thing I wanted to do is to make sure that you stay focused on being prepared because if you're prepared for the next Jacqueline Craig you're prepared and you're better prepared now as Leaders of this community than you ever were and I think when you look at Christina's final report you'll see that I want to talk about the unemployment now and you can see that that this is where we were you know with uh six point at 6.1 percent we just didn't have the same unemployment rate among this among uh despair there were disparities there with the highest number of unemployed in the median household lowest number uh we're in the minority areas now that's getting more and more difficult to look at because people are everywhere now you know you can't say this is a high density of minorities in this ZIP code but one of the things we found and you can you can see that for yourself there is that um we got the the information from the Census Bureau so Pete made a big point about what did he say Marine solid these numbers are real numbers so they were they were real numbers at the time and minority-owned businesses are the top 100 privately owned firms in Tarrant County 14 only 14 were owned by minorities I'm sure some of that has changed now and some of the causes this was more important to the community and to us was the causes of the economic disparities and it had to do with degrees I will say just from my perspective now that that's kind of changing because you know tasks and skills you know plumbers and welders make more money than people who go to college now right and people are looking for and especially in our area where we have the Lockheed Martin's and all of these high impact companies here uh they you know we're seeing people not go to get a bachelor's degree but it continues to be the gold standard so in our area we saw that whites are more likely to hold a bachelor's degree and uh minorities are more likely than whites to live in economically depressed areas employers uh were talking you know they were saying that when Executives hire solely on primarily through their own networks and what that meant to us and what that meant to the community who bought those comments to us would you hire who you know and you hire people who look like you and that had a lot of a lot of conversation job training we've talked a little bit about that and you'll find that some of those numbers have increased at this point and capacity building for minority-owned businesses one of the things I found when I was on the airport board is people in Dallas knew how to pull themselves together and I would get with you and you get with your friend and we could come together and be it for businesses we weren't doing that as well in Fort Worth is is the Dallas people do it so capacity building for minority-owned businesses was one of the disparities that we found I'm not going to read all of these back to you because of course you know you you've seen them hopefully you have and those newly elected officials it's a part of a document that I'm sure that you can have access to so I'll just hit the high points on on the ones that make a lot of sense uh the older infrastructures and getting people getting the buses to come through different areas that's still a problem probably in the 76104 area and making sure that they have access to Transportation so they can get to where they need to go I believe that's still true uh Congressman councilman Nettles Transportation recommendations we recommend it through the committee and when we when I say we we bought forward to you uh an equity policy for five-year action plan that's been worked and uh funding criteria for the transportation to get into those high-risk areas education I think you've had enough of Education Pete Garen and Pete Guerin and uh and and Dr Beasley did a great job but there's some things that we probably need to call out and as I was listening to him I thought well wouldn't it be great if we could get uh Dr Ramsey to come and present her plan she has plans she's going to be a dynamic superintendent I believe and just have her talk about it from Pete and and Dr Beasley's information but the graduation rate you can see was 88 for whites 85 percent for Hispanics and of course you know who bought in the the length the end of it college readiness we don't know where we are now because if you talk if you listen to the data that was just presented you'll see that uh you know you we don't know where we are because the parents haven't been in to look at that third grade reading level and if you don't if you can't read and I know that um mayor Parker can talk to this because that's her specialty if you aren't reading it at third grade level I mean it just Falls everything else doesn't work so that's that's why that's so important uh suspensions was a big discussion why are so many African-American and Hispanics suspended it was just phenomenal once we dug into the data to see that there were more student disciplinary suspensions among the people of color than the uh Africa then the Anglo I'll just let you kind of look at that quality curriculum and those were some of the education disparities that arose Community engagement which you talked about readiness for kindergarten and Pre-K I took some pre-ks to school this morning oh my goodness never stops Early Childhood Intervention you know with quality Child Care the rising star programs Workforce which is a board I serve on they are really doing a great job of making sure that working with the early childhood and of daycare centers elevating the care that you're that the kids are getting in those daycare centers and so I I think the needle has moved on this one as well and you know a bad governance disparities you live that one where only one in eight District Representatives on the city council is a person of color how do we stack up on that one that was where we were and you can evaluate that when yourself just looking around the table and then the executives and the managers you know you've seen now before you today that that has changed as well firefighters I don't think we've seen very much change in the firefighters in terms of of uh hiring people of color and we did the redistricting you guys did a great job of that thank you for all of your hard work on that and I know it was really hard to get done now I'll talk a little bit about health care because you know that's where I live in healthcare one of the things that I'd like to call out and you can see the rest of this for yourselves diabetes is a big problem still for minorities and a lot of it is lack of compliance it's not it's not a problem we're going to fix this an individual thing that people have to have to have to work on infant mortality is still very very high especially in 76104 in other areas and we still haven't figured out why except it's the food desert and some other things that play in the play out there but one of the things I want to call out in particular is as we do these health fairs you've been to health fair probably everybody in this room's been to health fair you go through and people are measuring your blood pressure they're doing your fingers stick to see what your H is and all of the other things where do you go from there though we still have a problem with access and it doesn't matter how much we call out the fact that the cognitive decline among African-Americans is at 23 doesn't matter if they have nowhere to go once you tell them you're diabetic and they can't get into JPS because they don't have the right paperwork or they don't meet the criteria so we still have a problem with that but the infant mortality is the one that bothers me and it's still a big number we looked at causes for Health Care disparities and as I said earlier we looked at the food deserts and and we're making a lot of progress in those areas you're seeing uh stores add vegetables and add different kinds of meats other than the processed Meats in their stores even though it's not a big full-service store and ability to seek medical care talked about that low literacy about finances and health insurance we still have a lot of people in our community who aren't insured and the the biggest tsunami that's going to come down pretty soon is the hospitals the hospital systems now are underfunded I know when I ran the uh when I was a part of the system uh we had a 25 net revenue 25 and everything came out of the 25 to fund the organization so we we've got some real issues there and I worry about our Health Care Systems and how we can work together with them to make sure that we're taking care of the people who come to their doors education and Outreach you can see the community out in the community now people out educating uh MD Anderson Texas Health Resources people are out now and we're really trying to get people Fed so I think we've made a lot of progress there but that was one of the recommendations that came out of the task force and that we needed to improve health education and Outreach and promote more active Lifestyles healthy foods and access to Providers access to Providers continue to be a big problem housing disparities has the I mean Mary Mary Margaret and her group have done a great job of getting rid of the Departments the apartments the projects uh of course you know Council woman vivens has done a great job over in the stop six area with that but getting people into housing or houses now that uh that feel better but that was a big disparity you know it had increased uh when we did this program which has been almost five years ago now we had segregation you had these little Villages creating themselves where you had a large number of minorities that's changed people are just living where they want to live now and the causes lack of affordable housing did anybody see the article the other day with the trailer the RVs yeah you know made you want to go out and get an RV with the taxes and everything it's just crazy how things are going people can't afford to rent an apartment and so I think we need to keep our eyes on this one because it's it's really still a serious problem recommendations was to try and get some affordable housing incentive policies you talked a little bit about that with utilities earlier and I think when you see the final product of some more data Rich stuff you'll know that we made some inroads there Fernando before I sit down does anybody have any appointed questions they want to ask I know I blew through that but I know you guys have been at that table for a long time any questions for Miss Biggins Council okay that's fine Chris wants to wait thank you he's going to wait till the end thank you okay you want to come through here up there or wherever thank you for speaking to Mr Sanders so where are we today in implementing the task force recommendations that you just heard uh from the coachers in summary the task force on racing culture presented the city council with 22 recommended strategies to reduce the racial and cultural disparities they just described and on this slide we've highlighted the five strategies on which we believe the city has made the most dramatic progress uh independent oversight of the police department capacity building for minority-owned businesses resisting Criterion procedures diversity inclusion and transportation Equity policy will elaborate in a moment under those 22 recommended strategies were a total of 107 recommended actions to implement those strategies as you can see from this pie chart of those 107 a little over half 55 have been completed as originally recommended by the task force in another 37 have been completed with some variations on those original recommendations so the vast majority of actions recommended by the task force on racing culture have actually been completed in one form or another only a handful are are pending completion and a few lack sufficient information to to draw any firm conclusions one of the most important ways of keeping track of the task force recommendations is to produce a regular dashboard of data measuring that progress in reducing disparities I need to hasten to say that the data at this time are not complete and not fully verified and so even though we provided to you earlier today with a copy of the dashboard which Mr Sanders and Miss Biggins uh cited uh earlier uh we don't think that the dashboard is yet ready for broad dissemination but we want you to know that we consider the measurement of progress to be vitally important and our intent is to report back to you uh on how well we're doing in respect to those recommendations I think it's fair to say that in many ways we're measurably moving in the right direction I think it's also important to add and I think you heard uh a side of it earlier today from from uh Pete Guerin the impact of covid has been substantial on many aspects of life in our country in our community not the least of which are educational outcomes uh and health disparities we began with big disparities in Education Health covet did nothing uh other than to magnify uh and in some cases compound those disparities we are now recovering but the task of closing those gaps has become even greater than it was before so we have in the dashboard data that measure our progress with respect to criminal justice Economic Development education all seven elements addressed by the task force on race and culture again we'll be happy to provide you with this information after we have a chance to to complete it and verify we'd like to close uh with a summary of our major accomplishments today and they are significant we've created the Office of police oversight monitor as a step toward independent oversight of the police department and we hosted the the annual conference of Nicole the National Association for civilian oversighted law enforcement and we're thrilled that our new police monitor has arrived to lead us further uh uh on this path uh toward the Improvement we have substantially increased the capacity of minority-owned business enterprises I think uh it's uh happy coincidence that uh at the beginning of your meeting today uh city manager cook uh uh brought forward Christina Brooks to share the uh Trailblazer award uh presented by the National Association of minority contractor that was no accident that was National recognition of the progress we've made since the task force delivered its report we've created cdfi friendly Fort Worth cdfi stands for community development financial institutions increasing cdfi capital investment in small minority firms from just ten thousand dollars two years ago to over 24 million dollars this year dramatic Improvement in the delivery of capital to minority-owned businesses and we've increased African-American business participation in City contracts from under one percent in 2019 to over six percent this year just slightly below the availability rate of 6.6 percent again uh dramatic Improvement uh in minority business enterprises of course you've already heard about uh uh redistricting and as a result of your efforts we now have six that the 10 Single member districts being classified as minority opportunity districts you've created the diversity inclusion Department which is now promoting business and Municipal Equity as well as enforcing our civil rights laws and of a particular importance we you've adopted a translation Equity policy which has led to much greater capital investment within majority minority areas both mmas with 50 or more minorities and smma super majority minority areas was 75 percent or more minority population and so in the 2022 Bond program of the 365 million dollars in the transportation proposition well over half 194 million was invested in the mnas and smnas and in your allocation of arpa American Rescue plan act funds all 16 million of the transportation funds that you invested were devoted to Super majority minority areas including 12 million dollars for Street lighting and four million dollars for pedestrian safety improvements which of course were major issues in those parts of Fort Worth and so we think it's important to underscore or underscore the importance of our process to be driven by data not merely anecdotes but but data driven focused on outcomes not just what activities that we perform but also what outcomes or results we achieved it's important for us to engage the public and be informed by public participation and the city can't do it alone it's important for us to work in partnership with many others in our community to continue this progress Madam mayor members of the council will be happy to entertain any questions myself uh Mr Sanders Miss Biggins and others are available to respond Chris I think you were first yes thank you uh mayor I start out uh by saying uh something we have heard before the city of Fort Worth has come a long way but we still have a long way to go I want to take an opportunity to thank Bob Ray for being here and Lily billions for being here and I and when I look at how this board was established we have people who are co-chairs of this board you know former CEOs of hospitals chaplain journalists um entrepreneur and her own right business and so we had a plethora of knowledge that took place in this race and culture task force and one of the things I wanted to do is bring it back up to our remembrance and I think this is maybe something we do on a yearly or annual basis because there were promises that were made that have not been fulfilled out some because city government it's not as fast as others and so it takes time to get processes through in order to implement these um different assignments for the city of Fort Worth and so I I think it was very important that we have some new Council that are on and frankly still we have some things that have not been done uh and so one of the things I want to allude to and I think you had it on one of those slides where there were seven uh uh things that were not that was recommended that has not been sought out that right there the pie chart not that one the next one the next one yeah uh seven recommendation not yet completed uh and so I think it's important do we know uh itemized what those seven we can provide you with that information yes sir okay thank you um one of the things these recommendations uh were not done in a vacuum they uh initially were given was it 12 months 18 months and then ask for an additional yes and after requesting additional time yes right so uh I'm just setting the stage that this was very throught out it was it was done in decency and in order and one of the things that I I think by Raya alluded to that he was talking on behalf of himself but I don't think he was he was talking on behalf of the community because one of the things that uh is very prevalent is that this community wanted a community civilian review board and when I met with our oversight Monitor and I told I said my sentiments of why the community wants a community board versus a independent office is because they are employed by the city of Fort Worth now being on the inside and working with Kim Neal and now with bonzia I can contest that that is an independent office that does independent work and work hand in hand with our police department and it is to the a best ability integrity and high class um that's us sitting at this table we know that and some of the uh information in our community they don't know that so I think it's important that with our new representative that we take this road trip on to the community to instill in the community what we have as an oversight monitor's office in conjunction with that how do we get to a community oversight that makes sense for our community it makes sense for our police department and give a voice to a crying crowd of people who still believe that we need that oversight in conjunction with it's just not about oversight for me it's about health disparities uh I operate I represent the 76104 district that has the lowest life expectancy and as uh Lily Biggins mentioned it's about access it's not that we don't have it we are not granted our community not granted the afforded to the access to get to the doctor's appointment and get to their medicine and um I was sitting um in a meeting up there talking about Transportation well in the homeless meeting I had yesterday where it may take us five minutes to get from here to Walgreens but somebody else that wants to get to their medication it might take them three hours and in this heat or in this uh uh controlled cold weather that's sometimes difficult um so I since we had this I believe this started in 2017. the task force yesterday uh since the task force which um in humble submission of come from the incident that happened with uh Jacqueline Craig and I I will contest that it's unfortunate that she has passed before we was able to put in place things that the community thought will prevent a Jacqueline Craig uh back in 2016 or December and and Gina always Lou everybody know where they were I know where I was I was sitting on my couch watching TV and saw and I was just in complete uh what happened we have since made some hurdles and jumps to fix that issue but from 2017 we have had Jaqueline Slayton uh that to me is still a questionable shoe uh depart this uh this great proper belief we also had their Tatiana Jefferson we have had this recent shooting on 4th of July that we're still waiting to get an investigation uh completed on to get information that the community is asking for so what I'm saying is this is just not at a city of Fort Worth issue as it relates to disparities as it relates to criminal justice this is a national uh issue around the world and I stated when we took that vote that was voted down five to four is that we can be the city that actually this nation and how do we do policing right how do we engage our community the right way how do we put dollars into our neighborhoods that can help our disparities and I think we are at applicable uh Pitbull moment in time to make that happen we have a great council with we was able to do or end up we was able to do a redistricting to bring on more minorities without doing independent redistration group and so I think this Council has the ability to do what the community is asking I wanted to bring this back and highlight there are still things that we need one is the community oversight board two is investment into our health disparities in our low uh economic areas in the city of Fort Worth being District a 511 and I don't want to speak for any other dishes but certainly District eight and I may have some questions as we move through this but I just wanted to set the standard of why I wanted to bring this back and I don't want to just be one time I think we're going to do it on an annual basis and so uh I do I have one thing I want to say and it was about um you made the comment Fernando how we have made some strides especially as it relates to um oh goodness gracious it was about um we went from point one percent uh to businesses um and if you can bring that slide back up and I 100 applaud this and for us to just now be getting here this is when I say we have a long way to go and so I appreciate the efforts uh that Christina and all those who have participated to get us to this to this Foundation but I want us to continue to build on what we have started thank you Chris Council any other comments or questions for Fernando or task force no Gina you're good Jeanette and then Gina and so the presentation by the task force um it has data that's six to eight years old and so I'd like to see five years ago but you know the 2015 to yes 20 2018. um so I'd like to see updated numbers just with the growing Hispanic demographic some of those may have changed Gina go ahead I don't have anything else but just say remember Jacqueline Craig thank you um Fernando I might ask Chief Nokes to come up for just a minute if you don't mind Neil I think he's still here yes he's hiding in the audience Chief just put you on the spot was there anything you wanted to add especially around the criminal justice slide and the significant changes you've made in the police department that you thought would be worth noting today thank you mayor for the opportunity uh very important topics one that we're really proud of was the wonderful recommendation to bring back our Cadet program our Cadet program has actually been back for quite some time and in conjunction with our Explorer Program we've seen a very diverse group of young people who are interested in law enforcement who've joined those programs and many of whom are either in our Police Academy now or are already our police officers out in the community as far as the diversity within specialized units that is something that has increased I think some of it has to do with the fact that the executive staff is more reflective of the department now from a point of demographics and is encouraging others to apply for positions quite frankly there are some that felt if they didn't look like me they wouldn't be accepted into some of these units we're proving that to be false also our our new president of the black Police Officers Association officer Willie Nash has been been very active and encouraging participation in these application processes and in our promotion processes throughout the entire department and specifically with his membership thank you chief um and anything other than within the department are you noticing out in the community is your community is your officers or your Command Staff work um with community members and also in concert as appropriate with opam absolutely the one of the things I always look for for members of Command Staff are those who are able to engage both internally and externally but their officers our professional staff but also our community members and we've seen members of the executive staff some of whom you saw here some of whom are very new and are already engaged who are connected with the communities connected with various stakeholders formal and informal leaders educational leaders in the community and the connections we've been seeing there have been breaking down some barriers that have been up for far too long and I think because of their efforts we're seeing a lot more benefit in the relationship building department in the Fort Worth Police Department thanks Chief any other questions for chief knows Council um it's really not a question it's just a statement so that everyone knows when I go throughout my District No Matter What part from stop six John T White Center Port people love this Chief and they love it because they know he's going to speak truth to them they confide in him there is there is no doubt that he is highly regarded and highly respected by my constituents and that includes myself as well I thank you very much mayor Pro tem but it's all the grace and blessings of God and the people he's put around me people like you people like people at this table the officers and professional staff I serve with amazing community members like we heard from today Ms Lilly Mr Bob Ray Sanders it's it's a team effort policing is a team sport there's no question about it and we've got some amazing members on our team thank you Chief um I'll just close by saying thank you to Fernando and Christina and your entire team for preparing this update I do agree with councilmember Nettles I think bringing this forward more often is probably helpful I do believe that there's significant strides in all of these categories some of which have nothing to do with the city but our partnership especially in health and also in education which I think are important to point to and it's no secret that one of those contentious issues this Council has dealt with is civilian oversight of the police department and I want to thank Bob Ray and Lily to continuing to Advocate where you believe is there is needed change and and we can agree to disagree some of us may not agree with that but I will say this that when the framework was created for from the task force um I do believe that the words were civilian review board or an alternative model of Civilian oversight so while we may not have the crb that I know that councilmember Nettles has been very vocal in supporting we do have independent civilian oversight and as time goes on and this Council continues to learn more about opam and the independent Advisory board that Chief Knox has assembled this conversation is not going away we'll continue to have this with the community and we have that obligation to the citizens of Fort Worth to make sure they feel like their Police Department is continuing to grow and strive for change and I know that Chief notes has put that on his Department as well for which we're very thankful I do think we have the best police department in the country and I also think we are leading by example in a variety of ways and I know that you lose lots of sleep about that Neil every single night and so does your team so thank you for that and to my colleague councilmember Nettles we appreciate your advocacy you've been incredibly vocal as of Gina of course and councilmember Williams councilmember Beck who's not here today and our other council members it's important that this that this body can really work hard on these issues we can disagree we can walk away angry but always come back together because I think to to lead by example especially on some of the most difficult topics facing our country today for Fort Worth to continue to be a strong a city that is successful and growing and thriving that's what we have to do is have these tough conversations so again we couldn't do it without you thank you to both for taking another debt time here at City Hall we should get you VIP parking at some point right yeah yes certainly so thank you all very much foreign we have two more presentations our next is an update on broadband I think Valerie Washington is going to kick things off for us thanks pal all right city manager mayor and Council thank you for allowing us some time this afternoon to talk about our Broadband enhancement strategy um just to set some perspective and to set the vision of how we got here today which ultimately we're have a request a mayor and Council to approve a contract for us to enter into doing business with sprocket networks but we need to set up why we would enter into an agreement with them and why this project is so important I think we all as we've talked today about the last couple of years remember how we were crippled at the beginning of covid-19 because we realized there were gaps in our community where we didn't have connectivity and Wi-Fi so when students and parents were forced to look at Telehealth or education by you know over the online that's hard to do if you have a little tiny device or you have multiple people living in a household and you don't have the bandwidth to support that we think about broadband and connectivity as we look at our future Workforce Economic Development did their strategic study a couple of years ago I believe they're working on an update that really focused on the need for us to make sure we're developing a Workforce which I think is even more solidified after we heard from Fort Worth ISD today or not the ISD but on the status of Education in our community today we're a growing city 20 000 people a year annually coming into our city they come here because we offer great Economic Development meant a great community and people want to be here and be a part of our energy you know we want to build our commercial tax base as we talk about the budget we always talk about that residential versus commercial um having a good Broadband technology infrastructure allows for that two other big reasons before I jump into this we talk a lot about public-private Partnerships as we look at Broadband Investments there are plenty of opportunities to work with our public Partners our private Partners here in the city of Fort Worth who are focused on Innovation and Technology our I.T Department Kevin Sally and team understood that as a growing city people coming in they wanted to find a way to contain I.T costs so as we were negotiating and figuring out how we can provide Broadband technology and also control the costs that was a big part of our thinking and understanding as we started working to find a vendor that can come in and help us with our Broadband strategies we did an RFP about a year and a half ago and it was for Broadband enhancement we weren't sure what was out in the market so we established an RFP to find out and we wanted vendors to respond back with how they would help us with our government local government connectivity how could we connect better into the community and how could we make sure we're providing the connections that are going to drive economic development in our communities once we started on this road and issued the RFP and we got plugged in with the state Broadband development office as you know there's about 3.3 billion dollars that's going to be flowing to Texas and state and federal funds to help support Broadband efforts our presentation we'll quickly quickly cover just the benefits of broadband how it works and the costs we wanted to of course show how this fits into your strategic priorities and we feel that this Broadband um enhancement project fits into quality life Economic Development Community safety and infrastructure and it really hits on all of the items that um you've determined need a focus as we move into the future he said Broadband again IT addresses the equity Equity Gap as we look at our communities that don't have connectivity it supports local government Communications we rely on a pretty big Network to support City facilities and City work so we want to make sure we have that Network in place and then it also bolsters economic opportunities as we were working with our proposed vendor and trying to figure out how we fit this in how do we sell it to the community how do we talk to y'all about it we really wanted to focus on first and foremost benefits to Economic Development um again as a growing city I think we're the 13th largest city I think competing for 12th largest and Counting and we need to be competitive as we look at Economic Development and again diversifying our commercial tax base and growing that and we want to be competitive you've heard Robert Stearns and William Johnson's talk about Economic Development opportunities and how we often lose out on some of those opportunities um to smaller cities like Plano who just have different infrastructure and can offer different incentives we are packaging something that will allow the economic development team to really get businesses to look serious seriously at the city of Fort Worth It should help them from a hiring standpoint with the technology that we offer and if you recall in the former committee that was chaired by former council member Firestone the technology and Innovation committee they talked a lot about internet exchange points and how having those internet exchange points in our city will help draw in technology businesses and as we talked with our team and David and pretty much every business that we have now is a technology related business and they need that technology infrastructure and order to be successful we also think that having this Broadband technology will help our small businesses grow and we need to provide them with the resources connectivity to allow them to be successful and we believe that these Partnerships that we're going to enter into with sprocket will help as we worked with our city of Fort Worth departments it was important to understand and get their buy-in we want to make a big investment in the city with this Broadband project and it was important that City departments understood they believed in the vision and they were willing to support it as we look at police and fire we worked with them to show them how the connectivity is going to help as they set up real-time crime centers camera connectivity in communities and we wanted to again show them the benefits so we could get their buy-in and they would help us make this that program successful but also understand how they fit into it and how it's a benefit to them we have just a couple of examples again in working with the city departments we wanted to know if we had this technology kind of what's the benefit to the public and it really just allows City of Fort Worth to optimize time provide better Services it removes barriers for employment if we have residents around the city who are able to access our Network and our job boards um so again just general increases accessibility protects our city with some of the public safety items and then from Parks and Rec even it helps us increase accessibility um as we are able to connect and engage with our residents at this time I would like Christina Brooks to come up she's going to talk to us about how Broadband is going to benefit the community from an equity standpoint okay how many um people uh were athletes at some point in their educational endeavors [Laughter] you don't have to have lettered you could have been a walk-on okay running back okay councilman Nettles was the state champion too North Crowley Panthers all the way okay well what I what I want to put this conversation in the context of a team sport and if you think about this in the context of a track team and you may have star athletes that if they are the ones lining up and they're sprinting it's just them in the lane but you get to a point in a track meet where it's a relay race right and you are dependent on at least four individuals to perform and you're only your outcomes will only be as good as the weakest person on a leg and if we think about that in the context of uh internet and broadband and what that means to the Fort Worth community if we look at the numbers that are on the screen here statistically we have a little over 300 000 households that we're talking about um about 75 percent have some type of access to high-speed internet but if you look at those last two numbers in red if you add those two up that's about 25 percent right that we're talking about that has no access to high-speed internet or no internet access at all and Valerie's point is well taken um covid taught so many lessons to so many cities around the country but right here when we experienced a shutdown of the school system and they had to go home to learn that impacted not only the progress of our students educationally it impacted so many businesses across our city as well who hadn't thought about a model that required digital uh ways for them to continue to sell their goods and services and so when you look at the Broadband household access on this map what you'll see in the dark green I want you to pay attention to those areas over 500 at least 500 households in those dark green areas are unserved right there's a lighter grain that's between 100 and 500 unserved and then 0 to 100 in the areas that are white and so one of the things that we have already talked about a couple of times is during covid our I.T Department got together and they identified some of those areas of Gap where we lacked infrastructure uh where families did not have internet access so you'll see those circled on this particular map what you might note is their proximity to those areas that are in dark green or light green and even some of the areas that are uh in in the white and so if we again go back to that contextual understanding that we as a city our relay team other countries or other cities around the country are setting up to become the next tech hub right we're positioning ourselves as a city that wants to attract Tech businesses the only way that we're going to be able to do that well is if we have a stable robust I.T infrastructure that can handle not only the tech businesses that are here but allows them the capacity to grow and that is part and parcel to what it means to make sure that every part of the city is capable of delivering on that type of problem promise not just specific sections of the city turn it back over Christina thank you and we appreciate you allowing us to share multiple voices just because this has been such a a big project to get to this point and I think there's kind of a mix of community and technological expertise that has gone into this and we will close this up mayor with the next couple of slides um Joe ferdoso a consultant that we've been working with is going to come up and walk us through a couple of the slides just explaining the technology it should just take a few minutes and we'll be able to close up yeah foreign Council thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity to talk with you today what I'm really going to do is as Val said I'm going to summarize a little bit about the arrangement with sprocket and talk to you a little bit about how this does check the three boxes that that you have set as priority in Economic Development and Public Safety and fiscal responsibility um what you're essentially doing with this project is that you are building a platform for City Services you spend about 3.7 million dollars or so a year today on a network that is partially pay as you go as you use more bandwidth you have to pay more for it from this project you're going to end up with a platform or a network platform a fiber platform that you are portion bandwidth as you need it at no additional cost so it meets that fiscal responsibility piece of it you run about Chief about a thousand cameras I think today for monitoring those are mainly on wireless contracts you pay about 30 or 40 dollars a month for those you will be able now to fiber those cameras and monitor without a wireless charge and add cameras at a fixed cost as you need them if they're on the fiber Network and this is a comprehensive fiber Network it's going to connect 250 facilities around around the city in addition to that you have your own strands of fiber the city will have control over two dozen strands of fiber that as Val mentioned can close Economic Development deals you can now offer a company that wants to come in its own dark fiber connection to ixcs all around the country and that's a compelling compelling Economic Development tool today it goes back to if a logistics company needs dedicated roads or new road building or expanded highways this is the expanded Highway of economic development in the 2020s and then finally as part of this deal as Christina so eloquently said is that you have 25 percent of your households in Fort Worth that do not have adequate access today this vendor because they are working you are using your city demand to seed their seed their financials is going to be able to serve those areas with fiber to the home so not only just a not only a minimal Broadband solution but one that scales to gigabit level scale so you can see this network strands on this network can be used for all three purposes right it can be used for economic development it can be used to operate the city and then separate strands can be used for residential and Commercial broadband the backbone Network basically it feeds into the last mile into neighborhoods this network will be resilient so that one fiber cut cannot bring down an area it has an architecture that will allow it basically to be self-healing the city Network costs as I mentioned you spend about 3.75 million dollars today to connect those 250 City locations that's about 124.5 million over over 32 years for this you're basically fixing that cost in the Future No Matter Where You're bandwidth demand goes over time and your bandwidth demand is growing at about 20 percent year over year no matter where that demand goes over time you will have a network that scales to that demand at no additional cost all right and we can add endpoints to the network at a fixed cost as I mentioned earlier so within the contract negotiation of where we are right now if you develop another Community Center or want to add a camera or want to add a sensor location you'll be able to add that at a fixed cost to the network and the network traffic won't cause additional costs so again very fiscally responsible you are the only city in the country that's thinking about its own I.T spend in the context of Economic Development and bridging infrastructure gaps in your community so it's a very efficient way to think about it you're using your own existing spend to address Equity gaps but also to to to accelerate economic development in the city so it's a very smart way to approach it so some Broadband investments in other places Dallas county is looking at putting 35 million dollars up front Clark County Las Vegas is about 43 million dollars up front Erie County in Buffalo is about 29 million dollars up front brexar County in San Antonio is about 32 million up front in the city of Memphis is about 15 million up front you're at about seven and a half million and three million of that is coming from the north central Texas council of governments in a grant none of these other cities except for Clark County Las Vegas are actually getting a production government wide area network out of this deal so you're actually checking two boxes with less money up front by leveraging that annual spend we talked a little bit about the affordable connectivity program in a couple of different sessions today but this is a thirty dollar benefit that the FCC offers to families with incomes below 200 percent of the poverty level it's about sixty thousand dollars for a family of four right now your registration in Tarrant County is about 35 percent for that program um with sprocket in in checking that final box of equity of access they're actually going to promote the uh affordable connectivity program with assistance to sign up for it in the neighborhoods where there's concentrations of of unserved households AS Val mentioned 18 months ago we put out six we put out an RFP response we received six responses we chose sprocket networks as our vendor sprocket has attracted about 75 million dollars in Bank financing to build out the network in addition to what uh to what uh the city is going to pay over time in its annual fees this is really about a two or three hundred million dollar and 250 to 300 million dollar investment sprocket is a 30 year old company they had the top proposal for equity and onboarding so when we looked at the unserved locations among the city and then looked at Economic Development and the ability to scale city services they were the top proposal in all three of those areas they are going to establish offices in Fort Worth as part of this program and in fact the the effort will be branded and the consumer brand will be Fort Worth fiber and the City of Fort Worth will be able to offer dark fiber services to technology companies through sprocket and independently to close Economic Development deals there were a lot of boxes checked the other thing that sprocket did was brought a Fortune 500 company to the table as their engineering and Construction in Qantas Services quanta has also offered a line of credit to sprocket as they build out the network they will be in charge of constructing the network and Engineering it what this does for the future particularly in Last Mile areas is that there are federal and state funding opportunities the state of Texas has been allocated 3.3 billion dollars the highest state allocation in the country for a Last Mile subsidy program that was part of the infrastructure investment and jobs act there are pockets of the city that will be eligible for this veed funding from the state particularly areas where there are affordable housing multi-dwelling units we tend to be very much behind in infrastructure investments in those areas we plan to work with sprocket closely to attract this funding and finally the one thing I will tell you is that in the next in the last couple of months other partners have started to come to the table with interest from Tarrant County and from other private providers and buying into this network and taking down fiber strands on this network the city has negotiated at least to this point the contract where the city gets half credit for funding that is brought in from those arrangements and that will be credited against our annual fee so not only have we fixed costs at the 3.6 or 3.7 million dollars a year that the city pays for Broadband Services we have an opportunity by attracting other partners and to lower that cost even more and become more efficient so again in conclusion you're basically taking money operating money that you would have spent anyway on Telecom services and you're using it to accelerate Economic Development build a platform that you can scale city services to the Future and bridging digital uh digital uh infrastructure divides in your community it's one of the smartest things I've seen in a long time now great presentation questions from Council Macy address the economic development impact again if we're using that as an argument to bring in companies have we done a study to see what we're missing on as far as it or technology companies coming to Fort Worth because we're lacking broadband Kevin do you want to take that so I'm going to let Kevin answer that question for me hi Kevin Gunn I am the I.T School District director and I appreciate that question council member Hill um we looked at this as part of the entrepreneur and Innovation committee uh and things prior to you were elected and you know you'll if you've looked around you probably noticed there aren't a lot of concentration of internet based or Internet focused businesses in Fort Worth uh there are a few like Facebook and uh the data center that they have up in North Fort Worth but but not as many as compared to the rest of the Metroplex that's because we don't have the internet infrastructure that those companies require to get to the networks that carry data across the country and across across the globe so that that's what this project is is doing in part is bringing that infrastructure here into the central business district so that we have it locally and can use that to attract those uh investments from technology focused businesses I mean is that anecdotal or do we have actual facts we've missed out on companies coming in yeah that's that's uh actual facts and we can walk through that uh I won't believe we're the point here but we have uh data to show that for you yeah other cities that have invested in infrastructure like this councilwoman Hill have um Chattanooga Tennessee is probably a great example of this they had an electric utility that the city owns and they were deploying fiber they use the fiber infrastructure to close Economic Development deals it's becoming very common and if you read a lot of the relocation and economic development trade Publications they will tell you that that the ability to to uh to close a deal with dark fiber saying I have a dark fiber path to an internet exchange has become you know if you don't have that you automatically get eliminated from relocation and economic development decisions so now you're going to put yourself at the top of the list and there's no City in the top 15 that has control of a dark fiber infrastructure in a public-private partnership that you can bring to the table for economic development I can point you and I will directly to a website that has a list of about 150 deals that have closed with dark fiber um yeah and um I built a network of Statewide Network in North Carolina I was president and CEO of an organization called mcnc that's a non-profit in the state and we served all the schools and libraries when we built our own network in 2010 we had dark fiber arrangements with apple Facebook Google at T that all used fibers from us to to serve their data centers when you look at a data center it's not just one path of fiber that they want they want four or five because downtime is is is it's unacceptable in a data center space so they want four or five different services along different Pathways and if you don't really have that within your community they're fine to do retail with a couple of you know normal service providers but they really want their own path that's scalable that they know that they can control and that they have certain service levels on it that they could get a cut repaired almost immediately so it's a huge deal it's like roads were you know back in the 80s and 90s to close Economic Development deals and we'll follow up with Robert Stearns and Ori to provide some factual information on some of the deficits we've had here from a technology standpoint uh Valerie and Kevin because uh I guess fiber optic networks and then the unused you know optical cables that are there that you know constitute dark fiber they're scalable you know I understand the high speed capabilities you know enhanced bandwidth reliability better communication Etc because of the amount of data all this is in real time I think I may have heard it maybe just alluded to a little bit under the scalability you know uh category but what does that do to our emergency response capabilities because now you have real-time data and you have a lot of it you can share it better so in theory you know if we are you know trying to work to get interconnected between our facilities we should be able to respond a lot better to emergencies correct kind of quicker better faster more consistent right fewer outages yeah all of those things okay and uh I know Tanya isn't here but maybe yourselves or David can answer it are we preparing adequately when we're refurbing the new city hall to be accepting of this yes and I like Kevin but I mean yes that's been on our radar since I mean we started dealing with audio issues in the council chambers and we were having a difficult time with our public meetings um so we've made it a priority to make sure future city hall is wired correctly um so yes future city hall will benefit from the fiber ring and we should have better faster connecting technology at future city hall all right thank you questions Jared go ahead um thank you all for the great conversation that we had before this meeting um though one thing I do want to um you know say on the record is just how important um these type of services are for communities like Como um also really grateful for what the city did and standing up Wi-Fi um you know during and just after pandemic and many of these neighborhoods and um you know access to high-speed internet is a basic necessity in this day and time and so um you know I commend you all for this work and also you know I'm particularly cognizant of the importance of building capacity and infrastructure and neighborhoods like almost so look forward to continuing to work on this and honest part of the evaluation committee Christina Brooks was able to join us and that was one of the things that was important as we looked at proposals was how were they How would vendor really work with the community how would they really help with digital equity and digital navigation and help get devices into the hands of families that need them so as we continue to talk more and more about sprocket with this mayor and Council I think you'll see the see them bringing those items to the table thank you and then just one more Equity piece and it may be in Christina's wheelhouse as well but I mean is there a business Equity component to this in terms of investment as we continue to roll out the build out of this infrastructure yeah yes there is um Christina I don't know if you want to give the details but yeah there's a I don't remember the percentages and how we set that up but there is a business Equity portion and our vendors coming with the table have mbes working with them that they're going to bring on and have engaged there is there is there were there were stocks we you know obviously did the RFP with City of Fort Worth purchasing so we uh had those goals well defined in the RFP process and sprocket is has a minority owned component but they also have committed to meeting the goals of in deployment and the other thing I will add is that uh businesses are accounted for as unserved and underserved locations so they will also be eligible for some subsidy funding from that 3.3 billion dollars that the state of Texas gets to deploy to them Alan so thank you for this presentation I think it's incredibly amazing when we talk about doing something better faster more robust more reliable and cheaper than what's happening now are we in government at the moment yes we are you're thinking like a private sector yeah so some private sector companies so I love this I'd love to see you know the same type of thing in more areas of the of the city I had a great meeting with Valerie on this uh last week and just had a couple of questions at that time you know one was about Sprocket in general and and you know the concerns were you know how viable of the company how how uh well-funded are they and I think you answered that pretty well today uh they uh I think they're they're more than capable of doing the job and the other concern I had was with ultimate ownership of the fiber which will not be with us and so can you the one thing I don't want to do is leave a future Council 30 years from now in a hard position so can you talk to me for a moment about what's happening there sure so your your agreement the city's agreement with sprocket is going to be Pro to provide a network that interconnects those 250 locations but you're going to have a strand capacity you have a long-term capital lease on 24 strands of fiber so that does a couple of things first of all you can run the network on four strands so you have 20 excess strands if for some reason and and that agreement is for 30 years with two 10-year renewals on it so you basically have the fiber for 50 years according to Gap fiber is about a 30-year asset uh depreciable asset and the conduit it'll be laid in is a 60 60-year asset so yeah and it's the electronics that you put on the fiber that that denotes the capacity and you'll have money in your budget to upgrade those Electronics but Having excess strands is an accountability Factor if sprocket for some reason does not perform there's obviously perform government's goals in the contract that you can you you can uh null the contract but also those extra 22 strands if they're not meeting the goals on the economic development side or on the deployment of consumer service you can attract another provider in with those 20 strands so you basically have beneficial ownership through those 22 excess strands or 20 excess strands without having to there's complications of fiber ownership there's maintenance of fiber if you own the fiber you're responsible for example um and this would be funny if it happened but if a road project comes along and you have to relocate you know three miles of fiber to accommodate that road project because you didn't pre-plan or look at the long-term tip you as the fiber owner would be responsible for all of those costs of relocating that three miles of fiber this iru agreement or this long-term lease is beneficial ownership without having to take all the negative consequences of real ownership like those relocation costs and cut repairs and other things and I'll share one story with you you know from being a beneficial owner a CEO of a 3 000 mile Network that spanned the state of North Carolina uh one day we had a drill bit take up 2 000 feet of fiber they didn't properly call 811 service to locate it that was about a two hundred thousand dollar repair that we were responsible for and it's an unplanned expense you basically take put that expense on the ultimate fiber owner by just iruing the fiber so again you get beneficial ownership of more strands than you need without the consequences of having to be the underlying owner and it's really hard for a government entity to be the underlying owner with all those with all those consequences all right thank you I appreciate that no problem Jeanette so mine is just a comment I'm excited about this project coming um but let's also consider those neighborhoods that already have established Wi-Fi um some of those are pretty old and maybe outdated and so we need to look at that when we roll things out yeah I don't think sprocket's going to be shy to compete in neighborhoods that already have good broadband service um I think they're going to offer a premium product at a competitive price and this Market can easily support two fiber to the home vendors and a cable company and I think it's good for the health of the market across the city not just in the neighborhoods we've targeted because it'll help competition will help keep rates reasonable and it's always going to be a hedge against a company that you know believes they have a monopoly Charlie I think I might be the last ones I might be standing between us and a short break so I'll make it quick one to Echo everyone else I'm excited about it as a newly appointed member and thank you mayor of the entrepreneurship and Innovation committee I think this is really going to help like you said um I do believe that if we attract the right businesses we can't do more on our property taxes so to that and though as far as like some of those underserved areas which you know we saw a couple are actually in North Fort Worth which I think is up there um will because as I understand right now for some of those other community Wi-Fi that's paid for from the cares act money correct I think we use cares and are do we use both but use care as an art bed to support them but yes so moving forward when those funds are are no longer there we'll we'll sprocket be picking will they be subsidizing that or is that something that we're going to be asking taxpayers to help subsidize or how's that going to work so the the neighborhoods that we put the wi-fi in uh that was kind of a temporary emergency measure to get internet out to those residents very quickly uh it wasn't intended to be a permanent service the wired connectivity for homes is intended to be the permanent service so we're going to build this out into those neighborhoods to replace that wireless connectivity and those that qualify for the affordable connectivity program they'll get that service at no out-of-pocket cost so that's our our plan for uh uh bringing in a better service than we could through the wireless and having a long-term service for those communities that uh did not have the connectivity they needed during the covet pandemic and one important addition here that I think was in the presentation maybe not as clear as the partnership that sprocket will provide with our other ISP companies across the United States to better Market the subsidies that are already available to a lot of these households that are sometimes just clouded in a lot of uncertainty and confusion and I think that was a big piece of the selection of sprocket and we look forward to working with them so in other words you have households right now that qualify for free are really reduced high-speed broadband and once this network is built out you're going to incent those isps to be further into those neighborhoods the tentacles I think that is the best way I've always heard it described which would be helpful and mayor to your point the the rate card that is will be in the agreement with sprocket it's 100 megabit symmetrical service which um I don't know about you I have two boys at home that always game and uh 100 megabits symmetrical and we're streaming at the same time so 100 megabits per second can support a lot of gaming streaming education Telehealth that will be a 30 a month package so when you take the ACP benefit if you're ACP eligible and apply it to that it's no out-of-pocket cost for a really really premium broadband service any other questions counsel no thank you all very much for the presentation yeah thank you and thank you for taking time to meet with us over the past couple of weeks so we can share this information with y'all thank you I think Val's next on our next presentation um involving 9-1-1 Tarrant County district is that correct Val yeah I'm really just here I'm going to introduce Sherry Decker who's the director of Tarrant County 9-1-1 um through ordinance we mayor and Council need to approve their fiscal year 24 budget so we have a resolution that will be on the September 26th agenda and Sherry is here just to provide an overview of the fiscal year 24911 budget I would say that I've had an opportunity to work with Tarrant County 9-1-1 and Sherry and her team as we've looked at 9-1-1 for city of Fort Worth and remember The City Gate report showed us that our 911 services could be better they were clunky they weren't as fast as they needed to be and not as patient-centric as they needed to be and so we are working with an internal 9-1-1 working group to look at consolidation of 911 here in city of Fort Worth um co-locating police fire and MedStar in a single facility um Sherry has been my partner in crime as we've begun this journey with police fire and MedStar she helped us and helped us fund a trip to El Paso and San Antonio to visit their 911 centers so I'm really proud to announce Sherry as she covers their fiscal year 24 budget quickly it's short and we'll just give a quick update on next-gen 9-1-1 thanks Sherry I don't want to knock things over here first of all thank you for letting us come or Anil and I my CFO come again we were here last year I see some new faces but we come every year it's part of our legislation that the city of Fort Worth City of Arlington Grand Prairie and Irving approve our budget along with the Commissioner's Court and the mayor's Council so we get to appear before you each year before you I think everybody has a packet uh just a little bit about our mission our goal and I love the whole talk about Broadband because that's what our next gen 9-1-1 course Services project is about is getting faster more reliable service for core response services to our fire police and EMS so our mission is to continuously provide reliable accurate responsive and effective emergency communications we have been here since 85 we've had the support of our cities we started out with about 46 911 centers due to organic con consolidation and or bringing agencies together to co-locate we're down to just under 30 now we finished a regionalization study that took one whole year we had a town hall last week that closed that out to help our cities decide if regionalization might be good for them and or co-location might be good for them some of those are right here in Fort Worth as well so I'm not going to read all these because you have this packet told you when we were established we do include agencies that are border our County and include DFW airport and the City of Irving back in the day people could either decide if they wanted to be a home rule City and say you know what we can pay for our 9-1-1 we don't need anybody's help or we want to be a county-wide 911 system or they might be 13 counties like North Central Texas 911's program so that's the people in ours and these are all the cities that we serve so let's just talk about our management uh Valerie and Robert Aldridge are both board members on our Board of managers we meet monthly and we try to bring them constructive projects that we know will allow an equal level of service to all of our cities so when you think about it today our county has the same 911 system the phone throughout we also have the same broadband throughout so these are all an equal level of service and that is one of our goals is to continue to provide that some of our goals of course are to maintain the standards of our sound governance but number one is to have a reliable Network we never want a call dropped lost or misrounded and that's why our motto is when seconds count we want to make sure that our call takers our telecommunicators our dispatchers have every tool that they need to process a call while our legislation may say that we only have to train these professionals on how to use the phone I have an issue with that I think what good is it to have a piece of equipment if the people that are using it don't know what to do with it after they've answered the phone so we have a robust Communications and education we like we handle the licensing class for telecommunicators in the state of Texas we have health and wellness we have first responded we have suicidal callers we have crisis Communications classes we have digital classes we offer everything that a regulatory service at Tico requires for a telecommunicator to have to maintain their license this is just our hierarchy our Board of managers is who who I report to it's a pleasure to serve I am a Tarrant County girl born and raised I retired from running a 911 Center back in 2005 North Richland Hills if anybody's from there uh my husband is a retired Fort Worth Police Officer retired in 2020 and so we've always been here in 05 I went to the Council of governments and managed the operations of 9-1-1 for the North Central Texas 911 district and I came to Tarrant County 911 District in 2022. November will be my two year anniversary so our next gym project is our biggest biggest project and it is reflected in the budget last year we cut our budget by 2.9 Million this year we cut it by 6.1 this next-gen core Services is a digital format our current Legacy 911 system is at end of life they're no longer making parts and so it's time that we put her to rest and we built another system the FCC gave our service providers such as at T Verizon T-Mobile that they have originally a 2024 deadline to cut services to the old equipment that has been extended to 2026 we're very grateful because it takes about 18 months to 24 months to put this system in our system is going to cost when we've got a big population between 28 and 30 million I have a grant for 12 of that and hopefully there's a proposition coming up in November if approved that'll give me 12 more and then we'll be able to handle the rest there's eight large components that are considered with a next-gen core services and 9-1-1 system and we're well on our way we've contracted with Motorola to be our vendor for this system and they're they're starting the infrastructure tear out in October probably the end of October so this is just some of the things that we do in our budget and our strategic plan while we've been really good about X Y coordinates our GIS team is now in the middle of a z coordinates we're on the second floor if you call 9-1-1 and you need help somebody needs to know you're on the second floor if you can't tell them and that's what the Z coordinates will do for us we have a lot of high-rise buildings in our city and more of more high-rise Apartments so this is very very important to us so I'm here to ask you to approve my budget for 2024 and I'm open any questions and I brought the man my CFO in case I have left anything out or you have questions for him any questions for Sherry I said I'd make it that you did and I just want to say that that Murray is a Marine well thank you Sherry appreciate that appreciate you Val thank you all right our last item um requests for future agenda items anybody Chris do you have one yeah um I would like an IR on our Council reconsideration policy uh specifically how many days we have to reconsider an item that was voted on um I spoke to a couple feel better so they should be aware of it also with like an uh probably uh presentation or our on the prioritization of filling vacancies for PD positions which divisions and teams uh I feel first um have some questions about um some of our teams such as the Hope team having to wait to be filled before other vacancies are filled also um I want to IR on what I intel if we have an Intel group art Department in our police force what there's that budget line item and what are we doing as it relates to [Music] um stolen guns I also like IR on the increase of Mayor and council salary being placed back on the upcoming ballot whenever that may be to start that conversation uh back up I think I'll stop there thank you all right anybody else Michael um I haven't had a chance to talk to this but we're gonna for the legislative affairs committee I just want to make sure when we're being briefed on that we not only talk about the report and I forget when this means report that we are going to do but also um have legal involved in that as far as the ramifications of some of the the policies and some of the things that have gone into effect so I know we normally just get a regular legislative update but I'd like also for us to have that conversation right thank you anybody else okay yeah I um I don't know if it's our presentation but I initially asked for us to have a biannual presentation from the fourth Isley Superintendent at Dr Ramsey we had her January 24th I know there was some talks of trying to uh establish a bi-annually um both elected offices meeting I want to know where we are on that for elected officers who said right okay four elected offices yes okay Carlos I I will add one and this is one that goes goes back to when we were not the only people on the council uh we used to have we we tried to meet with all school districts that touched the city of Fort Worth and so I'd like to revive that as an IR to see where we are with getting that on on the table on the agenda because we have Crowley ISD Northwest ISD you know we touch a lot and I think with the information that peach shared today it behooves us to have some type of rapport with those school districts that touch Fort Worth got it thanks Gina anyone else I'm sorry Jared I have two um one I think may be more relevant for the nqrc but I want to bring it up given the timeliness of wept's presentation I would like for them to come back um to the nqrc at some point um and the hope of that conversation is that basically we'll be able to start overlaying some of the data that we've collected through our neighborhood conservation strategy with some of the data they presented so I'm not terribly um you know tight on what time we select but we can work through that offline um this the second thing the second thing is um I think it's relevant for us to get an an update from Christina seam on MBE contracts and I can connect with her offline with more specifics but um I'll be bringing that one forward as well okay so General update on the status of nde contracts okay got it anyone else and one's going twice seeing none we're adjourned foreign [Music] [Music] [Music]