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Council Present: Botchway, Cole (arrived 5:30 PM), Dickens, Mims, Taylor, Thomas,
Throgmorton
Staff Present: Frain, Dilkes, Karr, Andrew, Korpel, Yapp, Havel, Grier, Bockenstedt,
Hightshoe, O'Brien, Bowers, Seydell-Johnson, Hargadine, Kelsay
Others Present: Neal (UISG)
Ouestions from Council re Agenda Items:
ITEM 18. TRANSPORTATION NETWORK COMPANIES (LIBER) — ORDINANCE
AMENDING TITLE 5, ENTITLED `BUSINESS AND LICENSE
REGULATIONS," BY ADDING A NEW CHAPTER 3, ENTITLED
"TRANSPORTATION NETWORK COMPANIES". (PASS AND ADOPT)
Throgmorton/ All right, so uh... I'm going to call the April 19a' work session, uh, together for
Iowa City City Council. Uh... should I ask for who's here? (laughs) Rockne (several
talking) Rockne's not here. He expects to arrive a little bit late, maybe 15, 20 minutes
late, uh, due to a court appearance he has to be involved in. So, we want to go through
the agenda items pretty quickly so that we can focus basically one hour of our attention
on the St. Ambrose traffic stop study. So ... let's ... let's kinda move through this agenda
stuff, uh, quickly, okay? So, does anybody have any items they want to bring up? I ... I
can tell you there's one I do, so maybe I should just mention it (laughs) right off the bat.
Uh, we received some news about Item 18, transportation network companies. Uh, it's
pretty important news that affects our action tonight. So, Simon, could you brief us about
what happened.
Andrew/ Sure! The, uh, legislation at the State level, um, was passed by both the Senate and the
House. Uh, the legislation will go to the Governor next. Um, the Governor's office has
been, uh, complimentary of the legislation thus far. We would expect that it gets signed,
but ... um, that's certainly not a given. Um, essentially what the, uh, legislation does is
regulate TNCs at the State level. Uh, it would take effect January 1St of 2017. Um, so we
would have good seven and a half months before that was in effect. Uh, it also clarifies
and, uh, takes away home rule authority to some degree on regulating traditional taxi
companies. Um, it clarifies that neither TNCs nor taxi drivers for vehicles under seven
passengers are required to have a chauffeur's license. Um, no longer required to have a
brick and mortar, uh, office in any given jurisdiction. Um, so it does a lot of the things
that we were looking at anyway in walking back in our taxi ordinance. Um, in terms of
the third consideration tonight, um, we would still recommend that you move forward
with approval of the TNC ordinance and that we would come back to you, um, possibly
the second meeting in May with a taxi ordinance that matches what the State regulation
would be, uh, come January 1St of 2017. But essentially the TNC side is roughly what
you've been considering already, that that will be the statewide, uh, framework come
January 1St, um, drivers wouldn't, uh, apply with the State. It'd be the company that's
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permitted through the State and permitting fees in that process would go through the State
Department of Transportation.
Throgmorton/ You and I spoke earlier about whether there might be any merit whatsoever in
deferring action on our ordinance tonight for two weeks, to our next meeting, in order to
make sure we understand the State legislation, and understand whether there's any, uh,
complications that we should be aware of and so on. Do you think there's any merit
in ... in doing that, given your own perspective?
Andrew/ From my perspective, I wouldn't recommend, um, waiting on that. I don't think that
there's going to be a significant amount of new information in the next two weeks that
would affect what your decision would be. Um, I would recommend that you either, uh,
approve, uh, the third reading of this ordinance or say that we're content to stay pat until
January. Um, I would fear that this, uh, is something that would continue to come back
to you, it would continue to, uh, dominate a lot of the input that comes to you and, um, a
lot of your meeting discussions, um, rather than moving on to more, uh, substantive
issues in your strategic plan. So, I ... I don't foresee a lot of information coming out in the
next two weeks that would, um, alter the decision making process, but, you know, of
course that's a ... an option for you.
Throgmorton/ I, uh, I'd like to recommend, uh, given the fact that there's a fair amount of public
interest in this particular topic, I'd like to recommend that we move Item 18 up on our
formal meeting agenda so that we actually discuss it immediately after the Planning and
Zone mater... Planning and Zoning material, so we would discuss it immediately after
Item 6 and before Item 7. Uh, does this sound reasonable to you folks? (several
responding)
Botchway/ I would agree. I just need to Tweet some stuff out about that (several talking)
Throgmorton/ Well (mumbled)
Mims/ I just always have the concern when we walk into this meeting and start changing the
order of agenda items and the public, if they're interested in something, has read the
agenda and has tried to get some idea of a timeframe of when they need to show up to be
here to comment on things. If we move it up and people come after we're all done with
it ... they're going to be mad.
Throgmorton/ Marian, can you tell ... tell us about the student you spoke to earlier today and what
she had to say?
Karr/ Um ... there was a, um ... uh, individual who was here at the last meeting and was, um,
concerned last time because the public input went beyond 6:00 that the agenda said. I'm
sorry, 8:00! I'm sorry, 8:00. The agenda indicated public comment would end at 8:00.
She indicated there were up to 40 people who were out in the hallway waiting for the
item on the agenda and, um, would like it moved up this time because of the scheduling
conflict that she has tonight. However, her scheduling conflict tonight is at 8:00. So
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either it's going to have to occur before that or she also requested that ... then she be
assured that it would ... she could go to her other commitment and come back at 9:00, and
I expressed to her that that isn't what we ... what we can do. But her concern was last time
that it was late in the evening and ... we didn't stay with the agenda.
Throgmorton/ Uh, so what's your will, Council Members?
Botchway/ I say move it. Honestly, I mean, Susan, I ... I agree. That's why I was actually saying I
Tweeted it out because I .... a lot of people were asking me where it was on the agenda,
and I said (mumbled) maybe late, urn ... but I ... I think at this point (mumbled) Of course I
can! I think at this point, um, I think we should just have the discussion, um, especially
since, uh, you know we have seen a lot of people here at the onset and, you know, and
provide opportunity for people to have comment on the issue.
Dickens/ Move it up.
Thomas/ I'm okay with moving it up.
Throgmorton/ Pauline?
Taylor/ We have had a number of people that always show up and are interested in this. Uh, so
I ... I do kind of agree with Susan that it might be alarming to them if they come ... but
seeing... they seem to come at the start of the meeting. They don't seem to come mid -
meeting. So, urn... I'll... I'll go along with moving it up.
Throgmorton/ I should announce this at the, right after calling the meeting to order I suppose.
Karr/ I would think that would be a good idea so that people who are at home and still have time
to come down.
Throgmorton/ All right. We'll be able to discuss what we want to do with regard to ... the ... the
third reading of the ordinance when we get to the formal meeting. Any other agenda
items? Okay, I don't see any, uh.... we can turn to Dr. Barnum. No, we have to do
Council appointments! We should do that next.
Karr/ You just have one.
Throgmorton/ We have one appointment, correct, and it's one applicant for one unexpired term
on the Board of Appeals.
Dickens/ Gender thing is no longer...
Karr/ The gender has passed.
Dickens/ Right.
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Karr/ So you have one male applicant.
Throgmorton/ Yeah, his name's Jim Walker, right?
Karr/ Correct.
Throgmorton/ So, uh, any reason not to appoint Jim?
Dickens/ Looks like he has a lot of (both talking)
Throgmorton/ ...so I should make a note of that. Any objection to ... okay. Let's see. Okay. Now
we can turn to Dr., uh, Barnum from St. Ambrose. Actually to the Chief first.
Presentation from St. Ambrose University's Dr. Barnum regarding the ongoing Police
Department disproportionate minority contact traffic stop study:
Hargadine/ I'm not Dr. Barnum (laughter) but I'm Sam Hargadine, Chief of Police for Iowa City.
And good evening, Mr. Mayor, Council. The Iowa City Police Department started to
collect demographic data on traffic stops in July of 1999. June of 2013 the Iowa City
Council passed resolution 12-320 estab ... establishing the Ad Hoc Diversity Committee.
This was to study City transit and law enforcement operations as they relate to minority
populations. Based on community conversation generated by the Ad Hoc Diversity
Committee, I worked with Dr. Barnum to incorporate more traffic stop data, and then
finalize his analysis. While this study was initially intended to be internal and for
academic purposes, I felt it was appropriate to have a public discussion on the topic at
that time by participating in this multi-year study. The ICPD is one of two police
departments in the state that collect and analyze traffic stop data. Dr. Barnum presented
the results of his analysis to the City Council on June 161' of 2014, and at that time we set
a two -fold goal — to reduce the traffic stop disproportionality as experienced in the high
levels in 2010 through 2012, and gained the confidence and trust of our community,
especially the minority community. Dr. Barnum is the Program Director for Masters in
Criminal Justice and Criminal Justice Professor for St. Ambrose University. He earned
his MA, his BA, MA, and PhD in sociology from the University of Iowa. He's been in...
interested in researching our traffic stop data since 2006 and has been consulting with our
department and the City of Davenport Police Department. Dr. Barnum, like I said, last
presented to the City Council in June of 2014 and he's here tonight to report on his
analysis of traffic stops that occur in 2015.
Barnum/ Thank you very much, Chief. I'm Chris Barnum from St. Ambrose.
Throgmorton/ Welcome!
Barnum: Uh, Mayor and Councilors, urn ... here we go! Uh, before I get started I'd like to
introduce some of the, urn ... people that have helped me with this project, my graduate
students who have played an integral role in both the data collection and the analysis of
the data. So, um ... Sam Loose, Matt Auliff, Colt White, and then back here is Robert
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Perfetti. Robert's finished, uh, Cole has a way to go, and these two will be done at the
end of May. So they're onto bigger and better things! So I really just wanted to
acknowledge them and uh, tell them how much I appreciate their support and their help
with this project. They've been invaluable. So I think the best way to proceed, given that
this is a work session, is that I will go through the slides and I will ... I will talk about
them, but feel free to stop me at any point and just ask questions as we go. I think that's a
little easier than skipping back and forth between the slides, so ... if that's all right with you
then, I'll proceed! So as the Chief mentioned, we, uh, have been analyzing data since, uh,
we've been looking at the Iowa City Police data since 2006. The actual data that we've
looked at runs from 2005 up until the present. The presentation I'm going to give tonight
for the most part is on the, uh, results from 2015. And as I got through this I'll explain
why we're kind of isolating on 2015, but in a nutshell, the reason why is that, uh, we have
a better, uh, we have a better gauge on what the benchmark driving population is in town
now, in terms of various, uh, areas of town than we did before. And I'll talk a little bit
about that. So ... um, this doesn't show up very well. Uh... but ... this area right in here is
the downtown area, and what that shows, what this map ... (mumbled)
Throgmorton/ All right. (several talking in background)
Bamum/ Sorry! (laughter) That's better! (laughs) Not really good with technology! So ... what
we did is, uh, when we worked with the Police Department, the last time we presented...
we were only able to determine, uh... stop levels based on the shift that officers worked.
We couldn't tell the actual location of where a stop was made, and so what we had to do
is we had to go forward and figure out a way that when a police officer went out on the
radio, we could figure out in terms of something that was manageable where that stop
was made and then compare that information to the people that are living and driving in
that area. So what happened is we divided Iowa City up into one square mile units, and I
think there's 65 of them on there, and this map depicts those square mile units of Iowa
City, and then again, this area ... just so you can kind of get a reference, this is the
downtown area and that's, uh, number 21 on the map, and this area... immediately below it
is, uh... would be the Broadway, uh, Cross Park area, right in there. And that's zone 29.
And so this is 28, 30, and so on and so forth. So they're just sequentially ordered. So
essentially what our strategy is is we go out and we watch traffic in those areas and we
look at census data in those area to try to determine the percentage of minority drivers on
the road in each of those areas, both day and night, and then we look at the Police data
and we know where the stops are being made in terms of these square mile areas and we
compare the percentages that the Police make to what we saw, both in the census data
and in our observations, and if there's any difference, then we call that disproportionality.
So that's kinda the overview for the traffic stop stuff. And ... Iowa City doesn't stop the
Police Department. They do not tend to stop cars evenly across the city. This slide
shows you where, uh, most of their stops are being made. And you'll have to refer back
and forth to the map to understand this slide, but, urn ... the ... the top number up there is
number of stops that the Police Department made in 2015, which is 12,850. And you can
see that the lion's share by far is ... of the stops were made in zone 21, which is the
downtown area, which is the first one I highlighted. And then, uh, zone 29 is second,
which would be that area immediately south of downtown, and that's the Broadway area,
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and then zone 13 is third, which would be immediately north of downtown. So that's
kinda like going out Dubuque Street, towards the interstate. That's where... that's where
the vast majority of the stops are made. And by the way, that holds for both the day
officers and the night officers. I better get this out of the way cause I'm gonna show you.
And ... the reason why that's, uh, important for us is because those are the areas of town
that we decided to watch very closely with our traffic observations, watch the areas
where most of the stops are being made so we can be very sure on the benchmarks in
those areas and that's what.... that's what, uh, we did. So, this is just the map, again, in
case you know you want to go back and forth between those. And ... I'm just gonna break
it out real quickly for you, then days versus nighs. They don't stop as many cars on days
as they do nights. So on days they made, uh, 3650 .... 3,650 stops. But the pattern's pretty
much the same, as you can see. It looks very, very similar. And here's nights. And you
can see on nights, the ... the stops are very, very heavily concentrated in the downtown
area. And so we needed to know ... are the drivers downtown at night the demographic
characteristics of those drivers are the same as they are during the day? So we had
to ... that's why we had to watch both day and night, and that's what we did. And ... these
guys did a lot of the watching actually, so... And so this is pretty much what I've been
talking about since we've been doing this since 2007. We've made about 56,000 traffic
observations in town. It's in multiple waves. We've watched in multiple waves. Two big
waves — 2007 we did a big wave and then we did a ... another large wave, uh, this year,
and we...we, uh, started watching in September and we finished up at the beginning of
March of this year watching traffic. And 27 roughly, 27,000 traffic observations these
guys made. And again, we concentrated most of our area ... uh, most of our observations
in the areas where the Police are doing the stopping, so we could be sure. So we're
watching the downtown area a lot. We went down and we watched around Broadway
and Cross Park, and ... and uh, the areas surrounding that area. That's kinda where we
focused at. And this slide just breaks that out so you can see, uh, of the ... of the
observations we made this time around, about 12,000 of those observations were made
downtown, and that ... that was divided between day and night. We did it all days of the
week, Monday through Sunday, including some football weekends ... uh, and you know,
just so we had an idea of what the drivers looked like in each of these areas. And then,
uh, we watched a lot in zone 29, then the rest were kind of spread out. Any questions so
far? Following me? And we had a lot of information from prior, uh, studies of watching
traffic, and from looking at the census data over the years, and ... and the level of census
data that we generally use is a block group. So the census data can be divided into, you
know, the city as a whole census tracts; census, uh, block groups, which are smaller than
census tracts; and then blocks, and a block group is roughly 20 to 40, um ... census blocks.
It's about 2,000 people in a ... in a block group. So that's the level we look at, and what we
found is that when we looked at the census data compared to what we saw on the roads, it
was pretty close. There was a fairly close correspondence between what the census was
showing and what our observers were showing, which is ... gave us some confidence that
what we are seeing is ... was probably a pretty good representation of the drivers who are
out there driving around in Iowa City. Now, based on what we knew before and what we
saw this time, we're pretty confident most areas of town are, uh... relatively, uh,
homogeneous in terms of the characteristics of the drivers on the roads. It's ... it's, uh... the
baselines are pretty constant from area to area, with a few exceptions, which I'm going to
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talk about. And so if..now given ... one thing that you should keep in mind as we're ... as
we're talking about this, when we're watching traffic, that's simply a sample of the traffic
on the roads. So there's going to be a degree of margin of error associated with that. I
can't estimate what the margin of error is because I can't estimate... you know, its an
infinite number of cars potentially that you could see. So you can't .... in order to come up
with a number for the margin of error, I ... I'd have to know the population size. I can't
really estimate that. So, but I would give a couple points either higher or lower when
we're .... when we're thinking about benchmarks. But a ... a good, uh, ballpark figure for
most areas of Iowa City, both day and night, is about 10% of the drivers on the roads are
minority drivers. Um .... on average. Now it's different in different parts of the
community, which I'll talk about, and we characterize minority drivers as ... anyone who is
not a white or Asian driver. We group together whites and Asians. There's a ... there's a
variety of reasons for that, but for the purposes of the study tonight, the main reason is
that's the way we've been doing it now for several years, so for consistency we've done
that. If you have questions about that, I'd be happy to talk about that. Um, but ... but, uh,
when you group that way what it shows is you're more likely.... you're more likely to find
disproportionality than if you don't group it that way. And the short answer is that
generally Asians tend to get stopped in lower numbers than their percentages in the
population. So if Asians are groups with the minorities, it tends to mask the actual level
of minorities being stopped. So that's why we do it. So this slide then... shows ... uh, the
next series of slides are just gonna show ... the areas, the square mile areas where the
percentages are a little bit different than 10%. And this first one is what we saw in the
downtown area during the days. And what we saw down there was about, uh, 7% of the
drivers downtown during the day were minority drivers as we classify them. And
it ... breaks it out for you by the various percentages. At nights though there's... there's
more minority drivers downtown than during the day. About 18%. And so a question
you might have is ... well, what's ... when does the night start? For us, you know ... the night
runs from 7:00 at night till 7:00 A.M. in the mornings. So we just divide the day in half.
7:00 to 7:00, overnight, and then 7:00 to 7:00 during the day. We ... that's irrespective of
the shifts the officers are working. We don't pay any attention to that. That's ... it's what
we say is nights, and so from 7:00 at night on, 19:00 hours until 07:00 hours, that's what
we call nights. And during that timeframe when we observe traffic, what we saw was
about 18% of the drivers on the road were, uh, minority drivers. Then in zone 29, which
is immediately south of downtown, the ... the Broadway, Cross Park area, during the day it
was about 25% minority drivers that we observed down there, which matches pretty
closely to what ... block group information says for the census. But at night, again, we saw
more minority drivers. 32%. Getting broken out by various classifications up there. An
issue that we ran into and an issue that I often get asked is... to talk about Latino and
Hispanic drivers, because it's difficult sometimes to tell, uh, visually if somebody's Latino
or Hispanic, and so that was just based on our impression, and the reason why we coded
that is because the Police data codes it. So the police officer have a category where they
can mark whether the driver was Latino/Hispanic, and if that box is checked, then that
means that the driver was not black. The driver was not white. So they're
treating... they're treating that category as a racial category rather than an ethnicity, which
kind of goes against what the census data does. And so that's why, you know,
when ... when these guys were out, uh, estimating drivers they were ... if they saw
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somebody that they thought was Hispanic, for whatever reason, they coded that. Okay?
Zone 30, which would be immediately to the east of zone 29, so this would be like, uh,
Sycamore Street, California, down in that area. Um ... both days and nights what we saw
in that area was about 17%, on average across that square mile, were minority drivers.
And ... 28 is immediately to the west ... of the Broadway area. 14% there. This is what I
mentioned at the top that .... it's important to keep in mind with these benchmarks that
they are truly a sample. So, if I say an area has a 10% benchmark, we could be off. We
could be off a couple of percentage points, so we ... you know, you have to ... you have to
think that way when you're interpreting the data. There can be some slippage in it. So
what you look for, and... at least my suggestion is you look for big differences between
what we saw on the roads and what the Police are doing. That's more informative than
little tiny differences. So ... that's kinda what's important and that's what we're gonna do
next, but before I move on to the next slides, is everyone on board with pretty much our
methodology? So we look at two broad areas as we ... as we analyze police data. We look
at the stops themselves. Uh, the stops differ from what we saw the people out on the
roads, driving (mumbled) and then we look at the outcome of the stop ... to see if people
once they're stopped they're treated differently, and there're several outcomes that we
look at. We look at warnings, citations, arrests, and search requests, voluntary search
requests. And then we look at hit rates from those voluntary search requests. So I'm
gonna kinda divide this up into two big sections. The stops come first and then the
outcomes come second. So the stops are much harder to analyze than the outcomes are
because you have to have a benchmark, you have to go out and get it, and that's the trick
right there. That's the whole trick to this type of work. So we're gonna look at the day
officers first. This is a slide that just refreshes your memory on where they're making
their stops — downtown, immediately south of downtown, and immediately north of
downtown — that's where they're making their stops. And this slide shows you
disproportionality. So the purple, the light purple, is our benchmark values. Those are
the percentages of minority drivers that we saw on the roads, and then the dark purple is
the percentages in those areas of drivers who were minority that were stopped by the
Police, and the reason I have that big arrow over zone 21 is to remind us that by far the
majority of the stops that were made were made in that area, and so a graph like this can
be a little deceiving because if you look at zone 30, for example, there's a large degree of
disproportionality there. You can see it, right? So the Police were making, oh, it's up
over 30% of their stops there were minority drivers and our benchmarks says that that's
17 or 18%. That's a large difference, but relatively few stops were made there, okay? If
you look at the area where a lot of stops were being made, the downtown area where the
arrow's at, the level of disproportionality is much less there. And this is a theme that we
found in the data. In the areas where the most stops are being made, the
disproportionality tended to be lower. In fact, in some areas there was very little
disproportionality where there were a lot of stops made, but in the areas ... where fewer
stops were made, the level of disproportionality increased. So .... so if you were going
to ... if you were going to calculate an average in your head, and I actually calculated an
average which I'll talk about here in a second, but if you were going to do it in your head,
when you look at a graph like this, what you do is you give the most weight to the areas
where the most stops are made, and that's where the arrow's at. And then less weight
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proportionately to the areas where fewer stops are made. That's how you would come
up ... if you wanted one number.
Throgmorton/ Area 22 seems to be an outlier. Uh, can you explain that?
Bamum/ Uh, in ... in ... in so ... outlier in what way?
Throgmorton/ The disproportionality's ... appears to be reversed.
Barnum/ Yeah, so ... there, in that area ... they were stopping — they, the Police were stopping fewer
minority drivers than what our benchmark showed, and that ... I think that shows you the
sampling nature of the benchmark. And so that, you know, if you look at something like
that and you compare that to zone 21, the distance is ... similar, the level of
disproportionality. It's reversed, but the ... the actual absolute distance between the two
bars is similar. Maybe that's noise there. I can't tell ya for sure if that's noise or not, but
that's... that's... when you see something flip like that, that's... that's generally what it's
indicating, and that's... that's what I'm trying to, you know, impress upon you that ... that
benchmarks truly are a sample and they.... they need to be accompanied... you know, you
need to give'em a ... a wide degree of, uh, latitude in terms of margin of error when you're
interpreting those. So ... yeah. But the areas that you'd look at, naturally, are, uh, 28 and
30, which ... I'm not so sure coincidentally are the two areas that are adjacent to the
Broadway area. So 20...28 would be immediately west of it, and 30 would be
immediately east of it. Just for a frame of reference. And ... this pretty much says what
I ... this slide just pretty much summarizes what I just said, that ... you need to give the most
weight to the areas where the most stops are made. We tended to find the most
disproportionality in areas where the fewest stops were made. Any questions so far? We
doin' good? So what I did then in the next few slides, in those areas where we found
quite a bit of disproportionality, I actually broke it out so you could actually see the stops
that the Police Department made so you can actually look. The first thing you should
look at is the bottom down there at the total ... the total number of stops made by the Police
Department, which is ... total. If you look down there you can see this is zone 27, so that'd
be two miles west of, uh, the Broadway area. Zone 29. And you can see that 228 stops
were made, out of the total.... 12,800, whatever that was. So you can see, not very many
stops were made there, but... and... and when your end goes down, when the total number
goes down, a little bit of divergence in the ... in the number of minority drivers will really
raise that percentage, and it'll ... it'll look like a lot of disproportionality. That's why you
have to be careful when you're lookin' at those bar graphs. It can be so deceiving, but...
you need to sort of present the data that way, so, you know, you can see where it's at, but
you had to keep in mind that we have to know how many stops were actually made there.
So you can see in zone 27, um, the disproportionality involved African American drivers
mainly and... that... but it was due to a relatively, uh.... modest number of stops. In zone
28, 280 stops were made there. So zone 28 is immediately west of the Broadway area.
And again, the disproportionality is ... seen mainly among African American drives.
That's another theme, so sometimes people ask me, well, which minority group is the
disproportionality highest for. It generally is for African American drivers, what we find,
rather than Latino or some other group. And so, um ... but again, on days there wasn't,
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they made, uh, roughly 4,000 stops on days. 280 of those stops happened in this ... this,
uh, square mile area down there. So not a lot. And 30's on the other side then, 260 stops.
Again, the highest levels of disproportionality are with black/African American drivers,
and it's the same theme over and over. So ... this ... this shows you that there is ... there is a
fair amount of disproportionality in these areas, but the number of stops is relatively, uh,
modest, small... compared to the downtown area where the lion's share of the stops are
being made. So now we're going to just do the same thing for nights! The exact same
thing we just did. And nights. You can really see, this is again the ... the, uh, graph just to
remind you where the stops are being made, and you can see on nights ... over 45% of all
the stops made by officers that we classify as night officers are making their stops in that
downtown area, that one squa ... square mile area downtown. And so ... urn ... that's the area
that you should give the most weight to when we look at disproportionality, which'll be
on the next slide ... which I've marked there. Very low levels of disproportionality there,
but again you see the same general pattern as we saw on days. Zone 30 and zone 28,
there's quite a bit of disproportionality ... in those zones. And there is also in zone 20,
on ... on this slide. So we'll go ahead and look at the individual slides then. So on zone
20, now on days there was roughly ... or excuse me, on nights there was roughly... 9,000,
9,000-ish stops made out of the total 12,000, and ... 490 of those were made in zone 20.
Again, the highest levels of disproportionality are among African American drivers. The
baseline in zone 20 is 10%, just to give you a reference there, the benchmark and you can
see that the percentage stopped was 18.37, so that's about eight percentage points higher
than what we expect. 27 ... only 208 stops were made in zone 27, but again, the same
pattern is holding. It'll... it'll keep holding through all these slides, which is interesting.
28, a few more stops are made there — 592, and uh... the level of disproportionality's a
little bit lower here than we've seen in the other slides. As the number... generally what
we found is the number of stops increased, the level of disproportionality went down.
Zone 30...394 stops out of roughly 9,000. And you'll ... if you just look through that you
can see where ... where the disproportionality's coming from. It's from black and African
American drivers. So before I get to the officer level, uh, analysis... that will ... because
that'll probably spark some conversation .... I did go ahead and calculate a weighted
average for both days and nights. I weighted ... the difference between the percentages of,
uh, minority drivers stopped by the Police by the number of stops made in the zone, for
each zone up there, 65 times. And that'll give you a ballpark figure. If you wanted to put
a number on it, that will give you a ballpark figure of what the level of disproportionality
is across all areas of town. And my best guess is, my best estimate is, that's about five
percentage points higher than the baseline. So if the baseline is 10, if we say across the
city on average the baseline is 10% minority drivers, my best estimate is that about 15%
of the drivers stopped by the Police when we compare to the benchmark, uh... I shouldn't
say that... about, uh.... 15% of the drivers stopped by the Police are minority drivers and
that's compared to the benchmark, so that's about five percentage points higher. But you
have to interpret that with a generous degree of margin of error, so that might be eight.
Might be three. Okay? So the next thing that we did was we calculated... this average
that I just talked about for each officer that made at least 20 stops in town. And ... the
thing to keep in mind when you do this kind of work, again because this is ... there's
sampling error involved in any sample, is that you look for officers whose values on this
index that we compute is ... are different or look different than the other officers. And
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what you... what's most informative generally is if you find a pattern where most of the
officers, the great majority of the officers, are very similar to each other in terms of the
numbers, but then there's a couple that aren't. That's usually pretty revealing that ... that
will lead you to ask the question why are ... the ones that are different different. Actually
that's the pattern that we're going to see here. So ... what we do is we ... we compute a
quasi -odds ratio. I won't go into the methodology on that, but essentially the thing to
keep in mind is that ... we are comparing the odds that a white driver will be stopped, a
white/Asian driver, against their baseline to the odds that a black driver will be stopped,
against their baseline. If that score is greater than one, if the value's greater than one, 1.0,
that means there's a level of disproportionality. If it's less than one, that means that
whites are being stopped, like in zone, uh, 20 that we saw, at a higher percentage than
what the benchmark is. The higher the value, the more disproportionality. Because
there's sampling error, I generally ... I ... I've been doing this in a .... in a couple different
communities for several years now. I ... I generally use as a rule of thumb a score larger
than two, I start looking more closely at. So that would mean an officer is stopping twice
as many minority drivers as what our baselines show. That's... that's what that score
would mean. So ... if you .... if you wanted to be really, um, technical about it, any score
over one, if our baselines are 100% accurate, which I'm not confident that they are, would
indicate disproportionality, but larger scores do indicate disproportionality in my opinion,
and the large you go ... the more disproportionality is. So a score of two is an officer's
twice as likely to stop a minority driver as a white driver, given the baselines. Score of
three is the officer's three times as likely, 300%. And this is the (both talking)
Dickens/ Are stops?
Barnum/ Sorry?
Dickens/ Are your... calculating just stops not arrests or tickets (both talking)
Barnum/ Yes, at this point (both talking) Yes, at this point we're just talking about the stops, um,
we'll talk about the outcomes. So that's ... kind of a little preamble I gave, you know,
where we divide this into two things. Sothis is just the stops, and this .... in order to do
this kind of work, you have to have the benchmark. You have to know where the stops
are being made and then you have to know the percentage of minority dri ... of minority
drivers on the road in that area where the stops were made at. So it's quite a bit of work
getting that information. And this is the actual formula if you're interested in it, that
gives you the ... the disparity index, which is similar to an odds ratio but it's a little bit
different. And this is what we found! So ... um ... what you see on the bottom, on the
horizontal axis, on the X axis, are the actual scores for that index that we computed. And
so a score of one is not listed on there, but ... we have two, four, and six. Two would be a
disproportionality index of two, meaning an officer is about twice as likely to stop a black
driver or minority driver as a non -minority driver, if our benchmarks are totally accurate
without sampling errors is what that would mean. And as you go higher along that axis,
that indicates more disproportionality and the scale goes up to six. If there were an
officer at that level, that would mean that that officer was six times as likely, 600% more
likely to stop a minority driver than a non -minority driver. The blue bars represent the
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officers. So the officers are grouped or been together based on a ... a small range of
scores, and so the frequency of the number of officers with a given score are indicated by
the, uh, vertical axis, the Y axis. So for example that tallest bar indicates that there's
seven officers that had a score ... uh, which looks like a little bit over one. So let
me ... this ... this is the bar I'm talking about, right here. So if you follow that down that's
going to be like... that's... that'd probably be like 1.2, 1.3, and so seven officers are at that
value. Right here ... this is a single officer. That's a single officer. And then I also
calculated the mean average for the entire group, which was 1.71, which is indicated by
this heavy black line. And then I calculated... this is a little statistical speak here, um,
but ... if we ... if we superimposed the normal curve on ... on these data, they're not really
normal, but this kind of gives you an idea of what you would do. Um .... what you look
for are extreme values, and those are generally considered any score that's at least two
standard deviations or more, greater than the mean, and this thin line indicates two
standard deviations above the mean. So if we look at this, if...if we look at the data as a
whole, most of the officers you can see are really grouped closely together, very tightly
together. Very, very similar scores, except... for these two ... out here. And, if that were a
normal curve, we would expect scores that extreme to ... to occur with an extremely low
probability. In fact, probability for this one ... would be about 1 in 50,000 .... of happening
by chance. So... those values are ... are values that we, uh, would look more closely at,
and... and the way we as researchers look more closely at it is not the same way the Police
Department does it, I'm sure, but what we then look at are the outcomes that that officer
had. These are also disproportionality in terms of tickets, arrests, search requests — those
types of things, and so that's... that's... that's the next step we take. But before I get to that,
urn ... are there any questions on this?
Throgmorton/ I was going to ask you about standard deviations. (mumbled) already did.
Barnum/ Yeah. Yeah, it's a standard score is all that is, and it's ... that's two standard deviations
above, so....so a value right here we would expect to happen, uh, two times in 100, and
as you keep going farther out this way, the ... the, uh... probability of that happening by
chance alone gets smaller and smaller and smaller, until you get to this point it's very,
very small. So ... this officer, um ... the ... the question, an important question to ask is how
many stops are these officers making. For example, if you only made 20 stops, and
you ... you were unlucky and a lot of the stops happened to be minority drivers, just for
whatever reason, just for statis... you know, statistical noise, you could end up with a
really high value. This officer made roughly 500 stops. This one, and this one .... this one
is a little more, uh, questionable. This one was, uh... just south of 50, it was between 40
and 50 stops. So that one ... that one ... is not as indicative, to me. Based on my opinion...
as a higher score based on more stops.
Cole/ Do you have a baseline level that you're comfortable with in terms of a number before you
can feel confident in the information? Obviously you feel comfortable with 500. Um,
what is that baseline where we can start having some ... pretty big concerns?
Barnum/ Over the course of a year, I would say a reasonable number of stops to look at in terms
of really being comfortable would be around 100 stops or more.
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Cole/ Okay. And over two on the X axis, that is giving what ... give people concerns, as well,
correct?
Barnum/ Uh...if..yeah, it...it...it somewhat depends on the way the... entire distribution's grouped.
If the baseline is ... is truly 10% or the other values that I mentioned. If it is that, then yes,
that... those... those numbers are starting to get high. Uh, the way to interpret that is that
those officers would be twice as likely to stop a minority driver as others, but again now,
if there's a little... even a little bit on the baseline off... those... two might not be a good
number. It might be two and a half. So that's why I'm ... I'm not trying to, you know, I
just ... want you to understand that there's a little bit of interpretation with this. The thing
to ... the thing to really look at is for differences. Why are those officers different, you
know, that's... that's the question you ask. Where are they working, how do they compare
to the other officers working in the same areas. What time are they working. Those
types of the questions that should be asked when you look at something like that. And
I'm sure that's what the... Chiefs doing. So now we can talk about the outcomes!
Outcomes are truly based on an odds ratio. We don't need to know anything about the
baseline to compute an odds ratio. We know the driver's stopped, an officer stops a 100
cars. There's going to be 100 outcomes. Some of those outcomes will be warnings.
Some will be tickets. Some will be arrests. We can look at the number of tickets given
for a minority driver. Yes... divided by the number not given, no. Then you divide that
number, number for white and Asians, yes, divided by white and Asians no. That gives
you an odds ratio. This... there's... this is a lot less wishy-washy here cause we don't need
to worry about the benchmarks. We can compare this statistically with any officer, him
or herself, and we can tell then the ... with a fair degree of certainty if there's levels of
disproportionality when we compute odds ratios. So first I give you a detailed count for
the department. Uh, the out ... uh, the outcomes for 2015 and then I will show you what
the outcomes have looked like since 2005. So ... so you can interpret trends in the data,
which is important. So ... this is odds ratio for warnings. Do you remember, uh, when I
was talking a minute ago I said the value of one, any value greater than one indicates
disproportionality towards minority members. Any value less than one equals
disproportionality to ... towards non -minority members, which we classify as white and
Asian. So this value is less than one, 0.73, which means that white and Asian drivers are
more likely to get a warning than are minority drivers. That's what that means (noises on
mic) And if you wanted to calculate the odds ratio yourself, you'd simply divide,
urn ... 2340 by 545, get that number, then you divide that number by ... 8400 by 1473 ... that
would give you .073. This is citations. This number is greater than one. So this
indicates that, uh, minority drivers are more likely to receive a citation. They were in
2015 ... from the Iowa City Police Department, than non -minority drivers, and that's about,
uh... so the way to think about that, they're about 28% more likely to receive a citation
than a non -minority driver. Not necessarily an indication of bias though, because there...
there might be differences in the reasons why citations are ... are being written. It could be
possible — I'm not saying this is the case — there could be differences in driving. There
could be differences in the types of cars driven. There could be ... uh, a variety of reasons
for that to happen. But it is something that you'd want to look more closely at. So I
guess what I'm saying is just because you see a number that's higher, you can't
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immediately jump to the conclusion that that indicates bias. However, I will say that
the ... the higher the odds ratio gets ... the stronger that you might want to lean that way.
This is a fairly, uh... uh, moderate level of disproportionality. It's quite a bit under two.
So arrests are... are almost two. This indicates that African Americans and minority
drivers are about twice as likely to be arrested on a traffic stop as non -minority drivers
are. And you can see that ... so the total number of arrests on a traffic stop were 768, and,
uh... 273 of those were minority drivers. Now, again .... an issue that ... that could possibly
account for this, there may be differences for example in, urn ... drivers who are stopped,
the propensity to have say a bench warrant. Officer runs a warrant check. If it comes
back as a hit, the officer has really no choice; has to make an arrest. That's not
discretionary at all. If there's differences, that would show up in these data. Driving
while under suspension or driving drunk are another... are instances where there's very
little discretion on the officer's part ... to, uh.... arrest and if there are differences in the
population, that will show up in here. Now, the higher the odds ratio, you know, the ... the
more it indicates that maybe something's going on.
Botchway/ (both talking) Say that last part again though. You said ... an incident where an
individual's driving under the influence.
Barnum/ Yeah, if ...if there's a difference, let's say, I'm not saying there is but ... so that's a non -
discretionary, for the most part, type of...you pull somebody over and they're very drunk,
you really don't have much of a choice. You ... you need to make an arrest there. If there
was a difference between... Asians and ... and uh... Pacific Islanders or something, right?
That would show up in here. I'm not saying that's the case, but ... that's how you have to
kind of interpret the data. You have to be careful about that. But what the data show is
that, and this has been steady and this is what we see everywhere we look every year is
that minority members tend to get arrested at higher levels than do non -minority
drivers...on traffic stops. Search requests — so now this one I ... I can stop being quite so
wishy-washy about and I can start being... giving a little more firm answers. These search
requests are requests that are voluntary search requests. So the way the officers are
supposed to mark these in their data is ... if they pull over a driver and they walk up to the
driver and they don't have probably cause to get inside the car to search it, or to search
the driver, they can't search the driver or the car legally. They'll often ask 'do you mind if
I take a look inside your car?' And the driver ... needs to answer yes for them to come in
and search. So what we track here is not whether the search occurred, but whether the
question was asked. Whether the question was asked. And what you see here is that...
the Police tend to ask that question more often of minority drivers than they do of non -
minority drivers. Which is also something that we find consistently in the data that ... that
we look at. So ... so the way to think about this now, and this one ... this is why I can be a
little, uh, more firm with this conclusion is that ... the officers are just basing it simply on
their desire to get in that car and look around, asking that question. Their gut feeling,
whatever you want to call it. And ... but they tend to ask that question more of minority
drivers than non -minority drivers, so then the next question, this begs the question is
well, when they ask that question and when the driver says yes, are they more likely to
find something among minority drivers than non -minority drivers? That's the next
question (mumbled) to show you, and it ... what that shows you is it's even odds. It's even
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odds. So that's known as a hit rate. The hit ... the hits finding, um .... evidence or
contraband... as the course of the voluntary search is about equally likely whether the
driver's a minority member or a non -minority member. So, although the Police are
asking that question more of minority drivers, the hit rates... aren't backing up, um, the
utility of doing that. Questions on that? So the very last part of my
presentation ... (mumbled) almost made it through it, is that we're going to look at trends
over time for each of these outcomes to see what that looks like... which is interesting! So
this is citations. And we go back to 2005 and we look at the data, and what you can see
is that from 2005 through 2007, non -minority drivers were more likely to receive a
citation than were minority drivers. That flipped in 2010 and it's kinda been up and
down. The last couple years it's been creeping back down to this year where it ... this says
1.3, but it was ... it was about 1.29, I think, is the actual thing. But, urn ... the question you
might have is ... well, not all your years are there. 2008 and 2009 are not there and the
reason why is there's no data for those years. There was an IT problem during those
years, uh, the data were lost so we can't analyze those. But this... nevertheless, uh, this
still gives us a pretty good indication of the trend in the data and you can see it did flip,
but ... those are fairly modest, um, at least recently, those are fairly modest odds ratios,
1.3's fairly modest. 1.6 is kinda sneaking up there, but 1.3's fairly modest... for citations.
It's interesting that it flipped to when the data was lost. That's just a coincidence, but it is
interesting. Here's what we found for ... for arrests. You can see a clear trend in the data
here. So, disproportionality in arrests has clearly been coming down ... since 2011, where
it reached its ... its maximum point. It's been coming down every year after that. So, in
2011 ... uh, a minority driver was almost three and a quarter times more likely to be
arrested and now that is at about two times more likely to be arrested on a traffic stop.
And this is search requests. You can also see search requests, the trend is down in that
question being asked. You can see back in 2007 a minority driver was ... much, much,
much more likely, 562% more likely to have that question asked of them than a non -
minority driver, and that's down to about roughly... twice as likely now. 200%.
Cole/ Have the hit rates remained constant?
Barnum/ That's the very next slide. So here's the hit rates, and ... so if you look at 2007, so ... this is
the requests and the hit rate that year was that... officers were three times more likely to
find something on the search of a white driver, even though they were asking black and
As ... or black and other minority members, urn ... about six times more .... more likely to
ask the question. They were finding evidence... about three times more among white
drivers, but that's flipping back and forth now, which means it's ... and it's close to one,
which ... which is pretty much statistical noise. So the way to think about it in recent years
is that it's even odds, whether something will be found. It's even odds. And ... here are my
conclusions! There is some degree of disproportionality in both stops and outcomes with
the Iowa City Police Department. My best ballpark estimate of disproportionality in
stops when weighted across all stops, across all areas of town, is about 5% ... five
percentage points higher than the, uh, values that we saw from our benchmarks. We also
found comparatively little disproportionality in areas where the lion's share where most
of the stops were made. We found more disproportionalities in areas where fewer stops
were made. Individual officers analysis show that two officers (mumbled) ratio of values
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(mumbled) disproportionality index values look different to us than the other officers.
Disproportionality in most stop outcomes has decreased, the lone exception is citations,
which flipped in 2010 but the ... the levels are, uh, relatively modest for that, but, uh, it has
shown an increase in citations. That's the one outcome where there was an increase. All
other areas of trends have shown decreases. And then... although we still find that, uh,
minority drivers are about twice as likely to have an officer ask them, hey, can I search
your car, the hit rates are about the same when that search is conducted between minority
and non -minority drivers. And ... I guess my one suggestion would be ... the trends look
pretty good, but I would ... I would probably keep watching this. And as you can see, that
was my last slide!
Throgmorton/ All right, folks, any of ya have questions for Dr. Barnum? Thank you very much
for that really outstanding presentation and to your students for the great work they've
done.
Barnum/ They've done excellent work (mumbled)
Thomas/ Do you have data on what the stops were for?
Barnum/ Yes! Uh, we can track ... we can track, urn ... whether the stop is for moving violation or
an equipment violation or a call for service. So out of those, uh... out of those
12,000...whatever stops, uh, in our data it showed 41 more for calls for service, for
example, so these are all pretty much officer discretion stops, um, but we can break it out
by equipment violations and, um ... by ... um ... moving violations, and we have done that in
previous years. I ... I didn't do that this time around. I'd be happy to do it if you'd like me
to, uh, and the reason is cause the slides start to get ... you know, you get too much
information. What we have found in ... in previous years, and I'll be very careful the way I
say this is that there hasn't been, um, a great ... that hasn't factored in when...when we've
run ... so if I run a little more complex statistical model where I take that into
consideration .... it's, uh, if I run something called logistic regression and I put that in there
to control for that, it doesn't really affect the results is what we've found previously.
Cole/ What about reasons for arrests? Were you able to categorize the reason for arrest? You
had mentioned the problem like arrest warrant. Obviously an officer has no discretion
(mumbled) about disproportionality in discretionary arrests. Were you able to categorize
(both talking)
Barnum/ Yes, uh, well, so this is an interesting issue. Um, we have, uh... the way we get the data
just has a column for arrest and it has zeros and ones in it, zero meaning no and one
meaning yes for each stop. I think the Police Department might be tracking this
information, but because .... the IT department didn't get it to us, so ... um, I can't answer
that question.
Throgmorton/ I ... I'm curious about the role of discretion and judgment on the part of individual
officers, and this makes me think about the importance of training and gets into, uh, I
guess a topic that really the Chief could address more directly than you could. Uh, so not
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trying to draw attention to any particular officer, of course. I ... I wonder, Chief, if you
could talk a little bit about, uh, about how training fits into this, how individual officers
learn ... uh, how to exercise discretion in a way that's, uh... productive and uh... reasonable.
Hargadine/ First part on training. Um ... Dr. Barnum presented to them, uh, after the last time,
2014 I believe. So ... but it ... there's a lot of...uh, most cops aren't... statistical analysts
and ... I ... I've heard his presentation probably close to 15 times, and there's somethin' I get
out of each time I listen to it, but ... um ... and there's many a things that I have to be
reminded about. Okay, that's why he did it this particular way. We did that again with
the officers Wednesday with a presentation that you all received tonight, and I, uh, I think
their questions were, urn ... a lot more informative, I mean, they've... they've taken the last
two years cause they've known for the last two years that we were, uh, analyzing the data.
They've always known that we've collected it. They just didn't always know what we did
with it. So ... um ... uh, I ... I think they just.... they're a lot more informed now because...
they've heard this more than once. Just like you guys, just like I am, and um, so ... uh,
we've had a number of trainings throughout the year. We do ... we continually, uh, update
their legal training on ... on racial profiling, race -based stops and the legalities of it,
civ ... civil ramifications if you're ... if you are, uh, caught doing it. Uh, we continue to
work with, urn ... uh... oh, Diversity Focus and we've had a number of in-service trainings,
uh, with the Government Alliance on Racial Equity. So there's a number of in-service
things that we're ... we're constantly talking about this particular topic. As far as
discretion, and... and that part of your question. Um ... there are ... we have, especially those
outlier officers, we've been having numerous discussions in-house with the staff and with
the officers. I didn't ... we didn't have to tell 'em who it was. Those officers knew
who .... who they were because those are very active, very productive officers. Um ... I'll
also tell ya in the one that was furthest out ... when you, um, .... when you talk about
embodying community policing, he's the first officer that comes to mind. He knows
everybody in that particular... and I'm not saying ... I .... I can't claim his bias or ... or those,
that type of thing, but I will tell you that he ... uh... he knows almost everybody in that
particular district or beat. Um, there are security... cause it's some of the rougher places in
our city and they've hired off-duty security, um, private security. Those ... those security
guards call this officer constantly. So-and-so's in the car, so-and-so's wanted, so-and-so's
revoked, suspended, uh... driving, you know ... we know he's got a gun. He's the one that
they call, and so a lot of these stops are done with prior knowledge. And even though it's
a traffic stop, it racks up for Chris' statistical purposes, but it's not like a random stop
because he had a taillight out either. So ... we're lookin', um ... we're lookin' at the situation.
I can't say definitively we don't have a problem, but we're also, uh... having that
discussion in-house.
Throgmorton/ Other questions, folks?
Botchway/ I guess for me, um, as I hear the presentation, as I think back to what you kind of
prepared for us last time, it seems there's ... I don't know, there's more information
missing, but ... I ... I felt like last time you tracked more of the location of the actual
officers, um, you're able to kind of pinpoint, um, you know, some of those things, as well,
and then, you know, we're ... we are talked about, you know, I think Sam was involved as
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well, talked about, you know, some of the, um, police policies that may have attributed
some of the higher levels of disproportionality, but I didn't necessarily see it in this
presentation. So I guess I'm trying to figure out why.
Barnum/ Yeah, so last time ... um ... last time we couldn't actually determine where the stop was
made at. The way we tracked it was based on the officer's assignment. So if they were,
for example, a beat two officer, that could be anywhere on the southeast side, but we
didn't know where on the southeast side the stops were being made. Now we can get it
within a ... one square mile area. So we actually have a lot more information this time
around. And so ... I didn't go into what the census showed in each area, you know, and
then average it and all that because we just need to know what's in each one square mile
area, which ... is what we got from our baselines when we were out watching the traffic.
Um ... so ... so the part where you're asking... what could account for it. Well, if...if you're in
zone 29, the Broadway area, across that entire area the ... the square mile area, what we
saw was about, at night, about 32% of the drivers were minority members, but that's
higher in one or two blocks maybe than it is in some other blocks, so it ... it's based a little
bit on where the officer decides to hang out at and make his stops at, his or her stops at.
So there's a little bit of that. And that's the discretion issue that the Chief just talked
about. One thing (mumbled) just dovetailing — when I've ... when I've given these, um,
and I ... I'll be happy to answer further too, Councilor, but ... when I'm giving these
presentations to the officers, it's apparent to me, um, and it's ... it's not from the
administration, that the officers still aren't understanding some of the things that I'm
asking. For example like on the search requests. Gave this presentation last Wednesday,
and some of the officers still didn't realize that... they're only supposed to mark that box
when they're asking that question, when they don't have probable cause. Some of the
officers, I think, have been ... you know, I'm going to ask that question because it's ... I'm
soft-soaping the driver. I'm gonna search the car either way. I have probable cause, but
I'm going to ask the question just so the driver's more cooperative during the search, and
then that box gets marked, but that's not really a voluntary search. That's not what we're
asking for. So the training, it does take a while to sink in.
Hargadine/ It's contrary to their training as far as court purposes as well.
Barnum/ Yes.
Hargadine/ Consent means somethin' to a judge, and ... it means somethin' different to Dr.
Barnum. So...
Barnum/ Right. We're just really interested in that question being asked when there's no other
reason to get in that car. Because if you think about it, that really is an indicator of bias.
If you're asking ... if...if the hit rates are the same but you continue to ask one group more
than the other group, I can't think of a reason why you would do that.
Cole/But for that particular officer that had a higher hit rate, how did he compare with people
working the same beat? I think that's what the concern is, is that ... if there's indication
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that he's working a high-risk area, fair enough, but how does he compare with other
officers under those same circumstances.
Barnum/ So...I, that's (both talking)
Botchway/ (both talking) ...that's kinda (both talking)
Barnum/ So ... I ... we didn't analyze it that way, according to beat. Now we analyzed it to where
the stops were being made, irrespective of beat, but the way to think about it is there are
several other officers working that area and they weren't that high. We didn't see any
values that high.
Botchway/ So I think that's the information that was shared last time, that we were attributing
that to a particular beat or it was like 2A or 2 and 2A that made it seem highly
disproportionate (mumbled)
Barnum/ So the ... the benchmark now where they set up to watch a lot of traffic is what we call
2A. So our benchmark... you know, takes that into account and, um ... the way to ... the way
to really think about that when you look at it is ... although there's other officers working
the same area and the same type of...same time of day and so on and so forth, that
officer's the only one that far out there, and it...it could be, like the Chiefs saying but ... but
that officer is different than the other officers working the same shift and same hours.
Throgmorton/ Dr. Barnum, could you please, uh, compare what you're finding here in Iowa City
with other communities you've worked in?
Bamum/ So...uh...essentially...Iowa City is to be commended, the Chiefs to be commended. Uh,
there's two cities in the state that collect this information, and ... and I think it adds ... I think
there's an issue of courage involved in this too, by the way. I think the ... it's Iowa City
and Davenport who do it, both the chiefs are very courageous there. I mean, they're
essentially sticking their neck out a lot of places they don't wanna know! The, uh... but
what we find in Davenport is that the level of -overall level of disproportionality is
higher than what I saw here, particularly among their special enforcement officers, which
they call'nets officers' there. I think they're called SCAT here. Uh, I can look at SCAT
officers but they would show up in that one graph if I did that. So, uh... to answer your
question, and we've done Davenport about the same number of years. The level of
disproportionality that we find there is higher than it is here.
Botchway/ I didn't know if you were going to ask any more follow up to that (both talking)
Throgmorton/ No, go ahead!
Botchway/ All right, so going back to kind of the... discretionary piece, or ... yeah, police
discretionary piece, you know, so first it sounds like we need more information, because I
agree with kind of the questions that Rockne and John are asked as far as, you know, the
reasons for the stop and other things may shed more light on, um, whether or not this
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situation was something that was just a missed taillight or there was a potential, you
know, warrants for an individual's arrest and not having that data ... you know, just opens
up a lot of questions that, you know (mumbled) and I think that was kind of along the
same lines ... I won't say anecdotally but from some of the discussion that happened last
time, because I mean we saw a disproportionality but if a high level of it's bench
warrants, then you know what are we gonna say about that. The question I have is kind
of based on .... the information you provided. It ... you tended to say that, you know, or let
us know, that some of the things were just, you know, static. Some of the things were,
you know, officers don't necessarily have a high level of discretion, so because of that
you didn't necessarily see a high level of disproportionality. It seemed like as we talked
about, you know, the searches or at least the voluntary ask in regards to the searches,
there is a high level of, you know, disproportionality based on the kind of increase in
police discretion. My question as you work on this, and your expertise, what is your...
what is your recommendation? And I don't mean to like, you know, ask that question
kind of publicly (both talking)
Barnum/ I'll tell ya, if I were looking at this data and I'm looking for bias, if I ... if I'm going to
start making wagers on whether or not some... something indicates bias, if the officers are
filling out the cards right in their computers, that search request and hit rates are where I
look. That's the gold standard, in terms of...now, in terms of what you're saying, if I ... if
we look at traffic stops, I can ... I can run a statistical model, logistic regression. I can put
in the reason for the stop, time of day, officer's years of service. I can put a whole bunch
of stuff in there and it'll give me net effects of each one of those, and when I've done that
in the past, it doesn't really change the interpretation. Um, so ... when you factor in ... I
didn't do it for this. I could do it, and I would be happy to do it for you. Happy to send it
to you. Um, but what I found in the past when I did that, it really didn't change the
interpretation of what I found ... that if you factor in the reason for the stop, it didn't
change the level of disproportionality.
Botchway/ Okay, well I want that information, but I guess my clarifying question to my second
question was ... not necessarily what is your recommendation as far as looking closer at the
data, but based on your expertise and working with other cities, what is your
recommendation as far as ... how to not have this particular disproportionality.
Barnum/ Disproportionality in arrests is going to boil down to whether they're discretionary
arrests or not, and the officer may not have control over that. Disproportionality in
asking the question boils down to the officer's discretion solely. And I think ... I think
what will happen, and I think you're seeing it in the data already, when the officers are
aware that the data's being analyzed, you see levels of disproportionality going down.
That's my recommendation is I would keep looking at it. I'm ... I'm, you know, urn ... if
you ... if you go to an officer and say, for example, boy, you have a high level of
disproportionality; we're concerned about that. The officer may then think, oh, I stopped
an African American and I need to now go find two white drivers to stop. I mean, so you
can, you know, there's things like that that can happen. It doesn't reduce the one driver
getting stopped in the first place though, but there's ways to hide it, so I think ... I think
that if the officers know that they're being tracked on that, they'll be a little more
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thoughtful about asking that question. That's an intrusive question, you know, that's
Fourth Amendment there. You're asking to search somebody. You're asking them for
their permission and there's... there's... depending on how you ask the question... it's... it
could, you know, degree of how voluntary it is is always raised too, you know, so...
Botchway/ So let me clarify further. So obviously, you know, you've said that if we watch or
continue to watch, you ... there'll be, you know, uh, a decrease in the disproportionality. I
guess my question more is along the lines of, you know, is there any particular training
modules that you've seen that have worked, um, more consistently at reducing that
disproportionality rate even faster. Are there any other things that we could be asking of
our officers in relation to that, to make sure that it doesn't happen. Should we be, I mean,
some of this is because, um, and Eleanor, we had some communication as far as, um,
looking at different ordinances around, you know, racial profiling laws and, um, and
looking at, you know, know your rights laws and so...
Barnum/ Yes.
Botchway/ ...and putting it on the officers to, urn ... ensure that if they're going to ask a kind of
discretionary question that, you know, they're also providing some information as far as,
you know, this is strictly voluntary, you know, you don't have to say yes, I mean, that
type of thing, and New York has been really instrumental in doing this type of law simply
because their disproportionality was off the charts, and so I guess that's what I'm trying to
get at, not necessarily that ... I mean, we ... we see that and I get that. I just ... if there....if...
the best practices and other things that would help us along (both talking)
Barnum/ I think fortunately for Iowa City that that is already occurring, uh, with the body
cameras. I think now with the body cameras, that little piece that we're talking about, the
question, it would be possible to go in and look, you know, it...it would be possible to do
a study...randomly draw, urn ... searches, search requests and see if the, you know, and do
some sort of coding on how the question was asked to see if they were ... were indeed
asking that question differently. Minority drivers versus non -minority drivers. And, I
mean, that'll clearly show up on that, I mean, they already have ... they already have car
cameras so that you could probably do it with that, but the body cameras now, you know.
Are ... are those going to be activated when the officers walk up for a traffic stop, to the
body cameras? Yeah, so that would give you a lot better information that way. So, um...
I guess that's what I would recommend. There's... there's training out there to do that.
Davenport has a program, I'm sorry I can't remember the name of it, now that their
officers participate in, and uh, but what we've seen in Davenport is that we saw this
decrease in disproportionality and then after ... it started decreasing after we kept doing the
study, started creeping back up. There's some other issues in Davenport that I don't really
want to go into here, but they have, um, recently what we have found is when you start
watching this very closely, and I don't know that this is the reason. I'm not saying it is the
reason, but the number of stops that they've made has ... has reduced significantly... since
we've been watching. And I don't know if that's a good thing or not. So ... their stops are
way down. But that could be for a variety of reasons too.
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Thomas/ Has ... has the policy on voluntary searches remained consistent over the years you've
been looking at the data? For Iowa City?
Barnum/ I'm not sure. Chief, has it?
Hargadine/ Yes they have, and it's pretty ... pretty much court -driven. You know, what's
acceptable and what's not, uh...
Throgmorton/ Are there any more questions? Well I see some really good trends, a ... a bit of
worrisome data, no horror stories, uh, looks to me like you've done a terrific job, uh,
thank you very much for that and to all your students. Chief, thank you.
Frain/ Mayor, if I...
Throgmorton/ Sure!
Frain/ ...if I can just pose a question. Your strategic plan — you've identified, um, a desire to set a
goal for the reduction of disproportionate ... I believe it's arrests but I'm going to take that
to be the ... the broader study here. Um ... I would propose, as you can ... as you heard
tonight, the ... the Chief and captains are diving into this data, um ... asking follow up
questions, doing additional research, uh, if okay with you, I think I would like to see that
goal, um ... developed a little... with... with that additional information in mind, presented to
you, and of course you'd have the ability to ... to modify that, but I think we can not only
present a goal but to .... Kingsley's point, um, touch on some strategies that we think will
be effective in bringing those numbers down. (several talking)
Throgmorton/ Sounds reasonable to me. (several talking)
Botchway/ I just want to add a couple more things. Um ... I ... I guess in keeping looking at the
data as you're talking about, Geoff, if there's any way of, you know, coming back with
more information. I don't necessarily know if we can, you know, use a work session for
it but ... you know, I think Dr. Barnum talked about the fact that weren't able to get some
information from the IT department that, you know, could shed more light, even ... and
even though...oh (mumbled) even though it might not be, um, you know, information that
changes kind of the nature of it, I just think it still paints a picture that we kind of need to
have some understanding of, and then beyond that, um, you know, and again this is kind
of ad hoc as far as you talking and me kind of throwing something out there and so I
think it needs to be kind of massaged a little bit, but ... you know, having a ... kind of pin-
pointed conversation around kind of the search and the voluntary, you know, questions
around that. He threw out, you know, looking at the body cameras and doing a study,
and so in relation to, um, possible strategies and other things, I think that would be
a ... another place to start, or another place to have that conversation.
Frain/ Okay!
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Information Packet Discussion [April 7, 141 Joint agenda items f IP # 5 Info Packet of 4/71
EMC 11P # 6 Info Packet of 4/71:
Throgmorton/ All right. Think we'll move on. Thank you very much! So we're gonna turn to
our Info Packets, April 7a' packet. Any, uh, comments on it? I'd like to ... I wonder if
Rockne and Susan could comment a little bit about the listening post, the one you held
out at Pheasant Ridge? That's IP #...4. You don't have to say anything, I mean, you held
it.
Cole/ Well I ... I think it was a fabulous meeting. It was a very productive meeting. We
exchanged views, uh, we listened to a lot of what the concerns were, we got a lot of sort
of granular feedback in terms of, you know, how the, uh, Iowa City, uh, inspection
department inspects for, you know, bugs and those sorts of things, we talked about small
business opportunities. It was ... it was a really fabulous encounter and I think that the
packet really accurately reflects what we talked about, so I'm hoping that we'll be able to
follow up with an actual response to those concerns that were identified in the packet.
Frain/ We are compiling a ... a response to those items and that'll be forthcoming in an
Information Packet.
Cole/ Thanks, Geoffl
Mims/ Yeah, the only additional comment I would make, um, I think it was a great opportunity
to meet people and ... you know, for them to, you know, meet us and kind of some face-to-
face conversation, I think what it ... what it continues to ... um ... to show is that there, you
know, there's lots of concerns that we can ... can listen to ... but the City cannot solve all of
these issues either. I mean there are ... you know, one of the things they were talking
about is people in their community, and again, this was mostly Sudanese people who are
very well educated and can't get jobs. I mean...we cannot solve that problem, and so ... but
to, you know, to be able to listen and hear and ... and try and, you know, give them maybe
ideas or suggestions, um, but the idea and I think it's important that we as Councilors and
people as we go out realize that, uh, we cannot solve all the problems that are out there
either. So...
Throgmorton/ Did it look like a pretty daunting list, uh, topics that were addressed?
Mims/ Yeah, I mean ... very much so! So...
Cole/ But I ... along those lines, I do want to give kudos to Geoff and staff. I think that we
are ... we do have a project in the works to develop small business opportunities for folks
that maybe have been left out of some of those business opportunities. So it is daunting,
but I do want to commend our staff for moving the ball on those particular projects, and I
think that that's gonna be announced in May or did you have an idea as to when that's
going to be announced, the, uh, small business program?
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Fruin/ I believe it's been announced. We did issue a press release on that, and is that in the queue
for this week's Information Packet? (several talking)
Botchway/ ...kind of series?
Fruin/ That is the series. (several talking)
Cole/ Yeah, it's going to be a great project. I'm ... I'm really excited about what staff is doing with
that.
Fruin/ Some more to come on that, and that's really the precursor to figuring out exactly how to
use the 50,000 that you set aside in next year's budget. So we'll .... we'll learn a lot
through that as long as .... along with the participants in that program, and then hopefully
we'll be able to tailor that $50,000 to help those very people that are going and getting the
education they need and the tips they need to start a business.
Cole/ ...great project!
Throgmorton/ Yeah, excellent! How bout ... how about IP #5, which is possible topics for the
joint cities meeting, which is, what, next Monday, Marian? Is that right?
Karr/ That's correct. The agenda will go out this week.
Throgmorton/ Yeah, so do you have, uh, topics that you think we should bring up, uh, at the joint
cities meeting?
Botchway/ I definitely think an update of kind of where we're at with the Rose Oaks' community.
I know that individuals could...
Karr/ I'm sorry.
Throgmorton/ Rose Oaks.
Botchway/ Sorry! Rose Oaks community. I definitely that, um, you know, people could look at
our Information Packet to see that update, but .... still putting it in the, um ... packet or
whatever is distributed I think would be a good thing as well, and then beyond that just
again having some kind of discussion around affordable housing, or update, from the
committee, as far as what's going on, where we're at.
Mims/ I think an update from the ... ask the School District to give an update on boundaries, cause
they've started talking about boundary changes (both talking)
Karr/ They have put that on the agenda.
Mims/ They have already? Okay, cause... okay.
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Cole/ I think one thing on the School District agenda is they're in the process of developing a
policy on spraying, and I know that that, uh, that was actually a pretty hot topic, so I think
that may possibly come up, so I think that'd be good to have that on the agenda, as well.
Karr/ Spraying? (several talking)
Cole/ ...school grounds.
Throgmorton/ Ub, maybe the CIT. The Crisis Intervention Training.
Karr/ That has ... that is on (both talking)
Throgmorton/ ...you're going down in early May, right, and... and uh, it's already on the (both
talking)
Karr/ Yes!
Throgmorton/ ...okay!
Cole/ ...San Antonio?
wiffs"ITAW. 101
Tbrogmorton/ Yeah. Uber, do we want it ... maybe we want it to ap... to appear? (several talking)
Yeah.
Cole/ For the joint cities meeting?
Throgmorton/ Yeah.
Thomas/ Does Coralville have an Uber ordinance?
Throgmorton/ No, I can tell ya I've talked with, uh, Tom, uh... urn ... what's Tom's last name?
(several talking) Gill, yeah. Thank you (laughs) Talked with him at the Convention and
Visitors Bureau meeting, and he said Coralville's going to wait to see what Iowa City
does.
Karr/ Coralville often does that with its taxi ordinances as well.
Cole/ Didn't I read a report though from the legislature that they are attempting this legislative
fix, cause you know I...
Throgmorton/ You missed that. We had a long ... we had a conversation (several talking) I can
brief ya in a minute. (several talking and laughing)
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Botchway/ I guess ... be interested to hear how the discussion goes. I don't know ... I don't, yeah, I
guess we can! I don't know if we necessarily know if we have an ... update to give, I guess
is my question.
Mims/ Depends on how we vote tonight.
Botchway/ Yeah.
Throgmorton/ Yeah, right! (laughter) It'll be in the news whatever we do (several talking)
Mims/ ...be in the news anyway. (several talking)
Throgmorton/ Is the Hunger Task Force report already on the agenda? I personally would be
interested in hearing the County talk about it. Anything else?
Dickens/ Maybe the sales tax. Isn't there a separate group studying that through the County
and ... where the sales tax is and where they're gonna try to raise it proportionately over the
years?
Throgmorton/ I don't know. Is it? (several talking)
Karr/ I'm sorry, didn't hear (both talking)
Dickens/ The sales tax.
Dilkes/ You're all gonna have to talk a little bit louder (laughter)
Dickens/ The sales tax group that's supposedly looking into ... I don't know who all is on that.
Frain/ I'm not aware of any (several talking) local option sales tax?
Dickens/ No, the sales tax, or not sales tax, I mean wages (several talking)
Karr/ Minimum wage (several talking and laughing)
Frain/ I do know the minimum wage advisory committee that the County set up did have their
first meeting, so they would...
Dickens/ Are they going to have some kind of update on...
Throgmorton/ Is that on the agenda already?
Karr/ I can add it!
Throgmorton/ All right. That's a pretty good array.
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Karr/ I think what we'll do is, um, we are hosting this meeting. What we typically do is I'll draft
an agenda and run it by the Mayor, because some of the items may involve an overlap or
the agenda may be so long you may wish to ... but I'll do that tomorrow.
Throgmorton/ I'll probably need a little help with regard to providing an overview of the Rose
Oaks' situation and affordable housing, or else ask you to give us an update during that
joint (both talking)
Fruin/ Whichever you prefer, yeah.
Throgmorton/ Okay. Okay, want to move on to another... any other topics here?
Mims/ KXIC is on there. IP6. (several talking)
Karr/ Do any of you have it for tomorrow, because I've not heard back from KXIC on this and I
was just wondering.
Dickens/ (mumbled) 20th.
Karr/ Okay. Okay,we can talk about... other dates.
Mims/ I can do May 11th.
Dickens/ I'll do ... March 27th.
Mims/ March?
Dickens/ (laughter) April. I'm still stuck a month behind! April! (laughter)
Botchway/ I can do .... May 4t .
Taylor/ I can do May 18'h
Throgmorton/ (several talking) I can probably do June 1, Marian.
Karr/ Okay.
Cole/ Is the next one then on the 15t' of June? (several talking) I'll do June 15d. Is that...
Taylor/ John and I are going to switch.
Karr/ 15th is Rockne.
Cole/ Yeah!
Karr/ And, Pauline, are you...
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Taylor/ I'll do May 25t' and John'll do May 18"'
Throgmorton/ Oh, you're mixing Friday with Wednesday now.
Taylor/ (mumbled) those are Wednesdays.
Botchway/ I can do ... oh ... May 20'.
Karr/ Okay.
Throgmorton/ How we doin'?
Mims/ What are you missing?
Karr/ ...faintest idea! (laughter)
Dickens/ Cause I put ya back in March! (laughter) Back to the future! (several talking)
Karr/ Think we're pretty good. (several talking) Probably we've got ... I don't think ... do I have a
Friday ... May 6th? Anybody? For Friday? I've got April 15th, but then May 6th.
Botchway/ I can do both, I just ... I mean I ... if everybody was okay with that.
Karr/ 4' and 6t?
Botchway/ Yeah.
Dickens/ (mumbled) talk about.
Throgmorton/ Fridays are mighty early! The hour is mighty early.
Karr/ Then we have, um ... May 20th we have. So, Kingsley, you've got the 4th, the 6th, and the
20'9
Botchway/ Correct. Yes. (several talking)
Cole/ Any open ones?
Karr/ Uh... June 3`d, Friday.
Mims/ I can do that.
Karr/ June 3`d9 Mims.
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Botchway/ Unless somebody wants one, I don't want to take (both talking)
Karr/ What I'll do is I'll mock it up and then...
Botchway/ Okay.
Karr/ ...put it in this packet going out Thursday and if you let me know I can make the
changes...when you can check your calendars and put it out there. But the only one we
don't have accounted for right now is June 17`h on Friday.
Dickens/ Put me down.
Throgmorton/ (mumbled)
Botchway/ Real quick for IP .... are we done?
Throgmorton/ Yeah!
Botchway/ Real quick for IP8. Geoff, is that going to come back to us, like ... just kind of an
update on what things are going on (mumbled) Coffee With a Cop? Can that be kind of
brought (mumbled)
Karr/ I'm sorry, I can't... still can't hear.
Throgmorton/ Just talk louder! (laughter)
Botchway/ Um ... can that be brought in in regards to, um, when you said you're coming back with
strategies and goals, as far as an update as far as where we're at with, you know, numbers,
how's it going, I mean, feedback, that type of thing?
Fruin/ Sure! Just information on ... number of attendees and...
Botchway/ How's it going...
Fruin/ Yeah, sure!
Throgmorton/ Okay, anything else on April 7? Moving on, April 14. Anything on it?
Botchway/ Um ... just ... sorry, IP9. Just want to say thank you to, you know, Stefanie and staff for,
you know, putting, um, the implementations update and everything together. Urn ... I ... I
can't remember, and I guess I didn't look back and I deleted all my previous packets, but
you know, the list is ever-expanding as far as a different initiatives that we're working on
and I don't know necessarily how that plays into the data, but you know I do want to say
thank you to the Chief and all the staff involved, and Eleanor as well, just for all the work
that's been doing on, the steps that the City's taken in regards to that.
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Frain/ Thank you. We'll pass it along!
Throgmorton/ I guess I'd like to make a quick comment about Ip #6, which is the regional
assessment of Iowa's Creative Corridor and the regional ... uh, a report prepared by the
Steering Committee of Regional Vision Rising... something like that. I ... I read the report.
It's a very long, thorough, reasonably complicated report that addresses many, many
topics. Uh, I think it deserves careful attention from ... from us and for me personally a
key question is how ... how we want to interact with that particular process, uh, I think that
deserves some thought. Uh, I noticed a few critical comments of Iowa City's City
Council and current policies, uh... not so much from the report but from some people who
have participated in the process, uh... and ... fair enough. I understand that kind of thing.
Uh, but we should think a bit about how we collectively want to, uh, have Iowa City, um,
interact with or contribute to that process.
Mims/ Well I sit on the committee.
Throgmorton/ Right, I thought it was ... it was that committee; I wasn't sure.
Mims/ I think... some of the comments that you see in there that ... what they did was they did a ... a
very large survey. I forget the number of people who participated in the survey, but they
reached out and had ... I believe in the hundreds, um, that they ... that did online survey and
then some people they reached out to personally in terms of some of the companies and
CEOs and that sort of thing in the process. So it's been, you know, a huge process that
the company Market Street that was hired to kind of oversee this, um, has been doing and
so ... urn, they're are kinda the ones that did the draft report and then, um, at our last
meeting people were able to, um, give some feedback and stuff on that draft report and
then they finalized it and this is what you see. So it's ... it's a compilation of a lot of input
and obviously a lot of data, urn ... and the process will be continuing until... into
September, October.
Thomas/ I found ... it was an interesting... it's an interesting document. At times was frustrated by
the fact that it ... was really looking at data for the entire corridor.
Thomas/ And so for example one ... one that I pulled out was ... the Iowa Creative Corridor has
housing options attractive to young professionals and 63% agreed with that statement,
and I really would like a better understanding of that 63%, you know, what is it they were
claiming to be ... that, uh, those ... that they felt there were housing.... housing options
attractive to that group and where are they. Urn ... so it was both... intriguing and
interesting and yet at the same time I felt ... it didn't quite answer my questions at times.
Mims/ Yeah, I think a really important part of this is ... is they are looking, and some of you may
remember a few years ago kind of, you know, the branding was done of Creative
Corridor, and then it ... kind of like it sat there and ... nobody really did anything with it and
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it was kind of like, okay, so ... so somebody came up with this great idea of a name but
what's really being done with it in terms of...giving this area a ... a really, um ... distinctive,
uh, feel or a .... a way of marketing it outside of, particularly outside of Iowa, and even
outside of the Midwest, and so ... when they were going through and doing, um, all of the
surveys and all the data analysis they've done, it has been with the eye of how do we look
at this region as a whole and ... look at the strengths and weaknesses and... and the various
statistics that are related to this region, and come to ... come with it kind of a coherent
package of. ... of information and data that can be used, um, in terms of marketing and,
you know, encouraging companies to move here and, you know, getting this information,
and some of the things you may have seen in here, you know, some of the companies,
you know, they look at coming here and they look at our unemployment rate and they
look at the percentage of the population that is employed, and it's like, whoa! We're not
sure we can find employees if we move there, and so ... they're looking at it from that
aspect of ..presenting this information really to outsiders. It's not with the goal of drilling
down, but the differences between Iowa City and North Liberty and ... you know, Cedar
Rapids and Marion, etc., which means that some of the data is ... useful for us in many
ways, but some of it is not in particular ways that we might want to use data. So ... you
just kind of have to look at what's the purpose of the group and, um .... and how they're
trying to, you know, use this for the future, but there's, I mean, there's people from a
number of different city councils, for a lot of different large organizations, um, President
Bruce Harreld's one of the three co-chairs of it. Another one is a vice president from
Rockwell. Um ... lot of people from the non-profit area, as well, serving... there's
probably ... 40 or 50 of us on the committee. So it's a big group.
Throgmorton/ Okay, I'm sure there's a lot more that could be said but we don't really have time
to do it right now. I ... I wonder if we could finish this Info Packet. Do we have enough
time to do that? (several talking) Think we probably do, so ... are ... are there any other
topics people want to draw attention to?
Fruin/ I'd like to just update you on IP4, which is the, um, Rose Oaks' memo from our
Neighborhood and Development Services Department. Just some additional information,
uh, for you. Um, we did receive ... a ... building permit applications to renovate the 16
buildings that they envision will stay on ... on the property, that will not be demolished.
Um, those, uh, have just been received and are just starting to be reviewed right now. So
that process, uh, can take several days if not weeks, uh, before.... before those are
reviewed and turned around. Uh, again, the site plan does not need to be approved before
they can start that work, okay. Those .... when you're not tearing down buildings, you can
start renovation work without the site plan, um, being approved. The site plan has not yet
been approved, as indicated in the memo, and we still have not received an updated site
plan from them after our initial round of comments. Uh, so we expect that any day now,
but to date we have not received that. We did also receive application for five demolition
permits, which includes four of the living structures, the apartments and the clubhouse.
Um, those, uh, app ... those demolition permits will not be approved until the site plan is
approved. So we will just hold those and, um, wait for the site plan to work through the
process.
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Cole/ Any estimate as to when we can expect those will be approved or is that just impossible to
know at this point, Geoff?
Fruin/ It's really ...it's really impossible because it depends on how quickly they get the site plan
back to us and how clean that site plan is. Um, if it's ... you know, if they turn it in
tomorrow and it meets all of our expectations, it...it could be days. If they, uh, sit on it
for another week and turn it in and there's still several deficiencies to be addressed, it
could be several weeks. So a lot of it is dependent on their timing and the complete
lis... completeness of their submission to us. So...
Cole/ Have they (both talking) as to their own timeline, their anticipated timeline?
Fruin/ They want to start renovations as soon as possible because it's ... it's our understanding that,
um, they are going to now try to, um ,allow some of the tenants to stay on-site during the
renovation, so they want to move quickly, at least on some of the renovations, uh, so that
they can, uh, proceed with their larger, uh, construction plan. Um, in terms of the
demolition permits, I ... I don't know what their expectations for starting are.
Taylor/ Were there some major concerns with the site plan that they needed to readjust?
Fruin/ Yeah. John, would you mind?
Yapp/ No major concerns. Numerous minor concerns.
Throgmorton/ I ... I guess I'd like to want ... make one sort of broad comment and then ... I guess
we're gonna have to stop. Uh, I was very pleased to see that the owner met with residents
of Rose Oaks, uh, on April 11 a', after we had our meeting with the owner here in the
Mayor's conference room. I was very pleased to see the transition document which, uh,
in which the owners put some things in writing. That's the first time I've seen that
actually, and I was very pleased to see, uh, a ... a counter -proposal that came from the
Rose Oaks Tenant Association. Uh, I ... I don't know really where things stand (laughs)
right now, but I was very pleased to see that kind of movement, uh, taking place.
Cole/ (mumbled) I agree!
Mims/ What was that, Rockne?
Cole/ Excellent leadership emerging, I think I agree. I think in terms of the Rose Oaks' residents.
Taylor/ Can I ask ... a question dealing with that? I had some questions and seeing both the
transition documents and the, uh, from the Rose Oaks' Association also, there were some
money figures thrown around as far as, um, what has been, um, allocated to the Shelter
House to ... to help these folks. Is there some plan in place for how that would be
distributed or ... or, and the money that we had said — the 15,000 (mumbled) money from
the Rose Oaks' folks, uh, how that's going to be distributed or offered to these folks? Do
you know?
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Fruin/ Shelter House, um, has an existing tenant based rental assistance program that's... that's
fairly well defined, um, and because it's federal dollars, there's limitations on how that
can be used. It's my understanding that those dollars can be used for, uh, short-term
rental supplements and, uh, security deposits. Uh, any dollars contributed by a private
entity, be it Rose Oaks or anybody else, presumably would not have the same strings. I
think that was the idea, is that if Rose Oaks contributes that can be targeted to, um,
moving expenses, um, and other things that, uh, our tenant based rental assistance would
not cover. Their money can also, uh, cover any of the ... any of the tenant needs that
maybe don't meet our income guidelines. So if there are some people that don't qualify
for, uh, the Shelter House program that we're funding... the... the private dollars
presumably could come in and assist those residents.
Throgmorton/ Okay, uh, why don't we stop there and we'll pick up with Council time when we
get back together after the formal meeting.
Council Time:
Throgmorton/ All right, so, hello, everybody! We're back in our work session! We ... stopped at
the moment where we were going to discuss Council time. So not to get confused
between Council information and Council time. All right, so Council time! You
mentioned, uh, the ... the event, the National League of Cities event that you, uh, would
like to get some travel fund assistance for, right. Can you tell us just a little bit about
that?
Cole/ Basically it's just a, it's a conference that's focused on essentially how cities can effectively
collaborate with non -profits and it just .... it seemed like a, right in line with what we're
already doing as a community. We're already doing a lot of really good things, but it
seemed kind of cutting edge and really exciting opportunity with the National League of
Cities.
Throgmorton/ Yeah, you know, it's my understanding that we have a travel policy that was
adopted by the Council back in 2000, though I don't know the content of it and I don't
know if anybody else does. Uh, maybe we would want to revisit that at some point in the
future, but at this moment it seems to me personally that it would be appropriate for you
to go to that. Uh, kinda like Susan's going to San Antonio. I ... I think the cost is really
quite minimal cause we're talking about Madison, right?
Cole/ Yep!
Throgmorton/ Uh... can ... are there any financial objections that the staff would have?
Fruin/ No. That's fine.
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Mims/ I think the more information we can get on public/private partnerships and partnering
with non -profits... great! We need to do that.
Throgmorton/ Okay, so I guess you're good to go.
Dickens/ I just have a question on tonight's meeting. Several other meetings we've had about
people coming up to speak at the mic more than once (several talking)
Throgmorton/ ...give me guidance about what you want me to do.
Dickens/ We need to ... because we've had a thing in place, but, you know, I know things change
as we have new people up here. I think if you speak once, that's... you know, always
things come into your mind that you want to say again later, but you ... you got your one
chance to speak and there was a lot of people that spoke, but all of a sudden we get a ... we
lose control of the meeting, I feel, and I've had a lot of people come up to me and say
why do you let people keep coming up there? They just start getting ranting and raving,
and I ... so I think if we could come to a consensus to limit it to one ... one per issue.
Throgmorton/ I'm ... I'm okay with that.
Mims/ And not giving their time up to somebody else either, because that just prolongs things, I
think. I mean...
Dickens/ So I think if we just do one, and I think it's fair if we ... if it's a big subject we can stretch
how many people speak. We've done that. But ... once is plenty, I think.
Mims/ And ... and like we did with the Rose Oaks the other night. We've done that with other
issues when we knew there were going to be a lot of people speaking. The Mayor has
typically said, you know, three minutes or four minutes instead of the five minutes, if we
anticipate a huge number of people (both talking)
Dickens/ They need to be heard, but...
Mims/ Definitely need to be heard and ... and I agree with what you're saying, Terry. Sometimes
on those situations we need to extend it beyond 8:00. We just need to...be sensitive to
what the issue is and ... and the people that are here.
Throgmorton/ Yeah. Understood. So with y'alls help I'll make sure I do that.
Dickens/ (several talking) ...just kind of throw something at ya! (laughter and several talking)
Well I can't kick ya from here so ... (laughter and several talking)
Mims/ The other one ... the other one I wanted to bring up, and ... and from what you said, Jim,
maybe this is already on a June agenda that the rest of us, you know, that you've been
working with staff on that the rest of us weren't aware of, and that was the 100 Grannies
and the plastic bags. Because I had talked with them at least a month ago and actually
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was going to bring it up at our last meeting, but didn't because we bad the Rose Oaks'
thing that took up a lot of our time that night, and indicated to them that I would bring it
forward to the Council to try and get that on ... actually on our agenda to discuss. So...
maybe that's already the case with what's happening in June, is that...
Frain/ Yeah, on June 7a', and this is really a staff -driven initiative to ... to get this on fairly
quickly. Um, we thought we'd try to pre ... present a more comprehensive waste
minimization strategy. There was a number of things already in the works, uh, for
instance the multi -family recycling ordinance has been...
Mims/ Yep!
Frain/ ...at the draft stage for over a year now, and ... we're ready to.....to present some
information on that, make sure you're comfortable with it before it goes through the
process. Same with curbside composting. You may recall we did a pilot, uh, project on
that, uh, a year or two ago. We've been workin', the staff has been working through the
logistics of that and how we may ex ... expand that from a pilot to, um, a ... a citywide
offering. So ... we thought we'd just present them all to you and you can see it as a big
picture strategy and all the steps we're taking. Um, some of them are pretty close to
ready to go — the two I mentioned are I think on the cusp of being ready. The others,
we'll be looking to you for direction, so plastic bags, um, we want to talk about a
cardboard ban at the landfill and ... and um, that's something frankly that we feel may be
quite a bit more impactful than a plastic ban ... bag ban, not to say that plastic bags don't
need consideration, but there's just some other ideas our staff have been working on and
as opposed to taking them one at a time we thought we'd spend a...45 minutes to an hour
with you talking through each of 'em, getting some feedback, and then hopefully getting
our direction and going on our way.
Thomas/ Is Styrofoam in that list?
Frain/ Styrofoam is not on the list but ... we can have Chris and Jen speak to that if you'd like
(several talking)
Cole/ And, Geoff, just to clarify, are you evaluating just sort of just general strategies to reduce,
um, essentially plastic bag use, or do we have ... or we evaluating an actual ordinance,
because I think that's when I think of the Grannies, they're not just sort of talking about in
general, at least as far as I understand. In fact they even handed me an ordinance tonight,
um, so what are we actually looking at? Cause that's what I would like to look at.
Frain/ That's the kind of direction we need from you all. Um...
Mims/ In fact, Geoff, they've provided you with like three different ones...
Frain/ They have.
Mims/ ...and they've provided them to me about a month ago (both talking)
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Cole/ (mumbled)
Mims/ Yes. So ... would you maybe make sure those go in our packets ahead of time, so that way
we'll have a chance to look at those ordinances, because when I met with them a month
or so ago, that was one of the things I asked them to do was to kind of do some of that
background research and find some ordinances that they thought might have some
features that would be positive here and might work, um ... also to save our staff maybe a
little bit of time (laughs) in terms of doing that research (several talking) Yeah, I mean ... I
don't know if there's going to be any one that's going to be perfect for us.
Cole/ And then how it would it comply with our home rule and that sort of thing.
Mims/ Right, and I ... I mean I realize Eleanor and her staff are still going to have to do some
work on stuff, but ... at least if we have something to start from, um, so if you could
include (both talking)
Fruin/ This has been an idea that's... that's floated around for many years and so I think our staff
has probably a good collection of sample ordinances and strategies that we can compile
for ya.
Mims/ Okay! Thank you.
Throgmorton/ Okay, other Council time... stuff here?
Fruin/ Can I ... Mayor, just mention as we prepare for the May 3`d streetscape master plan, just
want to give you a quick synopsis of what I think you ... you all want to see based on
previous discussions, but ... if there's other parts you want us to work into that
presentation, now would be ... it'd be helpful to know that now or between now and May
3'a. So I thought we'd just go through a quick history on the streetscape master plan, how
it got started, um .... uh, not great detail on how it was compiled, but basically what it
covers. Um, and ... and specifically look at the short-term implementation and so
we'll ... we can move forward from Washington Street, but the other high priority locations
and where those stand. We've done some preliminary design in some areas and ... and
(clears throat) urn ... uh, other areas have ... have not had any further action since the ... the
master plan was adopted, but we're probably going to focus in on Dubuque Street and the
ped mall, and then we'll bring in the two intersections on Burlington, Madison, and, um,
Clinton, although those weren't part of the master plan I think it's appropriate to get some
direction, uh, from the Council on that, or at least give you the opportunity to weigh in.
Is there anything else as part ... as part of that master plan that you want us to focus on?
Thomas/ Could you quickly .... so you're (mumbled) did you say Dubuque?
Fruin/ Dubuque, the reconstruction of Dubuque Street, and that would be between Iowa and
Washington.
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Thomas/ And the Madison and Clinton intersections...
Fruin/ Correct. So really four projects if you have those three and the ped mall.
Thomas/ I mean one ... one concern I have is just ... what is our overall intent with the streetscape
plan in terms of...you know, if you aggregate all these projects, what is that scope, what is
that cost ... because it...since....since these are kind of, um, they're projects where, you
know, they ... they all are, or could be, comprised of certain elements, street lighting and
so forth, so if you ... if you're talking about two streets, that's one thing. If you're talking
about 10 streets, then the cost, you know, goes up. So I .... were you thinking of talking
about what might be (both talking)
Fruin/ Well we can ... we can, I can get into that. Generally speaking I look at a master plan like
that as a 15 to 20 -year document. It's like a comprehensive plan. You're not necessarily
going to achieve everything laid out in that plan, and ... and yes, we could provide a cost
estimate for, a rough cost estimate for everything that that plan includes. Um, but
realistically, we won't get to all those items before some future Council starts to do a new
master plan 10 years from now or 15 years from now (several talking)
Mims/ You're looking more conceptually at this point.
Fruin/ Yeah, more .... more conceptually and ... and the whole plan of the master plan is we knew
we had some short-term things to address, Washington Street, ped mall, there's some real
challenges there, but we also knew that we ... we could be opportunistic with development.
So if we get a large development, uh, that fronts on Linn Street, for example, we want to
be prepared and have a streetscape plan that can be coordinated with those large
development projects, and we weren't prepared to do that in the past with ... with some of
our larger redevelopment projects. So it sets a vision, we work toward the vision
realistically. We don't achieve everything, but ... it's there, um, and it gets thrown in the
mix with everything else when it comes to budget time.
Throgmorton/ Did you want to ask any more about that?
Thomas/ No.
Throgmorton/ Okay, I'd like to bring up two topics, uh, one very, very briefly. Uh, on the 14`h I
met with the Chamber of Commerce's, uh, local, um, Government Affairs Committee and
with Geoffs help and Ron, uh, Knoche's help ... I had a pretty good meeting with'em.
Fruin/ Very good!
Throgmorton/ It seemed like a very fruitful thing, uh, that's the way it felt to me anyhow and
that's what the feedback seemed like to me. The other thing I want to mention has to do
with the Economic Development Committee. We met on the 12`h and among other things
we agreed that we were going to have, uh, more frequent meetings over the next couple
of three months. I don't know, it's really kind of not fully clear but we ... we intend to and
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now we're setting up the first three of those. Uh, at the ... during that meeting, Susan made
what I took to be a really good suggestion, which has to ... had to do with,
um ... really ... engaging the notions we had about inclusivity and transparency by making
sure that interested parties were... fully informed about what we would be talking about
during the meeting. So that caused my ... my photo -imagination to begin working. Uh,
I..I'm wondering if there would be support for having the committee... and we can't talk
about it during the committee meeting because it'd be too late... but... whether there would
be support for having the committee move the location of its meetings from ... uh, the
Mayor's conference room, which is really a very enclosed venue ... into this space, and to
televise it. So that ... really interested parties of all kinds would be able to see the
conversation that would be taking place, with regard to ... you know, proposals to change
the economic development policy. You know, we completely agree it's an important
gesture, I mean, to ... I mean, proposal to amend the thing, and it deserves wide -spread
attention. So ... I ... I'm wonderin' if y'all would agree or support that idea of moving the
venue to here and televising the... at least the first two or three. I don't ... I'm not talking
about doing it kind of (mumbled) you know.
Mims/ Staff, what do you see in ster... in terms of logistics?
Fruin/ The ... the meeting room for the .... EDCs met in a variety of different rooms in City Hall.
I'm not sure that we've met in this particular room, but if it's open and available we can
switch meeting rooms. That's not an issue at all. Um ... in terms of televising it, I ... I
assume that with the camera system we have, that's fairly easy. I mean we probably
don't have set positions to focus in on ... I assume you'd want to be set up down on the
floor as opposed to up here, but ... we can make it work. Um ... the, whether to televise you
or ... committee meetings or not, we have the resources to do it. Um, if you wanted to
televise all the commission and committee meetings (laughter) then I'm going to start to
say (several talking) but if..if you're lookin' at, you know, one or ... we talk about a series
of two or three meetings, I think, over the next couple months (both talking)
Throgmorton/ Yeah, just over the ... the proposal... proposed changes, um, in ... in the economic
development policy. So they get full airing.
Cole/ Yeah, cause they are big issues.
Dickens/ Try it.
Mims/ To ... to that point, um, I've been meaning to give you a call, Jim. And I don't know that
I'll get it done, urn ... for this Information Packet cause I'm headed out of town tomorrow,
but ... I wanted, as Chair of the Economic Development Committee meeting, urn ... one I
think we need to have a discussion about ... how in-depth our minutes are, because a lot of
our commissions and boards and stuff don't have really in-depth...
Throgmorton/ True!
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Mims/ ...minutes and I think, again, the discussion... the kinds of discussions we're having right
now are critically important and people need to see and hear more of that. So in light of
that, and be ... just because of the riming, also of getting minutes approved, um, it's my
intent to write a memo ... to the Council which would then go in our Information Packet,
um, laying out some of the things we discussed, and particularly some of the suggestions
you were making on addressing some of the vagueness in, um ... in the current TIF policy.
So I just wanted to give you a heads up of my intent to do that.
Throgmorton/ Yeah! Sounds good to me!
Mims/ Okay.
Cole/ And the affordable housing recommendation, is that going to come up May P then for our
full recommendation? Is that your understanding, Geoff? You know, for the application
of TIF?
Frain/ I don't know if we've settled on May P. I think that's probably realistic, but very ... the
message we got is the memo looked good; let's forward it on to the full Council. So as
soon as we can get that into a resolution form we'll ... we'll do that. I would think May
3rd's very achievable.
Throgmorton/ So, uh, support for the suggestion?
Mims/ Yeah, I think to try it (several talking) especially while we're talking about the TIF policy,
yeah.
Dickens/ If we don't like it we get rid of it. (several talking and laughing) It's pretty easy!
Council giveth, Council taketh away! (laughter)
Meeting Schedule:
Throgmorton/ Okay, so uh.... um, hope you can work that out, Geoff. All right, which gets us, I
think, to meeting schedule. Joint Cities Meeting on the 25th. Reception beginning at
4:00, here. And on the 26th, Geoff, Kingsley, and I will be meeting with, uh, I guess
Janelle and Rod ... from the County, and maybe, uh... the staff (both talking)
Frain/ Probably Andy Johnson.
Throgmorton/ Andy, uh, to discuss CIT. And really looking forward to hearing what you have to
say when you come back.
Mims/ Looking forward to the trip!
Throgmorton/ Anything else? Meeting schedule stuff? Marian, is there anything...
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Karr/ Uh, no. There ... the summer schedule will remain as is. I ... I have occasionally some of you
gone (clears throat) for one meeting, but no meeting have more than one, and we
certainly can make arrangements with many of you to do the electronic meeting, so...
Cole/ Jim, one final thought. Um ... your recommendation for the subcommittees on the various
contexts we sort of had some concerns about that. We don't have to decide tonight, but I
do like the concept of at least once a month sort of a ... open meeting brown -bag that we
do, so it's a little bit more informal that we can meet during the day. So I would support
that, just to sort of put that in everyone's mind. Think that would allow us a little more
opportunity to flush out some ideas as opposed to right before the (both talking)
Throgmorton/ You mean a work session that's structured as a brown -bag lunch?
Cole/ Yeah! Essentially it'd be a noon -time meeting. So it's just a thought, but I think it'd be
nice to have a work session that routinely meets where we can ventilate ideas in front of
the whole Council so it's not just, you know, individual discussions.
Dickens/ You get lunch?
Cole/ Well, you can bring it. It's called a brown -bag! (laughter) So....
Throgmorton/ I think it's a good idea myself.
Dickens/ Just going to be very difficult for me to get away in the middle of the day for something
like that, so I ... I'd say I can't.
Cole/ Okay.
Botchway/ Ditto.
Dickens/ That's just the way...
Throgmorton/ Well we don't want to exclude people.
Dickens/ It's just too tough.
Throgmorton/ It was a good idea though!
Cole/ Valiant effort. (several talking)
Dickens/ Six in the morning, you know!
Pending Work Session Topics IIP # 3 Info Packet of 4/141:
Throgmorton/ Course we could always get rid of Terry and Kingsley and (several talking and
laughing) Okay, uh, can we move to pending work session topics. Um, I do have a topic
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I would like to propose, uh, and I don't want to go into detail about it because... because
we're tired as we always are at this time of night (several talking and laughing) Um, we
agreed not to proceed with the two ... the two Council committees and I completely
understand the rationale — I'm persuaded. I think we can ... deal with the strategic plan
elements pertaining to the sustainable built environment well enough by having one or
two special work sessions. But I do wonder about the other one, having to do with social
justice and racial, uh, equity. So ... I would like to suggest that we have a special work
session, not sorry ... that we ... schedule, um, a ... a future work session on the possibility of
creating an ad hoc committee on social justice and racial equity that would consist not of
elected officials, though maybe one person could be a liaison, a non-voting liaison, but
would be ... uh... you know, independent people appointed to the commission, to the
committee, and ... and it would exist, as I imagine it at least, would exist for one
year ... instead of the two-year thing I originally imagined. So ... I ... I don't want to go into
detail about it because it wouldn't be fair to you, cause I haven't kind of put anything in
writing or anything. But I just wonder if, uh, you'd be willing to put that on our pending
list. I'm not saying move it up to the very top. I'm just saying get it on the list. So ... it's a
proposal for ya.
Cole/ I think it's a great idea! I'm supportive of that.
Botchway/ Ditto.
Taylor/ Me too.
Throgmorton/ Well I hear ... at least four in favor so .... good! Thank you. Moving on, what the
heck is next on our list?
Dickens/ Upcoming community events.
Upcoming Community Events/Council Invitations:
Throgmorton/ Community events ... (both talking) Yeah, upcoming community events and
Council invitations. Some of it's already been mentioned. The CPRB thing on the 26a .
The annual community forum. Anything else for community events? That hasn't already
been mentioned.
Botchway/ Free Medical Clinic fundraiser, 5:30 at the College of Public Health next Friday. Oh,
and sorry, the last ... this Sunday, 17a' annual Iowa City Hospice Walk for Dignity, 12 to
3:00 at Willow Creek Park.
Cole/ (mumbled) River Run coming up too?
Throgmorton/ (mumbled)
Cole/ April 24h.
This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work
session of April 19, 2016.
Page 42
Botchway/ And the City's putting on, I believe, outdoor city ping pong, downtown Iowa City
(several talking) #getyourgameon (laughter) and I play ping pong, so I'll be there!
(laughter)
Cole/ Watch out!
Throgmorton/ Yeah! All right, I'll take ya on!
Fruin/ That's your Market Street marketing dollars at work right there! (several talking and
laughing)
Throgmorton /Okay, I think that's it. So we're done with the work session! Thank you all! Have
a good night!
This represents only a reasonably accurate transcription of the Iowa City City Council work
session of April 19, 2016.