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CITY OF SOUTH BEND OFFICE OF THE CLERK confirmation but that is basically where we are. The question that we are asking is how did we get here? We know many factors contribute to the problem like educations and jobs and things like that, but, what we want to do is look specifically at the government policies that actually may impact our residents locally. She went on, So, kind of overall, what we have been doing with the Community Relations Committee is looking at the different departments that might contribute to these issues and evaluate some of these policies. We've had, over the past couple of years, some issues on housing and forums on that. We've made quite a lot of progress by looking at three (3) departments. The first (1st) department was the Department of Community Investment. We've made a lot of progress I think in connecting with the community and learning what some of the barriers are. Two (2) programs of housing repair have come about and so we've done some work on that. The second (2nd) department is the Department of Code Enforcement and that was what we were addressing that night. We had a third (3rd) department, maybe in the spring sometime, and that is the Police Department. So just looking at those three (3), what are those policies and practices? We want to get information from residents. The approach is trying to figure out how and what we do and how it impacts residents. We need to hear from them, gather those stories, and then improve our practice. She continued,With regard to Code Enforcement, what we did was look at the evidence that there is a problem and then we talked about some of the solutions. We've already made quite a lot of changes in the Department of Code Enforcement and we wanted to see where we are. So this (referencing the GIS Map Civil Penalty Data website: http://www.arcgis.com/home/webmap/viewer.html?webmap=3 87e3 8eb 1 f8b4005aef8dOb 1 cd87b ef7&extent=-86.3901,41.6214,-86.1366,41.729)is some data that Judy Fox shared with us. Every little dot on this map is a Civil Penalty given in a specific set of time. This was acquired via an APRA Request and received this information. She took it to one (1) of her students and she GIS mapped it. They overlaid that with Census Tract Data to get a sense of how our City Neighborhoods are populated based on race. So one(1)of the things we noticed here,for example, this is the Hispanic population and the darker red color is the higher concentration of where they reside. What you will notice are a lot of those little dots in those areas. We also had a chance to look at the African American population. Again, the darker areas are a higher concentration of African American households and you'll see there are quite a number of dots. She went on, I think one (1) of the interesting things about this is it also helps us understand just how segregated our City is.Did you notice that? How the darker red matches up almost like puzzle pieces with the darker blue. But anyway, you'll notice there are a lot of dots in those areas. The White population, again, the darker areas are farther out. So there are less concentration of households that are White in the City. Again, this is the data that Judy Fox presented. We had this conversation back in the spring with the City. We know this is one (1) piece of data. This is only civil penalties and it is not about every single violation but it is an indicator. So she had some questions about how we could use this information to improve our practices. We notice that most of the civil penalties are in the black and brown communities but we also know that those happen to be the communities where there is the most blight. It is low income and has the most blight. So the question is not so much whether this should be an area we should be targeting but how we should target it. We know we need to improve blight, right? The question becomes how do we respond? EXCELLENCE ACCOUNTABILITY INNOVATION INCLUSION EMPOWERMENT 455 County-City Building 227 W.Jefferson Bvld'South Bend,Indiana46601 p 574.235.9221 f574.235.9173 TTD574.235.5567 www.southbendin.gov 2