The Fayetteville City Council convened on January 13, 2026, for an agenda session to review and approve various resolutions, ordinances, and reports ahead of the formal city council meeting scheduled for the following week. The session covered routine consent items, deferred zoning rezonings, the adoption of updated council rules of order, and a housing department update, concluding with community announcements.
We are calling to order the agenda session. Today is Tuesday, January 13th. And this is uh the city council agenda session for next week's meeting. We'll be starting off next week. I'll be delivering a proclamation to the Fayetteville high school cheerleading team and coaches. Um and then we will have an award presentation from our city attorney, Kit Williams, and then a progress report. Um Clerk Paxton, will that be from members of the youth advisory? Okay, yes, for members of the youth advisory council. Um I'm now gonna read the consent agenda. So um, and we have staff here to come up and and talk about any of these items. So just jump in. This can be, you know, less formal than a meeting for sure. First, we'll have the meeting minutes. And then um next step is um on the consent is an item from Marley. It's a resolution authorizing the acceptance of a southern city's economic initiative planning grant in the amount of $55,000 to support a project to inventory vacant residential properties and pilot a workforce development program focused on affordable housing, rehabilitation and repair, and to approve the associated budget adjustment. And Marley is here and prepared for questions. Miss Moore. Or just said present in general. Yes, please. Absolutely. Yeah. I don't know if your mic's on. I'm sorry. Is it I think there's a switch on he's coming to help. Thank you. So we recently talked about uh this item a few weeks ago before we submitted our grant application. So this is a second phase grant um with the National League of Cities with a really cool program called the Southern Cities Economic Initiative, um broadly focused on sort of uh trying to synchronize some work between the housing and community services department and the long-range planning team. Um so the first piece uh will really be the focus of 2026, focusing on creating an inventory of vacant properties with sort of a special focus, I think in South Fayetteville, but potentially opportunities to expand beyond that, um, you know, where it makes sense to align for other projects. Um, and then the second piece would be the work for 2027, which will be focused on the workforce development program. Um so it's some additional work that will be done there in terms of identifying strategic partners to make that piece happen. But uh we're we're excited that we've been selected for another grant from this program. I think staff that have been involved with it uh sort of in the planning phase really enjoyed a lot of the technical assistance we received. We'll also have some opportunities to travel to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta and receive some additional training throughout the first and second quarter of this year. So happy to answer any questions about this grant. Okay, go ahead. Um I just wanted uh check and see uh we all define South Fayetteville in different ways, and so I was curious because it looks like we're targeting um uh housing to for preservation, it looks like. And I know um into kind of our downtown area, we've really had a lot of pressures on those how uh housing units as well, and so just curious what our South definition is and if that's movable at all. Yeah, no, absolutely. I I think that's a great question. Um, one of the things I've enjoyed most about being involved with this program is they've been pretty flexible with allowing us to kind of alter scope over the course of the engagement. So we'll have our first meeting as kind of a cohort on Thursday. Um so I'll be on that call as will our long-range planners. So that's something that I think is definitely in front of mind for us of thinking about sort of some initial tweaks we might need to make to the timeline answer, the scoping of that project. So I think that's definitely something we've been talking about more generally of um, you know, even do we want to keep it just focused on vacant properties? Do we want to think about um you know properties you might categorize as underutilized? So I think there's definitely some flexibility to make some changes at the margins there and use the analysis um to the best of our um, you know, being able to make that analysis useful for multiple topics. And just a follow-up, so would it be fair for us to potentially send you in if there's particular areas that we feel like over time we've kind of seen those pressures that we might might want for consideration, kind of now would be the time to kind of send on your direction then that would be great. Thank you. Teresa. Um, so I I guess I just wanted to clarify is it the is it properties that have houses that are run down or vacant, or is it just properties that don't have anything on there at all that are just absent of any structures?