Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to the community development committee meeting for Tuesday, June 9th.

And now call the meeting to order and ask for approval of February 10th meeting minutes.

Second.

Second.

Any comments?

Seeing none, all in favor, say aye.

Aye.

All in the negative, say no.

Seeing none, let's move on.

We have briefings today.

First one is a library's strategic plan, Dori.

Good afternoon.

Mayor Pro Tem Flores and Council members on the Community Development Committee.

It's wonderful to see you all today, and I'm very excited to share with you some updates to our library strategic planning process.

Our plan is called The Next Chapter Starts With You, which I think is a lot of fun.

We have our current strategic plan that expired in 2021.

It was a three year plan.

And you can see we had six focus areas that we really wanted to look at as a result of that study that was done.

We're very passionate about our customer engagement.

And you can see I'm not going to read through all of these, but you know, we're very focused on serving the community.

Arts and culture is another area where we've really made a lot of strides, education and growth, which is really about learning and making that fun for folks.

Of course, we are the library, so we'll always be looking at books and reading.

Community vitality is really about nurturing economic development, entrepreneurship, and just creating that opportunity for all people to thrive.

And then lastly, but very, very important is our employee empowerment, just making sure that we're supporting our city's goals and really working with our people to develop them into great library employees and also just hopefully happy and healthy folks.

I have a colleague who likes to say we've squeezed every single last drop that we possibly could have out of our current strategic plan.

These are just a sampling of the accomplishments that have resulted from the strategic plan.

You can see many, many of the things that were done.

I want to just highlight a few of these for you.

Increased checkout of library materials was a big goal.

And I know many of you have heard me say this before, but I'm really excited that our FY25 number of checkouts, which was just over 4.3 million checkouts, was our highest ever recorded amount of checkouts in the history of Fort Worth Public Library.

Yes, cheer for that.

Another real key accomplishment is the elimination of fines and fees as a barrier.

I'm really happy that we are no longer penalizing people for overdue materials.

A lot of studies have shown that when you reduce barriers like overdue fines, you actually increase usage of the library, and we've seen that happen.

Also, just our programming.

I would be remiss if I didn't say we have really been focusing on our programming at Fort Worth Public Library over the past really like five years.

And what's very exciting about that, and many of you have heard me say this as well, that we had uh nearly 132,000 program attendees for FY25, which is also our highest recorded ever amount of program attendees in the history of Fort Worth Public Library.

And you can read through the rest of these, but the last one I just really want to highlight, is about our team.

This one is provide staff with ongoing learning and development opportunities.

We have worked really, really hard to provide our team some additional learning opportunities.

One of these things that we've implemented is called the Empower Hour, and that gives all folks in our department one hour a week that they can focus on any kind of development that they would like to do for themselves.

We've also started a program called Build the Bench, where we're working with kind of our next generation of leaders in the library department, just working with folks so that they can kind of understand what it means to be a supervisor at Fort Worth Public Library, what are the kinds of skills that I need, who are the contacts I would need to know, et cetera.

It's been a really uh popular and successful program, and I'm very proud of it.

So you might be thinking to yourself, if the old strategic plan expired in 2022, why are we kicking this all off in 2026?

We really wanted to wait till we had some permanent leadership in place for the department.

And now that we've got that in place, we have a new assistant director as well as a new ish, I'm not going to call myself new anymore, but I'll add the ish to the end of it, director.

We went ahead and hired the consulting firm, Barry Dunn, in 2025, and that was back in August.

And since then, we've really just been gathering all kinds of feedback, both internally and externally.

We really want this plan to reflect the hopes and dreams of our community.

And I know that sounds a little bit woo woo, but we really know that if our community doesn't support and like what we're doing, they're not going to use us.

And we want to make sure that we're providing the kinds of things that our community is excited about.

So to that end, we've been doing quite a few things to gather their feedback and ideas.

Barry Dunn did deploy a statistically valid survey to random households in the city of Fort Worth.

They needed 400 responses to get to that 95% confidence rating.

They did receive just a few more than that, 475 responses, and that does provide for about a four and a half percent margin of error.

What's really exciting about this, and I hope to come back and just kind of give you an update just about this piece.

But when they looked at the respondents, they were almost equally distributed between all of our council districts, which was amazing to me.

They were also almost distributed totally equally between ages, and they even got non-users to respond, which was also very interesting to me because you would think, you know, you get this survey in the mail.

If I don't even use the library, why would I care to even fill the survey out?

But we actually have several non-users who had not been to the library in the past year fill the survey out, which is great.