The Raleigh City Council met on Tuesday, October 7, 2025, in an afternoon session beginning at 1:00 PM and an evening session beginning at 7:00 PM. The meeting covered recognitions, consent agenda items, planning commission recommendations, special items, reports from the city manager and advisory boards, public hearings, and council appointments. The following summary reflects the afternoon session; the evening session was scheduled for additional public hearings.
And that is fine. All right, good afternoon, everybody. Thanks for coming to the meeting. First order is the Pledge of Allegiance. If we can please stand, I'll lead us. I'm going to turn it over to the city manager because we have a recognition and special awards. Good afternoon, Mayor and Council. If we can have Stephen Bentley come to the podium. It is my honor and privilege to acknowledge our Parks Recreation and Cultural Resources Director as he kind of brags on some of the work that his staff has been doing along with this elected body, along with the city's management team, and along with the community to bring our parks um forward in a way that is exciting and in a way that celebrates who we are as a community. So that I won't steal his thunder, I will turn it over to Stephen Bentley. Yeah, thank you, City Manager Adams David, and thank you to my supervisor uh Nikki Jones. Both have been fully supportive of what I'm going to talk about today. Three years ago when the city manager made me director, I said, I want us to be nationally accredited, and she's like, Are you sure? And I said, Yes, I'm confident. So we are here today. Um I'm Stephen Bentley, Director of Raleigh Parks. Uh thank you, Mayor and Council for giving us a few minutes today. Uh I'm excited to share that the Raleigh Parks Department, Parks Recreation and Cultural Resources Department made a significant milestone the last 18 months by becoming nationally accredited. Um you might ask, well, Stephen, what does that mean? Uh there is an organization called the National Recreation and Park Association, which has a group called the Commission for Accreditation for Parks and Recreation Agencies, better known as Capra. Uh it's the only national accreditation program for park agencies in the country. And to put into context, there's about 10,000 park agencies in the United States, and approximately 2% are nationally accredited. And to be even more, we scored perfect. So there's a hundred and fifty-four standards we have to meet. That's fiscal management, that's planning, that's community engagement, that's safety. Because our community deserves it. Of course, as the director, I had the opportunity to stand on stage with some of my peers in this picture. But I didn't do a lot of the work. The work was really done by our staff. We had uh an impact of probably 60 to 70 staff that were involved. There's 10 chapters. Every chapter had a team lead of which they are in this picture here today. But they did this in addition to the duties that we asked them to do every day. So we might have had someone take on an HR chapter, but they weren't an HR specialist, but they said I want to lead, I want to learn more about the city organization. Same goes for fiscal management and safety. So I have a bunch of my staff with me here today. If you were a part of that team, could you please stand up? I do want to give a special acknowledgement. Stay up. Andrea is our social accountability and strategic manager for the department and an advisor to me. She led this entire process. So not only did we have to submit information, we had people come and basically audit our park system. And the four people describe uh Andre as passionate, a fierce leader, detail oriented, and relentless, which I like. So thank you to Andrea. Um she led with passion and compassion and coached a lot of people through leadership and really elevated the thinking for our park system. So thank you, Andrea White, for all your commitment. So we score it perfect. We have to uh do this every five years. I told the staff we have set the bar so we would be perfect again in five years. Um but we also will um will be audited each year.