The Fayetteville City Council held a work session on Monday, April 6, 2026, beginning at 3:00 PM. Key topics included the Dogwood Festival funding request, the 2026-2027 Annual Action Plan for federal grants, renewal of the School Resource Officer (SRO) Memorandum of Agreement, proposed changes to City Council Policy 120.09, and a discussion on telecommunications and data storage facilities (data centers). Council also considered several council member agenda item requests. The meeting included recognitions and a public forum, with the latter heavily focused on community opposition to data centers.
Good afternoon, everyone. On this April Sixth, my wife's lovely birthday. Happy birthday, friend. Let us bring our uh work session uh to order. Can we have an invocation by Council Member Malik Davis? Let us all bow our heads. One nation. I'm the guy. In the visible with liberty and justice problem. Can we get a motion to approve the agenda? So move to approve, sir. Yes. Um, very short um announcement today. Um, as so Chris Call, if you could come forward and uh introduce a new staff member we have with us. Okay, not doing work sessions. There we go. Good afternoon, Mayor Pro Town Council. Um, about nine months ago or so, um city manager encouraged me to apply for a competitive grant through the International City County Managers Association. Uh so we put in a grant application for a program they were working on for economic mobility and opportunity. Uh we got awarded one of 16 grants uh in the country. And so what that grant does is it allowed us to hire somebody with uh appropriate background and experience to come be part of our community and work with us for a couple of years and to figure out um how we can address some of the things that we found in a couple of studies that have happened over the years, y'all might have heard of. Um was a study conducted at Harvard called the Opportunity Atlas, and that talked about the likelihood that a child born in poverty would get out of poverty during their lifetime. And Fayetteville did not score very well in large metropolitan areas on that study. Uh similar work was replicated with Winston Salem State University a few years later, uh found similar uh findings. And so over the years we've done a lot of work. City council has invested uh a lot of resources and time and energy in addressing these issues. Um we don't know if we're any better off than we were in 2016. And so the hope with this grant is to bring in uh Terry, um who I'll introduce in just a second, and uh to really assess where we are as a community, what long-term viability of some of the efforts that we put in place are, and really come up with concrete actions that we can measure and hold ourselves accountable to to making sure that we can improve economic economic opportunity in our community. So with that, I'll ask Terry Slipka to come up here. Uh Terry has uh over two decades of experience working in economic development across the world. Um he's worked with local governments and states and even countries on uh setting up economic systems. Uh we were very fortunate enough to land him for the next two and a half years or so, and uh this is not the last time you'll see him, but it's our our first chance to kind of introduce him. So, Terry. Okay. Uh thank you. I appreciate the introduction from Chris and thank you, council members and attendees for the opportunity to introduce myself. Uh, with family who settled about 15 years ago, about 45 minutes from here. I've really appreciated the opportunity to come and do what I can to help the council and the people of Fayetteville realize their economic opportunities. As Chris said, I've worked around the world, worked with over a hundred municipalities in a number of countries to do those very things, and I think the opportunity to come back and bring that experience and work with the people of Fayetteville to find what's needed here and really develop evidence-based uh ideas that help inform policy choice and help unlock the potential of the people here is a great opportunity for me. It's an honor to come back here and work with you, with the council, with everyone here, the organizations in the private sector, and I look forward to doing that and us to achieving great results for the city and for the people and for the region. So thank you very much. Thank you, sir, and welcome aboard. Uh just yes, let's give it up for them. No, no, no. Thank you. Thank you. We we we expect great things, and we know you're going to deliver great things. Just earlier today, I was on uh with Councilmember Hondros. We were talking about the future of Fayetteville. And we need economic impact for the city of Fayetteville, so we can see so we can anticipate what we want to see five, ten, fifteen years from now when most office most of us are off this diocese.