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HomeMy WebLinkAboutTRC 20210902 auto captions[Music] public so with that now calling the meeting to order stephanie can we please get roll call commissioner ali president commissioner daniel president commissioner dillard president commissioner gathawa president commissioner harris is absent this evening commissioner johnson is absent this evening uh commissioner rivera president commissioner nobis present and commissioner treyore president thank you so next we do have the reading of the land acknowledgment we meet today in the community of iowa city which now occupies the homelands of the native american nations to whom we owe our commitment and dedications the area of iowa city was within the homelands of the iowa and sak and because history is complex and time goes far back beyond memory we also acknowledge the ancient connections of many other indigenous peoples here the history of broken treaties and forced removal that dispossessed indigenous peoples of their homelands was and is an act of colonization and genocide that we cannot erase we implore the iowa city community to commit to understanding and addressing these injustices as we work toward equity restoration and reparations thank you so we do have the discussion item on here as well with that so just wanted to check if anyone did have something to say on this i just have one clarifying item stephanie if i remember correctly city of iowa city council does um vote on whether to approve the recommendation for the land council for the land acknowledgement next week so your final minutes are part of the consent calendar for the city council meeting of tuesday september 7th um more likely than not if if there is a discussion that council has it would probably be set up for a you know a future work session for them to have a discussion on whether or not they're going to uh accept and move forward on the recommendation thank you um does anyone have any questions on that aspect okay so with that we now move on to agenda item number four which is the presentation and q a with kearns and west for trc facilitator just a reminder there will be no public comment during this agenda item the public will be allowed to provide comments during the next agenda item yeah i am theresa venator i'm the procurement coordinator for the city of iowa city tonight kearns and west is going to be presenting their proposal we're going to give them about 20 or 30 minutes to do a proposal and then we're going to open it up for about 30 minutes for questions so if you guys want to start off with introductions so you can just your names and then we'll turn it over to kearns and west um muhammad treyori amal ali chastity dillard kevo rivera what gooey daphne daniel takawa snobis puff johnson now we can turn it over to kearns and west good evening everyone mr chair and members of the commission uh it's a great privilege to be before you tonight my name is larry schooler i'm a director and senior facilitator at kearns and west and i'll be kicking off our presentation this evening and i'm joined by three other members of our team who i'll introduce in a moment um i don't have screen sharing rights at the moment so uh i'm happy to talk without a powerpoint deck or if it's possible for me to be granted that i can walk through a short stream can we turn the volume up a little please it's the first time in my entire career i've been told i'm too quiet it looks like i've got the screen share thank you very much so uh if you'll just give me uh a moment i'm gonna get to the right area do you all see a slide up on the screen yes okay very good well as i mentioned um we as a collective and as individuals are uh deeply honored by the opportunity to be considered for the role of facilitating this critically important body i'll tell you a little bit about myself last i want to introduce kyle vint kyle is a an iowan he has spent a good chunk of his uh life in eastern iowa and also a portion of it in iowa city as a student and as a resident sarah omar is one of our senior associates she has a graduate degree in conflict resolution from george mason university and leads up our equity and includes equitable and inclusive engagement practice at kearns and west she's also my co-facilitator for the community task force on policing in elgin illinois suburb of chicago and i know you all know eduardo gonzalez one of the leading worldwide thinkers on the topic of truth and reconciliation a veteran consultant and staff person to many trcs including his native peruvian trc at the trc in greensboro north carolina and elsewhere we're honored that he is a strategic advisor to our team you'll also know two other strategic advisors who aren't able to join us tonight dante james is a thought leader in the space of diversity equity and inclusion he's worked for city government in portland oregon denver and elsewhere and he and i co-facilitated the racial equity and policing commission of salt lake city that just completed its phase one report shaffin roberts of pepperdine university is also an advisor he worked with us in salt lake city but he also leads the mediation program for the los angeles police department in its interactions with the community and has lectured nationally on the topic of community police relations so we believe that our team is well positioned not simply based on our experience as facilitators but also as our subject matter expertise particularly trcs and just to introduce myself briefly in addition to supporting and facilitating the commissions i alluded to in salt lake city and elgin i'm the author of a book on truth and reconciliation commissions due out shortly from lexington it was the topic of my dissertation i reported on the greensboro trc for national public radio and voice of america and both eduardo and i are part of a national group that is considering a national trc that we can discuss later on so we all bring both a a passion for this work some subject matter expertise and we think uh some of the skills that would be uh useful to you all uh as this work uh continues sarah's gonna tell you a little bit more about kerns and west sarah thank you larry um i just wanted to take a few moments to talk about who we are as a firm so crimson west is a small woman-owned business that specializes in a range of services from collaborative collaborative and community engagement to process design and conflict resolution services we have a strong equitable inclusive and digital engagement practice in fact the practice of equity and inclusion is fundamental to the work we do we believe that equitable inclusive engagement is not only about ensuring diverse perspectives are at the table but are that deliberative actions and targeted strategies are taken to make sure that they're that they are part of the decision making process and for our digital engagement practice it's really to make sure that we seek different additional avenues to reach members of the community doing so to in ways to lower burden and help with the decision-making process larry mentioned a few of the different projects that we are involved in but others are the city of austin's equity-based historic preservation which is ensuring um the stories of all of austin is being heard um we are also involved in the the task force on policing in vancouver and then just to name a few and we're happy to discuss them in further detail thanks sarah we we assembled this team in large part to try to make sure that we had members of our team that can meet all of the different needs that this trc has outlined in the request for proposal so we are all trained mediators i should say those of us directly at kearns and west have received that training i have a doctor in a conflict resolution and we have all chosen to focus our careers in the public sector you may think of mediation as primarily for business disputes family divorce etc we really have staked our careers on public policy mediation and consensus building and working with the kinds of groups like the trc as i mentioned before we've been working actively throughout the course of the last two years with groups that have very similar goals and objectives no two groups are the same no two scopes are the same no two communities are the same but we believe that we can apply some of our lessons learned and best practices from those other commissions and task forces to assist iowa city we also have a deep background in community engagement and i'm sure many people saw chairman treyore's op-ed in the press citizen today where he talked about a call to action for community members to influence the work of the trc and to be heard i'm the former president of the international association for public participation and i'm a fellow at the national civic league and that's really where i sort of cut my teeth in this work is trying to ensure that all of those affected by decisions would have the chance to affect those decisions so the logos that you see on this slide reference a couple of specific tools that i've worked to develop uh that have been used in places as big as new york city and as small as probably fort worth texas um but all with an aim towards getting more of the voices into the conversation than we normally hear so the conversation core is a volunteer training program to train community members as facilitators to fan out across broader swaths of the community to receive more meaningful input and a view from you is a televised community conversation that is simulcast in multiple languages and provides people with telephonic uh text message and uh social media based options to contribute their views and we average anywhere from one to five thousand people per broadcast so we get a much broader range of views i also mentioned the equitable and inclusive engagement piece and i think it's important to note this is not something that just recently arrived on the scene for currents and west this has been something that our firm has worked on for quite some time we have a practice statement associated with our eie practice and it's also i think embedded into just about every project we have so it's not meant to be this you know side interest but rather a way to meaningfully integrate that into all of the work that we do and as i mentioned before we are doing quite a bit of work on policing i have some experience prior to this last couple of years with the austin police department as well as the experience that i mentioned with salt lake city and elgin and i know that other members of our team have had uh related experience as well so that's a little bit more about our team i'll turn things over to kyle thanks larry um i'd like to begin by just echoing larry's sentiment about how excited we are to be here discussing this proposal and the opportunity for our team to support this work the the team that we have proposed is invested in seeing this process move forward um towards success and i plan to speak about a few of the reasons why that's the case our team has put in decades of personal professional and scholarly time into the growth and evolution of the field of truth and reconciliation in ways that make us invested in seeing those truths and reconciliation processes prosper beyond the scholarship and the projects that you're aware of from larry and eduardo um you know they have both been working in a personal capacity to try and launch national trcs larry is as he mentioned publishing a book about the importance and process design behind trcs so that the group of individuals that we've assembled for this team are all eager to find projects like this one where we can you know take our pers our professional experience um and and see it directly overlap with the the type of work and effort that's needed on the particular project stepping back just a little bit kerns and west was one of the first firms in the field of stakeholder engagement in conflict resolution to formally adopt policies and principles of neutrality and i just want to underscore that we believe deeply in maintaining a fidelity to those principles when involving ourselves in processes like truth and reconciliation commissions we really want to work on projects where we can list a fact where we can protect and empower storytellers and we can assist in turning those shared perspectives um into policies that are informed by the community and as sarah and larry both mention we're all part of kerns and west's equitable and inclusive engagement practice where we take that desire and work professionally to develop meaningful processes to ensure that the underrepresented and the vulnerable are able to participate in public decision making efforts just on a a personal note and larry already mentioned this in passing but i have a somewhat different interest than the rest of the team in seeing this work succeed i'm a native cedar pidian and i spent over a decade of my life as recently as 2018 living in iowa city while working on my undergraduate and graduate education i coached the university of iowa debate team for a number of years i've worked with countless students from west and city high iowa city is a community that i love dearly and i i jumped at the opportunity to work with sarah sarah and larry and the rest of the team to propose our support in helping move forward these really critical conversations thank you very much kyle i want to just um spend a couple more minutes explaining how we envision the role that we would play on your behalf i think it's really important that you all understand that we are here to serve you and we are here to help you more easily achieve the things that are most important to you you probably know the word facilitation itself comes from a latin root for easy and we see our role as to make it easier for you all to be able to define and carry out the work that needs to be done we bring process and subject matter expertise and can help with you know designing events uh designing meeting agendas uh guiding discussion in such a way that it helps the commission uh achieve consensus wherever possible or at least achieve resolution to a set of conflicting perspectives we have as we've mentioned a lot of experience uh as third-party neutrals uh there to assist people of a variety of different perspectives with finding common ground with understanding each other's points of view and with arriving at decisions that the entire group feels that they can support we also believe that we have a critical role to play in identifying and elevating voices outside of the commission again based on the best practices and experience we've had all across the country our practice as you saw on the map it goes all the way from vancouver washington to miami beach florida and all points in between and so we've absorbed a lot as it relates to what works and what doesn't in engagement we know that each community is different and distinct so we will most assuredly be customizing any recommendation for an approach to the needs of the community as you all help us to identify them and as our team identifies but we believe we have the experience to bring some cutting-edge tools to bear to assist you with the critical community engagement part of this work also just want to briefly touch upon a proposed timeline this is of course as you all know a very ambitious undertaking any trc is most of the trcs with which i'm familiar there have been you know now i think almost four dozen or more depending on how you define trc but nearly all of them have taken at minimum two years from swearing in to final report that's the the greensboro timeline many take more years than that for a variety of reasons and so this timeline is assuredly somewhat aggressive what we're trying to do is we're trying to sketch out a plan that would meet all of the needs outlined in the rfp but at the same time allow the trc to be deliberate to hear the voices that need to be heard to allow anyone who feels they have a stake in this work to be part of it and to give you all enough time to deliberate before you issue final recommendations so you'll notice that there is some overlap for example between the first stage where we get a deeper understanding of this work of this community of this trc's purpose and our work on designing a process in tandem with the trc and that's because we believe that we can start doing some design work behind the scenes as we're gathering info but of course we need to bring those uh proposed designs back to you all to make sure that we're on the right track or to get any necessary course corrections then you'll notice that the fact-finding and truth-telling public process would get underway as that design work is is happening and that's simply out of recognition that oftentimes the best-laid plans of mice and men go awry so you could have a situation where we've agreed on a design as a team and as a trc and then we deploy that in the field and we find there are some key missing pieces missing links and so we would want to make some adjustments to the design as we go along based on uh the results and then we believe that the trc itself should continue meeting on an ongoing basis to assess what it is that they're hearing what they yet need to hear what research they need to be conducting independently of the community input and public process and then of course the report compilation would be something that we would expect would happen uh sort of in in coordination with the trc but not in such a way that all commissioners had to wordsmith and draft you know each word perhaps there would be subcommittees assigned to write different portions or perhaps members of our team would help with initial drafts and then bring it back but we believe that that extended process would be done both during meetings and uh in parallel to those meetings and then project administration is just a recognition that we have tasks that we would want to make sure we take care of as a as a consultant to make sure that the project remains on task and that's something of course that we would pursue throughout the course of the project so we know that there's probably a lot more that you're interested in knowing but we wanted to give you that overview and in closing just expressed you how deeply passionate we are about the work that you're doing this is this is no ordinary project it's no ordinary proposal this is no ordinary team for our firm and this is no ordinary time in american history and we are as i've said feeling privileged to be in a position to potentially assist you all with it and welcome any uh questions and conversation thank you very much for the time would any of you prefer to begin okay my initial question is with this 12-month proposed timeline um so just do want to make it clear that regardless of our recommendation the city council does also have to approve of the rfp and so when it comes to that how soon do you see yourselves being able to begin afterwards we are prepared to begin as soon as uh council approves us to begin and a contract is in place chairman we're we are ready we've you know a lot of the time necessary to do so so i mean we would anticipate being able to start potentially within the same month if that was um called for if not next month and then um just wanted to clarify what was meant by manage the project budget schedule and deliverables and specifically um [Music] specifically what i mean by that is in terms of manage it are we saying that in a sense of it is drafted by ourselves and for our review and then um gets sent that way or is it drafted by ourselves reviewed by us but then the final say and how it looks are you expecting to have control no sir mr chairman yeah i think it's a i could have phrased that a little bit more artfully what i meant there was simply that you all will be granting us a budget to perform the services that you've asked us to and so we have responsibility for monitoring the rate at which we are spending time on this project and reporting to you accordingly on a regular basis we also may be asking you to approve certain direct costs for various forms of technology or other engagement tools that we think would aid and abet the the work of the trc so that would be something that we would want to approve but it really just speaks to overall project management of the work that we would be performing to the trc there's no desire or benefit to our controlling any of your budget external to our uh you know to the fee that we would be uh receiving and then so um so the initial clarifying question earlier about the managing the project budget schedule and deliverables just another one stemming from that is the amount of control assumed on the final recommendations so again just very wary of how much input the community does get to have so would that be something as well that would be in tandem with the community in terms of really looking for um public engagement with the final recommendations we looked at in a survey format to the community to see what they would like to have avoid or more so of compiling what has been done over the entirety of the commission and just um formulating it that way well i appreciate the question and let me just be very clear in saying that you know this is these recommendations belong to the trc and the community of iowa city they are not kearns and west's they're they're none of ours individually you know we see ourselves as capturing the sentiments that you all produce um not not simply as stenographers you know obviously we're meant to to help you all have a productive conversation but but these recommendations belong to you and to you alone and as it relates to your question i think that there are a number of different tools including a survey that we could use to gauge community support or misgivings about any considered recommendations we certainly would flesh out a full-fledged inclusive engagement strategy that would allow anyone with an interest to give you that kind of feedback but it would be our highest priority to make sure that only when the trc felt the community community had been meaningfully engaged would you finalize your recommendations and they would have your names on it and probably not ours then this next question would be individually for each of you to answer um so when it comes to how much say you all expect to have uh amongst yourselves and also how much you are all collaborating is it truly um is it truly done in such a way that you all have an equal say or is there a main point person that has final ruling that's an interesting question i'm not sure we've been asked that before um kyle you want to go first and then sarah and then i'll i'll jump in and maybe eduardo can that in yeah i can take a first cut at that larry i i think um philosophically speaking we are a collaboration firm and we approach all of the projects through collaboration so you know in all of this we're starting off with a project management plan an approach plan that says how we as individuals within our knw team and the wider team would be approaching this we all have our areas of expertise so you know i my background is in digital communication and virtual engagement if there are a particular topic like how do you hold a virtual webinar virtual workshop i think i would probably lead that discussion but you know open that up for perspective and feedback from all of the other people on our team the commission and members of the public at the end of the day i view larry is the project manager and the project principal in charge on this and um if there were a question about how we should move forward i would defer to him on the best the best method for for making that decision but we we all make decisions through a consensus on the team given where we are in our our professional lives and the type of work that we do as a firm and um i completely agree with kyle and i just wanted to add we've all worked together before um and we know where our strong suits are so um i'm very i i'm pretty process oriented and will help probably with developing the work plan with internally as its crimson west team but also um when with the trc so that's where i know my strong suit is um and again we our process is having standing internal calls to discuss any action items that we have as a group and make sure that there's roles for each person mr chairman one thing i didn't mention is that i teach at the university of texas and one of the classes i teach is in facilitative leadership and so if i did not uh lead in that fashion then i would i would you know not have a job there that's for sure but i mean in all seriousness you know that's a that's a core value for me um to to as they say either lead from behind or you know lead only in in conjunction with uh the team and never would that be more true in this case and i do want to allow eduardo to share if he would like as well but as you know this team brings an enormous amount of expertise and lift experience and i would be a fool to make any decision uh on our behalf in a vacuum without you know huge amounts of input eduardo would you like to add anything yes larry very briefly thank you all for the participation and the opportunity to to be in this meeting as you may remember when the trc was created i wrote to the members of the trc to offer any kind of help that would be needed i also wrote to the city council in march when a discussion about the future of the drc was taking place and i'm very happy that the commission has is overcoming the difficulties of the beginning phases and and i do think that it will be very interesting for me as an advisor and honoring advisor to support this excellent team um i do think that one of my tasks um advising this team is precisely uh to understand the dynamics of of of work that the team has i do think that of course whenever you have a small team of people things tend to be perhaps easier and obviously there are lines of reporting and as kyle said larry is going to be the responsible person for this but i do think that it's always interesting and to have complementary roles in a team my role is going to be perhaps the easiest one as an advisor but it is this talented group of people that is going to be taking care of the heavy lifting and i do think that different views different life perspectives are definitely very useful for our team um the next question would be when it comes to the truth and reconciliation commissions and the trc-like organizations that you have worked with in the past how do you typically hear of these opportunities is it by solicitation from the governments themselves from the community themselves or from the actual trc bodies yeah it's a great question i mean the the salt lake city racial equity and policing commission did release an rfp in the same fashion that you all did they are probably a little bit more attached to municipal government and so it did come from salt lake city corporation as i recall and we submitted the winning proposal the same holds for the city of elgin where they created the community task force on policing and then did a municipal solicitation to which we responded now eduardo's body of work is different i would say in the sense that he of course has been involved in in you know countless efforts like this where it hasn't been done via formal solicitation it's been done based on you know perhaps word of mouth or other ways in which people learn affect what eduardo has to offer um so you know he certainly can add on but uh in response to your question the um the the bodies themselves in tandem with their sponsoring entities appear to have issued solicitations to which we've responded and uh cliff i do want to give you the opportunity to ask your question good evening uh just like to say thank you uh for uh your time tonight and uh just in general for trying to help us out in this situation i have a few questions uh uh answer them uh if you if you could answer them uh whomever it doesn't matter uh what would you consider a successful trc and what would you consider a failed trc well thanks for the question uh commissioner i think that a successful trc is one in which the commissioners feel that they have fulfilled their mandate that they have gotten something out of it individually but also that they feel as if they have positioned the city and the city council to help bring about very meaningful and needed change in the iowa city community i also consider it successful if the community itself feels that they have been heard both in terms of of raw numbers of participation and demographic breakdown of participants but also in the sense that the recommendations that come out of the trc that are hopefully blessed by the council reflect their input so when i did my dissertation that was the very topic that i that i researched it was i studied all of the testimony given to the greensboro maine and canadian trcs and then i looked at their final reports and analyzed and evaluated how well they did at hearing what the public was telling them and i believe that that's mission critical to the success of this uh endeavor i hesitate to talk about what a a failed trc is i mean i suppose if if the trc just you know did not complete its work that might be viewed as a failure but quite honestly i think that you are you all have achieved more success already than you may fully appreciate or realize and so you know i i don't see any indication that this would uh be on any path other than a successful one so i'm happy to defer to eduardo sarah and kyle for any additional insight but that would be my my take but i think the only thing that i'd add larry i i think you're right that success is defined in part by the outcomes um associated with the process but i also think that you know independently people feeling like they have a location that's safe to be able to come and tell their stories and tell their truth find credibility in in that platform is in and of itself a metric of success and given that my focus is on that that point of communication in an interaction i think it's it's really important that that level of credibility gets established and that's a that's an important marker of success in this process my point is very uh brief but i just wanted to that there's transparency and points where we engage with the public um as we go move up forward with this process um in different milestones go ahead eduardo sorry i promise i'm a bit more compelling in person but um something i would like to add is yes it's always difficult to define what exactly success is and certainly different groups are involved in the operation of a truth commission and the entire city is going to be judging how the commission does its work and there will be different opinions regarding whether the commission has been successful or not but what i think is probably useful is to think of what are the factors that result in making success likely what are the factors what are the methodologies that will help achieve success independently of of course the different subjective views about what success is and i do think that there are a few factors that experience tells us are significant one to me is that a successful commission is one that learns from their peers and there have been so many truth commissions right now in the united states and abroad that i think getting in touch with members of former commissions is a good strategy to find out what are the landmines what are the difficulties what are the risks the errors that they committed and what are the good practices too so learning from others to me is a factor of success a second factor of success i think is to listen truth commissions should not be in my view at least a debating forum that is it's not a place where commissioners go to discuss among themselves on the contrary it's a place where commissioners go to listen to what the community wants to say and to be the best conveyors of what the community wants to say so if a commission listens people will eventually realize that the commission is doing that the commission is not taking the opportunity to organize meetings to talk but the commission is going to be there to listen and at the end of the work they are going to certainly make recommendations make findings but for most of the time that the commission is going to be working it will be listening and if the people see that the commission listens that is in my view a factor of success another factor of success i do think is consultation that is truth commissions work with divisive issues with controversial issues things that not everybody in the community see in the same way because we in all our communities we live in situations of trauma of injustice and obviously trauma and injustice generate hard feelings and that is completely normal and understandable so commissions will have to work with that subject matter and the best way of doing that is by um by consulting by asking what to do where to go um the commission should not um come with a preconceived idea of what exactly is it it wants to it needs to have flexibility um and finally i do think that another factor of success is to have certain uh ground rules um among commissioners of how are they going to work how are they going to relate to each other and how are they going to organize their meetings their activities and that is one of the main things that i expect this team to be doing which is to facilitate meetings i think you will see eventually that as as time passes probably the strictly facilitating function is going to get lower in terms of other functions that this team is going to assume because you will be able to do that on your own some truth commissions need a lot of facilitation because sometimes there are intractable issues to discuss but eventually those move away a truth commission that is successful then in my view is one that over time builds consensus and understanding among its members successful truth commissions in my experience rarely bought or almost never vote or they vote only to confirm a finding or to issue its report but commissions that are functional rarely vote because they are able to work together and to build the credibility the trust that is necessary to uh to work in a functional way i appreciate that uh those answers uh i i have another question as well uh how much resistance have you dealt with and of what kind i'm thinking about the best way to answer that i mean i think that in salt lake city we certainly had a couple of situations in which um police officers who were monitoring the work of the racial equity and policing commission looked at that as something with deep skepticism and and even concern or dismay um we perceive there to be a variety of different opinions in elgin illinois around the formation of the community task force on policing there and some concern about whose voices are at the table and whose voices are not i think that there are always going to be folks who view something as monumental and as significant and as impactful as this with some mix of anxiety you know concern frustration or or you know vitriol or you know deep opposition um and i'm not sure that's avoidable nor nor maybe should it be you know i think this is not about necessarily creating a a safe space but about creating a brave space for people to be in touch with their discomfort around issues of of racial inequity and systemic and institutional racism and so it's almost as if a lack of resistance might alarm me if you understand my point commissioner so i hope that answers your question i'm thinking mostly about more recent projects um in in the way i'm answering oh and eduardo i think wanted to add something as well if he could i think you might be muted sir yes sorry again you know if i were to talk in percentages i do think that in any given community when a trc is established you're going to have a small number of people who are very actively expected to support the commission because they understand the mission they want it to succeed because of its goals and then there is probably another ten percent of people who is um ardently against it because they fear um truth telling they fear the truth they fear a change of the status quo um and that resistance is to be expected but what i really uh worry about is that 80 of people who don't care at all who appear to be indifferent or have learned because of life because of situations to put themselves in a careful studied position of being bystanders they are bystanders when there is injustice and there are bystanders when there is an effort to tell the truth and in reality i do think that when you have people who are hostile to the process uh the best way to deal with that is to making the effort to engage and uh probably they are not going to engage with you probably they are going to misrepresent the process anyway but it is very important to make sure that there is a constancy that you engaged and that you attempted this uh this relation but the big question to me has always been what to do with the indifferent or those who want to be indifferent in my view some people are in different because they just don't have the time because they're busy because they are living in conditions in which they cannot afford the luxury of thinking beyond uh the daily struggle and then there are others who are very comfortable with things as they are and so there needs to be a specific strategy of communication and outreach and i think that a truth commission should be putting most of its effort not just in you know thinking of those who attack the commission because there are always going to be those but think of how to engage those who are being indifferent who are showing that um that apparently issues of racial justice and racial inequity are not their problem and i think this goes without saying but if i could just add indifference is a form of resistance in my view i mean it is not simply passive um it is essentially making the statement that something that is affecting a huge portion of my community is of no concern to me or at least not enough concern that i would participate in some way and i'm not trying to cast aspersions i'm just simply trying to suggest that it is up to um us and the trc to make a a compelling case like the one in the chairman's op-ed that that indifference is not an option um you know there was a famous rabbinic quote in my tradition the opposite of love is not hate it's indifference um i have a few questions for you guys and for the sake of time i'm just going to ask them this is vice chair ali speaking um the first question is kind of more directed towards um kyle because he he is the self-proclaimed internet guy uh blind guy um but have you guys worked with entities like uh city council or um you know where there are laws um in regards to like public speaking when there's more than five people there um you know recording like that and then like all of the data that you collect and um the testimonies how does that work where is it going to be what access will we have to it what access will staff and city council have to it um and how that process looks like so that's my first question um and then would you mind if i well i'm sorry you wanted to ask both at the same time sorry question um well and my second question um is uh that so looking through this and hearing your presentation um there's uh a lot of mentioning like of the importance of structuring things in such a way to get law enforcement buy-in um so we had a previous oir report from june 3rd tear gassing which pretty much said that the iowa city police department is arguably over represented how do you guys propose to get law enforcement buy-in without reinforcing the impression that police drive the process and its goals rather than the community um and how familiar are you guys with the reforms and plans that have been produced so far in our city specifically um and along with that policing question um have you guys done things with like you know education health care housing sustainability um just because a lot of the focus is on policing which i think is really extremely important um that's where one of my passions is within the trc but i'd like to know kind of where else and what else you guys have done as well please sure let me just apologize up front if i omit anything as as we try to respond i may have to ask you to repeat i apologize but these are great questions um kyle if i could i wanted to just um start with responding to her question related to how testimony is is kept and and you know uh accessed and so forth and i speak about this both as a practitioner in terms of the work i've done but also as a as a researcher because i actually faced some of the very things that you were just asking about you know how do i get my hands on the testimony the first point i would make is that any testimony that is given publicly whether it be in a trc meeting or in a you know public event should remain public and everyone should be able to access it you know we would compile it in a fashion that folks who were interested in in summary could perhaps read summary but the input that people were willfully giving in public would be accessible to you know the the entire public and and we recognize that not everyone has reliable internet access to go visit a a web portal and so we would endeavor to compile it in forms that didn't require someone to have internet access but the one nuance to that is that you will face circumstances i predict and eduardo could speak to this also where people would like to give testimony privately where people would like for their testimony to be only viewed by a trc sometimes i've seen cases where someone gives testimony to the trc and they would like it to be you know expunged once the trc finishes its work so it's useful i think to have a set of choices for the person who is giving their testimony as to how they themselves would like it to be disseminated and that empowers them in my view that gives them a sense of of ownership over their story um that they may not have had before so in in some just to answer your original question we would work to ensure that any member of the public any city council member any staff person any trc member could see any and all testimony given in a public forum by someone willing to do so publicly and then if there were people willing to give their story only under certain conditions we would just seek to manage that process effectively honor those traditions those preferences i should say and make it available as the person uh deems is uh is appropriate the other thing i'll say just in response to your second question is that you're right that we paid particular attention to policing work but you know i'm coming into this with about 14 years of experience primarily in municipal government and so as you can imagine everything came my way you know from housing to education to parks and recreation to transportation uh human rights immigration homelessness you name it and so um you know we we tend to focus a little bit more of our backgrounds on where we think there's greater interest but we'd be happy to furnish you know more unabridged versions of our of our backgrounds with those additional projects and i can go into more detail but i would like to turn back to kyle for the first part of the the question yeah larry and i actually just want to pick up and add one layer on top of what you've shared about information that's made public and information that's not made public and just note an important conversation that needs to happen is between our project team if we selected our project team and the city attorney and the privacy information officers or staff at the city to determine if there are specific city regulations that guide how information with personal identifiers are stored in digital um interfaces you know we're experienced with document management for for various clients we've worked to strip personal information out of data prior to publication and gone through the review and redaction process we're happy to deal with that we've established systems and servers for maintaining records at certain record schedules you know if they have to be deleted after so many years or maintained for so many years per state or local laws the specific nature of those i think would be determined in you know accordance with the city attorney and i don't want to you know make a sweeping statement about what that looks like until that conversation is had um but we're experienced in managing those processes and having those conversations we know the vocabulary can have the conversation with the city attorneys and figure out what needs to happen uh per their recommendations for your question which i think was your first question about public meetings and facilitating public meetings that the thing that i note there is that kearns and west larry sarah and i in particular facilitate a number of other municipal city and county meetings for example larry and i helped to facilitate the city of gainesville's city council and their commission meetings in a hybrid space so we're serving as the conduit for call-ins in those meetings virtually and remotely in accordance with uh open meeting laws that they have in the state of florida we do similar work with travis county in texas where austin is i do work with arlington county um and and their needs to have both virtual um and in-person engagement whatever is required for the open uh meeting laws so i i think we're well versed in in how to facilitate meetings that are all in person that are all virtual and are a mix we can you know provide guidance for the video needs for the audio needs we've done text call-ins and text ins and phone calls and virtual polling and you know plenty of ways to increase the interactiveness of of hybrid meetings and i think one of the things that we'll want to do at the outset of this and it's in line with what eduardo was saying before is take a moment at the outset to define what the needs are for engagement what form it needs to be is the you know is the emphasis on in person are we going to be able to reach more people for hybrid meetings what do people feel safe doing and how do they feel safe giving their story and letting that define our approach um but the the foundation there is that we're we're experienced in in supporting um a number of different communities of different sizes and different complexities um to host their meetings in a virtual environment or hybrid environment impacted by coven uh mountain vice chair did we answer everything that you'd asked um there was one that you guys missed uh how familiar are you guys with the reports and reform plans so far and i guess kind of in addition to that um with uh maybe for lack of a better term like the turmoil that has happened between rtrc the relationship between the current members and council members just your knowledge of that we've had the opportunity to watch a number of city council meetings and have borne witness to dynamics that exist there um you know i uh suffice to say we we can detect that from you know from our our remove distance excuse me um and we also are aware that this trc originally had a set of members and now has a different membership and that there was at one time a uh a uh what do you call it like a spin-off an additional trc that had tried to uh do some work perhaps in parallel to this one my understanding is that it is is paused but we know that this has been a a bumpy road and um again i'm not particularly surprised because that's kind of what happens typically with trcs they are so bold they are so um meant to kind of push things beyond where they've gone before that invariably there's going to be resistance that doesn't mean it's justified it just means that it is and so i think we're aware of how much the police's handling of last summer's incidents have cast appall on the commission on the community as it relates to what they want to see change but as you rightly pointed out that this is about more than just uh police this is really about um finding a way to create an equitable community where everyone feels that they can enjoy a meaningful quality of life and so while we believe we need to pay close attention to what's being said and has been said about the police department we understand that we need to to continue to broaden the conversation uh at the same time i also remember vice chair you asked about bringing police to the table i think that that's a a multi-pronged approach that can't be formulaic what worked in salt lake city what works in elgin may or may not work in iowa city but i think that you know in my study of it my teaching of conflict resolution the one thing i've i've always believed is that fundamental to dealing with conflict is to enable people to feel heard and so sometimes it's a matter of giving a member of uh police department just a chance to be heard now that may not be in a public setting at first it may be in a a smaller more informal setting until they feel more comfortable sharing in a more open setting but i can tell you this is something we dealt with actively in salt lake city on an ongoing basis we had officers who participated in more than one meeting we had officers who came to one meeting some of those interactions were very fruitful and meaningful and some of them were very tense and at times unproductive but we we don't believe that this commission is there to do the work of the police department we believe it's there to do the work of the community and so our job as facilitators is to make sure that the focus remains on the commission the commissioners and the community to whom they want to hear from from whom they want to hear as opposed to the department itself and then just very very last one i promise are you guys prepared assuming we choose to recommend this to council next week um would you guys be prepared to present to council and discuss this with them as well we absolutely would yeah we absolutely would i only want to mention um that i believe they meet tuesday and that's rosh hashanah the jewish new year which i observe and so i'll sarah and eduardo would just be presenting in my stead if it were on tuesday night because of my religious obligations understandable go ahead um this is chastity dillard um i first want to thank you all so much for presenting to us and providing this rfp i just had one question and it was really off of what you said dr schuler when he said that this proposal is ambitious um and it was just wondering i guess my question is how do you think that could have impact this work and how effective do you think this nine-month process is really truly going to be when you said that it's generally a two-year process well i i thank you very much commissioner for the question i mean first of all it's important to you know compare apples and and apples so to speak you all have been at this for more than you know just now i mean you've you've obviously been working for several months and so it's important as we evaluate how long a process like this might take to take into consideration that a good deal of work has already been done so we're not really talking about nine months we're talking about probably 18 or or even more months that could be expended but i think that you know it's important also to realize how different the circumstances are for trcs you know the greensboro trc was done without the blessing of the city of greensboro um without any built-in funding they had to to essentially fundraise throughout the course of their work and and barely had enough to afford a small staff i mean eduardo certainly supported them but he wasn't able to i don't think moved to greensboro uh permanently during that time so they had a very small staff they had volunteers and they you know didn't have any city support i mean they had active city opposition for a good deal of their work and so that that prolonged things in a way that i think um wouldn't necessarily be the case when you have you know stephanie and others able to assist you with carrying out your work and willing to assist with the resources like the ones we have for this meeting and so forth um i also think it depends a little bit on the scope of the of the work the trc is embarking on and the size of the community and iowa city is certainly a large community but there are others that are larger and so part of it will depend upon the extent to which you all will feel that your work on community engagement is done how will you measure that and there's lots of different ways to do so and we can talk about what those are so i believe that in nine months we can ably assist you with meaningfully engaging the community with getting um extensive truth-telling to occur and with conducting meaningful deliberations and and issuing recommendations it'll it'll depend a little bit on again the the overall scope of what it is that you want to cover both in your recommendations and in your community engagement as to how much you can accomplish in nine months but most assuredly you can accomplish a great deal and we stand ready to assist thank you this is commissioner huango hello hi i i am owed by being in the presence of a group of afar that is accomplished in this area of inequity because as i was looking into you not really researching that will take more time than i've had but hearing you mention work with icc so you having done global international as well as national work very impressive and i i'm not going to use a lot of time we've already used a lot of time because a lot of my comments are i'm piggybacking on what has already been said and asked and uh i am curious on allow me to use the word and call you you are outsiders to the iowa city community and this is me standing in being iowa city being my city since 2002. so and a lot there the other communities members have been here even longer so uh how is your presence going to be in iowa city i'm curious about that and then i'll piggyback on what commissioner johnson had started on going with the word like resistance because uh you do work that is a motive that is controversial there there's a lot of mine fields and some of them uh my curiosity and how you navigate this it's not even from for me the areas i'm most concerned with is for me what i have in mind is as the com the trc the city council and you and your farm uh so we are working on moving towards uh achieving equity as we move how within ourselves how do we deal with are we there ourselves especially the three who are in the lead and how do you usually deal with that with ourselves who are there and on our journey are we there have we even begun the other thing how do you deal with the politics of the work the media being in the midst and sometimes could you be check a box diffusing a situation or a punching bag and i'm going to stop there i've uh i know i've just thrown all those things but right now that is what is going through my mind since when you began making your presentation and i'm going to yield the flaw and leave that to you too yeah to get your clarity on what i've i've figured out well uh commissioner i hope i don't let you down i hope we don't let you down uh your your answer your questions are certainly deeply uh meaningful and thoughtful and i'll do my very best and of course the rest of us will as well you asked about our presence in iowa city you know obviously all of us are mindful of the state of our world as it relates to the pandemic and we certainly want to comply with all relevant regulations and restrictions i know that mayor of iowa city has stuck his neck out a little bit in terms of pandemic restrictions in the state of iowa maybe in a different place the cdc the centers for disease control may be in a different place but we're prepared to come to iowa city multiple times to do this work with you all to be with you in your journey as you say and to make sure that we are understanding as best we can the needs of the community in the process and the needs of the community and the outcomes and that's something that we think you know can only be gleaned um oftentimes can only be gleaned by being there i i will tell you i mean i am the father of two children who are not eligible for the vaccine and so these are difficult times but i believe that we will reach a point where um our our travel to iowa city um will be frequent and will enable us each and collectively to walk with you in that space and i would just add in in trying to respond to some of your other questions about resistance and politics and checking a box that you know trust is is earned and often actions will speak louder than words and so just because i will perhaps sit down with a city council member or the mayor or some you know community organization and introduce myself probably won't necessarily engender a lot of trust but if they see that we have hosted events in their district if if it's a city council member or we've co-hosted an event with a community organization where they had uh ownership and we simply were there in in support and to provide you know additional resources or whatever role they asked us to play and then they see that we have heated their words and incorporated them either into process or into outcomes i think that's the way people view it as more than than a box check and they have to see us they have to know us they have to experience us and that comes with time that takes time and it will require an investment of significant time on our part and we're very prepared to do that not just kyle because of his you know ties and routes to the state and to the area but all of us we wouldn't be you know talking to tonight if we didn't fully um understand the need for us to you know to be on the ground with you to to sit with you not just to conduct meetings uh formally with facilitation but also just to learn about you to learn about your journeys and your struggles as iowa city residents and as just people of the world um so i i confess um commissioner there was there was a lot there and i don't know if i covered it all um i am going to see if kyle sarah and eduardo would like to add in um but if we miss anything uh please let us know so any any of my colleagues can join thank you for capturing um just me throwing things captured everything go ahead eduardo just a point about the media that i think the commissioner also raised um i do think that the commission needs to have a media strategy meaning that uh it needs to work with journalists so that journalists understand first of all what the truth commission is what its mission and its vision are and what its methodologies are otherwise sometimes journalists may operate from a space of thinking that the commission is just another body of of the city as a senior as any other uh or may misunderstand the mission of the commission etc so i think it's very important to educate uh and work together with the media there are excellent journalists in iowa city and i think it would be really necessary to engage with them on the other side i i do think also that um well it is important to be fully transparent in terms of the work of the commission it's also important for the commission to have space for uh for themselves we need to talk among the commissioners to understand uh to learn to learn from others and those kinds of spaces in if they are possible should be fostered so um so that is also important and then i do think that there is always a delicate balance on the one side of course you want to be responsive to the public and to the fourth state but at the same time you also need to have space for yourselves to discuss to understand to take decisions to to digest the enormous amounts of information that you're going to be receiving i just wanted to add commissioner that i was a as i think i mentioned actually a journalist in my first career um and so i'm very tuned in to some of the needs and wants of of the media of course the media has evolved but i believe that we are well positioned as eduardo just described to assist you all with a thoughtful strategy on how best to engage them uh on a go-forward basis do you have any questions yeah thank you um this is kevo rivera um i can respond to all pronouns including he she and they um thank you all for preparing um this proposal it was very comprehensive and really addressed a lot of things not only enlisted in our rfp but that we had been having in some of our subcommittee meetings and so i've been very encouraged to see the breadth of your expertise um in the scope of this proposal um my first question is um for kyle um i just want to know a little bit more about you um and kind of your level of involvement in our community specifically some follow-up questions would be like what connections do you have to the bipac community of iowa city and what work have you done that pertains to equity and inclusion yeah those are both great questions and i'm i'm happy to address them the the first thing that i'll mention is just my academic background i did my undergraduate at the university of iowa political science and then i went and did my phd work in the department of communication studies my phd work is in climate justice and environmental justice particularly how black and indigenous voices in the climate movement can be elevated um to inform science and and solutions to climate change and so um the the movement politics um um were a core portion of of my academic work but really what i want to focus on is you know my personal investment in the bipac community in iowa city and in particular the university of iowa one the you know the main example that i'll focus on was in my time as the debate coach um at the university of iowa where um the one of the core focuses in my time as a as a debate coach at the university of iowa is increasing the recruitment and retention of particularly black voices into the debate program working with what are called the urban debate leagues from across the united states to recruit black or minority students to join the university of iowa debate team and to promote alternative ways of of of going about debating styles that were based in black experience and black voice identifying folks who can readily coach those students um and encouraging and helping make a livable space on campus for those students once they had come to the university of iowa um and that's frankly when i was working time as as a graduate student where i spent the majority of my time and where the the focus of my efforts were with the bibac community in iowa city i'm happy to report that the university of iowa and while i was a coach won a national championship in debate and we had wonderful success and outcomes but also reformed the way that we were engaging the department of communication studies the way that we were addressing the scholastic efforts of the debate community and um bringing those voices into into the city thank you um and then this question is for um maybe anyone who wants to answer i think larry kind of touched on this a little bit when we were kind of asking about your understanding of what has sort of gone on in our proceedings thus far but um as we've been doing this work it's clearly been very emotional we've all been as commissioners have been very heavily invested in this and in a lot of ways i'm glad that we have remained so close to the work i also see the value in having um you know a third sort of in some ways neutral party that can help sort of provide feedback to help give us other perspectives to the scope of our work and so if i can bug you for some free consultation tonight how how would you tell the story of our commission thus far um like what has gone on um and and where do you see things going it's a powerful question commissioner and i certainly want eduardo to weigh in based on his lengthy engagement look i mean i think that in some ways the iowa city trc story is is not unlike several others in the trc space um a um you know a a struggle to be heard and to be recognized with a legitimate cause uh a moment of you know sort of political blessing um followed by a significant amount of of you know inner turmoil in determining who this drc wants to be and and how it wants to proceed followed by a fissure a real dividing point and now i think a a period of healing i mean i have received you all both in this meeting and in the meetings i've observed of the city council and of the trc as strong people who are in some ways invigorated by the work ahead of you and the challenges that that face you um and that's one of the reasons i'm so energized to be part of this conversation is because i i feel that despite how far physically i am from you so it appears to me to be you know a story of uh you know triumphs and and travails that's very similar to what i've seen in other trcs and frankly in other commissions like this around the united states here in recent months and years and my hope and my my faith my belief is that the best is yet to come for the iowa city trc but i'd love for eduardo to add it commissioner i believe very strongly that you are called to be healers of your city but having said that i don't think anyone would expect you on top of being healers to be saints all of us if we are called to do this job are have to recognize our own wounds we are wounded healers because all of the experiences that people are going to come to refer to us our experiences we have seen we have suffered people who are loved to us have suffered and that we have seen in different communities in different places so what has happened up to this point should be summarized in that way iowa wants to heal and iowa is recognizing that those who are supposed to heal to help iowa hill are wounded themselves and that is what makes things so difficult but also so promising because you are not going to be um you know um indifferent therapists or a technocrat sitting in a room listening to people in a detached way you are going to be very involved and you are very involved that is the reason why why the turmoil happened too these things require all of us to recognize our own experiences our own difficulties our own inadequacies too so if we are prepared to accept those difficulties those shortcomings um i think we are in a in a better place already thank you um commissioner johnson did you want to go next i think you had your hand up before mine i feel like this question has kind of been an answer to a degree but i'm gonna i kind of want to ask it again um when would you consider a trc's work to be done commissioner i would say that you know as much of a way out of an answer that this might be you know trc's function on the basis of a of some sort of mandate uh you can call it a mission statement you can call it a vision you know but but mandate is the term that i've seen used most frequently and so the fulfillment of that mandate much like an objective to a single meeting is placed on the top of an agenda uh the fulfillment of that mandate is a good part of the way that i think of a trc's work as being done i think the unique thing about a trc as compared to any other kind of task force or working group is that it's possible your work won't be done in the way that you're you know that we're talking about it you know it's possible that we will reach the conclusion of the work that we have scoped out here as a group and decide we must continue and and that's the case in salt lake city the racial equity and policing commission was i think intended to be a six-month endeavor and it is now essentially being funded on a on a recurring and permanent basis by salt lake city um and and will continue to provide needed input and oversight so you know it's a tricky question from that advantage for me because i i don't know that even the members of the trcs i'm most closely familiar with would say that their work is done perhaps they as a collective have completed their tasks as delineated by their mandates but many of them i know especially in greensboro where reform has taken more than a decade view their work as incomplete some of them have died you know since they finished their work and weren't able to stick around long enough to see it done but but others um are bearing witness to it and it's taken 15 or more years for some of their work to be completed um and they've been a part of that so um i hope that that that nuance of an answer is helpful i i think that it's it's complex and not easy to simplify eduardo you want to add in no you are completely right formally the work of the commission is going to end whenever the legal mandate says so but on a more profound way certainly commissions open a chapter in the history of their cities and communities in greensboro they took a lot of time to ensure that the truth commission report was accepted by the city council when they first issued the report the city council rejected the report in a vote on a raised basis basically it took years for them to have the report finally accepted then more years to have the city council establish a community policing board that was able to start a process of reform and then just a couple of years ago the city of greensboro initiated a process of apology and operation for the greens for massacre and that has taken a long a long time certainly is the same when truth commissions are not in a city but in a country in my own country in peru the truth commission ended its work 18 years ago and we have done a lot of progress in terms of you know putting some perpetrators in jail insuring operations to victims creating museums and so on but we are far from from being a fully reconciled society so i i suspect that um the the way you put the question has to do with that has to do with the with the long-term nature of this work i appreciate your answers i personally feel that uh a truth and reconciliation commission is almost uh i don't see where it ever ever should disappear personally that's how i feel because there's always something that uh we need to work on for progress so uh i appreciate your answers and uh that i yield sure it's not all that different in my view from our roles as students you know we may graduate from uh college as kyle mentioned graduating and receive a certificate and be entitled to certain privileges and so forth but any of us who stop studying and stop learning after we receive that piece of paper is obviously foolish um i would like i just have a few questions to and then i'm done with mine but um first and foremost how do you see um if there are ever any disagreements between your group and the truth and reconciliation commission how do you see us mediating that the truth and reconciliation commission is in charge here um we are here to support you now we're here to advise you we're here to make recommendations to you um but we will yield if ever there was a circumstance where we and you felt things should go in a different direction i i experience this all the time i mean not to suggest that i have conflicts all the time i just mean to say that that you know clients or organizations with whom i'm working will often want to do things differently than i would recommend i am i'm not in charge they are so um in my view there's not a need for any kind of a formal process there other than simply to say you know we've provided you with the input that we have and it is your decision um as to how we move forward and we will abide whatever that decision is that's that's what our job is in this case i hope that answers your question chairman yes very well actually um i'd like to ask as well when it comes to researching uh things in the past so one thing i'm very wary of is research into histories of things such as property ownership and also in cases where city governments in the past have had requests for proposal for developments and things of that nature how much experience do you have in researching these types of things a great deal sarah briefly mentioned that i'm supporting or that we're supporting the city of austin's equity-based historic preservation plan and i just put together a three-hour workshop that documents in depth some of the more i think it's fair to say racist uh planning measures that were taken by the city of austin over the last century uh and in particular you know incidents of redlining and you know racial segregation and the closure of schools that cater to the bipod community and so forth but i also was employed by the city of austin for 10 years and one of the most important things that a municipality does is oversee land use and planning and zoning and so i was reviewing you know dozens of those kinds of cases on an annual basis both calls for proposal for what to do with a piece of land as well as um you know someone requesting some kind of new entitlement or you know tax rebate or what have you and uh was knee deep in that as a as a part of my role so i don't know if others want to add in but that was certainly a focal point of my career uh prior to joining currents um so there was a portion where we talked about the active presence nature of your time in iowa city during this process then i also did hear a comment about maybe more or less facilitation being needed at certain points so one thing i would like to address is just a factor of the need for community collaboration and also the difficulty of possibly procuring more stakeholders but also just that i believe it's important to truly make them stakeholders in the fact that they're valued for their time and expertise lent in your past experience with trcs is there any kind of request or proposal process where um those stakeholders do join and then also is their room um in your past experience for them to have their organizations compensated for their time and efforts yes i mean is the answer in simple but i mean i think that we have reached a point in in the field of public engagement and in restorative and transitional justice where we have recognized that it is you know um very hard to ask someone to give of their time and and not expect there to be some um recognition of that acknowledgement of that or perhaps compensation no two cases are the same mr chairman i mean i don't want to suggest that you know just because one commission was pro bono and one commission gave stipends and one commission paid salaries or funded non-profits or what have you that that is the way it is to be done you know canada's commission for example had you know dozens of staff people and medical professionals engaged and retained and millions of dollars with which to work so um you know it's it's important to to be you know cognizant of what resources there are but as it relates to providing the support that would be needed to bring about the engagement you're suggesting i think that that could be a very worthwhile investment for the crc to undertake and we would do all we could to help it occur just the final question i would have before i yield is um in your history of working with trcs when there is that actual monetary backing from the city how often do you see a reimbursement or a stipend component to the members of that actual commission the the notion of a stipend or any other kind of compensation is very important was very important to canada i mean again they understood that an undertaking of that magnitude could not be done by someone occasionally popping in as a volunteer it required a tremendous amount of investment of time the the three commissioners if you can believe that there was a national commission with only three commissioners traveled to either end of that massive country and to great distances you know into the the uh the northern part of the state that's more inaccessible to hear testimony for stan and so that contrasted greatly with greensboro where the commissioners were paid you know nothing and maine were as i understand that they were not compensated some of them could maybe do it as part of an existing position they held either in state government or in their native american tribal organizations but they were not separately paid i i perceive that the investment of time that you all have made and are making and desire to make is extremely significant and time is is a valuable commodity and so we've certainly seen plenty of cases not just in canada but elsewhere where that recognition of how much time is needed to do this work properly uh is linked to compensation and so we see that as as justifiable and we you know understand that the amounts may or may not align with everyone's aspirations or their calculations of what the time is worth but sometimes it's about more than just the amount it's it's about the the gesture it's about the you know the willful commitment of funds to something that that matters i i don't know that there's necessarily i should say also though that salt lake city did pay stipends to its members for the racial equity and policing commission i don't believe we've heard one way the other about the elgin commission at this point in terms of that but i know salt lake city did um so it's they're certainly precedent thank you of course is i don't want to go over this i mean i know we've already gone over this hour but i don't want to mess up the procedure and whatnot i think we do have a question still remaining from commissioner johnson uh yeah i feel like you covered things quite well because i was going to ask about the sniper myself uh we can also always organize to not accept that money and give it to whatever local organization that could possibly need it if we didn't want to take those funds on ourselves and we i assume that you guys can help us organize that and uh get that squared away without even a problem all right yeah uh i had one more question and off the top of my head just kind of left me for a split second but uh it was uh so far i appreciate your time and things sound good and uh yeah if i if it comes across me again i would like to ask again later thank you no problem no problem larry can i clarify something about the the budget sure um so on the part up at the very top it says roll um and i know there's multiple people who are strategic advisors and directors and associates i'm just wondering uh i was trying to kind of do this while i was reading the stuff trying to figure out who would fall into what category um just because their rates are very different i'm just wondering if you could let me know or let us know who falls into each category when we're talking about project manager advisor blah blah you know sure forgive me that i don't have the whole budget in front of me right this minute but i mean i am a director uh kyle is a director um sarah is a senior associate eduardo by virtue of his position at the maryhook center for reconciliation at george mason doesn't have a specific hourly rate attached because he's doing this work for us as part of his role there which is fantastic miraculous even the other gentleman dante james and schaffen roberts from denver and from uh los angeles uh are you know private independent practitioners with their own uh hourly rates they both were attorneys or our attorneys so they are accustomed to you know kind of a different scale or different type of billing perhaps than than we are so hope that uh answers your question do any other commission members have any questions they'd like to ask commissioner johnson might have remembered what he was trying to think of i did uh about resets uh committees are our truth and reconciliation have you dealt with those before has there been resets where you had to drop an entire team in order to uh start from scratch again and how did you deal with that if that's the case well before you said the last part commissioner johnson i was going to say you know that in salt lake city we did have a reset i mean we came in probably i don't know five or six meetings into their work which was not you know our preference uh just that that is what it is you know there's no there wasn't anything we could do about it and there was a good amount of time expended trying to just determine the best way for us to serve them and the best way for them to operate to achieve the objectives that they had and i can go into more detail in terms of those changes but suffice it to say um we did not obviously direct them to do anything we didn't tell them you know do this do that we simply said here are some things that we're noticing that we think are worthy of your consideration and um some of them they took too readily others they didn't and and we continued down the down the path um i don't know if kyle sarah or eduardo have other sort of case studies in this regard i mean that that's what comes to mind for me canada for what it's worth you know canada did start out with one set of commissioners who all uh resigned uh under protest which i thought was very interesting and they did so because of as i understand that government interference and so um the next set of commissioners insisted upon a level of autonomy a level of independent judgment that i think they then received um and uh and i think they had an enormously successful endeavor when it was all said and done but that was a big bump there's no question i appreciate it thank you yeah of course should i do just have one final question that comes to mind when it comes to our um stated charges if if it were to be said to you by um government officials that they believe that it needed to be amended what do you think of the current structure of the charges and do they seem typical of a trc and what it needs to succeed mr chairman another good question i i just i'm reluctant to say whether something is typical in the world of trcs because there's just there's there's so much variety in you know is a commission meant to look at local matters is it meant to look at state or national there have been commissions that have examined current states of affairs there have been commissions that have looked much further back so it's hard to say whether or not the um the mission of the uh or the the mandate or the call so to speak of the of the iowa city trc is typical i mean certainly its attention to restorative justice uh its attention to bearing witness to truth its collection of testimony and public hearings i mean all of that is is very much of a piece with what most if not all trcs set out to do i don't know necessarily the answer to a question about what to do in the event the city council wanted to amend that i mean i think that would have to obviously be sorted out um because i in a way i believe the trc to be um you know in charge of its own work but of course was commissioned by the city and so um there'd have to be some dialogue if if there was a desire to to uh to change the the way in which you all operated we would be providing the advice that we have based on our our judgment of of what would make a trc a success well i guess to just clarify it um that in that case do you believe that um that it is lacking or or does it seem to be sufficient no i don't believe it's lacking at all i mean i think that we we will have plenty of questions to ask you about you know the specifics of of what meetings should cover what public events should cover but as it relates to the mandate or the call itself no i don't i don't believe it to be insufficient i'll take the flaw and i'll take just a second i think i think eduardo had a response yes um i don't think it's lucky i think it's actually very ambitious the charges under the mandate are three if i'm not wrong fact-finding truth-telling and reconciliation and each of those is pretty detailed you are supposed to do fact-finding that is to document those injustices in the city of iowa city that um correspond to the problems that the that the city wants to address issues of racial injustice of inequity etc you are supposed not only to find the information but also to provide to create platforms to create a forum so that people can talk which is why uh kernels and west's proposal indicates also a time in the timeline to have that kind of public engagement debates and then the most difficult one is that you are charged with uh reconciliation right that is to provide opportunities for people to talk directly now i have opened the the resolution right and and that is um interesting because you are supposed to create opportunities for people to talk to each other people who normally don't talk to each other and institutions that normally don't listen to the public to sit down and talk and that is what is under the charge of reconciliation so i do think that the three charges are actually very ambitious um so i i don't think it's lacking i think you have a lot of material there to cover and uh actually to link this with a previous question i think there is going to be a significant investment of your time in this [Music] i just want to apologize i'm the father of two young children and there was a ruckus behind me so i'm sorry i had to turn away there for a moment no apologies um we just have uh commissioner gothel and then also commissioner johnson but i don't have any further questions yeah i for me it's uh i've been curious since you applied to work with us i wonder why why do you want to work with us and i am done with my questions i yelled commissioner um i i believe truth and reconciliation is um one of the most important undertakings humanity can have and in particular one of the most important undertakings for the united states it has been far too long in coming you know the united states american the american people is often you know contented to turn their gaze away from that which they don't like to see and turn towards the next shiny object whatever that might be and i think that our country has finally said enough and i feel as if my professional life but also my personal life and my academic life have all sort of brought me to a place where this is what i believe i'm meant to do with the education and the skills and the experience that i've had and this is the best way i can serve we have one more question and then we'll wrap it up my last question uh is everyone what are your thoughts on uh critical race there i am i'm chuckling only commissioner johnson because i'm astonished at how badly misinterpreted and misunderstood critical race theory has been i live in a state that just tonight concluded their legislative special session with some sort of bizarre ban on critical race theory that makes virtually no sense critical race theory is is in some ways a statement of the obvious i don't mean to undermine the people who you know developed it um but who who among us could deny the significance of race to every aspect of american life um who who could possibly uh dare to suggest that we have reached some sort of you know post-racial uh society um where race isn't a dictate of unfortunately far too many um you know outcomes um so i mean it it seems odd to say whether i'm for or against it i mean it it's simply a distillation in my view of the way things are sad as that may be um and i think that you know even if i were in some way uncomfortable with it and i'm not but even if i were the idea that a legislative body should tell teachers what to teach um is even more problematic and probably indicative of the very foundations of the theory because after all the legislature is a predominantly you know white institution and they are you know deciding that they should dictate to teachers both white and of color what they should teach and that to me is as indicative of racism as anything so um i'm sure i could say more but suffice to say i i believe it is it is truth that is a part of our truth if anybody else would like to comment as well i'm more than welcome yeah i actually want to bring this back to the very first slide that i shared about the neutrality statement that kearns and west operates under and just take a moment to recognize that neutrality does not mean obliviousness to fact and historical fact in particular and i think what critical race theory does is evidence and makes clear the historical foundation of anti-blackness and racism as a founding principle of american public life and i think that that's what truth and reconciliation commissions are about at their core that methodologically and performative performatively they are a desire to make that fact public to evidence how that foundational sin of american public life plays out um in in lives to this day um and and the the type of a pain and scars that it produces and so you know i i think that larry you mentioned you know the the danger is people who don't take the time to see what's happening there i think that's exactly what's happening with this turn against critical race theory it's a desire or it's a reflex to not look at the pain and trauma that exists within the community and i i view this work as doing some of the the effort to um actively challenge those gestures and and bring those things to life so you know i i think that it maybe is not explicitly referenced but the the tenets of critical race theory are endemic or a core part of truth and reconciliation within america and they i don't i don't think that they can be separated in any in any way um i agree with kyle and larry and the only thing i want to add here is this goes back to not shying away from having difficult conversations just to say there is a difference between objectivity and neutrality i think we can be objective about the facts and we need to do that but we cannot be ethically neutral i think we also need to be on the side of the persons who have suffered the injustices that we are going to unveil uh objective about the facts the facts say one thing or another but ethically we need to be empathetic to decide who has been on the receiving end uh having said that um commissioners and to the team i will need to leave the meeting in a couple of uh minutes as i only have reserved two hours for it and i have also some family obligations hearing brooklyn sorry i appreciate your time thank you guys for answering my questions yes thank you okay with that i think we'll wrap it up um as the process moves on we will be in touch and thank you very much thank you thank you so much thank you thank you thank you we'll now move on agenda item number five before you move on to that i didn't know if anyone had any questions for teresa while she's here um sometimes you have questions about the process or what you can and cannot do whether you can have direct contact with them or not and so since she's here it would just be a great opportunity for you to ask directly all those questions that she just mentioned all those exact processes moving forward starting with well the process is going to be a little different because you guys are directly under the council so i think what we should probably do is if you guys have questions about the rfp and i mean the rfp and that go ahead and email them to me i'll put something together and then we'll send it off to them and it's gonna right now you're then after that you're going to have to take it to the council and see if you can get the funding for it so basically you said if we have questions to send them to you send them to me and then i'll get the only i can have contact with with them so if there's anything you want to know send me your your comments and i'll get i'll get the answers for you and then after that we're going to work on getting it on the agenda council's agenda the council agenda that's right okay and do you anticipate that being difficult the way you said that no it's not difficult okay no so if we decide tonight then we would need to communicate with you um if any amendments need to be made to council's agenda on tuesday i don't think there's time to get it for the next meeting we have to put it in a system and it's got to go through and get put in the packet so it'll probably be the following and she what theresa is referring to is if you choose to to hi if you choose to recommend to the city council that you want to hire them all right that's what she's referring to she's saying the first possible date that the council would probably be able to consider that would be their september 21st date now your budget is on the city council meeting for this tuesday the 7th that does not change those are two different two different things but depending on one another right you're going to need the approval of the city council if you choose to move forward with this this firm so i'll need you to fill out your scoring sheets and then get those into me i have a question for you on that number two references yeah yes and then references we're gonna have to decide who's gonna check them and usually it's it's it's one of you you can split them up or you can have one person do it and then they would make notes on the references distribute them to the group and then you would score on them that way i recommend you just kind of come up with a with some questions a set of questions and then you ask all the references the same question okay so to summarize the order of operations is in order to complete these someone needs to first contact the references and then report back to us and then based on these evaluations is that the decision to move forward with this firm or not and then after that if we come to a consensus then we propose to city council the rfp and approval of it and the budget that they've given us okay so we're still a long ways out on this last page uh farm who does it matter who writes the name i'm assuming it's trans and west since you only have one it's just kearns and west yeah are we supposed to do anything with this page okay this is just notes and then um one last question so if we wanted to make an amendment to the tuesday council with their budget then does that need your approval instead of having our budget we would amend it so that it would be their budget i think for the meeting on tuesday if when you get to that agenda item if you want to eliminate other line items and just stick with the cost of the facilitator for the council's consideration on tuesday then that's something you as a commission can decide okay if that answers your question yeah okay thank you so much welcome thank you with that we now move to agenda item number five which is public comment on kerns and west's proposal in the presentation so if any members of the public do have anything that they would like to ask or i mean um just comment on just want to remind commissioners that we are not to engage with the public anyone in the zoom version of the meeting if you would like to raise your hand if you have anything to say okay with that it does look like we are on to agenda item number six which is discussion on the proposal and presentation by kerns and west by the ad hoc truth and reconciliation commission i would just like to say first and foremost that just remember that we do have two more meetings this month and what it is sounding like is that at least in my opinion um the rest of your opinions also are needed here but instead of voting on that actual aspect of of going through with them that we may want to just take this time to reflect and just make sure we are going through these references because just because of the fact that it is not guaranteed that council does also approve this group so if the references are also checked i feel like that would leave more certainty on that aspect or at least raise the possibility and then for that to be on the council's next meeting september 21st i believe that would be we would still have another meeting at the end of the month so if they are to approve it at the september 21st meeting we would be able to begin with them from from what the facilitator group said as well at the end of this month does anyone else have anything they would like to add to that that makes sense okay um i don't have anything further to add on the discussion aspect other than thank you all for coming prepared with those questions and for being flexible on the timing as well and just very glad that we did have this process in this way believe it worked out very well got a lot of great information on that then now we're just on to agenda item numbers oh sorry um we should talk about who's gonna take on the task of checking the references um i've already kind of started to begin doing that in the sense that i do have contacts on the elgin task force so have asked them directly about their thoughts and just continuing to compile them so i'm going to be calling my contacts on that elgin task force in itself following up with them further on who actually is involved in that so that will give a little more clarity so i can just be sure to have an email to the entire commission by monday at the latest on what i do know from that group and um in terms of the lines have you oh i think that we do need to contact specifically the people listed yes also um i i like what we're just told that we should compile a list of questions so that it's consistent and we understand exactly what is being asked of the reference but i do appreciate the information that you have talked to people already so i think we need to do this correctly we should set a timeline for when people should have a list of questions to you maybe if you're prepared to be the person um so when we should have questions to you and then when you hope to be in contact with all these people when we should expect maybe a report back um or is that just maybe for our next meeting i know it gets complicated but not trying to disrupt the flow but it would be best if the questions were sent to me and then i send them to muhammad that's right yeah but that's we can go excuse me sorry we can still go with the time frame or timeline that you want but just be mindful that the questions be sent to me and i can format them and that way when they're sent to him they're just all in one document can someone point out where the references are in this i can't afford a page it's after page 22.okay there it is um since council won't be able to look at this until the 21st then i think we should maybe give us until next week sometime is that doable yeah i'd say if we could um have a soft deadline of next wednesday to get questions to stephanie and then by the latest next friday because that would just allow at least um a few days to get to the references but also to compile their responses and then still have enough time to have those together uh for the for our following meeting and then to make sure that we are prepared for that city council meeting and um just a question suggestion could we do it as a google doc where we could all see in real time and are we allowed to do that and i i would i think the the problem with google docs is it's like it's it's kind of an electronic way to have a meeting informally so i i guess i wouldn't suggest that i it you know i know it might add an extra layer but it's probably best just to send them to me okay and um chair if you want to do them all on your own that's fine but if you'd like help i would be willing to help as well that'd be great actually yeah um i think just um with uh just a rapport with elgin so far i'd be comfortable taking that taking that one and then in terms of salt lake city and austin if anyone would prefer to choose one or the other salt lake city okay i don't know which one is not taken so that'd be the city of austin and theresa do you have any templates of like reference questions just just that i could send out that would just they wouldn't necessarily have to use those questions but just something that kind of has a layout of our format i'll see what i can find okay thank you yes it sounds like we have that straightened out so um big questions to stephanie's soft deadline by next wednesday but at the latest by next friday so with that now on to agenda item number seven which would be vote on whether to recommend to the city council that kearns and west be selected as an independent contractor facilitator for the truth and reconciliation commission so again just on this just in terms of the timeline ensuring the process done right in the references we would want to defer this agenda item would we agree on that i do well would it be too late if we told them on the 17th that we wanted to recommend this though is does that fit in the timeline for when it can be in the council packet if their meeting is on the 21st then we're not making a decision on the 17 until the 17th um that would affect it they would post their packet on the 16th yeah so we need to make a decision before that yeah i mean so is there something we could do where we could still just i mean we've already had we already have our notes we're already looking at the references maybe still submit it to city council prior to the 16th and still have our vote on the 17th then they'd still at least have the items procedurally what's the sort of importance of us submitting these to you with an evaluator score before we can move forward um since you only have one you're not really scoring against other rfps yeah so you what you're trying to establish is whether or not you want to hire them or not so i think it's really important that you do check the references you can find out a lot about a firm from references if you want to check the reference i mean but the problem with references is a lot of times you can't get a hold of people so um that's gonna be that's gonna be challenging for you guys is just getting a hold of people if um i'm not sure how many references they have listed in here three three um you'll want to get back to me right away if you can't get a hold of anyone and maybe we can have currency west get a different reference for you um [Music] so the significance of the score is i mean it's basically just whether you really want to hire them or not so could that go to city council with just um like a vote on a recommendation from us um or does it have to yeah okay okay um there's nothing in the rfp that says they have to have a certain amount of points for you to recommend them so as long as we got confirmation from all of you that you want to move forward we could get it in the packet so we should vote today yeah we need to vote today i am okay with voting today i'm still unclear on that aspect because it sounds like as long as we have all the documents in prior to the 16th then the agenda item for the city council could be to the vote on our recommendation which has that gray area in the way it's written of what the recommendation from us is because they would still have all the information in the packet and have knowledge of over four days of whatever our vote was so we don't know if we're recommending right and we're deciding whether or not we're recommending based on whether or not we contact these references and just see if these people are who they say they are right and so we i think i think the point is taken that we really ought to talk to people who have worked with these individuals get their thoughts um and then i think that we should decide at our next meeting um whether or not we recommend and we can go either go through these evaluations or just vote as a commission either way we won't have something in the city packet for the 21st meeting so i think that that's the timeline yeah because i think even if you recommend it on the 16th that that's not going to be a contract that theresa has worked with them to put together to be a part of that package unless theresa you think that you could i mean i don't know how this is just so unusual yeah you guys are directly under the under the city council so normally when we do a project we already have the budget worked out and you guys don't so i am we're going to have to think about how how we're going to do this i just i think time is really important and i'm not i'm feeling pessimistic from conversations i've had with mayor and mayor pro tem um i really think that we should get this figured out at this meeting today and then figure the rest out i don't think that it that waiting until after their 21st meeting should even be an option i would just have to say that i can't agree with that just off the fact that if we don't check the references then we're voting before we've even checked references and if there's anything else that's found that we don't like then we've already voted to recommend and then that just shoots the entire thing down and i think um teresa and i and dennis i mean you know if this is something you choose to move forward with at the meeting on the 16th i i would hope that you know me there there would be a way to hopefully get that on the agenda for the 16th excuse me for the 21st if on the 16th you decide that you know this based upon the references you want to move forward with them i have to agree with um commissioner amell um i think it's very time is of essence um maybe i'm a little bit more optimistic that our references are going to come back pretty stellar um and this is very important we only have one rfp um i think we should vote tonight i disagree yeah i think that i disagree as well like i i understand the urgency you know we've been at this for a really long time and this has been a long drawn-out process so i'm impatient as well i i also get the excitement right we just got i think a really great presentation and i i feel very enthusiastic and optimistic as well um but i think that um if we're going to be a commission that really tries to seek truth and make recommendations based on that i think that we should also sort of model making sure that we are getting all the data that's available to us sometimes that takes time in this case it takes maybe an extra two weeks for us and that's all we're saying is it just takes an extra two weeks so i think that we should go procedurally through through sort of what we've suggested thus far i i have to say i agree uh quality of if we're looking for quality we got to take the time to look and if we rush things through it'll be a strong possibility to get shut down completely because we didn't look it up i i i this is one of the reasons why i believe that we should uh our timeline needs to be extended that's just mom yeah just very wary of the backlash of things being said such as uh voting to approve before seeing the references maybe that becoming a story and then that being used as leverage to shoot shoot it down and also just that factor of knowing that it's already contentious so want to give as little reason as possible to have any reason to shoot it down i want it to truly be that difficult decision of if it's being shot down it's on something immaterial rather than having something material to point to okay so just a compromise just because i don't understand are we able to have a special vote beforehand if we get the references i was just you mentioned that too i think that we should just have this question if we just if we make a goal to have the references completed by next week like i'll start calling these people tomorrow and leave them because i would just really like to get this figured out so that it can be on the agenda and then they have time to prep for what they're gonna say to city council um and how they're gonna defend um asking city council for you know 298 000 and so with that i think it would be best if um our chair and vice chair figure out the questions and then if you still need me to help call i can and then instead of us waiting until next friday i think that would speed up the process a little bit the funny suggested that we can get the questions from teresa goodbye yeah i couldn't be able to start to call city of boston tomorrow still need the questions yeah we should figure out the questions before we do that so i i'll just um i'll reach out to people individually you guys can think about is that okay if i text people individually and then find a time to zoom with less than quorum to discuss it next week i think possibly tomorrow um the folks who have volunteered to to reach out to the references could at least call or email and maybe set aside of time for next week to say are you available friday at 8 o'clock for me to ask you these 10 15 questions so that way at least you're not kind of chasing a reference next week when you have all the questions from commission members um i i mean commissioners can start sending me questions 24 7.so i mean they can send them now to me um and and if you can just tell me when you want me to to kind of stop accepting them and just send you and the compiled list of questions and add it with what theresa may be able to to find too okay um so then what i can um do tomorrow is reach out to all three of these people and try to set up a time next week to speak to them and let staff know what times they suggest or whatever and then you can communicate that with the rest of the commission sounds good yeah thank you vice chair should we also set a date for our special vote then how would that work i i think you can vote on the 16th i mean if there are times at a council meeting worth that something is withdrawn off of agenda so sorry i think you'd be okay and i i hate to be pessimistic but like how confident are you that they would be willing to allow this to be in the um packet on the 16th um i i think we can probably get a placeholder on like consider recommendation and agreement on trc facilitator you know as an hopefully as an agenda item and and then if stuff doesn't you know come to pass as quickly as um the group thought then they could defer it to the that first meeting in october okay so to close the loop um vice chair is going to contact the three references to try to set up meetings in the meantime all commissioners are going to be thinking of and forwarding our questions to staff who will then send them back to um vice chair and any other interested parties who are who'd be willing to participate in those interviews with the references once those occur um they'll kind of compile their thoughts and and what was heard during those meetings and conversations and then we'll discuss those during our next meeting um in two weeks and then on that day we can have an agenda item on whether or not to formally recommend this firm as um our facilitator does that sound reasonable and we we think that we can get um this on the agenda for the 21st and i did notice commissioner daniel and commissioner nobis had their hands raised they're no longer raised but i did notice that i'm okay thank you okay thank you [Music] um and then is that is is that is it okay to move on to the next agenda item you think are we good um uh to vote on whether to approve the amended budget presented to the city council on august 17th so i think there's definitely a discussion that we should have because um stephanie did make a good point last week or at the last meeting and i did reach out to members of council and i do think that it's important that we first submit the total for the facilitator fee and whatnot and then have them with their expertise help us with our budget um just because i think that they might be able to better draft a budget and defend a budget since they have that expertise and know kind of what these things entail um but i'm open to any other discussion or opinions about that i'd have to agree and i think we if i remember correctly we kind of settled on that in the last meeting but yeah we just wanted to have a formal vote on it just to make sure and also for everyone just to remember that the final total that they did have was 000 but had put on for the line item 200 000 and justified it to them as in case of any incidental reason like maybe some emergency travel or something that was unforeseen so just that piece they did say we can't amend budgets if needed but yeah it sounds like we should just do the amount given in the proposal does that sound yeah it's complicated because again we haven't sort of formed a recommendation but we're saying we're giving ourselves the allowance of two hundred thousand dollars so it has the freedom to perhaps accept um yeah this rfp right yeah so it just needs to be awarded as such not that we're you know using i mean we basically are uh using this figure as a guidance for for that line item but um it can't be specific to you know we're asking for this money to pay this firm because we haven't decided that sounds like you'd essentially just be um that a vote on uh so this isn't the actual emotion just making that clear but um a vote on uh city council to approve a proposed budget allocation of a hundred ninety seven thousand nine hundred and seven dollars for a payment for the facilitator of group i just wanna have some clarity on it so we're we're saying that what you're recommending is that we just send that number to city council without any breakdown or anything to show them why we believe this is warranted well we did already in the work session did we break down this 200 000 yeah yeah in full uh gave it to them told them as well to read it um the entire thing so gave that responsibility to them as well and can also send it to them once again just to make sure but i thought in the work session no one had it because it hadn't been updated yet so no no i attached it to them and sent it to them so they do have that and also ask them to look at it and they all did verbally say at that meeting as well or at least there was a majority of them that said that they are comfortable with that idea of 200 000 allocated to a facilitator group due to everything covered and when you say the breakdown do you mean the breakdown from the rfp from kerns and west well i i agree with what has been said that that doesn't really make sense but yes because it shows why this is just an arbitrary number of 200 000 so there what there were some um council members two to be exact that were not very big fans of the number so i'm just curious and just to clarify that in the city council information packet from last thursday the rfp was in that so the the seven members of the city council have had access to the rfp which would i think provide the breakdown that you're you're referring to thank you that's the clarity i was wondering as a point of discussion i'd be interested in hearing other's thoughts on these three line items on our um submitted budget for this upcoming meeting which would be keeping line items one two and um [Applause] sorry and six and seven so kind of sticking with all the discussions that we've had regarding stipends and back pay and then adding on um the facilitator and then kind of deferring all the other line items until we have facilitation who can kind of help us decide how best to use the the rest of our budget you're saying one two um six and seven yeah you want to keep one two six and seven okay that would be number one commission stipend number two facilitator experts number six back pay for pre-trc paws commissioners and number seven back pay for post trc pos commissioners for the recommendation to them for the recommendation for this up yeah for yeah um this is commissioner dillard i'm just going to say i disagree i i would really just love to stick with the facilitator portion um and just have that part and then i really agree that when um if we choose this rfp that they could really help us convey those items a little bit better then what has been happening at this time i completely understand your position but regardless of if it goes together with it or not i do not have any intention personally of within the budget subcommittee or with the group not still advocating for each of those items and a line of questioning that i personally gave was just to ensure that they seemed aligned with those ideas and also just i mean we can put them in together because they can vote to approve based on each line item but just to avoid the contention on that aspect i want to make it as simple of a decision for them as possible just double checking these when any of you zoom panelists have any opinions on amending the budget for council i think we should keep it the way it is i just want to just give the point again of one thing that the city council did bring up in the last work session was i don't understand why this keeps being said but that they feel that it needs to be spelled out more on um what is going to be spent on each part of the timeline this that etc but uh main thing i just wanted to point out as well was that in terms of the full process being put out and conveyed that still is going to be needed to be done uh with facilitator and all other budgets i've looked at that's always the case anyways it's hard to say what exactly you're going to do before it's done so that to me was a moot point that didn't make sense but again if this is twice now that they keep saying this even with um assumptions being put in there so it just seems easier to go with what they did verbally agree on to avoid that that aspect of um of essentially i'm shooting things down i mean i just want to reiterate again i'm not giving up on these items it's just more of don't want the debate and push back on each of these items and then for the votes to just be budget deferred because of these other things because that's a possibility too just because i don't maybe i don't understand whether they can default sorry can you can you explain then sorry so i thought we were trying to keep them on and then they can vote on line by line right they can do that but they do also have the choice of deferring the entire thing because they all came in together so they have multiple ways of playing it so again just to avoid the possibility of it being gamed just put in the one thing yeah i think we should keep stick to our i think we should stick to our our plan and just keep pushing um but uh yeah we should make them do their job and not just like you know like refuse the whole thing because they don't like some of it i mean they have common sense they can pick some items that like obviously work and that like are you know they're agreeing to so um i you know i just think that it's great that we continue to keep that in there [Music] it shows our you know it shows our like our tenacity and like our like you know we're not going to give up on it i'm just being very candid here i don't trust them well yeah i mean after what they did the other day i get it you know so my response is that um for some of these line items advertising outreach videographers right transportation like i think we can have sort of more details available to city council later once we have a facilitator in place who can help us sort of actually make moves on sort of the all the portions of our mandate right the fact-finding the truth-telling and and the reconciliation um events and processes that we're gonna do so i think that those things can wait until we have a facilitator the the advocacy for us sort of maintaining our position on stipends um i think shouldn't be shouldn't waver um sort of similar to what you're saying commissioner nobis right and i think that we've had plenty of discussions about those items and have justified them over and over again chair you have done a good job at defending those items to city council so if we present to them an amended budget that's only four line items three of which have to do with paying current or past commissioners and one dealing with hiring a facilitator i think that's simple enough for them to get through um and again they can sort of vote things line by line so i'll let commissioner daniel go but then should look to have a motion to vote one way or the other of how we want to do that then we can't hear you i got another thing after danielle goes no it looks like she's unmuted you know you should click the little arrow next to your microphone might be the right disconnect no she is unmuted i think her microphone just might be disconnected on her own computer no your audio input is is incorrect well daphne's um daniel when you hover over the little microphone icon is there a little like upwards arrow next to it okay if you click that can you are there options for microphone input and you think that you've selected the right one and it's not working okay can she call in is there a way to do that can you use your phone to call it on the zoom i think i think there is a number i think it's that three one two i should have it memorized by now but let me um locate that i just had a a quick thought because i'm tired and i could be looking at this wrong but for the facilitator part since it is nine months and um this says through december 31st should we have something that says that a little bit more specifically yeah i have that written down to change that part of it okay um while daphne is getting that figured out i'm just going to say i think where muhammad and i happen to be coming from is we did have a chat with mayor and mayor pro tem and it was [Music] really disheartening it's from what i felt like the conversation from them was they were for sure wanting to get on the change completely like the question was verbatim what would be the most optimal way to do the charges of the trc uh meaning from what i took is that what is the best way to change the charges of the trc and they were kind of not really they were kind of back pedaling on the facilitator aspect during that meeting i think that's where our pessimism comes from um to be completely honest uh they don't feel like we are all on the same page as council and commission and i don't think that they will trust or um want to invest in a facilitator until they believe that we are on the same page um and that's just from what i felt like from our conversation did they say can you give us any more information i guess like it was put towards us in a way of again that question of might want to again look at the charges of the trc so if that makes more sense as to why i asked that specific question to them on what they thought because they have so much experience with all of these other trcs and it was said before you know we even think about a facilitator we should think about verbatim the most optimal way to address the charges of the trc which is again interesting because on the first budget deferral the budget deferral was based on you need to first focus on getting a facilitator so the goal posts keep getting moved can you hear me now okay awesome um so i just wanted to say i i think focusing on the facilitator is the best the best way or the best way that will end up getting the stipend or anything because it's not that the city council doesn't understand our position on the stipends is that we have not presented a good argument and if you're making an argument sometimes taking a step back and realizing you need help you need supporting evidence is the best way to win um all this tech confusion i i hope that makes sense i just think we focus on one thing now and then with the help of the facilitator we can reach the goals that we've set out including getting that stipend i yield is there any more discussion on this um steph what would be the best way to word this for the minutes i don't want to um i think if um kind of just following the um i was just gonna say should i just follow the agenda i would just maybe read that vote on whether to approve the amended budget present it to the city council um and if it and yeah and then you might have to take a few votes but that's probably the or you could be more specific and um you know uh commissioner rivera could make uh a motion on including one two six and seven and and do it that way too so it's just kind of it sounds like we have at least three people who are set on just wanting to submit in a budget with one single line item for the for the facilitator and then there's been some other thoughts thrown out so i mean we can put emotion i'll make the motion um to not recommend the sort of previously amended and submitted budget but instead submit um an updated budget that only has the facilitator line item is there a second i think you can just make that a motion to submit the budget with just the facilitator item so motion so moved yeah second any other discussion any further discussion if not i'll take roll call uh commissioner ali yes commissioner daniel yes uh commissioner dillard yes commissioner gathawa yes commissioner johnson yes uh commissioner rivera yes uh commissioner nobis no and then commissioner uh treyori yes okay so the motion uh pass this seven to one motion to it and the negative are we cool to do a motion to adjourn we're all good thank you everyone for your time