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.

There's also currently running through, I think mid-June, our social point.

This is an online survey.

We've had 749 contributions as of May 29th, so we've probably picked up a few more since then.

I would really encourage you all to, when you're chatting with your constituents, if they have thoughts or ideas about the library, please share with them that we have this online right now, and they can access it and provide their thoughts and ideas.

We also hosted our first community task force meeting on June 3rd, and we had a very wonderful and dedicated group of folks who came together really in a focus group of just community leaders to share their thoughts and ideas about the library and our future.

We also met as a library advisory board last week with our consultant.

They provided some wonderful feedback, and then we'll be doing the same with our library foundation board members.

There have also been multiple in-person community engagements where the consultants have been on site, they've been attending different community events, our different library events.

They've got one of their engagement specialists also speaks Spanish, so we're able to, you know, get some feedback from a couple of different communities in a multitude of well, at least two different languages.

Internally, we formed our project core team back in October.

These are our really folks that represent key kind of functions within our department, and they're also subject matter experts.

We also have two different employee advisory councils.

We have 24 members in total, they represent all different levels of our organization as well as all of our different locations.

And then we're hoping that some of you might be interested in doing some interviews with us to provide some further feedback.

I just wanted to share this with you.

I think this is really a lot of fun.

This is a word cloud that came out of the meeting that happened with one of our actually with both of our employee teams, our advisory councils.

You can see they were asked during the session to give some ideas, some words that they felt described the Fort Worth public library, and then from all of their submissions, this word cloud was formed.

So you can see books is still the biggest thing and really central, the key idea here, but you can see all of the other wonderful and amazing words that they're thinking.

Maybe not all the words are wonderful and amazing, but there's a lot of I think really great ideas there.

And it's really really fun to get this feedback from our team to see where they're thinking and how they feel about the work that they're doing and how they feel about our department and our organization.

So just to come, we're gonna keep the social pinpoint online survey until the middle of June.

So we've got about I think another week or two left on that.

We'll have our next advisory council meeting with our internal teams on July 27th.

We hope to again schedule some city council interviews and city leadership interviews, and then we hope to do the final reporting and uh have a completed plan for our community and for all of you by the end of FY26.

Nothing to it.

Easy peasy.

And that is the update.

I'm happy to take any questions if you have any.

Any questions from the board?

I have one, Midori.

Uh, first, thanks for the presentation.

Secondly, on the um I can get my terminology straight.

Let's see.

Yes.

Mentioned how many responses you've gotten, but was there a goal going into it that you wanted to hit terms of responses?

It's a great question.

I think for that one, we'd really like to have as many as we can possibly get.

You know, we have a community of over a million people, bless you.

So we'd love to have you know more, but I think um we didn't we didn't have like a specific number.

Is that something that us as council members can you know promote and share on our social media to help you out?

Yes, that would be great.

Be happy to send you all the links if you would like to share that.

Thank you.

Thank you.

All right, next up.

I guess uh this is uh going to be a joint presentation, Marilyn and Jared.

And uh let's see.

Monique, are you in this one too?

Oh, okay, well.

Whoever would like to come to the podium and tell us about the South Community Center and National June Team Museum.

So great to see you all, Mayor Pro Tim and Council members.

Um, Monique and I are going to uh share uh work together on this presentation, and then Jared will be after we're done.

So we're talking about the South Side Community Center, and uh as Jared will fill you in, the National Juneteenth Museum is going to be constructed on the land that our current South Side Community Center resides on.

And in order to support Juneteenth, we are moving Southside Community Center to Hazel Harvey Peace Center.

And in order to do that, we have to do some construction to uh the first floor of Hazel Harvey Peace, and then move everything from Southside to Hazel Harvey Peace.

We began construction on the first floor in April of 2026, and on May 20th, we had a great time with council member Nettles and community members where they got to uh hammer through a wall, and it was a lot of fun, and then we toured them on the construction that's happening today and explaining where things would be.

We expect uh construction to be completed July 31st, and then that will at the end I'll explain uh when we think the land will be ready for Jared and his team.

I'm gonna turn it over to Monique.

Good afternoon.

We're really excited about this project, especially with Juneteenth coming, and we're starting celebrating today, so it's perfect timing.

Um so one of the things we wanted to make sure of, and Councilmember uh Nettles wanted to make sure as well as we move Southside that all of the services that we have would remain intact.

So we're really excited about that.

So we currently are working with all of our program participants.

We've started giving them the heads up that we're moving.

Uh, we'll be working on messaging.

Um, one of the things that was really uh exciting where you saw where we were hammering the wall is it allows us to begin to tell the story, right?

Of this transition and get everyone excited about that.

Um so we are working with all the agencies and uh our customers.

So we'll start some outreach and start talking about that and getting that out.

But you'll see our kiddos are having fun, some of our seniors and those pictures, and we expect that to transition over to Hazel Harvey piece as well.

So, some of the things that we want to make sure uh that we let the community know and make you aware of is we will continue to have our public spaces, as you know.

All of our community centers offer public spaces where you can rent them out, and so we'll have that for public meetings and input.

Um, we'll also keep our um uh special events and voting.

So, voting is really high uh at Southside Community Center.

It was important for us to make sure that that remains a service available to the community, so that would also be there.

And then, of course, our older adults.

Um, we have the step in grannies that uh practice at South Side Community Center.

So we want to make sure that we keep them active, and so we'll have space, uh, particularly for them, and we're really excited with the opportunity to have a team program where we're talking about podcasts, and then our community action partners program in partnership with NSD will also move over.

So we're moving intact, and we're really excited about our new start.

And just to wrap it up, so our next steps we will uh, as mentioned, we'll complete construction July 31st.

We anticipate it'll take us about a month and a half to two months to actually move South Side to South Side at Hazel Harvey Peace.

Um, and then we will have a grand opening.

The date is yet to be determined, but um I'm sure Monique will get that message out to everyone about a grand opening, and then the land, once we've moved, the land will then be available at 959 East Roseville, will be available for the Juneteenth Museum.

With that, we're done.

If you have any questions before we turn it over to Jared.

Questions, anyone?

All right, we're good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

We'll get a big introduction, drum roll, anything, you want.

Thank you.

Well, let me say good afternoon to everybody and thank you for having me.

Uh I am Jared Howard with the forthcoming National June Teeth Museum, and I'm absolutely exhausted.

So they gave me two hours to do this presentation.

I told them to give me 10 minutes, and I'll give them the rest of the time back.

Uh, we are excited about the future of the National Juneteenth Museum, but before there will be a National Juneteenth Museum, we've got to celebrate Juneteenth, which you all know happens in about 10 days from now.

So, uh, in the spirit of Juneteenth and all the things that Ms.

Opal Lee has worked for, happy Juneteenth to this council.

Uh, let me say before I put my presentation, thank you certainly to Councilman Nettles and to Valerie and their teams who have been working feverishly to support our initiative here.

Uh, and I'm really grateful and indebted to their team for the work that they've done.

I have a brief presentation, I'll go through it in seven or so minutes.

But I the the what I really want you to see is a short video.

But let's uh next slide.

Oh, I got it.

Okay.

I've told you I'm tired.

So uh let's see.

There it is.

There is an image of the forthcoming, this one right here.

What do you go back?

Gotcha.

Uh, there is an image of what is coming to 959 East Rosedale.

This is the what we hope will be the final rendering of the forthcoming National Juneteenth Museum.

I won't spend a great deal of time talking about the architecture.

I'll invite you to our website, www.national juneteethmuseum.org to learn about the architecture.

But I will tell you that it is strategic and intentional.

Our mission to keep Juneteenth alive in every heart and in every mind.

It is really that simple for us, and our vision is to become the world's epicenter for Juneteenth programs and education right here in Fort Worth.

While we certainly recognize that General Granger and Union Soldiers arrived in Galveston to enforce the emancipation Proclamation, the city of Fort Worth, which happens to be the country's 10th largest and is a part of the soon to be third largest MSA in the country.

It's probably a better place for a number of different reasons, but not the least of which is the amount of visibility that the museum will get here.

You all know that Fort Worth is already a Mecca for museums, and we intend to add to that pedigree.

We are building a 50,000 square foot culture complex.

It is not just a museum.

By all intents and purposes, it'll be anchored by the National Juneteenth Museum on the second floor.

But you don't build uh an edifice like this on the historic south side without addressing some of the issues that exist in the community.

Some of the ones that they told us they wanted us to help with were the fact that it is a food desert.

There's a great deal of food and security there.

So we're gonna have a food hall featuring five local, what they call foodpreneurs in the space.

And so right now, as you all are aware, the only restaurant they can sit down and have a meal at on Sunday afternoon at a church is a jack in the box.

And so that dynamic will change with the National Juneteenth Museum.

We've got a 250 seat theater that's going to be included in the construction of the National June Teeth Museum.

It's not lost to anybody here that Leon Bridges grew up in this neighborhood.

Kirk Franklin grew up in this neighborhood.

People like Channing Godfrey Peoples grew up in this neighborhood.

People like uh Tamron Hall grew up in this neighborhood.

The unfortunate thing is they had to go outside of the neighborhood to hone their crafts because there wasn't quite frankly anything in the neighborhood that would house what they were working on.

That dynamic will change.

We will have productions, we will have conversations, sometimes hard conversations, but all of that will happen in the 250-seat uh state-of-the-art theater that will be included in the National Juneteenth Museum.

At the core of everything we're doing, we are trying to incubate some economic development, right?

And so, as a consequence, one of the things we're going to do is we're going to incubate businesses with the business incubator.

Uh, there are people in this community that have skills that are monetizable, they simply don't know how to monetize, though.

We intend to bring them into the business incubator, teach them entrepreneurship skills and scale the businesses that already exist in the community.

So we're really excited about that.

One of the things Monique talked about is black box space.

We call it black box space.

It's for all intents and purposes, just space that can be used for any particular purpose.

The room can be configured for a birthday party, a wedding reception, a bar mitzvah, a seance.

If you rent it, you can do it in the building.

Uh and so that will be also in the National Juneteenth Museum.

And one of the things that we promised to the City of Fort Worth and to the citizenry of the community is that when we build the National Juneteenth Museum, we will make space for those at polling location that they love so much.

So we're really excited about that.

Alright, here is I'll ask for your discretion, and I know this is a public meeting, and everybody gets to see it, but I will ask that you don't tell anybody at least, because you're going to be the first group of people to see what I'm about to show you right now, which is a fly-through render of the interior of the National Juneteenth Museum.

So can I get a drum roll, please?

Thank you.

Alright, I'm gonna try to narrate really quickly you all.

This is obviously on Rosedale in New York.

This is as if you were coming to look at the National Juneteenth Museum, walking up the frontage of Rosedale up those stairs.

Okay, now we're done.

Alright.

Oh, I'm sorry, I was a little ahead of you.

Alright, so saving my reclaiming my time, reclaiming my time.

Uh, this is this is the front of the museum as you walk across Rosedale Avenue and you walk into the front of the building.

This is what you will see.

Once you go in to the front of the building, you'll see a stairwell on the second, there, which takes you up to the second floor, and that will take you to the museum experience.

The museum experience is on the second floor.

She's gonna turn right to see the museum exhibitions and learn all about Juneteenth.

Let me catch you a breath here.

Interactive, it is digital, it is incredible.

It's going to add to the great lure of Fort Worth Museums in a very significant way.

If I can pause that there for about 10 seconds, you'll back me up about 10 seconds on that video.

What uh the video was about to show was the food hall.

So in the morning, the food hall.

If not, nowhere, I can just kind of talk through it.

In the morning from six o'clock, it's about midway through.

A little bit back.

Back.

Back.

There you go, right there.

Alright, so this is the shot of the food hall, right?

I don't want to pause, I don't want to uh delay the meeting.

This is the shot of the food hall.

In the previous clip, you would have seen an area that is for all intents and purposes a sports bar.

So if you come between six and three in the morning, you'll be able to get a cup of coffee.

If you come after three o'clock in the afternoon, you'll be able to buy a drink, right?

All in the same location on the historic south side.

And there's nowhere to buy either of those.

There's it is reflected right there as it stands right now.

Keep going.

This is the food hall where the food vendors will be located, that's on the east side of the building.

This is the business incubator.

There's space for 50 co-working spaces in the building.

And there's another shot of the business incubator.

This is the theater.

As you can see on the second floor, the people are maneuvering around the museum, and this is what the theater will look like.

It is called the red theater.

We'll talk about that later.

This is the community hall, so it goes all the way around the inside perimeter of the building.

Here's a courtyard, and as you look at the roofs, you'll see the Juneteenth Star carved out into the roof line.

So that is a quick, very quick fly through of what's coming to Southeast Fort Worth, and we're really, really excited about that.

Next slide, almost done.

Reclaiming my time.

No, back to the slide presentation.

To the slide deck.

You're with us, Jerry.

No worries.

All right, here we are.

Here's a brief timeline of uh how this idea came to be.

It for those that may not be aware.

It started in 2015 with a conversation with newly uh appointed city manager David Cook, right?

David and I started having meetings on alternating Mondays, and he asked me a couple of questions about what would it take to make Fort Worth more attractive to people like me.

I am a marketing guy, both by nature, it's the way God made me and by trade.

Both of my degrees are in marketing, and so I did a focus group to answer that question.

And the thing that that triggered me was we need uh a coal corridor for cultural engagement.

Right, the city of Fort Worth is now surpassed a million residents, as we all know.

Uh 19 slash 20 percent of those are African Americans.

That means there are 200,000 African American people in the city of Fort Worth, but there is not a very strong African American footprint, cultural footprint in the city of Fort Worth.

And that the city's too big not to have that, right?

One of the beautiful components of a beautiful city is the cultures that exist, the microcultures that exist.

But that hasn't always been the case in Fort Worth, as you all know.

The historic South Side was the epicenter of black life in the city of Fort Worth historically, with Mr.

Madison McDonald and the investments that he made.

The beautiful thing about this community is that the stewards of the community have done uh a yeoman's job of preserving the history.

So we want to honor the things that they've done with the work that we're continuing to be continuing to do.

There's a timeline.

Uh, if we have our druthers, we will uh demolish the South Side Community Center with the community's blessing, I'll add uh this fall, and we'll start commenced construction shortly thereafter.

Almost done.

Next slide.

Oh, I got it, don't I?

Here we go.

All right, so here are our four program pillars preserve, celebrate, expand local economies.

I want to put a note there and then promote the culture.

Uh here are our core competencies, if you see competencies as an organization, if you will, right now at this particular moment.

We're focused on getting this building constructed.

Miss Opal Godville will be 100 years old on October 7th, and we want her to experience as much of our work as God will allow her to.

Partnerships, and that includes any and everybody.

Certainly, we are grateful for the partnership that we have with the city of Fort Worth ongoing, and then the programs.

Speaking of programs, uh this in another week or so, we're gonna launch our Freedom Vives program.

I'll tell you more about that in just a second.

Let's talk about this for a quick moment.

Um, our we had the Oxford uh Oxford Economics to do an economic impact study for us, and the byproduct of that study that we learned in that study through that study that more than 100,000 people will visit uh the National Juneteenth Museum every year.

The key component of that is more than half of those people will be non-Fort Worthians, which means they will be coming into Fort Worth to visit and to spend money.

And another component: 25 of the people that visit will stay overnight in the city of Fort Worth.

And so we're really excited about what this will do for uh the local economy.

We think it will have more than 20 million dollars of annual impact, and we're confident that we will produce more than 180 jobs per year.

Capital program, we're at 52 million dollars of a 70 million dollar campaign.

If I use old math, I don't know about the new math, but in the old math, that's more than 70% of the way there, thanks to all the people you see on the screen.

We do have a strategy right now that will get us to our goal that includes philanthropic partners, corporate, private, government, and other programs.

You all are probably aware that the great state of Texas uh gave us a 10 million dollar appropriation in the last legislature session session.

So we're really excited about that.

Uh last thing, and I'll be out of the way and take your questions.

We have uh the Freedom Vibes Festival coming up starting on Thursday of this week.

Freedom Vibes is our effort to be effort to be present before we are present.

We can ill afford to wait until the museum is built to be present in this community because America is grasping for Juneteenth programs and content.

And if we really want to be the epicenter of all of that, then we need to be active now.

So the byproduct of that is we've got an 11-day festival that will cause people to converge on the city of Fort Worth to participate in all these great things that we're doing.

What you see on the screen right now are some of the programs.

We are tapping into the eras.

We are bringing our homeboy Kirk Franklin, who's from Fort Worth home to help us celebrate gospel music on this Sunday at the Potter's House of Fort Worth on uh the 80 on Friday and Saturday, June 19th and the 20th, we will have what we believe to be what we've been advised will be the final two concerts at the Fort Worth Convention Center Arena.

And so we'll be sending the arena away in style.

Uh this will be, if we have our our druthers, will be an annual festival that will annually cause people to come to Fort Worth during Juneteenth.

I think that's my presentation.

Let me pause and see if there are any questions for me.

Any questions from the board?

Any Chris?

Yeah, please.

No questions.

Thank you, Jay, for the presentation.

Uh I really want to just take an opportunity.

I know as we get closer and closer to really uh thank staff, the city managers team, uh David Cook and Jay Chopper uh for continuing the work.

Uh we had talked about this one uh Jerry came about um using the South South Community Center as the National General Tech Museum.

But what was very important to myself and the community is that South South Community Center is a historic community, and it did not need to lose its vibrant, its voice or its statue in the city of Fort Worth on the south side.

And so we was able to work with city management to get not just a facility but uh upgrade facility uh that has an elevator and has uh police presence and other staff there uh and well as voting.

And so I really want to thank the public-private partnership with the city of Fort Worth and with the National Gene Tech Museum.

This is things that we can do when we work together.

So I really want to just really thank staff for all the work that you guys are doing.

I look forward to opening up Southside Community Center Havy Harry Peace as well as the groundbreaking of the National General Tech Museum in Historic South Side.

So thank you guys for working together.

Let's continue the work.

Thank you, Jared.

That's a really exciting presentation.

Can't wait to see finished product.

You've been there from the beginning, and we uh pray that that will continue.

Our commitment and our vow to the city of Fort Worth is that you will be proud of the work we do.

So we're it's been challenging, but I think the word product is really gonna show for it.

You know, it's gonna be a really wonderful addition.

Thank you.

Yes, sir.

Um, on the co-working space, uh, are you gonna have a mentor program for those startups?

Yes, very much so.

So we are we our goal is to be soup to nuts in that business incubator, right?

To take the, you know, 10-year-old budding entrepreneur and the 75-year-old person who's been in business for a very long time.

I'm uh former employee of the Fort Worth Chamber of Commerce.

So uh and one of the things I tried to do, I led uh a pillar called entrepreneurship and small business.

When I was there, I worked really, really closely with Goldman Sachs to bring their 10 KSB or 10,000 small Businesses program to Fort Worth.

Because Fort Worthians that participate have to go all the way to Dallas to do so, and I think that's a sad indictment on what is now the 10th largest city.

There's no way we should have to go 40 miles away to participate in such a program like that.

But those are the types of programs uh that we intend to bring to the uh incubator once we open.

And the music for just for everybody's benefit, the museum is not going into the business of running a business incubator or running for.