Leading Through the Pandemic: How Local Governments are Dismantling Barriers to Economic Mobility

Just Economy Conference – May 6, 2021

COVID-19 exacerbated the health and economic wealth gaps that we already knew persisted from decades of redlining and other discriminatory policies that have created hyper-segregated communities with concentrated poverty. Local governments were challenged with identifying revitalization strategies to address barriers to economic mobility with increased attention placed on the intersection of gender, race, health and poverty. This session will focus on how local government professionals are leading through the pandemic while shifting priorities to place equity front and center in their recovery efforts.

Speakers:

• Rashad Young, Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer, Howard University
• Katherine Crosby, Chief Staff, Toledo, Ohio
• Odie Donald, County Administrator, Augusta Georgia
• Elizabeth Pauli, City Administrator, Tacoma, Washington

Transcript

NCRC video transcripts are produced by a third-party transcription service and may contain errors. They are lightly edited for style and clarity.

Young, 02:18 

Good afternoon, and welcome to the NCRC 2021 just economy conference. My name is Rashad young. I’m the Senior Vice President and Chief Strategy Officer for Howard University formerly, formerly city administrator for the District of Columbia government. It’s my pleasure to moderate this panel with you this afternoon, leading through the pandemic how local governments are dismantling barriers to economic mobility. So we all know that COVID has really made their the desperate impacts and inequities that have impacted persons of color homes and communities all across this country, and made plain issues around gender, race, health and poverty, and how they impact people during the pandemic. And so this session is going to focus on how local government professionals are leading through this pandemic and setting priorities that are really equity based, and before in their efforts for recovery. So we have three outstanding panelists with us today to talk about their experiences from different parts of the country. So you’ll get to hear how different strategies are playing out in communities across the country we have with us, Katherine Crosby. She is the Chief of Staff for the city of Toledo and Toledo, Ohio. We have Odie Donald, who is the county administrator for Augusta, Georgia, and Elizabeth Pauley, who is the city manager for Tacoma, Washington. As our presenters present and talk about their experiences and strategies and their communities. We will go through those presentations and leave opportunities for you to ask questions at the end. There is a comment section or a chat box feature in this web stream. So list your questions in the web stream and after our presenters have presented. I’ll help facilitate the q&a portion of our session. So with that, let me turn it over to Katy Crosby, Chief of Staff city of Toledo who will start off our session. Good afternoon, Katy, the floor is yours. 

Crosby, 04:48 

Good afternoon. Thank you for shot. So I’ll start by sharing my presentation. Hopefully you’re all he can see the screen. As Rashad mentioned, I am the Chief of Staff for this City of Toledo. I’ve been in this role for about three years, going into my fourth year. And I have helped to lead the recovery efforts as well as our strategy around getting through the pandemic. So the city of Toledo is in Lucas county and Ohio. It is in the northwest portion of Ohio. It’s the fourth largest city in Ohio by population and the second by square miles, we have about 276,000 residents and our population has been slowly declining. At our peak, we were at about 400,000 residents, which meant that we had about 84 square miles. So we still have to provide services for that large body of our city, even though our residents continued to decline. We’re about two hours from Columbus, Cleveland, and about an hour from the tree. In terms of our population, we’re about half male half female population, and little under 60% Caucasian 27% African American and a little under 9%. Hispanic are female headed households are about 48% of households with children under the age of 18. And then are our family households with no spouse based on race and ethnicity. House male householders are about 45%. So that’s no spouse with a child under the age of 18. About 45% of those households that are male householders are white, 29%, black, and 16%, Hispanic. And then for female heads of households, about 46% are African American, 26%, white, and 14%, Hispanic. That’s important as we talk about the impact of the pandemic, because we know that female heads of household households tend to have higher rates of poverty, and also our marginal households with children. And then the other significant piece of information is that overall, almost 20% of our households did not have internet access, and another 10% did not have a computer. And that was most more significantly impacted by households with less than $20,000 of median income. Let’s talk a little bit about our educational attainment. As with many communities around the country, we see lower educational attainment in black and Hispanic communities. And this just represents what educational attainment is by race and ethnicity by gender, and then also for high school and bachelor’s degrees. So you know, as I mentioned, black and Hispanic households have less educational attainment than white households. And then we have less educational attainment by gender and female headed households. And that impacts earning potential as well. And in Ohio, Ohio, cities received their primary source of revenue from income tax collection. So when COVID-19 hit and folks could not go to work, we had a significant impact on our income tax collection. It represented about a four and a half percent in our income tax decline, and that represented $11.9 billion in our 2020 budget. We also had a drop in, we do get a portion of our revenue from property tax. And so we had a 6.8% reduction in home property sales. But the median price of home property sales went up and so that impacted the cost of housing in our community. Right now, we are anticipating evictions to increase and foreclosures to increase once the moratorium ends. And I’ll talk a little bit about some of the concerns we have there. As well as we have some issues with small businesses being able to access PPP, and then again, the limited access to internet and no computer at home impacted individuals ability to access classes virtually or to work from home. We are looking at information from our United one to one request for service. As you can see highlighted in yellow, most of our requests for service had to do with housing or shelter and rental assistance. And so we saw a huge increase in our residents needs for housing assistance. And that’s going to be reflected or that is really concerning as as these moratoriums began to end, how people are going to be able to make sure that they can stay in their homes. We also saw with our aging population, that there was an increase in mental health concerns that depression, social isolation, technology challenges. We have grandparents that are raising children, and so they weren’t comfortable with technology. So that really impacted their ability to be able to help their children learn in the household and then we had an uptick in the need for food and so food insecurity wasn’t Right concern. And so our partners were requested funding to be able to assist with that. And then the other challenges as individuals tried to get vaccinated, our aging population are homebound and so many of them were not able to get access to the vaccine. And so we’re working on strategies to make sure that we have equitable access to the vaccine. and respond to the pandemic and the concerns around rental assistance, we use our COVID dollars and now I’ll provide a breakdown of that shortly to provide rental and mortgage assistance. We also use it to help small and micro businesses. We assistant with the moratorium by providing a moratorium on water shut offs. And then we’re also working on a debt forgiveness and affordability program. I’ll talk a little bit about our gun violence reduction strategy, because we saw a significant increase in gun violence, it was about an 89% increase from the previous year where we had a 21% drop in gun violence. And then we also are doing some work, to respond to create an equitable entrepreneurial ecosystem, and then work around racial equity. In addition to that, our public school system provided laptops, Chromebooks, and access to Wi Fi, so that students were able to still do their work and parents were able to work from home. And then in response to the uptick in violence, where we’re investing dollars in recreational programming. This slide is an example of how we used our COVID care scholars to respond to the pandemic, as I mentioned to you before, much of the request, and the concern that was coming in was around housing, which is really important when dealing with a pandemic. And so the majority of our funding 44% went to helping people with emergency rental assistance. And then another large percentage went to helping our homelessness board make sure that we were able to support our continuum of care around homelessness. This is another example of how we spent the second tranche of our CDBG dollars. And again, much of that went towards business assistance. So we were able to provide emergency grant assistance to micro businesses, of which I’m over half of that funding went to minority businesses. So what we found is that many of our small businesses were not able to access PPP. And that was the result of their inability or them not having a direct relationship with banking institutions. So we use a large portion of our CDBG dollars to be able to help those businesses by providing grants under $5,000 for micro businesses, and again, much of that supported minority businesses as well as women owned businesses are second. Now we’re working on a mortgage Assistance Program. So in addition to our rent, in addition to our rental assistance program, we recognize that we are getting ready to come up on ending a moratorium around mortgage assistance. And I’m with that we need to make sure that we have a program to help folks that with their mortgages. So we are providing assistance for up to six months. One of the things that we’re seeing is that individuals are not applying for the funding because of the moratorium, so we do have some concern about an influx of applications and the availability of resources as a moratoriums in for individuals who are seeking mortgage assistance. The second thing that we’re doing with our rental assistance program is that um, one of the challenges that we ran into with our tenants applying for rental assistance is that either they felt like the process was cumbersome, or they just weren’t, they weren’t applying. And so we wanted to make sure that landlords were able to apply for the funding on behalf of their tenants. And so now, in the second part of our rental assistance program, landlords will be eligible to apply for their tenants. And that way, if the landlord starts the application, and then the tenant applies for funding, the application has already started. And the landlord doesn’t miss out on that money on the money for their rent, and then the individual is not evicted. As part of our creating an equitable entrepreneurial ecosystem, one of our banking institutions Huntington bank, reached out to forest cities and forest cities is an organization that has worked with cities across the country to help them to create an odd and equitable entrepreneurial ecosystem. And so as part of that strategy, they reached out to entrepreneurs in our community to find out where the weaknesses were in our ecosystem. And one of the things that we learned is that we’re just not doing a good job of telling our story about what resources are available in our community. And then secondly, we’re also we also need to do a better job of creating policies or developing policies that support and equitable our For your ecosystem. And so now we are focusing on four areas in order to create that ecosystem. And that includes counseling, capital, contracting, and changing the culture. And changing the culture is really going to be what is going to be most impactful because it’s really about making sure that our local businesses understand the need for supplier diversity programs that support that support local entrepreneurs, as well as making sure that they’re looking at opportunities to break contracts into smaller pieces, so that these are local entrepreneurs are able to bid on those contracts. So it’s really about thinking differently about around how you engage minority and women on businesses, so that they’re able to take advantage of those opportunities, and we can scale them up. So we’re doing a lot of work around that. And then the second thing that we’re doing around creating an equitable entrepreneurial ecosystem is creating a disc is entering into a disparity study. And so what that disparity study does is it not only looks at the availability and utilization of minority and women on businesses, but it also determines whether or not your local government has been a passive participant and discriminating against minority and women on businesses, and allows you to take that information to create a race or gender conscious program so that you’re able to support those businesses and create strategies to provide contracting opportunities. In addition to some of the challenges around water, one of the things that we were finding is that you most folks lost their jobs, they weren’t able to pay their water bills. And we knew we know during the covid 19 pandemic, that water was really important because of the need to wash hands. And so after the moratorium ends, we know that people will have large bills. And so we want to make sure that we have assistance available to them. So we formed a community committee to help us create a water affordability program. And so we’re getting ready to roll that out. And it’ll allow for debt forgiveness. And then it’ll also allow for reduced costs of bills. And we have a couple of different assistance programs. And this is just some information about those different programs. And we can make this presentation available to you after after the the panel. And now what we’re doing is having this cross sector conversation about equity and inclusion. And so we are now forming the Tito Toledo racial equity and inclusion Council. And it includes both private public and community and nonprofit partners coming together to think about strategies to address structural racism, as well as any barriers to building wealth. And so we’re focusing in six pillar areas, or we’re at seven now, but social justice reform, education, workforce development, health and well being economic development and housing. And in that process, we’re bringing on a consultant who’s going to help us create a community wide plan that will have broad community engagement and think of real strategies around how we create equity in our community. One of the concerns that we have going into this process, and we want to be very mindful of is that there is a great need in our community. If you remember that demographic data that I showed you, we have about 25% poverty, and that that number is significantly higher for blacks and Hispanics in our community. And so we only can do so much. And so we need to figure out how do we start small and then as we, as we get achieved, milestones continue to move forward with with achieving greater thing. So we’re working in all of these pillar areas. And then from there, we’ll have an action plan, and then began to implement that action plan. Here are some of the city’s equity initiatives. As I mentioned before, this includes four cities and the disparity study to help inform an equitable entrepreneurial ecosystem. We also hired a program manager to to implement a public health model for gun violence reduction. So we’re using a Cure Violence model to address gun violence. We know that gun violence disproportionately impacts African American males between the ages of 25 to 34 in our community, and the communities that are most significantly impacted, or those communities that have the lowest opportunity. So we not only will focus on addressing the high risk needs of individuals who are most likely to be involved with gun violence. But in addition to that, we are are leveraging or partnering or collaborating with other departments within the city and using our neighborhood revitalization strategy areas or nurses, which are HUD designation to really focus in and drive other investments to those communities that are experiencing violence. And so that might be anywhere from what we’re doing around sidewalks to Home Repair and rehab services, downpayment assistance and then also invested in that profit organizations that are doing capacity building in those communities. So instead of addressing just the violence portion of it, we’re also looking at what we can do around the built environment, we also have a over probably have about 140,000 properties, households in our community and have that at least 25,000 of them will be focused in line on the first part of our lead safe initiative. So about 100,000 of our properties have led and so we have a multi year initiative to begin addressing that safety. So we have resources that we’re dedicated to that for landlords to be able to do their remediation in their properties. But then we’re also seeking additional resources to continue to roll out that strategy. And then also using some of our entitlement, where CDBG and home dollars for lead line replacement for our, for both our public and water, and private water lines. Um, I talked a little bit about our neighborhood revitalization strategy, other things that we’re doing is also creating an Office of Disability Services. So our as our population ages, we are also having increased population with disabilities. And then we talked about the Toledo racial equity and inclusion Council. We’re now looking at how we can go deeper through our table, you know, Toledo recovery plan priorities. And so many of the priorities, which are these six listed here will also address equity and some of the issues that we have in our communities that have experienced a huge amount of disinvestment over the years. And then in addition to that, how can we address some of our housing stock so that we can attract, attract and retain talent in our community. So we’re looking at things that we can do to leverage those resources that don’t create ongoing costs, but have a long term impact on the economic viability of our community. And then we’re using those results, we’re also leveraging those resources with private investment. In that process of determining how we’re going to use our American recovery plan dollars, were engaged in a community engagement process where we were bringing forward to lead our recovery committee, and those committee members will help us pick projects, for our Toledo recovery plan, help us for those projects. And then those projects will will be implemented, partial part of them will be implemented by the end of the year. And then we’ll do this process again through our budget process every year. But one of the things that we want to make sure that we do is that we have that community voice at the table when we’re trying to decide what projects we want to we want to implement. So some lessons learned from the pandemic. And just really, in terms of the conversation around equity is that it’s really important that we use cross sector collaboration to address economic inequities in our community. We also really learn the extent to which violence is connected to health and economic disparities all across the country. And every community, we saw an uptick in gun violence. And so that speaks volumes to if we want to create safe communities, we really need to make investments in our neighborhoods. And then last but not least, racial equity is a catchphrase that is starting to circulate. And we need to be mindful that we don’t just use that as the the next buzzword, but that we really know what it means and how to achieve racial equity. And that’s really about looking at data and narrowly tailoring your solutions to what the data is telling you or what the data is saying about how disparities exist in your community. And then how do you engage with your local government, I always talk to people about being involved with the local government. So folks say they want to, they want more action, and they don’t want to just talk but what what people don’t realize is talking is action. The way that we learn about how we address needs in the community is is by our residents participating in public meetings and giving us feedback, participating in surveys, like if you get a survey about fair housing, or something like that, it’s really important that our residents engage with those surveys and give us that feedback. The same thing with our disparity study process, or any other process that requires public feedback. When you get that make sure that you provide input or if there’s a community meeting that you show up to that community meeting, because we do listen, and we do take that information and incorporate it in our strategies for addressing community concerns. And then last but not least, engaging with ncrc created a local coalition and allowing ncrc to work with you on how you engage your your banks for bank investments and encouraging the banks to work with your local government to leverage those resources that are coming into your community. Here’s my contact information and I’ve also provided a few links for you all to review later if you’re interested in learning more about some of the programs that we put in place with our entitlements ours and I’ll turn it over to Elizabeth from there. 

Pauli, 25:02 

Thank you so much, Katy. And I am Elizabeth Pauli. I’m the city manager for the city of Tacoma. And I entered this role as an interim about almost four years ago, four years ago, a little over four years ago, not intending to take the position. I’ve been the city attorney and in the city attorney’s office for 20 years prior to that. And I find myself now feeling really privileged to be leading during this time, despite multiple pandemics and declarations of emergency in in our community. But it’s certainly an opportunity and when I’m grateful to be a part of so I’m also grateful to to share with you a little bit about city of Tacoma, where rails meat sales, we say that because we’re also known as the city of destiny. And that name came when the city was chosen as the western most terminus of the North Pacific Railroad in the late 18th or 19th century. And so, as we move into the next slide will kind of show you why we hope this, our city can also be really a destiny, a place where people can meet their their full opportunity. And so the city is has an amazing geographic location between the cascade Olympic mountain ranges, cascade and Olympic mountain ranges. We have 33 miles of waterfront along the Puget Sound. We’re part of the Seattle metropolitan area with 3.9 million people. We are the home of the Gallup tribe of Indians. We were the county seat for Pierce County, the large third largest city in the state and we do have a council manager form of government. Next slide. We are home to the fourth largest largest container port in the United States, as well as the fourth largest military installation at with the home of being the home of the Joint Base Lewis McChord military installation we have roots in industry, transportation, entrepreneurship, and as well as a robust outdoor lifestyle connection given our location. We are so are an Etsy makers city, focusing on Creative partnerships and helping underrepresented groups participate in the creative economy and economy. We have several major industries including defense, trade, healthcare, finance, aerospace and government. We have an award winning winning Metropolitan park system, eight universities, where the hometown of renowned glass artists do jail, Dale Chu Cooley, and have really a creative infrastructure, including the hilltop artists and space work to come up. Next slide. Our demographics, we have just over 217,000 residents in our city of slightly over 50% of which are female, our meeting medium income is just over $60,000.06 60,000 we have 50% 52% owner occupied households, which becomes a really critical demographic, as we know, given some of the impacts of COVID that we’ll be talking about 18.8% of our population do not speak English at home. And as you see there we are about 64.8%, white, 10.5%, black, 8.8% Asian and 12% Hispanic Latino next, next slide. Of course, COVID, we are all recognizing and experienced the disparate impact on our bipoc community. And most particularly in the areas of housing, and, and health. And in, especially in the area of housing, just want to point out that prior to the pandemic, we were the fastest rising housing market in the country. And we had an affordability crisis heading into the pandemic with a spark report really showing the racial inequity in our housing opportunity, as well as in homelessness. So really, a lot of our pandemic response was focused on those kinds of assistance, rental assistance, mortgage assistance, utility assistance and tenant rights to be able to support our residents during during the pandemic. Next slide. In terms of revenue, we, you’ll see here that we had sales tax hit business tax hit, we had hit hits across all of our major sources of revenue with about a $22 million overall impact on our revenues. And while we are that came in, of course at a time where we’re seeing a need for increases in our in basic services in our community. And while we’re seeing some recovery towards 2019 level levels of revenue, which of course is good news, that revenue loss And and our ongoing structural deficit really is going to impact our ability to meet service needs, at the levels needed in the community so really ties into our need to transform our systems and really focus our revenues where we can have the greatest impact. On our next slide, just want to share a little bit, highlight some of our approaches to using data and some of the resulting themes from our community. On the left side of the slide, you see kind of the range of things that we used over the last year to ensure that we were being data driven and collecting data by by talking with our community a lot. And so we continued local and regional regional business surveys, as well as a full community survey, community communications with our business and neighborhood districts, we also put our Tacoma equity index into full use over the course of the last year. And that is an interactive tool that helps us to allocate resources and analyze programs and prioritize investments with an equity lens through GIS mapping. So what we end up getting is a visualization of disparities using 29 different data points to determine where in our community residents are not being served. Or our services are not meeting their needs. So some of the applications that we’ve been able to use for that tool. For example, when we looked in this timeframe as doing small business grants, we did the overlay of our equity tool, so that we could again, really focus those grants for the largest area of impact on opportunity in our community. We also used it to prioritize geographically, to those areas of least opportunity, sort of some first in line for opportunities situation like spoke. So for example, in our participatory budgeting exercises we looked and use that tool for where where could that have the most impact in our community, we also used a balancing act tool to allow our community directly and interactively online to show us how they think we should spend our budget dollars. On the right of the screen you show, we show some of the themes that came out came through loud and clear from our community over all these uses of data, certainly high level of concern about policing and the need to transform policing, in need for improved access to social services and healthcare, the need for more affordable housing and improve increased access to jobs, as well as accountability both at the city and government at large and, and within our police force. So those are some of the ways that that data has informed and continues to inform our efforts. On the next slide, I’m just really pleased to be able to short share some of the internal equity measures that the city in initiatives that the city has in play. So our City Council adopted what we refer to as resolution 406 to two which is a resolution where the our council acknowledge the disparate impacts of systemic racism, and affirmed affirmed the city’s commitment to anti racist systems transformation, and directed me specifically as the city manager to do certain things, including prioritizing anti racism in our budget development, which I’m pleased to say we really learned a lot and successfully did in this last budget development. It also led to suit some administrative actions such as doing disparity studies of our contracts, disparity studies of our hiring and personnel policy so that we can really, really focus our efforts based on that data and information coming through those studies. And as a part of this transformational efforts, effort, are we are members of the government, government Alliance for racial equity, which is a national network of government, governments working to promote fairness and equity in advance opportunities for all. And I see we’re sliding around with our slides there. Thanks. And we have so as a result of that, we have employee cohorts that are helping us lead our internal efforts towards towards transformation. We also have what we call racial equity plans or reaps where each department is required to have a plan with goals and measurable outcomes designed to promote fairness and inclusive values for our employees, and to increase opportunities for underrepresented and underserved groups in our both within our organization and in our service delivery and We’re really looking forward to the results of those racial equity action plans. We’re also participating in a contracted with the National Network for safe communities, which is, which is an entity that supports cities and implementing evidence based approaches to violence prevention, and public safety. And specifically, our work with the NSC that we’re looking forward to is working with NSC, our community, our police department to find the best way to acknowledge harm. And to seek reconciliation is what can we’re really looking forward to the impact of that initiative with with our community, we also engage 21st Century Policing, a consulting firm that assisted us in doing a current state analysis of our police department. Again, the purpose of that study was so that when we work on transformation, that we can really target our work in the gaps that were exposed through this analysis. And we have received 64 recommendations for policy and practice changes that we are now in the process of, of, of implementing, we also have internal organization wide and I raised this transformational strategic planning underway, where we’re creating mission, vision and values with objectives and measurable in initiatives and programs at all of our council priority and community vision areas of how we need to transform. Next slide, please. Thank you. We also have some external equity efforts underway. One of which we’re calling heal the heart heal the heart of Tacoma, our male mayor and council committed to this initiative, which is a community led multiset sector systems transformation effort where we’re bringing together a group of committed to community members to help empower and lift which is the heal part help empower and lift, and helping help us define our heart. So helping us define where in the areas of health and housing education, environment and economy, access and arts and relationships and resources, how we need to transform, and each of those areas in the economy is one of the six top systems that have been identified for transformation. And we anticipate although those groups are still forming, and again, this is a community led process. But we expect that the focus there will be on economic justice addressing the income wealth gap, and disparities in employment. And that’s a really exciting thing that we’re watching and waiting for where the community leads us in that regard. The next program on the next slide that I’m also really excited about is the mirror guaranteed income program. Our Mayor woodards was one of the founding members of the mayors for guaranteed income. And that the city has partnered with our local United Way and has launched a demonstration project for guaranteed income in our city that we’re calling grit and growing resilience in Tacoma. grit is going to be shaped by a community engagement process as well. And that process is underway. But just fundamentally, the program is going to focus on employed single heads of households whose wages don’t provide a sufficient income to cover the cost of living in our region. And particularly whenever recovery from any kind of incident is required. And as we all know, this is a population that’s overwhelming, overwhelmingly made up of bipoc residents and, and women, I single heads of household. So we have a wide range of funding for this program. It’s privately funded, we have $600,000 secured for our our pilot program, and which is going to be a year in length. So our community lead group is going to help define a really tight participation profile, but focused on again a program inspired by Martin Luther King Jr. in his statement that he was convinced that the simplest approach to addressing poverty would be to provide abolish it directly. And I’m sorry that I’m really messing up what is otherwise a beautiful and effective quote, but abolishing poverty directly and through a guaranteed income. So we look forward to where that pilot program year where it takes us the data that we are able to get from our demonstration project project to better understand the impacts of guaranteed income in in our community and support how supports the development of innovative policies to fight poverty and, and and how we also might use our experience to implement gi programs at the at the federal level. The next slide outlines another partnership that’s really important as a part of our equity efforts. And that’s the Tacoma Pierce County equity Action Network, which supports institutional alignment in the effort to build community response to the covid 19 pandemic, and specifically through a racial equity lens. So over 30 organizations are participating in that now. And some of our key successes were to really focus our testing site placement and outreach and engagement to reach communities that are hard to reach and hard. And an often and often left out in some of these large efforts. We are distribution of COVID related updates. were spread in diverse community groups with in multiple languages. And we supported efforts for advocacy and communication on the vaccine, as well as testing and and also we’re able to ensure that those that are housed in our the private Northwest detention center that sits within our community, were able to have access to to those services. On the next slide, I’m just wanted to share some of the uses of funding that came our way, and how we sort of focus those funds and in able to in order to help our community recover, and again, with a focus on having the most impact on the most impacted. So we use some entitlement funds for neighborhood neighborhood revitalizations. And we used cares funding to support food access distance learning, small businesses, transitions to remote work and public safety expenses for COVID responses, I want to just focus on some of our some of those efforts. So in the area of rental assistance, we were able to really quickly use $902,000 in serving 638 houses with households with rental assistance, with 45% of the funding, reaching households headed by a person of color, and 78% of the households surveyed were headed, or excuse me, where 78% of the households were spearheaded by persons of color. So we also focused our small business loans in a way again, using our equity index tool, and we’re able to assist 51 micro businesses in receiving over $1.1 million of funding with 45 small and minority businesses across our area receiving over $4.2 million in careful cares, Act funding. We also really focused our childcare assistance funding, with again, focusing on areas and communities hardest hit by COVID. And we’re able to assist 72 families, specifically in our in our area with some grants related to child care. On the next slide, we have quite a display that I realize is really difficult to read. But that just shows how we focused our 2020 cares act allocations which did not come to us directly. But we were able to really quickly deploy through existing programs, setting up new programs and, and working with closely with our county to get those get those funds in a wide variety of programs again, with through an equity lens. So we were able to serve over 18,000 meals to seniors during the pandemic as an example, we increased our food bank funding by $900,000, providing 10 million pounds of food and 140,000 additional visits to our food banks to address issues relating to food access. We also recognize that distance learning was really a hardship to certain segments of our of our community. And we were able to work with our Metro parks really closely to ensure that our families had digital access and there and provided that to at least 45 students duress directly, as well as to our providers of social services. We worked hard to employ funding to make sure that they had Digital, some access to some digital equity so that they could continue to provide the important services that they provide to our community. With small business grants, we were able to cover some things that aren’t previously paid for through other programs so and in specifically operating operation expenses, and also to focus on a category of business that was left out from some other folks funding and were able to assist some home based businesses within economically distressed areas that were identified, again by our equity index. During this time, we also use funding to create 257 new shelter beds for those experiencing homelessness during the pandemic. On our next slide, we outline some of the ways that we’re planning for use of our American Recovery Act dollars. So we do with our council, we’re focusing that funding on targeted priority areas, in particular housing, homelessness and jobs returning some services that were either cancelled put on hold or otherwise impacted during COVID. And looking at some of those some of those areas of deferred maintenance and loss of revenue and some some recovery there. We are working on some processes that, again, we hope to set the community up for success and sustain sustainable says success when the one time federal funding runs out. That’s one of our focus areas is to ensure that sustainability of our efforts, we are also focusing on large transformational base projects that include partners, partnering with stakeholders throughout our community in our county, we are very determined to again, apply this funding, that really is you know, it’s just a historical opportunity to make sure we have the impact with this funding that we that our community needs. So we’re going to be listening to community voice, and trying hard with our council when there’s so much need in so many good projects to not spread our funding too thin. So that’s just a little bit of a share of our strategies. The next slide is just a pictorial of in the in the first round of funding, how we are looking at dividing up our funding. And, again, still spending in in some of our council priority areas, not all but trying to concentrate in those with the biggest impact for recovery, and for assisting those parts of our community and the highest need, as well as setting some aside to look at projects that that will take some time to develop that but that are going to be important going going forward. So that takes us to our last slide, what we’ve learned and you’re going to hear a lot of similarity. productivity and innovation can exist even when we’re working remotely. And even when we’re in the midst of really unprecedented pressure through not just the impacts of the COVID pandemic, but the pandemic of racial injustice and, and in our community in particular homelessness, we were able to still rally our dedicated workforce and really come up with some innovative programming, and met all of our basic service level goals even as we initiated some innovative COVID response programming. We also learn relearned the importance of data both, both gathering it in ways that we really are collecting from all the parts of our community and understanding what we’re gathering and then of course, employing it what we learn through our data in ways to have the most impact. This pandemic has said several times already today, but really our community recognize disparate disparities that existed pre pandemic that that that the pandemic exposed and made worse, which the silver lining i think is where there was any doubt about disparity, there’s no doubt and where there wasn’t doubt, there’s more more focused and commitment to engagement and action. We also really have clear recognition of the need for broad systems transformation and looking forward to some of our initiatives and the impact on those transformational efforts. We, we know that we need to be led by our community and that community partnerships and collaboration are really critical for highest impact. And that’s the end of my slides. Thank you 

Donald, 50:00 

Well, listen, super excited to be here today and share with you always excited to kind of share with Mr. Young as well as Miss Crosby and excited to hear from our new friends. in Tacoma Odie Donald a second excited to represent a gusto Richmond County, the consolidated government and just kind of talk how we have used the pandemic, really as a tool to kind of be innovative and make our government more sustainable. Just a few quick things about Augusta. You know, we are the 120/3 largest city in the United States. Created in 1736, shortly after Savannah. So we have the pleasure of being the second oldest city in the United States, as well as the home of the Masters, the home of Fort Gordon, the cybersecurity capital of the United States as of 2016. And probably most fun and even most popular, the home of James Brown. And so uniquely, I have the the distinction and I don’t know if it’s the fortune or misfortune to have layer two cities have through a Coronavirus, a pandemic response. And I think I’ll highlight some of that today, as we kind of hone in and look at Augusta. I came from South Fulton, which is a city within the Metropolitan Atlanta region, a little bit smaller, about 110,000 residents about the fifth largest city in the state, where Augusta is the second behind Atlanta. And what I have seen and learned is that the structure, the geography, the politics and other factors really impact the way we respond to this pandemic. And so in Augusta, again, 200,000 people, you can go to the next slide. We are if you go to the Yeah, we are one of three consolidated governments in the state of Georgia. And what that means is that we provide both city and county functions which is extremely unique, but it is actually benefited us as we prepare for the American rescue plan. Because we are able to access funding for both the city and county portion for each, we would have been allocated around $40 million, but instead will receive a total allocation of about $84 million, which for us we’re really excited about but what it also means is that some of the functions that the county delivers are not actually administratively under the control solely of our commission. So our police is an elected Sheriff who oversees that piece. For Health Services. We are part of a Tri County Health District that is operated by the state and then our human services. While some activities are delivered internally, homeless services and things of that nature, housing and other services are actually done through both direct service and partnership through our community, which has also had a little bit to do with our success. As a part of the consolidated government. There are two other cities you can go to the next slide. One of those cities is blight is extremely small, a little under 1000 residents even in the new senses, and you can go to the next slide where you’ll see that helps advise also one of our cities at about 4000 residents estimated and so our three City County, we provide services for all of those areas you can go to the next slide was really, you know, interesting is while we have county functions, we do operate mostly as a city. With that being said the 84th mayor, and only the third African American mayor and second elected African American mayor in the history of Augusta is Mayor hardy Davis. He is served both in the Georgia General Assembly as well as taking leadership roles with NLC, the African American mayor’s Association and others and he’s been very focused on bringing forward Equity and Inclusion issues forward to the commission and really Nationally, he’s one of the first to champion and non discrimination ordinance, which we’re actually working through. Now. Although he was one of the first to champion it, Augusta has really been slow to take it on. Because the posture of the commission as well as our residents, and businesses has been that we not only want to have an ordinance or a policy, but we want to infuse equity into our operations. And so if you go to the next slide, our commission is very large because we have a consolidated government, we have 10 total elected officials, with 10 districts, two of them being super districts, you can continue to the next slide. And so while we have eight regular districts, we do have two super district commissioners, which are also determined through a large voting similar to the mayor, the Augusta you can go to the next slide. The Augusta Metropolitan Statistical Area really is a big engine here in Georgia, about 615,000 people in the csra, very strong labor force of about 270,000, which almost matches the jobs, exactly that information has changed a little bit and our medium household income for Georgia is fairly strong. We have seen quite a bit of growth within the csra as well as the medium household income has crept closer to that 60,000 National median income. Although our cost of living remains one of the lowest, you can go to the next slide. One of the big areas as we look at not only how we approach equity, but how we respond to the pandemic is being responsible to business and industry and bringing them into the fold as we make equity decisions. We’ve been blessed, as I said to be the cyber in tech hub for the United States. And so our federal partners have been very engaged and how we not only deliver service, but how we become more inclusive, we’ll soon be announcing a partnership with IBM that’s focused on workforce and bringing people into the technical side of of workforce development. In cybersecurity. We’re also one of the best places in the state of Georgia, for healthcare, while the state has been unfairly maligned, when it comes to health care services, we’ve got a very strong community here, one of the best in the nation, where we have Doctors Hospital, Augusta University Hospital, and we train about 20% of the best doctors that leave and go out throughout our country. And so for us responding to the pandemic, we have had some natural advantages that others may not have, because of the strong infrastructure that we have across workforce development, as well as in healthcare, and with our military partners. I will say that one of the challenges is that across the nation, we’ve seen that the building surge and the housing surge has been growing almost, you know, unexpectedly in some areas, and Augusta, as of last Monday, we only have 500 available houses throughout the county. And so while that is a great thing for our economy, with our growth, it provides some challenges, especially in the midst of the pandemic, to try to mitigate that and we’ll talk about some of the challenges when it comes to I’ll say workforce development, Labor and Industry. What we’ve done is we’ve seen the growth, we’ve started to create programs that helps to bring our most vulnerable citizens into the workforce. And so very recently, about a month ago, actually, less than a month ago, our mayor and I introduced a new program through seska that actually change I’m sorry, trains unemployed residents, and brings them into the workforce in the construction industry. with our partners at the construction and Education Foundation of Georgia. We’re actually on Monday be launching our first class of 15 students all who would be under the poverty line unemployed and having other barriers to employment, including criminal records, and the program has about a 97% success rate. And so we’re excited to add workforce development as a component of what we do here within the consolidator. Government, but also as a part of our package to mitigate COVID-19, you can go to the next slide. When we look at, you know, the employers here, you know, this is just our top private sector employers, because those are the partners that we’ve really been looking at and leaning on to kind of help lead and give insight into our recovery. What’s not listed here is a taxslayer. And Starbucks Starbucks is has a manufacturing plant here within our borders, which is about 300 persons and tax layer, I think is about 150. Employees well, and so both of those partners have been really good and kind of helping us not only assess, but also deliver new services and programs that help us not only be more equitable, but also include those things into our day to day operations, you can go to the next slide. Just a tidbit is when you look at a gust or an hour role within the region, little under 60% of all of our employee workforce comes from Augusta, and even supplies, you know, workers throughout our region. And so as we look at our economic development outlook, and how we sustain our operations and the future growth, we really want to become and maintain our leadership position here in the region. And so if we go to the next slide, the key way to do that is by really addressing unemployment. Here in Georgia, you know, our state’s political position in managing the pandemic has been one that is times has been very popular, and others not so much. I think I mentioned that I came from South Fulton, which was in metropolitan Atlanta, where the position was more on closing things and more public safety focus. Whereas here in Augusta, while public safety has been put primarily at the forefront, maintaining operations and supporting the needs of business has also been balanced in that public safety outlook. One of the key things that you’ll see from this slide is that when you look at unemployment, you’ll notice that somewhere around at the at the peak, about 12,000 people in our labor force, were unemployed, there’s always some additional information, when you look at the unemployment rate, that only highlights the people who are looking for work. And so the age of our residents, with us having a fairly young population, as well as an older population has had an impact on our strategy. And though and since you only capture those that are looking for work, we’ve also tried to engage those who may be dissatisfied with the workforce and wanting to be able to access working and access to services in a different way. And so if you go to the next slide, one of the key things that we’ve been looking at is making sure that as we shift our priorities, we use data and information to make sure that we are measuring appropriately, in South Fulton and I’ll highlight the gamut of what we’ve done. While I’ve had the opportunity to serve both of these communities, because I think the two perspectives are fairly relevant. In South Fulton, we mainly focused on responding because it was a smaller city, and a lot of functions are delivered at the county level. We focused on providing relief to our staff do Gladiator benefits versus hazard pay, where we actually incentivize people to stick with our organization for a period after the pandemic subsides. And in addition to hazard pay, they receive timely bonuses based on their one year anniversary, which was extremely popular amongst our staff and our production actually went up during the pandemic. We also raised our, I guess, the minimum wage of our employees up to $15 an hour, because one of the things that we saw is that those who have been impacted the most have actually were actually some of our staff members. We also conducted some activities around food insecurity, both creating a South fort and grows where we actually taught people how to grow fruits and vegetables in their homes, as well as doing food drives throughout the city here in Augusta, because we are an entire Minh city. Based on our size and our operations, we actually focused a lot on not only the small business and some of the community activities, and we had all of the same programs we had in South Fulton. We also added some homelessness and rapid rehousing program and based on funding that we received from hook for our cares act, we added about 1.2 million in small business relief, initially, we ended up adding an additional half a million dollars to take that up to about 1.7 million. And we got $6 million from the US Treasury that we’re currently dispersing throughout our community and only having that program up and running since March, we’ve already issued out about $900,000, of which 80% of that has gone into persons of color, and another 60% of of the total of 80% has gone to women led households. And so we believe that the way we have targeted has really been beneficial to us. So as we looked at shifting those priorities, we wanted to make sure that we are measuring all of our activities. And in addition to that, we want to make sure that the services that we’re providing that are so vital to these households does not be interrupted or delayed in any form of fashion. And then finally, especially here in Augusta, which is also true for South Fulton we have been known as having a high quality of service delivery. And so despite the interruptions of the pandemic, we wanted to make sure that we not only maintain but improve that. And so if you go to the next slide, I think for all of us especially from what I’ve heard from my partners in Toledo, Isbell, as well as Tacoma, we’re all kind of navigating these uncharted waters. And so you can go back to the previous slide. And the key of what we’ve tried to do is really make sure we’re communicating and delivering these these proper and accurate messages on what is coming down the pipeline, we’ve increased our transparency, especially to what would be considered marginalized communities by doing everything from partnering with operations like open gov, or creating an open checkbook here in Augusta where people can see where the funding goes, and how we measure things, as well as leveraging key partnerships. I think I mentioned, the US Treasury, we partnered with you, the United Way to be able to ensure that we can distribute those funds in a timely manner. We also are working very closely with the Salvation Army, as well as some of our hotel partners in our Rapid Rehousing efforts. And without those partners, we really would not be able to deliver the service. Because as a consolidated government, we aren’t set up for that. And I think that last piece of remaining flexible has really been the key for us, because we’ve been able to through our flexibility and partners that we may not have thought to work with previously, and now deliver a higher class of service to our residents, you can go to the next slide. And so in lieu of really breaking down each different program, because between the two organizations that I’ve had the pleasure of working for on equity issues and COVID response, we’ve had about 30 different activities that I think meet the call of our residents. But there are a few that really helped us deliver services and ensure that folks have not been left out. One thing that we did is we partner with our school system to ensure that students who are working remotely had the tools that they need it, whether it be internet, laptops and other things. And in doing so, we were also able to ensure that parents, small businesses and others had access to our services. One of the most popular is around online permitting. Another thing that we did, like many municipalities is moved to virtual council meetings where we actually started to add things to where we’re introducing legislation, you can track it through the process. And so the diversity and equity policy that I mentioned earlier is one that we just had our first public hearing on and it was virtual, and very well attended. I think we had over 350 residents who participated in a virtual setting. And so we were really excited about that. And we’re evaluating feedback now. We also launched the citizens Response Center in South Fulton Enhanced eyes 311 activities here and I’ll go to that as we move forward. But that has really been a key in both managing the pandemic, receiving information from our residents. And as we launched new programs receive feedback so that we can make adjustments in real time. What I will highlight is in South Fulton because folks not having access to the municipal court system can cause a lot of problems where a speeding ticket turns into a warrant, a bench warrant and things of that nature. And so we wanted to make sure we avoided that. So we were the second city in the state of Georgia to launch our virtual court system. And so in partnership with that, we also allow people to remediate any issues and pay lower fines, so that they would not have to actually go to court. And so not only that, we maintain the revenues and divert expenses, we also were able to help about 1500 people who would be in danger of having a bench war to avoid that. And I think the final thing I’ll talk about in this slide, is our enhanced public engagement, you know, we’ve actually taken the budget process to our residents and included them. And as a part of that process, the citizens Response Center, and here in Augusta, the 311 platform has been a humungous help for us and tracking information, releasing information and being able to stay close to our citizens. Our Rental Assistance Program was launched on both of those platforms. Here in August, I’ll just give you the data of that in the interest of time. And because that’s where I’m at now, we’ve had about 8 million total dollars infused into that program of our current expenditures. We’re at about 55% of those dollars being out in our community, and 70% of those total dollars have gone to persons of colors. We’ve also created a revolving loan fund that will partner with our our be a supplement to our overall blight program and ordinance. And our goal is not only to remediate blight, but also to put homes in the hands of those who might not have had access to that American dream. And so we’ll be releasing that program here in the next 30 days. And then we also are homeless and rapid rehousing program also launched through this platform, we had about $4 million, which is 70% expanded, and 85% of that went to a person of color. And so we’re really excited about those programs. And what’s next for us now that we have these online and remote platforms. While we’re still operating in a hybrid fashion. We’re confident that the community engagement that we’ve done in budgeting were similar to Tacoma, we’ve created a platform where people can actually access and give feedback on what they want to see in the budget. And then we get to assess it before presenting to the commission is really going to help us be a lot more active and inclusive and our operations. I think Secondly, we have infused resources that are focused on equity. And now it is just our way of life and how we do things. But in addition to the ordinance that I mentioned, one of the key areas and one that I believe we’re all most excited about is we have also launched a disparity study on the focus on our contracting, as we’ve seen through the pandemic, that there is a really a drought in minority contractors and subs who could actually become prime prime contractors on future projects. And so we’re about 80%. Through our disparity study, we’re actually doing business surveys currently now we’ve heard from the general public and as we wrap that up, we’re excited to present that information to the public. And so I think in closing, we are also very similar to Tacoma. And what I heard from our partners in Toledo really focused on the American rescue plan, as rules don’t come out until next week, although we’re hearing they may be later than that. On May 26. We will be hosting the first budget retreat that the Commission has held since they consolidated in 1996. And his budget retreat will set our five big priorities as well as identify our process for releasing funds into the public. Addressing Laos, revenue, deferred maintenance and other priority projects. And number one of all of these priorities is to develop the strategic plan. Which we have been given the task of ensuring that it is inclusive and equity driven. It will be the first strategic plan in the city’s history. And as I mentioned, we’ve been around since 1736. And so really excited to kind of create and and lay out a new future and guidance for the city of Augusta. And so that concludes our presentation. And, you know, welcome for any questions and anything else to discuss this topic. 

Young, 1:15:34 

Fantastic. I want to just thank our three panelists. This is a really rich presentation with a lot of great information about what all of you are doing in your respective communities. So really lead through this pandemic and serve your residents and various constituencies I know, we could probably talk for another hour about all the follow up and dig deeper into those into what it is that you’re doing programmatically. We have come to our time in the session and have gone a little bit over. So we won’t be able to move through the q&a. But appreciate the richness of discussion and the presentation and hearing the strategies for all the folks who are in this session. I hope you got a lot of ideas and least thinking about what your communities are doing. Perhaps either validating the things that you’re already working on or coming up with new ideas of things you can take back and have conversations in your respective communities and your stakeholders. So I want to give a virtual round of applause to our three panelists, Katie Crosby, Chief of Staff, and the city of Toledo, Ohio, Elizabeth Paulina, city manager, it’s come to Washington. And then my good friend, Donald city manager of Augusta, Georgia. I’m your moderator ever shot down from Howard University. Thank you all for being here at this great session. And I hope you all are enjoying the rest of the conference. Kate, is there anything else I need to do to wrap us up now? Thank you.

Crosby, 1:17:15 

No, thank you.

Young, 1:17:16 

Thank you, ma’am. You all enjoy the rest of your session and have a fruitful day. Thank you again to our panelists and our audience and participants. 

Donald, 1:17:25 

Thank you