Thank you. I ain't wrong. A bride and a groom coming out the door. White lace dress and a red bouquet. Just married written on a blue Chevrolet. Don't that make you want to fall in love? Don't that look like a picture of us? A match made in heaven if there ever was. Don't that make you want to fall? That just makes me want to give you my heart Ever forever needs a place to start Gotta be a sign from my baby Don't that make you want to fall in love Old folks sitting in a front porch swing Still holding hands like they were 16 50 good years they're a lover's dream Darling, that could be even me Don't that make you want to fall in love? Don't that look like a picture of us A match made in heaven if there ever was Don't that make you want to fall That just makes me want to give you my heart Ever, forever needs a place to start Gotta be a sign from my baby Don't that make you want to fall Yeah, yeah, yeah Well now don't that make you want to fall in love Yeah I'm out. ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ ¶¶ Thank you. ¶¶ I think if we can get started here, I think. Looks like we've got seven. We've got a quorum, so we will go ahead and get started. The first item on our agenda today is approval of the February 2, 2016 committee summary. Is there a motion? Motion by Council Member Scutchfield, seconded by Council Member Evans. Is there any discussion? There being none, all in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right, thank you. Those are approved. Now the item, first item, well, the only item on the agenda, I want to recognize Council Member Bledsoe on this agenda item. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Last fall when we were discussing the ESR process, we kind of went through after the voting and moved through all the budget stuff, and we kind of thought maybe there's some, as with anything, There's always opportunity to do things better and to tweak, and I commend Commissioner Ford for spending as much time with me and others as you did, trying to figure out how we can make this process the best it can possibly be. And I think he's come up with some good ideas. So I'll turn it over to Commissioner Ford and let you do the presentation. Thank you, Council Member Bledsoe, and good afternoon, Council Members and Committee. We're here this afternoon from the Department of Social Services to revisit a presentation we shared with you back in September on the Extended Social Resource Grant Program, the ESR grant program. We have just a few slides to go over with you, and we hope it leads to some discussion. And we also feel prepared to answer any questions that may come of the discussion. We are reviewing the current year, fiscal year 2016-2017's biennial ESR grant program. As we've stated continually through the budget process, the Department of Social Services is confident that the current grant process was conducted in a fair, deliberate, and inclusive manner. We tried our very best. We're here today though, however, in an exercise of continual analysis and evaluation to present policy areas which may be deserving of further study, deliberation and discussion with you, the members of the Urban County Council. The next few slides are just slides that we shared at that time. The current grant process is the fourth year of a competitive grant process and as you can see on this slide we've had continual revisions each and every year after those grants awards were made in the summer. We will generally come back in the fall and begin the process to revise the prior year's program. The current year program we funded in total 49 programs. We received closer to 70 applications. The lowest request was just over $6,300. The highest request was $375,000 and you can see the adjoining lowest award of $4,300 and highest award of $210,000. We were fortunate to award just over $3 million. We had just over $6.8 million in requests and this slide shows how those awards were allocated over the priority areas that we identified in last year's grant process. The emergency shelter was an even 25%, and that was one of the policy guidelines of the current year process. And you can see they go from human needs, mental health and substance abuse, youth development, public health, senior citizen services, and violence prevention. We're here this afternoon to present four policy areas that we would like your advisement on as we move forward potentially in the current year. They are to discuss the reestablishment of an annual grant cycle, to possibly redefine funding priorities, to establish grant requests and funding limits, and to revise evaluation and ranking processes. Again, we bring these ideas to you as policy areas, as potential discussions. We in the administration and the department have not come to any definitive conclusions just yet. If there are no changes made to the process, we feel just comfortable going on with the existing policies that are in place right now. However, we feel, based on the discussion we had at our September committee meeting, that these may be areas of interest to the council and also to our network of social service providers. The current process resulted in the fiscal year 16 and fiscal year 17 grant process being a two-year cycle. So our agencies, as we're speaking right now, are performing the first of a two-year grant program cycle. We're looking forward to coming back. There will be no applications or no awards this spring. We look forward to coming back this spring, however, and executing PSAs, purchase of service agreements, for the two-year continual of the current grant cycle. However, in regards to the annual grant cycle, based on the discussion we heard, there are some advantages if you consider going to an annual grant cycle. If we were to go to the annual grant cycle for fiscal year 2018, That will be an effective program period of July of 2017 through June of 2018. And that time will be here right before you guys know it. I think we all agree to that. The consistency with the annual budget process, we here in Urban County Government, as you guys know, operate an annual budget process that we've begun in earnest, I think, just this week with our department budget hearings. There's a uniformity with similar funding programs that we administer here in Urban County Government. And then also, an annual grant cycle would allow a flexibility and a response to community needs. If there were a community need that would present itself and become more evident in the interim of a grant cycle, an annual grant cycle would allow us to respond and also that of agencies out in the network. This slide that I present to you is a slide that I've referenced during the budget discussion in regards to the universal support that urban county government provides for social services, human needs, and housing needs for low-income residents in our community. It is only for context. I want to clearly say that our financial profile here in the government has really improved since the time of the recession a few years ago. But the ESR grant program is $3 million. The affordable housing fund that was long advocated for now is $2 million annually. An existing fund administered by Irene Gooding, our grants director, is approximately $1 million of home funds. The Homelessness Innovation Fund, I believe it is, that's administered by Charlie Lantern of our Homelessness Prevention Office, is $750,000 annually. And then you also see the sums for community development block grant and emergency solution grants as it pertains to human services. That's an outlay annually of just over $7 million universally from urban county government in partnership with our network of nonprofits to support human services in our community. Three important notes to this contextual slide. The ESR funding for this current year is nearly double to the allocation of fiscal year 2012 when it was set at $1.75 million. Again, affordable housing is a new program and our homelessness fund is a new program, both which are the results progressively and innovatively after a long community-based discussion to bring those resources to bear. And then also the Department of Social Services, which comprises of four co-operational divisions and four community-based programs, has a budget of $8.7 million for the fiscal year 16. The next policy area for consideration is funding priorities. And this slide and these figures, committee members, are just for illustration purposes only, but there is a basis that I'd like to share with you. With the assumption that the fiscal year 18 ESR grant program will be consistent to this year's funding level just at $3 million, If we were to condense and really define our funding priority areas, the current program has, I believe, seven funding priorities, including emergency shelter that we identified on the previous slide. So A is to keep emergency shelter at 25%, and that was a decision that the council made in conjunction with the administration, I think, a few years ago. 25% of the ESR program is a direct set aside administered by Mr. Lantern with the Homelessness Prevention Office. Food security and nutrition would be a new subcategory proposed at 15%, which is about $450,000. Food security and nutrition closely parallels emergency shelter and it also couples how the emergency shelter set aside was able to come to be a reality in this program. We've heard during the budget cycle our focus should be on basic human needs. And so if you were to add emergency shelter at 25% and food security and nutrition at 15%, that would effectively represent 40% of the ESR allocation going towards basic human needs. The next section proposed would be, or the funding priority rather, is health and safety. Please note that the current priority areas of public health, mental health, substance abuse services, and violence prevention would also pretty much condense to the priority of health and safety at 35%, and then also youth development at 25%. And again, these numbers are just for illustration purposes only, and we will greatly welcome your advisement and comment on it. The next funding area, the third one, is grant requests and funding limits. The current process has no limits on the aggregate grant requests that agencies can submit for ESR grant funds, nor does it have funding limits aggregate to what we can award. You guys have a packet with information in addition to the PowerPoint that clearly details the level of funding that we provided for this current year's program. The reality, however, is that we received $6.8 million in requests competing for the $3 million that we have funding for ESR. And again, the ESR $3 million funding is nearly double that of years past. Our objective in having this area considered is simply to provide a level of equity and balance, need versus available resource. Just a few figures for you to consider in regards to fiscal year 2016. 82% of the grant awards are in an amount less than $100,000. 46% of all requests were less than $50,000. 75% of all requests were less than $100,000. 12% of all requests were more than $200,000. The final priority area, policy area, that we bring to your consideration this afternoon deals with the evaluation and ranking process. In years past, we've employed a combination of an evaluation scoring committee and also a funding work group. We've heard the positives of that group being inclusive in nature. The current year's scoring committee was comprised of 38 citizen members that served on, I believe, eight scoring, ten scoring committees. This proposal would be to allow us to become more objective and to avoid any bias that may present itself, even with having citizen members on the panel. And I can attest the long hours and times that they dedicated to that work, so we definitely want to be appreciative of their work. What we're proposing potentially could be to allow an advisory evaluation committee, and again the key word there is advisory, to help our department in evaluating the applications that will come forward. That committee would be comprised of staff members and stakeholders in the Department of Social Services, the divisions of grants and special programs. We would hope Irene Gooding and her staff, they've been great partners thus far, would lend their expertise, the Social Services Advisory Board, and the Homeless Prevention and Intervention Board. We would hope to have each evaluation committee convened and assigned to the funding priority areas. And agency presentations to the respective evaluation committees be conducted in an open forum, consistent with public meetings. This is very much similar to a fashion of a process that I believe the Division then of Community Development had. It sometimes passed about 10 years ago where we would have open forums where agencies would come forward, present their proposals in an open setting similar to today's meeting, but allow others that may be interested, council members, council aides, members from the general public to come and all hear. What we did this prior year was we would invite each agency in individually, kind of on a rotating basis through our office and other areas, and meet in private with those agencies. We feel that this will bring the needed transparency. I'm going to ask the committee, if you will allow me, I skipped over a very important point in regards to the grant requests and funding limits. I spoke to the need of those, but I didn't highlight what a consideration might be. A consideration in regards to the limit of the maximum award would be $750,000 aggregate per single agency. Even though agencies in this current cycle may receive funding for more than one program, We execute, however, through financial instrument with the Department of Division of Central Purchasing and our Finance Department purchase of services agreements. So if you're an agency and you're awarded for four different programs that you were competitively successful in, we still nonetheless execute one PSA for X aggregate amount, sum total of those four programs. What this proposal would be is to aggregate maximum award amount of $750,000, again on the basis of a $3 million award, would be equivalent to 25% of the total ESR funding. The next relates to the application. One application per agency maximum per funding priority area. So if going to the previous slide which identified four priority areas, agencies could apply for more than one award, but they could apply for no more than one award relative to the applicable funding priority areas. Next steps. We're hoping that consistent to previous times for revisions, if there are any, we could establish the council's consent and endorsement of the next year's next forthcoming grant process via resolution to allow us administratively to begin our work to put the application together. We hope to open the application process this fall of 2016. We hope to close the application deadline a little sooner than we've had in times past in December. and we hope to work in the winter of 2017 to evaluate these proposals, to bring a recommendation in line with the mayor's proposed budget in April of 2017, and then begin programming work as scheduled in summer of 2017. Council Member Lamb, thank you for this opportunity to present. We will gladly answer any questions that the committee may have. Council Members? Council Member Bledsoe. Thank you, Chair. I'll only start so everybody can get their thoughts together. Thank you, Commissioner Ford. One of the things that I really was fighting for was that apples-to-apples comparison, that we do have groups that are in similar, you know, those four agencies or those four divisions, if you will, funding areas that are competing or at least presenting options within each sector, and that's really important. And so I commend you on that. I question the exact percentages. And my thought is to have more of a range of percentages instead of an actual percentage. My thought there being is that one year we may have a whole lot of people compete for one or the other. Maybe one isn't as good in one. The quality of applications aren't as good in one sector, if you're in one area. And so we may not want to award everyone in that area if there's only one, for instance. I've just given us some more flexibility. So I'm wondering if you had thought about that. We have thought about that, and I think that's an excellent idea. It would allow flexibility. It would, however, still yet serve the purpose of managing expectations for the council from a priority standpoint and also to the network of agencies that would apply that would allow them to estimate, calculate, and temper their request appropriately because they would already have published and forecast. either an allocation directly of X amount maximum or a range that we would work for. So I think either way would actually work, but we're open to either way if that suits the council. I think it would be helpful, and you're right. You want to set expectations on a pot of money. If you think it's $100,000 and we have it for $400,000, that's a difference. So I think conveying that kind of target, if you will, is a good thing. I just think we should give ourselves a little leeway for how we award that. So that's good. I'm getting there on the one application per agency per program. I think that's a good idea to the extent that it really forces you to pick your best program. I think it's challenging for some agencies to do that when they have, in their minds, maybe three or four really good ones and could do any of them. So that makes me a little, I'm okay with awarding maybe one of them, but competing for them, I think maybe, I don't know. Do you have a response? Well, I think that's a good point. I think, however, it would allow the agency or groups of agencies, if we're thinking collaboratively, to bring a comprehensive approach to their programmatic response to these priority areas. If they have, for example, two different programs, whether it's geographic, the difference is geographic, or whether it's population-based, how do you integrate that and bring it forth to respond to these aforementioned policy areas? But I do recognize your point. I think we could explore and examine more. Okay. So are you still going to do points for innovation and collaboration? I think that is something that also warrants. It's not in the slide today, but I also think that's something that warrants further discussion. One of the responses that we got from an agency during the appellate process and the period of dissent during the council budget was for us to reconsider that. The bonus points that we have in this current year process really awards collaboration, as defined by fiscal participation in this grant program. However, we had other programs that we know by design that the nature of their work is collaborative. It's just that they didn't come forward. It would have been very difficult to come forward with an application that fiscally demonstrates that collaboration. So I think that's something that we may want to consider removing. actually, I'm just speaking just from not a definitive point, but my take on it, is that collaboration should be, that's what we should be doing as a network of social service providers. And while we want to acknowledge and promote that, we don't want to penalize those that, by whatsoever means, may not be able to fiscally demonstrate a collaboration. Agreed. Good. So I'm glad you're thinking about that. The last point that I'll make, because my time is on the step, is just that I think it is challenging in a two-year cycle. It's hard in a one-year cycle to show results and deliverables and outcomes quickly. It's easier in a two-year cycle. That being said, not every program is a two-year program. And I'm going to throw this out there. You might kill me. This is over. That's okay. But could there be an opportunity for one-year pilot projects that's different than our two-year cycle, the two-year grants that are larger in nature? You know, I go back to that art bus that scored really high for collaboration and innovation. That's not a two-year program. You know, it was kind of a pilot idea. It was very cool. It was very innovative. That seems different than some of maybe the other larger, I mean, I look at emergency shelter. Those kinds of things are two-year things. If you're going to put that much money into the capital and into the program, you need two years to show the results. So just a thought, and I don't know how we do that, and if that's even a good idea from a policy perspective. but thinking about maybe one-year and two-year grants might be an option. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Maloney. Thank you. Thanks, Chris. I appreciate what you're doing. I know we've been fighting this for many years, how to make this right. And to me, it'll never be perfect because there's no such thing as perfect in this. But this is the best I've ever said. And I want to commend the process that you're doing. and one thing that I want to compliment is your staff and all, you're shorthanded as you know, but to me doing this every two years make these guys be able to keep up with the work and to make sure it's being done right. And sometimes when we were doing the ones every year, it just overburdened a lot of these folks and it just, we won't, sometimes you find mistakes and it's just hard to get it back on track. But allowing this to go every two years, I think it's helped these folks there. They've got a lot on their plate for what they do. And to do this every two years, I think it helps them. And that's one thing I want to do. Not only help them, it helps the program. And the program being run right makes this city run better on all the programs that we have. And I just commend you all on what you've done here today. and I think it's a great process. I mean, I've been dealing with it, like I said, 20 years. And every year everybody comes up and says something better and better and better. But this is by far the best I've ever seen, and I hope we continue to go with this. And I hope my colleagues remember that these folks are just shorthanded for what they have, and they're doing a tremendous job. And I think doing it every two years really helps them be able to monitor and make sure these programs are being done right. So I appreciate your hard work. Thank you. Council Member Evans. Thank you, Chair. Commissioner Ford, thank you for this. I think it was probably one of the more thorough presentations we've had, and it was such a hot-button issue. So I want to thank you for all the time that you put into this. And I would piggyback on what Council Member Maloney said, and I think I've told you this, that when you're practically giving away money, there's really no wrong way to do it when you have some guidelines. So you can skim the cat 50 million different ways, so I would tell you to keep that in mind as well. And I appreciate you all wanting to do it better and be more fair. but again this is it's grant money so I hope the message is being relayed to these other partners that perhaps I think that was some of the uproar that certain agencies were relying on this money. There's no guarantee we're always going to have this money so I think that also needs to be part of redefining whatever this program is. So that being said, I was also having the same concern, I think, as Council Member Bledsoe with the one application per priority, because I was concerned about the collaboration and how that would fit in. And if, yeah, I don't know if they it was just a concern that I was having as well, because that was the goal to get people to work together. And I don't want anyone to be pegged or discredited or, you know, I've lost my word. Don't want to be penalized for working together like we want them to do. I was curious about redefining the funding priorities. Is this order just the suggestion or is this the order that we have it now? I missed that. This is just a suggestion. This slide in regards to the redefined funding priorities are just a suggestion. Again, health and safety would be basically to condense existing priority areas of public health, mental health, substance abuse services, and violence prevention. And I'm going to slide back. This represents, I believe there are seven, including the set-aside of emergency shelter that are the existing priority areas of our ESR grant program now. And so emergency shelter will remain the same. Basic human needs, closely reclassified as food, nutrition, and food insecurity and nutrition. So, again, you combine basic human needs and emergency shelter, and that was 37% in its current funding. So it's really reclassification and open for discussion is not definite just for illustration purposes. I would also quickly, before your next question, Council Member, or comment, Council Member Evans, is I totally agree with you as it relates to funding cycle, whether it's a one-year or a two-year cycle. There's really not a wrong way to do it. It's really just what is the preference and priority of the council and the administration. Of course, keeping an attentive ear to the opinion and the needs of our network of social service agencies. But these would just be illustrations for this purpose. These numbers and these funding priorities are not sketched in stone. And with that answer, do you think it's necessary for us to redefine them right now? Or a suggestion on reviewing it every so often? I think there are advantages for doing so, particularly when it comes to the evaluation standpoint. This is really comparing apples to apples and oranges to oranges. And so if you're an agency and you're going to apply for youth development funds, what we hope to do is on the evaluation, advisory evaluation committee side, is we hope to convene and deploy an evaluation committee strictly for youth development. So those agencies that are applying for youth development, they kind of know the allocation amount and or the range. They can base their requests appropriately. They generally, in the network I would contend, know who's providing similar services and who may be a friendly competitor of sorts for these ESR grants. But it would also, on the evaluation side, it would allow our team to focus solely on youth development grants. And then that evaluation team that would focus on health and safety. As of right now, it would be pretty tough to manage with the seven that we have right now on an evaluation standpoint. So that was kind of the basis of the thought of condensing the priority areas. okay and i was going to recognize vice mayor had requested to speak a minute ago but he wasn't allowed he he's not in the system if you all will add him in the system so he can log in and recognize vice mayor okay thank you and thank you for allowing me to speak though i'm not on the committee first i'll echo what a lot of other folks have said commission this is a lot of really good work and since I've been paying attention to this, since I've been paying on council, it's all gone in the right direction. I think it's a better and better and better process. It's more fair. It's more transparent. All of that's in the right direction. And I'll agree with Councilmember Evans, it's hard to go wrong at this point. I think we've got some options. Yeah, there were upsides and downsides to every piece of that. But having said that, I do have a couple of comments and questions. I have, when we've had these conversations before, I have typically spoken against limits. With my reasoning being that I want as much as possible the system to make decisions based on the quality of the applications. And if that means that some agencies get more than others, that's because they have submitted better proposals or they're more equipped to do the work. It also, I mean, we have, I want to be careful how I say this, but I think everybody knows that there are certain, some agencies in this community that provide services that are a whole lot bigger than others, have a whole lot more staff, and people will say, well, I have a better opportunity, or they're more equipped to put in grants that are more appealing, etc. etc. etc. I still think I have questions about that. And again, I'm not saying it needs to go one way or the other. I think it will work out whatever we do, but I think we have to be careful about that. On the question of the one-year, two-year cycle, has there been conversation with the providers about what their preferences would be, what they see as the upsides, downsides of one or two-year cycles? I think there has been. and there hasn't been much that I've heard directly here lately. I think programmatically a two-year cycle probably is warranted. For example, right now the agencies, generally we would be in review and award mode at this point in time. However, I do think that the ability to respond with new programs or new initiatives in the interim of a two-year schedule I think would also be kind of welcome. And we haven't formally or scientifically polled the agencies. That may be something we could do in short order. But I think there are pros and cons to that. But as it operates right now, most of the agencies I believe that we visited with through our monitoring and our quarterly reporting are operating quite well. I think it's fair and accurate to say on a two-year cycle. Okay. Thank you for that. my other question has to do with health and safety aggregating, I mean combining those categories it seems to me that agencies that provide more than one of those kinds of services would be disadvantaged. They could only submit one application, they might do mental health, they might do substance abuse they'd have to choose amongst those. I think that may not work as well as we would like it to On the emergency shelter, that direct set aside, essentially what we're saying is that there are three or four agencies right now that provide emergency shelter. They would submit grants, and that would be a separate process from the evaluation process for the rest of the grants. Is that correct? That's correct. That's the way it operated this year. Charlie works with a subcommittee of his Homelessness Prevention Board and they evaluate those proposals that are brought forth. I believe we received four proposals and awarded four proposals from the agencies that provide emergency shelter in a slightly different application. However, I think it's very important to note that we do, from a standpoint, consider that a key part of ESR. slightly different to meet the specific need of emergency shelter, but overall consistent with what we're trying to do to provide those resources. Okay, I had one other question. I'm kind of leafing through and looking for the right page. I think it's actually not on your slides, but it's in the supporting materials. In the weighting of criteria, one of the questions that we have dealt with before has been the whole question of whether grants that are first of all grant applications need to be quote unquote innovative. They can be new programs. Is that still a case? Are they weighted that way? And is that still considered to be an appropriate way for us to ago about this business. And my time is up, but I want to let you answer, but I want to comment that I think the intention when we first added that as a category was to ensure that we weren't simply funding ongoing programs. I think we may have gotten too far the other way. And so I'll be happy to have your comments on that. I think that that is definitely on our radar to revisit, and I think we agree with you. I agree with you, Vice Mayor Vice Mayor Kaye on that, in regards to the innovative program. Some of these, again, basic human needs, there's only a certain degree. Efficiency is something we definitely want to promote and require from a fiscal accountability standpoint. But in regards to the true innovativeness in the general term, we may inadvertently go in a different direction. I want to quickly speak to the issue of limits. is that I think in regards to equity and balance, we don't want to stifle the creativity of agencies. We want to be able to fund as much as we can. The only limit that applies in the current process is that agencies, there is a limit in regards to their requests, is that agencies can ask, they can request for an amount no larger than the equivalent to 20% of their budget expenditures. So if your agency has a $20 million budget, you technically can request $4 million. I think that's right. But if your agency has a $100,000 budget, you know, vice versa. What I notice in the analysis during the budget is that agencies begin to bring requests, trying to estimate, guess, or forecast what their award would be. It's fair to say that this year, $3 million award versus $6 million request, there's no program that we fund 100%. And I don't believe we've ever funded any program 100% in the four years we've been doing this as a competitive. One thing I do want to get away from, And what requests that and plan to get away from is just blanket percentage funding awards. So in prior years, we've basically gone down the list of 20 awards, and we funded, I'm just going to throw out abstract numbers, the top tier at 80%, the second tier at 60%, the next tier at 40%. that may be a disadvantage to the agencies themselves, but we've only been doing that because of the scarcity of funding. We're trying to stretch our dollars as best we can. What I notice in the analysis of the request this year is that almost, in one particular instance, well, in several instances, the request was sizably larger than the prior year. And that makes it tough on us to evaluate. It's probably not the most fair to the agencies themselves. We want to be in a position, if we can confine and manage the expectation with priority and funding ranges or allocations, that they can bring us requests that are reasonable, that we can perhaps fund as best we possibly can to allow the program to proceed forward. So it's a tough balancing act that we'll have to pursue. But again, I think if we were to go to funding limits, we would want to say that our intent is not to stifle creativity and impact. It's actually to help us better bring that about, impact that is. My time is up. I might want to add a comment later, but thank you, Chair. Okay. Thank you. Council Member James Brown. Thank you, Chair. Thanks for the presentation, Commissioner Ford. The Vice Mayor asked most of my questions, which were good questions, but I like the recommendations made to the evaluation and the ranking process. I know a lot of the concerns that I heard were due to that in the last funding cycle, so I'm glad to see some of the recommendations, especially comparing apples to apples. On another note, what was the maximum awarded to one organization in one priority area this past cycle? We have that information. Let me get that here for you. The largest award, the highest award was $210,000. And who was that awarded to? I can tell you just one second, Council Member Brown. Yeah, you don't. I was just wondering if we were reaching the maximum recommended. There were $200. There were $210,000. No, I have it here, sir. I have it here. There were two awards of $210,000 apiece, the Hope Center. and the Canaan House and the Hope Center in employment, excuse me, and Jubilee Jobs. So there were two awards that represented the highest awards at $210,000. Okay. Thank you for that information. I see a lot of positives about going back to the annual funding cycle. Since you were on council at the time when y'all recommended going to a two-year funding cycle, what were some of the positives of going to two years as opposed to one year? I think some of it's been alluded to this afternoon is to allow agencies to bring forth programs that they can actually carry out continually to bring higher impact. by comparison, Council Member Brown, what would happen as a one-year cycle. Just to give you a, we would start, and Craig Benz was in the department at that time, we would begin a grant process in the fall. We would go through the spring. We would make awards in the spring aligned with the budget process. Council would go on break, and the department would go right back during summer break to start a new grant process, basically. It was almost a nonstop process from the department's standpoint and that of the agency. So we, through the PSAs, let me quickly describe. So we award, we execute PSAs, persons of services agreements, with each of the agencies that we award, and that's for the cumulative amount of their grant award or grant awards. We require quarterly reports. They submit quarterly invoices. And we do go to on-site visits. And we do go to on-site visits. So what would happen is, Council Member Brown, is before they would submit their second quarterly report, they were already working on their grant application for the next fiscal year to get it in right after the turn of the new year. So it was a nonstop process on their end and ours. So I guess that kind of answers my question. It was a benefit to both the city and to the grant awardees that kind of have the time to implement their program and for us to do the paperwork. Were y'all recommending any changes or improvements to the way you orientate organizations to the grant process? I know another thing that I heard last year is some of the organizations didn't make the pre-grant funding orientation. Right. I think the mandatory meetings was one of the requirements in order to submit a letter of intent or a pre-application. Council Member Henson, I believe, at the last committee meeting, mentioned and recommended that perhaps we have multiple opportunities for orientations of those type meetings. And so I think that's a great suggestion that we should be able to accommodate. We want folks to be included and aware of how to get involved in the process. So I think that's an easy fix we can accomplish. Okay. Yeah, and then I also have concerns, too, about the one applicant, one application, and one priority area. I think that may limit some organizations' ability to fund some programs that touch on different areas but happen to fall into the same category. What do you do about following up with organizations when you recommend funding less than what they requested? If you say they asked for $100,000 but you only decide to award them 50% of what they asked for, Or is there any kind of follow-up to make sure that they can still run their program off the amount of money that they pay? I think in lay terms, and Teresa, I think, is kind of sitting here right at a bidenage a bit. We have to go back and we have to reevaluate their outcomes. In certain cases, agencies may say to us that we can't perform and deliver what we projected and prescribed in our application at the level of funding. There's always a great sense of appreciation and gratuity on their part, but it's just that we may, in some cases we actually do, go back and fairly and accurately reduce what's expected of us in regards to outcomes on their application. So, again, by not being able to fund fully their requests, it impacts in regards to the community benefit that they can provide. Okay. Okay. All right. Thanks for the presentation, and thank you, Chair. Thank you. I would like to ask some questions, too. I was waiting to let all my – oh, and Vice Mayor, even though I haven't spoken yet, but I'll go ahead and let you speak. Go ahead. I thought you were waiting to be the cleanup batter. Do what? I thought you were going to be cleanup. No, I have questions, too. Yes, yes. Thank you. Thanks. Actually, the first question, I know that we're talking about the categories, which I think are really good ideas, but who's going to determine or verify what the application falls under? Whose onus is that going to fall to? I think that would be in the department. in the department. I think that one thing that we instituted in this current process was a letter of intent, a pre-application for us to determine if what the agency's proposal was actually met the criteria for ESR. We had very few that did not, but I think it would be the department. I will also say, Councilmember, is that we need to fully go back and prior to letting the application, we need to clearly define what these priority areas are. I mean, it almost needs to be in appendices to the application to define what our expectation is, what they are. That doesn't exist at this point. It is really kind of just matching what the agency is proposing to the general youth, what you would consider to be youth development, what you would consider to be substance abuse services, et cetera? I think that's going to be very important because I can just see there being misunderstandings in that part of it. I would think that there would be something like a checkbox at the beginning of the application where they have to choose one of the categories, and then you all would go in and determine or verify us. What currently happens this year is that of those seven areas, I believe we allow agencies, some of the programs and many of the programs, they've checked and identified that their program addresses several of these priority areas, more than just one. So a definition for clarity's sake is definitely warranted and will be a part of this forthcoming process. process. Okay. And on this list, I see we have services for senior citizens, but on the page 13, where does that fall in the categories? I mean, we clearly have youth development, we have health and safety, we have food security and nutrition, and then I still separate the emergency shelter. I keep that as a separate category in my mind. It could be. I think we've had programs in the past that deal with nutrition. Health and safety possibly could be. But we would want to definitely identify the area where it best fits now. I mean, where their activity would fit into the whatever newly defined category. We don't want to leave them out. Exactly. We just want to clearly let them know if you applied under senior services last year, this is where you would be reclassified if we chose not to keep that a separate. And perhaps if the intention was to include them in one of these categories, perhaps maybe the labeling of it could identify that it also addresses senior citizens as well. Because right now we see youth development on here, but nothing else that talks about or speaks to senior citizens. So we don't want to elude to them not being included. In the previous years, the emergency shelter grants has been actually on their own process. And I think if I understood correctly what you were explaining to the vice mayor, that it would remain its individual, its own independent process, but we just recognize it as one of the categories? That's correct. We itemize that allocation of 25% direct set aside. and we don't project or recommend to change that at all. That's new to the current process of 2016, I believe it is, and it was a result of one of the revisions we made in prior years, so we don't recommend any changes to that. I think it works well. Okay. And then you spoke, the other one question was, how often do the agencies report? Did I understand you said quarterly? Quarterly, yes. And how often are the funds distributed? Are they distributed once? Quarterly. Quarterly invoice. And so as we speak right now, for the current fiscal year, 16, we've already received the first three quarterly invoices. We're scheduled to make one final quarterly invoice. So that basically means we have remitted to the agencies $2.25 million of the $3 million for fiscal year 16. We have one final quarterly payment to make, and then we'll execute a new PSA for the continual year 2 of the grant, which is fiscal year 17. Okay. So everything basically, Council Member, is quarterly. And I was actually talking to Charlie Lanter over at Subway since the line was so long, I asked him if he wouldn't mind to explain how he measures the results. I know that you have a system, and if we don't mind, just ask him to explain your process of measuring your results. Sure. The way we arrived at the carve-out, for those who weren't here when we did that, if you're going to have $750,000 in our office for the innovative and sustainable funds, which is completely separate from this process, it made sense to put it all in one place, to have all of the homeless funding running through our office. And one of the main reasons for that is to ensure consistency of outcomes measurement. So we have systems-level outcomes that we ask all the shelters to measure and report on and set targets, and those are consistent across every shelter. So it's a little different from ESR in that each agency is submitting their project with their specific outcomes for that project, Whereas with the shelter grants, we're saying to every applicant, tell us your average length of stay. Tell us your percent exits to permanent housing. Tell us your recidivism, how many people fell back into homelessness after they were out. And then tell us your improvements in employment and non-employment income. It's those four core outcomes. So we measure in some ways the same way in that each agency gives me a report every quarter showing their progress on those four outcomes. I take a look at that and compare it to where they should be based on the targets they set in the original grant application. And if they're not on target, then we just pick up the phone and talk. And the advantage of running it through that separate process is we have the evaluation committee of the Homeless Prevention Board that actually gets those reports. They see those quarterly reports, and they look at them together, and the agencies are in the room, so they can easily ask questions. Hey, why is average length of stay up at this shelter? Why are permanent housing exits down at this shelter? or what can we do to help you? And so then what happens is we try to come alongside and provide supports because it's not necessarily always something they're doing wrong. It's a shift in the tendencies or a shift in the population that just needs some additional support. Okay, thank you for that explanation. And that leads me to my next question to Commissioner Ford. With the quarterly reports that you guys receive, do you have any measuring tools in place yet, or have you been able to, because I think that's, I know it's difficult, more difficult than the housing, the homelessness, but I think that we still need to have some. We do. Every PSA for every agency has an addendum to it which lists the program's goals, their outcomes, and what their outcomes should be. And when we do the quarterly reports and the agency visits, we go by that report versus what they have in their PSA addendum, which is based on their application, but we let them adjust it depending on their award. And we can also, if during the year, if there's a shift in the program, we haven't had to do any yet so far this year, but we would bring, there were a couple last year, we had to change the addendums, and we have to come back through you guys, through council, to approve the addendums to that PSA. For the second year of the PSA, for the second year we're going to meet with the agencies and what do you need to change in your outcomes? What's working, what's not? So we want to make sure, and we do, I take calls from the agencies every week about, hey, I've got somebody coming in Thursday they want to talk about, they may need to shift some stuff around. So we try to be responsive as we can be about being realistic of what they can do and what their outcomes are going to be with what they're awarded. Okay. Now, is that going to be helpful and useful information for future applications and be able to be used? We can always have the committee can always go back. We're keeping everything in spreadsheets, even dating when we get the quarterly reports in. versus what looks better the first visit last fall versus the visit this spring. We're keeping a spreadsheet on every agency and how they're progressing with their outcomes. Okay. Alrighty. Thank you. Thanks. Mr. has something else. Councilman, I think Teresa and our staff and the intern support that we have, I think they're doing a great job with the data. One thing that we can pledge going forward is how do we share this information with you, the council members with the network of social service providers? How do we go about compiling the data that we have ready available? That's going to be a task, but I think it's a task worth us pursuing. As we wrap up, for example, I don't think we've ever done that for prior ESR grant programs, but to wrap up fiscal year 16, we go back and take a look at what was proposed outcomes, what was achieved, and how do we demonstrate to you guys. I think that would help in confidence and assurance, quality assurance rather, that our agencies are doing what we know they're doing, which is the good work that they place to do. Well, I guess that leads into my last question, and I believe it was on page... Well, it was talking about when you actually... I guess it was on page 16, talking about the next steps, and it was speaking that the announcement of the grant awards would be for the May 2018 proposed budget would be during the April, I would assume, during the mayor's proposed budget address. So are you, is that, do you want to go back to the administration handling the whole process and it doesn't come through the council because, and I mean, I'm not saying I'm against that at all. I'm just wondering if that was the intention of the steps that you've laid out here. No, we still, the department feels fortunate to have this opportunity to guide and administer the ESR grant program. This is, again, I think it was mentioned in September, this is a new process to us that heretofore went through budgeting in the mayor's office. I think our network of agencies are becoming accustomed and conditioned to the competitive grant process. What we were hoping to do is better align the schedule than it applied, I believe, I guess, in fiscal year 15. What happened last year, as you guys recall, when the mayor presented his budget in the first few days of April, there was a line item of $3 million for ESR, and there was a disclaimer that these respective awards would be forthcoming, which they were, which we came back, I think, just about 30 days later in early May and presented that, and then went through the links process. If we were to go with this schedule and close the application in December, that may give us an opportunity to better have for the mayor and the administration's review to be incorporated into the budget, that is, the budget message in the budget document that is proposed to council in early April. That's kind of our thought process there. Cool. All righty. I appreciate that very much. Okay. And Vice Mayor, you had, and then I'll close it with you. Thank you. Yeah, a couple more kind of questions and comments. The first has to do with the actual way that the individual applications are evaluated. I was a little concerned in the last cycle that basically the difference between the top and the bottom was not very large, and the difference between cutoffs could be a point. and I'm not a statistician, but there are ways I don't know whether it's about changing the actual numerical scores so that the weighting hand I don't know what they are, but I know that there are ways to get a little more differentiation amongst the actual scores the second thing I would recommend you're thinking about is on the score sheet itself, there is no guide for what the meaning of 5-4-3-2-1 is. For years, I've interviewed applicants for college, and the direction I get from the college that I'm doing that from is that it's a scale of five, just like we have. Three is a good candidate. Four is well above the quality that we usually get in the application pool, and five is this kid's going to knock the socks off everything. Two is not likely. One is don't even consider. So maybe some guidance that says three is perfectly good. If it's distinguished, maybe it's a four. And if it's just spectacular, it's a five. So we get a little more spread, and the ones that really stand out would stand out more because most people, when they're evaluating, tend to start, they don't go down to the two and one. They start with three, and they go up. So that's just a thought. Secondly, though I don't want to create a whole lot of work for anybody, it would be useful, if it's not that hard to do, to take these priorities that you're potentially proposing, apply them to the last cycle. If they had been in place, what difference would it have made? If they had been in place, would that have limited some? Would it have changed the allocation so that we can see better what the meaning of these limits would be going forward, presuming they'd be somewhat similarly? And then finally, I presume you're going to come back with you're not calling these recommendations yet. You're calling them things for us to consider or whatever. but I assume you're going to come back with specific recommendations that then this committee and then the whole council can look at and say, yeah, one year and not two years, or vice versa, whatever. Is that right? We, yes and no to a certain degree, Vice Mayor, we, as I spoke with the chair, Council Member Lamb recently. We're prepared to come back to meet the schedule that's in the packet. We hope to have consent and endorsement of the council, hopefully by this fall. We're very fortunate today to have pretty much the committee's entire attention to this subject today for discussion. We know that won't be the case in future committee meetings, but we're prepared to come back just as soon as we're called on in April, May, subsequent meetings to report back on some of the discussion that's happened here today. However, what I would contend, and this kind of goes back to the initial slide, the intro of the review and discussion, these four policy areas, we are kindly requesting guidance from the council. And there is a snowball effect. I think we discussed it back in September. a position of the council from a policy guidance standpoint on one of these areas very well will have an impact on how we approach the second policy area and the third policy area, etc. So we stand ready to do that work, but we would, if time permits, really like at least a sign going forward that we're going in the right direction. If it's not a clear out vote, but just a sign if we're heading in the right direction so we can come back 15 minutes in future meetings and kind of tell you where we are. Great. Thank you. Thank you, Chair. Council Member Bledsoe. Thank you, Chair. Thank you, Commissioner. I was going to echo that same point, which is, as a council, it's our decision what areas we want to fund. what do we think the city's role is in funding the external grants or offices or services that we can't do that we want the city to do? And that can be a variety of different things, but that, I think, is what Commissioner Ford is looking for, is do we agree that these four funding areas are where we want the city to focus on extended resources for us? And I would mention, Chairman Lamb, that you were talking about the seniors. And I do think that most of what applied for senior citizens would fit into one of these things. They were doing housing for seniors. They were doing nutrition for seniors. They were doing maybe mental health or substance abuse for seniors. So they're not underserved. They're just going to be categorized in different ways. And I do think we've put a lot of resources behind the new senior center. So I do think we're kind of taking care of them. I think the emphasis on the youth development is different, meaning it's hard to put educational things and backpacks and resources for after-school kids and those other things and those top three shelter or food or health or safety that you can kind of lump seniors into. So I guess that's why I was kind of pushing, again, for a larger portion to be dedicated solely for our youth development. It's hard for them to compete on food for funds or food or counseling, if that makes sense. So that's kind of my thought behind why those four things are important. And I think it's a really good step that we've made towards trying to define as a city what we think our fund line priorities should be. So thank you, Chair. Council Member Maloney. I didn't need that. What is next? I mean, there is no motion. Chris, I'm just going to come out and say you're doing the right direction. If you need somebody to say, I'm hopeful in the council's support for this direction, you were able to answer my concern to one to two years. Because if we say it one year, folks here are already strung on the programs that they can do, and then on top of that, they have to monitor and then turn around with the application. It's just an ongoing all year. This here allows them to make sure the program is being done right. It gives you a chance to make sure, let's say somebody does come in and doesn't get awarded, give them a year and a half to see how they can do better on their application. Because if they come back in a year, that doesn't give them, in my opinion, don't give them your folks to educate them how they can do better. Because they're too busy right now getting ready for the next cycle of grading and get the process going right now. I'm just trying to figure out what's next. I didn't hear any motions being made out of this to want them to go direction, but from what I've been hearing, he wants to know if he's going the right way, the right direction. Right. I say he's going the right direction. I like to keep this going forward. I don't even know what the next step is. I'm happy what he's done, and then somebody else has it. I haven't heard anybody complain about it. I think, Council Member Maloney, I think that what we all need to make sure we understand, there's a resolution that the council in 2014 passed, and that resolution actually outlines the process. And what we're talking about today here is different than that. So I think it would be the council's, I think we would need to approve some other form of a resolution outlining a different process, process because right now they are held to run by this process that's outlined in Resolution 736-2014. So what I'm thinking is that you all put the pens back to the paper after this good discussion today and then come back maybe in May and Commissioner Ford wants to talk. Council Member, I appreciate that. Going back to the original slide, I think that, and Council Member Lamb is referencing Resolution 736 of 2014, which set the policy guidelines for ESR. Those stand in place right now. So if there are no changes, we stand in position and ready to move forward with the process to carry out a two-year, to start all over again on that regular cycle. If there are changes, however, and I think the discussion we've had today is a great discussion, but if there are changes, now would be the time to discuss those. And these four policy areas, if there is a, we seek guidance, and not necessarily in regards to necessarily that order, but those four areas, if we could kindly ask for council's guidance, because if there is not, I'll give you just an example, if there is not a desire for us to reestablish an annual grant cycle, I think we ought to hash that out. I really need the council's guidance on that. If you're okay with revising the evaluation and ranking process, I mean, kind of really, I'm not speaking to the protocol of the council, but we do need some indications on each of these four policy areas to afford us, and we will quickly come back based on how you guys feel about these areas. and so I mean I guess I'll make a motion that we go on approve this and if it didn't come back next month I don't see anybody in here who made any want to change anything yet I have not heard a motion that any of these four to be changed and I support what they're doing so I like to make the motion that we go on and keep going the way it is Is that a form of a motion? Move Is there a second? or is there a second for discussion council member evans second of the motion okay thank you um if I understand, Commissioner Ford, that these one, two, and three points, these are your suggestions. They are, no, Councilman Braves, at this point, they are potential policy revisions that I bring to the council if you guys want to make those changes. And I highlighted these very, in just verbatim, this context in our September committee meeting, that I would bring back these four areas for council's consideration. And I'm offering discussion points and advantages to those. Would I support carrying forward these out if the council endorses it? I surely could get behind that and work with our department and the administration to bring that forward. Okay. I guess, Council Member Scotchfield, sorry. I guess my question is to the motion. Do we really need a motion if we're not changing the way the resolution reads? Because are you wanting to adopt these things? then we need to draft a new resolution and bring that to committee and move from there. What I want to do is adopt these so they can make a resolution for it. But you're not endorsing necessarily any of these. You're stating these are possibilities. They are, and Council Member Scutchfield, I think what I'm being very careful not to do is to preempt the authority of the council. Yeah, I don't want to do that. You're there now, not up here. But I think I'm trying to make clarification, I guess, of what Council Member Maloney, because right now we can't, I guess you can have them come forward with a new resolution, but right now you're not necessarily endorsing a new resolution. Well, I think we're not at the stage, Council Member, going back to the schedule, I don't think we're necessarily at the stage of a new resolution. I think some of these policy discussions will allow us to move forward that in the summer, before we go on break in July, or when we return in September, we would then be able to couple all of these policy discussions and guidelines to draft the resolution. I don't think we're anywhere near a new resolution yet. Thank you, and I think that's the clarification. I think I'm not going to support the motion at this time. I think it's more important for us to keep in committee and come forward with more information from you, because I don't think we necessarily need all of those potential recommendations going forward. I think we do need more information. So, thank you. Vice Mayor Kaye? Thank you, Chair. Yeah, I guess I got confused. The motion, as I understand it, is to maintain the status quo. and not to, that's what the, so that's the motion as I understood it. Did I misunderstand the motion? Well, I want to get clarification from him first. Go ahead. My clarification, do you want me to get the clarification? Vice Mayor, it was my understanding with Councilman Maloney's motion that he was moving forward with what the recommendations were on page 10, I believe. with the potential policy revisions. That's the way I understood Council Member Maloney's motion. My definition is he did his presentation. He said these are the four most important issues he wants, the direction, which way to go with these. I said I'm fine with it. I want him to continue on with it. And I thought if I need to make a motion for him to continue on with this process, or so I made the motion. Or now you're telling me that I don't want to muddy the water. I just want him to keep going forward. I don't want to get off track and this is what I'm wanting to do. Right. Vice Mayor, were you finished? I think if that's the intention of the motion, which is to continue the conversation about these potential policy revisions, I can support it. I just don't want the record to show the opposite and then have the vote be in favor of it. So I don't know if we can get the... So, Council Member Maloney, did you want to speak again because your name is still on here, or do you want to clarify your intent on the motion? My clarification is to let him, as what I understood, he is looking for directions on these four here, which I support. And I wanted him to continue to go on that and whatever has to be done, whenever he's ready to write the resolution, whatever. I just don't think we need to get off track. I think this is what he needs. These are the four things to keep him in compliance, keep him ready for it to start after September. And the last thing I want to do is let the body just slow it down or anything like that to come up with some other ideas that he's happy with what we're doing right now. Okay. And that's why I made the motion that we continue to adopt these four and go forward with them. Okay. Now, I think that clarifies it. But I think that what also we have realized is that we're not at a point to where we're ready to adopt the resolution and move forward, but just to give the support of what's been brought forward today. And I also, Commissioner Ford, I need to recognize Council Member Scutchfield and then Council Member Evans. I think the motion, if you'll amend to clarify, it's basically a motion to keep it in committee with a resolution to come forward. If I can amend to clarify the motion. Okay, there's amendment to the motion. Is there a second? Second. Second by, you can't, all right. Is there a second? Second. Second by Council Member Bledsoe. All right. Okay, on the motion on the floor that we bring a resolution forward at another committee meeting down the road, and one to be yet to determine, is there any discussion on the motion? This is the amendment to the motion. No discussion. All in favor of the amendment to the motion? Say aye. Any opposed? Thank you. Now, that takes us back to the original motion, which is Council Member Maloney's motion and seconded by Evans, where we are moving forward and will determine, Commissioner Ford and I will discuss as to when he's prepared to bring stuff, bring more, the resolution forward, draft. perhaps the earliest it could be would be May. But if it's okay with the committee, we won't set a date as to when it will be brought back. We'll just keep it in committee and then be able to report once it's ready. So, all right. So on Council Member Maloney's motion, all in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. Thank you. And now, Commissioner Ford, does that make it clear as mud? I think it does. What we'll do is on, so for clarity on the policy revisions, we will bring back a report or guidance related to the revisions to reestablish an annual grant cycle, to redefine priority areas, to put in place limits and to also revise the process. Is that? That's what I understood the motion to be. So let me recognize Council Member Evans. Thank you, Chair. I think that's kind of, well, I don't know what to think anymore at this point. But maybe page 10, I mean, those were the potential policy revisions. I thought that's kind of what we were going to talk about, and if we would take maybe one or the first or second one, I mean, those seem to be perhaps easy questions to answer and perhaps have a motion on that. I mean, because either you believe in reestablishing the one year or you don't. Because I'm ready to make a motion, Commissioner, if that will help you. Council Member Evans and Committee Chair, what you have above you on the overhead, I asked Teresa to put a slide that was in the September committee packet. And this slide summarizes the contents of Resolution 736. And when Commissioner Mills was here and I was with you guys, what Commissioner Mills did was we went down every recommendation, and we kind of thumbs up and we kind of thumbs down. And that's what really led to resolution. That is the context of Resolution 736. So what Council Member Evans is referring to in regards to just quickly going down those four, because not all of those four may be to the liking of the committee. And irregardless, we would be fine with that. We just need to clearly understand if you want us to go back and consider all four or consider two and four or a variation thereof. But that is how we, by practice, came to Resolution 736. It was an exercise, but we don't have nine as we had then. We just had four to begin with. Okay. Council Member James Brown. Thank you, Chair. I think that's a good recommendation. I think we can go down the four and decide which ones we need you to look at. But I guess starting with recommendation one, and I don't want to create any additional work, but we see the benefit, you know, both from the one-year cycle and the two-year cycle. Is there any possible way to come up with some sort of a hybrid, maybe based on grant amount or the organization's needs? Because, like I said, there's benefits from getting funding for a two-year cycle. And then with some of the new programs that's innovative and kind of a startup, maybe funding those for one year could be a possibility. Council Member Brown, I think there's definitely a way for us to do that. we've actually exercised by need here recently with the Opportunity Grant Initiative. If you guys recall, here this last fall, we funded, I think, to the tune of almost, forget the exact amount, almost a couple of hundred thousand dollars for four initiatives. And again, the word with that program was it was an initiative. It's not a grant program because we haven't yet to decide that that's going to be an ongoing program. But it allowed us to respond to the issues with learning and the achievement gap while we kept our two-year funding cycle going. So that is something we could very well be open-minded to if we were to keep the one-year cycle but still give ourselves as a government the flexibility to respond as need arises and more importantly as resources arises. Again, the OGI Opportunity Grant Initiative came about because we were discussing fund balance. That's a great point, Council Member. Okay. So I don't know how you want to approach it, but just looking at the list, I'm fine with consideration number four to revise the evaluation and ranking process. I think that the work that you've done on that is sufficient, so maybe that's one that we don't need to look at. But the other three, I think, are areas that we might have more discussion on, or you might have some other suggestions. All right. Thank you. Council Member Maloney. I just want to go back to what you were talking about doing a pilot program for one year and two years. To me, I think the mayor and this council, when it comes to budget cycles, they need to set aside a couple hundred thousand dollars. If a new project comes aboard, and then you would have a special meeting with your committee, because the last thing I want to do is make this political. And to me, I like the process with taking as much politics out of this as we possibly can. and there will be times that when a new organization or a new group comes in and they have a great idea and this council and this administration would think we may want to do something but if we're in a two-year cycle, maybe the mayor could set aside some money and the council could approve it but you still would be able to go through the process and let the folks who grade the system for the two years what we have now and let them grade the one year to make sure if it is something that reaches one of their priority lists that we may want to try this. But I don't want to sit here and I want to keep politics as much as I can out of this. And I'm afraid if we start setting money aside for one year for people who didn't get awarded or something like that and come complain that it defeats the whole purpose while we're doing the two years and keeping us out of the politics. But I still think there are times there will be an idea to come up in that window there for two years that maybe just the mayor and the council needs to set aside a certain amount of money that will help with this kind of a project that he just council member brown just brought up it's a brand new project that they have never competed before with the other ones and did not get awarded they're coming in with something totally different that may be good to this whole council community Councilmember Bledsoe. Thank you, Chair. So I guess I'm just going to clarify. It would be helpful for you to have a motion from us saying we want you to look into a hybrid version, saying we agree with the two-year grant cycle. We would like to find a way to fund one-year cycles in some kind of way. And if that's through PSAs or if that's through the Opportunity Grant initiatives, so that there's a way of mechanism for you to recommend that, You're looking confused. No, and that would be, I could support that. I could support that, Council Member Bledsoe. As I look at the priority areas, there really is no wrong answer for number one, whether a one-year or two-year cycle. There is no wrong answer there. And we could actually do a hybrid of it. We could keep the two-year cycle and allow for innovation projects or interim projects or new projects, that can be accomplished. Number one, no wrong answer. Number two, number three, and number four, and maybe, forgive me for not bringing this forward, I do think those are good ideas to go forward. I didn't want to preempt you guys, but I do would stand here honestly as the department that's going to have to administer this. I do think those are good ideas to go forward on coming back with funding, the priorities, grant limits. We just don't have the resource to meet all those needs, so we've got to find a way to be fair about it. And then Council Member Brown, I think, is right. We can work in-house with the talent that we have on our staff to be fair and open about the evaluation process. Okay. I think most people who gave recommendations, they were tweaks to this, not radical changes, in the sense of sliding scale percentages versus an exact one. And I do think the funding priorities are very good. I do think maybe some people want more definition in those funding priorities, so that it's a little more clear to us what our target audience is in those four categories and more clear for the grantees what they're actually looking for. And I think it would be helpful. And maybe you come back and say we can't do it. We can't do a two and a one or a hybrid because of logistics or personnel or et cetera. That would be okay. I do think we need an answer on that. And I think several of us are interested in that option. Is that okay? I think, I mean, I concur. I think that the intention of today's meeting was to give you all direction and feedback. And I do believe that even though we made a motion, and I think the intention of it was to, we like what we're seeing, and I think that the further dialogue is leading to that we want to see a little bit more. and I think that if you will take that information and bring it back to us and we can decide on a proper time to do that, and then I think at that time is the point when we'll be ready to actually move forward. So, Council Member Scotchfield. I know Council Member Bledsoe is the one that put this into committee, although I think it's something that all of us are obviously very interested in. And I think, Council Member Bledsoe, if your office will work with Commissioner Ford to come up with what you think from this discussion would be an acceptable resolution. I think once we have that from your office with Commissioner Ford working on it, I think we can tweak it if we see things that we want differently. But then we don't have something in form right now to work on, if that makes sense. Sure. I'd be happy to work with Commissioner Ford to do that. And I guess I'm just going to ask for your all's leeway in making sure that if you have major changes to what we've seen that you tell me beforehand so we don't have a longer meeting at the next one. I know. Not blindside. I don't want to waste everybody's time, including my own, doing a whole lot of work. But I'm happy to do that and put together a resolution that I think reflects the discussions we've had and to get that to you as soon as we can. Thank you. And if it's okay with the discretion of the council, I would like to see if there are any agencies that are present today that would like to have any comments or anything. I recognize a few faces out in the, but I didn't know if there were any comments that, and I didn't want to not recognize them. It doesn't look like anybody wants to say anything. Okie dokie. All right. Well, I can't say I didn't ask you. Okay, Commissioner Ford, is there anything else that you need to do in closure of this conversation? No, Council Member. We just appreciate the time and the confidence that you've given our department to administer this program. We will get with Council Member Bledsoe and come back. We won't be in a hurry. We have some time, and so we'll bring back and discuss and go forward and prepare for this fall's application cycle. Thank you again. I appreciate it, and I thought this had been a really good discussion today, so thank you all for all of your input. And, Council Member, I guess we'll go on to the items referred to committee, and we have the aquatics program design, Council Member Scutchfield. Was that different than... We didn't. I think aquatics program design, I think we have reported out on. I don't know if Ms. Conrad is in here. If it's okay, we'll leave it in here. But I think that may be because we've presented it, and now it's funding. So actually, I'm going to make a motion to remove it. All right. There's a motion and second on the floor to remove aquatics program design. Any discussion? Oh, Commander. Commissioner. Amanda. I'm not taking Commissioner's title. You're correct. We presented on it, and I think it is a budgetary issue now, what the mayor decides to put in his budget or what the council decides to put in their budget as to what we want to do. I wish we could have had more of a discussion on what we want to do than what we have. I think we may at our budget retreat. I mean, so I don't think it's a discussion that's necessarily going to occur in this committee at this point. Well, I mean, there's a motion on the floor, and there's a second. So all in favor of the motion to take it out of committee, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? All right. We'll remove that from the, I mean, obviously at any point you can always bring something back. So the Parks Foundation, Council Member Scotchfield? Thank you. This is something I'm working with the Senior Services Commission on something that's similar to this. I don't have a resolution yet. I'd like to keep it in committee until we have moved forward. Absolutely. And the Review of Ethics Ordinance, Council Member Evans? Yes, Chair. We did have a subcommittee meeting, and I am hoping our next meeting we will be able to vote it out of the subcommittee to bring it to the full committee. That is my sincere hope. All right. I appreciate it. It has been a very informational subcommittee, and there's been a lot of work to be done on that, so I appreciate that. We have Commissioner Ford to thank for that. We have Commissioner Ford to thank for that. Absolutely, yes. Thank you. Okay, and we'll leave the ESR in here in the committee until we report back. Council Member Hensley had the Veterans Affairs, and since he's not here, I guess we'll leave it in here because of that. Council Member Fred Brown, security cameras in the parks. We'll be ready for April. Yeah, April. Put it on for April, and we'll have the parks give us a presentation. I think they're working on just some preliminary information, and then we can ask questions from there. Okay. All right. Council Member James Brown, did you have a comment? Yeah. About the security cameras in the parks. Do you know if they're looking at specific parks or are they just looking at the policy in general? I think it's policy in general, and then we may recommend or they may recommend some pilots. Okay. Something, you know, and what I really wanted to address there, and I'll meet with the parks one time just to try to get some information, but what we're trying to do is see what we do have. We do have a little bit of security in some of our parks, but really this is going to be a summary of where we're at and maybe a plan for the future on what we need to do in the future. Okay. Yeah, that sounds good. That's something that I'm interested in as well, so thank you. All right. Thank you. The next thing is the, and it's called legislative review here, but I'm actually going to change that to say council rules and procedures because it actually confused someone last month, and they called me up thinking that they needed a legislative review from state legislation. So if that's okay, just for clarifications. That's fine, and we're ready for April. April? Okay. Yes, ma'am. All righty. CNG fueling station, Council Member Maloney. You think we'll be ready for April? The bid's supposed to close out, I think, March the 10th. So hopefully we'll have some for you on this month. Okay. All right. Thank you. Boards, agencies, and commissions, Council Member Scutchfield? I have been working with the information keepers on that, and I think we will have a very condensed, perfect form for them, for us. And hopefully they'll present it. It'll be quick. If everybody agrees to that form, then it'll come off. So you think in April maybe? Oh, yeah. We've already met and have it. So I think as soon as we say that's an approved form. Excellent. All right. Okay, thanks. And then autonomous cars. Council Member Hensley had this, and since he's not here, I guess we'll leave it in here until we can find out more clarification. Some of the follow-up items, we've got the Bluegrass International Center. Maybe we could have an update on that in June or July maybe. I'm looking at Ms. Taylor out in the yard. Yes? That's awesome. And then we've got the EMS service fees. Council Member Henson is not here today, but Commissioner Ford and I were discussing briefly today that we might have some information maybe in May or something. So awesome. Is there anything else to discuss by my colleagues? Move to adjourn. Second. All in favor? Any opposed? Thank you. Last night I dreamed I died and stood outside those pearly gates When suddenly I realize there must be some mistake