UNOFFICIAL TRANSCRIPT:
MARK TURNER: All right, everybody.
Thank you for being here for the first East CAC meeting in I don’t know how long.
I’m Mark Turner, the interim chair. Give yourselves a round of applause.
Sure, why not?
Because we’re back, and it feels good.
We’re going to spend the night talking a little bit about what CACs are, because a lot of you are new here, which is great.
And it’s been a little while. And actually, I’ve forgotten half the stuff that I used to know about these things anyway.
So I’m going to read the slides that I just wrote and hopefully refresh my memory.
We’re going to hear from Raleigh Police Department. We’ve got two representatives here to chat a little bit about things that are going on.
And we’re also going to take nominations for CAC chair. So once you hear my presentation about what it’s all about, that would be a good time to decide.
What’s that?
Well, I’m happy to serve, right? Because I’m probably the only person who can figure out all these cables and wires anyway.
So I’ll be serving in one form or another, and Lynette has been pushing to get things put together. She’s awesome.
So give her a round of applause, too, for helping get this going.
And with that, let’s see.
I want to take a moment of silence, if we could, for our friend and neighbor, Bobby Poole, who would be at every single one of these CAC meetings, passed away this past month. So just take a moment. Let’s take about 10 seconds, 30 seconds, whatever moment of silence for Bobby, please.
OK, thank you.
Yes, he actually served on our Economic Development Committee way back when, helping to get businesses and stuff into the neighborhood. So I’m going to miss Bobby.
OK, so with that, I’m going to turn it over to Officer Hinton to talk a little bit about things that have been going on in the neighborhood, addressing any concerns anybody has.
Can I have you step over here for the camera and microphone? And thank you for being here. Thank you.
OFFICER HINTON: Thank you, Mr. Turner and Ms. Pitt, for getting this ball rolling again. Thank you all for being here.
As he mentioned, I’m Officer Eric Hinton, Northeast District Community Police Officer. That’s my supervisor over there, Sergeant Mitch Talley, with the Northeast.
We are the Northeast District Community Policing Squad. So if you know anyone who’s looking for a job, please send them our way.
Yes, we are the Northeast District Community Squad. So we stay pretty busy. Yes, we just need from folks. So we got some positions open. So if anybody’s interested, a lot of familiar faces out there, a lot of new faces, thank you all for being here.
We got a retired captain in the back back there as a representative for Lions Park here. He’s a liaison between the kids and the police department here. So he’s working with the city out here, continuing to help the community. So he’s a good resource for you all in the neighborhood. He knows a lot of us, knows me very well, and everybody with the police department. So we still have a good connection. And we’re happy to help you all out with any concerns you may have in the area.
So we look forward to working with you all in the future. And I don’t know what the plan is in the future going forward in terms of meetings.
MARK TURNER: We’re still working on that. But I’m not sure what the cadence will be. We’re still working on it.
OFFICER HINTON: Sounds good. Sounds good. We won’t have you back in.
Yes, ma’am?
[QUESTION ASKED]
Yes, I’d be happy to.
Yes, well, as I mentioned, community squad, every district has a community squad. So there’s six districts in the city. We serve the Northeast District. And we run down to Raleigh Boulevard and Glascock down here. That’s kind of our south end.
But we go all the way up to Triangle Town Center Mall. So we have a good stretch, Capital Boulevard, New Bern Avenue, New Hope Road, Louisburg Road. Keeps us pretty busy. But community police officer, we’re basically here to help bridge the gap between the community and the city or community and the citizens. So we do a lot of meetings like this.
We do HOA community watch. We can do security assessments at your homes. We’ve partnered up with the park here to the security assessment here. We do just about everything. We’re kind of like the utility squad.
If there is an issue that needs a little more attention in the district, we will try to, again, there’s two of us. So we’re stretched a little thin there. But we’re working.
Recently, we did an initiative with Spring Forest apartments where we were doing engaging youth through sports. So every Tuesday afternoon, we went out there for a couple of hours engaged in activities with the kids, soccer, ultimate frisbee, football, just to kind of build that trust there, try to get the kids out, give them something constructive to do. So we did that.
We also partnered with the North District on that. So we were at another complex there. But again, we do school lockdown drills, just about anything.
If you guys have a concern in your neighborhood specifically that might need a little more attention that are line officers or a beat officers, field ops guys, they’re going call to call to call a lot these days.
As we, any Raleigh people here? Raleigh, I always like to ask that.
I’m a Raleigh boy. Born and raised, I know we’ve got a lot of Raleigh folks here. But born and raised, I went to Millbrook High School. So I know a lot of folks in the area. My parents were both teachers. Athens Drive High School, Millbrook High School, Durant Road, Middle. So I’ve mostly North Raleigh area up there.
But I was a baby Jag, so I went to preschool at Athens Drive. So I’ve been all over the city. And I’m happy to serve you all. I’ve actually been here 18 years now with the Raleigh Police Department.
We’re at North District, Southwest District. And I’ve been in the Northeast District now for about eight years, a little over eight years.
[Applause]
So, well, thank you. Thank you.
Appreciate that. Appreciate that.
Chugging right along.
And do you want to say anything else about yourself, sir?
SGT TALLEY: Like Eric said, we’re here to help you guys. So we’re the officers that you guys can call when you need something that doesn’t necessarily need 911, and can wait a few days for us to address.
So if you have things like that, just reach out to us if you have events, that you like to maybe have an officer out doing community events, things like that you can reach out to us. We’ll try to get out here. Try to potentially bring some specialized units, things like that. So that’s our job to really bridge the gap, like he said between the police department and you guys and help out where we can.
OFFICER HINTON: We also have National Night Out coming up. So that’s a big, big event. I don’t know if you’re all familiar with that. But we’ll be out and about. So you’ll see a lot of us out that night.
Yes, ma’am, did you have something?
[Question about the Heart Program]
The Heart Program. Do you have more information on Heart? Who was that?
Yeah.
I know that’s in talks with City Council. I haven’t heard anything specifically on our end. Nothing’s been put out to us for that. But yeah, our Acorns unit is a unit with three officers, several social workers with that group, a detective and a lieutenant.
So they do a lot of our assistance for those mental health crisis, substance abuse.
We work a lot with them being community police officers with our homeless community whenever there’s a camp or a concern area. A lot of the times these pop up. We go out there, try to offer them resources and try to get some assistance to them if they need that. So we work with them.
But yeah, the Heart Program is not something that we have been briefed on yet. But I know it’s in the works.
Anyone else have a question?
I’m going to touch on a couple things here. One thing is making sure we’re locking our vehicles. I say this every meeting. The next time you see me, I’m going to tell it to you again. Tell your friends, I would greatly appreciate it.
We would make sure we’re not leaving firearms in vehicles. That’s what these, a lot of these juveniles, they’re going around checking car doors. You’d be surprised what kids are pulling out of these cars that are unlocked. So please make sure you’re spreading the word with that. These guns get stolen out of cars, getting used, these kids, gun violence. We all know how the world is these days. We don’t need to make it any crazier than it already is. So your help will be greatly appreciated with that.
And then we’re going to do a state of the district address. What’s the date?
August, that’s right there. August 14th.
So it’s a Wednesday night, August 14th. That’s going to be at our Youth and Family Services Building, which is at 4205 Spring Forest Road, right in front of Spring Forest Road Park. So it’s right there near just east of East Millbrook Middle School.
So we’ll be out there that night, what does it say, 6 o’clock? 6 p.m., August 14th. And Captain McKenna will be there. Our district lieutenants will be there.
So if you are available that night, we would love to see you all there. We’re going over some crime information. And you’ll be able to ask the captain and lieutenants questions directly. And they’re above my pay grade, so they might have a little more influence than I do. But it’s definitely a good resource, and I hope to see some of you all there for that also.
Let’s see, is there anything else we wanted to touch on right now? The district has been staying busy. Like I said, we’re hiring, so please push that out. I know Ms. Pitt says she has a family member who started the academy today. So very exciting about that. We’re happy to have them onboard. Yeah, but hey, we’ll take them anyway. We can get them. We’ll make sure to send them, send it your way. Put in a good word for you at least.
But did anyone else have anything else for me?
I just kind of wanted to do our first meeting with getting my, our information out there and let you know we look forward to working with you all in the future.
Yes, ma’am?
Okay.
How long have you been down here?
Okay.
All right.
So in Raleigh, we do, we reach out right now in the Northeast. I think we have three complexes that are confirmed for that night. So I know they do a big one out at North Hills. There’s one out there.
So if you all, if you have a neighborhood or a community that wants to get together and do something, you have my card, you can reach out to me and let me know. And we’d be happy to get you all on the list. I know it’s kind of getting close with it being, it’s always the first Tuesday night in August every year.
Just.
Tarboro Road Park.
Awesome.
Thank you, sir.
So Tarboro Road Park, they’re going to have one over there. And so every district has different events going up. They haven’t sent out the master list yet, but Tarboro is usually pretty.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It’s, so you’re going to have officers all throughout the city. We, we will go out talking to people, interacting with people, throw the football with the kids. Eat a hot dog. We do, we do just about everything. And the good thing about that is you’ll have a lot, everybody in the police department involved. So you might see the mounted unit, the horses out there. You might see canine traffic unit with the motorcycles. So it’s just a way to try to interact with the community, get, get people talking and working together.
Thank you, ma’am.
Thanks for that question.
Anybody else have anything?
Yes, if you don’t have my card, my email address is my name. It’s Eric.Hinton.
Right.
I don’t know why I had to question myself there, but thank you for being there for me, Sarge. What did I say, PD? Yeah, I was, I’m working the desk again because our desk officer’s off this week. It’s been one of those days.
Thank you for that. Good looking out.
Again, teamwork makes the dream work.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Thank you very much.
Again.
MARK TURNER: And just for the occasion, if you don’t mind indulging me for a selfie so I can post this on our website.
Come over here. Let’s see. Everybody in it? Hold on. Actually, turn it on to the camera thing. Technology, I tell you.
All right. Here we go. Say cheese.
All right.
It’s a potato phone, but it’ll have to do.
Okay.
All right.
I’ve got a little presentation I put together just to talk a little bit about CACs, what they used to be, where they are right now, hopefully where they’re going. And then I’ll take some questions.
Let me just see if I can get this projector working.
And Lynette? Lynette, if that AV cart is available, it probably wouldn’t hurt to have that on standby.
Oh, is it?
Okay.
Well, we’ve got police officers. They can open it. Oh, they just left. All right.
Give me just a moment here. For some reason, this is not showing up on my computer. Talk amongst yourselves again.
Everybody gets name tags. Okay. Everybody signed in. So we’ve got your information. I don’t know what kind of information are we collecting.
Email addresses, phone numbers. Nice. Yeah.
We used to have city forms that we’d get filled out. And they had carbon copies on them. And they collected a ton of information. I could never read any of the email addresses because I think they had like a tiny little block on them. It’s part of the old CAC I don’t really miss.
We’re kind of making this up as we go, though. That’s the thing.
And so give me a moment here on the technology. Hmm.
The laptop actually sees the projector, but it’s not the other way around.
Is it coming up? It did something. It’s black now. Let’s try a computer source.
Make sure. One second.
[A question about the CAC video]
That’s right. There was, and when the CACs got disbanded, the city took it down. And then I asked if I could get it put back up again. They said no. But I found it and I put it back up myself.
So that’s not very bright, is it? Would somebody mind getting the lights, please?
And thank you. Yeah, at least just one here.
All right. So you’re going to get this fancy presentation. Okay. Actually worked. I’m surprised.
CACs past and present. I’m an armchair historian. That means I study armchairs.
Thank you, thank you. I’m good for the dad jokes. If you could call it that.
Okay. So first off, I wanted to explain what CACs are because as I said, many of you aren’t familiar with it. And your memory might have faded. It has been four long years.
It’s sort of a form for citizens and city staff. So I think that the city gets as much out of it as the citizens do coming to these meetings because everybody’s face to face with each other.
So if the city has some kind of project going on or some kind of effort or they’re trying to drum up interest in something, they’ll come and they’ll talk to us any other way around. If you’re a citizen, you’ve got questions about something that’s happening. Maybe road work is taking place or something.
You know, I feel, I feel bad for the people on Atlantic Avenue who’ve had to sit through like years and years and years of that one little stretch of Atlanta getting fixed. Fortunately, we don’t have too many issues like that.
But whenever we have stuff like that that does happen, people come to talk to us about it and you could ask them questions face to face. And I think that is really, really helpful. You could also, of course, go down to city council chambers during a council meeting and you can sign up to talk. But you’ve got this whole big gulf between you and our elected leaders.
But when you’re in the room here, you can ask them questions. You can talk with them afterwards. I think it’s just a much better way of interacting with the leaders and decision makers of the city.
CACs, actually, let me start off, CAC stands for Citizens Advisory Council.
That’s what its traditional name is.
The entire group now, the RCAC is still deciding if they want to use those initials
and change the name a little bit because we’re going to be slightly different in the future.
And I’ll explain that a little bit more as we go.
At any rate, this is sort of like the historical CAC that I’m giving you right now.
The city supported it, but the city did not appoint anybody to CACs.
You did.
And in that regard, it was very responsive and representative of the neighborhoods that it served.
Everybody in the CAC would choose its own leaders.
This was good and bad, right?
We were able to set our own agendas and run things the way we saw fit.
We could have whatever topics we wanted at the meetings.
And the bad part about that is sometimes that rubbed people the wrong way, honestly.
They didn’t like not having control of these meetings.
And I think that there was some pushback, and that might have actually led to the situation we were in where they were disbanded.
I’ll go into more about that in a minute.
Hopefully we can get back there.
I would like that.
Neighbors elect their leaders, as I mentioned, and like I said, a forum for building connections between the city and citizens.
Every Raleigh citizen is a member of a CAC.
So the entire city, as big as we’ve gotten, has a CAC assigned to it.
Certain areas of the city have obviously grown faster than others.
And that’s presented some challenges because the goal for us is to try to make this accessible to everybody that we can.
And if you’re looking at like the northwest part of town around Umstead, and you’ve got, I don’t know, 60,000 people in that area?
and you’re trying to find one community center that’s convenient for everybody, forget it, right?
It’s not going to happen.
So it’s led to some situations where you’re passing up that sort of convenience for trying to make things equal and it’s challenging.
So when the CACs were disbanded, there were 18 of them or 19 were still trying to figure out nobody does math in the CACs.
There’s also been some CACs that emerged sort of in between like Wade’s CAC and the Hillsborough CAC used to be separate CACs.
There were also some CACs that were put into effect in the northeast part of town around Durant Road, I think, that may or may not still be around.
But that was historically the ones that we had.
Right now there’s probably half a dozen of them that are active and I’ll talk about that in a moment.
Run the gamut about things that we talked about, right?
Development issues, crime, you heard from the police department, you had an opportunity to ask them questions.
Social events, CACs also helped do things that build community.
So the East CAC was participating in what we call the East CAC Community Day.
And we partnered with Ronneil Robinson and the Food Lion over there at the shopping center to provide backpacks for kids in the neighborhood and play houses.
And we’ve also done social events where we’ve had popcorn and snow cones and stuff that we served and more bounce houses and things.
There’s also other community days that were held right here in Lyons Park.
So that’s something that I think really does help build community and hopefully we can do some more of that as we go forward.
Yes, ma’am?
September 14th. Okay, so Ronneil. Okay, awesome. Yeah, well, I wished I’d invited him actually. Well, not that he’s not always working all the time.
That’s kind of what Ronneil knows, but he’s been a long time friend of East CAC.
So I think we’ll probably find some way to help support that, which would be awesome.
As I mentioned before, East CAC leaders set agenda, so whatever’s on your mind is what we’ll talk about.
And if you’ve got ideas about things you want to discuss, if you’ve got people that you’d like to invite in to talk about issues or whatever,
let me know. Let Lynette know. Let whoever the East CAC leaders are know at that time and we’ll set it up because people love to have forums where they’ll come out and talk.
Okay, so CACs were formed way back in 1974. Raleigh Mayor Clarence Lightner was responsible for doing this.
It was an effort to really get federal funding, block funding.
So the federal government said, hey, we need to make sure that you have support of your neighborhoods if you’re doing this.
So Raleigh set that up in an effort to get this block funding. And according to the news reports I read that wasn’t actually successful,
but the CACs hung around. So they sort of became a thing. Paving over Oakwood was something that I think is associated with this.
I believe there was an effort at the time to put an interstate right through historic Oakwood because at the time those houses were in just horrible shape in the early 70s.
And there was an effort involved to organize and save all these historic Victorian homes.
And I believe the CACs sort of grew out of that effort because the federal government who was going to be paying for those that highway wanted to see if that was really what everybody wanted.
And that’s, I believe, how they nudged Raleigh into getting these CACs put in place.
Don’t quote me on that last part, but I’ve got the idea that that’s sort of how that happened.
Okay, CACs were previously supported by the Department of Community Services in Raleigh.
There was a staff of 12 that helped out. And out of our 18 CACs, every meeting would have at least one staffer assigned to it.
So there would be somebody here that would help set up the room for us, make sure that everything, the rent was paid or whatever.
By the way, our last CAC meeting came out of Lynette’s pocket and you got charged, what, 200 bucks?
Yes.
Yes, I mean, she got paid off, which is awesome.
But otherwise, yeah, I don’t want to say, like, she was looking.
You were looking for your bonus, though, for your relative getting into the police academy.
So I mean, yeah, she’s making money on the side, don’t worry.
But no, that’s how much it would cost to rent this room for meetings like this. And you can understand that that’s, you know, not sustainable unless I was, you know, passing the hat around during these meetings.
And nobody really wants to do that.
So that was a nice little perk that CACs had, that free community center stuff.
And tonight, actually, it is free.
We are renting this under a neighborhood sort of arrangement.
And I’ll go into more of that here in just a moment.
The city has several citizen leadership programs. They’re awesome. Raleigh Neighborhood College is one of them.
Raleigh Leadership Academy, I think, is another one.
These are citizens that go through several weeks of classes in the evenings.
They get to talk and hear from city staffers, the leaders of departments and stuff about how the city runs.
I went through a program like this before I became CAC chair and it was a huge advantage because now you know if there’s some problem in the city, you know who to call.
You know who’s in charge of it.
They’ll remember you too because, you know, you’ve had that interaction with them and it’s a great way to get things done.
So when the citizens come out of there, they’re just loaded and ready to go, right?
They can jump in and they can help out in their community.
So often the city looks for people like these leadership graduates to run CACs or join other boards that the city has,
like the parks board or the planning board, other things like that.
So I can’t say enough about the programs.
It was awesome.
I feel like it really grounded me in how Raleigh works and that helped me help the community.
And it is free, yes.
A lot of fun.
And you get to tour all these cool places like the Fire Training Center.
We got to tour the 911 Center.
I don’t know if they still do that anymore because there’s security things.
The Special Operations place where you get to see all the police motorcycles and SWAT team stuff.
That was kind of neat.
So you get a nice little behind the scenes look at really what makes the city run.
Okay.
So above every CAC is the Raleigh Citizens Advisory Council or the RCAC.
That’s like the CAC of CACs.
All these CACs have one seat on the RCAC board.
And so when those RCAC meetings take place, the chair, the vice chair can show up,
vote on behalf of the CAC.
And the CAC sort of makes, or the RCAC makes decisions that way.
This used to be held in the council chambers and it would be televised on the Raleigh Television Network.
There’s probably a lot of archives and stuff where you can see that.
Sometimes the meetings run long.
The thing about self led CACs is you get, it’s like herding cats if you’re trying to actually get something done with the RCAC.
Because that was, it was a challenging time.
I actually served as the chair of the RCAC.
But generally a lot of the issues that the neighborhoods in the city are facing are fairly similar.
All those needs are kind of the same.
So generally we agreed on the stuff that we were kind of trying to do.
But this was kind of the conduit for funding from the city, from the organization.
RCAC was responsible for doing the rules and bylaws for the other CACs just to make sure everybody was sort of operating the same way.
If there was something wrong with the leadership and like if there was an absence of leadership in a particular CAC, nobody bothered to step up.
The RCAC could help restart that CAC.
And I guess in a way that’s kind of what’s happening right now.
The RCAC is still around.
The East CAC is just kind of bootstrapping itself again as a result of the RCAC.
Community services liked dealing with the CACs through RCAC.
So I think that’s probably something that’s going to carry over in our new form as well.
Maybe not community services, but some other department that the city chooses.
Any questions so far?
I’m giving you a lot of information.
Okay.
All right.
Does it make any sense?
Is it interesting?
Okay.
All right.
Cool.
All right.
So dissolution.
The CACs got hit with a surprise vote February 2020 where the council decided we’re done with CACs.
We’re going to shut you down.
All the city resources that were allocated, the staff and the money and the funding, the budget, all that stuff disappeared.
They got reallocated to other places.
And the idea was that the council was going to come up with a new and improved community engagement effort.
I don’t think that ever happened.
Not to my knowledge anyway.
I think there was $800,000.
$800,000?
Yes, on something.
They hired a consultant for like $200,000 to come up with a plan.
And the funding that the CACs got was probably $20,000 a year at that point.
So paid 10 times as much to the consultant to come up with what?
I don’t know.
Yes.
Yes, ma’am.
Yes.
Yes, it has.
It’s been a slow start.
Yes, I agree.
And I like Tiesha.
She’s got a lot going on, I understand.
But it’s basically throwing out, it was throwing out a very effective system for one that had to get started from scratch.
So is it really representing the community or is it representing the council interest?
I don’t know.
I mean, that’s up to everybody’s decision.
Yeah.
Two years.
Two years.
That’s right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I mean, they’ve got a hole there, you know, a hole to dig themselves out of and it’s not really their fault that they were put in that position.
But, but there was a very effective system that was in place and then it got taken away.
And I think a lot of people in the community were really hurt by that.
Yes, sir.
You have a question or statement?
Yeah.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I have noticed that.
Yes.
They’re, they’re.
So, so some of those, some of those duties of what community services once did for CACs,
the community engagement office has taken over and some of them have gone to neighborhood.
What is it?
Neighborhood.
Right.
There’s, but there’s a, there’s a neighborhood department now for the city that has taken over some of the things that CACs have done.
So, or the Community Services Department did.
So those duties were kind of split between these two departments.
And I’ll explain in the next slide how there’s kind of some questions about how everything’s going to look like.
Yeah.
Like I said, okay.
So CAC revival was done again, February 2024.
I wrote surprise vote here, but it really wasn’t a surprise to the people because at the council retreats, everybody there was discussing this very topic.
And there was some consensus that it made sense to bring the CACs back.
So even though some people weren’t aware of the vote, everybody knew the gist of everything that was going to happen there.
It wasn’t really a secret.
A new council, yes, came and, and directed that to happen.
So the resolution don’t, I won’t go into details here, but it directed some city resources to go back to CACs like Zoom accounts, meeting space and, and many, many, many of the key things I think that we really needed for support.
Staff should be in there somewhere as well.
But that’s all still getting hashed out.
All right.
It was unanimous vote.
And as I mentioned, things aren’t fully fleshed out yet.
So we’re still trying to decide who’s going to do what with this.
Okay.
Presently, some CACs are active.
Some are not.
I think, like I said, there’s probably six or so very active CACs.
The Mordecai CAC continued to meet during the pandemic during the time that they weren’t officially recognized.
And I will note that city staff continue to come to Mordecai meetings.
Raleigh police still showed up at the Mordecai meetings.
They felt the need.
In fact, Officer Hinton reached out to me when he found out that the East CAC was coming back again because the police really need that kind of connection with the citizens and vice versa.
So there’s obviously need for these kinds of forms and this interchange of information.
Our CAC structure is still sort of being figured out.
I’ve been in some of the talks we’ve had with assistant city managers about CACs.
And I understand it from their point of view.
The CACs are very independent and sometimes, as I mentioned, that makes people nervous.
It especially makes city executives in the staff very nervous because their job and responsibility to the city is to manage risk.
And they like being able to control things that are going to blow up in their face potentially, which means that the CACs are like a hot potato to them.
Totally understand that.
They don’t want to, you know, step out and support something that could become a disaster.
So right now there is discussion between the RCAC staff, RCAC members like myself.
I’m the vice chair of the RCAC.
And city staff to try to figure out what role or form the RCAC is really going to need in going forward, basically.
Previously, we were like a pseudo city board that, as I mentioned, was citizen run.
But now the city doesn’t really want to accept that risk.
And I don’t know if CACs are going to come back in a very close semblance to what they used to be because of that, because of that risk that they see.
It’s a different level of staff running the city now, different number of directors.
Obviously the council changes on a regular basis.
They’re going to play it conservatively whenever they can because they don’t want to, you know, get anybody in trouble.
Totally understand that.
So right now we’re wondering, is there some sort of neighborhood organization that we can fit in and continue to get those types of resources that we had from the city?
Some of the RCAC members are pretty solid one way and there’s a good number that are going the other way.
So that’s just something we’re going to have to figure out.
Yes, ma’am.
Well, that’s a good point.
So the question for those online was, are there other models for kind of what the city did with CACs?
Yeah, what we can do.
Right.
Well, I think the CACs were fairly unique in the country with the citizen engagement that we did.
I don’t know of any other cities that had anything specific about that.
In fact, there was a school group that traveled to Raleigh, a government class actually, that spent the day with CAC leaders and city counselors to learn about CACs and how we did things.
And it was featured as sort of a very grassroots sort of level of government that they weren’t familiar with before.
So, you know, there’s obviously city organizations that the city, or organizations, nonprofit orgs that the city works with closely.
There’s business partnerships that they do like the Hillsborough Street, Downtown Raleigh Alliance, the Hillsborough Street.
I don’t even know what you call that one there that covers that.
Yeah, so those are nonprofits that the city helps fund and have some sort of autonomy from the city, but more of a partnership.
So that’s something that we could look at.
But we’re still trying to figure that out the best way going forward with that.
I think that there’s a lot of hope that we can go back to the way we used to be being a pseudo city board.
But as I mentioned, I personally don’t think that’s very likely.
So there’s obviously a need for meetings like this. The city gets a lot of value from it.
Hopefully we can come up with something that makes sense as far as how we interact with each other in the future.
Yes, ma’am.
The staff does not want to give out blanket sort of authority to a group that they don’t feel they can necessarily control or be accountable.
And so it’s going to be up to us.
Right. Like I said, the staff is going to report to the city manager who reports to the board.
They want to make sure their ducks are always in a row.
The money that was being presented to the CACs, as I mentioned at the end, was about $1,000 per CAC per year.
That’s a drop in the bucket from the city’s budget, honestly.
But now it’s been reallocated elsewhere.
And that does not take into account the salaries of the 12 staffers that were assigned to the CAC.
So I mean, there’s a little bit of money involved with that.
Yes.
I think it’s important to try to balance how she’s doing with his physical affairs stuff.
But also, it’s pretty clear that they’re fighting a leading fight against the general fund.
So I think it’s important to try to balance how she’s doing with the general fund.
Those are big donors.
I mean, let’s not dance around that subject too.
Yeah.
So you bring up a good point, and that is just a moment.
Is that previously, we talked about development issues in CAC meetings,
and generally we would have the developer come in, explain the project.
The CAC would take a vote on it.
And then that would get forwarded up to the Planning Commission for their consideration.
The state law basically made all that move.
It did not matter what they said.
They didn’t even have to come in front of us if they chose to.
And that was one of the reasons that was cited for dissolving CACs,
is that, well, these people are voting on these development issues.
Well, it was really just, I don’t know, it was like a courtesy sort of thing
that the Planning Commission could completely ignore it.
The city council often ignored it.
It didn’t really matter.
And it wasn’t binding on the developers, and it didn’t really mean anything.
But that was one thing that got some people upset.
Just the fact that somebody would come in here and vote against their baby pet project or something
and embarrass them, I guess, because legally we couldn’t do anything about it.
And like you said, the state government is going to be looking at ways
to smooth the path of people coming in with these development issues.
And so I understand the fine line that the city of Raleigh must be walking now
because we’re a pretty visible target.
Like I said, yep, big money donors.
So did you have a point you wanted to make?
Okay.
All right.
Helen, did you have something to say?
I just wanted to say that the CAC is rather than more than one.
I’m just here to present those.
And I would lie on the other side of my side too.
But I’m in the city of Raleigh.
The city of Raleigh is better.
More simple, but it’s done that for you.
And deal with the need to develop.
Really, when I started going to the CAC, I had no idea.
It was very, really, the need to develop.
And they really needed to solve that.
Right.
We’ve done neighborhood cleanups and stuff too.
And like you said, the whole development thing was really just a tiny part of what happened.
Four to six months or something, we’d have one case show up.
It’s not like we were ever really inundated with development issues here.
Yeah.
Right.
That’s a good point.
Yeah.
That’s a good point.
And that was one good thing.
Even if our votes didn’t count, we were able to provide feedback for these projects.
And ultimately, I think make them better projects in the ways that we could.
I think it was helpful for developers to hear the ideas that we had.
In some cases, I think it made better projects.
Yes, sir.
Well, he’s only one vote on the council, so you’ve got to have five.
And there have been plenty of times where the CAC would recommend something.
The planning board would turn it down.
The council is not under any obligation to accept anything from anybody.
Right.
So it’s all just advisory.
And there have been plenty of times where the boards would have a particular.
And I served on the parks board, too, in addition to CAC.
So there were times where I would present the parks board decision on something.
And they’re like, oh, that’s nice.
We’re going to do this other thing, too.
Hugely frustrating because you are a citizen volunteer serving on a board.
And these are complex projects that you’re learning all about and devoting lots of hours
in trying to make the best decision.
And it can be really hard to watch the council just abruptly change direction on you, you know.
But it happens.
And it really makes it fun to volunteer.
Sorry.
What did you say?
They have in the past.
Generally, they will show up and they’ll listen to what’s going on, some of the concerns and stuff.
And we’re recording this tonight, too.
So I’m sure that, you know, counselors will be watching this and picking up the details.
But we also, you know, I always had an open invitation for any,
like the District C counselor, whoever that was to come in and talk or listen or whatever.
And occasionally they do show up.
Yes.
And the mayor, of course.
And the mayor.
So, yeah, that’s four.
Yes, ma’am.
Yes.
Well, I’d like to caution you that this meeting is fairly unique.
We don’t have a lot of diversity here, but when I was running meetings,
it was an amazing community of people from all over.
So I could have done a better job getting the word out about this particular meeting.
In the future, that’s going to happen.
And, yeah, you’ll see much better representation from everybody in the community,
because that’s really what we were about.
So give me a moment.
I wanted to show you that video that I think Helen mentioned.
Talks about CACs.
This community center is a bit slow.
You’re actually not on camera, by the way.
That’s not working.
I’m the only one actually on camera.
All right, so let’s see.
All right.
Not really.
All right.
All right.
Some of that’s dated because some of those things don’t apply anymore with the new arrangement,
but we’re still, like I said, trying to sort out what the CACs are going to look like in the future.
So that’s the end of my presentation.
Any other questions about that?
All right.
Cool.
All right.
So Lynette, could you get the lights for us again, please?
If you want to learn more, this is the Raleigh CAC website, RaleighCAC.org.
And it’s got some links to the other CACs that are active and more is being added all the time.
East CAC has a website.
The main one right now is EastRaleigh.org.
And we have mailing lists and stuff that are attached to that.
So if you’re not on the East CAC mailing list or not on the Belvedere Park Woodcrest mailing list,
if you’re part of that neighborhood, if you have neighborhoods that you want a mailing list created for that you don’t know about,
come talk to me and I’ll be happy to set that up for you because I run those lists in addition to the other stuff I do.
It’s a great way to just keep in touch with your neighbors.
Mark, I have a question.
Yes?
I have a copy of the neighborhood that I’m going to show up.
I have a copy of the neighborhood.
Right now there are no official boundaries.
The shapefiles that used to be in the city’s GIS system were removed.
They’re still available on the open data website.
There’s no official boundaries now.
So out of the six CACs that have continued to meet, they kind of invite in neighborhoods and citizens just because you can still get information if it’s not necessarily specific to your place.
So it remains to be seen.
Our CAC ended at Brookside Drive going west and so there were a lot of people in the East Mordecai neighborhood that would kind of pay attention to what we were doing.
And I think it’s important because the issues that both sides are dealing with on both sides of Brookside Drive, it’s best to deal with them together rather than sort of create this artificial boundary between them.
In Helen, I’m so glad you’re here, you’ve showed up at so many East CAC meetings even though this is not your CAC.
You know, you’re North Central.
Right, you might as well because we’re going to be discussing things that are still going to affect you.
Open to everyone.
And that’s the other thing.
I always treated my meetings and I know you did too Lynette as citizen meetings and they were all run with the open meeting laws in mind.
So I would put out appropriate notice before the meetings as best I could and we wouldn’t really make any real decisions without publicizing it first.
And so I think that makes it easier for people to know really the transparency of what’s going on.
Okay, yes. I wish I had an old map.
I think now Raleigh Ironworks actually is part of the East CAC because that was a funny little section up there.
So there didn’t used to be people living there before but there is now.
Sure.
Very good question.
A lot of that is done at the RCAC level.
So in the RCAC meetings there’s usually be a time at the end of the official business where the representatives of East CAC would sort of go around and talk about the things that were happening in their community.
Mailing less of course help where RCAC members, the CCAC chairs would share information that way.
I always made a point to know what was going on with the Mordecai CAC and the North Central CAC and we would partner on community events like cleaning the creek right next to Con Am Lentry.
So we’d get out there, pick up trash during the mornings and that helped build those bonds between the people living on in either CAC.
So there are various ways of doing it and it takes effort. It just takes the desire to keep those connections going because CACs have been gone for four years officially and there’s a lot of work that still needs to be done to rebuild those kind of bonds and things.
So I’m glad you’re here.
I think that would be a good effort that they could look at that.
I think that various communities have their own ideas about how things should work as far as community engagement goes.
Some might not be as brave as Raleigh was creating CACs for some of the reasons I gave you.
The world looks a lot different now than it did in 1974 when Mr. Lightner sort of came up with this idea.
There might be better ideas out there, but we were always part of an annual event here that the city helped promote called the Neighborhood Exchange.
And that’s where a lot of CAC leaders would come for a Saturday morning and other board leaders here who were interested in finding out what was going on and they would invite a speaker to come in to talk about other cool things that were going on in the country.
So we would sort of come up to speed on other efforts about community engagement from those meetings.
So that was one way to do it.
Like I said, it’s a constant thing.
There are always new ideas coming out and there might be something that we can do.
Maybe our dissolution of the CACs will turn out to be a good thing that we can come up with something even better than we had before.
So it takes people like you giving input and looking around and finding other cool things that might be going on and then being willing to try that.
Being engaged I think is the number one thing that you want to make something happen.
Any other questions?
Yes, ma’am.
I’m just going to ask that maybe that, I don’t know if I’m familiar with what you’re saying, but is there a new model in the CAC?
There’s a number of people like you’re voting like that.
And you’re like, wow, do you know what it is?
And that’s just kind of the way of the audience.
So whoever’s doing that, that’s how you do it.
I’m wondering that we had such a long hiatus before tonight. I am very impressed that everybody here is here and I want to thank you all for it.
It’s great.
I can do a better job at outreach.
I don’t remember, we had at least 1200 people I think on the East CAC mailing list when it finally got pulled.
And I grabbed all those addresses, but of course there’s email address rod over time and so some of them I won’t be able to reach out to.
There are other ways to do it. It’s not just electronic, right?
Sitting out flyers.
The Belvedere Park, Woodcrest neighborhood that I helped participate in has a great outreach committee that like there’s one of them right over there who helps with events and helps keep the neighbors connected.
And so that’s something that I hope to do on a CAC wide basis, put flyers out places like the Brookside Bodega now.
What’s it called now? I forget.
Yeah, the old Brookside, yeah, the place is named.
The Mexican restaurant, formerly known as the Brookside Bodega, right there.
Grand opening.
Oh, grand opening, excellent, okay, good.
And it’s great to see local businesses thrive like that and seeing all the people out there.
So those are good places to put flyers and let people know.
We used to use money that the city would give our CAC to buy a bunch of yard signs that we would distribute to people.
Oh, good, good, excellent. In fact, I thought I should have put mine up.
Yeah, well, see that’s the thing because they say Wednesdays at what, 7.30 and obviously that’s not tonight.
So do you just have a sign?
There’s something else we want to say.
Okay, yeah, but I mean people would drive by, they’d see the signs and say, oh, okay.
Excellent, excellent, all right.
Right, that was the other thing.
Yeah, we would get messages put in the city’s water bills and hopefully we can get that done again because that helped tell people about CACs that probably wouldn’t find out about them.
And whatever other efforts that people dream up, let us know.
The first thing I think we need to do is come up with some regular meeting time and date.
And we’re still working that out with the parks department. We’d love to be able to get this room.
They’ve tried to put us in the Tarborough Road neighborhood community.
Was it Roberts Park? I think was the other one, which is well away from our base, you know, and the people that normally would show up.
And I worry about that because, you know, not everybody can get here very easily.
Lots of people used to walk into the meetings, which is great.
And so if we change it up and we make it too hard for them to get here, that doesn’t serve the community.
I would say, actually, to answer your question more specifically,
but generally there would be probably twice as many people here as there is right now.
When there’s a big development issue going on and there’s been some publicity, then we might fill this entire room up.
And I’ve seen that before. One thing that was great is when the city was trying to collect feedback on the Capital Boulevard Improvement Project.
We had over 200 people show up for those charats and providing input to the city, which was a record.
The city planning department never seen that many people show up at an event.
So we were able to provide some really solid feedback on how to renovate Capital Boulevard.
And we’re already seeing some of those benefits right now with the changing of the buildings and everything and parks.
And eventually, actually, I think this has been funded already, the former Devereux Meadows Park is Smoky Hollow Park.
So that’s going to have a greenway connection going right outside this neighborhood, which will be awesome.
Yes, so you’ll be able to bike from here straight into downtown and not touch any roads, which is awesome.
And we help provide feedback for that, which is great.
So yes, you have a question or a comment?
Oh, I did.
Okay.
Okay, yeah, yeah, so it varies.
This is a little bit on the small side, but generally it’d be about twice as many people or at least 50% more people at a meeting.
No one knows what’s going to happen to the community.
They exist.
Right, we’ve got work to do.
There’s a little bit of weight in the team now to see what it is.
Well, the vote was unanimous.
I think that they do want something.
I think the question is, what is it really going to look like?
You know, the doubles and the details.
And what’s really going to matter is how they budget it, right?
Are they willing to spend money on it?
Yes.
Yep.
But, you know, we’ll see.
We’ll see.
This is going to be very interesting next six months or so when all these sort of details get worked out.
But I think the council is intent on making something happen.
Yes?
Sure.
Sure.
Right now the city is treating the East CAC just like any other neighborhood organization.
It just has over 10,000 people in it.
It’s a fairly big neighborhood.
But we’ll probably get that going here too.
Because like I said, we did community days on a regular basis.
And that was always fun and a great way to reach out for people.
But you’ll see more participation once we get a regular date and time.
And people can put it on the calendars and show up.
So I gave what, two weeks notice or something?
I don’t know. I started promoting this meeting in, definitely in June.
Big burden?
I had to, yes.
Because I jumped the gun a little bit and the city was using this room the night I wanted to.
But I’m trying to get back to a Wednesday night sort of monthly cadence.
And hopefully we’ll get there.
But we’ll take whatever we can get at this point.
Actually, was it Monday?
Monday night or was it?
Maybe it was Monday night.
Maybe it was Monday night.
Okay.
Yeah.
It was Monday.
All right.
Anyway, if we can get it back to the way it was, that would be awesome.
I will keep everybody posted on what kind of arrangements we make.
But I don’t necessarily have to be the one to do that.
Because the next thing on our agenda tonight is CAC officer nominations.
So looking for somebody who is willing to step up and have some of this fun.
And I will even volunteer to assist you.
Yeah, I don’t think Kelly is actually running.
And that would probably not be very good for our marriage.
That’s a good point.
How does everybody feel about that?
Okay.
All right.
One problem with that particular approach is I don’t have a date on when we’ve got this
room again.
So I can’t really say when we’re actually going to be doing that.
But in the essence of interest of fairness and transparency, I think it’s a good idea.
And that will put us at least another 30 days out, I guess, before we can schedule another
meeting.
Yes?
Well, I think Lynette’s got a good point.
We can take nominations tonight.
We can also take nominations from the floor at our next meeting.
We don’t want to exclude anybody who’s interested in serving.
Yes, that’s what we did in the past.
Whenever we have candidates, they would have a couple of minutes to introduce themselves
and talk about who they’re about and everything.
So how does everybody feel about taking nominations?
Go ahead.
Okay.
Absolutely.
Yeah.
Right now, Lynette and I have been sort of serving that purpose.
But do I hear that you’re volunteering yourself, Brian?
Yeah, that’s what I was thinking is that we’re not going to have turnout like this in August.
It’s not going to get any better.
People are going to be gone.
So I’m escaping sweaty Raleigh.
Well, I don’t want to scare you off so much with things that I might have told you about
structure being not necessarily put in place.
Mainly that concerns the interface between the RCAC and the city.
For the level of just a particular CAC, I think you can still do the things that you’ve been doing before
without maybe as much of the city staff support that used to be there.
So it’s a little bit more work.
And I think the only thing that would really change is that your job would get easier when a staffer shows up
and helps you set up the room.
I think they do take, yes, August off.
Okay, so Helen and then Jean, and then we’ll take you, yes.
So I think the city is in a condition to form work.
Yeah.
I will admit that at this stage, a lot of this is performing without a net.
You know, you have to be willing to fly by the seat of your pants a little bit.
But I’m here and willing to help guide you in that because I became chair in what, 2008.
And when that retired and I served for three years, so I’ve got a little bit of experience with this.
And I’ve been working with the RCAC for a year and a half now.
No, you were great.
The reason I was successful is you had set a great foundation and had everything going.
So, all right, Jean, yes.
I don’t think we’ve ever really done any kind of remote voting.
Generally you’d have to be in the room and be signed in as a resident.
Yes.
Honestly, that’s probably also something you find here to be artificial.
Thanks, yes.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Those are good points.
I think I did actually send out the initial email back in May when I picked the date that wasn’t available in June.
So, here we are.
So, it’s been two months.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, that’s why we’re collecting names and sort of two.
Yes, Lynette.
Yeah, who here would be interested in distributing flyers to your neighbors?
Raise your hand.
Okay.
All right, good.
All right.
Well, I sent that to the East CAC list and the Belvedere Park list too, so that’s at least 500 people.
No, 1,700 people total that should have been known about it.
But I can always use more help getting the word out.
I think that’s a great idea.
And if you’re willing to help me out with that by distributing flyers and letting your neighbors know all the better, right?
Because I do want this to be part of the community.
Yes.
Okay.
Sure.
Okay.
I think that’s a good idea.
Yes, Pat.
Okay.
Yeah, that would be a good way to pitch it.
Sure.
No, good idea.
Yes, if you go to the Raleigh CAC website, at least you can see the video that I just showed you that’s on there.
And also, there’s a little bit of blurb about the history of CACs and what they do.
So you can just go there if you’d like.
So one other reason, I guess, for not holding this off too much is that, as I mentioned, there’s a lot of discussions that are happening right now at the city and the RCAC level about how things are going to look.
And I think it’s important for the CAC to have a voice there that’s active in helping decide how things are going to move.
So right now I’m going to these meetings.
I would love to get some help.
And so that’s one of the reasons why I want to get somebody who’s motivated and has the ability to spend some time in these discussions because what’s about to happen, which I fear, is that the city is going to make these decisions without really consulting the CACs and we’re going to be stuck with whatever they come up with.
And I think that’s going to be the default sort of approach that they’re going to take to this. So you need to be an advocate for CACs in order to not get boxed in that way. Yes, sir.
Why would I be worried? I’m a bit cynical about how things happened before. And as I mentioned, the staff is probably going to be take the conservative approach, which might not be the best approach for how the CACs interact with the city.
So you have to just learn to be your own advocate for things and push for things that you want. And a lot of things that the CACs have been able to do for neighborhoods have happened because people have been willing to stand up and say, hey, you know, this is what I think about this and advocate for it.
You just have to push sometimes whenever I got like police support for helping get, you know, community officers in the neighborhood. I kept bothering the police chief on a regular basis. Hey, you know, let’s talk about this.
And he eventually caved in and said, all right, you know, gentle, what do you call it, gentle pressure consistently presented or something like that. That’s what he said.
It’s a great approach, you know, but you engage people, you treat them with respect, and you know what you want and advocate for it. And that’s how you get it. Yes.
I thought it was kind of a study of ways to, you know, bring it to the community and try to bring it to the community and ask them questions.
Haven’t the candidate, is the candidate window still open? I think it closes.
No, you have to clear your ticket.
Okay, yeah. But, yeah, if you haven’t declared by now, you’re 19th. Okay.
Yeah. And it’s possible when we have our next meeting, we’ll be able to get some candidates in here to talk about their positions because that’s another thing that CAC does since the city council races are nonpartisan. Yes, Kelly.
Absolutely. Yeah, they’re open to. Good point.
We were completely open meeting at the East CAC and we’ve had candidates before. We’ve had the representatives, of course, sir. Yes.
So, I mean, we can certainly discuss it. All right, so here’s what I’m getting from the room. People aren’t necessarily comfortable with doing nominations tonight, which is fine.
I heard, Brian, that you were interested in helping lead a candidate committee, which is awesome. Thank you.
August is going to be a bus for attendance. Everybody’s going to be doing other things, getting their last vacation in before school starts.
So I’m going to try to get our next meeting scheduled for September. I don’t know when that’s going to happen. I depend on the city for finding an open date.
In the meantime, I’m going to call the candidate window open now. So anybody who wants to be a candidate can submit their stuff.
Gene, if you’re still interested, I will consider you a candidate.
Yes, thank you. September 14th, right. Ronneil Robinson is helping do a community fair.
And at the food line, yes, we’ve had some events there before. So yes, we will help with that in some form or fashion.
And so anybody who’s interested in, yeah, oh, the table is perfect. Yes.
Yeah. So definitely need to get the word out again and make sure people know.
So I’ll be hitting you up. Everybody’s got their email address on the sheet, right?
I’ll be sending you like PDF copies of flyers that we can get out. Yes, Kelly.
Fourth Wednesday, there’s a Zoom meeting and they are recorded and I don’t know how I can.
If you want to attend those meetings, I’m sure that’s fine. Get me your information and I’ll make sure you get a Zoom link to it.
What happened to, I think, the Midtown CAC a few months ago that caused the city to back off on giving CAC Zoom accounts,
was that it got Zoom bombed by these crazy racist people who went on a tirade with city counselors present at the meeting.
And it was really, really ugly scene. So there’s a fine line between letting people join these online meetings
and making sure that they’re not idiots who are going to derail the whole meeting.
So that’s a problem that the RCAC is going to have to solve. How can you be open versus transparent and also keep everybody safe?
Yes, Brian.
I would be the RCAC, yes.
Yes, the city will be dealing with RCAC to try to figure out how the CACs are going to work.
So you would start at the CAC level, interact with the RCAC and then to the city. That’s kind of how I’d picture it.
Generally, it’s the CAC officers that attend an RCAC meeting and anybody is an open meeting just like anything else
and is still that way even if it’s not a pseudo city board.
But when the RCAC is voting, each CAC gets one vote. So no matter how many CAC officers from East CAC show up,
East CAC only gets one vote. So you kind of have to decide ahead of time how things are going or, you know, pull your CAC.
Does that answer your question?
Well, I mean, a lot of the CACs are autonomous, right? Or at least they were. So, I mean, if there are any decisions that have to be made here,
then they get made here. But if there’s changes to bylaws or something like that or, you know, interacting with the city or expressing ideas about how you think CACs should look,
that should all go through the RCAC. And there’s a big effort to shuttle all that through the RCAC chair right now because we want to try to be consistent on the decisions that are being made and stuff.
Yes, yes. Or vice chair, it doesn’t really matter. But generally that’s how it works.
You need like, you need two people that can step up as chair at some point and a secretary generally. But yeah, and also, you know, whatever other committees.
Yeah.
Right now there’s a lot of support from city council and candidates for CACs. So there’s a lot of momentum and that’s another reason why it’s important to get whatever done we can right now.
Sure. Sure. Yep. Sure. Thank you. Yeah. My pleasure. Yes, Kelly.
I won’t be there for September 14th. I won’t be there.
I would like to meet before the 14th if we can. So early September, I think we maybe could squeeze a meeting in.
Probably. Yeah. So we’ll have to work around that. But yeah, and then we’ll schedule one immediately after that. But like I said, that’s the biggest problem right now is that we don’t have a regular meeting.
And I have to ask for every single one that we get. But good point. I won’t be around on the 14th.
We have a publicity chair right over here.
Right. Yeah. Yeah, we do have a Twitter account. We have a Twitter account. We have a EastCAC.org website. We’ve got EastRaleigh.org and of course the RaleighCAC.org website that I mentioned.
And a Facebook page, if you haven’t found the Facebook page, East CAC has a Facebook page.
Their, um, thanks, Nextdoor is funny. It’s complicated. No, there isn’t. And the reason is, right, back when I tried this, next door did not have the concept of overlapping areas.
So I created one for my neighborhood of 19 homes, and then I tried to create an overlapping one of the East CAC of the various, and they couldn’t do that.
So, you know, once you draw those lines for a particular neighborhood, that’s it, as far as they’re concerned.
I know. I’m not a big fan of next door, but that’s just me. Yeah, that’s why we have mailing lists for the neighborhood and Facebook page.
Yeah, please do post there. Right.
Sure. Whatever social media channels or whatever that you’re, you can get the word out. That’s fine.
I, you know, I want to make sure everybody’s aware of what we’re doing here and anybody who’s willing to participate is aware of it and shows up.
Sure.
Yeah, we might create a subreddit there for the East CAC. The Raleigh subreddit is really awesome. Yeah, I learned a lot of information there.
In fact, I think it probably gives me more ideas about what’s going on than a lot of the local media does, because I trust the people on Reddit and the voting and everything.
If somebody says something there, it’s usually important or worth looking at. Good idea. Thank you.
Okay. Anybody. Yes, Brian.
I would love to see that. It’s just not going to happen.
Yes, I think it’d be a great starting point. But as I mentioned, the staff is really leery that because they’re worried about the risk.
They want something they can control. And there was a perception in the city staff that we could do what we wanted in a day and like that.
That made them nervous. And I understand that. So I don’t know if that’s ever going to come back.
There’s a new city attorney that does not seem to be on board with that.
Thomas was more open to it.
Thank you.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, in the case of the example you gave, they’re not writing checks to the speakers at the podium.
When money is involved, they want to have something tangible that they can show to say, hey, we paid this to this group.
We got this in return.
Well, yeah, we used to get over $50,000 a year for that. In fact, it was, I think it was far more than that at one point.
Right. For the whole thing. So, yeah, that’s the reason why. So they don’t want to write checks that are unaccounted for it.
Because, you know, there were lots of cases in the city where that blew up in their faces spectacularly.
So they want to be able to count for the money that they give to something they want to have something that they can show for it.
And a lot of the neighborhood organizations, like the grant that we got to, you know, put the signs up for our neighborhood was a community sort of grant.
And that might be something that could be a model for the RCAC. We’re still discussing that with staff, and that might happen.
But these are going to be crucial months, the next couple of months before the election where a lot of those decisions might get made.
And we need to make sure that we’re offering our voice and how we think it ought to go.
That would be good. In fact, they’re going to kick us out in two minutes. So I think we might be done.
First off, before everybody goes, raise your hand if you heard about this from an email list.
Raise your hand if you saw it on Facebook, on the East CAC page.
If neither is to apply, raise your hand.
Okay. So word of mouth or something? Okay. Awesome.
Okay. There you go. All right. Good. Excellent.
All right. So we found somebody else for our publicity committee. Yeah, there you go.
All right. I will be hitting you up with flyers. We’ll try to aim for, like I said, early September.
We’ll start this and hopefully get some candidates put in place, and we will get going again.
So thanks for coming out tonight. We will see you in September. Thank you. Good night.