Work session will come to order.

Thank you.

All right.

Good morning, uh Mayor and Council.

Today's work session, we have one topic, and that topic is an update on the DMV site.

You will recall the city acquired this property from the state of North Carolina, and we've gone through an exercise of gaining community input and feedback into what could be some potential opportunities.

So today we have a trio presentation.

We have Nikki Jones, we have Taisha Mosley, and we have Ken Bowers here to present this item.

Good afternoon, Mayor and Council.

And I will work fast because I do think this presentation may go a little bit long.

Nikki Jones, City Manager's Office.

So as part of our regular cadence to bring this body major project updates, today we're going to talk about the DMV site.

So today I have Director Mosley, Professor Bowers with us, and we will update you all on the work that they and their great teams have been working on.

So if you didn't know, we have been engaging with the community for 20 months.

And we anticipate demolition being complete on the big block side, if you will, uh this time next year.

So with that, I'm going to pass it over to Director Mosley to talk about our community engagement efforts.

Good morning, Mayor, Council, City Manager, Taisha Mosley with the community engagement office.

So we spent a little bit of time talking about the site.

As you can guess, we are now going to shift to discussing the community.

This beautiful photo that you see here is a picture of residents who lived in the area in the 1950s.

Community engagement was critical to this process because we wanted to honor and preserve the rich history of the Newborn Avenue Corridor.

We also wanted to ensure that we understood the needs and the community's vision for the site.

Many are in the audience today, if you don't mind standing for me, please.

And just giving them a round of applause.

All right.

So I just want to remind council that the community engagement framework was the roadmap to our work.

It included four steps.

Step one was the research.

This is when we began in October of 2023, having conversations and engagement with residents and trying to gain input and ideas around how we could best inform engagement for the site.

We began conversations with organizations like Prosper Portland and Williams and Russell CDC, who had a lot of engagement, who had a lot of experience with engagement and redevelopment processes.

And we took their experiences and best practices and we brought that back here to figure out how we can incorporate it in Raleigh.

Step two was when we focused a lot of our time on temporary site activations.

We knew that once that final group of state employees left the site that it was going to be vacant, and we had a couple of goals.

One, bring people to the site, two, have conversations with them about what they felt and thought that the community needed, and then three, share information with them about how they can get involved in the process.

Step three is where we spent the majority of our time learn and ideate.

So I mean, excuse me, prioritize and curate.

So we had a lot of community presentations, and by a lot, I mean over 50.

This is when the project working group began exploring site opportunities.

They actually held their last formal meeting on June 12th, which was last week, and they put the final touches on those site opportunities.

And then step four of the process, Kim Bowers would talk more about the market study, the request for proposal, et cetera.

So these project working group members are truly the authentic ambassadors to the broader community.

They conducted a deep dive on redevelopment processes.

So some individuals came to the working group who studied redevelopment in their free time.

Others did not know much about the processes.

And so thankful to our planning and development staff, they really conducted a deep dive.

Their case studies ranged from local and national case studies on transit-oriented development, mixed-income housing, et cetera.

And they had over 13 months of meetings and having conversations about how their legacy residents, neighborhood advocates could work together to turn the site into the community's vision.

But in addition to the responsibilities of the group, they also created several milestones.

And their biggest milestone was creating a vetted list that provides an overview of potential site opportunities that align with the community's vision.

And I'm very happy to report that they accomplished that, and you will hear the details of that milestone in just a few.

It reads, What will we have on Newborn Ave transforming the DMV site?

So this large building, it was very important for us to inform residents that something was happening and let them know where they could find information on what was happening.

So the sign includes a QR code that takes them to our website that has regular updates about the site.

So we would have conversations with residents who are walking by or getting off the bus because there's a stop right there in front of the site, or they would see the van and they would stop driving and come talk to us because we may have had incentives like snacks and music to come chat with us.

And we had iPads for them to complete our survey, and we had countless conversations, and really an immeasurable amount of relationships were built to just make sure we were capturing what the community wanted to see here.

The top values included quality of life and community connection.

And we will have a full report on our engagement efforts made available to the public soon.

So to recap before we go into the details, the community priorities were informed by that community survey that we just shared, the 55 community meetings, the 13 meetings conducted by the project working group, lived experiences, and in a market analysis that our planning and development staff conducted.

You're about to see six high priorities, four low priorities and order of preference that will all be incorporated into the request for proposal.

So high priorities, affordable housing, with the key goal being housing options for families under 60% of the area median income.