Thank you, Wilkhal.

Today's housing, urban development, and zoning committee meeting to order.

Madam Clark, please call the row.

We're trying to be respective of our collaboration here with the library, so I'm trying to move as quickly as possible so that we can get what we're here for is to hear from you all, right?

And so we want to have as much time as possible to hear from you all before our horse stop it.

Sign up if you want to speak.

745 to be out by 8.

Um this is not the last opportunity to speak.

There will be no legislating as relates to amendments or anything so that we don't take up the time.

This time was in space with uh requested by President Green to meet you all out in community.

And so again, we want to take advantage of that as hopefully start as quickly as possible to have as much time as we can to hear from the community.

Madam Clerk, can you please call the row?

Altum and Cone.

Auto Woman Sweiser.

Vice Chair Sonier.

Alderman Browning.

Alderman Aldrich.

Present.

Chair Clark Hubbard.

Here.

President Green.

Present.

Altum and Cone.

Audown Swiss, sir.

Vice Chair Sonier.

Alderman Browning.

We have three presidents.

Okay, we're gonna we don't just for clarity, we don't actually need a full quorum.

I just came, that's where I'm rushing from.

We had another committee hearing that's still going on where two of our members are presenting, so they will come in later.

President Green, if you want to make an introduction on what Board Bill 22 is, so they can go directly into public comment.

Great.

Thank you, uh, Chairwoman Clark Humbert and members of the HUDS Committee.

Uh today I'm here to present on Board Bill 22, which responds to the critical citywide needs by allocating 230 million dollars of the RAM settlement fund.

The funding priorities in this bill reflect what we've heard from residents through a dedicated public engagement process and ongoing conversations with the mayor's office, members of the Board of Aldermen, and other community stakeholders.

The initial online engagement strategy demonstrated that the majority of residents viewed this fund as a transformational opportunity for the city and identified key themes for investment.

You might have remembered, you know, about two years ago we did the initial public engagement around this, and what residents across the city said they wanted us to focus on was infrastructure, city worker wages, uh subsidized child care, a revolving loan fund for redevelopment, particularly in areas seeing uh disinvestment in our city and the need for both downtown and north side uh development.

While those priorities remain, uh we know that we have had three events that have reshaped this proposal that we are discussing here today.

First and foremost, last year's tornado and the subsequent response by local, state, and federal officials made it clear that we need a significant long-term commitment to rebuilding.

Second, House Bills 199 and 3231, recently established entertainment and innovation districts, which unlock state funding for redevelopment projects downtown, allowing the city to build on momentum of other projects currently underway, including the redevelopment of the Millennium Hotel and the Jefferson Arms Building.

And third, in consultation with residents and neighborhood groups, the planning and urban design agency completed four neighborhood plans, which cover nine North St.

Louis neighborhoods.

And plans for the remaining North Side neighborhoods will be completed by the end of this year.

Many of you in this room may have engaged in the planning process already for those neighborhood plans.

And what those do is they give us a blueprint for rebuilding neighborhoods in a way that align with the various uh specific needs and visions that residents have for your own neighborhoods.

And before I move on, um, because we have gotten a lot of questions about this.

I want to highlight what it might mean to implement implement a neighborhood plan.

Um if we're just looking at the uh plan one uh plan area one plan for example, um some of the things that came out of that is residents wanting to see um more identity branding throughout their neighborhoods.

Um they wanted to see us enable urban agriculture and build more uh food access and food resilience hubs on vacant land.

They wanted us to expand down payment assistance and provide shared equity pathways to help grow grow black home ownership and to fill in sidewalk gaps near schools, nodes, and corridors to make it easier for residents to get around their neighborhoods.

And so those are the types of things that this money could fund in developing those neighborhood plans.

Plan is no good if it just sits on a shelf.

So for those reasons, Board Bill 22 supports three key areas that stakeholders have identified as vital to our city's long-term success.

The first is tornado recovery and rebuilding of North St.

Louis.

The second is citywide infrastructure investments, and the third is downtown revitalization.

And it's worth mentioning that the other residents' priorities like raising city worker wages and subsidized child care are being addressed in other ways.

So it was still important for us to hear that those were priorities from the community because, for example, the city did a pay study where we found that we had some workers making 30% under what they needed to be making.

And so in the next budget bill we have taking effect July 1, we've remedied a lot of those pay disparities.

And so that's another pathway for getting that done, even if it's not happening through Rams funds.