The Winston-Salem City Council met on Monday, November 3, 2025, at 6:00 PM, adjourning at 6:38 PM. The meeting included a City Manager update on federal shutdown impacts on SNAP and WIC benefits, a resolution honoring City of Winston-Salem University graduates, a consent agenda with six items, and nine general agenda items focused on affordable housing development (Cycle 2). Key votes included approval of multiple affordable housing projects, one denial with a replacement directive, and one withdrawal.
City Council and ask the city clerk to call the roll, please. Councilmember joyner present. Councilmember Clark. Here. Councilmember Andrew Bowen. Here. Councilmember Scipio? Present. Mayor Per Tim Adams. Here. Councilmember Taylor. Present. Councilmember Hall, present. And Councilmember Burke here. Thank you very much. Would you please join the City Council and meeting a moment of silence? Thank you so much. Would you please join the city council and meet in the Pledge of Allegiance? Pledge allegiance through the flag of the United States of America. To the Republic for standards one nation. Indivisible Liberty and Justice. Thank you. We recognize our Sergeant at Arms tonight, Lieutenant Vernon Q. Thank you, Lieutenant, for being with us tonight. And our fire marshal tonight is Bradley Watson. Fire Marshal was here keeping us safe. We uh do uh have uh the uh city manager's update now and I'll turn the meeting over to uh Mr. Payton. Uh thank you, Your Honor. Uh a couple of uh a couple of different things tonight, but first I'm gonna call on um uh Forsyth County Deputy County Manager uh Denise Price, who's here today to share us a little bit of information because there's a lot of publicity on the federal shutdown and how that's impacting uh food services in our area, including those folks that are getting SNAP benefits, and so she's has been providing information to the to the county as a whole, but we uh agree to come and provide it to you as well and to your audience. Welcome, Ms. Price. Thank you for being here. Thank you so much. Good evening, Mayor, Mayor Pro Tem, Council. It's my pleasure to be here to give you some updates. I preface each of these updates with this as true as of I know it at this very moment. The chances that something will change while we're speaking is very likely. So I'm gonna give you some places that you can go to get updated information in pretty much real time as well before we close. So there's two potential um impacts that I want to focus on tonight. Both are USDA funded programs. One is the supplemental nutrition assistance program, commonly referred to as food stamps, and the other is the women, infants, and children's program, commonly referred to as WIC. So both of these programs provide food and nutrition, and Forsyth County, there's about 57,000 individuals enrolled in SNAP benefits. This is valued of nutrition that goes into our community of about 10.3 million dollars a month. So it is a lot of people who rely on this program for food. Benefits are issued on a rolling basis, which means that some people got their benefits toward the beginning of October, some people got it toward the end of October. November benefits have not been loaded at this point. Um the USDA notified us last week that there was not sufficient funds for November benefits and not to send in our enrollments to get those benefits added to the EBT cards or the transfer cards. Over the weekend late last week, we had two federal judges who um ordered the administration to release contingency funding for SNAP. I will tell you that this is one of the areas we have an update, so I'm going to look down as opposed to reading from my slides.