The Raleigh City Council held a work session on May 13, 2025, at 4:00 PM to review the Sociable City Assessment results and receive an update on the Glenwood South Safety Pilot. The meeting featured presentations from the Office of Special Events, the Responsible Hospitality Institute (RHI), and the Transportation Department. Council members discussed findings, recommendations, and next steps for improving nightlife, safety, and mobility in downtown districts.
Council members raised questions and comments on various aspects:
Can we burn them through the thing? Can I find it? We do have a quorum and I don't think anybody has an excused absence. Uh so hopefully people will be uh coming. But we have uh the sociable city assessment results, and so we will invite up Whitney Schoenfield and Monique. Yeah. Good afternoon, Mayor and members of council. Once again, I'm Whitney Schoenfeld with the Office of Special Events. While our office is well known for managing special event permits, we do have work that extends well beyond that scope. So we also have a hospitality and nightlife team comprised of two full-time staff members from our office who play a key role in helping support and shape our city's social and nighttime economy. So each of you has a printed copy of our sociable city assessment plan in front of you, in addition to the digital version provided in your agenda materials. Please note that this final report serves as a recommended work plan outlining potential actions and implementation steps should we choose to do them. We acknowledge that not all of the recommendations presented may be feasible, and some of these may fall outside of the city's authority to do. However, there are actional items that we can take. The report generally provides a framework to guide and enhance the work of various city departments, partner agencies, and community stakeholders. At this time, I'd like to introduce Rachel Bain, who leads our hospitality and nightlife team to share a few remarks and introduce our consultant who will walk us through the presentation of the findings. We'll take questions at the end of our portion of the presentation, and then we also have transportation staff here to provide updates on the Glenwood South traffic safety study that they've done as well. Thank you, Whitney. Good afternoon, Council. As Whitney mentioned, my name is Rachel Bain, and I am on the hospitality and nightlife team within the Office of Special Events. Today we are so excited for y'all to see the report findings of the Sociable City Assessment, which has been years in the making. So how exactly did we get here? Our team has been guided by the principals of the responsible hospitality institute. You may hear us say or see it written as an acronym, RHI. So I just wanted to preface that if that rolls off the tongue easier than responsible hospitality institute. We have attended their annual conference for the past four years, and we've been able to network and learn best practices from other nightlife offices such as New York City, Nashville, Sacramento, Austin, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, Savannah, and more. And finally, our community for bringing their lived and experiences throughout downtown Raleigh to be a part of this report. I would like to mention that tomorrow night at 6 p.m. in the chapel at Dix Park, we will also be doing an overview of this assessment. We've invited all of our project participants in the community to come out and hear in case they weren't able to attend today's session or tune in. And we are also launching a web page on the city's website so the community will be able to access and read this report in full. So without further ado, I'm going to introduce Jocelyn Kane from the Responsible Hospitality Institute. She's going to share a little overview of them, what the process was for this assessment, and the findings for the city of Raleigh. Thank you. Good afternoon. Let's see if I can thanks. All right, we're going to maneuver through this PowerPoint. Hopefully you can uh hold your questions till I get through it. But if there's something burning, let me know. We'll go we'll go through it. Okay, so RHI, as Rachel mentioned, is a nonprofit. We were founded in 1983, maybe before some of you were born, with a mission to assist businesses and communities to create safe and vibrant places to socialize. We are the leading North American source of events, resources, and consultation services on nightlife and what we call the social economy. And we have provided technical service like this to over 80, probably closer to 90 communities in five countries. So I think we know a little bit about what we're talking about. Again, as Rachel mentioned, we had to narrow this study to two districts, Glenwood South and Fayetteville. But again, some of these recomm many of these recommendations can be thought of as assisting and help helpful in other neighborhoods. We didn't come here to tell you how to fix Raleigh from our perspective. We came here to listen to the city of Raleigh. So we were here three times.