Order the town council special meeting on June 3rd uh 2025.

Uh the special meeting we have uh three items on the agenda old town outreach, uh future parks funding options and direction and the review of the town wide uh special topic survey.

Um with that it will take role okay.

Sorry.

Um council member Pastor O'Malley.

Here council member O'Connor.

Here mayor for Tem Belly Moore here, Councilmember Mayor, President Council Montalera.

Here all right, would you please rise and join me in the Pledge of Allegiance?

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America in the Republic for one nation under God with liberty and justice for all.

All right, do we have a motion to approve the agenda tonight?

So move.

All right, motion is second.

All in favor, say aye.

Aye, aye.

All opposed, say no.

All right, we have an agenda, and so we will launch right in with the historical town outreach.

Yeah, I will turn this over to I turn it over to Sarah or Josh tonight.

So turn it over to myself.

All right, Josh, it's all yours.

All right.

Well, I appreciate you all being here tonight.

Um Josh Campbell, and I am the senior strategic planner here for the town.

Um, I do want to recognize that this is only got 15 minutes, so I'm gonna try to go over the next few slides a little quickly, that way we can leave some time for discussion at the end to hear from you all.

Um, but to give a little bit of um background of why we're here today is over this last year, we've had many different outreach and engagement opportunities with the community.

Um of the uh emerging themes that we we kind of heard specifically as it relates to old town residents uh was that there was a sense of some um forgetfulness or being overlooked, especially when they compare themselves to uh the surrounding neighborhoods that exist within Erie.

Um now this could be one of many different reasons.

Um but one of the items that we heard when having these conversations or asking a little bit deeper after hearing this was um could you explain that a little bit more?

And it was the uh sense of community that they were seeing existing in these other neighborhoods that they felt maybe wasn't as present or seeing within their community.

Uh when I say their community, I'm talking about old town.

Um now this could be one of many different reasons whether uh it's associated with those other neighborhoods being primarily HOAs, homeowners associations.

Um, whereas Old Town does not exist as an HOA, uh nor are they a voluntary neighborhood association.

Um there are many pros and cons to both of those.

Um not gonna go into those tonight as that's not part of the discussion.

Um, but I really want to harp back a little bit onto that uh that sense of community that's uh that we were hearing when trying to go a little bit further.

Um, there's a lot of ways of explaining what community means.

Uh the way that I have done this in the past, um, and I like to uh talk with residents is uh community is social capital.

It's the ability to know your neighbor, it's the ability to uh have those interpersonal relationships, have trust, have a sense of identity, ownership, and belonging to the area in which you reside in.

Um now that could be a geographic boundary uh such as a neighborhood, that could be just your one block street that you feel that your social capital exists in, um, or it could be just the town overall.

Um now going back to that social capital, that sense of community.

Um took a step back and brought this back into our internal thoughts and tried to figure out what does that mean.

Uh, but as we look to the future, we want to try to address or come up with processes to um maybe reverse this sense of forgetfulness or over being looked.

Um that brings us to what I'm referring to as the historical old town social capital exercise.

Um this is an opportunity where we want to uh take a moment to really talk to the residents that make up the community.

Um what I mean by that is over the course of the next four to six months, um we plan to embed ourselves within the community, um specifically old town to try to understand some of this misconception that may exist, this forgetfulness that exists, uh the sense of being overlooked and try to better understand what does that mean.

Um because social capital true is the true basis to understand um what we need to do to help better the community for themselves.

Um so what our goal is is to um or again, as I mentioned over the next four or six months to attend as many community events as possible, um maybe even host our own events that are targeted towards old town residents, um, have neighborhood activations where uh we're going down to the park or we're doing a block party to invite the neighborhood to come and talk with us to build those connections, that social um capital, those relationships amongst our staff as well as potentially amongst the residents of themselves.

Um and then after that, we really want to take a step further and go on to these one-on-one interviews.

Um I've done these in the past, and they typically uh last anywhere between an hour, hour and a half, some times even two hours, where we're just truly sitting down with these residents one on one and giving them an opportunity to speak.

Um it's one thing to come to the community and give them solutions, but it's another to listen and take back what we hear and try to synthesize that into a process moving forward.

Um again, I know I mentioned earlier the goal is to ultimately figure out a way that we can uh lessen this feeling of being forget forgotful or forgot about.

So that weird.

Um or uh try to understand how can we encourage that sense of community that they're feeling exists elsewhere to exist here.

Um I know I went through that very quickly, but the reason why we're bringing this forward to you tonight is it's one thing for myself to go out and have these interactions and build that social connection and build those relationships with these individuals, and it's another thing to have them build those amongst each other, but I want to make sure that invitation is shared with you all.

Um, and over the course of this next four six four to six months, um, I would like to extend the invitation for you all to take part in these activations with me, these conversations, these one-on-one interviews.

Um, it's important that you also feel like you're socially connected with these residents as well as they feel socially connected with individuals that represent our community as well.

Um again, I apologize I went through that very quickly, but I wanted to respect some other presentations that are coming up.

Um I wanted to turn it over to you all and one, see if you had any thoughts and opinions on this early on, uh, as well as understand if there's any uh particular events or outreach opportunities or things that you would like for us to experiment on and see what resonates with the community, um, and then two also just see what your thoughts and opinion are on joining me at these events in the future.

So that was the presentation I had for you very quickly.

Uh, but again, I wanted to turn it all to you all and hear your thoughts.

Great, and study session format, so I don't need to recognize you, just jump in.