08-16-17 Personnel and Finance (Overview)

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bond money committed in addition to the five million dollar($5 million) grant through the Regional Cities program. This investment will allow us to transform what it means to live in the City with great green spaces. I know the VPA team is excited to brief you in more detail on that. We have also made the trip to Chicago a lot quicker through partnerships across the region to address the South Shore Line. We are also addressing Public Health. Several issues have surfaced in the community. Some of them are nothing new but they are certainly getting the attention which is deserved. We want to make sure we are doing everything we can to help. This includes making sure we are taking measures to reduce the exposure of children to lead poisoning. Our water is fine but our children, in some cases, are not and that is largely the result of exposure that takes place in older homes. We think we can take $200,000 in Federal funds, some of which are the existing South Bend Home Improvement grants, and add up to $100,000 in City resources which are more flexible than the Federal funds and spend it on the mitigation of lead exposure. I don't want to pretend and think that is going to be everything required, but we think it is a step up from what we've got and we want to see if it makes the difference that we hope it will. He continued, We are also including funding for a rental safety inspection pilot program. We want to make sure we have the training and resources in our Code Enforcement Department to take a new look at rental inspections. This is specific to health. It is not just lead as there are other issues like black mold that children could be exposed to. We think the City needs more eyes, ears and teeth when it comes to being able to address these issues. That is why we are requesting funding for a Healthy Homes Inspection Program. A lot of substance abuse issues have also been in the news. The Council has dealt with Synthetic Marijuana with an ordinance that was passed on Monday. We have also had a lot of attention on the opioid crisis which, we now believe, has overtaken vehicle accidents as the leading cause of preventable death in our community. We believe that some City funding for expanding access to treatment for substance use and overdose issues is something that will pay off. He went on, We also think there is an opportunity around early childhood education. It is a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem. We currently have more demand than we can meet in terms of having more seats in quality educational programs and more teachers as well as more funding. We think there is an opportunity to intervene in a particular part of that which is investing in capacity building for the community. We are asking the Council to support us in doing that. If it is successful, we are likely to expand that in future years. Public Health also addresses the issue of gun violence. Many of the experts in the field are talking about it as an epidemic and saying we should use epidemiological tools to deal with it. This is in keeping with our Group Violence Intervention Initiative. We are asking for a shot in the arm for community policing by creating an outreach unit that would allow us to have individuals on the street helping to intervene in cycles of retribution and violence to prevent the violence from spreading and becoming more and more of a problem. Even though our violent crime index in our community is down dramatically from what it was like when I was a child growing up here,there is a distinct uptick in violent crime shootings here in South Bend and in most of the country, and we want to do everything we can to stop that from escalating. He continued, We found a site solution for Fire Station nine (9) that make sense from a fire suppression standpoint as well as a neighborhood standpoint. In economic development, our 3