Okay.

So I'm going to go through this somewhat quickly.

The goal is to get a consensus or some ideas from the committee members.

Um what has been attached to today's backup, the draft ordinance has not yet been sent through our process for legal.

It's just merely as an example.

I I wrote it, so I'm sure it's riddled with error.

But the the point is to get some get some feedback, get some consensus before we send it to Rachel for full council consideration.

Can you hear me back there, Lance?

Is it okay?

Okay, good.

It feels very unnatural.

But I'm going, I'm good.

We have no new microphones, so thank you very much to the uh to Lance and his team, audiovisual team for that.

Many, many, many months spent waiting for that.

So that's great.

Thank you very much.

Okay, so the cracks or the sort of the the idea.

Um backing up a minute.

The concept of the career technology center is one that has been widely discussed in our community at the Frederick County level and at the Board of Education level level.

But this was emailed to me, so I don't have a reason to believe it's not a good study.

I I thought it was amazing.

I read it and thought it had a lot of good information.

But I couldn't find it on their website, so I will work on figuring that out.

I don't know if they're I don't know if it's going to the board of ed or I'm not sure.

But the purpose of today is to reconsider essentially the ongoing practice of having an a balance in the school mitigation fund.

Um we have historically as a city collected uh collected these fees as part of our due diligence and our process through the develop the through the development process.

But there really isn't an ongoing mechanism to make sure that those funds are in fact transferred to the Frederick County public to Frederick County Public Schools.

We've had a history, and I don't want to misspeak, but I'm happy to pull this if anyone's interested.

But my understanding is essentially since I've been here serving on the council, the history is something to the effect of the county executive sends a letter and says, hey, we would like these funds for this purpose, and you know, we then have allocated funds for that purpose.

But essentially we don't, if you're familiar with the school mitigation fee ordinance, we don't program out where the specifically where the money goes.

We talk about things that it can be used for, but we don't actually prescribe where it needs to go.

And so the effect of that, and this is my editorializing, has been that we have amassed money and the money just sits in an account.

And this board, I think has, and this council excuse me, has indicated not just with this source of funding, but with other sources of funding for accounts, um, a desire to not to end that practice of just having these accounts sit with millions of dollars in them not doing the good that it was intended for.

And so I put forward this proposal to essentially um start the conversation, move the conversation forward about what our role should be.

Um I think we could have a really good healthy debate about the various really good uses for this funding.

I, for one, I'm a huge advocate for universal pre-K, but I recognize that maybe that isn't going to happen with six million dollars.

So I really thought about what we were where where we were as a pivotal moment in our community and what the needs were and the fact that the county had already done this study to lay out the groundwork for why we needed to invest in um career technical education and especially having the CTC now be in the City of Frederick limits.

I'm very motivated to see that any additional CTC uh resources remain within the City of Frederick.

And so that is the sort of rationale, the origin for why um I've proposed what I proposed.

Um but I'm I would like your feedback.

I would like um any questions that you have.

There's additional information.

This is the first time that we're seeing this proposal.

Well, this is the first time that we're talking about it as a group.

So again, like this is just the introduction, but um looking for any feedback that will make your any decision making or answering questions that you have.

Or I can go through it.

I can do that too if you like.

But well, first, thank you.

I share your philosophy.

Thank you for putting this together and formulating the idea of how to actually put dollars to work.

That is tremendous.

Uh I thought this was great.

My philosophical questions are do we want to be as prescriptive with the red text, uh the red text for those at home are specific recommendations on how funds could be used, or something broad, such as referring to the study, which I realize will have a sunset, but still referring to the study, or referring to uh uh making sure that these funds are spent on city schools and then just put such as and list out two or three and et cetera.

I do not mind I'm perfectly supportive of the this prescriptive list.

So uh that uh just a philosophical question about keeping it broader than that.

And then the other question is I I didn't see where it would be supporting the construction of school buildings.

And just wanted to add, do we want to add in as an optional use of the funds?

So those are the two things other than just gratitude that we're working on this, and this is great.

So the prescriptive text uh council member, I I'm not dug in my heels are not dug in on this.

I will tell you the origin of the prescriptive text was largely language that's specifically from the study.