Recording in progress.

Welcome everybody to our April 14th, 2025 uh City Council study session.

We have four agenda items on our uh actually five agenda items on our meeting today.

Uh first we're gonna hear about language access and accessibility, then we'll hear uh uh on uh report on our compliance update on equity in development, and then we'll hear a Rochester Public Library Master Plan study update, and then a PS2 uh comprehensive plan five year update, and then we will recess from this room, and then the council will go into an executive session after that.

So with that, uh administrators elms, you have any additional items.

I will call uh Jacob Pet to the um podium to give us a presentation on language access and accessibility education.

Now am I on?

Yes, that's better.

Thank you.

Uh okay.

So just as a quick overview, I think I've met some of you already, and I presented to the council before in February of twenty twenty-four, but just as uh an update, my name's Jacob Metz.

I am here as part of a two-year-long fellowship through the Bloomberg Harvard City Leadership Initiative.

Uh so I started in July of 2023 after I got my master's degree in public policy from the Harvard Kennedy School.

Since that time, I've worked with uh Chow as well as um uh Aaron on uh language access and accessibility as a whole.

And uh what really brought me here is I'm honestly very grateful to be here and working on equity in a city in the Midwest again, because I was working for the then deputy mayor of racial equity uh for the city of St.

Louis uh in 2017, so right after the protests in Ferguson.

So there was a large focus on what does it look like to make sure that there are equitable services to any and all community members, regardless of their background, the neighborhood they live in, their identity, the language they speak, and so how do we see what those disparities are and what can we do to be able to address and then close those disparities so that there are more equitable outcomes.

I know that's the mission of us here at the City of Rochester.

I know it's uh Chow's mission as well.

So with that, um, the focus on um for my fellowship was on language access and accessibility.

And as I understood it, the scope really boiled down to two main questions.

The first one being for language access, how can the city of Rochester best serve and work with community members with limited English proficiency?

And then for accessibility, the exact same question.

How can the city of Rochester best serve and work with community members with disabilities?

So I'll start on the language access portion, and there's a copy of the language access plan that was in the packet for your review, so just noting that.

So throughout this presentation, I'll actually refer to uh the community members uh who would be able to use these services as non as having a non-English language preference or NELP.

The reason for that is just to make sure that we're using more value neutral language when describing community members as opposed to saying limited English proficiency, which you would typically see in government documents.

We're choosing to use the phrase NELP instead.

So just as a quick overview of NELP community members here, according to the last numbers from the American Community Survey, a little over 7,100 community members are uh uh our NELP.

And for reference, Byron has just around sixty-five hundred.

So that's basically like a Byron-sized community of folks who we have language barriers with pretty consistently.

So the top five non-English languages within Rochester are Spanish, Somali, Arabic, Khmai, and Mandarin.

And this was found through a combination of census data, Olmsick County court interpreter requests, and then also data from the school district as well.

So also it's a staggering number.

86 home primary languages are spoken in Rochester Public Schools.

So we really do have a wide breadth of language diversity here in our community.

And these are examples of where city teammates have encountered language barriers in their work.

This was found through surveys, talking with community organizations who connect with and represent NELP community members, NUP community members themselves.

So just as a quick example on some of these, like paying a utility bill or explaining services in the field for RPU, or paying a parking ticket and getting a license for a business with the city clerk's office, or like conducting pretrial prep work for the city attorney's office.

So we see these language barriers come up again and again that teammates have tried to navigate and at points can struggle to navigate when our teammate doesn't know or speak or can write in the same language as community members who are trying to reach.

So as a result, and all of these initiatives you can see in the language access plan, this is what we've tried to do about it since 2024.

Four main language access initiatives, the first being language line for 311 and six other city departments.

So we have a negotiated rate with the state of Minnesota for a dollar and five cents a minute for whenever we use language line, which is an outside service that provides 24-7 on-demand uh access to interpreters in a wide variety of languages.

So one of my favorite examples with this is I had a teammate in community development say that what used to take 30 minutes to talk to someone in like tortured Spanglish, their words suddenly only took five minutes because of language line.

So for $5.25, that's a pretty good deal in my eyes.

One of the second ones is teammates receiving the language pay differential.

So we modeled a pilot program.

The pay differential is a pilot program off of what we've seen other cities do and other counties do.

So if you know and can demonstrate proficiency through testing with an outside service, and we use ALTA language services, that you know one of those top five non-English languages that I showed on the other slide, then you're able to get a stipend on top of each paycheck.

And the goal for this is there's a stipend for if you're able to help translate a document, so from written word to written word, interpret, which is spoken, or both.

We currently have 10 teammates representing four of those top five non-English languages, which is great.

It's really great coverage.

A good example of how we've been able to use teammates for this already who are receiving the differential is translating material in like a library pamphlet.

The rates for translation can be pretty high and probably higher than you might think when you go to an outside service.

Sometimes that's the right thing to do, and sometimes that's what you have to do when it's more formal legal language.

But if it's something that's a little bit more straightforward or an ad, you can use teammates instead who are receiving the differential and then save money.

It's that kind of an investment.

The third one is an internal process for interpretation and translation requests.

So, like what I had said on some of these things, you probably need uh a certified interpreter through IMAA or some other group who's able to help navigate some language barriers if it's a more formal legalistic situation, or if there's a really dense legal document or a notice of violation letter or something like that, it's probably more appropriate to be able to go to a certified uh translator or interpreter as opposed to uh one of our teammates who aren't necessarily certified through like a state uh certification program.

So now we've had a process to allow teammates to know what that looks like.