Christmas time off this morning as founder and CEO of success training initute which softelligence. attended today. Thank you very much. Watch out. instruction. So, I'm excited. Jesus Christ. Additionally, security Are you okay? You didn't think you were going to come here and leave empty-handed, now did you? And once everybody has their nice gift, you know, uh the Louis Vuitton watches are for the ladies and the Gucci watches are for the guys. So if you have the Gucci watch, then make sure you pass it over to the person. We can officially open these gifts that we open like this. I'm let you opening question. My opening question is going to be what I You've all got ingredients. I see some people have some baking representative. They represent because you may not ever think that we're something different. What's the purpose? What's happening kind of insulting like I've got my own in my I keep a few things that nobody understands why I hate matter. create something that believe that we are and I believe most of the time we think of this what everybody wants to who we believe we are. We believe that this is who we are. But in actuality, this is so much diff ingredients are something. Beautiful. Beautiful. So pretty much we are on the right track. These are simply outcomes and ingredients are designed to produce outcomes. That's what these are as an ingredients. as a result of that. We're all out. So I know you even my job is to strategically produce dynamic outcomes outcome a degree. And so today we're going to take a journey and learn about something. How often is it collaboration? I'm going to call our collaborate effectively and learn the dynamics of working together. The first step is compromise. First step is compromise. Google has Let's just like whatever we restaurant. How successful do you think our businesses may because by itself does not But when you compromise, how do I become recognize ideas invitation. Yes, we also recognize that shows how we are. We actually have a unique awareness of our own Of course, people attempt to do step number one. There's no way accept angry power together. and I just want to recogn in order to make this allegiance. Allegiance in business. has to be an ingredient to the king. This is the only thing that matters is whe process of becoming. I want to say You know, we need to say cut out. And as they are trying to make The beautiful part about sugar is there is no substitute for those sugar. That's just sugar. Sugar. One of the components of being out. truly discover. You start off thinking high know She know she made me Angeles. Every time she starts pulling out all the ingredients on the table on the table and our Let's just see what this stuff. Oh my goodness. She gets identify. I'll be able to effort to do those came about intensify when typically we started our effortowboy all the time. is not just also simply to protect others. don't have the capacity to the reason because messed up. have protect you know what Cowboys do like the recent Once we start process of that game will never stop. But yet my goal is to protect the other to protect each other. But let's not get in the habit of calling anythingbody's So, I'm thinking I will say let's not say supposed to. result. So now I say I understand how Then I also must embrace limit possibilities. Here's an exercise. I want you to look at I want you to about probably cornfully corn. Everybody's We're not fixation. We can do those things because we made our world so major and that's the result. will embrace I got forces there and those two ingredients. I want you to look at the expiration dates of your everything that you got. the last 27. Imag7%. very longity because that's all we're supposed to do our cakes and biscuits and waffles and burritos. show you how that's okay. are temporary. I'm supposed to produce outcomes every single outcomes are temporary. The only way I can embrace is by remaining this only is always together. So as a result of that component of collaboration if I can appate there's no way I I'm going to tell you something. I really didn't know at all. I've got appreciation for the fact I'm sure that we don't I'm sure it does. So as a result of this way, something. Did you realize Because the same outcome. last beautiful our last element of collaboration. Who has something that makes us together of All these ingredients mix together. I didn't bring eggs with me. So as a result of that oppress to be at one another as a result of what we get to be concerned about. Okay. Somebody's got to be to say that we're bold enough to what we can accomplish. We got to be bold enough first of all to use language. Yeah. It's the language that motivates the language that language that we want to use. And often times the way bonding breaks down Whatever they might I've got to be taking my daughter. driving something crazy. station walk street. So I tell her she says what into a hotel and the goal is always something positive and we can be positive. I would challenge you to look at every council member, every city manager, and you start What's the best thing I can do? I can say right now artist and thank you. That was terrific. We can have a white elephant exchange all over the country at the age of 32. Today was very special for me. Merry Christmas. I think we're taking part, right? Five minutes come back. I want to I think I know We are almost tested. You know what I mean? What is this? What's happening? Happy What's up? I don't know. What happened? Come on. Number two. I don't want It could be What do you think? Let's get back to the story. What I'm doing is Thanks for meeting. definitely pretty long. resolution. But We definitely want time. So, So I I want to emphasize that. That's very important. that talk about strength. I guess lots of opportunity. Sometimes So many That way we right there. We'll talk about I don't think that we're actually because anything about that. Very exciting. And then finally Lots of responsible focus. Everybody I remember one of the things Speech. Speech. Speech. We are performing. Foreign interest. short. Thank you. Any other questions? Thank you very much. Mic check test. Mic check test. >> [clears throat] >> mic check test. Mic check, test. Mic check, test. Good. You ready? Okay. Okay. Council, thank you for eating lunch quickly. Our next presenter is Jennifer Hernandez, who is a partner with Holland and Knight Land Use Environmental Law. Um, she's the West Coast chair out of San Francisco. She has four decades of experience in land use, environmental, climate change law, and co-leads the firm's climate change team in West Coast practice. She is a recognized author, educated board member advising public, private, and nonprofit organizations. I've had the pleasure of seeing um Jennifer present and then also at a conference most recently at UT Austin um around affordable housing policy and because this is an issue that's very important to each of us on council. I thought she could really help us be more proactive and and pushing the state of Texas and our own city on what housing policy really should look like. So, Jennifer, thank you for being here at this time of I know it's quite busy. Um, and the floor is yours >> now. Now, okay, great. Um, well, thank you very much. I have uh had the privilege of uh visiting Texas many a time. My grandmother was born in Warz. Um, the one anecdote I'll share with you that I'm glad to have survived was uh my not even quite husband yet uh who had never been on a canoe and didn't swim well and I uh spent a week by ourselves in a canoe uh eight days uh through Big Bend. And uh there's dumb and then there's really dumb and uh uh and we survived and thrived and have been together. But uh boy was that stupid. Uh and what amazing country. So it's a real pleasure to be here. Um I want to just briefly tell you enough about me so you can maybe put what I'm about to tell you in context. Um I grew up in Pittsburgh, California. It's named Pittsburgh because it got US Steel and it got it because it agreed to name Pittsburgh. and my grandfather, both Mexican and German, and my dad spent their whole uh careers uh as steel workers. And so it's union town stank. We all had weird rashes. But it was solid union jobs which meant we had medical care and we had paid vacations and we didn't really think too much about whether we were or were not prospering because we had what we needed. My parents owned their home. My grandparents owned their home. My Mexican grandparents [clears throat] took longer to own a home and redlinining is a real thing. Uh aan in California. Um, but then you know, eldest, what do I'm supposed to do right after high school? I'm supposed to go to junior college and then become a teacher. I'm like, no, I've always been bad, bad, bad, bad. The nuns, when you're trained by nuns, you're a saint or a sinner. I'm a sinner. And so, [sighs] so I'm like, I'm not staying in California. I applied for and got this crazy scholarship to Harvard. How crazy? It came with winter clothes and airplane tickets. It was crazy. And I had never been east of Reno. And and and then I flew out there and I was, you know, 17. And oh my goodness. And what an amazing rocket ship. And I went from there to Stanford Law, another full scholarship. I'm like, whoa, now I'm mistress of the universe, right? I couldn't be more conceited. [laughter] And uh so the goal was to start practicing law, learn the trade at a big firm, make some money, and then go to a nonprofit and do good for the environment. And in March of my first year as a lawyer, where I started off at $39,000, making $10,000 more than my dad ever made in his union job, um uh but in March of that first year, my dad, aed 57, was permanently laid off. and but for the fact that my parents owned their home, that my little brother had become a welder and had a good job with our local utility, and that my sister, who majored in high school in boys, had started at a Catholic school, college, and ultimately um graduated and got her masters. Um uh but for home ownership, our family would have been uh hurting big time, big time. And it was hurting big time. My dad went from that job to being a retail clerk, minimum wage. My mom ended up doing some house cleaning before I figured that out. Home ownership is a non-negotiable in this world ticket to stability, multifamily, multi-generational wealth. It is your bank account and you pay yourself every month. And we in California have made homeownership completely unattainable. Completely unattainable. We're running right now at about 9:1. The magic ratio is median income, home price. If median income, three, four, maybe five times home price, you can have attainable home ownership. Right now, California is running about 9 to one. Nine times your total annual income to buy a medianpriced house. We've broken we've broken it. And so I'd like to talk to you about two parts of the California experience and then I promise you promise you I will return and not exacerbate your housing situation by trying to move here. So uh uh um so the first thing is uh California has a very Orwellian way of communicating. It's very misleading when we talk about affordable housing. What we mean is incomerestricted, taxpayerf funded or philanthropic funded housing. And I like to focus on incomerestricted because if you take if you make too much money, you lose your home. It is a from my perspective a trap. It's a trap. That means if your kid gets a job, what do you lie about it while he's trying to save for college? Because now you're over the line and you're going to lose your home. It's a trap. It's hard to have two adults and not get over that line sometimes so you don't get married. It's a trap and it's a trap that we perpetuate. And in California, an affordable apartment, an incomerestricted for low-income families or or occupants, affordable apartment. And by the way, those are running 0.9 bedrooms per unit is the size of uh the units we build. An affordable apartment comes in at a little over $800,000 per apartment to build. Rand, which is a think tank in California, compared Denver, Los Angeles, and San Diego, San Francisco, and Dallas. Cost of building. For the cost of one incomerestricted affordable apartment in California, you could build four market rate apartments in Dallas, 1.5 market rate apartments in Denver. So what California has done is load on through frankly completely everybody just made a bunch of bad decisions for decades. My generation we kept turning knobs. Oh yeah, let's do this. Oh, let's do this. Oh, we got to do that. oper. We turned a bunch of policy knobs and we created a housing catastrophe. That starts with how much it costs to build the darn things. And it's really important, I think, to own that and to recognize we're going to have to make some changes ourselves. It's not that we have different wood. It's not that we have a different refrigerator. Our cost issue is partly land but not a lot, not totally out of control anyway, but it's mostly just policy decisions about what we've decided housing needs to have. So, that's one thing. The other thing is we've used climate policy to create this kind of framework uh moral framework policy framework that says people should live in small rental apartments without a parking space and take the bus. The people who have decided that are not living in small rental apartments or taking the bus. We have this very top-down political approach to how people should live and we're very righteous about it and we love lecturing everybody else around about our righteousness. And then the people have to live with the consequences of unattainable home ownership, two-hour commutes. And frankly, life as a renter may be a choice. I respect everybody's choice. I'm an all of the above in terms of housing. But is it the healthiest? Is it the best? Do you know how much more often homeowners vote? A lot more often. You know how much more they volunteer? a lot more often. There's stuff that comes with just being people that we can't switch around with policy knob turning by saying "Well climate we should all learn to live much more lightly on the planet and go outside." So, I'm going to touch on a little bit of these issues in more detail, but not much. There's only four, three of these text slides and then a picture. So, I'm not going to torture you long, but you just heard my stickick. So, the rest is a little more detail. So we have a deep blue green state uh virtually one party uh which means that all of these housing policies have been um uh imposed uh by I was a labor side envirro Democrat till about 3 weeks ago when I pulled over and declined to state because of what we've done. So these are political choices made by a deep blue, deeply in our minds at least compassionate, environmentally appropriate, civil rightsoriented group of folks making policy choices. But look what we've done. We have demonized local government. The very first thing we've decided in Sacramento by all these former local government officials who occupy the state house is that every local government in California is at fault for causing our housing crisis. Each of these people were from local government. But now the preeemption of local zoning, the top-down mandates to accommodate certain kinds of housing, certain numbers of housing units, to quickly process housing approvals. It may feel uncomfortable to you, but I have to say in California, really, I made a living. I have 30 lawyers working for me, making a living. We used to call it creative graveling. You used to ask for years Please sir, may I may I please make an make one house, make five houses, make 15. We have cases where we've litigated for 30 years over whether or not housing can be built. And that is in part local government. It's in part environmental laws. But we really did have a problem with local government. But what do we do when we have a problem? We kind of stumble around trying to make it better. And now I think we've done quite a top-own number on local government without really recognizing local government also has a job to do like providing real services for real people and how do they get paid for and whatnot. But top down big theme big theme of our state dense um California has 40 million people there a lot of people. Uh it's about 100 million acres big state not like yours but big. How much of California do you think is actually developed for people to occupy? Percentage. What do you think? How much of our land have we taken? eight. That's a remarkably good guess. According to the Census Bureau, it's five. And yet, we've decided, mostly for environmental reasons, that we need to go up, not out. I mean, that's a policy choice. It's not like we don't have land, but it costs three to seven times more to build up that difference between up to a three-story town home or single family home. If that's your sort of base price to build an apartment stacked on top of each other, uh, or god forbid condos stacked on top of each other for various other reasons, insurance and other stuff, that's three to five times more. Once you get above five floors and have to go to a steel frame building, that's close to seven times more. So by choosing a density knob on our policy dial, we've picked higher cost land. There's something there already. It's already in an existing community. Harder usually infrastructure because it's already kind of deteriorated and isn't sized for density. So you got a retrofit which is more expensive. and then a form of building that is more expensive and just that one like oh we should do density to like not drive to not burn fuel to even though we're trying to get to electric vehicles or whatever it's this whole kind of ethic about density good infill good exurban bad suburban bad um and again not to say that people shouldn't have options to live in existing neighborhoods they existing neighborhoods from my perspective shouldn't be able to shut the door. And if somebody wants to build an accessory dwelling unit in their, you know, backyard for their mother-in-law, that I don't think that should be disallowed. But the idea that everyone needs to cram into what's already the most densely populated region in America. Everybody like New York, Chicago, LA, LA, Long Beach, Anaheim. That metro has more people per square mile than New York. And yet we're going to go only up. Next, transit bikes. This one I'll give you I'll give you a headline. What's white, male, and six feet wide? Chronicle headline. Why? It's a bike path. We have a very ardent community of bikers and they love biking and it's a little unsafe to bike on streets and they're strong and they've got biking and I'll show you an image soon. Um, but everyone should bike or take the bus. Um, we have in the LA area 97% car dependency. So, we are now turning a policy knob for and it's not even really 3%. But the 3% who may or may not be able to use transit. Transit is built on a spoken hub system where there's a downtown and a dayshift. It does not take people to more distant jobs. It does not take people anywhere on off shifts and it takes two to four times longer to get there if the buses are running on time. So most people 97% choose as soon as they can afford it to buy a car. before COVID transit ridership even as we were expanding it uh transit and not increasing fairs all over the state transit ridership had plunged before co with co and remote work every transit system is in huge trouble but we're doubling down on people should ride their bike or take transit who who are these people that we're doubling down for who are we serving And I think there's a real disconnect between my dad used to say for being so smart you sure can be stupid sometimes and there is an element of being disconnected with your communities and and it seems to happen as soon as you get to Sacramento in California. Um uh but you know transit and bikes and we do have in fact we see them in Berkeley for example where I live or Santa Monica or whatever these like $7,000 electric cargo bikes with two little kids in the front and they're going to preschool. And I'm like how cool is that? That's neat, right? Those kids aren't going to be two and four forever. What happens when they get a little bigger? They're going to ride their own bike. In any event, it is a example of [clears throat] where California has married housing and transportation policy and policy choices in a way that has created the highest number of supercomputers, people who commute more than 90 minutes per direction every day in United States because people have to move further and further out. You drive till you qualify for housing you can afford to rent or buy. Rents. Rentals. Rentals are fine. Um they're a huge part of the market. Um they are critical for so many reasons. But rental only as opposed to home ownership products that changes the world in ways that no one I think is very comfortable talking about out loud. One thing that's true for renters, especially in urbanized areas, very high percentage of Democrats. I mean, it's what what are we doing and why? Why are we making home ownership unattainable? 95% of the units we build, housing units we build in existing communities in this infill uh regime are renters or rent are rentals only. And and and who voted against home ownership? I nobody did. But our policy choices got us there and continue to focus on it. And then what happens? We need rent control. rent control, eviction control even. So even when a unit becomes vacant, you can't reset it to the market. And then we have a return to what used to be called public housing and is now called social housing. And that's the idea that government should build, own, build, and operate housing at scale. There are places like Vienna and Singapore where this has been very successful. It's high cost. It's most identified as a policy priority for the progressive Democratic Socialists of America wing uh which we now have pretty significant contingencies of on various um city councils as well as in Sacramento. But returning to social housing where the government is now going to build $800,000 per apartment unit and then maintain it. It feels like deja vu. We've been there, right? I don't even need to comment on it, but these are housing policy uh passions of uh quite a few of California's leaders and and I think you probably could guess and certainly the numbers say why. Um that hasn't turned out to be very well, but the the vision is interesting, right? Let's all live in Berkeley or Brooklyn. um uh let's you know fasttrack approval of of the kind of housing we we want. So make it hard for local government to stall or block apartments in infill locations. Um let's make sure we accommodate the important interest groups in our political coalition. Um those include folks that are uh uh advocates for tenants, advocates for homeless housing. These are legitimate, very important advocacy efforts. Um, but if we try to accommodate them and then we add on the climate and green folks uh who have quite a a roster of uh I call them gizmos. I don't mean to, but like you know windows that don't up open and shut because it's more efficient to uh uh not heat or cool outdoor air. So, you shouldn't open windows and then you have to have pretty darn elaborate HVAC systems and you got to run those 247 or you'll get like Legionnaire's disease or something. So that is a cost that results in electricity pricing for every family who occupies those units that wouldn't be incurred by that family to the extent they can open or shut the window which in one of [snorts] the most temperate climates in the world is in fact mostly what we do along the coast. Um and then finally we have to deal with uh the fact uh that almost all residential housing is built with non-union workers. Um we have a notion of public works um for publicly financed projects infrastructure roads whatever. Those are typically um they are always required to have prevailing wage and most of the prevailing wage jobs uh go to construction workers. That has never been true anywhere in the United States for single family homes. And so we're going to favor a form of housing that gives uh union construction workers more jobs and we're going to mandate that uh uh kind of hiring. >> Jennifer, I'm going to interrupt you for a minute. I'm curious. State preeemption is I mean we're experiencing that extremely in Texas right now. >> I'm aware >> and housing in the same way. So, you know, local control is an issue all over the country regardless of party and it's been really detrimental to us in Fort Worth. I mean, most recently was Council Member Hall's district, District 6, where she had no power to really work with a multifamily developer because that particular location, you know, go along to get along. And so, I guess to kind of create a conversation around housing here is it does have real real implications for cities that are for us, we have great density in certain areas. that's working for us. A lot of it's in council district 9, but we also are 350 square miles that is sprawled. And I think we are actually pro a lot of these things. It takes a lot of balance and we don't have all the same issues that maybe you've had in California, but each of us could speak freely about our frustrations and how to intersect good local policy with what's happening at a state level also. And so I don't know if you've looked at all what Texas has done in the last few sessions that caused you pause and because what I really want us to get out of your discussion and and and help us today is what should we be advocating for differently in Austin? Um because they are on this affordable housing track and I'm very skeptical about the current um path that they're on because I don't think they have a real understanding of what it's like to implement locally. Yeah. So, I want to I would love to spend actually most of my time in a dialogue. So, let me make a couple more points and then I would love to talk to you about that because we watched the evolution of preeemption of local control. I was skeptical that the courts would uphold it. They did. We now as lawyers representing housing people, including affordable housing people, we love it, right? we can cram down approvals. Oh my goodness. And the more the most fun one that we're just starting actually is a 21 um story uh apartment complex in uh the San Francisco marina on top of a Safeway that has just outraged this totally wealthy community that thinks of itself as highly progressive, highly equitable, highly whatever until it hit their neighborhood. And now we're hearing the howling, but that is possible because of state laws layered on top of local laws. And um and so I'm going to come back and then would really welcome a robust conversation about this. Um uh in California there's a huge fiscal cost to local government because for years now we have been imposing fees on each housing unit to pay for all infrastructure to pay even for things like road maintenance and stuff that existing homeowners get by virtue of paying their taxes. So we c have now loaded more than a hundred grand again per unit in costs to try to make up the fiscal catastrophe of adding people without a way to pay for either hard or maintenance costs um for what people bring. And that's not just usurping local control in terms of policy control, what kind of housing, where um but also leaving local government um uh fairly stranded in terms of how to now pay for um the additional municipal costs incurred. In fact, um, Los Angeles just announced it was going to sue and is suing the state for usurping local control and requiring highdensity transit housing to be accommodated without a comasurate um, fiscal kind of uh, solution. So um I I can skip most of this. Um, I'll just leave you with not only do we have the nation's highest housing costs, second to lowest home ownership rate, um, but California also has for years now had the nation's highest poverty rate using a supplemental poverty uh, metric invented during the Obama administration, managed by the Census Bureau, and it just adds housing costs to the measure of poverty. um a a a poor family in Mississippi has more disposable income than a family making 30 40% more than that family in California because of California's cost structure. And so, um, we have a a real problem, a real problem with, uh, the 30 or so percent of our people who are just barely making it monthto month and anything anything topples them. And this is with a pretty generous safety net. So solutions I think here um are a little bit more Californiaentric and I don't think you've jumped off the cliff on a whole bunch of these topics as California has. You still have affordable housing in the sense that many people who live and work here can ultimately afford to stay here. We now have hit the place where, as you well know, Californians are leaving to go to a place that they can afford housing. >> But I would offer, and anybody could speak up here, I'm hearing more and more about affordability and have just the last four years as mayor, even before that, families from Fort Worth or this area that have called it home don't feel that way anymore. And their salaries and their household don't reflect that. And so it's something we all have to be cognizant of. >> Yep. Yep. Yep. So, in your in your local control uh debate uh with uh with Austin, um h how would you normally say yes or no to an apartment project? In the olden days before Austin did what it did, we have in California, it's called zoning and general plan, but you have a similar structure. So, I look as a developer uh at a location, it allows for, you know, 30 dwelling units per acre. It's 4 acres. I'm going to add 120 apartments and everything's copacetic. Can I just come in and say, "Give me a building permit." Or do you have a process by which you could say, "I don't think so. I don't think you've got a design that works in our community. I don't think this is the product type that works in our community." What's your ambient level of local control pre-eumption? >> That that was it. you could if it was zoned correctly, you came in with your plans and and you could move forward with your project, >> right? And it allowed council members a lot more autonomy to work with that developer and the neighborhoods around it because a lot of us are experiencing extreme concern around infrastructure and that lack thereof or amenities that our neighbors are wanting and asking for. And so now each of you could speak up for an example. you don't have that power anymore or the ability to work with a developer that you may have had before which is problematic. >> If you wanted to change the zoning all that happened if the zoning was there then they just have to make sure there's enough water you know water sewer all those kind of things >> parking whatnot. >> Exactly. But say they came in and it was surface parked with no pool and you wanted there to be a pool. If you're going to add that big number that you can >> previously we could have that conversation but and when I say previously I've only been here six months but my understanding is former zoning um we could have that conversation. Um now as the statute is written if I understand correctly we're not supposed to have those type of conversations with developers anymore. kind of kind of put everything the ball in their court with what they want [clears throat] to bring. Now it's just a I don't know. I don't know. It's it's a tango to try to get the outcomes that you want for the development. >> Previously, if you had the zoning, you could come in and do those things as long as you met all our building codes and requirements. >> And there was infrastructure, room in the sewer pipe, and you had water. What they changed was they did an basically a a local overlay that added multif family zoning to every commercial property >> in cities. So now a property that people bought a house next to that thought it was going to turn into a restaurant or some other commercial product can now show up with 300 apartments and we can't do anything about it >> except for historically designated. >> Right. >> Except for historically designated districts >> if it's historic. Right. Right. there was a uh a rush to declare uh whole cities historic uh or neighborhoods. Um and you can imagine that rush was most uh frequently uh accomplished in California in wealthier communities or neighborhoods. Uh uh and lower income areas uh were uh not part of that rush. Um uh there was a a further rush to uh uh designate we're very excited about our wildlife uh to designate uh uh urban uh communities as as as wildlife habitat where we shouldn't have more housing. Um that that that didn't quite fly. Um but it was a good time. >> Jennifer, your third bullet point here, master plan for attainable home ownership. Can you parse that out a little bit? >> Yeah. So this this golden rule of uh and it's a very bipartisan by the way desire to provide starter home products so people [snorts] can rent and then buy something that's not very spacious. I mean I grew up in a 810 square foot home until I was in fifth grade, right? Uh two bedrooms, three kids. Uh uh but that starter home sweet spot is the hardest thing to build. It's what the community accepts most readily if it's on a manageable density like a town home as opposed to an apartment block uh doesn't uniformly gets accepted um get accepted. that that starter home sweet spot coupled with uh which means that starter home has to be attainable to a family based on a median income ratio to home price of 3 or 4:1. You have to have a price point for home ownership at that ratio. Then what happens is renter people move up. There's movement in the rental market and there's move up opportunities for uh already starter homeowners as their income or preferences allow. >> But fixing the middle with an a home ownership product is a way to restore home ownership opportunities and you just have to be super cleareyed about how much you can afford. I mean, we don't go shopping for a car thinking I'm going to get $150,000 car. It's what can we afford? And policymakers have stopped in California asking primary questions. What can people afford? Because we always need taxpayer funded, supportive, and very lowincome household housing. We need that. that floor needs to be provided or we're going to have homeless and other crises that are catastrophic. Then we need the rental market to allow vertical movement so people aren't spending 60% of their income on rent which is a thing and that's not a good thing and we have that in several California communities. But if you restore that missing middle affordable product, then you actually can free up both the uh rental market and still provide uh for you know neighborhoods with with higher wealth homes. >> Council, did you have something? >> No, but I >> I got something. >> Yes, ma'am. [clears throat] Go ahead. >> Would you like to go first? >> Uh yeah, I think I would. Um, I'll be honest, this feels like a very myopic view of of the take of the housing policy um that created that crisis in California. Um, I don't even pretend to know all of the rules in California that make it more expensive. We know that they have a different set of standards. Uh but I think to say density is only a product of um uh a democratic green living uh agenda is shortsighted. For those of us that um deal with the budget of a city, what we can tell you is we know it's much cheaper and there's incentive for us to have density because it is cheaper for us to operate and maintain all of those city facilities. So I one I I don't know that I necessarily um subscribe to the same uh analysis that we've that you used on this. But really what I'm interested in knowing home ownership was the pathway to building wealth in the United States. Was the pathway. It is no longer the pathway now. And so the question begs, are we trying to force a pathway? Did the pathway disappear? Um, or are we trying to force people into a uh an an old pathway that is no longer productive or realistic in today's economy with today's society. Um, our parents bought homes. Your parents bought homes cuz they you grew up in the same home till you were in the fifth grade, right? And then I bet a >> Yeah, we got a threebedroom instead of a two-bedroom. >> You stayed there for a while, too. >> Still sharing a room with my sister. >> You and I mean just the way that people work in the workforce. Uh you used to stay at a job forever. You bought a house, you had a job, you stayed there forever. We have a much more transient workforce and it creates um a lifestyle in a society that's not necessarily looking to stay put for a long time. So that avenue to wealth building that home ownership once was really depends on building equity. But if you're moving every couple of years, that doesn't build equity. So I'm I'm interested to have a dialogue about that. >> Well, let let's let me clarify first. I'm an all of the above kind of housing person. So I support density. It's not it doesn't work everywhere. It certainly doesn't work for almost anyone if you say there's no parking and ride the bus, which California has conjoined. Uh, and it that hurts people who have to physically be present at a job, not in a central hub, not on a dayshift the most. It has a very desperate impact on lower income communities of color to conjoin those policies, housing and transit. Um, that's not to say though that there isn't every reason to want to live in some hip downtown area, right? I mean, why not? Uh, most people do, uh, end up wanting to own a home. And I don't accept that it's okay to overthrow the only established pathway to wealth we've created in the United States. And it has been a behemoth. I mean, it's incredible the ladder that home ownership created. And I'm not accepting the idea that, oh, it's that was yesterday. What are we going to do today? Put some money in the stock market. I don't know. I'm old enough to have gone through three different cycles and watch the stock market like, oh my goodness. Well, that's interesting. So I I don't think we should eliminate an a proven pathway and hope for the best with respect to an alternative because I don't trust an alternative is emerging. >> I don't think we eliminate it, but I think we know it's not the avenue. The the the policies that we had in place 50 years ago that really subsidized home ownership aren't >> ne subsidized in the sense that it's true. We use taxes to pay for things like road maintenance, >> right? And now those taxes are being stretched and it's more expensive to have more land that's developed than to have less land. We had federal and state policies that also incentivized building single family homes that that made it incredibly affordable. >> We had mortgage policies, mortgage insurance policies which we denied to black and brown people for years, by the way, and finally got that fixed in the late60s, early 70s. Did we get it fixed >> and got wiped out? A trillion dollars of equity of communities of color was wiped out in '08. And I started doing civil rights lawsuits against these policies because I don't think it's okay to say [snorts] home ownership was 50 years ago, you're not going to have it. I don't. And and I've lived it, right? I mean, it took my Mexican grandparents 15 more years than my German grandfather. >> But Jennifer, I will tell you, as someone who lived in the great state of California, you started your whole presentation. >> We are a nonpartisan group. And I think you made it very partisan when you started. And I'm going to be very honest, I checked out as a member of a community of color and having lived in California. I think it's unfair to blame one party for all the housing woes. And I'm just gonna be very frank with you. I just got a text from someone who was watching on TV. I mean on uh who's watching and they felt like uh your uh presentation is very partisan and I'm feeling that way too. And I want to talk about how we get uh to increase more affordable housing options for people and not feel like I'm being lectured to from a partisan perspective. >> Well, and I think to your point, Deborah, that the interesting thing, Council Peoples, and for the entire council is there, we are repeating a lot of the same things in Texas right now from the Republican side >> in a Republican state. And so our city has a responsibility because we're so fast growing and and we have good policy makers around this table and I think experts across the city. What do we need to be doing not just as a city but also advocating in Austin? It's very important. And you know we're not going to have time today to talk about the housing trust that's been created in council district 9 that has real possibility or our upcoming housing bond that could be more dollars. Absolutely. it's our first towin. What should we be focused on? And so today was really meant to be thoughtprovoking on it is to me it is a nonpartisan issue in that everyone's very jaded on this. Republicans don't have it right and neither do Democrats across the country. And we have an opportunity to really try to shape what Texas is going to do because what's interesting, if you look at what the legislature tried to do last session and is looking at this session, there's a lot of similarities for sure. And I I picked on council district 6 recently because I just feel like we've had so many zoning cases in D6 where council Hall has no ability to work with her district anymore. Um and I would push back the same way Council Rebeck did on the density comment. You know, we are as our city in certain districts need to encourage more density. And we also have put um pizzas in place, Jennifer, for you to know like um the public improvement district that's run in your Southside district. I would put them against anybody in the country in terms of how they work alongside Council District Beck and any developer in that area. And they're very, yes, there's still parking, but you talk about this, Beck, you could speak to it all the time on it's it's reduced, but it works for that area. Um, but you still are encouraging car ownership or transit, whatever it may be. And then we actually Jennifer, we have two council members, council member Crane, and Council Nettles that both serve on our transit authority to help create better synergy and decision making um for Trinity Metro as our transit authority and for the city of Fort Worth. So that's helpful context. All super uh both of those comments super helpful. Um uh but Councilwoman uh uh Councilwoman Peoples, my point in being as partisan as I am is because I trusted my party to avoid this mess and we made it worse. And I own that as a generational member who turned a lot of these dials and I don't think we need to stay with it. We can fix it. But from somebody who has lived in both red states and blue states, it is not a one party issue. As the mayor just said, we're we're facing this here in Texas. And Republicans have controlled this state for over 40 years now. And the median price for a home in my district is $450,000, which is ridiculous. I mean, most of my residents can't qualify for that. So, it's not one p one state's problem. It's a national issue and we need to look at it as a national issue and as a a nonpartisan issue because if we get into this red state, blue state, we're going to end up blaming each other and getting nothing done. >> Again, I couldn't agree more. And there's a a sort of movement, if you will, the abundance movement that says we got to get past these lines and we got to just start building stuff. And my point is we got to build stuff that people can afford. And from my perspective, and it's it's maybe a just different perspective, that includes home ownership, not uh an unknown substitute. Um, and it includes density and it includes transit and it includes cars and it includes what people actually want and can afford. And when you try to do with policy too much either party social engineering, I was telling someone I had a really good friend, brilliant guy, a lawyer, um, who who bought a place on a hill and decided with his wife to cut a tree and had seen the cartoons that said, you know, if you put the V on the tree, that's where the tree falls. And it turns out that doesn't work on a hill because there's gravity. And so very smart policy people can turn policy dials in ways that just don't work. And my point is we know these dials don't work. Now local government I what you have is so incredibly streamlined based on what we have that it's really apples and oranges. So we would have and do allow even with preeemption what we call kind of design control. No, you need to move the threestory units over here so they're further from this guy's backyard but you can still have the same number of units. But please work with us to make this fit more in the community that we have and none of our state preeemption laws preclude local government from doing that. Also, all of our state preeemption laws start with local zoning. There is though one, actually several, but they're hardly used that says any commercial uh uh area zoned for commercial with a prior use, prior redevelopment, uh retail, um office, parking, so no industrial or whatever. Um, but if that's your zoning designation, you can build an apartment by right. But it came with a mandatory inclusionary housing requirement for a certain number of percentage of units that had to be subsidized for low-income households. And it came with prevailing wage um uh labor requirements which ca more than doubled the cost of of building. And so that hasn't been used. Um uh and I think it's an example of when you hear California preeemption, there are gradations of preeemption. And in that way we still respect local control, but then there are overlays. And so in California, we have zoning. You make your choice. You live with your choice. You have to though zone for as many people as the state tells you you have to zone for. So, you can't just say, "I don't want to grow anymore." And we had a whole bunch of the California cities who had said that and found out the hard way that they have to accommodate more housing. And then we have state density bonus programs that say, "We'll let you do more than local zoning if you achieve these policy objectives, primarily inclusion of uh uh units restricted to lowincome uh families." and uh and that sometimes gets to outsize local zoning but it's usually in the kind of 20 to 30% >> uh above local zoning. >> So what you have just described in terms of like any commercial area is now permissible for apartments is more radical than what California's local >> preeemption program looks like. >> Council Rebecc did you have something there? Was it large or something you had a hand? No. >> No. Go ahead. I just um I'm I'm interested to know I think what would be helpful is none of these policies happened in a vacuum right like for instance the parking and transit policy um that is layered with all of the environmental regulations that um California has right their labor laws every the cost of doing business is much higher in California because of their regulatory scheme, not just those that touch housing. Right. So, >> a lot touches housing, but yes, you're right. >> And so, but those that are directly related to housing. So, how much of that transit policy impacted the cost of housing? How much how much did the the building code impact the cost of housing? Right. Where where was it? Because I imagine it's a death by a thousand cuts. And so where knowing where they which policy went the wrongest, >> yes, >> is I think the the most helpful in in preventing us from going down that particular path. I also am curious to know um because it's something that I feel like I push hard um push back against a lot at the city is um how many of those policies were California trying to to shoehorn uh Californians into a way of life that that they don't want. For example, um bike lanes in Fort Worth, Texas, right? We don't have culturally people in Fort Worth don't really like to ride bikes. Um, you know, it's just not what they do for an activity. They like to drive in the car, right? So, if we had a a policy that said every new road had to have a bike lane, we'd really be forcing Fort Worth into a character that they aren't. So, how much do you think played into to that that that it was just a quote unquote best practices as opposed to a context sensitive solution? >> Um, we are not respectful of contextsensitive solutions. If by contextsensitive you mean responsive to the way people live today. Um the top slide is actually family housing at the UC Berkeley campus, uh which is very impacted by housing. And this was built 20-ish years ago. Um they're three stories. They're chopped up into differentiz units depending on it's they're they're all grad students, but some are bigger and some are smaller. And you know, it it looks like a higher density apartment complex. in a scale that's more or less suburban. Um, uh, the image on the bottom is the newest campus housing for UC Berkeley on that same site. So, it's building out that family housing. The units on top have windows that open and close. The um units on the bottom are elevator, hallway, sealed windows, very green. And this is an example of a green building code uh kind of imagery, but none of them have enough quote parking, but they're grad students and there's a shuttle bus that takes them to, you know, school and also to, you know, the shopping center and stuff. So this is a purpose-built form of housing that in my mind accommodates on the bottom a lot more people albeit at a much higher per unit cost because of things like energy consumption and other sort of green building rules. The image on the right is a bridge that goes most directly from the a refinery in in Richmond, California, which is not a wealthy community, over to Alcatraz, the prison, and Marin, which is a highly wealthy community. And this bridge is the throughway for the huge workforce of essential workers that has to go to Marine every day to make sure that they have toilets that work. And there's construction workforce and retail workforce and there's just a huge need. And so every morning a whole bunch of people get on this bridge and try to get to work. And bike advocates persuaded folks to block one of the three lanes for bikes only. For on a good weekend day, fewer than 30 people use that bike lane and virtually none during the weekend. This is a transportation example of California really not doing such a great job forcing Marin to create workforce housing while putting a ton of additional cost. the cost of time, the [snorts] cost of time away from your families and making what should have been shorter commutes longer because the backup's ridiculous and the commute length is ridiculous based on a transportation policy choice. These are common sense. I think Texas is so far away from losing common sense that >> to me at least >> depends on the day >> it feels good. But you know what? I'm in such pain daily that your level of pain maybe I'm just not feeling. But I can't imagine why you don't have and shouldn't continue to advocate for much more local control uh for zoning compliant designs. Is there any we got to we got to wrap it up, but are there other cities or states that you think of outside of Texas or California that are doing things differently right now that are worth looking at for Fort Worth? >> You know, there there really are. And there was a a meeting uh uh in September of the quote abundance movement, an extremely bipartisan group of mostly people your collective age with maybe an exception or two saying this is ridiculous. we just got to build. And it there was a good focus, Governor Cox led, on starter homes being kind of where you need to tune government policy because that's what's not being built. Attainable home ownership, starter homes, developers build bigger homes, higher profit margins, nobody can afford them. And what happens in an infill only kind of regime is the lowest cost land gets the highest displacement. And so, um, uh, kind of opening up land was another major theme that was bipartisan. Um, issues for the lowest income families, you know, ideas like land trust. Habitat for Humanity has a great program. They're a client and um, you know, they allow for home ownership without the equity increase. And I think every council member to my knowledge has had significant growth on the habitat side and every has been a yes >> and every development looks different. Um this council specifically not historic the people that maybe had been their positions before but >> um which is helpful. >> Well, I'm I'm just grateful for the opportunity to share and and you don't invite me if you want somebody boring, right? I'm going to be spicy and irritating. It's my specialty. Um uh but I think you do have so much more going for you and so many more ways to solve a problem before it gets worse uh without undoing so many knobs. So I thank you. >> Yeah. Thank you Jennifer. We appreciate you very much. Okay council. I don't think we have a break before next one. So we're going to move right in to Ron Holyfield. Or no we do have a break says Jay. Five minute break. Five minute break. Council >> only if y'all think we need it. Let's Yeah. Give you a bathroom break. That's perfect. [clears throat] [snorts] Yes ma'am. >> Looking good. >> Okay, let's rock and roll. We're missing a couple of council members still. We'll hang on just a second. Okay, in the immortal words of Monty Python, now for something completely different. If I don't offend every one of you in the next hour, either I have failed or you're paying attention to texts on your phone. What we're going to talk about is actually how to get out of pain. The bad news is y'all are in a lot of pain. The good news is you literally have already resolved the biggest step in moving forward and that is in the interviews Hillary did and you saw the the reports. Everybody is in agreement. We're in pain and we're tired of being in pain. Now, I want to flash you back just for a moment about your fifth grade natural science class. And in fifth grade, you did an experiment. You took a piece of potouse ivy, cut it off, put it in a jar, in my days in a glass Coca-Cola bottle, and put water in it and set it in the window sill facing away from the window, away from the light. Within about 24 hours, that plant had actually moved and reoriented itself to face the light. That is a natural system. When we came in the room today, if the lights had not come on, there's only about three reasons that the lights would not have come on. That's why an electrician can make a living as an electrician. There's a limited number of things that would be the problem. If there were an infinite number of possibilities and you could not predict what the problems were, it would not you we wouldn't be able to have electricity. That's a natural system. Flash back with me for just a moment to the turn of the last century, 1900. It was the dawn of the industrial age. And at the dawn of the industrial age, there was something that you will recall from your college organizational development or organizational psychology class called scientific management. scientific management which had been posited by Frederick Taylor basically held that a human being was really now he didn't use these words but it was the concept was really just a cog in the wheel of the machine and that you could scientifically determine exactly the best way to achieve optimal productivity. You could determine how far the seat of the chair should be from the floor, how far the seat of the chair should be from the tabletop, what the light lumens ought to be, etc. That all of that you could scientifically determine in this industrial age how to optimize productivity. And what happened is in I think it was a seamstress factory in Chicago, they bring in a consultant. They had bought into scientific management. So they bring in a consultant and that consultant is going to study how to optimize performance. The human turn them into machines and they look at the temperature and what happens is and they're just trying to figure out the optimal temperature to maximize productivity. They turn the temperature up and productivity goes up. They turn the temperature down and productivity goes up. They turn the temperature sideways and productivity goes up. And what they discovered is yes, human beings were part of natural systems, but the natural system was not what's the optim optimal lumens or what's the optimal temperature or how far the seat is. the the the true scientific natural system is people responded to believing erroneously that management cared. They were responding to the belief that management was trying to take and actually make their world better. And that wasn't even the motivation. It was a misunderstanding. But the reality is how we treat each other actually produces tangible results. [snorts] That is systems theory. And systems theory applies to this city council just as much as it applied to the piece of potouse ivy. And I'm not calling y'all potted plants. just as much as it applied to the piece of potouse ivy in the window sill. Systems theory is no more complex than predictable inputs create predictable outcomes. It's that simple. Right now, one of your systems theory items is you don't have a healthy, you may not have any, but you don't have a healthy governance policy in place. You're not operating following a work plan of a governance policy that everybody has agreed to that says this is how we're going to operate. It is predictable in the absence of a welldone governance policy that you get frustration, disorganization, conflict anxiety pain. Predictable input creates a predictable outcome. One of the things that happens and and let me qualify this just a moment because I said I'm going to offend everybody before I wrap up. I have not had any conversations with staff, but SGR as a team works with over a thousand city council members a year. And there's nothing new under the sun. So everything I'm sharing with you, the things that are going to kind of poke you the most are not because somebody has whispered in my ear, but it's because they are great truths that are true because they're a product of systems theory. Does that make sense? So the first thing I want to draw your attention to is you ought to have a really wellthoughtout, highly highly you need to bleed and sweat over the right governance policy. That becomes your bible for how you're going to operate as a team. The mistake most teams make, most governing bodies make is they start working on solving problems before they have their system in place for how we're going to think about the problems. What happens is that means every time you deal with the issue and it doesn't matter what issue it is, everybody is bringing their own frame of reference instead of having an agreed upon frame of reference. What happens what I'm seeing happens a lot and again I'm talking universally. I'm nobody's talked to me about any of you either individually or collectively. What happens in today's world is somebody gets elected to city council, you get elected. Do y'all run on a Saturday in May or a Tuesday in a Saturday in May? Okay. So, the first time you get elected, you go to bed on Saturday night with the votes on the city council with the total misunderstanding that you're still a normal person. You wake up on Sunday morning and you go to church or the grocery store or whatever and Miss Johnson jumps you out wanting to know why the sewer plant stinks and she expects you to be able to answer that question. Now, let me give you context for this. All of you are familiar, I presume, with Maslo's hierarchy. Maslo's hierarchy says you can't be healthy here till you're healthy here, etc. And it's basically human needs. I'm convinced and I mean this in all sincerity. Maslo missed one of the levels. And the level he missed is our need to not look stupid. So what happens? The need to not look stupid. an incredible driver of our humanity, of the things we do every day, all of us. So, when you get elected to the city council and Miss Johnson jumps you out about the sewer plant, the temptation is for you to provide answers to her when you don't have a flipping clue what you're talking about because you feel like you're expected to have answers. And then what happens is we have a significant number of folks in today's world that get elected to council believing that no preparation, no study, no anything, no qualifications are required for you to be an excellent council member. So, you show up at your very first council meeting with a baseball cap and a catcher's mitt and everybody who's been on the council is wearing a helmet and shoulder pads. And the temptation is to immediately assume if you're the one that showed up with the ball cap and the catcher's mitt is that it's somebody else's fault and it's a conspiracy that everybody else is wearing shoulder pads and you're wearing a a catcher's m or carrying a catcher's mitt. See what happens is you have people who don't want you to actually prepare to do a great job on the governing body. You are on the board of one of the largest employers and organizations in North Texas and you have supporters who don't want you to do a great job on the board. They want you to obey. They want you to do their political bidding. They don't want you to spend the time actually wrestling with the issue. And what happens with that is it creates an intensely shortterm mindset. And almost everything that [snorts] is really wise over the long term is really dumb in the short term. And yet the political dynamic drives you to focus on the short term at the expense of the long term. It's the reason our infrastructure nationwide on average is rated a C minus or a D because we think we get conditioned to think short term. And in an environment in which we become increasingly partisan, which you guys have said is one of your problems, is that what happens is we begin to view real issues through a political lens instead of through a governance or a community lens. And and everything I'm saying, it doesn't matter which where you are on the political spectrum, it's all still true. And so what happens is when you start trying to think politically instead of thinking from a governance perspective, you are embracing a momentum to do dumb. It's just that simple. Now, there's nothing wrong and everything right with every special interest in the world being able to share their perspective from their special interest angle. Totally totally appropriate in our system. What is not appropriate is for you to confuse their special interest with the public interest. That's where it really begins to get messy because you have people who are pulling you in different directions and wanting you to obey rather than to actually come and engage and think deeply. All you've got to do is understand in a partisan environment, if you look at all of the polls, most of the nation on almost every big issue is actually in agreement at about a 65% or higher level. the public actually agrees about a lot of the topics but they begin to disagree about the methodology and they begin to disagree with the political. Does that make sense? So what happens is what what we've got to do the irony and it played out here exactly when Hillary did the presentation there were two things two two charts that she put up. one is what are you saying about how you're operating as a team? And basically what you said is we're in pain. We want it to get better. We're tired of hurting. And then she talked to you about your big priorities. What are those big topics? What are the priorities that staff ought to be focusing on? And you're all in agreement. We work with councils that are so busy fighting they have no idea they actually agree with each other on almost everything. Again, we work with about a thousand city council members a year. We've worked I I personally worked with one city council where two of the council members who had been on the council for seven or eight years together had not spoken to each other in 3 years. They literally would be I'm picking on you guys. Allan would literally say, "Mayor, would you tell Charlie this?" And Charlie would respond, "Mayor, would you tell out?" Now, I'm talking about from the DAS from the DAS. And they weren't embarrassed and humiliated with how stupid they looked. Now, if you want to transform this council, if you want to transform how much fun you're having, if you want to transform how much impact you have, there really are some simple ways to do it. Number one is that the tendency in a council meeting, and again, I don't know anything. I'm just using. I have no idea who's where on anything. In a council meeting, there's a zoning case that comes up and Michael is supporting it and Mia is is am I pronouncing is it me or Maya? Mia. And Mia is opposed to it. And what happens is all of the citizens that are opposed to it show up because the citizens who want it, nobody ever shows up and says, "Let's get all the neighbors out to tell the council how much we like you." You never have anybody that comes to do that. People are only motivated because they're upset. So what happens is Mia is opposed to it and her supporters show up and Michael is in support of it and they start ripping him and Deborah is aligned with Michael. So in a political mindset [laughter] in a political mindset Deborah starts defending Michael. What that does is it devolves lower and lower and lower into the muck of a political mindset. If you want to transform this city council, the answer is simple. Ronald Reagan said, "People say there aren't any simple answers." There are simple answers. They just aren't easy answers. The simple answer in the midst of that when the crowd starts getting abusive is for Mia to say, "Mayor, can I speak?" And then for Mia to look at the crowd and say, "Y'all know I agree with you on this subject. You know, I plan to vote against it, but I will not be a part of this kind of abusive behavior. And if it doesn't quit now, I'm going to leave the DAS and you have one less vote. See, stand up for what you believe in, but stand up for the the quality of the governance process is more important than any given issue. When you begin to do that, you will transform how you operate as a council. That's hard. It's simple, but it's hard. But if you begin to do that and you say how we how we deliberate is our foundational issue. And let's go back to Maslo just a second. Basically, if you don't have food in your stomach and your kids don't have food in your stomach, nothing else matters. And what I'm telling you is just like Maslo, if you don't have healthy governance processes that all of you not only agree to and have your fingerprints on, but defend, nothing else matters. You will never be able to resolve those other issues if you don't have healthy governance processes in place where you've agreed to the rules of the road. I will tell you the best city council I ever worked for as a city manager was in little bitty Farmersville. And in Farmersville, the city council would fight like cats and dogs. They didn't even have a DAS. They had a single table. Would fight like cats and dogs about the issue. In fact, when I went there, every city council member except one smoked. [laughter] Marlboro, [laughter] although some of my meetings would have gone better if they had done something different. While I was there, every one of the smokers except one quit at the same time. Now, you want to talk about cranky council meetings and the one who did not quit. I'll never forget one night on some issue and he was losing the battle. And again, they they were all around one table about this size. He is losing the battle. And Ray takes and he he's got he's already got about four cigarettes going in the ashtray at the same time. And he reaches up and he takes the deepest draw he can take. and he leans over the table and blows the smoke out. The debate stops completely. The debate shuts down as everybody is sniffing because there, you know, and so so I want you to know that they they they they it was full contact deliberation, but it was a matter of professional personal pride and ethics. that when the issue was done, they actually all closed ranks behind the issue because they believed in the integrity of the process that let them get to that point. Does that make sense? It's not about winning or losing on any given issue. It's about your number one goal, your foundational goal on the Maslo hierarchy is the integrity of the process. Most city councils, what they do is they head the next morning after the council meeting to the Dairy Queen. The Dairy Queen is sort of conspiracy central in most cities. You've got a bunch of folks that go hang out at the Dairy Queen the next morning and the council member on the losing side will often go sit at the Dairy Queen and go, "I can't believe they did that. I know it. I'll bet they're in a developer's pocket. They they they they don't they they didn't listen to the people. They didn't Yeah. Something was stinky. In other words, they're undermining the integrity of the process. Somebody who undermines the integrity of the process is a cancer on the future of your community. Very bluntly. If you believe that the process did not have integrity, then you have a duty as a council member to engage in correcting the situation, whether it's holding the council member accountable, changing the process, etc. But the answer is not to undermine the integrity of the process. Your number one goal, your number one duty as an elected official is to create an environment in which the public believes that you are deliberating with integrity. The reality is when you undermine the integrity of the process, you don't just undermine the credibility of the other s the other side. you undermine your own credibility when you're on the winning side. What you've got to do as a governing body [snorts] is to come together and say we are going to deliberate with integrity. We're going to have certain behavioral standards and we're going to hold each other accountable to that. Now, when I was um I was city manager in a city here in Darren, would you mind grabbing me a water? I was city manager in a city here and there was a a really in the DFW area a brutal election. I mean, it was brutal and it it Thank you. it. Um, in that case, right after the election, we have a council retreat and L. Sumc was the the facilitator we were using and we're sitting at a U like this and the council had had four seats turn over, a nine member council, and four of them had turned over. And so at the start of the retreat, L looks at the council and says, uh, before we get started, does anybody have anything to say? My five older council members were on this side of the table. The four new ones were over on this side. So, they were even sitting with each other. And my 29-year-old young buck, Mayor Pro Tim, who was a wild man, puts his hand in the air. L calls on him. He [snorts] looks at the other side and he says, "The four of you," in this very gracious voice, he says, "The four of you, you did a great job getting your message out, getting your voters out, and I commend you for that." There's only one thing you need to know to be successful on the city council, and that's how to count to five. I've got five. You've got four. Y'all can leave the retreat right now cuz it doesn't matter what you want. I'm going to kill it. See that mindset? That's a political mindset. That's all about every single issue. Every single item is a blood battle. What you've got to do to do a great job as a governing body is to recognize you actually agree with each other at about the 85% level. If you deliberate with integrity of process, what begins to happen? Not only do you make better decisions, you make more discern uh more sustainable decisions. You actually make decisions that don't whipssaw back and forth. Back when I was in city management long ago, Austin every year, one year the developers would win the election, the next year the environmentalists would win the election. And it simply pingponged back and forth in a constant sort of turmoil. And nothing was predictable because you knew that when the other side got in office then what was going to happen is it was going to swing the other way. You are in this truly unique situation in Fort Worth and as a council and I don't know the exact numbers but you're relatively divided between red and blue. We're in a environment in which the world is becoming more partisan, more more players who are driving conflict for the sake of conflict, more people who are stretching you. And I know I' I've been there not as a council member but as a city manager where you get to the point you're so tired of being beat about the head and shoulders that you start giving into stuff and you start getting sucked into it just cuz you're so weary of getting beat up. The reality is giving into the loudest voices because they are the loudest voices is the way to ensure that the abuse keeps keeps on coming. The way to end the abuse is integrity of process is building systems that actually have reliability. Building a governance system that everybody agrees to. And what happens typically is we become so wrapped up about a particular topic that we start trying to make the rules fit the topic, what whatever we think about that particular topic. And what you want to do is reach consensus on what the rules are and how we're going to operate and everybody be committed to this is the way we're going to operate. And then from there that's how you begin to wrestle with all the issues. So so that's number one is that whole sense of governance systems. Number two is how you deal with con uh conflict from the das i.e. you can never seize the moral high ground protecting your own side. You only seize the moral high ground by protecting the other side. And I'm not talking about agreeing with them, but by saying I'm not going to become that kind of person. It's matters to me that I've got I've got to rise above that. I have higher expectations for myself. Now, coupled with that is part of what you've got to do is begin to recognize. Let me let me let me give you three statistics. The first one, if one, and it's this package is the first of the three. If one citizen shows up and speaks on an issue at a council meeting or a public meeting, your tendency is to view it as an issue of grave public concern. If two citizens speak on the same issue, your tendency is to view it as a movement. And if three citizens speak on the same issue, you tend to view it as a mandate from the people. The reason that happens is because you have good hearts. You ran for office because you wanted to make a difference and you want to be able to do the things that impact folks in a positive way. But let me contextualize those three people for you. How what's the population in Fort Worth now? About a million. >> A little bit over. >> Okay, good. I can do the math a lot easier that way. So, the National Dairy Council, this is about seven years ago, did a study that 6% of Americans believe that chocolate milk comes from brown cows. Now, somebody that's better at math than me, Jay, what is 6% of a million? 60,000 >> people. >> Okay, so stop and think for a moment. If just the chocolate milkers showed up at a council meeting, you would have 60,000 people showing up at your council meeting to speak. When three out of the 60,000 that believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows show up, you don't allow them to hijack the agenda. Now understand, you still treat them with honor, dignity, and respect. They are do that not just because they're a Fort Worth resident, but simply by virtue that they're a human being. So I'm not talking about blowing them off. I'm not talking about ignoring them. and you need to legitimately and seriously consider what they have to say, but you don't surrender the agenda because three people spoke on an issue. every city council I ever worked with as a city manager at least once and most of them it was more than this I had a situation something similar to this where a in the in the period after the council meeting when it's been a very difficult council meeting and you're kind of going into the back in the ready room and looking for some stale potato chips and lukewarm coffee or whatever to decompress before you go home. And during that time period when you're sort of decompressing before you leave, one of the council members would say, "I can't believe we did that." And the second council member would say, "I know it. We ought to have our tails kicked." And the third council member would say, "I can't believe we did it unanimously." See what happens is the more you cater to extreme perceptions and behavior more than than topic. The more you cater to extreme abuse, the more you enable and empower extreme abuse. And it happens all across the political spectrum. I speak all over the United States. And it does not matter whether is a red city, red state, blue city, blue state, blue city, red, any any combination. The topics change, but the behavioral dynamics are the same. Does that make sense? Questions so far, reactions to what I've shared so far? >> No. And I just want to point out we do not have lukewarm coffee or [laughter] because we have an amazing staff that really takes care of us. I love it. I love it. Any any other thoughts, reactions so far? Are you sitting there going, "Oh my gosh, he doesn't know what he's talking about." [laughter] Jay, you need to start serving chocolate milk at every council meeting as a reminder. >> Just Well, yeah, for the people that come to chocolate. [laughter] So, see what what what I what what I want you to what I want you to hear go back to two big things. Number one, what Ronald Reagan said, people say there are no simple answers. There are simple answers. They're just not easy answers. And number two, it's all about the system. And if you don't have a healthy system, that's what drives conflict. And and I love when Hillary shared with you using the IO opt. I love using that because it begins to help you understand each other. In SGR, I am 880% more changeoriented than the rest of the team or at least previously the last time we did it a few years ago. The rest of the team as a whole. See what happens if they don't understand that. It just feels fickle. When I was city manager in um another city here in the DFW area, my mayor and a council member had intense conflict. I mean, intense. She felt like he was always bulldozing her and he felt like she was always simply being an obstructionist. And they were like this all the time. It wasn't the IOP we used, but we brought them in for an assessment. And what was interesting is that in essence, Richard, it didn't matter whether he was buying a new truck or buying a carton of milk. And I literally was with him on the car lot when he did this, where he walked onto the car lot, salesman came out and he says, "I want that truck. Can you have it ready for me by 4:00?" either. It doesn't matter whether it's a truck or milk. That's the way he would make a decision. Judith, it didn't matter whether she was buying a new car or a carton of milk. She's going to read every label. She's going to compare all the price per ounce of everything. She's going to look at all of the nutrient differences. In other words, their approach to how they thought about what the question was. Forget about the answer. their approach to how they thought about what the question was was dramatically different. And because they didn't understand that, it drove interpersonal conflict that was intense. When you begin to pay attention to the IOP stuff, and I would urge you to even begin to incorporate that into your conversations, make it part of your cultural dynamic because when you understand how the different people, how the different members of the team are going to process information, you begin to understand it's about how they think. It's not because they're trying to do something to pay political gotcha. Whether it's moving fast or slow, it both anything with the absence of de in-depth understanding tends to drive political gotcha perceptions. So what what you really want to do is begin to authentically understand each other. You have players out in the community writing you contribution checks, hosting fundraisers whatever. I hate to break this to you, but except for your mom or sister, the people who write you a check are not doing it just cuz they think you're a grand person. Just a reality. I'm not going to go write a check to somebody that I'm not trying to feel like I'm trying to advance an agenda. Now, it doesn't mean it's an illegitimate agenda, but it means you've got to understand and recognize that and factor that into how you think about the world. And again, it's totally appropriate for them to do that. It's appropriate for them to be advancing their agenda. It's not appropriate for you to confuse their agenda with the public interest. It may overlap, but it may not. Your job as a governing body is to figure that out. Your job as the governing body is to go, I want to take that into consideration, but I also want to take this information in consideration over here. See, one of the things that you get pressured to do is to not have any doubt or questions. We're in a political dynamic in which don't you dare act like you can accommodate the other side on something. We're we're in an environment that's looking for political purity at the furthest out extremes. And when you cater to that, you are abandoning where real transformation occurs. Real transformation and real sustainable future of Fort Worth happens in the 40% that are in the middle. That's where sustainable dec you. You need to be every decision you wrestle with. Quit thinking and I know I'm going to say this and you can't really do it, but quit thinking about the next election and start thinking about the next generation. Every question you ask when you're wrestling with staff agenda items, council uh council agenda items, every item you look at, you need to be asking yourself, what are the implications of this for the next generation? What are the implications for what this means 25 years from now? Not just in this moment. Does that make sense? It changes how you see everything. Not only does it make you a better elected official, if you can create the culture in which everybody is doing that, you're going to find that immediately you actually agree at about the 85% level. When you get out beyond about 5 years, definitely beyond 10 years, you are unbelievably aligned. Not because of what I saw there that suggested that, but because of worked with thousands of council members. When you get out beyond the next election, the further you get out from the next election, the more you actually agree with each other. And then what you can do is spend your time arm wrestling over the how instead of the what. But what happens is when we're not really thinking in those bigger terms, we end up getting wrapped around the axle on small stuff. Stuff takes on a life all of its own. And part of that, and I know you have districts, and you've got to be attentive and and and representing your district, but part of your role is also to educate your district that a rising tide lifts all ships. You've got to be taking and saying we've got to be thinking about 25 years from now and what are the implications. There is one city council I worked with that repres the person who represented a much lower in the lowest income segment of the community and he was a right-wing Republican and at the council retreat when they were talking about swimming pools he sounded like a left-wing Democrat because he was focusing ing on what's happening with my comm. In other words, his perspective got out of his personal political box and started thinking about the constituents. Does that make sense? And and and it changes when you just think politically, you don't make as good a decision. But what also happens is if you really think about driving decisions in that 40% in the middle of public sentiment, that's what is sustainable. That's what's going to allow you to leave a legacy that 25 years from now it really matters that you were on the city council. And so I urge you to think about it from a legacy standpoint. None of you ran for counsel because you did not have enough abuse in your life. You ran for counsel because you wanted to make a difference. But you know what? With a short-term mindset, you don't make a difference. All you do is move the deck chairs on the Titanic around if you're only thinking short term. When you begin to think long term in every decision you make, everything that comes out of that is good. When you think long term, it reduces the short-term conflict because you agree at a much higher level than you think you do. When you think long term, your community actually you become much more aligned because the community actually agrees at a much higher level than you think they do. and you begin to make better resource allocation decisions when you think 25 years down the road. We fall in the trap of doing a lot of dumb stuff in the short term purely thinking about the next election. When we begin thinking longer term, we make better decisions. Our human tendency is we get so weary of the abuse. And I promise you, I understand the abuse you get. I get it. You going to the grocery store and you're pushing your cart and you spot Miss Johnson down the aisle before she has seen you and you whip a U-turn to get on another aisle over before she can get hold of you. I get that. But the reality is better governance actually makes the difference in the impact you have, but it also makes the difference in how much fun you're having. You need to have each other's backs as a team process-wise. fight like cats and dogs around the topic, but be unified in the behavioral expectations of each other. And and the greatest strength comes when you step over and defend somebody on the other side on the behavioral dynamic. And here's what's interesting is that the community will begin noticing and you will literally begin impacting how the community interacts with each other. But I'm going to take it a step beyond that. You have this unique opportunity because of the thing that you feel the pain with with the blue red divide and the division and all of that that's going on everywhere and that political dynamic. you are uniquely positioned to actually become the role model for other cities across the nation to say it really is about that dynamic of weak. It's not just that you can disagree without being disagreeable. When you have healthy systems and healthy behavioral respect for each other, you actually take [snorts] and begin to transform the community in dramatic ways. Questions, comments on this so far. I'm getting close to time out and I want to make sure I don't cut off any interaction. >> Questions or comments? Council? >> No >> reactions. Just text to your significant other going, "Oh my gosh, I can't wait till he gets finished." >> You're good to keep rolling, Ron. >> Do what? >> Oh, okay. Um, so, so what you want to do is begin to think in terms of systems. What I would I would recommend is that you ought to do two retreats a year like this. The first one ought to happen after every single city council election. Just changing one player, it's a different team. you need every year within 90 days of an election is to come together as a team and your focus needs to be on our governance policy that is formally adopted. You deliberate, you wrestle through it. If you're trying to create the rules of the road when you're in the middle of an issue, the rules you come up with suck because the rules are are driven by the topic. So you want to literally take when it's fresh with the new team. And again, if it's just one member that's new, it's a new team. And you want to you want to make that all about here's how the system operates because part of what happens is new elected officials run for office making lots of promises. Then they come to their first council meeting in June. Jay, when do y'all start on the budget process? >> Last last week. >> Last week. >> Uh um April with the council. >> So So by the time they show up at their first council meeting, the budget is way down the road. And the tendency is they've made campaign promises and then they get there and it's too late in the current cycle to be able to really influence things. When you get into a rhythm, part of what you're able to do is to be able to explain to people, here's how the system operates, and we will have next fall our second council retreat of the year. And it really is the one where we talk about priorities and vision and budget and things of that sort. So you really ought to have two different one of them is all about governance process so that everybody owns it. One is about vision where are we headed that then feeds into staff to be able to use in the budget process. Second thing or third or 10th or whatever the heck it is, the tendency is for council to grow frustrated and again I work with over a thousand council members a year. We do is for council to grow frustrated with the relationship between the mayor and the city manager. >> [cough and clears throat] >> The tendency when that happens is to start sniping instead of dealing with it from a policy and a system standpoint. What you should do is come together in your governance process and say this is what we need. Now let me tell you one of the greatest challenges of the manager and it goes back to the IOP. Some of you on here, if you get more than a onepage executive summary, you're frustrated that staff is trying to hide the ball by not giving you enough information. Others on you on here, if you get anything less than a 250 page report, you feel like staff is trying to hide the ball by not giving you all in in in other words, it's a no-win situation. The way you resolve that is actually with a healthy system where you come together and you say these are the expectations that gives the that gives the manager and the staff the ability to actually meet the desires of the council. So what what you've got to do is always come back to do we have a healthy system? And if you don't have it formally laid out, you don't have a healthy system. And if you don't revisit it annually and have everybody agree to it, you don't have a healthy system. Does that make sense? Couple of other things. One of the things that can tend to frustrate council is when staff tells you what you don't want to hear. You do not want to have staff that can be bullied or sweettalked into styling a recommendation or report around what you want to hear. If if Allen can bully Jay into getting him to change stuff to accommodate him, Macy can bully Jay. In other words, what you want is for staff to give you their best professional opinion without regard to what anybody thinks. It is not their job to try to package it up for political purposes. Now once that happens the word to staff is council has the right to do dumb. Now what I mean by that is that it's council's prerogative to take your professional information and make the decision they want to make in it. I had a in a situation in a city when I was assistant city manager. We had a 250 year old oak tree that was in the way for where a road was planted and the traffic engineer was like a dog with a bone. We got to take that tree out because we can't have a curve in the road. council was like, "We are not cutting down a 250y old oak tree. Curve the freaking road." The mistake staff makes is being a dog with a bone and not letting it go. So, what you've got to have is both of those pieces working together. staff has got to believe that what council's expectations are is that you're going to give us your best opinion, your best recommendation without regard to any political angling whatsoever. And then you need to expect of staff once they've given their recommendation, they're not they shouldn't be emotionally involved into whether you follow it or not. See, your role is different. your responsibility to be the traffic engineer. The traffic engineer was technically right that the best road design according to standards went right through the middle of this 250 year old oak tree. The role of the council is to think more broadly than just that one recommendation. The role of the council is to think about the community to think about okay what are the implications for things that are unrelated to that issue at hand. Your job is to think holistically in everything you tackle. Those are two different roles. And what you want to do is you want staff to be highly confident that you really want them to give you their honest opinion. And then staff, you want counsel to be highly confident that once you give them that opinion, you've done your job and it's their job to make the decision with it. Does that make sense? Now, one other thing on on roles a little bit. One of the biggest mistakes that local government, city councils, and staff make is not understanding the distinction between strategic visioning and strategic uh planning. The role of the council is to do strategic visioning. Your responsibility is to be up on the bow of the ship pointing towards the horizon and saying this is where we're going. It's the role of staff to do the strategic planning that says this is how we're going to get you to where you said you want to go. Back to Maslo. Our human tendency is to want to lean into stuff we think we understand and abandon our roles so that we look smart or don't look stupid. Let me give you an example of that. One city I worked with, we had a council member who was a lubricant salesman for mobile oil. every agenda item, we would get a lubricant question. We could be buying freaking copy paper and we would get a lubricant question. And he was a great council me. He was not playing gotcha. He was very supportive of st good good good person. Good council member. Staff just like council doesn't want to look stupid. So, you know what staff did is that every other week before our every two-eek council meeting dur during our agenda prep session, we had about 12 department heads sitting around the table with the hourly clock running or what it cost. We would spend about an hour taking and trying to figure out what the lubricant question was going to be on that item. What you've got to understand as a council, it is your job to ask questions. It's your job to ask hard questions. It's not your job to ask gotcha questions. Nor is it your job to ask questions designed to make you look smart. The way you ask questions is actually a resource allocation issue. Just like in that city, we we spent $500, $1,000, whatever it was in department head time every council meeting just trying to anticipate the lubricant question. So through your questions, you're actually directing allocation of resources. What you really want to do with the way you ask questions is number one, always make it always know why you're asking the question and convey to the manager or the mayor, hey, I have this question. Sometimes it's going to be a question that you're that the best solution is to say, Jay, I'm going to ask this question. If you could be prepared for it, that would be great. Sometimes it's going to be I have this question. If you could answer it, I won't have to use up counsel time at the DA is going down a rabbit trail. It's fairly straightforward. Sometimes you're going to have a question that you feel the need to ask for political reasons. Nothing inappropriate about that. But your best solution is to call Jay and say, "Hey," or or the mayor, depending on dynamic of the of the topic. I was at a homeowners association last night. This question came up. I need them to know I'm listening to them. I'm going to ask you about this, so please be prepared to answer it. Part of what you do when you do that is you actually accomplish what you were trying to accomplish far more effectively. But what you also do is you build trust with those residents. Not just that you listen to them, but that the city that staff is responsive. So, so what you want to do is be purposeful in what you're doing. Don't be short-term mindset political gotcha kind of stuff in in how you approach stuff. Does that make sense? Okay. So, I was shooting to wrap up in about an hour here, which I'm I'm about at that time questions. And I I know I've kind of honestly I kind of blew off my PowerPoint and kind of went with the flow based on what I watched today where I thought maybe the the most ontarget uh stuff was based on today's conversation. >> I have a comment and observation that I want the council to react to. Curious whether or not I know I sound a little like I'm very manly. Sorry, Ron. is one thing I've heard from each of the council members at various points is that at times it feels like council, excuse me, staff well-intentioned is expecting a rubber stamp and like it's so far along by the time it gets to us that the input from council is not rejected, but sometimes it feels like annoying if we have feedback or we don't like where the direction is going rather than it come to us beforehand. something I mentioned to talk to Jay about earlier and I'm curious if council agrees with that and if so how do we work better with staff so that we have more time to deal especially contentious issues that may very well deserve and need more input from those of us that are represented elected to represent the city >> your first question was to council >> react to that if that's something that you all observe to Alan >> based on my eye profile I agree >> [laughter] >> anyone Mia counc um I would just say you know a lot of what you said I would say has been my experience I've only been here for 6 months and coming from somewhere previously where we did have board operating procedures and things that we adhere to and just I think a different culture of operation than I've encountered since being in this role. But to the mayor's point, for me, I think you've offered a lot of added value and suggestions with regards to operating um standards. But my question is more about the like the next steps and how that actually manifests like how do we um enact those expectations? How do we because you've had suggestions not only for council um suggestions for the relationship between mayor and and and manager but also the expectation with regards to staff. So I think that kind of centers on your question. How do we shape all of that and make it actionable to move forward? I hope I answered your question probably with the question. >> Any other council before I >> Yeah. Council Martinez. >> No. So, I I agree with you, mayor, and with that frustration, but um so that would kind of make me want to ask Jay the question. What are you doing? I know you're still um in your first year. What are you? Yes. Within your first year as city manager, are you planning to host some sort of retreat with the directors? Has that already been done? >> So, yeah. Um as far as retreat with directors, we do have one scheduled for February. And typically this retreat happens in February. We moved it up because I think both the mayor and I recognized that we needed to have more of this kind of discussion the council. And I think this idea about governance and actually having a framework for governance that applies both to the council and just overall in the meetings I think makes a big difference. And I mentioned earlier communication with these things we're trying to achieve and we can we can start pushing more toward committee meetings and then just provide make sure uh all the council knows more readily what's in those committee meetings so that we can have that public dialogue. uh because oftent times the the work involved in trying to make sure that that we're being transparent to the council as a whole so it doesn't appear like we're just working with one council member or two council members. So how we get how we do that and so the streamlining of meetings public meetings makes it hard sometimes. So I think we we were going to you and we [clears throat] talked about this we're going to need to be doing more of that through the committee process since those exist. They want to make sure that all the council members know what's on those committee meetings so they can pay attention or have their staff pay attention so they understand when it actually gets to the full council. They don't feel like it's the last minute. But those are all kind of tactical things that we've been talking about as staff to move forward. Um but because you do get like I mentioned going through the bond program, the list of bond program was already set basically when I came on board. We do we did make some changes. We were able to find additional dollars and now we're getting kind of to the date where a final bond list needs to be put together and I know there's opinions in the in the neighborhoods and there's opinions on the council that things should change. What makes it difficult is how do you come to consensus on how it's changed because everybody has their own uh priorities. So, so we are working on that. I think having some type of process on the governance side I think would would assist us in doing that. >> Lillock >> Jay, thank you for those words. I uh really do agree that I think we should [clears throat] look at putting together some kind of formal governance policy just so we kind of establish rules of the road between all [snorts] of us. I think that would be very helpful. Um, on the communications front, I'm I'm just going to share one thing that that causes me frustration and I and I expect it's uh not me alone. Uh when it comes to our formal meetings or work sessions, often the briefing material comes very late and puts us in a situation where we're having to do intense research with hours of time available. U so I'd really like to see that process improve as well. Just it would be very helpful. Mhm. >> We're addressing that as we go forward. >> Council Ed. >> Yeah. Um I think I mentioned a few times about coming to work session or an executive session where we have to make a a decision the very next meeting and how hard that is. And I think uh that some of those decisions are staff is looking at those where these are mandates or these are uh legally we have to do this. And so it's presented as if we're just going to rubber stamp it. I think they have seen this council come around this table and come up with creative ideas to say we can actually do things different. And so I think it's important that we have as much time as possible [clears throat] to have an open discussion with this council before we feel like that we have to make a decision just per law or mandate. >> Yeah. And so for me, I think that's like kind of back to like the question that I have originally like it sounds like, you know, you introduced the idea that we have a very limited meeting schedule that doesn't really give us an opportunity to have in-depth discussion about certain things. Um, so then my question gets back to how do you change that meeting schedule or how do you discuss if people want to change that meeting schedule? How does that become um a proposal or just even a discussion? and where's the time for that where it's, you know, reasonable and going to be received in in the manner in which it's intended, the spirit intended. Um, again, back to that question for me, it's just kind of this the same thing. >> Um, and just to address your original question on when these items come to us and it it looks like it's already been fully baked and we just need to rubber stamp it. and stab's defense too. Y'all live it every day and you're you're living and breathing these issues and then it's brought to us at a a different level. Um I do think a lot of that's relationship based. I think as a council we could probably do a better job developing those relationships with individual staff members when we know there's a project in the pipeline and we've heard rumblings about it. Um I've tried to to do that to reach out and be proactive, but that's also there's too many things coming at us at at a high frequency. But to um me your point, being able to have more work sessions, I'm all in support of that cuz I think that's more helpful for us to have um more open discussion more frequently and I think these issues will get hashed out and be a little bit more transparent to the public but also to us as well. >> Yeah, it really feels like the quantity of information that's being given to us has greatly reduced. And so I have been I've actually been wrestling with this for a couple months now. Um, and I don't know if it's, you know, our committee, the committee structure changed and also our committee assignments changed. So, at first I thought, well, maybe it's just I'm not on that committee anymore. So, you know, I don't get that that information. I'm getting other information from different committees. But what I noticed is our committees don't seem to be meeting as often, right? I get I it it feels to me that I'm getting more meeting cancellation notices than I am getting of actual subcommittee meetings being held. Um, and it feels like we're not getting the volume of information that we used to get. So, I don't know if a decision's been made to pair down what we get. I don't, but there's definitely a a different tenor when it comes to the way and the amount of information that this council is getting. Um, and I know you were gone, but you were certainly here when we um when this group got elected and you lived through uh what we put your predecessor through when it came to information and how we wanted it and and it became very clear that this council um is a little more involved than our previous iterations and it just doesn't feel like we're getting that. I do feel like I'm flying blind and I don't even necessarily mean specific projects in my district. Although I mean I agree with Macy. I think staff does a pretty good job of proactively reaching out and say I want to brief you on any myriad of things to the point where I'm not upset when there's something that they have forgot to brief or like if there's a project that they didn't necessarily brief me on um that happens so infrequently that it's not the norm. So, it's not like, hey, what's going on? But, um, I think we do need some better, more formalized information coming because it it I don't feel like I have as good a handle on what's happening in the city as I once did. >> I understand. I think we we are trying to we are we were struggling with the committee piece, right? So, is this a committee or is this a full council item, right? because I've heard from different folks and when something's gone to a committee they're upset that it should have gone to the whole council and so it kind of goes back and forth but I think that's part of the idea of and so I don't know that there's been any there's not a mandate to say provide less information it's just how things have rolled out right and um I think the idea going forward was the thought that I had was to have more things go to the committee so there'll be more committee meetings but ensure that the all the council members Um, even though it's in the packet, not everybody looks at it if you're if you don't have the time, but make sure that you get a special communication that says these are the items on these committee meetings so that if you are interested in that item so that when it comes to the full council and it's pretty baked because the committee gave us a lot of feedback that you don't feel like you didn't have a chance to to provide input along the way. That's that's the struggle, right? On on one side or the other. >> Yeah, I think I'd like to see us get everything. For example, the thing that came up on registered sex offenders, it went to the committee and we didn't know anything about it and we got a briefing in council and my district I felt like was targeted one of the examples. I heard you and that's that's one of the examples of of that went to the committee and went through that process. It was in the packets that everybody received that it was going there. And so I just think staff's gonna own up and we're gonna make sure that you get that you get that the information, you know, it's not just a part of a big packet that you get a special email with a communication that says these are the items. >> One thing Macy made a point that is true that staff is living and breathing a lot of this all day. You also have a very busy council um outside of this job. All of us are busy >> and the the way we're communicated with is inconsistent, right? And all of us have examples of that. Maybe it's a phone call from a department head, maybe it's an email, maybe it's a team's chat, maybe it's a text message, maybe all those things. And that can be really overwhelming for those of us that are trying to operate at a high level. Back to the our we can joke about the Dropbox, Chris, but um you know, it's not in Dropbox or we don't all have it in there. The presentations are late and we we it's probably not our responsibility to figure out that problem. It really is management to say this is the way we're going to communicate going forward and build a system that works for this entire council that creates more consistency because I'm not convinced honestly an email is going to work necessarily because we've already had issues before. It's like you didn't email D9 but you didn't email Elizabeth directly or that's too damn confusing. So how do you eliminate that too? And I I don't think we have to solve that problem today. I think we just have to state the state that there's an issue and we all need to get better at it. And to Elizabeth's point and um well most everybody that's spoken uh some consistency too I would say just down the chain a culture of if you're meeting or talking with someone that might affect us in some way that it shouldn't perk up because we find out about it accidentally. I'll use the golf course as the example right seem to be conversations that were happening or met with people etc. Um, and then I'm walking into a situation back to the point that someone made earlier like you don't want to say you don't know anything, but if someone does know something, just some communication and a culture of like, hey, this happened, this meeting happened, so we know what's happening. >> Council member, >> we're not trying to direct or whatever, but maybe we've got some backtory information about what the other part of it, the political side that we're supposed to be our our ear to the ground. That might be helpful too to stop things from going down roads that they probably don't need to and save time too for us. >> Understood. Yeah, that's true. Council, >> go ahead. >> One more thing to add and I agree with the comments already made. >> You know, given the time that I've served on council, I've had the opportunity to do those formative, you know, relationships with staff. So, much of that communication for me is facilitated because I know who to go to. However, lately, you know, we have staff changes and sometimes I find out on the tail end that it happened. I mean, I've been in meetings and I'm referring to a staff member, then I hear, "Oh, they're no longer with the city." I'm like, "No one told me." So, it becomes a little difficult to uh uh to reestablish those uh communication lines. So, I think maybe u review those uh processes that inform us of those, you know, staff members that we rely on to give us, you know, that information would be helpful, too. Okay. Uh couple of practical suggestions. Number one to staff, our tendency is to assume that the end of the agenda item is when seven hands or however many six hands go in the air. The agenda item doesn't end until the elected officials go to the theoretical Dairy Queen the next morning and explain why they voted the way they voted. When you've got a agenda packet like this, the greatest trap is for the council members who trust the staff the most because you tend to not really you go, I don't need to read all 200 pages of that. I trust staff. And then you go to the Dairy Queen and somebody goes, well, why did you vote for this? And your only real answer is because I trust staff. And that is not a good answer. So part of what you need to do as staff, one of the things I did as a city manager, my ex-wife's name was Cynthia, college degree, you know, normal intelligence, no local government background, and all of my What did I say? >> Normal. >> Oh, well, I just meant for your expert. [laughter] >> My my point my point being that there was no particular background, expertise, whatever. And what what I had staff do is develop a C. We didn't put it formally on that, but a Cynthia report. And what I said is every agenda item had to have a one-page Cynthia report that with her no local government background, no special expertise, etc. that she could take and read that one-page report and understand the basics. So, one of the things that I found that works is attaching that kind of a onepager with all of the other stuff because the greatest frustration of staff is one of you wants 500 pages and one of you wants one page and trying to figure out that balance is a real. So, so kind of coupling those is one strategy. A second strategy is that and and and that one pager needs to be designed for the Dairy Queen conversation. That one pager needs to give the the council member the talking points to answer the question, why did you vote for this? The second strategy that I found that works really well, and this is really mainly for Jay, is a Friday memo. What I actually did as a city manager is I kept an open email all week long and was just adding bullets to it. My my practice was it was no more than two sentences on any one item. It moved the responsibility to the council to say let let's just use a staff change. this department head has, you know, heads up, this department head is no longer with us and the comm if I don't want to pick a department head because then I'm going to start rumors and everybody's going to panic. Um, but but a particular department head has left and somebody on the committee that works with that department doesn't want to get surprised. They may have questions that somebody who's on the audit committee doesn't have. And so what a well done Friday memo can do is put the burden on the council to go it's my responsibility to say I need more information about this now particularly with a Friday memo it needs to be sort of at least two major sections one is current issues which may to it was either Michael or Allen's point you know that I had a conversation with this person heads up you may get a phone call kind of thing on this this issue. The second session section though is the longer term. That's an easy place to say, "Hey, we've been working on a policy on uh uh dangerous dog policy or whatever it is." It's not the place to provide all of the information, but it's the place to say, "Deborah really, really cares about this subject. she knows the conversation is going on. So, she can reach out, schedule time to say, "Hey, give me a heads up. Where are you headed?" etc. And then this one is going to get way out there and may be beyond any of your comfort zones. There's one city I know of that the city manager is now using an AI agent to predict the questions that each of the council members are going to ask. And what they've done is they've uploaded the council members campaign materials, bio, etc. And and it's and and it then the city manager actually has of going >> I will I will make chaos J Choa. I promise you [laughter] I will go out of my way to ask questions. >> Like I said, you may not be comfortable with that. >> Try it. [laughter] >> I'm not advocating that one. I haven't had experience, but it is something that's going on out there. Now, >> my personality said, "Don't try to predict me." [laughter] There's three of you. But but even absent a tool like that, part of the challenge, and this goes back to the lubricant salesman, part of the challenge for staff is actually begin to up your game in trying to anticipate what are those questions that are going to come. You know that Allen with his profile is really going to have some different kinds of questions than the mayor is going to have with her profile. And it's not about providing different information, but it's anticipating that. But it's really got to work in tandem. Staff's got to up their game on anticipation, but the council has to up their game on telegraphing to staff, hey, I'm going to have these questions. And the reality is the earlier notice that council has that a topic is going to be coming, council, if you get earlier notice, telegraph earlier. Here's what my questions are g and it may be it may be that Jay literally says we're going to start a study on a dog park and it may be a year-long study process. The earlier you provide feedback to him that says these are questions I'm going to have or this is data that I'm going to want to be able to make a good decision with it. the better job staff can do getting you what you need. Okay, my time is way beyond what I was asked to wrap up at. Any closing questions, comments, rocks? >> Um, I have a request from Jay for Jay. Um, and since we're still on the good governance topic, I think it would be helpful for council to if we did trainings on how to run appropriate meetings, um, committee meetings, um, especially being able to support mayor during public comment and help make sure that we're promoting civility with not just the audience, but among ourselves. But I think giving us tools that we can actually use would be very helpful. Well, I was going to ask the the council, would you all be willing to have another retreat just specifically to talk about a governance >> process and policy? >> Absolutely. >> No, [laughter] not eight hours. >> Would suggest a book. Uh Bob Widner is a longtime city attorney in Colorado. I don't remember which city, but he's written a book. What one of the traps you run into is trying to adopt Robert's rules of order, which is way too complex. What he's really done is a Robert's light. And the National Civic League, I think it is, also published sort of a Robert's light. They call it something different. But those are a couple of resources that can give you a good place to begin thinking. What matters is not what the rules are. What matters is what you agree the rules are, >> right? So, should we shoot January or February? >> February. >> February. Okay. >> January. >> Okay. Just >> You see, I didn't ask February or March. [laughter] >> No, just Ron, I like your idea about summaries, especially for those um committee meetings. And like uh Councilwoman Book said, you know, I've noticed a lot of cancellations, but you know, I and not to be negative, but I'm going to rely more on my staff to attend those uh or at least watch those committee meetings so I can be briefed. And um because I don't feel like I'm following those close enough and then that comes to council and I'm not prepared. And just working on myself and identifying how I'd like to receive information. I'll share that with you when I decide how I like that. >> Wait. So within staff, I am working on having a a weekly update to council and so we're just trying to figure out what the format is and what what all would be. But this helped this conversation helped on the type of information you want. >> Ron, thank you. It's always great to see you. Great job. >> Thank y'all so much. [applause] And all I want you to hear me in I mean we we haven't pulled any punches and all of that sort of stuff. you are in the best position you can imagine because while you're in pain, you're in agreement. We want to move forward. We want to get beyond that. That is the single biggest hurdle. So, you're you're actually in a great great situation. I don't want you to miss that. Thank you'all for letting us be a part of this today. >> Appreciate you, council. We're going to keep rolling. You can get up and go to his restroom or use a phone call if you need to, but Jay is our last presentation. >> Yes. And this won't be long. Okay. Gina short. >> Sure. >> Who Who's getting up? Are we going to lose quorum? >> Three minutes. Go for it. Yeah. Three minute break. >> We want Gina short. Gina. This is one of the >> [laughter] >> Okay, Jay, I think you can get started. Yes, >> ready whenever you are. >> Go for it. >> So, the length of this presentation will be proportional to the n the amount of questions you ask. >> Okay, >> so [laughter] Yeah. Yeah. >> Uh so typically, as I mentioned earlier, we uh >> staff, we're gonna get started. Sorry, y'all got to stop talking. T >> typically uh this pres this uh retreat is done in February. And so part of the overall retreat usually has this kind of in-depth uh population, a lot of data about the city, but that information is not available yet. it actually comes out later this month or around this time this month and staff has a time to compile everything and make it part of that presentation. So we'll we'll do that in the future maybe at a when we start the budget process. Um so this is really strictly kind of tied to to a little bit of information. and it's not very long and at the end of the the presentation the idea is to provide you kind of a 50,000 view very macro of what the next seven years general fund budget uh is looking at as we go forward. So we do as everybody knows we are now the 10th largest city in the country and uh we just wanted to show you just to remind you how quickly you see this all the time but how quickly the city is growing and as we continue to move forward according to COG there's no reason why we're not going to continue growing uh based on how uh the demographics are going and so you know we roughly could be 1.3 million people by 2050 so that's a short 25 years from And when you look at where those people are moving to in Fort Worth, you know, between 2010 and and 2020, you see the darkest green areas uh show where people moved. We did, I think, do a good job in infilling some of this central city. You see that dark green uh there and the darker shades of green in the central city. But as we move forward, uh you can see that really a lot of those areas are built out. Every time I talk to developers when they have significant issues, uh in the inner city, it's because those are the hardest places to to actually um build things out because there's either the already built conditions or because nobody built there before because of the slope or the drainage or whatever the issues are. So most of the growth in the next 25 years is going to the the edges of town. And you see the dark green is most of the pop population growth. We've also done a pretty good job. I think I mean the percentage wise we've done a great job on the job side, but really we are still not swinging the size of bucket we should for the size of the city of the number of jobs in Fort Worth. Uh we've grown 31% and this is a comparison with the other large cities in the in the state which is huge. only Austin has has grown faster on the job side. So, we've done a good job doing that. But long term, I think Fort Worth for us to be uh a place where people you can cut down commuting times, you can people can live in Fort Worth and work in Fort Worth, we need to continue that kind of job growth. Uh you see, Austin is smaller than us. They have uh almost not quite twice as many, but about uh 80% more jobs than we do overall in Austin. Um, and if you look at um, what is it? San Antonio. So, San Antonio is a lot larger than us and Austin has more than them. So, they're Austin's, you know, because of UT and because of all the tech jobs that have shown up there, they've really gr grown, but we should be closer to the the numbers associated with San Antonio and Dallas in the long term. And so, that's going to be a goal as we go forward. We had the conversation about affordable housing and you can see here that u our median home value has g has grown considerably. Uh 2023 it was nearly 300,000. Um and as was mentioned a lot of the new housing is that's coming online is 400,000 plus. It's hard to find new housing that's that's less than that on the single family side. We did see a a decrease in single family homes on the appraisal side. Uh but that I'm going to be t talking about that. That's really more tied to uh Tarant County and the fact that re residential housing or single family residential was not reappraised and there's actually uh folks actually um protested. So it lowered the overall values as we went on. So looking at the economy, you know, there's several factors. I think everybody here understands the different factors that impact the the economy. Uh inflation being one. Uh for the city, it means that when we have inflation uh that's low, you know, you you it has an impact on the amount of revenues because you're not people aren't spending as much and so we're not getting as many revenues. But when you it's converse you can also have people spending less when the inflation's high which also impacts uh revenues on the other side. High inflation though does I think impacts the city worse when it comes to cost of actual delivering services especially when it comes to capital and we saw that after co COVID with the huge increase in costs where several projects that we put in the 22 bond program coming short once you actually got the bids out. Um the DFW area has been lower than the national average the last few years when it comes to inflation. You can see uh before earlier right out of inflation we were actually higher. Interest rates [snorts] also impact how we do things. um as a you know my long term at the city. One of the things I've always advocated for whenever we've had severe uh reductions in interest rates is to as much as possible try to get the city council to issue more debt to do more projects uh because you get the bigger bang for the buck with the interest rates being low and you're able to stretch that out if we could afford it. And um the the problem with interest rates being too high or too low is that it impacts how us as citizens, us as individuals, our whole population react and work in the economy. If it's too high, then people are not buying homes. Um they're not moving forward with those kind of things. They're not they're not the economy isn't turning as much. when it's too low, then people have a tendency of it drives up housing costs. And again, the affordability uh piece comes into play. And so, uh having a a stable interest rates kind of in the middle, what's being targeted by the Feds uh is really where I think works best for the economy overall. So when we look at our our general fund budget as we go forward, the the general fund budget is really driven uh by the property tax side and sales tax. And if you look at at our property tax, this is the traditional for the last several years, uh David Cook would show that we needed to do better of closing the gap between commercial and residential. Uh we're too There's too much value up on the residential side, not enough coming from the commercial side. And this is what you've always seen the last couple of years. You've seen the residential come down and commercial come up. I think it's a combination of uh the city um the city's work for economic development to bring in commercial on the one hand, but it's also an impact of the TAD values going down this last year on the residential side. So this combination of those two have shown a little bit of movement and I always always have this conversation with my predecessor in that I always thought multif family residential is more commercial than it is residential and uh so I had staff pull out the multif family side um and you can see when you take the multif family side that's 10% of the values of the and there there's also since I've been here in the mid 90s and folks uh citizens and sometimes council members don't want additional multif family. You can see at least in the last seven years, but this goes back to the '9s, we've never been more than about 10% multif family across the whole city. And so, uh even though it seems like there's a lot more, there is a lot more, but there's a lot more residential. So proportionately, we've never really gotten there's never really been a separation or a growth of that of that number. But >> yeah, I just I know that's what I was just about to say. Just caveat if we could work with u our engagement team to really push that because I know one thing that we all hear incessantly is we're building too many apartments. We're building too many we have too we're we're not building anything else. And I'm actually really shocked by this um graph and I think our residents would be too. >> Well, and so people don't realize especially people depending on what part of town they live on, they don't go the other side of the the other side of the city and see the just acres and acres of rooftop single family that have been built at the same time. So that combination uh it's really kept us at that level around 10%. And I'm going to have staff to take this back to the '90s cuz I remember actually being a budget analyst and presenting that like in the mid '9s and it was Chuck Silox at the time. If you know Chuck Silox uh didn't want any more apartments and we were at about 9% is what I recall. >> Yeah. Interesting. >> Alan, did you have a question? Um so really when you look at the the numbers if you were to say to me apartments are business, right? and and so if you'd say that's commercial more than residential, then we're really closer to a 50/50 uh on the on the commercial versus residential. But I think separating it this way really provides a a cleaner picture of the the type of values that we have overall. Any questions on that? [laughter] Jay, uh, but on that graph right there, does that include tax exempt properties [clears throat] when you're dealing with multif family? >> It's everything on the tax roles, so that they're not >> Okay. Just want to be sure >> aren't on the tax rules. >> Thank you. [snorts] So, looking at at property tax overall, which is the biggest uh revenue source for the city, as I mentioned, uh TAD did not reappraise residential properties this past year. Um, and their their plan is to not is a three well, it's a two-year appraise every two years, but or every three years, but the first plan, the first year was just to stay status quo. So, it's really going to be 3 years before they actually reappraise. Um, and and so the idea was to provide relief to the home owners and so there was because people could still protest and so the values went down. Um 93% of our values come from um um TAD from Taran Appraisal District. So the other we're in five counties but the other counties combined are only 7% of the value um for our our overall properties. Um so as I mentioned the property residential values were frozen in 2026. The bianual reappraisals will start in for 2028 FY28. So the it won't be reappraised again until the January 2027. Uh there was a law that was passed or a in a bill that was passed there was a line in there that said that uh that said that January 1st needed to be reappraisals but it didn't specify annually and so TAD is not changing the way they're they're moving forward. Um as you recall when I came in on board and we started talking about the budget we were predicting having uh a reduction of the overall values and having to cut at the time. uh and we ended up coming actually above what we thought we were going to have and that was really tied to commercial valuations. Commercial re valuations went up. Um, and so actually allowed us to be able to not have to cut a a tremendous amount of of programs or or uh dollars and we were able to bring in MedStar and additional other public mostly public safety related um programs on board as well as add capital money to the maintenance side of transportation public works. But as we look forward knowing that um this reappraisal program is still going to be in place where we're not going to have residential reappraised and you look at what's happened with the the last state legislative process. We did um [clears throat] excuse me have House Bill 9 which basically took uh business personal property exemptions from $2,500 for businesses to $125,000. That impact to the city is that existing business personal property is wiped off the tax roles at that level and it's going to be an estimated about $6 million hits to our budget. So that just from start off, if if nothing changes, exact same values, we have no growth or whatsoever, there's a $6 million reduction in in our um in our actual um income. The the reappraisal process, I me I mentioned that the law that was passed that said they had to be reappraised January 1st, it didn't specify annually. And so my understanding is they still plan not to reappraise. And so we can expect uh residential property unless we had a lot of come on board probably be flat if not uh reductions again uh since since people will be able to protest their existing values that are on board. As you look forward, the governor put out a um his his uh he just announced that he was going to run again and his platform is primarily around property tax relief overall. And so these are the items that that he's put out there that uh in a couple years as we look at this seven-year forecast that we had to potentially, you know, think about some of these items being approved. Uh one is that instead of appraising every two years after the 2027 that it would be every 5 years. So residential properties wouldn't be appraised until every 5 years. So, you're going to see a stagnant value there. Um, that the cap on appraisal growth from one year to the next, currently 10%. So, if your house goes up in value, the appraisal amount can only go up 10% when it comes to actually taxing your home, it would only be 3%. So, we did, even though there was an appraisals this this last time, houses that were that had a higher value than the 10% cap or that could move in the 10 % cap. We did gain some of that value. In the future, it would only be 3% potentially. Um on the local spending side, uh for us, we currently have a 3 and a half% gap uh cap on existing revenue. So, existing values, revenues that come up from the existing value. The proposal is to have inflation [snorts] plus population growth or three and a half% as a cap for all revenue not just existing. So even this past year we had overall the the budget grew by 5.4% 4% because we added our existing plus our commercial our commercial growth the growth on the commercial side or the new growth it wouldn't matter it would be together it's 3 and a half or population growth plus infl inflation inflation last year was 1.9% our population growth was about 1.1 so you would be at 3% and that would be our revenue side for property taxes would be 3% growth if you want to go above that as city council you'd have to go to anction ction of of the citizenry and a super majority would have to approve that. And then the last one is there is a proposal to eliminate all property taxes for the ISDs. I don't know how that would work and it doesn't mention how it would be what would substitute for that. The good news is FIFA [laughter] um for this coming year. we're is I think when we did the the um we did our budget, we projected our sales tax just based on the things that we knew. So, we're hoping to see the bump in FIFA uh activity on the sales tax side and uh it's predicted to have almost 4 million visitors to the Metroplex uh because of the of the uh FIFA uh soccer in I was going to say Arlington, but in Dallas Stadium. Um the estimate overall for the direct impact to the the area is you know there's a huge range there of 160 to 600 million uh but consulting that's how they make money right they're never wrong and then on the DFW's uh overall uh [clears throat] the overall project impact just indirectly and everything tied in as a dollars recirculate is 2.1 billion and when you look at that we have the opportunity if especially ally if we land a um a team at TCU. So TCU is one of the potential sites uh host sites for one of the nations. If we land at TCU, I think the impact uh will be significant because all of the fans from that >> from that nation will end up wanting to be close and we'll congregate in this area. >> So when when will we know that whether TCU gets the site? I believe uh the 1st of March or late February is when the come >> Well, there's there's like eight locations and there's I believe six teams. So, there's a couple that may not hopefully we have one there. >> Yeah, we feel good about that. Yeah. >> Yeah. So here's the forecast looking out seven years based on all the data that we have currently and um making the ins the assumption that we would move forward with our our pay study plan uh and compression as that we had outlined to the city council the increases in group health that we're projecting and the uh EMS subsidies continuing um along with the 22 2022 bond project operating costs are the only things that we've put in there [cough] along with the normal growth uh to come up with these projections. So this year we're intending to be uh balanced. Of course in the state of Texas uh every you can't adopt a budget that's not balanced. So even you'll see as you go forward those numbers grow but uh you see the bottom line shows you the growth or the negative number or growth uh every year assuming a balanced budget was achieved. So, at the end of 7 years, if nothing changes, um, and no other additions were made other than the ones that I mentioned, we'd be about $68 million to the negative over that 7-year period. Of course, we have to balance the budget every year. So, if that was the case, we're nearly $39.5 million, uh, as Christine mentioned earlier, uh, almost $40 million to the negative now. So staff would be as we go through the process, staff with council will be working to figure out um how we would balance that. Of course, this is early, it's macro, it's big numbers. We'll start getting more information as we go through the year. Um and we'll be bringing potential solutions both on reducing the budget and hopefully ability to raise revenues on the other side. Um but the fact that we are looking at those headwinds on the appraisal side and uh potentially in the state further down the road um the some of the you know [clears throat] local preeemption things that are going on. Uh we're we're going to be looking I think and I'm not the only I meet with city managers every once in a while. In fact, in fact, uh, Ron puts a group of us from the Metroplex together every quarter. Um, and everybody's facing the same thing. So, this is not a Fort Worth specific issue. It's a statewide issue for local governments, uh, as we move forward. So, with that said, I think, you know, the mayor and I, it was just eerie or odd. We had a conversation about looking out and she made made the we were talking about potential shortfalls and we talked about the $40 million number. That was about a a month ago without having any data. Staff puts together this uh the this overall projection and it's right at $40 million. Um if you recall last year we added basically $40 million. That was the 20 million or so for EMS. uh an additional about 16 million for police and fire pay. Um and then the about 4 million that was tied to um uh PGO capital. So it's ironic that the number so close to that number that we did add to the overall budget overall. But with that, I'd take any questions or concerns or thoughts or >> comments or questions from council >> ideas for bake sales. >> Council member Block. So Jay, could you explain I understand how the net position is calculated. How does the shortfall to balance budget, how is that calculated? It's just assuming that going from 20 in 2027 that we would come up with a way if the if the total revenue and total expension numbers are correct, then assuming that that we got that down to zero, right? We would have uh we would have the shortfall the next year of about $8 million. It does correlate to the numbers above, but it it's how much less you're going to have every year as you go forward with the same assumptions down here. >> Anyone else? >> Of course, we know that we're we just started the process with uh the 440 on the renegotiation, the fire contract. So, you know, we know there's some things that are not going to be static. Uh but again, this is a 50,000 foot view just to give us the overall perspective. Yeah. >> Thank you, Jay. Appreciate >> it. Thank you. >> Okay. It says closing remarks. Is Ron closing us out? Is that the plan or no? He's looking at me like he's surprised. So, I don't think that's the case. >> Um >> I think he I think he was I think he was just going to say Miller time or something. >> Miller time. >> All I'll say is don't screw up and miss how good you really have it. It always feels worse in the middle of it. When you come from our perspective of dealing with folks all over the nation, y'all actually are in a great situation. You have the right foundation in place. Don't miss that because we focused on the challenges because that's the only way you get better. But y'all really are in a great situation. Have a wonderful Christmas. >> Well said. Yeah. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays to everybody here. Thank you very much. Thank you. Mm-m. [clears throat]