Okay, council. I think we'll get started after they do the presentation. Correct. Actually no. Okay. Good afternoon. I'll call our work session to order. It is I have no idea what time. 1:19 on April 15th. Turn it over to Jay Choa. Good afternoon. Um, we're going to start off with organizational updates and employee recognitions. And to start with that, I'm calling up Lauren Prior to recognize some of her staff who won some awards. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. Today, I'm proud to present to you your award-winning TPW streets and storm water operation teams. Uh, our first team was re recently recognized at the Texas AP. Come on up now. Why are y'all being shy? Come on. You know who you are. So, our first team, the streets operations team, was recently recognized at the Texas APWA conference that was held in College Station this past February. So, first up, we have Mr. Alex Aragon. He is recognized as the equipment operator of the year for Texas. [Applause] [Music] So, Alex is a TPW field operating crew leader with our streets division. As a crew leader, Alex has led his team through over 128 complex projects this year, often stepping in as a primary equipment operator while also training more than 30 new hires. His leadership and technical expertise and commitment to the public service embody the excellence we strive for in every city operation position. Thank you, Alex. We're not done. All right, so our second award from Texas APWA and second place from the equipment rodeo, Joe Manda. this award. So this award recognizes Joe for his indivivividual skill in this competition. He competed against other public works professionals statewide and won second place for his accuracy, speed, and demonstrating the quality of employees here in the city of Fort Worth. Keep the applause going. We're keeping. Okay. Our third award winner, John Rodriguez. So, he's not able to attend today, but he won the Texas APWA field excellence award. So, this award recognizes John for his contributions to operational innovation in public works. Mr. Rodriguez became TPW's first closed circuit television certified operator and was critical in advancing the underground storm drain assessment program. All right. Next, we were awarded we received the TPW APWA award for in-house project of the year. This award recognizes our in-house channel team for the the Harmon Road channel restoration project. So this successful channel restoration project was a massive undertaking to completely reconstruct the eroded slopes and restore the original channel flow lines in order to increase the capacity and reduce flood hazard. Great job [Applause] guys. All right, so next up we have our our storm water team. The Texas Flood Plane Management Association is an organization of professionals involved in the flood plane management, flood hazard mitigation, the national flood insurance program, flood preparedness, warning and disaster recovery. So staff from the city have been engaged with TFMA for years as a way to be at the forefront of floodplane management and professional development. Our own Lisa Biggs, our city flood plane administrator, is currently TFMA's region four director. So, in terms of awards, our city won the 2025 John Ivy Higher Standards Award. This award recognizes efforts to promote community based on higher flood plane management standards to reduce flood loss issues. The city received this award for our 25 updates to our flood plane ordinance and our efforts to better protect residents and businesses from non FEMA flood risks. [Applause] I don't know why they're being shy today. They aren't normally this shy. All right. And last but not least, our city was recognized as the 2025 city flood plane management excellence award. This award is for a Texas city that has shown excellence in the field of flood plane management, demonstrating achievements in reducing flood losses and preventing loss of life through administration of its flood plane management system. So over the last year, the storm water management program has made tremendous advancements in working towards reducing flood loss and protecting lives through the non-FEMA flood risk initiative. So creating a new flood plane development permit um as well as advancements to the high water warning system program. We're also accelerating the delivery of phased largescale flood mitigation improvements and improving the maintenance service levels. So great job That's it. Thank you, Lauren. Next up is Diana Gordano to recognize uh human resources folks for the recently held uh city job fair. As our TPW team is is leaving, thank you very much for coming. I have one question. If you win the equipment rodeo, do you get a belt buckle? He just can't Oh, he says yes. Okay. Thank you all very much for taking the time. We appreciate you. That's a really hard act to follow, all of those recognitions that they got. But I'm going to take a minute to recognize the talent acquisition team who works really hard to attract that type of talent to the city of Fort Worth every day. But I want to recognize Vanessa H. Hotman, Vidal Cox, Garrison Ellington, Ceda Floyd, Amanda Reyes, and Victor Esco, who's the talent acquisition manager. This team not only planned and coordinated, but they hosted the citywide job fair that it's worth working here. But let me show you some of the stats that happened this year. We had over 2100 attendees. Last year we had 1300 just under 1350. So 2100 attendees. It was held on April 5th. It was a Saturday morning. It was one of the coldest days in April that I remember and it was raining and yet we still had a great turnout. Not only that, we had 416 on the spot interviews. So individuals that actually got to interview for opportunities with the city. We had a great turnout from departments. Over 22 city departments participated. So shout out to all of those departments that took time out of their Saturday to be there. But it was a great event. And I think you know looking for dedicated staff to continue to work for the city has been the effort of this team. They've done everything from planning the event to promoting the event and to making sure that they were on site to ask answer any questions that might have arisen from that event. But I want to make sure that we just kind of recognize all of the efforts of the team here to make sure that we continue to attract people just as great as those TPW folks that you just saw that feel valued, empowered, and that continue to promote the mission of the city of Fort Worth. So, thank you guys. [Applause] Thank you, Diana. I did some secret shopping. I went through there and they're doing a great job because they turned me down on multiple jobs. I I have a comment before you may da I just want people to know just how wonderful this was. I don't know how you all promoted it to the job seekers but there were many applicants from North Texas lead who told me well we're going to be interviewed and they were and so hats off to you your team. It was cold. It was raining. But to get that many to show up, it shows that Fort Worth is a place where people want to come to work. Yes, that's right. Outstanding. Thank you. And our last update uh comes from Sunny Saxton. Here he comes. He'll be talking to us about the National Public Safety Telecom Communicator Week. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. So, uh, this week is the National Public Safety Telecommunicators Week, and that's the week that we recognize all those that work in our emergency communication centers. Uh, I can tell you as I learn more about our community and about the team that we're going to recognize. Guys, come on up here or stand up at least. Um, that uh I'm learning about uh the amazing work they do every day. They are essentially our gateway to emergency services. Yeah, we're going to try to we're going to try to get you up here. They are a gateway to emergency services. They answer over 1.2 million calls a year and they're doing more than answering. They begin triaging. They begin managing that emergency. We often refer to them as the first first responders. Uh with me as well as Aubrey Enskow, our 911 administrator, and she's going to introduce and talk about our team for a minute. Thank you. Pleasure to be here to recognize these incredibly hardworking first responders. uh you know their work is often not seen but it is definitely most impactful. Uh this is some of the most compassionate, caring and dedicated human beings that you will find. Their heart is there to serve and step up when those precious seconds count giving those moments back to this community. So can I also ask there's some FAO members here the fire alarm office who are part of this group. Could you guys come join us please? So, if you may not know, currently, and we're going to talk a little bit more about this soon, we have three emergency communication centers in the city of Fort Worth. One is the police communications group. That is police dispatch, 911 call take, and police support. The other is the fire alarm office responsible for dispatching fire resources. We work handinand with them. Um, and also your first responders at MedStar that are facilitating EMS response. So all these groups work very collaborative collaboratively together to make decisions in the best interest of everyone we serve. So community and our fellow first responders alike. So would you join me in just thanking them for their service and dedication to this community and give them a round of applause during their special [Applause] [Music] week. Thank you all very much. Thank you Sunny. Thank you. Thank you all for what you do. And as when I first took this job, I always said that Fort Worth has the most dedicated employees and that was one of the reasons I wanted to come back to the city. And you just evident today by all the awards and everybody that's recognized that do a great job. Thank you. That's all I have. Thank you, Jay. We have a number of informal reports. Right. When the mayor comes back, I'll announce the first one and go back to my own seat. First is 25-0052. I want to hear about that. So, let's hear from Yes, we have Leela Peoples here to um she's filling in for Holly to tell us about this IR and the cost of a additional holiday. Yes. Good afternoon everyone, mayor and council. So, this um IR is just to give an update on the total cost if we were to add the Caesar Chavez holiday to our standing holidays that we have. Right now, the city of Fort Worth offers 11 holidays. Um that includes New Year's Martin Luther King Memorial Day, Junth, Independence Day, Labor Day, Thanksgiving Day, day after Thanksgiving, and Christmas Day. And then two personal holidays that employees get to select from their own. If we were to add this, it would put us at 12 holidays for the year, which kind of fits the average for most cities our size. Um, the total cost for that would be 3,425. Sorry, $425,684. So, that would be the total cost if we were to include that in our holiday offering. We did put in the IR two additional options that are available, which would be to allow employees to just use a personal um vacation time or to use one of their personal holidays that aren't allotted for any specific holiday. We did also include a summary of all the other cities that have this um holiday, which ones are included, and then the number of holidays that um go through cities, count um counties, and also just for the state of Texas. So, you can kind of see the variety. Any questions from council? Councilman Flores? Yes. Have a question for I guess either you or Jay. Um, if this council were amanable to considering this, u timing wise, you know, we're entering our budget talks, what would you recommend uh would be an optimal time to consider this? We could make it part of the overall process to see what the impact is on the budget as we go forward. And if the council chose to to do it, we could make it, you know, as part of the ordinances and uh that come forward with the budget to approve it. And then since it it's not held until the spring or to I believe it's February is when it occurs typically. Um there wouldn't be any impact to this fiscal year be next fiscal year. Okay. All right. Well, I'd like to hear from my fellow council members, see how they, you know, feel as well and get some uh feedback from them. Any other questions or com? Yeah, Council Member Martinez. I'm just I would very much be in support of adding this holiday and be comparable or consistent with all the other large cities in Texas. Anyone else? I'll share. Council member Williams. Yes, ma'am. Thank you, Mayor. Um, while I support certainly um, designating Caesar Chavez as a day um, in the spirit of Caesar Chavez, I also think it's important that um, this council continue to work on um, increasing the minimum wage and ensuring that our employees have the benefits and the wages that they need to be able to live and thrive in this city. May I just I need to clarify consistent with the number of holidays other large cities have Any other questions or comments? Gina's reminding us that she's retiring. That's all that commentary was. Thank you, Gina. Okay. Okay. The next IR is a U the 911 text communication system. Aubrey Zinsko is here to answer any questions. I've just got a a request. Uh you don't even have to come down to the podium. I promise you won't have to answer anything. Um, I found out about this system when a reporter called me because a constituent was upset that they got a a response back that said, you know, officers are busy. Well, you know, we'll be back with you. They didn't read that as a positive. They read that as a negative. And that's really our fault because um we didn't tell people that we were rolling this out. Um, and so the only I think this is great and having read through the IR, the functionality I think is amazing and what we can do to better serve our public, but we have to let our public know that we have that. So, um, my charge to you is work with, uh, PIOS to get some public service videos or social media post, work with our media partners. Um, because if I don't I didn't know that I could text with 911 and now I know that I can text with 911. So, if I'm in a situation where I feel like I can't use the phone, I need to know that that's available. So, um just let's do a better job of trying to get this out to the public. Thank you. Thank you. The next uh IR is a pavement maintenance program update for this year and uh Lauren Priier's here for any questions. I have one. Lauren. Yes, sir. Hi, Lauren. And I just wanted to get your input if you can tell us uh how funds are matching you know the work that your department is uh you know tasked to do you know especially when it comes to the 50/50 uh cost sharing you know with the water department. Uh previously we you know you had addressed the council and told us what those results are how we were you know behind a little bit you know in terms of funding you know uh and just wanted to see if we're doing better as far as matching you know funds with the tasks that we have to do. Well so I believe our our 5050 program and it's not addressed specifically in this IR. So this IR really just talks about our progress with the fiscal year 25 street maintenance program. So, as you know, the the council um had added additional 10.4 million to this budget for a total of $38.8 million, which essentially added 33 lane miles of maintenance to this program. Uh but within our our street maintenance program, the council member is referring to our sorry our our 5050 program with the water department. Um where we both have a shared interest in um you know essentially they have identified a street that needs waterline improvements and we have identified a street that similarly needs uh street street improvements. Um and so that's roughly I want to say about 3.5 million a year that is dedicated towards that. Um and so we're really able to um stretch our dollars and it's most costefficient for us to work on these projects together and we're also not inconveniencing the public by essentially working on a street twice. Once for uh waterline work and then the second for the the pavement work with with which we both know is needed. Um so that is progressing well. I know that we've been partnering um with them primarily using bond funds for the 5050 program and and really capitalizing on the cast iron replacement program. Um so we're looking for opportunities there uh where we both have an interest in those roadways. One of the opportunities that you um uh during the time that you met with my office, we were talking about how do we make our dollars go further, you know, when it comes to resurfacing streets. uh I forget the uh technical term of art that there was a a new methodology of approaching how we do repavement of concrete streets uh kind of using groundup aggregate uh to to to accomplish that goal. Can you talk a little bit about that and tell us what how we're coming along with it? stretching back to a couple years ago, I think that the what we were looking at is was essentially more POS. Um, and and so that is kind of a more intensive maintenance treatment where you are actually uh getting into the subgrade and structurally repairing that. Now, it's not a full-blown reconstruction where we are replacing back a sidewalk to back a sidewalk, everything new. um but you are uh essentially repairing that structural integrity of the base of that roadway. Um so we are still utilizing that. I would say it's one of the many tools in our toolbox. Um and and that program is is definitely one of the most costefficient ways to address streets. All right. Thank you, Council Member Crane and Council Member Hill. Yeah, thanks Lauren for being there. I just thought it worth noting here since we're uh in the process of Ridgemar. Uh if we can look at this, there's a street uh your staff should be aware of that Mr. Needam has contacted many times. It's about two or three houses that just at the end of the street that didn't get finished. If we can look at finishing off the rest of that street, it'd be helpful. Okay. Yeah, we'll look at that. There could be many reasons for that. Um but I'll I'll look into that personally. Thank you. Council member Hill. Lauren, could you give an overview on how these projects the streets are selected um and then evaluated and ranked by priority to meet the reservicing list? Okay. Sure. Um, and we could be here all day on this. Uh, I'm I'm proud to say that we actually have a a PhD uh who runs our our pavement program. And so there is a essentially a decision tree. Um, and and to put it shortly that projects are prioritized um when they become critical for maintenance. So essentially uh you know there there is a a hierarchy of maintenance procedures that we can do on a roadway. So the more deteriorated it becomes the more intensive the maintenance. The way our decision trees are set up is that essentially um before a a roadway falls into the next category of maintenance we are trying to address it then. So we are trying to maximize the lifespan of our roadway and arresting the deterioration before it gets to the next critical stage. But yes, this could be a full presentation in itself. Thank you. Thank you, Council Martinez. Um Lauren, when were these projects chosen? So these projects are chosen during um the fiscal year 25 budget season. Okay. It's just it's interesting because there's only one street on this whole uh report that is in district 11. So I just don't and and I can name one street in my district that I just I can't even drive through. Um so it's just very interesting. Um well and again this is maintenance. This is not reconstruction. So, if a street is in a failed condition, um that is a candidate for recapitalization on the bond program. And to really put limited maintenance dollars to a street that is too far gone, uh would not be a wise use of money. Regardless, this is one street in district 11, and I'm sure there's others that can be, you know, just the this level of maintenance uh repair that should have been on here. So, I'm just wanted to point that out. So, and absolutely we can meet with your your office on your specific concerns. Um, and it might be that they're better suited for either a bond program or more or or a more intensive maintenance. Any other questions from council? Yes, Council Member Rivens. Just a comment, Lauren. I want to acknowledge you and your team for all of the construction I see going on in Southeast Fort Worth. Now, when you take a look at the Southeast Connector project and how your teams are coordinating along with storm water, I don't know how you're doing it without loss of life. And so, just, you know, hats off on that. I did see the media coverage from one of your staffers in the field promising to have a street repaired by a date specific. I'd caution against that. Anything could happen, but it was good PR and just, you know, hats off. And Council Member Martinez, I am right where where you are right now because this time last year and the years before, I just knew that they weren't looking at my streets. I can tell you that with certainty Lauren will own up to it because we had streets in complete failure in D5 starting from 2013 and beyond then. But you know, I just acknowledge her for being able to come and take a look. For those of you who have streets that you think should have been completed, it may have been something that you really never thought about, but it is baffling to the the constituent when they see that sidewalk being laid until they get three houses from their own house. it just makes no sense. And so once again, communication is very important. But thank you for all you do. Thank you. We appreciate it. Thank you. Yes, Council Beck. Okay. Uh, one thing I just wanted to point out for the council, it's on the last page of this IR and it's a pavement maintenance funding gap that Lauren and her team put together. It'll be especially important as we look to the next fiscal year budget. You can see what was allocated um, from our last budget, 10.4 4 million um to fill the gap needed next year. We're looking at closer to 32 million. Now, I know we'll have lots of discussion in the budget cycle, but I appreciate you putting this out there, Lauren, because it's a good starting place for conversation and we have not in the past had support on the council to do a street maintenance fee and so we've needed to fund those out of general fund dollars um and moving money around. So, it's just important because I know at least in my in my position, this is oftentimes one of the predominant topics I get asked about from constituents. The second piece is maybe a communications help is how we how we communicate to the public the amount of work and volume that your department is conducting across all 350 square miles is become increasingly more important. Um, I'm not telling you your your your doctor or your PhD and I don't know was it pavement science at this point. I don't know what you would call it, but you know, how do we best is open question that we communicate to residents um how hard your department's working across the entire city and then also the way we do signage with our contractors sometimes it's kind of confusing doesn't really actually tell you what the project is and so maybe kind of rethinking that in the future. No reason to go backwards in time but um maybe working with council members I probably give certain projects that would would deserve a little more um communication just in the way the signage looks along the roadway would be helpful. That's all great feedback. I know we have been experimenting with texting updates, right? Really trying to re reach that next generation or just on a project basis, right? If you have an arterial where people don't live, uh there's not really a direct person I can go talk to about it. So, can we put a message board up that says, "Hey, text this for project updates." So, we are open to any sort of new communication strategies as well as uh bolstering our our existing strategies. That's helpful. Thank you, Lauren. Appreciate it. Okay. Okay, council. Thanks, Lauren. The next IR is park and recreation department facility admission and membership fees. Council Beck has a question on this one. And Dave Lewis is here, I believe. Dave, can you come on down? Hello. Thank you for putting this together for me. Um, I kind of want to go through several of these, so if you'll bear with me, I'm going to take them by topic. Um the first one is um the fees associated with the Fort Worth Nature Center and Refuge. Um many of you know here that I am an avid hiker. Um over the course of about a thousand miles, I've encountered foxes, snakes, um even two bears. But the one thing that I have not encountered is a a park entrance fee. And that's because both the national parks and the state parks provide free entrance to veterans to use their facilities. And so I'd like to see the city of Fort Worth um uh follow the lead of these two agencies by um allowing free um day admission to um the Fort Worth Nature Center specifically because um several VA studies have shown that um exposure to the outdoor is um directly related to um decrease in PTSD levels for our veterans. So, just as a mental health, um that's why our national parks and our state parks, a big uh reason why they made that change. And so, I'd like to see the city of Fort Worth make that change as well. Um but I appreciate that we're offering a dollar discount. Now, um another just general um note on all of these fees that I see. Um for some, we have non-resident fees and resident fees. So, for our community centers, we have resident non-resident fees, but we don't have non-resident fees for our nature center and for our um golf courses. And so, I think that's a way we can make up some of the deficit to the the um discounts that we offer. But also, I just think that um a perk of living here as a resident, paying taxes is um you get a little break. And so, for those folks that aren't paying into our system, we need to recoup that somehow. I think that's through a non-resident fee on our golf courses and um in our uh nature center. And that's that's all I've got. Just some request on how we do the fees. Yeah, thank you. The especially the non-resident feas came up recently and during our budget development process. We'll do the analysis and provide the impacts on both sides of that providing non-resident and free to veterans as well and we'll make a recommendation through the process. Thank you. Thank you councelor. Yes, councelor Lars. Great idea. I love that. Make excellent points. Um, if we could, I'd like to see if we can extend that to our first responders as well for for Worth. I think it'd be great to get It's the least we can do for for what they do for us. So, we just look at that, too. That'd be great. We'll do. Thank you. Thank you, Dave. Uh, the next is update on fiscal year 2025 mid-year adjustments for operating PIDs and the tourism PID. And Kevin Gunn is here in his second hat of economic acting economic development director. If there's any questions? No. All right. Uh the next is water and wastewater impact fee update. Chris Harter is here to answer any questions. Yes ma'am. Chris, I I really the question I have is I see that we're increasing um we're going from 40 to 45% um for the percentage collected. Is there a reason why we're not up over 50? My my concern is that we're just not collecting enough to to keep up with our system. and and you hear uh myself and council member Flores um talk about the cast iron replacement at 20 m a year, 800 miles, we'll never replace that. So, are we um setting oursel up for failure by not charging enough to recapture the true cost of maintaining and building out our system? Yeah, I appreciate the question. Um to I get get to the answer, let me go through the statute first of all. So the chapter 395 statute uh requires that if you are a government agency that you're collecting impact fees, you create an impact fee advisory committee. So that advisory committee uh council appointed uh but it is made up by a very diverse body, right? So at least 40% of the members have to represent the development and the building committee. So this uh impact fee committee and I I think that we attached the letter from them to this IR uh the members uh are Don Allen, George Felin, Dan Hayes, Don Little, Rusty Fuller, and Rick Trice. And those uh members went through this whole process related to the land use, the capital plan, and then actually making a recommendation on a collection rate. So the recommendation that this committee made was to go from 40% collection to 45% with a 42 and a half% collection uh in year one. So that is their recommendation and that is their charge per the statute. My question to you is is that sufficient to keep us on track with what we need to build and maintain our water and wastewater systems? I mean I understand it's their recommendation. I appreciate their hard work. I think the answer to that is um how quickly we want to try to replace cast iron pipe, right? I mean, so there's no doubt that when you look at different utilities across the state, those utilities that are growing have a significant portion of their capital plan devoted to growth. You try to offset that using impact fees. communities that are not growing like u as an example Dallas. Dallas has over 90% of their capital plan devoted to infrastructure renewal. When you look at our capital plan, we have nowhere near Talk louder Chris. I'm sorry. It's me, not you. We have nowhere near 90% of our capital plan devoted to uh infrastructure renewal. So, the higher the collection rate, the more we can devote to infrastructure renewal. It's that simple. So, At the current rate of replacement for cast iron pipes at 20 miles of roughly 20 miles a year, we have a little over 800 in the city. That's 40 years that we'll be replacing cast iron. So I think if this rate um keeps us at that 20 miles, um to answer your question, how fast uh faster than 40 years? So, Council Member Beck, I also mention is that we're going to be um going over our bond rating uh agency presentation in a a few weeks with the rating agencies. Part of that is a proforma. We are uh going to be okay. We are going to be uh showing rate increases, okay, every year for the next uh five years. Okay. But we're also showing an increase every year of about $10 million for our PGO cash, which is our rehab and renewal type of a funding. So we're we're adding 10 million every year, not it it yeah adding. So it's compounding. So every every year our capacity for rehab and renewal uh work is increasing. Okay. All right. Thank you. Any other questions? No. Thank you, Chris. Don't go anywhere. Uh, next one's wastewater system expansion and improvements. If there's any questions with that? No. No. And then the last is the quarterly development activity report for Q1 of 2025. Any questions on that one? Nope. Okay. Council, we'll keep rolling. Any questions on changes to boards memberships or commissions, MNC log, upcoming zoning cases? If not, we're going to move into our first presentation, which is the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame expansion briefing. I see Pat Riley here with the National Cowgirl Museum, as well as WY Daily with the projects group. Good afternoon, mayor and council, and thank you all so much for allowing us to come and make this presentation. I'm Pat Riley. I am the executive director of the National Cowgirl Museum and Hall of Fame. And I just wanted to say a few words before I turn it over to WY who's our project manager um to go through our presentation. It's hard for me to believe that it was almost 22 years ago to the day that we opened the Cowgirl Museum in its new home here in Fort Worth. And that was largely due to our relationship with the city and the city coming on board when the museum moved here from a small town in West Texas and the city came and said, you know, if you're looking for property, um, please come and become a part of the city and you leased our current home to us. Over the past 22 years, we've um really made remarkable um strides and and efforts to become a major part of the fabric of Fort Worth and to really serve this city in in a way that we think is is really viable and incredibly important not only to tourism but also to the cultural aspects of the city. The Cowgirl Museum has a very interesting role in that. I think we because of our name we are, you know, automatically associated with cow town and cowboys and cowg girls and culture, but everybody who comes to the museum quickly learns that it's it's really about more than just one word. I mean, the women that we represent in the museum are as varied as Sandra Day Okconor, who everyone knows is the first female justice of the Supreme Court, to Georgia O'Keeffe, to the great rodeo cowg girls, to doctors, lawyers, uh we one of the women, young women who works with us right now, her great grandmother is in the Hall of Fame and she was the first female banker in the United States. So our philosophy is really no matter who you are, the Cowgirl Museum is a place for you. I mean I I think you would be hardressed to have anybody who could come and not find inspiration from the women who are represented. And that's the reason why we're so proud to be such a great part of this city who who ha this city which has such great respect for its culture and uh and also its women and and the people that um are represented in the museum. So um 22 years ago when we built our our uh geography was very very different. Um, we were at the very end of the cultural district. Beyond us was a parking lot and then beyond that was a parking lot. So everything for us really changed when Dickiy's Arena built and all of a sudden we became sort of the center of that area of the of the district. So one of the things that we looked at very quickly and realized was that our front door was in the wrong place. So the expansion that we're talking about here is in an effort to create a new front door, create new synergy with Dicki's everything that's happening off of Montgomery. So with that, I'm going to let Wy talk us through um a little bit of additional background um into what the Cowgirl Museum has done since they opened in 2002. So, in 2015, they went through a major groundf flooror renovation, um, totaling about $2.1 million of raised money where they redid their downstairs Legends Gallery. Um, they also then moved into phase two, which was a $5.5 million upgrade to their second floor. It's never just a horse gallery, which you can see both of them now today. Um and then in addition in 2019, a part of phase 2 and also relation to the Dicki Arena um opening, they redid what is now called Alice Walton Cowgirl Park. And so this now basically brings the museum and the front doors of Dickies together. And so in an effort to really complete um complete that cycle, they started the design process back in 2000 not 2022 uh with project teals who did the first um interior renovations. And then they also enlisted a local architect Euan Cole to support that. Um and here we are fast forward 2025 we've now got Lindbeck on board to help us with the enabling work of this project and then the projects group helping on the PM side. So, three local firms um supporting this project as well. Um what this expansion is doing for the museum internally. So, first and foremost, it's adding about 16,000 square feet of a wing that, believe it or not, actually in the original 2002 documents they had planned. So, um this was actually something you could see as a future expansion in the 2002 documents. The expansion is flipping the entrance so that now it faces Alice Walton Park and can really take advantage of that and Dicky's Arena and the access that all of that brings. It is also improving the access to the parking lot which right now it's also pretty difficult to get to the front door from that west parking lot which is where the um majority of their customers park their car. It is also adding four new gallery spaces in this expansion wing which allows them to improve their K through2 TICS requirements. And then it's allowing them to take advantage of their second floor, never just a horse gallery, and actually turn it into a muchneeded event space that's missing in the area. So this will dub as flex exhibit by day and then event space by night, which you can see in this photo here. We are going to run through some of the project renderings. Uh this is the rendering of what that main entrance will look like from Cowgirl Alice Walton Park. This is the first floor um expansion wing. You can see you will come in through the vestibule on the first floor and you will walk back through uh the long arm. So you will run past reception, a gift shop, um two major galleries and one smaller gallery. So the photos will be here. This is their gift shop. You'll also see the entrance to the grand stairs that will take you to their second floor as a part of this expansion. This first floor gallery will have collections from both their existing Hall of Famers as well as um inductees that they intend to have and then a photo gallery. And then this is their second floor expansion. So you can see the grand stairs will actually lead up to the second floor um into one large gallery where they intend to have a rotating exhibition of different um hall of famers. And I know the main feature of this as well is actually having a carousel gallery. And so this space will also dub as rental that will support the next door space and hopefully private events as well. So we are here today because we are requesting funding from the community partnership fund. Um we have completed the um design documents and have actually gotten approve an approval permit from the city as well. Um we've done all of this in constant coordination with the neighbors around us. So we actually meet on a monthly basis now with the Fort Worth Museum of Science and History Stock Show and Rodeo, the Will um Rogers Memorial team and Dickies to make sure that we are meeting their needs. Um and we have also raised over 13 and a half million in our private funds. This is an overall picture of the timeline. So um obviously I updated this in mid-March, but we are well into the enabling work which is the work that has to happen in order for anything else to take place. It's basically moving a bunch of power supply with Encore and doing some underground utility work. But we do intend to kick off this project in late May and it will go until August of 2026 with some time for the exhibit team to actually set up all of the four additional exhibits and move around the existing building uh with a grand opening tentative for November of 2026. Here's a summary of what we have in our capital budget. So, we're um estimating about 17.5 million in our construction cost with 350,000 of owner contingency that we have in reserve. We've encountered about um 1.6 million in professional fees. And we also have some money set aside for our exhibit setup. And then the bottom there, you'll also see we have still raised over 13 and a.5 million in private funds. Um so our summary to the city is again we've um been here for over 22 years in support of the of the city and so we are looking um for an approval of 6.5 million from the community partnership funds. Um we have raised over 13.5 million and we're really looking forward to partnering with the city. Jay, I'll turn it back over to you. Well, thank you for the presentation. Yes. Um, so we've had several meetings regarding this this project and it's a it's part of the culture cultural district. It's been there for a while. It brings a a heck of a lot of tourism. And so staff is working to see how um as as we mentioned, most of our community partnership projects involves the city uh participating especially on pro on projects where the city owns the property and and has a big impact to the city. And um if the city participate with funds, our funds come in on the back end. So they've already raised about twothirds of the dollars uh required. uh as we go through this year, we're looking to see if we can uh find the the dollars they're requesting so we can come forward and we have a few months uh this fiscal year or early early next year um to identify those dollars. And so staff is recommending that the that the city council we want to bring back a resolution uh to the city council that said that the city council supports this project. Not necessarily entering into actual contract for the dollars yet, but once we identify those dollars, we would then come back at a later date with an M andC uh to seek approval from the city council. So staff would be recommending moving that forward. Will this will this be included in our budget discussions? We could do that. We're we looking I'd like to see it. 6 million is a lot. We're looking to see how that we're going to end the year out and see if there like last year where we had funds available at the end of the actual fiscal year. So, it actually be fiscal year 2025, not 2026. Correct. If that was the case, but we would bring it back to the city council at that point. Okay. Before I ask Council Member Hill to say a few words, I have a question about the the footnote here on supporting National Calgary and City Property. What what piece of that do you anticipate, Jay, would be utilized for city property maintenance and operation? None of it. It would be for the construction of the actual building. They would be responsible for maintaining 100% of that going forward. Okay. Thank you, Council Member Hill. Um one, WY and Pat, thank you so much for coming today. I think this project is a great example of leveraging um a private public partnership. You all have gone out, you've had the vision, your board has had the vision, you've raised um the money, and you are looking for the partnership to continue to leverage these funds to bring in economic impact across the city of Fort Worth. This is just not localized to the cultural district, but this is a Fort Worth impact. And as you mentioned, it's not just cowg girls and cowboys, it's everybody in between and tourism and locals alike. So, thank you again. Thank you. Any other questions from council? No. Ladies, thank you for coming for the presentation. And sounds like we'll come back to this in a few months. Council com and this is Thank you'all for the presentation. Totally support this effort. Um my um two cents on this is um I understand during budget process we end up finding money in the budget um of the fiscal year that we're currently in. My challenge is that we throttle back when we set the budget on important priorities like doing the $20 minimum wage and then to find money um in a midbudget to fill the gap on our infrastructure and then find money, you know, into the microphone or maybe it's just me. Am I I don't know these microphones. Maybe they just turn them up. I'll be better about this. That's better. Um so I'll go back totally support what y'all are trying to do. Kind of a broader discussion. I have heartburn when we find money for projects midyear when we're um throttling back on priorities when we're setting the budget um like raising the minimum wage to $20. We made a very hard decision not to do that because we were concerned about whether or not we'd have funding available for that. And thankfully we did such a good job managing the budget that we're able to f fill the gap on infrastructure requirements particularly transportation infrastructure streets and more specifically as well as if we find money in the budget for this right we've accomplished two very important priorities while also throttling back on the minimum wage discussion at the beginning of this budget year. So I gives me heartburn and that's not necessarily um the way I would like to do a budget. Obviously, these things come up mid year. Um, but it's not fair also to our employees to find money and use argument that we don't have money to support our employees who are serving our city. Thank you, Jared. Anyone else? No. Thank you ladies for coming. We appreciate you. Okay. Next up is city literacy and reading resources. I think Madori Clark, our library director, and Moni K are going to kick us off as well with this presentation. Ladies, it's great to see I know we have some special guests in the audience. Also, we do. Good afternoon. I'm Madori Clark. I have the real honor and pleasure of serving as the Fort Worth Public Library director. Today, we are going to share a presentation with you about um our literacy and reading support in action. And Madori, as you get started, I'll recognize Pete Garin with the Sid Richardson Foundation is here with us, as is Caroline James. And then Elizabeth Brans, who runs the Morris Foundation, is also here. At the conclusion of this presentation, we're also going to do a literacy recognition. So, I just wanted to um make a note of that. And then separate from this, just make a note for council. Um we're going to move the emergency medical services update after this update just to for a few planning purposes. So, anybody that's here from city staff may just put you on deck for that as well. Thank you, Madori. Back to you. Absolutely. So, at the city of Fort Worth, we are really excited to partner with the community on literacy. We all know this is a very important topic for our community and so today we're going to share with you um from our two perspectives of our departments the commitment to lifelong reading support for the library. It really starts um with the early childhood literacy. So we start with babies um and our programming really incorporates the every child ready to read initiative. This was something that was started by the public library association and association for library service to children. And the five things that are incorporated in this initiative are talking singing reading writing and playing. So all of these programs that are listed on this slide here are things that incorporate those different techniques. We do uh thousands of story times. I think the library is really well known for story times. Have any of you been to a story time? Yes, I think several of you have, which is really, really exciting. I think it's something that the public library is very well known for, and it's really our time to get kids excited about reading and getting ready to learn to read. Um, we're also very proud of our thousand books before kindergarten program. This is a program where we um encourage uh parents to get started with their children at birth and we incentivize this participation for children and their families. We provide a lot of resources um for these parents and tips to get their kids excited about reading and getting ready um to learn to read. And we have had more than 2,300 families that have participated just in the past year alone. We al also have our music and movement as well as Lego based programs that uh incorporate all of the every child ready to read concepts and they enforce our letters and numbers. We continue then with the kiddos up until their preschool age and um we also have family- based initiatives. Um kinder prep is a weekly workshop filled with fun activities to help kids and grown-ups prepare for the transition into kindergarten. Um, we also have our story bites program which is geared toward keeping school age children who have outgrown traditional story times, keeping them involved with reading and talking about books. We have several different bookreated events. Did any of you know that Paddington Bear was recently in the house at our libraries? Okay, I'm seeing a couple nods. We had hundreds of people who came to see um Paddington Bear. And really, this is a way for us to elevate reading and books and characters in the library by getting the kids excited about meeting those characters in person. And then we also have specialized reading kits that focus on phonics, different kinds of specialty topics, and other uh readalong books, etc. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. I'm Monique Hill. I'm the assistant director with the park and recreation department and I'm responsible for let's see Dana. Okay. Is that better? Yeah. You have to be really close to the microphone. So sorry man. And you're tall. I apologize. Okay. Is that better? Yes. Thank you. Gotcha. Um and so I'm going to talk to you about our continued partnership. So, one of the things we wanted to make sure that you see is that the city of Fort Worth is very excited that we are working from the the babies all the way up to school age. So, when Madori and the library is kind of done, although they support them through all ages, then we get them. And so, our school age partnerships are some of the things we want to uh focus on. So in 2018 and I do want to point out uh Glenise Robinson who is here. she was our former uh director of library. Uh but she supported this initiative where uh with Reed Fort Worth at the time, we were trying to make sure that we did not have summer slide. And so one of those things that we did through the partnership um it's now called Rev Partnership, which was uh Reed Fort Worth prior to that um was that we were able to talk about how can we support literacy through our community centers. And so we did that by understanding what that looked like and what it meant to us to um have positions called literacy support specialists, which originally was funded through the city manager's office, but moved into our community centers and we learned that we needed to have these positions on staff during the summer uh when we had our summer day camp. So some of the things that we have with Rev Partnership is a provision of access to software that helps us with reading um and literacy. Um, also the other thing that it helps us do is to collaborate with other uh stakeholders that are very interested in making sure that our youth are prepared to read or that they maintain or gain uh reading throughout the summertime. Um, we have uh assessments that are done as well. So we have an assessment tool that we utilize called reading a toz and then we also have access to what's called Lexia core. This provides pretty much a a menu of services to our youth. And so through this, we have a curriculum through not only our summer day camp, but we also were able to expand this through our afterchool program. And so you don't hear a lot of programs, I'm sorry, uh say that. Uh and so one of the things that we are able to do now is to u make sure that we have these programs um in our programming. I'm sorry, Mon'nique. I was just gonna ask Elizabeth, is she still here? I miss her. I can't see if she is. Hi. Make you come to the microphone really quickly. come up. It's just to brag on you. Um, a lot of people don't realize this. You know, we started this initiative in 2018. It was actually a part of Reed for Worth. Um, Elizabeth was a part of that trying to struggle with what we thought the right fit and role for the city is. And even through COVID and after you've really stuck with the city to help make sure the program continued. And so, I just wanted you to take a minute, if you don't mind, to talk about the meaning the meaningful nature of this partnership and how you've seen students be successful. Uh, well, thank you very much. Um, I'm honored to be put on the spot to answer this and and first of all, I mean, a huge shout out to the city. I mean, a number of you have been leaders under a number of mayors who have really championed education as a whole and literacy specifically. And the thing that we really see about the early learning collaborative that has lived on um now under the REV partnership is that these are community partners across our entire city that have a wide range of missions and programming purposes from providing art programs and ballet programs. But all of them have a shared goal that literacy matters in our community and a shared commitment that even if kids have signed up to come to a summer ballet program that there's still a way to incorporate a minimum of 30 minutes of daily literacy instruction. And so what we really see as the power in this is that it's a shared community goal that literacy matters. And that has really been championed by our city and our city leadership to say that literacy should be a top priority um across the entire city of Fort Worth. And we're thrilled about the community partners that again have diverse missions and purposes, but every single one of them has said our kids need to be able to read. And so this program continues um by serving about 12,000 students every year in summer. And because the summer results were so impressive and I know um summer slide was mentioned over 90% of the students in this program maintain literacy in the summer or they grow their literacy achievement. Yeah. And click to that next slide Monique because Elizabeth is talking taking your points. This is really important for council members that may not follow this really closely when you're asked what is the city doing to help with the literacy crisis in our city and really across the country. To me, this is the most reflective slide and it exists in multiple administrations. This is not specific to any particular mayor. Um, I really give credit to city staff for holding fast and to Elizabeth and philanthropy for really stepping up in a big way. But, you know, look at 2021. 100% of your students maintained or grew. The lowest percentage you saw was 97%. This is really preventing that slide that oftentimes happens for students um in the summertime. So, thank you to the city and your leadership for continuing to champion the importance of literacy. Um, because we do have kind of the numbers to show that kids are growing or maintaining when they're in these programs. And so, you're playing an active role in making sure that more kids are coming back to school in the fall with the literacy skills that they need to be successful during the school year. Thank you, Elizabeth. Thank you, Mayor. Can you have one more slide before we talk about the new literacy roundup as well? Okay. So, I'm going to pass it to Madori. We wanted to kind of talk about some of the things that we're doing in addition to our partnerships uh that we do together um so that we are supporting one another and making sure that our efforts are continuing beyond just the library and our community centers and school. Um, so we're really excited that we are collaborating on the summer reading program and you can see we have some really fun things that are happening there with library field trips and toddler time. Um, Eric and Mon'nique's department was just talking about the new e-card registrations and I think there were,200 new cards that were registered to kids that were participating in the camps which is really exciting. Um, we've also found great ways to leverage our partnership. We've given away a lot of books. Um and then infused uh leisure reading during the summer which has been fun. Also uh the literacy days that part has had with Fort Worth N nature center um and also the log cabin village and then story times in the park. Thank you Madori. Okay. And so we are uh quite excited uh for our new partnership that we have with Sid Richardson's Foundation. We mentioned that Pete Karen and Carolyn James were here also and so um we are thrilled that we'll be able to couple what we're already doing in layers and add this um great initiative. So this started now we're we're actively piloting the program. Um and so what we're doing now is we are offering the diebells screening and so Sid Richardson has been so great to provide volunteers. We have the Rotary Club um along with people that are actually uh trained and certified so that they can come out and and provide these screenings at our libraries and our community centers. Uh we've had two screenings and I don't know if Caroline want Caroline wants to come up. She's welcome. Come on. Um we are so excited to have had over 22 families participate in uh the last two roundups. I'm going to let her talk a little bit about what that looks like and what the excitement is. Also, they have provided these great resources and I'd like for you all to have one so that you can see what parents are receiving u when they walk away from the screenings. I'm not going to be as eloquent as Elizabeth. Um we are screening kiddos for dyslexia. My son has dyslexia and it was missed uh for several years. And so I think it makes a huge difference when we can identify these students early and give them intervention. And so the idea is that the families will come to us and we will screen their student for potentially dyslexia using the Dibble screener and pair them with an advocate. So if they are indeed at risk for dyslexia, we'll pair them with an advocate from Rotary who will then walk alongside them through the possible testing and um services through the school district. And Caroline, if you don't mind, you're a lifelong educator yourself and have been a principal within Forthd. So, this is something that both professionally and personally I know is important to you. Very important. Intervention is prevention and if we can find kiddos that have dyslexia or at risk for dyslexia and get them the services they need. These kids are problem solvers. They're amazing and we just need to come alongside those families and support them and change their lives. This past week, we screened uh 11 students and four of them came out at risk for dyslexia. We shared some tears with parents, but there's nothing quite like knowing what you're up against and being paired with a Rotarian, someone that's going to support you in the next steps. So, it was it was a wonderful way to spend my Saturday. And Charlie, you'll especially appreciate the model they're using and getting volunteers to be advocates from, say, the Fort Worth Rotary Downtown Club, similar to CASA. So, you create a training program. These parents really need someone to walk alongside them. They don't have to be an expert in dyslexia, but they do need to know how to advocate for these families, especially if language is a barrier education. And so, I think we're just getting started on something that could be very meaningful right here in the city. And we thought it was important that each of you as council members could also be help us get the word out as we kind of get our footing with this pilot. And sounds like we've had some successful rounds twice now. Yeah, the first two were just kind of getting my feet wet figuring out what was going to happen, but they went very, very well. and Monnique and Eric uh Lopez with the city parks have been amazing to work with and I love talking to librarians about reading. That's like the best thing when you go into a room full of librarians and talk to them about reading. They've been hugely supportive. So, it's been a pleasure to work with the city. Thank you, Caroline. We appreciate it. Mayor, yes, please. Council Flores, I'd looked at this very quickly. Very good. You know, chalk full of good information. I would ask, has there been any consideration to have this in Spanish? It is in Spanish as well. Great. Thank you. Yes, Council Member Martinez. Um, Mayor, are we considering and I know Alcon helps at the schools, but have we considered them as a partner? You know, just me personally, I didn't get my first uh pair of glasses until I was in fourth grade, but I'm sure I couldn't see before then. And it was only because I was at um George Clark and Alcon came to the school. So maybe that could be a potential partner. It's a very good suggestion. Absolutely. Thank you. We cut you off. Do you have council member Bivvens? I uh I just sent a text to my friends at Fox 4. You know, every year they always do Eric first. And so I'm hoping we can get ahead of that and not only just talk about reading, but everything that you've done when it comes to children, literacy, what what have you. So we'll see if we can get ahead of that. I want our communications team to be aware. Uh years ago when my mom chaired the library board, her biggest deal was making sure kids had their library cards because we were not making that a push back then. And so hats off to Glenise whether she's here or not for focusing on that. But when you look at the whole body of work that you're involved in, I think we could leverage that into something real huge. And so just know that you inspired me as you know because you know my uh limited engagement with children before before you started to and through. You used to say you didn't like kids. Well, you know, trying not to go there, but uh I like the idea of of helping them. I don't require a lot of, you know, real close interaction, but I think it it would be helpful. So, she's not going to babysit anytime soon is what I heard. We appreciate you, Mayor Pro Tim. Thank you. We'll see if we can't get that. Thank you. And Councilwoman Bivvens, that is truly the greatest setup for our last slide in the presentation. So, thank you for that. I really appreciate it. This isn't necessarily literacy per se, but I would not be a good library director if I didn't take an opportunity to share with you that we do have many reading resources for anybody who would like to keep reading. So, of particular interest to me, we have 1.5 million physical and digital books that are available um at all different reading levels, all different topics. So, if you're not a person who likes to crack open a book and and read text, download the Libby app, listen to a book because that all counts as reading and we all learn in different ways. Um, so please do that. We also have library cards that are free for every child in Texas regardless of where you live. So, please take advantage of that. We also have an educator's card which allows our educators to keep the books a little bit longer than a normal library card. Um, the incentivized reading challenges. We all know we have a challenge with literacy in Fort Worth, but I've also seen data that shows this is a community of readers. I think the classic example is our Mayor Summer's reading challenge. Last year, we logged over 4 million minutes read, which was double what we logged the year before at just over two million minutes. So these kinds of um incentivized reading challenges, seasonal reading challenges are a really great way to keep reading and read with your family. Parents, you read a book while your kids reading a book and all log together. It can be a really fun family event. We also have the afterchool homework assistants um as well as several different book clubs for all ages and special needs. So, we have a book club where if you have developmental disabilities, you can still read a great book and be part of the discussion. So, please take advantage of all the amazing things we have at the library. Thank you, Madori. Um, council, as we close this one out, we're going to I've I've prepared a literacy recognition. Each of you may have participated in discussions and press conferences both at Fort Worth ISD around this topic and as well as the county commissioner's court. rather than doing something that was simply ceremonial in our typical city council meeting. I wanted this to be tied to the work that is actually happening, not just by the people around this table, but importantly by your city staff that will continue well after we're gone. And importantly, we couldn't do this work without the partnership from people like Caroline and your team and Elizabeth and the city Richardson Foundation to bring us new ideas. Council Martinez even had an additional partner that was maybe needed around sight for our children. I think we're just getting started is the point of all this. And so a few things that I think are important to come across. I'm not going to read this entire resolution before I ask our partners to stand with me in a moment. But we understand in Fort Worth to have a world-class city, it takes a world-class education system. There are 12 different school districts in the city of Fort Worth. Fort Worth ISD is just one of them. I often use a statistic. About half of your students attend Fort Worth ISD. The rest attend others. Um but I don't think anyone around this table is satisfied until every single student has access to a high quality education. And we understand that literacy is really at that foundation. It continues to be a priority for us. Unfortunately, only 35% of Fort Worth um public school students are reading at grade level, which is a significant challenge. And so, each of you are really allowing this city to to rise to the occasion and partner with the right individuals and organizations to really make some change around literacy. I know that progress is possible. You see that it's possible in small and big ways across the community. I've been incredibly heartened by people like Caroline who say, "I want to make a difference. I'm just a mom with a mission and look what can happen with that in a very short period of time. I think Caroline, you spoke to our city council back in October and here we are, you know, in April and you've already enacted a partnership that's incredibly meaningful and meeting the needs of families in Fort Worth. So, we really do appreciate you for that. So, importantly, we want to give special recognition um to Secretary Garren, to Caroline, to Elizabeth Brands, and the many others are not in the room. Um to Mon'nique and your entire staff. I know that you have a great team. So does Madori and the library system. They can't all be here because they're out serving the community, but we just wanted to make sure that that we are prioritizing literacy in the city of Fort Worth moving forward. This is not just a ceremonial push. This is something that each of us should be charged with and really encouraged to make a difference for our students today and in tomorrow. So, with that, I'm going to ask our partners to stand with me, take a quick picture, and then we'll move into our next presentation. Thank you. Okay. Sorry. [Applause] Pete, if you want to come up to the microphone, please do. He's going to say a few things. Thank you. Thank you for recognizing this is working. Yeah. This great work. And um Madori spoke and Mon'nique spoke. But I'd also like to bring to your attention two of their colleagues that have done extraordinary work here. Eric Lopez works with Monique and Javier Rodriguez with the library works from Madori. But those two have been so entrepreneurial and working with Caroline, taking this great idea and it's just been extraordinary how they took this idea and turned it into reality in such a short period of time. I'd also like to note that go beyond grades which the library is a partner is is a partner in this effort as well. So thank all of you and the city staff is doing a fabulous job. Thank you for your generosity, Pete. We appreciate you. Are Eric and Javier here? I didn't see them. They're working somewhere, aren't they? Jury duty. Oh, jury duty. Of course. That's Yeah, that is work. Thank you very much, Pete. We appreciate it. Council, we're going to move into our emergency medical services update. Uh, Chief Dim Davis will kick things off. Good afternoon, uh, Mayor Council. Jim Davis, fire chief, and uh I am privileged to stand before you today and give you a most recent update on a lot of uh work that's been going on behind the scenes in order to prepare for an anticipated one uh July one uh cut over officially of the emergency medical services system. I uh need to start out by just paying um a little bit of attention to the great group of people that have come together from all city departments. And while this list is not all inclusive, I think it's uh incumbent upon me to share with you that city manager's office and the fire department uh leadership team have u been um working side by side together uh specifically um helping to shepherd the process with a group of folks around us from every city department specifically meeting as a leadership team on Mondays. Uh, and again led by the city manager's office and the fire department, but Reggie and the lab staff with Christy and and Thomas and then Taylor and Chris from legal and Tony and Brandy talking about the, uh, compliance part and I'm sorry, billing and procurement. Um, Diana, Holly, um, and Leela all working together from the HR component. uh Marilyn and her team um with facilities and fleet, Kevin and Sally with the IT folks, and then Sunonny and Aubrey helping with uh you know the consolidation of our 911 services. Nothing could have gotten done without the work of all these folks and I just feel that right off the bat I need to call attention to that. As you know, um MedStar has operated as the single uh service provider for the city of Fort Worth and 13 member cities uh for the last 30 years. And in 2022, um, the leadership of the MedStar team came to the city and fluctuated between 6 and $10 million in a subsidy request to the city of Fororth in October of 23 with the city of Fort Worth support. Uh, there was a a outside consultant brought in called Fitchen Associates. It was done through a competitive process. Uh, the the uh, and bidding. Uh, the mayor's office put together an EMS ad hoc committee. That EMS adhoc committee came back with specific recommendations and challenges to what they saw as the future from a policy perspective of emergency medical services in the city of Fort Worth. Their challenge was to establish the system underneath the fire department to uh drop the unit hour utilization rate to 0.50 which uh is a measurement of the work productivity of the of the folks riding ambulances in the city. um to reduce and eliminate the inner facility transport business from the system as it was determined that taxpayer funding was helping to support um the uh not for-profit uh not for-profit hospital uh in u business. Uh they wanted to classify new a new single role EMS uh civil service position within the fire department working alongside the dual role structural firefighter emergency medical technicians. And then uh they wanted the the uh member cities to be allowed to come across and come a part of this journey with the city of Fort Worth providing services to them while maintaining two advisory boards, one of the member cities and one of the medical community uh looking at medical best practice within the communities. So the timeline that was set uh as I've started to go through the first part of it on the left side of the screen here on the right side of the screen you start looking at the fact that we have uh been working with uh local 440 and finalizing what that looks like. Uh mayor and council has had the opportunity to review that and approve it. The uh EMS interlocal agreements with the member cities um have all been worked upon and I'll talk about that a little bit more in depth. uh the fire and EMS 911 consolidations uh to put fire and EMS into one single combined dispatch facility uh and then a longer term plan that is being u built out by Sunny and Aubrey and their teams. The governance structure, the employees will be and are part of the Fort Worth Fire Department under the city of Fort Worth. The operational employees consist of the emergency medical technicians, the paramedics, their supervisors, and the telecommunicators. They are being represented by local 440 as you know. Uh the office of the medical director has been established as a separate independent department. Um and you have uh been briefed on that previously. There are two advisory committees that have been established and they are beginning to meet. The emergency service advisory board they will be meeting for the first time May 8th uh to formalize their uh operating and structure. The medical control advisory board has met uh once um and they are um formulating their their structure as well. Services to the member cities has been documented by ILAS um and all of the member cities have been uh very cooperative in in getting that completed. um member cities um are working towards uh well they've been provided allocations for cost services based on a unit hour response consumption and I'll talk about that a little bit more in a couple slides. So here's where we get to start talking about some budget issues. Uh when Fitchion Associates was in town, they talked about the idea of approximately $10 million in new revenue for supporting the current system and that projected uh budget is at $85 million currently uh regarding um bringing EMS into the fire department. So the conversation about a projected budget impact maximum we expect to be approximately $21 million. And where that's coming from is the additional staff pension and health care benefits. Pension and health care benefits account for 16 million of that. And then the additional staff that was uh 75 additional staff positions to meet the growing demand that uh Fitch identified in the service um of of the community was the uh is what is anticipated to be the remaining the outside of that um with the pension and healthc care benefits uh all of the other line items that have crossed over are right in line with the Fitch uh assumptions strategy. um the fleet and equipment. Uh we have uh got a capital replacement plan. Uh when we started looking at fleet, we determined that there was a need for immediate investment in fleet related to ambulance purchases. Um approximately 26 of their ambulances were in need of being replaced. And then there's been some challenges uh not just with the uh vehicles but also with consolidation of the communication strategy from radio and and um radio talk groups and making sure that fire, police and EMS can all speak together on the same channels. Um the legal and compliance part of it, the final external audit from the MedStar uh board and the MedStar uh organization is due to come before you I believe tomorrow. Um the member cities uh and the ILAS uh have been complete with a lot of due diligence and a lot of work by Taylor specifically. The budget allocations will be going and and they need to go to each member city before June of each year. And our commitment to them is we get that ahead of that um so they can do their budget process. And I've got a slide here that explains a little bit more about how they're being how their allocations are working. Um we are working currently with the state to get our updated license uh from being a first response organization to be a full transport organization. The application's been submitted. We are waiting on a regional inspection. Uh we don't see any anticipated challenges with that. It's just a matter of of working with them to get them in here to do that. Um, we are beginning to permit other ambulance services in the non-emergency setting to begin working with the hospital systems to do their non-emergency interfacility transports. We've been phasing that out. Um, we've reduced approximately 50% of that to this point and we've permitted approximately six private services. There's a fair amount of interest in the west side of the metroplex at this point. So the memorandum of understanding that's uh with the member cities dissolves the interlocal agreement that MedStar was created under. The service local agreements are specifically how we will interact and support the member cities and then a uniformed EMS ordinance um is uh has been put in place with the July 1 start date from a uh from the member cities uh from the city of forward serving the member cities. that is the is the way that this system has been set up. So when we talk about the uh budget, it it's important to understand that the amount of budget at 80 million or thereabouts is being offset by the re recovery of revenue that's associated with ambulance transportation reimbursement. And while there's a lot of complexity in that, um MedStar currently is generating um 60 plus million dollars a year in in revenue. We expect that that will that will continue. There'll be um the the one caveat to that that I have to express to you is with some of the uncertainty that's going on in the landscape of of the political uh climate right now in reimbursement rates, we're not exactly sure where that's all going to sit. Um but we're watching that very closely and everybody is experiencing that right now across the country. Um the we will continue to use an outside vendor. The benefit to using an outside vendor is that we challenge them and and their responsibility is to work in our best interest to stay on top of those ever changing um uh dynamics regarding what can be built, how much can be built, and how it's done uh without running a foul. And so I I I'm I'm really supportive of that and I think that that's that's what MedStar was doing and we're transitioning that over as well. And Tony and Reggie and his team are leading that. Chief, do you know off the top of your head what percentage of um are we billing to private insurance versus Medicare or Medicaid on? Yes, ma'am. There is uh that's called a payer mix. And the payer mix primarily in this community, which is very similar to most major cities across the United States, 60% is either Medicare or Medicaid. Approximately 10 to 20% 10 to 15% is some type of private insurance. And depending on the community, uh, the uncompensated uninsured rate is as high as 22% in some communities. Um, and that is pretty consistent with what we're seeing here, but I can get you specifics because the building company provides that to us on a monthly and quarterly basis. So, I can get that specifically for you. Thank you. Uh, because they do track that. uh each individual department that we're working with, IT, fleet, facility, those folks, they are all working with us to um put together their M andC's that need to come before you for uh their purchasing agreements and things like that. Uh the anticipation is they will come to you here uh in the month of April so we can get started with that ahead of the July 1 timeline. Uh from an HR standpoint, we're looking at 617 FTEES coming over and that includes 40 part-time folks that MedStar currently has. Uh the the conversation was about bringing those over um at least in the interim until we figure out get our get our feet underneath us. We figure out how and where we need to utilize them or if we need them moving forward. That is a discussion down the line. But that is uh that is the staffing component of it. Um we have recently there is the HR folks we worked with they wanted to make sure that in in the event that there was a group that did not transition over. They wanted to make sure we had an eligibility list to hire from so we didn't come you know come through the door without the opportunity to hire if needed. I'm very proud. I'm very excited to tell you that almost a thousand people signed up to take our first single roll EMT exam. Over 400 closer to 425 actually showed up and took it. There was a high pass rate and uh so we're we're really we're set up really nicely in the event that um some folks that have been offered the opportunity to come over decide to go in a different direction. I'm not the least bit concerned that we're not prepared to do some hiring immediately to reduce uh any type of uh overtime that would would occur from that. Um so that's that's actually really exciting. There was a lot of interest in that test. Um, we have been provide we've been working with the MedStar employees in the fire department, doing town hall meetings, recording them, getting them out, answering as many questions, oftentimes repetitive questions about what the transition is going to look like to them regarding their career, their benefits, their salary, their working conditions. And so, we've been working with um with the city folks and the communication folks in HR to to do those meetings on a monthly basis. Um 440 has been very a very cooperative and and very helpful in making sure that um there's a smooth and seamless transition. Uh we had a meeting, we had a couple days last week where folks came in, they started getting their pictures taken, they started meeting with the 440 about their healthcare, they started getting uh their uh photo IDs taken so they could be onboarded in the city's HR system. So there's been a lot of opportunity for these folks to start meeting and working together. there. Um, we do have a plan. We, uh, ADP was the payroll group for MedStar and we were planning on staying with them in through the transition of the fire police payroll project and there's been some challenges with that from the ADP standpoint, not the city, but rather ADP. So, we have made a decision to pivot and we're all working together on that. Uh, the consolidation of the 911 centers between uh, the uh, fire department and MedStar is ongoing. The decision has been made to temporarily colllocate them at the MedStar facility on Altameir. That budget is on time uh or is on point. That is uh the pro the project is on time and is on budget. Uh we have been colllocating a couple different times now for a few hours is is uh the knockout of the walls or the electricity needs to be upgraded. So there's been opportunity for these folks to already be working together. They're doing some good stuff together. They're working well. there's been no challenges there. Uh I'm very appreciative of it and of facilities uh and the uh police uh because they have helped to uh um welcome them in and and use some of their consoles during this outage that uh we had to it was a planned outage. So that's all on target. We're planning on trying to get that done in June. So, we've got a couple weeks ahead of time of the merger so that there's uh an opportunity for them. Uh we're not flipping an entire switch on in in July. Uh the fleet transition is going on. The the uh vehicles are right now they are being uh modified to accept the city's uh CAD system. So, they're on the city systems and that is going well with the support of it. the that this speaks to phase one of the 911 consolidation going on at Alder at the MedStar facility. Phase two is a plan that uh I believe that um Sunny is here to talk to you about and that is a longer term plan to use the zipper building. I'll let I'll defer that to him. And then the uh communications as I said is being coordinated by it. Chief. Yes, sir. May I interrupt you just for a quick second? And I don't want you to get too far forward because uh my questions go back to slides 10 and 11. Yes, sir. Um and I think you touched on this already. Uh using the external vendor, the billing uh part of that. Uh what what metrics or KPIs are are we placing on that vendor to make sure that we get as much revenue from that source as possible? So, the traditional KPIs that are measured um are the turnaround time on getting a claim out the door because in general there's a 90-day window in which from a time the claim is generated and filed until there's some type of reimbursement. However, secondarily, there's also the work that needs to be done to work to maximize the to your point to maximize the allow allowable reimbursement rate based on when and where the um recipient of service is in their deductible. So, there's something to be said. We don't just measure how quick the turnaround, but we want to make sure that it's filed at the proper time to maximize that reimbursement. and we work with and and I believe that Reggie and the finance team will be also working with the billing uh organization to make sure that we comply with federal law on that but to do it to your point. So that's one and that's the main one. Number two is making sure that we have a good um policy for folks that either um feel that um they were built inappropriately, that they have a a dispute with the bill um or are unable to pay. And so a some type of charity care policy has to be in place. And as an example, most major cities in the United States, um last year, as an example, Charlotte, Meckllinmberg County was about $4.5 million in um uh write offs from inability to pay. and as long as and so we'll make sure that folks that meet that criteria are given the opportunity in your districts but but also making sure that we work with folks that do have an ability to pay to make sure that we um we do so we get as much back as we possibly can within the limits of the law. All right. Then my second question when you mentioned the pivot that you had to do due to that technical issue with payroll. I know that we've talked about this before you know there was a plan in place uh to try to you know resolve this but we're pivoting for now but do you have any idea what time frame we're talking about when we can get this sorted out? I don't believe that I am the perfect person to answer that question. What I do know and I think it's fair of me to share with you is that that process um is moving in a positive direction and they are in um the testing phase now with certain groups. However, a decision was made um to slow that down somewhat uh when the ADP decision was made in order to fully focus on making sure that we bring the MedStar folks in and get their pay right coming out of the gate. So, what I what I'm what I'm trying to say is um the light is is still green. It's trending yellow, but Kevin and and his team have been very um they're they're very confident in the direction it's going and they've been very collaborative in helping us make sure that we have provisions in place that there are no payroll errors with the MedStar folks coming over. Makes sense. Does that Yes. Does that answer your question? Thank you sir. I do want to brag about this slide a little bit. I think that this is something that's very positive that we have seen. Uh even though um we are not fully responsible for the system, we have a lot of of things going on in it that that we are owning and we are seeing that the average response times right now are just under seven minutes, 6 minutes and 45 seconds on average across the city. There are certain council member districts that there have been areas of challenge and we have been very um pleased to be able to report to those folks that the um the transition we're we're seeing a decrease in folks leaving the MedStar system in anticipation of coming over and we're and because of that we're able to get ambulances on the street and therefore we're able to get ambulance in front of addresses in a proper amount of time. So, I I'm I'm very proud of this slide on behalf of the of the folks that are that are coming over. They're coming to work. They're out on the street. They're working side by side and um they're getting to places in in a reasonable amount of time at this point. And so, I just wanted to share that with you. This is the month of March based on and this is a response time update. Chief, do you remember a year ago maybe what these numbers look like roughly? Yes, ma'am. They were they were um above 10 minutes. Thank you. They were closer to 11 minutes. I and again I can get that for you for comparison. Thank you. So this is uh next slide is talks about the operational enhancements on the left is the things that you know we discussed in the ordinance um and the uh amount of expenditure going towards them. Um the slide here talks about the revenue and one thing I want to report I want to make sure that I point out to you here is that the member cities in addition the largest bucket there is is the reimbursement that we uh will be recovering from billing for services and for transports um the general fund support but then the uh red is the member city support each of the this is 14 and I want to explain that there's 13 member cities that were coming across as part of the transition since we did this. A 14th city and that being Richland Hills has asked to join the consortium and work with us um all moving forward. So there are now the city of for member cities and they are being and and here's a breakdown of their unit hours. As you can see, Halddem City is the highest. White settlements not, you know, too terribly far behind them in Forest Hills, but then it really drops down to some places like Westover Hills and and uh Lakeside, Edgecliffe Village, Blue Mound, a whole lot smaller. So, what am I talking about here? These cities, the way this system is being set up, we know that it costs us about $140, $150 a unit hour to operate an ambulance. that is the truck, the people on it, the equipment and things like that. It's $141 I believe. Um we know that in the previous fiscal year they used ambulances a total of x amount of hours. They needed ambulance transportation services from the time of dispatch to the time in backend service. thousand runs in their city on average a thousand hours um of time because a typical ambulance run and transport in the general area is 60 minutes. So do that math and that is a calculation of how these uh communities are being um asked to help supplement the readiness model of our system as we do dynamic employment around the city. Uh so I share that with you to talk about the idea that we will be doing we owe this information to them in June every year so that they can do their budget and then we will true up with them based on what their actual usage is versus what their uh pre uh existing usage was. So future of what we're looking at, we do expect that revenues, you know, this slide talks about the more we transport people, the more receipts we expect to receive and provided that everything stays the way it is today and that there's no changes in the reimbursement structure from the federal government and the state government, we expect that that will be true. We expect that the system will grow. We expect that our improved response times and our system reliability will allow us to provide those transports instead of giving them to other agencies in order to do them for us because of our lack of capacity. Right now, Eagle Mountain, American Medical Response over in Arlington do uh every day a fair amount of transports for the MedStar system and we have seen a a reduction in our dependency upon outside agencies uh over the last couple months. There are other strategies that are being explored to manage the volume that do not require transports to an emergency room. Those things are are such as tele medicine and going um either through the 911 center or going to the to the place of residence and talking to folks about all right do you need to go do you want to go to the emergency room versus we can use tele medicine to get a doctor here right here on the screen and talk to you right now. The whole idea and the concept is if it costs us $300, let's say, to do a run and we're only being reimbursed $250 run, is there ways that we can make sure that we stay within budget and make sure ambulances are available for those that truly need to be transported by ambulance. But while the city's investing more in our EMS operations is which what we're sitting here talking about today, we do believe that the increase in revenue will be will uh from transports that we are doing will offset the cost of providing that service. Our outreach strategies, we've been doing the town halls we talked about. We're doing plenty of um there's a SharePoint site that everybody's welcome to get on. The Fort Worth fire department has a weekly update uh uh public information uh press that they put out. MedStar folks have been getting that. Sunny was here to talk to you about telecommunicator week. EMS week's in May and we uh and we've got a lot of things planned for that from a public education roll out. Um we have put a cultural awareness committee together. This is Maryanne. Many many of you may remember her from her time here with the city. Um we did a dayong retreat at assistant chief retired Homer Robertson's place. Uh we all got together. We decided as a group between the MedStar leadership, the fire department leadership coming together, what our mission and values was going to be that we were going to be one team that we were stronger together. We decided on an acronym that is uh stands for the true north and that is putting people first uh that we will be uh we will work towards operational excellence. We'll be loyal to the mission. We will be aligned in our mission. We will work to have build resiliency into the system. We will function with high integrity and selflessness to service. That is that is our guiding principles in putting this merger together. And I I I leave you with the last couple things here. The next steps in this transition are to finalize the 26 budget to make sure that the member city allocations are are just are put out to them so they can budget, get our inspection from the uh state department of health. um finish the onboarding and recruiting process in the event that we need to give a class and then get the transition costs aligned for the remainder of 25 heading into budget cycle for 26. I share this with you. This is the first branded ambulance that's out on the street. Couple things of note that I would show you is that gold star in the middle. Uh council member, as you'll know from our time on the board together, that was generally red as the medar. Um we have turned it gold as you know a tribute and a tip of the hat to where the EMS systems come and in the upper back left in the back above the 99 in the upper part you'll notice the Molly in the city of Fort Worth those markings around it um the blue band says proudly serving and those uh around it are the member city logos of the fire departments or the cities that are the 14 contributing member cities. So with that folks, I I appreciate your time and I'll answer any additional questions. Thank you for the great update, Chief. Questions from council or comments? Council member Larsor. So really more just a comment is really um that Councilman Flores's point was about the payroll issue. Um I know you mentioned some of the successes that we've had with the uh with MedStar and having more ambulances out there now. Um I think firefighters have become accustomed to getting paid whatever they get paid, right? It's like it's in God's hands whatever they get. Um, what I do want to make sure we do though is as our MedStar employees are coming over, I'm sure they're going to be happier, better quality of life, but I just want to make sure that when their expectations are managed um, and that they understand, they may be some headaches and some hiccups, but we are working to get under control because I'd hate to see us lose them to someone else who is at least getting them paid on time. I I love our firefighters. our love our our MedStar folks, but at the end of the day, they're all they're doing it to serve their community, but also they have to pay bills. And so, I just want to make sure that we are doing what we need to as a city to ensure that, you know, this is a priority uh in getting that whole mess fixed. So, anything that we can do, uh please let us know on that. So, thank you. I I appreciate your comment and I assure you that, um I I feel the same way. The last thing that I would want to happen is them to lose confidence because of that. Um, we've been working I I have the confidence in Kevin and his team that that they what they have brought seems to be very functional and could work. Um, and if it works in this particular setting, then that's what we'll roll out to the entire organization. Um, however, I'm also um working with my team to make sure that we build in um a way to um capture the exceptions to their payroll, you know, when they work in an additional overtime shift or something. So we have good records of that. In the event that that we have a system issue and we need to go back to paper and pen, we've got the data. So we we're working on a safety net as well as a solution um with the confidence that we're going to pull it off. Yes, sir. Cas, I think you know I'm a fan of yours. If there was a Jim Davis fan club, I'd be president. Uh years ago, there were two companies. one named TU Electric and the other was Lonear Gas. And when one acquired the other, the cultures never fit. That's how you got Atmos. Okay. I'm looking at how you are going about making sure you build a team and I just want to acknowledge you for that because you're taking it very seriously and I think that's very important. So, I acknowledge you for that. Council member, I'm going to say thank you to that, but I'm also going to tell you that there's two members of the upper middle management and leadership of MedStar that um that decided to stay and see this through. Um their names uh are uh Heath and Shawn. They're part of the uh leadership team of this group. Uh they have been an absolute pleasure to work with and they have been uh essential to making sure that the uh staff of MedStar feels that um there's inclusiveness. And so I can't say enough about them and um and and and I thank you for the recognition that we're trying to put a good team together to to take this home. Council member Flores, did you have Yeah. Yes. Chief, um when you covered the budget and finance, suffice it to say all along we knew that we would be looking at an improved system, you know, with some projected, you know, increase in costs, right? We're merging two departments and offering a higher level of service in doing so. uh I don't want to do a deep dive but uh in your opinion I mean uh for example uh the projected annual budget impact of approximately 21 mil uh that for me you know when I look at this is is not entirely surprising right I'm not going to do a deep dive on the numbers but again it's along the lines of what we projected we knew what you know the startup costs were going to be and we also knew what the year after that was going to look like. You know, we expected those cost increases until things uh settle down and, you know, and all our operations, you know, are functioning as they should. Uh do you have anything that you want to add to that uh to give us a guess a little more context? You know, council member, the only thing that I I really think that I can give to provide context to this is that some of the um some of the other cities that I could say are somewhat comparable. Um Austin, Travis County, we just eclipse them in size. Um I'll repeat that again. We've just eclipsed Austin in size. That's kind of cool, right? Well, their EMS budget as a standalone agency outside of the Austin Fire Department in 2024 was $115 million a year. um Meckllinburgg County, which does uh Charlotte, um they receive a $27 million subsidy in their 25 2025 budget from the county and they have an EMS budget of 8079 plus million. So I I do think that that number sounds a lot. Um, I do call everybody's attention to the fact that it will be offset by revenue recovery from billing for service. An EMS system billing is never a profit center and going to make money. It's always billing to offset the cost of providing the service. You have challenged um the leadership of the city um in the city manager's office and the fire department to um enhance response times um and to provide a level of care to the community. Um and and I think that your commitment with this is um demonstrating is giving us all the tools that we need in order to deliver on that. Thank you. Yes, Councelor Williams. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Chief, for the update. Um I just um kind of reflecting on this process would just like to pause for a moment um in gratitude. Um there's there's moments when we sit in these seats um where we have to make decisions that aren't easy and certainly keep us up at night. And for me, this was one of those decisions. Um particularly because my dad um you know the story, but when we were going to the church and um right after an ice storm and my dad slipped and fell and broke his ankle and was laying on the ice in our church parking lot. And when we called 911, um the first response we received was a fire department, uh Fort Worth Fire Department fire truck. Um, and after waiting for a long time, my dad, um, on the cold ice, laying there in pain and me grabbing everything I could out of my car to bundle him up. Um, after 15 minutes, I'm the fourth firefighters who were there with me every step of the way encouraged me that we would probably be better off picking up my dad off the ice, putting him in my car, and not driving. Um and so this moment is um deeply significant for me um because it was a hard decision for this entire council. Um and we did something um that was hard, that was difficult. Yes, that had cost to it. Um but the cost didn't outweigh saving lives. Um and so I commend you and the entire team and just wanted to take a moment to ground ourselves a bit in the why that um many lives lives that I may never encounter um will survive and be able to do great things in this world um because of the decision we made. So God bless you and thank you council member. I I thank you for those comments. I I would add that um your zip code should not determine your outcome, right? and my commitment to you and I believe our organization's commitment to you um is to maintain a fiscal responsibility at the same time clinical competency and working together with the medical director's office to deliver that and again uh we couldn't do it without the support of mayor and council and the city manager's office and so um and every one of those people that I spoke about at the very beginning of this it's a team right and um I'm just very blessed and I appreciate the opportunity to to help the team get to get to this point. Amen to that. And we certainly did that. Um all the while honoring the the people um who will serve on these trucks and who will support this system day in and day out. Um and we did that with dignity and class. So um thank you again for leading uh the charge. Thank you. Any other questions or comments from council? No. Very thorough update, incredibly helpful. Thank you for taking the time to walk through the slide deck and to the entire team. multiple departments to getting to this place. I know that council I I feel secure in our decision and look forward to full implementation in July. I also wanted to mention Laya Peoples who was here earlier on another IR. I watched her work for MedStar on the HR side and she came over to the city really quickly and I've been so impressed with her and her team. Um, if you look at the HR slide alone, the number of employees you brought over pretty seamlessly is incredibly impressive. And and also want to thank you for paying attention to statistic culture as you integrate another department into the fire department, which is I know you'll you'll you'll get some kinks out over the next few months, but I have confidence you've you've got the right people in place. So, congratulations. Thank you, ma'am. Thank you. Okay, council. Let me look back and we're going to go um animal care and control and then go 911. Sorry, Sunny. Hi, Brian. What's going on, guys? How's everybody? Good to see you. Good to see y'all. Good day, right? Good day. It's the best April 15th of 2025 I've ever had, ever. It's not even a not even a discussion. So, I'm pleased to present to you all Brian Doerty, director of Go, excuse me, code compliance. Um, so we have an update on our live release rate as well as just some things going on in the animal world right now. Uh, obviously here's some of our awesome volunteers and the picture on the left is actually of a transport we did recently which we've had a significant improvement on. So I wanted to highlight it and if you're thinking are you just throwing a bunch of, you know, dogs into a plane and flying it. Yeah, that's exactly what you're looking at. Yes, when we have out of state transports on a plane, we are loading them up so that they can go somewhere else to find their forever home and, you know, just uh helping everybody out. I love that photo. Uh we're going to give you a live release update as well as some specifics on the challenges that we have with that as well as new programs and communications initiatives. Uh advisory board update um some updates to Silox to get it to reach ideally to uh the 2026 bond proposal that we also have in here. Um and that is from one of our recent events as we're having more at city hall. Uh the live release rate is sort of everything in the animal world that we work around. And just so you all understand that is uh you know we're trying to get all these animals out of the shelter so they can find their their homes and you know improve their lives as well as uh you know the families that they take on. We do have a significant high call volume um and obvious resource limitations. Uh as well as uh increase in our intake is about 5% annually. Um which is a challenge because that is not really sustainable. you can't just forever keep building, you know, to house these animals, which means we have to redirect and we got to work on information in the actually in the neighborhood. So, people are responsible pet owners. You know, they're getting them vaccinated, they're getting them altered as they should. Um, and then obviously there's uh staff retention and workforce challenges. It is a very, very, very, and I'll look at every single one, very hard job to work in animal services. Uh there's there's there's no other way to put it. It's uh you're dealing with living things that you're doing your best to take care of them and find their home and and oftentimes that's not the outcome and it's as challenging as it sounds. It's uh it's actually more than that. So I I can't respect them enough uh to to wait into that a little bit as an update that we're going to have. Uh we have had to close both of our shelters because we had a distemper virus outbreak. Um it's not ideal. It happens in the animal world. Uh there's other shelters also dealing with outbreaks. Um and just to give you an idea, distemper is a virus. Uh so there's there's not any treatment really. It's isolation and and taking care of them. But it's it's infected through the wildlife out in our our animal community because as you may know it's we're all in this together. It's not these animals are with us. We are all in this all together. And so obviously we'd like all the animals to be vaccinated. We don't we don't get you know not everyone's going to participate which is why we have to get out into the public and and make sure they're vaccinating and being responsible pet owners. Uh the mortality rate sadly is 50% in adult dogs and it's 80% in puppies. Um it's uh it's it's not a fun topic to go over, but you know it's it was it was brought on by um on the 21st through our random uh testing, which is really good. I I can't uh I can't thank staff enough. That is one thing that as far as this whole process is when it comes to preparation, execution, and overall just care of these animals. Uh I would put our staff up against any city at all. It's they've I've been blown away at at how fantastic they've done this. And I say all that to say um here's the timeline where it started at our north campus and with through further testing we found a more and then just a few that we've had in our Silox but out of abundance of caution we had closed both of them. uh Silox has since done a soft opening so it's north meaning the animals that were isolated that you know are are we feel safe to go out and through our our vets recommendation which uh Dr. Well, she's awesome right over there. Um has been instrumental in this as far as the as you can see there's almost 1500 tests that we've done. Um that means we've done multiple waves on animals to make sure that you know it it's not growing or or lowering. We've had 74 positives. But out of the the 700 plus animals we have I'll take that. That's a very low rate. Um if you're thinking the worst case scenario is exactly what the worst case scenario could be and we didn't have that. But I I do want to give many thanks to our staff. uh Chris and his team have been fantastic to mitigate this and so yes that will affect our live release rate but given how how well everything played out it didn't affect it as much as we thought. Um here's our comparison to other larger cities in Texas and we're all around the same same live release rate this year. Um I will say though that we're trending up. In fact this last uh week I think we had uh 90.5%. So we are incrementally getting up there and over 90%'s the goal but uh very very happy with staff. Um you can kind of see where it snapped back from COVID in 2023 but since it has been steadily going up and uh the amount of effort and resources that have been put into this is is really really awesome. Very very proud of the team. Um here's part of that uh with the new programs and communications initiatives. If you were on the city's website and would see the code and animal report before, it was a small phone book that they would have you look through if you wanted to look at statistics because we all love reading phone books. And I'm realizing right now in this moment, I'm dating myself because some people have no idea what a phone book is. Um, man, that's depressing. I'm going to keep going. Uh, we scaled them down to one pagers and so we highlighted the the live release rate, our intake adoptions, um, as well as, uh, the success stories that we've had. And uh our last transport, which was awesome, was 44 dogs that uh were able to be taken out. And excuse me, 13 were on the the urgent placement list, meaning you know they were right there. So that that's awesome. Um you can see a picture of one right. I can't draw on the screen, but I'm trying. Right there. Um but this is really just so you have an idea and the public has an idea. What are the highlights, you know, that I need to know to talk about the animal world? And then we still offer many other reports that are accessible, but we're we're pushing this out. We also do the same thing on the code compliance side, but uh I I tell the staff all the time, I said, "If you think the public's just going to come out of the woodworks when we do great things and tell everybody, you're not. We have to make sure that they're knowing what we're doing, what we're having success with, what we're tweaking, and what we're trying to, you know, get right because, uh, you know, we're always available for improvement. Um, this right here is a trailer that, uh, I actually discovered when I was looking for a trailer for the mobile tool shed, which went live and has had a lot of checkouts. Just to plug that in there real quick. Um, yes, exactly. Uh, we discovered this trailer far too large for for tools. Uh, it also had some repairs and was essentially just lifeless sitting there. Um, so it was reincarnated uh cuz I'm a stargazer and uh that life goes on with this trailer. Um, and so we're right now we're doing the repairs and we're going to have it as a mobile clinic. And I'm really really excited about this because the I we we're already reaching out to local vets to volunteer their time. And so we're gonna we plan on going into these underserved neighborhoods and offering spay, neuter, and vaccinations. And uh I mean on this last slide real quick, if you look uh you can see we are issuing citations. Um there's no way around that. Uh we they have to know how seriously you have to take you know being a pet ownership. And so with this effort right here, if we were going into these neighborhoods and doing all that we can, I feel more comfortable and I imagine y'all will feel more comfortable when you have to get to a citation. If you look up and you're like, they were offering free spay and neuter and vaccinations and you got a ticket for your pet not being altered. Yeah, you should have gotten a ticket. And so, uh, but you have to put in the effort. So, I'm really excited about this. We're getting it fixed right now and getting upfitted. We're going to have a a really cool design that we plan on putting it as well, but we're hoping to roll this out late summer. And so I'm I'm really excited about that. Um and as far as a lot of the stuff that we've changed up, um the new stuff, you've seen a lot of the adoptions events at city hall. Um as well as we've been pushing out some advertising on uh on the radio and then uh on our social media, we're trying to highlight all of our success stories as well as looking at our volunteer group. They're really important to us. uh they they're integral in what we do and so I'm pretty stoked that you know we're we're doing a day in the life of as well as just highlighting and spotlighting some of the efforts that they put forward. Um and Pets Smart right there we we reached a gold status for 2024 which was over I believe it's I'm going to be off by a zero. Yell Chris just yell it. A thousand uh pets we've donated have been adopted out of the PetSmart locations and that's a that's a pretty high award for them. I'm pretty stoked. Um, one of the changes you will see is we are expanding the committee on our advisory uh committee, animal shelter advisory committee and that's from 7 to 9. Um, the other two ideally are going to be an additional veterinarian as well as a representative from a nonprofit. Um, we would like, you know, to be able to have a trouble scaling down on who we select, but you know, we are hoping to get as many applications as we can. We're also going to increase the frequency from three to four times a year. Um, and this is really really important because this is sort of the conduit to the the community is we can have individual citizens come up and talk to us, but from an atlarge group where we can bring up issues to them or a policy change we made or some, you know, some incident that happened and how it was handled and and you bounce it off the committee saying, "Okay, what did y'all think? What did we do right? What did we do wrong? What do we need to improve?" And it's it's a very very good system when everyone's on the same page and it helps with mitigating how we're explaining things to the public as well as how we're handling our policies internally. Um this is sort of the outline of obviously how the the appointment process will go um as far as applications received. We're also you're going to see some annoying emails from me where I'm just reminding you that we're doing our board appointments and we'll also have a a flyer a little handout for y'all that you can if people are interested you can give to them kind of outlines what it means when you're on the board. there's a QR code to more information and so really really excited to get that rolling. You'll be seeing I believe on the next council meeting the change in the ordinance which you're only seeing the change from 7 to 9. This is more of the process that we're doing. Um one of the other exciting uh news that we have is we have allocated some funds to sort of uh do some renovations at Silox until we can get a new shelter ideally. You'll see that shortly. Um, we're renovating the play playyard as well as the the bathroom and improving the customer lobby and artwork and stuff like that. And then we have to get a lot of new kennel doors which uh are custom made and very expensive. Um, but again, when it comes to shelters, the amount of traffic and wear and tear these things take, it's just it's simply unless you're down there and kind of see the operations, it's it's hard to explain exactly how much traffic. But we're really big on cleaning standards and everything else to mitigate disease spread and simply it stuff just takes more wear and tear. Um the last update is we do have a new animal shelter on the 2026 bond at roughly $58 million. It's 4500 45,000 square feet which is pretty not significantly. I think it's about 28 30,000 square feet at Silox. However, it's all sort of peacemilled because they've had three expansions. um this 45,000 foot building is going to have where the continuity is going to work. Continuity is going to be better. The animals will actually have more natural light. The the standards that they live in are going to be higher to industry standards. So, I'm really really really excited to get this going. Um the lots that we're looking at, we're also looking at five to six acres, meaning if we have to expand, you can do it in the pod format that we have like at the north campus, which is a really big deal because the worst thing ever would be me coming back eight years later, even if we got it, be like, we can't fit any more animals. Um when in reality, if you can do expansion like that, you can sort of plan for the future a lot easier. A lot easier. So that is our updates that we have. Uh I was trying to be brief. I know a lot of people I can talk for far too long, but is there any questions you all have from the animal side? Mayor. Yes, Council Flores. Go ahead if you had a question. Nope, you're good. Okay. U just two questions on the spay and neuter um mobile unit. Um have you identified where the hot spots are in the city where you have the occurrences of more, you know, stray animals? Yeah, we can we can go back through our field calls and exactly, you know, see where we're needed and and where we would start working whenever we can get it set up with vets in line and have it built and everything. Yes. Okay. And as far as the makeup of your advisory committee, would that be reflective also of those hotspots in the city? Uh, I hope it is. Um, we can't force people to apply and be a part of it. So, ideally, that'll be a factor when we're looking at all the applications, but I'm not going to I'm not going to say there's not a scenario where we may need nine people when we have six applications. Um, so that's one thing where I'm going to pepper y'all. I promise it won't be too much. But, uh, if you have the opportunity to spread the word that, hey, you know, there's so many people that are care and, you know, involved in the animal community, it's like, well, let's take that one step further and help the city. So, yeah. Yeah. I used to serve uh several years ago on the animal advisory committee, and I I found it to be very uh, you know, enriching and informative. So, you know, I'd encourage anybody to uh uh to think good, you know, and think well, you know, on who you might appoint if approached. Last question. What's going to happen to the Silicox facility when it's replaced? That is a fantastic question. What is going to happen to it? Hasn't been decided. Yeah, that's that's one of the the tools where um you know, the city can maybe if if possible leverage that you know on on any number of things, but yeah, I there's no uh there's no certainty to it right now. Thank you, Council Member Crane, did you have a comment? Okay, Council Member Mah Hill. Um, well, we have the positive postman that comes to council meetings. I don't know. We need a nickname for you. You're the positive code compliance director. You're so happy, Brian. I'm so glad you're here. Um, and I do just want to reiterate that the hard work the animal control team does, y'all see the good and you see the bad. And I I really am amazed. Y'all have do have an emotional job and a very hard job. So, thank you every day for what you do for us. Um, I want to challenge my council members. If y'all have not been to Silox lately, it's in really bad shape. Really bad shape. Um, our employees look like they're working in closets. There's no natural light. Um, and y'all did actually handle the dister outbreak very well considering these animals are confined um, in appropriate spaces, but still, I mean, it's pretty tight. Um, addressing the live release rate, you've done an excellent job of providing us numbers with integrity. I know a lot of cities are not always as upfront with their live release rate and we're not at 90% but we've come a long way in two years and I'm really impressed with the work that you've done the short time that you've been here. So, thank you. Thank you. Any questions or comments from council council Williams and thank you. Um I echo the sentiments of both Council Member Flores and Council Member Hill. Um I just want to thank your staff too. Um this past Sunday we had um two dogs um who were stray and we called y'all on a Sunday and um we had to keep our kids inside during the worship services until we could figure it out and thanks to PD as well, the NPO and a couple of patrol officers kind of followed the dogs around the neighborhood until they found um their home. Um what I learned in that was a little bit more about this outbreak and that um um animal control couldn't take in new dogs, particularly these dogs were large breed um dogs. And so there was some angst and concern in the neighborhood about leaving them roaming without finding a home for them um for a number of reasons obviously. Um and so kind of two questions I'd like to learn more about um kind of where we are. I know you gave the timeline regarding the outbreak and when can we expect for um you know things to go back to normal and then secondly knowing that this is a challenge and the 2026 bond could you share more about how we're handling future outbreaks so that we don't have to necessarily disrupt services and bringing stray dogs into um our facilities without obviously putting them at risk for exposure to um a deadly disease. Yeah. Yeah. to your first question. Um there was a a soft opening. Actually, I think we're going to open Silox all the way because it was it started in North, but closing both shelters. Yeah, it's exactly what you said is we were needing great assistance from the public because we can't take in any more animals because there's a virus outbreak there. We we can't make this worse. And I realize that that's that's not a that's not a great feeling. I don't like saying that, but it's also where okay, let us network with our partners, you know, let let's see if you can network to find the owner and hold on to that animal. So, it's not ideal, but it is in these times where we need assistance from the public and and yeah, I was right in the middle of that when when you had called about those animals. Um, I will tell you that the amount of random testing um that we do here and what I've experienced it at other places I've worked, it's it's it's nothing short of miraculous what the team has been able to do with this disease outbreak. And so, uh, in future outbreaks, I I would keep it consistent with what we're doing. Um, it's had a much higher success rate with a lower, uh, you know, positive test rate. And it's it's it's shocked me, honestly. I've I've you've seen it in the animal world. Uh and it it there's I think there's at least four three or four other cities that are dealing with different disease outbreaks that have also had to close right now. So, it's it's an unfortunate part of it, but I've I can't be more impressed with the team. They they rock. It's just it's awesome. I wholeheartly concur. And then as far as the second question, I personally think if it's not included in plan, I'm sure it is, but if we need additional space in the bond to handle outbreaks and also in a way that doesn't disrupt operations, it might be something to consider. I would have never known about this until Sunday and um and I would certainly wouldn't have thought about it in terms of the bond. So, I wanted to offer that up for the discussion knowing that the plans may not have included that outbreak. If it does, great. If not, I would like to suggest that maybe it does to be more helpful in the future. I know y'all are living in strapped and doing an amazing job with what you have, but this is opportunity maybe to resource up so that y'all don't have to be as stretched in these type of circumstances. Yes, sir. Any other questions or comments from council? Great job, Brian. I also really appreciate you get strange anonymous emails with non-factual information that gets distributed to all council members and I always can't wait for Brian's very thoughtful response. It gives me strength. That's where all the energy comes from. You do a great job. But I it we joke but it's really difficult. I know because there's so much misinformation out there, but you and your department are doing a great job. To Chris, too, your team. Um, to Macy's point before, especially before we talk about bond election finalizing, please go see Sil Cox if you haven't had a chance to go see it in person. It really did help me speak to the needs of that particular facility and what we hope to do with the 2026 bond. But thank you, Brian. Okay, council, we're almost there. 911 update. Sunny, you've been so patient. Uh, Mayor and Council, thank you. I know the afternoon's getting long. Um, I appreciate, uh, allowing us a few minutes to talk about 911. Um, with me today, um, I've got our consultants that you're aware of, Fetch and Associates. I've got one of their representatives, so I'm going to introduce them just in a minute. Also, um, in a few minutes, Aubrey is also going to talk to us, uh, a little bit about our, uh, actions that are already underway. So, really, just to back up just for a minute and talk about our purpose. We're really talking about improving 911. Uh, what does that mean? That means operational efficiencies. That means reduced response times. That means assuring that, uh, everyone gets the help that they're asking for. Um, and we have already started actioning some of the information we're going to hear about today. Um, I do want to uh thank uh Chief Davis for kind of teeing up some of this discussion related to EMS. We're going to extend that conversation, too. But also, I I think he did it well when he talked about how we're very thankful for all the help of all the city team as well as our leadership, uh, city manager and, uh, all the office and assistant city managers have helped me and Aubrey and the team really understand this very complex challenge. Uh I do want to take us back a moment uh in the time here to 2022 2023 really talking about how this has been a timeline of progress of innovation. I won't go through each one of these but I I as I build on this graphic it almost becomes too much to to look at but but really there's a story here and that story is about the commitment to do better in service to the community and that's really what we're focusing on today. So to this moment, um, Fitch and Associates, uh, really took a deep dive into the operations at the 911 center, really looked at some of the data points and has, uh, some information for us. Uh, with that, I'll introduce Bruce Mohler. Actually, he's going to tell you a little bit about himself and how he led the Fitch team. Thank you. Good afternoon. I appreciate the opportunity to come back and speak uh, uh, to the mayor and council on this topic. My name is Bruce Mhler. I'm a senior consultant with Fitch. Um, historically as a background, my background's been in public safety for 30ome years. I've been a fire chief, city manager, assistant county administrator. Where's home for you, Bruce? Excuse me. Where's home for you? Uh, Tampa. Okay. Very. I hope you weren't trying to catch a flight this afternoon since we moved you three times. You can be honest. That's I will be I They have delayed my flight several times. Okay. So, sorry. It probably was us. So, luckily for me, the airlines have accommodated that. Okay. We appreciate you. But I what I want to do and it it's interesting uh Chief Davis spoke about it, Sunny just did. I want to go back to 2023 for those of you that may or may not remember. I I spoke to you in December of that year and we had at that time just done kind of the first blush of how the 911 center was performing and these were the metrics how the system performed. The 90th percentile is what we used. The national recommendations from both Nenina and the National Fire Protection Association focus at the 90th percentile. We also cited for you a study that had been done in seven large metro urban other centers that had primary and secondary PAPs calls have to be transferred. Um and the performance here um reflected that if not even maybe a little bit uh lower performing. The top left graphic here shows you what I showed you at the time. The reason is is a 911 caller that needs uh EMS and then fire to respond as a first responder. That call moved between the existing three different dispatch centers with police first answering the cone uh the call and asking certain information. You kind of see those um circles up there, the purple, the golden, and the reddish. That is information that was asked at each of the different dispatch centers. And the circles represent numerous times where that information was asked. What's the location of the call? That is much more difficult to determine in today's society with 80% of 911 calls coming from mobile devices. What is your phone number so I can call you back in case we get disconnected? What is going on in that information slowed the process down? That's the current state that is about ready to end that your staff has been working on for the last several months. The future state is represented on the top right. Chief Dave has alluded to kind of a phase one and phase two. This really is is is kind of an ideal future state is the phase two where a call occurs, somebody dials 911, the person that answers the call is able to get help going to them. It doesn't bounce between I don't have to repeat the information. It happens one time and that's what the right represents. A single call taker can put the call into the computerated dispatch system and that call will be routed to law, fire, EMS, whoever is needed. So that strive for the single person to talk to the caller is essential at least before dispatch. Just so you know, uh EMS uses something called pre-arrival instructions as does fire. So once resources have been dispatched, you may transfer the caller to somebody that can talk to them. What can I do to start CPR on a loved one? What should I do to evacuate the home or to manage an incident uh that may require the fire department? So, I just talked about 911, but there's also the radio channels, and you have numerous radio channels being used by the three different dispatch systems. We looked at that. This is rather br busy. This is all the primary channels. Here's the takeaway. On the top left on the scale, nobody ever reached what we call 0.2. Nobody ever got to 0.2 two airlings or in other words 20% of the time during any one hour of the day where the radio traffic was so busy that one telecommunicator or one radio operator couldn't handle it. This reflected that you have capacity within your system and potentially the opportunity to consolidate some radio channels to make the system more efficient. So let me go to the last two slides. This is busy. It's complicated. I'll break it down. Down the left side are the hours of the day. midnight through 11 o'clock pm. The different colors there are the police in blue, salmon is kind of the excuse me, fire department, EMS is green, and the total, look at that box on the far right, lower all by itself, 860 hours. The way the system uh has been staffed, I know Aubrey and Sunny have made some changes, but has been staffed for a 24-hour period across the three different dispatch centers. It was being staffed with 860 hours of personnel sitting in seats. It is a pretty impressive and significant effort. We applied something called airline modeling and you can see this is broken up for call intake and then radio. Call intake radio. This is what we modeled what is possible optimizing the system. Um again the first the takeaways it's complicated. I want you to look at the lower right again. 703 hours. With some of the recommended changes that we've talked about both in call intake and radio, you could reduce that by consolidating fire and EMS together. You can reduce the equ the equivalent of people being in there of perhaps adding some resources to police. Those calls will get answered in a timely fashion. The calls will get processed more rapidly. So in this snapshot of time potentially you could maybe save somewhere around 30 positions but I want to qualify something on that. We were asked about that at the time. In the report, we've talked quite a bit about in anything, Chief Davis alluded to this, when you make such a significant change in a system, you should act cautiously over time, implementing adjustments incrementally, evaluating the performance. Are we hitting the benchmarks we've established for ourselves? And to see if the reaction of the system remains the same. But overall, the city is moving in the correct direction. the consolidation of fire and EMS dispatch and a long-term goal of all three. Consolidating call intake will do several things. It will be a more efficient, a better run system, but more importantly, it will be more responsive to the needs of your community. And may I ask Bruce, this recommendation for future state, how much of this, and maybe I'll get into it, Sunny, can be implemented before we consolidate all 911 services into a new facility. and we can answer that later if it's helpful, but I just that question kind of lingers. I'll I'll yield to Sunny on that. Okay. Thank you, sir. So, just to address that and then I'll see if you had any other questions for Bruce. So, we are going to talk about that. We're going to talk about what we call phase one, which or phase zero if you will. We've already started um and then we're going to talk about how we transition to phase two. Uh but it is a definitely a future state that's going to take us time to get there. Uh I think that's a great tea up. Do you have any other questions for Bruce though on the data? No. Okay, I'm going to tee it up uh for Aubrey Enskco, our 911 administrator, and she's going to talk about the actions that are already underway. Thank you, gentlemen. Uh good afternoon. I'll try to keep this short and sweet. I appreciate Chief Davis's teed up wonderfully a lot of the things that um we're going to talk about here. So, in late uh February of 2025, we took ownership of the final uh 911 assessment from Fitch and Associates. And long before we delivered or took receipt of this uh city leadership was already engaged uh directing leadership in various departments to try to look for efficiencies. We need realized there were some gaps um strategy was formed and we devised some plans on how we could start working towards a brighter future for 911 and improving that operational resiliency. Um as we took possession of the assessment in February, really the key findings um focused on radio communications uh staffing within the emergency communication centers, how we're handling the calls as Bruce uh illustrated in his diagram of call flow and then what is the technology that we're using or technology that we need to seek to implement to help us realize those operational efficiencies. of that report. There were 12 key findings. Eight of which we are actively actioning right now that we're going to talk about in the next coming slides and four of them that we're reviewing. We just want to make sure that we operate operationalize those with caution. Um and also just making sure that we are uh realizing efficiency as we deploy different strategies. Next slide please. Or is it this one? Thank you. Um, so we had the 12 findings and I'm going to try to consolidate some of these as we talk about them and some of them you'll see some synergy or a little bit of a repeat from Chief Davis's presentation. Fitch finding number one and two really call us to action on looking for um enhancements with the FD and EMS radio communications. Um, looking for those fleet map changes. fleet map being uh the catalog of radio communications that we have and how do we um align those to be used in an efficient way to facilitate better communication amongst our field responders and then how do we look at the staffing models that are being used uh within the centers and looking for operational efficiencies and ways to enhance situational awareness for all those that are involved in this response. So phase one uh starts with a go live at the new Altimir facility which is currently MedStar's headquarters that's currently um being enhanced uh through partnerships with information technologies um facilities 911 team fire alarm office uh to prepare that for consolidation. So the fire alarm office uh for historical knowledge is located at 3000 West Bolt with police communications. So, we are readying that new space for them to move in with MedStar's existing emergency communications team as that first phase of consolidation. At the same time, where they're going to be physically located, you're going to start seeing um a push in technological consolidation um and efficiency. As chief mentioned, the new radio fleet map. Uh new dispatch roles have been devised and will be deployed during that time. And this is really our opportunity once we get everybody together um in the same room of this first phase to really evaluate the opportunities that we have for continued efficiency and understand what's working and what needs adjustment. Fitch finding number three and number eight um advised that we really need to start looking at the consolidation of fire and EMS dispatch. Uh looking at what the staffing allocation needs to be to facilitate our mission and that mission is right people, right place, right time. Um it really is what fosters better public safety outcomes. In addition to that, um looking at opportunities to reduce those call transfers that Dr. Mhler mentioned you know deline reducing those transfers um provides a better level of service to the community. So as we mentioned in the previous slide uh fire alarm and medstar will start consolidating um about the first week of June at the Altameir facility. About $2 million was um allocated towards that project to make sure that we right-sized uh that space for the new operations. These consolidations uh will absolutely help towards reducing those call transfers. So when fire and EMS become one under the fire alarm office, it's one transfer um for additional services for fire and EMS. But it also um promotes and increases our operational resiliency and efficiency. Again, coming back to the level of service that we want to provide. So what's phase two look like um from a staffing commitment perspective? So with um partnership with city manager's office and leadership across public safety, we have identified the zipper building as our future home to remodel to be a uh purpose-built space to consolidate all three of those emergency communication centers into one unified operation. This is really going to be um an incredible stride in just promoting the operational efficiency and resiliency that we want to see so that we can be working shouldertoshoulder making those decisions in the best interest of those we serve uh removing those barriers to communication. [Music] Fitch finding number four uh highlights the importance of us evaluating new technologies um that help us reduce the non-emergency workloads on our 911 teams um and increase our productivity. Um, I'm happy to say that as an early resolution ahead of the study being published, we actually back in late 2024, uh, we're working towards triing a platform called Prepared 911. In February of 2025, we successfully deployed that trial, which will be coming to an end here at the end of uh, April. And I want to just highlight some of the technology we were able to see and how that really um aided us in being more operationally ready to answer some of the 911 calls that were coming into the center. A couple of key pieces of technology for this particular platform that I really want to call your attention to. First and foremost is real time language translation and transcription. This is a powerful assist of technology in our space. um in a traditional environment we receive a call from someone who's non-English-speaking and we're relying on a limited amount of bilingual telecommunicators if it happens to be Spanish speakaking otherwise we're transferring that caller to another call center uh that is staffed with translators they too are having challenges filling their call centers so you can imagine that when you already have a tax system and you're transferring that to another tax system that that doesn't promote the the successful public out uh public safety outcomes that we want to see. It's further delaying the 911 team in understanding the situation so that we can react. Where real time transcription trans uh translation comes in is that every phone call coming into the emergency communication center is being transcribed and if it's being spoken in a foreign language, it's being translated. So that means that this team has instantaneous situational awareness. So whether we speak the same language or not, I understand what you just said. It's transcribed for me and I can take action on that and quicker action we know saves lives, right? We're still um in the process of um looking at what future transcription and transl rather translation looks like um as an industry, but this is an incredible step as we talk about equal access for the community. Um, you know, World Cup is coming and it's going to host a plethora of different languages into our community and we want to be able to serve those quickly and equitably um, understanding what's going on and and providing that expedient response where needed. As a high level, some of the other technology um, capabilities that Prepared has uh, ushered are live video streaming. I've been in this industry for 26 years and the one thing that I always wanted was the ability to see what's going on. We don't have that. We're relying on our verbal judo skills and the cooperation of the caller to try to make sure that we have a a good picture of what's going on so that we're resourcing them properly. This isn't every call every time type technology, but when words are a challenge or the situation um you know is out of control or they're not able to describe what they're seeing, we have the ability to live stream with the caller, show us what's going on so that we can do a size up. The fire alarm office has expressed that they're very grateful for this technology because they can put eyeballs on a structure fire for example and understand how bad is bad. What are the resources that I need? Um I'm sure you guys have heard that the more equipment we're sending and we're sending them hot that jeopardizes the responders and the community. So we want to make sure that we are sending the right people to the right place um and that we're doing so judiciously as warranted. So that's a pretty incredible piece of technology. Aubrey, how new is that technology? The the live streaming. Uhuh. And and also the prepared 911 technology. So prepared um is newish. There's a lot of different companies that are starting to dabble in um assisted technology, AI assisted technology andor video to 911. So in our space um we're a little slow on the adoption of some of this. Um, some of this is due to our analog technology that we have in the 911, the native 911 system. We don't have yet uh live video to 911 through that platform. So, this technology is growing and every time we log into it, there's new functionality that's available. So, u we're looking, we are not um the only ones in the metroplex doing this. A lot of people are trying triing this technology with different flavors of vendors. Um, just trying to understand where that real impact is. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Um, and then one of the other things I just want to highlight because it is so impactful is our ability to text and exchange media. Our 911 call takers are highly trained first responders that spend a lot of time handling non-emergency workloads and we're happy to do that. But it's things like providing a more comprehensive guidance to someone who needs information about the animal shelter or when trash is picked up or other non-emergency workflows. With our ability to send out text messages, we're able to send out comprehensive data via text message that they can access at a later time or communicate back and forth with us via text. So, what that does is allow those those trained 911 call takers to re-engage their readiness for 911 um and be prepared to answer those calls so they're not tied up with non-emergency workflows. So, what does phase two of this look like? Um I mentioned that in two weeks time this trial will come to an end. Um temporarily I'm hoping as we look for other funding sources. We realize and through the course of the trial that this powerful this technology is pretty powerful and it can really elevate the way that we serve this community to do that more efficiently um and increase our responsiveness to 911 calls by putting us ready for that mission. Um the next step uh in that if we secure the funding for another one-year trial is also to look at how AI can help us in answering those non-emergency phone calls that are coming in. Um so still providing that high level of service to the community, getting them where they need to be and the information that they need and again refocusing the efforts of our limited 911 staff towards the business of responding to 911 calls. Fitchf finding number five um asks us to examine um the appropriate policies and supervision that are in place to manage the call takein process call intake process apologies um early resolution. So, the city leadership identified um an opportunity to hire its inaugural 911 communications administrator and director of emergency management while they conceptualized what a new department look like um to expand on the current ECC model and continue to promote operational efficiency, resiliency, and broader situational awareness. Um, we are continuing to look at accountability to our existing operational expectations while we evaluate current and best practices looking for opportunities for improvement or enhancement. [Music] Fish finding number six and 12 call us to really take a deep dive look at unified technology and infrastructure um and to form committees around with representation from all public safety stakeholders to make sure that we are routinely discussing the challenges that we have um and looking for opportunities to infuse the ECC's with technology that aid us in facilitating our mission in a timely manner. So chief had chief Davis had alluded to the fact that we have CAD to CAD interface now established. That happened actually before this study was even published. Leadership uh at the city level and the department level came together uh with the partnership with its to develop a CADCAD interface. That means that when you call 911, uh 911 call taker does some triage of that event, enters a and creates an event in our computerated dispatch center that goes to all three public safety partners so that they can quickly action and facilitate that needed response instead of waiting for that call to be transferred to go through another triage to decide what they need to uh facilitate. So that's an incredible um improvement in what we've been doing. So what are next steps? Um in March of 2025, we established an ECC review committee. Um and we still are identifying some members, but we established the concept of that and we'll be meeting quarterly with those public safety stakeholders uh to make sure we're on the right track and we're looking for opportunities to improve our technology, improve our integration, improve the resiliency, um and just identify any blind spots or things that we could be doing better. Um, and then in again in June of 2025, you're going to start seeing some big movement as we start um consolidating technology to improve the level of situational awareness for all of our responders in the emergency communication [Music] center. And with that, I'll pass it back to Sunny who's going to wrap us up and give us some next steps. Is there any questions for me before I pass it on? Any questions for Aubrey? Nope. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Aubrey. Uh Aubry's been a great partner. Also, I don't know if I said it earlier for Bruce. I just want to say thank you. Thanks for Fitch and Associates for the work that they've done. Uh just to recap, so we've got communications that need to be integrated. Uh we've got to streamline the process of unified um calls. So, if you call a 911 center and you need help, we need to make it simple for you to get that help. Um also the assisted technologies really offer a promise of op optimized call handling and call delivery also streamline communications. Uh we are talking about an ordinance uh revision that needs to happen at um in order to form uh the new department uh as well as because there's some convers or excuse me there's some language within the ordinances related to emergency management. uh very important that we capture the significance how emergency management and emergency communications operate during a disaster. And so we want to make sure that uh we're giving attention to that in the ordinance recommended for mayor and council. And then uh we're looking at as we enter what we would affectionately refer to as budget blitz time. We're looking at fiscal year 26 and what that request will look like for personnel to to rightsize these operations and fully equip our 911 teams uh and the support around them. So with that I'll um the the hour is late so I'll open for any questions or further discussion you might have. Open for discussion or questions from council. No really helpful updates. Thank you. Um, and to Valerie and of course Mark's now retired, but this is your dream team. It took a long time to get them together. So, it's neat to see Aubrey and Sunny together presenting and really putting in action the changes we knew that needed to happen. So, we appreciate you both. Thank you, Mayor. Uhhuh. Thank you, council. That's the last of our presentations. Do we have any um future agenda items you'd like to bring to Jay's attention? I do. Guess Council Rebecca, I'll just go around the table. Um, thank you, Bruce. I'd like a presentation on what our city's process and efforts are to coordinate project timing amongst departments um so that we're best utilizing funds. Um and then I would also like what I haven't seen in this year's bond discussions is the equity analysis that we performed in last in the last the 2022 bond. So I'd like to see that for the 2026 bond as well. What kind of what kind of analysis? The equity analysis. Yeah. Council member what Nettles. Yes. I would like a presentation uh the YMCA to come and the city to present an update on the pools that we have in the city of Fort Worth. I think we list that we have maybe two pools, but we also have contracts with the YMCA how we can partnership a little bit more better. Council Williams then Bivvens. That's a great request. I just if I can add on to that. Um, I know the Ryan family, excuse me, I know the Ryan family, YMCA partnered with Crowley ISD. I'm not sure if the city of Fort Worth is partnering and that's something we've been talking about a need to provide access to swimming pools in the far south and southwest um portion of the city. So, if we're not partnering and there's ways that we could get access to that pool, it's a resource that maybe we can chip in and get access for a lower cost than building our own. I'm not, but I I have kids in the community, so while I have the mic. Second, she said I'm not going to be here anyways for that. But anyways, long story short, um um my actual informal report requests, I know um in this past budget, we um asked uh Diana's team for an update or I'm sorry, um approve we approved the marketing analysis or market analysis study for wages. I'd like to get an update on that as a presentation. um as well as um um what it would cost the city to increase the minimum wage to $20 an hour in this upcoming budget. Thank you, Jared. Council Ribbons, I'll let you sit with me and Betsy when we come back and heckle. I'll enjoy that. I have uh I want to tag on to council member Nettle's presentations about the pool because I heard a nasty rumor that the stop six pool was four lanes. That is not true. And so I want to make sure Dave is aware that his his predecessor left me with eight lanes. Council member Beck helped with that. A lot of her people did from Forest Park. So let's put that on the record. And even if I'm gone, I'm going to come back and make sure you do it right. Now the other item that I really just wanted really wanted to talk about till Chris brought that up. We need a joint multi-presentation linking text dot linking TPW linking stormwater and South Point to give a broad audience an update on the Southeast Connector project. They're doing a fabulous job, but only because in my district, I know who to call. There are other areas where people do not know who that communications person is. And if you think about construction, whenever you see that, that's great. That's progress. But right now, it's it's kind of jumbled up. And luckily, people are watching because I was watching people enter streets that were clearly marked do not enter. And within a few days, TPW blocked it off. That's what they needed to do. And so, let's have a a presentation bringing all these folk together so that people will know who is South Point, who is the city, all those people because they're all having to work together and again doing a good job. Thank you, Gina. Council Flores, nothing. Council, I think that's the last urgent items. Meeting is adjourned.