Meir Porta Maki to the flag of the United
States of America. to the Republic for which it
stands, one nation, under God, indivisible with liberty and
justice for all. I think you'll be seated. We'll
do the roll call starting with city council member Hernandez,
District one. P
Councilor Hill, Conor Jordan, present.
Councilor Simmons, uh, is under the weather and she will not be
attending the next meeting. Council member Ots present.
Uh, Councilor Ranker also is away. Mayor Putha Maki and
council member Mitchell. We'll do the announcement and
comments in the same order, starting with Councilor
Hernandez. Hello, everyone. Happy June.
Happy Pride Month. I just want to remind everyone, uh, that
this, this month we take a moment to recognize that love
exists in all shapes and sizes and forms and that we here in
the City of College Park provide a welcoming, uh,
environment for all. We're gonna be celebrating pride on
Friday, uh, with our, uh, city's Pride event, uh, the
Friday Night Live. Uh, I wanna share, uh, as the summer comes,
uh, to our I guess our sessions come to
a close for at least about a month that there's gonna be
schools that are graduating. I wanna congratulate Hollywood
Elementary School and the Monarch Preschool, uh,
graduates, uh, and all the other high school students who
made it to the end. This is a great opportunity to check out
some of the cities's, uh, reading programs
that we are currently offering. You can find more information
at the website, uh, uh, or any social media that you may have.
Finally, uh, I wanna just take a second to remind folks that
if you are uh going out of town, there is an opportunity that,
uh, is provided by our College Park contract police that they
go and do a, uh, a checkup on your property. Uh, all you have
to do is register online with uh the Prince George's County
Police Department. It's a good opportunity for, uh, folks to
make sure they just keep an extra eye on your, uh, property.
Separately and uh there's, I know that there's
gonna be a lot of opportunities over the summer, but if you're
interested in helping out with some of the projects that we've
got going on around the city. I know that many, I, I have some
opportunities, but some other people may have some
opportunities too, uh, to get involved. So please reach out.
Talk to you guys soon. Yes, hi, so this past Friday,
uh, uh, myself and, um, um, Morten Maki, uh, attended the
uh city employee employee appreciation, um, lunch. It was
a great turnout. It was great to, uh, see the, the
hardworking, um, employees of the city be recognized for the
work you've done. Um, and today I had an institutional
biosafety Committee meeting for the University of Maryland
review ing um biological research at
the at the um university and, uh, let's see, tomorrow will be
the United States Green Building Commission, uh,
workshop that uh the mayor and I will be attending at
University of Maryland day after tomorrow, day after
tomorrow Thursday, right, that's right.
And then um we have Friday Night Live, this Friday, the 66
or 8:30 right here at City City Hall, um, courtyard, and on
Saturday we have the trolley trail day and um that'll be
from, where's the time on the trolley showing?
I believe it's 8. Depending on where the event is
happening, but it goes all, all kind of most of the day and it
ends up in um at the College Park Airport Museum with a
great performance usually, uh, great, great, uh, music and,
and, and performances there. Uh, and then most of us will be
heading out to Maryland to Maryland municipal, uh, League,
uh, Saturday, Sunday, and on Sunday, there will be um a
history month um.
uh event at the College Park Airport Museum as well with ice
cream. and uh let's see.
Oh, on June 26th, there will be the, uh, committees and boards
appreciation dinner at the uh hotel.
That's all I have for now Thank you. A lot's going on
Um, thank you, Councilor Jordan. Yes, thank you. On Monday I had
the um the pleasure of attending with Mayor Kabir, um,
the celebration of the $3.1 million award to Attic Towers.
Senators Van Hollen and also Brooks and Representative Ivey
and State Senator Rosa Pep all, um, uh, uh, presented a a check
to them. It was a, a, a wonderful ceremony and um, uh,
just a, a, a great time to, to, uh, to be able to, to celebrate
this, um, director Michelle Johnson was instrumental in the
effort and it will bring much-needed
repairs to the attic Towers building and be a great help to
the residents there. It houses low-income seniors and
residents with disabilities. Um, uh, I was able to stop by the
BBCA planting event where they planted 500 plants donated, uh,
for the per permaculture garden, um, I, I did, uh, I did see
that, um, the board the Board of Education has announced they
will have a continuation of the Chinese immersion program
across all of Prince George's County, including Paint French
Elementary School and District 2 yes.
I will show you Um, uh, on a lighter note this
weekend, uh, the Boy Scout troupe that meets in District 2
will be walking to their summer camp. It is, uh, 208 miles over
14 days that they will be walking, just starting at Holy
Redeemer, um, in District 2, uh, there are two meetings that
may be of interest to District 2 residents and, and throughout
the city, uh, in College Park, uh, on, um, June 24th, the
State Highway Association is having um a meeting with res
with residents to discuss, uh, the development and
improvements on uh Baltimore Avenue between 193 and
Sunnyside Avenue and then on June 25th, uh, Thursday at 6:45
p.m., um, the Metropolitan will be hosting a, um, a resident
engagement time, uh, the city was gracious enough to host, I
mean to, uh, to provide, um, a meeting space for this. It'll
be at Davis Hall and that is a that will have a
hybrid, um, a hybrid option, and then finally, uh, the city
has put together a walking tour and survey for community
members to give feedback, uh, for a space in Berwyn, um, but
the 8807 and 8811 Rhode Island Island Avenue, property that
the city owns, um, it's a, a community space exploration
walk and it's designed to be, um, uh, like there's a survey
that you can take that you can give feedback about what you
would like to see in that in that area. Thank you
very much. Thank you. um, so I had the honor and the privilege
to attend rather represent um College Park at the US Mayor's
Conference, um uh, last week, um, and it was a
wonderful opportunity to connect with, uh, quite a few
mayors I already know and connect with the new mayors and
uh it's a wonderful opportunity of networking.
and lots of learning in different sessions.
Um, I also, I had the opportunity to attend yesterday
morning with Councilor Jordan at the attic towers, and this
is such a huge deal for College Park, uh, because of attic
towers in College Park, the senior housing, and they
received, um, 3.5 and $3.15 million. It's a lot of money,
um, for much needed repair at the attic towers and um
they brought a big check, um, but, uh, it is, it is, it is,
it is very wonderful, um, event and um I'm, I'm sure this will
benefit the community at the Attic Towers. Um, and I'll be
at the MML conference and the day after tomorrow, as
Councilor he mentioned, I will also have the honor to welcome
the participants at the US Green Building
Is that coalition or uh USGBC, um, uh, they, they're
very first symposium. um, in College Park, it will be
on uh River Road. I believe it's called Physics Building,
um, and there'll be, um, close to 100 people attending, um,
talking about different sustainability initiatives. Um,
so this is such an honor for College Park because this is
being hosted in College Park for the very first time.
That's all I have. Thank you, Councilor Mar Oz.
Thanks. Um, I won't repeat, uh, some of the things, but look,
we'll look forward to seeing folks at Friday Night Live and
trolley Trail day. Um, I will note, um, that the, uh, it's
summer, uh, and so wanted to remind people that you can get
30% off, uh, outdoor pool memberships as part of Reckwell,
um, for the UMD pool. Um, so encourage people to avail
themselves of that, um, and then also, um, just to flag the
national orchestral Institute is
ongoing, um, at the Clarice and so there's lots of performances
folks may wish to join. Thank you for mentioning that
Appreciate it. Mayor Putan Mackay. Yes, thank you. Um, I
won't repeat either, um, but I wanted to just thank the West
College Park neighborhood watch for doing an ice cream social.
That was a lot of fun on Saturday. Um, I want to also
encourage people to take advantage of the GoGov app,
which is College Park Connect on there you can get, uh, you
can sign up to get all kinds of alerts and bulletins about
what's going on in the city. uh, because like my colleagues
have said, several of us are going to be out at MML, which
is, um, we will be out of town, so the app will be something
that you'll, you'll need to be using. um
I also wanted to just encourage people to take advantage of the
free parking that's available over the summer and um
to um make sure that uh you're just uh looking out uh for in
this extreme heat to stay hydrated and looking out for
young people and older people, um, making sure that you look
in on on neighbors that might have, um, might be senior
citizens or have a lot of young children just to make sure that
we are mindful of our neighbors during the hot summer months.
Thank you. Thank you.
Uh, let's go to Councilor Mitchell.
Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Well, is that time? It is coming. It's
here in a couple of days, early voting is your time to exercise
your right to vote. Um, voting, early voting will begin on June
11th through 18th from 7 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. and you can go to
the College Park Community Center, or you still have time
to submit your replacement ballot.
a ballot that says replacement on there in the box uh don't
laugh, Mr. Mayor. Um, to, uh, no, I, I did too.
The exercise your right to vote. So I wanted to, um, uh,
acknowledge that for a second, I want to acknledge that people
having such problems with their water bill or your utility
bills, you can call 211 211 is the main number the
warehouses on customer service where you can ask questions
about either your WSSC bill, your PEPCO bill, any utility
bill, you can go there and they can provide you assistance with
that. Also, I don't have all the information, but there's an
AI technology workshop for adults that's being hosted by
University of Maryland College of Information. I will need to
get more information in regards to time, and I will pass along
the flyer to deceased staff so they can post that to the
website hopefully And for single fathers, we know
Father's Day is coming up. There's a single father's
Awareness Care Day for you, um, which will be held on June 22nd
from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. and the location will be at the Mixed
Food Hall, which is 3809 Rhode Island Avenue and Brentwood,
Maryland. Also, there is a job fair on
June 17th from 10 to 1210 a.m. to 12 noon, being hosted by the
Greater Washington region, Clean Cities Coalition,
coalition at the Second Baptist Church at 5501 Silverhill Road
and District Heights, Maryland, and I will leave this with the
step also to um publicize and put information on the website.
And that's all I have, Mr. Mayor. Thank you. Thank you.
I'm sorry, I forgot one thing. This coming Wednesday, there is
a senior activity at the College Park Woods Clubhouse
from 1 to 3, which is game time. It's loads of fun and I hope
that lots of seniors come out and and participate. Thank you.
Thank you. It's good I'm sorry It's, Mr It's. Mayor, I did
want to add something. I'm not, it's senoritis day to day. It's
really sad. But um just to echo my comments of my colleagues
that most of us, 3/4 of us will be out next week attending the
Amre Municipal League Conference.
and just want residents to know it's not an opportunity just a
fellowship, but an opportunity to to learn different
information about affordable housing or anything to that
nature that we are working on in regards to our strategic
plan, and we look forward to bringing back a report, a
comprehensive report from all of us when we get back. Thank
you. College Park will be in force.
Thank you. All right, let's go to our
student liaison, uh, starting with, uh, Stone liaisons.
Martin. Hi, uh, so we've been meeting
with the council members. We're trying to meet with everyone,
um, Sammy and I to discuss our initiatives and then how we can
help you guys with your own initiatives and then I recently
applied for the bicycle and pedestrian Advisory Committee.
So I'm excited to maybe uh do some work with that and then
we're also restructuring the student liaison advisory
committee, um, and we're working on getting that, uh,
fully ready for when the semester starts in the fall.
Let's go to side. Yeah, just, you know, building
on that, we're kind of creating our priorities for the year, uh,
really excited to work with you all on those and just building
a really strong student advisory council as well as
important because it's gonna allow us to connect student
voices with all of you. So there's ever an issue you guys
want student voice on, we're gonna have a very, very active
council who's going to be able to immediately provide input.
So that's kind of the structure we're formatting it around, but,
uh, you know, just really looking forward to building
initiatives and working with you all to do that.
certainly. Thank you. Let's go to our city
manager's report, Mr. Yang, uh, good evening, Mayor and council,
residents of College Park, uh, just a couple of quick
announcements. One, we'll be having some roadway patching
work done this week. Uh, our contractors will begin, uh,
roadway pageant and College Park Woods, and the Hollywood
area to fix the deteriorating asphalt's following locations,
uh, 3706 Marlborough Way, 3735 Marlboro Way, the 4900 block of
Indian Lane between Forty-ninth Avenue and R
ho de Island Avenue, Hollywood Road, and 51st Place
intersection, and we also will have the 9700 block of
Narragansett Parkway on the West Roadway section, and then
we also will have the 4900 block of Nantucket Road. Uh, so
we'll be having, uh, parking restrictions posted where
necessary and just ask people to use caution in those work
zones and adhere to posted parking restrictions. Um, we
also have uh, College Park, uh, the
Friday Night Live, our encore event, uh, this Friday from 6
to 8:30 p.m. uh in our City Hall Plaza, uh, the
entertainment is the dead flowers. I just had to make
sure I was reading that right. And uh uh free parking will be
available in our, our parking garage. Um, we also will have
um begun our college planning for
College Park Day, uh, believe it or not, we're already
working for that, that's coming up in October. Um, right now,
we're officially, uh, have opened our vendor food vendor
applications, and we're encouraging people to apply for
that. Uh, this year's event will be on Saturday, October
3rd. It'll be from 12:00 to 6 p.m. at the College Park
Aviation Museum and Airport. Um, usually we get about 12,000
visitors over those coast of those hours. Um
so we would, uh, encourage, uh, anybody interested in being a
vendor, uh, the applications, uh, are due by June 30th. We've
only pick about 15 to 20 vendors. So there's, it's very
limited, um, and, but we also look for a very wide diversity
of food offerings, uh, for attendees, uh, to apply. You
just need to go to www. College ParkMD.gov/CPD food vendor.
You can also go to our website and you can uh see where you
can apply there. Um, so, the applicants will be, uh,
notified by July 15th of, of whether or not they were
selected for our event, and then there's a $100
registration that's due upon, um, approval.
Uh, lastly, I just wanted to say thank you to, uh, Prince
George's fire chief. I'm gonna, uh, butcher her last name,
Michaelottis and Deputy Chief Harris and their staff as well
as the council member Eric Olson, uh, uh, for a meeting
that we held today, they kind of gave uh our staff briefing
on some of the changes that are upcoming uh for the College
Park Station. I've sent to each of you in your email
um, uh, internal, uh, memo that that kind of outlines what
those changes are, um, basically, um, it will remove a
um, a unit, uh, advanced life support unit, out of the
College Park, uh, location, uh, after 3 p.m. um
so Monday through Friday and then on, on, on the weekends.
Uh, so, um a little different, not ideal
kind of model uh for us, but, um
I think we're going to try and work with the university. I've
already had discussions with uh Ms. Claros from the university
and um also talked a little bit with the council member, uh,
Olsen today. That's all I have for today
Thank you, thank you for the update. Any question for Mr.
Young? Seeingan. Let's do acknowledge,
sorry, Muram Mr. Hernandez had his hand up very late, sir. I
apologize. Uh, Mr. City Manager, the only question that I have
is, uh, you said that they would be responded to by July
15th, uh, whether they did or didn't get uh accepted, right,
the vendors, OK, I just wanted to make sure that we can
communicate that back. Thank you. That's correct. July 15th
is our um notification, uh, we'll start
reviewing applications, obviously, uh, on July 1, so
great, thank you. Thank you.
Uh, let's do the acknowledgement. Uh, we have
two elected, former elected officials in the meeting, um,
one is in the room, a former district to council member Bob
Catlin. Thank you, Mr. Catlin, for joining and also we have
um District 3, former District 3
city councilor John Rigg also joined online. Thank you, Mr.
Rick, for joining Uh, Mr. Shorter, where did I
miss? Uh, former District one city council or uh
Mark Shorter also as shown. And Miss Collipark is with us
as well. Thank you for coming. All right, um, let's do the
proclamation an awards. We have 4 of them and let me read them,
and they're fairly short. The first one is about
Juneteenth and it reads as follows, whereas President
Abraham Lincoln's emancipation Proclamation declared the
freedom of enslaved people in Confederate territory and
helped pave the way for the abolition of slavery in the
United States, and whereas on June 19, 168 1865. News of
emancipation raged and enslaved Africa
n Americans in Texas, giving rise to the observance now
known as Juneteenth. and whereas Juneteenth
commemorates freedom, resilience, and the
contributions of African-American.
while providing an opportunity to
reflect on our nation's history.
and the ongoing pursuit of equality and justice, and
whereas the city of College Park joins communities across
the nation. in recognizing the significance
and legacy of Juneteenth. Now they are forbid proclaimed by
the iron council of the city of College Park, Maryland, that
June 19, 2026 is hereby recognized as Juneteenth in the
city of College Park and that all residents are
encouraged to reflect upon our nation's history.
and the continued pursuit of liberty, justice and equality
for all. Proclaim this 9th day of June 2026, fozul Kabir mayor.
City of College Park I will read the
one on parade at the very end, and you
will find out why I'll be doing it.
Um, I'll then read the proclamations on the pollinator
week, which is June 22nd to June 28, 2026. And it is as
follows, whereas pollinators such as bees, butterflies,
birds, bats, and other animals play a vital role in
reproduction of flowering plants
supporting healthy ecosystems that biodiversity and food
production and whereas pollinators contribute to the
production of approximately 1/3 of the food consumed worldwide
and are essential to maintaining healthy
agricultural and natural environments, and whereas
pollinator populations face increasing threats from habitat
loss, pesticide yields, climate change and other environmental
pressures And whereas the city of College
Park is committed to environmental stewardships and
to supporting efforts that protect
pollinators and their habitats. Now therefore be proclaimed by
the Miran Council of the city of College Park that June 22 to
28, 2026 is hereby recognized as pollinator week in the city
of College Park and residents are encouraged to support
pollinator friendly practices that help sustain healthy
ecosystems, strengthen food systems and enhance the quality
of life in our community proclaim this 9th day of June
2026. Fazil Kerier city of College Park.
and the third one is about the 25th
250th anniversary of American independence.
and it reads as follows, whereas on July 4th, 1776, the
13 American colonies adopted the United States Declaration
of Independence proclaiming the principles of liberty, equality,
self-government, and the pursuit of happiness.
and on July 4th, 2026, the United States will commemorate
the 250th anniversary of its founding, known as America's
semi Quincendental. semiquincentennial marking 2.5
centuries of democratic governance, civic participation,
resilience and progress. And whereas Independence Day
provides an opportunity to honor the generations of
military services, service members, public servants,
community leaders and citizens whose efforts have helped
preserve and strengthen the ideals upon which this nation
was founded. And whereas the city of College
Park joins communities across the nation in recognizing the
significance of this historic milestone and encouraging
residents to reflect on our nation's history and the
endearing principles that unite us.
Now therefore be proclaimed by the Mean council of the City of
College Park that July 4th, 2 2026 is hereby recognized as
Independence Day and the 250th anniversary of the United
States of America and all residents are encouraged to
commemorate this historic milestone and renew their
commitment to the ideals of liberty, equality, and
self-government, proclaimed this 9th day of June
2026 Basil Kabir mayor's City of
College Park and the 4th and final one.
is about the turret syndrome awareness month and it
is as follows. Whereas Tourette's syndrome or TS, in
short, is a neurological disorder characterized by
involuntary movements and vocalizations known as tics,
affecting individuals of all ages and backgrounds, and
whereas Tourette's syndrome, and other tic disorders can
impact daily life and are often misunderstood, leading to a
stigma and barriers to inclusion and whereas increased
awareness. education, and understanding
help faster acceptance and support for individuals and
families affected by Tare syndrome
and whereas individuals living with Tourette's syndrome make
valuable contributions to their schools, workplaces,
communities, and civic life. And where organizations such as
Turret Association of America, promote research
education, advocacy, and support for those affected by
Tourette syndrome. Now therefore be it proclaimed by
the mayor and council of the city of College Park that the
month of May is hereby recognized as Toret syndrome
awareness Month in the city of College Park and all residents
are encouraged to learn more about Tourette's syndrome,
support those affected by condition and help create a
more inclusive and understanding community for all,
proclaimed this 9th day of June 2026, Fazil Kiir Mayor, Syria
College Park. So what I'm going to do, this
is a proclamation that was requested by our Miss College
Park, and thank you for asking us to do it. So I'm going to go
to the podium. and give the proclamation to
her. Um, I hope that is OK with the council.
Um, and probably I think it'd be fitting if you all can take
a group photo with his college park. Thank you.
So let's give it to you first I.
I think Thank you. Your counsel, please
come forward and we can tell you what to see
Oh It's a good idea
Thank you. That's our, that's our city
center. All right, that was wonderful.
So let's do our next order of business, which is about public
comments. So if you have been patiently waiting to make
public comments. This is your time. If you have joined online,
please raise your virtual hands, and we will allow you to speak.
um Thank you, Mr. Dors and using,
if you follow our new rules of councils council's rules and
procedure, you can talk about anything under the sun at the
the only condition is you only have 3 minutes, no more than 3
minutes. Right, uh, my name is Dave Dorse and I'm here for
over half a century in the city of College Park. Uh, one of the
things that I wanted to find out is did you guys sell that
house at 4704 Calvert Road yet if not,
why not? The city does not need to be in the housing business
The other thing I've noticed is that we've started putting
these cameras on the stop signs.
Now supposedly this was for a public purpose.
But the purpose is, it seems to be just gouging money out of
people that, that the wheel doesn't come to a 100% complete
stop, even though it might just be turning a quarter of the way.
Nope. fines, and I don't think that's
really justified unless you've had a lot of accidents at one
of these intersections. I don't think this is justified. The
only people that make anything out of this or the company that
supplies it in the city because both of them get the money.
Thank you. Thank you so much. Let's allow, unless someone, OK.
Councilor Catlin, former councilor.
Please come forward For the record, please state
your name and if you're a resident. Yes, thank you. I'm
Bob Catlin, Collis Park resident since the late 80s, uh,
also I'm currently the vice chair of the College Park
Housing Authority. So I'd like to thank the mayor and uh
Councilwoman Jordan for attending the ceremony
yesterday honoring the award of $3.15 million to Attic towers
for much needed renovations uh, that helps. We've got money
from a couple of other people that stayed in from the city in
the past couple of years, so that contributes a lot to the
funds that we have to make these renovations. We're not
all the way there yet, but I think we will be in the near
future. um.
A few weeks ago, you started talking about the boulevard
project, which was uh the resurrection of a detailed site
plan for uh an apartment project at Cherokee Street and
it's had 3 DSPs approved since the early 2000s and the one now
apparently is resurrecting the last one that was approved
about 2013. So it gave me a topic because we've had other
DSPs approved in the city over the last 30 years, where the
projects never got built either. Uh,
so it's, I can't talk about all of them in the next minute and
a half, but I get probably take 2 sessions to
give you just a quick, uh, rundown on what happened. uh
about 30 years ago, McDonald, it was a McDonald's next to the
vigilante Coffee. and
it got approved to put another McDonald's behind that one, and
that never got built, uh, because McDonald's bought the
property across the street where the McDonald's is
currently, and they resurrected that as a McDonald's. We had
two other, uh, fast food projects approved with DSPs on
Route one in that area, a Wendy's and one I can't recall,
and they were approved by the planning board, and they never
got built. But they were not built for the
same reason that the first project at the Metropolitan
wasn't built. The counts, the uh county councilman for the
district rejected the planning board's approval. That was
something they could do way back then. They could change
the approval or they could reject the approval. Uh
so the city opposed both of those uh fast food projects and
fortunately we got them rejected by the district
council. So those are two things that
happened that were really important. College Park would
look a lot different today if we had two more fast food
restaurants across from Lakeland and Berwyn. Thank you.
Thank you so much and thank you for your service to the housing
Authority. Appreciate that
Um, saying none in the room, let's go to virtual and let's
start with former consumer John Rick. Um, let's kind of staff
allow Mr. Rick to speak. I don't have that privilege.
Yes, can you hear me? Yes, please. Thank you, Mr. Rick.
Please go ahead. Thank you, Mr. Thank you, Mr. Mayor, and thank
you for uh the council for permitting me to speak this
evening. I'm coming to you with a matter of uh substantial
importance and also of time sensitivity. Um, I was notified
last week through colleagues who, well, for those of you who
don't know me, I've worked for the last 25 years as a, as a
paramedic. A paramedic is an emergency medical services
provider with the highest level of training. We can provide
certain surgical interventions administer medications and de
fi b ri ll ate uh, or, or change the heart rate or rhythm
of, of many different heart rates that will otherwise kill
somebody. We're also extremely helpful in the event of a
massive trauma and are considered sort of the top of
the profession in terms of emergency medical services that
are provided by calling 911. Our only paramedic unit in the
city of College Park is Medic 812, which sits at the Company
12 fire station on uh in Lakeland, um right there that
you all are familiar with across the street. Uh,
basically from, from City Hall, just down the street
from City Hall. Early last week, I was notified by a colleague
of mine who is a Prince George's County firefighter
that, uh, the county is proposing to pull the only
paramedic unit in the City of College Park out of the city of
College Park, except for the hours of 7 a.m. to 3:00 p.m.
Monday through Friday. This will leave an enormous gap
in service in the city of College Park. We will have to
be served by other outlying organizations for, for, for
paramedic service. They would have to come from A Delphi or
from Greenbelt, um, and Company 812, Paramedicate12 is the only
medic service between Beltsville and the DC line. Um,
it will leave an enormous gap, not just for the City of
College Park, but also as a primary paramedic service for
the cities of Hyattsville, uh, the city of, uh, Riverdale Park
and, and others up and down the Rat one corridor.
My understanding is that the county is proceeding very
quickly with implementation of this change, which will have an
extremely negative impact on our own emergency response in
the city of College Park. I believe that they intend to
implement it on the first day of the new fiscal year, which
is July 1. I would urge the City of College Park to speak
strongly out against this. I've had conversations with the
university and with other concerned uh residents, but
it's happening so quickly, it seems as though the county's
going to try to to pull a fast one and do this as quickly as
possible and then um and then try to make us fight to get it
back. I, I would urge you to, to draft a letter tonight in
strong opposition to making this change and protect the
residents of the city of College Park. Um, as I've
listened to all of you, uh, make your announcements tonight.
I'm reminded of the many residents in our city who are
vulnerable to having an emergency who might require the
services of a paramedic, the prompt services of a paramedic,
uh, College Park Day is a graded example. Attic Towers is
a primary user of advanced life support services in our city.
Both of those just as small examples
would be much. more poorly served if that
medic unit were removed from the city of College Park. So on
behalf of our city and our 35,000 residents, I would urge
the city council to draft a letter to to the county, uh,
instructing them to keep advanced life support services
in the City of College Park. Thank you.
Thank you so much for your advocacy and
we will consider sending a letter today, uh, as well.
Thank you. It's coming. All right, let's go to the next
speaker, Jay Herrera. Can you please unmute yourself
and uh for the record please state your name and if
you're a resident of College Park.
My name is Juan Herrera, and I am a resident of College Park.
Are you able to hear me? You can hear you. Please go
ahead OK. I initially wasn't gonna
say anything, but council remember Hernandez brought
something up, so. I wanna speak to that, um.
back in May, I went on vacation and I did fill out that uh
premise check form online. I did not receive anything from
the city or the county saying that my form had been received,
that it had been approved, or that it had been forwarded. It
was just utter silence since I completed the form and like
I've said in prior meetings, even my neighbors, they told me
that they didn't see any police presence during that time that
I was on vacation. Uh, my ring cameras also didn't catch any
anybody. anybody that, uh, they caught
other people, but they didn't catch any police like pull up
to my house, kind of look around, or it was just regular
people, regular neighbors that I would see on the ring cameras,
never saw a police officer, never saw a police car stop in
front of my house, and according to my neighbors, also
they never saw no police. so I just wanted to bring that
up, so you know, I'm not sure if you even do get a response
when you complete the form or or not. That was all.
Yeah, I would strongly encourage you to be in touch
with our staff, um, and they can probably find out what
happened and suddenly we are here to serve you and make
things better. Um, thank you
Mr. Mayor, may I make a suggestion that, uh, Mr.
Herrera sent an email so that we can follow up with the
details with our contract please.
So that because I mean it would it's just a like a prudent step
of us. I know that we're not supposed to respond, but yeah,
certainly I'm just making the recommendation.
Yeah, um, please reach out to the staff and certainly, um, we
can find out more. from our side
So just via email, uh, Mr. Herrera. I just think it's,
it's important for us to be able to follow up through our
liaising, uh, with the director of Public Services.
Thank you. All right, uh, Xing Nan, let's
go to the next order of business, and which is.
um amendments to and approval of the agenda, Council member
Os. Yeah, uh, Consumer Hernandez,
who's gonna do it. You wanna do it? OK, sure, um, so, uh,
wanted to thank, uh, former council member Rigg, uh, for
his attention issue and again appreciate staff uh and had a
meeting earlier today regarding this issue with the Prince
George's County Department of Fire and Emergency Medical
Services, um, I think knowing that this is um coming up
quickly, uh, I would like to propose to add to our consent
agenda, um, to ask staff to send a letter conveying the
strong view of our city council that College Park continued to
have advanced life support, uh, in College Park, um.
happy to, uh, have any discussion of other things that
folks would like added. Thank you. I think, I think
it's pretty clear. I don't think there is a discussion for
Councilor Hernandez, 2, but just to add a comment, I mean,
I hope that this is just like the letters the first step and
that we include the our our legislative officials, county
officials, and other impacted municipalities, uh, for
awareness, uh, I think it's, it's an important step, but we
also have a county lobbyist, don't we? Uh, this time around
we're not, we're gonna ask them for some help.
uh to make sure that they're, they're advocating, I mean,
we're gonna go into like a big hiatus throughout the month, so
the um maybe Mr. Yang, do you have any
comments? Uh, I think that would be
appropriate. I think we'd add, uh, University of Maryland as
well, um, along with that, but yes, we can, LA Perez and
Associates were also involve them as well, certainly, thank
you, Mr. Holtz just suggest that, uh, you know, as opposed
to the focus being on the letter, I think it's, you know,
that's a part of this, but I'm trying to convey it on behalf
of council, um, although it is on the proposed for the consent
agenda that, um, you know, the policy of the council and the
mayor of council is that, you know, we want this,
so what you know if there's other advocacy that's needed, I
think that can be a staff discretion.
Thank you. All right, Council on this for
the comment. Yeah, sorry, Mr. Mayer. Uh, if possible, if the
letter could request the data, uh, and analysis demonstrating
the need to do this pilot, uh, I understand that we've asked
in the past for uh Prince George's County fire and EMS to
provide data, but it, we need to be able to tell the
residents what the impact is going to, like how it's going
to affect them. Uh, I'd also ask for them to encourage the,
the county fire, uh, to uh engage residents and other
stakeholders. I feels like this is just like a, a quick letter
that was sent on I see June 5th for action on June 29th. I'm
sure that there's a lot of different things that go on, uh,
and that this is a well-meaning effort by our partners at the
county, but we want to express our our deep concern. Certainly.
So I think there is an agreement and there is a motion
and the second, um, all in favor. Say I on this amendment.
I, and he opposed to any abs 10 tion
So this motion, this item has been
added to the agenda. Is there any
other amendment? Saying none, I entertain
emotion right now. to accept the agenda the way it
was amended. All in Swiss 2nd, second by
Councilor Hernandez, um, all in favor say aye, and he opposed
any abstention. the um agenda has been approved.
So now we have 2 consent agenda items
Mr. Mayor, what is the item number for the, um, letter? It
should be 26159. Am I correct? Am I sure, Madam Clark, OK. 26G
59. So there are two concerned agenda. Let me read them first,
and then I will entertain emotion. The first one is 26G58,
which is the approval of the March 3, 2026, Mayor and
council minutes, and the second, which had just has been added,
is 26G59. is a letter to Prince George's
Fire department and other entities as expressed during
the council comments about expressing concerns about the
um discontinuation or lack of services of the advanced life
support, um, services in College Park, otherwise called
ALS. Um, and the staff will, um
take from there Uh, I entertain emotion at this
point? Moved to accept the consent
agenda. Second.
Council member, moved by Mayor Putam Maki and seconded by
Council member. Oates, all in favors the I.
and he opposed any abstention, the
consent agenda has been approved.
All right, now we go to uh the two actually quite a few
presentations we have a we'll, we'll start with
4 of them. Well, let's start with the first one, which is
the um where the discussion of the bike and pedestrian
community, BPAC regarding their annual work plan, and this will
be kicked off by our grants coordinator
Mr. Rafi and thank you, um, um, the
members of the uh BPAC for your service to the community. Thank
you. Uh, I appreciate that. Uh, Mr. Rafi, please. Good
evening, Mayor and council. Um, I'm joined here by Chair
Schroeder and um by committee member Shelby Burke. Uh, today
will be a brief presentation just to discuss um a committee
overview what we do as a committee, um, then I'll pass
it over to, um Mark to discuss some of the committee
priorities over the past, uh, mentioned over the past 6
months or so, and then we'll conclude with the Q&
A session Um, for some background, the
committee was formed in 2023. Um, it functions as an advisory
committee, uh, with a focus on assisting in the preparation of
a citywide, uh, bikeway master plan and assisting in
conducting evaluation and assessments of bike and
walkability equity in the city. uh, to date
the committee has developed an annual plan, which is a
document that's a high level strategic document, uh, that
collects our recommendations and it will be a form of a
foundation for either a bikeway master plan or, or any uh
similar plan that the city will put out eventually. Um
some things we've completed or are working on are the um we've
received a bike friendly community uh designation, uh,
bronze designation, um, we've advocated for the ordinance on
enforcing bike lane obstructions in the past year,
uh, the committee has, uh, assisted staff in, um, applying
for and um positioning ourselves for uh safe streets
and roads for all, which is a federal grant program to
establish a comprehensive safety action plan, uh, that's
to eliminate roadway, uh, fatalities and serious injuries
for all modes of transportation.
and um the committee has assisted staff in bicycle and
pedestrian impact statements which make recommendations for
infrastructure and facilities within a half mile of new
development. Uh, the committee is also involved, uh, in, uh,
community outreach, uh, that includes bike to Work Day,
College Park Day, Hollywood Farmers' Market, uh, conducting
community surveys and audits with other committees as well,
um, and some of the outputs include assisting development
of citywide, uh, safety action plan, which is forthcoming in
the next few months we'll be working on that, um, informing
city policies and planning similar similarly to what we um
helped with the uh bike lane obstruction ordinance and just
continuing community engagement and expanding on those measures.
I'll go ahead and turn it over to um Mark now.
Mr. Shorter, thank you OK
Thank you. Um, first, I would like to address what I take to
have been uh, a complaint at the, when we
were asked to present and the complaint was that the bike
plan was vastly greater than any possible activity we could
accomplish in the in the coming year. That's true. I take
responsibility for it. Um, the reason it is such a a wide
ranging plan is that to a large extent we don't control.
uh, our priorities. Our priorities come from you and
your priorities tend to change. We are advisory, um, we tend
not to want to spend a lot of time advising you about things
that you don't want advice about.
Um, so, uh, and, and since the things you want advice about
tend to change. We wanted to, to make ourselves available to
give you advice about whatever that might happen to be. And so
that's why it's uh that's why it's all over the map there.
Um, now for in preparation for, uh, for this presentation, I
went to the, to BPAC and, and proposed certain priorities
based on what you have been doing and what you have been
asking for from us or what we thought you were asking for
from us. Um number one, our first priority
is your complete streets program.
uh, and to remind you what is the plan
for Complete Streets in FY 27. that would be
uh DARP, um, excuse me, 4-eighth
Place. uh, possibly Dartmouth, there's
a, there's an indication here that it's on hold for some
reason. Badwin, also a possibility
that's on hold. Wellesley ranchville Road
um, and in FY 28, the indications are
uh, Dartmouth
Bowden 51st Avenue phase 2.
and uh uh Saint Andrew's Place.
Um the second priority we had
based on your preliminary budget, which turned out not to
this item turned out not to get into your final budget was for
bike racks. That was a potentially very interesting
program, but since it isn't currently funded, it may not be
our second priority. Uh, the third item I'm going to
combine these two because although they're somewhat
different, they're both tend to be very cheap projects, uh,
BPIS, uh, bicycle pedestrian impact statements. Those are,
those are pri private development will have impacts
on on cyclists and pedestrians. Um, but we can't ask for a
million dollars for impact mitigation. Um, they tends to
be less than, less than $100,000. So those will be
fairly cheap projects. Um, safe streets for all,
similarly, uh, those will be demonstration projects, which
means that you can't put up, you can't spend the money on
anything that will be a permanent change to the street
grid, um, so those will, those will be like temporary barriers.
Our 4th priority is connectivity, and here we're
getting into some fairly deep waters, but many neighborhoods
in the city were built without any thought that the people who
live there might have to leave there by
foot or bicycle. Um, I will go through a I will
go through a couple of the, of, of examples and at, and at the
end of what I have to say, shall be bid, we'll have a,
we'll have a cut, we'll have some comments about College
Park Woods. Um, so I was on the council when we
approved the IKEA project with the associated, uh, apartments
and townhouses, um we were giving no thought to
anything except get that project was going to be built
regardless. We were giving no thought to anything except
getting the tax revenue. We did, it was clear that if we, if we
wanted to have a, an exit out of there that would serve
cyclists and pedestrians. um
not Route one um, that it would just be, it
would just it would just kill the project if we, if we, if we
got it, but we weren't going to get it. The project was going
to go ahead anyway. What we have is
you can't get in there and out of there by, by bicycle or foot.
Um, if you're going to, if you're going from the city or,
or to the city. Um.
that's unsafe Um, second
um we have
Crystal Springs Crystal Springs, the only way
in and out, it's legal. is Metarat Road
If you want, if you, if you want to get to the university
from there by, by what? uh I wouldn't suggest doing
this by bicycle. You will walk up, you will walk over a wooded
grassy area to 193 walk in, walk in the, on the shoulder of
193 until you get, until you get to a red light to cross
there. Um
Metsarat Road is not appropriate for, for banks for
bikes or pedestrians. and they're any number of other
um ways in which we have created bottle bottlenecks,
lack of con connectivity like and therefore lack of safe
egress. Um our fifth priority and this one,
I abstained on this one because I didn't think you wanted any
advice about it. Um, is lowering the speed limit to 20
MPH in the city. Um, and, uh, the uh
my fellow committee members would like to point out to you
that the enfor that if you said a 20 mile per hour speed limit,
it's really only enforceable about 40 miles an hour, um, and
at 40, so if you set it at 25 miles an hour, it's only really
enforceable at 45, and if, if a car hits a pedestrian at 45
miles an hour, the pedestrian is probably going to die.
That's what they would like to tell you. Um, number 6, we, we
want to cont we want to work with the city on, uh, improving
certain, certain important corridors in the, in the city.
Obviously Rhode Island Avenue, um, Duke Street, Saint Andrew's
Place, Edward 49th Greenbelt, Rhode Island
Campus Drive at Route 1 and the Mets, and Metzra Road
crossings. Uh, and if Shelby has a word to
say. Sure, thank you so much. um, Shelby Bird, District 4,
and College Park Woods residents. So thank you all so
much for the opportunity to speak. Thank you, Mark. Thank
you, Mr. Rafi, for your leadership as well. And just to
add on how important connectivity is in building
community in College Park Woods, we have several, um, amenities
that have been invested in by the city
as well as by the County and the Park Commission, and they
are very difficult to get to. without a car, and so as part
of the bicycle pedestrian advisory Committee. We want to
emphasize that being able to reach elementary schools by
foot, perhaps such as Cherokee Lane, um, would be possible if
it were safe to walk to where those paths are, at this time,
we have many parents who choose to drive their students, uh,
down to the park entrance, um, very close to my
residence on 9116 St. Andrew's Place, and they choose to do
that not just in bad weather, but in all times because it is
the safest way to transport their children. Similarly, my
daughter attends Robert Goddard Montessori School. Her bus stop
is at the top of our neighborhood, Saint Andrews and
Duke, and um she is a very quick, uh, 5 year old, but I
would not trust her to be able to walk up there by herself,
nor would I feel safe walking her even holding
hands as surprisingly, um, how fast individuals are able to
drive between two stop signs in front of my house that are 0.1
miles apart with a speed hump at each stop sign, and folks
are still able to reach speeds that would be catastrophic if
they were to hit a pedestrian. And so we certainly appreciate
the continu ous investment and research
that it takes to make the best decisions for our community to
make everybody safe. Thank you. Thank you
Um Mr. Raffi, please. Yeah, I'll
just turn it over to questions at this point if there are any.
OK. So, um
there are, there have been quite a few, uh
ideas and suggestions from VPAC and thank you, thank you for
sharing those ideas. Let's hear from the council, um, we'll
start with Councilor Hernandez. Hey, thanks for, thanks for the,
the very thorough report and the strategic nature of it. It
was really well, you can tell a council
member, a former council member is leading the charge there. Um,
I've, I've had the opportunity to join some of these BPAC
meetings, and they are run like a well-oiled machine. Uh, I
wanna make a suggestion slash recommendation, uh, to the
bicycle and pedestrian advisory Committee. The Route One
developments that are coming up. I mean, we need all hands on
deck in order to make sure that like proper bicycle and
pedestrian infrastructure is in place.
So I mean that means comments, that means showing up to the
meetings, that means writing letters. It's gonna be super
important because I've heard or the suggestion that it might
not necessarily be suitable for, but I, uh, bicycle like
infrastructure north of Maryland 193. So, as the most
uh organized I've ever seen, uh, a,
a committee, uh, to, to, to lobby and advocate. I'd really,
really appreciate seeing some of those recommendations being
pushed, mostly in a, in a, in a way that can be executable,
right? Uh, there's gonna be a lot of folks that talk, but I
mean, if people show up and they're organized, I think
we're gonna see some successful recommendations. One of the
things I, I didn't have the opportunity to, I guess, really
get into, but or see Edgewood itself is, so Edgewood,
which sits in District one, in North College Park for those
who are unaware, um at some point was going to be
redone Uh, I'm wondering or curious
what recommendations BPA has in place ready for that, um, for
that development, I know that we've seen recommendations
prior to or I've seen them from, uh, Mr. Hayes, I want to
believe, uh, when during one of his presentations, uh, do you
have any, uh, predictions on how you guys
hope to work with the city engineer.
So Steve Halperin told us that his
plan, his plan, which of course is subject to your approval. Uh,
when Edward next needs uh repaving is to install a bike
lane on the north end of it. from, uh, Route one to Rhode
Island. Um, that would have
two effects. Uh, first of all, it would protect bikers in the,
in the bike lane in that stretch.
Uh, and second, it would, uh, force narrowing of, it would
narrow the street, which would force slower traffic, which
would tend to pre protect both the children walking to
Hollywood Elementary, and the people and the children walking
to the bus stop, that's right near Hollywood Elementary.
um so
we thought that was a good plan, um, and
uh, we are therefore waiting for
Edgewood to get torn up I, I, I'm hopeful that when we
do do that, we preserve the like some aspects of the
parking. I know a lot of the residents have have raised
concerns about the limited parking that's on Edgewood. So,
I mean, we're gonna need to work together. Um, and secondly,
I know that, uh, the North College Park Community
Association sent over a letter requesting the extension of the
trolley trail. Uh, we can get into the historic elements of
where the trolley was or where the trolley was not, but
uh I believe that you all have been connected with uh Megan
and their team, uh, in order to try to, to look at what it
would look like to expand north of, I want to say it's, I guess
north of Maryland, 193, and possibly connecting to the
counties recently, uh, developed a large sidewalk just
north of Odessa, uh, heading up towards, uh, Sunnyside. I'd
like for there to be some strategic consideration here,
given the fact that many of our projects that are forward
facing, including uh the annexation efforts may connect
back into that if we are successful. So I, I believe it
would be very helpful. if, uh, the city engineer
received a message from the council
that they would like him to do a walking tour.
and indicate which there are there are at least 3 ways.
that you can extend the trolley trail for, for
pedestrians, um, one is with the current
substandard uh
sidewalk on the west side. uh, on the Western Service Road.
One is by putting a sidewalk which does not currently exist
on the eastern Service Road and the third is, I'm probably the
most expensive alternative. Um the, uh, putting a sidewalk
directly next to uh, the, the bike lanes that
you've already got there. Um, now,
I think it is not helpful, it is not useful.
to have to not have some expert
opinions about whether one of those alternatives is cost
prohibitive or not. Um, so in my view,
um, we, you need to, we need to
have an idea about what's feasible.
Thank you. Yes, uh, for those who don't know or who aren't,
uh, regularly up in this area. uh
there tends to be a lot of residents who use the bicycle
lane as a walking lane. Uh, I mean, it is an active road, uh,
Rhode Island Avenue. Uh, and these are, you know, temporary
bollards that won't necessarily do much to stop, uh, any sort
of car should something happen, it's more of a reminder of
anything. Uh, what I'd like to make sure that we're all
working together, right, on is, is what that looks like in the
future. Happy to have a larger conversation on council. I
don't know if you're aware, but Conso was
proud to uh to include in this year's budget a traffic study
that's going to look at what potential uh
outlets, I guess like egress, uh, spots will be best for cars
to come out of the service roads. Right now, what's
happening is people are rushing right out of them to try to get
onto Rhode Island Service Road, uh, potentially putting a lot
of people in danger and also just causing extreme backup and
delays, uh, and with Duval Field coming on board, uh,
we're gonna see a lot more traffic. So hopefully we can
tie all of these multiple efforts together in order to be
able to move forward successfully. Thank you, thank
you so much. Let's go to Councilor Mitchell and then
Councilor Oates. No.
No. OK, thank you, Mr. Mayor. Thank you for your report. I
appreciate your due diligence and intentionality, um, one
thing I, I know we just have the, uh, we will have the
opportunity to nominate Miss Martin to be a part of the BPAC
Committee, and one of the things that we talked about
with her, I did, was the fact that, um, looking at the
university's transportation plan and trying to incorporate
that into our plan as well, moving forward to help us with
um um bicycle safety as well as um
those who are pedestrians. Um, also, I just wanted to ask in
regards to your plan, I hope it's my hope that we will have
more opportunities for engagement with the community.
Going out to the community and talk about
what you do as a committee and what your recommendations are.
I think what comes as a little bit of a uh.
how can I say the word, um, heartburn for some individuals
cause they don't know what you're actually doing as a
committee and what you're trying to achieve. So I hope we
can have more conversations, especially in the District 4
area, um, I rega regards to what the committee is actually
doing. And the third point is Crystal Springs, yes, there
needs to be some type of help with Crystal Springs, as long
as myself and may approach and Mackie lived there. That has
been a sticking point with us in a really public safety
concern cause as you know, far, you know,
ambulance can get down there. No one can get out if there was
an emergency. So if anything can be done, I know the city
has put in for plans with um parking planning to do. I know
Mr. Young's doing something with regard to 35th Avenue, but
that is huge. Um, my other point, my
last point is, um, we would like to think about possibility,
some residents were asked by Lauren Speed.
because we know that's a problem, but also along Metarat
Road, you know, there's a potential development with the
county. Many residents are now aware about that in the
sidewalk and how that will impact Metaro going into Saint
Andrews and along that Duke corridor. So what we can't,
what can be done in order to, number one, bring that report
back and bring out the actual essential components, so
reticence are made aware, especially on Metarat Road
because many of them do not know there's a potentiality of
a sidewalk coming and they're gonna be caught off guard by
how we can work with them, the county and your committee can
work together to get the communication, but also to see
the feasibility of other safety measures.
Thank you, councilmember Mitchell. I, I will, I will ask
in return that that there be um second appointment to the to
BPAC from from District 4, you have a, you have a, you have a
vacant, you have a vacant seat here. We appreciate very much
Shelby being with us, um, otherwise this would not be
represented. District 3 is not currently represented at
District 2 is not currently represented. Um, we need, uh,
we need to, we need to have those vacancies filled because
I know, I know as a former council member, I know you want
to be hearing from the committee, from a
committee of your constituents. and and and we are definitely
gonna be looking for someone else to be on that committee,
but again, I, this is important, um, for all of us, especially
as we start to talk about our strategic plan. We need to have
as many many of you on the table to talk about how we move
forward. So thank you, Mr. Mayor.
Thank you. Um, I see Cons Ols and then Mayor Potamaki. That
story. Great. First, I just want to thank you both for your
report and for um coming here today before us, um, and, uh,
I'll say we're working on it for District 3, and it we'll
make our our broader, um, advisory board appointments,
and there are some new appointments, um, uh, including
one in District 3. I wanted to pull on a few threads, um, and
the first one was related to bike racks, um, because I think
that in my view, uh, to some extent, this is
actually um an economic development issue in the city
of, you know, people, uh, try to visit College Park
businesses or restaurants or other places and then don't
have any place to put their bike, um, or go to a playground
and, you know, don't, don't have things. Um, so, uh, I had,
uh, in our council discussions on the budget proposed that
there be money put in the budget to support bike racks.
Um, the reason that didn't end up, um, in the final budget was
that the view was uh, existing resources can meet
the need and that there's grant opportunities, um, that we
could pursue that would effectively pay for what the
needs are. So I'll just say I personally would be very
interested to hear more from BPAC on what, where are the
places that in the city um where you think there should be
by cracks, and in particular thinking about um, you know, so
new developments have to kind of build that infrastructure in,
but what is our, our older development and where, uh,
we're, where, where that ' s needed. Well, one of our
members was going to do a a a a huge survey operation to get
recommendations and, and when we found out there was no
funding, then she has she has suspended that effort, but I
will, um, I will say personally that I was
uh I think it was, was it yesterday or the day before, um,
in the College Park Shopping Center, which has no bike racks.
Um, I had, I got there by bicycle and I had to go, go, go
outside, go outside the shopping center to find a
railing to, to, to park my bike at. So it's
um, it's, it's all around us Yeah, I'm, so I'm happy to,
I'll, I'll be joining your meeting, uh, next Thursday. So
happy to, happy to chat more, but, um, I do think that that
is a need and one that, uh, is pretty easy to fulfill, but
that will change the feel of, oh, this is hard, even so even
if you have the connectivity, if the endpoints, you don't
have anywhere to put your, um, your bike, then it, it's not
there. I think, um, the other one, question I had for you all
is, is kind of, um, a weird one, but, uh,
I think I assume that when uh BPAC was last, uh, given a
charge. Um, it, uh, it was probably before the the era of
electric scooters. And so, you know, the focus on pedestrians,
the focus on bicycles, um, are scooters, uh, within the scope
of BPAC and do you think they should be?
Um I, I'll tell you what, if, if
you want to add it to our charge, we will take it in our
charge, and especially if you want to, if you want to add any
scooter activists to our, to our, to our committee, and we
will definitely be working on that. Um,
I, I haven't frankly seen. uh
much of an much of an issue where you're treating, where we
would be treating scooters differently from bi bicycle or
pedestrian. But you know, I'm open to it.
Yeah, part of the reason I ask is just, you know, the city
does have uh viaride contract, there are other issues where,
um, uh, they share resources with bikes and pedestrians. I
sure do. It seems to me like something that if we in the
future are reviewing the charge of the committee, it might be
worthwhile to include in scope. Thank you.
Thank you. Uh, let's go to Murta Maki and then
Councilorgil. Yes, thank you, and thank you for your report
and thank you to whoever answered all of my questions. I,
um, that I sent earlier. It was very helpful to receive those,
um, those answers. And I, I too, um, support your idea about
lowering the speed limit. I was the one who asked for this
speed limit to be lowered on Rhode Island Avenue, um,
several years ago. Um, and I'm glad that I did. I
don't know that it's it's, it's effective, but I
think it is that we went down and lowered the speed limit. Um,
one of the things with lowering speed limits and, and having
traffic calming. Those are all voluntary, um, you know, people
can choose to go over this beat hops really fast. They can
choose to not follow the speed limit. They can choose to go
through stop signs and not slow down. Um, so I am very um
supportive of measures that protect
cyclists and pedestrians, um, in ways that keep them safe. Um,
not just slowing people down, but keeping them safe. I want
to tell you that I actually went to the meeting about
Metarra Road. Um, it's a very extensive study and report that
if you haven't seen it, you should. And, um, you should
look at it. I think I might still have it if you want to
contact me um, but it's a very interesting
report about, um, that's Sara Road and um.
I'm, I just wanted to say that for me, um, engaging the
community is very, very important and also looking at,
um, issues, um, like one of the issues is that
we have a a epidemic in our country of childhood obesity
too. So it's very important that we're making places where
children can walk to parks, can walk to school, can walk to to
the the bike, um, to the bus stop. I saw the, uh, I was
driving back home into College Park Woods and saw the two bus
stops and was shocked at the amount of cars waiting there to
pick up their kids from the bus stops.
So, um, thank you for this report. Thank you for outlining
your priorities, um, and, uh, and um I just really want to
applaud you for the work that you're doing in the city and um
to really encourage you to continue. Thank you.
Well thank you and Rocky, uh, we've had now two requests that
we look at the messra Road development for our next BPEC
meeting? Can we do that? Yeah, we can review it. Um, we
have reviewed it after, uh, the county did go over it. There
was a, I think there was a workshop or something that they
conducted. It was a virtual one. so we did do, uh, overview of
that, just a quick rundown, I believe in one more, um, beatPA
member was part of that, uh, session, but we did run down,
but we can do it again, uh, just as a refresher again just
so we're I don't know if, I don't know if we ever had an an
our agenda. Yeah, yeah, OK. OK, go ahead
Um um, Mr. Mayor, if I can just
extend my um my day jobs, expertise in
getting you a point of contact to DPWT's liaison, who can
actually come to the meeting. and with
the committee to talk about the actual
project, so you'll have someone there firsthand to answer
questions for you. Thank you
because Mets are that that road is a county road, correct?
That's the reason? OK. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Hill,
for patiently waiting. Please go ahead and then Councilor
Jordan, I believe. Sure. Um, I'd just like to, uh, kind of
follow up on a council member Oates' comments. Uh, he, he
made me think about um uh something that was brought to
my attention by another resident, um, there are more
and more e-bikes on, on these trails nowadays and um
I, I have one myself from early adopter, but um one of the
things that can be an issue is that that
the amount of power, the wattage.
of these bikes, um, the residents urged me an article,
I forget where it was where a regular cyclist and a uh uh
biker that had a high powered motor.
um, head-on collided and uh they both died.
So, um, that's something that we need to take into
consideration. I've noticed a number of these um souped up
e-bikes now beginning to uh make appearances and um the
young individuals that have them uh are getting together
and, you know, daring each other to do, you know, kind of
reckless things. So, um, I know that some trails are
limited to the wattage, and then you can, you can only have
500 watts to blow, you know, that sort of thing. So this
might be something you might want to start considering as it
become more frequent, um, out there. Yeah, Yeah the Yeah,,
the Yeah,, the trail from um. think of it as the Park Run
trail, but, uh, I, I believe it's technically the paint
branch trail of, uh, is uh they have a limit, they have,
they say low powered bikes only that, but that's park and
planning. That's not the city, um, you would, you would have
to have, uh, you would have to have, if you want to address
this on city um city right away, you're
going to have to pass an ordinance, um, and if you want
us to talk about it, we can talk about it.
My main concern is the Charlie Trail.
the, the other, other, um, uh, bike lanes on Route 1, you know,
they're, they're single direction and you're flowing,
you're flowing with a faster um pace, uh, vehicles and new
sidewalks for pedestrians, but we're pedestrians and, and
other cyclists mixed together like on a trolley trail. I
think we need to consider um some sort of regulation.
Um, before my Jordan Cosmomo Jordan speaks. So in regards to
the scooters on
college, not the trial trail, but Payne ran trail, um, Mr.
Rafi probably remember we made a request
to, um, change the geo fencing of the vehicle.
so that our residents can use the trail to get into College
Parkwood. a couple of months ago. Um,
there's a complaint that the residents could not get into
the neighborhood. Um
as they are trying to cross, I I believe uh the um golf course
is road which the intersection is.
um, so there was a cutoff in in power once they passed the geo
fence or correct. Yeah. Um, that was handled by my
colleague Carlos, um, presumably, um, who spearheads
uh efforts with VO, um, but I can definitely follow up with
them. I wasn't included in in any updates for that, but, um,
I'm sure we would hear more if it wasn't taken care of. Let me
check and follow up if you could, please. Yeah, that would
address the, the, um, the um, connectivity issues that Ms.
Shelby was talking about, you know, residents.
don't have many options to get into College Park Es other than
driving. um
This is a wonderful opportunity Thank you. Thank you, Miss.
Councilor Jordan. Thank you very much for this
report and um this is an important issue for the council
and for the, the residents of College Park. Um, I want to
echo, um, Council member Hernandez about the advocacy,
especially for the um developments and improvements
that are coming to, um, some of these areas that you
highlighted in your, in your report, um, specifically the
Metropolitan is having uh a a session for community
engagement on, uh, January 25th. I mean, sorry, June 25th, um
but they're, they're, uh, in, in their, um, detailed site
plan in their, in their, uh, um, presentation to the um College
Park Mayor and council, uh, they talked about different
kinds of improvements that have to do with, with lighting and
bike lanes and and things like that. And so I think having uh
as as council member Hernandez said having members of BPAC or
are more and more residents who can show that the um the
interest of College Park that this would be something that
would be sorely needed. And similarly,
on June 24th, the, um, uh, State Highway Association for,
uh, is, is having a a community engagement meeting up for
Baltimore Avenue from 193 to Sunnyside and and as you know,
that is, that is one of the areas that you, um, that you
identified and so um. I think that this would be a a
a ripe opportunity for this. We already know that this, that
there will be changes to those areas and so if we can get in
and uh have a seat at the table, have a voice, then, um, then we
can see what we can do about, about, uh, affecting change for
College Park and then I also would like to echo Council
member Oates on the importance of bike racks. Again, I, I
don't know that it was, um, the intention of council that these
were not important. It was, it was, it had to do with the
funding sources, not not that it was not something
that we wanted to move forward with. Um, certainly it would be
one of my priorities, um, that's a part of using your
bicycle to go places means that you can go places. It isn't
just, um, I wanted, I wanted to ride my bicycle and then go
home, right? You, you want to go to dinner, you wanna go to
school, you wanna go, you wanna commute, you want to go
shopping, all these different things, um, so I appreciate, uh,
I, I do want to, to make sure that that is one of the
priorities, I believe, of, of counsel, certainly of myself.
Thank you. Thank you. I, I do echo the
importance of attending um, not only by BPAC but also community
as a whole, um, at the um, the rawan phase 2 and phase
3 meeting at Bellsville. Um, because this is a
once in a lifetime opportunity for us to advocate whether we
need to have multi-moral um privilege, transportation
options on Route one, once this is built, it's built, and we
lose that opportunity. Thank you. Um, question to Mr.
Yang. I know you have been involved in organizing this
meeting on face2 and phase 3. how will this meeting will be
handled, is it there, I don't think there'll be any QA
session or anything or any presentation's going to be more
participatory, um, kind of roundtable, uh, discussions, uh,
and presentations by the engineers they're involved,
they'll have the, the sketches, the um draft
um. renderings of, of, of their
project engineering. I'm not sure at what um
percentage of engineering, they're presenting, uh, at that
meeting, but, uh, it'll be the first time I, I, I will have
seen it myself. Thank you. So, there'll be some sort of, uh,
way to get community input, uh, as part of the discussion. So
suddenly, uh, you're input will be very valuable. Yeah, that's
been part of the delay is really getting some of the
preliminary engineering, uh, completed so that they could at
least start the conversation and people would have a place
at which to start and to have the conversation as to what
improvements would be needed. Thank you.
I appreciate it. All right, um, so Steph and BPA.
I, I, I think you had quite a bit, um, um, I'm, I'm sure that
we'll be working on and coming back with a report or something,
so, and some of the projects are related to his complete
street projects and probably could be incorporated in the,
yeah. the CIP
and some of them like the bike rack, I don't think, you know,
they need a CAP that could be done by our maintenance budget,
public works maybe. Um, so it looks like the
council has a support for that. Uh, so please let us know how
can we support you, soundly, and please continue to, uh,
advise us. uh, the way you want to say
College Park more walkable and bikeable.
Thank you for your work. Appreciate it.
All right, let's go to the next presentation, which is about
the framework for strengthening property regulations through
licensing and to its included business and residential rental
and vacant property registries, short term rental oversight.
overcrowding enforcement and adoption of updated property
maintenance code. And this will be taken by our deputy city
manager. Good evening, Mayor and council.
Thank you. Hi, um, thank you for reading
all of that, Mayor. That was a, I made the longest title for
you ever and I apologize for that. Truly, so, um, thank you
again and um so toni tonight council, we're here, this is,
uh, so for the record, Michelle Billy Hedgepeth, deputy city
manager, um, I want to first acknowledge staff, um, I've got
to Tinder, Cookar our our Department of Public Services,
um, David Spalding's here. He's our code enforcement manager
and Derrek Davies, our code-enf f or ce ment supervisors in the
audience. Mr. Davis, please come forward. Yeah, Davies.
Come on come on. So, um, what we wanted to first just provide
some um an overview, uh, for the council kind of something
brief today to get us started because there's been so many
questions about code enforcement. What are, you know,
how are we working through some items? Where are we going? And
I think over my 1st 2.5, I guess, whatever, whatever I'm,
I don't even, I'm kind of lost about I about 2.5 or maybe 3
months, whatever we' ve been kind of working on some
ideas of things that need to be addressed. So what we did is
put together this framework as a way for the council to sort
of see where we are. So I'm not gonna read every
slide. I'm just gonna kind of acknowledge some things that we
all know that's going on. One, that this presentation will
then just summarize some of our challenges. Um, it'll start to
align where we go with code enforcement. Um, we'll provide
some refinements to what we're looking at for the regulatory
items like our like the International Property
Maintenance Code, um, outlined some coordinated next steps and
then just kind of establish this framework for the council
in a policy direction moving forward.
Um, what we wanted to kind of just kind of say is like we
understand and we get them all the time or what are the
recurring nuisances that the council sees that residents see
that are out there, um, you know, we see businesses
operating outside of the zone uses. There's noise, we get
overcrowded rentals, um, and then, um,
we've got a lot of, um, just a lot of news we have some
nuisance issues, parking, trash, all those kinds of things.
Because we're a university, we have transient issues. Um, we
have unauthorized uses, um, in our short term rentals like
yard events, um, and we, we're still trying to get our arms
around short-term uses or short-term rentals. I think the
rise of Airbnb sort of put this in the forefront for everybody.
So we, um, we did adopt a we adopt a, um, we adopted an
ordinance for it, but with everything else that's going on,
we're gonna, we need to really tighten that up and also put
that together. And then repeated
property maintenance violations.
Again, that same trash and litter and then um adjacent
Holmes, homeowners, and long-term residents that clash
that kind of happens and university towns. All right.
I'm always forgetting which one to do. All right. Next one. So
we did just a quick overview of the complaint process. Um, Mr.
um Cookar kind of like, and I love his notes because he's got
the best handwriting in the world. So he put together kind
of these great notes for me in regards to what, what happens
in a complaint. You know, we perform the research and assign
an officer We start to activate the case,
advise the the complaint of a case number and provide a staff
contact. We do that field inspection, and then we verify,
and then we have a decision point, you know, issue a code
enforcement finding or not, um. and then what we do is we
comply, we follow up through inspections and compliance and
then either that case is closed or it's moving on.
When I'm looking at like this whole idea of our notice of
violations and steps. We have the, you know, what we collect
on notice of violation. So when the RNR is a violations, these
are the things that we, that we see and then these are what,
what's part of a notice of violation when something occurs.
I'm going to just kind of go through um some of these issues
that and and then staff will be here to answer the questions
that, you know, to answer where we are, but
again, where are we? What are we doing and how are we going
to get there in these focus areas.
Um, in the area of the city businesses rental licenses, etc.
um, we're primarily, um, working through this whole idea
of permit or permitting so we have um occupancy permits and
most people usually kind of call them rental licenses. I
think we even call them rental licenses and business licenses,
but we, um, are really looking to move to make it more
more consistent in our in our nomenclature and also making
sure that we are kind of not calling them necessarily
occupancy permits because some people um
have occupants believe their occupancy perm are the same as
the state, I mean sorry, the county has an occupancy permit,
and when they get an occupancy permit from the from the county,
they think that they don't need one when they come to the city
of College Park and it's not a, it's not right, but, um, it's
an issue that we've kind of find all the time. We were like,
well, I've gone to this, the county, and it should be the
same thing. You have to have the occupancy permit, and we're
not saying that we're going to change our process
a great deal about what we're going to inspect or what we're
going to look at, but we are still going to maintain the
fact that we need to have, um, we're gonna have the pretty
much the same idea. The next thing we found is our
um our code enforcement software, um, even today, and
our ability to answer things in a, in a, a really coherent way.
It's not great. Uh, we've had, we've had an experiment with
the cello over the last 2.5, last 3 or 4 years. Um, no, um,
no, no knock on a cellar, but totally knock on aa that um it
hasn't been what we expected, um, and we use our GoGov, which
is a separate process that what the um Department of
Public Works has been using and we'd like to move to GoGov, um,
in regards to your code enforcement. So we are working
through that module and we'll have some timelines, but what
we're hoping to do is we, we're going to enter into that this
summer, get it completed by the end of the summer and then stop
and start implementing through GoGov, which will allow us to
do a lot of the things, um, mobilely. I mean, I hate to
kind of to expose all of our secrets, but it's hard
um, for our employees to, um, they don't do our everything
mobilely. They have to come back to the office, download
photos and coming back and forth. And so you would think
that their jobs should mostly mobile, and it's really not at
this point. Um, in our parking, it is, but for our code
enforcement, it isn't. And so getting those processes, we
streamlined and putting them together in a way that really
works efficiently and effectively. It's something
that we'll be working on this summer.
All right So again, this is the whole
idea of the transitioning to licensing. Um, again, defining
the regula like regularly activities, reducing that
confusion, improving the tracking and the responsible
priorities, um, and then, you know, basically aligning our
enforcement tools across rentals, short-term rental,
non-residential, and the vacant property.
Um, we've passed an, a lot of ordinances recently. We've got
the, um, vacant property ordinance. We have the short
term rental property, and we also have the early lease
option. The early lease, which we're all working on
simultaneously and I don't even have early lease in here.
You'll have a separate thing while I'll just talk about
early lease, um, but those are all sort of, those are all um
uh enforced by our code enforcement officers. Um, and
so right now we are trying to make sure they're all aligned
and they're all in their individual buckets. And what a
lot of this is, is sorting and placing and sorting and placing
for you all to understand where everything is. Um, what we're
proposing is that we're gonna regulate it as our rental
license, our business license, a distinct short-term rental
license, a vacant property license aligned with the
registry. That's part of the ordinance. And then
licenses that are in Chapter 129, which are special licenses
and Sharon has explained to me what all these are, but I will,
I will depend on, um, Derek and them to answer those
extensively for you. Um, lastly, on the last ones is
about going to the short-term rental.
Um, some of the issues is that we said, the boom of Airbnb
kind of caused these short-term bundles to pop up, and I know
that a couple of the council members have, um, have, have
alerted us, and we, we know they're out there and they've
been operating. And a lot of questions have been asked like,
well, I can't, can staff go on and, you know, basically go on
to Airbnb and just kind of figure out where they are,
which I'd love to have the time to do that, but what I'm hoping
is maybe something that we can figure out through AI or
figuring out to be able to track these better
um, is a better response for us than probably looking through
Airbnb every day to see who and what, but we will use it as a
resource when we see, you know, when they're reported to see
how they're listed. Um, but beyond just that normal um
short-term rental, we also have these special event and party
houses and outdoor areas and pools that extend beyond that
typical family and vacation rentals. So that's where the
issues are. The issue of overcrowding, I
wanted to do a quick, um, slide on that. Overcrowding itself is
something that has been a pain, I would say I guess of the code
enforce its existence and even the council's existence from
the standpoint of identifying it properly, understanding
where it's occurring and being able to coordinate, you know,
an effective enforcement, you know, a lot of times it takes
working with um our parking enforcement. It's how it takes
looking at trash and working with public works.
and you know doing that and Jacob Basilotti, I'd have to
give him his shoutouts today that he's done a really good
job with a project when we look at looking at where the um
garbage cans are. And so he's actually he's and uh um they've
they've got they've done a, it's like it's amazing how
they're tracking where the tra the trash cans are that will
help us to understand where we're where we're seeing this
issue. So we're starting to get the data and since they have
GoGov and we have GoGov, that can all
overlap together, which is going to be helpful to us.
So here's our proposed timeline.
So implementing of GOGA would be the again, the summer of
2026, we're looking to purchase the program. I think we've
finally purchased it in the last couple of days. So that's
done and programming, it will take another month or two to
get it together. Staff has been working really hard on that and
really putting together those processes. I'd also like to
thank, um, to Tinder and the and actually the code team. Um,
there's several days and nights when I'm walking around here
and they're still here working on the policies and
procedures that we've been revising and aligning so that
when we use GoGov, it's correct. It matches our code, it matches
as our operations. And so over the last few months, we've been
really working on one of our processes and what our policies.
And then the next step would be developing a comprehensive
licensing framework. Um, the Code of amendments that we'll
be working on, and I'm going to overwhelm probably poor
Stephanie, our our city attorney on this as well.
is working through our code and um looking at that for the
standpoint of our IM of the IMPC and making sure that we're
aligning that to our licensing structure and we believe that
that should occur through August through November, August
through November of 2026. Um, we're also right now
implementing a new code enforcement standards and
operating procedures. It's kind of backwards. I have this
listed, um, which is going on right now in theta, as I
mentioned, the staff is working through that, which is in July.
Um, which should be completed in July. Um, we're doing
training with our staff, which the first set of training is
actually in the next 2 weeks, and we will continue to train
our code enforcement staff throughout the summer on both
the launch and also this change in our framework.
And then the public launch will happen this fall to the winter,
depending on how we, how the implementation of some of the
code changes happen. Um
we are reviewing, um, the fees and costs. We've got some
information that we provide some initial information that
you will see from us and that item will be presented this
fall, um, and probably fall to winter, which I like to not
give box myself in too much and then hopefully we can get an
adoption of the 2021 International Property
Maintenance Code. And why aren't we adopting, let's say
the 2026 or 2024, um, the county, I believe is still on
2021, um, and it's got one of those things
that you kind of take a little bit more gradually than just
doing the latest and greatest. So just in case you get that
question, like, why aren't you doing the new one? Because this
is much newer than the one we have. So
I'm here for questions and staff's here. Thank you. Thank
you so much. I have a couple of questions if I may ask, very
quick ones. Um the, I, I, I think you
mentioned the public works ceases go go and.
and public services yes DPS is Asala, am I correct? That is
correct, Mayor. Yeah, we've been using Acela for our
licensing, um, since about 2021, 22 or 2020, 2020, excuse me,
it's 2020. So when, when residents like us, uh, we use
the, the uh interface, the Collegeber Connect, or tell us,
um, what those those requests go to the CRM, which are the
customer service ones go through GoGov,
but the licensing and all those are going through. We are, we
are duplicating that in the cellar, so they're duplicated,
OK. Yeah. So that's why the process is. They're two
separate streams and my and staff is nodding so I'm getting
it right. So they're two separate streams. Uh, that's,
that's not the most efficient, uh, doing business. So I, that
makes sense that uh if you could use the same system.
Thank you. Totally agree. Um, 11 other thing as we've been
attending different conferences and the meetings, so we have
been seeing. uh more and more um cities and
towns and even counties, there have been adopting, um,
AI-driven software to do the initial screening. I'm not
talking about the review. I'm talking about the initial
screening, did you. the when someone submits the
forms and associated documents, the AI could be very helpful in
the software um to do the initial pass, um, is there
something, um, go go or Acea or any other software could uh
support. Yeah, I can speak to, uh, this
mayor. I think AI and machine learning, that process has been
used in building plan review process for new construction
aspect of things. And even in that it's still in the early
stages of implementation in the country. There are some, uh,
you know, big organizations who have, uh, started to, you know,
think through that, but there are still many challenges and
they are in terms of QAQC and other aspects of the operation.
As far as this, uh, uh, I think Accella
and GoGov, uh, uh, they don't talk to each other very well,
and, uh, uh, you know, we have had challenges in the Xala
implementation, how it was sold to us and how it was
implemented, so we probably had a lot of interfacing and uh the
software's working together for the, uh, effectiveness and uh
streamlining and efficiency part of our operation. What we
have realized, we imple ment ed uh CRM in the later
part of 24, and we are really doing well, and that is helping
us, but I think since, uh, you know, our licensing and
permitting aspects in our system is through Excella. So
in many cases we are duplicating a lot of things,
and sometime in Aksala there are some inherent, uh, you know,
automation functions which are not implemented correctly when
we bought the software as itself, uh, we are just working
through those phases and, uh, we have
recently kind of uh, uh, you know, uh, signed an agreement
with uh GoGov to move on to the licensing and permitting aspect
so that uh the same kind of software is used all across the
organization like DPW was you know, permitting and
licensing aspects all on the same, you know, like portal.
it'll streamline the efficiency, streamline the information flow
to the public internally as well as externally.
Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm, I'm suddenly took their
right initiative by the steps to streamline the two softwas
into one. Thank you. All right, um, let's see. I see a couple
of hands, starting with Councilor Hu and then Councilor
Hernandez. Uh, yes, thank you. I, I'm just
curious, what is the process for, you know, an individual to,
to register a uh rental, you know, it is a totally volunteer
volunteer or um. is it uh something that staff
you know. um intervenes on how, how is it
that, uh, a rental is declared cause I, I just reported, um, I
guess today, um, that the house went for sale. I had sold and
now it's a ferreent sign is up. So as new homes get sold, um,
you know, there's a high ratio of homes that are, are bought
in this city, get turned into rentals. So what's, what's the
process for following up on that?
Yes, um we try to track all the
properties that are sold in College Park and we'll reach
out to the new owner. We'll take down that information and
then we will issue an invoice or a letter to the new owner,
uh, talking about the rules of renting a College Park and how
to apply. We'll send them a leak on how to apply for rental
and we'll follow up with that as well.
But as far as volunteer, a lot of times that they buy in
College Park, they're not aware that they need to get a rental
license. um
Oh. so
Oh. OK. And um
and how
I, I know that when, when I'm out there campaigning and I,
I'll be talking to residents and they'll be, you know,
saying that there's all these unregistered, um, no.
uh rentals that, uh, we
are maybe aware of, not aware of
that, you know, it has not been followed up on that they've
complained about um, you know, what, what,
what's, how can we help? fix that situation when we're
told about this. I think Councilman, what you know what
you did when you submit through, let's say go, like when you
submitted it to us, we actually are going to put that we put
that into GoGov and we do that. So we take, I think
it's a multi-pronged approach, right? It's the enforcement
through the fact that we're we're, you know, we're we're
sending it as the things get sold. We're following up with
on complaints. I mean, it's complaint driven. It's it's
process driven. It's like, you know, we're going to have to do
multiple hits. So it's not perfect, and I think the other
part, what we're also looking at, we also look at previous
databases and we look at that homes that have been um
historically rented, right, Derek? I mean, do you want to
talk a little bit about like, so we we do
have an idea of houses that are traditionally have been rentals,
and we have a list that we follow up on that, but the
issue that we've had with the cella is that every year we
create a brand new license, and that license is not necessarily
linked to the old license, and so we have all of these files
that are not connected, and we've got to then connect the
different um files together and so part of it has been
very hard in our tracking, and we're hoping that with the new
system that this some of these um inefficiencies will be
corrected, but I think the one good thing is that our staff
themselves does have a good idea before we had a cella with
our old program um, and I don't know, I'll just
let you guys talk to that. So let me, let me stop talking and
let you talk. So
So a lot of y'all that have been around for a while,
remember the old green screens, the legacy system, they have
400. They would alert us that system would alert every time a
property came up for renewal for an annual permit.
The Ocea is not alerting us. Um, so we basically have to
manually go in to find what is being expired or it's getting
ready to expire. Sometimes it's slipping through the cracks,
trying to get that, um, so we're looking forward to going
to GoGov to be able to have that and also email
notifications as well, the old system would give out an email
notification to a property owner saying, you're, your
permit's gonna expire in 30 days. It's time to re-up. It's
time to renew. We're not finding that right
now with, with our system, so we're looking forward to that
as well. Thank you and lastly, um, I,
when I attend the um National League of Cities in their expo
uh hall. I'm not sure if you'll be there at MML. I hope they
will be, but there is a vendor who will
utilize all the online services like uh for for short term
rentals, like, you know, uh, Airb Airbnb and Purple and all
that to, to give us a profile of all the um short term
rentals that are operating within our city, uh, you know,
the hunt that stuff down and provide that information, so
this might be initially something we might want to
consider to get a baseline, uh, of the short term rentals in
our city. I appreciate that and we can
look that up. That's thank you. Yeah, please connect uh offline,
please. Thank you. Uh council member Hernandez and Councilor
Arts after that and then Councilor Mitchell.
So first and foremost, I'm supportive of, of us like
transitioning entirely to GoGov from just uh a standardization
perspective. What I found useful is, you know, that's.
it's easier and easier to sell to to residents to submit their
own complaints. Um, one of the things as a council member, if,
if it's possible for us to, I don't know if you can, but like
for us to be able to track some of the, some of the items
because otherwise we're kind of just repeating the same
submissions. I don't know if that's a growth opportunity
that we can do, um, but I think that would be helpful and also
helpful for us to be able to follow up with our residents
and says, hey, that proper ty ' s already been submitted,
like they're working on it and we can track it. Otherwise,
it's us submitting it in addition to our residents. So
any, any efforts to try to optimize it, it's fantastic.
I'll say when it comes to some of the other more lofty uh
frameworks that we're proposing, uh, it's, it's gonna be a lot.
It's gonna be a lot. I know that we've worked on the vacant
and blinded property tax in the previous council. I think it's
really, really important that we do that, especially with the
commercial properties across the city, uh, and some that are
just chrono like chrono or chronically uh just mm, I don't
know, uh, operating out of bad faith, I really don't know, uh,
so early intervention is more effective and less costly than
adjusting the long-term deterioration that we've seen
in uh some of our communities. I'm wondering
I'm wondering if when we do launch these different
ordinances that we, we possibly work across some of the
departments, right? Code enforcement and public services
has a, has a really important role in enforcing
efforts, but we have other departments, let's just say if
we're talking about commercial sectors, to work hand in hand
with economic development, work hand in hand with uh
some of the other departments that may be able to assist,
perhaps planning, uh, as you do these targeted areas. Uh, I'm
specifically focused right now on Edgewood and Rhode Island
and in the future, uh, Route one north of north of Maryland
193. There are a lot of businesses there that operate,
um, and when you just see the consistency of, of broken code.
I mean, you'll see the yard's out of place, the, uh, what's
it called? Uh, smoke shops that just
continue to pop up like, like just a bad weed, uh, and I'm
not really sure if they have licenses, but I don't know the
operational tempo that code enforcement is doing this. I'm
hoping that this serves like this, the standardization
serves as an like a, a trackable, measurable
effort for us to be able to to go after some of these long
term issues. Um, on the short term rental, just one, just one
comment. Uh, one of the issues that I've seen, at least
through one of the short term rentals in our district is a
lack of ability to enforce. Do we need ordinances in place
to be able to enforce some of the ordinances that we have
currently. in order for you all to be able
to address those issues. We need a process and we need a
license that allows us to, um, we have the ordinance in place
and I think, and I believe that we have the fine structure in
order to do it. We just need the operational, um.
so that someone can get our license. Does that make sense?
because the county license exists and Jatender please take
it on from there. Uh, I think Council member
Hernandez, you make a great point. Uh, one of the reasons,
uh, why we are switching our licensing, you know, from
Excella to Goavis. We want all that database within one system
and I will give you one example. I think we implemented, you
know, trash fees recently, and we were trying to implement
that in our Exceler software, but they were like they were
not avenues to generate billing within that, uh,
whereas, you know, like, uh, uh, when we talk to the Goga people
to implement that, they are just creating that. And as uh
Michelle has indicated earlier in her presentation that uh uh
we basically have rental property database. We got
business license database and then we got uh vacant property
registry, and then, uh, we're gonna be doing, uh, you know,
like any uh enforcement issues. They are all going to be in one
software talking to each other, and then also
all the transitional information that is also being
used by public works that is also going to be all in that as
well. So that will definitely enhance the streamlining and
the systems are easily talking to each other. So, you know,
for example, short term rental was implemented back in 23 and,
but we did not have means to implement that in Excella, but
with Goga when we are transitioning for this
licensing, we are already creating those applications and
because I think legally we cannot utilize the same rental
application for short term rentals. There has to be a
separate application based on the, you know, legal
department's suggestion, and even the vacant registry we
passed last year, and we have created a database and we are
managing that process at the present time through the uh
regular, you know, Excel spreadsheets that we have in
our system, but we will be implementing that also as a
license in GoGov, you know, implementation that we are
doing. Yes, it seems like lofty, but it is
doable, and that is probably the best streamlined process as
we go forward. OK. And we are not going to have a, you know,
like a big bite, but I think we're going to implement one by
one and to implement those we're gonna have to bring in
the ordinance changes, and that was the whole purpose why we
implemented the timeline in one of the slides that Michelle
talked about earlier. Thank you. Uh, so I, what I'm hearing is
that the current state is unwieldy, right? You're getting
it's, it's very difficult to take pictures, go back, process
it. And as we introduce new ordinances, you all are having
a challenging time, making sure that there's a streamlined
methodology to be able to to hit those certain
enforcement metrics This is going to help resolve
that. Absolutely. What I'm, what I'd like to ask just for
clarification purposes, and this can be taken entirely
offline, um, is, do you have the ordinance infrastructure in
place to be able to hold these entities accountable, uh,
because as I've understood that may have been an oversight
in the 2023 provision, at least for the short-term rentals.
Yeah, I think there will be minor, you know, ordinance
amendments that will be needed. And we will go forward with
those, you know, like efforts as well as we go along this
process. Fantastic. I, and I, uh, I'm interested in making
sure that we continue that discussion. uh, but it doesn't
need to happen right now. Uh, one final thing, I think
registration and licensing provide accountability and
transparency. and this new licensing, uh,
structure that we would potentially explore, could be a
huge revenue driver for, uh, the city. I think I saw our
financials, uh, come in for, was it the last quarter here?
Uh, we were close to just one, just under 1 million in, in, uh,
licensing and registration fees. I think it's fantastic. I think
even me, I have one of the, like a rental property.
It's not deep, um, but it's, it's definitely provides us
an accountability like metric. I think if we have to add
business licenses, we should talk about it and have like, is
this multiple entities that they own? Is it a restaurant? I,
we have to have a full conversation across council
before we end up doing that business license. Thank you and
we'll bring it back to you. Thank you. I appreciate it. Um,
let's see. Councilor Mitchell, sorry, Councilor Os, counselor,
and then Councilor Mitchell. And then Conover Hughes the 2nd
bite. Thank you. Um, thank you and
really I just want to say I appreciate the work that we've
done together over the last several months, um, and excited
to, to be here and getting these updates from you. Um, and,
and really appreciate the work that you did with our, um,
District 3 intern, Oliver Slade, um, uh, to collect data in in
District 3. I think, um, on the, the business license point, I,
you know, my understanding is that um we currently don't
issue our own city business licenses. It's like a state and
county re gu late d piece, um, so I want
to understand that more, um, that doesn't have to be right
now, but, um, but I think on, uh, kind of revising the code
and and moving towards licensing instead of permitting
and moving towards GoGov, all sounds great. I think one thing
as uh as part of that transition implementation, um,
that I know folks in the past, uh, that we had prior to Eella,
um, that people appreciated was having contact info publicly
available for landlords or landlords agents.
Um, so that residents or city staff could contact, uh, if
there are problems, uh, with particular rental properties,
um, I think that was helpful for folks, um, who would want
to see that, um, continue to, to move forward. I know that,
uh, we raised a question on AI earlier, I think, trying to
figure out how to use AI to review, um, uh, rental
advertisements for potential violations or um, you know, if
you're adver ti s ing a 14 bedroom house
that's permitted for 5 people, maybe, you know, look into that.
Um, uh, but, uh, and then, uh, on the point on vacant
properties, I think, you know, really, uh, great
uh first steps in terms of kind of understanding uh what the
scope of the problem is. I think it would, I'd like to see
the city do more in terms of actually maybe doing outreach
to improve the utilization of the housing stock and vacant
properties, particularly. I'll say uh uh a non-resident
reached out to me, uh, and from a, a neighboring municipality,
uh, recently and noted, you know, said, hey, you know, can,
can I, um uh, can I get access to the
vacant property lists like so I can contact the homeowners and
try to buy their home, those, those homes, right? And so like
the, the point isn't to just study the problem, it's also to,
um, uh, figure out why particular properties are
vacant and how do we, um, how do we convert them into, um, uh,
things that are helping, uh, housing, the housing stock, um,
within the city. So, um, and that can be, I think, through
collaborative means with landlords or with property
owners and through maybe less
collaborative means, um, but, uh, I think ultimately the goal
is to ensure that, um, as, uh, we're dealing with uh housing
affordability issues that there's not just vacant
properties, um, that are, aren't contributing to the
community. So again, uh, really excited
for for this work, um, and really appreciate the work of
staff to um put this together and look forward to many
further conversations, um, particularly on the, um,
changes to code, um, um, uh, that will have in the future.
Thank you. Um, let's go to Council member
Mitchell first and then Councilor Mackey and then
Councilor Hull. Canomer he has to get off. I
don't. Yes.
OK, there we go. We got you, got it. We, 3rd time it's a job,
John. Um, thank you, Mr. Mayor, I appreciate it. Um, thank you
for your report. I appreciate the information. I know this
has been a long time in discussion and coming around
the corner and the bend, but we are here and I know that um
moving forward, this is gonna be some excellent work that's
gonna be come out of your department. Um, one thing I
wanted to ask in regards to, we talked about the short term ren
tal s and the um Airbnbs we can we can we consider them
businesses, so hopefully you will consider them as a
business license versus a rental license, but also are we
gonna be um looking at some of the social media platforms such
as Willow and Zillow to obtain information on regarding those
entities, those houses who are using their house as a rental,
but now it's really as an Airbnb.
Yes, uh, no, maybe. I think that, you know what
Councilmember Hume is mentioning is that looking and
trying to find, I think an AI bot probably would help us a
lot in this, um, in the search and I think the one thing that
it's, it's really um, let's say providential that we're going
to um go to um MML very shortly and I think
that we'll probably see some resources that will be able to
help us with this in the data. So I think it is something I, I
feel like it's much better. It's a much better, um
lift for some something that's not um not staff intensive by
using AI or something like that, so we will, we will, we will
figure that out as a next step. And I hope that be going along
the lines when we talk about illegal construction. Um, with
houses that are being purchased and assumed to be Reynolds, but
they're all, but they are building them out to add more
rooms to them, and I know uh Mary Parton Mac and I have seen
many iterations of calls from residents about
several homes in the woods and in Crystal Springs have been
that have been done I know Mr. Days has been working with Depa
very intentionally in trying to help us um get violations on
that, so I hope that's another aspect that we can work on, um.
I think um those are my questions my
colleagues answer other questions that I was gonna ask,
but I received the answers, but I just really look forward to
the outcome, but I also hope that we can really also work
with the county with some of their best practices that they
have and trying to dig out the um the
large volume of issues that they have to deal with and how
we can rectify them in a timely fashion about some of their
best practices. Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Let's go to Mayor
Potomaki. Yes, thank you. Thank you for answering all my
questions that I sent you, and I just had a, a few additional
from your presentation. Um, so you said that there that um.
that DPW is doing a trash study.
Like I, I was very interested in that because there's houses
that have like 4 trash cans and 4 recycling. So I'm thinking to
myself, how many people are living there to make that much
trash and that much recycling, so I was, so you're studying
the like how much trash is being, so we're doing inventory
of, they were doing an inventory of the, um, number of
trash and recycling bins and where they're assigned
and trying to determine which ones belong at which houses and
all that information and so that's what we're trying to do
is to see where, what the actual numbers are. And I mean,
you know, Robert's really passionate about all this stuff.
I'm like I, I don't, I only, I can't even match his enthusiasm
on half of the stuff, but um I'll say that that's that is
something that is going on in public works that is sort of is
happening in parallel, and I guess that's the one good thing
about working with both public works and with DPS and with
planning, is that we're kind of talking about these issues now
a little bit broadly like I'll hear one thing here and connect
it to there and so I think we're connecting more on those
levels, but yes, this is going on simultaneously. We had an
intern who did a um. who did a, uh, what's a
capstone process we had a capstone project on this where
not a capstone, um the university project, the
Powells project were interns actually looked at all these
and worked with Jacob as well. So we have some very
interesting results that we will be working through and
along with um what Overton District 3, we've got some
really good synergies even from that and how that also kind of
overlaps. I can add there, you know, what it really uh allowed
us to do is make sure that we are billing for through the
amount of uh trash and recycling uh containers at each
proper ty has because we, we, we found
some, uh that we were only getting, uh,
one, uh revenue source for, for one
can and they probably had about 66 to 8. So, um, and that was
from, um, probably, uh, one of our, I guess they call those uh
more of a nonprofit organization uh that we were
trying to assist over the years. So, um, they were already at
our lowest rate. So, um, you know, we have to work toward
correcting that because, you know, our, our resources, um,
require that we make sure that we're accurately, um, charging
for the services that we're delivering. Right. I had one
more question, I think, um, so, am I understanding this
correctly that, um parking is staying with the
cella. or no, no, they're, they're,
they're already on GoGovern. They're, they have a different,
they have a different one, AIs, they have AI, AI which is
separate. So they're gonna stay on that. And they're fine. Yeah,
that's working. That's working because I think that
when you drive by a house and they have 3 cars in the park in
the in the driveway and 3 cars in front, and there's no place
to park on the street. It's a pretty good indication that
there's more than 5 unrelated people living in the house, so
I was just wondering if parking is gonna be in on on this too,
like in in some way. I believe that Ames has better
reporting and we're able to pull that reporting a lot more
consistently and we're able to pull those reports to get the
information, which is why we're considering this, we're
continuing to stay with Ames, um, and I don't think go and I
was mentioning it to Mr. Young is that when I was in
Bladensburg, we had GoGov and I wanted to move to parking, and
they couldn't do the parking the way I needed it, so I would
say stick with AMS because that was one of the ones I did look
at, and I would say that they are do it that we are not
having problems so this one's not broke. I
don't want to fix it this minute, OK, that's good to know.
So thank you very much and thank you again for answering
all my questions earlier. Thank you. Let's go to Councilor
Jordan. Thank you again for your report.
Um, I had a question about, uh, the inspections and how those
would happen and who they would like what properties those
would be applying to, um, so can you walk me through, uh, um,
what happens now and and what differences there would be
after this. I'm gonna let Mr. Spalding or
Mr. Mr. uh Davies worked with it, yeah.
Um, cause I, it's, uh, I, it'll be pretty much the same, but it
will be more of an electronic process, but Mr. Davies, take
it on from here. Dave, sorry. I know the last
name and I just I broke my mostly beat up. So the process
is really not going to change, um, the new software is going
to be able to enable us to track it better, to be able to
renew things quicker and be on the alert for those things that
um come up when it's time to renew. So the actual inspection
process will still be the same. We're still going to be
inspecting all residential rentals, all commercial
properties, all multi-family buildings all the way across
the board. So that, that process is not going to change.
And then my understanding is that um we're we're expecting
that there are some under the radar rentals at the moment
that will that will likely be found in this new process, and
so, um, that that's, that's good because the inspections in
addition to um you know, the, the rental
license has has benefits for the city financially, but also
we, we do want to see that our residents live in a safe
environment, um, and we want to make sure that, that, um, that
the buildings are, are in proper order and all those
kinds of things. Um, so this, this will be, uh, so
so short term, medium-term and long-term rentals, and vacant
properties. Is that my, is that what you, what you were saying?
um, and then businesses as well, uh, to the extent that we do
them now. All right. We encourage all residents to
notify us 30 ears and eyes of the neighborhoods. They're
there all the time. If they suspect there's a rental
property and they don't think it's licensed, please reach out
to us, um, send us an email or give us a call so we can
investigate to see if that's the case.
but please, yeah, please encourage your residents to do
that. Thank you very much. Thank you. Before we go to
Councilor Hull, um, um, Mr. Cocker, uh, thank you,
thank you for your email to one of our residents, um, over the
weekend and you gave uh some good news about
keeping track of a rental property database. I
remember many years ago we used to have it under proper
database, but because of some reasons. Yeah, we don't use it,
but now it looks like you have a way to bring that back. Yeah,
sure. Uh, I think in the legacy system we had that there and I
think all the residents, all the, you know, like management
company, they really liked it. Uh, when Excella was
implemented, there were some inherent, you know, security
issues as well as like, uh, uh, you know
certain things that we couldn't share that in a public forum or
a public portal because the, uh, we were concerned about the
system being hacked, uh, with this, uh, implementation,
everything across through the GoGov, you know, like platform,
uh, that issue is gonna be resolved, and we have heard
that loud and clear from all the stakeholders in the city.
We are going to do that and we are going to implement that.
There's already, you know, conversation happening in the
design of the switchover. Thank you. And this will be in
terms of timeline. This will be done by the summer. Am I
correct? We hope. OK, let's, let's,
that's around the corner. Uh, and, uh, the residents will be
able to search the property by the address or straight timer,
so, uh, they will, uh, like have the same capability as it
was in the legacy system. I think we, we have already
talked to GoGov about that particular need. Yeah.
Yeah, the, um, I think it's been at least 4 or 5 years,
then. Yeah, up until 19 uh 2019 or 2020 it was there, but when
there's like in 201 and when this thing got, you know, like
moved to Acella, uh, that was a, uh, you know, inherent
incapability. Yeah, it's kind of downgrading but I'm very
happy that this is coming back. Appreciate your work.
All right, Councilor Mar here, thanks for your patience so I
think you just asked my question whether we would have
access to the uh rental, um uh what
the rental listings so that we can, uh, provide accurate
updates sounds like everybody will, uh, residents and council.
who have access to that database. It'll be made public,
correct? that interface to yeah, like, uh, I think the, the
things which are, uh, you know, like legally rented uh through
our process, that listing will be there, right? Of course, I
think when I heard council member Mitchell, uh, like, uh,
there are other, you know, platforms or the conversation
like from Michelle about chatbot or utilizing. There are
companies out there who probably have reached out to us,
but I think we want to make sure that uh how much we are
gonna utilize or what is the extent of, you know, like a
short term rentals out there, I think the numbers differ like
it, you know, like uh earlier, you know, like they were single,
there may be 30 or 400 just in one district, you know, in one
area, and the, the reality is when we are trying to check it
from the outside, you know, available, uh, listings, those
numbers are a lot smaller, but we are definitely in case we
have a need, we will definitely look
into that option. Thank you, just to be clear,
not, not everything will be accessible to the public. Not
everything will be accessible to council members as well. So,
um, but there will be things that will be appropriate to be
able to share and we'll walk through that process, um, if I,
if I recall in the old system 5 years ago, we could only see um
the name of the property and when was the last time a
citation was given Mayor, you are taking me to the side of
that I'm thinking of bring ing my legal hat here. Uh, I
think anything that we share with the public, uh, you know,
it has connotations of privacy and uh definitely certain
things we can share without any issue coming back to us, but I
think those things definitely as the city manager said, they
will have to be kind of vetted through the legal process as
well, certainly, yeah, and I agree totally. Thank you. um,
just to um clarify on this point, I think, um, there is
some information that is currently available, um,
publicly, um, it is not, most of the information, I think
what you're hearing from council is not all information,
but some information should be available. I think that the
intention from from my perspective is, um, having the
city be able to help uh people solve their own problems, um,
when there are issues with uh rental properties, um, and I
think when the city removed uh the listing of a contact phone
number or other things. It meant that
people ended up having to go to the city to help solve those
issues more rather than just, you know, calling the landlord
and saying, hey, you know, can you
um, check in on this? So I, I, I, I think that's clear, um,
and I appreciate your, um, your work, but if, if, I think to,
to um council member Hughes's question around like which
properties are rentals. That's already public information
that's on the city's databases that are publicly available
online. Um, so where, uh, if, if they are permitted, um, then
that information is, is available. Um, what is not uh
available is the contact information for a landlord
Thank you Appreciate it. So, looks like
you had a robust discussion and there's quite a few good ideas
came sorry, Mr. Coker thank you Council members. I think you
expressed it very well. Thank you.
Thank you, Mayor, please, can I ask a question? Sorry, I don't
know how this works, and I apologize the question suddenly,
yeah, no problem. Um, yeah, thank you so much for the
fantastic presentation. Looking forward to a lot of items in
here, especially you guys we're talking about monitoring
parking and, you know, trash to look at overcrowding. That's
going to be very interesting and looking forward to the
reintroduction of that database. Uh, one thing I want to
highlight, I don't think is important when we're developing
these codes and you know, any ways you guys can support this.
I think there's often times a case where landlords,
especially for young college students, are not fully
informing them of all of the rules around, for example, how
many people can stay in a house, uh, the trash fee for the
number of trash and recycling bins. So we want to make sure
that we're protecting tenants who may not actually know about
these roles because you might tell the landlord and if the
landlord doesn't pass that on, then they get a fee for it. The
student gets a fee. That's gonna be on a bunch of college
kids who quite simply did not know the, the very specific
rules and codes we're going to be introducing. So when you
guys are creating these codes, figuring out ways that we can
make sure to be informing tenants with a
be through online, mail, anything like that. Uh, I think
that's key because I definitely know that I did not know all
the rules about my own home when I moved in, you know, the
landlord doesn't sit down with their tenants and say, OK,
here's all the College Park codes that, you know, are, are
applied, but I know for a fact that we pay fees on those. So
making sure to protect tenants, I think should be a key part of
this and whatever way you think of. So, just FYI, mayor, um, we
will be attending some, um some of the things that the
university provides to students in regards to housing
Actually, Lisa and I are signed up for an event that's actually
happening, I think this summer, but we'll continue to do
outreach to the students, um, population in regards to our,
you know, in regards to our public services, um, and a
different pro and the different things that are going on. We're
working closely with Laura on um just making sure that more
of this is available online. Um, especially because we're, we're,
again, like we have the ELO, we have the new move-ins. We are
part of Maryland Day and when people come, so we
are really working towards those to getting students more
educated, but I mean, I also think, Derek, we do knock and
talks and do you want to talk a little bit about that? Yes, um,
the first week of school we started this, uh, almost 20
years ago. The first week of school, we spend, uh, the 3
nights, about 3 hours each night, and we're concentrated
in the old town area where its students, and we knock on doors,
we provide information about the rules just like you
were talking about, um, we have code of student conduct comes
along, a police officer comes along, talks about safety, and
then I'll talk about noise, I'll talk about trash pickup
days, things like that, and we do that throughout the old town
area, the first week of school, trying to get the word out that
way. If you can think of anything else, we're all ears
here. Yeah, perfect. I, I think, uh, you guys came by my house
when I wasn't there that day, but my housemates informed me
about that. So that's a perfect example. But just making sure
if there's any new rules that get introduced that, you know,
tenants are informed of that Um, we're protecting tenants
from getting fees that they weren't aware of short so, but
everything else sounds great. Thank you all for the
presentation. Thank you. I appreciate it. I
think uh we had a good discussion. A staff, uh, final.
I'm sorry, very final one. I'm sorry, I just got a, a text
question from a resident, um, regarding and just want to make
sure they that they heard going back to the initial process
when someone purchases a home and they are intending to use
it for um they say rental property.
You sent out a well let me back it up.
When they purchased a home, do you send them a letter
asking them their intent on what the use of the house is.
Yes, we send out what we call usage intention statement to
the new owner, um, A lot of times we get the
information by doing to door knock because STAT doesn't
update very quickly. Sometimes it can take 5 or 6 months
before even find out who the new owner information is. So a
lot of times we will just do a door knock and try to find out
who the new owner is and may contact that way.
So the person who purchased the house, you sent the letter of
intent. They had not responded and you just said that SA takes
a couple months. But if you're using it as a rental property
instead of as a owner occupied property.
What is the ruling? So if we can confirm that it is
a rental and being rented without a license, we will
issue basically a notice of violation saying you're
rendering without a rental license, and you have 10 days
to make application. If you don't, then they can be subject
to amissible infraction fine. A mere prote Maki just asked me
that, what is the, the fine, the monetary amount of the fine.
How much is it changed. It's now $2500.
$2500. OK. And if between the time of them applying for the
license and acquiring the license, they have uh
violations in between that are very um uh guess pub public
safety, what happens then? We will knock on the door and
ask to do uh an inspection at the time to see if tenants will
let us in to confirm that it is safe property. We can do that.
OK. All right. Thank you. Thank you.
Appreciate it. All right, so that's all we have. Thank you.
um, thank you for all the um all the work you have done and
looks like some good stuff is coming in the pipe and I can't
wait to see them coming. Uh, maybe end of summer.
as early as that Thank you. Keep doing you,
counsel. Appreciate it. Alright, so next
two items will be um Res items, right? I can see.
The first one is the strategic priorities and the long-term
visual framework. Um, please go ahead. Floor is
yours. Thank you so much. Good evening, Mayor and council.
Tonight I am very pleased and excited to be here to talk to
you about strategic priorities in a long-term vision framework
for the city of College Park. Um, I've got a few slides
hopefully we'll get through them quickly because I think
what I'm most interested in tonight is hearing your
feedback on this proposal. Um, so why now? Um, our
strategic plan that we had in place between FY 21 and FY 25
has reached the end of its life cycle. It did serve as a
guiding document for us throughout this past budget
season and I think it's important for us to also
consider community contexts. So we know that there's been
significant redevelopment and investment underway. There are
obviously changing needs in the community and priorities, we
see increased demands on city services as well as our
infrastructure. the continued growth of the
university and I think what I've seen in my time here is a
recognition, you know, by this council as well as by staff and
members of the public that the decisions that we are making
today in this room will shape the future of College Park.
I want to explain this slide to you this all these speech
bubbles with lots of big buzzwords in them and what it
is is when I joined the city 5 months ago, I walked in here
knowing that one of the items I'd be working on was the
strategic plan and it was something that was really
excited about, but it was also something that was a very aware
of as somebody new to this community that I needed to do a
lot of listening. and so I joined here right when
we were talking about budgets, and there were a lot of budget
meetings, a lot of individual meetings, and I started doing a
lot of listening and taking a lot of notes, and I started
hearing a lot of common themes come up in those conversations
between council members as well as conversations with the
members of the public and so common themes started to emerge
and as I was hearing those themes, it started to emerge as
balancing today's priorities with college parks and
long-term future. And so as I continue to think
about that, and I think about the strategic plan, it started
to come together in a framework where we can look at planning
for today and for tomorrow. So what does
that mean? That means looking at the next 3 to 5 years, what
our strategic priorities? What are the operational needs we
have. So where should we put our efforts and focus on? How
do we allocate our resources and then thinking about what
outcomes matter the most and then thinking beyond that in
terms of a community vision. So that's what kind of
community do we want to see College Park B? How do we want
to see College Park grow and evolve. And it started to come
together that I think we haven't clear opportunity here
to establish clearer priorities for the near term, while also
being able to define the long-term vision for College
Park's future. So what you'll see here is kind
of a three-part structure. We'll get into the next slides
a little bit more detail here on the structure. What I want
to highlight here is really the two pieces that will run
concurrently, so that's the looking ahead piece, which is
our near-term strategic priorities and then looking
beyond peace, which is a vision proposed vision for 2045. So
those processes have different purposes, but they are
complimentary, and we're suggesting that they would be
developed concurrently through a coordinated public
engagement process. Doing them concurrently allows us to
maximize our community engagement efforts, maximize
staff capacity and time as well as our community's time and
input into this process and ensures our near term
priorities, those strategic priorities are informed by the
visioning process. So now I'm gonna dive a little
bit deep into this. So first step would be looking
back and I think it's really important that we look back to
close out the priorities that we had identified in the FY 21
to FY 25 plan by doing a strategic plan closeout
assessment. So what that means is looking at our
accomplishments during those times, evaluating the progress
that we made on the goals that we adopted, identifying any
unfinished initiatives. taking some lessons learned and
establishing what our baseline is for future planning.
This is proposed as a staff-led project, um, something that we
do leading up to the next two steps. And it's main
deliverable would be a strategic plan assessment
report. and our proposed timeline for
bringing that forward to council is this September.
Then, once we accomplish that, I think we get into two of the
more exciting pieces. So then we start looking ahead
and we start thinking about what are our strategic
priorities for the next 3 to 5 years. And again, that is more
like what are immediate organizational needs and
priorities are? What are the actions that we need to take?
What is the resource allocation that we have? What data do we
need to collect so we can measure those outcomes, and we
use those priorities to guide our annual budgets as well as
our departmental work plans. This is proposed to be led, as
I mentioned earlier, concurrently, led by consultant,
and it has several deliverables. So those deliverables, the
strategic priorities, the action initiatives, those
measurable and data-driven outcomes so we can keep track
of things, aligning with the budget as well as an
implementation and a reporting framework.
The timeline that you'll see here is proposed to start this
September and then take us up through that next FY 28 coming
up budget cycle. And then now the piece that I
think I'm most excited about. is why beyond 5 years and why
2045, um, so I don't know if everybody knows this, but the
city was incorporated in 1945, so in 2045 College Park will be
celebrating 100 years since incorporation.
and I think that Centennial milestone really gives us an
opportunity to think about what kind of city we wanna be, how
we're growing, how we're evolving.
how do we intentionally strengthen our partnerships?
What investments we're making that are gonna have the longest
term impact. and what legacy do we all wanna
leave for future generations. So this is again proposed as
consultant-led, and the deliverable, I'm calling
College Park 100, a vision 2045 plan.
It's a working title open to suggestions, um, the timeline
for this one is a little bit longer. So again, kicking off
at the same time as the other one, but then extending through
November of next year. Why use a consultant
So I think we've heard earlier that our staff has a lot on its
plate, um, so that's one piece of it a consultant can also
offer us uh specialized expertise and strategic
planning, best practices, benchmarking, other communities
processes. It also gives that independent facilitation
perspective to really guide the community engagement, which I
think is important for the public trust piece of this.
and then that ties into the community engagement capacity
as well as our communications capacity on this process. This
process is going to require a lot of outreach. It is a very
important process for the city and we don't want to skimp on
outreach, so I think that by adding a consultant to this,
that allows our staff to continue. It's very busy daily
operations. Support this process, but have
it be led and give it the attention that it deserves.
Um, so what does a consultant do that manages and leads that
citywide community engagement and communication support for
the engagement meeting facilitation that can include
things like council retreats, stakeholder interviews,
community forums, surveys. There may be other methods of
outreach that are proposed by our consultant as well and then
developing that strategic priorities framework that I
mentioned earlier and facilitating leading the
visioning process. Now this does not mean that staff is out
of it. We're not, um, staff are will remain responsible for
implementation as well as project management throughout
and the ongoing plan management.
Um, roles and responsibilities. I've already talked here about
what the consultant will do, um, staff obviously, I think I've
spoken to that as as well. I do want to highlight that. I think
it's important um that staff is involved in this too in terms
of like giving input to the plan and being involved in the
planning process as well, just as much as council and just as
much as the community and the stakeholders, um, council is
obviously an incredibly important stakeholder for us to
establish the priorities to participate all throughout this
process, and then ultimately this council will be
responsible for reviewing adopting the final plans. The
community and stakeholders, so again this is gonna be heavy on
community outreach. We want to hear from our community. We
want to hear what their priorities. We want to hear
what their vision is for College Park at 100 years. So
we're asking folks to participate in these engagement
activities. Give us the feedback on priorities and
visions and help us identify what issues and opportunities
this community has. Um, proposed timeline and I
will say that this, uh, timeline is kind of my best
case scenario here. We do need to hire a consultant and work
with a consultant on timelines and hear their, their strategic
advice on this, but this is kind of how we sketched it out
so far. The things that you'll see highlighted here in yellow
are the major deliverables for this plan. So this summer, um,
as I mentioned earlier, staff will be conducting a strategic
panel and close out assessment of our past plan. We would also
be issuing an RFP for the consultant and working
through that selection process that would then come back to
council, um, to authorize that contract for the selection in
the fall. In the fall, you would see that closeout report.
We would kick off this project with the consultant, and that
will very likely include something like a council
retreat to have to make sure that council is very involved
in this process from the beginning and then moving into
winter, we would be deep in community engagement,
stakeholder interviews, visioning activities, so very
much working with the community during that time.
In spring, it's our hope to align the priorities that we've
identified with our budget process so we can make sure
that we are aligning our resources with our priorities
and in the summer really looking at what that draft
vision 2045 is with a goal to adopt that in the fall.
Once you adopt, of course, it doesn't end. So you see there's
a very long horizon there, 2028 to 2045, which is implementing
and assessing the plan and so I, I think on the next slide I've
kind of set up a framework for how we might do that just to
give some insight into that. So how do we maintain this plan?
I I think it's something that becomes a part of the lives of
the staff and the council here as well as we want to integrate
it with the community, so we're making sure on an annual basis
we're aligning with the budget and the work plans with those
priorities were consistently monitoring progress and
reporting outcomes. We're reporting on data and our
departmental work plans are being updated to align with the
strategic plans, um, on an every 2 to 3 year basis, I
think it's very important to intentionally look at
doing a council strategic retreat, reviewing the goals
and objectives. I think this has to be a living document too
and update that document as needed. And on every 5-year
plan, really looking at those strategic priorities, how are
we refreshing them? How are we moving forward and then putting
in those checkpoints at the 10 and 15 year mark, which I know
sounds very far ahead, but it's really not um so looking at
that what that progress assessment looks like as we
head towards College Park 100
So tonight, um, what I'm really looking forward to is hearing
your input on a few things. So first off, we would love to
hear your input on the proposed framework. So do you support
this kind of three-stage framework which we have
proposed as like looking back by closing out the FY 21 to 25
plan. looking ahead
developing those strategic priorities for the near term,
for the next 3 to 5 years, and then looking beyond for a
longer term community visioning process. And if you are
interested in that longer term community visioning process, um,
the, the follow up question is really should the city's
centennial be that goal, um, that planning horizon for our
long-term vision. Based on the feedback that we hear tonight,
um, we will refine the project scope. Uh, we will develop an
issue that RFP this summer and then we'll begin working on
closing out the plan. So with that, I will turn it
back over to council and thank you for your time.
Thank you, thank you. I, um what is interesting, um, you
went beyond the our traditional five-year cycle planning
process, you, you went even further.
and that's probably because of the centennial milestone we'll
be having in 2045 Yeah.
Um, will the consultant be working on both plans
simultaneously or two different consultants. No, no, it would
be one consultant. I think that's definitely the way to do
it, that maximizes your time with the consultant. The
strategic expertise, and it rolls into one. I would not
propose having two different consultants. So there'll be
engagement either through a staff, city councilor, or the
community, uh, those engagement will be for both plans short
term and the long term. Correct, yes,
and we would work very closely with our consultant to make
sure that they're strategically organized to get to, I think,
you know, both of those two things. So the longer term
horizon, the overall visioning, as well as those kind of
near-term action things within that same meeting and I think
that benefits us too in terms of, you know, having these two
items which are very heavy on community engagement. Sometimes
when you continually going out to your community and asking
them, well, what do you think about this? What do you think
about that? That can lead to some fatigue
just on the part of your resonance. So being able to
combine these two efforts into one, I think overall benefits
both the community as well as us. Yeah, it's the, is the same
person, same resident will be giving input and residents
oftentimes could be thinking short term,
but they might have also some kind of dream ideas that think
it farther ahead. um, so it probably makes sense
if you go into that both routes. Thank you. All right, I see a
couple of uh starting with uh Mayor Porte.
Yes, I just, I love this report and I support the idea of doing
a five-year and then the longer plan. I, I think that that's
very important. Um, and I love the community engagement. I
think it's really important because this is, this is, uh,
people's homes, whether they're 4 years here or whether they're
50 years here. Um, I think it's really important that we have
community engagement to, to give us a vision for the future
and for the short term future and for the long term future.
Um, I'm looking forward to it. I, I thought you did a great
job with this, and I didn't really have
many things to add or, um, you know, I, I think that the
process will help us to hone in on things that have changed for
the, from the last time. And, um
just making it very clear to the residents what what we're
doing cause, you know, if you don't have a plan, you just,
you know, you, you, you're, you're going to fail. And so
it's really important that we have this plan, so I, I, I
support this, so I thought I'd start off um just telling you
that thank you. Thank you
Uh, let's see customer Os. Um, also I want to thank you
for this as I have reached out, I'm interested in kind of the
long term vision and how uh what we, what we want to be as
the future of College Park and how we can think about how to
make a a sticky, um, uh, slogan. I think one question I had on
the, the schedule, um, was related to agreement on the
vision part. versus the
um uh strategic priorities in
alignment with the budget. So like, knowing that like budget
is a driver of a lot of big ideas and big thinking, um, you
know, to what extent will we have discussions on the under
this proposed timeline, the discussions on Vision 2045, um,
will that not start until summer 2027, or would that be
like I, I think my uh proposal would be that like we have
the bigger picture outline um by uh the spring 2027 as we're
thinking about our budget, so we're aligning our vision, or
aligning our strategic priorities, and then, you know,
assuming that this is some longer report that, you know,
OK, it takes some time to put meat on the bones of uh of what
we're doing. Is that basically what you're proposing? I think
we're definitely aligned in that. I think it, you know, it
does. start with the vision, right?
and it ties into it. What I, what I didn't want to miss was
the opportunity to make sure we had actions that we could tie
to the budget, and we, when we did the timing with that, but I
agree with you. I think they're very interconnected, um, but I
think you do have to start with the overall kind of mission and
vision before and then you kind of drill down into it. So it,
it will be happening concurrently. I just, in my
experience, I think that we will get to a good kind of
midway point, by the time we're in budget, but I don't think
we're going to be at the wrap up point, which is why I've
left additional time at the end
Yeah, I think, I think time at the end to
finish the product, but my hope would be that for council that
we would buy the budget point, you know,
like our vision can drive our, our strategic priorities as
opposed to developing our priorities and then figuring
out why we, why those were our priorities afterwards. I think
the, um, thank you. Thank you, Councilor Jordan.
Yes, thank you for this report. Um, I, uh, I'm in, in favor of
the, the framework, the closeout, the, the strategic
plan and the long-term vision all um as you've laid out, uh,
when you're creating the RFP for the consultant, um, I
wanted to, uh, to bring up just sort of to highlight that the
uniqueness of College Park. So this is this this global hub, I
mean just a driver and and uh um accumulating knowledge to
disseminate to the world and it's a place to raise
a family, you know, it's a place to just, you know, to
live and be and so when you're creating it, when you're
creating the RFP and and the things that you're looking for
as a for a consultant that to keep that in mind um that uh
we're, we're all residents as students and long-term
residents and uh but also um what the university provides,
not just that people live here, but also that makes perfect
sense. Yeah, so, uh, I know Cons Hernandez wants to talk.
The uh the consultant who will be coming um what Councilor
Jordan and I believe Councilor also also uh talked about the
opportunities we have about branding College Park, like,
you know, having a slogan or something like that and even
bringing some logos um, and we actually did that
exercise of about 1015 years ago, um, there was a separate
but totally done by a separate consultant, not as part of the
strategic plan, um, so, um, maybe branding is
you know, a separate piece of it. I mean, I think that
we could certainly look at having that included into this.
Um, you know, this kind of slogan, the sticky slogan that
we were talking about, I think that ties very much into the
vision of it. Um, you're prob probably getting a little bit
deeper into another project as we go into branding and maybe
that's something that branches off from this once that's
decided. Yeah, and, and, and there's lots of brainstorming
in the end we selected the slogan Smart place to live, but
we never used it. for some reason. Anyway, uh,
Conor Hernandez. Sorry.
Thank you. Uh, first off, thank it's a thing. Are you guys here?
Is it like the speaker? Is it that?
No, oh, no, no No, I think it's a microphone
that's right there. 000, really? Oh, we don't know.
Uh, we seem to be having some technical difficulties here and
uh. chambers, uh
oh. I suppose it's me. All right,
uh, let me just, let me really just say this has taken an
incredible amount of work. I know that we started talking
about this probably probably a couple of the little
fan maybe, um, so uh I think a couple of years
ago and it's really refreshing to see how much thought is
being put into this. Um. so thank you. I know it's, it's,
it's a lot of work, uh, so I'll start off with saying that I'm
fully supportive. What's happening
Oh All right. Well, it's fully
supportive of uh bringing in consultants to help support
some of the extra work It maybe your computer laptop,
uh, volume. No, no. I.
Oh, it just went away. Oh.
hello All right, somebody's trying to
tell me not to talk, uh Kenny, um.
yeah, right Can you hear me now? Yeah, I
can hear you. All right, great. Um, so yes, supportive of, of
bringing in consultants uh to help out, uh, with refining the,
the overall workload, uh, for those people who, who struggle
with the understanding of why we need consultants. Uh, I
think that it takes a dedicated team that specialized on this
particular, uh, effort, um development of strategic
priorities and actions for the next 3 to 5 years. I think
that's great because I think right now what we're facing is
we're operating off of a, uh, a strategic plan that was
built out almost now almost 8 years ago, um, so although
we're all eager to make sure that this happens, uh, I think
real good thought is needed. Of course we're gonna need a lot
of community input, uh, and having that dedicated support
is definitely going to be super important. Um, a long term.
community visioning process. I'm trying to go off of the
things that you want from us, um, the one thing that I wanna
make sure is threaded in. whether adjacent to the entire
effort or as a part of the process is some sort of
strategic communications plan. Uh, I think that
what the city does very well is uh
it, it has a lot of programs. We have a lot of different
efforts, a lot of different initiatives that staff works on
consistently, right? Um, but I believe that
we could optimize by refining the entire approach to how we
do communications, uh, I say that because there's
there's just a such, such a, such an important
element of civic engagement is going to be to understand not
just the tools that are available for us.
but like the priorities from that.
communication strategy. Uh, so I'm hopeful that we can, we can
find some sort of opportunities, uh, I, I didn't see that in the,
uh, I think it was the word clouds that were presented, uh,
I don't know if it was a word cloud, but it was definitely
the various, uh, buzzwords that you said a lot of words. Yes,
uh, so I really, I just wanna, I wanna a footst stop as, as
hard as I can, uh, the, the, the communication not only to
the residents, but just in terms of our overall
policy, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm well aware that there are often a
lot of different, um, staff that handle communications for
the various projects that we have and maybe our
it's, it's framed in an entirely different way, but I
think that we should be thinking about how we, how we
conduct outreach, how we implement bilingual
communication, how we're speaking towards the business
community, uh, with an effort to, to hopefully, uh, draw the,
the outcomes that we, we all want. I will say I wanna say it
was a council member Oates, uh, sent around a uh
a vision which I found incredible. Uh, it was, it was
wall that out, it was forward looking. We, we should be
thinking about the, the massive investment that's coming in
from the world, uh, into College Park as the Quantum
capital of the world, right? So how, what are we doing to make
sure that we are not only just a willing host, but also, uh,
an economic driver that brings in those entities, uh, and the
supporting entities, um, so I'm hopeful that that can
be kind of threaded in here. It doesn't need to be specific to
quantum. It can be towards technology innovation, uh, and
then I would also add an element of trying to, uh, if at
the very least consult with the university, um, they have a
very large uh, planning process when it
comes to how they build out, um, I think it would be helpful for
us to conduct that outreach ahead of time, um.
it's just, it's, it's, uh, something that we're, we're,
we're gonna work with them as partners or we're gonna be
working at odds and I really would rather work with them as
partners. OK then
that's helpful. I appreciate that. Um, I agree with, uh,
just to address some of your points, um, consulting with the
university, yes, they're incredibly important
stakeholder, and we would be a full not to look and see what
resources they have. So I agree with you, um.
regarding the strategic communications plan. I, so
communications as you know, you know how I feel about it. I
think it's incredibly important. Um, I do think that a strategic
communications plan is a different effort that involves,
you know, looking at our communications audience
analysis. it is a different thing than a
than this plan. I think that communications can absolutely
be threaded into this plan. but I don't want to put out the
false impression that this will also be a strategic
communications plan because that is a different thing and
it's worthy of its own effort. You have to
Thank you. Uh, see, that's the muzzling. Um, I, I entirely
agree. I think that the maybe it would be worthy to to push
that, uh, for a different effort.
I just want to be mindful that everything that we're doing
with this strategy has a communication element.
Absolutely. Involved with it, uh, whether that be what our
what our affordable housing plan is, uh, or our economic
development. Everything should have some sort of effort to
explain the why back to the residents and to whatever
stakeholders are, are their public safety, uh, I mean, what,
what does our current crime statistics look like more than
just an insert in the uh in like the weekly bulletin, right?
Uh, it's you know sus tain ability We have so many
different programs and advisory boards. How do we communicate
that back and also draw on some of the efforts that have been
successful like LED, um, and our investment into the city
streetscape, all of it just threading together to say, hey,
this is what we're doing. Absolutely. I mean, I
completely agree with that. I think that once, you know, we
develop that vision and then that vision obviously comes
with action plans as well as like key things that we wanna
focus on and each one of those deserves its own communication
strategy. So I think we're aligned on that for sure. OK.
Thank you. And if, if, I mean, I'll ask my colleagues, uh, if
we want to do some sort of larger project, but, uh, we'll
take that offline. Thank you. Thank you. Um, speaking of the
universities's plan, I believe they have a 10 year plan, 20202,
2030. So, um, that might be helpful
as well. I know our plan is our plan, but uh we can always look
into what they have as well so that
we can um
it can be complementary to each other.
All right, uh, who is next? Council member Hill, I believe.
because also, yeah, sorry for a second bite, um, but just on
this point, I do think um doing more than I think it's
important to understand what the university is doing in
terms of their long term planning, but I also think,
um, looking at what opportunities there for
alignment, so more than just kind of talking to them, but,
uh, you know, the future of College Park is inextricably
linked to the future of the University of Maryland College
Park, um, and we should recognize that fact and um and
see how we can work together towards a common vision so that
university is not pulling in one direction to say, oh, you
know, the only thing that matters is quantum, and we're
pulling in a different direction or vice versa. um,
but I think, um, so I think they'll be a, a
very important stakeholder, um, in the process and would be
good to to chat with them. And again, thank you for your
help. OK, thank you. Councilor here. Thank you. Um.
so, so when we're looking at our long term strategic plans,
uh, going out to 2045. I think that that also are setting
standards for the region, and we should keep the regional
goals in mind as well, especially along the lines of
environment and sustainability issues.
That's a great point. Thank you.
Thank you. Um I believe those are the
comments they have. Thank you. Yeah, thank you. And
thank you for your leadership and your work. I know it's a
lot of work and more work is coming on the way. OK, so
you're not going away because next item I can see your name.
against it Um I'm not allowed to leave.
None of us are living, um, charter review workgroup. Last
one, please. Thank you so much. OK, um, and we'll get into this
next one, which is our charter review workgroup, um, get into
this one. I do want to acknowledge just right off the
bat that this was um a council initiative. I, I think it's
very much aligned with best practices and governance, so I
wanna give some shout outs to our council members. I believe
those council member Mitchell who was spearheading this
originally and then of course support
ed by council member Mackey so I wanna give credit where
credit is due as we get into this, um, I do want to talk
through just kind of some kind of basics of how this work
group would be set up. um, first off, what is it? We're
proposing it as an internal advisory work group. Keyword is
advisory there, um, that is tasked with reviewing the
charter and developing recommendations that will come
forward for council consideration. What is the
scope of work so our city charter, I'm sure you've all
read it. You probably read it every
night before you go to bed. um, you're looking at those 12
charter articles. I mean, that's what I do, right?
Bedtime story bedtime story. Um, so you're looking at those 12
charter articles that cover all kinds of things, the governance,
elections, personnel, public improvements, finance, and
really looking at those, um, it's been a while since they've
been looked at, looking at them for compliance with state law.
Look at them, are there outdated references and
provisions in there. My guess is that yes, there are, and as
well as making sure that we're consistent aligned with the
city's current practices as well as municipal best
practices, so the main deliverable coming out of this
work group would be a report that is presented to council
with recommended amendments for council's consideration. As far
as the composition of this work group goes again it's composed
of um both staff and council members. It's an internal
advisory group, and that was being proposed
as made up of the mayor 4 council members, 1 from each
district. Our city manager or his
designee, our city attorney or her designee, um, our city
clerk and then a staff member subject matter expert, which
may vary based on what the needed basis is, and what do I
mean by that? So if we're talking about finance chapter.
We may want to have our treasurer there for that
conversation. If we're talking about personnel, we may wanna
have our human resources director there. So that that
position kind of varies depending on what the work
group is working on at that particular
time. Um, what I have proposed here
is a phased work plan and really like looking at this in
the phased in order to kind of help us manage the capacity of
this. So allowing to give us time for detailed review, sort
of section by section or kind of um category by category,
while also really trying to keep the workload to this
approximately one meeting per month. So kind of thinking
about both staff and council's capacity to get this done. So
as we look at the phases here we've broken this down
into phase one, which is really just kind of an overall sort of
flagging stage is kind of how I see it. So looking at all the
different articles we have looking for state law
compliance looking for those outdated references kind of
flagging areas where we think that I, I don't know what I'm
doing with this. I can try.
Yeah, I don't you try to, yeah, I think this might be a little
clicker thing? Yeah, there's a clicker, OK. Give me the
clicker. I'll sit down. Thank you.
That It's not you?
Jacob, OK, you know what, I can just reach over here and, and
tap it. We'll make it work. OK, guys.
Hope this doesn't do it to me. All right, um, so looking at
that ambiguous language and then flagging it. Thank you, I
hear that. Um, for review. that would be sort of overall
phase one, do some flagging, where areas that we'd like to
dive into deeper and then moving on to phase two, which
we have set up here looking at the various articles that
you'll see listed there, which is really focused on our
elected officials in the charter and governance. So
looking at the powers and duties of the mayor and council
looking at elections, looking at our districts and our
boundaries and looking at council meetings and what's in
there for that. So that is, that's kind of a beefy section
right there. There's a lot in there
Um, moving through to that, we would move on to legislative
procedures that is very much tied closely with state law, of
course, looking at whether we're compliant with the
adoption of our ordinances and charter amendments. Excuse me,
I'm sorry, I have a motion to extend.
All in All in favor side. We don't need it, right? Oh, the
new rules. Oh, here you go. Still living in the old time.
No worries. OK, um, moving on, so then we'd be looking at
after that personnel and administration, so looking at
the charter provisions that relate to our personnel, our
study manager as well as other personnel, and then moving into
finance and infrastructure. So there are pieces of our charter
that relate to budget, taxes, public improvements, special
assessments, um, and then that would take us to a final phase
where we'd have that internal advisory work group develop
their recommendations. So looking at all of the
recommendations that they've done through the phases I
mentioned before, prioritizing those recommendations and
developing a final report that would come back to submission
and presentation to the full council as well as members of
the public at a meeting just like this.
um the deliverable, as I mentioned
earlier, would be the report to counsel.
Ideally, that report would include what the rationale is
for each recommendation. And a prioritization on the
recommendations as well, we may come out of this process with a
number of recommendations. I think it's really important for
that advisory group to say, OK, this is the number one thing
that we've got to accomplish and here are kind of the
subsequent ones we have. Another suggestion here would
be to categorize the recommendations, are they
technical? Are they administrative? Are they
compliance or are they substantive?
right? The ones that obviously that are most meaningful and
will require the most amount of public engagement are ones that
are substantive, and that takes us to the public engagement
process, um, so I think all of you know that prior to the
adoption of any recommended charter amendments.
the city has to provide opportunities for public input.
At a minimum, a public hearing is required for any change to
the charter, but there are certainly opportunities for us
to give additional input opportunities. I think that
that could really depend on what changes we're talking
about. If we're talking about a change to make us just
compliant with state law, that probably does not need the same
level of public engagement as something that may relates to
how we do elections or the terms of
council members. That is something that is more deep to
the core of our governance that would require things like
informational meetings, public forums, surveys. Now I threw
that one out there just as an example. Don't get nervous. But
just to explain, you know, there could be some substantive
things in there. um, so what you have here is a proposed
timeline, um, so this is really broken down taking each of
those phases and I'll kind of one month chunk, um, starting
in July, if the council wants to
move forward with this, we would establish the work group
and appoint the members, um, have an organizational meeting
in August and then really kick off the work in the fall, which
would take us up through early next year with a goal of
presenting that report to the full council in March, and then
giving council time to absorb and digest those
recommendations as well as doing some initial public
engagement. And then summer would really be the time where
we look at that list that this council has come up or the
advisory work group has come up with that
prioritize the list and saying, OK, we're gonna consider X, Y,
and Z first and moving forward from there.
Um, so tonight, uh, just immediate next steps, uh,
hoping to receive feedback from council on this proposed, uh,
work group, and then you'll see sort of the sequencing of
events after that and I'm really glad this stopped
ringing on me here, so thank you for that. Like we're all
done. Thank you
Um, any comments? So I, I see the council packet and there
there's a there is a guidance of
kind of high level guidance or the other goal
the goal of this charter review committee and what kind of work
they'll be doing. The goal is to ensure the charter is in
compliance with the applicable municipal law and aligned with
best governance practices. um,
yeah, I, I, I I, I, I like that kind of guidance, otherwise,
you know, it could probably talk about anything we want.
Yeah, I don't think that is a good idea on the scope. Yeah,
we need to, we need to keep ourselves within, within the uh
framework. Uh thank you
All right, I see, uh, Mayor Puran May Puran Puran May
Puran Puran May. Yes, um, this is a very, um, I, I love the
report. I think it's very well done and and um
I support the, the idea my colleague has been saying it, I
think, from before I, I was on council, so I'm very glad that
this is coming to fruition. I'm just a little worried about the
aggressiveness of the timeline with you just talked about the
strategic plan and then, um, the deputy, uh, city manager
was talking about the major changes in, so, um, I, I'm just
a little concerned about the the timeline. Yeah, I, I think
that's fair. I think it is an aggressive timeline, um, and we
certainly do, we, we absolutely have a lot on our plates, um,
so, you know, I put this word as sort of best case scenario.
I think that um we, we should also, you know, provide this
work group with the flexibility to shift and adjust as needed.
You know, I, I don't think you want to have it be, you don't
want to be be a work group that lives forever, right? Of course
not. So there's gotta be like some reasonable stop point on
it, but at the same time, I think, um, you know, internally,
and that's one of the benefits of having it be an internal
advisory group, you can have some flexibility there.
OK, thank you. Any other comments?
concerns about us? Yeah, I had one which is uh how around how
often do we review the charter? or do municipalities or when
was the last time we did Councilor Mitchell can remember?
10 years. Yeah, last time I did, I think it was a resident
community, am I correct? Yes, we had um residents and
two council members and the city attorney are part of it.
Yeah, I, I would say around every 10 years is
probably the standard that I've heard, but it can vary from
community to community. So, my, my only question then
is, um, if we are keeping the scope tight to only look at the
part I, I, I would be open to thinking about potential
additions as opposed to only amendments if, if we, if there
are like through we realize, oh, actually every other
municipality has this thing and we don't even talk about that.
Um, uh, I think given if we're not looking at this.
except once a decade. Um, I think it's worth, uh, including
that as part of the scope that. you know, we're looking at
legal sufficiency, but if we identify gaps that there can be
things that we would potentially change. Again, not
trying to boil the ocean, but um, I, I wouldn't want to
preclude at the, at the initial stage, um, that, uh,
at potential additions. I don't it wasn't my intention to
preclude that. you know, I, I think if we're
in there we're in there
if you're making changes, you're making changes, yeah.
an amendment to the absence of addition addition is a change
too, right? All right. Any other comments?
Uh, Councilor Jordan. Yes, thank you. Um, thank you for
your work on this. It's, uh, it's going to be needed. It
sounds like there are a lot of things to clean up and, and we
always want to be in compliance with state law, and it's good
to think about the bigger picture, um, as Council member
Oates said, um, my question is, uh, can you, um, can you walk
me through at what points, um, this will be something like,
will the, uh, will these be made public or brought to mayor
and council? at each of the phases or only
at the final recommendations, uh, portion please. So the way
that I was thinking about it was that it would only come
forward as part of the final recommendations. So giving the
working group really the time, yes, work on it in phases, but
then take sort of that last month or 6 weeks to really
compile all the things that we've learned from the
different sections into one report that would then be
public, rather than doing it, you know, piece by piece.
I think as I was thinking through this I was also in my
head thinking about what we're going
into with the strategic plan and vision and how we're going
out to the community and that will also be happening sort of
in this like winter time period. So I wanted to keep it to like
one real really like one major public engagement piece on the
actual report. Thank you.
Yeah All right, that's all we have.
I think you have clear guidance from the council.
That's, uh, bring it up, um we don't need a resolution to
form the committee.
right? I, I don't believe so because it's an internal
working group. Um, I can consult with the city attorney
on that and confirm. OK. Thank you.
All right, so we are done with all the presentations. So we
are the very last item, which is interestingly action item,
uh, and now it's 10 : 30 Actually, more than that
1040, um, and this is about 26G55 approval of the boats and
committee reappointments and appointments and our city clerk,
Ms. Ellen, do you have any comments before we, we take a
motion? No, I have no additional comments. OK. Thank
you. Um, I believe, uh, we have the list in the packet.
and also you have a updated list on
um, with the one additional change to one of the committees.
Um, looks like, um, the council is in agreement. If that is the
case, I will entertain a motion. Mr. Mayor, I move to approve
the appointments, uh, as included in the attached list.
So I uh, moved by Councilor
Hernandez, seconded by, I believe, Councilor.
Mayorpotamaki, um, for comments, Councilmember Hernandez.
No thank you. We greatly appreciate, absolutely everyone
who applied, uh, and if you weren't considered, we highly,
uh, encourage you to participate as a part of the
boards, though you may not be a voting member, your input is
absolutely welcomed and appreciated. I mean, it, it's
impossible to be able to fill all of these thoughts with all
the amazing qualified, uh, candidates. So thank you so
much for applying and hope to have a great year.
Yeah, and, uh, do, do echo that. um, thank you all who stepped
forward. uh to serve College Park, um,
and this is not an easy job. There's lots of volunteering
time they need to spend on um, if there is no comment,
I'll take a, uh, you have a comment? Um, I just, uh, uh,
also for anyone who, um, uh, who does not receive a, um, uh,
a spot in on one of these, uh, commissions or or committees
that the process will begin again in December. Yeah, this
is not the last time. And consulos
You have a comment You have a question
Question, that that's the next item, right?
All right, uh, we are not going to go to the audience to take a,
take a, take comments because that was, that actually
happened in the beginning of the meeting.
Um, so this is the time to take the vote. All in favor, say I.
Any he opposed, any abstention, the motion passes.
So we're done with the action item and the very final one is
the request for status of the future agenda items. Is there
an application? Probably not. Then I entertain
emotion to hold on, hold on, hold on.
Sorry, I did I just have a question on the future that
giant items, um, I see on consent the renewal of the
Acela contract as we're talking about GoGov.
is that yes, I can explain that um because of the um term in
which the um ELA contract renewed and in
order to have continuity, we asked to actually have a six
month contract. They refused and so we've reduced the number
of licenses, um, to the what we need, the bare minimum, and
then we're renewing for the one year, so we have time to go
from one to the other, but unfortunately we have to renew
with them because they hold all our data.
Does that make sense I'm sorry. Interestingly, even
though we might not be using them, I feel like. Well, we'll
use them, we'll be using them, um, you know, in July 1st,
which is when it starts again and so we'll have to use them
for a couple months, so we can share our experience with other
Maryland municipalities, uh, we will. And I think it's all
about timing, right? So we have to really next time we've been
working on this for the last few months, but it's just, it
just got too close. Thank you for thank you for
asking. Appreciate it. All right
uming Nan, um, I entertain a motion to adjourn. Move to
adjourn. All in favor, say I. Any, any
opposed to no extension or council meeting is adjourned.
Goodnight College Park. So this, the motion was council
member.