Town Council Retreat, Day 1

The Apex Town Council met for our annual two day retreat this past Wednesday and Thursday. A lot of policy was discussed. I'll attempt to summarize it here over the course of a few posts.

Last week we had a regularly scheduled Council meeting followed by a “retreat” for two days in the training room (3rd floor) at Town Hall. I previously posted about the Council Meeting, so let’s continue start with Day 1 of the retreat. Here are the Youtube links for the AM Session and PM Session

Team Building Activity

No retreat is complete without a team building exercise! This year the activity focused on Council/Staff relations.

One interesting output from the exercise was asking staff and Council to both re-prioritize previous years Council initiatives. I took some pictures to show you. The staff one is the one with more dots.

State Update / Legislative Agenda Discussion

The Town of Apex contracts with Checkmate for lobbying work at the state level. The team came to our retreat and gave us a general update on activity at the state house, as well a draft they have prepared of our legislative goals.

I pushed to add expansion of the senior property tax exclusion to the agenda, which was agreed to by everyone. I also tried (and failed) to add this to the League of Municipalities legislative agenda earlier this year.

Below is our draft legislative agenda; it will be going to a future Council meeting for more discussion and possible adoption.

Advisory Board Application Discussion

Our Clerk gave an update on our Advisory Board application process. The general idea here is to develop a more verbose and consistent application to apply across all of our boards, which collected additional geographic, demographic, and work background information.

I argued (and my colleagues agreed) to remove the requirement of having a full resume be included, as much of the information is duplicative of fields already collected, and many people (myself included) haven’t updated their resumes in decades.

We expect to roll out the new application and begin recruitment efforts in March, with new appointments made in April/May.

Special Events Discussion

Next we had a pretty difficult discussion about our ongoing capacity issues with special events. The growth in events the town either plans or helps plan has been enormous - to the point where we are at (if not over) capacity. No other town in the area really takes as direct a role as Apex does in planning and funding their many events.

We spoke about the desire to have a more consistent policy with community events in terms of what the town funds and what it doesn’t, and to revisit a policy where the town in kind contributes all services to events thrown by non-profits (even if they are fundraising). I think Apex may be the only town to do this across the board.

I believe Council doesn’t desire to reduce the number of events, but it’s likely future expansion will be limited as we attempt to address scaling issues. Additionally I think we may want to move to a model where the support provided by the town is consistent across all events.

Smart City Technology Pilot

Finally, we have a presentation about the pilot program for Smart City technology our IT team has been working on. This is something I am really excited about and had been pushing this budget year. I was really excited to see we have made a ton of progress!

There are two main features we’ll be rolling out soon: a “smart parking” app (an application and web app to show how many spaces are available in each lot) and a resource availability app for Pickle Ball courts. We’re initially targeting monitoring of the Town Hall, Seaboard, S. Elm, and Moore street lots. It works via computer vision. These apps should launch soon.

We also had a brief discussion about how generative AI (ie, ChatGPT type things) can be utilized across the town. Chatbots basically, but both internal and external facing.

That’s it for Day 1.

Preview of Day 2

Day 2 Topics include financial condition review, facilities study, budget prioritization results, capital project prioritization, and Parks & Rec capital project discussion (including discussion of a possible bond). I’ll post about it soon.